Directors:
G.W. Pabst, Alan J. Pakula, Jafar Panahi, Sergei Parajanov, Park Chan-wook, Nick Park, Alan Parker, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pawel Pawlikowski, Alexander Payne, Raoul Peck, Sam Peckinpah, Arthur Penn, Christian Petzold, Maurice Pialat,
Roman Polanski, Michael
Powell, Otto Preminger, Cristi Puiu
Pabst, G.W. (Georg Wilhelm)
G.W. Pabst | Biography (1885-1967) biography from Lenin Imports
By vague consent, Pabst is one of those directors we have a duty to remember, even if there is only a single film still compulsory viewing. With eighty years Pandora's Box has grown into one of the most compelling studies of sensual self-destruction, whereas the once respected humanitarianism of Kameradschaft seems facile; and Waterfront 1918 is no more or less profound an antiwar film than Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front.
b.
There is no doubt that around 1930 Pabst was enormously accomplished, as a realist and in his psychological exploration—what was called his "X-ray eye camera." But it is the skill that impresses more than personal conviction. In retrospect, we may notice that Pandora's Box and Kameradschaft endorse diametrically opposite attitudes to people. Was Pabst an opportunist then, a drifting director waiting for a breeze? Kameradschaft, for instance, is a compromise between locations in a real mining town and clever studio reconstruction of the mine tunnels.
It has even been discovered that Pabst shot two endings to that film—one hopeful, one despairing.
It seems appropriate to the conflicting method that he could not settle for one attitude or the other. Die Freudlose Gasse, despite its attack on inflation and urban misery, revels in its melodramatic consequences, especially the threat of the brothel awaiting Greta Garbo. And as for Pabst's undeniable coup with Louise Brooks, the originality of Pandora comes from Brooks's fearless sense of an intelligent woman unable to resist her own sensuality. Pabst's contribution is that of entrepreneur, selecting Brooks to enact the erotic spiral of Wedekind's original.
The filming is proficient and expressive, but Pabst is content to create a heavy, fog-bound Victorian atmosphere, such as he used in Die Dreigroschenoper, to smother the dramatic starkness that Brecht had intended. Such background detail is common to much of Pabst's work and it is secondhand compared with the worlds invented by Lang for Metropolis, Frau im Mond, M, or the Mabuse films. Pabst excelled in the selection of detail—objects, expressions, and quick effects of light. Certainly, with Brooks this alertness was fully stimulated; her darting spontaneity as Lulu adds to the meaning because it runs counter to the massive premeditation of the German actors. Lulu still thrills us because of Louise Brooks's effect of vulnerable emotional vitality. Pandora's Box seems the one occasion when Pabst trusted a player to carry a film, rather than the theory that the camera could penetrate psychological reality.
With Geheimnisse einer Seele this approach added to a schematic and tendentious dramatization of Freudian theories, but with Pandora's Box and Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen the discovery is startling and moving. Is Pabst or Brooks the true creative personality in those films? The tentativeness in all Pabst's work, and the dullness of most of his later films, support Lotte Eisner's feeling that Brooks had:
"succeeded in stimulating an otherwise unequal directors talent to the extreme."
Like many other German filmmakers, in 1933 Pabst moved to
His post-war films included two made in
G.W. Pabst - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films:, Publications Liam O’Leary from Film Reference
Bryher, writing in
Close Up in 1927, noted that "it is the thought and feeling that
line gesture that interest Mr. Pabst. And he has what few have, a consciousness
of Europe. He sees psychologically and because of this, because in a flash he
knows the sub-conscious impulse or hunger that prompted an apparently trivial
action, his intense realism becomes, through its truth, poetry."
G.W. Pabst was
enmeshed in the happenings of his time, which ultimately engulfed him. He is
the chronicler of the churning maelstrom of social dreams and living neuroses,
and it is this perception of his time which raises him above many of his
contemporary filmmakers.
Like other German
directors, Pabst drifted to the cinema through acting and scripting. His first
film, Der Schatz , dealt with a search for hidden treasure and the
passions it aroused. Expressionist in feeling and design, it echoed the current
trend in German films, but in Die freudlose Gasse he brought clinical
observation to the tragedy of his hungry postwar Europe. For Pabst the cinema
and life grew closer together. In directing the young Greta Garbo and the more
experienced Asta Nielsen, Pabst was beginning his gallery of portraits of
women, to whom he would add Brigitte Helm, Louise Brooks, and Henny Porten.
Geheimnisse
einer Seele carried
Pabst's interest in the subconscious further, dealing with a Freudian subject
of the dream and using all the potential virtues of the camera to illuminate
the problems of his central character, played by Werner Krauss. Die Liebe
der Jeanne Ney , based on a melodramatic story by Ilya Ehrenburg, reflected
the upheavals and revolutionary ideas of the day. It also incorporated a love
story that ranged from the Crimea to Paris. Through his sensitive awareness of
character and environment Pabst raised the film to great heights of cinema. His
individual style of linking image to create a smoothly flowing pattern induced
a rhythm which carried the spectator into the very heart of the matter.
Two Pabst films
have a special significance. Die Büchse der Pandora and Das Tagebuch
einer Verlorenen featured the American actress Louise Brooks, in whom Pabst
found an ideal interpreter for his analysis of feminine sensuality.
Between the high
spots of Pabst's career there were such films as Grafin Donelli , which
brought more credit to its star, Henny Porten, than to Pabst. Man spielt
nicht mit der Liebe featured Krauss and Lily Damita in a youth and age
romance. Abwege , a more congenial picture that took as its subject a
sexually frustrated woman, gave Pabst the opportunity to direct the beautiful
and intelligent Brigitte Helm. His collaboration with Dr. Arnold Fanck on Die
weisse Hölle vom Pitz-Palu resulted in the best of the mountain films,
aided by Leni Riefenstahl and a team of virtuoso cameramen, Angst,
Schneeberger, and Allgeier.
The coming of
sound was a challenge met by Pabst. Not only did he enlarge the scope of
filmmaking techniques, but he extended the range of his social commitments in
his choice of subject matter. Hans Casparius, his distinguished stills
cameraman and friend, has stressed the wonderful teamwork involved in a Pabst
film. There were no divisions of labor; all were totally involved. Westfront
1918, Die Dreigroschenoper , and Kameradschaft were made in this
manner when Pabst began to make sound films. Vajda the writer, cameraman Fritz
Arno Wagner (who had filmed Jeanne Ney ) and Ernö Metzner, another old
colleague, worked out the mise-en-scène with Pabst, assuring the smooth, fluid
process of cinema. With Pabst the cinema was still a wonder of movement and
penetrating observation. The technical devices used to ensure this have been
described by the designer Metzner.
Westfront 1918 was an uncompromising anti-war film which
made All Quiet on the Western Front look contrived and artificial.
Brecht's Die Dreigroschenoper , modified by Pabst, is still a stinging
satire on the pretensions of capitalist society. Kameradschaft , a
moving plea for international cooperation, shatters the boundaries that tend to
isolate people. All these films were studio-made and technically stupendous,
but the heart and human warmth of these features were given by G.W. Pabst.
When Germany was
in the grip of growing Nazi domination, Pabst looked elsewhere to escape from
that country, of which he had once been so much a part.
L'Atlantide was based on the Pierre Benoit novel of adventure
in the Sahara. The former success of Jacques Feyder, Pabst's work featured
Brigitte Helm as the mysterious Antinea. Don Quixote with Chaliapin did
not fulfil its promise. A Modern Hero , made in Hollywood for Warner
Brothers, had little of Pabst in it. On his return to France he handled with
some competence Mademoiselle Docteur, Le Drame de Shanghai , and Jeunes
Filles en détresse. In 1941 circumstances compelled him to return to his
estate in Austria. He was trapped, and if he was to make films, it had to be
for the Nazi regime. Komödianten was a story of a troupe of players who
succeed in establishing the first National Theatre at Weimar. Its leading
player was Pabst's old friend Henny Porten, who gave an excellent performance.
The film won an award at the then Fascist-controlled Venice Biennale. Paracelsus
, again an historical film, showed Pabst had lost none of his power. For
his somewhat reluctant collaboration with the Nazis, Pabst has been savagely
attacked, but it is hard to believe that any sympathy could have ever existed
from the man who made Kameradschaft for the narrow chauvinists who ruled
his country.
After the war
Pabst made Der Prozess , dealing with Jewish pogroms in
nineteenth-century Hungary. It was a fine film. After some work in Italy he
made Der letze Akt , about the last days of Hitler, and Es geschah am
20 Juli , about the generals' plot against Hitler. Both were films of
distinction.
Pabst died in
Vienna in 1967, having been a chronic invalid for the last ten years of his life.
As Jean Renoir said of him in 1963: "He knows how to create a strange
world, whose elements are borrowed from daily life. Beyond this precious gift,
he knows how, better than anyone else, to direct actors. His characters emerge
like his own children, created from fragments of his own heart and mind."
Biography
for GW Pabst - TCM.com biography from
Turner Classic Movies
German
43 Profile biography
G.W. Pabst >
Overview - AllMovie bio from Hal
Erickson
G. W. Pabst biography from Kino
G W Pabst from Tiefland - at Film.com biography from Film.com
Georg Wilhelm Pabst - The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia bio
Georg Wilhelm Pabst The Auteurs
The Films By G.W.Pabst filmography from The Other Eye
Louise Brooks Filmography
Series
Details Introduction and brief
reviews from UCLA Film Restrospective, January 7 –
THE silent and
sound German films of GW PABST brief
synopsis of available films from NY Film Annex
German Film Classics Page available videos
News | The Masters of Cinema
Series Eureka
nthposition online magazine: Two Pabst operas reviews of PANDORA’S BOX and THE THREE PENNY OPERA BY Douglas Masserli from nth Position (undated)
B helm Fire
& Ice, The Life and Films of Brigitte Helm, by Scott D. Ryersson from
Filmfax (pdf)
Schatz-project1 The Treasure – A Film Symphony in Five Acts by Max Deutsch, by Nina Goslar and Frank Strobel (undated)
GarboForever - Garbo in
Berlin Garbo Forever
The Times (19/Dec/1930) - Sound and dialogue films: recent ... Alfred Hitchcock Wiki posts an article from The Times, December 19, 1930
Pandora's Box: Pabst and Lulu Louise Brooks essay, originally published in Sight and Sound, Summer 1965
Louise Brooks, Actors and the Pabst spirit Actors and the Pabst Spirit, by Louise Brooks from Focus on Film, February 1972
Brecht and Pabst’s Three Penny Opera Jan-Christopher Horak from Jump Cut, 1977, also seen here: Three Penny Opera: Brecht vs. Pabst, by Jan-Christopher Horak
The Girl in the Black Helmet Kenneth Tynan essay, originally published from The New Yorker, June 1979
seduction
and ruin Innocence, Seduction, Ruin in PANDORA'S BOX and PRETTY POISON, by
Julia Lesage, from The Film Center of the Art Institute, 1979
WITH PABST Lotte Eisner from Sight and Sound, August 1987
Frank Wedekind's Lulu
Plays (Erdgeist and Büchse der Pandora)
Lulu: Sexuality
and Cynicism on the Stage and Screen, by Nancy Thuleen, 1995
Past Issues - 1997 | Classic Images Francis Lederer, A Man of Many Worlds, by Charles P. Mitchell, based on interviews with Paul Parla and Dorothy Barrett, from Classic Images, June 1997
Classic Movie Reviews: Jake and Boomer's Silver Screen Homepage Pandora's Box: Lulu, the Beautiful Evil, essay by Tim Samuel, Twenties Reconstruction Society, 1998
Film history and film preservation: Reconstructing ... - Screening the Past “Film history and film preservation: reconstructing the text of The joyless street (1925),” by Jan-Christopher Horak from Screening the Past, November 16, 1998
Page
1 of 2 MoMA | press | Releases | 1998 | Comprehensive ... MOMA Exhibition Press Notes, October 5 – 31, 1998 (pdf)
Wheels of
History J. Hoberman from The Village Voice,
GW
Pabst: Pandora's Box | Film | guardian.co.uk Derek Malcom from The Guardian,
Dangerous liaisons Michael Billington from The Guardian,
Tom Dewe
Mathews: why was everyone keen to forget GW Pabst? | Film ... Tom Dewe Mathews from The Guardian,
Pandora's
Box Alfred Hickling on a theatrical
production from The Guardian,
The Joyless Street • Senses of Cinema Michael Koller, July 26, 2004
Pandora's Box •
Senses of Cinema Dan Harper
from Senses of Cinema, July 26, 2004
Diary of a Lost
Girl • Senses of Cinema Martyn
Bamber from Senses of Cinema, July
26, 2004
Westfront 1918 •
Senses of Cinema Robert
Keser, July 26, 2004
Preface to G.W. Pabst: The Threepenny Opera • Senses of Cinema Bruce Williams, July 26, 2004
The Moral Tendency: Kameradschaft • Senses of Cinema Andrew Tracy, July 26, 2004
Female Trouble | Village Voice J. Hoberman on Pandora’s Box, from The Village Voice, June 6, 2006
Siffblog:
Girl, Interrupted - Individual David
Jeffers from Siffblog, January
11, 2007
Will
the Shark Bite? G. W. Pabst and The Threepenny Opera - Bright ... Gordon Thomas from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 1, 2007
media
release Louise Brooks and the “New Woman” In Weimar Cinema, exhibit from
the International
Center April 29, 2007 (pdf format)
Inglourious
Basterds; Jackboot Mutiny « Louis Proyect: The ... Finding Pabst in Tarantino, Louis
Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist,
TSPDT - G.W.
Pabst They Shoot Pictures, Don’t
They
Find-A-Grave
profile for Georg Wilhelm Pabst
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
Georg Wilhelm Pabst - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lotte Eisner >
Overview - AllMovie
DER SCHATZ (The Treasure)
User comments from imdb Author: plaidpotato from United
States
Like a 17th century Germanic 'Kiss
Me Deadly'
This is very different from Pabst's later and more famous films, Pandora's
Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. It's more in line with the other German
Expressionist stuff of the period: gothic, shadowy, sort of ponderous, and with
a simple moral message. But there's also some humor, so it's not as totally
downbeat as some of the other German silents. The acting's stylized, mildly
hysterical, but in a good sort of way--plenty of maniacal laughter and such. I
saw it without English intertitles (and with very limited, maybe 20-30%,
comprehension of German), and it was still quite understandable and quite watchable.
8/10.
JOYLESS STREET (Die freudlose Gasse)
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
G.W. Pabst's 1925 film made a star of Greta Garbo, who was
second billed but easily stole the show from the ostensible lead, Asta Neilsen.
The picture belongs to the realist phase of expressionism, adapting the
striking visual techniques of the movement to a more or less accurate portrait
of the despair, poverty, and general social disruption of the postwar years in
central
Pabst's record of the process of destitution in the middle
classes of
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Ben Sachs
From Michael Koller's program notes for the Melbourne Cinematheque, reprinted in a 2004 issue of Senses of Cinema: "[I]t is for Pabst's political acerbity that [THE JOYLESS STREET] is truly memorable. Many contemporary critics viewed the film as a stirring moral protest, and by modern expectations of a silent film, the explicit portrayal of sexual promiscuity is surprising." What may be equally surprising for contemporary audiences who know Pabst mainly as the director of PANDORA'S BOX is that JOYLESS was an influential work of the so-called "New Reality" movement, a naturalistic successor to the extremes of German Expressionism. The film garnered much praise for the quality of the performances, particularly that of a young Greta Garbo, seen here in her second film role. The sensitivity reflected by the behavior tempers the harsh melodrama of the plot, a cautionary tale about young women tempted by prostitution in times of economic distress. "Even the most villainous character [is allowed] a moment of dignity," Koller adds. "A prime example of this occurs... when the butcher, the most abhorrent character in the film, portrayed by Pabst's longterm collaborator Werner Krauss, awkwardly attends a brothel in his Sunday best. He is rejected by Garbo, yet once he removes his gloves he is granted a minute of peace and shown eating a slice of cake."
The picture's only commercial value is the presence at the head of the cast of Greta Garbo. The role is a poor one of a rather furtive and bedraggled heroine which does not gain much sympathy.
The picture has minor virtues and major defects. The principal
drawback is that it's fearfully long and dull, besides being hard to follow in
its complications. The central idea is good. It deals with the middle class
enmity in
The screen story gets them tangled up with shoddy melodrama
in what one takes to be the red-light district of
Some of the character types - the pompous butcher and the two fat, sleek profiteers among others - are excellent in portraiture, and the settings are generally interesting.
Photography is far from high grade. Often the quality is thin and sometimes blurred, the best effects being in the handling of heavy light and shade masses.
[Version reviewed was a toned-down 95-min. version released
in the
User comments from imdb Author: Diosprometheus from
The Sorrows of "The Joyless Street"
Director Georg Wilhelm Pabst's "The Joyless Street" is one of the
most censored and mutilated films in history. The film premier on
The film was based on Hugo Bettauer's 1924 serialized novel. The film version
would propel Greta Garbo to international fame.
Bettauer would never see the premier of the film based on his novel. On
The original version of "The Joyless Street" was a dark study of life
in hyper-inflation
The film shocked European governments.
Americans thought that the only value of the film was the presence of Greta
Garbo. Curiously, Garbo was paid in American dollars rather than worthless
German ones.
As a result, most of the available versions of this film were cut to make the
international sensation Great Garbo the star the film over the top billed Asta
Nielson, who played a woman driven to murder.
Over the years, Nielson's leading part in the film will almost entirely vanish
like the Jews in Bettauer's novel.
Garbo was the second lead to the once legendary Asta Nielson.
Most of the story line involving Asta Nielson's character Maria Lechner was cut
out of the film.
Most of the story line involving Warner Krauss' abhorrent butcher of
Other story lines, involving other characters, were cut out or toned down.
International censorship removed these segments long ago. They were deemed too
controversial and too dangerously political.
When the film was released in
In 1937, this version was re-released with synchronized music and sound
effects. It is this terrible version people have most likely seen.
The result of this censorious butchery a sappy happy
Rumors persist that Marlene Dietrich had a part in this film. There is no
evidence that she ever had a role in this film.
The German actress Herta Von Walther played the part of the woman in Butcher's
line who comforts Greta when she collapsed. In the original version, Herta had
a bigger part that involved prostituting herself to the Butcher.
Herta Von Walther is forgotten today, but she made four films with director
Georg Wilhelm Pabst between the years 1925 and 1928. The four are "The
Joyless Street", "Secrets of a Soul", "The Love of Jeanne
Ney", "Abwege".
There is no record of director Georg Wilhelm Pabst having ever made any films
with Marlene Dietrich. Still the rumors persist.
In 1999, the Munich Filmmuseum partially restored this this film. A 16 mm
reduction positive exists in the museum.
Today, the film is mostly remembered as the last European role the timorous,
timid Greta Garbo played before coming to
The Joyless
Street • Senses of Cinema
Michael Koller, July 26, 2004
Film history and film preservation: Reconstructing ... - Screening the Past “Film history and film preservation: reconstructing the text of The joyless street (1925),” by Jan-Christopher Horak from Screening the Past, November 16, 1998
Edition
Filmmuseum Shop - Die freudlose Gasse Edition Filmmuseum ... DVD review by Jan-Christopher Horak
A
cinema history [J.E. de Cockborne]
The Joyless Street |
Silent Film Festival
Margarita Landazuri
The Joyless Street-1925 « Bennythomas's Weblog October 14, 2008
Observations on Film Art: Kristin Thompson November 29, 2012
The Joyless
Street (Die freudlose Gasse) : DVD Talk Review of the ... Chris Neilson from DVD Talk
PROGRAM NOTI Ed Lowry from Cinema Texas
"The Cinema and the Classics" by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) book excerpt (pages 106 – 108), July 1927
Garbo/Helen: The self-projection of beauty by H.D. Charlotte Mandel discusses Hilda Doolittle’s comments on Beauty (1980), revised April 6, 2003
"Jack
Knife Man" John DeBartolo
The Joyless Street, The Joyless Street Movie, Die freudlose Gasse ... Jason Day from Wildsound Filmmaking
mediadiary -- the annex - Joyless Street
Greta Garbo - The Ultimate Star - The Joyless Street
Progressive Silent Film List: Joyless Street Production credits, also here: Silent Era : Home Video : The Joyless Street (1925) Review
Joyless Street - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Image results for Joyless Street
GEHEIMNISSE EINER SEELE (Secrets of a Soul)
Time Out review Tony Rayns
Fascinating as the first 'serious' attempt to deal with Freudian psychoanalysis on the screen, Pabst's film is also notable for bringing a solid intellectual perspective to the 'expressionist' idiom of contemporary German movies. It's essentially a bourgeois melodrama, about a chemistry professor whose frustrated desire to father a child meshes with his jealousy of his wife's childhood sweetheart. The professor's fantasies are, of course, generously illustrated in the remarkable dream sequences, awash with sexual symbols. The deciphering of these dreams as he consults a psychoanalyst is necessarily too pat, but Pabst's aims still look as bold and daring as they must have done in 1926.
Geheimnisse
einer Seele (1926) James Travers
from Cinema Forever
There is clearly a natural relationship between German
expressionist art of the 1920s and the revolutionary theories in psychology
which were being expounded by Sigmund Freud and his contemporaries in the
preceding years. Expressionism is inherently a dreamlike
re-interpretation of the real world and Freud saw dreams as the key to
unlocking the secrets to the human subconscious, so the two have a manifest
connection. The first film which attempted to bring the two together was
G.W. Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul, a curious work that manages to be both
compelling and unsatisfying.
Viewed today, it is much easier to appreciate this film for its artistic merits
– its striking visual design and atmospheric expressionistic photography – than
its intellectual content. As a serious attempt to represent Freud’s ideas
it leaves a great deal to be desired and almost comes across as a mockery of
psychoanalytic theory. The crux of the film is its famous dream sequence
(which is imaginative and well shot, but is hardly the most spectacular that
cinema has given us) and its subsequent interpretation by a psychoanalyst.
These two things combined seem to constitute an Idiot’s Guide to Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams, so apparent is the lack of subtlety and
intellectual rigour. The images that make up the the dream sequence are
so obvious that it is not beyond the wit of any spectator to make a more
convincing job at explaining them than the eminent psychoanalyst does in the
film’s drawn-out leather couch denouement. Interesting, but definitely
not Pabst’s best work.
Turner Classic Movies dvd review Michael Atkinson (link lost)
It made perfect sense that the German Expressionists, like
the Surrealists at roughly the same time, the 1920s, would’ve been fascinated
by the concepts and extra-reality inquiries of a certain Dr. Sigmund Freud,
whose theories had been seeing print since the beginning of the century, but in
the roaring ‘20s which were just beginning to sink in to the public brainpan
and shake the world in its boots. After all, the Expressionists virtually
pioneered the notion that art like film or theater or music or painting could
voice an entire culture’s private angers and fears and doubts – indeed, could
express the inexpressible, and manifest the silent howl of man’s inner struggles.
Madness seemed to linger at the fringes of life then, and Expressionism gave it
form. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) was the template, portraying
modern
No German film from the period – a time when no one was making films as
distinctive and ambitious as the Germans – was as thoroughly mixed up with
Freud and Freudianism as G.W. Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul (1926). The new
Kino DVD has a protracted text supplement articulating in scholarly detail the
efforts that the film’s producers took to get Freud to officially approve of
the film – making it a kind of nascent-psychology house movie – and the
resistance Freud offered, over much correspondence, until a coterie of Freudian
acolytes lent their names to it, causing a rift in the powerful Vienna
psychotherapy community. Freud’s complaints seemed to be mostly directed at not
the proposed film in particular (on which Freudian psychologists Karl Abraham
and Hanns Sachs got "technical consultant" credit), but with the very
idea that unconscious conflicts could be represented meaningfully on film.
He had a point – thoughtful critics have long noticed that dream sequences and
even outright cinematic Surrealisms have an essentially silly thrust to them,
perhaps largely because cinema itself is already overwhelmingly dream-like, and
our experience of it (sitting in the dark, semi-consciously "entering
into" the narrative, taking as "real" an associative series of
shots that are actually unrelated, etc.) is already very much like dreaming.
But by the same token, most uses of dream imagery from cinema’s first three
decades or so have impact now as beguiling experiments (what does and doesn’t
work as visual narrative was still being worked out), and as anarchist time
capsules (several early Surrealist films date badly, but Dali and Bunuel’s Un
Chien Andalou, from 1929, still has the electric jolt of an airborne
Molotov cocktail). Pabst’s film is a little of both – for one thing, it was
expressly conceived as a drama structured around the concept of neurotic
pathology and its psychoanalytic cure, and it’s this aspect of the film, after
many decades of Freudian hot air wafting its way through popular movies (just
look at how badly Spellbound dates compared to Hitchcock’s other
mid-century films), that feels hokey. At the same time, Secrets of a Soul,
based on an "actual case history," isn’t so clear about what’s
unconscious and what isn’t – it’s still a German Expressionist film, which
demands that the "real world" outside of the protagonist’s feverish
skull is to some degree warped and darkened by stylistic pessimism.
You could be forgiven for mistaking the entire opening sequence as a bad dream,
and a creepy forecast of the Dali/Bunuel film to come: a middle-class chemist
(Werner Krauss, six years after Caligari and four years from playing the
evil rabbi in the famed Nazi propaganda film Jud Suss) tries to shave in
the morning, when a mismatched countershot of his wife hollering from another
room summons him, at which time she asks him to cut hair at the nape of her
neck with his straight razor... Then a woman outside screams – who? – and the
man accidentally cuts his wife’s neck, and a crowd forms on the street (in
front of the couple’s house?); cut to the dressed couple coming downstairs,
where a brood of puppies frolic... They exchange meaningful but mysterious
glances... She pushes a buzzer-button on the wall, dissolve to an empty
kitchen... He wanders out to the street, like one of Un Chien Andalou’s
passers-by, eyeing a slow ambulance and hearing vaguely from the crowd about a
murder...
It continues in this disjointed, enigmatic mode, piling up banal incidents
nevertheless pregnant with menace, until the couple go to bed, and "The
Dream" begins – and suddenly we’re in a Dali painting, where women’s heads
swing inside church bells and a matchstick city rises from the dark hills in
the distance. From there, one shouldn’t get caught up with the procedural
structure of the movie (the opening incidents and their corresponding dream
associations are reviewed in therapy with Pavel Pavlov’s psychologist, to
uproot Krauss’s phobia of blades). Rather, watch how the film suggests visually
that the characters’ world is disarmingly dreamlike and irrational even when
they are awake. Freud or no Freud, the subjective issues at hand are bigger
than one man’s neurotic kink. With only his fourth film, Pabst was already
establishing the anxious, shadowy, predatory vocabulary that would make him a
world-class auteur just a few years later, with The Loves of Jeanne Ney
(1927), Pandora’s Box (1929), Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) and Die
Dreigroschenoper (1931). But quickly, he and German cinema gave up on
Freudianism, leaning more toward tales of moral conflict and retribution that
spoke more acutely to the German people’s downtrodden postwar frame of mind,
and to the ambitions of the rising Nazi party. Secrets of a Soul remains
a crazy artifact, then, conflicted by style, forgotten by history, and buried
by a new kind of mass pathology not unlike the private diseases it sought to
elucidate.
dream
and photography in a psychoanalytic film: secrets of a soul 11-page essay by Nick Browne and Bruce
McPherson, from Dreamworks, Spring 1980 (pdf)
Secrets of a Soul | film by Pabst | Britannica.com
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Wilson) dvd review
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
SECRETS OF A SOUL (G. W. Pabst, 1926) « Dennis Grunes
SECRETS OF A SOUL (“Geheimnisse einer Seele”, 1926) by GW Pabst Stranger on the 3rd Floor
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Secrets
of a Soul (Geheimnisse Einer Seele) | BAMPFA
Psychoanalysis
and Film - Freud Museum
The
influence of Freud on the movies | Film | The Guardian June 16, 2001
Secrets of a Soul DVD - Kino on Video
Secrets of a Soul - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
SECRETS
OF A SOUL - BL!NDMAN Dream sequence
on YouTube (
THE LOVE OF JEANNE NEY (Die
Liebe der Jeanne Ney)
Time Out review Tony Rayns
Pabst's adaptation of a novel by Ilya
Ehrenburg is in many ways a trial run for his masterpiece Pandora's Box,
made the following year. Its German heroine flees from the
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
Jeanne Ney (Edith Jehanne) is the daughter of a French
diplomat in the
As is evident from this summary, the film's plot is rather complicated, and Pabst uses as few intertitles as possible, which requires the viewer to pay close attention in order to follow the story. Yet, despite a certain shapelessness in the material, and a bad performance from Rasp (who chews up the scenery as the bad guy), the film is a stunning exhibition of cinematic style, and represents something of a breakthrough in technique for Pabst. Brilliant camera placement and dynamism (including some daring camera angles), inspired use of objects and setting, and an editing style that cuts on the actors' movements to create a feeling of flow between scenes - all combine to engulf the viewer in a visual experience that was rarely equalled in films of that time.
Jehanne has an alluring presence, although her title role is
more of a passive field of conflict for the male characters than an active
person in her own right. The picture is sexually frank, while expressing a
certain repugnance at the decadence prevalent in
G. W. Pabst’s The Love of Jeanne Ney (Die Liebe der
Jeanne Ney, 1927) is not an Expressionist film, but like the
Expressionists, Pabst never managed to
reject a shot which was both forceful and picturesque. The theme was similar to
The Joyless Street (Die Freudlose Gasse, 1925), except instead of
depicting
Pabst was forced to work under some distressing pressures.
First, the American films were already having a deleterious box-office effect
on the German film industry, and Pabst was instructed to stage his picture “in
the American style.” Second, he was also under pressure to match the recent
successes of the Russians Eisenstein and Pudovkin. And finally,
Jeanne Ney developed from sequence to sequence with breathtaking power. Mood succeeded mood, each perfect in its tension and its understanding.
Fritz Arno Wagner, now at the height of his cinematographic
powers, achieved in his smooth travelling and panning shots and in his natural
lighting a technical tour de force.
The cutting of the film has become a textbook example of unobtrusive
effectiveness. Every cut was made on actual movement, so that at the end of a
shot somebody was moving and at the beginning of the next shot the action was
continued. The eye, following the movement, scarcely notices the actual
transposition. This style was in sharp contrast to Eisenstein’s montage, which
was deliberately used to shock the spectator. There is one scene in The Love
of Jeanne Ney that, though lasting only three minutes, has over forty cuts
– though the eye scarcely notices them. This short sequence has been used for
pedagogical purposed in filmmaking courses.
Iris Varry, writing for the
Pabst’s work here is in no sense picturesque, it is photographic. His settings and his individual scenes are quite as carefully composed as those of the more obviously artistic German films, but the craftsmanship is less apparent, the spectator is led to feel “how true”, rather than “how beautiful”.
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Silent Era : Home
Video : The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927) Review
ABWEGE (Crisis)
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Just before his two masterworks with Louise Brooks, Pabst directed this
provocative study of an upper-class woman's sexual frustration. Neglected by
her work-obsessed husband, Brigitte Helm falls in with a fast crowd of
Abwege (1928) James Travers from Cinema Forever
This film, in which Brigitte Helm gives a daringly realistic
portrayal of a sexually frustrated bourgeois wife, evoked great controversy
when it was released in 1928. It is unusual in at least two
respects. Firstly, it explores the feelings of its central characters
with unprecedented psychological depth, effectively contrasting their intense
inner moods with the superficial world in which they live, reflecting a
struggle between desire and security, freedom and stability. Secondly, it
uses a voyeuristic style of camera work which, although used by many directors
since, was virtually unknown in the silent era. This cinematographic
approach emphasises the conflict in Irene’s mind between the inner and outer
world, between thoughts of primal lust and reasoned awareness of social
conventions.
Although the film doesn’t quite have the impact and dramatic cohesion of some
of Pabst’s later films, it has a great deal to commend it. There’s Helm’s
commanding performance of a woman visibly tortured by her ferocious sexual
urge, a set piece scene in a night club which conveys the decadence and moral
decay of German society in the late 1920s, and some exquisitely beautiful
photography which is subtly influenced by the expressionistic style. That
the film is far less well known than Pabst’s other work is down to the fact
that one reel of the original film was lost. Recently, the film has been
meticulously restored, using a surviving French print of poor quality.
PANDORA’S BOX (Die Büchse der Pandora) A 97
You'll have to kill me to
get rid of me. —Lulu
(Louise Brooks)
A timeless Silent film that represents the hedonistic
decadence of amorality and debauchery in the Weimar Republic (1918 – 1933) of
1920’s Berlin, so prevalent in films like Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS (1927), von
Sternberg’s THE BLUE ANGEL (1930), or even Pabst’s own THE THREEPENNY OPERA
(1931), an extraordinary period of artistic freedom and sexual experimentation
that gave rise not only to the birth of German Expressionism, the Bauhaus
modern art movement, and a new international style of architecture, but also a
notoriously vibrant nightlife of underground theaters, cinema, café’s and bars
that stretched the boundaries of sexuality.
Born out of
A composite of two well-known German plays by Frank Wedekind, known as the “Lulu” plays, Erdgeist (Earth Spirit, 1895) and Pandora’s Box (1904), his work criticizes bourgeois sexual attitudes through the exploration of a sexually liberated character, Lulu (Brooks), a victim of the time in which she lived, seen as a sexual temptress whose carefree innocence and naiveté is part of her allure, as her frank eroticism inspires lust and violence in others, where she ends up ruining the lives of everyone around her. Lulu has been dancing in the bars and nightclubs of Berlin since she was a child, leading a sexually active life, often supported by the patronage of influential or wealthy men, and while Brooks is indeed sexually enticing throughout, there is no explicit sex or nudity, as instead everything is suggested largely from the close ups on her naturally expressive face, as she latches onto the arm of every available man she sees, seemingly oblivious to the effect this would have on anyone else, but simply loves being adored, where men become obsessed with a kind of fatal attraction towards her and lavish her with expensive gifts, where she is constantly the center of attention. For better or for worse, this is simply the life she’s used to, where her beauty, natural openness and expressed vulnerability inspires a group of hangers-on, which includes a widowed newspaper publisher Dr. Ludwig Schön (Fritz Kortner), his son Alwa (Francis Lederer), an old friend, perhaps her father, old enough to be her grandfather, but more likely her pimp, a mysterious controlling force that continually takes advantage of her, Schigolch (Carl Goetz), and even an interested lesbian (Alice Roberts), the Countess Anna Geschwitz, a group that seems to follow her around wherever she goes, an odd sort of collective of societal misfits that is strange in itself. Pabst was criticized in the press at the time for casting a foreigner in a role that was considered so definitively German, so it’s ironic the film is largely remembered for Brooks’s legendary performance, where she provides such a powerful sexual presence. American critics had problems as well, claiming her unwholesome lifestyle was not suitable for the screen, cutting out large portions of the American release. Of interest, the plays are also inspiration for a modernist opera called Lulu, Lulu (opera), written by Alban Berg in 1937, which was seen here in Chicago during the 2008-09 season, Opera Today : Berg's Lulu at Lyric Opera of Chicago, one of the definitively bleak works in the opera repertoire. The work was, appropriately, banned by the Nazi’s, as were the original plays, where Lulu’s sexual freedom, femininity, and daring experimentation were deemed problematic.
Suggesting we all have a dark side, the film is presented as
the rise and fall of a free spirit, mired in an aura of extreme pessimism,
where people get what they want sexually out of Lulu, but she never asks for
anything. Using distinctly
expressionistic theatrical settings, the film opens in Lulu’s nicely furnished
bourgeois apartment paid for by Dr. Schön, as she’s been his longtime mistress, but
she doesn’t take it well when Schön announces his plans to marry a wealthy
socialite, the daughter of the Minister of the Interior. Not going away easily, Lulu tells him “You'll
have to kill me to get rid of me.” Alwa,
who also has designs on her, decides to star Lulu in one of his theatrical
productions, but Lulu refuses to perform in front of Schön’s new fiancée, pulling a giant sized
tantrum of epic proportions in front of all the players in full costume where
she ends up seducing him just as the fiancée walks in on them, forcing the poor
bastard to marry her instead, even after telling his son that “one does
not marry” a woman like her. Despite cavorting
with everyone at the wedding except the groom, causing a minor scandal dancing
with the Countess, Schön has had enough and in a jealous rage, attempts to
convince Lulu to kill herself right then and there, as there’s no other
solution. In the ensuing struggle, he’s
killed when the gun goes off. Despite
Alwa testifying on her behalf at the trial that it was an accident, she is
found guilty, where the prosecutor links her to the fatalistic evil of
Pandora. In the chaotic mayhem after the
verdict, she escapes with Alwa and Schigolch first to
Kim Newman from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
A lasting masterpiece from G.W. Pabst, adapted from Frank
Wedekind’s “Lulu plays,” Pandora’s Box is remembered for the creation of an
archetypal character in Lulu (Louise Brooks), an innocent temptress whose
forthright sexuality somehow winds up ruining the lives of everyone around her.
Though Pabst was criticized at the time for casting a foreigner in a role that
was considered emblematically German, the main reason the film is remembered is
the performance of American star Brooks. So powerful and sexual a presence that
she never managed to make a transition from silent flapper parts to the talkie
roles she deserved in a
Presented in distinct theatrical “acts,” the story picks up
Lulu in a bourgeois
Though her husband in effect commits suicide, Lulu winds up
convicted of his murder. On the run with Alwa, Schigolch, and her lesbian
admirer Countess Geschwitz (Alice Roberts), she makes it to an opium-hazed
gambling boat on the
Though the original plays are set in 1888, the year of the
Ripper murders, Pabst imagines a fantastical but contemporary setting, which
seems to begin with the 1920s modernity of Berlin and then travels back in time
to a foggy London for a death scene that is the cinema’s first great insight
into the mindset of a serial killer. Lulu, turned streetwalker so that Schigolch
can afford a last Christmas pudding, charms the reticent Jack, who throws aside
his knife and genuinely tries not to kill again but is overwhelmed by the urge
to stab.
Pabst: Die Büchse Der Pandora (Pandora's Box) (1929) Billy Stevenson from A Film Canon
This is the first
silent film that I have seen in which a woman is unashamedly cast as a sexual
object, or, alternatively, in which the gaze of the camera is entirely
sexualised. The iconic Lulu (Louise Brooks) stands in an ambiguous relation to
the host of admiring men who surround her, encompassing the role of wife,
lover, prostitute and, occasionally, daughter. Unfortunately, this romantic
ambiguity - the most original feature of the film - is somewhat undermined by
the highly episodic narrative structure, which locates each of the eight acts
in a radically different location, as if this were the way to distinguish it
from its theatrical forbear. Not only does this dissipate the charged sexual
atmosphere, but it further decontextualises all the male characters, decreasing
the significance of their interactions with Lulu in such a way as to reduce her
own appeal to her physical beauty, rather than her consummate powers of
flirtation. That said, the final act is a spectacular - if incongruous -
anticipation of film noir, in which Lulu, having fled to London, falls victim
to Jack the Ripper. Apart from his manipulation of light, shadow and fog,
Pabst's innovation lies in the manner in which he draws out the sexual exchange
between Lulu and the killer, emphasising its continuity with the other roles
that she has played for the men in her life.
Louise Brooks's famous bobbed hairstyle precipitated her eternal inimitability, its razor-sharp aesthetic a marker of her essence. G.W. Pabst understood this, which is why when Brooks's doomed flapper from Pandora's Box flees a courtroom after a murder conviction, she cuts her hair to become almost unidentifiable—to be like other women, except perhaps for the curly-blond gal pal who longs for her affections. (One sign of the film's coolness is its refusal to waltz Alice Roberts into the celluloid closet.) It's an act of desperate self-preservation in a film wickedly chockablock with exciting displays of amorous exaltation and domination. This is a stirring vision of the world gripped by a sinister moral vice—a nosedive into a carnal abyss of despair lined with visionary chiaroscuro sights and thorny mythological reference. With a voracious Lulu at the gilded controls, a vibrantly in-the-moment Pandora's Box evokes a thoroughly-modern world trying to completely exorcise the vestiges of its serial sexual and historical perversities like a sweaty dry heave. The film's triumph is Lulu's seduction of Dr. Peter Schön (Fritz Lederer) prior to a musical revue, a sick spectacle that begins with a diva tantrum and spirals into a chilling show of mind control, with Lulu laughing at Schön's wife as she pecks the man on the lips—never has the face of evil looked so beautiful. The rest, from the man's attractive son, Alwa Schön (Fritz Kortner), to the sniveling Rodrigo Quast (Krafft Raschig) will fall like dominos, but who is doing the toppling here? Lulu, like Else Heller's Mutter from Joe May's Asphalt the same year, is not totally rotten (her devastating dying gasp—a stirring act of contrition—suggests as much), though she does metaphorically embody the evils of the world. Pabst twist, though, is that Pandora's box is already open and certainly not of her own accord. How to close it becomes a modern world's ultimate ethical, self-reflective challenge.
Raging Bull
Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4] also seen here: Raging Bull [Mike
Lorefice]
What's unique about Pabst's style is although he delves into the
expressionism that was the in thing at the time, he mixes it with realism,
naturalism, and fantasy. This is a far more subtle work than you'd expect from
a silent, utilizing the power of the glance if not pure suggestion to greatly
increase the tension. Though Pabst is among the most fatalistic, this is one of
the most diverse mood pieces of the silent era. The expert photography and
lighting convey the brutal and realistic, the sensual and seductive, and so on.
Pandora's Box was a scandalous film when it was released because of it's sexual
daring and the "unacceptable" characters that filled it's world. It
took a while to attain it's reputation as a classic, but much of the reason it
still plays so well is the modernness of it's lead, who asserts herself for
better or in her case usually worse. Louise Brooks gives arguably the most
erotic performance of the silent era as the flirtatious hedonistic seductress
Lulu who accidentally hurts everyone around her. The ribless browless bore
Dietrich wanted the role, but her calculation would have destroyed the film,
she could never have pulled off playing an unknowing victim and victimizer with
any credibility. The far more natural Brooks brings a certain spirit of freeness
and innocence, an unconscious exuberant limberness to her movements, which the
camera captures with equal energy. This is an extremely confident performance,
but the brilliance is it's not particularly self conscious like you always get
from those actresses who appear to put all their effort into manipulating their
appearance. Despite the cabaret stars obvious sexual powers Lulu doesn't seem
to know them herself, instead trying to succeed through sheer willpower.
Sometimes she asserts her self and is wickedly manipulative, other times she is
pathetically naïve; her poor financial state has taught her to look out for
herself as best she can. Brooks utilizes her whole body, and Pabst refuses to
constantly shove the camera in her face to explain everything to us, which
helps maintain some of the aforementioned enigma. As Pabst is a bleak one, the
film never degenerates into sentimentality and the conclusion, though in a
sense the only one possible, is not imaginable until the last few minutes
(unless you've already heard what it is which unfortunately seems quite
common).
Movie
review: 'Pandora's Box' Michael Wilmington from
the Chicago Tribune
Few movie goddesses can break your heart like saucy, black-banged
Louise Brooks, whose centennial comes this year and whose best film and
performance, as Lulu in G.W. Pabst's "Pandora's Box," plays this
weekend at the Music Box Theatre, in a new print.
If you've never seen Brooks--or "Pandora's Box"--you've missed one of
the most extraordinary personalities and films of the silent movie era. Brooks'
life story is remarkable in itself. She was an actress and dancer from Kansas
who had starred for directors Howard Hawks and William Wellman by the time she
was 22, then became famous and scandalous in Germany for her two films with
Pabst ("Pandora's Box" and "Diary of a Lost Girl"), only to
see her Hollywood star career collapse at the dawn of the sound era. A few
decades later, when her career was over and the films were revived, she
achieved and then held her present legendary status. She died in 1985.
How did Brooks survive the buffets of fate and fame? She was a stunner--one of
those personalities who can explode off the screen, with a piquant energy and
dazzling smile that, in the end, broke down all defenses.
One look at Brooks' curving helmet-like bangs, soft dark eyes and hyperactive
dancer's body in "Pandora's Box," and you know why the well-respected
editor Peter Schoen (Fritz Kortner) sacrifices himself to pursue her, and why
his son, Alwa (Franz Lederer, who became "Francis Lederer" when he
emigrated to Hollywood), throws away his life to flee with Lulu when she's
convicted of manslaughter in his father's death. You know also why she enslaves
women like the chic lesbian Countess Anna Geschwitz (Alice Roberts), and why
even
"Pandora's Box," showing Friday and Sunday, was regarded in its day
as shocking and immoral. But it's actually one of the most socially acute,
sophisticated films of its era, a prime example of the urbane, knowing
German-Austrian film tradition that also produced Ernst Lubitsch and Billy
Wilder. With his brilliant staging and visual mastery of the rich, shadowy
blacks and whites that would later mark American film noir, Pabst re-creates
the rigid, mercenary society around Lulu. Then he shows how her impish beauty
throws open its doors.
In life, beauty is ephemeral. But in the movies, it can become seemingly
immortal. Brooks lost a career--due, it's said to sound, to American dismissal
of her foreign stardom and to her refusal of some key
Opening Pandora’s Box Criterion essay by J. Hoberman
Pandora’s Box (1929) - The Criterion Collection
Every Little Breeze - The Louise Brooks Page
Die Büchse der Pandora Barbara Salvage from Film Reference
Pandora's Box •
Senses of Cinema Dan Harper
from Senses of Cinema, July 26, 2004
Pandora's Box: Pabst and Lulu Louise Brooks essay, originally published in Sight and Sound, Summer 1965
The Girl in the Black Helmet Kenneth Tynan essay, originally published from The New Yorker, June 1979
seduction
and ruin Innocence, Seduction, Ruin in PANDORA'S BOX and PRETTY POISON, by
Julia Lesage, from The Film Center of the Art Institute, 1979
Frank Wedekind's Lulu Plays (Erdgeist and Büchse der Pandora) Lulu: Sexuality and Cynicism on the Stage and Screen, essay by Nancy Thuleen, 1995
Past Issues - 1997 | Classic Images Francis Lederer, A Man of Many Worlds, by Charles P. Mitchell, based on interviews with Paul Parla and Dorothy Barrett, from Classic Images, June 1997
Classic Movie Reviews: Jake and Boomer's Silver Screen Homepage Pandora's Box: Lulu, the Beautiful Evil, essay by Tim Samuel, Twenties Reconstruction Society, 1998
GW
Pabst: Pandora's Box | Film | guardian.co.uk Derek Malcom from The Guardian,
Pandora's
Box Alfred Hickling on a theatrical
production from The Guardian,
Female Trouble | Village Voice J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, June 6, 2006
Forum: The University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture ... Screaming through the century: The female voice as cathartic/transformative force, from Berg's Lulu to Tykwer's Run Lola Run, by Maree MacMillan from RMIT University/The University of Melbourne (2007)
media
release Louise Brooks and the “New Woman” In Weimar Cinema, exhibit from
the International
Center April 29, 2007 (pdf format)
Of
Sexual Hate and Lonely Death: The Mysteries of Pandora's Box ... Thomas Gordon from Bright Lights Film Journal, May 1, 2007
LAVENDER UTOPIA: G.W. Pabst's, Pandora's Box (1929) Dagmar Duvall at Lavander Utopia, February 14, 2008, accompanied by photos: Louise Brooks
Nikolaj Efimov on G. W. Pabst & Louise Brooks (1936) Louise Brooks Society
The
Shag Room: "Pandora's Box" (G.W. Pabst, 1929) Ian C. from Cinematic Jazz,
Green
Integer Blog: Bread or Knife (on G. W. Pabst's Pandora's Box) Green Integer Blog,
Pandora's Box »
the fifi organization July 19, 2009
nthposition online magazine: Two Pabst operas reviews of PANDORA’S BOX and THE THREE PENNY OPERA BY Douglas Masserli from nth Position (undated)
The DVD Journal | Reviews : Pandora's Box: The Criterion Collection Mark Bourne
Pandora's
Box (1929) | Classic Movie Review
Paul Page from Lenin Imports
Pandora’s Box (1929) James Travers from Cinema Forever
DVD Times Kevin Gilvear
LOUISE FROM MEMORY on Notebook | MUBI Craig Keller, September 2, 2009
Screen Scene (Keith Dumble) review
stylusmagazine.com (Patrick McKay) review
The New York Sun (Nicolas Rapold) review also seen here: New York Sun [Nicolas Rapold]
Movie Reviews UK review [5/5] Damian Cannon
Film Notes - Pandora's Box Kevin Hagopian from New York State Writer’s Institute
Pandora's Box / Louise Brooks / Georg Wilhelm Pabst / Die Büchse ... James Travers from Cinema Forever
Being There - Criterion DVD Review [Matt Conroy] also seen here: Being There
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection
DVD Talk (John Sinnott) dvd review [4/5] [Criterion Collection]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/4] Criterion Collection
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review Criterion Collection
DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review Criterion Collection
DVD Verdict (Brett Cullum) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
homevideo.about.com (Ivana Redwine) dvd recommendation
FilmFanatic.org (Sylvia Stralberg)
User comments from imdb Author: Vlad B. from United States
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Pandora's Box (1929, 2006) - Audiophile Audition John Sunier
Movie Magazine International review Monica Sullivan
The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [3/4]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Pandora's Box Dr. Macro
Edinburgh U Film Society (Sarah Artt) review
Pandora's Box (1929) The Auteurs
All Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola] also seen here: Buchse der Pandora [2 Discs] [Criterion Collection] - DVD ...
Louise
Brooks's Swan Song to Stardom
Michael Atkinson from The Village
Voice,
Louise
Brooks Plays with the Shadows « shadowplay
November 14, 2009
Silent Era : Home Video : Pandora's Box (1929) Review
G.W. PABST'S PANDORA'S BOX previously at Film Forum in New York City Film Forum
Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [A-] Tim Purtell
BBCi - Films Tom Dawson
San Francisco Examiner (Barry Walters) review
`Pandora's
Box' Is Steeped in Critical Hysteria
Mick LaSalle from The
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies]
The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
DVDBeaver.com - Full Review [Markus of ChiaroScuro]
Die Büchse der Pandora Celtoslavica
Pandora's Box (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
BBC - h2g2 - Louise Brooks: Actress and Writer biography and filmography
1924 — The Duchess of Sidebottom photos of Louise Brooks in early films from Silent Star
UNDER THE ROOT: Women and Weimar Germany 1920's
Frank Wedekind - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
DIARY OF A LOST GIRL
(Tagebuch einer Verlorenen)
An elegant narrative of moral musical chairs, Pabst's last silent film not only plays on who holds what kind of legitimate place in society, but is also a starkly direct view of inter-war Germany. Feasting the camera on Brooks' radiant beauty, Pabst follows the adventures of innocence led astray in the shape of Thymian, a pharmacist's daughter. Her progress from apple of her father's eye, through sexual lapse and approved school, to darling of an expensive brothel and finally to dowager countess, gives Pabst the opportunity to measure the Germany of the Weimar republic against Brooks' embodiment of a vitality so exuberant that it equals innocence. However damning, though, Pabst's indictment of the bourgeoisie as torn between powerless compassion, greed and scandal-lust, his alternatives - the brothel as the one place of true friendship, or the aristocratic father-figure who puts everything right in the end - smack very much of a cop-out, allowing him to both revel in decadence and enjoy the moral superiority of denouncing it.
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Kino Home Video has released an amazing transfer of Diary
of a Lost Girl, the second of two films American actress Louise Brooks made
for German director G.W. Pabst. Relegated to bit and supporting parts in
Pandora's Box, with the Jack the Ripper as its villain, is perhaps better known and more highly celebrated, but Diary of a Lost Girl is easily its equal. Brooks stars as the naive pharmacist's daughter, a poor girl who is raped and gets pregnant, is shipped off to an evil reform school, then escapes and joins a brothel before inheriting her father's money. Pabst presents this material delicately but without shying away from it, and Brooks drives the whole thing from the center seat.
The Kino disc was mastered from a beautiful German print
containing footage not seen in the
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
After the ecstatic enshrinement of female sexuality (mated
with the pull of death) that capped Pandora's Box, director G.W. Pabst
and leading lady Louise Brooks could only go back to square one. Accordingly,
their follow-up is a far more conventional piece of
User comments from imdb Author: melvelvit-1 from NYC suburbs
Louise Brooks is luminous in this rather trite tale of a
young girl's ruination and regeneration. The plot line founders toward the end
but, as a whole, "Diary Of A Lost Girl" is notable for its arresting
visuals and set-piece sequences.
Unfortunately, we'll never see G.W. Pabst's original intent:
"The Diary Of A Lost Girl was based on the moralistic novel by Margarete
Bohme... But the censors did not miss the point. They butchered Diary more
brutally than Pandora. In the ending Pabst intended, Thymiane was to become the
proprietress of her own high-class brothel, rejecting respectability in favor
of the wealth and power that a rotten bourgeoisie could respect. But the
censors insisted that Thymiane embrace precisely the kind of sentimental
reformism that Pabst disdained, twisting the film into conformity with German
middle-class values. Pabst capitulated because he had to coexist with them and
because he would live to fight another day for such subsequent (and better) films
as ...The Threepenny Opera... DOALG was a kind of sacrificial lamb, as its
scenarist, Rudolf Leonhardt, affirms: 'Pabst's accommodating nature had already
made him prepared to make two different endings -for vice, even involuntary
vice, must not go rewarded. Where the censors had not forbidden passages
beforehand, entire filmed sequences were cut without mercy later on...'"
I love what there is of it (especially the brothel & reformatory scenes),
but I was never in the majority:
"But it was death, rather than immortality, that awaited DOALG at the box
office upon its release... The influential critic Hans G. Lustig gave it a
single withering paragraph in Der Tempel... No serious criticism of DOALG could
take place until three decades later...Lost on most critics was the fact that
Pabst's technique in DOALG was different from that of Pandora. Lotte Eisner,
virtually alone, recognized a new, semi-documentary restraint: 'Pabst now seeks
neither Expressionistic chiaroscuro nor Impressionistic glitter; and he seems
less intoxicated than he was by the beauty of his actress."
Highly recommended!
Das Tagebuch Einer Verlorenen - Film (Movie) Plot and Review ... John McCarty from Film Reference
American actress Louise Brooks achieved stardom after
abandoning
Based on Frank Wedekind's play of the same name, Pandora's
Box , the movie highlights Brooks as the alluring Lulu, who uses her
considerable beauty and sexual charms to get ahead, destroying the lives of
several men in the process. Lulu gets her comeuppance at the hands of Jack the
Ripper when her wanton ways reduce her to a life of prostitution on the streets
of
The film caused a sensation for its remarkable frankness and potent images of an amoral society swamped in sin and perversity. But it was but a harbinger of things to come from the Brooks-Pabst team. Their follow-up collaboration, Diary of a Lost Girl , caused even more a furor. Pabst cast Brooks not as a sexual predator this time around but as a waif whose repeated victimization by men leads her into a life of prostitution. She triumphs in the end—at least in the sense that she suffers no retribution for the sinful life she, however involuntarily, has been forced to pursue.
Diary of a Lost Girl pushed the envelope of sexual frankness on the screen even further than Pandora's Box with its earthy look inside the daily, not just nightly, workings of a brothel and the candor of its seduction scenes.
These scenes were presented symbolically rather than
graphically, but their content was no less clear. For example, when Brooks's
character, Thymiane, is carried to bed by her first seducer (Fritz Rasp), her
swaying legs knock a glass of red wine off a nightstand, splashing the dark
liquid across the sheets—an unmistakable visual metaphor for the subsequent taking
of her virginity. Such a hue and cry arose among contemporary watchdog groups
on both sides of the
Had Louise Brooks and G. W. Pabst continued working together,
they might have enjoyed the ongoing success of that later actress-director duo,
Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg, whose pairing on a number of steamy
extravaganzas the Brooks-Pabst team-up somewhat anticipated. But after making
one more film in France for another director, Brooks returned to her native
country to resume the stalled Hollywood career which had spurred her to seek
fame, fortune—and better roles in better films—in Europe. By then the talkies
had arrived to finish off the careers of many a silent screen superstar. Brooks
was not one of them. It was not the advent of sound that drove her from the
screen, but her unwillingness to pick up her career where it left off. She
demanded the kinds of roles in the kinds of arty films that made her a name in
G. W. Pabst fared little better. Although he continued directing movies until 1956, his work never again achieved the acclaim or the notoriety Pandora's Box and, especially, Diary of a Lost Girl had brought him.
Diary of a Lost
Girl • Senses of Cinema Martyn
Bamber from Senses of Cinema, July
26, 2004
not coming to a theater near you (Ian Johnston) review
Scott
Reviews G.W. Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl [Masters of Cinema Blu ... Scott Nye
Nikolaj Efimov on G. W. Pabst & Louise Brooks (1936) Louise Brooks Society
Louise Brooks Society: Diary of a Lost Girl on Blu-Ray Louise Brooks Society
Best
Actress Of 1929-30: Louise Brooks (Pandora's Box and Diary Of A Lost Girl) Mythical Monkey, August 29, 2009
Diary
of a Lost Girl DVD review | Cine Outsider
Slarek
Diary
of a Lost Girl - DVD Movie Central
Ed Nguyen
Diary Of A Lost Girl | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review
LOUISE FROM MEMORY on Notebook | MUBI Craig Keller, September 2, 2009
Diary of a Lost Girl Blu-ray: Tagebuch einer Verlorenen | Masters of ... Svet Atanasov
Cinema and the Female Star: Louise Brooks Tina Marie Camilleri
Diary of a Lost Girl (Masters of Cinema) Graeme Hobbs
Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) L’Eclisse
DIARY
OF A LOST GIRL (DIR. G. W. PABST, GERMANY, 1930) – DVD ... Ed Doyle from Reflection on Film
Diary of a Lost
Girl - Silent Era : Home Video Reviews Carl Bennett
Diary of a Lost Girl (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen - german films ... German Films Archive
'Diary of a Lost Girl' 1929 (dir. GW Pabst) "Diary of a Lost Girl ... Montage Film Reviews
Movie
Alphabet - part I Art, Movies, Wood
and Whatnot, March 27, 2009
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The
Village Voice [Leslie Camhi] Distribute the Wealth,
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Diary
of a Lost Girl Blu-ray - Louise Brooks - DVD Beaver
Diary of a Lost Girl - Kino on Video
BBC - h2g2 - Louise Brooks: Actress and Writer biography and filmography
Diary of a Lost Girl - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE WHITE HELL OF PITZ PALU
(Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü)
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
White goddess Leni Riefenstahl, who later directed such ideological entertainments as Triumph of the Will, starred in this silent 1929 mountain-climbing epic, codirected by the great G.W. Pabst and the more modestly pictorial “mountain film” specialist Dr. Arnold Fanck. It's reputed to be one of her best early efforts as an athletic actress. 150 min.
The title of this late silent mountain picture refers to a sequence in which a party of rescuers brandishing flares enter a crevasse to retrieve the bodies of some students caught in an avalanche. The imagery is indeed hellish, the scene itself the only one to suggest that Fanck and Pabst might genuinely have collaborated. For the rest, a lengthy passage in which a grim, grief-stricken Diessl shares a mountain hut with a sexy couple (Riefenstahl and Petersen) is echt-Pabst, while Fanck's trademarks - distant figures traversing fantastic ice-scapes, the theme of endurance in the face of hostile Nature - are overwhelmingly present. The plot is rudimentary, with WWI ace Ernst Udet, as himself, flying in to round things up. Altogether a curious example of bifurcated auteur syndrome.
The White Hell of
Pitz Palu | DVD Review | Slant Magazine
Fernando F. Croce
While the Mabuse spy thrillers would later be molded (and
shrunk) into Bondian escapades, the mountain film—
CABINET // Mountain and Fog Nina Power from Cabinet magazine, Fall 2007
Teleport City Keith Allison
DVD Talk (John Sinnott) dvd review [4/5]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review
User
comments from imdb Author: blue-7 from
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Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü Niciole Gagne from All Movie Guide
The White Hell of Pitz Palu Robert K. Klepper, including a Leni
Riefenstahl photo: here
White Hell of Pitz Palu, The (weisse Hoelle - german films - Film ... German Films Archive
AN
ALPINE ROMANCE.; "The White Hell of Pitz Palu" at the Cameo Has Many
Thrills. Mordant Hall from The New York Times
Critic's
Choice: New DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times,
Reich Star Clive James’ book review of two books on Leni Reifenstahl from The New York Times, March 25, 2007
First
Chapter: ‘Leni Riefenstahl’ Jürgen Trimborn from The New York Times,
Kurzbeschreibung auf stummfilmmusiktage.de (in German)
Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü – Wikipedia
The White Hell of Pitz Palu - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Image results for Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü photos
WESTFRONT 1918
Time Out review Tony Rayns
Pabst's first talkie offered a grim, humanitarian perspective on trench warfare, not unlike that in the almost contemporary All Quiet on the Western Front. Hardly any film since has given such an unremittingly horrific picture of warfare-in-action, from the agonising lulls to the surprise attacks, from harsh resilience to the release of madness or a death wish. The point is ultimately a simple pacifism, with all the political limitations that implies. But Pabst's brilliant tracking shots along the trenches, through ruins, and across no man's land, remain more haunting than anything in 'expressionist' cinema.
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review
Made during the wave of pacifist sentiment that swept the
movies in the early 1930s, this German feature by G.W. Pabst is relentless in
its portrayal of the horrors of war. It follows four members of a German
infantry company stationed on the French front as they stumble from battle to
battle, and eventually to their deaths. Pabst doesn't permit the vaguest
glimmer of hope; apart from a sentimental interlude in which one of the
soldiers dallies with a French farm girl, the depiction of human relations is
unremittingly bleak and cynical; at times, you wonder if the film isn't really
a prolongation, into even darker and more brutal territory, of the bilious
fatalism of Pabst's celebrated silent Pandora's Box. With Fritz Kampers,
Gustav Diessl, Claus Clausen, and Hans Joachim Moebis; existing prints are missing
13 minutes of atrocity footage trimmed by the censors.
Tivo Alert J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, May
3, 2005
An unknown masterpiece, cablecast early Saturday morning at the ungodly hour traditionally reserved for such treasures, Austrian director G.W. Pabst's first talkie—released in 1930—is a World War I movie far superior to the same year's All Quiet on the Western Front. The always protean Pabst made a brilliant adjustment to sound. Despite the crudeness of the available technology, Westfront 1918 is at least as audio-innovative as Fritz Lang's M in its brilliantly extended, existential battle sequences, thudding sense of the material world, and close-to-overlapping dialogue. (The first words heard in this exceedingly bitter and uncompromisingly anti-authoritarian German movie are in French.)
Even bolder than the use of sound is the way in which Pabst makes monotony and terror tangible, returning again and again to ponder the scarred and denuded deathscape of the trenches. Westfront 1918 feels as much lived as acted. Indeed, Siegfried Kracauer (who reviewed it for the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1930) praised Pabst for making something like a historical document: "Already a generation has reached the age of maturity which does not know those years from personal experience. They have to see, and see time and again, what they have not seen for themselves." And so it goes.
Westfront
1918 - TCM.com Jeremy Arnold
At its
German director G.W. Pabst's first talkie, Westfront 1918 follows four
German soldiers of varying backgrounds who are sent to the French front towards
the end of WWI, when the war's outcome is in little doubt and the continuation
of combat seems futile and senseless. The view of war here is stark, raw, and
totally unromantic, qualities reflected not just in the barren landscapes but
also in the film's narrative structure. It's made up of loose episodes rather
than a straightforward, linear plot progression, and violence is not exciting,
heroic or narratively "satisfying" in the traditional sense.
1930, of course, was also the year that an Oscar®-winning, anti-war American
film dealing with WWI was released: All Quiet on the Western Front. The
two films are remarkably similar, from their titles, plots, settings and themes
to their amazingly virtuoso filmmaking techniques. Westfront 1918,
however, is the more pessimistic of the two, delving into the German homefront
in scenes that paint a picture of a corrupt, bitter society which is in serious
economic disrepair. As film historian Robert Keser has put it, these sequences
illustrates that "the homefront offers no escape from the anxieties of the
front lines."
Pabst was one of the architects of modern cinema and Westfront 1918 is a
major achievement alongside his better-known The Joyless Street (1925), Pandora's
Box (1929) and Diary of a Lost Girl (1929). The technical
craftsmanship of Westfront 1918 is impressive. Pabst and his
cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner (who also shot Nosferatu, 1922 and M,
1931), created a stunning lighting design both realistic and expressive, and
the camerawork is full of long, fluid tracking shots. Such advanced camerawork
was not that unusual at the end of the silent era, but it was unusual in the
first talkies, when the technical challenges posed by the new sound recording
technology often resulted in stagy, stilted films. Even more unusual was the
surprisingly sophisticated use of sound for such an early talkie, with
expressive sound effects conveying the horror of war.
Cast member Gustav Diessl was an actual prisoner of war for a year during WWI
and turns in an especially believable performance as one of the soldiers. Westfront
1918 and All Quiet on the Western Front each opened in their home
country six months before the other film, and it was the first release in each
case that caused the sensation among the public and film community.
Westfront 1918 • Senses of Cinema Robert Keser, July 26, 2004
Film
Front Weimar: Representations of the First World War in ... - SSO Bernadette Kester’s book online (339 pages,
complete), Film Front Weimar:
Representations of the First World War in German Films from the Weimar Period
(1919-1933) (pdf)
An
Endless Number of Great Deeds: Film Front ... - Senses of Cinema Jay Weissberg reviews Bernadette Kester’s book Film Front Weimer: representations of the First World War in
German films of the
<em>Film
Front Weimar: Representations of the ... - Screening the Past Michael
Paris reviews Bernadette Kester’s Film front
Forms of Culture in Hugh MacDiarmid's 'Etika Preobrazhennavo ... Michael Whitworth from the International Journal of Scottish Literature, (4th paragraph following the initial poem) Autumn/Winter 2009
Westfront
1918 Study Guide
Ronald
Bergan: Films of the first world war | Film | guardian.co.uk Grand
Illusions: Films of the First World War, by Ronald Bergan from The Guardian,
FILM;
How the First World War Changed Movies Forever - The New ... Stuart Klawans from The
Cinema
And Film Industry in Weimar Republic, 1918-1933 Seçil Deren from The Cradle of Modernity:
Politics and Art in Weimar Republic (1918-1933), part of a Masters thesis (1997)
Bartov's Paper Industrial Killing: World War I. The Holocaust, and Representation, an essay on his own book, Murder in Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation, by Omer Bartov, March 1997
Bright Lights Film Journal | Realism, Part 2 How to Turn One’s Back on a Tyrant, by Andrew Grossman, May 2003
Weimar Cinema and the Contested Remembrance of World War I: The Ban of All Quiet on the Western Front in Germany (1930) Benjamin Schröder from The University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History, 2008 (pdf format)
Westfront 1918 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
SKANDAL UM EVA
Germany (96 mi) 1930
The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall) review
Even those unfamiliar with German will at least appreciate the clever character studies in "Skandal um Eva," a German dialogue screen comedy now at the Eighth Street Playhouse. G. W. Pabst, who has several worthy films to his credit, is responsible for the direction of this offering, the story of which can be summed up as one wherein people who dwell in glass houses regret in the end that they have thrown stones.
To aid in understanding the action of this production, the management of the theatre has had a synopsis of the tale printed in the program. Nevertheless, it is really a production that can be enjoyed far more by those with a knowledge of the Teutonic tongue.
Fraulein Henny Porten, who recently played a dual rôle in "Gretel und Liesel," impersonates Eva, a cheery young school teacher who adopts a little boy. The village folk and those connected with her school are amazed one day when the child runs up to Eva and calls her "mother."
Soon the gossipers are busy and Eva's dismissal from the school is demanded. Everybody appears to be frightfully worried about the child except Eva. The scandal whisperers bring about an investigation of Eva's conduct, which appears at first to be welcomed by the principal of the school and one or two of the teachers. But subsequently they are led to understand that all those connected with the school are to be interrogated concerning their own private lives, and one after another they visit Eva and plead with her to resign.
The climax comes when Kurt, the minister of education, who is engaged to marry Eva, discovers that the child who has caused all the fuss, is none other than his own. By that time the hypocrites have learned their lesson and all is well with Eva, Kurt and the youngster.
Oscar Sigma gives a facile performance as Kurt. Ludwig Stoessel is excellent as the school principal. Fraulein Porten is charming, and in the course of her portrayal she sings several ballads.
THE THREEPENNY OPERA (Die 3
Groschen-Oper) B 89
aka: The Beggar’s Opera
Bertold Brecht play, Kurt Weil music, where Mack the Knife rules the underworld until he marries Jenny, Lotte Lenye, daughter of the King of the Beggars, where the beggars actually steal the movie with their incredible hordes of cripples marching to gain control of the city.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Brecht and Weill may have sued Pabst over what they considered his manhandling of their musical (the director rewrote Brecht's script and dropped several songs), but the social satire remains thankfully intact. The story itself is preserved: in Victorian London, womanising gentleman thief Mack the Knife joins, through marriage, both the king of the beggars and the chief of police in setting up a bank. If Brecht's anti-capitalist sentiments are muted by Pabst's heavily stylised lyricism, there is no denying either the sheer visual eloquence of the sets and photography or the charismatic power of the performances, most notably, perhaps, Lenya as the whore Jenny.
Superfluities Redux George Hunka
What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank? —Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera
The streets and buildings are carved from stone and eerily lit
in G.W. Pabst's 1931 film of The Threepenny Opera, available now from The
Criterion Collection in a new restoration. Designed with more than a glance to
Expressionism, the film retains the identification of Victorian London with
There are other ways, too, in which it's not the Threepenny
Opera with which we're most familiar. Only half of the music is retained (most
sadly, the "Tango-Ballad" in which Macheath and Jenny describe, in
song, the circumstances surrounding the abortion of their child was dropped,
for fear of censorship problems, early in the production process); the plot
elements are rearranged and shifted, and, rather than a near-hanging, the film
now ends with the four principal characters founding a bank. Mackie himself is
a middle-aged, graying Rudolf Forster, not Sting nor Raul Julia nor Alan
Cumming, three recent Macheaths. The film however does the singular service of
preserving three of the most mesmerising performances from the original
Pabst's Threepenny Opera is mostly his own; those who seek a truer rendition of the Brecht/Weill original will have to look elsewhere. (Unfortunately, the sparkling Columbia recording of the Richard Foreman/Stanley Silverman Threepenny Opera from the mid-1970s, which restored Weill's original score and orchestrations, remains out-of-print, as does the 1956 recording of the full score in the original German language, supervised by Lenya and something of a benchmark, for all its faults.) But Pabst does cut to the criminal core of the original, which continues to remain relevant. The DVD also contains an informative 49-minute documentary, featuring Eric Bentley, Weill expert Kim Kowalke, Pabst scholar Jan-Christopher Horak and Pabst's son Michael, about the origin and history of both the play and the film.
Die Dreigroschenoper
- Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Rob Edelman from Film Reference
G.W. Pabst's film version of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera is a fascinating though flawed curio. The property, initially presented on the stage in 1928, is an adaptation of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera , a parody of Italian musical dramas first performed 200 years earlier.
While Brecht retained the basic plot of The Beggar's Opera , he updated it and related the satirical elements to his own era. At the same time, he was concerned more with ideas than coherent storyline or character development. In cinematizing the play, Pabst treated the plot and characters far more realistically, with greater emphasis on the feelings and motivation of the principal roles; in this regard, the film bears more the mark of Pabst than Brecht or Weill.
The sets, lighting and props are very stylized (except for the sequence detailing a beggar's demonstration) resulting in an odd conglomeration of surrealism and reality. Brecht originally collaborated on the film, but the script was rewritten when his ideas clashed with those of Pabst. Brecht and Weill were displeased with the filmmaker's interpretation, and took out a lawsuit over the material's copyright.
Brecht's social satire is still preserved though, along with this unaffected
lyricism. The theme is as relevant to the present as to 1928 or 1728: the
government and the underworld are as equally amoral in terms of self-interest.
A once orderly world—which may only exist in the fantasies of those nostalgic
for the "good old days" that in reality were never really so good—has
been polluted by economic and political chaos. The setting is a dreary
Victorian London of pimps and prostitutes, thieves and killers, and crooked
politicians. ( The Threepenny Opera was banned in
Weill's songs, so important in the stage production, seem less so here: some—"Ballad of Sexual Dependency," "The Tango Ballad," and "The Ballad for the Hangman"—were omitted by Pabst. On one level the film is difficult to evaluate because current prints are faded; and the soundtrack seems archaic because of the technology then available for recording dialogue and music. But the disunity of style (a fault) and the keenly realized satire (an asset) are both lucidly apparent.
The Threepenny Opera is one of a trio of films Pabst directed in the 1930s that were anti-capitalist, stressing the importance of friendship and the moral obligation to oppose the forces of evil. The others were Westfront 1918 and Kameradschaft. Though The Threepenny Opera is far more romantic and stylized than the first two, all are united thematically.
The film was released on the eve of Hitler's seizure of power in
The Threepenny Opera: Doubles and Duplicities Criterion essay by Tony Rayns
The Threepenny Opera Criterion essay by Anneliese Varaldiev
The Threepenny Opera (1931) - The Criterion Collection
Preface to G.W.
Pabst: The Threepenny Opera • Senses of Cinema Bruce Williams, July 26, 2004
Will
the Shark Bite? G. W. Pabst and The Threepenny Opera - Bright ... Gordon Thomas from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 1, 2007
Brecht and Pabst’s Three Penny Opera Jan-Christopher Horak from Jump Cut, 1977, also seen here: Three Penny Opera: Brecht vs. Pabst, by Jan-Christopher Horak
Criterion Reflections: The Threepenny Opera (1931) – #405 David Blakeslee
Able
to Forget (on G. W. Pabst's Die Dreigroschenoper--The Threepenny Opera)
Green Integer Blog, February
11, 2009
nthposition online magazine: Two Pabst operas reviews of PANDORA’S BOX and THE THREE PENNY OPERA BY Douglas Masserli from nth Position (undated)
The Threepenny Opera (1931) | Classic Movie Review Lenin imports
not coming to a theater near you (Ian Johnston) review
The Threepenny Opera, by David Kalat – TCM
Die
Dreigroschenoper (1931) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Sean Axmaker
Threepenny
Opera movie diva
Shooting
Down Pictures » Blog Archive » Video Essay for 920 (61 ... Kevin Lee analyzes a video sequence from Also Like Life,
Shooting
Down Pictures » Blog Archive » 719 (60). (Die ... Kevin Lee’s full review from Also Like Life,
Marilyn Ferdinand, Ferdy on Films, etc.
Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon
User
comments from imdb Author: JoeytheBrit from www.moviemoviesite.com
User comments from imdb Author: Terrell-4 from San Antonio, Texas
DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [4/5] [Criterion Collection] also seen here: Criterion Confessions
DVD Verdict [Bill Gibron] Criterion Collection
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3.5/4] Criterion
Collection, also seen here: 100 Top Flowers Sites
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection
DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review Criterion Collection
dOc DVD Review:
The Threepenny Opera (1931) Jon
Danziger, Criterion Collection
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review [Criterion Collection]
In Review (Adam Suraf) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
About.com [Ivana Redwine] - The Threepenny Opera DVD Review
Moving
Pictures: The Talkies Learn to Move: Pabst's 'Threepenny ... Justin DeFreitas from The
Pennies From Heaven
- September 25, 2007 - The New York Sun
Gary Giddins from The New York
Wilmington on
DVD: The Man in Black - Isthmus | The Daily Page Michael Wilmington
Die
Dreigroschenoper (1928) Kurt Weill
Foundation for Music
The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall) review also seen here: The Threepenny Opera (1931) – The New York Times
CRITIC'S
CHOICE Dave Kehr from The New York Times, September 25, 2007
DVDBeaver dvd review Per-Olaf Strindberg
THE THREEPENNY OPERA (L'opéra
de quat'sous)
User comments from imdb Author: Gary170459 from
I feel a bit odd being the 1st post as I would have thought Artheads would
have been here years ago describing this one's social significance,
contextualising it, contemporary relevances, and dissecting comparisons with
the simultaneous German version. As I'm only a dumb-cluck who happens to like
"old" movies I can only offer some humble humdrum opinions on a few
points instead.
I've seen Die 3groschenoper a number of times now, but this was my 1st visit to
the French version, my first impressions being favourable as it is an exact
scene-for-scene re-run after all - for the story refer to everyone's comments
for 3G. The French runs 7 minutes faster - is that just down to the language
differences? I wonder how many of the background extras acted in both (and did
they get paid for 2 movies!), but the speaking parts of course were handed to
French actors and actresses - the whole reason why this talkie was made. I can
almost get by in French - but German is a real tongue-twister for me, so to me
a lot of the earthy harshness and
If you enjoyed 3G then you're sure to enjoy this. Overall, for an Englishman a
very enjoyable (French) curio, but for instance if I ever feel that I need a
shot of Cynical Sleazy Singing I'll be heading back to Ernst Busch, Carole
Neher, Lotte Lenya and Co.
L’Opéra de
quat’sous (1931) James Travers from
Cinema Forever
In 1928, Bertolt Brecht et Kurt Weill worked on one of their
most successful collaborations, Die Dreigroschenoper, a stage play based
on John Gay’s 1728 satire, The Beggar’s Opera. The success of the
play soon led to a film adaptation by W.G. Pabst, then one of
Considered for many years as a masterpiece, the film has lost some of its impact, mainly because its overt political messages no longer have the force they once had. With its artificial, obviously stagey sets and morose songs, the film now appears more of an oddity than a monumental work of cinema. The film’s strength now lies in its intense atmosphere, the way it conjures up a world ravaged by underground vice, cynical exploiters of people’s misfortune, of poverty and corruption.
The sombre tone of the film jars somewhat with its liberal
use of comedy, although some of the visual jokes are still exceedingly
funny. It is interesting to note that Pabst gave the film a slightly
different ending to that of the original play, to make a veiled assault on the
financial corruption which was becoming apparent in
W.G. Pabst is recognised as one of the great German
expressionist directors, and the expressionist style is apparent in the
intimidating, shadowy sets and the dehumanised crowd scenes. This, together
with the film’s subject matter, makes the film an obvious forerunner of the film
noir genre which would emerge across the
Bizarrely, the song which opens and closes the film, Moriat became a pop music hit in 1959 as Mack the Knife, sung by Bobby Darin.
Opera De Quat'Sous, L' | CLOSE-UP Close Up Videos
DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [4/5] [Criterion Collection] also seen here: Criterion Confessions
DVD Verdict [Bill Gibron] Criterion Collection
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3.5/4] Criterion
Collection, also seen here: 100 Top Flowers Sites
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection
DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review Criterion Collection
dOc DVD Review:
The Threepenny Opera (1931) Jon
Danziger, Criterion Collection
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review [Criterion Collection]
In Review (Adam Suraf) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
COMERADESHIP (Kameradschaft)
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review
G.W. Pabst's 1931 film recasts an actual incident—a mine disaster on the Franco-German border in 1906—into a parable on international relations; the “little people” transcend their political differences in helping each other. It may be naive and sentimental, but Pabst's filming packs a punch—the action is well-nigh irresistible. The pessimistic ending, in which the boundaries are reestablished, has been clipped from many prints.
Time Out review Tony Rayns
The absolute high-point of German socialist film-making of
its period. Pabst imagines a coal-mine on the French-German border, where the
aftermath of World War I is still being played out: French prosperity and
chauvinism hard up against German inflation and unemployment. There's a
disaster in the French wing of the mine...and the German miners go to the
rescue. Both the visual style and the 'message' of solidarity owe a lot to
Soviet Socialist Realism, but Pabst was a more sophisticated social critic than
any of the Russian film-makers. Only a bruised and cynical
User comments from imdb Author: rsoonsa
(rsoonsa@bandbbooks.com) from Mountain
This, the finest achievement from Georg Wilhelm Pabst's Social Realism period is based upon a tragedy in early 1906 that claimed the lives of nearly 1100 French miners as a coal dust explosion deep in mines at Courrieres in northern France took place after a fire had smouldered for three weeks, eventually releasing deadly pit gas that brought about the fatalities. Estimable designer Erno Metzner creates stark sets that simulate the tragedy, providing a perception of reality, augmented by matchless sound editing, with the only music being produced by integral orchestras during the beginning and ending portions of a work for which aural effects possess equal importance with the eminent director's fascinating visual compositions. Pabst's manner of "invisible editing" that segues action from shot to shot through movements of players proves to be smoothly integrated within this landmark film that also showcases sublime cinematography utilizing cameras mounted upon vehicles, enabling the director to shift amid scenes without having a necessity of cutting. Although the work's cardinal theme relates to Socialist dogma, the unforgettable power of this film is held in its details, born of Pabst's nonpareil skill at weaving numerous plot lines into a cinema tapestry that stirs one to admiration for German rescue squads of whom their Fatherland is greatly proud while no less despairing of disastrous losses to the families of French victims; certainly, a seminal triumph fully as stimulating today to a cineaste as it was at the time of its first release.
Kameradschaft
- TCM.com James Steffen
In the
G. W. (Georg Wilhelm) Pabst's Kameradschaft (1931) is based on an actual
event: the 1906 Courrieres mining disaster in northern
In the opening scene of Kameradschaft, a French boy and a German boy
quarrel over a game of marbles, each speaking in his own language, suggesting
that war represents and infantile stage of human development. The shadow of war
reappears at other points in the film, as well: a French mine worker, upon
seeing a rescuer wearing a gas mask, involuntarily relives the trauma of the
Great War. In order to reach their French counterparts, the German rescuers
must break through an underground gate dating from 1919 and erected on the
border between
However, Kameradschaft is more than a mere message film; it is also one
of the most technically accomplished works of the early sound cinema. For his
first sound film, Westfront 1918, Pabst had decided to forgo the bulky
soundproof booths that were commonly used in
As befits the subject matter, Kameradschaft was a French-German
co-production and thus was financed by Gaumont in addition to Nero-Film. The
film's producer, Seymour Nebenzahl (also spelled Nebenzal) founded Nero-Film
together with Austrian director Richard Oswald in 1924 as a competitor to
The Moral Tendency:
Kameradschaft • Senses of Cinema
Andrew Tracy, July 26, 2004
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4]
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
User comments from imdb Author: planktonrules from
MISTRESS OF ATLANTIS
aka: The Lost Atlantis
Germany (87 mi) 1932
User comments from imdb Author: Robert Keser (rfkeser@ix.netcom.com) from Chicago, IL
Atlantis in the
Pabst sets his cameras gliding across the sands and into real locations in the
Hoggar mountains. Towering, black-shrouded tribesmen appear, then sleek native
women beckon with mysterious gestures of invitation. When they descend into the
maze of tunnels that is Antinea's kingdom, they find a tipsy, excitable Quentin
Crisp-y character, a longtime resident who holds some key to its history. As
Antinea, the great German star Brigitte Helm has a mesmerizing presence as she
lolls on a divan, with a menacing leopard at her side. Equally imposing is a
monumental stone head of her visage that figures in several memorable
compositions. When the protagonist [who is not a traditional hero] is first
summoned to Antinea, what unfathomable depravity will take place? They play
chess, of course. The story comes from a popular French novel, but it is
Pabst's fluid style that makes this masterly kitsch.
Mistress of Atlantis Fesfilms
(
Very rare "Lost" adventure film from the great
director G.W. Pabst. Brigitte Helm, the legendary beauty from Fritz Lang's
"Metropolis," stars as Antinea, the Mistress of Atlantis, the lost
empire that yet survives in the
The novel by Pierre Benoit was first filmed in 1921 in
Germany's most accomplished director, G.W. Pabst (Joyless Street, Pandora's Box, The Threepenny Opera, etc.), re-made it in 1932 as "Die Herrin von Atlantis" with Brigitte Helm. French and English versions were made at the same time on the same sets. Helm re-shot her scenes speaking French and then English. Some of the other actors also repeated their roles though some substitutes were made because of the language. The English language version (not dubbed) is the one being offered.
Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings (Dave Sindelar) capsule review
Two soldiers on a mission in the
I have never seen PANDORA'S BOX, but I am aware of the movie's reputation and am looking forward to catching it one of these days. This has become even more true after watching this movie, directed by the same man, G. W. Pabst. I'd seen the 1922 version of the movie with Italian title cards, but I was never able to figure out the story; I'll get back to it now that I've seen this one and have an idea of what's going on.
When I'd reviewed the earlier version, I made the comment that it seemed similar to SHE. Seeing this one, I can say that it is similar in terms of plot, but the comparison ends there; though the various versions of SHE that I've seen have all been entertaining, not a one of them has been as compelling as this movie. There is a real sense of exotic mystery that never dissipates, and the breathtaking shots of the desert and the blowing sand are exquisite. This was one of three versions made concurrently in different languages, mostly with the same cast; I notice that one of the ways they made this work was to keep the dialogue to a minumum for certain characters; Brigitte Helm (who plays Antinea) has only a handful of lines in this version. Therefore, it relies on visuals and the commentary of certain key characters to tell its story. I found myself drawn into this world and totally caught up in the story, a rarity for lost civilization movies, most of which have a little too much silliness to them. This movie is a rare and somewhat unexpected treasure; it has proven to be one of the best movies to come up in my movie-watching project that I hadn't already seen before.
User comments from imdb Author: melvelvit-1 from NYC
suburbs
At a French outpost in
Jacques Feyder was the first to film L'ATLANTIDE in 1921 and there have been
many versions since, including one by Edgar G. Ulmer in the early 1960s. Pierre
Benoit, author of the 1919 novel on which the films were based, was accused of
plagiarism because of similarities between his adventure story and H Rider
Haggard's "She" but director G.W. Pabst dispenses with most of
Benoit's saga to create his own compelling tale. Pabst shot German, French and
English language versions simultaneously with the same sets and cast using
actual
The Video Vacuum [Mitch Lovell]
The Mistress of Atlantis - Action & Adventure Classic Movies on ... Oldies
L’ATLANTIDE
L’Atlantide
(1932) James Travers from Cinema
Forever
Although considerably less polished and memorable than some of Pabst’s other works, L’Atlantide is a compelling film with a strong visual style throughout. The film is a remake of Jacques Feyder’s 1921 adaptation of Pierre Benoît’s novel, with some striking differences, particularly in the portrayal of the queen Antinea. As was the case with Feyder’s film, this film uses extensive location photography and cost a fortune to make, even though its runtime is much shorter. The film was made in three versions, one in French, one in German and another in English. In the French version, the actor who played Morhange, Jean Angelo, played the same role in Feyder’s film.
Fantastic Movie Musings and
Ramblings Dave Sindelar
A man in the foreign legion discovers the lost civilization of Atlantis in
the
What, we're back here again? Didn't we just do this movie some time ago? Yes, and no. During the early years of sound a phenomenon arose whereby certain movies were shot in several versions in different languages; during the silent era, this was not necesary, as merely the title cards needed to be changed. DRACULA (with its alternate Spanish language version) is merely the most famous example; L'ATLANTIDE was shot in three different languages; English, French and German. I've already covered the English version (THE MISTRESS OF ATLANTIS); this is the French version, and outside of a few different performers, it is for all practical reasons the same movie; Brigitte Helm appeared in all three, and since her character has very few lines, it wasn't too much of a problem to have her speak three different languages. Actually, this particular story seems to be giving me a language workout; the 1920 version had Italian title cards, and this French version I have has German subtitles, which makes me suspect that the German version is missing altogether. It's still a beautiful movie to look at, though I'm sure English-speakers will want to opt for the English language version first to grasp the subtleties of the plot.
User
comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil
Pierre Benoit was then a famous writer: his extravaganza’s seem out of time
now but at the time his novels were transferred to the screen at such a speed
it makes you feel giddy: think that it's the second version (there is one
silent movie) and there's a Ulmer's version. And "Desert
Legion"(1953) starring Arlene Dahl and Alan Ladd owes a good deal of its
screenplay to Benoit's book too.
The first sequence is a lecture on Atlantis "since we found the ruins of
Flashback: Once he discovered a mysterious city with subterranean where a
queen, Antinea, reigns.This queen seems to be fond of men because she is a
woman to die for...or to kill for...Brigitte Helm (famous for her part of Maria
in Metropolis) was an obvious choice but she has barely four lines to say and
her appearance does not exceed fifteen minutes. Like in the famous Hotel
California, you can check any time you want in Atlantis but you can never leave
.
Pabst's talent shows now and then: a weird sequence in les Folies Bergères in
Paris complete with Can Can in that context becomes downright surrealist; the
flight across the desert -I studied this part of the book when I was in sixth
grade, nowadays nobody studies Benoit- includes a good scene when the two
fugitives find the well which is dry.
But the last sequences set the record straight: Saint-Avit is out of his mind,
so all that happened might possibly be a mirage; anything is illusion anyway
for the "Queen" might well be a former French Can Can dancer.
DON QUIXOTE (Don Quichotte)
France Great Britain (73 mi) 1933 France version (82 mi)
Time Out review
Along with an English-language doppelgänger, shot concurrently, this has long been a hard film to find, so we should be grateful for even an abridged, disjointed version (all that remains?). The film's commercial wash-out is easy to understand. This is a bleak, comfortless adaptation, emphasising madness (Chaliapin is grotesque, though not inappositely so), failure and death. But as an evocation of period (sets by Andrejew) and of sun-baked Iberian languor, it shows how stylish a film-maker Pabst could be. The ending is pure despair: Quixote dead, the police burning his books, and long, long slow-motion shots (reprised by Truffaut in Fahrenheit 451) of pages curling up in agony, accompanied by Ibert's vigorous score. (Students of the composer's work will be best placed to identify such songs as have been excised in this copy.)
Don Quixote Movie Reviews, Trailer & Summary-Spout Hal Erickson from All Movie Guide
The French/British Don Quixote is a faithful rendition of the Cervantes novel, with a poignant ending added by director G.W. Pabst. Opera star Feodor Chaliapin stars as Cervantes' "Knight of the Woeful Countenance," an aged, addled Spanish gentleman so devoted to stories of long-ago chivalry that he decides to relive those bygone days. With his faithful squire, Sancho Panza (George Robey), Don Quixote rides off to tilt at windmills and to worship chubby milkmaid Dulcinea (Renée Valliers) as his lady fair. Sancho manages to save Quixote from killing himself, but cannot prevent the old gent from returning home utterly disillusioned. Director Pabst alters Cervantes' original ending by having the dispirited Quixote pass away as he watches his precious books on chivalry going up in flames. There are actually two versions of Don Quixote, one in English and one in French; the French-language version has a different supporting cast, but Pabst draws the same deep emotions and brilliant bits of business from both. Though the film unfailingly comes to life in front of an audience, Don Quixote is generally out of favor with devotees of G.W. Pabst, who consider the film a step down from his brilliant silent work.
DON QUIXOTE (G. W. Pabst, 1933) « Dennis Grunes
One approaches with
some trepidation any one of the fifteen or so film versions of Don Quixote,
the very early seventeenth-century Spanish novel by Cervantes, in full, Miguel
de Cervantes y Saavedra. Brilliantly philosophical and richly colored, the
book, despite a simple plot, is considered by many the single greatest novel
ever written. My own vote goes to a brilliantly philosophical, richly colored
Russian novel that appeared 270 years later, Anna Karenina; and as
surely as Lev (or Leo) Tolstoi’s Anna is perhaps the greatest female character
in all of fiction, Cervantes’ Quixote is perhaps the greatest male character in
all of fiction. By one of those inexplicable coincidences of literary history, Quixote
appeared in print at almost the exact time that Shakespeare’s King Lear
appeared on the English stage, and both these characters are a lot alike, with
each up to the other’s measure. Both are stubborn and irascible old men; but
Quixote surely is, more than Lear, the resident of his own mind.
That mind is full
of books—books about chivalry. Quixote is an anachronism, a medieval dreamer in
a sixteenth-century post-medieval world. (Lear is a real king, while Quixote
only imagines that he is a knight.) The word quixotic has come to
describe such an idealist, whose “madness” may be perfect sanity, only shifted
in time to when it can no longer be accepted or even understood. Quixote isn’t
a liar, making a show of tilting at Weapons of Mass Destruction; he is outmoded
nobility tilting at windmills, which he perceives to be opponents—giants—that
endanger the common good. He’s a man for all seasons, but not one for any
particular time and place, including his own, and he is inspired by a world
that probably never existed, except in legend. Today he would be labeled
“paranoid schizophrenic” or “manic-depressive,” or something, and be locked
away—for society’s convenience. At least that’s what would happen to him in the
United States.
Enter Georg
Wilhelm Pabst, a great German filmmaker, thirty years after the first film of Don
Quixote appeared. This is the giant (not windmill) who had made The
Joyless Street (1925), The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927), Pandora’s
Box (1928), Westfront 1918 (1930), Kameradschaft and The
Threepenny Opera (both 1931)—and, too, the fillmmaker capable of such tacky
melodrama as Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), among the most dubious works
by anyone of such conspicuous talent. Pabst at the time was in his late
forties, old enough to grasp Quixote, and he filmed three versions in
succession, in German, French and English. It’s the last that I have seen,
albeit in a cut version—and this was, regrettably, Pabst’s last film as a
committed Leftist. Like too many others, Pabst capitulated to German
nationalism, lending his considerable credibility to the film industry of the Third
Reich.
The film is often
faulted for its coldness, and such criticism is fair enough. Inevitably,
moreover, the film in no way duplicates the novel’s richness; it develops only
two themes—and these, we shall see, belong solely to Pabst, not Cervantes. Very
little of the novel, in fact, survives the transposition from one medium to
another. (At least in the edition that I saw, Pabst doesn’t make room even for
Dulcinea, the creature of his imagination upon whom Quixote lavishes his
chivalry but who appears in the film as little more than a walk-on—and, as in
the Massenet opera, real.) All that said, this is a brilliant film, a towering
achievement. For all the oddity of George Robey’s beery, aggressive Sancho
Panza, Pabst’s Don Quixote is a masterpiece.
What may
disappoint some fans of the novel most is that, for the most part, the film
proceeds as “Scenes from Don Quixote” rather than as a full-blooded
adaptation. It is as though these scenes were being little more than indicated,
not cinematically realized. But all this is likely a deliberate distancing
strategy, to which one should add the unexpected songs that punctuate the
proceedings, most of them sung by Quixote himself. (The music is by Jacques
Ibert, although the star of the film had also sung Quixote in a production of
the 1910 Jules Massenet opera.) Indeed, the film opens with a sharp stroke of
distancing—rolling lines of print that give Quixote a negative spin. This
written commentary describes Quixote as “an impoverished relic of the landed
gentry that once ruled feudal Spain. . . . Living in the imaginary past, he
clashes with living reality at every turn. The results are at once pathetic and
ridiculous.” These are harsh words that hardly do justice to a character who
is, in the Cervantes novel, as moving and inspiring as he is deluded. However,
among other things, the film will reverse the impression of Quixote that this
opening seems to impose on the viewer. The theme that will emerge is that of
the cherished and precious nature of books.
Throughout, until
the film’s two great set-pieces, there’s a hovering sense of selfconsciousness,
a sustained distancing that accumulates into a shrewd and distinct impression
that not only are we watching actors performing some version of Don Quixote
but that the characters they are playing in the film are themselves actors
selfconsciously playing characters from Cervantes. In short, the film’s
distancing strategies, no matter what else they do, suggest that the characters
themselves seem to have read the book. Indeed, the opening commentary that sets
all this distancing into motion flashes the viewer ahead, to a point in time
after the novel, before showing the viewer the seventeenth-century novel’s
sixteenth-century action in a (seemingly) crudely abbreviated form that keeps
constant his or her position in the present in the forefront of the viewer’s
mind. We aren’t transported into the world of the book; rather, we are
constantly reminded of the book itself. We are thinking this from the start
when we silently respond to the opening commentary, “No, these harsh words do
not sum up the character of Quixote as the novel presents and develops it.” At
many subsequent junctures, we again are attending more to the book than to the
film because we are thinking, “This isn’t the book!” In this way, our dispute
with the film shifts our heart to the importance and value of the book. (A
“warmer,” more sentimental approach would not have advanced this procedure.)
All this is deliberate on Pabst’s part; it is part of the film’s thematic
development.
The film claims
two passages that are universally regarded as great. Both come near the end;
one prepares the viewer for the other, with which the film closes. The first is
the passage in which our self-anointed knight tilts at windmills. Quixote
believes his mission is to right society’s wrongs and champion the downtrodden
and dispossessed. To him, the advancing army of giants that he misperceives the
rotating windmills to be encapsulates everything that inflicts misery on the
people of Spain. Stunningly shot and edited (the cutter is Hans Oser),
Quixote’s jousting rush on the windmills gives the film its own rush. And more:
When Quixote becomes trapped in one of the windmill’s radiating slats, the
camera angle and proximity help make it appear as though Quixote, having
propelled himself into it, is stuck in the page of a book.
Quixote, now, is
returned home, to the care of his loving niece. All these books on chivalry
that dazzled and misled his mind: what’s to be done with them? They are
ceremoniously burned. But wait: recall that the elasticity of time references
distances the viewer from the time of the action and sets the viewer’s thoughts
in the present. For the viewer of the film, what is the most monumental book
ever written on the subject of chivalry? Why, Cervantes’ Don Quixote
itself! In closeup, the camera catches a book that has been burned to a crisp
in the fire. In the single greatest shot Pabst ever devised, we watch the
unburning of that book in slow motion and reverse motion until, page by page,
the book is restored to wholeness. The film ends on the title page. What book
is this? Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
To be sure, Pabst
had at his disposal Jean Epstein’s wind-caused page flappings in slow motion in
the French silent The Fall of the House of Usher (1928). Whereas
Epstein’s achievement in the Poe film is lyrical, intended to conjure an eerie,
forlorn mood, however, Pabst’s achievement is analytical. The film opened, as a
ruse, by bluntly disparaging Quixote and his idealism, heading the film in the
direction of the burning of the books; by reclaiming, through visual means
(trick photography), Don Quixote from the fire, though, Pabst reverses
the message that the opening commentary seemed to have imposed on the viewer,
while at the same time underscoring the “time trick” that puts Cervantes’ Don
Quixote among the books about chivalry that Quixote himself owned and read.
This book must not burn. These books must not burn. Their ideas
and ideals must remain to inspire current and future readers.
A “cold” film?
Anyone who loves books will be profoundly moved by the ending here, into which
the entire film pours. And, yes, there’s more. Adolf Hitler became Germany’s
chancellor in January 1933. Four months later, Hitler’s chief propagandist,
Josef Goebbles, orchestrated the mass book burning in Berlin, executed by SA
troops and students, to rid the “new Germany” of books and authors the state
deemed deleterious. It’s impossible, no matter with whatever other ideas the
film may have begun, that in the editing process Don Quixote didn’t
become Pabst’s impassioned protest against this spectacle in Berlin. As far as
I know, neither Cervantes nor Don Quixote was one of Goebbles’ targets;
but in Pabst’s fiercely beautiful film, this book represents all books that
engage humanity’s better angels. Pabst’s final shot in which the book, as it
were, comes back to life is nearly comparable in force to the ending of Ordet
(Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1954).
Pabst shot all
three editions of his film in Haute-Provence, France. His excellent
black-and-white cinematographers are Nicolas Farkas and Paul Portier.
His outstanding
Russian-born star is Feodor Chaliapin, who gives a great performance (as would
Nikolai Cherkasov in the 1957 version directed by Grigori Kozintsev*).
Chaliapin speaks softly and humbly at times, but some regret the declamatory
style that the actor seems to use in other spots. Needless to say, I find this
element of selfconsciousness perfectly in keeping with the idea that this Don
Quixote is enacting a role—that this Don Quixote has himself read Don
Quixote.
Heinrich Heine, I
believe, once wrote that where books are burned, then human beings will also be
burned. The burning of Quixote’s books is tantamount to killing Quixote. The
pages we watch being reclaimed from the fire that has burned them represent the
man who read and cherished them, and (given what the book turns out to be) whom
they are about. On some level, it is Quixote who is also being reclaimed from
the fire.
Pabst’s is a perplexing
case. How could a Leftist become any part of Hitler’s state? Yet this happened.
Nationalism trumped ideology and idealism—as happened also in the case of Erich
Engel, whose marvelous postwar film The Blum Affair I have written
about. (Please see, under “film reviews,” my essay on The Blum Affair.)
Both men chose to work in the entertainment industry of the Third Reich rather
than leave Germany. Who knows what their combination of motives might have
been. (Is it possible that they felt that they couldn’t desert their country in
what the Nazis had made Germany’s greatest hour of need?) How sadly ironic that
Engel, the man who directed the original stage production of Brecht’s Threepenny
Opera, and Pabst, the man who directed the film of that play, should have
both found themselves for a wearyingly long spell cast adrift, separated from
their souls, in the same discredited boat on the same diseased ocean.
* Indeed, Peter
O’Toole’s performance as Quixote is not one of the many problems sorely
afflicting Arthur Hiller’s Man of La Mancha (1972), based on the
Broadway musical.
Audaud.com - DVD Review Gary
User comments from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England
User
comments from imdb Author: Albert Sanchez Moreno from
User
comments from imdb Author: Benoît A. Racine (benoit-3)
from
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
New York Times [Herbert L. Matthews] (registration req'd)
DU HAUT EN BAS (From Top to Bottom)
User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil
Although the director is very famous, this is one of the most obscure of all
Gabin's movies. Who knows in his native
This is a must for Gabin's fans, one of the best movies of his pre mega-stardom
days.
A MODERN HERO
User
comments from imdb Author: David Atfield
(bits@alphalink.com.au) from
This is not a great film, but it has much to recommend it. With the great
G.W. Pabst at the helm, there is much of visual interest, and with one of the
best actors of his generation, Richard Barthelmess, in the lead role, there is
much of dramatic interest too. Although both men were at their height in the
silent era, they were both still great cinema artists in 1934.
In the Barthelmess films of the early 1930s, there was a tendency toward a kind
of tragic masochism, where everything that can go wrong does go wrong for the
Barthelmess character. And we see it here again. Twenty years later we'd see
another great actor being attracted to such roles - Marlon Brando. But Pabst
steers the character's suffering (perhaps a symbol for a rather innocent
All the supporting performances are excellent, but Marjorie Rambeau stands out
as Barthelmess' mother. The film is also quite risque for its day - with Richard
obviously sleeping with rich older women for money, and fathering a love child.
Pabst was bringing a real European sensibility to American cinema here -
something that would soon become impossible with the
Movie Mirror Sanderson Beck
Based on Louis Bromfield's book, a circus performer fathers a son and gets rich in the automobile business; but his relationships fall apart, and he loses it all.
Pierre Rodier (Richard Barthelmess) rides horses in the
circus, where his mother works. He has an affair with Joanna (Jean Muir), but
his mother Azais (Marjorie Rambeau) advises him to wait a year to see if he
really loves her. Azais tells
Henry Mueller (Hobart Cavanaugh) tells
Paul goes out with
Paul goes to
This modern parable of the ambitious businessman, whose drive to success allows little time for meaningful relationships, spans the first third of the 20th century. Has he or the audience learned from his failures?
MADEMOISELLE DOCTEUR
aka: Street of Shadows, or Spies from
France
A lunatic with a craving for melons accidentally strays into a den of spies. The ensuing encounter is hilarious, prototype Pinter. But it has nothing to do with the rest of the movie (WWI, glamorous German spy, handsome French officer, background of minarets, sweaty cabarets, danger under every fez), and you can appreciate the dismay of '30s cinephiles, finding that the great socialist-humanist Pabst had turned to such 'meaningless' melodrama. In any case, Pabst - glum, unromantic - was clearly miscast as director, and the result is a hodgepodge, redeemed by odd flashes of brilliance, like the melon scene. Parlo, fine as the bedraggled bride in L'Atalante, lacks the requisite Dietrich blend of insolence and melancholy, while the movie's finale is so perfunctory as to suggest production problems.
User comments from imdb Author: writers_reign from
In some ways this anticipates Welles' Mr. Arkadin inasmuch as it is an uneven film crammed with brilliant performers, directed by an acknowledged master with a plot verging on the bizarre. Welles, of course didn't need much help with screenplays - if we exclude Citizen Kane - yet Pabst had three on the payroll two of whom, the exotic named Irma von Cube and Jacques Natanson, had some tasty credits; von Cube had worked on both Mayerling and Johnny Belinda whilst Natanson worked on Max Ophuls final films, La Ronde, Le Plaisir and Lola Montes yet none of these was remotely like Salonika - Nest Of Spies which moves from Paris to Berne to Salonika in the first two reels setting up encounters between top-billed Dita Parlo and the likes of Louis Jouvet, Viviane Romance, Pierre Fresnay, Jean-Pierre Barrault, Gaston Modot, Pierre Blancheur and Charles Dullin among others. Some are little more than cameos, as in the case of Barrault, a lunatic who manages to intrigue via a schtick with a melon; Louis Jouvet seems to be anticipating Akim Tamiroff in For Whom The Bell Tolls - on the other hand Pepe Le Moko was released about the same time so maybe someone figured Jouvet would make a passable Arab/gypsy fortune teller. For good measure Viviane Romance throws in an emotive song and a good, if slightly puzzling time is had by all. This is a film of moments rather than a whole but definitely worth seeing.
User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil
It belongs to the French period of GW Pabst's career. The director had an
international cast at his disposal: his fellow countrywoman Dita Parlo - who
starred at the same time in Renoir's "La Grande Illusion" - and the
creme de la creme of French actors: Louis Jouvet, Pierre Fresnay, Jean-Louis
Barrault, Pierre Blanchar and the bad gal Vivianne Romance.
It's a -rather confusing- spy thriller: Spy Parlo is in
The plot is muddled and hard to catch up with. Some scenes are memorable, no
matter the connection they have with the desultory story.
-Jean-Louis Barrault, in a one-scene performance, buying a melon; the audience
thinks there's something hidden in his purchase, but there isn't: he is as mad
as a hatter.
-Vivianne Romance's song on a stage "Qu'en pensez-vous? "; the same's
death in Jouvet's shop, a model of film noir scene, with the melons rolling on
the ground.
-Parlo's tapping the consul's phone.
-the final car chase.
In my copy the movie ends with Parlo's car burning. But there is a different
conclusion in other copies: Parlo escapes unscathed but suffers from amnesia.
Like this? try these.....
Marthe Richard, Au Service de La France, Raymond Bernard 1937
Dishonored, Joseph Von Sternberg 1931
Mata Hari, Agent H21, Jean-Louis Richard 1964 (screenplay and dialog by
Truffault)
THE SHANGHAI
User comments from imdb Author: writers_reign from
Henri Jeanson had worked with Louis Jouvet on Hotel du Nord and that's a
masterpiece whichever way you slice it so adding Pabst to the mix in that same
year (1938) should have been a shoo-in but alas, the best-laid schemes ... It's
probably fair to say that Jeanson and Pabst expect the viewer to be fully up to
speed on the political situation that obtained in Shanghai at the time and not
only do they fail to make the audience au fait but they also waste a lot of
footage on a mother crooning to a child and tend to go overboard in the last
reel with the visual equivalent of We Shall Overcome filling the frame. Not a
turkey but it still falls a little short of being a contender - about from here
to
User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil
This is a very complicated story and the viewer - not familiar with the
situation in
In fact, this is as far-fetched as "Fraulein Doctor" aka
"Salonique Nid d'Espions" which Pabst made two years before .What
saves this film is the cast (Louis Jouvet, Raymond Rouleau) Some of Henri
Jeanson's lines ("compared to our passports, the true ones look
false!" "why didn't you do that fifteen years ago?" (kill me)
are up to scratch; Pabst 's directing is sometimes excellent: the free-for-all
in the night club; the bloody passport bullets went through; and most of all,
the death of Kay in the jubilant crowd.
GIRLS IN DISTRESS (Jeunes
filles en détresse)
Jeunes Filles En Detresse > Overview - AllMovie Hal Erickson
Jeune Filles en Detresse
(Young Girls in Distress)
was director G. W. Pabst's last French production before
his (ill-timed) return to Nazi-occupied
Girls in Distress - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE COMEDIANS (Komödianten)
All Movie Guide [Hans J. Wollstein]
Although she is known as a patron of the arts, a graceful duchess
nevertheless refuses her nephew to marry an enterprising actress in this German
melodrama starring Kathe Dorsch and silent screen legend Henny Porten. When Philine (Hilde Krahl), the troupe's ingénue, is
rejected as proper marital material by the Duchess of Weissenfels (Porten),
Karoline Neuber (Dorsch) creates such a furor that she is
banished from the country. A performance at the court at
PARACELSUS
User comments from imdb Author: MAK-4
G. W. (PANDORA'S BOX) Pabst's celebratory film about the
"revolutionary" 16th century German philosopher/doctor (known as
Paracelsus and actually born in
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
"Paracelsus," which was shown at the First Avenue
Screening Room last Sunday and will be repeated there at
Pabst, who died at the age of 82 in 1967, is a fascinating character, known as "the red Pabst" (Papst means pope in German) until he went back to Hitler's new German empire. His best films, including the silent "Joyless Street" with Greta Garbo and "The Threepenny Opera" (1931), are rather uproarious amalgams of stark realism, wild melodrama and pure poetry. Lots of elements in his films look dated today but also there is usually, something that looks totally new and surprising.
"Paracelsus," considering when it was made (1943) and under what conditions, is a remarkably interesting film, though full of not especially well disguised propaganda. It's the story of Paracelsus, the 16th-century Swiss healer whose reputation took on a new vogue in the Germany of the early nineteen-forties. Nazi writers and intellectuals began to attribute all sorts of Nazi ideals to the mystic healer who had been ridiculed and oppressed for choosing to write in German instead of Latin and who had challenged the authority of vested (feudal) interests.
With the exception of Werner Krauss, who plays Paracelsus as a sort of medieval Dr. Gillespie, crusty but kind, the acting is operatic. The screenplay is full of noble opinions about the German character and its ability to triumph over the ignorance of its enemies.
The physical production, however, is astonishingly handsome. In addition, the movie contains one of Pabst's most magical scenes, in which Death, in the person of a juggler, enters a town in the siege of plague and invites the citizens to join him in a celebratory dance. Realism moves into fantasy (and back again) with less awkwardness than most other directors display when making a simple cut between two scenes in the same style.
A further footnote to this footnote to history: after the war, Pabst went on to make other films, including "The Trial" (1949), about anti-Semitism in Hungary in 1882, but Werner Krauss was blacklisted, largely for his participation in the notorious "Jud Süiss."
THE TRIAL (Der Prozeß)
User comments from imdb Author: solymosi from
A well known historical fact among older people in
After having made two films for the Nazis during World War
II, the great G.W. Pabst seemed to be in need of a way to redeem himself. By
the standards of what Pabst was capable, this is a mediocre condemnation of
anti-Semitism. Set in the late 19th century, the story concerns the trial of
several Hungarian Jews for the murder of a young girl who actually committed
suicide. A famous lawyer takes up the case on the basis of religious freedom
for all people, and does a good enough job of proving his points to win a
verdict of innocent. Though Pabst was still a very capable filmmaker at this
point in his career, he seemed to let sentimentalism get the better of him in
several sequences in this picture. Part of the service in the synagog is sung
by famous Hungarian cantor Ladislaus Morgenstern.
VOICE OF SILENCE (La voce
User comments from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI
(marrod@melita.com) from
Another aspect of my Catholic upbringing that I recall from my childhood days are Lenten Services which, apart from this obscure Italian movie emanating from the twilight years of the great German director G. W. Pabst, I do not think I have really ever seen dealt with in the cinema. For the uninitiated, Ash Wednesday inaugurates a period of solemnity, penance and contemplation for devout Christians all around the world that effectively ends on Easter Sunday. During this time, one is expected to give up on some of his daily cravings especially for sweets and dessert – equivalent to the 40 days of fasting that Jesus Christ spent in the desert by himself. Likewise, Christians are called to Church for special meetings called Lenten Services – that are generally sorted by category: married couples, singles, senior citizens, professionals, religious societies, social clubs, etc. – in which they reflect on The Gospel and how it applies to the world today. Well, VOICE OF SILENCE brings together several Italians to one such meeting for professionals presided over by an elderly priest (Eduardo Ciannelli): politician Jean Marais, candle manufacturer Aldo Fabrizi, former soldier Daniel Gelin, a pulp novelist and even a thief! Gradually, we come to realize that each member of the congregation has his own personal demon to confront – Marais cannot bring himself to forget (or forgive) that one of his sabotage missions while with the Resistance caused the death of 3 innocent civilian bystanders; Fabrizi's trade is being threatened by a loss in demand due to the introduction of synthetic candles; Gelin is not only tubercular but, having been given up for dead, cannot bear the humiliation of seeing his former wife walking around the streets of Rome with her new husband and their kids; the novelist sets out to write the Great Italian Novel but, begrudgingly and on the advise of his Macchiavellian agent (Paolo Stoppa), countered continual rejection by selling himself short and give the common people the lurid reading material they seemed to hunger for, and so on. Within the Church walls themselves, a young priest is having a faith crisis and is almost on the point of quitting his calling before fate intervenes in the film's closing sequence. As usual, the rotund, bug-eyed Fabrizi can be relied upon to provide fleeting moments of hilarity as he forms an unlikely alliance with the thief, in an attempt to come out on top of his particular dilemma – despite the imposition of enjoying no contact with the outside world throughout the duration of the Services. In his first of two films that he made in Italy, Pabst has (for the most part) understandably relinquished the visual stylistics that had made him a force to be reckoned with during the Silent/early Talkie era but, while perhaps being a minor work within his distinguished canon, VOICE OF SILENCE is still sufficiently well-acted, sensitively handled and altogether unusual to make it a satisfactory viewing.
THE CONFESSION OF INA KAHR
(Das Bekenntnis der Ina Kahr)
aka: Afraid to Love
Germany U.S.
The New York Times review H.H.T.
WATCHING Elisabeth Mueller and Curt Jurgens in the German
drama "The Confession of Ina Kahr" it's easy to see why the
professional orbits of these two Continental screen toasts are widening. The
lovely, gazelle-like actress sandwiched in one effective
However, in their homemade Omega Production, which opened yesterday at the Seventy-second Street Playhouse, they are personably wasting their time, and to be blunt, the audience's. Although this Sam Baker Associates release bears the trade-mark of the distinguished director, G. W. Pabst, it remains a carefully wrought soap opera of an ill-fated marriage — handsome, static and curiously unmoving. For all its taste and classy trimmings, some of the swankiest modernistic interiors ever used in a German film, the import is as pretentious as the very title.
At the outset, Miss Mueller, as a self-styled murderer, sits in a prison's death row, with sealed lips. Rather belatedly, she "confesses," and the flashbacks begin. The daughter of a scientist, she has married a frank ne'er-do-well, Mr. Jurgens, apparently expecting him to change completely. Unable to take a lengthy parade of mistresses, she finally poisons him. (Or did she really mean to? This remains fuzzy.)
As a marital study, if that's the basic intention, Mr. Pabst has carefully arranged a series of handsomely photographed vignettes, literally right off a stage, as the couple continually quarrel, separate and reaffirm their love. It's hard to swallow the aggressive naïveté of Miss Mueller (even with those beautiful eyes), so resoundingly warned about her loved one's philandering, and with a solid year's engagement, mind you, to get an inkling herself. Our hero is this kind of guy—a man who jovially tells his wife he won't leave other women alone but probably would kill her for misbehavior.
By a miracle of talent, Miss Mueller and Mr. Jurgens are, again, personable, if not especially compelling in their thankless roles. So are Arno Ebert, Albert Livien, Ingmar Zeisberg and others, on the sidelines. Incidentally, by another miracle, the "despair" of Miss Mueller's "confession" allots her a six-month sentence instead of execution.
One thing would have been of immense help to Mr. Pabst's stately superficiality, to the scenario written by Erna Fentsch, and certainly to that marriage. If only Miss Mueller had limbered up and crowned Mr. Jurgens with the nearest frying pan.
THE LAST TEN DAYS (Der letzte
Akt)
User comments from imdb Author: tils4 from
Made only ten years after the actual events, and set in the Bunker under the Reichstag, Pabst's film is wholly gripping. It reeks of sulfurous death awaiting the perpetrators of world war. Haven't seen this in over three decades, but it remains strong in my visual and emotional memory. The characters seem to be waiting to be walled up in their cave. Searing bit of dialog between two Generals: "Does God exist?" "If He did, we wouldn't." Shame this is not more readily available for exhibition or purchase because it would be interesting to view and compare this film with the documentary about Traudl Junge, "Im Toten Winkel" {aka "Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary") and "Downfall" with Bruno Ganz.
User comments from imdb Author: johnclark-1 from
I saw this obscure German film in
User comments from imdb Author: ustase from
Since most review's of this film are of screening's seen decade's ago I'd like to add a more recent one, the film open's with stock footage of B-17's bombing Germany, the film cut's to Oskar Werner's Hauptmann (captain) Wust character and his aide running for cover while making their way to Hitler's Fuehrer Bunker, once inside, they are debriefed by bunker staff personnel, the film then cut's to one of many conference scene's with Albin Skoda giving a decent impression of Adolf Hitler rallying his officer's to "Ultimate Victory" while Werner's character is shown as slowly coming to realize the bunker denizen's are caught up in a fantasy world-some non-bunker event's are depicted, most notable being the flooding of the subway system to prevent a Russian advance through them and a minor subplot involving a young member of the Flak unit's and his family's difficulty in surviving-this film suffer's from a number of detail inaccuracies that a German film made only 10 year's after WW2 should not have included; the actor portraying Goebbels (Willy Krause) wear's the same uniform as Hitler, including arm eagle- Goebbels wore a brown Nazi Party uniform with swastika armband-the "SS" soldier's wear German army camouflage, the well documented scene of Hitler awarding the iron cross to boy's of the Hitler Youth is shown as having taken place INSIDE the bunker (it was done outside in the courtyard) and lastly, Hitler's suicide weapon is clearly shown as a Belgian browning model 1922-most account's agree it was a Walther PPK-some bit's of acting also seem wholly inaccurate with the drunken dance scene near the end of the film being notable, this bit is shown as a cabaret skit, with a intoxicated wounded soldier (his arm in a splint) maniacally goose-stepping to music while a nurse does a combination striptease/belly dance, all by candlelight... this is actually embarrassing to watch-the most incredible bit is when Werner's Captain Wust gain's an audience alone with Skoda's Hitler, Hitler is shown as slumped on a wall bench, drugged and delirious, when Werner's character begin's to question him, Hitler start's screaming which bring's in a SS guard who mortally wound's Werner's character in the back with a gunshot-this fabricated scene is not based on any true historic account-Werner's character is then hauled off to die in a anteroom while Hitler prepare's his own ending, Hitler's farewell to his staff is shown but the suicide is off-screen, the final second's of the movie show Hitler's funeral pyre smoke slowly forming into a ghostly image of the face of the dead Oskar Werner/Hauptmann Wust-this film is more allegorical than historical and anyone interested in this period would do better to check out more recent film's such as the 1973 remake "Hitler: the last 10 day's" or the German film "Downfall" (Der Untergang) if they wish a more true accounting of this dramatic story, these last two film's are based on first person eyewitness account's, with "Hitler: the last 10 day's" being compiled from Gerhard Boldt's autobiography as a staff officer in the Fuehrer Bunker and "Downfall" being done from Hitler's secretary's recollection's, the screen play for "Der Letzte Akte" is taken from American Nuremberg war crime's trial judge Michael Musmanno's book "Ten day's to die", which is more a compilation of event's (many obviously fanciful) than eyewitness history-it is surprising that Hugh Trevor Roper's account,"The last day's of Hitler" was never made into a film.
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
WHAT amounts to a graphic speculation on the way Adolf Hitler died and the events that took place in his famous bunker under the Berlin Reichschancellory during the few days before the end is put forth in the German-language picture "The Last Ten Days," which had its American première at the World yesterday.
It is not a pleasant picture, nor is it a particularly significant or edifying one, as written by Erich Maria Remarque and directed by the German veteran, G. W. Pabst. It is based upon research assembled in M. A. Musmanno's book "Ten Days to Die," and it conveys no information or speculation that has not already been fully publicized.
Hitler, played by Albin Skoda, alternately flames with wild-eyed hope or flares into fits of screaming fury, while his staff generals languish, paralyzed, and the various smaller people in the bunker fearfully or fatalistically await their doom. There is a great deal of military detail about the final deterioration and collapse of the armies and the Luftwaffe, which probably absorbed German audiences when the picture was shown there, but is technical and tiresome here. And there is less than might be fascinating about Hitler's mistress, Eva Braun.
What there is of sympathy in the drama mainly centers on a young captain, played by Oskar Werner, who is a courier from one of the hard-pressed army corps. He arrives at the bunker to try to get the Fuehrer to dispatch reinforcements to the corps, and he waits in despair and frustration to witness the macabre goings-on.
As played by the blond Herr Werner, who will be remembered from the American film "Decision Before Dawn," in which he appeared as a young Nazi turncoat in the last year of World War II, this captain is a decent, rational fellow. He contrasts sharply to the obvious maniac and the frightened or cynical professional soldiers who swill brandy and bootlick to him. It is evident that this character is included to symbolize the decent Germans who were drawn along by Hitler and had to suffer his Goetterdaemmerung.
There is, to be sure, some grim excitement about a few events toward the end of the film. The representation of the flooding of the Berlin subway at Hitler's lunatic command, even though it was full of civilians and wounded soldiers in hospital cars, makes a vivid, violent sequence. And a scene of an orgy in the bunker on the night that Hitler died, with one nurse doing a lurid danse macabre, is a weird and delirious thing.
The actors are all quite effective, even though Herr Skoda's role requires him to chew the scenery in pretty hammy but probably accurate style. Lotte Tobisch makes a placid, passive Eva; Herr Werner plays the captain handsomely, and Willy Krause looks and acts Joseph Goebbels so completely that it might be he. Erik Frey and Herbert Herbe are also excellent in one conversational scene as Generals Burgdorf and Krebs. Their dismal discourse is hauntingly staged by Herr Pabst.
But for all its ironic contemplation, this is a pretty late and profitless account of an episode in history that can gratify only the morbid now.
There are, of course, English subtitles for the German dialogue.
JACKBOOT MUTINY (Es geschah
am 20. Juli)
aka: It Happened on July 20th
NY
Times: Jackboot Mutiny Hal Erickson
from All Movie Guide
Two films concerning the
User comments from imdb Author: kirksworks from
This is G. W. Pabst's version of the Valkyrie story. I wanted to see it
after seeing the Tom Cruise version and amazingly, Pabst film is identical on a
beat per beat basis, so much so that my wife asked if Bryan Singer, who
directed the Tom Cruise version, had seen this film. Yet, "It Happened on
July 20th" is very different in other ways. It starts right before the
Valkyrie plot begins, rather than show the failed attempts on Hitler in advance
and the blast that disfigured Stauffenberg. The Pabst film is fast paced, very
tight, only 75 minutes and the focus is on the event, less so Stauffenberg. Yet
Stauffenberg takes center stage when he delivers the briefcase with the explosive
and it is quite exciting. I have to say I liked this film very much even though
it's not as emotional an experience as the new film. The Pabst film felt more
authentic in that it was shot only 11 years after the actual event, was shot
User comments from imdb Author: vandino1 from
This is one of famed director Pabst's final films and is available under the title "Jackboot Mutiny" although it is actually titled "It Happened on July 20th." Anyway, as a film it is more or less a docudrama, with little characterization or style. It looks like it could've been directed by any hack, much less the renown G.W. Pabst. Expect nothing stylish or atmospheric, cinematically, but do expect an expert re-telling of the events that unfolded on that day that a cabal of German officers attempted to kill Hitler and end the war. I've checked the details the film includes and they are right on the money. Much of the dialogue is lifted straight from historical records and there are no fictional characters added. The actor playing Goebbels looks much like him and the film intelligently dispenses with presenting an on-camera Hitler, therefore eliminating the obvious distraction. Wicki plays the true-life hero Stauffenberg and is excellent. An interesting opportunity to see one of Germany's most capable post-WW2 directors acting for a change (Wicki directed the outstanding film 'The Bridge' and also helmed the German sections of 'The Longest Day.') The weaknesses of this film include the lack of suspense and hysteria inherent in the enterprise of killing Hitler and trying to take over the German state. That's a heck of a story and it is told honestly, but without any dramatic oomph. It is also confusing, and with a running time of only 74 minutes, it certainly could have spent a little extra time sorting some things out. As it is, you can't make out at times who is who and doing what. That may be historically accurate but it is unhelpful to a viewer walking in on this story. Still, as a piece of history it is educational and, as I mentioned before it is a rather short film, so it moves very fast without a single slow moment.
Inglourious
Basterds; Jackboot Mutiny « Louis Proyect: The ... Finding
Pabst in Tarantino, Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist,
Jack Boot Mutiny: The July 20th, 1944 Bomb Plot To Assasinate ... International Historic Films
Jackboot
Mutiny (1955)
VHS : Jackboot Mutiny [VHS] American Poems
Jackboot Mutiny - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pacscovszky, József
THE DAYS OF DESIRE (A vágyakozás
napjai) B 88
In true Hungarian fashion, this is a broodingly sad and depressing tale that offers brief spurts of hope before growing more morbidly bleak, gorgeously shot on Black and White film by cinematographer Sándor Kardos, which almost feels like a throwback to a 60’s era film, especially with the prominent use of a muted female character, giving her the elevated stature of an idiot savant, like a similar character used in Tarkovsky’s ANDREI RUBLEV (1966), or like Balthazar in Bresson’s AU HASARD BALTHAZAR (1966), where the brutality inflicted upon them is an examination of human cruelty through the silent suffering of the character. Anna (Orsolya Schefcsik) certainly represents a state of grace while all around her self-interested humans reveal themselves to be miserable and wretched creatures. Shot along the riverbanks of the Danube River in the outskirts of Budapest, Anna, a young orphaned teenager, answers an ad, scribbling on a piece of paper, “I’m dumb, but I hear everything” for her prospective new boss, hoping to become the live-in maid and housekeeper of a self-centered yet eccentric wealthy woman, Angéla (Catherine Wilkening), a Lena Olin look-alike who lives in an enormous home with a window overlooking the landscape of the city, who hires her at once as her home is in a state of complete disarray. Her character is distinguished by bringing a different man home every night until her husband Zoltán (Zsolt László) returns home, an eye surgeon who has recently lost his license due to an unfortunate incident.
With her husband home, Angéla settles down into a more normal routine, where the two of them become loving parents, acknowledging the loss of their teenage daughter in a recent car accident, bestowing upon Anna all the love they once felt for their own daughter. Both the husband and wife share personal moments of grief with Anna, who listens silently and attentively with her huge, expressive eyes, where the damaged couple can’t speak to one another about the tragedy but they can pour out their hearts to Anna, actually rebuilding their broken lives around her. When a young boy in the grocery store, Miklós (Ákos Orosz), takes an interest in her, introducing her to his own mother, the couple lavishes her with attention, where Angéla is happy to take her shopping and buy her new clothes, creating a fantasy of family harmony. But when Anna actually grows fond of this young boy, the wealthy couple suddenly loses interest in sharing her with outsiders, preferring to keep her all to themselves, like a prized pet. The momentary bliss is shatterered when Angéla loses her job for refusing to respond to her boss’s sexual advances and Zoltán starts drinking heavily again, where their true colors reveal a wretchedly miserable couple who have only contempt for themselves and anyone else around them, eventually turning on Anna as well, her relationship with the young boy destroyed by the couple’s cruelty, leaving Anna alone, left adrift in a hopeless society.
New
Hungarian Film - European Film Festival - Palic 2010
Anna is a
young woman who cannot speak and drifts from one odd job to another. She is
hired to serve as a housekeeper for a wealthy young couple. They are struggling
with the recent death of their only child, and as they come to terms with their
pain Anna becomes a well-loved member of the family and also a surrogate for
the child they lost. But the couple's affection for Anna is tested when she
falls for a young man and they now have a rival for her attentions.
Padilha, José
BUS 174 A- 94
Brazil U.S.
Remarkably intense juxtaposition of multiple viewpoints
examining a real-life incident, the armed hijacking of a bus on the streets of
Bus 174 Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine
José Padilha's taut, elegantly
structured Bus 174 is essentially a chronicle of a death foretold. In
the summer of 2000, Sandro do Nascimento hijacked a Rio de Janeiro commuter
bus, holding its occupants hostage. When the city's incompetent police forces
couldn't secure the area around the bus, a media blitzkrieg ensued and millions
of Brazilians watched as the hostage situation unraveled on their televisions.
Combining taking-heads interviews of people who knew Sandro over the years
along with up-close-and-personal footage of the melodrama he orchestrated,
Padilha sheds light on numerous social catastrophes and hypocrisies plaguing
Rio de Janeiro and the incestuous, complex relationship between real life and
reality television. Padilha clearly sympathizes with Sandro, repeatedly
summoning the brutal death of his mother when he was a young boy throughout the
documentary. With every mention of her name, the details of her death become
more lucid. This almost novelistic decision further heightens the tension of
his crime, and the audience's awareness of the horrors that plagued Sandro's
young life grows in proportion with our certainty that the hostage situation
can only lead to his slaughter. Padilha is critical of the miscommunication
between SWAT team officers assigned to negotiate with Sandro, and though this
voyeuristic work exposes the abuse of Brazil's underprivileged at the hands of
the authority figures that are supposed to protect them, it also contemplates
the strange allure of reality television. The great tragedy of the Sandro's
life was that he was invisible (that he had "nothing to lose"), and Bus
174 details how he sought to validate this nothingness by casting himself
in his very own action movie. What with all the references made to American
films, it's as if Padilha is daring us to mistake the events of that summer day
with something concocted by Hollywood studio execs. When one of Sandro's
hostages has to scribble notes on the bus's windows using her lipstick, it's
like a scene out of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. But, make no
mistake: this is reality.
BUS 174 Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion (link lost):
Most
Documentaries tend to live and die according to the interest one brings to the subject matter. All too many filmmakers think they simply need to point the camera at someone, shoot hour upon hour of footage, and then magically discover something revelatory in the editing room. The magic usually fails, producing something shapeless and artless.
In contrast, director Jose Padilha put a great deal of thought into his film’s look and structure. He may be the only documentarian ever to kick off his film with a helicopter shot.
On
Sandro suffered a childhood from hell. He never knew his father. His mother, pregnant at the time, was murdered in front of him. Afterwards, he became shy and introverted. He joined a gang of homeless street kids. Witnessing a massacre of his friends, he became even more embittered. He got addicted to sniffing glue and cocaine, and was probably on a coke binge when he hijacked the bus. In 1996, he was sent to reform school, and two years later, received a three-year jail sentence for robbery but escaped on New Year’s Day, 1999.
While most TV news coverage stresses violent drama over the root causes of social problems, “Bus 174” strives to see Sandro’s crime in the broadest possible context. The opening helicopter shots introduce this larger perspective, beginning at the beautiful, inviting coast, but moving on to the teeming slums of Rio, where every square inch not covered by a tree is occupied by a house, before ending up in the less densely populated business district.
Padilha’s wide focus is all the more essential against the context of the hijacking’s news footage itself. It was a chaotic affair, with Sandro and his hostages shouting out the window. One hostage paints Sandro’s death threat on the bus window with lipstick. The captives readily comply with his instructions to behave as histrionically as possible, while he periodically screams at cops.
The police have no idea how to handle the situation. An ex-SWAT team
commander tells Padilha that the
On a moment–to–moment basis, it’s difficult to figure out exactly what’s going on. If anything, Padilha heightens this confusion. When he uses slow motion and overhead shots in the finale—a resolution to the crisis that made little sense even to those carrying it out—the advantages of Padilha’s storytelling technique are obvious.
Rather than depict the hijacking simply as a bizarre true story—as Sidney Lumet did to darkly comic effect in “Dog Day Afternoon”—Padilha passes judgment on society at large for failing Sandro. He places particular blame on the police and jails. Marginalization turns street kids, most of whom are black, although the film doesn’t emphasize this point, into petty criminals. The penal system’s brutality returns their violence in kind, making them angrier and even more likely to resort to murder and robbery.
On the most superficial level, Sandro’s hijacking is never fully explained; on a deeper one, it feels like a desperate attempt to make a mark on a world that detested him.
Conservative viewers are likely to get fed up with Padilha’s sympathy for Sandro. Undeniably, there’s something a bit too deterministic about the film’s worldview, especially its conviction that Sandro’s decline began with his mother’s death.
Nevertheless, Padilha builds a convincing case without suggesting any easy
answers. His two tours through
Paes, Marie-Clémence and Raymond Rajaonarivelo
MAHALEO B- 82
Madagasgar
A musical documentary whose international premiere was in Chicago, which features throughout the entire film the music of one infamous musical group, Mahaleo, known for their honest lyrical portrayals and their easy to sing along melodies and harmonies, together for over thirty years, since 1972, just before the collapse of the Madagasgar colonial empire. Shot with a relatively crude visual style that reveals colorful landscapes and unique foliage that stand out, as well as the bright and colorful look of the towns and villagers living in a sunny, near tropical climate, the filmmakers follow the men joke with one another and talk seriously about group decisions they must make. Despite being the most recognizable musical names in the country, where they are legendary pop musical figures, their songs dominating the radio airwaves, they each have their own lives and reflect a cross section of local society. Several are local doctors, one is a surgeon, examining patients, performing surgery, routinely checking the daily shipment of incoming medicines, perscribing from what’s in stock, one is a sociologist, another is a member of Parliament, while still another represents community self-help groups, encouraging locals to improve their farming techniques or increase their water supply. Through the changing political times, they have consistently remained at the center of a cultural optimism. While revealing glimpses of life in Madagasgar, certainly unique from a cinematic perspective, the film leads to an outdoor concert performed before an extremely appreciative audience that crosses all age groups from young and old that mouths the words to every song, laughing and dancing, sometimes eating on the ground under the hot sun, but enjoying themselves in a very animated manner, sometimes hugging one another in groups, joking with local law enforcement, or just jumping up and down, it’s obvious the songs have had a great impact in these people’s lives. The most memorable scenes for me were a car ride in the dark while a gentle guitar melody played that seemed to sway in rhythm of the night, and a concert song about growing up as an orphan and a hoodlum, fatherless, as his father died in political demonstrations, a street urchin, a hoodlum, still a son of the people, which played with teenage smiles all around that signified a great joy at the sound of hearing music that touched ordinary and common people, everyday kids who seemed to take heart in the sympathetic poetry of the lyrics.
Pai Ching-jui
THE BRIDE AND I (Xin niang yu wo)
Doc Films A Time for Freedom: Taiwanese Filmmakers in Transition, essay
by
Even a brief overview of
Pressured by foreign competition, mostly from the
Pai Ching-Jui was one of the most important Taiwanese
filmmakers of the sixties and seventies. So The
Bride and I serves both as a fine exemplar of the romantic comedies popular
at the time, and as a wonderfully self-conscious iteration of the same, as Pai
tests the limitations of the genre. The narrative, which concerns a young
couple's attempts to reconcile their arranged marriage, engages a theme that
would develop into a central concern of New Taiwanese filmmakers, especially
Edward Yang: the obstinacy of Confucian forms of social organization in a
culture undergoing capitalist transformation.
Painter, Melissa
STEAL ME C 73
A film shot in the
small town of Livingston, Montana, set in a beautiful valley at the foothills
of the Rockies, known for it’s legendary trout fishing according to Richard
Brautigan’s prose, but in this off beat, but relatively weak story, using that
ever popular voice over format, we learn that an outsider teenager (Danny
Alexander) loves to steal, comparing it to some form of zen inner peace,
bragging that he is so good that he could steal just about anything in order to
survive. None of this philosophizing did
anything for me, as it’s a form of self-loathing in disguise, as he’s been
abandoned by his parents and is homeless, so he hops on a freight train to this
small town searching for his lost mother, who has disappeared without a
trace. Caught stealing a car radio, he
is befriended by the kid with the car (Hunter Parrish), invited back into his
home where he lives with his typically overprotective parents, Cara Seymour and
John Terry, causing a certain amount of consternation, as he’s not trusted
right away, and we see him taking small personal objects of others and keeping
them in a box, like a personal collection, much like the objects Scout kept and
hid inside the holes of a tree in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. In the meantime, he’s supposed to have a keen
sense of observation which allows others to notice him, calling attention to
himself, but actually he’s just a pretty disturbed young man. But he hides it well, as he is more mature
than the other kids his age, and has an easier time with woman, actually having
an affair with the brazenly sexual neighbor next door, Paz de la Huerta, easily
the best thing in the film, whose husband has recently cut out on her and her
newborn baby. But he eventually
overstays his welcome, as the good intentions of others turn to suspicion. Much of this plays out in an idealized
universe, particularly among the images of kids, which looks a bit forced,
where few, if any characters, are sympathetic, yet this kid keeps toying with
the generosity extended to him, always playing with fire. While the
Pak, Greg
ROBOT STORIES D 63
USA
4 different short stories featuring robots, many utilizing the same cast, and while supposedly inspired by Ray Bradbury and episodes of “Twilight Zone,” none of these episodes are particularly inspiring, although the last story featured some interesting acoustic blues music. The acting was atrocious, and while these were attempts to find human revelations in the robotic world, I found scant pickings.
Robot Stories Gerald Peary
Pakula, Alan J.
In
Focus: Alan J. Pakula : Silver Spring Events AFI Retrospective, April 25 –
Best known for his smart, character-driven dramas and sophisticated thrillers, Alan J. Pakula excelled at creating tension through precisely rendered screen space combined with a carefully orchestrated atmosphere of paranoia -- a master of mise en scene who was adept with plot secrets, subtleties and subterfuge. He guided eight different actors to Oscar-nominated performances, including early career-boosting performances for Jane Fonda in KLUTE and Meryl Streep in SOPHIE'S CHOICE.
FilmInFocus Flashback Alan J. Pakula dies | Old Films & Classic ... November 19, 2009
One of the quiet men of
Alan J. Pakula - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films ... Deborah H. Holdstein, updated by R. Barton Palmer from Film Reference
Now considered by many a major cinematic stylist, Alan J. Pakula began his career as a producer. The quality of his films is rather uneven, ranging from the acclaimed Fear Strikes Out and To Kill a Mockingbird to the universally panned Inside Daisy Clover. Critic Guy Flatley noted that Pakula is affectionately acknowledged within the film industry as an "actor's director," eliciting "richly textured performances" from Liza Minnelli in The Sterile Cuckoo ; Maggie Smith in Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing ; Warren Beatty in The Parallax View ; Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, and Jason Robards Jr. in All the President's Men ; Jane Fonda, James Caan, and Robards in Comes a Horseman ; and Burt Reynolds, Candice Bergen, and Jill Clayburgh in Starting Over. Many filmgoers are surprised upon discovering that it was Pakula who directed all these films.
Pakula's self-effacement is deliberate. In the Oscar-winning Sophie's Choice (for Meryl Streep as best actress), the director's name is less known than the actors who worked so effectively under his direction, and far less known than the tragic personal, social, and historical themes of the film. Pakula stresses the psychological dimension of his films. Klute , one of his most celebrated efforts, is highlighted by his use of taped conversation to both reveal character and heighten suspense. The film is noted for "visual claustrophobia" and unusual, effective mise-en-scène . For her performance, Jane Fonda received an Academy Award.
Klute was Pakula's first "commercial and critical
gold." As one critic writes, "the attention to fine, authentic detail
in Klute reflected the careful research done by both the director and
the actress in the
Pakula's other films have had equal success: All the President's Men , for example, was the top-grossing film of 1976, and won four Academy Awards. It was nominated for best picture and best director, as well. Even the critic known as "Pakula's relentless nemesis," Stanley Kauffmann, "relented a little" concerning All the President's Men. Alan J. Pakula is a filmmaker whose work most notably features tautness in both narrative and performance; he is a director of "moods," and is often "congratulated for the moods he sustains." He has described his approach to filmmaking as follows: "I am oblique. I think it has to do with my own nature. I like trying to do things which work on many levels, because I think it is terribly important to give an audience a lot of things they may not get as well as those they will, so that finally the film does take on a texture and is not just simplistic communication."
Although he has remained active in recent years, Pakula has not produced—with one exception—work of real significance since Sophie's Choice (itself more of an actors' than director's film). See You in the Morning attempts to recycle the melodramatic poignancy of Klute and The Sterile Cuckoo , but does not rediscover the stylistic finesse that made these earlier films so successful. See You in the Morning 's examination of family and personal breakdown is heavy-handed and hence strangely unaffecting.
The Pelican Brief , based on John Grisham's amateurish
novel about the corrupt
Only in Presumed Innocent does Pakula recapture some of his earlier success. Despite numerous plot inconsistencies (the legacy of Scott Turow's novel), Presumed Innocent is compelling viewing because Pakula takes pains to fashion a detailed setting (heightened by fine character performances); he also astutely directs Harrison Ford in the lead role.
ALAN J. PAKULA: A CINEMA OF ANXIETY essays and interviews
Alan J. Pakula biography by Lucia Bozzola from All Movie Guide
Alan J. Pakula: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article biography from Absolute Astronomy
Alan J. Pakula biography and filmography from Discos.eu
Tribute to Alan J Pakula | Lasting Tribute biography from Lasting Tribute
IGN: Featured Filmmaker: Alan J. Pakula biography
Alan J. Pakula Summary biography from Book Rags
INEX: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Alan J. Pakula) brief biography
Alan J. Pakula NNDB profile page
Alan J Pakula from The Pelican Brief - at Film.com brief bio and production credits
Authors : Hannah Pakula : Author Revealed
Alan J. Pakula | Tony McKibbin The Architecture of Power (Undated)
Klute | Tony McKibbin The
Paranoia of Style (Undated)
'Klute':
Alan J. Pakula and the Lewis Brothers' Thriller-Disguised ... ‘Klute’:
Alan J. Pakula and the Lewis Brothers’ Thriller-Disguised Exploration of Human
Interactions, Relationships and Psyche, from Cinephilia and Beyond (Undated)
'The
Parallax View': Pakula's Unsettling Examination of the Post ... ‘The Parallax View’: Pakula’s Unsettling
Examination of the Post-Compliant America, from Cinephilia and Beyond (Undated)
KLUTE
- Monthly Film Bulletin Review
Tom Milne from Sight and Sound,
Autumn 1971
Parallax View Political Paranoia, by Fred Kaplan from Jump Cut, 1974
Parallax View [Robert C. Cumbow] 13 Ways of Looking at the Parallax View, August 14, 2009, originally published in Movietone News, August 1974
THE
PARALLAX VIEW - Films & Filming Review Gordon Gow from Films & Filming, December 1974
All
the President's Men Robert Hatch
from The Nation,
"The
Pakula Parallax" essay Richard
T, Jameson from Parallax View, August
14, 2009, originally published in Film
Comment, September/October 1976, also seen here: The Pakula
Parallax - Parallax View
Pakula's Choice | The New Republic Pakula’s Choice, by Stanley Kauffmann from The New Republic, January 17, 1983
PAKULA'S
CHOICE by Neil Sinyard Cinema Papers (Melbourne), July 1984
KEVIN
ANDERSON FINDS A HOME IN 'ORPHANS'
At the
Movies
FILM;
Family Ties Bind Pakula To His 'Morning'
Bruce Weber from The New York
Times,
At the Movies
FILM; Stop the Presses! Movies Blast Media. Viewers Cheer. Glenn Garelik from The New York Times, January 31, 1993
Bright Lights Film Journal | Film Noir Since the '50s Beyond the Golden Age, by C. Jerry Kutner, November 2006, originally published in 1994
Beijing,
Trying to Bully Film Festival, Misjudges
Letter to the Editor from The New
York Times,
Disaster?
Was There a Disaster? Ian Fisher
from The New York Times,
PUBLIC
LIVES; A Filmmaker's Family Faces Mental Illness Elisabeth Bumiller from The New York Times,
Alan
J. Pakula, Film Director, Dies at 70 - The New York Times James Sterngold from The New York Times,
Academy
Award Nominated Writer-Director-Producer Alan J. Pakula ... obituary from Ain’t It Cool,
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; Finding Depth In Society's Shallow End Janet Maslin from The New York Times, November 23, 1998
DVD Savant: PARALLAX VIEW: The Incredible Montage Glenn Erickson from DVD Talk, June 1999
PUBLIC
LIVES; Not Exactly Starting Over: Writer's Choices Jan Hoffman from The New York Times,
WATCHING
MOVIES WITH/Steven Soderbergh; Follow the Muse: Inspiration To Balance Lofty
and Light Rick Lyman from The New York Times,
Klute • Senses of Cinema Karli Lukas, April 10, 2001
She
Shtups To Conquer Manohla Dargis
from The LA Weekly,
The
Conspiracy Thrillers of the 1970s: Paranoid Time - Article ... Jay Millikan from Stylus magazine,
This is not a game: Alan J. Pakula's Rollover. | Goliath Business News Cine-Action, March 22, 2005
Klute
- Bright Lights Film Journal Dan
Callahan, April 30, 2005
Alan J. Pakula by Jared Brown - Hardcover - Random House book overview from Random House, September 1, 2005
Book
Review: Alan J. Pakula: His Films And His Life - Books & Reviews Matthew Reynolds book review from Variety,
Moving
Pictures: Alan J. Pakula: His Films and His Life Mark
Great
scenes -- The brainwashing montage in "The Parallax View ... Rob Thomas from Madison, October 9, 2008
Obama inauguration: The 25 best movies about American politics of ... Scott Feinberg from The LA Times, January 20, 2009
PARALLAXED | Datacide A Dark 70’s Amerika, by Howard Slater
from Datacide, January 22, 2009
Great
Director #66: Alan J. Pakula « News from the Boston Becks director profile,
Creative
Minds: True Stories of Imaginative Writers, Entertainers ... Olivier Boler under Groundbreaking
Entertainment from ForeWord Reviews,
The
Sterile Cuckoo - Alternate Ending : Alternate Ending Tim Brayton, September 12, 2009
The Parallax View - Alternate Ending : Alternate Ending Tim Brayton, September 30, 2009
Antagony & Ecstasy: ALAN J. PAKULA: <i>ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN</i ... Tim Brayton from Antagony & Ecstasy, October 8, 2009
Sex
and the City in Decline: Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Klute (1971) 16-page essay by Stanley Corkin from the Journal of Urban History, 2010 (pdf)
Klute |
Forced Perspective Jonathan
Henderson, February 4, 2011
The
Parallax View (1974) - Columbia Journalism Review Erika Fry, September 1, 2011
Female
Identity and Performance: An Appreciation of Alan ... Rachael Johnson from Bitch Flicks, October 15, 2013
This
is an announcement, gentlemen. There will be no questions. Isayc from Now in Full Color, With a Happier Ending, October 26, 2013
DREAMS
ARE WHAT LE CINEMA IS FOR...: KLUTE 1971
Ken Anderson, November 16, 2011
The
Parallax View: a JFK conspiracy film that gets it right - The Guardian Alex Cox, November 19, 2013
Alphaville Issue 6 - Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media “The Politics of Independence: The China Syndrome (1979), Hollywood Liberals and Antinuclear Campaigning,” by Peter Krämer, Winter 2013
Paranoia Strikes Deep - DGA Marc Forster, Spring 2014
World Cinema Review: Alan J. Pakula | All the President's Men Douglas Messerli, December 30, 2015
On Its 40th Anniversary: Notes on the Making of All the President's Men Jon Boostin from The LA Review of Books, March 25, 2016
After
Love: Alan J. Pakula's The Sterile Cuckoo - Bright Lights Film ... Steve Johnson from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 26, 2016
Essay
on the PAKULA / FONDA Collaborations
Politicising Stardom: Jane Fonda,
IPC Films and Hollywood, 1977-1982, by James Michael Rafferty, June 2016
Alan
J. Pakula's “The Parallax View” | Wonders in the Dark J.D. Lafrance, June 23, 2016
How
'All the President's Men' Defined the Look of Journalism on ... Andy Wright from Atlas Obscura, September 29, 2016
Of
Typewriters, Telephones And ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN | Birth ... Priscilla Page from Birth, Movies, Death, December 20, 2016
Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men | Wonders in the Dark J.D. Lafrance, February 21, 2017
All
the President's Men made Woodward and Bernstein the stuff of ... Mark Feeney from Slate, June 14, 2017
Alan
J. Pakula's film The Parallax View constructs a labyrinth of ... In the
Dark, by Jonathan Kirshner from Slate,
July 27, 2017
Pakula on
KLUTE Tom Milne interview of Pakula
from Sight and Sound, Spring 1972
American Film Institute interview Interview from a 1985 AFI Seminar
Film-makers on film: All the President's Men (1976) - Telegraph Alastair Sooke interviews director Marc Forster about Alan J Pakula’s All the President’s Men, from The Telegraph, October 18, 2004
The 50 Greatest Political Protest / Social Commentary Movies of ... Andrew Vinstra from Associated Content
Best Films of the 1970s Jeeem’s Cinepad
100 Greatest Movies of the '70s Digital Dream Door
Whatever Happened To… » Blog Archive » The Greatest 70s Movies Whatever Happened To…
Rob's Favorite Films a list of Robert Altman’s favorite films
Independent Lens . Inside Indies . Favorite Films | PBS Filmmaker’s favorite films from PBS Independent Lens
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
Image results for Alan J. Pakula
Alan J. Pakula (1928 - 1998) - Find A Grave Memorial
Alan J. Pakula - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE STERILE CUCKOO
Pakula's debut as a director, two years before making Klute,
is one of those rare American films which manage to be gently observational
without succumbing to the Europeanism of Mazursky or Cassavetes. Liza
Minnelli, improbably, is the kook of the title, a college girl who tumbles
through an autumn romance with a bashful student (
Chicago Reader (Don Druker) capsule review
Director Alan J. Pakula's first effort is so technically imprecise and understated that it has a kind of wistful charm—as if Wendell Burton, who plays the superstraight, mild-mannered preppie to Liza Minnelli's sad, quizzical, freaked-out emotional loser, had directed and written it himself. This is the film that established Liza Minnelli as the living Keane portrait, the compulsively talkative adolescent who's in pain and comes on freaky, and resulted in her overblown reputation as a heavy dramatic actress. Pakula has gone on to do better work (Klute) and Liza has her Oscar.
The
Sterile Cuckoo - TCM.com Margarita
Landazuri
A bittersweet story of first love between two misfit,
mismatched college students, The Sterile Cuckoo (1969) was Liza
Minnelli's second film, earned her the first of two Oscar® nominations, and
made her a star. Minnelli plays Pookie Adams, whose mother died giving birth to
her, and whose father rarely sees her. To cover her vulnerability, Pookie has
adopted a brash, wisecracking manner and refers to most people as
"weirdos." On the bus taking her to college in upstate
Minnelli, the daughter of superstar Judy Garland and director Vincente
Minnelli, made her stage debut at the age of 17 in an off-Broadway revival of
the musical Best Foot Forward (1963), and became the youngest person to
win a musical Tony Award for Best Actress when she starred in Flora, the Red
Menace two years later. Minnelli's only previous film appearance before The
Sterile Cuckoo was in a small role in Charlie Bubbles (1967). Around
the same time, director Alan J. Pakula had contacted her about playing Pookie,
but she hadn't heard back from him. Meanwhile Burt Bacharach and Hal David
offered Minnelli the lead in their Broadway show, Promises, Promises
(1968), a musical version of the 1960 film The Apartment. At first she
agreed, but as she told Tom Burke in a 1969 New York Times interview,
she ultimately backed out. "I think I still had Pookie very much on my
mind." When Pakula did contact Minnelli again and offered her the role in The
Sterile Cuckoo, she was available.
To play Jerry, Pakula chose Wendell Burton, whom he had seen playing the title
role in the
Although he had been a successful producer for more than a decade, Pakula had
never directed before. In 1962, he had formed an independent production company
with Robert Mulligan, who directed the films that Pakula produced such as To
Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and Love with the Proper Stranger (1963).
With The Sterile Cuckoo, Pakula, who had directed plays in college and
always wanted to direct films, showed excellent instincts his first time out.
In the same New York Times interview, Minnelli noted that Pakula
scheduled several weeks of intensive rehearsals before they went on location at
Many critics disliked The Sterile Cuckoo's then de-rigueur "falling
in love" montages of the lovers frolicking in golden-hued light, to the
strains of a syrupy song, Come Saturday Morning. ("I suppose they
are Lelouchy," Pakula admitted in the Sight and Sound interview,
referring to Claude Lelouch, the director of the film that started the trend,
1966's A Man and a Woman.). But Come Saturday Morning earned an
Oscar® nomination, and Fred Karlin's score was nominated for a Grammy.
Some critics also complained about the shifts in tone, from romantic comedy to
poignant drama. Roger Ebert called Pakula's work "a schizo directing job.
Pakula has a good story, and tells it, and then gums it up with the unnecessary
scenes he probably felt obligated to include.... But parts of it are awfully
good, and Miss Minnelli is one hell of an actress." On the latter there
was general agreement. There were raves for both Minnelli's and
Both Pakula and Minnelli would go on to greater glory. Pakula's next film was
the superb Klute, and he earned Oscar® nominations for directing All
the President's Men and for his adapted screenplay for Sophie's Choice.
Minnelli won her Oscar® for Cabaret (1972), and while her film career
has not lived up to her early promise, she has become a legendary stage
performer. Pakula later recalled working on The Sterile Cuckoo as
"One of the happiest times of my life....mostly because of Liza. I've
never seen anybody get more joy out of working, and it's contagious."
After
Love: Alan J. Pakula's The Sterile Cuckoo - Bright Lights Film ... Steve Johnson from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 26, 2016
The
Sterile Cuckoo - Alternate Ending : Alternate Ending Tim Brayton, September 12, 2009
The Sterile
Cuckoo Movie Review (1969) | Roger Ebert
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
The Sterile Cuckoo -
Wikipedia
KLUTE A 96
USA (114 mi) 1971 ‘Scope
Alan J. Pakula, a Yale drama graduate, is one of the leading proponents of richly textured, character-driven dramas, where he helped guide eight different actors to Oscar-nominated performances, including Academy Award winners relatively early in the careers of both Jane Fonda (age 34) in KLUTE (1971) and Meryl Streep (age 33, another Yale grad) in SOPHIE’S CHOICE (1982). In much the same vein as Roman Polanski, Pakula excels in smart, sophisticated thrillers, known for creating tension through oppressive, tightly constricted screen space, with a fascination for sleek, modern exteriors that lend a timelessness to his films. The 70’s may be the greatest era of American cinema, where the once-powerful Hollywood Studios sold off many of their assets temporarily reducing their power and influence, leaving an opening for directors to have an impact on films like never before, producing the likes of Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970), Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and BARRY LYNDON (1975), Altman’s MASH (1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), Images (1972), The Long Goodbye (1973), California Split (1974), Nashville (1975), and 3 Women (1977), Coppola’s THE GODFATHER (1972), THE GODFATHER Pt. II (1974), THE CONVERSATION (1974) and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976), Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), Polanski’s CHINATOWN (1974), Woody Allen’s ANNIE HALL (1977) and MANHATTAN (1979), but also American independent films like Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970), Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN (1978), along with a decade of films from movie maverick John Cassavetes, Husbands (1970), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), and Opening Night (1977). Almost forgotten in this firestorm of powerful dramas are the carefully orchestrated paranoid thrillers of Alan J. Pakula, who specializes in suspense thrillers layered in subtlety, plot secrets, and deception. The first of what would become known as the “paranoia trilogy,” along with THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974) and ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN (1976), these were films made in response to the looming fears that gripped the nation coming on the heels of 60’s assassinations, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, where television images flooded the nation reinforcing a government that had lost control, where behind the scenes secret and often nefarious powers vied for the power vacuum, where instead of the massive participatory demonstrations of the protest movements of the 60’s, suddenly ordinary citizens felt powerless to effect their destiny.
The paranoia thriller exemplified impotence in the face of danger, simultaneously ushering in an era of 70’s disaster films like AIRPORT (1970), THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (1972), EARTHQUAKE (1974), THE TOWERING INFERNO (1974), and JAWS (1975), with revenge films to follow in the 80’s, vividly portraying a breakdown of community cohesiveness leaving the individual feeling isolated, hopelessly trapped and alone, exuding a strange and mysterious passivity bordering on defeatism, represented by Sydney Pollack’s THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975). What’s lacking in these films is a conquering hero to eradicate the pervasive threat, like Clint Eastwood in DIRTY HARRY (1971) or Charles Bronson in DEATH WISH (1974), as the mythical era of the western hero has passed, replaced by ineffectual real-life political leaders disgraced by unethical abuse of power and rampant corruption, where Pakula in particular emphasized the empty spaciousness of the surroundings, where the individual is dwarfed by the seemingly mammoth skyscraper reflections of power and modernity, barraged by interior fears, often of unknown origin, while the idea of security or personal well-being has all but vanished, left with a feeling of impending doom creeping into the moral fabric of society. Ironically, Pakula himself lost his life in a freak auto accident on the Long Island Expressway in 1998 when another car hit a lead pipe on the road that flew through his windshield, killing him instantly. KLUTE was the director’s first major commercial success, significant for the exhaustive research done by both the director and lead actress in exploring the lurid, behind-the-scenes lives of Manhattan’s call girls, including meticulous production values that included fashionable haute couture outfits from Fonda’s own personal wardrobe that made such a splash onscreen. Despite Pakula’s considerable talents, this is largely remembered as a Jane Fonda movie, having lost the Oscar earlier to British actress Maggie Smith in THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE (1969), despite being the odds-on favorite for her amazing performance in Sydney Pollack’s THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY? (1969), suspected to be due to her unpopular (in Hollywood) “Hanoi Jane” activism against the war in Vietnam at the time. But in KLUTE Fonda is quite simply brilliant in a career-defining performance, blowing away the all-British competition to win the Best Actress Award, the last of her “sexy” performances playing a high-priced call girl in this interesting dual exploration of sex and capitalism as seen through the lens of the burgeoning feminist movement. Written by Dave and Andy Lewis, almost exclusively known as television writers, Fonda’s character is uncommonly rich and fully realized, a complex composite of a prostitute and film noir femme fatale, much of it developed improvisationally by Fonda herself, especially the therapy sessions, exhibiting mood shifts that are often beautiful and ugly in the same scene, where her surface level wit and everpresent sarcasm is her chief defense mechanism hiding a more scarred and wounded interior soul.
KLUTE is an unusually intelligent film that balances mood and atmosphere with personality and vulnerability, which is what we remember afterwards in Fonda’s character of Bree Daniels. Dressed in mini-skirts and high boots, wearing tight sweaters without a bra, with a shag haircut accentuating her bangs designed by a hairdresser in New York’s Lower East Side, Bree is a modern woman that always looks like a million bucks. An aspiring model and actress, seemingly in control of her own career path, she is a part-time call-girl making quick cash in order to pay for the lavish lifestyle to which she has become accustomed, living alone, drinking wine and smoking an occasional joint upon returning home at night to relax and wind down. Mixing themes of surveillance and voyeurism, over the opening credits the audience is introduced to an audio tape recording where Bree can be heard reassuring one of her customers to relax, have fun, and basically “let it all hang out,” which serves as a kind of code for the sexual revolution of the 60’s that went awry when certain factions turned violent, basically spoiling the party for the free love generation. Meanwhile, somewhere in the heartland of Tuscarora, Pennsylvania, a family man and business executive Tom Gruneman (Robert Milli) disappears during a business trip to the city, where his boss, Peter Cable (Charles Cioffi), feels somewhat responsible, so he hires Gruneman’s best friend, Donald Sutherland as John Klute, a Pennsylvania-based private detective to search for his missing friend. According to the police, they reached a dead end after six month’s, as the only evidence obtained is an obscene typewritten letter found in Gruneman’s office addressed to call-girl Bree Daniels in New York, who reports receiving several letters and phone calls from Gruneman, though she can’t recall meeting him, while she also has a feeling she’s being stalked. Renting an apartment in the basement of her building, Klute taps the phone of Ms. Daniels while also following her as she turns tricks. While she exudes confidence and a sense of personal liberation by always being in control of her male customers, seen faking an orgasm while looking at her watch, we’re also privy to a different side, seen in a series of visits to her psychiatrist (Vivian Nathan), where she reveals the sex work is more a compulsion than a necessity, though it pays well, but it’s hardly fulfilling, leaving behind an interior void in her life, where she’s been trying to get out of “the life” with little success. When Klute finally talks to Bree, after her initial reluctance, she reveals she was seriously beaten by a psychopathic customer several years earlier who “was serious” about beating women, though she can’t connect the photo of Gruneman to that man.
Klute discovers Bree is his only connection to a lurid world of women-for-hire in a city that he is already excluded from, so he needs her help, delving more deeply into her personal associates, including ex-boyfriend Frankie Ligourin (Roy Scheider), her former pimp and protector, a slick con man with underworld connections who is the picture of male arrogance and pride, always seen with a beautiful girl on his arm, making sure Klute gets the company message, “I want to make something clear: You know, I don’t go to a woman. A woman comes to me. *Her* choice.” Frankie reveals it was one of his other girls that passed on the abusive client to Bree and another girl, Arlyn Page (Dorothy Tristan). While that girl is now dead from a suicide, Page has become a drug addict and completely dropped out of sight, where she could be anywhere. Despite dealing with a sophisticated call-girl who speaks freely and openly about sex, Klute remains an honorable man, who comes from a small town and retains his core values of conservatism and good will, offering his protection, which is something Bree takes advantage of, “Don’t feel bad about losing your virtue. I sort of knew you would. Everybody always does.” However, their relationship deepens, developing into a sexual romance (as it did in real life between the two leads), where one of the best scenes in the film is walking the streets of New York together where they stop and pick up fruit at an outdoor market, where she is just eying the guy, as if for the first time, afterwards seen telling her therapist that she’s afraid of losing control, that this man is good and decent to her, who’s seen her look fabulous, but also completely horrid, where trusting a man is not easy, suggesting she wishes sometimes she could go back to “just feeling numb.” Throughout the film, she is frequently shown alone in her apartment from the vantage point of a stalker across the street who is watching her. At one point Klute realizes he’s on the roof, but his search proves futile. The uninhibited freedom of her lifestyle is constantly under threat, reflective of the early stages of a feminist era that was continually under attack as well, where it’s interesting that early feminist critics lauded the film as a realistic portrayal of a woman’s personal conflict, only to later reverse course, as her attempt to accept a man in her life for stability or balance is paramount to endorsing patriarchy. This reflects, however, the complexity of the role, as it appeals to a cross-section of viewpoints, even after the passage of time, retaining a unique blend of modernity and film noir, pitting hardboiled cynicism against the romanticism of a possible relationship.
Movies and Methods: An Anthology Pt. 1, by Bill Nichols, 1976 (pdf format)
More than a classical
thriller, a “film noir,” or a contemporary reworking of the “private eye” movie
— as some critics have seen it — Klute seems
closer to the psychological suspense thriller, with most of the action going on
inside the central character’s head. Klute is told from a highly subjective
viewpoint, and the other characters, while “real,” can be seen as projections
of the heroine’s psyche. The film
functions on both levels, as a straight suspense story and as a dramatization
of intense inner conflict, but it is from its second level that it derives its
power.
Critic Diane Giddis in her essay The Divided Woman: Bree Daniels in Klute, taken from her book Women and Film, 1973, suggests women should completely disregard the conventional film noir conventions and reclaim the film on the basis of its sexual politics alone, where Bree becomes a stand-in for the feminist cause. But the film offers an equally compelling narrative about the male psyche, where the private eye genre is a vehicle commonly used for strong individual male characters, where the stalker element in a tense paranoia film adds a disturbing element of potential male violence directed towards women. Offering an openly cinéma vérité style of viewing the streets of New York, the interior shots, by contrast, beautifully photographed by cinematographer Gordon Willis, create a visual claustrophobia that explores the male fears about women. While championing Bree’s interior psychological world, where asking what a woman wants becomes such a significant aspect of her character, the film simultaneously delves into a world of male apprehension, where a liberated woman, as reflected by the repeated tape recording loop heard at the opening, somehow opens the floodgates of a demented male psychopath whose masculinity is threatened by these open sexual freedoms, where his only response is criminally inappropriate. This unfortunately reflects the existing reality where rape remains a systematically entrenched violent form of criminal male domination over women that continues to plague all sections of the globe, including the American armed forces, but is especially prevalent in war ravaged regions. The distinctively eerie musical soundtrack by Michael Small, so effective in the film, is reminiscent of John Carpenter’s memorable synth score in HALLOWEEN (1978), where it’s hard to believe Carpenter wasn’t hugely influenced by this film, as much of this has the same creepy feel as a slasher movie, where something is always approaching Bree, with the camera continuing to follow her wherever she goes (as it does Jamie Lee Curtis), at times literally becoming the eyes of the stalker. Pakula does an extraordinary job creating a feeling of pathological disassociation, of being outside societal boundaries and literally over the edge, especially the view of a man seething in his own disgust with himself, alone in the darkness of a penthouse skyscraper office with floor-to-ceiling windows revealing an utterly spectacular vantage point of the city of New York. But in fairness, the film also offers another more balanced male view, that of the titular character Klute, who may as well be a stand-in for the audience. Sutherland is terrific in a performance defined by quietly subtle restraint, where his impassive stoicism is laudable, making no judgments about her former life as a Manhattan prostitute, recognizing that she needs total acceptance as a woman to really be free of her past. He appreciates her even when she doesn’t appreciate herself, but in a subversion of the testosterone-laden film noir detective genre, he’s not the featured central character. While she freely exposes her inner domain both sexually and through repeated visits with a therapist, his more closed, inner psyche remains hidden and largely unknown, as it’s uncertain where this will all lead and whether they even have a future together. Ahead of its time both then and now, the film’s true insight is the revelation that feelings of love alter the sexual and psychic dynamic, as the normally self-reliant Bree feels increasingly overwhelmed and disempowered by a sudden surge of feelings she can’t control, as it’s no longer all about her, where learning to share the uniqueness and fragility of her own inner world with a significant other remains one of the mysterious challenges of anyone’s life.
David del Valle from 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die:
The post Vietnam/Watergate sensibilities of 1970’s cinema
were never more evident than in Alan Pakula’s classic neonoir Klute.
From the fetishized phone conversation of the opening credits, the
director makes us aware of the surveillance age that would culminate so
strikingly in Francis Coppola’s The
Conversation. Klute is an
unconventional film that is both detective thriller and character-driven mood
piece, one rife with subtexts of urban decay and a claustrophobic sense of
helplessness.
Despite the title, this is Bree Daniels’s (Jane Fonda)
story, and its success relies on the complex inner life of Fonda’s call girl,
who is neither your typical tramp with a heart if gold nor a total bitch. Fonda’s work here is the crowning achievement
of her career. Bree wants to be an
actress and model, and Pakula’s depiction of
Enter John Klute (Donald Sutherland), a small-town detective
out of his depth in the underbelly of
As a mystery, Klute
has no real suspense because the killer’s identity is made known early on. The dynamic between the two leads is what
keeps the film on target. The real joy
is Fonda’s acting virtuosity, and her ability to register so many edges and
contradictions on camera. Pakula’s
aesthetic centers on the voyeuristic pleasure of watching Bree develop into a
nonhero as fear envelops her world and her tough veneer starts to crumble when
she must trust a man, perhaps for the first time.
As for Pakula, his three masterworks (Klute, The Parallax View, and All
the President’s Men) more than justify his place among the great directors
of the 1970’s or any other decade. His
style remained unique to the last.
Klute | review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes ... - Time Out
Fonda's Oscar-winning performance as New York call-girl Bree Daniels is the real focus of Pakula's thriller, rather than Sutherland's Klute, the private eye whose increasingly obsessional 'protection' she reluctantly receives when menaced by a former client. Though it's obviously valid to follow the line that Klute, with its abstracted updates of private eye and urban noir conventions, initiated Pakula's string of paranoid thrillers (The Parallax View, All the President's Men ), it's just as fruitful to see it as belonging to a trio of features (with Comes a Horseman and Rollover), each starring Fonda, that hinge on the contradictions of autonomy and emotional commitment facing would-be independent women. The threats of dependency and destruction here become Sutherland's investigator and Cioffi's telephone breather, and Pakula's open ambivalence about Bree's eventual 'fate' will be repeated in Fonda's dealings with Caan's war-hero/Western stranger and Kristofferson's Wall Street cowboy. For once, a genuinely psychological thriller.
"It
is not the film critic's business to... - Robin Wood - critic Film
Comment, 1972
It is not the film critic's business to adjudicate between rival and moral positions, except in so far as these are realized in their respective films: what concerns him, that is, is the convincingness of the realizations. Reduce (WR and Klute) to messages, and the Makavejev is certainly the more appealing- its basic assumption being that happiness through sexual liberation is possible, while the assumption of Klute is that it probably isn't. WR is an extraordinary film inviting a complex and detailed analysis: brief comment runs the risk of over-simplification. It seems valid, however, to express some anxiety at the virtual disappearance in WR of certain qualities strikingly present in Makavejev's previous work: the tenderness and sense of human dignity that in Switchboard Operator were associated with the film's more 'traditional' elements. In WR such qualities are restricted, again, to the most inhibited character, and allowed expression only after he has cut off the heroine's head with an ice-skate. The film comes dangerously close to rendering sexuality merely trivial or ridiculous- to the extent that, granted the obliqueness of Makavejev's method and the possibility of ubiquitous irony, one is tempted to take that this as his real point and read the whole film in a sense contrary to its apparent drift, though such a reading is only possible, I think, by means of a rather extreme application of the principle of trusting the tale, not the artist. Perhaps tenderness and human dignity- and deep emotional commitments- are 'old fashioned' illusions we shall have to do without; though they are not to be tossed aside too lightly, a warning which it is the purpose of Klute quite unrhetorically and unpretentiously to assert.
KLUTE (Alan J. Pakula, 1971) « Dennis Grunes
One of the eeriest, most frightening psychological thrillers, Klute is by far Alan J. Pakula’s best film. (All the President’s Men, 1976, can’t measure up because, in the absence of relevant information, Pakula couldn’t figure out what to do about Deep Throat.)
John Klute (Donald Sutherland, giving his best performance) is a small-town detective whose best friend, an engineer, has vanished; Tom’s employer, Peter Cable, employs Klute to find Tom, which leads Klute to New York and a desperate, dangerous half-world involving Bree Daniel[s] (Jane Fonda, best actress, National Society of Film Critics, New York critics, Oscar, Golden Globe, etc.), a call-girl and aspiring actress. In psychotherapy, Bree is attempting to reclaim her life.
Fonda, Barbara Stanwyck-no-nonsensical, is the main attraction here, propping up Pakula’s challenge to film noir: misogynistic Klute initially takes Bree, despite her vulnerability, for a femme fatale who knows more about Tom than she is telling. Working from an adept script by Andy and Dave Lewis, Pakula divests the piece of red herrings by disclosing the villain’s identity early on. This doesn’t help our jumping hearts as Pakula orchestrates point-of-view shots that indicate the stalking of Bree way more nightmarishly than anything that Brian De Palma would conjure. In a deserted garment factory, the final confrontation between Bree and the villain, a former brutal client, culminates in shattered glass as the villain leaps to his death out of the frame, to which Pakula applies stunning slow motion: a suggestion of Bree’s interiority and the end of her bad dream.
Indeed, Pakula and color cinematographer Gordon Willis have brilliantly sculpted one widescreen shot after another to project Bree’s states of mind: overwhelming blackness whose slivers of intense light serve only to highlight the dark.
Pakula’s “revision” of film noir honors film noir.
Jane
Fonda, Klute: Pauline Kael Pauline
Kael from The New Yorker, July 3,
1971
“Jane Fonda's motor runs a little fast. As an actress, she has a
special kind of smartness that takes the form of speed; she's always a little
ahead of everybody, and this quicker beat--this quicker responsiveness--makes
her more exciting to watch. This quality works to great advantage in her
full-scale, definitive portrait of a call girl in Klute. It's a good,
big role for her, and she disappears into Bree, the call girl, so totally that
her performance is very pure--unadorned by "acting." As with her
defiantly self-destructive Gloria in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, she
never stands outside Bree, she gives herself over to the role, and yet she
isn't lost in it--she's fully in control, and her means are
extraordinarily economical. She has somehow got to a plane of acting at which
even the closest closeup never reveals a false thought and, seen on the movie
streets a block away, she's Bree, not Jane Fonda, walking toward us.
"The center of the movie is the study of the temperament and the drives of
this intelligent, tough high-bracket call girl who wants to quit.... Though
there have been countless movie prostitutes, this is perhaps the first major
attempt to transform modern clinical understanding into human understanding and
dramatic meaning. The conception may owe some debt to the Anna Karina whore in My
Life to Live, but Bree is a much more ambivalent character. She's maternal
and provocative with her customers, confident and contemptuously cool; she's a
different girl alone--huddled in bed in her disorderly room. The suspense plot
involves the ways in which prostitutes attract the forces that destroy them.
Bree's knowledge that as a prostitute she has nowhere to go but down and her
mixed-up efforts to escape make her one of the strongest feminine characters to
reach the screen. It's hard to remember that this is the same actress who was
the wide-eyed, bare-bottomed Barbarella and the anxious blond bride in Period
of Adjustment and the brittle, skittish girl in the broad-brimmed hat of The
Chapman Report; I wish Jane Fonda could divide herself in two, so we could
have new movies with that naughty-innocent comedienne as well as with this brilliant,
no-nonsense dramatic actress. Her Gloria invited comparison with Bette Davis in
her great days, but the character of Gloria lacked softer tones, shading,
variety. Her Bree transcends the comparison; there isn't another young dramatic
actress in American films who can touch her....”
Klute - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Thomas R. Erskine from Film Reference
Jane Fonda's Academy Award-winning performance as Bree Daniels, a
In an interview in Positif Alan Pakula stated that he regarded the film as similar to a 1940s thriller, a genre that he could use for his own purposes. In fact, Klute possesses several film noir characteristics, both in style and content, but Pakula shifts the psychological focus from Klute, the detective, to Bree, the intended victim. Klute's attempts to discover the identity of the killer pale in comparison to Bree's efforts at self-discovery, which are aided by a female psychotherapist. Thus the film is generically both film noir thriller and a psychological thriller, and the audience identifies with Bree, a developing character whose inner conflict torments her, not with Klute, the static and reticent male.
Bree wants to leave "the life," which ironically gives her control and independence, for modeling, but the audition with its "lineup" and depersonalization, seems to offer only a different "life." When Klute, the small-town friend of a murder victim, pursues the identity of the murderer, he seems to offer her another option, love and its accompanying dependence; for he comes to love and protect her. Ironically, his love and protection further endanger her, and as she relinquishes control to Klute, she nearly loses her life. Like Cable, the murderer, Klute poses a real threat, though it is more psychological than physical. At one point Bree attacks Klute with scissors and twice flees from him to her ex-pimp, only to find that prostitution itself involves dependency and, eventually, death. Just as Klute represents an appeal to dependency and loss of control, Cable, the murderer, represents control in the form of detachment. Neither Bree nor Cable is emotionally involved in sex, which becomes an act by which each wields power, and both wish to be emotionally numb. Even their voices, as rendered on the tape recorder, seem similar. Although the stereotypical roles of detective and criminal are antithetical, Klute and Cable actually have a great deal in common, thereby reinforcing the image of Klute as a threat to Bree. After the tape recorder is played in rural Pennsylvania, Klute appears in New York; and both men use similar methods, though for different purposes.
Just as Klute and Cable can be viewed as dramatic projections of the forces within Bree's mind, her apartment may also represent herself. She is spied on in her apartment, which is subsequently and brutally penetrated by Cable; Bree's semen-soaked underpants suggest that Cable, too, sees his action as rape. When she leaves her apartment and sleeps with Klute, she also leaves her "self" and becomes dependent on him. At the end of the film she and Klute leave her apartment, which is empty, except for the ringing telephone, her link with the "johns" and her therapist. Her furnishings, that which made the apartment "hers," are gone; and she may be empty of her past, ready to acquire Klute's furnishings, his values, his life, his identity.
Though Cable's death and Bree's decision to leave dark, claustrophobic New York for the sunlight of rural Pennsylvania imply that she has opted for love and dependence, Pakula does create some ambiguity. She has told her analyst that she will probably be back next week for an appointment, but that verbal message does not carry the weight that the visual one does: standing in the empty apartment, she is wearing the same clothes she wore at the beginning of the film. Bree may have chosen love and dependency for the present, through the efforts of the female therapist who has encouraged that choice, but the choice is not without personal cost.
Klute
- TCM.com Margarita Landazuri
Jane Fonda won the first of two Academy Awards® for what many
consider her best performance in Klute
(1971), playing Bree, a complicated New York City call girl whose life is in
danger, and who becomes involved with a cop investigating the case. When she
made the film, Fonda's life and finances were in disarray. Her marriage to
French director Roger Vadim was on the rocks. She had taken time off from
making films to get involved in anti-Vietnam war activities and other left-wing
causes, and had poured most of her own money into them. Fonda may have agreed
to star in Klute for the money,
but something in her responded to Bree's vulnerability, and she made something
remarkable of the role.
Working on her character from the outside in, Fonda collaborated with costume
designer Ann Roth to perfect Bree's look. Much of it was based on Fonda's own
style: the midi skirts, high boots, chunky jewelry, tight sweaters worn without
a bra, and the leather-trimmed trench coat all became iconic looks that were
copied by '70s fashionistas. So was the shag haircut, created by a hairdresser
in New York's Lower East Side.
For Bree's inner self, the Method-trained Fonda researched her part by talking
to New York call girls. That research helped shape her burgeoning feminism as
she learned about the violence prostitutes often endured from their pimps and
johns. She also seemed to dig deep into her own psyche for the scenes of Bree
talking with her psychiatrist, played by fellow Actors Studio member Vivian Nathan.
Their scenes together were improvised, and are among the most riveting in the
film. But Fonda's insecurity sometimes got the best of her, and she told
director Alan J. Pakula that she was wrong for the role and that he should
replace her with Faye Dunaway. Pakula was patient, and Fonda later expressed
her gratitude to him for helping her to trust her instincts.
The atmosphere on the Klute set
didn't help Fonda's nerves. Many crew members did not share her outspoken
antiwar opinions and support of the Black Panthers, and were openly hostile. On
one occasion, when she had made negative remarks about the Nixon
administration, Fonda arrived on set to find that the crew had hung a large
American flag. Her costar Donald Sutherland shared her views, however, and the
two began an affair. After the film wrapped, he joined her touring in an
anti-Vietnam war stage show called F.T.A. (which stood for "F**k the
Army," or euphemistically, "Free the Army") and appeared with
her in a documentary about the F.T.A. tour.
For Klute, the reviews were
mixed. The New Yorker's Pauline Kael had kind words: "Reminiscent
of the good detective mysteries of the 40s -- it has the lurking figures, the
withheld information, the standard gimmick of getting the heroine to go off
alone so she can be menaced." Roger Greenspun of the New York Times
found it less effective. "The actual intentions of Klute are not all that easy to spot, though I think they have more
to do with its intellectual aspirations than with its thriller plot." But
Fonda's performance received nearly unanimous raves. Jay Cocks of Time
magazine wrote that she "makes all the right choices, from the mechanics
of her walk and her voice inflection to the penetration of the girl's raging
psyche. It is a rare performance." According to Richard Schickel in Life
magazine, "Jane Fonda has emerged as the finest actress of her generation
with a mercurial, subtly shaded, altogether fascinating performance." Kael
agreed. "Her performance is very pure, unadorned by 'acting'...she has somehow
gotten onto a plane of acting at which even her closest closeup never reveals a
false note...There isn't another young dramatic actress in American films who
can touch her."
Many observers believed that Fonda's radical activism had cost her an Oscar for
1969's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (Maggie Smith won for The Prime
of Miss Jean Brodie). During the 1971 awards season, Fonda was showered
with nominations for Klute. She won a Golden Globe and sent a Vietnam
veteran to pick up the award in her place, a move that earned her criticism for
politicizing the event. Fonda recalled in her memoir, My Life So Far
that as the Oscars approached, she struggled with how she should accept the
award if she won, trying to decide whether she should reference the controversy
over her political views. She asked her father what he thought. "'Tell 'em
there's a lot to say, but tonight isn't the time,' was his recommendation --
and the moment I heard it I knew he was right." Her acceptance speech was
brief and to the point, almost verbatim what Henry Fonda had suggested, with an
added, simple "Thank you" at the end.
'Klute':
Alan J. Pakula and the Lewis Brothers' Thriller-Disguised ... ‘Klute’:
Alan J. Pakula and the Lewis Brothers’ Thriller-Disguised Exploration of Human
Interactions, Relationships and Psyche, from Cinephilia and Beyond
KLUTE - Monthly Film Bulletin Review Tom Milne review from Sight and Sound, Autumn 1971
Pakula on
KLUTE Tom Milne interview of Pakula
from Sight and Sound, Spring 1972
Klute | Tony McKibbin The
Paranoia of Style
Klute
- Bright Lights Film Journal Dan
Callahan, April 30, 2005
Sex
and the City in Decline: Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Klute (1971) 16-page essay by Stanley Corkin from the Journal of Urban History, 2010 (pdf)
Female
Identity and Performance: An Appreciation of Alan ... Rachael Johnson from Bitch Flicks, October 15, 2013
Klute |
Forced Perspective Jonathan
Henderson, February 4, 2011
DREAMS
ARE WHAT LE CINEMA IS FOR...: KLUTE 1971
Ken Anderson, November 16, 2011
The Conspiracy Thrillers of the 1970s: Paranoid Time - Article ... Jay Millikan from Stylus magazine, July 7, 2004
Klute • Senses of Cinema Karli Lukas, April 10, 2001
Klute |
Nothing is Written Groggy Dundee
Edward Copeland on Film (Josh R)
What
Ever Happened to New Hollywood? | Film | Propeller Pt. 1 by Dan Deweese from Propeller magazine, Fall 2012
"Not
a Love Story" by Lisa DiCaprio - Jump Cut Lisa DiCaprio, March, 1985
The DVD Journal
| Reviews : Klute D.K. Holm
This Distracted Globe [Joe Valdez]
Armchair Oscars - 1971 - ArmchairCinema.com ... Jerry Roberts
Public Transportation Snob [Dan Heaton]
MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman
Looking for dignity in all the wrong places [Jerry Saravia]
Movieline Magazine review Michael Atkinson
Associated Content [Ben Kenber]
Klute - AMC Blogs Pete Croatto
DVD Talk Gil Jawetz
DVD Verdict Harold Gervais
Urban Cinefile dvd review Shannon J. Harvey
eFilmCritic.com (Charles Tatum) review [4/5]
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Johnny LaRue's Crane Shot [Marty McKee]
www.cinemagumbo.com
- JOURNAL - Alan J. Pakula on Klute (1971)
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Edinburgh U Film Society [Stephen Townsend]
Alan J. Pakula - Film Reference Deborah H. Holdstein, updated by R. Barton Palmer
Feminism, Multiculturalism, and the Media: Global Diversities Angharad N. Valdivia, 1995 (pdf)
Movies and Methods: An Anthology Bill Nichols (pdf)
BBCi - Films David Wood
The
Parallax View: a JFK conspiracy film that gets it right - The Guardian Alex Cox, November 19, 2013
Cleveland Press [Tony Mastroianni]
The New York Times Roger Greenspun, also seen here: Movie Review - Klute - KLUTE - The New York Times
She
Shtups To Conquer Manohla Dargis
from The LA Weekly,
Klute | Jane Fonda which includes an impeccably clean widescreen video of the opening 23 minutes of the movie
THE PARALLAX VIEW
A thriller about a journalist, alerted to the mysterious deaths of witnesses to the assassination of a presidential candidate, who embarks on an investigation that reveals a nebulous conspiracy of gigantic and all-embracing scope. It sounds familiar, and refers to or overlaps a good handful of similar films, but is most relevantly tied to Klute. Where Klute was an exploration of claustrophobic anxiety, The Parallax View is inexorably agoraphobic. Its visual organisation is stunning as the journalist (Beatty) is drawn into an increasingly nightmarish world characterised by impenetrably opaque structures, a screen whited out from time to time, or meshed over with visually deceptive patterns. It is some indication of the area the film explores that in place of the self-revealing session with the analyst in Klute, The Parallax View presents us with the more insecurity-inducing questionnaire used by the mysterious Parallax Corporation for personality-testing prospective employees. Excellent performances; fascinating film.
The Boston Phoenix Gerald Peary
This brilliant, spellbinding 1974 political thriller was the unseen bastard film of Alan J. Pakula’s watch-your-back " paranoia " trilogy, squeezed between box-office favorites Klute (1971) and All the President’s Men (1976). In The Parallax View, a Northwest TV news crew is accidental witness to a senator’s fatal shooting by a waiter, who (remember Lee Harvey Oswald) is himself slain by police before he can talk. A high court rules that the murderer acted alone (think Warren Commission), then employees from the TV station die off one by one. Are these deaths accidental, or are they the serial killings of those who may have sighted additional assassins?
One among the survivors investigates: Joseph Frady (Warren Beatty), a frazzled ex-alcoholic loner news reporter. He makes a Hitchcockian trek from one perilous environment to another until he stumbles onto the Parallax Corporation. Joseph suspects a front for assassination squads, so he decides to spy from within. Fatal mistake!
Audiences back then didn’t warm up to Pakula’s cryptic film —
even for adventurous 1970s Hollywood, The Parallax View was
experimental, almost avant-garde in its reliance on off-kilter, Euro-artsy
visuals (the cinematography is by the great Gordon Willis). There are extended
non-dialogue patches, such as the recruiting film for the Parallax Corporation:
five uninterrupted minutes of eerie, brainwashing images. Best of all, there’s
the way the famous political assassination in
Cinepinion [Henry Stewart] also seen here: Film School Rejects (H. Stewart)
The
Parallax View is regarded as a paragon of the ‘70s paranoid political
thriller, but, make no mistake, it is no taught, thrilling procedural along the
lines of All the President’s Men—it’s
an uneven bore that's as incredibly dated as Warren Beatty's haircut.
Thematic and capellic obsolescence seem to be a real problem for many Warren
Beatty movies (I'm thinking of the abysmal Shampoo); as a colleague,
Clayton White, told me recently: "They might have been big in their time,
but most of them need to stay in their time." Beatty plays Joe Frady, who
mostly uses aliases throughout the film, a two-bit journalist present at the
assassination of a prominent Senator. The murder is declared, familiarly, the
work of a lone, crazed gunman, but several years later many of the other people
who were present start dying, whether from seemingly benign accidents or
natural causes.
At first, Frady is satisfied that everything is as they say and the unusual
deaths are mere coincidence. But when a fellow journalist and assassination
attendee dies immediately after fortelling her own death, Frady decides to dig
a bit deeper, and soon unearths a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top
of…the Parallax Corporation; well, that's just a cheap cop-out, a free pass to
the CIA et al., that allows the film to avoid directly indicting the US
government as complicit in the assassinations of the late 1960’s. The best part
of the movie, though, is the classic Parallax training video that bifurcates
the film, a staccato photocollage that examines the natures of, and
relationships between, the concepts of self, family, country, and religion.
It’s some serious, subversive Kuleshev shit.
The world of the film, in which superficially innocuous surfaces are far more
sinister once you dig a bit deeper, is perfectly reflected by Gordon Willis’
gorgeous photography, the movie’s strongest point, that features bright
exteriors and shadowy interiors. Willis also captures the ominous threat posed
by the colossal Parallax Corporation by commonly shooting Beatty against
enormous man-made artifices, be it a dam or a glass-paneled office building.
(It's a visual motif that should be familiar from the same year's far superior
examination of paranoia, The Conversation.) Beatty's pit himself
against forces far larger than the inquiring individual.
But the first half of the movie simply plays out as a corny action movie,
brimming with car chases, feral fist fights and, everyone’s favorite, big
explosions! (Whereas the recent film Shooter is playfully aware of its
fundamental stupidity, The Parallax View is unduly conceited, taking
itself far too seriously to the point of approaching unintended kitsch.) The
second half is far superior, primarily comprised of two long, tense
assassination set pieces: one an aborted attempt at blowing up an airplane; the
other, trouble at a political rally dress rehearsal. They're paradigms of
dialogueless, suspenseful filmmaking, but they’re awkwardly stuffed into a
senseless, flimsy, confusing (it felt like a reel or two were missing) film
that adds up to little other than: don’t trust the Warren Commission. Well,
duh.
The
Parallax View - TCM.com Sean
Axmaker
Alan Pakula's The Parallax View, a political thriller
with an unmistakable resemblance to the Kennedy assassination, was not the
first conspiracy thriller to emerge from
In those first few minutes, Pakula establishes an atmosphere of unease and a
distrust of authority that never lets up. When we catch up with Frady three
years later, being hounded by the police for his investigations into drug
crimes and enforcement, he comes on like a dogged reporter from a thirties
newspaper drama with seventies style, a mix of old school journalist chutzpah
and modern sensibility. But even he is dubious of conspiracy claims until fellow
reporter and ex-girlfriend Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) turns up dead (a suicide
is the ruling, but Frady doesn't buy it). She's the seventh of twenty witnesses
to the Senator Carroll shooting to die in the three years since, and once Frady
takes up the case, he discovers that he is also now a target. With the tacit
support of a paternal editor (Hume Cronyn), Frady follows his clues to the
mysterious Parallax Corporation and, with the help of a former FBI agent
(Kenneth Mars) and a psychologist (an uncredited Anthony Zerbe), catches the
interest of a sinister recruiter (Walter McGinn). "If you qualify, and we
think you can, we're prepared to offer you the most lucrative and rewarding
work of your life."
The film, based on a novel by Loren Singer, is most assuredly of its time.
Pakula described the film as "sort of an American myth based on some
things that have happened, some fantasies we may have had of what might have
happened, and a lot of fears a lot of us have had." The story comes right
out of the suspicion with which many Americans viewed the
The Parallax View marked Beatty's return to the screen after two years
of political activity, raising money and actively campaigning for presidential
candidate George McGovern. He had been developing Shampoo (1975) with
Robert Towne, a project he would produce and star in, but he had committed to
acting in The Parallax View first. "I wanted to come in and work as
an actor with a director I liked," he explained in an interview. But even
though Beatty was not a producer on the project, his creative involvement went
beyond simply acting. A writers strike stopped all work on the screenplay and,
due to Beatty's limited window of availability, the film went into production
without a completed script. The script is credited to Lorenzo Semple, Jr., and
David Giler (who was brought in for rewrites before the strike), but dialogue
was often worked out with Pakula and the actors sometimes as little as a day
before shooting and Pakula spent much of the production rewriting the script.
Some of his more substantial changes include adding the assassination that
opens the film and turning the character of Frady from a cop to a reporter (at
the suggestion of Beatty and Giler).
The Parallax View reunites Pakula with Gordon Willis, his director of
photography on Klute (1971) and perhaps the greatest cinematographer of
the seventies (his work in the decade include The Godfather [1972], The
Godfather: Part II [1974], All the President's Men, Annie Hall
[1977] and Manhattan [1979] - and none of them, astoundingly, nominated
for Best Cinematography!). Willis had earned the nickname "The Prince of
Darkness" for his distinctive use of dark and shadows. Here he shrouded
many of the scenes in an ominous darkness. Pakula and Willis create a visual
style that favors alienation and a sense of helplessness over conventional
scenes of tension and action. "The Parallax View was a whole other
kind of filmmaking for me," recalled Pakula. He shot key scenes in extreme
long shot to view characters overwhelmed by their surroundings and caught alone
in the middle of vast, empty areas, vulnerable and isolated.
It's especially effective in the film's climax, where another assassination
attempt is planned on a powerful politician in a massive conventional hall and
Frady has arrived to stop it. The scene was originally supposed to occur at a
crowded rally but Pakula saw the potential of the empty auditorium and reworked
the scene to use the vast empty space to create a feeling of isolation and
alienation. The prerecorded speech echoing through the empty hall only
accentuates the eerie, surreal quality of the scene, as does the anthem-like
score by composer Michael Small. It creates a surreal atmosphere and an almost
abstract drama with a hero who has no personal life or definition beyond his
job and his drive to discover the truth.
"If the picture works the audience will trust the person next to them a
little less," Pakula reportedly told Beatty. On that score, the film works
remarkably well. The seventies was rife with films, both fictional and factually
based, that played off suspicions of authority and fears of conspiracy, from The
Conversation (1974) and Three Days of the Condor (1975, also
scripted by Lorenzo Semple, Jr.) and Pakula's follow-up film All the
President's Men to the Kennedy assassination thrillers Executive Action
(1973) and Winter Kills (1979). None of those films have the sense of
helplessness and eerie dislocation, of being played by powers beyond your
control and seeing it all unfold with a hopeless inevitability, that Pakula
gives The Parallax View.
'The
Parallax View': Pakula's Unsettling Examination of the Post ... ‘The Parallax View’: Pakula’s Unsettling
Examination of the Post-Compliant America, from Cinephilia and Beyond
Parallax View Political Paranoia, by Fred Kaplan from Jump Cut, 1974
Parallax View [Robert C. Cumbow] 13 Ways of Looking at the Parallax View, August 14, 2009, originally published in Movietone News, August 1974
THE
PARALLAX VIEW - Films & Filming Review Gordon Gow from Films & Filming, December 1974
"The
Pakula Parallax" essay Richard
T, Jameson from Parallax View, August
14, 2009, originally published in Film
Comment, September/October 1976
PARALLAXED | Datacide A Dark 70’s Amerika, by Howard Slater
from Datacide, January 22, 2009
The Parallax View - Alternate Ending : Alternate Ending Tim Brayton, September 30, 2009
The Parallax View (1974) - Columbia Journalism Review Erika Fry, September 1, 2011
This
is an announcement, gentlemen. There will be no questions. Isayc from Now in Full Color, With a Happier Ending, October 26, 2013
Paranoia
Strikes Deep - DGA Marc
Forster, Spring 2014
Alan
J. Pakula's “The Parallax View” | Wonders in the Dark J.D. Lafrance, June 23, 2016
Alan
J. Pakula's film The Parallax View constructs a labyrinth of ... In the
Dark, by Jonathan Kirshner from Slate,
July 27, 2017
Savant Review: The Parallax View - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson from DVD Savant, June 26, 1999
DVD Savant: PARALLAX VIEW: The Incredible Montage Glenn Erickson from DVD Talk, June 1999
Great scenes -- The brainwashing montage in "The Parallax View ... Rob Thomas from Madison, October 9, 2008
FilmFanatic.org » Parallax View, The (1974)
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley) review [4/5]
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Deep Cuts: “The Parallax View” – 1974. Dir. Alan J. Pakula ... Frank Mengarelli
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [77/100]
Random Movie Club Rich Nathanson
The Movie Archive [Marjorie Johns]
User reviews from imdb Author: Graham Watson from Gibraltar
User reviews from imdb Author: secragt from United States
User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: RadioWaveTelescope from United Kingdom
The Conspiracy Thrillers of the 1970s: Paranoid Time - Article ... Jay Millikan from Stylus magazine, July 7, 2004
FilmArcade.net: "The Parallax View" movie review by Ben Kenber also seen here: The Parallax View - Associated Content - associatedcontent.com
The Parallax View - Alan J. Pakula, Michael Small Snore and Guzzle
Best Films of the 1970s Jeeem’s Cinepad
100 Greatest Movies of the '70s Digital Dream Door
Whatever Happened To… » Blog Archive » The Greatest 70s Movies Whatever Happened To…
Rob's Favorite Films a list of Robert Altman’s favorite films
Independent Lens . Inside Indies . Favorite Films | PBS Filmmaker’s favorite films from PBS Independent Lens
BBC Films review David Wood
Obama inauguration: The 25 best movies about American politics of ... Scott Feinberg from The LA Times, January 20, 2009
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN
Alan Pakula's pedestrian 1976 recap of Watergate is a study in missed opportunities. The opening of the film, with Woodward (Robert Redford) and Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) first stumbling over the story, is involving and sometimes exciting, but from then on it degenerates into confusion and repetition. The arch “realism” works against the film, with screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) apparently unwilling or unable to impose any dramatic shape on the material. PG, 138 min.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Inevitably softened by hints of self-congratulation
concerning the success of Woodward and Bernstein's uncovering of the Watergate
affair, Pakula's film is nevertheless remarkably intelligent, working both as
an effective thriller (even though we know the outcome of their investigations)
and as a virtually abstract charting of the dark corridors of corruption and
power. Pakula's visual set-ups are often extraordinary, contrasting the light
of the Washington Post newsroom with the shadows in which hides star
informant Deep Throat, and dramatically engulfing Hoffman and
All the President's Men Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge
"Turning journalists into heroes takes some doing" - a casual aside from The Mekons' classic 1989 track 'Empire of the Senseless.' The comment, like the song, was intended as an indictment of Margaret Thatcher - but it applies quite nicely to All the President's Men, the adaptation by Alan J Pakula (director) and William Goldman (scriptwriter) of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's book of the same name. The book chronicled how the pair's investigations proved crucial to the eventual downfall of President Richard Nixon over what became known as Watergate - a line which Pakula and Goldman are happy to adopt.
There's rather more to the whole affair than either book or film let on, of course, and historians debate the actual impact of Woodward and Bernstein's work. Leaving such considerations aside (something many remain decidedly reluctant to do), All the President's Men continues, three decades on, to work thunderously well as a movie. Still pressingly topical in its wider implications, it's an enthralling depiction of the journalistic process that concentrates - with surprising intensity - on the profession's nuts and bolts.
The film contains no fewer than 25 telephone conversations in which the audience is privy to both sides of the exchange: the actors playing Bernstein and Woodward's unseen interlocutors are in many ways the hidden heroes of the movie, and there's justice in the fact that 'Best Sound' was one of four categories in which the picture was successful at the Oscars.
Jason Robards won Best Supporting Actor for his effortlessly
authoritative turn as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, in a picture which
has countless speaking parts and is conspicuously well cast down to the very
smallest roles. It's notable that, while the main focus is squarely on men
(Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman prove a successful cheese-and-chalk
combination as what Bradlee eventually comes to call 'Woodstein'), it's the
women of
And while the journalists' quest keeps hitting various obstacles and speed-bumps, All the President's Men rips along at such a clip that its 130-odd minutes simply fly by. Even if you don't know Gordon Liddy from Maurice Stans from John Mitchell from Donald Segretti - and the film is audaciously light on exposition, featuring not a single geographical or chronological on-screen title - the picture is a textbook example on how to present decidedly complex real-life events in an accessible, compelling and enthralling manner.
All the President's Men Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film Fred Hunter, Special Edition
On
In the film version of All the President's Men,
Both reporters set out to gather more information about the connection between
Charles Colson's office and the burglar, and find themselves running up against
a blank wall at every turn: people refuse to talk to them, contradict
themselves, and openly lie, all within twenty-four hours of the break-in.
Through occasional slips on the part of the government employees they contact,
they are able to at least piece together that this is a bigger story than then
had imagined, one which involves highly placed government officials. It is at
this point that managing editor Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards) takes a look at
what they have and tells them that they don't have enough facts, so their story
will be relegated to page three. But Bradlee can recognize a good story, and
tells them to keep after it.
The reporters get their first real break when they start investigating the
background of the burglars and discover a check made out to Kenneth Dahlberg,
Midwest Finance Chairman for the Committee to Re-elect the President (which
would come to be commonly referred to as CREEP), in the bank account of a firm
owned by burglar Bernard Barker. From there their investigation escalates: but
when they finally run out of leads again, Woodward turns to a contact he used
in a past investigation. This time the contact refuses to speak to him about
the new investigation, or at least that's what he tells Woodward over the
phone. The contact surreptitiously gets a note to Woodward with instructions on
when and where to meet him (a dark semi-underground garage in the middle of the
night). When they meet, the contact lays out ground rules: he will not be named
as a source, and he will not give Woodward any information, he will only
confirm. He leaves Woodward with the admonition to "follow the
money," and thus the legendary shadow figure of Deep Throat was be born.
Woodward and Bernstein's investigation, which would gain momentum, notoriety,
and scorn as it continued from '72-'74, would eventually lead to those closest
to President Nixon, and then to Nixon himself, with revelations about his
knowledge and complicity in illegal activities and the notorious "dirty
tricks" campaign eventually forcing his resignation.
All the President's Men is a remarkable film that works on all levels.
Screenwriter Goldman and director Pakula fashioned Woodward and Bernstein's
book into a combination political thriller and in-depth look at investigative
reporting. Goldman presents investigative reporting as it really is rather than
as it is usually depicted in the movies: not all excitement, but frustrating
and (at times) plodding with long periods of getting nowhere and running into
dead ends. At the same time, Pakula miraculously keeps the tension high, even
as Woodward and Bernstein are forced to go down a list of hundreds of names of
employees and visit their homes strying to find someone who will talk about
CREEP and how their money was handled.
The film is filled with fine performances:
All the President's Men should be mandatory viewing in every history
course in
Warner Bros.' DVD of the film presents a beautiful transfer struck from source
material that is in excellent shape. The black level is rock-solid and the
contrast is way above par: a must for a film in which so much of the action
takes place in dark areas. The audio is also in fine shape, with rich tone
quality and deep bass. The two-disc special edition includes a feature-length
commentary by Redford; "Telling the Truth about Lies: The Making of All
the President's Men;" "Woodward and Bernstein: Lighting the
Fire" featurette; "Out of the Shadows: The Man Who was Deep
Throat" featurette; the vintage featurette "Pressure and the Press:
the Making of All the President's Men;" and an interview excerpt with
Jason Robards for the 70s talk show Dinah!, hosted by Dinah Shore.
World Cinema Review: Alan J. Pakula | All the President's Men Douglas Messerli, December 30, 2015
All
the President's Men Robert Hatch
from The Nation,
Antagony
& Ecstasy: ALAN J. PAKULA: <i>ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN</i ... Tim Brayton from Antagony & Ecstasy,
On
Its 40th Anniversary: Notes on the Making of All the President's Men Jon Boostin from The LA Review of Books, March 25, 2016
How
'All the President's Men' Defined the Look of Journalism on ... Andy Wright from Atlas Obscura, September 29, 2016
Of
Typewriters, Telephones And ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN | Birth ... Priscilla Page from Birth, Movies, Death, December 20, 2016
Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men | Wonders in the Dark J.D. Lafrance, February 21, 2017
All
the President's Men made Woodward and Bernstein the stuff of ... Mark Feeney from Slate, June 14, 2017
All
the President's Men - TCM.com
Lorraine LoBianco
The DVD Journal | Reviews : All the President's Men: Special Edition Gregory P. Dorr
All the President's Men Steven Loeb from Wild Sound
All the President's Men (1976) - Audiophile Audition Jim Fasulo
The
Conspiracy Thrillers of the 1970s: Paranoid Time - Article ... Jay Millikan from Stylus magazine,
Top 100 Directors: #66 - Alan J. Pakula (All the President's Men review) Night Hawks News
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
All the President's Men (1976, Alan J. Pakula) Films 101
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Eye for Film (Stephen Carty) review [4.5/5]
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
DVD Talk (Gil Jawetz) dvd review [5/5] [Special Edition]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review 2-disc Special Edition
DVD Verdict (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [Special Edition]
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review 2-disc Special Edition
DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Special
Edition] Colin Jacobson
DVD Authority.com (Matt Brighton) dvd review [Special Edition]
Monsters and Critics - DVD Review [Jeff Swindoll] Special Edition
Movie-Vault.com (John Ulmer) review [9/10]
filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [78.5/100]
Celluloid Heroes [Paul McElligott]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Exclaim! dvd review Michael Barclay
Journalists:
Thank All The President's Men for your rumpled look in ... Joe Blevins from The Onion A.V. Club
Film-makers on film: All the President's Men (1976) - Telegraph Alastair Sooke interviews director Marc Forster about Alan J Pakula’s All the President’s Men, from The Telegraph, October 18, 2004
Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [A] Ken Tucker
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
As
'All the President's Men' turns 40 today, let's follow our favorite ... Michael Cavna from The Washngton Post, April 9, 2016
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
All the
President's Men - Wikipedia
COMES A HORSEMAN
From the first, with its graveyard claustrophobically hemmed
in by mountains, Comes a Horseman is a misfit Western, with Pakula using
Jane Fonda's
uncanny resemblance to her father to set up a curious tangential relationship,
respectful and rebellious, with classic Western mythology. Fonda is the rather
uneasy 'banshee woman boss' of a
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
Alan J. Pakula's opening shots bring to mind Ford's words to
the young Spielberg, about directing really boiling down to understanding when
to put the horizon high and when to put it low in the frame. The project may be
couched in its maker's reverence for Shane, but it also derives from a
small detail in The Parallax View, the brawl in the Western-styled lodge
set to "Buttons 'n' Bows" -- Pakula approaches the open spaces of the
frontier to escape from urban claustrophobia and instead finds reflections of
it, lonely graves and cavernous rooms lit by oil lamps. The cowboy (James Caan)
is a World War II vet riding through the hills of
Comes
A Horseman - TCM.com Jay S.
Steinberg
Jane Fonda was at a career peak when she signed on for the
post-modern western Comes a Horseman (1978). She had just completed Coming
Home (1978), the project for which she'd obtain her second Best Actress
Oscar®. The new film seemed to be offering a comfort zone, as it would be
directed by Alan J. Pakula, who helmed her first Academy Award-winning performance
in Klute (1971). Further, she'd be re-teamed with Jason Robards, Jr.,
her co-star with whom she rendered another award nominated performance in Julia
(1977). Throw in the added star presence of James Caan, and the cinematography
of Gordon Willis, and it sounded like another batch of gold statuettes would be
in the offing. However, the end result from this talented collaboration didn't
quite gel, and the Academy would largely ignore this interesting misfire.
The story is set in the wake of World War II, and
As they pool their resources and hold
Comes a Horseman did allow Fonda to show her chops in a de-glamorized
role, and Pakula felt it was uniquely suited to her talents, as expressed in
George Haddad-Garcia's The Films of Jane Fonda. "In most westerns
the woman is in a calico dress, running after the hero on the horse saying,
'Nothing is worth dying for,' or she's a gun-toting Calamity Jane. The ideas of
dealing with a heroine in the West, very much a woman yet willing to fight with
the same passion as men, was a great attraction. I thought there was no one
better than Jane Fonda to represent that kind of strong yet vulnerable American
woman."
In reviewing the film, New West critic Stephen Farber noted that
Pakula's works "often demonstrate a subtle but troubling sexual prejudice.
He is fascinated by strong women but also seems somewhat frightened of them; he
wants to put them in their place. In The Sterile Cuckoo [1969] the
abrasive Liza Minnelli was finally rejected by the sensitive hero; in Klute
Jane Fonda was rescued from degradation by supercop Donald Sutherland. Comes
a Horseman reworks the same story; a strong, proud woman 'realizes' that
her salvation comes in submitting to an even stronger man."
Ultimately, the industry legacy of Comes a Horseman will be the boost it
gave to the career of Richard Farnsworth, the 58-year-old veteran stunt rider
and bit player who received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar® nomination for his
efforts as Ella's grizzled ranch hand Dodger. Even critics who savaged the
movie singled out the weathered, endearingly charismatic Farnsworth as a bright
spot, and he brought the film its sole nomination from the Academy.
User reviews from imdb Author: theowinthrop from United States
STARTING OVER
What to do if you are male, American, no spring chicken, and abandoned by your wife on the ground that you get in the way of her career? One answer is to wedge the tongue firmly in cheek, join a Divorced Men's Workshop, get yourself a new girl, and regard your ex-wife with the careful patience usually reserved for the demented. The irrepressible ebullience of Burt Reynolds, which has been known to buoy up less fragile craft than this, is here in danger of swamping not only Jill Clayburgh's rather mousy rendition of Marilyn-the-nursery-school-teacher, but the movie as a whole. Moments of little-boy-lost helplessness, thrown in to indicate his 'earnestness', merely make you wonder if he's schizoid or just a complete philanderer. It's as if Pakula had got on a fairground horse that has gone out of control, and is undecided whether to go with it or try to stop it.
PopMatters (Samantha Bornemann) dvd review
Why am I so sure I’m in
big trouble here?
—Marilyn (Jill Clayburgh), Starting Over
Watching an old film you heard was great and finding it only interesting can’t help but disappoint. Such was my experience with 1979’s Starting Over, wherein airplane magazine writer Phil (Burt Reynolds, by turns amused and blank) is torn between self-absorbed ex-wife Jessica (Candice Bergen) and his quirky, kind girlfriend Marilyn (Jill Clayburgh). Based on a novel by Dan Wakefield and adapted by James L. Brooks, the script ping-pongs between earnest drama and broad character strokes, before settling for a pat happy ending.
To the film’s credit, we wonder which woman Phil will choose, and, to a lesser degree, which he should choose. But not because we want both women to be happy: Jessica is one of those annoying types trying to find herself through “creativity,” and by sleeping with Phil’s boss and then asking for a divorce. As the film opens, Phil is trying to charm her out of that decision (“I swear to God, we’re getting a divorce when all we need is separate vacations”), while she’s claiming she has found her “voice” in songwriting. “It’s not like the painting and the photography,” she argues. “It’s not.”
Trouble is, she’s a terrible singer, demonstrated when Bergen
screeches to comic effect (“This woman’s got a right to be more than a shadow
of her man”) as Phil leaves their sleek apartment en route to his brother’s
(Charles Durning) couch in Boston. The tune will haunt him. Set up on his first
date in eight years, with a lascivious single mom (
Between dates, Phil attends a divorced men’s support group in a church basement, where he trades stories with the bitter and the hapless, like Paul (Austin Pendleton), who keeps marrying and divorcing the same woman. Phil confesses that for some reason he’s avoiding going to bed with Marilyn. “Maybe she’s special,” he supposes. “It’s possible, you know.” For her part, Marilyn struggles not to believe in such fluff. After they do sleep together, she wakes just after he’s left—and chases him out into the snow to lambaste him for treating her like a one-nighter. Reassuring her that he left a note and will see her the next night, he says, with affection, “If you can avoid it, I’d prefer you didn’t act crazy anymore.” Marilyn tells herself, “I think I could love this man.”
With Marilyn, the film captures the sting of loving someone
despite knowing he is going to break your heart. Indeed, Phil is such a mess
that we don’t know whether to pull for her to get what she wants from him, or
to get out alive. He’s clearly not over his ex-wife, whose fitful reappearances
both hinder and propel his new romance. When Jessica calls and interrupts
Thanksgiving dinner, Phil describes Marilyn as a friend of his brother’s
family. Does he really want Marilyn, or is he just trying to hold on to
something? Neither is sure, and viewers aren’t, either, because Reynolds’
vacant countenance is impossible to read. Is he a smooth talker on a down turn?
Or a schlubby nice guy who delivers the occasional good line? (While some kind
writers have posited that Reynolds was too pigeonholed by his Smokey and the
Bandit persona to parlay his Golden Globe nomination for Starting Over
into an Academy Award nomination, as Clayburgh [best actress] and
When Jessica shows up in a low-cut blouse, we see the familiarity and humor they share. They seem destined to sleep together, until Jessica hits PLAY on the tape deck and ridiculously sings along to her latest composition, “Better Than Ever” (lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager). “Have you lost your marbles?” Phil asks as the music fades out, freed (along with the script) by this full-on movie joke from making a decision.
Still, the genre demands a rupture in his new romance, in order to test the pull of his old one. Disappointingly, cinematic rules and conventions take over in the film’s final stretch, granting Phil his big epiphany (“I need terrific, I need wonderful, I need love”) and propelling him into one last grand romantic gesture. While he’s not as eloquent in this climactic scene as was Jerry Maguire (a more recent incarnation of the character), he gets the job done. Though it’s staged as a victory over lowered expectations, the opposite of settling, it sure looks like a movie compromise to me.
DVD Verdict (Dennis Prince) dvd review
DVD Talk (Scott Weinberg) dvd review [3/5]
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
User reviews from imdb Author: Ed Uyeshima from San Francisco, CA, USA
Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [B-] Edward Karam
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
ROLLOVER
Time Out review Tom Milne
A generally underrated film, admittedly not always easy to follow in its voyage through the rarefied reaches of high finance and merchant banking, discovering conspiracy and murder along the way, with the fate of the entire Western economy hanging in the balance. Disconcerting in its kaleidoscopic shifts in tone, it's nevertheless too absorbing simply to dismiss. Matching gamesmanship with gamesmanship as his financiers elaborate on their abstruse gambits in incomprehensible computer-speak, what Pakula seems to be trying to demonstrate - with the final confrontation suggesting a standoff between two gunfighters, stalemated because the villain proves able to justify his villainy - is that the complex power plays of international finance constitute an entirely new genre with which the old ones arrayed here (film noir, romantic comedy, political exposé, Western) are ill-equipped to cope. It's a fascinating experiment, well worth seeing anyway as another of Pakula's marvellous evocations of urban paranoia.
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The capitalist machine is presented in a swift preamble, a
dormant stockroom coming to life via dissolve as the dollar plummets, followed
in short order by a gag from Vidor's The Fountainhead (the diminutive
mogul posing in his office with
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [2.5/5] Richard Scheib
Plot: When
the president of New York’s Borough National Bank is murdered in his office,
banking troubleshooter Hub Smith is sent in to sort the bank out. When Hub sees
the president’s wife, former movie star Lee Winters, being treated
patronizingly by the board of directors, he supports her bid to become the new
chairman. The two also become lovers. But after obtaining a $500 million loan
from
This is a rather
unusual thriller, one that for once does not predict the end of the world
coming via nuclear holocaust or plague but rather through the deliberate
disabling of the Western economy. A film set in the world of high finance is a
good deal more challenging than the average thriller and certainly makes for a
complex and difficult to follow plot – trying to follow the talk of positions
points, bond marks, venture capital and Eurodollar exchange rates almost makes
it like watching a foreign film without subtitles – and to no real surprise the
film was not a box-office success. The denseness of the material is something
that both Jane Fonda and Kris Kristofferson seem clearly daunted by too – at
times they seem reduced to suitcases that open and spout banking chatter.
Although there is at least one very good performance from Hume Cronyn who
demonstrates a sharp predatoriness far removed from the feelgood OAPer roles he
was stuck with in the latter half of the 1980s.
However with perseverance the plot has a certain effectiveness. The unveiling
of the scheme and the edgy gamble in saving the bank from the rollover hold
suspense. Director Alan J.Pakula had made excellent award-winning films like All the President’s Men (1976) and Sophie’s Choice (1982), as well as several films
with Fonda including Klute (1971) and Comes a Horseman (1978).
And overall the film fails to grip as a thriller, with Pakula’s direction
remaining too stodgy by half. The ending, wherein comes its real
science-fictional content, remains too downbeat by half, despite a ludicrously
optimistic reuniting of the lovers. A more credible ending surely would have
had Kristofferson defeating or exposing the scheme, which would have at least
satisfied the requirements of the thriller form. Ultimately it is also a film
that heavily depends on and unsubtly plays to a certain form of racism that was
prevalent in the 1970s – the fear of the increasing economic strength of the
OPEC nations and of the Arabic stranglehold resultingly placed on the Western
economy.
Rollover
- Alternate Ending : Alternate Ending Tim Brayton, October 28, 2009
The Sleepless Movie Review Dustin Sklavós
Alan J Pakula film Rollover | | Global financial crisis ... Commercial Break
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
SOPHIE’S CHOICE
Ample make this bed.
Make this bed with awe;
In it wait till judgment break
Excellent and fair.
—Emily Dickinson, Time and Eternity, Volume 2, Part IV, verse #63, published 1890-91
A summer in
Brooklyn in 1947, and an infatuated boy (MacNicol) tries to learn the dreadful
secret of Sophie's awful Choice. It's Pakula's first film as his own
screenwriter, and his scrupulous adherence to the dense details of William
Styron's novel seems to have slowed down the deft visual sense so marked in Klute.
A more serious problem occurs in long flashback scenes as Sophie describes her
ordeal in Auschwitz. The information (for on one level, this is a tantalising
Gothic romance) comes thrillingly, in fits and starts, with revelations
following on the heels of half-truths. But one watches uneasily as the
obscenity of the Holocaust is served up for our entertainment yet again, and
another actress with perfect cheekbones and a crew cut loses a few pounds to
lend credibility to a death camp scene. By the end, the accumulated weight and
lethargy of the production fails to invest Sophie's fate with the significance
Styron achieves.
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
THE heroine of William Styron's ''Sophie's Choice'' is a creature of such extravagant and contradictory attributes that it isn't always easy, while reading the novel, to imagine her in the flesh. She is tragic, voluptuous, suddenly exuberant and then just as suddenly sodden, the survivor of one calamity and the woman at the heart of another. Mr. Styron's Sophie would seem too oversized and literary a figure to be embodied by any actress, even by an actress of extraordinary resourcefulness and versatility.
Meryl Streep has already established herself as a performer of that caliber, but nothing in her earlier work fully anticipates ''Sophie's Choice.'' In Alan J. Pakula's faithful screen adaptation of Mr. Styron's novel, Miss Streep accomplishes the near-impossible, presenting Sophie in believably human terms without losing the scale of Mr. Styron's invention. In a role affording every opportunity for overstatement, she offers a performance of such measured intensity that the results are by turns exhilarating and heartbreaking. Though it's far from a flawless movie, ''Sophie's Choice'' is a unified and deeply affecting one. Thanks in large part to Miss Streep's bravura performance, it's a film that casts a powerful, uninterrupted spell.
Mr. Pakula's ''Sophie's Choice,'' which opens today at Cinema I, follows the lengthy novel closely enough to capture it with amazing comprehensiveness in a little more than two-and-a-half hours. In fact, the novel is reflected so accurately that both its strengths and its weaknesses remain intact. Struggling as it does to compress the book, the film loses much of the novel's windiness, although a few voice-over narrative passages (read by Josef Sommer, as an older and wiser version of Mr. Styron's part-autobiographical character, Stingo) quickly recapitulate that aspect.
The manipulative and oversymmetrical aspects of the story are also here, and the events and devices that seemed awkward on the page - Mr. Styron's having Sophie and her lover Nathan dress in period garb to suggest their manic ebullience, for instance -have stayed that way. But the book's most overpowering quality is its inexorable momentum, and that has been preserved to the fullest. A suspenseful, troubling novel, it makes for a movie that is even more so.
The bulk of Mr. Styron's story is set at a
Among the more daring things Mr. Pakula attempts here is the
structural anomaly of interrupting the
The film's two leading men, Kevin Kline as Nathan and Peter MacNicol as Stingo, have roles that are in some ways even more challenging than Miss Streep's. Mr. Kline, whose Nathan convincingly demonstrates the greatest of tenderness toward Sophie, is also called upon to rail at her mercilessly. In the tender scenes Mr. Kline makes himself very appealing; in the cruel ones, he does the best he can to affect a viciousness that, even on the page, seemed less than fully convincing.
Mr. MacNicol plays Stingo with a touching Southern gentlemanliness and reserve, but the role of an admiring listener has its difficulties, too. And he isn't helped by the novel's hubris regarding Stingo, preserved here in a passage in which Nathan only half-facetiously welcomes the aspiring young author into ''that pantheon of the gods whose words are all we know of immortality.'' The movie's Stingo, who hasn't demonstrated anything to warrant this, is called upon to take the compliment more or less in stride.
The chief thing Stingo must do, though, is to lead the reader or audience toward an unqualified fascination with Sophie. That part is easy. The character's halting, Polish-accented speech; her charming (and, in one instance, hilariously obscene) malapropisms; her frank sexuality (something Miss Streep conveys easily without any need for nudity); her long, haunted reminiscences -these are the components of an unforgettable heroine, and the work of the astonishing actress who brings her to life.
Sophie's
Choice - TCM.com Jay Carr
Alan J. Pakula's Sophie's Choice (1982), from William
Styron's novel about the after-effects of Holocaust evil, gives us film's most
memorable incarnation of survivor's guilt. If Meryl Streep had inscribed no
performance other than this film's tortured Polish woman who can't forgive
herself for continuing to live while witnessing so much wrenching death, it
would have insured her place in film history. Sophie is forced to make many
choices - not between life and death, but between death and even worse death.
History, despite its overwhelming presence, isn't what gives Sophie's Choice
its power. It's Streep's tragic heroine tearing at our hearts, as she lives and
relives the agony she never can shake for long. She throws herself into
desperate, fleeting breakouts into sex and drink, revolving around her American
Jewish lover, Nathan (Kevin Kline), equally damaged in different ways.
Life, intoxicating as it can get during these brief, heady interludes, is never
a match for death. Sophie's tragedy is that she can't see how heroic she has
been, and is. She thinks of herself as a failure. Streep's pale-skinned,
delicate features become a geography of human torment. Her immersion in the
character of Sophie includes an immersion in the Polish language - not just
impersonation, but internalization. She has spoken of connecting with her own
inner gutteral sounds. So it's not just a matter of getting the sound right -
although her flawed, heavily accented English is pitch-perfect. It's also a
matter of pulling from her gut a primal depth of sound that contributes to
Sophie's innate earthiness, liveliness, integrity, never long able to escape
being engulfed by an undertow of sadness.
She's not just an ambulatory accent; she's a personification of soul-sickness,
weariness, too much experience of the wrong kind, from the day her stomach
convulses when she learns that the respected law professor father in
Much of what she says is with her eyes, sometimes candid, sometimes breaking
the gaze of her friend and confessor, Peter MacNicol's young observer figure
and Styron surrogate, Stingo. He literally gives the film much of its voice, as
narrator and innocent novice who comes to
Pakula, of Polish-Jewish lineage, has said that if his father hadn't come to
Today, you'd call Sophie and Nathan co-dependent enablers for their shared
sado-masochism. They're love and death in the same package. Since Sophie and
Nathan have befriended the writer named Stingo, and drag him from his solitude
in their restored Victorian Brooklyn rooming house to party and join their
spirited capers, the element of betrayal is present in spades, too. After
Sophie drinks with Stingo when Nathan isn't around, Nathan accuses Stingo of
moving in on "his girl" and accuses Sophie of letting him. Nathan's
paranoia on this score isn't altogether unfounded. Still, the brilliant,
impulsive and, on rare occasions, tender Nathan's roller-coaster ups and downs
suggest that not all is well with him either as he seesaws between manic
elation and murderous depression. Nathan's extremes leave Kline without the
equivalent of Streep's detailing - her brilliant, seemingly improvisatory way
of sometimes letting the faintest curl of an extended finger, or a vocal hesitation,
or a distracted tugging at a loose strand of her golden hair do the talking.
She's cool, but avoids mannerism. With Nathan, you quickly just wait for the
next outsized gesture. Pakula, ever sensitive to mood, charges the emotional
air with tense expectation. It gets the film past some slack pacing.
Kline's is a performance insufficiently appreciated for its choices and even
subtlety, partly because Nathan's paranoid schizophrenic mood swings make us
uncomfortable, squirmy. MacNicol's Stingo does, too, because whatever else he
is - sensitive, good, chivalric - he's also something of a drip. It was Streep
who recommended Kline to Pakula even before she was cast as Sophie. Cloaked in
inevitability as her Oscar®-winning performance is, it's illuminating to recall
that Streep was far from a shoo-in for the role. Styron went on record as
favoring Ursula Andress as Sophie. Pakula's first choice was Liv Ullmann for
her ability to project the foreignness that would add to her appeal in the eyes
of an impressionable, romantic Southerner. Ullmann went on to other projects
when Pakula took two years to fashion the screenplay. Polish actress Magda
Vasaryova, Barbra Streisand, Marthe Keller and Streep (like Pakula, a
PAKULA'S CHOICE by Neil Sinyard Cinema Papers (Melbourne), July 1984
Sophie's Choice Sophie's Choice, Undeserved guilt, by Phyllis Deutsch from Jump Cut, February 1984
Pakula's Choice | The New Republic Pakula’s Choice, by Stanley Kauffmann from The New Republic, January 17, 1983
CultureCartel.com (David Abrams) review [4.5/5]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [4/4]
Movieline Magazine review Michael Atkinson
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
DVD MovieGuide Colin Jacobson
Apollo Movie Guide [Brian Webster]
Filmicability with Dean Treadway
Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [D+] calling it a false and dishonest melodrama
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus] tedious and poorly executed
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The collected poems of Emily Dickinson - Google Books Result
Emily Dickinson: The Complete Poems
Emily Dickinson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
ORPHANS
Adapting his own play, Lyle Kessler
has ventured out from the clapped-out clapboard in
Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review
Clearly overwrought, director Alan J. Pakula brings us "Orphans," a roller coaster of a play adaptation that apes the carryings-on of the Steppenwolf Theater Company's original production. Not since Shelley Winters sank with the Poseidon have we seen such histrionics.
This oddball drama of male bonding finds two feral orphans -- one a delinquent, the other a recluse -- redeemed by a kidnap victim turned fairy godfather, a dapper mafioso played with welcome restraint by Albert Finney. Matthew Modine and screen newcomer Kevin Anderson, however, scramble and grapple like demented gerbils in performances that may have worked for the Steppenwolves playing to the balcony but that overwhelm on screen. Pakula and company forget the rule of thumb: You don't have to project when using a projector.
Modine, of "Full Metal Jacket" fame, plays Treat, a self-styled Robin Hood who steals to feed his kid brother Phillip, who cowers in their filthy Newark home. It's a dilapidated clapboard on the edge of New York -- and therefore, one guesses, civilization. Treat has convinced Phillip that he will die of an allergic reaction if he goes outdoors. (I'm not so sure he's wrong.) It's a frail variant of "Lord of the Flies," more on the importance of parenting.
Here, Finney's well-heeled gangster, Harold, becomes a father to the boys. "This is the best thing that ever happened to me in New Jersey," says Harold when he magically escapes his bonds. On the lam and an orphan himself, he decides to move in and play a gothic "Father Knows Best." He tames the kids with a tough-but-tender approach; Phillip goes outside and Treat gains self-discipline.
Playwright Lyle Kessler, who reworked "Orphans" for the screen, writes for the actors, not the audience. His story, a claustrophobic parenting parable, goes nowhere, but it features three actorly parts -- like ham cans waiting to be filled. So we see actors instead of characters, technique instead of truth, and performance instead of psychic progress.
Finney, in his second orphan movie ("Annie" being the first), is the exception with his amusing and mythic Harold. He's as impish as George Burns in "Oh, God!" and yet as menacingly moral as Robert De Niro's devil in "Angel Heart." Modine, muggy and moody, swaggers like a saddle-sore cowboy after an all-night rodeo. Anderson re-creates his stage role as the skittery Phillip, whose fantasy life teems with other selves. He hasn't made a successful transition, with his work wobbling somewhere between staginess and comedy-club improv.
The whole production is like an actor's workshop, where students pretend to be amoebas and egg beaters. Despite all his accomplishment, Pakula seems duped by the theatricality of the project; he's proved he can handle grand emotion with "Sophie's Choice," but somehow awed by the Steppenwolves, he unfortunately adopted their version of "Orphans."
A Room
With No View [ORPHANS] | Jonathan Rosenbaum
The
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
Siskel & Ebert (video)
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
SEE YOU IN THE MORNING
This risible divorce drama opens strikingly. Successful psychiatrist Larry Livingston and wife Jo (Bridges and Fawcett) with a couple of cute infants gambolling in the countryside; cut to another happy couple (Krige and Dukes) with two kids moving into their New York dream home; cut to Bridges and Krige in flagrante. Turns out her concert pianist husband died, while his vapid wife left him to continue a modelling career. It's about starting over, with Krige's kids forced to come to terms with a (somewhat ingratiating) new dad. The story of their new life is reasonably told, but the Farrah Fawcett subplot is a major drawback as Bridges skips over to remonstrate with his ex-wife, visit his small children, and swap philosophies with a sickeningly spiritual mother-in-law (Sternhagen). There's a lengthy scene with Bridges (who rises engagingly above the tosh) reading a retch-inducing bedtime story about a dolphin called Caring, and spook-eyed, sinister Krige is less than ideally cast as a sweet young mother.
Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review
In "See You in the Morning," Jeff Bridges moves though his scenes with an expression of vague worry, like a man who's misplaced his keys and keeps patting his pockets, hoping that somehow they'll magically reappear.
Bridges plays Larry Livingston, a
Something is wrong and, soon, the family is in pieces and Daddy is about to marry someone new and start all over again. Ostensibly a comedy of modern manners, "See You in the Morning" is about the chaotic, partner-switching family life of the '80s and, watching it, you feel as if you are being "Donahued" to death. The film has a sort of waxy buildup of warmth and sentiment -- it practically has LET'S HUG! stamped on every frame. Written and directed by Alan Pakula, it chronicles the troubled histories of two families, the Livingstons and the Goodwins, each in its own way insufferably accomplished. The second clan is headed by Peter (David Dukes), a world-acclaimed pianist who, early on, kills himself because of his failure to recover from a paralyzing hand injury, leaving behind his dedicated wife Beth (Alice Krige) and their two children Cathy and Peter (Drew Barrymore and Lukas Haas).
Still reeling from his divorce, Larry is introduced to Beth by their mutual friend, Sidney (Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Linda Lavin), who describes her as a saint, "the only kind of woman who'd have anything to do with you." But the last thing Larry appears to be is a handful. Larry is more the homey, good-husband type -- faithful, attentive, safe. And when Beth overhears him giving out his home number to one of his patients, she melts. Men are men, but a good bedside manner is hard to find.
The structure of the film is glibly elliptical. At the slightest provocation, one of the characters will stare off into space pensively, prompting yet another poignant flashback. From such moments we discover that Beth, who once had dreams of being a photographer but instead became a devoted helpmate to her genius husband and a doting mother to her kids, isn't the type for easy banter. Beth has a natural elegance, but there's something haggard and withdrawn in her expression. Guilt, we learn, is the reason. Having done everything humanly possible for her family, she berates herself for not doing more.
As a type, Beth is easy to identify, but that's about all she is -- an easily identifiable type. Self-punishing and feeling unworthy of anyone's love, she pushes Larry away -- not because she wants to but because she's afraid of happiness. When Larry confronts her on this, you can't believe that Pakula would dare just to dump this unprocessed psycho-drivel at our feet.
Is there anything more horribly '80s than a couple brought together by a migraine? Pakula is working hard here to deal fully and honestly and entertainingly with recognizable issues that have genuine social resonance, but why is his treatment so uninspired, so bland? There's a hunger for films about lovers who struggle to transcend their problems and make a life together, and you want to restrain yourself from ragging on anyone who takes a serious approach to the subject. But does the thing have to be such a droning bore?
The faces the actors have set for themselves are as fixed as masks. As the tender-souled, befuddled shrink, Bridges fights to find that plodding, commonplace, overearnest side of his personality, and, in flashes, he manages to convey an authentic emotion. (You can't help but wonder though how this part got away from Alan Alda.) Krige, on the other hand, seems stifled by the generalizations in her character. That migraine seems to have spread throughout her whole body. Fawcett plays a tortured beauty, unsatisfied by monogamy and comfy family life, and certainly, somewhere underneath her blond tangles, there must be facial expressions that convey some of this, but if there are, none of them made it onto the emulsion.
Banal as it is, the film may find its supporters. In "See You in the Morning" all the issues are flagged, and Pakula seems more interested in scoring easy sociological points than in penetrating to something deeper, something more personal. He has succeeded in capturing the lifestyle terrain -- furniture, the clothes, the cultural stuff. And for Pakula, this seems to be an end in itself. But in fact, the problems of this achingly self-conscious class of Manhattanites have been given more than their share of screen time. Shot in rich, soft-colored hues by Donald McAlpine, the picture is handsome in a slightly overarticulated way, and with its tasteful Gershwin numbers, what it most brings to mind is the worst of Woody Allen, and few things in life are worse than that -- it's Alan doing Woody. And this Woody isn't worth doing.
Reasons to
Believe [SEE YOU IN THE MORNING & SAY ANYTHING ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, April 28, 1989
The Tech (MIT) (Manavendra K. Thakur) review
Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
Siskel & Ebert (video)
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
PRESUMED INNOCENT
Pakula and Frank Pierson faced a difficult task in adapting Scott Turow's novel. The dense, first-person narrative - told from the perspective of an alleged murderer - has been simplified and tightened, its psychological subtleties jettisoned, the emphasis shifted to legal and forensic investigation. Rusty Sabich (Ford) is a prosecuting attorney whose life is thrown into turmoil after a colleague (Scacchi) is raped and murdered. They had enjoyed a brief affair, and suspicion falls on Sabich, who finds himself hiring a defence attorney (Julia). Even stripped down, the plot provides suspense and intellectual fascination, but the film quickly runs into problems of characterisation. In Turow's novel, the victim is viewed from Sabich's vantage point; here, the emotional distortion has been lost, and her role is merely functional. To a lesser degree, Sabich also loses in the translation, but he's given dimension via his relationship with his tormented, mathematician wife (Bedelia, excellent) and through Ford's earnest intensity. In a welcome return to suspense, Pakula effectively conveys the claustrophobia of domesticity and courtroom procedure.
Washington Post (Joe Brown) review
What people hate most about movie critics is that they seem to delight in giving away the plot twist or the surprise ending. The makers of "Presumed Innocent" know this. They also know that the main thing their competent, resolutely unflashy murder mystery/courtroom drama has going for it is an unanswered-to-the-end question: "Did he or didn't he? And if he didn't, who did?"
So the studio sent out imploring letters to critics everywhere: "Please don't reveal the ending in whatever you write or say on the air," they begged. And "Please don't reveal if Rusty Sabich (Harrison Ford) is guilty or innocent."
Not to worry, guys. I was kept blissfully in the dark (if not exactly on the edge of my seat) till the end of the movie, and anyway, I'd never dream of spoiling someone else's sleuthing.
What I can say is that in this faithful-to-the-letter adaptation of lawyer Scott Turow's 1987 bestseller, Ford plays assistant D.A. Sabich, who leaves his ostensibly happy home one morning for the office and finds his boss waiting for him with Bad News: Carolyn Polhemus, a beautiful young lawyer Sabich has been secretly involved with, has been murdered. And Sabich is assigned to the case.
Sabich drags his feet on the case, "forgetting" to submit crucial physical evidence to the lab for examination. But when fingerprints finally surface, they finger Sabich himself as the prime suspect. Up against it, Sabich hires his own longtime rival to defend him in the trial, and it's a toughie -- the case is further complicated by an impending election, missing criminal case files, marital discord and a victim who seems to have slept with everyone but the jury.
Director Alan J. Pakula sets the story at a methodical, unhurried pace, with a tone of sober, almost drab, realism enlivened by occasional flashes of courtroom drollery (and a smidgen of sex, when Sabich and Polhemus indulge in a desktop celebration after a successful child abuse prosecution).
Everyone in the cast underplays competitively, but no one can underplay like Ford. Here, the action-movie hero is required to react to awful evidence and accusations for much of the movie. When he does speak, it's in a barely intelligible mumble, and his haunted, hangdog look -- he's a legal beagle -- serves him well and never tips us off. Ford and Pakula do a good job of keeping you wondering ifhedunit till the end.
Bonnie Bedelia is dependably radiant as Sabich's wronged wife Barbara, and Greta Scacchi seems to carry her own light source as the sexy, aggressively careerist victim Carolyn, glimpsed only in gory evidence photos and Sabich's flashbacks. Raul Julia is an intellectual iceberg with satisfyingly sharp edges as Sabich's defense attorney. Brian Dennehy is hissably reptilian as Sabich's turncoat boss, and Joe Grifasi leaves you with no choice but to despise his wormlike prosecutor.
By the way, it's not always the critics who are the bad guys as far as endings are concerned: Some guy in my row figured it all out a few beats ahead of the rest of us, and was so proud he couldn't keep his conclusion to himself. We critics are playing fair this time -- now it's up to you.
Presuming
Innocence Tarlton Law Library,
Movie-Vault.com (John Ulmer) review [7/10]
eFilmCritic.com review [4/5] Slyder
DVD Verdict (Nicholas Sylvain) dvd review
Mark R. Leeper review [high +2 out of -4..+4]
Rolling Stone (Peter Travers) review
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
User
reviews from imdb Author: Dennis Littrell
(dalittrell@yahoo.com) from SoCal
User
reviews from imdb Author: James Hitchcock from
Entertainment Weekly review [B-] Owen Gleiberman
Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
Siskel & Ebert (video)
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
CONSENTING ADULTS
This faltering addition to
Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review
It all seemed so innocent, so harmless, just like that little tryst Michael Douglas had with Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction." Or the hiring of Rebecca De Mornay as a nanny in "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle." We're all adults. Right? We're all normal? Right?
Right?
When Richard (Kevin Kline) and Priscilla (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) meet their new neighbors, Eddy (Kevin Spacey) and Kay (Rebecca Miller), in the boneheaded new thriller "Consenting Adults," sure, maybe Eddy seems a little odd. But then, maybe he's just a little eccentric, or a free spirit. Whatever it is, he certainly seems happier and less repressed than the neuralgic yuppie couple next door. And, boy, is his wife a looker.
This fact is not lost on Richard, who eyeballs the honey blonde as if she were the dessert cart at Spago's. Nor does Eddy fail to notice that Richard's libido gets on its pogo stick every time Ms. Tastee-Freez sidles into the room. In fact, a sort of mutual titillation society develops between the two couples, with Eddy and Priscilla engaging in some of the same flirty patty-cake as their other halves.
The director, Alan J. Pakula ("Presumed Innocent" and "All the President's Men"), flawlessly executes this seductive opening act. As the couples spend an increasing amount of time together -- sailing, biking, playing touch football -- the air becomes thick with erotic insinuations. It's tremendous fun watching the subtle ways in which the characters express desires that are not entirely conscious, even to themselves. It's like watching a seduction that can't speak its own name.
Then Eddy speaks up. What if, he says casually to Richard, we just change places in bed with each other one night. You know, you slip into bed with my wife and I'll slip into bed with yours. The wives will be sleeping, and we'll make love to them, and they'll probably never know the difference. And if they do, well, we know they pretty much want it anyway, so the worst thing that can happen is that we'll be sent home with our wrists slapped. Come on, pal, you know you want to.
It's true; Richard does want to sleep with Kay. Plus, he's even being accused by his wife of being a stick-in-the-mud, afraid of taking chances and really living. Maybe he should do what Eddy says and shake things up a little. And maybe the women wouldn't know the difference. Maybe he should roll the dice and see what happens.
It's when the husbands decide to go ahead with their plan that Richard's life -- and the movie too -- goes to hell. Up to that point, Matthew Chapman's script had been immaculately intelligent. He created a potent situation among these four (well, three) rather average upper-middle-class married people, and with tremendous care and skill, developed it into a beautiful trap. But the second half of the film -- that is, everything after the dubious wife-swapping -- is as mindless and sloppy as the first half is sharp.
To even stick a toe into a plot description here would give too much away, but the main thrust of the action is that Eddy is a nut case. And no one makes for a better nut case than Kevin Spacey. In both television and movie roles, he has flitted around the edges of stardom for years, doing marvelously peculiar turns that more often than not steal the thunder of the bigger-name performers. And, as Eddy, he is given his first real opportunity to fully express his fruitcake talent.
He doesn't disappoint -- though, ultimately, he does outclass the movie and his costars. Kline, who has proved himself to be an expert comedian, hasn't seemed this pallid and forgettable since "Sophie's Choice." Though the movie focuses on Richard and the repercussions of his indiscretion, Kline only manages to seem dumbstruck; his only reaction is, like, "Duh?" As Priscilla, Mastrantonio looks pinched and artificial. (Her rarefied, porcelain beauty sometimes works against her when she plays so-called "normal" people.) And Miller, who shimmers through the movie as if all the bones in her body had been surgically removed, comes dangerously close to parody in her portrayal of a lost beauty; she's the ultimate sad-eyed lady of the lowlands.
In the end, it's the lusty, Mad Hatter gleam in Spacey's eyes that sticks with us. Even when the movie asks us to suspend our disbelief far beyond what is reasonable, he deliciously spins his web. In a just universe, his name should become a household word.
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [2/5]
Movie
House Commentary Johnny Web
Dragan Antulov retrospective [2/10]
User reviews from imdb Author: Bothan
from Birmingham, Alabama
User
reviews from imdb Author: (rcraig62@comcast.net) from Brick, NJ
User reviews from imdb (Page 3) Author: dbdumonteil
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reviews from imdb (Page 4) Author: Robert J. Maxwell
(rmax304823@yahoo.com) from
Entertainment Weekly review [D] Owen Gleiberman
Washington Post (Kevin McManus) review
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3/5]
THE PELICAN BRIEF
The assassination of two Supreme Court justices has
bewildered the nation, but not coltish, flame-haired law student Darby Shaw
(Roberts), whose unofficial conspiracy theory is shockingly vindicated by
anonymous hitmen. Exit Darby's sozzled mentor Callahan (Shepard), enter
crusading reporter Grantham (Washington). Writer/director Pakula's adaptation
of John Grisham's potboiler is a classy but transparent reintroduction to Roberts'
sympathetic spunky/vulnerable screen presence (and also, regrettably, to her
limited range).
THE PELICAN BRIEF has a lot in common with this summer's THE
FIRM. Of course, both are based on uberbestsellers by John Grisham, but the
similarities run deeper than that. THE FIRM starred
THE PELICAN BRIEF opens with the assassination of two Supreme Court justices who appear to have little in common, one an aging liberal and the other a young conservative. However, a possible link is discovered by Darby Shaw (Julia Roberts), a law student at Tulane University. Through her law professor/lover Thomas Callahan (Sam Shepard), Darby's theory, which comes to be known as "The Pelican Brief," is circulated in Washington. Among its implications are possible connections between the assassinations and the president (Robert Culp), and suddenly people start turning up dead. A frightened Darby turns to Gray Grantham (Denzel Washington), a White House reporter investigating the assassinations, and soon the two are running for their lives, desperately searching for proof of their theory before they too are added to the growing body count.
Technically, THE PELICAN BRIEF is just fine. Director Alan J. Pakula (ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, PRESUMED INNOCENT) knows how to ratchet up the tension, using pull-back crane shots to heighten the sense of paranoia. James Horner's score works well, even if it does depend overmuch on dissonant piano chords and wood block percussion. The problem with THE PELICAN BRIEF, the movie, is the same thing that's wrong with THE PELICAN BRIEF, the book: there's not a single interesting or original thing happening, either from a story or character perspective. The big conspiracy at the heart of the story is both insipid and insulting to one's intelligence. It's impossible to accept that no one considered the possibility of spacing out the assassinations, or being slightly more creative than putting a bullet in the head of a man who was on a respirator. There's only one possible reason for such stupidity: there wouldn't have been anything for a clever law student to sniff out. It's equally ludicrous to suggest that no one else in Federal law enforcement would have considered the possibilities Darby Shaw comes up with. Grisham's story is loaded with implausibilities and the payoff it offers for accepting them is simply not worth it.
The characters in Pakula's adaptation don't fare much better. Julia Roberts chose Darby Shaw as her first role in two years, but it's difficult to figure out why. There is not a shred of back story, nothing to suggest why she pursues the assassination story, nothing to make her anything but a positively bland lady in distress. To her credit, Roberts' reaction to an explosion is gripping, and she's thoroughly convincing at suggesting dazed trauma, but dazed and traumatized is about as fara as this role goes. Denzel Washington, one of the most talented and charismatic leading men around, has an equally blank slate with Gray Grantham; somehow he manages to act circles around a part where there's really nothing there. Up and down the cast it's the same story: Tony Goldwyn is the President's shadowy Chief of Staff; John Lithgow is Washington's skeptical editor; Stanley Tucci is the icy killer. Only Hume Cronyn, in a single scene as the aging justice Rosenberg, has any spark. No one else has a thing to work with.
THE FIRM was no piece of art, but at least its characters were reasonably fleshed out for the screen. THE PELICAN BRIEF asked me to sit through nearly two and a half hours of repetitive chases involving people I didn't care about. A third Grisham adaptation, THE CLIENT, is on its way next year. I suppose it's too much to ask that he's learned to write an interesting story by now.
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2/4]
Cine-Moi Dennis Toth
Serdar Yegulalp retrospective [2.5/4]
Film Freak Central dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Walter Chaw
Apollo Guide (Dan Jardine) review [58/100]
Movie Reviews with Joan Ellis review
The Tech (MIT) (Patrick Mahoney) review
Laramie Movie Scope (Patrick Ivers) review
User
reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Dennis Littrell
(dalittrell@yahoo.com) from SoCal
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reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Max Salvatore from
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reviews from imdb (Page 5) Author: Rigor from
Entertainment Weekly review [C-] Ty Burr
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [2.5/5]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
Review/Film; Presenting Nancy Drew For the 90's Janet Maslin from The New York Times, December 17, 1993, also seen here: The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray
Version]
DoBlu.com Blu-ray Review [Matt Paprocki]
The Pelican Brief (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE DEVIL’S OWN
A Hollywood blockbuster in which Northern Ireland comes over as the usual assemblage of gentle natives, scheming Brits, down-home knitwear, and gunfire stilling the plaintive sound of the uileann pipes. His fisherman dad a victim of the 'security forces', IRA man Pitt takes the battle to the sanctuary of the US, where he plots a missile shipment from a safe house set up by republican sympathisers. His unwitting host, decent Irish-American cop Ford, is kind enough to offer shelter to the young man from a troubled homeland, but as the visitor settles in, an ominous shadow is already looming over his Transatlantic sojourn. The tension between the dedicated terrorist and the family nest that might yet redeem him proves the piece's strongest dramatic suit, buoyed by Ford's believable performance as the hard-pressed NYPD man trying to do the decent thing against the odds. Otherwise, lacking the adrenalin of an out-and-out action movie, and without the intelligence to be much of anything else, the film has nowhere to go. Pitt's accent, most convincing when he says 'aye', is somewhat tested by whole sentences.
Albuquerque Alibi (Devin D. O'Leary) review
Sometimes it's both a blessing and a curse to know what really goes on in the movie industry. Take for example, the new Harrison Ford/Brad Pitt film The Devil's Own. I know that the production was marred by on-the-set squabbles between Ford and Pitt. Both stars went to the mat with director Alan J. Pakula over who's movie this really was. Such behind-the-scenes battles have a tendency to show through in the final product. If a film's romantic leads hate each other, then the on-screen chemistry just isn't going to be there. Similarly, if two action stars can't decide who's really starring in the film, how can the narrative be expected to decide between the two?
So the question is this: Is The Devil's Own the story
of a sensitive IRA terrorist named Frankie MacGuire (Pitt) who comes to America
to buy a load of Stinger missiles for the cause back home, or is it the story
of a sensitive New York cop
named Tom O'Meara (Ford) who invites the young Irish lad into his peaceful
suburban household not knowing the violence that surrounds him? Having seen the
movie, the answer seems simple. The Devil's Own belongs to Frankie MacGuire. It is the story of how he comes
to
But being a superstar like Harrison Ford and collecting a salary somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million dollars, it seems only natural that Ford would demand his own cut of the pie. Somewhere along the line, rewrites were demanded to give Ford's character more screentime. There are now a lot of scenes showing the no-nonsense officer O'Meara performing his daily cop duties (none of which really seem to further the plot). And, of course, O'Meara gets to express a lot of angst over hunting down this terrorist he has come to love like the son he never had. The result is a slightly schizophrenic storyline that bounces between the two leads with occasional jarring effect.
Despite what TV ads would have you believe, The Devil's Own isn't much of a "thriller." It is more of a quiet, intense character study that occasionally bursts into some explosive drama. Ford is, as ever, the workhorse of American superstardom. Though he seems to have lost much of the joy and humor that marked his early work, he can still be counted on to deliver a charismatic performance. Pitt continues to prove that he is more than just a pretty face, adopting a world-weary countenance and a workable Irish burr. Though most of the secondary characters (doomed cop partners who talk a lot about upcoming retirements and daughters who spend all day on the telephone) are pretty cliché, much of the central drama works. The interaction between Pitt and Ford feels real. Pitt's character, you see, lost his father at a very early age. Naturally, Ford's character becomes a father figure to the confused lad. When the two leads actually go head-to-head in the film's final reel, The Devil's Own really starts to hum.
Despite its herky-jerky narrative and its swollen star power, The Devil's Own has a lot going for it. Points must be given for not turning this into a formulaic good-American-guys-versus-bad-foreign-guys-with-bombs thriller. Fans of both Ford and Pitt are sure to flock.
You can bet that Sony Pictures executives have spent plenty
of time in the last few weeks hoping that there is, in fact, no such thing as
bad press. Rumors of on-set tension have been swirling for months, production delays
bumped the film from its higher-profile fall '96 release date, and reports had
the budget creeping into the $90 million range. Then, in a Newsweek interview,
Brad Pitt took a few shots at the mid-stream script changes on his upcoming
film THE DEVIL'S OWN, inspiring the kind of spin control usually seen only on
the teacup ride at
Pitt plays Frankie McGuire, a native of
THE DEVIL'S OWN clearly wants to establish a father-son dynamic between Tom (who has three daughters but no sons) and Rory, and it works primarily because it never strains too hard to make the point. The bonding between them is casual and un-dramatic -- a game of pool here, a snippet of conversation there -- and director Alan J. Pakula trusts the actors to establish a connection without resorting to trite dialogue or inappropriate outbursts of emotion. These are two quiet, determined men who simply seem to like each other and enjoy each other's company.
We like them, too, and for quite a while both of them are the
heroes of THE DEVIL'S OWN...until Pitt kicks his performance into another gear.
Though the film's opening scenes show Frankie in a gun battle with government
troops in
In a film with such an unconventional struggle at its center, it is all the more jarring when conventional formula elements rear their ugly heads. Obligatory psycho-villain Treat Williams gets to ooze malevolence and serve up severed heads; obligatory romantic interest Natascha McElhone gets to be gorgeous and supportive of Frankie. There is a distracting sub-plot as well, concerning the involvement of Tom's partner Eddie (Ruben Blades) in the shooting of a car thief, which serves only as yet another reminder that Tom is honest, hates violence, and believes in the letter of the law. When THE DEVIL'S OWN begins to resemble low-rent DIE HARD clones, it drifts.
Those occurrences are relatively rare, however, because THE DEVIL'S OWN doesn't move the way you expect suspense thrillers to move. The action sequences are infrequent but emphatic, with a premium placed on the patient establishment of character. Still, there is a moment late in THE DEVIL'S OWN (during a climax reportedly re-shot just a few months prior to opening) which may be an example of what Pitt was complaining about to Newsweek. In that scene, Tom suggests that he never wanted to be a cop, a sub-text which appears out of nowhere and might have given more depth to the character throughout the film. There are certainly instances where THE DEVIL'S OWN feels like the product of a script-by-committee, but the star power of Ford and Pitt in an intriguing relationship guides it over its rough points. I could only hope to be subjected to more "troubled productions" like this.
The Devil's Own - Salon.com Charles Taylor, April 28, 1997
Nitrate Online (Eddie Cockrell) review
Industrious Thuggery - By David Edelstein - Slate Magazine also seen here: Slate [David Edelstein]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]
Harvey's Movie Review (Harvey O'Brien) review
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [2/4]
Film Freak Central dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Bill Chambers
DVD Town (James Plath) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Verdict (Gordon Sullivan) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [2/5] [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Authority.com (Matt Brighton) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [2/5]
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Dragan Antulov retrospective [3/10]
Mark R. Leeper review [high +1 out of -4..+4]
The Tech (MIT) (Teresa Huang) review
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
The Onion A.V. Club [John Krewson]
CineScene.com (Mark Ashley) review
Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Owen Gleiberman
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
Philadelphia City Paper (A.D. Amorosi) review
The Boston Phoenix review Jeffrey Gantz
Rita
Kempley The
Desson
Howe The
Austin Chronicle (Russell Smith) review [3/5]
San Francisco Chronicle (Ruthe Stein) review
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
DoBlu.com Blu-ray Review [Matt Paprocki]
Palcy, Euzhan
SUGAR CANE ALLEY (Rue cases nègres)
Chicago Reader (capsule) Dave Kehr
In the colonial
Palcy's first
feature is set in her native Martinique of the '30s: an 11-year-old boy lives
in a shanty row (Rue Cases Nègres) in the middle of the back-breaking regime of
the sugar cane plantations. Thanks to the selfless devotion of his grandmother,
and the spiritual awakening offered by an ancient mentor, whose father was an
African slave, he prospers at school, and manages to escape the grinding round
of poverty by dint of education. Shot in ochre hues, with a remarkable polish,
the movie never allows itself the easy route of angry misery, but actively
engages its themes with optimism and its characters with love. The old people,
especially, are treated with great dignity, while the boy's slow awakening to a
poetic understanding of his condition is imbued with potent, primitive magic.
DVD Verdict Jesse Atiade
The opening credits of Sugar Cane Alley are deceptive.
A tinny piano plays a bouncy ragtime tune over faded sepia photos, unwittingly
romanticizing an era now long past. But there's nothing romantic or even
nostalgic about Euzan Palcy's film, which revolves around a young boy's
perilous ascent from the
Set in
It would have been easy for Palcy to focus on Jose's struggle to get an education, and his grandmother's quiet willpower that allows him to achieve that goal. But she takes a different approach, weaving this central story into a rich tapestry teeming with colorful characters and minor plotlines, demonstrating that this is one single story running parallel and interacting with numerous others. This sets up Sugar Cane Alley as a film depicting the struggles of society in general, and not an exhilarating story of a protagonist who beats the odds against crippling circumstances.
It's particularly admirable how steadfastly Palcy refuses to pander to the audience or play up the emotional elements of the film. Material dealing with oppressed people is emotionally-charged stuff, but she never exploits this. Tragic circumstances and painful deaths occur frequently throughout the film, yet they are never artificially dwelt upon. She treats each situation with dignity and respect, but never plays up certain elements that would cause an emotional response, essentially allowing the viewer to come to their own decision on the ramifications of each individual circumstance. This technique allows the combined weight of suffering to increase in resonance as the film progresses, leading up to the final devastating scene, where hope somehow emerges when all seems irrevocably lost. That is the greatest success of Sugar Cane Alley: Palcy and her actors manage to find a thread of hope hidden among the sordidness of the circumstances depicted.
Sugar Cane Alley is beautifully photographed in muted
tones; an attempt to recapture the tattered elegance of ancient photographs
while bringing their images to vivid life. The browns and deep purples have a
haunting quality in the night scenes, as if casting a perpetual shadow of
sadness over the entire proceedings, while in contrast, the blinding yellows of
the day scenes highlight the dusty and stifling qualities of the
New Yorker Films thankfully gives Sugar Cane Alley an anamorphic transfer that does the gorgeous cinematography and camerawork justice. Despite some minor image defects, the beauty of the film shines through. The audio is also quite clear, with some effective use of the surround sound in regards to natural background noises. English subtitles are provided, and the only "extras" to be found are several trailers for four other New Yorker releases.
Sugar Cane Alley is a film that could easily slip under a person's cinematic radar, but it is film not easy to shake off. Director Euzan Palcy's Cesar win for her directorial debut and Darling Legitimus's award for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival were both richly deserved, and only further validate the worthiness of this haunting and heartbreaking film.
User reviews from
imdb Author: xmeenax from Canada
The historical outlook on the era of slavery depicted through
films often has a direct, nationalistic approach or feel within dialogue,
characters and even choice of director, actors or country of
production/distribution. Euzhan Palcy's 1983 film Rue Cases Nègres is an
example of a motion picture that directs away from the cliché historic tales.
Based in early 19th century Martinique, the island once infamously filled with
traded African labourers working for little to no wages in the high fields of
the sugar canes, brings out the tale of a young orphaned boy and his personal
struggle with daily life as well as the stories of assorted characters around
him.
As young Jose lives in the small shack-housing area near the cane fields with
his working Grandmother Adamantine, their dream of a promising future through
education for the boy becomes more and more of a reality. The immediately
noticed feature within the film was apparent right at the beginning, where
viewers will notice the narration and point of view incorporated from the young
José. In contrast to higher-authoritative figure portrayals within other films
where protagonists range from military or government dignitary, this genuine
depiction gains a chaste, warmer feel of the overall film. This also shines the
film in a different light; the often bloody, technicalities of infamous past
era overlook and a usually dismissed angle of that particular era or situation.
Not to say that this adaptation of a crucial era in history is depicted as
childish, naïve or unrealistic; the world is much simpler seen through the eyes
of a different character, which might be the cause of even more sympathy for
the viewers. Of course as every historical film's undertone establishes, the
effects and situations of José and Adamantine's physically demanding life is
apparent and personal insight to both their lives allows the viewers emotions
side with the struggling family. The acting of most characters was
significantly believable and played the part of the roles given. Because all
dialogue was in Palcy's native French, there were vast differences in the film
and that of
Directing by the then Euzhan Palcy is quite impressive, as I often compared
many of the wide shots and angling to that of Martin Scorsese. Although the
lightening was dim and at time faces could not be seen entirely, this once
again adds more of a realistic approach to the film which allows viewers to see
the
Although most to all characters played an important role in José's life and
story, many had a story themselves that was unfortunately not unfolded. An
example would be the life of old Adamantine; her struggles and upbringing of
her grandson were most appreciated and in the end, we all felt great empathy
for the old woman. Leopold, a fellow student of José, also had an interesting
life where he is seen as the by-product of an assumed native
Overall, the film Rue Cases Nègres sets the bar high, placing it amongst the
more original, heart-warming glimpses into the world of early 19th century,
colonized
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
DVD Talk (Robert Spuhler) dvd review [3/5]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
A DRY WHITE SEASON
Behind the credits, two boys play
happily together. Within minutes, the black boy is caught up in the Soweto
uprising, the murderous violence of which is cross-cut with the white boy's
family sitting on a manicured lawn to the strains of classical music. That,
unfortunately, is the end of the film. Oh, there's business to clear up over
the next 100 minutes, as Afrikaaner Ben du Toit (Sutherland) sees that
Something Is Wrong in South Africa and that Something Should Be Done. There's
Brando's star turn as a lawyer jaded by the realisation that justice cannot
exist in matters of race, puffing, pausing, snorting, looking like he's
wandered in from another movie. There's Prochnow's nicely understated Special
Branch officer, and Suzman playing the bitch again; horrific tortures in police
custody; and a sub-plot, not in André Brink's novel, designed to include a few
black faces (South African exile Zakes Mokae
is particularly good). But like Cry Freedom, it's still whites debating
racial injustice: fine for a book published in Afrikaans a decade ago, but a
poor premise for a message movie.
Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review
“A Dry White Season” is political cinema so deeply felt it
attains a moral grace. A bitter medicine, a painful reminder, it grieves for
As in "Cry Freedom" and "A World Apart," the movie focuses on a white protagonist transformed -- a soft-spoken Afrikaner who awakes from his complacency to find he is essentially powerless in a police state, a dupe who has lost his freedom while ignoring the rights of others. Odd that a black director would choose this perspective, but Euzhan Palcy is after all adapting a novel by Afrikaner Andre Brink.
The film, set against the political upheaval of 1967, tells a tale of two families, pointedly pitting the idyllic life of the du Toits against the proud subsistence of the Ngubenes. Though loving, law-abiding clans, both will be broken into bits and fitted into Palcy's mosaic of injustice, ignorance and greed.
The South Africa Palcy depicts is a hothouse for sadists, a nation in which "good" men, such as Ben du Toit, look the other away. Donald Sutherland is the rather too gentle Ben, a history teacher becalmed in his Johannesburg Eden, tended by Gordon Ngubene (Winston Ntshona) whose own back yard in Soweto has become a killing field. Gordon turns to Ben when his son disappears along with other Soweto schoolchildren, who are variously shot down and arrested by police at a peaceful demonstration.
Ben tut-tuts, certain that a polite but firm inquiry will resolve what is no doubt a bureaucratic snafu. But while Ben wasn't looking, the benevolent society he imagined became a police state. There is nothing subtle about Special Branch Capt. Stolz (Jurgen Prochnow), a storm trooper who is torturing little kids in the other room. He's slime from the bottom of the gene pool, but oblivious Ben readily accepts his assurances.
When Gordon continues his search, he is detained and beaten to death by Stolz's men, who claim he committed suicide. On seeing Gordon's burned and bruised body, Ben can no longer deny the truth. "I'll ask McKenzie {a lawyer} to help," says Ben, still something of a limp rag. "If it makes you feel good," says Stanley, an enigmatic taxi driver played by South African exile Zakes Mokae.
Sutherland is a particularly sober version of the father he played in "Ordinary People," trying to keep his household together. Abandoned by his wife and daughter, he finds allies in his young son, a journalist (Susan Sarandon) and a garrulous lawyer (Marlon Brando, corpulent but masterly as an African Clarence Darrow). He advises Ben to forget about Gordon's death, for "justice and law are distant cousins ... but in South Africa, they're not related at all." While the director manipulates her agenda, she shows tolerance for her enemies, seeming to understand their motivations, creating some of her strongest scenes in confrontations between Ben and his family. The Ngubenes are not so fully drawn, but the eloquent South African actors (associates of Athol Fugard) give them body.
"A Dry White Season" is preaching to the choir, a movie we've seen before, not an easy sell. Its lessons are applicable from Johannesburg to Bensonhurst.
A
Dry White Season - TCM.com Frank Miller
"Law and justice are distant cousins, and here in South
Africa they're not on speaking terms at all."
Marlon Brando in A Dry White Season
The late '80s were a hard time for South Africa on screen and with good reason.
With the world's growing disgust with the nation's racially discriminatory
Apartheid policies, international filmmakers tackled the subject in a series of
pictures, including Richard Attenborough's Cry Freedom (1987), with
Denzel Washington as Steve Biko, Chris Menges' A World Apart (1988) and
the 1989 political thriller, A Dry
White Season. Although all three focused primarily on white South
Africans involved in the fight for equality, A Dry White Season had the distinction of being the first major
Hollywood feature directed by a black woman, Euzhan Palcy, while also
containing one of Marlon Brando's last great performances.
Martinique-born Palcy had first attracted attention with her 1983 account of
growing up in her homeland, Sugar Cane Alley. With that film's
international success (in Martinique it out-grossed that year's biggest hit, E.T.),
she set out to make a film about Apartheid. But after years of struggling to
find financing, she realized that nobody wanted to finance a film on the
subject unless it featured a white protagonist. Fortunately, she managed to
hook up with an adaptation of Andre Brink's 1979 novel that had begun at Warner
Bros. with producer David Puttnam.
Brink, one of the first South African novelists to write in Afrikaans, had
risen to fame with his story of a white school teacher who becomes involved in
the fight against Apartheid when his black gardener and the man's son are
killed by the South African police. The novel had even achieved the distinction
of being banned in Brink's native land.
Puttnam was already in possession of a screenplay written by Colin Welland, who
had won an Oscar® for the producer's Chariots of Fire (1981). Then the
project moved to MGM, where producer Paula Weinstein took it over. Palcy had
problems with Welland's script and set out to re-write it, most notably
changing the ending to introduce a note of revolution not present in Brink's
novel. .
Although A Dry White Season had
been cast with international actors of a high caliber -- including Donald
Sutherland as the schoolteacher, British actress Janet Suzman as his wife and
then rising young actress Susan Sarandon as a British journalist -- it was
lacking in marquee value. As a result, MGM started pushing Weinstein and Palcy
to find at least one major star to flesh out the cast. Palcy thought Brando
would be excellent casting for the small but flashy role of a crusading lawyer
who tries to help Sutherland win one of his legal battles. She never expected
him to accept the role, but Brando, who had been off-screen since The Formula
in 1980, had been so impressed with her earlier film and so moved by the
story's politics that he agreed to work for scale against a percentage of the
gross. He even donated his paycheck to anti-Apartheid organizations.
Not that he came without problems. Whether for artistic reasons, as he claimed,
or because he simply couldn't learn his lines any more, he insisted that his
lines be transmitted to him over a closed-circuit receiver he wore in his ear.
He would later claim that he re-wrote his few scenes and even directed them
himself. When he saw the finished film, he denounced MGM for allegedly
butchering the film to give the impression that Apartheid was a thing of the
past. He also complained that his best scene had been cut.
Despite his complaints, Brando got some of the film's best reviews. When the
year's Oscar® nominations were announced, Brando was a surprise nominee for
Best Supporting Actor. There were even gasps from the press when his nomination
was announced. He lost the award to Denzel Washington for Glory.
Overall A Dry White Season
received only mixed reviews, with some critics lamenting the changes from
Brink's novel while others complained that it was time for an anti-Apartheid
film with a black protagonist. Along with Brando, the best reviews went to
three South African actors, Zakes Mokae, Winston Ntshona and John Kani. All
three were associates of pioneering South African playwright Athol Fugard,
another anti-Apartheid activist, and all three had won Tony Awards for Broadway
appearances in his plays.
not coming to a theater near you (Eva Holland) review
Hollywood's apartheid: 3 films Nicholas Wellington from Jump Cut, May 1991
Film Freak Central dvd review Travis Mackenzie Hoover
DVD Talk (Gil Jawetz) dvd review [3/5]
User comments from imdb Author: jotix100 from New York
User comments from imdb Author: bkoganbing from Buffalo, New York
Moderns and Classics Movie Reviews [Brian Bell]
Washington Post (Jeanne Cooper) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
Paley, Nina
Sita Sings the Blues - About Nina Paley
Nina Paley
(b. 1968,
Nina Paley - International Museum of Women
Nina Paley's career
began in 1988 with her self-syndicated comic strip, Nina's Adventures, which
appeared in several alternative newspapers and two paperback collections,
Depression is Fun and Nina's Adventures. She created two solo comic books for
Dark Horse Comics, and various graphic short stories for Last Gasp Comix, Rip
Off Press, Laugh Lines Press, Grateful Dead Comix, Kitchen Sink Press, and the
Japanese artist volume Jarebong. Her first mainstream daily comic strip, Fluff,
was distributed internationally by Universal Press Syndicate between 1995 and
1998; in 2002 she drew The Hots for King Features Syndicate. Comics burn-out
drove Nina to animation. Her first film, Luv Is...(1998), was clay stop-motion
shot with a vintage super-8 camera. She went on to make 3 more films in 1998,
each exploring a different medium: Cancer (drawing and scratching on 35mm), I
Heart My Cat (16mm stop-motion) and Follow Your Bliss (traditional pencil and
ink on paper). In 1999 she made the world's first completely cameraless IMAX
film, Pandorama, and received a grant from the Film Arts Foundation to produce
Fetch! (2001), a short film incorporating optical illusions. In 2002 she
created a controversial series about overpopulation and the environment,
including the Stork, which won first prize at the EarthVision Environmental
Film Festival and an unsolicited invitation to Sundance (2003). In 2002 she
briefly lived in Trivandrum, India, where she encountered the Ramayana, sexism,
and the failure of her marriage. She subsequently embarked on her current
project, "Sita Sings the Blues," a feature-in-progress combining the
ancient Indian epic Ramayana with 1920's American jazz. In addition to making
independent animated festival films, Nina freelances and teaches animation at
Parsons School of Design in Manhattan. She is a 2006 Guggenheim Fellow.
Nina Paley: America's Best-Loved Unknown Cartoonist
Nina Paley - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
SITA SINGS THE BLUES B+ 91
USA (82 mi) 2008 Sita Sings the Blues
"If
You Want the Rainbow, You Must Have the Rain" —Sita, sung by Annette Hanshaw, Harmony
Records, 1928
A remarkable film that in its origins resembles the therapy-driven, computer designed autobiographical experimentation of Jonathan Caouette’s TARNATION (2003), as the entire film was designed exclusively from the director’s own computer over the course of five years, only here this multi-media mix is animated, mixing ancient parable from India’s Ramayana with the travails of an apparently happily married modern day couple that eventually suffer an unexpectedly painful separation, all blended together in a song narrative out of the 1920’s using the torch songs of Annette Hanshaw, whose songs of love and heartbreak provide the emotional core of the story. This interweaving of different art forms is a revelation, as the bright colors and the gorgeous detail to the exotic artwork is impressive throughout, yet it’s always surprising how the song choices and musical numbers remain so perfectly within the context with the story. Apparently the idea behind the film was the director’s own break up with her husband, where she soon began identifying not only with Sita, inexplicably banished by her own husband who she dearly loved, but also with the clarity and simplicity of Hanshaw’s soulful, near conversational song renderings which are filled with melancholic longing and pain. While the popular parable glorifies the perfect union of Prince Ram and Princess Sita, Hindu gods who come to personify true love, it is when Ram acts in his role as King that he banishes her, questioning her purity after she’s been kidnapped by a demon king. Thinking that others would find any possible explanation unacceptable, her stain on his nobility is sufficient to get rid of her, love be damned. Power is everything. So she is exiled from his kingdom.
Paley’s version
resonates with the splendid adornment of Sita’s unconditional love, certainly
one of the highpoints of the film, but it’s also perhaps a prescription for
failure, as life inevitably leaves its share of emotional scars, especially as
humans rarely live up to storybook idealizations. But within this fairy tale world, where a few
offscreen narrators can be heard amusingly chatting and occasionally arguing
about how they recall the ramifications of the Ramayana fable when they grew up, the director is cleverly able to
establish a historic link tracing back thousands of years of women being
treated badly. In male dominated
societies and in fables, men always have the final word, sometimes cruelly and
violently, a practice that continues into the present age, where there’s
virtually no evidence of violent retaliation or fighting back by women. Throughout the course of time, women have
simply had to bear their burdens as naturally as bearing children. While there is absolutely no finger-pointing
here, the succession of songs about hurt, however, and pain in the heart
certainly implies a feminist tone, suggesting perhaps we should start by
recognizing how women are set up from early childhood to buy into the concept
of a handsome prince who will come and rescue them, implying they are helpless
and can’t save themselves, as in the iconic Disney SNOW WHITE (1937) fantasy Someday My Prince Will Come.
A subversive message permeates throughout the entire film, seen exclusively from the female point of view, but it does so with such gentle and playful humor, where exotic animals regularly frolic and dance alongside the human characters, some even fly, and where they all break character for an inexplicable three minute intermission to go get candy and popcorn. Indian dance numbers play alongside dance sequences set to the blues, all of which provide a spirited energy throughout the film, where the more brilliantly colorful narrative of Sita coincides with the more hum drum world of the married couple. In the end, despite their absolute devotion, beautifully expressed here by the surging, romantic Tchaikovsky music of “Romeo and Juliet,” both women are dumped and are forced to face humiliating emotional consequences, not the least of which is having to start their lives over again. It’s interesting that not an ounce of energy is wasted on getting back for their obvious mistreatment, where instead Paley writes a scathingly satiric children’s song that hilariously praises the greatness of Rama, which of course, immediately undermines his authority. The attention to cultural detail brings to mind KIRIKOU AND THE SORCERESS (1998), a Michael Ocelot children’s film immersed in the sunlit African traditions. But in this day and age, religious fanaticism in India has produced death and rape threats to the director, much like similar threats to Islamic author Solomon Rushdie, as there are those who are threatened by seeing their gods and idols dancing in an animated musical, calling it blasphemy. What this really calls attention to, however, is the hostile reaction to any perceived threat challenging the century’s old, male dominated order of the universe. While the film is obviously heartfelt and genuine, this violent, fanatical reaction to it tosses that message aside in an all out assault to maintain the narrow interests of self-perceived credibility and power.
You're mean to me
Why must you be mean to me?
Gee, honey, it seems to me
You love to see me cryin'
I don't know why
I stay home each night
When you say you phone
You don't and I'm left alone.
Sing the blues and sighin'
You treat me coldly each day in the year
You always scold me
Whenever somebody is near, dear
I must be great fun to be mean to me
You shouldn't, for can't you see
What you mean to me
—“Mean to Me,” songwriters Fred
Ahlert and Roy Turk, 1929
Soundtrack Music
"Sita in Space"
Composed and Performed by Todd Michaelsen
Published by Dragon's Lair (ASCAP)
"Yiraha"
Composed and Performed by Rudresh Mahanthappa
BMI Publishing
Red Giant Records, 2002
"Here We Are"
Lyrics by Gus Kahn
Music by Harry
Warren
Sung by Annette Hanshaw
Harmony Records, 1929
"Ganpatl"
By MASALADOSA
From the album "Chili Aurn"
(C)Pierre-Jean & Bruce Duffour
(P)Madaladosa 2004
Monkey Business Publishing
"What Wouldn't I Do for That Man"
Jay
Gorney & E.Y. Harburg
Sung by Annette Hanshaw
Velvet Tone, 1929
"Daddy Won't You Please Come Home?"
Sam
Coslow
Sung by Annette Hanshaw
Puritone, 1929
"I Like it When You Play The Blues"
Composed and Performed by Rudresh Mahanthappa
BMI Publishing
Red Giant Records, 2002
"Who's That Knockin' At My Door?"
Gus
Kahn & Seymour Simons
Sung by Annette Hanshaw
Pathe Actuelle, 1927
"Bom, Shankar"
By MASALADOSA
From the album "Chili Aurn"
(C)Pierre-Jean & Bruce Duffour
(P)Madaladosa 2004
Monkey Business Publishing
"Romeo & Juliet"
Pyotr
Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Arranged and Performed by Rebecca Lloyd
"Mean to Me"
Roy
Turk & Fred E. Ahlert (as Fred Ahlert)
Sung by Annette Hanshaw
Velvet Tone, 1929
"Biryani"
By MASALADOSA
From the album "Chili Aurn"
(C)Pierre-Jean & Bruce Duffour
(P)Madaladosa 2004
Monkey Business Publishing
"If You Want the Rainbow, You Must Have the Rain"
Oscar
Levant, Billy Rose & Mort
Dixon
Sung by Annette Hanshaw
Harmony Records, 1928
"Intermission"
Composed and Performed by Nik Phelps
BMI Publishing
"Balancing Act"
Composed and Performed by Rudresh Mahanthappa
BMI Publishing
Red Giant Records, 2002
"Agni Parisha"
(Sita's Fire)
Compsed and Performed by Todd Michaelsen
Vocals by Reena Shah
Lyrics by Laxmi Shah
Published by Dragon's Lair (ASCAP)
"Moanin' Low"
Howard
Dietz & Ralph Rainger
Sung by Annette Hanshaw
Okeh Records, 1929
"Am I Blue?"
Harry Aiest and Grant Clarke
Sung by Annette Hanshaw
Harmony Records, 1929
"Rama's Great"
Music by R. Sukhdeo (ASCAP)
Lyrics by Nina Paley
Vocals by Nitya Vidyasagar & Rohan
Composed and Performed by Rohan
OmLand Publishing (ASCAP)
"Lover Come Back to Me"
Oscar
Hammerstein & Sigmund Romberg
Sung by Annette Hanshaw
Columbia, 1929
"I've Got a Feeling I'm Fallin'"
Harry
Link, Fats Waller (as Thomas Waller) & Billy
Rose
Sung by Annette Hanshaw
Velvet Tone, 1929
"The Song is Ended"
Irving
Berlin
Sung by Annette Hanshaw
Pathe Actuelle, 1927
"It's Movie Time" [John DeSando]
"The
blues was like that problem child that you may have had in the family. You was
a little bit ashamed to let anybody see him, but you loved him. You just didn't
know how other people would take it." —BB King
The fine recent animations such as Persepolis and Wall-E have set an
intelligence standard hard to equal, much less surpass. While Sita Sings the
Blues at least equals those in intelligence and wonder, it surpasses them in imagination
considering the parallel stories of wives unfairly abandoned by their husbands
are set in modern and ancient times, based on the well-know Ramayana story in
India.
Although the animation seems a primitive 2-D next to Pixar's successfully
realistic product, director and almost everything-else-in-the-picture Nina
Paley suffuses the frames with brilliant colors and variable landscapes.
Heroine Sita is shaped in circles and curves to make her voluptuous and
expressive in an endearingly abstract style.
I have never seen such richly subversive animation that pushes the feminist
agenda without offending. The story, after all, is clear about the failure of
mankind over the millennia to stop the sexism that puts women through
humiliation without retribution. Paley's success at entertaining with a wildly
imaginative palette and loveable characters and cats contradicts, however, the
generalization that all women suffer degradations centuries old—she is an
artist and entrepreneur, who, faced with a restrictive copyright law that
doesn't let her market the film because of Jazz singer Annette Hanshaw' 1920's
performance (the music is in the public domain, but not the publishing)
distributes her film free (find it in ten installments on YouTube).
Hanshaw's Betty-Boop like singing is the apex of pleasure in this multi layered
story, whose intricacy is richly rewarding, sometimes difficult even for
Indians to decipher, such as the three Indian voice-overs who wittily try to
figure out the details of the Ramayana legend. I rarely make the time to return
to a film before I report on it—this time I will happily return to hear Sita
sing the blues and put the beautiful mosaic into order.
JT Abron (a
sweet blog review) Judith Tabron
We got to go see Sita Sings the Blues last night.
It was at least its
A friend of mine pointed me to this movie and I think it was because of the
art, which is incredibly detailed and gorgeous. (She herself is an artist and
known for her incredibly detailed, gorgeous work.) As a feat of animation it's
insanely impressive. Almost all of it was done in Flash, including hand-traced
rotoscoping of a classical Indian dance sequence, and the richness and variety
of the animation styles make it a tour de force of art no matter what else one
could say about it.
But there's actually a lot to say about it. It's not just design styles, but
storytelling traditions and cultural histories that are blending here. Nina
Paley, the creator, has told a story mirroring an experience in her life in
which her husband leaves her for a tech job in
After the showing there was Q&A with Nina and the other actors, dancer,
musicians, and supporters involved in making the film. The audience asked the
predictable first questions you would have time for in half an hour right after
a movie has shown. They were captivated by the combination of East and West in
the movie, captivated by the rich multi-leveled presentation of the story of
the Ramayana, which is told and re-told by many voices including a chorus of
shadow puppets and Mughal-style art cutouts as well as Paley's own animation
creations. They were interested, as voyeuristic audiences often are, in her
inspirations and her work process. (The effects she achieved were simply stupendous.)
The music got less attention than it deserved, as it's fantastic. It's clear
that this group of artists isn't market-oriented, because the idea of making a
distributable version of the music (at least sales online through something
like cdbaby.com) should have occurred to them ages ago. There were certainly
questions about when the music, and the movie, might be available in other
formats. (Answer: don't know yet.)
The longest answer was about the reception the movie has gotten in some areas from
Indians (or perhaps more specifically Hindus) who find it objectionable. I find
it personally discouraging that in this day and age an artist can still receive
rape threats in response to a work as beautiful and heartfelt as this one, and
Nina Paley both reported those threats and refused to let them discourage her
in a way that was simple and quietly courageous. She has no choice, of course
but to stand by her work. She is still hoping that the film will be shown in
But it really rewards further investigation, and as soon as I was done clapping
I immediately thought to myself "I must find a way to show this in the
class I'm going to teach next year." That class will be on global
storytelling and global markets for storytelling, particularly in new media,
and I really can't think of a better framing text than this one.
The movie itself is a triumph of individual creation. Paley literally
hand-created almost every frame, using technology that is very widely
available. I can easily see it taking one of several routes - being distributed
online (which would probably net her the most money, if she can sell enough
copies to non-pirates), or being picked up by one of the larger distributers
like Searchlight. I don't see that happening, because the movie isn't the sort
of simple feel-good story that generally does well in those markets (it's
nothing like "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" - in fact one might call it
the polar opposite), but it could certainly garner a big cult following and
would work as well on big screens in theaters as the trailer does on laptop
screens.
In addition
to that, though, the movie is a demonstration of how one white Western woman
connected with not only the sacred story of Sita but also with a dimpled jazz
singer of the last century. There are really three women who are telling one
another's stories here: Paley, Sita, and Hanshaw. Because the wavery sweet
voice of the jazz singer, when put into Sita's mouth, makes Sita's pain
emotional and recognizable and also in a way survivable. Sita can't help loving
her man; in fact her life reflects that love is a mitzvah, a holy blessing, one
she has the power to give and she does give it, freely, wholly. Christians
might easily see in her selfless unconditional love a reflection of the love of
a Protestant Jesus, for instance. It could be argued that only a deity actually
does give that sort of bottomless unquestioning love - except that in Paley's
movie we see that women give that sort of love too.
And we see
the downsides of that sort of all-encompassing unconditional love. Certainly if
one looks at it from the point of view of a twenty-first-century woman, a
product of the post-Freudian era, the destructiveness of love is immediately
evident. Hanshaw's songs tell about a woman who does not stand proudly
independent and alone without her man - she clings to him, adores him, and
definitely is not fulfilled without him. Sita's voice and Sita's eyes and
Sita's hands and Sita's actions all embody the same devotion. It is not good
for Sita - it isn't good for Rama either; perhaps it isn't good for anyone. But
it is, and that wholehearted love lets the Nina character in the movie
feel her own wholehearted love. It might not be healthy and it certainly isn't
proud, but it is, and because it is a part of her, she can feel it and, in a
sense, there are hints, move on. Paradoxically, by acknowledging the one-sided,
damaged and damaging, all-encompassing love, Paley's characters somehow
integrate it into their larger selves and become in their own ways whole.
The movie is what I would consider one of the best examples of inter-cultural
mingling: one that does not deny the differences in cultures, traditions,
language (Sita is always Sita, and the Ramayana is her story, and the
shadow puppets working to remember it through the various versions they know
from picture books and television and textbooks are inhabiting their own
culture and it will feel alien, I think, more than co-opted, for the conscious
viewer), while at the same time making connections between human stories that
really do have connections. A woman's broken heart, while culturally specific,
has similarities to other women's broken hearts, and those similarities can
cross boundaries of time and space.
In a way, then, if the movie glorifies anything, it glorifies the unfortunate
omnipresence of women's broken hearts. Paley's hopeful, optimistic treatment of
such a sad theme makes it somehow positive, more positive than any images in
the closing of the movie itself. It is precisely because Paley's work
demonstrates the universality of her experience that we can feel hopeful about
heartbreak.
Having seen "Sita Sings the Blues", yes, I want to read the Valmiki Ramayana,
and yes, I also want to go back in time and give Annette Hanshaw some solid
feminist advice about getting by on your own (and maybe a few new songs to
sing). But I also feel closer to Paley, and Hanshaw, and I feel closer to Sita.
And that's a good thing.
Manushi article Lady sings the Blues: When Women retell the Ramayana, essay by Nabaneeta Dev Sen from Manushi magazine
Yes to Sita, No to Ram by Madhu Kishwar The Continuing Popularity of Sita in India, by Madhu Kishwar from Manushi magazine, January-February 1997
Anju Bhargava's Sitayanam Sitayanam...A Woman’s Journey…of Strength, 2000
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review also seen here: The House Next Door [N.P. Thompson]
Hammer To Nail [Michael Tully]
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [5/5]
Film Journey Doug Cummings
‘Sita Sings the Blues’ Sepia Mutiny
Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Sita Sings the Blues" Phil Nugent from the Screengrab
A Nutshell Review Stefan S
eFilmCritic.com (David Cornelius) review [5/5]
Cartoon Brew Jerry Beck
Watch It For Free: Sita Sings the Blues (2008, Nina Paley) Paul Clark from Screengrab
Sita Sings the Blues in the NY Times Amid from Cartoon Brew, February 14, 2009, where one can view the first 11 minutes of the film, also see: 2008 pick of the year for best animated feature
Wired Interview by
Patrick Di Justo from Wired magazine,
interview
in Film & Video Interview by
Bryant Frazer,
Spout "Media Diet" Interview Interview by Brandon Harris from SpoutBlog,
Suite 101 Interview
Interview by Dominic von Riedemann,
Variety (Ronnie Scheib) review
Time Out New York Ben Kenigsberg
Boston Globe review [3.5/4] Ty Burr
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
write-up in this Sunday’s NY Times. Hindu Goddess as Betty Boop? It’s Personal, Margy Rochlin from The New York Times, February 13, 2009
Analysis of different variations of the Ramayana from the book: Ramayana in the Arts of Asia, by Garrett Kam
Sita Sings the Blues - Why Annette Hanshaw?
"the voice of an angel" Annette Hanshaw website
Full download of the film at The Internet Archive
Sita Sings the Blues - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
PuppetIndia Shadow Puppets
Palfi, Gyorgy
HUKKLE C+ 76
This film was the director’s graduate thesis at the
Palitzsch, Peter and Manfred Wekworth
MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN A- 94
Directed by Bertold Brecht and longtime associate Erich Engel, featuring Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble production, winner of the 1954 Theatre Festival in Paris, both for the play and the production. For Brecht, writing plays was the way to enter the world of theater, including his completely new way of viewing reality with a social consciousness, arguing against the emotional engagement of the audience, stressing empathy but distance. Only in his last years did he have his own theater company, the Berliner Ensemble, and this play was their most famous production, featuring Helene Weigel, Brecht’s surviving widow who had an uncredited role in Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film METROPOLIS, as Mother Courage, a courageous and strong-minded woman who tries to profit from the war and does not recognize that it is the war that is killing her children, yet she can’t avoid it. A play with musical interludes about the psychology of war profiteering, viewed from the point of view of the poor, from the starving masses who are cheated, exploited, and in the 30 Years War in the 1600’s, lost half their children, as half the population of Germany was lost to war and disease – very intelligent and compelling stuff.
User comments from imdb Author: msrich-1
from
If you know just a little German, you will enjoy this film. The casting is perfect and the acting is so subtle and intelligent that you will get a lot out of each scene, even if you don't understand every word. This movie was done from a stage production by Brecht's own company, using the techniques of epic theater that he invented, so there is a certain restraint, even dryness, to the style that is supposed to make it easier for the viewer to think about the issues. Regardless of your politics, however, once you've seen this production, others will pale by comparison. The script is based upon a very old story about female merchants who followed the troops to do business during wars. They are a tough breed, and Helen Weigel, who plays the title role, certainly conveys that.
Helene Weigel | Jewish Women's Archive
Mother Courage and Her Children - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mother Courage and Her Children Study Guide by Bertolt Brecht ...
Past Productions: Mother Courage Gideon Lester on the evolution of the play from The American Repertory Theater
Theatre at UBC: Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht ... historical notes from The University of British Columbia
ArtScope.net: Mother Courage and Her Children historical notes by Sandra Marie Lee from Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater
Bertolt Brecht - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bertolt Brecht biography
Bertolt Brecht biography
HSC Online biography and extensive analysis of his works
Biography of Bertolt Brecht | List of Works, Study Guides & Essays ...
Brecht study guide
Berliner Ensemble - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
IBS: Berliner Ensemble history of the Berlin Ensemble
Berliner Ensemble - MSN Encarta
THEATRE / Auf Wiedersehen Brecht?: The Berliner Ensemble has ... Aaron Hicklin from The Independent, January 14, 1993
Brecht’s War Primer - 21st Century Socialism Simon Korner from 21st Century Socialism, August 14, 2006
Pan, Bertha Bay-Sa
FACE C 71
This is the completion of the director’s graduation thesis, an all too predictable story about growing up Asian-American, separated from American culture while simultaneously loosing your Asian roots, leaving much of the film spotty and uneven, some of the acting atrocious, and all the characters stereotypically predictable, with the exception of Anthony “Treach” Criss, the lead singer of the rap group Naughty by Nature, who plays a black DJ. The film follows Bai Ling, an American-Asian daughter of a traditional Chinese mother living in Queens, New York, who is criticized by her elders for being too white, so in an act of attempted independence, goes out alone and gets taken advantage of by a so-called friend of the family, who rapes her. The parents, in traditional old-world style, arrange for their marriage in order to provide for the resulting daughter, but they split up after the baby is born, as neither has a clue how to be a parent, and the mother leaves the baby with her own mother and just disappears for nearly 20 years. Meanwhile, the daughter, Kristy Wu, grows up and has an affair with the black DJ, bringing a melodramatic over-reaction of more shame into the household, as the grandmother has for an entire generation attempted to save “face,” leaving her shamed, as if cursed, by her daughter and granddaughter. Tension mounts when the mother returns for the high school graduation of the daughter she’s never seen, as she has no interest in her mother whatsoever, and generally behaves like a spoiled brat. Outside of the novel diverse music that plays throughout, and a layered criss-crossing narrative that suggests a continuing culture shock, everything else about this film is typically made for TV.
Panahi, Jafar
Story Teller: Jafar Panahi biography from Culture Unplugged
Jafar Panahi, born in 1960 in
Jafar Panahi | Iranian
director | Britannica.com biography
Panahi,
Jafar 1960 - Encyclopedia.com
biography
Jafar Panahi Extensive biography and profile from Adorable Movies
Jafar Panahi |
Movies and Filmography | AllMovie
Persian Directors - Jafar Panahi
THE WHITE BALLOON (BADKONAKE SEFID, 1995) - Sight and ... Simon Louvish from Sight and Sound, January 1996
Toddler Time
(THE WHITE BALLOON) | Jonathan Rosenbaum
March 8, 1996
This
year's Prize of Freedom of Expression was given to Jafar Panahi Doran Emrooz from Payvand Iran News,
A Statement
of Protest - Letter to the US National Board of Review of ... Jafar Panahi from Senses of Cinema, April 23, 2001
[Reader-list] A Letter from Jafar Panahi, the Iranian Film Director June 7, 2001
Squaring the Circle | Jonathan Rosenbaum June 8, 2001
Don't Look at the Camera: Becoming a Woman in Jafar Panahi's Iran ... Jared Rapfogel from Senses of Cinema, July 18, 2001
BFI | Sight & Sound
| The Circle (2001) Julian
Graffy from Sight and Sound, October
2001
A
Mirror Facing a Mirror • Senses of Cinema
Jared Rapfogel from Senses
of Cinema, November 20, 2001
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; Lifting the Veil On a Far-Off World A.O. Scott from The New York Times, November 23, 2001
The White Balloon • Senses of Cinema Michael Price from Senses of Cinema, July 19, 2002
Jafar
Panahi: It's the Iranian 'Taxi Driver' - Features, Films ... Jonathan Romney from The Independent,
Jafar
Panahi: Home of the brave - Features, Films - The Independent Roger Clarke from The Independent,
2003 October 15 Doug Cummings from Film Journey
*cnn film review Iranian Balloons: Panahi and the West from Commit No Nuisance, October 30, 2003
An
Iranian Declares His Independence - NYTimes.com Dave Kehr from The New York Times,
The Circle by Jafar Panahi (Review) - Opus March 26, 2004
Vertigo Magazine, Article - Squaring the Circle, by By Emilie ... Emilie Bickerton from Vertigo magazine, Spring 2006
BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Offside (2006) Julian Graffy from Sight and Sound, June 2006
A new film explores Iranian society through soccer - CBC Arts | Film Kicking Up a Fuss, by Rachel Giese from CBC Arts, April 5, 2007
The Match Off the Field | The American Prospect Noy Thrupkaew, May 11, 2007
Asia
Pacific Screen Awards > Asia Pacific Screen Awards Announces ...
Jafar
Panahi and Early Pere Portabella: On DON'T COUNT ON YOUR ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, May 15, 2009
Iranian Filmmaker Jafar Panahi Arrested In Tehran - indieWIRE Peter Knegt from indieWIRE, July 30, 2009
Iranian
Filmmaker Jafar Panahi Arrested In Tehran // Current
Iranian director Jafar Panahi to lead Montreal's competition jury ... Denis Seguin from Screendaily, August 18, 2009
Iranian director Jafar Panahi to lead the jury of Montreal Film ... Payvand Iran news, August 19, 2009
Help
for Iranian Filmmakers - International Film Festival ... Ludmila Cvikova from
Iran director missing as Mumbai opens Nyay Bhushan from The Hollywood Reporter, October 30, 2009
India to screen films by Jafar Panahi Press TV, December 1, 2009
tehran times :
India's Third Eye festival to hold Jafar Panahi ... The
Tehran Times,
Iranian artists warned by Culture Ministry CBC
News, December 20, 2009
Iran lifts travel restrictions on actress Motamed-Arya The Tehran Times, December 23, 2009
Jafar Panahi update er Keough from The Boston Phoenix, December 26, 2009
More from Iran Peter
Keough from The
Iranian Filmmakers Keep Focus on the Turmoil Michael Slackman from The New York Times,
Persian miniatures Peter Keough from The Boston Phoenix, January 6, 2010
Iran's Jafar Panahi invited to Berlinale Mehr News, January 10, 2010
Iran's Jafar Panahi invited to Berlinale The Tehran Times, January 11, 2010
Jafar Panahi arrested in Iran Xan Brooks from The Guardian, March 2, 2010
Iran arrests top film-maker Jafar Panahi for supporting Green movement Ian Black from The Guardian, March 2, 2010
Iranian Filmmaker Speaks Out on Prisoners - The Lede Blog ... Robert Mackey posts a protest letter by Abbas Kiarostami, March 9, 2010
Jafar
Panahi, Director of 'The Circle,' Held in Iran | Village Voice J. Hoberman, April 6, 2010
Jafar
Panahi: the Filmmaker Laureate of the Green Movement | New ... Will di Novi from The New Republic, June 10, 2010
The Lede: Iran Jails Filmmaker for 6 Years Robert Mackey from The New York Times,
2 opposition Iranian filmmakers jailed for 6 years The
Jafar Panahi, Iranian Director, Sentenced to 6 Years in Prison,
Banned from ... J. Hoberman from The Village Voice,
Jafar
Panahi Sentenced to 6 Years in Jail, 20 Years of Silence on ... David Hudson from Mubi, December 20, 2010
Iranian film-maker sent to jail BBC
News,
Iran
jails director Jafar Panahi and stops him making films for 20 ... Saeed Kamali Dehghan from The Guardian,
Jafar Panahi and
Mohammad Rasoulof Sentenced to 6 Years in ... Human Rights House of
International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran blog December 21, 2010
Iranian filmmakers Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof unjustly ... Gabe Wardell from Creative Loafing, December 23, 2010
Who's
afraid of Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof? - Cinema ... Vera Mijojlic from Cinema Without Borders,
Peter Bradshaw on Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof | Film ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, February 2, 2011
BFI | Sight &
Sound | The revolution of inaction: This Is Not a Film Amy Taubin, July 2011
Cannes
2011 | This Is Not a Film Festival - Cinema Scope Mark Peranson, Fall 2011, also seen
here: TIFF
Day 2: Arirang / This Is Not a Film / Almayer's ... - Cinema Scope
'This Is Not a Film': The extinguishing of Jafar Panahi's career, for real ... Sheila O’Malley from Politico, October 5, 2011
Jafar Panahi loses appeal Ben Child from The Guardian, October 18, 2011
Review:
This Is Not a Film - Film Comment
Phillip Lopate, March/April 2012
Jafar Panahi: arrested, banned and defying Iran with his new film ... Xan Brooks from The Guardian, March 22, 2012
Where
is Jafar Panahi's “The White Balloon”? | IndieWire Anthony Kaufman, July 24, 2012
Jafar Panahi:
This is Not a Retrospective - Harvard Film Archive November 3, 2012
The
Use of Spatial Setting in the Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami and ... The Use of Spatial Setting in the Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar
Panahi, by Jay Schuck in 12-page academic essay,
Spring, 2013
Iranian 'Social Films' • film analysis • Senses of Cinema Keyvan Manafi on Crimson Gold, September 22, 2013
Observations
on film art : Directors: Panahi - David Bordwell October 10, 2013
Jafar
Panahi's Remarkable “Taxi” | The New Yorker Richard Brody, October 13, 2015
Sight
& Sound [Trevor Johnston] Taxi, December 14, 2015
The
Best Films By Jafar Panahi: A Cinema Of Rebellion - Culture Trip Azadeh Nafissi, November 5, 2016
TSPDT - Jafar Panahi They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
An interview
with Jafar Panahi, director of The Circle
David Walsh interview from The
World Socialist Web Site,
The Case
of Jafar Panahi - An Interview with the ... - Senses of Cinema Interview by Stephen Teo from Senses of Cinema, July 18, 2001
Making
Movies Under the Eye of Iranian Censors : NPR Madeleine Brand interview from NPR,
Offside rules:
an interview with Jafar Panahi | openDemocracy Maryam Maruf interview from Open Democracy,
Chatting
with Jafar Panahi | Village Voice J.
Hoberman interview from The Village
Voice, March 13, 2007
Jafar Panahi
By Chris Wisniewski - Interviews - Reverse Shot Chris Wisniewski interview from Reverse Shot,
March 26, 2007
Interview
with Jafar Panahi, part one - Outside The Frame Peter Keough interview from The Boston Phoenix,
Jafar Panahi interview, part two Peter Keough interview from The Boston Phoenix, September 28, 2009
BFI | Sight &
Sound | Jafar Panahi: the green badge of courage Gabe Klinger interviews Iranian filmmaker Rafi Pitts about the Iranian government’s
imprisonment of leading filmmakers Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof, March
2011
Jafar Panahi: Filmmaking Ban Is My Iranian Prison - The Daily Beast Jamsheed Akrami interview, July 8, 2014
Jafar
Panahi Remembers Abbas Kiarostami | IndieWire July 7, 2016
Jafar Panahi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE WHITE BALLOON
This extraordinary debut feature, about a 7-year-old's first
journey alone into the streets of
User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Rigor
from
Post-revolutionary
Watching this film from an American context is a remarkably political
experience. In a country that has replaced cold war nonsense (
While the film obviously has a number of subtle an beautifully realized
political and social messages that evidently resonate within in its own
national context, it should also be respected for its cross-cultural themes and
it's ability to inspire audiences from diverse backgrounds around the world.
...........
Tucson Weekly (Stacey Richter) review
THE IRANIAN FILM industry operates under a blanket of censorship that's hard to imagine from the sex-crazed, blood-drenched aisle seats of our own cinematic Gomorra. Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, almost all western movies have been banned due to severe restrictions governing the ways women can be portrayed. "We are not against cinema; we are against prostitution," the Ayatollah Khomeini has declared, which means, in practical terms, that Islamic dress codes requiring women to cover their hair and wear loose-fitting garments in public must be strictly observed at all times. Though a woman may be "at home" in the context of the film, the censors, who apparently don't buy into the suspension of disbelief, still consider her to be "in public" when her image appears on the screen. Women are often pictured sleeping with their head scarves on in post-revolutionary Iranian films.
Furthermore, according to Islamic codes, a woman may only be "intimate" with members of her own family. Intimacy includes activities like touching and hugging, which can't be portrayed on screen unless the actors are related. It's very difficult for Iranian filmmakers to portray husband and wife characters if the actors aren't married in real life. This, added to a legacy of harsh political censorship from the time of the Shah, has resulted in a style of filmmaking that (at least in the examples exported abroad) is often concerned with small conflicts, the lives of children and the anxieties of everyday life. The mysterious death of a cow, a crack in a water jar, a schoolboy's lost notebook and a little girl's desperate desire for a plump goldfish--these are all basic plots of some better-known Iranian films.
Despite restrictive guidelines, Iranian filmmaking has
thrived. The White Balloon, the first feature-length film from director
Jafar Panahi and winner of the 1995 Camera D'Or prize, is a sweet but sober
glimpse into the life of a little girl in downtown
A sense of threat accompanies Razieh on her journey. First, some snake charmers--a bunch of men that she has been warned not to look at--manage to separate the 7-year-old from her note. With the help of her sturdy vocal chords she manages to get the money back, only to lose it again. There's a subtle feeling that Razieh might be paddled by her parents if she doesn't get her money back--her brother, who convinced their mother to give his sister the money in the first place, shows up at one point with a black eye.
The adults who surround the two children can't seem to understand how dire it is that they get their money back, but the kids themselves are quite certain of the gravity of their task. With earnest concentration, they try a variety of techniques to retrieve the bank note that has fallen through a grating into a cellar. The film takes place in real time, heightening the sense of living inside a child's world. Though the adults can't understand how important it is for Razieh to get her goldfish or to retrieve her money, it becomes very clear to the audience that these are matters of immense importance.
Though The White Balloon is about children, it isn't really a children's movie. The subtext is probably too dark for younger kids, and there's a sense of threat, nuance and subtlety that would probably be better appreciated by Arch Deluxe-quaffing grown ups. Panahi's static compositions, which resemble still photography more than the dynamism of western directors, give The White Balloon a documentary air of mature calm; this, along with the small scale of the subject matter, lends the film the remarkable feeling of being a chronicle of real events.
THE WHITE BALLOON (BADKONAKE SEFID, 1995) - Sight and ... Simon Louvish from Sight and Sound, January 1996
The White Balloon • Senses
of Cinema Michael Price from Senses of Cinema, July 19, 2002
Don't Look at the Camera: Becoming a Woman in Jafar Panahi's Iran ... Jared Rapfogel from Senses of Cinema, July 18, 2001
Toddler Time
(THE WHITE BALLOON) | Jonathan Rosenbaum
March 8, 1996
*cnn film review Iranian Balloons: Panahi and the West from Commit No Nuisance, October 30, 2003
Where
is Jafar Panahi's “The White Balloon”? | IndieWire Anthony Kaufman, July 24, 2012
36.
The White Balloon | Wonders in the Dark Allan Fish
The White Balloon (1995)
| The Lumière Reader
Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
The Tech (MIT) (Stephen Brophy) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Edinburgh U Film Society (Katia Saint-Peron) review
Movie Magazine International review Michael Fox
Variety (Lisa Nesselson) review
Philadelphia City Paper (Jerry White) review
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3/5]
San Francisco Examiner (Barbara Shulgasser) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
FILM
FESTIVAL REVIEW; Of a Girl and Her Goldfish
Janet Maslin from The New York September 29, 1995
FILM;In
Iran, Simple Films Can Speak Volumes
Geraldine Brooks from The New York
Times,
THE MIRROR (Ayneh)
Iran
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Iranian director Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon, The Circle) served as assistant director to Abbas Kiarostami on Through the Olive Trees (1994). Later, Kiarostami provided the original stories for Panahi's films The White Balloon and Crimson Gold. Though Kiarostami had nothing to do with The Mirror, which has finally been released on DVD, the film definitely channels Kiarostami, notably his 1990 masterpiece Close-Up.
In Close-Up, Kiarostami filmed the real trial of Hossain Sabzian, a man who was caught impersonating another great Iranian director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and then Kiarostami went back and recreated the events leading up to the trial, and cut them together as a seamless whole. Seven years later, Panahi begins The Mirror as the story of a little girl (Mina Mohammad Khani), whose arm is in a sling, trying to get home from school when her mother fails to pick her up. It's an archetypal Iranian film, carefully observed, with a keen sense of space and location and excellent use of character types and supporting players.
But halfway through, Mina suddenly takes off her cast and claims that she's quitting the film. A film crew appears and it's revealed that she has, up until now, only been an actor in a film about a little girl getting home. The clever filmmakers leave her remote microphone on and discreetly continue to follow her as the little actress tries to get home, this time for real.
It's a fascinating idea, and the only real problem is that Panahi doesn't really sustain it. The switch comes at about the 40-minute mark, leaving about 50 more minutes to tell the story's second part. It's never clear if the actress, not playing her role, knows how to get home. Several of her conversations contradict one another, and we never really know what's going on.
It's entirely possible that Panahi planned this. Indeed, Close-Up ends with a similar scene. Perhaps he's saying that, as much as these films strive for realism, they can never capture the messy, unpredictable nature of life itself. When, during the second part, Mina meets up with an old lady who was acting in the previous section of the film, Mina asks if the lady's dialogue, about her strained relationship with her son, was made up. The woman says it wasn't. But how do we know she hasn't made up this second time?
In that way, The Mirror treads upon a bit of new ground that Kiarostami did not get to in Close-Up. And so, though it can't measure up to its master, The Mirror is ultimately a worthy and captivating picture.
The Film Sufi: "The Mirror" - Jafar Panahi (1997)
Jafar Panahi was born in 1960 and began making his own amateur films as a teenager. In 1994, he was the assistant director on Abbas Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees, and the following year he released his debut directorial effort, The White Balloon, which was scripted by Kiarostami. The Mirror (Aydeh) is Panahi’s second film and was released in 1997.
In order to appreciate The Mirror, it is useful to
reflect on certain conditions of the Iranian film scene. Films about children
have a universal appeal, but with the social restrictions in place since the
1979 Iranian revolution, making movies about children in
The Mirror begins in a fashion similar to other child-focussed films: as
school lets out, a young girl, again about seven years old, is seen waiting for
her mother to come and pick her up. As it turns out, the mother doesn’t arrive
at the appointed time, and the entire plot is simply about the girl’s efforts
to get home. So it looks like another White Balloon, and in fact the
lead in this film, Mina Mohammad Khani, is the younger sister of the girl in White
Balloon, Ayda Mohammad Khani. But as I will discuss here, The Mirror
is significantly different and innovative, not only from that previous film but
also from Kiarostami’s well-known style of filmmaking.
Almost immediately, we can see an important difference from Kiarostami: the
filmmaking style. While Kiarostami typically uses austere,
long-duration static camera shots of people in close conversation, Panahi opens
up this film with a spectacular three-and-half-minute panning shot that makes a
full 360-degree circuit around a traffic circle. Later on, there are other
carefully crafted, long-lasting shots showing the girl wandering in and out of
closeup, sometimes disappearing in crowd scenes, and then reappearing, still in
perfect frame. Contemporary Iranian films are sometimes likened to the Italian
neo-realist period of the 1940s and 1950s, and that comparison perhaps conjures
up images of rough-and-ready, documentary-style films seeking to capture more
of the “real world” by disregarding professional narrative film craftsmanship.
But if you look at those original Italian neo-realist films, they do use narrative filmmaking techniques
quite skilfully. This, however, is not the case with the more clumsy offerings
of Kiarostami or Makhmalbof, who are sometimes critically celebrated as modern
Iranian neo-realist equivalents. But Panahi is different; he does in fact
display an admirable level of craftsmanship that must belie a considerable
amount of planning and setup. You can be sure that the random conversations
overhead in the background and on the buses of The Mirror are under his
control. Yet the film is still thoroughly immersed in the noisy and intense
hustle and bustle of modern
But almost exactly halfway through The Mirror, just as one has gotten
lulled into Panahi’s meandering narrative of the lost girl trying to find the
right bus, something strange and unexpected happens. The young actress pulls
off her costume, looks straight into the camera, and announces that she is not
going to continue acting in this movie. The fourth wall has suddenly been
shattered. When this happens the cinematography suddenly changes dramatically,
too. Immediately, we are subjected to jerky, hand-held shots (the camera had
been perfectly steady up to this point). The film stock looks grainy, the
colour balance of the shots is off, and the shots are no longer framed and in
focus. Now we are shown what a truly ad hoc style of filmmaking really does
look like, and the contrast is striking. During these hand-held shots, Panahi,
himself, is shown with his crew trying to coax Mina back into resuming her role
(but she refuses). Since Mina still has her radio-controlled microphone clipped
on, the film crew at this point attempts to keep the filmmaking process going
and continue filming her (now “real”) journey home. As the film proceeds from
here, it once again returns to the carefully crafted filmmaking and tracking
shots of before. But this time the subject of that filmmaking is no longer
cooperating, and the filmmakers struggle to keep her in view as she wanders
down the street, often out of view and sometimes disappearing into random
taxis. Many times Mina is now out-of-view, and all we see are random scenes of
traffic congestion as the search for her in the crowd continues. Even the sound
sometimes drops out as her clipped-on microphone is accidentally switched off
at times.
How much of this actress’s rebellion and breakout is authentic, or is it
staged? This has been debated by critics, but my guess is that the whole thing
has been carefully contrived. But what does it all mean? For the second half of
the film, there is now a tension between fiction and “reality”, and one
struggles to find the boundaries between the two. The “real” Mina is not a
first-grader, but is a second-grader; she is not lost, but now knows her way
home (sort of). But the differences are not that great, and one can’t
quite be sure what is true and what isn’t. Panahi seems to be playing with the
narrative confines of the child-focussed neo-realist genre and perhaps
reminding us to reflect on the true nature of the social cityscape that he is
presenting. That
What, actually, is meant by or supposed to represent the "mirror"?
I’m not sure, but since the very nature of film expression has been called into
question, perhaps the mirror is just the film, itself. But it's not really a
just mirror; it's a picture that's even better than a mirror. Perhaps you will
have some good suggestions here.
Overall, this film is fascinating, but not as brilliant as Panahi’s following
film, The Circle. In general,
stories and films that become self-reflective can offer intellectual challenges
but can also have difficulty sustaining our interest over the full course of
the narrative. The Mirror is nevertheless something of a cinematic tour
de force and indicative of an important figure to watch on the Iranian film
scene.
Don't Look at the Camera: Becoming a Woman in Jafar Panahi's Iran ... Jared Rapfogel from Senses of Cinema, July 18, 2001
jafar panahi « The Seventh Art Srikanth Srinivasan from The Seventh Art, January 11, 2009
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
Movie Habit (Marty Mapes) review [3.5/4]
THE MIRROR (Jafar Panahi, 1997) « Dennis Grunes
Spirituality & Practice (Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat) review
MovieMartyr.com also reviewing THE CIRCLE
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3/5]
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
FILM REVIEW; No Time for Stardom on Teheran's Busy Streets Stephen Holden from The New York Times, November 25, 1998, also seen here: The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
THE CIRCLE (Dayereh) B 88
The Circle David Denby from The New Yorker
Anonymous women on the streets of
Time Out review Tony Rayns
A quantum leap forward from Panahi's films about children,
this is a panoramic account of the various ways women are oppressed in
present-day
BFI | Sight & Sound
| The Circle (2001) Julian
Graffy from Sight and Sound, October
2001
A street in
Back wandering the streets of the city Pari meets Nayereh (Fatemeh Naghavi), who abandons her young daughter in the hope that she will get a better life. Later Nayereh accepts a lift from a man, but they run into a police check and she risks arrest. The police concentrate on a defiant young woman, Mojgan (Mojgane Faramarz), and Nayereh slips away. Mojgan is arrested and taken to a cell. Among the women already there are the trio from the start of the film.
Review
In the prologue to The Circle, unseen behind a black screen and the opening
credits, we hear the cries of a woman, Solmaz, giving birth. The film's first
words, 'It's a girl,' are met with despair by the woman's mother - 'but the
ultrasound said it would be a boy.' She is certain that her daughter's
parents-in-law will demand a divorce. This chilling vignette sets the scene for
a connected series of powerful and engaging stories of women's experience in
modern
Like Panahi's acclaimed first feature, The White Balloon (1995), The Circle
uses the quests of its central characters to provide a subtle and original
evocation of city life. But whereas the earlier film was unashamed to trade in
the charming and the picturesque, and its plot hinged upon a large element of
fakery, The Circle jettisons these props, displaying
The men who run this world are rarely glimpsed. Elham's Pakistani husband is seen only though a window, while the cinema cashier Monire's is not seen at all. But they have arbitrary power over the lives of their wives - the Pakistani doctor has divorced his first wife, who just didn't suit, and Monire's husband took a second wife while Monire was in prison. Faced with this, the women have a choice between solidarity and frightened subservience. The first of these causes Monire to be grateful to wife number two for looking after her children in her absence. It is the latter that makes Elham unable to offer Pari the help she needs.
Jafar Panahi's contention is that women are powerless and marginalised, dependent on the whims, prejudices, and occasional kindnesses of men. This is realised through a series of dazzling visual and narrative devices. Always covered from head to toe, they additionally don dark chadors at moments of danger, which render them indistinguishable and almost literally invisible. Fearing re-arrest at the start, Arezou and Nargess run away looking like two huge crows. When Pari visits her prison friend Monire, their conversation is hidden as men buying tickets completely block the screen. This invisibility is compounded by a pervasive uncertainty about their fates - we are given no backstories, no reasons for their arrest, and the minimal information about their plans and desires is delayed or withheld with disorientating effect. In key cases we are not even given the characters' names until they are required to identify themselves to authority - Nargess in order to be sold a bus ticket, Nayereh when she faces arrest. In most cases, too, the characters share the actresses' own names, adding to the sense of universality. And the formal structure of a relay of incomplete narratives leaves the viewer with a shockingly unsettling series of unfinished stories, untold lives.
The Circle is also related through a subtly deployed system of metaphors. Throughout the film women look out at the world through bars, and windows and doors slam shut; they are forbidden to smoke in public places; they fail to complete their journeys to a place of safety. Seeing a cheap copy of a Van Gogh, Nargess recognises it as the paradisaical Raziliq of her childhood, 'only the painter didn't get it quite right.' And throughout the film, a wedding party wends its way as ironic commentary.
Panahi observes the classical unities - this is the story of a single day in
a single town, a day in the life of everywoman and her daughter. At the end,
when darkness falls and the women enter a communal cell, the metaphor of
women's life as a prison is uninsistently realised. The Circle of the film's
title is a place in
Don't Look at the Camera: Becoming a Woman in Jafar Panahi's Iran ... Jared Rapfogel from Senses of Cinema, July 18, 2001
THE CIRCLE (Jafar Panahi, 2000) « Dennis Grunes
The Sheila Variations: <i>The Circle</i>; director, Jafar Panahi
The Circle The Film Sufi
The Circle by Jafar Panahi (Review) - Opus March 26, 2004
Squaring the Circle | Jonathan Rosenbaum June 8, 2001
Jafar
Panahi: the Filmmaker Laureate of the Green Movement | New ... Will di Novi from The New Republic, June 10, 2010
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul (Laura Sinagra) review
Nitrate Online (Cynthia Fuchs) review
World Socialist Web Site Joanne Laurier
“The Circle” - Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek, April 20, 2001
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Metroactive Movies | 'Crimson Gold' Richard von Busack
Movies that make you think: 61. Iranian director Jafar Panahi's ... Jugu Abraham
DVD Times Mark Boydell
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [5/10]
hybridmagazine.com review Eric Vanstrom
The sizzling sleepers of
summer - Salon.com Charles
Taylor, June 1, 2001
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
Exclaim! review James Luscombe
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B]
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B+]
Movie Magazine International review Moira Sullivan
Movie-Vault.com (Vadim Rizov) review [8/10]
VideoVista review Gary Couzens
The Circle & Contemporary Iranian Cinema Banned & Censored Cinema
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [3/5]
JonathanRosenbaum.com » Blog
Archive » The Circle (capsule
review), also here: The
Circle
MovieMartyr.com also reviewing THE MIRROR
Entertainment Weekly review [A] Lisa Schwarzbaum
Variety (Deborah Young) review
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]
BBC Films review Michael Thomson
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker
San Francisco Chronicle (Wesley Morris) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
FILM
FESTIVAL REVIEW; The Taboos And Panic For Women of Iran A.O. Scott from The New York Times,
FILM;
Circles Within Circles Within Iran
Nancy Ramsey from The New York Times,
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
CRIMSON GOLD B+ 91
Iran
Unique to Iranian films, this has a certain Western commercialized style to it, almost like a sophisticated thriller, something like Neil Jordan’s THE GOOD THIEF (2002), which accentuates a certain sensuality in the filmmaking, featuring in some points a jazz soundtrack, but at the same time, it’s written by Abbas Kiarostami, so there’s brevity and conciseness to the story. While hardly a commercial film, what stood out for me were incidents in the film which are NOT likely to be shown to an Iranian audience, such as the police routinely rounding up what appear to be innocent civilians, or showing petty thievery on the streets, the drinking of alcohol, or prostitution or homelessness in Tehran. There’s even slang, and the use of the word “dude” spoken by an Iranian in the script. The film moves forward with an economy of motion, driven by a certain kinetic energy following a man on a motorcycle, and one feels what he feels, and sees what he sees.
The film opens with a riveting scene where a jewelry heist is going badly. Mostly the camera shows staring onlookers who peer inside to see a large man wearing a motorcycle helmet, who appears to have lost control of the situation. Immediately there is a flashback to the events that led up to that exact moment. The story follows Hossain Emadeddin, a non-professional actor who is in real-life what he plays here, a motorcycle pizza deliveryman, so physically imposing that he resembles André the Giant, but his character is instead gentle and soft-spoken. But we learn he has gained size since he served in the Army and doesn’t feel well, due to the necessity to take steroids. As he delivers pizza, we see a world largely unseen in Iranian cinema, ultimately leading him inside an opulent, palatial home, complete with fountains and a swimming pool. I can’t speak for anyone else, but as the camera slowly follows him from room to room, I immediately thought of Fellini’s NIGHTS OF CABIRIA (1957), where the lowly prostitute played by Giulietta Masina suddenly finds herself in a palatial villa and is overwhelmed by the splendor surrounding her. Here as well, Hossain may as well be on another planet, sophisticated jazz music plays when the lights are turned on, and his rich playboy host who invites him in is bored and has lost all interest in the sumptuous surroundings. It is this dizzying contrast of rich and poor, haves versus have-nots, and the brutal social inequities constantly thrown in his face that are at the core of this film, leaving Hossain a bit disoriented and dangerous by the film’s end. Winner of the Gold Hugo Best Film Award.
Time Out review Geoff Andrews
A quietly brilliant film that uses the events leading up to a
suicidal jewel robbery (shown in the opening scene, before the film flashes
back to chart the actions of the culprit, a pizza deliveryman, and his likewise
hapless partner in crime) to illuminate and reflect on social divisions in
modern
Crimson Gold Anthony Lane from The New Yorker
Jafar Panahi, the Iranian director who made "The White Balloon"
and "The Circle," addresses a subject that has, until now, received
scandalously little attention: the life of a pizza deliveryman. Hussein
(Hussein Emadeddin) is as doughy a figure as his profession would suggest; he
waddles through
Crimson Gold Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Aside from a couple of expository missteps (the older thief
in the café scene; the fate of the delivery boy with the cool sneakers),
Panahi's latest is pretty much perfect. The film is both an exacting
character study and an incisive depiction of the insignificant slights and
oblivious wounds to fragile pride that are the real stuff of day-to-day class
conflict. Hussein Emadeddin is the best non-professional performer to
grace movie screens since L'humanite's Emmanuel Schotté.
Like Schotté', Emadeddin is a mostly reactive, inward figure whose blank
indignation at the world around him registers for us, makes us viewers
equally over-sensitive to banal daily insult and the soul-grinding accumulation
of subtle signals that others send us, to remind us that we don't really belong
in the world the way we think we should, that we are over-reaching or gazing
well beyond our assigned station. The film has a precise visual style,
capturing urban
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
In April 2001, Iranian director
Panahi left
Crimson Gold is more cyclical, socially conscious cinema from the world
of Panahi and Kiarostami. This parable begins at the end when a lonely pizza
deliveryman, Hussein (Hussein Emadeddin), shoots himself in the head after a
botched jewel heist. The narrative quickly rewinds and Panahi observes the
simple but devastating events that would slowly squash the man's human spirit.
The genius of Kiarostami's deceptively simple screenplay is how it quietly
evokes
The practical and logical Hussein tries to deliver pizza to an apartment
complex but is forced to wait outside by authorities that are there to crash a
party. This scenario is riddled with endless absurdities (the officers wait for
their victims to come to them and not the other way around), and it's a
testament to Hussein's humanity that he's able to retain his capacity for
kindness in spite of the way he's treated (while the officers sit around, he
offers them pizza). Hussein does a lot of waiting in the film: outside a
jewelry store when the owner doesn't let him in; inside the store after he and
his friends dress up and pretend to be rich; and inside a bourgeois apartment
when his rich customer is engaged in nonsense talk on the telephone.
"If you want to arrest a thief, you'll have to arrest the world,"
says an armchair philosopher in the film as Hussein's friend Ali (Kamyar
Sheissi) goes through the contents of a woman's purse he's just stolen. Tipsy
from this conversation about guesswork, entitlement, and cause and effect, Ali
envisions a world where he can spare himself considerable embarrassment by
knowing the contents of a woman's purse before pinching it. Crimson Gold
is a film largely concerned with the surface of things, and the message of this
mystical scene is abundantly clear: Just as Ali cannot separate the purse from
the woman, the
Every scene in Crimson Gold evokes oppression within
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Crimson Gold (2003) Julian
Graffy from Sight and Sound, November
2003
A Tehran jeweller (Shahram
Vazira) is attacked while opening his shop. When he hits the alarm, his
assailant, Hussein (Hossein Emadeddin), shoots him dead. As a crowd gathers,
Hussein shoots himself.
Ali (Kamyar Sheisi), Hussein's
sidekick, rides off on his motorbike into the long flashback that makes up the
film. Hussein and Ali talk in a tea room about their plan for Hussein to marry
Ali's sister (Azita Rayeji) and about the receipt for an expensive necklace
which Ali has found in a bag he has snatched. They find the jewellers that sold
it but are not allowed in.
By night they work as
pizza-delivery boys. Hussein takes pizzas to a man who turns out to have been
his senior officer at the Front. Another delivery is thwarted by a police raid
on a party in an adjacent flat.
They return to the jewellers,
this time with Hussein's fiance, but again they are humiliated and directed to
a cheaper shop, which upsets Hussein.
A midnight delivery takes him to
the opulent penthouse of a man called Pourang (Pourang Nakhaei) who, deserted
by his girlfriend, invites him in. Hussein wanders round the flat in amazement.
Next morning, as the jeweller unlocks his shop, Hussein knocks him to the
ground...
Review
Like the heroes of Abbas
Kiarostami's Close-Up (1989) and A Taste of Cherry
(1997), or the little-girl protagonist of Panahi's own The White Balloon
(1995), the taciturn pizza-deliverer Hussein spends the whole of Crimson
Gold pursuing an obsessive goal, a goal that is both practical in this
case buying a necklace for his fianc e and, more importantly, symbolic:
achieving respect, becoming visible. As he criss-crosses bustling Tehran in
pursuit of his aim, his episodic encounters provide a kaleidoscopic vision of
the city, a structure deployed in both Panahi's The Circle (2000)
and Kiarostami's 10 (2002). Here the two film-makers, Kiarostami
as scriptwriter and Panahi as director, collaborate to produce another
compassionate and revealing narrative of the tensions and ambiguities of life
in contemporary Iran.
Hussein is a large, introspective
man of few words. As we plunge, unannounced, into the flashback of his life, we
learn about him mainly through the reactions of others: his fellow pizza men
all admire him and his former officer describes him as a saint. He has fought
in defence of his country perhaps it was there he underwent the experience that
requires him now to take the cortisone that has blown up his face to give him a
constant look of bewilderment. What this ordinary, overlooked man wants,
doggedly and single-mindedly, is to be paid some attention. This is why he is
drawn back to the jewellery shop where he was treated with such casual disdain.
When he returns there with his fiance he is smartly dressed in a constraining
grey suit, but still the jeweller ignores him.
Hussein is an unlikely hero, and
a fragile backbone for the narrative, but his stillness attracts the compassion
and the demonstrativeness of others. Ali, his younger friend, is much more
bouncy, darting around him full of questions. Ali is constantly eyeing up women
and asks Hussein what it was like when they used to walk the streets
"naked", that is without their veils. Hussein did not find it
offensive. Ali's unnamed sister, who is also Hussein's fianc e, is similarly a
victim, kind and gentle with her unlikely partner, but herself terrified of
inadvertently breaking the codes that govern the behaviour of Iranian women.
Other fleetingly glimpsed characters such as fellow delivery boy Skinny, whose
flashy oversized sneakers lead to his sudden death in a crash add to the
picture of quiet desperation. These are characters who are oppressed by the
intrusive society they live in, but all are searching for a way to autonomy.
At the other end of the social
scale are the army officer, whose promise of help never materialises, and the
jeweller and his assistant, whose exquisite politeness cannot conceal their
indifference. This is also the world examined in the film's two longest
episodes: an illicit party and a visit to the playboy, Pourang. The scene
outside the party is doubly unnerving both because Panahi never spells out for
the benefit of western viewers exactly what is happening (it seems to be the
morality police, clamping down on illicit dancing) and because of the passivity
with which people allow themselves to be arrested. This is a society in which
not only the underclass is cowed.
The final episode, in which Hussein
wanders around the penthouse of the absurdly wealthy Pourang, while Pourang,
whom nostalgia has dragged back from the US, rails at this "city of
lunatics", is structurally placed as the straw that must break Hussein's
back. But it is crudely drawn and, like the party episode, overlong. Overall,
the film lacks the tightness and tragic dynamism of The Circle,
where the progression from one woman's story to another's plunged the viewer
ever deeper into a maelstrom of appalled sympathy.
What the two films share is a
brilliant use of a system of visual and aural metaphors. The pizza itself is
employed as an emblem of a society in confusion. Why should a country with its
own rich culinary culture fall prey to this imported form? But Crimson
Gold's most pervasive image, one also deployed in The Circle,
is that of imprisonment. The film opens to the frantic sound of a caged bird, a
sound that recurs as Hussein lies in his cell-like flat and listens to a
neighbour being arbitrarily taken away. At the start of the film we look out
from the metal bars protecting the jeweller's shop, and at the end we return to
them. In between, with sympathy, attentiveness, and, for the most part, with
understatement, the lives of many of the denizens of this modern metropolis are
revealed as being lived in a cage.
Iranian 'Social Films' • film analysis • Senses of Cinema Keyvan Manafi on Crimson Gold, September 22, 2013
not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith) review
The Invisible
Man | Village Voice J.
Hoberman, January 6, 2004
Jafar
Panahi: the Filmmaker Laureate of the Green Movement | New ... Will di Novi from The New Republic, June 10, 2010
Crimson Gold Henry Sheehan
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
Crimson Gold -
Reviews - Reverse Shot Class Clown, by Elbert Ventura, January
16, 2004
Reverse
Shot's Best of 2004 January 2, 2005 - Features - Reverse Shot listed as #7 Film of the Year
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review
filmcritic.com (Jeremiah Kipp) review [4.5/5]
Film Freak Central review Bill Chambers
World Socialist Web Site David Walsh (midway through article)
Together Again in the Dark: The 2003 Chicago International Film ... Robert Keser from the Bright Lights Film Journal, October 31, 2003 (midway through article)
DVD Talk (Randy Miller III) dvd review [3/5]
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review
MovieFreak.com (Howard Schumann) review [+]
Film Journal International (Maria Garcia) review
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
stylusmagazine.com (Akiva Gottlieb) review
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B-]
The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review (Pages 4, 5)
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [3/5]
Eye for Film (Keith Hennessey Brown) review [3.5/5]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Premiere.com review Peter Debruge
Exclaim! review Elizabeth Bailey
Entertainment Weekly review [B-] Owen Gleiberman
BBC Films review Jamie Russell
Boston Globe review [4/4] Wesley Morris
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Washington Post (Michael O'Sullivan) review
The Seattle Times (Moira Macdonald) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Jonathan Curiel) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
Los Angeles Times [Manohla Dargis]
OFFSIDE B 86
A highly praised Iranian film, many stating definitively
that’s it’s easily the country’s best offering of the year, though my preference
leans instead towards Farhadi’s FIREWORKS WEDNESDAY, the winner of the 2006
Chicago Film festival, both films released in 2006. Even the ending resolution fireworks
sequences in both films are similar and are easily the most dazzling images in
each film. OFFSIDE is a film where not
much happens narratively, yet much is expected from the audience in
sympathizing with its message of social injustice, a common Panahi
practice. In the fashion of MEDIUM COOL
(1969), shooting a fictionalized story right in the middle of the Chicago
police actually clubbing demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic Convention, most
of this film was shot just outside the Tehran soccer stadium where a World Cup
qualifying match was taking place between Iran and Bahrain, the winner advancing
to play in the 2004 World Cup, a treasured outcome symbolic of great
nationalistic pride. In
The problem here is that not much happens, so the film is
reduced to occasionally humorous verbal sparring, with the women all trying to
extend the limits of common sense and justice, with the poor young policemen
having to defend their actions by following orders that make little sense to
them as well, but they answer to a higher chain of command so they keep the
women locked up. Women supposedly are
not permitted to hear the foul language yelled at soccer games or read the
graffiti on the walls. Most peculiarly,
there are no women’s bathrooms, so when a female prisoner needs a rest room,
the policeman has to create a scene by clearing out the male occupants, then
forbidding anyone entrance until the woman can utilize the facilities
alone. This turns into a comical farce
that turns utterly ridiculous. The
absurdity of it all is easily understood in the West, thinking this is a no
brainer, but the policy still exists in Iran, where authorities were planning
to arrest the filmmaker on sight, so this was hastily shot under duress using
non-professional actors to play the parts.
Still and all, the themes are enjoyable but the film feels too simplistic
for the West, and not nearly ready to be addressed by the fundamental Islamic
world of
While the women themselves are supportive of one another and are all united by their common interest in the game, there are a few standouts, one is a kick ass “butch,” a lesbian prototype known as the cigarette lady, who by her aggressive nature becomes the spokesperson for the group and at times tries to quietly talk mano a mano with the head policeman, who himself is prone to hysterical screaming, so there is an interesting dynamic at play of role reversal. Another runs away and escapes, free to watch the game with over 100,000 screaming fans, yet inexplicably voluntarily turns herself back in, maintaining the moral high ground over the police who were squirming about losing face by allowing a woman prisoner to get away. Eventually a police van arrives, adding a young man who has been arrested repeatedly for carrying hazardous fireworks, whose face looks like it’s been used as a battering ram for police brutality exhibitions. But once on the bus, the tempo of the film changes, as there is a camaraderie between the prisoners and the police while in motion, best expressed by a policeman sticking his body out the front window to try to hold the broken radio antenna in place so they can listen to the last few minutes of the soccer game. They even stop and the police buy beverages for everyone. So it’s a wonder that they’re even taking them to the station to process their arrests, which becomes an impossibility once Iran wins the game and the entire city erupts in an explosion of fireworks and car horns, stuck in the middle of a non-moving traffic jam, where the kid pulls out his private stash and lights sparklers for everyone to wave while they are surrounded by the bright flashes of fireworks, everyone jubilant over the nation’s victory. A nationalistic pop song breaks out and somehow the entire country is suddenly of one mind, where the policemen are pulled out of the bus to dance and prisoners simply walk off the bus and join the ongoing street festivities of song, dance, fireworks and celebratory flag waving, a vision of utopian equality.
2006 New York Film Festival Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion (excerpt)
Iranian cinema was hot on the festival circuit in the ‘90s, but it’s fallen out of fashion in the past few years. Recent films like Mani Haghighi’s “Men at Work” and Bahman Ghobadis ‘Half Moon” suggest a resurgence, an impression confirmed by Jafar Panahi’s “Offside.” Iranian women aren’t allowed to attend soccer games alongside men, so the heroines of “Offside” sneak into the stadium disguised as boys. There’s a feminist sensibility in most of Panahi’s work—implicit in his early films about children, explicit in “The Circle”—but he doesn’t portray women as helpless victims of patriarchy. Instead, “Offside” celebrates teenage girls’ resistance and ability to work around ludicrous rules. It’s also rather sympathetic to the young men drafted into enforcing them.
Panahi’s ability to create an aura of reality has few
peers. The narrative of “Offside” is a series of confrontations and arguments,
with tension defused by humor. That makes its joyous ending all the more
startling and exhilarating. In the end, “Offside” attempts something I’ve never
seen before in Iranian cinema: reconciling nationalist pride and feminist rebellion.
Its female characters celebrate being Iranian, while striving for full
participation in the country’s culture.
With Offside, director Jafar Panahi (The
Circle) once again tackles systemic inequality in his native
It's unlikely that Jafar Panahi will ever make an aesthetically
uninteresting movie and his latest work, Offside, certainly doesn't lack
for striking images. Most memorable: The moment where one of the unnamed girls
who make up the film's ensemble shrouds herself in a gender-bending chador,
obliterating her male disguise in one quietly defiant instant. It's catchy, but
in context it means next-to-nothing beyond the most schematic of observations.
Panahi is so concerned with a particular social problem (a law that forbids
women to enter
In Offside, Jafar Panahi has given himself a break
from the intensity of his most recent films--the claustrophobic, desperate maze
of women's lives in The Circle, the abjection of the wounded, would-be
criminal in Crimson Gold. Instead, his new picture takes place within a
holiday atmosphere. Busloads of wildly excited fans stream into
This much of Offside is documentary: shot daringly and exhilaratingly on the fly, while the real events unfolded. The fictional part concerns half a dozen young women whom Panahi assembled as his cast, with each disguised as a young man. It is illegal, you see, for women to enter the stadium, even if they love soccer as much as their fathers do, even if they play the sport better than their brothers. So, evidently, it's common for a few determined girls to try to sneak in. Offside is the deceptively light story of such impostors--their schemes, their capture, their frustration at being held where they can hear the match but not see it--and of the soldiers who keep the women under arrest.
A clue about the guardians: They're not having fun, either.
You, however, will probably have a ball with Offside, as you get to know the characters, marvel at their get-ups, share in their boisterous defiance and at last watch them join the celebration. These women won't be denied. Nor will Panahi, who in effect sneaked himself and his crew into the midst of a big public event, much as his characters sneak into the stadium.
Dissidence has rarely been such a kick.
Offside Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Or, Judith Butler Goes to
[ADDENDUM: Something I'd meant to mention in the review, that
actually occurred to me during the
Goal(s)! | Village Voice J. Hoberman, March 13, 2007
BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Offside (2006) Julian Graffy from Sight and Sound, June 2006
The Match Off the Field | The American Prospect Noy Thrupkaew, May 11, 2007
Offside - Reviews -
Reverse Shot Chris
Wisniewski, March 10, 2007
Jafar Panahi: the Filmmaker Laureate of the Green Movement | New ... Will di Novi from The New Republic, June 10, 2010
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
DVD Times Noel Megahey
Kamera.co.uk review Antonio Pasolini
Cinema Without Borders (Luz Aguado) review
PopMatters (Mike Schiller) review
Film Freak Central dvd review Travis Mackenzie Hoover
Don't
Judge a Film by Its Venue [BLACK BOOK & OFFSIDE] | Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, April 20, 2007
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Culture of Soccer » Blog Archive » Review of Jafar Panahi's Offside
The
Sheila Variations: Offside, dir. Jafar Panahi
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [4/5]
DVD Outsider Slarek
CineScene.com (Chris Knipp) review
Film Monthly (Tom Carrao) review
The New York Sun (Darrell Hartman) review
stylusmagazine.com (Bill Weber) review
Offside Mike D’Angelo
DVD Town (James Plath) dvd review
eFilmCritic.com (David Cornelius) review [5/5]
The Cutting Room Blog [Yaseen-Ali Yusufali]
Strictly Film School Acquarello
Brandon's movie memory » Offside (2006, Jafar Panahi)
A new film explores Iranian society through soccer - CBC Arts | Film Kicking Up a Fuss, by Rachel Giese from CBC Arts, April 5, 2007
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The Lumière Reader Mubarak Ali
David N. Butterworth review [3/4]
Film Journal International (Maria Garcia) review
DVD Verdict (Kristin Munson) dvd review
CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) review also seen here: Talking Pictures (UK) review and here: MovieFreak [Howard Schumann]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] IndieLisboa film festival report
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [4/5]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B] also seen here: Eric D. Snider
Exclaim! [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]
Notes of a Film Fanatic [Mat Viola]
Jafar Panahi on Offside Payvand Iran news
Offside by Jafar Panahi film website
Chatting with Jafar Panahi | Village Voice J. Hoberman interview from The Village Voice, March 13, 2007
Entertainment Weekly review [A-] Lisa Schwarzbaum
Variety (Deborah Young) review
BBC article about women in Iranian film Iranian Women Tell Their Own Story, by Alex Webb from BBC News, May 4, 2001
Time Out London (Geoff Andrew) review
Time Out New York (David Fear) review [5/6]
Film of the week: Offside | Film | The Observer Phillip French
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [3/5]
Boston Globe review [3.5/4] Janice Page
The Boston Phoenix (Tom Meek) review
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Austin Chronicle (Marrit Ingman) review [4/5]
San Francisco Chronicle review Mick LaSalle
San Francisco Chronicle [G. Allen Johnson]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
Offside (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THIS IS NOT A FILM (In film nist)
More
on This is Not a Film Gabe Klinger from
Sight & Sound,
The disingenuously titled This is Not a Film, Jafar Panahi’s surprise entry to the
festival (co-directed with Mojtaba Mirtahmasb), is by its very nature one of
the most vital films in
The film reaches an unexpected crescendo in the final ten minutes or so, as Panahi follows his doorman on rubbish-collection routine. Unexpectedly cathartic, this sequence is a powerful testament to Panahi’s filmmaking dexterity, his capacity to find poetic substance in the most ordinary of situations. This is Not a Film is built from nothing, and yet every moment has a powerful urgency to it.
The way the film came to be in the festival is still unclear. At
the screening, Thierry Fremaux mentioned that This is Not a Film was
smuggled out of
The comment turns out to be facetious. Afterwards I ran into a festival staffer who said that, in fact, the digital file containing the film was put in a pen drive that made it out of Iran’s borders in a remarkably – almost unbelievably – simple vessel: a cake.
“THIS
IS NOT A FILM” AND MORE: IRANIAN CINEMA AT THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL Livia Bloom at Cannes from Filmmaker magazine,
When is a film not a film? In one of the triumphs of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the remarkable documentary This is Not AFilm, by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, asks this question and more as it portrays, diary-like, a day in Panahi’s life awaiting trial at his home in Tehran. Panahi talks on the phone with friends, illustrates with tape the boundaries of a future film set, chats with a garbage man who has just earned his Masters degree, and is kept company by his daughter’s free-roaming and giant pet lizard, Igi. If one is forbidden by law to make movies for 20 years, if one but sits in front of another’s camera, if one merely reads a vivid script aloud, does a word like “director” still have meaning?
Well-known to cinephiles for works including The White Balloon (winner of Cannes’ Golden Camera Award for Best First Film), The Circle (2000) (winner of Venice’s Golden Lion Award), and Offside (2006) (winner of Berlin’s Silver Bear Award), Panahi has been the subject of rumor, speculation and international concern over of the of the last year. In connection with a planned project about the controversial 2009 re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Panahi was arrested in March 2010 on propaganda charges.
Contrary to many reports, including those published by The New York Times and The Hollywood Reporter, Panahi was not under house arrest while making the film, nor is he currently in prison. According to co-director Mirtahmasb, who is in attendance at the Festival, Panahi currently is–and was during filmming–allowed to travel anywhere he wishes within Iran’s borders. On December 10, 2010, ten months after his arrest, Panahi was finally sentenced to six years in prison. He was also forbidden, for the next 20 years, to give interviews, make movies, write scripts, or travel outside the country. That sentance is being appealed, as Panahi discusses on the phone with his spirited lawyer during the film, and a prison term will not begin until after the appeal process is completed. The film was made after Panahi’s sentencing in December, and it includes footage from Nowruz, the Persian New Year’s celebration, which is held in March. While awaiting appeal, Panahi must remain within his country’s borders.
In the meantime, Panahi has been invited to serve on
numerous juries, including here at Cannes in this year’s Director’s
Fortnight section. Since he could not travel out of Iran, a chair in
the centerof the Fortnight theater was kept empty for him and marked with his
name at all screenings. Although Panahi is not here in person, he is very
much here in spirit. The film’s title makes reference to René Magritte’s
masterpiece of surrealism: a painting of pipe inscribed with the
phrase “This is Not A Pipe.” Magritte’s piece was only
a representation of a pipe, not a pipe itself; likewise This is
Not A Film questions the boundaries between the literal
and figurative; shot entirely on video, by strict
definitions, it can be argued that this work isn’t technically a
film. But if it’s not a film, and if it was made before Panahi’s sentance
begins and is therefore not contraband, then why was it taken out of
Tehran in a manner so dramatic it could be the subject of a film itself?
According to Serge Toubiana, dirctor of the Cinémathèque française and
moderator of the film’s press conference, a woman smuggled it into
Cannes
2011 | This Is Not a Film Festival - Cinema Scope Mark Peranson, Fall 2011, also seen
here: TIFF
Day 2: Arirang / This Is Not a Film / Almayer's ... - Cinema Scope
But seriously folks, Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb’s unimpeachable This Is Not a Film—perhaps the closest Khavn de la Cruz will get to Cannes—is an absorbing, fascinating, and slyly complex portrayal of the Iranian director at home, living his daily life, and delivering a master class on how to make a film without making a film. (The closing credits modestly—and legally—identify the work as “an effort,” which would make Arirang “a joke.”) Everything that director Kim Ki Duk does wrong—which is literally everything—Panahi does right. Always comfortable in front of the camera, despite periodically protesting his distaste for the scenes that are being and have been shot, Panahi is totally bereft of arrogance. He illustrates his grander points—which have more to do with filmmaking in general than the specific place in life he finds himself—through mise en scène, not flatly declaring them to the camera like director Kim Ki Duk. The work feels completely effortless, but my money says it’s an elaborate sound and image construction: though it claims to be a day in the life of Panahi, Mirtahmasb (recently snatched at the airport in Tehran while en route to TIFF) explained in interviews that the film was shot over four days.
This Is Not a Film proves that even if a political entity tries to take the power of filmmaking—or film festivalling—away from a director, there’s nothing that can be done if that filmmaker possesses creativity, dedication, skill, and intelligence. The comparisons with Arirang are obvious. Panahi is a filmmaker whose internal exile is a result of a 20-year government ban from travel and filmmaking; he can’t leave Iran, and spent a long period under house arrest. Though he’s presently free to travel within his country’s borders, all of This Is Not a Film takes place in his apartment as he awaits news of his appeal, doing daily tasks like preparing breakfast, speaking to his attorney and supporters (such as director Rakshan Bani-Etemad) on his iPhone, watching the Japanese tsunami on television. To quote again director Kim Ki Duk: “I can’t make a film so I’m filming me. My life is a documentary and a drama. I think films are the truth…there’s no need for lighting or fancy cameras.” Over the course of the not-a-film, Panahi’s main company, besides the video camera—he is reluctant to turn it on or touch it himself, as a way of ensuring he does not break the ban on “filmmaking”—is Igi, his daughter’s rather large iguana, whose roaming throughout the apartment, creeping up Panahi’s body and ending up on the walls behind the bookshelves, serves as a deliciously ironic parallel to Panahi’s own mental and physical state. (Some other priceless comedic bits involve a yapping dog belonging to his neighbour, who unsuccessfully attempts to saddle Panahi with the pet.) Eventually Mirtahmasb shows up, claiming to be making “a behind-the-scenes film about Iranian directors not making films,” and the real film within the not-a-film begins.
Panahi launches into something of a lecture on directing non-professionals, contending that in his kind of filmmaking, the director is never fully responsible for the content of his film. He illustrates this point with a memorable clip from The Mirror (1997), wherein the young “actress” removes a cast from her arm and stops acting, walking off camera—where she is of course filmed by another camera. (Of special note in this scene is Panahi’s bootleg DVD collection, which features the Ryan Reynolds-in-a-coffin film Buried [2010] facing us, clearly placed there to make a point.) On the surface, Panahi’s professed identification with his young star speaks to his sense that he is just marking time by making this not-a-film, which he constantly degrades over the course of the too-brief 75 minutes. But, on a deeper level, what Panahi does over the course of the not-a-film is behave as an actor, controlling the image as much as when he is holding the camera—which, of course, he is not allowed to do.
Panahi then begins to read from a screenplay of the film he was preparing to shoot (and had already cast) before running afoul of the law, the story of a girl from a traditional family admitted to study in an arts university against the wishes of her parents, who lock her in their house when they leave on a trip. (Indeed, director Kim Ki Duk also relates the story of a film he planned to make, about a US soldier who fought in the Korean War and returns 50 years later to find the body of a man he killed; it sounds awful.) The entirety of Panahi’s unmade film was to take place—like the one we are in the process of watching—inside of a house. (He had never shot interiors before, he mentions, because of the cultural taboo surrounding the need for so-called women’s modesty.) Panahi thus skirts the ban by reading and acting out a screenplay that has already been written, taping lines on his carpet to erect a floor plan of the interior he would have filmed, and “dressing the set,” unconsciously bringing to mind the design of none other than Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003). (Or is it conscious?) He abruptly stops, overcome by the realization that telling a film and making a film are not, and can never be, the same thing. “If we could tell a film, then why make a film?” Or, indeed, why write about one?
Over the course of his narration—starting even earlier in the afternoon—we hear what sounds like ominous gunshots or explosions on the soundtrack, booms about as jarring as anything Gaspar Noé could conceive of. Panahi is seen looking out the window in curiosity, eventually “filming” on his iPhone 4G what we are led to think are political protests, or the suppression thereof. Only late in the game—as what Panahi is playing is an elaborate game, not only with the regime but also with his audience—are we told courtesy of the television that it’s actually Fireworks Wednesday, the celebration of the coming Persian New Year, and these booms and cracks are in fact celebratory explosives. Still the political situation remains dicey, as Panahi learns from a phone call from a friend in his car who relates how he was stopped by the police and asked what he was doing with the camera on the seat beside him.
But before then, the film has taken another detour, one which sees Panahi finding a perfect balance between relating his personal tragedy and creating art out of it. Following a second illustration of his own filmmaking philosophy via a clip from (the Wellspring DVD of) Crimson Gold (2003), Mirtahmasb leaves, but not before imploring Panahi to leave the camera on, as the main thing is the need to document (implying that what we are seeing is a mere document, when that’s far from the case). Enter the door-to-door trashman, actually a college student “substituting” for a relative, who wonders why Panahi is shooting on an iPhone when there’s a real camera sitting in the kitchen. Panahi then picks up the camera for the first time and follows the almost too-telegenic collector along his route, down the elevator, as the kid reveals he was in the building the night the police raided Panahi’s apartment and arrested him. The student never gets to finish his story recounting the events of that evening, as it’s constantly interrupted by stops to pick up trash, another encounter with that yapping dog, and so on. Eventually Panahi interrupts this surely planned-out set piece, telling him that the story isn’t important; what matters, we’ve come to understand, is the filming. At last venturing outdoors, Panahi comes across the streets of fire, celebrations and yelling that might also be a glance into hell—the last intrusion of the real and hopefully not the last image he will ever film.
Review: This Is Not a Film - Film Comment Phillip Lopate, March/April 2012
That one of the most consistently amusing and enlivening movies to emerge from 2011’s crop of festival films should have been made by a filmmaker under house arrest, his hands pretty much tied, his budget nil and equipment minimal, just goes to prove that you can’t keep a good man down. I stress the playful charm of This Is Not a Film by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb because the circumstances surrounding this singular work (and most attempts to describe it) inevitably portend something grimmer. For allegedly promoting anti-regime activities, in 2010 Panahi was banned from making films for 20 years and sentenced to six years in prison. Idled while appealing his sentence, bored and jittery, he decides to circumvent the ban through a technicality. He will read the screenplay that the authorities had refused to grant him permission to film: as he slyly explains, he was forbidden to direct, write, or give interviews, but not to read aloud on camera. So he invites a friend, the documentarian Mirtahmasb, over to his apartment to record him.
Part of the jest is that Panahi is such a commanding personality, he cannot stop playing at being a director. He tells his colleague “Cut,” but is reminded that giving such an order constitutes directing. Panahi, an auteur with a string of international successes (The White Balloon, The Circle, Crimson Gold, Offside), comes across as an immensely vibrant, moody artist at the top of his form. In his black T-shirt, jeans, sandals, and tinted glasses, he is like a caged animal prowling his opulent apartment with the latest appliances and electronic gadgets, talking on the speakerphone to his lawyer (she pessimistically prepares him for the prospect of doing some jail time), switching on the (censored) cable news to see footage of the typhoon in Japan, and watching snippets from his own movies, as though to reassure himself of his identity. His true co-star is the family pet iguana, Igi, another caged animal, who keeps upstaging him by exploring the apartment and distracting the great man, digging into Panahi with sharp claws as he plays with his laptop. There is also a neighbor who is trying to find someone to watch her dog Mickey while she goes off to see the fireworks. Mickey barks ferociously when he sees Igi, Panahi’s offer is rescinded, and life goes on.
The premise is that we are watching an artless home movie documenting a day in the life of Panahi as he awaits the court’s final decision. In fact, the film was shot over the course of a week—some parts written, some sketched out, and others serendipitous—with a combination of HD camera and low-definition camera phone, and, despite the graininess of the latter, most of it looks pretty smooth. Panahi draws further attention to the film’s artifice by questioning whether all this pretense of straight documentation is phony. Iranian cinema has often traded in such self-reflexive moves, letting meta- collide with neorealism. Panahi conducts a little seminar on using nonprofessional actors in his films, approving the way they often come up with surprising bits that he could never have thought of, or refuse the “lie” of acting. In doing so, they direct him. But this time, he is the actor, directing himself, and he does a good job of animating what might have been an inert situation.
Similarly, despite his periodic protestations that nothing is happening except two men reduced to filming each other, the 75 minutes are packed with incident. Panahi puts tape marks on his rug to block out scenes from his screenplay, lying down and hammily playing his suicidal heroine with tears in his eyes; listens on the phone to his wife issuing instructions about feeding the iguana; impatiently watches the construction cranes from his balcony; answers the doorbell for food delivery; basks in favorite moments from his movies on his flat-screen; or—in what becomes the climax of the film—engages with a young, exuberantly polite art student who is picking up the building’s trash for his brother-in-law custodian.
In the elevator, the student begins to tell Panahi his account of witnessing the police coming to arrest the filmmaker, but keeps getting interrupted by the need to collect trash on every floor, until Panahi, exasperated, gives up on hearing this vignette in which he clearly hoped to be the star, and asks the young man what he plans to do when he graduates with a master’s degree. Self-absorbed vanity yields to genuine curiosity about other people. This is another familiar trope of Iranian cinema: in films as diverse as The Apple, The White Balloon, and Through the Olive Trees, any pretense of plot grinds to a halt as we watch some ordinary shopkeeper or farmer whose craggy individuality is suddenly not to be denied.
For all the scene’s everyday brio, we are reminded in the final shots that serious courage has been involved here. “Be careful, Mr. Panahi, they’ll see your movie camera,” warns the student as they leave the building proper. The filmmaker records, just beyond the building’s gates, a conflagration in the street which seems to have been part of a pro-democracy demonstration. There are no direct discussions about political injustice; the sense you get is it’s too obvious for cultivated Iranians to reiterate—and too sensitive. Panahi’s co-director, Mirtahmasb, is currently in jail, and Panahi, sentenced to prison and barred from filmmaking for 20 years, is still waiting to find out about his final fate. The finished film was smuggled out of Iran (on a USB thumb drive hidden inside a cake) and shown first at the Cannes Film Festival, and subsequently at the New York Film Festival and elsewhere. The final credits thank a series of unnamed benefactors (represented by strings of asterisks). As for the movie’s title, it can be seen as both a bit of faux humility and a cheeky, preemptive plea of innocence. If this is not a film, by all means let us have many more such not-a-films.
BFI | Sight &
Sound | The revolution of inaction: This Is Not a Film Amy Taubin, July 2011
'This Is Not a Film': The extinguishing of Jafar Panahi's career, for real ... Sheila O’Malley from Politico, October 5, 2011
This Is Not a Film By
Chris Wisniewski | February 28 ... - Reverse Shot Chris Wisniewski, February 28, 2012
This
Is Not a Film: The Filmmaker Who Isn't | Village Voice Karina Longworth, February 29, 2012
Paste
Magazine [Annlee Ellingson]
CANNES
REVIEW | Jafar Panahi Turns Censorship Into Art with Stunning “This is Not a
Film” Eric Kohn at
Banned
Filmmaker Jafar Panahi Sends a Message in a Bottle with This Is Not a Film Stephanie Zacharek at
Ferdy
on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
The
House Next Door [Elise Nakhnikian]
White
City Cinema [Michael Smith]
Slant
Magazine [Phil Coldiron]
Jigsaw
Lounge / Tribune [Neil Young]
The
Steve Pulaski Message Board [Steve Pulaski]
girish: TIFF 2011: The Round-Up Girish Shambu, September 23, 2011
Tativille:
The 49th New York Film Festival: A Separation & This Is Not a ... Michael J. Anderson from Tativille, September
29, 2011
DVD
Talk [Jason Bailey] also seen
here: Fourth
Row Center [Jason Bailey]
DVD
Talk [Christopher McQuain]
Slant
Magazine DVD [John Semley]
Public Transportation Snob [Dan Heaton]
New York Magazine [David Edelstein]
The House Next Door [Glenn Heath Jr.]
Film-Forward.com [Nora Lee Mandel]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anne-Katrin Titze]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The House Next Door [Fernando F. Croce]
NYFF
2011. Mojtaba Mirtahmasb and Jafar Panahi's "This Is Not a ... David
Hudson at
Cannes
2011. Jafar Panahi's "This Is Not a Film" David Hudson at Cannes
BFI | Sight &
Sound | Jafar Panahi: the green badge of courage Gabe Klinger interviews Iranian filmmaker Rafi Pitts about the arrests of leading
filmmakers Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof, March 2011
This
Is Not a Film: (Cannes 2011 Film Review)
Deborah Young at
Jafar Panahi not in Cannes for This Is Not a Film premiere Catherine Shoard at Cannes from The Guardian, May 21, 2011
Jafar Panahi: arrested, banned and defying Iran with his new film ... Xan Brooks from The Guardian, March 22, 2012
The
Japan Times [Giovanni Fazio]
Austin
Film Society [Chale Nafus]
Almodovar's limp noodle, Panahi's home movie Barbara Scharres at Cannes from the Ebert blog, May 19, 2011
A
Provocateur Steals Cannes Spotlight
Manohla Dargis at
TAXI
aka: Taxi Tehran
Iran (82 mi)
2015 Official
Site
Film Comment: Olaf Möller May 05, 2015
The Golden Bear went to Jafar Panahi for his widely liked Taxi, a film that certainly knows how to please an art-house crowd hell-bent on feeling good and politically savvy. Panahi plays himself once again, this time posing as a Tehran cab driver who turns his fares into the film’s unwitting protagonists—until he’s recognized and the game turns. Or does it? What does it matter if these encounters are staged or accidental when the resulting dialogues offer little more than political commonplaces? Isn’t it all a bit coy and vain? Compared to the rigor and richness of his previous film Closed Curtain, Taxi is flat and trite; compared to the final taxi vignette in Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Tales, it’s embarrassing.
Taxi Tehran (2015), directed by Jafar Panahi | Film review - Time Out David Ehrlich
The Iranian authorities have banned director Jafar Panahi from making films – but he keeps ignoring them
By striking director Jafar Panahi down, the Iranian government
has only made him more powerful than they could possibly imagine. Banned from
making movies and baselessly convicted of crimes against national security, the
filmmaker has nonetheless successfully exported three bona-fide masterpieces in
the five years since his sentencing. Although ‘Taxi Tehran’ boasts neither the
raw anger of 2011’s ‘This Is Not a Film’ nor it’s incredible origin story – the
footage was loaded onto a USB drive and smuggled out of Iran in a cake – this
spry, sharp and relentlessly clever middle finger to censorship is Panahi’s
boldest act of defiance to date.
Reflecting Iranian cinema’s fascination with cars and their unique properties
as a space that’s simultaneously both public and private, the film finds Panahi
behind the wheel of a cab in downtown Tehran. Shot to resemble a documentary
(but far too pointed and plot-driven to be mistaken for one), ‘Taxi Tehran’
slowly transforms the interior of Panahi’s car into a stage for crimes,
confessions, deathbed declarations and even a goldfish-related tragedy.
Each passenger who climbs into his mobile prison cell is quick to notice the
camera mounted to the dashboard, but none of them are disturbed by it (the cast
are uncredited to protect their identities). In fact, most have cameras of
their own and look into Panahi’s lens as though it were a mirror – a
self-admitted criminal mistakes it for an anti-theft device, a lawyer compares
it to Big Brother, and Panahi’s adorable young niece eagerly likens herself to
the heroine of a film her uncle made before she was born. Such reflexivity has
always been key to the director’s work, but he’s never had this much fun
smudging the line between fiction and reality.
Many of the characters at the heart of these miniature dramas recognise their
cabbie, who’s a celebrity in his home country even if his movies are prohibited
from screening there. From its opening long-take to its gut-punch of a finale,
this is a brilliantly humane testament to the fact that, in the twenty-first
century, cinema is truly everywhere, and Jafar Panahi is still in the driver’s
seat.
Review: Taxi - Film Comment Richard Combs, September/October 2015
The good news is that Jafar Panahi is out. Out, that is, from the cloistered world he inhabited in his last two films: his Tehran apartment in This Is Not a Film (11), following his six-year jail sentence and 20-year ban on filmmaking for “making propaganda against the system”; and then a house by the Caspian Sea in Closed Curtain (13), where the closing down of his creative life was driving him to thoughts of mortal termination. In Taxi, he is good-humored, outgoing, almost jovial at times, plying a new, made-up trade as a taxi driver. We’re inside his cab for the whole film, as he picks up passengers who—seemingly—play out fragments of daily life for the benefit of Panahi’s dashboard-mounted camera.
Is there bad news to go
with this? Perhaps not—only the same news differently weighted, seen from a
reverse angle. Taxi opens with a long static shot from the taxi’s
camera, pointed outward, as Panahi cruises down a Tehran thoroughfare. Two
passengers eventually get in: a young man and a woman who are soon arguing over
political views, hardline versus liberal. They are the first of several fares,
representing a cross-section of people and professions—a comic thread is that
they are not impressed by Panahi’s skills as a cabbie—in a film that has been
described as documentary-like, a “portrait of the Iranian capital.”
What develops is not a
documentary but a rehearsal of the guiding principles, and the methods, of
Panahi’s cinema, before and after his arrest in 2010. He presents us with an
infinite regression of setups, touching on both his own movies and the
difficulties for any filmmaker of addressing Iranian “reality.” His first
passenger, who describes himself as a “freelance mugger,” asks whether the
camera is an anti-theft device, whereupon it is turned to face the backseat.
The film then cuts to a reverse angle (but from what camera?) showing Panahi
for the first time at the wheel, a cheerfully flat-capped cabbie. Conventional
shot/reverse-shot editing takes in all the subsequent conversations. Another
passenger, a pirate video peddler, “recognizes” Panahi and declares that the
freelance mugger must have been a setup, a character riff on Crimson Gold
(03).
Taxi can’t really be “out” like Panahi, or a form
of documentary, because it depends on the kind of interior structures he has
always favored, in which the imagery of cages and prisons advertises both the
political subject matter and the problems of capturing and discussing it.
Panahi picks up his niece Hana (Hana Saeidi) from school, and she comes with
her own Canon camera (her jerky footage occasionally becomes the film). She
wants a subject for a school exercise, a short film that must obey certain
rules to be “distributable” by avoiding “sordid realism,” i.e., showing what’s
“real but not real real.” It’s the reality that’s everywhere but is out of
bounds for portrayal. Panahi looks for it when he jumps out of the cab at one
point: he thinks he hears the voice of someone who interrogated him when he was
blindfolded after his arrest.
The authorities who have
banned Panahi from filmmaking appear to have joined him in a strange Alice
in Wonderland world where—with a jail sentence hanging over him that looks
unenforceable—he is both free and not free. When Panahi won the Golden Bear
award at the Berlin Film Festival, the head of the Iran Cinema Organization
responded by both congratulating him and condemning the award with a coy
vehicular pun: “I am delighted to announce that the director of Taxi
continues to drive in the fast lane of his life, freely enjoying all of its
blessings.”
Film of the Week: Taxi - Film Comment Jonathan Romney, October 1, 2015
Before he fell foul of the Iranian government in 2010, Jafar Panahi was very much a realist filmmaker, his aesthetic seemingly a world away from the self-referential concerns which mark much of the work of Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Then the social critique of films such as The Circle (00) and Offside (06) led to Panahi being threatened with imprisonment, prevented from traveling, and forbidden to make films for 20 years. He has responded by working surreptitiously—and becoming a very different kind of director. If a filmmaker is barred from working yet continues to work nonetheless, much of his concern may justifiably focus on the moot question of whether or not he’s “actually” making films, as the authorities understand it. This Is Not a Film (directed with Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, 11), shot while Panahi was under house arrest in his Tehran apartment, is a tantalizing hybrid of documentary self-portrait and contemplative fiction, at once an act of rebellion and a singular example of film as legal loophole: Panahi was effectively telling his persecutors, “You never specified that I couldn’t make a film like this, because you never could have anticipated me making it.”
This Is Not a Film crackled with both anger and nervous energy, mixing Panahi’s expression of his restlessness with a vibrant sense of new possibility. I was less convinced by the follow-up, Closed Curtain (directed with Kambuzia Partovi, 13), a somber, absurdist parable that induced precisely the feeling of depressive claustrophobia that its predecessor had so triumphantly dispelled. Shot, self-evidently, in Panahi’s house by the sea, the film also displayed an irksome dimension of narcissism—as though Panahi couldn’t keep himself, and the posters for his movies, out of the film, so as to (unnecessarily) to remind the world that the story was really about him. Now Panahi again appears in Taxi, his third letter from internal exile, and the winner of this year’s Golden Bear in Berlin. After Closed Curtain, Taxi shows Panahi loosening up again and enjoying the pleasures of his city.
The film, set and filmed entirely in a taxi driving through Tehran, using small well-concealed cameras, starts with a shot looking out through the windscreen. After a while, the cab stops to pick up passengers; a man gets in and we hear his voice; eventually the camera pans round to reveal him and a woman sitting behind him (this is one of those shared taxi services that are standard in many cities). The man—a cocky, short-sleeved young guy—is complaining about tire thieves, whom he would like to see hanged. The woman calmly objects. There have recently been hangings in Tehran, she points out: “Did anyone learn anything?” she asks rhetorically. The man’s having none of it: “Law and sharia have spoken, so chill out, lady” (the subtitles are in breezy Western demotic). To which she retorts—and the audacity of this line is quite breathtaking in a film made in an Islamic country at this particular moment—“So sharia will solve all our problems by increasing the number of executions? After China, we have the most executions in the world.” The man sneers on hearing that she is a teacher: “You work in fiction, lady.” Then this stickler for law and order dismounts and reveals his own profession: he’s a mugger.
It’s now, about nine minutes in, that the camera pans round once more to reveal none other than Jafar Panahi in the driving seat. We quickly realize that we’re looking not at a taxi driver in a drama played by Jafar Panahi, but at Panahi himself, the well-known film director, driving a cab or possibly masquerading as a taxi driver. On one level, we’re aware that, in reality, he’s doing this in order to make a film; but on another, we can’t help wondering whether perhaps Panahi is driving for a living now that he’s banned from directing (it was, apparently, this very worry that inspired him to make the film).
Panahi is soon recognized, although the film keeps it ambivalent whether he’s recognized for real by an actual passenger, or recognized in a fiction by someone playing a passenger. It doesn’t really matter which—the cast’s energetic naturalness makes it hard to tell who is real and who is an actor, though Iranian viewers may well pick up on nuances of performance that give the game away. Panahi’s next customer, at any rate, identifies him and asks whether his previous passengers were actors in a film that he’s shooting; he also points out that part of their dialogue came right out of a scene in Panahi’s own Crimson Gold (03). This new passenger knows his movies. Squat, sweaty, and bumptious, he is Omid the DVD bootlegger, who once supplied Panahi with Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Midnight in Paris. His wide catalogue currently includes Kim Ki-duk and Kurosawa, as well as The Walking Dead (season five), but he can also offer Panahi dailies of films currently being shot (presumably Iranian ones, in which case this seems a slightly tactless offer to make to a filmmaker who’s barred from touching a camera). Omid boasts that he is the only way that people in Tehran get to see foreign movies—“Without me, no Woody Allen”—but it seems likely that he’s also the only conduit to certain Iranian movies too, like the one we’re watching.
All human life, it seems, is on the streets of Tehran, and in Panahi’s cab. A couple get in: the man is bloodied after a bike accident. Thinking he’s about to die, he borrows a cellphone to record his will on camera. Two elderly ladies get in with a bowl containing a fish which, apparently as a matter of life and death, must be placed in a certain pond by midday. One of Omid’s clients is a young filmmaker who asks Panahi to help him find a subject. Panahi replies: “Those films are already made, those books are already written. You have to look elsewhere, you have to find it for yourself.” This may well be an in-joke at Panahi’s own expense, since Taxi itself has arguably already been made in Iran, in the form of Kiarostami’s pioneering 2002 in-car drama Ten.
Panahi shows us a world in which people are constantly filming, even while his own camera—in fact, three Blackmagic Cinema Cameras—remains unseen, and we never quite get a handle on who is moving it. A friend of Panahi, who has been beaten up, shows him footage of the attack on his iPad. While the meta-cinematic can often come across as a neurotic tic in Western films, here the act of filming the everyday is shown as hugely important, for it captures indispensable evidence of hidden truths in a society where image-making is subject to state suppression.
This meta-cinematic aspect comes to a head when Panahi collects his young niece Hana from school. She berates him for turning up in a taxi: she told her friends her director uncle was picking her up, and how will she look now? Hana threatens to get out and find her own way home, “like the girl in your Mirror film”—a reference to Panahi’s 1997 feature. Again, a certain narcissism is at work here, as people are constantly referring to Panahi’s filmography; it would have been a lot funnier if, instead, he had dropped his movie titles into the conversation and no one had known what he was referring to.
Hana too is a budding director, whose teacher is encouraging her to make a “distributable” film. But that entails certain rules, she explains: a distributable film requires respect for the Islamic headscarf, no contact between men and women, ties to be worn by bad guys only, and an avoidance of “sordid realism.” At one point, as she films a wedding couple—who are meanwhile being filmed by their official videographer—her camera catches a street boy collecting junk, who pockets a banknote that the groom has dropped. From her seat in the back of the cab, this lofty young cineaste calls the boy over to berate him: by committing a criminal act on camera, he has made her film undistributable. Hana wants him to return the cash: “I only want to show sacrifice and selflessness,” she says. To which the boy replies—as well he might, given his economic status—“What the fuck is sacrifice and selflessness?”
Panahi’s final passenger is a bespectacled woman carrying a bunch of roses. Although never identified in the film, she is the real-life human-rights lawyer and activist—and recipient, along with Panahi, of the Sakharov Prize—Nasrin Sotoudeh. She’s on her way to visit Ghoncheh Ghavami, a woman imprisoned after attending a volleyball match alone, and now protesting through hunger strike—a desperate last resort, says Sotoudeh, but one that she and Panahi have both themselves used. Breaking the fourth wall, Sotoudeh offers a rose to the camera—and to the watching world—“because the people of cinema can be relied on.” Then she warns Panahi: “Better remove my words from your movie. You’ll be accused of sordid realism!”
“What is sordid realism?” Hana finally asks, noting that her teacher advised her to “show what’s real, but not real real . . . If reality is dark and unpleasant, don’t show it.” Until its final frames, in which the real real creeps into shot while Panahi’s back is turned, Taxi seems not to show anything obviously dark and unpleasant—but Panahi is working in a social context that is entirely dark and unpleasant for filmmakers like him, and for women like Ghavami and Sotoudeh (herself jailed for almost three years for defending dissidents).
Taxi may feel slight and loose, but it exudes joy and wit, its vivacity making the film a much more eloquent act of protest than the solemn, introverted Closed Curtain. Panahi, intermittently glimpsed smiling behind glasses and flat cap, seems to be having a great time in enjoyable company—and it’s only a shame that we don’t know who most of his collaborators are. Taxi’s final words are its bitterest joke. A caption informs us that Iran’s Ministry of Islamic Guidance approves the credits of distributable films; Panahi adds the note, “Despite my heartfelt wish, this film has no credits.” The punch line of this blackest of real life comedies is that, of course, it’s the undistributable films that the world most needs to see.
Berlin
Review: Jafar Panahi's 'Taxi' is a Unique Cinematic Masterpiece ... Kevin B. Lee from indieWIRE, February 06,
2015
Is
this the end of Iranian cinema? - Al Jazeera English Hamid Dabashi, February 18, 2015
Sight
& Sound [Trevor Johnston] Taxi, December 14, 2015
Jafar
Panahi's Taxi Is a Strange, Wonderful Film -- Vulture Bilge Ebiri, October 3, 2015
Jafar
Panahi's Remarkable “Taxi” | The New Yorker Richard Brody, October 13, 2015
Taxi (2015); d. Jafar Panahi |
The Sheila Variations September 23,
2015
Taxi - Archive -
Reverse Shot Michael Koresky,
October 1, 2015
Jafar
Panahi's Taxi - Joyless Creatures
Matt Levine
Jafar
Panahi's film Taxi, reviewed. Dana
Stevens from Slate
The
House Next Door [Kenji Fujishima]
Spectrum
Culture [Jesse Cataldo]
The
Film Stage [Giovanni Marchini Camia]
194
Movies that make you think [Jugu Abraham]
Seongyong's
Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
The
Steve Pulaski Message Board [Steve Pulaski]
World
Socialist Web Site [Hiram Lee]
Taxi Tehran - Little White Lies Glenn Heath Jr.
The Chicago Reader: Ben Sachs October 29, 2015
Brooklyn Magazine: Michael Joshua Rowin
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Potpourri of Vestiges: A Toast to Jafar
Murtaza Ali Khan
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Sight & Sound: Robert Greene listed at #9 of Top Twenty Documentaries of
the Year, January 18, 2016
Taxi
Tehran review – Jafar Panahi's joy ride | Film | The Guardian Jonathan Romney
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Jafar
Panahi, Iranian Filmmaker, Persists Despite a Ban - The New ... The
New York Times
Panh, Rithy
S21: THE KHMER ROUGE KILLING MACHINE
The cinema of genocide has understandably concerned itself
with the stories of victims and survivors. Analyses of the bureaucracy of
terror and of the perpetrators' psychology are far rarer. Rithy Panh's
devastating documentary exploration of the Cambodian tragedy unites both
approaches to harrowing, extraordinary effect. He builds his case from the
concrete details of procedure, focusing on S21, the country's main security
bureau. From 1975 to 1979, 17,000 prisoners were processed, tortured and
executed there. Only three, it seems, are still alive. One is painter Vann Nath,
reunited here with his former guards. Panh follows the painter's attempts to
understand how and why they acted as they did, 'until there was nothing human
left'. Dead-eyed, the guards recount their involvement in the 'mild', 'hot' and
'rabid' interrogation teams, read from the meticulous prison documentation and
re-enact their daily routines. With great dignity, Vann Nath's
interrogation shows how finally, with the normalisation of atrocity under a
regime that sought to erase history and even time, 'all of
S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
The majority of Rithy Panh's documentary is a fine study of exactly how one should both learn from, and amend, the Claude Lanzmann paradigm. Following the complex template of Shoah in a fraction of the time, S21 is not as exhaustive as Lanzmann, but gains a different kind of power in the bargain. Its impact is sharper, at least for the first hour. The problem of representing the Cambodian genocide is brought front and center: Nath, the painter, narrates his memories of torture as the camera pans over his Leon Golub-like artwork as "evidence;" Chum Mey, the other survivor in the film, breaks down in tears, noting how hard it is to force himself not to forget; Panh shows us the physical decay of memory, as he pulls apart crumbling, water-damaged photos from the S21 archive; and, most remarkably, Panh takes one of the former guards back to the cellblock and asks him to recount his daily routine, his descriptions soon giving way to lusty, horrific pantomime. Whereas Shoah gradually accrues cumulative effect, serving as a slow, furious meditation on the unthinkable, S21's relative brevity splices all such evidence together, letting it fall like truncheon blows. At the same time, Panh's method has two notable drawbacks. First, it spends the majority of its running time eliciting self-serving pseudo-apologies (rationalizations, really) from the numerous S21 personnel participating in the film. The two survivors are shunted aside, and while it stands to reason that Panh, like Lanzmann, wants to give the Khmers ample rope to hang themselves, the effect is, ironically, to indulge in a fascination with violence, as though survival were dull by comparison. Second, this lopsided attention results in a rather aimless final half-hour, turning the horror into something tedious and bureaucratic, but not in the "banality of evil" manner you might expect. The result is that Panh implicitly answers the problematic he sets up -- the inadequacy of representation and memory in the face of mass genocide and nationalist insanity -- by backing away from the issue with a shrug.
The Village Voice
[J. Hoberman]
S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine revisits the most extreme Communist regime to ever decimate a society—nearly a quarter of the Cambodian population was killed during the 1975–1979 Khmer Rouge reign of terror. Rithy Panh's compelling documentary, first shown here during the 2003 New York Film Festival, focuses on the regime's S21 "security bureau," a high school turned detention center in the middle of Phnom Penh where 17,000 prisoners were processed and only three lived to tell the tale.
Panh, who escaped Cambodia in 1979 and lives in France, documents two of the survivors—one a painter who kept his life by making portraits of the guards and now, in fantastical detail, paints the atrocities he witnessed—and, most powerfully, brings them together with men who had been their jailers. The former guards, some of whom were as young as 13 when they stoked the killing machine, explain that they were in a state of terror as well. "If you were victims," a survivor asks, "what does that make the executed prisoners?"
Taking a strategy from Holocaust documentarian Claude Lanzmann, Panh stimulates memories by directing his subjects to demonstrate how things were done. Re-enacting—or reliving—the particulars of their once daily routines, the guards seem weirdly gung ho. Perhaps it's a sort of exorcism. (One former victim asks the dead to help remove the bad karma.) However, when the guards describe how they sexually abused women prisoners or killed others after harvesting their blood with the help of doctors, they seem like former zombies—the denizens of Cambodia's long night of the living dead.
In their madness, the Khmer Rouge kept detailed records. S21
is now a museum, and the walls of its former offices are covered with hundreds
of photographs of victims gazing out like reproachful ghosts. S21 is
understated and unforgettable; in its modest way, this movie is as horrific an
exposure to evil as Lanzmann's Shoah.
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
Philadelphia City
Paper [Sam Adams]
Offoffoff.com
review Joshua
Tanzer
filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [3/5]
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
Film Journal International (Maria Garcia) review
Mixed
Reviews: The Arts, The World, and More (Jill Cozzi)
review
Educational Media Reviews Online review Paul Moeller
DVD Talk (Scott Weinberg) dvd
review [3/5]
One Guy's
Opinion (Frank Swietek) review
[B]
Entertainment
Weekly review [B+] Owen Gleiberman
BBCi
- Films Jamie Russell
Washington Post (Desson Thomson) review
The Boston Phoenix review Mattias Frey
The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review
DUCH, MASTER OF THE FORGES OF HELL
Duch,
Master of the Forges of Hell: Cannes 2011 Review Jordan Mintzer at Cannes Hollywood Reporter, May 16, 2011
This one-on-one interview with a former Khmer Rouge party secretary explores his tenure as director of two prisons specializing in what we now call “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
More formally conventional than S21– which featured a handful of ex-torturers reenacting their crimes within the abandoned secret prison located in Phnom Pneh – Duch consists of a lengthy conversation with Kaing Guek Eav (nicknamed “Duch” for unknown reasons), a loyal follower of the Khmer Rouge who supervised torture procedures in the M13 and S21 facilities, and is currently a serving a 35-year sentence for crimes against humanity.
Giving Duch free reign to narrate his rise to power within the party, spout Marxist ideology and recite French poetry at will, Panh provides what is likely one of the most elaborate discussions with someone responsible for mass genocide, which in this case saw the depths of nearly 2 million people between 1975 and 1979. At once didactic and dismissive, Duch explains that he “had to do the job in the party’s interest, in my own interest of survival,” but denies having tortured the victims himself. When confronted with conflicting testimony from several underlings, he just laughs it off, and then claims that he’s “doing his best to forget.”
Not unlike Hannah Arendt’s classic study of Eichmann, Duch describes a highly bureaucratic apparatus of death, where testimonies culled from tortured prisoners are scrutinized, corrected, and then sent to party headquarters to be examined by defense minister Son Sen and, occasionally, by Pol Pot himself. Although a few convict photos are glimpsed briefly at intervals, the film is most telling when Duch holds up copies of his own handwritten lists of slaughtered prisoners, revealing how an entire life was reduced by the Khmer regime into a single stroke of ink.
Mixing the interviews with black and white archive images of Cambodian labor camps, Panh mostly spares us the grittier footage of mass graves and human remains, allowing Duch’s own accounts of abuse and execution to sink in even deeper.
Duch,
Master Of The Forges Of Hell Dan
Fainaru at
Kang Guek Eav, aka Duch,
may not be Adolf Eichmann but he is certainly a monster in his own right. As
the former commander of an infamous Khmer Rouge prison in Cambodia, he was
personally responsible for the death of at least 12,380 inmates, possibly much
more. Put on trial, in 2009 he was condemned to 35 years in jail - he has of
course appealed and the final verdict is due to come out in June 2011.
Rithy Panh, possibly the best-known Cambodian filmmaker abroad, based in Paris now for many years, has already dedicated a vastly researched documentary in 2002 to the prison camp S21, displaying in detail the crimes perpetrated there by the communist regime.
Now, he decided to allow Duch, who was in charge of the camp from 1975-1979, to have his say. He went back to Cambodia to interview him in prison and out of 300 hours he collected on tapes, with additional documentary footage of the camp at the time, and several testimonies of survivors from that period, he came up with what is essentially an almost two hour-long speech by a man who does not even bother to deny that he is responsible for everything that took place in the S21 death factory.
On the contrary, he simply argues he did it all in the spirit of the regime he has faithfully served - an obedient and dedicated soldier of a revolution which intended to put an end to the corrupt system ruling the country until then and start everything from scratch, for a more equitable and just society.
Though he never actually says the words, “you don’t make omeletes without breaking eggs” in his eyes, all those he tortured and killed were expendable victims on the altars of the new world. He is more than willing to explain in detail that extracting confessions was essential, torturing prisoners was the best way to achieve this end, the point being, of course, not to kill the subjects but make them speak.
That is unless the party leaders preferred - as happened most of the time - termination to imprisonment. In which case, simply to save money and efforts, Duch would first bleed his prisoners to death, after establishing that their blood was safe enough to be used for soldiers fighting on the front, and then, once the prisoners were dead, dispatch their bodies for extermination (“much easier than to send them alive”).
As he goes through the piles of documents that brought to his conviction, he painstakingly details many single operations, but insists that he never committed any crime personally. He may have devised and trained the torturers and executioners on the particular techniques they used (of which he is quite proud) but stayed away, in person, from any bloodshed.
Witnesses who served under him deny these allegations. But he still sticks to his point, adding that in any case, now he has reverted back to the Catholic Church and realises that he has done wrong, but did it for a cause he believed in at the time.
For those who are not familiar with recent Cambodian history, with Pol Pot’s regime and the identity of his faithful minions, Duch’s avalanche of information may be just a little bit too much to swallow.
However, this is an important document to keep and show in future, a lesson not to be forgotten. One of its most striking aspects being that you don’t identify monsters by their horns or tails, because they don’t sport them out for everyone to see. They look just like and other human beings… in Duch’s case just like the mathematics teacher he used to be before he joined the revolution. But they are monsters, nevertheless.
THE
MISSING PICTURE (L'image manquante) A 98
Cambodia France (90 mi)
2013 Website Trailer
Imagine
a society in which money has been banished. A society in which you would be
arrested if you wear eyeglasses, if you wear ties, or if you speak a foreign
language. One where it is prohibited to wear bright colors, to have long hair,
to marry for love, to even express emotions. You are a traitor if you catch a
fish, or pick a fruit. All of these actions signify that your have an
individualistic way of thinking, not a collective one. These activities signify
that you are educated, that you are bourgeoisie, and that you are therefore an
enemy. Simply for reading this essay, you would be considered an enemy, one who
needs to be eliminated. While such a society sounds possible only in fiction,
this is what happened during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. They attempted to
eliminate the middle-class, but what happened in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979
was the elimination of humanity. The idea was to go backward, to become
peasants again, to de-civilize society. To lose everything we have gained.
—Randy Rosenthal, book review of Rithy Panh’s The Elimination from The Coffin Factory,
Review
• The Elimination by Rithy Panh | The Coffin Factory
For
many years, I have been looking for a missing picture: a photograph taken
between 1975 and 1979 by the Khmer Rouge, when they ruled
over Cambodia...On its own, of course, an image does not prove mass
murder, but it prompts us to think, to meditate, to build history. I searched
for it in the archives, in old papers, in the villages of my country, in vain.
Now I know: this image must be missing. I was not in fact really looking for
it; would the image not be obscene and insignificant? Thus I have made it up.
What I offer you today is neither the image nor the search for a unique image,
but the image of a quest: the quest that cinema allows.
—Rithy Panh
While the film has a Chris Marker essayist tone about it, with a pensive
first-person narration beautifully expressed throughout, written by Rithy Panh
but spoken by French-Cambodian actor Randal Douc, the film is a somber meditation
on memory and death, specifically the Cambodian Genocide that took the
lives of Panh’s family during the reign of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the
1970’s. The Maoist regime, modeled
largely after China’s Great Leap Forward (1958-61) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), executed 90% of
Cambodia’s creative artists and performers, while also targeting intellectuals,
teachers, doctors, former military police members, lawyers, and religious
devotees, mostly in the very first year of rule, effectively eliminating any
form of western technology, decimating the once thriving film industry,
abolishing the middle class, while advocating a communal way of life, where
city dwellers were forced into punishing agrarian labor camps to live and work in
the rice paddies, where they were told “A spade is your pen, and the rice
paddies your paper.” Perhaps most
significantly, citizens were evaluated according to how closely they adhered to
the new ideology, where children helped eliminate their own parents. And while the stated enemy was foreign
imperialists, the fact is they murdered 1.7 million other Cambodians, where the
combined effects of executions, forced labor, starvation, and poor medical care
caused the deaths of nearly one-third of the Cambodian population. Largely inspired by his own book, The Elimination: A Survivor of the Khmer
Rouge Confronts his Past and the Commandant of the Killing Fields,
that he co-wrote with French novelist Christophe Bataille, the film won the Un
Certain Regard award at the Cannes Film Festival, and while it’s considered a
documentary, it must be included in any discussion of the best films of the
year, as it’s a potent subject, an amazing film aesthetic, and one of the most
dramatically powerful films seen in years.
Its haunting expression feels more like a sacred religious experience, a
transcendent film that attempts to express the indescribable, as words are
clearly inadequate, and the overall tone is one of unending sorrow.
What Apichatpong Weerasethakul is to Thailand, Rithy Panh is to
Cambodia, arguably the foremost documentarian chronicling the crimes of the
Khmer Rouge, where both largely reflect the Buddhist consciousness of their
respective nations, where much of their artistic careers were built reflecting
upon the horrifying aftermath of Communist killings, developing memory plays
that interact in the present with the audience.
Since there is no known footage of Pol Pot executions or even evidence
of ordinary life, the director describes this as “the missing picture,”
enlisting the aid of French-Cambodian artist Sarith Mang to help chronicle the
Khmer Rouge years with literally hundreds of clay carvings of all the missing
people. Panh and his family were among the
2 million residents of the capital, Phnom Penh, who were forcibly evacuated
(none of it captured on film apparently) to rural areas by the Khmer Rouge,
where a once vibrant city becomes totally deserted on April 17, 1975, The
Missing Picture YouTube (1:30), where Panh is exactly the same age as
Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel in The
400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959).
Their autobiographical portraits couldn’t be more radically different,
as Panh’s use of hand-painted clay figurines are used as stand-ins to represent
himself, his family, and so many others during the reign of terror, continually
mixed with old newsreel and modern day footage, as well as a heartbreakingly
personal narration that provides a vivid account of the horrors experienced,
where first his parents, nephews, and little sister all die, one by one, while
his brother disappears early, and he is left as the lone family survivor left
to tell the story. This unique method is
highly inventive, where perhaps the most memorable is mixing live images of a
dancing actress into his memory world, creating a magical effect, Clip:
The Missing Picture, "Childhood Cinema" (NYFF51) YouTube (2:12).
The musical score by Marc Marder beautifully supports the film, as the
continually shifting music and sound design, along with the flowing narration,
provide a fluid sense of motion and movement, like the wind or the lapping
waves of the sea, even as the figurines remain still. Listening to him describe life in the camps
is reminiscent of Elie Wiesel’s autobiographical novel Night that recounts his experiences at age 16 in Auschwitz and
Buchenwald at the height of the Holocaust, where he learns “Here there are no fathers, no
brothers, no friends, everyone lives and dies for himself alone.” You wouldn’t think little stick figures could
convey such deep meaning, but it is shockingly effective, where the horrifying
death of his sister couldn’t be more devastating. As he describes the starvation in the camp
and the delusional ideology that produces so much death, equally as methodical
as the guillotine or gas chambers, these lives hold no meaning whatsoever to the
regime, where the figures disappear before our eyes, a hauntingly convincing
technique.
If
I close my eyes, still today, everything comes back to me. The dried-up rice
fields. The road that runs through the village, not far from Battambang. Men
dressed in black, outlined against the burning horizon. I’m 13 years old. I’m
alone. If I keep my eyes shut, I see the path. I know where the mass grave is,
behind Mong hospital; all I have to do is stretch out my hand, and the ditch
will be in front of me. But I open my eyes in time. I won’t see that new
morning or the freshly dug earth or the yellow cloth we wrapped the bodies in.
I’ve seen enough faces. They’re rigid, grimacing. I’ve buried enough men with
swollen bellies and open mouths. People say their souls will wander all over
the earth.
In order to maintain his sanity, he reflects upon better times in his
youth, yet this also vividly describes the extent of what has been lost, as
people were friendlier and happier then, a time when food was plentiful and
music filled the air, such as this local rendition of Wilson Pickett’s
“Midnight Hour,” Clip: The
Missing Picture, "Plane Savior" (NYFF 51) (1:32).
With extraordinary grace, Panh tells the story of his ravaged country
subjected to incomprehensible horror, including 500,000 American bombs, where
“the more bombs the American B-52s dropped, the more peasants joined the
revolution, and the more territory the Khmer Rouge gained,” suggesting the
Cambodian genocide was a direct result of American action, knowledge few
Americans hear about or are aware of, all the more reason to see a film that
resounds with such indescribable pain and open defiance. Often playing like a video installation,
drawing us nearer to the experience, the film resonates with such deeply felt
intimacy that its very unusualness heightens the effect. This is a world where “color vanished like
laughter, song, and dance,” where the only object anyone was allowed to own was
a spoon. “The revolution’s promise
existed only on film,” as peasants are seen happily toiling in the fields from
the regime’s own propaganda footage that absurdly mocks the pitiful stream of
deaths that comprise the abysmal reality.
The rusty film cans seen in the opening moments remind us what a fragile
thing memory is, where this brief historical moment wiped out more than twenty
years of freedom and independence, all but rewriting a nation’s history by
replacing everything that previously existed with pathetic propaganda
films. Panh’s extraordinary film creates
a visual record of what was lost, where his first-hand experience reminds us
how cinema plays such a prominent role in shaping our view of history.
In
Review Online [Kenji Fujishima]
Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture has the feel of a man possessed—driven by a desire on the filmmaker's part to exorcise demons that remain from his traumatic experiences during the reign of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. But because much of the existing newsreel footage from Cambodia during that time was state-sanctioned, showing an optimistic side to the country that came nowhere close to reflecting the horrific realities of the atrocities being committed in the name of “progress,” Panh has turned to artistic representation—in this case, the use of wood-carved figurines and large-scale diorama-like recreations—to depict his own personal memories of the period.
But The Missing Picture is more than a mere history lesson-cum-memoir. With its wood-carved-figures-in-dioramas alternating with old newsreel and modern-day footage, Panh's film also functions as a dialectic of various forms of media representations of history, both personal and societal. This media palimpsest is tied together by a voice-over narration that takes occasional detours into Jean-Luc Godard-style ruminations on the possibilities and limitations of media to get at hidden truths. In a sense, one could consider this a variation on what Andrei Ujică did for Nicolae Ceaușescu in The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu, puncturing Pol Pot’s delusions of societal advancement by turning his own conscious attempts at image-making against him. Unlike Ujică’s film, though, Panh is less stringently rigorous conceptually, more willing to give his film over to lyrical meditations on, among other things, the ability to retain one’s humanity amidst great inhumanity. The Missing Picture is almost relentlessly grim but fascinating nevertheless—and, in its own way, inspiring in the way it snatches an aesthetic victory out of a psychological near-defeat.
Rithy Panh - Cinema
Scope Christoph Huber, Summer 2013
The eventual Un Certain Regard prizewinner, Panh’s The Missing Picture parts with the formal orthodoxy of his previous films on the subject like S-21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine (2003) or Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell (2011), for the first time using both found footage (documentary and fictional propaganda films made by Pol Pot’s regime) and voiceover narration, based on the autobiographical parts of Panh’s book The Elimination (an English translation of which was published earlier this year). “If I close my eyes, still today, everything comes back to me. The dried-up rice fields. The road that runs through the village, not far from Battambang. Men dressed in black, outlined against the burning horizon. I’m 13 years old. I’m alone. If I keep my eyes shut, I see the path. I know where the mass grave is, behind Mong hospital; all I have to do is stretch out my hand, and the ditch will be in front of me. But I open my eyes in time. I won’t see that new morning or the freshly dug earth or the yellow cloth we wrapped the bodies in. I’ve seen enough faces. They’re rigid, grimacing. I’ve buried enough men with swollen bellies and open mouths. People say their souls will wander all over the earth,” reads one significant passage, pointing to Panh’s most flummoxing innovation. The (fascinating) found footage aside, he uses handmade clay puppets to illustrate and occasionally expand on the voiceover—the voice clearly not Panh’s, further complicating the issues of representation.
As the camera pans through these tableaux morts, the frozen puppet plays nevertheless exude a sense of archaic, almost childlike wonder, clashing with the terrible recollections on the soundtrack. There is a spiritual dimension to Panh’s strategy, in that he is looking for the soul of the dead: “What is the soul? Earth, wind, water, fire,” he said when explaining his decision for clay figurines to Cristina Nord in a recent interview, adding that “statuettes have a soul.” But as implied by the title The Missing Picture and discussed in the voiceover, there is also a haptic quality that governs Panh’s memories: he remembers not so much images as the touch (which also brings to mind the perpetrators re-enacting torture in S-21, resulting in unconscious, thus horrifyingly casual illustrations of body memory). Panh’s burnt clay theatre meshes perfectly with the justified pathos distinguishing the narration, while—intensified by complex negotiations with the historical film material—he proposes a miraculous method to represent the unrepresentable.
LFM
Reviews The Missing Picture @ The New York Film Festival Libertas Film Magazine
According to estimates, the Maoist Khmer Rouge regime
executed ninety percent
While the Khmer Rouge churned out plenty of propaganda, they were more circumspect in documenting their own crimes. That left plenty of holes for Panh to fill in, as his title suggests. With the help of Mang’s coarse yet eerily expressive clay figurines, Panh recreates the torturous conditions he somehow lived through, but which claimed the lives of his parents, nephews, and little sister, one by one.
Panh’s decision to use Mang’s figures and richly detailed diorama backdrops might sound bizarrely hyper-stylized, but it is shockingly effective. Frankly, the scenes depicting the horrifying death of Panh’s sister are nothing less than devastating. It is an unlikely approach, but it directly conveys the emotional essence of the circumstances.
To better understand the extent of what was lost, Panh periodically looks back at happier, pre-Khmer Rouge days, as well. Again, he compellingly evokes of tactile sense of those innocent times. Viewers can practically smell the spices at the neighborhood parties as they listen to a hip local rendition of Wilson Pickett’s “Midnight Hour.”
Rarely has a documentary ever been so exquisitely crafted. Each and every one of Mang’s figures is a work of art, perfectly lit and lensed by cinematographer Prum Mésa to bring out their full eloquence. Composer Marc Marder supports the visuals with what might be the most mournful film score since Schindler’s List. It is a film that resounds with raw pain and defiant honesty (aside from a dubious bit of moral equivalence regarding western capitalism, probably tossed out to mollify festival programmers).
Not a film to be shrugged off, The Missing Picture holds viewers completely rapt and haunts them for days after viewing. Recommended for a considerably wider audience than traditional doc watchers, it screens this coming Monday (9/30) at the Beale Theater and Tuesday the eighth at the Gilman as an official selection of the 2013 NYFF.
Slant
Magazine [Nick McCarthy]
Marc van de Klashorst
International Cinephile Society
Paste
Magazine Tim Grierson
These
Are a Few of My Favorite Things: New York Film Festival I Howard Feinstein from Filmmakers magazine
Cannes
2013: Dark mirrors | British Film Institute
Geoff Andrew from BFI Sight and
Sound, May 20, 2013, also seen here:
Geoff Andrew
Busan:
Cambodia's Rithy Panh on His Cannes Winner 'The Missing ... Patrick Brzeski interview from The Hollywood Reporter
Day
3: Far out feeling / The Dissolve
Mike D’Angelo
Cannes
2013. Fragile History: Rithy Panh's "The Missing Picture" Daniel Kasman from Mubi
Cannes
Roundtable One: Amy Taubin, Gavin Smith ... - Film Comment discussion group by Film Comment
Daily
| NYFF 2013 | Rithy Panh's THE MISSING PICTURE ... - Fandor David Hudson, September 30, 2013
Daily | Cannes
2013 | Rithy Panh’s THE MISSING PICTURE
David Hudson from Fandor, May 2013
The Missing
Image: Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter Neil Young
Justin Chang at Cannes from Variety
Review:
'The Missing Picture' a poetic study of Khmer Rouge horrors ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times
Violence,
War, Death: Cannes Report, May 19 | Cannes | Roger Ebert Barbara Scharres
New
York Film Festival Is Still Sober, but Hardly Dry Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, September 26, 2013
Review
• The Elimination by Rithy Panh | The Coffin Factory book review by Randy Rosenthal, February 11,
2013
Rithy Panh -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Paquin, Anna – actress
Anna
Paquin Fan | www.annapaquinfan.org | Your online source for ... Anna Paquin website
The Unofficial Anna Paquin Homepage
Anna Paquin Biography
from NNDB
Anna Paquin AOL Television biography
Anna Paquin | Anna Paquin Pictures | Anna Paquin Biography | Anna ... bio from Moono
"A Young
Star is Born in the Piano"
Elaine Dutka from The Los Angeles
Times,
TIME April 4, 1994 I’d Like to Thanks My Dog, by Jeffrey Ressner
from Time magazine,
"Paquicking it in" Pam Lambert from People magazine, April 15, 1996
"X
Appeal" The Observer, August
6, 2000
Nylon, October 2000 Anna Busts a Move, by James Servin from Nylon magazine, October 2000
New York Times, November 16, 2001
In Her World, Normalcy Includes the Grotesque, by Ben Brantley from The New York Times,
"X Patriate Anna
Paquin" Michele Manelis from The
Vanities: Anna Paquin | vanityfair.com Paquin’s Back, Krista Smith from Vanity Fair, May, 2009
"Rogue Star" Luje Crisell from New York May 20, 2007
Anna Paquin
& Stephen Moyer Are Engaged! - Engagements, Anna ... Stephen
M. Silverman from People magazine, August 5, 2009
Anna
Paquin Nude Photos From True Blood [PICTURES PHOTOS] | Amy ... Amy
Grindhouse, August 26, 2009
Anna Paquin & Stephen Moyer's Romance Not True Secret at Work ... Reagan Alexander from People magazine, October 11, 2009
Katie Holmes and co-star Anna Paquin slips into sexy negligees on ... The Daily Mail, November 17, 2009
Katie Holmes and co-star Anna Paquin film wedding scenes for The ... The Daily Mail, November 18, 2009
ifilmalliance.com Karina Halle interview from Independent
Filmmakers
Anna
Paquin | Film | Interview | The A.V. Club
Interview by Gregg LaGambina,
TO DIE FOR -
NYLON MAGAZINE Luke Crisell from Nylon magazine, August 24, 2009
Anna
Paquin: interview for 'True Blood' - Telegraph Marianne Macdonald interview from The Telegraph,
Anna
Paquin: I'm No Bridezilla - OK! Magazine - The First for ... Luisa Metcalfe
interview from OK magazine, October 6, 2009
Anna Paquin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Anna Paquin Pics | Actress Archives
Anna Paquin
Pictures - Anna Paquin Photo Gallery - 2010
Parajanov, Sergei
In the temple of cinema there are images, light and
reality. Sergei Paradjanov was the master of that temple. His unmistakable
films are rarely watched, often admired, and usually regarded as some of the
most important movies of the 20th century. —Jean-Luc Godard
There
are few people of genius in the cinema; look at Bresson, Mizoguchi, Dovzhenko,
Paradjanov, Bunuel: not one of them could be confused with anyone else. An
artist of that calibre follows one straight line, albeit at great cost; not without
weakness or even, indeed, occasionally being farfetched; but always in the name
of the one idea, the one conception. ––Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
Kievski
Freski (Kiev Frescos) By Sergei Paradjanov
Paradjanov’s Films on Soviet
Folklore, by Jonathan Rosenbaum, initially from Cineaste, posted at Greylodge,
“It’s astonishing how little we still know about Soviet cinema in general and Sergei Paradjanov (1924-1990) in particular, and it’s possible that Soviet history has something to do with this — a desire among many not to remember pointing to an even more basic desire not to know. Considering what a teller of tall tales Paradjanov was himself, it seems inevitable that he would only add to the confusion while he was alive rather than clear up most of the muddle. Writing about three Paradjanov features that were showing in Chicago thirteen years ago, I noted that his name couldn’t be found in Ephraim Katz’s Film Encyclopedia or in the indexes of books by Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann, or John Simon (among many others), and lamented that, as far as I knew, no one anywhere had yet written a book or monograph about him. I was writing only a month after he visited the West for the first time — attending the Rotterdam Film Festival, where I was fortunate enough to be present — and this was only four years after he resumed work as a filmmaker following something like sixteen years of enforced silence, either as a prisoner or as a director whose proposed projects since Sayat-Nova in 1969 had all been rejected.
What were his crimes? In the Stalinist period, Paradjanov was reportedly detained in a ‘re-education’ labor camp for homosexuality. In the mid-Sixties, shortly before Khrushchev was deposed, he was attacked in the press for being a formalist; after he signed letters in support of Ukranian dissidents, he was called a “Ukranian nationalist”; he was never allowed to finish his 1965 Kiev Frescos due to “bourgeois subjectivism and mysticism” and “ideological deviation”; after many battles over his Armenian masterpiece Sayat-Nova, the film was reedited into a version twenty minutes shorter by director Sergei Yutkevich. After his next dozen or two dozen film projects were rejected (accounts differ), he was arrested in late 1973 for charges that ranged from dealing in foreign currency, speculating on artworks, and stealing icons to spread venereal diseases, inciting suicide, and homosexuality, and sentenced to five years of hard labor — a term eventually reduced to four years after a petition of protest was circulated interntionally. According to one account, he admitted to being bisexual, but it seems that most or all of the charges were specious and that his ‘real’ crimes were being an eccentric and a ‘troublemaker.’ (Yuri Ilyenko, cinematographer on Paradjanov’s masterpiece Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, who attended the trial, once told me that the man Paradjanov was accused of raping was built like a football player; considering that Paradjanov himself was roughly the height of Mr. Natural, the charge was visibly ridiculous.)
Four years later, he was arrested a third time, for attempting to bribe an official, then cleared of the charges after about a half a year in prison. The first feature he was able to make after Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964) and Sayat-Nova (1969) was The Legend of Suram Fortress (1984), followed by the much slighter Ashik Kerib (1988) two years before his death from cancer.”
Worldview
- Sergei Paradjanov Milos Stehlik
from
The films and tragic life of film director Sergei Paradjanov
– one of the most original and imaginative filmmakers of the 20th century -
resonate against the background of the current Russian-Georgian conflict. Born
in Georgia of Armenian parents, educated at the film school in
The film which catapulted him to world fame was also his most accessible –
SHADOWS OF OUR FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS in 1964. Set in a remote mountainous region
of the Carpathian mountains, home of the Hutzul people, this visually dazzling
film is the Romeo and Juliet story of two lovers whose families are bitter
enemies, and whose love must end tragically. Filled with ethnic music, stunning
imagery and symbolism, the film careens at a breakneck pace of images that
leave you breathless.
SHADOWS OF OUR FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS was made during the brief period of the Krushchev-era “thaw” which came to an end when Krushchev fell from power. Paradjanov was outspoken in his defense of Ukrainian intellectuals. He protested having SHADOWS OF OUR FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS dubbed into Russian – standard practice for Soviet era films made in the republics. In 1968 he was arrested for “Ukrainian nationalism” and shifted to the film studios in Soviet Armenia. There, one after another of his scripts were refused.
In 1969, he was allowed to make another film, THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES, or SAYAT NOVA. The theme is the great 18th century Armenian troubadour and poet Aruthin Sayadin, who trained as a weaver and grew up to be a poet and minstrel at the Georgian court. In contrast with the ferocious pace of SHADOWS OF OUR FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS, SAYAT NOVA is a series of static tableaux. Narrative progression is minimal: we see Sayadin as youth, man, poet, court minstrel, monk, martyr. There is no dialogue, only antique Armenian music and inter-titles like in a silent film, which are taken from Sayadin’s work. The film is extraordinarily beautiful - a series of frontal, surreal images.
The film was banned, accused of formalism. SAYAT NOVA was cut into a butchered, shortened version. What was so offensive in this static work of art? The film celebrated the resilience of Armenian culture against massive oppression. Blood-red juice spills from a pomegranate onto cloth and forms a stain in the shape of the boundaries of the ancient Armenian kingdom. Wool being dyed comes out of giant vats in the colors of the national flag.
After SAYAT NOVA, Paradjanov continued to be ostracized. His films were rejected. In 1974, he wrote a passionate pamphlet to the Soviet authorities, describing his personal situation and decrying the state of Soviet cinema. He was arrested, charged with homosexuality, trafficking in ancient art objects, and “incitement to suicide.” He was sentenced to 5 years at hard labor.
Some of the most moving accounts of Paradjanov come from his years in prison as he was moved from one camp to another. He began making miniature collages with found objects and began teaching other prisoners. He said that his life “without this experience would have been only a mirage. …If one is a poet, one can create even in these conditions. The prisoners procured some paper for me; I wrote a hundred short stories and six scenarios. I became their confessor. They recounted their crimes to me, their loves, their sexual relations….I have painted eight hundred pictures with coal, with anything whatever, and I have worked with scraps of cloth, with pieces of burlap sacking…I taught the prisoners how to paint, how to draw, to make collages…They made me dig, carry heavy loads….They made us dig as though we were digging for gold. I deliberately broke a drain pipe; the odor was unbearable; we couldn’t dig any longer…One day, they had pity and gave me easier work. I washed sheets…Then I was a street sweeper.”
A campaign to free Paradjanov took hold, especially in France. Bunuel, Godard, Truffaut, Resnais, Fellini, Visconti, Rossellini were among those who signed petitions. After serving 4 years of his sentence, Paradjanov was released. He lived in poverty, without work. He survived by selling his possessions. In 1982 he was re-arrested, but a new campaign to free him ended with his acquittal. Under the Gorbachev regime, he was allowed to make THE LEGEND OF SURAM FORTRESS, his first film in 15 years.
Parajanov-Vartanov Institute | Official site
Sergei Parajanov | Parajanov-Vartanov
Institute biography
Sergei Parajanov: Information from Answers.com extensive profile and biography
THE CINEMA OF SERGEI PARAJANOV An overview of his works and ... in depth essay on Paradjanov, Dimitar Kutmanov website
Sergei
Paradzhanov - Director - Films as Director and Scriptwriter ... Liam O’Leary profile essay from Film Reference
Paradjanov, Sergei -
GLBTQ Archive Gary Morris from Encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual,
transgender and queer culture
Biography Paradjanov biography from TCM
Sergei Paradjanov > Overview - AllMovie bio from Nathan Southern
Sergei Parajanov profile page from NNDB
Sergei Parajanov Totally Explained extensive overview
Sergei Parajanov: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article Absolute Astronomy biography
Paradjanov Festival 2010 which also includes a biography and filmography, February 27 – May 9, 2010
Welcome
to Tirana International Film Festival 2004
includes a biography and filmography,
Sergei Parajanov - The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia biography
Sergei
Paradjanov : Define, Explore, Discuss
bio from
Sergei Paradjanov from Swan Lake: The Zone - at Film.com biography from Film.com
Sergej Parajanov Museum official site of the
Great photo gallery of the Parajanov Museum artwork
museum.com - Sergei
Parajanov Museum in
Sergei Parajanov museum in Armenia
Armenian
Arts & Crafts
Nueva
Vista :: Sergei Parajanov House-Museum
Explore
Sergei Parajanov - Armeniapedia.org Armenian Encyclopedia
Sergei
Paradjanov Acquarello reviews from
Strictly
Harvard Film
Archive November 7 –
The Films of Sergei Paradjanov Gary W. Tooze from DVDBeaver
The Films of Sergei Paradjanov DVD - Kino on Video
The Films of Sergei Paradjanov : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Chris Neilson
Russian Directors - Sergei Paradjanov Multilingual Books
Abril Books - Sergei Parajanov
Sergei Paradjanov | Seven Visions | Green Integer Books Seven Visions, Sergei Paradjanov, translated from the French by Guy Bennett (255 pages), from Green Integer
Parajanov Himself - Cornerhouse edited by Garo Keheyan, 144 pages, from Cornerhouse
THE CINEMASEEKERS HONOR ROLL The Cinema and Art of Sergei Paradjanov: In Memory of Beauty, by Gregory and Maria Pearse
Tarkovsky visits Parajanov an excerpt from an article found in the Kwartalnik filmowy collection, pp. 265-267, from nostalghia.com, also seen here: [ Nostalghia.com | The Topics :: Parajanov's Collage for Tarkovsky ]
Cinema Scope » Columns | Gloval Discoveries on DVD: Critical Editions Jonathan Rosenbaum (end of article) from Cinema Scope (Undated)
Paranormal
Parajanov « Yerevan Yekaterina
Barabash and Natalia Shastik from
The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre: Sergei Parajanov short bio and film reviews from The Last Exit (Undated)
Sergei Paradjanov Experimental Films, film analysis by Mike Grost (Undated)
Images - Masterworks of Soviet Cinema David Gurevich from Images (Undated)
The Parajanov Case - The New York Review of Books Letter to the Editors from The New York Review of Books, March 18, 1982, also seen here: The Parajanov Case, March 1982
Parajanov Arrested follow up Letter to the Editors from The New York Review of Books, May 27, 1982
The Greatest Living Soviet Filmmaker | Jonathan Rosenbaum Jonathan Rosenbaum, March 25, 1988
Letters
to the Zone two letters
written to Sergei Paradjanov when he was in prison published in Iskusstvo
Kino (1990), from nostalghia.com
David Somerset: Sergei of Tbilisi David Somerset essay, Film Bank (Fiba) editor, from FantomPowa (1998)
Requiem for Cinema A Requiem for Cinema "Fin de Cinéma" (the end of "Weekend" by Jean-Luc Godard, 1967), by Gregory and Maria Pearse (1998)
Sergei Parajanov's 75th birthday Olga Bobrova from Russian Culture Navigator (1999)
Sergei Paradjanov Living Collage, Sergei Paradjanov's film fever, by Chris Fujiwara from The Boston Phoenix, November 25 – December 2, 1995
Films of Sergei
Paradjanov - Harvard Film Archive
November/December 1999
Immanence
and Transcendence in the Cinema of Nature • Senses of ... Fergus Daly from Senses of Cinema, December 28, 2000
Dionysus in Georgia: Paradjanov on DVD: The Color of Pomegranates ... Gary Morris from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 1, 2001, also seen here: Bright Lights Film Journal | Sergei Paradjanov
Paradjanov on DVD | Jonathan Rosenbaum Jonathan Rosenbaum, originally from Cineaste magazine, June 2003
Sergei
Parajanov Doug Cummings from Film Journey,
Actress Sofiko Chiaureli and many others about him Sergey Parajanov, a Filmmaker Once and for All, by Arevhat Grigoryan from The Brosse Street Journal, January 21, 2005
Sergei
Paradjanov - Armenian Dramatic Arts Alliance
A collective interior monologue: Sergei Parajanov and Eisenstein's ... A collective interior monologue: Sergei Parajanov and Eisenstein's Joyce-inspired vision of cinema, by Karla Oeler from The Modern Language Review, April 2006
For
those who want to know more about Parajanov
A.V. Koshy from Lyrical Lyricist,
Mamoulian,
Paradjanov Subject of Documentaries May 10 and 11 - The ... Library of Congress Newsletter,
Modern
Mosaic Art – Mosaic Artist & Film Director – Sergio ... Mosaic Art Source,
"The
Films of Sergei Paradjanov," "El Cid" - On DVD - News - IFC.com Michael Atkinson from IFC,
The
Rep Report (February 20--27) Phil
Nugent from Screengrab,
Mystic Master:
The Films of Sergei Paradjanov :: Stop Smiling Magazine Michael Joshua Rowin from Stop Smiling,
Saluting
Sergei: Arts + Words: Beatrice Smigasiewicz ... Beatrice Smigasiewicz from Centerstage
Chicago,
• View topic -
Sergei Parajanov Criterion forum, a
cinema discussion group,
The
Films of Sergei Paradjanov | PopMatters Paradjanov Box Set: A Four Part Review,
by Erik Hinton, April 17, 2008
National
Gallery for Foreign Art Sergei
Parajanov Collages,
Sergai Parajanov- Letters to Prison by Mike Nalbandyan Armenian ... book comments by Mike Nalbandyan, December 31, 2008
Armenian
Reporter: “Forgeries” of Parajanov’s work removed from auction, from The Armenian Reporter,
Potenza International Film Festival » Special programs biography and program notes, November 29, 2009
Steady
State » Blog Archive » Tbilisi: Where cultures meet Onnik Krikorian from Steady State,
Sergei Paradjanov: film-maker of outrageous imagination | Film | The ... Elif Batuman from The Guardian, March 12, 2010
VERTIGO
| Shadows of Sergei Paradjanov - Close-Up Film Centre James Norton, Spring 2010
Barnflakes:
The films of Sergei Parajanov
April 19, 2010
TSPDT - This page is coming soon... They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Kinema : :
A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media
Interview by Ron and
Dorothea Holloway in Berlin, July 1, 1988, also includes a bio and filmography
from Kinema, published December 8, 1995
Sergei Parajanov - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Paradzhanov,
Sergey
Sergei Parajanov Museum - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Short
films by Sergei Parajanov
feuilleton,
Sayat Nova music, Yerevan,
May 2007 Traditional ensemble
performing Armenian Music on YouTube (
Film
about Parajanov Museum in Yerevan
Isle of Parajanov (
kagablog » an interview with sergei parajanov, the greatest ... 6 part Documentary on YouTube from Kagablog
Sergei
Parajanov - Documentary [1/6] (
Sergei
Parajanov - Documentary [2/6] (
Sergei Parajanov - Documentary [3/6] (10:01)
Sergei Parajanov - Documentary [4/6] (9:58)
Sergei Parajanov - Documentary [5/6] (9:56)
Sergei
Parajanov - Documentary [6/6] (
Parajanov-Hakob
Hovnatanyan 1967 (
SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS
(Tini zabutykh predkiv)
aka: Wild Horses of Fire
Time Out review Tony Rayns
Paradjanov was considered a safe director of Ukrainian 'quota' features until he seized a unique moment of freedom to make this Carpathian rhapsody, which spoke loud his own closet dissidence and ushered in a flood of non-conformist movies from the other regional Soviets, including Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev and Abuladze's The Wishing Tree. The 'forgotten ancestors' are mid-19th century villagers, who frolic naked in their youth and grow up into adulterers, lovelorn misfits, and feuding murderers. Their 'shadows' are not exactly sombre either: Paradjanov stops at nothing in his quest for startling images. The athletic camerawork and the bizarre visual effects take their tone from the folk ballads that recur on the soundtrack, sometimes touching an authentically barbaric or tragic poetry. The film is as chaotic as The Colour of Pomegranates is formalised, but it confirms that Paradjanov was 'dangerous' because he was committed to artifice - and imagination.
Sergei Parajanov's adaptation of Mykhailo Kotsibuynsky's novel is a sweeping epic, a Romeo and Juliet story about a boy and a girl from a small village in the Ukraine who try to overcome the animosity of their families through love. But the film is not really about the story, or its characters, but rather the wild pageant of Ukrainian village life that Parajanov and crew create through costume, landscape, and, most importantly, a unique and baroque style of camerawork. Cinematographers Yuri Ilyenko and Viktor Bestayev's camera seems totally unhinged, liable to take off running at any time, park itself miles from the action, or take on the identity of a murder weapon as it sees fit. And yet we always have the sense that the whole strange universe of the film is all around us, just out of frame. As the film goes on and the characters grow up, the profusion of technical wonders begins to slow and the story takes more of a center stage. We find ourselves in a world more D.H. Lawrence than Shakespeare, a bleak pastoral world of small farmers, bad memories, and marital frustrations (albeit hinted at with a coded Soviet prudery). But naturalism is never a priority for Parajanov or his actors, who jump back and forth between mad happiness, dull resignation, and murderous rage so quickly that it can be a little confusing. The romantic leads are wooden and stilted, but the craggy ensemble, whose expressionism and physicality borders on mime, is wonderful.
Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [5/5]
One of the sadder casualties of Soviet censorship, director
Sergei Parajanov spent a sizable chunk of the 1970s in a gulag breaking rocks.
Before then, he was drinking aperitifs with Fellini at international film
festivals. The reasons for such detentions were never fully clear. (Charges
against Parajanov included “homosexuality and illegal trafficking in religious
icons”; he was also strongly pro-Ukrainian, a big no-no in the
Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors depicts that artistry in its most accessible form. It takes the shape of a romantic myth, set in rough, mountainous terrain during an unspecified part of the 19th century. Here live Carpathian shepherds and farmers. When they marry—as Ivan (Mikolajchuk) and Palagna (Bestayeva) do—they are blindfolded and literally yoked together for the ceremony, thus producing the earliest example of couple’s therapy on film. Elsewhere, as Parajanov’s camera swirls vertiginously to capture harvest festivals and celebrations, you sense a linkage of past and present that’s astounding.
The harshness of the land catches up with its young lovers, and after tragedy strikes, Parajanov drains all of that color and vitality away as the movie kind of starts over—an enormously sympathetic gesture. The latter half becomes a ghost story, with pale, outstretched arms reaching past the white stalks of birch-tree forests. Parajanov knew the lure of simple imagery, the rush of nature and fate. His only crime was to celebrate these things—and to hope that audiences would too.
SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS (Sergei Parajanov, 1964) « Dennis ... Dennis Grunes
Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov’s tribute to Ukrainian mentor Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Tini zabutykh predkiv draws upon weirder, denser visual material than does the master’s beautiful piece of Ukrainian folklore, Zvenigora (1928). I find Parajanov’s film remarkable but also, because I can only imperfectly follow it, frustrating.
There is a melodramatic plot in the
This linear tale, however, exists as pieces of narrative that are buried in a dazzling kaleidoscope of imagery. Parajanov’s shots include all sorts of camera angles and movements amidst elemental Nature and applied to robust humanity, including shots up from under water, in both rich color and chilly black and white, with explosions of music (lots of Jew’s harp), rivulets of freeze frames, and sheafs of Orthodox Christian iconography, symbolism, ritual. The film unfolds in titled vignettes. There are two fatal sacrificial acts early on: Ivan’s elder brother dies protecting Ivan from a falling tree; Marichka dies rescuing a lamb. Curiously, Ivan, the sole survivor of eight siblings, doesn’t seem fazed by his brother’s death. “Let go of me!” he says over and over as he tries pulling away from the crushed corpse with a poignant grip.
Life is harsh, full of hard work. One wonderful shot follows the sharpening of a scythe. All life, it appears, is preparation for death; familial love, romantic love, a preparation for loss.
The sorcerer who kills Ivan resembles him—but grotesquely. Perhaps he embodies Ivan’s refusal to embrace life after Marichka’s death.
The throes of love and desire are no simple capture, nor a surefire slay in the battle of image and sound on screen. They are, in fact, the most treacherous of realms to navigate with the intention of putting forth through cinema an example of that which we seek so blindly and are so often driven by, propelled headfirst into some form of joy, madness, or sorrow, like no other thing.
In the short history of moving pictures, there are few who have captured this realm on film so succinctly, so gracefully, and so without any hesitance or fear, as Sergei Parajanov. A Georgian born director of Armenian ancestry, jailed by the Russian government for much of his adult life for acts of supposed official depravity (i.e. being queer, and defiling fellow Party members through his exploits), he managed in a relatively hostile creative environment to create series upon series of images and stories that encapsulate the luscious, painterly qualities of exactly the kind of magic and fascination that only filmmaking, as a craft, is capable of. In a time when the reality of social struggles seemed all the rage (and was the only genre of cinema officially endorsed by the USSR), Parajanov drew from his own history, from folklore, and from natural mysticism in order to create an amalgam of engaged and forceful cinematic performances, rich with costume, set design, and camera work ahead of its time.
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (also known as Wild Horses of Fire) is no different. The story of two lovers who gain intimate knowledge of each other at a young age, son and daughter of rival, hateful families, it finds itself in a class of its own in just how it chooses to relentlessly extrapolate the notion of true love found, lost, and bred into mortal obsession.
We meet Ivan and Marichka in the Carpathian highlands of Ukraine, members of the small subset of people known as the Hutsul. Their Montague and Capulet—like orientation to each other fades as Ivan consistently—across the course of many years yet told in the breath of a few moments—enchants Marichka, and becomes enchanted by her. They run wild on hillsides and in small streams, and the scenes of their love’s beginnings are some of the most accurate depictions of child’s play that can be found. Parajanov illuminates the beauty of these innocent, traditional lives and their growth into complex, devoted adulthoods, filled with passions and dreams that lead them helplessly astray. He shows us the naïve, the blissful, and the perilous in their hearts and making. In one scene, the two lovers enrapped in thin sapling branches, deep in the forest of their village, float as if on air, traversing effortlessly the twigs and limbs of the trees, all seemingly bare and skeletal. They move towards each other through the branches like magic, without any of the rhythmic rise and fall of normal, mortal steps. Instead they seem to be levitated, quite literally swept off their feet. It is only when the forest itself begins to rotate, hypnotically around them, that the level of artistry at work becomes clear.
While this love and purity seems to exist in a safe and assured world for our characters, as with every other tale of joy and pleasure, there is sorrow upon the horizon. Eventually separated by fate from Marichka, Ivan finds solace only in his memory of her, in his longing, never fulfilled. Marrying a new woman, Palagna, Ivan finds nothing of the comfort and clarity that his youthful adventures with Marichka once bred so steadfast in him. Instead, he is haunted by visions. The truth behind his eyes, his madness, becomes synonymous with the beauty he once knew, loved, and now must search for, to the empty, loveless frustration of his new wife. There is no more poignant a scene than that of their wedding ceremony to play as an example, a foreboding of what’s to come for these characters—yoked and blindfolded, led to encircle each other by the townspeople, their families, the two are almost like statues in the origin of their matrimony. They seem to be reciting vows of pantomime only, like two debtors in the colonial stocks, until the oxen yoke holding their heads so close together clatters to the earthen floor and their veils are lifted. Palagna stares back at her new husband, as he undresses her, pulling every garment from her in a still, shocking stare, until finally not even her rosary remains safe on her body. The wedding party looks on, and while Palagna is quite startlingly beautiful, the one thing she is not, and cannot ever be, is Marichka, her husband’s dream.
We find ourselves consistently at the hands of a true master in Parajanov’s work. The pictures themselves personify the three standards he himself saw so lacking in the cinema of his age: “…experience, craftsmanship, and good taste.” There can be no more touching a story than that of Ivan and Marichka, and in the same instance, with all of its complexity and grandeur, no more simple of one. It is a breath of magic told in a traditional, almost alien lifestyle, and much welcomed. The great Andrei Tarkovsky, who inspired and was in turn inspired by Parajanov’s efforts, once said in a plea to the Soviet government that, “He is guilty - guilty of his solitude. We are guilty of not thinking of him daily and of failing to discover the significance of a master.” His reverence leads us to another veneration, much cited, from the Soviet critic Alexei Korotyukov, who said simply: “Paradjanov made films not about how things are, but how they would have been had he been God.” And there comrades, we have it.
The Film Sufi: “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” - Sergei Parajanov ...
VERTIGO
| Shadows of Sergei Paradjanov - Close-Up Film Centre James Norton, Spring 2010
Shadows
of Forgotten Ancestors - Forgotten Classics of Yesteryear Nathanael Hood
Shadows
of Forgotten Ancestors - Ferdy on Films
Roderick Heath
Daily Film Dose [Greg Klymkiw]
It Takes a
Village | Village Voice J.
Hoberman, October 23, 2007
The New York Sun (Nicolas Rapold) review
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [4/4]
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
SF360: Paradjanov and Godard on DVD
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Wilson) dvd review
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
User reviews from imdb Author: Mandrivnyk from United States
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
Metroactive.com [Richard von Busack]
Edinburgh U Film Society (Iain Lang) review
Brandon's movie memory » Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964 ... film images
3quarksdaily:
Video roundup: Russian cinema Dave Maier,
March 17, 2014
Stop Smiling Online [Michael Joshua Rowin] The Films of Sergei Paradjanov, 4-disc dvd review
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
Shadows
of Forgotten Ancestors Movie Review (1966) | Roger Ebert
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
New York Times [Dave Kehr] (registration req'd) New DVD’s
DVDBeaver.com [Gregory Meshman]
HAKOB HOVNATANYAN
aka: Hagop Hoynatanian
Russia
National
Gallery of Armenia also seen
here: HAKOB
HOVNATANIAN
He became familiar to painting through his father, who was a
church-painter in
Stop Smiling Online [Michael Joshua Rowin] The Films of Sergei Paradjanov, 4-dvd review (excerpt)
There’s no denying the quality of Kino’s content: Each Paradjanov film in the set (including the short 1965 experimental film Hagop Hovnatanian) is a world unto itself, a play of unsynchronized sounds (usually mesmerizing traditional music) and images that revel in artifice as much as life. Paradjanov’s cinema is one of extremes: scenes filmed from far off distances in order to frame subjects against sprawling action and formidable environments, tableaux of pure symbolic imagery, and Méliès-like jump cuts that enact the crudest, but most powerfully transformative, of cinematic magic.
Dionysus in Georgia: Paradjanov on DVD: The Color of Pomegranates ... Gary Morris from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 1, 2001, also seen here: Bright Lights Film Journal | Sergei Paradjanov
Paradjanov on DVD | Jonathan Rosenbaum Jonathan Rosenbaum, originally from Cineaste magazine, June 2003
The
Films of Sergei Paradjanov | PopMatters Paradjanov Box Set: A Four Part Review,
by Erik Hinton, April 17, 2008
Parajanov-Hakob Hovnatanyan 1967 Videoyan on YouTube (10:05)
Sergei
Parajanov ( Paradjanov ) - Hakob Hovnatanyan (1967 ... Alba Mora
Viddler.com
- Sergei Parajanov - Hagop Hovnatanian(1967 ... (
THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES (Sayat Nova) A 99
Russia (78 mi) 1968
My water is a
very special kind of drink. Not everyone
can drink it.
My writing is a very special kind of writing. Not everyone can read it.
—Sayat Nova
Paradjanov was born a Russian citizen, but was labeled
esoteric and difficult by Soviet critics, and he refused to dub his films in
Russian. His films were sent to
international film festivals, where his first film won 16 international awards,
but the director was not allowed to leave
There are some parallels between the filmmaker and the 18th
century poet featured in this film, Sayat Nova.
Both lived in Tibolisi, both only visited
This film is a cinematic poem loosely based on Sayat Nova, a
troubadour, poet, lutist, monk, and a man who rose to be Archbishop of the
Armenian Church defending
Originally refused an export licence, Paradjanov's
extraordinary film traces the life of 18th century Armenian poet Sayat Nova
('The King of Song'), but with a series of painterly images strung together to
form tableaux corresponding to moments of his life rather than any conventional
biographic techniques. Pomegranates bleed their juice into the shape of a map
of the old region of
Sergei Parajanov: The Color of Pomegranates « Waldorf School TV The entire film may be viewed here on video (72 minutes)
Steeped in religious iconography, The Color of Pomegranates
is a deeply spiritual testament to film director Sergei
Parajanov’s fascination with Armenian folk art and culture. It is also a
controversial work, which, coupled with another of his films, Shadows of our
Forgotten Ancestors, led to his arrest and imprisonment in a Soviet Gulag for
four years. The Soviets insisted he was guilty of selling gold and icons
illegally and committing “homosexual acts.” In reality, his only crime was
offending the tenets of socialist realism, both in his daring surrealistic form
and in his choice of subject matter. While many of the popular films of this
era in Soviet cinema were largely propaganda designed to serve the ideological
interests of the regime, Parajanov chose to focus on the ethnography and
spirituality of the
Cinema of Armenia « The Seventh Art
“I am the man whose
life and soul are torture”
If a list of biggest innovations in cinema is made, the Russian directors would arguably occupy the top few slots. Their gift to cinema has been the prime mover for so many other breakthroughs across the world of cinema. And Sergei Paradjanov was one such filmmaker who had the special ability to have a different perspective of cinema, much different from the others. And the most fantastic of all his films, The Colour of Pomegranate (1968) clearly tells why.
Unquestionably arthouse film consists of a series of tableaux-like compositions presented in a deliberately impassive manner by the leading lady who seems to take up various roles, both male and female, as the lifetime progresses. Though seemingly “of-the-moment” and radical, The Colour of Pomegranate does present a narrative if one could resort to the conventional terminology. Strung with the poems of Armenian poet Sayat Nova, the film presents his childhood, coming of age, adulthood, his unsuccessful love life, priesthood and eventual death using the most striking images and symbols one has ever assembled on screen. Decidedly not for all tastes, the images that Paradjanov conjures up are so riveting that it is impossible for one not to make a visceral connection with them that lasts a lifetime. Paradjanov’s use of reddish brown tinge throughout the film, as striking as his tragic classic The Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964), provides it the painting-like quality that visibly enhances the “two-dimensionality” of the visuals.
There is virtually no camera movement and the stage-like setting provides the apt platform for the deliberate execution to explore the medium and take it to places it has never been before. The images of Sayat Nova’s death, his life at the monastery, the still life and his view of the world of the child are so strikingly assembled that it transcends the film’s bizarre nature and eliminates any alienation that the viewer may feel. How much one would appreciate and relate to the film remains a big question of subjectivity. But what is sure is that no matter what you feel about the film, you know that this is art, Must see it if one wants to explore the boundaries of filmmaking.
The Colour of Pomegranates • Senses of Cinema Rahul Hamid from Senses of Cinema, December 28, 2009
The
Film Sufi: “The Color of Pomegranates” - Sergei Parajanov (1969)
Paradjanov on DVD | Jonathan Rosenbaum Jonathan Rosenbaum, originally from Cineaste magazine, June 2003
VERTIGO
| Shadows of Sergei Paradjanov - Close-Up Film Centre James Norton, Spring 2010
reverse shot : online : spring 2004 - Archive.is Deep Red, by Joanne Nucho from Reverse Shot, Spring 2004
Dionysus in Georgia: Paradjanov on DVD: The Color of Pomegranates ... Gary Morris from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 1, 2001, also seen here: Bright Lights Film Journal | Sergei Paradjanov
The
Films of Sergei Paradjanov | PopMatters Paradjanov Box Set: A Four Part Review,
by Erik Hinton, April 17, 2008
Only the Cinema: The Color of Pomegranates Ed Howard
Sayat
Nova (aka, The Colour of Pomegranates, 1968) - Ferdy on Films Roderick Heath
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Lopez) dvd review
Kamera.co.uk review Monika Maurer
238. THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES (1969) | 366 Weird Movies Gregory G. Smalley
MUBI's Notebook: Fernando F. Croce September 14, 2014
thirtyframesasecond:
The Colour of Pomegranates (1968, Soviet ... Kevin Wilson,
THE COLOR
OF POMEGRANATES Matt Jay from MJ’s
Blog, September 15, 2008
The Color of Pomegranates & Stalker Banned and Censored Material
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
The Lumière Reader (capsule) Mubarak Ali
Edinburgh U Film Society (Iain Lang) review
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [1.5/4]
Film Is Truth Jeffrey
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Images (David Gurevich) review Masterworks of Soviet Cinema, also seen here: Images - Masterworks of Soviet Cinema
AvaxHome -> Sergei Paradjanov-Sayat Nova ('Colour of Pomegranate ...
Brandon's movie memory » The Color of Pomegranates (1968, Sergei ... film images
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] 2-disc dvd review
Stop Smiling Online [Michael Joshua Rowin] The Films of Sergei Paradjanov, 4-disc dvd review
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
DVDBeaver.com [Gregory Meshman]
ANGELO says:: The masterpieces of Sergei Parajanov film clips on YouTube
Sergei Parajanov: The Color of Pomegranates « Waldorf School TV The entire film may be viewed here on video (72 minutes)
1001 films you must see before you die- Part IX: 1965-1969 - Página 6 The entire film may be viewed here on video (72 minutes)
THE LEGEND OF THE SURAM FORTRESS
Georgia Russia (82 mi) 1985
Time Out review
A visually striking but rather inscrutable depiction of a Georgian myth, Paradjanov's film concerns a young boy who saves the constantly crumbling Suram Fortress by allowing himself to be covered with earth and eggs and walled up alive. The undeniable visual pleasures offered by the imaginative images and rich colours are unfortunately undercut by the stylised presentation - much of the action takes place amid the ruins of the fortress as it survives today - a confusing plot and some esoteric cultural references.
Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review
The Georgian film director Sergei Paradjanov isn't the artist the Soviets are most proud of. When he was sent to prison, where he spent most of the '70s, the charges ranged from trafficking in illegal art objects and manipulating currencies to engaging in homosexual practices and "incitement to suicide."
His reputation in this country is based on two films, "Shadow of Our Forgotten Ancestors," which came out in 1964, and "The Color of Pomegranates," which was made in 1969, but didn't reach these shores until it was smuggled out eight years later. Both established him in the top rank of international filmmakers. But, after his release from jail in 1978, he was reimprisoned in 1982 (for attempted bribery) and his career as a director, most thought, was finished.
That his latest film, "The Legend of the Suram Fortress," the first he's made in 15 years, has reached this country only a year after its completion is a remarkable achievement in itself. But its significance may be more political than artistic.
It's impossible to watch even a few feet of film by Paradjanov without acknowledging his mastery of the medium and the originality of his vision.
Essentially, he has a painter's eye, expressed in a fondness for exotic damasks in rich purple and school-bus yellow, in still-life tableaux with peacock feathers, animal hooves, bruised fruit and brassy-gold samovars. But while you revel in the visual textures and the just-slightly-skewed formal symmetries, you wonder where you are in the narrative, who the characters are, where the action is taking place. The legend here, which deals with a monarch's mostly failed attempts to rebuild the crumbling Suram castle and protect his empire, isn't as resonant as the individual images.
And Paradjanov's storytelling skills aren't as well-developed as his visual ones. (The film -- which was codirected by Dodo Abashidze -- is so fragmented and the narrative gaps so wide that it's hard to believe we're seeing the full version.) With its cast of tightrope walkers, jugglers and fortune-tellers, the movie plays like folk performance art -- a mixture of primitive and postmodern impulses. It's entrancing, at times, but inscrutable.
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
Based on one of the national myths of his native
As usual, Paradjanov presents his narrative in discrete sequences that are intended to symbolize various themes (spiritual, social, political) rather than as links in a conventional linear narrative. The viewer must let the story sink in, as it were, obliquely. As far as one can piece it together, the tale concerns a young man involved in the building of the eponymous fortress, intended to protect the community from hostile tribes, who flees persecution after continuous attempts to complete the structure result in the crumbling of the walls. He promises his lover that he will return, but he betrays his promise by joining a tribe of nomadic exiles, and marrying and having a son within it. The spurned lover becomes a seer, and eventually the leaders of the city must visit her in order to learn how to overcome the spell that prevents them from completing the fortress.
Continuing his life project of creating a cinematic language for folkloric wisdom, Paradjanov makes extensive use of longshot to evoke an archaic feeling of tribal struggle against a background of forbidding landscapes. The movement of figures within the frame often takes on the flavor of ceremony, or dance. But unlike Color of Pomegranates, the spiritual forces seem unconscious, connected to poetic truth only through the medium of rituals that are tainted by violence. With its themes of exile, grinding poverty, and blood sacrifice, Suram is both a tribute to and a critique of ancient ethnic belief. The richness and wild energy of his previous films have given way to a vision of a broken world (the reliance on jump cuts is a telling indicator) suffering a loss of faith that is only apparently resolved by the fable's disturbing resolution.
In order to appreciate Paradjanov's work, it is probably best to view his films in the order they were created. In the light of his first two works, this third film is a tragically moving parable of disillusionment, and a bitter comment on nationalistic fervor of all kinds, now and then.
Reviews: Legend of
Suram Fortress [and] Ashik Kerib
Paghat the Ratgirl
VERTIGO
| Shadows of Sergei Paradjanov - Close-Up Film Centre James Norton, Spring 2010
Dionysus in Georgia: Paradjanov on DVD: The Color of Pomegranates ... Gary Morris from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 1, 2001, also seen here: Bright Lights Film Journal | Sergei Paradjanov
Paradjanov on DVD | Jonathan Rosenbaum Jonathan Rosenbaum, originally from Cineaste magazine, June 2003
The
Films of Sergei Paradjanov | PopMatters Paradjanov Box Set: A Four Part Review,
by Erik Hinton, April 17, 2008
DVD Times Noel Megahey
DVD Outsider Slarek
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
AvaxHome -> Sergei Paradjanov-Ambavi Suramis tsikhitsa ('The ...
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] 2-disc dvd review
Stop Smiling Online [Michael Joshua Rowin] The Films of Sergei Paradjanov, 4-disc dvd review
DVDBeaver.com [Gregory Meshman]
ASHIK KERIB A- 94
Georgia Russia (73 mi) 1988 co-director: Dodo Abashidze
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
Sergei Paradjanov's 1988 film, loosely adapted from Lermontov's tale about a Turkish minstrel and maiden, is a relatively minor work with much personal and autobiographical significance. But minor Paradjanov would qualify as something very close to major from most other filmmakers. The style is somewhat akin to the frontal tableaux vivants of The Color of Pomegranates with the addition of some camera movement, dialogue, and offscreen narration; the Azerbaijani dialogue and the subtitled Georgian narration tell the story proper, though the visuals tend to be more illustrative than is usual with Paradjanov. But even if Ashik Kerib were only a collection of beautiful shots (and it is clearly more than that), they'd still be some of the most beautiful shots to be found in late-Soviet cinema—richly colored, mysterious, and magical. 78 min.
In a period of the undefined past, Ashik Kerib is a wandering minstrel, a lute player and singer, who falls for a rich merchant's daughter, is spurned by the father (minstrels are poor functionaries), and is despatched, to wander for 1001 nights, but not before he's made the girl promise not to marry till his return. True to Paradjanov's unique method, the ensuing episodic tale of his meetings, experiences, difficulties and growth are told in a blaze of visually splendid 'tableaux vivants' and miraculous images and symbols (doves, swans, pomegranates), intercut with religious iconic works and artefacts, and overlaid with song and poetry. The source is a story by poet Mikhail Lermontov, but the interpretation, though grounded in the world of ethnic cultural references of the Turkish (Muslim) Azerbaijani peoples, is free, open, sensual and personal. There are coded messages of the tribulations of the artist here, and also a playful, mischievous comedic tone that allays any feeling of self-absorbtion on the director's part. Astonishing.
Reviews: Legend of
Suram Fortress [and] Ashik Kerib
Paghat the Ratgirl
Dionysus in Georgia: Paradjanov on DVD: The Color of Pomegranates ... Gary Morris from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 1, 2001, also seen here: Bright Lights Film Journal | Sergei Paradjanov
Paradjanov on DVD | Jonathan Rosenbaum Jonathan Rosenbaum, originally from Cineaste magazine, June 2003
VERTIGO
| Shadows of Sergei Paradjanov - Close-Up Film Centre James Norton, Spring 2010
The
Films of Sergei Paradjanov | PopMatters Paradjanov Box Set: A Four Part Review,
by Erik Hinton, April 17, 2008
DVD Times Noel Megahey
DVD Outsider Slarek
User reviews from imdb Author: Niffiwan from Toronto, Canada
not coming to a theater near you (Ian Johnston) capsule review
AvaxHome -> Sergei Paradjanov - The Hoary Legends Of The Caucasus ...
Ashik Kerib (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] 2-disc dvd review
Stop Smiling Online [Michael Joshua Rowin] The Films of Sergei Paradjanov, 4-disc dvd review
The New York Times (Walter Goodman) review
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gary W. Tooze]
DVDBeaver.com [Gregory Meshman]
THE CONFESSION
Georgia Russia
Cinema Scope » Columns | Gloval Discoveries on DVD: Critical Editions Jonathan Rosenbaum from Cinema Scope (end of article excerpt)
Is the restored version from Kino Video of Die Puppe (The Doll, 1919), one of my favourite Lubitsch comedies, a “critical edition”? It’s very nearly that by virtue of being complemented by Robert Fischer’s feature-length 2006 documentary Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin on the same disc. But I can’t bring myself to call the same label’s belated and highly welcome release of Sergei Paradjanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964) a critical edition in any shape or form. Admittedly, someone has gone to the trouble of including an 8-minute experimental film of 1985 “dedicated” to Paradjanov, as well as a recent 39-minute documentary by someone else about Paradjanov and Tarkovsky that juxtaposes clips and documentary footage relating to both and a brief account of their friendship and mutual admiration. But, as with so many other Russian editions of Soviet films, the overall rule seems to be to throw various materials at us while identifying practically nothing. (Just for starters, Paradjanov’s imprisonment and Tarkovsky’s exile are both noted so sketchily—alluded to rather than explained—that practically no information about either is imparted). Facts are so hard to come by involving Paradjanov’s life and career that it’s frustrating that we’re not even offered a biographical sketch here as we are in the Clémenti set, and the continuing unavailability of Paradjanov’s awesome Confession—an unfinished fragment made just before his death in 1990 that I value much more than either of his last two features, The Legend of Suram Fortress (1984) and Ashik Kerib (1988)—is equally vexing.
PARAJANOV: THE LAST SPRING
User reviews from imdb Author: czcimea from Czech
Republic, Prague
I don't remember the last time I wanted to see a documentary twice but I am a film student and this highly unusual documentary was completely inspirational and changed me greatly. It was really wonderful to watch Paradjanov working on the set, see those fantastic collages of Mona Lisa he made and find out about the horrors of his imprisonment. Not a typical documentary though, feels like a movie, like a dream. The ending almost made me cry, it is a genius ending. 9/10
User reviews from imdb Author: yearz from London,
England
I saw this film many years ago in
Parisot, Dean
GALAXY QUEST
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Galaxy Quest (1999) Kim
Newman from Sight and Sound, May 2000
The US, the present. Cancelled in
1983, the television show Galaxy Quest remains the subject of a
fanatical cult following. The stars of the show - egotistical Jason Nesmith
(Commander Peter Quincy Taggart), Gwen DeMarco (Tawny Madison), Alexander Dane
(alien Dr Lazarus), Fred Kwan (Technical Sergeant Chen) and grown-up child-star
Tommy Webber (Pilot Laredo) - are reunited at a Quest convention.
Nesmith is approached by Mathesar, a real alien from the planet Thermia.
Mathesar's civilisation has no concept of fiction and takes the television
heroes for the real thing. Aboard a working replica of the spaceship Protector,
Nesmith is asked to negotiate with alien-tyrant Sarris and, thinking this is an
acting job, orders an attack. Later, he persuades his fellow cast members, plus
bit-player Guy Fleegman (once a nameless victim on the show), to join in the
quest.
Escaping Sarris, the crew visit a
desolate planet and secure a replacement for a damaged power source which enables
the actors to approximate their on-screen heroics. Sarris catches up with the
ship and Nesmith is forced to reveal to Mathesar he's only an actor, but -
using a comm-link to obsessive Quest fans on Earth for guidance -
Nesmith is able to save the day. The Thermians take over the ship and the crew
return to the convention, where Nesmith finishes off Sarris before an audience
of Quest fans. A new series of Galaxy Quest goes into
production, with Guy joining the crew.
Review
Positing a fictional science-fiction
series whose actors are suddenly whisked off by real aliens for an adventure, Galaxy
Quest evokes the universe of Star Trek producer Gene
Roddenberry with a keen awareness of such shows' potential absurdities and
tackiness. Bit-part actor Guy worries he's the expendable crew member due a
horrible early death until it's suggested he might be the "plucky comic
relief"; a trip through the starship is needlessly dangerous and complex,
prompting Gwen to protest, "This was a badly written episode." It also
embodies the ship-in-a-bottle utopia of Star Trek far more
successfully than any of the pompous or camp feature films Paramount has spun
out of its tattered franchise. While managing to satirise Trek,
its famously testy cast and its obsessive fans without real viciousness, it's
still exactly the sort of picture which could be shown at a Star Trek
convention.
It's an obvious ploy to have a
character move from being a cynical-but-pathetic has-been to a gloryhound
fantasist to a genuine hero, but Tim Allen's Nesmith/Taggart is a respectful
evocation of the mix of bedrock decency and naughty-boy rebellion that
characterised William Shatner's Captain Kirk. This is one of Allen's more
comfortable big-screen roles, even when he takes on such Shatner/Kirk staples
as a shirtless scene and a mock punch-up with his alien best friend. Sigourney
Weaver, always an underrated comedienne, finds a moment of real strength when
she insists on doing her scripted job (repeating everything the ship's computer
says) no matter how stupid it is, and goes along gamely with the adolescent
premise by showing more and more cleavage as the perils increase.
The concept is not entirely
original, having precedents in The Last Starfighter, where a
video-games champion was needed to win a space war, and the cable series Adventures
of Captain Zoom, in which the vain star of a 50s sci-fi show is asked to
become a real hero by a race like Quest's Thermians. However, this
is a far healthier production which flits easily between showing the lightly
caricatured world of Quest fandom (nerds bombard actors with
technical questions, dumpy women in unflattering uniforms stand around mooning
over middle-aged matinee idols), the career afterlives of former stars and
adventure. Aside from spaceship sets whose clean, television sci-fi look still
feels like a 'real' environment, there are genuinely imaginative special
effects which manage to be recognisably in the spirit of the cheesy originals.
The plot creates tension between the go-it-alone heroism of Allen's character and the grumbling of his often-overshadowed crew. But the film accords each cast member funny bits of business - after a space battle, a terrified Alan Rickman leaves the ship's bridge with the cry of, "I'm looking for a pub" - and there are amusing sub-plots. Tony Shalhoub's Kwan misses a crucial revelation and so is much more casual about dire peril than his teammates, while Sam Rockwell's Guy incredulously exclaims as the crew wander into danger, "Didn't you watch the show?" After finally impressing on the others he might really be endangered, Gwen makes the supremely unreassuring statement: "Let's get out of here before something eats Guy."
Park Chan-ok
JEALOUSY IS MY MIDDLE NAME B 88
South Korea
South Korea seems
to have cornered the market on terrific roles for sweet guys, something we
rarely see done well. Last year, one of
the best South Korean films seen, besides TURNING GATE, was ONE FINE SPRING
DAY. What’s interesting about this first
time, writer-director’s very assured style, besides her remarkable character
development, is how she offers very subtle shifts in character and takes a
departure from what we anticipate. Park
Hae-il plays a reserved, understated role as a guy who has just broken up with
his girl friend, a character whose presence continues throughout, yet she is
never seen on screen. But the next girl
he finds, Bae Jong-ok, is more of a free spirit, and seems to be more than he
can handle, as she starts sleeping with his boss as well. The title of the film is misleading, as it
suggests a mindset that I didn’t see in this film at all. Instead, we see an intelligent, soft-spoken
guy who is more hurt than jealous, but, wisely, it never changes the way he
behaves towards anyone, and it is his likable charm and appeal that carries
this film.
Park
Chan-wook
With the development of civilization and the rise in
education levels, people have had to hide their rage, hate and grudges deep
within them. But this does not mean that
these emotions go away. As relationships
become more and more intricate, the rage only grows more and more. While modern society is burdening the
individual with a growing sense of rage, the outlets through which people can
release their rage are becoming narrower. This is an unhealthy situation, and it’s
probably why art exists. In reality,
however, the vengeances represented in my movies are not actual vengeances. They are merely the transferring of a guilty
conscience. My films are stories of
people who place the blame for their actions on others because they refuse to
take on the blame themselves. Therefore,
rather than movies purporting to be of revenge, it would be more accurate to
see my films as ones stressing morality, with guilty consciences as the core
subject matter. The constantly recurring
theme is the guilty conscience. Because
they are always conscious of and obsessed with their wrongdoings, which are
committed because they are inherently unavoidable in life, my characters are
fundamentally good people. The fact that
people have to resort to another type of violence in order to subjugate their
initial guilty consciences is the most basic quality of tragedy characteristic
in my movies thus far.
—Park Chan-wook
Interview: Park Chan-wook - Film Comment Goran Topalovic interview, October 28, 2016
Ever since Park Chan-wook’s 2003 Cannes Grand Prix winner Oldboy—a film that epitomized the New Korean Cinema and turned the hammer-wielding Choi Min-sik into an icon—he has maintained a reputation among his most ardent fans as the master of operatic tales of vengeance and creative expressions of extreme violence. But one important element in his films tends to get overlooked, and that’s his continuing examination of the female psyche—especially in Lady Vengeance (2005), I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006), Crush and Blush (2008; an underrated black comedy that Park produced and co-wrote for director Lee Kyoung-mi), his English-language debut Stoker (2013), and his new period drama, The Handmaiden, which screened in competition at Cannes last May. While his films couldn’t feel further from being quiet chamber pieces, Park’s focus on female characters and their resilience in the face of the larger societal forces suggest a through-the-looking-glass kinship with Mikio Naruse, one of his favorite filmmakers who was known as a great director of women.
In his films, Naruse effectively examined the impact of modernity on working-class women in mid-20th-century Japan, especially in his frequent collaborations with the legendary actress Hideko Takamine—the character of Lady Hideko in The Handmaiden is named after her. While the setting for Park’s films is primarily the world of late modernity, both his and Naruse’s heroines are not passive observers of their circumstances, but are trying to be in control of their own destiny, staying true to their emotions and following their desires—from finding love to getting revenge—despite the odds. Whether consciously or not, Park ultimately wants us to pay attention to the increased complexity of the roles of women (and men) in society caused by ever-accelerating technological change, be it the modernity of colonial Korea in The Handmaiden, or the late capitalist dystopia of the Vengeance Trilogy.
Set in 1930s Korea under Japanese colonial rule, The Handmaiden is at its core a sensual tale of romance between two women: Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), a Japanese noblewoman who lives on a secluded estate belonging to her overbearing Uncle Kouzuki (Cho Jin-woong), and her new Korean maid Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri), who is secretly plotting with con artist Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo) to defraud Hideko of a large inheritance. Inspired by the Victorian-era lesbian crime tale Fingersmith from Welsh novelist Sarah Waters, the genesis of The Handmaiden was also made possible by two women. First, it was the wife of producer Syd Lim (Oldboy, Crying Fist, The Handmaiden) who read Fingersmith and thought that it would make for a great movie; and second, director Park’s wife encouraged him to follow up Stoker with another female-centric film, while he was contemplating another project.
Film Comment spoke to Park while he was in New York for a mini-retrospective of his films at Metrograph, organized by the Korean Cultural Center, and the U.S. release of The Handmaiden. The interview took place in an evening car ride across town, which reminded the director of Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis.
Starting with Lady Vengeance, there has been a shift toward female protagonists in your films. How did this come about?
It’s because in Oldboy, the lead female character, Mi-do [Kang Hye-jung], is somebody who is not privy to the truth. That was something that didn’t sit right with me, even though, as the daughter of Dae-su [Choi Min-sik], she needed to be excluded from the truth by the necessity of the narrative. So as I started to develop Lady Vengeance, I got to think about this a little bit. In the film industry, in the realm of the commercial feature-length films, we really haven’t had a lot of female protagonists. I got to realize this more, as I was getting ready to make Lady Vengeance. And when you place a woman at the center of a film, it makes the film that much more enriched, and it makes it feel much more sophisticated. Also, I have one daughter, and as she grew older, I had more of an opportunity to talk to her. Between my wife and my daughter, I have learned to see the world through more of the female perspective, and I would call that progress—I became more mature as a person.
Do you see The Handmaiden as the culmination of your exploration of female characters?
I wouldn’t exactly call it a culmination, but it’s a movie where I pushed the feminist perspective the most. This film is fundamentally different from my previous films because it’s about two women—it’s not just one woman fighting a lonely battle—but it is two women who find love and form a bond of solidarity. Overall, The Handmaiden is a very simple film. It divides everything into two clear sides, and that’s to make a point. It pits man against woman, almost as a battle of the sexes, and you have the female characters forming an alliance to fight against the male oppressors and escaping from them. In this film, all the men are villains and all the men are pathetic. The only cool characters are women. And the only positive male characters in the film are one or two babies [Laughs].
Lady Hideko and Sook-hee prove superior to the male characters, and there’s a sense that they don’t have any need for men.
Yes, even if that feels like a fairy-tale world—in fact the last scene does feel like that, doesn’t it? With the moon, the ocean, and the clouds, with the colors that I used in the last scene, I wanted to imbue it with that kind of beauty. Even if it’s a fairy tale, I wanted to end on a note where we’re dreaming about this type of idealized world.
The newcomer Kim Tae-ri shines as Hideko’s maid Sook-hee. Can you tell us a bit about the casting process?
We saw around 1470 young women during the audition, but didn’t end up selecting any of them. We just couldn’t find the right actress until the very end. I would like to say one thing about the casting process: if you find yourself in a situation where you are wondering if anyone from the short list is the right person for the role, that probably means that none of them are right. An actor should stand before you and you should immediately feel that the person is right for the role, and this was the case when we cast Kim Tae-ri. We came across her based on a recommendation that was made by one of our producers. At the audition, Kim Tae-ri didn’t seem to be at all concerned about appearing pretty. She did her best, and she gave the performance in her own way, not something that anyone else could’ve done. It’s as if she was saying “this is me, take it or leave it.” Seeing her, I was looking at a very independent and empowered woman.
What do you hope that the audience will take away from The Handmaiden?
Everything that I wanted to say with this film is probably in this one scene where the women are jumping over the stone wall—and notice how low this wall is. Had she ever wished, Lady Hideko could’ve always jumped over that wall. But the deep-rooted emotional trauma inside her was holding her back. And then this person [Sook-hee] enters her life and she is able to find love. Through that love, Hideko gains bravery that allows her to jump over that wall, in a single breath, toward freedom.
The male characters also appear trapped. Even though they try to control the women, they are prisoners of their own selfish desires. And since they don’t know how to love, liberation is not possible for them.
Yes, exactly. It’s because of their greed.
There’s a conversation that takes place between the Count and Kouzuki in the library. The Count asks, “Why this urge to become Japanese?” To which Kouzuki replies, “Because Korea is ugly and Japan is beautiful.” What does this exchange tell us about Korea’s historical experience with foreign cultures, particularly when it comes to the Japanese occupation, and even the U.S. influence since the Korean War?
There are those people in Korean society, found among the intellectuals in the upper class, who during the Japanese occupation would worship the Japanese. These days, they could be worshiping the Americans, and some of them might be worshiping the French or the Germans. And above all else, prior to the Japanese occupation, the Koreans have been worshiping the Chinese for hundreds of years, and that’s something that had become part of the conscience of some section of the ruling class and some of the intellectuals of the day. There’s a Korean term, sadaejuui, that is used to uniquely express this notion, where the people of a smaller nation are so drawn to the power of a larger nation, and become subservient to that power. They internalize it so much that they are not worshiping the bigger power by force, but are doing it voluntarily. Through the character of Uncle Kouzuki, I wanted to paint a portrait of these poor, sad, and pathetic individuals—who are poor, I say—but who become a big threat and a serious danger for the other people of their nation.
This also makes for an interesting dynamic between Lady Hideko and Kouzuki.
Uncle Kouzuki is neither Japanese nor a nobleman. Hideko is both Japanese and of noble birth, which is what Kouzuki aspires to. Even though she has raised her from childhood, Kouzuki cannot do what he pleases with Hideko, since he recognizes that she is inherently superior to him by birth, because of the values that he holds dear. And this also affects Kouzuki’s relationship with Count Fujiwara. Kouzuki is deceived so completely by the Count, because he thinks that he is Japanese and of noble birth, and he’s simply unable to suspect him of any wrongdoing.
I may be reading too much into it, but if we look at this simplified battle between a man and a woman in symbolic terms, we could say that Korea represents the female and that the occupying foreign influence represents the male.
I can see why you feel that may be the case, and that sort of dynamic is organically created, but it’s not something that I consciously intended.
ingersmith is set in Victorian England. Why did you choose to move it to the 1930s Korea during the Japanese rule?
I found out that the BBC had already made a miniseries based on Fingersmith, and because there was a preexisting work, I didn’t want to follow in its footsteps and also set the film in Victorian England. So producer Syd Lim came up with the idea that we move the setting to 1930s Korea, since it was also a period of transition, as the country was going through modernization.
Lim mentioned how he came across Oldboy manga, which served as the source material for your landmark film, when he was bored and visited a comic book shop. How important is boredom and leisure time for the creative process?
It is very important. That kind of free time, idle time, is essential for the people in this industry. However, the more experience you have, and the further in your career you get, there are far less opportunities for leisure. So we have to fight to somehow obtain that sort of idle, free time. In the old days, it used to be that a director would make a movie, and that would be it. But nowadays, you can’t expect that. It was probably when Hitchcock became a bit of a star director that this kind of tradition was established, where directors are also expected to be actively engaged in promoting the film, to give interviews and talk about their films. All of these activities cut into your free time.
And I get the sense that you don’t like talking about your films that much?
That’s the only thing about being a film director that is difficult for me. As a film director, I get asked those kinds of questions—“Oh Park, what was the most difficult thing that you had to contend with during the screenwriting stage or during the process of directing this film?”—and I would always say that nothing was difficult; I enjoy every step of the process, I enjoy every aspect, every facet of it. If there is one thing that I find difficult, it is this—promotion.
You are known as an avid reader. How important do you think reading and exposure to literature are for aspiring filmmakers?
The way I see it, only a handful of filmmakers from each generation join the pantheon of the masters. Out of all the young filmmakers out there, only a handful will be remembered as greats in the future, so maybe only a handful of those young filmmakers are doing a lot of reading—who knows?
What are you currently reading?
Émile Zola’s La Bête humaine—I have almost finished reading it. It is scary good! So good that I can’t figure out why I’m only reading it now. After Thérèse Raquin [upon which Thirst (2009) was loosely based], I’m thinking, do I have to do another film inspired by Émile Zola?
You worked as a film critic in the 1990s. Do you miss writing about film?
Not at all! That work is something that can be very important and can be fun. But for me, the work was the one I did to put bread on the table for my family. So I only have memories of it being a burden and a lot of work. You see the predicament: I want to be making my films, but here I am spending all my time watching other people’s films and analyzing them.
It’s been mentioned on many occasions that seeing Hitchcock’s Vertigo made you decide to become a film director. Who are some other filmmakers that have inspired you and influenced your work?
I’m not sure about other people, but for me, I don’t watch any movie more than once. I’m not the type of person who plays a movie, replays a scene over and over again in order to analyze how the scene was structured, how the shot was composed. I don’t do that. I don’t study film when I watch film. I’m actually not sure how much influence I get from filmmakers whose works I like, because I even forgot about the films of theirs that I have watched in the past. Under that caveat, Yasuzo Masumura is a film director whose films never cease to amaze me. He has had a very interesting career. He went to Tokyo University law school, meaning that he’s from the elite. Yet his films don’t feel at all like they were made by someone from the elite. It’s more like they were made by a crazy, eccentric person! The other filmmaker that I really like is Mikio Naruse. You might get the feeling that his films are on the opposite end of the spectrum when compared to my films, but I feel inexplicably drawn to them. His films have such power that I broke my rule and have watched his films twice, three times! [Laughs]
What ambitions do you still have as a filmmaker? Things you still want to accomplish, certain stories that you want to tell?
A lot! I would like to make better films, the kind of films that will stay in people’s memory for a long time. And the kinds of films that would be screened at cinematheques time and time again, and people would revisit them on Blu-rays, and what have you. In terms of genres, I’d love to try my hand at a Western, sci-fi movie, spy movie, musical… I haven’t done any of those yet.
So what’s going to be next?
Not sure. There are a number of projects that I am developing, but I don’t even know yet if my next film is going to be in English or Korean.
Park Chan Wook - South Korean director's website
Park Chan-wook biography by Tom Vick from All Movie Guide
HanCinema Director
Page brief bio
"Contemporary South Korean Auteurs" Rachael McConkey from Trauma Film (undated)
Blood Feuds Michael Atkinson from The Village Voice, August 14, 2001
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) Ryan
Gilbey from Sight and Sound, July
2003
Park Chan-wook's World of Personal Introspection: The Subtext of ... The Subtext of Cinematic Space in Old Boy, by Boris Trbic from the Korean Film Page, October 27, 2004
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; Sometimes Blood Really Isn't Indelible - New ... Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, March 3, 2005
Notes on Park
Chan-wook's Joint Security Area • Senses of Cinema Christopher Bourne, April 15, 2005
Filmmaker Magazine | Winter 2005: GETTING EVEN Nick Twemlow from Filmmaker magazine, Winter 2005
FIPRESCI
- Undercurrent - #2 - Lady Vengeance
Steve Erickson, 2006
BFI | Sight &
Sound | Vengeance Is Theirs a
look at South Korean cinema by Grady Hendrix from Sight and Sound, February
2006
Mr. Vengeance
Ian Buruma from The New York
Times, April 9, 2006
"Yellow
Sea Rising: The Resurrection of South Korean Cinema" Christian Blauvelt from Day for Night magazine, Spring 2008
Tartan "Asia
Extreme" films, text version
Chi-Yun Shin from Jump Cut,
Spring 2008
"The
New Cult Canon: Oldboy" Scott
Tobias from The Onion,
Scott Macaulay Cinema With Bite: On the Films of Park Chan-wook, an overview on the
director from Film in Focus, May
19, 2009
Park Chan-wook's Entire Revenge Trilogy Now Set To Be Remade ... Rob Hunter from Film School Rejects, January 7, 2010
Last Ten
Films: Park Chan-wook - Film Comment
February 21, 2013
Film Trilogies: New Critical Approaches, Perkins & Verevis book review by Radha O’Meara from Senses of Cinema, June 29, 2013
The
10 Most Distinct Traits of Park Chan-wook's Cinema « Taste of ... Panos Kotzathanasis from Taste of Cinema, August 15, 2016
Park
Chan-wook: The reluctant auteur - CNN.com
Thomas Page, October 18, 2016
The
Best & The Rest: The Films Of Park Chan-Wook Ranked Jessica Kiang and Oliver Lyttelton from The Playlist, October 19, 2016
Park
Chan-wook Is a Master of Desire – The Ringer K. Austin Collins, October 24, 2016
Where
to begin with Park Chan-wook | BFI
Leigh Singer from BFI Screen
Online, April 13, 2017
"Dialogue:
Park Chan-wook" Mark Russell
interview by The Hollywood Reporter,
SuicideGirls
interview with Park Chan-wook Daniel
Robert Epstein interview from Suicide Girls,
Cinema Strikes Back (Charlie Prince) review [4/4] which includes an interview
BFI | Sight &
Sound | Interview: Park Chan-wook Ali
Jaafar interview from Sight and Sound,
February 2006
BOMB Magazine: Park Chanwook by Esther K. Chae Esther K. Chae interview from Bomb magazine, Summer 2006
Bright Lights Film Journal :: Interview with Park Chan-wook Damon Smith interview, August 2006
Between Productions [Robert Cashill] interview with the director from Cineaste, Fall 2006
Total
Sci-Fi Online review Matt McCallister, which includes an interview
Park
Chan-wook: interview David Jenkins
interview from Time Out London,
Wheel Me Out - Issue Four. Alex Fitch interview from Wheel Me Out, 2009
Hollywood Reporter Park Chan-wook interview at
The
Insider | Park Chan-wook - T Magazine Blog - NYTimes.com Joy Dietrich interview from The New York Times magazine The Insider,
Park
Chan Wook Has An Irresistible 'Thirst' : AsianWeek Dino-Ray Ramos interview from Asian Week,
Salon (Andrew O'Hehir) review feature and interview
"A.V. Club
interview with Park Chan-wook"
Keith Phipps interview from The
Onion A.V. Club,
Park
Chan-Wook: interview Tom Huddleston
interview from Time Out London,
October 13, 2009
Shock horror! Park Chan-Wook is refreshingly normal | Film | The ... Andrea Hubert interview from The Guardian, October 17, 2009
Park Chan-Wook's
Humor and Heart - Page - Interview Magazine Emma Brown interview, October 26, 2016
Park
Chan-wook interview: The Handmaiden, film critics | Den of Geek Ryan Lamble interview, April 14, 2017
Interview
with Park Chan-wook, member of the Feature Films Jury ... Cannes festival interview May 26, 2017
Park Chan-wook - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
JUDGMENT
(Simpan)
aka: Justice
After a wave of national disasters, insurance companies and the South Korean government offer compensation to victims' families. Inside a morgue, two grieving parents and a doctor both claim a disfigured body as their long-lost daughter. South Korean. Original title: Simpan.
Made after two features but a year before his break-out hit JSA,
Justice is seldom achieved.
User reviews from imdb Author: only_kam from
There are a number of features which this film does not possess: a
blockbuster budget, award-winning acting or extravagant imagery. Though
thankfully, all this can be set aside considering the fact that it still
possessed many of the features which make a Park Chan-Wook film great.
The biggest mention has got to be rewarded to the film score. There are two
words to describe this; chilling and haunting. Though I will not give too much
away, whenever the main tune appeared, it did not fail to send an eerie chill
down my spine. Only Park Chan-Wook veterans would understand.
Next has to be the camera technique. You see that Park Chan-Wook understands
the limitations set for a short-small budget film but yet plays of the strength
of this. The macabre setting of a morgue, the focus on different objects, as
well as the sad TV footage remains at the forefront of your mind even after the
film ends.
The change in mood and hints of dark humour, modestly delivered are examples of
what is to come with this director. Although the acting is not spectacular
either, Park Chan-Wook does try to give depth to them, via a heavy reliance of
dialogue and plot twists.
All in all though Simpan is not a film to be watched first without having
watched any of Park Chan-Wook's big budget films beforehand (namely the revenge
trilogies). However, if you have watched his other films, and appreciate his
skills in directing, then you will surely be able to appreciate the raw talent
that is evident in this movie.
DVD Verdict- Cinema 16: World Short Films [James A. Stewart]
JOINT
SECURITY AREA
Time Out review Tony Rayns
An incident in the JSA (the demilitarised zone between North
and
Tuna from Asian Cinema Drifter (link lost)
It started out as a generic military
thriller/mystery involving the usual differing flashbacks with the added twist
of North and
Two murdered North Korean soldiers are found dead on their side of the Joint
Security Area (the border between North and
Aside from the slightly tedious start, JSA’s strengths lie in the script and
the characters. Through early flashbacks we are informed that the conflict
arose out of a forbidden act of friendship. Two South Korean soldiers find
themselves good friends in two North Korean soldiers, but given the strict
division and tension, (demonstrated well in the beginning even for foreign
audiences) they are forced to secretly meet in the night. Easily being able to
shift from the fun dialogues between the friends, and the tense political
relations, Park
Chan-wook puts the emphasis on the characters to make the
murders so much more meaningful. We’re left very early in the film trying to
figure out the intricate aspects of the four soldier’s relationships, even if
we understand the eventual outcome.
Most of the drama from the story comes from our connections with the
characters. Everything they are doing is right. They are revealing the
stupidity behind borders and separation with the message that they can still be
friends and have no differences. Although is sounds like a cheesy after-school
special, it really works giving us a genuine feeling friendship that brings a
smile to your face, especially in scenes where they have to do their jobs while
secretly remaining friends. The sole plot problem lies in the Neutral
investigator actually, who is outshined by the charisma and interaction of the
soldiers. I’ve heard the source material is more focused on the investigator,
but in the film it seems to drag and feel more like filler rather than the
initial plot. Still, it’s minor, as the character relationships are strong
pulls for the whole film once it gets going.
All fine performances by the four main soldiers each conveying their respective
character well even with their eccentric qualities, such as Kim Tae-woo
providing a convincing and strong nervousness to add stress to crucial scenes with
Song Kang-ho’s counteractive composure. The Neutral officer played by Lee
Yeong-ae is often regarded as wooden and out of place but she’s best taken
lightly. By shifting focus to the flashbacks it just becomes a minor problem
and nevertheless she isn’t awful, she just has no draw to her character.
With subtle technical brilliance, Park tweaks the film just with noteworthy,
yet simple editing and transitions . The cinematography is well-done with some
fantastic dramatic shots and points of view (say on both sides of the bridge?)
A favorite although seemingly insignificant technical quality was the lighting,
which films rarely take advantage of these days. JSA takes place mostly at
night, but was filmed with this warm mood enabling the night scenes to seem
more welcoming than the day. On the practical side of things, it also tends to
be a pain to watch films reliant on incomprehensible night scenes and with
whatever Park's reason, his lighting managed to kill the thematic bird and this
bird with one stone.
With a completely objective view on the situation and focus on the themes and
characters’ friendships, Joint Security Area comes recommended as a nice
introduction to Park Chan Wook, and as a political thriller for people who
don’t like political thrillers.
Joint Security Area Darcy Paquet from the Korean Film Page
For the second year in a row, the Korean film
industry has struck gold with a movie about
Park Chan-wook's film opens with a shooting
in the truce
JSA is described as a mystery/ human drama, and its structure is clearly divided into two parts: the investigation by Korean-Swiss Major Sophie Jean, and an extended flashback to the incident between the soldiers. I think most would agree that the film's biggest strength is the flashback, with actors Song Kang-ho and Lee Byung-heon excelling in their roles. This part of the film also features some breathtaking cinematography for the scenes that take place along the Demilitarized Zone.
The mystery element contains less tension, particularly if the viewer knows too much about the plot beforehand. Attention is focused not so much on what happened, but why. This part also contains a large number of scenes in English, which may have to be redubbed if the film opens in English-speaking territories. Nonetheless it has been noted by critics and audience members alike for its rare casting of a female actor (Lee Young-ae) in a non-romantic part.
The producers of the film spared no expense in
recreating the setting around
The film has won more or less unanimous praise from every sector of Korean society, with one exception: the army. Many in the military have derided the film as pure fantasy, based on an event which could never happen in real life (probably true). In a bizarre incident on September 26, twenty older members of the JSA Veterans' Association stormed into the office of Myung Film, breaking windows and physically threatening the employees of the company. They demanded that the production company issue a public apology to the army and insert notices at the beginning and end of the movie stating that it is a work of fiction. After four hours, the employees of Myung Film acquiesced, and despite vocal objection from the film industry, the group's demands are being met.
Some have compared this film to Shiri
because of its superficial resemblance, but it really is a much different work.
As relations with
Notes on Park Chan-wook's Joint Security Area • Senses of Cinema Christopher Bourne, April 15, 2005
"Art horror films" text version Joan Hawkins from Jump Cut, Spring 2009
VideoVista review Richard Bowden
World Socialist Web Site review Stefan Steinberg
DVD Times Anthony Nield
Twitch Todd Brown
MediaCircus (Anthony Leong) review
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [5/5]
The Onion A.V. Club review Noel
eFilmCritic.com (David Cornelius) review [5/5]
Celluloid Dreams Simon Hill
Future Movies (Matt McAllister) review [7/10]
DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [3/5]
DVD Town (Yunda Eddie Feng) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Joel Pearce) dvd review
DVD Talk (John Wallis) dvd review [4/5]
MovieFreak.com (Dylan Grant) dvd review [7/10]
Hong Kong Digital (DVD Review) John Charles
Choking on Popcorn Mariken
Korean Grindhouse Drew P.
Cinespot - All About Asian Cinema Kantorates
Asian Cinema Drifter Tarun
Plume Noire review Fred Thom
Offoffoff.com review Joshua Tanzer
Film-Forward.com George Tan
The
Village Voice [Michael Atkinson] Blood Feuds,
Quentin Tarantino's top 20 movies since Reservoir Dogs - scanners Jim Emerson from Scanners, August 20, 2009
Comic
Critic: Jsa. Mark Monlux, The Comic Critic
The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [0/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
CRITIC'S
NOTEBOOK; Sometimes Blood Really Isn't Indelible - New ... Manohla Dargis from The New York Times,
DVDBeaver dvd review Henrik Sylow
SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE
You would have to go all the way back to Robert Aldrich at his most grotesque to match this Korean ‘kidnap gone wrong’ movie for intensity, cynicism, and sheer balls-out bravado. Mind you, while it’s not quite gore a-go-go like Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer, it’s frequently, quite literally, stomach churning. Deaf and dumb Ryu (Shin) is screwing revolutionary agitator Young-Mi (Bae), and is so devoted to his older sister that he sells his kidney on the black market in a desperate deal to get her a life-saving transplant. They rip him up and rip him off. Young-Mi comes up with a better plan: they will ‘borrow’ the young daughter of the capitalist boss who fired him (Song) and raise funds that way. Fine in theory. In practice, well, let’s just say: Don’t expect laughs. But do expect myriad scenes of torture and death, visual and aural invention, some narrative confusion and implausibility, political overtones, and an overwhelming cruelty as psychological as it is physical.
After the smashing success of his breakthrough film Joint Security Area (2000), director Park Chan-wook had the opportunity to make just about any kind of movie he wanted. His ultimate decision was to go back to a scenario he had written in the mid-1990s: a grim, violent tale about the kidnapping of a young girl and the father who sets out for revenge. Back in 1995, Park didn't have a chance of finding someone to fund such a film... after JSA, however, he was practically handed a blank check. The end result is wondrous and horrible, a movie that will give you nightmares but leave you in awe of its power.
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance opens with the narration of Ryu, a deaf man with bleached green hair who works in a smelting factory. Ryu is desperate to find a kidney transplant for his dying sister, and he assures her he will do everything in his power to save her. When his initial plans fail, however, he and his girlfriend, a leftist with radical views, find themselves contemplating the unthinkable.
Of the film's many strengths, the first to stand out is its cast. After playing the two North Korean soldiers in JSA, Song Kang-ho and Shin Ha-kyun return, this time aligned against each other. They are joined by one of the hottest young actresses in the industry, Bae Doona, in the role of Ryu's girlfriend. All three actors possess great talent, and are well-directed by Park. The film's cinematography is remarkable too, achieving an ordinary but utterly distinctive look. The movie is shot almost entirely in daylight, with little camera movement and almost no music.
Before this film was released, word leaked out about its grim tone, and viewers who may have originally hoped for JSA 2 largely stayed away. The local critical response was highly mixed; some gave the film great praise, while others criticized its excessive violence.
Joint Security Area also contained a fair share of pessimism and violence, however that film balances the dark moments with episodes of humor and warmth. Sympathy, however, does no such thing: it begins relentlessly pessimistic, and only grows more savage towards the end. It is ironic that much of the violence in this film finds its roots in love. This is no way dulls the film's edges, though -- viewers will find it very difficult to watch, but those with the stomach to sit through to the end will be treated to a rare artistic achievement.
Tuna from Asian Cinema Drifter (link lost)
What a painful film. Incredibly beautiful and brutal, Sympathy for Mr.
Vengeance just angers the viewer to the point of utter desperation. The whole
film is tormenting as the characters engage you in the first five minutes and
just repeatedly haunt you through cold violence and dark emotion. With a
seemingly obvious departure from JSA, Park
Chan-wook crafts a thematically similar work that deals with
relationship, conflicting emotion, desperate situations but most importantly
his newest venture, vengeance.
Ryu, our green haired, deaf and dumb protagonist needs a kidney for his sick
sister. After an illegal organ deal gone bad and the chance donation of a
suitable kidney, Ryu needs 10 million won in less than a week to pay for the
operation. With the help of his activist girlfriend, they plot a *safe*
kidnapping of his boss’s young daughter but things take a turn for the worse
spiraling into conflicting vengeance.
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance takes quite possibly the most unfortunate sequence
of events committed to a film. The mainstream current placeholder is apparently
Requiem for a Dream, which can’t compare in those terms to this moody tragedy.
Think you’re having a bad week? Sit back, watch and either depress yourself
extensively, or feel significantly better about your life.
The characters immediately hook you with poor Ryu just getting kicked around by
his boss and his sister’s doctor. Things are merely getting started when he
loses his transplant money in several physically and emotionally painful scenes
for him. The characters grab you immediately and you can’t help rooting for
them. Exploration behind the characters motives always leaves them to be
understandable human characters under the harshest of circumstances. Events may
soon become predictable, but yet you wince at the thoughts and uncontrollably
hope for a happy outcome.
Song Kang-ho
follows up his two previous hits with a fine performance. It isn’t entirely
effective as the script delivers a generally negative persona for him while he
does offer explanation for his actions through his acting. The show stealer is
Shin Ha-kyun as Ryu who arouses so much sympathy and comes across entirely
convincing with the deaf role. He is absolutely perfect in revealing his
emotion and thoughts using only his expressions and the occasional subtitles in
conversation for his sign language. His girlfriend played by Bae Du-na
is befitting as the tough but likable support for Ryu. Using seemingly little
depth in the characters, the screenplay and acting performances are strong enough
to carry the intensity of the film.
Park Chan Wook does it once again, matching the narrative of Sympathy
technically. The camera is a noticeable departure from JSA as here; he uses the
dead camera style for beautiful shot composition and images. It feels like
Kitano as he presents powerful long or establishing shots that maintain the
melancholy ambiance and then combines it with the intensity of painful
close-ups. There are so many set-up shots that staged scenes so well,
encompassing all the necessary elements along with the tragic emptiness of
locations. The only possible problem was the lack of a soundtrack as the
closest we got to music was some five-second crashing rock type music at key
moments. They were quite effective, yet out of place due to the long gaps
between them. They show that a soundtrack could have added more to the scenes,
but Park's decision maintains it may have taken away from the moodiness, which
remains the first priority.
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance comes highly recommended for a serious viewing.
Emotionally powerful and sometimes a bit slow, it's anything but a breezy
watch; it’s much more than that. Park really proves himself by moving in a
different direction and creating something that he seems more passionate about
than JSA. The film feels like a Takashi
Miike one at times with the violence and offbeat characters, but
is handled much more
Sympathy,
But No Devil - Gay City News Steve
Erickson, August 18, 2005
In 2001, a new
aesthetic bridging the arthouse and grindhouse came aboveground with the
American release of Takashi Miike’s “Audition,” made two years earlier, and
Catherine Breillat’s “Fat Girl.”
Such artsploitation
films combine extremes of sex and violence with stylistic choices, slow pacing,
and an openness to wide tonal shifts alien to ordinary genre films. Needless to
say, this development hasn’t been greeted with cheers everywhere. Nor have any
artsploitation films become major
However, many have
found an enthusiastic cult audience, especially on DVD. If artsploitation films
have one thing in common, it’s restoring pain to screen violence. In a American
context, that’s what’s most interesting and valuable about them. In Doug
Liman’s popular Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie vehicle “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” murder
has less moral, emotional, or even physical weight than a fender-bender; the
privileges of stardom include the right to kill without consequences. Its
violence is antiseptic.
By contrast,
“Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” is awash with blood and urine. Its torture scenes
are difficult to watch, as they should be. Its chain of bloodshed is permeated
with loss and grief. Which depiction does more to trivialize violence? Yet “Mr.
and Mrs. Smith” is rated PG-13, while even the trailer for “Sympathy for Mr.
Vengeance” is rated R.
A deaf and mute
man, Ryu (Shin Ha-kyun), works at a smelting factory. His sister will die
unless she gets a kidney transplant soon. His situation deteriorates further
when he’s fired from his job and gets ripped off by organ traffickers. His
activist girlfriend Yeong-mi (Bae Doona) comes up with a strategy––making money
by kidnapping his former boss’ daughter. Yeong-mi insists that it will be a
“good kidnapping,” in which the girl will be well taken care of and returned to
her father as soon as he delivers the money, but things go awry.
Ryu’s sister
commits suicide. While he buries her body near a riverside, the kidnapped girl
goes for a walk and accidentally drowns. Her father, Park Dong-jin (Song
Kang-ho), comes after Ryu and Yeong-mi.
Made in 2002,
“Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” is the first part of a trilogy about revenge. Its
successor, “Oldboy,” was re-leased earlier this year, and the third film,
“Sympathy for Lady Vengeance,” will come out next fall or winter.
“Sympathy for Mr.
Vengeance” isn’t exactly realistic—unless Korean urinals are plastered with
stickers aimed at human organ buyers––but it’s less grounded in myth and fantasy
than “Oldboy,” whose plot pivots around a hypnotist so powerful that he can
keep the protagonist totally under his thrall. In a statement in the press kit,
Park says that “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” contains “a small amount of
realism... the reality of one who considers the world a barren desert.”
Avoiding the
desperately hip flash of “Oldboy,” this prequel’s vision of urban despair––all
dingy colors, claustrophobic apartments, and so much noise pollution that
deafness seems preferable––is a thoroughly believable environment. In some
respects, “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” is a neo-noir, its narrative a spiral of
violence that no one seems able to stop after an initial crime sets a chain in
motion. It has a stylized, hyper-real quality, particularly in its vivid sound
design.
Park doesn’t avoid
close-ups, but he frequently uses panoramic long shots with deep focus,
directly facing the action. The background is often filled with activity,
whether visual or aural. In one key scene, a character listens to a radio
played by men in the next apartment, a space Park often connects to Ryu’s
through unbroken tracking shots. These directorial decisions emphasize the
extent to which no man or woman is an island.
There are no heroes
in “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance,” no one the audience can safely identify with.
But there are also no real villains. The characters are victims of a moral
climate in which compassion is dead and everyone thinks the ends justify the
means. However, their worst actions are rooted in understandable situations and
emotions––economic desperation and the pain of seeing a loved one die. The
title is serious. Park does indeed have sympathy for “Mr. Vengeance”––who could
be any of the three main characters at various points––and expects us to supply
the empathy so lacking on-screen.
Rich or poor, CEO
or anarchist, everyone in “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” has the same
vulnerabilities and succumbs to the same amorality. While the film’s anger
about corporate irresponsibility and poor people’s lack of access to health
care feels genuine, its leftists offer no real alternative to the society they
claim to oppose, although they do turn the ending into an ironic, if bloody,
joke.
In addition to Park’s trilogy, Tartan releases a line of films straight-to-video
under the “Asia Extreme” banner. It would be a shame if “Sympathy for Mr.
Vengeance” wound up in such a cultist ghetto after a token two-week theatrical
run. It’s Asian, and its violence may be extreme, but its investigation of
revenge fantasies describes something very real in American culture and
politics, as well as
FIPRESCI
- Undercurrent - #2 - Lady Vengeance
Steve Erickson, 2006
Oct Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
BFI | Sight & Sound | Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) Ryan Gilbey from Sight and Sound, July 2003
BFI | Sight &
Sound | Vengeance Is Theirs a
look at South Korean cinema by Grady Hendrix from Sight and Sound, February
2006
Torture
Chamber Drama: Park Chan-wook's “Sympathy for ... - IndieWire Brad Westcott, Karen Wilson, and Nick
Pinkertson at Reverse Shot for indieWIRE, August 15, 2005
DVD Outsider Slarek
The Onion A.V. Club review Tasha Robinson
Filmbrain Like Anna Karina’s Sweater
VideoVista review Gary McMahon
Film Monthly (Alexander Rojas) review
PopMatters (Jesse Hassenger) dvd review
filmcritic.com (Nicholas Schager) review [2/5]
The New York Sun (Nathan Lee) review
Cinedie Asia Luis Canau
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3.5/4]
DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [4/5]
DVD Verdict (Joel Pearce) dvd review
DVD Town (William David Lee) dvd review
JackassCritics.com ("The Grim Ringler") dvd review [7/10]
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
sneersnipe (David Perilli) review
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [C+]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Asian Cinema Drifter Tarun
Comingsoon.net review Edward Douglas
Film Journal International (Daniel Eagan) review
The Horror Review [Horror Bob]
DreadCentral.com DVD review Andrew Kasch
CHUD.com (Devin Faraci) review
The Spinning Image (Daniel Auty) review
Ruthless Reviews review Erich Schulte
The Village Voice [James Crawford]
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B]
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [3.5/5]
Korean Grindhouse Drew P.
Jam! Movies review Jim Slotek
Eye for Film ("Heimdal") review [3.5/5]
The World's Greatest Critic [J.C. Maçek III]
The Lumière Reader Aaron Yap
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [2.5/4]
Offoffoff.com review Joshua Tanzer
Movie Gazette (Gary Panton) dvd
review [7/10]
Window to the Movies (Jeffrey Chen) capsule review [7/10]
Film-Forward.com Michael Wong
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [1/5] also seen here: Jay's Movie Blog
BFI | Sight & Sound | Interview: Park Chan-wook Ali Jaafar interviews from Sight and Sound, February 2006
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/4]
Channel 4 film [Ali Catterall]
BBC Films review Jamie Russell
Boston Globe review [3/4] Wesley Morris
The Boston Phoenix review Brett Michel
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
San Francisco Chronicle [G. Allen Johnson]
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review
Chicago Tribune [Michael Phillips]
The
New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review
CRITIC'S
NOTEBOOK; Sometimes Blood Really Isn't Indelible - New ... Manohla Dargis from The New York Times,
DVDBeaver dvd review Henrik Sylow
DVDBeaver.com - Full Review [Kin Ho]
IF YOU WERE ME
User reviews from imdb Author: J Chang from
This omnibus film, sponsored by the National Human Rights Commission of
Korea, featured six short films covering the theme of "prejudice" or
"discrimination". Like its successor, this allows for a broad range
of films, from straightforward examinations via linear narrative, to science
fiction, hybrid documentary/fiction and so on. Each of these contextualizes a
societal issue in
The opening film, "The Weight of Her", is a very straightforward work
set in an all-girl's school. It's protagonist is an overweight young woman who
has to confront the regular societal pressures not only to be thin, but also
the pressures to be beautiful (as defined by the culture) and ladylike. We
follow the protagonist as she struggles with herself and her situation of being
genetically disfavored by society. There's a bit of a twist at the end, but not
one that necessarily makes you feel any better about the plight of women in
The second film is the most curious of them all. "The Man with the
Affair" deals with a complex, troublesome and shunned element of society
in its titular character. What makes it curious is that the story actually
focuses around a young boy, but even more so, it's set in a dystopian future. I
was particularly impressed with the weight of oppression that the setting
brings, but the story itself doesn't really let us into the subject and instead
we are more engrossed in the plight of the protagonist, which has an element
relating to the theme itself, but the distance from part of the core of the
film creates enough friction to make this an admirable, but flawed effort.
The third film, "Crossing" encounters a man with what appears to be
cerebral palsy. What's striking about this piece is that the actors are all
clearly people who actually have the conditions that their characters portray.
Otherwise, the piece is a non-linear work, much like a visual journal and while
it does connect with the theme, it's more about humanizing the protagonist to
us. Unfortunately, the story doesn't fully tie together and so the piece is
left uneven, with good acting and characterization, but a bit of an aimless
story that does conclude, but, not being so reflexive or existentialist, it's
story doesn't really strike in any way. Nonetheless, it's remarkable for the
positive points mentioned above.
The fourth film, "Tongue Tie" is a story about a child and the
problem that his parents perceive him to have. It's a rather shocking piece and
one that I can't necessarily recommend just because not everyone can handle it.
But it does an immense job of raising questions when it's over, especially
about the parent/child relationship as well as the pressures facing children in
the cutthroat competitive workforce that they face even decades in their
futures. It's not for everyone, but has a surprising amount of merit when it's
all said and done.
The fifth film, "Face Value" is also a very interesting tale that
centers on a man who wakes up in a parking garage after a night of heavy drinking.
It deals with his encounter with an attractive garage attendant and
straightforwardly breaks class and gender prejudices. There is a bit of a twist
at the end that turns this story into something else, but I had a hard time
trying to figure out why it was necessary. The piece has good characterization,
decent acting and interesting dialog, but doesn't necessarily bring it beyond a
modest work.
The final film, "
Almost all of the directors featured have at least one film that I love, so it
was quite interesting to see some of their approaches to the task set before
them. Overall, I have to admit that while this is a good work, the segments are
of varying cohesiveness and successfulness. Nevertheless, each attempt has
something valuable about it. It's a good work and merits viewing, with caveats
as mentioned above. 7/10.
Film Details: If You Were Me 1 [6 Short Films] [Korean LE 2-Disc ... HK Flix
Discrimination can come in all shapes, sizes and colors. This may be why it took six local directors to make one feature film on the subject.
"Yosotgae-ui Sison (If You Were Me)" is a compilation of six short films of varying lengths and moods by noted feature filmmakers. The project was organized and funded by the Human Rights Commission of Korea, which asked the directors to each create an episode dealing with the issue of discrimination as they saw fit.
The film first debuted as the opener at the Jeonju International Film Festival in April and has made the rounds at domestic and international film events, most recently screening at last month's Pusan International Film Festival.
Though the responses of festival-goers have been positive, some still questioned whether the film would be commercially viable if released in theaters. Given the short run of "Sontaek (The Road Taken)," another recent feature film with a strong social message, things may not bode well for "If You Were Me" when it opens this Friday.
However, since the film does include new works by such noted directors as Park Chan-wuk (Joint Security Area), it has a fighting chance at the box office. And regardless of its commercial success, the Human Rights Commission and the film's makers should still take satisfaction in the fact that such a feature film was able to find its way to the theater at all.
As for the film itself, the results are predictably disparate, reflecting the different personalities and styles of the participating directors. Along with Park, the film includes some of the more interesting young independent directors, along with a few who are approaching the middle of their careers.
Of the six short films, the ones that seem to work best take on the subject of discrimination head-on. Im Sun-rye's "The Weight of Her," the film's first episode, is an involving look at how the pressure to look thin and beautiful drives students at a commercial high school. Focusing on the experiences of one young student as she tries to meet the approval of her teachers and society, Yim successfully balances the seriousness of the problem with lyricism and humor.
Another winner is "Tongue Tie" by Park Jin-pyo, which shows how far some parents go to have their children speak better English. The story takes place in a pediatrician's office where a young boy undergoes surgery on his tongue to enable him to pronounce the "R" sound more naturally.
The jarringly colorful office with its television monitor playing animations and a nurse dressed up as a bunny rabbit is surreal enough, but more disturbing is how Park takes footage from real tongue surgeries and mixes them into his story. Much like his feature film "Chukodo Chowa (Too Young to Die)," the boundary between fiction and reality becomes blurred with provocative results.
The four other episodes of "If You Were Me" seem less direct and concrete about the nature of discrimination. The most abstract is Jeong Jae-eun's "The Man With an Affair," in which a young bed-wetter crosses paths with a sex offender in an apartment complex where thought control runs rampant. Jeon seems to be criticizing how society tries to use shame as a form of punishment, but her point gets lost in the imagistic narrative.
"Face Value" by Park Gwang-su revolves around an argument between a female employee at a parking garage and a male customer. The director tries to link their fight to the fact that they?e both good-looking and to their assumptions about each other, but it's a tenuous connection at best.
Yeo Gyun-dong's "Crossing" is a well-intentioned story about the struggles of a handicapped man that just tries to do too much in 14 minutes.
Ending the film is Park's "Never Ending Peace and Love," the astonishing true story of a Nepalese woman who, while working in South Korea, becomes mistaken for a mentally ill Korean after losing her purse and any proof of her identity.
Beginning and ending with the woman back at her home in Nepal, the film tells of how the South Korean people who came in contact with her refused to believe that she wasn't Korean and she ended up spending over six years in a mental institution. Though rough in parts, Park subtly shows the difficulty of being different in a homogenous society through an absurd situation where the opposite was true.
If You Were Me Adam Hartzell from The Korean Film Page
Inner
Turbulence: The 4th New York Korean Film Festival • Senses of ... Christopher Bourne from Senses of Cinema, October 28, 2004
If You Were
Me | The American Prospect Noy
Thrupkaew from The American Prospect,
World
premiere of If You Were Me to open Korea's Jeonju fest ... Darcy Paquet from Screendaily,
If You Were Me Korean Movie Database
If You Were Me - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
OLD BOY C 74
"My films are the stories of people who place the blame for their actions on others because they refuse to take on the blame themselves."
—Park Chan-wook
To say this is not
my bag is putting it mildly. Despite
whatever technical brilliance people may attribute to this director, I find it
ridiculously manipulative, filled with the obsessive ruminations of a sadistic
control freak who wishes to prey his manic mindgames on the audience in the
name of highbrow entertainment or art.
Obviously there is a place for films lke this, as the director has taken
on an iconic stature among great filmmakers, blending violence and horror with
a kind of twisted psychological edge like THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962), but
rather than confine his movie to the movie screen, Park’s real target is the
audience, where he just wants to squeeze every last ounce of sweat or
anticipatory anxiety out of them. My
problem is I’m just not that interested.
Drawing on genre stereotypes, all the characters take on a fantasy good
and evil comic book persona, where there’s little else to go on. Choi Min-sik plays Dae-su, something of a
self-centered, arrogant drunk, who after cooling his heels in a police station
calls home to inform his daughter he’s bringing her a birthday present, but
he’s kidnapped instead and held captive for fifteen years, fed dumplings on
daily basis, where his only company is an empty room with a television. He hasn’t a clue who is doing this to him, or
why, as nothing else is communicated to him.
His demeanor grows more subdued and inert, yet all he thinks about is
getting back at whoever is doing this to him.
One day, inexplicably, he’s released without a word, an amazing and somewhat
humorous exit. A stranger gives him a
wallet filled with money and a cell phone, where his captor calls and continues
to humiliate him.
Heightened in stature after receiving the
Michael Wilmington
examines the trilogy from the Chicago
Tribune (link lost):
Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy--comprising
three dazzling, thematically related tales of bloody revenge--is the Korean
cinema's equivalent of the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood western trilogy. Like
that series, Park's trio of contemporary urban thrillers is a virtuoso popular
genre work, which breaks boundaries and drenches the screen in fear, beauty,
dark humor, bloodshed and horror.
"Oldboy"
(2003), my choice as best of the three, begins with a mystery, the strange
kidnapping and imprisonment of a boorish businessman (Choi Min-sik, the star of
Im Kwon-taek's "Chihwaseon") for 15 years, by unknown captors.
Finally released, he embarks on a "Point Blank"-style one-man
vendetta, which leads him to a vicious string-pulling mastermind and his own
dark past. An explosion of violence and action, staged and shot with
unparalleled intensity, "Oldboy" was the Grand Jury Prize winner
(runner-up award to the Palme d'Or) at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival--where its
most passionate partisan was jury president Quentin Tarantino.
Oldboy Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
A willfully unpleasant and needlessly overbearing viewing experience, Old Boy has such an intelligently conceived premise that I'd actually have preferred to see it tackled by another director. I have no prior experience with Park, but his overly mannered visual style (washed-out purplish grunge with fluorescent light so blanched that it ceases to be blistering or even striking, and just recedes into the overall mud) and his idiotic "operatic' gestures (hyper-caffeinated camerawork that makes City of God look like Edward Yang; needlessly assaultive, oh-so-contrapuntal use of the most obvious compositions from the classical canon) tend to undercut the story's inherent power at every turn. And this is the case in terms of character motivation and actorly behavior as well. Example: the big third-act revelation is so nerve-jangling on its own, that we need to just sit with it, to roll it over in our minds and let its full horror sink in. But no, the Old Boy has a psychotic freak-out that Pacino would reject as blowsy scenery-chewing. He barks like a dog, licks things, severs his own . . . well, you get the idea. And this non-stop hypertensive tone just becomes, against all odds, boring. Also, isn't anyone else bothered by the script's ridiculous reliance on hypnosis as a deus-ex-machina? Twice?
Time
Out London review
It’s easy to feel blasé about the steady stream of action-oriented movies from the Far East, but this latest head-spinner from the director of the crunching ‘Sympathy for Mr Vengeance’ is far, far too good to leave to the ‘Asia Extreme’ crowd.
When we first meet businessman Oh Dae-Su (Choi Min-Sik), he’s a drunken boor, though he’d doubtless sober up if he knew what was coming. Abducted by persons unknown, he’s held prisoner for 15 years, until he’s just as unexpectedly released. Still none the wiser, he falls into a relationship with a sushi-bar hostess, whereupon his captor contacts him by mobile and offers a deal: if he can work out why he was kidnapped in the first place, the villain will offer up his life – if not, the girl cops it.
For Oh Dae-Su, getting mad and getting even amount to virtually the same thing. The sequence where he rearranges some low-life’s dental work will doubtless attract over-excited attention, much like the jaw-dropping one-take hammer-wielding skirmish in a corridor. But the upfront mayhem shouldn’t be allowed to distract from the film’s emotional depth or indeed its brilliant lead performance. For the protagonist, vengeance is a voyage of discovery, yet his newfound propensity towards violence troubles him, and his burning desire to confront his secretive nemesis may be fuelled by lingering self-doubt that he deserved his fate. Whatever happens, he’ll never be the same man again.
Choi
Min-Sik is in the Pacino or De Niro class, running the gamut from
terrifying rage to abject degradation. The implausibilities in the plot melt
away because we’re living the experience with him, thanks also in part to the
bravura expressiveness of Park’s direction. Hitchcock and Fincher are reference
points, but this combines visceral punch, a tortured humanity and even an
underlying Korean political resonance given the weight of the past. Quite an
achievement then, and well worthy of its
Tuna from Asian
Cinema Drifter (link lost):
After Sympathy for
Mr. Vengeance, the Old Boy anticipation grew, and knowing of its second place
at
On his young daughter’s birthday, Oh Daesu is on his way home with a present
for her. After using a phone, he disappears no more than four feet behind his
friend and finds himself imprisoned in what looks like a hotel room. He is held
there for fifteen years with no explanation whatsoever. With nothing but a
television set and daily meals, he slowly finds an escape and begins what any
logical person would do after. Find the answers as to why, and seek brutal
torturous revenge against whoever did it.
Old Boy kicks off with a sharp contrast playing out the early talkative Oh
Daesu. We undergo major character shifts in the first fifteen minutes as he
convincingly transforms into a stolid vengeful man through a stylish montage of
television programming, cogitative preparation and physical training. Daesu
then turns to the audience, starting a voice-over narrative that solemnly
guides us through his journey and envokes an awkward bittersweet sympathy for
him. The entire aura of mystery and his dark monologues fit perfectly as the imprisonment
scenes capture the confinement and intensity of the situation. It’s a shame
when the plot begins to alter its direction and lay everything on the table for
plot advancement. The ambiguity of the early scenes created an appealing mood
for the film but in order for the plot to work, the mystery was shed rather
early. It’s interesting how a result of this comes when after Daesu gets out;
the mystery is rather limited, confining him to a set path that feels just as
constrained as his prison. Along his path of revenge we’re treated to offbeat
characters and violence that leans in the Miike direction, and a fun fight
sequence that plays with your mind as much as the plot does. The middle lacks
the pull and curiosity, which the beginning holds, but once it all begins to
wind down and tie up, it ends on fantastic note. It feels like it’s taunting
you when you step back and notice the plot has manipulated you too.
Fantastic performances all around, most notably, Choi Min-sik as Oh Daesu,
walking along the edge of insanity while struggling to retain compassion, and
dramatically shifting to make it feel like he played three characters instead
of just one. Yu Ji-tae turns in a believable performance too in a nice change
from the last role I saw him in.
The technical brilliance has also improved here with merely the little things.
The camera work is superb, distinctively adding to this feeling of confinement
we feel with close-ups and tight shooting. My favorite change was the addition
of a soundtrack, which Park hardly used much in his last two works. Merely as a
classical film score with an underlying techno and waltz tune, it compliments
the mood in ways making it difficult to imagine the film without one. Blandness
might have overcome it without effective montages or musical accompaniment to
the fights and dramatic moments. The overall composition strangely works too,
as the lighting effectively makes most scenes feel gloomy, but even in broad
daylight something about the character presence and mood reveal dark
undertones.
Old Boy comes highly recommended as the third step in Park’s gradual
progression. Solidifying himself as
Framed, Hero Seeks
Answers - Gay City News Steve Erickson, March 24, 2005
“Oldboy” starts with a bang and doesn’t let go for the first
half hour.
Businessman Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) sits in a police station after a drunken
night out. Loud and obnoxious, he annoys the cops so much that they handcuff
him. A friend bails him out. Then the real story kicks in.
Oh wakes up the next morning in a prison cell, which resembles a hotel room. He
spends the next 15 years there, with only cable TV to keep him company. His
captors feed him fried dumplings. He tries to figure out who would want to keep
him hostage. Then one day, he’s freed, dumped on a
The plot gets far more complex from there, but the film begins going downhill
once Oh leaves the cell. It starts out as a story full of possibilities,
directed in an exciting style. Soon, its look gets tired. The washed-out
lighting and green-tinged cinematography are intended to be stylish, but just
become ugly. The editing that works so well in the opening scene becomes too
hyperactive for the good of the film.
“Oldboy” is the second part of a trilogy of Park films about revenge. The
finale, “Sympathy For Lady Vengeance,” will be completed later this year, and
the first one, “Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance” will be released this year on video
in the
In a New York Times article about Park, critic Manohla Dargis accused him—and
several other Asian and French directors—of bringing the foul air of
exploitation films into the art house, offering up a brand of ultra-violence
that encourages audience apathy. However, “Oldboy” loses its humanity through a
plot that espouses a cynical determinism, rather than bloodshed. It’s hard to
explain exactly what’s so problematic about it without giving away the ending.
The narrative becomes so implausible that it’s impossible to take at face
value.
Does it work as an allegory? Is the struggle between Oh and his nemesis Lee a
reflection on the battles between North and
The first interpretation doesn’t really fit, and the second indulges a banal
fatalism. Like M. Night Shyamalan at his worst, Park likes twists for their own
sake, without really thinking through their emotional implications.
On some level, Park seems aware of how callow his film’s sensibility is; the
title seems to acknowledge as much. Despite being a middle-aged family man, Oh
has never really grown up, but he looks quite mature next to Lee. Their
conflicts are ultimately rooted in high school, the name of which Lee takes his
e-mail address from. Unlike many American films about retribution, “Oldboy”
never glorifies this impulse. Instead, it’s clearly a form of madness that
degrades everyone in its path.
All the same, the film is not very analytical. Park seems more enamored of
suave posturing than interested in thinking about it. He also has a taste for
cheap gross-out scenes. At a sushi restaurant, Oh eats a live octopus, passing
out with its tentacles dangling from his mouth, a pitiful waste of wildlife.
Even at his goriest, Japanese director Takashi Miike, also mentioned in Dargis’
article, usually gives the impression that he cares about his characters; the
carnage is often a metaphor for his characters’ failed attempts to connect to
others. Unlike his work, “Oldboy” ultimately isn’t a film about people, just
about plot twists and fluorescent lighting. What little heart it has stems from
Choi’s performance. “Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance” offered a more substantial
take on a set of similar themes. The Korean director Jang Jun-hwan’s film “Save
the Green Planet,” which opens next month at Film Forum, matches the hipness
quotient of “Oldboy,” maintains a seductive style through a complex series of
tonal changes and actually has something to say.
“Oldboy” will certainly expand the audience for Park’s earlier and worthier
films, and I suspect that it may become a cult film. Even if it has finally
brought him the attention of Western viewers, it’s a step down for him.
Old Boy Kyu Hyun Kim from the Korean Film Page
Watching this sucker-puncher of a movie in the
venerable-but-revamped Hollywood Theater in
It is a rare thing these days that a motion picture transports me back to the times that turned me into a lifelong film fan, when I felt in my bones the pleasures of discovering a new work, that spoke new languages and showed the things I had never seen before, yet did so in the manner that was also deeply familiar, because it was so solidly grounded in the idioms and conventions of the cinematic works that had come before it. A film that gives me the same sense of shock and pleasure that I felt when I saw Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) or Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974) for the first time in my life. Old Boy is one such film, sometimes thought to have become extinct in this age of mobile phones and video games.
The diabolically talented writer-director of Joint Security Area (2000) and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Pak Chan-wook, determined not to repeat the commercial failure of Sympathy, has carefully plotted his counterattack, recruiting Choi Min-shik (Chihwaseon, Failan, Shiri) and Yu Ji-tae (One Fine Spring Day, Ditto, Nightmare), organizing the movie around their star personalities, and devising a mystery plot that revolves not around the question of "whodunit" but that of "whydunit."
Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-shik), a grumpy businessman with a wife and a toddler daughter, is kidnapped by a group of gangsters. It turns out that they operate a private prison, and someone has paid them an astronomical amount of money to incarcerate him indefinitely. Compelled to rusticate for years and years inside a dingy, dark cell, with fried dumplings his only choice of menu, Oh is overcome with the desire for revenge. However, just when he is about to break free from his prison, he is dumped into the street. He hooks up with a young female sushi chef Mido (Kang Hye-jeong, the teenage guide from Nabi: The Butterfly), to locate the man responsible for robbing him fifteen years of his life.
The basic setup and title of the movie are derived from Tsuchiya Garon and Minegishi Nobuaki's Japanese comic, but the plot, characters and everything else have been completely re-worked. The movie blows away the ijime-obsessed faux-existentialist machismo of the original and instead plunges into the themes far more universally resonant, as ancient as the scarred bones interred in our ancestral tombs: the unrequited (and unrequitable) love and the Biblical suffering that such a love brings to the hapless, hypocritical animals that we are.
Choi Min-shik, looking like a mangled lion with a hyena-chomped black mane, gives the most electrifying performance of his career. His role runs the gamut from the Lee Marvin-like taciturn heroics of a seventies crime thriller to the spectacular implosion of a broken man, pitifully wailing and literally licking the shoes of his enemy, and everything in between. The film's final image, Choi's vacantly joyful, yet infinitely sad smile, will etch itself into your retinas and refuse to fade for a long, long time. Yu Ji-tae uses his lean, equine physique and contemptuously bland voice to illustrate an almost surrealistic character, part a villain in a James Bond movie, part a Greek God fallen from Mount Olympus and releasing his pale furies against the mortals. The movie's real acting revelation, however, may well be Kang Hye-jeong, at turns dangerously sexy and achingly vulnerable. There is little doubt that this role will launch her into stardom.
One could easily compile a book analyzing shot by shot the techniques used in Old Boy, its multiple parallels, extravagant leaps and surgically precise abbreviations. There is something ingenious, interesting or at the very least eye-catching in practically every shot of the film. The dialogue is also amazing, the previously unheard-of Korean that somehow combines the rhythm of Bond-film one-liners, the tone of lyrical poetry and the dry wit of the narrations in a hard-boiled crime novel, arch and fluid one minute, pitiless and cutting to the bone the next.
Old Boy is definitely not the kind of film that can win the endorsement of every viewer. A sizable number of the audience will no doubt find the film's resolution or even thematic material repulsive. Others may be turned off by its excesses that occasionally slip into plain weirdness (Do we really have to see Choi Min-shik chowing down a squirming, live octopus headfirst?). Its violence, while not as unblinkingly brutal as in Sympathy, is still disturbing enough to generate an NC-17 rating if turned over to the MPAA.
In the end, though, even its excesses and manic quirkiness are part of Old Boy's design. Unwatchably ugly and breathtakingly beautiful, gut-wrenching and delicate, heartbreakingly emotional and coldly manipulative, mind-bogglingly entertaining and almost arrogantly artistic, Old Boy is a mass of contradictions that nonetheless coheres as a whole. It is unclear at this point whether the movie can eventually claim the position of a world-class masterpiece, but one thing is certain for me: Old Boy is without doubt the most purely cinematic (both in form and content) piece of work, the truest motion picture, released in South Korea this year.
Park Chan-wook's World of Personal Introspection: The Subtext of ... The Subtext of Cinematic Space in Old Boy, by Boris Trbic from the Korean Film Page, October 27, 2004
FIPRESCI
- Undercurrent - #2 - Lady Vengeance
Steve Erickson, 2006
Tartan
"Asia Extreme" films, text version Chi-Yun Shin from Jump Cut, Spring 2008
Fight
Schlub: Park Chan-wook’s “Oldboy”
Suzanne Scott, Michael Joshua Rowin, and Jeff Reichert at Reverse Shot
from indieWIRE,
Oldboy
meets Kill Bill - Archive - Reverse Shot
Blood Feud, Oldboy meets
Kill Bill, by Michael Joshua Rowin, May 15, 2005
"The
New Cult Canon: Oldboy" Scott
Tobias from The Onion,
The Onion A.V. Club review Scott Tobias,
Ferdy on Films [Roderick Heath]
Gotterdammerung [Branislav L. Slantchev]
Between Productions [Robert Cashill] April 19, 2007
FilmBrain Review Like Ana Karina’s Sweater
Beyond Hollywood review James Mudge
Slate (David Edelstein) review
Village Voice (Michael Atkinson) review
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
Plume Noire review Sandrine Marques
Teleport City Cinematics (Keith Allison) review
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
The New York Sun (Nathan Lee) review
MediaCircus (Anthony Leong) review
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [7/10]
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
PopMatters (Marco Lanzagorta) dvd review
stylusmagazine.com (Jen Cameron) review
eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [5/5]
CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) review
Movie-Vault.com (Avril Carruthers) review [7/10]
Ain't It Cool News Harry Knowles
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
DVD Times Kevin Gilvear
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3.5/4]
DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation John Carpenter
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell) dvd review
DVD Talk (David Walker) dvd review [5/5]
Hong Kong Digital - DVD Review John Charles
DVD Clinic ("Sturdy") dvd review [4/5]
DVD Outsider Slarek, 2-disc Special Edition
DVD Times - 2 Disc Special Edition Alex Hewison
Movie Gazette (Anton Bitel) dvd review [9/10] 2-disc Special Edition
DVD Clinic (Jason Adams) dvd review [5/5] [Special Edition]
DVD Talk (Randy Miller III) dvd review [4/5] [Collector's Edition] 3-disc Collector’s Edition
DVD Verdict (Joel Pearce) dvd review [Ultimate Edition] 3-disc Collector’s Edition
DVD Town (William David Lee) dvd review 3-disc Collector’s Edition
DVD-Dweeb.Com (Oliver Korioth) dvd review [Collector's Edition]
DVDActive (Gabriel Powers) dvd review [10/10] [Collector's Edition]
Beyond Hollywood dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] James Mudge
DVD Verdict (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Talk (Daniel Hirshleifer) dvd review [3/5] [Blu-Ray Version]
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nate Goss, Blu-Ray
filmcritic.com (David Thomas) review [4.5/5]
Monsters At Play (John Kostka) dvd review
Cinescape review Oren Kamara
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Asian Cinema Drifter Tarun
Film School Rejects [Rob Hunter]
The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review George Wu
Bloody-Disgusting review [5/5] Brad Miska (Mr. Disgusting)
Kamera.co.uk review Oliver Berry
eFilmCritic.com (Dr Nick) review [5/5]
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [4/5]
eFilmCritic.com (David Cornelius) review [5/5]
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [2.5/4]
hybridmagazine.com review Nathan Baran
The Lumière Reader Tim Gray
VideoVista review Alasdair Stuart
The Spinning Image (Daniel Auty) review
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [C+]
Offoffoff.com review Joshua Tanzer
Film Monthly (Del Harvey) review
Movie Habit (Marty Mapes) review [4/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Luke Pyzik) review [5/5]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review Collector’s Edition, also seen here: SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [3.5/4]
Premiere.com review Glenn Kenny
Eye for Film (Keith Hennessey Brown) review [4/5]
Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [4/5]
Eye for Film (Iain Macleod) review [5/5]
Jam! Movies review Jim Slotek
The Horror Review [Horror Bob]
Ruthless Reviews review Erich Schulte
Film Journal International (Daniel Eagan) review
Electric Shadows David Wester
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
CHUD.com (Devin Faraci) review
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [1.5/4]
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B+]
Korean Grindhouse Drew P.
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
Motion Picture Purgatory (Rick Trembles) review [image] comic
Between Productions [Robert Cashill] interview with the director from Cineaste, Fall 2006
Entertainment Weekly review [C] Lisa Schwarzbaum
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/4]
Channel 4 Film [Daniel Etherington]
BBCi - Films Jamie Russell
BBCi - Films (DVD review) Stella Papamichael
The Guardian at Cannes 2004 review Peter Bradshaw,
Boston Globe review [3/4] Ty Burr
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Washington Post (Desson Thomson) review
Washington Post (Stephen Hunter) review
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul (Matthew Wilder) review
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker
San Francisco Chronicle [Walter Addiego]
Los Angeles Times (Carina Chocano) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The
New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review
CRITIC'S
NOTEBOOK; Sometimes Blood Really Isn't Indelible - New ... Manohla Dargis from The New York Times,
DVDBeaver dvd review Henrik Sylow
DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray
Version]
THREE…EXTREMES (Sam gang yi)
aka: Three Extremes
aka: Three
Hong Kong segment “Dumplings” d:
Fruit Chan
Japan segment
“Box” d:
Takashi Miike
S. Korea segment
“Cut” d:
Park Chan-wook (118 mi) 2004
The Onion A.V. Club review Scott Tobias
Anthology
films are mixed bags by nature, partly because multiple novella-length features
rarely complement one another when stitched together, but mainly because
directors tend not to bring their A-games to a side project. If nothing else,
the horror anthology Three... Extremes, a trio of macabre shorts from
first-rate Asian filmmakers, provokes a strong effort from everyone involved,
though they're not all wholly successful. There isn't much to connect the three
in terms of style, which ranges from Park Chan-wook's thick baroque sensibility
to Takashi Miike's uncharacteristically elegant formalism, but each concern the
capacity people have for vindictiveness and cruelty when their feet are in the
fire. Whether due to vanity, jealousy, or sheer desperation, the leads in all
three stories commit atrocities that would seem beyond their capabilities.
In
Chan's queasily effective "Dumplings," Miriam Yeung plays a
stressed-out trophy wife in need of some polish, lest her wealthy husband leave
her for a newer model. For this, she turns to the giddily sadistic Bai Ling, a
former gynecologist who has parlayed her old career into a new one making
"special" dumplings for older women seeking a miracle rejuvenation
cure. Taken literally, the premise of aborted fetuses being ground up and cased
in fried dough is distasteful in the extreme, especially when Chan plays up the
sound of teeth grinding through the gristle. It's more acceptable (though
blunt) as social commentary—the rich gaining luster by making a meal of the
underclass, basically—but that doesn't make it any easier to digest.
Made
between Oldboy and Sympathy For Lady Vengeance, the second and
last entries in his revenge trilogy, the disappointing "Cut" is
concerned with Park's usual pet theme, but it feels like he's going through the
motions, albeit with his usual surplus of technical brio. Lee Byung-hun stars
as Park's alter ego, a popular film director who returns home to an invader who
ties him up and forces him to choose between atrocities: the murder of an
abducted child, or watching his pianist wife get her fingers chopped off one by
one. Gradually, Lee's response to this torment makes him seem as villainous as
his captor, but Park's idea of revenge spreading like a poisonous contagion
gets lost in the baroque unpleasantness.
The
last and strongest of the three is Miike's "The Box," which is more
abstract and less immediately accessible than the other two, but looks and
feels unlike anything Miike has done. Unfolding like a waking dream, with
memories of a past trauma flooding into the present, "The Box"
follows Kyoko Hasegawa, a successful but lonely author whose latest book
attracts an editor that reminds her of her childhood. As a little girl,
Hasegawa and her twin sister were contortionists at their father's traveling
magic show, but one night, her jealousy over her sister's close relationship to
him leads to tragic consequences. Few directors are as "extreme" as
Miike, but ironically, his entry in Three... Extremes is the least
explicit; its suggestive tale of envy and guilt resembles Edgar Allen Poe's
"The Tell-Tale Heart" more than Miike's usual six-per-year gorefests.
Could this mark the start of a new phase in his career, or will it be back to
business as usual?
culturevulture.net,
Choices for the Cognoscenti review
Les Wright
Following the style and format of the old television series
Night Gallery, Three...Extremes showcases a
trilogy of short films by master directors of Asian cinema. In the order they
appear in the U.S. release, these include Hong Kong director Fruit Chan’s
macabre meditation on the fountain-of-youth-themed "Dumplings," South
Korean Chan-Wook Park’s self-consciously cinematic psychodrama "Cut,"
and Japan cult director Miike Takashi’s much-praised trauma drama
"Box."
The film’s billing as hybrid horror genre is somewhat
misleading. All three narratives do have much in common with the long string of
American trashy slasher films, going back to Hershell Gordon Lewis’s 1963 cult
classic Blood Feast. But more notably, they partake of a
specifically Asian cinematic taste for sadomasochistic family romances. The
acknowledged masterpiece of this tradition is Nagisa Oshima’s 1976 world-wide
hit In the Realm of the Senses, which re-enacts a famous
"weird news" case from 1930s Japan, in which the sexual obsession
between a man and a woman causes them to forsake everything, including life
itself. The genius of Oshima’s film’s narrative lay in how it pursued the theme
of sexual obsession until Oshima had emptied it of any sexual dimension
whatsoever.
The shorts of Three … Extremes, however, celebrate
their sexual perversion, blending the sexual metaphors of carnality, gustation
and desire as vehicles of power. In each tale, an underlying, unresolved sexual
obsession opens the door to baser cravings for control over other people. In
"Dumplings" (referring to what is more popularly known as "potstickers"
in the U.S.), for example, Mrs. Qing Li (Miriam Yeung), a not quite so young
wife, sets out to regain the sexual attention of Sije Li (Tony Ka-Fai Leung),
her husband, by visiting a former gynecologist (presented as a modern-day
witch) known as Aunt Mei (Bai Ling) in her prison-like working-class high-rise
cage of an apartment. Mrs. Li quickly embraces the diet of potstickers,
steamed, boiled, or pan-fried, slurping the crunchy critters with ever
increasing pleasure. As she and the audience come to know, viscerally, the
source of the little meat hearts of the dumplings, Chan intensifies his montage
of human body fluids and body parts, gleefully offering cannibalism, acts of
abortion, and blood-disgorging sexual congress for the audience’s delectation.
In "Cut" (the title plays on both the notion of
cutting with knives and a director’s command to "cut" a scene and
ergo an actor’s ego), fictitious film director Ryu Ji-Ho (Lee Byung-Hun) comes
home to find his wife bound to the family grand piano, her fingers
simultaneously glued to the keys and attached to wires which spiral into the
walls and ceiling. A disgruntled extra (played by Lim Won-Hee) has set a series
of traps for Ryu, forcing the director to atone for being both rich and a
morally good person at the same time (something which enrages the poor, no
longer humble extra, frustrating his world view that the rich are morally
bankrupt).
The absurdist challenges given Ryu (to strangle a child, to
witness his wife’s fingers being chopped off one at a time, to morally debase
himself in front of the actor) are mirrored in the self-conscious way in which
director Park plays with the artificiality of film. Ryu leaves a sound stage
after a day’s filming and returns to his home, which is the sound stage he had
just left. The actor portraying a man bitten by a female vampire and left
frozen on-stage turns up still frozen in Ryu’s home. The little girl Ryu is
commanded to strangle turns out to be someone else, and even Ryu’s wife is cast
in several different lights, depending on how a particular scene is being acted
out at any given moment.
Three … Extremes is definitely an
acquired taste of an art-house subgenre type. The dim sum-like array of
choices, glimpses into contemporary Asian cinematic styles and prominent
directors and actors, is noteworthy. The tension, of balancing visceral horror
with psychological sadomasochism, requires a disciplined viewer. Whether this
film achieves its pay-off depends upon the palate of the moviegoer, for this is
a rare delicacy indeed.
Eye for Film
("Marnie") review [3/5]
Three of Asia's premier horror directors each
delivering a 40-minute tale of terror sounds like a dream - or should that be
nightmare?
Sadly, the end result is not quite the
spine-tingling scare-fest you expect. While the three Twilight Zone-style
movies - Dumplings, Cut and Box - are not without merit, they are far from
satisfying or truly terrifying.
Most Asian horror offers up a large slice of
the supernatural, often in the form of creepy, long-dead killers (Ring being the prime
example) but Dumplings goes for gruesome over ghostly... and it is one of the
most stomach-churning films I've ever had the displeasure to see.
There isn't slasher movie-style decapitations
or buckets of blood - the story alone is enough to have you chucking up. There
is no point to the short other than to disturb - a surprise and huge
disappointment considering it was written by Farewell My Concubine scribe
Lillian Lee. But there is a feature-length
version of the movie, which perhaps develops the themes only briefly
touched on here.
Ageing TV star Mrs Lee (Miriam Yeung) wants to
recapture her lost youth and goes to visit Mei (Ling Bai), who makes dumplings
that turn back the clock. But forget a Death Becomes Her-style magic potion and
a few laughs - Mei's anti-ageing treatment is made from the cooked foetuses of
aborted babies. All together now, "EEEWWWW". It gets worse... you get
to see one of said foetuses after its grizzly home abortion and just before it
gets sauteed. Now there's a version of Hell's Kitchen Gordon Ramsay has yet to
try.
There are stylistic touches which save the
film, as it is altogether too gruesome a concept to enjoy otherwise. Its themes
of the desperate pursuit of youth are thought-provoking, though, and the movie
also hints at an interesting social comment on China's one baby per family
policy - particularly since the most potent anti-age foetuses are boys and they
are rarely aborted - but it fails to fully develop this concept.
Next on the bill is Cut, from Korea's Park
Chan-Wook. The acclaimed Sympathy
For Mr Vengeance and Oldboy director
serves up a sadistic revenge tale reminiscient of Saw - but this tale
of torture could be a lot more bloody and shies away from any real gore.
It tells the tale of a likeable film director
(Byung-hun Lee) who is kidnapped by one of the extras from his movies. The
psychotic failed actor takes him to his movie set - incidentally a replica of
his living room - where he is forced to witness his wife (Hye-jeong Kong) being
mutilated.
His bride - looking truly terrified and yet
almost comical with wild hair and a waterfall of running mascara - is sitting
at the piano and tied up using an intricate, spiderweb-style system of piano
wire - which could be used to inflict more inventive harm than is actually
delivered.
Cut's saving grace is its twisted humour and
bursts of unexpected ridiculousness - the extra demonstrating the roles he has
played dressed as a soldier, doctor and even a swimmer, complete with flippers,
are hilarious. His song and dance routine - complete with wacky faces Jack
Black would be proud of - will also have you on the floor.
There are also wonderful fast tracking shots
across the sets and quick, almost montage-like cuts to each character,
brilliantly showing their fear, confusion and anger.
The final instalment is Box and it is the
highlight of the disc, offering supernatural chills.
Young woman Kyoko (Kyoko Hasegawa) is haunted
by nightmares of her child. Aged 10, she and her twin Shoko (Yuu Suzuki)
performed as contortionists in a circus, with their star turn being their
ability to fold themselves into a tiny box. But Shoko is killed in tragic
circumstances and her twin is haunted by the past - literally.
A wonderful atmosphere of dread is introduced
early on by Japanese director Miike Takashi, who brought us Audition.
The dark sets and solemn score lower the mood
and create tension, while the Ring-style scene involving a little girl will put
you firmly over the edge.
But the plot is confusing and the unexpected
ending will have you scratching your head. But hey, at least this doesn't rely
on gore to get a scare.
Classic Horror
review Kairo
Film Freak
Central review Walter Chaw
LoveHKFilm.com
(Ross Chen) review
DVD Outsider Slarek
Film
Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [4/5] Jeremy Knox
stylusmagazine.com
(Jake Meaney) review
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Rotterdam Film
Festival report
filmcritic.com
(Nicholas Schager) review [3.5/5]
Film
Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [4.5/5] Eric Campos
Twitch
(Philippe Gohier) review
Twitch Nick
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film
Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib
CHUD.com
(Jeremy G. Butler) dvd review
Movie Martyr (Jeremy
Heilman) review [3.5/4]
eFilmCritic.com
(Jay Seaver) review [5/5]
eFilmCritic.com
(Peter Sobczynski) review [4/5]
Film Monthly
(Andrew Dowd) review
DVD Verdict (Joel
Pearce) dvd review
DVD Talk (John
Wallis) dvd review [4/5]
Thoughts on Stuff Patrick
Bright Lights Film
Journal [Ian Johnston] May 2005
Film
Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [3/5] Heidi Martinuzzi
Lee's Movie Info (Lee
Tistaert) review [C+]
Creative Loafing [Curt Holman]
ReelTalk
(Adam J. Hakari) review also seen
here: Passport
Cinema [A.J. Hakari]
Bloody-Disgusting
review [3.5/5] T.W. Anderson
FilmJerk.com
("The Real Dick Hollywood") review [B]
House
of Horror (Caretaker) review
CompuServe
(Harvey S. Karten) review
Korean Grindhouse Drew P.
Motion Picture
Purgatory (Rick Trembles) review [image]
cartoon
TV
Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [3/4]
Boston
Globe review [2.5/4] Ty Burr
The
Boston Phoenix review Brett Michel
Austin
Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]
San Francisco Chronicle [G. Allen Johnson]
Los
Angeles Times (Kevin Crust) review
Movie
review: 'Three...Extremes' Michael Wilmington from The Chicago Tribune
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York
Times (Dana Stevens) review
DVDBeaver
dvd review Gary W. Tooze
SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE
aka: Lady Vengeance
The Nation
(Stuart Klawans) review (Page 2)
Searching for a term adequate to describe Park Chanwook's Lady Vengeance--a film that begins with Korean carolers, dressed as Santas, performing a country gospel tune, and ends with the cries of terrified children and a visit from a ghost--I reach for my James Joyce and choose "collideorscape." What else to call this mad jumble of overhead shots, pop-in-the-face close-ups, slanting perspectives and faux TV-news footage, this fireworks burst of scattered time frames and points of view, this Grand Guignol joke that turns into a women-behind-bars thriller that turns into a deadly serious morality play? A collideorscape it is, and a very fine one.
Angel-faced Lee Yeong-ae stars as the title character, newly paroled after serving some thirteen years in prison for kidnapping and murdering a small boy. Her intentions upon release are murky--but judging by the way she slaps on her dark glasses, after telling the evangelist who sprang her to go screw himself, she must be planning something outside the range of the godly. By the end, she hasn't recovered her reputation as a prison-house saint, but neither does she qualify any longer for her cellmates' nickname, The Witch. This transformation no doubt helps to explain why Lady Vengeance is currently the movie of choice among intelligent young women. The rest of the explanation? Sheer aesthetic bliss.
Time Out London review
There’s a moment in ‘Lady Vengeance’ when the central
character commissions a bespoke firearm with the stern direction that ‘it has
to be pretty. Everything should be pretty.’ It’s not a bad emblem for the films
of Park
Chan-Wook, in which unabashed, even sadistic, violence is married with an
aesthete’s concern for the well-turned image. The final part of his ‘vengeance
trilogy’, this shares its predecessors’ formal and thematic concerns rather
than their characters or settings: like 2002’s ‘Sympathy for Mr Vengeance’ and
2003’s ‘Oldboy’, it’s a slow-burning retribution narrative in which a
well-founded, better-nursed grudge is visited on the body of its target with
such calculated ferocity that the boundaries of victim and perpetrator blur in
the red mist. Pound-of-flesh cinema, you might say.
In ‘Sympathy…’, selfless deaf-mute Ryu became a kidnapper with blood on his
hands; in ‘Oldboy’, victim of outrageous abuse Oh Dae-su turned out to have
some atoning of his own to do. ‘Lady Vengeance’ spins this approach itself
around: we first meet Lee Keum-ja (Lee Young-ae) as a convicted child-killer
approaching parole and only gradually realise the righteous foundations of the
vendetta she coldly begins to pursue, aided by various fellow inmates whose
favour she has assiduously curried.
Keum-ja is an uncommunicative lead character and, Lee’s strong performance
notwithstanding, engagement is mostly maintained through style and story. Both
of these feel newly expansive for Park: the screen heaves with richly ornate
pickings and black-white-and-red motifs, from the delicate titles and
flourishes of religiose iconography to macabre daydream visions and digital
sleight-of-hand. The tight narrative traps of ‘Sympathy…’ and ‘Oldboy’,
meanwhile, give way to copious flashback and an odd climax: while underlining
Park’s interest in the price to be paid when parental duty fails, it makes
Keum-ja a bystander in the cathartic blood-letting to which the whole film has
been directed. This sequence, strangely funny and sadistic, seems to suggest
that if there’s one thing better than taking revenge, it’s watching it dished
out – an objectionable premise which can only give queasy pause as you sit
watching it.
2005 Toronto International Film
Festival Michael Sicinski from the
Academic Hack, see reviews under 9/15, also includes a Postscript (Excerpt)
Dear Ms. Dargis,
Hi. We've never met. But no matter. I'm writing to let you
know that upon further evidence, I am increasingly certain that you are right
about
I was troubled by your piece in the Times around the time of the BAM's Park retrospective. You claimed (I'm paraphrasing here – your original piece is available for inspection here) that Park was shallow and possessed of few talents beyond a willingness to shock. You felt his violence was brutal and stylized but held no implicit critique. Instead, he made a fetish out of extreme cruelty, essentially tossing out red meat for the Asia Extreme fanboy crowd.
At the time I found your objections wrongheaded and perhaps even a bit priggish. I considered (still do, I think; the past tense is a tad premature here) Park's first film in the "vengeance trilogy," Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, to be an exceedingly accomplished work. Formally, Park displayed a remarkable facility with editing and composition. From moment to moment, the film felt almost sculptural in its construction. The pieces locked into place with a breathtaking power. Moreover, Mr. Vengeance's violence was more the stuff of obligatory ritual than bloodlust, and I felt quite confident that the sorrow with which punishment was administered bespoke a statement on the futility of revenge. As with Irreversible, I felt that you and the other highbrow critics had missed the boat.
But maybe I was wrong. My first inkling came with seeing Oldboy, a crass, ugly film whose metallic grayness and overbearing, faux-operatic extravagances made me feel browbeaten. Its plot twists were as Byzantine as they were idiotic. Just an off outing, I reassured myself. But then came his horrid, Fincher-on-overdrive short film "Cut," the weakest link in the Three...Extremes omnibus. And now, the final film in the vengeance trilogy confirms your perspicacity, and my poor judge of character. Park is a callow, opportunistic filmmaker who will do anything to goose his target audience.
Miraculously, some are calling
It's not just that the film is a right-wing screed posing as a philosophical inquiry into ethics. (I'm sorry, but I defy anyone to explain to me how Geum-ja's elaborate torture plan is mitigated by her lost innocence, her difficult interactions with her daughter, or her burying her face in the ceremonial tofu. The audience's bloodthirsty exhilaration is not problematized in the least.) It's not just that Park has essentially rehashed Kill Bill, only making that smart film infinitely stupider. It's that Park is so eager to please, to dazzle, that he sacrifices not only rigor but coherence. Why are we introduced to each of Geum-ja's fellow convicts, as though they will play a role in the plot later on? What becomes of Jenny's Australian parents, once their comic-relief function is exhausted? And why oh why are viewers seduced by the surface of a film so unremittingly hideous? Park manages to make natural sunlight a jaundiced yellow, render every interior a pallid green, and process and reprocess every single image out of existence.
I will need to see Mr. Vengeance again to be sure I wasn't wrong the first time. (Maybe my low expectations made it seem more vibrant and masterful than it really was.) But in any case, Ms. Dargis, I was wrong about you. You hit the nail on the head with Park Chan-wook, a charlatan who must be denounced for being such. We shouldn't allow him to be feted on the false premise that he has pulled off some sort of pulp / arthouse transubstantiative magic trick, at least not without exercising our lungs in healthy dissent. You called this one in the air, Manohla. Good job.
Sympathy for Lady Vengeance is a repugnant piece of shit.
Yours,
Th. Ac. Hack
FIPRESCI - Undercurrent - #2 - Lady Vengeance Steve Erickson from Fipresci magazine, 2006, also seen here: Lady Vengeance and Its Critics
Are Park Chan-wook's films serious examinations of violence
or exploitation films pandering to uncritical audiences? Why do North American
directors like David Cronenberg (in A History of Violence) and Clint
Eastwood (in Unforgiven and
For me, Park's trilogy peaked with its first installment, but that judgment may merely be a preference for art cinema over the hip flash of Oldboy and Lady Vengeance. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is not exactly realistic — unless Korean urinals are plastered with stickers aimed at human organ buyers — but it's less grounded in myth than Oldboy, whose plot pivots around a hypnotist able to keep the protagonist totally under his thrall. The first film's vision of urban despair — all dingy colors, claustrophobic apartments, and so much noise pollution that deafness seems preferable — is a thoroughly believable environment, while the later films are over-directed, as if every scene needed to be a peak moment. Lady Vengeance recalls recent Japanese films like Tetsuya Nakashima's Kamikaze Girls, Gen Sekiguchi's Survive Style 5+ and Katsuhito Ishii's more sedate The Taste of Tea in its use of techniques like direct address and extremely stylized camera movement, as well its absorption of influences from manga and music videos.
Like many Korean films (such as Jang Joon-Hwan's Save The Green Planet and Im Sang-soo's The President's Last Bang), Lady Vengeance changes moods swiftly, mixing dark comedy and violence in a way that's often unnerving. Black humor can enhance the horror of its subject matter or trivialize it, and Lady Vengeance rests on the border between these two modes for its first half. Are cultural differences the reason so many Americans have a problem with it? It's a tempting theory, but few critics raised similar objections to the violence in Save The Green Planet or The President's Last Bang.
Quickly, Park introduces one of the film's key themes: anti-heroine Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae) as a sum of other people's perceptions. Her life is narrated — out of chronological order — by her friends and possibly colored by their perceptions. She wound up in jail for participating in the kidnapping and murder of a young boy, although Mr. Baek (Oldboy star Choi Min-sik) was the real villain. Recalling her involvement with Baek, the narrator emphasizes her youth and innocence. An implicit question lurks. Is this really the way Geum-ja was or is it how other people remember her? It's noteworthy that she's barely a visible presence in this scene — her voice is loud but she's relegated to the back of the frame. In another key scene, she talks about the murder while standing out of the camera's range.
One of the film's strongest critics, Michael Sicinski, has called it a sexist fantasy: "She [Geum-ja] is 'hot,' Park ensures, because his presumed viewership can project their fantasies onto her with minimal interference." Without entirely disagreeing with him, I think the appeal of the femme fatale is a large part of what it's really about. The early scenes take numerous potshots at the media's tendency to romanticize killers: a horde of photographers gather to watch Geum-ja reenact the boy's killing. Through this act, she becomes a celebrity, gathering a large following. Soon after her release from jail, a middle-aged couple walk into the bakery where she works and place an order. They think she looks familiar but can't quite place her. When they realize who she is, they're appalled and throw out the food she handled. However, most people have the opposite reaction. She drops many references to the murder she plans (much like Patrick Bateman's muttered confessions of his crimes in American Psycho), which everyone else ignores — but almost no one thinks it's a bad idea. In prison, she's called "the kind-hearted Geum-ja" (the Korean title's exact translation), but that's a projection based on her decision to donate a kidney to a fellow inmate. All her good deeds are ultimately self-serving. From the very first post-credits scene, Lady Vengeance is filled with religious references. Men and women in Santa outfits stand outside a jail, where Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae) is about to be released from prison. One declares "they say she's a real live angel," while the group goes on to sing a gospel song.
"Mr. Vengeance" could be any of Sympathy for Mr.
Vengeance's three main characters, but Lady Vengeance can only be
Geum-ja. "Sympathy" has been stripped from its American title, but
the film's devoid of it anyway. In its own blood-splattered way, Sympathy
for Mr. Vengeance was a humanist lament with no real villain (or hero); Lady
Vengeance makes the mistake of thoroughly dehumanizing its villains. That
doesn't let Geum-ja off the hook, but its treatment of "the witch,"
whom Geum-ja kills in prison, is particularly problematic. Unless I missed
something, we've never told her real name. She's introduced in a shot that
emphasizes her grotesquerie, as she spreads her legs in preparation for forced
sexual favors. Geum-ja's slow-motion murder (a three-year poisoning via bleach
in her food) of "the witch" is played largely for laughs. To put it
bluntly, the film suggests that it's OK to kill her because she's a fat dyke.
This is the first sign of a sadistic streak in Geum-ja that will later be taken
more seriously, but
It's difficult to discuss Lady Vengeance seriously without giving away the ending, so readers who haven't seen it yet should stop here. Upon release from prison, Geum-ja plans to murder Baek. Gathering her ex-con friends, she kidnaps him from a restaurant and brings the parents of the many children he killed together. She shows them home videos of their children, made just after their kidnapping and shortly before their deaths. Not surprisingly, the families are emotionally devastated. She has reunited them to kill Baek, and while they discuss what should be done with him (in a parody of discourse around capital punishment), her desires are pretty clear. One by one, they enter the room where Baek is tied to a chair, armed with a weapon. Collectively, the group kills him.
This sequence is the riskiest part of Lady Vengeance. Somber in mood, it brings to the surface the nastiness underpinning Geum-ja's character. The film showed signs of it earlier — as when she shot a puppy at point-blank range, preparing to kill Baek. Dressed in black rubber, she looks like a dominatrix here. She moans orgasmically as she grabs Baek by the hair. Her decision to show the home videos is the most blatant instance of her manipulative tendencies: it's obvious that after watching their late children cry for their lives, their relatives' bloodlust will be inflamed. Perhaps she thinks there's something cathartic about it, but it sets the stage for an unsettling finale.
Lady Vengeance stacks the deck against Baek heavily, but the families' cruelty is still disturbing, especially when one man compares torturing him to using the toilet. (He thinks both should be done one-by-one, in private.) However, the film has gradually brought its darker undercurrents to the fore by this point. It expects us to be on the families' side but pushes that identification into the void. Advocates of capital punishment claim that it offers closure to victims' relatives; for a while, that seems to be both Geum-ja and Park's point as well, but the scenes following Baek's murder are telling. It's also crucial that most of the violence takes place offscreen; Park denies us the satisfaction of viewing it as spectacle.
During the group slaughter, the families somehow look both overcome with emotion and robotic, framed as small bodies on a regimented line and covered in plastic wrap that makes them look the same. More than one person collapses after leaving the room where Baek is being killed. After burying him, the group gathers again at the bakery. A cake is brought out, but the mood is hardly one of celebration. The silence is deafening. When a man walks in and says that it's snowing outside, the families race to leave the bakery. They clearly haven't achieved catharsis; judging from their faces, total blankness is more like it.
It's telling that Lady Vengeance takes the image of Geum-ja's face after shooting Baek and turns it into a shot of static on a blank TV screen. Even at this intimate juncture, she's as much a media creation as a real woman. However, the film makes one more major change in its final few minutes, entering fantasyland as the ghost of Won-mo (the boy Geum-ja helped kidnap) appears to Geum-ja. To its critics, this part of the film — which bluntly criticizes her actions — is pure hypocrisy. Sicinski writes: "I'm simply aghast that anyone could see Park's film as a critique of mob violence. Everything we've learned from how to read the cinema (and Park, like Tarantino, is clearly more of a movie brat than a freethinker) tells us the opposite." Indeed, the decision to have a narrator tell us that she used people and couldn't achieve redemption through violence plays like a PSA.
If Lady Vengeance didn't show the attractions of Geum-ja's scheme, the regret at its end wouldn't be nearly as moving or disturbing. Even so, it could be far stronger. The religious references aren't thoroughly thought out — although I'd like to see an American film that dares to blame religion for fueling its character's murderous notion of "redemption" — and the digs at the media are artless swipes. In fact, many of the first half's tonal swings are a confusing muddle. Park's direction tends to be overbearing and heavy-handed.
In some respects, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is so well done that it makes the remainder of Park's trilogy pointless. Its characters are victims of a moral climate where compassion is dead and everyone thinks the ends justify the means. However, their worst actions are rooted in understandable situations and emotions: economic desperation and the pain of seeing a loved one die. Its strengths become all the more apparent in light of the influence of Asian cinema — especially Takashi Miike's Audition — on truly reactionary American films like Eli Roth's Hostel or David Slade's Hard Candy, which doesn't even have the guts to take responsibility for its castration fantasies. When he is at his best, restoring pain to screen violence ranks high on Park's agenda. He leaves it up to us to provide the sympathy missing onscreen.
koreanfilm.org Kyu Hyun Kim from the Korean Film
Page
Filmbrain Like Anna Karina’s Sweater
Twitch dvd review by X
Lady Vengeance
- Reviews - Reverse Shot A Dish Served Lukewarm, by Michael Joshua Rowin, May 10, 2006
not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith) review
Village Voice (Michael Atkinson) review
The Onion A.V. Club review Tasha Robinson,
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review George Wu
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [D+]
CultureCartel.com (Kevin Buffington) review [4.5/5]
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [4/5]
Cinema Strikes Back (Charlie Prince) review [4/4] which includes an interview
Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]
Eye for Film (Anton Bitel) review [4/5]
PopMatters (Jesse Hicks) review
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
Premiere.com review Ethan Alter
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [5/5]
The Man Who Viewed Too Much [Mike D'Angelo]
VideoVista
review Jonathan
McCalmont
Beyond Hollywood review Eric Choi
Shuqi.org - Asian Cinema Uffe Stegmann
Bloody-Disgusting
review [4.5/5] Brad Miska (Mr. Disgusting)
Eye for Film (Scott Macdonald) review [4.5/5]
Eye for Film (Paul Griffiths) review [4/5]
Exclaim! review Travis Mackenzie Hoover
eFilmCritic.com (William Goss) review [4/5]
The Lumière Reader Tim Gray
The Lumière Reader [b] Tim Wong
The World's Greatest Critic [J.C. Maçek III]
DVD Outsider Slarek
DVD Town (William David Lee) dvd review
DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [4/5]
DVD Verdict (Joel Pearce) dvd review
DVDActive (Gabriel Powers) dvd review [8/10]
DVDActive (Casimir Harlow) dvd review [7/10]
Lady Vengeance (Sympathy for Lady Vengeance) Michael Den Boer from 10kbullets
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo
DVD Clinic ("Sturdy") dvd review [4/5]
DVDActive (Chris Gould) dvd review [8/10] The Vengeance Trilogy
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [3/5]
sneersnipe (David Perilli) review
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
Film School Rejects (Chris Beaumont) dvd review [A]
A Nutshell Review Stefan S.
Confessions Of A Film Critic [John Maguire]
The Onion
A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
The Onion
A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
DVD Verdict [Adam
Arseneau]
The Independent Critic [Richard Propes]
Thoughts on Stuff Patrick
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [C+]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [C]
Eye for Film (Chris Brooks) review [4.5/5]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Film Journal International (Lewis Beale) review
Eye for Film (Richard Mellor) review [3.5/5]
Tiscali UK review Paul Hurley
The Spinning Image (Daniel Auty) review
hybridmagazine.com review Jeffrey Harris
Comingsoon.net review Edward Douglas
Ain't It Cool News Quint and Buttercup
David N. Butterworth review [3/4]
Exclaim! dvd review
Motion Picture Purgatory (Rick Trembles) review [image] cartoon
Park
Chan-Wook Q&A Time Out
Entertainment Weekly review [A-] Lisa Schwarzbaum
BBCi - Films (DVD review) Stella Papamichael
The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [2/5]
Boston Globe review [3/4] Wesley Morris
The Boston Phoenix (Brett Michel) review
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [4/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
San Francisco Chronicle [G. Allen Johnson]
Movie
review: Lady Vengeance' Michael
Wilmington from The Chicago Tribune
FILM REVIEW; For Want of a Kidney, a Child Is Kidnapped and an Explosion of Shocking Violence Ensues Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, August 19, 2005
The
New York Times (Nathan Lee) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Pat Pilon
I’M A CYBORG, BUT THAT’S OK D 60
This feels like a largely unwatchable costume drama about life inside a mental institution filled with silly cartoonish characters who aren’t really connected to this world, where the line between doctor and patient is nearly indistinguishable. I found it pretty imbecelic, losing interest almost immediately as it’s so goofily otherworldly, as if written exclusively for the childish minds watching Saturday morning cartoons, yet kids would find this incomprehensible and have the good sense to find something else to do. I had the same urge. I also got a strange feeling that this was really a tribute to the weird kaleidoscope world of Federico Fellini, where even the music sounded like Nino Rota at times, and his childish lead, Young-goon (Lim Soo-jung) was his stand-on for Giulietta Masina. If only that were true. But Masina exhibited warmth and humanity with every gesture, while this instead feels like a completely made up pre-school, dress-up game where kids can wear any weird costume they choose.
Taking place almost entirely within a mental institution, with doctors and nurses running around in white coats, with patients out of sorts with various annoying maladies, which includes yelling and screaming and scratching their asses, oh, and why not walking backwards, this film exists through a world of flashbacks and fantasy, as the world Young-goon imagines actually comes to life briefly, but then dissipates, eventually joined by a fellow patient, Il-soon, (pop star Rain), who specializes in theft of all sorts and joins her fantasy world by believing in what she imagines. Together, by being something other than who they really are, which makes them feel dreadful, they feel capable of appreciation. One of the more imaginatively drawn sequences is her inability to eat, so he surgically installs a special mechanical device, warranted for life, he even produces the business card, which converts rice to electronic energy, exactly what’s needed for a cyborg. As the doctors have been stymied and all the other patients worried about her health, this was a major advancement in the movie, as it kept her alive. The film is given a gorgeous color palette, but the characters are too underdeveloped, playing the same note the whole time, which gets boring fast, so it’s a sweet love story where the fantasy elements are overwhelmed by the film’s obvious drawbacks.
Korean Grindhouse Drew P.
For years, critics censured Park Chan-wook for glamorizing violence in his landmark trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, Lady Vengeance). And while you'll encounter the same high-gloss gunfire in I'm a Cyborg But That's Okay too, Park slyly sidesteps the issue this time by placing every gloriously shot, bloody massacre inside one crazy character's trippy head. She's a mental patient (Lim Su-jeong in a fright wig) who think she's bionic so her little fingers turn into mini-machine-guns whenever she gets too lightheaded from malnourishment and feels compelled to act out a fantasy. Now the question arises: Is an artful staging of a mass murder more or less offensive when it makes you wish it had happened? By the closing credits, I was convinced that this movie would have been better if the delusional damsel was really an android assassin capable of mowing down doctors and orderlies, and that likewise, her fellow inmate (played by the pop star Rain) would be more interesting if he did indeed have the ability to steal people's personality traits or shrink to the size of a dot. Because their whimsical romance never makes that glorious leap to scifi, the electroshocking moments leave us with a clean conscience: We haven't seen anything that will corrupt us.
BBCi - Films Jamie Russell
After his rip-roaring revenge trilogy - Sympathy for Mr
Vengenace, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance -
Whatever you make of this oddball rom-com, it's nothing if not inventive. Opening in a Metropolis-style factory populated by red-robed women assembling transistor radios, it quickly spirals into padded cell madness as Young-goon is sent to an asylum after slashing her wrists and hooking herself up to the electrical mains. There she meets the biggest collection of freaks and geeks this side of One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest. Convinced she's a cyborg who can talk to vending machines using her granny's dentures (!), Young-goon spends her time recharging her power cells by licking batteries. She also piques the interest of mask-wearing nutter Il-sun, an inmate who tries to steal his fellow patients' psychoses.
"INSANE INTENSITY AND RAMBLING DULLNESS"
Park directs with admirable verve, building his story into a touching tale about two damaged souls who connect through insanity. Shot in brightly unreal colours, it verges on becoming a mental musical (there's only one tune, but since it's a yodelling number that transports Young-goon to the Alps on the back of a giant CGI insect, who's complaining?). The fantasy sequences climax with a bizarre moment when Young-goon transforms herself into a battle bot - fingers firing bullets, metal mouth dispensing shell cases - and mows down doctors and nurses. Like all psychotic ramblings, I'm A Cyborg flits between insane intensity and rambling dullness - but there's a human heart pumping beneath its mad, metallic surface.
Eye for Film ("Chris") review [5/5] Chris Docker
I'm A Cyborg, But That's OK reminds you of many different movies in the first ten minutes. You try to fit it into a box. Hey! It's like so-and-so! But it's not. The vision that director Park Chan-wook presents us with is foreign, so alien to any genre that our minds are confused. Maybe you have to give up all expectation before you can enjoy it.
Young-goon thinks she is a cyborg. A nice, normal young girl otherwise, that is her only kink. Hello mental institution. She can't eat of course - food makes her ill (really) so she licks batteries of various sorts as other inmates tuck into their dinner. She's lonely, and talks to machines. The drinks dispenser is one of her favourites. But she's not a psycho - as she will point out - "I'm not a psycho: I'm a cyborg."
As inmates go, Young-goon is fairly low maintenance. Most of the anti-social patients are weird beyond belief. But it is a young man called Il-soon who manages to reach out to her where doctors have failed. Il-soon believes all sorts of things - like believing he has the power to steal intangibles from people, such as character, attitudes or habits. His services are soon in demand among the other patients. It is Il-soon who manages to reach into Young-goon's fantasy world.
Young-goon has some internal conflicts. For cyborgs, there are seven deadly sins, and they give her some problems. The seven deadly sins for a cyborg are:
Sympathy
Sadness
Restlessness
Hesitating
Useless day-dreaming
Feeling guilty
Thankfulness
Of all these sins, sympathy is the worst.
Interestingly, the inmates are like parts of the body: they compensate for each other's particular shortcomings and have very sane insights into kinds of madness not their own.
When the film becomes a love story, it is not one based on lust and idiocy.
The funny farm becomes a parable for a world in which we need to believe in and
accept each other's failings.
I'm A Cyborg, But That's OK takes
So maybe take a very deep breath. Make sure your batteries are fully charged. If it doesn't blow you out the cinema, I'm A Cyborg, But That's OK may just blow your mind.
Koreanfilm.org Kyu Hyun Kim
Young-goon (Im Soo-jung, ...ing, Tale of Two Sisters) is a new patient in a psychiatric ward. Suffering from what appears to be paranoid schizophrenia, she hallucinates that she is a half-machine cyborg, equipped with deadly weapons and possessing a special affinity with electric appliances, including soda vending machines and fluorescent lights. Poor Young-goon is also slowly starving herself to death, as she believes that her body can be sustained only through being recharged like a battery. Il-soon (Jung Ji-hoon, better known as the Asian pop star "Bi" or "Rain"), supposedly capable of absorbing emotions or personality traits of other patients, is attracted to her. Deducing the logic of her behavior, he decides to convince Young-goon that it is okay for her to consume food.
Having finished the "Never-Ending Peace and Love" segment for the omnibus human rights project If You Were Me (2003), Park Chan-wook indicated an interest in helming a more contemplative, slower-paced, less violent film than was expected of him. I'm a Cyborg But That's OK seems to be the outcome of his professed intention to make a "gentler" film than the Vengeance Trilogy. While by no means a "watered-down" version of Park Chan-wook's disturbingly resplendent cinema, the movie is likely to disappoint anyone looking for either a TV-drama style tear-jerking romance or a piece of white-hot "extreme cinema" with devastating plot revelations and dynamic action sequences, although it does contain one spectacular sequence of Peckinpah-like carnage that will blow many viewers out of their seats. Evidently the domestic Korean viewers were by and large less than impressed, as it pulled in a tepid 800,000 tickets.
In this film Park returns to one of his frequent themes, the difficulty, or even impossibility, of communication. Just as the deaf and mute Ryu in Sympathy and Oh Dae-soo in Oldboy were plunged into living hells because they could not, or would not, understand the significance of what was said to them and what they themselves uttered, Young-goon faces death since her subjective universe is incomprehensible to anyone but herself, and she has no means of communicating its logic and meaning to us. Likewise, we never learn the "origins" of Young-goon's "condition," even though she has clearly been traumatized by the violent episode of her grandmother's forced institutionalization. Rejecting the psychoanalytic unspooling of Young-goon's mind as either narrative engine or thematic subject, Park instead invents an alternative, almost science fictional method of communication in Il-soon's radical empathy. Instead of trying to make Young-goon rejoin the ranks of "normal" humanity, Il-soon finds a way to share her "craziness" and thereby co-inhabit her subjective world. In this sense, Cyborg can be seen as an anti-Spellbound, minus the kind of condescending, "crazy-people-as-holy-fools" portrayals given in popular European movies like Queen of Hearts.
In terms of tone, the film is frequently charming and moving but seldom cute. There are scenes of quirky humor but most of them also possess ever-so-slightly disquieting qualities, as when Il-soon literally shrinks into a homunculus in reflection of his panicky urge to become invisible. The production credits are, again, top-notch. Cinematographer Jung Jung-hoon and production designer Ryu Seong-hee work together to create the slightly ramshackle sanatorium, with its torpid but oddly comfy-looking apple-green walls for the isolation rooms and sleepily golden-hued corridors. From a waft of cat hair drifting in the morning sunlight to the shiny copper-chrome of a bullet shell dropping out of Young-goon's mouth, Cyborg is filled to the brim with fantastic colors and amazing visuals. It's just that you should not expect them to make a whole lot of "story sense."
Still, few films I have seen, made in Hollywood or Japan, have had such a sumptuous but exacting imagination on display in re-creating the archetypically manga-ish imagery of a young girl fused with machinery. In my humble opinion, Park outclasses any living Japanese director (Kaneko Shusuke, Miike Takashi and Kurosawa Kiyoshi included) in getting "right" such mind-boggling visual details as the jet plasma ejected from the hovering Young-goon's sneakers, scorching footprints onto the dried glass. To a long list of fantasy projects that I wish Park Chan-wook would take on in the future, I must add an adaptation of a high-quality science-fiction manga: how about Iwaaki Hitoshi's Kiseiju (Parasytes)?
Cyborg is also an excellent showcase for Im Soo-jung's talent, a Vanessa Redgrave in Kate Moss's body, if such a characterization is, I hope, not too rude. Essaying a role perhaps more intuitively fit for Bae Doo-na or Gang Hye-jung, Im initially looks excessively frail and neurotic (she does look incredibly frightening when she appears sans eyebrows and wearing grandma's false teeth) but she ultimately delivers a terrifically nuanced performance that not once relies on cutesy shtick or emotional button-pushing. Bi is certainly not bad, but, not surprisingly, he is not in the same league as Im or other veteran supporting actors, headlined by Lady Vengeance's Oh Sung-mi and the currently ubiquitous Oh Dal-soo.
Many viewers, including some of director Park's loyal fans, might merely tolerate or even actively dislike I'm Cyborg But That's OK, considering it an odd detour for the filmmaker, a stroll in the park before he sets out for another grueling, record-breaking sprint. I do not share this view. Cyborg is every inch a Park Chan-wook film: it's like a blues song recorded with an acoustic guitar from a progressive rock'n roller world-famous for incorporating cutting-edge electronic sounds into his music -- and this song, for me, is just as great, as graceful, inventive, challenging and beautiful, as his other million-seller tunes.
New Korean Cinema [Martin Cleary]
Cinematical:
Erik Davis at
VideoVista review Jonathan McCalmont
Electric Sheep Magazine James Merchant
A Nutshell Review Stefan S.
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [4/5]
eFilmCritic.com (William Goss) review [4/5]
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
CHUD.com (Devin Faraci) review
DVDActive (Chris Gould) dvd review [7/10]
DVDActive (Gabriel Powers) dvd review [7/10]
Cinephiliac
[Aaron Hillis] at
Far East Films [Andrew Skeates]
User reviews from imdb Author: thebanquet from
User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: J Chang from
Total
Sci-Fi Online review Matt McCallister, which includes an interview
Time Out London (David Jenkins) review [4/5] which includes an interview
Park Chan-Wook: interview Tom Huddleston interview from Time Out London, October 13, 2009
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Pat Pilon
DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Enrique Michaels
THIRST
Cannes
2009: Sucking Zola ("Thirst," Park) on Notebook | MUBI Daniel Kasman
Here is the ideal Park Chan-wook film: one man and one woman beat and torture one another, each one having a go until the other is so badly hurt that, in theory, the audience wants to see the victim have his or her turn, taking vengeance and beating the other until our sympathy and bloodlust shift again. Repeat for two hours. Park’s various revenge scenarios (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance) pretty much follow this reprehensible path, and when his new film Thirst tries to convince us of its viability by trying to make it romantic, the filmmaker’s stupidity and hollowness are all the more apparent.
The pitch that must have greenlit the film was obviously “vampires meet Zola’s Thérèse Raquin,” which makes no sense to me, as vampirism is already romantic, corrosive, and murderous enough that tacking on—as Park awkwardly does half way through—the complex plot and psychology of the Zola novel shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the very subject of the film. With Let the Right One In barely out of theaters, reminding us of the complex otherworldly bonds and deep romanticism of vampire lore, and Coppola’s Cannes entry calling us back to the perfectly stylized genre of his Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Park’s smug, unconscionable account of supremely stylized violence for the sake of love—in a movie unable to be romantic—is vacated of everything but sadism.
Maggie Lee at
Released domestically two weeks ahead of its
Park takes his famed eroticization of violence, pain and cruelty to new,
feverish heights, and garnishes it with deliciously sadistic gallows humor.
Those who thrive on gore, twisted sexuality and brutish handling of women can
drink their fill from this film. More serious arthouse critics, however, may
balk at the script's soapy excesses, as well as the tonal discordance of yoking
the horror-fantasy genre to a love tragedy with classical, literary trappings.
Layered with satire on religious and social hypocrisy, Sang Hyun's conflict
between repression and impulse (memorably represented by his thwacking his
groin with a recorder) constitutes the film's most amusing and penetrating
moments. However, once Tae-ju conspires with him to murder Kang-woo in what
Park professed is a re-envisioning of Zola's "Therese Racquin," the
characters swing wildly between gleeful amorality and extreme tormented
conscience. The atmosphere is that of macabre farce rather than the novel's
haunting psychological depth.
Kim Ok-vin's high-pitched neurosis is sometimes grating, but for a relative
newcomer, she keeps her continuous personality transformations in stride, even
when she finally becomes a de-humanized hunter driven only by instinct.
Like all of Park's films, cinematic technique is highly distinctive in
"Thirst," though art direction is more naturalistic than his last
three films. In the final reels, a blue-against-white color scheme begins to
dominate, providing a striking contrast to the lurid bloodletting.
Thirst Darcy Paquet from Screendaily, also seen here:
Screen
International [Darcy Paquet]
After winning the Cannes Grand Prix with his 2003 revenge epic Oldboy, Park Chan-wook has faltered somewhat (2005’s Sympathy For Lady Vengeance, the poorly received I’m A Cyborg, But That’s OK in 2006), but his visually arresting vampire movie Thirst looks certain to create a stir: adopting a more lyrical mode than before, this complex and supremely inventive work sees the filmmaker back on top form.
Thirst is
not, as some observers expected, a return to a more audience friendly approach
- Park is aiming far above the heads of mainstream viewers. But even as
it confounds some audiences, Thirst’s
sheer creativity and cinematic brio will drive word of mouth and propel it to a
solid, though not super, international career in theatrical and ancillary
markets. Renewed interest in the vampire genre, manifested at the multiplexes
by Twilight and in critical
circles by
The film has already recorded the biggest opening of the year
in its native
Intriguingly, Park takes Emile Zola’s 1867 novel Therese Raquin as the starting point
for his story. Sang-hyun (Song) is a Catholic priest who, in an act of moral
desperation, volunteers for a dangerous medical experiment in
Meanwhile Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin) is locked in a loveless marriage to a sickly, infantile young man (Shin) doted on by his obsessive mother (Kim Hae-sook). When the priest - a childhood friend of her husband - becomes a regular visitor to her home, Tae-ju’s previously suppressed desires and frustrations rush to the fore. Sang-hyun, locked in his own inner battle between conscience and worldly lust, submits to her advances.
Since his breakthrough with Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance in 2002, Park’s work has been characterised by its visual inventiveness, dark humour, intense acting performances, and strange but compelling shifts in tone. The first 90 minutes of Thirst is a robust display of these talents, but it is anchored in a melancholic lyricism that is new to Park’s oeuvre. Although the focus of its narrative movement is not always clear, in its best moments, Thirst offers something of the poetic force of cinema’s timeless masterpieces.
A key plot development comes at the three quarters mark, and at this point the film displays a shift in style to the kind of highly kinetic Park Chan-wook film many viewers might have expected in the first place. Even the production design undergoes a noticeable transformation. Although logically consistent with the plot’s development, the shift is slightly unnerving, and it robs some power from what might have been an even more heartbreaking final scene.
In the midst of Thirst’s
swings in mood and style, it is the restrained, pitch perfect performance of
Tae-ju, modelled after Zola’s Therese, is a less consistent character, despite the best efforts of young actress Kim Ok-vin. One of the film’s weaknesses is that, perhaps relying too much on the implicit link with the novel, Tae-ju’s characterisation in the screenplay lacks depth. Supporting performances, bolstered by a highly experienced cast, are excellent.
Technical aspects of the work, from the smoky colour palates of Jeong Jeong-hun’s cinematography to the deliberate artifice of Ryu Seong-hee’s antique-styled production design, are as good as anything in contemporary Asian cinema.
Village Voice (Jim Ridley) review also seen here: Park Chan-wook Gets Positively Trendy with Thirst - Page 1 ...
Reviews - Reverse Shot Jeff Reichert, July 31, 2009
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib
DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) review [3/5]
Film School Rejects [Rob Hunter]
not coming to a theater near you review Victoria Large
Beyond Hollywood review James Mudge
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
Last Night With Riviera [Matt Riviera]
The New Republic (Christopher Orr) review
Offoffoff.com review Kristina Feliciano
Bloody-Disgusting review [3.5/5] Brad Miska (Mr. Disgusting)
A Nutshell Review Stefan S
New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [3/5]
Critic's Notebook [Robyn Citizen]
AMC Horror Hacker [Maitland McDonagh]
The L Magazine [Henry Stewart]
The Lumière Reader Jacob Powell
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
theartsdesk.com [Anne Billson]
Electric Sheep Magazine [Sarah Cronin]
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [2/5]
Twitch (Todd Brown) review Lauren Baggett
Eye for Film (Scott Macdonald) review [3.5/5]
Movie-Vault.com (LaRae Meadows) review [9/10]
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [C]
Future Movies (Mike Barnard) review [9/10]
Harry loves Park Chan Wook's THIRST! -- Ain't It Cool News: The ... Harry Knowles, August 2, 2009
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Total Sci-Fi Online review Matt McAllister
eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [4/5]
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B]
CHUD.com (Alex Riviello) review
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [5/5]
Asian Cinema Drifter Tarun
dystopiaMagazine.com [Carol Sullivan]
Daily Film Dose [Blair Stewart]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Dread Central Review [Evil Andy]
Screenjabber review Adam Boult
Cinema Autopsy (Thomas Caldwell) capsule review [4/5]
Jam! Movies review Liz Braun
Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [B-]
Little White Lies [Jonathan Crocker]
Thirst (1979) Bill Gibron from DVD Verdict
Monsters At Play (Lawrence P. Raffel) dvd review
VideoVista review Max Cairnduff
DVD Verdict (Daryl Loomis) dvd review
DVD Talk (Chris Neilson) dvd review [2/5]
DVD Clinic (Chris Bumbray) dvd review [3.5/5]
The Digital Bits dvd review Adam Jahnke, Special Edition
Thirst (1979): Special Edition David Johnson from DVD Verdict
DVD Outsider [Slarek] Blu-Ray
Horrorview.com [Black Gloves] Blu-Ray
DVDActive (Chris Gould) dvd review [7/10] Blu-Ray
:: The Playlist ::: Cannes 09: Park Chan-Wook's 'Thirst' Is An ... May 17, 2009
Todd Brown at Cannes from Twitch
Cinema is Dope [Blake Ethridge] at Cannes
Cannes '09: Day Two at Cannes from Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club, May 14, 2009
Alison Willmore at Cannes from The IFC Independent Eye, May 16, 2009
Patrick Z McGavin at Cannes from Stop Smiling magazine, May 16, 2009
Cannes 2009 Review: Park Chan-wook's Thirst Alex Billingham at Cannes from First Showing, May 14, 2009
Charles Ealy at Cannes from Austin 360 Blogs, May 14, 2009
Thirst David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 15, 2009
PARK CHAN-WOOK 14-page press kit (pdf format)
Entertainment Weekly review [A-] Lisa Schwarzbaum
Hollywood Reporter Mark Russell interview at
Salon (Andrew O'Hehir) review feature and interview
Derek Elley at
Time
Out London (Tom Huddleston) review
[4/5] also
including: Read an interview with Park here
Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [3/5]
The
Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [3/5]
Independent.co.uk
[Jonathan Romney] Jonathan Romney
from The Independent,
The Daily Telegraph review [4/5] Tim Robey
The Globe and Mail (Jennie Punter) review [3/4]
Cannes
'09 Day 2: Blood Simple Wesley
Morris from The Boston Globe, May 15,
2009
Boston Globe review [3/4] Ty Burr,
The Boston Phoenix (Peter Keough) review
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [2.5/5]
San Francisco Chronicle (Walter Addiego) review [2/4]
Park
Chan-wook's 'Thirst' is a vampire film sans cliches - Los ... Reed Johnson from The LA Times,
Los Angeles Times (Betsy Sharkey) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
A precious American girl, a Japanese love doll, Iranian rockers, and a Korean vampire Barbara Scharres from Cannes from The Chicago Sun Times, May 15, 2009
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Park,
Kelvin Kyung Kun
A
DREAM OF IRON (Cheol-ae-kum) A 95
S. Korea (100 mi) 2014
‘Scope
Originally conceived as a three-channel museum video art instillation, 철의 꿈 (鐵夢, A
Dream of Iron), 3 Channel Installation - Vimeo (1:48), where three
large projections run simultaneously in 30-minute loops, as shown at the Daegu
Art Factory Survey Exhibition in March 2013, where there is no beginning and no end, as
the viewer is free to move around the room and leave at any time, which,
according to the director, represents a style of film more liberating than a
feature film. But this Korean
manufacturing film develops into an intoxicating and impressionistic essay on
massive, large-scale machinery that become an extension of man’s reach, as he
is able to create machines that are so much bigger and stronger than anything
he is capable of himself, where the colossal machines are reverently described
as gods, as humans worship them on such a massive scale, becoming dependent on
them to survive. While the machines come
to represent the hopes and dreams of the future, ushering in a more modern era,
it also comes at a price, suggesting the spiritual domain, the inner sanctity
of man has been sacrificed at the foot of the giant machines, where Park’s
somber film style documents on a grand scale the rituals of an industrial age,
becoming an immaculately beautiful requiem for the remnants of a dying
age. Featuring some of the most
extraordinary cinematography by the director himself that literally takes one’s
breath away, where viewing this on as large a screen as possible can reduce one
to tears simply by the rapturous beauty of the film which takes on a sci-fi,
post-apocalyptic tone, as if humans once lived in gargantuan steel cities ruled
by machines. Unlike the Wiseman film National
Gallery (2014) which surprisingly doesn’t allow moments of introspection
due to the constant explanations, this more wordless effort is fertile grounds
for quiet contemplation. The stunning
power of the images has not been seen since the seemingly endless opening shot
of Jennifer Baichwall’s MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES (2006), a slow tracking shot
down a side aisle of a huge Chinese iron assembly plant of 23,000 workers,
revealing endless rows of bright yellow-shirted factory workers sitting at
their work stations performing a synchronized monotony of repetitious motions,
many of whom seem relieved to stop and stare at the camera’s obvious intrusion,
where the accumulation of ever-expanding space defies all known concepts of
rationality. These technological
wastelands drive the nation’s economy but leave the workers doomed to
indifference and solitude.
What Park does, however, is strive for the profound by magnifying the extraordinary beauty of size, where cinema has rarely concentrated on filming objects of this immense magnitude before without being seen at some distance, like the lift-off sequence of a space craft into outer space, or resorting to fictional movie recreations, capturing commanding images through a choreography of slow pans, obtaining views never before seen, where the viewer is literally immersed in an industrial aura of seemingly endless time and space. Shot in the port city of Ulsan along Mipo Bay, home of one of the world’s largest shipyards, the director shoots at POSCO (Pohang Steel Company) and the Hyundai Shipyard, both playing a key role in the postwar economic development and industrialization of South Korea, where the company name “Hyundai” means “modernity,” playing into a myth that corporate industrialization has been at the forefront of a modern social movement since the 60’s, but the film documents many of the accompanying protests, including strikes by workers both in the 1970’s and again in the 1990’s protesting against the giant “Goliath crane,” where 78 workers actually occupied the crane, a prelude to many other “high altitude” battles to come, as these goliaths introduce new and unprecedented dangers into the work place, where welding at that altitude is particularly hazardous. As a result, they try to build as much as they can on the ground and then hoist it to the elevated heights needed. By photographing this amazing process, the director transforms this bleak industrial landscape into a poetic exploration of the sublime, where the power of the visual tableaux is awe-inspiring and ominous, creating an astonishing montage set to Mahler’s 1st Symphony, 3rd Movement, played by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Rafael Kubelík, A DREAM OF IRON Trailer | Festival 2014 YouTube (2:46), which is quite simply one of the most ravishingly beautiful sequences of cinema seen all year. The slow precision of the camera movements are similar to Kubrick’s monumental outer space movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), where the human eye is simply captivated by what the future holds, while at the same time reveals a kind of unspoken mysticism from Tarkovsky’s messier, less sterile version of the future in SOLARIS (1972), where the symphonic imagery of steel in motion is also accompanied by age-old Buddhist monk spiritual chants, continually connecting the present to the past.
Originating with the silent film short Manhatta
(1921),
where the city of New York is reduced to an abstraction of images, which was
followed by a similar treatment of Paris in Alberto Cavalcanti’s NOTHING BUT
TIME (Rien que les heures, 1926), the 20’s was
an era when experimental filmmakers began exploring the rapid growth in urban
development, capturing the rhythm and motion in montage films known as “City
Symphonies,” including Walter
Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis
(1927), André Sauvage's ÉTUDES SUR
PARIS (1928), and Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929). In Park’s mind, the metal ships under construction
remind him of the awe that was once associated with giant whales, depicted in
the Neolithic
wall drawings of the nearby Bangudae Petroglyphs, where over 200 images of
animals and people are drawn onto the side of the Bangudae Mountain, dated
somewhere between 3500 and 7000 years ago.
It was only after whales were conquered by humans and began being hunted
and captured for commercial use that they lost their sense of epic grandeur,
where they were once seen as near mythological creatures. When seen in the ocean, they remain a
colossal figure of undisputed nobility, where the sounds they make can sound
musical, adding a sense of artistry and co-existence when heard interacting
with the industrial images, where the film retains a religious sense of divine
glorification. Briefly interjected into
this observational documentary is a personal, diary-like narration that
suggests the narrator’s former girlfriend has just left him to seek
enlightenment as a shaman, where she wishes to pursue a relationship with
God. In response, the director goes on a
similar quest to seek out the remnants of new earthly gods, which offer their
own sense of undefinable wonder. Using a
mix of electronic and acoustic music from Paulo Vivacqua, the effect can be
strangely hypnotic, offering its own sense of sacred insight by connecting with
another medium, where film can turn the abstract into something poetically
comprehensible, imparting euphoric feelings of joy and reverence. A style in contrast to J.P. Sniadecki’s The
Iron Ministry (2014), where old-world iron horse style trains have been
replaced by modernized bullet trains, this film examines every level of
production, where we hear from one of the first female laborers as she puts on
the various protective layers of uniform, covering every part of her body
before she steps out to weld large metal pieces together, but we also see
streams of workers arriving to work while another shift is leaving
simultaneously, creating hordes of human congestion on the street as a traffic
policeman stands on a pedestal directing traffic with a series of strange hand
motions. While individual workers are
discretely isolated in their own space performing their assigned tasks, what’s
most striking are the bold and terrifying images where constantly monitored
computers are pouring enormous vats of hot, molten iron or lifting gigantic
ship parts that only the massive “Goliath” cranes can hoist in the air,
creating unforgettable, mind-boggling images that offer a sense of the sacred
and the sublime.
TIFF
2014 | A Dream of Iron (Kelvin Kyung Kun Park, US/South Korea) — City to City Michael Sicinski from Cinema Scope
To paraphrase Calvin Coolidge, the chief business of cinema is business. As a general rule, festivals like films that can sell; Oscars and acquisitions provide high-level film programmers with industry niches that we critics will never really understand. But now and then, those thoughtful public servants manage to smuggle in something decidely uncommercial. It’s a reasonably admirable thing for TIFF to include an experimental documentary in a showcase like City to City, since there is no shortage of slick Korean studio product waiting in the wings. Sadly (and here comes the subtweet), you shouldn’t send a narrative film specialist to do an avant-garde programmer’s job. Kelvin Kyung Kun Park’s A Dream of Iron has some things going for it, to be sure: in a socio-economic era obsessed with high-tech, Park wants to examine the advent of heavy industry (steel mills, in particular) and how it transformed South Korea in the ’60s and ’70s. With its spare, poetic narration, floating array of interviews, historical footage, and lengthy shots of the iron-forging process, A Dream of Iron conjures memories of Chris Marker and Harun Farocki. But as we know, those men created their magic through rigourous editing; by contrast, Park’s film is sloppy and obtuse, often feeling like a set of half-organized rushes. Only two clear ideas come across in A Dream of Iron: 1) Hyundai sure is big and powerful. 2) Park likes whales.
A love story comes to an end when a woman sets out in search of a
shamanic god.
Park's imagery also evokes the divine: embers and steel, sparks and fire; people dwarved by huge cogwheels, robbed of their individuality. A brave new world in which workers produce modern industrial goods, even as industry has long since been producing the modern worker. Work is a god we have submitted to. Yet every existence is temporary and fleeting, which applies in equal measure to both relationships and gods.
Cheol-ae-kum carries a unique signature. Park weaves together his different narrative strands into a complex documentary work of shamans and propellers, whales and industrial halls. His editing suite comes to resemble a piece of welding equipment, the soundtrack a commanding symphony of industrial noise, whale song, Gustav Mahler and shamanic songs.
Modern
Korean Cinema [Pierce Conran] also
seen here: Berlinale
2014 Review: Grand and Hypnotic, A ... - Twitch
Early on in A Dream of Iron,
a new documentary premiering at the Berlin International Film Festival this
year, director
In a brave new world with seemingly limitless access to information, it takes a lot to stimulate our awe. Hyperbolic titles in the viral digital landscape may tempt us into thinking they hold the key to new wonders but by dint of out credulity, we are often led to disappointment. In an information age with few locked doors, there is little left to amaze us. Yet, rather than seeking out something new, director Park points his keen eye towards something that’s been around for decades but is no longer in lockstep with our technological fancies.
Before leading us into the cavernous expanses of POSCO, Park narrates over the backdrop of a Buddhist ceremony before showing us ancient cave etchings. These old drawings cast whales as mythical beasts, perceived as gods in the eyes of those that drew them. Further images show us Korea as it enters the modern age and experiences its stunning economical development. One of the crowning achievements of this period was POSCO, the Pohang Iron and Steel Company that was founded in 1968 during the Park Chung-hee administration. The fourth largest of its kind in the world, this company constructs ships that stretch far beyond the imagination of the peninsula’s ancient cave dwellers.
With its dark shadows and molten glow, the interior of POSCO is oddly reminiscent of the most recent Hobbit film but, being real and demonstrating greater ingenuity, it is all the more impressive. This factory was one of the drivers that fueled Korea’s rapid growth, itself represented in the film by earlier shots of the country’s many uniform residential blocks littering cityscapes. Park’s carefully composed images, accompanied by a waltzing tune, are both magnificent and disquieting.
The music adds a droll touch to the visuals and Park’s satirical bent pops up a number of times over the course of the documentary, including in the next scene where workers march through a street crossing of the massive complex, which at this point seems like a small town, except with almost exclusively male and uniformly garbed residents. This shot unfolds as what seems to be an old Korean morning exercise song plays in the background, which sounds more like a socialist ballad. Though a bastion of Korea’s staunchly anti-communist government, by juxtaposing a few choice morsels of music against images of the plant, Park’s vision of POSCO has more than a little in common with Soviet Russia.
As things move out into the shipyard, the scale becomes larger and the tableaux more intricate. At this point the music also switches to the hypnotic chanting of Buddhist monks. Combined, the effect is awe-inspiring and terrifying in equal measure. The compositions are themselves filled with different kinds of artists, as workers toil away on the large panels and parts, turning the images into living tableaux, evolving and repeating over time.
With some of the best photography you’re likely to see in any film this year, let alone a documentary, Park’s masterful A Dream of Iron is a confident and immersive non-fiction work that teaches and inspires us through catharsis rather than fact.
A
Dream of Iron - Next Projection
Rowena Santos Aquino
During the latter half of the 1920s, a genre of avant-garde/experimental filmmaking emerged devoted to capturing the modern, urban city’s bustling movement of people and machines. Regarded as ‘city symphonies,’ films such as Rien que les heures (1926, Alberto Cavalcanti), Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927, Walter Ruttmann), Man With a Movie Camera (1929, Dziga Vertov), Rain (1929, Joris Ivens/Mannus Franken), and their precursor Manhatta (1921, Paul Strand/Charles Sheeler) present poetic impressions of a city, with the city and oftentimes its industrial development as the main character over individuals. They are also driven more by a visual musical rhythm, formal experimentation, and lyrical tone than explanation or rhetorical persuasion.
A Dream of Iron nods to the tradition of ‘city symphonies,’ only this time the famous Hyundai shipyard that stretches along Mipo Bay in Ulsan, South Korea is the focused city space. Not to be confused with his 2010 debut film Cheonggyecheon Melody: A Dream of Iron, multimedia artist Kelvin Kyung Kun Park constructs a veritable visual symphony of steel and iron at work with and without humans at the shipyard, to address the country’s history of modernisation via these heavy industries. The film’s subject announces itself rather clearly with archival footage of surveyors, machines, trucks, construction, and turning over the earth during the opening credits, followed by an overhead tracking shot of the shipyard’s massive grid of industrial buildings and roads. Park blends the poetic and the observational in his presentation of large-scale machines at work, frequently set to a mix of classical music, downtempo, and dissonant sounds. Such an audiovisual tapestry lends the film a sci-fi, post-apocalyptic undercurrent, as if one were inside a megacity ruled by machines.
In fact, Park constantly contrasts bodies and machines and explores the kind of relationships to be had between them. The enormity of edifices and machinery is so striking that human bodies appear seemingly powerless next to them, even when we see people operate some of the equipment. Moreover, one of the few people with whom the film converses is a woman who works at the shipyard like her husband and compares the past and its sense of community among people with the present, colder, more distant, and more compartmentalised. She remarks, ‘People keep taking care of only what’s theirs,’ which is somehow in keeping with the aforementioned sci-fi feel.
But A Dream of Iron is more than just another documentary that falls in the category of a ‘city symphony’ film in its exploration of the relationships between humans and machines. Accompanying intermittently the footage at the shipyard with its factories and machinery is a voiceover that dictates letters to his former love Seung-hee. In truth, the voiceover addressing a letter to Seunghee begins the film over images of a Buddhist rite at a temple. Seunghee had left in search of a god, leaving the narrator to do a search of his own, something in this world. This narrative point of departure enables Park to speak in mythical terms of the ancient and modern histories that literally mark the city of Ulsan. On the one hand, petroglyphs (rock carvings) by Daegokcheon stream speak of an intimate connection between humans and nature. Park implies the breaking of this connection first with the creation of a dam in the 1960s, which has resulted in yearly floods that threaten to erode the petroglyphs. The construction of the Hyundai shipyard in the 1970s fully ruptures the humans-nature connection. This rupture brings about the coming of a new god, Park’s metaphor for South Korea’s modernisation project.
Steel is the new god, the one that removed the people’s hunger pangs and replaced them with hopes and dreams. Park then transitions to the funeral ceremony of Park Tae-joon, who played such a crucial role in the development of the steel industry in the country through his company POSCO. While a colleague gives a eulogy, Park pairs it with images of factory smoke bellowing in the wind, inviting the reading that Park Tae-joon’s death is like a sacrificial offering to the new god. Still following the metaphor of a new god and rituals, Park also includes footage of labour strikes and protests at the shipyard during the 1970s and information about more recent strikes in the 1990s. In particular, he provides information on the ‘Battle of Goliath,’ so named since the strike took place by the immense red crane known as the ‘Goliath crane’ and led to a nationwide strike as a symbol of the labour movement. ‘High altitude battles’ like this strike continue to this day as a popular form of labour protest. In the context of Park’s mythicisation, these strikes are popular, communal rituals of celebration and unity; taking it further, the crane is a modern-day steel version of the ‘wicker man.’
The film’s most striking scenes are precisely those at the factory presented as rituals, which contrast with footage of actual Buddhist rites: images of machines and men finishing a huge propeller with a soundtrack of Buddhist chants and percussion; the extended shot of lifting a huge piece of steel and turning it to its side to release water from it, with one or two workers in the frame somewhere below it, with Buddhist chants again on the soundtrack; transferring heavy steel materials from one spot to another, suspended in the air, like steel clouds passing through. Ritualistic choreography of steel and human skill.
[notification type="star"]90/100 ~ AMAZING. Park blends the poetic and the observational in his presentation of large-scale machines at work, frequently set to a mix of classical music, downtempo, and dissonant sounds. Such an audiovisual tapestry lends the film a sci-fi, post-apocalyptic undercurrent, as if one were inside a megacity ruled by machines.
A
Dream Of Iron - 15th JeonJu International Film Festival
Movie
Review: “A Dream of Iron” | Blog.AsianInNY.com Ismary Munet from Asian in New York
Berlin
2011 Reviews: A Dream Of Iron, Joe Swanberg's Art ... What Culture
Opsis Art - Kelvin Kyung Kun Park: A Dream of Iron Sat.... Facebook entry, also seen here: "철의 꿈" Kelvin Kyungkun Park, "A Dream of Iron" - Opsis Art and here: 철의 꿈 - ArtRescape
Cheol-ae-kum
- Arsenal press packet (pdf)
Running Time: 98 min | HD cam | Stereo | 2.35:1 - Chicago ... another press packet (pdf format)
Installation - 박경근 / 朴慶根 / KELVIN KYUNG KUN PARK
Kelvin
Kyung Kun PARK, Director of A DREAM OF IRON
Pierce Conran interview from Korean
Film, March 10, 2014
'A
Dream of Iron' (Cheol-ae-kum) - The Hollywood Reporter John DeFore
at
South Korea ShiRyard Hyundai Workers Battle Troops Marxists (pdf)
South Korean activist ends
309-day crane protest - My ... My
Sinchew
ntlk's blog:
Samson and Goliath - Personal thoughts
Cheonggyecheon
Medley: A Dream of Iron - Berlinale
(pdf)
Park , Nick
CREATURE COMFORTS
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dale Dobson) dvd review
Image Entertainment's Creature
Comforts DVD presents four short animated films produced at Aardman
Animations, the British studio best known for the recent feature film Chicken Run and the Wallace and
Gromit shorts. The DVD includes:
Creature Comforts (1989):
A festival favorite since its debut, this innovative five-and-a-half-minute
clay animation short is set in a zoo, where various animals discuss their lives
and concerns in captivity. What makes the film so entertaining is its cinéma
vérité approach, synching the animation to live, unscripted interviews conducted
with ordinary people about zoos, housing, and living conditions in general.
The illusion is seamless and surprisingly magical—a cougar from
Wat's Pig (1996):
This simple morality tale posits a kingdom whose queen bears twin sons, one of
whom is kidnapped and abandoned in a pigsty in an extremely filmic,
dramatically lit and photographed opening sequence. Years later, one of the
boys has been raised to adulthood by his adoptive pig family, with whom he
lives a simple agricultural life, while his long-lost brother has grown up to
be King. When the land is invaded by a neighboring Kingdom, events conspire to
reunite the brothers. The King sends his brother forth in his place, and an
unexpected climax affirms the simple values of the "poor" brother.
The animation isn't as consistently solid as the work seen in Aardman's other
shorts, but the visual style of this eleven-minute, largely dialogue-free piece
is vital and dramatic, with strong lighting and camera angles, clever use of
split-screen and a solid sense of the medieval, courtesy of director Peter
Lord.
Not Without My Handbag (1993):
A hilarious tale in an E.C. Comics-meets-Absolutely Fabulous vein, this
twelve-minute short film tells the story of a little girl's Aunt who is sent to
Hell for failure to keep up her washer payments (per the unexamined terms of
her contract with the Dante Corporation). Distorted, forced-perspective,
garishly lit set designs lend a joyously spooky feel to the proceedings as
Auntie rises from her grave in search of her faithful handbag, with her dress
and bouffant orange hairdo intact on her otherwise fleshless skeleton. When
Satan disguises himself as the handbag in question to reclaim Auntie's soul,
her little niece ("My aunt is a zombie! From Hell!") must find
a way to help her rest in peace.
This is the least Aardman-esque short on this disc, directed by Boris Kossmehl
with movement and design that frequently call traditional cel animation to
mind. Character models are simple and stylized, with fingerless hands,
"pipe-cleaner" limbs, and heads sculpted and cast without the
malleable "Aardman brow." The animation is kinetic and effective, but
the film is carried largely by its colorful, expressionistic design sense—asymmetric
doorways and tilted staircases fit the story perfectly.
Adam (1991):
Director Peter Lord tackles Adam's relationship to his Creator. Adam is placed
on the globe by God, then subjected to all manner of abuse—divinely ordained
and self-inflicted—before he finds a greater happiness, all in the space of
about six minutes.
The character animation is the big attraction here—Adam is a simple (though
obviously male) clay figure, and the Creator appears only in the form of a
pixelated human arm and hand. But the business derived from Adam's relationship
to God and his simple environment (a round Earth that can be traversed in
seconds) is inventive, and Adam's reactions, emotions and thought processes are
comically clear.
Cinefantastique: The Review of Horror, Fantasy & Science Fiction Films Steve Biodrowski
Beatdown Magazine (Alan Wigodski) review
User
reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Andy (film-critic) from Bookseller of the
Parent Previews evaluation [A-] Donna Gustafson
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review
A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review
MovieFreak.com (Dylan Grant) dvd review [7/10]
Short
of the Week.com [Andrew S. Allen]
Movie Hell (Michael J. Legeros) review [A-]
Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [B+] Marc Bernardin
Deseret News, Salt Lake City review Chris Hicks
A GRAND DAY OUT WITH WALLACE
AND GROMIT
Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]
This is, apparently, how to avoid, forever, job interviews.
Just do something this brilliant in school and they come looking for you.
Actually, I don't know that it's more brilliant than what a lot of people
do in school, but at least it made sense to them . The claymation's
the thing mate, and if that ain't brilliant enough you have an exaggerated
sense of self! Do I? Anyway, the claymation is very cool and with a plot about
flying to the moon thinking it's a big hunk of cheese for your crackers you
can't really go wrong from there. Unless you go on about it, and they don't.
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
This is the first, and my favorite, of the three
clay-animated "Wallace and Gromit" shorts. It's the most laid-back
with the best use of long pauses and quiet spaces, and it's also the most dryly
imaginative. It begins as inventor Wallace and the speechless, but highly
intelligent Gromit try to decide where to go on their annual holiday. When
Wallace discovers that they're out cheese, their decision is made: they'll go
to the moon. They build a spaceship in the garage (apparently made partly out
of wood, since they're seen doing some sawing) and take off. The moon cheese
tastes sort of funny, but things get really weird when a lonely robot comes
back to life. The film was nominated for a Best Animated Short Oscar, but Park
lost to himself! His other masterpiece, Creature Comforts, was the
winner. Lionsgate has re-released the three Wallace and Gromit shorts on three
separate DVDs, priced at a mere $10 each. Park provides a commentary track for
each, and each one has a bonus "making-of" short. (See also The Wrong
Trousers and A
Close Shave.)
DVD Verdict- Wallace And Gromit: Complete Collection (Blu-Ray) [Michael Stailey] (excerpt)
Confounded by where to go for their bank holiday, Wallace's startling discovery of a household cheese shortage sends our dynamic duo into the planning stages for a trip to the moon. After all, the whole thing is made of cheese. Little do they realize there may be someone or something waiting to foil their grand day out. *Nominated for an Oscar. Won a BAFTA.
I was first exposed to Nick Park's brilliant A Grand Day Out through Spike and Mike's Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation in 1990, America's first introduction to the charming duo of Wallace the absentminded inventor and his genius-intellect faithful companion Gromit. From that moment on, I was hooked. My passion for stop motion animation had just found a new hero.
Wallace & Gromit found life in creator Nick Park's sketch books from an early age. Part stereotypical northerner, part Nick's own father, Wallace grew out of his mustached stocky appearance and settled on his present form in fairly short order. Gromit started life as a cat and made several evolutions before arriving at the look he has today. In fact, when Nick began work on this film in 1983, the very first screen test had Gromit looking like a big old wolf hound. A labor of love, he continued his work at National Film and Television School but ran out of money and missed his deadline. It wasn't until he picked up a job at Aardman Animations that he was able to finish the film.
Filled with expressive characters, brilliant sight gags, and detailed sets, what I love most about the film is that we don't get bogged down by the absurdity of it all. Wallace & Gromit are like The Little Rascals, limited only by the power of their own imaginations. We don't care that Gromit can read and weld metal but not speak; the logistics of building a rocket in basement with a staggering depth of foundation; the lack of physics needed to allow them to walk and breathe on the surface of the moon without space suits (while a soccer ball cannot) or traverse the vacuum of space with no cabin pressure. We're more interested in Wallace being able to grab crackers from the kitchen and make it back to the ship before it takes off, the sheer volume of set detail inside the rocket, and the potential threat posed by a sentient vending machine (an ancestor of Wall-E?) who polices the moon and harbors dreams of skiing the Alps.
Sure the technicality of the film is superb, but the real genius of Nick Park and his Aardman compatriots is in getting us to love these characters. From the principal heroes to the mice in their basement, we're invested in this adventure from the very beginning, despite the fact that only one character has any dialogue. In 24 minutes we get a complete adventure with a main story and equally enchanting subplot, both leaving us with an uncontrollable grin. What more can you ask for?
pulpmovies.com (Paul Pritchard) review [5/5]
Hollywood Gothique Steve Biodrowski, The Early Adventures
The Digital Bits capsule dvd review Bill Hunt, Their First Three Adventures
The Flick Filosopher's take Wallace and Gromit Trilogy
A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review Their First Three Adventures
DVD Verdict [Mike Jackson] The Incredible Adventures
DVD Town [James Plath] Three Amazing Adventures
DVD Verdict [Mac McEntire] Three Amazing Adventures
FilmIntuition.com: Complete Collection Blu-ray [Jen Johans]
DVD Net (Gavin Turner) dvd
review [Region 4] Three Cracking Adventures
WALLACE & GROMIT IN THE WRONG TROUSERS
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Wallace & Gromit take on a boarder-a fowl penguin who pulls diamond capers cleverly disguised in a chicken hat. Dog or not, Gromit is no dummy and no chicken is going to outsmart him just by reading "Electronics for Dogs." Claymation's not my thing, but there are some funny bits.
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
This second of the three Wallace & Gromit clay-animated
shorts takes a far more conventional, three-act
BBC Films review Nick Hilditch
Of the three Wallace and Gromit films made by fast-rising British animation studio Aardman, "The Wrong Trousers" is the most accomplished. It developed the characters and considerable talent showcased in "A Grand Day Out" and was merely reworked in their equally enjoyable third outing, "A Close Shave".
Wallace and Gromit, an inventor and his highly intelligent dog, live together in a cosy English idyll aided by various handy gadgets straight out of the cartoons of Heath Robinson. Then they take in a devious penguin lodger who drives Gromit from his room, and ultimately out of the house. The evil little bird also happens to be a master criminal and he soon exploits Wallace's peculiar genius to steal a diamond from the local museum.
Nick Park creates a kind of dynamic previously confined to two-dimensional animation and with tightly structured narrative pays homage to a broad cinematic heritage. The penguin's efforts to drive a sleeping Wallace through the museum in a pair of remote-controlled trousers and the finale in which they hurtle around the house on a model train are set pieces as thrilling as any in live action blockbusters.
Gromit is the most expressive cartoon dog since Snoopy, and without uttering a word he carries the story through its all too brief 30 minutes. Attention to detail makes it a rewarding film to watch and re-watch, with amusing headlines and daft wallpaper. The film earned itself an Oscar and its studio a reputation big enough to make the feature length claymation movie, "Chicken Run". It's the kind of children's fare adults want to be a part of.
Edinburgh U Film Society (Ben Stephens) review
The Book-Lover's Guide to Cinema (Matthew Gold) [shrine] also A CLOSE SHAVE
DVD Verdict- Wallace And Gromit: Complete Collection (Blu-Ray) [Michael Stailey]
Hollywood Gothique Steve Biodrowski, The Early Adventures
The Digital Bits capsule dvd review Bill Hunt, Their First Three Adventures
The Flick Filosopher's take Wallace and Gromit Trilogy
A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review Their First Three Adventures
DVD Verdict [Mike Jackson] The Incredible Adventures
DVD Town [James Plath] Three Amazing Adventures
DVD Verdict [Mac McEntire] Three Amazing Adventures
FilmIntuition.com: Complete Collection Blu-ray [Jen Johans]
DVD Net (Gavin Turner) dvd review
[Region 4]
Three Cracking Adventures
WALLACE AND GROMIT IN A CLOSE
SHAVE
Park's claymation film follows an Ealing-esque comedy-with-sinister-undertones
scenario. The adventure centres on the case of the disappearing sheep. Northern
gadget-meister Wallace and his hound Gromit have taken up window-cleaning, and
it isn't long before Wallace is swept off his feet by the owner of the local
wool shop, Wendolene Ramsbottom. Amateur sleuth Gromit, meanwhile, investigates
the mysterious movements of her shifty-looking dog,
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
The third and final of the "Wallace & Gromit"
shorts is perhaps the most exciting, cut from traditional Hollywood thriller
cloth, but still very funny. In it, Wallace & Gromit operate a high-tech
window-washing business. Wallace meets and falls for Wendolene Ramsbottom
(voiced by Anne Reid), who runs a wool shop. It turns out that her evil robot
dog,
The countless numbers of short films that play at your local film festival are endless. They are not just the hardest pick for your office's Oscar pool. There are many ideas that can be expressed in just forty-five, thirty, or even fifteen minutes. The sad thing is that non-festival goers will probably not have a chance to see any of these films. Despite the occasional Spike & Mike festival or the new short film websites that are popping up everywhere on the Internet, these (sometimes) masterpieces don't get much play. That's why it's amazing when a thirty minute short about the strange relationship between a man and his dog, and the adventures they go on, became a huge hit. The first two Wallace and Gromit films (The Wrong Trousers and A Grand Day Out) were big successes. The Wrong Trousers even grabbed the Oscar for best Animated Short. A Close Shave is the latest release from Aardman Animations, an Australian animation company headed by Nick Park (the director of this movie). Aardman is the front runner (some would say pioneer) in bringing animation to the mainstream film audience. With the series' recent success, it's not hard to seek this lovable pair out on video. In fact, I suggest you do so immediately.
Wallace lives in a cozy house somewhere in
Wallace falls in love almost instantly, but Gromit has other
troubles. Wendolene has a mean and evil dog named
Every moment of A Close Shave is filled with extremely funny sight gags, many of which are priceless and will not be forgotten. One of the things I like about these movies is that the characters are so darn likable that you always know who to root for, even if you are laughing at them in the process. All of the animal characters behave in a human manner giving the film an unneeded comic touch. There is so much funny stuff here that it seems impossible to add anything more to this wild roller coaster ride. I also enjoy the replay value that this film has. I own all three shorts (this is by far my favorite) and I constantly find myself watching them again and again, and I still laugh. Go to your local video store now and seek Wallace and Gromit out, you'll thank me after it's over. This short animation masterpiece gets **** stars.
The Young-Uns: There is one scary scene near the end involving a vicious dog, (I won't say which one) but otherwise there's nothing in the film that's harmful. Good Age: 4 and up
Beatdown Magazine (Alan Wigodski) review
Edinburgh U Film Society (Ben Stephens) review
Teen Movie Critic (Roger Davidson) capsule review
The Book-Lover's Guide to Cinema (Matthew Gold) [shrine] also THE WRONG TROUSERS
DVD Verdict- Wallace And Gromit: Complete Collection (Blu-Ray) [Michael Stailey]
Hollywood Gothique Steve Biodrowski, The Early Adventures
The Digital Bits capsule dvd review Bill Hunt, Their First Three Adventures
The Flick Filosopher's take Wallace and Gromit Trilogy
A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review Their First Three Adventures
DVD Verdict [Mike Jackson] The Incredible Adventures
DVD Town [James Plath] Three Amazing Adventures
DVD Verdict [Mac McEntire] Three Amazing Adventures
FilmIntuition.com:
Complete Collection Blu-ray [Jen Johans]
DVD Net (Gavin Turner) dvd review [Region 4] Three Cracking Adventures
Deseret News, Salt Lake City review Chris Hicks
CHICKEN RUN B- 82
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
The last half-hour of Aardman's first feature is pretty much all one might expect. But as far as laughs go, it's slow to take off; and in terms of gags, characters and narrative, it lacks the freshness of some of the earlier films. This is The Great Escape with chickens, and herein lie the limitations. First, the fowl are neither as funny nor as well characterised as Gromit and Co. Furthermore, directors Park and Lord are so keen to get the PoW format pat that the film comes across as pastiche not parody. As Ginger tries to persuade Rocky, a Rhode Island Red, to help her fellow egg-layers escape from Tweedy's Farm (where a barbaric pie machine is being built) familiarity with the stereotypes may produce pleasure of recognition, but not consistent laughter. Still, it'd be churlish to carp about this triumph of craftsmanlike technique.
Exclaim! review Poonam Khanna
Chicken Run is a World War II prison
movie, an army training flick and a love story - all set on a chicken farm.
It’s a formulaic movie with a brilliant twist guaranteed to elicit laughs. The
movie, the first feature by famed Wallace & Gromit creators Peter Lord and
Nick Park, borrows heavily from such classics as The Great Escape and cult hits
as The Shawshank Redemption (the chickens, one of them points out, have been
imprisoned mentally as well as physically). Ginger (Julia Sawalha of Absolutely
Fabulous fame) is the leader of a group of chickens imprisoned on a chicken
farm by the cruel Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson) and her bullied husband
(Tony Haygarth). If the chickens stop producing eggs, the gluttonous and
overbearing Mrs. Tweedy takes them out to the woodshed and serves them up for
dinner.
In desperate attempts to avoid this fate, the chickens try
again and again to escape from the farm - they dig tunnels and try going under
the wire like their counterparts in the Great Escape. But they aren’t quite as
skilled. Ginger decides they must all get out at once. When Rocky, a rooster
voiced by Mel Gibson, comes flying over the fence and crashes into the farm,
Ginger has her plan. She asks the rather arrogant Rocky (with whom all the
chickens, except of course Ginger, fall in love) to teach the chickens how to
fly. Like all good comedies, Chicken Run deals with some rather harsh
realities. It has a dark side to it which makes the antics of the chickens all
the more endearing (and which is likely to turn at least a few viewers
permanently off chicken). If Chicken Run has one fault, it’s that it’s
predictable - there’s never any doubt about just how the movie will end. But
watching the chickens get there is still well worth it.
Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review
Aardman Animation’s cartoons have always seemed as English as Flake bars and pasty skin. Best known for Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit cartoons, which feature the misadventures of a tea-loving inventor and his ever-capable pooch, Aardman’s cartoons are both broadly and delicately funny and at the same time grossly absurd and subtly daffy. In the three W&G films, for example, the pair are placed in a series of predicaments absurd enough for any knockabout farce — the plots involve, respectively, a trip to the moon (A Grand Day Out), a pair of mechanical trousers and a penguin on the lam (The Wrong Trousers), and a sheep-shearing syndicate run by an ill-tempered dog (A Close Shave) — but it’s the juxtaposition of these thoroughly outlandish plots with Wallace’s foggy bewilderment (and his inevitable cries of "Gromiiiiiit!") that really makes the series tick. Think of them as plotless characters adrift in a plot-driven world.
Imagine Wallace as a bespectacled boob à la Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor and you have some ideas of the dangers awaiting Chicken Run. Making their first for an American studio and their first feature ever, there was every reason to suspect, or at least fear, that Aardman might have flattened out their humor to find a broader audience, or souped up their plots to fit in better with the cavalcade of summer blockbusters.
And so they have — sort of. With Chicken Run, Park and co-director Peter Lord have managed to have their cake, eat it, and go back for seconds. Instead of a summer action movie, the film plays like a parody of summer action movies, or at least the most eccentric possible twist on them. Blatantly lifting from obvious sources (à la Robert Towne’s much-remarked-upon rewrite of Notorious for Mission: Impossible II), Chicken Run recasts The Great Escape inside Tweedy’s Chicken Farm, where a bevy of Yorkshire hens are held captive by the menacing Mrs. Tweedy (voiced by Miranda Richardson). While plucky Ginger (Absolutely Fabulous’ Julie Sawalha) has masterminded scores of escape plans, and spent many nights confined in the coal bin as a result, she’s never come up with one ingenious enough to rescue the whole flock at once, a plan that becomes urgently necessary when word leaks out that the profit-hungry Mrs. Tweedy has decided to convert each and every one of her egg-layers into chicken pies. (Her scheme is facilitated by a giant pie-making machine that’s a cousin to A Close Shave’s sheep-shearing device.)
Enter Rocky (Mel Gibson). A cocky Rhode Island Red (shades of William Holden in Stalag 17), he’s just pulled off an escape of his own from a circus where he was known as "Rocky the Flying Rooster". That’s right, a flying chicken: in fact, he enters Tweedy’s farm by flying over the barbed-wire fence, although a damaged wing hampers his attempts to get back out again. Though Ginger doesn’t like having her authority usurped and can’t stand Rocky’s cock-of-the-walk attitude, she instantly recognizes that he may be the key to getting the chickens out of Mrs. Tweedy’s once and forever.
The contentious relationship between Ginger and Rocky, which has more than a touch of Hepburn and Tracy to it, grows more so as Rocky continues to postpone fulfilling his promise to teach the rest of the chickens how to fly, and you soon begin to suspect that this particular rooster may not be as immune to the laws of physics as he might claim. As Rocky basks in the attention showered on him while secretly struggling with his guilt, Chicken Run gets a little too close to A Bug’s Life’s deceptive circus bugs for comfort, a kinship only enhanced by Chicken Run’s climax, which features a similarly mechanical solution to the chicken’s predicament.
But where A Bug’s Life was broad and rousing, Chicken Run is manic and breathless. The best jokes are the ones you almost don’t get, as when Rocky finds himself about to tumble into the pie machine’s entrance chute, and, as he plummets, yells, "Shoot!" The sequence that follows, which begins with Rocky trying to rescue Ginger and ends (of course) with her rescuing him, is about as close to an action movie as Chicken Run gets, with the two imperiled fowl fleeing the machine’s perilous cogs and barely escaping with their skins. But when they find themselves trapped in unbaked pies and poke their gravy-covered heads through the crust, you end up laughing at their predicament even as you hope they won’t end up in the frozen foods section. The satire isn’t smarmy, but it’s sure.
At times, Chicken Run tries for too much, and you can’t help wishing they’d cast a subtler actor than Mel Gibson for the lead voice. Gibson certainly has Rocky’s self-assured drawl down pat — no surprise, since Gibson always comes off as a smug bastard — but he’s hopeless at expanding the character beyond that point, and more importantly, he’s not funny. While it’s been nice to see the upsurge in feature-length animation the last several years, it’s a shame that the massive cost of such undertakings necessitates both casting American box-office stars in the lead roles and disallowing them from using anything other than their own money-in-the-bank voices. It takes one of the best aspects of animation out of the picture, and unintentionally reveals just what a bland, technically unskilled lot we’ve got for A-list talent these days. (Try watching Titan A.E. without knowing who’s in the cast and guess which voice is which.) Luckily, the other characters do have their own distinct voices, from the gruff blather of the pompous ex-R.A.F. Fowler (Benjamin Whitrow) to the blackboard-scratching twitter of the hapless Babs (Jane Horrocks, also an AbFab veteran).
Chicken Run doesn’t have the stunning digital vistas that have become de rigeur in animated features; its plasticine and silicon figures look positively primordial next to Dinosaur’s smooth-skinned beasts. But the Aardman folks take advantage of the winning clumsiness of stop-motion animation by focusing on one of the least graceful species ever to walk the earth; these pear-shaped hens are underdogs from the second they peck their way out of the shell. The gently eccentric tone of Park’s Aardman cartoons has been flattened somewhat, but Chicken Run is its own kind of beast, and a clever one it is, too.
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Chicken Run (2000) Kim Newman
from Sight and Sound, August
2000
Tweedy's Chicken Farm, somewhere
in England, the 50s. Ginger, a hen, plans a series of escape attempts. Despite
foiling all of these planned breakouts, the farmer Mr Tweedy is unable to
convince his wife that the chickens are organised. Rocky, a rooster who has
escaped from a circus, seems to fly into the farm. Ginger enlists his reluctant
aid in teaching the chickens how to fly. Mrs Tweedy, tired of low-profit egg
farming, orders a new machine which kills chickens to produce ready-made pies.
After installing it in the barn, Mr Tweedy singles out Ginger to test the
machine. During his rescue attempt, Rocky unwittingly joins Ginger inside the
contraption. Before sabotaging the device and breaking free of it, Ginger and
Rocky realise that all the farm's chickens are slated for slaughter.
Despite winning the admiration of
the chickens, Rocky slips away at night, leaving behind proof he was only able
to fly when shot out of a cannon. Ginger calls on Fowler, an aged cockerel who
is always reminiscing about his wartime experience, to supervise the
construction of an ornithopter out of odds and ends scavenged by rats Fetcher
and Nick. Having fixed the pie machine, the Tweedys chance upon the chickens as
they prepare for their escape bid; the chickens take to the ornithopter. With
the help of Rocky - who unexpectedly returns to the farm - the chickens fly
over the farm's fence, dropping Mrs Tweedy, who has been hanging on since the
machine took off, and settle in a bird sanctuary.
Review
The high concept behind Chicken
Run is that it is a prisoner-of-war film featuring grimacing plasticine
chickens in place of Richard Attenborough, John Mills or any other persistent
screen escapee from Colditz or Stalag 17. To underline this, there are
enormously pleasurable quotes from John Sturges' The Great Escape
(1962), the only POW film liable to be familiar to an international audience.
After each failed escape attempt, Ginger, the mastermind behind the chicken's
plans, is confined to a coal bunker where she bounces a Brussels sprout just as
"cooler king" Steve McQueen did a baseball in solitary confinement.
The finale of the film also sees a tricycling Rocky, a rooster, pull off
(albeit in reverse) the wire-jumping motorcycle stunt that was McQueen's finest
moment in The Great Escape.
From the hoary but still-fresh
experiences of World War II which the cockerel Fowler recounts to the snatches
of early rock 'n' roll ('Flip, Flop and Fly') on the wireless, Chicken
Run would seem to be set sometime in the 50s. Not only does this make
for some lovely period touches (a Toblerone carton is used for a "chocs
away" gag), but the setting allows directors Nick Park and Peter Lord -
both leading figures in Aardman, the Bristol-based animation company behind Chicken
Run - to play on the fact that an oppressive farm from that time, with
its barbed chicken wire and neat rows of wooden huts, bears some resemblance to
a movie stalag. Thankfully, they avoid any direct references to modern
battery farms, which if transplanted to Aardman-land might seem more like
extermination camps than rough-and-ready POW enclosures. This said, the film
isn't without its darker moments, notably a post-Babe touch of
cruelty when Mrs Tweedy uses a chopper to dispose of an unproductive hen.
The chickens' construction of a
homemade flying machine has a precedent in an episode of the 70s television
series Colditz where prisoners cobbled together a glider from
found materials (which itself echoes a true historical incident). In Chicken
Run, the aircraft knocked together by the inmates is a delightful
combination of slave galley and airliner with lazily flapping wings. It's
tempting here to detect the influence of such film fantasists as Karel Zeman or
Terry Gilliam. But the flying machine has a more immediate stylistic
predecessor in the elaborate contraptions which featured in co-director Park's
award-winning Wallace and Gromit short films. Though the characters in Chicken
Run are well defined and have their share of memorable moments, no cast
members quite match up to Wallace and Gromit's inspired inventor-dog
double-act. The added length of a feature doesn't help: some of the minor
players - wartime bore Fowler, aggressive hen Bunty - are one-joke creations
who repeat their shtick two or three times with little development and
diminishing effect.
Pitched almost as a UK answer to Toy
Story, Chicken Run offers a specific British setting
(albeit with an American guest star) and employs animation techniques which are
(ostensibly) as old-fashioned and hand-crafted as Toy Story's CGI
imagery is high-tech and virtual.
Like Toy Story, the tale hinges on bickering between two
characters, replacing the past/future opposition of Woody and Buzz with the
Brit/Yank opposition of Ginger and Rocky. Ginger, voiced with spirit by Julia
Sawalha, is a British escape-film officer incarnate, not satisfied unless the
whole prison population can head for freedom, while Rocky, drawled to
near-creepy perfection by Mel Gibson, is the hollow blowhard hero who pulls
through in the end.
The voice casting - including
instantly recognisable turns from Jane Horrocks as the chicken with an
obsession with holidays and Timothy Spall and Phil Daniels as wide-boy rats who
object to being paid "chicken-feed" - is spot-on. But it's the model work
and animation that make these creatures so vivid. With wide eyes and broad
grins (hen's teeth are not rare hereabouts) the poultry cast are capable of an
extraordinary range of expression, especially during the sad or mildly scary
scenes.
Taking a sequence almost at
random and breaking it down to its components, you realise just how much
physical and emotional texture Park and Lord have worked into crafting their
film's seemingly effortless charm. (As with the best children's movies, which
are likely to be viewed over again on video by their young audiences, Chicken
Run rewards repeated viewings.) The scene in which Ginger discovers the
truth about Rocky, for instance, features an inspired narrative device as she
joins together two halves of a poster that reveal the rooster can only fly by
being shot from a cannon. It's a small masterpiece of cinematic storytelling:
as tear-like animated raindrops fall all around, a thunderclap erupts in the
distance, acting as a literal burst of understanding and an imagined, mocking
echo of Rocky's impression of flight.
“Chicken Run” - Salon.com Michael Sragow, June 21, 2000
AboutFilm.com (Carlo Cavagna) review [B+]
filmcritic.com (James Brundage) review [5/5] also seen here: James Brundage review
Wolfpack Productions (Sujit 'Chief' Chawla) review
Movieline Magazine review Michael Atkinson
Chicken Run (2000) – Film Review | Cinefantastique Online Steve Biodrowski
Nitrate Online (Carrie Gorringe) review
Film Freak Central dvd review Bill Chambers and Travis Mackenzie Hoover
PopMatters Gordon G. Geise
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review
DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Shawn Harwell, 3-disc Special Edition
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review 3-disc Special Edition
Audio Revolution (Bill Warren) dvd review [Special Edition]
A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review 3-disc Special Edition
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [5/10]
Mixed Reviews: The Arts, The World, and More (Jill Cozzi) review
Mixed Reviews: The Arts, The World, and More (Gabriel Shanks) review
CineScene.com (Sasha Stone) review
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
Film Monthly (Andrew Lewicky) review
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [4/5]
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3.5/4]
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
culturevulture.net Bob Aulert
CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [5/5] also seen here: Old School Reviews [John Nesbit] and here: John Nesbit
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Murali Krishnan review [3.5/4]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3/4]
The Digital Bits dvd review Todd Doogan
Needcoffee.com review Widge
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review (Page 2)
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B+]
Mutant Reviewers from Hell review Justin and Lissa
Film Journal International (Kevin Lally) review
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
Film Quips Online (John R. McEwen) review [4.5/5]
DVD Verdict (Erick Harper) dvd review
Chicken Run Kevin Clemons from digitallyOBSESSED
Plume Noire review Anji Milanovic
SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [2.5/4]
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3.5/5] Richard Scheib
Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [B+]
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [A]
Movie Habit (Marty Mapes) review [3/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Jason Whyte) review [4/5]
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [2/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Stephen Groenewegen) review [4/5]
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [4/5]
Brilliant Observations on 1492 Films [Clayton Trapp]
pulpmovies.com (Paul Pritchard) review [5/5]
Entertainment Weekly review [A-] Lisa Schwarzbaum
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
BBC Films review William Gallagher
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Examiner (Wesley Morris) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Peter Stack) review
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review
WALLACE AND GROMIT IN THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBITT B+ 90
the world’s first vegetarian
horror movie
Wallace & Gromit in a horror genre featuring rabbits gone wild sounds delightful! With a well-written script that continually throws out Marx Brothers-style one-liners, some interesting character development, and a throwback to THE WOLF MAN, where a man turns into a wolf by moonlight, poor Wallace suffers the same fate, turning into a ravenous giant fuzzy rabbit by night, but only after he, working in his professional capacity as pest control removal extraordinaire, amusingly rids the neighborhood of a rabbit infestation, rounding up all the adorable vegetable munching rabbits before the town’s famous Giant Vegetable Competition, actually attempting to brainwash them of their evil ways, reassuring the lovely Lady Tottington, Helena Bonham Carter, the hostess of the competition, that everything is under control. In no time at all, Wallace has been waltzed into the most intimate chambers of the castle, a glass-enclosed tower that resembles a greenhouse, where only her most special plants are allowed, causing Wallace to remark: “It’s a veritable vegetable paradise.” Meanwhile another of her suitors, Victor Quartermainge, Ralph Fiennes, a sort of Clutch Cargo adventurist character, a smug, overly indulgent would-be hunter who thinks bullets and a sharp-toothed dog are the answer to the world’s problems, is besieged with jealousy. When a huge, furry beast starts terrorizing the town’s prized vegetables, the town is in turmoil, complete with a pitchfork-wielding mob, screaming out things like: “We’ve got to have our Giant Vegetable Contest!” “We’re simple people! It’s all we have!” As all the rabbits have supposedly been captured by Wallace & Gromit’s clever ingenuity, how can anyone explain the continuing rampage of a savagely hungry beast under the full moon? Only Gromit has the knack for a case such as this, but he has to overcome plenty of odds to make anyone else understand. Meanwhile, there’s Victor running around with 28 carrot bullets, sure to be the only way to kill a Were-Rabbit, who comes within an eyelash of putting poor Wallace out of his misery. We get fast car chases, flying machines, extraordinary gadgets of all kinds, a Were-Rabbitt KING KONG sequence, and the merriment of two of the most charming characters on the planet, once again, trying to save their own little town from pure anarchy, bringing a little peace and stability back to their sleepy middle class community.
Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Definitely my favorite Wallace & Gromit adventure. The animation is always cool, and the very concept of a were-rabbit appeals to me a great deal. It's enough to even get you thinking about it: imagine that at least some member of the British aristocracy is dull-witted and doofy (easy enough), that at least a single member of the lower classes is so bound by it all as to worship her anyway (check), and that the guy's dog is smarter than both of them…it begins to take on a terrible sense of realism despite it all! And then they're terrorized by a were-rabbit!! The power is not in the details of the plot, but in the details of the faces and movements, the cheeky charm of writers who find themselves absolutely unable to avoid even the most obvious double entendres and the undisputable fact that even the villains are more to be pitied than censured.
The quality of the animation in Steve Box
and Nick
Park’s feature-length cartoon is so slick and smooth that you’d be forgiven
for thinking it was just another computer-animated job. It isn’t. As with
Park’s previous claymation works, every movement here has been painstakenly
stop-frame animated with, presumably, only occasional help from a computer.
Trouble is, the finished article is so CGI-like that you wonder whether all
that organic stop-frame stuff was necessary. Sorry, chaps.
Wallace’s hilarious Heath Robinson-esque inventions are still to the fore and,
in this instance, responsible for the outcome of much of the plot, which is
somewhat superficial. With the annual giant vegetable competition on the
horizon, the locals are dependent on cheese-loving Wallace and his heroic hound
Gromit’s pest-control company ‘Anti-Pesto’ to keep at bay the ravaging rabbits
that threaten to devour the neighbourhood’s prized veggies. In a misguided
effort to brainwash one of their captors into hating vegetables, Wallace hooks
himself and a test bunny up to his latest gizmo. Needless to say, it goes awry
and before long the neighbourhood is being terrorised by a gigantic rabbit.
Park’s previous outing ‘Chicken Run’ played like ‘The Great
Escape’, and this ups the film-borrowing quotient even further to include
scenes from ‘The Fly’, ‘King Kong’, ‘Frankenstein’, ‘Curse of the Werewolf’,
even ‘Tremors’. The pun level is sky high (I especially liked Wallace’s retro
‘Smug’ fridge). Sadly, though, it treads water during the closing stages and
it’s left to Gromit’s silent, deadpan stoicism and ingeniously expressive ‘Do I
need this?’ facial language to win the day.
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit Keith Uhlich from Slant magazine
How appropriate that Wallace &
Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is being released on the heels of Tim
Burton's much-hyped and overpraised Corpse Bride. Both films share a technique
(stop-motion animation) and a lead actress (Helena Bonham Carter), yet the
difference in overall quality is staggering. The key, I'd posit, lies in the
eyes. Whether living or dead, Burton's characters in Corpse Bride gaze out from a universally
hollow and soulless black abyss. As illustrated by the film's production
number-prone skeleton Bonejangles, who literally rolls his one eyeball between
sockets, Burton views the so-called windows to the soul as interchangeable
commodities. In Wallace & Gromit there's a similar ocular jest when
cheese-loving inventor Wallace (Peter Sallis)—who runs a humane pest control
outfit with his oft-exasperated, always silent dog Gromit—colors a black circle
onto a light bulb and uses it as a replacement eye on his picture wall of
clients. At a cursory glance all the eyes look the same (there's something
chillingly zombie-like in the characters' faux-innocent Ping-Pong ball stares),
but co-directors Steve Box and Nick Park use the similarities to probe beneath
the plasticine veneer and reveal a heartening sense of community.
Like the series of still pictures at the film's outset that act as an endearing
shorthand depiction of Wallace and Gromit's relationship, Were-Rabbit is
most concerned with the connections between things, specifically the ties that
bind animal to human and, more theoretically, film frame to film frame.
Stop-motion is one of the few cinema styles that requires and demands attention
to each and every individual picture making up the 24 frames of one film
second; as one critic pointed out, Wallace & Gromit bears the
profound remnants of that labor in the random appearance of animators'
fingerprints on the clay figures. There's something inherently rough and rugged
about Wallace and Gromit's world—the imperfections are left in as opposed to
eliminated, and even when the film makes quite apparent use of digital
technology, Box and Park find ways of maintaining their personal, humanist
stamp. Thus, when Wallace and Gromit make use of an oversized vacuum to suck up
a football field's worth of rabbits, the directors make sure to show us things
from the bunnies' point of view. Hilariously, and touchingly, they think
they're going to heaven, a sublime, insightful, and resonant image that
perfectly parallels the divine experience of watching Were-Rabbit.
The Onion A.V. Club review Tasha Robinson
Half the charm of Nick Park's stop-motion-animation films is the sheer craft: Every detail implies hard work and literal hands-on attention, right down to the fingerprints on the characters' faces. The other half of the charm is those characters themselves. From the short film Creature Comforts through to 2000's Chicken Run, Park's work has centered on characters split evenly between painfully bright and earth-shatteringly dumb, but virtually all featuring a cheerful, big-hearted positivism that's rare in the Irony Age. Clever writing and whipcrack plotting haven't hurt any, but Park's upbeat characters and the indelible bonds between them are particularly unique.
And none are more memorable than Wallace, a garrulous, dim-witted-but-talented inventor, and his anthropomorphic but silent dog/companion/servant/partner Gromit. As voiced by Peter Sallis, Wallace is appealingly buoyant and utterly naïve, mostly oblivious to the havoc he causes, sometimes even when he's bearing its brunt. Gromit, for his part, is smart, tolerant, and unflaggingly loyal—man's best friend, but with opposable thumbs and the ability to drive, cook, and serve tea. They could almost be a classic smart guy/dumb guy comedy duo, but without the acerbic edge or sense of borderline-violent rivalry.
Their sweet, goofy dynamic continues neatly into their first full-length feature, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit. This time around, Wallace has his Rube Goldberg contraptions hard at work protecting his customers' gardens from marauding bunnies. In a community utterly obsessed with gardening—the annual Giant Vegetable Competition seems to be the only thing on anyone's mind—his service is invaluable, especially since the only alternative seems to be an arrogant, smug, Elvis-pompadoured hunter (Ralph Fiennes) with personal designs on Wallace's latest client, soft-hearted Lady Tottington (Helena Bonham Carter). But when Wallace's latest bright idea backfires and sets a monstrous hybrid rabbit-monster loose on the town's prize veggies, Fiennes gets his chance at guns 'n' glory.
Park and his co-writer/co-director, Chicken Run key animator Steve Box, pack the screen with sight gags, puns, slapstick, and film references, notably from The Wolf Man, King Kong, and Watership Down, and they maintain a pace that's frenetic but not overwhelming. In Park's world, there's always time for a frantic combat to halt so the antagonists can take stock and present another joke before moving on. The humor edges against absurdism, but stays self-aware and witty, with that mild-mannered optimism presiding. Not all the plot points make sense, but they don't really need to. The film holds itself together on reckless charm and lovingly rendered gap-toothed grins.
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Les Wright
There is trouble brewing in the back yard of cheese-loving, home inventor Wallace (Peter Sallis) and his loyal companion, the pragmatic, worry-riven, and mute dog Gromit. Tottington Hall’s annual Giant Vegetable Competition is fast approaching, and the village, indeed the entire shire, has been overrun with voracious herbivore rabbits. Fortunately, the Plasticine duo now run a thriving security company, Anti-Pesto, replete with laser triggered alarms placed in garden gnome statuary, and are ever at the ready with mechanical and philosophical inventiveness, fueled by amazing, Vaudeville-quality, punning powers of reasoning.
When Lady Tottington, who bears an uncanny resemblance to both Mr. Bill and a tall carrot, seeks out Anti-Pesto for a humane solution to her infestation, the clay boys soon find themselves dodging bullets and battling wits with the good Lady’s foppish suitor, the gun-toting Victor Quartermaine (Ralph Fiennes). Meanwhile, a mysterious, oversized were-rabbit, an amalgam of several 1930s Universal horror flicks and another endless source of visual and verbal punning, is on the rampage.
Nick Park’s beloved clay-animation characters have been making movies, very sparingly for sure, for sixteen years, and Wallace and Gromit fans will shout hurrah and call for more cheese, at this endearing first feature-length cartoon of their adventures. In A Grand Day Out, the two flew to the moon, in a cozily Victorian-decored rocket ship on a quest for cheese. In the follow-up, The Wrong Trousers, the boys conducted their first bit of sleuthing when the penguin boarder Wallace had taken in to help meet expenses proved slightly sociopathic. And it was in A Close Shave, when they were overrun with sheep, when Wallace had his first near-romantic encounter with a lady of the opposite sex. Curse of the Were-Rabbit not so much reprises as plays saucily upon these previous adventures and playfully elaborates further complications, from the Rube Goldbergian alarm system to the Bun-Vac 6000, able to suck bunnies from their lairs with a single whoosh.
The screen is rich with nostalgic images, hand-crafted artifacts, and cartoon-ish vegetables. By night Wallace’s village resembles a fogged-in industrial North crime scene straight out of a Sherlock Holmes tale. By day the vast estate of Lady Tottington’s manor suggests the morning after of the Hound of the Baskervilles, the brightly lit Harvest Festival fairgrounds more nourished and wholesome than Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, and the mysterious were-rabbit a mirthful compendium of Hollywood horror cliche. Much to Wallace’s chagrin, Lady Tottington’s nocturnal tryst in the high tower of her secret garden in the conservatory comes to naught.
Wallace and Gromit drive a 1964 Austin A35, on city streets,
through private gardens, and even through a were-rabbit burrow. An actual
Actually, everything is all in only the best, sweetest, most
mock-horror fun. Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is
guaranteed good fun, a fall holiday evening out for the whole family, from
great-grandma to Junior’s favorite stuffed toy. Long live the boys of
American Cinematographer essay ["A Model Thriller"] Rachael K. Bosley
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib
The New York Sun (James Bowman) review also seen here: James Bowman review
Pajiba (Daniel Carlson) review
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
Village Voice (Ed Park) review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Digital Spy (Daniel Saney) review
Flak Magazine (Andy Stilp) review
The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
Hollywood Gothique Steve Biodrowski
Confessions of a Film Critic [John Maguire]
FilmStew.com [Commentary] Kevin Biggers
CHUD.com (Jeremy G. Butler) dvd review
Mutant Reviewers from Hell review PoolMan and Justin
FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [A-] also seen here: OhmyNews [Brian Orndorf]
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [A] also seen here: Eric D. Snider
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
Mark R. Leeper review [+2 out of -4..+4]
eFilmCritic.com (David Cornelius) review [5/5]
Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [B+]
Eye for Film (Anton Bitel) review [4.5/5]
filmcritic.com (Sean O'Connell) review [5/5]
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B-]
Film Monthly (Aaron Riccio) review
eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley) review [5/5]
DVD Verdict (Mike Jackson) dvd review
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3.5/4]
DVD Talk (Randy Miller III) review [4/5]
DVD Town (Justin Cleveland) dvd review
DVDActive (Peter Martin) dvd review [8/10]
Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-rabbit Nate Meyers from digitallyOBSESSED
DVD Clinic (Jason Adams) dvd review [4.5/5]
A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [A-]
The World's Greatest Critic [J.C. Maçek III]
Film Journal International (Kevin Lally) review
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [4/5]
Cinescape review Abbie Bernstein
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [5/5]
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Tiscali UK review Paul Hurley
Film Monthly (Hank Yuloff) review
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [4/5]
hybridmagazine.com review Duncan Wright
stylusmagazine.com (Kris Allison) review
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
Premiere.com review Glenn Kenny
Exclaim! review Noel Dix
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [2.5/4]
Entertainment Weekly review [A] Lisa Schwarzbaum
Variety (Leslie Felperin) review
BBCi - Films (DVD review) Stella Papamichael
The Independent review [5/5] Anthony Quinn
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [4/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
The Seattle Times (Moira Macdonald) review
San Francisco Chronicle [Peter Hartlaub]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Movie
review: 'Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit' Michael Phillips from The Chicago Tribune
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The
New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
Parker, Alan
Alan Parker - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films ... Quentin Falk from Film Reference
Of all his fellow graduates from the prolific British commercials school of the 1960s (Ridley and Tony Scott, Hugh Hudson, and others), Alan Parker appears to have made far and away the most successful complete transition to theatrical filmmaking. Which is not to say that his movies to date—from Bugsy Malone to Angela's Ashes —have all been wholly successful in either box-office terms, critical reception or, blissfully, both at the same time. However, what Parker has managed always to achieve, with admittedly varying degrees of success, is that elusive blend of strong story and elegant frame, a symbiosis that tends regularly to elude other directors schooled in (and too often hamstrung by) the purely visual.
Two themes could be said to dominate Parker's work: children and controversy.
After an award-winning teleplay, The Evacuees , about the bittersweet
plight of evacuated
Later, after both Angel Heart , a labyrinthine Faustian tale which was briefly threatened with an American "X" rating, and Mississippi Burning , a powerful civil rights drama that was accused of blatant Hollywood-isation, Parker's unquenchable passion and his admitted preference for "the theatrical edge" have continued to be, rather unfairly, mistaken for a filmmaking arrogance that tends to help make him less than a darling to those critics whom he has always termed "the Sight & Sound mafia."
Shoot the Moon , Parker's most personal film about marital mishaps and muddled offspring, and Birdy , which seamlessly transposed novelist William Wharton's post-World War II traumas to a post-Vietnam setting, best demonstrate his theatrical style carefully crafted into (though never subsuming) strong content. Especially the latter, which deals with two emotionally damaged young men whose bond transcends the scars resulting in a message—common to much of Parker's work—that is joyously life-affirming.
In 1991 Parker released The Commitments , a film based on a novel by Irish writer Roddy Doyle. The film, which garnered mixed reviews, told the story of the efforts of a ragtag group of musicians with widely varied individual agendas and their efforts to launch a successful band. 1994's The Road to Wellville , meanwhile, despite an impressive cast headed by Anthony Hopkins, was a decidedly unsuccessful adaptation of T. Coraghessan Boyle's novel.
Alan Parker - Yahoo! Movies biography and filmography
From his humble beginnings as an office boy at age 19, Alan Parker worked his way up in the advertising business and began his career in earnest when he and partner Alan Marshall founded a production company to make industrial films and commercials. Between 1969 and 1978, Parker churned out over 500 television commercials, winning every major industry award, while also being cited as an important influence on both fashion and film style of that time. He adeptly used lighting, and his sense of drama as a feature film director has seemed to come as much from his early need to convey a message in 30 seconds as from a sense of pictorial grace.
In 1973, Parker wrote and directed a 50-minute film, "No
Hard Feelings", which the BBC bought and eventually aired several years
later. "The Evacuees" (1975), his first film produced for the BBC,
brought attention from the theatrical marketplace. The following year, he and
producer David Puttnam collaborated on Parker's debut as a writer-director,
"Bugsy Malone", a musical spoof of gangster films with an
all-children cast. His second feature, the powerful "Midnight
Express" (1978) was based on the true story of an American arrested in
Parker followed the popular and stylish musical "Fame" (1980), his first US-produced feature, with arguably his most personal film "Shoot the Moon" (1981), a sensitively detailed examination of the disintegration of a marriage. The quirky, touching "Birdy" (1984) and the controversial "Angel Heart" (1987) solidified his reputation as a highly visual storyteller whose palette made use of the soundtrack as well as strong imagery. "Mississippi Burning" (1988), a glossy recreation of a famous civil rights murder case was praised for its fine performances (particularly by Gene Hackman as a veteran FBI man), but drew fire for its glib reworking of history. Plunging into farce, Parker directed Anthony Hopkins in "The Road To Wellville" (1994), a send-up of American health fadist John Kellogg. Parker also produced and wrote the screenplay based on T. Coraghessan Boyle's novel, but the colorful casting and spectacular cinematography was pretty much wasted on this uneven romp.
Among his contemporaries, Parker is the only director courageous enough to return again and again to the movie musical. Of course, good reviews build confidence, and critics have been generous with their praise of his efforts. The charming idea of casting kids in a gangster movie struck a responsive chord in most and "Bugsy Malone" also profited from an astonishingly assured performance from a 13-year-old Jodie Foster. His insights into talented young people and his ability to tell their stories in dozens of vignettes as opposed to a conventional linear plot helped insure the success of "Fame", and in "Pink Floyd--The Wall" (1982), he transformed a best-selling rock album into one of the great modern musicals. Visually stunning in its wide array of images that included animated sequences by cartoonist Gerald Scarfe, this movie appealed to a much wider audience than just rock 'n' roll fans. "The Commitments" (1991) for all its high energy and great soul music fell a bit short of the mark established by his other musicals, and though his "Evita" (1996) was epic, lavish and fascinating, the MTV-style editing diluted the inherent power of the material and worked against the integrity of Madonna's titular performance.
Always fiercely independent, Parker has often lambasted the British film establishment and film critics. No stranger to controversy, he took on the ratings board of the MPAA and personally challenged their "X" rating of "Angel Heart". Parker has also authored a compilation of satirical cartoons, "Hares in the Gate" (1982), and in 1984 produced "A Turnip Head's Guide to British Cinema", a sarcastic documentary which ridiculed the critical mentality, a film that delighted his filmmaking contemporaries as well as his four children, whom he has cited as his chief inspiration.
Alan Parker - Director, Writer, Producer - Official Website director website
Biography - Alan Parker - Director,
Writer, Producer - Official Website
biography
BFI
Screenonline: Parker, Alan (1944-) Biography biography by Martin Hunt, Directors in
British and Irish Cinema
Alan Parker: Information from Answers.com Biography page
Alan Parker facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles ... biography
Alan Parker - Alchetron, The
Free Social Encyclopedia biography
Evita
Website Biography Director biography
Alan Parker NNDB profile page
Note to Self... Alan
Parker | BAFTA Guru
The Cartoons of Sir
Alan Parker - BFI Southbank BFI Screen Online
Movies
Directed by Alan Parker: Best to Worst - Ranker
Come See the Paradise The Color of Paradise, by Robert Payne from Jump Cut, July 1992
Madonna
joins tribute to director Parker BBC News, November 2, 1998
Parker
calls the shots BBC News, August 4, 1999
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Film of the Month: Angela's Ashes (1999)
Nick Roddick, January 2000
BBC News | FILM |
Alan Parker: Pioneer of UK cinema December
31, 2001
Alan
Parker: Director's cut | The Independent
Matthew Sweet from The
Independent,
The
real Billy Hayes regrets 'Midnight Express' cast all Turks in a bad light -
Seattle Post Intelligencer John
Flinn from The SF Chronicle,
"Stone
sorry for Midnight Express",
Great
Director #64: Alan Parker « News from the Boston Becks
Filmmaker
Alan Parker to receive top British film accolade - Reuters January 23, 2013
BBC News - In
pictures: Sir Alan Parker's film career January 23, 2013
The 10 Best Films of Sir Alan Parker | PopMatters Bill Gibron, March 25, 2015
Alan
Parker Went From Ad Copywriter to Scribe With 'Melody' | Variety Leo Barraclough, October 13, 2015
Alan
Parker: 'Bugsy Malone' financier Rank was a "disgrace" | News ... Geoffrey Macnab from Screendaily, December 5, 2016
Alan Parker | Film | guardian.co.uk Interview from The Guardian, January 7, 2000
Alan
Parker on making Bugsy Malone - Telegraph November 13, 2011
Dolby - Interview with Sir Alan Parker – Bugsy Malone, Evita, Fame Peter Cowie interview, February 29, 2012
Interview:
Sir Alan Parker - Financial Times
Rosie Millard interview, May 23, 2012
How Alan Parker progressed to Bafta's top table | Film | The Guardian Andrew Pulver interview, January 23, 2013
Alan
Parker: 'I like the craziness of the film set' | Film | The Guardian Andrew Pulver interview, January 24,
2013
Sir
Alan Parker: “Meryl Streep is unbelievably brilliant, she ... - film talk Brussels Film Festival interview, December
20, 2014
'Film-making
lost its lustre': how Alan Parker found solace in art | Film ... Dalya Alberge interview from The Guardian, January 14, 2017
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
Alan Parker - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
FOOTSTEPS
User reviews from imdb Author: bml84 from United
Kingdom
A classic little Gem, which, for those of a certain age, will recall an era
of late films screened just before closedown. Something to give people
throughout the land a quick shiver before the anonymous announcer wished them a
good night and, ironically, to sleep well.
It belongs to an era of Public Information Films and Late Call, when Late Night
TV consisted of a short burst of tasteful stills shown to haunting music before
the screen went black.
Almost forgotten now, it was a frequent little visitor to the late slots (well,
it was in
Well worth the seeking out- Excellent Structure & Acting.
BUGSY MALONE
Time Out London (David Jenkins) review
Watching it now, there’s something worryingly ‘wrong’ with Alan Parker’s
‘Bugsy Malone’. It’s not that this Prohibition-era musical, set principally in
a
filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [2/5]
Fourteen-year-old Jodie Foster had a very busy and very weird year in 1976. There was Freaky Friday for Disney, there was Taxi Driver for Scorsese, and then there was this. Thirty years after its release, Bugsy Malone, an adult gangster comedy/musical in which all the roles are played by children, can make you nostalgic for the '70s and the '30s at the same time. That this oddity was directed by Alan 'Midnight Express' Parker, only makes the whole thing more bizarre. Watching the always amazing Jodie vamp it up with her co-star, '70s teen dreamboat Scott Baio, as they lip sync to tracks of the adults who sing for them is one of the stranger cinematic experiences you'll ever have. Forgive me if I pause a moment to go look up more synonyms for 'weird.'
Basically a story of warring gangs, Bugsy Malone
introduces us to Fat Sam (John Cassisi) and Dandy Dan (Martin Lev), who are
battling for turf. Bugsy (Baio) shows up at Sam's bar and meets Blousey Brown
(Florrie Duggal), who wants to be a star. When the bar is raided, Dandy Dan
breaks out his new weapon, a 'Splurge gun' that shoots whipped cream. Bugsy and
Blousey hit it off, but he's also caught the eye of sexy vamp Talullah
(Foster), who always gets her man. Do you care?
With a dozen songs by short-limbed '70s pop music go-to guy Paul Williams, most
of which are utterly forgettable drivel that even the Carpenters or the Captain
and Tennille couldn't have salvaged, the movie goes along in its own insane
way, alternating between boring stretches, the dubbed songs, and Splurge gun
fights that leave all the kid gangsters covered with goo. One wonders how all
the middle school students who use this story as a basis for their annual
school play finesse those gunfight scenes.
If there's any winner here it's Foster, who does what she can with the
material, playing the tough girl just as she did for Scorsese (and just as she
still does today). There's little else here that delivers even the bare minimum
for a musical or a comedy. Your kiddies may find it fun to watch other kiddies
playing dress up, but you'll just be scratching your head in amazement as you
ponder the fact that Baio, not Foster, was supposed to be the breakout star of
this show.
Why doncha come up and see me some time. We'll watch Teletubbies.
Brilliant Observations on 1492 Films [Clayton Trapp]
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo
DVD Talk (Stuart Galbraith IV) dvd review [3/5] [Blu-Ray Version]
Listen To Me Gringo
BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) dvd review [Special Edition]
The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [2/5]
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
MIDNIGHT EXPRESS
Time Out review Tony Rayns
A meaty anecdote, heavily fictionalised from a factual
source, about an American kid on a dope charge going through Hell in a Turkish
jail. Some of the performances (Hurt,
The Onion A.V. Club dvd review Keith Phipps
For years after the release of Billy Hayes' book Midnight Express, and especially after the film version directed by Alan Parker, the term "Turkish prison" became a shorthand punchline for hell on earth. Attempting to smuggle hashish out of the country, Hayes was arrested by Turkish police searching for terrorists. Sentenced to a relatively lenient four years and a few months, Hayes served most of his time, only to see the sentence converted to life by a higher court, prompting him to make a break for the Greek border and tell the world his hellish tale.
Parker and a young screenwriter named Oliver Stone were among those listening, and with the 1978 film version, they converted Hayes' story into an exploitative yet meditative film. Brad Davis plays Hayes as a naïve American tourist unprepared for the consequences of his crime. Thrown into prison, he bonds with a few of his fellow prisoners, which isn't enough to stop the place from slowly leeching his humanity away.
Cued by Giorgio Moroder's excellent, though not exactly timeless, synth score, Parker's gauzy direction uses the stylish play of light and shadow that Ridley Scott would soon perfect; there's a lot of the coming decade in this '70s film. The neutral tone nicely offsets the extreme material, and the cast—which includes a drugged-out John Hurt and a hotheaded Randy Quaid—does excellent work. Davis has a heart-wrenching late scene that's almost too raw to watch, as a reunion with his girlfriend reduces him to a sobbing, masturbating mess.
But Midnight Express is at war with itself. Strong when it focuses on the psychological toll of prison, it falls apart when it turns the focus elsewhere, and its depictions of all Turks as swarthy, corrupt, and sadistic is pretty inexcusable, leading Stone and Hayes to apologize in later years. (Sample dialogue: "For a nation of pigs, it sure is funny that you don't eat 'em.") And it flinches in some unexpected places. After a long buildup and an erotically staged, romantically scored shower scene, Davis firmly rebuffs the advances of a Swedish friend. He, and the audience, can handle the torture, sure. But not that.
Key features: A solid making-of documentary joins Parker's thorough commentary and surprisingly entertaining making-of booklet. A sample: "[John Hurt's] decision not to bathe for six weeks made him less than popular."
Midnight
Express - TCM.com Jeff
Stafford
In 1977 Billy Hayes, with the assistance of William Hoffer,
wrote a best-selling account of his arrest and imprisonment in a Turkish prison
entitled Midnight Express. Hayes, an American student on vacation in
Produced by Peter Guber, Alan Marshall and David Puttnam, who would later have
a brief, turbulent reign as Columbia Studio's Chairman from 1986 to 1988, Midnight
Express (1978) was directed by Alan Parker, who had only one feature film
to his credit - Bugsy Malone [1976], a peculiar gangster musical in
which all of the key roles were played by children - and an impressive resume
of award-winning commercials which he produced during his advertising career in
the U.K. The screenplay was written by a relative newcomer to the film industry
- Oliver Stone - who had been shopping a script about the Vietnam War (which
later became Platoon, 1986) around Hollywood and had previously written,
directed and edited the independent horror thriller Seizure in 1974.
Their collaboration produced one of the top box office hits of 1978 and
launched both Parker and Stone on highly successful solo careers with Stone
establishing himself as a critically acclaimed writer-director with
From the beginning Parker and Stone had strong convictions about the material
and shared the opinion that
The first thing that Parker and Stone had to address was the book's chronology
of events and the screenplay's structure. "In the book, as in a lot of
prison stories," Parker noted, "the action wanders back and forth
among a lot of characters. But in a movie we had to concentrate on the
story." So Stone wrote a first draft of the screenplay in six weeks and
then he and Parker went through it page by page, fashioning a final shooting
script that retained "the integrity of the book" while building enormous
sympathy for Hayes so audiences would identify strongly with him.
Among the many changes they made were making the love story between Hayes and
his girlfriend Susan an important dramatic subplot and writing Hayes's defiant
speech to the Turkish judges at his second trial. In Hayes's real account, he
was alone when he was arrested at the Istanbul airport and in the film he is
accompanied by his girlfriend who has no idea that he is smuggling drugs onto
the plane back to America. As for the scene where Hayes is given a thirty year
sentence, he goes ballistic with rage screaming "For a nation of pigs, it
sure is funny you don't eat 'em. Jesus Christ forgave the bastards, but I
can't. I hate you, I hate your nation, I hate your people, and f*ck your sons
and daughters because they're all pigs..." In real life, however, Hayes
delivered a speech "to touch those people somehow" and he did it
without emotion. "I tried to make a statement that would affect them, so I
said that from one society to another laws change, from one age to another laws
change, but that's all. I was trying to maintain a balance, and I had a simple
secret - to smile, to send out good energy no matter what. I'd gotten past
screaming and yelling. I said to them, "All I can do is forgive you."
(from The Cinema of Oliver Stone by Norman Kagan).
The chronology of the events were altered as well with Hayes's placement in the
criminally insane wing of the prison, for example, occurring toward the end of
the film instead of earlier in the true account. The most controversial
changes, however, involved Hayes's attack on a fellow prisoner who was an
informer, his relationship with a Swedish inmate and his climactic escape from
prison. In the film, Hayes becomes completely unhinged when Rifki informs on
his friend Max and beats him mercilessly before biting off part of the
stoolie's tongue - an incident that never occurred. On the other hand, Hayes
did have a homosexual relationship while in prison but in the movie version, he
resists the advances of Erich because studio executives were afraid a
homosexual encounter would "diminish the hero's otherwise
"All-American" appeal." Hayes later commented that "I like
the dreamlike quality of the scene, but I wish they'd have the steam come up
and fade out. But I'm very happy that maybe somebody in the
The biggest distortion of all in the movie is Hayes' escape from prison which
has him accidentally killing the head jailer Hamidou by pushing him against a
wall where his head is impaled on a metal coathook. He then slips on a guard's
uniform, is given a set of keys by an oblivious jailer and slips out unnoticed
into the streets where he escapes. The scene with Hamidou, who was preparing to
rape Hayes, also suggests that the jailer had been sexually abusing him all
along though Hayes states in his book that he never saw the Turkish prison
guards sexually abuse any prisoners. At any rate, Hayes' actual escape might
have made an even more dramatic ending: he had been transferred to another
prison, located on an island far from the mainland, and managed to break out.
He swam to a fisherman's dingy during a storm, rowed through a churning sea to
the Greek mainland where he had to swim across a river before finally arriving
at safety after walking through a minefield.
Midnight Express was filmed on location in
The movie was, according to Alan Parker, the most grueling shoot of his career
and lasted fifty-five days with the cast and crew often working six-day weeks.
John Hurt, cast in the role of Max, got into his character so completely that
he stopped bathing which made him reek so badly by the end of filming that
nobody could stand to get near him. The famous tongue-biting sequence was also
so repulsive to most of the cast and crew that Parker was left to shoot it with
just the two actors present and Brad Davis had the unenviable job of carrying a
pig's tongue around in his mouth before spitting it out in the movie's famous
slow motion shot.
When Midnight Express was first screened at the Cannes Film Festival in
May of 1978, it generated an enormous amount of both criticism and praise.
"The
Janet Maslin in The New York Times noted that "Midnight Express
offers its audience the vicarious thrill of sharing Billy's depravity without
making the viewer feel compromised." Newsweek's David Ansen wrote
"The filmmakers...evidently felt that we could sympathize with a hero
given to biting another's tongue off....but not with one given to physical
affection for a man. After a titillatingly lyrical build-up to a kiss between
Billy and his Swedish friend, our hero draws back from any further contact -
like an old-fashioned
Regardless of the criticisms, Midnight Express, which was made for 2.2
million dollars, grossed more than $100 million, and wound up with Academy
Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best
Actor in a Supporting Role (John Hurt), Best Original Music Score by Giorgio
Moroder and Best Screenplay by Oliver Stone with the latter two winning
statuettes for their work. Moroder would go on to win Academy Awards in the
Best Song category for Flashdance ("Flashdance...What a Feeling)
and Top Gun ("Take My Breath Away") and Stone would soon move
into the director's chair and win Oscar®s for helming Platoon and Born
on the Fourth of July (1989). Alan Parker has yet to win the Oscar® for
Best Director but that hasn't stopped him from pursuing similarly edgy and
challenging subject matter from Shoot the Moon [1982] to Mississippi
Burning [1988], for which he received his second Best Director Academy
Award nomination, to Angela's Ashes [1999].
The one person whose career didn't seem to greatly benefit from
Since the release of
Midnight Express - Viddied Reviews Alex Jackson from I Viddied On Screen
eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Slyder
Movie-Vault.com (Brian Andrews) review [8/10]
Edinburgh U Film Society (Spiros Gangas) review
DVDActive (Marcus Doidge) dvd review [6/10]
DVD Clinic (Jason Adams) dvd review [3.5/5] [Special Edition]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review also seen here: Turner Classic Movies dvd review 30th Anniversary Edition
DVD Verdict (Michael Rubino) dvd review [30th Anniversary Edition]
DVD MovieGuide dvd review [30th Anniversary Edition] Colin Jacobson
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3/4] [Blu-ray]
DVD Verdict (Adam Arseneau) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
High-Def Digest - Blu-ray Review [Joshua Zyber]
DVD Talk (Jason Bailey) dvd review [3/5] [Blu-Ray Version]
dvdfuture.com (R. L. Shaffer) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Town (James Plath) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Colin Jacobson
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [3.5/5]
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [4/5]
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4/5]
Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [B] Sean Howe
The
real Billy Hayes regrets 'Midnight Express' cast all Turks in a bad light -
Seattle Post Intelligencer John
Flinn from The SF Chronicle,
"Stone
sorry for Midnight Express",
DVDBeaver Blu-ray review [Gary Tooze]
FAME
A British-directed, New-York based musical which follows the
heartbreak-and-success story of a group of youngsters as they're put through
their paces at the
Edinburgh U Film Society (Michael Morrison) review
Fame is the story of eight teenage embryonic superstars who
spend four years at
Though the characters didn't all turn out to be the successes they had hoped for, the film itself was a big hit. So they made a TV series out of it. It was a big hit as well. Singing and dancing to a disco beat in the corridors at the drop of a hat, combined with a dose of teenage angst, appeared to be just what the public were crying out for. On the other hand, like several of Parker's other box-office successes the critical reaction was mixed. That could be because of the snobbery which surrounded his origins as a director of television ads. Of course, like the performances of its leading characters, this film doesn't come in the Great Art category but Parker's showy commercial style is perfectly suited to this sort of project. And as the director of musicals including Bugsy Malone, The Wall and The Commitments there is no doubt that this is a genre he is fond of.
And there's more than just music. This film includes displays of every kind of artistic endeavour from juggling to joketelling. Unfortunately the wit is directed at all manner of religious, racial and sexual minorities. But then the film was made before the birth of political correctness.
Anyway, if you want to see our heroes tread the difficult path to the heights of superstardom, public adoration and the Pantheon of immortals, the show is on January 24th.
filmcritic.com (Jason McKiernan) review [4/5]
Nearly thirty years after its debut, Alan Parker's Fame remains, in its way, even fresher than its glossy 2009 remake. Sure, times have changed, and with them the modes and methods of entertainment to which wannabe stars could aspire -- nowadays one is more likely to come across an aspiring YouTube star than a blossoming ballet dancer. But the form and style of Parker's original remain striking, resonant, and uniquely interesting after three decades of aging. The original Fame is like a fascinating concerto of a movie, following its many characters through the ups and downs, ebbs and flows, and tensions and joys of real life as struggling artists.
The film follows an eclectic group of talented students at
A massive cast of unique talents and interesting stories populate the film, but
four characters become the central hubs of this emotional journey. There is
Ralph (Barry Miller), the emotionally volatile comedian whose brash likability
can quickly turn into vitriolic hatred; Doris (Maureen Teefy), the shy vocalist
who longs to break out of her shell; Coco (Irene Cara), who aspires to be a
multi-talented star, but whose ambition leads her down unexpected dark alleys;
and Montgomery (Paul McCrane), the sensitive and caring musician who harbors
painful personal torment. These characters drift into and out of each other's
lives with the natural flow of life during stressful formative years, and the
film touches on powerful moments of painful reality in each individual's
journey. We share in the joy when the humble Doris lets loose at a midnight
screening of Rocky
Horror, cringe at the pain when Ralph's one-man show
fizzles after the audience gets tired of the same material, and shrug at the
inevitability when we see the formerly popular acting student who, years later,
is working in a cheap diner to make ends meet.
Parker's interpretation of Gore's celebrated script is, very simply, wonderful
filmmaking. The movie thunders in on the notes of student auditions of varying
success, and ends with the bang of powerful orchestral chords at the final
student performance. In between, the characters are given free rein to make
their own journeys and the camera stands by with the intense interest of a
voyeur. In a film commonly classified as a musical, a film that's legacy
primarily consists of one celebrated song, it is the quiet attention to
intimate character details that defines Fame's enduring quality.
Over the past three decades, Fame has sort of evaporated into the
zeitgeist and become its own cultish joke, not unlike Rent or
Rocky Horror. But in revisiting the film, it is undeniably non-kitschy;
it is, in fact, a keenly honest look at the uncompromising road to success as
an artist. For a movie that could very easily have slipped into simpering
melodrama or sanctimonious, inspirational nonsense, Fame avoids all
pitfalls and narrows in on the almost obsessive, often painful, always
unpredictable life in pursuit of artistic passion.
Parallax View [Richard T. Jameson] originally published in Movietone News, March 1981
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
eFilmCritic.com (Scott Weinberg) review [4/5]
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
DVD Talk (Don Houston) dvd review [4/5]
Urban Cinefile dvd review Shannon J. Harvey
DVD Talk (Stuart Galbraith IV) dvd review [5/5] [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Verdict (Brett Cullum) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
Blu-rayDefinition.com - Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]
Film Intuition: Blu-ray [Jen Johans]
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo, Blu-Ray
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review Blu-Ray
BBC Films review William Gallagher
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Leonard Norwitz
SHOOT THE MOON
There is a sentimental optimism in both Parker's films and Bo Goldman's scripts. So it's no surprise that together they made this Californian coming-to-terms-with-a-relationship movie. Finney plays a successful writer who first picks up a literary award, and then throws up his marriage (to Keaton), four believable daughters, and a large country house. It's a superior film of its kind, for much as one may kick against Finney and Keaton's much-exploited mannerisms (rage and winsomeness respectively), they, like the script, have impressive moments, balancing hilarity and tragedy. But even Parker's direction, with its unerring sense of pace, cannot disguise an awkwardly episodic narrative which just cannot find a sense of an ending.
Slant Magazine review Dan Callahan
Late one rainy night, George Dunlap (Albert Finney), a successful writer, comes to give his oldest daughter, Sherry (Dana Hill), a birthday present. George and his wife Faith (Diane Keaton) have been separated for a short period, and they've tried to be "grown-up" about their broken marriage, even to the point of grudgingly accommodating younger lovers, Sandy (Karen Allen) and Frank (Peter Weller). Gradually, some tension builds between them; George is openly angry and clearly confused, while Faith is miserable when she's alone but puts on a subtly flirty, needling manner around her volatile husband. When Faith opens the door to George, her face is stiff with determined anger, and his face is puffy with suppressed temper. She's not going to let him in, and he's not going to go away. Director Alan Parker lights this impasse very harshly, and he uses a hand-held camera to capture the ensuing chaos, as George smashes his way through plate glass, forces Faith outside, knocks her down, and slams the door shut, blocking it with a chair. "How do you like it?" he howls. "How do you like being locked out of your own house?"
This is only the beginning stretch of one of the most stomach-churningly realistic views of marital recrimination ever put on film, all the more upsetting because the couple's small children (played by Viveka Davis and future TV kids Tracey Gold and Tina Yothers) are used as foot soldiers in their war with each other. Sherry is on her mother's side from the start, which infuriates George, so he runs upstairs and starts beating her with a hanger, then begs her for forgiveness; he looks like a swollen, chastened child when his anger is spent. Finally, completely demoralized and humiliated, George leaves the house and, following his instincts as always, starts to run to get to his car. Will he cry? Throw up? Both? Such queasy feelings will probably overcome any reasonably sensitive audience member several times before this film is over.
Shoot the Moon has several scenes that are nearly as painful to watch as this primal family confrontation, such as a long single take of Faith in a bathtub where she smokes some grass, lightly sings the Beatles's "If I Fell," and goes through a series of bitter emotions that feel so private that you can't believe a camera and a crew could have possibly been there in the room with her to catch them. Keaton is so emotionally naked in this scene that there's something almost otherworldly about her face. She's so deep inside herself that, paradoxically, it's as if she's shining a searchlight back at you; as she tries to reach something buried and private, so do you. This is acting on the highest possible level, and it will certainly come as a shock to anyone who only knows Keaton from her fluffy work of the past 20 years; there was a brief period when she gave several indelible dramatic performances, and this is definitely the best of them. As for Finney, if you really want to see great acting, watch the way he waves his hand at his wife right before he makes the horrible but gutsy gesture of defiance that ends the movie on a note of total, helpless destruction.
Unfortunately, Shoot the Moon has some serious problems that get in the way of these unforgettable performances. There are several unaccountable male Jewish stereotypes floating around and picture-postcard views of lakes and ducks that feel like filler. Though Parker's way of going for the jugular can be very effective in the big moments, he lets lots of small, deliberately banal domestic scenes just dribble away. It's a shapeless piece of work by the screenwriter, Bo Goldman; sometimes the random slices of life between the various traumas are suggestive in a disorderly way, and at other times they're just arbitrary. The soundtrack makes plaintive use of the song "Don't Blame Me," played tentatively with one childlike finger on a piano, and this harsh, lonely sound fills in a lot of the gaps, but not all of them.
Parker and Goldman seem to want this battling couple to represent a sort of romantic '60s point of view, and they show up the younger lovers as shallow, '70s-style hedonists. George and Faith fight because that's the way they feel most spontaneous and alive; this is expressed vividly during their low-comedy reconciliation in a restaurant after her father's funeral, a wild switch in tone that works only because the acting is so damn good. Though this loose, farcical scene comes as a relief after all the misery on view, the broadness of the writing kills any chance of real believability. In spite of all its flaws, however, this mixed bag of a movie is so good on divorce, plate-smashing fights, and the bad behavior of disappointed lovers that it remains a small classic.
Spirituality & Practice (Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat) review
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DVD Verdict [Clark Douglas] Leading Ladies Collection, Volume 2
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
PINK FLOYD THE WALL
'We don't need no education' - cue inevitable shots of blank-faced schoolkids on a conveyor-belt to the dead-end mincer. It's hard to see where the much-rumoured creative clashes between Floydian self-analyst Roger Waters and director Parker arose, since the movie is a matter of such stunning literalism: it's little more than kinetic sleeve art keyed slavishly to a slim concept-album narrative. Neither Parker's bombastic live action sequences (carrying Geldof's mute Pink from a war-baby context of military carnage towards neo-fascist rallying, via the turbulence of rock stardom) nor Gerald Scarfe's animation offer more than pictorial italicising of Waters' lyrics; and the autobiographical pain is laid on so thick it emerges looking more like misogynist petulance. Crossing Privilege with Tommy couldn't result in anything shallower. All in all, it's just another flick to appal.
Nitrate Online (Capsule) Eddie Cockrell
More than the “kinetic sleeve art” sniffed at by British critics, this literal yet lively pre-MTV film version of the Pink Floyd concept album has held up quite well, particularly in the stunning transfer and sleek menu design utilized for the DVD debut (the widescreen VHS tape is due January 25). Boomtown Rat and Live Aid organizer Bob Geldof plays Pink, a beleaguered British rock star crumbling under the pressures of an American tour. Alan Parker’s direction moves the story (on which he collaborated with band founder Roger Waters) deftly from the present into the past and into a possible future, scoring obvious (war is bad!) but still powerful points about how the traumas of the child affect the man. While at least one of the extras (punningly called “a saucerful of features”) is the usual studio-generated “making of” puffery, there’s a new documentary called “Looking Back at the Wall” that includes new and for the most part revealing interviews with a graying Roger Waters (who calls rock and roll “my industry”), Parker, graphic designer Gerald Scarfe, cinematographer Peter Bizou and others. The goodies also include a rough edit of the “Hey You” number, which had been largely truncated prior to the film’s release and the feature itself sports a remastered surround sound/Dolby Digital soundtrack. The downside: there are no printed chapter titles, which makes it difficult to navigate through such a non-linear movie, and the booklet is just a folded collage of Scarfe’s images with precious little useful information.
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4.5/5]
What is The Wall?
If you're caught up in the psychedelic imagery, confused by
what the film is really about, let me offer a summary. At its heart, a rock
star named Pink (Bob Geldof) discovers his wife is cheating on him when he
calls home one day while on tour, discovering she's with another man ('this is
United States calling...'). Pink recedes into a shell of his own creation,
remembering his troubled childhood with evil schoolmasters ('hey, teacher,
leave those kids alone...') and the problems he caused his mother ('mother, do
you think they'll try and break... my balls?'), but mostly dreaming about his
father who died in World War II ('bring the boys back home!'), a father he
never knew. Crazier and crazier ('toys in the attic, he is crazy'), Pink puts
up a wall to shield himself from the outside world, finally imagining himself a
Hitler-like leader ('if I had my way... I'd have all of you shot!') until his
eventual trial for his real and imaginary crimes. The verdict: Guilty. The
sentence: 'Tear down the wall.'
The Wall is also a little too obvious of a reference to the Berlin Wall,
but no wall stands so high as the one Pink has built. Directed by Alan Parker
(also responsible for the atrocity that is Evita),
The Wall is a stylistic and deeply atmospheric drama, along with Tommy
the only decent rock opera on film. Set to music by Pink Floyd's Roger Waters
(and performed so memorably by the band--the sountrack album rates as one of
the greatest musical experiences available), the film also makes absolutely no
sense without its songs -- try watching based on the spare subtitles alone and
you'll be totally baffled. The blur of images, from extreme close-ups to
far-out animations don't help your mind, but that's the point.
Anyway, if you don't buy my interpretation, there are plenty more to hear on
the DVD. Waters offers a commentary track, and two documentaries explore the
making of the film. It's a must-own for any Pink Floyd fan and a recommended
investment for any moviegoer.
eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Py Thomas
We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control. No dark sarcasm in the classroom. Teacher, leave them kids alone. HEY! Teacher! Leave those kids alone! All in all you're just another brick in the wall.
You know, I'm getting sick of seeing Michael Jackson's
"Thriller" (not the album, the John Landis 15-minute video thingy)
being honored by MTV and most of the media as best music video of all time.
You'd think that something better would have come up by now. Jeez.
I know what you're thinking... "why are you talking about Michael Jackson
in a review for Pink Floyd: The Wall?" Because if The Wall was considered
to be a music video, it would kick Thriller's ass from here to the dark side of
the moon. Because that's what this film basically is... a two-hour-plus top-quality
music video. Almost no spoken dialogue, lots of haunting and thought-provoking
imagery, a visual bombardment of jump-cut scenes, songs flowing into one
another... it basically set the standard for the alternative/metal videos to
come.
The fact that this movie was made in 1982, and that it was based on Pink
Floyd's 1979 magnum opus concept double-album, makes The Wall all the more an
amazing experience. Alan Parker takes the songs and, with the help of auteur
Roger Waters and animator Gerald Scarfe, crafts an eerie and breathtaking
glimpse into the disturbed psyche of a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown:
one Mr. Pink Floyd (played by Bob "Mr. Live Aid" Geldof).
No, not everyone will understand what goes on in this film, as the storyline isn't
something very linear. For the most part, we see Pink's "wall" - the
buildup of repressed emotions and communication difficulties - being gradually
crafted, starting with his traumatic moments of childhood featuring an
overprotective mother and a sadistic schoolteacher. Fast-forward to his
rock-star days... his marriage is in ruins, and not even an enthusiastic
groupie could make him feel better. Suddenly he morphs into a cruel and
heartless leader of a fascist movement, with its own hand gestures and walking-hammer
symbols. And finally, putting his own stoicness on trial, the wall comes
tumbling down.
The most thought-provoking images in this film come from Mr. Scarfe's pen. His
animations range from the elegaic (his requiem to the fallen soldiers of World
War II) to the provocative (a dysfunctional relationship symbolized by two
fucking flowers that eventually turn into hateful bloodthirsty beasts) to the
grotesque (the trial scene featuring a true butt-head judge). And the animated
vignettes blend in seamlessly with the live-action footage.
If you get the DVD version of the film, you're in for a special treat... it's
jam-packed with extra goodies. The running commentary option features Waters
and Scarfe commenting on the film (and at times turning into MST3K-wannabes).
You'll also get the behind-the-scenes documentary "The Other Side of The
Wall" and a newer "Retrospective" program with modern-day
interviews with the guys involved with the movie. And of course, the movie
itself is digitally remastered and restored to its intense glory.
Centuries from now, The Wall will no doubt be looked upon as a cinematic masterpiece probing the darker inclinations of the human psyche, just like we regard the works of Edgar Allan Poe today. Run like hell to the video store and see for yourself.
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib
Needcoffee.com - DVD Review Widge
Dreams of the Red King [Alexander Case]
Audio Revolution (Bill Warren) dvd review
DVD Times Alexander Larman
DVD Verdict (Norman Short) dvd review
DVD Talk (Chuck Arrington) dvd review [4/5]
The Digital Bits dvd review Frank Ortiz
DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Mike Long
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review fullscreen
DVD Authority.com (Greg Bankston) dvd review widescreen
Home Theater Info (Doug MacLean) dvd review
Mutant Reviewers from Hell review Justin and Clare
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Movie Magazine International review John A. Lavin
eFilmCritic.com (Ryan Arthur) review [4/5]
Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review
All Movie Guide [Perry Seibert] Jude Blaise
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
BIRDY
A trifle self-indulgent - well, it is directed by Alan Parker
- but never boring, this tells of the strange, trusting friendship between
Birdy (Modine), an introverted teenager whose ideal companion is one of his pet
birds, and his protective mate Al (Cage). Their relationship is explored both
through flashback, larking about at school and fighting as
Edinburgh U Film Society (Spiros Gangas) review
Having been awarded the Grand Prix from the Cannes Special Jury, Birdy is regarded by many, including Alan Parker himself, as the director's most accomplished film. The antithesis between the physical and the psychological consequences of war is very interesting indeed, with further exploration as to the nature of madness given from a rather individualistic perspective. Unfortunately the fact that Parker has fully embraced American cinema, manifests itself clearly in his films. The slow film-making of this one - a rather radical step for such a director - combined with the pseudo intellectualism which is typical of Parker's work leads to a result of little importance. With good performances from both Modine and Cage, it is oceasionally pleasant and warm but ultimately remains shallow and unimaginative.
The Digital Bits dvd review Todd Doogan
Matthew Modine and Nicolas Cage star in Birdy, a very haunting
character study about the value of friendship and triumph of the human spirit.
Man, I'm a blurb writing machine!
Modine is Birdy, a quiet, introverted kid who's only dream in this world is to
fly. He's not all that keen on getting on a plane though. Birdy wants to
actually fly on his own. We first meet Al (Cage), Birdy's best friend, after Al
has had his face blown off in
Alan Parker expertly directs this film, and it really is pretty hypnotizing to
watch. The acting is very good from everyone involved -- including some
supporting actors that I've never seen before or since. The other thing that
helps keep you involved, is the minimalist score by Peter Gabriel. It's quite
moving and it just fits the film so well. Fans of Gabriel may recognize much of
the music in this film as sans-vocal versions of tracks on his 1982 album Security.
In terms of quality, this isn't the best disc from
Don't get me wrong -- the disc is in no way unwatchable. Some minor video
faults are easy to overlook, given
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [51/100]
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
DVD Talk (Chris Hughes) dvd review [2/5]
DVD Verdict (David Rogers) dvd review
User
reviews from imdb Author: Scott A. Frisina
(liny4ever@att.net) from
User reviews from imdb Author: -744
User
reviews from imdb Author: dee.reid from United States
User
reviews from imdb (Page 3) Author: soymilk from
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
ANGEL HEART
A first-person Faustian detective novel presents quite a
problem to the screenwriter, and Parker's alterations to William Hjortsberg's Falling
Angel slacken the cunning weave of strands. Private eye Harry Angel
(Rourke) is hired by the mysterious and malevolent Louis Cyphre (De Niro) to
find a missing crooner who dabbled in the occult; but Angel's leads all wind up
dead in a series of ritual murders. The supernatural is rendered in standard
props (steam from a
Edinburgh U Film Society (Stephen J. Brennan) review
Mickey Rourke's arguably finest performance (though excluding
Rumblefish and Barfly - the choice wasn't THAT wide) as 1950s
The film is a "riveting Faustian thriller" and has a superb cast where even Robert De Niro puts in a memorable performance (not his usual incoherent street hood) as a vengeful Mr Big - Louis Cyphre who hires Angel "the first dick in the directory" to trace and bring back a creditor who has defaulted on a deal with Cyphre.
The plot twists back and forth from the claustrophobia of
Charlotte Rampling also gives an excellent performance and as the leads get closer and closer the tension rises. Scripted from William Hjortberg's novel "Fallen Angel" it provides one of the few examples of the 80s noir cinema, which doesn't fall flat on its face.
An understated and often overlooked fiery tale of claustrophobia, voodoo and the occult.
Slant Magazine review Joseph Jon Lanthier
One can't help but feel there's a competent, gallows
humor-infused thriller buried somewhere beneath the camp affectations of Alan
Parker's Angel Heart, even if one lacks the will power or desire to
persuasively excavate it. The termitic meat of this Faustian exercise sits
trapped under multiple, calcified layers of narrative and visual inanity:
grubbily ostentatious foreshadowing, ham-fisted private dick-isms that would
crinkle Mickey Spillane's nose, roly-poly Su-thun-ah stereotypes, queasily
curdled sexuality, highly unlikely deaths-by-gumbo cauldron, and purple voodoo
orgies that make Nick Roeg's equally flawed Eureka seem well-informed by
comparison. From the masterfully shot but grimly artificial seediness of the
Still, metaphysical and emotional anemia is an important tradition in cult horror/mystery, a category the daffy plot twists and crimson, incestuous excesses of Angel Heart sit quite cozily in. Most thrillers that exude a frightening nihilism do so by maintaining a merciless indifference to the humanity of their characters; Angel Heart takes this one step further by instilling within its cast a blasé inclination toward self-destruction. The detached, smart-ass behavior of Mickey Rourke's Harry Angel, aided magnificently by the actor's phoned-in performance, is an effective metaphor for the protagonist's circuitous cherchez l'homme assignment, as well as Rourke's subsequent, dead-end career: He's a lifeless, sedentary shell of a man, bitterly self-loathing whenever falling back on his ignorance-defending "I'm from Brooklyn!" mantra, and perfectly displaying the lack of self-awareness one would anticipate from a shell-shocked kid who's had his heart cannibalized by some dark spiritualists. The scenes between Rourke and Robert De Niro's Beelzebub avatar Louis Cypher (the noting of which is no more of a spoiler than Cypher's effetely sinister mannerisms or pewter pentangle jewelry) are creepily perfunctory: Neither of them bothers to act, so the enveloping emblems of Satanist iconography appear unsettlingly casual.
It's unlikely that a mystery film will again attempt to mesh the distinct debaucheries of New York and New Orleans after the infamous failure of Angel Heart, which is unfortunate; the explicit hocus pocus of pseudo-voodoo could use some wise-guy shrewdness to coax out its more subtle flavors. What drags this film to hell isn't the mis-mixing of genres, but the insistence on hammer-to-the-anvil suspense buffoonery (which Parker soon after swapped for blatant political buffoonery). The walls bleed when Harry unknowingly fucks his daughter (Lisa Bonet playing "bad") and the heavy-set Louisiana cops playfully stretch their suspenders when he later puts a pistol "up her snatch" (to borrow the officer's parlance); it would all be laughable if the evil deeds and premature deaths and withered witch doctor hands led us to more than the protagonist's unnecessarily messy self-discovery. As it is, it's mostly just gratingly pointless.
Gone
Away, Come Back: Mickey Rourke | The House Next Door ... Sheila O’Malley, December 17, 2008
How
Mickey Rourke became irresistible again.
Dana Stevens from Slate, February
19, 2009
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib
Classic Horror review Jason Jones
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna
Ruthless Reviews review Jonny Lieberman
The World's Greatest Critic! [J.C. Maçek III]
American Cinematographer dvd review Chris Pizello
alan parker - The Screengrab Paul Clark
DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Guido Henkel and Lieu Pham
dvdfuture.com (George Castillo) dvd review
DVD Talk (Bill Gibron) dvd review [4/5] [Special Edition]
DVD Verdict (Patrick Bromley) dvd review [Special Edition]
Total Sci-Fi Online review [Special Edition] Richard Matthews
PopMatters (Michael Curtis Nelson) review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Verdict (Daryl Loomis) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
Clark Quinn review [high +1 out of -4..+4]
eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Slyder
eFilmCritic.com (Charles Tatum) review [5/5]
Mark R. Leeper review [+2 out of -4..+4]
HorrorView.com Head Cheeze
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]
BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) review
Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
Siskel & Ebert (video)
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
MISSISSIPPI
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Parker's film, loosely based in fact, goes for the gut rather
than the head in its assessment of
If Alan Parker burns in hell for making this deplorable movie, will he even understand why?
The gross distortions of history are bad enough, but the real
crime is the way Parker gratuitously distorts and manipulates emotions with a
manipulative style that's the equivalent of a cinematic bludgeon. This
background and analysis, written as the film was about to go into wide release
in January, 1988, has been slightly re-edited.
"Mississippi Burning is now on trial," New York Times
film critic Vincent Canby proclaimed in a defense of Alan Parker's inflammatory
film -- a fact-based, but heavily fictionalized melodrama about the 1964 murder
of three civil rights workers in
The headline over the
burning-cross-emblazoned cover of Time magazine screamed: "Mississippi
Burning: A new movie's scary view of racism stirs a debate over fact vs.
fiction." And the NBC Evening News sent a reporter who
originally covered the story back to
The critics have passionately taken up sides. Canby concluded his review of the picture with the haughty but unenlightening pronouncement: "A first-rate film." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times and TV's Siskel & Ebert called Mississippi Burning the best American movie of the year. The National Board of Review agreed with him.
But Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote that in Mississippi Burning, "Parker uses the civil-rights movement to make a Charles Bronson movie, and, from his blithe public statements, he seems unaware that this could be thought morally repugnant.... The [movie's] manipulation got to me, all right, but the only emotion I felt was hatred for the movie."
Most of the debate surrounding the film has focused on the way it distorts key events in the history of the civil rights movement. Set in the same year that Martin Luther King received his Nobel Peace Prize, Mississippi Burning concentrates on the efforts of two white FBI agents -- Willen Dafoe as agent Ward and Gene Hackman as agent Anderson -- to find the Ku Klux Klan killers of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, a black man and two whites.
It's a famous case. But Mississippi Burning has been chastised (by Chaney's brother and King's widow, among others) for goading audiences into cheering a down-and-Dirty-Harry-style FBI campaign in which the agency, under the directorship of notorious King-hater J. Edgar Hoover, uses the Klan's own illegal vigilante terror tactics against the Klansmen.
In so doing, Parker's
propaganda picture implies that white liberal vigilantes in the FBI -- not
organized coalitions of blacks and whites dedicated to Dr. King's moral policy
of non-violence -- were the ones righteously carrying the banner for civil
rights in the South during the '60s, ready to fight for the cause at any
cost. "The truth is, wrote Jack E. White, condemning the film in
Time, "that
The
Time's White accused Mississippi Burning of presenting "a version of history so distorted that it amounts to a cinematic lynching." Even so, although you can certainly take issue with the many bizarre choices Parker has made, lots of movies -- even great ones -- have distorted history. Just because Intolerance or Citizen Kane or Gone With the Wind or Chinatown take liberties with historical fact, that alone doesn't diminish them as brilliant movies -- any more than it would make sense to condemn Stanley Kubrick's vision of the future in 2001 if it doesn't turn out to be exactly accurate. The best movies create their own worlds; they're timeless.
The real moral corruption of Mississippi Burning is rooted in every detail of the movie's style and aesthetics. As Pauline Kael noted in her review, Parker is "a slicker -- a man with talent and technique but without a sustaining sensibility," a director who presumes that "the audience needs a whomp in the gut every two minutes. But if it does, that's because whomping is Parker's basic way of reaching people, and he sets up a pattern."
Even if the film had gotten the story right, Parker's overbearing techniques, his relentless "whomping" of the audience, would probably have pulverized historical fact into bloody irrelevance, anyway. In movies, style is content -- the bulk of the story comes across in the way it's told -- and Mississippi Burning sets out not so much to conquer the Klan as to mount a merciless attack on the viewer's autonomic nervous system.
Heart-pounding music, stomach-churning cutting, orchestrated explosions of light and (Dolby stereo) sound -- the whole show is designed simply to get your adrenaline pumping and leave you wrung out, quivering in your seat in stupefied fear and loathing. Character, performance, compassion, moral questions and thematic ideas are not just devalued, they're obliterated by Parker's empty but crushing style.
The movie leaves no room for considerations of history, ethics, justice, or morality -- things you'd think would be vitally important to this story. Instead, like the exploitation picture it is, it sacrifices all such matters to the throat-grabbing thrill of the "powerful" moment. You're too busy flinching to experience anything deeper than an autonomic response.
Mississippi Burning may masquerade as a serious adult drama, but basically the film does to Southern blacks what Friday the 13th movies do to teenagers, presenting them as nothing more than meat for the grinder.
Even Newsweek's Ansen, who praised the movie, admitted in his review to feeling a "Pavlovian wince" every time a black person appeared on the screen. That's because the movie soon conditions you to expect an eruption of violence every time you see a black face. Parker uses blacks only as victims -- "noble" stick figures to be beaten, lynched or burned in orgiastic explosions of slickly packaged pyrotechnics.
In contrast, white Southerners are invariably presented in freak-show close-up as sweat-drenched, no-neck monsters -- inbred gargoyles on parade. Parker brags in the film's press kit about the rogue's gallery of casting photos he kept on his wall for the film. He doesn't even seem to realize that his vision is not only racist, it's misanthropic. Making the Klan the villains and the blacks the victims (definitely not the heroes in this picture) is meaningless when you treat both as if they were undifferentiated subhuman cyphers.
Parker has also boasted of rewriting Chris Gelerno's screenplay to shape it into the movie he wanted to make. Parker himself fabricated one of the film's most sensationalistic scenes, in which a black FBI agent (!) kidnaps the town's mayor and threatens to castrate him with a razor blade. It's one of the big, rabble-rousing, crowd-pleasing moments in the picture, invariably winning cheers from the audience by appealing directly to their basest mob instincts. You realize that all Parker would have to do is switch the races onscreen and he'd have the very same audience screaming for black blood like a Southern lynch mob. When all you're doing is appealing to a crowd's worst instincts, it really doesn't matter which "side" you happen to pretend to be on. I can only imagine how horrified Dr. King would be at this spectacle.
Clearly, the movie Parker wanted to make had nothing to do with the reality of the
FBI's (or African-American's) role in the civil-rights movement (or even in
this particular historical incident), with the actual conditions of racism in
As a number of critics have observed, Parker wallows with glee in his movie's grandiose scenes of mayhem and murder, inviting viewers to get their adrenaline kicks out of it as much as he often does. (Parker, who directed the comparably dishonest and manipulative Midnight Express from Oliver Stone's screenplay, is the ham-fisted godfather of the empty stylistics Stone would later take to an even greater extreme in Natural Born Killers.) As a result, his movie doesn't condemn violence (regardless of whether it's committed by the Klan or the FBI). It simply exists as a showcase for it.
But the movie is not sloppy. Every image in Mississippi Burning, regardless of content or context, is meticulously and self-consciously composed -- an ultra-polished style that reveals Parker's background as a director of television commercials.
This glossy approach, however, has moral as well as aesthetic ramifications. It becomes particularly disturbing when, for example, Parker frames with painstaking care, a picture-postcard shot of a black man hanged in silhouette against the flames of his burning barn. Does it strike him that to prettify such an image is reprehensible? Of course not. It's just another picture-postcard to Parker. You'd think he were shooting a TV commercial for a firewood company rather than a lynching. And while there is no question that many lynchings such as this one actually occurred, why would you want to make them look so lovely?
"Prepare to be shaken and moved," Ansen wrote, and prepare you should if you plan to subject yourself to Mississippi Burning. It is to movies what airliner crashes are to commercial aviation. Its defenders have remarked on the film's undeniable power. Well, of course it's powerful. Any movie that exploits images of hooded figures terrorizing children, killing people, and blowing up churches can hardly help but be "powerful" at the very least.
But, to wring a new
twist on an old phrase, power corrupts. And Mississippi Burning
is corrupted by the reckless exhilaration it betrays in wielding its own
pumped-up, self-inflated cinematic power. Is it a film about a terrible
chapter in American history? Racism? Civil rights? Law enforcement?
Vigilantism? Not really. It's a film about using cinema as a sledge
hammer to pound knee-jerk reactions out of audiences, compelling them to kneel,
mindlessly and helplessly, before the altar of "powerful"
moviemaking.
eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Slyder
DVD Town (Tim David Raynor) dvd review Special Edition
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review
eFilmCritic.com (Jack Sommersby) review [5/5]
Randy Parker retrospective [3/4]
That Cow (B. Kiefer) review [7/10]
Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
Siskel & Ebert (video)
COME SEE THE PARADISE
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Parker's movie about the experience of
Japanese-Americans immediately after Pearl Harbor characteristically undermines
its socio-political problems by focusing single-mindedly on the lives of a
handful of individuals and resorting to simplistic bombast. The opening
sequences bode ill: examining the cultural and racial barriers that divide his
would-be lovers - ex-union activist Jack McGurn (Quaid) and Lily (Tomita), the
Nisei daughter of Jack's employer - Parker even indulges Quaid with a silly,
redundant song-and-dance number. Once Jack is drafted, and Lily and her family
are interned in a desert camp with thousands of other victims of US xenophobia,
the film plunges headlong into turgid melodrama. Dust, death and disintegrating
values are the Kawamuras' lot, as the narrative staggers through an endless
series of farewells and reunions, fallings-out and reconciliations; tears flow,
the music swells, and Jack, affirming his love for Lily, discovers a poetic
articulacy that is quite implausible for this working class hero. Except for
the historical data inserted here and there into the dialogue, everything on
view derives not from reality but from manipulative movie cliché.
Movieline Magazine review Stephen Farber
As anti-Japanese sentiment rises in insecure economic
times, Alan Parker's Come See the Paradise--which focuses on the
internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II--takes on a special
timeliness.
In his autobiography, Elia Kazan reports that Darryl F. Zanuck, who was one of
the great advocates of socially conscious movies, always insisted that these
movies be made more commercial by inserting a "love story in which the
lovers are involved in the issue under conflict." That same thinking seems
to have motivated Alan Parker, who has fashioned Come See the Paradise
as an interracial romance between a white union organizer (Dennis Quaid) and a
Japanese-American woman (Tamlyn Tomita). Yet the love story seems just as tepid
and expendable as it often did in Zanuck's topical dramas.
Parker's last movie, Mississippi Burning, was rightly criticized for
telling the story of the civil rights movement entirely through the eyes of a
white FBI agent. Parker has taken that criticism to heart, and this time he
gives the Japanese characters a stronger identity than he gave any of the black
characters in Mississippi Burning, and all of the Japanese characters
are perceptively and poignantly drawn. But this only makes us more impatient
when the film keeps cutting away to stock romance scenes involving that far
less compelling all-American hero.
By the second half of the film, Parker can no longer feign interest in Quaid's
story. The film captures the tragedy of the Japanese-American internment
without resorting to the shrill melodrama that marred Mississippi Burning
or Midnight Express. Parker does some of his best directing in these
scenes in the prison camp. But the central romance is so completely overwhelmed
by this agonizing social backdrop that when the lovers are finally reconciled,
it seems like a perfunctory anticlimax.
User comments from imdb Author: Paul Sampson Fish from Stow, Ma
"Come See The Paradise"
is a forgotten gem of a film that takes place during one of the
Like many films, "Come See The Paradise" is about the strength of
love. The fact that it uses this period as a backdrop sets it apart from the
rest. The chemistry between Quaid and Tomita is amazing. Just watch them
together when they meet for the first time and they kiss. It's simply stunning.
Quaid has rarely been this good, and Tomita is obviously relishing having a
lead role. In most of her films she's listed as "(somebody's) wife".
Films like this and "The Joy Luck Club" prove that she is one of the
most talented and under-used actresses.
Some have complained that this film uses an "American" character to
tell the story of a "Japanese" family. As if any non-Japanese
audience members would not be able to understand, or relate to, the Japanese
family. The Quaid character is called "un-American" because of his
labor rights stance. The family is called "un-American" simply
because they are of Japanese descent. Even though the children were born in the
Side note: this movie has not been released on DVD. I anxiously await that day.
Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review
“Come See the Paradise,” Alan Parker's romantic look at the "relocation" of Japanese Americans during World War II, has the feel of a still life. A placid, well-nigh-elegiac portrait of the Kawamuras of L.A.'s Little Tokyo, it is a history told by 19-year-old Lily, an apple pie nisei with the most compelling almond eyes. Like Lily and her family, the film itself suffers from divided sympathies, the brash can-do of the West versus a quieter Eastern resilience.
Tamlyn Tomita, born in Okinawa and raised in Los Angeles, has the role of Lily, a young woman as graceful and purely stunning as her namesake. It is 1936 and Lily, the eldest of the six American-born Kawamura kids, is being pressured to marry a rich old Japanese widower to whom her gambler father is greatly indebted. Then along comes Dennis Quaid as Jack McGurn, a dashing Irish American who comes to Los Angeles to escape his past as a militant union organizer in New York. A projectionist by trade, Jack takes a job at a Japanese cinema owned by Lily's father (Sab Shimono) and managed by her easygoing, baseball-loving brother, Charlie (Stan Egi).
For Lily and Jack, it is love at first sight. However, their sweet, rather chaste romance is opposed not only by Mr. Kawamura but by the State of California, which forbids intermarriage. The lovers elope to Seattle, where Jack takes a factory job and Lily gives birth to their daughter, Mini. Their happiness ends when the militant Jack resumes his union activities against her wishes, and Lily feels forced to leave for L.A. with Mini on Pearl Harbor eve. Back home, Lily learns that her father is being held by the FBI for his involvement in Japanese cultural societies -- he brought Japanese plays to the United States. "Don't forget the crummy movies. They're dangerous weapons. They could bore us to death," says Charlie.
Even when government agents are searching the house, even when the family is traveling to the internment camps, even behind barbed wire in the dusty barracks themselves, the Kawamuras are as American as Campbell Soup Kids. A hard-working, optimistic lot, they are soon planting trees and holding beauty contests. Eventually stress and rage send the two older Kawamura sons -- Charlie and Harry (Ronald Yamamoto) -- their separate ways and the family is torn apart. In the meantime, Jack, who doesn't know where his family has been imprisoned, is drafted but refuses to give up his search for Lily and Mini. Will they ever see each other again? Will the noble Mrs. Kawamura (Shizuko Hoshi) ever see Mr. Kawamura again?
The movie, both written and directed by Parker, is as melodramatic as "Gone With the Wind" but not nearly as good at giving us perspective on relationships sundered and sometimes sealed by war. The British director -- who is forever poking his nose into our affairs -- is extremely respectful of the Japanese American people. Perhaps he has responded all too well to the charges of racist revisionism leveled at his 1988 film, "Mississippi Burning," in which the FBI came to the rescue of the civil rights movement. The FBI comes off as the bad guys here, but it's still a fairly timid assessment of the events of the period.
Though it features uniformly solid performances, "Come See the Paradise" misses a dynamo like Gene Hackman's tough cop in "Mississippi Burning." Quaid is endearing as the self-deprecating Jack, but he's not crackling with his customary sexual energy. But then "Come See the Paradise" isn't driven by anything more dramatic than the perseverance of its cast. Everything that happens -- whether the death of a loved one or the upsetting of a cart of cabbages -- gets equal dramatic weight here. But as fate would have it, the movie does gain emotional resonance by the coincidence of its wartime release date.
Come See the Paradise The Color of Paradise, by Robert Payne from Jump Cut, July 1992
Edinburgh U Film Society (Michael Morrison) review
Entertainment Weekly review [D+] Owen Gleiberman
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
Siskel & Ebert (video)
The New York Times (Caryn James) review
THE COMMITMENTS
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Foul-mouthed, fast-talking and very funny, this is Parker's
best to date. It's an intentionally 'small' movie that treats a familiar
subject (kids forming a rock band) with a deft intimacy. But as the young
hopefuls from
The
Commitments Terrence
Rafferty from The
New Yorker
Alan Parker's film
is a loose, friendly musical comedy about the brief career of an Irish soul
band. The Commitments are the brainchild of an energetic young music enthusiast
named Jimmy Rabbitte (Robert Arkins), who lives in a poor
Exclaim! dvd review Michael Barclay
Movies about forming rock bands usually
get it painfully wrong. For starters, everyone’s way too good looking.
Secondly, it’s often painfully obvious that the music you hear in the film is
recorded by professionals in a studio, not naive wankers learning their
instruments. Finally, there’s always some schmaltzy ending where the band lands
a record deal, jams with their hero or something equally preposterous. The
Commitments is the antithesis of this model, although, okay, some of them are
pretty hot in their radiant working-class
Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review
Alan Parker's sexy, hilarious, exuberantly energetic new film, "The Commitments," has so much rhythmic juice that it's nearly impossible to stay in your seat. The film, which follows the roller coaster ups and downs of a group of poor Northside Dubliners who come together to form an Irish soul band, gets into your blood like an Aretha Franklin song; it's a transfusion of pure joy, raw and earthy and transcendently funky -- the best rock-and-roll movie since "A Hard Day's Night."
What "The Commitments" has is that rarest of all
things; it's got soul. Soul, in fact, is the movie's ruling principle, its Holy
Grail and its nirvana. Soul is what the band's all about, says Jimmy (Robert
Arkins), the ambitious young music lover who whips the group into shape; and
soul is what
The band members join Jimmy in his soul quest even though they're not quite sure what he's talking about. Jimmy is a born promoter, a huckster with the passion of an evangelist. The kids, who are either on the dole or work as meatpackers or bus conductors or blacksmiths, are skeptical at first, but they like it when Jimmy says that soul is all about sex. Their confusion resurfaces when he shows them a tape of James Brown and says, "That's what you have to measure up to, lads."
"The Commitments" is an ensemble piece with Jimmy at its center. He starts by taking out an ad in the local paper, looking for the right mix of musical personalities; all shapes, sizes and denominations apply, though most don't make it past the front door. "What are your influences?" he asks a skinhead in a leather jacket. "Barry Manilow," the skinhead answers. Slam. A young woman with a velvet hat says "Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez ..." Slam. A third girl says, "Sinead ..." Slam.
Parker gives this audition sequence a whiplash comic pace that is right on the money. The film's script -- which Roddy Doyle adapted from his novel with Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais -- is beautifully structured and tight as a drumhead. This is a deadly funny movie; nearly every scene is broken off with a punch line. But Parker's sense of comedy is organic; he never lets the jokes elbow the characters, or the music, out of the spotlight.
Parker keeps all the film's elements in balance. Every nuance is on the beat. The cast of players is large, but each character vividly emerges as a distinct personality. All films in this genre have a predictable dramatic curve: The band comes together, then after a few awkward early gigs, miraculously finds its groove and soars headlong into fame and fortune. Parker and collaborators have avoided all these cliches; there's nothing predictable about the band's progress. Pushed along by Jimmy and Joey "The Lips" Fagan, a veteran horn player who serves as the group's spiritual wellspring -- God told him to join the band -- the Commitments develop slowly, discovering themselves a little at a time.
This gradual maturation gives us a chance to get inside the characters, the dynamics of the group, and, most of all, the music. The movie couldn't be as great as it is if it weren't made by passionate musical connoisseurs. When the band starts to click, we feel like we know why; we know what's been missing, and feel their little epiphanies, both viscerally and intellectually. When they hit their groove, we're right in step with them.
We're also right in sync with the tensions that threaten to blow the group sky high. Deco (Andrew Strong), the band's lead singer, is the source of most of the problems. Everyone admits that he's blessed with a rare set of lungs (his voice is a combination of Van Morrison and Joe Cocker), but he's also a brutish pig. Offstage, he lasciviously taunts the backup singers, swaggers and belches. And his onstage behavior isn't much better. One drummer quits because he knows it's going to come to violence ("And I'm on probation," he says); and his replacement finally smashes the singer over the head with a trash can.
Deco isn't the only problem. The other force tearing the group apart is, as Jimmy puts it, "that old demon ... sex." The main culprit here is Joey the Lips, who in quick succession takes each of the three backup singers to bed, creating dissension in the female ranks. The women aren't happy, either, that Jimmy doesn't pay much attention to them. When Natalie (Maria Doyle) tries to seduce him, he puts her off. "What if you weren't the manager?" she asks. "But I am the manager, Natalie," he snaps back, walking off alone into the night.
Most of the actors are novices, and there's not a slouch
among them; they take to the screen with uncanny ease, both individually and as
members of an ensemble. Parker has to get a lot of the credit for this, as he
does for giving us the dilapidated atmosphere of the movie's setting. Like the
American music that captured the spirit of the black slums, the movie captures
the texture of
Then there's the sheer pleasure of watching the group perform. Most music movies give us small samples of the band's performances, but in this one the music provides the heartbeat. Parker knows how to showcase the band in its onstage appearances. The bottom line, though, is the music itself, and during numbers like "Take Me to the River" or "Dark End of the Street" or "Try a Little Tenderness," a feeling of sheer, irresistible delight moves through you. "The Commitments" will transport you, carry you off. No other movie this year can touch it.
BFI Screen Online Paul Clarke
filmcritic.com (Mark Athitakis) review [3.5/5]
Mark R. Leeper review [+1 out of -4..+4]
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [4/5]
Rolling Stone (Peter Travers) review
DVD Times Gary Couzens
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Brian Calhoun) dvd review
DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Guido Henkel
DVD Talk (Matthew Millheiser) dvd review [4/5] [Collector's Edition] 2-disc
The Digital Bits capsule dvd review [Collector's Edition] 2-disc
Film Freak Central dvd review [Collector's Edition] Walter Chaw, 2-disc
DVDFanatic.com [Robin Wilner] Special Edition, 2-disc
The Commitments, Alan Parker Film, Classic Movie Reviews, Musical ... Carey Lewis
Top
100 Directors: #64 - Alan Parker
Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Movie Habit (Matt Anderson) dvd review [4/4]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Entertainment Weekly review [C] Owen Gleiberman
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Austin Chronicle (Kathleen Maher) review [3.5/5]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
Siskel & Ebert (video)
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
ANGELA’S ASHES
When
I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was,
of course, a miserable childhood; the happy childhood is hardly worth your
while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish
childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
—Frank McCourt, Angela’s
Ashes
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Parker's film of Frank McCourt's bestseller charts a
Nashville Scene (Jim Ridley) review
Frank McCourt may indeed feel that the movie version of Angela's
Ashes has captured the events of his memoir just as he remembers them, as
the current TV ads proclaim. Still, don't you wonder how McCourt feels,
watching two major studios spend millions of bucks to recreate his family's
abject misery? There's something faintly obscene about
That country, of course, is
The cast works hard, but the characters aren't sketched with much depth. Watson in particular is given so little to work with that she's a passive blank at the story's center. And Parker's ponderous, dully respectable treatment loses the vitality of McCourt's narrative voice. That hurts the most. McCourt's gallows humor puts a salve on his childhood's stinging cruelties. When he writes, on the first page, "Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood," the words ring with a survivor's rueful wit. When the same words are spoken as narration in Parker's film, they come off sounding weirdly self-important: The worse the poverty, the more important the movie must be. Particularly since Parker pays more attention to the props of impoverishment--chamber pots, rags, grease-stained papers--than he does to the people.
That's not to say that movies should never deal with poverty--there's
a great film called Rosetta now winding across the country that's as
harrowing a depiction of being poor as you'll ever see. But it's set in a
recognizable present that makes you distinctly uncomfortable. It challenges you
to consider living in the same world, whereas Angela's Ashes is a period
piece that treats being poor as part of the past--the dank, disease-ridden
flats of
I wouldn't feel so cynical about the movie version of Angela's Ashes if it had even the slightest whiff of passion or personal commitment. But the movie doesn't seem to have been made for any other reasons than having a popular literary pedigree and a chance of recouping its cost--a fraction of which could've fed people as bad off as the McCourts in the here and now.
Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review
Angela’s Ashes is not one of my favorite books. I say this not for the purpose of attacking a beloved literary monument, but merely in the interest of disclosure, since to the great many people who have fallen under the spell of Frank McCourt’s memoir, the book is more than a portrait of life in Depression-era Limerick. It’s something more like a sacred text, or a talisman, a uniquely touching story of perseverance under the most inhuman of conditions, proof that pluck, luck and love can see people through the very worst of times.
I was given my copy of Angela’s Ashes by my grandmother, who always wanted her grandchildren to be proud of their Irish heritage (my copy of How the Irish Saved Civilization was similarly bequeathed), but even though she’d gone to the trouble of getting the book autographed to me and my two siblings, I never ended up finishing it. McCourt’s evocation of Limerick’s terrible, dank poverty was palpable, but the story seemed to go in circles; no sooner would the McCourt family take a half-step out of poverty than they would be flung forcibly back from whence they came, often ending up worse than before. What strung it all together was McCourt’s wry, fatalistic humor — the book’s famed opening passage uses the word "miserable" four times in three sentences, as much to comic as descriptive effect — but at some point I put the book down, started reading something else, and that was that.
This is all by way of saying that, although I generally dislike the work of Alan Parker, the director chosen to turn McCourt’s memoir into a movie, I wasn’t prepared to slam him for desecrating a literary masterwork, nor did I go to the theater with sky-high expectations. But it turns out comparison with the book is almost irrelevant, since Angela’s Ashes falls short not just of literary standards, but those of common sense as well.
The moment I knew Angela’s Ashes wasn’t going to get any better was when, upon being failed once again by the charismatic but deadbeat Malachy McCourt (Robert Carlyle), his wife Angela (Emily Watson) takes the whole family to move in with her relatives. Horrified at the condition of her children, one of the relatives exclaims how filthy they are, and immediately begins scrubbing at his ear with a towel. And it’s at that moment it dawns on you that the ear she’s scrubbing at is perfectly clean, and that apart from a few facial smudges, so is the child. In order for Angela’s Ashes to mean anything at all, it would have to reek of the poverty of the narrow Limerick streets, which in Angela’s Ashes are always as rain-slick and shiny as those in any action movie chase scene.
But what Parker and cinematographer Michael Seresin (shooting
his eighth Parker film) give us is a simulacrum of poverty that looks like it’s
just come out of the box, and I suspect that many who loved the earthy details
of McCourt’s book will feel betrayed by the movie. Parker, who’s at his best
directing spectacles like Evita, gives us swelling John Williams music
and emotional caterwauling, but every shot looks like it was lit for a magazine
spread on "The New Poverty." Robert Carlyle is particularly fine in
the film’s most complicated role, while Watson has little to do besides look
long-suffering and angelic (both well within her reach), and the trio of young
actors playing young Frank (Joe Breen, Ciaran Owens and Michael Legge) vary in
effectiveness. I liked the youngest (Breen, whose hard, arresting face graces
the poster) best, but it may just be that the others seemed worse as the film
failed to improve. What’s sad about Angela’s Ashes is not that it’s
surprisingly bad, but that it’s predictably so.
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Film of the Month: Angela's Ashes (1999)
Nick Roddick, January 2000
New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review
AboutFilm.com (Jeff Vorndam) review [C]
World Socialist Web Site review Liz Smith
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
MediaCircus (Anthony Leong) review
filmcritic.com (James Brundage) review [2.5/5]
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
PopMatters Renee Scolaro Rathke
culturevulture.net Scott Von Doviak
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [3/4]
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3/4]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Robert Mandel) dvd review
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [2/4]
DVD Verdict (Nicholas Sylvain) dvd review
A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review
DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Michael Pflug
DVD MovieGuide dvd review Colin Jacobson, Special Edition
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Film Journal International (Maitland McDonagh) review
Movieline Magazine review Stephen Farber
Movie Magazine International review Casey MCabe
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [2/4]
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [C+]
Film Monthly (Wayne Case) review
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [3/5]
Movie-Vault.com (Dan Smith) review [7/10]
Movielocity Movie Reviews (Blake Kunisch) review [6/10]
eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [1/5]
Entertainment Weekly review [C-] Owen Gleiberman
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul (Kate Sullivan) review
Austin Chronicle (Steve Davis) review [2.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Examiner (Walter Addiego) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE D+ 64
Disgraced philosophy professor and anti-capital punishment
advocate David Gale (Spacey) awaits death by injection for the rape and murder
of his beloved colleague Constance (Linney). As the clock ticks, Gale protests
his innocence in flashback to flinty reporter Bitsey Bloom (Winslet). The
condemned man's lack of storytelling economy gives early warning that he's not
out for standard redemption. He's in no hurry to complete his narrative, an
alcohol-fuelled tailspin encompassing the decay of his marriage and a false
rape charge by a student. As the twists and turns mount in Bitsey's
investigation (she also obtains a videotape of
Premiere.com review Glenn Kenny
I'm not sure what kind of movie Kevin Spacey, Kate Winslet, and Laura Linney thought
they were making when they signed on to do The Life of David Gale, directed by
Alan Parker from a script by Charles Randolph. But whatever they may have
thought, what they ended up in is one of the most viciously cynical motion
pictures I have ever seen. Only a recap of the film that completely gives away
all of its plot points will allow me to dissect the movie's cynicism in the way
I'd like to, which would of course be unfair to readers who haven't experienced
the staggering thing that is The Life of David Gale. In the film, Kevin Spacey
plays Gale, a
Leaving aside the inaccuracies about the magazine world this movie advances (the extent to which Mann's intern gets away with being such a snot strains credulity), this movie really shows its hand when Gale, in a television debate with a Bushlike Texas governor, chokes on a question that any real-life anti-death penalty activist would have a ready answer for. Movies take liberties with facts, and with history, all the time; but I've never seen a film do so as disingenuously as this one does (and yes, I am including Oliver Stone's fantasy JFK, not to mention Parker's own odious Mississippi Burning, here). By the time we get to the film's twist, or should I say twisted, ending, Parker has made his contempt for his characters and his audience palpable. I didn't learn anything about the director's opinions on the death penalty from this film; it did confirm, however, that Parker probably has a distaste for human life in general. So that's something.
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
Oh what a tangled web we weave! Alan Parker's turgid,
bleeding-heart The Life of David Gale has timeliness on its side but
its "dialogical exhaustion" (coincidentally, the title of the titular
death-row inmate's book on talking too much) is liable to shame good liberals
straight into the Republican Party. David Gale (Kevin Spacey) is accused of
raping and murdering his colleague Constance Hallaway (Laura Linney), head of
the anti-death penalty group DeathWatch. The unfortunately named Bitsy Bloom
(Kate Winslet), an investigative reporter for News Magazine (apparently
Hearsay, Poop and Leak were already taken), gets three two-hour interview
sessions with Professor Gale, who now sits in Death Row awaiting a Friday
execution. Nancy Drew, er, Bitsy hears Gale's side of the truth and sets out to
find
Los Angeles Times (Manohla Dargis) review
Alan Parker, the director of the death-penalty drama
"The Life of David Gale," likes his acting big, his edits hard and
his stories slick. A filmmaker with a penchant for highbrow material and an
instinct for lowbrow thrills, Parker is a consummate journeyman and a
relentless huckster (like a number of major British directors, he started in
advertising), and it's a rare one of his movies that doesn't entertain. Even
when they're as deadly serious as Parker's earlier prison-house thriller "
Written by Charles Randolph, "The Life of David Gale" involves a
former philosophy professor and death-penalty activist (Kevin Spacey) who tries
to clear his name in the four days leading up to his scheduled execution.
Convicted of killing his fellow activist and university colleague, Constance
Harraway (Laura Linney), Gale has landed on death row after enduring a spectacular
flameout that ignited with a charge of rape and was fanned by an accusation of
murder. As he waits for
If you're thinking Christiane Amanpour, think again. Gale's
designated pundit is Bitsey Bloom (Kate Winslet), a tough cookie with peroxide
tips who's chased down child pornographers and, having no use for
technicalities like objectivity, knows a guilty man when she sees him. Smelling
another cover story exclusive, Bitsey travels to
In time, Bitsey also uncovers how he ended up in prison. "The Life of
David Gale" is pitched as a mystery but it doesn't take all that long to
piece together the puzzle since neither Parker nor the screenwriter can resist
leaving clues scattered through every scene. (Admittedly, I was slower on the
uptake than either of my friends, both of whom took to irritatingly whispering,
"Haven't you figured it out yet?")
Frankly, the film's real surprise is that it doesn't collapse under the weight
of its sanctimonious posturing and howling pretension. The film is crammed with
high-cultural references and people playing "smart," but none of it
adds up -- not Bitsey, not Gale, not Constance, not the booze-soaked academic
bacchanal and certainly not the tinhorn lawyer who drawls, "Let's not
throw a pity party and sit around reading Kafka."
Well, let's, actually. If for no other reason than Parker's tendency to smash
through stories ends up being brutal on Spacey and Winslet. Both actors have
proven they can more than bite off oversized emotions but tend to do their best
work with the mute on. This seems somehow lost on Spacey, whose career may not
withstand too much more melodramatic sloshing; as with many Academy Award
winners, the actor seems increasingly drawn to roles tailored to show him in a
virtuous light.
Like Spacey, Winslet can be absolutely fearless -- this is, after all, a woman
who survived "Titanic" and stood naked toe-to-toe with Harvey Keitel
in "Holy Smoke" -- but she's flummoxed by a character who's no more
evolved than Brenda Starr. Somehow it's hard to imagine Amanpour stamping her
foot in frustration during an interview; she may be a girl reporter but she's
definitely not bitsy.
The
cruel and unusual Life of David Gale. - Slate Magazine David Edelstein, May 3, 2003
World Socialist Web Site review Joanne Laurier
culturevulture.net,
Choices for the Cognoscenti review Nigam Nuggehalli
Nitrate Online (Gregory Avery) review
“The Life of David Gale” -
Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek,
February 21, 2003
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna
Milk Plus: A Discussion of Film Allyn
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [1/4]
The Filmsnobs (James Owen) review
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [1/4]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Erasing Clouds review Jerry Salisbury
Village Voice (Dennis Lim) review
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [2/5]
The Onion A.V. Club review Noel
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [2/10]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [1/4]
Movie-Vault.com (Avril Carruthers) review [7/10]
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [C-]
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [C+]
eFilmCritic.com (Collin Souter) review [1/5]
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2.5/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Jack Sommersby) review [2/5]
CultureCartel.com (Brandon Curtis) review [0.5/5]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [2/4]
DVD Town (Tim David Raynor) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review
DVD Talk (Don Houston) dvd review [1/5] [Widescreen Edition]
A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review
CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) review also seen here: Talking Pictures (UK) review
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review [2/4]
Moda Magazine (Brian Orndorf) review [6/10]
stylusmagazine.com (Jen Cameron) review
eFilmCritic.com review [4/5] The Ultimate Dancing Machine
SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [2/4]
Film Monthly (Hope Villanueva) review
Movie Habit (Marty Mapes) review [0/4]
Film Journal International (Doris Toumarkine) review
hybridmagazine.com review Michelle Fajkus
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
Film Blather (Eugene Novikov) review
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review
Exclaim! review Elizabeth Bailey
Entertainment Weekly review [C] Owen Gleiberman
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [2/4]
Variety (David Stratton) review
BBC Films review Jamie Russell
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [1.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
Las Vegas Review-Journal (Carol Cling) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review
Movie
review, 'The Life of David Gale'
Michael Wilmington from The
Chicago Tribune
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review
Parker,
Mary Louise – actress
Overview
for Mary-Louise Parker - TCM.com Biography
from Turner Classic Movies
One of the most steadily working actresses on both coasts, Mary-Louise Parker enjoyed a Tony-winning career with Broadway dramas like "Prelude to a Kiss" and "Proof" before winning over television audiences as the subversive suburban centerpiece of Showtime's dark comedy, "Weeds" (2005-2012). Parker also made several successful forays into feature films with "Fried Green Tomatoes" (1991), "Grand Canyon" (1991), "Bullets Over Broadway" (1994), "The Client" (1994) and "Boys on the Side" (1995). But it was on the small screen that she made her greatest impact, thanks to spending several seasons in recurring fashion as political activist Amy Gardner on "The West Wing" (NBC, 1999-2006). During that time, she earned multiple awards â¿¿ including an Emmy and Golden Globe â¿¿ for her supporting turn as the Valium-addicted wife of a closeted Mormon in the critically acclaimed miniseries "Angels in America" (HBO, 2003). Forever shifting gears between film and the stage acting that was her primary passion, Parker appeared in the comedy "Saved!" (2004) at the time she gave birth to her son fathered by actor Billy Crudup, who famously broke things off with her during her pregnancy. Meanwhile, she landed the role of Nancy Botwin, a widowed mother who resorts to selling marijuana to make ends meet on "Weeds," which also led to her on-again, off-again affair with her showâ¿¿s dead husband Jeffrey Dean Morgan. With roles in varied projects like "The Spiderwick Chronicles" (2008) and "Red" (2010), Parker maintained her status as a talented performer very much in demand.
Born on Aug. 2, 1964 in Fort Jackson, SC, her father's career in the U.S. Army led the family to such far-flung places as Thailand, France, Germany, and the wilds of Texas. Parker was an extremely shy girl, but came to life whenever she was onstage in dance recitals and plays; her comfort inhabiting other personas led her to an acting career early on. For college, she returned to her native South and attended the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, where she became friends with future successes Peter Hedges, the director of "Dan in Real Life" (2007) and other features, and Joe Mantello, who would become a multiple Tony-winning director. After graduating in the spring of 1986, she moved to New York City and within a few months, had landed her first professional gig in "Night of the Iguana" at a theater in nearby Stamford, CT. Along with Hedges and Mantello and K. Todd Freeman, Parker co-founded The Edge Theater, with which she made her off-off-Broadway debut, appearing in half a dozen productions.
An early stint on the ABC soap "Ryan's Hope" (ABC, 1975-1989) helped finance her love of live theater, beginning her lifelong pattern of alternating impassioned New York stage roles with heady TV and film dramas. Parker made her film debut as an abused girlfriend in "Signs of Life" (1989) and that same year began a long-term working relationship with playwright Craig Lucas, appearing in a film adaptation of his "Longtime Companion" (1989), portraying the best friend of a gay man dealing with the AIDS crisis in one of the first films to address the controversial topic. A year later, Parker made it to Broadway and earned a Theater World Award and a Tony nomination for the challenging role of a young bride who accidentally swaps souls with an old man in Lucas' "Prelude to a Kiss." The breakout performance and Parker's compelling ability to combine smarts and sophistication with emotional vulnerability won the eye of film directors and Parker was soon on her way.
Famed writer-director Lawrence Kasdan cast her as a lonely secretary infatuated with her employer (Kevin Kline) in "Grand Canyon" (1991), but it was her breakthrough as an abused wife empowered by her friendship with a female cafe owner (Mary Stuart Masterson) in "Fried Green Tomatoes" (1991) that really drew attention to her facility for complex characterizations. Never away from the theater for long, Parker hit the boards to play a woman driven to madness by the birth of a deformed child in "Babylon Gardens" (1991), as well as essayed an ambitious and scheming actress in John Patrick Shanley's black comedy "Four Dogs and a Bone" (1993). On the big screen, the romantic comedy "Mr. Wonderful" (1993) starring Matt Dillon failed to do the thespian justice, but a meatier role as a 1930s intellectual bohemian in Woody Allen's hilarious and underrated "Bullets over Broadway" (1994) was a delight. Proving that there was a place for the skills of a seasoned stage actress in popular Hollywood movies, Parker delivered a series of sad and delightful revelations in "Boys on the Side" (1995), her emotionally compelling turn as a young woman with AIDS, easily eclipsing that of co-stars Whoopi Goldberg and Drew Barrymore. Reuniting with writer Craig Lucas, Parker played a paraplegic deaf mute in a screen adaptation of his smart comedy "Reckless" (1995) before scoring on the small screen as 1950s pop singer Phyllis McGuire and mafia moll in HBO's biopic, "Sugartime" (1995).
At the peak of her film career in the mid- to early-1990s, Parker gave a series of powerhouse stage performances as well, beginning with her portrayal of aspiring and troubled saloon singer Cherie in a revival of "Bus Stop," starring opposite Billy Crudup, with whom she would begin a long-term relationship. The following year she picked up an OBIE for her captivating chronicle of a victim of child abuse in Paula Vogel's Pulitzer Prize-winning "How I Learned to Drive" (1997), and in 1998 won critical kudos in Alan Ayckbourn's razor-sharp comedy "Communicating Doors" as a Cockney dominatrix who overhears a dying man's confession and attempts to save his victims by traveling back in time. After Parker's awkward but attractive secretary romanced Don Johnson in Roland Jaffe's comic thriller "Goodbye Lover" (1998), she was in top form as a flaky, tragic divorcee in the stylish yet quirky TV film "Anne Tyler's 'Saint Maybe'" (CBS, 1998). Several more TV films helped finance Parker's passion for the less lucrative stage, including "The Simple Life of Noah Dearborn" (CBS, 1999), in which she co-starred with no less than Sidney Poitier, and the Hallmark Hall of Fame production "Cupid & Cate" (CBS, 2000) with Peter Gallagher. Her big screen performance as the wonderfully high-strung cake maker with no sense of taste in the "The Five Senses" (2000) was sadly a limited release, though it was a critical pick at festivals internationally.
In 2001, Parker earned the biggest raves of her stage career for starring as an enigmatic, troubled young woman embroiled in a mathematical mystery in "Proof." The play ran for over a year and a half and earned the actress a Tony Award, as well as pretty much every other theater award in the Western world, including a Drama Desk, Obie and Lucille Lortel Award. Parker's high-profile accolades led to an offer from the "The West Wing" for a recurring role as women's rights advocate Amy Gardner. Not surprisingly, she was again applauded by critics, earning an Emmy nomination in 2002 for her role on the popular political drama. Parker next filmed the "Silence of the Lambs" prequel "Red Dragon" (2002) with Anthony Hopkins and Ed Norton before Mike Nichols cast her in HBO's acclaimed adaptation of the Tony-award-winning "Angels in America" (2003). It was a highlight of Parker's screen career, proving what the actress was capable of on film if given worthy material and a director who recognized her strengths.
On a personal note, her "Angels" efforts were honored with Emmy and Golden Globe Awards. At the Golden Globe ceremony, Parker, who had recently given birth, not only won a statue that night, but also America's sympathy. The press had recently jumped on the story that just as she was about to become a new mom, her seven-year relationship with the baby's father, actor Billy Crudup, had ended after he reportedly left his pregnant girlfriend to woo his much younger co-star, Claire Danes. To say Parker was a figure of admiration due to the class with which she conducted herself in light of a broken heart, was an understatement. Despite her new responsibilities as a single mother, Parker maintained a dizzying schedule, starting with a run of TV movies, including "The Best Thief in the World" (Showtime, 2004) and "Miracle Run" (Lifetime, 2004). In addition to her recurring role on "The West Wing," she appeared in a supporting role in the feature comedy, "Saved!" (2004), a timid Christian satire, and returned to Broadway in Craig Lucas' "Reckless," playing the role that had been Mia Farrow's in the 1995 screen adaptation.
But the best was yet to come as far as high profile exposure was concerned. After earning another lead actress Tony Award nomination for "Reckless," that fall, she was cast in her first lead television role on "Weeds" (Showtime, 2005-2012), a dark comedy about a widowed suburban mom who maintains her lifestyle after her husband's death by supplying her idyllic community with high-grade pot. The quirky, stylized show was a hit for the network and Parker, its anchor, recognized with multiple SAG, Emmy and Golden Globe nominations. She took home a Golden Globe in 2006 and was nominated the following year in addition to her nom for the television murder mystery "The Robber Bride" (Oxygen, 2007). In 2008, Parker was slated to appear off-Broadway at Playwright's Horizons in a new production entitled "Dead Man's Cell Phone," as well as continue her impressive work on the much beloved "Weeds," which earned her a fourth Golden Globe nomination and a third consecutive Emmy Award nomination, all in 2009.
The same year, she also played a part of the ensemble supporting cast of the dramedy "Solitary Man" (2009), starring Michael Douglas, and went on to have her first major role in a blockbuster with the action movie "Red" (2010), featuring Bruce Willis and Helen Mirren, among others. In 2012, "Weeds" concluded, and Parker moved on from her seven-year run on the show by filming notable parts in the supernatural buddy movie "R.I.P.D." and "Red 2," which both, oddly enough, debuted on the same summer day in 2013.
Mary-Louise Parker - NNDB biography
Mary-Louise
Parker - Theater Actress, Film Actress, Television Actress ... Biography
Mary-Louise Parker Does Not Smoke Weed, but She Has Licked a Pot ... Vanity Fair, August 27, 2010
Mary-Louise
Parker Pays Tribute to the Men in Her Life | Out Magazine R. Kurt Osenlund from Out magazine, October 7, 2015
Mary-Louise
Parker on the guys — good and bad — in her life - The ... The
Washington Post, November 9, 2015
Learning
About Mary-Louise Parker's Dear Mr. You -- Vulture Ken Salikof, November 13, 2015
Mary-Louise
Parker's 6 favorite contemporary books - The Week November 14, 2015
After
12 Years, Mary-Louise Parker Finally Wrote About Being - Jezebel Bobby Finger from Jezebel, November 15, 2015
Mary-Louise Parker: 'The World Doesn't Need Another Mean Book ... Malcolm Jones from The Daily Beast, November 15, 2015
Dear
Mary-Louise Parker, You've Written A Great Book : NPR Jean Zimmerman book review from NPR, Novmber
16, 2015
Mary-Louise Parker on Life With and Without Men - The New York Times November 15, 2015
“I'm
the parent who wants their kids to have sex”: Mary Louise Parker ... Elissa Schappell from Salon, December 19, 2015
Mary-Louise Parker - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Parker,
Nate
THE BIRTH OF A NATION C+ 78
USA (120 mi) 2016 ‘Scope
The
American soil is full of the corpses of my ancestors, through four hundred
years and at least three wars... What
one begs the American people to do, for all our sakes, is simply to accept our
history.
—James Baldwin on the 100th anniversary of the
Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery, 1965, in a debate at Cambridge
University with William F. Buckley, on the question: “Is the American Dream at
the expense of the American Negro?” Classics
of American Political and Constitutional Thought: ...,
also on video, James
Baldwin Debates William F. Buckley (1965) - YouTube
(58:57)
Indeed
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice
cannot sleep forever.
—Thomas Jefferson, opening quote
Another Hollywood depiction of slavery supposedly “based on a true story,” this time examining Nat Turner, an American revolutionary figure, the leader of the most notorious slave rebellion in American history in 1831, and while there were hopes that an independent production might provide more historical accuracy, where the black writer/director Nate Parker indicated he was seeking “historical fidelity,” instead he resorts to the same trickery of Hollywood fictionalized embellishments, turning this into an overblown melodrama of the highest order, portraying Turner as a Christ figure, where the finale borrows heavily from Mel Gibson’s THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (2004), with Gibson’s name listed in the final credits, working as an advisor on the script. While Turner may have been a religious zealot, believing he was chosen by God to lead a revolt to eradicate slavery, which he felt was morally wrong and violated the law of God, this film erroneously portrays him as a man avenging his wife’s vicious gang rape at the hands of slave patrollers, acting as her protector from an event that likely never happened, where his conversion to an insurrectionist happens only when his wife gives him permission to avenge her rape. As a result, the film completely alters the justification for his actions. When examining historical events, motivations matter. In this case, one can only speculate why Parker and his cowriter Jean Celestin decided to add this false narrative. Curiously, both Parker and Celestin were black roommates on the wrestling team in college at Penn State University in 1999 with both charged with raping a fellow white student while she was intoxicated and unconscious, where she also accused them of harassing and shaming her on campus after she filed charges, including hiring a private investigator to show pictures of her around campus, subjecting her to ridicule, identifying her as the “white girl crying rape!,” causing her to drop out of school, where she eventually committed suicide in 2012. Fiercely supported by Penn State alumni, the same ones that wanted to excuse assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky when he was found guilty on 45 counts of sexually molesting young men, and Joe Paterno, the head football coach that turned a blind eye, Parker was found not guilty, while Celestin was initially convicted and sentenced to two to four years in prison, which was overturned in 2005 for having insufficient counsel and charges were never refiled. According to a September 29, 2016 Variety article written by the victim’s sister Sharon Loeffler, "Nate Parker's 'Birth of a Nation' Exploits My Sister All Over Again (Guest Column)":
As her sister, the
thing that pains me most of all is that in retelling the story of the Nat
Turner slave revolt, they invented a rape scene. The rape of Turner’s wife is used as a reason
to justify Turner’s rebellion. This is
fiction. I find it creepy and perverse
that Parker and Celestin would put a fictional rape at the center of their film,
and that Parker would portray himself as a hero avenging that rape. Given what happened to my sister, and how no
one was held accountable for it, I find this invention self-serving and
sinister, and I take it as a cruel insult to my sister’s memory.
Whether this alters one’s appreciation for the film is undetermined, but the revelations of this past incident, along with Parker’s refusal to show remorse for what happened, has certainly dampened the enthusiasm of the film coming out of the Sundance Festival, with many declaring an outright refusal to see it. Parker is mostly known as an actor, starring in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s underrated Beyond the Lights (2014) while also appearing in Denzel Washington’s THE GREAT DEBATERS (2007). The film has two distinct sections, one on becoming a man and another on being a man, opening in a tribal ceremony in childhood where a birthmark traced back to his ancestors leads elders to pronounce him a prophet, suggesting divine birth, which comes from Turner’s own testimony about himself while being held in prison, transcribed by Richard R. Gray in 1831, The Confessions of Nat Turner. Without anointing him to an epic hero, as the film does, it’s important to remember that Nat Turner is just an ordinary man who was raised in the dehumanized conditions of slavery and made to witness the atrocities that accompany slavery. The choice that he made to revolt against the system of tyranny and oppression is a startling one, where his insurrection led to savage results, as he and his rebels killed at least ten men, fourteen women, and thirty-one children. That last figure is a particularly brutal reality, as it reflects what happens when dehumanized people are stripped of hope, as they are left with no other option but to behave in an equally inhumane fashion, where violence breeds violence, similar to the black-on-black violence that ravages today’s inner cities, where shootings and staggering murder rates are a stark legacy of historical oppression. While the film may attempt to establish this link to the present, it fails miserably, as the effort is undermined by mythologizing Turner and forcing him into the role of a one-dimensional super hero, literally valorizing black manhood, like SHAFT (1971) or Django Unchained (2012), which plays into all the other white-washed Hollywood versions of black history, even though in this case it’s written and told by a black man. Or put differently, the road to hell is paved by good intentions. While there’s something almost inadvertently admirable about this film, especially its occasional artistic touches, it ultimately fails to make the case of bringing the historical relevancy of the past into the present, connecting it to the Black Lives Matter movement, for instance. This film will not change anyone’s minds, as those who know it already know it, and those that don’t either won’t see the film or won’t be persuaded by the content. In the ensuing hysteria following the rebellion, fearful that other slaves may revolt, states overreacted by passing laws making it illegal to teach blacks how to read or write, creating an educational gap that societally has never been bridged.
Surprisingly, what works best is everything that happens prior to the insurrection, where it’s simply a portrayal of day-to-day life under slavery. As a child, Nat is skipping around and playing with his slave owner’s son Sam, where the two become best friends, though each retreats into decidedly different households come dinner time, Sam to the mansion and Nat to the slave quarters. This film inaccurately shows personal cabins for slave families, something that was certainly not the case in Southampton, Virginia where there were no private living quarters for slaves. Without explanation, we discover Nat has the capacity to read as a small child, something noticed by Sam’s mother Elizabeth (Penelope Ann Miller), bringing him to live inside the mansion where she teaches him The Bible. Nat’s father is run off the plantation when he is caught stealing food, forced to disappear into the night and never be seen again. Jumping ahead to Nat (Nate Parker) as a young man, we see that Sam (Armie Hammer) still considers him a friend, believing him trustworthy, where Nat lives with his mother (Aunjanue Ellis) and grandmother (Esther Scott), where they are portrayed as a loving family. That, in itself, is a revelation, as slaves are rarely depicted as capable of having intelligence and human feelings. These bonds grow even more intimate with the appearance of Cherry (Aja Naomi King), as Nat actually persuades Sam to purchase her in a slave auction, with a young black boy holding up a sign that reads “Slaves for Sale.” She ends up as the personal property of one of Sam’s sisters, working inside the mansion along with Esther (Gabrielle Union), a silent character who never utters a word of dialogue throughout the entire film. In an op-ed for The Los Angeles Times, Union, who was raped at gunpoint at the age of 19, explained that in Esther’s silence “she represents countless black women who have been and continue to be violated. Women without a voice, without power. Women in general. But black women in particular.” Nat has worked the cotton fields since childhood days, making it difficult to find private moments alone with Cherry, where the budding romance, eventual marriage, and having a daughter actually has a degree of love and tender grace to it, offering a delicately humanized alternative to the surrounding harshness. But that soon changes, once Nat is called upon by neighboring slaveholders to have Nat preach to their slaves, teaching them the sanctity of “obedience.” The horrors that he witnesses while performing this service are inhumanly grotesque, catalyzing his growing awareness, as he notices that Biblical passages on obedience to false prophets are followed by the wrath of an angry God, where he comes to believe his own complicity in the slavery atrocities, delivering more rousing sermons that suggest a deliverance from evil. One of the most haunting images seen is a mirror image of Nat and Sam as young boys, but here it is a young white girl skipping across the porch with a rope connected to a young black girl following behind with a noose around her neck. What’s so provocative is the utter obliviousness on their innocent faces, while Nat is profoundly affected by the implication. As these visits continue, where Sam earns enough money to save his farm, Sam also grows more indifferent to Nat, drinking heavily to vanquish the pain, increasingly treating Nat and others like property, not only allowing, but insisting that Esther be raped by another prominent slave-owner. The final eruption of violence is as much about personal betrayal as it is about slavery.
Cinema Scope: Adam Nayman September 10, 2016
Let’s stick to what’s on screen here, and say that Nate Parker isn’t the first multi-hyphenate to conflate artistic megalomania with authentic heroism—a pre-damage control Mel Gibson got an Academy Award for it, for instance. At the risk of praising with faint damnation, The Birth of a Nation is roughly on a par with Braveheart (1995) as far as gory populist epics go. This genre has defeated the filmmakers who have tried to bridle against or reinvent it; by contrast, Parker strives shamelessly to inhabit a banal format head-on. By casting himself as the insurrectionist preacher Nat Turner, who torqued his sermons to lead several Virginian plantations’ worth of slaves against their masters in the early 19th century, the filmmaker ensures that his ostensible homage is also a star vehicle. Parker the director gifts Parker the actor with huge, screen-filling close-ups and rousing, scripture-driven speeches, while the other performers barely seem to have been guided at all. (Playing Turner’s hard-drinking, guilt-stricken master, Armie Hammer at least attempts some semblance of complexity, whereas Jackie Earle Haley contributes a cartoon of racist villainy.) Bereft of either Steve McQueen’s formalist rigour (the stabs at expressionism, like a bleeding ear of corn, are dismal) or Quentin Tarantino’s faux-retrograde craziness (gotta give Django Unchained [2012] that, if nothing else), all Parker can do is haplessly transform a vital, unsettling and, yes, contemporarily resonant episode in American history into an unfortunate string of clichés. It’s very strange to watch painful verities staged in a way that diminishes their power under the guise of amplifying it. This is a film about deep-seated systems of oppression that feels tonally like a superhero origin myth. The cynicism that rationalizes such a hard-sell approach as a necessary tactic to make difficult material palatable for mainstream audiences is something to be very wary of indeed.
Film Comment: Michael Koresky September 03, 2016
Sundance smash The Birth of a Nation, like any movie, deserves to be considered for its craft rather than its buzz or controversy. So, then: Parker’s dramatization of the 1831 rebellion of Virginia slave Nat Turner is impressively mounted, unimaginatively directed, and dubiously conceived—provocative in title only. Parker’s glossy hagiography stars the director himself as the fiery leader of the most notorious race revolt in pre–Civil War American history, often rendered in righteous slow-motion. Yes, Nat Turner’s story is one that needs to be told, but savvy marketing will tell us it has to be told right now.
Apparently made in tribute to bad 1990s epics, The Birth of a Nation boasts Braveheart battles and a Legends of the Fall score and doesn’t offer a single original visual idea. Filled with gruesome violence and gorgeous men sporting bad teeth (Parker and Armie Hammer, cast as his white childhood friend turned initially-sympathetic-but-ultimately-sadistic owner), this stylized veneration constantly equates Turner (and thus, Parker—gasp) with Christ, which proves to not lift him to deity-level as much as weigh the character down with a burdensome cross to bear (he even gets touched by an actual angel in the film’s climactic martyrdom sequence).
It’s almost amusing to think how criticized 12 Years a Slave was from some quarters for its alleged aestheticizing of atrocity in light of Birth of a Nation’s elevation of genocidal horrors to the realm of the mythic: in an almost pornographically literal move, Nina Simone’s “Strange Fruit” accompanies the “poetic” image of a lynched child with a butterfly fluttering on his chest.
Sundance 2016 | Amy Taubin - Film Comment March/April 2016
Of course, you want to read about The Birth of a Nation, the big story out of Sundance 2016, but not one that necessarily will have legs. Nate Parker’s debut feature is a biopic about Nat Turner, a contested figure in American history (when he is not ignored outright). Turner led a slave revolt in Southampton County, Virginia in 1831 that began and ended in a bloodbath: about 60 white men, women, and children were murdered by Turner and his followers, who in turn were all murdered or driven out by whites, and with them many slaves who had not participated in the uprising. The Birth of a Nation is a mess of a film, but it has ambition (witness its title) and a sense of urgency—qualities that were notably lacking in many films by established independent filmmakers on this year’s Sundance slate.
Easily the festival’s most anticipated event, The Birth of a Nation’s premiere screening began with a standing ovation for Parker (the star as well as the director and screenwriter) and ended with about 50 people on stage: cast, crew, producers, and, in what might have been a Sundance first, a bevy of financial backers. In a statement no less confusing than the film itself, Parker said that he wanted to show that the system (slavery) corrupted everyone, and that he hoped viewers would have their own interpretations of the film’s historical and contemporary relevance, and that it would encourage them all to become “change agents.” Given that the film is less than rigorous about distinguishing religion from politics and the point of view of the filmmaker from that of his protagonist, it is difficult to imagine the change that it might effect. Is it Turner who subjectively confuses the vengeful prophets of the Old Testament with the turn-the-other-cheek Jesus of the New, or is it the filmmaker who, through his use of visual metaphors, likens Turner to Jesus, even after he’s wreaked havoc with his axe and musket?
Such niceties did not deter a bidding war from commencing even before the film ended, involving most of the major Hollywood studios, a few established independents, and the deep-pocketed parvenus, Netflix and Amazon. Panicked and hopefully chastened by the shortage of minorities from the nominations for the Academy Awards, the industry and most of the press saw The Birth of a Nation as the antidote to “Oscars So White.” And since the Hollywood establishment has a history of preferring slavery narratives to contemporary African-American stories, the next award season may prove them right. Parker’s film sold to Fox Searchlight for about $17.5 million, at least $5 million more, adjusted for inflation, than any film in Sundance history. It was widely reported that Netflix bid $20 million, but Parker preferred Searchlight, which had a theatrical success with 12 Years a Slave, propelling the film to the Best Picture Oscar in 2014.
Film Comment: Eugene Hernandez January 28, 2016
There have certainly been spectacular moments of discovery at the Sundance Film Festival over the past few decades. Early films by Darren Aronofsky, Ava DuVernay, Quentin Tarantino, Bryan Singer, Steven Soderbergh, Kelly Reichardt, Todd Haynes, and many others debuted at the Utah festival, lifting their directors to wider awareness. But rarely does a film cause the sort of stir that Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation did earlier this week. In fact, it’s hard to name a film that had a bigger, more raucous, more financially lucrative world premiere here.
The premiere of The Birth of a Nation at the 1,200-seat Eccles Theatre was immediately etched into Sundance history, not only because just hours after the screening ended it was sold for distribution for a record-breaking $17.5 million (to Fox Searchlight), but because of the rapturous reaction at its first showing. Anticipation for the film, a biographical look at Nat Turner who led an 1831 slave rebellion, sparked a standing ovation as Parker took the stage to introduce the unseen film. As the credits rolled, the standing ovation resumed in the dark theater for several minutes and continued again when Parker came back on stage to talk about the movie.
In the days since the debut of The Birth of a Nation, press have swarmed Nate Parker, and the story of the film’s major success at Sundance has become national news. The filmmaker, and his studio distributor, intend to use the awareness to build on a national rollout for the film later this year.
We are in a unique moment for film culture and the Hollywood industry. Pointed criticism over limited opportunities for women in feature filmmaking have intensified, particularly over the past year, and Sundance 2016 began in the wake of sharp criticism of recent Academy Award nominations that failed to recognize key achievements by people of color and LGBTs. AMPAS responded on the second day of Sundance saying it would dramatically improve the makeup of its membership within four years. The move drew praise from those seeking a more representative body and criticism from some older members of the institution. On Sunday afternoon, at a reception hosted by the Academy at the festival, filmmakers and insiders chatted with each other and questioned AMPAS reps about the new initiative.
The premiere of The Birth of a Nation, a film that Nate Parker spent seven years developing, writing, and producing, could not have been more perfectly timed. The ovation that greeted him as he introduced the movie was an embrace. Just getting the film this far, the industry seemed to be saying—against so many hurdles—was an achievement.
A historical tale striking brutal, adoring, and vengeful notes, Parker’s The Birth of a Nation details Nat Turner’s life as a literate kid on the plantation and then flashes forward to capture his rise to prominence as a preacher to southern slaves. Parker plays the adult Turner alongside Armie Hammer, Gabriele Union, and Jackie Earle Haley, among others. Turner witnesses the scourge of slavery as he travels to preach to other plantations and soon turns his faith against his people’s oppressors. Observers here quickly branded The Birth of a Nation as a cross between Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave and Mel Gibson’s Braveheart.
Indeed, the film doesn’t spare either the beauty of the South or the brutality of what becomes open war between master and servant.
“I made this film for one reason, with the hope of creating change agents,” Parker told the electrified audience after the first screening ended. The hope was “that people can watch this film and be affected, that you can watch this film and see that there are systems that were in place that were corrupt, and corrupted people. And the legacy of that still lives with us. There are systems in our lives right now, in your environment right now.”
“I just want you,” he added, “if you are affected and if you are so moved, to ask yourself: are there systems in my life that need attention, whether it be racial, whether it be gender, sexual? There are a lot of injustices.”
Parker was clear about his agenda for the film. He said this week that he had aimed “to make a healing mechanism for America.”
An actor seen in Beyond The Lights and Arbitrage, Parker added that in Hollywood he was advised against making The Birth of a Nation, told that the subject matter was bad business, and warned that the film wouldn’t travel overseas because it featured people of color. He put his acting career on hold, funneled his own money into the production, and said that he sacrificed everything that he could to pave the way for this movie.
On Monday, he was clear to link his goals to the challenges currently facing the film culture and the entertainment industry.
“It all speaks back to the original D.W. Griffith,” Parker related. “The original Birth of a Nation is the foundation of our industry. That was it, the first. We’re built on sand in this industry, we just are. And if we don’t give it attention, we’re going to have these issues, this infrastructure, that we have to deal with from generation to generation.”
Fox Searchlight is still strategizing the release plan for The Birth of a Nation, but trade reports indicate that the studio has committed to a 1,500 screen theatrical rollout later this year. According to Variety, Parker will hit the road and stage discussions in various cities. He aims to use the film to stoke a national conversation about race in this country.
“This is my tool, this is my weapon,” Nate Parker said in a public radio interview this week at Sundance. “Nat Turner used an axe. My axe is a camera, and sound equipment, and an incredible crew.”
On Monday, Parker pulled much of that crew on stage at Sundance’s Eccles Theatre to acknowledge their contributions to the film. Heading out of the festival he and his team are already deploying the hashtag #NatTurnerIsComing to galvanize audiences ahead of this year’s theatrical release.
“What I took from this is that Nat Turner had a riotous disposition towards injustice,” Parker said on Monday. “That developed in him, and he used the tools he had. He didn’t have Twitter or Facebook. If he did, it might have been a different rebellion.”
'The Birth of a Nation' Is an Epic Fail | The Nation Leslie M. Alexander, a professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University, where she specializes in 19th century Black culture and political consciousness, teaching courses on slavery, resistance movements, and historical accuracy in film
“The Birth of a Nation” Isn't Worth Defending Vinson Cunningham from The New Yorker, October 10, 2016
The
Literary Battle for Nat Turner's Legacy | Vanity Fair Sam Tanenhaus from Vanity Fair, August 3, 2016
The New Yorker: Richard Brody October 09, 2016
Nate Parkers Alleged Sins Wont Keep Me From Seeing The Birth of
a Nation Goldie Taylor from The Daily Beast, August 26, 2016
The Birth of a Nation
Is an Important Film Worth Seeing Despite Its Flaws Nsenga K. Burton PH.d. from The Root, October 7, 2016
Review:
The Birth of A Nation Isn't Strong Enough to Shake Director's ... The
Birth of a Nation Isn’t Strong Enough to Shake Director’s Past, by Lawrence Ware from The Root, October 7, 2016
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Reviews 'Birth of a Nation ... - Hollywood Reporter Kareem-Abdul Jabbar
The Birth Of A Nation review: Nate Parker's awards-bait spectacle is ... Tasha Robinson from The Verge
Movie Review: The Birth of a Nation David Edelstein from Vulture, October 3, 2016
Review: The Birth Of A Nation is a furious act of subversive ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny
Why the Debate Over Nate Parker Is So Complex Morgan Jerkins from The Atlantic, August 21, 2016
Grappling With The Birth of a Nation Christopher Orr from The Atlantic
The
Blunt-Force Trauma of 'The Birth of a Nation' | New Republic Tim Grierson, October 6, 2016
'Birth Of A Nation,' The Historian's Review: A Scholar
Considers Use Of The Past In Parker's Movie-For-Today Patrick H. Breen from Deadline, October 7, 2016
Nate Parker's The Birth of a Nation, reviewed. - Slate Dana Stevens
The Birth Of A Nation · Film Review The Birth Of A Nation is a powerful ... A.A. Dowd from The Onion A.V. Club
The
Rebirth of a Nation Jill Lepore from
The New Yorker, January 31, 2016
The Last Shall Be First in "The Birth of a Nation" | The Progressive Ed Rampell, October 6, 2016
Time: Stephanie Zacharek September 12, 2016
Vulture [Bilge Ebiri] January 26, 2016
Blood
on the leaves | The Economist
The
Birth of a Nation' Is Not a Good Movie | Complex Khal and Ross Scarano
'The Birth of a Nation': Sundance Review | Reviews - Screen Daily Tim Grierson, January 2016
The Steve Pulaski Message Board [Steve Pulaski] also seen here: iNFLUX Magazine [Steve Pulaski]
The Birth of a Nation Review - Den of Geek Edward Douglas
Way Too Indie [Dustin Jansick]
The House Next Door [Jake Cole]
10 Things You May Not Know About Nat Turner's Rebellion - History ... Christopher Klein from History, May 24, 2016
10 things Birth of a Nation got right about Nat Turner | OUPblog Patrick H. Breen, October 11, 2016
A Nat Turner scholar on how Birth of a Nation distorts history and ... Aisha Harris interiews Dr. Vanessa Holden, an assistant history professor at Michigan State University, from Slate, October 7, 2016
Nate Parker on The Confessions of Nat Turner | Vanity Fair interview with the director from Vanity Fair, August 3, 2016
Nate
Parker talks Sundance hit 'The Birth Of A Nation' - ScreenDaily Jeremy Kay interview from Screendaily, January 28, 2016
The Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy]
Irish Film Critic [Ashley Marie Wells]
Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]
Nate Parker's 'The Birth of a Nation' finally makes its mass-audience ... Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post
The big debate over 'The Birth of a Nation' is over: Audiences just weren't interested Caitlin Gibson from The Washington Post, October 10, 2016
Charleston
City Paper [T. Meek]
The
Cleveland Movie Blog [George M. Thomas]
Lyric Movie Review: “Birth of a Nation” passionately explores a
dark chapter of American history
Samuel Perrine from The Rocky
Mountain Collegian
The
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
San Diego CityBeat: Glenn Heath Jr. October 04, 2016
Los
Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]
The Birth of a Nation Movie Review (2016) | Roger Ebert Matt Zoller Seitz
Sundance 2016: “The Birth of a Nation” | Sundance | Roger Ebert Brian Tallerico, January 25, 2016
RogerEbert.com: Monica Castillo February 01, 2016
Review: In Nate Parker's 'The Birth of a Nation,' Must-See and Won't-See Collide A.O. Scott from The New York Times, October 7, 2016, also seen here: New York Times [A.O. Scott]
How 'The Birth of a Nation' Silences Black Women - The New York Times Salamishah Tillet, October 12, 2016
The New York Times: Manohla Dargis January 29, 2016
'The Birth of a Nation,' Nate Parker's Heralded Film, Is Now Cloaked in Controversy Brooks Barnes and Cara Buckley from The New York Times, August 18, 2016
Tricky Goal for 'Birth of a Nation': Inspire but Don't Incite Brooks Barnes from The New York Times, October 3, 2016
A Casualty of 'The Birth of a Nation' Controversy Speaks Out Cara Buckley from The New York Times, December 8, 2016
The Birth of a Nation (2016 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Complaint
against Penn State University regarding Nate Parker rape ... court documents of initial rape complaint
published in The LA Times, March 5,
2002
Memories
of rape charges imperils Oscar track of The Birth Of A Nation ... Michael Cieply and Mike Fleming Jr from Deadline, August 12, 2016, also seen
here: Fox
Searchlight, Nate Parker Confront Old Sex Case That Could
Nate
Parker, 'Birth of a Nation,' Star Stood Trial for College Rape ... Ramin
Setoodeh from Variety, August 12,
2016
Nate
Parker: Why He’s Speaking Out Against 1999 Rape Accusations Before ‘Birth of a
Nation’ Awards Cycle Dana Harris
from indieWIRE, August 12, 2016
The
Birth of a Nation director Nate Parker talks about being accused of ... Nigel
M. Smith interview from The Guardian,
August 12, 2016
Nate
Parker Addresses 1999 Penn State Rape Case -- Vulture Dee Locket from Vulture, August 12, 2016
Nate Parker Addresses College Rape Accusations The
Root, August 13, 2016
Nate
Parker Rape Trial Could Change 'The Birth of a Nation' Release ... Ramin Setoodeh and Brent Lang from Variety, August 15, 2016
Nate
Parker Rape Trial: Accuser Committed Suicide in 2012 | Variety Ramin
Setoodeh from Variety, August 16,
2016
'The Birth of a Nation,' Nate Parker's Heralded Film, Is Now Cloaked ... The New York Times, August 16, 2016
How
rape accusations should change the ... - Washington Post Alyssa Rosenberg from The Washington Post, August 16, 2016
Inside
the Nate Parker Rape Case - The Daily Beast Kate Briquelet and M.L. Nestel from The Daily Beast, August 16, 2016
The
Birth of a Nation's reception compromised by director's rape trial ... Nigel
M. Smith from The Guardian, August
16, 2016
'Birth
Of A Nation' Director Nate Parker Responds To Rape Accuser's ... Mike Fleming Jr from Deadline, August 16, 2016
'Birth
of a Nation' director Nate Parker's rape accuser is dead ... Jason Guerrasio from Business Insider, August 16, 2016
'Birth
Of A Nation' Director Nate Parker's College Rape Allegations Cole Delbyck from Huffington Post, August 16, 2016
There's
No Way I Can Support Nate Parker's
“The Birth Of A Nation” Veronica Wells from Madame Noir, August 16, 2016
1999 Rape Case Swirls Around Nate Parker and His Film 'The Birth ... The New York Times, August 17, 2016
A
decades-old college rape case casts cloud over Oscar hopeful Nate ... Rebecca Keegan from The LA Times, August 17, 2016
'Birth of a Nation' director Nate Parker responds after learning of the ... Libby Hill from The LA Times, August 17, 2016
Rape Allegations Against The Birth of a Nation Director and
Star ... Matthew Dessem from Slate, August 17, 2016
There's
No Good Reason to Support Nate Parker | Complex Michael Arceneaux from Complex, August 17,
2016
Nate
Parker Writes 'Devastated' Facebook Response to College Rape Trial and
Accuser's Suicide Kate Erbland from
indieWIRE, August 17, 2016
The
Birth of a Nation posters
defaced after Nate Parker rape trial ...
Nigel M. Smith from The Guardian,
August 17, 2016
Studio Moves Ahead With Nate Parker's 'Birth of a Nation' Despite Rape Case Tom Huddleston Jr. from Fortune magazine, August 18, 2016
Will
rape story kill 'Birth of a Nation?'
Lisa France from CNN Money,
August 18, 2016
'The
Birth of a Nation' movie release renews attention to director's Penn State rape
case JC Lee from Penn Live, August 18, 2016
What
Would Penn State Have Done Had the Nate Parker Case Happened Today? Emily Deruy from The Atlantic, August 18, 2016
Nate Parker and the Court of Public
Opinion Gillian B. White from The Atlantic, August 18, 2016
Rape Allegations Against Actor-Director Nate Parker Resurface Audie Cornish interviews Variety reporter Brent Lang from NPR, August 18, 2016
The
story of Nate Parker's rape accuser and a university's cold ... Molly Redden from The Guardian, August 19, 2016
Rape
allegations and an Oscar hopeful: how the attempt to smooth Nate Parker's past
failed Carolyn Framke from Vox, August 19, 2016
Nate
Parker and the Limits of Empathy - The New York Times Roxanne Gay, August 19, 2016
On Nate Parker and Hypocrisy La Sha from Jet magazine, August 19, 2016
Nate
Parker: director with a back story | Observer profile | Film | The ... Nigel M. Smith from The Guardian, August 20, 2016
Al
Sharpton on Nate Parker: Hollywood Trying to - The Root Jamal Watson interviews Rev. Al Sharpton from
The Root, August 20, 2016
Harry
Belafonte on Nate Parker: 'What Has He Done That Requires This Kind of Animus?' Yesha Callahan interview with Harry Belafonte
from The Root, August 24, 2016
Nate Parker's Penn State: Campus sexual assault issues at the
center of “The Birth of a Nation” controversy Renée Martin from Salon, August 24,
2016
Oscar Voters Ponder Nate Parker and 'Birth of a Nation':
"I Would Not Go to the Movie"
Gregg Kilday and Scott Feinberg from The
Hollywood Reporter, August 24, 2016
Academy Member Admits They'll Likely Skip The Birth Of A Nation Sean O’Connell from Cinema Blend, August 24, 2016
Nate Parker's Past, His Present, And The Future of 'Birth Of A
Nation': Episode 14 Gene Demby from NPR, August 24, 2016
On Nate Parker, and lessons my father tried to teach me about
rape Natasha S. Alford from Salon, August 24, 2016
Exclusive: Nate Parker's Former Classmates, Penn State Alumni
Speak Out in Support The Root, August 25, 2016
Nate Parkers Alleged Sins Wont Keep Me From Seeing The Birth of
a Nation Goldie Taylor from The Daily Beast, August 26, 2016
'People need to see this movie': Oscars boss defends The Birth
of a Nation Benjamin Lee from The Guardian, August 26, 2016
'Birth
of a Nation' actress Gabrielle Union: I cannot take Nate Parker rape
allegations lightly Gabrielle Union
Op-Ed to the LA Times, September 2,
2016
'The Birth of a Nation' Actress Gabrielle Union Says Nate
Parker Controversy Has Caused "Stomach-Churning ... Hilary Lewis from The Hollywood Reporter, September 2, 2016
The Public Trial of Nate Parker Jeannie Suk Gersen from The New Yorker, September 2, 2016
Nate Parker is not a victim: “The Birth of a Nation” filmmaker
needs to stop talking about his innocence
D. Watkins from Salon, October
3, 2016
How 'The Birth of a Nation' Dishonors Rosa Parks and Black
Female Activists (Guest Column)
Danielle McGuire from The
Hollywood Reporter, October 5, 2016
Nate Parker Criticizes Media Coverage of Rape Trial Scandal:
"What Are These Journalists Trying to Do?" Meena Jang from The Hollywood Reporter, October 5, 2016
5 Reasons The Birth of a Nation Sold for So Much Kyle Buchanan from Vulture, October 5, 2016
Why 'Birth of a Nation' will be successful despite the rape
controversy surrounding it Jason
Guerrasio from Business Insider,
October 5, 2016
'Birth of a Nation' Reignites Art vs. Artist Debate The
Hollywood Reporter, October 6, 2016
'Birth of a Nation': The most powerful moments behind the
scenes The Washington Post, October 7, 2016
Nate
Parker's Past Surfaces in Prosecutors' Investigation of Penn State Jacqueline Williams and Serge F. Kovaleski
from The New York Times, October 28,
2016
Parker, Trey and Matt Stone
SOUTH PARK
The opening credit sequence artfully mimics the reassuring tone of Disney does Rodgers and Hammerstein and introduces the diminutive heroes, third-graders Stan, Cartman, Kenny and Kyle. Their first port of call, however, is a movie house, where they bribe a bum to walk them into the R-rated comedy 'Asses of Fire', starring the scatological Canadian clowns Terrance and Philip. The boys emerge with a new vocabulary they can't wait to show off, and pressing questions about the nature of the clitoris. The first half hour aims low and rarely misses. A below-the-(Bible-)belt satiric assault on the pieties of the censorship brigade, this feature spinoff from the animated TV series takes no prisoners, and blows gratuitous raspberries at the Baldwin brothers, Saddam Hussein and Winona Ryder among others. Genuinely outrageous and sometimes hilarious - but size does eventually matter, and all-rounder Trey Parker just can't keep it up for the full 81 minutes.
Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review
Ever since my younger brother brought "The Spirit of
Christmas" home from school, I’ve been waiting with bated breath to hear
Stan, Kenny and especially Cartman open their foul mouths again. Wish granted,
and how. The
BFI | Sight & Sound |
South Park Bigger Longer & Uncut (1999)
Leslie Felperin from Sight and Sound, September 1999
South Park, Colorado. The
present. Third-graders Stan, Cartman, Kyle and Kenny manage to see the
'R'-rated film Asses of Fire, starring their favourite
scatological comedians, Terrance and Phillip, who are both Canadian. The next
day at school, the boys scandalise their teacher Mr Garrison by quoting filthy
lines of dialogue from the film. Their mothers are notified and Kyle's mother
Sheila starts a campaign to blame Canada for the corrupting influence of
Terrance and Phillip, who are arrested and sentenced to death. War is declared
between the US and Canada after the Canadians bomb the Baldwin brothers.
Meanwhile, Kenny is killed by
accident and arrives in hell where Satan is having relationship trouble with
his new lover, the recently deceased Saddam Hussein. Terrance and Phillip's
death will be Satan's cue to take over the world; Kenny's ghost tries to warn
the others. Cartman is fitted with a 'V-chip' that electrocutes him every time
he swears. Stan forms a resistance movement, partly to foil Terrance and
Phillip's execution and partly to win back his classmate Wendy's affection from
a rival. At a huge USO show, the resistance foils the execution but war breaks
out. Many are killed. Kyle stands up to his mother who nevertheless shoots
Terrance and Phillip. Satan and Saddam are about to take over the world, but
Kenny persuades Satan to kill the callous Saddam. A grateful Satan grants
Kenny's wish to return everything to normal; Kenny bids his friends goodbye and
ascends to a heaven.
Review
It's all too tempting for UK film
goers to sneer at the excesses of US-based censorship and self-censorship in
the film and television industry (and all too dangerous to be complacent when
the track record of the BBFC and the broadcasters here is so patchy). But no
community is more aware of the absurdities of the current climate and their own
responsibilities than those who work in the American industry. The rancid atmosphere
of genuine anxiety and hysteria hanging in air after the Colorado shootings in
April is ripe for Swiftean satire.
So South Park Bigger Longer
& Uncut couldn't have come out at a better time. Skewering the
military, politicians, the media, xenophobic Americans and weirdly-accented
Canadians, meddlesome Jewish mothers ("horrific depictions of violence [in
film] is OK as long as no one says naughty words," says Kyle's mother
Sheila), smug school counsellors and misogynist schoolteachers ("never
trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die," sums up Mr
Garrison's advice on the subject of women), the acting Baldwin and Arquette
families, Canadians Bryan Adams and Alanis Morissette, dim starlets Brooke
Shields and Winona Ryder, gay relationships, suburban coprophiliacs, black
machismo, people with car alarms, Disney movies (Satan's ballad 'Up There' is a
spot-on parody of many a lyrical montage of Disney protagonist suffering) and
many more, the film seems hell-bent on making good on celluloid the television
series' pre-credits warning that the following material is
"offensive" and "should not be seen by anybody".
Co-producers and South Park's
creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have revealed in interviews that the
title's "uncut" may be a bit of a misnomer: early versions of the
script certainly offended the delicate sensibilities of the MPAA (the US
version of the BBFC). Some of the compromises agreed seemed even more vicious
to them, so if their account is true this may be the first case of censorship
improving a script. Whatever the cause, Bigger Longer & Uncut
is far tauter, more a laser-guided contraption than the often scattershot
episodes of the series. The only element that doesn't work here is the
character of Christophe, an atheist French kid whose contribution seems
negligible. Fans of the show will bemoan more space couldn't be spared for
favourite recurring characters such as Chef (but he does get to initiate a
wonderful running gag about clitorises).
Even if South Park Bigger
Longer & Uncut is unlikely to shame pro-censorship critics into
silence, at least the success of the film at the US box office and that of its
soundtrack album in the record shops will be seen by history as a victory of
sorts: the revenge of drama-club nerds, we might call it. Clearly Parker and
Stone spent far more time than is healthy rehearsing productions of Guys
and Dolls and On the Town in high school, because to all
intents and purposes this film is a musical, and a damn good one at that. Kenny
in heaven knows it's certainly an improvement on Cannibal! The Musical,
Parker and Stone's first slapdash film. And they can also now be officially
forgiven for their second film, Orgazmo.
South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut - Archive - Reverse Shot Oh My God! They Reinvented the Musical! You Bastards! by Suzanne Scott, December 12, 2003
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [4/5]
Nitrate Online (Joe Barlow) review
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [B]
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review DAK
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3/4]
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
The Digital Bits dvd review Bill Hunt
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [2.5/4]
Ain't It Cool Movie Reviews (Harry Knowles) review
A Guide To Current Film Review: "South Park"
Nitrate Online (Capsule) Eddie Cockrell
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Entertainment Weekly review [A-] Lisa Schwarzbaum
Austin Chronicle [Sarah Hepola]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Paula Nechak
San Francisco Examiner (Wesley Morris) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
TEAM AMERICA
Sort of like the short program that precedes the super-loud,
super-fast speed race at the Indy 500, TEAM AMERICA features puppets colorfully
decked out in star spangled banner jump suits, a superpatriot crack squad that
gets the jump on terrorists carrying WMD’s, no matter the cost. So say goodbye to the pyramids, or to the
ancient sculptures of Egypt; say goodbye to the Eiffel Tower, which falls on
top of the Arc de Triumph, or to the Louvre, as this kickass gang of
superheroes blows away buildings as well as bad guys with their own incredibly
obnoxious theme song: “Team America:
Fuck Yeah!” With puppet strings
flying all over the place in full view and puppet parts being blown to hell,
this is a sillified version of parody, finding the line just above completely
ridiculous. But still, this is a joyful
romp into the deep recesses of North Korean Kim Jong Il’s private Halloween
surprise, luring weak-kneed, liberal actors from Hollywood, led by Alec
Baldwin, along with Sean Penn, Susan Surandon and Tim Robbins, etc, to join him
for an inspirational tribute to song and world peace. Behind this disguise is another attempt for
world domination, foiled only by the quick thinking, guns blazing TEAM
It’s been a long time since a comedy had me fearing for the
seat I was sitting on, but watching a rabid assortment of soap-jawed
marionettes solemnly swear, spew, and besmirch the civilised world under the
bomb(t)astic rubrick of the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’, I really got
the willies. I understand this ranks me as a reactionary running-dog and
impressionable delinquent – but at least I kept the chair clean.
The missing – and debatably sarcastic – link between
More candid than the sniggering schoolboy politics is Parker’s justifiable
pride in how his painstaking (and often painstakingly crude) puppetry shows up
the human performers in live-action Jerry Bruckheimer-style jingoist
extravaganzas, as elaborated in the serenade ‘I Miss You (And ‘Pearl Harbor’
Sucked)’. Team
Better sustained than the ‘
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
One of the great advantages of satire comes from a paradox:
The more absurd satire gets, the easier its job of telling the truth becomes.
Jonathan Swift knew it when he created a plan for eating Irish babies, and
Heavily inspired by Gerry Anderson's '60s
"Supermarionation" programs (Thunderbirds, Supercar, et
al), Team America creates a world where strings dangle from the sky and
explosions occur with alarming frequency. Keeping order of a sort is Team
Shortly after the film opens, Team
Parker (who directed the film) and Stone (who co-produced and co-wrote it with Parker and longtime South Park contributor Pam Brady) have worn their success well. South Park gets sharper with each successive season, and with Team America, they continue its mission of not caring who they piss off: Only the film's doves look more ridiculous than its hawks, and the film ends with an obscene, ridiculous, and not entirely insincere defense of American interventionism.
How do they get away with it? Genuinely engaging the issues helps: Years from now, Team America will better convey the political character of 2004 than a stack of Time magazines. Staying funny helps even more. Whether deploying a well-timed puke gag, parodying the Darryl Worley school of tragedy-exploiting country music, exploring puppet sex (in a scene trimmed to obtain an R rating), or employing their dizzying command of film clichés, Parker and Stone rarely seem satisfied until they've squeezed the most possible laughs out of a given moment. Puppets seem to suit them as well as cartoon kids. When at a loss for what to do, Team America simply focuses on its cast's graceless attempts to fight, embrace, or walk through doorways. Those moments let the illusion of humanity slip away, but other moments don't let us off so easily.
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Film of the Month: Team America World Police () Leslie Felperin from Sight and
Sound, January 2005
Team America World
Police
uses singing puppets to spoof the action genre. But is it gunning for the doves
or the hawks, asks Leslie Felperin
Like some fiendish device
invented by the evil genius in a Bond movie, Team America World Police
comes booby-trapped with irony. Viewers intent on defusing this contraption’s
satire in the hopes of debunking its supposed politics or of discovering the
intent of its makers will find it primed to explode and cover its traces. Even
the most delicate of critical bomb-disposal experts, seeking only to find out
how the clever gadget is wired, risks a serious singeing, since nothing dampens
humour as much as over-analysis.
So before we take off the casing
to get into the guts of the machine, let’s pause to salute the makers of Team
America World Police for fashioning a beautifully made piece of kit.
Released in North America just before the US election in order to wreak maximum
damage on both left and right, this action-movie spoof - in which an imaginary
band of SWAT-style puppet heroes ‘save the world’ (while destroying a lot of it
too) from weapons of mass destruction held by terrorists controlled by North
Korea’s Kim Jong II - is at the very least a technical triumph. Lit and shot by
crack action cinematographer Bill Pope (DoP on The Matrix franchise),
its one-third-scale world, if occasionally distorted by visual jokes like the
superabundance of croissant shapes in the opening sequence’s Paris, is lovingly
constructed for maximum verisimilitude.
Indeed, apart from the fact that
it’s also a musical of sorts - as in director Trey Parker and his
co-screenwriter Matt Stone’s previous film South Park Bigger Longer &
Uncut, the featured songs are often catchier than the works they parody
- Team America looks and feels exactly like a Jerry Bruckheimer
shoot-’em-up but with stars who are literally rather than just figuratively
plastic. Inspired by the puppetry of Thunderbirds creator Gerry
Anderson, the film has the kind of cool gadgets (cars that turn into planes,
Mount Rushmore faces that expand hydraulically to become hangars) that satisfy underage
viewers (who given the film’s ‘R’-rating can see it only accompanied by a
guardian in its home territory) as well as viewers with underaged imaginations.
Though brilliantly staged, the puppets’ actions have a tactile, home-made
quality that serves to expose further the far slicker visual clichés of the
contemporary action movie: the parodic Matrix-effect wire-assisted
fight sequences, for instance, are especially sharp when the strings supporting
the puppets’ mid-air acrobatics are all too visible.
As Anderson understood, there’s a
primal attraction about puppets, even ones engaged in scatological or other
gross-out activities as Team America’s so often are (one of the
film’s funniest such moments is when the hero involuntarily vomits after a
night of drinking, a spectacle reminiscent of Jan Svankmajer in its unnerving
effect). As well as the lamentably live-action Thunderbirds, this
year saw the release of another all-marionette movie, Danish director Anders
Rønnow Klarlund’s art film Strings, whose unsettling quality
derived in part from its characters’ dead-pan, or dead-wood, faces. The
puppets’ simplified expressions in Team America - their eyes widen
and mouths open and close - work as a comment on the wooden acting in action
films. What is the difference, the movie implicitly asks, between stiff-haired
stud hero Gary Johnston here and any character played by the inexplicably
successful Ben Affleck, memorably dissed in one of Team America’s
power ballads that compares how much someone misses his lover to how much Pearl
Harbor "sucked"?
In fact, as a comedy Team
America is at its funniest when it plays things straight, mimicking the
cheesy dialogue and corny, cliché-ridden plot mechanics of the action genre. In
the scene where Gary and his colleague Lisa, still grieving for her slain
fiancé, debate whether or not they can consummate their relationship on a
viewing platform atop Mount Rushmore, the dialogue ("It’s too soon!"
cries Lisa) is a note-perfect spoof of words we’ve heard a hundred times in
action blockbusters. One almost doesn’t need the sex scene that follows - which
is more graphic than anything a live-action film could get away with, though
the US ratings board forced the film-makers to cut some shots to secure the
aforementioned ‘R’.
Parker and Stone (who between
them do most of the voices) have dodged swearing allegiance to either left or
right in interviews - and one would be hard-pressed to make a watertight case
that the film itself endorses the hawks or the doves. The opening scene neatly
sends up the US government’s scorched-earth policy on terrorism, depicting Team
America’s wholesale destruction of key Parisian landmarks in order to kill off
a few suitcase-toting terrorists. Later the same treatment is given to Cairo.
Only the most literal-minded
critic would fall into the trap of accusing the movie of being racist because
of its depictions of Arabs, French people and other non-US citizens. Clearly,
or at least one hopes, the intent is to spoof Hollywood’s own cliché bank, down
to having Arabs speak a gibberish of random phrases strung together
("durka, durka, jihad"). Meanwhile President Kim mixes up his ‘L’s
and ‘R’s (a classic Asian comedy tic used also in Lost in Translation)
and while one might cringe at the dig, it nevertheless enhances the absurdity
of his big ballad number ‘I’m So Ronery’, a send-up of the Andrew Lloyd Webber
musical soliloquy style.
But venom is also reserved for Hollywood liberals such as Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn and Tim Robbins. Shown here as terrorists’ patsies, or "pussies" who "get fucked by dicks", the actors are also subject to homophobic jibes that sit more uneasily with liberal viewers - for instance, by being made members of the fictional Film Actors Guild so "F.A.G." can be appended to their names in spoof news reports. Penn, who is depicted talking up Iraq in hyperbolically happy terms, wrote an open letter to the film-makers (published in Matt Drudge’s online Drudge Report) criticising less their satire of him than their urging of undecided voters to stay at home rather than make a random choice of president. One can only wonder what these well-meaning if occasionally glibly sanctimonious movie stars did to offend - or whether Parker and Stone suffered the trauma described by Team America member Chris as setting off a lifetime’s hatred of thespians: namely being gang-raped at a tender age by a provincial cast of Cats.
On Team America: World Police - Bright Lights Film Journal Mark G.E. Kelly, April 30, 2005
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [3/5]
The New York Sun (Nathan Lee) review
Slate (David Edelstein) review
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib
Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review
American Cinematographer essay ["The World On a String"] Christopher Probst
The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review
Beyond Hollywood review Donnie Saxton
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Slant Magazine review Nick Schager
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
Ruthless Reviews review Matt Cale
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
filmcritic.com (Aaron Lazenby) review [4/5]
Premiere.com review Aaron Hillis
Exclaim! review Noel Dix
DVD Times Review [Tiffany Bradford]
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Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3/4]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell) dvd review
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MovieFreak.com (Dennis Landmann) dvd review [8/10] [Special Edition]
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) dvd review [Special Collector's Edition]
DVD Monsters and Critics [Andy McKeague]
Digital Spy Daniel Saney
CHUD.com (Devin Faraci) review
FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [A-]
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [A-]
Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [2.5/4]
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [C]
About.com Rebecca Murray
Film Monthly (Clint Fletcher) review
stylusmagazine.com (Troy Reimink) review
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
Celluloid Heroes [Paul McElligott]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
The Film Journal (Rick Curnutte) review
CineScene.com (Ed Owens) review
Entertainment Weekly review [B] Owen Gleiberman
BBCi - Films Stella Papamichael
Team America: World Police | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
The Japan Times [Giovanni Fazio]
Boston Globe review [2.5/4] Wesley Morris
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
Washington Post (Desson Thomson) review
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [2.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [1/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
Pasolini, Pier Paolo
Pier
Paolo Pasolini: An Overview : 네이버
블로그 Jonathan Rosenbaum
The critical neglect in the
Beginning in film as a scriptwriter (on such films as Fellini's Nights of Cabrina), Pasolini started out in Accatone (The Scrounger, 1961) as a radical stepson of neo-realism by adapting one of his own novels, A Violent Life - a passionate account of a pimp living in Pigneto, a squalid suburb of Rome where Pasolini had himself lived during the forties. Inspired by the frescoes of Masaccio and Giott, Pasolini gives notice at the outset that his intention isn't merely to reproduce life as he sees it, but to render it with a sense of poetry and gravity that can only be described as religious.
Indeed, he first attained worldwide notoriety with his stark and unconventional The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) which retells the story of Christ to the strains of Bach, Mozart, Prokofiev, Webern, African music, American blues and spirituals, and Russian revolutionary songs. His next feature, Hawks and Sparrows (1964) - a comic free-form essay in the form of a picaresque journey taken by an old friar (Toto) and a young novice (Pasolini regular Ninetto Davoli) accompanied by a talking raven - provides both an excellent introduction to Pasolini's work and one of his finest inventions. A delightful, provocative adventure that is set alternatively - and at times simultaneously - in the year 1200 and the present, it is the only film that comes to mind which starts off with singing credits, and it clearly gives the lie to any suspicions that Pasolini's underlying seriousness was uninflected by any sense of fun or wit.
Beginning in the ancient past and ending in the present, Pasolini's powerful Oedipus Rex (1967) may well be the strongest of all his classical adaptations, although his subsequent encounters with Greek tragedy both completed in 1970 - a Medea featuring the only film performance of Maria Callas (in a non-singing part), and Notes For An African Oresteia, a short feature with an original score by Gato Barbieri - should also be noted.
The controversial and pungent Teorema (Theorem, 1968) probably remains the most influential of all Pasolini's films. It grew out of notes for a verse tragedy that also yielded a novel written partially in verse, and it describes the arrival of a divine visitor (Terence Stamp) in a contemporary bourgeois household, his subsequent seduction of all four family members and the maid (Massimo Girotti, Silvano Mangano, Anne Wiazemsky, Andrès José Cruz Soublette, and Laura Betti), and the subsequent traumas and convulsions created by his n less mysterious departure.
Significantly, Teorema was Pasolini's last feature with a contemporary setting. Loathing everything that the modern world had become, he turned next in his acclaimed "Trilogy of Life" to a celebration of guiltless paganism in other eras, beginning with the erotic Decameron (1970), continuing with the scatological Canterbury Tales (1971), and ending with his very carnal and sensuous Arabian Nights (1974). He then concluded his career, before being brutally murdered, with his most extreme film, Salo (1975), an adaptation of The 120 Days of Sodom that transposes the Marquis de Sade's eighteenth-century novel to fascist Italy in 1944. As Pasolini described his intentions in a self-interview, "Aside from the metaphor of the sexual relationships (obligatory and ugly), which the tolerance of consumeristic power imposes on us nowadays, all the sex in Salo (and there is an enormous quantity of it) is also a metaphor for the relationship between power and those who are subjected to it."
From Foreign Affairs: The National Society of Film Critics' Guide to Foreign Films, Schulz Huffhines, K. (Ed.). San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991.
Film Reference Tony D’Arpino
Pier Paolo Pasolini, poet, novelist, philosopher, and filmmaker, came of age during the reign of Italian fascism, and his art is inextricably bound to his politics. Pasolini's films, like those of his early apprentice Bernardo Bertolucci, began under the influence of neorealism. He also did early scriptwriting with Bolognini and Fellini. Besides these roots in neorealism, Pasolini's works show a unique blend of linguistic theory and Italian Marxism. But Pasolini began transcending the neorealist tradition even in his first film, Accattone (which means "beggar").
The relationship between Pasolini's literary work and his films has often been observed, and indeed Pasolini himself noted in an introduction to a paperback selection of his poetry that "I made all these films as a poet." Pasolini was a great champion of modern linguistic theory and often pointed to Roland Barthes and Erich Auerbach in discussing the films many years before semiotics and structuralism became fashionable. His theories on the semiotics of cinema centered on the idea that film was a kind of "real poetry" because it expressed reality with reality itself and not with other semiotic codes, signs, or systems.
Pasolini's interest in linguistics can also be traced to his
first book of poetry, Poems of Casarsa , which is written in his native
The ideas of Gramsci coincided with Pasolini's own feelings,
especially concerning that part of the working class known as the sub-proletariat,
which Pasolini described as a prehistorical, pre-Christian, and pre-bourgeois
phenomenon, one which occurs for him in the South of Italy (the Sud) and in the
This concern with "the little homelands," the indigenous cultures of specific regions, is a theme linking all of Pasolini's films, from Accattone to his final black vision, Salò. These marginal classes, known as cafoni (hicks or hillbillies), are among the main characters in Pasolini's novels Ragazzi de vita (1955) and A Violent Life (1959), and appear as protagonists in many of his films, notably Accattone, Mamma Roma, Hawks and Sparrows , and The Gospel according to Saint Matthew. To quote Pasolini: "My view of the world is always at bottom of an epical-religious nature: therefore even, in fact above all, in misery-ridden characters, characters who live outside of a historical consciousness, these epical-religious elements play a very important part."
In Accattone and The Gospel , images of
official culture are juxtaposed against those of a more humble origin. The pimp
of Accattone and the Christ of The Gospel are similar figures.
When Accattone is killed at the end of the film, a fellow thief is seen
crossing himself in a strange backward way, it is Pasolini's indictment of how
Christianity has "contaminated" the subproletarian world of
In the 1960s Pasolini's films became more concerned with
ideology and myth, while continuing to develop his epical-religious theories. Oedipus
Rex (which has never been distributed in the
In Teorema ("theorem" in Italian), which is perhaps Pasolini's most experimental film, a mysterious stranger visits a typical middle-class family, sexually seduces mother, father, daughter, and son, and destroys them. The peasant maid is the only character who is transformed because she is still attuned to the numinous quality of life which the middle class has lost. Pasolini has said about this film: "A member of the bourgeoisie, whatever he does, is always wrong."
Pigpen , which shares with Teorema the
sulphurous volcanic location of
As a result of his growing political pessimism Pasolini disowned the "Trilogy" and rejected most of its ideas. His final film, Salò , is an utterly clinical examination of the nature of fascism, which for Pasolini is synonymous with consumerism. Using a classical, unmoving camera, Pasolini explores the ultimate in human perversions in a static, repressive style. Salò , almost impossible to watch, is one of the most horrifying and beautiful visions ever created on film. Pasolini's tragic, if not ironic, death in 1975 ended a visionary career that almost certainly would have continued to evolve.
1965
Pier Paolo Pasolini Interview - Film Comment James Blue interviews Pasolini from Film Comment, Fall 1965
I have been wondering what
I should ask you. Often I ask questions of directors that seem a little stupid,
you see, but I don’t want to avoid those, for finally the stupid questions are
the ones to which I most want reply. I know that it will be difficult—I don’t
think I would be able to answer very well concerning my own films—but I hope
that your replies help me to arrive at certain conclusions later. Have you
understood?
Yes, I understand.
You know I’m compiling a
book on the directing of the non-actor. I am meeting many directors. The book
is primarily a way for me to organize my own thinking and to take advantage of
the experiences of other directors in order to see how I may be able to create
more completely a kind of human existence in front of the camera, without the
use of professional actors, and without falling into cinema conventions. The
ideas I’m looking for have been discreetly developing for 20 years. So that’s
why I’m writing this book, to clarify my ideas. Have you understood?
Yes, very well.
Let me start with a
question that may seem stupid—how do you create? Are you aware—even vaguely—of
certain recurring processes? What helps you? What pushes you to create? When
you want to work, what steps do you take to get started?
What is it that urges me to create. As far as film is concerned, there is
no difference between film and literature and poetry—there is this same feeling
that I have never gone into deeply. I began to write poetry when I was seven
years old, and what it was that made me write poetry at the age of seven I have
never understood. Perhaps it was the urge to express oneself and the urge to
bear witness of the world and to partake in or to create an action in which we
are involved, to engage oneself in that act.Putting the question in that manner
forces me to give you a vaguely spiritualistic answer . . . a bit irrational.
It makes me feel a bit on the defensive.
Some artists collect
information on a subject, like journalists. Do you do this?
Yes, there is this aspect, the documentary element. A naturalistic writer
documents himself through his production. Because my writing, as Roland Barthes
would say, contains naturalistic elements, it is evident therefore that it
contains a great interest in living and documentary events. In my
writing there are deliberate elements of a naturalistic type of realism and
therefore the love for real things . . . a fusion of traditional academic
elements and of contemporary literary movements.
What brought you to The
Gospel According to St. Matthew, and once you had the idea, how did you
start work on it? Why did you want to do it?
I recognized the desire to make The Gospel from a feeling I had. I
opened the Bible by chance and began to read the first pages, the first lines
of St. Matthew’s Gospel, and the idea of making a film of it came to me. It’s
evident that this is a feeling, an impulse that is not clearly definable.
Mulling over this feeling, this impulse, this irrational movement or
experience, all my story began to become clear to me as well as my entire
literary career.
Once you had this feeling,
what did you look for to give it form, to make the feeling concrete?
I discovered first of all that there is an old latent religious streak in my
poetry. I remember lines of poetry I wrote when I was 18 or 19 years old, and
they were of a religious nature. I realized, too, that much of my Marxism has a
foundation that is irrational and mystical and religious. But the sum total of
my psychological constitution tends to make me see things not from the
lyrical-documentary point of view but rather from an epic point of view. There
is something epic in my view of the world. And I suddenly had the idea of doing
The Gospel, which would be a tale that can be defined metrically as
Epic-lyric.
Although St. Matthew wrote without metrics, he would have the rhythm of epic and lyric production. And for this reason, I have renounced in the film any kind of realistic and naturalistic reconstruction. I completely abandoned any kind of archaeology and philology, which nevertheless interest me in themselves. I didn’t want to make an historical reconstruction. I preferred to leave things in their religious state, that is, their mythical state. Epic-mythic.
Not desiring to reconstruct settings that were not philosophically exact—reconstructed on a sound stage by scene designers and technicians—and furthermore not wanting to reconstruct the ancient Jews, I was obliged to find everything—the characters and the ambiance—in reality. And so the rule that dominated the making of the film was the rule of analogy. That is, I found settings that were not reconstructions but that were analogous to ancient Palestine. The characters, too—I didn’t reconstruct characters but tried to find individuals who were analogous. I was obliged to scour southern Italy, because I realized that the pre-industrial agricultural world, the still feudal area of southern Italy, was the historical setting analogous to ancient Palestine. One by one I found the settings that I needed for The Gospel. I took these Italian settings and used them to represent the originals. I took the city of Matera, and without changing it in any way, I used it to represent the ancient city of Jerusalem. Or the little caverns of the village between Lucania and Puglia are used exactly as they were, without any modifications, to represent Bethlehem. And I did the same thing for the characters. The chorus of background characters I chose from the faces of the peasants of Lucania and Puglia and Calabria.
How did you work with
these non-actors to integrate them into a story that was not their own,
although analogous to their own?
I didn’t do anything. I didn’t tell them anything. In fact, I didn’t even tell
them precisely what characters they were playing. Because I never chose an
actor as an interpreter. I always chose an actor for what he is.
That is, I never asked anyone to transform himself into anything other than
what he is.
Naturally, things were a little more difficult with regard to the main actors. For example, the fellow who played Christ was a student from Barcelona. Except for telling him that he was playing the part of Christ, that’s all I said. I never gave him any kind of preliminary speech. I never told him to transform himself into something else, to interpret, to feel that he was Christ. I always told him to be just what he was. I chose him because he was what he was, and I never for one moment wanted him to be anyone else other than what he was—that’s why I chose him.
But to make your Spanish
student move, breathe, speak, perform necessary actions—how did you obtain what
you wished without telling him something?
Let me explain. It happened that in making The Gospel, the footage of
the characters told me almost always the truth in a very dramatic fashion—that
is, I had to cut a lot of scenes from The Gospel because I couldn’t
“mystify” them. They rang false. I don’t know what it is, but the eye of the
camera always manages to express the interior of a character. This interior
essence can be masked through the ability of a professional actor, or it can be
“mystified” through the ability of the director by means of cutting and divers
tricks. In The Gospel I was never able to do this. What I mean to say is
that the photogram or the image on the film filters through what that man is—in
his true reality, as he is in life.
It is possible at times in movies that a man who is devious and shady can play the part of one who is naïve an ingenuous. For example, I could have taken a professional and given him the part of one of the three magi—an unimportant part—and by the way it is clear that there is a deep candor in the souls of the three magi. But I didn’t use professionals, and therefore I couldn’t have their ability to transform themselves in to others. I used real human beings, and so I made a mistake and misjudged a man psychologically. My error was immediately evident in the photographed image. There is another rather unpleasant example that has sprung to mind—for the two actors who played those possessed by the Devil, I chose actors from the Centro Sperimentale film school in Rome. I chose them in a hurry. Later, I had to cut the scene because I was obvious that they were two actors from the Centro Sperimentale.
In reality, my method consists simply of being sincere, honest, penetrating, precise in choosing men who psychological essence is real and genuine. Once I’ve chosen them, then my work is immensely simplified. I don’t have to do with them what I have to do with professional actors: tell them what they have to do and what they haven’t to do and the sort of people they are supposed to represent and so forth. I simply tell them to say these words in a certain frame of mind and that’s all. And they say them.
To get back to Christ, once I had chosen the person whose essence or interior was more or less that needed to play the part of Christ, I never obliged him to do any specific things. My suggestions were made one by one, instance by instance, moment by moment, scene by scene, action by action. I said to him, “do this” and “get angry.” I didn’t even tell him how. I simply said, “you’re getting angry,” and he got angry in the way he usually got angry and I didn’t intervene in any way.
My work is facilitated by the fact that I never shoot entire scenes. Being a “non-professional” director I’ve always had to “invent” a technique that consists of shooting only a very brief bit at one time. Always in little bits—I never shoot a scene continuously. And so even if I’m using a non-actor lacking the technique of an actor, he’s able to sustain the part—the illusion—because the takes are so brief. And if he doesn’t have the technical ability of an actor, at least he doesn’t get lost, he doesn’t freeze up.
Although I was able to find characters analogous to the wise men or to an angel or to Saint Joseph, it was extremely difficult to find a character analogous to Jesus Christ. And so I had to be content with finding someone who at least came close to resembling Christ externally and interiorly, but actually I had to construct Christ in the cutting room.
Although other directors make tests, I never make them. I had to make one for Christ, though—not for myself—but for the producer who wanted a certain guarantee. When I choose actors, instinctively I choose someone who knows how to act. It’s a kind of instinct that so far hasn’t betrayed me except in very minor and very special cases. So far I’ve chosen Franco Citti for Accattone and Ettore Garofolo for the boy in Mamma Roma. In La Ricotta, a young boy from the slums of Rome. I’ve always guessed right, that from the very moment in which I chose the face that seemed to me exact for the character, instinctively he reveals himself a potential actor. When I choose non-actors, I choose potential actors.
Naturally, Christ was a more difficult thing for me than Franco Citti because Franco, after all, was to play a part that was more or less himself. First of all, this young Spanish student at the beginning was inhibited about playing the part of Christ—he wasn’t even a believer. And so the first problem was that I had playing Christ a fellow who didn’t even believe in Christ. Naturally this cause inhibitions. This young student wasn’t an extrovert or a simple, normal type of person. He was psychologically very complex, and for this reason it was difficult the first few days to get him to win out over his timidity, his restraint, his inhibitions, while for the other actors I didn’t have this problem. The very minute I put them in front of the camera, they acted the way I wanted them to.
What did you do with your
Spanish non-believing non-actor to get the results you wanted?
Nothing really. I simply appealed to his good will. He was a very intelligent
and a very cultured young man who became bound to me by the friendship that
grew up between us in those few days—however, he had the basis of an
ideological background and a rather strong desire to be useful to me. It was by
this means that he succeeded in overcoming his timidity.
As far as the rest goes, I had him perform in very small segments, one at a time, without even preparing them first. I would suggest the expressions while he acted. Inasmuch as we were shooting without sound, I could talk to an actor while he was performing. It was a little bit like a sculptor who makes a sculpture with little improvised blows of the chisel. While the actor was acting, I said to him “Look here”—and I told him each expression, one by one, and he followed them almost mechanically. I shot everything that way. He had the speech memorized more or less, and he began to say it. He had to—for example—take 10 steps forward, or move, or look at someone. I never told him beforehand, except in a very vague way, what it was all about, and gradually as he performed, I said, “now look at me . . . now look down there with an angry expression . . . now your expression softens . . . look toward me and soften your expression slowly, very slowly. Now look at me!” And so while the camera rolled, I told him these things. I prepared the action beforehand, in a very vague way, so that he would know more or less what he was supposed to do and where he was supposed to go. Whatever the nuances, the little movements, I suggested to him one by one. Prior to the shot, I gave him general movements and told him more or less what he was supposed to do. Then I explained these things more precisely while we shot. Once in a while I would surprise him—I would say to him, “Now look at me with a sweet expression on your face.” And while he did this I would say suddenly, “Now get angry!” And he obeyed me.
Didn’t this request make
him attempt to imitate the way an actor he had seen got angry?
No. Actors would be tempted to do this, but one who is not an actor—for
example, those whom I chose—would never do this. It’s not possible, because
they have never confronted themselves with the technical problems of an
actor—that is, he doesn’t have a technical idea of “anger,” he has a natural
and genuine idea of anger.
I’ve done this rather often in other films. For example, I would have the person say a line that was not what it was supposed to be in the text. If he was supposed to say “I hate you,” I would have him say “Good Morning,” and then when I dubbed I would put in “I hate you.” Normally, I should have said to him, “All right now, say ‘I hate you’ as if you were saying ‘good morning.’” But this is pretty complicated reasoning for a person who is not an actor. So I simply tell him to say “Good morning,” and then in the dubbing I put in his mouth “I hate you.”
For dubbing, do you use
non-actors or professionals?
I do both. That is, I take non-actors who generally reveal themselves to be
splendid dubbers. For Christ, I was obliged to use a professional actor, so it
depends on the circumstances. More than anything else, I try to balance
everything out between the professional and non-professional performances. For
instance, the boy in Mamma Roma did his own dubbing. But Franco Citti
could not do his own dubbing, for even though he was bravissimo his
voice was rather unpleasant. So I had him dub another character.
If you don’t give the
non-actor much explanation of character, do you at least tell him the story?
Yes, I do, in two words. Just out of curiosity. But I never go into a serious
discussion with him. If he has any doubts . . . if he says to me “what do I
have to do here,” I try to explain to him. But always point by point,
particular by particular, never the whole thing.
Do you add expressive
gestures, which are not normally a part of the non-actor’s personal
comportment?
No, I never have him do gestures that are not his. I always let him use the
gestures that are natural to him. I tell him what he has to do—for example,
slap someone or pick up a glass—but I let him do this with the gestures that
are natural to him. I never intervene regarding his gestures.
If I want to underline some act, I do so with my own means, with technical means—with the camera, with the shot, with editing. I don’t have him emphasize it. Actually, I am very careful not to indicate to him the “intention,” because these “intentions” are the phony part of the actor.
Do you trick at all, in
order to produce emotional responses?
Up to now it has never happened. If it were necessary, I’d do it. It’s never
happened to me because my actors do not have petit-bourgeois inhibitions. They
don’t care. They do what I tell them, generously. Franco Citti, Ettore
Garofolo, the protagonist of La Ricotta, and my Christ as well—they gave
of themselves completely, blindly. They don’t have that conventionality or
false modesty of hypocrites, so I’ve never had to do this. However, if I had to
trick, I’d do it.
Do you see a way of
directing the bourgeois-class person who is a non-actor?
I was faced with this problem filming The Gospel. Whereas in my other
films my characters were all “of the people,” for The Gospel I had some
characters who were not. The Apostles, for example, belonged to the ruling
classes of their time, and so obeying my usual rule of analogy, I was obliged
to take members of the present-day ruling class. Because the Apostles were
people who were definitely out of the ordinary, I chose intellectuals—from the
bourgeoisie, yes—but intellectuals.
Although these non-actors as Apostles were intellectuals, the fact that they had to play intellectuals removed, no instinctively but consciously, the inhibition of which you spoke. However, in the case of one’s having to use bourgeois actors who are not intellectuals, I think that you can get what you want from them, too. All you have to do is love them.
How did you work with the
intellectuals to rid them of their inhibitions?
The process was identical with that for the lower-class performers. With the
former naturally, I used a language that was on a more elevated level. But my
methods were the same.
Do you feel the need of knowing your people a long time before shooting, to make friends with them, to learn their natural gestures in order to use them later?
I had known Franco Citti for years, because he was the brother of a friend. I knew his character more or less. On the other hand, Ettore Garofolo of Mamma Roma—I saw him once in a bar where he was working as a waiter. I wrote my whole script around him without speaking to him further. Because I preferred not to know him. I took him and began to shoot after having seen him for just that one minute. I don’t like to make an organized and calculated effort to know someone. If you can intuit a person, you know him already.
Generally I have very precisely in mind what I’m going to do. Because I’ve written the script myself, I’ve already organized the scene in a given way. I see the scene not only as a director but also with the different eyes of the scriptwriter. In addition, I choose the settings. I go to these places and make an adjustment of what I’ve written in my script to fit the place where we are going to shoot. And so when I go to shoot, I more or less know already how the scene is going to go.
I did this for every film except The Gospel. With The Gospel, the thing was so delicate that it would have been easy to fall into the ridiculous and the banal and the typical costume film genre. The dangers were so many that it wasn’t possible to foresee them all. And it being so difficult, we had to shoot three or four times more material than necessary. In effect, most of the scenes I created in the cutting room. I shot the whole Gospel with two cameras. I shot every scene from two or three angles, amassing three or four times more material than necessary. It was as if I had done a documentary on the life of Christ. By chance. With the moviola, I constructed the scene.
Did you seek a particular
style in the framing, and was this possible with two cameras going?
Yes, I always have a rather clear idea of the shot I want, a kind of shot
that is almost natural to me. But with The Gospel I wanted to break away
from this technique because of a very complicated problem. In two words it’s
this: I had a very precise style or technique with which I had experimented in Accattone,
in Mamma Roma and in the preceding films, a style which is, as I said
before, fundamentally religious and epic by its very nature. And so I thought
that my style—possessing naturally these qualities of sacredness and
epicness—would go well with The Gospel also. But in practice, that was
not the case. Because in The Gospel this sacredness and epic quality
became a prison, false and insincere, and so I had to reconstruct my whole
technique and forget everything I knew, everything that I had learned with Accattone
and Mamma Roma, and begin from the beginning. I relied on chance, on
confusion, and so forth.
All this was due to the fact that I am not a believer. In Accattone, I myself could tell a story in the first-person because I was the author and I believed in that story, but I could not tell the story of Christ—making him the son of God—with myself as the author of this story, because I’m not a believer. So I didn’t work as an author. And so this forced me to tell the story of Christ indirectly, as seen through the eyes of one who does believe. And as always when one tells something indirectly, the style changes. While the style of a story told directly has certain characteristics, the style of a story told indirectly has other characteristics. That is, if in literature I am describing Rome in my own words, I describe it in one style. But if I describe Rome—using the words of some Roman character—the result is a completely different style because of the dialect, the popular language, and so forth. The style of my preceding films was a simple style—almost straightforward, almost hieratic—while the style of The Gospel is chaotic, complex, disordered. Despite this difference in style, I shot all my films in little pieces all the same. Except the frame, the point of view, the movements of the extras were changed.
I have read that you have
said that you have trouble with actors. Why is that?
I wouldn’t like people to take this too literally, not in a dogmatic way. In La
Ricotta I used Orson Welles and I got along beautifully with him. In the
film I’m making now I’m going to use Totò, a popular Italian comic, and I’m
sure everything will work out fine. When I say I don’t work well with actors
I’m uttering a relative truth—I want to be sure that this is clear. My
difficulty lies in the fact that I’m not a professional director, and so I
haven’t learned the cinematographic techniques. And that which I have learned
least of all is what they call the “technique of the actor.” I don’t know what
kind of language to use to express myself to the actor. And in this sense, I’m
not capable of working with actors.
After your directing
experiences with Anna Magnani in Mamma Roma and Orson Welles in La
Ricotta, what have you learned about using professional actors as distinct
from non-actors?
The principal difference is that the actor has an art of his own. He has
his own way of expressing himself, his own technique which seeks to add itself
to mine—and I cannot succeed in amalgamating the two. Being an author, I could
not conceive of writing a book together with someone else, and so the presence
of an actor is like the presence of another author in the film.
With Welles, how did you
get a result you felt was fruitful?
For two reasons—first of all in La Ricotta Welles did not play another
character. He played himself. What he really did was a caricature of himself.
And also because Welles, in addition to being an actor, is also an
intellectual—so in reality, I used him as an intellectual director rather than
as an actor. Because he’s an extremely intelligent man, he understood right
away and there was no problem. He brought it off well.. It was a very brief and
simple part, with no great complications. I told him my intention and I let him
do as he pleased. He understood what I wanted immediately and did it in a
manner that was completely satisfying to me.
With Magnani, it was much more difficult. Because she is an actress in the true sense of the word. She has a whole baggage of technical and expressive notions into which I was unable to enter, because it was the first time I had any kind of contact with an actor. At present, I’ve had a little bit of experience and at least can face the problem—but at that time, I couldn’t even face it.
Now that you have
experience, have you thought how you may overcome this acting “baggage” of the
professional performer? You said you are using Totò in your next film—have you
reflected upon your way of directing him?
Yes, I think the way to get around this problem is to use the fact
that they are actors. Just as with a non-actor I use a whole series of things
unexpected and unforeseen—leaving them to their own vital confusion (for
example, when I tell them to say “Good morning” instead of “I hate you”),
leaving them to the ambiguousness of their being—so I must use the actor
specifically for his actor’s baggage. If I try to use an actor as if he were
not an actor, I would be wrong. Because in the cinema—at least in my cinema—the
truth always comes out sooner or later. On the other hand, if I use an actor knowing
that he is an actor, and therefore using him for that which he is and not for
that which he is not, I hope to succeed. Naturally, the character whom he
interprets must be adapted to this idea.
It just happens that the characters in my new film are all ambiguous characters who have something real, human, profound about them, and at the same time something invented, absurd, clownish and fable-like. The double nature of the actor, Totò-man and Totò-Clown, this double nature can be used by me for my character. In Totò himself this double nature—man and clown, or man and actor—functions because it corresponds to the double nature of the character in the film.
Do you plan to explain to
Totò this double nature you’ve outlined?
Yes, of course. As soon as I met him I explained that I needed a character just
like himself. I needed a Neapolitan. Someone profoundly human, who as at the
same time this art that is clownish and abstract. Yes, I told him right away.
Are you not afraid that
now that he knows, Totò will try to play both the clown and the human being?
No, I told him to make him feel freer. Because I saw that he would worry about
it. It’s the first time that he has worked on a film that has this kind of
ideological content. Of course, he has made several good films, but they were
always on an artistic level, without political commitment. So probably he was a
little worried. In order to leave him completely free, I told him—so that he
could go on doing what he had always done, so he won’t have to do anything
different.
Do you rehearse a lot or
do you shoot immediately?
I never rehearse. I shoot right away.
Does this impose simple
camera work?
My camera movements are very simple. For The Gospel, I used camera
movements that were a little more complicated, but I never use a dolly, for
example. I’ve always shot in pieces. Shot by shot,. A few pans and very simple
tracking shots but nothing more.
What are your observations
about the aesthetic and technical characteristics of film as you have gained
experience?
My lack of professional experience has not encouraged me to invent. Rather it
has urged me to “re-invent.” For instance, I never studied at the Centro
Sperimentale or any other school, and so when the time came for me to shoot a
panoramic shot, for me it was like the first time in the history of cinema that
a panorama was shot. And so I re-invented the panoramic.
Only a person with a great deal of professional experience is capable of inventing technically. As far as technical inventions go, I have never made any. I may have invented a given style—in fact, my films are recognizable for a particular style—but style does not always imply technical inventions. Godard is full of technical inventions. In Alphaville there are four or five things that are completely invented—for example those shots printed in negative. Certain technical rule-breakings of Godard are the result of a pains-taking personal study.
As for me, I never dared to try experiments of this kind, because I have no technical background. And so my first step was to simplify the technique. This is contradictory, because as a writer I tend to be extremely complicated—that is, my written page is technically very complex. While I was writing Una Vila Violente— technically very complex—I was shooting Accattone, which was technically very simple. This is the principal limitation of my cinematic career, because I believe that an author must have complete knowledge of all his technical instruments. A partial knowledge is a limitation. Therefore, at this particular moment, I believe that the first period of my cinematic work is about to close. And the second period is about to start, in which I will be a professional director also as far as technique in concerned.
But what have you
discovered about film in an aesthetic sense?
Well, to tell the truth, the only thing I discovered is the pleasure of
discovery.
You’re talking like Godard
now.
I answered like Godard because the question is impossible to answer. Look, if I
believed in a teleology of the cinema, in a teleology of development, if I
believed in an end-goal of development, in progress as improvement . . . but I
don’t believe in a “bettering,” an improvement. I think that one grows, but one
does not improve. “Improving” seems to me an hypocritical alibi. Now,
believing in the pure growth of each one of us, I see the development of my
style as a continuous modification about which I can say nothing.
How do you conceive the
structure of your films, what makes them move from one end to another?
It’s too demanding a question. For the moment it’s impossible to answer. But I
would like for you to read in Cahiers an article I wrote. This question
implies not only an examination of my films and my conscience, it brings up the
question of my Marxism and my whole cultural struggle during the Fifties. The
question is too vast. It’s impossible.
But let me say this now in a very schematic fashion. At this point, the cinema is dividing itself into really two large trunks, and these two different types of films correspond to what we already have in literature: that is, one type on a high level and another type on a low level. While cinema production until now has given us films of both a high and low level, the distribution apparatus has been the same for both. But now the organization or structure of the cinema industry is starting to differentiate . . . the cinema d’essai is becoming more important and will soon represent a channel for distribution through which certain films will be distributed, whereas the remainder of the distribution will take place normally. This will bring about the birth of two completely different cinemas. The high level of cinema—that is, the cinema d’essai—will cater to a selected public and will have its own history. And the other level will have its own story.
In this important change, the selection of non-actors will be one of the most important structural aspects. Probably the structure of this high level cinema will be modified by the fact that no longer will there be an industrial organization hanging over it. And so all kinds of experiments will be possible, including that of using non-actors, and this will transform the cinema even stylistically.
In Cahiers, do you
speak of aesthetic structure?
The structure of cinema has a special unity. If the structuralist critic were
to describe the structural characteristics of the cinema, he would not
distinguish a story cinema from a non-story cinema. I don’t believe that this
story distinction affects the structure of cinema; rather it affects the
superstructure—I mean the style. The lack or the presence of a story is not a
structural factor. I know that some of the French structuralists have attempted
to analyze the cinema, but I don’t believe that they have succeeded in making
these distinctions.
Literature is unique, it has unity. Literary structures are unique and include both prose and poetry. Nevertheless, there is a language of prose and a language of poetry, although the literary structure is one. In the same way, the cinema will have these distinctions. Obviously, the structure of cinema is one. The structural laws regarding any film are more or less the same. A banal western or a film by Godard have structures that are fundamentally the same. A certain rapport with the spectator, a certain way of photographing and framing are the identical elements of all films.
The difference is this: the film of Godard is written according to the typical characteristics of poetic language; whereas the common cinema is written according to the typical characteristics of prose language. For example, the lack of story is simply the prevalence of poetic language over prose language. It isn’t true that there isn’t a story; there is a story, but instead of being narrated in its integrality, it is narrated elliptically, with spurts of imagination, fantasy, allusion. It is narrated in a distorted way—however, there is a story.
Fundamentally, the distinction to be made is between a cinema of prose and a cinema of poetry. However, the cinema of poetry is not necessarily poetic. Often one may adopt the tenets and canons of the cinema of poetry and yet make a bad and pretentious film. Another director may adopt the tenets and canons of the prose film—that is, he could narrate a story—and yet he creates poetry.
Life and Works of Pier Paolo
Pasolini Pasolini website (click on
American flag for English version), also seen here: Pasolini.net
Pier Paolo Pasolini another website
The History of Cinema. PierPaolo Pasolini: biography, filmography ... Piero Scaruffi website (Italian only)
Pier Paolo Pasolini > Overview - AllMovie biography by Jason Ankeny from All Movie
glbtq >> literature >> Pasolini, Pier Paolo biography essay by David Ehrenstein, also seen here: Ehrenstein, David (2005). Pasolini, Pier Paolo. glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture.
Pier Paolo Pasolini: Definition from Answers.com Biography and profile page
Pier Paolo
Pasolini • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Gino Moliterno from Senses of Cinema, December 2002
Pier Paolo Pasolini biography and filmography from Books and Writers, compiled by Petri Liukkonen
PIER PAOLO PASOLINI Italian director, screen writer, essayist ... 4 page biography (pdf format)
PIER
PAOLO PASOLINI biography from The
The Italian Almanac - Pier Paolo Pasolini biography
Pier Paolo Pasolini Biography Biography Base
Pier
Paolo Pasolini - Biography, Works, Significance, Political ... bio from
Pier Paolo Pasolini - The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia biography page
Pier Paolo Passolini 1 World Films biography
Paolo Pasolini
resource page from Queer Theory
Pier Paolo Pasolini NNDB profile page
Pier Paolo Pasolini § Aesthetics and Philosophy of Film profile page, including significant resource materials
Quo Vadis? The Cinema and the Fate of Paolo Pasolini website by Gregory and Maria Pearce, also text here: Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini, P.P.Pasolini, Pasolini, Art Italy art exhibits (paintings, drawings) from Kara Art, also seen here: Kara Art: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini Prophecy Prophecy, 3 page poem may be viewed online (pdf format)
Pier Paolo Pasolini - Director by Film Rank Films 101
Maria Callas in Pasolini's Medea
pier paolo pasolini (important to patti smith)
Pier Paolo Pasolini - Filmgalerie 451 brief bio and film comments
Italian Directors - Pier Paolo Pasolini brief film synopsis
PIER PAOLO PASOLINI film based website, also seen here: the subterranean cinema
Jim's Reviews - Films of Pier
Paolo Pasolini - JClarkMedia.com extensive
film essay reviews
Pasolini essay by Dante Maffia (Undated), also seen here: Italian Dialect Poetry - Pasolini
Kara.art A Revolutionary Alternative, 3 page essay on Pasolini by Giuseppe Zigaina (Undated)
The
Ashes of Italy: Pier Paolo Pasolini's Ethics The
Ashes of
The Cinema of Poetry Pier Paolo Pasolini text originally read by Pasolini at the Pesaro New Cinema Festival, June 1965, published in Cahiers du Cinéma, October 1965, edited by Bill Nichols, 11 viewable pages from Movies and Methods, Volume 1, 1976 (pdf format)
"Berlinale
1966: Juries" Jury members at
the
Pier Paolo Pasolini Observations on the Long Take// 1967 Seriality article from 1967 (pdf format)
"Berlinale
1972: Prize Winners"
Problems with Pasolini | Jonathan Rosenbaum June 4, 1980
Roman
poems - Google Books Result by Pier
Paolo Pasolini, 145 pages, released in 1986, limited preview available online,
great cover photo (pdf)
Short
Films By Pier Paolo Pasolini | Jonathan Rosenbaum October 1, 1992
A
certain realism: making use of Pasolini's film theory and practice - Google
Books Result by
Maurizio Sanzio Viano, 368 pages, released in 1993, limited preview available
online (pdf)
A
poetics of resistance: narrative and the writings of Pier Paolo ... - Google
Books Result by David Ward, 215
pages, Volume 1995, limited preview available online (pdf)
Censuring Salo: the unbanning of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo, by ... Rebecca Huntley, Masters thesis (4 pages), 1995 from Libertus
"Why was Pasolini Murdered?" A review of Pasolini: An Italian Crime, by David Walsh, which includes an interview with Marco Tullio Giordana, director of Pasolini: An Italian Crime, from the World Socialist Web Site, November 1995
Works That Are Small But Big in Artistry Helen A. Harrison (Page 2) from The New York Times, November 24, 1996
Courting Contradiction Fernanda Eberstadt book review of Pasolini’s Petrolio (470 pages) from The New York Times, March 23, 1997
Salon | Sneak Peeks Scott McLemee book review of Pasolini’s Petrolio from Salon, April 18, 1997
ELISAVA TdD | 14 | Pier Paolo Pasolini's Edipo re Oedipus Rex essay by Albert Berrio from Elisava TdD, 1997
In the Extreme: Pasolini's Salò • Senses of Cinema Bill Mousoulis from Senses of Cinema, March 5, 2000
Sal˜ or the
120 Days of Sodom by Gary Indiana | Film | The Guardian extracts from the book by Gary
Indiana, from The Guardian, September
22, 2000
Agony and Ecstasy: A legend in life and death, Pasolini made excess into art Deborah Hochberg from Metro Times, December 13, 2000
Salò: 15 Years of Vision • Senses of Cinema Alberto Pezzotta from Senses of Cinema, December 28, 2000
Profile:
Pier Paolo Pasolini (from 2001) | Sameer Padania biographical essay from Kamera, 2001
Pasolini, Croce, and the Cinema of Poetry Pasolini, Croce, and the Cinema of Poetry, by Patrick Keating from Scope, June 2001
The Canterbury Tales •
Senses of Cinema Gino
Moliterno from Senses of Cinema, March
13, 2002
Translation as De-canonization: Matthew's Gospel According to ... Translation as De-canonization: Matthew's Gospel According to Pasolini - filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini - Critical Essay, by George Aichele from Cross Currents, Winter 2002
Pier Paolo Pasolini: An Italian Passion - Features, Films - The ... Roger Clarke from The Independent, April 9, 2004
Accattone • Senses of Cinema Gino Moliterno from Senses of Cinema, April 22, 2004
Pier Paolo Pasolini in the Cuban media articles in the Cuban press, from May 2, 2004
The
Cinema Of Pier Paulo Pasolini - Blogcritics Video Duke De Mondo from Blog Critics,
BBC News report on the reopening of the murder case Benedetto Cataldi from BBC News, May 10, 2005
CESNUR 2005 International Conference - PIER PAOLO PASOLINI ... Pier Paolo Pasolini: Revelation, Revolution and the Symbol of the Desert, by J. Edgar Bauer, paper presented to the CESNUR international conference, June 2 – 5, 2005
Doug
Ireland, "Restoring Pasolini"
Doug Ireland from Z Net,
"Victory" A
HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED PASOLINI POEM -- on the 30th anniversary of the poet's
death, Doug Ireland from Direland,
TRIBUTE
TO PASOLINI - Straight Up | Jan Herman
The life and
death of Pier Paolo Pasolini | openDemocracy Geoff Andrews from Open Democracy,
Guy Scarpetta, The
gospel according to Pasolini Le Monde Diplomatique,
March 2006
POETRY OF SQUALOR: EXPLORING THE BORGATA IN PIER PAOLO PASOLINI'S ... Accattone 9 page essay by Pei Suin Ng, 2007 (pdf format)
Telegraph
Article (2007) Poet of the cinema who championed the damned of
World People's Blog » Blog Archive » Pier Paolo Pasolini – Italia ... February 17, 2007
BBC - collective - pier paolo pasolini volume 1 dvd review Pasolini DVD Box sets, review by Kaleen Aftab, April 12, 2007
Pasolini DVD Box Set Volumes 1 & 2 Louis Bayman from The Socialist Review, June 2007
Pasolini
Boxset 2: Uccellacci e uccellini (1966) (Hawks
& Sparrows), Oedipus Rex (1967) and Porcile (1969)(Pigsty) Antonio Pasolini from Kamera, June 14, 2007
• View
topic - Pier Paolo Pasolini Criterion
discussion forum,
Pier Paolo Pasolini's Italian Dance Party at bavatuesdays Reverand from Bava Tuesdays, July 20, 2007
SF360:
Pier Paolo Pasolini Dennis Harvey
from SF 360,
The
Passion of Pasolini Nathaniel
Rich from The New York Review of Books,
September 27, 2007 (1st three
paragraphs only)
The Passion
of Pasolini - BAM/PFA - Film Programs
November 1 –
# PIER PAOLO PASOLINI • HOME PAGE # Poet of Ashes # Cinema ... November 2 – December 18, 2007
Pier Paolo Pasolini Exhibition | Horror Society Dr. Gore from Horror Society, November 7, 2007
Pier Paolo Pasolini: Movies For and About the Fringe Outsider Art, Ed Gonzalez from the Village Voice, November 20, 2007
Understanding Pasolini By
Revisiting His Work A.O. Scott from The New York Times, November 23, 2007
On Pier
Paolo Pasolini « The Gay Recluse
THE TALK; O Salo Mio Armand Limnander from The New York Times, March
16, 2008
Controversial
Painting of Jesus Removed - ABC News
Christel Kucharz from ABC News,
Swans
Commentary: Pier Paolo Pasolini: Fragments Of 1968 ... poem to young Communist students, from Swans Commentary,
Offscreen.com :: Pier Paolo Pasolini's Notes for an African ... Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Notes for an African Orestes ~ Intellectual Responsibility and Imagination ~ August 2008
Pasolini's Cruel Masterpiece - August 26, 2008 - The New York Sun Bruce Bennett frim The New York Sun, August 26, 2008
Venice: The buzz on the Lido gets literal Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, August 29, 2008
Pier
Paolo Pasolini's Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom is the Good ... November:
Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom, by Garan Holcombe from The Good Web Guide,
The
Fearful Symmetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salò" on Notebook - Mubi Ben Simington from Mubi,
Pasolini's Roman poetry Ian Thomson TLS Ian Thomson from the Times Online Literary Supplement, November 19, 2008
Pasolini book review of Naomi Greene's Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy, by Michael J. Bayly, November 25, 2008, also seen here: Pasolini - Kislány a zongoránál - Blog.hu
Vertigo Magazine, Article - ANOTHER WAY OF SEEING: Pasolini and ... Stephen Barber from Vertigo magazine, Winter 2008
The
resurrection of the body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Saint Paul ... - Google
Books Result by Armando Maggi, 411
pages, released in 2009, limited preview available online
(pdf)
The PIP
(Project for Innovative Poetry) Blog: Pier Paolo Pasolini Green integer blog,
Italian Film Commission - News Film notes for an upcoming retrospective, March 28, 2009
Pier_Paolo_Pasolini_APRIL_2009 Brief retrospective notes from American Cinematheque, April 3 – 4, 2009
Pier
Paolo Pasolini's La ricotta: the power of cinepoiesis. - Free ... Silvia Carlorosi essay from The Free Library,
The
Passion of The Christ (2003) - Spiritual Connections David Bruce from Hollywood Jesus,
Mala Italia film essay (concludes on Pasolini) from Jon
Jost’s weblog,
FILM;
Revisiting a Cinematic Smackdown, and Other Avant-Garde Pleasures Manohla Dargis from The New York Times,
William Klein: Rome Aperture Texts by Alberto Moravia, Pier Paolo ... William Klein: Rome, 224 pages, texts by Alberto Moravia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ennio Flaiano, and Federico Fellini, December 31, 2009
Born
March 5: Pier Paolo Pasolini - Band of Thebes Band of
The Complete Pier Paolo Pasolini - Harvard Film Archive September 2010
Pasolini @ 90 on Notebook |
MUBI David Hudson, March 5,
2012
I racconti di Canterbury (Pier Paolo Pasolini)/The ... Sam Rhodie from Screening the Past, August 2012
Pasolini's Legacy: A Sprawl of Brutality - The New York Times December 27, 2012
Pier
Paolo Pasolini: No saint | Film | The Guardian Ian Thomson, February 22, 2013
Who
really killed Pier Paolo Pasolini? | Film | The Guardian Ed Vulliamy, August 23, 2014
Viewers' Engagement in Pasolini's Salò • Senses of Cinema Paolo Russo, December 16, 2015
The
violent death of “inconvenient” intellect, Pier Paolo Pasolini ... Riccardo Schirru and Laura Egan from Il Globo, December 14, 2016
An
introduction to Pier Paolo Pasolini | BFI
Chris Fennell, February 27, 2017
"The Atheist Who Was Obsessed with God" Guy Flatley’s interview with Pasolini from The New York Times, 1969, posted in Movie Crazed
Gary
Indiana interview Rob White
interview with the author of the book Salò or The 120 Days of Sodom,
from BFI Onscreen August 23, 2000
Interview with Roberto Chiesi on Pier Paolo Pasolini Robert J. Hanshe from Hyperion, April 2008 (pdf format)
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922 - 1975) - Find A Grave Memorial
Pierpaolo Pasolini murder site
Pier Paolo Pasolini - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Image results for Pier Paolo Pasolini
ACCATTONE
Accattone Judy Bloch from Pacific Film Archives
Pasolini’s first film is set in the milieu of his early novels Ragazzi di Vita (1955) and Una Vita Violenta (1959)—the world of prostitutes, pimps, and layabouts living on the outskirts of Rome and existing outside of both bourgeois and proletarian morality. The film shares some qualities with neorealism, but Pasolini’s unsentimental approach to the cruelty and craftiness of poverty’s children makes Fellini’s vitelloni look like the princes they are. No, this is a Dantean netherworld, and, like the central character, it is of interest to Pasolini, prized even, precisely for its refusal of redemption. The filmmaker graces it with his understated visual passion, at once lyrical and honest, not incongruously set to Bach. In the character of Accattone—a street nickname meaning pimp/scrounger—Pasolini introduced the first of his remarkable finds, Franco Citti (brother of his friend and collaborator Sergio Citti), an actor whose rough-hewn beauty is like a slap in the face.
The seamy side of the sub-proletariat of Rome, a world of prostitutes, layabouts and petty thieves in which Franco Citti's Accattone, not quite making the grade as a pimp, finds himself trapped between the alternatives of working for starvation wages, or trying - with the police already on his tail - for easy pickings as a thief. Treating a social milieu Pasolini knew at first hand, his first film as a director was misunderstood by many critics when it was first released as a return to the canons of Italian neo-realism of the '40s and '50s. In fact, its editing style, use of close-ups, dialogue in the Romanesco vernacular - not to mention the Bach score - all betray an originality much more of a piece with Pasolini's later work than with neo-realism. And the character of Accattone himself, self-destructive and conscious of his situation within a class from which he cannot escape, embodies many of the contradictions in Pasolini's lifetime of coming to terms with Marxism and Catholicism.
Eye for Film ("Themroc") review [5/5]
Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in 1922, the son of an army officer whose support for fascism led the young Pasolini to become a fervent Marxist. Developing an early interest in literature and the arts, he was a published poet at the age of only 19 and by the time he began his career in film 13 years later, he had already established himself as an eminent essayist, critic and novelist.
Having collaborated on a number of screenplays including
Federico Fellini’s La Notti di Cabiria/Nights of Cabiria (1956) and Mauro
Bolognini’s Il Bell’Antonio (1960), Pasolini finally began his own career as a
writer-director in 1961 with Accatone, a film based upon one of his own novels,
Una Vita Violenta (A Violent Life). The film created an immediate impact when
it premiered at the 22nd Venice Film Festival, due in part to its grittily
realistic and hitherto barely glimpsed depiction of a sub-proletarian
Vittorio Cataldi (known as Accatone) is a cynical young pimp whose life and income go into freefall following the arrest of the girlfriend he has been prostituting to support his indolent lifestyle. Estranged from his wife and young son and reviled by her family as an embarrassment and a disgrace, he gropes for redemption in the arms of a beautiful virgin peasant girl named Stella. However, unable to break out of the lifestyle that has trapped and conditioned him, Accatone’s life spirals towards its premature end with a sense of tragic inevitability.
Pasolini’s attempts to reconcile his Marxism and his Catholicism underpin the film (as they would underpin much of his career), both in terms of the film’s depiction of an underclass caught in a vicious circle of criminality and poverty, and in the religiosity which informs both the tone of the film and its themes of grace and redemption. It’s easy to see why Pasolini’s work had such a profound effect on the young Scorsese and remarkable to note the extent to which Scorsese’s own films, in particular Raging Bull (1980), betray this influence.
However, Accatone contains a sense of poetry - or perhaps lyricism would be more accurate - that Raging Bull somehow lacks, and there is a humane tenderness in the compassion Pasolini extends to his eponymous anti-hero, which Scorsese seems either unwilling or unable to allow his own brutalised protagonist. That said, Pasolini’s film is defiantly unsentimental. Although fate, circumstance and social conditioning are all presented as contributing factors in Accatone’s downfall, no attempt is made by the director to excuse his arrogance, misogyny or predisposition to self-destruction.
Ironically, it was this unwillingness to editorialise by condemning his characters’ shortcomings that often led to Pasolini’s films being criticised, particularly for their sexual politics. However, it’s a mistake to assume that this lack of explicit judgement amounts to endorsement. Rather, it is reflective of a humanism that lends his lowlifes’ stories a dimension of tragic complexity and prevents his films from becoming trite moral lectures or didactic Marxist tracts. Instead, the overall tone created is one of quiet despair at the ways in which the cynicism that informs the choices people make railroads them into a life where they are forced to fight like rats for dominance and survival.
The cast of unknowns are universally terrific, but the fragmentary narrative is held together by the astonishingly nuanced central performance. In the title role (and present in almost every scene), Franco Citti plays Accatone with a combination of brooding, languid charisma and simmering violence. Proud but vulnerable and torn between the reflex of self-interest learned on the streets and feelings of jealousy and affection he has neither the capability nor the maturity to understand, Citti conveys the character’s contradictions with a plausibility and confidence that belies his complete lack of acting experience.
In the neo-realist tradition, Pasolini used a cast made up of
non-actors, largely drawn from the environment in which the film is set, and
shot exclusively on location in the crumbling slums of
Combined with the foreboding quotation from Dante with which he opens the film and the film’s omnipresent religious undertones and iconography, Pasolini succeeds in taking a small story anchored in the grim realities of post-war poverty and deprivation and giving it the sweep of operatic, even transcendent, emotion and spirituality. That he achieves this command of tone and idiom without lapsing into pretension or self-importance is in itself impressive. That he also managed to craft a profoundly moving work of art is testament to his talents as a visionary filmmaker.
Accattone Jim’s reviews
Accattone • Senses of Cinema Gino Moliterno from Senses of Cinema, April 22, 2004
POETRY OF SQUALOR: EXPLORING THE BORGATA IN PIER PAOLO PASOLINI'S ... Accattone 9 page essay by Pei Suin Ng, 2007 (pdf format)
Accattone : FilmMonthly Daniel Engelke
VideoVista review Andrew Hook
Accattone / Accattone! / Pier Paolo Pasolini / 1961 James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
Movie-Vault.com (Vadim Rizov) review [6/10]
User reviews from imdb Author: aliasanythingyouwant from United States
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reviews from imdb Author: MisterWhiplash from United States
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DVD Times Noel Magahey, Pasolini Volume 1
The
Italian Cinema: Beyond Neo-Realism
Dennis Toth from Film Notes from the CMA,
MAMMA ROMA
Mamma Roma Judy Bloch from Pacific Film Archives
Mamma Roma captures the dispirited world of a spirited prostitute and her efforts to rise above her trade toward a petit bourgeois life for herself and her grown son. In stone ruins and suburban housing projects, Pasolini finds a combination of the seamy and the lyric, the ugly and the classical, rough trade tempered by raw beauty. His dreamlike edits open neorealism to a transcendent modernity, though the film sears with reality. Pasolini, who rarely used professional actors (“I choose actors for what they are and not for what they pretend to be”), questioned using Anna Magnani. Nevertheless, as Mamma Roma, walking the streets giving young johns what they want—her stories; giving her pimp ex-husband (Franco Citti) his due in ribald song; dancing a tango with her soon-to-be martyred son, it’s hard to picture anyone but Magnani in the role.
Pasolini's second feature jumps a class from the
sub-proletarian milieu of Accattone, following the efforts of a
prostitute, 'Mamma Roma' (Magnani), to make a petty-bourgeois life for herself
and her teenage son in suburban
Mamma
Roma - TCM.com Sean Axmaker
Novelist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, social critic,
outspoken intellectual, committed Marxist and openly homosexual artist, Pier
Paolo Pasolini was a controversial figure before he ever directed his first
film. Cinema offered him new tools to create with and a wider audience to shock
and scandalize. Many of his late films were indeed aggressively provocative –
the social satire Teorema [1968], the ribald The Decameron [1971]
and The Canterbury Tales [1972] and the explicit Salo, or the 120
Days of Sodom [1975], adapted from Marquis de Sade novel – but his first
film, the 1961 Accattone, drew from the tradition of the neo-realists
for a drama set in the Roman borgate, the slums at the edges of the
city.
For Mamma Roma [1962], his sophomore feature, he cast a star in the
lead, but otherwise continued his neo-realist practice of casting non-actors
and exploring the lives of the lower classes. Anna Magnani is the Mamma Roma of
the title, a middle-aged prostitute who has finally freed herself from her pimp,
the slick and seedy Carmine (Franco Citti), and saved enough money to leave the
borgate and buy an apartment and a stall in the produce market. Most
importantly, she can reclaim her now teenage son, Ettore (played by Ettore
Garofolo, who Pasolini discovered waiting tables at a restaurant), and take him
back to
Like Pasolini's Accattone, Mamma Roma draws from the neo-realist
tradition, but Pasolini goes beyond the tradition to play with the form and
structure. He leaves unanswered questions hanging throughout the film – who is
Ettore's father? Who raised him while she was working in
Pasolini was unhappy with Magnani's performance, which he made very public at
the time of its release, but by 1969 he chalked it up to a mistake in casting.
"As I choose actors for what they are and not what they pretend to be, I
made a mistake about what the character really was, and although Anna Magnani
made a moving effort to do what I asked of her, the character simply did not
emerge." Perhaps not, but Magnani's brassy, full-blooded presence fills up
the screen and the character that she brings to the film is a magnificent
creation: fiery, bawdy, ambitious, fiercely devoted to Ettore and driven with
guilt over her absence in Ettore's youth. When one of her friends observes,
"You'd hang on a cross for him, wouldn't you?," you can't help but
agree. But her attempt to make up those lost years by lavishing him with presents
and refusing to discipline his increasingly arrogant and reckless behavior does
nothing to strengthen his character or give him a future. For Pasolini,
however, the problems go deeper: Mamma Roma has idealized her new station in
life and her upward mobility. Her modern apartment is in an anonymous
development on the edge of war ruins and empty fields and the boys of their new
suburb that she favors over Ettore's old neighbors are just as aimless and
unambitious, they just dress better. By film's end, Pasolini's gutter Madonna
and Christ figures, as sullied and sinful as they are, have fulfilled their
roles, right down to a symbolic crucifixion.
As with many of Pasolini's earlier works, including his first film, Mamma
Roma was controversial for its portrait of life in the borgate. It
was protested at its premiere at the Venice Film Festival and censured in
Mamma Roma Jim’s reviews
Mamma Roma (1962) - The Criterion Collection
Pasolini, Mamma Roma, and La Ricotta Criterion essay by Gary Indiana, June 21, 2004
Pasolini's Roman poetry Ian Thomson TLS Ian Thomson from the Times Online Literary Supplement, November 19, 2008
kagablog
» 287. Mamma Roma (Pier Paolo Pasolini 1962 I) René
Veenstra from Kagablog,
Mamma Roma by Pier Paolo Pasolini 1962 Metalluk from Movie Masterworks, June 17, 2006
not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor) review
Mamma
Roma (1962) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
Nathaniel Thompson
Mamma Roma | Film
Review | Slant Magazine Bill
Weber
filmcritic.com (Jake Euker) review [4/5]
Pasolini Pier Paolo: Mamma Roma Italica
Mamma Roma
(1962) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
DVD Verdict (Bill Gibron) dvd review [Criterion Collection] 2-disc
DVD Journal Clarence Beaks, Criterion Collection, 2-disc
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3.5/4] Criterion Collection, 2-disc
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Robert Edwards) dvd review Criterion Collection, 2-disc
DVD Movie Central Ed Nguyen, Criterion Collection, 2-disc
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection, 2-disc
DVD Talk (Matt Langdon) dvd review [4/5] [Criterion Collection] 2-disc
The Digital Bits capsule dvd review [Criterion Collection] Todd Doogan
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review [Criterion Collection] 2-disc
Floatation Suite [Sheila Seacroft]
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AvaxHome -> Pier Paolo Pasolini-Mamma Roma (1962)
pasolini directs « chained and perfumed photo
Pier
Paolo Pasolini: No saint | Film | The Guardian Ian Thomson, February 22, 2013
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [4/5]
San Francisco Examiner (Barbara Shulgasser) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review also seen here: FILM REVIEW; A Steamy Pasolini Rarity From 1962 - New ...
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SAINT
MATTHEW (Il vangelo secondo Matteo)
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Certainly Pasolini's most satisfying movie, devoid both of the frequent lapses into pretentiousness that mar (for example) Theorem and Medea, and the sloppy editing and awkward acting of movies like The Decameron. The director's Catholicism and Marxism serve him well here as the Messiah is presented as a determinedly political animal fuelled by anger at social injustice, while the miracles are allowed to remain unexplained (but also never presented in terms of flashy special effects). The film's beauty, in fact, derives from its simplicity, with the Italian landscape (and non-professional actors) turned into a convincing milieu for the all-too-familiar goings-on by marvellous monochrome camerawork. And Pasolini's use of music, from Bach to Billie Holiday, is astounding.
The Gospel According to St. Matthew Judy Bloch from Pacific Film Archives
(Il vangelo secondo Matteo). What was seen in 1964 as a daringly direct, almost reportorial account of the Gospel of St. Matthew, set against the everyday life of the times, today looks like a radically stylized classic. Pasolini employed a cast of nonprofessional actors, and settings of rugged Southern Italian landscapes and hill towns, shot with a mixture of cinema-verité techniques, expressive close-ups, and ingenious set pieces. His Christ is an anguished and determined revolutionary, setting children against their parents as he has turned against his, a peripatetic preacher against the afflictions of social injustice. (He has an artist’s ego: “Only in his own country, a prophet goes unhonored.”) His miracles are as matter-of-fact as Pasolini’s pageantry is gritty. The faces Pasolini has chosen are those of the rural proletariat, but they evoke parallels with Italian religious art; similarly, the music is a mixture of black spirituals, the Missa Luba, and Bach.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Candace Wirt
In 1963, the well-known atheist and Marxist Pier Paolo Pasolini collaborated with several directors on the satire ROGOPAG. Pasolini's segment, "La ricotta," starred Orson Welles directing a film about the life of Jesus Christ. Due to "publicly maligning the religion of the State" in his film, Pasolini received a suspended prison sentence and the film was banned. In a strange turn of events, only a year later he directed the critically acclaimed THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW, winning the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival and the first prize of the International Catholic Office of Cinema. Now considered one of the best cinematic adaptations of Christ's life (played by a young Spanish student of economics named Enrique Irazoqui), the film begins with Christ's birth and continues through his betrayal by Judas and crucifixion at the hands of the Scribes and Pharisees. Most of the film simply concerns Christ sharing his teachings with people, the same beliefs now inculcated into our culture so deeply that they appear secular. Working under the tenets of Italian neorealism, Pasolini shot the film outdoors in the poor Italian district of Basilicata and its capital city Matera, capturing Christ and his disciples in long shots traveling through vast natural landscapes. Pasolini cast non-professional actors (including local shopkeepers, factory workers, and truck drivers) who fully embody their characters and do not rely upon make-up or elaborate costumes; the film and its realist aesthetic benefit most from these people. He also used actual text from the Bible rather than dramatically modifying it, which gives the film a sense of authenticity missing from other religious pictures. When later asked at a press conference why, as an atheist, he made a film about Christ, Pasolini replied, "If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for belief." THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW is a great, yet atypical, protest film from the 1960s, telling a story about the origin of faith not only in God, but also in humanity and why it continues to exist.
Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Gospel According to St Matthew | Features ... Derek Malcolm from The Guardian
Films about the Christian God are not exactly my cup of tea, being either maudlin or boringly dignified, and almost always badly acted. Who can forget Jeffrey Hunter in King of Kings, who caused the film to be nicknamed I Was a Teenage Jesus? But two at least are memorable: Monty Python's Life of Brian, which, as well as being very funny, had the advantage of being widely objected to; and Pasolini's The Gospel According to St Matthew, made in 1964 by a Marxist who was frequently accused of blasphemy by the Catholic church and whose attitude to religion was ambivalent.
Its portrait of the Messiah - played by Enrique Irazoqui, a
young Spanish economics student with a scraggy beard - is far harsher than the
usual soft saint that passes for Jesus. He is, as screenwriter and director
Paul Mayersberg has suggested, "a procurer for God". The actor wears
no make-up and nor does the rest of the cast. Judas is played by a truck-driver
from
It is a stark film (someone has described it as one-dimensional), but with clear-headed interpretative qualities that avoid the usual cliches. This Christ was a political animal, angry at social injustice. The silent cry from the cross is believable and the miracles avoid any kind of underlining comment - they just happen, with not a special effect in sight.
All this puzzled the Catholic church greatly. But it was decided to approve of the film, even though Pasolini had vastly annoyed the papacy with his episode in 1962's RoGoPaG (a compilation of four satirical films by different directors) with his parody of the deposition from the cross, and had been given a suspended prison sentence for "publicly undermining the religion of the state". (He had also been expelled from the communist party, for alleged homosexuality.)
A planned life of St Paul never materialised; instead he made the less ambitious but more popular Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and The Arabian Nights, and the more intellectual, poetic and, at times, portentous Hawks and Sparrows, Theorem, Pigsty and Medea. He never acquired the purity of The Gospel again, and Salo (1975), his last film, went in the opposite direction - a tortured scream against fascism that almost succeeded in being fascist itself. He was a loved and sometimes hated figure of Italian culture so that his murder, almost certainly by a teenage hustler, was, and still is, interpreted by many as some sort of political conspiracy.
The
Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1964)
Nick Burton from Pif magazine,
Perhaps no other filmmaker was less likely, and paradoxically, more qualified to make the most reverent biblical film in cinema’s history than Pier Paolo Pasolini. After all, this was Pasolini, the self-confessed Marxist, homosexual atheist poet who had become the target of Catholic censure with his 1963 short film La Ricotta (from the compilation film Rogopag), about a movie extra in a biblical film who dies from starvation on a cross during shooting. But, familiar with the Bible in a way only an intellectual lapsed Catholic atheist can be, Pasolini the Marxist wanted to return the story of Christ to the working class, whom he pointed out, even in the Partito Communista Italiano, were staunch believers. Thus, Pasolini stripped his work of the mythology associated with most films of the genre, and of the traditional Christian iconography, in favor of a grim realism appropriated from neo-realist cinema. The resulting hand-held, semi-documentary style aligns the film more with Pasolini’s own Accattone than King of Kings.
The film follows the story of Jesus familiar to all, from the annunciation
to the flight to
Pasolini steadfastly refuses to dip into the standard images of faith put
forth by the Church. Here, Palm Sunday looks like Twig Sunday, and Salome’s
dance for Herod is a chaste dance that has nothing to do with veils, but
everything with the discreet charm of the upper classes, the “generation of
vipers.” Pasolini uses music in this film with amazing effect – we get not only
Bach and Mozart, but also Anton Webern, the spiritual “Sometimes I feel Like a
Motherless Child” (during the visit by the three wise men), Delta blues and the
Congolese Missa Luba. All traces of the
Still, there’s a good chance such images may bother those used to more traditional biblical images. Pasolini’s film, in effect, takes the story of Christ away from the Church – and thus from the middle classes that he hated more than anything – and returns it to the hands of the people to whom religion means the most. In this regard, the film is radically politicized – that its text comes solely from the Bible itself and fits comfortably within Pasolini’s Marxist ideology may say more about the Christ story than one is ready to admit.
Michael Wood
reviews 'The Gospel According to Saint Matthew' · LRB ... Michael Wood from London Review of Books, March 21, 2013
The Gospel According to Saint Matthew Jim’s reviews
The Gospel According to Pasolini
| MostlyFilm Viv Wilby
The Wild Reed: Pasolini's "Wrathful Christ" Michael J. Bayly from The Wild Reed, March 15, 2009
Filmsweep
by Persona: The Gospel According to St. Matthew. (1964 ... April 3, 2011
The
Gospel According to St. Matthew | News | The Harvard Crimson Jeremy W. Heist, April 16, 1966
Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [A+] One of the 15 films listed in the category
"Religion" on the Vatican film
list also listed at #10 here: Arts
& Faith Top100 Spiritually Significant Films
The Vagrant Café - Christian Cinema [Seth Studer]
'The Gospel
According to Matthew' one of the great works of world ...
Jeremy Carr from Pop Optiq
not coming to a theater near you (Marlin Tyree) review
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul (Rob Nelson)
review Salt of the Earth,
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review Loaves and Fishes, Pasolini's Gospel and the depiction of Jesus on film, 2001
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [2/4]
The
Evening Class: THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MATTHEW (IL ... Michael Guillen
Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
VideoVista review Paul Higson
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Movie Magazine International review Moira Sullivan
The Gospel According to St. Matthew Robert Stewart from Glyphs
The
Gospel According to St Matthew. A Hollywood Jesus Movie Review David Bruce from
Movie Habit (Marty Mapes) review [3/4]
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]
Pasolini - Faculty of Arts at The University of Auckland, New Zealand Classroom Outline
The
Italian Cinema: Beyond Neo-Realism
Dennis Toth from Film Notes from the CMA,
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]
The
Gospel According to St Matthew: No 10 best arthouse film of all ... Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, October 20, 2010
Baltimore City Paper (Bret McCabe) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review also seen here: Movie
Review - - Screen:The Life of Jesus:Pasolini's Film Opens at the ...
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
The
Gospel According to St. Matthew (film) - Wikipedia
LOVE MEETINGS (Comizi d'amore)
Italy (90 mi)
1964
User reviews from imdb Author: alessio from
Pasolini filmed this documentary in 1963, looking for an
account of sexual life in
What stroke me more is the great journalistic pace of the documentary, the
technique of intermixing different areas of the country, a very clever
approach. A great work still "modern" nowadays.
Sadly amusing the part where Pasolini (an homosexual himself) asked common
people an opinion about homosexuality receiving answers of total denigration.
The Cinematic Threads capsule review Matthew Lotti
Pasolini doesn’t so much 'meet' with people of all regions of
his country as interrogate them, trying to investigate the sexual mores of his
time in a typical melding of politics and sex, of Marx and Freud. Although
dated, it's vital as a time capsule of 60's
VideoVista review Tom Johnstone
Fairly mild coming from the director of The Canterbury
Tales, The Arabian Nights and Salò, Love
Meetings (aka: Comizi d'amore) is nevertheless something of an
eye-opener in its own way. It is in fact a documentary vox pop, in which
Pasolini roams the streets' corners, dance halls and beaches of early 1960s'
As we might expect in a Catholic dominated country, we are confronted by
numerous examples of conservatism about sexuality and gender roles, and we can
only guess what must have been crossing the mind of the gay, atheistic director
as he spoke to people expressing almost pathological disgust at the thought of
homosexuality. His own commentary and many of his interviewing prompts are full
of an impish sense of mischief. In one fascinating scene, a crowd of working class
Italian males, and some prostitutes, are shown commenting on the abolition of
licensed brothels in
In some ways, it is interesting to compare Love Meetings with Pasolini's
masterpiece from this era, The Gospel
According To St Matthew. On the face of it, the two films could not be
more different. One is a contemporary documentary, the other a fictional
account the life of Christ. However, The Gospel used documentary
techniques, real Italian settings and unknown actors to tell this story, while Love
Meetings gives its collage of interviews a poetic feel by inserting subject
inter-titles. Both films express the tension between Pasolini's Marxist
radicalism and the conservative Catholic traditionalism he faced as a director.
Eye for Film ("Themroc") review [4/5]
Love Meetings, Pasloini’s absorbing 1964 nationwide survey of
Italian attitudes to sexual behaviour and mores, opens with the director asking
young children where they think babies come from. As the film progresses, the
answers he gets from the adults on subjects such as prostitution, marriage,
homosexuality, sexual equality and divorce (which was illegal in
My poor knowledge of Italian geography meant that distinctions in regional attitudes were largely lost on me (although rural attitudes appeared less flexible than those of city-dwellers). Across the board, however, there seems to be agreement that the young enjoy far greater freedom than the elderly did “in their day”, but predictably there is disagreement over whether or not such a development was, on balance, desirable.
Female interviewees, by and large (though not exclusively or unanimously) agree that women ought to be allowed the same de facto behavioural rights as men, while male interviewees seem less keen on the idea. There is disagreement between realists and traditionalists on the subject of divorce - with the latter outweighing the former by about two to one. On the subject of homosexuality, attitudes are united in a mixture of fear and revulsion, which is hardly surprising given how seldom the subject was even acknowledged, let alone openly discussed.
Even Pasolini, who was never able to fully come to terms with his own sexuality, infers that homosexuality ought to be better understood as a physiological affliction that could be “cured”. Equally unsurprising, is the consensus amongst interviewees, both male and female, that the passage of the Merlin Act, which outlawed brothels and therefore the regulation of organised prostitution, had been a terrible mistake for the women and their clients alike. However, although at first this seems to reflect an unexpected streak of progressive thinking, it is in fact symptomatic of the general conservatism and resistance to change of any sort that characterises most of the answers. Although lip service is paid to perfectly sensible arguments for re-legalising prostitution, I suspect that if Pasolini had asked the same question of the same people after 40 years of prohibition, they would all have endorsed the status quo.
The central problem with the documentary is that whilst the working class interviewees are happy to express their views frankly, Pasolini finds it nearly impossible to penetrate the bourgeois veneer of respectability to get the middle classes to talk about the subject. As one responds when asked a characteristically blunt question by her impatient inquisitor: “You have to understand that in order to get answers to these questions, you would need to talk to your interviewees for a long time and waste a lot of film”.
When asked to explain why this is, a psychologist speculates that their reticence comes from both a fear of the self-awareness necessary to answer the questions honestly and a reluctance to risk negative social repercussions by saying something controversial or non-conformist. The result, as Pasolini himself acknowledges, is that there is a large black hole in the centre of his film. It ends up being, not a representation of Italian attitudes, but a representation only of the attitudes of those prepared to answer his questions. Although it is possible to guess at why others refuse to discuss such subjects, it’s impossible to know what they really think about them.
Confronted with this awkward fact, Pasolini attempts to spuriously
link his findings to a Marxist critique of Capitalism by summarising: “People
talk [about these subjects] with disarming superficiality or hopeless
confusion… all this in a country blessed by an economic miracle… naively hoping
to find signs of a simultaneous cultural and spiritual miracle. The spirit of a
materially wealthy
In fact, what the film presents is far more prosaic. It’s
simply a portrait of a sexist, homophobic, socially conservative, morally
reactionary underclass with no interest in solidarity, equality or in
understanding those perceived as different or “abnormal”. Contrary to being a
phenomenon unique to the unenlightened
Love Meetings Jim’s reviews
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
User reviews from imdb Author: MisterWhiplash from United States
THE HAWKS AND THE SPARROWS
(Uccellacci e uccellini)
Chicago Reader (Don Druker) capsule review Henrik Sylow
Pier Paolo Pasolini was a major theorist as well as a leader in the Italian avant-garde. This film, made in 1965 immediately after his famous (and notorious) The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, reveals the structuralist's fascination with the transplantation of myth, as Pasolini relates the tale of everyman, using Toto (Italy's most famous comic actor) as the father and Ninetto Davoli as his empty-headed son. There's also a talking crow that says things like “The age of Brecht and Rossellini is finished.” In Italian with subtitles. 91 min.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Given
Hawks and Sparrows Judy Bloch from Pacific Film Archives
(Uccellacci e uccellini). Pasolini coined the term “ideo-comic” to describe this unusual film that is at once a political critique and a delightful, offbeat comedy, Bertolt Brecht meets Buster Keaton. It is an allegorical tale following the on-the-road exploits of three characters: a father, his son, and a talking crow who recounts Marxist fables and philosophies. Father and son are jettisoned into the thirteenth century to serve St. Francis, a true man of the people, by teaching faith to the arrogant hawks, humble sparrows, and “dried-up Christians.” Pasolini, a great admirer of Totò, cast the famous clown as the wistful, awkward father; Ninetto Davoli, a nonprofessional actor who became a Pasolini regular, plays the son. As for the bird, Pasolini stated, “The crow is extremely autobiographical.” Despite the humor, country roads and idylls seem to reverberate with longing in this film that begins with the question, “Where is mankind going?” and ends by eating crow.
Eye for Film (Ben Sillis) review [4/5]
It’s not often that a film opens with the credits being sung, and even less common for the same singer to declare that the director put his reputation on the line in the making of the film. Normally this would seem like self-indulgence in the extreme, but watching Hawks And Sparrows, it’s not hard to see why. Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film breaks structural and thematic conventions like few others, and stands as one of the most remarkable political films of that most turbulent of decades, the 1960s.
The premise sounds simple. A father and son are walking
through the empty roads of
Despite the use of non-professional actors, save for the famous Toto as the father, in most parts then, it’s a road trip that takes a serious look at Italy’s socio-economic plight without being Neorealist (Fellini’s La Strada made the same fantastical break, but in a more light-hearted manner). Indeed, it avoids pigeonholing as a road movie too. One half-hour segment focuses on a pair of medieval Italian monks (played by the leads) ordered to spread the word of God to the hawks and sparrows, species Pasolini uses as a metaphor for class conflict, the haves and have-nots.
Underlining his point is the mixture of poverty and wealth
that Pasolini’s 1960s “Boom”
Pasolini was a talented artist, with an unusual world view; a
staunch anti-Vatican who made a film in conjunction with the Catholic Church,
The Gospel According To St Matthew, and Hawks was made at a unique and charged
point in
Refreshingly, Pasolini drops some of his more bizarre obsessions for the film. Decapitation and severed heads feature in no less than three of his works, but are thankfully absent here. Somewhat inevitably though, given that the film is only 90 minutes, Hawks suffers by trying to say too much in too short a time, and the segments sometimes feel disconnected or even somewhat repetitive. But more than any other of his films, it feels personal (He later called it his favourite work). With Hawks, a frustrated and passionate Pasolini was trying to reach out and speak to both sides of the divide titling the film, but without knowing where to begin.
The Hawks and the Sparrows Jim’s reviews
VideoVista review Jim Steel
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
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DVD Times Noel Megahey, Pasolini Volume 2
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Henrik Sylow
OEDIPUS REX (Edipo Re)
Italy Morocco
(104 mi) 1967
Pasolini's working of the Sophocles tragedy, though not
wholly successful, has its very definite strengths. Citti's Oedipus is
intuitive and primitive rather than intellectual; the myth itself is treated as
a dream set in the Moroccan desert in parenthesis between 'Oedipal' scenes in
modern
The Cinematic Threads capsule review Matthew Lotti
Admirable free-adaptation of Sophocles' play by Pasolini - it's not a film that immediately works on the consciousness, I think, with its sometimes irksome combination of pretentious seriousness and amateur elements, but I found it to be memorable in the long-term. The acting is a problem - Pasolini liked to use non-professionals - but the combination of the directors' abstract approach to storytelling (since there's very little dialogue, the conversations are almost 'telepathic'!), beautifully barren landscapes (it was shot mostly in Morocco) and innovative camera work (the violent swordfights are made surreal by shooting into the sun, effectively burning large patches of white light onto the frame) compensate. Pasolini referred to it as an autobiography - he despised his father and adored his mother - so there were certainly personal reasons for making it.
Eye for Film (Keith Hennessey Brown) review [4/5]
Fearful that his newborn son Oedipus will usurp him, King
Laius (Luciano Bartoli) of
As a young man Oedipus (Franco Citti) leaves
Along the way Oedipus encounters Laius, whom he kills to
complete the first part of the prophesy. Arriving in
When reviewing just about any other film such details would count as spoilers of the Verbal-Kint-is-Keyser-Soze variety. In the case of a classical text like Oedipus Rex, however, we're dealing with a story that the audience is surely already familiar with, even if this familiarity may extend little further than that of he's the guy who kills his father and has sex with his mother type name recognition. We're also dealing with a work which, through its very status as tragedy, inherently offers no surprises, the end answering the beginning in that inevitable, predestined, fated-to-be kind of way.
As such, the key area of interest in lies in what the film-maker actually chooses to do with their source text, the degrees of reverence and violence they treat it with. And here, unsurprisingly, it is where Pasolini's genius emerges.
While the first (literal) sign we see in the film is one pointing the way to Thebes and, from the looks of it, of classical provenance, the subsequent (semiotic) signs attending the birth of Oedipus are anachronistic – a bicycle, a uniform, a farm building – and seem to establish the time and place of the action as pre-war fascist Italy.
It's a brilliant device by which Pasolini simultaneously
universalises Oedipus's narrative by divorcing it from ancient
In terms of the first, it establishes the possibility of a
psychoanalytical reading of fascism, in line with the popularisation of
Freudian ideas within
In terms of the second, it inserts Pasolini himself into the story (the French histoire, with its multiple meaning, seems more apposite here, however) through obvious affinities between his own biography (he was born in 1922, his father an army officer) and that of his character and the way Oedipus's subsequent travails also become an account of his own Oedipal trajectory. Or, rather, don't:
“I have never dreamt of making love with my mother. Rather I have dreamt, if at all, of making love with my father (against the dresser in the miserable bedroom my brother and I shared as children)..."
Things become even more complex as the action shifts from
This, in all its complexities and ambiguities, is in turn is where the film becomes arguably Pasolini's finest realisation of the (deceptively) naïve theories he was developing around the same time, as a “heretical empiricist” committed to “a certain kind” of “realism” whose function, in line with his preference for the “cinema of poetry” over the “cinema of prose,” was to raise questions as to how reality comes to be defined and, just as importantly, with what consequences for us all.
If Oedipus Rex is a challenging film for those used to more conventional aesthetic approaches this is thus with good reason and, in many respects, the entire point: Pasolini wants us to open our eyes to the world, even if the risk is, like Oedipus, that we may not like what we come to realise in doing so...
I realise the problem is not really giving much in the way of the "is this a good film someone would want to see" kind of information. The opening 15 minutes, which are virtually devoid of dialogue, perhaps lets someone answer that question for themselves. The film is technically accomplished and well acted, if we allow for the nature of the material and the director's approach to it necessarily meaning that conventional standards of film acting don't really apply here.
Oedipus Rex Jim’s reviews
ELISAVA TdD | 14 | Pier Paolo Pasolini's Edipo re Oedipus Rex essay by Albert Berrio from Elisava TdD, 1997
OEDIPUS REX (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967) « Dennis Grunes
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
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AvaxHome -> Pier Paolo Pasolini-Edipo re (1967)
DVD Times Noel Megahey, Pasolini Volume 2
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Henrik Sylow
TEOREMA
In Theorem, Pasolini achieved his most perfect fusion
of Marxism and religion with a film that is both political allegory and
mystical fable. Terence
Stamp plays the mysterious Christ or Devil figure who stays briefly with a
wealthy Italian family, seducing them one by one. He then goes as quickly as he
had come, leaving their whole life-pattern in ruins. What would be pretentious
and strained in the hands of most directors, with Pasolini takes on an intense
air of magical revelation. In fact, the superficially improbable plot retains
all the logic and certainty of a detective story. With bizarre appropriateness,
it was one of the last films made by Stamp before he virtually disappeared from
the international film scene for some years.
Chicago Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum] (capsule review)
Apart from his final feature, Salo, this is probably Pier Paolo Pasolini's most controversial film, and to my mind one of his very best, though it has the sort of audacity and extremeness that send some American audiences into gales of derisive, self-protective laughter (1968). The title is Italian for “theorem,” in this case a mythological figure: an attractive young man (Terence Stamp) who visits the home of a Milanese industrialist and proceeds to seduce every member of the household—father, mother (Silvana Mangano), daughter (Anne Wiazemsky), son, and maid (Laura Betti). Then he leaves, and everyone in the household undergoes cataclysmic changes. Pasolini wrote a parallel novel of the same title, part of it in verse, while making this film; neither work is, strictly speaking, an adaptation of the other, but each deals with the same elements, and the stark poetry of both is like a triple-distilled version of Pasolini's view of the world—a view in which Marxism, Christianity, and homosexuality are forced into mutual and scandalous confrontations. It's an “impossible” work: tragic, lyrical, outrageous, indigestible, deeply felt, and wholly sincere. In Italian with subtitles. 105 min.
Slant Magazine review Dan Callahan
Highly regarded in some quarters, Pier
Paulo Pasolini's Teorema is basically a film about Terence Stamp's
crotch. Admirers of Stamp who have long nursed a secret urge to kneel before
Zod may rejoice in the film's endless scrutiny of his family jewels; everyone
else will be laughing at Pasolini's pretentious, free-form, dream-like
nonsense. It's meant to be a scathing attack on the bourgeoisie, but any five
minutes of any Buñuel film would make short work of Teorema.
A nameless young man (Stamp) takes up with a bourgeois family and seduces them
one by one. He starts with the loony maid (Laura Betti), who stares at him
while he sits and reads a book; we see two extreme close-ups of Stamp's crotch
(one wonders how these gratuitous shots were explained to the actor). Pitying
the poor woman, Stamp climbs atop her in his painted-on pants and Pasolini
stares at his trim little ass as it starts to grind the maid a bit. (Could
Stamp's crotch be for the characters in the film and his butt solely for the
director and the audience? Film studies majors, get working.) Stamp then gets
naked and goes to sleep with the fearful son (Andres Soubrette), consoling him
in his own patented way. Next is Mama (Silvana Mangano), who takes it all off
after feeling up his discarded clothes. Stamp goes to her, smiling his
tolerant, sexy smile, the sun blaring behind him (at least Pasolini resists the
temptation to have the sun shine straight out of Stamp's apparently all-healing
bulge).
He doesn't do Papa (Massimo Girotti, who did Stamp-piece-of-ass duty for
Visconti years before), but he does put the older man's legs on his shoulders,
definitely the film's sexiest (and weirdest) moment. Stamp seems most
interested in the daughter (Anne Wiazemsky), and he opens his legs extra wide
for her, even leers (is this the actor or the character reacting?) Teorema
loses whatever momentum it has when Stamp exits halfway through, leaving the
family to self-destruct without him. The maid goes back to her native village,
won't eat, gets gray-haired, and finally levitates (!). The son babbles about
painting and eventually pisses on one of his canvasses. The daughter becomes
catatonic and the mother takes lovers (more crotch shots). The father strips
after being confronted with the abundant crotch of a male drifter, goes to the
desert (which has been intercut throughout the film), and screams.
Is Pasolini suggesting that the bourgeoisie just can't handle the phallus? Or
is he just getting off on shooting Stamp's body and the bodies of various
hustlers as if they were the proverbial blue-plate special? It's all very grand
and vague and shapeless, filmed better than most of Pasolini's movies, but
indulgent and fairly meaningless. Stamp, one of our finest actors and a great
male beauty, plays this impossible part for all it's worth (just as he caught
the impossible mix of good and evil in Melville's Billy Budd earlier in his
career). He seems omniscient, otherworldly, haughty, and rather amused. As a
movie, Teorema is overrated and idiotic. As high-class arty wank-off
material for Stamp fans, it can't be beat.
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul (Matthew Wilder) review
Released amid the turmoil of 1968, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema (Theorem) blew the beanies off American audiences and critics. The usually blistering reviewer John Simon was so dumbstruck by it that he could only recount its plot in minute detail, like a child describing a recently witnessed car crash. Pauline Kael reported to have giggled throughout it, but she marveled that some friends appeared to have had a religious
experience. And no less a critical authority than John Waters deemed Teorema the ultimate art movie: a hundred-proof cocktail of prurience, angst, lounge jazz, and overindulgence, typifying the late Sixties as much as a Jules Feiffer beatnik or a Get Smart lunchbox.
Me, I'd say that Teorema is the most interesting--if not necessarily
the "best"--selection in the
Clearly the program does reflect some sort of cultural shift. The closest
analogy I can find to describe it is critic J. Hoberman's assessment of the
impact of Reservoir Dogs on American independent film: "At last,
the flavor of hamburgers and ketchup came to the land of granola and lowfat
milk." In the late 1940s, Italian cinema found its voice in the
bombed-basement naturalism of DeSica and Rossellini, who made the gussied-up surfaces
of commercial cinema look aptly shameful. Recovering from its postwar
shellshock,
Though Gospel isn't featured in the
Some of the characters are destroyed; others reach a state of grace through
the sexual interference of said stranger. There's nothing particularly radical
about that basic setup (which ought to be familiar to fans of Down and Out
in Beverly Hills). Rather, it's the
surrounding elements that make Teorema as groundbreaking as Godard's Weekend.
Pasolini begins with images of a blighted desert--a wilderness associated with
the urban
And yet the sensuousness of Pasolini's images combats the austerity of the conception. The resulting tension exquisitely dramatizes the filmmaker's anguished struggle between a John Donne-like, world-as-a-bed cosmology, and his very public responsibility to socialism: two utterly incompatible desires in the same body. Pasolini would later intellectualize this split in Salo, but here it has the rawness of violently excavated, extremely personal material.
"Before and After the Revolution" features other well-known
masterworks, such as Antonioni's sleek, shrewd, icicle-like La Notte
(8:00 p.m. Saturday, November 10); and Marco Bellocchio's Verdian incest sitcom, Fists
in the Pocket (8:00 p.m. Saturday, November 17), which plays like a psychosexually
charged duet between Fellini and Scorsese in a wailing high C. There are also
many other, possibly distinguished works that are unknown to me--and, in fact,
to most anyone in the
Indeed, one of the things that's most worthy about "Revolution"--its focus on rare and previously unsubtitled films of the period--makes it hard to assess comprehensively. Yet it's difficult to imagine a stronger film than Teorema--the one movie in the series that appears to take place both before and after the revolution. Has a major filmmaker ever created a work that simultaneously seemed so rational and so stark raving bonkers at the same time? Later in his career, Pasolini would learn Rainer Werner Fassbinder's lesson that "love is the part that does not produce capital." But in Teorema, he still held out hope that sex could spring the bourgeois to revolution, that it could heal the psychic wounds of the oppressed, that it could bring spirituality back into a materialist society. The concept is theoretical, certainly, but the artist is also venting his very personal, sexual desire to be as free as a bird, unfettered by convention and romanticized in his struggle.
Teorema Jim’s reviews
Teorema (1968) |
PopMatters David Sanjek
Teorema
(1969) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
Nathaniel Thompson
Teorema (1968) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
DVD Times Noel Megahey
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
The Films of Pier Paolo Pasolini Mondo Digital
Electric Sheep Magazine Pat Long
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [2.5/5]
Movie Magazine International review Moira Sullivan
Film Fanaddict Magazine [David Carter]
The
Auteurs [Adrian Curry]
Theorem, a film by by Pier Paolo Pasolini - Wellington - Eventfinder brief film notes from Event Finder
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Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
Critic's Choice: New DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times,
DVDBeaver dvd review Gregory Mesham
PORCILE (Pigpen)
To accompany screenings of Buñuel's short feature Simon of the Desert, Pasolini wanted to make Orgy, a fairytale about an 'innocent' (Clémenti) who roams the volcanic wastes of Etna devouring people. But then he added a second story mirroring the themes of Orgy, called Pigsty. A savage parody of Godard, Resnais and... Pasolini, ironically chronicling the 'existential anguish' of the children of the bourgeoisie, it features Léaud as a mystic youth whose being finally merges with 'nature': he gets eaten by the pigs he loves. Porcile is not only an exquisitely revolting satire, it is also Pasolini's most fascinating piece of cinema.
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
Two contrasting and mutually reflecting and enhancing stories about consumption. One, set in contemporary Germany and featuring Jean-Pierre Leaud and Anne Wiazemsky (both dubbed into Italian), is about the son of a former Nazi who forsakes his fiancee to have sex with pigs; the other, set in the Middle Ages, features Pierre Clementi starving in the desert and eventually resorting to cannibalism. This isn't one of Pasolini's greatest films, though it's possibly the one that today best shows the warp and woof of its period (1969).
VideoVista review Paul Higson
Pasolini's Pigsty (aka: Porcile) skips between
two settings, the bourgeois modern and the volcanic hillocks of the
conquistador age. Pasolini's cold eye on the hot earth, revels in the barren
rises where little grows and little walks or crawls, and where trapped
travellers resort to cannibalism to survive. A lively representative mix of the
wealthy do-littles populates the modern. There are the young who are idealistic
or apathetic. The elders meanwhile luxuriate and revel in their despicable
collaborative role in the recent war. The film bristles with humour, dark,
confused and confusing. The young are acutely misunderstood.
The volcanic then is a simplistic tale following one man (Pierre Clementi)
scrabbling in the scree, snatching at rare spots of sprouting green blades of
grass. He discovers skeletons picked clean and interprets it as permission for
cannibalism. He will later battle with another lone soldier, kill him and make
a meal of him. He encamps with other survivors and the four men and four women
feed on passing travellers. They slay and decapitate a passing woman and make a
gift of the head to a fiery opening in the ground. The woman's husband, who had
allowed her to ride onwards on horseback while he urinated, witnesses the
terrible incident. He returns to civilisation and calls on the authorities, the
church and the army, to act, bringing to justice the wasteland cannibals.
'Meanwhile', in the 1960s the younger generation is bi-polar, taut at two
extremes, apathy and proactivity. "Julian we are two rich bourgeois. We
are here to analyse ourselves because it is our privilege." Julian Klotz
(played by Jean-Pierre Leaud), is one of the idle rich, and his viewed
transgression is to rebel against any notions of rebellion. He is uncaring and
self-destructive. "My best quality is remaining inalienable," he
tells the beautiful younger Ida (he is 25, she is 17). "I discovered that
even as a revolutionary I was a conformist," he tells, but also
understanding, "The fifty percent conformist parts of me are suspended and
my fifty revolutionary parts are suspended." Ida (played by Anne
Wiazemsky) wants to imbue him with her romance for change, thereupon invoking a
romance with the young man. She thinks she may have convinced him to join her
in her emotive journey to
The older generation all appear to be hiding wartime secrets, collaborators and
participants allowed to smile away their prior crimes and involvement. They
spar mentally with a pretence to sides but all are fat of the same skank
animal, morally putrid. In a Hitler moustache Julian's father (Alberto
Lionello) welcomes a worthy from the past, Herdhitze (Ugo Tognazzi), travelling
under an assumed name, which had become a common practice now. They negotiate
on a history of wrongdoing. Mr Klotz is vilely comic, bemoaning his age and
awarding his contemporary a comparative youthfulness, a success powered by his
earlier evils. "I am an old fireplace while you are a modern
radiator." They see others less favourably, party guests observed in their
gorging. "
The quiet of the centuries past sequences can be close to hypnotic. The camera
is unsteady, handheld, searching with Clementi and then his excitable band of
anthropothagi, for food, anything edible. Clementi is a slim, handsome Sawney
Bean, and though he is the infectious instigator of the flesh eating it is he
that is the first to admit his guiltiness of his wrongdoing and accept his
punishment. Some of the subtitles are a little off ("Hitler was a little
feminine" becomes "Hitler was a little female"). The camerawork
is inconsiderate, unimportant; the true key to the film's affability despite
the dark themes is its keen wit. One to be seen but not one to overly enthuse
over...
Porcile Jim’s reviews
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Eye for Film (Caro Ness) review [2/5]
The Cinematic Threads (capsule review) Matthew Lotti
DVD Times Noel Megahey, Pasolini Volume 2
User reviews from imdb Author: zetes
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DVDBeaver dvd review Henrik Sylow
MEDEA
Time Out review Tony Rayns
It's worth stressing the position of Medea in Pasolini's work, since it makes much the most sense when seen in context: it followed Pigsty (whose twin-level structure it duplicates, this time within a single narrative), and preceded the much-abused trilogy (whose rumbustious humour and sexuality were apparently a reaction against the outright nihilism evident here). That said, the film stands as Pasolini's most bizarre exploration of Freudian themes through Marxist eyes: a retelling of Medea's story (elopement, marriage, desertion, revenge) as a mixture of social anthropology and ritual theatre, with every incident given both a 'magic' and a 'rational' reading. Its splendours crystallise in the casting of Callas as Medea, a virtual mime performance with her extraordinary mask of a face bespeaking extremes of emotion; its weaknesses, equally, in the casting of Gentile as Jason, blandly butch, whose presence does nothing to fill out an ill-sketched, passive role. But the real achievement is that Pasolini's visual discourse is every bit as eloquent as the verbal one he puts in the mouth of Terzieff's centaur.
not coming to a theater near you (Marlin Tyree) capsule review
Yep, it’s the Euripides classic play given a film treatment by the notorious Pier Paolo Pasolini. His treatment is vastly different from Lars Von Trier’s approach. Paolini reaches for archetypal patterns pointing to energies dormant in most of us, but horrifyingly present once he begins to unleash his succession of images.
This is not mystification on Pasolini’s (or my) part. In re-dramatizing
the ancient rituals and sacrifices of ancient
Pasolini shows how Medea has always made decisions based on her passions, something we rarely see in women of contemporary culture. You don’t merely sympathize with the powerfully striking Maria Callas as Medea, but become a part of her vengence. If you can manage to remain present until the Euripides story begins in earnest, you’ll become utterly involved (unlike the Von Trier film, where the artifice keeps you slightly removed). Unforgettable.
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
The centaur’s sermon, with its mythological semantics
("Everything is holy, but holiness is also a malediction") and 7th
Voyage of Sinbad illusionism, states the style. How does one film
Euripides? Turkey and Syria stand for Greece, with telling contributions from
Pisa and Cinecittà -- mountains like titanic anthills, caves like Byzantine
cathedrals, intense natural lighting bathing all in resplendent orange. A
loinclothed youth is led smiling to the sacrificial rack, the villagers scoop
up his blood in bowls and fertilize the earth. It might be a pagan idyll, or a
spaghetti Western. "All apparitions." Jason (Giuseppe Gentile) is a
beefcakey athlete and Medea (Maria Callas) is a bejeweled sorceress out of Piero,
they meet on the journey for the Golden Fleece, a tattered rag hurled at the
usurper’s feet. Antiquity and modernity are the gladiators in Pier Paolo
Pasolini’s sun-blasted arena, though the chief contrast is between the absolute
realism of the terrain and the heightened tremors of his visiting-alien leading
lady. Dubbing strips Callas of her voice, but her physical grandeur still
towers: Mane sweeping and eyes flashing from beneath a tangled mass of
earrings, medallions and necklaces, she gives Pasolini visual aria after visual
aria. Elsewhere in
Medea Jim’s reviews
The Cinematic Threads capsule review Matthew Lotti
MichaelDVD Region 4 [Trevor Darge]
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Maria Callas in Pasolini's Medea
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver.com [Per-Olof Strandberg]
THE DECAMERON
Pasolini manages in his uninhibited fashion to capture the anarchic comic spirit of Boccaccio's bawdy tales in this episodic romp; but the sight of the endless assembly of seemingly toothless proles Pasolini picked up as extras can be a bit intimidating.
The Decameron Judy Bloch from Pacific Film Archives
(Il decamerone). For the first film in what he called his “Trilogy of Life,” Pasolini selects eleven tales from Boccaccio’s classic one hundred, mostly those set in Naples, and loosely weaves them together using the thread of his own vision, cloaked in that of a character added to the story and played by Pasolini himself: the painter and Boccaccio contemporary Giotto. While the stories are good-naturedly sexual, in a particularly anticlerical kind of way, the film gains gravitas and focus—religion, almost—from the sheer beauty and precision of its creation; every scene is a set piece, every shot quite literally a work of art. Pasolini’s is an art of teeming hill-town marketplaces and medieval stone interiors, a love affair with the faces of peasants, and always the beautiful young men. His artist of the people Giotto asks, “Why create a work of art when dreaming about it is so much sweeter?” Making it a film is sweeter still.
not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith) review
For his adaptation of The Decameron, Pasolini tells ten stories of Neopolitan peasant life, taking roughly one story from each of the ten sections of the book. Rather than using the device of the storytellers (who, in Boccaccio, spend ten days in seclusion while waiting out the plague), the film presents the stories in two parts, with each part structured around one story that frames the others. In the first section, stories are simply and somewhat haphazardly interspersed with portions of the story of Ciappelletto, a murderer, thief, and homosexual who makes a false confession on his deathbed and thereafter becomes a saint.
In the second part, however, the stories are woven together
with a more traditional frame-story. This story follows the artist Giotto, who
has come to
Indeed, this image can also be interpreted as Pasolini’s own
vision of the divine order of this idealized medieval
The Decameron Jim’s Reviews
Trilogy of Life - The Criterion Collection
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Il Decameron: Old School Reviews John Nesbit, also seen here: CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [3.5/5]
Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Decameron Martin Foreman from A View from the Edge
Electric Sheep Magazine Paul Huckerby
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The Digital Fix [Anthony Nield] Anthony Nield, Trilogy of Life, Region 2
DVD Talk - Blu-ray [Jamie S. Rich] Criterion Blu-Ray, Trilogy of Life, also seen here: CriterionConfessions.com
DVD Verdict - Trilogy of Life (Blu-ray) Criterion Collection [Bill Gibron]
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Joseph Jon Lanthier] Criterion Blu-Ray, Trilogy of Life
High-Def Digest [Steven Cohen] Criterion Blu-Ray, Trilogy of Life
Movie Metropolis [Christopher Long] Criterion Blu-Ray, Trilogy of Life
The Digital Fix - Blu-ray [Noel Megahey] Criterion Blu-Ray, Trilogy of Life
The QNetwork [James Kendrick] Criterion Blu-Ray, Trilogy of Life
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov] Criterion Blu-Ray, Trilogy of Life,
Pier Paolo Pasolini's
Trilogy of Life - Mondo Digital Mondo
Digital, Trilogy of Life
Trilogy of Life (The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales ... John Sunier, Trilogy of Life Blu-Ray, from Audiophile Audition
Nunsploitation.Net (James Clark) review
Urban Cinefile dvd review Andrew L. Urban
Eye for Film (Gator MacReady) review [1/5]
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Il Decameron L’Alligatographe (French) best photos
Channel 4 Film [capsule review]
Laramie Movie Scope (Patrick Ivers) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
THE
Between
a jest and a joke, many a truth can be told. —Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, first published in 1475
Pasolini was born and educated in Bologna in central Italy,
one of the most left-leaning cities in the country, where his father, an army
lieutenant with Fascist leanings, actually saved Benito Mussolini’s life in an
assassination attempt by Anteo Zamboni, but during the war he and his mother
lived in Casarsa, in the Italian countryside of Friuli at the extreme northeast
of Italy, within sight of the Alps, where besides Italian, it was commonplace
to speak the local Friulian language.
Pasolini fell in love with the language and is partially responsible for
reviving and preserving it, as his initial books of poetry were written in
Friulian. For Pasolini, he began to
idealize the peasantry of the region as uncorrupted by the stain of modernity,
remaining pure and innocent, even obtaining a mythical status, as it was
connected to a way of life in the past that was destined to disappear. During the war, Pasolini became an ardent
anti-Fascist, the strains of which remained with him throughout his lifetime,
writing a sympathetic, pro-communist declaration for the front page of the
newspaper Libertà, even though he was not a member of the Party. In the early 50’s, he was forced to flee
Friuli for Rome, as he was accused of sexually molesting a young boy as well as
being a Communist, as the Party disavowed him as well, where his exile felt
like an expulsion from the Garden of Eden, suddenly finding himself living in
the shanty towns of the Roman slums, where he was immediately part of the
marginalized society of the reviled, including whores, thieves, pimps, and
criminals who had all been rejected by society.
As part of Pasolini’s refusal to conform, he romanticized this
rejection, elevating their perception in his eyes to exalted status, becoming
fascinated with the subculture of criminality that surrounded him, where he
began to write about it in essays and novels.
“My view of the world is always at bottom of an epical-religious
nature: therefore even, in fact above
all, in misery-ridden characters, characters who live outside of a historical
consciousness, these epical-religious elements play a very important
part.” His graphic depiction of the
Roman underworld brought offers of scriptwriting from renowned Italian
directors, which included Fellini’s NIGHTS OF CABIRIA (1957) and Mauro
Bolognini’s MARISA (1957), directing his first film ACCATTONE (1961), based on
his own novel, where its violent depiction of the life of a pimp in the slums
of Rome caused a sensation. Pasolini’s
film career was both scandalously erotic and distinctly personal, expressing
his own controversial views on Marxism, atheism, Fascism, and homosexuality,
culminating with the relentlessly grim SALÓ, OR THE 120 DAYS OF
While this is not likely one of Pasolini’s best films, it is
however something of a playful romp through the Middle Ages, where the director
appears to be having a lot of fun entertaining himself, having a bit of a blast
placing himself in the middle of the set as legendary author Geoffrey
Chaucer. Taking the unusual steps of
making the film in England, Pasolini recreates the day-to-day feel of actually
living in the Middle Ages, using wonderfully ornate and partly-preserved
buildings still standing from the period, including the Canterbury Cathedral, where the elaborate
costumes and exquisite details of the crowd scenes are quite simply
amazing. More than anything, however,
what stands out is the bawdy humor and nonstop display of naked bodies, where
copulating like rabbits was apparently the mindset of the times. Only using about eight of Chaucer’s
collection of more than twenty stories from his 14th century classic
novel, they do reflect a kind of exaggerated grandiosity conjured up from the
minds of the era, as each highlighted tale is presented as part of a
storytelling contest by a group of pilgrims gathering at an inn in the 1380’s
before they embark on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, enhanced by drink, the
pleasure of women, and plenty of songs.
The second film of Pasolini’s “Trilogy of Life, which began with THE
DECAMERON (1970) and was completed by ARABIAN NIGHTS (1973), what they all have
in common is an excess of sexual fantasy, seen by the director as a sign of
liberation and freedom, an affront to bourgeois tastes and concerns where male
genitalia is equally on display as women’s bare breasts and bottoms, but the
quasi discerning public saw this as little more than Pasolini’s entry into
sexploitation films, which were increasingly popular during the 70’s. Initially shown at the Berlin Film Festival
in 1972, winning the Golden Bear First Prize, the film was jeered by the
audience and subject to scathing reviews that ridiculed its amateurish editing
and acting, along with its obsession with sexual intercourse, creating often confusing
and clumsily mixed together extracts from Chaucer’s story, emphasizing the
prurient over the grander notions of the novel.
Pasolini was so disappointed that it led to his final film, SALÓ, OR THE 120 DAYS OF
While this was a costly production, with moments of supreme inspiration, unfortunately much of the initial criticism is warranted, as there is an amateurish quality to much of the acting, made even worse by the post-production technical flaws in being unable to match the lip-synching to the dubbed dialogue, which is particularly irritating in this film. Pasolini’s use of non-professional actors, which in other films heightens a sense of realism, does him no favors in this exaggerated and comically absurd version, where the film’s deficiencies, not the least of which includes a rambling, disconnected style, diminish whatever critical points are being made. Part of the problem may be the rather infantile and adolescent view of many of the lead characters, who are mere boys, and not really adults, so much of this has the prankish atmosphere of youth to it, where they’re constantly plotting and devising strategies to divert attention from the object of their real desires, such as removing the presence of the hovering husbands so they have free access to their wives or daughters. One striking aspect of the film is how often women are portrayed as the exclusive property of the husbands, where the wives continue to lay in bed all day, supposedly at the beck and call of the men, which make them easy targets for the younger sexually charged adolescents who want a chance to have sex with them, as they’re otherwise sitting around doing nothing. While the loosely-connected episodes are not separated, but instead blend into one another, using a different set of actors, the only indication the audience has of a break in between stories is a recurring shot of Pasolini himself as Chaucer sitting at his desk lost in thought, randomly flipping through various books in his library, taking an amusing interest in The Decameron, seen as an intellectual curiously removed from the constant chatter of the streets below, where offscreen we may hear the voice of his wife berating him. Part of the interest in the film is the director’s own take on a well known literary work, as he’s also a renowned poet, novelist, and literary theorist, where his unconventional approach may illuminate a feeling of mutual respect between the film and the literary work. The revolving characters, with their vastly different points of view, do produce a cumulative portrait of the era, but more pronounced than anything else is Pasolini’s visual design, veering from his extraordinary outdoor street scenes teeming with an overpopulated humanity spilling over onto one another, always vividly animated with music, livestock, and movement, to his graphic interior depictions of bedroom fornication.
If Pasolini stood for anything, it was anti-conformism, where his graphic depiction of nudity, sex, piss, and vomit, not to mention sheer stupidity, was intended to be a kick in the ass to conventional theater by showing viewers what was not generally allowed in bourgeois cinema. By allowing the film to evolve like a three-ring circus of neverending entertainment, the director has created a kind of absurd theater of the burlesque, using a series of sight gags involving characters dressed up in bizarre costumes often at odds with one another, using song, dance, farce, and slapstick as a means of provoking the audience, where the behavior witnessed is often ridiculous and juvenile, with people behaving like conniving idiots, where it’s more a mockery of the human condition. By the time he gets around to making SALÓ, however, the outrageous comic spectacle has turned to torture, sexual abuse, sadism, rape, and finally murder, expressing the origins of his own disillusionment. In equal measure with literature, painting, and sculpture, Pasolini’s film aesthetic frequently moves from one medium to another, but also one language to another, as Chaucer’s Middle English went through a series of transformations and was eventually modernized into everyday English, then retranslated into common Italian speech and slang, while providing an accompanying English dubbed version. Pasolini disliked the make believe worlds of American films, especially Hitchcock and Hawks, and seldom referred to other films for inspiration, instead relying upon the world of painters. Near the end of the film, Pasolini’s vision moves from the cluttered realms of the city to the rural expanse of the region with its small farmhouses and lush, green pastures enveloping a pastoral landscape, evoking paintings of Brueghel and Bosch which are not afraid to embrace the ugly aspects of a peasant’s life, where Pasolini has a tendency to elevate the status of lowlife whores, pimps, criminals, and murderers, who are viewed like saints, where the sacred and the profane trade places, where the ancient had more value than the modern, and the despised was more sacred than the Sacred, as the high priests themselves are despised and defiled. In the final sequence, which borders on the surreal, Pasolini’s continued depiction of debauchery and church corruption leads to the Catholic church’s vision of Hell and damnation, perhaps the ultimate epilogue, becoming a caricature of The Last Judgment, where a long procession of sinners is forced to endure whippings and rape, while Satan himself is envisioned as the ass of a donkey, painted bright red, where Satan farts and shits out corrupt deacons and friars into a grotesque world of unending copulation, where people are continually seen having sex with priests. Though it lacks the wit and savage humor of Buñuel’s VIRIDIANA (1961), the film is a grotesque and comic satire of the church and its hypocrisy.
Like The Decameron, a broad canvas on which is writ large and bawdy the life of the people. We are again plummeted into a world of lecherous ladies, ugly old husbands, willing and ready pages, ending with a superb final fling in a gaudy red Sicilian hell, accompanied by a salvo of farts. As usual Pasolini creates visual magic where other directors would never see beyond the banal, and the humour is as rich as ever; but there is a distinct feeling of strain, not to say waste, about this film. The best tales are of course the blacker ones: Franco Citti as the Devil, in the Friar's tale, blackmailing sexual offenders; or the Steward's tale, a neat variation on one of the hoariest sex gags around.
The Canterbury Tales Judy Bloch from Pacific Film Archives
The scandal of The Canterbury Tales, the second in Pasolini’s literary trilogy, winning the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival had little to do with the film’s many bare bottoms and prominent codpieces, scatological effects, and almost obsessive copulation. It is visually splendid, and shot on authentic English locations; studded with talent, from Hugh Griffith as Sir January in “The Merchant’s Tale” and Laura Betti as the Wife of Bath to a Chaplinesque Ninetto Davoli in “The Cook’s Tale”; and has all the beautiful young and rutted old faces of Pasolini’s trademark nonprofessional actors (including himself as Chaucer). But the critics wondered what it was all in service of, and the film’s “erratic” editing and language problems (its overdetermined Englishness) only chafed. Then again, this is Pasolini. Should sexual license be, in his Marxist terms, “consumable”? As noted as the Tales begin, “Between a jest and a joke, many a truth can be told.”
The Cinematic Threads capsule review Matthew Lotti
Middle component of Pasolini's "Trilogy of Life" is a liberal rethink of Chaucer's classic work, centering on the sexual dealings of peasants, rich men, young men, prostitutes and so on - it's done with a tongue firmly in cheek and also quite raucous and juvenile. The Marxist/atheist in the great Italian comes through in some of the tales (particular the one about the riches under the tree) and the sexual radical in him can't resist making a supremely dark gag out of a homosexual being burned alive while the voyeur can't resist ogling the exposed flesh (if anything, this and the other films in the trilogy are odes to the vulnerable human body). The hammy, amateurish acting and flatulence gags are things to 'look past,' and sometimes when watching Pasolini's films I think that some of the 'flaws' are actually done with great intent (although this deserves an essay and not a capsule). If you can't find at least a little tasteless delight in the ending - a depiction of Hell as a Bosch painting, complete with a devil literally shitting out other monsters - this isn't for you.
The Canterbury Tales, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Movie Review ... Bernard Hemingway from Cinephelia
The Canterbury Tales was the second film in what
Pasolini came to call his “Trilogy of Life” which began with The Decameron
(1970) and was completed by Arabian Nights (1973). If one
accepts that sex is life then that is about as profound as the association
becomes, however, with Pasolini indulging his sexual fantasies in a variety of
places and times across the three films. Here, taking for himself the role of
Geoffrey Chaucer, Pasolini subjects the olde worlde text to a Rabelaisian
reading, reducing the stories to a set of bawdy tales with plenty of bare
bosoms, bottoms and male genitalia on display. How appealing this is will
probably be a function of how much you are engaged by the latter, for though
the film is quite a costly production it amounts to little more than an
aggregate of loosely-connected episodes of such..
The narrative patchiness is compounded by the mixture of English and Italian
actors, including amongst the latter some not good ones (Pasolini’s main
casting criteria seems to have been a willingness to get one’s kit off,
reflecting amongst other things his lack of interest in acting per se) and the
dubbed dialogue. Of course in its day all this had a counter-cultural frisson
of anti-bourgeois effrontery (the film won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 1972)
that Pasolini claimed as a liberating celebration of the libidinal . This was
quite a naïve belief and though commercially successful, audiences mainly
appreciated them as peep shows, the films being absorbed into the upsurge of
sexploitation films that were becoming increasingly mainstream at the
time. A disappointed Pasolini soon recanted his claim. His final
film, Saló (1975) is the very antithesis of the optimistic
attitude to sex shown here although some might say that the references to Bosch
at the film's end witnesses the seeds of Pasolini's despair.
Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Leo Goldsmith]
“Why create a work of art when dreaming about it is so much sweeter?” This is Giotto’s question at the end of Pasolini’s Decameron. With this question in mind, the second film of the Trilogy of Life, The Canterbury Tales, reconfigures the relationship of the artist to the peasants of the stories. Instead of depicting the artist like Giotto, interacting with the people he depicts, Pasolini appears in the character of Chaucer, curiously removed from the marketplaces, fields and churches of the peasants’ world. Largely dispensing with Chaucer’s frame-story (which had pilgrims spinning different yarns along the road to Canterbury), Pasolini’s Chaucer sits in his library, musing over various tales found in his collection of books. In this vision of rural, medieval England, the artist-figure is not united with peasant life in the same way that Giotto seemed to be, rather Chaucer is an intellectual, physically distant from the scenes of human interaction, though not indifferent to their circumstances. For Pasolini’s Chaucer character, the stories of the peasants are not directly observed, but found among the books in his study. We even briefly see him playfully consulting a copy of The Decameron.
This shift in the role of the artist is accompanied by more subtle changes in the general tone of the tales included in the film. Indeed, the facts of climate notwithstanding, Chaucer’s England is portrayed in a far less sunny fashion than Boccaccio’s Naples. Each film presents its own version of rural paradise — lush, sun-baked olive groves and ruins in the former, golden wheat fields and farmhouses in the latter — but Pasolini’s camera clearly favors the bronze skin of the Neopolitan peasants to the sallow and spotty complexions of the English. In the earlier film, lust goes uninhibited: nuns and priests indulge themselves, and one character comes back from the dead to tell his friend that, in Purgatory, fornication does not really count as a sin. By contrast, the England of The Canterbury Tales is much more harsh in its treatment of vice of all kinds. Lust, greed, and hypocrisy meet with violent retribution in the form of public execution, everlasting damnation, and hot pokers between the buttocks. The film concludes, not with a beatific vision of the Virgin Mary, but with a comical, yet frightening premonition of Hell: demons rape and whip the sinners, and a giant Satan farts corrupt monks from an enormous red anus. Thus, if the beautiful symmetry of Cimabue and Giotto were the aesthetic models for the idealized vision of the trilogy’s first film, the second film adapts the paintings of Brueghel and Bosch with their chaotic, warty images of rural life. As Brueghel’s paintings embrace the ugly and raucous aspects of the peasants’ world, Chaucer’s tales are at once more scatological and more cruel than Boccaccio’s, and so this second film is that much more gritty than its predecessor.
The Canterbury Tales • Senses of Cinema Gino Moliterno from Senses of Cinema, March 13, 2002
I racconti di Canterbury (Pier Paolo Pasolini)/The ... Sam Rhodie from Screening the Past, August 2012
Trilogy of Life - The Criterion Collection
Drama,
Narrative and Poetry in The Canterbury Tales Elizabeth Scala book review of Drama, Narrative and
Poetry in The Canterbury Tales, by Wendy Harding (246 pages), from The Medieval Review
"The Dialectic of Adaptation: The Canterbury Tales of Pier ... The Dialectic of Adaptation: The Canterbury Tales of Pier Paolo Pasolini, by Martin Green (opening page) from Film Quarterly
‘The Canterbury Tales’ a fully realized depiction of what Catholic ideology calls hell also seen here: Sound On Sight (Cody Lang)
The Celluloid Tomb Killing My Lobster
Cinepassion Fernando R. Croce
The Digital Fix [Anthony Nield] Anthony Nield, Trilogy of Life, Region 2
DVD Talk - Blu-ray [Jamie S. Rich] Criterion Blu-Ray, Trilogy of Life, also seen here: CriterionConfessions.com
DVD Verdict - Trilogy of Life (Blu-ray) Criterion Collection [Bill Gibron]
High-Def Digest [Steven Cohen] Criterion Blu-Ray, Trilogy of Life
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Joseph Jon Lanthier] Criterion Blu-Ray, Trilogy of Life
Movie Metropolis [Christopher Long] Criterion Blu-Ray, Trilogy of Life
The Digital Fix - Blu-ray [Noel Megahey] Criterion Blu-Ray, Trilogy of Life
The QNetwork [James Kendrick] Criterion Blu-Ray, Trilogy of Life
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov] Criterion Blu-Ray, Trilogy of Life
Pier Paolo Pasolini's
Trilogy of Life - Mondo Digital Mondo
Digital, Trilogy of Life
Trilogy of Life (The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales ... John Sunier, Trilogy of Life Blu-Ray, from Audiophile Audition
Eye for Film (Keith Hennessey Brown) review [4/5]
The Spinning Image [Graeme Clark]
The Canterbury Tales > Overview - AllMovie Kristie Hassen
Alligatographe (French) best photos
New York Times [Vincent Canby]
DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Brian Alan Montgomery
ARABIAN NIGHTS (Il fiore
delle mille e una notte)
The Arabian Nights Judy Bloch from Pacific Film Archives
(Il fiore delle mille e una notte). For the third in
his “Trilogy of Life,” Pasolini desired to convey the Arabian Nights tales in
the spirit of their original telling. He roots this magic-carpet fantasy in the
kind of realism that he consistently drew from landscapes (here, in
not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith) review
Arabian Nights is the final film of the Trilogy of
Life and further develops Pasolini’s notions of the relationship of narrative
to an idealized medieval world. This is the broad swath of the
This is another example of Pasolni’s alteration of his source material: he completely eliminates the original frame-story of the storyteller Scheherazade (along with some of the more famous tales from the original, like those of Aladdin, Sinbad, and Ali Baba). The stories of Pasolini’s Arabian Nights are not the property of any one artist or storyteller who oversees human interaction (like the character of Giotto in The Decameron) or compiles tales from the comfort of his library (like the character of Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales). Instead, the tales of Arabian Nights arise fully formed out of the context of the people, ungoverned by any dominant individual intellect. The film’s epigraph reads “Truth is not found in one dream, but in many,” and the tales in this film seem like the endless collective dream of a culture. If Arabian Nights is the most colorful and aesthetically beautiful film of the trilogy, it is also the freest in its narrative structure and the least confined by its source material. In its beauty of color and setting, it is rather like Paradjanov’s Sayat Nova or Scorsese’s Kundun, deliriously abstract with baroque imagery and an elusive sense of place and time.
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]
Arabian Nights, the third film in Pier Palo Pasolini’s “trilogy of life,” (following The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales) feels as if it’s intoxicated by the possibilities of storytelling. This anthological film’s multiple narratives collapse upon each other turning into a labyrinthine tangle that few films, outside of The Saragossa Manuscript, manage to match. Stories unfold from within other stories, and everyone seems equally likely to begin narrating another tale and sending the film off on another tangent. They flow into each other instead of being separated cleanly. The Arabian Nights’ roots as oral anecdotes are acknowledged by this plot structure, and the movie feels wildly random and spontaneous as a result. Despite the relative simplicity of the tales that are being told, the movie feels as if it takes place in a world filled with complexities. Perhaps, that exhilarating confusion arises for Western viewers because the film casts them into a fictionalized world where traditional rules of Western narrative don’t apply. Women are active participants in the story instead of passive set decoration. Chance plays more of a role here in determining a character’s fate than temperament does. As a result, the tales don’t really end in tragedy or comedy so much as in an undeniable acknowledgement of an unseen hand that guides the events in our lives.
We don’t ever see Scheherazade, Aladdin, or Sinbad during Pasolini’s adaptation of these classic stories, but the tales that he does opt to adapt (picked from a group numbering over 400) tell us more about the themes of the source material than most previous attempts to transfer them to film have. It’s a widely held misconception that the bulk of the Arabian Nights stories were aimed at children, but Pasolini’s film does much to debunk that perception. Many of the tales are sexually charged, and the majority of them feature characters that engage in intercourse as flippantly, and nearly as graphically, as actors in a porno movie. Pasolini presents these sex scenes with total candidness, however, so they never feel exploitative or embarrassing. The combination of this sexual frankness and tales about subjects that might seem outwardly puerile (there are stories about a vengeful demon, a bandit queen, and a slave who becomes king, to name a few) creates a happy medium in which the sex seems more innocent than it is, and these “children’s stories” are suddenly made worthy of adult consideration. Pasolini’s Arabian Nights succeeds mostly because it never assumes neither frank carnality nor flights of fancy are beneath us.
Viddied Reviews Alex Jackson, also seen here: I Viddied It on The Screen [Alex Jackson]
Trilogy of Life - The Criterion Collection
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib
Electric
Sheep Magazine Peter Momtchiloff
The Digital Fix [Anthony Nield] Anthony Nield, Trilogy of Life, Region 2
DVD Talk - Blu-ray [Jamie S. Rich] Criterion Blu-Ray, Trilogy of Life, also seen here: CriterionConfessions.com
DVD Verdict - Trilogy of Life (Blu-ray) Criterion Collection [Bill Gibron]
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Joseph Jon Lanthier] Criterion Blu-Ray, Trilogy of Life
High-Def Digest [Steven Cohen] Criterion Blu-Ray, Trilogy of Life
Movie Metropolis [Christopher Long] Criterion Blu-Ray, Trilogy of Life
The Digital Fix - Blu-ray [Noel Megahey] Criterion Blu-Ray, Trilogy of Life
The QNetwork [James Kendrick] Criterion Blu-Ray, Trilogy of Life
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov] Criterion Blu-Ray, Trilogy of Life,
Pier Paolo Pasolini's
Trilogy of Life - Mondo Digital Mondo
Digital, Trilogy of Life
Trilogy of Life (The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales ... John Sunier, Trilogy of Life Blu-Ray, from Audiophile Audition
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
They Shoot Actors, Don't They? Aaron
User
reviews from imdb Author: francois chevallier
(francheval@noos.fr) from
User reviews from imdb Author: enicholson from Venice Beach
User
reviews from imdb Author: rbverhoef
(rbverhoef@hotmail.com) from
User reviews from imdb Author: MisterWhiplash
from United States
User
reviews from imdb Author: Vlad Rotariu (vlady_r2002@yahoo.com)
from
DVDBeaver.com [Brian Alan Montgomery]
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Pasolini's last movie before his being brutally murdered may now seem strangely prophetic of his death, but it is undeniably a thoroughly objectionable piece of work. Transporting De Sade's novel to Mussolini's Fascist republic of 1944, Pasolini observes with unflinching gaze the systematic humiliation and torture of beautiful young boys and girls, herded into a palatial villa by various jaded, sadistic members of the wealthy upper classes. According to the director, the story was meant to be a metaphor for Fascism, but the revolting excesses shown on screen (shit-eating and sexual violence included), coupled with the fact that the victims seem complaisant in, rather than resistant to, their ordeals, suggest murkier motives in making the movie. It's very hard to sit through and offers no insights whatsoever into power, politics, history or sexuality. Nasty stuff.
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom Pacific Film Archive
(Salò, o Le centiventi giornate di Sodoma). In Salò,
his last and most controversial film, Pasolini explores the relationship
between Fascism and sadism: “The whole film,” he wrote, “with its monstrous,
almost unspeakable atrocities, is offered as a huge Sadean metaphor for the
Nazi/Fascists’ ‘detachment’ in their ‘crimes against humanity.’” Pasolini
transposed de Sade’s novel 120 Days of
Salo,
or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) Nick
Burton from Pif magazine,
On the other end of the spectrum from Bunuel’s elegant surrealism is
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 interpretation of Marquis De Sade’s most infamous
novel, The 120 Days Of Sodom. Pasolini sets his work in fascist
This is a tough and disturbing film that shows sex as a simple mechanical function, completely devoid of passion. It also shows that it can become the ultimate expression of power and control. Before Salo, Pasolini made a trilogy of films – The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights – that celebrated unbridled sexuality. Originally seen as subversive by film-going, middle class audiences, the strong sexuality present in the films was eventually embraced by these same viewers. Pasolini made Salo in part as a reaction to this turn. Ostensibly a parable about Fascist Italy, the film also criticized it’s contemporary audience with a infamous “dinner” scene wherein the feces of the soon-to-be-slaughtered youngsters is graphically consumed.
Almost unbearably claustrophobic, Salo is a fascinating, if not horrifying vision of inhumanity and sexuality.
Incidently, in an almost fitting twist of fate, Pasolini was killed by a male prostitute shortly after this film was released.
Slant Magazine review Eric Henderson
Tempted as one is to simply process this film (indeed, to digest it and then quickly excrete it) as a poker-faced recreation of The Aristocrats, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom is more than just a blast of cathartic flatulence, cutting through the hypocrisy of hope. It is a rather humorless film of ice-cold outrage. It is the work of a man who had all but given up on anything other than his own anger. Its main obscenity is not that it presents social taboos without comment, in the manner of pornography, but rather that its aims are as high as Pasolini's subject matter gets low. (Indeed, and with regard to its sexual implications, it's functionally a great deal less provocative and dangerous than the hot-blooded libertine works of the Marquis De Sade.) In a strange twist of fate, what is an unequivocal assault on mankind's eschatological consumerism has been accorded a cachet, by way of its reputation for extremity, that borders on an embodiment of consumerism. It's a "must see" or, for many, a "must avoid" film.
In interview footage filmed during the making of Salò,
Pasolini admits he hates the leaders who were then in power, clarifying that
one always hates the powers that be at the moment of time that they hold power,
which at least partially explains the fact that the film intends to comment on
parallel eras. Taking its inspiration in roughly equal measure from De Sade's
novel, which is referenced in the film's surtitle, and Dante's Inferno, Salò
repositions De Sade's atrocity by setting it in 1944
A quartet of libertines, assisted by armed guards and loquacious prostitutes, round up 18 of the finest pieces of ass they can find, anal-retentively splitting their crop between boys and girls (and I do mean that in the journalistic sense, as some—if not all—appear to be of questionably legal age). Having been harvested, the beautiful herd is sequestered in a countryside villa that's, appropriately, about as erotically inviting as an Art Deco meat locker. There they are subjected to humiliation, rape, abuse, torture, unwelcome pansexuality, shit, blood, long stories, sadomasochism and, finally, death. Rather than present this banquet of degradation in a fever of hysteria, Pasolini films almost the entire movie in frigid medium shots. (The close ups that linger most vividly in memory are those from the dinner scene, in which viewers are treated with the opportunity to appraise the texture of shit and santorum as it clings to the diners' teeth.) Fastidiously attuned to the denial of the comforting release of either eroticism or expulsion, Pasolini's boudoirs of perversion lack De Sade's scarlet hedonism. Quite the opposite, his boners reveal only the presence of spiritual rigor mortis.
VideoVista review Michael Brooke
Apologies, first of all, for my evasive omission of a standard VideoVista rating - but anyone who's seen Pasolini's last film will know that it's such an extreme love-it-or-hate-it experience that reducing it to a mark out of ten seems utterly meaningless. There are plenty of notorious films whose notoriety stems more from official disapproval than anything else - most of the titles on the DPP's original 'video nasties' list are not only laughably bad but also laughably tame, as demonstrated by the fact that most of them have quietly slipped out onto video and DVD in recent years with little fanfare. But one of the many remarkable things about Salò (aka: The 120 Days Of Sodom) is that it's still a genuinely shocking, transgressive experience that's lost virtually none of its original potency - it hasn't been diluted by age or tamed by subsequent films tackling similar material.
Salò is derived from three sources - Dante, de Sade and Mussolini. In the original British release, a textual prologue was added to explain this - a wise, if peculiar move, since few films are more in need of some form of contextualisation (the DVD supplies Pasolini's own introduction to the film, and those in search of more background detail are recommended to try Gary Indiana's monograph in the BFI Modern Classics series). And the film's scholarly pretensions are further emphasised by one of the most distinctive opening credits ever created - a bibliography, citing works by Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes, Pierre Klossowski and others. Whether this is a sly in-joke by Pasolini or a somewhat crude attempt at emphasising the essential seriousness of his film no-one knows - it may even be a bit of both.
As in de Sade's novel, four pillars of society carefully select and imprison 16 beautiful youths of both sexes, and subject them to an increasingly degrading series of humiliations and tortures, aided by male guards and female courtesans: the former meting out violence, the latter lurid, sexually graphic anecdotes, incongruously underscored by Chopin nocturnes. The Dante influence is most explicit in the way the film is divided up into a series of 'circles', an opening 'Antinferno', the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Shit and the Circle of Blood, all of which neatly characterise the content of the scenes within them. And the year and place in which it's set - 1943, the town of Salò, the site of Mussolini's short-lived attempt at establishing a breakaway Fascist republic - makes it clear that the film is primarily about Fascism, which of course was the dominant political system under which Pasolini spent the first two decades of his life, but it's also an attack on capitalist systems in general: the film's most notorious scene, a banquet whose guests eat their own excrement, is apparently intended as a commentary on processed foods - and this does actually stand up to a great extent, but it's likely the first-time viewer will be too nauseated to want to think too much about what the scene is actually saying.
And this, of course, is Salò's great dilemma - it's simultaneously challenging, provocative and intellectually exciting, while at the same time it's virtually impossible to come up with the kind of rational, analytical response that Pasolini invites because the surface detail is so physically repellent. Although once the first circle is breached, there's scarcely a shot that doesn't contain copious frontal male and female nudity, and there's scarcely a scene that doesn't contain some atrocity or other, it's deliberately filmed in such a way as to make it profoundly unappetising - long shots predominate, and the very soft transfer of this BFI version occasionally makes it hard to see what's going on.
Put bluntly, anyone thinking of watching Salò for the kind of pleasurable thrills you get from, say, a Herschell Gordon Lewis gore movie or films made by Pasolini contemporaries Dario Argento, Mario Bava or Lucio Fulci will almost certainly switch it off well before the end or, worse, will challenge themselves to stay the course, but in so doing will miss what the film is actually saying - and while the setting may appear to date it, its points about corruption and exploitation stand up just as forcefully today.
Pasolini never intended it to be his last film (he was murdered shortly after its completion) but it's hard to imagine where he'd have gone from here: a relentlessly nihilistic experience, Salò doesn't so much teeter on the edge of the abyss as plunge into it with reckless abandon. It's no wonder that few are comfortable about making the same journey - by challenging us to even sit through his film, Pasolini forces us to ask questions about ourselves whose answers are more disturbing than any of the images he throws up on screen.
Salò, Or the 120 Days of Sodom: The Contemporary ... - Cine-Excess Salò, Or the 120 Days of Sodom: The Contemporary Distribution of Sexual Extremity, by Simon Hobbs, also seen here: Salò, Or the 120 Days of Sodom: The Contemporary ... - Cine-Excess (pdf)
Viewers'
Engagement in Pasolini's Salò • Senses of Cinema Paolo Russo, December 16, 2015
Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom Jim’s reviews
SALÒ,
OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM d: Pier Paolo Pasolini Dan Schneider from Cosmoetica,
Salò, or the 120
Days of Sodom | Deep Focus | Movie Reviews for the ... Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus
Salo, or
the 120 Days of Sodom | PopMatters
Marijeta Bozovic
Studies
in Cinema [Jeremy Carr] February 21, 2010 , also
seen here: Salo
as Pasolini's Film on Film
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review
[7/10] which
includes a link to Guy Flatley’s 1969 interview with Pasolini:
Click here
not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor) review
In the Extreme: Pasolini's Salò • Senses of Cinema Bill Mousoulis from Senses of Cinema, March 5, 2000
Salò: 15 Years of Vision • Senses of Cinema Alberto Pezzotta from Senses of Cinema, December 28, 2000
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) - The Criterion Collection 2-disc
Salò John Powers Criterion essay, July 21, 1998
Salò:
Breaking the Rules Naomie Greene Criterion essay,
Salò: I, Monster Catherine Breillat Criterion essay, August 25, 2008
Salò: The Written Movie Gary Indiana Criterion essay, August 25, 2008
Salò: The Present as Hell Robert Chiesi Criterion essay, August 25, 2008
Salò: A Cinema of Poetry Sam Rohdie Criterion essay, August 25, 2008
Watching Salò Neal Bartlett Criterion essay, August 25, 2008
Because
You Can Never Have Enough . . . Kim
Hendrickson Criterion essay, August
27, 2008
Press
notes: Laughing Till It Hurts Criterion
essay, October 7 , 2008
Pasolini’s
Rome Ian Thomson Criterion essay,
December 2, 2008
Singing
Morricone’s Praises Criterion essay,
August 23, 2009
BFI | Features | Salò or The 120 Days of Sodom
BFI | Features | Salò | A Mad Dream Pasolini’s own notes on Salo in 1974, also seen here: EuroScreenwriters - Interviews with European Film Directors - Pier ...
Sal˜ or the
120 Days of Sodom by Gary Indiana | Film | The Guardian extracts from the book by Gary
Indiana, from The Guardian, September
22, 2000
"Salò" Andrew Schenker from The Cine File,
Pasolini's Cruel Masterpiece - August 26, 2008 - The New York Sun Bruce Bennett, August 26, 2008, also here: The New York Sun (Bruce Bennett) review
Pier
Paolo Pasolini's Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom is the Good ... November:
Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom, by Garan Holcombe from The Good Web Guide,
Vertigo Magazine, Article - ANOTHER WAY OF SEEING: Pasolini and ... Stephen Barber from Vertigo magazine, Winter 2008
Must
Film Buffs Watch the Revolting Salò?
David Haglund from Slate,
Digital Retribution Mr. Intolerance
filmcritic.com (Keith Breese) review [3/5]
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [5/5] Richard Scheib
eFilmCritic Reviews John Linton Roberson
The Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem]
The Onion A.V. Club dvd review Noel
Plume Noire review Sandrine Marques
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
DVD Talk (Bill Gibron) dvd review [4/5] [Criterion Collection] 2008 reissue
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Matt Serafini) dvd review Criterion Collection 2008 reissue
DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review [Criterion Collection] 2008 reissue
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection 2008 reissue
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/4] Criterion Collection 2008 reissue
DVD Verdict (Gordon Sullivan) dvd review Criterion Collection 2008 reissue
DVD MovieGuide dvd review [2008 reissue] [Criterion Collection] Colin Jacobson
The Digital Bits dvd review [Criterion Collection] Todd Doogan, OOP version
Pulsing Cinema BFI-MGM DVD review, offering a comparison to Criterion
DVD Times [Anthony Nield] BFI 2-disc
DVD Times (Blu-ray) Noel Megahey, BFI
Salo O 120 giornate di Sodoma - SADEMANIA - MARQUIS DE SADE Sisto Garesi from Sadomania
Paradise Cinema.com [Giovanni Pistachio]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]
Cinefantastique Online Steve Biodrowski
The Spinning Image (Rónán Doyle) review
Passport Cinema [Chris Luedtke]
Movierapture Keith Allen
Lonely Reviewer Sam
Cult Reviews Hieronymos Grost
They Shoot Actors, Don't They? Aaron
Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom > Overview - AllMovie Robert Firsching
Alligatographe (french) excellent photos
Dvdclassik Review (French) excellent photos
BBC Films review Michael Thomson
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
Regarding the Torture of Others. Susan Sontang from The New York Times Magazine, May 23, 2004
DVDBeaver.com Version Comparison Gary W. Tooze
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
LA RABBIA DI PASOLINI (The Anger of Pasolini)
User reviews from imdb Author: Max_cinefilo89 from
Pier Paolo Pasolini was always a controversial figure - as a journalist,
poet, novelist or filmmaker, he was never completely satisfied unless he could
upset someone. In 1963, he tried to do the most of it with La Rabbia (The
Anger), a documentary that consisted of newsreel footage he would comment with
a very critical voice-over, read not by him but by two of his artist friends,
who would alternate between prose and poetry readings. The project was meant to
be a fierce document reflecting Pasolini's personal views on politics,
religion, war, the media and other important topics of the time. The it was
decided that his left-wing opinions had to be accompanied by those of someone
who thought the exact opposite. That someone was Giovanni Guareschi, the
creator of Don Camillo, and his contribution to La Rabbia angered Pasolini to
the point that he opted for shortening his segment and giving his
"rival" more space, since his voice was being given less
consideration anyway.
Which brings us to Pasolini's La Rabbia, the real one, available to the public
thanks to the effort of Giuseppe Bertolucci, whose family was closely involved
with Pasolini's film career (the more famous Bernardo Bertolucci, Giuseppe's
brother, was a crew-member on the set of Accattone). With the help of the Film
Archive of Bologna (Pasolini's home town), the original version of the film was
restored by using the script as a guideline: the text was recorded alongside
the existing soundtrack, and the supervisors of the project subsequently picked
images they thought Pasolini himself could have chosen in 1963. As an extra
treat, they also added unrelated footage (sketch shows and interviews) which
could give a more complete idea of Pasolini's "anger".
Such an undertaking was huge to say the least, and the result is nothing short
of astonishing: the film looks like it had been shot just a few years ago, and
it's just as well, considering the relevance Pasolini's words still have to
this day. In particular, his comments on consumerism have always been seen as a
spot-on prediction, and he confirms this with his venomous statements about
television, which he calls a "weapon for the spreading of lies or
half-truths" and an object that leads to "the death of the
soul". Such phrasing shows exactly how fearless the famous author was and
provides fascinating insight of the mind of a peculiar individual, one who can
even get away with comparing himself to the greatest "arrabbiato" of
all time (his words), i.e. Socrates (this is shown in one of the extra interviews).
Few people could say something like that with real conviction, and it's
possibly the definitive proof of how much the world lost when Pasolini was
brutally murdered in 1975: now more than ever, his voice is truly missed.
Cinema Viewfinder (Tony Dayoub) review
While shooting his sequence for RoGoPaG
(1963)—"La ricotta," which featured Orson Welles—Director Pier Paolo
Pasolini created a Marxist film out of found footage called La rabbia
(The Rage) (1963). A restored simulation (more on that shortly)
screened last night as the 47th
New York Film Festival's opener for its 13th annual Views from the Avant Garde
series, running this weekend. While experimental films have never really been
my bag (last night's moviegoers wondering who was intermittently snoring at the
Walter Reade theater need look no further... it was me), the story behind the
scenes is quite interesting.
Pasolini had been approached by producers to make a film
entirely from newsreel footage. What he created was an impassioned Marxist
screed that uses footage of everything from the 1957 Republican National
Convention to Castro's revolution in Cuba (with footage of Marilyn Monroe and
Sophia Loren thrown in to spice things up) to criticize man's selfish nature
when doing anything but working together for a common goal of peace and well-being—or
fighting against the bourgeoisie. As usual, Pasolini focuses on the lower class
as the unsung and downtrodden heroes of his piece. And a narrator drones on and
on over the footage, tying all of its disparate pieces together. Timely as some
of the issues brought up seem to be at this stage of our own lives, to this
writer—liberal as he is—the left-wing propaganda was laid a little too thick
and deep.
Which is probably why the film's producers sought to
balance Pasolini's segment with another one by writer Giovanni Guareschi, an
ultra-conservative as far to the right as Pasolini was to the left. Pasolini
was outraged, and chose to abandon his original concept of the film, shortening
it to some extent.
Giuseppe Bertolucci, younger brother of Bernardo and an
admirer of Pasolini, decided to reconstruct the film from the director's
original script. Bertolucci used footage he thought would appropriately
illustrate Pasolini's ideas, and attached this to the original 1963 version as
a prologue of sorts, clearly marked with a title announcing its addition in
2008. Then he added an epilogue comprised of newsreel and interview footage of
Pasolini himself, as an angry young political advocate.
The strongest segment is still the original 1963 version.
You can sense the indignation of the Pasolini even in his proxy's narration.
It's almost as if you sense the passion of youth—Pasolini's youth—in that
segment, standing in sharp relief against Bertolucci's more sedate
expression—the expression of an older man—despite the fact that he still used
Pasolini's original text. In a fascinating misfire, the inclusion of Pasolini's
fierce voice in the third part of this triptych, bolsters his original segment
(the body of the new film) while further undercutting Bertolucci's prologue.
Seeing the fiery Pasolini in full political mode seems to highlight the fact
that Bertolucci just can't seem to muster the same level of rage as his
antecedent did.
La Rabbia di Pasolini – Pier Paolo Pasolini & Giuseppe Bertolucci ...
Venice: The buzz on the Lido gets literal Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, August 29, 2008
Pate, Jonas
SHRINK C- 68
This is a true Hollywood wannabe film, where it wants to establish an authentic tone for what goes on behind the glitter and glamour of Tinseltown, using elements of farce before delving into a darker mood, using Paul Haggis-style intersecting stories, each more preposterous than the other, all attempting to find some hidden truths about the town and the kind of people who live there. The problem is the utter absurdity of so many happenstance coincidences, where major plot devices just happen to occur directly in the path of other intersecting storylines, all of which conveniently allow this movie to unfold the way it does while attempting to find some transparency in our lives. Isn’t that the pattern of another LA ensemble movie that uses contrivances to make social statements, namely controversial Academy Award winner CRASH (2004)? Both films are inundated with stereotypes that are meant to stand for true life, but without an ounce of naturalness, which only serves to trivialize the subject matter. Kevin Spacey plays a psychiatrist for the stars, a best selling author who is going through the traumatic event of his life, surviving his wife’s suicide, which he does by consuming as much pot as possible. While the template for this kind of film done seriously elsewhere winning the Cannes Palme D’Or in 2001 was Nanni Morretti’s THE SON’S ROOM, where Moretti is a psychiatrist listening to the mundane problems of others when his own family is hit with a shockwave and is forced to come to grips with the sudden and unexpected loss of one of their children, this version uses the collective lives of others and their extensive dirty laundry to comment upon the condition of the psychiatrist, who is stuck in a malaise of grief and indifference. As patient after patient tells him their world of woes, all we see reflected outside the wall-sized windows of his million dollar office are the self-absorbed lifestyles of the rich and famous, some of the richest people on the planet driving expensive cars, living in lavish surroundings, continually showing up at various parties, having free access to any drugs or alcohol of choice, the pathetic kind of people that inhabit People magazine or show up on entertainment TV shows because they aspire to careers obsessed with drawing attention to themselves. These folks have never grown out of the me generation. Why are we supposed to care about a group of filthy rich people whining away about their sorry lives when they have had everything all but handed to them on a silver spoon?
From the opening shot, which reveals the backside of that
famous
Village Voice (Vadim Rizov) review
We know Kevin Spacey is one
depressed psychiatrist because he doesn't shave and he chain-smokes pot. (What Elliott Gould did
for cigarettes in The Long Goodbye, Spacey does for joints in Shrink.)
Broadly about therapy, Jonas Pate's film is also about the dark side
of Hollywood, which he signifies by shooting the
famed sign from behind—the other view of the high life! But, really, it's one
of those multiple-connections movies: If I'd never been to
Time Out New York (Kevin B. Lee) review [2/6]
Take a pothead celeb psychologist, a pregnant surrogate MILF, a tortured
ghetto teen and a half dozen other Sundance character concoctions. Put them in
a blender of contrivance that splatters them across an ersatz landscape of
Kevin Spacey is the smoked-out shrink, spending half his scenes stoned on his back channeling pre–Iron Man Robert Downey Jr. He’s the nexus of a sprawling web connecting a dopey struggling screenwriter (Webber), an asshole star agent, two of his A-list clients, and the aforementioned hottie and troubled black student (Palmer). Even Gore Vidal and a shockingly subdued Robin Williams show up in this overloaded calliope. Credit director Jonas Pate, a TV veteran (Friday Night Lights, Battlestar Galactica), for capably juggling his cast in serial fashion, even as some members disappear for extended stretches. He’s both helped and hampered by the fact that characters amount to ready-made types, instantly recognizable but lacking the depth to carry more than one scene at a time.
Ultimately Shrink strains to connect its characters, practically flaunting its coincidences. The film plays like a summation and implosion of tropes that have festered in quirkaholic Indiewood for much of this decade. Never mind the crazy cast; this weary retread of trendy multicharacter melodramas is what’s really unhinged.
Moving
Pictures magazine [Eric Kohn]
In "Shrink," Kevin Spacey plays a familiar archetype: the psychiatrist more in need of help than his patients. His Henry emerges as a combination of characters recently portrayed onscreen: Just last year, Ben Kingsley guzzled bongs in between dispensing advice in the coming-of-age drama "The Wackness"; like Billy Crystal's perpetually upset doc in "Analyze This," Henry's father has a successful practice that casts a shadow on his own work; and the root of Henry's woes (his wife killed herself) bears a resemblance to the protagonist's source of guilt in the short-lived Showtime series "Huff," in which Hank Azaria copes with the aftermath of a patient's suicide. It's hard out there for a shrink.
As a result of this tattered path, the makeshift
troubled doctor genre suffers from a severe case of diminished returns.
Spacey's efforts to make Henry seem like he's worth caring for wear thin after
the third (or maybe fourth) time we watch him spark a joint outside his office
between sessions. He's one Sad Sack in need of his own advice, yet he somehow
manages to continue dispensing help at a normal rate.
A hilarious (uncredited) Robin Williams cameo brings a spark of comic ingenuity
to the story, if briefly, but the main drama revolves around a handful of
uncomplicated figures who seem more like props than real people. Marc Webber
plays a wannabe screenwriter whose druggy socializing with Henry ends up
servicing his art, Dallas Roberts takes a page from the Ari Gold handbook as an
unruly obsessive-compulsive movie agent, and Keke Palmer embodies that young
troubled student-type whose sob-worthy backstory gives Henry the chance to
finally help someone in need.
But the problem with "Shrink" lies not with the
cliché-ridden plot but with its appearance of just going through the motions.
Smartly acted and gorgeously photographed to create an artful
"Shrink" might work better if Henry didn't reside in such a busy
world. Pate stuffs a huge crowd of stereotypes into his character's life, then
gradually finds a way to pull them all together. In that sense,
"Shrink" suffers from "Crash" syndrome, which demands that
all story elements must come together into a unified whole even when it's
illogical for them to do so. "Apparently, everybody knows everybody
here," one person observes in the penultimate scene where nearly the whole
cast gathers under the same roof. Intentionally or not, his words break the
fourth wall, critiquing the flaws of the narrative while blindly continuing to
perpetuate them.
Boston Globe review [1/4] Wesley Morris
In “Shrink,’’
Kevin Spacey plays a Los Angeles psychiatrist, pothead, and best-selling author
who’s been depressed since his wife killed herself. Folks like Robin Williams,
Saffron Burrows, Dallas Roberts, and Keke Palmer play the patients. They’re all
thumbnail sketches masquerading as characters. And for about 10 minutes, I
played along. The movie introduces most of these people during the opening
title sequence, and starts forcing connections. The lovelorn valet/screenwriter
(Mark Webber) has a “Graduate’’ poster in his apartment; the troubled teen
(Palmer) has cut school to watch “The Graduate.’’
This is the sort
of movie where the teen will run into the obsessive-compulsive talent agent
(Roberts), with a hands-free headset on his ear, in slowest motion outside the
shrink’s office. She will pick up a script he dropped; you will wonder how an
obsessive-compulsive does such a thing. Needless to say everyone becomes
tangled up in everyone else. Or, to invoke a similar Oscar-winning
movie-turned-television series, they crash into each other. This is an “of
course’’ sort of movie. Of course, the valet/screenwriter sleeps with the
agent’s pregnant assistant (Laura Ramsey). Of course, she shows his screenplay
to the agent, who, of course, had once left the valet/screenwriter with his
car.
“Shrink,’’ like
“Crash,’’ is also a montages-set-to-dreamy-music movie. When filmmakers can’t
think of how to dramatize relationships, they make a little music video that
shows characters interacting with each other, with themselves, or with drugs.
There are at least two such videos here.
As for the shrink,
he refuses an intervention staged by friends, former clients, and his father (a
reupholstered Robert Loggia). He turns to his young drug dealer for advice. He
has a breakdown on a talk show hosted by Gore Vidal. He holds a stoned pity
session with the valet/screenwriter, who’s also a relative (a “step-godbrother’’).
Of course.
While writer
Thomas Moffett and director Jonas Pate strain to get more “American Beauty’’
drollery from Spacey, everything he does on screen here he’s done before. Yet
Spacey is an instinctive enough actor to make it seem like he’s made it all up.
He’s not taking it easy, but there’s nothing challenging about this material,
which is more concerned with striking the poses of good drama (those montages,
say) than with providing the characters anything natural to do. They’re cogs in
a screenplay.
“Shrink’’ wants to
tell us how connected all our pain is and how even the most selfish and
annoying people are capable of goodness. I didn’t believe any of it, mostly
because the movie takes so many lazy, tidily resolved shortcuts to establishing
a working cosmos of citizens. It’s Coincidence City.
This movie brings
to mind much better cable TV shows like the marijuana comedy “Weeds,’’ the
one-on-one psychodramas of “In Treatment,’’ and the astonishingly cinematic
“Breaking Bad,’’ in which a terminally ill teacher resorts to crime to make
ends meet. Entertainment has turned upside down once certain television makes
you believe you’re in a movie theater, and some movies send you feeling around
for the remote.
Slant
Magazine review
Ryan Stewart
Kevin Spacey needs a “Shrink” - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, includes an interview with Kevin Spacey, July 23, 2009
DVDTalk Theatrical Review
[Tyler Foster]
Screen International review Patrick Z. McGavin
Film School Rejects [Neil Miller]
Variety (John Anderson) review
Time Out Chicago (Hank Sartin) review [2/6]
The Globe and Mail (Michael Posner) review [2/4]
The
Boston Phoenix (Peter Keough) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Amy Biancolli) review [2/4]
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
The
New York Times review Stephen Holden
Pavich, Frank
JODOROWSKY’S DUNE B+ 90
USA France (90 mi) 2013 Official site
Dune
will be the coming of God.
—Alejandro Jodorowsky
Part of the monumental task of creating works of art is first conceiving original ideas, followed by the development of a plan of execution to bring these concepts to light so they can be viewed and evaluated by the public. What this film documents is the case of a classic artistic derailment, where the colossal ideas are by all accounts staggering, brought to life by an always exuberant, ever optimistic Alejandro Jodorowsky at age 84 who simply loves recounting the joys of his creation in front of the cameras, describing his own wildly ambitious take on Frank Herbert’s 1965 operatic sci-fi novel Dune, the world’s best selling science fiction novel (which included five sequels, where Jodorowsky hadn’t read the book, but a friend had told him it was great), where in the mid 70’s he began shopping around his own ideas about bringing his vision to life, eagerly pursuing some of the greatest music and special effects artists of the era, some who had never worked before in the movie business, but brought their own unique sensibilities to this mystifying creation, where Jodorowsky’s exaggerated sense of euphoria surrounding his own project is delightfully charming. In order to better understand just who we’re dealing with, a quick background check is in order, by Keith Phipps from All-Movie biography, Alejandro Jodorowsky movies, photos, movie ... - All Movi:
Born in 1929 in
Once in Paris he began a lengthy collaboration with Marcel Marceau, collaborating on some of his most famous mimeograms. He also worked both in mainstream theater (directing Maurice Chevalier's comeback) and offbeat productions. For the next few years, Jodorowsky would alternate between working in Mexico City and in Paris, developing his interest in the avant-garde and staging the playwrights who would be major influences on his film career, including Samuel Beckett, Ionesco, and August Strindberg, and the surrealists. Of special importance would be Theater of Cruelty champion Antonin Artaud and Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal, with whom he launched the Panic Movement (from the god Pan) in conjunction with artist Roland Topor. By the mid-'60s, the Panic Movement began yielding full-fledged "ephemeras" or "happenings," theatrical events designed to be shocking. One four-hour ephemera starred a leather-clad Jodorowsky and featured the slaughter of geese, naked women covered in honey, a crucified chicken, the staged murder of a rabbi, a giant vagina, the throwing of live turtles into the audience, and canned apricots. This privileging of the provocative above all other qualities would prove to be a sign of things to come in Jodorowsky's early film career.
Whatever Jodorowsky’s artistic merits may be prior to this film, they are largely absent in this documentary, which instead is set strictly in the present in Jodorowsky’s Parisian apartment and allows the man himself to describe, in minute detail, how he envisions his infamous lost film, recreating character by character, scene by scene, adding the conceptual brilliance of several of those hired, including French artist and cartoonist Jean Giraud (Moebius) who created illustrated storyboards for the entire film, Swiss surrealist painter H. R. Giger, who created the basis for the set and character design, but also John Carpenter’s special effects man, Dan O'Bannon, and sci-fi book illustrator Chris Foss painted detailed designs of the otherworldly costumes, while also luring into his cast the likes of David Carradine, Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí, Amanda Lear, and Udo Kier, while also training his own 13-year old son Brontis in an intensive two-year training session with a world renowned martial arts instructor in order to prepare him for his role as an intergalactic warrior. Every bit of Jodorowsky’s wit and charm was used to capture the attention of some of these world renowned megalomaniacs, but his precise recollection is often hilariously revealing, where one can only imagine how all of this would come together, while also enlisting the mind altering space rock of Pink Floyd and the French progressive rock band Magma, who invented their own (untranslated) interplanetary language Kobaïan for the lyrics from a fictional planet called Kobaïa for their ten concept albums. What we begin to realize as all this materializes before our eyes is the gargantuan scope of this absurdly surrealist sci-fi project, all of which takes place in Jodorowsky’s head, taking creative liberties from the source material, and having already spent nearly all of his projected $15 million dollars in pre-production costs, where the ideas were consolidated into an enormous book the size of a phonebook with all their costumes, set, and production designs, not to mention planets and space ships, that literally serves as an instruction manual for shooting the film, shot by shot, where according to director Frank Pavich, “Everything is there, everything is in the storyboard book Jodo made — the artwork, every scene, every bit of dialogue, every camera move, everything.”
In truth, with visions of grandeur, Jodorowsky’s goal was nothing less than to change the world, using an interstellar space opera to expand the consciousness of youth the world over, reproducing onscreen the mind-altering effects of LSD without ever having to take the drug. Best known for his experimental, avant-garde films, often filled with violently surreal images, his films might be described as transformative visions with a hint of the religious bordering on the mystical, where Jodorowsky is a revered cult figure, as until recently his work was largely unseen except by a core of midnight enthusiasts. According to director Nicolas Winding Refn, “You could read about Jodorowsky through a few books and magazines, but his films were basically inaccessible.” With the backing of a young French oil heir named Michel Seydoux, Jodorowsky immersed himself into this project, spending two years completing all the necessary prep work before sending his book of Dune to all the Hollywood producers, showing how serious they were by having the film ready for shooting, with shot by shot storyboards completed ahead of time in the event any studio heads had any questions, and while they admired his ideas, even his professionalism, they refused to authorize the final few millions needed to complete the film, as they simply didn’t trust the weird and bizarre antics of Jodorowsky himself, who was not adverse to the idea of a 14 or 20-hour film, who continually saw this film as one of the greatest achievements in the history of mankind, marking the arrival of an “artistic, cinematic God,” while Hollywood only saw dollar signs slipping down the drain. Hollywood simply didn’t understand that something this oversized was marketable, as Jodorowsky was going after oversized creative personas who were just as mad as he was, where their appearances in the film might have been jaw-dropping to audiences.
This venture into the world of
Following Jodorowsky’s failed debacle, Dan O’Bannon entered a psychiatric hospital, eventually working on thirteen different scripts, the last one being Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), the large science fiction spectacle in outer space that Jodorowsky had envisioned, a film that also employed H.R. Giger to create the original Alien creature, also Moebius and concept artist Chris Foss. Hollywood, being the unethical enterprise that it is, basically stole many of the ideas from Jodorowsky’s massive book on Dune and redistributed them in future pictures, which uncannily includes STAR WARS (1977), FLASH GORDON (1980), RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARC (1981), Blade Runner (1982), THE TERMINATOR (1984), CONTACT (1997), THE MATRIX (1999), and even Ridley Scott’s more recent Prometheus (2012), movies that made plenty of “other” people millions of dollars. Not to be deterred, some forty years later, Jodorowsky’s unbridled enthusiasm for life remains intact, where his massive vision for this failed venture is enormously entertaining, as he relishes the idea of describing every nuance and detail of this film to a new generation, taking great pride in seeing his ideas live on, much like the original movie ending he envisioned where his ideas are literally reborn in the films (lives) of others, where perhaps he did change the world by altering the cinematic landscape of what’s possible. Jodorowsky is a believer that art is larger than life, that it encompasses more than we can imagine, where this film literally encourages future generations to open their minds to new ideas and to embrace the challenge of possibilities. If Jodorowsky’s living spirit is about anything, it’s about expanding one’s conscious mental awareness, where this film is literally a plea for the world to attempt the impossible. As he points out in the film, “I have the ambition to live 300 years. I will not live 300 years. Maybe I will live one year more. But I have the ambition.”
Electric Sheep [Greg Klymkiw] short version
If we imagine a world without Star Wars, we can imagine a world where cinema was not dying as it is now. If we imagine a world where Alejandro (El Topo) Jodorowsky beat Star Wars to the punch with his planned film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel Dune, we can imagine him laying the groundwork for a new and different kind of film spectacle, rather than the empty state-of-the-art 80s blockbusters that spawned endless rollercoaster rides masquerading as movies.
Frank Pavich’s feature documentary is as close as we’re ever going to get to seeing what might have been one of the great movies of the late 20th century. A mere five-million-dollars short of becoming a reality, the film was to star Mick Jagger, Salvador Dali and Orson Welles. Seeing this doc is to indulge in the creative excitement that went into every second of preparing this epic motion picture. We experience Jodorowsky’s pride (albeit with a tinge of melancholy) at planting seeds for the future greatness of others from a movie that was never made. The films exists only in a massive frame-by-frame storyboard book with the screenplay and Jodorowsky’s notes – a document used to raise additional financing in Hollywood, but which was instead passed around to one filmmaker after another. Hollywood accepted the genius, but rejected the artist and, sadly, his film.
IONCINEMA.com [Jordan M. Smith]
Frank Herbert’s epic novel Dune has been a sci-fi benchmark since it’s original release back in 1965, and since, there have been several attempts at a worthy film adaptation. No one guessed that psychedelic surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky, who rose to fame for his midnight oddities El Topo and The Holy Mountain, would be the man to stake his claim for the task. After a friend suggested he check out the book, Jodorowsky (without initially reading it first) decided it to be the follow up to his 1973 sleeper hit. His goal was to use the interstellar opera to expand the consciousness of youth the world over, reproducing the mind-bending effects of LCD without taking the drug itself. Fancying himself a movie-making martyr with a metaphysical mission, Jodorowsky remarkably amassed a past and future A-list cast and crew of ‘spiritual warriors’ (as he called them) to attempt the seemingly impossible, stretching the technical boundaries of cinematic sci-fi at the time to create his version of Dune. After two years of full-bore prep, the film fell apart due to lack of a studio backer. The story of his incredible failure has become the stuff of Hollywood legend, and it’s now the subject of Frank Pavich’s deliriously amusing documentary, Jodorowsky’s Dune.
Sticking to the basics, Pavich smartly relinquishes center stage to Jodorowsky, allowing him to tell the tale himself with only by a small collection of making-of artifacts and a select few mouthpieces at his back. Now a vivacious 83 years old, the director rambles on excitedly about his many discoveries and chance encounters that led to the congregation of his insanely talented filmmaking assemblage. Casting his pre-teen son, Brontis, as Peter Atreides alongside the Kung Fu star David Carradine in the leading role as Duke Leto, Jodorowsky surrounded them with an eclectic mix of artistic giants whose unyielding thirst for creativity and larger than life narcissism often left them teetering on the edge of sanity. Thanks to his own blind aplomb and appreciation for the surreal, Jodorowsky convinced the impossible to work with Salvador Dali to take the role of Emporer Shadom Corrino IV, offering him the title of highest paid actor per on-screen minute in the world, and his famed muse, Amanda Lear, the role of Princess Irlan. And, at the height of his fame, Mick Jagger blindly accepted the role of Feyd-Rautha at a party in a chance meeting. Another man whose poor professional reputation proceeded him, the indomitable Orson Welles agreed to play the bloated Baron Vladimir Harkonnen after being offered to be fed by his favorite chef throughout the shoot. Did I mention Pink Floyd and Magma were also slated to score the film?
Now, we must take these claims with a grain of salt, as Jodorowsky nearly alone attests to this epic cast, but his vivid, often hilariously animated accounts seem to match the ridiculousness of the entire project. Where cold hard facts come into play is with the men behind the aesthetic aura of Jodorowsky’s Dune. Before Ridley Scott’s monumental sci-fi touchstone Alien came to fruition, several key men behind it were fostered by Jodorowsky. Dan O’Bannon (the writer of Alien), H.R. Giger (the artist who created the original Alien creature) and Chris Foss (one of the leading concept artists on Alien) were all plucked from obscurity after face to face meetings of spiritual connection (Giger and Foss give their accounts on screen, but sadly, O’Bannon’s voice only appears lifted postmordem from an archival interview). If Jodorowsky felt someone was not of the proper mindset, they didn’t make the cut (as was supposedly the case for 2001‘s special effects guru Douglas Trumbull, who’s name did appear in an early draft of the Dune poster). With his own stable of talented subversives assembled, he approached every major studio with a copy of his legendary storyboard book, in which the film was described shot for shot and meticulously drawn by famed comic artist Jean Giraud, a.k.a. Moebius.
Despite being awed by both the ambition of the undertaking and the professionalism of their presentation, no one believed the wild and wooly Jodorowsky was capable of a massive (for that time) $15 million dollar film that could potentially span hours of screen time. His disappointment still shows in his face as the agonizing memories float to the surface, the downtrodden Dune storyboard tome laying before him. Pavich makes impressive use of the book, weaving frames together to create animated sequences of the unmade film – one, the epic opening long take which aimed to top that of Welles’s Touch of Evil intro – giving us just a taste of what could have been. Orated by its insane author, his surviving merry men and a sprinkling of critics and admirers, Jodorowsky’s Dune is a fantastic docu-fable that brings to life a mythic failure with such verve that it might almost be better that it allows the film it sketches to live on in the imagination rather than in what could have been a catastrophic failure the likes of Lynch’s attempt. Wrapping the film with a bitter sweet silver lining, Jodorowsky pleads for humanity to embrace our ambitions, expand our minds and to attempt the impossible – all for the sake of art. If nothing else, Pavich’s docu proves Alejandro certainly did his part.
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Owen Van Spall]
Chilean surrealist director and artistic enfant terrible Alejandro Jodorowsky had a dream in the 1970s. That dream, riding the success of his cult ‘midnight movie’ hits El Topo and The Holy Mountain and backed by Parisian producer Michel Seydoux, was to make a science fiction film like no other. In 1975 - and thus before Star Wars, before the era of CGI, and before $100 million dollar budgets became the norm - Jodorowsky wanted to direct an adaption of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune.
This film was planned on a scale so large that a book of the production sketches and storyboards that Jodorwsky had created to sell the project, and which he shows off in interview segments in this documentary, ran to hundreds of pages and looks like it would sink a bookshelf with its bulk. Inside, are sketches of a film that it seems even modern CGI artists would struggle to render, and today’s studios would be reluctant to budget. In that book, and in Jodorowsky’s mind, is where that version of the film remains. Despite months of prep, no studio would part with the cash to make Jodorowsky’s film. Then Star Wars came out, and the rest is history.
Essentially the highly entertaining story of a giant folly that nonetheless salutes the power of the dreamer (even the mad ones), director Frank Pavich’s documentary is also a reminder that unmade films can have as much impact as real ones. As various talking heads (including Nicholas Winding Refn, who claims to be one of the few to have read the Dune production book) attest, this unmade Dune has become something of a legend in Hollywood and beyond, a concept before its time pointing the way to an alternate history where it, and not Star Wars, pushed the boundaries of what dreams 1970s filmmaking techniques could put on screen.
It helps Pavich’s film hugely that Jodorowsky, amazingly vigorous at 84, is never anything less than captivating, funny, and passionate when on screen. Alternating in interviews between wildly overblown statements about how Dune was going to be the most epic artistic achievement since the Mona Lisa and ranting about the ignorance of pig-headed studio executives, the irrepressible Jodorowsky is the portrait of the artist as his own worst enemy. Though Pavich’s film is sympathetic towards the manic director, there is little doubt that studio executives were not without reason when it came to denying him the presumably dozens of millions he would’ve needed to make such a ridiculously ambitious epic. Jodorowsky himself admits he wanted the film to be 14 hours-plus in running time. He saw himself and his crew, most of whom were assembled seemingly from random meetings in hotel lobbies or at parties, as spiritual warriors on a quest. Casting Salvador Dali as the evil galactic emperor? No problem. Putting his own young son through two years of martial arts training so he could take on the role of Paul Atreides?
A necessary sacrifice of flesh and blood for the god of art. Mick Jagger and Orson Welles were apparently on board at some point. That this ramshackle project might require convincing a skeptical studio to part with its money, and audiences to actually come and see this film, seems to not have featured much in Jodorowsky’s thinking back then. He claims he hadn’t even read the novel when he pitched the idea to Seydoux.
But what dreams the man had! Pavich’s film, through stills and gorgeous animated sequences, takes us inside the Dune book to give us a brief taste of the mind bending tale Jodorowsky was cooking up, with creatures and worlds that looks like they would’ve made Avatar look run of the mill had they been made concrete. The creative team Jodorowsky patched together in his own haphazard way, was a rich one indeed, including artists Moebius, Chris Foss and HR Giger, as well as writer/producer Dan O’Bannon, all of whom would make their mark in Hollywood and international filmmaking later.
Jodorowsky sadly admits that his own failed project in some ways helped sow the seeds of more successful ones, as the creative team he brought together fragmented and later orbited around other endeavours. O’Bannon, broke after selling the shirt off his back to move to Paris to work on Dune, staged a glorious comeback by penning a small science fiction film known as Star Beast with co writer Ron Shusset. Sold to Twentieth Century Fox, the project became Alien, whose creature was designed by none other than Dune fellow traveller HR Giger. Jodorowsky and Moebius recycled many of their original concepts in their long-running Incal comic-book collaborations.
Whether or not you feel Jodorowsky’s unmade film would’ve been an epic success or sunk a studio, Pavich’s film is a highly enjoyable romp through the history of one of Hollywood’s great ‘what ifs?’.
Alejandro Jodorowsky - Unseen Dune Dune Behind the Scenes, by Alejandro Jodorowsky
“Jodorowsky's
Dune”: The sci-fi classic that never was - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, May 19, 2013
New Republic [David Thomson] March 20, 2014
Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]
Klymkiw Film Corner [Greg Klymkiw] long version
ErikLundegaard.com [Erik Lundegaard]
Slant Magazine [Jesse Cataldo]
Krell Laboratories [Christianne Benedict]
Sound On Sight John McEntee
Independent Ethos [Hans Morgenstern]
The Film Stage [Raffi Asdourian]
Cinema365 [Carlos deVillalvilla]
DVDTalk.com - theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
Jodorowsky's Dune Randy Miller III from DVD Talk, Blu-Ray
Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]
Film School Rejects [Michael Treveloni]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
Interview
with Alejandro Jodorowsky - Electric Sheep Maga Virginie
Sélavy interview from Electric Sheep Magazine, April 16, 2007
Doomed 'Dune' Was Generations Ahead Of Its Time Scott Simon interview from NPR, March 22, 2014
Entertainment Weekly [Chris Nashawaty]
The Hollywood Reporter [Stephen Dalton]
Beyond Jodorowsky's Dune: 10 greatest movies never made Christian Blauvelt from The BBC, March 24, 2014
Orson Welles: The most glorious film failure of them all - The G David Thomson from The Guardian, October 22, 2009
Albany.com - The Reel Deal [Jay Matthiessen]
The Star-Ledger [Stephen Whitty]
'Jodorowsky's Dune' - Washington Post Ann Hornaday
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel [Duane Dudek]
Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages [Alan Scherstuhl]
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
Los Angeles Times [Robert Abele]
RogerEbert.com [Matt Zoller Seitz]
New York Times [Jeannette Catsoulis]
The Psychomagical Realism of Alejandro Jodorowsky - NYTim Eric Benson from The New York Times, March 14, 2014
DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
Jodorowsky's Dune - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pawlikowski, Pawel
THE LAST RESORT A- 93
A small gem of a film
which is basically a miniature story inside a larger portrait of social
realism, shot with meticulous detail by Ryszard Lenczewski, pared down to its basic
minimal ingredients never once hitting a false note. Pawlikowski was fortunate to work with
Russian actress Dina Korzun as Tanya, as she’s superb throughout. Apparently given only sketches for a script,
she carries the film in nearly every scene, speaking to her son Artiom (Artiom
Strelnikov) in unsubtitled Russian while speaking a completely believable
broken English. Arriving in
All of this slowly
unravels in the pre 9/11 world, back in the good old days, but it takes her
awhile to realize what’s going on.
Meanwhile, her son is already running with a small crowd of petty
vandals, but also meets Alfie (Paddy Considine), the appropriator of contraband
and one of the few merchants working in the region. Tanya was a children’s book
illustrator back home and has with her a single predominately blue painting
that when Alfie sees it says it makes him feel like crying. But nothing at this end of the world is as it’s
supposed to be, as Tanya is easy prey to Les (Steve Perry), an oily snake of a
man who’s attempting to exploit confused and disoriented immigrants for his
Internet sex business. She and Artiom
can see through him straight away, but she hasn’t any other options. The government gives them food vouchers, but
when they order fish, Artiom pleads that there’s no fish in the fish, it’s all
batter. The longer they stay, the more
helpless they feel, asking Alfie if he can find someone to smuggle them
out. But that costs money, leaving them
no way out.
Despite the minimal length of the film, the pacing is leisurely featuring many ponderous moments where there’s simply nothing to do, where the exceptional music from Max de Wardener perfectly describes the mood, quiet, repetitive, but lilting, as if rocked by the waves from the nearby sea. Overall the talent is excellent in the film, as is the attention to detail, as the filmmaker is always finding just the right touch in this makeshift prison where people are trying to pass the time without losing their humanity. Korzun, especially, makes her plight ours, as we identify whole-heartedly with her situation. When Alfie befriends the two of them, for whatever reasons, she’s immediately suspicious, as men have deceived her all her life. But his life was no picnic either. This never rises to a major work, as it pleads no political case, it simply shows life as it is in this neck of the woods and much of it isn’t pretty, but the believability factor is quite high, and there’s nothing phony about the developing relationship where Artiom would just as soon they lived with Alfie. Tanya may have been confused and ignorant in the opening, but this little slice of life has opened her eyes and ours as well. When it opened, it double-billed with Guy Maddin’s short 5-minute “Prelude” at the 2000 Toronto Fest, THE HEART OF THE WORLD, which, unlike this film, had kick-ass energy, making this one of the best viewing experiences of the year.
Tanya (Korzun) and
son Artiom (Strelnikov) arrive at Stansted airport from Moscow but don't get
past immigration. Her fiancé never shows. She claims political asylum. The pair
are dumped in Stonehaven (aka Margate) in midwinter, where they are expected to
subsist on vouchers until their case can be considered. But the desolation of
this grey open prison (Britain is made to look like the old Eastern Bloc) is
not allowed to overshadow a tentative, tender courtship between Tanya and a
sympathetic local bingo caller Alfie (Considine). Compassion, it seems, tempers
the Polish-born director's fiery conviction.
Eye for
Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review
[4/5]
At a time when New British Cinema is churning out pseudo American pap, it takes a Polish documentary maker to show what can be done on a miniscule budget in a depressed south coast town.
Last Resort fits into the contemporary fascination with asylum seekers, although writer/director Pawel Pawlkowski has no intention of scoring political points. What interests him are the quirky characteristics that raise people above emotional and cultural despair.
Tanya is Russian and comes to
"Be my friend," she says. "Trust me."
The unseen fiance doesn't want to know and she is left at the mercy of Immigration Services, which means a police escort to Margate where she is dumped in an unfurnished high rise apartment, with the prospect of 18 months living off food vouchers, surrounded by strangers who don't speak any recognisable language.
The film has a rare organic feel to it, as if Tanya's story evolves naturally from the situation she finds herself in.
Her character is beautifully realised by Dina Korzun, emotionally insecure ("I always need to be in love"), angry ("This city is like punishment for me") and quietly determined.
If this was
It is not bureaucracy's rule-playing, or the failure of democratic hyperbole, that matters here. It is the people and how they are with each other and what they do to survive the system.
indieWIRE Andy Bailey
A 75-minute gem from
But writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski, working with the doc division of BBC Films, has created a winsome screen heroine in Tanya, a Russian emigre (played by irresistible newcomer Dina Korzun) who arrives in London with her 10-year-old son Artiom (Artiom Strelnikov) only to discover that her cold-feet British fiance; is nowhere to be found. In a fit of desperation Tanya requests political asylum, instantly thrusting her into a bureaucratic nightmare of forms, queues, meal vouchers and contempt. Relocated to a deserted seaside resort called Dreamland, Tanya and Artiom become part of a refugee community relegated to "designated holding areas" within a miserable high-rise council estate where rampaging kids peddle used appliances and black market vodka through its cyclone-fence perimeter. It's a modern-day concentration camp, right down to the surveillance cameras and predatory guards.
Tanya tries to find work -- she's hired by a sleazy cybersex
mogul (Lindsey Honey) to perform
soft porn acts over the Internet -- until a kindly video arcade manager named
Alfie (Paddy Considine, in
another winning performance) offers his assistance. A self-confessed
undesirable, Alfie takes streetwise-beyond-his-years Artiom under his wing and
redecorates Tanya's squalid apartment. He's obviously smitten, though Tanya's
hesitant to trust another suitor -- "I think she loves men who make her
cry," Artiom tells Alfie in broken English, in the film's most heart
wrenching moment. Later in the film Tanya tells Alfie she once wrote children's
books for a living, a devastating admission when you consider how many millions
There's a touch of wide-eyed Emily Watson in Dina Korzun's Tanya, not to mention shades of "Breaking the Waves" in the movie itself, though Pawlikowski isn't after cheap hand-held melodramatics and heart-tugging pathos -- he's a committed documentary filmmaker who has tried (with unqualified success here) to inject his social realism with a more genuine narrative thrust. He's peppered "The Last Resort" with Loach-like scenes depicting the mindless leisure of the bingo hall or the noxious funk of the fish-and-chips shop, which makes the film feel like something of an empty shell. The other film it recalls is "Stranger Than Paradise," with its wide-open spaces and immigrant's soul burn.
But the characters in Pawilowski's film are so credible;
their situations so convincingly wrought that it manages to transcend its
chilly veneer with remarkable ease. Part of this was undoubtedly due to the
unique shooting structure of the film. Pawlikowski started the project without
a proper script. Scenes and dialogue grew out of workshops with the actors held
prior to filming. Several scenes emerged spontaneously during the chronological
shoot and -- as in David Gordon Green's
majestic indie discovery "George
Washington" --cast and crew slept and ate under one roof during the
entire production. Communal living may have been the downfall of Lukas
Moodysson's hand-held heart-stirrer "Together" -- the only other film at
User comments from imdb Author:
Alice
Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from
When Jean-Luc Godard made '2 or 3 Things I know about her' in
1967, he was trying to capture the monumental soullessness of consumerist
society as embodied in its high-rise tenements and the like. The problem was,
as Eric Rohmer noted, Godard's camera couldn't help the ugly look beautiful.
Something of the sort happens here. The Russian heroes are sent to a dismal
English sea-resort, Stonehaven, in 'the armpit of the universe', its very name
suggesting a negating of 'haven', refuge, home, by 'stone', architectural,
bureaucratic. This is where all asylum seekers are stranded by the British
government, their applications taking over a year to process. It is a literal
prison, with fences, vigilant policemen, huge dogs, and surveillance cameras
(pointedly compared to the porn monitors).
In one alarming scene, the film stock changes to grainy video, following Tanya
and Artyom as they try to leave for
The streets are littered with bored packets of refugees, endlessly queuing for
the one telephone, joylessly playing the gaming machines. As during the war,
food is rationed, with vouchers to chippers where the battered fish contain no
fish.
This is all grim enough. But even if Stonehaven wasn't a refugee camp, it is
still a sea-resort off-season, its amusements ostentatiously unused, tediously
rusting, just lying there like beached whales. In this atmosphere, any sign of
colour or sound - eg the gaming parlour - seems forced and artificial. Tanya's
huge tower-block stands like a boil in this armpit. Stonehaven is like an
economically deprived, northern town during the 80s, by the sea. Kids have
nothing to do but smoke, get drunk , smash things, steal. The one thriving
business in the town is an internet porn company.
A horrible place, hell frozen over. You can imagine how a Mike Leigh or Ken
Loach might film it, mercilessly emphasising its soul-destroying numbness. When
Tanya first enters her designated flat, she looks out the window at the arcade,
where 'Dreamland' is proclaimed in dull neon. The point seems laboriously
obvious - if this is a dream, it is a nightmare, and I want to wake up. And
yet, somehow, Pavlikovsky does make Stonehaven a dreamland: if not the land of
your dreams, than certainly a land in your dreams.
It's not just that these old dilapidated pleasure resorts have a perverse
Benjaminian nostalgic beauty, not necessarily a reminder of former happiness,
but of a former, failed idea of what might constitute happiness. It's not just
that the mundane paraphernalia of a sea resort, such as the bright auburn
carousel on top of a gaming machine, or the tacky colour of tatty wallpaper
with a
A lot of it has to do with the old cliche of looking at the everyday through
new eyes. The very first sequence, as Tanya and Artyom sit in an airport
luggage carousel waiting for the exit light, alerts us to the strangeness of
the realism. Even dull shots emphasising immovable tedium, such as the repeated
views of the tower-block, becomme magical, because of the different camera
angles and the differing quality of the sky light. This light casts a very
unEnglish colour over the misery throughout, breathtaking lilacs, blues and
olives. The violence of the sea can break up the staticness of the image. Even
something as oppressively routine as bingo night is made to seem alien,
fantastic. That this is a transforming vision is suggested by Tanya's beautiful
painting, which looks like an intricate Eastern tapestry, and suggests how
something flat can have resonance. When she leaves, she takes her vision with
her, but she leaves the painting with the already marvellously strange Alfie,
hopefully galvanising him into a new way of looking at the world, as
she/Pavlikovsky did us. That a journey into a strange land so harrowing, that a
romance ending up unconsummated and in a shattering act of violence
(reminiscent of Shane Meadows' films, but undermining his bleakness) should
result in a film so uplifting, so heartening of spirit, is only one of
Pavlikovsky's miraculous achievements.
BFI | Sight & Sound |
The Cruel Seaside Iain
Sinclair from Sight and Sound, March
2001
World Socialist Web Site David Walsh
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) : "eerily convincing spontaneity" also seen here: Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [9/10]
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Arthur Lazere
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
DVD Times Noel Megahey
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3/4]
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
User reviews from imdb Author: bob the moo from Birmingham, UK
User reviews from imdb Author: justingmorrison from Kerry, Ireland
SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [3/4]
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [3/4]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B]
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]
Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Owen Gleiberman
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]
BBC Films (George Perry) review
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan)
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
MY SUMMER OF LOVE B+ 91
Made by the director of an austere little gem of a film THE LAST RESORT (2000), the first feature of this accomplished Polish director who got his start making documentaries for the BBC (TRIPPING WITH ZHIRNOVSKY). You would think that on the surface, by the title, this would be an idyllic love story filled with fluidity and grace, aided by an affection for close ups, a hand held camera and some lush cinematography by Ryszard Lenczewski, who uses the light and the pastoral landscapes like brush stokes, but it turns out to be a carefully observed study of class difference, filled with unresolved issues and ambiguity. Co-written by the director and Michael Wynne, adapting parts of a novel by Helen Cross, this is a somewhat minimalist coming-of-age story of two equally brash young girls who find each other as a way of dealing with their own boredom. Nathalie Press is the exuberant lead Mona, filled with freckles and an untapped energy and a dire need to get away from her born again brother Phil (Paddy Considine), who is starting to give her the creeps, who fills his life with Jesus as a means of dealing with the guilt over his former life of crime. There’s a nice scene where she misses who he used to be, offering a plea for his genuine self, but he’s too engulfed in his own obsessions. They live alone above what used to be a pub, formerly known as the Swan, but the brother has turned it into a religious meeting ground, where the murmur of prayer is always to be heard, which drives Mona as far away as possible, into the waiting arms of Tamsin (Emily Blunt), supposedly expelled from boarding school, the rich heir to a fortune living on a giant estate nearly by herself, as her parents are both off on various escapades leaving her to her own enterprise, playing the cello, sipping brandy, and listening to Edith Piaf recordings. The two girls carry on with an air of innocence, indulging a spirit of youth, exploring their own as yet undeveloped personas, playing pranks on others, riding a motorbike together and playing in the woods, swimming in the streams, and generally carrying on like the best of friends, where even a touch of love is in the air. But as soon as they get serious and announce their feelings for one another, where Tamsin vows “We must never be parted. We’re going to spend our lives together. If you leave me, I’ll kill you.” Mona replies in total earnestness, “If you leave me, I’ll kill you, then I’ll kill myself.” Mona vows to leave her brother, who Tamsin has exposed as a fraud, and pays a heavy price to do it, but Tamsin’s parents have returned, changing her total disposition to that of a spoiled, pampered brat, calling herself a fantasist, but in truth, a clever deceiver, barely recalling any vows to Mona, a stunning revelation of emptiness, instantly exposing the disparity between class and privilege, showing us the real worth of wealth, leaving Mona floundering in anguish, alone, but easily the richer and more worthy of the two.
Premiere.com review Glenn Kenny
Polish-born director Pawel Pawlikowski’s second fiction feature, freely adapted by the director and Michael Wynne from a novel by Helen Cross, is a disarming story of two young women of very disparate backgrounds colliding into a risky, beguiling affair. At the beginning of the titular summer in a Yorkshire town, Mona (Natalie Press) hasn’t a lot to look forward to: Her partner in carnal relations (as we see later in the film, it won’t do to call him a boyfriend) has thrown her off, and her brother (the increasingly reliable Paddy Considine, who also has a nice role in Cinderella Man) has come out of prison born-again; we first see him emptying liquor bottles in the pub he and Mona inherited from their parents, the better to convert the spot into a Christian meeting place. One day, toddling about on her engineless scooter, the bright-eyed blond meets the almost witchy Tamsin (Emily Blunt), whose fairy-tale appeal is enhanced by the fact that she lives in a veritable castle, complete with neglectful parents. The two become passionate friends, then more. Beautifully acted by the two leads and filled with astonishingly enacted and acutely observed instances of the kind of magic that happens when two people get lost in each other (even when what they’re getting lost in isn’t the “real” person), this is as wonderfully realized an observation of female affinity as 1999’s great The Dreamlife of Angels.
Polish-born Pawlikowski has already filtered his daring background in documentaries (for which he chewed the breeze with an extreme Russian nationalist and hung out with a crazed Serbian warlord) into two exceptional features, both made and set here in Britain: ‘Twockers’ and ‘Last Resort’. Famously, he also abandoned the doomed project that morphed into the dreary ‘Sylvia’ when he tired of his producers’ restrictions. Now, with typical bravado, Pawlikowski has chopped up and distilled Helen Cross’ source novel into a free-wheeling, romantic and singular study of teenage sexuality and obsession that unites two exceptional and exceptionally well-paired young actresses, Natalie Press and Emily Blunt.
Alison Goldfrapp’s dreamy, mysterious music sets the tone for
this lyrical exploration of one summer in the lives of two
Much is made of Pawlikowski’s approach to filmmaking, which incorporates extended periods of casting, improvisation and workshop and an intense, DIY approach to the shoot itself, when he likes to re-create scenes even as the camera rolls. It’s a documentary approach, but the film never feels like it: the dialogue is rich; the acting superb. Furthermore, Pawlikowski cares for social truth, but never treads awkwardly in this territory. For him, everything is in the characters: they reveal everything and much else is concealed or only subtly revealed in the background. Here, that makes for an unusually hypnotic, involving and charming experience.
Film Comment Kristin M. Jones from Film Comment, May 2005
"If you leave me, I'll kill
you," two teenage beauties whisper to each other as they kiss in front of
a blazing fire, their silhouetted profiles intersecting like strange flowers.
In Pawel Pawlikowski's impressionistic, radiant, and psychologically feverish
romance My Summer of Love, which is very loosely based on the central
relationship in Helen Cross's 2001 eponymous, Yorkshire-set novel, characters
seek salvation by controlling others or surrendering control of their lives,
but their words often fuel self-delusion and clear a path for betrayal. A
writer-director who has made numerous documentaries in addition to the
narrative features The Stringer (98) and Last Resort (00),
Pawlikowski works intuitively, with an emphasis on visual storytelling. In My
Summer of Love he sketches an emotional landscape as replete with dramatic
shifts as the physical terrain, with its hills and valleys, moors and forests.
The movie's heart belongs to its most
sarcastic but ardent character: a scrappy, gravelly voiced gamine with a
strawberry-blonde mane and abundance of winsome freckles named Mona (Natalie
Press), who lives with her ex-con big brother Phil (Paddy Considine) above the
Swan, a pub their mother ran before she died of cancer. Having found God while
in prison, Phil has poured the pub's inventory down the sink and begun hosting
prayer sessions for a flock of childishly pious townsfolk. He also sets about
building an enormous crucifix to be planted atop a hill overlooking the town.
Dumped by a local married lout and constantly berated by her brother, Mona
escapes from her troubles on a scooter. While sunning herself in a meadow one
day, she encounters the coolly elegant, dark-haired Tamsin (Emily Blunt), who
materializes on a white horse like the heroine of a 19th-century novel.
Mutual curiosity quickly develops into an intoxicating infatuation after Mona
accepts an invitation to visit this exotic creature at her house, which is
cocooned in ivy, filled with lovely, gleaming objects, and has an aura of
enchantment. In her parents' absence, Tamsin swans around her home, telling
fantastic stories and hilariously pontificating, advising her friend to read
Nietzsche, "Or Freud, you know." The girls' growing mutual obsession
leads to conflicts with Phil, experimentation with the occult, and eventually
their own falling-out. An instinctive, mercurial actress, Press plays Mona with
alternating wide-eyed sweetness, earthy sensuality, or raucous rebelliousness,
while Blunt brings an air of sly complacency to the role of the more
manipulative Tamsin; together, they have a believably addictive chemistry.
Pawlikowski's treatment of the love scenes is also refreshingly natural, free
of any tinge of discomfort with female adolescent sexuality - in many ways
theirs could be an adult relationship, or a heterosexual one. At the same time,
the movie's down-the-rabbit-hole sense of mystery and mounting exhilaration is
heightened by the moody whistling and vocals of Goldfrapp's soundtrack.
Ryszard Lenczewski's superb cinematography
effectively captures the rhythm of the girls' volatile interactions and growing
obsession. His handheld camerawork has a quicksilver alertness, at one point
imperceptibly zooming in and out of Mona's face during the scene in which she
finds Tamsin playing Saint-Saëns's "The Swan" on the cello after
entering her friend's magical house for the first time. Pawlikowski has a
sculptural sense of space, which is often heightened by imaginative framing and
vivid color: some of the film's most resonant images suggest different levels
of reality between the interior and exterior of the house, or between the
working-class homes in the valley and Tamsin's posh manse nestled in a wooded
area high above. In one ravishing panoramic shot, the cross, which Phil has
successfully mounted on a golden hill, parallels a tall smokestack rising from
the town in the foreground, evoking the born-again Christians' yearning to
escape their mundane lives in an otherworldly place marred by postindustrial
decay. Pawlikowski, who created Phil's character by drawing on his experiences
working on a documentary about a group of British fundamentalist Christians,
pointedly contrasts the vitality of Mona and Tamsin's love affair with Phil's
brittle, puritanical fervor. He has also stated in several interviews his
awareness that the location was once the site of witch trials and religious
wars and that he aimed for a feeling of timelessness by eliminating signs of
contemporary mass culture. My Summer of Love's depiction of elemental
passion set against deadening piety echoes similar themes in such Yorkshire-set
Brontë works as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, while the lush
landscapes, industrial blight, thwarted passion, and memories of pagan ritual
recall novels by Thomas Hardy (think Tess of the d'Urbervilles arrested
at Stonehenge after murdering for love). If this bold and lyrical movie has a
flaw, it's that it may leave some viewers wishing its compelling characters
inhabited a less impressionistic and more fleshed-out, novelistic narrative.
But, although he aggressively reimagines the summer love story as a tale of
grand passion evocative of romantic and post-romantic literature, Pawlikowski
stays true to its fleeting essence.
Kristin M. Jones is a film and art critic based in
CBC.ca Arts (Katrina Onstad) review
AboutFilm.com (Carlo Cavagna) review [A-]
Village Voice (Michael Atkinson) review
The Onion A.V. Club review Keith Phipps
Jigsaw
Lounge (Neil Young) review [6/10] longer review: here
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul (Jessica Winter)
review
New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review
Slant
Magazine review
Ed Gonzalez
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]
Film Journal International (Erica Ebeel) review
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
Film Monthly (Matthew Vasiliauskas) review
The New York Sun (James Bowman) review also seen here: James Bowman review
Movie-Vault.com (Avril Carruthers) review [9/10]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Joel Cunningham) dvd review
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [2/4]
DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review [4/5]
DVD Verdict (Rob Lineberger) dvd review
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review George Wu
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
Long Pauses Darren Hughes
Georgia Straight (Ken Eisner) review
SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [2.5/4]
Tiscali UK review Paul Hurley
FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [B]
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B-] also seen here: Eric D. Snider
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B]
A Nutshell Review Stefan S
Eye for Film (Scott Macdonald) review [3.5/5]
filmcritic.com (David Thomas) review [4/5]
sneersnipe (David Perilli) review
Exclaim! review Allan Tong
CHUD.com (Ian Arbuckle) dvd review
The Village Voice
[J. Hoberman]
Salon.com [Andrew O'Hehir] which includes an interview with the
director,
Entertainment Weekly review [A] Owen Gleiberman
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[3.5/4]
BBCi - Films Neil Smith
Boston Globe review [2.5/4] Ty Burr
The Boston Phoenix review Peg Aloi
Washington Post (Michael O'Sullivan) review
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Paula Nechak
San Francisco Chronicle [Ruthe Stein]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The
New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
THE WOMAN IN THE FIFTH B+ 91
Polish director
Pawel Pawlikowski, still working exclusively in Britain where it’s been seven
years since his last film, is a literature and philosophy expert, doing his
post graduate work at
Desperately hoping to reconnect with his daughter, all he can do is watch from afar, as he’s a picture of a distraught man living in exile, where he ends up down and out in the underbelly of Paris where the sins of the past prevent him from finding the world he’s looking for, perhaps re-inventing one instead. Shot by Ryszard Lenczewski, much of this feels like getting caught up in a dreamlike nightmare, where there are atmospheric mood shots of gothic imagery or dreamy images of a forest immersed in fog with train rails heading off in opposite directions. Often large bugs are seen scattering around, where always Ricks is portrayed as a desperate man just hoping to survive. His luck changes when he attends a literary gathering, meeting an older, mysteriously beautiful Hungarian émigré Margit Kadar (Kristin Scott Thomas) on an outside balcony a mere few feet away from the Eiffel Tower, a woman whose extensive knowledge of 7 or 8 languages led to her work as a book translator, and an avid believer in his novel, his only published work. The two strike up a torrid affair, where she always has an answer for his ongoing anxieties and concerns, suggesting only he has the power to make things better. Simultaneously, the young Polish bargirl downstairs at the café, Ania (Joanna Kulig), found a Polish translated copy of his novel and has also taken a personal sexual interest in discovering the American in exile, where these two beguiling women both exhibit Greek Siren seductress tendencies, where they tend to portray a fantasy view of the kind of woman he desires.
His luck is fleeting, however, as without explanation some of his enemies start to disappear, where Margit has reportedly been dead for years, where she must be some kind of apparition, yet for him she exists with all her mysterious and exotic sexual allure, where the harder he tries to pull away, the fiercer her love grows, becoming an obscure and intoxicating expression of pure passion. Meanwhile he and Ania have these fantasy afternoons together as well, where she lures him into meadows with tall grass, into this luxurious blend of natural elements, yet throughout all these affairs, he is a completely passive participant, where the women are the sexual aggressors, which has a purely fantasy feel to it, where perhaps the story onscreen has become what he is writing in his novel, where perhaps nothing ever happened, as it’s all been imagined. Seen exclusively through the eyes of Ricks, the pervasive mood of his anxieties and growing paranoia about his disappearing world are evident in every aspect of the film, especially the sexualized elements which are the most intimately personal, where he feels most vulnerable and openly exposed. His world evolves into a Kafkaesque nightmare where reality is questionable, where his part in it is unknown, as the lines between fact and fiction are blurred and indistinguishable, where it’s hard to tell, even by the finale, where we’re not sure just where we’ve ended up, as there remain multiple possibilities, as if we’ve been absorbed into the writer’s imagination.
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
A seriously strange
little movie, The woman in the fifth follows Ethan Hawke's Tom Ricks
as he arrives in Paris hoping to reconcile with his estranged ex-wife and spend
time with his young daughter. When neither of these things occur, Tom takes a
room in a shady motel, begins working for a slick mobster, and engages in an
affair with a mysterious woman (Kristin Scott Thomas' Margit). It's a simple
setup that's employed to surprisingly engrossing effect by filmmaker Pawel
Pawlikowski, as the director has infused the proceedings with a low-key, character-study
sort of vibe that's heightened by Hawke's consistently compelling performance.
The straight-forwardness of the tale is admittedly punctuated with brief bursts
of mystery, with the relationship between Tom and Margit certainly ranking high
on the movie's list of unusual elements. The watchable atmosphere persists
right up until around the halfway mark, after which point Pawlikowski infuses
the proceedings with an increasingly meandering sensibility that forces the
viewer to wonder if the filmmaker has a plan for all of this. It's worth noting
that everything basically does come together at the end, though hardly in the
manner that one might have expected. The ethereal finish basically works, even
if it does leave the viewer wondering what it all means, and it's ultimately
clear that The woman in the fifth has no clearer ambitions than to be
labeled a curious yet passable art-house headscratcher.
The
House Next Door [Fernando F. Croce]
at
Following the Brit-indie
naturalism of Last Resort and My Summer of Love, Polish
director Pawel Pawlikowski embraces his inner Polanski with this intriguing but
contrived mystery-drama. Revealing the characters' backgrounds and objectives
bit by gradual bit, it follows an American novelist (Ethan Hawke) who arrives
in Paris bent on reviving a long-frayed relationship with his estranged family.
Turned away by his wife and robbed of his belongings, he takes refuge in a room
above a seedy tavern populated by stock types (volatile proprietor, seductive
waitress, abrasive neighbor). While working at a warehouse of vaguely illegal
operations and sneaking peeks at his six-year-old daughter, he meets a haughty
literary translator (Kristin Scott Thomas) whose mysterious appearances give
the first hint that the writer's grip on reality may not be all that tight. As
in his previous features, Pawlikowski's own role behind the camera as a visitor
results in fresh-eyed views of the area, from the Eiffel Tower glimpsed from
the rooftop of a squalid lodge to the blood-crimson inside of a Fifth
Arrondissement home—contrasting worlds uneasily navigated by the alienated,
increasingly anxious protagonist. Unfortunately, the tantalizing build-up of
details soon folds itself into a twisty, undercooked psychological thriller,
squandering its personal musings about expatriate artists and the trapdoors of
creativity and culminating in possibly the most risible fade-to-white since Black Swan.
The Woman in the Fifth: Toronto Review - The Hollywood Reporter John DeFore
Pawel Pawlikowski's art
film stars Ethan Hawke as a troubled American who has fled to Paris in the wake
of a scandal that cost him his job.
A haunted-novelist art film sporting a lusciousness that's as unfashionable as it is pleasurable, director Pawel Pawlikowski's The Woman in the Fifth takes a path viewers may not expect but is hypnotic enough to succeed in arthouses starved for the combination of sensuality and the romanticization of literature.
American novelist Tom Ricks (Ethan Hawke) comes to
After having his luggage and wallet stolen, Tom finds lodging in a sketchy inn and gets a night-watchman job entailing an almost allegorical combination of tedium and menace. Two women enter his life: a Polish blonde at the inn, who reads and loves his single novel, and a striking widow named Margit (Kristin Scott Thomas), who gives him her card at a party and invites him to come visit. (Margit lives in the Fifth Arrondissement, hence the title.)
Tom is working on an epic letter to his daughter and stalking her on the city's playgrounds, but the film (based on a novel by Douglas Kennedy) suggests he has another, subconscious mission. Margit, for one, believes she knows what he needs: Offering herself to him sexually immediately after they meet, she quickly slides into the role of supportive muse. As she bathes and clothes him, making calmly adoring assertions like "You have a voice. I believe in you," her red-hued room is a fantasy refuge for a writer who has given up on his career. All the while, though, Tom is prone to frustrated outbursts that suggest old problems will bubble up before he can achieve anything with this visit.
As small mysteries and threats of violence become a part of Tom's daily landscape and his mental state seems more precarious, the tale takes on a Paul Auster flavor suggesting a puzzle that may never quite be solved. Max de Wardener's score conjures meditative states, and the picture's tone doesn't bend toward repressed frenzy, as it might in a more contemporary film of this sort. Hawke offers more restraint than usual, and it works well for the film; by the time we (and Tom) begin to understand what is happening, we may be as seduced as he is.
The
Most Famous American Writer You Never Heard Of - TIME Donald Morrison from Time magazine,
Since its publication in
France in May, Douglas Kennedy's The Woman in the Fifth has sold more than
200,000 copies and dominated best-seller lists. It will enjoy similar success
when it appears in a dozen other countries over the next few months. That's an
easy prediction to make because a) like the American author's six previous
novels, this one is brisk and brainy and b) each of those has sold at least
half a million copies.
Just don't look for The
Woman in the Fifth here in the U.S.: it does not have a publisher. Kennedy, 52,
is an international literary franchise, but he can't get shelf space in the
land of his birth. He may be the most successful American novelist America
doesn't know.
Not that he minds.
"Everyone should have my problems," says Kennedy, in the elegant 19th
century London house he shares with his wife and their two children. They have
other homes in Paris and Berlin and on the Maltese island of Gozo. "I'm
published in every English-speaking country in the world except the U.S. I'm
translated into 18 languages, including Romanian and Lithuanian. They love me
in Vilnius."
As they once did in New
York City. He grew up there, attending expensive U.S. schools and working
off-Broadway. He went to Dublin at 21 to start a theater group and ended up
running the respected Abbey Theatre's second stage. In 1988, Kennedy and his
wife moved to London, where he cranked out four travel books and a novel, The
Dead Heart.
Then, says Kennedy, came
"my 15 minutes of fame." He got successive $1 million advances for
his next two books and was heralded as the next John Grisham. But they weren't
big hits. "I was 41," he says. "I decided I was going off to
write what I wanted." That was The Pursuit of Happiness, a sweeping love
story set in postwar New York City. No U.S. publisher would touch it, but it
thrived overseas, selling 350,000 copies in the U.K. alone. Kennedy has the
gift--or perhaps curse--of transcending genres. His thrillers are romantic, his
romances thrilling, and all of them bristle with literary references and big
questions about love and life. Consider The Woman in the Fifth. Harry Ricks, an
American academic, loses his job and his marriage over a disastrous fling with
a student. He flees to Paris and ends up living and working illegally in a
squalid corner of the immigrant-filled 10th arrondissement. He meets a
beautiful woman, but she will see him only a few hours a week at her apartment
in the tidier fifth arrondissement. Then people who have wronged him start
having "accidents," and he begins to suspect that the woman he loves
is not what she seems.
The setting is no
coincidence. Kennedy's Paris flat is not far from the fifth, he is fluent in
French, and last year he was made a chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des
Lettres. His novel tries "to look at Paris in a different way," he
says, "through the eyes of immigrants who live there but seldom come in
contact with white French natives."
Kennedy's next novel
returns him to the U.S., to Boston. He's going home only in his imagination,
but hey, it's a start.
Variety Reviews - The Woman in the Fifth - Toronto Film Fest ... Justin Chang
Douglas Kennedy, The Woman in the Fifth Book observations from The Classroom Conservative, October 1, 2007
The
Woman in the Fifth, By Douglas Kennedy - Reviews, Books ... Book review by Christian House from The Independent,
Paperbacks:
The Woman in the Fifth, by Douglas Kennedy ... Emma Hagestadt book review from The Independent,
The
Woman in the Fifth by Douglas Kennedy | Books | The Guardian Book review by Steven Poole from The Guardian,
The Inner Sanctum » Blog Archive » THE WOMAN IN THE FIFTH ... book review by Kara, July 6, 2011
IDA A 95
Poland Denmark (80 mi) 2013
Do
you have carnal thoughts? You should
try, otherwise what sort of sacrifice are these vows for you?
—Wanda (Agata Kulesza)
Unlike the literary hallucinations of The
Woman in the Fifth (2011), where reality is so absorbed into the
consciousness of the imagination where the lines between fact and
fiction are blurred and indistinguishable, this eye-opening film harkens back
into a different era of filmmaking and is the first film the director has made
in his native
While Wanda is a heavy drinker and smoker
who enjoys the company of men, who’s possessed with a sharp critical tongue
used to lashing out at others, it’s a stunning clash of moral values, but also
personalities, as Wanda is as sharply direct and to the point as any man, a
prosecuting judge known as “Red Wanda” for having prosecuted so many “enemies
of the people” for the communist regime during Stalinist purges in Poland. Wanda is used to comical effect, showing
brilliant Kafkaesque wit, yet she’s also brutally honest, instantly cutting
through any pretense (“So you’re a Jewish nun?”), where she’s a perfect fit for
the dark edgy humor of a Bèla Tarr movie, where the intervention of the church,
through Anna, only makes things more absurd.
Anna, it turns out in a startling revelation, was born Ida Lebenstein, a
Polish Jew whose father was Jewish, who somehow survived the war by growing up
in a Catholic convent, with no memory whatsoever of her family origins, but
she’s curious what happened to them. The
two embark on a road movie to uncover a painful piece of history by searching
through the rural farmlands outside Warsaw, where the locations are used to
stunning effect, as each shot is dwarfed by a mysteriously threatening sky,
given almost apocalyptic implications in this personal walk through history, where
Wanda cautions Ida before they leave, “What if you go there and discover there
is no God?” Wanda’s character evokes
pain and tragedy in every shot, while each shot of Ida reflects the meticulous
balance and composition of Vermeer paintings, evoking the near mystical
tranquility of Woman with a Water Jug or Girl with a Pearl Earring, where
she is benevolent and completely non-judgmental, with both combining to create
an incredibly intense effect. Wanda is
surprisingly informative about her childhood recollections, including
photographs of Ida’s mother, recalling various childhood incidents, including
her sister’s artistic talent in creating her own stained-glass window that she
built for a barn when they were living on a farm. Driving through the empty landscape, they
come to a crossroads where they actually pick up a young hitchhiker (Dawid
Ogrodnik) who is an alto sax jazz musician playing in the town where they are
heading. His friendly nature is a clue
for Wanda to sarcastically advise Ida to lighten up, “You should try carnal
love.” Later that evening, with Wanda
already drunk and passed out in bed, Ida wanders downstairs to listen from behind
one of the large columns, where the eloquence of the music is hauntingly
beautiful, as they’re playing John Coltrane’s “Naima” John
Coltrane, "Naima" YouTube (4:25).
Joana Kulig is seen briefly as the lead singer of the group,
which earlier in the evening was playing more raucous rock ‘n’ roll dance
numbers that recall the finale sequences of Buñuel’s classic satires on the
Catholic church, VIRIDIANA (1961) or Simon of the Desert (Simón del Desierto)
(1965), where even here the sensuous nature of the music has a way of
challenging Ida’s devotion to the church, as she’s hearing something she’s
never experienced before, creating an avalanche of doubt that leads her to
ponder what life outside of the monastery would be like, suggesting there’s a
great deal more in the world to learn about, yet at the same time she’s
discovering the crushing truth about her family. Her parents died under mysterious
circumstances, where in the small village of Piaski they visit the farmhouse of
the neighboring Polish family that presumably protected Ida’s Jewish family
from the Nazi’s during the war, but instead could easily have murdered them in
order to gain their property, where at one point Wanda, displaying her
prosecutorial bluntness, starts a painful argument with someone who may or may
not have actually killed Ida’s parents, where the confrontational tone of
belligerence and accusation sends Ida outside into the barn with the farm
animals where she sees the stained-glass window. It’s a haunting moment of quiet existential
realization, a momentary crisis of faith, as the unvarnished truth is often too
painful to hear. History and the Holocaust
are only a backdrop to this story, where
The subtlety of the film speaks volumes as it delicately contrasts the present with the past. While on the surface it’s a very simple film about good and evil, yet there are multiple layers of underlying examinations, not the least of which is a perceived absence of God in the Jewish extermination, or in the subsequent Stalinist purges, contrasted against a novitiate nun’s interest in experiencing “the world” before she takes her vows, where the music is positively extraordinary, matching the artistic reach of the cinematography, where the "worldly" music of John Coltrane may have never been put to more expressive use. The film avoids any ounce of pretense or melodrama, but is starkly realistic and purposeful, recalling the extraordinarily spare and spiritually bleak films of Bresson or Dreyer that question the existence of faith, where art transcends the inevitability of human fallibility, suffering, and sorrow throughout time immemorial. With the inventive use of a haunting visual scheme, creating a profoundly mysterious and tranquil atmosphere, Pawlikowski makes effective use of unbroken silences in unforgettable, underplayed performances, and a simply glorious use of music that touches on the divine, concluding with Alfred Brendel playing a Bach chorale, Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ (I), chorale prelude for organ (Orgel-Büchlein No. 41), BWV 639 (BC K68) YouTube (3:31). There are moments of sublime poetry in this film, and exquisite acting, where the implications at the end are left ambiguous. At only 80-minutes, Pawlikowski’s approach to conventional material is revelatory, where the film is an homage to Eastern European filmmaking of the 60’s, literally rediscovering a lost art since the break up of the Soviet Union, while at the same time providing an elegiac requiem for all those lost during the war, where the slow pace and long static shots are woven into the fabric of this film, which is itself a slow and arduous journey of discovery into the painful realms of the past.
TIFF 2013 | Ida (Pawel Pawlikowski, Poland ... - Cinema Scope Jay Kuehner
Pawel Pawlikowski’s return in letter and spirit to his native Poland is an elegiac, quasi-pious hymn (in requisite black and white) to a bygone era of Eastern European filmmaking, and by implication the legacy of Jews after occupation. Orphaned, novitiate nun Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska, a non-actor discovered in a local café) prepares to take her vows, but is ordered to make contact with her last remaining relative, a hard-drinking but self-possessed aunt named Wanda who works as a judge. Wanda’s disclosure of Anna’s true identity as a Jew (her real name is Ida), and her own past as a prosecutor of “enemies of the people” (historically, former anti-Nazi resistance fighters who were convicted in show trials under the Stalinist regime, though the film doesn’t elaborate on this as much), lead the pair on a search for the truth about Anna’s family. Pawlikowski entertains the premise for a gently ironic but still haunting journey through the monochromatic Polish countryside circa 1963, through which the two disparate women pilgrimage into the past and pause to pick up a hitchhiking jazz musician who takes a shine to the still-cloaked Anna, charming her with late night renditions of Coltrane in the smoky lobby of a hotel. Such incongruities of gravitas and levity take effect in a curious, soporific spell, in which the seemingly sacred gives way to the pathetically profane as the weight of historical revelation proves intractable. Ida is an exquisitely rendered artifact that nonetheless becomes truer for holding its diminutive shape against such weighted material, something like finding a lost Zbigniew Herbert poem scrawled on a kielbasa wrapper.
Film
Comment: Emma Myers September
10, 2013
Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida similarly centers on a somewhat unearthly young woman with striking features. The director’s first film in his native Polish, Ida tells the story of a nun (Agata Trzebuchowska) who finds out that she’s Jewish just before taking her final vows. It’s Wanda (Agata Kulesza), Ida’s uninhibited aunt, who bluntly delivers the news when the wide-eyed novice interrupts Wanda’s midday rendezvous with a gentleman caller. The two women initially clash over their worldviews, but they begin to bond as they set out to find Wanda’s former neighbor who murdered their family.
Despite its heavy historical themes, Ida is more a character study than an ideological statement. Both the women are strongly written, and undergo arcs that are layered rather than engulfed by their political backstories. And the script, though sparse, is as comic as it is naturalistic. “Do you have carnal thoughts?” Wanda asks Ida. “You should try, otherwise what sort of sacrifice are these vows for you?” Ida’s only response is a half-amused, half-embarrassed smirk, but the seemingly ridiculous conceit that a soon-to-be nun should indulge her sexuality becomes a temptation within arms reach when Ida meets a handsome jazz musician on the road.
The director discovered Trzebuchowska completely by chance, with her nose buried in a book at a small café in Poland. Her immaculate cheekbones, sternly dimpled chin, and expressive brown doe eyes make her a striking screen presence, and the first-time actress brings a genuine aura of innocence to the ingénue she plays. Shooting in austere black and white, first-time DP Lukasz Zal opted for an overall aesthetic of carefully framed stillness that does justice to the script’s impressive range, from its most endearing highlights to its darkest shadows.
Yet another film shot in black-and-white, Pawel Pawlikowki’s Ida has a milky complexion to its images that give the impression that it was made in the early 1960s, which is the era of war-ravaged Poland in which the film’s events take place. Pawlikowski’s film is a tale of holy teenage girl Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska), who, while preparing to enter the sisterhood of nuns, is forced to visit her aunt (Agata Kulesza) and embark on a journey to discover the resting place of her Jewish parents.
Ida is admirably free of the clichés and contrivances that plague films dedicated to repairing old wounds, as the bond between the two women appears authentically fragile for family members estranged for most of their lives. Their relationship plays out tensely, and Pawlikowski resists the urge to lead the two women to too pat a point of understanding, their different personalities and values outweighing any necessity to recapture a happy familial status. The action unfolds with wonderful patience and control, with relative newcomer Lukasz Zal’s ornate cinematography capitalizing on the stoic qualities of Eastern European architecture, recalling the early work of Andrei Tarkovsky—particularly Ivan’s Childhood (1962) and Andrei Rublev (1966)—in its breathtaking austerity.
Unfortunately—and disappointingly, after he treated the stirrings of adolescent female sexuality so sensitively in his 2004 film My Summer of Love—Pawlikowski stumbles in his approach to Ida’s burgeoning curiosity in the film’s latter stages. Once her religious dilemma becomes apparent, the character’s transition into a sexualized red-headed bombshell feels rash, appearing to come as a result of a singular dramatic plot point rather than through a more plausibly gradual realization. While certainly accomplished, Ida doesn’t have the depth of spiritual turmoil evident in Fred Zinnemann’s The Nun’s Story (1959), nor does it reach the painful experience of blooming female sexuality one had come to expect from its director’s previous glories.
Film Comment: Graham Fuller May 07, 2014
The weight of 20th-century Polish history, specifically the anti-Semitism of the war years and the Stalinist peak of the early Fifties, hangs over Pawel Pawlikowski’s stark, black-and-white road drama. The political is personal in the story of novitiate nun Anna, who, sheltered in an orphanage since she was a baby and now in 1962 about to take her vows as an 18-year-old, tries to find how her parents disappeared during World War II and where they were buried. That heaviness takes the form of the spartan interiors and vast blank skies that frequently push Anna to the bottom of the frame, the oppressiveness of the mise en scène enhanced by the use of the almost square Academy ratio by DP Lukasz Zal.
This spatial cloistering is a self-conscious yet effective way of presenting the devout, stoical protagonist, who is so wary of the outside world that she faces it with a single grave expression (Warsaw University student Agata Trzebuchowska gives an intensely focused performance in her screen debut). She has been conditioned to mistrust the freedoms and pleasures offered by the secular world, and even when, late in the film, she considers sampling them, it is as if she will be seeking empirical proof to confirm that her decision to become a nun is the correct one. Yet in putting on makeup and a dress and swigging from a bottle, she is also honoring the sybaritic values of her Aunt Wanda (formidably played by Agate Kulesza), who has helped Anna on her quest.
An uprooted Pole who has lived in exile his entire adult life, Pawlikowski has shown particular empathy as a filmmaker for dislocated female outsiders: the young Russian mother and asylum-seeker in Last Resort (00); the working-class girl who cathects a posh girl in My Summer of Love (04). Anna’s alien status is intensified by her interaction with Wanda, whom she is sent to visit at the outset by her mother superior before she enters the nuns’ order.
Inspired by Helena Wolinska-Brus, a professor’s wife at Oxford where Pawlikowski met her in the early Eighties, Wanda is a former Stalinist show-trial judge with blood on her hands. Her moral failure is contrasted with Anna’s moral innocence; Anna’s self-abnegation is contrasted with Wanda’s dissolutedness. She drinks and picks up men less to assuage her culpability as a ruthless apparatchik, however, than to escape a wartime tragedy above and beyond the death of her beloved sister. She may also be afflicted with survivor guilt. A Jew who escaped the Holocaust, Wanda informs Anna that she was born Ida Lebenstein and that her parents were murdered because of their religion. Despite having never previously met her niece as an adult, she takes charge of Anna’s quest. Retaining enough of her authority and influence to intimidate those who get in her way, she brings about the fateful situation in which she and Anna are led across a field to a cluster of trees by the son of the dying Polish farmer who appropriated the Lebensteins’ home and land. Filmed in long shot, Anna and Wanda are dwarfed by the godless landscape, which inevitably evokes some of the woods and fields in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Władysław Pasikowski’s Aftermath.
Bressonian in its austerity, Ida is Pawlikowski’s most beautiful film yet. Though unleavened by humor, it makes a few concessions to 1960s modernity. On their road trip, Anna and Wanda give a ride to a young sax player (Dawid Ogrodnik) whose good looks are not lost on Anna. His band, led by a cool blonde singer (Joanna Kulig), later gigs for a small town’s anniversary in scenes that have a Czech New Wave frisson. When he and Anna chat after he’s played John Coltrane’s “Naima” after hours, they sit before the central lower section of a patterned six-panel glass screen that, typifying the film’s visual style, presses them to the foot of the frame. They’re in a hotel, but the church-like feel of the image reminds the viewer of Anna’s ultimate destination. For her, as for her Aunt Wanda, living in the material world is not an option.
Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski delivers a spiritual ... Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski delivers a spiritual masterpiece, by J.R. Jones from The Reader, May 21, 2014
In Ida a virginal teenager who's been raised in a Polish convent since her infancy is summoned by the mother superior and informed that, before she takes her vows of ordination to become a nun, she must travel to the city and meet her only living relative, an aunt who refused to take her in after her parents died. Poland is still under communist rule in the mid-60s, and the aunt is a powerful magistrate known for sentencing enemies of the state to death ("Red Wanda," people call her). From this embittered and alcoholic woman, the young novitiate learns that her real name is Ida Lebenstein, that her father was Jewish, and that her mother perished alongside him during the Nazi occupation; together Ida and Wanda set off for the little village of Piaski to learn where the parents are buried and how they met their fate. Wanda cautions Ida before they leave: "What if you go there and discover there is no God?"
You can't ask a filmmaker to aim any higher than the question of God's existence, and as the women arrive at the truth about the murdered couple and try to reckon with it, Ida becomes a classic struggle between reason and faith, the carnal and the spiritual, hatred and forgiveness. Writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski (My Summer of Love, The Woman in the Fifth) gives this the sort of visual dignity it demands; Ida is an extraordinarily spare and beautiful film, shot in crisp black-and-white and an old-fashioned aspect ratio of 1:1.37, that recalls the metaphysical dramas of Robert Bresson and Carl Theodor Dreyer. There's almost no score, which leaves many scenes in near silence and heightens the dramatic effect whenever the cloistered Ida is exposed to diegetic music (a dance band at a local hotel, a phonograph record of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony). The film's modesty extends even to its length, a mere 80 minutes, yet Pawlikowski and coscreenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz touch on emotions so profound their story has the force of a parable.
Pawlikowski took a considerable risk in casting a nonactress as the young novitiate, but dimpled, wide-eyed Agata Trzebuchowska, discovered in a Warsaw cafe, gives an impressively still and silent performance as Ida. The movie opens with a shot of her staring fixedly as she paints the face on a statue of Jesus, and from that moment Ida becomes an emblem of religious devotion; when she and her aunt are driving to the village, they pass a crucifix at a crossroads, the car stops, and Ida gets out of the car to kneel before the cross and pray. Yet her faith has never been tested by the outside world, and Wanda, who still grieves for the girl's mother, sees the different person she might have become. She encourages her niece to meet a man and experience the pleasure of physical love: "Otherwise, what sort of sacrifice are those vows of yours?" Later, when Wanda returns to their hotel room drunk and tries to goad the girl by reading from the Bible, Ida wrests the book from her hands and sticks it under her pillow.
By contrast, Agata Kulesza has a long resumé in Polish film and TV, and she brings to the role of Wanda a caustic edge appropriate to a woman haunted not only by her sister's violent end but by her own years of sending political dissidents to the gallows. Wanda knows the allure of sex, restlessly hitting the bars and bringing home middle-aged men for one-night stands, and also the intoxication of worldly power. When she and Ida arrive at the little farmhouse where the parents lived and get no answers from the man who owns it now, Wanda declares, "I know when someone is lying. I can destroy you. You have children." These ugly threats repel Ida, who leaves the room, yet the truth is even uglier: as Wanda has suspected all along, the parents were killed not by the Nazis but by their own Christian neighbors, who took advantage of the opportunity to seize their property for themselves.
The buried history of Polish complicity in the Holocaust has become a hot-button issue in a nation accustomed to its victimhood: a storm of controversy greeted the 2001 publication of Neighbors, Jan T. Gross's nonfiction book about the Jedwabne pogrom—in which some 300 Jews were butchered by their fellow townspeople—and the 2012 release of Aftermath, Wladyslaw Pasikowki's dramatic feature based on the same incident. As a longtime expatriate, Pawel Pawlikowski may not understand just how sensitive his fellow Poles are on the subject, yet Ida transpires on a level far removed from the political forces of nationalism or fascism or communism. It tells a story of simple good and evil, and how an innocent young woman comes to know herself better as she grows more intimately acquainted with each.
Cinema Scope: Jerry White December 30, 2013
Ida marks Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski’s first feature film in Polish—the director immigrated to the UK with his parents in the ’70s, and subsequently built his career there—but just what kind of Polish film it is proves a rather tricky question. There are, to be sure, several national-cinema standbys on order: it’s gorgeously photographed in black and white, has a plot that centres on the vexed relationship between Poland’s Jewish and Catholic populations, and moreover has a distinctively Polish je ne sais quoi, that combination of intense brooding and faintly absurd black humour that seems somehow connected to large political and moral questions. Kieślowski couldn’t have done it better, one might say, and yet the filmmaker I couldn’t get out of my mind as I watched Ida was Krzysztof Zanussi, who became the standard bearer for Poland’s “Cinema of Moral Anxiety” in the ’70s and consequently earned the predictable kind of attention from the state overseers. Where Zanussi differentiated himself from his fellow dissident filmmakers, however, was in his devout and open Catholicism, which doubly stigmatized him in the eyes of a Polish state that viewed the Catholic Church as a retrograde obstacle. That was just fine with Zanussi, who saw dissent and religious commitment as going hand in hand: his critique of empty materialism was one and the same as his critique of Soviet-style authoritarianism. (For me, Zanussi’s best film is Contract [1980], whose story of a wedding party without a wedding seriocomically depicts not only the moral but the spiritual emptiness of that first generation of Poles to grow up knowing only communism; the following year, he made a biopic about Pope John Paul II.)
There is in Ida something of that sense one finds in Zanussi of the complex way that politics, religion, and dissidence play out in communist Eastern Europe, but ultimately it feels rather hidden, if not buried, and one has to wonder why. Set in the ’60s, the film focuses on a semi-cloistered young nun named Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), who, on the verge of taking her vows, is informed by her sexy, secular, and super-socialist aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza)—a chain-smoking jazz fan and a formerly much-admired (and thus, it is taken as read, much-feared) state prosecutor, now banished to professional purgatory as a rural magistrate—that her family is actually Jewish, and that she was born with the name Ida. To briefly summarize (with spoilers): Anna/Ida and Wanda travel the countryside in an effort to unearth the family’s grim recent history, but the revelations prove too much for both of them; towards the end, Wanda kills herself (in a chillingly well-executed shot where she throws herself from a window), and Anna/Ida seems to takes on her persona. In the film’s key sequence, Pawlikowski cuts from Wanda’s tatty state funeral, where the assembled mucky-mucks begin to play a tape of “The Internationale,” to a jazz club, where Coltrane’s “Equinox” is being tooted out by a sax player with a thing for Anna/Ida, who is sitting at a nearby table wearing Wanda’s period-precise cocktail dress.
Pawlikowski, who has spoken about how Wanda is based on a certain kind of Polish idealist that he remembered from his youth—often Jewish, quite cosmopolitan and sophisticated, and seriously committed to socialism in its more internationalist iteration—seems to pose this “Internationale”/“Equinox” combo as the central mystery of Auntie Wanda, the fundamental contradiction that she can no longer endure. The final image of the young, liberated former nun seems to suggest a dialectically ordained synthesis of the two women: Anna/Ida has, in essence, cast off the chains of both Church and State, no longer constrained by either the ascetic demands of Catholicism or the cold autocracy of Iron Curtain Poland. The problem, however, is that this closing invocation of modernity and liberation—and specifically Western kinds of modernity and liberation—does not seem particularly consistent with the film’s clear intention to present Poland as a nation unable to deal with its painful past. The freedom that Anna/Ida finds and Wanda could never reconcile herself to is grounded in a Western conception of individualism that, given both Pawlikowski’s chosen symbolic vehicle and the film’s sociopolitical context, strikes me as utterly wrong. In the first case, jazz was never just about the virtuosity of a single player: Coltrane’s greatest, most spiritually searching improvisations were unthinkable without the backing of McCoy Tyner and Jimmy Garrison. The film’s grasp of Polish Catholicism’s relationship to Judaism is similarly misguided: coming to grips with your nation’s relationship to its Jewish community basically by becoming more “true to yourself” is to substitute personal becoming for collective being. The same extends to Pawlikowski’s depiction of Anna/Ida’s life in the convent as intensely solitary: while this clearly serves the film’s ultimate thematic ends, it not only evinces a rather blind investment in the notion of the individual self as the alpha and the omega, so to speak, but it propagates a rather radical misunderstanding of what cloistered religious communities are all about (compare, say, Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills [2012]).
What’s most frustrating about the shallowness of Ida’s Westernized ideology is the luminous and genuinely mysterious visuals with which Pawlikowski invests it: the restricted space of the convent courtyard is as still and cold and deep as the rolling countryside, while the spare interiors conjure lost worlds whose lost-ness seems preordained, inevitable. Visually speaking, the closest analogy for Pawlikowski’s work in Ida is Nuri Bilge Ceylan, with the difference being that Ceylan has a much sadder and, ultimately, a more fully thought-through sense of the relationship between modernity and individualism—an understanding that brings the Turkish filmmaker far closer to Zanussi than is Pawlikowski.
And so we come back to Kieślowski after all. The Kieślowski of the ’70s and ’80s was a dissident filmmaker in a distinctively Polish way, not only critiquing the rigid state under which he lived, but also calling for a more serious, and ultimately more moral, way of seeing the world; The Decalogue (1990), the obvious touchstone in terms of that tendency, is another work that shares a great deal, visually speaking, with Ida. But Kieślowski’s move to France was a nearly unmitigated disaster in terms of serious filmmaking, leading to a series of absurdly pompous and pseudo-metaphysical blobs of Euro-pudding, with the possible exception of the (considerably more Polonized) Trois couleurs: Blanc (1994). What we have in Ida, essentially, is a kind of amalgamation of the Kieślowski of The Decalogue with the Kieślowski of Trois couleurs and La double vie de Véronique (1991). While Ida’s visual style is part of a recognizably Polish variant of a contemplative filmmaking tradition that has yielded some very fine contemporary manifestations in Turkey, Portugal, and elsewhere, its ideology feels pan-European in the most pejorative sense—one that is unable to fully evoke how, in the Poland of the ’60s, Catholic asceticism was as countercultural as jazz. That sense is there in the film, but in the end Pawlikowski takes the easy way out, and lets us forget that the guy who wrote that groovy jazz that welcomes our ex-nun into the brave new world of the Age of Affluence has, as his undisputed masterpiece, a small symphony called A Love Supreme.
Film Comment: Jonathan Romney May 01, 2014
Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida is a remarkably beautiful film—which, for some, may cause alarm bells to ring. I should add that it’s a remarkably beautiful film set in the early Sixities, in black and white and in Academy ratio—and those bells may ring louder. This stately drama from Poland will indeed polarize viewers: when it screened in Toronto, Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter hailed it as “a connoisseur’s delight” with overtones of Dreyer, while Variety’s Peter Debruge was less impressed: “Devoid of color and mirth alike . . . just the sort of joyless art film one might expect Polish nuns living under the clutches of 1960s communism to appreciate.” That’s not fair: actually, Ida might appeal to nuns anywhere, as long as they have historical perspective, an eye for period atmosphere, and a taste for stark moral irony. Ida is in no way lacking in pleasures, although they’re on the dryer (rather than the Dreyer) side: they’re to be found in the tartness of the drama and in the elegance of the style. And I’d certainly never consider a moody late-night rendition of John Coltrane’s “Naima” joyless.
Ida is about a novice nun in Poland facing up to questions of faith and identity—and director Pawlikowski, who co-wrote with British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, is doing something similar. For this is the film in which he rediscovers his Polishness. Born in Poland, Pawlikowski left the country in the early Seventies and went on to establish himself as a British filmmaker, first as an imaginative and caustic documentarist (notably with Serbian Epics, which revealed the bardic pretensions of Radovan Karadzic), then in a series of low-budget dramas that stretched the British realist tradition in idiosyncratic directions. Last Resort (00) depicted the world of asylum seekers as a bitterly inhospitable micro-climate within Britain, while the teenage female folie à deux of My Summer of Love (04) mixed eroticism, pastoral lyricism, and the English class structure into something delicately unsettling. Pawlikowski only came unstuck with The Woman in the Fifth (11), an awkward essay in Parisian paranoia.
It’s hard to tell from all this exactly who Pawlikowski is as a director, although among his features, Last Resort offers the most cogent picture of someone turning a documentarist’s sensibility to the creation of disillusioned fictions. Ida doesn’t look like any of his other films, and it’s a fascinating self-reinvention—and the film in which Pawlikowski invests most systematically in visual style.
The film begins in a convent, where young nun Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) is first seen putting a restorative touch to a statue of Jesus, which she and her fellow novices then place on a plinth in the snow, standing around to adore it (these are the sort of nuns Debruge is thinking of, who certainly could use an art movie by way of distraction). This is indeed the most severe-looking convent imaginable: the novices’ hoods are a field of grey, and in one shot the building’s façade looks like a trompe l’oeil oil-painting in grey, slightly blurred, like a Gerhard Richter copy of a photograph. The place even has an austere sound: in the refectory, the spoons emit a bone-dry clatter.
Then Anna is summoned by her mother superior (what do mothers superior ever do in nun movies but summon novices?) and told that, before she takes the veil, she should visit one Wanda Gruz, the aunt who has never seen fit to make contact. Anna gets on a bus, and suddenly the film is infused with city bustle. She goes to Wanda’s apartment, where a louche-looking middle-aged woman (Agata Kulesza) greets her in a dressing gown, cigarette in hand (a gentleman caller is dressing in the background), and gives her an altogether chilly reception. We may be forming our own ideas about what kind of racy bohemian Aunt Wanda is—but we soon learn that she’s a forbidding pillar of Communist Poland. In her daily work, she’s a judge, presiding sternly over such cases as the trial of a discontent who hacked down some official ornamental flowers with a sword. In fact, Wanda bitterly prides herself on being a heavyweight: as she tells Anna, she was a hard-line state prosecutor in the early Fifties: “I even sent people to their death—Enemies of the People. Red Wanda, that’s me.”
Little wonder that she has turned to the bottle and an aimlessly hedonistic off-duty life. But Wanda’s conscience—and, it turns out, tragic backstory—impel her to take Anna under her wing and help her discover their shared past. For Anna, Wanda reveals, was born Ida Lebenstein and is actually Jewish (a nun who learns she’s Jewish—now there’s a Sarah Silverman vehicle we’d all like to see). But think about why a Jewish girl, in her late teens in the early Sixties, might have been placed in an orphanage in Poland as a baby, and you begin to see the somber themes that Ida is dealing with. The film becomes a road movie of sorts when Wanda and Anna/Ida head out to confront these themes, and after the austerity of the opening convent sequence, things loosen up considerably.
Ida starts to inhabit two worlds at this point. On one side, there’s the bleakness of rural Poland: a world of grey muddy farmyards, overcast roads (the monochrome vistas of Alexander Payne’s Nebraska are the Côte d’Azur by comparison) and at one point a forest of trees so densely, darkly crushed together that the screen resembles a woodcut. On the other side, there is the indoors world of entertainment and sparse luxury that Wanda retreats to, and where Ida finds some sustenance too. It’s in hotel lounges and jazz cellars that Ida hits a vein of melancholy cool—in low-vaulted bars where a torch singer (Joanna Kulig from Elles and The Woman in the Fifth) silkily croons, and where a dashing alto saxophonist (Dawid Ogrodnik, bringing a dash of Fifties Polish icon Zbigniew Cybulski) touches on a secular nerve in Anna.
There’s a consistent thread in film fictions about novice nuns who venture out beyond convent walls—always an erotic frisson, however subliminal. It’s the promise of symbolic deflowerment, in that we always want to see the virginal heroine remove the veil and enter into an intimate relationship with the world—whether it’s Julie Andrews, off to climb every mountain, or the heroine of Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch, dabbling with Islamic fundamentalism. Anna’s blank, demure surface is exploited as a consistent tease—in contrast to Wanda’s soured, worldly blowsiness—and sure enough, there comes a moment when she cautiously removes her scarf and examines her hair in the mirror. In the context of a story about a virginal, silent novice, this is practically the equivalent of Natalie Wood’s Louise in Gypsy first stepping out to sing “Let Me Entertain You.”
But if there’s a striptease in Ida, it’s really the uncovering of layers of Poland’s past. Wanda, the woman who knows—and forces others to reveal what they know—is an experienced interrogator, a peerless detector of lies and prevarications. (She’s funny too: she asks a woman, “Do you know the Lebensteins?” “Jews?” the woman says. “No, Eskimos,” Wanda retorts.) Her questioning lays bare the guilty secrets of wartime Poland, although they are secrets that she knows already—while her own uneasy conscience stems from the cause she once adopted, and what she sacrificed for it. Worn out, disillusioned, bitter about the injustices she executed as an idealistic but draconian judge, she has a last crack at redemption trying to help the young innocent that she can’t help admiring, despite her skepticism and anger (“I’m a slut and you’re a little saint,” she says to Anna. “This Jesus of yours adored people like me”).
So we shouldn’t be over-impressed by the seemingly pious austerity of the opening convent sequence, or of all those shots in which grey walls and Anna’s face alike seem to soak up light (Pawlikowski seems to have sought out every mildewed wall in Poland). Ida is a much more worldly and hard-edged film than it initially seems. What’s more, at a concise 80 minutes, it doesn’t linger more than necessary on any shot, Jaroslaw Kaminski’s editing bringing the drama a bracingly crisp edge.
Hardness also emerges in the tension between the two women—Wanda distancing herself with sour irony, Anna sometimes retreating into defiant mutism. The story is as much Wanda’s as Anna’s, and the older woman’s soured elegance, her scowling disapproval of a world that she’s seen right through, emerge in Agata Kulesza’s superb performance, authoritative and quietly distressing. As Anna, Trzebuchowska is more of a mystery, as befits the character. Sometimes we don’t know if there’s a person there (yet), as we see only a face framed by a headdress, a face wide, placid, and lunar that appears to reveal nothing—a blank slate that seems as if it’s about to be written over by life’s troubles.
The film is shot primarily by camera operator Lukasz Zal, making his feature debut; he took over shortly into the shooting from the director’s usual DP Ryszard Lenczewski, who stepped out partly because of illness. And it’s meticulously designed by Katarzyna Sobanska and Marcel Slawinski; the lounges and bars echo the mood of the underground spaces of Wajda’s Fifties films (a friend also detected a flavor of early-Sixties Forman), but more than anything I was reminded of the melancholy retro of Aki Kaurismäki’s Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana, while a wide shot of a car in a glum garage yard made me think of early Jarmusch. In any case, Ida’s cultivatedly stark beauty is neither merely decorative nor a shortcut to transcendental exaltation (as its opening shots might suggest). It’s a sharper, grittier film than the premise might make you think. Ida still doesn’t give us a clearer idea of who Pawel Pawlikowski is—but it’s good to see him on his best form in some time, whether or not he decides to continue as the reborn Polish director who’s made this compelling quasi-debut.
Interview: Pawel Pawlikowski | Film Comment Violet Lucca interview from Film Comment, January 21, 2014
During Poland’s many years under different occupying powers, Polish mothers came to serve as the preservers of the culture, carrying on traditions, history, and the native language at home. The idea of the feminine as the link to a buried past underlies the instigating incident of Ida, a film about an orphaned nun who learns she is Jewish from her aunt, a powerful pro-Stalinist judge with an independent outlook. The two embark on a road trip to uncover painful recent history against the only slightly thawed backdrop of rural Poland in 1961. FILM COMMENT interviewed Warsaw-born director Pawel Pawlikowski (My Summer of Love, The Woman in the Fifth) from London about his film. Ida, which opens on Friday, screened at Toronto and Sundance and was the closing-night film of the 2014 New York Jewish Film Festival.
You originally worked on this script with Cezary Harasimowicz,
and it had more of an action feel to it. Why did you feel the need to change
the story, and why did you choose to work with Rebecca Lennkiewicz?
It wasn’t about the writers. It was where I was with the story. I usually write my own scripts, and I like to have a partner to kick it around with. So when I was kicking it around with Cezary, I was actually working on two other scripts, and I wasn’t really focused on this one. I was knocking around ideas, and out of it came something a little clichéd and mechanical. When I came back to the project later, I reconfigured it and tried to make it less plotty, less obvious. Basically the sort of film that I’d like it to be, the sort of film I like. I also wanted to introduce the character of the aunt, Wanda, who wasn’t very prominent in the first attempt.
But I usually work on the script throughout the whole process—I re-wrote whole sections of Ida in prep, during rehearsals and even during the filming. It’s not like there’s a script and then I go and execute it. The script is always growing, evolving in my own peculiar method. It’s not like the usual film made in the U.S. or even in Britain. It’s more like an ongoing process based on a simple structure that then gets complicated, simplified again, complicated again, introduces some characters, takes them out, and slowly distills something in the end that’s very simple.
So when you’re collaborating with someone, do they come in
towards the beginning of the project, or towards the end, or throughout?
Usually the beginning. Part of the problem with my method is that you need 60 or 80 pages completed to get funding, so a lot of it is trying to knock out something that you can go to funders with while knowing that it’s going to be worked on and improved. So the whole filmmaking process is like a dance with a series of partners: at some point it’s a co-writer, then it becomes the production designers, the actors, and the DP. It’s a series of collaborations but in the end, it’s all part of the same process. Even if I’m working with the actors and a DP and a good production designer, I keep thinking, inventing, and scrapping things. Writing and all the rest of it is part of the same process. It’s a very odd method, but I keep getting away with it.
The film has a very distinctive look that reflects films shot
in the Sixties, from the use of black and white and the academy ratio. What
films did you revisit when preparing to shoot this?
None, really. I watch films all the time, but there wasn’t an obvious source for this one. I keep watching 8 ½ by Fellini, which has nothing to do with this, but because it gets me worked up about the whole business of filmmaking. I used to love the films of the Czech New Wave in the late Sixties, but I wasn’t watching them now for this. It’s like I have a group of films that I’ve watched for decades, and they’re somewhere in there.
The real inspiration for how this film looks was my impatience with cinema, where the vein of cinema is going. I wanted to make an anti-cinema film where there are no pointless camera moves, no pointless close-ups. I’m not emotionally excited by the power of cinema’s tricks anymore. Maybe it’s my personal midlife crisis. I’d love to see something that was calm and meditative, where you suggest more than show, where each kind of shot has some kind of density and tension, not just in the drama and the acting, but in the visuals, and where acting and image and sound are all part of the same thing. When I watch most films, with some exception, I always ask myself: “Why is the camera moving? Why is there a close-up now? Why does this have to be handheld now?” It was a way of purifying, getting rid of habits, and doing something really simply. Looking at a picture, contemplating it, while not really reading the emotional charge. But staying away from the kind of cinema rhetoric that I’m finding myself more and more impatient with. Maybe it’s my last film, like a farewell to my career—although I don’t have much of a career.
My family’s photo albums from that period also influenced me. Not literally restaging them, but just the atmosphere of these photographs. It’s not like they’re great photographs, but there’s something about them that gave me an impulse to do it like this. That’s how I remember that time, through the prism of early childhood memories, and from family albums.
I think the way in which things are framed, and how much sky
is in every shot—when you’re in a rural area, that’s what dominates. It’s
beautiful but also oppressive.
That’s good to hear. That wasn’t the intention from the beginning. I only wanted to not move the camera and have the 4:3 in black and white. But when I was doing camera rehearsals in some locations, I was sort of bored with the framing of it in a wide shot, so I asked the cameraman to tilt up just to see what it would give us, and it looked interesting. There was something forlorn about the characters with all that sky above them. Usually people get lost horizontally in landscapes, but here they look lost vertically. But then because I liked it, I kept going like that—it was more intuitive than an intellectual decision.
Returning to the idea of collaboration, how did you balance
working with the two different cinematographers?
The first cinematographer [Ryszard Lenczewski] dropped out very soon, partly because he fell ill, but also because he didn’t like where it was going. So I ended up shooting it with the camera operator, Lukasz Zal, who’d never DP’d a film before, and had no fear and no reputation to lose. He was really positive, enthusiastic, and brave. Lukasz was a real blessing because he’s a talented lighting cameraman, but his enthusiasm for doing something rather eccentric helped me with the whole process because that excited him, and we started contributing in the same direction.
It does look like the work of someone who’s very established.
Which is also true of Agata Trzebuchowska [who played Anna/Ida], who you chose
for this part after fellow director Malgorzata Szumowska spotted her in a
Warsaw café. How did you balance working with a nonprofessional and working
with an actress [Agata Kulesza, who played Wanda] who has a great deal of
experience?
Well, they have different needs as actors. In the end, my only criterion in all of these different parts of the process is if it doesn’t ring true, if it isn’t exciting, if it isn’t expressive, I get rid of it. During rehearsals with the actors, we figured out what does and doesn’t work. I cast well, so I knew that the two knew what they were doing. What matters is what’s there on the screen at the end of the process, so when I’m looking through the viewfinder of the monitor, I like this, I don’t like that…The older actress [Kulesza], the virtuoso, was offering a lot, and what she was offering needed to be channeled all the time, sculpted, and often reduced. And she got into the character really deeply, because she rehearsed and researched a lot, and we spent a lot of time thinking through Wanda’s character. With the younger Agata, it was using some characteristics she has, and sculpting within them, and then, at some point, livening her up. The good thing is that they both got on really well, and the older Agata created, or helped to create space for, the younger Agata so she didn’t overwhelm her with her personality and the personality of her character. She left space for Ida to exist, which was not easy.
It was also difficult because there was no coverage in the film. There were few cuts inside the scenes, basically: most scenes were done in one take. So to have both of them perform while the lighting’s right, when the framing’s right—the camera doesn’t move, so you can’t correct anything during the take, and then you can’t cut your way out of trouble either. It was a challenge that frightened everyone at first, but then they got motivated by it. They felt this concentration: everything has to happen from this angle in this image. It really created a bit of magic.
You shot this with only one camera?
There were no cuts. Each scene was done mainly from one angle. We didn’t rearrange lights for each scene. This was the ideal shot for this scene, these are the ideal movements of the actors, so they need to coincide and feed off each other, all in one take.
What were your guiding principles in terms of filmmaking when
telling this story?
The general thing is to take things away. With production designers, the obvious thing to do is to create a realistic environment with bits and pieces from the period. And what I was doing was constantly taking away and leaving only a limited number of objects in the shot, which would carry more force. So the image isn’t an imitation of reality, but it’s a reality in its own right. It works through suggestion rather than replicating reality. The work we did there was finding the right elements and stripping away all the make-believe realism, the extras. Not to try to imitate reality, trying to get away from the pseudo-realism—a shaky camera, a lot of camera moves and extras. I was more interested in a stripped-down suggestive world, which has some of the quality of dreams. When you finish watching this film, you remember it as some dream landscape rather than some replica of reality.
Yes, absolutely. The intentional sparseness in the frame you mentioned, plus other, unintentional, uncontrollable things, like fog or haziness.
The funny thing is I would cut out images that seemed too beautiful. I tried hard for the images not to feel like beautiful images in their own right. They would never be divorced from the emotional content and the actors’ presence, from the dramatic subtext of the scene. I get annoyed by pretty photography that's in love with itself, that doesn't point beyond itself.
It wouldn’t fit the subject matter. Did your background as a
musician influence how music fits into the film?
Again the idea, like in every other area, was “less is more.” I would only put in bits of music that really had some kind of a charge. And that includes the pop songs of the period, which I remember from my early childhood and haunt me still, and Coltrane, and a bit of Bach and Mozart. It was basically bits of music that I like and thought would enhance the film. I didn’t want “filmy” music in the film. And the sound design is very simple as well, but it’s very hard to do simple sound design because most films attempt to imitate reality, so there’s just a lot of noise. Whereas here, there’s not a lot of camera movement, there’s not much going on, so each little noise is very crucial. So that was a tricky process with the sound mixer who had never done this type of quiet film before, where every scene isn’t rescued by music. But here, the music comes in as a dramatic character—they were dramatic events in the film. There was no score composed for the film, except for the two bits that seep in, but I didn’t want it to be noticeable. Mostly it’s just selected sounds of that world, very few elements that suggest, rather than replicating reality.
This was your first film made in Poland. Was the experience of
shooting there different from previous films you’ve made? What was the
reception there like?
The experience wasn’t so different—the crews are great in Poland, and everyone was really excited by the project and the kind of weirdness of it, I suppose. It was great doing the location scouting because it allowed me to discover my country again, and I spent weeks and weeks driving around finding the right farmhouse and small town. I hadn’t spent much time outside of Warsaw, which I visit regularly, before this. We had a really lively, creative team, who I hadn’t worked with before, and it was great to “discover” them.
Generally, the reception was very enthusiastic—we won two festivals—and pleased that there was a Polish film that didn’t try to imitate preexisting cinema. In Poland, we had a tradition of original cinema once in the late Fifties and Sixties, and then there was Kieslowski, but a lot of Polish cinema just imitates Western cinema, especially Anglo-Saxon cinema—not just commercial thrillers or romantic comedies, but Ken Loach-style social realism. And this film isn’t about an issue, or social problems, nor is it a romantic comedy or a thriller. So some people seem to like that it’s of its own kind, and has the confidence Polish cinema once had to go its own way. There were some fringe political reactions—I’m talking about some patriotic voices, patriotic in the wrong sense—that it’s an anti-Polish film, and some people didn’t like that she leaves the secular world in the end, that she turns her back on life. There were all sorts of comments, but I’ve never had such great reviews in all my life. I was taken aback a bit.
I tried to make a film that’s resonant, but not in the least explanatory or didactic—that feels coherent but doesn’t teach you a lesson. She’s a particular character, and it’s difficult to be in Poland in 1961, and to be a woman—I mean, what options are there? Both heroines finish with the impossibility of life. So I didn’t want to stir things up too much, but just allow the audience to enter that space created by the film and make it resonate differently for everyone.
Ida - Paweł Pawlikowski | Culture Bartosz Staszczyszyn, September 18, 2013
Ida - Reviews - Reverse Shot Hans Morgenstern, May 5, 2014
The New Yorker: Richard Brody May 10, 2014
Sight & Sound: Catherine Wheatley September 25, 2014
Warsaw 2013
Review: IDA, A Revealing Tale Of Faith And Human Frailty Patryk Czekaj from Screen Anarchy
Review:
IDA, A Lovely, Artfully-Crafted Little Masterpiece Dustin Chang from Screen Anarchy
East European Film Bulletin [Moritz Pfeifer]
“Ida”: A wrenching voyage into Polish history - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir
Ida review: Pawel Pawlikowski's hauntingly beautiful ... - Slate Dana Stevens
Sound On Sight Rob Dickie
Ida / The Dissolve Scott Tobias
Review: Pawel Pawlikowski's Striking, Evocative 'Ida'|The ... Jessica Kiang from The Playlist
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
Paste Magazine Tim Grierson
Little White Lies: Glenn Heath Jr.
Spectrum Culture [Jesse Cataldo]
Next Projection Jordan Ferguson
Cinema365 [Carlos deVillalvilla]
TIFF Review: IDA Is A Beautiful Puzzle | Badass Digest Jordan Hoffman
Film-Forward.com [Nora Lee Mandel]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
Joe Morgenstern Wall Street Journal
White City Cinema [Michael Smith]
Global Comment [Mark Farnsworth]
The Chicago Reader: Ben Sachs June 13, 2014
Artforum: Nick
Pinkerton December 30, 2013
Daily | Telluride + Toronto 2013 | Pawel Pawlikowski's IDA ... - Fandor David Hudson
TORONTO REVIEW: Ida - Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy
Time Out London: Tom
Huddleston
Peter Bradshaw The Guardian
Ida director Pawel Pawlikowski stands ground against ... Ben Child from The Guardian, January 30, 2015
'Ida' movie review - The Washington Post Ann Hornaday
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Ida - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
Ida Movie Review & Film Summary (2014) | Roger Ebert Godfrey Cheshire
A.O. Scott The New York Times
Payami, Babak
A SILENCE BETWEEN TWO THOUGHTS
BFI | Sight & Sound |
A Silence between Two Thoughts (2003)
John Wrathall from Sight and Sound, July 2004
Eastern Iran, the present. A
young man who works as an executioner for the Hajji, the spiritual leader of a
remote village, is ordered to spare his latest victim on the grounds that she
is a virgin, and would go straight to heaven if killed. When he is ordered to
marry the virgin, the executioner questions the Hajji's leadership for the
first time.
The executioner is ostracised by
the villagers, including his adopted family, for his role in the Hajji's reign
of terror. The Moazen, who was responsible for his religious education, tells
him he has been seduced by Satan. Under the guidance of a venerable matriarch
known as Auntie, the women of the community prepare for a pilgrimage. The Hajji
wants to ban it, but the Moazen insists it should go ahead. On the pilgrimage,
Auntie gives the virgin seven grains of wheat, and tells her to make a wish.
Auntie dies. The virgin takes the opportunity to escape, but stops when
confronted by the vastness of the surrounding desert. The executioner
recaptures her and locks her up. Turning away from violence, he buries his gun.
Hearing that the Hajji has killed
the Moazen, the executioner releases the virgin. The villagers rise up against
the Hajji's followers, and seize the executioner. As the Virgin walks free, she
hears shots as the executioner is killed.
Review
Judging from the plot summary
above, Silence between Two Thoughts might sound more conventionally dramatic
than much of the recent Iranian cinema seen in the west. But in fact the film
sets a new benchmark for austerity, even by Iranian standards. It opens with an
extraordinary nine-minute take: in the grey light of dawn, a man sits waiting,
his face masked by a scarf. After a while he stands up, raises his rifle and
fires a shot. We don't see what he is shooting at, but his air is so impassive,
it could be target practice. He sits down again, then stands and fires a second
shot. He wipes something from his eye, perhaps a tear. He is about to shoot a
third time when he receives the order to stop. He sits down and drinks a cup of
tea, talking to the boy who sold it to him. The camera starts to circle him. A
cart passes in the background, carrying away the corpses of his first two
victims. Very slowly, the camera keeps circling, until it's behind the
executioner and we can see what he sees: the figure of a woman, standing in
front of a wall – the third victim, whom he has been ordered to spare on the
grounds that she is a virgin, and would therefore go straight to heaven if
killed. Two women walk into frame and lead the virgin away. The executioner
gets up, shoulders his rifle and goes over to the wall, where he picks up the
woman's discarded cloak and sandals, before walking out of shot.
The shooting style – long takes,
the occasional measured tracking shot – may recall that of Abbas Kiarostami,
along with Mohsen Makhmalbaf, one of the godfathers of modern Iranian cinema
(the film was co-edited by Jafar Panahi, director of the Kiarostami-scripted
The White Balloon, 1995, one of the first Iranian films to break through in the
west). But whereas for Kiarostami the camera's very restraint provides the
breathing space in which flickers of unexpected life may be captured – the
sudden grins of children, the background bustle of city life – in this third
film by writer-director Babak Payami, the austerity of the visual style is
matched by a corresponding austerity in all other departments, with not a trace
of the sly comedy of his previous film, Secret Ballot.
The title Silence between Two
Thoughts refers to the crisis of doubt undergone by the protagonist, the
executioner, as he comes to question his spiritual leader, the Hajji, in whose
name he has shed so much blood. But none of this shows in his face, as played
with Bressonian impassiveness by Kamalan Narouii, a charismatic
non-professional recruited by the director in the remote village on the eastern
border of Iran where the film was shot. The solemnity of the actors is matched
by the barren landscape: parched earth, rock and glaring white skies. All
dramatic events, from the opening executions to the death of the Moazen, occur
off camera. Sometimes this obliqueness works to powerful effect, as at the
film's climax: when the villagers put the executioner up against the wall and
debate whether to kill him, the camera stays fixed on his face, until he is
suddenly dragged out of shot. At other times, it is just mystifying: while the
opening scene of the film sets up the paradox that the executioner is ordered
to marry the victim he has spared, the implication being that he can thus
deflower and then execute her, by the end of the film it is unclear (at least
to this reviewer) whether the marriage has taken place.
This obliqueness may not always have been intentional on the part of Payami: the negative of his film was confiscated by the Iranian authorities, and this print appears to have been assembled using a video copy to plug the gaps. (Despite that misfortune, one of the film's most haunting features is Farzad Jodat's cinematography, which starkly captures the grey light of the desert at sunset.) With its remorseless depiction of a barren, blighted land, where traditions are dying but the only sign of the 21st century are the binoculars with which the Hajji spies on the villagers, this is hardly a vision of Iran that the country's rulers would want to export.
Payne, Alexander
An
American Dream - Film Comment Larry
Gross, September/October 2013
Alexander Payne and his writing partner, Jim Taylor, came out of the box thrillingly with their first two features, Citizen Ruth (96) and Election (99). The former skewered both sides in America’s abortion wars, and the latter scrutinized blind ambition and why it wins. Rare in the sheer idiosyncrasy of their themes, they were exceptionally intelligent acerbic comedies, complex enough to warrant comparison with Preston Sturges.
In About Schmidt (02) and Sideways (04) Payne and Taylor tried admirably to deepen the emotional palette of their work, expand the realistic detail, and make the characters less comedically invulnerable. But you could sometimes feel the work lurching from somber observation to would-be wackiness in that uncontrolled manner that Pauline Kael used to call “opportunistic.”
But if one had qualms about Payne’s progress, they were completely overwhelmed by the delicacy and skill of his next directorial effort (co-produced but not co-written by Taylor), The Descendants (11). The third time out, Payne got the comic-pathetic balance right. He managed the star persona of George Clooney effortlessly (which he did not do with Nicholson in About Schmidt), and in his rendering of parent-child dynamics, there was the grace of the fully mature artist and an emotional generosity that did not in any way preclude Payne’s sharp eye for the pettiness or ridiculousness of his characters. Critics have so far viewed almost all of Payne’s films with favor, reaching a peak with Sideways, which no fewer than seven urban critics associations, including New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and London, named the best film of 2004. Which may mean that Payne is due for a bout of critical backlash and disenchantment. This would be an injustice because Nebraska, written by first-time screenwriter Bob Nelson (for the first time, Payne himself has not taken a writing credit), is Payne’s best, most complex, and most satisfying work to date.
Woody (Bruce Dern) is an elderly, unemployed ex-drunk who, believing he’s won a mail-order sweepstakes, sets out on foot from his home in Billings, Montana, for Lincoln, Nebraska, where he obstinately imagines his prize money is waiting for him. His younger son, Dave (Will Forte), decides to indulge his father rather than fight him, and he agrees to drive him to his destination.
The bulk of the story takes place in the fictional town of Hawthorne, Nebraska, where Dave and Woody stop on the way to Lincoln to reunite with Woody’s living relatives and old acquaintances—all of whom take his fantasy of good fortune for fact. Throughout the film, they treat him, sometimes sweetly and sometimes selfishly, as an embodiment of their own unfulfilled dreams and desires.
Woody, as Scott Foundas has pointed out, is the name of another ordinary guy mistaken by his hometown for a hero, in Preston Sturges’s 1944 masterpiece Hail the Conquering Hero. One of American cinema’s finest character actors, Dern, whose career took off in the Seventies, proved too eccentric, too unconventional to work as a mainstream leading man in commercial fare, but here he’s wonderfully worthy of this auspicious lineage. Payne conceives of Woody as a man who has been cumulatively hardened, punished almost, for the crime of being a bit unusual. Dern used to make comic hay out of his fascination with the sound of his own Midwestern twang, but Woody is all but mute much of the time—a boldly counterintuitive choice, making the few brief moments when Woody does speak up extremely moving.
But Nebraska also displays Payne’s special gift for creating singular female characters. Laura Dern’s Ruth Stoops and Reese Witherspoon’s Tracy Flick, the respective protagonists of his two early comedies, were hyperbolically original anti-heroines, almost worthy of Molière in their weird exuberance. As buddy-centric as Sideways was (and as skilled as Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church’s performances were), Virginia Madsen’s Maya was the freshest and most moving thing in the film. Even more remarkable, perhaps, was the way that Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie), the wife of George Clooney’s Matt King, gradually became a fully realized character in The Descendants despite the fact that she is seen alive in just one tight close-up at the very beginning.
The central female in Nebraska is Woody’s wife Kate, played by June Squibb (who got killed off early in About Schmidt so that Nicholson could have the movie to himself). Payne must have taken note of her potential. In Nebraska, he and Nelson misdirect us into thinking she’s just a comic shrew, but gradually we grasp the fairness and astuteness that go hand in hand with her character’s caustic manner. The moment in which she frantically makes small talk with some old married-couple acquaintances in order to shield her sons from being exposed is one of the film’s comic high points. The possibility that she actually understands Woody, and that their marriage has lasted so long with good reason, dawns on us gradually, as a pleasing slow-burn revelation.
Some great directors are visual stylists from the outset, but not all. Reputedly, Woody Allen didn’t know which end of the camera the lens was mounted on when he began making Take the Money and Run. He learned. When you watch the early (superb) films of Hou Hsiao-hsien, you could never imagine the splendors of The Puppetmaster and Flowers of Shanghai.
Payne’s first four films were all character, acting, and dialogue. The Descendants marked a big leap in visual sophistication. To lapse into critical cliché: the landscape of Hawaii became a protagonist. But the staging was also more flexible and fluid, and it was an exciting film to watch.
Nebraska is the first film by Payne that is visually ravishing. However character-centered it is, audiences will also come away remembering many magnificent images: Woody roaming the desolate highwayside, the depleted main street of Hawthorne, the ruined farmhouse. The choice to have cinematographer Phadon Papamichael (it’s their third collaboration) shoot in black and white is Payne’s way of telling us that there’s a darkness in this world, that it existed before the story started and the characters appeared, and that it can’t ever be entirely dispelled.
Quite a bit of Nebraska takes place in the distance between Hawthorne and Lincoln, and there’s no doubt that Payne’s quiet ambition is to sketch the fate of certain American myths symbolized by those names—and by a third, still-active American of near-mythic status that the film’s title can’t help but evoke, Bruce Springsteen.
Hawthorne is the American artist who, more grimly than any other, insists that our culture’s habits of self-esteem will never entirely escape the legacy of our crimes. Lincoln and Springsteen are, of course, Americans who tell us that our dreams, however mired in blood and moral failings, are still worth pursuing even in the flawed incompleteness of their realization.
Payne is becoming another of America’s great liberal/conservative filmmakers. This is the lineage of Capra and Ford as well as Sturges. It involves the liberal critique of greed and acquisitiveness, and the conservative insistence that something in the idea of American exceptionalism and the celebration of the inspired individual is true, that our landscape summons us and our families to something uniquely heroic and noble. The fully achieved balance of these attitudes in Nebraska makes Alexander Payne one of the handful of filmmakers on whom the future of mainstream American cinema depends.
Alexander Payne > Overview - AllMovie bio from Andrea LeVasseur
Alexander
Payne - Director - Biography.com
biography
Alexander Payne: Information from Answers.com biography
Alexander Payne - Yahoo! Movies biography
Alexander Payne - Overview - MSN Movies profile page
Alexander Payne NNDB personal profile
Alexander Payne - Director by Film Rank Films 101
History of the Moving Image Auteur Paper: Alexander Payne ... biographical essay (Undated) (pdf format)
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Election (1999) Geoffrey
Macnab, October 1999
FILM
FESTIVAL REVIEW; An Uneasy Rider on the Road to Self-Discovery Stephen Holden from The New York Times,
The
Bard of Omaha John Hodgman from The New York Times,
BFI | Sight & Sound
| About Schmidt (2002) Xan
Brooks, January 2003
Come Back,
Jack! Why Schmidt Is Shit - Bright Lights Film Journal Why
Schmidt Is Shit, by Tony Macklin, February 1, 2003
About Schmidt: Is That All There Is? • Senses of Cinema Girish Shambu, March 21, 2003
Kenchen.org ||| Sideways (Spring 2004) Deflated Ego, by Ken Chen, Spring 2004
Sideways - Reviews - Reverse Shot Down the Hatch, by Eric Hynes, October 22, 2004
The
Verve Is Back: The New York Film Festival 2004 - Bright Lights ... Megan Ratner from Bright Lights Film Journal, from the
Alexander
Payne and Jim Taylor's Sideways: Are You Serious ... Alan Dale from Blog Critics,
Besides
Sideways | Jonathan Rosenbaum January
7, 2005
Alexander Payne receives Two Oscar Nominations for “Sideways ... Greek News, January 31, 2005
Sideways: Sideways to Hell, Maybe! Alan Vanneman from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 31, 2005
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Red, White And Brew Mark
Salisbury from Sight and Sound, February
2005
hackwriters.com - Sideways by Alexander Payne - The Road Movie ... Sam North, February 3, 2005
American
Squander: Sideways and the Extravagance of Self-Pity ... Natalie Reitano from Senses of Cinema, February 8, 2005
The Believer - Interview with Alexander Payne Kate Donnelly profile overview (no interview unless a subscriber) from The Believer, March 2005
Alexander Payne and Sandra Oh Separate - Divorced, Alexander Payne ... Chris Gardner from People magazine, March 12, 2005
Alexander Payne presents The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing | The ... Eastman House, December 9, 2006
Sandra Oh News | Sandra Oh and Alexander Payne officially divorced Actress Archives, December 27, 2006
Everyday
Heroes / Jim Taylor and Alexander Payne team up again for ... Everyday
Heroes, Jennifer M. Wood from Moviemaker
magazine,
Are
Alexander Payne And Misanthropic Fashionista Blogger Alice Kim ... Jezebel
magazine,
When Omaha Met
Cinema Eric Konigsberg from The New York Times,
MishmashMagazine.com | Mike Gets Around: Alexander Payne Signing ... Mike Sametz, Mishmash magazine, October 2008
UPDATE:
Has Alexander Payne Corralled Cohen, Giamatti, Streep and ... Brad Brevet from Rope of Silicon,
Alexander Payne offers students practical advice on writing and ... Brenda Mills from Florida State University, June 4, 2009
Telluride
picks Payne as guest director for 2009 festival | News ... Wendy Mitchell from Screendaily,
Alexander
Payne Ditches Downsizing, Picks Up The Descendants ... Alex Billington from First Showing,
Alexander
Payne Moves From Downsizing to The Descendants? | /Film Russ Fischer from /Film,
Stuff
And Shit Vancouver: Alexander Payne's 14th Arrondissement ... Stuff and Shit
Coen
Brothers, Alexander Payne, & 'The Thing' Remake Breaking ... Edmund Mullins from Black Book,
NYFF:
Life is (Alexander) Payne | Village Voice Nick Pinkerton, September 28, 2011
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Film of the month: The Descendants (2011) Xan Brooks, December 20, 2011
Chance and Choice, Biology and Theology in ... - Senses of Cinema Lesley Brill, September 19, 2012
Nebraskan Director Alexander Payne - Nebraska Life Magazine Alan J. Bartels, November /December 2012
Home Movies |
The New Yorker Margaret
Talbot, October 28, 2013
Artinfo: J. Hoberman November 13, 2013
Salon: Andrew O'Hehir November 14, 2013
The New Yorker: Richard Brody November 14, 2013
Film of
the Week: Nebraska - Film Comment
Jonathan Romney, November 21, 2013
Cinema Scope: Adam Nayman November 22, 2013
Sight & Sound: Trevor Johnston December 06, 2013
Nebraska - Reviews -
Reverse Shot State of the Union, by Elbert Ventura, December 13, 2013
The
Propagation of Empathy, the Absence of Bathos: On Alexander ... The
Propagation of Empathy, the Absence of Bathos: On Alexander Payne’s Sideways
(2004), by Sean Hooks from Bright Lights
Film Journal, October 19, 2016
Albuquerque Alibi (Angie Drobnic) review Interview with
the director,
SPLICEDwire:
Alexander Payne intervew (1999) Rob
Blackwelder interview from SPLICEDwire,
BBC - Films - interview - Alexander Payne Alec Cawthorne interview from the BBC, January 9, 2003
"THIS
IS ALEXANDER, HE MAKES MOVIES": Film Freak Central ... Walter Chaw interview,
Director
series: Alexander Payne | Below the Line
Mary Ann Skweres interview from Below
the Line,
'Sideways':
Payne's Latest Comic Antidote : NPR Michelle
Norris interview from NPR,
INTERVIEW:
ALEXANDER PAYNE Devin Faraci from
CHUD,
Interview:
Alexander Payne - IGN Jeff
Otto interview from IGN,
Alexander
Payne's Sideways - Filmmaker Magazine - Fall 2004 Matthew Ross interview, October 20, 2004
“Sideways” and Behind: An interview with writer/director Alexander ... Paul Contos interview, October 28, 2004
Flashback –
Interview: Alexander Payne on “Sideways”
Stephen Saito interview from The
Daily Texan, November 3, 2004
Alexander Payne · Interview · The A.V. Club Scott Tobias interview, November 10, 2004
Interview:
Melissa Denes meets Alexander Payne | Film | The Guardian Melissa Denes interview, December 31, 2004
Interview:
Alexander Payne - Uncut Kevin Maher interview from Uncut magazine, January 31, 2005
Interview:
Melissa Denes meets Alexander Payne | Film | The Guardian Melissa Denes interview from The Guardian,
BBC - Movies - interview - Alexander Payne Adrian Hennigan interview from the BBC, January 14, 2005
PopEntertainment.com:
Alexander Payne - Director of "Sideways ... Brad Balfour interview from Pop Entertainment,
Alexander Payne interview | LOVEFiLM LOVEFiLM interview May 16, 2005
Bizet, with added tumbleweed | Film | The Guardian Xan Brooks interview from The Guardian, June 16, 2006
Alexander Payne · Interview · The A.V. Club Scott Tobias interview, November 15, 2011
Alexander Payne | The
Talks interview, May 30, 2012
Alexander
Payne interview: 'Bruce Dern looks like a wreck – and that's ... Philip Horne interview, December 7, 2013
Ranked 24th on The Guardian's 2004 List of the World's 40 Best Directors
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
Alexander Payne - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
CITIZEN RUTH
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
In this insightful black comedy, a reprobate glue addict (Laura Dern), pregnant for the fourth time, must decide whether to have an abortion. While such a premise is generally not a source of great mirth—particularly when dealing with an issue that inspires such seemingly absolute and irreconcilable positions—Alexander Payne (who also directed) and Jim Taylor's smart script deflates the pretenses of both sides. After being rescued from jail by the head of the local "Baby Savers" chapter, Dern falls in with a pair of pro-choice lesbians, a situation that leads to a bidding war between the opposing parties. While never moving far from the recognizable aspects of the controversy (Burt Reynolds' funny but over-the-top minister is an exception), Payne and Taylor mine the abortion issue for all its satirical value. A deft, three-dimensional performance from Dern, playing an almost entirely unlikable character, aids incalculably in exposing what happens when political factions lose touch with the realities of the issues for which they claim to provide answers.
A little more than thirty years ago, audiences were both outraged and delighted when Stanley Kubrick made light of the threat of nuclear war; critic Jonathan Rosenbaum notes that one of his companions at a 1964 screening of Dr. Strangelove exited the theater in tears. Fifteen years later, a similar reaction greeted Monty Python's satire of early Christianity, Life of Brian -- for my money, one of the greatest comedies ever made. Citizen Ruth, a new film directed by first-timer Alexander Payne, isn't quite as remarkable as its predecessors, but it's equally audacious, mining laughs from perhaps the most ferociously divisive issue in contemporary life: abortion. In tackling this potentially treacherous terrain, Payne and his co-screenwriter, Jim Taylor, made two important choices: one smart, one brilliant. The smart choice was not to choose sides, to satirize both factions of the debate; the brilliant choice, the one that gives the film its bite and prevents it from becoming mired in bathos, was to make the film's protagonist, Ruth (Laura Dern) -- a young pregnant mother caught in a tug-of-war between pro-life and pro-choice advocates -- as unsympathetic, manipulative and (heh) ruthless as those who would exploit her. This is risky business, as there's nobody with whom the audience can fully identify, but the gamble pays off; guaranteed to offend virtually everybody (and I can attest that it's a nightmare dating movie; the argument it inspired went on for hours), it's the year's sharpest and funniest comedy. I'll go further: as of this writing, with only a handful of 1996 films left for me to see, it's my favorite non-documentary film of the year. Payne and Taylor were clearly inspired by the social satires Preston Sturges wrote and directed during the 1940s; as in Sturges, even the least important supporting characters are vivid and memorable (in addition to Dern, who is fantastic, the excellent cast includes Mary Kay Place, Kurtwood Smith, and Swoosie Kurtz...but even the actors whose names I didn't recognize or remember make an impression), and though Ruth is unquestionably the film's nominal protagonist, most of its scenes involve large groups of jabbering people, with Ruth at the center, rather than the shot/reverse-shot duets that permeate most movies. And while the film ridicules everybody who even momentarily walks into the frame, the general tone is one of bemused affection (Sturges) rather than cynical misanthropy (Billy Wilder -- though as Ruth seems to belong in a Wilder picture, what we have here is something of an amalgam of the two). As venal and selfish as Ruth is, the filmmakers clearly love her, and they extend the same largesse to every character she encounters; Citizen Ruth is somehow simultaneously vicious and sweet-natured, and the tension between these two contradictory tones is absolutely perfect for the material, laden with emotional baggage as it is. See it, but consider seeing it alone.
CITIZEN RUTH is not coming soon to a theater near you. If you live in one of the half-dozen or so cities where Miramax gave the film a trial run, you missed it months ago; if you don't live in one of those cities, you never even got the chance to miss it. No one markets unconventional or controversial films better than Miramax, but even they couldn't get more than a handful of people into theaters to see CITIZEN RUTH. This time, they were dealing with the Grand Poobah of unconventional, controversial subjects. You see, CITIZEN RUTH is about abortion. No, wait, it gets worse -- CITIZEN RUTH is a _comedy_ about abortion. It sets out to offend nearly everyone, and succeeds. It's got an unrepentant loser as its protagonist, and she's the most likeable character in the film. In short, CITIZEN RUTH has absolutely everything working against it except a blisteringly funny script, assured direction and a remarkably brave lead performance by Laura Dern.
Dern plays Ruth Stoops, a young woman with no home, no job and a penchant for sniffing anything that comes in a can or a tube. Ruth is already a four-time loser as a mother when she learns after her 17th arrest for inhalation of dangerous substances that she is pregnant. The judge (David Graf) threatens Ruth with a felony charge for endangerment of her fetus, but suggests that he might reconsider if she were to get an abortion. That suggestion outrages local right-to-life leaders Norm (Kurtwood Smith) and Gail Stoney (Mary Kay Place), who take Ruth into their home and try to turn her case into a media event. Of course the other side isn't about to sit still for such tactics, eventually snaring Ruth away from the Stoneys to make their own political statement. Stuck in the middle is Ruth herself, who seems to have more control over procuring her next high than over the fate of her pregnancy.
If you were inclined to keep a tally, you'd probably find that Alexander Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor don't split their mockery evenly down the middle. They take some savage shots at the Baby Savers' tactics, including a hilarious scene at a "clinic" where Ruth receives "counseling" about her "choice." Norm, meanwhile, is portrayed as an ineffectual horn-dog who ogles Ruth in a bathroom and uses his job as a hardware store clerk to proselytize. That doesn't mean the pro-choice advocates get off easy. They are portrayed as just as obsessed with "messages" and public relations, and just as star-struck by their national leader. It's also hard not to chuckle at the terribly earnest paean one lesbian couple sings to the "moon mother."
There is only one place where the film-makers' sympathies obviously lie, and that is with Ruth. You may have a hard time sharing that sympathy, however, because Laura Dern isn't interested in making you like Ruth. Ruth is a selfish manipulator, always ready to swear that she's going to turn her life around a moment before she grabs a full bottle of chianti and an empty bottle of toilet cleanser. It is a gutsy and brilliant performance, one on which the success of CITIZEN RUTH as a social satire depends. If Ruth Stoops is turned into one of the sanctified poor, the film collapses under the weight of its sincerity. Instead, she is made completely oblivious to anything but her own immediate needs. She is a walking worst-case scenario, which makes it easy for both sides to use her as an example. It also makes it impossible for either side to control her, making for some of the funniest film moments of the year.
Payne's most extraordinary accomplishment may be satirizing both sides of a serious issue while never understating the seriousness of the issue itself. In fact, CITIZEN RUTH is really about how this particular battle has taken on a life of its own apart from the people affected by it. There is a scene at a protest early in the film where a clinic employee chides protesters' behavior with a reminder that they "know the drill." It is a telling moment. At some point, Ruth Stoops' case becomes just another drill, another "war story" like the one a protester tells as he gathers with colleagues as though in a social club. Near the climax of the film Ruth tries to escape from both sides, and is shocked to discover that she can walk away virtually unnoticed; everyone is too busy shouting to pay attention to a single troubled woman. It's a shame that a subversively spectacular film like CITIZEN RUTH managed to walk away just as unnoticed.
Citizen Ruth, Citizen Ruth Movie, Alexander Payne Abortion Film ... Matthew Toffolo
Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [C+]
Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [A-]
Prole Models
[CITIZEN RUTH & INVENTING THE ABBOTTS ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, April 4, 1997
Movie-Vault.com (Aaron West) review [8/10]
Film Scouts (Karen Jaehne) capsule review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Dragan Antulov retrospective [6/10]
DVD Talk (John Wallis) dvd review [3/5]
DVD Authority.com (Matt Brighton) dvd review
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [3.5/5]
Movie Magazine International review Mary Weems
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]
Albuquerque Alibi (Angie Drobnic) review Interview with
the director,
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
The Boston Phoenix review Alicia Potter
Philadelphia City Paper (Ruth & Archie Perlmutter) review
San Francisco Examiner (Barbara Shulgasser) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
To
Abort, Not to Abort: A Comedy Janet
Maslin from The New York Times,
On
the Edge, but Still in the Driver's Seat
Margy Rochlin from The New York
Times,
ELECTION B+ 92
I
really must insist you help me win the election tomorrow because I deserve it. —Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) in a
plea to God for help
An early dose of Alexander Payne’s medicine, still, in my
view, his best film, which features a mix of biting, sarcastic humor that comes
close to caricature right alongside humans sliding into the abyss of their
moral fallibility, literally paying a price for their horrible mistakes in
life. It’s a difficult line to straddle,
as the tone is light and breezy, a reflection of
Mr. McAllister has a chip on his shoulder and already holds a grudge against Tracy, as he’s seen what she can do when his supposedly happily married best friend, a fellow teacher at his school, was fired after it was discovered he was concealing a sexual relationship with Tracy, claiming they were “in love.” Tracy never claimed she was coerced, admitted it was consensual, but she’s underage so clearly she’s the victim, yet Mr. McAllister continues to harbor misogynist feelings as he laments the loss of his friend, somehow blaming Tracy who’s now running unopposed for class president, a position that works closely with Mr. McAllister in the upcoming year, a thought he dreads with a passion. With that in mind, he encourages another student to run against her, Paul Metzler (Chris Klein), a dim but likeable jock who suffered a season ending injury while skiing in the off season, feeling a void in his life without athletics. This only fires up Tracy, who vows to work even harder, driven by the corporate example of how Coca Cola remains number one, as they outspend their competition. An interesting device used by the director is his multiple use of interior narration, where the inner thoughts of several characters are exposed revealing their true motives and intentions, also a freeze frame technique where time is literally stopped while a character explains themselves in greater detail. What we discover is a layer of hidden ulterior motives, largely fed by self centered impulses, tucked underneath the artificial exterior that we use to show the world who we are. In this film, it’s hard to tell which is the real person, the one they want to be, or the one they really are, as both seem to be vying for control. This duality of good and evil suggests our own moral choices are quite tenuous, as rather than hard and firm beliefs, our guard could be let down at any moment allowing the greedy, selfish impulses to take over.
It’s not easy to examine the hypocrisy of human behavior, and to do so in a comedy, but this film does a pretty good job, especially with the introduction of Paul’s younger sister Tammy (Jessica Campbell), who is just discovering her lesbian impulses, though not yet acknowledging that she’s gay. But when she is rejected, and her former girl friend (Frankie Ingrassia) ever so casually becomes her brother Paul’s girl friend instead (proving she’s not gay), actually taking over the running of his campaign for president, this catapults Tammy into her own candidacy for president. Unlike the promised sincerity of the other two, however, pledging ways to improve their school, Tammy opens her speech with the remark, “Who cares about this stupid election?” Tammy offers the refreshing thoughts that reflect how most kids feel, that the only person it really matters to is the winner, as nobody else even cares. Inexplicably, Tammy is the huge audience favorite at the assembly, where students stand up and cheer, sending the administration into emergency damage control, as her views do not reflect the school’s intended message of civic pride and responsibility. Tammy is the unsung hero of this film, as she’s the only character in a movie filled with despicable people who actually says what she means. It’s a joy to watch her spend time in her favorite spot where she goes to be alone, a giant grassy field overlooking a massive power station. But the movie has more devious intentions, as it’s really about dishonesty, exposing the seamy underside of student council elections, where the election is a stand-in for any human endeavor where we face a choice, a moral dilemma. The question becomes, just how far would we go, what steps would we take to prevent what we perceive as a horrible outcome? Would we cross the line of ethical behavior to prevent it from happening? And simultaneously, how far would we go to get what we want? Don’t we all have the same conniving Tracy Flick attributes coded into our genetic DNA? But don’t we just suppress it, as it makes us too uncomfortable to think we’re that deceitful? In the end, of course, humans are that deceitful all the time, never bothering to think about the casualties of people hurt along the way.
This remarkable film may be set in high school, but its satiric
take on moral corruption, political chicanery, adultery and seduction is
anything but juvenile. In a smart role reversal, Ferris Bueller (aka Broderick)
plays Mr McAllister, a responsible, concerned teacher worn thin by long years
at George Washington Carver High, by his sexless marriage, and by the plight of
his best friend, sacked for sleeping with the redoubtable but under age Tracy
Flick (Witherspoon). Come elections for student council president,
User reviews from imdb Author: Camera Obscura from
With me, Alexander Payne can do no wrong. Before he entered
In a pitch-perfect role, Reese Witherspoon is Tracy Flick, one of those
irritating girls that are always in the front row, always raise their hand and
wanna do something for the sake of the school, read, for their own resume.
Tracy Flick is one of those, a fiercely calculating careerist who will stop at
nothing to get the main prize, the office of student body president at Carver
High. Since she's running unopposed, nothing seems in her way at getting what
she wants, again. History teacher and student government adviser Jim McAllister
(Matthew Broderick, Ferris Bueller reversed) seems content with his life, but
is worn out by his love-less marriage, and by the plight of his best friend and
colleague, sacked for sleeping with consenting but under age Tracy Flick. With
the coming elections, McAllister is appalled by the prospect of working closely
with this little nagging career bitch, and charged with overseeing the
proceedings, discreetly sponsors a rival candidate, dumb but popular jock Paul
Metzler (Chris Klein), to enter the election. But when Paul's sister Tammy
(Jessica Campbell), an embittered and unpopular girl announces her candidacy,
the election becomes a really back-biting and nasty affair, with Jim McAllister
getting more than he bargained for.
I think this film might appeal even more to adults than teenagers. If you like
Alexander Payne's uncompromising approach to his subjects, this will definitely
be up your alley, with everything from lesbianism to adultery thrown in the
mix. Ideally casted all the way, with Matthew Broderick, after a number of
uninteresting roles in lame movies, really making his mark. He gives his role a
sort of understatement that makes Mr. McAllister a hopelessly tragic, but
utterly lovable loser.
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Election is about a twisted, backstabbing run for political office among candidates who are self-centered and slightly dim. No, this isn't the Democrats and the Republicans. This is high school.
Reese Witherspoon stars in perhaps her very best performance as
Tracy Flick, the go-getter who must succeed in everything come hell or high
water. Matthew Broderick plays her teacher, Mr. McAllister, who doesn't like
There are more twists to this tawdry tale, but I won't give them
away. The movie is scripted by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor from the novel by
Tom Perotta, and is directed by Payne. Payne and Taylor last did Citizen
Ruth, another political mind-bender that had pro-life zealots and
pro-choice maniacs vying for the poster child support of the pregnant
glue-sniffing Laura Dern. The trick with that movie was that Payne and
The movie is full of hilarious nasty little moments, like when we
first meet
I have to say again just how good Witherspoon is in this role. She started out as a slutty bad girl in Freeway, Twilight, and Pleasantville, and now here she is on the other side of the spectrum as an uptight goody-goody. When she moves it's as if there's a wound-up spring running up and down her body. When angry, she flares her nostrils like they're helium balloons. I'm not sure who I'd rather watch; Witherspoon, Drew Barrymore, Natalie Portman, or Christina Ricci. There's enough talent and screen presence between the four of them to fill the shoes of a Katharine Hepburn or a Bette Davis. I hope the Academy remembers this movie when Oscar time comes and, once again, they can't find five decent performances to fill the Best Actress category.
Election works because all these characters are multi-sided and because the story is so vicious. As a bonus, we are allowed to read references to adult political races into the smaller petri dish high school race, but without being preached to. Kudos to Payne and Taylor for their courage, balance, and humor.
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Election (1999) Geoffrey
Macnab, October 1999
The US Midwest, the present,
Tracy Flick, star pupil at George Washington Carver High, is standing unopposed
for president of the student government. Civics teacher Jim McAllister has a
grudge against Tracy because of her part in a sex scandal which saw fellow
teacher Dave Novotny sacked. McAllister encourages high-school football hero
Paul Metzler to stand against her. Paul's sister Tammy also joins the race
after being dumped by her girlfriend (who, to spite Tammy, has become Paul's
girlfriend and campaign manager). One weekend, Tracy loses her temper putting
up posters in the school corridor and tears down the election banners. There is
a school inquiry. Tammy takes the blame - even though she knows Tracy was
responsible - and is suspended. Her parents decide to enrol her in a strict,
all-girl convent school instead. As the election draws nearer, Jim has a brief
fling with Dave Novotny's estranged wife Linda. Although he thinks he's in
love, she dismisses the affair as a mistake and tells Jim's wife about it.
Jim oversees the election count;
Tracy has won by one vote. Jim surreptitiously throws two votes for Tracy into
a wastepaper basket and declares Paul the winner. Tracy is devastated. The
school janitor finds the missing votes. The election result is overturned. Jim
resigns in disgrace. His marriage breaks up. He heads to New York, where he
gets a job working in a museum. While visiting Washington DC he sees Tracy
climbing into a car with a Republican politician whose assistant she has
become. He throws his drink at the car and runs off.
Review
"It's like my mom said: the
weak are always trying to sabotage the strong," proclaims Tracy Flick, the
foot-stamping, cupcake-baking overachiever whose battle to become class
president forms the backdrop to Election. As demure as Pippi
Longstocking and as sanctimonious as Tipper Gore, Tracy works her heart out.
She's also the only one in class who can explain the difference between
morality and ethics, but that doesn't change the fact that she's a little
monster. If Billy Wilder had been assigned to make a teen comedy, he might well
have come up with a film as witty and sour as this. Alexander Payne's second
feature (after Citizen Ruth), Election is a
wonderfully acidulous satire which uses its high-school setting to make some
barbed points about US politics and culture in general. We're offered a
presidential campaign in microcosm, complete with dirty tricks, smears, a hint
of a sex scandal, and even some unseemly vandalism.
Payne manages to make us see
Tracy through the eyes of the one person who detests her - her teacher, Jim
McAllister. Not that it is immediately apparent that the film is biased against
her. The screenplay (co-written by Payne and Jim Taylor) seems scrupulously
even-handed. In voiceovers running throughout the film, all the candidates are
given the chance to reflect on the events surrounding the fateful election
campaign. The mainstream is represented by high-school football hero Paul
Metzler, a genial, simple-minded oaf with (so he's told) a big penis, who
doesn't think it's right to vote for himself. We hear from the counterculture
in the form of Paul's sister Tammy, a nihilistic lesbian whose slogans
"Who cares?" and "What does it matter anyway?" appeal
infinitely more to the voters than Tracy's pious homilies. Tracy, for her part,
represents ambition, self-help and "the American way". (Sure enough,
she turns out to be a Republican.) The most compelling voice, though, belongs
not to the candidates but to the teacher overseeing the campaign.
At GWC High, McAllister is all
that stands between Tracy and absolute power. His hackles rise every time she
shoots up her arm in class. US politics is about checks and balances, he tells
his class, and checking Tracy's career becomes his full-time obsession. After
his experiences as a squeaky-clean juvenile lead in such films as Ferris
Bueller's Day Off and Project X, it must surely have been
liberating for Matthew Broderick to play a character as crumpled and seedy as
McAllister, a man who keeps porn films in the basement. He suffers every manner
of indignity. He is spat at. His car is bespattered with mud. He's stung in the
eye by a bee. When he cheats on his wife, Payne makes him look all the more
absurd by showing him groping with Linda Novotny from the baby's point of view.
Still, he's as close as Election gets to a hero. He's the one who
upholds democratic values - even if it means cheating. "Do you want an
apple or an orange? That's democracy," he explains to a bewildered-looking
Paul as he tries to ensure Tracy isn't elected unopposed.
Election turns the usual conventions of the
high-school comedy on their head. There's no prom night. Payne doesn't labour
the tension between the jocks and the nerds, or try to show school life from
the rebel's perspective. The film may have been made by MTV, but its fairground-style
music (by Rolfe Kent) sounds as if it were borrowed from some old Mack Sennett
comedy. Just occasionally, we feel flickers of sympathy for Tracy. Nobody likes
her much and her all-consuming ambition means she is never satisfied.
Witherspoon, last seen as the goodie two-shoes in Cruel Intentions,
plays her brilliantly, screwing up her features and scowling when things go
against her and smiling insincerely at all other times.
The funniest moments are often
the cruellest. When gawky teacher Dave Novotny bursts into tears as he realises
his affair with Tracy has ruined his career, the scene is played for laughs.
(Perhaps Novotny deserves his punishment for using Lionel Richie's 'Three Times
a Lady' as a seduction theme.) Jim's humiliations are also milked for comedy.
The humour may be vicious, but there's also a strong vein of pathos running
through the film. Payne's sympathies are with the underdog. Ultimately, it is
success - at least in the way it is achieved by Tracy - which seems shabby.
Chance
and Choice, Biology and Theology in ... - Senses of Cinema Lesley Brill, September 19, 2012
The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review
» Election (Alexander Payne, 1999) Mat Viola from Notes of a Film Fanatic
Nitrate Online (Elias Savada) review
World Socialist Web Site review Kate Randall
Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs) review
MediaCircus (Anthony Leong) review
Salon (Mary Elizabeth Williams) review
Nashville Scene (Noel Murray) review
Ain't It Cool Movie Reviews (Harry Knowles) review
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Mixed Reviews: The Arts, The World, and More (Jill Cozzi) review
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review
Linda Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies) review
CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [5/5]
Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [3.5/4]
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [4.5/5]
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
DVD Times Gary Couzens
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3.5/4]
DVD Verdict (Sean McGinnis) dvd
review
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DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Mike Long
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Blu-Ray
DVD Verdict (Clark Douglas) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
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dvdfuture.com (R. L. Shaffer) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
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digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell) dvd review Blu-Ray
DVD Authority.com (Matt Brighton) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
FilmJudge (David Mercier) review [5/5]
Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Michael S. Goldberger
Edinburgh U Film Society (Neil Chue Hong) review
SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [3/4]
Movie Magazine International review Casey McCabe
eFilmCritic.com (Scott Weinberg) review [5/5]
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Allan Marcus
eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Py Thomas
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3.5/4]
AboutFilm.com (Kris Campbell) review [A] #19 from Top #25 Films of the 1990’s
Reviews on the Side (Steven Lekowicz) review
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [4/5]
Ruthless Reviews review Erich Schulte
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [4/5]
Film Journal International (Kevin Lally) review
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4.5/5]
The Tech (MIT) (Vladimir Zelevinsky) review
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
Election - by Alexander Payne andJim Taylor movie script from Dailyscript
Entertainment Weekly review [A] Lisa Schwarzbaum
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) dvd review
The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [2/5]
The Boston Phoenix (Betsy Sherman) review
The Boston Phoenix review Gary Susman
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Examiner (Wesley Morris) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
FILM REVIEW; The Candidate: Dirty Tricks and Even Dirtier Minds Janet Maslin from The New YorkTimes, April 23, 1999, also seen here: The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
TAKING
THE CHILDREN; High School Rocks the Vote, Then Stands It on Its Head Peter M. Nichols from The New YorkTimes,
REVISIONS;
The American Way of Class, a Game of Self-Delusion Margo Jefferson from The New YorkTimes,
LA
Weekly [Manohla Dargis]
DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Leonard Norwitz
ABOUT SCHMIDT D+ 65
Years afterwards, I remember sitting in the theater and hating this film, thinking it overated to the point of being loathsome. Nicholson is as uncomfortable as I ever remember seeing him, especially having to carry an overall theme of emptiness and meaninglessness, and the film continually rings that same bell of pretentiousness and delusion. What this film has to do with aging or real people’s lives is beyond me, as there’s a smart aleck attitude that just won’t quit, where all these vague middle class values that are meant to mean something are foisted upon us by shallow, insufferable characters who don’t in the least remind the viewer audience of themselves, yet it’s the audience that is supposed to do the heavy lifting and make some sense out if this when it’s apparent no one in the film does. While Kathy Bates is always a breath of fresh air, Payne has defined a breezy, light-hearted comedy that strains to deal with the heaviness of grief and ordinary, everyday angst through social satire, and while some films about existential nothingness are quite clever, I get the feeling this one is pretending to be clever without really having that much to say—Tolstoy or Chekhov, it’s not. Like most of this director’s other films, it got rave reviews from the critics, but damn if anything memorable or important sticks afterwards.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
After retirement and his wife's sudden death, insurance
salesman Warren Schmidt (Nicholson) feels his life, and all the bland
assumptions that have sustained it, slipping away from him. To get back on
course, he travels in his Winnebago to see his beloved daughter (Davis) in the
hope of preventing her marriage to a walking cliché (Mulroney) and of spending
his remaining years with her. This perhaps excessively droll, even ponderous
satire of Midwestern manners really takes off only when
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4.5/5]
At the age of 66, Warren Schmidt (Nicholson) is a man
unprepared to face life's ambiguities. As the movie opens, we see Schmidt alone
in his office at Woodmen of the World insurance company in Omaha -- coat in
hand, paperwork boxed up, eye on the clock watching the second hand inch toward
5pm on the day of his retirement. All he knows of his future is what he has
learned from a career spent working with actuarial tables. But nothing in those
tables has readied him for the structure-free life of retirement. The toasts at
his retirement dinner ring hollow, his longtime wife suddenly seems to him an
unrecognizable old woman, and the young MBA grad who has replaced him at work
has no foreseeable use for
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul (Terri Sutton) review
Alexander Payne has done the impossible: The
director of Election has pushed Jack
Nicholson to become an actor again. In Payne's About Schmidt,
Nicholson plays a retiring assistant vice president at a life insurance firm in
Omaha, Nebraska.
Warren Schmidt is a pursed, droopy fellow carrying more than a few extra
pounds. He whines. When he tries to kiss women half his age, they scream and
run. (Aha! Reality bites!) In certain lights, Nicholson is unrecognizable.
Except for the eyebrows. And a gleam in his eye that says
That gleam reflects Payne's perspective (no pun intended). There's a cynical intelligence behind this "whimsical" tale of a retiree's attempts to find meaning in his life. It makes me ask: Who is Payne's intended audience? About Schmidt runs on satire and sentimentality. It mocks the white working class with an insouciance I thought had gone out of style. (Welcome back, Republicans.) The "feminized" white suburban middle class--which Warren exemplifies--suffers not a few jabs, though our hero is beatified in the end. And yet I doubt this movie was made for retiring assistant vice presidents of Nebraskan life insurance firms. It seems to be pandering to a different class's notions about such assistant vice presidents.
Retirement robs Warren Schmidt of his most beloved perks: the illusion of
power, distance from his wife, distraction from thinking. In boredom, he is
driven to sign up for one of those support-a-poor-foreign-child charities. As
he writes his assigned child a letter to accompany a very small check,
It's a promising start. June
Squibb, as the wife Helen, is perfect: round and soft and gray. She looks
like a million women I see in malls, but never see in movies. How does Helen
feel about
Of course, it's not my job to tell Payne what movie he should've made, even
if his male journey of self-discovery was worn to threads before Eliot imagined
"an old man in a dry month." (Payne's screenplay adapts--or, rather, reduces--Louis
Begley's novel.) But I can say that the portraits of women are uglier here
because a female character is never granted her own perspective. (On the other
hand, Election did allow young women to be protagonists, and it still
ran on misogyny's gassy fumes.) Payne mocks everybody (besides the upper and upper
middle classes), but the story belongs to
The same is true of the middle class versus working class satire.
Jeannie fights
About Schmidt: Is That All There Is? • Senses of Cinema Girish Shambu, March 21, 2003
Come Back,
Jack! Why Schmidt Is Shit - Bright Lights Film Journal Why
Schmidt Is Shit, by Tony Macklin, February 1, 2003
BFI | Sight & Sound
| About Schmidt (2002) Xan
Brooks, January 2003
Even
Jack Nicholson can't save About Schmidt. - Slate Magazine David Edelstein, December 12, 2002
New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review
Road Warriors |
Village Voice J. Hoberman,
December 10, 2002
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [1.5/5]
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
DVD
Times Mike Sutton
Images (David Gurevich) review
World Socialist Web Site review Joanne Laurier
“About Schmidt” -
Salon.com Charles Taylor,
December 13, 2002
Philadelphia City
Paper [Sam Adams]
BrothersJudd.com - Review of Alexander Payne's About Schmidt
Kamera.co.uk review Edward Lamberti
The Filmsnobs (Stephen Himes) review
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [6/10]
The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review (Page 2)
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Kamera.co.uk dvd review Paul Clarke
Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review [3/4]
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B]
The Filmsnobs (James Owen) review
Movie-Vault.com review [8/10] Scott
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [A]
stylusmagazine.com (Jay Millikan) review
Nitrate Online (KJ Doughton) review
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]
hybridmagazine.com review Nancy Semin
Harvey S. Karten review [3.5/4]
Mark R. Leeper review [low +3 out of -4..+4]
CNN Showbiz (Paul Clinton) review
PopMatters (Shan Fowler) review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3/4]
DVD Town (James Plath) dvd review
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Audio Revolution (Bill Warren) dvd review
DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Ed Peters
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A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review
Film Freak Central dvd review Walter Chaw and Bill Chambers
filmcritic.com (Rachel Gordon) review [2/5]
Ruthless Reviews review Jonny Lieberman
tonymacklin.net [Tony Macklin]
Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [3.5/4]
SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [3.5/4]
The Film Journal (Peter Tonguette) review
That Cow (Andrew Bradford) review [9/10]
eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) review [3/5]
Brilliant Observations on 1492 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Ain't It Cool Movie Reviews (Harry Knowles) review
Film Monthly (Parama Chaudhury) review
Window to the Movies (Jeffrey Chen) review [9/10]
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [A]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [3/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [4/5]
Movie Habit (Marty Mapes) review [2/4]
FilmJerk.com (Edward Havens) review [A+]
Film Journal International (Kevin Lally) review
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [3/4]
Film Monthly (Hank Yuloff) review
Movie Magazine International review Casey McCabe
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [4/5]
ESpy.ca (Andrew Dignan) review [4.5/5]
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [4/5]
Plume Noire review Anji Milanovic
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
CineScene.com (Les Phillips) review
Exclaim! review Erin Oke
Premiere.com review Fred Schruers
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [3/4]
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
BBC Films review
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
Boston Globe review [3/4] Ty Burr
Dallas Observer (Robert Wilonsky) review
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
Movie
review, 'About Schmidt' Michael
Wilmington from The Chicago Tribune
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
FILM;
That Mythic American Hero: The Regular Guy
A.O. Scott from The New York
Times,
FILM
REVIEW; Just an Average Guy Overcoming Obstacles, Helping Keep the Earth Well
Salted The New York Times,
Via
Hollywood, a Glimpse of African Poverty
Marc Lacey from The
FILM;
Nicholson On Age, Acting And 'Being Jack'
Dana Kennedy from The New York Times,
Asian
Sensibilities, Anime to 'Schmidt'
Dave Kehr from The New York Times,
AT THE
MOVIES Dave Kehr from The
My
Novel, the Movie: My Baby Reborn; 'About Schmidt' Was Changed, But Not Its Core Louis Begley from The New York Times,
SIDEWAYS B+ 90
Breezy, mostly feel-good, relatively mainstream American comedy that parallels the excruciating care needed to produce great wine with the foibles of being human, requiring a bit of the same tender loving care, with moments of hilarity alongside slow moments of isolated anguish, much of it in recovery from the resulting hangovers from nights of excessive drinking. The story follows two single guys, one recently divorced, Paul Giamatti, who is something of a loner, a failed would-be writer, probably a better wine connoisseur, and his former college roommate, Thomas Haden Church, who is about to get married over the weekend and wants one final fling before he loses his bachelorhood. While they couldn’t be more opposite, they have an amazing antagonism, which is brilliantly funny, largely due to the appealing, easy-going manner of Church, whose performance is simply magnificent.
The film turns into a buddy movie where the two visit the California wine country, visit a few vineyards, and due to Church’s incessant charm, pick up a couple of wine savvy girls, Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh (at that time, Payne’s real-life wife), who they take for a ride, never realizing that by withholding the inevitable about the impending marriage, they were only fooling themselves. With bits of slapstick thrown against a quiet realism, it’s an effective film style, and has a fairly seamless feel to it until the abrupt end, which reminded me of the dilemma Tom Hanks faced at the end of CAST AWAY. The constant indulgence of food and wine, and who, might I ask, is paying for all this, mixed with the constant unfulfilled needs of the two guys leads to a middle class void that suggests nothing but trouble ahead. The boyish charm of Church and the meticulous pessimism of Giamatti makes for some scintillating dialogue in their scenes together, however, this seems overly pointed towards people with the economic means to indulge themselves like this. Most of us still have to work for a living. The concept of responsibility was nearly completely absent in this American middle class portrait. While this is a critically acclaimed and much awarded film, I’m not sure it shares international themes, as it seems overly concerned with strictly American consumerism and our own shallow values. And to make matters worse, as if relating to those suffering with a hangover, the over-indulgent musical score sounds very much like some piano-led classic light station, just one step up from Kenny G.
‘Can I ask you a personal question?’ wonders Miles (Paul
Giamatti), our paunchy anti-hero, as he leans in towards Maya (Virginia
Madsen), a friend he knows from his regular trips to California’s
vineyards. ‘Why are you so into Pinot?’
What a chat-up line. Yet this and other crucial questions concerning wine, men,
love and friendship are the lifeblood of this low-key road movie about two middle-aged
men, Miles and Jack (Thomas
Haden Church), who take to the highway to explore California’s vineyards in
the week before Jack gets married.
This odd, contrasting pair share little more than long-gone college days. Miles
is a schoolteacher, aspiring novelist and divorcé with a near-desperate
obsession for wine and a defeatist, hang-dog demeanour that indicates he is a
depressed shell of his former self. Jack, meanwhile, is an out-of-work actor,
fancies himself as a Casanova and still dines out on a long-gone, brief stint
on a television soap opera. Their ideas of a holiday are very different: Miles
just wants to drink wine and play golf, while Jack is determined to have one
last fling before marriage and so engineers an evening with two local girls,
Maya and Stephanie (Sandra Oh).
Jack is in his element; Miles seems about to disintegrate.
Depression, loss and disappointment are at the heart of this film, which
grounds a simple story of mismatched friends and road-movie mishaps in serious,
intelligent and affecting themes. In their different ways, Jack and Miles are
the embodiment of male crisis. Payne, meanwhile, demonstrates immense
confidence by holding back both the humour and the pace of the film so that it
trips along maturely like the lazy Californian sun that he indulges so well. He
and co-writer Jim Taylor
also have great fun with Miles’ oenophile tendencies, allowing for such gems of
dialogue as ‘quaffable, but far from transcendent’. Intelligent, funny and
moving.
Exclaim! review James Luscombe
Alexander Payne is the poet laureate of
male self-delusion. His characters, from Mr. McAllister in Election to Jack
Nicholson’s Schmidt, are all blind to their own misplaced obsessions. Payne’s
new film, Sideways, continues in this tradition, but it’s more gently nuanced.
The duo at the heart of this "coming of
middle-age" story is Miles (Paul Giamatti) and Jack (
Adapting the novel by Rex Pickett, Payne and his
collaborator Jim Taylor have created a movie that’s basically a story of
romantic regeneration, but they begin by throwing out every cliché of the
romantic comedy. When Jack and Miles meet Maya (Virginia Madsen) and Stephanie
(Sandra Oh), the sexual lightning bolts start to fly, but it takes forever for
Miles to realise that he’s not as much of a loser as he thinks he is. Jack
meanwhile, does everything in his power to help his buddy, but pretty soon he’s
too busy philandering with Stephanie to pay much attention. A slow flirtation
develops between Miles and Maya, and even though Miles sees it and wants to act
on it, he’s too paralysed by doubt and self-hatred to make a move.
As with Payne’s other films, he doesn’t shy away from
making his characters look pathetic or ridiculous. Sporting a broken nose from
a bad break-up earlier in the day, Jack ends up sleeping with a plain-looking
waitress on the spur of the moment, and through some bad luck has to run back
to his hotel naked. Miles, meanwhile, has a meltdown when he hears that his
book isn’t being published and he tries to drink an entire spit bucket full of
discarded wine.
The women in the film are never really the objects of
satire here — they’re fun, smart, sexy and relatively well-adjusted. This is
all about male foibles and vulnerabilities. While this is nothing new for an
Alexander Payne film, his treatment of the subject matter here shows a subtlety
and maturity that secures his position as one of the last great moralists in
cinema today.
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
In the opening minutes of Alexander Payne's wonderful road
comedy Sideways, Paul Giamatti gives the first impression of an unkempt
Making another claim on the title "the Preston Sturges of his generation," Payne (Election) defines his universe through these sorts of wry behavioral observations; in his last film, About Schmidt, Jack Nicholson's order at an Omaha Dairy Queen says more about him than reams of dialogue would have accomplished. Like Nicholson, Giamatti expects nothing from life but disappointment, and his attitude has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Still, he's a diamond in the rough, a noble and sensitive soul who begs for (yet aggressively resists) discovery. A true wine connoisseur, capable of arch phrases like "quaffable but far from transcendent," Giamatti sees the road trip as a casual jaunt through boutique vineyards and public golf courses, but his mismatched pal has other ideas. A washed-up soap-opera actor who acts like a castaway from a Mike Judge cartoon, Church expects a frat-guy bacchanal before he gets married the following weekend. To that end, Church trains his bird-dog eyes on sexy single mother Sandra Oh while Giamatti tentatively courts the charming Virginia Madsen, a local waitress who shares his rarefied palette.
As much as Payne lampoons the haughty language of the tasting elite, he also uses wine as a natural metaphor for aging gracefully and seizing peak moments before they crest. Though his unpretentious style and generous sense of humor could be mistaken for a lack of artistry, Payne's knack for broad, crowd-pleasing comedy fails to do justice to how much thought and feeling goes into the tiniest details in his movies. Subtle shadings in décor and behavior sharpen the gags and make the characters seem more real, which gives the film's dramatic payoff a resonance far more powerful than its breezy tone might have predicted. As in About Schmidt, Sideways builds to a scene where the hero has to do the right thing against all his bitter instincts, and Giamatti's face brings two hours of observation into a heartbreaking summation. Good comedies are rare, but rarer still are those that conflate laughter with intimacy.
With so much of Hollywood’s output drowning in a cesspool of its own construction (I can’t remember a period when so many American films haven’t even been worth commenting upon), it is no fun to report on the failure of “Sideways,” the latest from writer-director Alexander Payne and his writing partner Jim Taylor. One can only hope that this dispiriting letdown is only a bump on the road following such gems as 2002’s About Schmidt and 1999’s Election.
As they did with Schmidt, Payne and Taylor have shaped their newest film as a road movie, although with another twist of the nuptial sundial. Whereas Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson), was largely involved in motoring to his daughter’s wedding following the death of his own wife, the two main characters of Sideways are exploiting the last days of one’s bachelorhood.
Miles (Paul Giamatti), a morose, unpublished novelist working as an eight-grade teacher in San Diego, is taking his college buddy Jack (Thomas Haden Church), a moderately successful actor, from the latter’s home in Los Angeles and on through a good portion of California wine country as a substitute for a bachelor party. Whatever shortcomings he may have, Miles is a wine connoisseur of utmost dedication and expertise. But he also drinks to get drunk and, to all intents and purposes, is an alcoholic.
Sideways shies away from labeling Miles as a lush per se and, like Miles himself, chalks up his excess drinking to the sensitive sad sack’s divorce two years earlier. The experience put the writer manqué into an emotional despond that he shows no desire to escape.
As for Jack, he’s a blithe live-for-today hedonist, and to Miles’s shock, intends to have as much premarital sex as he can cram into seven days. Jack strikes sexual paydirt when he hooks up with spunky Stephanie (Sandra Oh), a winery employee and friend of the more soulful Maya (Virgina Madsen), a waitress at a classy restaurant who is a longtime acquaintance of Miles and a budding connoisseur herself. When he manages to rouse himself from drunken displays of depression, Miles contemplates his own liaison with Maya; alas, she’s just gotten out of a long-term relationship and is in no hurry to get into another serious situation. And everything Miles does is serious, or at least somber.
Payne approaches this material with the ingenuity that has become a virtual hallmark. Just as an example, he uses a split-screen – split into double or quadruple images – on Miles and Jack as they motor north. Although you might not notice it, the complementary, simultaneous frames share the same perspective; everything is filmed as if from the point-of-view of a silent, non-judgmental observer sitting in-between the two men. This gives the technique, which has been largely a useless flourish in the past, an emotional grounding, as the two men are assessed, even in silent moods, as equals.
This show of evenhandedness extends to dialogue and performance as well. When, after one seduction too many, Miles excoriates Jack for his infidelity to his fiancée, the normally casual Jack responds with a low-volume but intense comment that, as smart as Miles may be, he doesn’t understand Jack’s needs. The subdued urgency, displayed with an off-angle close-up, and with a nice finish by the normally wooden Church, are all testament to Payne’s superior talent.
But the movie’s fatal flaw is that, though it appears to be about four characters, it’s really only about one: Miles. Simply put, the supporting trio around Miles function as no more than a mirror for him. One of the movie’s crucial scenes comes when, late at night, Miles and Maya have a postprandial tête-à-tête. Maya asks Miles why he loves wine and he responds with a poetic evocation of life, nurturing, and growth. While he does so, Payne gives us significant shots of Maya as her gaze goes from interested to infatuation. Maya gets to give her own assessment of wine’s philosophic essence, but Miles doesn’t respond with a corresponding emotional back flip. After all, he is already in love with Maya.
The crux of this scene encapsulates Sideways’s central flaw. We are seduced into accepting Miles’s superiority because Payne had quickly jettisoned the judicious split perspective of the split-screen sequence. More and more – and speedily – the camera’s viewpoint merges completely with Miles’s perspective until it squeezes out any competing attitude. This shift achieves a finality in a restaurant scene in which Miles is making a drunken fool of himself. He excuses himself to do what Jack had been warning him against: Making a drunken and recriminating phone call to his ex-wife. But by the time he’s into the call, Payne has pushed his camera right up into Miles’s face for the tightest close-up of the entire movie. That move insures that, just as Miles’s face obliterates everything else from view, so the possibility that Miles is merely pathetic, rather than sympathetic, is obscured.
So, in the scene with Maya, we don’t need a shot depicting Miles’s attention while Maya talks. Any question of watching how he responds to Maya – or to anyone else – is mooted by the by-now automatic assumption that Miles occupies the moral, though not social or romantic, high ground. Miles has to adjust his behavior in order to stop alienating people and to curb his drinking in order to claim control of his emotions. But his stance as the fulcrum on which everyone else’s character is judged is established relatively early and never questioned. When Maya’s look turns adoring while Miles prattles on about grapes, it’s a sign that not Miles, but Maya has become worthy.
Sideways is an unfortunate example of a successful artist – Payne (and Taylor) – expressing a mystifying self-pity through the plight of an unsuccessful artist. The chance that any other character will achieve an autonomous dramatic existence is capped by the project’s very nature. And the chance that Miles, as a figure, will embody any truly challenging characteristic, is squelched.
Sideways: Sideways to Hell, Maybe! Alan Vanneman from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 31, 2005
The
Propagation of Empathy, the Absence of Bathos: On Alexander ... The
Propagation of Empathy, the Absence of Bathos: On Alexander Payne’s Sideways
(2004), by Sean Hooks from Bright Lights
Film Journal, October 19, 2016
American
Squander: Sideways and the Extravagance of Self-Pity ... Natalie Reitano from Senses of Cinema, February 8, 2005
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Red, White And Brew Mark
Salisbury from Sight and Sound, February
2005
Besides
Sideways | Jonathan Rosenbaum January
7, 2005
The Slow Review - Alexander Payne – Sideways Kirk Marshall
Sideways - Reviews -
Reverse Shot Down the Hatch, by Eric Hynes, October
22, 2004
Kenchen.org ||| Sideways
(Spring 2004) Deflated Ego, by Ken Chen, Spring 2004
Series - Reverse Shot Brad Westcott, January 5, 2005
Sideways:
sloshed in America. - Slate Magazine
David Edelstein, October 21, 2004
not coming to a theater near you (Beth Gilligan) review
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review
Slant Magazine review Keith Uhlich
The New Yorker (David Denby) review
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [4/5]
“Sideways” - Salon.com Charles Taylor, October 15, 2004
Sideways – Alexander Payne and the mid-life crises Odyesey. (Film ... Lisa Thatcher
The
Verve Is Back: The New York Film Festival 2004 - Bright Lights ... Megan Ratner from Bright Lights Film Journal, from the
Sideways (2004) |
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs,
October 22, 2004
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
This Distracted Globe [Joe Valdez]
Sideways (2004) |
PopMatters Jesse Hassenger
SIDEWAYS
d: Alexander Payne Andre Soares from
Alt Film Guide
Newsweek
(David Ansen) review Life Is
a Cabernet
New York Observer (Andrew Sarris) review
World Socialist Web Site review Joanne Laurier
CineScene.com (Chris Knipp) review
Kamera.co.uk review Ian Hayden Smith
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review George Wu
SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [4/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
Sideways (2004) |
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs DVD
review, April 7, 2005
Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [4/4]
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [A]
Movie-Vault.com (Aaron West) review [9/10]
Erasing Clouds - DVD review J.D. LaFrance
stylusmagazine.com (Liz Clayton) review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
Beyond Hollywood review Donnie Saxton
Window to the Movies (Jeffrey Chen) review [8/10]
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]
hackwriters.com
- Sideways by Alexander Payne - The Road Movie ... Sam North,
Eye for Film ("The Exile") review [3.5/5]
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
The New York Sun (Nathan Lee) review
hybridmagazine.com review Nathan Baran
Rolling Stone (Peter Travers) review [4/4]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review
Mutant Reviewers from Hell review
Ruthless Reviews' Best Films of The Decade Erich Schulte
DVD Talk (Francis Rizzo III) dvd review [4/5]
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Steve Evans) dvd review
DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Guido Henkel
DVD Clinic ("Johnny Moreno") dvd review [4/5]
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo
A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review
DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Talk (Stuart Galbraith IV) dvd review [5/5] [Blu-Ray Version]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/4] [Blu-ray]
DVD Verdict (Franck Tabouring) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
dvdfuture.com (R. L. Shaffer) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Talk (Jeffrey Kauffman) dvd review [2/5] [Blu-Ray Version]
n:zone dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
The Hitching Post II: Sideways, A Film by Alexander Payne The Hitching Post II Restaurant (2004)
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B+]
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [5/5]
Karina Montgomery review [5/5]
David N. Butterworth review [3.5/4] also seen here: Offoffoff.com review
Movie Gazette (Anton Bitel) review [8/10]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
eFilmCritic.com (Stephen Groenewegen) review [5/5]
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [4/5]
FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [A-]
filmcritic.com (Jesse Hassenger) review [4/5]
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
hoopla.nu review Mark
Georgia Straight (Paul Myers) review
Future Movies (Michelle Thomas) review [9/10]
Maclean's Magazine (Brian D. Johnson) review
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [4/5]
CHUD.com (Devin Faraci) review
DVD Monsters and Critics [Andy McKeague]
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [4.5/5]
Tiscali UK review Kevin Murphy
Mark R. Leeper review [+1 out of -4..+4]
The Trades (Beth Gottfried) review
Talking Pictures (UK) review Jamie Garwood
Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review [4/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Laura Kyle) review [5/5]
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
Exclaim! dvd review Noel Dix
Movie Magazine International review Casey McCabe
Virginia Madsen Interview - Virginia Madsen on Sideways and ... Rebecca Murray interviews actress Virginia Madsen from About.com, December 19, 2004
Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [A] Ty Burr
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
BBCi - Films (DVD review) Stella Papamichael
The Independent review [5/5] Anthony Quinn
Boston Globe review [4/4] Ty Burr
The Boston Phoenix review Steve Vineberg
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Washington Post (Desson Thomson) review
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3.5/5]
Las Vegas Review-Journal (Carol Cling) review
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
The Seattle Times (Moira Macdonald) review
Sacramento News & Review (Jim Lane) review [5/5]
San Francisco Chronicle [Carla Meyer]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The
New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review
THE
NEW SEASON/FILM -- SCENE STEALERS: Thomas Haden Church; The Performances to
Watch Karen Durbin from The
THE POUR; Wine,
Women and a Pair of Buddies Eric
Asimov from The New York Times,
Arts,
Briefly; 'Sideways' Dominates Critics' Awards
'Sideways' and
'Aviator' Lead Golden Globes
MOVIES: The Best
Films of the Year; Clint Eastwood Does John Coltrane Manohla Dargis, #3 of Best Films of 2004,
from The New York Times,
The
Most Overrated Film of the Year - The New York Times A.O. Scott from The New York Times,
'Aviator' and
'Sideways' Earn Golden Globes Sharon
Waxman from The New York Times,
Is a Wine-Soaked
Film Too, Er, Rosé? Mireya Navarro
from The New York Times,
At the Anti-Awards
Ceremony, a Definite 'Sideways' Tilt
Nick Madigan from The
FILM; 'Sideways'
Returns, Uncorked For Japan Ari
Karpel from The New York Times,
DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray
Version]
Sideways - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE DESCENDANTS B+ 90
USA (115 mi) 2011 ‘Scope Official site
One of Payne’s better films, where the spaciousness of his canvas is particularly appealing, as the Hawaiian setting here is idyllic, certainly a change of pace from the rat race of our normal lives, where we should be so lucky to have these kinds of inheritance problems, but one wonders what the infatuation is for lifestyles of the super wealthy, which seems to be an American and European fascination at the moment while the reflective economies are in a terrible downturn - - see von Trier’s MELANCHOLIA (2011), Almodóvar’s THE SKIN I LIVE IN (2011), Assayas’s SUMMER HOURS (2008) or Woody Allen’s MIDNIGHT IN PARIS (2011). Based on an adapted screenplay from a novel by native Hawaiian Kaui Hart Hemmings, who herself has a role as Clooney’s secretary, the story concerns the coexistence of natives and whites in modern day Hawaiian society, suggesting they bear a responsibility in deciding what to do with the original lands of the indigenous past while also cultivating a need for development in a rapidly changing modern society. Apparently large amounts of land continue to be held in trusts that were set up more than a century ago by the families of Hawaiian royalty. Under a law called the rule of perpetuities, individuals, as opposed to charitable organizations, have until a specific date to act upon these trusts. This is a backdrop for the story of Matt King (George Clooney), the hapa-haole (half-white) heir of a prominent Hawaiian landowning family that married into 25,000 acres of unspoiled land 150 years ago that now stands to make a bundle if they agree to sell off their shares. However, much of what makes Hawaii so uniquely gorgeous has disappeared beneath a blitz of high end housing development for more hotels, condominiums, and luxury resorts, the kind of thing that makes a few people very wealthy at the expense of the pristine beauty of the island. Many of the same questions were raised by Olivier Assayas’s SUMMER HOURS, where the heirs of the French aristocracy were too busy in their impersonalized modern lives to concern themselves with their family or the nation’s legacy, forgetting how influenced they were in their own childhoods by their seemingly unlimited and unending cultural access.
Payne has crafted an irreverent but very low key approach that follows flawed yet original characters, highlighted by Clooney’s beautifully understated performance, a guy that appears out of nowhere to suddenly take an interest in the family he’s otherwise neglected for his own business adventures through the years. However he’s called into action due to the medical emergency of his wife who ends up in a coma from a boating accident. When her condition is not expected to improve, he’s forced to confront his two daughters, Shailene Woodley as Alexandra and Amara Miller as Scottie, both offering spirited performances, showing unusual range of expression without falling into the typical family cliché’s. King also has to contact the friends and extended family at the same time he’s considering what to do about the family trust. His lifelong retreat behind the safety net of complacency is suddenly called into question, made even worse when his daughter reveals her mother was having an affair. Like a house on fire, King has to decide what’s worth saving and what he has to let go. Quiet and surprisingly tender, there’s a healthy dose of humor mixed with pathos wrapped up in the tragic circumstances, where the revelations slowly reveal themselves and only grow more poignant, becoming more personalized with the growth of the characters. While it’s first and foremost a family drama, one can’t help but see the broader implications and how it reaches into the lives of all Hawaiian citizens. King understands many resent his inability to connect to his indigenous past, yet he’s the one that stands to make millions from land that never actually belonged to him or his family, but was entrusted to a vision of an idealized Hawaiian future.
With brief autobiographical narration from King, what’s
intriguing about his character is that he continues to play someone who is
himself still developing into the person he is becoming, changing skins, making
room for adjustments, experiencing a myriad of emotions from anger, confusion,
sadness, the loss of parental authority, to suddenly finding himself alone
without a partner, where he has to come to terms with his wife’s betrayal of
her own family, all told in a tone that mixes humor with heartache. Payne carefully sprinkles the family with
notable eccentrics, but also shows the serious family portraits that have been
hanging on the walls for generations.
Raising questions about assimilation and cultural identity, all of the
music in the film comes from Hawaiian artists, where one was even written by Liliuokalani,
Criticize This! [Brian McKechnie]
Based on Kaui Hart Hemmings’ novel, The Descendants tells the story of Hawaiian resident Matt King (Clooney) after his wife is put into a coma when she’s involved in a motorboat accident. We find out he hasn’t been the best husband or father, spending most of his time working or dealing with the huge amount of land his family own on Kaui. He regrets it now that his wife is slipping away and he has no clue how to raise his two daughters. Directed by Alexander Payne, The Descendants has a lot of comedy mixed with the drama and in the end is a movie to celebrate. Hopefully this will be the one to also get George Clooney a Best Actor Oscar.
Hawaii is one of the most scenic places on earth. And for Academy Award winner, Alexander Payne, the perfect backdrop for his latest work, The Descendants, a complex drama slash comedy that comes seven years after indie darling, Sideways, took audiences on a manic trip through California wine country. Here, a Hawaiian land baron, Matt King, played by George Clooney, takes his daughters on a personal journey of self discovery after learning that his wife, currently hospitalized after a tragic boating accident, was having an affair. With effortless dexterity, The Descendants bridges dark comedy with tragedy. And features a strong, centered performance from Clooney. Emotionally stirring, The Descendants is somewhat cathartic - a quirky, methodical detour through tropical paradise.
The Descendants, on the other hand, is the closest I've seen to a perfect movie in a long, long time. It's Alexander Payne's first movie since Sideways, and for me a far richer, more humane and enjoyable film, though just as funny and sharp about all kinds of human desires and miseries that other directors never seem to deal with. Clooney is fantastic in a lead role that asks more of him than even Up in the Air did, playing a father of two dealing with the impending death of his wife (who is in a coma after a boating accident), the impending sale of 25,000 acres of land owned by his family for generations, and the new knowledge that his wife had been having an affair. He spends most of the film in the company of his two daughters, played by the incredible teenage actress Shailene Woodley and 10-year-old Amara Miller, and the three of them build a believable, contentious, ultimately tender rapport that gives the movie a surprising emotional punch. Payne hasn't softened since his Election days, exactly-- his gift for subtle satire is as sharp as ever--but he's opened his arms a bit, making a movie about some of life's deepest emotions and allowing the audience to feel everything along with the characters. The Descendants wears its heart on its sleeve but is careful not to overdo it, resulting in a film that's as moving as it is witty and dark. It's simply terrific.
The House Next Door [Elise Nakhnikian]
Part Coen brothers and part James L. Brooks, Alexander Payne makes comedies about serious stuff like abortion and midlife crises. His characters may verge on caricature and his scripts on contrivance, but nuanced acting and lingering close-ups make their emotions feel vividly, even painfully real.
His best film since Election, aside from the segment he directed for Paris Je T'aime, The Descendants is based on a novel written by a young woman, Kaui Hart Hemmings, which may explain why the two girls in the story feel so well-rounded. But then, Payne has always gravitated toward interestingly prickly female characters, from the glue-sniffing title character of Citizen Ruth to Election's endlessly ambitious Tracy Flick and the impetuous biker played by Sandra Oh in Sideways.
The main women in this story are Matt King's (George Clooney) wife, Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie), and the couple's two daughters, 10-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller) and 17-year-old Alex (Shailene Woodley), both of whom are acting out like crazy as the story begins. Elizabeth never speaks a word (we see her first as a gigantic face filling the screen with delight as she rides in a speeding motorboat, then as a comatose husk of a body in a hospital bed), but we get a pretty good sense of her through the things other people say about her—and to her as she lies there, a pale slate for other people to scrawl their emotions on.
Her injury leaves her workaholic husband to care for the daughters to whom he has always been an absent presence. Matt, Alex, and Scottie have to come to terms with Elizabeth's condition. They also have to learn how to be a family in a whole new way, since Matt has been just the "backup parent" up to now, as he says in a voiceover that dominates the first part of the film but fades away in the second, as he finds people other than himself to talk to. As if that weren't enough, everything Matt thought he knew about his marriage is upended when Alex tells him that Elizabeth had been having an affair before the accident that knocked her out.
Hawaiian culture is as strong a presence in this film as Omaha was in Citizen Ruth and California's wine country was in Sideways. We don't see much of the state, but what we do see is heavy on aging beach bums ("In Hawaii," Matt tells us, "some of the most powerful people look like bums and stuntmen") and light on picturesque volcanoes and beaches. More than halfway through the film, Matt asks a cousin who's driving him and his girls from the airport on Kauai to make a detour to the family holdings. (Another subplot has Matt guiding a huge clan of cousins to a decision about how to dispose of 25,000 gorgeous acres of Kauai that belong to the family, since their great-great-grandmother was a Hawaiian princess.) "Let's see the land," he says, and he might be talking to us, since the magnificent vista we're about to be treated to is the first we've seen since the movie started.
Matt is supposed to be an ordinary shlub, but, as good as Clooney is here, he can't quite pull off ordinary. He does manage to look tired and unglamorous, his shoulders tensely awkward and his waistband too high. When Matt finds out about the affair, he takes off running with none of Clooney's natural grace, his elbows flailing and his feet slapping the ground noisily. But the real power of Clooney's performance rests in his eyes, which always let us know just what Matt is feeling, whether he's warily greeting a cousin, confronting his wife's lover in a near-paralyzing rage, watching his daughters in frustrated silence, or gazing into space, stunned at the news of another betrayal.
Matt is not the only character whose soul is bared. All but the most minor characters have at least one emotional scene where they get to reveal their true face, often triggered by news of Elizabeth's dire condition. (Grief is always closely linked to anger in The Descendants, and people generally cope with a blow by attacking somebody else.) But the excellent cast—particularly Clooney, Woodley, and Robert Forster as Elizabeth's fiercely devoted father—keeps the rolling epiphanies from feeling rote.
Slant Magazine [Jaime N. Christley]
On the basis of About Schmidt, you'd think Alexander Payne (and his writing partner, Jim Taylor) had a problem dealing with grief. Early on, when Jack Nicholson's newly retired Warren Schmidt discovers that his wife has died while he was out, Nicholson's reaction is heard, not seen, and when his crying jag is reprised, late in the film, catalyzed by a letter from the African orphan he adopted, and whom he's never met, the camera leans into his face, aiming for blunt simplicity, instead getting a distorted mask of humiliation, like something out of a Todd Solondz film. Between these two markers, About Schmidt goes in the direction I had worried Election and Citizen Ruth were sometimes heading, but was glad they avoided: caricature-based comedy of social and domestic discomfort, with About Schmidt reaching its nadir when Kathy Bates's nude body is used to get a laugh.
Seven years after the Academy Award-winning Sideways, Payne has made not only what may be his best film, but one of the very best films on the subject of grief. The Descendants, among other things, tells the story of a family dealing with loss—their emotions, yes, but also the logistics of bereavement, the complications, and the way grief seems to recolor one's surroundings, invisibly but palpably. It has an enormous, rich cast, with almost too many standouts in the supporting gallery to name, but most notable is Robert Forster's volatile retiree, Beau Bridges's garrulous, drinky cousin, and the lunkheaded boyfriend played by Nick Krause.
In a development that seemed to begin in earnest with Sideways, a large part of The Descendents seems to operate on a non-narrative level. The script, which Payne and two new co-writers adapted from Kaui Hart Hemmings's 2007 novel, isn't just efficiently pruned to ensure that characters only say exactly the things that are necessary to move a scene forward, but say things that reveal mental and emotional states or, more importantly, fail to do so in the usual way. The characters all seem to have at least seven or eight things on their mind at any given moment, but only the time and/or the wherewithal to say aloud one or two of them, so that the film acquires a forward momentum that has as much to do with what's spoken as much as unspoken. Two other films from 2011 share this quality: Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret and Asghar Farhadi's A Separation.
The Descendants is a bundle of contradictions. At once mellow and light (the paradise of the Hawaiian landscape provides a hypnotic background, and the soundtrack follows suit), there's hardly a scene that doesn't somehow revolve around death, or other grave matters. As the movie is equally about fatherhood, George Clooney's Matt King has plenty of shortcomings as a workaholic dad, immediately beset with two daughters who were, until that point, mostly the concern of his now-comatose wife. But the static that's produced by the combative relationships between Matt and his daughters is only half the story, especially as the older one (a brilliant Shailene Woodley) gradually becomes a kind of Hawksian "Girl Friday," butting heads with her dad in one scene, his wingman in the next. Her own relationship with her younger sibling is also telling—a mentor, perhaps in need of improvement in the presentation department, but an effective and honest one nevertheless. Again, the relationships, as much as the language, seem to depend less on a linear narrative through line and more on what the characters seem to need at any given moment, and what they need seems to emerge from—instead of point to—a slippery inner life that I found myself contemplating as often as I was watching the events unfold on the screen.
Not all of this business is perfectly judged. A crucial moment toward the end of the film affords Clooney the opportunity to make a big, Oscar-y speech, and it's here that Payne seems to insist on a narrative resolution we've already reached emotionally. Yet it's the imperfect quality of this moment that speaks to a larger picture that The Descendants only hints at with its title. The story concerns family dynamics, always falling, never settling, so it's only natural that some moments should land downrange of their intended targets. At the risk of sounding pretentious, we descend from our parents and grandparents, but create our landings as we go. As it gained momentum, what I began to see writ across The Descendants was an overlay of decisions and feelings and inner turmoil: unseen cinema.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Film of the month: The Descendants (2011) Xan Brooks, December 20, 2011
Wall Street Journal [Joe Morgenstern]
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
New York Magazine [David Edelstein]
Palm
Tree of Life Elbert Ventura from Slate, February 23, 2012
Review: George Clooney anchors great ensemble in ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny
The Descendants Review: We'll All Float On - Pajiba Daniel Carlson
Fourth Row Center [Jason Bailey] also seen here: DVD Talk [Jason Bailey]
Fantasy
Island: Alexander Payne's Feel-Good Hawaiian Excursion ... J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, November 16, 2011
Filmcritic.com Sean O’Connell
Movieline [Stephanie Zacharek]
Eye for Film : The Descendants Movie Review (2011) Anne-Katrin Titze
Christian Science Monitor [Peter Rainer]
Next Projection [Kevin Ketchum]
The Descendants | Review | Screen - Screen International Mike Goodridge
New York Daily News [Joe Neumaier]
Richard Schickel: 'The Descendants': Clooney Goes Down Easy ... Truthdig
The
Descendants Jeffrey M. Anderson from
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NEBRASKA B+ 91
USA (115 mi) 2013 ‘Scope
One
aged man—one man—can’t fill a house,
A
farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It’s
thus he does it of a winter night.
An Old Man's Winter Night, by Robert Frost from Mountain Interval, 1920
A sad and solemn affair, a minimalist and spared down look
at a man near the end of his life, where perhaps what matters most in a man’s
life is not the million dollar fantasy that this film suggests, but his pride
in being a man. Especially growing up in
small towns where there’s hardly much difference between people’s lives, as
they all pretty much look the same, so the way you take stock of your own life
is what eventually matters most. What
might surprise some is the complete absence of religion or the presence of a
church anywhere to be seen, replaced here by the influence of corner taverns,
which is almost entirely an all-male event, much like gathering around the
television in the living room to watch football while the women chatter away in
the kitchen. Other than when they’re
drinking, most of these men lead silent, uneventful lives, revealing little
about themselves, reflecting the emotional reserve that connects them to the
hard-scrabble life of growing up on a farm.
Bruce Dern has a rare lead role, his first in over twenty-five years,
playing Woody Grant, a Korean War veteran with a history of drinking too much,
now grizzled and forgetful, hard-of-hearing and near-senile, where he’s easily
mistaken for an Alzheimer’s patient, even within his own family, who are
contemplating putting him in a retirement home.
But he still lives at home in Billings, Montana with his acid-tongued
wife Kate (June Squibb), who appears to be his alter-ego, as without her
pestering him all the time, he’d be even more lethargic. At issue is a junk mail letter from a
Publishing Clearance House-style sweepstakes marketing firm informing him that
he’s won a million dollars, while in fine print it specifies only if he has the
winning numbers on the sweepstakes ticket.
Despite being told it’s just a scam, Woody is convinced he’s won a million
dollars, but needs to trek to
While the film bears some similarity to David Lynch’s THE
STRAIGHT STORY (1999), the 73-year old Alvin Straight went on his journey
alone, without any help, offering a kind of mystical wisdom to people he
encountered along the way, even camping out under the stars at night, where his
gentle, easy-going personality carried more weight. While Kate thinks they’ve both got a screw
loose, “You dumb cluck,” David and his Dad set out on the open road, where soon
they are in the middle of nowhere, which are easily the most gorgeous shots in
the film, shot in ‘Scope and in Black and White by Phedon Papamichael Jr. (the
son of John Cassavetes’s art director and production designer), where the flat,
wintry emptiness of the desolate landscapes match Woody’s gruff interior mood,
feeling lost and isolated from everyone else, continually drifting off, with
fewer moments of clarity. Along the way,
they visit
A portrait of working class America, part of the film’s intrigue is the familiarity with the Nebraska landscape, the fourth Payne film to take place in his home state, where he is single-handedly the region’s poet laureate on celluloid, beautifully capturing the shape of cloud formations, lone farmhouses, empty, run-down towns, where part of his visual vernacular is finding the trademark images that are underrepresented in other movies. Going to considerable length to capture the authenticity of the region, Payne chose many locals to act in his film, many of them living in Plainview, Nebraska, where much of the film was shot, including many retired farmers who live nearby. In addition to Angela McEwan, whose friendly small town kindness gets noticed (she baked cookies for Payne on the day they initially met), so does Rance Howard as Uncle Ray, Woody’s couch potato older brother, who happens to be the real life father of director Ron Howard. Certainly that kindness rubs off on the young son, David, who sticks up for his old man throughout the picture, just trying to offer him a bit of dignity in his waning years, where it pains him to see his father made the butt of bad jokes, especially when the vultures come in for the road kill, as everyone wants a piece of the money, especially his old business partner Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach), who gets creepier by the minute. For Woody, it’s just holding onto a pleasant memory or a sweet dream, where he’s the kind of guy that can’t say no to others, always willing to give them a helping hand, even at his own expense. Much of this is a reflection of the Midwestern way of life, where the film suggests offering a helpful hand to others is dying in America, a part of the culture that doesn’t exist anymore, like so many of the faded landmarks shot in solitude. The music by Mark Orton is initially effective, especially some of the wordless landscape montages, but it’s overused and keeps repeating, becoming problematic after awhile. While there are no great dramatic moments in this film, it makes the most of the small ones, often shot in a stream-of-conscious style, becoming a somber reflection of aging, of holding onto what you’ve got for as long as you can, even refusing to let go of that stubborn pride, as sometimes that’s all you’ve got left. Winter is the season of life in the film, where for farmers the promise of next year’s crops lies frozen under a blanket of snow, where you never know what the next year will bring.
Film
Comment: Kent Jones July 14, 2013
Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis, and Jia Zhang-ke’s A Touch of Sin were three Competition highlights. Payne’s film, written by fellow Nebraskan Bob Nelson, also offers a biography of its central character delivered by unusual means, in this case a mosaic compiled one piece at a time from former friends, enemies, and lovers of Woody (Best Actor winner Bruce Dern), on the road from Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska with his son David (SNL alum Will Forte). Payne has always walked a fine line between sharp social observation that occasionally edges into satire (a little less satire with each new film, I think) and a rich sense of character. In Nebraska, shot in delicately toned black-and-white ’scope, he has made a film that is, at its core, an elegy for the Midwestern men of an earlier era and all the tales and dreams and heartbreaks they left unexpressed and buried beneath a habitually unfazed stoicism. There is a scene in which the entire family decides on the spur of the moment to visit their old family home, still standing but uninhabited since their departure. Memory, ruin, regret, and a vanished way of life, all in one sustained passage.
Nebraska, Cannes Film Festival - film review Derek Malcolm at Cannes from The London Evening Standard, also seen here: Derek Malcolm
It’s a slight story. Woody (Bruce Dern), a confused old guy with only a few dollars to his name, is convinced he has won a sweepstake $1 million. He hasn’t, and his son Tom (Will Forte) knows he’s been had by one of the oldest scams in the business. But Woody has the piece of paper which says he’s won and insists on his son driving him from Montana to Nebraska to collect the money.
Perhaps only Alexander Payne, who made About Schmidt and the wonderful wine odyssey Sideways, could make something of this. He does, investing his country characters with an endearing naivety, but not exactly dubbing them innocents. Take June Squibb’s doughty wife of Woody. She knows full well that he’s a fool to go and remembers his friends and relatives with a very rheumy eye. Her furious plain-speaking is one of the chief joys of the film
She’s right too, because as soon as they get wind of the $1 million, a lot of them want to get hold of a part of it, particularly Stacy Keach’s Ed, who says he’s owed more than $1,000 and intends to get a lawyer in if he doesn’t lay his hands on the dough. No matter how hard Woody’s son protests there is no money, nobody believes him.
The film is more of an eccentric road movie than a study of old age on the skids. En route Woody is hurt in a fall and stops in the small and now decaying Nebraska town where he was born — and was guy lives who borrowed a compressor from him decades ago and never gave it back. So they steal it back from what they think is his barn, only to find they have gone to the wrong address.
Bob Nelson’s scenario is full of humour but doesn’t patronise Woody and his hick friends. Dern, one of America’s best veterans, gets a chance to deliver the kind of performance he’s often been noted for. No grandstanding, but a thorough appreciation of the character he is playing.
Nebraska | review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes ... - Time Out Dave Calhoun
Alexander Payne is the compassionate, thinking face of American
comedy. With films like 'Sideways' and 'The Descendants', he tells laidback
tales of people facing problems or changes in their lives. His new film
'Nebraska' is shot in black and white and takes the name of his home state as
its title. It's an intimate road movie about one family, yet it also lingers on
the landscapes and fabric of an old-time, dying vision of the American Midwest.
There's a wistful air of time passed and chances lost as Payne tells of a quiet
but irascible elderly man, Woody (Bruce Dern), a retired mechanic, taken on an
interstate trip to his small, fading Nebraskan hometown by his patient son,
David (Will Forte), who sells stereos in the suburbs. Their journey is part of
a wild goose chase to collect some non-existent prize money which Woody insists
he's owed after receiving a scam letter. His snappy wife, Kate (June Squibb),
has long since stopped listening to – but not loving – him. 'I never knew the
son of a bitch wanted to be a millionaire,' she barks. The promise of riches
sends the heads of some old friends and family into a spin and shows their true
colours. But David, and Woody's other son Ross (Bob Odenkirk), do their best to
humour a dad who hasn't been much of a father to them.
The film's laughs are as low-key as Payne's reflective but straight-shooting
style of storytelling, and there's a fair amount of sadness. There's a
last-minute dash for warmth, too, but mostly 'Nebraska' is fairly blunt about
family relationships and friendships, while preserving the possibility that
neither are necessarily bad for you and never getting too tragic or maudlin.
One of the poignant questions that hangs over the film is whether Woody, played
with real unshowiness by veteran character actor Dern, is going senile or is
depressed, neither of which possibilities are helped by his lingering
alcoholism.
What's driving Woody to go on this trip? Does he believe the letter? Or is it a
last-minute desire on his part, however deeply buried behind his inexpressive
exterior, to squeeze something else out of a not exactly perfect life?
'Nebraska' doesn't suggest any trite answers to any of this. It's also
pleasingly free of nostalgia, even if the past hangs heavily over Bob Wilson's
well calculated, often moving screenplay, and there's definitely a suggestion
that the world has got harder, meaner: 'He just believes stuff that people tell
him,' David says of his old dad. It's often funny, too, in a deadpan,
gallows-humour sort of way, and more than ever Payne allows the humour to rise
up gently from his story rather than burst through it.
A wry, somewhat downbeat comedy in the vein of The
Straight Story, Nebraska sees Alexander Payne return to the road trip
in this affecting story of a taciturn old man with advancing dementia, played
by Bruce Dern, who insists on travelling to Lincoln, Nebraska with his son to
claim a $1 million lottery prize which is clearly a scam.
Shot in lustrous black and white by Phedon Panamichael, a decision which emphasises the bleakness of its battered Midwestern terrain, Nebraska pays tribute to the stoic seniors who have lived a hard life in these dented, dingy towns of America’s heartland but takes an uneasy vantage point in which some of the laughs are affectionate and respectful yet others can feel a little cheap and mean-spirited.
Nebraska is much stronger when it starts speaks subtly of the past, through a son (Will Forte) who begins to piece together his father’s troubled life, and the relationship between his squabbling parents in this smaller-scale work from Payne.
Dern’s leading performance, supported by the wonderful June Squibb and a great cameo from Stacy Keach, should find a response come awards time and help attract smaller-scale, upmarket audiences to Payne’s work while not quite achieving the reach of Sideways or Election. Fans of the director will see a return to form after The Descendents.
Payne’s black-and-white view of his home terrain is stark with, at times, an almost Depression-era feel, starting in Billings, Montana – “the magic city” - with Woody Grant (Dern) determinedly walking down the freeway to claim his lottery winnings when he’s picked up by a policeman and brought home by his son, David (Forte). Woody’s outspoken, misanthropic wife June says it’s time to put him in a home, but electronics salesman David argues with his TV anchorman brother Ross (Odenkirk) to be more sympathetic to an elusive father who has always been uncommunicative, as well as a lifelong drunk.
Travelling through Wyoming – they detour to Mount Rushmore in South Dakota – Woody ends up with a gash in his head after a drunken fall in Rapid City and they take a side trip to his home town of Hawthorne for what becomes a family reunion. Woody, it transpires, has six surviving brothers. Pieces of their story emerge – a Swedish father, a Lutheran upbringing, siblings who died, and military service in Korea.
This is where Nebraska is at its strongest. Meanwhile, as news of Woody’s lottery win circulates through Hawthorne, various “friends” including Woody’s old business partner Ed Pegram (Keach) discover debts they’d like to be repaid. This is where Nebraska can stumble, when the characterisation of simple farming folk takes a turn towards the portraying them as simpletons.
Whenever things falter, though, there’s always June Sqibb as bitchy, complaining matriarch Kate to steal the show, positioning herself as the hottest thing in town back in the day. Against her, Forte’s performance can seem anemic, and the character of David fades into the dramatic scenery.
While Nebraska is a wry comedy, the humour just adds a gloss to its main thrust, which is a tribute to America’s heartland and the generations who came, worked, and ultimately, the film suggests, lost this terrain. This is where Nebraska is at its most powerful, and this is the picture that will resonate after the laughs subside.
Of note is Dennis Washington’s production design, captured sadly by Papamichael. The at-times jaunty, guitar-led score can be at odds, sometimes jarringly, with these visuals.
Cinema Scope: Adam Nayman November 22, 2013
Alexander Payne’s Nebraska is a mechanical movie, and the machine it resembles is a duck press—an old-fashioned device, but darned if it doesn’t squeeze something out in the end. Such moist entreaties have been the director’s stock-in-trade since the smiling-through-tears conclusion of About Schmidt (2004), a road movie that cast Jack Nicholson as an uneasy rider 35 years after he hooked up with Captain America and Billy. With Nebraska, Payne hitches his wagon to another (r)aging bull, Bruce Dern, who was always born to be wild: recall that before Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda concluded they’d blown it, they’d driven down the road together with Dern in tow in Roger Corman’s LSD extravaganza The Trip (1967), which was written by Nicholson.
The Easy Rider gang would chug its way towards manifest destiny, but Dern got lost along the way: a few sterling turns in the glory days of the New Hollywood (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? [1969], Smile [1975]), one lonely Oscar nomination for his PTSD Vietnam veteran in Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978), and subsequently a truly eccentric list of credits (the 1981 Tattoo, in which Dern plays a mentally ill body artist, is a bizarre harbinger of the erotic-thriller cycle to come). The ’80s weren’t a great time for actors of Dern’s cohort, but at least his ex-co-star Hopper and his ex-wife Diane Ladd each got their shots at redemption courtesy of David Lynch, who was dusting off ex-celeb curiosities while Quentin Tarantino was still slinging VHS tapes. Dern, though, remained marginalized, save for the efforts of one clever young patron: Joe Dante, who cast him in The ’burbs (1989) when seemingly nobody else would, and later invited him back for Small Soldiers (1998) and The Hole (2009).
Alexander Payne is also a clever director, and he makes a point of kidding his star’s marginal status. Coerced into a touristic time-out during a Quixotic inter-state quest, Dern’s septuagenarian veteran Woody Grant frowns disinterestedly at Mount Rushmore: “It doesn’t even look like it’s finished.” The old man’s nonplussed reaction to this literally monumental bit of national portraiture could be a gesture of disillusionment in the country that produced it, but there’s also a tangible sense of the performer’s irritation as well. If you were to swap out American presidents for American movie stars, chances are that Nicholson would find his Cheshire grin inscribed in stone, as would Robert Redford, who’s enjoying his own Hollywood Senior moment this season with All Is Lost; Dern, on the other hand, wouldn’t even make it onto the waiting list.
It would be wrong to characterize Dern’s work in Nebraska as monumental; a lifelong alcoholic who now appears stooped and stuporous beneath a tousled mess of stringy white hair, his Woody is more like the man who’s barely there. It’s a running joke in Bob Jones’ screenplay that the other people in Woody’s life—his long-suffering wife Kate (June Squibb) and his adult sons David (Will Forte) and Robby (Bob Odenkirk)—talk about him rather than to him, even when he’s sitting right beside them. The topic of conversation is invariably how to make the old man less of a burden to his loved ones, a mixture of protectiveness and resentment that figures into David’s decision to drive his father from Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska to collect an obviously bogus million-dollar magazine sweepstakes prize. It’s a seemingly harmless, gas-guzzling bit of indulgence that also doubles as an opportunity to get in some quality time before the final buzzer.
The decision to use Forte—a sketch comic recently seen dangling a rib of celery out of his butt in MacGruber (2010) and soaping down Kevin James’ car with his bare chest in Grown-Ups 2 (2012)—in an essentially serious straight-man role is a calculated gambit. The heavyweight-vs.-cruiserweight dynamic of the casting primes us for an unfair fight, but Forte more than holds up his end as it gradually becomes clear that Nebraska is as much a movie about a son coming to terms with his father’s flaws as it is a tribute to the older man’s durability. There’s a sense in which David is an audience surrogate here: he knows immediately that his father’s sudden fortune is a payload of fool’s gold, and that taking him to collect it is an entirely symbolic gesture. But even as we increasingly come to see Woody through his son’s eyes, with his obvious flaws (his drinking problem, his orneriness) perceptually reconfigured as more empathetic failings—he drinks to cope with childhood tragedy and the horrors of his military service, his stinginess with affection belies his generosity with money—we also never quite break away from the director’s gaze, which emerges, as usual, from skeptically narrowed eyes.
It’s doubtful that Payne shot Nebraska in black and white as commentary on his own propensity to divide his characterizations between two distinct categories: sympathetic naïf and bullying asshole. But the fact is that there are more shades of grey in the slightly jaundiced digital cinematography by Phedon Papamichael than the majority of the supporting characters here. Woody and David are a complicated pair whose interactions are alternately relatably cozy and discordant, but when they arrive in the former’s hometown of Hawthorne for an impromptu extended family reunion, it’s as if the signal was given to the casting department send in the yokels. After Woody lets it slip that he’s an instant millionaire, everyone in town, from his predatory ex-business partner Ed (Stacy Keach) to David’s no-account cousins ( Tim Driscoll and Devin Ratray, looking like twin parade-float doppelgangers for Danny McBride) start making noises about taking their fair share. The locals’ sudden interest in Woody’s fortunes implies not only avariciousness but also a virulent strain of gullibility: possibly the movie-mad Payne sees Nebraska as a Midwestern gloss on Greed. But in these scenes, it comes off more as an extended remix of the gruelling bit in Million Dollar Baby (2004) where Clint Eastwood bravely glared down the covetous hillbilly clan horning in on his protégé’s winnings.
A more direct reference point might be Preston Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), another film about a returning soldier named Woody whose homecoming becomes the talk of the town. Payne has been compared to Sturges before, especially for his earlier, fleeter films like Citizen Ruth (1996), which nodded to The Miracle at Morgan’s Creek (1944), and Election (1999), an underage The Great McGuinty (1940). The comparison to Sturges cuts both ways, at once creating a laudable context for Payne’s tendencies towards broad regional caricature and setting the bar for comic invention and narrative convolution far higher than any American comedy director could reasonably hope to stretch. Joel and Ethan Coen have distinguished themselves as the finest inheritors of Sturges’ screwball legacy because they honour his velocity while sidelining his residual humanism; their sublimely caustic films speed along via series of hair-trigger comic mechanisms. Payne’s films since Election are more like jalopies: they’re built to get from point A to point B in their own good time, ticking off grace notes like rest stops along the way. Nebraska is his most magisterially paced movie yet, culminating in a slow ride down a literal Main Street, U.S.A. that’s a wonderful package of narrative and dramatic compression. It’s also as fixed in its meaning and as crowd-pleasing as a Disneyland ride, and no less gently platitudinous: It’s a Small World, After All.
Most of what’s good in Nebraska is also fairly obvious. Any praise it has received specifically for its subtlety has more to do with how skillfully Payne and his collaborators have applied a patina of subtlety—a good paint job—to the proceedings rather than any truly multifarious artistry. That’s not a knock, by the way: The Descendants (2011) was obvious too, written with a sledgehammer gracelessness, relentlessly hitting the nail on the head while missing the mark (and hey, guess what, it won an Academy Award for its script). The theme of Nebraska—that our parents were people before taking their places as all-powerful archetypes—is deep and resonant even if the homespun melodies laid over top of it are often tinny and thin. That the moment when Woody admits that he only went chasing after a jackpot so that he’d have something, anything, to leave to his kids after a lifetime spent steadily losing everything he worked for feels so methodically blueprinted does little to diminish its genuine melancholy. Reader, I cried.
Film of
the Week: Nebraska - Film Comment Jonathan
Romney, November 21, 2013
Road movies can be about two things: going somewhere, or going nowhere. The opening of Alexander Payne’s new film tells us right away that Nebraska is in the latter category: the elderly Woody Grant (Bruce Dern in heavy winter flannels) lumbers doggedly towards us in a drab edge-of-town landscape shot in black-and-white and spread out across a wide-screen frame. The location is Billings, Montana, and Woody’s intended destination is Lincoln, Nebraska. As the film’s studiedly dreary images of both places alert us, this promises to be a journey from nowhere to nowhere, but Payne plays an ambivalent game. As a Nebraskan who still spends much of his time in Omaha, Payne is the first to say that his state and its neighboring territories are colorless flatlands, not just in the geographic sense, and to mock them as such; this is his second road movie, after 2002’s About Schmidt, to start from the premise of Nebraska as dullness capital of America. And yet his new film also contrives to give the state’s solemn vistas something of an epic quality, and to make its dwellers pithily intriguing, if not fascinating as such.
Written this time not by Payne himself but by Bob Nelson, the film is ostensibly a journey along the approximately 850-mile stretch of road dividing Billings and Lincoln (normally a mere 12-hour drive). But Nebraska ends up becoming something more complex—an odyssey into the past, into missed opportunities, and into the complexities of an everyday family of malcontents. Woody has received a letter telling him he’s won a million dollars (part of a magazine subscription scam), and he’s innocent enough and confused enough to believe it. His wife, Kate (June Squibb), who can beat Woody hands down for cantankerousness, thinks he’s an idiot to fall for it—and takes every opportunity to vent years of long-fermenting spleen: “I never knew the son of a bitch even wanted to be a millionaire. Shoulda thought about it years ago, and worked for it.”
It falls to the couple’s son David (Will Forte), an unambitious hi-fi salesman becalmed in his stagnant middle years, to drive Woody to Lincoln. There are unscheduled stops along the way—including a detour to the railway tracks to find Woody’s lost teeth (a very funny sequence, running a nice twist or two on Woody’s supposed dopiness) and a family visit to the fictional backwater town of Hawthorne.
In Hawthorne, there’s really nothing going on. In the living room of Woody's brother, the old men sit blankly gazing at TV, while David’s two adult cousins sneeringly close in on him like 10-year-old thugs who haven’t yet realized that they’re inhabiting obese middle-aged bodies. For a while, the script seems just to be playing the old “credulous hicks” card. Word gets out that Woody is coming into big money, and everyone believes it; Woody seems content to go along with the myth, and the film briefly becomes a Midwestern version of Gogol’s The Government Inspector.
Then, bracingly, things get nasty. Woody’s old business partner Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach) leans on David for a cut of the loot, and Keach’s quietly menacing mock-aggrieved bullishness (“Hey… I’m the victim here”) very nearly steals the film. When Kate and her other, pushier son, local TV anchor Ross (Bob Odenkirk), take a stand, the film gets nicely peppery, but a little ingratiating: nothing pushes the cantankerous-plain-folks-comedy button more rapidly and efficiently than an innocuous-looking but feisty old lady telling everyone to go fuck themselves.
This is one way in which Nebraska tells us a little too insistently that we’re having a good time, despite the bleakness of the visuals. Squibb is another magnificent scene-stealer and deeply enjoyable company all the way, but the script sometimes overplays her no-nonsense eccentricity—as when Kate whips up her skirts at the grave of an old boyfriend (“See what you could have had?”). And throughout, Payne indulges his most off-putting long-term habit, his use of droll folksy music (here, Mark Orton) to plaster a superfluous wry smile on things.
For all the knockabout stuff, and the sometimes outrageous one-liners, Nebraska is often at its best when illuminating the Grants’ ordinary griefs and complaints—and managing to pull back from sentiment. In a terrifically poignant scene, Woody visits the shell of his childhood home—a stack of clapboard amid dead fields—and we learn not only that his father built it with his own hands but that, having built it, he proceeded to make his son’s life a joyless ordeal. We also meet the charming woman (Angela McEwan) whom Woody could have married—which poses a nice understated philosophical dilemma for David. She could have made his father a lot happier than the embittered Kate, but then David would never have been born—he’d have been even more decisively stuck in Nowhere than he is.
Payne casts the film brilliantly. There’s a weather-beaten realness to many of these faces, especially the unfamiliar ones, who could have come out of vintage Walker Evans photographs. Squibb, Keach, and the two slob cousins (Tim Driscoll and Devin Ratray) are magnificent, while Dern creates a definitive American curmudgeon—a sort of walking liver spot, exhausted by life and alcohol but permanently crackling with barely contained contempt at the world. I have no argument with Dern winning the Best Actor Award in Cannes, but I wish it had been shared with Will Forte; for me, he’s Nebraska’s revelation as a man who carries the weight of his disappointment like a beer belly under his plaid shirt. His David is immensely likeable, partly because he expects so little from life; his whipped-puppy vulnerability, together with his unshakeable quiet decency, make you want him to make good, though you doubt he ever will.
Nebraska neatly avoids the expected cathartic father-son bonding. There’s a decisively kind filial act by David at the end, but the rapprochement between the pair ultimately comes across as more like a curt nod of recognition. You can’t actually imagine life becoming any sweeter or more manageable after the end credits.
All of this adds up to an immensely satisfying adult comedy and one of Payne’s best. The film’s additional claim to distinction is Phedon Papamichael’s superb black-and-white photography (digital, although you wouldn’t know it). The camera contrives to distill the film into essentially a series of majestically lugubrious stills, in the spirit of a journey essentially defined by stasis rather than motion. Nebraska also comes laden with echoes of cinema’s color-era black-and-white landscape tradition—The Last Picture Show most obviously, not to mention Wenders’ Kings of the Road, which was nothing if not a search for America in the middle of Germany.
But the closest comparison is surely Aki Kaurismäki’s 1994 film Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana, hitherto the most dour road comedy ever made, and another story about two emotionally illiterate men obliged to keep company in an inhospitable terrain. Some may feel that the sheer classiness of Papamichael’s photography is out of proportion to the modesty of the subject, but not only does it give Nebraska a dour elegance that lifts the story out of the realm of mere anecdote, it also makes you feel you’ve really been to these places—and perhaps relieved not to have made the trip in person. Someone should program this with the Coens’ equally melancholy road-based Inside Llewyn Davis—that would be the downbeat Winterreise double to end them all.
Salon: Andrew O'Hehir November 14, 2013
Artinfo: J. Hoberman November 13, 2013
The New Yorker: Richard Brody November 14, 2013
Nebraska - Reviews -
Reverse Shot State of the Union, by Elbert Ventura, December 13, 2013
Sight & Sound: Trevor Johnston December 06, 2013
Jason Bailey [Flavorwire] which includes Q & A comments from Bruce Dern
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Slant Magazine [R. Kurt Osenlund]
The Steve Pulaski Message Board [Steve Pulaski]
DVDTalk.com - theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
In Review Online [Kenji Fujishima]
Ruthless Reviews [Matt Cale] (Potentially Offensive)
Jigsaw Lounge / Tribune [Neil Young]
Jessica Kiang at Cannes from The Playlist
Cannes 2013: Payne's Nebraska and Puenzo's Wakolda ... Chuck Tryon at Filmmaker magazine, May 23, 2013, also seen here: Chuck Tryon, including a Bruce Dern interview May 26, 2013, seen here: Chuck Tryon
Grantland: Wesley Morris November 27, 2013
Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE
The House Next Door [Jordan Cronk]
Richard Corliss at
Cannes from Time magazine
Little White Lies: David Jenkins
Sluggish Days at Cannes Richard Porton at Cannes from The Daily Beast
Guy Lodge at Cannes from Hit Fix
Kyle Buchanan from The Vulture
Ryland Aldrich at Cannes from Twitch
Jordan Hoffman at Cannes from Film.com
arts•meme: Robert Koehler November 16, 2013
Are the Hills Going to March Off?: Carson Lund December 11, 2013
The L Magazine: Nicolas Rapold November 06, 2013
Cannes 2013, Day Eight: Blue Is The Warmest Color captures a relationship’s rawness and beauty Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club
The
Academic Hack: Michael Sicinski
Daily | Cannes 2013 | Alexander Payne’s NEBRASKA David Hudson from Fandor
Kenneth Turan chats with Payne from The Los Angeles Times, May 22, 2013
Steven Zeitchik Steven Zeitchik interviews the director from The LA Times, May 24, 2013
Logan Hill talks with Dern and Forte from The New York Times, May 24, 2013
Owen Gleiberman at
Cannes from Entertainment Weekly
Time Out New York [Keith Uhlich]
Cannes 2013: Nebraska – first look review Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian
Kaleem Aftab at
Cannes from The Independent
Alexander Payne finds the faces of 'Nebraska' - latimes.com Susan King from The LA Times
Globe Trotting: Cannes Report, May 23 | Cannes | Roger Ebert Barbara Scharres
Cannes: Bruce Dern and Will Forte visit "Nebraska" Ben Kenigsberg from The Ebert blog
The New York Times: Manohla Dargis May 23, 2013
Payne, Thymaya
STOLEN SEAS C+ 78
USA Canada Somalia Denmark Philippines Estonia (88 mi) 2012 Official site
Much of this plays out like a journalistic exposé, where this feels like an in-depth
television news piece rather than a feature length documentary movie, as this
has a History Channel feel throughout in what is mostly a historical analysis
of a particular event in time, the November 2008 hijacking of the CEC Future, a
Danish cargo ship traveling through the Gulf of Aden by heavily armed Somali
pirates, an event that alerted the world to the revival of this seemingly
barbaric 18th century practice, becoming commonplace in the modern
era along the East African coast of Somalia.
A necessary passageway between the
One of the significant aspects of the film is tracking down
both Gullestrup and his counterpart Somali negotiator Ishmael Ali, as each are
operating on decisively different points of view, becoming a window into their
respective cultures. Gullestrup is
pretty much what you’d expect, a conservative, tight-lipped European
businessman who’s used to seeing the world strictly in dollar signs, where
driving a hard bargain, streamlining costs, and weighing financial options is
what he does for a living, surrounded by lawyers, and plenty of advice from
police and hired consultants. In fact,
he quickly hires a disinterested spokesperson to handle all the negotiations, a
professional in dealing with extortion demands, which typically takes its time,
as they are subject to various threats to hopefully bring about a quick
resolution, but when these tactics don’t work, the pirates tend to grow increasingly
frustrated. Ishmael Ali, on the other
hand, is a unique figure, educated and fluent in English, he’s seen living an
upscale life in Somalia where he nonchalantly flaunts his wealth, owning about
75 camels, claiming owning camels in
While piracy still holds a romantic swashbuckling notion
from Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn in films like THE BLACK PIRATE (1926),
CAPTAIN BLOOD (1935), THE SEA HAWK (1940), or the recent PIRATES OF THE
CARIBBEAN (2003 – 2015 and still counting) series, the more intriguing aspect
of the film is what it unearths about the nearly unfathomable nation of Somalia
itself. Somalia is unlike anywhere else
in the world, a communist state aligned with the Russians before the fall of
the Soviet empire, they were left adrift with no one to sponsor their interests,
becoming a bloody battleground in a senseless Civil War that resolved nothing,
leaving half a million dead Somali’s in the wake and no acting government. When the Americans attempted to lead a United
Nations mission in 1992 to bring food to a starving nation, where 300,000 had
already died from famine, they got caught up in the nation’s Civil War,
attempting to arrest one of the brutally corrupt war lords who was guilty of
massive human rights abuses and stealing much of the incoming food, but they
paid a heavy price in doing so, as depicted in typical Hollywood style in
Ridley Scott’s BLACK HAWK DOWN (2001).
Since that failed debacle, Somalia has been left alone to fend for
themselves with little to no help from the outside world, where toxic chemicals
wash up on their shores from discarded shipping waste, effectively destroying
the shoreline fishing industry, which was once the nation’s leading source of
income. From the Somali point of view,
the passing ships are simply sitting targets, potential sources of income in a
nation nearly destroyed with a shattered and depleted economy. But all evidence suggests there is no trickle
down effect from the multi-million dollar ransoms paid, as a few get enormously
rich, while there is no foreseeable dent in the nation’s poverty. While the filmmakers intermix Ali’s
discerning thoughts about
STOLEN SEAS Facets Multi Media
A chilling exploration of the Somali pirate phenomenon, Stolen
Seas is the story of a Danish shipping vessel's 13-man crew held at the
mercy of pirates, a country responding to global capitalism in overdrive, young
boys with nothing to lose and a translator who gets in over his head. When the
pirates demand an exorbitant $7 million dollar ransom, the hostages remain
helpless as haggling between the ship's stoic owner and the pirates' negotiator
drags on for 70 days. These two adversaries will have to become unlikely allies
as they race to keep the crew from being killed by their violent captors.
With exclusive interviews and unparalleled access to real pirates, hostages,
hostages' relatives, ship-owners, pirate negotiators and experts on piracy and
international policy, Stolen Seas is an eye-opening refutation of
preconceived ideas on how and why piracy has become the world's most
frightening multi-million dollar growth industry.
Village Voice Alan Scherstuhl
'If the state can't stop 12 guys in a boat, how powerful is it?" asks Matthew Raffety in Stolen Seas, Thymaya Payne's investigation into the causes and reality of piracy near Somalia. Raffety is the possessor of the world's greatest on-screen title: "pirate historian." But the romantic buccaneering that suggests is far from the hard truths of Somali pirates' hostage-taking, ransom-holding, and brandishing of Kalashnikovs. With audio of negotiations between pirates and a Danish shipping company, and occasional photos and video diaries taken by actual hostages, Payne traces the protracted 2008 ship-napping of the CEC Future. This drama is couched in illuminating context: how the deregulatory zeal of shipping companies has made piracy all but inevitable, how it's impossible for first-world navies to stop every small-crewed ship, how Cold War brinksmanship has left Somalia ruled by regional tribes, how poverty and famine have ravaged the Somali population, how for some young men there a couple years' work as pirates is enough to ensure a lifetime free from want. Older men believe that, too, including Ishmael Ali, the film's most arresting character, a dad who insists that it was to give his son a better life that he signed on to serve as the translator for the pirates during their negotiations with the Danes. In memorable interview segments, he boasts of how many camels he owns—and how once he got embroiled with honest-to-God pirates, he found himself in much, much deeper than he expected.
Stolen Seas | Movie review - Film - Time Out Chicago Vadim Rizov
Exemplary journalism but rote filmmaking, Stolen Seas explores Somali piracy via Ishmael Ali, the translator and negotiator for a band of brigands who hijacked a Danish merchant vessel, the CEC Future, in 2008. The prolonged hostage situation and negotiations serve as a framing device, with audio of the actual negotiations laid over rather cheesy re-enactments.
Ali’s on-camera presence, explaining piracy’s appeal to a nation without a unified civil government since 1991, is the film’s insider coup. Veteran documentary screenwriter Mark Monroe (The Cove, The Tillman Story) and director Thymaya Payne have cobbled together a serviceable primer, full of talking heads with smart things to say about the causes of Somali piracy. It’s a sophisticated argument from a firmly liberal-left viewpoint (Noam Chomsky, of course, drops in). During its 90-minute running time, Stolen Seas argues, among other things, that the American government uses piracy as an excuse to trot out pricey battleships and that wealthy shipping companies should stop hiding behind nation-states.
In Ali, Stolen Seas has a fascinating if underused focal point; a former American citizen, he has much to say about piracy’s macho allure in an underdeveloped country. But the original footage is otherwise undistinguished, looking very much like an A&E miniseries, full of gauzy, “you are there” shots of nothing in particular.
Meet the skull and crossbones | Movie Review | Chicago Reader J.R. Jones, also seen here: Chicago Reader
The hijacking of the U.S. shipping vessel Maersk Alabama by Somali pirates in April 2009 struck many people as anachronistic: How could there still be pirates in the 21st century? Back then, more Americans were concerned with media piracy, people sneaking into theaters with cameras and selling bootleg copies of blockbusters like . . . Pirates of the Caribbean. Cable news stations went to town on the Maersk Alabama story and were rewarded with a slam-bang ending: on April 12, U.S. Navy Seal snipers killed three pirates in a lifeboat as one pirate aimed an AK-47 at their hostage, Captain Richard Phillips. The exotic tale soon disappeared from the headlines, but Stolen Seas—a 2012 documentary by University of Chicago alumnus Thymaya Payne, which opens Friday for a weeklong run at Facets Cinematheque—digs deep into the subject of piracy, arguing that it's less an anachronism than a sign of the times.
The Maersk Alabama case was unusual, the first pirate capture of a ship under the U.S. flag since the early 1800s. Payne's focus is on a much more typical crime: the hijacking of a Danish ship, the CEC Future, on November 7, 2008, as it transported U.S. steel from Belgium to Indonesia through the Gulf of Aden separating Somalia and Yemen. Through Daniel Howden, a reporter for the Independent, Payne made contact with a man calling himself Ishmael Ali, who represented the pirates in their negotiations with the Danish shipper, Clipper Group. Unlike the Maersk Alabama story, which lasted five days and ended in a blaze of action, the CEC Future hijacking dragged on for 60 days as the two sides haggled over a ransom amount: the pirates demanded $7 million, the Danish countered with $400,000, and the final payment, dropped from a helicopter into the water near the ship, came to $1.7 million. This was only a drop in the bucket for a problem that, according to one recent independent report, costs shippers as much as $8.3 billion a year. One sailor on the CEC Future declares that the area off the Somali coastline where captured ships are held "looks like New York harbor."
To his credit, Payne takes the time to unpack all the commercial and geopolitical forces that encourage piracy, like the open registry of commercial ships. In the 1920s, U.S. companies began sailing their ships under the Panamanian flag to skirt their own country's regulations. Since then the "flag of convenience" has become commonplace, allowing more than half the world's merchant ships to register in countries like Liberia and the Marshall Islands, blow off labor and environmental standards, and hire cheap labor from anywhere in the world (the Philippines, for instance, accounts for 30 percent of all the world's merchant sailors). Though Clipper Group is based in Copenhagen (Payne interviews its calm, crisp CEO, Per Gullestrup), the CEC Future was registered in the Bahamas and its crew consisted of a Georgian, a Lithuanian, and 11 Russians. The Bahamas, whatever their charms, are not known for their commando forces, which leaves companies without the firepower that protected the Maersk Alabama.
Responding to that headline-grabbing case and the growing piracy epidemic, a multinational task force (including the U.S., Canada, France, Great Britain, and Japan) established a patrol zone in the Gulf of Aden and in 2009 began going after pirates with considerable success. The Kenyan court system has been established as the legal venue for prosecuting Somali piracy cases; yet according to Stephen Haskins, a maritime lawyer who negotiated the CEC Future ransom for Clipper Group and speaks on camera, only about half of those pirates captured are even prosecuted. To some extent, this is because shippers refuse to cooperate. "The cost of having a ship pulled into port, while its crew is testifying at a trial that could last a year, is devastating to the shipper," explains Eugene Kontorovich, presented as an expert in maritime law. "The shipper would rather pay the ransom." Another report asserts that piracy incidents are underreported because they push up shippers' insurance premiums. Lacking the military might to fend off pirates and financially discouraged from prosecuting them, the shippers do what they're best at: cutting deals.
At the same time, a faltering world response to the failed state of Somalia has created what Howden, interviewed for the movie, calls "a laboratory" for chaos. Since civil war broke out in 1991, the country has splintered into ten tribal areas barely held together by the administrative apparatus in the north, once the site of the communist government. Africa historian Richard Dowden notes Somalia's warlike character and recent history as a Cold War chess piece: "Both America and the Soviet Union filled it with weapons." Drought, joblessness, and economic distress are the last ingredients, and this is where Payne's contacts on the ground pay off. "Every girl is looking for a pirate," explains Ali, asserting that the macho element attracts them as much as the money. Payne also interviews Ibrahim, a 17-year-old pirate with a wife, a child, and a gangsta mentality. "The situation now," he declares, "is how to make my life brief."
Stolen Seas suffers from the fact that the negotiations progress so slowly and dispassionately—this is all business, we're reminded again and again—which Payne remedies somewhat by accumulating various human-interest stories. Videocam footage shot by a sailor aboard the CEC Future shows a photo of his grandchild on his dresser and bullet holes in the wall. "Here is a hole in grandpa's cabin," the sailor explains from behind the camera. "It comes from the best machine gun in the world, from a Kalashnikov." Payne also interviews Juergen Kantner and Sabine Merz, who were captured aboard their yacht by Somali pirates in June 2008 and carried off into the mountains of northern Somalia. Ali, who handled the negotiations for their release, remembers Merz as completely fearless, daring her captors to kill her. Ali himself has an interesting story: he spent 20 years in the U.S. but says he lives much better now in Somalia, and Payne shows him tending to his herd of camels, which he likens to a country club membership in America.
What the movie may lack in momentum it makes up for in breadth. By casting a fairly wide net (so to speak), Payne manages to show how Somali piracy fits into a larger pattern of exploitation linking the poor tribal state and the industrialized world. Since the civil war, Somalis have complained about European countries dumping barrels of toxic waste on their shores (Payne includes a photograph of one hideously scarred man) and giant fishing companies poaching from their territorial waters. In fact illegal fishing is another rewarding operation for pirates, costing Somalia an estimated $300 million a year and weakening environmentalists' efforts to protect ocean populations. Piracy historian Matthew Rafferty argues in the film that this occurs with some complicity from the same Western powers waging war on piracy in the gulf: "It's not like Japan, France, the United States has no idea where all this fish is coming from as the prices drop, as the catches go up." The key insight of Stolen Seas may be that, in the eyes of Somali pirates, we're the real buccaneers.
Somali Pirate Documentary 'Stolen Seas' Will Premiere on DirecTV ... Alison Willmore from indieWIRE
Hollywood Reporter Sheri Linden
Stolen Seas: Everything you ever wanted to know about Somali piracy James Adams from The Globe and the Mail
Film: DocFest highlights include pirates, cults | SF Bay Guardian Cheryl Eddy
Stolen Seas movie review - chicagotribune.com Michael Phillips
New York Times A.O. Scott
Pearlman, Bari
DAUGHTERS OF WISDOM C 72
Despite its best intentions, this documentary is a severely
limited view of Kala Rongo, the only women’s monastery in Tibet, a place of spiritual
refuge for women who are otherwise looked upon as servants or slaves in the
Tibetan culture and historically prohibited from studying Buddhism. Set in one of the most remote mountainous
regions on earth in northeastern
Despite the picturesque location and offerings of freedom, what is immediately apparent is how severely restricted the nuns are not only in geographical isolation, but in the possibilities of what they might actually want to do with their lives. Most if not all continue to lead lives of stifling boredom and routine, where it is evident they are poorly educated to the point of illiteracy. As one monk attempts to suggest that they develop a system to take control of their own finances, in the same breath he mentions problems in the past due to a lack of understanding of basic mathematics. Where they may tend to a flock of yaks or provide food services, while others are completely at ease with hard labor, it was difficult to find evidence of any spiritual development of any kind. Much as one wants to empathize, the filmmaker does a poor job revealing how they got into this mess in the first place, and instead chooses to focus on several different women, none of whom sound very inspiring, as most turn out to be poor camera subjects with little interest in the rest of the world. While this at least offers the viewer a glimpse of an otherwise unseen world, unfortunately, that alone does not make for a provocative film.
Daughters
of Wisdom JR Jones from the Reader
Time Out Chicago (Hank Sartin)
In chronicling the
lives of Tibetan Buddhist nuns, Pearlman faces some big challenges. She has to
convey some context about Tibetan culture, where women are perceived as
inherently inferior to men and most people toil in abject poverty. She has to
get across some basic information about the tenets of Buddhism. And, perhaps
most challenging, she has to break through the reticence of the nuns themselves
and get them to talk in an interesting way about their lives. Pearlman chooses
to do this without any voiceover narration or interviews with experts,
preferring to let the nuns speak for themselves. That she gets mixed results is
not exactly shocking. It’s rather surprising how much she does accomplish.
Pearlman stresses
the horrendous life the women are fleeing in choosing a religious calling;
Tibet has one of the highest childbirth-mortality rates in the world, and women
do back-breaking labor while garnering no respect. As one nun simply puts it,
“Women have to suffer much more.” She takes this as a fundamental truth about
life. What’s missing is the kind of immersion in the women’s spirituality that
made Into Great Silence such a compelling doc about the religious
calling. It’s clear that these nuns think deeply about life, but deeper
insights remain tantalizingly out of reach.
Chicago Tribune (Maureen M. Hart)
Documentary filmmaker Bari Pearlman has taken her cameras
to a harshly beautiful corner of rural
“Daughters of Wisdom” spends its 68 minutes in the company of the nuns of the
Kala Rongo Monastery. Though a sheltered religious life might not seem
liberating by Western standards, these girls and women were born into a society
that considers their gender a matter of bad luck, where childbirth mortality is
among the highest in the world and where the normal daily routine is both
mind-numbing and back-breaking. The 300 nuns of Kala Rongo (founded in 1990
after a long period of religious oppression lethally enforced by the Chinese army)
are among the first women in their country to immerse themselves in the study
and practices of Buddhism, trading days full of herding, weaving and churning
for quiet study, religious retreats and leadership opportunities.
Pearlman follows one of the nuns, Tsering Chodron, home to show first-hand the
life she has left behind (yak dung collection is but one of the tasks), then
back to the monastery to experience the residents’ days of ascetism and
giggles. When founder Lama Northa Rinpoche returns and recommends that the
women elect eight leaders from among their number to manage the monastery,
their lifestyle choice moves beyond “escape from” to “control of” their
destinies.
As the camera pans their mountainous setting, it’s hard not to recall another nun-centric
film, “The Sound of Music”; unlike Maria, though, the nuns of Kala Rongo don’t
need to leave their mountain to find their life’s best path.
Intermedias Review [Sandra Peredo]
Peck, Raoul
Raoul Peck - Biography IMDb biography
Raoul Peck has become one of the most intriguing figures in the International film community. Born in Haiti, raised in Zaire (Congo) and France, he additionally is well-suited for the international following he has earned. He remains one of few filmmakers that successfully produce documentaries and feature films. No doubt his early travels throughout the world have informed his particular aesthetic as a filmmaker. Educated in Haiti, Zaire (Congo), France, and Germany, Peck initially studied engineering and economics at Berlin University. He worked as a journalist and photographer from 1980 to 1985. In 1988 he received his film degree from the Berlin Academy of Film and Television. Since graduation, Peck has developed short experimental works, socio-political documentaries, and features based on fact as well as fiction. His feature Homme sur les quais, L' (1993) (The Man by the Shore) was the first Haitian film to be released in theatres in the United States; this feature was also selected for competition at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival. A true internationalist, Peck divides his time between Europe and the United States and for a brief time in the 1990s he served as Haiti's Minister of Culture. For his international vision, historical and political insights, along with his potent artistic vision, he has been richly rewarded. In 1994 he was awarded the Nestor Almendros Prize by the Human Rights Watch in New York; and in 2001 he received the organization's Lifetime Achievement Award. Peck promises to be one of the major trendsetters in filmmaking and indeed socio-political commentary well into the twenty-first century.
About Raoul Peck, Haitian Movie
Producer from Haiti biography from
Haiti Surf
RAOUL PECK was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 1961 his parents fled the Duvalier dictatorship, finding asylum and a new life in the recently independent Republic of Congo, which became their second home for nearly 25 years. Raoul Peck attended school in Leopoldville, later public school in Brooklyn, NY and finally Orleans, France. Upon completing his Baccalaureat, he left for Germany where he studied economics and industrial engineering. After completing his diploma, Raoul Peck worked for one year as a taxi driver in New York City while awaiting his acceptance at the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB) in Berlin. He was accepted along with 17 other colleagues into the class of 1984. While a student at the DFFB, Peck completed his first award-winning full-length feature--a film made for $150,000--HAITIAN CORNER, shot in Brooklyn and in Haiti. Other projects soon followed, establishing him as one of the most prominent and prolific black filmmakers.
Between 1982 and 1990, Peck worked on numerous development
projects in Europe and in Africa. He taught at the Berlin Film and Television
Academy, at the F.E.M.I.S. (France's national film school) where he worked with
Krzysztof Kieslowski and Agnieska Holland, and at NYU's Tisch School of the
Arts. He returned to Haiti as Minister of Culture in the government of Prime
Minister Rosny Smarth after the restoration of democratic rule.
Following political confusion and an 18-month struggle, Peck, along with Prime
Minister Smarth and several other Ministers, resigned from his post. He left
behind a number of important development projects, most importantly the
groundwork for the first National Cultural Plan Directive of the Republic of
Haiti.
Peck resumed his career as a filmmaker with the award-winning, feature-length
documentary LUMUMBA - DEATH OF A PROPHET (1992) and MAN BY THE SHORE (1993),
the first Caribbean film to be selected in Competition at the Cannes Film
Festival. LUMUMBA was also presented at Directors Fortnight at the Cannes Film
Festival.
Peck is the President of the Caribbean Federation of Film and Video, a member
of the German Writer's Guild, and a member of the influential French
Authors/Directors/Producer's Guild (ARP). In April 2000 he was named President
of the French commission "Fond Sud" which allocates production funds
of 2.5 million U.S. dollars in over 85 countries.
Peck is the Founder of the Fondation Forum Eldorado, dedicated to cultural
development in Haiti and the Caribbean and working with schools and
underprivileged communities in Haiti. For the work of the Fondation, Peck
bought a movie theatre called the Eldorado in Port-au-Prince. With the help of
contributions, the theatre has become one of the rare local facilities
affordable to local artists and schools.
Awards include the 1994 Nestor Alemendros and the 2001 Irene Diamond Lifetime
Achievement Award from the Human Rights Watch Organization. He has been
decorated with the Honor and Merit Order (Knight) in Haiti and the Order of
Arts and Literature (Knight) in France.
In 1997 Peck was guest artist at the Dokumenta in Germany, one of the two major
world exhibits of contemporary art, where he produced and exhibited his
award-winning film CHERE CATHERINE.
Recent retrospectives of Peck's work have been held at Les Journees
Cinematographiques de Lussas (August 1998), the American Museum of Natural
History, Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival (November, 1998), and The
Puerto Rican International Film Festival (September 1998).
Peck's films have been shown at dozens of international festivals, including
those in Cannes, Berlin, Toronto and New York. He has received numerous awards
and prizes for his work. Peck's films have been released theatrically and on
television throughout the world. Peck has authored a book entitled
"Monsieur Le Ministre, Jusqu'au Bout de la Patience" on his political
and personal experience as the Minister of Culture in Haiti.
Awards and prizes for LUMUMBA include:
Best Film, Pan African Film Festival LA 2001
Paul Robeson Award, Fespaco 2001
Best Film, Santo Domingo International Film Festival 2001
Audience Prize, Best Actor, Jury Prize, Grand Prize OCIC, 11th African Film
Festival, Milan Italy 2001
Best Film by A Foreign Director, Acapulco Black Film Festival 2001
Raoul Peck lives and works in Voorhees, New Jersey, in Paris, France and the
tiny town of Port a Piment, Haiti, where he owns two cows and a modest
pineapple field.
Raoul Peck: Biography from Answers.com biography page
Raoul
Peck facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles ... biography
RAOUL PECK was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti bio page
Raoul Peck bio from Black Filmmakers
Raoul Peck Biography 5-page bio from Bèl Films
Raoul Peck profile page from the New York State Writer’s Institute
Maisha Film Lab brief bio
Black Eyes –
Letter to Raoul Peck – Free listening at Last.fm Black Eyed Peas song, “Letter to Raoul Peck” (
Black Eyes - Letter To Raoul Peck Lyrics song lyrics
Laura Harris Raoul Peck's Desounen: Dialogue with Death and the Relay of Fantasy (Undated)
Hunt and Peck Gary Dauphin from The Village Voice, November
10, 1998
Review/Film
Festival; Independence in Africa and Death in High Places Stephen Holden from The New York Times,
Raoul Peck's poetic reality | American Visions | Find Articles at BNET Raoul Peck’s Poetic Reality, by Joanne Harris from American Visions, June-July 1996
Driven
to Perfection Amy Taubin on Lumumba from The Village Voice, June
19, 2001
Elombe
Brath, Raoul Peck's 'Lumumba:— A tale of human suffering ... Raoul
Peck's ‘Lumumba:’ A tale of human suffering, sacrifice and hypocrisy, by
Raoul Peck's movie "Lumumba" a discussion by D'Lynn Waldron (2001)
Issue 10 -
The DISH Venue for an Artist: Raoul Peck, by John Burl Smith, from The Dish,
Haiti: The Fall of the House of Aristide - The New York Review of ... Peter Dailey book review of Haiti’s Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy, by Roger Fatton Jr. from The New York Review of Books, March 13, 2003
Ann Pale :: View Forum - 2004 Discussion group of international events, from Winterludes, August – December 2004
Lumumba
- Bright Lights Film Journal Gary
Morris, October 31, 2004
Aristide is no Mandela - Mail & Guardian Online: The smart news source Raoul Peck, sent to all British and South Africa newspapers, December 14, 2004
Aristide
is no Mandela (Raoul Peck) Raoul Peck, sent to all British and
Raoul Peck is no Spike Lee… so what!? - December 17, 2004 Jean St. Vil writing in response to Peck’s letter, Aristide is No Mandela, from Haiti Action, December 17, 2004, also seen here: Marguerite Laurent.com | Ezilidanto
Rwanda Revisits Its Nightmare; Filmmaker, in HBO Project, Uses Survivors and Actual Sites to Recount 1994 War Marc Lacey from The New York Times, February 17, 2004
Some
notes on "Political Cinema" Prompted by Seeing Raoul Peck's ... Some
Notes on “Political Cinema” Prompted by Seeing Raoul Peck's Sometimes in April
in Competition at the
A Grim
Excursion to Rwanda's Hell
Alessandra Stanley from The New
York Times,
Some Notes on “Political Cinema” Prompted by Seeing Raoul Peck's ... Some Notes on “Political Cinema” Prompted by Seeing Raoul Peck's Sometimes in April in Competition at the Berlin Film Festival, by Jon Jost from Senses of Cinema, April 15, 2005
Cecile Vernant, Raoul Peck - Paradigm Breakfast At The 2007 ... Life magazine photo, April 7, 2007
Lumumba (2000) directed by Raoul Peck Talatu-Carmen from Abubuwan da nake Rubutawa, May 2007
Peck sets sights on Karl Marx biopic Charles Masters from The Hollywood Reporter, May 4, 2007
BMRCL Fall 2007 Vol. 6, No. 2 Fazia Aitel book review of From Split to Screened Selves: French and Francophone Autobiography in the Third Person, by Rachel Gabara, from the Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature
Haiti, Raoul Peck on
Notebook | MUBI David Hudson from
Mubi, January 14, 2010
Stolen
Images: Lumumba and the Early Films of Raoul Peck book written by Raoul Peck, 2012 (pdf)
Interview
with Raoul Peck, by Olivier Barlet Olivier Barlet interview from Africultures, January 10, 2000
Lumumba: an Interview with Raoul Peck Prerana Reddy interview from the New York African Film Festival, 2001
AT LUNCH WITH: Raoul Peck;Exporting Haitian Culture to the World Interview by Gary Pierre-Pierre from The New York Times, May 8, 2006
Back to hell | Film | The Guardian Feature and interview by Geoffrey Macnab from The Guardian, March 15, 2005
All
Your Buried Corpses are Now Beginning to Speak: Raoul Peck on ... Matt Fagerholm interview from the Ebert site,
January 31, 2017
I Am
Not Your Negro's Raoul Peck on Optimism Versus Pessimism ... Kristen Yoonsoo Kim interview from Vulture, February 1, 2017
Raoul Peck
interview Steven Erickson interview
from Fandor, February 2, 2017
Raoul Peck - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
HAITIAN CORNER
Haiti USA
Germany
User reviews from imdb Author: (artemis_98@hotmail.com)
from Mandeville, Jamaica
This early film of Raoul Peck tells the story of a Haitian immigrant in New York who becomes obsessed with finding the man who tortured him on behalf of the Duvaliers. Convinced that his torturer is also in New York, this tormented soul quits his job, alienates his friends and his family, and ruins his chances of a love relationship with a beautiful and caring childhood friend. The movie is a bit too long, and the cinematography, at least the version I saw, was very grainy, with very hard to read subtitles (the film is in Haitian Creole, for the most part). Nevertheless, the movie is well worth watching for anyone who is a fan of Raoul Peck, as well as for a unique insight into a world seldom revealed on film.
LUMUMBA: DEATH OF A PROPHET (Lumumba: La mort du
prophète)
France
Switzerland Germany (69 mi)
1992
User reviews from imdb Author: FelixtheCat from
Cleveland, OH
The 1961 assassination of Zaire's prime minister Patrice Lumumba is the
subject of this modest documentary. Raoul Peck directs this unique look at a
tragic time in African history, where the one man who seemed poised to finally
speak up for the black population of the Congo was brutally killed before his
goal of equality could be completely achieved.
Peck, who intertwines bits of his own childhood into the mix to establish the
period, uses little music to help establish the somberness of the subject. The
result is a worthwhile documentary, especially to those interested in African
history. Peck, who also narrates, directed the 2001 narrative film on the same
subject entitled "Lumumba."
User reviews from imdb Author: etoukesteph
(etoukesteph@yahoo.fr) from Yaounde, Cameroon, Central Africa
In 1992 Haitian-born filmmaker Raoul Peck reconciles with his boyhood
memories of the genesis of post-independence
California Newsreel page on Lumumba: La mort du prophète
Lumumba: la mort du Prophete offers a unique
opportunity to reconsider the life and legacy of one of the legendary figures
of modern African history. Like Malcolm X, Patrice Lumumba is remembered less
for his lasting achievements than as an enduring symbol of the struggle for
self-determination. This deeply personal reflection by acclaimed fimmaker Raoul
Peck on the events of Lumumba's brief twelve month rise and fall is a moving
memorial to a man described as a giant, a prophet, a devil, "a mystic of
freedom," and "the Elvis Presley of African politics."
If Lumumba: la mort du Prophete is a film about remembering, it is even
more a film about forgetting. It is not so much a conventional biography as a
study of how Lumumba's legacy has been manipulated by politicians, the media
and time itself. Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck meditates on his own memories as
the privileged son of an agricultural expert working for the regime which
displaced Lumumba. He examines home movies, photographs, old newsreels and
contemporary interviews with Belgian journalists and Lumumba's own daughter to
try to piece together the tragic events and betrayals of 1960.
A film essay in the tradition of Night and Fog or The Sorrow and the
Pity, Lumumba: la mort du Prophete explores how any image inevitably
represses the multiple stories surrounding it, how the past as preserved by the
media is always in a sense the hostage of history's winners. Therefore
present-day Europe figures as prominently in Lumumba as the Congo in 1960,
because Europe was the unseen hand behind the camera and the events leading to
Lumumba's assassination. Peck presents an unfamiliar Europe seen through the
eyes of a visitor from the Third World - cold, affluent, a guilty present
trying to forget its past. Yet, as this film testifies, Lumumba's prophecy will
not be silenced until Africa achieves its second independence where the
promises of the first can be fulfilled.
Review/Film Festival; Independence in Africa and Death in High Places Stephen Holden from The New York Times, September 30, 1992
THE MAN ON THE SHORE (L’Homme sur les quais) A 98
aka: The Man By the Shore
France Canada Haiti Germany (106 mi) 1993
All
sea animals eat up men, but only the shark has a bad reputation. —Sarah (Jennifer Zubar)
A film on my short list of all-time favorite films, rarely
screened and never released on DVD, distinguished for being the first film from
the
Told out of sequence, moving back and forth over two years
time, the film details the changing behavior when the local police lose their
authority to the brutal methods of the Tontons Macoute, Duvalier’s militia
thugs with guns who rule the neighborhoods through intimidation and fear. The chief enforcer is Janvier, Jean-Michel
Martial, a wickedly sadistic madman who doesn’t look at people so much as stare
holes through them, usually accompanied by bloody beatings, and to the extreme,
shootings and disappearances. But at
least initially, he is still under the authority of the police, Sarah’s father,
who doesn’t condone those methods, but when he tries to intervene, “Don’t tempt
the devil” would be Janvier’s response, where he and his gunmen would resort to
gangland style violence, eventually taking over, demanding blood money from
everyone. Her mother and father flee to
There’s a national unity celebration filled with loud speaker pronouncements from President for Life Duvalier to his citizenry, a street procession of raw, authentic Haitian music, much like Best haitian music Webert Sicot Crab mazorey (3:41), ORCHESTRE SEPTENTRIONAL (6:57), or even Cuban salsa queen Celia Cruz - Guede Zaina (3:10), with posters of Duvalier lining the streets, and red and black flags all around when Duvalier announces an amnesty. All Haitians who fled are urged to return, as the country needs to generate needed capital and it was the rich that had the means to flee, where Duvalier actually brokers an agreement with the Pope where the Church and State become inseparable, where Sarah and her sisters could finally come out into the open, but what people are subjected to is continued harassment and raids by the Tontons Macoute who don’t follow any laws, but simply brutalize and murder anyone they don’t like on trumped up charges, proving repeatedly that anyone could be suspected of subversive behavior. No proof is necessary, only guns. There’s an interesting character, a brain-damaged invalid named Sorel (Patrick Rameau), who feels like a simpleton character out of August Wilson plays, the stuttering Hambone from Two Trains Running who continually shouts out the same words throughout the entire play, “I want my ham.” Whenever he sees the Tontons Macoute he stands at attention and salutes, calling them chief, mimicking the shooting of a rifle, but he’s simply a street beggar who takes on the role of Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), an idiot savant, but also a protector of children. He plays a big role in the film as the audience identifies with what he goes through, as he is arrested, beaten and sexually brutalized with a nightstick, a tortured character who is traumatized by listening to the endless machine gun shots by the shore near the police holding center. This is one of the most eloquently powerful films describing life under such a repressive regime, where it all plays out like a nightmarish dream, where one wonders how this can actually happen, where all human resistance is simply liquidated. Unlike THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1966), no one is trying to overthrow the government here, yet every citizen is viewed with derision and contempt. The finale to this film is profoundly moving, beautifully set on the gorgeous shores of the turquoise ocean, young girls riding bikes under the swaying palm trees, a picture of serenity ultimately violated in the most obscene way, but the director chooses not to sensationalize and uses a long shot, where the audience can see what happens off in the distance before that continually panning camera comes to rest on an idyllic shore. The setting is Haiti, but we’ve seen this kind of wretched terror inflicted on citizens before by Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung’s Chinese Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and a host of others, where genocide is a historical reality, but this film brilliantly puts a human face on the reign of terror. THE MAN ON THE SHORE has a searing intensity that is expressed through a poetic realism, where the beauty of the island landscape and the proud dignity of the people who inhabit the country are the centerpiece of the film, where a Pandora’s Box opens wide to spoil and nearly destroy this Edenesque lost paradise.
"Batèm rat"
Written by Gérard Monfiston
Performed by Aux Callebasses
"Duvalier à
vie"
Performed by Orchestre Septentrional
"Guédé Zaina"
(popular music)
Performed by Célia Cruz
"Marche 1804"
Written by Occide Jeanty
Performed by Fanfare militaire de Port-au-Prince
"Twa fey
tombé"
Written by Ensemble Radio Commerce
Performed by Rodolphe Legros
"La vi vié
neg"
Written by Antoine Innocent
Arrangmant by Coupé Cloué
"Duvalier, Président à vie"
Performed by Ensemble de Weber Sicot
User reviews from imdb Author: Poisonous_Products from United States
Disturbing, powerful and bleak drama about horrible memories that linger in the mind and keep us awake at night, but specifically about the experience of a girl's life in the middle of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier's reign in Haiti in the 1960's; in which he made life hell for everyone he came in contact with, and he had no qualms with trying to rape little girls or blowing an innocent person's brains out. Hard to watch but has a certain ring of truth to it that a lot of other films don't have, thanks to the director's personal touch, in which he brings his own childhood experiences to the film's narrative and tone. It's refreshing, honest and has a wicked performance in Jean-Michel Martial, who truly defines the meaning of the term "villain".
Man
by the Shore Yosha Goldstein for The Independent,
May, 1996
"All sea animals eat up men, but only the shark has a bad
reputation," recites eight-year-old Sarah, skipping playfully though her
grandmother's attic. As she opens the door to the attic's balcony, the serene
daylight is abruptly offset by a scream from the neighboring yard. The girl
sees her father standing below with several men over a slumped and brutalized
figure; he frantically motions her away.
This primal scene of agony and betrayal repeatedly punctuates the narrative of Man
by the Shore, Raoul Peck's third feature, which is set in
The Man by the Shore is an eloquent account of the ways in which
political oppression can saturate one's consciousness and infiltrate the
details of everyday life. Sarah's father is an ineffectual local military
officer whose weaknesses are exploited by Janvier, the town's ruthless Tontons
Macoute (government-supported militia) leader. After Sarah's parents are forced
to leave the country, she and her sisters refuge in a nearby convent, then in
her grandmother's attic. The story is recalled by an adult Sarah thirty years
later, and the resonance with
"If you analyze the relationships between the different characters, there
is always a fine line [between power and fear]," remarks Peck, seated in
his downtown
Originally scheduled to film Man by the Shore in
The film garnered critical acclaim at
Man
by the Shore
In September 1994-with a
The terror that haunts the small Haitian town of Man by the Shore
derives not from the zombie meat that Americans like to imagine, but the
self-legalized murderers, torturers, and rapists that U.S. policy makers choose
to ignore (when not sneakily underwriting them). The gift of Peck's disciplined
narrative is in making this terror intimate, palpable, but at the same time,
humane. Terror dances around eight-year-old Sarah, movingly portrayed by
Jennifer Zubar as a girl exiled within her own country, hidden in the attic of
her family house, guarded by her grandmother, awaiting a safe time to join her
parents abroad.
This town and its inhabitants occupy a dreamlike primacy, the streets as bare
and shadowed as a de Chirico piazza, scantily populated by survivors trying to
remember their humanity against the menace of the Tonton Macoute leader
arrogantly cruising in his jeep. Sarah's innocence figures as the dream of a
nation for peaceful existence, her anxious impatience to move about outdoors and
to play a precise yardstick of freedom denied the society as a whole.
Peck wrote Man by the Shore during Aristide's first stretch as a
president: "And while I was writing it there was the military putsch, just
a few weeks before shooting. It was traumatic because it was a film that was
supposed to be a monument to a time past. I told everybody, don't worry. This
is going to take one week, and then the problem will be solved. That's how naive
we were. And it took three years. Three whole years. Deadly years."
But the notion of an instantaneous deliverance from the nightmare of the putsch
is a mistake. After years of artistic success abroad and the all-but
suppression of his films in Haiti, Peck had a difficult time in January 1995
getting his work on a screen before his own people. It was clear to all who had
seen Peck's films that they would prompt Haitians not only to remember but in
many cases to discover raw what older relatives had lived through in recent
decades. Like Rwandans, South Africans, Bosnians, and Argentineans, Haitians
have had to wrestle with the question of whether it is better to remember and
punish, remember and not punish, or just to pretend nothing happened.
Multiple screenings of Man by the Shore to high schoolers in
Port-au-Prince brought tears, stunned exclamations, and tense exchanges with
parents. "It forced people to take positions. It helped me to see who were
the enemies and who were the friends. One viewer said, since I saw your film,
faces come back to me, and I recognize the guy who arrested my father. I mean,
you forget about all those things. He told me the names. One was minister of
defense."
Edgy nerves got another jerk from the lead in a major Haitian daily, Le
Nouvelliste: "Raoul Peck is dead. He has been assassinated." One
of Peck's literary friends had overcooked a metaphor that quickly spread
through the capital as "news." "Radios were going crazy. I had
to spend the afternoon saying that I am alive, I am in New York, I'm back
teaching, all that." One radio station was already preparing a
demonstration for the evening. "And people believed it quickly, because a
lot of people were scared about the whole thing. It shows you how fragile the
minds were in Haiti."
The very much alive Peck has since returned to Haiti, where he has been
appointed minister of culture. Moving from filmmaker to political appointee,
Peck needn't skip a beat. "I never made a distinction between making a
film and culture advocacy. It's not a new career. It's just part of my
work." Watching other Haitians abroad, Peck decided, "I would never
play the game of exile, waiting for the perfect time to go back. I went back
continually, even when it was dangerous for me to go back. So I've been very
present over the last 10 years."
Peck is almost hopeful about the prospects for Haiti: "I feel, not that it
is the last chance, but that it is important to be involved. It's going to be a
long fight and there will be a lot of drawbacks, you know, a lot of very sad
and dark periods. But something has changed, and now let's see what we can do
with it."
THE MAN BY THE SHORE (Raoul Peck, 1993) « Dennis Grunes
The Man by the Shore is about Haiti, where its maker, Raoul Peck, served briefly as Minister of Cultural Affairs until he resigned in 1997. Peck himself was born in Haiti, in Port-au-Prince, in 1953, but he and his family, fleeing the dictatorship of François (“Papa Doc”) Duvalier, moved to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) when he was eight years old after his father secured a teaching post there. Peck’s highschooling was completed in France, after which he studied industrial engineering, economics, and filmmaking in Germany. In between his German studies, Peck visited the United States. Peck has homes in Paris, Port-a-Piment in southwest Haiti, and Voorhees, New Jersey.
The Man by the Shore, whose script Peck and André Graill co-authored, draws upon Peck’s own childhood memories of a frightening, brutal place where his father was arrested twice and many others contesting the government “were disappeared,” that is, made to disappear, that is, murdered. However, the film’s protagonist isn’t an eight-year-old boy but an eight-year-old girl named Sarah (Jennifer Zubar). (Sarah has two sisters.) On one occasion when the child is being routinely intimidated by the local military/police “chief,” Sarah, standing, wets the floor. I can understand the welter of feelings that might prompt Peck to identify his boyhood self in that terrifying environment with a girl instead; but I can also understand objections to this procedure.
One of the film’s indisputable achievements, however, is the integrity of Sarah’s childhood that it conveys despite all. Peck knows the difference between showing us one of Duvalier’s vicious Tontons Macoutes terrorizing Sarah and brutalizing the character himself. Peck appropriately distances everything we see—so much so, in fact, that when at the last Janvier, the Macoute, meets his own brutal end, not a single drop of glee rises in our hearts. Peck is not a sentimentalist; we watch Janvier’s end in pitiless horror and some relief, knowing full well that Duvalier will promptly replace Janvier with another one of his soulless army of Tontons Macoutes. Peck has devised his film, then, so that we take in an environment of daily political terror, through incidents large and small, rather than react to a cardboard melodrama that manipulates our emotions. Peck grasps that he can’t be credible arguing how certain regimes seek to dehumanize ordinary people if, as a sensationalist filmmaker, he himself is dehumanizing the characters who represent these ordinary people.
Above all, he employs the resources of cinema to achieve the distancing necessary to create a portrait of the social and political environment that we can think about rather than simply react to. In this regard, Janvier’s murder constitutes one of the film’s finest accomplishments—a masterful scene because it’s a masterful shot. We watch Sarah hide a pistol on her person, knowing that her father has taught her how to use a pistol. We see her and one of her sisters ride to the shore on their bicycles, all but inviting Janvier to mess with them. Janvier does, pulling Sarah’s older sister by the hair in order to rape her, and Sarah, her armed hand in closeup, retaliates. There is a click; no discharge. A second click fires; Janvier, in medium shot, falls to the ground dead. The camera moves screen-left to record the girls’ stunned escape; the camera, this time stunning us, moves screen-right to reveal that someone else, Gracieux (Patrick Rameaux, in a haunting performance), the girls’ godfather, whom Janvier earlier sexually brutalized with his thick stick, delivered the lethal shot. Gracieux, as gentle as Sarah and nearly as innocent, has been perverted into becoming a killer, as she might have been perverted into becoming a killer. A Brechtian filmmaker, Peck has his filmmaking bible: John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), where everything breaks and turns on who really does the shooting that we first think someone else did. Ford, too, devised a brilliant shot to show us who killed the villain, with the camera then moving to reveal who really did the killing. Peck’s film isn’t quite so momentous; the history of a nation doesn’t hinge on the widened knowledge that is disclosed to the audience with a movement of the camera, as happens in the Ford. Peck knows this; he also knows that his reduced application of Ford’s strategy yields a more intimate result.
The sisters have been all but orphaned. Their parents fled for their lives once Duvalier was in power. The children’s grandmother, Mme. Desrouilliere, is in charge of them; her righteously rebellious spirit underscores how powerless people are to oppose Duvalier and his minions. Duvalier’s local authorities dole out injustice with unqualified and vicious authority.
If there’s a better film than Peck’s for revealing to audiences what living in a police state is precisely like, I don’t know what it might be. (Compare this valuable film to Guillermo del Toro’s worthless Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006, about Franco’s Spain.) The Man by the Shore isn’t just recommended viewing. It’s essential viewing.
Man by the Shore Moving Image, including a collection of reviews from The Village Voice, The Independent, The Chicago Tribune, and Newsday
Haiti, Raoul Peck on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson from Mubi, January 14, 201`0
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4] also seen here: James Berardinelli
Max Hoffmann review also seen here: Max Hoffmann
Man by the Shore | Chicago Reader Andrea Gronvall
Festival
de Cannes: The Man by the Shore"
Man By The Shore
(L'Homme sur les Quais), 1993
The Man on the Shore - Movie info: cast, reviews, trailer on mubi.com Mubi
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
AT LUNCH WITH: Raoul Peck;Exporting Haitian Culture to the World Interview by Gary Pierre-Pierre from The New York Times, May 8, 1996
New
York Times (registration req'd)
Raoul Peck - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
La Fémis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
LUMUMBA A- 94
Lumumba Olivier Barlet from Africultures,
Raoul Peck's new film comes as a shock to all those who had
grown used to his scalpel-like, cold style softened only by its delving into
the interior world of individuals. Here, the didactic intent predominates. But
it avoids falling into propaganda or radicalism. Peck develops as strong a
determination on the screen as that which he shows in real life - and begins
his film with the note: "this is a true story". Indeed, at a time
when light is being shed on the conditions in which the Congolese leader was
killed, the film is about restoring a memory, of fighting oversight and
disinformation. Lumumba is a somewhat classical fresco, therefore, whose
images and music tend towards efficiency. It constitutes an almost Hollywoodish
ode to the determination of this exceptional man who, faced with the
back-biting of the false Congolese independence, refused to compromise and only
lasted two months as Prime Minister. But there where
Movie Shorts Cynthia Fuchs (shorter review) from the Philadelphia
City Paper, May 15, 2003
Raoul Peck's film
begins
Elombe Brath, Raoul Peck's 'Lumumba:— A tale of human suffering ... Raoul Peck's ‘Lumumba:’ A tale of human suffering, sacrifice and hypocrisy, by Elombe Brath, Haiti Progres, June 20 – 26, 2001
“Lumumba,” the new feature film by Haitian director Raoul Peck, is a film that must be seen. It is a brilliant and majestic work which documents the extraordinary contributions and self-sacrifice that the 1960's Congolese leader Patrice Emery Lumumba made in attempting to safeguard the territorial integrity and tremendous wealth of the Congo against the greed and power plays of the United States of America and its allies.
Peck deals with a particularly nefarious part of U.S. history, which is still ongoing. “Lumumba” shows how the U.S. and its allies undermine democracy in African states, destabilize fledgling governments, and, after bringing down a government, help to create a mythical consensus that the people of the targeted African country were not yet ready for self-rule. Covert operations by Western “counter-intelligence” agencies stealthily undermine African governments and make them appear to be ungovernable, thus fostering the myth that once European colonialists left, Africans automatically slide back to atavism, stagnating until the “good white father” returns to rescue them through recolonization. It is of vital importance that people, particularly the black community, see “Lumumba” so that they become conscious of the real motivations of U.S. foreign policies and how the machinations to reach their objectives are accomplished.
What happened after the independence of the Democratic Republic of the Congo on June 30, 1961 is a classic case of such foreign intrigue. This subversion of the dreams and aspirations of the Congolese people still haunts the second Democratic Republic of Congo today. In my view, it is no coincidence that the DRC's late president, Laurent Kabila, was assassinated one day short of the 40th anniversary of the assassination of his mentor Patrice Lumumba. In time we will likely see that the forces behind the brutal murder of Patrice Lumumba, along with that of two of his closest aides, are the same as those which engineered Laurent Kabila's assassination five months ago. My premise is reinforced by Peck's revelatory new film.
Having been involved over the last 40 years with African liberation struggles in general and the Congo in particular, I can attest that Mr. Peck has directed a great and honest film. It reveals how Western nations concocted a communist bogeyman to justify their covert actions on behalf of Western capitalist monopoly interests.
Peck depicts how Lumumba and his Congolese National Movement (MNC), democratically elected in a “free and fair” election, were undermined by a conspiracy between the former Belgian colonial rulers and their longtime financial partner, the U.S. This alliance arranged the assassinations of Lumumba and his cadre and imposed a puppet to protect their vested economic interests: Col. Joseph Desire Mobutu, the moody, envious, self-serving opportunist who was co-opted—and contracted—by the U.S. to betray the Congo's national independence.
Mobutu's brutal reign was maintained by financial and material assistance from eleven U.S. Administrations As a result, according to several press reports, Mobutu would become second only to the Shah of Iran as the richest leader in the world, while the Congo had its precious natural resources sucked away and was reduced to an “economic basket case,” leaving the Congolese masses wretchedly impoverished.
Eric Ebouney, a stage and film actor from the Cameroon with masterful oratory skills, delivers an exceptional and explosive performance as Patrice Lumumba. With equal gusto, Alex Descas, from Guadeloupe, plays Mobutu, Lumumba's former aide-de-camp turned nemesis, delivering a wonderfully believable performance.
“Lumumba,” which is in French with English subtitles, is a tremendously moving film experience, with beautiful cinematography and a stupendous soundtrack. The casting of both African and European actors is outstanding, with exceptional performances throughout. Raoul Peck's directing exhibits as much finesse as a maestro guiding an orchestra. It is no wonder that the film has already won the Director Fortnight Award at Cannes last year and was the winner for best feature film at the Pan- African Film Festival in Los Angeles.
Shot in Belgium, and Zimbabwe and Mozambique for its African locations (the ongoing war in the DRC prohibited filming there), the film has astounded audiences in Europe, Africa, Cuba and Canada. It is a phenomenal depiction of the human suffering caused by the hypocrisy of Western “democracies.”
As Lumumba wrote in his last message to his wife, Pauline Opanga, “History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations will teach, but that will be taught in countries emancipated from colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history, and it will be, to the north and to the south of the Sahara, a history of glory and dignity.”
An essential part of that history was written 10 years ago in Raoul Peck's award-winning documentary “Lumumba - Death of a Prophet.” That bio-doc has now been magnificently complemented by this poignant and breathtaking film masterpiece, whose screenplay Peck wrote with Pascal Bonitzer. “Lumumba” is a major contribution to the reclaiming of Africa's glorious history in dignity. The puppeteers are not likely to be happy with Peck's product. But all people who believe in common decency, fair play, social justice, and redressing old grievances by making right past wrongs, they will love Raoul Peck's “Lumumba.”
LUMUMBA and ALL AFRICA Contents Page archival articles from foreign press correspondent D’Lynn Waldron
Patrice Lumumba, Stanleyville, Belgian Congo D'Lynn Waldron
Raoul Peck's movie "Lumumba" a discussion by D'Lynn Waldron (2001)
Lumumba (2000) directed by Raoul Peck Talatu-Carmen from Abubuwan da nake Rubutawa, May 2007
Lumumba
- Bright Lights Film Journal Gary
Morris, October 31, 2004
Driven
to Perfection Amy Taubin from The Village Voice, June 19, 2001
On the Forty First Anniversary of the Independence of the Congo, a ... On the Forty First Anniversary of the Independence of the Congo, a Conversation with Raoul Peck About His Award Winning New Film “Lumumba” from Democracy Now, July 3, 2001
Heart of Darkness: the Tragedy of the Congo, 1960-67 Robert Craig Johnson from World at War (1997)
Tambour d'Afrique: Raoul Peck & Lumumba... Tambour d’Afrique, May 8, 2007
Director
Raoul Peck And The Legacy Of Lumumba - Culture Trip Claire Hayward
Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs) review (longer review) also seen here: Nitrate Online (Cynthia Fuchs) review
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul (Peter S. Scholtes) review
Lumumba Esther Iverem from Seeing Black, May 17, 2001
Reel Movie Critic (Pam Singleton) review [4/4]
MovieMusings.com (Ken Rosenberg) review
Flak Magazine (James Norton) review
Film Journal International (Eric Monder) review
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
blackfilm.com (Wilson Morales) review
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B+]
Urban Cinefile dvd review Louise Keller
User reviews from imdb (Page 3) Author: Philip Van der Veken from Tessenderlo, Belgium
Julia Watson - Raoul Peck's Lumumba : A Film for Our Times ... brief essay description, Raoul Peck's Lumumba : A Film for Our Times, by Julia Watson, from larger anthology, Research in African Literatures, Summer 2002, pages 230 – 235, also opening page seen here: Raoul Peck's "Lumumba": A Film for Our Times<product> <source ...
Filmmaker Raoul Peck To Speak About Lumumba Mount Holyoke College, February 19, 2002
BMRCL Fall 2007 Vol. 6, No. 2 Fazia Aitel book review of From Split to Screened Selves: French and Francophone Autobiography in the Third Person, by Rachel Gabara, from the Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature
FilmFestivals.com - Cannes 2000 Ron Holloway
Panther Film Fest: The International Black Panther Film Festival
New York State Writers Institute - Lumumba
JBA Production - Lumumba by RAOUL PECK
Forging a New African Image: Eriq Eboauney Debi Williams from Seeing Black, April 16, 2004
Lumumba: an Interview with Raoul Peck Prerana Reddy interview from the New York African Film Festival, 2001
Entertainment Weekly review [A-] Lisa Schwarzbaum
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]
The Boston Phoenix review John Ruch
Baltimore City Paper (Luisa F. Ribeiro) review
Washington Post [Stephen Hunter]
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [4/5]
San Francisco Chronicle (Wesley Morris) review
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; A Multicultural Kaleidoscope Of Filmmakers' Gifts to the Art Elvis Mitchell from The New York Times, September 19, 2000
FILM; In a Mirror on Africa, a Hero Unfairly Tarnished Alan Riding from The New York Times, June 24, 2001
The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review June 27, 2001, also seen here: FILM REVIEW; An African Leader's Brief Blaze of Glory
PATRICE LUMUMBA Wikipedia
Patrice Lumumba, From Africa Within
Historical Biography Patrice Emery Lumumba, with special italics added by Raoul Peck, from Africa Within, also here: Biography of Lumumba
Independence Day Speech Patrice Lumumba, The First Prime Minister of the Congo (Zaire), June 30, 1960
"Lumumba
Assails Colonialism as Congo Is Freed"
Harry Gilroy from The New York
Times, July 1, 1960
"Marred: Lumumba's offensive speech in King's presence" The Guardian, July 1, 1960
Lumumba's Last
Letter Written to his wife just
before his death
"The
Bad Dream" Time magazine, January 20, 1961
BBC BBC News reports of Lumumba’s death, February 13, 1961
19
February 1961 Demonstrators clash over Lumumba's murder BBC
News, February 19, 1961
The Passing of Patrice Lumumba by Dr. John Henrik Clarke 1961, which is just one piece of a larger website here: Africa Within
6) Plan to poison Congo leader Patrice Lumumba (p. 464), November 1962 CIA Memorandum
"Sidney Gottlieb" March 7, 1999 obituary of the man the CIA chose to poison Lumumba’s toothpaste, from CounterPunch
Lumumba's son arrested BBC News, April 24, 2000
Belgium probes Lumumba's death Oana Lungescu from the BBC News, May 2, 2000
"A killing in Congo" Kevin Whitelaw from the U.S. News & World Report, July 24, 2000, also seen here: Mysteries of History
"President 'ordered murder' of Congo leader" Martin Kettle from The Guardian, August 10, 2000
"Who
Killed Lumumba?" David Akerman
from the BBC News, October 21, 2000,
also archived here: Who Killed
Lumumba?
Belgium urged to come clean on Congo BBC News, January 15, 2001
Lumumba hearing in Belgium delayed BBC News, January 26, 2001
Belgium link in Lumumba death BBC News, November 16, 2001
Report Reproves Belgium in Lumumba's Death - New York Times The New York Times, November 17, 2001
Belgian Commission's Conclusion (pdf format), also the December 2001 findings of the Belgium Parliament here: Belgian Parliament
BBC Lumumba apology: Congo's mixed feelings, by Arnaud Zajtman from the BBC news, February 6, 2002
Lumumba's son hails Belgian apology BBC News, February 6, 2002
New Data on
the Murder of Lumumba Opening the Secret Files on Lumumba's Murder, by Stephen R.
Weissman from The Washington Post,
July 21, 2002
"Interview with Mark Garsin" "Mr. Garsin from Kinshasa," Tempelsman's Man Weighs In on the Murder of Patrice Lumumba, by Suzan Mazur from CounterPunch, January 29/30, 2005
CIA plans included the assassination of Patrice Lumumba Karen De Young and Walter Pincus from The Washington Post, June 27, 2007
Speeches and writings by and about Patrice Lumumba Marxists.org
Virtual Memorial to Patrice Lumumba Find a Grave
Lumumba and the Congo YouTube documentary film on Lumumba (9:58)
Lumumba and the Congo YouTube documentary film on Lumumba and the Congo (10:01)
PROFIT AND NOTHING BUT! OR IMPOLITE THOUGHTS ON THE CLASS STRUGGLE A- 93
A blistering documentary on capitalism, filled with contempt, much like Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground.” However, this is a brilliant filmmaker who prefaces his treatise with thoughts like: “Capitalism has won. Theoretically, my country doesn’t even exist.” Then he proceeds to lay the case for how capitalism has winners, but at the expense of over two-thirds of the rest of the world who, as a consequence for the lavish lifestyle of a few, live in abject poverty with absolutely no hope of any change in their lifetime. Peck suggests criticism is meaningless, as the war is won, complete with all the means to communicate the message, as the media is all owned by large corporate entities which are not about to dilute their profit margins. No one wants a revolution based on class struggle anymore. They simply want to go home after work and watch TV, then do it all over again the next day. Peck even questions his role as a filmmaker, suggesting it was either make films or destroy and vandalize cars. This film has the feel of Franz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth,” as it is clear to anyone who listens to this message that the world is totally unfair, certainly when seen through the eyes of a Haitian. The film has bits of biting sarcasm fed by little jazz interludes, an opening and closing sax, with percussion and a walking bass line leading the discussion, all feeling very raw and earthy. The film has a very humanist quality. Children are shown very effectively watching a film; eyes are eagerly paying attention. The question is – what is worth paying attention to?
Time Out review
Subtitled 'Impolite Thoughts on the Class Struggle', this is a righteous rant against the iniquities of a global capitalism that claims 'it alone knows the truth, is moral, can deal with politics', while at the same time it privatises its manifest failures. It's hard to argue with the gist of the polemic, but the editorial would benefit from a few hard facts. There's some funny stuff down Haiti way with a vendor of recycled plastic bottles, but too much comes straight out of the mouths of various French academics.
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [3.5/4] Ken Fox
Raoul Peck's 52-minute film about the effects of market economy and globalization on his homeland, Haiti, is more a film essay than a traditional documentary. Instead of facts and figures, Peck offers the learned commentary of various economists, including Rene Passet, Serge Latouche and Haiti's agricultural minister, Gérald Mathurin, as well as his own personal reflections on the way in which so-called free market capitalism has rendered Haiti a country that "theoretically doesn't exist." Capitalism, they feel, is a system that serves only the richest citizens of the richest nations, and they note a deep contradiction between its self-proclaimed triumph and the reality of day-to-day life in countries like Haiti — countries whose markets have been drastically deregulated to encourage exports of their most valuable resources, while importing the worst of what the rest of the world has to offer. The system has succeeded in turning money into capital: Rather than a means of expediting the exchange of goods in an attempt to meet the basic needs of the people, money has become the goal of transactions. It accumulates in the bottomless coffers of a handful of paranoid super-capitalists interested only in increasing their fortunes, regardless of the effects. Men like Bill Gates, whose personal worth equals Haiti's cumulative GNP for the next 30 years. This "crazy machine" — an opaque, feudal system whose true nature remains invisible — is now out of control, Latouche argues, but our society facilitates blindness to its dysfunctions by encouraging irresponsibility and a forgetfulness that Peck likens to a form of societal Alzheimer's disease. And in the face of this illusory triumph, which smothers dissent and renders discussion pointless, Peck ultimately questions the futility of creating images. Are they to exist only as mementos to lost battles? Impassioned and deeply troubling, Peck's film is not entirely without hope, and would make a powerful double bill with LIFE AND DEBT, Stephanie Black's 2001 film about globalization's disastrous impact on Jamaica's economy.
Casualties
of Global War Jessica Winter from The Village Voice, October 30, 2001
Viva Revolution
| Village Voice J. Hoberman, May 7,
2002
Profit and Nothing But Paul T. Miller from Journal of Pan African Studies, June 2007 (pdf format)
PopMatters Elbert Ventura
Film Freak Central capsule review Walter Chaw
Profit and Nothing But! Icarus Films
FILM REVIEW; Haitian Capitalism and a Hunt for Diamonds in the Sea Dave Kehr from The New York Times, May 8, 2002
SOMETIMES IN APRIL – made for TV B+ 90
A searing drama filmed largely in Rwanda, using a nearly all-African cast, recreating the historic conditions over the 100 days in 1994 when Hutus massacred 800,000 or more Tutsis, as well as other Rwandan peoples, largely using machetes, claiming the use of a bullet was a wasted bullet on a Tutsi “cockroach.” Following immediately after the Rwandan president’s plane is mysteriously shot down, effectively preventing the implementation of a peace agreement, mob action is incited by Hutu incendiary radio broadcasts, by trucks roaming the streets going door-to-door with rifles and machine guns pulling Tutsi’s from their homes, and by the use of ever-present roadblocks preventing anyone’s escape, where 8000 or more people are killed per day for the next 100 days. Using the United Nations troops to remove only the white citizens from Rwanda, leaving the rest to be slaughtered and mutilated by angry mobs while the so-called civilized world sat and watched, including the United States Clinton administration, which had just experienced disastrous murders of American soldiers in Somalia, they along with the rest of the world did nothing as they argued over terminology, calling it “acts of genocide” rather than genocide, which by treaty, would have mandated American military aid. As it turns out, that was precisely what was needed, as it was a small group of leaders carrying out this plan which could easily have been neutralized by force, and thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of killings prevented.
This film makes no judgments and just presents the actions in the historical context in which they took place, told in a flashback from a schoolteacher who was once a soldier, haunted and shamed by such intense personal memories of what he witnessed and what he was forced to endure. Much of it is raw and chillingly graphic, beginning with a scrolled history of how tribal peoples were pitted against one another by the colonial rule of the Belgians, who maintained control of Africans by arming one tribe against another. The outbreak of madness on the streets beginning in April of 1994, as seen through the eyes of one fictionalized family, the husband a Hutu soldier, his wife a Tutsi, divides the nation against one another, as anyone with Tutsi connections is systematically hunted down from hand-written death lists and pulled from their homes and murdered. The most emotionally devastating moment is an all-girl’s Catholic school, where the Priest in charge believes he can do nothing, leaving all the unarmed girls to fend for themselves against an angry mob of murderers, who wipe them out entirely in a matter of seconds. A few crawl out alive from underneath the dead and mutilated bodies. Years later, haunted by the memories of the dead, it is difficult for those survivors to even come in close proximity to this building without reeling from the devastating power of anguish from what they were forced to experience. Eventually Rwandans themselves stop the killing, as armed Tutsi’s rebel against the slaughter and regain power throughout the country, establishing Truth Tribunals to identify and charge the perpetrators, but only a few dozen are convicted of crimes against humanity, not the many thousands that participated. Some of the power of the film is diluted from a rather bland voiceover which begins and ends the film, which feels particularly out of balance juxtaposed against such an onslaught of unending violence, and with something less than standout acting performances, but is enhanced by Peck's ability to recreate the state of mind of the participants alongside such strict adherence to historical accuracy, also the interesting uses of music, both African street or folk music mixed with European church music which plays during the hauntingly eerie scenes revisiting the Catholic school.
User
reviews from imdb (Page 3) Author: sweetlusciousangel from Los Angeles, CA
I work for Amnesty International and we are currently in serious crisis in the Western Reigon of Darfur, Sudan and Sometimes in April could not be a more important film for everyone to see right now. I've seen both this film and Hotel Rwanda, and Sometimes in April literally left me ill, to the point of retching. There is a point in the film where an entire room of young Catholic schoolgirls are shot and then dismembered with machetes and this is the point where the film transcends reality. Unfortunately the truth is that these events really did happen, which is the sickest fact of all. These movies are important to see because when we (specificially Western Nations) think of the word "genocide" and we hear the enormous amounts of loss of life that occur, we forget that each number that passes is a human being. Someone's friend or relative. Watching this film hit home with me that these people could have been my own relatives and friends, i could have been one of the almost 1 million victims during the massacres. Movies like this will never fully encapture what takes place during genocide, but i believe that 'Sometimes' comes as close as possible and hopefully will anger enough people to truly stop these events from happening ever again. What needs to be understood is that Rwanda could have been stopped, the killing that is currently underway as i write this in the Sudan can be stopped, but until enough people are ready to undertake the challenge of doing whatever it takes to end the violence, it will continue.
Sometimes
in April Olivier Barlet from
Africultures,
Sometimes in April clearly differs from the other fictions made on the Rwandan Genocide (100 days, Hotel Rwanda, Shooting Dogs) by its will to be complex. The other films had based their stories on heroes trying to overcome the horror by reconstructions based on "real facts", pulling the spectator only into sentimental terror and desperation and eventually closing with a comforting happy end, affirming the necessity of humanity. On the contrary, Peck draws his inspiration from reality in order to transpose it to the different strata of an entirely constructed script. There are no good victims or bad genocide perpetrators but, through the relationship between two brothers, Augustin and Honoré, whose choices oppose, the complexity of a country that has drifted away emerges.
Opening the film with a historical reminder and colonial images, Peck deliberately fixes the genocide in a historical process in which colonization has not led to civilization but dissension, at the origin of contemporary tragedies. Assigning Augustin the role of a schoolteacher and facing him to his pupils who wonder, ten years later, how their parents managed to come to that, he makes of the question of memory the mainspring of a reflection with an educational vocation. Fiction is only here to give substance to the story, recall the emotions, remember the different experiences and pass on the marks left by the tragedy.
Past and present are interwoven by a game of flashbacks, from 1994 to the actual law process and from the international Arusha court to the gacaca, the People's court.
Of course, memory is painful and difficult to grasp. It is cries through the wall of a hotel, Augustin who struggles to see his brother again… But remembrance is possible if one agrees to go back to the facts: justice plays a major role and is the only place where things can be and must be told. And justice is necessary, as is the film to the Rwandan population because it does not dispossess them of their memory or take it over. On the contrary, it answers their request to tell the world what their terrible experience is teaching them. The film stands in the current political and human affairs about the conflict for power, which causes conflicts nearly all around the world. Abuses are only the result of a political interest in domination and appropriation and not the doing of the big, bad and inhuman. It is a nation that is tearing itself apart, where everyone carries the marks of History.
The genocide was only possible because
Shot in
One will have to find what will keep one alive, like that laughter that the pupils shared when watching Chaplin's The Great Dictator. And above all, find the strength to testify so that no revisionist deny tomorrow what was the martyrdom and the suicide of a people, so that people stay vigilant when, as Bretch concluded in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui: "The womb, from which the hideous beast came out, is still fertile". Sometimes in April does it admirably, without lapsing into entertainment, with respect for the complexity of its subject.
Film Comment 100
Days, by Amy Taubin from Film Comment
(Undated)
The devil's in the details. The most indelible moment in Sometimes
in April, Raoul Peck's real-life horror film about the Rwandan genocide,
occurs when one of a straggly bunch of Hutus, out on a Tutsi killing spree,
leans down without breaking step to sharpen his machete on the paving stones.
You can avert your eyes from images of bloodletting or defend against them by
telling yourself that these are merely actors and the red stuff a prop-person's
mixture. But this scraping sound like that of a butcher preparing his blade
catches you off guard. It makes your hair stand on end even before you quite
grasp what it portends. Don't bother turning down the volume on the TV; it's
already playing back scrape, scrape, scrape in your head. The machete is
the primary implement of Rwandan agriculture, but during the genocide it was
used to cut down humans. Over 800,000 were murdered in 100 days beginning on
Unlike Hotel Rwanda, which focused on the extraordinary heroism of Paul
Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle) and thus sent people out of the theater with a sense
of uplift, Sometimes in April takes as its protagonist a well-meaning
Hutu army officer with a troubling capacity for denial. Augustin Muganza (Idris
Elba) refuses to believe that a bloodbath is imminent until it is too late for
him to save his Tutsi wife, their two children, and his best friend from the
slaughter. It doesn't diminish the specificity of the Rwandan genocide or the
vast historical, political, and cultural differences between a small,
post-colonial, African country and the
As he did in Lumumba, Peck has made a film that asks us to think about
history and politics in the third world and how we, first-world subjects of
filthy rich, putatively democratic regimes, are implicated in them. The HBO
website (HBO produced the film and will continue to cable-cast it throughout
May as well as release the DVD) has some excellent supplementary materials
including a stark timeline of the genocide (with the U.N. and the U.S. quibbling,
just as they are now in Darfur, about whether what is taking place is genocide
or merely "acts of genocide") and descriptions of the production
process. Shot on location in
Sometimes in April is structured as a Cain and Abel story. Augustin is
the good brother, who like the "good Germans," couldn't believe his
fellow countrymen had become murderers until they knocked on his door. His
brother, Honore (Oris Erhuero) is a hate-radio DJ who agitates for the
extermination of the Tutsi "insects." Ten years after the genocide,
Honore is on trial for war crimes and he asks Augustin to visit him. The film
segues back and forth between the 100 days of slaughter and 2004, when the
International Criminal Tribunal for
Back to hell | Film | The Guardian Feature and interview by Geoffrey Macnab from The Guardian, March 15, 2005
The monster, says Raoul Peck, doesn't come from nowhere. It is slowly conjured into being, and just about everybody is complicit in its creation. "You look aside the first time when someone is slapped in public. You don't say anything. The next day, they kill him in front of you and you don't say anything. Then, on the third day, they can come and take your wife and rape your wife. And then it's too late for you to do anything. That is how the monster arrives. It starts with little things."
The director - and former Haitian minister of culture - is
explaining why he wanted to revisit the Rwandan genocide in his new film,
Sometimes in April. It's one of three major new movies inspired by the horrific
events of April 1994, when an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were massacred by
their countrymen as the world stood idly by. Peck is philosophical about the
rival projects - the Oscar-nominated Hotel Rwanda and Michael Caton-Jones's
yet-to-be-released Shooting Dogs - all coming along at once. From his point of
view, the more that can be done to jolt memories about the genocide, the
better. Besides, he says, his film is likely to reach a far greater initial
audience than the other two features. It was financed by
None the less, Peck realised that a
dry, factual account of the genocide would struggle to find an audience.
"Drama enables people to get into a subject emotionally in a quicker and
deeper way," he says. So his film focuses on the experiences of a single
family. The story begins in April 2004 as Augustin (Idris Elba), a
schoolteacher, prepares to visit his estranged brother, Honoré, a one-time
radio journalist now on trial for his part in inciting genocide with his
inflammatory broadcasts. Augustin, we discover, was a moderate Hutu, but his
wife was a Tutsi. They were split apart in tragic circumstances during the
genocide.
What Peck's film does supremely well
is to show how, during the genocide, violence became normalised. Elderly men
say goodbye to their wives, pick up their machetes and march out to murder
their former neighbours as if they're simply off on a day's work. Teenagers sit
swigging beer at roadblocks, ready to kill anyone who doesn't have the right
papers. Soldiers roam from house to house, blithely shooting dead any Tutsis
they encounter. In sci-fi films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Dawn of
the Dead, it's a cliche to have sleepy communities suddenly turn on their own
inhabitants. In
"I tried to be as authentic as
possible in making my films, even if it is under the label of fiction,"
Peck says. Lines of dialogue, he points out, are taken directly from witnesses'
testimony at the International Criminal Tribunal. The film was shot on location
in
Now 51, Peck was born in
Peck begins Sometimes in April with
eerie archive footage shot by Belgian colonialists. A white potentate in full
uniform is shown meeting a cowed and suspicious tribal leader. The dignitary
offers his hand but the leader is too baffled and terrified to take it.
"This is one of the strange films that the Belgians made about the first
colonialists who came to
He included this overture to show
his audience in a shorthand way that the fissures in Rwandan society first
opened up during the colonial era. It was the Belgians who installed the rigid
system of racial classification that distinguished between the Tutsis and the
Hutus. Peck also made frequent use of western TV footage shot during the
genocide. (As he makes clear, the western media in the spring of 1994 was far
more preoccupied with the suicide of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain.)
The film-maker becomes visibly
irritated when I ask if Debra Winger's character in the film, the US lawyer
Prudence Bushnell agitating for UN and US intervention to stop the massacre,
was included at the behest of HBO, so there would be at least one sympathetic
westerner with whom US audiences could identify. "No, no, no, no, not at
all," he protests. "I think the American public and studios would
have been happy if I had excluded that part, so it would just have been a black
story in
Back in January, Peck held the world
premiere of Sometimes in April in a huge stadium in the Rwandan capital of
Some
Notes on “Political Cinema” Prompted by Seeing Raoul Peck's ... Some
Notes on “Political Cinema” Prompted by Seeing Raoul Peck's Sometimes in April
in Competition at the Berlin Film Festival, by Jon Jost from Senses of Cinema, April 15, 2005
62. Haitian director Raoul Peck's US/French film "Sometimes in April" (2005): Remarkable feature film on the Rwandan genocide Jugu Abraham from Movies That Make You Think, April 20, 2008, also from Dear Cinema here: Sometimes in April: Remarkable Feature Film on the Rwandan ...
The Cinema Source (Elizabeth Brady) review [B]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Gareth On...: Sometimes in April (Raoul Peck 2005) Gareth James from Gareth On, April 24, 2009
'Sometimes in April' looks at Rwandan genocide - TV dramas- msnbc.com March 23, 2004
DVD Talk (Randy Miller III) dvd review [3/5]
DVD Town (Hock Guan Teh) dvd review
Killer Movie Reviews (Andrea Chase) review [5/5]
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [3.5/5]
DVD Verdict (Joe Armenio) dvd review
MovieFreak.com
(Greg Malmborg) dvd review [7/10]
Back to
the Future Ted Hope from The Village Voice, January 4, 2005
Shadow
of Guilt Joy Press from The Village Voice, March 8, 2005
Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [B+]
Nommo Speakers' Bureau: Film News Black Filmmakers
Sometimes in April 1World Films
Variety (Leslie Felperin) review
Hard to watch, but worth it - Page 2 - Los Angeles Times Robert Lloyd from The LA Times, March 18, 2005
Rwanda Revisits Its Nightmare; Filmmaker, in HBO Project, Uses Survivors and Actual Sites to Recount 1994 War Marc Lacey from The New York Times, February 17, 2004
A Grim Excursion to Rwanda's Hell Alessandra Stanley from The New York Times, March 18, 2005
MOLOCH TROPICAL C 74
Haiti France (107 mi) 2009
All of Peck’s films have a blisteringly realistic point of view revealing unfiltered, eye-opening information filled with intelligence, a refusal to compromise, and a powerful message that goes largely unheeded in the world at large. Giving voice to the downtrodden or to third world nations, he takes chances and goes where others refuse to try, such as using onsite African or Haitian locations as well as local non professionals to powerful effect, showing a reverential respect for the subject matter that other directors only give lip service to, as he solemnly lives by the creed of his filmmaking. His films immerse the viewers into difficult regions around the world and compel them to intelligently assess the situation as if they were there, forced to do the unthinkable or the impossible. His first feature film, A MAN BY THE SHORE (1993), which exposes life under the ruthless military dictatorship of Haitian President Papa Doc Duvalier and his savagely brutal thugs for hire, the Tontons Macoutes, as seen through the innocent eyes of a young 8-year old girl, is an unparalleled masterpiece, as the searing images of living in secrecy, in fear, and under threat of death on a day-to-day basis for several decades under a terrorizing, power hungry military dictatorship are timeless and certainly not rooted to Haiti alone. In LUMUMBA (2000), Peck gives us an insider’s view of the Congo (where the director was raised) in the early 1960’s after obtaining their colonialist independence from Belgium and reveals how the first democratically elected Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated by a well orchestrated coup d’état, most likely attributed to Belgium and CIA, as Lumumba was an unrepentant enemy of colonialism and an avowed socialist. In SOMETIMES IN APRIL (2005), Peck re-enacts a nation’s history by traveling to the killing fields of Rwanda and makes a film using local actors who most likely took part or witnessed the Rwandan genocide that led to the savage mutilations and murder of nearly a million people, some 20% of the country’s citizens in the 100 days following immediately after the assassination of the country’s president in 1994. But despite the searing sense of raw emotional authenticity in these earlier films, MOLOCH TROPICAL really falls off the rails, the first major misstep by this director.
As clear as his message was in his earlier films, what Peck is trying to do here in a fictionalized yet semi-biographical depiction of democratically elected Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s final days before being ousted by gang rebellions on the loose and the American CIA is clouded in a tone of mockery, where the absurdity outweighs any realism, and audiences are bound to blame the Haitians themselves for the mess that they’ve gotten themselves into rather than understand any historical perspective of how Haiti has fallen under the colonial yoke of France or America’s larger capitalist interests, taking whatever resources or slave labor they wanted for themselves while leaving pennies behind for the Haitians. Laurent Cantet gave an inkling of this in his exposé of sex tourism and the lingering influence of Haiti’s colonialism in his intricately complex film HEADING SOUTH (2005), which was based on the interconnecting stories of Haitian writer Dany Laferrière. But Peck has given a rather surrealistic take on the subject, using the term “Moloch” as a divisive influence that comes between God and his chosen people, such as a false idol or fallen angel, where anyone sacrificing their children to Moloch would be abandoned by God. Fritz Lang depicted the subject in his silent film METROPOLIS (1927), a vision (seen here on Google video: Metropolis - The Moloch Machine) of life on earth being sustained by an underground hell where subjugated workers are swallowed up by giant machines that transform into the face of Moloch, a demonic figure with pointed fangs where workers plunge into his mouth to their deaths, paying the ultimate sacrifice. Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 poem Howl rediscovers Lang’s Moloch as a metaphor for workers sacrificing their lives to industrial capitalism.
Just exactly what Peck has in mind is anyone’s guess, but
the closest I’ve seen is the delusions of grandeur expressed in THE EMPEROR
JONES (1933), a radical expressionist Eugene O’Neill work that depicts a former
railroad porter who escapes from a sentence of shoveling coal on a ship to a
fictitious Caribbean island where, through the use of witchcraft, he schemes to
become Emperor of the island, feared by all, until eventually his own inner
demons force him to flee into the jungle.
Peck’s depiction does resemble the bunker mentality reflecting Hitler’s
final days, similar to Alexander Sokurov’s MOLOCH (1999), which was shot in
Bavaria, but here President Jean de Dieu (Zinedine Soualem), a former priest who has
traded in his ideals and moral values for a promise of wealth and monetary
riches built through a lifetime of corruption has the world closing in on him
as he resides in the opulent mountaintop estate of Haiti’s Citadelle
Laferrière, the largest fortress in the Western Hemisphere, built by a key
leader of the Haitian slave rebellion Henri Christophe in 1820, supposedly
impenetrable, though Christophe himself committed suicide after some of his
troops mutinied. This is precisely the
kind of blend of myth and madness that Peck seems to be looking for, as
eventually (off his medication!!) the President believes he is God’s
messenger here on earth and no one is bothering to listen to him.
Having said that, there is a disconnect between the audience and the film characters like no other Peck movie, and much of it seems due to the wretchedly amateurish performances by nearly all involved, as no one delves beneath the surface, all seem terribly wooden and uninteresting, and mostly they just stand around inside this giant fortress doing foolish things. The sexual self-indulgence is exaggerated beyond class exploitation to caricature. The same could be said for the torture sequence, designed to teach those who speak out against him a lesson of who’s in charge, yet it also feels shamelessly exaggerated, especially the use of the dogs, and so much attention is given to a single prisoner, while the jails must have been filled with others. The portrayal of a President in utter isolation in a remote vista with such a small cadre of loyal staff reduces the picture of a working government to a smaller staff than it takes to run the kitchen, which seems oddly absurd. Communication to the outside world is seen through occasionally working cell phones and the continually running photo pieces from American CNN TV, such as smiling pictures of George W. Bush, the torture photos of Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the arrest of a bearded and bedraggled Saddam Hussein, and of course the unrest on the streets of Haiti where the President is eventually convinced that he needs to send in the thugs to take care of the situation before it gets out of hand. Eventually, of course, the thugs take over and with the help of the Americans (“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”) run the President out of the country.
There isn’t a single gut-wrenching scene, normally a staple in Peck’s
films, or any scene where an actor has a lasting impact, and mostly the
portrayal, from the audience’s point of view, is one of outrage for the sheer
incompetence displayed. Ultimately, as
Wagner’s Ring Cycle can be heard, it’s a portrait of self destruction and
madness, where power deludes leaders from their original sense of purpose,
which was to live up to the dream of bringing hope to a devastatingly poor
island living in abject poverty with absolutely no hope of any change in
their lifetime. The gap between rich and
poor is insurmountable. The centuries of
hopelessness and unending poverty are what lead to the rise of mafia style
gangs in the poorest neighborhoods in Haiti, which offer the promise of power
to the powerless through guns and more money than they’d otherwise ever see,
where their life expectancy is not likely to ever reach 30. This picture of Haiti was sadly omitted so
that the delusional power barons could be handed on a tray and delivered to the
public with an image of a naked emperor roaming helplessly through the empty
corridors in his final days of power, which it turns out is something he never
had, but only thought he had, as his ascension to power was filled with so many
American conditions that he was undermined and straight jacketed from the
outset. It’s a familiar refrain, such as
Nero playing the violin as
User reviews from imdb Author: FitAsianPear from United States, also seen under comments from FilmsdeFrance: Moloch tropical / Raoul Peck / 2009
Moloch Tropical is a dynamic, powerful, opulent, well choreographed and formulated film. Once again, Mr. Raoul Peck has clearly demonstrated his remarkable and unprecedented talents. Moloch Tropical continues to be the highly anticipated film by movie critics worldwide. Moloch Tropical first premiered at the opening of the TIFF, and currently has quickly risen to the top twenty four most highly anticipated films list at the DIFF. Mr. Peck continues to validate his genius edge by consistently producing liberal films that captivates the attention span of audiences worldwide by utilizing unique and creative approaches, while simplifying the complexity of social economical political regimes. Mr. Peck is well-known for freely expressing his passion for films by placing emphasis on creativity, vivid cinematography, and commemorative story plots. Moloch Tropical is a remarkable and influential film that depicts nepotism and turmoil during political incumbencies. Practical, enlightening, and fascinating are the very least words to describe such a magnificent, fictional film that is highly and strongly recommended to film connoisseurs for viewing and purchasing. Another great film achievement indeed; directed, written, and produced by the renowned film prodigy, Mr. Raoul Peck.
Raoul Peck: A different View of Haiti « Repeating Islands Lisa Paravisini from Repeating Islands, February 25, 2010
Film director Raoul Peck tell CNN he’s uncomfortable that his earthquake-ravaged country has become just a victim in the eyes of the world. Peck, director of Moloch Tropical (which just screened at the Berlin Film Festival) and once Haiti’s culture minister, says he knows the world is watching — and thinking — about his native country now, following the January 12 earthquake that killed thousands and left the capital city of Port-au-Prince in ruins.
Even though he’s taking advantage of the world’s attention, he wishes there could be a deeper understanding of his country, a more nuanced view of the Caribbean nation. It’s very uncomfortable to be in a place of a victim in the eyes of the rest of the world,” Peck told CNN in Berlin. “Showing ‘Moloch Tropical’ shows another side of Haiti.” He said that it was important for him to be in Berlin to “give a different view of what people might think of Haiti.”
That’s especially true when the only information being spread about Haiti is from news snippets in the wake of catastrophe, he said. It’s very difficult “for anyone else to understand that this is a normal country — with its problems, with its moments of happiness. It’s a mixture of all of these,” Peck said.
Catastrophes trigger the world’s emotion and solidarity, but “when [they're] not in the news anymore, things don’t get the same support,” he told CNN.
“My fear is that when the lights go out that nobody will still be at their side.”
Shot on location in northern Haiti, “Moloch Tropical” is a “political marker” about power in Haiti over the last half-century, he said. It chronicles a despotic president’s final day in office. Peck called it a fable about what happens to democratically-elected leaders after they assume power. He said he hopes the film will shine a light “on the struggles for democracy that have been burning” in Haiti for the past three and a half decades. “I’m active as a filmmaker. I’m active as a person of culture, but I’m active as well as a citizen,” said Peck, who returned to Haiti a few days after the earthquake struck.
Peck has put
Peck said he wants to bring together the many individuals he’s been involved with in politics and civil society over the years to “improve communication, coordination. What I know I can do is to bring those wheels together and to try to build something stronger,” said Peck.
Like for many others, the devastating earthquake took a personal toll on the filmmaker. He lost friends as well as an uncle and a cousin.
There is a long road ahead for Haitians, he said, and it will
take a united effort to rebuild the ravaged country. “I hope that we will be
able to forge a united
But he also expressed optimism that film would help bring
people together and play an important role in
Digital Fix Noel Megahey from DVD Times
Shadow And Act » Review – “Moloch Tropical” (Raoul Peck's Return ... Tambay from Shadow and Act, December 23, 2009
World Socialist Web Site [Stefan Steinberg]
The Village Voice [Nick Schager]
Filmmaker: I want to give the world a different view of Haiti ... Grace Wong interviews Peck from CNN News, March 3, 2010, also here: Director interview
Go to the Film Page for Moloch Tropical Toronto Fest film comments
HaitiXchange Teledjòl Forum | Moloch Tropical, new film by Raoul Peck Haiti Xchange, March 9, 2009
The
8th Annual CHICAGO AFRICAN DIASPORA FILM FESTIVAL Facets Multi Media
Human Rights Watch Film Festival | No Sweat March 17 – 26, 2010
Images for Citadelle Laferrière
I
AM NOT YOUR NEGRO A 96
USA France (95 mi) 2016
What white people have to do, is try and find out in
their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place,
because I’m not a nigger, I’m a man, but if you think I’m a nigger, it means
you need it.
—James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro clip -
Future of America YouTube (2:01)
A blistering and
incendiary commentary about American history as seen through the educated and
emancipated eyes of James Baldwin, an openly gay, distinguished black American
writer forced to leave the country in 1948 due to the entrenched systematic
racism that he felt was so pervasive that he literally feared for his life and
had to escape, moving to Paris, where he finally felt safe and his career
blossomed. But during the Civil Rights
struggles of the 60’s, he felt an obligation to be a part of it and not watch
from afar. What he witnessed was white
community rage targeted against non-violent blacks marching for equal rights,
police brutality against innocent black victims in protection of that white
rage, and the murder of three influential black figures in the 1960’s, Medgar
Evers in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968,
all shot down in the prime of their lives before they reached forty, with the
writer having a close personal relationship with all three men. Baldwin envisioned writing a book tying the
stories of these three men together called Remember
This House, but he died in 1987 before it was ever completed. However, every single word of this film is
taken from Baldwin’s original draft, becoming a shattering and profoundly
moving film essay read by Samuel L. Jackson that emulates what Baldwin had in
mind, speaking candidly about race in America from personal experience, yet
retaining poetic oversight in recalling how difficult it is for America to be
truly accepting of blacks, as instead they buy into various fantasies that make
whites feel better about themselves, but have virtually nothing to do with
black reality. It sounds harsh at times,
and sarcastically critical, but he lays the foundation of how whites have been
fooling themselves since blacks were brought to this country, as they’ve always
been viewed and treated as less than human, but the majority white population
barely raises an eyebrow to the barrage of violence inflicted upon blacks on a
daily basis, accounting for the lack of credible social change that’s been
crying out for a solution for centuries, but there’s little evidence that
whites have any personal interest in the lives of black people other than
through various entertainment venues, where a solid musical soundtrack
featuring traditional blues music accompanies archival footage, where only the
contemporary Kendrick Lamar tune playing over the end credits feels like a
minor misstep. What’s curious about the
timing of this film, now that one political party has completely abandoned all
efforts in addressing issues of race, or social and economic inequality and has
instead become a party exclusively for white people, perhaps people of good
conscience may listen this time around, while previously they might have felt overly
complacent, thinking this criticism is simply too brutally harsh, as conditions
for blacks couldn’t haven’t deteriorated to this extent, but the unrest
in Ferguson, Missouri and continued police shootings of young black males
across the country, with police departments routinely spreading false
narratives to justify their actions, along with the rise of an exclusively
white political party, which also has a habit of spreading false narratives,
with no accountability whatsoever by police officers across the country or
their unions, where white supremists are no longer considered terrorists, but
every black man in America is subject to being treated like one, have left this
nation anxiously in a different state of high alert, especially if you are a
person of color. Ironically, this may
actually become the most commercially viable film of Peck’s career.
Haitian director
Raoul Peck got his start with what is arguably his most brilliant film, The
Man On the Shore (L’Homme sur les quais) (1993), a poetic masterpiece
recalling the insidious terror from the late 50’s to the early 70’s during the
reign of the Duvalier dictatorship and his armed militia, the
Tontons Macoute, who similarly terrorized the Haitian population, yet few have
ever seen that film, as it has never been released on DVD. Still it remains one of the most meaningful
and impactful films this viewer has ever seen.
Peck spent many years in the Congo when his parents escaped the
Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti in the early 1960’s and followed with LUMUMBA (2000), another extraordinary work revealing how
Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba (Eric Ebouney) and his struggle for African liberation was
undermined by the former Belgian colonial rulers, their longtime financial
partner, the United States, and by extension the United Nations, inventing a
fictitious communist bogeyman to justify covert actions removing him from power
on behalf of western capitalist world bank issues. Despite being freely and democratically
elected, U.N. soldiers that were assigned to protect Lumumba did nothing to
stop his torture and brutal assassination in 1961, revealing the moral
hypocrisy of how America and its western allies, the supposed democratic
leaders of the free world, actually undermine democracy in African states. The HBO made-for-TV production SOMETIMES IN
APRIL (2005), shot in Rwanda, reenacts the Rwandan genocide, using thousands of
local Rwandan citizens, many of whom experienced the genocide firsthand, to act
out their own national tragedy, where over the course of 100 days in 1994 Hutus
massacred more than 800,000 Tutsi people, mostly using machetes, claiming
the use of a bullet was a wasted bullet on a Tutsi “cockroach.” Perhaps the most devastating scene is a
massacre of schoolgirls by an angry mob of murderers at a French Catholic
school after the European evacuation, where the girls refused to betray their
Tutsi classmates, so all of them were shot together. As in LUMUMBA, Peck implicates the inaction
of the Western democracies who spent their time in the United Nations arguing
about whether what was taking place was actually genocide (requiring a military
response) or merely “acts of genocide,” where they could sit on their hands and
do nothing, noting that the western media was far more preoccupied with the
suicide of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. While
those, up until now, are likely Peck’s best films, the one this most resembles
is PROFIT AND NOTHING BUT! OR IMPOLITE
THOUGHTS ON THE CLASS STRUGGLE (2001), a blistering critique of capitalism,
that rages like Dostoyevsky’s Notes from
the Underground, laying out the case for capitalism’s winners, but only at
the expense of over two-thirds of the rest of the world who, as a consequence
for the lavish lifestyle of a few, live in abject poverty with absolutely no
hope of any change in their lifetime. In
tiny powerless countries like Haiti all hope is lost, where Peck suggests
criticism is meaningless, as the war is won, complete with all the means to communicate
the message, as the media is all owned by large corporate entities which are
not about to dilute their profit margins.
This kind of seething emotional rant is exactly what Baldwin had in mind
when recalling the bloody history in America of how whites have mistreated
blacks from the outset, viewed and treated contemptuously as second class
citizens, as if they are less than human.
While many would prefer to believe otherwise, the reality is that most
white Americans have simply never risen above that view.
In addition to the unfinished book, Peck includes material from an infamous debate at Cambridge University in 1965 between Baldwin and William F. Buckley on the 100th anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery, arguing the question, “Has the American Dream been achieved at the expense of the American Negro?” which can be seen on video and in written transcript here, Transcript: James Baldwin debates William F. Buckley (1965) - Blog #42, also viewed here: James Baldwin Debates William F Buckley 1965 - YouTube (58:57), and transcribed here: Classics of American Political and Constitutional Thought: ..., where Baldwin at one point pleads, “The American soil is full of the corpses of my ancestors, through four hundred years and at least three wars. Why is my freedom, my citizenship, in question now? What one begs the American people to do, for all our sakes, is simply to accept our history.” Baldwin never joined various organizations, like King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or Malcolm X’s Black Muslims, or even the Black Panther Party, and offers his reasons, but mostly because he refused to believe all whites were bad. Fittingly, his own childhood growing up in Harlem is an example of a white teacher going out of her way to help a gifted black student, not only bringing him to libraries, discussing great literary works, but taking him to plays and concerts, offering him exposure to a wide range of arts, where it’s clear it was at great personal risk to do so, as this was certainly not reflective of the norm. Similarly, Peck expands the canvas to include clips from American films, revealing how whites were revered for their heroism, like John Wayne in STAGECOACH (1939), or the many romantic films where men routinely get the girl, while blacks were continually demasculated, shucking and jiving in UNCLE TOM’S CABIN (1927), reduced to minstrel clowns like Stepin Fetchit in I AIN’T GONNA OPEN THAT DOOR (1947), or the butt of all jokes in Eddie Anderson’s character of “Rochester” in various movies and in television on the Jack Benny Show (1950 – 65), perhaps reaching its apex with Sidney Poitier in GUESS WHO’S COMING FOR DINNER (1967), where a handsome and virile black man never gets sexy or struts his stuff, has an overly timid onscreen kiss, refuses all premarital sex, and has to tip-toe his way through an interracial marriage in a white world without stepping on anybody’s toes, conceived as idealistically perfect, having to be completely acceptable to whites in every way, which is the only way the film was accepted in the American South. Baldwin makes a point about America’s double standard on the Dick Cavett Show (1968 – 74), I Am Not Your Negro clip - Baldwin/Cavett YouTube (1:17), claiming whenever whites pick up a gun, like John Wayne in the movies, they are viewed as heroic patriots defending their land and freedom, but when blacks pick up a gun, whites don’t hesitate to view them as criminals and outlaws, where society treats them differently solely due to race. Outside of honorary war service, there may not be a single instance in American history when a black man picked up a gun and white America concluded they acted heroically. Accordingly, America, a land formed by patriotic fervor and revolutionary sentiment, “Give me liberty or give me death,” has never allowed blacks to have their own heroes. This racial stigma persists into the present and contrasts mightily with the list of black men being beaten or killed in the hands of the police, where a pathological sickness persists in our society, part of which is a societal unwillingness to clearly view a problem even exists, offering less and less of the urban resources needed to address the problem. White police anxiety in the presence of black communities has led to killings in epidemic proportions, where there is a systematic, nationwide problem, yet little if anything is done to stop the killings.
One of the strongest realizations of Baldwin as a small child was that in viewing the John Wayne movies where the noble American hero saves the day from the savage Indians, is that “the Indians were you.” Blacks in America are perceived in much the same way as the Indians, a force that needs to be eradicated, to pave the way for whites, which may subliminally explain why so many young American blacks today are either dead or incarcerated in order to alleviate the fears of a pervasive white anxiety. Baldwin goes so far as to find the white race delusional in their thinking towards blacks, as they continually lead their lives in total denial about the reality of black life, where in this film a perfectly coiffed Doris Day worries about her looks and her love life in LOVER COME BACK (1961), but the scene fades to a succession of archival photographs of lynched black men, made all the more harrowing and grotesque by the clueless faces of the white men gathered nearby, not a single one feeling an ounce of remorse (The Charleston Chronicle, American Lynching: 4,000 Unpunished ...). As those faces peer back at us from the screen, Baldwin offers some stinging remarks, “You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves. And, furthermore, you give me a terrifying advantage. You never had to look at me. I had to look at you. I know more about you than you know about me. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” while we hear firsthand stories of school children having to pass by lynched bodies hanging from trees in order to get to and from school, where the bodies were intentionally left hanging for days in order to send an even more terrifying message. How much more of a stark contrast is there than that? Whites are simply used to looking out for themselves while ignoring the festering problems that persist in black urban communities, which are literally starving for jobs, resources, opportunities, institutions, hospitals, medical centers, and places of employment, all strangely and peculiarly missing in black neighborhoods, yet drugs and liquor stores are pervasively found wherever you look. What impact does that have on black kids growing up? It’s obvious the implications are that the larger society simply doesn’t give a damn about them. That is what every black child learns at a very early age while white children everywhere are told they are special and can be whatever they want. Blacks must continually strive to overcome this disadvantage, as exemplified by the young black girl passing for white in IMITATION FOR LIFE (1934), humiliated and ashamed when her visibly black-skinned mother shows up in her classroom, exposing her secret identity. One of the more interesting revelations was hearing Baldwin speak so derisively about the Kennedy brothers, recalling being in the room with playwright Lorraine Hansberry urging Attorney General Robert Kennedy to provide protection for the innocent black students who were bused to previously all-white schools, where she walked out of the meeting when it was clear he was offended by the request, believing all that theory about justice is blind, leaving kids to fend for themselves against angry white mobs spitting on them while yelling angry racial invectives in their faces, traumatic moments leaving permanent psychological scars. Baldwin also recalled a speech by Bobby Kennedy in 1961 predicting in forty years we may have a black president, a message that reverberated differently between black and white audiences, suggesting the comment was laughed at by blacks, as it condescendingly suggests if blacks capitulate and behave themselves “like good little negroes,” maybe whites will let you have a president — in forty years — , which is followed by poignant, slow motion footage of the Obamas marching in the first inauguration parade. Among the most effective stream of images are white police violently targeting the mostly black Birmingham marchers with dogs and billy clubs in 1963, the black outrage shown in the Watts riots in 1965 and again after Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, then connecting these same images to riots following the Rodney King verdict in 1992 allowing all white police officers to be vindicated of any criminal wrongdoing, where they could simply walk away free, followed by more recent images of young blacks who have been killed at the hands of police, suggesting a single time line connecting the past to the present, where Baldwin’s outrage can be seen in a brief clip from the Dick Cavett Show in 1968, James Baldwin on the Dick Cavett Show - YouTube (1:02), where his words continue to resonate just as deeply now as when he spoke them. This is not just brilliant and articulate filmmaking, it is essential viewing, among the most acutely intelligent and profoundly eloquent films ever made on race in America.
Cine-File
Chicago: Scott Pfeiffer
If the role of the public intellectual is to speak truth to power, then James Baldwin was one of the greatest America ever produced. A searing and compassionate social critic, he was equally penetrating when he turned his novelist's gaze toward film, as this galvanizing, heartbreaking essay/documentary by Raoul Peck demonstrates. Its voiceover is in Baldwin's own words, the beautiful music of his language measured out by Samuel L. Jackson in an intimate spoken-word performance. In televised interviews and debates from the 1960s, Baldwin is pensive and incendiary, and the film cuts between his embattled times and our own. Baldwin investigated the mystery of the fathomless hatred of white Americans for blacks, and while his analysis was economic, it also involved a kind of psychoanalysis of the American psyche. This film's jumping-off point is Remember This House, his unfinished manuscript about the intertwining lives, and violent deaths, of his friends/foils Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers. Soon it turns to The Devil Finds Work, his earthy, shattering essay about growing up a child of the movies. Baldwin understood cinema as "the American looking glass," and he wrote with such lucidity, and such painful honesty, about what he saw reflected there, about himself, race, and his country. "To encounter oneself is to encounter the other," he wrote, "and this is love. If I know that my soul trembles, I know that yours does, too: and, if I can respect this, both of us can live." Viewer identification is complex: as a youngster whose heroes were white, who rooted for Gary Cooper, it came as a huge shock for him to realize "the Indians were you"—and these heroes aimed to kill you off, too. Peck has called his film an essay on images, a "musical and visual kaleidoscope" of fiery blues, lobotomized mass media, classic Hollywood, TV news, reality TV, and advertisements. He causes a government propaganda film from 1960 about U.S. life, all baseball games and amusement parks, to collide with the Watts uprising; a Doris Day movie meets lynched bodies. The point is not even that one is reality and the other is not. It's that these two realities were never forced to confront each other—and they must, because one comes at the other's expense. When Baldwin speaks of the "death of the heart," of our privileged apathy, of an infantile America, an unthinking and cruel place, he could be speaking of the Trump era. He feared for the future of a country increasingly unable to distinguish between illusion, dream, and reality. "Neither of us, truly, can live without the other," he wrote. "For, I have seen the devil...[I]t is that moment when no other human being is real for you, nor are you real for yourself." Let this movie inspire today's young dissenters, and let James Baldwin be our model of oppositional, critical thinking as we raise our angry voices against Donald Trump and everything he stands for.
Cinema Scope: Steve Macfarlane September 13, 2016
This past summer, I attended a screening and panel discussion hosted by the New Negress Film Society in Brooklyn; standing outside the venue afterwards, a flustered British gentleman took the evening’s general political timbre to task as follows: “I’m just a bit tired of hearing about the whole ‘white supremacy’ conversation. It’s so hostile!”
James Baldwin diagnosed a similar privilege-as-umbrage in his 1972 No Name in the Street: “If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have needed to invent, and could never have become so dependent on, what they still call ‘the Negro problem’.” The quotation is one of many threaded through Raoul Peck’s new I Am Not Your Negro, which is (at times, despite itself) a worthy companion to the two Baldwin docs of current record (Richard O. Moore’s Take This Hammer and Karen Thorsen’s The Price of the Ticket). Peck uses Baldwin’s 30 pages of notes for a book that never came to pass—about the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.—as a jumping-off point to explore his individualized epistemology of disenchantment during the now-hallowed “Civil Rights Era,” weighing lived experiences of racism against the official nomenclatures (then and now) that constitute “progress” in the American system.
But since the narration of Negro consists solely of Baldwin quotes read aloud by Samuel L. Jackson (using, here, a gravelly register that’s the opposite of the Snakes on a Plane voice he uses to pay his kids’ college tuition), this means what’s good about the film is what’s good about reading Baldwin, which is to say an entire constellation. Peck throws out a few interesting filmic propositions along the way, using clips from old movies to demonstrate the tropes by which the author, growing up, involuntarily measured his own selfhood against the gaping void of onscreen representation in 20th-century America. (The movies include John Wayne westerns, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the 1934 Imitation of Life, and Mervyn LeRoy’s Southern melodrama They Won’t Forget, featuring a sobbing black janitor played by Clinton Rosemund bullied into falsely testifying against a teacher from New York, in the service of good-ol’-boy reverse-classism.)
This extra-cinematic approach makes for a diverting enough complement, but more gripping still are, naturally, the clips of Baldwin’s appearances on American TV. While it’s beyond cliché to cite anything as “more relevant today than ever,” Peck finds grist in blotchy digital-video imagery from the last several years of #, protests and dashed hopes for police reform, to delineate Why Baldwin Matters Now. Given the undying strain of starter-kit bio-docs primed for Netflix streaming (or NY/LA release, typically for one week at a time), this polemicism is fairly welcome. Baldwin wasn’t just thinking ahead of the moment during the “Civil Rights Era”—whose officialese and in-hindsight tokenism is dissected in Peck’s film with considerable care—he was also ahead of ours. If I Am Not Your Negro lacks subtlety as an objet d’art, then, all I can say is America continues to live in hostile times.
The
Great Divide: I Am Not Your Negro | Raoul Peck - Film Comment January 03, 2017
Sometime during the honeymoon phase of the Obama era, there was a multiplex pre-roll promo that depicted moviegoers of various races sitting together in a theater, taking in the assimilating raptures of the screen with fresh-faced, uniform sanguinity. We’re all the same in the dark, or so the tagline may as well have read. It would have been absurd to feel affronted by such contrived naïveté, which after all was just another example of branded, Benetton-style pluralism patting itself on the back in an allegedly post-racial world. What did sting, though, was the realization that even this hollow gesture was hard-won, that this recognition of racial unity in a public space would have been inconceivable just a half-century before. If classic Hollywood had ever tried being kinder to people of color, such a utopian fantasy might have asserted itself with greater force much earlier in our history—perhaps as an outgrowth of the idea, propagated in films like The Crowd and Sullivan’s Travels, that the movies are where we go to escape the real-world contingencies that isolate us from one another. When we talk about the communal enterprise of moviegoing, the underlying assumption still seems to be that, in surrendering to the universality of the screen, we should hold all of our inconvenient identities in abeyance.
One imagines James Baldwin would have had none of that. In his most sustained commentary on cinema, the 1976 book-length essay The Devil Finds Work, he gives voice to the suspicion and anger that many movie lovers feel toward an art form that not only fails to represent them but insists on slandering them at every turn. One of Baldwin’s most boldly digressive works, the essay shifts between recollections of childhood, accounts of the writer’s own experiences in the movie industry, and unsparing interpretations of the racial knowledge inscribed in everything from the “straight, narrow, lonely back” of Joan Crawford to the respectability politics of Sidney Poitier. At the heart of these scattershot musings is a liberating idea that flies in the face of film criticism’s traditional reliance on textual exegesis and aesthetic appreciation. For Baldwin, cinema opens the mind up to a kind of free-associative soul-searching. The experience of a film lives at the intersection between an entrancing, dreamlike medium and each viewer’s own incoherent repository of hopes, fears, memories, and moral convictions.
Anyone married to the belief that critics should stick to parsing what’s on screen will balk at the rhetorical leaps that Baldwin takes with a film like The Exorcist, whose “mindless and hysterical” conception of evil prompts him to rail against the graver horrors of racism, poverty, and war. Yet who would deny that the ability to evoke such subjective, even willful responses—which have everything to do with those identities we’re called to relinquish in the darkness—are what give movies their power to wound and enrage? If the photographic properties of film, as Bazin argued, guarantee “an image that is a reality of nature,” then for viewers of color it can only be a dystopian nature, one in which almost all meaningful traces of one’s own people have been debased or omitted.
In some of the most striking passages in the new documentary I Am Not Your Negro, director Raoul Peck implicitly connects The Devil Finds Work with the tradition of Marlon Riggs’s Ethnic Notions and Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, films that reimagine cinematic history as a site of racial excavation. Peck’s film sets out to make use of the unfinished manuscript of Remember This House, Baldwin’s late-career attempt to grapple with the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers, but it soon abandons this premise for the kind of emotional detours that give some of Baldwin’s best work its freewheeling, capacious spirit. One of the film’s strategies is to pair the voice of Samuel L. Jackson intoning selections from Baldwin’s writing with relevant images salvaged from American history, including segments that highlight the white supremacy encoded in Hollywood narratives. With Baldwin as his guiding light, Peck delivers an indictment of cinema that ultimately covers more ground than either Riggs or Lee did. He’s not just identifying moments where pop culture’s twisted racial logic is made blatant, as in King Kong or John Wayne westerns or the career of Stepin Fetchit. He’s suggesting that, for those who internalize the pain of these offenses, the comparatively innocent whiteness of someone like Doris Day looks like nothing less than an emblem of moral rot.
There’s a studiousness to I Am Not Your Negro that serves as a counterpoint to Baldwin’s impassioned, off-the-cuff soliloquies, which take the spotlight in several excerpts from the writer’s TV interviews and public appearances. Peck balances the sometimes explosive heat of his star with an arsenal of footage, photographs, and text, unleashed in brilliantly edited bursts that call to mind the cumulative power of Leo Hurwitz’s leftist documentary classic Strange Victory. Among the artifacts on display are images of racial violence across the decades, some of which seem to have been chosen for their numbing familiarity. Peck also seamlessly integrates the terrifying iconography of our Black Lives Matter era (a video of Eric Garner, a photo of Trayvon Martin), disregarding the distinctions between past and present that have sometimes caused friction between black activism’s old and new guard. In perhaps his trickiest maneuver, Peck interweaves impressionistic shots of contemporary America—of highways, train tracks, and the consumerist spectacle of Times Square—to imply that, when you exist as a racialized subject, it can be difficult to go anywhere without projecting the anxieties of one’s oppression onto the landscape. Once examined, the specter of racism is hard to unsee.
If there’s an overriding tone that emerges from this assemblage of found material, it’s one of spiritual weariness. Due to the exigencies of transforming hearts and minds, most American documentaries about racism adopt a mood that can galvanize an audience into action, typically landing on a note of empathy or outrage, or, in the case of Ava DuVernay’s recent 13TH, a tightly constructed sense of factual mastery. But watching I Am Not Your Negro four long years after the death of Trayvon Martin, and mere weeks after the election of Donald Trump, it’s hard to ignore the question that Peck and Baldwin have left unanswered: where does all this evidence get us? For centuries, anti-racist movements of various ideological stripes have hinged on the belief that public opinion could be shaped by the dissemination of certain persuasive truths. For towering figures like Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington—those who were touted as “extraordinary negroes” in the press and political establishment—the focus was on rendering irrefutable the intellectual equality of black people. In the past half-century, we’ve seen a new emphasis on uncovering, at ever-increasing degrees of intimacy and veracity, the realities of white violence and black suffering. As our national mythology would have it, it was not until Bull Connor unleashed dogs and fire hoses on black protesters in 1963 that white people had the chance to come to grips with the evils of Jim Crow. We are accustomed to thinking that if only the truth would out itself, the world could be so different—as if this truth had not already been in plain sight.
We live in a time that has proven to us, again and again, that all the visual evidence in the world will not lead to the conviction of those who have killed unarmed African-Americans in cold blood. In the face of this futility, it’s tempting to feel nostalgic for some dreamed past in which the political efficacy of the self-evident might have seemed on sturdier ground. I Am Not Your Negro does not succumb to such nostalgia. Echoing the powerful 1982 documentary I Heard It Through the Grapevine, in which an aging Baldwin journeys through the Deep South to take stock of the little that has changed in the decades since the civil rights movement, Peck’s film burrows deep into the contradictions of a nation in which the sheer inertia of social change has been disguised by feel-good monuments and heroic symbolism. The film also shares its dejected mood with other recent odysseys through racist America, most notably Arthur Jafa’s lyrical documentary Dreams Are Colder Than Death, which captures the feelings of disorientation and fatigue that racism induces in its victims, and Claudia Rankine’s extraordinary prose poem Citizen, which documents a series of everyday microaggressions with crisp, almost clinical immediacy. If the average American has been taught to envision the arc of the universe bending toward justice, then Baldwin’s restlessly self-questioning voice offers a counterargument to such deeply ingrained moral certitude, an admission of doubt uncannily aligned with some of the defining anti-racist works of our moment.
The recent resurgence of interest in baldwin has admittedly robbed I Am Not Your Negro of some of its sense of discovery. And since the film is structured to always take him at his word, it ends up smoothing over the complexities of a writer who always seemed at odds with his own impulses. The great risk of applying Baldwin’s words to our present-day horrors is that it lends his work an undue semblance of prophecy. But Baldwin was no clairvoyant, and this false projection only allows us to interpret the persistence of injustice as somehow inevitable, deflecting our collective responsibility to eradicate the ills he diagnosed. When we listen to Baldwin disassemble the logic of racism, as this film gives us ample chance to do, we are responding not to the man’s foresight but to his courage to speak from within the specificity of his own time and place. As we hear in his words on the voiceover, Baldwin was reluctant to align himself with the class aspirationalism of the NAACP, the aggression of the Black Panthers, or the piety of the Nation of Islam or the black church. For this, people like Eldridge Cleaver accused him of being a sycophant starved for white approval. And yet Baldwin’s resistance to being taken for an obedient mouthpiece for the movement is everywhere to be seen in the ferocious way he plays his audience and dominates each space he enters, swooping his arms through the air, taking flamboyant drags from a cigarette, and, as a former junior minister, modulating his church-honed cadences to land a particularly righteous punch line.
In his wide and wicked smile, you can see that Baldwin knew he was destined not just for the page but for the camera. Despite the imperiousness of his on-screen persona, his vulnerability lay in a transparent need to be understood by his listeners, including the white ones. It was not a contradiction for him on the one hand to openly pity white people for their moral deficiencies (“There is little in the white man’s public or private life that one should desire to imitate,” he wrote in The Fire Next Time), while on the other acknowledge them as loved family members whose betrayal he longed to one day forgive (“We, the black and the white, deeply need each other”). This push-pull between rebuke and reconciliation is what makes even a resolutely disillusioned political documentary like this one inherently frustrating. Baldwin famously expressed disdain for the narrow confines of the protest-art tradition, but even his writing cannot avoid the desire to connect with the same oppressor from whom he must also establish an unequivocal independence. Similarly, for all the catharsis that some viewers of color may experience upon seeing their reality corroborated on the big screen, it’s hard not to feel like Peck’s address—for better and for worse—is squarely directed at an imagined white “you,” whose emotional response to the material will serve as a measure of its effectiveness.
“When you lookin’ at me, tell me, what do you see?” spits Kendrick Lamar on To Pimp a Butterfly, the Album of the Moment that I Am Not Your Negro invokes over its closing credits. For many people of color, the line registers as a purely rhetorical question intended to rouse the addressee; the answers, after all, are already known by the asker. In one startling scene near the end of the film, Peck all but re-creates this question with a series of shots of black people staring directly into the camera as if standing their ground, presenting the white “you” with visual evidence of themselves. The emotions that surface across their faces range from heartbreak to rage to steely self-assurance. It’s an unbearably fraught moment, one in which the subjects seek to convey their autonomy and humanity, but one whose dynamics are invariably governed by the question of how to prove the depth of one’s emotions to the historically unfeeling white onlooker. And yet it’s in the imagining of what it would mean for each of these gazes to be returned that the echoes of Baldwin’s words finally take on their devastating cinematic force.
The New Yorker: Hilton Als February 06, 2017
Under the Spell of James Baldwin | by Darryl Pinckney | The New York ... Darryl Pinckney from The New York Review of Books, March 23, 2017
Catching Up to James Baldwin | by Darryl Pinckney | The New York ... Darryl Pinckney from The New York Review of Books, May 25, 2017
On James Baldwin | by Darryl Pinckney | The New York Review of Books Darryl Pinckney from The New York Review of Books, April 4, 2013
How
I Am Not Your Negro Is a Reminder of Hollywood's Power to Lie Clover
Hope, senior writer at Jezebel, from The Muse
Review:
The Imperfect Power of 'I Am Not Your Negro' - The Atlantic Dagmawi Woubshet
Fandor: David Ehrenstein November 03, 2016
The Ringer: K. Austin Collins February 02, 2017
This
James Baldwin-Inspired Film Links The Past To The Present Like ... Antwaun Sargent from The Fader, February 02, 2017
Teaching
James Baldwin and Richard Wright in the Ferguson Era ... Benjamin Anastas from The New Republic, May 25, 2015
Who James Baldwin was and why you should see I Am Not Your
Negro Elizabeth Grant-Campbell and
Dave Sewell from Socialist Worker, April
11, 2017
“Not Your Negro:” Why James Baldwin would not have been
surprised by Donald Trump Noah
Berlatsky from The Quartz, February
26, 2017
Film
director Raoul Peck on his documentary I Am Not Your Negro Tobias Grey from Financial Times, April 4, 2017
The Brooklyn Rail: Rich Blint “You’re the Nigger, Baby,” James Baldwin on Film, February 01, 2017
James
Baldwin: Voice of a preacher, heart of a nomad J.R. Jones from The Chicago Reader
Reverse
Shot: Michael Koresky February 03,
2017
Slant
Magazine [Clayton Dillard]
Movie Review: I Am Not Your Negro Is Timeless -- Vulture David Edelstein
MUBI's Notebook: Matthew Harrison Tedford February 06, 2017
I
Am Not Your Negro · Film Review I Am Not Your Negro ... - The AV Club Noel Murray
Review: 'I Am Not Your Negro' is radical and of the moment Lindsey Bahr from Salon, January 31, 2017
Raoul
Peck's I Am Not Your Negro Is Necessary Viewing - Vogue Julia Felsenthal, February 3, 2017
Every Movie Has a Lesson [Don Shanahan]
Brooklyn
Magazine: Nicolas Rapold January
30, 2017
FanboyNation.com [Sean Mulvihill]
I Am Not Your Negro Clip: James Baldwin and Dick Cavett | Time.com Eliza Berman, February 3, 2017
AwardsCircuit.com [Clayton Davis]
Film-Forward [Nora Lee Mandel]
The
Film Stage [Michael Snydel]
I Am Not Your Negro, review - 'powerful portrait of James
Baldwin' Saskia Baron from The Arts
Desk
Independent
Ethos [Ana Morgenstern]
Punch
Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]
queerguru.com
(Roger Walker-Dack)
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
FilmFracture
[James Jay Edwards]
The New Yorker: Richard Brody December 10, 2016 (capsule review)
NYFF54
Spotlight on Documentary Lineup Announced
Brooklyn Magazine: Paul Dallas November 18, 2016
The New
York Review of Books: J. Hoberman February 01, 2017
Sight & Sound: Robert Greene #18 of Top 25 Films of the Year, January 13,
2017
The Village Voice: Bilge Ebiri September 29, 2016
Artforum: Nick
Pinkerton September 22, 2016
All
Your Buried Corpses are Now Beginning to Speak: Raoul Peck on ... Matt Fagerholm interview from the Ebert site,
January 31, 2017
I Am
Not Your Negro's Raoul Peck on Optimism Versus Pessimism ... Kristen Yoonsoo Kim interview from Vulture, February 1, 2017
Raoul Peck
interview Steven Erickson interview
from Fandor, February 2, 2017
'I Am
Not Your Negro': Film Review | Hollywood Reporter Deborah Young
'I Am Not Your Negro' Review From the New York Film Festival | Variety Owen Gleiberman
I Am Not Your Negro review – James Baldwin's words weave film of ... Jordan Hoffman from The Guardian, October 20, 2016
The
fire this time – the legacy of James Baldwin | Books | The Guardian Lanre Bakare from The Guardian, February 15, 2017
How James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time still lights the way towards equality Steven W. Thrasher from The Guardian, April 4, 2017
I Am Not Your Negro review – astonishing portrait of James Baldwin's civil rights fight Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, April 7, 2017
I Am Not Your Negro review – thrilling James Baldwin
documentary Simran Hans from The Observer, April 9, 2017
I Am Not Your Negro review: Lets James Baldwin's searing work
soar Geoffrey Macnab from The Independent, April 5, 2017
I Am Not Your Negro — forcefully eloquent Nigel Andrews from The Financial Times
Powerful documentary 'I Am Not Your Negro' speaks to current
moment The Boston Globe
"I Am Not Your Negro" examines James Baldwin's unfinished call to action Angela N. Carroll from The Baltimore City Paper, March 7, 2017
The
best takedown of Hollywood comes from James Baldwin in 'I Am ... The
Washington Post
James Baldwin doc 'I Am Not Your Negro' highlights how little
progress has been made in the last 50 years
Thaddeus McCollum from Orlando
Weekly, March 8, 2017
In 'I Am Not Your Negro,' fire of Baldwin's words burns anew Minneapolis
Star Tribune
Austin
Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
'I
Am Not Your Negro' review: A poetic journey into the heart of the civil ... Seattle
Times
I Am Not Your Negro - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
Indie
Focus: Checking back in with 'I Am Not Your Negro' and female ... Mark Olsen from The LA Times
To
director Raoul Peck, 'I Am Not Your Negro' is a 'bomb' — here's why ... Tre'vell Anderson from The LA Times, February 3, 2017
San Diego CityBeat: Glenn Heath Jr. February 07, 2017
I Am Not Your Negro Movie Review (2016) | Roger Ebert Matt Zoller Seitz
'I Am Not Your Negro' review: Baldwin's unfinished book project subject of powerful documentary Michael Phillips from The Chicago Tribune, also seen here: James Baldwin's powerful unfinished book transformed into film
New
York Times [Manohla Dargis]
Review:
'I Am Not Your Negro' Will Make You Rethink Race A.O. Scott from The New York Times
Finally,
a Screenplay by James Baldwin
Salamishah Tillet from The New
York Times
I Am Not Your Negro - Wikipedia
Racism's Rage and Bitter Despair,
James Baldwin's Heart - ENVISION
Beth U, 2014
Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture Acquires James Baldwin Archive Artforum,
April 13, 2017
Peckinpah, Sam
biography from a Sam Peckinpah website
Sam Peckinpah was a paradox who both cultivated and disdained his own
legend as one of Hollywood's most difficult directors, his often violent films
evoked strong responses and varied, almost contradictory, readings. Born to a
California legal clan, Peckinpah served in the Marine Corps and earned a
master's degree from USC in 1950. He spent his early career as a theater and
television director before becoming an assistant on five films to director Don
Siegel, famed for his hard-bitten action films (Peckinpah even played a small
part in Siegel's INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, 1956). Peckinpah soon became
associated with the western genre, writing and directing episodes of
"Gunsmoke," "The Rifleman," "The Westerner" and
other TV series. His 1957 script on the legend of Billy the Kid eventually
became, without his participation and with many changes, Marlon Brando's
eccentric ONE-EYED JACKS (1961). Peckinpah's first film as a director, THE
DEADLY COMPANIONS (1961), plus RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (1962), MAJOR DUNDEE
(1965), THE WILD BUNCH (1969) and PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID (1973) form an
arc in the stylistic span of outlaw mythology; among other accomplishments,
they raised to the level of perverse sacrament the male gesture of mutual
respect that supersedes fear of death. His "semi-westerns," THE
BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE (1970) and the director's personal favorite, JUNIOR
BONNER (1972), extended his theme of the demise of a noble way of life in the
face of a modern world. THE GETAWAY (1972) and CONVOY (1978) put contemporary
anti-heroes ahead of as well as outside the law. Perhaps his most controversial
film was STRAW DOGS (1971); the inevitable brutality of its protagonist,
ostensibly a man of reason, offers a metaphor on the ancient bent of the human psyche
vis-à-vis personal territory and blood rites. BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO
GARCIA (1974), reputedly autobiographical, was a psychodrama refracted through
a tequila haze, a saga of a loner/artiste who reaps the grotesque wages of sin
on a desperate trek of atonement. Peckinpah's distrust of policymakers was
reflected in THE KILLER ELITE (1975) and his last film, THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND
(1983), both essays on vicious tactics and dissolute friendship in the CIA.
CROSS OF IRON (1977), Peckinpah's largest production, is a fiercely edited view
of World War II slaughter where the Wehrmacht wear the patented scars of his
honorable killers. Few directors have had more conflict with studio heads and
producers than Peckinpah. Feuds over the content and final cuts of MAJOR DUNDEE
(after which Peckinpah was blacklisted for three years), THE WILD BUNCH and PAT
GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID (1973) are the stuff of Hollywood legend. Critical
response to his work has often been as violent as the films themselves, with
Peckinpah frequently berated for demeaning women and excessively glorifying
male exploits. On an aesthetic level, Peckinpah is celebrated for his slow
motion furies, first employed in a 1963 entry of TV's "Dick Powell
Theater" called "The Losers," exercised to startling effect in
THE WILD BUNCH, but somewhat overused in subsequent work. "Cathartic
violence" was a term that seemed coined to define his iconoclastic
postures. In Peckinpah's Conradian scheme that mixes nobility with tragedy, all
are guilty to some degree and all have their reasons. His work typically exists
on a skewed moral plane between eras and cultures, with ambiguous quests for
identity and redemption undertaken by hopelessly lost outcasts and enemies. He
vividly defines the thin line between internal conflict and external action,
and, perhaps most importantly, the violent displacement of a false code of
honor (and law itself) by another more enduring and devout. As thorny as his
relationships with producers and executives were, Peckinpah could inspire
extraordinary loyalty among actors and technicians. An ensemble of notable
Peckinpah players would include David Warner, Warren Oates, L.Q. Jones,
Strother Martin, James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson and Ben Johnson. Peckinpah
also enjoyed repeated and fruitful collaborations with cinematographers Lucien
Ballard and John Coquillon and composer Jerry Fielding.
Film Reference biography essay by Andrew Tudor
It is as a director of westerns that Sam Peckinpah remains best known. This is not without justice. His non-western movies often lack the sense of complexity and resonance that he brings to western settings. He was adept at exploiting this richest of genres for his own purposes, explaining its ambiguities, pushing its values to uncomfortable limits. Ride the High Country, Major Dundee , and The Wild Bunch are the work of a filmmaker of high ambitions and rare talents. They convey a sense of important questions posed, yet finally left open and unanswered. At their best they have a visionary edge unparalleled in American cinema.
His non-westerns lose the additional dimensions that the genre brings, as in, for example, Straw Dogs. A polished and didactic parable about a besieged liberal academic who is forced by the relentless logic of events into extremes of violence, it is somehow too complete, its answers too pat, to reach beyond its own claustrophobic world. Though its drama is entirely compelling, it lacks the referential framework that carries Peckinpah's westerns far beyond the realm of tautly-directed action. Compared to The Wild Bunch , it is a onedimensional film.
Nevertheless, Straw Dogs is immediately recognizable as a Peckinpah movie. If a distinctive style and common themes are the marks of an auteur , then Peckinpah's right to that label is indisputable. His concern with the horrors and the virtues of the male group was constant, as was his refusal to accept conventional movie morality. "My father says there's only Right and Wrong, Good and Evil, with nothing in between. But it's not that simple, is it?" asks Elsa in Ride the High Country. Judd's reply could almost be Peckinpah's: "No. It should be, but it isn't."
In traditional westerns, of course, right and wrong are clearly distinguishable. The westerner, as Robert Warshow has characterised him, is the man with a code. In Peckinpah's westerns, as in some of his other movies such as Cross of Iron , it is the code itself that is rendered problematic. Peckinpah explores the ethic rather than taking it for granted, plays off its elements one against the other, and uses his characters as emblems of those internal conflicts. He presents a world wherein moral certainty is collapsing, leaving behind doomed variations on assertive individualism. In some modern westerns that theme has been treated as elegy; in Peckinpah it veers nearer to tragedy. His is a harsh world, softened only rarely in movies like The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Junior Bonner. Peckinpah's richest achievements remain the two monumental epics of the 1960s, Major Dundee and The Wild Bunch. In both, though Major Dundee was butchered by its producers both before and after shooting, there is ample evidence of Peckinpah's ability to marshall original cinematic means in the service of a morally and aesthetically complex vision. It has become commonplace to associate Peckinpah with the rise of explicit violence in modern cinema, and it is true that few directors have rendered violence with such horrific immediacy. But his cinema is far more than that: his reflections upon familiar western themes are technically sophisticated, elaborately constructed, and, at their best, genuinely profound.
Cineaste: Sam Peckinpah’s
Legendary Western Collection Reviewed
José
Teodero reviews the recent 6-disc DVD set including Ride the High Country (1962), The Wild Bunch (1969), The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970)
and Pat Garrett and Billy the
Kid (1973) for Cineaste (link lost)
More than two decades after his death, the considerable body of work writer/director/producer Sam Peckinpah left behind remains overshadowed by the unsavory labels applied to him (however justly) during his life. The fact is that once a public figure has been associated with such poisonous adjectives as “misogynist” and “fascist,” little can be done to shake off the accompanying stigma.
Perhaps more than any other major American filmmaker, Peckinpah is preceded by his bad reputation, one constructed not only from the reception of his more caustic films but through the antagonistic relationships, notorious substance abuse, and cruelty that routinely tumbled out from his tumultuous personal life into his public/professional one. Particularly for younger filmgoers who missed them upon their original release –a generation for whom the Western genre has far less cultural weight than it did for preceding ones– Peckinpah's films are in danger of being ignored, victims of a brand of infamy that discourages consideration, combined with the common understanding that, like those of Orson Welles, Peckinpah's films were routinely compromised by unsympathetic studio powers.
In my own attempts to consider his films from a fresh perspective, the situation has placed me in the rather uncomfortable position of ‘defending' Sam Peckinpah. I'm not among the true believers and possess no figurative membership within the small but adoring Peckinpah cult. I'm particularly disinclined to defend Peckinpah's character, as though it were a stain inextricable from the offerings of his creative output. The ways in which biography informs his films can obviously supply texture to our readings –he was in every respect an auteur filmmaker. But there's been excessive concern with the moral agenda behind his films, which, assuming any of us were equipped to accurately deduce it, would still remain separate from what viewers can take away from them.
“Sam Peckinpah's Legendary Westerns Collection” functions as an ideal survey of the genre with which Peckinpah held the most obvious affinity. Despite the ostensible limitations of genre, what's impressive about these films is the diversity of approach they display. Any broad assumptions regarding Peckinpah's distinctive manipulation of violence, for example, fall short when applied to any of the selected films save The Wild Bunch (1969). Likewise, assumptions regarding Peckinpah's disrespectful treatment of women prove hollow when held against the self-actualizing journeys of female characters found in Ride the High Country (1962) or The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970). My aim here is not to whitewash the repellent aspects of Peckinpah's art but to acknowledge how much his art defies facile classification.
Also notable in these films is the profound degree to which Peckinpah's cinema is contingent on the contributions of collaborators, not only cinematographers and editors (those embroiled directly in nurturing visual style), but actors (who, besides improvising, often brought with them residual attributes from their previous films), production designers (who at times radically altered the sense of space that helped determine levels of realism or abstraction) and composers. This becomes particularly relevant in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), a masterfully lyrical film made in what's generally considered a period of decline for Peckinpah. The emotional delicacy, protracted pacing, elegiac tone, and remarkable cohesion of this skeletal narrative is tremendously supported by Bob Dylan's score, which becomes a kind of disembodied narrator, weaving together threads of myth, memory, and regret, reinforcing the flashback structure only fleetingly apparent in any extant version of the film.
For all the discoveries awaiting the open-minded contemporary viewer, second-hand, dismissive presumptions about Peckinpah are still being made in response to this same DVD package, as in a recent issue of Moviemaker ( Issue #61, Vol. 13) where Peckinpah is maintained to be a purveyor of “unapologetic machismo.” I would argue the exact opposite claim: Peckinpah's characters are macho all right, but either they (or the filmmakers) constantly apologize for it, sometimes nakedly, from some lonely place rife with confusion, inertia, and waste.
Even for those predisposed to dislike Peckinpah's films, it's difficult to deny the charms of Ride the High Country , his second feature. Bathed in an autumnal glow and wreathed in branches, an almost palpable surge of nostalgia permeates this story of ideologically opposed aging cowboys and friends (Western movie legends Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, both effortlessly radiating authenticity) who team up to transport gold from a miner's camp to a town bank. Expressing a consistent Peckinpah theme, the encroaching of civilization upon the frontier renders these men anachronisms in the very world they helped to forge; yet all of their values are questioned within their own ranks, providing a level of self-critique that makes Ride the High Country a genuinely transitional film of its genre, at once a late classical and early revisionist Western.
The reunion, conflict, and eventual realignment of the friends supplies the moving central narrative, one reverential of traditional ideals of courage and dignity. A secondary narrative however, that of an isolated, overprotected farm girl (Mariette Hartley) who determines to escape her pious father and recklessly marry a gold prospector she barely knows, is equally engaging as a midpoint digression and is quite striking in its depiction and championing of female empowerment in the face of patriarchal savagery. The garishly colored nightmare wedding sequence spirals into what nearly becomes a gang rape, an event Hartley's character barely evades yet which signifies a brutal leap in her maturation. Though her story, like those of Scott and McCrea's characters, is peppered with warmth and humor, it is fundamentally one of betrayal, displacement, and the question of survival in a changing world of false institutions, where pearls of folksy wisdom lull us into sublime refrains but are finally inadequate shields against reality.
The same breed of men (and, in the case of the wonderful Warren Oates, even one of the same actors) who threatened and were finally punished for attempting to defile High Country 's heroine would later become the protagonists in Peckinpah's epic of suicidal misadventure, The Wild Bunch . Although the film again casts known actors who exude the class and dignity of a bygone period in American film (i.e., William Holden), the moral transgressions of these characters –cold-blooded murderers every one– are, unlike Scott's wayward cowboy, thoroughly irredeemable. The absence of untainted heroism allows us to probe murkier caverns of these characters' trajectories.
Taking a cue perhaps from the gangster film, Peckinpah seems to have divorced himself by this point from the pretence of the protagonist as upholder of even the vaguest moral code, instead inviting viewers into an utterly Godforsaken world in which, like James Cagney in White Heat , the outlaws are gradually more and more confined until there's no place left for them to go but up in flames. Their eventual act of bravery is urged into being largely by existential acceptance of their diminishing prospects. If there is a lament for the Old West in The Wild Bunch , we are not expected to share in the grief any more than we are to weep for the psychopathic killers that lurk in the novels of Jim Thompson. It is only necessary that we identify with them—and, thanks to a series of ingenious plot twists and lavish character development supported by supremely colorful performances, this is not at all hard to do.
The question of the stylization of violence in The Wild Bunch , so shocking in its day, might best be addressed in light of other approaches that have followed. The kinetic use of flash cutting and slow motion in The Wild Bunch may look to have inspired the films of John Woo, for example, but the comparison holds only if we neglect to acknowledge that Woo's violence aspires to balletic beauty while Peckinpah's seems more concerned with the crazed, accusatory binding of thrills with horror. Though its techniques are utterly distinct, there's arguably a far greater kinship between The Wild Bunch and a film like A History of Violence (2005), in which dynamic violence is designed to excite viewers just before images of the gruesome results of violence question the viewer's complicity. (And it's no accident that both films explore violence as an instinct that, once unleashed, proliferates like an uncontrollable disease.)
If there were any doubt that Peckinpah desired to continue developing his signature themes without remaining dependent on sensationalistic violence, one needn't look further than to the feature that immediately followed The Wild Bunch . The Ballad of Cable Hogue contains a number of questionable attempts at broad comedy (including unprecedented indulgence in Peckinpah's breast fixation), yet how refreshing to see Peckinpah branch out from fevered nihilism and into quieter questions of honor vs. domesticity. Anchored by resonant performances from Jason Robards and Stella Stevens, Cable Hogue observes a topic rarely breached in films of any era: the difficulty of accepting new love in middle age. It features a protagonist determined to exact revenge on those who once abandoned him, yet moves convincingly toward forgiveness and acceptance. The weakest film in this quartet, Cable Hogue , not unlike Peckinpah's forgotten gem Junior Bonner (1972), is nonetheless a touching and challenging film, and one that hardly anyone bothered with when it came out.
Though set in an earlier period than the preceding films, by the time we arrive at Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid , Peckinpah's West has truly reached its point of final disillusionment and perdition, utilizing the most frequently revisited characters from America's frontier mythology, the titular friends turned opponents embodied so definitively by James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson. Draining every ounce of romanticism from these icons (aside from their sheer appeal as magnetic personas acutely aware of their local stature), these outlaws literally appear to have nothing to do, their options reduced to either passing time with acts of petty sadism (shooting the heads off of chickens) or trading in their anarchist integrity for middle-class digs and a star.
More than one critic has noted that the film is about a chase in which the pursuer doesn't want to catch the pursued and the pursued doesn't want to run, an odd sort of conflict through mutual surrender. Its characters thus relatively inactive, Pat Garrett assumes an air of boozy languor (Garrett, when not literally killing off his past, is constantly drinking to forget it), exploring numerous themes similar or identical to those of The Wild Bunch while altering the formal schema in almost every way, through extended shot duration, softer light, fluid montage over jarring juxtapositions, and a tone of inevitability and futility that eliminates suspense. A deeper sadness hangs over this picture than any other by Peckinpah and, despite a few brief, unneeded scenes, this sadness emerges not from any sort of directorial neglect but from a mature level of craftsmanship and trust in both audience members (who must adapt to its slow rhythms) and collaborators (who create virtually all the magic in certain key moments, such as that shared by Katy Jurado and Slim Pickens in the latter's touching death scene).
The supplemental materials in the box comprise a frustrating and wildly varied smorgasbord. Audio commentaries for each film (including both the 1988 ‘Turner Preview' cut and a new, tighter version of Pat Garrett ) are delivered by Peckinpah scholars Nick Redman, Paul Seydor, Garner Simmons, and David Weddle and while each possess distinct, valuable insights into Peckinpah's life and work, such insights are frequently sabotaged by amiably fought battles to dominate the conversation, which itself is repeatedly steered toward simply praising the work and rarely questioning it. (It is especially disappointing that there is little historical contextualizing of any kind.) Few of the numerous documentaries stand out, but Sam Peckinpah's West: Legacy of a Hollywood Renegade , while a very conventional biography, is at least fun, generally informative and benefits from appearances by Paul Schrader, Benicio Del Toro, and David Thompson.
Each commentator appearing on these discs shares a
keen sense of being haunted, above all, by certain moments in Peckinpah's
Westerns, which hover independently above their larger frameworks. This says
something about the strange nature of personal vision. That wordless, eerily
calm moment when Garrett, camped out alone by a bucolic stream, comes upon a
passing barge and shots are traded back and forth for little discernible reason
aside from vague wariness, says as much about the buried impulses in American
identity as any full narrative could muster. I can't imagine any filmmaker
besides Peckinpah conceiving of such a moment and expressing its significance,
both conscious and subconscious, so confidently. However ugly and conflicted
the spirit that lies beneath, it deserves to be at least partially redeemed for
offering up its dark knowledge so gracefully. Perhaps we might even be a little
the wiser for heeding its observations.
A Tribute to Sam Peckinpah by ConvoyTM.com Tribute to Sam Peckinpah website
Sam Peckinpah filmmaker website, also seen here: TB's Sam Peckinpah fansite
Sam Peckinpah: Biography from Answers.com biography page
Sam Peckinpah > Overview - AllMovie Biography by Lucia Bozzola
Sam Peckinpah - Biography Paul Hurley biography from Talk Talk
Overview
for Sam Peckinpah - TCM.com biography
page from Turner Classic Movies
Sam Peckinpah
• Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema
Gabrielle Murray from Senses
of Cinema, May 21, 2002
Sam Peckinpah fansite on MySpace excellent photos and a lengthy biography
essay by Carletto di San Giovanni
Sam Peckinpah [1925-84] Page at 'Readers of the Purple Sage' Readers of the Purple Sage, a Peckinpah website
filmfodder.com: movies: specials: director profiles: sam peckinpah Director profile by Chris Barry
Sam Peckinpah bio from NNDB
Sam Peckinpah - Filmbug brief bio
Sam Peckinpah | Cracked.com Cracked Topics, Peckinpah facts and trivia
Murray Hotel [est. 1904] in Livingston, MT {where Sam lived 1974-84}
Sam Peckinpah Suite, Livingston, Montana
Latest Pictures of Sam Peckinpah > New, Latest Photos Shoot : pics ... some trivia listed at Platinum Celebs
Earned in Blood A Sam Peckinpah discussion forum
Film4 Filmography Sam Peckinpah reviews and comments on Peckinpah’s films with links to more, also seen here: Film4
Sam Peckinpah Movies brief reviews of Peckinpah films
Sam Peckinpah at Frank's Movie Log reviews of Peckinpah films
SAM PECKINPAH: A MAN APART brief film comments from Mercury Theater
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd
review Legendary Western
Collection, Ride the High Country, The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue,
and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
Home Cinema @ The Digital Fix - Sam Peckinpah's Legendary Westerns ... Dave Foster from DVD Times
Bloody Sam Peckinpah Dick Dinman’s DVD Classics Corner, reviewing Peckinpah’s The Legendary Westerns Collection
The Aisle Seat by Andy Dursin A Return to Peckinpah’s West, on The Legendary Westerns Collection
DVD Review: Sam Peckinpah's The Legendary Westerns Collection ... Adnan Tezer on The Legendary Westerns Collection from Monsters & Critics
Sam Peckinpah - Interesting Motherfuckers - Acid Logic ezine Wil Forbis essay on Sam Peckinpah from Interesting Motherfuckers (Undated)
EI > Video Risks > BLOODY SAM: THE FILMS OF SAM PECKINPAH (1969,71 ... Rusty White from E Insiders (Undated)
A Brief Examination of Misogyny in the Films of Sam Peckinpah Mitch Walrath from b-independent (Undated)
Series of essay from The High Hat (All Undated)
Essays about Sam Peckinpah's films Wherefore Art Thou, Bloody Sam? by Hayden Childs from The High Hat, also seen here: The High Hat Feature or here: Introduction
Looks That Kill Gary Mairs from The High Hat
Pick a Peck of Poses A Beginner’s Field Guide to the Peckinpah Actor, by Phil Nugent from The High Hat
Ride the High Country Tom Block from The High Hat
Major Dundee Chasing the Great White Whale in Mexico, by Hayden Childs from The High Hat
Algonquin Kids’ Table: The Wild Bunch a collection of writers speak their mind about Peckinpah, in specific THE WILD BUNCH, in a 4-page series of e-mail impressions, from The High Hat
Straw Dogs Dana Knowles from The High Hat
Junior Bonner The Tao of Junior Bonner, by Hayden Childs from The High Hat
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid Tom Block from The High Hat
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia Phil Nugent from The High Hat
The Bottom Shelf: Convoy Scott von Doviak from The High Hat
The Osterman Weekend Leonard Pierce from The High Hat
Parallax View series of essays, most originally published elsewhere
The Ballad Of David Sumner: A Peckinpah Psychodrama Kathleen Murphy, May 3, 2010, originally published at Movietone News, January, 1972
‘Tough ole hide’: The Getaway Essays, Film Reviews, Sam Peckinpah, by David Willingham, May 10, 2010, originally published at Movietone News, May – June, 1973
Review: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid Film Reviews, Sam Fuller, by Richard T. Jameson, May 12, 2010, originally published at Movietone News, May – June, 1973
Short Notice: “The Marshal” Richard T. Jameson, April 26, 2010, originally published at Film Quarterly, Summer 1974
Review: The Killer Elite Robert C. Cumbow, May 17, 2010, originally published at Movietone News, June 1976
The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Jr. Bonner: Another Side of Sam Peckinpah Essays, Sam Peckinpah, by Rick Hermann, May 8, 2010, originally published at Movietone News, October 1976
Cross Of Iron: On getting past the blood Richard T. Jameson, May 19, 2010, originally published at Seattle Weekly, May 25, 1977
Sam Peckinpah Sam
Fuller, republished in Parallax
View, May 2, 2010, originally published in Movietone News, February
1979
“A privilege to work in films”: Sam Peckinpah among friends Richard T. Jameson transcript of a Q & A with the director following a screening of the film in Seattle, July 19, 1978, from Parallax View, April 23, 2010, originally published at Movietone News, February 1979
Sam Peckinpah by Sam Fuller Sam Fuller, May 2, 2010, originally published at Movietone News, February 1979
Sam Peckinpah: Introduction to Film Comment Midsection (1981) Richard T. Jameson, April 25, 2010, originally published at Film Comment, January/February 1981
The Ballad of Cable Hogue Richard T. Jameson, May 1, 2010, originally published at Film Comment, January/February 1981
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia Essays, Film Reviews, Sam Fuller, by Kathleen Murphy and Richard T. Jameson, May 13, 2010, originally published at Film Comment, January/February, 1981
Sam Peckinpah: No Bleeding Heart Kathleen Murphy, April 24, 2010, originally published at Film Comment, April 1985
Ride the High Country Robert Horton, April 26, 2010, originally published in “Myth of the West” at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, 1990
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia Essays, Film Reviews, Sam Peckinpah, by Kathleen Murphy, May 16, 2010, originally published at The Austin Chronicle, October 22, 1999
The Beautiful and the Damned: Major Dundee Richard T. Jameson, April 28, 2010, originally published at Queen Anne News, April 11, 2005
Learning to Do It Right: “The Wild Bunch” – A Personal Reflection Essays, Film Reviews, Sam Peckinpah, by Robert C. Cumbow at Parallax View, March 11, 2009
The Ballad of Cable Hogue Robert C. Cumbow at Parallax View, April 29, 2010
Blood of a Poet: The Films
of Sam Peckinpah Editor from Parallax View, May 5, 2010
Peckinpah Doesn’t Sing Along Essays, Sam Fuller, by David Coursen from Parallax View, May 14, 2010
Director Sam Peckinpah: what price violence? - Google Books Result What Price Violence? by P.F. Kluge from Life magazine, August 11, 1972
In Defense of Sam Peckinpah 1st page only of essay by Mark Crispin Miller from Film Quarterly, Spring 1975
SNL Transcripts: Robert Klein: 11/15/75: Sam Peckinpah Transcript of Saturday Night Live Peckinpah skit November 15, 1975
Peckinpah:
A Portrait in Montage
book by Garner Simmons (270 pages), 1982
Sam Peckinpah (general discussion) Last of the Desperadoes: Dueling with Sam Peckinpah, by E. Jean Carroll from Rocky Mountain Magazine, March 1982
Justified lives: morality & narrative in the films of Sam Peckinpah - Google Books Result by Michael Bliss (353 pages), 1993
If They Move... Kill 'Em!: The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah - Google Books Result by David Weddle (592 pages), 1994
Peckinpah brief excerpt from the book: "If They Move....Kill'em" The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah, by David Weddle (1994)
"If They Move … Kill 'Em!": The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah ... "If They Move … Kill 'Em!": The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah, book review by Howard Hampton from ArtForum, November 1994
"Jim Jarmusch on Dead Man, God, Sam Peckinpah and Harvey Weinstein ... Jim Jarmusch from The LA Weekly, May 17 – 24, 1996
Savage cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the rise of ultraviolent movies - Google Books Result by Stephen Prince (282 pages), 1998
Film Philosophy,
Vol. 3, number 18, April 1999 The
Means and Ends of Screen Violence, essay by Steven Schneider in response to Stephen Prince’s book, Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of
Ultraviolent Movies (282 pages), 1998
Sam Peckinpah's The wild bunch - Google Books Result edited by Stephen Prince (228 pages), 1999
Sam Peckinpah's <I>The Wild Bunch</I> - Cambridge University Press edited by Stephen Prince (228 pages), 1999
Pauline
Kael Remembers Sam Peckinpah Marjorie Baumgarten introduction to a
Peckinpah retrospective, from The Austin
Chronicle, November 19, 1999
"A Glorious High" by Pauline Kael Charlie Sotelo interviews Pauline Kael about Sam Peckinpah from The Austin Chronicle, November 19, 1999
Ultraviolent Movies: From Sam Peckinpah to Quentin Tarantino - Google Books Result by Laurent Bouzereau (249 pages), 2000
The Frenzy of the Visible: Spectacle and Motion in ... - Senses of Cinema The Frenzy of the Visible: Spectacle and Motion in the Era of the Digital, by Angela Ndalianis from Senses of Cinema, February 6, 2000
Drifting Out of the
Territory: Sam Peckinpah's Pat ... - Senses of Cinema Maximilian Le Cain from Senses of Cinema, also seen here from Nonstop Design, April 10, 2001:
Sam
Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
Cross of Iron • Senses of
Cinema Gabrielle Murray from Senses of Cinema, September 18, 2001
The Film Journal Their Dying Is His Living: The Violent Offerings of Sam Peckinpah, by Robert Castle from Film Journal, 2002
Ultraviolent Movies (2000) book review by Branislav L. Slantchev from Götterdämmerung, February 17, 2003
Pat Garrett &
Billy the Kid • Senses of Cinema
Garrett Chaffin-Quiray, March 21, 2003
Wanat
on This wounded cinema, this wounded life
Matt Wanatt book review, This wounded cinema, this wounded life:
violence and utopia in the films of Sam Peckinpah, by Gabrielle Murray (176 pages)
from Screening the Past, 2004
The Getaway • Senses of
Cinema Rick Thompson from Senses of Cinema, April 22, 2004
peckinpah The Ballad of Bloody Sam: The Films of Sam Peckinpah, brief film comments at the American Cinematheque, May 6 – 16, 2004
Sergio Leone vs. Sam Peckinpah (A late challenger) - Topic Powered ... Metacritic discussion forum, January 13, 2005
The Stax Report's "Bloody Sam" Edition - Movies Feature at IGN A salute to filmmaker Sam Peckinpah, by Stax from IGN, February 22, 2005
Big Media Vandalism: “There’s nothing sacred about a hole in the ground or the man that’s in it. Or you. Or me.” Steven Boone, October 17, 2005
This
Wounded Cinema, This Wounded Life: Violence and Utopia in ... This
Wounded Cinema, This Wounded Life: Violence and Utopia in the Films of Sam
Peckinpah by Gabrielle
Murray, book review by Claire Perkins from Senses of Cinema, October 20, 2005
"ENTERED HIS HOUSE JUSTIFIED": THE ... Entered His House Justified: The Making of the Films of Sam Peckinpah, by Jeff Slater (290 pages), 2006, from Cinema Retro
Film: Redefining the Western? Chiwan Choi from Associated Content, January 27, 2006
Guns and Tequila - Modern Drunkard Magazine Rich English from Modern Drunkard magazine, March 2006
The Westerns of Sam Peckinpah. - By Stanley Crouch - Slate Magazine April 13, 2006
A bullet in the back | Film | The Guardian Alex Cox, May 4, 2006
The Wild Bunch • Senses of Cinema Tony Williams from Senses of Cinema, May 5, 2006
Sam Peckinpah versus Michael Mann Paul Cremean from Grover Watrous Golden Egg, May 23, 2006
The Last
Man: An Epitaph for Sam Peckinpah • Senses of Cinema Benjamin Kerstein from Senses of Cinema, July 31, 2006
Western Movies Ride into the Sunset - Fewer Western Movies Today Thomas Majewski from Associated Content, August 15, 2006
[This Savage Art]: Bloody Sam And Theme Explored William Speruzzi from This Savage Art, November 5, 2006
Oggs’ Movie Thoughts: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid November 12, 2006
The Independent Moviemaker - Understanding Genre: the Western Will Wright from Associated Content, February 14, 2007
Sam Peckinpah Blog-A-Thon | This Savage Art William Speruzzi from This Savage Art, February 21, 2007
[This Savage Art]: Intoxicated With The Madness William Speruzzi from This Savage Art, February 21, 2007
Forager Blog: The Osterman Weekend February 21, 2007
The Hollywood Reporter: Risky Biz Blog: Happy Birthday Sam Peckinpah February 21, 2007
Sam Peckinpah | This Savage Art William Speruzzi from This Savage Art, August 23, 2007
• View topic - Sam Peckinpah Criterion discussion forum, September 23, 2007
Sam Peckinpah - Hollywood's Last Rebel Director - Associated ... John Sanchez from Associated Content, December 31, 2007
Sam Peckinpah: Interviews book edited by Kevin J. Hayes, (192 pages), brief comments, 2008
Miniseries #7: Movie Directors and the Means of Production Director #43, If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, January 11, 2008
"Bloody Sam: The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah" John Roberts from Associated Content, May 30, 2008
DD: Dellamorte Remembers... Batman (1976) Andre Dellamorte from CHUD, June 27, 2008
When men were men - Features - Boston Phoenix Steve Vineberg from The Boston Phoenix, September 3, 2008
A Review of Ultraviolent Movies: From Sam Peckinpah to Quentin Tarantino Eric Pudalov from Associated Content, September 5, 2008
Sam Peckinpah, Blood Poet - Harvard Film Archive notes from a Peckinpah retrospective, September 5 – 12, 2008
Read more - et - Full Story Grudge Match, The set wasn’t big enough for American director Sam Peckinpah and Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, by Mohamed Khan from Egypt Today, November 2008
The softer side of Sam Peckinpah Time Out London, December 30, 2008
The softer side of Sam Peckinpah with Time Out Film - Time Out London January 2, 2009
Sam Peckinpah: A taste for blood - Features, Films - The Independent Geoffrey Macnab from The Independent, January 5, 2009
Inside
the head of Sam Peckinpah | Film | The Guardian Rick Moody from The Guardian, January 8, 2009
BFI | Sight & Sound | Sam Peckinpah Dead Men Walking, by David Thomson from Sight & Sound, February 2009
• View topic - PASSION & POETRY - THE BALLAD OF SAM PECKINPAH discussion forum that includes great shots of Steve McQueen, from McQueen On Line, March 23, 2009
Great Director #76: Sam Peckinpah « News from the Boston Becks April 26, 2009
Sam
Peckinpah: Interviews edited by Kevin J. Hayes • Senses of Cinema book review by Gabrielle Murray from Senses of Cinema, July 9, 2009
The Best Sam Peckinpah Westerns Are a Wild Bunch Indeed - AMC ... Robert Silva from American Movie Classics, October 17, 2009, also seen here: Best Sam Peckinpah Westerns
Home Cinema @ The Digital Fix - Passion and Poetry: The Ballad of ... Passion And Poetry: The Ballad of Sam Peckinpah, by Mike Sutton from DVD Times, December 6, 2009
FilmInFocus | "Pure Wasted Insanity": Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch ... Walter Donohue from Film in Focus, December 28, 2009
The Story of Oscar-Winning, Movie Sound Pioneer GEORGE R. GROVES ... February 5, 2010
Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs - Amy Sumner: An Examination of Susan ... Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs - Amy Sumner: An Examination of Susan George's Character, by Vanessa Appassamy from Suite 101, March 20, 2010
When is a Julian Lennon video also a Sam Peckinpah film?: 9 ... When is a Julian Lennon video also a Sam Peckinpah film?: 9 stylistically suspect music videos made by famous film directors, by Steven Hyden from The Onion A.V. Club, April 5, 2010
Videodrone
Classic: 'Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia' - Parallax ... Blu-Ray review by Sean Axmaker from Parallax View, April 3, 2014, also seen
here: Videodrone
Classic: Peckinpah's 'Alfredo Garcia,' a Psychedelic ...
Videophiled Classic: Sam Peckinpah's 'Noon Wine' - Parallax View Blu-Ray review by Sean Axmaker, September 26, 2014, also seen here: Noon Wine Movies - Cinephiled
Ride
the High Country Sam Peckinpah film review - Senses of Cinema Tony Williams from Senses of Cinema, October 5, 2014
The Ballad of Cable Hogue Peckinpah film review - Senses of Cinema Martyn Bamber, October 5, 2014
Bring
Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia Peckinpah • film review Wheeler Winston Dixon from Senses of Cinema, October 5, 2014
'Bloody'
Sam Peckinpah: wasted, insane and indestructibly pure | Film ... John Patterson from The Guardian, March 30, 2016
Audio Interview with Sam Peckinpah : Interview : By Tony Macklin ... 48 minute audio interview at his living quarters in a Burbank studio, summer 1976
Interview with David Weddle by N.E. Lilly (SpaceWesterns.com) 2008
Sam Peckinpah's STRAW DOGS: interview: SALLY THOMSETT ("Janice ... Interview with STRAW DOGS actress Sally Thomsett from Facebook, May 18, 2009
Sam Peckinpah Pictures pictures of Peckinpah
Sam Peckinpah (1925 - 1984) - Find A Grave Memorial
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
Sam Peckinpah - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sam Peckinpah's "Salad Days" - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Monty Python does Sam Peckinpah
Sam Peckinpah - Video : Kosmix brief Peckinpah clips on YouTube
GSPindex The Ghost of Sam Peckinpah, a claymation short film
THE DEADLY COMPANIONS
USA (93 mi) 1961 ‘Scope
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Peckinpah's first film, a not altogether characteristic but nevertheless quirky Western which sees Keith's ex-army sergeant making amends for killing a boy by ferrying his corpse and his mother on a funeral procession through Apache territory. Routine in places, but enlivened by the sardonic characterisation (reminiscent in some ways of Faulkner's superficially similar As I Lay Dying) and by odd moments of visual bravura.
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
A rather grim tale made under unhospitable circumstances, The Deadly Companions is Sam Peckinpah's first credited film as a director after a stellar run as a top TV writer during the heyday of prime time western fare. As is usual, most accounts of the filming are told from Peckinpah's perspective. Star Brian Keith was the lead character in Peckinpah's noble producing effort The Westerner (13 episodes in 1960) so it's assumed that theirs was the important creative relationship. The movie was actually produced by Maureen O'Hara's brother, Charles B. Fitzsimons; O'Hara and Brian Keith were fresh from co-starring in the boxoffice success of Disney's The Parent Trap. From their point of view Peckinpah was simply a director for hire, and any hope of a creative collaboration broke down in a power struggle. Being a low budget undertaking, The Deadly Companions didn't have room for the egos involved, and Peckinpah's first directed movie was eventually taken from him. This last might account for the awful music score, which all too frequently meanders about with annoying, inappropriate guitar solos. It's like they pulled up to the music pump and asked for eight gallons of ethyl, to fill it up good.
The movie was always considered an interesting failure with interesting scenes and characters. Although Peckinpah didn't write the script and was forbidden to change the dialogue (a shame, as his colorful western speeches are unmatched), The Deadly Companions has themes lot in common with his later work: a tortured, crippled hero, a wild and wooly villain and a contemptuous attitude toward frontier hypocrisy. The big news with this release (Savant rarely reviews Region 2 releases) is that Futurefilm's Finnish release (said to be similar to the UK Optimum release) is a beautiful widescreen transfer. Since its abbreviated initial release, The Deadly Companions has only been available in miserable (the word is too kind) pan-scanned TV prints and video releases. Seen in its proper Panavision screen shape, it finally looks like a real movie. Savant is indebted to Finnish reader Olli Larimo for the opportunity to view this new release.
The Deadly Companions plays like a morbid variation on one of the Budd Boettticher Ranown films with Randolph Scott, minus much of a sense of humor and plus a lot of grotesque details. Brian Keith's unlikely hero Yellowleg has a bum shoulder and repeatedly drops his gun when he tries to shoot, and his shyness about the scar on his hairline is an obvious castration complex. He comes off as a too-exaggerated version of one of Peckinpah's later 'cripples' with old leg wounds or nagging guilt complexes. Chill Wills' Turk is a shambling weirdo who wears a shaggy fur coat in the desert and rambles on about Freedonia, the private kingdom he wants to establish with slave labor. He returns in practically the same role in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and is echoed in Slim Pickens' furry muleskinner in Major Dundee. Steve Cochran's Billy Keplinger is a stock girl-chasing dandy, and predictably gets the heave-ho when he tries to rape the leading lady. The rather tasteless ad for the film shows menacing silhouettes hovering over Maureen O'Hara cowering nude in a water hole.
Peckinpah was never known for directing women, and Maureen O'Hara's main sequences are probably even less interesting because, as Peckinpah once said, she more or less refused his direction (some accounts say she forbade Peckinpah to speak to her). We see Kit Tilden in her dance hall costume only once, and most of her scenes concentrate on her various states of distress and anguish.
The scenes in Gila City are rather flat and sometimes even awkwardly blocked, with the only memorable image that of the cheating Turk half-hung in the saloon, his cards pinned to his shirt.The movie picks up out in the open desert, where William Clothier's beautiful cinematography takes over. The character action is predictble until Kit and Yellowleg find themselves alone in the wild, eventually dragging the son's coffin by hand. Kit is determined to prove to someone that her dead husband, Meade Tilden, really existed.
The Deadly Companions is noted for two more sequences. One is pure western art for its own sake. Instead of having the lone Yellowleg (established as a western hero who cannot shoot his gun!) hold off Indian attacks, Peckinpah shows a group of drunken Indians playfully re-enacting a stagecoach robbery that perhaps happened the day before. Indians on horseback chase their friends, who are dressed up in the clothing left by the presumed victims. The unique sequence is rather eerie.
The other noted moment is the confused ending, (Spoiler) Yellowleg elects to shoot it out with his ex- partners, who have returned from robbing the bank for real. Peckinpah wanted the gunfight to be Yellowleg's victory over his handicap, which turns out to have been more a mental problem than a physical one. O'Hara and Fitzsimons apparently insisted on 'protecting' Brian Keith's star player status by having Turk shoot Billy in the back, for the vaguest of revenge reasons. Poorly staged and awkwardly cut, the death of Billy is an almost complete letdown. Yellowleg's role in the story is thus limited to finding a bond of common trust with Kit Tilden. The townsmen offer to let her return to Gila City, but Kit and Yellowleg choose to ride off alone.
Electric Sheep Magazine Paul Huckerby
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [B]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY A 95
This is one gorgeous looking CinemaScope western, beautifully shot by Lucien Ballard, capturing all the grandeur of the Inyo National Forest in the Eastern Sierra Mountains just west of the California border with Nevada, including Mount Whitney (Full resolution), which at 14,496 feet is the highest peak in the lower 48 states. In a movie like this, location is everything, as the film is all about a 2-day journey up the mountains, and another trip back down. Starring two icons of American westerns, Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, both near the end of their legendary careers, where their declining age parallels the waning years of the frontier West, McCrea rides into town for a job transporting gold from the nearby mountains back into town safely delivered to the bank, a job that comes with high risks, as these carriers make easy targets. Scott, on the other hand, is wearing his wig and Buffalo Bill outfit and working the Western carnival road show circuit as a touted gunman, the Oregon Kid, challenging would-be gunslingers to hit his rigged target. But once they meet, they’re like two peas in a pod as they’re old friends with a history between them, and their clever dialogue together, written by N.B. Stone Jr, with a few Peckinpah ad libs thrown in, is delightfully comical making their screen time together thoroughly entertaining.
Scott’s young partner is Ron Starr, an overly rambunctious
kid who operates a camel race scam against horses and gets into fights at the
drop of a hat. In the West, it’s not
always important to win or lose, just that you get into a fight and give it your
best. That’s all anyone could ask. The three of them working together form a
team, though Scott and the kid have plans of their own to steal the gold,
thinking it could be worth as much as a quarter of a million dollars. McCrea, on the other hand, is a morally
righteous man, a former lawman who characteristically serves as the emblematic
code of ethics for the West, setting the right example, being honest, morally
upright, honorable, loyal to your partners, true to your word and commanding
the respect of others. These are the
values being fought over in nearly every western and they’re certainly fought
for here. Along the way up, they stop at
a preacher’s farm, where R.G. Armstrong is a puritanical father (cast in a familiar role in other
Peckinpah films as well) in raising a lone daughter (Mariette Hartley)
alone. She, however, has never seen
anything beyond the borders of her farm, as her father won’t even let her
accompany him into town, so her curiosity about spending time with the overly
game kid is understandable, as he’s one of the only young men of the opposite
sex she’s ever seen. No sooner are they
off the next morning before she joins them, claiming she’s running away to
marry Billy Hammond (James Drury) in the mining town where they’re heading. When the kid makes a move on her the first
chance he gets, he gets clobbered by the two older men reminding him of his
better judgment.
When they get to the mining town, it’s nothing but tents and a
whorehouse that serves women and liquor, where the kid delivers her to her
young fiancé, one of four brothers and a father that comprise the Hammond clan,
one of whom is Warren Oates, the one with a bird on his shoulder who never
takes a bath, where the idea of marriage gets them all stirred up, as their
idea of marriage is little more than condoned gang rape, where what belongs to
one belongs to them all. The marriage
itself is a crazy scene in the whorehouse where they arrive in procession on
horseback, she in the lead wearing her mother’s white wedding dress, with the
brothers singing a rousing rendition of “When The Roll Is Called Up
Yonder,” When the roll is called up
yonder - Twila Paris - YouTube (4:43) or Johnny Cash Johnny Cash -
When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder ... (1:37), with the Madame as the Maid of Honor and
her hired help are the bridesmaids, married by the town’s drunken mayor, where
she has to fend off not only the brothers but all the customers as well, which
turns into a madcap scenario until McCrea hears her screams and decides to put
an end to the nonsense and return her home to her father. The clan has other ideas and the frontier
spirit is alive and well as there’s several day’s ride ahead to sort all this
out. Scott and McCrea really carry the
show, where they supposedly reversed characters at the last minute, but as
partners in a long line of memorable partners seen in westerns, their
friendship and well-worn characters make each of them feel perfectly
comfortable in their roles, where the back and forth banter between them is a
special highlight not often seen in westerns, as there’s a compelling, age-weary
wisdom that tests the limit of their friendship as well as their understanding
of the spirit of the West. An engaging
and highly personal film that is simply spectacular to look at, where these two
leads could just as easily be chatting on your living room sofa—they’re that comfortable.
Time Out review Tom Milne
Peckinpah's superb second film, a nostalgic lament for the West in its declining years, with a couple of great set pieces (the bizarre wedding in the mining camp, the final shootout among the chickens). Affectionately funny as Scott and McCrea, once more hired and temporarily in harness, creak rheumatically while climbing off their horses, turn aside from the trail to bathe aching feet, and sport long woolly combinations for bed. But also achieving an almost biblical grandeur as the two oldtime lawmen, fallen upon hard times and suddenly realising that the world has left them behind, contrive not to fall from grace and self-respect when a tempting gold shipment comes between them. Truly magnificent camerawork from Lucien Ballard.
Ride
the High Country - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Philip Kemp from Film Reference
Apart from his first feature, the rarely screened The Deadly Companions , few of Sam Peckinpah's films have escaped controversy. The obvious exception is Ride the High Country , acclaimed a classic within months of its release—and which still remains the Peckinpah movie that people who hate Peckinpah movies can like. It's clear enough why this should be so. Such violence as occurs is relatively muted; the film exudes a melancholy, autumnal gentleness, enhanced by the presence of two much-loved veterans of the genre, Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, in what are evidently conceived as farewell performances. The characters—the upright lawman, the bad guy who becomes good in the end, the brash youngster who learns wisdom, and so on—are all comfortingly familiar types, and the plot itself springs few surprises. With Ride , Peckinpah openly staked his claim to the mantle of Great Western Director, heir to Ford, Mann, and Boetticher—before striking out, in Major Dundee and The Wild Bunch , on the maverick trail to a more equivocal position as (in Jim Kitses's phrase) "John Ford's bastard son."
Yet, beneath all the conventional elements—which are handled, it should be said, with a vigour and assurance which prevent them ever seeming merely routine—the thematic preoccupations of the later films are already in place. If Peckinpah didn't invent the elegiac, passing-of-the-west western (Ford, for one, could stake a claim with Liberty Valance ), he made more telling use of it than any other director, and Ride locates us there from the start. From the majestic wildness of the "high country" we cut, as the credits end, to the bustling vulgarity of a California township where the shabby old lawman, Steve Judd (McCrea), is nearly run down by an automobile (anticipating the fate of another Peckinpah hero, Cable Hogue). Meanwhile his former colleague, Gil Westrum (Scott) has been reduced to running a carnival side-show, got up in a phony Buffalo Bill outfit as "The Oregon Kid."
These two, creaky and rheumatic, rehashing ancient exploits, bedding down in baggy long-johns, clearly enough embody the old, heroic, outmoded west. But they also foreshadow, in their contrasted attitudes, such later opposed pairs as Bishop and Thornton ( Wild Bunch ), Steiner and Stransky ( Cross of Iron ), Billy and Pat Garrett. Ride , like most of Peckinpah's work, explores the tensions of relative morality. Judd professes absolute values ("He was right. I was wrong," he says of his one-time mentor. "That's something you just know"), and can trade biblical texts with Knudsen, the grimly puritanical rancher. But after Westrum's treachery, doubts creep in. "My father says there's only right and wrong, good and evil," says Elsa, Knudsen's daughter. "It isn't that simple, is it?" "No, it isn't," Judd responds. "It should be—but it isn't." The old, clear-cut frontier code—the code of a Ford movie—no longer holds up; and maybe it never really did.
Having set up his stock types, Peckinpah slyly subverts them. Judge Tolliver, the venal old drunk performing Elsa's wedding ceremony in a brothel, comes out with a wistful speech about marriage: "A good marriage—there's a kind of simple glory about it." Even the squalid Hammond clan can be goaded into an open showdown through their "sense of family honor"—which, of course, promptly gets them killed. By all the conventions of the genre, Westrum should die in the final shootout, atoning for his earlier misdeeds. But it's Judd who dies, gazing up at the austere purity of the mountains, granted his wish "to enter my house justified" (a phrase Peckinpah borrowed from his own father). Westrum can adapt and compromise; he survives.
The casting of Scott, icon of integrity, as the devious Westrum, is a master stroke; and while Peckinpah didn't originate the idea (McCrea and Scott, initially cast the other way round, spontaneously suggested a swap) he makes shrewd use of it, bringing out a foxiness which, we can recognize, was always latent in the actor's persona. That Westrum should survive, though, was the director's idea, part of his extensive—and uncredited—rewrite of Stone's script. Ride also marks Peckinpah's first cinematic collaboration with the veteran Lucien Ballard, whose lyrical widescreen cinematography makes it one of the most beautiful of all westerns.
Not for the last time, a Peckinpah movie hit studio problems. Ride , victim of a front-office feud, was taken away from him in post-production and released as a second feature. Critical enthusiasm and prizes at European festivals embarrassed MGM into giving it a rerelease; and its reputation remained unaffected by the hostility aroused by Peckinpah's subsequent work. If not, as some have claimed, his best film, it's surely his most perfect.
Ride the High Country Tom Block from The High Hat, also seen here: culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review
Sam Peckinpah was 36 years old when he made Ride the High Country, but it feels like the work of a man who’s somewhat farther along in years. That’s not because the film speaks so knowingly about the difficulties of aging (though it does that in spades), but because of its air of potent, self-aware nostalgia. A film of abundant visual beauty, it’s also a highly literate one through whose heart blows a chill valedictory breeze. It’s a modern Western that uses the Old West not just for its color, but as a concrete part of the American experience, a way of reflecting the shift in attitude towards the past between the people who lived in it and those who came afterwards. A highly versatile work (its 94 minutes enclose a morality play, a historical essay and a probing character study), it represents a summing-up of everything that preceded it in the Western genre, the same way that Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch would perform another, more convulsive, summing-up seven years later.
Ride the High Country’s autumnal tone begins with its casting of Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott, two of the genre’s most revered icons; after making scores of Westerns between them, High Country was to be Scott’s last movie and McCrea’s second-to-last one. McCrea plays Steven Judd, a former U.S. Marshal grown too old to wear a badge and now reduced to picking up work where he can get it. Surrounded by the signs of a creeping progress, Judd has outlived not only his reputation but also the era he made it in. Wanting nothing more than to recoup his self-respect, he’s just landed a job that draws on his experience as a lawman: armed guard, responsible for transporting gold bullion from Coarsegold, a mining camp in the high Sierras, back down to a bank in the lowlands. Judd needs help on the four-day ride to and from the settlement, and as luck would have it his old friend and former deputy Gil Westrum (Scott) is in town.
Westrum, who scrapes together his living from a rigged carnival game, is tantalized by the promise of easy money that he sees as rightful payback for his years of unrewarded service. Enlisting the aid of the impatient young hustler Heck Longstreet (Ron Starr), he offers their services to Judd, hoping that once on the trail he can tempt his old friend into taking off with the gold. Gil opens his psychological gambit the second they move into the foothills, using every opportunity to remind Judd of the ungrateful citizens and unmourned lawmen that litter their past. The two old friends talk through the moral problems posed by their lives, resorting in turn to Scripture, aphorism and the memory of shared experience, until their journey finally becomes as much an inward as an outward passage. “The clothes of pride—is that all you want?” Gil asks at one point along the trail. Judd replies with a paraphrase from the Book of Luke: “All I want is to enter my house justified.” Coming out of Joel McCrea’s mouth it’s the cornerstone of a simple but certain philosophy.
Their progress is complicated by the appearance of Elsa Knudsen (Mariette Hartley), a young woman fleeing her repressive household to join her fiancé, a white-trash miner in Coarsegold named Billy Hammond (James Drury). Forced by circumstance to accept Elsa into their party, Judd and Westrum again save her when Hammond and his four brothers turn out to be a pack of deadly human jackals. During the party’s return trip down the mountain, Judd must fend off both Billy Hammond’s attempts to retake Elsa and the crisis of betrayal brought on when Westrum and Heck, having run out of patience, try to seize the gold by force. If at the end of The Wild Bunch Pike Bishop takes his enemies to Hell with him, Steven Judd does his best to trailblaze a path into Heaven for his friends.
Ride the High Country is the work of a relatively conventional Sam Peckinpah, done before a more radical artistry began altering the contours of his work. The gentleness of his sensibility is most palpable in the love he sheds on the great outdoors; rare for its time, High Country even contains an admonition against littering. Paired for the first time with world-class cameraman Lucien Ballard and shooting in CinemaScope, Peckinpah gets the most out of his locations — from serene aspen-lined lakes to the mining camp’s utilitarian grittiness — investing each of them with their own moral and emotional temperatures. His movie is riddled with unexpected pockets of pitched emotion: an alcoholic judge (Edgar Buchanan), looking like a beetle that’s been pickled in its own perspiration, pulls himself together to deliver a deeply felt wedding sermon; a prostitute gnaws on a turkey leg while taking absent regard of a vicious beating that’s occurring at her feet; a man enraged at missing his human target turns his gun on a hapless flock of chickens and blasts away.
After releasing Straw Dogs in 1971 Peckinpah would be vilified for his ostensible misogyny, and depending on how you see it Ride the High Country remains either the best rebuttal to this accusation or a measure of how far he would fall in the next 10 years. It’s hard to think of a character more sympathetically rendered than Elsa Knudsen, the naive farm girl who escapes a sexually inflected relationship with her father only to land in a worse situation. Elsa’s wedding to Billy Hammond remains one of Peckinpah’s most memorable set pieces, beginning with the comically lurid horseback procession in which the Hammond boys serenade the couple with a whiskey-fueled rendition of “When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder.” The ceremony and ensuing revelry — all depicted through Elsa’s eyes — carries her through disillusionment (Billy expects her to give up her virginity in the local whorehouse) to the horrifying discovery that the Hammond clan views marriage as a legitimized form of gang rape.
Seeds of the Sam Peckinpah who a few years hence would revolutionize cinematic violence are evident in Ride the High Country. The unblinking portrayal of physical suffering that would become a Peckinpah hallmark can be seen in the aftermath of a gunfight above the timberline, when a mortally wounded man seems to be watching his own death descend upon him as a cold mountain wind whips at his hair. And the concluding gunfight, in which Judd and Westrum test their values one last time by going head to head with the Hammonds, is edited in increasingly percussive rhythms as the bodies fall, presaging in embryonic form the cataclysmic gun battles that open and close The Wild Bunch. With Ride the High Country, Peckinpah began gathering about him one of the most colorful stock acting companies in film history: Warren Oates and L.Q. Jones are wonderfully repellent as two of the Hammond brothers, and R.G. Armstrong appears as Joshua Knudsen, the first of several religious fanatics he’d play for Peckinpah.
Joel McCrea turns in an irreplaceable performance as Steven Judd, whose touching mixture of stoicism and longing lies at the heart of so many Western heroes. The contrast between McCrea’s flinty line-readings and Randolph Scott’s speculative, laid-back style perfectly mirrors the distance between Judd’s unyielding sense of purpose and Westrum’s flagging morality. McCrea gets the great speeches but Scott provides some of the movie’s most affecting moments. When Gil, his scheme gone awry, extends his bound hands and asks Judd to cut him loose for the night, he bluntly offers his only reason: “I don’t sleep so good anymore.”
“People change,” the drunken Judge Tolliver reminds us in his oration, and by the end of Ride the High Country all four of its characters have traveled to an emotional location far from where they began. Steven Judd in particular moves from a state of humiliation to bittersweet triumph, which is something like the opposite of what happened to Sam Peckinpah over the course of his career. But perhaps it doesn’t matter that the beleaguered director didn’t “sleep so good” in the end, for any man that ever had a Ride the High Country inside him has plainly entered his house justified. The movie’s famous closing shot, in which death and fulfillment arrive hand-in-hand, leaves nothing else to be said.
Ride
the High Country Sam Peckinpah film review - Senses of Cinema Tony Williams from Senses of Cinema, October 5, 2014
Ride the High Country - TCM.com Jeff Stafford
Ride
the High Country (1962) - Articles - TCM.com
Ride the High Country Robert Horton at Parallax View, April 26, 2010 (“Myth of the West” at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, 1990)
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Images Movie Journal Elizabeth Abele
George Chabot's Review of Ride the High Country
Ride the High Country Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film Paul Sherman on the DVD release
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Nate Meyers) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Ryan Keefer) dvd review
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd
review Legendary Western
Collection, Ride the High Country, The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue,
and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] Legendary Western Collection
The Aisle Seat [Andy Dursin] Legendary Western Collection
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] Legendary Western Collection
CHUD.com (Russ Fischer) dvd review
DVD Authority.com (Christopher Bligh) dvd review
FilmHead.com (Matt Heffernan) review [3.5/4]
Talking Pictures (UK) review Howard Schumann
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
filmcritic.com (David Bezanson) review [4/5]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [A]
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Ride the High
Country - Wikipedia
MAJOR
Formally, this is barely recognisable as a Peckinpah movie (producers hacked out 20 minutes, distributors l4 more); yet many of his major thematic preoccupations (loyalty, betrayal, redemptive death) are clearly emerging here as Major Dundee, a Federal officer relegated to command of a prison camp, sets out to subdue a band of marauding Apaches at the head of a rag-tag volunteer troop of thieves, renegades and paroled Confederate prisoners (the latter ambivalently headed by Harris). Of the many debts to Ford, the largest is Heston's Dundee, trading on his image of epic man of action but propelled, like Wayne in The Searchers, by racial hatred, worm-eaten by divided loyalties, and finally found wanting at the crunch. A fine if fractured Western, more subversive of conventional mythologies than it seems.
The Boston Phoenix review Chris Fujiwara
Sam Peckinpah’s magnificent third film, an epic about a cavalry troop pursuing a band of Apache into Mexico, became the subject of one of the costliest battles the maverick director would fight in Hollywood. While rewriting the inadequate script and presiding over a turbulent location shoot, Peckinpah had to cope throughout the production with jittery, interfering Columbia executives. The latter were dissuaded from firing the director only when the film’s star, Charlton Heston, offered to return his salary if Peckinpah was allowed to continue. At that, Columbia still screwed Peckinpah, and the world, out of the masterpiece Major Dundee might have been: the studio took the film out of his hands, refused to let him complete scenes he had left unshot, and twice re-edited what was left. The first version ran 134 minutes (about a half-hour shorter than what Peckinpah had in mind). When it got a negative response at a preview, the studio shortened it by a further 12 minutes before its general release in 1965.
These 12 minutes have been found and restored, thanks to Grover Crisp of Sony Pictures, and this extended version of Major Dundee is now viewable for the first time in 40 years. Crisp also commissioned a new score to replace the execrable original one. With the restored footage and the improved music, Major Dundee is still a rampaging, awe-inspiring wreck of a film, though now one a little closer to Peckinpah’s intentions.
Peckinpah takes the classic Western theme of the lone adventurer hero driven by personal obsession into realms of madness and chaos built on a scale rarely envisioned in previous Westerns. Heston’s Major Dundee is neither a Manifest Destiny ideologue nor, it seems, a rabid Indian hater; he’s a professional soldier who’s embittered by his job of running a prison garrison and who sees his Mexican mission as the chance to fight his last great war. The recently ended Civil War looms over the film, taking on the character of a national tragedy. Dundee’s counterpart is Tyreen (Richard Harris), an Irish immigrant and former Confederate officer who embodies both rebellion and the sense of honor that Dundee has betrayed. The conflict between these two is as filled with mystery as Dundee’s entire existence. "Just what the bloody hell are you doing here?", Tyreen asks him. Dundee’s only answer is to raise more bloody hell.
Heston, that "axiom of the cinema," as he was called by critic Michel Mourlet, has never been more axiomatic than in Major Dundee. It is probably his best performance. He’s ideally matched by Richard Harris (giving what is surely his best performance), and the running dialogue between Dundee and Tyreen gives the film not only much of what coherence it has but also much of its anguish, bite, and dread. Far more than an aborted rehearsal for The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah’s next film), Major Dundee is a key Peckinpah work, a unique piece of threatening, loping, slashing, lurching, alcoholic cinema. (134 minutes)
Major
Dundee (extended version) - TCM.com Jeremy
Arnold, Extended version (136 minutes)
Of all the famous movies most in need of a restoration that
will likely never be possible (due to the destruction of original film
elements), Sam Peckinpah's western Major Dundee (1965) is right up there
with the likes of Greed (1924) and The Magnificent Ambersons
(1942). Film historian Jim Kitses has called Major Dundee "one of
Hollywood's great broken monuments." Peckinpah himself called his original
version "possibly the best film I ever made in my life." On the flip
side, he described the experience of having the picture taken out of his hands,
badly edited down, and terribly scored "one of the most painful things
that ever happened in my life...They left out what it's about."
Major Dundee is a Civil War-era western whose story and production have
already been recounted on tcm.com. The somewhat restored and extended version
produced in 2005, however, requires a little more backstory. Two days before
the film's shoot began in February 1964, Columbia Pictures underwent a
corporate shake-up and Major Dundee's shooting schedule and budget were
slashed. Peckinpah was told to adjust the scope of his film to fit the lower
parameters, but he was so obsessed with making the film the way he had
originally planned - on the scale of Lawrence of Arabia (1962) - that he
just kept on doing so. The new studio brass, recounted J. Hoberman in The
New York Times, "feared that they had inherited a runaway production
with a lunatic at the helm."
After a contentious shoot, the picture wrapped 15 days late and $1.5 million
over budget. Peckinpah assembled a 164-minute (some accounts say 161-minute)
version and was fired off the show by producer Jerry Bresler, who abhorred
Peckinpah's use of violence in the film. Bresler oversaw the deletion of about
30 minutes of footage and the addition of a score by Daniele Amfitheatrof,
which Peckinpah hated. Then, after a bad preview screening, the studio cut 12
more minutes, bringing the running time to 124 minutes. In all, the deletions
included an opening massacre, major character development, and bits and pieces
throughout that affected the story's overall coherence.
In 2005, Sony Pictures found the 12 minutes and restored them, meaning that Major
Dundee now exists in the 136-minute version after it was first cut by
Bresler. Peckinpah's original version (which itself was never really complete)
will likely remain lost forever.
The other big difference, however, is that Sony also commissioned a brand-new
score for the film, by Christopher Caliendo. That might seem like sacrilege,
but in this case, it was a well-taken choice. Most film enthusiasts agree with
Peckinpah that the original score was overly exuberant and occasionally
ridiculous. Further, since the director had nothing to do with the original,
the notion of a new score done in the style of a 1960s western is really quite
an intriguing idea - in this one case alone. Besides a better, more appropriate
score, there's actually less music overall in the new version, which allows
dramatic scenes to play out more effectively but which also exposes some underlying
sound problems with the film; it was evidently never properly mixed or dubbed,
and as a result, a few scenes sound altogether too quiet in their backgrounds.
As for the reinserted footage, it comprises three new, complete scenes which
critic Todd McCarthy has described as "the key introduction of Richard
Harris' character..., the elaboration of Dundee's fort as a jail, and a drunken
weekend of Dundee's that climaxes with the lady he has romanced discovering him
with a half-naked Mexican whore. There are also numerous, much shorter
insertions throughout, some of which make the film considerably more
bloody." Dundee's recovery from a leg wound is expanded, for instance, as
is a knife fight between James Coburn and the Indian scout.
Glenn Erickson, an expert on the film and its troubled production background,
has written: "Although only 12 out of a possible 30 or 40 minutes have
been restored, the average audience now has a chance to understand the show on
a first viewing, and appreciate the scope of its story. The old cut had glaring
continuity problems, starting with an awkward beginning that omitted the
introduction of a main character and didn't properly establish the setting of
Fort Brenlin as a Union stockade for Confederate prisoners. Big pieces seemed
to be missing from the second half of the show, which barely maintained a
coherent storyline."
In the end, writes Erickson, "A confusing movie with poor continuity is
now an intriguing movie... a more complete assembly of a larger work."
The Beautiful and the Damned: Major Dundee Richard T. Jameson from Parallax View, April 28, 2010 (Queen Anne News, April 11, 2005)
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Extended cut, August 19, 2005
DVD Times Mike Sutton, Extended cut
Major Dundee Chasing the Great White Whale in Mexico, by Hayden Childs from The High Hat (Undated)
Film Quarterly Review by Ernest Callenbach 7/1965 Major Dundee Blog
review by Frederick Lombardi Major Dundee Blog, May 29, 2011
LIFE MAGAZINE 3/26/1965 article by David Zeitlin / Stunt crew Major Dundee Blog
American
Cinematographer Artcle by Herb A Lightman 2/1965 Major Dundee Blog
MAJOR DUNDEE by Sam Peckinpah Dan Schneider from Alt Film Guide, November 16, 2007, also here: Alternative Film Guide [Dan Schneider]
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce, Extended cut
“Major Dundee: The
Extended Version” - Salon.com
Stephanie Zacharek, April 6, 2005
Village Voice (Michael Atkinson) review March 29, 2005, Extended cut
Major
Dundee - TCM.com Rob Nixon
(123 minutes)
Projections Serena, February 13, 2009
Edward Copeland on Film [Wagstaff] June 22, 2007
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Extended cut theatrical release, April 4, 2005
DVD Verdict (George Hatch) dvd review [Extended Version]
DVD Town (James Plath) dvd review Extended cut
CHUD.com (Russ Fischer) dvd review Extended cut
Film-Forward.com Jeff Sneider, Extended cut
The Aisle Seat [Andy Dursin] Extended cut
DVD Authority.com (Christopher Bligh) dvd review [Extended Cut]
Classic Film Freak review Orson DeWelles, Extended cut
The Trades (Jonathan Baylis) dvd review Extended cut
Grover Crisp on Restoring Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee which includes a 21 minute audio interview from DVD Talk, September 22, 2005
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B+] [Extended Version]
Major Dundee Monty Hamilton from Associated Content
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Eye for Film (Daniel Hooper) review
[3/5] also a
DVD follow up here: Read DVD Review
Viewpoints Chris Jarmick, extended cut
eFilmCritic Reviews dionwr
The Restoration of Major Dundee: Robert A Harris talks to Grover Crisp of Sony Pictures June 5, 2011
Entertainment Weekly review [B] Owen Gleiberman
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review [Extended Version]
Boston Globe review [3/4] Wesley Morris
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] reviews The Legendary Westerns Collection
Washington Post (Stephen Hunter) review [Extended Version]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review also on NPR here: NPR's Morning Edition (Kenneth Turan) review (audio)
Movie Review: 'Major Dundee: The Extended Version' Michael Wilmington from The Chicago Tribune
The New York Times (Eugene Archer) review also seen here: The New York Times Review by Eugene Archer 4/8/196...
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
NOON WINE – made for TV
aka: ABC STAGE 67 – TV episode, Season One,
Episode 9: Noon Wine
USA (48
mi) 1966
User reviews from imdb Author: mpgmpg123 from usa
This was an excellent adaptation of the Katherine Ann Porter
short story. It was perfect for the old anthology format. I saw this at the
Museum of Television and Radio in New York. It concerns a farm couple and a
murder, won't say much more than that or might ruin the plot. But Jason Robards
was excellent as always in the role of a rough farmer who makes a mistake and
tries to right it. And then there was Olivia de Havilland in one of her last
real starring roles, and her first role on television. It is too bad she did
not accept more roles in television around this time. She is Robard's wife, a
former school teacher in one is essentially a loveless marriage that she has
resigned herself to due to duty to marriage and her children. It is a great
performance of hers, one of her best in television that ranks with her roles in
Roots and Anastasia in her ability to touch your emotions. See this one if you
ever get the chance! A real treat for de Havilland fans.
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]
Surprisingly spare, intense, and nuanced PBS American
Playhouse version of Katherine Ann Porter's superb short story. A very
mysterious and unpredictable work that cleverly builds to and sees through a
chain reaction. Swedish immigrant Stellan Skarsgard arrives in a small town
looking for any job, and through his handiness and tireless work he transforms
Fred Ward's farm from poor to excellent. Ward quickly yields every notable task
on the farm to Skarsgard, so though Ward becomes the most fortunate man in
town, he owes all of it to the hired hand. Ward, who really only cares about
his dignity and reputation, can't stop talking throughout the film. He's one of
those b.s. artists who thinks he's plotting everything to perfection but he's
actually quite dim and inept, tending to only make his case less convincing.
His wife Lise Hilboldt is obviously not fooled by his shenanigans, but
tolerates him because it's her duty. Skarsgard also demands nothing, which
works well for Ward, but still the family would like him to become one of them.
Skarsgard refuses to talk, more or less avoiding social contact and amusing
himself in the brief time he isn't working by playing the same tune on the
harmonica. All anyone knows about him is the harmonica is precious, touch it
and he'll discipline you. The film seems to be building to him turning violent,
but the shocking event comes a little more than halfway through and reorganizes
the story entirely. Despite, or perhaps because of the small budget, the film
works well as a period piece of turn of the century Texas; there's nothing
showy or flashy but that suits the claustrophobic psychodrama perfectly. You
are simply plunged headfirst into the life and asked to observe and draw your
own conclusions. Both Ward and Skarsgard are excellent, with Skarsgard
initially impressing with the enigma he brings to his character, but Ward
seeming better in the end because his character is a lot more complex; it's not
until you reflect upon Ward's work that you realize how well he set it up. Sam
Peckinpah directed an earlier TV version in 1966 that biographer David Weddle
considers one of his greatest and more proof of what he could have done if he
wasn't pigeonholed into "Bloody Sam", but it's nearly impossible to
find.
Moon In The Gutter: Sam Peckinpah's Forgotten Masterpiece: Noon ... Jeremy Richey from Moon In the Gutter, May 28, 2009
An often overlooked and sometimes completely unknown chapter in Sam Peckinpah’s influential and impressive career, 1966’s Noon Wine is one of his most haunting, important and resonate productions. Virtually unseen in the forty plus years since it was broadcast on ABC TV as part of the Stage 67 series, Noon Wine is a mesmerizing and moving near fifty minute work that stands as the equal of many of Peckinpah’s more known and celebrated big screen productions, and its relatively lost in time status is extremely unfortunate.
Based on an acclaimed short story by Katherine Anne Porter, Noon Wine concerns a farming family who hire on a strange Swedish man to help out and board with them. Things go well for several years until another stranger arrives with some news about the mostly silent Swede that alters everyone’s life forever with most tragic results.
Scripted by Peckinpah himself and starring Jason Robards, Olivia de Havilland, Theodore Bikel, Per Oscarsson, and in two smaller roles Peckinpah favorites Ben Johnson and L.Q. Jones, Noon Wine is an astonishingly adult and challenging work that is as far away from the trash TV culture we find ourselves surrounded by these days. Charged with the humanity and heart that had fueled his earlier Ride the High Country and later masterpieces like The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Junior Bonner, Noon Wine stands as one of the most subtle and sincere works of Peckinpah’s career.
Shown in stark black and white and featuring a mesmerizing
score from none other than Jerry Fielding, Noon Wine will come as something of
a shock to film fans who only know Peckinpah through his blood drenched
reputation as the director of works like The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs. And
yet, it was the success of Noon Wine that directly led to Peckinpah to be able
to shoot the string of films that would make him such a legend over the few
years after its television premiere.
By pretty much every account Sam Peckinpah was finished in Hollywood by 1966.
The disastrous production of Major Dundee and his firing from The Cincinnati
Kid had made him all but un-hirable, and it is was these factors that made Noon
Wine such a redemptive prospect for the uncompromising Peckinpah. Marshall Fine
writes in his excellent Bloody Sam that it was television producer Dan Melnick
who extended a helping hand to the down on his luck filmmaker in 1965 by
offering him a shot at Noon Wine. Peckinpah was certainly no stranger to
television, as fans will know, but Melnick’s offered surprised even him
considering the troubled state of his career. Fine wrote that, “when Melnick
called Peckinpah, the director seemed cautious to the point of being defensive.
Peckinpah said, ‘You ought to know I’ve been blacklisted. I’ve recently been
fired from The Cincinnati Kid. No one’s going to want you to hire me.’” Melnick
persevered and ABC gave in giving Peckinpah the shot he needed at a
much-deserved comeback.
Noon Wine began shooting in the fall of 1964 from a script from Peckinpah’s own pen that none other than Katherine Anne Porter herself and given an enthusiastic recommendation to. Fine wrote that, “Peckinpah insisted on two weeks of rehearsal”, something that was a bit uncommon for these sort of short television films, and something that no doubt helped give the performances the push that made them so strong across the board. Robards would be quoted as saying in Fines book that, “we could work like it was a play.” The inspiring actor would reportedly be so proud of his performance in the film that he kept his own private copy for years after.
According to Fine, “the production was shot in color on videotape and film” and that Melnick remembered that, “Sam shot Noon Wine like a film”, and actor Theordore Bikel recalled that, “there seemed to be a great deal of stress on him” during the shoot, which no doubt gave the proceedings an air of necessity. Because of this, and due to his inability to compromise, Melnick said, “He was very tough on the crew always” but it paid off and by the time it was ready to air Noon Wine was nothing short of a masterpiece, and it would give Peckinpah the chance to make The Wild Bunch just a couple of years later.
Fine wrote that Noon Wine was, “broadcast in November of 1966” and that it “won good reviews and put a new spin on Peckinpah’s career.” Melnick would take it even further and say that, “Sam was a hero again” after Noon Wine. Sam would receive nomination from The Writers and Directors Guild but he came home empty handed both evenings. It didn’t matter though, Sam Peckinpah was back in the game and for the next nearly ten years he would produce one of the most iconic body of works in American film history..
The holy grail of lost Peckinpah works, Noon Wine has been traded from collector to collector for years, and it can currently be screened at The Library of Congress and the Museum of Broadcasting. It is far too powerful a work to not be more readily available though and it desperately needs a proper re-release. My own experience watching Noon Wine proved to be quite a devastating one. I found it to be one of the most moving television works I had ever seen, and I will not soon forget it.
Even though Sam Peckinpah is one of the most legendary American filmmakers of the past fifty years, his career has still not been put in the proper perspective. Infamous tales of cocaine and alcohol binges combined with the overwhelming violence found in some of his most famous works have pigeonholed Peckinpah into a particularly dark corner. Noon Wine shows him as less an out of control madman and more a visionary poet…he entered his house justified.
Videophiled
Classic: Sam Peckinpah's 'Noon Wine' - Parallax View Blu-Ray review by Sean Axmaker, September 26,
2014, also seen here: Noon Wine Movies - Cinephiled
User reviews from imdb Author: Neil Doyle from U.S.A.
User reviews from imdb Author: ametaphysicalshark from prejudicemadeplausible.wordpress.com
THE WILD BUNCH C+ 79
I
wouldn’t have it any other way. —Pike
Bishop (William Holden)
Law and order and grace
and understanding are things that have to be taught. … People are born to
survive. They have instincts that go back millions of years. Unfortunately, some
of those instincts are based on violence. There is a great streak of violence
in every human being. If it is not channeled and understood, it will break out
in war or in madness. … [The children’s torture of ants and scorpions at the
beginning of the film is] an ugly game, but it’s a game children play—unless
they’re taught different. They would have had to be taught not to play that game. And man was a
killer millions of years before he served a God.
—Sam Peckinpah, interviewed by Aljean Harmetz, The New York Times, 1969
I suppose I’m something of an outlaw myself. I identify
with them. I’ve always wondered what happened to the outlaws of the old West
when it changed.
—Sam Peckinpah
A film that has the feel of a death march all the way through, as the old ways refuse to give way to the new, and one of Peckinpah’s most prominent themes is given full display, as the last of a dying breed from the old West decides to hold out for just one more score, bringing a dramatic end to an era, one that Peckinpah choreographs with an exclamation point of unfettered violence. This sets the precedent for others to follow, namely Quintin Tarantino, though it should be noted that all of Eastwood’s Sergio Leone films preceded this one, certainly two directors that play the violence card as others play with emotions. What distinguishes this film is the make of the lead pack of outlaws, the last of the holdouts, as they are anything but noble characters, despite the director’s best intentions to persuade the audience to identify with them. What they bring is a ruthless brutality of unmended souls, all broken in some capacity, like the walking wounded, who live their lives bringing nothing but death and hardship to others while they have exactly what to show for it? Drinking and whoring apparently, which is all they ever do in their free time, basically wasting their lives away at the expense of others. These men don’t give a damn about the civilized world, because all they see from it is a mercenary corps of armed goons that the railroad sends out to kill them. Other than that, they’re used to taking what they want without asking. But the real problem with this film, as it is with Tarantino, is the blatant use of stereotypes to demean entire groups of people, women as whores, Indians, Mexicans, soldiers, Generals, Germans, railroad workers, gutter trash, as one character calls poor uneducated whites, all portrayed in such negative light that it’s easy to think they all get just exactly what they deserve, because they’re worthless to begin with. THE WILD BUNCH is tragically flawed in this respect. Who wouldn’t rather be an ignoble outlaw to get away from such a pathetic depiction of society?
William Holden as Pike Bishop leads the bunch, one of his
better roles, a man who gives direct orders and accepts no back talk, yet in
quiet moments reflects upon everything that went wrong in his life. Ernest Borgnine is Dutch Engstrom, his right
hand man, a man always itching for a fight, yet in some ways the more sexually
restrained and morally evolved of the group, a guy who laughs in the face of
adversity, while Warren Oates and Ben Johnson play a tag team act of whiners
and complainers, the low men on the totem pole, always jawing about something,
thinking somebody’s always cheating them, that they’re not getting their fair
share, while Jaime Sánchez as
Angel is the dreamer, the believer in social justice, the man in the corner
gently strumming the guitar and singing Mexican ballads. The unknown factor is Robert Ryan as Deke
Despite their criminality, the bunch is seen as striving to
be human, where the characters are well-defined and the dialogue is crisp and
often amusing. They may be a rag tag
group but they think they abide by a sense of honor through loyalty, as jaded
as that may appear to be. This is the
film’s centerpiece, however, the glue that holds them together, the purpose
that separates them from becoming animals, and yet this is the most glaring
betrayal of all, as they end up leaving Angel behind for the sadistic amusement
and pleasure of a two-bit Mexican General who does business with the bunch, but
singles him out as a thief, betrayed by a woman, leaving Borgnine in a state of
paralysis, as it’s either get shot or leave him behind. When they go in after him, more to evade the
railroad trackers than out of any loyalty to Angel, they act surprised at the inhuman
treatment on display, as he’s being gruesomely tortured in front of the entire
town, no different than a lynching or a public hanging. This sacrifice of one of their own has a way
of humiliating them, eating at their already corrupt souls, and it leads to the
final set piece, known for its mix of standard speed with slo-motion, often
thought of as ballet-like in its depiction of human slaughter, a kind of
nihilist memoriam that has come to typify the senseless violence portrayed in
standard
Post Addendum:
I guess there are books written, generations of
admirers, and careers established by advancing the artistic merits of
Peckinpah, someone I happen to admire myself, but not as a fanboy. The
Wild Bunch has always been a troublesome film for me, and yes, one should
look at the artistic expression of a tormented soul. At the risk of being
thrown off this site for cinema sacrilege, I also have the same trouble with
Tarantino, whose body count is legendary, who is more of a copycat stylist,
adding his own stamp of personality upon the originality of others.
Well, you know, one could say the same of Mozart, who simply
used traditional means of expression and improved upon
them without revolutionizing the artform. Peckinpah is placed in the
pantheon of revolutionaries for his near ballet-like depiction of massive and
grotesque violence in Wild Bunch, leading to other similar stylists
like Tarantino or John Woo, but I find that misleading, preferring to think Bonnie
and Clyde (two years earlier), not to mention Eastwood in the entire Sergio
Leone Western series, were much more radically ahead of their time, and
not nearly so miserablist in spirit.
Thinking back, it is amazing that this miserablism and
downright defeatism was right on the heels of some of the most radically
inspirational thinking this country has ever seen. Forget how they
were infiltrated and obliterated, but the ferocity of spirit and sheer
audacity in the formation of the Black Panthers is beyond description using
today's mentality. How do you explain that to your
grandkids? And we put a man on the moon the same year this film was released,
but there were also plenty of arrests, unending police brutality, and
political assassinations Certainly that era is known for having
higher ups and lower lows, and Peckinpah seemed to relish the stupor that
misery brings, a state of mind not uncommon with returning veterans, as they've
seen horrible things no one on earth should have to see, and they have to find
a way to live with it, continually having to deal with flashbacks swirling
around their head. So that may at least partially explain Peckinpah's
personal demeanor, as his alcoholism and drug use didn't start out of
thin air. So the question is, how does this translate to his
movies?
Some of Peckinpah's films and characterizations are
amazingly tender, but what of the misfits in Wild Bunch, cold blooded
murderers every one? I read that people sympathize with them, but after
seeing them shoot in cold blood one of their own, that would be impossible for
some. And perhaps that's the line of demarcation. These men are without
redemption, yet all of Peckinpah's dialogue and attention to detail goes into
the creation of these characters, who are extremely well developed, while the
railroad men and townsfolk are all stock characters, largely
portrayed as buffoons. Part of what really bugs me is his use of
stereotypical and lazy portrayals of the townsfolk, which seems
cruelly comical, as it's not so funny. In fact it's vulgar and insulting,
no different than demonizing, which reflects, I suppose, the state of mind of
the outlaws. But I'm inclined to attribute that laziness to
Peckinpah, as everyone else in the film is equally revolting, while the
Bunch are portrayed as heroically fighting to retain their independence,
stubbornly refusing to give it up, even against all odds, and eventually,
without really considering their options, accept suicide as an acceptable
state of mind. So in the end, there's no ideals, no heart, nothing to
live and strive for, we're all just revolting creatures? And this is a
time honored masterpiece? I'll stick with Kurosawa's Seven Samurai,
which is a joy to watch, and is all about heart and human sacrifice, but the
defeatist miserablism of The Wild Bunch really leaves me
cold.
Kim Newman from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
A Hemingwayesque answer to the Erich Segal-ish Western revisionism of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Wild Bunch is at once disgusting and romantic investigating the
thesis that “even the worst of us want to be children again—“perhaps the worst
of us most of all.” Director Sam Peckinpah, in his breakthrough picture, opens
with innocent children pouring ants onto scorpions and setting fire to the nest
as the Bunch ride into town disguised as the U.S. Army. Continually cutting
away to kids watching the action, they imitate the grown-up bang-bang games,
and finally take part. Even the repulsive General Mapache (Emilio Fernandez) is
hero-worshipped by a boy who picks up a gun to avenge his death. The opening
bank raid is a complete botch as the corrupt railroad tycoon lures the Bunch
into town with bags of washers disguised as payroll—“silver rings,” gasps a
hopeful idiot when the ruse is revealed. A shoot-out between the bandits and a
crew of degenerate bounty hunters leads to the deaths of many innocents as a
temperance parade
Violent but honorable badman Pike Bishop (William Holden)
is pursued by his former friend Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan). Pike is admired by
his sidekick Dutch (Ernest Borgnine) and a tagalong Mexican (Jaime Sánchez),
tolerated by the fractious, grumpy, and childish Gorch brothers (Warren Oates,
Ben Johnson), and looked over by father figure Freddy Sykes (Edmond O’Brien),
though he abandoned the old man’s crazy grandson (Bo Hopkins) during the
initial raid. With the American frontier closing down, the Bunch find
themselves appalled by the tyranny of pre-Revolutionary
Set in 1913, at the end of the era of the Western outlaw, The Wild Bunch drags the cowboy movie myth into an age of mass-produced murder symbolized aptly by the Gatling gun and the Model-T Ford. Shot through with whiskery Western eccentricity, including a hilarious double act from L.Q. Jones and Strother Martin as human vultures (“This one’s got gold in his teeth”) and a great deal of picturesque dialogue (“Well, kiss my sister’s black cat’s ass”), this was the film that reclaimed the American tradition of the Western back from the Italians and proved that Peckinpah could pop more blood capsules than Sergio Leone. Famous at first for its gory violence, The Wild Bunch has lasted for its elegiac lyricism (“It ain’t like it used to be, but it’ll do”), strong performances, and a sense of dead-end honor.
From the opening sequence, in which a circle of laughing children poke at a scorpion writhing in a sea of ants, to the infamous blood-spurting finale, Peckinpah completely rewrites John Ford's Western mythology - by looking at the passing of the Old West from the point of view of the marginalised outlaws rather than the law-abiding settlers. Though he spares us none of the callousness and brutality of Holden and his gang, Peckinpah nevertheless presents their macho code of loyalty as a positive value in a world increasingly dominated by corrupt railroad magnates and their mercenary killers (Holden's old buddy Ryan). The flight into Mexico, where they virtually embrace their death at the hands of double-crossing general Fernandez and his rabble army, is a nihilistic acknowledgment of the men's anachronistic status. In purely cinematic terms, the film is a savagely beautiful spectacle, Lucien Ballard's superb cinematography complementing Peckinpah's darkly elegiac vision.
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Ben Sachs
For many, the quintessential Sam Peckinpah movie. Terse dialogue amidst laconic pacing, a portrait of hardened masculinity at once gritty and elegiac, and, of course, violence depicted with such exacting detail as to seem (pace Roger Ebert) "a meditation on itself": Everything we associate with the art of Bloody Sam is flown from the rafters here. THE WILD BUNCH was one of Peckinpah's most ambitious productions, utilizing not only thousands of extras (and nearly 100,000 rounds of ammunition!), but also the monumentality of 70mm film. The grandeur seems ironic, given the movie's subject matter: the final defeat of Wild West machismo, as played out by a gang of worn-out criminals on the run in Mexico. Yet the veteran cast—which includes William Holden, Warren Oates, Ernest Borgnine, and (as the lawman on their trail) Robert Ryan—incarnates the characters with an authentic sense of tragedy. Also, Peckinpah's loving recreation of 1913 Mexico places the pathos in precise historical context. To quote at length from Ebert's "Great Movies" review: "In between the action sequences (which also include the famous scene where a bridge is bombed out from beneath mounted soldiers), there is time for the male bonding that Peckinpah celebrated in most of his films. His men shoot, screw, drink, and ride horses. The quiet moments, with the firelight and the sad songs on the guitar and the sweet tender prostitutes, are like daydreams, with no standing in the bunch's real world. This is not the kind of film that would likely be made today, but it represents its set of sad, empty values with real poetry."
The Lumière Reader - DVD Brannavan Gnanalingam
“PECKINPAH makes epics about failures”. But with four crooked
men striding purposefully to save their captured friend, Peckinpah re-wrote the
rules of Westerns and in an instant, became a star himself. The Wild Bunch
is the classic riposte to the idealism of the 60s – with amoral and
self-interested desperadoes existing in a brutal, corrupt and greedy society.
There’s no peace and love here – it’s all cynically shattered by rivers of
blood, throat cuttings and scorpions being eaten up by armies of ants.
It’s easy to forget just how revolutionary this film was. Westerns were
traditionally simple binary opposites of good vs. bad, the nostalgiac Fordian
myth of the frontier and civilisation (of course, movies like The Searchers
excepted). The Wild Bunch forced us to identify with a bunch of immoral
criminals and not with institutions like the railroad, the army or
civilisation. Indeed, the bunch – headed by Pike (William Holden) – aren’t the
nicest guys. They drift around committing casual crime and looking for one
final score. Having been forced to flee to Mexico, they find their amorality
doesn’t quite fit into the immorality they witness.
This is all set-up in a classic, blackly comic beginning. Peckinpah creates a
bravura shootout involving the bunch (dressed as armymen), the corrupt railroad
men with a moralistic Temperance Union (of conservative folk) caught in the
middle. Meanwhile children firstly kill two scorpions by dropping them in an
anthill, and then burn the anthill. The brutal callousness of the children is
only heightened by the inability of morality to do anything but get shot at.
This is a brutally cynical vision typified when a member of the bunch shouts
out "kiss my sister’s black cat’s ass" as he is gunned down.
What follows is one classic scene after another. The romp in the winery; the
“silence” of the train robbery; the portrayal of the men; the integration of
the flashbacks are all examples of genius. The climax is even better. Peckinpah
made some great films, but none were as unified in their brilliance as this.
Peckinpah loved showing us men appearing out of their time. Ideas of duty and
honour only exist when it’s a matter of survival. He never did write women
well, but nor does he seem to care. This is certainly muscular stuff, a vision
of masculinity eating the scorpions but being consumed by the fire.
THE FILM is being released as a two-disc special edition,
with the centrepiece being the original director’s cut which was first shown in
1994. There is a comprehensive commentary by Peckinpah biographers Nick Redman,
Paul Seydor, Garner Simmons and David Weddle. And while occasionally hyperbolic
in their critique (man they love this film), it certainly is insightful. A
second disc features additional scenes (which actually aren’t really that much,
and are kinda dull) and documentaries. This is certainly to appeal to the
die-hard fan – there’s something overwhelming about all this that seems to
remove a little bit of the mystique of the film. It does however, add to the
legend that is Peckinpah – for example, the iconic walk of the last four was
improvised by Peckinpah at the last minute. The scorpion scene was also a late
addition, based on Emilio Fernandez (who played General Mapache) childhood
stories.
The documentary Sam Peckinpah’s West: Legacy of a Hollywood Renegade
features narration from Kris Kristofferson (who starred in Peckinpah’s classic Pat
Garrett and Billy the Kid) and interviews with the likes of David Thomson,
Roger Ebert and Billy Bob Thornton, offering a comprehensive account of
Peckinpah’s life. The Wild Bunch: An Album in Montage is an Oscar
nominated documentary which charts the making of, while an excerpt from
commentator Nick Redman’s documentary, A Simple Adventure Story: Sam
Peckinpah, Mexico, and the Wild Bunch is included where Peckinpah’s
daughter goes back to the town where the film was shot. I’m always overwhelmed
by the amount of information that exists in special edition DVDs like this –
but with a film as impressive as Peckinpah’s masterpiece, it’s almost worth it.
The Wild Bunch is a brutish, nasty, ugly
movie, a film that aims to strip the Western genre of its stereotypes and
clichés and instead strips it of its humanity, of any trace of true honor or
decency or goodness. The film certainly strips the varnish off of great Western
archetypes like the honorable outlaw or the decent lawman on his trail, but it
doesn't replace the absence with anything: it's just a big gaping hole that
goes unfilled. As such, the film is an unremittingly unpleasant experience, watching
rotten people do rotten things to one another, with one band of these rotten
people placed in the central position usually reserved for the heroes in these
kinds of movies. There's a lot of shrill laughter, but very little true humor:
just these men making one another the butt of cruel jokes.
It's certainly hard to work up much sympathy for the gang of bank robbers and
bandits led by aging tough guy Pike Bishop (William Holden). Joined by his
friend Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine), the rowdy, womanizing Gorch brothers
(Warren Oates and Ben Johnson), the proud Mexican youth Angel (Jaime Sánchez)
and the withered old coot Sykes (Edmond O'Brien), Pike and his gang have become
the most wanted men in Texas. They're hunted by a band of bounty hunters led by
Pike's former partner Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), who has no choice but to
hunt down his old friend or else be sent back to prison. The bounty hunters are
portrayed as a gaggle of cackling vultures, hooting and hollering whenever they
come across a corpse, picking at the boots and weapons and gold left behind.
These filthy, stupid, nasty men are so thoroughly amoral that Pike and Deke
actually begin to seem almost honorable in comparison, almost like the good
guys by default, just because there's no one else available who could possibly
fill that vacuum.
In fact, though the outlaws claim to have a code of honor, to be bound together
by their promises and commitments to one another, there's little honor to their
actual behavior. They stop just short of killing one another, but that seems to
be just about their only limit. They're hard men, doing anything for some gold,
not above leaving one of their own to die and thinking very little of it. When
one of the men learns that his grandson has been killed, he shrugs and just
wants to know if the boy acquitted himself with honor — a laughable premise
since the kid was a typically brutish thug who died while abusing and
threatening a group of hostages. Pike and his gang are deluding themselves with
their talk of honor and loyalty, of being bound together as a group, as though
there's something noble in what they're doing. At one point, Pike talks about
doing one last job and then pulling back, the oldest of clichés for Western
outlaws getting old, but Dutch quickly puts things in perspective: "pull
back to what?" These men have nothing beyond the hard, cold lives they've
made for themselves, nothing to look forward to beyond the next gold score and
the whores and booze it can buy for them.
Director Sam Peckinpah signals right from the very beginning
what kind of a movie this is going to be. As Pike and his men ride into town,
dressed as soldiers to rob a bank, they pass by a group of kids by the side of
the road, playing with a pair of trapped scorpions being overrun by swarming
red ants. The symbolism is obvious, and hints forward all the way to the film's
conclusion: a few deadly, dangerous creatures being destroyed, eventually, by
the less powerful but more numerous hordes surrounding them. Throughout the film,
children frequently appear, as images of lost innocence for Pike, who is, with
Deke, alone among these men in seeming to have some regret about what he's
become. The laughing faces of children thus often appear as symbols of
innocence, but just as often it's apparent that children can be taught to
torture, to kill, to serve as soldiers: the innocence Pike seems to remember
and cherish is very fragile indeed, easily overcome by a cruel world. On the
way out of town, after the failed bank job, Pike and his men pass by the kids
again, to see them growing bored of the contest between the scorpions and the
ants; the kids cover the whole ground with straw and light it afire.
These opening scenes establish the elemental themes of the film to come,
particularly in the disastrous bank heist, which backfires when Deke and his
bounty hunters are waiting in ambush. In the resulting melee, the two groups of
killers shoot up the town, and it's not clear who takes more innocent lives
caught in the crossfire, the bandits or the men supposedly working on the side
of the law. The streets are soon filled with blood, bright red and blatantly
artificial blood, each bullet smearing a big red circle on anyone it hits.
After this frenetic shootout, the pace of the film slows down, and the middle
section is languid and episodic, following the disappointed bandits as they
meander around, trying to plan their next heist while evading capture.
They spend some time in Angel's poor Mexican village, where he is outraged to
find that in his absence, Mexican federal troops have stormed the village,
killing his father and stealing his lover away as the woman of the general
Mapache (Emilio Fernández). Angel is the only character in the film who has
some sense of nobility, who wants something beyond himself: freedom from
tyranny for his people. The film's middle section drags, though, mainly because
Peckinpah seems very interested in capturing the milieu of his characters, but
not in delving any deeper into them as characters. Pike gets a few very brief
flashbacks, fading in and out over closeups of his face, but neither him nor
any of the other characters could really be said to have much complexity or
nuance. The closest the film comes to deeper characterization is the blank
stares of Pike whenever he's in an ugly situation, like the excruciatingly long
sequence toward the end where Pike sits uncomfortably staring at the prostitute
he'd just spent the night with, as her baby cries in the background. In
overthrowing old archetypes, Peckinpah only replaced them with new ones, crude
and ugly archetypes biding time until they next bathe in blood. The film picks
up again when the group decides to rob a munitions train and escapes with both
Deke's hunters and the US Army on their trail. But no matter how viscerally
exciting the film's action set pieces often are, it's hard to escape the
overwhelming impression of this film as wallowing, without relief, in dirt and
blood and ugly emotions.
Learning to Do It Right: “The Wild Bunch” – A Personal Reflection Robert C. Cumbow, March 11, 2009, also seen here: Parallax View [Robert C. Cumbow]
The Wild Bunch • Senses of Cinema Tony Williams from Senses of Cinema, May 5, 2006
Algonquin Kids’ Table: The Wild Bunch a collection of writers speak their mind about Peckinpah, in specific THE WILD BUNCH. in a 4-page series of e-mail impressions, from The High Hat
The Frenzy of
the Visible: Spectacle and Motion in ... - Senses of Cinema The
Frenzy of the Visible: Spectacle and Motion in the Era of the Digital,
by Angela Ndalianis from Senses of
Cinema, February 6, 2000
The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]
hackwriters.com - THE WILD BUNCH Directed by Sam Peckinpah - DVD ... Dan Schneider from hackwriters and Alt Film Guide, May 2007
“The Wild Bunch” - Salon.com Michael Sragow, October 20, 2000
Nitrate Online (Carrie Gorringe) review
Eye for Film (Jeff Robson) review [4.5/5]
The Wild Bunch -
Archive - Reverse Shot Tom J.
Carlisle, September 7, 2005
Images Movie Journal Elizabeth Abele
not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor) review
Film Court (Lawrence Russell) review
The DVD Journal | Reviews : The Wild Bunch: Special Edition Dawn Taylor
The Wild Bunch remains a wildly influential & violent masterpiece. Christopher J. Jarmick
Edward Copeland on Film (40th anniversary)
Joel Bocko (Movieman's) Review of Sam Peckinpah's 'The Wild Bunch ... Joel Bocko from Wonders in the Dark, July 26, 2009
FilmInFocus | "Pure Wasted Insanity": Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch ... Walter Donohue from Film in Focus, December 28, 2009
Great Director #76: Sam Peckinpah « News from the Boston Becks April 26, 2009
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [4/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [5/5]
The Tech (MIT) (Scott Deskin) review
Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest) review
Movie Reviews UK review [5/5] Damian Cannon
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]
CINE-FILE: Cine-List Ben Sachs from Cine-File
DVD Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review
DVD
Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Legendary Westerns Collection, Ride the
High Country, The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, and Pat Garrett and
Billy the Kid
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Nate Meyers) dvd review Director’s Cut
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [4/4] [Director's Cut]
DVD Verdict (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [Original Director's Cut]
DVD Clinic (J. Andrew Hosack) dvd review [4/5] [Director's Cut]
DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Director's Cut] [Special Edition] Colin Jacobson
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]
DVD Talk (Daniel Hirshleifer) dvd review [4/5] [HD-DVD Version]
DVD Verdict (David Johnson) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review [HD-DVD Version] Nicholas Sheffo
DVD Talk (John Sinnott) dvd review [4/5] [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Verdict (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch: Demons in the Dust Jonathan Hiott from Associated Content
Lucien Ballard: Legendary Cinematographer Jon C. Hopwood from Associated Content
Celluloid Heroes [Paul McElligott]
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [4.5/5]
Projections Jon
eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Slyder
eFilmCritic.com (Scott Weinberg) review [5/5]
Edinburgh U Film Society (Stephen J. Brennan) review
The Spinning Image (Daniel Auty) review
Exclaim! dvd review Travis Mackenzie Hoover
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review
IndependentCritics.com [Jacob Hall]
Movie Hell (Michael J. Legeros) review [B+] [Restored Version]
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]
Variety (Whitney Williams) review
BBCi - Films (DVD review) Stella Papamichael
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] reviews The Legendary Westerns Collection
San Francisco Examiner (George Powell) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Peter Stack) review March 3, 1995 Director’s cut
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4] August 3, 1969
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies] September 29, 2002
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Gary W. Tooze
Category: People: Sam Peckinpah The Wild Bunch photo from Cinema Is Dope
THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE
USA (121 mi) 1970
Time Out review Geoff Andrews
A strange and fascinating Western from the man renowned for the blood baths of The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs. In gentler vein than usual, he portrays the efforts of a prospector, robbed and left to die in the desert, to turn a waterhole into a personal oasis, and to take revenge on the men who betrayed him. Hogue is probably Peckinpah's most likeable hero, and the film benefits from Robards' wry performance, as well as from the unusual mixture of comedy, action, romance, nostalgic elegy, and even song. The tone is uneven, but it's a touching and original portrait of a man trying to go it alone in the world, with tragically ironic results.
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review
Sam Peckinpah followed The Wild Bunch with this intimate, eccentric, appealing 1970 comedy, which treats many of the same themes in a soft, regretful mode. As Hogue, the tapped-out prospector who has no one but God to talk to in the middle of his yellow desert, Jason Robards puts his theatrical gestures to good use; he's rarely seemed so at home in a movie. But the film belongs to Stella Stevens, who, as the prostitute who moves in with Hogue, shows the kind of warmth and spirit that would have made her a major star had she not been pinioned by changing tastes. With David Warner, a devil's emissary who arrives on a big black motorcycle. 121 min.
The
Ballad of Cable Hogue - TCM.com Paul
Sherman
When we think of the late Sam Peckinpah, we automatically
remember extreme, violent movies like The Wild Bunch or Bring Me the
Head of Alfredo Garcia. Often overlooked are his tender, low-key
early-1970s movies Junior Bonner and The Ballad of Cable Hogue.
The second just debuted on DVD, individually and as part of the Sam
Peckinpah's Legendary Westerns Collection boxed set, and it's among the
best of the director's many odes to misfits.
It's certainly the most light-hearted. It rides a roguish performance by Jason
Robards as the title character, a failed prospector who's left for dead in the
Arizona desert by his two cohorts (Dub Taylor, L.Q. Jones), but who discovers
an oasis that literally and then financially saves him. Cable digs out the
mudhole he finds into a well, makes a deal with the local stagecoach line to
operate a station in what he christens Cable Springs and picks up the
friendship of two other misfits along the way: Hildy (Stella Stevens), a
shapely prostitute he falls for after sighting her when filing his land claim
in the nearest town, and Josh Sloan (David Warner), a self-proclaimed preacher
whose appetite for sin usually trumps his pleas for salvation.
The love between Cable and Hildy is central to the story. Peckinpah, working
from a script by John Crawford and Edmund Penney (neither of whom have any
substantial credits beyond this), leaves little doubt what Cable sees in Hildy,
repeatedly inserting a shot of her cleavage into their first meeting to comic
effect. It's crass, but it captures smitten Cable's lust, and after a while
Hildy is charmed by Cable's cranky individualism. The romance here is unusually
mature, with both Cable and Hildy aware of each other's flaws and willing to accept
them (the pair is in sharp conquest to a stuffy "proper" husband and
wife Cable encounters early in the action). Their relationship is also good and
bawdy, with Stevens, who's never looked more delectable, oozing sensuality and
physical confidence. But she also makes Hildy a warm, wise person who isn't
going to give up her dream of striking it rich in a big city in order to
indefinitely hang out in the desert with Cable. The combination of Stevens'
body, brains, comic timing and emotions makes Hildy the Nutty Professor
actress' best role. She and Robards even sing a song together, one of several
on the soundtrack. The songs and the occasionally speeded-up scenes of
slapstick are hardly highlights of the movie, but they are part and parcel of
its loose atmosphere.
Despite the differences in tone from his more violent films, the movie is
unmistakably Peckinpah's, and not just in Cable's cockeyed idealism and
vengeful streak or the fact that the movie, like its title character, is
lovably ramshackle. Like Peckinpah's Ride the High Country and The
Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue is set at the turn of the 20th
century and, like the protagonists of those movies, Cable becomes an oddball
symbol for the passing of the Wild West. The appearance of the automobile, a
measure of change common to all three movies, becomes centrally important to The
Ballad of Cable Hogue, with the sad climax of the comedy becoming
unexpectedly poignant in its eulogy of the end of an era.
Like the other DVD releases of Peckinpah movies, the disc of The Ballad of
Cable Hogue includes another audio commentary by Nick Redman, Paul Seydor,
Garner Simmons and David Weddle, Peckinpah biographers who mull the contexts
and influences for the movie with little of the stuffiness "film scholar"
audio commentaries usually have. Redman also contributes "The Ladiest
Damn'd Lady," a welcome but flawed half-hour interview with Stevens named
for Hildy's line about what she aims to become in San Francisco. This is a
problematically shapeless featurette, as it omits the interviewer's questions.
Consequently, shifts in subjects can be jarring, as Stevens segues from talking
about how much she liked Hildy to how difficult Peckinpah was ("he only
thought about himself") to the most intriguing tidbit supplied?that, for
cutting her asking price and deciding to work with Peckinpah, Stevens' deal
with the director to appear in The Ballad of Cable Hogue not only
included the promise that Hildy would return to the desert in the script's
third act, but that Stevens also would star in another of his movies. She was
supposed to get the female lead in his 1972 adaptation of Jim Thompson's The
Getaway, but star Steve McQueen nixed that, a disappoint Stevens saw coming
the first time she and McQueen met.
The
Ballad of Cable Hogue Peckinpah film review - Senses of Cinema Martyn Bamber, October 5, 2014
The Ballad of Cable Hogue Robert C. Cumbow from Parallax View, April 29, 2010
The Ballad Of David Sumner: A Peckinpah Psychodrama Kathleen Murphy from Parallax View, May 3, 2010 (Movietone News, January, 1972)
The
Ballad of Cable Hogue - Parallax View Richard T. Jameson from Parallax View, May 1, 2010, originally
published in Film Comment, January/February 1981
The
Ballad of Cable Hogue and Jr. Bonner: Another Side of Sam ... Rick Hermann, May 8, 2010, originally published in Movietone News,
October 1976
“A privilege to work in films”: Sam Peckinpah among friends Richard T. Jameson transcript of a Q & A with the director following a screening of the film in Seattle, July 19, 1978, from Parallax View, April 23, 2010 (Movietone News, February 1979)
The Agitation of the Mind: The Ballad of Cable Hogue Neil Fulwood
[This Savage Art]: Bloody Sam And Theme Explored William Speruzzi from This Savage Art, November 5, 2006
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd
review Legendary Westerns
Collection, Ride the High Country, The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable
Hogue, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Nate Meyers) dvd review
CHUD.com (Russ Fischer) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Ryan Keefer) dvd review
DVD Authority.com (Christopher Bligh) dvd review
The Ballad of Cable Hogue Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Michael Reuben
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] The Legendary Westerns Collection
User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: virek213 from San Gabriel, Ca., USA
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
The Aisle Seat [Andy Dursin] The Legendary Westerns Collection
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] reviews The Legendary Westerns Collection
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Roger Greenspun) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
The Ballad of
Cable Hogue - Wikipedia
STRAW DOGS
USA Great Britain (118 mi) 1971
Taking elements of both the Western and the British horror film, Peckinpah's masterstroke was to shoot Straw Dogs absolutely straight, without the reassuring signposts of either type of film. Hoffman's American mathematician settles with his wife in the village where she grew up, encountering first hostility, then violence from the remote, backward (inbred?) Cornish community. 'Civilised' man's confrontation with irrational violence is handled with impeccable logic. Indeed, looking back, it's hard to see what the charges of gratuitous violence were all about. More intriguing and questionable is Peckinpah's total annihilation of Hoffman's marriage. The violence that befalls it can be interpreted partly as an externalisation of the couple's latent incompatibility (stressed again and again). But the ensuing mixture of fantasy wish fulfilment and pure terror seems more informed by a general misogyny than specific doubts about that particular relationship.
Exclaim! dvd review Michael Barclay
This 1971 film is every pacifist’s worst nightmare, one that would send Gandhi into a moral quandary. Dustin Hoffman plays a mild-mannered mathematician who flees the societal strife of late ’60s America, ending up in his British wife’s rural hometown. There he finds himself the suspicious outsider, both to the locals and to his increasingly estranged spouse, who regresses to the level of an attention-seeking child as he isolates her further with academic distance and patriarchal condescension. When confronted, he cowers, his policies of appeasement and diplomacy resulting in impotence. He’s so wishy-washy that they should have made the character Canadian, not American. In the film’s terrifying final half hour, he begins by bellowing, "I will not allow violence against this house!" Soon enough, his ethical stance quickly unravels into brute force once the barbarians are at his gates. This film, which was released the same month as Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, was banned from video and DVD release by the British censors right up until 2002, and it has lost little of its ability to shock. The politically dubious rape scene is horrifying, due entirely to the strength of the actors and the foreboding, tightly-wound suspense of Peckinpah’s pacing; apparently actress Susan George refused to allow the scene to be even more graphic than it is. Peckinpah’s masochistic morality lesson about a man’s breaking point has only two female characters — one is braless, the other wears ridiculously short skirts — and both of them are implicated in their own demise, with both demanding male attention and becoming helpless in the face of masculine aggression. There are no heroes (nor heroines) here, with Hoffman’s character the subject of equal cheering and jeering. There is an older Criterion version of this film with scholarly commentary and a couple of documentaries; this cheaper version contains zero extras. But Straw Dogs’ horrifying moral morass is so powerful that talking heads and contextualisation would only distract from drawing your own conclusions.
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
In the "Correspondence" supplement to the superb two-disc DVD of Sam Peckinpah's polarizing 1971 masterpiece Straw Dogs, the director delivers a telling response to an irate male viewer: "I didn't want you to enjoy the film. I wanted you to look very close at your own soul." Shot through with all the technical bravado of his groundbreaking anti-Western The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs may be the purest statement on violence in Peckinpah's career, with implications so disturbing that critic Pauline Kael once famously dubbed it "a fascist classic." Stepping away from the Western genre for the first time, Peckinpah directly confronts the violence at the heart of masculinity; as his response to the letter-writer implies, he wanted men to consider the unsettling extent to which it defines their actions. To that end, he cast Dustin Hoffman as the ultimate passive-aggressive wimp, a bespectacled American mathematician who shrinks from conflict at every turn, until a climactic home invasion finally summons his manhood. Hoping to repair their fraying marriage, Hoffman and his beautiful English wife (Susan George) move to her former home, a seemingly quaint Cornish village that pulses with alarming savagery under the surface. Hoffman's quiet contempt for George and the vulgar, snickering locals working on their garage incites tragic consequences, culminating in George's rape by former lover Del Henney and his crony. On the surface, this infamous scene plays out like an indefensible rape fantasy, as George's initial horror melts briefly and shockingly into ecstasy, suggesting a primal response to a man more powerful than her husband. But as film scholar Stephen Prince argues on his insightful commentary track, the scene is a little more ambiguous than it appears, complicated by George's romantic history and her dissatisfaction with Hoffman, who arguably holds her in dimmer regard than the rapist. Peckinpah treads an extremely fine line, but it's a credit to his skill and George's brave, harrowing performance that the film never underplays her violation, which gives the bloody showdown that follows a powerful current of tension and subtext. When Hoffman finally defends his castle, Peckinpah unleashes the full brunt of his disorienting slow-motion and montage effects from The Wild Bunch, but removed from the Western's shoot-'em-up conventions, the violence seems more disquieting and real. Though many still write off the film's macho philosophy as distasteful or silly, the DVD supplements help clear up some common misperceptions. Audiences who knew Hoffman from Midnight Cowboy and The Graduate were used to seeing him as a put-upon hero, but Prince's commentary and Peckinpah's notes cast him as Straw Dogs' heavy, a man whose hidden aggression triggers all of the film's bloody tragedies. Also included on the discs is the solid 82-minute talking-head documentary Sam Peckinpah: Man Of Iron, a pair of crude behind-the-scenes featurettes, and new interviews with George and producer Daniel Melnick that testify to the director's volatile genius. Though studio interference and his own personal demons hampered his later work, Straw Dogs shows a master in control of his effects, which made an artist of Peckinpah's sensibility an especially dangerous man.
filmcritic.com (Mark Athitakis) review [4.5/5]
The movies you love best aren't always the ones whose ideas you agree with. D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation is easy to admire for its technical innovation but easy to despise for its virulent racism; the Nazi hagiography Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will has similar pleasures - and problems. Sam Peckinpah's 1971 masterpiece Straw Dogs isn't as overtly problematic as those films. It's not viciously racist, nor does it glorify totalitarianism. But it's messy stuff all the same. The surface violence that made it famous in 1971 looks more or less timid now, but the deep cynicism at the core of the movie - this is a world where intelligence is suspect, murder equals redemption, and rape is almost tolerable - is still chilling.
Dustin Hoffman plays the hero, David Sumner, and at first he
seems to be continuing in the string of nebbishy neurotic roles he took
previously in The
Graduate and Midnight
Cowboy. A mild-mannered American college professor, he's arrived in
western England with his wife Amy (a brave and brilliant Susan George) so he
can have peace and quiet to work on his 'astral mathematics.' The small town,
full of sad stone houses and often cloaked in fog, is where Amy grew up, and
she's almost immediately stalked by a passel of alcoholic locals. The film's
first five minutes has some virtuosic foreshadowing in it, giving us shots of
David and Amy carrying a large and intimidating 'mantrap' (basically a
man-sized bear trap); tight shots of thuggish locals like Charlie (Del Henney)
getting too close to the pair; a shot of Amy's sweatered chest, noticeably
bra-less, which will become an important plot point later. Subtly and quickly,
Peckinpah announces his three themes: sex, intimidation, and violence. It's
gonna be interesting, but it's not gonna be easy to get through.
Because Peckinpah is so skilled at shading the mood of the neighborhood, it's
easy to lose track of how swiftly everything goes wrong for David and Amy.
David refuses to pressure Charlie and his mates to finish some roofing work on
their house faster, leading Amy to berate David as wimpy and unmanly; the thugs
catch on to the internal strife, leading them to continue their intimidation
inside the couple's home via a dead cat; David's foolish attempts at a
reasonable reconciliation leads to Amy being raped by Charlie and a fellow
hooligan. And there's a distressing moment in that rape scene that's played
like erotica - as if Amy is enjoying her violation, the better to spite her
husband for his spinelessness.
So, to recap: Americans and academics are wimps and fools, Brits are alcoholic
and violence-prone, all outsiders deserved to be abused and mocked, and rape
isn't just a weapon of power men use against women - it's a weapon women use
against the well-meaning but shiftless men who fail to protect them. All of
this comes into play in the final act of Straw Dogs, where the
townspeople attempt an assault on David and Amy's home. Part of the genius of
the film's final sequence is that the violence is so multi-layered, practically
symphonic: David not only has to defend himself and his home (mostly without a
gun), he has to decide if his own wife is worth defending and rethink his old
ideas about authority figures (policemen aren't dealt with sympathetically
here).
Straw Dogs sprang out of the early ’70s as part of a string of movies
that sympathized with vigilante justice; Joe, Dirty
Harry, and Dog
Day Afternoon, among others, all argued that a lone gunman had more
morals and authority than a national justice system. Straw Dogs is the
grittiest of the bunch, and the one most willing to toss us down the rabbit
hole into a confused and bloody moral universe. The title isn't explained in
the film, but it comes from the Taoist manual I Ching, which has a
passage stating that heaven and earth treats all of us like straw dogs - in
other words cheap and easily disposable things. That's a hard sentiment to get
behind personally, but it plays out with ferocious brilliance on film.
Home Like No Place: Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs Criterion essay by Joshua Clover, March 24, 2003
Straw Dogs (1971) - The Criterion Collection
Gotterdammerung [Branislav L. Slantchev] February 13, 2004
Straw Dogs Dana Knowles from The High Hat
STRAW DOGS d: Sam Peckinpah 3-part essay by Dan Schneider from Alt Film Guide, February 28, 2007
STRAW DOGS II – Dustin Hoffman, Susan George Part II
STRAW DOGS III Part III
Eyes opening up - Salon.com Michael Sragow, July 29, 1999
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [4/4]
Criterion Confessions [Jamie S. Rich]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
Colin Marshall: Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971) July 23, 2009
Review: Straw Dogs (Peckinpah, 1971) « Top10Films.co.uk Daniel Stephens from Top 10 Films.uk
Film Court (Lawrence Russell) review
British Horror Films (Chris Wood) review
not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor) review
Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs - Amy Sumner: An Examination of Susan ... Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs - Amy Sumner: An Examination of Susan George's Character, by Vanessa Appassamy from Suite 101, March 20, 2010
Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs - The Killer Inside: An Examination of ... Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs - The Killer Inside: An Examination of David Sumner portrayed by Dustin Hoffman, by Vanessa Appassamy from Suite 101, March 20, 2010
Encyclopedia Of Fantastic Film & TV Kevin Lyons
Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]
PopMatters Brian James
Slant Magazine review Nick Schager
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3.5/5] Richard Scheib
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [3.5/5] also writing the DVD review here: EyeForFilm.co.uk
Edinburgh U Film Society (Stephen Cox) review
Movie House
Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna, also
a brief interview with Gordon Williams, the novelist who felt Peckinpah took
liberties with his book, "The Siege of Trencher's Farm"
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Matt Peterson) dvd review
DVD Times Nat Tunbridge
DVD Verdict (Joel Pearce) dvd review
DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [4/5]
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Jonathan Joy
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
DVD Journal Damon Houx, Criterion Collection
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/4] Criterion Collection
Straw Dogs - Criterion Edition Head Cheez from Horror View
DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Criterion Collection] Colin Jacobson
DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Guido Henkel, Criterion Collection
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Viewpoints Chris Jarmick
The Spinning Image (Andrew Pragasam) review
Not
Again! 24 Great Films Too Painful To Watch Twice | The Best ... #7, The Best Article Every Day, April 14,
2009
Mouchette - Robert Bresson Film Movie Review Mike Lorefice briefly describes the link between Mouchette and Straw Dogs, from Raging Bull Movie Reviews
BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) dvd review
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] reviews The Legendary Westerns Collection
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
JUNIOR BONNER B 88
They
still make cowboys as tough as they ever did. —Rodeo
announcer
Something of a disappointment, really, especially after discovering this is one of the director’s favorite films. Rodeo and bars, bars and rodeos—that’s pretty much what you see here with Steve McQueen as the last of the rodeo bullriders J.R. (Junior) Bonner, a former champion whose era has passed, yet it’s all he gives a damn about. From the opening ballad, the use of split screen, slow motion, demolition scenes, flashbacks, country music, overlapping dialogue and the shift to black and white, this is an Altmanesque style movie that pre-dates NASHVILLE (1975), set in Prescott, Arizona over the 4th of July where nearly the entire movie is filming the Frontier Days parade and rodeo. What little story there is follows the Bonner clan joined together for the occasion, headed by the stern matriarch Ida Lupino and her good-for-nothing, perennially absent husband Robert Preston as Ace Bonner, a man hellbound to follow his dreams, the latest a harebrained scheme to mine for gold in Australia. Prescott is being sold foot by foot by J.R.’s proudly rich brother Curly, Joe Don Baker, a real estate magnate who is a natural born salesman who thinks the world revolves around money and success, who along with his wife believe the rodeo days are over and have little meaning any more. As he reminds his brother, while he’s well on his way to earning his first million, J.R. is still searching for 8 seconds, the time needed to stay on a bull. The disparity in values couldn’t be more starkly contrasted than between these two men, one who represents progress and modernization at any cost, even if it destroys the natural beauty of the landscape, and one who values individualism, pride, and self respect.
The commercialization of the West is prominently featured here, as is the idea of being a success. Ben Johnson plays a heavy-pocketed rodeo promoter, a wise, old time cowboy dressed in a business suit who’s built a career making money by knowing the rodeo business from the ground up, by choosing the right bulls and steers. He offers Junior a chance to work with him, where he’d have a less dangerous and more stable future, but Junior isn’t ready to hang it up just yet, as there’s something about “the life” that still reels him in, where all he has to answer to is the wide open spaces. The man simply refuses to be penned in like the rodeo animals. Perhaps the best scene in the film is the father and son, Ace and Junior, sharing a bottle and having a heart to heart while sitting on a bench at the empty train station, the quietest and probably the loneliest spot in town, the only place excluded from the glitz and exuberance of the everpresent crowds. Like John Huston’s THE MISFITS (1961), which goes to much greater depths, there’s nothing like the heart of a cowboy, which is portrayed like a dying breed, a near extinct species, a profession where men still follow their dreams for the sheer thrill of it. It’s certainly not for the $952 dollar 1st place prize money. In any era, that’s a mere pittance of the money being made in the rodeo business, so cowboys are being exploited financially and they know it, but they do it anyway just to know that they can. There’s very few people that actually understand and know this kind of life, which is why it’s so hard to leave it. It’s such a small community and all your friends are there. There’s an attempt by Peckinpah to create a big, brawling scene in the bar when a fight breaks out, but it’s not much different from other fights and doesn’t really distinguish itself. The endlessly upbeat western music soundtrack really does date this movie, as it’s featured nearly wall-to-wall throughout this film, also the drone of the rodeo announcer begins to sound like that neverending voice at the airport, a constant interruption, which unfortunately detracts from feeling a connection to what’s happening onscreen, becoming more depersonalized. The movie is a sincere portrait, but feels limited by its own style, stifled by the neverending presence of a filmed rodeo event, staying on the surface, never really digging deep enough into anyone’s character.
Peckinpah coasting enjoyably between Straw Dogs and The Getaway with an elegiac reworking of Nick Ray's The Lusty Men, an alternately wistful and raucous family Western about the shrinking frontiers of the rodeo circuit and the anachronism of honour (a suited middle-class horseman rides by with The Wild Bunch embroidered on his saddle-blanket). Some of the symbolism's a bit heavy-handed (wild bulls: bulldozers), but the performances are finely affecting, and Peckinpah captures the contradictory flavours of the new west with a multi-camera set-up at the real Prescott, Arizona rodeo and judicious use of split screen.
User reviews from imdb Author: norm1972_8 from United
States
This is one of my favorite films from one of my favorite directors, and
starring one of my favorite actors. I saw a lot of parallels to my own life in
this film and the road I have chosen for my own life. The simple fact that JR
Bonner lives for "the ride" is really what this film is all about. He
continues to ride even though he's past his prime, and still acknowledges his
father amidst the division he finds upon his return home. His disenchantment
with changing times is very evident here, as this part is pure Peckinpah, who
lived and thrived in the western genre for most of his filmography. This theme
of what the west has become and what it is becoming has been a theme of
inspiration for Sam Peckinpah's films throughout his barely twenty year career
as a director. The Father/Son relationship between Junior and Ace strikes a
chord with me, especially during the cow milking scene when the Bonners lose,
and Ace says "We could've won it", and Junior says "We did
Ace". It is profound, and gets me to thinking of my own Father, whose
Footsteps I walk in and took after even in my Mother's disapproval.
Junior's sole mission in this film is simply to ride "Sunshine", the
bull no man ever rode, and his failure to do so continually haunts him, even as
he rides the bull and finally succeeds by staying on the bull for the 8 seconds
required. His family situation is a backdrop of events leading up to this
triumphant moment that motivates him to continue down the road, and follow his own
destiny.
The scene between Steve McQueen and Joe Don Baker where Curly (Baker's
character) slugs Junior onto the floor of the Palace Bar is a key moment as
well. The two are feuding brothers, one becomes a businessman, and destroys the
Matriarch of the family's house (Ace Bonner, played wonderfully by Robert
Preston). The other (McQueen) follows the path of the Father, not really being
around or being there for his family, but wants to. When Curly invites Junior
into the real estate business, and Junior refuses lets you know that Junior is
his own man. Curly lashes back by saying "I'm working on my first million,
and you're still working on 8 seconds". That lets you know who Junior
Bonner is, and who he has chosen to be.
Junior has a love for his Father the rest of the family can't understand, he
even gives up over half his winnings for riding Sunshine to buy his Dad a plane
ticket to Australia to start a sheep farm. This film has a lot of themes in it;
changing times, division of family, and dedication to something when you are no
longer on top. It is a true interpretation of the life of the rodeo cowboy.
It's a shame this film did not do well when it was first released, I guess it
was ahead of its time like Sam Peckinpah. I totally recommend this film because
it, like The Ballad of Cable Hogue was unexpected and unpredictable, like its
maverick director.
Junior
Bonner - TCM.com Sean Axmaker
At first glance, the elegiac rodeo drama Junior Bonner
(1972) might seem to be an anomaly in the career of Sam Peckinpah, famed as the
director of controversial studies in violence such as The Wild Bunch
(1969) and Straw Dogs (1971). That was surely one of the factors that
attracted Peckinpah to this gentle tale of aging rodeo champion Junior Bonner
(Steve McQueen), who returns to his hometown of Prescott, Arizona, for his
first rodeo in a year – and a return match with an unbeaten bull named
Sunshine. Yet the themes couldn't be more suited to the director. Bonner is the
last of the cowboy loners in the modern world where housing developments and
high finance tear down the past. Peckinpah's first contemporary western is
another tale of an outmoded hero in a changing landscape, the (symbolic)
descendant of the heroes of Ride the High Country (1962), The Wild
Bunch and (later) Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973).
Steve McQueen, who was looking for a change of pace role, signed on to play
Junior and the film was rushed into production to shoot during the real-life
Frontier Days Rodeo in Prescott. Peckinpah hurried back to the states from
England, where he had been editing Straw Dogs, and quickly cast the
supporting roles. Robert Preston plays Junior's father Ace, a former rodeo
champion now coasting on his glory and fantasizing about prospecting for gold
in Australia. Ida Lupino is Junior's mother, tired of Ace's irresponsibility
but still fond of the old charmer. And Joe Don Baker plays Junior's
wheeler-dealer of a brother, who buys out the family homestead and builds a
housing development on it.
The film was shot on location in Prescott. As many as nine cameras were brought
in to film the town parade and real-life rodeo footage. Peckinpah had his
actors play their roles against these real events to give the film a sense of
authenticity (production secretary Katy Haber described Peckinpah's planning
for the parade scene, which featured many of the film's stars, as "like a
military arrangement"). Rodeo legend Casey Tibbs, an advisor on the
picture and the film's stunt coordinator, and co-star Ben Johnson, a rodeo
champion and veteran stunt man in his own right, brought their own experiences
to screenwriter Jeb Rosebrook and helped Peckinpah capture the reality of the
rodeo life. Extras were cast locally and Peckinpah made use of real-life
locations for key scenes, notably the Palace Bar, a second home to the
characters and the site of a comic barroom brawl, a scene that recalls many a
John Ford movie.
It was by most accounts an amiable set, at least by Peckinpah standards. There
were, of course, Peckinpah's irascible nature and inevitable clashes with
actors and crew members. Ida Lupino almost walked off the picture after a
disagreement over her make-up escalated into an argument, until Peckinpah
apologized with flowers and a witty note. "What can you say to that,"
recalled Lupino in an interview. "So I stayed on the picture and loved
it." Otherwise, the greatest tension on the set came from McQueen's
constant rewriting of his scenes, which frustrated his co-stars and led to a
major disagreement over a key scene. According to Peckinpah biographer Garner
Simmons, McQueen refused to let Preston knock his hat off in an argument in the
train yard, thinking it made his character seem less manly. When McQueen
stormed off the set, screenwriter Jeb Rosebrook intervened, explaining to
McQueen that "just sitting there and taking your punishment, if you want
to call it that, from your father made you more of a man." McQueen
considered his perspective and played the scene as written. It's one of the
film's most moving and bittersweet scenes.
Peckinpah's signature style – telephoto and zoom photography, slow motion
shooting during the rodeo scenes, razor sharp editing – is used to excellent
effect. McQueen was allowed to do a few of his own stunts but was doubled for
the most potentially dangerous scenes. But for all the rodeo action, Junior
Bonner is really a gentle character study and a lyrical portrait of family,
respect and integrity in the face of adversity. It wasn't what audiences were
expecting from the first collaboration between Peckinpah, master of violence,
and the taciturn action hero McQueen and it was a commercial failure, in part
due to an ill-considered releasing strategy. Peckinpah and McQueen both urged a
slow release to let a word-of-mouth campaign build. Instead Junior Bonner
was opened wide and audiences expecting a violent film were frustrated with the
gentle drama onscreen. Initial reviews were mixed and many papers ignored the
film entirely, but its reputation has grown over time as critics see the film
for what it really is: one of Peckinpah's loveliest and most personal films.
User reviews from imdb Author: jhclues from Salem,
Oregon
The true individual will carve out a niche for himself in life, and
gravitate toward those endeavors or communities most conducive to maintaining
that autonomy which is to that person, all important. For some, it can be a
life's work, the occupation of seeking out and accepting whatever challenge
will take them down their own road. And who could better personify such a man
than Steve McQueen, who plays the title role in `Junior Bonner,' director Sam
Peckinpah's character study of a man so determined to live life on his own
terms that the only challenge that means anything to him is the one he makes
with himself. When Junior says, `Rodeo time, I gotta get it on down the road,'
it's his way of saying, `Life awaits.' His life; and he's working it in such a
way that whenever he gets to the end, he's going to be able to look back and
say unequivocally, `I did it my way.' That's the challenge. That's Junior
Bonner.
He's been a rodeo cowboy most of his life; a former champion-- like his dad,
Ace Bonner (Robert Preston)-- he's worn out and weary, but not down. The glory
days may be behind him, but that's not what it was ever all about anyway, at
least not for Junior. And who he is and what he's all about becomes perfectly
clear when the circuit takes him back home to Prescott, Arizona, for a Fourth
of July show. When he hits town, Junior approaches Buck Roan, the man who owns
the rodeo stock and will be overseeing the draw for the bull ride; Junior wants
to ride Sunshine, the meanest, toughest bull in the bunch, and he's willing to
pay for the privilege-- he'll pay to ride the very bull that most cowboys would
pay to stay off of. But the way Junior puts it, `There's one of him, and one of
me. I need it--'
In the meantime, Junior reconnects with his family: Ace, who is still looking
for that gold ring, living on the memories of his forty plus years riding the
rodeo, and dreaming of a new start in Australia; Elvira (Ida Lupino), his mom,
who has long suffered Ace's fantasies; and his brother, Curley (Joe Don Baker),
a successful entrepreneur who wants Junior to hang up the rodeo and come to
work for him selling mobile homes-- which he has to know is never going to
happen. The difference between Curley and Junior, in fact, is summed up when
Curley says to him, `I'm working on my first million, you're still working on
eight seconds...'
Stylistically rendered, Peckinpah's film is affecting, and at times almost
disarmingly sincere. Junior's relationship with Ace, for example, is so subtly
underscored with honesty that it rings true-to-life and gives a perspective to
both characters that is contextually invaluable. The way Peckinpah presents it
is definitive, as is the way in which Junior relates to Elvira, Curley, and
even the rodeo itself. It's Peckinpah's way of examining the individualist,
beginning with the outstanding screenplay by Jeb Rosebrook, then by setting a
perfect pace and utilizing some imaginative split-screen photography and slow
motion shots to great effect. And, as with all of Peckinpah's films, there's a
sense of violence-- understated here, less pronounced than that of say, `The
Wild Bunch'-- but present, nevertheless; you can feel it, lying just beneath
the surface of all that's happening, but definitely there. You can see it in
the confrontation between the cowboys and the bulls they ride; in the way
Junior lives his life, that constant challenge of man against beast or against
nature; or in the bulldozers razing an old ranch house, grinding down the old
and weak in favor of the new and the strong. It's pure Peckinpah, and it's
brilliant filmmaking.
Tough, adamant, iconoclastic; Steve McQueen was the perfect choice for the role
of Junior. One of the most underrated actors ever, he has a daunting magnetism
and a commanding screen presence that allows him to dominate any scene if he so
chooses, and he doesn't have to be the guy doing the talking to do it. Consider
his scenes with Preston; Ace may have the lines, but your attention is drawn to
and focused on Junior. And everything McQueen does tells you something about
who Junior is, from the way he walks-- has he spent a lifetime astride broncos
and bulls? You bet-- to the way his hat sits on his head. It's the kind of
natural and detailed performance that sets McQueen apart, and looking back on
this character, and on his whole body of work, you can say without hesitation
that he did it his way. This is one gifted, singular actor who never gives less
than 110%. And there will never be another like him.
Preston, too, is memorable as Ace, a man who, if not larger than life himself,
has dreams that are. You can tell Junior is cut from the same cloth, though Ace
still thinks there's going to be gold for the taking around the next bend, if
only he can get there. Junior, though, has been there and knows there's nothing
around that bend but the next rodeo-- which for him is enough. The biggest
difference between them is the fact that Ace still seems to have the need to
prove himself to the world, while Junior has nothing to prove to anyone but
himself. There's something of `The Music Man's' Prof. Harold Hill in Ace, but
overall Ace is unique, and Preston plays him to perfection.
An absorbing drama that captures a sense of time and place that no longer seems
to exist, `Junior Bonner' is a glimpse at a dying breed, the individual who
takes life head-on without trying to put a spin or a `politically correct'
perspective on it. Like Junior said, `There's one of him, and one of me.' And
that about sums it up. It's the magic of the movies. 10/10.
Junior Bonner The Tao of Junior Bonner, by Hayden Childs from The High Hat
The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Jr. Bonner: Another Side of Sam Peckinpah Essays, Sam Peckinpah, by Rick Hermann, May 8, 2010 (Movietone News, October 1976)
DVD Times Mike Sutton
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: virek213 from San
Gabriel, Ca., USA
User reviews from imdb (Page 2)
Author: Bill Slocum
(slokes@optonline.net) from
Norwalk, CT USA
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review
DVD Verdict (George Hatch) dvd review
DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [3/5]
Audio Revolution (Bill Warren) dvd review
VideoVista review Jeff Young
UpcomingDiscs.com (David Annandale) dvd review [3/5]
DVD Authority.com (Christopher Bligh) dvd review
Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw] The Steve McQueen Collection
DVD Verdict [Dave Ryan] The Steve McQueen Collection
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
THE GETAWAY
USA (122 mi) 1972
An evident precursor to The Driver (Walter Hill scripted both, this one from Jim Thompson's novel). The major strength of The Getaway rests solidly on McQueen's central role, a cold tense core of pragmatic violence. Hounded by furies (two mobs, police, a hostile landscape), he responds with a lethal control, blasting his way through shootouts that teeter on madness to the loot, the girl, and Peckinpah's mythic land of Mexico. Survival, purification, and the attainment of grace are achieved only by an extreme commitment to the Peckinpah existential ideal of action - a man is what he does. Peckinpah's own control of the escalating frenzy is masterly; this is one of his coldest films, but a great thriller.
Shooting Down Pictures » Blog Archive » 961 (103). The Getaway ... March 29, 2009 (excerpt)
Even the likes of Pauline Kael turn their noses at Sam Peckinpah’s most commercially successful feature as a formulaic genre exercise done mostly for the paycheck. But Peckinpah’s creative investment is apparent from the opening sequence, a dense montage that weaves multiple layers of time to establish a cold, mechanistic world in which ex-con Steve McQueen and wife Ali McGraw (who, with his consent, sleeps with a prison warden to ensure his release) rediscover each other with tension and tenderness. The overt mechanical elements of this opening, such as the numbing, clacking sounds of prison doors and work equipment, might be Peckinpah’s way of acknowledging the trappings of heist film formula with which he must contend. The film is far from resembling the satire on the genre he had planned, but it expresses his candid, problematically misogynist views on sexual relationships and loyalty perhaps more complexly than any of his features, though as usual the depth lies more on the male side of the ledger.
This time Peckinpah’s Man, that molotov cocktail of helplessness and violence grubbing for salvation, is imbued with a cold professionalism unparalleled in his filmography thanks to McQueen’s tightly coiled appearance of masculine assurance: unflinching eyes incessantly assessing everything around him; a body that betrays nary a twitch of unnecessary movement. He’s among the least sentimental of Peckinpah’s heroes, but this should not be confused with a lack of pathos; McQueen’s character finds redemption in a job well executed, and the upholding of a moral code throughout – involving repeated beatings of McGraw whenever she messes up. Peckinpah validates McQueen’s behaviors by contrasting him with Al Lettieri, a heist accomplice who betrays McQueen, then kidnaps a doctor who saves his life and seduces the doctor’s voluptuous, dim-witted wife (Sally Struthers), enacting a comic and nightmarish opposite of McQueen and McGraw’s Ideal Man and Woman. While I don’t have that much use for Peckinpah’s worldview, and consider his prominence largely a sign of pervasive misogyny in Hollywood culture (I’ll reconsider my position the day that Hollywood regularly produces eloquently man-hating movies by female directors), I have to admit that few directors are as good at dramatizing their pathologies as Peckinpah.
The Getaway (Deluxe Edition) Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film Paul Sherman
There are three important ways to look at 1972's The
Getaway: as a Steve McQueen movie, a Sam Peckinpah movie or a Jim Thompson
movie. The new The Getaway Deluxe Edition DVD does a good job at the
first, as it partially owes its existence to Warner Home Video's recent Steve
McQueen boxed set. It covers director Peckinpah's role more extensively,
rounding up the trio of Peckinpah biographers from MGM's Bring Me the Head
of Alfredo Garcia disc for another affable audio commentary. Alas, it only
incidentally touches upon the movie in relation to Thompson, whose novel
provided the source material (other Thompson adaptations over the years have
included The Grifters, The Killer Inside Me and After Dark, My
Sweet). So while this is a very good DVD of a very good action-thriller, I
wouldn't go so far as to call it definitive.
The Getaway is relatively conventional territory for both Peckinpah and
Thompson. The story of veteran bank robber Doc McCoy (McQueen) and wife Carol
(Ali McGraw) eluding a corrupt backer (Ben Johnson) and a vengeful cohort (Al
Lettieri) after a Texas heist, this bullet-riddled road movie is faithful to
most of Thompson's novel, despite betraying the overall irony of Thompson's
title (his tale is a steady descent into hell in which Doc and Carol do not get
the escape hatch afforded their movie counterparts). Many of the best sequences
come right out of the novel, smartly rendered by Peckinpah, while the book's
most extreme endurance test for the couple (three days and nights spent in a
sweltering dung heap), has been wisely transferred to a death-defying trip in
the hold of a garbage truck with a hydraulic compactor the driver is very fond
of using.
We usually think of excess when we think of Peckinpah, most readily from the
trademark slow-motion violence of 1969's The Wild Bunch. We don't often
think of his nuts-and-bolts filmmaking. Yet despite the gunplay and occasional
slow-mo in The Getaway, the movie is ample evidence that he could really
tell a story in more traditional ways, too. The crisp opening detailing the
grinding monotony of Doc McCoy's prison stint, the cross-cutting among all the
elements of the heist and a tense sequence in which McQueen scours a train for
a con man who bamboozled Carol out of their bag of ill-gotten money are all
textbook examples of visual storytelling. Peckinpah and McQueen had just come
off of the flop Junior Bonner together (another fine collaboration),
while McQueen laid a more high-profile egg before that with Le Mans, so
the emphasis here was to make a crowd-pleaser, and they definitely succeeded.
Balancing the crime story is the romance between Doc and Carol. Their
relationship has to survive the fact that she slept with a member of the parole
board (Johnson) in order to get Doc out of jail, as well as overcome the stress
of being outlaws on the run. This part of the story doesn't date as well as the
brisk action. McGraw's performance has always been flat, but her star power
gave it a big boost when the movie was new (this was her first film after the
pop culture phenomenon that was Love Story). She's beautiful, and we
don't doubt Doc's affection for Carol for a moment (indeed, McQueen and McGraw
each divorced their spouses to be married after falling in love during the
shoot). But, 30+ years later, McGraw comes off as awfully dainty for the
rough-and-tumble role. Typically for a Peckinpah movie, the stars bump into all
sorts of colorful supporting players during the story, many, like Johnson,
familiar faces in the director's movies. These include Dub Taylor, Slim
Pickens, Bo Hopkins and Richard Bright.
In addition to the audio commentary with the Peckinpah biographers, there is
also a 20-minute compilation of audio clips of the director and his two leads
separately talking about the movie. Perhaps the most interesting thing in it is
McQueen's comment that they took High Sierra as the model for how The
Getaway should look and feel, and that he wanted Doc McCoy to be the same
sort of sympathetic underdog criminal as Bogart's Roy Earle in Raoul Walsh's
1941 thriller. I wouldn't say we get as emotionally attached to McCoy as we do
to Earle because, for better or worse, the movie jettisoned the novel's
background details and because McGraw is no Ida Lupino (but who is?). McQueen
mentions having read Thompson's 1958 paperback novel, while Peckinpah states
that he tried to option the book a decade before, but someone had beat him to
it. That someone was the movie's producer, David Foster.
A Thompson featurette might have gotten into how The Getaway was the
first Thompson movie adaptation, and how in the past 20 years his searing
novels have become more famous than ever and been filmed more than ever.
Thompson was still alive when Peckinpah made The Getaway, but as pulp
paperbacks became a thing of the past, he had been relegated to penning
novelizations, including one for TV's Ironside. No doubt the success of
the McQueen movie was a financial and emotional shot in the arm for the man.
I'm sure Thompson biographer Robert Polito (who appears on the extras on the
DVD of The Grifters) and The Getaway screenwriter Walter Hill
(who's nowhere to be found on this disc) would have tales to tell about
Thompson. Of course, the movie was remade unremarkably in 1994 with Alec
Baldwin and Kim Basinger, another married couple, playing the leads. Like
McQueen and McGraw, they broke up a few years after playing Thompson's married
criminals.
‘Tough ole hide’: The Getaway Essays, Film Reviews, Sam Peckinpah, by David Willingham from Parallax View, May 10, 2010 (Movietone News, May – June, 1973)
The Getaway • Senses of
Cinema Rick Thompson from Senses of Cinema, April 22, 2004
Director Sam Peckinpah: what price violence? - Google Books Result What Price Violence? by P.F. Kluge from Life magazine, August 11, 1972
Classic Film Review: Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway R.J. Martin Jr. from Associated Content
filmcritic.com (Keith Breese) review [3/5]
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [7/10]
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [4/5]
Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Jonny Lieberman
Amnonymous [Amnon Buchbinder] also reviewing THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND
DVD Verdict [Maurice Cobbs] Deluxe version
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]
DVD Verdict (David Ryan) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]
DVD Talk (Adam Tyner) dvd review [3/5] [HD-DVD Version]
DVDTown - HD-DVD Edition [John J. Puccio]
Real Political Face Talk - Blu-ray Review Nate
DVD Verdict (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
DoBlu.com Blu-ray Review [Matt Paprocki]
Talking Pictures [Aaron Asadi]
VideoVista review Jai Clare
George Chabot's Review of The Getaway
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna
User reviews from imdb Author: pzanardo
(pzanardo@math.unipd.it) from
Padova, Italy
User
reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: johnnyboyz
(j_l_h_m@yahoo.co.uk) from
Hampshire, England
User
reviews from imdb (Page 4) Author: Bill Slocum
(slokes@optonline.net) from
Norwalk, CT USA
User reviews from imdb (Page 4) Author: Boba_Fett1138 from Groningen, The Netherlands
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] The Essential Steve McQueen
The Getaway Script - transcript from the screenplay and/or Sam ... Script-o-rama
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Gary W. Tooze
PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID A- 94
There are various cuts of this film, the original at 106 minutes which was drastically cut by the studios, a 1988 restored version which adds 15 minutes, and a 2005 Special Edition DVD that cuts half of the added minutes. By all accounts, the 1988 restored version is the way to go, but a recent theater screening turned out to be the 115 minute Special Edition version which cuts some actors out of the movie completely, edits out certain lines as well while re-structuring various scenes. Peckinpah’s last western feels like a somber death march, a mournful, poetic elegy to an end of an era where the values that men stood by were slowly disappearing along with their freedoms, replaced by the will of a few rich and powerful men who ruled the territory, monetarily and politically, putting an entirely new restricted face of commerce on what used to be wide open spaces and the land of the free. The applicable metaphor, which is mentioned in the film, is their utter disgust at men who would fence in the West, in this case, cattle barons. Set in New Mexico in 1881, James Coburn, in what is easily the performance of his career, chucks that career-defining hustler’s grin for a solemn frown as Pat Garrett, a world weary former gunslinger turned lawman, a man who rode with Billy the Kid in some capacity in their past, who opens the film riding into town visiting the Kid, a very young and clean shaven Kris Kristofferson, warning him to get out of the territory, as in 5 days he’ll become a lawman sworn to get rid of him, cleaning up the state, making it safer for bankers and cattle owners and prospective business ventures. Even earlier, before the opening credits, there is a Black and White sequence of Garrett himself getting gunned down, an event that happens some 30 years into the future, certainly a foreshadowing of ominous things to come, and an interesting use of differing time periods where the death of both are mysteriously but inevitably linked together.
The first 45 minutes of the film are simply extraordinary, featuring the music by Bob Dylan, whose name is credited above the title of the film and who also appears in a small role, where the mixture of sepia and Black and White from the opening set the tone for some astonishing use of ‘Scope by cinematographer John Coquillon, capturing the essential brightness of the empty desert landscape in early morning, but also the extreme light at dusk, where one of the more brilliant shots is seeing a rider on a horse on the far shore of a river get buried in the dark shadows, but a clear and vivid silhouetted reflection can be seen in the water as he rides across the entire length of the screen. Two of the opening set pieces are riveting, among the best in the film, the taking of Billy alive and his subsequent jailhouse break out, which is unlike anything seen before or since. After his memorable escape, someone brings him a horse which immediately throws him, an unusual commentary since it happens in front of a gawking crowd on Main Street right in front of the hangman’s execution site they are constructing. From that point on, Garrett is on a mission to appoint involuntary deputies to help go after him, avoiding until the end the one place he’s most likely to be, instead visiting a litany of ornery characters throughout the vast territory who are never introduced but seem to have a history together, whose faces are synonymous with westerns, who simply appear out of thin air, where virtually every sequence is built around inevitable killings, compiling a high body count by the end, even for Peckinpah. These secondary characters are essential, however, as they provide the emotional heft of the film, starting out with Slim Pickens and his rifle toting wife Katy Jurado, carrying bullets in her breast, both of whom appeared in Marlon Brando’s ONE-EYED JACKS (1961) a decade earlier, who silently express with their eyes everything we need to know about the murderous and endlessly bleak landscape.
As Garrett wanders through the vast expanse of the territory, it’s obvious he’s not in any hurry, that he’s simply setting the tone for his mission by announcing his intentions across the state. The Kid as well shows no sign of panic or alarm, as the film loses much of its initial vigor and sense of expectation and instead seems to meander slowly to its inevitable conclusion. Unlike Brando’s film, based on the same Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid source material, The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones by Charles Neider, who inverts the story making the Kid the killer, another infurioratingly downbeat western where a maniacal lawman (Karl Malden) seeks public glorification by building a reputation of killing or humiliating a notorious outlaw (Brando), similar to Gene Hackman’s Sheriff “Little Bill” in Clint Eastwood’s UNFORGIVEN (1992), sadistic lawmen who will resort to murder as a way of enforcing the law, Garrett seeks no public affirmation and asks for no special compensation, and is instead driven by a complex code of honor that is already outdated, like the end of the samurai era, and he wearily knows it, where the routine of killing has become a rotten job doing the bidding of others who are more ruthless and brutally despicable than the so-called outlaw. While there may have been a motivation at the outset, as the Kid broke out of his jail and he sought revenge, but by the end, after the passage of time, all that is surprisingly meaningless, as what he’s asked to do is kill a friend, man to man, someone he respects perhaps above all others, especially those who are paying him to do it. This hint of anguish and regret affects every move he makes as he eventually closes in, actually waiting patiently outside the Kid’s window as Kristofferson is making love to his eventual wife Rita Coolidge, another sign of obvious affection and respect. But this is a story of a destroyed friendship, one who remains a free spirit until the end and another who is encumbered by age, duty, and responsibilities, who disappointingly accepts compromise and domesticity, all of which adds to an alcoholic portrait of bitterness and scorn, contemptuous of the vile men he works for and the short-sighted interests of lawmen who seek the same aim, thinking a kill may somehow bring them glory. For Garrett, fulfilling his duty leaves a pathetic emptiness, dulling any hopes that the future offers any glimpse of righteousness or respectability.
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Reader
Sam Peckinpah's cut of his last major western (1973) runs 15 minutes longer than the release version and is structured differently. Filmed in 'Scope and originally scripted by Rudy Wurlitzer (though his script was much revised under the supervision of Peckinpah and others), this story about the last days of Billy the Kid, framed by the death of Pat Garrett in 1908, is perhaps Peckinpah's most elegiac picture and certainly one of his most romantic. Peckinpah's cut is a lot more coherent, though it's still a film of uneven pieces. The movie tends to be stronger in its handling of secondary characters—Slim Pickens's death scene is a classic, and Katy Jurado, Jason Robards, Chill Wills, Jack Elam, Gene Evans, and Harry Dean Stanton all acquit themselves memorably—than in its treatment of the three leads. James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson have their moments, but at times the mythic heft of the story seems to weigh them down, and Bob Dylan is too clearly Bob Dylan to portray anyone else convincingly.
Restored and reassembled, this is the full and harmonious movie that Peckinpah wanted to be remembered by before the butchers at MGM got their hands on it. Starting with a framing sequence from 1909 which shows Coburn's aged Garrett being gunned down by the same men who hired him to get Billy the Kid back in 1881, the additional 15 minutes introduce the menacing figure of Barry Sullivan's Boss Chisum, a frolicsome brothel scene ('Last time Billy was here it took four to get him up and five to get him down again'), some engaging Wild West cameos, and a less obtrusive use of Bob Dylan's soundtrack. All in all the film is more playful, more balanced, and very much an elegy for the old ways of the West, rather than a meandering bloodthirsty battle between Kristofferson's preposterously likeable outlaw and Coburn's ambivalent survivor, Garrett. Like Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, it both records and condemns the passage of time and the advent of progress; and there is a sombre, mournful quality which places the film very high up in the league of great Westerns.
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Sam Peckinpah cuts scenes on lingering facials like no one ever has, and James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson are perfect in the leads. Durango (Old Mexico) couldn't look more like New Mexico in the olden days. Without question one of the great westerns ever, but clarity is gained when you realize that the studio radically edited the film, cutting out 15 key minutes and rendering a final cut that Peckinpah demanded that his name be removed from. For all that they couldn't take out the artistry, the haunting sense of foreboding and lost opportunity as big business turns the outlaw gunners against themselves, in order to make things safe for civilization (which would now serve industry), and maybe turn a quick buck in the process. One of the cut scenes revealed that Garrett (Coburn) was killed by the man who ordered him to kill Billy. The political undertones are maintained nonethless, with Kristofferson occasionally muttering about "selling out," in reference to his one-time friend who should know better. James Coburn has never been better, an elegant but devastated outlaw wooed by the dark side to become a lawman; something of a Wild West Peter O'Toole crossed with a vampire from Santa Fe vogue. The scenes between Slim Pickens and Katy Jarado (who appears to be the baddest gun in the west) are incredibly poignant, particularly the final one accompanied by the Bob Dylan score. It takes great talent to typecast Dylan as a cowboy, accomplished here by giving him a feather in his hat, knives instead of guns, and reading a grocery inventory in distinctively iniambic poetic meter. The film has the feel of the land, the timing of truth, and offers wisdom beyond words: the latter two assets no doubt being the ones that made the studio desperate to cut it. Not one to be easily deterred, Peckinpah would make his points even more severely in Convoy. "God damn law's ruining this country."
Pat
Garrett & Billy the Kid - TCM.com
Paul Tatara
By the time Sam Peckinpah began filming Pat Garrett &
Billy the Kid in 1972, it would be fair to say that the director himself
was considered an outlaw. Far more graceful as a filmmaker than as a man,
Peckinpah drank, cursed, and punched his way through a career that reached a
zenith with The Wild Bunch (1969), an extraordinarily violent meditation
on dying Western ideals. From there on, though, Peckinpah's pictures were
flawed character studies that still bore the indelible imprint of their
creator. To work on a latter-day Peckinpah film was to be immersed in a
three-ring circus of antagonism, with the director serving as both the clown
and the ringmaster. The best anyone could do was take a deep breath and hang on
tight.
Peckinpah bookends his version of the Billy the Kid legend with scenes of the
broken lawman, Pat Garrett (James Coburn), reflecting on his own loss of
dignity as capitalists shatter the codes of the Old West. The rest of the movie
unfolds as a gritty memory, in which Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson) escapes
from a Lincoln, New Mexico jail and heads to Fort Sumner. There, he confronts
his old friend, Garrett, who's been hired by the Governor (Jason Robards, Jr.)
to bring the outlaw to justice. A mysterious newspaperman named Alias (Bob
Dylan) is so seduced by Billy's mystique, he decides to tag along on the
doom-laden journey. Peckinpah is especially pitiless, even by his own
standards, as he carefully orchestrates Billy's inevitable demise.
Peckinpah viewed Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid as an allegory for the
greed that had corrupted America - the pillage being conducted by its shady
politicians. Whether that's readily apparent in the finished film is debatable.
Perhaps Peckinpah would have made the picture he intended to make had he not
been saddled (no pun intended) with MGM president Jim Aubrey, who was known to
openly antagonize filmmakers who didn't toe the corporate line. In David Weddle's
Peckinpah biography, If They Move...Kill 'Em, Coburn contended that
Aubrey "would hire big-time directors and top writers and stars, and then
step in and f**king destroy the film. He was totally irrational." Aubrey
and Peckinpah together would prove to be a disastrous combination.
One of the loopier aspects of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid is the
chin-scratching presence of Dylan, the songwriting visionary who changed the
face of popular music back in the Sixties. Dylan was originally recruited by
screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer to supply some music for the movie's soundtrack.
However, after watching and being awed by The Wild Bunch, Dylan asked if
he could also act in Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. As a kid, he said,
he always wanted to be in a Western, and this seemed like as good a time as
any.
It wouldn't be long before Dylan was wondering what he had gotten himself into.
In the documentary, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs and Rock
'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (2003), Wurlitzer recounts Dylan's
introduction to Peckinpah: "As we walked up to the house, there was a
scream, and (Peckinpah's) maid ran out, terrified, and we heard a
gunshot." When Dylan and Wurlitzer entered the house, they found Peckinpah
standing in front of a shattered mirror, stark naked, holding a bottle of booze
and waving a gun around. To make matters even worse, Peckinpah claimed to have
never heard of Dylan (this seems unlikely, at best), and wasn't particularly
interested in having him in his movie. Luckily, that all changed when Peckinpah
heard a ballad that Dylan had written about Billy. Peckinpah loved the song so
much, he wound up listening to it over and over again for inspiration.
The tone of shoot was set after a couple weeks of filming, when everyone gathered
to watch the first batch of rushes. The footage had to be shipped to a lab in
L.A. to be developed, so, at this point, not even Peckinpah had seen any of it.
It became clear after just a few minutes that none of the master shots were
usable - a faulty lens caused half the image to fall permanently out of focus,
a mistake that wouldn't have occurred had Aubrey sent Peckinpah a camera
technician as he requested. Peckinpah, who, along with everybody else, had been
drinking tequila while watching the footage, promptly drug his chair in front
of the crew, stood on it, and urinated on the screen. For the rest of the
shoot, rushes would have to be viewed on a screen with an "S"-shaped
stain in the middle of it.
Coburn describes what happened then: "Aubrey didn't know we were
reshooting the stuff till he saw it in the rushes back in L.A. Then this big
edict came down, 'You can't shoot any more retakes!'" But that didn't stop
Peckinpah and his gang. "Well," Coburn continues, "we reshot
everything that was necessary. But we had to reshoot it in the context of
shooting the new scenes. We were reshooting scenes at lunchtime, we were
reshooting at the end of the day, we were reshooting whenever we could.'"
The problems on Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid were of the Apocalypse
Now (1979) variety- monumental setbacks that might have sunk another, less
obsessed director. Rainstorms repeatedly halted filming and ruined sets. A
large chunk of the cast came down with the flu (there's one scene that Coburn
didn't even remember filming because he was so ill). The script was being
extensively re-written on the set. Even Dylan inadvertently added $25,000 to
the final tab when he went jogging and ruined a shot of the sunset that
Peckinpah had been preparing to capture for several hours! The already boiling
tension between Peckinpah and Aubrey increased with each new incident.
As the production drug on, Peckinpah's alcoholism and paranoia finally got the
best of him. Reportedly, he would begin each morning with a big glass of vodka,
just to stop shaking. Then, when he got to the set, he'd mix vodka and
grenadine all day long, until he was in a rage. "After about four hours,
Sam was gone," Coburn said. "He was a genius for about four hours,
then it was all downhill." At one point, Peckinpah even posed for a joke
photograph that he sent to the Hollywood Reporter, showing him lying on
a hospital gurney while receiving a bottle of whiskey through an intravenous
drip.
"On that film Sam created an atmosphere that was so poisonous," one
crew member recalled. Peckinpah even had an assistant tap the telephones, so
conversations could later be perused to see if any crew members were planning a
revolt. He also flew actors to Durango and purposely kept them in hotel rooms
for weeks on end, on full salary, just to get back at Aubrey. He even billed
MGM for mariachi bands that he hired to entertain the crew...or, more
specifically, to aggravate his nemesis in Los Angeles.
With all this agitation, it's a miracle that Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
holds together at all. Though not a masterpiece, it still contains moments of
intense beauty and bedraggled poetry. As an accurate portrait of the man behind
the camera, it can't be beat. One thing is certain - if you enter the world of
Sam Peckinpah, you play by Peckinpah's rules. Even if they're not always
coherent.
A note on the original theatrical release of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid:
For years the only available version of Peckinpah's 1973 feature was the
studio-approved edit which the director disowned. Recently, however, Warner
Video has released the studio version on a DVD along with a Director's cut of
the film which is much closer to the version Peckinpah intended. The latter
version has caused some critics to change their original opinion of the film.
For example, David Thomson wrote in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film that
"Pat Garrett is one of the great American films, entrancing,
perplexing, and - may I add - growing: only recently, a letterboxed videotape
came my way with a long, bitter scene between Garrett and his wife that changes
my sense of the film (yet again). For there are versions of Pat Garrett,
and there is a Peckinpah cult that delivers Sam's real or deepest wishes long
after his death. Why not? So many of his films were butchered, adding confusion
to plot lines that are often cryptic and episodic."
Pat Garrett and
Billy the Kid Tom Block from The High Hat
Pat Garrett &
Billy the Kid • Senses of Cinema
Garrett Chaffin-Quiray, March 21, 2003
Drifting Out of
the Territory: Sam Peckinpah's Pat ... - Senses of Cinema Maximilian Le Cain from Senses of Cinema, also seen here from Nonstop Design, April 10, 2001:
Sam
Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
DVD Times [Mike Sutton] Mike Sutton, 2-disc Special Edition
Review: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid Film Reviews, Sam Fuller, by Richard T. Jameson, May 12, 2010 (Movietone News, May – June, 1973)
Oggs’ Movie Thoughts: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid November 12, 2006
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid Colin from Ride the High Country
Movie Review: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid - Western Ballads and Gunslingers Mule from Blog Critics
Pedro Sena retrospective [4/5]
Ruthless Reviews review Matt Cale
Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Exploded Goat review [Joe Cormack]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Legendary Westerns Collection
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] Legendary Westerns Collection
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] Legendary Westerns Collection
The Aisle Seat [Andy Dursin] Legendary Westerns Collection
VideoVista review J.C. Hartley, 2-disc Special Edition
DVD Verdict (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [Special Edition]
CHUD.com (Russ Fischer) dvd review 2-disc Special Edition
DVD Authority.com (Christopher Bligh) dvd review [Special Edition]
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Urban Cinefile dvd review Andrew L. Urban
Edinburgh U Film Society (Andrew Abbott) review
AvaxHome -> Sam Peckinpah - Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1988 ...
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA B+ 92
USA Mexico (113 mi) 1974
Sam Peckinpah grew up in Fresno, California
in a family with a legal background, where generations of lawyers, including
judges and Congressmen went back something like a hundred years, where early on
he developed a disdain for the subject, instead joining the Marine Corps during
World War II, but saw no action in combat.
However he did witness atrocities in China between the Japanese and
Chinese soldiers where the American forces were not allowed to intervene. Additionally, he applied for a discharge
while in Peking (Beijing) to marry a Chinese woman, but his request was denied,
an incident that mirrors his troubles with authority throughout his
lifetime. After his discharge, he became
a theater major, receiving his Masters degree in theater at USC, working as an
assistant to director Don Seigel, but he got his first real start in the film
business in the late 50’s by submitting scripts for many of the popular Western
TV shows, one of which was rejected on Gunsmoke (1955
– 1975) due to the violent content but was developed into
its own series, The
Rifleman (1958 – 1963), where he directed four episodes. Peckinpah’s insistence upon violent realism
put him at odds against the show’s producers, but it was here that he met actor
Warren Oates, who would become a lifelong friend, drinking and working
companion, also one of his neighbors, living with an eclectic group of writers
and artists in and around Livingston, Montana, including Richard Brautigan,
Thomas McGuane, Peter Fonda, and Margot Kidder.
When Peckinpah directed his first film THE DEADLY COMPANIONS (1961), he
quickly learned how easily studios could re-edit films to their liking, a
practice that would haunt him to his grave, as few things in life irked him
more. Of his fourteeen feature films,
only four were released the way he wanted, Ride
the High Country (1962), THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE (1970), JUNIOR BONNER
(1972), and BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974). His quarrels with studio heads are legendary,
where in the 60’s he was one of the few directors who went public with his
growing discontent with the studio system, as he felt they were ruining his
films. Pat
Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) is a case in point, where the studios
arbitrarily cut 15 minutes, even eliminated certain actors, releasing a
truncated version disowned by the cast and crew, later restored fifteen years
later in 1988, four years after Peckinpah’s death, to some of the best critical
acclaim of any Peckinpah film.
This is notable for being the last film Peckinpah directed that he wrote himself, giving him personal sway with the subject matter, where Oates rather brilliantly plays an ordinary character who is pushed beyond his limits, where he single-handedly takes on all the smug power brokers who think they control the world, but they’re little more than small time operators with hired guns, making them appear to be big shots. The film can be seen as a nihilistic expression of Peckinpah’s feelings towards the movie industry, where he’d like to annihilate many of the controlling interests, who are seen as petty and vindictive, with very little separating their mindset from that of the mafia. It should also be pointed out that those who serve in the military see a world on the battlefront of ruthless horror, where chaos turns to madness, and next to nothing makes sense. Peckinpah brings this moral abyss into his films, where characters are hard-pressed not to cross that line into an interior wasteland where life has no meaning. Much of the film was inspired by John Huston’s obsessive journey of greed and self destruction in THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRE MADRE (1948), as both were shot on location in Mexico, significant portions of the dialogue are in unsubtitled Spanish, and one of the characters in the film, Gig Young as Quill, a local gangster, amusingly introduces himself, when asked, as Fred C. Dobbs, the name of Bogart's character in the movie. Much like Tabu (2012), the film has two halves, opening with an idealized vision of innocence, love, and Paradise, but concluding with Paradise Lost in an ever more escalating series of violent and bloody confrontations, where Oates becomes unhinged, losing all sense of rationality, acting instead on pure instinct, where what was a trail of vengeance against Mexican outlaws becomes an interior journey of personal anguish and despair, guided by his own self-loathing and contempt, mostly with himself, setting a dour interior mood for what is easily one of the grimmest Peckinpah pictures.
This is on the list of often overlooked films, and rightly so, as it was critically condemned upon release, called ugly and repugnant, among the worst films ever made, it was a huge box office failure, yet others recognized the ingenious originality of the work, becoming a modernist expression plunging into the absurdist wasteland of a man’s soul, perhaps an American Western as Samuel Beckett might have imagined it. A sloppy and rough-around-the-edges movie, it has a peculiar power to both disgust and enthrall, given a highly realistic yet seedy Mexican setting where heroes and outlaws all share many of the same traits, where at times it’s difficult to tell any difference between them, where humanity is a blend of good and evil, but the lines are too often blurred during the journey into the heart of darkness, obsessively driven to find the mythical Golden Fleece from Greek tragedy at the sacrifice of everything else, where choices often don’t make sense in the thralls of a magical quest that has life-changing implications. This is a story of contradictions, given a near mythical opening of unspoiled innocence, yet in the next instant the mood couldn’t be more brutally shocking, where a young pregnant girl is stripped to the waist by her own father demanding to know the name of the man who dishonored his family, offering a million dollar reward for the man’s head. Oates is a small-time American piano player and part owner of a tiny Mexican bar where women and drink are both cheap commodities, where Peckinpah distinguished himself from the John Ford westerns by offering seedy bars, cheap women, and men driven by self-interest, not any glamorized view of heroism. While Peckinpah is known as one of the undisputed poets of alcoholic cinema, this film has B-movie written all over it, never missing an opportunity to show men behaving badly, often mistreating women who are involuntarily forced to bare their breasts, but rather than inducing any sexual appetite, the only thirst these men have is for the bottle and a lust for money and power.
When a couple of local thugs offer Oates $10,000 to kill Alfredo Garcia (keeping a tidy $990,000 profit for themselves), needing his head for proof, he dreams of getting out of this dirty and rotgut world, taking his prostitute girlfriend Elita (Isela Vega) along with him, getting a fresh start somewhere else. When she informs him Garcia is already dead, Oates thinks it’s a walk in the park, but to her, taking his head from the grave is an unthinkable moral transgression. While the film is admittedly gritty and overly downbeat, it also reveals the most tender and affectionate relationship in any Peckinpah film, beautifully expressed in a picnic sequence where Elita even brings a guitar and quietly sings to him. As they dream of building a new life together, the scene as written ends, but the cameras continue to roll as Vega surprises Oates by asking him why he never asked her to marry him? Completely perplexed by the utter surprise, Oates has no way out but to gently propose, becoming a completely improvised dramatic center of the film, giving a romanticized quality that is rapturously dreamy before their little party is quickly interrupted by a couple of gun-toting bikers, one being Kris Kristofferson, who takes Elita and a bottle into the high grass, stripping her naked to the waist, but rather than be intimidated, she shows no fear, which has a way of unnerving the man, where the balance of power shifts, as she’s suddenly in control, displaying some of the more complicated sexual dynamics as she freely offers herself as part of a Faustian bargain in hopes no one will get killed and they will come out of this alive. Oates, meanwhile, overpowers the partner, grabs his gun and comes after what he presumes to be a rapist. When he discovers the sex is consensual, hardly what he expected, he shoots both men anyway, not out of any moral duty to her, but simply as an act of vengeance, like something Travis Bickle might be inclined to do in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), made just two years later, washing the “scum off the streets.” Despite his professed love for Elita, Oates ignores her wishes and desecrates the gravesite, which sends him on a doomed whirlwind adventure well past the point of no return, growing increasingly existentialist, containing as much complexity and depth as anything Peckinpah ever created, extending into this no man’s land of psychic confusion where reality remains elusive, becoming an absurdist descent into one’s own personal Hell, a horrifyingly violent and bloody escapade that leads to a lonely man’s showdown with his grievously damaged and deranged soul.
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
By far the most underrated of Sam Peckinpah's films, this grim 1974 tale about a minor-league piano player in Mexico (Warren Oates) who sacrifices his love (Isela Vega) when he goes after a fortune as a bounty hunter is certainly one of the director's most personal and obsessive works—even comparable in some respects to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano in its bottomless despair and bombastic self-hatred, as well as its rather ghoulish lyricism. (Critic Tom Milne has suggestively compared the labyrinthine plot to that of a gothic novel.) Oates has perhaps never been better, and a strong secondary cast—Vega, Gig Young, Robert Webber, Kris Kristofferson, Donnie Fritts, and Emilio Fernandez—is equally effective in etching Peckinpah's dark night of the soul.
Time Out London (Tom Huddleston) review [5/5] also seen here: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia | review, synopsis ... - Time Out
It is perhaps the most shocking opening in cinema: a pregnant
teenager is marched before her father, who demands the name of the man who
deflowered her. When she refuses, she is first stripped to the waist, then has
her arm broken. What follows is a catalogue of mounting brutality, as
‘Alfredo Garcia’ is a work teeming with contradiction: it’s Peckinpah’s
grittiest, ugliest film, but it centres on the most respectful, affectionate
relationship he ever wrote. Benny is a multiple murderer, but also a
sympathetic hero trying, in his way, to do the right thing. Oates’s performance
is a revelation, ably supported by Isela Vega
as his doomed paramour. Readable equally as a bleak, brutal exploitation movie
and as a horrified, humanist cry from a disturbed soul, ‘Alfredo Garcia’ is a
worthy rediscovery.
The Portage Theater: Events Julian Antos
Living at the end of his rope, small town piano player and bar manager Warren Oates is offered $10k by two bounty hunters for the head of Mexican outlaw Alfredo Garcia. Oates takes the offer, hoping to secure a better life for himself and his new fiancée Elita (Isela Vega). Inspired in great part by John Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Peckinpah’s story of unadulterated desperation was met with equal doses of critical and commercial rejection. By 1974, violence in American cinema had been tacitly embraced by critics and audiences alike. This was the year of box office heavyweights The Godfather Part II ($57m) and Texas Chain Saw Massacre ($31m), yet somehow Alfredo Garcia ($2m) was trashed by nearly every American critic other than Roger Ebert, who wrote that he could “feel Sam Peckinpah’s heart beating and head pounding in every frame.” In an era when Hollywood seemed more and more emotionally detached, Alfredo Garcia emerged gut-wrenchingly personal. It’s now recognized as one of the most important (and rewarding) films of the ‘70s. This screening will be introduced by our friend and Peckinpah historian Steven Lloyd, who contributed to the recently published Peckinpah Today.
Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [4/5] also seen here: EyeForFilm.co.uk [Jennie Kermode]
Relatively few films in the history of cinema have gone on to receive so much critical acclaim after being so widely derided on their release as Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia. Now painstakingly restored to its full glory, this Peckinpah classic is receiving a welcome re-release, and will hopefully receive the welcome it deserves from audiences.
Fans of the western genre, and of the thrillers that emerged from it, will know the score, and on the surface the story here is a simple one. A rich man's daughter is pregnant. After publicly humiliating her, demanding to know who brought this shame upon his family, he issues the titular proclamation. Whoever can provide him with the head of her lover will receive a rich reward. His lieutenants quickly spread the word, hoping to get the job done for them for a smaller sum. But unknown to them, Alfredo is already dead. His former lover, a small town prostitute, accompanies her sleazy boyfriend Bennie on a trip to rob his grave. It ought to be simple and, Bennie argues, not deeply immoral. The money could change their lives. But it's a brutal world out there, and he has scarcely guessed at where the journey may lead him.
What Peckinpah does so brilliantly in this deceptively clever film is to build elegantly on the established tropes of the genre only to pull the rug from under them half way through, letting Bennie slide into a much darker narrative. Some have called this a surrealist film, but in many ways it's a western with the usual surreal elements removed. People here have real emotions and real relationships, real (if tawdry) dreams, and the impact of brutality has a real effect on them. Nothing is as easy as it usually seems in the movies. When a chance encounter with some bikers leads to Bennie's discovery that he enjoys violence, a properly disturbing transformation is set in motion, and the strange dialogue which he develops with the dead Alfredo is both hilarious and disorientating. It almost charms the viewer into participating in his madness.
The treatment of women is often a sore point in films like this, and Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia certainly contains some voyeuristic and misogynistic scenes, yet it subverts them by drawing on a powerful performance from Isela Vega as Bennie's girlfriend Elita, the source of his humanity. By making a character the genre would traditionally have exploited into a charismatic and convincing individual, Vega forces the viewer to think seriously about the way she's treated, and the emotional impact she has on Bennie's life ultimately forms the crux of the narrative. This might be a world in which men like to think they're independent of women and domestic life, but love and a sense of family are driving forces underscoring this cruel narrative, bringing us back, just as the story eventually does, to the pregnancy and the love affair which preceded it. This focus on relationships also helps to bring Alfredo to life as a character, so that by the end of the film we almost feel we know this man whom we've never met.
Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia is an enormously important film, a re-evaluation of its genre and a fascinating exploration of the desire for and effects of violence. It's also spectacularly directed and highly watchable. Treat yourself.
Bring
Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia - TCM.com
Richard Harland Smith
Sam Peckinpah never made a musical but Bring Me the Head of
Alfredo Garcia (1974) comes close to fitting the bill. Many characters sing
at one point or another (with or without musical accompaniment) as they race
towards what they think will be an easy $1,000,000. The story’s protagonist,
Bennie (Warren Oates), is a pianist whose early career in the finer nightclubs
of
After having lost final cut on Major Dundee (1965), a dispirited
Peckinpah worked in television and labored on feature films for which he received
no credit. The success of his revisionist western The Wild Bunch (1969)
reenergized the maverick filmmaker while its success made him bankable in
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia features several of Peckinpah’s rep
players and trademark authorial touches but feels improvised and raw, at once
typical and uncharacteristic. Although the project had been initiated during
the upswing in Peckinpah’s career, it was shot in the fallout of the failure of
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which MGM had recut without his
participation. Angered at his treatment by the studio (and disgusted at the
reelection of Republican President Richard Nixon), Peckinpah retreated to
Peckinpah’s casting of character actor Warren Oates in a lead role was seen as
an additional act of defiance but Oates was actually Peckinpah’s third choice
to play Bennie, after both James Coburn and Peter Falk passed on the
opportunity. According to screenwriter Gordon T. Dawson (who inherited Frank
Kowalski’s original treatment and an aborted script by Walter Kelly), Peckinpah
was listless and diffident during filming, plagued by woman troubles at home
and over-medicated by quack doctors. According to
Despite its unblinking brutality and double digit roster of victims, Bring
Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is about nothing so much as the redemptive
power of love – and the price to be paid for sacrificing love in the pursuit of
gain. Bennie and Elita are one of cinema’s great outlaw couples, due in large
part to the onscreen chemistry of Warren Oates and Isela Vega. Although this
was only her second English language film, Vega was playful and bold in her
scenes with Oates, continuing Elita’s prodding of Bennie to propose marriage
even after Peckinpah had called “cut”... and prompting from the unprepared
Oates a palpably emotional in-character response. According to Kris
Kristofferson, who plays a small role as the motorcycle rudo who
interrupts this romantic scene, Peckinpah not only printed the improv but
rewrote the scene to follow because of it. (Peckinpah also changed the ending
of the shooting script, which had Bennie surviving the climactic head handoff.)
Another of the film’s great twosomes is the Mutt & Jeff act of Gig Young
and Robert Webber. Comedian Mort Sahl had been cast originally in Young’s role
but quit the production when delays threatened his own performance calendar;
Young and Webber were flown in at the behest of independent producer Marty Baum,
who had once represented both actors as a talent agent. It was Webber’s
instinct to play against the expected machismo and he and Young (with
Peckinpah’s encouragement) turned Quill and Sappensly into an unexpectedly
devoted couple not too far removed from the queer assassins Wint and Kidd who
bedeviled James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever (1971). Peckinpah may have
allowed this character shading as proof of Quill’s and Sappensly’s decadence
but the actors play it with subtlety and tenderness, giving Oates’ and Vega’s
doomed lovers a literal run for their money.
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
Essays,
Film Reviews, Sam Fuller, by Kathleen Murphy and Richard T. Jameson,
Peckinpah Doesn’t Sing Along Essays,
Sam Fuller, by David Coursen from Parallax
View,
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
Essays,
Film Reviews, Sam Peckinpah, by Kathleen Murphy,
Bring
Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia Peckinpah • film review Wheeler Winston Dixon from Senses of Cinema, October 5, 2014
Radiator Heaven: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia J.D. Lafrance
BFI
| Sight & Sound | Sam Peckinpah Dead
Men Walking, David Thomson
from Sight and Sound, February 2009,
also seen here: BFI | Sight & Sound
| February 2009
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia Phil Nugent from The High Hat
Sam
Peckinpah's Head Movie: Ringing in the New Year with "Alfredo ... Phil Nugent from The Screengrab,
For
Criterion Consideration: Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia James McCormick from The Criterion Cast,
Videodrone
Classic: 'Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia' - Parallax ... Blu-Ray review by Sean Axmaker from Parallax View, April 3, 2014, also seen
here: Videodrone
Classic: Peckinpah's 'Alfredo Garcia,' a Psychedelic ...
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo
Garcia
Nick Schager from Slant
magazine, also seen here: Slant Magazine
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia - The DVD Journal DSH
Ruthless Reviews review Jonny Lieberman, also seen here: BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA - Ruthless Reviews
Big
Media Vandalism: “There’s nothing sacred about a hole in the ground or the man
that’s in it. Or you. Or me.” Steven Boone,
Between the Seats: review: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia Edgar Chaput
Sam Peckinpah's Last Classic: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia Paul DeCirce from Associated Content
One Movie a Day David Wester
movie reviews Jeff Lester from Lazy Bastard
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson] Head Hunter: Peckinpah's Anarchic Nixon-Era Neo-Noir, March 15, 2005
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Electric Sheep Magazine Pat Long
Projections Jon
Film7070: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) Jordan McGrath from Eat Sleep Live Film
From San Francisco With Love [Oktay Ege Kozak]
Bring
Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) - Home Video ... - TCM.com Paul Sherman
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] Keith Phipps
DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [4/5] also seen here: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia : DVD Talk Review of the DVD ..
Eccentric Cinema Troy Howarth
Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia (MGM DVD) - Fulvue Drive-In .. Ned Goss
DVD Authority.com (Christopher Bligh) dvd review also seen here: DVD Authority
Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) Film discussion group, Sergio Leone discussion board, September 27, 2012
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Sam Peckinpah) - Blu-ray Forum Film discussion group, July 21, 2012
User
reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: MisterWhiplash from United States
User reviews from imdb (Page 3) Author: superfly-13
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reviews from imdb (Page 5) Author: Bill Slocum
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Norwalk, CT USA
User reviews from imdb (Page 7) Author: aliasanythingyouwant from United States
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Crushed By Inertia Lons
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
Edinburgh U Film Society [Stephen J. Brennan]
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [8/10] also seen here: Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia - Jigsaw Lounge
Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia - The Spinning Image Graeme Clark
The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [3/5] January 2, 2009, also seen here: Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia (18) - Reviews - Films - The ...
Inside the head of Sam Peckinpah Rick Moody from The Guardian, January 9, 2009
John Patterson on Sam Peckinpah's masterpiece, Bring Me The ... John Patterson from The Guardian, December 26, 2008
Film review: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
Film review: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia | Film | The Observer Philip French
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] Peckinpah retrospective
Austin Chronicle [Louis Black]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4] August 1, 1974, also seen here: Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies] October 28, 2001, also seen here: Ebert's Great Movie Essay on Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
The New York Times (Nora Sayre) review
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE KILLER ELITE
USA (122 mi) 1975 ‘Scope
After a brilliantly cryptic opening, The Killer Elite settles into Peckinpah's most apparently straightforward action film since The Getaway. Built around the internal politics of a San Francisco company which sidelines in dirty work that even the CIA won't touch, it concentrates on the painful recovery of an agent (Caan), wounded in knee and elbow in a double-cross, and his search for revenge. During Caan's lengthy recuperation, Peckinpah contemplates the old themes of betrayal, trust and humiliation. And through the action of the second half, Caan (like other Peckinpah heroes) comes to some sort of understanding. The set pieces (a Chinatown shoot-out, a dockland siege, the superb ships' graveyard climax) are excellent, as are so many secondary scenes. There are echoes here of Point Blank, and behind the deceits and manipulations both are essentially simple films. Unmistakable Peckinpah - not a masterpiece, but enough to be going on with.
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is his great, grotty confessional, but there's no denying Sam Peckinpah's fuck-you agenda in this snarky thriller -- a fable of self-romanticizing paranoia, acknowledged as a splendid private joke played from deep within a corporate potboiler. The director's name is plastered over a mamma bird feeding her young'uns, the first section is ad-libbed macho razzing on vaginal infections and duck quacking between James Caan and Robert Duvall, top men at a shadowy agency of professional eliminators ("the thought that the CIA might employ such an organization for any purpose is, of course, preposterous," the opening crawl assures). The joshing is interrupted by renegade Duvall's defection, but not before he forces his bud into early retirement with a couple of strategically paralyzing bullets; the recovery of Caan's limbs takes up the next movement, his revenge the last. Will that bring back his knee and elbow, asks a treacherous superior (Arthur Hill). "No, but wherever they are, they'll be a lot happier," quips the jock-avenger. That's just one of the hack lines in the Marc Norman-Stirling Silliphant screenplay, Peckinpah purifies them by molding them to his own irrational Old West code of honor (Wyatt Earp and Tom Mix are evoked, inevitably) in a world where betrayal, whoring, and compromise reign supreme. (Gig Young's ravaged mug is used throughout as sell-out emblem. "My father used to be a minister... That's what he wanted me to be," he moans to a general "Who cares?") Only Pauline Kael took the time to unpack Peckinpah's most abstract exercise, other reviewers could just blink at the iris-enclosed close-ups of hands shaping bombs, cubist cutting in the airport melee (Monte Hellman did the editing), and a climax where a flurry of trendy ninjas is utterly unable to tackle faithful ol' Burt Young, the wacky spectacle watched silently by the giant frozen guns of the stationed navy fleet, as irrelevant to modern times as Caan's (and the filmmaker's) stubborn maverickdom. With Bo Hopkins, Tiana Alexandra, and Mako.
VideoVista review Richard Bowden
After being betrayed by his friend, an injured security agent returns to full health and accepts an assignment to ensure a chance at revenge.
Peckinpah's 1975 thriller is infuriatingly uneven. It is also one of his most interesting films, one whose weaknesses throw the director's preoccupations into relief. It was made between the gothic thriller Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia (1974), and his last great film, Cross Of Iron (1977). As the critic Pauline Kael noted, it was a way of proving himself alive to the Hollywood establishment, a "transparent disguise for... determination to show Hollywood that he's not dead yet... that, despite the tabloid views of him, frail and falling down drunk, he's got the will to make great movies." It's no accident that this is a film in which the director stresses his auteurism with some self-consciousness (the words 'directed by' and 'Sam Peckinpah' are separated by an emphatic crosscut in the opening credits). Neither that it is one in which the theme of rehabilitation - or more specifically recuperation - dominates the 'real' dramatic matter in hand, giving the narrative a lopsided feel from which it never really recovers.
Despite a kung fu orientated plot, at the centre of The Killer Elite is the relationship between Locken (James Caan) and Hansen (Robert Duvall). The shifting balance between two men, who find themselves on opposite sides of the law, recall similar relationships in Ride The High Country (1962), between Steve Judd and Gil Westrum, or in The Wild Bunch (1969), between Pike Bishop and Deke Thornton. "I can't figure why he didn't put the third one in my head," says Locken, brooding in hospital.
"He's your buddy," is the characteristic reply. Locken and Hansen may travel further apart than the other examples of broken camaraderie in Peckinpah's work, but their mutual respect remains intact to the end. In the shoot out at the darkened quay, despite his thirst for revenge, Locken walks away from his former partner in disgust and he is not responsible for the final bullet.
The relationship between the two men is what focuses Locken's life and gives his actions perspective. Once his buddy is dead, his character loses all motivation, and then the movie its soul. What's left is a ramshackle kung fu killer plot, which any competent straight-to-video producer could have scribbled down on the back of an envelope. Peckinpah's other films frequently end when the central partnership was irrevocably dissolved. For all of its martial pyrotechnics, The Killer Elite just goes on too long.
The most successful part of the film is contained within the opening third. The first operation, Hansen's initial betrayal (which occurs in a world of surveillance that anticipates The Osterman Weekend, 1983), and the mechanics of Locken's physical reconstruction are, in turn, engrossing. It's a time of development and learning for Locken. From the casual sex of the opening the injured agent has to adjust, restrain his bitterness ("I'll just limp out of here"), and establishes a more permanent relationship with his nurse while on the mend. There's a similar attraction between nurse and patient to be seen in Cross Of Iron. From embracing a broad, Locken ends up clutching a bedpan; and then grasping at any chance to re-establish himself as whole. Peckinpah found delineation of the mending processes so engrossing that the belated introduction of Negato Toku (Tak Kubota) as "Godfather of all the ninja assassins," and then Locken's fortuitous assignment to protect Yuen Cheung (Mako) against death within the USA is like a dramatic afterthought - tellingly summarised in conversation over the airport fight.
These airport scenes, however expertly cut together by the director, are perhaps amongst the most gratuitous scenes of violence in his oeuvre. The fighting is dwelt on purely as a means to patch over a glaring narrative fault line, carrying along some clumsy verbal exposition. It has none of the catharsis, or brutal poetry, familiar from the director's other films. Locken's recuperation has proved a distraction. After his hospital a scene, the belated 'catching up' scene feels at best rushed, at worst intrusive. Worse, we sense Peckinpah is just not as emotionally engaged with martial arts as he is with the matter of the Old West. (A feeling is underlined when Locken watches the final ninja swordfight with calculated disinterest, calmly betting on the result.) An obvious sop to those fans who wanted more of the action exemplified in Clouse's Enter The Dragon of two years previously, the kung fu in Peckinpah's film is vigorous, filmed with style, but remains peculiarly unconvincing.
Strip away the martial arts and what remains is far more interesting and consistent with Peckinpah's personal philosophy. As in his other films there is a theme running through The Killer Elite, one of honour and the inexorable passing of the old ways. One thinks of the mothballed fleet the scene of the final confrontation, a veritable graveyard of former pride and glory. "You've just been retired Mike, enjoy it," says Hansen after crippling Locken.
"You just retired, Cap," echoes Locken in irony, when addressing his traitorous superior at the end. In The Killer Elite, a new order is recognised: that of power systems, none of which care about civilians, or integrity - a recognition enunciated rather surprisingly by the shambling Miller (a scruffy Bo Hopkins). Cap Collins (Arthur Hill) had earlier put these changes more succinctly: "Would you believe that heroism has become old fashioned?"
So half-baked and ludicrous is the action plot that much of the film's other pleasure comes from incidentals. The initial friendship between Locken and Hansen for instance, or Miller's girlfriend calling everyone 'Mr Davies'; the editing of the explosive opening sequence; or the bomb-under-the-car scene, ending with the distant explosion (pure comic 'business' rare in Peckinpah); Caan's sensitive performance. Allied to this is Jerry Fielding's score, an outstanding contribution from a composer who worked with the director on several occasions, as well as the acting in support from Peckinpah regulars like Hopkins.
In short, The Killer Elite is something of curate's egg, only good in parts but, with all its unsatisfactory elements still essential viewing for admirers of this director.
Review: The Killer Elite Robert C. Cumbow, May 17, 2010 (Movietone News, June 1976)
Videophiled
Classic: Sam Peckinpah's 'Noon Wine' - Parallax View Blu-Ray review by Sean Axmaker, September 26,
2014, also seen here: Noon Wine Movies - Cinephiled
Pluck You, Too! [Thomas Pluck]
DVD Authority.com (Christopher Bligh) dvd review [3/5]
Light Views, Reviews & Previews (John Larsen) dvd review
Past Picks Online [Jimmy Gillman]
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reviews from imdb Author: FilmFlaneur from London
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reviews from imdb Author: Robert J. Maxwell
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User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Bill Slocum (slokes@optonline.net) from Norwalk, CT USA
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
The New York Times (Richard Eder) review
CROSS OF IRON
Great Britain Germany (132 mi) 1977 U.S. version (119 mi)
Peckinpah's only war film, based on a novel by Willi Heinrich, displays his familiar preoccupation with the individual confronted by events beyond his control. Dealing with a German platoon involved in the 1943 retreat on the Russian front, the film reveals a special feeling for the universalities of war: lives in the balance, the single-suppression of emotion. Sombre and claustrophobic photography, an intelligent script, and Peckinpah's clear understanding of a working platoon of men, are all far removed from the monotonous simplicity of most big-budget war films.
Slant Magazine review Eric Henderson
Sam Peckinpah's autumnal battlefield epic
deigns to critique unchecked masculinity by pitting two WWII German army den
mothers against each other amidst the backdrop of their infantry's retreat from
Russian battle lines. Which sort of raises the question whether Peckinpah only
felt comfortable taking a more ambivalent view of the sort of six-shooter
sensitivity he previously celebrated in The Wild Bunch when the men standing
center stage were Nazis, generally portrayed with zee requisite feline
silkiness. (While Cross of Iron is hardly less than three steps from
Visconti's The Damned on the Kinsey scale, it's also
not hard to imagine James Mason's Colonel Brandt hiding his flaccid, impotent
dick behind the
Cross
of Iron (Widescreen special edition) Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film
Glenn Erickson, also seen here: DVD Savant Review: Cross
of Iron - DVD Talk
Sam Peckinpah's last really successful film is this 1977
European co-production, initiated with insufficient funds and finished (after a
premature filming shut-down) with money from EMI. The director had never done a
war picture before and achieves a savage desperation in his scenes of hardened
German troops trying to hold back overwhelming Soviet forces. The narrative is
clear but the dialogue is painfully pretentious - the German officers
articulate their inner motivations, while the troops offer philosophical
observations about the pointlessness of their sacrifice. That leaves Cross
of Iron to stand or fall on the appeal of its gritty battle action, the one
aspect where Peckinpah doesn't let us down.
Synopsis: 1943. German fortunes are turning for the worse in Russia, as the
would-be-conquerors are forced to go on the defensive against Stalin's growing
opposition. Respected, battle-weary Rolf Steiner (James Coburn) must hold his
men together in a fighting unit while putting up with Hauptman Stransky
(Maximilian Schell), a Prussian who asked for a transfer from the south of
France so he can "earn" the Iron Cross. Stransky cowers in his
bunker, and then demands that his men vouch that he led a counterattack. The
only problem is that Steiner refuses to lie when Oberst Brandt (James Mason)
asks for certification. Fearing that Steiner will testify against him, Stransky
purposely leaves Steiner's squad behind when the German units retreat.
Cross of Iron really boils down to the same story as Robert Aldrich's
1955 Attack!:
Non-coms and soldiers fight and die like dogs while cynical officers make plans
for their political futures back home. To hide his cowardice and scheming, the
villain officer tries to insure that his accusers are killed in action. Cross
of Iron is set in the German army but hasn't the usual conflict between
ordinary soldiers and Nazi fanatics. Maximillian Schell's Stransky is a
Prussian honor-bound by his aristocratic family to come back from the front
with the Iron Cross. That's almost the same as the collusion between Attack!'s
Lee Marvin and Eddie Albert: Both are from Southern military families and are
expected to uphold the family name with "heroic" wartime deeds.
The novel setting within the German Army is something of a commercial drawback.
Besides Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front and Douglas
Sirk's A Time to Live and A Time to Die, war movies in enemy trenches
have been few and far between, and both of those were from pacifist novels by
Erich Maria Remarque. With all dialogue in English and British and American
actors in the lead roles, Cross of Iron has only some good beer-drinking
songs to instill a German flavor. Yugoslav locals play German and Russian
troops, and we have to keep checking uniforms to remind ourselves that this is
Hitler's army.
Peckinpah succeeds whenever he depicts the ordinary soldiers waiting between
action, drinking and trying not to lose their minds. But most of the drama is
obvious and forced. Coburn's Steiner natural fighter is inwardly an ethical
man; we can tell that he will be betrayed by his superiors, as was Jack Palance
in Attack!. Steiner takes responsibility for a Russian boy that the
officers want shot, and lets him loose with an embarrassingly pretentious
speech. We know the kid will end up riddled with bullets anyway. Stransky
doesn't hide his sneeringly selfish intention to win an unearned Iron Cross,
and further shows his villainy by threatening two homosexual junior staff
officers with death. James Mason's Major Brandt is investigating Stransky's
doubtful claim for the medal, and puts Steiner in a bind: Steiner won't lie to
help Stransky, but he won't testify against him either. Even though Brandt is
sympathetic to Steiner, the hard-bitten sergeant's only response is that he
hates all officers.
Steiner's softer side is explored when spends some time with Senta Berger's
nurse in a field hospital. As Peckinpah professionals are wont to do, he
ignores his medical discharge and returns to the front lines. His reward is
treachery from Stransky, who purposely leaves Steiner's unit on point while the
rest of the division retreats. After battling their way through Russian-held
territory, Steiner's best men make it back to the newly established German
front line. Stransky ignores Steiner's correct password and orders his men to
shoot.
Cross of Iron's furious battle action is far more convincing than the
fighting in Sam Fuller's combat swansong film The Big Red One.
As is Peckinpah's style, there is little camera movement but individual shots
are impressively staged. His trademark slow motion inter-cuts well in this
context -- machine gun shells spit into the air and explosions blast men into
the mud. When Russian tanks overrun Steiner's squad we're given a fine sense of
their feverish struggle. And we're told that Peckinpah got these tense scenes
with only two tanks, one of which wasn't operable.
If anything, Peckinpah's Germans are too sensitive. When Steiner's men capture
a group of female Russian soldiers, the film elects for exploitative details of
isolated rape and mutilation rather than something more credible -- the fear
and hatred between these two armies was such that the only credible outcome
would seemingly be some kind of atrocity. Or is the script saying that only
Nazi officers committed war crimes?
James Coburn is solid as the no-nonsense Steiner but Maximillian Schell and
James Mason look like stars that have dropped in for a week's work. Another
Peckinpah veteran David Warner has too small of a part to make a lasting
impression. Haircuts are mostly whatever the actors felt like wearing. For no
fault of their own, all but Schell fail to be convincingly German, and he
subdues his accent to match his co-stars. The mock-meaningful tone of some of
the dialogue is exemplified when Coburn declines to gun down Schell, and
instead invites him to fight like an honest soldier: "Let me show you
where the Iron Crosses grow." We hear maniacal laughter as the credits
play over an ineffective photo montage of civilian victims of war --- that
includes children from Vietnam, Africa and the Middle East.
Hen's Tooth Video's DVD of Cross of Iron is a pleasant surprise. Earlier
discs were frankly terrible full-frame transfers. All indications are that this
is a full-length cut. At 132 minutes it's a full reel longer than a 119-minute
count given in sources for the original American release. The rumored video
release said to be upwards of ten minutes longer is more likely than not a myth
or a misprint.
The enhanced transfer restores Cross of Iron's proper compositions. The
image is sharp and the color strong, and overall the disc looks far better than
the weak and greenish AVCO Embassy prints this reviewer saw in 1978. Ernest
Gold's music score makes use of German marching motifs.
Author Stephen Prince provides Peckinpah-friendly commentary that's more
informative than usual; he analyses the historical basis for the action and
gives a serviceable read of Peckinpah's themes. He starts from the assumption
that Cross of Iron is a great film, and does a good job of defending
that opinion.
The disc has both English and French soundtracks and a gallery of German lobby
cards. The snowbound image on the film's original poster art misrepresents the
film, which all takes place in bright summertime forests.
Cross of Iron • Senses of Cinema Gabrielle Murray from Senses of Cinema, September 18, 2001
Cross Of Iron: On getting past the blood Richard T. Jameson, May 19, 2010 (Seattle Weekly, May 25, 1977)
The Agitation of the Mind: Cross of Iron Neil Fulwood from The Agitation of the Mind, December 26, 2009
Cross of Iron -
Reviews - Reverse Shot Nick
Pinkerton, May 10, 2006
DVD Times Mike Sutton
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
Eccentric Cinema (Widescreen DVD) Brian Lindsey
Crushed by Inertia Lons
Eye for Film (Donald Munro) review [5/5]
Celluloid Heroes [Paul McElligott]
Sgt. Slaughter Goes to War (Ben Cressy) review
Edinburgh U Film Society (Spiros Gangas) review
The MovieHamlet [Stefan Hedmark]
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]
Cross Of Iron (Sam Peckinpah) International Historic Films
User
reviews from imdb Author: Theo Robertson from Isle Of Bute, Scotland
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BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) dvd review
Cross
of Iron | Film | The Guardian
Philip French
The Japan Times [Giovanni Fazio]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Cross of Iron
Blu-ray James Coburn - DVD Beaver
CONVOY C+ 78
USA Great Britain (110 mi) 1978 ‘Scope
After a couple of box office failures, Peckinpah was in no position to haggle with the Hollywood executives, taking a barebones script about runaway truckers armed with CB radios, inspired by the 1975 popular hit song by C.W. McCall, Convoy 1978 movie Theme Song YouTube (4:02). So in effect, Hollywood was attempting to use Peckinpah to cash in on a recent American CB radio craze which was a precursor to the Internet, as anyone within range could listen in on conversations or get the word out in a hurry warning other truckers of speed traps, police sightings, blocked road construction, or cheap places to eat or buy gas. After the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo where OPEC producing nations effectively boycotted the United States, the price of oil rose substantially from $3 dollars to $12 dollars per barrel, effectively doubling the real price of crude oil at the refinery level, causing massive shortages in the United States while also generating high inflation rates that persisted until the early 1980’s, with oil prices continuing to rise until the mid 80’s. In response to this, the U.S. government imposed a nationwide 55 mph speed limit to help reduce fuel shortages, which especially had an impact on independent truckers who were often paid by the mile, so their productivity and potential earnings took a hit, where CB radios were crucial in helping alleviate some of the other unforeseen obstacles, like the presence of corrupt police who typically shake down truckers, threatening to impound their trucks unless a fine is paid. This opened the door for fast car action comedy hits like SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT, the 4th top grossing film of 1977, and The Dukes of Hazzard on TV in 1979, and this film, 12th highest grossing film of the year, making $45 million dollars, contributing to the CB radio craze that took on a life of its own, since it requires no registration fee, where all you need is the equipment to be hooked up. While there was a small licensing fee, during the height of its popularity in the late 70’s this was routinely ignored, as people used anonymous nicknames called “handles.” Due to lax enforcement, there was widespread disregard for regulations, allowing people to chat mindlessly with one another, often engaged in tedious exchanges, which also included highly aggressive racist and sexist views, like chat room conversations, often resulting in highly descriptive masturbation fantasies.
Sure enough, in the opening few minutes of the film, Kris Kristofferson as 18-wheel truck driver “Rubber Duck” is involved in a cat and mouse game of leap frog with a convertible sports car driven by Ali MacGraw, a photojournalist, each passing one another until a policeman stops him for speeding. Very cleverly, he gives the cop a story about how that female driver up ahead was driving without any panties, which certainly diverts the cop’s attention, as he heads off to arrest the woman. A word about each of the stars, as both had worked with Peckinpah before, but this time Kristofferson had gotten himself clean and was totally sober, making it harder for the director to work with him, as without the booze and drugs there was little rapport between them, and as for MacGraw, heavily tanned and wearing what appears to be a short afro, one of her worst looks ever, this film really points out her acting deficiencies, where an exasperated Peckinpah wasted valuable time just running the camera, hoping later to find something of value. The shoot was chaotic anyway, mostly in New Mexico, where half the time the CB radios didn’t even work, with MacGraw’s jealous husband Steve McQueen often intruding, thinking MacGraw was having an affair with someone on the set and making wild death threats, as his marriage was on the rocks, with many days where the raving and near psychotic director was so coked up that he never came out of his trailer, where the assistant director James Coburn actually shot some of the main shooting, with the film going overbudget, largely due to the difficulty lining up such massive vehicles for a second or third shot, which required substantial time and effort, where the script called for using a hundred 18-wheel trucks for a good portion of the film, doubling the initial $6 million dollars and the film went over schedule. They actually shut down the entire production to allow Kristofferson and his band, seen in the film as the “eleven long-haired friends of Jesus in a chartreuse microbus,” as described in the song, to complete a previously scheduled 30-day tour before resuming filming, where many of the crew simply never returned. Even worse, the director was so disgusted with the film, shooting nearly three times the footage as The Wild Bunch (1969), where he was known to utter “I haven't done one good day’s work on this whole picture,” that he eventually abandoned the project completely, never able to get the film under three and a half hours, putting the final cut in the hands of the studios to finally complete. Irrespective of all these problems, it was the highest grossing film in Peckinpah’s career.
Despite the troubles on the set and the overwhelmingly negative reviews, Peckinpah immersed himself in a love affair with trucks, where more than any movie stars, they were the real stars of this show, where the film excels at glorified stunt driving sequences, including a handful of highly choreographed crashes, where often the thrill is to put the audience into the driver’s seat. So as a purely adrenaline laced, entertainment venture featuring plenty of trucks and even muscle cars flying through the air, crashing through billboards, the film is a success. Where it fails is in the human element, as Peckinpah’s idea was to explore the mystique of truck drivers as modern-day cowboys, as if they were the last bastion of freedom on the highways in the American West before the government all but put them out of business. While the film attempts to build into something of a protest movement, it can never figure out what it’s trying to protest, linking independence and true freedom as outside any collaboration with politicians or a trucker’s union. While it does present the idea that a man alone is not as strong as someone with the force of 100 trucks behind him, this idea degenerates into the mass chaos of an extended wrecking sequence, where trucks simply destroy much of the local property, where instead of a hail of bullets and explosions from a prolonged gunfight, trucks annihilate everything in their path. It certainly continues Peckinpah’s nihilist themes, but without the poetry behind it. Only Ernest Borgnine stands out as the indefatigable, trucker-hating sheriff, as his contempt for these lawbreaking “modern cowboys” couldn’t be more devious, pulling out all stops to find a way to stop them in their tracks, where he’s really playing the constantly thwarted coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons, literally rising from the dead on multiple occasions only to pull out more dirty tricks to try and trap them again, always with that gleeful look of anticipation on his face, where the audience, unfortunately for him, continually roots against him. This kind of cartoon generates a few laughs, offers up some good ol’ boy trucker lore, sounding off on just about everything from Viet Nam to the proposed “double nickel” nationwide speed limit, where giant trucks barreling down the road are seen as an expression of rebellion and defiance of “The Law,” as represented by Borgnine, a guy who routinely shakes down truckers. It’s a modern American parable of unnecessary government intrusion, where Uncle Sam is seen as dipping into the trucker’s pocketbooks and affecting their livelihood, or so goes the myth, as it was always more about inflation and the unstoppable price of oil from OPEC than anything having to do with the truckers.
Taking CW McCall's hit single as starting-point, scriptwriter Bill Norton (director of Cisco Pike) makes Rubber Duck (Kristofferson) a populist hero of the classic Hollywood kind, leading a group of heavy truckers in their war of independence waged on the highways of America; and Peckinpah's direction places the film in the tongue-in-cheek comic vein of his own earlier Ballad of Cable Hogue. Its blatant and impossible artifice is also completely in keeping with Peckinpah's pessimistic streak. Police cars, trucks and bars are destroyed in balletic slow-motion, but none of the characters appears to get hurt (and no one dies - even when you think they do). The narrative goes a bit over the top in the second half, but it's after a large dose of the best kind of escapist good humour.
User Reviews from imdb Author: Jonathon Dabell (barnaby.rudge@hotmail.co.uk) from Todmorden, England
Convoy is the shallowest of Sam Peckinpah's films, but by no means the
worst. It contains some oddball characters and a number of memorable sequences,
and alternately funny and thought-provoking dialogue. It also features one of
the very best Ernest Borgnine performances that I can remember - not bad for a
man who won an Oscar for Marty!
The story traces the fortunes of some truckers, led by "Rubber Duck"
(Kris Kristofferson), as they drive through the states of New Mexico, Texas and
Arizona. They are pursued by the law, and gradually more and more truckers join
on at the back of the line until they have literally hundreds of lorries, all
roaring along the highways in protest of the prejudicial treatment they receive
from the cops.
Kristofferson is supremely enigmatic as the leader of the pack. Ali MacGraw is
a bit of a bore as his female companion. As mentioned before, the real star is
Borgnine, mean and menacing, funny and cruel as the cop who dedicates his life
to victimising truck drivers. For such a shallow film, it looks and sounds beautiful.
Even the car chase through the sand is poetic. I can't explain what's good
about this picture. It sounds dull and pointless, yet to watch it is a
thoroughly enjoyable experience. Convoy is a contradiction of itself....
plotless, pointless, thinly plotted, and yet still (somehow) a top notch film!
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
I would love to drink of whatever they drank to decide to turn a two-minute country song, half of which is a CB radio monologue, into a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster. That ain't half of it-I want some of what they gave Sam Peckinpah to make him agree that it was a good idea. It gets stranger. Forget the first twenty minutes when they float a decoy plot. The truth begins to assert itself in the subsequent desert shots of proud, venerable, workhorse proletarian trucks rising through the desert to the accompaniment of classical music. Mud has never looked so good, trucks have never before even flirted with this mythological context in which they so clearly belong. The mist, the motion. It's a poem masquerading as a movie. Take Johnny Guitar as a point of reference, along with the political beatitudes collected near the middle. A political poem with good music. Who better as the protagonist in a the-revolution-that-could-have-been-but-wasn't-because-you-guys-weren't-where-you-were-supposed-to-be than Kris Kristofferson, arguably the greatest country songwriter of all time (yeah I heard of Hank, he was great but Kris is complex but simple). His beard is impeccable, how can anyone else even have a beard after that, but his eyes define the purity of the message. Ali MacGraw would seem well cast as his love interest (ok, one of many) sidekick, but she never gets past her bad haircut, even when they put her in the wet t-shirt emblematic of the post-The Deep Hollywood era. I don't know who would have worked better-anyone, I guess, but especially Patti Smith. Once you entirely let the plot go and immerse in the baptism of the symbolism, the grandeur of the ambition is intoxicating (even though they could have had more beer and pot floating around). They do spell a bit too much out, suggesting some lack of faith in the going-into-hibernation Morrison-lizards that were surely the only reason to make something like this. The dark ages approacheth, let us burn the last of the light quickly to illuminate as much as we can, lest it all be forgotten. The shots of Ernest Borgnine (who played a similar role in no less than Johnny Guitar) at the end, are wonderful, didn't change anything coming, weren't designed to, he's just laughing at it. That they occasionally paste in a few words of the original C.W. McCall song is absolutely hysterical, as if he envisioned anything like this. No one did, but sometimes you have to leave the cards and walk, or escape via lawng-hared-frien's of Jesus communal bus while making out with your girlfriend.
Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule: REVISITING SAM PECKINPAH'S ... Dennis Cozzalio, August 4, updated August 6, 2009
A few weeks ago, the day after the coronation of Sean Penn, Kate
Winslet and Slumdog Millionaire as this year’s Oscar champs, I posted a
sort of Oscar palate cleanser in the form of a few smart-ass comments about the
much-derided Sam Peckinpah action vehicle Convoy.
And then, by sheer coincidence, Convoy ended up featured on the
wonderful MGM HD channel just two days
later. I made a point to sit down and watch it all the way through, my memory
of it being derived from a crappy cropped VHS cassette and a similarly
bleary-looking HBO screening I saw nearly 20 years ago, neither of which I made
it all the way through. The high-def showing was probably the best chance I’d
have to judge the movie on its merits alone, divorced from the notoriety of its
cocaine-and-madness-fueled production history and its insistent reputation as
the nadir of a once-great director’s career, the penultimate act of an artist
desperately slumming for a hit. (My nominee for that honor would go to the film
Peckinpah made previously, The Killer Elite.)
I wish I could say that Convoy is a movie misrepresented, like Mandingo,
by a critical community blinded by conventional wisdom, one worthy of a
complete reappraisal and repositioning within Peckinpah’s oeuvre. Alas, it is
not a masterpiece. Many of Convoy’s dialogue scenes are marred by
atrocious overdubbing and indifferent staging, and even some of the
hand-to-hand action, like the truck-stop fistfight that opens the
movie—Peckinpah’s bread and butter a mere decade earlier—are hampered by a
deliberate editing scheme that looks pawed over, slapped together, with little
regard for fluency. (There is a good joke in there, though, involving Franklin
Ajaye as a trucker named Pigpen-- guess what he’s hauling-- who draws first
blood in the fight, a broken ketchup bottle which shatters over someone’s head
and draws immediate comic commentary on the director’s reputation amongst lazy
critics as an indiscriminate letter of blood.) The movie, based on C.W.
McCall's novelty top-40 hit, was a huge hit, especially on the drive-in
circuit, though Peckinpah’s on-set antics ensured he wouldn’t work again for
nearly five years. No, it’s not a maligned work of genius, but it is damned
entertaining despite its many glaring flaws, mainly because, in trolling for
box-office gold by exploiting the then-popular CB craze, the director manages
to pump a goodly amount of nihilistic steam into the idea of a political
movement, a trucker’s protest convoy which gains populist momentum without
anyone-- least of all its ostensible leader, Rubber Duck (Kris Kristofferson)--
seeming to have any coherent agenda or ability to agree on what it all means.
For Rubber Duck, and for Peckinpah, the director desperate to shoot film who
increasingly lost his grip on the reality of what to shoot and why, the only
act with any meaning at all is the simple act of forward movement.
And forward movement through vividly rendered space is something Convoy
does quite well. This is one of those wonderfully tactile films from the ‘70s,
like Charley Varrick or Electra Glide in Blue, that seems
kinetically, electrically connected to the landscapes on which its dramas take
place. The soaking up of the spectacular Panavision vistas, deepened by
darkening clouds, a line of trucks skating across the bottom of the frame
silhouetted in the dusk, is as dramatic as any action set piece in the movie,
many of which are shot and edited with an identifiable precision and poetry
that is clearly derived from Peckinpah’s sensibility (this despite testimony to
the effect that James Coburn and others were called in to direct shots and
sequences when Peckinpah arrived on set too drunk and/or deranged to do the job
himself). Convoy is a pedal-to-the-heavy-metal, meat-and-potatoes Hal
Needham action flick directed by an artist, or a man still enough of one to
elevate even its deadliest, hoariest conceits-- Ernest Borgnine’s
mustache-twirling devilry as evil sheriff Dirty Lyle, who rides Rubber Duck’s
ass straight to hell; Rubber Duck’s populist-Christ resurrection that occurs
five minutes after the movie should have ended; and the entire nostril-flaring
presence of Ali McGraw-- into classifiably forgivable sins, so spectacular is
the movie’s milieu, its dusty testimony to the desperate beauty of the road, of
trucks, of desperate, disillusioned men. Do yourself a favor—keep your eye on
that MGM HD schedule, and if it ever comes
around again see Convoy in this format. The German DVD I have is a
not-even-close second, and the cropped versions of the olden days are simply
unacceptable. Until MGM issues a proper domestic DVD (an event with little
economic motivation, it would seem), this will remain your best chance to see
everything that is up, and down, about this flawed Peckinpah gem.
Parallax
View [Richard T. Jameson] originally published in Movietone News, August, 1978
The Bottom Shelf: Convoy Scott von Doviak from The High Hat
Convoy -
TCM.com Scott McGee
Time Magazine 77/July 4 - ConvoyTM.com Time magazine article, July 4, 1977
DVD Savant Review: Convoy - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson
CONVOY - Ruthless Reviews Jonny Lieberman
The Village Voice [Andrew Sarris] (pdf format)
Qwipster's Movie Reviews [Vince Leo]
The Video Vacuum [Mitch Lovell]
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Cool Awesome Movies Ventilation Shaft U
Surfin' Dead Deeky Wentworth
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
User Reviews from imdb Author: Gavno (quixote2@ix.netcom.com) from Mad City, Wisconsin
User Reviews from imdb Author: sol1218 from brooklyn NY
User Reviews from imdb Author: imulysses from Canada
User
reviews from imdb Author: aimless-46 from Kentucky
User
reviews from imdb (Page 3) Author: James Hitchcock from Tunbridge Wells, England
Scopophilia: Movies of the 60's, 70's, 80's [Richard Winters]
Sam Peckinpah´s CONVOY 1978 - Thomas Schäfer´s FANSEITE / FAN-SITE ... Thomas Schäfer Fan Site
index.html David Frederick fan site, including CB radio
and trucker links
BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) dvd review
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND
Time Out review Tom Milne
Adapted from Robert Ludlum's thriller, this trails a McGuffin about an un-American spy ring, but really revolves around a top brass CIA man with his eye on dictatorship (Lancaster), a disgruntled agent whom the aforesaid bastard has doublecrossed (Hurt), and a flag-waving investigative reporter (Hauer) whom Hurt manipulates into a game of unmask the spy from three candidates (Hopper, Nelson, Sarandon) that has a much more sinister purpose. It all raises the question: who needs another mess of espionage and post-Watergate paranoia? Not Peckinpah, certainly, since he shows scant interest in the convolutions of the plot (neatly enough set out in Alan Sharp's script). Instead, he toys with the agent's name (Fassett) as an excuse to explore facets of reality, fascinatingly turning the screen into a multi-purpose surveillance device. There's a neat trick involving a prerecorded 'live' TV show, a precision-timed shootout round a swimming-pool, some flickers of dark humour. Not a hell of a lot to come away with, except that (sadly, Peckinpah's last film) it is directed with such dazzling skill.
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Many film directors earn reputations of being difficult, not getting along with financiers, having their work butchered, and putting up fights. Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles come to mind; giant sized artists whose work could never be understood by those who supplied the cash. John Huston was a notorious hellraiser, so was Samuel Fuller. But the most explosive of all, the most self-destructive, had to have been Sam Peckinpah.
Aside from his television projects -- like the great Western series "The Rifleman" -- Peckinpah finished only 14 films in his career. He died in 1984 at the age of 59. After the disastrous 1978 film Convoy, Peckinpah had trouble finding work; he even stooped to directing music videos at the very end, and The Osterman Weekend was the only film he released during the last six years of his life. Of course, the studio butchered it, Peckinpah hollered, and critics treated it like a sick animal.
Thankfully, Anchor Bay has released the film in a new double-disc special edition, which gives us a second chance to really look at it, and despite some script contrivances, it finds Peckinpah high in the saddle again and full of the same old thunder and lightning.
Based on a Robert Ludlam novel (The Bourne Identity), The Osterman Weekend centers around extreme talk show host John Tanner (Rutger Hauer), who is approached by the CIA to spy on his friends during their annual weekend get-together. Through surveillance footage, the agent in charge (John Hurt) convinces Tanner that his friends are working for the Russians. They bug his house and stick him with the job of getting at least one of them to come clean, but other, more twisted plots are afoot.
Burt Lancaster co-stars as a slick, sinister Reagan-like politico (with traces of his Sweet Smell of Success character J.J. Hunsecker) in charge of the whole thing. Dennis Hopper, Craig T. Nelson and Chris Sarandon play the friends. (Strangely, all you'd have to do is replace the Reagan-ish character with a Bush-like character and exchange "Russians" for "Terrorists" and you'd have an eerily up-to-date flick.)
At first Peckinpah plays it straight, having fun with the voyeuristic nature of the assorted surveillance equipment, showing spies spying on other spies and back again, until the explosive climax rips across the screen with the same machine-gun ferocity shown in The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs. This time even the girls get to have fun; Tanner's wife (Meg Foster) snatches up a bow and arrow to help out (her image was used on the poster and in the publicity stills).
Anchor Bay's superb letterboxed DVD comes with four audio mixes (Dolby Digital, DTS, Surround and original Mono) plus an audio commentary track with four Peckinpah scholars. The second disc comes with a VHS transfer of Peckinpah's original cut -- about ten minutes longer -- screened for audiences just once in 1983. It also includes a feature-length documentary, "From Alpha to Omega," Anchor Bay's usual excellent cast and crew biographies, the theatrical trailer and a still gallery.
Now all we need are Peckinpah's greatest works on DVD: a new Wild Bunch to replace the terrible one already on the market, Ride the High Country, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, the director's cut of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and The Ballad of Cable Hogue.
The Osterman Weekend Louis Gerber from Cosmopolis, May 2000, also seen here: Cosmopolis
Sam Peckinpah was one of the most radical directors of
American cinema. Born in Fresno, California, in 1925, Peckinpah went to a
Marine school and joined the US-army as a marine infantryman in World War II.
To his "disillusionment", his regiment never became active in the
war. In 1947, he married his first wife. Then, Peckinpah began to study theatre
at the University of Southern California and had some small jobs such as with
the Liberace show (!). He worked as a director for the theatre and for TV. For
television, Peckinpah wrote Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, The Westerner. In
the midst of the 1950s, he became assistant to director Don Siegel. In 1960,
his own TV-series, The Westerner, only lasted 13 weeks, after which he
made some unsuccessful attempts to become a part of mainstream cinema. He
remained a maverick, the "bad boy" among America's directors.
Peckinpah was a victim of alcohol and drug abuse - he often behaved strangely
and made himself a lot of enemies on the set. During his last years, he mostly
lived in a motor home.
Peckinpah's first feature film was The Deadly Companions in 1961. Ride
The High Country followed in 1962 featuring Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea
in their last Western film. Some other movies by Peckinpah: In 1969, he shot The
Wild Bunch, a "slow-motion Western action comedy". This film gave
him a boost. In 1971 followed Straw Dogs (with Dustin Hoffman) - for
which he was accused of using excessive violence, one of his trademarks. In
1972, he made the road-movie The Getaway (1972) featuring his friend
Steve McQueen as well as Ali McGraw. Another film was Pat Garrett and Billy
The Kid (1973) with the stars of folk music Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson
in the leading roles. In 1976, he shot Steiner - Cross of Iron about
obedience in war. His last film was The Osterman Weekend (1983).
Peckinpah died in 1984.
Peckinpah considered making film his personal war against Hollywood, its
studios, producers, crew. In Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid he
"ruined" six cutters - cutting took him usually months. Peckinpah's
distinctive style includes the use of slow-motion, timelapse, film stills and
short cuts. His violent scenes were often shot in slow motion and from
different perspectives. Despite these facts, he tried to be realistic in these
scenes. The characters in his movies do not use violence without
"reason". They often are at crossroads, lose perspective and fall
into an orgy of violence.
The Osterman Weekend is a film about multiple conspiracy, human
relations, violence and morals. It begins with a scene in which Lawrence
Fassett (John Hurt) takes a shower after having made love to his wife. A hidden
camera in his appartment shows two men coming in, holding his wife and
injecting something into her nose. She dies.
Only then do the audiende realize that Maxwell Danforth (Burt Lancaster) and
Stennings (Sandy McPeak) were watching the scene on videotape. It took place
years ago. The KGB killed Fassett's wife - with the tacit complicity of the
CIA. According to Danforth, Fassett never learned about this fact, although he
searched like crazy for the murderers. But his research "apparently"
made him discover a spy-ring called Omega.
Danforth and Stennings are impressed. Fassett proposes to "turn
around" one of the three American citizens who work as KGB-agents. They
are all friends of John Tanner, a television host who runs a show that digs
deep into dirty politics, corruption and other scandals. Together with their
wives, the four had studied together in Berkley and they meet once a year for
the so-called Osterman-weekend, named after Bernard Osterman, one of the four,
at whose home the meeting first took place.
Fassett, Stennings and Danforth first have to persuade Tanner, a critic of
Danforth (who wants to become President of the United States), that his three
friends are spies. Tanner has to watch tapes showing his friends in
compromising situations. After his wife and son are almost kidnapped, he is convinced.
Tanner's home, where the Osterman-meeting takes place this time, gets
completely wired and video surveillance is installed.
When they arrive, the friends already know that they are under surveillance.
The situation is tense. Everybody is watching everybody. But nothing is at it
seems to be: Danforth, Fassett, Tanner, the friends, their wives nobody knows
really what is going on. A psychological war is going on among all the people
involved. Tension increases as Fassett makes strange signs such as
"Omega" appear on his television. Things get out of control and
violence starts.
The film is great on the psychological level. The acting by John Hurt, Rutger
Hauer, Burt Lancaster and all the other actors is impressive. As the story goes
on, one learns that some things are different than they seemed to be. Less
convincing is the violence which dominates the second part of the film. Things
get out of control - also regarding the director's work. A subtle psychological
thriller becomes an orgy of not always convincing violence. Still, The
Osterman Weekend is one of Peckinpah's best films
The Osterman Weekend Leonard Pierce from The High Hat
Forager Blog: The Osterman Weekend February 21, 2007
THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND - SAM PECKINPAH COMMEMORATIVE 2-DISC EDITION DVD Walter Chaw from Film Freak Central, also seen here: Film Freak Central dvd review
DVD Times Mike Sutton
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna
The Action Mutant Reviews Joe Burrows
Amnonymous [Amnon Buchbinder] also reviewing THE GETAWAY
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Monsters At Play (Carl Lyon) dvd review
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Commemorative 2-disc Edition
Bill Up Close [Bill Treadway] Commemorative 2-disc Edition
DVD Authority.com (Christopher Bligh) dvd review Commemorative 2-disc Edition
KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review [Commemorative Edition] Commemorative 2-disc Edition
Urban Cinefile dvd review Keioth Lofthouse, Commemorative 2-disc Edition
The Digital Bits capsule dvd review Todd Doogan, Commemorative 2-disc Edition
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review [Divimax Edition] Nate Goss, Divimax 2-disc Edition
Moda Magazine (Kage Alan) dvd review Divimax 2-disc Edition
DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Divimax Edition] Colin Jacobson, Divimax 2-disc Edition
The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [0/4]
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
User
reviews from imdb Author: Nick Faust
(vidfaust1@me.com) from Evansville,
Indiana
User reviews from imdb (Page 4) Author: max von meyerling from New York
BBC Films review David Wood
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [1/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Peele,
Jordan
GET
OUT B+ 91
USA (104 mi) 2017 ‘Scope Official site
Like Nate Parker’s The
Birth of a Nation (2016) a year earlier, this film jettisoned out of
Sundance with rave reviews, but unlike Parker’s film that tanked at the box
office, this is already the most successful American film in history to have
been written and directed by a black artist, topping the $100 million dollar
mark after just two weeks. A black
satirical spoof of horror films that arouses the worst kind of black fears
about white people, even those with the best intentions, the result is a
hilarious film that radically accentuates racial fears, using the horror genre
to turn on its ear the well-intentioned white liberal movie, Stanley Kramer’s
GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER (1967), where the daughter of a well-to-do white
family brings home a black boyfriend to meet the family, where of course he’s
completely unthreatening and nonsexual, academically at the top of his class,
overly perfect in every way so they can have no doubts about accepting him,
fitting a requirement of moral decency in order for the film to be accepted in
the South, where it was hugely successful, but a pernicious stereotype
developed that led to blacks having to be better than whites at the same jobs,
in the same positions, where they had to have spotless reputations in order to
be accepted. So even when blacks were
initially accepted into an integrated corporate workforce, where they may have
been the only black person in the room, there was not an equal standard, as
blacks were required to excel above and beyond in order to justify their
hiring, where in effect they became company mascots, where each business would
sing the praises of their own company hire, claiming theirs is the best, where
really, it was all a matter of prestige for the company. While that was 50 years ago, things have
changed considerably, as many, including a majority in the Supreme Court,
believe with the election of a black President that we’re living in a
post-racial America, which was their reasoning for loosening and/or gutting
federal voting rights protections for minorities written into Civil Rights laws
in a June 2013 decision, with Chief
Justice Roberts writing “Our country has changed, and while any racial
discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation
it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions,” suggesting
blacks have grown to a sizable portion of the voting population. Of course, immediately after the decision,
many states with Republican majorities drafted legislation to suppress minority
voting, which had a significant effect in the most recent presidential
election, but instead of using race to justify the need for mandatory voter
ID’s, reduced voting hours, and fewer polling places in minority neighborhoods,
they made fictitious claims of rampant voter fraud, though it’s nearly
non-existent, between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent, where it’s
more likely someone will be struck by lightning, according to Debunking
the Voter Fraud Myth | Brennan Center for Justice. For example, Donald Trump won the state of
Wisconsin by just 27,000 votes, but 300,000 registered voters lacked the
state-mandated forms of ID to vote, according to a federal court, where voter
turnout in the state was the lowest in twenty years. Wisconsin was one of 14 states with new
voting restrictions in effect for the first time in 2016, making this the first
presidential election in 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act.
Despite years of so-called social progress, Americans are as racially blind as ever, pretending it’s not an issue, yet the stereotypes and myths persist, along with segregated, impoverished neighborhoods that white Americans simply ignore, using a rabid anti-tax fervor to defund public schools, using a majority voting block that mandates fewer tax dollars will be sent into cash-strapped black neighborhood schools. Turning a blind eye to the effects, the perpetuation of a separate and unequal underclass, this remains the standard model of addressing race relations in America. In other words, nothing is being done to correct the obvious disadvantages of being black, where there are simply more hurdles and obstacles to overcome, yet a majority of whites believe they are all on the same playing field. Peele has written a social satire that couldn’t be more relevant, where it is this fairy tale perception of racial harmony that lays the groundwork for this film, written and directed by a black comedian who had a television show on Comedy Central entitled Key & Peele (2012 – 2015), where Peele’s expertise was impersonating former President Obama (Key & Peele - Obama's Anger Translator - Meet Luther - Uncensored, 2:48). While there are 400 million Americans, only 13 percent are black, which means they have a unique perspective than the rest, often the only black person in the room, especially at colleges and universities, where they quickly discover diversity is a term used for the different kinds of white people and their variety of interests, where blacks are routinely ignored, unless asked what sport do they play. And it is here that the film excels, as it gets under the skin and into the mindset of white people who show an outward perception of benevolence toward blacks, friendly and accepting, seemingly embracing their culture, yet they are in an entirely different economic class with a completely different agenda that totally excludes blacks except in a subservient role, like nannies, cooks, or groundskeepers. For many whites, these are the only blacks they know, overly docile and friendly, house broken, so to speak, where they’re almost part of the family, exactly as they were in the plantation era of slavery. But these friendships never stopped the brutal and despicable treatment towards other slaves. In this film, not much has changed, as the condescension continues. The film opens in something of a comment on the Trayvon Martin incident, a black 17-year old kid fatally shot by an armed white neighborhood watch volunteer, where his only crime was being a black person in a white neighborhood. In this scenario, however, the lone black kid is targeted by a following car and kidnapped, snatched and stuffed into the back seat of a car, never to be seen again. Cue the film title. According to the director, racial fear hasn’t been a subject in horror films since George Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), where his Rod Serling-style aim is exploring the fears of being a black man in a white world, where you are a stranger in a strange land, with the bottom falling out before you’re done. Key to the film are two friendships, a racial couple very much in love, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a black photographer, and his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams), together for five months, but also Chris and his best friend, TSA Officer Rod Williams (Lil Rel Howery, whose comic timing is impeccable), also black, who regularly communicate by phone. As the young lovers are about to visit Rose’s parents for the weekend, Rod’s sage advice to Chris, “don’t go to a white girl parents’ house.”
Horror connoisseurs will marvel at Rose’s parent’s house, as it’s set in an isolated and remote location, a mile from the closest neighbor, who is on the other side of a lake, and surrounded by the woods on three sides. A bit suspicious that she didn’t reveal to her parents that he’s black, Rose reassures Chris he has nothing to fear, as her parents are super liberal, that her father would have voted for Obama for a third term, which, of course, is the first thing that comes out of his mouth. Meet Dean (Bradley Whitford) and Missy (Catherine Keener), who are perfectly accommodating, though both show a creepy warmth, where Dean talks in slang, slaps him on the back and keeps calling him, “My man!” while namedropping Tiger Woods and Jesse Owens. Dean is a renowned neurosurgeon while Missy is a psychotherapist who specializes in hypnosis, working in a room there at the house, where her specialty is curing the addiction to smoking. Her antennae are raised when she discovers Chris is a smoker, where she can’t wait to get him into her study. Perhaps more unnerving are the black servants, Georgina (Betty Gabriel), the cook and maid, and Walter (Marcus Henderson), the groundskeeper, as neither one acknowledges their blackness, yet maintain sinister smiles as they swear a certain allegiance to the family. Chris suspects something is up, unable to grasp why people are acting so strangely, and has trouble sleeping, grabbing his cigarettes and taking a walk outside, but he’s spooked by even more disturbing events, one of which leads him into Missy’s study where he’s hooked, as she hypnotizes him to the repetitive movements of her spoon while stirring her tea, sending him to the darkest and deepest regions of “the sunken place,” disconnected from all earthly realities, where he no longer has control over his own body. Awaking in a fright, he thinks this might all have been a terrible dream, but the thought of cigarettes sickens him, which makes him feel even more susceptible to some strange and mysterious power emanating from an unknown force, exactly the same vulnerabilities from circumstances raised in Frankenheimer’s THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962), perhaps the ultimate in advocates of conspiracy theories, as it gives credence to all their worst fears. Similarly, Peele ramps up the tension throughout the film, reaching grotesque proportions when a larger, extended family comes to visit, literally creating havoc, though Rose is seemingly unaffected by anything out of the ordinary, as it’s all happening to Chris. Peele does an excellent job paying homage tributes to other horror films, writing a nuanced script that shows alarming interior perceptions, incorporating subtle truths about hidden racial agendas, decoding the mythologies and lies, making an extremely relevant social statement that is as funny as it is tragic, though black audiences are likely to find greater humor in the overly personal behavior of white people around blacks, appropriating black culture, moving the conversation to athletes or musicians, slyly suggesting they’re hip, when the truth suggests just the opposite. The overall cast is excellent, none more creepy that Missy, where Keener played a uniquely similar role in Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999), a wildly inventive film that left people trapped in someone else’s body with no control. It’s also ironic that the hypnotic means to control Chris is with a silver spoon, a symbol of wealth and privilege. This turns into a mindfuck of a film, as darker forces are doing the devil’s work, with Peele creating a queasy atmosphere of escalating tension and dread, where Chris is up against it throughout. Constantly playing on racial stereotypes, Peele has a field day having fun with this film, where the toxically charged atmosphere can turn on a dime, revealing unusual talent and insight, producing a remarkably accomplished first film.
Movie
Review: Jordan Peele's 'Get Out' - Vulture
David Edelstein
Jordan Peele’s Get Out is the satirical horror movie we’ve been waiting for, a mash-up of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? and The Stepford Wives that’s more fun than either and more illuminating, too. Daniel Kaluuya plays Chris, a black photographer who travels to an affluent suburb with his white girlfriend, Rose (Allison Williams), to meet her family. Before they leave, he learns she hasn’t told them he’s black, and he’s a bit nervous — and so are we, given that the movie opens with a young black man getting snatched from a suburban sidewalk and thrown into a white car playing the ’30s music-hall ditty “Run, Rabbit, Run” (“Run rabbit — run rabbit / Run! Run! Run!”). No worries, though. Rose’s parents, Dean (Bradley Whitford) and Missy (Catherine Keener), turn out to be conscientious liberals and hugely welcoming. Dean tells Chris he’d have voted for Obama a third time. And Dean is mindful of the awkwardness Chris feels in the presence of their black housekeeper and gardener, who are a couple. Dean insists that the two have been with them a long time and that they’re like family. He’s not far off.
This is Peele’s directorial debut, but it feels like the work of someone who has been making features for years. He uses the wide screen like John Carpenter in Halloween, to lull but decenter you. His “Boo!” moments make you jump and then laugh at yourself for jumping — then steel yourself to jump again. His surrealist sequences are gorgeously lyrical, his gore, when it finally comes, Pollock-splattery. His years crafting sketches for Key & Peele have taught him the difference between parody and satire. There are plenty of savory horror tropes, but Get Out wouldn’t work as well if, in the real world, white people weren’t so unconvincing in their assurance that black people have little to fear apart from those fascist-racist cops and their fascist-racist Republican enablers. Peele is after less obvious targets: rich white liberals as black soul-suckers.
The performances are devilishly clever — heightened but without a whisper of camp. Whitford’s Dean is too chummily direct to be hiding anything, right? A villain would be more evasive. Keener is the psychiatrist as warm, tousled Earth Mother: Should Chris fear the way she gets into his head — into the feelings he has about his own mom, killed in a hit-and-run accident so many years before — or welcome her attempt to get him to confront his repressed guilt? Caleb Landry Jones, one of the more interestingly weird actors in movies, plays Rose’s brother, who can’t seem to control his competitive instincts and always wants to start some kind of street fight. The vivaciously pretty Williams makes Rose the biggest mystery. She picks up on the strange, threatening vibes in the house and lets Chris know he’s not imagining anything. A true conspirator would assure him that everything’s okay. But she’s in there helping him sort out what’s real and what’s imagined. She really cares.
Kaluuya, a Brit, is a perfect hero for a movie like this. Chris registers on some level that he’s a character in a horror movie — he can’t believe how bizarre these people are behaving — but the dislocation is deeper and more disabling. LilRel Howery is Chris’s boisterous TSA-agent friend who tells him not to go into suburban white people’s houses, which is a twist on white people telling innocent girls not to walk down dark urban streets. Get Out is a ludicrous paranoid fantasy, but that doesn’t mean it’s not alive in the unconscious. Having it out there in so delightful a form helps us laugh at it together — and maybe later, when we’ve thought it over, shudder.
Call Jordan Peele's sneaky-clever directorial debut Get
Out his take on Stanley Kramer's insufferably benign racial
warmedy Guess Who's Coming To Dinner with knives drawn out midway
between the fish course and dessert. The politeness and civility are still
there only like a pair of lips drawn taut to conceal fangs.
Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) and his girlfriend Rose Armitage (Allison
Williams) are visiting her parents Dean (Bradley Whitford) and Missy (the
always excellent Catherine Keener). His best friend Rod Williams (Lil Rel
Howery) warns him "don't go to a white girl parents' house"--an
obvious line that nevertheless evokes a strong response from the viewers; when
later in the film the line is repeated its meaning has expanded from caroming
off the various loops and twists of the plot; the audience response as a result
is bigger.
Critics wonder how such a funny guy (Peele is best known as half of the TV
sketch comedy team Key and Peele) could be so adept
at horror; watching this you wonder why they wonder. Get Out is basically
a comedy sketch stretched to feature-film length, pushed (as Monty Python often
would) into the realm of nightmare (in an interview
with Forbes Magazine Peele compared comedy to horror: "So much of it is
pacing, so much of it reveals." And as master not just of suspense but of
comedy Alfred Hitchcock might put it so much the expert manipulation of
viewers' expectations). The horror gives the comedy bite; the comedy helps spin
the horror past viewers' defenses, to strike at their inner
complacencies.
Certainly pacing is part of what makes Peele's film work. Get Out starts
with Chris and Rose preparing for the drive to her parents' house (which looks
as if it were set in a typical affluent American suburb somewhere in New
England, but was shot in Alabama to take advantage of tax credits). We're
lulled by their conversation, basically Chris' apprehension at visiting parents
who still don't know he's black and Rose insisting he'll be all right ("my
dad would vote for Obama for a third term if he could"); suddenly a car
accident, a quick "WAKE UP!" moment that jolts you straight up
in your seat, followed by an even better scene involving a police officer that
treads the delicate line between nervous giggle and muted outrage.
Things progress slowly but surely from there: a guided tour of the Armitage
home, including Walter the watchful black groundskeeper (Marcus Henderson) and
Georgina the mysterious black housekeeper (Betty Gabriel). Aside from the
faintly unsettling preponderance of black employees the household is as
staunchly progressive as in any Kramer picture (Dean: "I'd vote for Obama
for a third term if I could") only the many idealized details form what
feels like the crust on a caramel brittle--you expect the fragile surface to
shatter at any second.
The ultimate reveal is silly--think The Manchurian Candidate with a
touch of Roger Corman-produced Poe--but what can you expect, given the premise
and genre? At least Peele when he finally tips his hand does so with some verve
and style: when Chris is unknowingly hypnotized Peele drops him into what Missy
calls "the sunken place"--literally a claustrophobically deep hole
that evokes both Ewan McGregor's drug trip in Trainspotting and (even
better though not as successfully) Allan Gray's eerie coffin ride in Dreyer's
classic Vampyr (Peele seems to know his horror films, and draws
from some of the better ones). Later blue rubber is stretched round an
anesthetized man's skull and as the saw bites down we see blood dribble behind
the bright azure halo, a distancing yet oddly beautiful effect.
What's Peel trying to say? O any number of things: that the most liberal family
can hide the most racist sentiments (they're just much more skilled at lying
about it); that a black man's worse paranoid fears are at some level justified;
that sometimes getting into a family's inner circle is easy--it's
getting out that might prove more problematic.
The cast is excellent (love Keener's authoritative presence when stirring the
tea in a cup) but Daniel Kaluuya truly stands out. I remember him from Black
Mirror's "Fifteen Million Merits" where I thought he gave a tour
de force performance; here he has to reflect the many twists of tone and
circumstance in Peele's film and each magnified microsecond response is visible
on his nakedly emotional face.
Get Out joins the collection of fairly innovative fairly subtle American
horror films in recent years, a collection that would include (off the top of
my head) David Robert Mitchell's It
Follows which (a la John Carpenter) played on point-of-view, and
(a la Hitchcock) managed the remarkable feat of making wide-open spaces
agoraphobically terrifying; M. Night Shyamalan's The
Visit and Split,
which prove that old-fashioned virtues like effective plot twists or effective
narrative hooks can still draw an audience; and Robert Eggers' The
VVitch, which (again!) channels Dreyer (in this case Day of
Wrath) to touch on some of our more primordial (sexual spiritual existential)
fears.
The first great black horror-comedy? Not quite I think; Charles Burnett's To
Sleep With Anger was more slyly funny more subtly horrific without for a
moment betraying its carefully constructed realist surface. Peele has gone an
amazing long way with his first major film; that said, he may still have some
ways to go before we can call him a major artist.
Film Comment: Ina Archer March 03, 2017
Directed by Jordan Peele of the comedy duo Key and Peele, Get Out is the horror film that we’ve been waiting for. It arrives just in time, at a moment when genre filmmaking can harness familiar tropes to reflect a post-election world that feels increasing surreal, backward-looking, and unfamiliar.
Chris Washington (British actor Daniel Kaluuya), a young photographer focused on black, urban street life, is going on a country weekend trip with Rose (Allison Williams), his girlfriend of four months, who, to his dismay, has neglected to tell her family that she is dating an African American. Rose assures him that her parents are not racists (a comment that elicited explosive laughter from the audience I watched the movie with), and they depart, leaving Chris’s dog in the care of his friend, Rod, a TSA agent (raucously played by comedian Lil Rel Howery). Things get shaky fast, starting with a car accident and a tense confrontation with a suburban police officer. Arriving at the Armitage estate, Chris meets Rose’s professional, apologetically liberal parents, Dean and Missy (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener), and her pugnacious brother Jeremy (a smarmy Caleb Landry Jones). Rounding out the household are two bizarrely robotic African American servants, Walter and Georgina (Marcus Henderson and Betty Gabriel); also on hand is Stephen Root as Jim Hudson, a blind art dealer who’s previously admired Chris’s artwork (in a role rising above an “old white man” lampoon, as do all the white actors, however motley).
It turns out to be the weekend of the family’s annual garden party, and the next day a funereal procession of middle-aged and elderly white guests arrive. They scarcely conceal their admiration of Chris’s physique and their curiosity about his imagined sexual prowess. Confused by his prior icy reception by the black servants, and a terrifying dream brought on by a nocturnal encounter with Missy, who is a hypnotherapist, Chris tries to disappear behind his camera lens. He is surprised to spot another young black man (Keith Stanfield) in his viewfinder at the party. Chris reaches out to him as a sympathetic brother, unleashing the frightening events that follow.
Peele’s adept direction balances comedy and menace, with nuanced performances, especially from Kaluuya, who is a thoughtful, emotive presence. And the casting of Williams, of which I was suspicious, proves ideal, recalling her self-involved character Marnie from Girls. (Imagine Joanna Drayton—Hepburn and Tracy’s willful daughter who inexplicably snags and brings home Dr. Sidney Poitier in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—as a succubus.) Unlike another recent popular genre pastiche, which nostalgically samples celebrated film musicals of the past, their shortcomings unchallenged, Get Out self-consciously and subtly mines the conventions of the horror genre to create a film that resonates on multiple levels. It applies the universal concerns of horror movies (such as providing catharsis for our fears) to specific issues of race and racism, and particularly of blackness, effectively linking a nuanced storyline to the familiar signifiers of the genre—a sense of paranoiac dread, sudden scares, and requisite carnage—making visible the all too familiar microaggressions experienced daily by African Americans. In doing this, Peele references and draws upon the techniques of classic scary movies (Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead), thrillers (Rear Window), and comedy and social problem movies (The ’Burbs).
Get Out is a great movie for people who dislike or dismiss horror expecting “gratuitous” explicit violence and nudity, because of its humor, PG sex scenes, and the analogies drawn to contemporary lived experiences of race relations. Get Out is also one of the rare horror movies that features a black protagonist, playing with the generic adage that black characters are habitually the first slaughtered. It also challenges the credence of African American audiences that black characters would instinctively run away from danger rather than bungling towards it like their hapless white counterparts, and presents a black male as the vulnerable figure of audience identification. Peele shows empathy for his characters, seeking to explain the Other rather than presenting him or her as a beast or merely monstrous.
So Get Out can be variously enjoyed as an entertaining thriller/comedy, or additionally read as a (much appreciated) fist bump to cinephiles of color as well as a complex evocation of eugenics, paternity, expropriation, and the interrelated/interracial legacy of slavery, while deploying stalwart horror motifs like the unknown, the woods, the haunted house, what/who’s in the basement, urban displacement, hypnotism . . . The only thing missing is quicksand!
True to the horror genre’s habits, the elderly, aging, and the past are regarded as especially unnerving, antique objects. Discordant old-timey music, bygone decor and technology feel sinister here and are associated with whiteness, and the Armitages’ coldly symmetrical, midcentury rec room, with its anachronistic console television, becomes a prison. While under hypnosis, Chris slips into a kind of televisual seeing as he falls into what is called the “Sunken Place” of his inner consciousness, in which he sees the images far above him with the appearance of a flickering, small-gauge home-movie frame.
I first saw Get Out at Brooklyn’s BAMcinématek one afternoon with a mostly white audience and more black people than I usually see there. Afterward, despite the sold-out screening and joyful audience of movie-talkers, I was melancholy walking around nearby Fort Greene. While the film was perceptively funny, there was just enough anger to give it a (vampiristic) bite and a gory, revelatory finale, and I was haunted by questions and lingering dread. What does it mean to look, to dress, act, or to be “black”?
The movie’s core horror is the entire or almost complete expropriation of black people physically, culturally, and creatively, leaving only some black consciousness retained deep inside the Sunken Place. It is a state of being in which the body is effectively paralyzed in place and emotions can no longer be expressed freely. That painful and scary notion reminded me of the unnerving denouement of The Vanishing, where to be curious—motivated by psychic grief (an emotion underexplored in horror)—to explore the unknown consciousness of another, by choice or by force, brings the film’s protagonist to a petrifying and deadly realization. Likewise, Get Out suggests that black people can become buried alive in whiteness, much in the way the minstrel’s blackface mask engulfs performers of color, but taken to an existential extreme.
Or like the gentrification of a neighborhood. That’s why there was something profoundly discomfiting to me walking around on a sunny day in a vibrant, community that was once predominantly African American. During my second viewing (prior to the scary Oscars broadcast), this time with a majority of African American viewers and aware of upcoming shocks, I admired the details and hints threaded throughout the story (such as the revelation of the Armitages’ grandfather coming in second to Jesse Owens). These are woven together at the end yet leave obscured whether gentle Chris has become the beast he was stereotypically envisaged to be—maddened as in theater’s perennial blackface role, Othello, who is plainly referenced by Peele.
Ultimately, Get Out’s true terrors are universal and are voiced succinctly in a line from Moonlight, a film where characters also seek solace/refuge/desire in the transformation of the appearance and the body: “Who is you, Chiron?” What makes us who we are, what is our purpose? Can we view ourselves through the eyes of (an)other? And what about those Oscars?? Indeed, the broadcast ended with a return of the racial repressed as Moonlight emerged victoriously from the precise Sunken Place so chillingly depicted in Get Out!
The New York Review of Books: J. Hoberman March 13, 2017
The New Yorker: Brandon Harris March 04, 2017
Big Media Vandalism: Odie Henderson Odie “Odienator” Henderson and Steven Boone,
March 07, 2017, also seen here: Big Media Vandalism: Steven Boone
The Ringer: K. Austin Collins February 23, 2017
Get Out's Ending & Message Explained - Screen Rant Bob Chipman
Get Out Ending Explained: Let's Discuss Its Brilliance | Collider Brian Formo, February 28, 2017
We Really Need to Talk About That Get Out Ending | WIRED Kelli Rubin
The New Yorker: Richard Brody March 02, 2017
“Get
Out” Takes Cultural Appropriation To The Cultural Harvest Level Rebecca Carroll from VSB, February 27, 2017
Get Out is a horror film about benevolent racism. It's spine-chilling. - Vox Alissa Wilkinson
'Get
Out' Reviews Underline the Racism That's so Terrifying in the Movie Victoria Anderson from Newsweek
Horror and Race: How Jordan Peele's Get Out Flips the Script ... Randall Colburn from Consequence of Sound
In Get Out, the Eyes Have It - The Atlantic Lenika Cruz
How Get Out positions white womanhood as the most horrifying ... - Slate Aisha Harris, March 7, 2017
Get
Out, Jordan Peele's horror movie, reviewed. - Slate Aisha Harris, February 23, 2017
Get
Out and the Threat of the White Monster - The Muse - Jezebel Clover Hope, February 27, 2017
A
horror movie for our time: “Get Out” is frighteningly topical - Salon.com Mary Elizabeth Williams, February 24, 2017
Esquire: Steven Thrasher March 01, 2017
'Get Out' Is a Funny, Brilliantly Subversive Horror Film - The Atlantic David Sims
National Review [Armond White]
Nick Pinkerton - Archive - Reverse Shot I Wanna Be Black, February 24, 2017
Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com
Jordan Peele's Genius New Horror Movie Shows the Terror of Being ... Jada Yuan from Vulture
Get Out · Film Review Jordan Peele shifts from comedy ... - The AV Club A.A. Dowd
Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]
Get Out Review: Jordan Peele's Horror Film Isn't Afraid To ... - IndieWire David Ehrlich
You Won't Believe Hollywood Let Jordan Peele Get ... - Village Voice Alan Scherstuhl
Get Out Review: The Horror Movie We Need Today | Time.com Stephanie Zacharek
Every Movie Has a Lesson [Don Shanahan]
Get Out Review: Jordan Peele's Film Is Clever and Terrifying | Collider Matt Goldberg
Ruthless Reviews (potentially offensive) [Goat]
“Get Out” And 10 More Films About The Existential Terror Of Existing While Black In America Lawrence Ware from Very Smart Brothas, February 24, 2017
10 Pitch-Perfect Examples Of “Yeah…That’s Some White People Shit” In Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” Damon Young from VSB, February 25, 2017
For Colored People Still Thinking About Dating Interracially When Watching Get Out Wasn’t Enough Kaylé Barnes from VSB, March 6, 2017
Review: Jordan Peele’s ‘Get Out’ Is a Witty & Ferocious Horror Film That Unravels Modern-Day Racism Aramide A. Tinubu from Shadow and Act, February 23, 2017
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
“Get Out” moments are real: Why Jordan Peele's new film should be ... D. Watkins from Salon, February 28, 2017
Get Out :: Movies :: Reviews - Paste Magazine Andy Crump
Jordan Peele
Profile: From Comedy to Horror With Get Out | Time.com Eliza Berman
ErikLundegaard.com
- Movie Review: Get Out (2017)
iNFLUX Magazine [Steve Pulaski] also seen here: Steve Pulaski Message Board, The [Steve Pulaski]
Sight & Sound: Trevor Johnston March 17, 2017
Film Corner, The [Greg Klymkiw]
The Kim Newman Website (Kim Newman)
What
Becky Gotta Do To Get Murked? White Womanhood In Jordan Peele’s Get Out Kinitra Brooks from VSB, March 3, 2017
In Jordan Peele's Gripping Get Out, “Humanity Is the Monster”Vanity Fair Yohana Desta, February 17, 2017
Jordan
Peele lists his scary influences, from 'The Shining' to 'Jaws'
Key
and Peele give 'Obama's Anger Translator' one last hurrah
I Heard That Movie Was [Justin Morales]
Hannah McHaffie [Reel Insights] also seen here: Reel Insights [Hannah McHaffie]
Get Out Alternate Ending Revealed by Jordan Peele | Collider Matt Goldberg
Jordan
Peele Horror Movie Trailer: Watch the First Footage of Get Out Matt Miller from Esquire, October 5, 2016
Digital Journal [Sarah Gopaul]
FilmFracture [James Jay Edwards]
Spectrum Culture [Mike McClelland]
Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Angus Wolfe Murray]
Filmmaker: Dan Schoenbrun Observation Number 5, February 03, 2017
Brooklyn Magazine: Max Kyburz Top 5 Movies of February 2017, February 28,
2017
Pussy Goes Grrr: Alice Stoehr March 09, 2017
Get Out's Fashion Explained by Costume Designer Nadine Haders ... Brooke Bobb interview from Vogue, March 23, 2017
Jordan
Peele's 'Get Out' Was Originally More Disturbing - Esquire Drew Fortune interview, March 1, 2017
Waking Nightmares: A Conversation with Jordan Peele - From the ... Andrew Chan interview from Criterion, February 24, 2017
In 'Get Out,' Jordan Peele Tackles The 'Human Horror' Of Racial Fear ... Michael Martin interview from NPR, February 19, 2017
The Village Voice: Bilge Ebiri director interview, February 14, 2017
The Hollywood Reporter [John DeFore]
Get Out (2017), directed by Jordan Peele | Movie review - Time Out Joshua Rothkopf
Get Out review – tea, bingo… and racial terror | Film | The Guardian Mark Kermode
Get Out review – fantastically twisted horror-satire on ... - The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
Get Out: the film that dares to reveal the horror of liberal racism in ... Lanre Bakare from The Guardian, February 28, 2017
Get Out review – white liberal racism is terrifying bogeyman in sharp ... Benjamin Lee from The Guardian, February 22, 2017
Get Out: the horror film that shows it's scary to be a black man in ... Ashlee Blackwell from The Guardian, October 6, 2016
Get
Out review: Cutting commentary balanced with humour and horror Jack Shepherd from The Independent
Irish Film Critic [Tracee Bond]
Irish Film Critic [Byron Coker]
Cleveland Movie Blog, The [Bob Ignizio]
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Los
Angeles Times [Justin Chang]
Get Out Movie Review
& Film Summary (2017) | Roger Ebert Brian Tallerico
New York Times [Manohla Dargis]
The Movie 'Get Out' Is a Strong Antidote to the Myth of 'Postracial' America Brent Staples from The New York Times, March 27, 2017
Peerce, Larry
THE BELL JAR
User reviews from
imdb Author: rrrusty from the big green (wa)
I saw this movie when it first came out, before I had read the book. It's impossible to capture the immensity of Esther's pain as she staggers toward oblivion, but watching the movie gave me a definite sense of a life in utter chaos. Yes, the film is flawed, but in my mind it stands alone as a separate entity. Marilyn Hassett's portrayal of Esther is terrifying--I haven't empathized so completely with a character on the brink of dementia since Kathleen Quinlan as Deborah in "I Never Promised You A Rose Garden." The supporting cast is equally solid--it's not their fault that there's just too much ground for one little movie to cover. Donna Mitchell stays in my mind as creating, in Joan's character, a young woman as doomed and in as much mental disarray as Esther. Mitchell is an amazingly underrated (and under-used) actress. I'm not sure if our boys would have given it two thumbs up, but it remains one of my closet classics.
User reviews from
imdb Author: MarieGabrielle from
This movie is one of the few I actually bought several copies
of. Though it is circa 1979, it is not dated, and so much more effective than
the recent "Sylvia" film, which is dominated by Gwyneth Paltrow's
persona.
Marilyn Hassett plays the principal role, and does an excellent job. She does
not overshadow the personality of Sylvia Plath, who was an interesting,
conflicted and brilliant individual.
The story follows Sylvia at
The story progresses as she wins a scholarship to NY where ..."ëvery one
envied me that summer"... However, there is the fateful backdrop of the
Since it was the late 50's Sylvia was expected to marry, but does not see this
as a viable solution, indeed it is a hindrance to her writing career. She is on
the brink of decision, when she has the ultimate breakdown; I will not
delineate the detail, you must watch the brilliantly constructed story, which
leads her to her decision. The main issue I liked was that her life was shown,
not in conjunction with a man (like the more recent movie) but how SHE was
affected, and what life meant to her.
Lesbians
in "Nice" Films
Claudette Charboneau and Lucy
Winer from Jump Cut
Peirce, Kimberly
BOYS DON’T CRY 96
The grimly compelling true story of Teena Brandon, a 21-year-old Nebraskan who chose to carry herself off as a boy, 'Brandon'. When her hometown of Lincoln gets too hot, s/he picks up with a rough, rootless bunch from Fall City, including ex-con John (Sarsgaard), who has 'no impulse control', his buddy Tom (Sexton), who's into self-inflicted pain and arson, and the white trash glamour girl Lana (Sevigny). When Brandon falls in love with the latter, it's a safe bet things aren't going to work out. Like a number of Christine Vachon productions, this deals in sexual transgression and retribution, but director Peirce keeps a lid on her artier tendencies, with the focus squarely on the actors. Given Hilary Swank's brave, enthralling and Oscar-winning performance, and the dismaying power of the story, that makes a lot of sense.
Boys Don't Cry David Denby from The New Yorker
A delicately conceived but fearless movie. In small-town Nebraska, a
young woman named Teena Brandon (Hilary Swank) clips her hair into a butch cut,
flattens her breasts, puts on boys' clothes and a boy's swagger, and passes in
the world as Brandon Teena, handsome young dude. What she feels is pure
exhilaration, the excitement of leaving her past behind and becoming a lover;
what we feel is dismay and fear. Brandon falls in with a group of derelict,
white-trash kids and attracts the languid beauty Lana (Chloë Sevigny), who
allows herself to think that Brandon is a man—with inevitably disastrous
results. The movie is a fine, terrifying tragic poem that is also, at times,
subversively funny: the women who like
The
Brandon Teena Story Sarah Kerr from The New Yorker
The Brandon Teena Story (1998)
Susan Muska and Gréta Ólafsdottir remind us that the documentary doesn't
have to be a neutral form—it can be passionate, angry, and persuasive. Working
with a shoestring budget (from the looks of it), they tell the story of Brandon
Teena, a twenty-year-old girl who chose to live as a young man and who wound up
murdered, execution-style, in a cabin in rural Nebraska. The theme here is
homophobia, but the filmmakers also coax us into seeing
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Boys Don't Cry (1999) Xan
Brooks from Sight and Sound, April
2000
The US Midwest, the early 90s.
Teena Brandon, a petty thief from Lincoln, Nebraska, cuts her hair, binds her
breasts and reinvents herself as a boy named Brandon Teena. Alighting in the
depressed Nebraskan township of Falls City, Brandon befriends young
single-mother Candace and her dropout buddies: ex-cons John and Tom and
vixenish teenager Lana. John lives at the home of Lana's mother and is fiercely
protective of Lana, who is herself attracted to Brandon. Lana and Brandon begin
a relationship.
However, when Brandon's warrant
sheet catches up with him, the authorities realise he is actually a girl and
place him in the women's cell. Brandon tells Lana he is a hermaphrodite and she
arranges his bail. Back at Lana's house, a disgusted John and Tom strip Brandon
naked to prove he is actually a girl. Later that night, John and Tom drive
Brandon to a remote part of the country where they rape and beat him. Brandon
presses charges and hides out at Candace's home where he plans to escape Falls
City with Lana. Informed of his whereabouts by Lana's mother, John and Tom
drive over and kill Brandon and Candace. End credits reveal they are both
serving time for murder. Lana left town but later returned to Falls City.
Review
Fledgling film-maker Kimberly Peirce first learned of the murder of Teena
Brandon from a 1994 article in that oracle of
Strange to note, then, that Boys Don't Cry's gender-bending concerns
fit with a surprising snugness into its stolid heartland setting. After all,
the American West has always trumpeted itself as a place of renewal and
reinvention, a land where pioneers could throw off the shackles of the past and
live the life they always dreamed of. And what is Teena Brandon if not a
contemporary update of the 19th-century frontiersman, a sexual pioneer who
sheds her old skin in
Peirce elects to keep her protagonist's unhappy
Not that Boys Don't Cry is ever so obvious, so explicit in its gender
politics. On the contrary, Peirce's picture is marked throughout by a lovely,
lyrical ambiguity. Despite the sheer gut-churning horror of its central rape
scene, the perpetrators are never demonised as brutish monsters, and while
Peirce stacks the cards substantially in
More importantly, Sevigny manages to conjure Lana into an astonishingly
subtle and unreadable creature. We peg her for a dupe - a naive white-trash
vixen who's in for a big surprise - only to realise that she is actually two
steps ahead of everyone else. The enigmatic
Lana knows what she knows, trusts in her lover and is reluctant to dig any
deeper. In the end, the relationship between Brandon and Lana turns out to be
the crowning glory of Boys Don't Cry. On a stylistic level, of course,
this poetic slice of trailer-park blues also takes its lead from the true-crime
prose of In Cold Blood and The Executioner's Song or Terrence
Malick's lovers-on-the-run classic
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Queer And Present Danger B.
Ruby Rich from Sight and Sound, March
2000
Boys Don't Cry, Being John Malkovich and The Talented Mr. Ripley - each of these recent US films has a pronounced
queer element. But what do they owe to the pioneering spirit of the New Queer
Cinema of 1992, of Derek Jarman, Todd Haynes, Rose Troche, Gregg Araki and
others
Almost a decade ago, the biggest
independent-film news was the arrival of a phenomenon dubbed (by this writer,
in this publication) the New Queer Cinema (S&S September 1992). That was
then, this is now. As this issue went to press, the most recent film that would
seem to qualify for that moniker, Boys Don't Cry (see page 18),
had become one of the most acclaimed films of 1999. Based on the best
made-for-the-movies true-crime story since In Cold Blood, Boys
Don't Cry tells the tale of a small-town boy from the land of
country-western music who transgressed the rules of gender and finance and paid
with his life. The fact that he turned out to have been a biological female who
had changed names and cities to pass as male was central to the case and, by
now, the legend; the fact that he'd forged cheques, less so. Not only had
Brandon Teena started life as Teena Brandon, but he'd won girls over with a
special brand of romantic charm lacking in the male of the species in the
backwaters of America. For sure, the story had possibilities.
Critical raves have poured in,
from the FIPRESCI award at the 1999 London Film Festival to the breathlessly
awaited Oscar nominations, where Boys Don't Cry looks to stand a
chance of snagging at least one - for its luminous star Hilary Swank, who has
already picked up a Golden Globe for her trouble. The coveted Independent
Spirit Award nominations have already been announced, with first-time director
Kimberly Peirce as well as her star and co-star Chlöe Sevigny qualifying, while
critics' associations throughout the US have bestowed honours on director and
cast. Peirce even picked up a Five Continents Award at the European Film
Awards. Recently PopcornQ, the pioneering and immensely popular queer-film
website, completed a poll of its visitors and named Boys Don't Cry
one of the top queer films of 1999.
In so far as Peirce's true-life
saga of Brandon Teena, a woman murdered for passing as a man, can be counted as
the full-fledged flowering of the New Queer Cinema's early shoots, then the
movement may really have arrived, hitting the big time at last. But not so
fast: the story is more complicated than that, its conclusions less clearcut,
the movement itself in question, if not in total meltdown.
First of all, from the beginning
the New Queer Cinema was a more successful term for a moment than a movement.
It was meant to catch the beat of a new kind of film- and video-making that was
fresh, edgy, low-budget, inventive, unapologetic, sexy and stylistically
daring. The godfather of the movement was the late great Derek Jarman, who
pronounced himself finally able to connect with an audience thanks to the
critical mass of the new films and videos that burned a clearing in the brush
and attracted attention from the media as well as audiences. This was an
exciting moment, but hardly due purely to cinematic developments. The era was defined
by two other major but utterly unrelated events: the survival of the Aids virus
(but few of its victims) past the original crisis into a second decade and the
proliferation of small-format video as a medium for both production and
distribution. To these should be added the new alliances forged between
lesbians and gay men in the wake of Aids organising, along with an exponential
growth in gay and lesbian film festivals servicing emotionally spent
communities in need of relief and inspiration. A new generation was growing up
and old genres were wearing out. Clearly there was now fertile ground in which
something new and powerful could take root.
Creation is never explicable,
really. Elements can be identified, but not how they came together, or why, or
when. And even when we see something happen, there's rarely an explanation that
satisfies. Why me? Why now? Even those caught up in the maelstrom are unlikely
to know the answer. Similarly, when it's all over, there's never an adequate
reason for why it had to end so soon. So it was with the New Queer Cinema and
its short sweet climb from radical impulse to niche market.
In the late 80s Hollywood was too
busy manufacturing blockbusters to take much notice of the independent world.
But that changed, famously, in 1989 when sex, lies, and videotape
won the audience award at Sundance and proceeded to fill the bank accounts of
an upstart distribution company by the name of Miramax. The queer moment for
independent film owes its genesis not to money but to repression, namely the
savage attacks by US right-wing politicians on government funding for such
films as Todd Haynes' Poison (1990). The bad press, though, made
for good reviews and decent box office. More dramatic features followed, laying
claim to the same category: Young Soul Rebels (1991), Swoon
(1992), Go Fish (1994), All over Me (1996), Beautiful
Thing (1996), Lilies (1996), Watermelon Woman
(1997), and dozens and dozens more. The work spawned a whole sector of queer
filmdom, not just genres but viewers and distributors and venues. By the late
90s there were well over 100 film festivals billed as queer; according to one
survey, a full 80 per cent of the work shown there was never seen outside the
queer circuit.
There were downsides, too, and
they came along fast. First, the sheer volume diluted the quality. For critics
the consequences could be dispiriting, as queer audiences flocked to films
every bit as mediocre as those pulling in heterosexual dollars at multiplexes
down the road. Soon enough the draw of the queer dollar and the aura of a queer
fashion began to attract heterosexual directors eager to make their mark and
skilled enough to do it well. Remember Heavenly Creatures? Bound,
anyone? If imitation truly is the sincerest form of flattery, then Chasing
Amy (1996) was probably the most sincere product of its season. Not only
did Kevin Smith manage a career comeback, but his film managed to draw all the
attention in a year when numerous lesbian independent features languished for
lack of publicity and audience.
Queerer than thou? Identity
politics doesn't meld well with market considerations. Soon enough the glut of
product began to be blamed by distributors for the receding public: lesbian and
gay ticket-buyers were no longer reliable and could no longer be counted on to
rush to the box office in support of 'queer' work. The problem had become so
acute by 1999 that PopcornQ started up a first-weekend club to try to fill the
seats for queer films.
But what's a queer film? The
films and their receptions over the past few years have rearranged all such
definitions. Gods and Monsters (1998), for instance, was such a
crossover hit (i.e., beyond queer audiences to straight ones) that it propelled
Sir Ian McKellen into an Oscar nomination and won writer-director Bill Condon a
best adapted screenplay Oscar. The film, which beautifully excavates the life
of James Whale (creator of the Frankenstein movies), crossed over
in part because of its Hollywood-history theme. I suspect it was also helped by
the homophobia of the Brendan Fraser character, who provided an identificatory
figure for audience members suffering from the same ailment, and by the
participation of such a class act as McKellen (stand by for more about actors
and the New Queer Cinema). Finally, though, I'd wager that Gods and
Monsters, a film I dearly love, could achieve success beyond the
previous run of queer films not only for these reasons but also because it's
set in a particular corner of the modern edition of Brideshead-land, a place in
the not-so-distant past where British accents of the proper vintage can be
heard and money is still required for entry (except, à la Sirk,
for the gardener). The same American affection for upstairs-downstairs dramas
helped John Maybury's exquisite Love Is the Devil Study for
a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998): the box-office triad of high art,
rough trade and a tragic death never fails, however queer the particular
application.
Two other films might be seen, in
retrospect, to have both gilded the lily and sounded the death knell of the New
Queer Cinema. One is Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together (1997); the
other Lisa Cholodenko's High Art (1998). Both could tear your
heart out with one hand tied behind their respective backs. (Indeed, tragedy
seems paradoxically to have been the favoured tone of much of the New Queer
Cinema.) Happy Together illustrated how brilliantly a heterosexual
director could capture the essence and nuance of queer romance, lust, jealousy
and rage; in so doing it also pointed up how cowardly many of the
certified-queer films had been in dealing with the realities of queer
relationships. So you see, it seemed to be saying, it all comes down to genius
after all, despite all your labels of sexual identity.
As for High Art,
well, that's a bit different. Lisa Cholodenko very much fitted the mould of the
New Queer Cinema film-maker. Not only was she a certified lesbian, but she'd
even been inspired to quit her career in Hollywood and move to New York to
enrol in film-making at Columbia University after reading an article about
these new films. Cholodenko's High Art defied all the prior taboos
of contemporary lesbian cinema by showing the dark side of lesbian society:
cut-throat ambition and opportunism, infidelity, drug addiction. The film
charted new territory and did so brilliantly. It even had the nerve to go for
an unhappy ending. But it also did something else: it made stars of its
actresses. Ally Sheedy launched a much deserved 'comeback' after winning awards
and praise for her daring role, while Radha Mitchell showed she could play
American and Patricia Clarkson, who played German so well, expanded a cult
following into more widespread admiration.
With such films, it could be a
moment of triumphant consolidation for the New Queer Cinema. Yet the opposite would
seem to suggest itself: that it has become so successful as to have dispersed
itself in any number of elsewheres. Lacking the concentrated creative presence
and focused community responsiveness of the past, the New Queer Cinema has
become just another niche market, another product line pitched at one
particular type of discerning consumer. At a time when casting has become
essential to getting independent films financed and produced, it's clear why
actors have to be involved. On the other hand, it's the runaway success of the
New Queer Cinema works that has turned them into such welcome vehicles for
actors, reversing the trend that in the past saw them turn away from films that
would push sexual identity into a zone of ambiguity. Suddenly, queer directors
can get actors. "We actually got to cast this film," said one
producer in reference to Boys Don't Cry.
And cast it they did! Hilary
Swank's performance as Brandon Teena has the film working overtime. It is Swank
who makes the audience hold its collective breath at the magnificent,
fine-tuned cockiness of the performance, capturing the exact feel of a young
guy in the full flush of puberty. And it is Swank who makes the awards
audiences hold their breath once more: the boyish Brandon transmutes back again
into sexy babe as Swank shows up in form-hugging dresses, batting her eyes and
thanking her husband. The good news? That was all acting. The bad news? The
same. In the old days the New Queer Cinema tended to be peopled by friends or
lovers of the director, or sympathetic actors who wanted to help put the
picture over. Now it's turned out that starring in a gay- or lesbian-themed
film can be a career-making move. (This can, of course, be a huge advantage for
queer film-makers. Most recently, Ana Kokkinos benefited from the trend when
she was able to cast an Australian television idol as the star of her
passionate coming-of-age tale and gut-wrenching family drama Head On.)
Boys Don't Cry has another problem fitting into any
imaginary New Queer Cinema canon: it's not about a lesbian at all. When the
real-life Brandon Teena murder took place, a slew of stories followed in the
gay press. One, by US journalist Donna Minkowitz, took a lot of heat for
presenting Brandon as a butch lesbian - an identity roundly rejected by the
transgender community that turned out for the murder trial. As an earlier
documentary, The Brandon Teena Story (1994), made clear, Brandon
saw himself as a transgendered person (even though at the time of his death he
hadn't yet had any surgery) not as a lesbian or as a woman. Gender confusion
haunts the reviews of the film and even showed up at its big premiere bash at
the Toronto International Film Festival, where Lindsay Law, then head of its
distributor Fox Searchlight, rose to offer a toast to Brandon and "her
bravery" only to be followed by director Peirce toasting Brandon for
letting them film "his story".
It's the murder at the centre of Boys
Don't Cry that links it, perhaps perversely, with the other hot film of
1999, The Talented Mr. Ripley, another lethal cocktail of covert
queerness and killing. Back to back, the two make a new sort of sense. Step out
of the cosmopolitan world of big cities at the turn of the millennium, switch
time zones into the lockstep past or redneck present, switch identity into
attraction to the same sex without the baggage of modern queer identity, wander
into the land where the US military policy under Clinton (don't ask, don't
tell) becomes instead a social habit, and voil´, there's a perfect set-up for a new cinematic code of conduct: kill or be
killed. Ripley kills, Brandon is killed. Both of them were invented: one by a
writer, one by himself. Both based their lives on a driving need to be
something they were not (wealthy, male). And both inventions depended on not
being found out, lest the price be death, spilling either one's own blood or
someone else's. Ripley becomes, in this scenario, the mirror image of Brandon.
Is either one a New Queer Cinema product? I think not. If only because no such
thing can exist any more.
If it did, though, I can think of
another film entirely that I'd have to nominate for the honour: Being
John Malkovich (see page 12). Here's a movie that's all about gender
confusion, gender trading and the kind of identity destabilisation brought
about by celebrity worship. Its characters are deeply implicated in the whole
project of gender positioning, a crisis precipitated by the now-familiar device
of discovering a portal leading into John Malkovich's brain. As a result Lotte
(Cameron Diaz) is bowled over by her unexpected attraction to another woman and
immediately assumes she's going to need gender-reassignment surgery, as though
lesbianism were beyond the pale, a lesser alternative. Malkovich
is just the sort of cheeky and original film that first made the New Queer
Cinema possible. And it's got something none of these other films can offer,
apart from its box-office numbers: it offers a lesbian happy ending, though
somehow none of the newspaper reviews ever mentions it.
I think of Being John
Malkovich as a mainstream movie made possible by the advances of the New
Queer Cinema. I like to imagine one of those television voiceovers accompanying
any awards ceremony in which it figures. I can just about hear the stentorian
tone, acknowledging the debt as rewards are bestowed, as though movies followed
the traditions of science, rock music or pharmaceuticals. For truly, madly,
deeply, without all that groundbreaking and heart-stopping work of the early
days, it's impossible to imagine the existence of the more mainstream films
coming along now to play with the same concepts, cast bigger stars and shuffle
the deck for fresh strategies. Don't get me wrong. I'm happy to have them. I'm
happy to be part of a new niche market. And, yes, I'm working on my ability to
synthesise current fashion with memories of the good ole days. I think of it as
a millennial strategy.
Hell in the
Heartland: Boys Don't Cry - Bright Lights Film Journal Gary Morris, January 1, 2000
Sexuality.org
[David Steinberg] To
Be a Man: "Boys Don't Cry" and the Story of Brandon Teena, by David Steinberg from Sexuality.org (1999)
World Socialist Web Site review The Unhappiness of Youth, also David Walsh interviews the director, November 8, 1999
True Enough (BOYS
DON'T CRY & THE STRAIGHT STORY ...
Jonthan Rosenbaum, October 22, 1999
The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review Rough and Tumble, (Pages 1 and 3) October 21, 1999
Nitrate Online (Cynthia Fuchs) review also seen here: Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs) review
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [8/10]
AboutFilm.com (Carlo Cavagna) review [A]
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
“Boys Don't Cry” - Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek, October 11, 1999
Boys
Do Bleed David Edelstein,
October 15, 1999
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Mixed Reviews: The Arts, The World, and More (Jill Cozzi) review
Film Quips Online (John R. McEwen) review [4.5/5]
Pajiba ("Agent Bedhead") review
“Boys Don't Cry” -
Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir DVD
review, August 8, 2000
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [4/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
filmcritic.com (James Brundage) review [5/5]
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [4/5]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review also reviewing THE BRANDON TEENA STORY
AfterEllen.com - Lesbian and Bi Women in Entertainment review Malinda Lo, also reviewing THE BRANDON TEENA STORY
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [4/5]
SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [2.5/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [5/5]
Film Freak Central dvd review Bill Chambers, also seen here: Epinions.com [Bill Chambers]
DVD Verdict (Harold Gervais) dvd review
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3.5/4]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Robert Mandel) dvd review
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review
DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Guido Henkel
DVD Authority.com (Matt Brighton) dvd review
A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [4/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Charles Tatum) review [2/5]
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
Mixed Reviews: The Arts, The World, and More (Gabriel Shanks) review
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B+]
Linda Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies) review
CultureCartel.com (John Nesbit) review [4.5/5]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review
MediaCircus (Anthony Leong) review
Film Journal International (David Noh) review
Apollo Guide (Dan Jardine) review [86/100]
Film Monthly (Doug White) review
Big Picture Big Sound (Joe Lozito) review [3/4]
Movie Magazine International review [Part 1] Monica Sullivan, also Pt. II: Movie Magazine International [Moira Sullivan]
Entertainment Weekly review [A] Owen Gleiberman
BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) dvd review
The Japan Times [Giovanni Fazio]
The
Boston Phoenix review Scott Heller
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Keith Harris
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4.5/5]
Albuquerque Alibi (Devin D. O'Leary) review including an interview with the director February 21, 2000
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Paula Nechak
San Francisco Examiner (Wesley Morris) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Peter Stack) review
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Boys Don't Cry
Movie Review & Film Summary (1999) | Roger Ebert
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
Brandon Teena - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
glbtq >> social sciences >> Teena, Brandon glbtq encyclopedia biography written by Andrew Matzner
Death of a Deceiver Death of a Deceiver: The True Story of Teena Brandon, by Eric Konigsberg from Playboy magazine, January 1995
"Activists Protest Violence As Lotter Trial Begins" Davina Anne Gabriel, May 15, 1996
"Brandon film lawsuit settled" Chicago Sun Times, March 11, 2000
"Boys
Do Cry" Noelle Howey from Mother Jones magazine, March 22, 2000
"Seeing
doubles" Philippa Hawker from The Age, March 1, 2002
The
victims of prejudice Chris Summers
from BBC News, December 26, 2003
"Inmate Recants Teena Brandon Story" USA Today, September 20, 2007
Home: The Brandon Teena Story The Story of Brandon Teena, A Life That Should Have Been Lived, Murder and Prejudice In the Heartland, by Anna M. Griffy from Justice Junction
Tom Nissen confesses to the murders of Teena Brandon, Lisa Lambert and Phillip DeVine. Katherind Ramsland from True TV Crime Library
Teena Brandon / Brandon Teena - Boys Don't Cry Chasing the Frog
Brandon - An American Tragedy Friedman Law Offices, including the case facts: "Brandon - An American Tragedy"
Brandon Teena Case Activists Protest as Lotter Trial Begins
Brandon Teena Murderer Sentenced Songweaver
"Teena R. "Brandon Teena" Brandon" Find-A Grave
"Nebraska Inmate Details: John Lotter"
"Nebraska Inmate Details: Thomas Nissen"
Image results for Brandon Teena
STOP LOSS
At the
Movies Michael Wood from The
Peli, Oren
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY B- 80
A film that expressly makes use of its own tedium in order to exploit our own sense of dreaded anticipation, which by the way, is a play by play introductory cinema technique on how to create suspense. Add to that the claustrophobic restriction of never leaving a single apartment throughout the entire film and the viewer may as well be locked into the premises along with the featured couple, Katie (Katie Featherston) and her electronics gadget freak boyfriend Micah (Micah Sloat). As a rule, she’s genuinely sympathetic, while he’s annoying throughout. While the apartment itself is modern and clean as a whistle, with an electronic security system, which includes Micah’s obsession with a bedroom camera cam which has a counter that counts down every minute and second of what transpires in the dark, we soon discover no surveillance techniques can capture the netherworld between reality and an alternate reality. Without ever really understanding what continually haunts Katie, who’s been beset with bad dreams and horrible personal experiences since the age of 8, as if visited by nightmares and demons at night, she otherwise couldn’t be a more normal girl, modestly reminding Micah to get that camera out of her face and to turn it off during intimate encounters. But initially they seem quite close, often seen kidding around even if they have nothing to talk about except what haunts and plagues Katie, and her aversion to whatever methods Micah is willing to explore, which she finds offensive, thinking it will only “offend” the creature and make matters worse. So the gist of the film is watching the repeated sequences of late night surveillance video waiting for some shit to happen. There’s no question about whether or not it happens, as otherwise why make the film, so the inevitable comes punctuated with an exclamation point.
Initially they are visited by a psychic who admits this is really out of his realm, referring them to another colleague (who’s out of town of course), but he nonetheless listens and offers his views that this is a matter not to be taken lightly, as what this creature obviously wants is Katie, and he’ll follow her to the ends of the earth no matter where they go. This has an ominous ring to it which sets the stage for Micah’s sarcastic indifference to the otherworld while Katie is obviously frightened because she’s completely immersed in something she can’t deal with or understand. She allows Micah his electronic gadget diversions but she grows more hostile to them every day, almost as if they’re an insult to the enormity of the problem. Micah never gets this, nor does he have any real insight into his girlfriend’s inner sanctum, which is where the film is eventually heading like a slow moving locomotive filled with explosives honed in on a single target. Each sequence moves us a little closer to that eventual moment of friction, perfectly expressed by the deterioration of trust in this couple’s relationship, where Micah’s clueless behavior along with her sleepless nights leaves Katie more and more pissed off at him. But every night we see them fast asleep until some ungodly hour in the morning when something weird happens which undoubtedly freaks Katie out.
Using a premise where things that go bump in the night tend to frighten people, especially when nothing can explain it, as if conjured up from our own collective subconscious, like Freddy Krueger’s capacity to attack during dreams, there is no disputing the effect this haunting is having on Katie, who grows ever deeper into a morose state of depression, having no means to fend off this creature. While initially she’s willing to try just about anything, as the film goes on her will power and wall of resistance wears down and she begins to give in, even if only subconsciously. Micah remains a total numbskull, a worthless, empty-headed fool who can’t read the deteriorating signs all around him, still willing to leave her more vulnerable in a perpetually fragile state. Of course, no one thinks to get medical help or hospital care, as reality is never allowed to intervene, so instead they become consumed by this tug of war with the otherworld whose impact boldly becomes more pronounced. To its credit, the film is short, occasionally humorous and does not overplay its hand, backing the audience and this couple into a corner where there’s no way out. It’s effective, almost too surgically neat and clean, ending the film in a moment of utter devastation. Interestingly, all very calculated, there are no end credits, so the film fades to black for a full minute before the lights come back on. In the screening I attended, no one moved in their seats or uttered a sound, waiting instead for a sign that it was really over.
Time Out New York [Ben Kenigsberg]
Arriving on a wave
of carefully orchestrated viral hype, Paranormal Activity lacks the conceptual
elegance of its obvious precursor, The Blair Witch Project. The movie
invites us into the home of a couple (Featherston and Sloat) conveniently
saddled with the same names as the actors who play them. Katie suspects a
haunting, so in what’s now a time-honored tradition, they’ve grabbed a
camcorder and elected to film everything. While superior to inept would-be Blairs
like Open Water, Paranormal Activity Oren Peli’s horror flick often
has the feel of a film-school exercise in which the object is to wring maximum
suspense from rudimentary tools.
Still, there
aren’t many movies that have the power to scare you with the sound of a
creaking door, and it’s hard not to admire the way Paranormal Activity
makes a virtue of simplicity. The opening scenes, which suggest nothing so much
as a mumblecore horror flick, are eye-gougingly boring and slapdash—but that’s
the point. In its most effective steal, the film makes brilliant use of a
stubbornly fixed camera: As we wait, trapped with the tripod in Micah and Katie’s
bedroom, wondering what happened downstairs, it’s easy to forgive the movie’s
crudeness.
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
The reliably intolerable Harmony Korine gets an honorable mention for the
upcoming Trash
Humpers (a movie about trash... being... humped), but the year’s P.T.
Barnum Award has to go to Oren Peli for Paranormal Activity. The gag is
that this is oafishly composed and horridly acted because it’s supposed to be
footage found by the police as evidence in a spooky case involving a suburban
couple. As a girl (Katie Featherston) is picked on by a malevolent entity, her
dickhead beau (Micah Sloat) records the tantrums for our benefit. "You
promised me you wouldn’t buy a Ouija board!" "You’re fuckin’ freaking
me out, babe!" A medium drops by: "Wooo, it looks like you guys have
a demon. That’s not my area of expertise." Horror is no less subjective
than humor, I know, but talcum footprints don’t exactly hit me where it hurts.
Over and over again, the camera returns to a bluish, night-vision tableau of
the couple’s bedroom, with half the screen vacant so that scare-starved viewers
can anticipate the indescribable terror of... a creaking door. I mean, really?
Have we learned nothing from the Blair Witch hoax? Paranormal
couldn’t get a shiver out of a
New York Magazine
(David Edelstein) review
Like The Blair Witch Project, the micro-budget horror picture Paranormal Activity proves that nothing is scarier than nothing. Think of a creak in the dark. You freeze. You wait. And wait. It’s the waiting that’s unbearable. What you don’t know can hurt you.
The perspective is radically limited: We see everything
through the video camera of Micah (Micah Sloat), a
Paranormal Activity is weakest when most explicit: A clear shadow or a door swinging shut dilutes the dread. But I’ve never seen a movie that so cunningly exploits our anticipation. Every time Peli cut to another bedtime and the timer appeared on the screen, I said out loud, “Oh, shit, here we go.” In the light of day, it’s all very silly and conventional. But of course we’re not talking about the light of day.
Dreamlogic.net [Kris Kobayashi-Nelson]
Last week, Chris and I saw the SF screener for Paranormal Activity and bit for the hype. We had skipped it when it made its rounds at the film fests despite all the raves because it just looked so fake, but it’s actually pretty well-made, and for a sweet $11k. Picked up by Paramount, who are only releasing it in thirteen theatres across the nation for a very limited run, are pushing it to go viral by encouraging people to “demand it” at your local cineplex; our screener had an “urgent message” from Ain’t It Cool News founder Harry Knowles. Sneaky repeat marketing trick, but I’m happy to try to help it along. Go go micro-budget films!
Most people will think this review is weird because it’s not like most other reviews of the “sleeper” horror hit Paranormal Activity, and because you’ll think I’m weird. I’m weird because I’ve seen ghosts. In Hawai’i, it’s inevitable; everyone and their Aunty has had at least one encounter with or has one good story about the spirit realm. And we’re not psychics or mediums or ghosthunters; the people I hung out with were just really open and accepting, I think. That and maybe we boozed a lot… just kidding. And I’ve always felt that most of the spirits were benevolent, almost like guardians, even during those 4am barely moonlit talk-story times when we’d see a huge inky shadow drag itself across the floor and through the room, we’d be comforted in a way that they just wanted to let us know they were there. It freaked us out, but we got over it.
Here in California, it seems like the only people who will admit that they’ve seen a ghost are paranormal fanatics or psychic scammers. I’ve dragged Chris to a few of their “ghost hunts” and they, like the “macho” lead daytrader Micah (pronounced Mee-kah and not like Formica, like the few Micahs I’ve met) in Paranormal Activity, whose brash curiosity drives a rift between him and his girlfriend Katie, and Katie closer to the clingy demon she can’t shake. Cleverly, the couple is introduced to us in realistic spurts, with Katie annoyed by her boyfriend’s silly antics and incessant filming. When the camera upsets the ball of negative energy that had been following Katie since childhood, his attitude wavers from skeptical sarcastic brat to unrealistic hero to unbelievable jerk, as he, like those people Chris and I went on ghost hunts with, calls out the spirit via insults in efforts to confront it physically. And he’ll get his chance, alright.
The minimal special effects captured on grainy resolution really help solidify the mockumentary “realism”. Great contrast between daylight hours and creepy night footage where the scares come to you, rather than chasing them. False hope arrives with a hired psychic and news of an expert demonologist. Katie’s tank tops are always sloppily disheveled and can sometimes barely (still ‘G’-ratingly) contain her boobs, much to the delight of young men everywhere, relying on that age-old horror movie formula of titillation before gore.
You really empathize with the victim as the tangible evidence piles up and Micah disrespects everyone, the living and the dead. You’ll want Micah to just respect his girl and quit filming, but then, doi, there would be no movie. And for Chris and I, it really is just a movie. I’m still stumbling around in darkest pitch at 3am for a drink of water or watever; no nightmares nor fear of the dark here. But I’ll tell you, at our screener the loudest yelps were from guys, so it’s definitely thrilling, chilling entertainment that I wholeheartedly endorse.
I don’t want to give too much away, so I’ll end with a few pretend taglines and the SoCal screener trailer:
- Oh well, one less stock broker in the world.
- Ghosts like giant breasts, too!
- Hug your girlfriend tight, treat your girlfriend right.
- Respect the living and the dead.
- Oh crap, they gave it all away in the trailer.
Fangoria review Michael Gingold
Although it
belongs to the same school of through-the-camcorder-lens horror as THE BLAIR
WITCH PROJECT and its imitators/successors, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY adopts a
notably different aesthetic. Rather than a series of shaky visuals reflecting
the panicked point of view of the characters, its key moments are seen through
the static, unblinking eye of an unmoving camera—which, if nothing else, will
be a relief to those who got motion sickness from BLAIR WITCH or CLOVERFIELD.
Many fans are no doubt simply sick of the wait they’ve had to endure between
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY’s attention-grabbing screening at the Slamdance Film
Festival in January 2008 and its commercial debut this weekend as a
midnight-movie attraction. (Go to the official website for a list of venues for the coming weeks,
and to Demand It! for your area if it’s not already scheduled there.) The
movie, once (pointlessly) destined for the more-expensive-remake treatment, has
been slightly re-edited for the current release, with a new ending added; I
haven’t seen the original version, but judging from what I’ve been told of its
conclusion, the new one is less cluttered with unnecessary side characters and
more of a piece with the approach of the rest of the film. It also features a
pair of moments guaranteed to levitate you out of your seat.
Directed by Oren Peli and presented without credits other than those
establishing it as a video case file, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY literally focuses on
Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Micah Sloat) as they document on tape the
strange events that have begun to plague them by night. Katie has come to
believe that there’s an unpleasant presence in their house; Micah isn’t
convinced, and frankly, he’s a bit of a jerk about it. Nonetheless, they set up
their camcorder to watch over them while they sleep, and the long, unbroken
takes of the couple in their bed and the surrounding room are the meat of the
movie.
Most modern vérité horror films use the form to plug you directly into the
frightened psyches of their protagonists, suddenly glimpsing and attempting to
flee from the ghosts/monsters/psychos stalking them or coming upon horrific
sights. Peli’s use of the objective camera turns the viewer into an increasingly
anxious observer, studying the frame for a sign of, well, paranormal activity
as Katie and Micah sleep. (The director frequently fast-forwards the footage to
the late-late-night moments when the invisible evil makes itself known.) He
knows how long to make the audience wait before springing a sudden jolt on
them, and the ordinariness of the setting and situation means that he can raise
hackles with the simple movement of a door or a bedsheet.
Soon there’s enough evidence that something is supernaturally wrong that the
question becomes what to do about it. But the tension of their nocturnal
haunting is exacerbated by a sense of helplessness as none of the potential
solutions do any good. Micah’s risible decision to buy a Ouija board only ends
in bad news for the board; when a psychic expert in the spirit world comes to
visit, he informs them that they’re actually being plagued by a demon before
beating a hasty retreat. And gradually uncovered evidence, along with
recollections from Katie, reveal an especially unnerving side to her
predicament.
Katie’s plight is made so relatable that it’s a shame she also has to share the
house with a boor like Micah. One of the chief criticisms directed at BLAIR
WITCH etc. has been that their characters sometimes come off as obnoxious, and
that’s the case where he’s concerned. It’s true that extreme circumstances
don’t necessarily bring out the best in people, but Micah’s frequent callous
attitude toward Katie and refusal to take the phenomena seriously, and the spats
they too often indulge in, detract from the empathy level. Under the
circumstances, it’s no surprise that the movie works best when he’s asleep and
not talking.
Nevertheless, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY proves that there’s still life in the
found-footage approach that has been sliding into tired cliché over the past
decade. However shrill Micah’s behavior becomes, both Sloat and Featherston
turn in entirely naturalistic and believable performances, which jibe perfectly
with Peli’s no-frills approach. His special FX are simple, and pulled off so
well that they never register as effects—and they may well make you just a
little nervous when you turn out your own lights the night after you see the
movie.
Pajiba (Steven Lloyd Wilson) review
eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [4/5]
Salon (Mary Elizabeth Williams) review
Last Night With Riviera [Matt Riviera]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
The
Onion A.V. Club review [B+] Nathan Rabin
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) review [4/5]
Bloody-Disgusting
review [4/5] BC
Bloody-Disgusting
review [4.5/5] Brad Miska (Mr. Disgusting)
Slant
Magazine review
Rob Humanick
FeoAmante's
Horror Thriller (E.C. McMullen, Jr.) review
filmcritic.com (Keith Breese) review [3/5]
Cinefantastique
[Steve Biodrowski]
DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd
review [Theatrical Version]
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) review
[3.5/5]
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
The L Magazine [Henry Stewart]
Paranormal Activity Scott Spicciati from Movie-Vault
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
Nick's Flick
Picks (Nick Davis) review [B]
One Guy's
Opinion (Frank Swietek) review
[B]
The
Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review
[B+]
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Film Monthly (Jason Coffman) review
About.com Hollywood Movies (Rebecca Murray)
review [B]
Moving Pictures Magazine [Elliot V. Kotek]
Screenjabber
review Craig
McPherson
CHUD.com (Devin Faraci) review
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review also at Common Sense Media here: full
review
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review
[4.5/5] Felix
Vasquez Jr.
Entertainment
Weekly review [A-] Owen Gleiberman
The Hollywood Reporter review Kevin Lally
Variety (Dennis Harvey) review
How
Paranormal Activity became a frightening success Amy Raphael from The Guardian, November 21, 2009
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [0/5]
San Francisco Chronicle (Peter Hartlaub) review [3/4]
Los Angeles Times (Betsy Sharkey) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
Arts,
Briefly: ‘Paranormal Activity’ Fills Midnight Seats Dave Itzkoff from The New York Times,
Pemberton, Tony
BEYOND THE OCEAN B+ 91
A wonderfully inventive film that features the dark, sadistic Russian humor front and center, but with some brilliant tarkovsky-like style and imagery, it reminded me of a film several years ago, INSIDE/OUT, about meandering relationships in and around a countryside mental institute that was visually overwhelming and the outer surfaces dominate or cover up, the inner reality, which is really what the film is about, there is a similar result here, half the film is b & w, the flashback sequences, half is in color, half is filmed in Russia, the past, half is filmed in NY, the present, there isn't much of a story, it's the way it unfolds that is so special, mostly in a very well integrated flashback, sometimes out of focus, completely original music, befuddled characters, it follows an incredibly bleak look at a beautiful girl who is mistreated, misunderstood, and manipulated by nearly everyone she meet.s
The film opens with a unique, series of views of tv antennas, there are lines and scratches on the surface of the film, making you think someone pulled this stuff out of the 1950's archives, but it lets you, the viewer know that this film is about the various problems that we, the human race have, and continue to have, even in the modern age, with reception.
b/w in russia
she is a child with parents who do not love her, but appear to prefer the company of drunken stupors, so she places wooden matches around her mother's mostly nude body while she sleeps
b/w in russia
she is a young teenage girl running through these beautiful meadows chased by her uncle who desires her, mistreated by her family who doesn't want her, but the beauty of the imagery masks the loneliness of this girl who no one loves or understands. There is such a strange collection of characters here, some of the darkest humor, like a band of traveling gypsies, these flashback segments are simply riveting
"Did you hear the story of the cockroach? Beyond the ocean it's wings and feet were covered with ice, preventing it from flying, so it died in a frozen lake"
This is the heartwarming stuff that is central to understanding the dark humor and the truly original world of this film
Color in ny, now a pregnant young woman who arrives in NY to be with the womanizing father who pawns her off on his buddy the non-stop yakking hip-trip dj who means well but is lost inside his own inner galaxy, he tapes conversations with her where she describes how a picture reminds her of her childhood, another friend tapes a lovemaking session, so the dj blends all this together in a wonderful mix of weird disco confusion that brings all of these inner conflicts to the surface and, of course, no one wants to see her, they see instead their own version of her, the world as they want it to be, she has to find her way through this labyrinth of dead ends and she is an extremely compelling character, played by 3 different actresses at the 3 stages of her life. The young girl and the young woman are among the best acting performances I've seen, but it's the filmmaker's direction that is superb, they way he puts together his film. The ny guys are nothing to write home about, the russia boys are equally oblivious. We're not talking about a great film here, but the style is unique enough, very raw, very edgy, sometimes brilliant, sometimes just plain weird, some terrific original music. I found this an absolute delight, a marvelously inventive first film by Tony Pemberton, born in Toledo, Ohio, married to a Russian wife, Katya, who produces films and has a literary degree, they have spent years together in both places.
There is a website very much in the style of the film that gives one of the most beautiful images from the film, a beffudled fisherman who finds a dead body in a calm stream http://www.goeastfilm.com
Check it out, there is a section for this film, also the current projects he is working on, a documentary on the tattoos of Russian criminals in prison, and another documentary on the reflections of comrade lenin, nearly unanimously hated by the present generation, yet remembered in their childhood with a puzzling, nostalgic fondness, mysteriously, this closely resembles the fondness aristocrats used to feel for the death of the czar that lenin so ungraciously displaced. Anyway, all in all, this film stimulates some original nerve endings that haven't been used for awhile, not to be missed in my view.
Pengfei
Song C 76
UNDERGROUND
FRAGRANCE (Xia Xiang)
China France (75 mi)
2015
An example of an independent Chinese film made outside the commercial
stream, this is an interesting experiment that doesn’t really work, stuck
somewhere between a narrative film and one that is experimental, more of a
quirky idiosyncratic film where one is never able to emotionally connect with
anyone or grab any real sense of meaning or significance in this aimless and
relatively indifferent story of broken dreams that suggests a certain fatalism
about drifting through the swirling winds of change surrounding China’s abrupt
transition into the modern world. It’s
an already familiar story shown in the abstract, an impressionistic mosaic that
simply doesn’t provide anything new or revelatory to hold onto, where what’s
uniquely interesting is not the story itself, but the manner in which its told,
as the director has worked under Tsai Ming-liang, receiving one of the
co-writing credits for Stray Dogs (Jiao
you) (2013), while also working as a director’s assistant on FACE (2009) in
Paris. What’s missing here is the
feeling of Tsai’s longtime connection with his actors, who work in a
collaborative process with the director in achieving complex and often
disturbing films with a remarkable impact.
So while there is some similarity in style, the impact here is minimal,
as there is no connection to the characters, where the viewer is just as likely
to drift off from lack of any genuine interest.
Set in the outskirts of Beijing, Yong Le (Chinese model Luo Wenjie) makes a living salvaging
furniture from abandoned houses to resell, spending his days watching construction
workers dismantle the old villages that can be picked clean afterwards, where
the industrial landscape resembles a city in ruins, a junkyard of demolished
houses and piles of abandoned items, a major contrast from the sleek
skyscrapers of the nearby modern city.
Simultaneous to this story is another thread about an old man Lao Jin
(Zhao Fuyu) and his wife (Beijing opera singer Li Xiaohui), living in nearly
condemned property that they’ve been struggling to sell for years as the land
is being bought up for a new development project of prestigious homes on a lake
that is still in the early construction stages, yet the sales pitch is already
in high gear, where the two are whisked away on a private boat ride and given a
tour of the still unfinished buildings hoping to convince them now is the time,
but the offer on their own home remains too low, so Jin holds out longer,
hoping to increase the price. A third
story concerns Xiao Yun (Ying Ze), a migrant working as an after-hours pole
dancer, for lack of a better job, remaining aloof and resistant to customer
offers.
The atmospheric musical score by Jean-Christophe Onno is crisp and
clean, given a percussionist flavor, where the common element throughout is an
everpresent feeling of discarded items that contribute to a pervasive mood of
continual isolation, extreme emotional alienation, and people working on the
fringes of society who can barely make ends meet. Yong Le eventually suffers a serious work
injury leaving him temporarily blind for an extended period, seen with a
bandage around his eyes crawling around the dingy and claustrophobic interiors
of his labrynthian underground home, a former bomb shelter in Beijing’s
Underground City, now used as cheap housing for drifters moving into the city,
where he has to use a rope to find his way around the dimly lit basement halls,
literally bumping into Xiao Yun at the other end of the rope, the girl next
door who kindly offers assistance bringing him food and helping to take care of
him, developing something of a wordless instant connection. More of an atmospheric essay, the visual
design of the film highlights an oppressive loneliness, showing a multitude of
pedestrian street traffic in the sprawling city, where figures lost in the
crowd become anonymous and indistinct, as Xiao Yun is also seen crossing the
city on busses riding alone in the early hours of the day before having to make
the same journey again later on that night, while without her help, Yong Le is
decidedly more helpless and alone.
When Yong Le’s vision returns, he’s in some ways more blinded than
before, as the girl he met while blindfolded has suddenly disappeared, leaving
his future even more uncertain, retreating once again to the anonymity of the
city. While the film attempts to explore
the damage caused by a seemingly endless stream of constant relocation to the
big cities in China, particularly Beijing, in seek of work, painting a picture
of a marginal social class of migrants that rarely interact, uprooted lives
suddenly disconnected from their homes and families, this works more
effectively with the basement dwellers who are drifting through, while the Lao
Jin sections are more of a comic farce, displaying an exaggerated stubbornness
well beyond reason that amounts to arrogance, proudly offering a sumptuous
banquet to a well-connected political official in hopes of securing favor, even
offering an accompanying dramatic presentation, where each drinks and joins in
the singing, eventually giving away all his furniture and belongings, still
holding out hope that he will receive a better offer on his home, even as the
water and electricity have been cut off, leaving him a figure of abject
failure. Suffused with melancholy and a
pervasive sadness, the vacuousness of the film itself overrides any central
themes or message, shot in static long takes, becoming a meandering exercise of
futility, where the real struggle is enduring a continuous, one-note tone of
apathy and indifference.
Underground
Fragrance | Chicago International Film Festival
On the rapidly urbanizing outskirts of Beijing, Yong Le spends his days scouring homes scheduled for demolition for furniture to pawn and his nights in the sub-basement of a high-rise apartment building. After an accident blinds him, a nightclub dancer, hoping to secure a day job with a real estate developer, nurses him back to health. Produced by Tsai Ming-Liang, the film adapts his signature meditative social realism, revealing a world in which everyone, literally and figuratively, is looking to move up.
CINE-FILE:
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Alex
Kopecky
The key synoptic selling point of UNDERGROUND FRAGRANCE is director Pengfei Song’s working relationship with Tsai Ming-Liang (amidst the smorgasbord of international co-producers and production funds that defines much of Contemporary International Art Cinema,) whose influence is readily apparent—which isn’t a bad thing. Fans of Tsai’s work will appreciatively recognize the subtly droll static compositions, deep human connections made via a bare minimum of communication, and exceptionally effective use of bathrooms as cinematic staging grounds. That isn’t to say that Pengfei doesn’t bring his own sensibility to this story of three aspirational lower-class denizens of Beijing, which he explicitly situates in the current state of Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Dream.” It’s basically what you want from a first feature: recognizable stylistic referents, intimations of a political viewpoint, and enough particularly well-executed scenes to convince you to pay attention to the director’s subsequent work.
Underground
Fragrance (2015) | Filmuforia Meredith
Taylor
Stray Dogs co-collaborator FengPei Song returns to Venice with his directorial debut UNDERGROUND FRAGRANCE which tells another delicately rendered story this time of young love that blossoms amongst the ruins of Beijing’s property boom.
Yong Le, a young migrant worker from the south, works salvaging furniture from abandoned houses to re-sell. He lives in cramped conditions in Beijing’s Underground City, a labyrinthian former bomb shelter that serves as cheap housing for people looking for opportunities in the big city. But after a bad work accident leaves him temporarily blind, he has to use a rope to find his way around the dimly lit basement halls, until one night when he meets a girl at the other end of his rope. Xiao Yun, is a migrant too. A night-worker in a pole-dancing venue, she is desperately trying to find a more suitable work when a tentative relationship develops between her and Yong Lee, encouraging her to hunt for a more respectable job. At ground level, Lao Jin has been struggling with his wife for 8 years to get a decent compensation deal from the authorities who want to demolish his house. His health is declining and his savings are evaporating. Desperate to move on, he’s counting on Yong Le to sell his furniture at a good price. These stories intermingle in the meltdown generated by the the “Chinese Dream” when Southern country-dwellers who thronged to the Beijing metropolis during the last decade’s property boom.
Suffused with melancholy and broken dreams this is an enchanting urban story with convincingly sombre performances from its talented cast of largely newcomers. Often crowding people or machinery into his vibrantly-coloured static long takes FengPei generates a feeling of claustrophobia that echoes desperate emotional alienation and loneliness rather than oppression and there are sharp some bursts of humour: at one point Lao Jin sets off fireworks in the trees outside his house in an attempt to silence nesting owls. Nostalgia for the past and the longing for country life and traditional values are reflected in some tender scenes involving attachment to animals and religious customs and Jean-Christophe Onno’s atmospheric original score adds a lilting romantic feel throughout this charming debut.
PENGFEI (Beijing, 1982) was born into a family of Peking Opera performers in Beijing. Under the influence of his family, he developed a strong passion for the arts. He went to Paris to study film at Institute International de l’Image et du Son and majored in film directing. After seven years of living in Europe, he returned to China to work on this debut. He worked as Tsai Ming Liang’s a.d. for Face in 2009, The Diary of a Young Boy, and the short Walker in 2012. Pengfei raised finance for UNDERGROUND FRAGRANCE – through various sources including the Cannes’ Atelier in 2012, the Production Award from TorinoFilmLab in 2011, and the Sundance Screenwriters Lab Cinereach Award in 2012.
Underground
Fragrance : the soil and subsoil in modern ... Vittoria Scarpa from Cineuropa
On the outskirts of the ultra-modern Beijing, debut Chinese director Pengfei leads us into a hidden world underground, where the destinies of three characters meet
Beijing, with its skyscrapers, motorways, billboards and managers in suits and ties: we only see them from afar in Underground Fragrance [+], or rather, from below. Indeed, the debut film by Chinese director Pengfei, which features in the official selection of the Venice Days section of the 72nd Venice Film Festival, leads us through the suburbs of the huge city and into a hidden world underneath it, showing us the other side of the ‘Chinese dream’, with its bulldozers, crumbling houses and piles of ruins, following three characters and a new love that is doomed from the start.
The young Yongle (played by Chinese model Luo Wenjie) makes a living salvaging second-hand furniture. He lives in makeshift accommodation in the basement of a building, along with many others who have come to the city from provincial towns to build a future for themselves. When he suffers injury to his eyes, he must find his way, blindfolded, around underground tunnels with the help of just a length of rope, which attracts the attention of his beautiful neighbour Xiao Yun (debut actress Ying Ze). The girl is an unwilling lap dancer who dreams of having a respectable job in an office. She discreetly gets close to Yongle, bringing him food and taking care of him, and a tender relationship blossoms between the two. Meanwhile, in the world above, old Jin (Zhao Fuyu) and his wife (Beijing opera singer Li Xiaohui) dream of having a house on the lake: a property developer is intent on buying the land they currently own in the suburbs and building on it, and with an agreement in sight, Jin gives away all its furniture and possessions, with Yongle’s help. But things don’t go to plan and nobody gets the happy ending they hoped for.
The portrait of a stratified society in the throes of full-blown change, in which those underneath (literally and metaphorically speaking) aspire to reach the surface, Underground Fragrance marries together the subtle representation of a new world and its contradictions (“I’m obsessed with the rapid transformation of my city,” said the director upon returning to Beijing after completing his studies in France) with the all-Asian poetry of newly acknowledged love and the unsaid, in a piece born between two cultures (the film is a Franco-Chinese co-production) which shows us, with humanity and a pinch of humour, what could lie under the surface of a thriving modern capital.
Underground Fragrance was produced by House on Fire and Mishka Productions with the financial backing of, among others, the TorinoFilmLab and the CNC. The film is being sold internationally by French company Urban Distribution International.
Venice Days review
- UNDERGROUND FRAGRANCE by ... CineCola
TorinoFilmLab |
Projects | Underground Fragrance
Underground
Fragrance - Cineuropa
Daily | Venice
Days 2015 | Keyframe - Explore the world of ... David Hudson from Fandor
'Chinese Dream' at
Venice Int'l Film Festival - China Daily
Xinhua interview from China Daily
News, September 10, 2015
Chinese film wins
Fedeora award at Venice Film Festival ...
Xinhua from China Daily News,
September 14, 2015
Underground
Fragrance scoops Fedeora award in Venice ...
Xinhua from Want China Times,
September 25, 2013
Underground
Fragrance - Film Business Asia Derek Elley
Penn, Arthur
“I
would say that the only people who really interest me are the outcasts from
society. The people who are not
outcasts--either psychologically, emotionally, or physically--seem to me good
material for selling breakfast food, but they’re not material for films. What I’m really trying to say through the
figure of the outcast is that a society has its mirror in its outcasts. A society would be wise to pay attention to
the people who do not belong if it wants to find out what its configuration is
and where it's failing.”
—Arthur Penn, quoted in World
Film Directors, Volume Two, edited by John Wakeman
Arthur Penn, American Auteur - Harvard Film Archive Notes from Penn restrospective, February 1 – 4, 2008
Arthur Penn (1922–) is a true legend of the American cinema.
From the 1950s through the 1970s Penn forged a unique place for himself within
Hollywood through a series of intense and brilliant films that helped
revitalize studio filmmaking and reconnect with lost audiences. Penn's
discovery of a new artistic freedom within the commercial industry effectively
paved the way for the auteurist cinema defined in the 1970s by Coppola,
Friedkin, Scorcese, et al. While retaining a deep concern for quintessentially
American themes, Penn also explored a mode of vividly stylized cinema in works
such as Mickey One and The Chase that engaged in a crucial
dialogue with the French New Wave. Balanced with Penn's frequent use of overt,
almost overripe symbols is his keen sensitivity to the violence endemic
throughout American history and society. Penn's boldest masterpieces such as The
Chase, Bonnie and Clyde, Night Moves and Little Big
Man were not only critically and, at times, commercially successful films
but also landmark cultural events – films that gave an unwavering voice to the
zeitgeist of a traumatized nation and the rise and fall of the counter-cultural
movement.
A preternaturally talented and intelligent director, Penn has also proven
himself on the stage and in television, fields where he remains an acknowledged
master, especially for his ability to elicit pitch-perfect yet always
surprising performances. One-time advisor to John F. Kennedy for his crucial
television debate with Richard Nixon and later head of the Actor's Studio,
Penn's uncanny ability with actors is proven by the electric and
career-defining performances from Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty,
Anne Bancroft, Paul Newman and Gene Hackman that run throughout Penn's cinema.
Like so many of our greatest directors, Penn's profound and lasting
contribution to the American cinema has not been fully acknowledged by critics
or historians. This retrospective is a rare opportunity to view Penn's master
works and reconsider his important legacy as one of America's most gifted and
influential filmmakers. The Harvard Film Archive is deeply honored that Arthur
Penn has generously accepted our invitation to present his work and join us for
a rare dialogue about his films and career.
Film Reference Philip Kemp
Arthur Penn has often been classed—along with Robert Altman, Bob Rafelson, and Francis Coppola—among the more "European" American directors. Stylistically, this is true enough. Penn's films, especially after Bonnie and Clyde , tend to be technically experimental, and episodic in structure; their narrative line is elliptical, under-mining audience expectations with abrupt shifts in mood and rhythm. Such features can be traced to the influence of the French New Wave, in particular the early films of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, which Penn greatly admired.
In terms of his thematic preoccupations, though, few directors are more utterly American. Repeatedly, throughout his work, Penn has been concerned with questioning and re-assessing the myths of his country. His films reveal a passionate, ironic, intense involvement with the American experience, and can be seen as an illuminating chart of the country's moral condition over the past thirty years. Mickey One is dark with the unfocused guilt and paranoia of the McCarthyite hangover, while the stunned horror of the Kennedy assassination reverberates through The Chase. The exhilaration, and the fatal flaws, of the 1960s anti-authoritarian revolt are reflected in Bonnie and Clyde and Alice's Restaurant. Little Big Man reworks the trauma of Vietnam, while Night Moves is steeped in the disillusioned malaise that pervaded the Watergate era.
As a focus for his perspective on America, Penn often chooses an outsider group and its relationship with mainstream society. The Indians in Little Big Man , the Barrow Gang in Bonnie and Clyde , the rustlers in The Missouri Breaks , the hippies in Alice's Restaurant , the outlaws in The Left-handed Gun , are all sympathetically presented as attractive and vital figures, preferable in many ways to the conventional society which rejects them. But ultimately they suffer defeat, being infected by the flawed values of that same society. "A society," Penn has commented, "has its mirror in its outcasts."
An exceptionally intense, immediate physicality distinguishes Penn's work. Pain, in his films, unmistakably hurts , and tactile sensations are vividly communicated. Often, characters are conveyed primarily through their bodily actions: how they move, walk, hold themselves, or use their hands. Violence is a recurrent feature of his films—notably in The Chase, Bonnie and Clyde , and The Missouri Breaks —but it is seldom gratuitously introduced, and represents, in Penn's view, a deeply rooted element in the American character which has to be acknowledged.
Penn established his reputation as a director with Bonnie and Clyde , one of the most significant and influential films of its decade. But since 1970 he has made only a handful of films, none of them successful at the box office. Night Moves and The Missouri Breaks , both poorly received on initial release, now rank among his most subtle and intriguing movies, and Four Friends , though uneven, remains constantly stimulating with its oblique, elliptical narrative structure.
But since then Penn seems to have lost his way. Neither Target , a routine spy thriller, nor Dead of Winter , a reworking of Joseph H. Lewis's cult B-movie My Name Is Julia Ross , offered material worthy of his distinctive talents. Penn and Teller Get Killed , a spoof psycho-killer vehicle for the bad-taste illusionist team, got few showings outside the festival circuit. Among his few recent directorial works is The Portrait , a solidly crafted adaptation for television of Tina Rowe's Broadway hit, Painting Churches. "It's not that I've drifted away from film," Penn told Richard Combs in 1986. "I'm very drawn to film, but I'm not sure that film is drawn to me." Given the range, vitality, and sheer unpredictability of his earlier work, the estrangement is much to be regretted.
Welcome to Arthur Penn Fansite
Biography for Arthur Penn - TCM.com Turner Movie Classics biography
TCM
Remembers Arthur Penn - TCM.com 1922
– 2010
Arthur Penn | Biography, Movie Highlights and Photos | AllMovie bio by Lucia Bozzola
Arthur Penn Great
Director profile • Senses of Cinema Adam Bingham from Senses of Cinema, December 2, 2003
Arthur Penn: Information from Answers.com biography page
Arthur Penn - Biography - MSN Movies biography page
Arthur Penn: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article biography page from Absolute Astronomy
Arthur Penn NNDB bio page
Arthur Penn - Morelia International Film Festival 2010 Festival bio
Arthur Penn | IBDB: The official source for Broadway Information Broadway DataBase
Arthur Penn Off-Broadway DataBase
Arthur Penn - Director Movie Reviews at TopTenReviews.com film rankings and reviews from Top Ten Reviews
Arthur Penn - Box Office Data Movie Director Box office total gross financial numbers
"BONNIE & CLYDE" (ARTHUR PENN) & "BREATHLESS" (JEAN-LUC GODARD ... Undated essay
Amazon.com: Arthur Penn (Praeger Film Library Series ... book by Robin Wood and Ian Cameron (142 pages), 1969
Arthur Penn's
Bonnie and Clyde Arthur
Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, edited by Lester D. Friedman, (229 pages), pages 71 – 100 shown,
December 1999 (pdf format)
A Rare Vote For Experience Over Youth - At 77, Arthur Penn Takes ... A Rare Vote For Experience Over Youth; At 77, Arthur Penn Takes His 'Bonnie and Clyde' Skills To the Right Side of the Law, by Bernard Weinraub from The New York Times, August 24, 2000
Review of Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde" Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, edited by Lester D. Friedman, remarks by Luca Prono from American Studies, February 1, 2001
Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde Gabrielle Murray’s book review of Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, edited by Lester D. Friedman, from Screening the Past, March 1, 2001
Alan Bates Theatre Archive: Broadway Reviews, "Fortune's Fool" Clive Barnes from The New York Post, April 3, 2002
Catch a Movie, or Maybe 50 Gary Santaniello from The New York Times, February 9, 2003
Bonnie and Clyde: Together Again - Bright Lights Film Journal Alan Vanneman, January 31, 2004
THEATER REVIEW; Stealthy, Wealthy, Joke-Wise Ben Brantley from The New York Times, April 2, 2004
Article | Hollywood's liberal losses Brian C. Anderson from The Chicago Sun Times, November 20, 2005, also seen here: Conservatives in Hollywood?! by Brian C. Anderson, City Journal ...
David Chase, Arthur Penn among DGA Honors recipients Gregg Kilday from The Hollywood Reporter, September 12, 2006
Arthur Penn - Deutsche Kinemathek - Museum für Film und Fernsehen Berlin Film Festival Homage essay to Arthur Penn, 2007
KinoCritics Article: Arthur Penn: A Media Legend Karen Pecota from KinoCritics, 2007
• View topic - Mickey One (Arthur Penn, 1965) Criterion Forum, January 1, 2007
In praise of Arthur Penn Ronald Bergan from The Guardian, February 14, 2007
Arthur Penn: Available for Directing Again - Cinematical Jefferey M. Anderson from Cinematical, February 15, 2007
How violent taboos were blown away Philip French from The Observer, August 25, 2007
Arthur Penn: interviews - Google Books Result book edited by Michael Chaiken and Paul Cronin (219 pages), 2008, also updated to 2007 here: Arthur Penn: Interviews or here: Arthur Penn – Interviews
Arthur Penn put his signature on Hollywood film - The Boston Globe Mark Feeney from The Boston Globe, January 27, 2008
American original - Features - Boston Phoenix Steve Vineberg from The Boston Phoenix, January 29, 2008
'Pictures at a Revolution,' by Mark Harris: As the Tides Turned: Hollywood in 1967 Through the Lens of Five Films Pictures at a Revolution, Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, by Mark Harris (490 pages), book review by Janet Maslin from The New York Times, February 11, 2008
Anthology
Takes a Tour of the Bonnie and Clyde Director's America Nick Pinkerton from The Village Voice, March 12, 2008
When Mrs. Robinson Met Dr. Dolittle Pictures at a Revolution, Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, by Mark Harris, book review by Jim Shepard from The New York Times, November 18, 2008, with a brief aside on the writer: Up Front
The Outsider by Michael Chaiken and Paul Cronin - Moving Image Source “The Outsider,” essay adapted from the Michael Chaiken and Paul Cronin Introduction to their book Arthur Penn: Interviews, June 4, 2008
'Bonnie and Clyde' director Arthur Penn hospitalized with ... Entertainment Daily, July 14, 2009
Loose Ends in Night Moves • Senses of Cinema Bruce Jackson, July 11, 2010
Saddle shoes and knee socks and other lost icons of the Seventies Lance Mannion on Night Moves, September 8, 2010
Lance Mannion: The most interesting night moves in Night Moves are ... Lance Mannion, September 10, 2010
Arthur Penn, Director of 'Bonnie and Clyde,' Dies Dave Kehr from The New York Times, September 29, 2010, also seen here: Arthur Penn 1922-2010 - Dave Kehr including a Slide Show here: Looking Back at Arthur Penn
Bonnie and Clyde director Arthur Penn dies aged 88 Xan Brooks from The Guardian, September 29, 2010
Arthur Penn obituary | Film | The Guardian Sheila Whitaker from The Guardian, September 29, 2010
the full Times obituary of Arthur Penn Dennis McLellan from The Los Angeles Times, September 29, 2010, also seen here: Arthur Penn dies at 88; director of landmark film 'Bonnie and Clyde'
Arthur Penn: With 'Bonnie and Clyde,' he changed movies forever Patrick Goldstein from The LA Times, September 29, 2010
Bonnie and Clyde director Arthur Penn dies Heidi Blake from The Telegraph, September 29, 2010
Arthur Penn The Telegraph, September 29, 2010
RIP Arthur Penn Keith Phipps from The Onion A.V. Club, September 29, 2010
Arthur Penn: 1922 - 2010 Nigel M. Smith from indieWIRE, September 29, 2010
Arthur Penn Immortalized 'Bonnie and Clyde,' Staged 'Miracle' Peter Rainer from Bloomberg, September 29, 2010
director Arthur Penn has died Brittany Kaplan from CNN News, September 29, 2010
Arthur Penn, 1922-2010 Mark Feeney from The Boston Globe, September 29, 2010
'Bonnie And Clyde' Director Arthur Penn, 1922-2010 Bob Mondello from NPR, September 29, 2010
Bonnie and Clyde director Arthur Penn dies aged 88 BBC News, September 29, 2010
Remembering Arthur Penn and the Last Scene in Bonnie and Clyde Juli Weiner from Vanity Fair, September 29, 2010
Watch "The Miracle Worker" in Honor of Director Arthur Penn Jessica Grose from Slate, September 29, 2010
R.I.P. Arthur Penn 1922-2010 - The Playlist Kevin Jagernauth from The Playlist, September 29, 2010
Arthur Penn, 1922
- 2010 on Notebook | MUBI David
Hudson, September 29, 2010
Penn Matt Langdon from BunueL, September 29, 2010
Arthur Penn: a gentle man and a master of violence David Thomson from The Guardian, September 30, 2010
Arthur Penn: a career in clips Ben Walters from The Guardian, September 30, 2010
In Memoriam: Arthur Penn Peter Biskind from Vanity Fair, September 30, 2010
Arthur Penn: The Miracle Worker of Bonnie and Clyde Richard Corliss from Time magazine, September 30, 2010
Director Arthur Penn, 1922–2010 Malcolm Jones from Newsweek, September 30, 2010
Arthur Penn, filmmaker who embraced realism, dies Mick LaSalle from The San Francisco Chronicle, September 30, 2010
Arthur Penn; ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ director loved outsiders Mike Stewart from The Boston Globe, September 30, 2010
His 'Bonnie and Clyde' jolted US cinema Emma Brown from The Washington Post, September 30, 2010
Tony Curtis & Arthur Penn: Classic Matinee Idol, Counter-Culture Rebel Bret Lang from The Wrap, September 30, 2010
Why I Love: Bonnie & Clyde David Gritten from The Telegraph, September 30, 2010
Hollywood Veterans Richard Brody from The New Yorker, September 30, 2010
Two Passing Greats: A Tribute to Arthur Penn and Tony Curtis John Farr from The Huffington Post, September 30, 2010
Arthur Penn: The old-wave-meets-new-wave magic he brought to 'Bonnie and Clyde' Owen Gleiberman from Entertainment Weekly, September 30, 2010
Six Degrees of Arthur Penn Todd S. Purdum from Vanity Fair, October 1, 2010
Arthur
Penn obituary Peter Biskind from Sight and Sound, December 2010
Killing Dreams: Youth and Nostalgia in Bonnie and ... - Film Journal Killing Dreams: Youth and Nostalgia in Bonnie and Clyde and Public Enemies, by Thomas B. Byers, 2013
WNET: Arthur Penn Interview Channel Thirteen American Masters interview transcripts of Arthur Penn on Buckminster Fuller (Undated)
American Theatre Wing - SDCF Masters of the Stage - Arthur Penn ... Melvion Bernhardt interview from American Theater Wing (audio only), May 14, 1987 (86:40)
Charlie Rose - An interview with Carol Burnett and Arthur Penn Charlie Rose TV interview, September 26, 1994 (57:20)
Arthur Penn - Show All - Dialogues - Moving Image Source November 11, 1994, audio only (57:41)
Charlie Rose - Arthur Penn Charlie Rose TV interviews, both September 26, 1994 (link above) and November 29, 2000 (20 minutes)
Arthur
Penn, filmmaker feature article by
Wolf Schneider from The Hollywood
Reporter, March 7, 2007, also an interview here: Dialogue:
Arthur Penn (subscription needed)
Arthur Penn: The Hollywood Interview Joe Zelazny interview September 29, 2008, reposted at The Hollywood Interview, April 9, 2009
Arthur Penn - Director by Film Rank ranking of Penn’s movies, by Films 101
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
Arthur Penn - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
YouTube - Lumière and Company - Arthur Penn (55 seconds)
THE LEFT-HANDED GUN C+ 78
USA (102 mi) 1958
A
society has its mirror in its outcasts. —Arthur Penn
A romanticized and sympathetic portrayal of one of American’s iconic
outlaws, William Henry McCarty, Jr. aka: William Bonney, aka: Billy
the Kid, whose legend has been lionized into mythical status through
exaggerated newspaper accounts and dime store novels, becoming one of the great
figures of the American West. While there are more than a dozen
movie versions of his story, most are fairly second rate accounts of his life,
where even the title of this film has been discounted as myth, suggesting the
real Billy the Kid was right-handed, but for nearly a century wrongly thought
of as left-handed from an archival photograph that was originally viewed
through a reversed mirror image. More interesting accounts of the Kid's
story both come from the same source, The
Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, a 1956 novel by Charles Neider, used in
both Brando’s ONE EYED JACKS (1961) and Sam Peckinpah’s PAT GARRETT & BILLY
THE KID (1973), where Peckinpah actually worked as one of the screenwriters on
Brando’s film. Both of those films use a more naturalistic style, though
in Brando’s film, he’s hunted down by a maniacal lawman seeking public
glorification by killing a notorious outlaw, while in Peckinpah’s he’s
regrettably shot down by his best friend, initially seen as an act of revenge
for breaking out of jail, but eventually seen as a hollow and meaningless
act. This film, written by Gore Vidal, was originally a 1955 made-for TV
movie called The Death of Billy the Kid,
expanded by screenwriter Leslie Stevens for a feature length film, using the
same lead actor in each, Paul Newman. Penn’s account turns the Kid into a
martyr figure, a common portrait seen throughout Newman’s storied career,
especially during the 60’s, THE HUSTLER (1961), HOMBRE (1967), and COOL HAND LUKE
(1967).
This is Arthur Penn’s first film, made than a decade before his most
infamous outlaw movie, BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967), where one common factor in each
is the director’s love for outsiderism and actor Denver Pyle, depicted as a
bellicose lawman in each. Newman’s acting is overly theatrical, typical
of the times, where there wasn’t much difference between the histrionics and
largesse of stage performances and those before a movie camera. It was
largely the 60’s influence of European films and Jack Nicholson whose
understated portrayal in FIVE EASY PIECES (1970) altered the standard, though
the existential realism of the Penn performances in MICKY ONE (1965) and BONNIE
AND CLYDE certainly helped pave the way. Newman’s role was originally
scripted for James Dean, where the misunderstood feelings of alienation and
personal torment are present, where it’s clear the character is curious, but
illiterate and uneducated, where from the outset he seems to be lost (wandering
without a horse), aimlessly running away from his difficult past. He
hooks up with a cattle drive on their way to Lincoln, becoming something of a
hot-headed boy apprentice to his gentleman boss, Tunstall (Colin
Keith-Johnston), known as "The Englishman," who affectionately takes
him under his wing. When a crooked sheriff shoots the unarmed Tunstall
down in cold blood, the Kid vows revenge, soon joined by two partners in crime,
Charlie (James Congdon) and Tom (James Best), though when together, these boys
act like mere adolescents. It’s the speed of the Kid’s gun that brings
them quick notoriety, killing the sheriff and one of his partners, quickly
idealized in pulp novels that became instant best sellers. Relatively
unknown during his lifetime, his legendary reputation, whose exploits were exaggerated
after his death, turned him into a folk hero.
Like Truffaut’s THE BRIDE WORE BLACK (1968), the Kid has no
rest until he can gun down the other two that still remain at-large who were
involved with Tunstall’s murder. There
are certain story elements that simply get lost, like what happened to all the
cattle, as we never see them again, or who became the next sheriff, as we see
several men wearing badges afterwards.
Instead, the Kid and his two partners recuperate from injuries and hang
out in
Time Out review Tom Milne
Newman as Billy the mixed-up Kid, an ebullient young illiterate who takes to slinging a gun when his substitute father is killed, only to face another, sterner father figure. Endlessly fascinated by his own image, blindly following a death-wish to its logical conclusion, this Billy is very much of the rebel- without-a-cause breed, a hero unable to match up to his legend. Violent, stylised, occasionally top-heavy with symbolism (although the religious parallel is convincingly carried by Hatfield's marvellous performance as Billy's Judas disciple), The Left Handed Gun is a remarkable attempt to communicate an understanding (ours of Billy, his of himself) viscerally, felt through movement and gesture. Penn's first film, it is in many ways a key stage in the development of the Western.
The Left Handed Gun (1958) Arthur Penn « Twenty Four Frames John Greco from Twenty Four Frames
Arthur Penn’s “The Left Handed Gun” is a James Dean film without James Dean. The angst, tormented, misunderstood youth Dean portrayed in “Rebel without a Cause” and “East of Eden” is all here. This role was originally scheduled for James Dean who died in the well-documented car crash on September 11, 1955. Paul Newman who at this point in his career was looked at as a Marlon Brando/James Dean wanna be was selected to replace Dean as his previously did in “Somebody up There Likes Me”. Based on a television play by Gore Vidal, Newman play’s Billy the Kid as a tormented misunderstood, inarticulate, hot headed, and resentful youth whose one father figure, the English cattleman John Tunstall, was gun-down in cold blood by a crooked sheriff and his deputies. This was the start of the famed Lincoln County war. While based on fact this is a highly fictionalized version of the conflict, one example is Tunstall who is portrayed as an older man so he could represent a father figure to Billy was less than a month shy of twenty-five when he was killed.
Billy is hell bent on revenge, one by one taking the life of each of the four men who killed John Tunstall in cold blood. Along the way, he meets Pat Garrett (John Dehner) who befriends Billy but warns him against seeking revenge against the killers especially after an amnesty was issued by the governor for all the killing during the Lincoln County War. However, Billy has a narrow vision and even after promising Pat Garrett that he would not cause any trouble on his Wedding day, guns down the last of Tunstall’s killers.
Penn already displays some of the themes that would be prevalent in his later work, the outlaw as a sympathetic anti-authority figure, the breakdown of myths and sudden unexpected violence breaking out causing pandemonium. Also, notable is the use of actor Denver Pyle who portrayed Texas Ranger Frank Hamer in “Bonnie & Clyde” and here plays a deputy sheriff, who kills one of Billy’s gang (James Best) before being shot gunned to death himself by Billy. Penn loves outsiders and continued to portray them throughout his career in films like “Bonnie and Clyde“, “Alice’s Restaurant” and “Little Big Man .” He has also taken film genres and given them a revisionist look , The P.I. in “Night Moves”, the gangster film in “Bonnie and Clyde” and of course the western in “Little Big Man”, “The Missouri Breaks” and “The Left Handed Gun.”
Paul Newman’s portrays Billy as inarticulate, uneducated with a boyish charm (Newman charm to be more accurate). He is sometime over the top and actually gave a better performance as the inarticulate, uneducated with boyish charm, Rocky Graziano in the 1956 film “Somebody up There Likes Me.” Newman was just becoming a major star at this time and would go on to become an even bigger star and a better actor as his career progressed. John Dehner is okay as Pat Garrett, though I did find both James Best and James Congdon as Billy’s two gang members unconvincing.
“The Left Handed Gun” is a flawed film that is more interesting than most successful works, unique in its vision in a decade known for its bland conformity.
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review The Paul Newman Collection
You have to give credit where it's due: The Left Handed Gun was no box office hit but was extremely influential. Subsequent Billy the Kid epics borrow its scene structure and its theme of Alienated Gunfighter Chic: Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks and Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Paul Newman's confused killer cowpoke might be called I Was a Teenage Gunfighter if it were not for the quality of the writing and direction.
The movie is recognizably Penn's in form, or he decided to adopt the themes of Leslie Stevens' and Gore Vidal's script for his later work. The balance is between the immature world of Billy, a 'kid' fond of singing and carousing with his two equally inexperienced pals Charlie and Tom, and the 'grown-up' world of serious violence. The society around Billy is laced with commitments and politics -- Pat Garrett's marriage, the cattle war, his friends in town -- but Billy doesn't know how to be faithful to his word, or how to manage a stable relationship. That's consistent with later Penn protagonists in Mickey One, Bonnie & Clyde, The Chase and Little Big Man: All are kids caught up in confusing 'adult' problems. The New Wave crowd praised The Left Handed Gun (when domestic reviewers ignored it) and adopted some of Penn's ideas. Bonnie & Clyde started life as a project that might have been made in France. The gag of a tortured existential crook facing the law with no gun or an unloaded gun would become a given in several French Melville cops 'n' robbers shows.
Later genre criticism examined The Left Handed Gun and found it rich in thematic material, mainly because Penn's direction communicates much of Vidal's psychosexual context heaped into the screenplay by Stevens. Billy is seeking father figures -- trail boss Tunstall, Pat Garrett and Mexican friend Saval (Martin Garralaga). That means that when he seduces Saval's young wife Celsa, he's sleeping with his 'mother.' Billy's pals' adolescent attitude to sex includes making inappropriate jokes like giving Pat spurs for a wedding present. The movie's violent content no longer seems to be buried subtext -- guns might as well be sex organs. James Best runs around a party squirting wine at people out of a pigskin ... that sort of thing. The film's tone encourages dirty -- excuse me, sensual -- interpretations of nearly everything.
Is this the first western in which the hero surrenders with his arms thrown wide, striking an intentionally Christ-like pose? Probably not.
Arthur Penn has an almost instant rapport with the camera. He tells the story clearly and uses unfussy but interesting angles making something halfway fresh of studio exterior sets we've seen 50 times. His small touches prefigure Peckinpah (when a little girl laughs at Denver Pyle's Ollinger, blown clear out of his boots) and find clever visuals of their own, as when the boys 'shoot (the reflection of) the Moon' right out of a pond.
Paul Newman is charming, precise and intense -- it's a trained actor's performance and not really a personal one. Solid support from John Dehner helps the story along. Lita Milan is just so-so but James Best and James Congdon excel as Billy's luckless buddies. The symbolic frontier mythmaker Moultrie is possibly Hurd Hatfield's best role and nothing like his usual upper-class cold-fish characters. Under Penn's direction, even the rather stiff actor John Dierkes gives a particularly affecting performance.
The
Left-Handed Gun - TCM.com Bret Wood from Turner Classic Movies
Nothing is Written: A Film Blog: The Left-Handed Gun Groggy Dundee
The Left Handed Gun (1958) – Speakeasy
The Left
Handed Gun - Movie Locations of the Great Southwest!
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Past Picks Online [Jimmy Gillman]
Just Hit Play: The Left Handed Gun
Billy the Kid Week 2010: Review of The Left Handed Gun (1958 ... Paxton from Cavalcade of Awesome
THE LEFT HANDED GUN - 1958 Movie Review. Biography | Western. Jarred Thomas from Wildsound
Talking Pictures (UK) review Howard Schumann
DVD Verdict-The Paul Newman Collection [Brendan Babish]
filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [69/100]
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reviews from imdb Author: ironside
(robertfrangie@hotmail.com) from
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reviews from imdb Author: William Giesin from United States
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Ideas & Trends; When 'Director's Cut' Is a Contradiction in Terms Elvis Mitchell from The New York Times, September 1, 2002
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
The Left Handed Gun - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Billy the Kid - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
List of most expensive photographs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE MIRACLE WORKER
USA (106 mi) 1962
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Penn's remarkable screen version of William Gibson's play about Helen Keller, which he directed on Broadway. It's a stunningly impressive piece of work, typically (for Penn) deriving much of its power from the performances. Patty Duke as the young girl born deaf and blind, and Anne Bancroft as the stubborn Irish governess who helps her overcome her inability to speak, spark off each other with a violence and emotional honesty rarely seen in the cinema, lighting up each other's loneliness, vulnerability, and plain fear. What is in fact astonishing is the way that, while constructing a piece of very carefully directed and intelligently written melodrama, Penn manages to avoid sentimentality or even undue optimism about the value of Helen's education, and the way he achieves such a feeling of raw spontaneity in the acting.
Apollo
Guide (Scott Renshaw) review [85/100]
Sure, I knew about Helen Keller. I knew she was a deaf and
blind girl; I knew far too many black-humoured Helen Keller jokes as a
pre-adolescent. And I knew there was a movie about Helen and a teacher, and
that it had a scene with a water pump. But actually watch the film in question?
Horrors, no. It could only be one of those heart-warming true stories of
overcoming tremendous obstacles that filmmakers, especially filmmakers of a
bygone era, generally rendered with overbearing sentimentality.
Arthur
Penn’s
1962 version of The Miracle Worker is not that film. In fact, if that
film exists in some alternate universe, it would explode on contact with this
one. Yes, this is a true story, based on the relationship between
seven-year-old Helen (newcomer Patty Duke) and novice teacher Annie Sullivan (Anne
Bancroft). Yes, it chronicles the overcoming of obstacles, as Sullivan
tries to rescue the feral Helen from a prison of sensory deprivation combined
with parental indulgence. But Penn and screenwriter William Gibson (adapting
his own play) bleach all tear-jerking artifice from a potentially maudlin tale.
Stark and haunting as rendered through Ernest Caparros’
black-and-white cinematography, The Miracle Worker emerges as a small
miracle of understated power.
Bancroft and Duke both won Oscars for their performances, and it would be easy
to hand them all credit for the film’s success. Indeed, the two
actresses spark the film in tremendously challenging roles. As Sullivan, the young
woman with her own history as an institutionalized blind girl and plenty of
emotional axes to grind, Bancroft plays on the edge of unlikeability as the
teacher’s
“tough
love”
approach sometimes shows far more tough than love. Duke, meanwhile, lets loose
with the ferocity of an animal that doesn’t know how to express her
desire not to be an animal. By themselves, they’d have made a solid film drama
Penn’s
direction, however, cranks it up to another level. His deep focus compositions
and use of shadow evoke Orson Welles at
his most hypnotic; the eerie distorted images of Annie’s
vision-impaired memories add even more psychological depth. When he stages the
film’s
showcase confrontation, a battle of wills between Annie and Helen in the Keller
family dining room, Penn never allows a moment of cinematic flab. For several
dialogue-free, music-free minutes, The Miracle Worker portrays a literal
war for a girl’s soul, making that war so ugly that it’s
impossibly beautiful.
Touches of melodrama peek through in the supporting performances, with Inga
Swenson, Victor
Jory and Andrew Prine all over-emoting at times as the well-meaning but
ineffectual Keller family. They’re forgivable lapses, reminders
of how easy it would be to play the story strictly for pity. Penn could have
chosen no more effective approach for The Miracle Worker than to make it
pitiless, while still emotionally resonant. And when the water finally does
flow from that pump, and perhaps from viewers’ eyes, the story means much
more than the sad, hard life of one deaf and blind girl.
The Miracle Worker - TCM.com Mary Anne Melear
Helen Keller penned her autobiography titled, The Story of
My Life in 1902, but it wasn't until 1959 that it was adapted for the
stage. The Broadway production was directed by Arthur Penn and written by
William Gibson. Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft, little known actresses at the
time, played the leading roles of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan and received
rave reviews for their performances.
Despite those positive reviews, United Artists made it clear to Penn and Gibson
that they preferred bigger names in the proposed film version of the story.
Reportedly, the studio made the following offer: " We'll give you $5
million if you do it with Liz Taylor, $500,000 if you make it with
Bancroft." The choice to keep Bancroft in the leading role speaks to the
way in which the creative team viewed Bancroft's performance. They remained
committed to their original cast members and the studio acquiesced.
During the filming of The Miracle Worker (1962), both Bancroft and Duke
became so immersed in their roles, they put their health at risk. For the
famous dining room battle scene, which required three cameras for a nine-minute
sequence and took five days to film, both actresses wore pads beneath their
clothing. At one point during the filming, Bancroft started laughing from sheer
exhaustion and her reaction was left in the film. In fact, Bancroft was
hospitalized with pneumonia just after filming was complete. As for Duke, she
later admitted she dreaded the final wrap-up of the film because it meant her
final separation from a role that had become such an important part of her
life.
The Miracle Worker was responsible for launching the careers of both
stars. Bancroft, who up until that point had been cast in mediocre movies, such
as Treasure of the Golden Condor (1953) and Gorilla at Large (1954) went on to
starring roles in The Graduate (1967) and The Turning Point (1978). Patty Duke,
just 15 at the time the movie was made, went on to star in her own sitcom, The
Patty Duke Show (1963-66).
That same year, Bette Davis was also nominated for Best Actress for her role in
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. However, her co-star in the movie and longtime
rival, Joan Crawford, was passed over by the Academy. In an effort to upstage
her nemesis, Crawford wrote congratulatory letters to each of the other
nominees - Katharine Hepburn for Long Day's Journey into Night, Geraldine Page
for Sweet Bird of Youth, Lee Remick for Days of Wine and Roses - in addition to
Anne Bancroft. In Crawford's letter, she extended an offer to accept the award
on the actresses' behalf, if for some reason they were unable to attend the
ceremony.
Bancroft, who was in New York working on Broadway in the production of Mother
Courage at the time, was torn about leaving the play for the Oscar® ceremony.
She sought advice from Mel Brooks, who she was dating at the time (They married
in 1964). When he saw the list of the other nominees, he advised her to stay at
work. So, Bancroft accepted Joan Crawford's offer to accept her award - just in
case.
On the night of the awards, when Anne Bancroft was declared the Best Actress
winner, Bette Davis stood waiting in the wings. Suddenly, Joan Crawford brushed
by her saying, "Pardon me, but I have an Oscar® to accept."
Meanwhile, Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks were watching TV at their home in New
York. When her name was called, Bancroft and Brooks were elated. Then, Anne
watched as an equally excited Crawford accepted her award. Struck by Crawford's
appearance, Bancroft said, "My God! Joan Crawford looks like me!"
For the record, The Miracle Worker was nominated for five Academy
Awards® including Best Actress (Bancroft), Best Supporting Actress (Duke), Best
Director (Arthur Penn) and Best Screenplay (William Gibson).
1 PROVING THE DIFFABLE'S INDEPENDENCE IN ARTHUR PENN'S THE MIRACLE ... 7-page academic essay by Muhammad Anwari, 2009 (pdf format)
Urban Cinefile dvd review Keith Lofthouse
The Spinning Image (Mary Sibley) review
Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [A-]
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4/5]
Junta Juleil's Culture Shock [Sean Gill]
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
THE TRAIN
USA France
Italy (133 mi) 1964
alternate version (140 mi)
d: John Frankenheimer Uncredited original director: Arthur Penn, fired and replaced
Time Out review Tom Milne
Discount some self-conscious talk about Art as a national heritage, as well as clumsy dubbing of the supporting cast, and you have a rattling good thriller about a World War II German general (Scofield) determined to flee Paris just before the liberation with a trainload of Impressionist paintings. One obsession runs headlong into another as a French railway inspector (Lancaster), once unwillingly started out in opposition, finds he cannot stop, and must go on finding new ways and means of delaying the train for an hour here, a day there. In Frankenheimer's hands, the whole paraphernalia of trains, tracks and shunting yards acquires an almost hypnotic fascination as the screen becomes a giant chessboard on which huge metallic pawns are manoeuvred, probing for some fatal weakness but seemingly engaged in some deadly primeval struggle.
The Train
- TCM.com Bret Wood
Questioning the sanity of war, even as it valorizes those who sacrificed their lives to win it, The Train (1964) is a World War II action film tinged with a Cold War sensibility from director John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, 1962).
Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967) was originally slated to direct the film but was relieved of his command less than one week into filming by star Burt Lancaster, who was also one of the film's producers. Lancaster was concerned that Penn was neglecting the story's potential for action and suspense, and remedied the situation by calling in Frankenheimer, who had directed Lancaster in The Young Savages (1961), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964). Frankenheimer in turn discarded Penn's footage, brought in his own writers to overhaul the script, and ultimately delivered the WWII thriller Lancaster had hoped for.
Lancaster stars as Labiche, a railway inspector and member of the French Resistance, who is asked to somehow detain a train loaded with priceless paintings - national treasures by Gauguin, Degas, Cezanne, Renoir and others - confiscated by the occupying forces. This sets in motion a series of elaborate deceptions, hairbreadth chases and ironic twists that constitute The Train's intricate and satisfying plot.
Shot almost entirely on location in France, the production faced unexpected difficulties, especially in regards to the inclement weather in Normandy. "The Allies couldn't invade Normandy until June," Frankenheimer later recalled, "and we were trying to shoot this thing in September and October when the fog comes rolling in from the Channel." Eventually, the production was shut down until the following spring, allowing the crew to shoot interior scenes in Paris and to begin assembling a cut of the film. Once the weather improved, they knew exactly what they needed to finish the picture.
Aside from the weather, there were many other challenges involved in making The Train. To film the bombing of a railway yard, special effects supervisor Lee Zavitz spent six weeks planting dynamite charges beneath the tracks of an actual rail yard (which the French government was already planning to tear apart and renovate), for a scene that lasts only 50 seconds. According to Newsweek, this brief sequence incorporated 140 separate explosions, 3,000 pounds of TNT and 2,000 gallons of gasoline. No miniatures were used in The Train, a fact that is readily apparent when one views such sequences of carefully-orchestrated destruction that punctuate the film's tightly-wound narrative.
A fine example of the film's life-sized special effects is a collision of two steam locomotives, which was not as simple as it appears. The tracks of the approaching train were dismantled and re-laid below ground level so the impact would be more dramatic, causing the locomotives to destroy one another and tear apart the earth around them rather than bouncing in different directions.
One sequence that proved to be unexpectedly complicated was the derailing of a slow-moving locomotive. Instead of approaching at the planned speed of seven miles per hour, the driver accidentally tripled the speed. As a result, the train left the rails and proceeded to destroy every camera in its path....except one. No crew members were injured, six cameras were demolished, and the sole surviving camera provided a shot better than anything Frankenheimer had anticipated: a close-up view of the catastrophe, concluding with one steel wheel spinning mere inches from the lens of the camera.
When a cut of the film was screened for United Artists executives, the producers were asked to add one more action sequence. Anticipating this request, Frankenheimer already had a scene in mind and, for an additional $500,000 (approximately $5 million by contemporary filmmaking standards) willingly provided it. This scene, of the train being strafed by a British Spitfire, racing toward the safety of a mountain tunnel, proved almost fatal to Frankenheimer and some of the crew. Filming from a helicopter just ahead of the train, the helicopter accidentally pulled into the path of the Spitfire as it sped toward the mountainside. "The Spitfire was roaring toward us at 300 miles an hour," Frankenheimer remembers, "I could see the pilot's face and he looked as terrified as I felt. He missed us by ten feet... My wife was watching on the ground, and she fainted."
Although the sequence is not closely tied to the rest of the plot, it is a masterful achievement of heightened and prolonged suspense that helped solidify The Train's reputation as one of the best action films of the 1960s.
Film Court (Lawrence Russell) review March 2000
The Train (1964) | Rikaroo June 8, 2014
House Next Door [Matt Zoller Seitz] also seen here: Dallas Observer.
Sgt. Slaughter Goes to War (Ben Cressy) review
Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [A]
filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [57/100]
Viewpoints George Chabot
AMG Lucia Bozzola from American Movie Guide
DVDTalk [Paul Mavis] The John Frankenheimer Collection
PopMatters [Marco Lanzagorta] The John Frankenheimer Collection
DVD Verdict [Victor Valdivia] The John Frankenheimer Collection
The
Train review – it's Lancaster v Scofield in this French Resistance ... Philip French from The Guardian
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDBeaver
dvd review Gary
W. Tooze
MICKEY ONE A- 93
USA (93 mi) 1965
The
ride was over, I was trapped and I find out suddenly I owe a fortune. —Mickey
One (Warren Beatty)
Is
there any word from the Lord? —Jeremiah
37:17
Forget
it, you don’t have to pay. Gambling’s
illegal in Illinois. —Chicago
cops
A rare, one-of-a-kind film, the likes of which they don’t make any more, all set in a mindblowingly experimental, Black and White underground noir style, a dissonant portrait of madness, confusion, and fear, perhaps a reference to the artistic blacklists of the 1950’s during the McCarthyist Red scare, where nightclub comic Warren Beatty, young and brilliant, supposedly goes on a drunken gambling rampage and ends up owing some astronomical amount to the mob, apparently so large an amount they won’t even tell him how much, though he can’t remember what he did to incur the debt. Opening wearing a suit in a steambath, Beatty spends the rest of the film drifting in and out of his own imagination, a dreamlike, nightmarish state of mind filled with startling imagery where only Fellini comes close in comparison. Just to comprehend the inventiveness on display, before the opening credits roll there are nightclub scenes with the strikingly sensuous Donna Michelle as the Girl doing a kind of modern dance with a scarf during his gambling euphoria, underwater sequences, mirror reflections, the use of splitscreen in the same shot, or shots superimposed over others, but most striking are the close ups of faces saturated in light, almost like masks, creating a hypnotically surreal effect. Much like the French New Wave, there are startling jump cuts, showing quick mood swings between what’s real and the imagination, using a dreamy jazz score by Eddie Sauter with Stan Getz on saxophone, creating a sad, moody, and melancholic portrait of a man on the run, as Mickey decides to change his identity and get out of Detroit, which is immediately followed by visits to hobo jungles and starkly threatening images of cars being demolished and compacted at a junkyard. The interior mental picture is portrayed as a nightmarish, existential wasteland. 36 years later the film still feels modernist, like a Waiting for Godot theatrical production where there's only one guy onstage talking to himself, stuck in his own purgatory.
While it’s hard to make sense out of any of this, as much of the time Beatty is doing his onstage schtick telling jokes to canned laughter, where he’s not the least bit funny, but there are definitely signs of ISHTAR (1987) in his nightclub act. There’s also a sense of meandering, where the pace of the film mimics the aimlessness of the character, who would prefer to remain an undiscovered comic. When Mickey moves to a strip club in Chicago, the city never looked more luminescent, where pristine nighttime panoramas blend into a daytime skid row district where he hangs out, mostly shots of back alleys and secondhand stores, where the Polish landlady keeps trying to rent his room while he’s still in it. Eventually she succeeds, where Alexandra Stewart as Jenny is thrust upon him. He goes through an entire repertoire of conflicting thoughts before deciding she may be the one for him, all expressed in an endlessly meandering soliloquy that he expresses to her. It’s a kind of well-written, off-Broadway theatrical rush, as it’s a highly inventive way to show them getting to know one another, all communicated through his intensely personalized mind’s view. Somewhere off in the distance is Jean Tinguely playing a mime that follows him around like his conscious, a guy who’s quite inventive and entertaining himself, who puts on a modern art exhibition called Yes, suggesting courage is freedom, introducing a large kinetic sculpture, a mechanical monstrosity created by Robert Fields, an industrial design student at the School of the Art Institute, that actually plays music before self-destructing into a series of giant explosions, turning into a blazing bonfire requiring the intervention of the Chicago Fire Department to put it out, ending the show on a sad note, a portrait of the American Dream gone wrong.
Wouldn’t you know that there’s an upscale nightclub called
Xanadu that suddenly enters the picture, which is actually the now torn down
Gate of Horn folk club on the southeast corner of Dearborn and
Chicago Reader (Don Druker) capsule review
This 1964 film is so obscure that contemporary critics dismissed it as a colossal bit of self-indulgence by director Arthur Penn and star Warren Beatty. Scripted by Alan Surgal, it's a variation on Kafka's The Trial, with Beatty as a second-rate nightclub comic on the run from a nameless threat (which may or may not involve the syndicate and some gambling debts). Quintessential Penn, far easier to read now than it was then, and even funny in spots. 93 min.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Mickey (Beatty) is a successful nightclub comedian, confused and neurotic about his life in general, and possibly suffering from a persecution complex: someone or something is threatening him, for something he may have done in the past. Exactly what he is afraid of - the Mob, America at large, his conscience? - and why remains all too obscure in Penn's most European movie, made with almost total artistic freedom; the result, at once his most infuriating and one of his most intriguing films, is a rather vague allegory about alienation, guilt and despair, structured as an elliptical narrative complete with jump-cuts and bizarre, symbolic images. A few scenes are truly disquieting - as when Beatty is auditioned in a silent, darkened auditorium - but the overall effect is too cerebrally self-conscious to be genuinely gripping.
Mickey One at MOMA J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, April 15, 2008, also here: The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
An off-Hollywood production made for under a million dollars, Arthur Penn's Mickey One (April 17 through 23 at the Museum of Modern Art) had its American premiere at the same 1965 New York Film Festival that opened with Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville; widely reviled at the time, it shows its ambitious director, several years before Bonnie and Clyde, trying to figure out just what a "new wave" American movie might be.
A still-raw Warren Beatty stars as the eponymous hero—a piano-playing, Noo Yawk–inflected stand-up comic ("Onstage, I'm the Polack Noël Coward"). Miscast if energetic, Beatty gives the picture a certain poignancy—particularly as Penn, no humorist himself, regularly gooses the star's onstage shtick with the visual equivalent of canned laughter, and equates his character's situation with the trials of Joseph K. The mob is pursuing Mickey, and he can't figure out why: "All I know—I'm guilty." Asked of what by his rational gf of mystery (Alexandra Stewart), he replies: "Guilty of not being innocent!"
A far cry from the svelte absurdism of Hitchcock's North by Northwest, Mickey One is most striking for its downbeat Americana—Mickey hides in hobo jungles and automobile burial grounds, hangs out in striptease dives and skid-row revival halls—and its high vernacular interludes. Strolling through Chicago, Mickey and the gf watch a spindly Jean Tinguely machine's spectacular self-destruct act—the supposed artist played by a cosmically annoying mime—and, throughout, the freewheeling jazz score erupts with "improvisations" by Stan Getz.
That sax is the point. MOMA is screening Mickey One in conjunction with its ambitious survey "Jazz Score," a five-month, 50-plus series of American, European, and Japanese films. The chronology ranges from the 1950s to the present, and the parameters are generous—including composers like Alex North, Elmer Bernstein, and Henry Mancini, who seem more jazzy than jazz. Still, the show is notable for presenting—and even insisting on—another way to look at familiar and not-so-familiar work.
The first week's offerings effectively embed Mickey One in a late-'50s constellation of jazz-infused crime films, including Robert Wise's 1958 I Want to Live! and, even cooler, 1959 Odds Against Tomorrow (music composed by the Modern Jazz Quartet's John Lewis). Although stunt-meister Otto Preminger engaged Duke Ellington to score his 1959 Anatomy of a Murder, the music and movie never gel; Martin Ritt's 1961 Paris Blues, which Ellington and Billy Strayhorn also scored, is a lesser film with a more impressive sound. Mikio Naruse's downbeat melodrama, A Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960), is terrific by any standard, with Toshirô Mayuzumi's ironic cocktail jazz an organic element. The most electrifying jazz, however, is to be found in Louis Malle's 1958 Elevator to the Gallows—a schematic thriller lifted toward greatness by a score that Miles Davis improvised in a single, all-night recording session. "Jazz Score," April 16 through September 15, MOMA.
24XPS » Blog Archive » Arthur Penn on 'Mickey One' Arthur Penn on ‘Mickey One,’ by Steve Dollar from 24XPS, November 11, 2008
Cinema is frequently called the art form of the 20th century, but jazz lays equal claim to the title. The two crossed paths early on, beginning in the late 1920s, as Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway lent a bawdy dazzle to Max Fleischer’s cartoons on their way to bigger matinee stardom.
But jazz didn’t really seep into the cinematic consciousness until the 1950s, when directors began to find ways to integrate the music’s improvisatory verve and percussive tension into their story lines — rather than, say, making a biopic about a jazz musician (think “The Glenn Miller Story”) or throwing some racy saxophone into a sleazy nightclub scene in a film noir. The Museum of Modern Art’s sprawling new program ‘Jazz Score,’ which includes screenings of more than 50 films, an exhibit, and live performances, takes encyclopedic note of the ways jazz has influenced film.
The series, which begins tomorrow and runs through September 15, includes plenty of no-brainers — the kinds of films that jazz fans treasure, either for their soundtrack albums or for the way they factor into a legendary performer’s career. Highlights include Louis Malle’s “Elevator to the Gallows,” with its brooding Miles Davis score; Otto Preminger’s “Anatomy of a Murder,” which marked a breakthrough for Duke Ellington; John Cassavetes’s “Shadows,” with its practically ambient backdrop of Charles Mingus pieces, thumping as if in the next room, and Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris,” whose libidinal Gato Barbieri theme became a boudoir staple in the mid-1970s.
The series also examines how movie composers soaked up jazz influences, whether reflected in Henry Mancini’s border-town exoticism in “Touch of Evil” (later remade as a killer homage by jazz greats Ran Blake and Clifford Jordan), or excursions into the genre by Japan’s Tôru Takemitsu (“Crazed Fruit”) and Poland’s Krzysztof Komeda (“Knife in the Water,” “Le Depart”).
Thankfully, the series avoids the more obvious “jazz flicks,” such as Bertrand Tavernier’s “’Round Midnight,” in favor of genuine obscurities. The 1970 documentary “Jack Johnson” inspired Miles Davis to record one of his groundbreaking electric sessions, and the 1962 Danish film “Dilemma” transposes Max Roach’s “Freedom Now Suite” to the deserted streets of apartheid-era Johannesburg.
But rarely has the music meshed as naturally with visual style as it did in “Mickey One,” Arthur Penn’s neglected 1965 film, which opens the series tomorrow with an introduction by the 86-year-old Mr. Penn. Exhibited in a fabulous restored print that lends seductive depth and richness to its black-and-white palette, “Mickey One” remains as curious as ever. Its opening scene establishes a surreal tone, as a nightclub comic (played by budding heartthrob Warren Beatty) lights up a cigar in a sauna, sitting fully clothed in foppish finery as a laughing chorus of fat, old guys cackles at him. Must be the 1960s.
Mr. Penn was flexing his creative muscles after an Oscar nomination for “The Miracle Worker” helped to win him a hands-off, two-picture deal with Columbia.
“I didn’t want to hear a bunch of suits talk to me about script changes,” the director, chatting recently by phone from his Manhattan home, said. “The idea was for it to be an unexpected movie.” Mr. Penn was so successful at that goal, expanding writer Alan Surgal’s stage piece into a kind of Kafka-meets-the-New-Wave fever dream, that “Mickey One” actually forecast the 1960s. The movie’s prevailing air of paranoia — as Mr. Beatty’s title character goes on the lam to escape an unspecified mob menace and invents a new identity — and tilted sense of reality succinctly captures the bizarro spirit of the times.
Cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet, who would collaborate with Robert Bresson on several classics, contributed greatly to the film’s fugue-like atmospherics, with its pulp-fiction mugs of bartenders and bums leering as if through the bottom of a shot glass.
“I wanted black-and-white because I thought, there’s nothing about this film that’s colorful,” Mr. Penn said. “Conversely, when we were going to make ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ they said, ‘Do you want to shoot this in color?’ And we had to. If it was black-and-white, it would be a documentary.”
But most of all, it’s the score, by big-band arranger Eddie Sauter with solos by saxophonist Stan Getz, that defines the spirit of “Mickey One.” The music matches, or anticipates, Mr. Beatty every step of the way, as his character improvises a new identity and tumbles through the back alleys and burlesque dives of Chicago. The music alters its shape as vertiginously as Mickey perceives the city’s underbelly, cutting between Dixieland bustle and passages of breezy bossa nova, Bartok-inspired abstraction, and fiery bop, constantly lit up by Getz’s improvisations.
As it turns out, the latter was a happy accident.
“There we were, getting the score down and I didn’t anticipate that Stan Getz was a great pal of [Sauter’s],” Mr. Penn said. “Stan kept dropping by the scoring sessions, and picked up his horn and went to work.”
The film was very much a reaction to its times, Mr. Penn said. “I was pissed off at the movie business. I had started to work on a film with Burt Lancaster, but it turned out he had made a secret deal with John Frankenheimer to take it over. Burt arrived and had me fired.”
Eager to create something he could shove in Hollywood’s face, Mr. Penn also was responding to the previous decade in American life. “The paranoia? Oh yeah. The heritage of the McCarthy era. He scared a whole generation.”
But it was Mr. Penn who apparently instilled fear in his studio. Columbia opted out of the second picture in their deal. The director re-teamed with Mr. Beatty to shoot David Newman and Robert Benton’s New Wave-inspired screenplay of “Bonnie and Clyde,” and nothing was ever the same again. “Mickey One,” meanwhile, has lingered in the shadows, like one of Getz’s plaintive tenor solos.
“They didn’t get it,” Mr. Penn said. “They really didn’t. But left by itself, it continued to have a life. It’s incredible that as time goes by, there’s a higher estimation of it.”
Mickey
One - TCM.com Jeff Stafford
The Kim Newman Website [Kim Newman]
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
The Greatest Movies in the History of the Human Race [Mitch Lovell]
Beatty
and Penn make 'Mickey One' an arty nightmare - Film Noir Blonde
Mickey One (1965, Arthur Penn) « Diary of a Mad Movie Fanatic Gelpi, August 13, 2008
• View topic - Mickey One (Arthur Penn, 1965) Criterion Forum, January 1, 2007
The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [1.5/4] also seen here: The Stop Button [Andrew Wickliffe]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Time Magazine October 8, 1965
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reviews from imdb Author: Infofreak from Perth, Australia
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reviews from imdb Author: sol1218 from brooklyn NY
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reviews from imdb Author: screaminmimi from United States
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All Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola]
Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [3/5]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
San Francisco Chronicle [Peter Stack]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review also seen here: New York Times
THE CHASE
USA (135 mi)
1966 ‘Scope
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
Arthur Penn's bizarro 1965 thriller Mickey One had the misfortune of originating in the wrong country at the wrong time. If Penn's black-comic homage to the French New Wave and Film Noir had been released in France it would have fit right in with the cinematic revolution instigated by the Cahiers Du Cinema crowd. If it had hit American studios a decade later American audiences would undoubtedly have been more indulgent towards its arty weirdness.
Instead Mickey One died an unmourned death with critics and audiences alike. By the time Penn directed 1967's Bonnie & Clyde a counter-cultural revolution had primed audiences for its radical reinvention of the gangster movie. In between the two movies Penn struck out with 1966's The Chase, a relic of a bygone era when desperate studios fatally out of step with the times threw money at prominent theatrical and literary properties in a doomed attempt to stave off obsolescence.
The Chase consequently boasts a formidable pedigree on all fronts. It was adapted–in theory at least–by Lillian Hellman from Horton Foote's novel and play though it was reportedly taken out of Hellman's hands early and rewritten extensively. The legendary Sam Spiegel produced and Penn had already developed an impressive reputation thanks to his television work and films like The Miracle Worker. Then there's the cast: Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Robert Duvall, James Fox, Angie Dickinson, E.G Marshall and even a young Paul Williams, who looks disconcertingly like a lesbian midget in one of his earliest roles. With all that going for it how could The Chase possibly fail? Then again with the sky-high expectations that come with that level of talent how could The Chase possibly succeed?
The Chase takes place in one of those hot-blooded small Southern towns where long-simmering resentments constitutes the local growth industry and business is booming. It's a town where everything is for sale, especially people and sex. Marlon Brando stalks forthrightly through this cesspool of sin and moral degradation as a sheriff looking to recapture the parts of his soul that haven't been fatally compromised through his relationship with town patriarch E.G Marshall, a character actor I suspect emerged out of the womb a middle-aged, faintly malevolent authority figure.
Redford co-stars as the only other man in town whose soul isn't entirely owned and operated by Marshall's family or their money. For much of the film Redford stands out as a solitary figure, an outlaw surviving on wits and animal instinct. Brando and Redford serve as mirror images of each other, renegades playing by their own moral code. If The Chase had focused on Brando's pursuit of Redford with the single-minded focus William Friedkin brought to The Hunted the result could very well have been a striking existential thriller.
Instead Penn gets bogged down in a punishing gauntlet of subplots. Cuckolded bank employee Robert Duvall let Redford take the rap for stealing fifty bucks years earlier and suspects that Redford is bucking for revenge. Wealthy scion of the Marshall fortune James Fox is shtupping Redford's wife (Jane Fonda), much to the chagrin of Marshall and the community. Everyone's fucking everyone besides the people they're married to while the town's young people seem perpetually on the verge of revolt.
The Chase is at heart a film about the way money controls our lives in a million different ways. But just as Crash subscribed to the curious notion that the best way to deal with the strange silence concerning race in American films was to make a film where no one talks about anything but race The Chase tries to correct the absence of class-consciousness afflicting American movies by making money the explicit subject of damned near every conversation.
The Chase is an unexpectedly dull muddle but it attains a deceptive cumulative power. While Redford and Brando are engaged in a treacherous end game the rest of the town boozily, blearily parties like the apocalypse is at hand. The town elders behave like drunken frat boys while the anarchic energy of a young generation devoted only to cheap kicks and mindless pleasure threatens to tear society apart.
So while The Chase is far from a success there is a strange majesty to its failure. The Chase contemplates a world where the stodgy old order is dying and young people are more likely to destroy old traditions than preserve them. In its bleak, borderline apocalyptic climax The Chase eerily anticipates the cultural forces that would change American movies and America itself, forever.
The
Chase (1966) - TCM.com Jeff
Stafford
Sometimes when you bring together a talented group of actors,
a critically acclaimed director, a successful producer and the most experienced
film crew professionals in Hollywood you get a masterpiece or a box-office hit.
Most of the time, however, with so much creative talent involved, egos,
artistic compromises and internal power struggles undermine what could have
been an important and highly influential motion picture. This was certainly the
case with Sam Spiegel's ambitious production of The Chase (1966), based
on the novel and play by Horton Foote.
The project was Spiegel's first film since his international success with Lawrence
of Arabia, the Oscar®-winning Best Picture of 1962, and he wanted the
celebrated playwright Lillian Hellman, whom he had always admired, to write the
screenplay.
Foote's story was set in Texas and opens with a prisoner named Bubber Reeves
escaping from jail with another inmate. During their getaway, they stop a car
and the driver is killed by Reeves's companion who then abandons him there to
take the blame. Instead he returns to his hometown to see his wife who is now
involved in an affair with his best friend, Jake Rogers. The local populace,
however, are outraged by Reeves's escape and purported crime and attempt to
take the law into their own hands when the town sheriff, Calder, opposes their
demands. He, of course, wants to see that Reeves is safely captured and receives
a fair trial but Calder only endangers his own life with this stance.
From the beginning, Hellman agreed with Spiegel that The Chase
"should concern itself with a society that is not too distant from
frontier life." She stressed that "Such a society would carry with it
violence, or the possibility of violence, because it must contain many
displaced people who find that frontiers no longer exist." She also added
that "Texas, unlike most of the South, is rich and powerful, and often
shows a kind of anger that its convictions do not govern the rest of
America...I would think that this is one of the reasons for the spitting at
Adlai Stevenson and possibly one of the reasons of the handling - not
the killing itself - of the Kennedy murder. It also accounts for Mr.
Ruby." (from Sam Spiegel by Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni).
Marlon Brando had been linked to the film adaptation of The Chase from
its earliest stage and was initially chosen by Spiegel for the role of Jake
Rogers but after seven years had passed, he was considered too old for that
role and cast instead as the town sheriff. It was never a movie he desperately
wanted to do and after returning from witnessing a famine in Northeast India as
part of a UNICEF tour, acting began to interest him less and less.
For the director, Spiegel had approached some of the biggest names in the film
industry - David Lean, Elia Kazan, William Wyler, Fred Zinnemann, and Joseph L.
Mankiewicz who felt the movie might be more powerful if the Reeves' character
and his wife were African-Americans. All of them declined the offer. Arthur
Penn, another contender to direct, wasn't interested at first until he heard
Hellman had signed on as screenwriter. After that, he lobbied hard for the job
and with Hellman in support of him was signed by Spiegel. At the time, Penn was
still a rising talent in the industry but his Oscar® nomination for The
Miracle Worker (1962) in 1963 added clout to his reputation and his
previous film Mickey One (1965) showed he approached the medium as an
art form and was open to experimentation and new movements such as the Nouvelle
Vague which was sweeping Europe. This latter attribute, however, would cause
some concern with the Columbia studio heads and later with Spiegel who operated
like a Hollywood mogul from the studio system days.
The casting for The Chase was unconventional in that Spiegel actively
pursued some actors for specific parts but let Penn pick many of the key roles.
Spiegel was intent on Peter O'Toole playing Jason Rogers but when the actor
absolutely refused, he awarded the role to James Fox. Spiegel also insisted on
casting Jane Fonda and Robert Redford. Penn later admitted that he had never
heard of Redford before The Chase but said "as far as casting, Sam
was fantastic. He certainly had a clear view of what the film should be like.
At first, he certainly delivered." It was also rumored that Spiegel used
the "casting couch" technique to fill some of the smaller female
roles in the film. Actress Pat Quinn (she later played the title character in
Penn's Alice's Restaurant, [1969]) said, "On the set, it was
thought that most of the women in the party scene had gone down on their knees
for Sam...it was good old Hollywood."
Among the actors Penn brought on board for The Chase were Robert Duvall,
who was still primarily a television actor except for his memorable appearance
as Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird [1962], E. G. Marshall, Janice
Rule and Richard Bradford. The other high profile cast members included Angie
Dickinson as the sheriff's wife, Ruby, Miriam Hopkins as Mrs. Reeves, Martha
Hyer and Diana Hyland.
After Hellman delivered the screenplay, Spiegel still felt it needed work and
brought in Ivan Moffat (Giant, 1956, Tender Is the Night, 1962)
to rewrite it. "It was a bad version of High Noon [1952],"
admitted Moffat whose own reworking of the script also included rewrites from
Horton Foote as well. When Hellman read the new draft she was not pleased and
stated "the bite and freshness and comment have been, in many places, lost
altogether, and a rather well organized old fashioned quality has crept
in."
The Chase was rapidly turning into a chore for Penn who was constantly
subject to Spiegel's last minute changes or additions. For one thing, he
couldn't hire his own cameraman. Instead Spiegel had given him Robert Surtees,
a three-time Oscar®-winner who got sick on the job and had to be replaced.
Without notifying Penn, Spiegel then hired Joseph LaShelle, another legendary
cinematographer (The Apartment, 1960, Laura, 1944) who was a bad
match for the younger director. "It should have been a close
relationship," said Penn, "but I found him to be difficult and slow.
For the night scenes, he would be lighting until midnight. And, in The Chase,
we had a lot of night scenes." Penn also ran into other situations that
taxed his patience. The film "required a certain amount of baby-sitting.
Miriam Hopkins, who played Bubber's mother, she needed a great deal of care.
Now, I have nothing but compassion for a former movie legend playing an old
lady, but it takes up time."
If Penn had his production headaches, so did Spiegel who was constantly
frustrated by Brando's behavior during the filming. Besides playing practical
jokes on Spiegel, the actor refused to allow himself to be photographed for
publicity purposes despite his contract which allowed him complete photo
approval. He also created problems for the audio department because his line
delivery was often too low and indecipherable. When he was asked to speak
louder, he became obstinate, saying "I cannot sacrifice the mood of the
scene for the sound track." But Brando would also offer valuable creative
suggestions at times such as the staging of his vicious beating by angry
townies. Penn recalled, "That was Marlon's idea. He said, "You know,
I think the beating should be really savage." And I said, "Yeah, but
how are you going to do it so savagely." So he showed me how to do it,
which was to film it with slow motion acting and speeded-up camera. It doesn't
show, it was just a few frames faster, but it was astonishing."
Jane Fonda, still trying to find herself as an actress, tried her best to make The
Chase a success. After all, she had aggressively pursued the role after
losing the part of Lara in Doctor Zhivago to Julie Christie. Despite the
fact that Spiegel had launched a "nationwide search" for the role of
Anna, she eventually convinced him she was perfect for the part and not some
unknown. It also helped that she had an inside connection with Brando: her
father Henry had studied acting with Brando's mother, a drama coach in Omaha.
Once filming began, however, it was obvious that "Brando had lost interest
in the film. Jane, Redford, and costar James Fox struggled to breathe life into
the story, but the linchpin of the operation merely became more and more
morose. To alleviate tension on the set, Jane took to imitating Brando's
trademark acting style - the seemingly endless brooding silences, the perpetual
scowl, and mumbled lines"(Citizen Jane: The Turbulent Life of Jane
Fonda by Christopher Andersen).
As for Robert Redford, he spent most of his time being filmed by a second unit
film crew as he ran through foliage and underbrush while off screen he occupied
his time with fishing and hunting on location. When he was rehearsing his
scenes with Brando, he learned they shared similar views on the plight of
Native Americans. Redford also found a kindred spirit in Jane Fonda; they both
shared similar political views and became friends, working together again as a
screen team in the smash box office comedy Barefoot in the Park [1967]
and The Electric Horseman [1979].
Once filming on The Chase was completed, the footage was shipped to
London to be edited there but Penn first had a prior commitment to direct Wait
Until Dark on Broadway. By the time he arrived in London, the director
recalled (in an interview with Cineaste magazine), "they had
already finished eight reels, scored and everything, and it was not a good cut.
They left out some of the best material, including some of Brando's unique
improvisations." Penn later stated, "I'm not saying the film would
have been necessarily better if I had edited it, but I just knew the rhythm
that was in my gut and it was not on that screen. The tempos were not right and
I pride myself on the tempo and on the accumulating velocity that is part of
the volume." Penn's unhappy experience on The Chase resulted in a
promise to himself: "I won't touch anything I can't control to the end.
And have fun with. Nothing's worth anything if you don't have fun." As if
in retaliation for The Chase, Penn's next feature, Bonnie and Clyde
(1967), was an international hit with both critics and audiences and is still
considered a landmark American film and easily his greatest work.
Jane Fonda's own assessment of The Chase was more amusing: "It was
a little like "Barbarella comes to small-town Texas." Maybe out of
revenge for all those bad-hair years I'd endured, I was now playing second
fiddle to a mane of hair that, as a friend recently said, should have had its
own billing." Probably the most candid revelation of the movie's failure
was the original screenwriter Lillian Hellman who said, "Decision by
democratic majority vote is a fine form of government, but it's a stinking way
to create. So two other writers were called in, and that made four with Mr.
Spiegel and Mr. Penn, and what was intended as a modest picture about some
aimless people on an aimless Saturday night got hot and large, and all the
younger ladies in it have three breasts, and ---. Well, it is far more painful
to have your work mauled about and slicked up than to see it go in a
wastebasket."
As expected, most major film critics in the U.S. panned The Chase. The
New Yorker proclaimed it "an opulent melodrama, overproduced by Sam
Spiegel, overplotted to the point of incoherence...and overdirected."
Bosley Crowther in The New York Times called it "a phony, tasteless
movie...everything is intensely overheated." And Judith Crist in the New
York Herald-Tribune wrote that it was "a mishmash of Peyton Place
sociology, Western mythology, and Deep South psychology." She did,
however, single out a few performances for praise: "Robert Redford is, at
very least, the most nearly sympathetic character on hand as the bad boy;
Robert Duvall is notable as the sexpot's weakling husband, a sneaky, cowardly
kid who never grew up; and Richard Bradford is very good as the nastiest of the
town's nasties."
European critics, however, praised The Chase seeing it as a telling
indictment of violence in American society, particularly in France where it was
released as La Poursuite Impitoyable. And since then, other defenders of
the film have come forward such as critic Robin Wood who describes The Chase
as "a seminal work" and Tom Milne of TimeOut Film Guide who
wrote "it does manage to weave a credible pattern out of the tangled
loyalties and enmities, which Penn's direction takes by the scruff and shakes
into a firework display of controlled violence. Terrific performances
too..." Clearly The Chase is overdue for a reevaluation.
DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jesse Shanks) dvd review
DVD Verdict (David Johnson) dvd review
I Hate The New Yorker: the chase (arthur penn, 1966) Zoe P. from I Hate the New Yorker, September 9, 2005
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
The Chase (1966
film) - Wikipedia
BONNIE AND CLYDE A 95
USA (112 mi) 1967
You've read the story of
Jesse James--
Of how he lived and died;
If you're still in need
Of something to read
Here's the story of Bonnie and Clyde.
Now Bonnie and Clyde are
the Barrow gang.
I'm sure you all have read
How they rob and steal
And those who squeal
Are usually found dying or dead.
There's lots of untruths to
these write-ups;
They're not so ruthless as that;
Their nature is raw;
They hate the law--
The stool pigeons, spotters, and rats.
They call them cold-blooded
killers;
They say they are heartless and mean;
But I say this with pride,
That I once knew Clyde
When he was honest and upright and clean.
But the laws fooled around,
Kept taking him down
And locking him up in a cell,
Till he said to me,
"I'll never be free,
So I'll meet a few of them in hell."
The road was so dimly
lighted;
There were no highway signs to guide;
But they made up their minds
If all roads were blind,
They wouldn't give up till they died.
The road gets dimmer and
dimmer;
Sometimes you can hardly see;
But it's fight, man to man,
And do all you can,
For they know they can never be free.
From heart-break some
people have suffered;
From weariness some people have died;
But take it all in all,
Our troubles are small
Till we get like Bonnie and Clyde.
If a policeman is killed in
Dallas,
And they have no clue or guide;
If they can't find a fiend,
They just wipe their slate clean
And hang it on Bonnie and Clyde.
There's two crimes
committed in America
Not accredited to the Barrow mob;
They had no hand
In the kidnap demand,
Nor the Kansas City Depot job.
A newsboy once said to his
buddy:
"I wish old Clyde would get jumped;
In these awful hard times
We'd make a few dimes
If five or six cops would get bumped."
The police haven't got the
report yet,
But Clyde called me up today;
He said, "Don't start any fights--
We aren't working nights--
We're joining the NRA."
From Irving to West Dallas
viaduct
Is known as the Great Divide,
Where the women are kin,
And the men are men,
And they won't "stool" on Bonnie and Clyde.
If they try to act like
citizens
And rent them a nice little flat,
About the third night
They're invited to fight
By a sub-gun's rat-tat-tat.
They don't think they're
too smart or desperate,
They know that the law always wins;
They've been shot at before,
But they do not ignore
That death is the wages of sin.
Some day they'll go down
together;
They'll bury them side by side;
To few it'll be grief--
To the law a relief--
But it's death for Bonnie and Clyde.
The
Story of Bonnie and Clyde, by Bonnie Parker, 1934
BONNIE AND CLYDE, for better or for worse,
changed the landscape of American cinema, as it brilliantly mixes sex and
violence, caricature with realism, folksy humor with bullets and death, where
as soon as the humanist portrayal of the Barrow gang makes one sympathize with
them, they'll go on another violent-tinged escape with devastating consequences,
where bullets are raw and graphically ugly.
Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway provide a master class in acting as Clyde
Barrow and Bonnie Parker, legendary outlaws from the 30’s, especially Dunaway
who may give the performance of her career here, never more vulnerable, and
that’s saying something. From the
opening scene where she stands naked at a window looking out at Clyde
inspecting her mother’s car, it recalls the opening in Terrence Malick’s
BADLANDS (1973), capturing the same cloistered details of small town life where
the dangerous outsider status of criminal male behavior is the woman’s only
ticket out of town, especially for such a sensuous woman as Bonnie who has to
accept the dreariness of nothing ever changing in a dirt poor Texas town and
little to hope for during the Depression era of the 30’s. A charmer and sweet talker like Clyde shows
signs of reckless masculinity never before seen in her small, dusty town, where
she fondles his gun like a sexual object, which gets him all riled up where he
feels the need to show off in front of his young girl and decides to rob the
first store he sees, immediately making their escape together where Bonnie
couldn’t be more sexually aroused afterwards, so much so that Clyde has to stop
the car and pull her off of him. They
literally have to invent the idealized version of themselves that they want to
be, and the sound of “We’re Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker…We rob banks” does
the trick. Using stunningly effective
close up shots of the two glamorous leads, including fashion shoots with Faye
Dunaway, posing in her beret, toting a pistol in her hand and a cigar in her
mouth, they become pin up and poster celebrities for
What’s immediately apparent is the level of violence onscreen, much of it brutal and ugly, where people really are hurt and debilitated, which only escalates with later directors such as Sam Peckinpah who brings a sense of poetry and a final freeze frame to the screen, where there’s plenty of shootouts here with police and people do get killed, which is a system shock following such easy going humor. Despite the appealing charm of the leading couple, it’s clear what they do for a living is a despicable choice, irrespective of the glamorization, yet they are romanticized through bank robberies, wild shootouts and spectacular car chases in vintage cars, not to mention the illicit romance. This, then, becomes the theme of the film, as despite reviling crime, outlaw figures can become heroes, as Bonnie & Clyde soon become in American folklore, defying authority, supposedly driven to commit crimes, appealing to the poor because legend had it they only stole the bank’s money, usually small rural banks, and did not take what was in the pockets of the poor farmers. This appealed to the nation’s growing sense of injustice, blaming the banks for the severe hardships suffered from the economic meltdown of the Depression, as the outlaw gang exerted a good-natured sense of fairplay, as when they capture a Texas Ranger (Denver Pyle) and let him live, sending a humiliating photo to the newspapers with Bonnie Parker draping her hands all over him. This kind of stuff dazzled the public’s imagination demonstrating the misfit outlaws had personality and a sense of humor. Soon the Barrow gang expanded to include Michael J. Pollard as C.W. Moss, pitch perfect as a rural gas station attendant who’s got nothing better to do with his life, also Gene Hackman as hillbilly brother Buck Barrow and his shrieking wife Estelle Parsons as Blanche, a preacher’s daughter, but also a reference to the swooning melodramatic anxiety of Tennessee Williams, who despite winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, is perhaps the least impressive from this standout ensemble cast, none of whom were box office stars at this point in their careers.
Like THE GODFATHER (1972), one of the great crime sagas of all time, the director humanizes the criminals, brings them down to earth where onscreen they seem just like you or me, giving them a folksy quality, especially in the brilliant family sequence where they’re playing with the kids, eating ice cream, rolling them down a sand dune, but also in an eerily quiet moment when C.W. drives up to a hobo camp asking for water, where people slowly gather around the wounded couple bleeding in the back seat of the car and voluntarily offer them food and blankets. Bonnie Parker sent poems and photographs to the newspapers showing them off as a populist outlaw gang, similar to the Zodiac killer who sent cryptic letters in code to the newspapers as well, the kind of stuff that only adds intrigue to the nature of the crime itself, as it seems to deflect the gross horror of the killings and instead helps perpetuate a mythical image of Bonnie and Clyde as misunderstood, star crossed lovers. When reality finally catches up to them under a hail of gunfire, Texas lawmen shoot 187 rounds of bullets into them, a hugely exaggerated amount, which is a comment itself on just how much the police reviled this outlaw couple. By ending the film with this visual imprint of excessive violence, it does bring back into focus just exactly what they did for a living, as they carried a heavy arsenal with them wherever they went, and despite the idealized dime store depictions, these were notorious killers. The humorous banter between the characters is particularly effective, especially in a scene where they pick up Gene Wilder and his girl friend just for the hell of it after stealing his car, buying hamburgers and telling jokes in the car, but then immediately dump him on the side of the road in the middle of the nowhere several hours later when they discover he’s an undertaker. This kind of dark humor perfectly suits this film, as it’s a charming, character driven depiction of a short-lived road to destruction. BONNIE AND CLYDE set the tone, as did Penn’s earlier film MICKEY ONE (1965), for a different style of American film, and not just with violence, but also in the existential realism of the performances, where there’d be no FIVE EASY PIECES (1970) without the theatrical innovations of Arthur Penn - - a very underrated director who only completed 13 feature length films.
Time Out review Tom Milne
Reclaiming the American gangster movie after it had been stolen by the Nouvelle Vague, Penn's film was so successful (and so imitated) that it inevitably met with some grudging devaluation. But it's still great: half comic fairytale, half brutal fact, it reflects the essential ambiguity of its heroes (faithfully copied from history and the real-life Barrow gang which terrorised the American South in the early '30s) by treading a no man's land suspended between reality and fantasy. With its weird landscape of dusty, derelict towns and verdant highways, stunningly shot by Burnett Guffey in muted tones of green and gold, it has the true quality of folk legend.
Bonnie and Clyde | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
When Fritz Lang filmed it in 1938 (as You Only Live Once), the story had a metaphysical thrust. When Nicholas Ray filmed it in 1948 (They Live by Night), it was romantic and doom laden. But by the time Arthur Penn got to it in 1967, it was pure myth, the distillation of dozens of drive-in movies about rebellious kids and their defeat at the hands of the establishment. It's by far the least controlled of Penn's films (the tone wobbles between hick satire and noble social portraiture, and the issue of violence is displayed more than it's examined), but the pieces work wonderfully well, propelled by what was then a very original acting style. With Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, Michael J. Pollard, and Gene Wilder. 111 min
Shooting Lessons: 1000 Pictures: Target #270: Bonnie and Clyde ... Andrew Ackatsis from Shooting Lessons, May 12, 2009
In 1967, two films ushered in a new wave of Hollywood film. Mike Nichol's The Graduate (1967) introduced casual sexuality into the mix, with young graduate Dustin Hoffman enjoying a tryst with Anne Bancroft's Mrs. Robinson, highlighting the vast generation gap between the Baby Boomers and their parents. Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), likewise, pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable to show in film, featuring glorious set-pieces of violence that would influence the later work of Sam Peckinpah and Martin Scorsese. This new brand of authentic yet stylised brutality may have been borrowed from Spaghetti Western director Sergio Leone, whose own "Dollars" trilogy had proved successful with American audiences {his Hollywood-funded follow-up, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), was a magnificent film, but noticeably toned down the violence}. Many reviewers were initially indifferent to Penn's picture, and Warner Brothers had little faith in its financial prospects, but the support of critics like Pauline Kael prompted a swift reevaluation, and Bonnie and Clyde was soon a box-office hit.
Despite being set in the 1930s, and, of course, based on true events, Penn's retelling of the Bonnie and Clyde story overtly reflected the revolutionary cultural times in which the film was made. The two titular fugitives symbolised the attitudes of the young people of the day – brash, impudent, dismissive of authority, and indifferent as to the consequences of their actions. Intriguingly, Bonnie and Clyde appears to suggest that something more than mere anarchistic tendencies fuelled the pair's violent escapades. Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) is portrayed as sexually impotent, and a lengthy, uncomfortable would-be sex scene emphasises the self-loathing frustration that, perhaps, fuelled his personal inadequacy and prompted him to seek other, more destructive means of alleviating his stress and exhibiting his masculinity. Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) is depicted as a young woman whose sexual repression at the hands of a well-meaning but morally-uptight mother has stifled her femininity, and only through societal rebellion does she appear to regain her sense of identity. This theme ties in nicely with the Women's Liberation of the 1960s.
Beatty and Dunaway are perfect in the two leading roles, displaying enough charisma and sex appeal to come across as likable, but also inspiring sympathy and disapproval for their clearly irresponsible and reprehensible behaviour (the film initially provoked controversy for its perceived "glorification" of criminals, but, though the audience's empathy is recruited to some extent, the destructive and inevitable consequences of the gang's actions are hardly glossed over). The famous, gruesome climax – in which Bonnie and Clyde are apathetically gunned down in a bloody police ambush – was perhaps the most intense minute of cinema American audiences had ever experienced. Of course, once the floodgates were opened, New Hollywood began to adopt his fresh, powerful frankness in its storytelling. Sam Peckinpah, no doubt inspired by Penn's efforts, decisively raised the bar with his Revisionist Western The Wild Bunch (1969). A landmark American film, Bonnie and Clyde furthered the reputations of both its director and star Warren Beatty, and successfully launched the acting careers of Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman and Gene Wilder. 8/10
Currently my #4 film of 1967:
1) Voyna i mir {War and Peace} (Sergei
Bondarchuk)
2) The Graduate (Mike Nichols)
3) In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison)
4) Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn)
5) Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg)
Nashville Scene (Jim Ridley) review
Gangster movies are a law-abiding citizen's version of porn--a film-looped ritual that endlessly spools out fantasies of rebellion, of brute force and money, of death. The Code-era gangster classics of the '30s hid behind a moral smoke screen to deliver doses of lowdown thrills. You still got to see lawbreakers raise hell and bang bang bang, and as long as justice prevailed before "The End," your appetite for destruction was sated, not challenged. Bonnie and Clyde, which shows Tuesday and Wednesday in a special engagement at Sarratt, calls into question just what the hell we find so thrilling.
Bonnie and Clyde is quintessentially the product of a country where guns are props in the national playhouse, from the time a kid is old enough to play cops-and-robbers. At the same time, the movie is shrewd enough to wonder what kind of impact that has on our notions of reality and fiction, law and order, right and wrong. As such, Bonnie and Clyde may not be the greatest American movie--let's not even play that parlor game--but you could certainly make a case for it as the great American movie, the one that best represents our character and our cinema, warts and all. Even after 31 years, after countless imitations and the numbing escalation of movie violence, its basic contradictions remain more pertinent than ever. How can we demonize crime as citizens and romanticize criminals as moviegoers?
First and foremost, Bonnie and Clyde is a great gangster movie about two people who imagine themselves as the stars of a gangster movie. Everything in it calls to mind the outlaw classics of the 1930s, only fonder and dreamier. No Little Caesar or Scarface ever looked as flawlessly handsome as Warren Beatty's Clyde Barrow; no moll ever gave off anything like the heat of Faye Dunaway's Bonnie Parker. The gleaming roadsters, the vintage fashions (which sparked a short-lived craze)--Burnett Guffey's camera polishes them all to a stylized gloss that evokes the world through a celluloid curtain. Car chases cut from real cars to obviously fake process shots; the fleeing robbers see themselves riding to glory against a back-projection screen. A scene in a movie theater captures the disparity between the movie world and their life of crime. Onscreen, dancing chorines sing "We're in the Money" in a Busby Berkeley production number. In the audience, Clyde fatmouths about killing a bank guard--the first of many killings to come.
What isn't stylized is the violence. It isn't poetic, as in The Wild Bunch; it's blunt and ugly. The director, Arthur Penn, undercuts the rollicking tone of the early scenes with ominous hints: credits that fade to blood-red, a splash of ketchup on Bonnie's blouse. A clerk with a cleaver bolts into the frame behind Clyde as he holds up a grocery, deliberately violating the lighthearted mood, and from then on the violence is sudden, disruptive, and as harsh as the rest of Bonnie and Clyde's world is idealized. The outlaws pose for photos with guns and write their own ballad, but the grubby reality constantly undermines the glamour--matinee-idol Clyde is an impotent coward, beautiful Bonnie is a vicious crook, and the people they kill look like us. We start out admiring the outlaws, and they respond by shoving their shiny guns back in our faces. In the notorious ending, a masterpiece of montage in editor Dede Allen's hands, a firing squad brutally punctures their delusions with a hail of machine-gun fire.
Ironically enough, it was the seriousness of the violence that infuriated reviewers when Bonnie and Clyde was released in 1967. (Many of them turned about-face when the movie became a blockbuster and a critical cause célèbre.) The blood was nothing new, and neither was the brutality. Herschell Gordon Lewis' far grislier cheapies had been playing drive-ins for years, and one of the biggest hits the same year was Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen, which tossed in a near-rape and several beatings along with a substantially higher body count.
But those movies didn't explode their cartoonish use of bloodshed as entertainment the way Bonnie and Clyde did. Bonnie and Clyde jumbled humor and horror in ways that recalled the groundbreaking thriller pastiches of the French New Wave--whose leading lights, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, were initially offered the David Newman-Robert Benton script by producer Beatty. (A lyrical slow-motion shot of a child tumbling down a hill, an homage to Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, gives a glimpse of the film that might've been.) The movie's moral ambiguity isn't about killing; it's about bank-robbing. The movie immerses us so deeply in the delusions of its bank-robber heroes that it makes banks deserving targets, stick-ups fun, and lawmen bloodthirsty bullies. It takes bullets to snap us out of it.
The many caper movies that followed Bonnie and Clyde abandoned subjective subtleties altogether. The movie's careful ironic remove gave way to an easy cynicism that made heroes of criminals, patsies of working stiffs, and villains of lawmen. By the time you get to something as corrupt as the recent Set It Off, in which the filmmakers' casual exploitation of economic troubles winds up glorifying armed robbery, you see violence reduced to window dressing, to affectless spectacle that leaves an audience feeling numb. As even a cursory look shows today, that's one crime nobody can pin on Bonnie and Clyde.
Two
Outlaws, Blasting Holes in the Screen
A.O. Scott from The New York Times,
August 12, 2007
THE story of “Bonnie and Clyde” has been told so many times that it has acquired the patina of legend. It’s the kind of historical fable that circulates to explain how the world once was and how it came to be the way it is now: a morality tale in which the wild energies of youth defeat the stale certainties of age, and freedom triumphs over repression.
I’m
not talking about the adventures of the actual Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker,
who robbed and shot their way through
The ups and downs of the movie’s early fortunes have become a
touchstone and a parable, a crucial episode in the entwined histories of
Their horror was undercut by jaunty, rambunctious humor and by the skittering banjo music of the soundtrack. The final shootout, in which Mr. Beatty and Faye Dunaway’s bodies twitch and writhe amid a storm of gunfire (not long after their characters have successfully made love for the first time), was both awful and ecstatic, an orgy of blood and bullets. The filmmakers seemed less interested in the moral weight of violence than in its aesthetic impact. The killings were alluring and gruesome; that the movie was so much fun may well have been the most disturbing thing about it.
As we endure another phase in the never-ending argument about movie violence — renewed by the recent popularity of extremely brutal horror films like the “Saw” and “Hostel” cycles; made momentarily acute by the Virginia Tech massacre last spring; forever hovering around the edges of dinner-table conversations and political campaigns — it’s worth re-examining this legend to see if it has anything left to teach us.
“Bonnie and
The most celebrated, and consequential, brief for the defense
was longer still. In more than 9,000 words in the Oct. 21 issue of The New
Yorker, Pauline Kael, then a freelance contributor, hailed “Bonnie and Clyde”
as “the most excitingly American movie since ‘The Manchurian Candidate,’ ”
which had come out five years earlier. Hardly an unqualified rave (“probably
part of the discomfort that people feel about ‘Bonnie and
“ ‘Bonnie and
And so “Bonnie and Clyde” was the somewhat improbable vehicle — a period picture made, with some reluctance, by a major movie studio (Warner Brothers) at the insistence of an ambitious young movie star — by which a new mode of expression and a new set of values entered the cultural mainstream. The movie was quickly marked as a battlefield in an epochal struggle: between “the kids” and their stodgy, respectable elders, between the hip and the square.
According to the standard accounts, now duly taught in classrooms and rehearsed around baby-boom Elderhostel campfires, hip triumphed. By the beginning of 1968 the squares had been routed. Time magazine, which had run a dismissive review, put Bonnie and Clyde, as rendered by Robert Rauschenberg, on its Dec. 8 cover, accompanying an essay by Stefan Kanfer called “The New Cinema: Violence ... Sex ... Art.”
Crowther, after 27 years at The Times, retired. His place was
taken by Renata Adler, a writer for The New Yorker who was not yet 30. Kael,
already a contentious and influential figure in the world of movie criticism,
joined the staff of The New Yorker, where for the next quarter-century she
would reign as the most imitated and argued-about film reviewer in the
English-speaking world. “Bonnie and
That it won only two — best supporting actress for Estelle Parsons and best cinematography for Burnett Guffey — may have helped to assure its enduring cachet. Too complete a victory would have led to a loss of credibility. Hip is, by definition, an oppositional stance that the embrace of the establishment can only compromise.
The products of the liberal Hollywood establishment — the earnest, socially responsible dramas that Crowther frequently championed and that Kael in particular despised — did not retreat in the face of a generational challenge mounted by “Bonnie and Clyde” (and also, less noisily, by “The Graduate”). The big Oscar winners that year were “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” both movies about gray-haired, socially empowered white men whose prejudices are demolished by Sidney Poitier, at the time Hollywood’s all-purpose answer to America’s race problem.
At the height of the ’60s, the solution proposed by those
movies — that basically decent men could work toward mutual understanding and
respect — might have seemed wishful at best. The Oscar ceremonies took place on
As J. Hoberman notes in “The Dream Life,” his revisionist
history of the ’60s and its movies, “ ‘Bonnie and
They are not fighting injustice so much as they are having fun, enjoying the prerogatives of outlaw fame. They exist in a kind of anarchic utopia where the pursuit of kicks is imagined to be inherently political. In this universe the usual ethical justifications of violent action are stripped away, but the aura of righteousness somehow remains.
When pressed by his brother, Buck, about the killing of a
bank employee — “It was him or you, right?” —
But the Barrow gang’s own sadism is evident when the outlaws kidnap a nervous undertaker and his girlfriend after stealing the man’s car. The couple turns out to be the very embodiment of square: He complains about his hamburger; she reveals that she lied to him about her age. These people are along for the ride, but they just don’t get it.
Not Getting It has been, ever since, the accusation leveled against critics of a certain kind of movie violence by its defenders. The easiest way to attack movie violence is to warn of its real-world consequences, to worry that someone will imitate what is seen on screen. The symmetrically literal-minded response is that because violence already exists in the world, refusing to show it in movies would be dishonest.
Neither of these positions quite acknowledges the
particularity of cinematic violence, which is not the same as what it depicts.
Even the most bloodthirsty moviegoer would be likely to leave a real fusillade
like the one at the end of “Bonnie and
The
Thus the geysers of blood at the end of Sam Peckinpah’s “Wild Bunch” two years later could be savored for the director’s visual and formal audacity. The unflinching brutalities of ’70s movies like “The Godfather” and “Chinatown” became hallmarks of the honesty and daring of the New Hollywood. (At the same time the harsh, righteous vengeance unleashed in the “Dirty Harry” and “Death Wish” movies appalled many of the same critics who dug the radical chic of “Bonnie and Clyde.”)
By the 1990s, as a newer generation of filmmakers began to
fetishize the glories of post-“Bonnie and
And to raise objections at this point is, perhaps, worse than
square. It seems philistine. But I can’t escape the feeling that, just as it
has become easier since “Bonnie and
Don’t misunderstand: I still get a kick out of “Bonnie and
Bonnie and Clyde: Together Again - Bright Lights Film Journal Alan Vanneman, January 31, 2004
Killing Dreams: Youth and
Nostalgia in Bonnie and ... - Film Journal Killing
Dreams: Youth and Nostalgia in Bonnie
and Clyde and Public Enemies, by Thomas B. Byers, 2013
DVD Times Mike Sutton
Bonnie
and Clyde Ed Howard from Only the Cinema, February 15, 2010
Bonnie and Clyde - TCM.com Jeff Stafford
Bonnie
and Clyde (1967) - Articles - TCM.com
Frank Miller
The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]
Slant Magazine review Eric Henderson
PopMatters (Chris Barsanti) review
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [4/5] also seen here: Movie Vault [Goatdog]
eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley) review [5/5]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [4/4]
American Translation 1Jargon computer from Cine It, December 10,
2008
Bonnie and Clyde (no 37) Wonders in the Dark, April 21, 2009
StinkyLulu: Estelle Parsons in <i>Bonnie and Clyde</i> (1967) Estelle Parsons from Bonnie and Clyde, by Stinky Lulu, December 9, 2007
La Nouvelle Vague (The French New Wave): Arthur Penn's Bonnie ... Andre Seewood from La Nouvelle Vague, December 11, 2008
culturevulture.net Arthur Lazere
Past Picks Online [Jimmy Gillman]
FilmInFocus | Arthur Penn: "The American Truffaut" | Movie info ... Walter Donohue from Film in Focus, September 25, 2009
DGA Quarterly Winter 2009 - Shot to Remember Dance of Death, by Robert Abele from DGA Quarterly, Winter 2009
Execution Without Conviction David Thomson compares Michael Mann’s PUBLIC ENEMIES to BONNIE AND CLYDE, from The New Republic, July 8, 2009
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) retrospective
DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Mike Long
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [4/4]
DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [5/5] [Ultimate Collector's Edition] 2-disc dvd
Turner Classic Movies dvd review Glenn Erickson, Special Edition 2-disc dvd
DVD Talk (Phil Bacharach) dvd review [5/5] [Special Edition]
DVD Verdict (Tom Becker) dvd review [Special Edition]
Cinematical Jefferey M. Anderson, Special Edition 2-disc dvd
The Onion A.V. Club dvd review Tasha Robinson, Special Edition 2-disc dvd
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review Special Edition 2-disc dvd
DVDTown - Two-Disc Special Edition [John J. Puccio]
DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Special Edition] Colin Jacobson
DVD Clinic ("Quigles") dvd review [4/5] [Special Edition]
DVD Talk (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [3/5] [HD-DVD Version]
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo, HD DVD
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Blu-Ray
DVD Talk (Adam Tyner) dvd review [4/5] [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Verdict (Gordon Sullivan) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
dvdfuture.com (R. L. Shaffer) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Authority.com (Matt Brighton) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
Viewpoints Chris Jarmick
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
filmcritic.com (Pete Croatto) review [5/5]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Edinburgh U Film Society (Sarah Woolner) review
Bonnie and Clyde - Dir. by Arthur Penn - Exclaim! Canada's Music ... James Keast from Exclaim!
BONNIE AND CLYDE - 1967 Movie Review. Biography | Crime | Drama ... Martyn Warren from WildSound
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [4/5]
Bonnie and Clyde 1967: Movie and film review from Answers.com includes All Movie Guide comments
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Bonnie and Clyde (1967, Arthur Penn) Films 101
(Arthur PENN) Bonnie and Clyde [DVDrip] 1967 in AvaxHome film photos
Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [A] [Special Edition] Ken Tucker
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]
Bonnie
and Clyde: No 11 best crime film of all time | Film | The Guardian Cath Clarke
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4] September 25, 1967
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies] August 3, 1998
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review April 14, 1967
True Horror: When Movie Violence Is Random A.O. Scott from The New York Times, March 23, 2003
First Chapter: ‘Go Down Together’ The Platte City Shootout, excerpted from Go Down Together, a new book by Jeff Guinn, from The New York Times, May 8, 2009
Book Review - Books About Bonnie and Clyde by Jeff Guinn and Paul ... Bryan Burrough from The New York Times, May 10, 2009
DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Gary W. Tooze
Bonnie and Clyde (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Editors Guild Magazine - Online Exclusive Tribute to editor Dede Allen from Editor’s Guild magazine, November 13, 2007
ALICE’S RESTAURANT
USA (111 mi) 1969
Time Out review Tom Milne
Brilliantly visualised, Arlo Guthrie's very funny 20-minute talking blues - about how, fined $50 for being a litterbug, he was subsequently rejected for service in Vietnam as an unrehabilitated criminal - is retained as the centrepiece of a film which expands into a sort of chronicle of Arlo's hippy wanderings through rural America. The context is different, but the reference point powerfully echoed throughout is his father Woody Guthrie's experience as the troubadour of the dying Dustbowl during the American Depression of the '30s, with the ballad this time asking what went wrong with the dropout dream of the '60s. Criticised at the time for a certain opportunism, Penn's lyrical vision of the end of an era looks increasingly apt in the perspective of passing time.
Alice's
Restaurant - TCM.com Jeff
Stafford
After the phenomenal success of Bonnie and Clyde in
1967, director Arthur Penn wanted to go in a different thematic direction, away
from exploring violence as an unavoidable human condition. His inspiration for
a new project came from an unlikely source, an eighteen-minute talking blues
ballad by Arlo Guthrie entitled "The Alice's Restaurant Massacree."
In an interview with Bernard Weinraub for the New York Times, Penn said,
"I heard a record and said, 'That's a movie.' I didn't know what shape it
would take. It seemed so active and cinematic. It took on images very quickly.
It was difficult, though, because we didn't have a strong narrative, as we had
in Bonnie and Clyde, to thrust it forward." But using key moments
from the song like the confrontation with Officer Obie over the illegal dumping
of garbage in the town dump and Arlo's experiences at the Army induction
center, Penn's movie began to take shape, one that he hoped would encapsulate
the counterculture of the sixties -- flower children, draft card burning,
commune living, the rebellion against authority.
Retaining the loose and rambling ballad structure of the song, Alice's
Restaurant (1969) is an often lyrical and bittersweet movie about an
awkward time in the sixties. Though the general tone of the film is humorous, a
more serious side emerges occasionally through the addition of new incidents --
such as Arlo's visit to the hospital to see his dying father, the legendary
folk singer Woody Guthrie (played by Joseph Boley) -- or new characters like
Shelly (Michael McClanathan), who dies of a drug overdose. But overall, the
storyline mimics the song. Arlo, an itinerant hippie, drops in on a commune run
by his friends, Ray (James Broderick) and Alice (Pat Quinn), and decides to
stay awhile in their Berkshire County home (a reconverted church). A
spectacular Thanksgiving Day meal ends in Arlo's arrest, which later
inadvertently helps him avoid the draft and return to the commune. But the
easygoing camaraderie among the hippies is slowly eroded by competitive
relationships and sexual rivalries -- typical human foibles.
Alice's Restaurant was filmed in and around Stockbridge, Pittsfield, and
Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and New York City. One of the most celebrated
moments in the movie is the final shot of Alice, sitting alone on the steps of
the deserted church, staring into an uncertain future. Penn and his editor,
Dede Allen, spent months planning this complicated sequence which took hours to
actually shoot. "The camera was dollying back and zooming in at the same
time and the image of Alice remained constant," Penn said in the
aforementioned New York Times article. "I wanted a certain
melancholy in that scene. It was the closure of a phase in someone's life. I
wanted the constancy of a memory experience and the physical sense of
departure." In 1974, director Sidney Lumet would try to recreate this
tricky final sequence with Blythe Danner in Lovin' Molly, an adaptation
of Larry McMurtry's novel, Leaving Cheyenne.
When Alice's Restaurant opened theatrically, it received decidedly mixed
reviews from the critics and wasn't a popular box-office success with its
intended age group. Many pointed out that Arlo Guthrie was no actor but is
merely playing himself here. Still, the film did garner an Oscar nomination for
Best Director and introduced audiences to some talented newcomers, including
Pat Quinn as Alice; character actor M. Emmet Walsh as the Group W sergeant; Tina
Chen as Mari-Chan, Arlo's girlfriend; and Shelley Plimpton (former wife of
David Carradine and mother of Shelley Plimpton) as Reenie, an undernourished
groupie. James Broderick (father of Matthew), who plays Ray, had only appeared
on television and in a few bit parts like The Group (1966) before
winning this important role. Folk singer Pete Seeger appears as himself,
performing "Pastures of Plenty" and the "Car-Car Song" with
Arlo. And Joni Mitchell can be heard singing "Songs to Aging
Children" during the wintry funeral scene at Shelly's gravesite. By the
way, the real Alice of Alice's Restaurant appears in a cameo. She later
published a cookbook of her recipes.
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review including a rebuttal letter by “Woggly” B. Baker
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Badmovies.org B-Movie Reviews (Andrew Borntreger) review [1/5]
DVD Verdict (Norman Short) dvd review
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review
DVD Times Anthony Nield
Creative Loafing [Curt Holman]
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [1.5/5]
Apollo Guide (Dan Jardine) review [67/100]
eFilmCritic.com (Charles Tatum) review [2/5]
User
reviews from imdb Author: jt1999 from Lost Angels, CA
User
reviews from imdb Author: misterjones from New York City
User
reviews from imdb Author: j-knutsson from United States
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reviews from imdb Author: Woodyanders
(Woodyanders@aol.com) from The Last
New Jersey Drive-In on the Left
User
reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: MisterWhiplash from United States
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reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Dr Jacques COULARDEAU from Olliergues, France
User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: imfunnnyright from Canada
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
LITTLE BIG MAN
USA (139 mi) 1970 ‘Scope alternate version (147 mi)
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Penn's adaptation of Thomas Berger's novel is an epic post-Western that sets out to demythologise its subject-matter through the eyes of Jack Crabb (Hoffman), either a 121-year-old hero who's seen it all or a phenomenal liar. Ambiguity, both towards fact and character, is the keynote, as Hoffman's protagonist is orphaned, adopted by Indians, returned to the whites as a conman, and finally acclaimed as the sole white survivor of Custer's downfall at Little Big Horn. It's a shaggy, picaresque tale, laden with off-beat but pertinent observations as Crabb exchanges cultures and bears witness to the white man's genocidal treatment of 'the human beings'. Parallels with Vietnam naturally abound, but finally it's a wryly ironic rewriting of American history that makes up for its occasionally facile debunking of heroic targets by means of vivid direction and effortless performances. Funny, humane, and a work of brave intelligence.
Little
Big Man - TCM.com Paul Tatara
Arthur Penn's vaguely loopy revisionist Western, Little
Big Man (1970), is mainly remembered today for the carefully crafted,
seriocomic performance delivered by its star, Dustin Hoffman. But Hoffman's
character, Jack Crabb, has a great deal in common with a far more popular
big-screen creation named Forrest Gump. Like Forrest, Jack is a chameleonic
everyman who stumbles through pivotal moments in American history, always
surviving when many others die. He's also brimming over with a sense of
humanity that's beyond the reach of the people surrounding him...unless they're
Native Americans. And that last part makes Little Big Man a landmark in
movie history.
The film opens with Jack - at this point an ornery 121-year-old who insists
he's the only white person who survived the Battle of Little Big Horn - being
interviewed by an incredulous young historian (William Hickey). Jack gets all
huffy and tells the misinformed interviewer to just sit back and shut up— he
has a few things to say about Gen. Custer, and about assorted historic events
from the 19th century. He was there, you see. He experienced them.
The saga that follows touches upon such concepts as manifest destiny, the
government-sanctioned genocide of Native Americans, religious and sexual
hypocrisy, and the sheer idiocy of revenge. Jack's surrealistic embellishments
of each story are a particular highlight, because you're never really sure, in
fact, if they're really embellishments or the truth. If history proves
anything, after all, it's that crazier things have happened. Over the course of
the film, Jack spends time as a Western settler who's kidnapped and raised by
peaceful Cheyenne Indians, as an orphan being pursued by a lecherous preacher's
wife (Faye Dunaway), as a snake-eyed gunfighter, as a medicine show con artist,
as a down-and-out drunk, and as a scout for the egotistical, utterly buffoonish
General Custer (Richard Mulligan).
Not surprisingly, Little Big Man is far more political than the
studiously benign, and studiously commercial, Forrest Gump (1994). Jack
has strong opinions about the events that unfold around him, and he's tormented
by what he's experienced. Penn and his screenwriter, Calder Willingham, took
Thomas Berger's source novel and turned it into a commentary on how Native
Americans have been treated by this country's government, as well as how
they've been portrayed in our motion pictures. Despite the number of
belly-laughs it contains, Little Big Man is a righteously angry film,
and that dichotomy of emotions makes for a very memorable ride.
Little Big Man's production was no small undertaking. The film was shot
on location, and often outdoors, in Montana, California, and Alberta, Canada,
with an increasingly exhausted cast. The Canadian portion was especially
grueling, as large pieces of it needed to be filmed in the bitter cold, with
snow on the ground. At one point, when snow seemed out of the question, Penn
even tried to convince a medicine man to do a dance and stir up some
precipitation! That's what you call thinking of everything.
Dunaway writes about Hoffman and Little Big Man in her autobiography, Looking
for Gatsby. She and Hoffman knew each other as struggling New York actors
in the early 1960s, but had never worked together before this picture. And she
was fascinated by his acting process on the set.
“Dusty was always reaching for a way to make each take fresh,” she writes. “He
wanted to make the performance different and unique every time. Everyone
develops their own way of getting that freshness, but his, I think, goes down
as one of the most entertaining.” Hoffman's ritual before the cameras rolled
undoubtedly made sense to no one but Hoffman himself. Apparently, he was a fan
of the old Earl Scheib car-painting commercials that peppered radio and TV
airwaves in the 1960s, and he utilized them in a patently strange manner.
“Dusty would get just the right nasal sound,” Dunaway writes, “and promise, as
Earl had done for years, that ‘I'll paint any car, any color for
$29.95...guaranteed.' When the assistant director called ‘Rolling,' before
Arthur said ‘Action,' Dusty, to keep himself loose, would go into these ads,
rattling off their corny, hard-sell spiels— you hear it on the printed takes.
And then on ‘Action,' he'd go from unabashed commercialism to high art, moving
right into the heart of Jack Crabb. It was an amazing thing to watch.
PopMatters (Elbert Ventura) review
Arctic Shores Contemporary Reviews (Bob Miller) review
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Dan Mancini) dvd review
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [2.5/4]
Urban Cinefile dvd review Keith Lofthouse
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
MovieEye.com review David Litton
The Digital Bits capsule dvd review Barrie Maxwell
Film-Daily: Little Big Man, Arthur Penn, USA 1970 Martin Sauter from Film-Daily, November 19, 2009
eFilmCritic.com (Scott Weinberg) review [5/5]
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]
Ruthless Reviews review Matt Cale
filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [89/100]
User reviews from imdb Author: Jugu Abraham (jugu_abraham@yahoo.co.uk) from Trivandrum, Kerala, India
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]
Cleveland Press (Tony Mastroianni) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
NIGHT
MOVES A- 94
USA (100 mi) 1975
When we all get liberated like Delly there’s going to be
fighting in the streets.
—Paula (Jennifer Warren)
Unlike other 70’s
films known for espousing conspiracy theories, this is a peculiar response to
the vacuum left by the assassinations of the 60’s, when something sucked the
air out of the lives of the ardent followers of President Kennedy in November
1963, Malcolm X in February 1965, Martin Luther King in April 1968, the
presidential aspirations of JFK’s young brother Bobby in June 1968, leaving a
traumatized nation in mourning and despair over an extended period of time,
like a nightmarish hangover one never fully recovers from. This is a decade when built-up dreams of a
better future are instead eviscerated and die, becoming an era of sorrows and
tears, where the casualties of the Vietnam War lingered well into the next
decade along with rising numbers feeling the effects of poverty and social
inequality, where a President resigned in disgrace, exposing the vulnerability
of power, where one inevitably found themself mired in a prolonged funk, unable
to distinguish good from bad, as if the floor has been pulled out from
underneath your feet, lingering in suspended animation, waiting for a time when
you could actually feel your feet once again on solid ground. Though met with indifference by the critics,
the downbeat mood of the film is a startlingly accurate reflection of the
times, where a disturbing series of events seems to get us no closer to the
truth, instead we are stuck in limbo, in a state of infused paralysis where
despite our best efforts, we can’t seem to get anywhere, languishing in our own
ineptitude, interior anguish, and personal frustrations. NIGHT MOVES (1975) is a brilliant
little gem of a film, with an impressive Melanie Griffith in her film debut at
her spoiled Lolita-esque best, and Gene Hackman as a wounded soul in a
beautifully complex yet understated and sorrowful demeaner (which he does
really well), where much of the noirish mood is taking place in the light
of day, but constantly retreating under the surface. Part of the film’s charm is its narrative
ambiguity, as it makes no attempt to help explain what’s going on, placing the
viewer inside a meticulously well developed, psychological state of mind, which
resembles having to punch one’s way out of a paper bag, at times feeling
hopelessly impossible. Though it’s
largely a character study that has the feeling of being a bit slight, it plays
out like a technically perfect mood exercise that never quite takes your breath
away, but leaves you melancholic and disheartened from the futility of the
ride.
Penn’s last great film pays tribute to the 1940’s era of
detective novels written by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, where the
fierce independence of the tenacious detective pays dividends, though here in a
humorous light, as one character tailed by the detective mocks the process,
challenging Harry Moseby’s (Gene Hackman) restraint, urging him to punch him in
the face like Sam Spade. While Humphrey
Bogart as Sam Spade was synonymous with film noir, the archtype movie detective
against which all further detectives would be measured, where most of all he
had character, always cool under pressure, exuding confidence, persistence, and
a strong inner strength, a depiction of masculinity in action, representing
moral order, rubbing elbows with beautifully sophisticated women who often were
involved with unscrupulous men. Like
Altman in The
Long Goodbye (1973), Penn places his detective in a contemporary
modern setting, suggesting a certain suburban malaise, a marriage in trouble, a
career in question, where he’s caught up in an existential quagmire of finding
purpose in his life. Unlike Bogart,
Hackman’s Harry Moseby is the picture of anxiety, a former football player
turned detective, a guy who may have outlived his profession, as all the
contacts and people he knows are has beens, people whose lives have fallen off
the rails and are on a downward slide, probably drinking too much, holding on to
precious memories like uncashed checks, where who you know continues to be the
stepping stone to success, but these people are all washed up, with dreams that
died a long time ago, yet they’re still holding on to the idea that they can
mount a comeback and be significant again.
It’s a world of utter desolation, where pride and purpose have been
replaced by alcoholic delusions, passed on to the next generation who simply
tune them out, walking to the beat of their own drum, showing little respect
for the authority of the past. Moseby
seems to straddle both worlds, recalling an era when he was riding high,
literally the talk of the town, where everybody was his friend, now spending
his time spying on cheating husbands or wives, or finding missing persons who
don’t want to be found, looking past all the warning signs, delving into a
dangerous subterranean nightmare of dead ends, shadows, and lost dreams. You’d think this was a German Expressionist
picture by all the signs of deterioration and moral decay, but this takes place
in the oppressively sunny landscapes of Los Angeles and the Florida Keys.
In the shark-infested viciousness of Hollywood, filled with moral ambiguity, mixed motives, and plenty of sex, Harry finds himself more comfortable in the company of cutthroats and pathological liars, continually struggling to understand the events around him, where his old-school methods bring him no closer to achieving clarity, remaining caught up in a myriad of surrounding confusion, a comment on the muddled, post-Watergate era of paranoia and growing American despair. Written by Scottish screenwriter Alan Sharp, who also wrote the hauntingly spare, acid western The Hired Hand (1971), what perhaps distinguishes Hackman’s portrayal of Moseby is his own indecisiveness, an inability to counter the forces against him, the exact opposite of a man of action, where he’s caught up in a myriad of bad choices, each one worse than the next, leaving him isolated, unhappy, and out on an island fending for himself, avoiding all contact with social respectability, a loner preferring to work alone, practically hiding out on his job, disconnected from the surrounding world, slowly suffocating from the stench. While he checks in at his prototypical detective office, labeled Moseby Confidential, we already see he’s in a world of trouble, as his dysfunctional marriage is on the rocks. While he goes through the motions of showing signs of interest and respect to his wife Ellen (Susan Clark), he quickly discovers she’s having an affair with Marty (Harris Yulin), a guy whose home offers a gorgeous panoramic vista of the ocean. Offering her a chance to come clean, instead she fabricates a lie, which sends him directly to Marty, facing him man to man, which he figures is more truthful than talking to his wife. Despite the revelation, they’re moving on different tracks, as he’s heading out of town, hired by Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward), a former Hollywood starlet grown old with age and booze, whose only source of income are the proceeds of her daughter’s trust fund, which requires that they be living together, so she wants Moseby to find her missing 16-year old daughter, Delly (short for Delilah), who lives a somewhat uninhibited lifestyle, sleeping with every man (or boy) she sees. While she likely learned that trait from her mother, Moseby heads off for the Florida Keys to find Tom Iverson (John Crawford), the kid’s stepfather, but not before a thorough examination of the local scene, which turns up James Woods in an early role as Quentin, an ace mechanic who works with a group of stunt men repairing their airplanes and vehicles, where all have had their dealings with Delly. Moseby heads to a New Mexico film shoot on location where he runs into the stunt coordinator Joey Ziegler (Edward Binns), an old friend from his hey day who catches him up to speed, where he learns Delly left for the Keys.
What Moseby blindly walks into is like an alternate universe,
where blinders prevent him from seeing how the world works completely
disconnected from any moral order, meeting Paula (Jennifer Warren),
intelligent, attractive, yet surprisingly open and amenable to Harry, the kind
of woman rarely found in movies, yet she’s constantly sending coded messages
about the unusual arrangement, where Tom appears to be having a ménage a trois
with both Paula and the underage Delly, something Paula has apparently already
come to terms with, leaving in short order an air of cynicism, where Paula is
attentively seen serving drinks to numb one from the pain. Delly’s appearance reveals a rebellious and
free-spirited daughter where permissiveness has gone amok, overly promiscuous
to the point of destruction, revealing something quite disturbing on the
premises. As Delly expresses no interest
in returning with him, Harry makes himself comfortable and settles in for
awhile. What he observes is seen through
curtains, screens, and windows, often skewing the picture, creating a behind-the-scenes
allure of something sinister happening, leaving Harry (and the viewers)
bewildered by it all. With Paula as his
drinking partner and navigator of the murky waters, they take a nighttime boat
excursion with Della gleefully stripping off her clothes to swim in the nude,
but discovers something particularly distressing underneath, the remains of a
dead body stuck inside a wrecked aircraft, with ghoulish images haunting her
afterwards. After that traumatic
episode, Delly agrees to return to Los Angeles with Harry, giving him an
opportunity to reexamine his broken marriage.
But rather than things returning to their rightful place, things
deteriorate even further and go haywire instead, causing Harry to have to
return to the Keys and reevaluate the situation there, this time without the
blinders on, as all Hell has broken loose, seemingly generated by a ravenous
appetite for greed. The psychological
descent into darkness and despair is constantly seen through Harry’s eyes,
never clearly knowing or understanding anyone, never finding all the answers,
where the journey usually leads to dead-ends or comes up empty. The film only grows more complicated by the
end, caught in an existential quagmire where there are no easy answers, sunk in
their own moral vacuum, where the best one can do is hope to stay afloat to
avoid drowning. Often labeled one of the
best films nobody saw, this is a taut and concisely told low-budget film, with
few, if any, extraneous scenes, where the film never points to any big scenes
or spectacular moments, but is instead filled with the smaller details of
people constantly mistreating and misunderstanding one another, often
intentionally, through betrayal or cruel deception, but also from simple
emotional neglect, which in this film leads to emotional paralysis and moral
corruption, where in the end nobody wins.
The pessimistic nature of the film really describes the malaise of the
70’s and the bleakness of the times, a decade of lower expectations and regret,
representing a growing sense of powerlessness and alienation, where nearly two
decades later Robert Altman actually refined this state of fragmented
subjectivity in Short Cuts
(1993).
Night Moves, directed by Arthur Penn | Film review - Time Out
A truly enigmatic thriller and a key film of the '70s, brilliantly scripted by Alan Sharp. Hackman is the private eye torn apart from within, unable to come to terms either with his father or his errant wife, but doggedly, almost pointlessly, pursuing a wayward daughter for an equally wayward mother. Sharp's elusive, fragmented script precisely catches the post-Watergate mood, while Penn's direction brilliantly parallels the interior/exterior investigation. A very pessimistic film, it ends exactly at the moment that Hackman understands what has happened but can do nothing about it. Essential viewing.
Night Moves | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Released in 1975, near the end of Arthur Penn's most productive period (which began in 1967 with Bonnie and Clyde), this haunting psychological thriller ambitiously sets out to unpack post-Watergate burnout in American life. Gene Hackman plays an LA detective tracking a runaway teenager (Melanie Griffith in her screen debut) to the Florida Keys while evading various problems of his own involving his father and his wife. The labyrinthine mystery plot and pessimistic mood suggest Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald, and like them screenwriter Alan Sharp has more than conventional mystery mechanics on his mind. One of Penn's best features; his direction of actors is sensitive and purposeful throughout. With Jennifer Warren, Susan Clark, Edward Binns, Harris Yulin, Kenneth Mars, and James Woods. 95 min.
Night Moves: The Pleasures of Monday Night Football Benjamin Strong from The Village Voice, November 24, 2008
As part of its retrospective last week for director Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, Alice's Restaurant, Little Big Man) Anthology Film Archives screened the largely forgotten Night Moves (1975), a film worth putting in your queue if you missed it. Like Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973) and Robert Benton's The Late Show (1977), Night Moves is a neo-noir, but a fretful one, a movie fully aware that its genre conventions are anachronisms totally out of place among the bell-bottoms and shag hairdos of the Me Decade. In fact, Gene Hackman, as Harry Mosbey, a former NFL star turned depressive gumshoe, wears what must be the worst comb-over/hairpiece combo in film history (in tatters during the action-packed denouement). Hired by a Hollywood widow to find her missing teenage daughter (a nubile Melanie Griffith) Harry travels to the Florida Keys, where he predictably stumbles onto bigger crimes than he anticipated.
While Night Moves shares the knowingness of its contemporaneous neo-noirs ("Well come on Harry, take a swing just like Sam Spade would") its anxieties are unique. From the opening scene, in which Hackman listens to the messages on his Code-a-Phone 700 answering machine, to the prolonged shrill noise his rental car makes when he leaves the door open, to the Uzi- and seaplane-involving finale, Night Moves shows the encroaching presence in Harry's life of futuristic technology. "That thing will kill your eyes," his wife says about the small B&W portable TV he keeps in his den. Harry Mosbey is considerably more world weary than Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe ever were, but those guys never had Monday Night Football to think about, let alone nagging wives to distract them from it.
Night
Moves (1975) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
Paul Sherman
Few movies are as ripe for rediscovery as Night Moves. If you want to delve deep into the
heart of American moviemaking's rich 1970s, this is as good a place to be as Nashville,
Shampoo, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Network
or Taxi Driver. Reading between the lines of Arthur Penn's tale of a Los
Angeles private detective, you'll find the soul-searching wrought by the
national events that led up to that decade and continued to change the country
during that fertile cinematic era. In a previous time, private eye Harry Moseby
(Penn's Bonnie and Clyde co-star Gene Hackman) might have been a more
dashing hero: he'd solve the case, get the girl and end up feeling good about
himself. But in Night Moves,
solving the case turns out to be inconsequential and the girl turns out to be a
foe, not a friend. Perhaps the only place a hero could still ride off into the
figurative sunset in 1975 was the fantasy setting of James Bond, but this is
far from 007's world.
Though, like Bond's martinis, the characters in Night Moves are shaken.
The movie especially encapsulates the psychic changes wrought by the
assassinations of the 1960s, the quicksand-like war in Vietnam and the
faith-sapping Watergate scandal in chilling, very dramatic fashion. Off-screen,
it was an era in which it was suddenly hard to tell the good guys from the bad
guys. The public came to realize that generals and presidents could lie - and
did! - and the creeping suspicion that the government didn't want us to know
the truth (about John F. Kennedy's assassination, the war in Vietnam or
campaign dirty tricks) took root. Not knowing who to trust was a bad thing, but
when that same problem became reflected on the big screen after the breakdown
of the production code in the late 1960s, it was a dramatic breakthrough to
have an abundance of morally complex characters. It was a time when the
American swagger at home and abroad no longer held the currency it used to, and
Harry Moseby might as well be the poster child for wounded American
masculinity, circa 1975.
The ex-jock with the virile 1970s moustache and cool car acts as if he's in
charge, but we soon learn he¿s not in control of anything. His marriage
is a sham, he realizes, after he discovers wife Ellen (Susan Clark) cheating on
him. His professional skills are suspect, as his efforts to find frisky teen
Delly (jailbait extraordinaire Melanie Griffith) and then protect her
result in the worst for the girl. And, personally, his emotional gauge is on
the blink. His flirtation with Paula (Jennifer Warren), Delly's ex-stepfather's
lover, leads to a night of sex that ultimately has nothing to do with the
romantic sparks Harry thought he saw flickering between them, while the new
friend he makes during the investigation, stunt man Joey Ziegler (Edward
Binns), turns out to be more crooked than the guy Harry had pegged as the
shadiest in the case, jittery mechanic Quentin (James Woods).
The inability of seemingly incorruptible and impartial intruder Harry to
separate the good guys and the bad guys taps into another meaty aspect of the
best of the 1970s American movies - that no one is innocent. The violent events
at home and abroad made purely heroic movie characters laughable. Figures of
authority no longer were beyond reproach, and the triumphant "Hollywood
ending" was seen for just what it was, a "cop out" in the
parlance of the day (if 1976's Rocky had been made during any other
period, do you really think the blue-collar hero wouldn't have won the
big fight?). Alan Sharp's screenplay wryly plays with the loss of faith in
"winning" and the bruised American mentality, especially in the scene
in which Ellen comes home to find Harry watching a football game on TV. She
asks, "Who's winning?" He replies, "Nobody. One side's losing
slower than the other." Beautiful.
Sharp also wrote Peter Fonda's soulful western The Hired Hand, another
revisionist take on a quintessential American genre. The amazing thing about
Sharp, beyond his skills as a writer, is that he's a Scotsman, yet he had such
a clear vision of the changing American state of mind during this period and of
the hit American masculinity was taking to its pride. Night Moves is a
revisionist film noir and not a neo-noir, due to the simple fact that I don't
think any movie could be a neo-noir in 1975. The qualities of film noir were
not so well-known by the moviegoing public at this time, and there wasn't yet a
second wave of film school grads who'd been taught about noir and started their
careers wanting to emulate it, often self-consciously. So Penn doesn't ape the
visual style of vintage noir. He and Sharp just place the private eye picture
into a new, less heroic time - as Robert Altman did with Raymond Chandler's
Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye.
The Night Moves DVD makes the all-too-forgotten movie available again.
The disc offers no extras beyond a vintage eight-minute promotional short, the
sort that was provided to local TV stations for filler, and the trailer.
Loose Ends in Night Moves • Senses of Cinema Bruce Jackson, July 11, 2010
Lance Mannion: The most interesting night moves in Night Moves are ... Lance Mannion, September 10, 2010
Saddle shoes and knee socks and other lost icons of the Seventies Lance Mannion, September 8, 2010
Shooting Down Pictures » Blog Archive » 930 (71). Night Moves ... Kevin E. Lee from Also Like Life, November 13, 2008
Night Moves (1975) | Film Noir of the Week David N. Meyer, May 3, 2009
notcoming.com | Night Moves Glenn Heath Jr.
R.I.P. Alan Sharp, A Writer Too Dark for Hollywood David Thomson from The New Republic, February 22, 2013
"With Autumn Closing In" Daniel Moses Luft from Thrilling Detective, June 2014
Harry Moseby - Thrilling
Detective Kevin Burton Smith
from Thrilling Detective
DREAMS
ARE WHAT LE CINEMA IS FOR...: NIGHT MOVES 1975 Ken Anderson, November 30, 2010
Night
Moves: Gene Hackman In A '70s Noir You Forgot Exists | Stand ... Supreme Being from Stand By For Mind Control,
September 22, 2014
REVIEW: ARTHUR PENN'S "NIGHT MOVES" (1975) STARRING ... Don Stradley from Cinemaretro
Night Moves
(1975 review) | Jonathan Rosenbaum
May 10, 1975
Night Moves Review | Mystery to Me - Pajiba Drew Morton
Night Moves 1975 with
Gene Hackman: Arthur Penn ... - Alt Film Guide Andre Soares
Sunset Gun: Summertime Blues: 'Night Moves' Kim Morgan from The Sunset Gun
Parallax
View [Rick Hermann] originally published in Movietone News
43, September 1975
kamera.co.uk - film review - Night Moves directed by Arthur Penn ... Tim Applegate
Night Moves - Crimeculture Roger Westcombe, also seen here: Big House Film (Roger Westcombe) review
Cinema Romantico [Nick Prigge]
Noirsville - the film noir: Night Moves (1975) - The Deconstructed ... Cigar Joe Ottulich from Noirsville, January 29, 2016
Night
Moves - TCM.com Richard Harland
Smith
Film Freak Central - Night Moves (1975) - DVD Walter Chaw
Classic Film & TV Cafe [R.B. Armstrong]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Robin's Underrated Gems The Back Row
The Philosophy
of TV Noir by Steven
Sanders and Aeon G. Skoble (pdf)
The Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman (3rd Edition) by Robert Kolker (pdf)
Arthur Penn - Director - Films as Director:, Publications - Film Reference by Philip Kemp
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin] reviewing a Hackman Collection
DVD Savant Review: Night
Moves - DVD Talk Glenn
Erickson
Film @
The Digital Fix - Night Moves Nat
Tunbridge
DVD Verdict (Paul Corupe) dvd review
CHUD.com (Ian Arbuckle) dvd review
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review
Harry Moseby tribute page created by Alan Sharp
"I saw a Rohmer film once...": The truth behind the Night Moves ... Jim Emerson’s Scanners, January 11, 2010
Scopophilia: Movies of the 60's,70's,80's [Richard Winters]
Even
by the standards of noir, Night Moves is harsh · Watch This · The ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club, April 26, 2013
Edinburgh U Film Society (Gio MacDonald) review
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
The Stop Button [Andrew Wickliffe]
Rack Focus Joshua Land from The Village Voice, July 19, 2005
Night Moves (1975) The Auteurs
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [2/5]
User reviews from imdb Author: Alice
Liddel (-darragh@excite.com) from
dublin, ireland
User
reviews from imdb Author: Robert J. Maxwell
(rmax304823@yahoo.com) from Deming,
New Mexico
User
reviews from imdb (Page 3) Author: Woodyanders
(Woodyanders@aol.com) from The Last
New Jersey Drive-In on the Left
User
reviews from imdb (Page 3) Author: MisterWhiplash from United States
Arthur
Penn's 'Night Moves' demands, and deserves, multiple viewings ... entire Alan Sharp screenplay (132 pages),
also Gary Crowdus and Richard Porton interview from Cinephilia and Beyond
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] June 11, 1975
Night Moves Movie Review & Film Summary (1975) | Roger Ebert March 26, 2006
The
New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
also seen here: Movie
Review - - NIGHT MOVES - NYTimes.com
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Night Moves (1975 film) - Wikipedia
Night
Moves (1975 film) - Revolvy Quizzes
THE MISSOURI BREAKS
USA (126 mi) 1976
Time Out review Tom Milne
A wonderfully quirky Western, brilliantly scripted by Thomas McGuane, which strips all the cute whimsy away from the Butch Cassidy theme (outlaws on the run from a relentless lawman), replacing it with a kind of pixillated terror. Playing the 'regulator' as a camp Buffalo Bill with an Irish accent, Brando makes his entrance playing peekaboo from behind his horse, and at one point even stalks his prey in a dress and poke bonnet. But he is also a legalised killer, expert with a rifle but preferring (as the flail of God) to use a harpoon shaped like a crucifix. And as his gloating sadism shades into hints of bizarre perversion when he dedicates a love song and a kiss to his horse, the tone gradually darkens to a kind of horror. It's one of the few truly major Westerns of the '70s, with a very clear vision of the historical role played by fear and violence in the taming of the wilderness.
The
Missouri Breaks - TCM.com Lang
Thompson
The Missouri Breaks (1976) is not your usual Western.
In fact, it's not your usual anything. The words most commonly used in reviews
at the time of its release were "bizarre" and "odd" and it
must have equally confused audiences expecting something quite different from
the inspired teaming of Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson. But seen today, the
film's peculiar mixture of Western cliches, black comedy, quirky romance and
revenge drama makes for a decidedly offbeat entertainment.
The story is an old one about two natural enemies - ranchers and outlaws - but
novelist/screenwriter Thomas McGuane gives it an unexpected modernist spin. The
cattle rancher this time is David Braxton (John McLiam), a settler turned range
boss and his nemesis is Tom Logan, a cattle rustler (Jack Nicholson) who preys
on his stock with the help of a gang. When the rancher has Logan's best friend
hanged, Logan acquires a neighboring farm to the rancher's property which he
uses as a cattle smuggling base. Complications arise when he falls in love with
the rancher's daughter and decides to permanently settle down. Meanwhile, the
rustlers have become so brazen that Braxton finally brings in a hired gun (Marlon
Brando) who turns out to be one of the weirdest characters who ever prowled the
Wild West. This "regulator," known as Robert E. Lee Clayton (Marlon
Brando), has an Irish brogue, takes baths at the oddest times, recites love
poems to his horse, occasionally dresses in drag (his appearance in a dress and
bonnet is never explained), and has a knack for ingenious murders (he commits
one with a harpoon in the shape of a crucifix).
The Missouri Breaks had a lot going for it: superstars Brando and
Nicholson at the height of their fame, director Arthur Penn (Bonnie and
Clyde, 1967) and hip writer Thomas McGuane. In fact, it's McGuane who got
the whole ball rolling. Though he's sometimes better known for his marriages
(one to Margot Kidder and another one to Jimmy Buffett's sister), McGuane's
novels are wry explorations of machismo and individualism like Rancho Deluxe
and Ninety-Two in the Shade (which was nominated for a National Book
Award; McGuane directed the film version himself). McGuane originally wrote the
script for The Missouri Breaks as a project for himself to direct and
planned to feature Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton in the starring roles.
But when producer Elliott Kastner got involved the situation changed. Kastner
came up with the idea of casting Brando and Nicholson (real-life neighbors
who'd never worked together) but immediately found that the actors weren't
interested. But he continued to sweet talk them and eventually closed the deal
when he hired Arthur Penn, a director both actors mutually respected.
Once Brando and Nicholson finally agreed to commit (at about $1 million each)
things really got interesting. Contract negotiations were so convoluted that
even on the first scheduled day for shooting they weren't finished and Brando
wouldn't work. (Cast and crew played football instead.) The preparation time
had been so short that a set from a previous Penn film, Little Big Man
(1970), was converted for use at the Montana location. Brando's scenes had to
be shot first and then his talent (or weakness) for tinkering started to cause
problems. He changed lines constantly and kept adding bits of business for his
character, much of which didn't match material shot later for the film.
After Brando's contractually limited shooting period was finished, a patchwork
of scenes remained to be completed. Several actors like Randy Quaid, Harry Dean
Stanton, John P. Ryan and Frederic Forrest were cast in supporting roles and
made the most of their scenes with Nicholson (some of them were close personal
friends). One newcomer was Kathleen Lloyd in her first feature film (she would
later have a recurring role on Magnum P.I. and spots on dozens of other
TV shows). There were still problems with the story that resulted from changing
an ensemble script to a star vehicle and from Brando's enhancements but Penn
and Nicholson worked to resolve them. They were stuck, however, for a good
ending until help arrived in the form of Robert Towne (the Oscar winning
screenwriter of Chinatown (1974) and a famous script doctor). He came up
with the final showdown (what else?) and finally The Missouri Breaks
entered the editing stage. The wrap party was financed by Brando, who had
continued to hang around the location even though he didn't participate in any
more filming after his bit was done. (Some viewers might want to know that the
film was listed as Unacceptable by the American Humane Assocation, apparently
for the inhuman treatment of horses during production. Specific details aren't
available currently since the AHA says their representative was not allowed on
the set and they are still searching for their original report.)
While most critics were particularly unkind to the film when it opened, British
writer Tom Milne was one of the few to assess the film's true quality: "It's
one of the few truly major Westerns of the '70s, with a very clear vision of
the historical role played by fear and violence in the taming of the
wilderness."
DVD Times Mike Sutton
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
VideoVista review J.C. Hartley
UpcomingDiscs.com (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [3/5]
Exclaim! dvd review Travis Mackenzie Hoover
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [4/4]
Moderns and Classics movie reviews Brian Bell
Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [B+] Tim Burtell
BBC Films review Tom Dawson
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
FOUR FRIENDS
USA (114 mi) 1981
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review
Arthur Penn's direction is sensitive and skillful enough to make this movie seem extremely good until the second it leaves the screen, at which point it totally evaporates. With his themes of personal flight and family membership, Penn finds a sympathetic collaborator in screenwriter Steven Tesich (Breaking Away), yet development is stalled and impact blunted by what seem to be large, undigested chunks of Tesich's autobiography. Craig Wasson plays a young Yugoslavian, growing up with his immigrant parents in East Chicago, Indiana, and moving on to Northwestern University and New York City. Jim Metzler and Michael Huddleston are two friends; Jodi Thelen, an imponderable young woman who appears to be the embodiment of “America,” is the third. Photographed by the late Ghislain Cloquet, in evocatively deep, dreamily saturated colors.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
To some extent drawing on the experiences of its scriptwriter Steve Tesich, this traces key moments in the life of Yugoslav immigrant Danny (Wasson), from his arrival in the States as a boy to the time when, thirty years later, his parents return to the old country. Although its episodic narrative entails a certain lack of unity, it's nevertheless an ambitious and impressive work that deals intelligently with a number of themes: the way time and distance play havoc with relationships, particularly with Danny's beloved Georgia, a lively, infuriating and generous girl whom he shyly rejects with saddening results; the way personal lives often rhyme with wider history; and most of all, the difficulties romantic Danny faces in trying to come to terms with the many contradictions and polarities - poverty and wealth, rural simplicity and urban sophistication - inherent in his adopted homeland. A dense but never pretentious film that manages to convey the atmosphere of the '50s and '60s succinctly, it offers delights galore, not least a light, perceptive wit and an unsentimental ability to touch the emotions.
A charming, heartfelt, sometimes insightful look at four friends who form strong bonds while in high school in the early 1960s, and then desperately cling to that love during the turbulent social upheavals that marked the end of the decade. Unfortunately, FOUR FRIENDS attempts to cover so much ground that at times the film becomes frustratingly muddled.
The film's focal point is Danilo (Wasson), the son of a Yugoslavian immigrant steelworker (Simon) who does not understand Danilo's refusal to follow in his footsteps. Danilo seeks refuge with his best friends: handsome jock Tom (Metzler), overweight mama's boy David (Huddleston), and free-spirited Georgia (Thelen). Although the latter loves Danilo best, for various reasons she gives herself to Tom, leading to rifts among the group. Following graduation, they go their separate ways, and the film becomes a series of vignettes that attempt to dramatize nearly every aspect of life in the late 1960s.
Though FOUR FRIENDS runs out of gas toward the end, it's filmed with obvious love for the characters and features outstanding performances from the underrated Wasson, Thelen and Simon. Well worth seeing.
When I began this blog many years ago, I swore that some day I
would get around to writing about Four Friends. It's just a
shame that it took Arthur Penn's death to finally get me to do it. Ever since I
first saw the movie in high school, it's held a special place in my heart and
seeing it again revived that feeling. My regret is that I probably won't have
the time to give the film the detailed tribute I've long felt it deserved.
This semi-autobiographical screenplay by Steve Tesich, who
won an Oscar for his brilliant script for the great Breaking Away, returns his characters to Indiana, only instead of
Bloomington, this time it's East Chicago and the main character Danilo comes to
the U.S. with his mother as a child to join his father who arrived first from
their native Yugoslavia.
Fast-forward to 1961 and Danilo, now tending to go by
Danny (Craig Wasson) is a senior in high school about to graduate with his
three best friends: Tom (Jim Metzler), David (Michael Huddleston) and Georgia
(Jodi Thelen), the planet the three young men orbit around. Georgia is a life
force, convinced that when Isadora Duncan died, her soul transferred to her
body. Don't bother her with the fact that Duncan died 15 years before she was
born: Her soul just hung out in limbo until baby Georgia arrived in the
universe.
All four friends belong to the Roosevelt High band. Georgia
causes a bit of a stir on the night of the senior concert as the music gets to
her and she continues playing as she rises out of her chair, flabbergasting the
conductor who berates her after the concert ends. "These middle-class
minds," she tells her male buddies, "they don't know what passion
is." Their musical prowess also provides one of Penn's earliest and best
sequences as Danny wanders the streets playing the clarinet until he gets to
the railroad tracks where a train is running and his sound soon gets
complemented by Tom and David playing on the other side. Once the train clears,
the three friends continue playing through the streets on the way to Georgia's
house, serenading her with "Georgia on My Mind" and then all three
rushing to be the one who gets to light her cigarette.
Danny and Georgia are the two of the friends most determined to get out of East
Chicago, though Georgia's exit seems iffy at first. Tom doesn't seem to care,
though he does get out of town by way of service in Vietnam. David wants to
avoid following his father into the mortuary business, but he sells out for the
price of a nice car. Danny succeeds though, heading off to college with dreams
of being a writer and a scholar, something that doesn't sit well with his
hard-working, blue-collar immigrant father (Miklos Simon) who tells his son
that he makes fun of his life with his dreams.
As much as Four Friends means to me and as much as I enjoy it each time I see it, I do
have to admit its flaws each time. It seems as if it were either meant to be a
novel or that a lot of things were left on the cutting room floor. There may be
four friends, but it's really only two who get any development. In fact,
Danny's college roommate Louie (the very good Reed Birney), who suffers from
some unnamed terminal disease but keeps persevering through life anyway
dreaming about space exploration ("When stars collide, it's out of
loneliness," he tells Danny), gets as much development and screentime if
not more than either Tom or David, especially when his sister Adrienne (Julia
Murray) becomes Danny's romantic interest and fiancee. Really, only two
friends, Danny and Georgia, count, and it's ultimately Danny's story.
In fact, since the film covers 1961-1969, it does touch on
most of the major touchstones of the decade— JFK, the Civil Rights Movement,
Vietnam, the moon landing — but for the most part, the events occur on the
periphery of the characters' lives. It's not as if Tesich's screenplay tries to
march his characters through the 1960s greatest (or worst) hits. They're just
window dressing for telling the story of the people and how people grow apart
as they grow old and depicts those strange moments when your high school
friends intermingle with friends you made in college.
Arthur Penn who so wonderfully captured the era in 1969
with Alice's Restaurant does it again in Four Friends, but grounds it more in a character piece and realism. One of
his best sequences comes when Danny, whose life has taken a tragic turn, ends
up in a traditional Pennsylvania community and that community's picnic
contrasts with a whacked-out New York party that Georgia finds herself at.
After the NY bash goes horribly awry, she finds her way to Danny again, finally
collapsing in his arms and declaring, "I'm so tired of being young."
Jodi Thelen plays Georgia so well I have to wonder if this
were a once-in-a-lifetime role for her. Later, she played the kooky sister on
the early Fox comedy Duet and I've
spotted in her in an occasional commercial and her IMDb credits are active and
full, but she's such a powerhouse here that it boggles my mind that she didn't
parlay her Georgia into a great career. If there were justice in Hollywood, she
would have. Then again, more people would have heard of Four
Friends as well, so you know how that goes.
Some films have an amazing ability to make you feel nostalgic
even when the era being depicted isn't your own, but that's because the
nostalgia Four Friends engenders
is a universal one of friendship and where and when it takes place is
irrelevant as long as it's told truthfully.
DVD Talk (Scott Weinberg) dvd review [1/5]
DVD Verdict (George Hatch) dvd review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Spirituality & Practice (Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat) review
User
reviews from imdb Author: Bill Treadway
(treads22@hotmail.com) from
Brooklyn, New York
User
reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Putzberger from Chicago IL
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review December 11, 1981
ARTHUR PENN CONFRONTS THE PAST IN A NEW FILM Leslie Bennetts from The New York Times, December 6, 1981
TARGET
USA (117 mi) 1985
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
The Lloyds are a typical middle class American family, beset by dullness and young Chris' feelings that his Dad is a staid, materialist cop-out. Typical, that is, until Mom (Hunnicutt) suddenly disappears during a trip to Paris: when father (Hackman) and son (Dillon) follow in search and are welcomed by hails of bullets, all kinds of mysteries erupt, not the least of which concerns Dad's secret past as a CIA agent. Penn's film might seem an altogether ordinary foray into the world of international espionage were it not for his teasing examination of various concepts of 'family', a word much abused throughout to denote not only the Lloyds, but also the several murderous organisations out to destroy them. An uneven film, to be sure, but far more ambitious and intelligent than most spy thrillers.
User reviews from imdb Author: Robert J. Maxwell
(rmax304823@yahoo.com) from Deming, New Mexico
The first time I saw this, about ten years ago, I thought it
was pretty cool. Zippy car chases, nicely staged, up and down stairs in
Hamburg, in and out of passageways, and so forth. Three -- count 'em -- three
gorgeous women. Gene Hackman and Matt Dillon, a couple of engaging actors. And
it had an interesting premise, too. Young man doesn't get along well with his
dad, discovers dad was a CIA spy, develops new respect for him.
But I just saw it again, less distracted by the puzzling plot, and it was
something of a disappointment. The women are just as gorgeous, Gene Hackman is
as good as he almost always is, and the shenanigans with the cars are as
exciting, but the rest seems pedestrian, almost amateurishly done -- from the
script to the direction.
I'll give you an example of what I mean. Hackman and Dillon are driving on a
crowded road outside of Paris. Hackman is driving slowly and Dillon impatiently
urges him to speed it up. Hackman, his eyes on the rear-view mirror, says,
"We've got company." Then he shifts into a lower gear and the Peugot
leaps ahead. "What are you doin'?" Dillon exclaims. "Seeing how
good he is," replies Hackman with a slight smile. There follows a high
speed chase with cars twirling around on wet sandy roads, through some kind of
quarry, and it ends with Hackman confronting the other driver and telling him
to quit following him. The chase is fine. But it's pointless. Why is the car
chase in the movie anyway? "Seeing how GOOD he is?" That's the reason
these lives are put in danger for five hectic minutes? Not to mention the
Peugots? That would be a great motive for a car chase in a kiddy cartoon.
The rest of the plot is almost as weak. Matt Dillon's character is a complete
irritation for the first third of the movie. He seems to have nothing but
contempt for his father, although Hackman doesn't seem to be guilty of much
more than losing the kid's jitterbug bass lure. Dillon is always noodging him,
the way Captain Ahab was always noodging Moby Dick. The kid is a dumb,
self-indulgent slob and Hackman can never do anything right. Well -- that's
okay as a proposition, but it's very poorly delivered, and Dillon's character
is turned into a strident stereotype. Furthermore, Dillon himself gives an
artless and unconvincing performance in a role that maybe nobody could
convincingly enact. When Dillon finds out his father, whom he'd thought to be
an ineffective stick-in-the-mud, was a spy, he almost begins to weep as he goes
through his lines -- "You've been lying to me all this time." Dillon
ought to be elated at discovering his Dad's secret identity.
Another curious incident, among so many curious incidents: the evil guys (and
man, do they LOOK evil with their black leather coats and their rimless
spectacles as thick as Coke bottle bottoms) have kidnapped Hackman's succulent
wife, Gale Hunnicutt, because he has information they want him to spill. So the
first thing they do when he steps off the plane is try to massacre him in a
drive-by shooting? Did I miss something? Why kill someone you need to wring
information from?
I won't go on, I guess. It's still an engaging movie if you're seeing it for
the first time because you don't know where it's going to turn next. And the
location shooting is interesting too, reminding us that in the middle of a
chill wintry drizzle even Paris doesn't look so hot, never mind Hamburg. It has
other exciting moments that I haven't mentioned. Identities twist themselves
inside out unexpectedly. I don't want to get into that and possibly debase the
film's chief virtue.
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Chuck Aliaga) dvd review
DVD Talk (Scott Weinberg) dvd review [2/5]
DVD Verdict (Mac McEntire) dvd review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin] reviewing a Hackman Collection
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review November 8, 1985
DEAD OF WINTER
USA (100 mi) 1987
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Struggling actress Katie (Steenburgen) auditions for a part that entails travelling upstate to a rambling country house inhabited by crippled Dr Lewis (Rubes) and his amanuensis (McDowall). She should, however, be less concerned about her acting prospects than about the missing actress she is to replace, Julie Rose. Were she a thriller fan, she'd realise that her life is in danger; after all, she's the pawn in a game reminiscent of Joseph H Lewis' My Name Is Julia Ross. While beautifully shot, admirably old-fashioned (sexual violence and explicit gore are absent), and endowed with pleasing plot twists, the film is too formulaic and offers little opportunity for Penn to display his prodigious talents.
There's no denying it - Alfred Hitchcock was one smart,
shrewd filmmaker. His films - at least the good ones - are so meticulously
constructed, so rigorously executed, so ineffably right that you realise
that to watch them is to learn the very grammar of cinematic suspense. Indeed,
Hitchcock's best films - Vertigo, Rear Window, Psycho -
remain such superlative examples of the form that they transcend the boundaries
of genre altogether. It's a lot to live up to. Although you might say Hitchcock
had the advantage of doing it first, he also did it the best, and his
continuing influence on filmmakers is a testament to his enormous talent.
Describing any thriller as Hitchcockian, therefore, has always seemed somewhat
redundant to this viewer since any director worth his salt simply cannot make a
good suspense thriller without referencing Hitchcock's work in some way. True,
some directors - notably Brian De Palma, for example - have been more explicit
than others in the way they borrow from the director but their own considerable
accomplishments should be considered no less because of it. So it is
disappointing to discover that Dead Of Winter, while a reasonably
suspenseful and diverting little thriller, doesn't care at all to build on
Hitchcock's feat (despite the unmistakable influence), particularly since this
unassuming, unambitious tale was directed by the once-mighty Arthur Penn.
Following a grisly opening sequence involving the mysterious murder of an
unknown woman, we are introduced to struggling New York actress Kate McGovern
(Mary Steenburgen) who attends an audition for a part in a new feature film
being made upstate. Upon first laying eyes on her, the recruiter, Mr Murray
(Roddy McDowell), immediately offers her a chance at the role, informing her
that a further screen test will be necessary before a final decision is made.
Kate's husband Rob (William Russ) is unhappy that the job requires her to be
away from him but the affable Mr Murray assures her that she will be well taken
care of. After a long car journey through a blizzard, Kate arrives at the
isolated rural retreat of the wheelchair-bound Dr Joseph Lewis (Jan Rubeš),
former psychiatrist now turned aspiring film producer. A seemingly charming
elderly gent, he explains to Kate that she will have to undergo a makeover in
order to ensure that she looks like the actress she is replacing, apparently a
troublesome prima donna who walked off the film set in mid-production. Unable
to make contact with the outside world due to the worsening weather conditions,
Kate settles into the task of transforming herself into the image of Julie
Rose, the absentee actress, with some help from the man of many talents, Mr
Murray, Lewis's general factotum. Before long, however, Kate realises that all
is not what it seems and if you are at all savvy about his kind of movie, you
will have already drawn a few conclusions yourself by now so I won't spoil it
for you by saying any more.
This is actually the film's biggest flaw - for much of the time, the viewer is
way ahead of the plot, thanks to the predictable storyline and the director's
habit of foreshadowing every important detail. That old adage of Chekhov's that
the gun you see in Act One must be fired in Act Three undoubtedly applies here.
Not that that's necessarily a bad thing - there is a certain comfort that comes
from watching an old-style thriller like this but it stands little chance of
getting past the sophisticated audiences of today, too well versed in cinematic
deception thanks to wily tricksters like David Fincher, M Night Shyamalan and
the like. That said, although the film does tend to signpost its twists and
turns a little too heavily, it is not without its sudden jolts and cheap (but
effective) shocks. In truth, there is actually much to admire here, with the
film's most obvious asset being its well-chosen cast. Steenburgen does very
well in her dual (or is it triple?) role, skilfully drawing audience sympathy
for her plight, particularly in the scene just after she learns the truth about
the real part her employers want her to play. The police actually show up at
the house at this point but…well, watch it and see if you're still interested.
If you don't find yourself shouting at the screen by then, I'd say you've
probably got a heart of stone. It's actually a good showcase moment for Rubeš's
fine turn as the sinister doctor too, a model of Machiavellian
cold-heartedness. Man of the match though is definitely Roddy McDowell, an
underrated actor who does a splendid job here as the friendly but increasingly
unhinged manservant. Toadying and sickeningly obedient to his master's every
command, McDowell has great fun with the role of the creepy Mr Murray, exactly
the kind of character to make your flesh crawl. The darkly comical moment early
in the film when he reveals to Steenburgen that his relationship with Lewis the
psychiatrist was at first a professional one certainly carries a casually unsettling
significance.
Dead Of Winter is in fact a reworking of a little-seen B-movie from 1945
entitled My Name Is Julia Ross (directed by Joseph H. Lewis - note the
in-joke in this '87 version) but the allusions extend beyond that source
material. What we have here is another woman-in-peril thriller with, yes,
multiple Hitchcock references present and correct - the incapacitated hero of Rear
Window, the spiked milk from Suspicion, the physical makeover from Vertigo,
the sociable but sinister antagonist (Psycho) and so on. And this is
undoubtedly why the film feels so predictable since, after an intriguing first
act that sets up the story nicely, it lazily falls back on clichéd plot devices
and all-too-familiar scenarios from other movies, particularly in its
overextended climax. Actually, Dead Of Winter's premise too bears a
close resemblance to the subsequent (and more successful) Stephen King
adaptation Misery. In both cases, the story centres on a protagonist
held captive in an isolated environment, who suffers both mental and physical
torment, and who is forced to engage his/her particular talent in order to
survive. Furthermore, the central character is terrorised by a similarly
psychopathic antagonist, single-minded of purpose, who can switch from sociable
to homicidal in a heartbeat. Like Misery, Dead Of Winter has its
share of contrived moments and occasionally preposterous plot turns that do
require some suspension of disbelief but to be fair, the story ultimately
remains engaging enough so that it doesn't affect the viewer's overall
enjoyment.
All in all then, originality doesn't seem to be a great concern in Dead Of
Winter - there is nothing here than hasn't been done well before or even
done better since. The film sets out to be tense and chilling and it does so
with a modicum of style and a minimum of fuss. Its wintry, claustrophobic
setting is appropriately atmospheric, and the director manages to inject some
wicked humour into the story at intervals. Although the film is not above the
odd nasty moment - Steenburgen's wake-up surprise, for example - it never
resorts to using explicit gore or bloody violence. This might come as a
disappointment to some viewers since the film was made by Bonnie And Clyde
director Arthur Penn but, frankly, more disappointing is the discovery that
this once highly accomplished filmmaker could deliver so conventional and
anonymous a movie. From any other hack director, this would be acceptable fare
but from the talent that gave us such smart, multi-layered, often allegorical
work as The Left-handed Gun, Little Big Man and Night Moves,
Dead Of Winter feels like the product of a director merely treading
water. I'm probably being unduly hard on the film since, taken on its own, it
is perfectly watchable but in the context of Penn's work as a whole, it is
criminally average. Put simply, while this movie just might entertain you, Penn
was once capable of so much more.
DVD Talk (Holly E. Ordway) dvd review [3/5]
Anchorwoman In Peril! Ross Horsley, January 28, 2008
Spirituality & Practice (Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat) review
The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [1/4]
Washington Post (Paul Attanasio) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
Siskel & Ebert (video)
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
PENN & TELLER GET KILLED
USA (89 mi) 1989
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
Whether this goofy 1989 black comedy is a total success is debatable, but you've got to admit it's different. Postmodern comic magicians Penn Jillette and Teller play themselves in a script of their own devising, which is deftly delivered by director Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, Night Moves). After Jillette brazenly announces on national TV that his life would be more exciting if someone tried to kill him, a bizarre series of murder attempts ensues during an engagement in Atlantic City, and it becomes increasingly difficult to determine who's pulling the strings. Deconstructing illusion, Penn and Teller's stock in trade, becomes the modus operandi of the plot—like a farcical version of House of Games, with heaps of good-natured gore added and a literally unbelievable grand finale—and the dynamic duo make the most of it. With Caitlin Clarke, David Patrick Kelly, Leonardo Cimino, and Celia McGuire. (JR) 90 min.
Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review
"Penn & Teller Get Killed" is a practical joke of a movie about a pair of pathological practical jokers. And if by some cruel twist of fate you actually pay money to see it, you'll realize immediately who the butt of it is.
The premise is this: While Penn Jillette and Teller (who play themselves) are on a talk show, Penn lets slip that he thinks it would be really neat if someone were trying to kill him. "It would give your life focus," he says. "You wouldn't sweat the small stuff."
Next thing you know, someone is trying to kill him. First he's abducted and threatened with a scalpel, next he's shot in the arm by a sniper, then stabbed in the belly, then, finally, shot in the belly. Initially, the culprit seems to be none other than Teller himself. For years the two men have indulged in a masochistic competition of practical jokes, each sicker and more elaborate than the last, and the attacks appear simply to mark a macabre escalation in their well-established routine.
But when Teller spots a third man (David Patrick Kelly) made up to look exactly like Penn, a female detective is assigned to the case, one who loves the Velvet Underground, the Three Stooges and diet cola -- Penn's ideal girl.
Naturally, since Penn and Teller are sleight-of-hand artists, the cop isn't really a cop and the killer isn't really a killer. The sleight of hand isn't really sleight of hand, either. It's movie magic, which is to say no magic at all. Penn and Teller's career in magic is built on shock and outrage; they're famous for dropping hundreds of cockroaches on David Letterman's desk, and for routines like one in the film, in which there's a foul-up in a trick and Teller appears to have been impaled by 10 or so huge power drills. But whereas in person there's a kind of punk effrontery to their style, and a flagrant disregard for the standard contract between performers and their audience, on film they seem tame, almost old hat -- there's no kick to it, and without the kick, they have no act.
The film was produced and directed by Arthur Penn, and all one can say about that is, "Oh, how the mighty have fallen." This is shapeless, incoherent work -- the kind of thing you might expect to see produced by a first-timer making a cheap entry into the profession. What it amounts to is little more than a prolonged advertisement for the magicians' stage act -- prolonged and painful.
Febriblog August 4, 2009
Penn & Teller Get Killed Movie - The 80s Movies Rewind John Edward Kilduff from Fast-Rewind
Penn & Teller Get Killed: Every Conservatives...: Review of Penn ... Kevin Rodriguez from Lunch magazine
Forgotten Films: "Penn & Teller Get Killed" (1989) Nerve, March 28, 2008
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
The Stop Button [Andrew Wickliffe]
User reviews from imdb Author: Rosabel from Ottawa, Canada
Reelist [S.W. Black] movie poster
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
Penn, Sean
THE INDIAN RUNNER
USA Japan (127 mi) 1991
Plattsmouth, Nebraska, 1968. Tattooed tearaway Frank Roberts (Mortensen) returns from Vietnam to be uncomfortably reunited with his brother Joe (Morse), a law-abiding family man. 'Some of the boys are coming back confused,' muses Bronson, excellently cast against type as the helpless father who needs constant reminding that 'Frank left confused'. As Joe strives in vain to rekindle the bond which once joined him to his brother, Frank descends into alcohol-addled oblivion. Inspired by Bruce Springsteen's 'Highway Patrolman', Penn's first project as writer/director is a film out of time, drenched in an overbearing '60s world-view which veers between the dated and the dopey. As a brother, Joe is heartbroken; as casual onlookers, we soon tire both of Frank's drunken philosophising and of Penn's reverence for his suffering. Potentially potent and not without naive charm, but ultimately a masturbatory ejaculation of all too personal juices.
In early 1990s Sean Penn toyed with the idea of quitting the acting business and continuing his movie career behind the camera. First attempt in that direction was his 1991 drama THE INDIAN RUNNER.
The plot deals with two brothers from small Midwestern town. Joe Roberts (played by David Morse) had taken a job of deputy sheriff in order to provide for his family. He is forced to kill a youth in self- defence on the very day his brother Frank (played by Viggo Mortensen) is returning from Vietnam. This incident, very traumatic for Joe, is a sign of things to come because two brothers are complete opposites of each other. While Joe always tried to do the right thing, be dedicated family man and responsible member of society, Frank had been a victim of his violent temper and often ended in jail. Years later Frank is leaving jail and Joe meets his girlfriend Dorothy (played by Rosanna Arquette). Determined to set his brother straight once and for all, Joe takes Frank into his house, gets him a job, helps him start a family and tries to keep him out of trouble. But some characters don't change and the tragedy is unavoidable.
Penn claimed that he had found inspiration for this film in Bruce Springsteen's song "Highway Patrolman". More cynical observers would say that Penn could have found inspiration in his own life, particularly brawls with photojournalists and other incidents that had brought him notoriety during the first stages of his career. Penn probably saw THE INDIAN RUNNER as a way to prove himself as something more than tabloid fodder. The film indeed shows the mark of an emerging talent, especially in the way Penn (who doesn't appear in front of camera) allows his fellow actors to exploit their abilities. THE INDIAN RUNNER has plenty of very diverse acting talents that use diverse acting styles and create powerful performance. Although David Morse and Viggo Mortensen dominate the screen, the viewers would probably be very impressed with the appearance of Charles Bronson, here in very unusual role of old Roberts. Unfortunately, Penn in this film also showed typical beginner's mistake of being too much in love with his first movie and not using editor's scissors as much as he could. The movie is at least thirty minutes longer than it should be and the utter seriousness of the theme and tone of THE INDIAN RUNNER makes the viewing experience almost unbearable at times. The film failed but it wasn't such a tragedy for Penn or for the audience. Following this, Penn decided to continue acting and therefore provided the audience with some truly remarkable roles in 1990s.
eFilmCritic.com (Natasha Theobald) review [4/5]
The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [4/4]
Green Man Review Michelle Erica Green
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Entertainment Weekly review [B-] Owen Gleiberman
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [2.5/5]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
Siskel & Ebert (video)
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
THE CROSSING GUARD
USA (111 mi) 1995
After six years of desperate, unrelieved mourning, Freddy Gale (Nicholson) feels his life has just one terminus: the murder of John Booth (Morse) who killed his daughter in a drunk-driving accident. Writer/director Penn cuts between Gale's impotent, pent-up rage, aimed also at his ex-wife (Huston), and Booth's equally consuming remorse after his release from prison. Only a hesitant affair with a painter (Wright) proffers hope. This is a naive film. Very evidently the work of an actor, it follows the performances with a dogged faith which lands you in all sorts of nooks and crannies, some no more than dead ends. Yet Nicholson delivers his most committed, penetrating work in years. Penn is at his best simply pointing a camera at lonely men in anonymous rooms, choking for air in emotional vacuums of their own devising.
Tucson Weekly (Stacey Richter) review
THERE HAVE BEEN commercials on TV lately where serious men with big strong arms stare into the camera and talk about how much Excedrin means to them. The emotional intensity of these spots is staggering--nothing is more significant, they seem to say, than using the right pill for the job. In fact, commercials in general have a dramatic weight that's all out of whack with the content. The actors are earnest, the lighting is dramatic, the music swells--and is it really such a big deal if Cindy has the sniffles? No, it's not such a big deal.
Crossing Guard, the new film written and directed by Sean Penn, suffers from the same kind of hyperactive intensity. It's a family drama with grand, Shakespearean themes, and every moment is dripping with tension, conflict and pathos. It's essentially a two-hour Excedrin commercial. As you can imagine, it gets pretty exhausting. The story involves Jack Nicholson and Angelica Houston, an estranged couple haunted by the death of their young daughter at the hands of a drunk driver. Nicholson, not surprisingly, plays a character who's slid into that antechamber of despair where one sneers, exudes bitterness and binges at strip clubs. Houston is remarried and has her life annoyingly together. Tension breaks loose when the guy who killed their child is realeased from jail and Nicholson decides his mission in life is to murder him.
As it turns out, the drunk driver is genuinely remorseful and reformed. David Morse is magnetic as John Booth, a man trying to come to terms with his guilt. He's nice, he lives with his parents, he visits the little girl's grave. It's Nicholson, intent on revenge, who seems to be the inhuman one.
All this sounds like the stuff of great drama, and at moments Crossing Guard is pretty great. Sometimes the arc of the plot and the experiences of the characters actually are profound, but the rest of the time the light slants and the music churns but nothing seems to be happening. Nearly all the scenes have an undeserved emotional charge and inevitably end in conflict. These characters can't get along, even for a few minutes. The word "overwrought" springs to mind.
The structure of the film forces the intensity even further. Penn cuts repeatedly between Nicholson hanging out with cigar-smoking men in strip clubs to Morse, the reformed drunk driver, hanging out with idealistic college students debating the nature of morality. This formula doesn't work for two reasons: First, Penn repeats it so many times you want to shoot him; and second, the equation of strip clubs equals degeneration is tired, lazy and sexist. Penn plops Nicholson among strippers as a kind of shorthand to suggest how emotionally bankrupt he's become, but really, what's so sinister about naked ladies? Stripping is totally legal and women do it for a variety of reasons, but probably none of them do it to represent man's dark side. If Penn wants to pick on a legal, seedy occupation, why not bail bondsmen?
For all its failings, Crossing Guard is peppered with engaging moments. Penn, of course, is an actor himself, and it's in the area of acting where he takes the most risks. Many of the scenes have an improvised feel, and there are a few heady moments, rare in movies, where what unfolds between characters feels honestly fresh and surprising. Most of these involve the charismatic Morse (from TV's St. Elsewhere). In fact, it's worth the price of admission just to watch him steal scenes from Nicholson, a man forever doomed to do the same shtick. Sadly though, a good portion of the improvisation conveys not spontaneity but an uninspired, acting-class feeling. The plot is just too contrived to support so much drama, and it ends up smacking of manufactured emotions.
Crossing Guard bears the marks of Penn's incomplete apprenticeship under John Cassavetes, a '70s-era filmmaker who made dramas full of improvisation and strange, powerful moments. Cassavetes often used actors with real-life relationships--he and his wife Gena Rowlands for example--and there's a sense of connection and tension that spills over on film. Penn seems to be aiming for this by casting Nicholson and Houston, a former item, as exes. The wonder of a Cassavetes movie like A Woman Under the Influence is that it seems as quirky and out-of-control as real life. Penn, on the other hand, has everything in Crossing Guard under control, from the carefully composed shots to the sometimes contrived plot. The artifice is obvious; there's only an illusion of spontaneity. Just as it's obvious that guy in the commercial doesn't really have a headache.
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
Movie Reviews UK review [3/5] Damian Cannon
Dragan Antulov retrospective [4/10]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [2/4]
DVD Verdict (Nicholas Sylvain) dvd review
The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [4/4]
Georgia Straight (Ken Eisner) review
Entertainment Weekly review [B-] Owen Gleiberman
BBC Films review Danny Graydon
Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs) review
Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
San Francisco Examiner (Barbara Shulgasser) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
THE PLEDGE B+ 91
This is a Sean Penn film with a brooding quality and a
highly distinctive, snowy opening, where the opening credit sequence
lists a cast of characters that looks like one of the greatest casts ever
assembled. While the opening scenes are in
Aaron Eckhart is Stan, a cynical detective filling Jerry’s shoes, and we see he likes to cut corners and take the easy route, something of a showboat, exactly the opposite of Jerry’s more internalized, exhaustively thorough style, where Nicholson actually channels his own subdued performance in THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS (1972). Much to Jerry’s consternation, Stan goes way over the top in an interrogation interview with a suspect, Benicio del Toro as a mentally disturbed Native Indian sex offender known as Toby. Stan probably breaks all the rules of fairness and objectivity by leading Toby into a confession, never really giving him any other option, where it’s clear the suspect is so confused, he’d probably admit to anything. Nonetheless Stan raises his arms in victory to the interrogation room hidden camera, as if he just scored a touchdown. Two minutes later, however, Toby takes a gun from one of the jailers and blows his brains out. To all the officers involved, including Dale Dickey and Sam Shepard as two of the commanders, the case is closed. Only Jerry remains convinced there’s a killer still on the loose, and despite being officially retired, he continues to work the case, discovering a pattern of similar murders in the same geographical region going back ten years, all targeting 7-year old blond girls, sexually violating every one before they are brutally murdered. What haunts him the most, however, is informing the parents of the most recent victim, where the distraught mother (Patricia Clarkson) makes him promise on his “soul’s salvation” that he will find who did this to their little girl. With that, his conscience has been unable to rest. Perhaps the most dramatic moment in the entire film is provided by Vanessa Redgrave as the victim’s piano teacher, where recalling one of the deceased’s favorite passages from Hans Christian Anderson becomes one of the most chilling scenes of the film. She also gives Jerry a picture made by the recent victim of a man she was supposed to meet, depicted as a giant in the Porcupine Forest where he is actually giving her something resembling tiny porcupines while arriving in a large, black station wagon. While the entire police force scoffs at the idea, Jerry is sure the girl was drawing a picture of the potential killer. Accordingly, he visits Helen Mirren as a child psychologist, whose analysis of the picture is as much about Jerry himself, as he won’t let go of his nagging theory.
One thing that’s clear as the story progresses is the stunning use of these name actors, including appearances by Mickey Rourke and Lois Smith, most onscreen for just a few short minutes, yet their dramatic impact is felt, giving the film a certain gravity it wouldn’t otherwise have. Penn also uses a poetic realism in advancing his story, where one of the most gorgeous transitions is Jerry moving to the country, into the land of Field and Stream territory, where the drive along a river in a Jeep hauling a boat is accompanied by a simply sublime use of music, including the African song from Mozambique, “Nwalhulwana,” performed by Wazimbo and the Orchestra Marrabenta Star de Moçambique, seen in a brief movie clip here, The Pledge, music - Mozambique - Nwalhulwana ... - YouTube (49 seconds), and in its entirety here, Mozambique Nwalhulwana Mazimbo360p H 264 AAC - YouTube (3:46). Using a map drawn of the site of the murders, he buys an old gas station and connecting house from Harry Dean Stanton (who actually plays a normal person!), figuring the murderer would have to pass through this area. With this in mind, he dedicates his life to the best trout lakes in Nevada, while waiting, keeping a continual lookout for anyone who fits the picture description. The film is further compounded by the introduction of the director’s wife at the time, Robin Wright Penn as Lori, a local bartender who lives with her own 8-year old daughter Chrissy (Pauline Roberts), eventually moving in with Jerry after a violent incident of domestic abuse. What starts out as friendship leads to more, developing an intimate relationship, where Jerry seems to specialize in reading bedtime stories at night. While there are a few false leads, in Jerry’s mind, they are indistinguishable from reality, enmeshed with the rhythm and routine of his own life, where protecting Chrissy at all costs from black station wagons and the bogeyman “is” his new occupation. With bold, unconventional storytelling, we seem to lose track of time, much as Jerry loses his own internalized moral bearings, as the dizzying pace of the world around him seems to pass him by, leaving him to dwell on his illusions and personal obsessions, where the bleak, off-setting finale may leave much of the audience puzzled, as there’s no satisfying symmetry or conclusive rationale for what happens. Nicholson is simply astonishing throughout, tormented, riveting, yet always completely understated, as is the original music by Klaus Badelt and Hans Zimmer, yet the tranquil, atmospheric look of the film, surrounded by such majestic beauty, provides a mystifying tone of existential ambiguity and human mystery.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Adapted from a book by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Penn's cop thriller-cum-psycho-drama is ambitious but deeply flawed. Nicholson is mostly impressive as the cop whose retirement is effectively blown by the news of the horrendous killing of an eight-year-old girl. But Penn's occasionally flashy direction of a contrived, often clichéd script all too happy to toss in a shoal of red herrings progressively undermines his efforts as the story (literally) unravels. It's just about credible that the cop would stand by his promise to the dead girl's mother to solve the mystery, but by the time he encounters Del Toro's retarded redskin (dubious indeed) and Mirren's psychologist (who profiles the murderer and his probable future actions after looking at the child's painting!), we're deep into movie madness, and the rest is hokum. Chris Menges' camerawork, however, remains effective.
Kamera.co.uk review Bob Carroll
It's easy to sit back and look at serious, emotionally engaging dramas like The Pledge and cynically try to pick out the Oscar moment (admirably sent up in Wayne's World.) Yet Sean Penn's third outing as director side steps the risk of self-importance in two cunning ways. Firstly, every scene could stand alone as perfect example of screen acting. Secondly when boiled down to its essentials, the plot is like a throwaway B-movie cop out for revenge saga. It is merely the handling that is different. And it is the handling of Penn and lead Jack Nicholson that makes all the difference.
A girl is found murdered during Jerry Black's (Nicholson) retirement from the force party. Circumstances see him being the bearer of bad news to the victim's parents, yet in trying to ease the mother's pain he makes a promise that will consume him for the rest of the film. A pledge to catch the killer. When his former colleagues close the case, happy that a man they had in custody is guilty, Jerry follows his gut instinct on a downward spiral in his pursuit to catch the killer.
Whereas in your average thriller this would have lead to much chasing of cars, snarling down phones and kicking down doors, Penn masterfully gives an hour of reflection. We meet various people touched and tarnished by child murders. The horrifying coroner's photos we are shown are accompanied by all too human reactions to what for many of us is an unimaginable situation. While unpleasant, these images are not utilised gratuitously. The pace similarly moves gently like the well-marked changes of season. Penn revels in his restrained narratives. His killer takes a realistic amount of time to be exposed as Jerry desperately clings to clues from a child's arbitrary crayon drawing.
Nicholson lends the expected gravitas to his falling character, a man stuck in his own hell. In fact despite some plum roles over the 90's - Wolf, A Few Good Men - this is the first time in a long time you don't catch him playing 'Jack'. Instead we get a soulful, determined man who is often lost for words inside the cage he is creating for himself. Support comes from so many capable familiar faces that the opening credits read like a 'he could be the killer' supporting actor roll call. Penn as this keeps the tension rising during appearances from Harry Dean Stanton and Tom Noonan, minor characters yet fully rounded. No one has to resort to the stock in trade crazy ticks or sinister expressions.
A film rippling with such intelligent metaphors that even the obvious ones are powered by their consistency to plot and tone. This is probably Penn's least personal work. It is also his strongest. Around the bedrock of Nicholson's towering achievement he has made an actor's showcase that excites in the minute and drags the viewer into a different gear than most will be accustomed to. The film is all the better for its astute observations, lethargic pace and commitment to its characters.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Pledge, The (2000) Richard Kelly, October 2001
The fraught relationship between crime and its shadowy double, justice, has inspired a few great writers, as well as a horde of fairly mediocre ones. But given the ceaseless public appetite for tales of cop versus criminal, it's no surprise that sometimes a kind of literary stewardship takes place, whereby a fine specialist respectfully appropriates the themes of a genius, and renders them in slightly more accessible form. Much as the late Patricia Highsmith modelled her fictional explorations of guilt on 'the master', Dostoyevsky, so the Swiss novelist and dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt offered his readers a racy revision of Kafka.
The womb of all Dürrenmatt's work might be Kafka's famous parable of the law from The Trial, wherein justice is seen as eternally elusive to those who most ardently seek it. Dürrenmatt's sequence of slender, existential detective novels, such as Der Richter und sein Henker/The Judge and His Hangman (1952) and Das Versprechen/The Pledge (1958), are fables that toy with the genre, in order to indulge the author's pet themes: the helplessness of man against insatiable evil, and the impossibility of avoiding moral contamination in the act of revenge. Often grisly in detail, these novels are leavened nevertheless by a keen sense of comic irony. It's in a kindred spirit of mischief, perhaps, that Sean Penn describes his new film version of The Pledge as 'a 'no-good-deed-goes-unpunished' tale'.
Superficially, this is Penn's most mainstream work as a director to date, dealing as it does with a detective's efforts to trap a serial murderer of little girls, having sworn a vow on his 'soul's salvation' to a grieving mother. Commercially and critically, The Pledge has enjoyed a rather less grudging reception than Penn's previous directorial outings, Indian Runner (1991) and The Crossing Guard (1995), but it's a different breed of beast in several key respects. For one, the screenplays of those pictures were Penn originals, and very characteristic of the man himself in their high levels of naked, earnest emotion. So, although Miramax tried to sell The Crossing Guard on its elements of gunplay and suspense, Penn was at pains to point out that he saw the piece as 'an anti-thriller, an anti-revenge movie': a study of how grief and guilt may be at least partially salved by kindness and forgiveness.
The Pledge, however, is not a novel that offers much solace to the
tender-hearted. It was brought to Penn by his producing partner Michael
Fitzgerald, and it was reckoned as a solid property upon which to reunite Penn
with his friend Jack Nicholson, whose soulful performance anchored The
Crossing Guard. Screenwriters Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski
accordingly translated the action of the novel from
Penn has been true to the novel's contours in all but one respect. Dürrenmatt's narrative is encased within a sly framing device, his narrator (a lugubrious crime writer) sharing a sodality with an old police chief, Dr H, who instructs him as to why true crime is so much more infernally complex than fiction. By way of example H recounts the debacle suffered by his 'most capable man', one Inspector Matthai, whose patiently wrought plan to catch a child-killer with 'live bait' was undone by a simple twist of fate, the killer himself was killed in a car wreck en route to the scene of the sting. Hence H's - and Dürrenmatt's - rueful lesson: 'The only way to avoid getting crushed by absurdity is to humbly include the absurd in our calculations.'
Implacably Penn reels us towards the same terminus, working as ever with editor Jay Cassidy, and pacing his film with total assurance. His Matthai figure, Nicholson's Jerry Black, is morally skewered by his pledge to murdered child Ginny Larsen's pious mother (Patricia Clarkson). While his colleagues readily accept a barely coherent confession extracted from a retarded man (Benicio Del Toro), Black pursues other ominous clues, such as Ginny's crayon sketch of the 'porcupine giant', a tall dark man bearing little prickly gifts. We can see that Jerry wants to be righteous, but Penn steers us to the discomfiting realisation that his best intentions are leading him unwittingly into evil, as when he befriends roadhouse waitress Lori and draws her daughter Chrissy into his design to catch the killer.
In Dürrenmatt's novel, Matthai has scant feeling for this mother and child, and states his intentions quite plainly to H, who ponders before asking, 'Isn't that rather a devilish scheme?' Yet both men are hooked, in a manner so unseemly as to make for a kind of complicity in the original crime. Penn, though, has Jerry Black keep his own counsel, and so we are left to make our own judgement on the basis of Jack Nicholson's superbly controlled performance. We are, at least, encouraged to think well of the fondness Jerry lavishes on Chrissy (Pauline Roberts) and the fledgling intimacy he shares with Lori (the hugely affecting Robin Wright Penn).
Still, Penn also makes us suffer in ways even Hitchcock might have shied away from. Late in the novel, H halts the narrative to suggest how his awkward story could be converted into the simpler stuff of a hit movie. Playing to his friend's penchant for cruel denouements, he proposes that Matthai might pursue the wrong man, perhaps 'some sectarian preacher with a heart of gold' who 'would attract every shred of suspicion the plot has to offer'.
Penn duly invents just such a character, Gary Jackson, cloaks him in the
sinister trappings of Ginny's 'porcupine giant' and casts towering actor Tom
Noonan, previously the homicidal 'Tooth Fairy' in Manhunter (1986). Such
troubling touches help to make The Pledge's final reel an authentic
experience in dread, flaying both Jerry's nerves and ours. (Possibly we don't
deserve the queasy sequence in which Jerry races to
In the end, Jerry is still chasing these phantoms when his real nemesis, the barely glimpsed 'Wizard', crashes and burns. So, while Jerry's ex-colleagues and his surrogate family desert him in mingled pity and revulsion, Penn's camera zeroes in on the Wizard's roasted, blackened corpse at the wheel of his flaming sedan. Is this the torment of the damned, or just another cosmic joke about the anonymity of evil? Either way, Penn then deposits us back where we began in the film's opening moments: Jerry, sun-baked and rotten with booze, rocking on his heels outside his lonely gas station, conducting an angry dispute with himself. The main musical theme, glacial and shivery when first heard over the opening credits, now grows percussive and exultant. Resistance is useless, senselessness has triumphed, and the camera ascends to leave Jerry stranded, a natural fool of fortune.
Penn has confessed elsewhere that The Pledge is 'a retirement-crisis story disguised as a thriller. I didn't get the retirement-crisis story financed, if you know what I mean. But I got it shot.' The result is a brilliant achievement, albeit one that finds Penn flexing only selected sets of his creative muscles.
He is 41 now, wholly committed to a directing career, and yet it's taken him a full ten years to get three pictures under his belt. It's possible that in a further decade's time, if he has built the body of work he aspires to, then The Pledge will be viewed as a film that he made largely because he could. But there's no harm in that. (Orson Welles made his Nazi-hunting thriller The Stranger, 1946, just to get back on terms with RKO; even Cassavetes set about The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, 1976, hoping that he might benefit from the vogue for gangster movies post-Godfather.)
The Pledge is an elegant rejoinder to a tired genre, a consummate work of screen adaptation, and further evidence that there is precious little Sean Penn can't achieve on film, whether before or behind the lens.
Consider the Source | Jonathan Rosenbaum from January 26, 2001
Guessing
Games David Edelstain from Slate
World Socialist Web Site Joanne Laurier
Sean Penn's The Pledge - Culture Court Lawrence Rusell from Film Court, January 2001
“The Pledge” - Salon.com Charles Taylor
The Pledge - Nitrate Online Review Gregory Avery
The Pledge Tom Block from culturevulture.com
VideoVista
review Richard
Bowden
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray, also seen here: Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [3.5/5]
The Pledge (2001) | PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Jigsaw
Lounge (Neil Young) review [8/10]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
CultureCartel.com (Lee Chase IV) review [4.5/5]
CineScene.com (Sasha Stone) review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3.5/5] Richard
Scheib
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
THE PLEDGE - Ruthless Reviews Plexico Gingrich
Flak Magazine (Clay Risen) review
Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [3/4]
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [3.5/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [3/5]
Movie Reviews UK review [2/5] Michael S. Goldberger
Movieline Magazine review Daniel Papkin
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [4/5]
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3.5/4]
Film Freak Central dvd review Bill Chambers
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3/4]
DVD Verdict (Patrick Naugle) dvd review
DVD Town (William David Lee) dvd review
DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Mike Long
DVD Authority.com (Matt Brighton) dvd review
Urban Cinefile review Louise Keller, Andrew L. Urban, and Richard
Kuipers
MediaCircus (Anthony Leong) review
Movie-Vault.com (Timotei Centea) review [9/10]
One Guy's
Opinion (Frank Swietek) review
[A-]
The Flick Filosopher's take MaryAnn Johanson
filmcritic.com (Jonathan Curiel) review [4/5]
CNN Showbiz review Paul Clinton
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [C+]
Film Monthly (Hank Yuloff) review
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
The Pledge - Jonathan Rosenbaum capsule review, January 19, 2001
Motion Picture Purgatory (Rick Trembles) review [image] cartoon
Entertainment
Weekly review [B] Owen Gleiberman
The Hollywood Reporter at Cannes review Kirk Honeycutt
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
BBC Films review Nev Pierce
Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review
Austin Chronicle (Marrit Ingman) review [2.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Chronicle [Bob Graham]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Roger Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents [Omer Mozaffar]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4] January 19, 2001, also seenhere: rogerebert.com [Roger Ebert]
RogerEbert.com [Roger Ebert] June 18, 2012
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review also seen here: New York Times
The Pledge (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
INTO THE WILD B+ 91
Rather
than Love, than Money, than Fame, give me Truth —Henry
David Thoreau
For all of Chris McCandless’s philosophical musings
downplaying the human interactions in life, believing the essence of the
natural world around us is the truth that will liberate us from our social
confinements, it is the social interactions in the film that work best. While there is still plenty of artistic
pretension to this film, which could have lopped off a good twenty minutes or
so, not the least of which is some of the self-centered poetic soliloquies
found in McCandless’s own prose, this is an extremely effective film because of
how it compresses all the places he visits into such a short period of time,
leaving behind quite a powerful impact.
Emile Hirsch plays the college graduate McCandless who still has $25,000
left in his college account after he graduates from
Using a series of voices as the narration, many of which are literary references, but also choice musical passages throughout by Eddie Vedder as well as yellow writings onscreen made to resemble letters he composed, he also reads from his own poetic diary entries, which has the effect of being too heavy handed, as the language is oblique and unclear, closer to an internal rant than anything defining, and at least initially it diminishes the power of the immense imagery that accompanies his journeys. But after he disappears off the face of the earth on his journeys, when his sister and his parents begin to realize he’s intentionally leaving no trace of himself, his sister’s voice continues the narration, which is more heartfelt and does a better job of describing who he is, including the family he’s leaving behind. Everything that leads to his Alaskan adventure is stunning in its depiction of life on the edge, whereas when he finally arrives in the great vast unknown, there is no one left to talk to other than himself, and one does scratch their head wondering what this is all about, thinking how Werner Herzog might have interpreted this differently, as this idealistic guy alone in the wilderness bears a strange resemblance to one of Herzog’s last films, GRIZZLY MAN (2005). Thankfully, Penn decides to interrupt his Alaskan adventure with flashback sequences of earlier picturesque human stories that fortified his intentions to make his Don Quixote-like (though it was not on his reading list) single-minded quest, filled with a satchel of precious books from Jack London, Henry David Thoreau, Boris Pasternak, to Leo Tolstoy.
Filled with a natural curiosity about life, an appealing
smile, but a fairly morbid view of humans, McCandless weaves his way across the
country, working in the wheatfields of South Dakota, traveling for a brief
period with a hippie couple that is undergoing serious relationship issues, a
liberated Swedish couple listening to a blaring MC Hammer at the bottom of the
Grand Canyon, a kind and helpful woman working at a homeless shelter, which
offers unique imagery of the loneliness of disconnected souls in Los Angeles,
rediscovering the hippie couple again at their trailer home in the desert,
where he befriends an eerily sorrowful young singer (Kirsten Stewart), which
leads to his connection with an aging veteran (Hal Holbrook) who poignantly
takes him under his wing before reluctantly setting him free. The time he spends with each is invaluable,
as it gives him a perspective that is otherwise missing from his all too
sheltered life from the Virginia suburbs, but he’s still too young to know what
to make of it. All he can think about is
Postscript:
While not as detailed as Jon Krakauer’s terrific book by the same name, one can’t
help but value the movie version, despite overall aspects that are admittedly
disconcerting. This is another sumptuously gorgeous film shot on
'Scope by Eric Gautier (no slouch) that looks great on a big screen, shot using
a mix of digital and Super 35 blown up to 35 mm. I would wager this is a
better depiction of Kerouac's On the Road than Walter Salles's yet to be
seen 2012 Cannes version, as I felt it did an excellent job observing the road,
and how disconnected from mainstream existence you feel on the road,
developing abstract theories of existence, singular interest in books and
philosophies, where a book is as valuable as any friend, and where the detached
nature of how you feel comes to mean so much more especially because of the
disconnection to society. The singular obsession of this guy to
experience an adventure "into the wild" goes through a lot of stages,
where the people aspect before he heads to Alaska is invaluable, as for
all practical purposes, he's already there. He just doesn't realize
it. "Into the wild" is really a state of mind that exists in
your head, not a vast wilderness in
Penn can be obnoxious onscreen as he is in life, so there is that, but this
film isn't so much about Penn as what he can bring to a young man's
idyllic journey. The fact that McCandless is headstrong and careless seems to be part
of his psychic dimension that Penn can appreciate, or perhaps even relate to,
where you get the feeling he was young and impulsive, also prone to fixation,
where throughout his ordeal he remains just a kid, making reckless decisions in
haste without having the wisdom to think them through, where acting on impulse
often leads to disastrous results. But that is youth. More to the point it is the obsession of
youth, where they get their mind made up on something and won't let go, where
he becomes infatuated with the *idea* of the wild, much like people fall in
love with the idea of love. It is a film about personal ideas, growth,
and exploration, a far cry from most of what's onscreen these days. While
I could never say it is a complete success, but the ambitious nature of the
project took some guts and I felt much of that translated to the
screen. It did succeed in planting the seeds of curiosity and exploration,
the love of the journey and the idea of wanting to be *on your
own.*
This is a special time of life, post college, pre career, compare this
to THE GRADUATE (1967), for instance, which quickly veers towards romance,
where discovering yourself, much as the Beats did, is rarely given any kind of unique
understanding, as it has here.
While the book may be better, largely because the author has his own
worldly insights that he continually interjects throughout, and also
because it better explains what happened to the poor kid stranded out
there alone. The movie does a good job, however, in describing the
path he took to get there.
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch) first appears in Into the Wild as a fugitive shape at the edge of the frame, a tiny figure etched against the white crust of an Alaskan winter. The scene was shot not far from where the real Chris McCandless starved to death, nearly four months after leaving civilization behind and two years after he cut up his driver's license, gave his life savings to charity and, as far as anyone who knew him was concerned, disappeared off the face of the Earth.
When the story of McCandless' death broke, first in newspapers, later in an article Jon Krakauer wrote for Outside magazine, he was pilloried as a rash, daydreaming city kid who bit off more than he could chew and paid the price. But in Krakauer's book version of McCandless' life, and in Sean Penn's adaptation of it, McCandless becomes something else, part secular saint, part cautionary tale.
Steeped in Thoreau and Jack London, McCandless saw himself as
a natural man struggling against the corruptions of the modern world. Krakauer
largely insulates his readers from the (apparently) overwrought prose
McCandless scribbled on his journeys, but Penn has him call himself "an
aesthetic voyager whose home is the road," a heady epithet for an
upper-middle-class kid from the
McCandless' actions are characterized by the excesses of a true believer, but the most surprising thing about Penn's film is how restrained it is. Penn's previous movies as a director have been unfailingly pretentious, but Into the Wild is altogether different, a unified, long-haul work that is rarely caught straining for effect. There's little doubt that Penn sees himself in Chris McCandless' disgust with mainstream society, his quest for purity and self-definition.
Penn, who wrote the adaptation himself, sets McCandless' journey within a series of frames. He begins with McCandless entering the Alaskan wild at the end of his journey, setting up camp in an abandoned bus. When he stands on its roof and yells, "Can anybody hear me?" it's not a cry for help but a means of verifying his solitude. He whoops back deliriously, "Guess not!"
Returning to McCandless' college graduation, Penn divides the movie into chapters: "Birth," "Adolescence" and so on. Periodically, a voiceover by his sister Carine (Jena Malone) picks up the story on the home front, detailing the troubled home life that helped sour McCandless' view of material wealth, but also the gaping hole that his abrupt and unannounced departure left in his family. Penn sketches in the outlines of McCandless' upbringing, tying his rejection of authority to his anger toward his unyielding and abusive father. But the movie presents McCandless' solitary odyssey not as an inevitability but a choice, and as far as his family is concerned, a particularly harsh and unforgiving one.
Into the Wild's Chris McCandless is a classic movie hero, a living embodiment of an idea taken to its limits. But he's also petulant and grandiose, with an ugly self-righteous streak. When his parents, played to repressed perfection by William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden, make the mistake of offering him a new car to replace his beat-up Datsun, his response is a withering, "I don't want any thing."
More schematically than Krakauer's book, Penn's movie presents McCandless with a series of familial surrogates that he embraces and rejects in turn. Vince Vaughn's gregarious grain farmer offers him acceptance and comradeship, and a hippie couple (Catherine Keener and the splendid newcomer Brian Dierker) tenderly take him in until he vanishes one night, leaving behind a thank-you note scrawled in the sand.
The most poignant connection is forged near the end, when McCandless crosses paths with an elderly widower named Ron Franz, played by Hal Holbrook. Rather than indulging his young friend's rhetoric, Holbrook's pugnacious veteran squarely rebuts him, while at the same time offering the closest thing to love that McCandless has ever known. But McCandless doesn't warm to, or seem to notice, the old man's affection. Perhaps he's too scarred, or too suspicious, to let the old man in, but it's hard not to hate McCandless a little when he condescendingly tells him, "You're wrong if you think the joy of life comes primarily from human interaction."
As a director, Penn has often pushed his actors into caricature, but Into the Wild's performances, while full of life, are graciously understated. Hirsch's devil-may-care grin morphs seamlessly into a cry of rage, and Holbrook is a flat-out revelation, his technique so flawlessly camouflaged that he's easy to mistake for someone who's never acted before. For as much effort as Penn evidently put into the movie, the end result feels as if it hasn't been worked on at all.
A portrait of self-marginalized America Mike D’Angelo from Las Vegas Weekly
Two diametrically opposed schools of thought have emerged
regarding Christopher McCandless, the young Emory grad who donated his life
savings to Oxfam International, broke off all contact with his family and spent
two years as a wandering nomad, eventually starving to death alone in an
abandoned bus outside
In part, that’s because McCandless—or Alexander Supertramp, as he soon begins to call himself, with what can only be termed delusions of squalor—spends relatively little time alone. Penn opens Into the Wild with Chris’ trek into the Alaskan wilderness, holding a magnificent shot in which the pickup truck that’s just dropped him off occupies one small corner of a frame that’s otherwise an immense frozen white sea. After a quick flashback to his college graduation, meant primarily to show us the horrors he’s running from—overbearing dad (William Hurt), stifling mom (Marcia Gay Harden)—the film alternates between his final, fatal weeks in Alaska and the various pit stops he made during the nearly two years it took him to get there.
However insufferable one may find—okay, I may
find—Chris/Alex’s general attitude, it’s impossible not to be charmed by the
open, welcoming relationships he forms with practically everyone he encounters,
from a married hippie couple (Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker) to a jovial
wheat farmer (Vince Vaughn) to a lonely, elderly widower (Hal Holbrook). The
film isn’t so much a character study as it is a genial portrait of
self-marginalized
I never saw Penn’s first two films as a director, The Indian Runner (1991) and The Crossing Guard (1995), both of which looked from a distance like overwrought exercises in actorly anguish. The Pledge (2001), however, was a marvel of doomy atmosphere, and while Into the Wild could hardly be less similar tonally, it confirms Penn’s considerable gift for visual storytelling, In particular, he knows his way around a montage sequence, finding a different compelling rhythm and tempo for each leg in McCandless’ journey. Less effective are his experiments with onscreen text—phrases from letters and postcards Chris sent appear onscreen in giant yellow hand-printing, to no particular end—and his use of voice-over narration by Chris’ sister Carine, played here by Jena Malone. The latter seems expressly designed to exculpate Chris from charges of insensitivity and cruelty toward his family—hardly surprising, since the family had to sign off on the movie rights and hence had to be mollified.
In the end, I would have preferred a film that took a sharper, more critical stance toward its protagonist, who spends way too much screen time standing atop some gorgeous vista with arms outstretched toward the sky in that clichéd I-embrace-life pose. And while Penn shows the starving McCandless’ failed attempt to cross an impassable river (which had been frozen over when he first arrived), he doesn’t mention, as Krakauer does, that both a tram and a cache of emergency supplies were within easy walking distance, had Chris only bothered to learn of their existence. Even the death scene is treated as something akin to rapture. But the more you gaze at the splendor of the landscape, and get to know the eccentric folks who inhabit it, the more you’re inclined to forgive a little romanticization.
The Village Voice [Scott Foundas]
To some, the story of Christopher Johnson McCandless, the
24-year-old
At the time of its 1996 publication, Krakauer's book about McCandless, Into the Wild, sparked a predictable array of love-it-or-hate-it reactions. It is to the credit of Sean Penn that his film version will provoke no less animated a debate about its subject, and about its very existence as a movie—which can be construed as a further cashing-in on the McCandless family's tragedy, or as the ideal vessel for a story about one man's communion with the last remaining wide-open spaces of the American West.
To these eyes, Into the Wild is an unusually soulful and poetic movie that crystallizes McCandless in all his glittering enigma, and allows us to decide for ourselves whether he was the spiritual son of Thoreau, Tolstoy, and John Muir, or the boy most likely to become Theodore Kaczynski.
Like Krakauer, Penn has conceived McCandless's story in road-movie terms—a new-millennium Easy Rider that opens with McCandless (played by Emile Hirsch) embarking on the Alaskan pilgrimage that was to have been the final leg of a two-year transcontinental adventure. Then the filmloops back to McCandless's college graduation and his attempt to pacify his parents (Marcia Gay Harden and William Hurt) by promising to apply to Harvard Law. But no sooner does McCandless toss his mortarboard hat into the air than he sets about the symbolic desecration of credit cards and ID, the donation of his entire life savings to Oxfam, and the severing of all ties with family and friends.
In between those bookends, Into the Wild takes to the
highways and back roads of places named Niland, Carthage, Slab City, and Oh My
God Hotsprings, capturing a vivid panorama of burnouts, dropouts, and other
self-proclaimed "tramps" who have gone in search of something more—or
less—than mainstream society can afford them. As I write that, I realize it
risks making Into the Wild sound like two and a half hours of
hippie-dippy philosophizing courtesy of one of conservative
As screenwriter, Penn has done a superb job of giving shape and dimension to characters who passed only fleetingly through Krakauer's pages—the fellow travelers McCandless encountered on his journey and whose lives, in some cases, he irrevocably altered. They include the South Dakota grain-elevator operator Wayne Westerberg (Vince Vaughn); the neo-hippie earth mother Jan Burres (Catherine Keener), who sees in Chris—who was by then calling himself Alexander Supertramp—the ghost of her own estranged teenage son; and the octogenarian widower Ron Franz, played by Hal Holbrook in a performance that is as much a thing of beauty as any of the film's ravishingly photographed wide-screen western vistas.
Penn also seems more engaged with the language of cinema here than he has in any of his previous directorial efforts (which include the excellent The Pledge and the overwrought The Crossing Guard). He freely toys with form (multiple narrators, passages of text scrawled across the screen) in a way that sometimes feels self-conscious, but which lends Into the Wild the sense of experimentation that emboldened the great American films of the 1970s. It is a feeling enhanced by the presence of several original songs composed and performed by Eddie Vedder, which do not merely regurgitate the story of the film but in fact are integral to the telling of it. Most of all, Penn allows Hirsch the space he needs to build a performance of enormous physical and psychological rigor.
The criticisms of Into the Wild are easy to anticipate. Is the movie too long? Probably, at least by that hallowed yardstick that says a film must move rapidly from point A to B—something McCandless himself was in no hurry to do. Is it less than judicious with respect to McCandless's parents and sister, who exist in the film mostly as fragments of memory, phantoms of a discarded existence? Arguably so, until you consider that, during his entire two years on the road, McCandless failed to place so much as a single phone call home. Part of the enduring fascination with McCandless, of course, is that his story tends to mean considerably different things depending on where you're standing—whether you are parent or child, restless wanderer or happy conformist. Penn's triumph is that he manages to see McCandless as both boy and man, prophet and fraud, vagabond and visionary. Which is, I suspect, awfully close to how McCandless saw himself.
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
For those who have read Thoreau's Walden, there comes a time, maybe only lasting a few hours or a day, when the notion of living alone in a tiny cabin beside a pond and planting some beans seems strangely seductive. Certain young men, of which I was one, lecture patient girl friends about how such a life of purity and denial makes perfect sense. Christopher McCandless did not outgrow this phase.
Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, which I read with a fascinated dread, tells the story of a 20-year-old college graduate who cashes in his law school fund and, in the words of Mark Twain, lights out for the territory. He drives west until he can drive no farther, and then north into the Alaskan wilderness. He has a handful of books about survival and edible wild plants, and his model seems to be Jack London, although he should have devoted more attention to that author's "To Build a Fire."
Sean Penn's spellbinding film adaptation of this book stays close to the source. We meet Christopher (Emile Hirsch) as an idealistic dreamer, in reaction against his proud parents (William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden) and his bewildered sister (Jena Malone).
He had good grades at Emory; his future in law school was right there in his grasp. Why did he disappear from their lives, why was his car found abandoned, where was he, and why, why, why?
He keeps journals in which he sees himself in the third person as a heroic loner, renouncing civilization, returning to the embrace of nature. In centuries past such men might have been saints, retreating to a cave or hidden hermitage, denying themselves all pleasures except subsistence. He sees himself not as homeless, but as a man freed from homes.
In the book, Krakauer traces his movements through the memories of people he encounters on his journey. It was an impressive reporting achievement to track them down, and Penn's film affectionately embodies them in strong performances. These are people who take in the odd youth, feed him, shelter him, give him clothes, share their lives, mentor him and worry as he leaves to continue his quest, which seems to them, correctly, as doomed.
By now McCandless has renamed himself Alexander Supertramp. He is validated by his lifestyle choice. He meets such people as Rainey and Jan (Brian Dieker and Catherine Keener), leftover hippies still happily rejecting society, and Wayne (Vince Vaughn), a hard-drinking, friendly farmer. The most touching contact he makes is with Ron (Hal Holbrook), an older man who sees him clearly and with apprehension, and begins to think of him as a wayward grandson. Christopher lectures this man, who has seen it all, on what he is missing and asks him to follow him up a steep hillside to see the next horizon. Ron tries, before he admits he is no longer in condition.
And then McCandless disappears from the maps of memory, into
unforgiving
This is a reflective, regretful, serious film about a young man swept away by his uncompromising choices. Two of the more truthful statements in recent culture are that we need a little help from our friends, and that sometimes we must depend on the kindness of strangers. If you don't know those two things and accept them, you will end up eventually in a bus of one kind or another. Sean Penn himself fiercely idealistic, uncompromising, a little less angry now, must have read the book and reflected that there, but for the grace of God, went he. The movie is so good partly because it means so much, I think, to its writer-director. It is a testament like the words that Christopher carved into planks in the wilderness.
I grew up in
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Into the Wild (2007) Tim
Robey, December 2007
not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor) review
Into
the Wild (2007) Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4]
New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review
World Socialist Web Site Joanne Laurier
Into the Wild -
Reverse Shot Elbert Ventura,
September 21, 2007
PopMatters (Mike Schiller) review
Cinematical (James Rocchi) review at Toronto
CBC.ca Arts (Katrina Onstad) review
Into
the Wild reviewed. Dana Stevens from
Slate
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Ruthless Reviews review Matt Cale
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]
New York Magazine (David Edelstein)
Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]
Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune review Colin Covert
Cinematical (Kim Voynar) review at Telluride
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Harry Chotiner
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
About.com Hollywood Movies (Rebecca Murray) review [A-]
Cinepinion [Henry Stewart] also seen here: Film School Rejects (H. Stewart) review [D+]
The New Yorker (David Denby) (Page 2)
stylusmagazine.com (Yannick LeJacq) review
Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [B]
Eye for Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [4/5]
DVD Talk (Kurt Dahlke) dvd review [3/5] [Collector's Edition] 2-disc DVD
Ultimate Guide to Disney DVD dvd review Aaron Wallace, 2-disc Collector’s Edition
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell) dvd review 2-disc Collector’s Edition
DVD Verdict (Clark Douglas) dvd review [Collector's Edition] 2-disc DVD
DVD Review: Into the Wild (Two-Disc Special Collector's Edition ... Jeff Swindoll, 2-disc Collector’s Edition
DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Special Collector's Edition] 2-disc DVD
A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review [Special Edition] 2-disc DVD
DVD Town (John J. Puccio & Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Talk (Chris Neilson) dvd review [3/5] [Blu-Ray Version]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3.5/4] [Blu-ray]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell) dvd review Blu-Ray
DVD Verdict (Dan Mancini) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
Into the Wild – Blu-ray Review - Monsters and Critics Frankie Dees
dvdfuture.com (R. L. Shaffer) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Authority.com (Matt Brighton) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
The New York Sun (Bruce Bennett) review
FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [B+]
Epinions DVD review [Stephen O. Murray]
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
FlickFilosopher.com [MaryAnn Johanson]
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [C+]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B]
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Big Picture Big Sound (Lexi Feinberg) review [3.5/4]
The New York Sun (S. James Snyder) review interview at Toronto with actor Emile Hirsch, September 14, 2007
Emile Hirsch, Into the Wild portrait by Mike D’Angelo from Esquire magazine
Screen International Mike Goodridge (registration required)
Entertainment Weekly review [C-] Owen Gleiberman
Time Out London (Dave Calhoun) review [3/5]
Time Out New York (Mark Holcomb) review [1/5]
Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg) review [4/5]
The Observer (Jason Solomons) review
Boston Globe review [3/4] Ty Burr
The Boston Phoenix (Peter Keough) review
Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review
Austin Chronicle (Josh Rosenblatt) review [3/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
San Francisco Chronicle review Mick LaSalle
Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Gary W. Tooze
Pennebaker, D.A.
DAYBREAK EXPRESS
USA (5 mi) 1953
User reviews from imdb Author: Enoch Sneed from United
Kingdom
A brisk little film, beautifully photographed, around the 3rd Avenue
Elevated railway in New York. Apparently it was due for demolition so Mr
Pennebaker immortalised it in this film. We see lots of stark monumental railway
architecture silhouetted against the morning skies, 1950's commuters in trilby
hats and overcoats, and swirling images as the trains plunge into central New
York. A good experiment with technique, a great soundtrack, and now a great
piece of nostalgia.
I saw this as an accompaniment to "The Horse's Mouth" on DVD. I am
pleased the filmmaker was stubborn enough not to sell the film outright and
made a handsome return of $25 a week during the run of the main feature.
User reviews from imdb Author: MisterWhiplash from
United States
This is what was said before this short was shown at a movie theater in NYC I got a chance to watch it in. I think it applies well; this is a short that is simply composed of images of the city circa mid 1950's. It's extraordinary not necessarily for what is shown alone, though first timer D.A. Pennebaker does overload the viewer with experiments in using the camera in traveling motion. I found that aspect of the film to stand well on its own terms from a purely visual perspective. But, like a Stan Brakhage film, you have to be very, very concentrated in your visual output and montage for this film to stand without anything else applied. So Pennebaker does something very wise by putting the film to one of Duke Ellington's briskest, most inspiring musical numbers. The director here knows well that, with the right music, the images work twice as effectively; in a way this is like one of the early, rough kind of music videos. That it's done to a number by one of America's best composers, never-mind Jazz musicians and orchestrator's, creates a special mood for it. It doesn't over-stay its length, and it fills up the swooping and careening subway and car shots with great tact. Like the one-line says, if you want a quick fix, here's one for those wondering what happened to MTV lately.
DON’T LOOK BACK
1965. Bob Dylan's Yankee caravan moves through a dreary, unswinging Britain. The attendant press and entourage look to the beautiful Mr D for answers ('Do you read the Bible?') which he doesn't provide, being too busy with his metamorphosis from nice folkie to withdrawn rockstar. His mask slips, fascinatingly, as he struggles between affection and disaffection. Only the wardrobe is definitely set: shades, leather jacket, tight pants and raked back hair (a rocker, no less) set him aside from the denim and fringes, dating him less than his surroundings. While Dylan plays a part and apart, nearly all the others, drawn like moths to his flame, appear in the grip of some great masochism. The abiding memories of Don't Look Back are lack of privacy, dull cliques, stumble-drunkenness, very insecure British artists (Price, Donovan), and Dylan's bored, amused sparring with anyone trying to point him in the direction of Damascus. The restless hand-held camera is the main disadvantage of a fascinating document: a sore sight for the eyes, with enough whip-pans to defeat the most determined self-flagellant.
A
portrait of the young Bob Dylan - Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington from
the Chicago Tribune, March 2, 2007
The great folk-rock documentary--and an amazing document of
youth, pop and social culture in the '60s--is cinema verite master D.A.
Pennebaker's no-holds-barred portrait of legendary balladeer Bob Dylan, shot
just before Dylan's transition from folk to rock, "Don't Look Back."
In 1965, Dylan allowed Pennebaker to accompany him on his concert tour of
The movie brilliantly evokes its period, still. And it's so
candid and revealing that it set a standard for all rock concert documentaries
that followed--only a few of which ("Gimme Shelter," "The Last
Waltz," "Woodstock") are in its league. Watching the young Dylan
here, one can see clearly another face of the love-and-peace era and the
emergence of one of
BFI | Sight & Sound | DVD Review: Dont Look Back (1967) Tim Lucas from Sight and Sound, July 2007
D.A. Pennebaker's
impressionistic black-and-white documentary of Bob Dylan's 1965 British tour,
his farewell to purely acoustic performances, somehow retains a sense of
immediacy in its fifth decade while other music films of its time have
succumbed to nostalgia or irrelevance. Unflinchingly real where other 1960s
rock films dealt in fantasy, Dont Look Back is about more than music:
its unvarnished presentation of press interviews, business negotiations,
backstage nervousness, hotel-room camaraderie and the myriad sorts of people
seeking some kind of personal validation from Dylan all give the film a
directness that hasn't aged. There is also something about Dylan himself,
captured here in his early twenties - his stance in the spotlight (vulnerable
behind a bare arsenal of mouth organ and guitar yet unimpeachable in his
defiance, charm and articulation) and out of the spotlight (a funny, walking
bullshit-detector in prescription shades) - that continues to exemplify our
concepts of art and the artist and the necessity to both of risk.
Seemingly
shapeless, the film (shot in 16mm) culminates in the first of two performances
at the Royal Albert Hall, attended by anybody who was anybody in London at the
time. We see Dylan steel himself in preparation and emerge from that
trial-by-fire as two people: as an artist, more than he was, yet still himself,
pale and incredulous, almost too shaken by destiny to acknowledge what has
happened in words.
Dont Look Back (which takes its title from baseball
legend Satchel Paige's aphorism, "Don't look back; something might be
gaining on you") has returned to DVD as a two-disc box-set of bible-like
size and heft - a '65 Tour Deluxe Edition' as opposed to what it also is, a
'40th Anniversary Edition'. In addition to the standard-ratio main feature, the
set includes a commentary by Pennebaker and Dylan road manager Bob Neuwirth; a
new printing of the 168-page companion book (an illustrated transcript of the
film that makes for interesting reading divorced of sound and image); a
flipbook edition of the 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' sequence that only gets
as far as the 'Tip Toes' card; five previously unreleased audio performances
from different tour venues in stereo; and, most wonderfully, Bob Dylan 65
Revisited, a new 66-minute assembly of outtakes from Dont Look Back
(also with optional Pennebaker/Neuwirth commentary).
For a film
composed of "things that didn't seem important at the time but now,
looking back, do," 65 Revisited has surprising structural integrity
of its own. It opens with a performance of 'Don't Think Twice, It's Alright'
that seems to guy the film's own nature as a reconsideration of what's
valuable, then staggers documentary and performance footage from various towns
and venues, indulging those who criticised Dont Look Back's emphasis on
the man over the music by presenting eight songs in their entirety or almost.
Pennebaker also indulges himself by including the second half of 'The Lonesome
Death of Hattie Carroll', withheld from Dont Look Back because its final
stanza would have overpowered its place in the centre of his picture. Unlike
the main feature, here every location is identified and the menu ascribes dates
as well. Some notable moments show Dylan and Joan Baez hosting a joint photo
opportunity, and a visit from Nico, two years before she joined the Velvet
Underground.
The audio
commentaries develop into extremely informative tracks, of value to Dylan fans
and students of documentary film-making. Pennebaker offers remarkable insights
into the function of composition ("Long wide-angle shots slow down a film,
tight shots speed it up"), and yields tetchy but engrossing stories about
how an Auricon camera was customised for the job, and about his general
disregard for framing: "Sometimes I just put a wide-angle lens on and
guess." Forty years on, Dont Look Back remains the perfect exemplar
of Pennebaker's theory: the most objective portrait of Bob Dylan we've ever had
- proving, as Dylan himself once sang, that even the president of the United
States must sometimes stand naked.
Dont Look Back: Everybody Loves You
for Your Black Eye Criterion essay
by Robert Polito, November 24, 2015
Archive
Fever Dreams: Inside the Bob Dylan Archive Criterion essay by Michael Chaiken, February
07, 2017
Dont Look Back
(1967) - The Criterion Collection
Gadfly Online. I Film While Leaping from My Chair, by David Dalton from Gadfly, April 1999
Marking
transitivity in Don't Look Back - Screening the Past David
Baker, July 8, 2005
Inside
the Incredible Restoration of Dylan Doc 'Don't Look Back ... David Fear from Rolling Stone magazine, November 27, 2015
Bob Dylan in D. A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back (1967) - Bright ... Alan Vanneman, July 1, 2001
He's
an Artist, He Don't Look Back: Pennebaker's Landmark Dylan ... Cynthia Close from Docucmentary, January 20, 2016
Dont Look Back
- Reviews - Reverse Shot
Michael Joshua Rowin, February 1,
2008
Divided and Divisive: Dont Look Back Zachary Wigon from the House Next Door. February 1, 2008
Don't Look Back Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film Lang Thompson
Documentary Film .Net [Mark A. Nichols]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
DVD Talk (Aaron Beierle) dvd review [3/5]
DVD Talk (Jason Janis) dvd review [1/5]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jesse Shanks) dvd review [Collector's Edition]
DVD Talk - 65 Tour Deluxe Edition [Jamie S. Rich]
Monsters and Critics - DVD Review - 65 Tour Ed. [Jeff Swindoll]
TheFilmChair.com Deluxe Edition
Dont Look
Back Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com
Svet Atanasov
Bob
Dylan: Don't Look Back Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Jeffrey Kauffman
Bob
Dylan: Don't Look Back (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Ian Jane
Dont Look Back
(Criterion Collection) Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Gordon S. Miller
Don't Look Back |
Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine
Chris Cabin
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [10/10]
Village Voice (Jim Ridley) review January 22, 2008
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
Eye for Film ("Chris") review [4/5]
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Movie Magazine International review Andrea Chase
UTK Daily Beacon [Ryan Freeman]
Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [5/5]
Don't
Look Back, Bob Dylan and the invention of the rockumentary ... Simon Bowcock from The Guardian, May 17, 2016
Austin Chronicle [Jerry Johnson]
San Francisco Examiner (Craig Marine) review
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] March 21, 1968
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] May 1, 1998
The New York Times (Donal J. Henahan) review
No
Direction, No Restriction: D.A. Pennebaker Looks Back at a Dylan ... Dave Itzkoff from The New York Times, May 20, 2016
DVDBeaver dvd review Richard Malloy
Dont
Look Back Blu-ray - Bob Dylan - DVD Beaver
MONTEREY POP
USA (78 mi) 1968
Monterey Pop, directed
by DA Pennebaker | Film review - Time Out
Geoff Andrew
Quite simply one of the best rock concert films ever (distilling the 1967 International Pop Festival at Monterey, California), thanks not only to some great performances (towards the end, with Joplin, Redding, Hendrix, things really start cooking), but also to the way it sums up the spirit of the times (the Summer of Love) while never sentimentalising. Hang on to the end, however, when a small Indian man appears nursing a sitar: Ravi Shankar's exhilarating twenty-minute finale is the best thing in the entire movie.
filmcritic.com (Rachel Gordon) review [4/5]
For those of us who weren't yet born when the 1960's rock 'n' rolled around, Monterey Pop affords an affectionate glimpse of the music that influenced our parents to be hippies. From Otis Redding to Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin to the Mamas and the Papas, and Jefferson Airplane to The Who, this documentary is jam-packed with contagious energy. But I give fair warning that I will reveal the ending, which does not do the rest of the film the justice it deserves.
Shot in 1969 at an outdoor concert that precluded Woodstock,
the film defies the stereotype of the general population at the time. Sure,
some have painted their faces and smoke joints, but D.A. Pennebaker (The
War Room, Moon Over Broadway) surprisingly chooses to show a
broad spectrum of the audience. No matter who is watching, it all comes back to
the talented musicians that stir your soul.
The excitement starts before the music even begins. A young girl is cleaning
thousands of seats and when asked why by an interviewer, she replies that she
feels lucky to do so. There are moments of organized craziness as John
Phillips, leader of the Mamas and the Papas and one of the concert organizers,
tries to get in touch with Dionne Warwick. And when one band is tuning up, a
member remarks, 'Finally, a decent sound system!'
You can tell just by watching these first few moments that this show isn't
about vanity, it's about playing the music you love to those who have an
appreciation for it, a two-way street. This interaction between audience and
performer continues throughout the film and becomes infectious to the audience.
It's impossible to tear your eyes away from Janis Joplin as she belts out her
ballad about love being a ball and chain. And while the lyrics to 'Wild Thing'
may not be all that complicated, watching Jimi Hendrix mime having sex with his
guitar is as captivating as Otis Redding singing about love. Even if you don't
recognize every band you see on stage, you can imagine being as enthralled by
their work as the public sitting in those seats.
The only drawback to the film is the ending, which unfortunately I must reveal.
All the other bands, big names then and still today, got approximately 7 to 10
minutes of screen time. In contrast, the last band on camera, a wholly
forgettable one, gets an entire 18 minutes of screen time. For a film that's
only 78 minutes long, that's too large of a chunk, especially when previous acts
are much more stimulating.
All in all, Monterey Pop is a precious, rare look at a time period that
still holds sway over us. The variety of music, as well as the beautifully shot
performances, are easy to become immersed in. If there was ever any question as
to why most of these bands were so popular, this is quickly dispelled. It's
almost depressing to think that music this moving doesn't get made much
anymore. Instead we're stuck with *Nsync, the Backstreet Boys, and Jennifer
Lopez, all of whom should have stuck with modeling.
The film is now available on a standalone single disc or as part of the
three-disc set, complete with extra footage and outtakes. You can also buy the
extra footake (Jimi Plays Monterey/Shake! Otis at Monterey) separately.
Each of these movies also has a bonus interview attached.
A
Bloody Battle over Monterey Pop Festival Criterion essay by Jann Wenner, November 11,
2002
Monterey Pop: The First Rock Festival
Criterion essay by Michael Lydon,
September 22, 2009
Monterey Pop: People In Motion Criterion essay by Armond White, September
22, 2009
The
Meeting of the ’Twain: Monterey and the Great California Divide Criterion essay by Barney Hoskyns, September
22, 2009
Anatomy
of a Love Festival - Part Two Criterion essay by Robert Christgau, November
11, 2002
Monterey
Pop Artist Bios - Part One Criterion essay by Bruce Eder, November 11,
2002
Monterey
Pop Artist Bios - Part Two Criterion essay by Bruce Eder November 11,
2002
Monterey
Pop Artist Bios - Part Three Criterion essay by Bruce Eder November 11,
2002
Monterey
Pop Artist Bios - Part Four Criterion essay by Bruce Eder November 11,
2002
Monterey
Pop Artist Bios - Part Five Criterion essay by Bruce Eder, November 11,
2002
Monterey Pop (1968) -
The Criterion Collection
Monterey Pop • Senses of Cinema Allan James Thomas from Senses of Cinema, November 5, 2000
Monterey
Film Bummer - Rolling Stone Sue C.
Clark, February 10, 1968
Why
Monterey Pop remains the pinnacle of concert movies Matthew Eng from Little White Lies
A
Look Back At Monterey Pop, 50 Years Later : NPR Paul Ingles, June 15, 2017
Jason Bailey Fourth Row Center, September 23, 2009, also seen here: DVD Talk [Jason Bailey] Criterion Collection 2-disc Blu-Ray
The DVD Journal [Mark Bourne] Criterion Collection 3-disc
DVD Times Gary Couzens, Criterion Collection 3-disc
DVD Verdict [Patrick Naugle] Criterion Collection 3-disc
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd
review Criterion Collection
3-disc
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3.5/4] Criterion Collection 3-disc
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nate Goss, Criterion Collection 3-disc
DVD Talk (Randy Miller III) dvd review [3/5] [Criterion Collection] Criterion Collection 3-disc
DVD Verdict [Steve Evans] Criterion Collection 3-disc
Film Freak Central dvd review [Criterion Collection] Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Criterion Collection 3-disc
DVD Movie Guide [Colin Jacobson] Criterion Collection 3-disc
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection 2-disc Blu-Ray
DVD Verdict (Blu-Ray) [Bill Gibron] Criterion Collection 2-disc Blu-Ray
The
Complete Monterey Pop Festival Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest M. Enos Duarte, 2-disc Blu-Ray
DVD Town (Ranjan Pruthee) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] [Criterion Collection] 2-disc Blu-Ray
seanax.com [Sean Axmaker] Blu-Ray of the Week, Criterion Collection 2-disc Blu-Ray, September 21, 2009
Blu-ray
Review: The Complete Monterey Pop Festival (Criterion ... Brad Brevet, 2-disc Blu-Ray
How
Janis Joplin and Otis Redding Conquered Monterey Pop Festival ... Wren Graves from Consequences of Sound, June 18, 2017
Apollo Movie Guide [Scott Weinberg]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [3/5]
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
The Village Voice [Jessica Winter]
Movie
review: Music legends still shine in 'Monterey Pop' - The Salt ... Sean P. Means from The Salt Lake City Tribune
The New York Times (Renata Adler) review
DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Brian Montgomery
ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS
Great Britain (90 mi) 1973
The whole flashy, rockist affair is based on a wobbly premise of sentimentality. It's a record of the Ziggy character's farewell dates at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1973, and while the likes of 'Oh You Pretty Things' and 'All the Young Dudes' still raise a smile, the presiding image is of those flesh-crawling glam-rock costumes and stage antics. Go for the music, or not at all.
Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York
Cinéma vérité, the fly-on-the-wall documentary style pioneered by D.A.
Pennebaker (among others), was conceived both as a way of keeping pace with
real-life events as they unfold and as a means of capturing truth without
artifice. God knows, then, why Pennebaker chose to employ this freewheeling
method to capture for posterity the final show of David Bowie's 1973 world tour
in support of Ziggy Stardust. See, in a rock concert, you always know
where your subjects are going to be (on the stage) and what they're going to be
doing (rocking), so there's no particular need for improvisatory camera work.
And if ever a rock star symbolized outsized artifice, it was
But no. There's a reason this film is making its theatrical debut some 30
years after it was shot: Apart from its (considerable) value as a historical
document, it's virtually unwatchable. Penne-baker's cameras are scarcely ever
in focus, and images are constantly underexposed; the entire movie, save for a
handful of stolid backstage interludes, looks as if it had been shot by a
determined group of fans perched on the shoulders of their buddies. At the same
time, the rawness of the filmmaking lends the affair a hazy underground charm,
and there's no denying that Bowie, strutting confidently in a series of
outlandish, adrongynous costumes, is in reasonably good form, even if he seems
more invested in covers of "Let's Spend the Night Together" and
"White Light/White Heat" than in his own material. Touching, too, to
see moon-faced teenage girls weeping as they sing along to "Moonage
Daydream" (though perhaps they'd just heard
Ziggy Stardust
and the Spiders from Mars - TCM.com Pablo Kjolseth
A few years ago David Bowie was listed as the world's
wealthiest entertainer. Acclaimed documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker,
thinking back on his experiences with the rock musician, remarked on how
impressed he was with Bowie's ability to separate art from business, and how
Bowie seemed to have a special compartment in his brain, call it a talent, for
both. Given Bowie's current credentials as a savvy businessman, painter,
musician, collector, film star, multi-media magnate and more (do we need to
point out his marriage to Iman, one of the most exotic and beautiful
supermodels on the planet?) it might seem strange to say this but Bowie's peak
came in 1973. Of all of Bowie's artistic phases, the one most beloved by his
music fans remains that blip of time surrounding his androgynous space-man:
Ziggy Stardust. Bowie's musical output from 1969 (Space Oddity) & 1974
(Diamond Dogs) had the kind of muscle that wasn't rekindled again until his
SCARY MONSTERS release in 1980 (an album that touched on various cosmic tropes
and revisited Ziggy's energy).
For the reason above, D.A. Pennebaker's documentary, ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE
SPIDERS FROM MARS, is to Bowie fans what the Zapruder film is to conspiracy
buffs: essential viewing. Bowie may have choreographed Ziggy's retirement for
maximum effect, but Ziggy's last stand alongside The Spiders from Mars (the
late Mick Ronson-led backup band) was sprung on both the filmmaker and the band
at the very last minute. With this in mind, it's a marvel that Pennebaker was
able to marshal five 16mm cameras to capture this event on July 3rd, 1973, on
Bowie's home-turf of London, at a modest venue called the Hammersmith Odeon.
Legal wrangling would tie up the film release until 1983, and this delay,
alongside a muddy sound mix, didn't help the film's reception. It also didn't
help that most theaters would show the 35mm blow-up prints with their standard
1.85:1 aspect ratio instead of the correct 1.33:1 ratio. Sure, the film was
grainy, dark, and sometimes out-of-focus, due to the limitations placed on 16mm
camera gear in a dark concert hall shooting on the fly, but that all added to
the purity of the moment. Showing the film at the wrong aspect ratio, however,
obviously added nothing (and deducted quite a bit).
There are still some mysteries that surround Ziggy's last performance with The
Spiders from Mars. A German vinyl bootleg of the event captures Jeff Beck as a
guest guitarist on a track of Jean Genie that segues into a cover of "Love
Me Do," by the Beatles, and one can't help wondering what petty legalese kept
this moment (and others) from being included in the film. But there's no grassy
knoll to speak of, the main event here is the music. And that music, offered up
here in this remastered 5:1 surround music mix and restored 35mm print by
Cowboy Pictures, rocks the house, and rocks it clearly. Look for it at theatres
in major cities across the U.S. this winter.
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Phil Freeman
PopMatters (Elbert Ventura) review
Brilliant Observations on 1492 Films [Clayton Trapp]
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [2/4]
filmcritic.com (Rachel Gordon) review [3.5/5]
Reeling Reviews (Robin and Laura Clifford) review [B,B]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
DVD MovieGuide dvd review [30th Anniversary Edition] Colin Jacobson
The Boston Phoenix review Carly Carioli
Baltimore City Paper (Ian Grey) review
Peploe, Clare
THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE
Time Out London review Geoff Andrew
An adaptation of a Marivaux play about
the deceitful wiles of a cross-dressing princess, filmed in the gardens of some
picturesque Italian palace? It sounds like some boring corseted litflick, but
against all odds, Peploe’s film is not only admirably intelligent but – here’s the
rub – great fun.
It’s partly down to the performances. Mira Sorvino
is surprisingly well cast as the regent who’s fallen for innocent hunk Agis (Jay Rodan).
Somewhat inconveniently, this hunk is rightful heir to her kingdom (his dad was
bumped off by hers), and he’s been brought up – by the philosopher Hermocrates
(Ben
Kingsley) and his scientist sister Léontine – to hate not only herself but
all womankind. Some challenge: in order to woo and win him over, the princess
has first to get to him, which means attaining an audience with the likewise
hostile cerebral siblings. Disguise must be donned, while there should also be
a smidgen – well, a carriageload, actually – of bare-faced seduction. Hence the
nobleman’s garb.
Sorvino gets some sterling commedia dell’arte support in the servant roles, but
it’s Shaw and Kingley who finally steal the show as the flustered rationalists
whose vanity’s pricked by the trickster’s attentions. Wisely, Peploe never
tries to conceal the artifice of the whole thing, but revels in it, deploying a
light and mobile camera to get right into the heart of the scrummy intrigue.
It’s clear from the start who’s likely to win the match, but at what cost? It’s
by insisting on such questions that the film does justice to Marivaux, rather
than ending up as some camply costumed romcom.
filmcritic.com
[Jeremiah Kipp]
The moral of love: Be manipulative and conniving to get the man
(or woman) you want, even if a few other folks get their hopes crushed along
the way. That’s what’s certain after watching Clare Peploe’s depressing
fairytale/restoration comedy Triumph of Love (based on a superficial
Marivaux play originally performed in 1732). That’s not the filmmaker’s
intention, though. She’s clearly going for whimsy, light romance, and slapstick
cuckolding. What her film lacks is a heart and a conscience.
Mira Sorvino plays a princess who dresses up as a dandified male student to
infiltrate the summertime estate of a misogynistic philosopher (Ben Kingsley).
Under the old man’s tutelage, a dashing prince (Jay Rodan) has been instructed
to distrust the female sex. So clever Sorvino attires herself as a man to earn
his friendship, trust, and above all, love.
Along the way, she pretends to be wooing the philosopher’s wan spinster sister
(poor Fiona Shaw) and, in her most audacious move, reveals herself as a woman
to Kingsley, but as a sultry temptress. In doing so, she dupes Kingsley and
Shaw into falling head over heels for her. The end result, inevitably, is that
they’ll get hurt if and when she takes home her chosen man.
I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie where I wanted so badly for the
protagonist to fail. Sorvino’s smug, self-involved performance is a study in
egotism, bordering on Julia Roberts “I love my life” indulgence. If the man
gives over to her, even a Ken doll like Rodan, it’s to applaud deceitfulness,
trickery, and selfishness. Shaw’s character is a fool and a prude, but she
doesn’t deserve her heart trampled upon for the sake of Sorvino’s boy toy
infatuation. Oh, for a dose of morality in our cynical times (or any time! Even
in 1732, this is loathsome.)
And that ham Ben Kingsley is quickly becoming the flashing red light to Stay
Away from any movie he’s in. Last year, it was the loathsome music
video-stylized gangster film Sexy
Beast. This year, it’s his cartoon misanthrope. His feverishly
mannered acting might work on the stage, but on film it’s grotesque. Kingsley’s
scenery chewing distracts from the one thing Triumph of Love has going
for it, namely the appealing gardens and verandas where Sorvino flaunts her
perkiness. The nice locales make up for a lot, and are continually eye-catching
-- but what I wouldn’t give for some nice acting to accompany them.
I kept waiting for some character to tell Sorvino, “Go away from here and never
return. I hope I never see you again. You should be ashamed of yourself, you
terrible person.” In the end, it’s fair to say I almost got my wish. But before
I thought Triumph of Love had actually played its cards close to the
vest in condemnation of Sorvino’s girl who knows nothing of the complexity of
honest love, the point is negated by a pat Happily Ever After. If you always
wanted to see a Nora Ephron (You’ve
Got Mail) costume drama, this love bud’s for you. My question:
Don’t we expect a little something more from writer/producer Bernardo
Bertolucci?
The
Triumph of Love, Life or Something Like It, and ... - Slate Magazine David Edelstein
Images
(Crissa-Jean Chappell) review
“The Triumph of Love” - Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
culturevulture.net,
Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere
Film
Freak Central review Walter Chaw
eFilmCritic.com review [4/5] Thom
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [1.5/4]
hybridmagazine.com review Roxanne Bogucka
PopcornQ review Brandon Judell
eFilmCritic.com (Stephen Groenewegen) review [4/5]
The Village Voice [Leslie Camhi]
click here for Triumph of Love review MaryAnn Johanson from FlickFilosopher
Interview: Clare Peploe Interview with the director from Time Out London, October 6, 2004
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [2/4]
The Globe and Mail review [3.5/4] Ray Conlogue
Austin Chronicle (Steve Davis) review [1/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker
The Boston Phoenix review Scott T. Cummings
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review
Washington Post [Stephen Hunter]
Chicago Tribune (Michael Wilmington) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
Pereira dos Santos, Nelson
VIDAS SECAS (Barren Lives)
The Lumière Reader Brannavan Gnanalingam
Barren Lives (Vidas Secas), right from the start, doesn’t pull any punches. Through subtitles,
Dos Santos exhorts his audience to feel pity for the millions of people
suffering in Brazil’s north-east, where arid lands and the cruel elite conspire
to tread all over the poor workers. He then proceeds to use very uncomfortable
distorted sound on the soundtrack in the opening image, the likes which would
have made Michael Snow proud. From that opening, you can tell that this isn’t
going to be particularly pleasant viewing.
Based on an important Brazilian novel by Graciliano Ramos, the
film bears a strong resemblance to the righteous anger and frustration of the
Italian neo-realist film movement. The novel is reputed to be part Faulkner and
part Steinbeck, and the story follows a homeless family’s quest for a home and
work. Their struggle is brutal – menial work, failed dreams, and family tragedy
all serve to indeed make their lives barren.
The film aims to be entirely subjective. The source novel is Faulknerian in its
construction, with different subjectivities telling the story. Dos Santos
attempts this with point of view shots and shot-reverse-shots. For the most
part this is quite successful, but I’m not sure if dos Santos had the rigour to
completely carry this style through. Furthermore, certain moments, such as
having two characters speak at once directly to the camera, didn’t work
particularly well. But then again, dos Santos, wasn’t addressing a comfortable
Western viewer. But the subjective viewpoint did work beautifully in particular
moments – particularly in the heartbreaking prison scene.
This is a brutal film. While quieter than Rocha’s films, the anger is
slow-burning but intense. The film manages to portray the events with little
sentimentality or forced emotion – that’s where the Italian neo-realist
influence came in (in fact, the early Cinema Novo films were heavily indebted
to the Neorealist movement, it took the likes of Rocha to skew it in different
directions). Little character moments built up to break the characters down –
the payment of interest, a single bet too many, a misdirected bullet (at the
end). And the film ends viciously like it started – distortion on the
soundtrack, an empty road, few possessions and a cruel, unforgiving sky.
Slant Magazine [Fernando F. Croce]
If the main aim of
Graciliano Ramos's acclaimed novel was often compared to The Grapes of Wrath,
so it's fitting that the narrative begins in 1940, the year of John Ford's film
version of the Steinbeck novel. Fabiano (Átila Iório) and Sinhá Vitória (Maria
Ribeiro) are first seen walking the parched backlands with their young sons
(Gilvan and Genivaldo Lima) and faithful dog Baleia, a journey, we soon deduce,
that is neither just beginning nor close to an end. Dialogue is sparse, and
Santos shapes the family's struggle as blunt moments of survival against the
landscape—their parrot gets curtly cooked over a fire for food; one of the sons
collapses under the heat, and the father tries to rouse him by poking him with
his rifle; an empty hut offers refuge for the night, only to be reclaimed by
the local wealthy landowner. Fabiano finds work as a cowhand and the family
lays claim to a tiny patch of land, giving hope to their dreams, namely owning
a leather bed, the possession that would solidify their status as "real
people." However, a squabble with a petty policeman and nature's own
merciless grip set the characters back on the road.
Noted upon its original release for a documentary style readily linked to
Italian neorealism, Vidas Secas, with its telling compositions,
subjective shots, and atomized overexposed lighting, now seems relentlessly
subjective, keyed to the unarticulated anger of a people aware of its
exploitation yet politically too embryonic to consider revolt.
Like Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, another oft-misread seditious text, the
film seems primed for a revolution, yet Fabiano is never to become an active
force of rebellion like Henry Fonda's Tom Joad—the trajectory is across
plateaus of increasing awareness, though the growing consciousness is the
audience's rather than the characters'. (A mordantly hopeful sliver of
awareness is injected for the next generation; playing with the dog after being
chided for asking about Hell, the older son looks at the inhospitable grounds
all around and sees no difference between home and the mystical purgatory.) The
desert stretches endlessly, yet the battered dignity etched on the characters'
faces attests to their unity as both family and culture, endlessly roaming for
survival, mirroring neocolonial
World Socialist Web Site Joanne Laurier
THE AMULET OF OGUM (O Amuleto de Ogum)
Brazil
Film Update Robert Stam from Jump
Cut
Hailed in
Narrated by a blind singer from the Northeast, AMULET recounts the
trajectory of Gabriel (played by Nelson's son Ney Sant'Ana), a young man from
the Northeast whose body has been magically closed by an umbandista at
his mother's request. Protected by the amulet of Ogum, Gabriel goes to Caxias,
a notoriously lawless
The film itself is as generically and stylistically syncretic as the religion of which it speaks — part picaresque comedy, part folktale, part sociological essay. While many left intellectuals found the film problematic in its apparently uncritical embrace of Afro-Brazilian religion, Nelson responded that intellectuals often talk about popular culture, while they despise some of its most expressive forms, such as religion. AMULET anticipates TENT OF MIRACLES (1977) in its animated celebration of Afro-Brazilian culture. It is an extremely important film for understanding Nelson Pereira career as well as for explaining recent popularizing tendencies in Brazilian cinema.
TENT OF MIRACLES (Tenda dos Milagres)
Tent Of Miracles Myth of racial democracy, by Joan R.
Dassin from Jump Cut, November 1979
Perelman, Vadim
HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG B 89
USA
I can see where some may find greatness in this film, as it deals with issues that matter, that may actually be strangling this country, like the perception that we, above all other people, matter, and everyone else, particularly those of foreign persuasions, are considered secondary, with no regard for the consequences of ignoring this kind of intolerance towards others, revealed in this film by a kind of madness of possession. At issue is the ownership of a home, inherited and then lost by an out-of-sorts, selfish and irresponsible daughter, played by Jennifer Connelly, who has never, by the way, looked more beautiful, even when she was living out of her car, and Ben Kingsley, a deposed Iranian colonel, who purchased the house for his family at a county auction. Connelly is insistent, even after losing the house, that it still belongs to her, that it has always been part of her family, so it is her birthright. It is this kind of arrogance that the film boldly attempts to reckon with, as it seems to be a prevailing American attitude which this film hits right on the head. Though asking only metaphorically, our nation may be strong and great, but who did we have to step over to get there, what price had to be paid, and at what cost? It's a daunting film about the failure to take responsibility for consequences. My problem with this film is that it's a very conventional melodrama that seems mired, deeply, in its own form, never daring anything subtle or innovative, instead relying on an overkill of image and emotion, which becomes all too predictable after awhile, deflating the actual issues which are at the heart of this film.
THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES B 86
But
it’s too late to say you’re sorry.
How
would I know? Why Should I care?
Please
don’t bother trying to find her,
She’s
not there. —The
Zombies
From the brightly colorful opening title sequence, this film
has a look that wants to appear dazzling, continually using repeating motifs of
flowers, water, lightning flashes, poetry and art, not to mention two gorgeous
icons of the movie industry, martial arts ass-kicking über-woman Uma Thurman from Tarantino’s PULP FICTION (1994) and
KILL BILL sagas (2003-4) and Evan Rachel Wood who has pretty much cornered the
market on teenage angst roles, THIRTEEN (2003), DOWN IN THE VALLEY (2005), and
ACROSS THE UNIVERSE (2007). Moving back
and forth in time with ease, we see both women are morphed into the same role,
one as a rebellious teenager and the other as a sheepish, overprotective mother
fifteen years later. The event that
separates the two is a Columbine style high school shooting that leaves a
devastating impact in an otherwise sleepy
Based on the novel by Laura Kasischke, what immediately strikes us is the overly
controlled tone and very pronounced formalism, and
the fragile, almost feeble nature of Thurman’s Diane, who is still haunted by
the event. As the high school has built
a memorial in tribute with an eternal flame, they are making preparations to
hold a 15 year anniversary celebration which is flooding Diane with flashback memories
continually replaying in her mind. As
she teaches a bored classroom about the audacity of Paul Gauguin’s originality,
radically departing from established beliefs, she is barely there herself,
seemingly lost in a daze that may have been implanted by the ghosts of that
day. But we also share the tumultuous
day to day lives of two young teenage girls who are caught up in discovering new
life experiences, their different way of handling it, each sharing their dreams
about their futures. Interjected into
this story is the brief refrain from the Zombies singing “She’s Not There,”
(also heavily featured in KILL BILL) one of the 60’s British invasion groups
that’s an amusingly upbeat and light-hearted number seemingly out of place and
out of time. Also of interest, despite
the 15 year gap, there are no recognizable differences between the world of
Diane as a teenager and as an adult.
They are completely indistinguishable.
The whole story unravels with an unusual degree of formal control,
tweaking the audience with artistic metaphors brilliantly photographed by Pawel
Edelman, with eerie, overly somber music by James Horner that resembles Arvo
Pärt, all of which adds an element of death and solemnity to the occasion, as
if the mood of the entire film is befitting a memoriam.
At one point near the end, as the
adult Diane’s world is quickly crumbling before our eyes, yet she somehow manages
to hold it all in and offers her own personalized tribute, where she
denies being a survivor and takes flowers to the school, walking
through the classrooms and empty hallways, where there’s a certain eloquence in
her silence. But that silence is broken,
as if coming out of a trance. From
that point on, the film disintegrates, as it repeats itself incessantly and
drives home the point with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, losing the subtlety and grace it had just earned in
the previous sequence. The freewheeling finale is simply too bizarre for words,
as words and images repeat themselves with such regularity that the emotional
impact wears thin, taking advantage of an unsuspecting audience in a strange
and unsettling way, with the director drilling our brains with a piledriver of
incessant clues, constant reminders of what we’re supposed to think and know
which becomes a huge detractor at the end.
It’s unfortunate, as this apparently ruined the film for many viewers. I found it a head scratcher, as up until 10
minutes from the finish, I thoroughly enjoyed this film, especially the 3
leading actresses, all of whom give exquisite performances. The idea of seeing young
Diane’s future idealized onscreen for nearly the entire film before you
realize Uma may be a complete fabrication is
unquestionably intriguing, but how it surrealistically plays out is another
story. Nonetheless, it’s an unusually
austere effort, reminiscent in tone, perhaps, with Nicole Kidman in Jonathan
Glazer’s BIRTH (2004).
Paste Magazine [Amanda Petrusich]
Based on Laura Kasischke’s 2002 novel, The Life Before Her Eyes, this film tackles the psychological ramifications of violent crime—in this case, a brutal school shooting—as recounted by a young woman named Diana (first played by Evan Rachel Wood, then Uma Thurman) who, at 17, ends up barricaded in a bathroom with her best friend and a teenaged gunman. On paper, the plot sounds contrived and straightforward; in reality, the film is awkwardly complex, bulleting back and forth in time. In the end, though, it’s marred by either a fumbled attempt at Magical Realism or just bad plotting, depending on how you interpret its closing scenes. Kasischke’s novel is dreamy and poetic; the film, directed by Vadim Perelman (House of Sand and Fog) is far too coy about its conceit, and, consequently, more confusing than enlightening, despite a trio of outstanding female leads.
The Village Voice [Ella Taylor]
Riddled with high concept, this florid adaptation of Laura Kasischke's 2002 novel is a horror picture of sorts that plays off a Columbine-style high-school shooting from the victims' point of view. But moviegoers may mistake The Life Before Her Eyes for an unduly long L'Oreal commercial featuring softly lit film stars moving languidly with swinging hair through overbearingly premonitory weather. All but derailed by director Vadim (House of Sand and Fog) Perelman's fondness for the slow-motion sequence, The Life Before Her Eyes stars Evan Rachel Wood, shortchanging her considerable talent yet again, as Diana, a troubled small-town teen whose undisciplined appetites are tempered by her friendship with churchgoing good girl Maureen (Eva Amurri, giving her all to a thankless task). Fifteen years after the two friends are improbably commanded by the high-school shooter to choose which of them should die, Diana, played by Uma Thurman in various attitudes of vague distress, is living a golden life edged with portents of Something Amiss. A twist that offers fertile potential for subtle meditation on growing up, conscience, and roads not traveled ends up buried beneath insect metaphors, lurid flashbacks, and a thunderstorm that creaks with the climax to come.
New York Magazine (David Edelstein)
In a vile-movie competition between Michael Haneke’s Funny Games and
Vadim Perelman’s The
Life Before Her Eyes, Haneke’s film would win—but only because he’s
working so much harder to be noxious. Perelman, who also directed the punishing
House of Sand and
Fog, clearly regards himself as a life-affirming humanist: He lingers
over bodies of bullet-ridden high-school students to drive home the idea that
opening fire on random teenagers is a bad thing. Trapped by a sociopathic
student along with her best friend (Eva Amurri) in a school bathroom, spunky
17-year-old Diana (Evan Rachel Wood) is forced to make a terrible
choice—whereupon we cut to the anniversary of the tragedy fifteen years later,
when the older Diana (Uma Thurman) is an art-history professor and the
overprotective mother of a radiant little girl. Perelman moves back and forth
between the younger Diana (whom he rather fetishizes) and the increasingly
disoriented older one, with breaks for high-resolution shots of flowers, bees,
etc., as well as that school-bathroom confrontation, which functions in the
narrative like a striptease. If you haven’t caught on to the gimmick after ten
minutes, the Zombies’ “She’s Not There” is all over the soundtrack. In between
snorting and rolling your eyes, you can pass the time pitying Thurman, who has
to emote in a vacuum, and admiring Wood—who is open and unaffected, the
anti–Ellen Page.
The Onion A.V. Club [Tasha Robinson]
Vadim Perelman's
2003 directorial debut, House Of Sand And Fog, frequently read as an
overreaching attempt to outdo Atom Egoyan at his own dread-fueled,
atmosphere-rich cinematic game. Similarly, Perelman's follow-up, The Life
Before Her Eyes, finds him clumsily trying to outdo M. Night Shyamalan. His
second film doesn't have the heartbreaking visual beauty of his first, but once
again, the dread is thick and the atmosphere is so heavy that every simple car
ride or bedtime story seems like it's happening on the crumbling edge of a
lonely cliff.
That's certainly
what Perelman is going for, for reasons that become clear in the final act, but
the preceding 85 minutes of setup maintain such a forcefully manipulative,
portentous tone that the end is more long-awaited relief than key puzzle piece.
Like an episode of Lost, the film leaps back and forth in time, finding
nonstop meaningful parallels between two phases of a woman's life. As a
teenager (vividly played by Evan Rachel Wood, in one of the film's few bright
spots) Life's slightly wild protagonist is determined to express herself
personally and sexually, and to escape her boring small town. At the same time,
she's insecure and afraid of being judged, particularly by her religious but
deeply supportive best friend, Eva Amurri. Fifteen years later, as a brittle
adult played by Uma Thurman, she's still in the small town, now with a husband
and daughter, and her life revolves around the crippling guilt stemming from a
school shooting where she and Amurri faced the gunman together.
Perelman and
first-time screenwriter Emil Stern (working from Laura Kasischke's novel) clearly
hope their audience will be panting for the big reveal as they dole out tiny
slices of the past, saving the key moment for last. But it's hard to maintain
interest through the overbearing foreshadowing, the pointlessly repeated
footage, James Horner's exhaustingly ominous soundtrack, and the worst use of a
professorial lecture to explain a film's psychological underpinnings since Jade.
And then there are the oh-so-pointed ways in which Wood's every casual word and
deed carries significant ironic weight in her future. Every moment is
critically meaningful, Life says, in its facile, simple-minded way. But
if that's true, why does it waste so much of its run time on overwrought
symbolic music-video footage of dead birds and wilting flowers? Like Wood, viewers
may someday regret every squandered moment of their lives, and this film is
full of them.
Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune Colin Covert
Blossoms that
bloom, morph, change and decay fill the opening credits of "The Life
Before Her Eyes," a handsome and intriguing puzzle film. The cycle of
birth, change and death is a constant undercurrent throughout the film, both in
the visual imagery and the story line.
The film centers
around Diana (played as a teenager by Evan Rachel Wood and in adulthood by Uma
Thurman). In her youth, Diana was the survivor of a Columbine-like high school
shooting. As the 15th anniversary of the tragedy nears, the adult Diana is
haunted by traumatic memories and unsettling premonitions.
The film hints at
a story line as we float between Diana then (a promiscuous pot smoker) and now
(an art lecturer with a picture-perfect professor husband and daughter). High
school Diana debates morality with her goody-two-shoes best friend Maureen (Eva
Amurri). Thurman's corrugated brow and anguished eyes suggest grown-up Diana is
dealing with major guilt issues, but director Vadim Perelman ("House of
Sand and Fog") implies everything and spells out nothing -- in story
terms, at least. Visually, the film is humid with water imagery from swimming
pools, sprinklers, burst pipes and rain.
Based on the
acclaimed novel by Laura Kasischke, the film abounds with literary flourishes.
The pivotal scene, replayed in ever-greater detail, shows Diana and Maureen
cowering in their school lavatory while the shooter plays
eenie-meenie-minie-moe with his gun. Then the flashback -- if that's what it is
-- ends and we return to the present -- if that's what it is.
Wood and Thurman
are well paired as young and mature incarnations of the same woman, often
wearing similar petal-flecked floral prints. Their naturalistic performing
styles synch seamlessly. The less well known Amurri (Susan Sarandon's daughter,
with those huge, expressive eyes) has a warmth that makes the unlikely
friendship between "the virgin and the whore" plausible.
The film builds to
a last-minute twist, but fans of Ambrose Bierce, "The Twilight Zone"
or M. Night Shayamalan should be able to guess the big revelation. Even the
title is a hint: What happens when your life flashes before your eyes? As the
Zombies oldie that cycles through the soundtrack hints, "Please don't
bother trying to find her / She's not there."
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
The Life Before Her Eyes is an examination of survivor guilt. It uses as its backdrop a Columbine-like school shooting and flashes back and forth between a girl as she is at the time of the incident and the woman she will be fifteen years later. Director Vadim Perelman is careful in the way he assembles the movie to create some uncertainty about whether the "present" represents the scenes with the girl (flashing forward to her future) or the scenes with the woman (flashing back to her past). However, although events occur in two separate time lines, the screenplay eventually connects them in a way that may not be entirely expected.
Columbine has become a touchstone of modern American society and, like 9/11, filmmakers approach the event (or one inspired by it) with trepidation. In The Life Before Her Eyes, the goal is to explore the impact of an event like this in terms of how it haunts the survivors and the gaps it creates by those who are gone. Cataclysmic incidents like this, no matter how senseless, are impossible to merely "shake off" (as much as society might wish this to happen). Fifteen years after the experience, those who watched it transpire must live with the memories of what happened, the sense of guilt that they escaped, and the echoes of the voices of those who did not. The Life Before Her Eyes is not interested in the school shooting in and of itself (this is not a police procedural) but in the ramifications associated with it.
For Diana (Evan Rachel Wood) and her best friend, Maureen (Eva Amurri), it's just another day in school. The girls duck into the bathroom between classes and that's when the shooting starts. At first, the staccato bursts of gunfire and screams of panic are muffled and distant but, as they grow closer, it becomes clear what's happening. Then, after killing a teacher in the hall, the gunman enters the bathroom and faces Diana and Marueen. They know him; he knows them. Diana pleads with him not to kill "them." He responds that he's only going to shoot one of them. The question is: which one?
Fifteen years later on the anniversary of the tragedy, a now-adult Diana
(Uma Thurman) still can't shake the horror of the day. Memories rush back as
she drives past the suburban
On an emotional level, The Life Before Her Eyes is a little on the clinical side. We observe Diana's pain but don't connect with it. Some of this is because of the manner in which Perelman has elected to compose the movie. The non-chronological approach creates an intellectual puzzle but limits the ability of the audience to relate to the characters. And the marked physical differences between Evan Rachel Wood and Uma Thurman make it a little difficult to accept that both the teenage Diana and the adult Diana are the same individual. Rarely is it not possible to see a 32-year old in her 17-year old self. This might seem like a minor thing but in a movie like this, it gains importance.
Technically, the movie is impressive. Cinematographer Pawel Edelman has composed a series of memorable insert shots that show the details of everyday life we often don't notice. If nothing else, it can be said that The Life Before Her Eyes offers variety for the eyes. Even the most mundane scenes are set up with a sense of confidence and James Horner's score is one of the most subtle and least intrusive he has composed in some time. Perelman understands the importance of technical aptitude; his previous feature, House of Sand and Fog, exhibited strong photographic and musical components.
Of the two timelines, the one featuring the teenage Diana is more involving than the one featuring the adult version. Both lead actresses give fine performances, but Thurman has less material to work with. The adult Diana is more one-dimensional than her younger counterpart. Wood portrays Diana as a girl on the cusp of womanhood who is seeking a change. She's a free-spirit who experiments with drugs and sex but in many ways envies Maureen's simpler, more puritanical lifestyle. The bathroom incident has plainly scarred her and the Diana we meet fifteen years later is a different, less interesting individual. One might wonder why Perelman chose to structure the story in such a seemingly haphazard format. The compelling reason becomes clear late in the proceedings; a strictly linear telling would not have worked and would have muted one of the film's more intriguing aspects. The Life Before Her Eyes is an effective portrayal of the lingering impacts of survivor guilt but, in many ways, it works even better as a portrait of a young woman's life as she approaches a tragedy she does not see coming.
indieWIRE Leo Goldsmith
Cinemattraction.com [Robert Levin]
Screen International Mike Goodridge
FilmJerk.com Review [Brian Orndorf] also seen here: BrianOrndorf.com and here: DVD Talk
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Harry Chotiner
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Los Angeles Times [Carina Chocano]
New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden
Peretz, Jesse
FIRST LOVE, LAST RITES B+ 92
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Long on mood and short on narrative,
First Love, Last Rites does a good job of capturing the sense of young love's first
flush and its inevitable erosion. A resolutely independent work, Jesse Peretz's
debut feature makes few concessions to the demands of popular entertainment in
terms of involving his extremely likable characters in larger narrative actions
or external storyline. Based on a short story by Ian McEwan, the film is set in
the
First Love, Last
Rites essay from Gerald Peary
I've been a major fan of ex-Lemonhead rocker Jesse Peretz's First Love, Last Rites since viewing it as a member of the international critics' jury at the 1998 Rotterdam Film Festival. We awarded it our grand prize, and our citation praised the movie "for its challenge to the dominant American narrative through its unexpected concentration on mood, atmosphere, and sexual mystery."
Precisely. A brilliant adaptation (screenplay by David Ryan) of a subtle, affecting Ian McKewan short story.
This is about it for story: in backwater Louisiana, a college-age boy, Joey (Giovanni Ribisi), and girl, Sissel (Natasha Gregson Wagner), sequester themselves in a single-room house on stilts, where they are consumed by lovemaking. A very steamy movie! Sometimes the couple start to talk, the tilt of each conversation dependent on Sissel's ever-shifting moods. The girl's young brother, Adrian (Eli Marienthal) visits, and exhausts them with his monkeying about.
Occasionally, Joey leaves the room, and hooks up with Sissel's crazy dad, Henry (Robert John Burke), who lives in a motel room, thriving on a diet of overcooked scrambled eggs and a single slice of toast. Henry takes Joey hunting in a pea-soup swamp, and gets him involved financially in an eyebrow-raising business operation, catching eels in traps and selling them at market. "Eels are special, a smart animal," Henry waxes enthusiastic. "In Vietnam, they love eel over there."
There are no Vietnamese in this Louisiana bayou locale.
But most of the movie stays in that Women in the Dunes-like room, Joey and Sissel's love shack. It's Joey's first affair, and he's totally hooked, away from the world, far away from his home in Brooklyn. Undeniably, there's something creepy, vampiric, about the way Sissel has sucked him in. She's in control, deciding when, and how, they climb together, and she's certainly a late-teen version of the Mysterious Woman. Sissel asks Joey blunt, probing questions about his childhood, but answers inscrutably about herself and her family.
Joey: "What does your dad do?" Sissel: "Business." Joey: "What kind?" Sissel: "Different kinds."
Sissel, describing to Joey her job at a sugar factory: "I make sure that sugar gets into a bag."
The lead performances are just terrific. Giovanni Rabisi, also on screen in Saving Private Ryan, is a sympathetic nice kid as Joey with a giggly, uncertain laugh, sensing himself over his head in this whirlpool Louisiana environ. Natasha Gregson Wagner as Sissel shifts moods on a dime, from sullen to insolent to sort of loving to madly sexual. She's a pouty post-Lolita, always barefoot and in her undies, keeping Joey in her rein.
(Wagner is the daughter of actor Robert Wagner and the late actress Natalie Wood, and here she's so much the reincarnation of her Rebel Without a Cause mom: the same fabulous nose and mouth).
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Film Journal International (Ethan Alter)
World Socialist Web Site Richard Phillips
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice Ilana Lindsey
The Boston Phoenix Rotterdam Film Festival review from Gerald Peary
New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden
Pérezcano,
Rigoberto
NORTHLESS (Norteado) B+ 92
A small gem of a film, currently without a distributor, but beautifully
made, almost narrative free, as the dialogue is kept to a minimum, which becomes
part of the allure of the film, and while the subject is the timeless desire to
risk it all for a border crossing to America, this is also an exquisitely drawn
relationship drama that couldn’t be more appealing. The near wordless set up in the opening half
hour makes the words that are finally spoken priceless. Andrés (Harold Torres)
is seen trapsing across an empty Mexican landcape until he plants himself in a
bar, finally meeting a guy with a cellphone who utters the only words spoken in
the opening half hour: “Are you the guy
from Oaxaca?” We see the two of them
walking through the desert, each carrying their own water jugs, sleeping in the
sand at night, but only one of them is there in the morning. Andrés is left on his own, where we see him
wandering through the desert losing his bearings, not really knowing what
direction to take, where the wordless quiet resembles Van Sant’s GERRY (2002),
where death is always surprisingly near.
Alejandro Cantú captures the simmering heat in the flat, desolate
emptiness of the desert pointing in all directions. When we see the photo of George W. Bush and
Arnold Schwarzenegger on the wall of the Border Patrol office, we know Andrés
has succeeded in staying alive while also earning a one-way ticket back to Tijuana,
Mexico where he has to get in line behind the stream of others hiding behind
fences, peeking over to the other side where the border patrol stands between
them and still more fences that await them, all desperately waiting for their
chance to cross.
Alone and hungry, Andrés offers to help two women
making several trips carrying heavy garbage bags from their store to the trash,
eventually carrying crates of produce, loading and unloading trucks, all for a
home cooked meal at night. When he’s asked
to help again the next day, he’s at least found a way to stave off
starvation. Earning their trust, he’s
eventually allowed to sleep on the premises, take a shower, eat regular meals,
and even earn a few dollars. The owner
of the store is Ela (Alicia Laguna), a middle aged woman with eyes like a hawk
who watches his every move, while the beautiful young woman that barely utters
a word is Cata (Sonia Couoh), who is usually seen cutting vegetables, quietly
preparing the meals. Joining them
occasionally is Asensio (Luis Cárdenas), a man who appears welcome in their
home at any time who works at the meat plant in Tijuana. In time, the long silences are broken by a
few words, until eventually, to Cata’s apparent disgust, as if she has seen
this before, Ela offers Andrés a clean shirt and spends the night drinking and
dancing with him. The bar is bathed in a sensuous red light, where we discover
Andrés is married with two children back in Oaxaca, but Ela asks him to stay on
with her anyway, where the obligation is made mostly in the form of a
threat. Distance becomes familiarity
after dancing to Norteño music, where Ela is noticeably happier, repeatedly
showing him quick glances, offering Andrés occasional beers after work. Asensio, on the other hand, believes three’s
a crowd, and encourages him to keep with his efforts to cross and even offers
him a supposedly safe route, driving his truck up this enormous incline lined
by a corrugated metal fence all the way to the top, an image that couldn’t
appear more insurmountable. Andrés sets
off on foot alone where we are immediately treated to the photos of George W.
Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger once again, who in America’s interest send
Andrés back to Tijuana, where Ela has made it clear when he decided to leave
that he would not be welcome back.
Ela is out of town, however, over the weekend, and
Cata has washed his clothes while he slept.
Without Ela around, Cata’s earlier coldness and suspicion disappears, as
the two are free to explore each other’s lives, where back at the same Mexican
bar we learn that the husbands of Ela and Cata both crossed to America while
promising to send for them, but years passed without a word, a similar plight
for many Mexican wives who are soon replaced by clean supermarkets, fast food,
and the allure of America. It’s hard to
believe that any man would ever leave Cata behind, but that’s what makes this
all the more interesting. It happens. The music by Ruy García offers a temporary
respite from the pain while also offering a window into the soul of Mexico, as
there isn’t an ounce of fat or pretense in this picture which could just as
easily be a documentary, layered in the commonplace images of everyday
life. The interplay between Andrés and
the two women and the underlying erotic tension feels like a carefully drawn
play, reminiscent of a Greek tragedy where women who wait are expected to
endure by silently bearing their pain alone, where every word and gesture is
calculated with multiple meanings, where a burning intensity fills the empty
spaces. There is nothing more wise and
vulnerable than an a bared, open soul, especially given the fresh authenticity
from the naturalistic performances which are so in synch with their
surroundings. Like Kurosawa’s TOKYO
SONATA (2008), the use of Debussy’s Clair
de Lune adds an inexpressible layer of elegance that offers a unique poetic
dignity to this otherwise repulsive and insufferable divide. There are no false steps in this film where
the possibilities are endlessly intriguing, as these characters are so
carefully drawn we feel that we know each of them intimately, where their fate
is closely linked to our own, all part of the same human tragedy.
Special Note – supporting actress Alicia Laguna and
Sonia Couoh, direction Rigoberto Pérezcano, Screenplay Edgar San Juan and
Rigoberto Pérezcano, cinematography Alejandro Cantú, music Ruy García
Boxoffice
Magazine review
Pam Grady
The red-hot debate
over illegal immigration into the United States gets a human face in Mexican
filmmaker Rigoberto Pérezcano's debut narrative feature Northless.
Refreshingly free from politics, the drama focuses on an impoverished migrant
who confronts daunting obstacles in his attempt to cross the border. Drama fans
interested in a more personal look into the plight of the undocumented will
appreciate this Spanish-Mexican co-production's naturalistic performances,
timeliness, sly humor and evocative cinematography. That ought to be enough to
garner the film a limited theatrical run, but dampening its overall box-office
prospects are its glacial pace and a lack of dramatic momentum.
Like Pérezcano
himself, Andrés (Harold Torres) hails from Oaxaca in southern Mexico. Lured by
the promise of better opportunity in the U.S., he heads north.Northless
is at its most effective in early scenes after Andrés is dropped off alone in
the desert. Cinematographer Alejandro Cantú's camera suggests the punishing
heat of the sun in an arid world where sparse scrub offers little shade, and
also communicates Andrés' isolation in the desert's vast spaces. There is real
tension in the sequences of Andrés’ journey, the danger surrounding the
traveler only too evident.
Andrés is not
alone as he appears. The U.S. Border Patrol is there, too. Agents deliver
Andrés to Tijuana, a place that, to him, might as well be purgatory. He remains
determined to sneak into California, but attempt after attempt ends in failure.
Stranded, with no way to move forward of back, he finds friendship with Ela
(Alicia Laguna), the owner of a bodega; Cata (Sonia Couoh), Ela's helper and
their pal Asensio (Luis Cárdenas). His relationships with the women quickly
become fraught with erotic tension as Ela makes little secret of her attraction
for Andrés, while Andrés laconically pursues the younger, prettier and very
reluctant Cata. Both women have husbands who have disappeared into the United
States, while Andrés has a wife and kids back in Oaxaca. Spouses and children
hardly matter, though, in lives that have become strictly improvisational.
Northless might have been a compelling film despite
the slow pace and lack of incident if only Pérezcano and his co-writer Edgar
San Juan had paid more attention to character development. When Andrés stands
on the sidewalk on the road leading up to the American border, only yards from
the place he longs to be but as separate from it as if he were standing on the
moon, it ought to be an affecting moment. It isn't, because Andrés remains a
cipher throughout. It is never even clear whether his dream of living in the
United States is a way to support his family or abandon them. Torres is
excellent at suggesting Andrés' essential melancholy, but whether that feeling
is a response to his situation or just his nature is a mystery, because there
is no depth to the character. Lacking that strong central figure and a sense of
urgency, what begins so promisingly eventually drifts into a listlessness from
which it never recovers.
Variety (Jay Weissberg) review
The theme of
Mexican immigrants trying to cross the border into the U.S. has been so
overdone, it's almost shocking to discover there really are new, compelling
ways to tell this story. "Northless" will have to
contend with an audience tired of the subject, but Rigoberto Perezcano's
understated, warm, non-exploitative take on a young man's failed crossings, and
the temporary life he has in Tijuana, reps an impressive debut and heralds a
much-needed new voice. A healthy fest life is assured, but a critical push will
be needed for theatrical play.
Perezcano
immediately upends expectations with a dialogue-free opening, in which Andres
(Harold Torres) eventually manages to hitch a ride from Oaxaca to the border.
When Andres stumbles straight into a patrol, the helmer uses a shorthand style
to telegraphically provide all the necessary information: shots of men and
women (dignified, if tired) being processed through the system, then the
turnstiles, and suddenly, Andres is on the broken streets of Tijuana.
While waiting for
the next chance to cross, Andres asks Ela (Alice Laguna) if he can help haul
some vegetables at her grocery store. She's wary but welcoming, as is her
friend Asensio (Luis Cardenas); they know his type, recognizing their own loved
ones to a degree. Ela's employee Cata (Sonia Couoh, especially good) is less
friendly, not quite so trusting and even a little resentful.
The characters
gradually reveal themselves: Ela is the most forward (she's the boss),
obviously in need of sexual companionship. Andres is married with two kids back
home, while Ela's husband crossed the border some time earlier and hasn't been
in touch in years. When Ela leaves on a business trip, Cata relaxes, now able
to vie for Andres' attention; she, too, has a husband in the U.S.
Ela tries to
convince Andres to stay, but he has an almost instinctive need to get across,
despite a hazy notion of what awaits him. The film avoids any sense of
omniscience, much as it eschews melodrama or tragedy: Perezcano keeps things in
the here and now, his interest focused on extremely likable characters in
limbo. Occasional shots of the corrugated metal fence abutting Ela's property
and literally separating Mexico from its prosperous neighbor come as a reminder
of the physical proximity of this uncertain utopia, where people are swallowed
up once they succeed in crossing.
In keeping with
the overall economy of style, the thesps deliver subtle but standout perfs,
bringing a wealth of background details that inform every action without the
need for it all to be spelled out. The four characters are an unlikely quartet,
repping a mix of classes and ethnicities, yet their dignity and kindness
supersede their differences. After so many pics mired in the wretchedness of
illegal immigrants, "Northless" is an incredibly refreshing, deeply
human take on this unstoppable phenomenon.
D.p. Alejandro Cantu, who has
collaborated with Julian Hernandez to sumptuous
effect, works beautifully with Perezcano's very different aesthetic, using an
almost docu style filled with warmth and humor. Terrific editing by Miguel
Schverdfinger (Lucrecia Martel's "The Headless Woman")
often furthers the wry commentary; Perezcano's unexpected use of Debussy's
"Clair de lune" is inspired.
Camera (color),
Alejandro Cantu; editor, Miguel Schverdfinger; music, Cornelio Reyna;
production designer, Ivonne Fuentes; costume designers, Laura Garcia de la Mora, Gaby
Fernandez; sound (Dolby Digital),
Pablo Tamez, Ruy Garcia;
associate producer, Rigoberto Perezcano; casting, Viridiana Olvera. Reviewed at San
Sebastian Film Festival (Zabaltegi New Directors), Sept. 19, 2009. (Also in
Toronto Film Festival -- Discovery.) Running time: 91 MIN.
Perisic, Vladimir
ORDINARY PEOPLE
Ordinary
People Howard Feinstein at Cannes
from Screendaily
This powerful Serbian film has an English title which succinctly sums up its subject: soldiers who violate international law during wartime without self-judgment, viewing their acts as banalities on the same level as smoking a cigarette or brushing their teeth. Perisic does not depict these young men as monsters, but as uninteresting products of a system of rigid discipline that, over time, eradicates one’s sense of self as well as one’s conscience.
He makes his point by putting us inside the head of a simple
conscript, Dzoni (Popovic), during the 1990s when the Serbs were fighting
Muslims and Croats over their secession from
Perisic takes his time showing us the young man’s evolution into a murder machine. The camera lingers on him as he sits in the grass with nothing to do. After the first batch of men arrives, Dzoni tells his macho commanding officer, Kouki (Isakovic), that he cannot carry out the order. He tries anyway, but turns his head and misses his target; another man finishes the victim off. Out of ennui, and the desire to be accepted by his comrades, and possibly the wish to please the man in charge—the psychology of military training put them in the role of father figures—Dzoni becomes thicker-skinned. He does not hesitate to fire, then becomes even more brutal. By this time his features have altered, making him look somewhat harder.
This plot may not seem sufficient to carry a feature, but the director’s artful skill carries it along. Perisic opts for a precise, minimalist style with mostly static shots in carefully framed long takes, often with windows and doorways to double the effect. The sparseness affords him an opportunity to play with light and shadow: it might seem a dichotomy, but he treats this heavy, horrid subject poetically.
We never lose sight of the fact that the single day in which the action takes place is an extremely hot one. White walls give off a punishing glare, Dzoni squints and sweats. There is an existential component to this story; it’s possible that similarities to Albert Camus’s The Stranger are conscious. For Dzoni, new calluses on his right hand are the only reminder of what he did. Foreseeing a potential problem, Kouki tells him, “Nobody forced you.”
Fabien Lemercier at Cannes from Cineuropa, May 16, 2009
Cannes.
"Ordinary People" David
Hudson at
Jon Frosch at
Jordan Mintzer at
Perry, Alex Ross
THE COLOR WHEEL B 83
USA (83 mi) 2011 Official site
A misery-loves-company film where the venom feels as if laced with steroids, introducing two of the more atrociously unlikable leads who just happen to be the co-writers, Alex Ross Perry (the director, editor, lead actor, and producer) as Colin and Carlen Altman as JR, a brother and sister act that couldn’t be more uniquely despicable. From the outset, this film is designed to alienate as many people as possible, to frustrate and completely alter one’s expectations through a theater of discomfort that reaches epic proportions of such absurd heights that one actually starts developing a begrudging respect for just how narcissistically unpleasant these two individuals really are. Shot over 18 days on grainy 16 mm Black and White film by Sean Price Williams, working with as small a crew as possible, this is a throwback to a different kind of film, not really Mumblecore, which features aimless and often unemployed characters ambivalent about their seemingly non-existent future, which this most certainly is, but it’s more a cage match of blistering verbal assaults, highlighting a competitive sibling rivalry where one remains profoundly shocked at the depths one is willing to stoop to in order to insult and eviscerate the others character with viciously personal attacks. This kind of take-no-prisoners mentality breaks new territory for brother and sister films, suggesting an inner rage and hostility heretofore unseen in movies. One can think of the family dysfunction and outrageous dark comedy of Mark Waters directing Wendy MacLeod’s play THE HOUSE OF YES (1997), where Parker Posey steals the show as a mentally challenged sister who dresses up as Jackie-O while she has incestuous relations with her brother (Josh Hamilton) as JFK. But the stinging remarks of that film are both more comical and more tragically poignant, bearing little resemblance to this flamboyantly eccentric but more emotionally shallow effort. The real interest in this film lies in the audacious style-over-substance presentation, a free-for-all of anything goes for the sake of honesty, fuck the consequences, so to speak, almost exclusively shown through attack mode dialogue by two friendless characters who are obviously no threat to anyone but themselves, whose self-esteem apparently couldn’t be lower, whose only claim to fame is a kind of pathetic, mouse-that-roared, stream-of-conscious ability to hurl insults, but overall, outside the brash performances, one wonders what impact, if any, this film might have.
Chosen by IndieWire (Indiewire's 2011 end-of-year poll for best undistributed film) and The Village Voice (New York Film Poll - Village Voice) as the best film of the year without a distributor, rejected by both Sundance and the South by Southwest Film Festivals, the tone of the film may remind viewers of Vince Gallo’s men-behaving-badly movies, BUFFALO ’66 (1998) and THE BROWN BUNNY (2003), where Gallo is one of the driving forces behind the film, also Philip Roth’s scathingly brutal literary portrayal of family life is a model for the dialogue heavy fireworks in the screenplay. Despite the obvious discomfort factor, where characters bludgeon one another throughout, including others they meet along the way who may be even more screwed up than they are, this is a bare-bones project immersed in a sea of unpleasantness, but given a dark, comical edge. The bookended opening and closing scenes suggest there are recurring elements of wish fulfillment, which are not only rejected but harshly denounced, leaving one with nothing else to do except offer equally bitter personal recriminations in response. When life with his girlfriend is going nowhere, where she’s seen turning the pages of a magazine using boredom as a means of thwarting all sexual advances, Colin’s sister arrives out of nowhere asking for his help, turning this into a road movie through the turnpikes of the Northeast where each is soon confronted by the horrors of their pasts, namely each other, where they bicker endlessly about everything under the sun, but that’s not nearly as sad as JR having to confront her ex, a pompous college professor (Bob Byington, also a producer) with a near Warholian deluded sense of grandeur and sadistic self-importance, where his idea of feeling good about himself is stepping on the self-esteem of others, kicking them and stomping on them while they are down. One wonders why anybody would put up with this nonsense, but the audience quickly realizes nobody else in the world can stand these two except each other, yet even their lives together are a constant stream of insults and fights.
With John Bosch creating the original music and the sound design, there’s a blur of images streaming by as their road trip takes them through a series of diners, cheap motels, and thrift stores, where they’re forced to revisit shallow people they grew up with but have no interest in whatsoever, where JR in particular has to continually lie and exaggerate what she’s doing with her life in order to appear to be a success in their eyes, afraid to be seen as the pathetic loser she really is to feeble-minded former friends whose narrow view of the world hasn’t changed much since high school, who are now little more than ghosts from her past, completely disconnected from her life, unable to see her for who she is. Why it should matter what they think is an open question, as it’s clear neither one of them has any intentions of ever seeing any of them again. This sense of outright humiliation and self delusion runs throughout the film, where clearly they relish selfishly telling others how they hold them in complete contempt, but towards the end the focus shifts into a strange interior world where illusion begins receiving greater embellishment than reality, suggesting possible dreamlike effects. With both collapsed on the sofa in a state of road weary exhaustion afterwards JR goes on a long, rambling monologue that starts out imagining innocently enough what her brother would do in a certain situation, probably make a fool out of himself, but her soliloquy becomes more and more autobiographical, eventually feeling intensely confessional, where it’s clear that while she’s talking about him, she’s interjecting thoughts and feelings about herself, where the two, at least for the moment, intersect, realizing they only have each other, becoming jointly intertwined in illicitly compromising incestual behavior that may or may not be real, as it all may be imagined, where the truth, hard as it is to decipher, never reveals itself when you’re constantly inventing a substitute version to replace your real self. By the end of the film, it feels like delusion has taken over and reality has left the building. Feeling a bit like Sartre’s theatrical play No Exit, one wonders what could be worse than the thought of never being able to see past your own view.
New York Magazine David Edelstein
Chosen both by IndieWire and The Village Voice as the best film of the year without a distributor, Alex Ross Perry’s The Color Wheel might also be the most unpleasant. It’s actually the most entertaining unpleasant film I’ve seen in years. Perry and his co-writer, Carlen Altman, play a semi-estranged brother and sister on a road trip in a trash-strewn car to move her stuff out of her lover-professor’s apartment. At rat-tat-tat speeds, they verbally flay each other before they’re undermined in turn by ex-boyfriends, crushes, and former schoolmates. Yet the vibe is ickily erotic.
Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
Shot on 16-millimeter, this cheapo black-and-white road movie by Alex Ross Perry is the most compelling New York indie I've seen since Ronald Bronstein's Frownland (2007). An angry young looker (Carlen Altman) and her tall, dorky brother (Perry) set off on a car trip to reclaim her stuff from the broadcasting professor who's just terminated their teacher-student romance. Most of the movie consists of the two siblings mercilessly needling one another about their gaping emotional flaws, and the nasty banter is so cruel, knowing, and funny that only in the end does one realize it's sheer compulsion. Altman and Perry wrote the movie together, and despite the relentless verbal combat, they're smart enough to let a devastating scene at the end play out in near silence.
Village Voice [Nick Pinkerton]
Alex Ross Perry's second feature, shot in 16mm black-and-white, is an offhand-picturesque road-trip movie with a mock-epic northeastern itinerary. It's also a cage-match brother-and-sister act, revolving around the curiously complimentary relationship between JR (Carlen Altman), a defiantly unemployable broadcast journalism major, and her younger brother, Colin (Alex Ross Perry), whom she recruits to come along as backup while she clears her belongings out of the Boston home of her professor and ex-lover, Neil (Bob Byington). It is at first a mystery to both Colin and the viewer as to why he has been selected for this task, for he and his sister have a habit of saying to one another, point-blank, the cruelest things that they can think of. "You make me, Mom and Dad, and my girlfriend sick to our stomachs every time you come up in conversation," is one of Colin's characteristic tossed-off lines. Gloves-off verbal abuse, it turns out, is the mother tongue in The Color Wheel, delivered in blistering fusillades by characters far too nasty and tetchy to ingratiate themselves—though they're vividly individual monsters of id. Like Howard Hawks's Twentieth Century, it's a travelogue movie about a couple whose impossible, porcupine personalities leave them safe, finally, for nobody's company but each other's.
The New Yorker Magazine [Richard Brody]
In this new comedy, the director Alex Ross Perry gives a harsh, sarcastic twist to the intimate rivalry of siblings. He co-stars as Colin, a diffident aspiring writer whose older sister, J.R. (Carlen Altman), a proud and caustic aspiring actress, has dropped out of college after ending a relationship with “one of the top broadcast-journalism professors in the entire state.” She recruits Colin to join her on a road trip to her ex’s house to get her belongings. The siblings’ antic humiliations begin at a Christian-themed motel, where they must pretend to be a married couple, and continue through a series of chance encounters, including one with their former high-school friends (Kate Lyn Sheil and Anna Bak-Kvapil). Along the way, they pummel each other verbally with their constant squabbling and dredge up several decades of pent-up grudges. Perry directs these uproarious rapid-fire flareups with exquisite comic timing and incisive comic framing (the black-and-white cinematography is by Sean Price Williams); he and Altman go at each other with claws bared, revealing the terrifying vulnerability of a pair of wounded souls who know each other’s wounds all too well.
The House Next Door [Glenn Heath Jr.]
Shot in ultra-grainy black and white, Alex Ross Perry's The Color Wheel is both an obnoxious deconstruction of the classic road film and a fascinating oddity that contemplates another slow-motion dive into one strange emotional rabbit hole. Grown siblings Colin (Perry) and JR (Carlen Altman) don't get along, and their estrangement is made perfectly clear in the film's abrasive first act. Racist jokes, casual dismissals, and plenty of shit-talking make up the brunt of their relentless banter as the pair traverses cross-country to move JR's belongings out of her ex-boyfriend's house. During their trip, the siblings make fun of a hillbilly motel clerk, mock JR's pretentious ex (who says things like "your stuff is taking up psychic energy"), and, during the film's revelatory denouement, attend a house party with old high school acquaintances. But plot points such as these are merely a ruse to get these two characters into the same space for lengthy amounts of time. While incredibly tedious on the surface, their conversations are mired in densely layered dialogue that foreshadows darker and more uncomfortable intentions to come.
In this sense, The Color Wheel is all about what is repressed and unspoken. As the film finds a breezy groove all its own, something shocking happens; Colin and JR begin to enjoy each other's company, and so do we. It's a small miracle you don't end up hating these people considering the vapid first impression they make. They're far more nuanced than they originally suggest, thanks in large part to the illuminating performances by Perry and Altman. All the hipster angst and verbal diarrhea is a façade for lost souls trying to deal with some truly uncomfortable emotions and doubts about the future. The Color Wheel comes to a disturbing boil in an audacious single take where JR and Colin express themselves truthfully for the first time, only to enter another dark moral void. It's a cinematic achievement that's most striking in hindsight, after the ramifications of one life-changing decision filters outward to a grander realization: that laws of desire aren't always rational.
Documenting a road trip undertaken by one of the most plausibly despicable brother-sister pairings in all of cinema, Alex Ross Perry’s second feature The Color Wheel is an astonishing work of pathos that broaches the question of redemption by way of a sincerity shellacked with layer upon layer of cynical vitriol.
The director plays Colin, a twentysomething who has all but given up on attaining an existence that is conventionally interesting. Living with his parents and his girlfriend (who couldn’t seem less attracted to him) under one roof, he is the picture of thinly veiled social immobility. His sense of humor largely hinges on a disingenuous racism that he alone finds funny (“My sexual preference is for white women and I don’t expect to be discriminated against because of that,” he declares half-seriously and totally pathetically). His awkward movements—which suggest a self-loathing walking corpse—convey an estrangement between mind and body; his fetish for gargoyle figurines implies a development not so much arrested as aborted.
Colin’s sister J.R. (Carlen Altman, the film’s co-writer) is just as repulsive: an irrepressible narcissist who didn't learn to read until she was 10 and who aspires to become a TV weather girl, she is her family’s black sheep and then some, excluded even from a family trip to Puerto Rico. Having recently broken up with her boyfriend Neil (her former broadcasting professor, played with ingenious monotone wit by filmmaker Bob Byington), J.R. asks Colin’s help with retrieving the few belongings she has left behind in her ex’s apartment. The two siblings hit the road and plunge headfirst into a world that is, miraculously, even crueler than they are.
The Color Wheel makes spectacle out of schadenfreude: the exhilarating rapidity with which Colin and J.R. verbally eviscerate each other almost obscures the brilliance of Perry and Altman’s script. Their plentiful mutual disdain and the contempt that their environment harbors for them accounts for much of the film’s engagingly sour tone. The narrative progresses by way of simple, often gorgeous black-and-white 16mm compositions (hat tip to Sean Price Williams, who also shot Ronald Bronstein’s exquisitely feel-bad Frownland and Perry’s deliriously spacey 2009 debut Impolex). These images contribute to the oddly serene mood of the journey’s beginnings, an atmosphere borrowed wholesale from The Brown Bunny. More than a little bit paradoxically, The Color Wheel smothers you with its characters’ prickly dispositions while simultaneously giving you plenty of mental room to consider the implications of the psychosocial chaos unfolding within its rich mise en scène.
The result is a thorough examination of a generation-specific collective anxiety about doing anything, and of whether it’s possible (or even worthwhile) to try to redeem oneself in a world gone ornery. I don’t expect to see another film released this year that approaches the crux of the Human Condition Today as effectively. Perry plants an exceptionally thorny rose bush on the grave shared by Jean Eustache, Céline, and other, similarly ruthless observers of society’s hypocrisies and poorly concealed shames. That a filmmaker of his experience (working quickly with a minuscule budget) is responsible suggests that American independent cinema’s young, repertory theater-frequenting contingent is on the verge of achieving something on par with their oft-acknowledged idols.
Slant Magazine Joseph Jon Lanthier
Meet In The Lobby [Norm Schrager]
Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
NewCity Chicago Ray Pride
Film Fracture [Tom von Logue Newth]
The Flickering Wall [Jorge Mourinha]
The Color Wheel — Inside Movies Since 1920 - Boxoffice Magazine Sara Maria Vizcarrondo
THE COLOR WHEEL Facets Multi Media
Vancouver International Film Festival 2011: The Color Wheel, Mr ... Sean Axmaker from The House Next Door
New York Times: director interview May 13, 2012
A Conversation With Alex Ross Perry Michael Tully interview from Hammer to Nail, May 18, 2012
A Conversation with Alex Ross Perry About The Color Wheel Miriam Bale interview from Slant, June 19, 2011
An Interview With Alex Ross Perry, Writer, Director, Star of The Color ... Steve Erickson interviews the director from LA Weekly, June 7, 2012, also seen here: Village Voice
Hitting the books with writer-director Alex Ross Perry | The Bleader Ben Sachs interview from The Reader, June 26, 2012
The Hollywood Reporter [Sheri Linden]
TimeOut Chicago
A.A. Dowd
Boston Globe Wesley Morris
Review: The Color Wheel - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough
The Portland Weekly [Christopher Gray]
Chicago Tribune Robert Abele
The New York Times [A.O. Scott] also seen here: New York Times
Perry, Hart
VALLEY OF TEARS
USA
A film that resembles a raw and unfinished work, as it has many historical gaps which are unaccounted for, not adequately explained, and it just feels incomplete. The film examines a Mexican-American led onion strike in South Texas in the 1970’s, led by a young female field worker, who helps organize the Mexican community, which is politically displaced, despite comprising about 90% of the population. The landowners and the political power remains in the hands of the whites, who are not about to cave in to the Mexican worker demands, so they rally against the strikers in the small town of 8000 in Raymondville, Texas. It takes until the mid-to-late 1990’s before the balance of power shifts, however many issues are never adequately explained, such as the wage issue of the field hands, representation in the school system, or other political avenues. An off-screen guitarist plays throughout, utilizing various styles of acoustic music, and while the film has a look of authenticity, it seems like little, if any progress is made.
Perry,
Frank
Frank Perry |
Biography and Filmography | 1930 - Hollywood.com
Perry established himself as a TV documentary producer before making an acclaimed feature directorial debut with "David and Lisa" (1962), written by his wife Eleanor. A sensitive, finely acted portrait of two mentally disturbed teenagers, the black-and-white film was shot on a minimal budget and possessed a distinctly independent tone. Perry and his wife collaborated on several more offbeat and savvy studies of social mores, notably their adaptation of the John Cheever short story, "The Swimmer" (1968; direction completed by Sydney Pollack) and "Diary of a Mad Housewife" (1970). Perry's work, always earnest if rather obvious, suffered somewhat following his divorce in 1970 but he returned to form with the spoof western, "Rancho Deluxe" (1976), scripted by novelist Thomas McGuane. He scored another popular success with the suburban satire "Compromising Positions" (1985).
Perry's work in fiction TV was infrequent but memorable. He produced and directed "A Christmas Memory" (ABC, 1966), a superior TV-movie adapted from Truman Capote's Southern childhood memoir of a holiday spent with his eccentric aunt Sookie. Still aired periodically, the telefilm has become something of a classic. Two years later, Perry returned to Capote country for "Thanksgiving Visitor" (ABC, 1968). After a long hiatus from the medium, he helmed "Dummy" (CBS, 1979), a powerful crime docudrama starring LeVar Burton as an illiterate deaf-mute accused of murder and Paul Sorvino as his deaf court-appointed attorney. Perry also directed Abby Mann's teleplay for "Skag" (NBC, 1980), a memorable TV-movie cum successful pilot starring Karl Malden as a feisty aging steel worker battling back from a stroke.
In 1990, Perry was diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer. As part of his battle against the disease, he produced, directed and starred in "On the Bridge" (1993), a filmed journal that explored the various methods of treatments he underwent and also included interviews with cancer patients and oncologists. Perry believed that by working on the film, he had prolonged his life.
Frank Perry | American
director | Britannica.com biography by Michael Barson
Frank Perry Explained -
Everything Explained Today biography
Frank Perry - NNDB.com brief profile
Frank Perry - Movies, Bio and Lists on
MUBI
FRANK & ELEANOR PERRY photos
Frank
Perry | American Cinematheque
Frank Perry - Director by Film Rank
- Films101
Frank Perry Article | notesonafilm Matthew Mandarano, also seen here: Along the Bridge: The Films of Frank Perry (Undated) (Undated)
frank and eleanor perry -
Moviecrazed (Undated)
1964 Press Photo
Frank Perry stage and film director | Historic Images
Frank
Perry, 65, the Director Who Filmed 'David and Lisa' - NYTimes ... Mel Gussow obituary from The New York Times, August 31, 1995
Obituaries
: Frank Perry; Director of 'David and Lisa' - latimes Myrna Oliver, September 1, 1995
OBITUARY:
Frank Perry | Obituaries | News | The Independent Paul Ryan, September 11, 1995
Domestic
Disturbances by Bilge Ebiri - Moving Image Source Bilge Ebiri, August 25, 2008
Out
Demons Out!: The American Nightmare of Frank Perry Andy Seven, June 18, 2011
They
live by night: Two by Frank Perry: Man on a Swing (1975) and ... Bilge Ebiri, March 3, 2013
John
Cheever vs. Burt Lancaster and the making of 'The Swimmer ... Paul Gallagher from Dangerous Minds, July 14, 2014
177. THE SWIMMER (1968)
| 366 Weird Movies Alfred Eaker,
August 7, 2014
The Lost
Cinema of Frank Perry | Keyframe - Explore the world of film. Kieran Turner from Fandor, August 29, 2015
Movies
that make you think: 186. US directors Frank Perry's and ... Jugu Abraham, November 1, 2015
Biosphere,
Part I: Interviews About Writing Film Biographies, with Author Justin Bozung on
Director Frank Perry Daniel
Kremer, November 2015
Interview
with Frank Perry | Interviews | Roger Ebert October 1, 1972
Frank Perry - Wikipedia, the
free encyclopedia
DAVID
AND LISA
USA (95 mi) 1962
David And Lisa
| Jonathan Rosenbaum
Probably not everything it was cracked up to be in 1963, this independent, low-budget first feature by Frank Perry, about two emotionally disturbed teenagers (Keir Dullea and Janet Margolin) who fall in love, was sufficiently sensitive to elicit the admiration of Jean Renoir at the time. I suspect he dream sequences haven’t stood up very well, but Howard da Silva does a good job as a sympathetic doctor. With Neva Patterson and Clifton James; written by Eleanor Perry.
David and Lisa - TCM.com Jeff Stafford
David (Keir Dullea), a young man suffering from an overwhelming
fear of being touched, is admitted to a home for disturbed teenagers run by Dr.
Alan Swinford (Howard Da Silva). Though at first resistant to interacting with
the other patients, David finds himself drawn to Lisa, a schizophrenic girl who
speaks only in rhymes. Their relationship, which grows from antagonism to one
of trust, gives them both the strength to confront their inner demons and hope
for the future.
The debut film for the husband-and-wife team of Frank and Eleanor Perry, David
and Lisa (1962) was a surprise commercial success when it was first released.
Made on a remarkably low budget of $200,000, the film worked on several levels
- as a technically accomplished first feature, as a love story, and most
importantly, as a more realistic look at the treatment of mental illness minus
the usual psychobabble and sensationalism associated with Hollywood produced
films in the same genre. What particularly impressed critics were the
naturalistic performances and the seamless mixture of documentary-like realism
with nightmarish dream sequences, all strikingly photographed in black and
white by Leonard Hirschfield in and around Philadelphia. In a year that saw the
release of such landmark films as Lawrence of Arabia, To Kill a
Mockingbird, The Manchurian Candidate and Lolita, it was no
small achievement that David and Lisa won Oscar® nominations for Best Director
and Best Screenplay (adapted by Eleanor Perry from the case study, Lisa and
David by Dr. Theodore Isaac Rubin). The film was remade for television by
co-producer Oprah Winfrey in 1998 with Sidney Poitier as the psychiatrist,
Lukas Haas as David and Brittany Murphy as Lisa.
While most psychiatrists have since criticized David and Lisa for its
suggestion that David's obsessive-compulsive behavior was caused by his
mother's dominant personality, the film still works as a moving and insightful
character study with unexpected touches of humor. And it remains one of Keir
Dullea's finest performances though he admitted in Current Biography
that the film actually hampered his career for awhile: "It got so that I
began to hate David and Lisa. I'd walk down a street and people would
come over and say, 'Hello, David, can I touch you?' And...I just couldn't break
the mold professionally in either the movies or TV work I got after it."
Director Frank Perry was one of several filmmakers who was associated with the
New York City independent film movement of the late fifties and early sixties,
a period that saw the emergence of such talents as John Cassavetes (Shadows,
1959) and Shirley Clarke (The Connection, 1962). Perry, who studied
acting under Lee Strasberg and worked as a theatre director, went on to
collaborate with his wife (as screenwriter) on several critically acclaimed
features (Last Summer (1969), Diary of a Mad Housewife, 1970)
before they ended their marriage and working relationship in 1981. Unlike
Cassavetes who abandoned Hollywood financed projects after his unhappy
experiences on Too Late Blues (1961) and A Child is Waiting
(1963), the Perrys managed to work within the studio system to create
thought-provoking but accessible entertainments for most of their partnership.
Since their split, neither filmmaker enjoyed a success comparable to their
earlier work though, ironically, Frank will probably be best remembered for the
camp classic Mommie Dearest, which he directed in 1981 with Faye Dunaway
playing Joan Crawford.
David
and Lisa (1962) – CINEBEATS
Kimberly Lindbergs, also seen condensed here: Cinedelica
[Kimberly Lindbergs]
American independent cinema has had a long and fascinating history. One of the most critically acclaimed early independent films to come out of the US was undoubtedly Frank Perry’s David and Lisa (1962), which was finally released on DVD last year by Image Entertainment.
In David and Lisa we’re introduced to two young, attractive and deeply troubled patients living at a mental health clinic. David (Keir Dullea) suffers from an extreme phobia similar to what many would refer to as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) today, which makes him go berserk anytime another person touches him. Lisa (Janet Margolin) has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and insists on speaking only in rhymes. Somehow these two mentally damaged individuals manage to overcome their personal difficulties and form an uneasy friendship. As the film unfolds their relationship deepens and they’re finally able to help each other come to terms with their psychoses.
Keir Dullea and Janet Margolin are both very good in their roles as David and Lisa. Dullea does a terrific job of portraying an angry and emotionally damaged young man, but I was especially impressed with Janet Margolin. Margolin is really lovely, but also very talented and she imbues Lisa with the perfect combination of innocence and world-weariness. It’s a shame that the actress didn’t find more worthwhile starring roles throughout her rather brief career. She clearly shows great sensitivity as an actress here and her moving performance will stick with you long after David and Lisa has ended.
The film is beautifully shot by director Frank Perry and features some truly impressive black and white cinematography from Leonard Hirschfield. There’s a wonderfully surreal aspect to the film’s eye-catching dream sequences and the melancholy mood of the institution is underscored by the use of stark shadows and startling bursts of light. The film also manages to perfectly convey the isolation that both David and Lisa are clearly feeling with expressive close-ups and long takes. Unfortunately David and Lisa suffers from its melodramatic script (written by Frank Perry’s wife at the time, Eleanor Perry) and the overbearing score by composer Mark Lawrence seems totally out of place and distracting at times, which often diminishes the film’s more subtle moments. I’d personally like to see David and Lisa re-scored by a composer who is more cautious and creative.
When David and Lisa was originally released in 1962 it caused quite a stir. Film critics applauded the movie and audiences embraced it. The film was nominated for many awards, including an Oscar for Best Director. Now that some 45 year have passed since it’s original release, it might be hard for modern audiences to fully appreciate what all the fuss was about. But when David and Lisa is compared to other films about mental illness made prior to it, I think it’s easier to understand the film’s importance. Today many are embracing pharmaceuticals over psychotherapy, but David and Lisa offers an intelligent and sensitive study of mental illness that dares to look at several possible explanations and cures. Parental culpability, childhood trauma, as well as an individual’s sensitivity to their environment, are just a few of the factors that can exacerbate mental illness and I was impressed with the way the film subtly explored them. In the end David and Lisa encourages individuals to take charge of their own lives as well as their mental health and its message should still resonate with many viewers.
Dan Schneider on David &
Lisa - Cosmoetica
David and Lisa (1962) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com David Sterritt
The Spinning Image
Graeme Clark
Secretly
Scary: 1962's DAVID AND LISA - Shock Till You Drop Lee Gambin
Best
Director Home Stretch: Frank Perry for David and Lisa | Cliff's ... Cliff’s Oscar Quest,June 2, 2014
DVD
Savant Glenn Erickson
DVD
Talk Francis Rizzo III
Bleeding
Skull [Joseph A. Ziemba] DVD review
David
and Lisa, The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, Ladies They ... Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine
Film
Appreciation: David and Lisa - Thinking Cinema Dana Lemaster
Talking Pictures [Howard Schumann]
Cinematic Threads [Matthew Lotti] (capsule)
MUBI [Adrian Curry] movie poster
The Cleveand Movie Blog [Charles Cassady Jr.]
New York Times [Bosley Crowther]
DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
David and Lisa - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Obituaries
: Frank Perry; Director of 'David and Lisa' - latimes September 1, 1995
LAST
SUMMER
USA (95 mi) 1969
One of those winsome, nostalgic beach movies (this one has a wounded seagull). Four gawky teenagers spend the summer on Long Island, learning the usual, bittersweet rites-of-passage lessons about life, love and loyalty. Director Perry was renowned for the way he probed human relationships. He's helped here by an insightful script adapted by his wife Eleanor Perry from a novel by Evan Hunter. The acting is also a cut above the average: Cathy Burns, who's since disappeared without trace, was Oscar-nominated for her depiction of a troubled adolescent.
Last Summer (1969) - TCM.com David Sterritt
Last Summer (1969) might make you squirm if you were an
adolescent in the 1960s, or if you were an adolescent, period. The drama's
extremely narrow focus precludes any possibility of high artistic merit, but
since its obsessions - sexual attraction, sexual confidence, sexual rivalry -
coincide precisely with the obsessions of the characters, it accurately
captures what life was like for teenagers growing up absurd in midcentury
American society. Although the picture doesn't contain any "major
truth," to borrow a phrase from the dialogue, its minor truths feel almost
embarrassingly authentic until its one completely false scene - an outburst of
violence and melodrama at the very end - brings it to a close.
The action takes place almost entirely on Fire Island, a long sandbar off Long
Island with the Atlantic Ocean on one side, the Great South Bay on the other,
and upper-class summer homes built on its beaches and dunes. The main
characters spend school vacations on those beaches and in those homes. The
story's dominant figure is Sandy, a pretty girl from Manhattan with a penchant
for mischief, a rude vocabulary, and (she claims) an IQ in the genius range.
One sunny day two boys wander into her life: Peter and Dan, who take an
immediate liking to Sandy's brash manner, not to mention her willingness to
shed her bikini top now and then.
As soon as they meet, a test of courage appears: Sandy has rescued a wounded
bird that will die if they don't remove the fishhook stuck in its throat. The
boys rise to the challenge, earning Sandy's delighted thanks. They are now
three teenage musketeers, shielding one another from the company of boring
grownups. Before long they're joined by a fourth companion named Rhoda, a prim
and slightly younger kid who values their friendship even though she
disapproves of their wild ways. Together they have various small adventures -
training the seagull, taunting boys on the mainland, going on a collective
blind date with a surprised Latino who proves to be a very good sport.
Meanwhile they flirt, occasionally pet, and play an ongoing game of chicken
with their sexual urges, bringing about the story's overcooked and arbitrary
climax.
Released in 1969, Last Summer was directed by Frank Perry from a screenplay by
Eleanor Perry, his wife and frequent collaborator, based on an eponymous novel
by Evan Hunter, whose writing credits range from the screenplay for Alfred
Hitchcock's classic The Birds (1963) to numerous TV episodes and crime
novels. The Perrys had dealt sensitively with youthful emotions in their first
feature, the low-budget drama David and Lisa (1962), about two severely
neurotic teenagers who meet in a mental institution and work their way slowly
and painfully to a trusting relationship. The year before Last Summer the
Perrys made The Swimmer (1968), another unconventional look at emotional
anxiety, with Burt Lancaster as a troubled man paddling through miles of
backyard swimming pools, revealing his past in conversations along the way.
Last Summer called for a youthful cast, and Frank Perry assembled a good one.
For the key roles of Sandy and Peter he chose 21-year-old Barbara Hershey and
18-year-old Richard Thomas, both seasoned performers with extensive TV credits
to their names. The slightly older Bruce Davison made his first screen
appearance as Dan, and Catherine Burns made her second as Rhoda, earning an
Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Although she plays the
youngest character, Burns was the oldest member of the quartet - at 24, she was
a year older than Davison - and her mannerisms seem a bit studied, as if Rhoda
weren't longing for a taste of emotional freedom but trying to become even more
uptight and stuffy than she already is. Burns probably owes her Oscar®
nomination to Rhoda's one big scene, a lengthy monologue describing the
untimely death of her mother, who drowned as the result of exactly the kind of
impulsive, irresponsible behavior that Rhoda is edging toward with her new
friends. This said, Burns is always likable in a challenging part, and when she
becomes the victim of reckless sexual violence in the final scene, Perry's
camerawork refrains from making a spectacle of her - perhaps out of sympathy
with the outrageously abused character, but also because Allied Artists recut
the climactic rape to dodge the X rating initially given to the film.
Reviews of Last Summer were mixed. Time said that bits of dialogue and
the story's oscillation between poignancy and shock revealed an "enormous
debt to J.D. Salinger," adding that the debt goes unpaid except for
Burns's performance as a quintessential outsider who is "exactly the kind
of kid Holden Caulfield wanted to catch in the rye." Taking a more
generous view, Richard Schickel wrote in Life that the characters are
"constructed not out of social science statistics...but of flesh and
blood," and that they live "in a film of very subtle dynamics,
wonderfully sensitive to the endless, unannounced shiftings of adolescent
moods." New York Times critic Vincent Canby called the screenplay
"tough and laconic" and praised the actors for seeming
"variously awkward and strident, dense and dumb, and sometimes very
innocent, without ever being self-conscious about it," although he found
Burns's monologue "too good, and...so calculated that it stops the movie
cold." Roger Ebert loved the "brilliantly acted" monologue,
however, and his Chicago Sun-Times review pronounced all four lead
performances "the best that could possibly be hoped for." Today's
viewers are likely to have equally diverse opinions, making Last Summer a
lively candidate for discussion and debate.
They Live by Night [Bilge Ebiri] also seen here: SEE THIS MOVIE: "Last Summer" Will Air on TCM February 1st
Frank and Eleanor Perry’s Last Summer (1969) is one of the lost gems of American cinema – long unavailable on DVD, only briefly available on VHS eons ago (buy a $75 copy on Amazon here!), and pretty much never screened retrospectively. The folks at Warner Archive have said that it’s one of most requested titles in their library, but their plans to release a DVD were scuttled (hopefully only temporarily) last year by the unavailability of a decent master. So, its appearance on Turner Classic Movies in early February is a momentous event, especially if it actually winds up being a decent copy. (The TCM website suggests it will not be letterboxed, but I don’t know how wide the cinematography was to begin with – I’ve only ever seen it on VHS.)
It’s showing in the middle of the night on February 1st at 2:45 am EST (so I guess it's technically February 2nd, though the schedule lists it under the 1st). In other words, you’ll probably have to set your Tivo or DVR or whatever.
I wish I could say that Last Summer’s lack of availability was an aberration, but the fact is that most of the Perrys’ films are languishing in obscurity. Which is, frankly, a goddamned crime. On his own Frank is probably best known today (somewhat unfairly) as the guy who directed Mommie Dearest, but the first decade of his career – from David and Lisa in 1962 to Diary of a Mad Housewife in 1970 – in which he collaborated with his then-screenwriter-wife Eleanor, represents an amazing run of unusually sensitive, offbeat and mesmerizing films. Together, their best-known film is probably The Swimmer -- a bit ironic because it was taken out of their hands and much of it reshot by Sydney Pollack.
Several years ago, I wrote an overview of the Perrys’ work for Moving Image Source. The bad news is that it's one of the few attempts at a critical assessment of their films anyone has written, anywhere. The good news is that a lot of people have contacted me over the years about it, suggesting that there's genuine interest in the Perrys' films out there. If only they were easier to find.
Last Summer is a strangely creepy coming of age film about
three teenagers -- Sandy (Barbara Hershey), Peter (Richard Thomas), and Dan
(Bruce Davison) – who befriend each other one summer in a beachside community,
just as they’re discovering the awesome power of their own sexuality. They are
teens, but like many of the Perrys’ characters – adults and kids -- they
actually seem younger, almost childlike. The story plays out as a series of
games these characters play with each other and with others; the central game
involves each telling one truth about him or herself.
But even as the kids profess to be truthful, they seem to be spinning greater
and greater lies, their made-up world of increasingly cruel games only
reinforced by the isolation (and desolation) around them. Their parents are
virtually non-existent (Sandy’s mother might as well have that Peanuts wah-wah
adult voice), and the outside world in general seems like some kind of distant
planet. Into this potentially toxic environment walks Rhoda (Catherine Burns),
a plump, precocious and troubled young girl who seems a lot wiser than these
kids but also, perhaps, more trusting: When she chooses to play their truth
game, she opens up in a way none of the others ever have.
The story takes on darker and darker overtones, until we begin to realize that what we’re watching is not just an unusually focused psychodrama but also, perhaps, an allegory. There is a certain Lord of the Flies quality to it, I suppose, except that these kids aren’t stranded on some forgotten island. What seems at first like a typical rite of passage eventually turns into something monstrous. I have this strange theory that one could view almost all of Eleanor and Frank's films as post-apocalyptic -- their events and characters are always hovering around traumas both seen and unseen -- and sometimes I catch myself thinking of Last Summer as being set on some post-nuclear, semi-lunar landscape (albeit one with pretty beaches). I'd be curious if anyone else catches that vibe.
I realize I'm making the film sound rather grim and bleak and unpleasant, which it's not. The Perrys bring an odd mixture of lyricism and gothic menace to it, similar to how they took The Swimmer’s moody portrait of suburban angst and turned it into a kind of rhyming fairy tale about madness. The film is in no way naturalistic; the young actors give unusually mannered performances (which some viewers will no doubt find off-putting) and there’s an otherworldly look and sound to the whole thing.
I’ve never read the Evan Hunter novel Last Summer is based on, and I’m curious as to how much of what I’m seeing on screen comes from Eleanor’s script and how much of it comes from the book. I can say though that there are startling echoes between this film and so many of the Perrys’ other works.
Speaking of Eleanor: Those that are interested in these films should check out her novel Blue Pages (long out of print but easily findable for cheap), which is a fictionalized memoir of sorts, full of thinly-veiled portraits of people like Sam Spiegel, Burt Lancaster, Truman Capote, and (of course) Frank himself. I have no idea how much of it is actually true; it’s extremely mean-spirited, written after her divorce, but also extremely readable. Eleanor was a remarkable figure in her own right, having had a distinguished career as a suspense novelist and playwright -- in collaboration with her previous husband -- before hooking up with Frank. One wonders what she might have done in a world that didn’t insist on seeing her success in light of her husband’s. Though let's give Frank his due, too: In the years immediately following their divorce, he continued a rather impressive run of films, including Doc, Rancho Deluxe, Play It As It Lays, and Man on a Swing.
Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For...[Ken Anderson]
Acidemic Journal of Film and Media [Erich Kuersten]
Through the Shattered Lens [Lisa Marie Bowman]
MUBI [Adrian Curry] movie posters
Variety Jay Weissberg
New York Times [Vincent Canby]
PLAY
IT AS IT LAYS
Joan Didion’s quintessential L.A. novel was not so much a love letter as an acid-penned take-down of the amoral, isolating void at the heart of the corrupted and toxic celebrity scene. The devastatingly cynical 1970 book was adapted into a cult classic directed by Frank Perry and stars Tuesday Weld as Maria, a troubled and jaded actress who recounts her life in flashback while in the fragile aftermath of a mental breakdown. She compulsively drives around the city’s freeways in her yellow Corvette, her numb sense of purposelessness and string of meaningless hook-ups in Beverly Hills pads with swanky pools reflected in the aimlessness of her path through these circling road networks, aerial shots capturing their impersonal vastness.
Strictly Film School Acquarello
Something of a prelude to David Lynch's explorations into the dark side of tinsel town (and in particular, the intersecting alternate realities of his sprawling metafilm Inland Empire), Frank Perry's Play It As It Lays is a stark, fragmented, and disjointed, but instinctually cohesive, occasionally luminous (and humorous), and inevitably heartbreaking adaptation of Joan Didion's acclaimed novel on Hollywood starlet, Maria Wyeth's (Tuesday Weld) gradual descent into madness and self-destruction following the dissolution of her marriage to influential filmmaker (and erstwhile Svengali), Carter Lang (Adam Roarke) - an emotional rupture that was perhaps catalyzed by their daughter's commitment to a sanitarium for behavioral problems near the completion of their latest collaboration, a highly controversial autofiction film in which he elicited a raw and soul-baring performance from his increasingly vulnerable and fragile wife by incorporating autobiographical elements culled from her tumultuous and impoverished childhood. The film opens to an angular shot of Maria leisurely walking through the footpath of a meticulously manicured garden, symmetrically - and diminutively - framed by a pair of tall, majestic evergreens. This double entendred image of nature and construction, openness and constriction serves as a recurring metaphor into the unsustainable paradox of Maria's vacuous life of excess and profound isolation - a sense of pervasive estrangement and entrenched hopelessness that she has learned to subsume through a string of meaningless affairs, aimless road trips to nowhere, and intimate philosophical conversations (that inevitably lead to the unarticulated silence of mutual resignation) with Carter's closeted producer, B.Z. (Anthony Perkins), whose transparent double life reflects his own irreconcilable spiritual ambiguity. Evoking the demoralizing ennui of industrialized dehumanization (or, in this case, the manufactured dream world of Hollywood) of Michelangelo Antonioni's The Red Desert fused with the asequential, fractured recursion of inescapable, haunted memories that pervade Alain Resnais' Je t'aime, je t'aime, Play It As It Lays is a caustic, disorienting, and ultimately bracing exposition into the profoundly isolating process of role rejection, the human search for meaning, and self-discovery.
Encore:
Play It As It Lays - Film Comment Melissa
Anderson from Film Comment, January/February
2007
If you were to imagine a celluloid ancestor to Mulholland
Drive’s Diane Selwyn, she’d
probably look a lot like Maria Wyeth, the heroine of Frank Perry’s acerbic Play
It As It Lays, a 1972 film based
on Joan Didion’s merciless second novel, published two years earlier.
Brilliantly played by Tuesday Weld, Maria is rapidly unraveling, as is her
marriage to her director husband, Carter Lang (Adam Roarke). Carter has
previously directed her in both a vérité short, barking bullying off-camera
questions (“Did you ever want to ball your father?”), and an acid-rock biker
movie called Angel Beach. As
Carter prepares to shoot his next movie in the desert, Maria—which rhymes with
“pariah”—drifts through a succession of ghoulish Hollywood parties and
hotel-room assignations with producers from the East Coast, always returning to
the driver’s seat of her banana-yellow Corvette. Speeding along the freeway
provides Maria with her only moments of pleasure. She hasn’t worked for at
least a year.
In interviews, Joan Didion has remarked that one profession that’s always
interested her is the film editor, or, to use her preferred term, “cutter.”
Cuts play a major part in both the film Play It As It Lays and its
source novel. Didion wrote the screenplay with her husband, John Gregory Dunne;
it was their second script collaboration, after 1971’s The Panic in Needle Park. Didion’s book is extremely fragmented, with some chapters no
longer than a paragraph and the point of view shifting abruptly between the
third and first person. Perry’s film, edited by Sidney Katz, expertly
translates this disjointed sense of time. Some shots last only a second;
chronological sequences aren’t always clear; sound and image are jarringly
juxtaposed. Nowhere are these cuts more horrifically displayed than at the
film’s literal moment of incision: Maria’s visit to an illegal abortionist (Roe
v. Wade would be decided the year after the film’s release). The doctor’s
“slicing” is chillingly conveyed as a rapid series of images: a hand encased in
a surgical glove switching on an air conditioner, something tossed into a waste
can, blood washed down a sink drain. This short sharp shock of a montage will
haunt Maria throughout the film—as it will the viewer.
In dreams—or, in Maria’s case, nightmares—begin responsibility. “I Can’t Get
That Monster Out of My Mind” is an essay about Hollywood from Didion’s first
nonfiction collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Maria is indeed surrounded by monstrous people, monstrous
behavior, monstrous misfortune. Kate, her only child, is locked away in an
institution for an unnamed mental disturbance. Her husband takes pleasure in
humiliating her. “I’ve never been much impressed by catatonia as a lifestyle,”
he says upon finding her in a depressive stupor; at other times he disgraces
her on television and in front of a journalist. Maria herself is not above
debasement: she sleeps with an unctuous Vegas power broker and with an
outrageously narcissistic tv star she picks up on a tennis court. “I’m sick of
everyone’s sick arrangements,” she gripes to Carter on the way home from a
dinner party. This judgment is directed at herself as much as at the producers,
showbiz lawyers, Euro starlets, and hunky hopefuls she brushes up against
daily.
Maria, like Diane Selwyn, comes from a tiny town: Silver Wells, Nevada. With
these humble beginnings came a sense of hope. “I inherited from my father an optimism
which did not leave me until recently,” Maria says in voiceover, walking
through the Last Year in Marienbad–type grounds of a mental clinic. Even
at her most distraught, Maria still clings tenaciously to the belief that she
and her daughter will be reunited someday, imagining them canning preserves
together on a sunny porch. And Maria’s bleakest moments are mitigated by the
one true—yet deeply flawed—friend she has: B.Z. (Anthony Perkins), Carter’s
bisexual producer. The relationship between Maria and B.Z. is far more
developed, not to mention tender, in Perry’s film than in Didion’s book, yet it
never compromises the sting of Didion’s original prose. Rather, the expanded
scenes between Maria and B.Z. provide a showcase for two actors of tremendous compatibility,
further exploring the rapport they shared four years earlier in Pretty
Poison.
“I know what nothing means, and keep on playing,” Maria says near the film’s
end. Perry would keep on playing, too, making Mommie Dearest (81), an
assessment of Hollywood that’s as grotesquely garish as Play It As It Lays
is coolly austere. But what about this haunting film from 1972? Unavailable on
video or dvd and rarely screened, Play It As It Lays aired last year on
the Sundance Channel. Didion’s extraordinary memoir of grief, The Year of Magical Thinking, will
soon become a Broadway show. But who will make this film available?
Joan Didion
and Hollywood | Keyframe - Explore the world of ... - Fandor Justine Smith
The Village Voice [Molly Haskell] (pdf)
Wednesday
Editor's Pick: Play It As It Lays (1972) - Alt Screen
Play It As It Lays
| shadowplay David Cairns
They Shoot Actors Don't They? Katarina
The Lost
Cinema of Frank Perry | Keyframe - Explore the ... - Fandor Kieron Turner
Panic in Needle Park and the films of Joan Didion and John Gregory ... David Haglund from Slate, July 19, 2007
Scopophilia:Movies
of the 60's, 70's, 80's [Richard Winters]
Movies in the City [Casey Scott]
Cult
Vault #36: Bruce LaBruce on Play It as It Lays | Dazed Dazed Digital
The Horn Section Hal Horn
Interview
with Frank Perry | Interviews | Roger Ebert October 1, 1972
How
Joan Didion the Writer Became Joan Didion the Legend | Vanity ... Lili Anolik from Vanity Fair, February 2, 2016
Person, Robert
GENERAL ORDERS NO. 9 – video B 86
You
are not a witness to the ruin. You are the ruin, to be witnessed. —Narrator (William Davidson)
The reviewers that claim this film is reminiscent to Terrence Malick, or for that matter essayist Chris Marker (about half the reviews), simply don’t understand the depth and profound complexity of these two unique and highly original filmmakers, both of whom are among the best filmmakers of their era, where accolades still don’t express how deeply they have changed the face of cinema. This director, on the other hand, seems to have some idea what he wants to express, writing, editing, handling the camera and directing the work, but the film grows overly repetitive, repeating the same downbeat tonal note, where his narrative thrust meanders to the point of listlessness, which is a shame, as there’s obviously an intensely personal message along with a visual palette that’s gorgeous to appreciate. Unfortunately the film is shot on video, usually a fatal flaw for films with such a reliance on visual composition, where this choice certainly diminishes the overall look the director is looking for, flattening the screen, eliminating much of the texture that would enhance the lustrous color and beauty of the film. The director spent 11 years making his debut feature, narrated by the somber reflections of William Davidson, an abstract, somewhat experimental essay on the changing landscape of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, suggesting the character of the South, especially Georgia, the director’s home state, has been deeply compromised since the Civil War. With the collection of artifacts and relics, including old coins, the initial allure of the film is expressed through a backwoods country landscape that includes lines of graves, where remnants of the Civil War, like old abandoned shacks in the woods or shaded, tree-lined creeks have been grown over for almost 150 years, yet old wounds may never heal.
The narrator suggests there was an order to this landscape,
a topography that made sense, where people felt a relation to the land and the
world around them, but acknowledges the Indians were driven out of their lands,
“foot by foot,” to make way for the coming white advancement. The title makes reference to General Robert
E. Lee’s farewell speech to the
Despite a portrait of an untainted natural beauty, the director also utilizes archival photographs, many showing what a downtown city looked like over a hundred years ago, at one point superimposing this image in front of the sprawling skyline of Atlanta today. The urban characteristic of Atlanta is shown to be a cement graveyard of uninhabited, wasted space, including long empty hotel hallways where nary a soul is seen, an eerily empty, cement parking lot garage without a single car, or a back entrance of a giant mall store where trucks make deliveries, images of a ghost town surprisingly quiet when there’s no one there. The underlying theme appears to be the death of the Confederacy, still undergoing a state of slow decay, not viewed as a politicized notion but as something that was once romanticized, idealized, and cherished, a reverence for the land expressed through a haunting stillness and emptiness, some destroyed through natural causes like hurricanes or tornadoes, where the director treats the hallowed grounds as something sacred, like Gettysburg. Perhaps the most chilling shot is an historic archival photo of a downtown public square that is absolutely jam packed with people stuffed together like sardines, where it’s impossible to comprehend why they have gathered together with such immense interest, until the picture slowly expands and a black man is standing on a wagon elevated above the rest, like an apparition, one man alone surrounded by a sea of whites that can only have one vile act in mind. Not a word is spoken about this image, but the camera lingers for a moment before moving on. The film’s elegiac tone resembles a requiem for the dead, featuring no natural sound, but a wall to wall electronic score and original music from Chris Hoke, but also haunting choral music from John Tavener, including “Mother and Child” heard here: Theotokos on YouTube (4:37). The slow pace may test the patience for some, but he makes effective use of slow motion, where at some point time seems to stop altogether, like a canoe filled only with books floating downstream, knowledge passing through time, or when we see a flickering ghostly image of a human being moving slowly, clouded and blurred by smoke, a solemn visualization of a living person taking on a non-recognizable spirit form, like something out of a Weerasethakul film, a chief exponent of ghosts and a human relation with the everlasting afterlife.
General Orders No. 9 Showtimes & Reviews | Chicago Reader ... Fred Camper
Robert Persons spent 11 years on this debut film, and I've never
seen anything quite like it. Using maps and lush nature imagery, referencing
both courthouses at town centers and the decentering effects of interstate
highways, Persons meditates on the geography of, and environmental destruction
in, the region that's now
Facets Multimedia: Cinémathèque: General Orders No. 9
A superbly original and elegiac film about the loss of the
natural world to the onslaught of urbanism in the
The movie's title comes from General Robert E. Lee's "General Orders No. 9," his farewell address to his
army of
NewCity Chicago Ray Pride, also seen here: Review: GENERAL ORDERS No. 9 « Movie City News
Robert Persons’ “General Orders No. 9″ is a lyrical essay
film at least partly about the urbanization of rural Georgia, an elegy of
haunted mood reminiscent of Patrick Keiller’s lovingly dyspeptic but visually
striking “London” and “Robinson in Space” or Terence Davies’ brooding memory
musical “Distant Voices, Still Lives.” It’s more in those schools than Terrence
Malick’s “Tree of Life,” the convenient reference point for reviewers upon its
overlapping
Village Voice [Karina Longworth]
Robert Persons’s experimental doc-poem on the evolution of the
landscape of the South, from farmland to battlefield to homogenized urban
space, is sure to inspire comparisons to The Tree of Life. Both films
are marked by the juxtaposition of elegiac natural imagery with the cold
architecture of contemporary commerce, interior monologue voiceover, allusions
to Stan Brakhage, and bombastic musical punctuation (in
the case of Persons’s film, some of it by indie ambient act Stars of the Lid). In dissolve-heavy montages that
are meditative verging on somnolent, he combines still images, animation, and
his own stunning cinematography of
Slant Magazine [Joseph Jon Lanthier]
An essayistic montage of landscapes, cityscapes, archival photos,
maps, and objects, each of them seemingly free-floating before us but
contextualized by an aggressively rhythmic narrator, Robert Persons's General
Orders No. 9 is both a Chris Marker-esque paean to the state of
Persons mostly avoids confronting the discomfort of Southern nostalgia, though not with sustainable elegance. (His title refers to General Lee's post-Appomattox issuance to Virginia-based troops, but the "surrender" here is to industry and consumerism without any Yankee/Dixie baggage.) After all, to reject the tradition-crushing footsteps of the 20th century is also to at best ignore, and at worst, revile concurrent attempts to achieve civil rights. In the film's opening shot, a pair of hands turn over a series of antique objects—pieces of clay and copper that could be either 100 or 400 years old, a turn-of-the-century firearm, a bird skull, a chipped die—as though attempting to absorb their progenitors and previous owners. The juxtaposition of these very dissimilar but still recognizably "old" things likeably promotes history as fluid and emotionally approachable. (In the 21st century, is there a crucial difference between 100 or 400 years of temporal distance?) Later, however, the narrator looks upon a dilapidated shack and painfully intones: "There was a war here. One hundred years before this generation was even born." This abruptly gawky cop-out seeks to create ideological distance that can't fairly exist in this antebellum-gothic mythology. What does Persons think that old gun was used for?
Elsewhere, Persons's solution to this semiotic conundrum is to avoid people and their messiness altogether while doting philosophically on their absence. Every shot, no matter how stagnant, is suggestive of inhabitance and abandonment: We see an empty canoe, an empty attic, a pile of unread books, a cemetery, a foliage detritus-pocked water surface zoomed in on so close it appears celestial. But when Native American roads become county roads, and then county roads become interstate highways, we want to conclude that nature has been paved over to allow the passage of people, for better or worse. Yet Persons rejects the connective power of asphalt, saying that it merely "bring[s] cars" and "make[s] the city possible." His anxiety toward the future and mourning of the present are facilitated by a mass dehumanizing; mankind is powerless against an eerily autonomous development that has paradoxically emptied the Earth.
After bemoaning the lack of symmetry that interstate highways have (he calls the crossroads of Atlanta a "false center"), Persons observes the "tragedy" of machinery that helps us to invent worthless ephemera we have no choice but to continually destroy. Cars are impacted, buildings bulldozed. When we espy people in these scenarios, they appear hopeless, bemused, and glassy-eyed, the somnambulist slaves of progress they haven't invited. In the movie's most incendiary moment, we observe African Americans wearing bleached, ghostly masks. These are, presumably, snapshots of the recent lynching reenactment-cum-protests in Monroe, Georgia, but they've been agilely divorced from their political context, fading in and out of blurred autumnal colors. Is the implication that anonymity is always a useless weapon against—or maybe simply a byproduct of—environmental pressure? If so, the loaded intentions of Persons's abstractions here make even the fight for tolerance seem like an attempt to enforce an unholy asymmetry.
General Orders No. 9 has some subtlety on its side, both conceptually and visually. There's a series of stark, white-on-black silhouette symbols—an elk's head and a road sign among them—that are more striking than any of the picturesque cinematography; the icons are so bright and pale that when we blink we can see their imprints, like portentous birthmarks on our eyelids. But Persons exercises this pseudo-lyrical obliqueness even when approaching ideas that need to be tackled and wrestled into the moist dirt of the backyard he so lovingly photographs.
Early on, the fertile Georgian county that serves as a narrative anchor is called "a holy district, and it is holy throughout"; a cross-dissolve then shows us a dyad of electrical towers perched ominously on an otherwise bucolic hillside, and it occurs to us that our narrator may not be as omniscient as his solemnity suggests. The voiceover similarly refers to the rise of cities over towns as "the epidemic of the future," and then contradicts its own verbiage by commenting, "There are no words to describe the city." And in the film's dismal tour of the unnamed metropolis (Atlanta), Persons imagines via CGI a boxy environment of totalitarian cleanliness and monotony. But this generic, Orwellian nightmare achieves the same symmetry as the blessed county's immaculately centered courthouse, so why is the narrator's "soul vexed" so indelibly?
Persons does his best to make the real city appear ugly beside his shamanic rattlesnakes and turtles and flopping fish; he shoots, in black and white, a myriad of oil splotches and belching smokestacks and oppressive structures of iron and glass. But the pellucid, high-res camerawork undoes his thesis, as it all looks bewilderingly beautiful, oneiric. As does the totemic apocalypse toward the ending, where all the maps and icons and knickknacks we've meditated on coruscate wildly on the screen while a grand chorale crescendos. After this, a canoe floats downstream in a narrow, shallow river, full of unread books. So the rise of modernity—and the emergence of technology that has made literature more accessible than ever before—has brought about the death of literacy too? What of the tools that produced, at an admittedly small scale, the books that are being ushered to their watery grave in this scene? Where along the line, from the mighty leap to "county road" to "interstate," did we turn our backs on our wholesome essence?
Our classic love/hate relationship with the modern age might be best illustrated by the single breath that praises Gutenberg's ingenuity but damns the printing press and the subsequent the loss of textual individuality. This is understandable, as achievement is humanly resonant while innovation has always reverberated into changes that intimidate us. (The ultimate American hero might be the failed inventor, an eternal wellspring of ideas that stimulate us with their vision, but stop short of challenging the status quo.) Persons, however, takes this ambivalence a step further and erases Gutenberg from the picture altogether. The written word becomes moveable type becomes the (evil, soulless) mass paperback, and all the humanity between those gaps has just been along for the canoe ride, unaware of the waterfall waiting to goose them. He elucidates this fallacy with enough measured silence and meta-textual ponderousness to be mistaken for poetic. But beneath the slipshod verse, General Orders No. 9 is repugnantly anti-social.
They Live by Night [Bilge Ebiri]
Review: 'General Orders No. 9' A Moving Study Of Change In The ... Christopher Bell from the indieWIRE Playlist
“GENERAL ORDERS NO. 9″ – A HAMMER TO NAIL REVIEW Michael Tully from Filmmaker magazine, June 23, 2011, also seen here: GENERAL ORDERS NO. 9 – Hammer to Nail
General Orders No. 9 | Film Review | Tiny Mix Tapes Paul Bower
General Orders No. 9 | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Alison Willmore
Reviews: GENERAL ORDERS NO. 9 Review Ben Umstead from Twitch
The L Magazine [Henry Stewart]
Review of General Orders No. 9 Leslie Stonebreaker
'General Orders No. 9′ Trailer: A Documentary Aimed Squarely at ... Russ Fischer at /Slash Film
Ethereal 'General Orders No. 9′ Trailer Will Haunt and Confuse ... Cole Abaius
First Printing of Robert E. Lee's General Orders No. 9 actual printing of Lee’s entire speech to the Northern Virginia Army under his command, April 10, 1865, from Seth Kaller Historic Documents
User reviews from imdb Author: jessecclark from
Director interview
Daniel James Scott interview with the director from Filmmakers magazine,
The Hollywood Reporter [David Rooney]
Variety Reviews - General Orders No. 9 - Film Reviews - - Review by ... Robert Koehler
Time Out New York [Keith Ulhich]
Movie Review - 'General Orders No. 9' Review - NYTimes.com Neil Genzlinger
Pesce, Adam
SPLINTERS B- 82
USA (94 mi) 2011 Official site
One may have to do a Google search to find out where Papua New Guinea is on the globe, and it turns out to be a neighboring island just north of Australia, connected to the long strip of Indonesian Islands. With nothing more than having seen a photo of a young boy holding a surf board cut out of local wood called a splinter in Papua New Guinea, first time filmmaker Adam Pesce, a surfer himself who was studying diplomacy and world affairs along with documentary filmmaking part-time, decided to leave the comforts of Southern California and take a look for himself, ending up in the seaside village of Lido. Apparently twenty years ago, there wasn’t even a road, but an adventurous Australian pilot left a surfboard behind after teaching some of the locals how to surf, creating something of a cultural explosion of interest, particularly among the male population. With over 80 % of the population unemployed, this at least gave them a pastime, where one mentioned that after catching waves all afternoon he wouldn’t feel like working anyway. In this film, nearly entirely shot in this remote rural community, located on the northwestern coast, close to Vanimo, known for its spectacular waves approximately 45 minutes from the border with Indonesia, there is scant evidence of anyone working at all. Instead there are custom built grass-roofed huts and coconut trees along the beach for as far as the eye can see. But there are two surfing clubs, Vanimo and the Sunset Surf Club, where their town would host the initial Papua New Guinea national surfing title in 2007, where the top 3 finalists in each category would win a trip to Australia for exposure to more competitions. With no conceivable way to ever earn that kind of money, as one-third of the entire nation lives on less than $1.25 per day, probably less in this remote area, this creates a fierce competition to gain a spot on the team.
Pesce introduces us to a number of the contestants, many of whom are related, and in the process the surfing story becomes almost secondary, as the viewer is instead immersed in this isolated region of the world where few people have ever been. This becomes the fascinating focal point of the film, where the film raises many more questions than it answers, as it instead simply watches and observes, where one of the local surfers brutalizes his wife in front of the entire community, continually throwing things at her and kicking her, where no one intervenes and we never truly find out what led to this outrageous display. Afterwards the woman simply explains how sad it is that women don’t stand up for each other, that men are allowed to simply walk all over them. Later we learn that few of these individuals ever went to school, that there’s no running water or electricity, so with no conceivable jobs, there’s little opportunity for advancement or improvement. Still one can’t help but gaze at the gorgeous images of surfers in the water, where several of the guys compete for bragging rights about who’s the best on the island, especially the younger Ezekiel and the reigning champ Angelus, while two sisters, Leslie and Susan apparently are the two female hopefuls to go to Australia. The two surfing clubs are closely familiar with each other, where there’s still plenty of leftover animosity from a rift nearly a decade ago when Angelus felt he was cheated out of an opportunity at Vanimo, where they gypped him out of a contract to compete in Australia by failing to fill out some paperwork, which led to he and Ezekiel forming a rival club.
The filmmaker moves back and forth in time, as we see the arrival of cars and trucks and crowds lining the beach for the competition, but also a prelude to these events, where there are shattering circumstances seen months ahead of time that defy explanation. Ezekiel, for instance, is a young inarticulate teenager who hangs every night with a group of kids drinking excessively, where they literally hassle and stop cars on the highway at night for kicks, often throwing rocks at them if they don’t stop. This is not how normal athletes prepare for such impactful competitions. When one of the leading regional surfers arrives to move things along for the big event, making sure the town makes all the needed preparations, what he discovers is utter chaos. First, no one has moved a muscle, nothing at all has been built, as judges need a higher vantage point to view the surfers, and the men are stealing all the boards meant for the women, as they’re supposed to be split half and half. Even more appalling, when urged to include women equally, they insist upon following their local custom which gives only men a say. Currently, for instance, men are allowed to buy Vanimo women and make them their brides. Despite Western intervention, it’s never clear what happens, only that they reached a brick wall of resistance when it comes to highlighting regional authenticity in hopes of drawing an international surfing audience. While the director captures the natural flow of events both on land and at sea, he offers surprisingly little footage of the championship event itself, though what is shown is captivating. Nonetheless, in the end, it does come down to winners and losers, where in something of a surprise, the island itself once again intervenes and adds its own cultural flavor to what constitutes winning and losing. While the filmmaker takes a balanced view throughout, too much remains unresolved and unanswered, where the beauty of the idyllic sport never transcends the backward nature of their ordinary lives, which continually seems caught in a modern day quagmire.
TimeOut NY Andrew Schenker
Chronicling the lead-up to a national surfing contest in Papua
New Guinea, Adam Pesce’s documentary offers a compelling look at the
preparations undertaken by two rival wave-rider clubs in the town of Vanimo. It
also doubles as an incisive portrait of a community given to internecine
rivalry, petty jealousy and shifting gender politics. While marred somewhat by
the griminess of its HD imagery, Splinters nonetheless successfully
integrates the sport and an attendant subculture in a way that manages to
enhance both, leading to a climactic competition that actually makes you feel
something important is at stake.
Village Voice
Michael Atkinson
Apparently, in the '80s, some fly-by-night pilot left a surfboard
behind on the beach in a small Papuan village, and, this being the unpaved, undeveloped
land of cargo cults, the mysterious artifact bloomed into a 21st-century
cultural obsession. The best film ever made about competitive surfing in Papua New Guinea (and Best Documentary of the year
as per Surfer Magazine), Adam
Pesce's film positively saunters into Vanimo, where it seems the
non-elderly inhabitants are all Jamie
Foxx–Jada Pinkett beautiful and are all unabashed
about opening their guileless lives to the camera. The surfing bug grips the
community, as rival surf clubs engage in spurts of grass-hut espionage on their
way to a national contest and try to gain recognition from Aussie media. The
real challenges, however, are not tubular—Pesce does not shy away from
palm-frond gorgeousness, but just when you're thinking about tropical paradise,
the realities of poverty and underdevelopment move in, and it becomes apparent
that the sport is viewed by everyone as just a way out. The Papuans smile, but
their lives are slowly revealed as subsistence dead ends, with plenty of
alcoholism and wife-beating, and the staring out to sea is about more than the
waves.
Splinters, a movie set in idyllic Lido village, Vanimo, will premier on ... Melanesian Online, April 23, 2011
THE surfing movement in Papua New Guinea may have taken more than 24 years to evolve and gain popularity as a sport and a tourism product but it is about to hit the world with a bang - propelling PNG’s image and surfing here to heights never before imagined possible. On April 25, Splinters, a movie set in idyllic Lido village, Vanimo, will premier on the world stage in New York at the Tribeca Film Festival. In fact, two more screenings in New York following the world premiere have also been sold out including another screening at the Surfing Hall of Fame Museum in California. While critics may be cynical about how far the feature documentary can go in marketing and promoting Papua New Guinea on the world stage, president of Surfing Association of PNG Andrew Abel is adamant Splinters will, in one hit surpass any past or present marketing effort to promote surfing in North America.
“It will be enormous, it will be the major catalyst for PNG surfing to gain momentum in the United States and the world market for that matter as SAPNG has only been concentrating in luring surfers in the Australian and Japanese markets,” Abel said. On one level, splinters is a term given to small planks of wood for children to belly-surf with; sometimes they are pieces of old canoes and this prepares them stand up on modern surfboards. But, on a more metaphorical level, producer and director Adam Pesce saw the surfboard as a symbol of change but with that change comes fissures or cracks. This is Adam’s first film after only studying part-time documentary making and completing international relations studies. His interest in this remote island paradise suddenly intensified one day when he saw a picture of a young boy holding a splinter in a far-flung place called Papua New Guinea. So, in 2004, with no documentary-making experience, he packed his camera bags and headed for Vanimo.
After a few months in Lido he headed back to California empty-handed but two years later, he heard the inaugural PNG national surfing titles would be held in Lido in 2007 and that was what really made Splinters. While Splinters is already getting great reviews and is been featured on websites, this is a short synopsis movie goers will read when they go to the world premiere in New York: “In the 1980s, an expatriate pilot left behind a surfboard in a remote seaside village in Papua New Guinea. Twenty years later, the sport of surfing is splintering Vanimo village. For select surfing talents, it’s a way to compete in the “whiteman’s” world. Personal and clan rivalries emerge as hopefuls’ claw for this prestigious position. The counter-cultural sport is also a unique catalyst for social change as women gain newfound status in a sometimes violent and patriarchal community. The surfing experiment comes to a head when five village surfers compete in the country’s first-ever national surfing titles. As the village grapples with its identity, these young heroes dream their surfboards will carry them to a better life.”
Adam Pesce insists he never set out to make a “surf movie”. “The phenomenon of western music and cinema revamping the cultural terrain of far-flung lands is ubiquitous. But, in the village of Vanimo, it really is the surfboard that is the most ardent ambassador of the west. It serves as both an icon of the modern world and the mechanism by which the indigenous environment is remodelled,” he says. “My aim with Splinters is to introduce the viewer to an experiment unfolding in a Petri dish. How the surfboard catalyst will ultimately fuse two disparate worlds together is unknown. Will it be the golden goose that provides a “way out” for emerging surfing talent? Or, could it give false hope and usher in the erasure of indigenous heritage while paving the way for commercial exploitation from the West? It is important to me that the film enlivens this debate yet leaves it unresolved. “In the people I filmed, I see the old world/modern world crossroads personified. Ezekiel’s puffed up surf dream is fed by the promise of Western stardom.
With the advent of Western influence, Lesley and Susan could be the beneficiaries of women’s rights but at the cost of eroding indigenous “family values.” “The dream of winning the surfing competition is not only that, it is the dream of achieving status in a modern world. That is the grand prize for the individual surfers and village at the end of the day. The siren song is sweet and much in the same way we might be inclined to idealise paradise, it seems paradise is looking back at us wearing the same rose-coloured glasses. Vanimo is a microcosm. Although castaway and idyll it is a reminder of the wider world’s struggle for “progress.” What is lusted after there is no different than here? The reality of that satiny, polished next big thing may not be either.”
Splinters followed the progress of surfing enthusiasts Steven Tekwie, Ezekiel Afara, Angelus Lipahi and sisters’ Leslie and Susan Umpa.
Since the 2007 national surfing titles the boys and Susan have represented PNG in the South Pacific Games and some advanced courses in Australia. Fast forward to March at Tupira in Madang for the 2011 Globe National Surfing Titles and they are all still competing except for Lipahi – who could not defend his 2007 short board title because so many young guns, with even bigger dreams, have come on to the surf scene. Abel and Ezekiel Afara will make the trip to New York for the world premiere of Splinters. They will be doing interviews and Abel will be taking the opportunity to spread the gospel on the evolution of surfing in PNG over the past 24 years. While the actors may not receive the same world fame as those in Slum Dog Millionaire – it is hoped it will none-the-less do wonders in proclaiming PNG to the world.
Review: 'Splinters' Is A Compelling Surfing Doc With More On Its ... Ryan Sartor from The indieWIRE Playlist
Splinters - Movie Review - 2011 - Documentaries - About.com Jennifer Marin
Splinters | Film Review | Slant Magazine Chuck Bowen
SPLINTERS Facets Multi Media
The Culturist - Home - Splinters by Adam Pesce
Director interview Kristin McKracken interviews the director from Tribeca, February 1, 2012
Review: "Splinters"; Adam Pesce's Riveting Documentary On Life ... Emmanuel Akitobi feature and interview with the director from indieWIRE, February 1, 2012
TimeOut Chicago
Matt Singer
BBC News - Papua New Guinea profile - Overview January 26, 2012
Lake Michigan surfer dude gets community service, stays defiant Kim Janssen from The Chicago Sun-Times, February 16, 2012
Papua New Guinea - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Vanimo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Papua New Guinea: Maps, History, Geography, Government ... Info Please
Papua New Guinea U.S. State Department
Things to do in Vanimo - Lonely Planet
Papua New Guinea Travel Information and Travel Guide - Lonely ... Lonely Planet
Papua New Guinea Surfing Association
Images for Vanimo Village, Papua New Guinea
Lido Village Surfing in Sandaun.m4v - YouTube (1:24)
Vanimo Surf - Papua New Guinea - YouTube (3:05)
Peterson, Leila Conners and Nadia Conners
THE 11TH HOUR
The 11th Hour | Review | Screen Jonathan Romney from Screendaily
Leonardo DiCaprio discreetly lends his weight as star and
environmental campaigner to The 11th Hour, an unashamedly polemical
documentary cum call-to-arms about the current dire state of the ecology - and
future prospects for change.
The film makes a
suitable companion piece to last year's high-profile Al Gore documentary An
Inconvenient Truth but its barrage of information and functional assemblage
of archive footage and talking heads will make it a less appealing commercial
prospect than Gore's narratively coherent film. DiCaprio's status alone will
enhance its public profile, however, and the film's true future no doubt lies
in DVD, where it promises to provide a key teaching tool in schools and other
educational contexts.
The film's tenor is
generally positive rather than doom-laden, with DiCaprio and his collaborators mustering
their information in order, in the film's final third, to propose immediate
courses of action to steer humanity away from its current catastrophic actions
and to envisage a new course of sustainable design. A variety of independent
commentators - economists, environmentalists, oceanographers, designers et al –
including Professor Stephen Hawking and a briefly-glimpsed Mikhail Gorbachev –
offer their diagnoses for the state of the planet and proposals for ways to
create sustainable ways of ensuring a survival for humanity and the planet.
The first parts of the
film are a strict 101 of environmentalism and global catastrophe - montages of
footage and information showing, first, how earth's biosystems arose and came
to sustain themselves, and secondly, the catastrophic damage done since the
Industrial Revolution. Much of the film offers the familiar litanies of floods,
famine, hurricanes et al, but the film takes a much more positive and indeed
militant turn in its final third as commentators show ways in which green
design systems and new industrial and economic models could, if not reverse the
tide of damage, at least provide ways of slowing it down.
The film is
didactically effective in its upbeat final moments, which plead for humanity to
commit itself to new ways of living - the key term, says one speaker, is
"frugality" - rather than damaging wastefulness. The film isn't
afraid to take a moderately political line, pointing the finger at corporate
globalisation and governments' complicity with it, and although the film isn't
angrily didactic on a Michael Moore level, it couldn't be accused of being
apolitical either.
The film suffers most
from its form, being a routine succession of interviews interspersed with
archive footage, assembled in a not always coherent fashion, with occasional
animated scientific diagrams likely to confuse more than enlighten. DiCaprio
himself, a rather stiff narrator, makes only occasional modest appearances. As
an exercise in film pamphleteering, the film, formally stuffy though it is,
fulfils its brief with economic efficiency, as befits its subject.
Charlotte
Higgins
from the Guardian
The Hour Is Near from
Vanity Fair
Petit, Christopher
RADIO ON
Radio On Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge
Quite unlike anything else in British cinema before or
since, this debut by former Time Out film-section editor - and sharp
critic - Petit is a monochrome road-movie in which a modishly alienated young
man (David Beames - whatever happened to him?) drives from London to
Bristol to investigate his brother's suicide. Shades of Get Carter are
presumably entirely deliberate, given the fact that Petit reviewed that picture
for Time Out - he described it as "one of the relatively few
British films of the period... to exploit its setting to advantage." And
if he does nothing else, Petit certainly exploits all of his settings to
maximum advantage:
Petock, Matthew
A LITTLE CLOSER D 62
This is an obnoxious little film where the viewer keeps waiting for something interesting to happen, but it never does. Made in the early David Gordon Green style, but without a hint of his poetry or artistry, as this is simply a bad example of the copycat movie, a director who thinks he’s on to something, but he’s not. This is just a dull film about a loathsome family without a single scintillating moment, where the hand-held camerawork is often out of focus simply due to excessive movement, or being too close to a subject, or dimly lit, creating an annoying look to the movie, often excessively dark. Set in an economically depressed, rural area of Virginia, a single mom (Sayra Player) is overworked and largely out of the picture in the daily lives of her two rambunctious sons, 15-year old Marc (Parker Lutz) who cleans the cars in the lot of a car business, and 11-year old Stephen (Eric Baskerville) who is forced to attend summer school due to his inability to focus in school. These two brothers make complete asses of themselves in the opening minutes, but so does the director in thinking this is somehow revelatory, yet this writer/director pulls out every cliché in the book, where nothing surprising, or for that matter interesting, ever happens.
Instead this is painting by the numbers, where each character has their own individual personal crisis. Mom sits home sipping wine and smoking weed but has no social life, so she’s forced to attend social mixers at a local recreational center where two or three couples dance and everyone else just stands around sipping beverages, which is about as interesting as watching paint dry, as nothing happens. Marc finds a socially isolated, dull, and naïve girl he likes, Joanna (Catherine Andre), but picks her largely so he can take advantage of her, while Stephen is actually attracted to his black teacher Ms. Moss (Stephanie Parrott), peeping through a window at her home in various states of undress. Actually Ms. Moss is the one truly appealing character in the movie, but the director doesn’t seem to know that, as he doesn’t care enough about her to leave her in the story, but simply uses her as he wishes before dropping her midway through, as if she doesn’t matter. Instead, one by one, each of the three family members pursues their own sexual awakening, suggesting this is the road to fulfillment, except they bring to the experience the boredom and emotional emptiness of their own lives. Nothing surprising there. And for those who think this director knows what to do shooting a couple on a dance floor in a single take, might I remind people of Valeska Grisebach’s BE MY STAR (2001), a near wordless, unsentimentalized film that excels exactly where this one doesn’t, in communicating the aching loneliness that exists between hopelessly attracted couples who can’t express what they feel, further isolating them even from themselves.
The Flickering Wall [Jorge Mourinha]
An auspicious feature
debut for young US director Matthew Petock (also scripting and editing), A Little
Closer doesn't really bring anything new to the table of modern American
no-budget indie film-making. Its lyrical, hand-held approach to character and
landscape unavoidably recalls earlier "fellow travelers" such as
Antonio Campos (Afterschool), Lance Hammer (Ballast) or the early films of
David Gordon Green. But mr. Petock engagingly transcends the classification as
yet another young rural filmmaker through a keen sense of narrative and a
lovely attention to detail, essential if his slender story is to work.
Essentially, A Little
Closer is a classic country song wrapped in new-fangled alt-country
trappings about people looking for love in all the wrong places: here, it is
harried single mom Sheryl (a remarkable Sayra Player), whose awkward attempts
at socialising in rural Virginia are juxtaposed to the sexual awakenings of her
two callous teenage sons. Although the film spends a lot of time cutting
between the three, it's Sheryl's tale that gives it an edge, especially in a
superb single take on a dancefloor that runs the gamut of love-gone-wrong
emotions only through ms. Player and Chris Kies' eyes and bodies. It's not the
only highlight of the film, but is the strongest evidence that mr. Petock is a
talent worth keeping your eye on.
Directed, written by
Matthew Petock.
With: Sayra Player,
Parker Lutz, Eric Baskerville, Chris Kies, Catherine Andre, Stephanie Parrott,
Natalie Racoosin, Rolland Colella, CJ Doss, Ryan Lyle, Peter Dempsy, Douglas
Nelson.
A single mom negotiates
the shores of loneliness while her adolescent sons discover their sexual urges
in Matthew Petock's unpretentious debut, "A Little Closer." Solidly
made with a minuscule budget whose limitations are ably overcome, the pic is
obviously made from the heart, covering well-worn themes with more honesty than
originality, generating a deja-vu feel that rarely diminishes. Perhaps best
seen as a sort of well-done thesis film which proves the young helmer's
capabilities, "A Little Closer" is likely to see more traffic over
streaming sites than in cinemas, though smaller fests may offer a welcome.
Petock sets his story in rural
Older son Marc (Parker Lutz), 15, works a summer job at a car lot where an older colleague gives him tips on how to get a girl into bed. Meanwhile, 11-year-old brother Stephen (Eric Baskerville) is at summer school, since Sayra can't afford any other option to keep him busy. Both boys are coping with chaos-inducing hormones: Marc gets a g.f. (Catherine Andre) who he pressures into "proving she loves him," and Stephen has a crush on teacher Ms. Moss (Stephanie Parrott).
Petock and his flawless cast get everything right: Sheryl's nervous ticks while hoping for a decent-looking guy to ask her to dance, her exhaustion from bearing so much responsibility alone, and her frazzled but loving rapport with her kids. The boys are age-appropriate, with Marc completely in thrall to his testosterone while younger Stephen is on the cusp between innocence and knowledge. Dialogue is real, situations are believable, and the pic nicely captures the circumscribed options available to nontraditional families in this kind of community.
A few scenes are memorable, foremost a series of extended closeups of Sayra dancing with a guy (Chris Kies) she meets at the mixer. The tight shots and Player's complex emotions, all stemming from the overwhelming sensation of being held close, baldly convey her loneliness and need for physical contact. Despite other nice moments, there's just not enough here to make the pic stand out from other sincere slice-of-life indie productions. Modesty is no fault, yet in a crowded market, viewers are likely to demand more than a mirror of reality.
Visuals are sharp, benefiting from confident handheld lensing by Daniel Patrick Carbone and a proper appreciation for natural light. Editing, too, also by Petock, is sure-handed, nicely overlaying conversations onto silent montages.
Paste Magazine [Curtis Woloschuk]
TheSkyKid.Com [Georgi Krastev]
A Little Closer : FilmMonthly Elaine Hegwood Bowen
Film
Society at Lincoln Center and Double Hope Films ... Ted Hope from indieWIRE
A Little Closer | Filmlinc.com | Film Society of Lincoln Center
CIFF 2011: All our capsule reviews - Roger Ebert Bill Stamets
Petri, Elio
INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN ABOVE SUSPICION
Investigation of a Citizen Under Suspicion Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York
In real life, murders are invariably
committed either for personal gain or out of ungovernable anger. Within the
world of fiction, however, there exists an illustrious tradition of purely
philosophical killers, and alongside such inscrutable legends as Dostoyevsky's
Raskolnikov and Camus's Meursault broods the unnamed police inspector (Volonté)
at the center of Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, a film
confident enough to trumpet its agenda in its very title. Methodically
manufacturing further evidence of his crime—deliberately handling a liquor
bottle sans gloves; planting a thread from his blue silk tie under one of the
victim's long fingernails—the inspector means to demonstrate that his social
status and position of authority render him invisible, and he watches in an odd
combination of smug satisfaction and existential horror as the homicide squad
willfully overlooks every clue that points in his direction, no matter how
blatant.
Driven by a metronomic Ennio Morricone score and Volonté's peerlessly oleaginous performance, Investigation, which won the Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar in 1971, never truly enlarges the thesis implicit in its premise, playing out pretty much exactly as you'd expect (apart from a strangely ambiguous ending). Petri, the subject of a career retrospective at MoMA that begins next week, was an avowed Communist; here, his hatred of fascism—personified by the Inspector's ruthless sense of privilege, illustrated by Homicide's eagerness to pin the murder on a radical or homosexual—sometimes strays into didacticism. But the sight of Justice eagerly and selectively applying her own blindfold remains deeply unnerving all the same.
Petrie,
Daniel
A
RAISIN IN THE SUN
Started as a Broadway Production
"A Raisin in the Sun" began as a groundbreaking Broadway play. When
it premiered in 1959, it was a smash hit with audiences - black and white
alike.
It won the 1959 New York Drama Critics Award for best play of the year and catapulted playwright, Lorraine Hansberry into the national spotlight. She became the youngest and the first African-American to win this award.
A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by an African-American woman (Lorraine Hansberry) and directed by an African-American man (Lloyd Richards) to appear on Broadway. It also became one of the longest-running African-American theatrical production at the time with 530 performances.
Film Version Released in 1961
In 1961, the film version of A Raisin in the Sun was released. Lorraine
Hansberry wrote the script and all of the major actors who appeared on Broadway
agreed to play the same roles on screen. This included Sidney Poitier as Walter
Lee Younger, Claudia McNeil as mother
Creatively, Sidney Poitier and Claudia McNeil had differences of opinion about who should be the focus of A Raisin in the Sun. This created real tension between the two actors.
In his book, The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography, Sidney Poitier states, "Claudia McNeil, a fine performer, was in complete dominance over the most of the other members of the cast. Naturally enough, she perceived the play as being best when it unfolded from the mother's point of view. I perceived the play as being best when it unfolded from the son's point of view, however, and I argued that position. In fact, we argued constantly."
Based on
Lorraine Hansberry uses some of her own life experience in A Raisin in the
Sun. When she was nine years old, her family moved to a white neighborhood
in
In her book, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, Hansberry
wrote about this experience. She states, "I also remember my desperate and
courageous mother patrolling our household all night with a loaded German Luger
pistol, doggedly guarding her four children, while my father fought the
respectable part of the battle in the
Title Inspired by Langston Hughes Poem
The inspiration for the title, A Raisin in the Sun, came from the
Langston Hughes poem entitled "Harlem: A Dream Deferred."
By Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore --
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over -
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load
Or does it just explode?
A Raisin in the Sun was one of the few black cast movies made during its time. It is considered a breakthrough drama because it showed a dimension of African-American life that had never been seen before on stage and screen. It successfully brought to life the social realities of racial segregation and frustrated ambition.
Award Winning Film
Sidney Poitier and Claudia McNeil were both nominated for Golden Globe Awards
for their performances in the movie. Ruby
The movie was selected in 2005 to the U.S. Library of Congress National Film Registry. The purpose of the registry is to preserve films that are "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant films."
A
Raisin in the Sun - TCM.com Paul Tatara
Motion pictures that spring from successful plays are
unique in that they already have a lot of mileage on them before the cameras
even start to roll. If key members of the cast also played opposite each other
before live audiences, they haven’t just been rehearsing the material, they’ve
been actively getting under the skin of their characters. The script’s content
and the characters’ motivations have been scrutinized in a manner that simply
isn’t possible while making a conventionally produced film.
Daniel Petrie’s A Raisin in the Sun
(1961), which is based on Lorraine Hansberry’s groundbreaking play about a
proud African-American family, is a case in point. The very intent of the piece
was a matter of great debate while it was being performed on Broadway, and its
two leads, Sidney Poitier and Claudia McNeil, were regularly at each other’s
throats over which approach would work best. The strained mother-son
relationship that audiences finally saw on the big screen was the result of considerable
tension during the initial phase of the play’s successful run. The real-life
stand- off between Poitier and McNeil actually grew so heated that, years
later, Poitier wrote that he believed the actress “hated” him. Nevertheless,
the two managed to convey a devastating amount of love for each other, both on
stage and in Petrie’s acclaimed film version.
Poitier plays Walter Lee Younger, a young black man who stumbles upon an
opportunity to improve his standing in a society that’s determined to hold him
back because of the color of his skin. Walter’s strong, dignified mother,
In his recent Oprah Winfrey endorsed autobiography, The Measure of a Man,
Poitier discusses his take on acting in general, and Walter Lee Younger in
particular. Even after all these years, he seems utterly convinced that he was
right when he insisted that A Raisin
in the Sun should focus on Walter’s plight, rather than Lena’s. This
didn’t sit well with McNeil...especially since she was supported in her belief
by Hansberry, the play’s author (Hansberry also adapted her work for the
screen).
“Claudia McNeil, a fine performer, was in complete dominance over most of the
other members of the cast,” he writes. “Naturally enough, she perceived the
play as being best when it unfolded from the mother’s point of view. I
perceived the play as being best when it unfolded from the son’s point of view,
however, and I argued that position. In fact, we argued constantly.”
“In my opinion,” he says, “it was the son who carried the theatrical obligation
as the force between the audience and the play. The eyes of those watching were
on the son to see if the tragedy would destroy him, would blow him apart beyond
recovery. And it was also my opinion that there was no such feeling between the
audience and the mother. The audience witnessed the sadness that was visited on
her. They saw that her family was in disarray, but also saw her as a force
beyond that kind of vulnerability. If they were to vote, they would say, ‘Oh,
but she’s going to be okay.”
By the time Petrie made A Raisin in the Sun,
it would seem that Poitier either won the argument by virtue of his dynamic
stage interpretation, or because of his standing as one of the more prominent
African-American actors in motion pictures. Certainly, the movie’s emotional
focus leans a great deal more toward Walter Lee Younger’s plight than anything
his mother experiences. McNeil’s performance is remarkable in its sensitivity;
it’s both big-spirited and heart-breaking. But you leave the film with
Poitier’s desperate gaze seared into your memory.
Poitier seems to feel that this sort of turmoil is
something you have to deal with when you’re fully committed to your craft. “You
simply can’t ‘fake’ your way through good work,” Poitier writes. “But even the
purest devotion to an art or craft doesn’t take place in a vacuum. We work with
others, with people often very close to our hearts, so convictions that are
firmly held can cost a pretty penny indeed.”
U.S. black family film Mark A. Reid from Jump Cut, May 1991
DVD MovieGuide dvd review Colin Jacobson
DVD Verdict (Norman Short) dvd review
DVD Talk (Chuck Arrington) dvd review [4/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Justin Helmer) review [5/5]
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4/5]
A Raisin in the Sun - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A Raisin in the Sun Summary and Study Guide - Lorraine Hansberry
A Raisin in the Sun 45-page study guide (pdf format)
ClassZone.com a study guide
A
Raisin in the Sun | Guthrie Theater 
A Raisin in the
Sun Book Notes Summary by Lorraine Hansberry Book ...
Pettigrew,
Damian
FELLINI: I’M A BORN LIAR
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
Genuflecting toward another time-worn legend, the doc Fellini: I'm a Born Liar features the beloved ringmaster's last interviews, in which he sometimes cheerfully, sometimes mordantly, kisses his own ass and maintains into perpetuity that his "fantasies" were the stuff of pure genius. How enlightening you find Damian Pettigrew's obsessive film depends on whether you're as adoring of Fellini as he was of himself; for the devoted, it's a gold mine, revisiting famous locations from the maestro's films and life, and including uproarious interviews with Terence Stamp and Donald Sutherland about their scalding experiences working for cinema's most self-involved puppetmaster. (You also see, in behind-the-scenes footage, actors actually counting instead of reciting dialogue; few major filmmakers cared less about sonic fidelity, and the creepy disconnect that resulted from Fellini's routine dubbing atrocities may have been part of their fascination to 1960s audiences.) In choosing his gorgeous film clips, Pettigrew tellingly eschews the prototypically grotesque Fellini image—in any case, this may be the best way to see many Fellini films, one disembodied minute at a time.
In the superb documentary fantasia
“Fellini: I’m a Born Liar,” Federico Fellini directs an erotic scene from
“Fellini Satyricon” (1969), shaping the performances of three beautiful young
actors with his hands, caressing the air as he croons instructions to first one
and then another. His control of the scene is remarkable, but it makes you
laugh, too, because in so much of the surrounding interview material the
director describes himself as a kind of medium through which a given movie
passes, a mere craftsman in the service of ineffable visions. His actual
practice, as we see from the many scenes of him at work, is consciously to mold
every breath of air in the movie, to dominate, terrify, seduce, and to dream
and suffer for everyone. And some of Fellini’s collaborators confirm his mania.
This Franco-Italian-Scottish co-production, directed by Damian Pettigrew, is an
extraordinarily controlled piece of film in its own right. The interviews,
recorded in the year before the director’s death, are often eloquent—Fellini’s
long sentences actually take you somewhere—and Pettigrew and his colleagues
provide a surrounding texture of film excerpts and freshly shot footage that
has the density of one of the maestro’s own movies, without the excess.
Pettigrew uses a gliding camera to capture the actual look of Fellini’s home
town, the bedraggled seaport of Rimini, and other locations that the director
recast as revery; the movie has periods of mystery and quiet and, throughout,
an over-all atmosphere of uncanny poignance. The most delicious episode:
Terence Stamp re-creating Fellini’s accent and manner as the director gives him
profane instructions for a scene in the 1968 short film “Toby Dammit.” Stamp’s
outrageous bit of mimicry may be his greatest achievement as an actor.
filmcritic.com Matt Langdon
Damian Pettigrew's Fellini: I’m a Born Liar is a
good documentary that features a terrific firsthand interview with the great
Italian director Federico Fellini and a good number of other interviews with
those who worked with him to create some of the best films of his career.
It is structured mainly to give us Fellini’s philosophical take on making
movies and the psychology of the creative process. Fellini provides a ton of
great quotes, such as, “The instant I begin to work, a mysterious invader that
I don’t know takes over the whole show,” and, “The greatest danger for an
artists is total freedom.” And, more to the point of his method perhaps,
“Psychologically the artist is an offender. He has a childish need to offend.
And to be able to offend you need a parent, a headmaster, a high priest, the
police…”
Fellini wasn’t above "offending" his own crew either. Donald
Sutherland, in a candid if not harsh interview, states that Fellini’s
relationship with his actors was dreadful and that he was a martinet, a
dictator, and a demon.
Others are a more gracious, though each of them recalls Fellini as a
controlling man who some of the time had a unique sense of humor. Terence
Stamp, who starred in Toby Dammit, has some of the best and more
humorous recollections. One in particular is how Fellini told him to in order
to get into the character he was playing he should imagine that he had been up
all night partying and getting laid and now someone had put LSD under his
tongue.
The best sections are the behind-the-scenes footage where we see Fellini’s
working method in such films as Amarcord,
Satyricon, and Casanova. What doesn’t get mentioned though is
that Fellini worked without sync sound, thus shooting everything silent and
then dubbing all of his actor’s voices later in the editing. By working this
way he was able to constantly talk to and instruct the actors on the set as we
see in a great clip from another documentary titled Ciao, Federico!,
which is about the making of Satyricon.
Fellini: A Born Liar has a few shortcomings. One is that it primarily
deals with his late films as opposed to his first seven-and-a-half. And also,
by delving into Fellini’s method and psychology the film rarely gets down to
the actual making of the films. Most of the things Fellini says are general
ideas about his mental process, his love of artificiality, and his natural
propensity as an artist to invent his own reality. Rarely does Pettigrew let us
hear Fellini talk about his specific methods, which is why the real
behind-the-scenes footage is so good.
According to the press notes Damian Pettigrew did ten hours worth of interviews
with Fellini and it really makes you wonder what he left out. But despite these
petty shortcomings, this is the best documentary yet about the great Italian
master.
Nitrate Online [Gregory Avery]
Indiewire [Wendy Mitchell] including an interview with the director
PopMatters Jonathan Kiefer
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Fellini: I'm A Born Liar Gerald Peary
Fellini: I'm a Born Liar Profiles the Filmmaker's Love of Artifice (and ... Colin Marshall from Open Culture
DVD Verdict Mark Van Hook
EyeForFilm.co.uk George Williamson
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
Austin Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]
Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]
Chicago Tribune [Michael Wilmington]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
Petzold,
Christian
Christian Petzold | Special Feature | Subtitledonline.com
German cinema is going through an inspired period at the moment. A
captivating Berlin Film Festival earlier this year showcased top German films
and their directors, including Hans Christian Schmid’s subtle and powerful
family drama Home For The Weekend. Winning the Silver Bear was Christian Petzold for his glacial ’80s set
drama Barbara, which
is
currently picking up a lot of positive reviews after playing across UK cinemas
over the last couple of weeks. Now seems the perfect time to cast an eye back
to this modern pioneer of world cinema.
Rightly considered to be one of the country’s leading filmmakers, Petzold started life in the cold suburbs of West Germany, in the small town of Hilden, a place with no movie theatres or cultural exposure. It wasn’t until he reached high school that he began driving to larger cities in the district to feed his cinematic appetite, even attending a Hitchcock retrospective at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. This exposure to Hitchcock makes a lot of sense when analysing the themes and styles of Petzold’s feature films: there’s the clean, crisp visuals, exploration of fear in its many forms, and the fascination with blonde leading ladies. In Petzold’s case, it’s his long standing working relationship with the luminous Nina Hoss.
After graduating high school, Petzold read Literature and Drama at the Free University of Berlin, all the while knowing full well that his path would lead him to film. He wanted a fuller knowledge of the world before he turned his eye to making his own films and the study of literature offered him this. Moving on to the German Academy of Film and Television, Petzold focused on movie production and was tutored by some big names in German cinema at the time, Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky. Petzold began assisting these filmmakers on their productions, mostly documentaries like Die UFA (1992) and A Day In The Life Of A Consumer (1993). Even though Petzold didn’t follow his tutors down the avant garde path you can still see this influence on his narrative cinema, in the photography and stern focus on characterisation.
In 2007, Petzold made one of his most acclaimed works, the physiological drama Yella, starring Nina Hoss as a woman who leaves behind a broken life in a small town in Eastern Germany and starts working at a venture capital firm, becoming the assistant to a powerful executive. Petzold makes films about ghosts, about people who are in transition from one stage to the next, who are shrouded or invisible from society, framing them in transitional spaces: cars or forests, for example. This is definitely in evidence in Yella, where Petzold zeros in on this woman who may or may not be having a mental collapse: she hears voices and sees mysterious strangers shrouded in shadow. Yella isn’t really all there. She’s caught in purgatory between the past and future, the living and the dead. The cold visual style with long takes and slow editing helps to draw the audience in soft waves of paranoia and confusion.
Christian Petzold is often seen as one of the founding members of the ‘Berlin School’ or the ‘First Generation Berlin School’ which grew out of the New German Cinema Movement. This loosely gathered film movement, which also claims Angela Schanelec and Thomas Arslan as compatriots, was coined by influential critic Rudiger Suchsland. It’s essentially seen as a counter cinema movement that strives for realism, exploring social issues against the backdrop of political themes. As a collective, these visionary directors can be separated from other post war German directors in their attempt to map out and engage with the language and aesthetics of German narrative filmmaking. The label is a little misleading, though, as Petzold and the other members seek to engage with the less urbanised centres of the country. Many of Petzold’s films, indeed, are set in small towns or in the countryside, this rural setting providing him with the perfect backdrop with which to craft his eerie, physiological thrillers. The countryside or small town becomes a character in its own right in his films.
Petzold has struggled, as have many new German filmmakers, to get their films shown outside of their home country. This is the curse in belonging to a revolutionary cinema movement and making difficult, thought provoking films. The State I Am In (2000) is his only successful box office hit to date and won the German Film Award for Best Movie of that year. It’s a taut thriller centring on two left wing terrorists and their fifteen year flight from the law. The film can be seen as an early influence on the Oscar nominated German drama The Baader Meinholf Complex (2008) in the way they both explore left wing terrorist themes and organisations. Again Petzold engages with ghost-like people in an inhospitable environment, living on the edge of society. Characters at once trapped by their environment and yearning to escape it shape the meaning of Petzold’s work. This can be seen in his 2008 drama Jericho, where a love triangle emerges between a Turkish businessman living in northern Germany, his wife and the discharged soldier who comes to work for them. All these characters are trapped emotionally and physically and so Petzold frames them against a harsh landscape: the dense forests and cliffs of Northern Germany act as a visual metaphor for their situation.
Barbara has already been selected as Germany’s official entry for next year’s Best Foreign Language Film category at the Academy Awards. Petzold’s time is now. He consistently shows the world what German cinema and its filmmakers can do in his searing physiological dramas, studying provocative themes and complex characters with much verve and style.
Intensifying Life: The Cinema of the “Berlin School” - Cineaste Magazine Marco Abel, Fall 2008
After a quarter century of neglect, German cinema has rekindled international interest in its productions. The many awards and recognitions German films have recently garnered evidence this renaissance of German film culture. For instance, Wolfgang Becker’s bittersweet Ostalgie comedy about Germany’s reunification, Goodbye, Lenin! (2003), became the first German film to win the European Film Award; it also won the French and Spanish Film Awards for “Best European Film” and earned a nomination for “Best Foreign-Language Film” at the Golden Globes.1 German-Turkish director Fatih Akin’s go-for-broke migration melodrama, Gegen die Wand (Head-On, 2004), became not only the first German film in almost two decades to win the Golden Baer at the Berlin International Film Festival (“Berlinale”) but also received the European Film Award only one year after Becker’s triumph. And Hans Weingartner’s Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (The Edukators, 2004), a drama about three good-looking twenty-somethings confronting the (im)possibility of engaging in effective political action in the age of globalization, was the first German film production to compete at the Cannes Film Festival since 1993—an honor subsequently enjoyed by Akin’s complexly layered, episodic drama, Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven, 2007), for which Akin received the prize for best screenplay. Most remarkably, German films have also risen to prominence at the Academy Awards since the beginning of the second millennium.
Two films won the Oscar for “Best Foreign Language Film”: in 2001, Caroline Link’s Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in Africa), which follows a Jewish family’s flight from Nazi Germany to Kenya and its struggle to adjust to the African environment; and in 2006, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s controversially discussed Stasi-drama Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others). (In 2007 this award was won by Austrian-born director Stefan Ruzowitzky’s German-language production, Die Fälscher [The Counterfeiters], a film about a Jewish counterfeiter whom the Nazis approach for help in their effort to destabilize the United Kingdom by flooding its economy with forged currency.) Two additional films were honored with a nomination for this award: in 2004, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s portrait of Hitler’s last three days in the Führerbunker, Der Untergang (Downfall); and in 2005, Marc Rothemund’s Kammerspielfilm, Sophie Scholl—Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl—The Final Days), which revisits the final confrontation between the Nazi regime and Ms. Scholl, member of one of the few bona fide German anti-Nazi resistance groups, the “White Rose.” Of these four recent German success stories at the Academy Awards (five, if we include The Counterfeiters), all but one deal with the country’s fascist legacy, with The Lives of Others still fitting this pattern given that it, too, focuses on the country’s past troubles—in this case, the state totalitarianism perpetrated by “real existing socialism.”
Notwithstanding the many accolades these films received, they did not really advance the art of filmmaking in Germany. For all but Akin’s films embrace thoroughly conventional film aesthetics and narrative strategies. However, that they nevertheless exude significant appeal for an international audience is, at least in my view, hardly coincidental, since they almost pathologically corroborate the ideologically convenient belief perpetuated outside Germany’s borders that this nation is still almost exclusively reducible to its totalitarian past(s) (see sidebar). Further, even though films such as Downfall, The Lives of Others, and Goodbye, Lenin! promote themselves by way of their ‘big’, historically and politically charged, topics—the Nazis!; the Stasi!; the Reunification!—the politics of the image perpetuated by them is remarkably conservative. Yet, since these films seemingly offer a window onto Germany’s internal struggles with Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), this lack of aesthetic adventurousness, which might have functioned to problematize the exoticizing voyeuristic point of view these films afford international audiences, did not seem to hinder their (relatively) successful runs abroad.
Only too predictably, the German press and the country’s film industry representatives jumped on the opportunity to appropriate the recent success stories of German films, as if to declare, “we’re somebody again.” This nationalistic rhetoric eagerly espouses the belief in a German film ‘resurgence’—a convenient myth that via a synecdochal logic allowed more nationalistically minded journalist and bureaucrats to dream of the long hoped-for fulfillment of their desire to see the country itself resurge out of the long shadows cast by its totalitarian history (and post-reunification economic woes) and emerge, at long last, as a ‘normal’ country. However, as appealing as this view of German film ‘history’ may be, it simply draws an incorrect picture, as one of Germany’s leading film critics, Katja Nicodemus, asserts in response to this newfound nationalist feeling about German film productions. The mainstream press and film industry representatives, which now celebrate the success of Downfall or The Lives of Others as ingenious entrepreneurial endeavors that almost single-handedly pulled German films into the limelight of international film culture, have always obsessively focused their attention on how well the country’s film productions fare at the box office; but they have only rarely paid attention to developing a healthy film-cultural infrastructure capable of nurturing and sustaining a broad range of homemade productions—including artistically innovative small-scale films that usually do not rake in big returns at the box office but that are, aesthetically, considerably more challenging than the nation’s best-known productions. And yet, as Nicodemus argues, it is precisely these small films that constitute the proper “we” at the heart of German film culture, rather than the few internationally mainstream successes opportunistically celebrated by the country’s culture industry.
Accounting for the recent developments in German film culture, French film critics coined the phrase nouvelle vague Allemande. Pleased with this positive reception across the Rhine, the German film industry un-self-critically appropriated this assessment into their own self-satisfied nationalist sentiments, all the while ignoring that for the French this term encompasses not merely films such as Goodbye, Lenin! but also Ulrich Köhler’s Bungalow (2002), Christoph Hochhäusler’s Milchwald (This Very Moment, 2003), or Angela Schanelec’s Marseille (2004). It is films such as these—persistently ignored at home—that cumulatively demonstrate the emergence of a new film language in German cinema and constitute, according to Nicodemus, the true “we” of contemporary German film culture. Yet, what appeared to the Cahiers du Cinéma as a ‘new’ wave of creatively innovative German films in fact are only more recent examples of a subterranean genealogy of German filmmaking that hearkens back to the first half of the 1990s. Consequently, what appears to many as a ‘resurgence’ of German cinema is much better thought of as a continuationof an ongoing filmmaking process since reunification—one that predominantly took place below theradar of the country’s self-appointed cultural guardians.
This, if you will, counter-cinema, has become known in Germany as the “Berlin School.” The films associated with this ‘school’ distinguish themselves from other post-wall German films primarily in that they constitute the first significant (collective) attempt at advancing the aesthetics of cinema within German narrative filmmaking since the New German Cinema of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Alexander Kluge, Klaus Lemke, Margarethe von Trotta, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, and others. So who or what is the Berlin School? The label, coined by German film critic Rüdiger Suchsland, originally referred to what is now known as the 1st generation of the Berlin School: Schanelec, Christian Petzold, and Thomas Arslan. All three attended and graduated in the early 1990s from the Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb), arguably the country’s most intellectual film school, and were taught by avant-garde and documentary filmmakers Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky. However, as others have observed, the “Berlin School” label is somewhat misleading when its scope is widened to a 2nd generation of filmmakers such as Köhler and Henner Winckler, graduates of the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, Hochhäusler, Benjamin Heisenberg, and Maren Ade, graduates of the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München, Maria Speth, who honed her skills at the HFF “Konrad Wolf” in Potsdam-Babelsberg, Valeska Grisebach, who studied film in Vienna, or Aysum Bademsoy, who studied theatre at the Freie Universität Berlin and is, like Arslan, a child of Turkish immigrants who came to Germany in the 1960s.
In short, many so-called Berlin School directors neither hail from, nor learned their filmmaking skills in, Berlin (even though most of them have moved there by now). Nor, I hasten to add, are many Berlin School films about, or even set in, Berlin; in fact, one of the more interesting aspects of these films is their willingness to encounter spaces outside of Germany’s urban centers. Still, the label has unquestionably become part of the daily vocabulary of German film critics—so much so that discussions of the merits of individual films are often subordinated to considerations of them as examples of this school. That this de-singularization is something neither filmmakers nor more adventurous film critics are particularly fond of is understandable. Symptomatically, Olaf Möller claims in his program notes for “A German Cinema,” a side series he curated for the 2007 Indie Lisboa Film Festival, that he did not include certain directors usually associated with the Berlin School at least partially because he did not want to perpetuate already existing prejudices. He points out the danger involved in pigeonholing these directors, citing the reception of the latest films by Arslan, Schanelec, and Petzold (Ferien [Vacation], Nachmittag [Afternoon], and Yella, respectively), which were often discussed upon their premiere at the “Berlinale” in 2007 only in relation to each other rather than based on their own, individual merits.
Agreeing with Möller’s concerns, I still think the label remains useful because it enables the description and even advocacy of a cinema that otherwise finds itself ignored by a mainstream press more concerned with the latest box office numbers than with challenging its readers to seek out films that actively try to re-envision what German cinema could be(come). So what are these films like? Oskar Roehler, one of Germany’s foremost directors of the post-wall era who decidedly does not belong to the Berlin School, characterizes these films as recalcitrant and stern. According to him, nothing much happens in films such as Arslan’s Mach die Musik leiser (1994), Schanelec’s Plätze in den Städten (Places in Cities, 1998), Petzold’s Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In, 2000), Grisebach’s Mein Stern (Be My Star, 2001), Hochhäusler’s Falscher Bekenner (Low Profile a.k.a. I’m Guilty, 2005), or Köhler’s Montag kommen die Fenster (Windows on Monday, 2006). Instead, so Roehler, these films are slow and dreary, feature hardly any dialogue, are admired by critics—and attract 5,000-10,000 viewers. Indeed, box office receipts confirm Roehler’s negative assessment. For instance, whereas films such as Downfall, Michael “Bully” Herbig’s (T)raumschiff Surprise (2004), and Tom Tykwer’s Das Parfum—Die Geschichte eines Mörders (Perfume—Story of a Murderer, 2006) attracted 4.6, 9.1, and 5.5 million theatrical viewers, respectively, Jan Krüger’s Unterwegs (En Route, 2004) was seen in Germany by merely 1,200 theatrical viewers, Winckler’s 1st feature, Klassenfahrt (School Trip, 2002) by 2,300, Schanelec’s Marseille by 3,100, Low Profile by 6,600, Heisenberg’s Schläfer (Sleeper, 2005) by 10,600, Grisebach’s Sehnsucht (Longing, 2006) by 22,500, and Petzold’s Gespenster (Ghosts, 2005) by 40,000. Only Petzold’s The State I Am In, the winner of the German film award in 2001, found a considerably broader theatergoing audience, attracting a respectable 120,000 viewers, which makes it the most successful Berlin School film to date.
Yet it would be misleading to consider this group of filmmakers merely successful with cineastes in France and England (BFI’s Sight & Sound has probably paid more attention to contemporary German cinema than any other international publication) and a handful of film critics in Germany. With a production cost that rarely exceeds 1 million Euros, most of these films reach a 12-15% audience-share during their TV screenings. Furthermore, judging by the “Berlinale” of the last few years, this film movement is picking up some steam. For instance, among the annually fifty or more German films the festival screens were new efforts by Arslan, Petzold, Schanelec, Grisebach, Heisenberg, Hochhäusler, Köhler, Speth, and Winckler. Even more remarkable, Grisebach’s second feature-length film, Longing, a provocative study of longing in small town East Germany shot with non-professional actors, was screened in the festival’s main competition in 2006, rather than as part of the artistically more adventurous “Forum” or “Perspective German Cinema” series. Although Grisebach’s film didn’t win any prizes, audiences enthusiastically applauded the film, and many critics considered it the best competition entry. Likewise, many praised Petzold’s Yella as the best film of the 2007 competition. Yet the film’s positive critical reception did not prevent it from fizzling out at the German box office at around 80,000 theatrical viewers; and as one of the few Berlin School films that received U.S. distribution, it has thus far earned less than $20,000 since its May 2008 release in New York City.
Nevertheless, it would be preposterous to suggest that the Berlin School has become, or is at least part of, the establishment, either in Germany or elsewhere. Indeed, most Germans have never even heard of these directors and their films. Nor, for that matter, has this group as a whole received unanimous critical praise. In fact, their general lack of commercial success has made them vulnerable to polemical attacks from representatives of the German mainstream film industry and media. Writing for the Berlin Tagesspiegel, film critic Harald Martenstein, for instance, lambasted the “Berlinale” premiere of Ghosts, complaining that upon viewing the film he “felt thrown back into the hell of the German Autorenfilm of the 1970s, in which protagonists remain meaningfully silent and each character functions as a metaphor for existential thrownness.” And Doris Dörrie, one of Germany’s best-known directors ever since her breakthrough film, Männer (Men, 1985), chimed in the ongoing backlash against the Berlin School by accusing them in the German film monthly Film-Dienst of hiding too much behind film theory and playing it too safe, adding, “I secretly hold against them […] that they do not risk enough and hide behind form. I don’t like this: to hide oneself behind form.”
Most notoriously, the Berlin School cinema recently became the implied subject of a highly visible public put-down by the president of the German Film Academy, Günter Rohrbach. Rohrbach once was an important supporter of the New German Cinema. He produced, for instance, Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) and also left his mark on German film culture as the producer of some of the country’s commercially most successful movies, including Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot (The Boat, 1981). Having presided over the Academy since its founding in 2003, Rohrbach attacked in an essay originally published in Germany’s leading weekly news magazine, Der Spiegel, German film critics as vain self-publicists for their tendency to trash commercially successful German film productions such as Tykwer’s Perfume while celebrating films such as Longing that “wither away in the cinema.” Rohrbach singled out Grisebach’s film because German film critics enthusiastically reviewed it and vehemently complained that this personal film, unlike Tykwer’s blockbuster, received no nominations for the German Film Prize, which as of 2005 is being awarded by a body of voters resembling the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
In addition to the charge of box office impotence, Ekkerhard Knörer reports that another common criticism of Berlin School films is that they supposedly lack interest in the political and instead present us with a “bourgeois poetics of middle class navel gazing.” According to Christina Nord, this tendency has hypostatized in some cases into a sense of bourgeois “melancholic suffering” affecting the films’ protagonists and, simultaneously, a formal mannerism affecting the films themselves. It’s impossible to argue against the empirical evidence of these films’ struggle at the box office; however, to charge these films with the ‘crime’ of being a-political strikes me as questionable. In the age of finance capitalism, the conception of the ‘political’ at work in such accusations seems unproductive, not least because it nostalgically relies on a version of traditional ‘leftist’ politics that may no longer have any purchase on the objects of its critique (for more on this issue see my interview with Christian Petzold, Cineaste online, June 2008). Indeed, part of the reason the Berlin School films are so compelling—and deserving of greater (inter)national recognition—is their specific cinematic nature, which renders these films political, albeit not in the traditional (content-based, or ‘agitational’) sense of the term.
*****
If one wanted a shorthand description for the films of the Berlin School one could do worse than starting to consider how they tend to pursue an aesthetics of reduction reminiscent of the films by Robert Bresson, Michelangelo Antonioni, Michael Haneke, or the Dardenne Brothers, as well as the 2nd generation directors of the French New Wave such as Maurice Pialat, Jean Eustache, and Philippe Garrel. Many, though not all, Berlin School films are dominated by long takes, long shots, clinically precise framing, a certain deliberateness of pacing, sparse usage of extra-diegetic music, poetic use of diegetic sound, and, frequently, the reliance on unknown or even non-professional actors who appear to be chosen for who they ‘are’ rather than for whom they could be. In so doing, films such as This Very Moment, a contemporary riff on the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale, “Hansel and Gretel,” set in the German-Polish border region, Winckler’s Lucy (2005), a patiently observing study of a teenage girl’s reluctance to live up to the expectations and responsibilities she suddenly faces as a new mother, Arslan’s Aus der Ferne (From Far Away, 2006), his nearly voice-over-free travelogue of Turkey, his country of birth, or Karger (2007), a Ken Loach-like study of the fate suffered by working class life in the post-industrial age by Elke Hauck, another dffb graduate, sharpen the viewer’s attention while effortlessly creating ‘un-dramatic’ tensions. And cumulatively, these cinematic aspects stress the characters’ spatio-temporal existence—the fact that unlike the films belonging to what Eric Rentschler influentially described as the “cinema of consensus” cycle these films unmistakably take place in a specific time and place: in the here and now of reunified Germany.
Such spatio-temporal precision directs viewers’ attention to the poetic texture of what could easily be mistaken for an artlessly realist mise-en-scène. These remarkably precise films solicit audience attention so that our sense perceptions are made to tune in to the extraordinary qualities of otherwise rather ordinary lives. Many of these films, that is, thematically focus on the every day and attempt to capture normality—though they do this so that in their visual intensification of normality the extraordinary at the heart of everydayness emerges. And as Benjamin Heisenberg remarked in a conversation with me, what these films have in common is “that the camera does not allow the viewer to identify with the characters, but it’s not really distancing us from them either. Instead, it creates and positions us in an in-between space that pulls us to and fro, ultimately holding us suspended in a middle space that’s quite akin to the characters’ own subjectivity/subject position.” It is as if they intentionally heeded a filmmaking adage André Bazin once attributed to Erich von Stroheim: “Take a close look at the world and keep on doing so.” Relentlessly focusing their camera on seemingly unremarkable events, these films exhibit a tendency to ‘stare’, thus effecting an alteration of that which they stare at from within the act of seeing (and listening) itself.
We should therefore not reduce these films to the ‘documentary-like’ moniker that is so often used to describe films that call in the services of so-called realism. Certainly, as Hochhäusler says of Köhler’s Bungalow, a distinctive feature of the Berlin School films is that they allow for an “incursion of reality into the German film.” If anything, though, the Berlin School’s aesthetic is more akin to what Bazin once defined as “true realism”: these films are too obviously stylized by means of camera movement and mise-en-scène as that they could be described as ‘documenting’ reality. For instance, the sheer length of most of Schanelec’s shots in Marseille foreground the artificial choices that give rise to the sense of reality we feel when exposed to her images: reality isn’t just ‘captured’ but rendered sensible through the effects her images have on the viewer. Likewise, the ambient diegetic sounds (car and street noises, the sounds of trees swaying in the wind) in Petzold’s Ghosts or Yella, which often intrigue us because of their astonishing, indeed eerie, clarity, don’t so much declare “that’s the way reality is” as provoke in us a sense of wonder about the materiality at the heart of the everyday. These films force us to confront something that is ‘real’ enough for us but that usually remains outside of our day-to-day purview because of how our perceptive apparatus tends to block out such aspects of social reality. Rather than aiming to ‘represent’ reality ‘as it is’, these films abstract from our preexisting cliché perceptions of reality in order to induce a different experience of it by making reality itself appear more intensely sensible.
Along with this forgoing of any attempt at producing representational (or ‘psychological’) realism comes these films’ tendency to flaneur in the Benjaminian sense with their characters, seemingly aimlessly or, perhaps better, phlegmatically, as is the case in, for example, Lucy, Ghosts, Arslan’s Der schöne Tag (A Fine Day, 2001), Schanelec’s Mein langsames Leben (Passing Summer, 2001), or Ann-Kristen Reyels’ Jagdhunde (Hounds, 2007). Köhler’s Bungalow is in this respect one of the most quintessential of all Berlin School films. Not only is the defining feature of the film’s protagonist, Paul, his utter apathy and refusal to care about the consequences of his (in)actions, but the film’s mise-en-scène itself relentlessly images his refusal to engage and to live up to expectations (of the army, his brother, his friends, etc.). Consider, for instance, the film’s opening sequence. For about three minutes, we witness a continuous camera movement that follows the arrival of an army truck, depicts soldiers entering and exiting a burger joint, and suddenly ‘refuses’ to continue its movement with the soldiers, just as Paul, seemingly spontaneously, ‘decides’ to stop his own movement and not join his troop as it leaves. Did he plan to desert? The film does provide no evidence for this. Why does Paul not re-join his comrades? We never learn, and we do not gain the sense that Paul himself knows, or cares to know. Paul’s ‘actions’ are imaged here and throughout the film not in terms of an active, conscious rejection of something in particular but in terms of an unexplained phlegmatism, exemplified by Paul’s deliberate, slow movements through the rural middle-class spaces he inhabits, his lack of emoting in his interactions with his do-gooder brother and his pretty Danish girlfriend, as well as his general indifference to how his behavior affects his surroundings. For the viewer, the strangeness of Paul’s behavior foregrounds also the strangeness of what otherwise might simply appear as the normal, mundane environment in which many middle class Germans dwell. In short, the Berlin School films’ ethnological gaze—which they frequently direct at in-between spaces, such as the border region separating Germany and Poland in School Trip and This Very Moment or the socially and emotionally transitory spaces that one frequently finds within German cities in most of Petzold’s work—shows contemporary Germany as if from the perspective of a stranger.
Although the Berlin School does decidedly not exhibit the traditional characteristics of ‘avant-garde’ cinema, these films’ attitude towards reality is akin to that of an experiment whose outcome is yet to be determined. These films approach the world they encounter with the assumption that they do not yet know what this object—or the other—they try to depict is. They are careful not to ‘represent’ this other and thus reduce it to the preexisting point of view of a subject that speaks from a position of superior knowledge; they instead exemplarily heed, as Theodor Adorno put it in Aesthetic Theory, “the primacy of the object.” They neither speak for this object nor make it speak; rather, in patiently engaging their objects, they create maps of the very socio-political, economic, cultural, and emotional forces that have paralyzed post-wall Germany since 1989, when the country’s most recent rollercoaster ride began with the heights of the fall of the Berlin wall and the country’s subsequent reunification only to end in massive unemployment and an attending social malaise. This depression culminated around the turn of the millennium in a public debate on the Germans’ unwillingness to ‘move’—to communities away from home, to different careers, to a different state of mind no longer beholden to the belief that the role of the state is supposed to be to take care of its citizens—lest the final remnants of the once well-functioning welfare state vanish, too. Indeed, it is hardly a coincidence that current German President Horst Köhler, formerly head of the IMF, felt compelled to admonish Germans in 2005 to become more mobile in a speech about which the most remarkable aspect was that it had to be delivered to begin with; after all, one of his predecessors, Roman Herzog, had already famously addressed the German nation in 1997 with the demand that Germany needed to jolt itself into action. Köhler’s reiteration of Herzog’s original appeal thus simply yet symptomatically marked the seemingly all-pervasive paralysis that afflicted Germany once its ‘reunification party’ came to an end.
The Berlin School cinematically responds to this nexus of socio-cultural paralysis. However, these films do so neither by realistically representing such immobility nor by providing viewers with sympathetic characters who manage to escape. Their aesthetic is not emblematic of a more traditional ‘representational realism’, let alone expressive of a naïve form of political (thesis-driven) social realism. Indeed, Ulrich Köhler recently published a polemical essay in which he explains why he does not make political films. One of the surest ways to receive public funding for film productions in Germany is, so Köhler, to make topical, message-driven films that package political enlightenment in stories. Köhler, who like many of his fellow Berlin School directors is currently struggling to find financing for his next film project, derides such Lehrfilme (educational films) as the embodiment of “the aesthetic program of social-democratized cultural politics.” Against this moralistic imperative to be a conscientious filmmaker who uses his art for the betterment of society, Köhler mounts a near-Adorno-esque defense of the autonomy of art, writing “art, which wants to be nothing but art, is often more subversive” than topical art, whose popularity itself is frequently an index for its affirmation of the status quo. Arguing against any form of liberal-bourgeois instrumentalization of filmmaking, Köhler declares, “If art is political then it is so in exactly this manner: it resists its appropriation for daily political and social concerns. Its strength lies in its autonomy.” Far from political acquiescence, Köhler articulates here that the job of art is not to be political (qua content) but to produce politically. In the case of cinema, producing politically today entails an (renewed) investigation of the politics of the image—not least because contemporary capitalist culture is the ‘lightest’, most image-based economic operation to which we have ever been exposed.
Rather than (moralistically) exercising the well-meaning yet ineffective operations of representational realism, the Berlin School films invent images of mobility that render visible something that is currently absent in the viewers’ real social context. These films image their characters’ lived refusals to either embrace the clichéd desires of individual and social security or pursue the bourgeois demand for social upward mobility—the very demand rhetorically articulated by the German presidents. Yet the experimental character of their individual encounter with reality ensures that these films ultimately differ from each other. This singularity ensues from the directors’ essential attitude towards their medium—an stance perhaps best articulated by Hochhäusler when writing in the British film magazine Vertigo that the “goal is a cinema that makes life more intense. Every film has to let itself be measured against life. It could be said: A film is an instrument in the process of producing reality. It is therefore part of a social context. The basic question is: What is real? Each attempt at replying is a personal commitment.” This strongly felt sense of personal commitment to reality results in a cinematic attitude towards reality that rejects the very clichés that have dominated German cinema, as well as its post-wall political discourse, for the last two decades.
Instead of catering towards the familiar, these films present their audiences with new, non-preexisting images of Germany. But this imaging of novelty proceeds by intensifying their look at reality, rather than by avoiding it. These films are thus involved in inventing—or at least experimentally developing—an a-representational realism: a film style that cinematically embraces, seeks out, and non-judgmentally welcomes reality but does so in ways that can be considered an extension of Adorno’s often forgotten late-career argument about cinema in “Transparencies on Film.” Putting the slightest pressure on Adorno’s comments, we might say that the task the Berlin School sets itself is not to create immediacy with reality but with the (reality of the) image, so that the depicted world becomes aesthetically autonomous, abstracted from empirical reality. It is, however, just this aesthetic abstraction from empirical reality that affords viewers an intensified encounter with their own social reality, as they find themselves confronted with the necessity to rethink the very relation between what and how they see. Put differently, the (hoped-for) effect of such aesthetic intensification of the act of seeing is to bring about a momentary suspension of our habituated tendency to read images through the framework of representational realism. By affirming the image as image, the Berlin School films thus affectively transform reality, forcing viewers to engage the seemingly familiar as something unfamiliar while never alienating us from what we see. This achieved effect thus neither correlates to the ‘cinema of identification’ nor embraces the imperative to create distance between image and viewer as it was advocated by what some have denounced as “grand theory” (see, for instance, David Bordwell and Noël Carrol, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies). While some might consider this failure to create distance between the film and our perceptive apparatus another reason for characterizing these films as, at best, a-political, I would concur with Steven Shaviro that in a world in which the experience of life is dominated by permanent alienation one can hardly have any faith in creating more alienation as an effective political solution to the problems caused by consumer capitalism. As Shaviro writes in The Cinematic Body, “Precisely because film is already predicated on what Benjamin […] calls the destruction of the aura, because it is already an ‘alienated’ art, its capacity to affect the spectator is not perturbed by any additional measure of alienation.” Instead of alienating us from their images in order to ‘get out’ of them, the Berlin School films immerse us in their images (and sounds) to get us away from the clichés of reality—to affect us so that we may begin to re-see and hear again, that is, to rethink, our own relation to the world we all too often perceive in overly reductive ways.
Instead of becoming (however unintentionally) a mouthpiece for the patriarchal, neoliberal rhetoric of Germany’s past and present presidents, then, these films offer viewers sensations of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in their inspired interpretation of Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener,” have theorized in Empire as “absolute refusal” of neoliberal mobility. This sensation, articulated by Bartleby’s famous “I prefer not to” reply to any request put to him, is rendered haptically available through an intensive filmic actualization of mobility: it is precisely because so little movement occurs in many of the Berlin School films that the sensation of movement becomes affectively palpable at crucial moments in them. I’m thinking here, for instance, of the opening and closing moments of Bungalow; the astonishing ending of Marseille, which forces us to consider the transformation the protagonist might have undergone as we look at a static, seemingly endless long shot in which she gradually disappears strolling along the Mediterranean beach; the last images of Low Profile in which the protagonist, who falsely claims authorship for a series of violent events, smiles directly into the camera as if to express that he finally managed to escape the comfortable yet boring life afforded him by his suburban, provincial upbringing; or for that matter Petzold’s entire oeuvre (for an extended discussion thereof, see my forthcoming essay on Petzold in The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and its Politics at the Turn of the Century, eds. Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager).
Consider also Benjamin Heisenberg’s Sleeper. The film narrates a triangle love story in which one of the male protagonists, German scientist Johannes, is asked by an agent of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND, the German Secret Service) to file reports on Farid, his Arab colleague, whom the BND suspects of being part of a currently dormant terrorist cell. Sleeper compellingly images the affective, if you will ‘viral’, quality inherent to the act of denunciation. The film’s point is not to make us wonder whether Farid is guilty of the bomb attack that eventually occurs. If the film posits the question of guilt at all, then the point seems to be quite clearly that it is Johannes whom we are supposed to consider guilty because of the way he takes advantage of the power that’s been given to him: Johannes, refusing to provide Farid with what would seem to have been a genuine alibi, is the film’s real sleeper, not Farid.
But what strikes me as most interesting about the film is how the film renders visible the moments of transformation that lead Johannes to abuse his power. We can identify three steps. The 2nd and 3rd pertain to Johannes’ feelings of jealousy: of Farid’s appeal to Beate, the two men’s love interest, and Farid’s success at work. Crucially, Johannes does not report on Farid until the latter’s presence affects Johannes on the level of desire. In other words, Johannes does not begin to report on Farid because of ideological motivations, because Johannes is inherently bad, or even because he believes the BND has a good case. Johannes does not do what he does because he thinks it’s the morally and ethically right thing to do; rather, Johannes becomes a sleeper because of the way he is plugged into a particular circuit of desire. But, arguably, neither the 2nd nor 3rd step in this transformation would have occurred had it not been for the 1st crucial step: Johannes’ encounter with the ‘outside’—his meeting with BND agent Mrs. Wasser. For it is his exposure to her insinuations that implant in his mind—virus-like—something that he cannot not respond to. Even though he dismisses the very idea of his colleague being a potential terrorist, he does perceive Farid with a heightened, affectively intensified awareness that emerges only as a result of having been encroached upon by the force of the outside. In a reversal of the Enlightenment slogan “cogito ergo sum,” we observe the formation of subjectivity being beholden to the formula: something impinges upon me, therefore I become-different to myself. So Johannes becomes a denunciator not because of his inherently immoral character, because of his preexisting ideological commitment, or because of some brainwashing operation he underwent; rather, his becoming-denunciator is the result of the force of desire that affects him.
Johannes is not a denunciator by nature; nor is his behavior explainable via recourse to ‘ideology’. Rather, the film shows how social action is largely an effect of desire, of affect, of sensation. And this becomes sensible for the viewer because of the film’s stylistic choices: its patiently observing gaze, its languorous tracking shots, its refusal to sensationalize or sentimentalize, and its refusal to show the bombing and turn the film into an action thriller. It’s the film’s durational quality—how we are made to endure the events without being afforded moments of explosive relief—that leaves its mark on our sense-perception of the film.
What I’m trying to suggest is that the logic of Sleeper induces a transformative moment in the viewer: it is we (rather than the characters) who ultimately are moved to, well, move, for our preconceptions about the nature of denunciation and moral betrayal are put at stake. Indeed, the film suggests that we are the real sleepers, in two opposing senses. If we continue to insist that the most important questions to ask of a film are questions of meaning—is Farid guilty or not?—then we simply sleep through the film’s political provocations. But if we affirm our subjection to the film’s affective qualities we might find that specific virtual potentials within us—dormant or un-actualized thus far—might actualize themselves. Whether such actualization of virtual potential occurs depends, of course, on multiple conditions: for a seed to come to fruition, the environment in which it is planted has to be responsive to such seeding. But part of these conditions is undoubtedly the need to take seriously the force, or affective quality, of images: that images have their own reality, independent of their representational meaning, and that this reality does things to us.
Although Sleeper—but I could have just as easily discussed films such as Ghosts, Longing, Afternoon, Vacation, Windows on Monday, or Speth’s Madonnen (Madonnas, 2007)—provides us with images that seemingly invite contemplation, their nature is not hermeneutic, since what we see is always quite lucid. The question they provoke is never, “what does this image ‘mean’?”; instead, they affectively solicit our subjection to them: they provoke our fascination and expose us to their sensations. In so doing, they establish a mimetic relation in Adorno’s sense between the depicted world and the reality from which the images are abstracted; instead of ‘representing’ this reality and thus inevitably reducing it to the primacy of the representing subject, these films articulate an analogical similarity with this world, which, however, becomes possible only because they heed the irreducible difference of that to which their images point. It is this very metonymic relation that affectively expresses the cinematically fashioned provocation for us to move as well—to forge relations with our world so that the preexisting life-world reappears as strange. This making-strange of the familiar initiates in viewers material encounters with their worlds that issue forth a sense of joy and thus hope. It is as if these films were appealing to their (German) audience to start believing in their world again, rather than wallowing in nostalgia for a lost Eden— sugarcoated by whitewashed memories of life in pre-unified Germany—or investing their hopes in the false utopia promised by neoliberal demagogues.
*****
To return to my earlier notion of the cartographic quality of the Berlin School films, the nature of the maps these films produce of contemporary Germany is ‘untimely’ rather than ‘representational’. They delineate less a series of images of post-wall Germany ‘as it is’—cliché impressions that would merely have the questionable appeal of tourist snapshots—than a network of images that, as if by accident, emerge from within the characters’ subjective existence. Generative in nature, these images do not represent a preexisting reality; they instead render visible aspects of social reality that are either inaccessible to, or simply absent in, the current ‘real’ reality of post-wall citizens. And it is their ‘untimeliness’ that finally imbues these images with a political quality: they are ‘of’ their time only in so far as they are offered up in hopes of a better future to come. The Berlin School produces films that are politically necessary, not because these directors make ‘political’ films (i.e., message-driven films such as Michael Moore’s) but because they make their films politically—because their images don’t so much pretend to represent some invisible knowledge of ‘real’ Germany offered up as indispensable insights as point to the future in hopes that the force of these images bears enough virtual potential for affecting yet-to-come moments with transformative energy, with the capacity to alter the very reality from within which these images initially emerged.
This aesthetic dwelling in, and intensification of, the here and now points us to one final aspect of the Berlin School. These films neither willfully universalize their cultural-historical specificity as do, for instance, many German comedies of consensus such as Rainer Kaufmann’s Stadtgespräch (Talk of the Town, 1995); nor do they sidestep the difficulties of the present by once again dutifully (re)turning to the by now neatly codified horrors of the past as did the recent wave of Hitler-films such as Sophie Scholl, Dennis Gansel’s Napola (2004), or Downfall. The Berlin School instead presents us with a passionate and innovative effort to find new ways of describing and analyzing the present of a country that continues to struggle with finding its ‘true’ identity six decades after the end of WWII and almost two decades after its reunification. This presentism—pursued in the name of affecting the future—should not be considered a denial of history, as if this new generation of filmmakers turned its back on the horrors perpetuated by an earlier generation of Germans. Rather, the films’ insistence on discovering, and tapping into, the plentitude of stories available in the country’s present sheds light on the very conditions of possibility in today’s Germany for ethically heeding a sense of responsibility—for habituating one’s capacity to become response-able before the other at the very moment when the socio-psychic environment of Germany faces great pressures from within and without in form of both the economic and psychological costs of the reunification, which went anything but smoothly, and, concurrently, the brutal socio-economic effects produced by the logic of neoliberalism, which accelerate the erosion of Germany’s once celebrated social security net.
Notwithstanding their individual differences, we might view the Berlin School as undertaking the effort to create an itinerary of the present—not in order to deny history but to speculate about how a different future might be brought about. Since speculation—specere is Greek for ‘to look at’—is by definition ‘of’ the sphere of the visual, it is only proper that these filmmakers pursue their conjecture by carefully attending to how their practices realize their medium’s inherent qualities. The Berlin School films produce images that invent new lines of flight, or arrows of thought, so that viewers may pick them up in order to find solutions to their individual and collective malaise by re-seeing the problem from within their own social space. By amplifying the images’ realistic concreteness to a point of abstraction, these films insist that such images are, precisely, politically necessary. It is through this process of rendering-visible that the sensation of mobility or transformation emerges: at the most intensified moment of utter stasis is where things break down, where transformation, that is, the affective sensation of movement for which one then needs to forge linkages with the reality of socio-cultural space, occurs. Understood this way—as attempting to wrestle away utopian images from preexisting social reality—the Berlin School films can be regarded as a cinema that is engaged in the difficult task to improve Germany’s reality in the age of post-wall globalization by providing better images for it.
1. From the mid-1990s on, when the initial euphoria about reunification morphed into the creeping sense that too many people, especially from former East Germany, ended up being Wendeverlierer (losers of the reunification), the phenomenon of Ostalgie— nostalgia for life in the former German Democratic Republic—emerged. Films such as Peter Timm’s two Go, Trabi, Go comedies (1991; 1992), Detlev Buck’s Wir können auch anders (No More Mr. Nice Guy, 1993), and Leander Haußmann’s Sonnenallee (Sun Alley, 1999) successfully tapped into this developing sense of East German disenfranchisement and, in turn, fed the intensifying resentment and attending yearning for life before unification. Although Becker’s film is superior to, and may be less ‘ostalgic’ than, the others, it nevertheless displays fondness for the idea(l) represented by the GDR’s “real existing socialism,” albeit not for its actual instantiation.
Barbara | tiff.net Toronto Film fest programming notes
Christian Petzold • Great Director Profile • Senses of Cinema Jaimey Fisher, July 6, 2013
UI
Press | Jaimey Fisher | Christian Petzold published book (224 pages), December 2013
Christian
Petzold (Director) | Project Gutenberg Self-Publishing ... biography and filmography
Christian Petzold - Movies, Bio
and Lists on MUBI
Christian Petzold :: 34th Moscow International Film Festival brief bio
The History of Cinema.
Christian Petzold: biography, filmography ... film reviews by Piero Scaruffi
Images for a
Post-Wall Reality: New German Films at the 55th Berlin ... Images
for a Post-Wall Reality: New German Films at the 55th Berlin Film Festival, by
Marco Abel from Senses of Cinema, April 15, 2005
Senses of Cinema 39 The State of Things Part Two: More Images for a Post-Wall German Reality: The 56th Berlin Film Festival, by Marco Abel from Senses of Cinema, May 2006
The Province Always Rings Twice: Christian Petzold's Heimatfilm ... The Province Always Rings Twice: Christian Petzold’s Heimatfilm noir Jerichow, by Alasdair King from Transit, 2010 (pdf format)
Worlds of Possibilities: Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, and ... Dennis Lim from Cinema Scope, 2011
Facts of Migration, Demands on Identity: Christian Petzold's Yella ... Facts of Migration, Demands on Identity: Christian Petzold's Yella and Jerichow in Comparison, by Matthew D. Miller from The German Quarterly, February 9, 2012 Get PDF (307K) (pdf format)
Christian Petzold's Berlin Winner 'Barbara' Leads German Film Noms Scott Roxborough from The Hollywood Reporter, March 23, 2012
Kevin B. Lee Deceptive Surfaces and the Films of Christian Petzold, Kevin B. Lee video essay from Fandor, May 8, 2012
• View topic - Christian Petzold on DVD film discussion forum, August 2, 2012
Oscar 2013: Christian Petzold's BARBARA Is Germany Submission Andre Soares from Alt Film Guide, August 31, 2012
Who Is Nina Hoss? Karin Christensen from Germany on Your Mind, September 18, 2012
Christian Petzold: The State He Is In – Keyframe - Explore the world ... Dennis Harvey from Fandor, September 26, 2012
Film
of the week: Barbara | BFI Catherine
Wheatley from Sight and Sound, September
28, 2012, also seen here: Sight &
Sound: Catherine Wheatley
“WINNING A (HI)STORY OUT OF PLACES” Christian Petzold's ... Christina Gerhardt from The Brooklyn Rail, October 2012
Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf and Christoph Hochhäusler Film Comment, October 2012
NYFF: 'Barbara' Director Christian Petzold Talks The Influence Of ... Christopher Bell from The indieWIRE Playlist, October 15, 2012
Barbara - Reviews -
Reverse Shot Clean Slate, by Andrey Tracy, December
20, 2012
Review: Barbara - Film Comment Phillip Lopate, December 19, 2012
Christian
Petzold: In Limbo - Goethe-Institut Thilo
Wydra, April 2013
BOOK REVIEW: The
Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School, by Marco ... The
Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School, by Marco Abel; Christian Petzold, by Jaimey Fisher, book review by Cara Tovey from
Transit, 2014
Christian
Petzold's "Ghosts" trilogy - Film Comment Max Nelson, February 25, 2014
Cinema Scope | The Face of Another: Christian Petzold's Phoenix Adam Nayman, Summer 2015
Yella/ Barbara -
Touching Cinema Minna
Yliruikka, July 2015
Germany's
Nina Hoss and Christian Petzold - The Daily Beast Nick Schager, July 25, 2015
Gespenster | Movie by Christian Petzold | Synopsis interview with the director, 2005
Interview: Christian Petzold - Features - Film - Time Out London David Jenkins brief interview, 2007
Christiane Peitz:
"We have stars but no sky" (13/09/2007) - signandsight Christiane Peitz interview from Der Tagesspiegel, September 11,
2007
Jerichow:
Interview with Writer-Director Christian Petzold | Emanuel Levy Emanuel Levy interview, March 26, 2009
Uneasy Riders: Christian Petzold's Postindustrialist Road Movies ... Scott Foundas interview from The LA Weekly, May 13, 2009
Anna Tatarska interview from Fandor, March 5, 2012
Life in a bubble Ralf Schenk interview from The Berliner Zeitung, March 7, 2012, published in Sign and Sight, March 21, 2012
Barbara: Christian Petzold interview | SBS Film Helen Barlow interview from SBS Film, June 14, 2012
Barbara:
Interview with Christian Petzold | Electric Sheep Pamela Jahn interview, September 28,
2012
Article/
The Curzon Interview: Christian Petzold - HOME Jason Wood, Director of Programming,
Curzon Cinemas, interview from Home, October
1, 2012
Spatial Suspense: A Conversation with Christian Petzold on - Mubi Daniel Kasman and David Phelps interview from Mubi, October 16, 2012
Christian Petzold on Barbara | Filmmaker Magazine R. Kurt Osenlund interview, December 21, 2012
Megan Ratner - Christian
Petzold Interview / Film Quarterly Building On the Ruins, Megan Ratner
interview from Film Quarterly, Winter
2012/2013
Films for Friends | Frieze Sarah Khan interview, August 27, 2014
Filming
Around the Wound: A Conversation with Christian Petzold on ... Daniel Kasman interview from Mubi, February 26, 2015
Interview: Christian Petzold - Film Comment Nicolas Rapold interview, February 26, 2015
Cinema
Scope | The Face of Another: Christian Petzold's Phoenix Adam Nayman, includes an interview,
Summer 2015
Survivor's Song: Christian Petzold on Phoenix | Filmmaker Magazine David Jenkins interview, July 23, 2015
Why
'Phoenix' Finally Makes Christian Petzold a New Arthouse Auteur ... Ryan Lattanzio interview from indieWIRE, July
29, 2015
Surviving
the Shipwreck: Christian Petzold and Nina Hoss on ... Patrick Z. McGavin interviews Petzold and
actress Nina Hoss from the Ebert site, August 3, 2015
Nina
Hoss on her staggering star turn in the new-to-Criterion Phoenix ... Adam Nayman interviews actress Nina Hoss from
The Onion A.V. Club, April 19, 2016
Interview:
Nina Hoss on Christian Petzold's Phoenix | Feature | Slant ... James Lattimer interviews actress Nina Hoss
from Slant magazine, April 25, 2016
′Germany
doesn′t produce many images of itself, except for Stasi or ... Jochen Kürten interview from DW, July 5, 2015
Christian Petzold (director) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
PLOTINNEN
– made for TV
aka: Drifters
Germany (68 mi) 1995
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Bradford Film Festival report
Very early Petzold – made for television, on a minimal budget
that dictated the odd running-time. And, as so often happens,
straitening financial limitations prove a major boon to the creative
process: this is a fine, tough, surprising little picture that makes a
virtue of its strict geographical restriction to the bleakly
bourgeois/industrial Leverkusen area. And the languid Eleonore Weisgerber, as a
sardonic, fatalistic, down-on-her-luck cosmetics saleswoman, is just
terrific. The genre-referencing plot, meanwhile, takes its own sour
time to come together but, as with Petzold's subsequent masterpiece The
State I Am In, it proves well worth the (brief) wait.
Floatation Suite - Bradford Film Festival report [Sheila Seacroft]
The first in the Petzold retrospective, this debut film, while
sometimes short on plot exposition, contains so many elements of Petzold's
later work - the strong women, the settings in unglamorous working life, the
sudden volte-faces, the unexpected lyricism in mundane surroundings. It tells
of Karin, a past her prime cosmetics saleswoman, with her increasing
exasperation with her life and her dreams of leaving it all behind and living
in Paris. An unlikely but entertaining plot develops, where anything can
happen, though nothing frequently does, an odd alliance is formed, and a
multi-mix of genres leads to many twists and turns. Patchy though the film
occasionally is, Petzold wears his Hitchcock-admiring heart entertainingly on
his sleeve, and there are many moments of breath-catching cinematic beauty.
Eleonore Weisgerber, with her Fassbinder-esque looks, is perfect as the
enigmatic, haughty heroine, and it's a must see for any admirer of his latest
grand success, Yella.
CUBA LIBRE – made for TV
Germany (92 mi)
1996
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Bradford Film Festival report
I'm not aware of Petzold ever having made a bad or uninteresting film so far – but of the seven I've seen, the ones I find least effective are Wolfsburg (2003) and Cuba Libre, his first feature-length work, made for German TV. It's a crucial stage in his development as a writer, but at this point he hasn't yet managed to fully work out how to integrate his preoccupations within the format of the thriller genre (the plot twists into near-incomprehensibility towards the end) or the structure of a 90-minute movie. Tough-nut protagonist Richy Muller, however, proves relentlessly watchable throughout.
User reviews from imdb Author: jan onderwater from Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Depressing, dark love drama with thin story line, that makes you wonder whether the makers believe in life at all. The male protagonist is constantly running into problems and gets beaten up time and time again, so much so that after a while I could not help laughing, which cannot have been the intention of the makers: they are vèry, vèry serious. The crux of the film seems to be a sharp comment on the money driven German society, in which it is impossible to show any real affection; of course this could be a dilemma of the makers themselves: money is not the problem, but what you do with it. Not forgotten is to include an extreme right wing man whose self-proclaimed purpose in life it is to free the street of socially undesirable elements. It is all very heavy symbolism with no relief, but it is certainly well-made with a script that - as the film progresses - becomes less and less surprising. The two acting leads are good.; fine cinematography.
THE STATE I AM IN (Die innere
Sicherheit)
Germany (106 mi) 2000
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Bradford Film Festival report
Petzold's masterpiece (so far): a superbly constructed, brilliantly acted and meticulously directed tale of teenage angst, hormones, terrorism, state-surveillance and inter-generational strife. Quiet surfaces and seemingly innocuous events consistently hint at much greater implications – and though there are the occasional longueurs here and there, they are swept away by one of the most shattering climaxes in all of cinema. The way Petzold dramatically concludes his (previously oh-so-measured) film's action – and then rolls his credits to the accompaniment of Tim Hardin's "How can we hang on to a dream" – is evidence of some kind of genius at work.
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
German "Berlin School" writer-director Christian Petzold ("Yella"/"Jerichow"/"Wolfsburg") brilliantly constructs a different kind of political film that delves into the generation gap, the psyches of fugitives on the run, the difficulties in trying to keep a nuclear family together in contemporary times in such a materialist age and how living in the past makes for a cloudy future. American folksinger Tim Hardin's song "How can we hang on to a dream" signals the film's complicated theme of learning to live in the present, that's buoyed by references to Moby Dick, a Heinrich Heine poem, the Steve McQueen film The Getaway and numerous ideas on how to make a movie which is perceived as not that different from living in real life.
Clara (Barbara Auer) and Hans (Richy Müller) were in the 1960s German terrorists in the RAF and are on the run for the last 20 years. In recent times they are living underground in Portugal with their perceptive, socially awkward, antsy 15-year-old daughter Jeanne (Julia Hummer), when they are suddenly forced to flee back to Germany when their money is stolen. The conflicted Jeanne, craving for a normal teenager's life of wearing cool clothes and listening to CDs, takes up with air-head hunk surfer Heinrich (Bilge Bingul) she met in a Portugal tourist spot, who turns up working in a pizza parlor in Germany, as her parents try to reunite with German terrorists from the past, to get some cash, now all respectable citizens unwilling to acknowledge their past.
It's an observant film that delves into the psyches of the dysfunctional family, as it takes a long hard look at what becomes of radicals who are left in no man's land when they can't quite accept that their past violent but idealistic acts can't mean much in today's changing material world. Their actions can't even impress their own child, who still loves them for trying their best to love her. Which the talented filmmaker hints might be all that can be expected in the ever evolving world.
Emerging from The State I Am In, dazzled audiences may find themselves asking two questions: just how good a film-maker is this Christian Petzold? And why aren’t his movies shown outside Germany, apart from screenings on the film-festival circuit? The first query is more easily answered – on the evidence of State and follow-up Something To Remind Me (2001), Petzold is extremely good. In fact, among current European directors it’s hard to think of a more intelligent, impressive talent – and he’s surely out on his own when it comes to the brilliance of his screenplays (which he sometimes co-writes with Harun Farocki.)
The issue of Petzold’s international profile – or scandalous lack of – is altogether trickier. Perhaps it’s partly due to the clumsy English titles with which his films are saddled, and which bear little relation to the German originals: Something To Remind Me for Toter Mann (the swimming term “dead man’s float”), and, even more awkward, The State I Am In for Die Innere Sicherheit (internal or inner security). In certain snobbish quarters, meanwhile, it probably doesn’t boost his status as a ‘serious director’ that most of his work has been made for television – of his half-dozen films to date, only two are cinema features: State and Wolfsburg (2003).
Then there’s the related issue that his films tend to be somewhat ‘flat’ visually – especially compared with, say, his fellow Westphalian Tom Tykwer, whose Run Lola Run, The Princess and the Warrior and Heaven have all been commercially released in the UK. But, like Rainer Werner Fassbinder before him, Petzold shows that a talented director doesn’t have to be a painterly visual stylist: his films are blunt and straightforward, as befits their genre aspects – both Something and State are, on one very basic level, crime movies. There’s a whole lot more going on besides, of course: the pair are intimate films about personal relationships in crisis, with small casts and economic dialogue.
An unclassifiable combination of teen romance, coming-of-age drama, and paranoid political thriller, State is mainly told from the perspective of 15-year-old Jeanne (Julia Hummer). Like many girls her age, she’s growing resentful of parental demands: who she should see, where she should go, how she should dress, etc. But for her father Hans (Richy Muller) and mother Clara (Barbara Auer) Jeanne’s blossoming independence poses unusual problems: the pair are renegades, permanently on the run from the police for unspecified reasons. All we know is that they were once part of some kind of underground organisation – presumably a Baader-Meinhof type gang. When their money is stolen in Portugal, the family must return to the more hazardous surroundings of their native Germany, where Jeanne soon resumes her ‘holiday romance’ with surfer-kid Heinrich (Bilge Bingul). But this proves increasingly difficult, as her parents sense the law closing in.
Though a very serious film, The State I Am In isn’t without some unexpected moments of dark humour – at a large cross-roads regulated by traffic lights, Hans fears the worst when menacing black BMWs arrive simultaneously on the scene: as his wife and daughter duck down in their seats, Hans gets out and puts his hands in the air. only for all the cars and their bemused, non-cop drivers to pull away when the lights change. Early on, however, when Hans and Jeanne are attacked by the crooks stealing the family’s stash, we see that the family do indeed inhabit a very dangerous world in which violence – and, even worse, the threat of capture – is seldom far away. This assault, which leaves both father and daughter unconscious, is played out in an almost casual manner, without any of the pointless muzak most directors would instinctively deploy to amp up tension: Petzold’s technique is closer to the offhand killings in Wim Wenders’ The American Friend.
Not that The State I Am In eschews music altogether: Stefan Will’s score is all the more effective for being so very sparingly deployed, and the film is bookended with Tim Hardin’s plaintive 1967 song ‘How can we hang on to a dream?’ – the question confronted by Hans, Clara and Jeanne herself. For Jeanne, the dream is of romance – her stormy relationship with Heinrich is very convincing, and we get the impression this is very probably her first sexual experience. But her intimacy with Heinrich is clearly dangerous – it breaches the ‘internal security’ of the family unit, as Jeanne occupies that ever-hazardous transitional phase between youth and adulthood: between, in effect, reliance on parents and taking responsibility for one’s own actions.
Hans and Clara’s ‘dream’ is much less concrete, pressing and well-defined. In fact, it’s a source of minor frustration throughout the film that we’re never told anything about the activities that have forced them into ‘permanent hiding’ (reviewers’ assertions that they are part of the “70s generation of German political terrorists” seem wide of the mark – this mid-thirties pair would have only been Jeanne’s age at the end of the 1970s). But Petzold knows exactly what he’s doing by tantalisingly withholding this apparently vital information: Hans and Clara are no longer motivated by any specific ideology – their choices have led them down increasingly narrow paths, where flight and subterfuge have become daily routines. Jeanne, brought up in this environment, has never known any other life – and the impact is clear on Hummel’s lived-in face, reminiscent of Linda Manz’s street-urchin from Days of Heaven.
Because she never speaks about what her parents did, or now do (“they fuck” she tells Heinrich), we’re also kept in the dark. To parallel this, dramatic developments that Jeanne doesn’t witness herself remain tantalisingly unshown to us: we see the bloody aftermath of violent events (a former colleague of Hans nursing his bloodied nose after presumably receiving a punch; Hans’ bullet-wound after a botched bank heist), but not the events themselves. And though the dialogue is often outstanding (“over-conformity can often attract attention too,” complains Jeanne when forced to wear a particularly drab outfit), as in the best scripts it’s the unspoken stuff that carries the greatest weight.
Petzold places high demands on our attention – we must be alert to the details and nuances of every event and conversation, and the pace of the film is often rather slow around the mid-section. In addition, several crucial developments seem to rely on rather distracting implausibilities. But, as in Something To Remind Me, the compellingly vivid characterisations by the actors constantly engage: most scenes revolve around Hummer, Auer, Muller (a stockier Jurgen Prochnow) and Bingul (a youthful Val Kilmer type). And, as in the follow-up film, the brilliant structure of the screenplay means that everything clicks into place only at the very end, when we’re finally made aware of the threat facing Jeanne and her family, and of the remarkable ends their enemies will go to trap them. Everything hinges on Jeanne’s decision on whether or not Heinrich can be trusted with her family’s secret. Trained by her father never to say anything when under interrogation, Jeanne at first tries out the tactic in a romantic context when Heinrich jokingly ‘grills’ her using his bedside lamp – but by the end, the personal and political elements of their relationship, of Jeanne’s life, and of the film itself, are utterly indivisible.
Christian
Petzold's "Ghosts" trilogy - Film Comment Max Nelson, February 25, 2014
Money—who has it, who lacks it, and what those who need it are willing to do to get it—is a constant, corrosive presence in the work of German filmmaker Christian Petzold. In the three movies that make up his “Ghosts” trilogy, it’s the fuel that keeps the engine of the narrative running and the obstruction that makes it stall, an object that corrupts those who have it and cripples those who don’t. It’s what drives a married pair of former West German terrorists to endanger their teenage daughter’s future by committing a desperate, irrevocable deed in the last act of The State I Am In (2002), what brings together—then tears apart—a struggling, marginalized girl and an emotionally shattered businessman’s wife in Ghosts (2005), and what determines every step of a young accountant’s uncertain future in Yella (2007). It’s the hurdle that Petzold’s characters have to jump before they can arrive at any kind of intimacy with one another, and the sudden, pressing interruption that cuts their moments of tenderness short. And it’s bound up closely with a subject that haunts every frame of Petzold’s trilogy: the fault lines created, widened, and exposed in Germany’s national identity in the wake of the country’s 1990 re-unification.
Petzold, who was born in West Germany in 1960, graduated from the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie in 1994—five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and four after the re-unification of East and West Germany. In the following decades, the trilogy suggests, Germany would be united in name only. Nearly half a century earlier, the country had been parceled out Länder by Länder among the Allied powers; in the following five years, as the Soviet Union’s relationship with its former allies cooled, both sides moved to consolidate their German holdings. By 1949, West Germany had become its own independent, fully functioning republic, and its relationship to its British and American occupiers had taken on a strange double meaning. For all their resolve to keep the new state’s government on a tight leash, the Western powers knew that creating strong links between West Germany and the rest of Europe would give them a bulwark against their rivals to the East. It was the same thought on the Soviets’ part that led to the formation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which would spend the length of its existence under socialist rule. Over the subsequent decades, each half of Germany was steadily, decisively absorbed into its respective bloc, while still retaining traces of its prewar history that kept it tied to its closed-off neighbor.
The story of the collapse of the GDR is similar to that of the collapse of several Soviet satellite states in the late Eighties: a progression of violently suppressed uprisings, bursts of mass dissent, and refusals on the part of the ruling powers to bend to their subjects’ demands. It’s important to keep in mind that, when East and West Germany were eventually, officially united, the former state had little to bring to the table and even less traction to make demands. With the collapse of the USSR, the West had won, and it was accordingly West Germany that called the shots when it came to forming a new nation. In 1990, the two states were widely separated culturally, politically, ideologically, and—perhaps most fundamentally—economically. Midway through The State I Am In, the heroine’s penny-pinched parents dig up a parcel of East German money they’d buried under a bridge years before. Pulling out a fistful of long-defunct pre-unification bills stamped with the face of Albrecht Dürer, the father passes the stacks disdainfully on to his daughter as a “history lesson.” (“Nobody wants old Dürer anymore.”) East Germany, in short, paid a price for its increased freedom—once-secure jobs were thrown up for grabs, education stuttered, crime and unemployment rose—and if liberty was, in the end, worth the ticket, the cost still stung.
The State I Am In, Petzold’s first feature made for theatrical release, is the entry in the trilogy that deals most directly with Germany’s post-unification discontent. It’s a softer, tenderer variation on the setup of Oshima’s Boy: two West German parents, leftist radicals wanted for unspecified, decades-old crimes, drift rootlessly from state to state with their teenage daughter in tow. As the film goes on, she grows increasingly torn between her attachment to her family and her need—catalyzed by a budding romance with a young, Brian Wilson-loving surfer—for a stable life. One of the trio’s pit stops is at a coastal pier where they linger in the shadow a German flag, just as, in Oshima’s film, a fugitive family of con artists lingered at the snow-covered tip of Japan. “I wish Japan was bigger,” the older boy said in that scene—and Petzold’s characters, one senses, likewise wish that Germany would grow, or shrink, to accommodate them.
The first two minutes of The State I Am In go a long way towards explaining Petzold’s methods and intentions in the trilogy. A young girl with blonde, wind-tossed hair—eyes downcast, lips set in a natural frown—gets change at a seaside bar, strolls over to the jukebox, and puts on an American pop song (“How Can We Hang On to a Dream?” by Tim Hardin). The camera hovers on her shoulder, lingering over the curve of her neck, then pulls back slightly to follow her as she saunters with studied casualness towards an empty table. (“What can I say,” the singer asks plaintively: “she’s walking away…”) She glances off-camera, casts her eyes back down, lights a cigarette, and sits silently for another twenty seconds, lost in thought. Her eyes barely move; her mind is busy turning over invisible possibilities, considering options, and reflecting on a past to which we don’t yet have access. When she looks back up, Petzold cuts to a shot from her eyeline of a handful of surfers chatting at the other end of the dock, and her desire finally connects, in our mind, with an object. But it’s in those previous twenty seconds, I would argue, that she comes alive to us. For a moment, her desire seems to exist outside of, or prior to, the narrative that is about to be constructed around it. It would be hard to count the number of times over the course of the trilogy that Petzold films a young woman sitting alone like this, planning what kind of movie she wants to inhabit.
What kind of movie does she want to be in? One, presumably, in which her parents don’t force her to wear baggy, secondhand clothes so as “not to attract attention,” in which she isn’t forbidden from seeing boys because “lovers have no secrets,” in which she doesn’t stiffen up when she passes a cop in the street, and in which she never has to choose, as she now does, between her family’s commitments and her own. The world Petzold gives her to inhabit is smaller, tighter, and more restrictive in nearly every way than the one she imagines for herself before the movie begins—and it’s this contrast, further developed in Ghosts and Yella, that gives the trilogy much of its moral thrust. Petzold’s characters are more often than not condemned to be drifters, loners, and ghosts, but they each carry around some image of a brighter world. It’s when those images brush up against one another that we get scenes like Jeanne (Julia Hummer)—the heroine of The State I Am In—suddenly, desperately embracing her estranged surfer beau when they encounter each other again in a fast-food restaurant bathroom, or the two young female lovers in Ghosts drawing closer to one another after the sleazy businessman who’s been watching them dance gets called away by his jealous wife, or Yella’s financier partner tenderly kissing her shoulder after their first night together. That said, it’s never long in these films before the economic realities of post-reunification German life intrude back on the characters’ lives, forcing them to act in a movie—directed variably by history, commerce, and human biology—rather than make their own.
The heroine of Ghosts, too, enters the film alone. We first encounter Nina (Hummer, five years older, her forehead now hidden behind a row of dark bangs) standing in an empty field wearing a bright orange Park Maintenance jacket, collecting trash. She hears a muffled scream, looks up, and sees a young woman being pulled forcibly away by a pair of anonymous men—which prompts her to stride haltingly towards us. The camera, just as it advanced to follow Jeanne at the start of The State I Am In, retreats back. When the woman and her assailants vanish into the brush, Nina stops to pick up an earring left lying on the park’s graveled path. Like Alice chasing after the white rabbit, or Jeffrey in Blue Velvet—who finds an equally portentous object lying in a field—she is stepping from the public world, with its civil duties and economic obligations, into a private one of fairy tales, erotic fantasies, and waking dreams.
Later in the film, in fact, she reveals that it was the memory of a recurring dream which led her to follow the screaming girl; it occurs to us that, again like Jeanne in The State I Am In, she must have been silently replaying the dream in her head as she advanced. “I walked towards the music, and there was a little wood, a birch wood. There was a car there. The roof was open, and the music was coming out of it. And then I heard someone screaming. I followed the screams into the wood, and in the wood was a little pond. There I saw a girl.” What comes next is an account of sexual violence that, like the car, the music, and the pond, doesn’t correspond to the film’s first scene. (The two men turn out to be robbers.) But it explains the sense of erotic possibility that hangs between the two women throughout the film, occasionally crystalizing in a kiss, a dance, and—in the end—a one night stand, but always being superseded by the pair’s need for work, food, shelter, money, and clothes. After a second chance meeting, the two girls team up and start drifting through Berlin’s Potsdamer Plaz—once bisected by the Berlin wall, now a prime urban renewal site. Nina spends the rest of the film moving between the external world and her private, internal Wonderland, alternating between the movie given to her by her status as a young, unemployed, rootless Berliner and the seduction drama playing in her head. She’s fated for defeat as soon as she gives Toni (Sabine Timoteo) the central role in the latter movie, since Toni herself, tougher and more pragmatic, is willing to surrender anything—and anyone—to meet the former movie’s demands.
Ghosts, then, is always threatening to turn into a kind of dark fairy tale: a parentless, penniless girl, drawn in by a talismanic earring and a prophetic dream, meets an older, worldlier young woman who takes her on a threatening adventure, with all the sexual consequences that description implies. What’s fascinating about the film is that it keeps briefly becoming the fairy tale its heroine wants it to be, then returning, somewhat cruelly, to its real subject: the way that individuals have their identities slowly effaced when their society fails to give them either a share in the past or a place in the present. Germany, as depicted here, is suffering from a sort of collective amnesia, unable to bear the guilt of its crimes in the first half of the 20th century and equally unable to come to terms with the legacy of those crimes in the second half: the GDR’s long history of violence and repression, or the traces of Nazism and anti-Semitism that pervaded West Germany and persist in the country today. (Memorably, in The State I Am In, Jeanne sneaks into a high school class on the day they’re scheduled to watch a documentary on the concentration camps. When the lights come up, the teacher’s first line is to scold the kids for their poor attendance: “When it’s movie time, suddenly everybody shows up!”) But because the country is also unable to guarantee its citizens economic security in the present, it forces them to stake their identities and their lives on the future—which is, perhaps, why Petzold’s heroines are so quick to lose themselves in thought, and so susceptible to falling, ghost-like, between institutional cracks.
Petzold is fascinated by people who fall through the cracks, drift towards the margins, or—in the case of the subplot that makes for Ghosts’ central enigma—simply disappear. The film’s third heroine is Françoise (Marianne Basler), an upper class, middle-aged French woman scouring Europe for her daughter, who was abducted nearly two decades earlier outside a German supermarket at age three. She fixates on Nina as a possible match, but outside interventions cut their two brief interviews short. (Tina swipes her purse at their first encounter, and the woman’s husband—who suspects Nina of manipulating her for cash—breaks up their second meeting.) Here is the missing link in Nina’s fairy tale: the mysterious, regal woman who arrives from a faraway land to tell her that she isn’t like the others, that her heart-shaped birthmark and scarred ankle are, in fact, marks of a higher birth. The irony is that Françoise, who seems at first to come from a different movie in which she’s reserved Nina a new and better role, turns out to be one more victim of modern Germany’s refusal to remember its missing and its dead. All three films in the trilogy include jolting inserts of security camera footage, but the most devastating of these comes late in Ghosts: a brief, slowed-down clip of Françoise’s toddler daughter, momentarily left unattended in a shopping cart, being pulled by an unidentified man out of the frame—and away from the state’s narrow jurisdiction. Is Nina the missing girl? The question lingers in the movie’s final frames like an unfinished sentence at the end of a dream, but it won’t, we sense, have a chance to linger for long. There are clothes to steal, shows to audition for and money to make, somehow or another.
Yella is the coldest, grimmest, and most aggressively materialistic film in the trilogy. It is also, to an extent that only becomes apparent in the movie’s final minutes, the entry in which Petzold moves deepest inside the consciousness of one of his heroines. The great Nina Hoss, in her second of four performances for Petzold—a fifth is on the way—plays a young professional under pressure. Her estranged husband, desperate to win back her love by reviving the failing business they once ran together, is stalking her; near the start of the film, after insisting on taking her to the train station, he drives their car off a bridge. Soaked and alone, she arrives in a new town for an accounting job that, as it turns out, doesn't exist. In the bar of her hotel, she meets a young, ambitious businessman; they bond over balance sheets and form a partnership that, by the end of the film, has spilled over into an affair. The movie’s dialogue is a tangle of charts and figures, net values and selling prices, offers and counter-offers, audits, deductions, and percentages. From time to time, Yella drifts off into her own private world, where the rustling of the leaves outside and the music of birds in the distance take on sudden, overwhelming intensity. Another movie is peeking through, but—unlike in Ghosts—it never appears in more than flashes, glimmers, and pinpricks. Petzold’s movie, in contrast, eventually evolves into a kind of corporate thriller-cum-morality play, complete with a Macbeth-like touch: in the film’s last ten minutes, Yella becomes the first of the trilogy’s heroines to see a ghost.
Yella is a hard, opaque object shaped by unresolved tensions and contradictions; it underlines rather than answers the questions posed by the first two films in the trilogy. Are these movies about the state of post-reunification Germany, or the state of their heroines’ inner lives? Are they tough, sharpened studies in the uses and abuses of power, like the films of Petzold’s first two cinematic influences—Hitchcock and Lang—or are they defined more by their brief-but-central moments of tenderness and mutual understanding? Are they rigidly deterministic, or open to the intrusion of outside possibilities? Are the relationships they depict cold and businesslike, or charged with erotic potential? Is human life, in these movies, given inherent or only instrumental value? What extent of imaginative freedom does Petzold allow his heroines? And is that freedom a blessing or a curse? They’re the kinds of questions that the trilogy’s heroines might ask themselves, before turning back to their bank notes or balance sheets.
User reviews from imdb Author: hasosch from United States
User
reviews from imdb Author: jcappy from ny-vt
The State I Am In : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Jeremy Mathews
EyeForFilm.co.uk Keith Hennessey Brown
Living Ghosts: Christian Petzold's Gespenster-Trilogie
The
State I Am In | Variety David
Stratton
The State I Am In Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London
SOMETHING TO REMIND ME (Toter
Mann) – made for TV
Germany (90 mi) 2001
EyeForFilm.co.uk Keith Hennessey Brown
Middle-aged lawyer Thomas assists Leyla, an attractive blonde, when she drops her things at the pool. After their paths keep crossing, he picks up the courage to ask her out for a date. Somewhat to his surprise she agrees, but arrives late, just as the restaurant is closing. They go back to his apartment for an impromptu pizza and, after a few drinks, she falls asleep on the couch.
The next morning Thomas awakes to find Leyla and his laptop, which contains vital case files, missing...
An expertly constructed thriller in the tradition of Hitchcock and Chabrol, writer/director Christian Petzold's Something To Remind Me keeps the viewer enthralled throughout.
Utilising a deliberately cold and clinical mise-en-scene and drawing subtle, finely nuanced performances from Nina Hoss and Andre Hennicke in the Novak and Stewart roles, Petzold manipulates us as skilfully as Leyla does Thomas. He knows exactly when to deploy each signifier, be it the leitmotif of Burt Bacharach's What The World Needs Now Is Love or - a rather more German specific reference unfortunately - Wolfgang Kautner's Under The Bridges, and the precise moment and way to reveal each new piece of the puzzle.
Take this sequence midway through: Leyla and one of Thomas's cases, Blum, have, obviously not coincidentally, taken up work at the same factory. From Leyla's apparent point of view, we observe Thomas and Blum talking. Then Petzold cuts to a reverse angle of Leyla, seen from behind the two men, with an extremely startled look on her face. In an instant Petzold establishes one set of audience expectations, confounds them and puts the film on a different track. From Vertigo to Que La Bête Meure in a matter of seconds...
Remarkably assured for a second feature that originated as a TV movie, Something To Remind Me marks Petzold as a name to watch.
Something To Remind Me Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge
The less audiences know about Something To Remind Me the better. It helps that its various titles have little to do with what unfolds at various stages characters listen to Burt Bacharach records, including Always Something There To Remind Me, which presumably explains the (slightly awkward) English-language title, while on German TV it was shown as Toter Mann, which translates roughly as the scarcely more-helpful Corpse Man.
Toter Mann went down so well that production company ZDF decided to try their luck on the film-festival circuit, starting with Rotterdam, Berlin and Gothenburg. The film easily warrants such wide exposure in fact, its rather more satisfying than many German made-for-cinema films which obtain international release, especially their woeful Oscar entry Das Experiment. Admittedly, the look of the film is very TV-flat but writer-director Petzolds script is so ingenious that, if anything, perhaps its better that there are no flashy visuals to distract us from the rather complex narrative, or to offer unwelcome clues along the way. It will be a major surprise and a badly missed opportunity – if this script does not get picked up for a Hollywood remake.
At first, it seems like a tentative romantic drama, as fortyish parole-officer Thomas (Andre Hennicke) drifts into an a relationship with Leyla (Nina Hoss), a younger, Hitchcock-style cool blonde he meets in a suburban swimming-pool. But just as Thomas seems to be breaking down Leylas reserve, she repels his advances and promptly vanishes from his life, her job and the city. Hurt and baffled, Thomas investigates further and soon discovers he’s been the victim of a meticulously-staged con-trick operation carried out by the scheming Leyla. The focus then starts to shift between Thomas, Leyla, and the man who appears to be her next target an introverted, painfully shy ex-convict named Blum (Sven Pipping)
At this stage, regular cinemagoers may suspect Something To Remind Me is about to develop further along Hitchcock lines into Vertigo or Marnie territory. Then it seems were heading into some distaff version of The Vanishing or In The Company of Men or even, perhaps, a European variation on Audition. Petzold leads us up these paths quite deliberately and it would be unfair to reveal our actual destination. But what appear to be disaparate elements of the plot suddenly come together in the final reel, slotting into place with such smoothness that even the most ardent mystery fan will be kicking themselves that they didn’t piece together the puzzle sooner. In retrospect, it all seems quite blindingly obvious, but Petzold is careful never to reveal any more of the overall design than he needs to at any particular stage. What seemed to be a slow, meandering, unfocussed character-based piece of casual intersections and divergences is, we realise, an tightly-constructed mechanism in which no word or gesture is wasted.
But Something To Remind Me isnt just a twisty trick picture whose appeal is exhausted once the red herrings are revealed. The characterisations and performances add another level of resonance, ensuring that the pulpier aspects of the plotting never overwhelm the psychological aspects of the suspense Something To Remind Me joins Harry, Hes Here to Help among the best recent Patricia Highsmith adaptations not actually based on any specific Highsmith text. This is thanks in no small part to the efforts of Pippig as the tragic Blum – a performance that builds from almost nothing to an unexpectedly epic level of shattering, heroic despair.
WOLFSBURG
Germany (90 mi) 2003 Official Site [Germany]
Wolfsburg Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London
A sleek, cool, fairly rigorous psychodrama from the director of The State I Am In, Wolfsburg is about the fallout from a hit and run accident which punctures the listless complacency of the yuppie car salesman at fault, almost as much as it traumatises the mother of the boy hit. Familiar territory, then, and writer/director Petzold's stringent grip on proceedings means the film never gets your pulse racing. All the same, it's a cogent piece of storytelling elevated by its nose for moral ambiguity. Strong, sober performances, too.
kamera.co.uk - film review - Wolfsburg - Elke de Wit
Petzold is most definitely one of Germany's top up-and-coming directors. Each film he makes is more accomplished than the last. Wolfsburg is certainly a far cry from the banal and cheap looking 'Pilots' (Germany 1995), although it is in the same league as The State I Am In (Germany 2000) and Something To Remind Me (2001 – made for TV)), both of which rely heavily on suspense and atmosphere.
The plot of Wolfsburg is relatively simple. Phillip Wagner (Benno Fürmann), a flash salesman, knocks a boy off his bike and doesn't stop. He keeps trying to tell people around him what he has done, but interruptions prevent him from doing so. For a while it seems that he's in the clear, but then the boy dies and he meets his mother. At this point the story becomes more complex and the sense of palpable dread is ratcheted up with each successive scene. You can't help yourself constantly asking yourself the crucial questions - will he tell the boy's mother? Will she find out that he killed her son? Will his girlfriend find out what's going on? And most importantly, what will both women do when they find out? I developed a serious case of goosebumps watching the lengths that Phillip goes to in order to soothe his guilty conscience.
Although the plot of Wolfsburg is full of twists and turns, there is a sense of steady progression to an almost inevitable end. Petzold has deliberately chosen a slow, meandering, sometimes tortuous pace in order to build tension. Many of the shots are lengthy and take in the scene at leisure, or focus almost fetishistically on a beautifully framed close-up. Some of the close-ups are so close that they are literally brimming over with sensuality. One such shot of Benno Fürmann makes you almost believe that you can look into his soul - although unfortunately, one suspects this may be due more to good camera work than his acting talent.
It is a little unfortunate that Fürmann's acting style seems to rely so heavily on an intense overuse of his uncannily blue eyes, and in fact, the lead actor is the weak link in this feature. That weird look that he uses would scare anyone into knowing that he had killed their child, and it was difficult to really believe that Laura Reiser, played by Nina Hoss, would fall for him. Hoss, on the other hand is flawless in her role as the bereaved mother. She has stunning features and her acting is full of hidden depths. Watching her figure out, step by step, what happened to her son is a revelation.
Wolfsburg is a stylish and entertaining thriller, then - more reminiscent of French cinema than the coming of age films that seem so popular in Germany at the moment – and Petzold is definitely a name to watch.
After the masterly The State I Am In and Something To Remind Me, Wolfsburg represents something of a disappointment from European cinema ’s reigning “poet of apprehension. ” But, taken on its own terms, this is an effective, slow-burning study of guilt and grief. At this stage in his career, however, Petzold needs to deliver rather more if he ’s to make his long-overdue breakthrough to the next level of international renown: at the time of writing, not one of his films has ever obtained commercial distribution. That situation isn ’t likely to change as a result of the rather too low-key Wolfsburg, a film named after its setting: the northern German city known as Volkswagen ’s ‘company town. ’
But while the film revolves around ‘car trouble ’ of various kinds, VW oddly isn ’t mentioned once – the autos we see are mainly Fords and Audis. They ’re the stock in trade of Philipp (Benno Furmann from The Princess and the Warrior) a thirtysomething yuppie-ish car-salesman whose relationship with fiancee Katja (Antje Westermann) isn ’t going too well. Driving through a deserted rural area on the town ’s outskirts one day, a lapse in concentration after a mobile-phone-row with Katja leads to Philipp knocking down a young cyclist, Paul (Martin Museler). Impulsively driving off, Philipp is racked by guilt and fear of punishment. He surreptitiously tracks down Paul to hospital, where he gets to know the boy ’s mother, Laura (Nina Hoss). Paul dies, and Philipp and Laura eventually drift into a relationship – which, when Katja twigs on, causes crises at work as well at home as her brother Klaus (Stephan Kampwirth) is Paul ’s boss. His life falling apart, Paul throws himself into an amour fou with Laura – who is determined to track down her child ’s killer …
Like 21 Grams, Wolfsburg traces the spiralling tragic/romantic consequences of an automobile accident: “One thing leads to another, ” someone says, summing up one of Petzold ’s recurring concern. But whereas Grams tries to distract the viewer from its more melodramatic aspects with gimmicky script construction and hyperkinetic editing, Wolfsburg risks a cooler, more distanced and matter-of-fact approach. It ’s essentially a stripped-down two-handed character study, and the performances by Hoss (as in Something, an implacable angel-of-vengeance) and Furmann (haunted, hollow-eyed, intense) are sufficiently strong to overcome the contrived aspects of the couple ’s background connection.
It ’s clear that, as a result of his split-second decisions on that quiet country lane – one act of commission, one of omission – Philipp is doomed and damned, spiralling helplessly towards his fate. Likewise, we see that Laura effectively died with her son: a single mother, stuck in a dead-end job, she ’s little else to sustain her. Until, of course, Philipp comes along – but it ’s only matter of time before the truth emerges and the couple ’s tentative happiness shatters into dangerous shards of revenge.
In State and Something, Petzold meticulously structured his screenplays so that they only made sense in the final reel, the tension building throughout until the climactic twist was revealed. Wolfsburg similar ratchets up the anxiety levels as we wait for the inevitable catastrophe, but the payoff doesn ’t quite hit the mark this time: Laura ’s discovery of the truth relies on an implausibly careless slip from Philipp. Unless, we ’re supposed to infer that he subconsciously desires the punishment he knows Laura won ’t hesitate to deliver. Ending with an unexpectedly quiet and ambiguous coda, Wolfsburg remains open to interpretation and, refreshingly doesn ’t feel the need to deliver answers to all the questions it poses. It ’s a minor work from a major talent.
KQEK.com DVD Review [Mark R. Hasan]
O
Bruder, Where Art Thou? The 8th European Union Film Festival ... Robert Keser, April 30, 2005
GHOSTS
(Gespenster)
Germany France (85 mi)
2005
Ghosts | Film Society of Lincoln
Center
Unreleased in the U.S., the third film by one of the most exciting directors from Germany’s Berlin School interweaves two intersecting story lines to explore the spectral existences of three female outsiders—a pair of late adolescent girls and an unstable middle-aged woman—who struggle to reconnect with “normal” society and find a place to belong. The action unfolds in Berlin’s redeveloped Potsdamer Platz, symbol of the post-reunification German social and economic order, but nonetheless haunted by three “ghosts”: lonely Nina (Julia Hummer), who lives in a youth home, manipulative homeless delinquent Toni (Sabine Timoteo), and Francoise (Marianne Basler), who is searching for her long-ago kidnapped and still missing daughter. After a chance encounter in Tiergarten Park, Nina becomes infatuated with the worldly Toni and joins her world of petty crime and vagrancy. Always looking to get ahead, Toni drags Nina to a casting call for a television show called “Friends,” dreaming of climbing her way to the good life. Meanwhile, Francoise is collected from a stay in a mental hospital by her husband Pierre (Aurélien Basler), who has come to terms with their loss, and wanders the city, seeing her grown child in the faces of other young girls—until eventually she and Nina cross paths. Inspired partly by the chaos and euphoria unleashed after the Berlin Wall came down in 1990, partly by the Brothers Grimm tale The Shroud, about a dead child whose mother’s tears wet his shroud, preventing him from ascending into heaven, and partly by photos of missing girls in a French post office, Petzold’s film forms the middle section of his “Ghosts Trilogy” (initiated by The State I Am In in 2000 and concluded in 2007 with Yella). Here the ghosts are not just his three main characters—one lost in a traumatic past, one trapped in an empty present, and one grasping at an imagined but hollow future—but the collective and historical ghosts of Germany’s unconscious.
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Edinburgh Film Festival
A return to form for writer-director Petzold after the disappointing Wolfsburg, Ghosts is a characteristically intricate and gently suspenseful tale whose slow pace ultimately rewards patient attention. The central character is a mousy German teenager Nina (Julia Hummer) who has been in trouble with the Authorities; we follow the development of her friendship with wild-child Toni (cast standout Sabine Timoteo); and also her dealings with an emotionally-fragile Frenchwoman (Marianne Basler) who claims that Nina is her own child, having been abducted as a two-year-old.
Aurelien Recoing plays the Frenchwoman's husband, making this the second Edinburgh 05 title (after the rural One Long Winter Without Fire) in which he plays a man grieving the 'loss' of a small daughter. Ghosts has a little more of the guessing-game about it: like Petzold's two best films (The State I Am In and Something to Remind Me) it's a carefully-modulated puzzle building up to a revelation of one of the characters' true identity, a denouement which casts a different light on all that's gone before.
A work of calm surfaces and strong emotions, Ghosts is a subtle, compelling, mature work that will probably repay a second viewing. So how sad that the general moviegoing British public seem unlikely to get the chance even of a first encounter: it's nothing short of a scandal that, while all manner of undistinguished French product obtains distribution (see yesterday's Les yeux clairs), no company has yet taken a chance on any Petzold feature. Ghosts may not be quite up to his finest work, and as a director he's clearly never going to be anything other than unobtrusively functional - but he remains one of European cinema's most remarkable scriptwriters, one of the very few film-makers whose work gets better the more you think about it afterwards.
KQEK.com [Mark R. Hasan] (English)
The middle film in Christian Petzold’s Gespenster Trilogy (buffered by Die Inner Sicherheit / The State I am In from 2000, and Yella from 2007) is another intimate drama about lost souls living emotionally numb lives, although what’s unique in Gespenster are the two unrelated stories that gradually converge and affect each other, as well as a nihilistic tone that ensures whatever hope for a resolution is undone by characters that are too trapped in their own narrow pathways to look clearly, and see the opportunities that lie ahead.
The first story which opens the film is of Nina (Julia Hummer), a teenage girl bored out of her skull as she works a youth support job picking up trash in a large city park. When she spots a sexual assault in a corner, the film hovers into Antonioni terrain: Is the assault real or imagined? Are Toni (Sabine Timoteo) the victim, and Nina the voyeur, really aware of each other, or is one the figment of the other’s imagination?
Both girls end up being quite real, and strike up a romance of sorts, although really what’s at play is Toni’s toying with Nina as a potential conquest; she tests Nina’s loyalty by participating in petty theft and lies, and becomes more possessive when Nina’s shoplifting of a dress is interrupted by a strange woman named Francoise (Marianne Baslerz) claiming to be her mother.
Francoise’s arrival occurs early into the film in scenes where she’s initially seen as the lover of a fellow Frenchman visiting Berlin. Their relationship is remote, and both share some awful loss that’s later revealed to be the abduction of their three year old daughter.
The film’s midsection involves Francoise’s efforts to prove she’s Nina’s mother (or rather Nina is indeed her lost daughter Marie). Thrown into the conflict is Toni’s magnetic pull on Nina, and their vain and silly efforts to audition for film roles. The couple are later invited to a party by the film’s director (a subdued and rather nebbish Benno Fürmann), where the two girls consummate their relationship. By sunrise, however, it’s clear to Nina that she was just a conquest, and as she wanders through the park, she encounters Francoise, who invites her to breakfast.
Most of these events are perfunctory, and maintain the low-level mystery of whether Nina is indeed Francoise’s daughter; Petzold’s real aim is to bring in an element of truth, have it relegated to the dustbin (literally), and offering neither character a chance at a positive future.
The cruel irony is that Francoise’s honing in on a young girl is part of a damaged psychological pattern her husband has had to handle in the past, and this time Francoise got it right. Nina eventually discovers a clue that tells her the truth, but the fragility of Francoise, as well as Nina’s apathy to her own needs, are what doom both characters to eternal loneliness.
As with Petzold’s prior films (Yella, and Wolfsburg), conversations happen in cars, but more intriguing with Gespenster is a total lack of any stylish architectural iconography that acknowledges the setting as Berlin. In buses, characters are seated by dirty windows, and the park environs are banal; for the latter, Petzold also frames shots to make sure none of the locations can be identified.
Even the party attended by the young girls is photographed in close-ups and medium shots. Main characters wander through rooms decorated in abstract art and primary colours, and any background figures are kept blurry. Even when Nina walks through a crowded room, one feels she doesn’t belong because she’s the only one kept in focus.
Petzold also plays with sounds to illustrate Nina’s immaturity. Whereas Francoise and Toni have their own sense of style and walk with silent confidence, Nina wears bulky work clothes, and her social clumsiness is illustrated by the ongoing sounds as the legs of her ill-fitting jeans scrape against each other.
As a mystery-drama, Gespenster is maybe too low-key, but Petzold narrative doesn’t labour on pretentious details. At under 90 mins., the film has a good pace, and the fragmented nature of the two storylines sustains enough ambiguity towards the characters, ensuring the finale has strong resonance.
Christian
Petzold's "Ghosts" trilogy - Film Comment Max Nelson, February 25, 2014
signandsight.com Anke Leweke
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
EyeForFilm.co.uk Keith Hennessey Brown
Berlinale Diary - More reviews. . . - Like Anna Karina's Sweater
Ghosts Kurt Dahlke from DVD Talk
User
reviews from imdb
Gespenster | Movie by Christian Petzold | Synopsis
Living
Ghosts: Christian Petzold's Gespenster-Trilogie
DVDBeaver.com [Brian Alan Montgomery]
YELLA B+ 92
A German stalker flick, highly intelligent in the precise manner in
which it builds layer after layer of suspense with a near documentary level of
realism, using the accumulation of the most banal details, where of all things,
the psychological strategy of analyzing hidden corporate assets in order to get
the upper hand in mundane business meetings is used in a remarkably effective
manner that helps add to the build up of suspense. Nina Hoss, winner of Best Actress at Berlin,
is picture perfect as the non-descript Yella, stalked by her abusive
ex-husband, Hinnerk Schönemann, where the
interior effects of being beaten down by the relentless browbeating
tactics of this monster are evident all over her face. She decides to seek a job opportunity outside
of town in hopes of making a new start away from him, but he’s all over her
every move. The creepy nature of their
relationship is highly unsettling, but that is the nature of stalkers. The viewers are treated early on to a series
of anxious close calls where it appears this guy is the kind of trouble that’s
never going to go away, where she actually survives his intentional crash
driving them both through a bridge railing into the river below. Afterwards as she walks up a muddy embankment
in her high heels, there’s a snicker of bleak humor as it’s also evident they
“both” survived.
Despite the deliberate pace of the film, revealed through a series
of hotel room and business meeting vignettes that are exemplary examinations of
detailed minutiae, the director adds some mysterious Antonioni-like side
effects, the sound of rushing water, the rustling of the leaves, a screeching
bird, all of which nearly incapacitate Yella is if she is being paralyzed by an
unseen or imaginary force. She
inevitably snaps out of it, but this mind-altering pattern repeats itself
throughout. Her venture into her new
life takes an unfortunate turn when the guy who hired her has been thrown out
of the office for suspected fraud, where we see him hiding out in the parking
lot attempting to catch her attention in what resembles a Monty Python
skit. What follows is the inevitable
realization that she’s been set up, that there is no new job, that it’s all an
illusion. But a strange guy meets her in
the hotel lobby with one of the worst pick up lines ever who asks if she would
accompany him to a business meeting.
Little did he know what’s in store for him, as she is a highly skilled,
ruthless competitor at the negotiations table, intimidating prospective clients
with her shockingly detailed revelations about their financial
shortcomings. All of a sudden she’s back
in the game again. But little does she
know what’s in store for her, as she’s taking her chances with this new guy,
and her spells and her stalker keep manifesting themselves in strange
ways.
The editing is exceptional in this film, as
are the interweaving forces of what might be real and what might be imaginary,
remaining ambiguous throughout the entire film, where at center is the
appearance of order, surrounded by a constantly shifting chaotic world that is
exploding out of control, beautifully connected by the intermittent use of
Beethoven’s highly structured “Moonlight Sonata,” Yella - YouTube (1:50),
also used to great effect in Edward Yang’s YI YI (2000). The music has such a recognizable sense of
order and calm that it settles down the nerves and gives the appearance that
all is well. But like John Carpenter in
HALLOWEEN (1978), the musical cues may also be a disturbing reminder of the
presence of her stalker, who disrupts her perceived calm with his chaotic sense
of brutal threats and violence, who abruptly reappears when she least expects
him only to terrorize her once again.
This has a Rod Serling effect, as her skilled business acumen is
undermined by her past that continues to inevitably creep into her present,
where she’s forced to relive this same reoccurring nightmare. But all sense of underlying terror is
carefully subverted by draining the emotions out of the characters, by Yella’s
icy coolness in dealing with financial matters, and by the rigid austerity of
the filmmaker’s style.
Three Imaginary Girls [embracey]
The titular heroine (unbelievable Nina Hoss) is trying to
make a fresh start -- new job, new town, new life. Problem is, voices and
images from her past keep entering her consciousness. Is she psychic? Is she
off her meds? Does she see dead people? Director Christian Petzold tells her
tale via a languid, occasionally jolting series of events, and doesn't let you
in on the deal until the stunner of a final scene: it's nothing new, but it's
told in a very new way, and whether you choose to buy it will affect your view
of everything that came before. (I bought it, and I'm dying to buy it again.)
In Christian Petzold's Yella,
the eponymous heroine escapes from her stultifying life and psychopathic
ex-husband in a moribund town on the Polish border and finds a dangerous new
life as an accountant in Hanover. A handsome, crafty young businessman engages
her to help him exploit troubled companies on the brink of collapse. It's a
gripping business thriller with a compelling performance from Nina Hoss.
Unfortunately, a gimmicky construction helps the writer-director avoid facing
the consequences of the drama he's set up.
Time Out London (David Jenkins)
Scouring the morally abstruse
hinterland of mergers, acquisitions and venture capitalism, this Teutonic
nightmare from gifted ‘Berlin School’ writer-director Christian
Petzold is a welcome addition to the current cycle of German films
(alongside ‘Downfall’, ‘Good Bye Lenin!’ and ‘The Lives of Others’) which deal
confidently and directly with the country’s turbulent recent history. Yella
(played with a spectral simplicity by Nina Hoss)
is a business-savvy divorcee based in the sleepy East German town of
Wittenberge. Looking to make a clean break with her past, she accepts a job as
an accountant for a company in Hanover, but tragedy strikes when her resentful
ex-husband trys to kill her by careering his Land Rover into the Elbe. Managing
to claw herself away from the wreckage, she eventually reaches her destination
but discovers the job she was promised doesn’t exist. A chance meeting with
crotchety loner Phillip leads to some lucrative freelance investment work and
the couple roam the country crushing smaller companies with their superior
business smarts.
As their professional relationship
soon blossoms into love, Yella and Phillip become the business equivalent to
Bonnie and Clyde with a laptop in place of a Tommy gun and stacks of accounting
spreadsheets in place of bullets. But the drab, overcast landscapes are awash
with supernatural forces which are constantly reminding Yella of a dark secret
from her past. With its sardonic use of ultra-functional mise en scène redolent
of Laurent Cantet’s ‘Time Out’ juxtaposed with random blurts of Lynchian aural
dissonance (the repeated use of Julie Driscoll’s ‘Road to Cairo’ is especially
ghostly), Petzold’s film is an expertly crafted thriller which offers a
pessimistic, though deeply rewarding, glimpse of a society being haunted by its
own past.
Yella review | Film Comment | Film Society of Lincoln Center Chris Darke
How does a filmmaker depict the modern world? A world increasingly beset by deadly schisms over which the official language of business, media, and politics casts a pall of lies and illusion? It would be reassuring to believe that cinema retains a capacity to illuminate the world—and even that it has a responsibility to do so. Easier said than done. Consider how much time we spend watching films in which characters stare at computer screens and babble on cell phones. Sure, these depictions reflect the way we live now, but how has this state of affairs transformed cinematic dramaturgy and such fundamentals as mise en scène and montage? Is it enough to simply make visible the accoutrements of modernity in order to give an account of its condition? Clearly not. The sheer complexity, intensity, and violence of the present day require more than simple showing. It demands new ways of telling.
It’s in Yella’s response to challenges like these that Christian Petzold’s latest feature is so smart and pleasing. Not that the director has made anything like a manifesto for a new cinema, nor does he eschew displays of the high-tech paraphernalia of everyday life. Rather, it’s in the choice of narrative framework—something between a ghost story and a dying woman’s dream—that Petzold, a leading light of the current generation of young German filmmakers, succeeds in making the modern world strange again
Clocking in at just under 90 minutes, Yella is a modest, haunting, highly economical work that rewards repeated viewings. It tells the story of Yella Fichte (Nina Hoss), a young woman from the former industrial town of Wittenberg in what was once East Germany, who is about to start a job in the West. On the eve of her new life, she accepts a lift from her unhinged ex-husband Ben (Hinnerk Schönemann), and as they drive across a bridge he plunges their car into the Elbe. This moment brackets the film’s main narrative in which Yella (alive, dead, or only dreaming?) makes it to Hanover, falls in with venture capitalist Philipp (Devid Striesow) and discovers she has an innate facility for cutthroat business deals. She enters the mirage-like environment of what French anthropologist Marc Augé has dubbed the “non-places” of supermodernity, a world of ubiquitous glass and steel, autobahns and hotels. Many sequences in Yella were filmed at Hanover’s moribund Expo 2000 site, and one of Petzold’s triumphs is how he lends these banal locations an uncanny edge, transforming them into a limbo for today’s unquiet souls where the past will not lie down and die. The whole film is marked by an acute sensitivity to place and space, from emblematic bridges and corridors to rivers and roads, carefully infusing materialism with metaphysics. In this, Petzold is assisted by Hans Fromm’s clinically lit, forensically framed cinematography, and a spectral sound design. Nina Hoss, who appeared in the previous Petzold projects Wolfsburg (03) and Something to Remind Me (02), memorably inhabits Yella as a haunted, Bambi-eyed wraith, an uncertain escape artist from the other side.
Is Yella a political
ghost story? An allegory of German reunification? A young woman from the East’s
dream of life in the West? It’s all of these and more. As a vision of the
contemporary world, it’s perhaps best described in the words of Walter
Benjamin, the great German critic whose insights resonate throughout the film:
“the sensation of the entirely new, of the absolutely modern, is a form of
becoming as oneiric as the eternal return itself.”
Christian Petzold is an inspired German director of icy
suspense thrillers which until now have not had full
The setting is
After a horrific final encounter with Ben,
Yella stumbles into a strange new job with a man who befriends her in a hotel
restaurant: Philipp (Devid Striesow). He is a species of forensic accountant
employed by a venture capital outfit whose job it is to scan the books and quiz
the executives of those businesses who want his company's investment. Yella, a
trained accountant, comes along with Phillipp, and is schooled in the psych-out
and gamesmanship techniques that he uses in meetings: when to look the executives
in the eye, when to pretend to be studying her laptop, when to pretend to
whisper urgently in his ear. The sexual tension between Yella and Phillipp
builds, assisted by Yella's discovery that Phillipp is playing a very dangerous
game with the privileged information he is getting: building back-channels of
corruption and even blackmail to bankroll his own personal and highly suspect
financial plans.
It is a world of workaday commerce, and
identikit business hotels: Yella intends at the beginning of the movie to work
for a company making steering modules for Airbus. Yet the sheer, industrial
ordinariness of it all has something perversely sexy and is a coolly effective
counterpoint to Yella's psychological tumult and her uneasy sense of ill-omen.
Petzold's resolute control and steady, shrewd gaze, on scenes unfolding under
huge, featureless Northern European skies, establish an atmosphere of
agoraphobic menace: a sense of exposure to something just behind an
innocuous-seeming horizon.
Electric Sheep Magazine Sarah Cronin
Written and directed by the German filmmaker Christian Petzold, Yella is an intriguing, suspenseful mystery with a singular clarity of vision. It is constructed like a jigsaw puzzle and each scene cleverly fits together to reveal a film that is much more than the sum of its parts. Winner of the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 2007 Berlinale, Nina Hoss delivers an excellent performance as the title character – a disillusioned woman desperate to free herself from an oppressive, unsuccessful marriage. Hoss imbues her character with a sombre, haunted quality, perfectly attuned to the subtleties of Petzold’s screenplay.
Yella attempts to flee her threatening husband, Ben (Hinnerk
Schönemann), and their failed business venture in
There is much more to Yella than its plot, and both colour and sound contribute subtle clues to the film’s intricacies. Petzold weaves these aesthetic elements into the fabric of the film, compelling the audience, as well as Yella, to play detective. The palette is composed of luminous, iridescent tones of green and red, with a crisp quality to the colour that evokes a heightened sense of reality. Breaking glass, the sound of rushing water, the rustling wind, bird song: all remind Yella of what she has endured, nudging her ever closer to the truth. She finds herself returning time and again to the river that divides East and West, her old life from her new.
Yella, struggling to escape from her past, is haunted every step
of the way by Ben. He follows her to
Yella is an almost metaphysical exploration that, frame by frame, spins out an intriguing narrative about the human condition. Petzold meticulously probes beneath the surface of Yella’s life, revealing universal truths about love, desire, greed and regret. It’s an intelligent, well-crafted and superbly acted film that lingers in the imagination long after the final credits have rolled.
Christian
Petzold's "Ghosts" trilogy - Film Comment Max Nelson, February 25, 2014
Yella - Essays - Cinema Guild German Desire in the Age of Venture Capitalism, by Marco Abel
Yella/ Barbara -
Touching Cinema Minna
Yliruikka, July 2015
DVD Times Noel Megahey
The Village Voice [Scott Foundas]
DVD Outsider Slarek
Between Productions [Robert Cashill]
Cinemattraction.com [Sheila Cornelius]
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Edinburgh Film Festival report
www.european-films.net (Boyd van Hoeij)
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
The New York Sun [Martin Tsai]
Eye for Film (Amber Wilkinson)
Living
Ghosts: Christian Petzold's Gespenster-Trilogie
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden
JERICHOW B+ 92
A German film
that’s so German it feels like it’s Austrian, as it’s a surgically precise
psychological thriller, a remake of THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1946) that
features an overly detached, icy cold emotional world. Benno Fürmann is brilliant from the outset without even uttering a word, as that
piercing glare in his eyes could immediately disarm anyone’s hostile
intentions. Yet in the opening sequence,
the director completely breaks from the mold as the hyper aggression directed
toward him defies belief, as does his perceived passivity, which hides his real
intentions. Immediately we’re lured into
what’s underneath the surface. Petzold’s
last film YELLA (2007) was another standout in cleverly creating multiple layers
of suspense, which included the added twist of interchangeable psychological
worlds, where a dreamlike Antonioni reverie would replace the meticulous minutiae of drab or dreary reality, teasing the
audience with completely indistinguishable states of mind. The same actress Nina Hoss returns here as
the object of two men’s desires, all three hiding behind dark and mysterious
pasts. Her Turkish husband is Ali, Hilmi
Sözer, an enterprizing foreigner in Germany
who runs a string of successful food huts, but has a pathological distrust of
those that work for him, as he suspects everyone of cheating on him. Over time, he uncovers several clever schemes
to rob him of his profits. He runs into
Fürmann completely by accident in a scene
that borders on the absurd, yet the believability factor is completely
authentic, especially Fürmann’s
character, a former soldier in Afghanistan, now a moody silent type who lives
alone rebuilding his deceased mother’s house.
Ali hires him to be his driver after he loses his license for drunken
driving, but he becomes his most trusted employee, more like a bodyguard, as he
saves Ali’s life from irate or distraught employees on more than one
occasion. In friendship, he introduces
him to his German wife, the beguiling Hoss, who effortlessly combines multiple
levels of emotions all at once, which seems to be the inspirational emotional
source of the film, that we are all things simultaneously, quite capable of
wisdom along with disastrous blunders, at times not able to distinguish between
the two.
We’ve seen this
before in Polanski’s initial feature film KNIFE IN THE WATER (1962), a
tantalizing battle of wills between two men vying for a sultry lady, or the
scandalous noir thriller THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1946) featuring iconic
performances from John Garfield and Lana Turner, or the loveless and amoral
murder mystery of DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944), all of which exaggerate the hidden
intentions of the characters. Much like
Douglas Sirk clouds the emotional surface with a flamboyant color scheme that
hides his character’s repressed inner worlds, noir films are drenched in
darkness and doom, a fatal combination when love is in the air. Petzold carefully crafts his own world of
suspicion where Ali is surreptitiously spying on his own employees as well as
his wife, supposedly trusting Fürmann, which feels out of character, allowing him access into the inner
sanctum of his business and his personal life that includes his wife, the two
most successful ventures of his life, which from his own poisonous behavior
seems capable of precariously unraveling at any moment. Ali can be amusing, but is subject to
drinking binges, which leaves an opening for Fürmann who is initially rejected, but then pounced
on by Ali’s sensuous wife. When Ali
pretends to take a business trip abroad for a few days, leaving Fürmann in charge, the audience sees that he
doesn’t actually leave, something the character’s themselves don’t
suspect. Everything after that is veiled
in a lurid mystery of misguided emotions, all subject to the creepy idea that
Ali will jump out of the bushes at any moment and surprise our budding young
lovers who are dangerously crossing the line and breaking the limits of moral
acceptability. This creates an added
level of suspense and an exposed emotional vulnerability that otherwise would
not be there. Within this scenario,
things usually spin out of control, even from the perfectly controlled world of
Fürmann, as their behavior only grows more
dangerously suspicious, where ironically Fürmann was offered a choice earlier whether or not
to rescue Ali as he was dangling precariously off the edge of a cliff, an act
that sealed the deal for Hoss who immediately fell madly in love with him, her
knight in shining armor that might come to her own rescue.
Petzold’s stories
take their own path where the question remains whether or not any crime has
been committed, and if so, to what degree does it effect one’s life? This is a Crime
and Punishment story that explores the extent of one’s guilt even before
any wrongful action has been committed.
Can just the mere thought of an illicit action put one in the same moral
abyss as committing the act? Does
skimming from the profits compare with spousal abuse or murder? How far can one cross the line before it’s
clear they’ve passed the point of no return?
In this film, the audience sees the various developmental stages,
including the measures of protection taken to protect both business and
privacy. What can stop a crime of
passion? The three main characters are
particularly strong here, smart, compelling, yet psychologically cautious and
mistrustful, where emotions are seen as a weakness, something to be taken
advantage of by others, where Hoss declares at one point that without money,
love is never even an option. In an
economically depressed region where jobs are scarce, money is as much a
fictitious object of desire as passion, where in a unique role reversal, the
moneymaker is a Turkish immigrant, usually the object of racial scorn in German
films, given considerable poignancy by Sözer’s performance,
while his penniless, down on his luck “guest worker” driver is a German
citizen. In a film that’s hazy about true character,
what’s especially compelling about both Hoss and Fürmann is coming out of the emotional void of an
extended loveless state, where they are suddenly stripped of all protection as
they are ensnared in the intrigue of love.
Petzold tightens the noose around each one of the characters until they
nearly suffocate on their own delusions, with their paths so meticulously
carved out ahead of time but never quite taking into consideration the unknown
factor that is present in each and every crime.
Stripped of all pretension, souls are finally bared, but at what
cost? Everybody loses a piece of
themselves until there’s finally nothing left in the end but the illusion. While not nearly as off-the-edge and
experimentally risqué as
YELLA, this is every bit as well crafted, balanced, and deliciously
entertaining.
Time Out New York (Keith Uhlich) review [3/5]
Terms like small film and minor work could easily be applied to Jerichow, and they wouldn’t be undeserved. This is an expertly constructed thriller—basically a love triangle in which a down-on-his-luck former soldier (Fürmann) falls for the wife (Hoss) of his Turkish employer (Sözer)—that never rises above the trappings of its genre. Writer-director Christian Petzold has more on his mind than relaying a simple three-hander (it’s not accidental that the title refers to an economically challenged region of Germany), yet nothing resonates beyond the in-the-moment actions of his characters.
Petzold’s rigid-eye aesthetic, which builds an intriguing tension in the early going, ultimately acts as a negating drag on whatever themes he’s trying to illuminate. This leaves us with a trio of terrific actors performing in the service of a great nothing, though even with Jerichow’s many failings, their work is almost enough to recommend the film. It’s difficult to shake Fürmann’s brute intensity, Hoss’s frumpy sensuousness or Sözer’s wizened anguish as they live out their reel-world existence to the final, tragic beat. Petzold gets them to that point through untold contrivance, but what lingers is Hoss’s incantatory reading of the last line—she brings a necessary dose of spirit to the sterility.
Jerichow Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack
While word out of
As with Yella, but to far greater visceral impact,
Petzold plays with semi-misdirection. That is, it’s never clear that either he
or the film is actively trying to deceive you in the manner of classic
Twitch
(Kurt Halfyard) review also seen here: Row Three [Kurt
Halfyard]
Coming into Christian
Petzold‘s rural neo-noir, it might be helpful to have an
understanding of the films that he is aiming to re-create. Like his
previous film, Yella, which played with the conventions of An
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge in the context of modern Germany, Jerichow
(presumably named after the town where the film is set) teases audience
expectations with their own knowledge of the rich history of noir cinema.
Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice even
The Last Seduction are bound to guide and confound where the plot
is (or should) be going. That Petzold lingers, drops red
herrings and shifts audience loyalty between the three characters is one of the
joys of the piece. While in the end it comes across a bit more like
precise clock work than a living, breathing simulacrum is a bit frustrating
however.
Thomas, recently discharged
(dishonorably) from the German army is relieved of his discharge funds from his
alienated friends, to whom he owes a large sum of money. Broke, with the
financial means of renovating the decrepit family home completely evaporated
(along with his friends), he is only barely getting by with unemployment office
posted jobs. Things take a decided turn when he encounters Ali, a well
off owner of a series of falafel huts, with a penchant for drinking and
driving. After finding Ali and his Range Rover in the Elbe River, he lies
to the police about who was driving. This leads to Thomas getting gainful
employment as a driver for Ali as he collects from all his shops. Ali, a
wealthy self made Turkish immigrant, doesn’t trust anyone, and Thomas physical
presence comes in handy for keeping his shifty franchisees in line.
Thomas quickly becomes close to both Ali and his gorgeous German wife, played
exquisitely by the über talented Nina Hoss (one of the best (and beautiful)
actresses currently working in German cinema). See where the film is
going? Perhaps you do. Maybe not.
The trio of performances are
pitch perfect insofar as they are both skin deep and subtly vague. Thomas
(played by the flexible Benno Fürmann) is a blank slate, smart enough, and watching,
he still has some elements of the classic patsy, his posture hints at cockiness
although it may just be aloofness or stoicism. Hoss is cool, sexy,
desperate and perhaps not as bright as she lets on. Ali (Himli Sözer) is
a fireball of suspicion, arrogance, calculation and yet somehow, his
immigrant/outsider status offers an interesting form of sympathy. The
film has the tiniest morsel to say about how easily money (or lust) compromises
trust and where exactly the line between temptation and entrapment lies.
But mainly the film lets the actors bump and grind along, against the varied
backgrounds of the town shops, verdant countryside and empty beaches. The
pacing and construction create comforting notion (perhaps a smugness) of where
the film is headed before yielding a twist that is not a twist. In the
end, it is a fun and interesting ride, but less revolutionary or re-inventing
than it is simply a flippant riff on the genre.
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Rotterdam Film Festival 2009
Still perhaps the least internationally-recognised of Europe's front-rank writer-directors, Germany's Christian Petzold seemed on the verge of a belated major breakthrough with 2007's Yella - winner of Best Actress at Berlin (for his frequent collaborator Nina Hoss), his first picture to obtain UK distribution, and perhaps his most all-round satisfying work since the film which remains his masterpiece, 2000's The State I Am In (his theatrical-feature debut.)
And Jerichow has been received with ecstatic praise in certain quarters - especially, it's interesting to note, among those 'pockets of resistance' who'd previously been immune to Petzold's immaculately crafted psychological thrillers. In his report from Toronto Film Festival, Michael Sicinski of The Academic Hack website described it as "a film that picks up the Sirkian project from Fassbinder in a way that seems, for the first time, completely logical, as though we've finally found the heir apparent. In any case, I doubt I'll see a finer film this year than Jerichow."
Pretty heady praise, but after a first viewing I can't quite see where Sicinski is coming from. This is an absorbing page-turner of a movie, one which takes James M Cain's lean-and-mean 1934 novel(-la) The Postman Always Rings Twice and updates it to the rural but claustrophobic-feeling area just west of Berlin, around the small town which provides the film with its intriguingly quasi-biblical title ("Now Jericho was straitly shut up because of the children of Israel: none went out, and none came in" - Joshua 6:1).
The three main characters are a hotheaded former Afghan serviceman (Benno Furmann), the Turkish snack-van magnate (Hilmi Sozer) he starts working for after a (bizarre) chance encounter, and the latter's dissatisfied, abused wife (Hoss), with whom he soon commences an affair. The basic dynamic is drawn from Cain, but Petzold himself cites Vincente Minnelli's film Some Came Running (1959) as a significant influence, and fans of Patricia Highsmith - Petzold should surely adapt one of her novels for the screen sooner rather than later - may spot a couple of sequences and touches that nod to her oeuvre.
As we have come to expect from Petzold, the early and middle stretches of Jerichow unfold with gripping precision - though it becomes increasingly debatable whether his detached, classical coolness is really appropriate for the raw, hurtling, doomed carnality of Cain. The film's pacing feels a little off - there's a certain urgency that's lacking, and there's something not quite right with the structure: barely has Petzold delivered the big twist that markedly diverges from Postman's template, than his narrative comes to a jarringly abrupt halt.
A second viewing might yield greater depths, but so far I'd say this is Petzold essentially treading water - experimenting with genre as he goes along, without coming up with anything particularly startling or revealing. Then again, perhaps it's churlish to complain: Petzold-by-numbers is still significantly more accomplished and worthwhile than what the majority of the world's current writer-directors come up with when operating at the top of their game.
Slant Magazine review Joseph Jon Lanthier
The Village Voice [Melissa Anderson]
The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
Eye for Film (Keith Hennessey Brown) review [4/5]
User comments from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [3.5/5]
Screen International review Dan Fainaru in Venice, also seen here: Screen International [Dan Fainaru]
Filmstalker Richard Brunton
Loquacious Kumquat [Nicholas Bell]
DVD Talk (Jeremy Mathews) dvd review [4/5]
Monsters and Critics Ron Wilkinson
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B-]
Georgia Straight (Ken Eisner) review
The Hollywood Reporter review Ray Bennett
Toronto Star (Jason Anderson) review
Boston Globe review [2.5/4] Wesley Morris
The Boston Phoenix (Brett Michel) review
Philadelphia Inquirer (Steven Rea) review [3/4]
Philadelphia Weekly [Matt Prigge]
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [3/4]
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review May 15, 2009
FILM; A
German Wave, Focused on Today Dennis
Lim from The New York Times,
DVDBeaver
dvd review
Brian Montgomery
DREILEBEN
TRILOGY I B 89
BEATS
BEING DEAD (Dreileben - Etwas Besseres als den Tod) – made for TV
Germany (88 mi) 2012 d:
Christian Petzold
The Dreileben Trilogy is the product of director Christoph Hochhäusler, who was looking for something to write in his film magazine Revolver on the 40th anniversary of the German Film and Television Academy, initiating a public correspondence on film aesthetics and the lack of genre films in Germany with two other filmmakers from the Berlin school, Christian Petzold and Dominik Graf, deciding the only remnants they could find of the genre school was to be found on television. So they decided to jointly participate in a project for German television, not a mammoth omnibus project like GERMANY IN AUGUST (1978), which featured a critical analysis of the German political landscape of the 1970’s as seen from 11 different directors, but instead combining three individual stories, each about 90-minutes in length, revolving around an escaped mental patient who is also a murderer and sex offender, all set in the small town of Dreileben (meaning three lives), using various genre styles to heighten the suspense, offering a unique perspective on a world where people’s lives may overlap and intersect, and where old feelings buried in the past may have a profound influence on the present. Christian Petzold may be the most familiar of the group, where YELLA (2007) and JERICHOW (2008) are both widely acclaimed, each a standout in cleverly creating multiple layers of suspense, including the added twist of interchangeable psychological worlds, where YELLA offers a dreamlike Antonioni reverie replacing the meticulous minutiae of drab or ordinary reality, using offscreen sound and a clever editing scheme to continually tease the audience with completely indistinguishable states of mind, while JERICHOW is a surgically precise psychological thriller, both notable for the accumulation of small, banal details and characters nearly paralyzed by unseen or imaginary forces.
Shot on 35 mm, the opening slow-paced and character
driven segment beautifully lures us this into this remote locale, almost
perfectly integrating the psychological state of mind of a disturbing incident
in town with the nearby woods, which is an enchantingly beautiful green forest,
offering a pristine walkway to and from town that characters continually use,
where each successive trip into the darkened interior touches on a mounting
state of dread, as one continually wonders what may be lurking nearby, where
the director offers offscreen sounds and a camera vantage point that apparently
offers the sightline of the escaped convict, turning this into a Hansel and Gretel story of two young
lovers that get lost in the woods. Jacob
Matschenz is Johannes, a somewhat inattentive orderly at the local hospital,
supposedly studying to become a doctor, who may have inadvertantly left open a
door allowing the escape of a demented murderer and sex offender, where the
continual police presence throughout of sirens wailing, helicopters combing the
vicinity, and officers on the street confirm he’s still on the loose. Nonetheless, Johannes pays little attention
to this escalating crisis developing right outside his window at a nurse
hostel, offering him a superb view of the enveloping forest nearby. Instead, he daydreams about the hospital
director’s daughter, Sara (Vijessna Ferkic), while becoming infatuated with
another young girl, Ana, Luna Mijovic, recently seen in Breathing
(Atmen), that he voyeuristically sees having oral sex with
the leader of a biker gang at a nearby lake where Johannes has gone innocently
enough for a naked swim, carefully concealing himself while she’s left behind
after a demeaning and humiliating experience when the biker shows the rest of
the gang a video of them having sex, where she angrily tosses his iphone into
the lake. After initially rejecting his
offer of help, she’s subjected to a brief attack by the escaped patient in the
woods before Johannes intervenes, becoming inseparable afterwards, as if fate
had brought them together.
The two spend the rest of the film in the throes of
love, where they spend nearly every waking moment together, often seen in bed
or playfully hanging out in his room, where Ana can continually be seen walking
back and forth through the woods on her way into town where she works as a
housekeeper in the local hotel. This
pattern of continually tempting fate is the underlying suspense of the film,
accentuated by hyper-expressive chords of pulsating musical hysteria, as the
two routinely ignore the ominous presence of an unseen danger lurking nearby,
instead lost in their own little world where nothing else matters. Occasionally brief flare ups occur between
the young lovers, where quick tempers and adolescent naiveté seem to account
for their momentary blind spots, both exhibiting short attention spans. Accordingly, Johannes can occasionally be
seen falling asleep at work while charged with watching the security video
monitors, showing yet another voyeuristic side to his personality, often
becoming obsessed with what he sees on the monitor, where Ana may be waiting
outside for him. Initially, he was
excited by her presence, running off to see her, but over time her presence
becomes an unanticipated added weight.
But it’s at an upscale party at a local resort where the relationship is
truly tested, where this on-again, off-again mating ritual inexplicably takes
on a hideous dimension, where the motives of both Johannes and Ana undergo a
thorough transformation, where their previously inseparable paths diverge into
uncommon territory, like split personalities, both becoming unrecognizable to
the audience, mysteriously spiralling out of control in a dreamlike finale,
leaving the audience emotionally adrift in a suspended state of paralysis. Petzold may spend an inordinate amount of
time in his films establishing a meticulous rhythm of ordinary detail, but he
also has a way of shifting our attention on a dime into a netherworld where
it’s near impossible to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not.
Swiss
Mix: Eclectic Highlights from the 2011 Locarno Film Festival Leo
Goldsmith from Fandor, August 18, 2011
But by far the best thing the festival had to offer was Dreileben,
a triptych of features about small-town crime and punishment by “
Film|Neu
- germany • austria • switzerland - Films - Dreileben Part 1 ... Eddie Cockrell from the Goethe Institute
Though Dreileben is conceived as an experiment in linked
narrative, each film can be enjoyed independently of the others; nevertheless,
as with Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy of Blue, White
and Red, their interlocking structures and overlapping character
references reward sequential—and attentive—viewing.
In the thick Thuringian woods surrounding a picture postcard German town, sex
offender and convicted murderer Frank Molesch (Stefan Kurt) eludes the
authorities. Meanwhile, rudderless hospital orderly Johannes (Jacob Matschenz)
initiates a hesitant relationship with unhappy Bosnian chambermaid Ana (Luna
Zimic Miljovic). So absorbed are they in the intricate minutiae of love that
the manhunt swirling around them goes entirely unnoticed. This is consistent
with director Christian Petzold’s overarching interest in the delicate balance
between life and death, and the resulting sense of foreboding and dread is
Hitchcockian in its cumulative intensity.
Dreileben
1: Beats Being Dead Review. Movie Reviews ... - Time Out Tom Huddleston, entire Trilogy
German television takes a leaf out of
Channel 4’s book with this ‘Red Riding’-style three-parter, as three directors
with distinctive styles tell interlinking stories all set in the same fictional
Bavarian mountain town. While each of the individual 90-minute films is
unmistakeably flawed, taken together they add up to an impressive overview of
German small-town life in the early twentieth century, exploring ideas of
class, culture, legality and love. Christian
Petzold’s opening instalment ‘Beats Being Dead’ is the least
straightforward of the three, a fantastical, at times slightly directionless
love story between a medical student and a Bosnian chamber maid which gradually
builds into an impressively controlled and unsettling study of how social
stratification destroys those on the lowest rungs. Dominik Graf’s ‘Don’t Follow
Me Around’, meanwhile, is a terse police procedural fused with an intimate
bourgeois psychodrama, as a forensic psychiatrist travels to the town to track
down an escaped mental patient and is forced to confront the ghosts of her
romantic past. Finally, Christopher Hochhaüsler’s ‘One Minute of Darkness’ is a
deceptively straightforward chase thriller following the aforementioned escapee
as he attempts to evade capture in the ancient, haunted woods surrounding the
town, all the while wrestling with his own inner demons.
User reviews from imdb Author: Sindre Kaspersen from
Norway
The first part of "Dreileben", a loose trilogy based on a
fictitious story about a murderer called Frank Molesch who escapes from a
hospital in the rural village Dreileben in The Free State of Thuringia, is
succeeded by "Don't Follow Me Around" (2011) and "One Minute Of
Darkness" (2011). It was written and directed by German filmmaker
Christian Petzold and tells the story about Johannes, a young and energetic
hospital worker, and Ana, a vulnerable and free-spirited woman who works at a
hotel and lives with her mother and her younger brother. Johannes and Ana meets
and falls in love during a summer in Dreileben when the police is chasing an
escaped murderer, but Ana's increasing devotion decreases their evolving
relationship.
Christian Petzold's stylistic, perceptive and engaging directing is distinct in
this slow-paced and character-driven mystery which is finely acted by German
actor Jacob Matschenz and Bosnian actress Luna Mijovic as the promising young
lovers Johannes and Ana. The brilliant use of sound and the visually noticeable
photography by German cinematographer Hans Fromm reinforces the predominant and
impending atmosphere in this romantic psychological thriller which is the most
rigorously structured and minimalistic part of the Dreileben trilogy.
tiff.net
- 2011 Films - Dreileben Andréa
Picard
A trio of interlocking films rather than a standard trilogy or
omnibus, Dreileben is an invigorating experiment in narrative
construction by three of
The premise of Dreileben (literally “three lives”) stems from an
incident in which a convicted murderer and sex offender escaped from a
hospital, setting off a manhunt. Each director chose a different angle from
which to tell the story, and did so in their respective signature style. The
result is an idiosyncratic yet modestly masterful cubist puzzle in which points
of view continuously shift focus, and a transmuted storyline engages the
audience’s imagination and sense of visual recall. The films cumulatively
reveal parallel worlds, moving from Petzold’s cool, Hitchcockian romantic
thriller (Beats Being Dead); to Graf’s novelistic criminal
investigation (Don’t Follow Me Around); to Hochhäusler’s dual
psychological character study that veers toward a Thuringian fairytale. A
feverish tension builds over the five-hour whole as characters intersect and
suspicions are overturned.
Although made by filmmaker/critics, Dreileben checks its theory at the
door to give us the year’s most refreshing, playful and clever instances of
inter-narrative filmmaking.
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Anne-Katrin Titze]
Christian Petzold's Dreileben Part 1: Beats Being Dead depicts a modern small-town world in all its ennui and greyness and stagnant social order. Events unfold in the midst of a dramatic, yet indifferent, landscape.
The film's title translated means "three lives", and is the name
of a small town in the
Johannes (Jacob Matschenz) is an intern in the local hospital. He works at
the weekends, the head physician's daughter is his ex-girlfriend and in his
room at the nurses' home, he has postcards from
In the same spirit as Jerichow (2008), Yella (2007) and Ghosts (2005), Petzold exposes the social machinations behind the seemingly simple love stories. He follows the protagonists to their jobs and beyond. Surveillance camera images are important tools in Petzold's storytelling. The maids come to work dressed in yellow, through the back gate. The intern at the hospital has to undress and collect the laundry from a disturbed homeless woman. A party at the golf club is where Ana wants to go, dressed in red, she burns her competition.
Walks in the forest, where the escaped sex offender might be lurking and police with dogs are ever present. Some of the motifs are obvious, such as the the use of the song Cry Me A River, while some scenes only expose their relevance after seeing all three parts of the trilogy. It's not as straight forward a police investigation as in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's elegiac Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011).
Ana, who lives with her mother and little brother in a small apartment and seems to be the only one supporting the family financially, connects Johannes with the guests at the hotel. "You all drink tea," she says, "the guests drink tea all day, like idiots." There are some visual references to Krzysztof Kieslowski, master of the Three Colours trilogy. A poster for "Coffee To Go" with a girl blowing a kiss mirrors the billboard in Red (1994).
Johannes wants to go to medical school in
LA turns out to be a fantasy that aims to impress, Johannes imagines himself coming back, dressed in white. Unlike Audrey Hepburn in Billy Wilder's Sabrina (1954), it is difficult to root for him.
NYFF
Spotlight Nicholas Kemp from the
Film Society of Lincoln Center, entire Trilogy, September 14, 2011
"Over the last few years we’ve done a number of screenings
of works that were originally designed for television: the Red Riding Trilogy a
few years ago, Carlos and Mysteries of Lisbon last year. Dreileben is a
three-part series of films with three completely different directors, but
they’re all about the same incident. They’re about a murder that takes place in
a small town in Germany and each film looks at the murder from a different
point of view—one from the point of view of other townspeople, one from the
police investigating it, and one from the murderer himself. There’s a little
bit of overlap in all of them, but really we are looking at one incident from
three different points of view, three different directors, three different
cinematic styles. It’s a fascinating project that was unveiled at
Dreileben’s three directors are among the shining stars
of the "Berlin School" of modern German cinema. The most familiar of
the bunch, Christian Petzold’s recent credits include: Jerichow
(2008), which was nominated for a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival; Yella
(2007), which was nominated for a Golden Berlin Bear at Berlinale and won
prizes for editor Bettina Böhler and actress Nina Hoss; and Gespenster
(2005), another Golden Berlin Bear nominee. Dominik Graf is a prolific and
award-winning director of German film and television programming whose 2002
feature A Map of the Heart also received a Golden Berlin Bear
nomination. Christoph Hochhäusler is a well-known German critic whose recent
work as a filmmaker has earned him increasing acclaim.
Phil Coldiron for Slant Magazine: “Happily, I can report that Dreileben, a triptych film made of parts by Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, and Christoph Hochhausler, takes this fragmented approach and makes something genuinely worth being called Faulknerian with it. The result of a conversation among the three on the state of German cinema, the film sets off from a central event—the escape of a convicted murderer, Molesche (an alternately blank and delirious Stefan Kurt), while visiting the body of his dead foster mother at a nursing home—and tells three tenuously connected stories that in concert present a brutal vision of a world on a wire.”
Above all else, Dreileben is an engrossing and intensely
watchable experiment in cinematic storytelling. Born of a correspondence
between three key directors of the so-called “Berlin School” of German cinema,
this trio of interlocking films revolves around a single event, the escape of a
murderer and sex offender from a hospital in a small town in central Germany.
In genre, style and tone, however, the three films could hardly be more
distinct.
Christian Petzold’s Beats Being Dead (Etwas Besseres als den Tod)
is a tragedy of young love between an orderly at the hospital with a promising
future ahead of him and a down-and-out, and somewhat unstable, Bosnian refugee
who works as a housekeeper at a nearby hotel. The manhunt that unites the three
films is mostly relegated to the background as Petzold explores the romantic
angst caused by the divergence in the young lovers’ weltanschauungs, only to
rear its ugly head in a series of terrifying scenes at the film’s end.
Dominik Graf’s Don’t Follow Me Around (Komm mir nicht nach) brings the audience closer to the main event by following a big-city police psychologist brought in to help with the search for the escaped convict. However, we are quickly diverted again by her discovery of systematic police corruption in the area and her reunion with an old friend, with whom she is staying while in town. Over quite a few glasses of red wine, the two friends discover that they once dated the same man at the same time without knowing it, a revelation with distinct and important implications for each woman.
In Christoph Hochhäusler’s riveting thriller One Minute of Darkness (Eine Minute Dunkel), the audience is finally brought into the point of view of the escaped felon himself, as well as that of the gruff police inspector in charge of recapturing him. While the felon creates a surprisingly tender bond with a young runaway he meets in hiding, the inspector begins to question his guilt after studying the original case that landed him behind bars. Laced with visual callbacks to the first two films and a nail-biting concluding sequence, Dreileben’s final chapter delivers ample payoff on the audience’s investment in the series.
Dreileben:
Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter
Neil Young, entire Trilogy
The result (to be aired on German TV this fall) is three separate though linked takes on the same manhunt story, ideally suited to small-screen exposure over successive nights, either broadcast or via a DVD box-set. Though unusual and ambitious in conception and execution, Dreileben is by no means without precedent. The most recent parallels include Lucas Belvaux's Belgian Trilogy (2002), Channel 4 UK's Red Riding (2009), and Lars Von Trier's ongoing Advance Party experiment (which has so far yielded Andrea Arnold's Red Road and Morag McKinnon's Donkeys).
While decidedly uneven — Graf's Don't Follow Me Around (the only one shot on film) is the weakest, Hochhäusler's excellent One Minute of Darkness by some way the most accomplished — overall Dreileben (literally "three lives") emerges as more than the sum of its parts. Adventurous festivals may emulate the Berlinale and screen the films in one marathon sitting; alternatively, programmers might prefer to scatter them across their schedules.
Arguably the most influential of post-Reunification German film-makers, 50-year-old Petzold (The State I Am In; Yella; Jerichow) is also the most internationally renowned Dreileben auteur. His DV-shot contribution Beats Being Dead (Etwas Besseres als den Tod).a twisty, fairtytale-inflected study of teenage love, is a little disappointing by his own high standards. But in its quizzically Hitchcockian exploration of psychological/emotional complexities within a genre format, it's unmistakably a Petzold movie.
Johannes (Jacob Matschenz) is a happy-go-lucky teen working as an intern at a quiet countryside clinic and involved in an on-off courtship with Sarah (Vijessna Ferkic), pretty daughter of the institution's chief surgeon (Rainer Bock). But when he meets Bosnian refugee Ana (Luna Mijovic) a more fiery romance quickly develops against the backdrop of a police-search for convicted murderer Molesch (Stefan Kurt). Molesch escaped - with the hapless Johannes' inadvertent assistance - while "visiting" with his deceased mother at the hospital's mortuary.
All isn't what it seems, however — a recurring theme across Dreileben is the unreliability of appearances — and Johannes' behavior provides unexpected (and unwelcome) surprises for Ana and audience alike. Indeed, the protagonist's characterization is the main problem with Beats Being Dead, third-act developments fitting awkwardly with what's gone before. The finale nevertheless packs a punch with a skillfully-choreographed jolt, followed by a caustically ironic coda that showcases Petzold's flair with classic songs (Julie London's Cry Me A River).
Eight years Petzold's senior, Graf is a respected figure among his German peers. His varied résumé comprises TV-movies and serials, and occasional features (A Map of the Heart). Feeling very "small-screen" in its look and approach, his Don't Follow Me Around (Komm mir nicht nach) is jarringly different in tone from the other two Dreileben movies, which are more downbeat and focused.
Here, the manhunt serves as pretext to take criminal-psychologist Jo (Jeanette Hain) away from home and stay with long-time best friend Vera (Susanne Wolff), who resides near Johannes' workplace. Scriptwriters Graf and Markus Busch alternate between policier material — as Jo, helped/hindered by corrupt local cops, ingeniously tracks down her man — and talky domestic passages where Jo and Vera reminisce about a boyfriend they unwittingly "shared" years before. Wine-fueled conversations are played out at unrewarding length; the manhunt scenes, conversely, are excessively brisk and choppy. The (implausibly easy) capture of Molesch is presented almost as an afterthought, via narrated stills.
Graf struggles to integrate a streak of off-beat humor within essentially serious material. The story-strands only occasionally and arbitrarily come together, as if the Jo/Vera business was being shoehorned into the darker template established by the other two movies. Indeed, the most effective elements are perky book-ending sequences featuring Jo's young daughter Lucinda (Malou), an adorable moppet who steals her every scene.
There's also a key child-performer in Hochhäusler's One Minute of Darkness: Paraschiva Dragus, who plays the little girl who befriends Molesch during his time on the run. Briefly glimpsed in Beats Being Dead and Don't Follow Me Around,the escaped convict moves front-and-center here.
In the first two Dreileben movies, Molesch comes across as a psychotic boogeyman. As Hochhäusler and co-scriptwriter Peer Klehmet reveal, however, Molesch is really more hunted than hunter: lost in Dreileben's forests — where he encounters a fellow "runaway" Cleo (Dragus) in scenes reminiscent of James Whale's Frankenstein — suffering from educational subnormality, emotional trauma and mental illness.
He might even be innocent of the murder of which he'd been convicted some five years before, as this verdict depended on circumstantial evidence involving a closed-circuit video-camera (a gap during one crucial recording provides Hochhäusler with his evocative title.) The resulting update of Hitchcock's favorite "transference of guilt" theme is given extra dimension as we follow veteran cop Marcus (Eberhard Kirchberg), deploying unorthodox methods to belatedly unearth the facts.
Slow-burning One Minute of Darkness (Eine Minute Dunkel) is chiefly concerned with atmospheric investigations of place and the probing of a disturbed personality. Punctuated with moments of droll humour and touching poignancy, the film weaves its alluring, surprisingly suspenseful spell with assistance from a rumbling, bass-heavy score and pin-sharp digital cinematography courtesy of Germany's most reliably excellent DP, Reinhold Vorschneider (In the Shadows).
A sometime film-critic, 38-year-old Hochhäusler (The City Below) has quickly emerged as one of his nation's most promising younger directors. One Minute of Darkness amply confirms and consolidates that reputation, wrapping up the slightly cumbersome Dreileben on a triumphant and haunting note. Indeed, the closing seconds are perhaps the finest in the whole project — beautiful, chilling and tragically ironic.
Worlds of Possibilities: Christian Petzold, Dominik ... - Cinema Scope Dennis Lim from Cinema Scope, 2011
After a decade-long procession of HBO critical darlings, in the wake of Olivier Assayas’ Carlos and now Todd Haynes’ Mildred Pierce, received wisdom holds that television—or more precisely, its funding structures and serial configurations—represents our best hope for narrative filmmaking. Such pronouncements tend to assert the benefits of duration and scope, the breathing room, and the level of detail that bigger canvases allow. But the greatness of the three-part, three-director Dreileben is not, or not simply, a matter of scale.
Like the Red Riding Trilogy (2009), Dreileben consists of three self-contained but interlinked films, each by a different filmmaker (Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, Christoph Hochhäusler), all dealing with related crimes in the same location. But while the Red Riding films span a decade, Dreileben circles around a single time and place, locating different entry points (which turn out really to be points of departure) and refracting the nominally central incident through different perspectives (which often means marginalizing it). Each installment tells what the filmmakers call a “horizontal” story—impelled by the forward motion of a romance, an investigation, a manhunt—but the point of Dreileben is to stack them on a vertical axis. While Red Riding enforces a unity of mood, each Dreileben film, despite existing within the same clearly delineated physical world, suggests a subtly different universe from the others. Which comes as no surprise given how it originated: not through omnibus-film gimmickry or convenience but in the course of an actual exchange of ideas.
The starting point was an e-mail correspondence among the three filmmakers, published in Revolver magazine in 2007, on the state of German cinema that revealed mutual concerns and sharp disagreements. Graf was born in 1952, Petzold in 1960, Hochhäusler in 1972, and each has a distinct relationship to the now decade-old “new German cinema” that has come to be imprecisely known as the Berlin School. Graf, a respected senior figure and a stalwart of German television, predates the Berlin School’s emergence, and has criticized what he sees as the reticence and passivity of many of the films. Petzold is often identified as one of the movement’s de facto founders, part of the pioneering wave that studied at the dffb in the ’80s and ’90s. Hochhäusler belongs (with Benjamin Heisenberg and Ulrich Köhler) to the Revolver-aligned second generation, whose careers have progressed and diverged in ways that reflect the constant sense of flux, born of habitual self-examination, that defines this loose group.
It is perhaps to be expected, given all the former and part-time critics and academics in its midst, that the evolution of the Berlin School—and it has evolved, in more tangible and interesting ways than most so-called movements—rests on an interplay between theory and practice, a compulsion among its affiliates both to discuss and to demonstrate what it means to make films in and about Germany today. If the Berlin School’s house style—cool, precise, observational—was positioned as a reaction to mainstream storytelling conventions, the recent move toward genre experimentation, with an embrace of more robust narratives and more expansive emotions, seems partly a reaction to the marginalization of the early films. (Dreileben begs to be seen in the light not just of the Revolver correspondence, which weighs the possibilities and traps of genre cinema vs. auteur cinema, but also of Heisenberg’s The Robber and Thomas Arslan’s In the Shadows, two exemplary genre reworking and high points of last year’s Berlinale.)
One of Graf’s main charges is that the minimalism of the Berlin School, “instead of expanding narrative possibilities,” represents “a narrowing of gaze.” Expansion is inherent to the structure of Dreileben, which fans out from the tabloidish scenario of a convicted killer and sex offender who escapes while paying his last respects to his mother in a hospital. Petzold deals with the victim-to-be, Graf with one of the investigators, and Hochhäusler with the killer himself. As genre narratives, each comes freighted with expectations, as does the setting. While many Berlin School movies have taken place in the border zones and liminal spaces of contemporary Germany, Dreileben unfolds in Thuringia, the mythic, heavily forested region known as the nation’s “green heart.” (The verdant, imposing landscapes come across most vividly in Petzold’s film; folklore is most directly referenced in Hochhäusler’s, which invokes witch hunts, haunted caves, and the legend of the slumbering emperor Barbarossa.)
Petzold’s Beats Being Dead is as taut as it is volatile, a fever-dream compound of romantic tragedy and slasher noir that focuses on two young people who cross paths with the killer: Johannes (Jacob Matschenz), a pre-med student working as a nurse to fulfill his national-service obligations, and Ana (Luna Mijovic), a chambermaid and Bosnian emigré. As in Jerichow (2008) and Yella (2007), Petzold inscribes cold, hard truths of class and money into almost every scene, fusing erotic tensions with socioeconomic ones—a flirtatious moment sours with a suspicion of stolen cash; the climactic betrayal happens at a country-club shindig. The film is yet another of Petzold’s ghost stories set among the living dead, but if that has often meant a measured detachment, the mood here is deeply mysterious, at once playful and irrational.
Beats Being Dead has the flavour of myth and the power of a trance. Petzold underscores his fairy-tale inspiration—Undine, the tale of the water nymph who yearns to join the human race—by having Ana and Johannes begin their love story by a lake, in the nude. There is a comic edge, a kind of screwball syncopation, to their push-pull courtship—one of them is forever walking away, chasing after the other, or apologizing. Music is crucial to the film’s tone of ominous romanticism. In contrast to the minimal, ambient scores of Petzold’s previous films, he envelops the action here in a Bernard Herrmann-esque cocoon (a leitmotif-heavy swoon by Stefan Will), and makes inspired use of Julie London’s “Cry Me a River” as the siren song that casts the spell—and, in the enigmatic, pitch-perfect final scene, breaks it.
Graf’s contribution builds directly on his Revolver remarks, where he complained of the Berlin School’s “distrust of communication, of language.” Don’t Follow Me Around is a screenwriter’s movie, in the best sense: talky and witty, packed with revealing tangents and glancing micro-observations. Shot by Michael Wiesweg in soft-toned Super 16—a striking contrast to the crisp, controlled visuals of the other two entries—Graf’s film makes a virtue of skittishness. The distractable camera snoops, wanders, lingers on odd details, and the narrative likewise keeps shifting its attention.
The protagonist, Jo (Jeanette Hain), is a police psychologist, called in to investigate the escaped killer. But the real point of her trip is an internal affairs investigation into local corruption. The core of the story, in any case, turns out to be Jo’s reunion with Vera (Susanne Wolff), the old friend she stays with—and an unexpected conduit to an ex-flame. Both women find out that years ago in Munich they were in love with the same man at the same time, unaware of each other’s existence. Jo and Vera’s relationship—which gets more complicated as the women compare notes while withholding information—reinforces Dreileben’s larger context: a world of imperfect knowledge.
In A Minute of Darkness, Hochhäusler turns back to the primary narrative, which he propels to a genre payoff and imbues with philosophical richness. A brooding dual character study, it follows the killer (Stefan Kurt) in his interlude of freedom (overwhelmed by the natural world, rendered with tactile immediacy by Reinhold Vorschneider) and the grizzled policeman (Eberhard Kirchberg) who revisits the original case, haunted by the missing minute in the surveillance footage of the crime. Hochhäusler has said that the early inspiration was Petzold’s misremembered summary of Schiller’s novel The Dishonorable Reclaimed, which he had inaccurately described as the story of “a man who became a murderer only because he was hounded,” but the premise also recalls Hochhäusler’s own Low Profile (2005).
The taunting lacuna at the centre of A Minute of Darkness, the most self-reflexive aspect of Dreileben, speaks to the impossibility of certainty in the absence of observable evidence, the danger of imposing stories onto what we cannot know for sure. This conundrum is, of course, intimately linked to the de-dramatized cinema of the Berlin School: the fear of narrative as, to quote Hochhäusler, something that “contaminates the picture,” a lie, and what’s more, a lie that could become the truth.
Coming at a single starting point from multiple angles, Dreileben takes what might be called a cubist approach to storytelling, reinforcing a basic fact of human coexistence, that shared experiences reverberate in different ways. But as an epistemological exercise, which such Rashomonic endeavours tend to be, it has an obvious advantage over, say, Lucas Belvaux’s La Trilogie (2002)—with three filmmakers working in concert but also autonomously, subjectivity is built into the project. In toto, the Dreileben films offer many of the pleasures of the puzzle movie: stories intersect and characters move between foreground and background; ellipses are filled in and questions answered, one segment providing a (sometimes literal) reverse angle on another. These are satisfactions that tapestry movies, with their criss-crossing plots and chance encounters, supposedly provide. But Dreileben avoids the sins of Babel (2006) and its like: the smug omniscience, the thesis-driven diagramming, the dutiful slog of connecting the dots and filling in the blanks. Instead, each installment enriches and complicates the others. These stories do not add up so much as tunnel outward. To put it another way, Dreileben represents a termite solution to a white-elephant problem. Taken together, the movies attest to the limits of knowledge and the potential of imaginative empathy. The self-contained modesty of each film belies the immensity of the project: Dreileben conjures not just three lives but worlds of possibilities.
The
Agonistic Politics of the Dreileben Project | Marco Abel ... 40-page essay, The
Agonistic Politics of the Dreileben Project, by Marco Abel from The German Studies Review, 2013 (pdf)
Dreileben
- Berlinale Press Notes translated to
English by Christoph Terhechte for the Berlinale, August 15, 2006 (pdf)
Subtitledonline.com
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NYFF
2011. Three Directors, Three Films, One Town and One Crim NYFF
2011. Three Directors, Three Films, One Town and One Criminal: “Dreileben”
by Daniel Kasman reviews the entire Trilogy from Mubi, September 29, 2011
Dreileben Michael
J. Anderson and Lisa K. Broad review the entire Trilogy from Tativille,
September 25, 2011
Moria
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The
House Next Door [Phil Coldiron]
entire Trilogy
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VIFF vitality, fancy and plain David
Bordwell from Observations on Film Art, October 16, 2011
Vadim Rizov The L Magazine, entire Trilogy,
September 30, 2011
London
Film Festival 2011 Diary Special: Dreileben | Front Row ... Sam Inglis, entire Trilogy
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15th EU
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Dreileben
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User reviews from imdb Author: Aamir Ahmad (kgpianasimov) from Portugal
User reviews from imdb Author: JvH48 from Netherlands
NYFF
2011. Petzold, Graf and Hochhäusler's "Dreileben" on ... David Hudson offers the links from Mubi
Dreileben
1: Beats Being Dead Review. Movie Reviews ... - Time Out Tom Huddleston, entire Trilogy
Review:
Dreileben - Reviews Peter Keough,
entire Trilogy, from The Boston Phoenix
DREILEBEN
TRILOGY II C- 69
DON’T
FOLLOW ME AROUND (Dreileben – Komm
mir nicht nach) – made for TV
Germany (88 mi) 2012 d:
Dominik Graf
This film makes the biggest departure from the original concept, which
was to experiment freely with the use of genre films, claiming this aspect was
missing altogether in German films, but there’s little evidence of it here in
this second segment of The Dreileben
Trilogy, all part of a series of interconnected films, each taking place in
the same location and linked by a familiar event, the escape of a deranged
killer. Dominik Graf is not a name
widely known overseas, as he is a professor for feature film directing at the International Film School in Cologne, but his success has largely come in the
German television industry. Graf’s claim
is that the Berlin School prefers visual style to narrative and well written
screenplays, an example of which is noted German cinematographer Uta Briesewitz
whose Berlin School aesthetic helped shape the look of the first three seasons
of the American television show The Wire,
claiming the film school actually downplays the role of language in cinema
and overlooks the possibilities of characters communicating with one another
onscreen. Accordingly, this is a
decisively different tone than the other two episodes of the Trilogy, a chatty, dialogue driven film,
where almost all the action is advanced not by what the audience sees, but
hears through various conversations.
What this really turns out to be is an attempted critique of the
bourgeoisie, in particular the professional class, where if it was meant to be
a comic satire, it falls flat. What this
is most reminiscent of is Fassbinder’s THE THIRD GENERATION (1979), a savage
satire on the comic ineptitude of the radical left, people who name drop talk
of revolution, including the right books, quoting the right phrases, going to
all the important meetings and demonstrations, where the middle class actually
turns radical action into a convenient lifestyle choice. What was once spirited street defiance,
confronting the government and the police through mass disobedience, has turned
into a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle without any real ideology except
self-centered indulgence.
Jeanette Hain plays Jo, a criminal psychology specialist who is called
into the town of Dreileben to offer her expertise to the police in helping
catch an escaped killer. She is provided
a working team to assist her round the clock, but mostly they do nothing more
than sit and toss ideas around from 9 to 5 before heading off for lunch, where
food is really what’s at the top of a policeman’s agenda, continually introducing
her to new places that serve heaping portions on a plate, offering their rave
reviews of noted German delicacies. Jo
has only a single surviving victim to interview who can help identify the
killer, and her remembrance is not very helpful, as what she describes is more
animal than human, so this does not exactly consume her time. Instead, because of a foul up at the hotel
where she planned to stay, she instead pays a visit to a best friend, Vera
(Susanne Wolff) and her pseudo writer of a husband Bruno (Misel Maticevic),
both living in a historical home that was used by various East German radical
organizations at one time or another, where Bruno loves to point out their
former meeting rooms. They spend the
majority of their time rehashing old times over several bottles of wine every
night, which turns out to be little more than gossip sessions. The director struggles to incorporate humor
into what is essentially a serious story, so if these intimate conversations
were meant to be comic, they’re not, and they’re overlong, minimizing the
importance of the criminal at large while they instead share stories about a
boyfriend they unwittingly had in common.
Bruno is reduced to little more than an innocent bystander. The film all but forgets the premise of her
visit and instead explores the parameters of Jo and Vera’s long term
friendship, whether it can withstand some bracing truths about what happened
years ago, as they intently delve into each other’s past history, an attempt to
stress an otherwise overlooked factor throughout the Trilogy.
There’s an interesting contrast between the cop scenes, now introducing
a slightly deranged cop and a corruption-within-the-force angle, where their
attempts to track down the killer are reduced to brief episodes of non
activity, mostly people just standing around, while instead all the focus and
attention is on long, drawn out scenes of after-work drinking and
socializing. Unless you knew ahead of
time that there was a deranged escaped convict on the loose, you’d barely know
this was part of the story, though there is a freeze frame photo-op. If Graf is supposed to be a screenwriter
aficionado, his characters never have an intelligent word to say throughout,
making this a tepid and uninteresting experience of the worst kind, as there’s
only sketchy character development featuring mediocre acting, lengthy
wine-fueled conversations, few police updates, no action to speak of, and
literally nothing for the audience to grab hold of. What this film has to say about professionals
is more about their jaded and slightly askew perceptions of themselves, where
they are continually seen as petty and insecure, constantly asking for personal
reinforcement to help boost their sagging self-esteem. After all, they’re supposed to be catching a
killer on the loose. Jo’s suggestion on
how to catch him not only seems ludicrous but downright criminal in itself,
where any department that actually carried out this plan would subject
themselves to personal lawsuits for damages in the multi-millions of dollars
for placing an innocent civilian in harm’s way.
This feels like television scriptwriting, as it has no place in the real
world, which is more interested in convictions that will stick. Of vague interest, this is the only episode
in the Trilogy actually shot on 16 mm
film, but you can hardly tell, as this segment, largely shot indoors, makes the
least effective use of the actual locations in an area known as Thuringia,
which was part of East Germany, known for its historical and legendary past,
and while this is the 2nd episode in the Trilogy, chronology-wise this is the final episode.
User reviews from imdb Author: Sindre Kaspersen from
Norway
The second part of the "Dreileben" trilogy was directed by German
screenwriter and director Dominik Graf who co-wrote the screenplay with Markus
Busch. It tells the story about psychologist Jo, a single mum who lives with
her parents in
This slow-paced and dialog-driven mystery drama focuses on the relations and
the dynamics between the three central characters, draws ardent and extensive
milieu depictions and is more of an intimate and psychological drama than a
thriller. The atmosphere is as significant as in the first and the last part of
the trilogy and the acting performances by German actresses Jeanette Hein,
Susanne Wolff and German actor Misel Maticevic is prominent. The second part of
the Dreileben trilogy provides the most detailed milieu depictions and is a
finely directed study of character about a woman who whilst investigating a
murder case becomes more interested in examining her own personal feelings.
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Anne-Katrin Titze]
Part 2 in the Dreileben
trilogy, Don't Follow Me Around, is the story of Johanna (Jeanette Hain), a
police psychologist, who is sent to the small town in
Director and co-screenwriter Dominick Graf is very good at having a lot going on at once. The private past plot, the police corruption plot, the escaped patient plot and a marriage on the rocks plot all intertwine and yet, they all make sense and move each other forward.
There are more unhealthy breakfasts, police lunches, ice-cream stop overs, thrown out sandwiches and drunken dinners in this one, than there are in all the other New York Film Festival films combined.
At the start, Johanna drops off her little daughter with the grandparents,
played by Rüdiger Vogler and Lisa Kreuzer. Vogler and Kreuzer, who were the
stars in Wim Wenders' 1974 road movie Alice In The Cities, stay put this time
with the kid, and provide some background. The grandmother, who smokes at
breakfast, knows whom to blame. "The doctor wants me to smoke five
cigarettes." The grandfather explains to the little girl that her mother
is going to the legendary place, where Kaiser Barbarossa is sleeping under the
Kyffhäuser mountain with his knights in a cave. When there are no longer any ravens
flying, he will awake and restore
When Johanna arrives in the area, there is a mistake with the hotel booking, so she ends up calling and staying with her old university friend Vera (Susanne Wolff), who moved to Thuringia with her novelist husband Bruno (Misel Maticevic) and is in the middle of renovating their interesting old house, the former culture centre of the town during GDR times.
The two women reminisce, over many bottles of wine, about their college days and discover, now, so many years later, that they had the same boyfriend, once upon a time.
The colleagues from the local police feel insulted to have a woman from the city come to help them. A local pub is, ironically, called Glasnost. At the county fair, Johanna picks out a red-haired woman as bait for the wanted man, whose life will unfold further in part three (One Minute Of Darkness).
Someone is convinced that what was shot was an animal and had hooves. Think David Lynch. "He changed into a deer", makes as much sense as the "Barbarossa hunter", an unfortunate tourist at the hotel who tries to find traces of the famous Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I. Water damage, a tricky badger, the blood of a dog, the father of a child, all equally important with strings nimbly tied together at the end. The fantastic interrupts the profane.
NYFF
2011. Three Directors, Three Films, One Town and One Crim NYFF
2011. Three Directors, Three Films, One Town and One Criminal: “Dreileben”
by Daniel Kasman reviews the entire Trilogy from Mubi, September 29, 2011
An ambitious project: three different directors, one central location, one core plot element, three feature length films. Discreet films yet this is a television project, a medium where scope does not preclude detail, and vice versa. Perhaps Dreileben is the best of both worlds, as it really is unfair to talk about how stellar an episode of serial television is, when that episode is contigent on surrounding entries. Each film in this trilogy—directed by Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf and Christoph Hochhäusler—can and does stand by itself, mysteries explained by the other features left as more powerful, unsolvable ambiguities reverberating around the frames' edges. Disassembly is easy, then, but reassembly is also possible, and strange. Without the television's producer to guide a relative aesthetic consistency between directorial entries, we have three puzzle pieces that somewhat-fit into a narrative, a space and a mystery.
Petzold's Beats Being Dead stands alone, not just as the finest film of the three but as the most self-sufficient; the director's tautly restrainted framing, use of space and spare mise-en-scène is particularly well-suited for engaging with a kind of surgical analysis and precision his story's tropes of genre and fairy-tales. We enter the film in the middle of a sullen-eyed and slow-motion class climbing story: our hero is a hospital resident lazily studying to become a doctor; above him is the head doctor's wealthy, blond daughter, placed behind doors, inside cars, within security monitors, always out of reach; and below them both is a young Bosnian girl who cleans rooms at a hotel, is tossed off by a local biker gang and who latches on to the young man as a step up in the world.
The love flaring between the hospital resident and the Bosnian girl is the film's center, as both aspire to the vague pleasantries of an abstract, barely suggested higher plane of livelihood. Around their lives is a fairy-tale forest in which lurks the murderer whose escape and flight from the police is the event shared across Dreileben. Petzold structures his work like a diagram, a proof to be run and proven, a cinematic technique that is as dry as it is potent—each location, each shot change, every chance word spoken, all carries the weight of impactful content on the progression and developmental of this scenario, of this lower-middle class guy plus lower class girl plus indeterminate forest space equals success in life and love for who? So rigid is this form that the mystery that slides between and around all three films becomes powerfully evocative in Beats Being Dead because it's the only uncertainty in Petzold's world. This escaped killer, these walks people must take to get everywhere, this pervasive sense of danger, that one might be knifed at all times—the kind of atmosphere where a class-climber or a lover's (are they the same thing?) wrong word or wrong move can not just ruin one's life but end it. The chilling ending evokes both potentialities, entwined, love and money, dismay and death.
Where Beats Being Dead is a clean proof drawn in ink on graph paper, Dominik Graf's second entry in the series, Don't Follow Me Around is a patchwork, a roving, 16mm camera eye (compared to Petzold's 35mm and Hochhäusler's RED camera) of fuzzy globs of color and a hyper-attentive, almost skittish editing, recalling Alain Resnais' desire to piece together time, space and meaning through fragmented, documentary observation of world details splintered off from conventional understanding. Yet this film is also the most melodramatic, most screenplay-like, focusing on characters (rather than Petzold's machines, Hochhäusler's figures) with paths, emotions, secrets, desires. The heroine is an investigating psychologist who visits the central town to assist in the capture of the escaped madman. Graf holds her in a ramshackle, bohemian house of East German cultural heritage with an old girlfriend of hers and the girlfriend's husband for late night wine-fueled discussions and early morning, coffee and bathrobed pacing, and contrasts this with densely assembled, divergent and opaque "investigation" scenes filled with oblique local incident, culture and characters.
Graf slyly hides one police investigation behind another, and similarly hides several melodramatic reveals behind the reminiscence of the friends, which turns on its head (and on itself) when they find out they shared a lover at the same time in their lives many years ago. All this is shot with a piecemeal approach, finding a great deal of screen tactility to the image and likewise accumulating like a interested tourist the locality's details in passing, almost-mysterious glances, shading the edges of the frame and of the central story with suggestions of stranger things, real histories and a real town, a populace, a great deal of off-screen and suggested texture that Petzold carefully withholds from his film, where you'd hardly know there was a town at all. The film devolves considerably when the investigations fall to the wayside and characters' pasts and secret motivations come to a head, the film calming down considerably, losing that Desplechin-anticness that is able to juggle stories, characters and decor bric-a-brac with near-manic aplomb. But the layering effect Graf is going for, placing locality, character, psychology, spaces, crimes and corruption all on the same cinematic quilt leaves one with a greater complexity than does the resolution of the story.
One Minute of Darkness, Hochhäusler's final entry, gets the short shrift in the set by seemingly being left with settling all the resulting conventional generic tropes scattered on the sidelines of D1 and D2: the psychology and movement of the escaped convict and the psychology and technique of a local investigating detective. The movements of each are dull, but the visual scope of the film is as expanded with D3 as with the others—we plunge headlong into the forest that lined the paths and buildings of Beats Being Dead and hugged Don't Follow Me Around. Details shine, too, in that way that sleek genre films carry with them an evocative glamour in their attention to key, telling elements in a mise-en-scène optimized for honed storytelling. The Yves Klein-like blue mountain-tech monochrome of the convict's stolen windbreaker, for example, creates a constant visual element of electricity in the frames; the sluggish, hunched physique of the detective, looking like a suburban, beleaguered William Friedkin, also has a sliding kind of presence—something to help the images move, one to the next, something that's needed due to the uninteresting nature of both the chase and the investigation.
Nevertheless, this hide-and-seek is apparently necessary, because its movement traces a line around the town and around the trilogy, its generic binding, if you will. The convict's movements through the forest (finding a young girl, as in Frankenstein) and the detective's through the town (scenes with his wife in their home, as well as spending time in the convict's childhood house) thus represent the fairy-tale of mobility and motion in D1 and the residential-domestic aspects of D2. As such, One Minute of Darkness visualizes directly both the sociopathic (and potentially psychopathic) side of the one and the crime-solving psychological clues and manipulation of the other. Thus despite being the least expressive of the three films, Hochhäusler's film seems to pierce through its breathern, and reveal inside them the core generic—and criminal—powers that drive these stories, this town and these films.
The
Agonistic Politics of the Dreileben Project | Marco Abel ... 40-page essay, The
Agonistic Politics of the Dreileben Project, by Marco Abel from The German Studies Review, 2013 (pdf)
Dreileben
- Berlinale Press Notes translated to
English by Christoph Terhechte for the Berlinale, August 15, 2006 (pdf)
Worlds of Possibilities: Christian Petzold, Dominik ... - Cinema Scope Dennis Lim from Cinema Scope, 2011
Subtitledonline.com
[Rob Markham]
Films
Dreileben Part 2: Don't Follow Me (Dreileben—Komm mir nicht ... Eddie Cockrell from The Goethe Institute
Parallax
View [Richard T. Jameson] entire
Trilogy
The
House Next Door [Kenji Fujishima]
entire Trilogy
Dreileben |
Reverse Shot Leo Goldsmith, entire
Trilogy
NYFF
2011. Three Directors, Three Films, One Town and One Crim NYFF
2011. Three Directors, Three Films, One Town and One Criminal: “Dreileben”
by Daniel Kasman reviews the entire Trilogy from Mubi, September 29, 2011
Dreileben Michael
J. Anderson and Lisa K. Broad review the entire Trilogy from Tativille,
September 25, 2011
Moria
- The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib] entire Trilogy
Christopher Bell The
indieWIRE Playlist, entire Trilogy, October 1, 2011
The
House Next Door [Phil Coldiron]
entire Trilogy
More
VIFF vitality, fancy and plain David
Bordwell from Observations on Film Art, October 16, 2011
Vadim Rizov The L Magazine, entire Trilogy,
September 30, 2011
London
Film Festival 2011 Diary Special: Dreileben | Front Row ... Sam Inglis, entire Trilogy
Electric
Sheep Magazine [Pamela Jahn] entire
Trilogy
R Emmet Sweeney
Movie Morlocks, entire Trilogy
NYFF
2011. Petzold, Graf and Hochhäusler's "Dreileben" on ... David Hudson offers the links from Mubi
NYFF
Spotlight Nicholas Kemp from the
Film Society of Lincoln Center, entire Trilogy, September 14, 2011
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Dreileben
| Filmlinc.com | Film Society of Lincoln Center entire Trilogy
Dreileben
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Kevin B Lee Fandor, entire Trilogy
Filmleaf
[Chris Knipp] entire Trilogy
Swiss
Mix: Eclectic Highlights from the 2011 Locarno Film Festival Leo
Goldsmith from Fandor, August 18,
2011
User reviews from imdb Author: JvH48 from Netherlands
Dreileben:
Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter
Neil Young, entire Trilogy
Dreileben
1: Beats Being Dead Review. Movie Reviews ... - Time Out Tom Huddleston, entire Trilogy
Review:
Dreileben - Reviews Peter Keough,
entire Trilogy, from The Boston Phoenix
The
Wire, Dominik Graf and the Berlin School « silent listening July 27, 2010
Dominik Graf bio from Mubi
DREILEBEN
TRILOGY III B+ 91
ONE
MINUTE OF DARKNESS (Dreileben – Eine Minute Dunkel) –
made for TV
Germany (90 mi) 2012 d:
Christoph Hochhäusler
While Christoph Hochhäusler is an established German filmmaker, it may
be his writing about contemporary German cinema as co-editor and publisher of
his film magazine Revolver that has
brought him to international acclaim, as it was here that The Dreileben Trilogy took form, where Hochhäusler publicly
challenged fellow Berlin School filmmakers Christian Petzold and Dominik Graf
to express their thoughts about a lack of genre films as well as the changing
German aesthetic emerging from the mid 90’s that has taken a distinct interest
in German locations while also examining political and/or cultural
ramifications. It’s only fitting then
that Hochhäusler provide the concluding episode (shot in digital) and the
segment that is most genre driven.
Dreileben is a small town in the German countryside engulfed by nature,
where the enormous surrounding woods have a way of culturally isolating the
inhabitants, creating an almost fairy tale and mythic illusion, which are
frequently referenced through the Grimm Brother’s Hansel and Gretel, explored in the initial episode, but also
Wagner’s Ring cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, loosely based on characters from Norse
mythology where giants and dwarves thrive in the darkness of the Thuringia
woods, often finding themselves at odds with one another. It is here the focus has finally shifted from
a peripheral role to the featured attraction, as the concluding episode is
largely seen through the eyes of a mentally disturbed escaped killer, Frank
Molesch, played by Stefan Kurt in a simply extraordinary mix of innocence and
deranged confusion. Molesch seeks refuge
in the forest and spends most of the film roaming aimlessly through the woods,
but Hochhäusler
also retraces how easily he initially escaped from the hospital, as the police
allowed him to visit his dead mother in the Dead Room at the hospital, but only
guarded one of the two exit doors. The concluding episode, like Kieslowski’s
RED (1994) in his Three Color Trilogy,
has the most connecting links to previous episodes, and although each claims to
be an independent, stand alone film, it helps if one is familiar with the
earlier references, as the finale sheds new light on everything that has come
before.
The finale also introduces us to a new character, the chain-smoking
Marcus Kreil (Eberhard Mirchberg), a Columbo-like
seasoned police inspector who is on medical leave, but can’t stay away from
tinkering with the case, as the town is under siege from strange attacks and
unresolved murders, where the audience is treated to gruesome forensic photos
of the deceased. While we get a taste of
his family life, where his overbearing wife berates him for not staying in bed
and his dim, constantly demanding son wants his approval for another
hair-brained business proposition, hoping his dad can interest the police
department into using his exercise equipment that is otherwise sitting dormant
in an empty gym collecting dust. Marcus
is often seen alone scrutinizing the video security tapes of the hospital,
including the evidence used to convict the killer, the last man to see the girl
alive, where the title is based on the tape going blank just prior to a young
girl’s murder, leaving lingering, unanswered questions, where he is hoping to
discover new clues, but he’s also interested in changing the focus of the
investigation, trying to fathom why Molesch would go on a murder spree, trying to understand how he thinks,
where he often visits Molesch’s mother’s vacant home in the middle of the night
hoping to pick up new information, where the constantly wandering Molesch is
also seen hovering nearby. In fact, the
latest police strategy is to form tightly connected search lines combing
through the woods, where Molesch can frequently be seen just out of reach
desperately trying to escape, reminiscent of Peter Lorre’s frantic attempts to
escape the police manhunt in Fritz Lang’s M (1931). When he’s flushed out of the forest, he often
meanders into various pieces of the preceding episode, where despite a
sighting, his detection was appropriately misidentified, a clue to the
filmmaker’s goal of challenging the audience’s expectations.
This finale has a rhapsodic approach when the convict is free to roam
through the countryside, feasting on wild berries, talking to himself, his mind
often wandering to thoughts of his dead mother, where instead of a vicious
monster of the loose, Molesch seems more
like a simpleton, a manchild who has been tossed out into the world, frightened
and alone, where his mood shifts and nervous body language are often
inexplicable. Perhaps the highlight of
the film is a sequence in the woods where Molesch has amusingly stolen
sandwiches from a picnic table of visiting tourists enjoying the hillside view
of the town nestled in the valley below, where he retreats into the woods to
first identify and label the contents of each sandwich before gobbling them
down, when he is unexpectedly interrupted by a young girl (Paraschiva Dragus)
hanging from a tree limb above who is also hungry. She immediately trusts and protects him,
warning him where the police are, quickly escorting him to safety, developing a
tender bond between the two where they sit by an evening fire as he sings a
silly song in a beautifully realized tribute to FRANKENSTEIN (1931). The dual narrative tracks of the finale
center upon exposing the heart of each character, the cautiously circumspective
police inspector and the gentle giant, often maligned monster in the woods,
where at one point the police dragnet forces his retreat into the hidden
confines of a cave, which turns out to be a historical witch’s cauldron, where
he has to hide from another tourist group as they listen to legendary tales of
witch burnings and witches capturing unsuspecting hikers. Still in the cave when the evening fog rolls
in, Molesch can be seen trying to squirm under the enveloping layer quickly
filling the empty spaces, obviously threatened by a fear of the unknown. This all too human quality, ironically from a
monster regarded as a deranged serial killer, described by Hochhäusler as “a
man who became a murderer only because he was hounded,” becomes a major theme of the film, how easily
we jump to the wrong conclusions, as if anything, this Trilogy suggests
humans are continually prone to making mistakes.
User reviews from imdb Author: Sindre Kaspersen from
Norway
The final part of the "Dreileben" trilogy was directed by German
screenwriter and director Christoph Hochäusler who co-wrote the screenplay with
Peer Klehmet. It tells the story about escaped murderer Frank Molech who has
sought refuge in the
This acute psychological thriller draws an intimate portrayal of the murderer
and as in all parts of the trilogy the use of sound is brilliant and reinforces
the pivotal and impending atmosphere. German actors Eberhard Kirchberg and
Stefan Kurt's acting performances is commendable in this engaging study of
character which shifts between the driven investigator and the deeply disturbed
murderer, and so is the directing in the darkest and most plot-driven part of
the Dreileben trilogy, which takes the viewers into the deep forest of Dreileben
and into the mind of the murderer. A fine end to a brilliantly narrated,
directed and nuanced trilogy about a hideous crime and a beautiful and
enigmatic place.
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Anne-Katrin Titze]
Christoph Hochhäusler's Dreileben Part 3: One Minute Of Darkness is the most straight forward police thriller of the Dreileben trilogy.
After watching the first two Dreileben films at the New York Film Festival press screenings, my fellow critics and I were speculating: Will part three focus on the escaped mental patient? Will it shed light on unanswered questions about characters we already know? Will someone named a variation of John (Johannes in 1, Johanna in 2) play a prominent role in the plot? Yes, yes, and yes - although not as one might expect.
A nervous omission by the intern Johannes in the hospital of part 1, gives Frank Molesch (Stefan Kurt), a convicted sex offender, the opportunity to escape. His mother has died, and when he sees an open door in the "Dead Room" of the hospital and a convenient laundry transport, he takes advantage and eventually hides in the famous woods, where tourist groups are out and about to discover Wagner's Thuringia while listening to Rheingold or hiking to the Feuerloch Cave, a witch's cauldron, and a historical center of witch hunting.
The veteran detective Marcus Kreil (Eberhard Kirchberg), is trying to catch Molesch, and becomes more and more obsessed. He cannot even enjoy the family barbecue or respond appropriately when a gym owner suggests to rent out his studio for the police sports club as a favor. He goes to Molesch's dead mother's house to do some research. On a box of old Christmas decoration is written "For When I'm Gone" and inside are the fragments of the troubled man's early life. In the house of the dead woman time stood still, East German nostalgia looms large. While the detective is in the "Witch's house", Molesch, who has more than an initial in common with Fritz Lang's 1931 film M (in which another town was looking for another murderer), is with the deer hunters in the woods. Is there another killer?
Piece by piece the puzzle connects:
Young Molesch was given up by his parents, his foster mother kept a day-by-day book of what he did wrong. Meanwhile, the adult Molesch has encounters with tourists, who, recognising the "monster from TV", behave as if they saw a bear instead of a hungry human being, who is stealing their sandwiches. The next encounter mirrors another film from 1931, James Whale's Frankenstein, as Molesch meets a little runaway child, who sits in a tree and is hungry. He sings a song from an old commercial for cough drops to the child as they sit by a fire in the woods. Fires can regenerate, and with a few more twists, various crimes are more or less solved. A lot can happen in one minute of darkness. Don't forget to look out for another Johanna, and count the women who have fallen victim.
After seeing three films in and around the small town of
The
House Next Door [Phil Coldiron]
entire Trilogy
There's been no worse trend in 21st-century cinema than the emergence of the water-cooler puzzle movie. Defined by the films of Christopher Nolan (ambiguous highbrow entertainments) and Alejandro González Iñárritu (sentimental works of art-house prestige), they exist to carry no meaning of their own, preferring to offer a string of possibilities up to the viewer as a flattery to her ability to figure out a meaningless problem or make meaningless connections. It would be a mistake to call these talking-point machines generous; as much as the franchise film, these are the apotheosis of film as product, as a child's desire for a new toy has been replaced by an adult's to confirm his own intelligence.
Happily, I can report that Dreileben, a triptych film made of parts by Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, and Christoph Hochhausler, takes this fragmented approach and makes something genuinely worth being called Faulknerian with it. The result of a conversation among the three on the state of German cinema, the film sets off from a central event—the escape of a convicted murderer, Molesch (an alternately blank and delirious Stefan Kurt), while visiting the body of his dead foster mother at a nursing home—and tells three tenuously connected stories that in concert present a brutal vision of a world on a wire. Because each happens to run a feature-length 90 minutes, the three sections of Dreileben are being shown individually elsewhere, a regrettable decision given how thoroughly dependent on the direct mingling of divergent aesthetics and contradictory narrative facts the cumulative wallop of the film is.
Unlike the dire Red Riding Trilogy, Dreileben occurs in vertical rather than horizontal time, with each of the three sections complicating any sense of temporal certainty in the others. This conflicted time is just one facet of the struggle for a coherent narrative that lies at the heart of the project, a fact that manifests itself on every conceivable level across the film's nearly five hours. Graf's section, Don't Follow Me Around, embodies this conflict most distinctly on the level of narrative: What begins as a procedural modulates into a chamber piece centered on the drama caused by the revelation of a mutual lover shared by two old friends. Graf builds the film out of cluttered, illogical compositions (his favorite being a fractured image that splits two people in close contact into completely separate spaces) and unmotivated camera moves that give the impression of an organizing intelligence situated forever beyond our recognition.
Petzold too concerns himself with issues of perspective, beginning his section, Beats Being Dead, as a series of touches and annoyances that's one of the most accurate portraits of young love in recent memory before breaking it up with the intrusion of a gratingly suspenseful score and a number of menacing point-of-view shots whose view is never directly revealed (Petzold disappointingly gives away the game on this rather early by confirming the presence of a looker). The whole of Beats Being Dead gives the impression of being a smart trifle occurring on the fringes of a more urgent story, though its focus on the class conflict between social climbing med student Johannes (Jacob Matschenz) and his immigrant-maid girlfriend Ana (Luna Mijovic, like a young Hanna Schygulla with her pouty, knowing face) eventually falls near the heart of the film.
The final section, Hochhausler's One Minute of Darkness, focuses directly on the motivating story, following the killer on the lam in something like a less allegorical Essential Killing and the mental decline of the police chief tasked with finding him and haunted by the original murder, caught on surveillance cameras at all but the crucial minute. With its copious use of fantastic elements, tossed-off handling of narrative details (one major point of the plot is, as far as I can tell, beyond all comprehension, though it does serve to reinforce a thematic point), and eventual arrival at Dreileben's political core, One Minute of Darkness is both the film's outlier and the most crucial to an understanding of its philosophical project. Molesch, having spent 80 minutes running from waves of police through the German woods, eventually arrives at his foster mother's home where, in the midst of a literal hell, he burns documents relating to his past, chief among them a newspaper relating his biological father's persecution as a labor organizer. Confronted with one history, he responds violently toward his situation, leading to a replay of the scene that closed Beats Being Dead (though one that's shot as if from a slightly incorrect memory), which folds in all of the issues of class and repression that have circled the story into a single instant.
Though its ending offers a number of possible interpretations, this inability to pin down a single meaning is both an organic part of the project, and more importantly, each reading proves of real political and social insight (as opposed to the no-stakes games of Inception or Babel). Dreileben makes distinct and deeply meaningful use of film and digital: Beats Being Dead and One Minute of Darkness were shot HD, the former in crisp images that lay the situation bare, the latter in rich, stylized green browns and shadows that mirror the film's increasing skepticism of a comprehensible situation, while Don't Follow Me Around's soft, grainy 16mm is appropriate to its shifty, nostalgic story; all three are presented digitally. And with the emphasis on a very cinephilic sense of image recall, it's useful to look at Dreileben as the festival's thesis film. Here's hoping that there are even a handful that can match it.
Worlds
of Possibilities: Christian Petzold, Dominik ... - Cinema Scope Dennis Lim, entire Trilogy, September 2011
After a decade-long procession of HBO critical darlings, in the wake of Olivier Assayas’ Carlos and now Todd Haynes’ Mildred Pierce, received wisdom holds that television—or more precisely, its funding structures and serial configurations—represents our best hope for narrative filmmaking. Such pronouncements tend to assert the benefits of duration and scope, the breathing room, and the level of detail that bigger canvases allow. But the greatness of the three-part, three-director Dreileben is not, or not simply, a matter of scale.
Like the Red Riding Trilogy (2009), Dreileben consists of three self-contained but interlinked films, each by a different filmmaker (Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, Christoph Hochhäusler), all dealing with related crimes in the same location. But while the Red Riding films span a decade, Dreileben circles around a single time and place, locating different entry points (which turn out really to be points of departure) and refracting the nominally central incident through different perspectives (which often means marginalizing it). Each installment tells what the filmmakers call a “horizontal” story—impelled by the forward motion of a romance, an investigation, a manhunt—but the point of Dreileben is to stack them on a vertical axis. While Red Riding enforces a unity of mood, each Dreileben film, despite existing within the same clearly delineated physical world, suggests a subtly different universe from the others. Which comes as no surprise given how it originated: not through omnibus-film gimmickry or convenience but in the course of an actual exchange of ideas.
The starting point was an e-mail correspondence among the three filmmakers, published in Revolver magazine in 2007, on the state of German cinema that revealed mutual concerns and sharp disagreements. Graf was born in 1952, Petzold in 1960, Hochhäusler in 1972, and each has a distinct relationship to the now decade-old “new German cinema” that has come to be imprecisely known as the Berlin School. Graf, a respected senior figure and a stalwart of German television, predates the Berlin School’s emergence, and has criticized what he sees as the reticence and passivity of many of the films. Petzold is often identified as one of the movement’s de facto founders, part of the pioneering wave that studied at the dffb in the ’80s and ’90s. Hochhäusler belongs (with Benjamin Heisenberg and Ulrich Köhler) to the Revolver-aligned second generation, whose careers have progressed and diverged in ways that reflect the constant sense of flux, born of habitual self-examination, that defines this loose group.
It is perhaps to be expected, given all the former and part-time critics and academics in its midst, that the evolution of the Berlin School—and it has evolved, in more tangible and interesting ways than most so-called movements—rests on an interplay between theory and practice, a compulsion among its affiliates both to discuss and to demonstrate what it means to make films in and about Germany today. If the Berlin School’s house style—cool, precise, observational—was positioned as a reaction to mainstream storytelling conventions, the recent move toward genre experimentation, with an embrace of more robust narratives and more expansive emotions, seems partly a reaction to the marginalization of the early films. (Dreileben begs to be seen in the light not just of the Revolver correspondence, which weighs the possibilities and traps of genre cinema vs. auteur cinema, but also of Heisenberg’s The Robber and Thomas Arslan’s In the Shadows, two exemplary genre reworking and high points of last year’s Berlinale.)
One of Graf’s main charges is that the minimalism of the Berlin School, “instead of expanding narrative possibilities,” represents “a narrowing of gaze.” Expansion is inherent to the structure of Dreileben, which fans out from the tabloidish scenario of a convicted killer and sex offender who escapes while paying his last respects to his mother in a hospital. Petzold deals with the victim-to-be, Graf with one of the investigators, and Hochhäusler with the killer himself. As genre narratives, each comes freighted with expectations, as does the setting. While many Berlin School movies have taken place in the border zones and liminal spaces of contemporary Germany, Dreileben unfolds in Thuringia, the mythic, heavily forested region known as the nation’s “green heart.” (The verdant, imposing landscapes come across most vividly in Petzold’s film; folklore is most directly referenced in Hochhäusler’s, which invokes witch hunts, haunted caves, and the legend of the slumbering emperor Barbarossa.)
Petzold’s Beats Being Dead is as taut as it is volatile, a fever-dream compound of romantic tragedy and slasher noir that focuses on two young people who cross paths with the killer: Johannes (Jacob Matschenz), a pre-med student working as a nurse to fulfill his national-service obligations, and Ana (Luna Mijovic), a chambermaid and Bosnian emigré. As in Jerichow (2008) and Yella (2007), Petzold inscribes cold, hard truths of class and money into almost every scene, fusing erotic tensions with socioeconomic ones—a flirtatious moment sours with a suspicion of stolen cash; the climactic betrayal happens at a country-club shindig. The film is yet another of Petzold’s ghost stories set among the living dead, but if that has often meant a measured detachment, the mood here is deeply mysterious, at once playful and irrational.
Beats Being Dead has the flavour of myth and the power of a trance. Petzold underscores his fairy-tale inspiration—Undine, the tale of the water nymph who yearns to join the human race—by having Ana and Johannes begin their love story by a lake, in the nude. There is a comic edge, a kind of screwball syncopation, to their push-pull courtship—one of them is forever walking away, chasing after the other, or apologizing. Music is crucial to the film’s tone of ominous romanticism. In contrast to the minimal, ambient scores of Petzold’s previous films, he envelops the action here in a Bernard Herrmann-esque cocoon (a leitmotif-heavy swoon by Stefan Will), and makes inspired use of Julie London’s “Cry Me a River” as the siren song that casts the spell—and, in the enigmatic, pitch-perfect final scene, breaks it.
Graf’s contribution builds directly on his Revolver remarks, where he complained of the Berlin School’s “distrust of communication, of language.” Don’t Follow Me Around is a screenwriter’s movie, in the best sense: talky and witty, packed with revealing tangents and glancing micro-observations. Shot by Michael Wiesweg in soft-toned Super 16—a striking contrast to the crisp, controlled visuals of the other two entries—Graf’s film makes a virtue of skittishness. The distractable camera snoops, wanders, lingers on odd details, and the narrative likewise keeps shifting its attention.
The protagonist, Jo (Jeanette Hain), is a police psychologist, called in to investigate the escaped killer. But the real point of her trip is an internal affairs investigation into local corruption. The core of the story, in any case, turns out to be Jo’s reunion with Vera (Susanne Wolff), the old friend she stays with—and an unexpected conduit to an ex-flame. Both women find out that years ago in Munich they were in love with the same man at the same time, unaware of each other’s existence. Jo and Vera’s relationship—which gets more complicated as the women compare notes while withholding information—reinforces Dreileben’s larger context: a world of imperfect knowledge.
In A Minute of Darkness, Hochhäusler turns back to the primary narrative, which he propels to a genre payoff and imbues with philosophical richness. A brooding dual character study, it follows the killer (Stefan Kurt) in his interlude of freedom (overwhelmed by the natural world, rendered with tactile immediacy by Reinhold Vorschneider) and the grizzled policeman (Eberhard Kirchberg) who revisits the original case, haunted by the missing minute in the surveillance footage of the crime. Hochhäusler has said that the early inspiration was Petzold’s misremembered summary of Schiller’s novel The Dishonorable Reclaimed, which he had inaccurately described as the story of “a man who became a murderer only because he was hounded,” but the premise also recalls Hochhäusler’s own Low Profile (2005).
The taunting lacuna at the centre of A Minute of Darkness, the most self-reflexive aspect of Dreileben, speaks to the impossibility of certainty in the absence of observable evidence, the danger of imposing stories onto what we cannot know for sure. This conundrum is, of course, intimately linked to the de-dramatized cinema of the Berlin School: the fear of narrative as, to quote Hochhäusler, something that “contaminates the picture,” a lie, and what’s more, a lie that could become the truth.
Coming at a single starting point from multiple angles, Dreileben takes what might be called a cubist approach to storytelling, reinforcing a basic fact of human coexistence, that shared experiences reverberate in different ways. But as an epistemological exercise, which such Rashomonic endeavours tend to be, it has an obvious advantage over, say, Lucas Belvaux’s La Trilogie (2002)—with three filmmakers working in concert but also autonomously, subjectivity is built into the project. In toto, the Dreileben films offer many of the pleasures of the puzzle movie: stories intersect and characters move between foreground and background; ellipses are filled in and questions answered, one segment providing a (sometimes literal) reverse angle on another. These are satisfactions that tapestry movies, with their criss-crossing plots and chance encounters, supposedly provide. But Dreileben avoids the sins of Babel (2006) and its like: the smug omniscience, the thesis-driven diagramming, the dutiful slog of connecting the dots and filling in the blanks. Instead, each installment enriches and complicates the others. These stories do not add up so much as tunnel outward. To put it another way, Dreileben represents a termite solution to a white-elephant problem. Taken together, the movies attest to the limits of knowledge and the potential of imaginative empathy. The self-contained modesty of each film belies the immensity of the project: Dreileben conjures not just three lives but worlds of possibilities.
The
Agonistic Politics of the Dreileben Project | Marco Abel ... 40-page essay, The
Agonistic Politics of the Dreileben Project, by Marco Abel from The German Studies Review, 2013 (pdf)
Dreileben
- Berlinale Press Notes translated to
English by Christoph Terhechte for the Berlinale, August 15, 2006 (pdf)
Worlds of Possibilities: Christian Petzold, Dominik ... - Cinema Scope Dennis Lim from Cinema Scope, 2011
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Tender Speaking: An Interview with Christoph Hochhäusler | Senses ... Marco Abel interview from Senses of Cinema, February 2007
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BARBARA B 88
Germany (105 mi) 2012 Official site [Germany]
No other movie about East
Germany in the past 20 years (including the Oscar-winning “The Lives of
Others”) has touched me, a former East German, as much as this one. It vividly
brought back memories and emotions I had long forgotten. Everything is just so
in this film, nothing exaggerated or glorified. In a convincing unhurried way,
Mr Petzold has caught the spirit and atmosphere of the time. Each gesture, each
tableau, from the hospital equipment and apartment furnishings to the smallest
accessory, such as a folkloristic Bulgarian ashtray (something no East German
household could be without) is rendered just right. Spiritually, too, the film
airs the values that many East Germans feel
have got lost in the more opulent, materialist world of a unified Germany. It
is a fine homage to ordinary people living in extraordinary times.
—excerpt from The
Economist, May 10, 2012, New
film: "Barbara": Ordinary people at extraordinary times
Winner of the Silver Bear award for Best Director at Berlin
2012, Petzold has created perhaps his most conventional film, though initially
resorting to the most uncompromising means, turning vaguely compromising only
at the end, which feels somewhat disappointing.
Within this über
repressive East German society on the edge of the Baltic Sea in 1980, the film
stays completely under the surface for nearly the entire film, where feelings
are a liability that can only get you into trouble, where everyone is under
suspicion, often visited and scrutinized by the Stasi secret police, which
means apartments searched and citizens subject to a thoroughly humiliating body
cavity inspection, so the entire society exists as a kind of ghost world. As seen through the eyes of a single
character who is in nearly every frame of the film, Nina Hoss as the title
character plays a disgraced citizen recently released from interrogation, where
her crime was apparently requesting an exit visa, exiled to a small rural
village where a somewhat dilapidated apartment has been assigned to her, also a
job working as a physician at a local hospital, where everyone has been prepped
by the Stasi for her arrival, particularly her boss André (Ronald Zehrfeld), the lead physician. Barbara plays her role with such a subdued
nature, her eyes downturned, never showing any sign of interest, completely
guarded as if every living soul is spying on her. Every neighbor and coworker has ulterior motives,
as is every car parked outside, or every ring of the doorbell becomes a
continuing sign of oppression, as it’s never a welcome visitor. In terms of a character study, it’s
reminiscent of Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Elena
(2011), the subjugation of an older woman living in
This is another
minimalist film told with a certain rhythm and precision, with little information
obtained through dialogue, as all normal channels of communication are blocked,
buried beneath the surface, so instead it’s a film about body language, brief
glances, furtive looks, inquisitive eyes, or stares, where Barbara is
continually viewed as someone that has something to hide. By following her routines even as no one is
watching her, she does seem to have a secret life, riding her bike much of the
time, often veering into the deep of the woods, obviously trying to avoid
detection. Often she is punished by the
police simply for avoiding their watchful eyes when they cannot account for her
actions. While it feels like she is
literally being run into the ground by incessant hounding, she never seems to
have a moment of peace. But in this
society, that’s ordinary and what’s to be expected. What’s unusual is for someone to care as much
as Barbara does about the idea of freedom, where she’s already tasted it, lived
it apparently, as she’s cultured and refined, one of the few doctors that
actually listens to her patients, and away from the microscopic lens of the
Stasi, she actually exhibits kindness to her patients, reading regularly to one
of her young female adolescents, a story about riding down the Mississippi
River on a raft from Huckleberry Finn,
enjoying the air of being free, out from under the reach of an abusive father
that cages and beats his own son. The
symbolism for freedom is not lost on the audience. While the picture of life behind the Iron
Curtain is one of mental captivity, where the State is always trying to capture
and possess what’s in your mind, citizens find ways to elude the police, to
tell them little or nothing, which is another way of not telling them anything
at all. While Barbara doesn’t exactly
fit in, where all around her, everyone views her as a political subversive, André is continually supportive and helpful,
attempting to make her life a little less miserable, which only makes her more
suspicious of his motives.
Petzold exudes
formal restraint, exercising a Kieslowski Eastern European style cinema of
moral anxiety, never allowing emotions to rise to the surface, showing a bleak
world where life isn’t lived so much as barely tolerated, where nobody likes
living under a police state, but most get used to the inevitability that people
close to them are informers, as the Stasi claimed nearly a quarter of a million
informers, most all of them ordinary citizens.
When Barbara ventures outdoors on her bike, it’s a sunless world draped
in layers of grey, where the wind is always howling and it feels like storms
are continually approaching. Nature
itself feels untamed and hostile as humans attempt to navigate their way
through the dark. Few clues are offered
here, as it’s a barebones story with little to go on, where much of it is
following the doctors as they make their rounds through the hospital, yet
throughout, one feels like Barbara is resisting this everpresent weight on her
back simply by not joining in, by adamantly refusing to go along with this
repressive regime. In a moment when she
lets her guard down, she admits, “It's impossible to be happy
here.” Unlike THE LIVES OF OTHERS
(2006), winner of the Best Foreign Language Film that told a similar story from
the point of view of a conflicted Stasi officer, this reveals the everyday
rhythms of the same subjugated society through the life of an ordinary
citizen. While the film gets many of the
details right and dramatically reflects a downbeat and subservient society, it
doesn’t expose the behind-the-scenes operations of the Stasi that THE LIVES OF
OTHERS reveals or the profoundly effective interrogation techniques used to
browbeat information out of people.
Instead BARBARA creates an atmospheric recreation of a toxic cloud hanging
over
'Barbara' review by Mike D'Angelo • Letterboxd
Period signifiers are so subtle that it took a while before I realized the Wall was still intact. (I'm sure it'd be obvious to Germans, and probably also to anyone who pays more attention to cars and clothes than I do.) Consequently, pleasurable befuddlement reigned, and I felt a bit betrayed when the story's fundamentally conventional shape emerged. Hoss is terrific as usual, but watching her gradually thaw wasn't what I had in mind; supporting characters who'd seemed mysterious and/or random, likewise, turn out to have very clear narrative functions. Just a conversion tale, really. Exquisitely made, though.
Day 2 at TIFF brings the calculated scandal of Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, a 3D animated Monty Python, and more love for The Master Scott Tobias at Toronto from The Onion A.V. Club
Scott’s Take: A few years ago, German director Christian Petzold knocked me out with Jerichow, an original and distinctive reworking of the oft-adapted James M. Cain novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. Petzold’s new film Barbara affirms his talent for evoking an aura of suspicion and tension that’s subtly unnerving without overly asserting itself. For non-Germans, it helps enormously to read the synopsis, because Petzold doesn’t provide any orienting signposts: Barbara takes place in rural East Germany in the early ‘80s, and stars the extraordinary Nina Hoss as a Berlin doctor who’s been banished to a rural hospital as punishment for requesting an exit visa. It’s an open secret among the country folk that Hoss is a possible subversive, and she doesn’t do much to try to fit into her new surroundings—her “otherness” only begins to dissipate when she warms to the hospital’s chief physician (Ronald Zehrfeld), who she nonetheless can’t completely trust. The hostility directed toward Hoss is made subtly apparent: A few not-so-friendly visits to her assigned apartment, a flat tire on her bicycle after she returns from a tryst in the woods. But Petzold is careful to make those threats just a part of life in East Germany, more insinuating than explicit. And he has the perfect actress in Hoss, a Verhoeven blonde who walls herself under an icy, withering stare but lets down her guard enough to where we recognize how carefully practiced (and necessary) her act is for survival. Grade: B
Michael Sicinski Cinema Scope, October 2012
One of several films from this year’s Berlinale that were far more deserving of the Golden Bear than the actual winner, Barbara finds the normally austere Petzold shifting toward a more conventional, humanistically inclined art cinema. His work certainly doesn’t suffer for this broadened accessibility, and it’s guaranteed to win new converts to his cause. But whereas Petzold’s recent films such as Yella (2007) and especially Jerichow (2008) examined the lingering impact of the GDR through the lens of post-communism’s displaced nomads, Barbara is a period piece, situating his benighted characters within the terror and malaise of the East German 1980s. Dr. Barbara Wolff (Nina Hoss) has been sent from Berlin to the countryside for unspecified transgressions against the state. At her new post, she reports to Dr. Reiner (Ronald Zehrfeld), a young and talented doctor who, we learn, informs to the Stasi to keep his own mistakes from catching up with him. Barbara and her West Berliner lover (Mark Waschke) have a plan to sneak her into the West, but things get complicated. She was intent on merely marking time and passing through, but between having her apartment tossed and periodic body cavity searches, she finds herself getting personally invested in the young patients who, like her, are victims of the GDR’s neo-Stalinist tyranny. Petzold invests Barbara with a warmer, more classical look than usual; he has quite deliberately sanded down the more jagged edges of his directorial style. Nevertheless, Barbara retains the filmmaker’s clear-eyed materialism. Power and violence saturate everyday life to such an extent that they become a leaden weight in the body’s cells, an added gravity or a barely visible dust that impedes movement ever so slightly. Compare this to the sensationalism of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (2007) or the bromides of The Lives of Others (2006), and Petzold’s accomplishment shines all that much more brightly.
Most compelling in Barbara, Christian Petzold's latest, is the way the filmmaker adeptly conducts his tides of Cold War paranoia. Set in East Germany in 1980, and as such making it Petzold's first period piece, Barbara apprehends the East/West postwar schism with equal measures of grace and chest-tightening claustrophobia. Beginning with the titular East Berlin doctor (Petzold regular Nina Hoss—stern, self-possessed, and delicate all at the same time) banished to the provinces for seeking an exit visa, the film creates a thick feeling of Soviet unrest as an abiding threat that both is and isn't there: a constant.
Reassigned to a rural hospital, Barbara's big-city smugness earns her little but the ire of her co-workers, who come to use "Berlin" as shorthand for her haughtiness. It's as much a matter of willful pride and self-defense, stemming from her proactive belief that everyone at the hospital is closely observing her, reporting back to the ever-watchful local Stasi officer (Rainer Bock), who seems to relish in springing searches of Barbara's apartment (and person) with cruel, impulsive irregularity. Barbara's attitude, especially toward her gentle, teddy-bearish coworker, Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld), seems justified. After all, as they say, you're not paranoid if everyone's out to get you.
The initial distance, the aura of suspicion and urbane chilliness, which Petzold develops around his lead feels alienating at first, if totally by design. Petzold's comparably reserved style keeps things at arm's length, as she scowls at her colleagues and slinks away to rendezvous with her West German paramour, Jörg (Mark Waschke), who makes pillow-talk about hatching her out of the bucolic penal colony. Things warm considerably when Barbara begins caring for Stella (Jasna Fritzi Bauer), a pregnant teenage runaway sick with meningitis.
Petzold slow-plays Barbara's shifts in attitude and allegiances, effecting her careful warming toward Andre's affections, and divestment in her young patient more manically distressed by the realities of the East German Stasi state, with great deliberateness. That stifling chuff of claustrophobia hanging over the film's first few reels isn't so much lifted as fleetingly dispelled. At times the fissures in Barbara's (and the film's) glacial façade feel a bit too methodical and unhurried, though it all lines up elegantly as Petzold carefully works toward a wrenching climax that satisfyingly delivers on his lead's reticent private turmoil.
Barbara's measured quality makes it seem plodding at times, nudged along as it by its sleepily low-key atmospherics, drab backdrop, and succession of medium shots. The sag is offset considerably by the rich sense of detail, from the rickety period bicycles to the credibility of Hoss's furtive, over-the-shoulder glances. The film's authenticity may be attributable as much to Petzold's steady directorial hand as his background: The director's family fled the German Democratic Republic, giving him a connection to (and felt respect for) the material that marks him as something other than just a prying West German sneaking a peek over the wall.
New film: "Barbara": Ordinary people at extraordinary times The Economist, May 10, 2012
IN A small Baltic coastal town in 1980s East Germany,
conversation is minimal: the sea is the backdrop that seethes with
emotion and colour. Barbara, a young paediatrician who used to work in East
Berlin's prestigious Charité hospital, was transferred here as a punishment for
applying for a visa to emigrate to the West. Her friends have disowned her. The
film starts just as her new provincial life begins.
Although this is fiction, the director, Christian Petzold, based it on the
experience of an East German doctor he learned of some years ago. The film won
him the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival this February.
Barbara is a reticent, cautious woman, brilliantly played by Nina Hoss, one of
Germany's best stage and film actresses. She knows she is under permanent
surveillance by the Stasi, East Germany's secret police. With amazing
self-control she puts up with the repeated intrusions of Stasi officers and
their humiliating strip-searches. It is clear that she has emotionally
distanced herself from her country; her only aim is to leave it. “It's
impossible to be happy here,” she tells her West German lover Jörg during one
of their hurried clandestine meetings on his business trips to the German
Democratic Republic. He is preparing her escape. She is wary not to raise
suspicion.
She keeps herself aloof from André, the boss of the clinic, afraid he may be an
informer to the Stasi too. However, she can't avoid working with him—she can't
quite distance herself from her profession. She likes the work as much as he
does. Little by little she becomes captivated by André's unassuming manner, his
selfless and tireless help for his patients regardless their social background
(including a young girl who has escaped from a youth prison). East German
provincial hospitals in the early 1980s required a great deal of improvisation,
given the regular shortages of supplies. Eventually André's calm, serene voice
and brown eyes get under her skin (Ronald Zehrfeld is pretty irresistible to
the female film-goer).
Very gently the film shows Barbara's developing affection for this man. When
her lover assures her that she won't have to work in the West, since he owns
enough for two, she finds herself second-guessing her desires. Will life on the
other side of the Iron Curtain really bring the freedom she was hoping for?
This is where the film puts its finger on the paradox of the two Germanys, and
the huge differences that came to light with the act of unification.
No other movie about East Germany in the past 20 years (including the
Oscar-winning “The Lives of Others”) has touched me, a former East German, as
much as this one. It vividly brought back memories and emotions I had long
forgotten. Everything is just so in this film, nothing exaggerated or
glorified. In a convincing unhurried way, Mr Petzold has caught the spirit and
atmosphere of the time. Each gesture, each tableau, from the hospital equipment
and apartment furnishings to the smallest accessory, such as a folkloristic
Bulgarian ashtray (something no East German household could be without) is
rendered just right. Spiritually, too, the film airs the values that many East Germans
feel have got lost in the more opulent, materialist world of a unified Germany.
It is a fine homage to ordinary people living in extraordinary times.
Review: Barbara - Film Comment Phillip Lopate, December 19, 2012
The pleasures of this coolly controlled, tensely watchable, subtle psychological thriller are many, starting with the perfect sensibility match between director Christian Petzold (Jerichow) and his perennial leading actress, Nina Hoss. There is no getting around the fact that Hoss is amazing, brilliant, dominant in the title role. As Barbara, a physician exiled to an East German provincial town as punishment for having applied for an exit visa from the GDR (the film is set in 1980, almost a decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall), Hoss exudes such fierce wariness and disdain for her colleagues, whom she realistically suspects may be spying on her for the Stasi, that the film’s suspense lies less in whether she’ll be able to smuggle herself out of this country she detests than whether she will exhibit any humanity, any crack in her icy demeanor. She does eventually, revealing a warmer, more vulnerable femininity beneath the chiseled façade of embitterment, but in such precisely calibrated ways that each time it comes as a shock.
For all that the film bills itself as a character study (and a star vehicle), it is at least as much about the dynamics of a whole society under police surveillance. Where everyone is expected to snitch on neighbors, relatives, and colleagues for the good of utopian, if by now worn-out, socialist ideals, it becomes harder to despise individual informants. Unlike, say, the heavy-handed way The Lives of Others makes villains of its police agents, here we see that the characters have little choice but to inform: everyone has his reasons, legitimate reasons, beyond cowardice even, to cooperate with the state.
The adamant Barbara, who will never snitch, is drawn reluctantly to her male colleague at the hospital. Andre, a shaggy, amiable doctor superbly played by Ronald Zehrfeld, has secretly been instructed to report on her. Andre’s motor seems to be running at half the speed of the tightly wound Barbara, and that disparity makes for unusual potential partnering. In one of the film’s strongest scenes, Andre confesses to Barbara the reason why he has been exiled to this backwater. He tells his heartfelt tale and she receives it in total silence, with pure mistrust, forcing him to comment like an acting student after a failed audition: “What’s the matter, did I tell it too smoothly?” You realize suddenly that in this vigilance-driven society, everyone is forced to be an actor, to wear a false mask.
The film zigzags physically between tight, claustrophobic scenes at the hospital and relatively more expansive ones following Barbara on a bicycle into the picturesque countryside, where she tries to find some privacy while putting in place the means for an escape attempt with the aid of her West German boyfriend. She is always looking over her shoulder, afraid of being watched, and with good reason, it turns out. Meanwhile, her medical professionalism is aroused by the needs of her patients. Petzold and his cinematographer, Hans Fromm, have framed each shot with consummate intelligence and restraint, capturing both the austerity and the decorousness of this human-scaled environment. We are always made aware, compositionally, of the emotional constraints on the characters, and in the final act, of the temporal limits as well. Time is running out for Barbara. But is the conclusion too neat, too predictable, as a film critic friend of mine complained? Maybe so. On the other hand, there is a thin line between the predictable and the inevitable, and a film that does so many things right is entitled, I believe, to conclude in the manner of its own choosing.
Interview: Nina Hoss - Film Comment R. Emmett Sweeney interview, December 21, 2012
Barbara is one of the finest suspense thrillers of the year, and most of its tension is expressed in the impassive face of actress Nina Hoss who plays the title character. A doctor at a rural hospital in East Germany planning an escape while under the vigilant eye of the Stasi, Barbara now lives a life characterized by watchfulness and fear, and she hides her inner turmoil behind a mask of affected indifference. Hoss’s layered performance shows the effort involved in maintaining this façade, and the terrifying freedom of revealing one's feelings. FILM COMMENT spoke with Hoss in New York about how she prepared for the role, the backstory she invented, and how those who had lived in the GDR reacted to the film.
One of the most striking things about the movie is the extent
of detail, from your performance down to the set design and sound effects.
Could you talk about the research you did to get into the role?
It was a role where I
knew there would be no possibility of talking much, to explain her. I would
have to do a different kind of work, to make it interesting, her being silent,
but always being present. I had to create a backstory. It was very crucial for
this part, that I knew why she tries to hide her true self. I thought she was
[originally] a very lively, positive person. I had a backstory as to why she
got in trouble with the state. She was forced to build up this defensive wall:
“You can’t get to me, you won’t hurt me, not on the outside and not on the
inside. I am not vulnerable.” But that is not the truth. Someone cannot [truly]
be like that, but you can work on it. I wanted to show her work on that—train
[herself] to be strong, although she might not be. Like when she’s at home and
it gets to her when this woman [from the Stasi] is constantly there with her
rubber gloves. But you can’t really show it with this guy [the Stasi
interrogator] sitting there. You can only give a hint of what this woman is
going through: “He’s looking at me, and I won’t give him the victory of showing
weakness.” And that is exhausting. It must have been exhausting for people like
Barbara.
I researched a lot by
reading books about that time—Christa Wolf and Stefan Heym, all these authors
from the GDR—in order to get to know this atmosphere and how people coped with
it. I never experienced it, because I’m from the West. I talked with people a
lot. What was it like, this feeling that you can’t talk freely? You had to go
into the forest to talk, because sometimes it was your husband who spied on
you. The subtleness of that threat was even more horrible than the obvious one,
where you’re already in the grip of the state, interrogations and prisons. That
is another horror. But what infected the society was everywhere, and you didn’t
see it. And that’s what they all described. As well as all the beauty, and
that’s what we wanted to portray, the area in all its vibrant colors. Not gray.
It must be hard to leave that country. It’s hard for Barbara to make this
decision. Every home, as horrible as it can be, still has something. It makes
you, and you’re attached to it, and it’s hard to leave.
What was the backstory you created for Barbara?
She must have gone along
with the system for quite a while, because otherwise you wouldn’t be allowed to
study medicine. She must have gone through all these institutions, all those
youth groups doing parades and so on. You have to be part of that. There must
have been a point, and I thought in school, where she met a very good friend
who was a Protestant pastor. This friend had a tough time in the GDR, because
you weren’t meant to pursue your religion under Communism. So this girl, this
friend of hers, got in trouble in the classroom, and Barbara didn’t stand up
for her. She pretended not to be her friend. Which is something you can
understand, as Barbara could get in trouble as well. But being the person that
she is, she felt guilty through the years of her studies. It stuck with her. A
deep wound, I thought.
Then at work, again
something happened, where she could either keep quiet, or actually say something.
And she speaks. The guilt, that wound is healed, although under a very thin
layer of skin. So that’s not what she is dealing with anymore. Now she’s
dealing with being in conflict with the state. Saying something against it, she
really felt what they are like, in the claw of that system. We thought she was
in prison, as well, and that happened by just saying you wanted to leave. They
would put you in prison for a few days to intimidate you. And then having this
punishment of not being allowed to work in the Charité, the biggest hospital in
Berlin. It’s clear she needs to leave, she can’t make any compromises anymore.
She closes down, and doesn’t want anything to do with this country anymore.
But through her job [at
the rural hospital], the only moment where she can’t keep that wall up is when
she meets the patient, Stella. And this is where she meets André [the head
doctor, played by Ronald Zehrfeld]. He always gets to her in moments when she’s
actually feeling something. She teases him, trying to find out if he is a spy.
“Who is this guy? Why is he interested in me? He should leave me alone.” And he
can withstand this. He always finds the right thing to say. No matter what she
says, he has an answer.
I understand that the director Christian Petzold screens a lot
of movies before production begins. What titles did you watch and did any
influence your performance?
He always does that, and
I love it. We talk so much about filmmaking, and the perspective used. The
standpoint of the camera tells a lot. Christian and Hans Fromm [the DP],
thought that because the film is about the state observing the people, the
camera should not be at an observing angle. The camera should be a friend of
Barbara. When she’s on her own in the bathroom, I never have the feeling that
the way we look at her is threatening. The audience is never in the voyeuristic
position. That was very important for me to know. We talk about that by
watching movies. We watched The French Connection, for example, where
you never see the shooter. It’s about perspective. That tells a story in
itself. Then we watched Howard Hawks’s To Have and Have Not: that is
about a flirtation that is going on. [Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall] are
quite harsh to each other, and very clever. And because they can handle each
other, they are attracted to each other. The other person won’t crumble. We
watched that also just to watch a great movie [laughs].
I read that you watched Rossellini’s Stromboli as well.
Yes, we also watched it
for Yella [07]. It’s about being foreign, her being on that island.
There’s always a struggle. I always have the feeling that the characters
Christian creates are similar in that sense. Either they were thrown out of
society, or something happened like in Wolfsburg [03] where a kid died
and you’re thrown out of it. It’s always about, in a sense, how to get back in,
to find their position. And how much do you have to give up of yourself to be a
part of something? And don’t you need to be part of something to be a fulfilled
person?
Were you able to watch Barbara with people who lived
through that period?
Yes, it was exciting and
quite nerve-wracking, especially for Christian and me, coming from the West.
The three of us—Ronald, Christian and me—did a cinema tour throughout Germany.
Leipzig was the first city in the East, and we were nervous. I didn’t know if
they would tear us apart. It turned out to be the opposite, which made me
really happy. I had this one incident, a woman came up to me afterward and
said, “Thank you so much, for the first time I really felt this atmosphere
again, it reminded me of my childhood, and that happiness. I felt happy. It was
so green, and people had time, and God, people were sitting smoking in the
hospital!” A minute later, a guy comes up to me and says, “Thank you so much
for the movie because it just shows the way it was, and it was shit.” Whatever
your experience was with that state, that’s what you’ll find. And I was really
happy about that. Because it means we treated it with a lot of respect.
Film
of the week: Barbara | BFI Catherine
Wheatley from Sight and Sound, September
28, 2012, also seen here: Sight &
Sound: Catherine Wheatley
Barbara - Reviews - Reverse Shot Clean Slate, by Andrey Tracy, December 20, 2012
Christian
Petzold: The State He Is In – Keyframe - Explore the world ... Dennis Harvey from Fandor, September 26, 2012
Kevin B. Lee Deceptive Surfaces and the Films of Christian Petzold, Kevin B. Lee video essay from Fandor, May 8, 2012
Yella/ Barbara - Touching Cinema Minna Yliruikka, July 2015
“WINNING A (HI)STORY OUT OF PLACES” Christian Petzold's Barbara Christina Gerhardt from The Brooklyn Rail, October 4, 2012
The
House Next Door [Kenji Fujishima] September 26, 2012
The Cold War Drama Barbara Is One for the Ages | Village Voice Melissa Anderson, December 19, 2012
MUBI's Notebook: Ignatiy Vishnevetsky December 23, 2012
CriterionCast | Joshua Reviews Christian Petzold's Barbara [NYFF ... Joshua Brunsting from Criterion Cast
Christian
Petzold: In Limbo - Goethe-Institut Thilo
Wydra, April 2013
Christian
Petzold 'Barbara': Germany Oscar Submission - Alt Film Guide
Glenn Heath Jr. Little White Lies
Daniel Lindvall Film International
theartsdesk.com [James Woodall]
Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2012: The Joke, The Silence ... Veronika Ferdman
R. Emmet Sweeney TCM Movie Morlocks
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Owen Van Spall]
Stephanie Zacharek at Berlin from Movieline
Screen International [Jonathan Romney]
Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Angeliki Coconi]
Nigel Andrews Financial Times
Christian Petzold – Newsroom Nick Bruno
NYFF
2012: Barbara, Another Political Thriller from Christian Petzold ... Henry Stewart from The L-magazine, also seen here: Henry
Stewart
Jigsaw Lounge / Tribune [Neil Young]
History Spawns Peak Films at Telluride Festival - The Wall Street ... Joe Morgenstern from The Wall Street Journal
Christopher Bourne at New York from Twitch
Guy Lodge at Berlin from Hit Flix
Darren Hughes at Toronto from Long Pauses
Kevin B Lee at Berlin from indieWIRE Press Play
Daniel Kasman TIFF 2012. Correspondences #2
Georgia Straight [Mark Harris]
Filmaluation [Hemanth Kissoon]
Sound On Sight Neal Dhand
Christian Petzold – Barbara (2012) | Cinema of the World
Barbara - The 50th New York Film Festival | Film Society of Lincoln ...
DAILY | NYFF 2012 | Christian Petzold's BARBARA – Keyframe ... David Hudson at the New York Film Festival from Fandor
Berlinale 2012. Christian Petzold's "Barbara" on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson at Berlin from Mubi
MUBI's Notebook: David Hudson February 13, 2012
The Hollywood Reporter [Jordan Mintzer]
Barbara Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Dave Calhoun
Time Out Chicago: Ben Kenigsberg
Philip French The Observer
Barbara – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
Barbara,
Christian Petzold, 105 mins (12A) | The Independent Jonathan Romney
Barbara, review - Telegraph Robbie Collin
TIFF movie review: Barbara - The Globe and Mail
The Nashville Scene: Michael Sicinski
'Barbara,'
Directed by Christian Petzold - The New York Times Manohla Dargis
PHOENIX A 95
Germany Poland (98 mi) 2014 ‘Scope Official site
Speak
low when you speak, love,
Our summer day withers away
Too soon, too soon.
Speak low when you speak, love,
Our moment is swift, like ships adrift,
We’re swept apart too soon.
Speak low, darling speak low,
Love is a spark lost in the dark,
Too soon, too soon,
I feel wherever I go
That tomorrow is near, tomorrow is here
And always too soon.
Time is so old and love so brief,
Love is pure gold and time a thief.
We’re
late darling, we’re late,
The curtain descends, ev’rything ends
Too soon, too soon,
I wait darling, I wait
Will you speak low to me,
Speak love to me and soon.
—“Speak Low,” by Kurt Weill (written while in exile in
America) and Ogden Nash, 1943, Billie Holiday Speak Low YouTube (4:26)
Like the surprise hit of last year, 2014 Top Ten List #2 Ida, Christian Petzold returns to form with this tense, brutally moving Holocaust drama that was inexplicably rejected by both Cannes and Venice, displaying another level of newfound maturity in his still evolving career with what is arguably his best film yet. Like his others, it’s meticulously directed, but contains the most complexly intriguing story he’s ever worked with, another showcase for actress Nina Hoss, who is onscreen in nearly every shot in what is essentially an intensely personal search for a newly constructed post-war German identity, adapted by Petzold and the late Harun Farocki in his last screenplay, who worked with Petzold on and off since his very first feature THE STATE I AM IN (2000). Loosely based on Hubert Monteilhet’s 1961 detective novel Le Retour des Vendres (The Return of the Ashes), the film is accentuated by a beautifully understated and low key jazz score that both begins and ends the film, enticing the audience from the opening frame while also creating what is the most haunting ending of any film seen this year. For a story that explores human identity, you won’t find a more symmetrically perfect screenplay from start to finish, where the formalism of its construction is marked by an economy of intricate precision, but this is a throwback to a Fassbinder style story where Germany is trying to come to terms with the evils of its own troubled past, with shades of THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN (1979) and LILI MARLENE (1981), or an improvement on DESPAIR (1978), once more embellishing upon a film noir theme, the third time Petzold has used this device, where Yella (2007) and Jerichow (2008) were impressionistic reconstructions of earlier films CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962) and THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1946), where this one utilizes Georges Franju’s EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960), as both use surgical reconstruction to evoke the medical atrocities of Nazi SS officer Josef Mengele’s fanatical quest for Aryan purity by performing deadly genetic experiments on Auschwitz concentration camp victims. Hoss plays Nelly Lenz, a survivor of Auschwitz who is shot in the face in the waning days of the war, having to undergo painful facial reconstruction, introduced to the audience with her entire head covered with protective bandages, where her surgeon suggests after the war “a new face is an advantage,” as it allows one a fresh start in life. Nelly, however, continues to dwell on her former life, which is unknown to the viewer and only comes together in bits and pieces, where her intentions remain shrouded in mystery for a good deal of the film, only really revealing herself in the magnificence of the final shot.
Described as a Trümmerfilm (literally “rubble film”), narratively, the film has an interesting structure to it, continually shifting the perspective through the eyes of various characters while Nelly is forced to retreat into the background, lost inside her head, unable to recognize herself or even speak after the operation, where she’s painfully forced to admit that for all practical purposes, she no longer exists, Phoenix (Christian Petzold, 2014 YouTube (4:47). Not only a war casualty, rescued after spending two years in Auschwitz, her essential humanity has been stripped from her as well, seen early on wandering through the bombed out ruins of postwar Berlin searching for any semblance of her former life. With the help of a loyal friend Lene Winter (Nina Kunzendorf), a clerk in the Hall of Jewish Records who painstakingly goes through the files attempting to identify Nazi’s and reconstruct the lives of the missing, Nelly returns to Berlin for plastic surgery and a chance for rest and recovery, and while she’s not at all pleased with the results, finding it difficult to live with herself, it does allow her the opportunity to rebuild her shattered confidence. Lene’s generosity and kindness are expressed in every frame, as she goes to great measures to protect Nelly and insure she is as comfortable as possible, consolidating her family assets, while it’s her fervent desire they may both move to a new Zionist homeland currently envisioned as Palestine, a safe refuge for Jews displaced by the war. What better place to start a new life? A staunch Nazi hater, Lene can’t continue to live among them or even bear listening to German songs anymore, though for Nelly, she continues to find rapturous delight in the Germany she once knew. When shown pictures of Haifa, where they could live overlooking the sea, there is a suggestion of sexual undertone when Nelly almost contemptuously replies “I am not a Jew,” raising questions not only about her identity but her state of mind, a stranger to the changing world around her as she insists upon finding her lost husband Johnny, where thoughts of him were the only thing that kept her alive in the dark days of the camps where she lost her entire family.
As much about individual destinies as an emphasis on social conditions, in their former lives Nelly was a cabaret singer to his piano playing, so she searches the bars for any trace of him, finally discovering him working as an impoverished busboy in a decadent Berlin night club appropriately named Phoenix, a music hall beer drinking establishment for soldiers featuring showgirls and musical entertainment, where we see a tawdry German rendition of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.” While she is petrified at what he will think, Johnny, Ronald Zehrfeld from Barbara (2012), doesn’t recognize her (described by the director in Cinema Scope [Adam Neyman] as two ghosts that can’t recognize each other), too busy scraping by at the bottom end of the wage scale. Undeterred, she tries again, introducing herself as Esther (the name of her dead sister), to which he replies, “There aren’t many of those left,” where her persistence gets her thrown out of the club, but Johnny has other ideas, concocting an idea where he can use her resemblance to impersonate his dead wife who stands to inherit the family fortune locked away in a Swiss bank, becoming a mad homage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), both men haunted by the tragic loss of their dead wives, literally trying to reinvent them with another woman, training them to look, act, and talk the same, wearing the same clothes and hair style, as if resurrecting a ghost. Despite the wickedness of Johnny’s harebrained scheme, Nelly allows herself to be used, literally playing the part of herself, clinging to the beleaguered hopes that her husband would recognize her for who she is, at one point feverishly waking up Lene in the middle of the night to excitedly reveal, “I know he loves her” (referring to herself), but Johnny is equally certain of her death. Lene has no interest in Johnny and in fact despises him, warning Nelly that it was Johnny who betrayed her to the Gestapo, where according to records she uncovered he was arrested two days before and was released on the same day as her arrest. Lene’s profound influence over this film is remarkable, noted by her clear, unambiguous archival revelations and her measured assurance, as she comes to represent the Jewish reaction “after” the war, a voice of unwavering authority that some have chosen to ignore to this very day. Refusing to believe the man she loves is a Nazi collaborator, having spent months during wartime hiding in a hole, Nelly has her own doubts, where her shattered interior world struggles to heal, but she willingly plays along with his tortuous game, and in doing so the audience delves even deeper into Johnny’s dubious personality.
Delving into realms
of moral duplicity, Petzold builds suspense by continually allowing unanswered
questions to linger, where the audience remains in doubt whether Johnny ever
loved her or could actually expose her to the Nazi’s, and is he just pretending
not to know her real identity? All the
characters come under a broader cloud of suspicion in the immediate aftermath
of the war, as who among them was not a willing participant? What friends and neighbors were also
collaborators and betrayers? How many
ordinary citizens simply looked the other way?
The setting itself is fraught with fear and suspicion, where the
tantalizing mood is drenched in a suffocating atmosphere of dread. The deeper one gets into the psychological
plight of each character, the more the world around them is stained by the
toxic lead-in to war. Perhaps most
revealing is a family photograph that Nelly discovers taken before the war,
where circles have been placed around the heads of those identified as Nazi’s
while crosses are placed above those that are now dead. It’s a horrifying notion to think that one’s
fondest memories have been defiled and contaminated by the despicable acts of
one’s own country. Brilliantly conceived
and masterfully crafted, Petzold reaches elevated territory in this
impressionistic psychological mosaic that becomes a literal postwar reawakening
to the reality of the world around them.
Joining the ranks of essential postwar films, Petzold shows how delusion
becomes a coping mechanism for an enveloping madness, like Johnny, whose
refusal to recognize his wife (or the role he played in her capture) is not by
accident, as he comes to signify those ordinary citizens blinded by their own
willful collusion, refusing to see their own complicity in the crimes taking
place around them, which may start out as fear or a defense mechanism, but
saving themselves at any cost ends up becoming a way of life that eventually
leads to the Holocaust. Many more lives
are lost to suicide even after the war is over as a result of “collateral
damage,” a descent into a moral disillusionment that evokes a special note of
sadness. But this is ultimately a film
about Nelly, a lone survivor whose longing to claw her way back into a
reconstructed German society represents the need of an entire nation, where the
agonizing doubts and concerns are reflected in the marvelously subtle
performance by Nina Hoss, who is the real star of the show in a remarkable portrait
of a devastated society suffering the impact of enormous historic crimes, where
the postwar debacle is revealed in the broken wreckage of fallen debris and
ruined lives. Shot in the Brandenburg
region in Germany by Hans Fromm’s dark cinematography, with a few shots in
Wroclaw, Poland, the jazz score by Stefan Will is particularly expressive,
setting the tone of eloquent, emotional restraint. If this film does anything, however, it
delivers enormously with a huge payoff in the virtuosic final scene, where
everything in the entire film leads to this moment, and Petzold delivers with
one of the great cinematic endings that resonates so powerfully that it will
become one of the most discussed shots in the annals of cinema history, Speak Low performed by Nina
Hoss @ Phoenix YouTube (3:01, recommend not to be watched until “after”
seeing the film), where part of its power is its unexpectedness, yet according
to the director, TIFF
Review: Petzold's “Phoenix” Soars – City By Heart, the ending plays out quite differently in front of German audiences. By itself, it’s hardly spectacular, but seen
in context with everything that has come before, the composite effect is simply
stunning, an indictment of Johnny, and the nation’s, collective forgetfulness,
where the specter of the past seeps into the uncertain present and all lingering questions and concerns are
finally put to rest.
An excerpt from Jeffrey Fleishman’s
interview with the director from The LA
Times, July 29, 2015, World
Cinema: Christian Petzold's 'Phoenix' haunted by ...
The eerie mood and
questions raised by “Phoenix” have intrigued Petzold. He said his next film will be set in the 1940’s
in the French town of Marseille as refugees hide and hurry to catch boats to
Mexico as the German army closes in. Part
of him, he said, wants to capture the aura and verve of German filmmakers, such
as Fritz Lang and Max Ophüls, who fled to America to escape Hitler.
“The light from Germany
went to the U.S.A. in the 1930s,” he said.
“We have to bring the light and style back to Germany, especially the
noir which was created by Austrian and German refugees.”
Just as riveting in a wholly other genre, Christian Petzold’s Phoenix follows Nelly (Petzold’s striking muse, Nina Hoss), a concentration camp survivor returning to Berlin in search of Johnny (Ronad Zehrfeld), the husband she still loves, who may or may not have betrayed her to the Nazis. Phoenix is set in the intriguing period immediately following the war—or “After the Camp” as Petzold puts it—that gave rise to the Trümmerfilm (literally “rubble film”). It’s an engrossing reflection on the postwar reconstruction of identity (as the title suggests, although it also turns out to be the name of the bar where she finds Johnny) couched as a noirish thriller of mistaken identity. Co-written with the late Harun Farocki, it is a precisely and exquisitely crafted chamber piece, resonant and gripping, softly building up to a stunning finale.
In a loose adaptation of Hubert Monteilhet’s 1961 novel Le Retour des cendres, Berlin School stalwart Christian Petzold has decided to move further back in history, leaving East Germany behind (a fine decision as far as I’m concerned) for Germany 1945, and asking what it takes to rise from the ashes in these desperate and confusing circumstances. Phoenix begins as a woman with neither a home nor a face crosses across the Swiss border back into the rubble of postwar Germany. This being a Petzold film, the woman is of course played by Nina Hoss, her visage swathed in bandages after a stint in a concentration camp, en route to a facility where she can choose to rebuild herself, literally, before starting her life again in Israel. (Echoes of Dark Passage? Franju?)
But Hoss’ Nelly Lenz refuses to take the easy way out, electing to reconstruct her looks as close as possible to her old ones (mistake #1), then escaping into the Berlin night to hunt down her husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld, remarkably unctuous as the righteous gentile turned righteous asshole), denizen of the nightclub underworld and all-around no-goodnik (mistake #2). Johnny doesn’t recognize her, but sees a resemblance, and soon proposes that Nelly pretend to be his ex-wife (i.e., herself) in order to claim her inheritance. Claustrophobia sets in again (she spent months during wartime hiding in a hole) when Nelly is again imprisoned, this time being complicit in her own captivity, as Johnny forces her under lock and key to re-learn her own mannerisms, enacting a very dangerous cat-and-mouse game indeed. (Clear and intentional echoes of Vertigo.)
Truly elevating the pulpy source material, Petzold swirls the pot of suspense, revenge and guilt with not only a Hitchcockian but also a Fassbinderian touch. Films don’t get more psychologically complex than this, which was inexplicably rejected by both Cannes and Venice in favour of who the hell knows what. One last note: Petzold collaborated on the script with the great Harun Farocki, who passed away on July 30, and worked with Petzold on his feature scripts dating back to The State I Am In.
Phoenix — Cineaste
Magazine Jonathan Murray, Fall 2015
Christian Petzold’s Phoenix is a powerful reminder that we all face the world in more ways than one. Emphatically predicated on the power of the visage, Phoenix underscores the extent to which the human countenance simultaneously grants a sense of personal identity-cum-integrity and the means to communicate this publicly: our individual features are a present that allows us to present ourselves to other people. At the same time, Petzold’s movie is also a meditation on the power of mirage, the dangerous chimeras and consequences conjured up by human refusal (or inability) to face up to things as they really are: the true nature of the times and places in which we each find ourselves living, and the individual parts we play in shaping those settings for our lives.
But this still isn’t quite the full story: alongside visage and mirage, we should also acknowledge homage as the final entry in Phoenix’s interlocking triumvirate of thematic preoccupations. Liberally adapted from Hubert Monteilhet’s 1961 novel Le Retour des cendres, Petzold’s film weaves a complex tapestry of cinematic reference points into and around its central source material. In swaddling its protagonist’s face in surgical bandages for a significant part of proceedings, Phoenix nods knowingly toward plot precedents set by Georges Franju’s Les Yeux sans visage (1960) and Delmer Daves’s Dark Passage (1947). In exploring a different form of cosmetic surgery altogether, namely, post-World War II Germany’s anguished oscillation between collective acknowledgment and avoidance of the Holocaust and its aftermath, Petzold also picks up on (and from) earlier German cinematic attempts to confront an awful period in the nation’s history, Wolfgang Staudte’s The Murderers Are Among Us (1946) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) prominent among them. The result is a movie that asks, as emotively as it does intelligently, some profoundly searching historical, moral, and philosophical questions of its viewer.
Having been shot in the face by Nazis, Nelly Lenz (Nina Hoss) is a severely disfigured Jewish concentration camp survivor brought back to postwar Berlin by her long-term friend Lene Winter (Nina Kunzendorf), an investigative lawyer dedicated to the task of finding and supporting camp victims and any surviving relatives. Nelly’s escape from death is doubly miraculous, given that she had seemed to actively court extinction some years before, returning to Berlin from the safe haven of London in 1938, in order to be with her beloved husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld). A professional singer by trade, Nelly wants nothing more than to resume her life as it was before Nazism, although Lene has made arrangements for the two women to emigrate to Palestine as quickly as possible.
After receiving plastic surgery that successfully treats her facial (if not psychological) trauma, Nelly obsessively scours the dangerous, dilapidated streets of Berlin for her husband. Lene protests vehemently and in vain, trying to convince Nelly that Johnny betrayed her to the Nazis. When Nelly finds Johnny working in a reopened cabaret bar (the—or at least one of the—phoenixes referred to in the film’s title), he does not recognize his wife, whom he is convinced has died in the camps. But he cannot fail to notice his “new” acquaintance’s resemblance to his presumably deceased spouse, and asks her to pose (after an extended period of coaching) as Nelly in order that he might claim her substantial family inheritance for himself. Nelly plays along, telling Johnny that she is a concentration-camp survivor called Esther, but clearly hoping that the scales will eventually fall from her errant husband’s eyes. An emotionally excoriating climax comes when Johnny finally puts his long-planned scheme into action.
The high-wire precision of Phoenix’s plotting—deliberately flirting as it does with a plunge into outright implausibility—works to underscore Petzold’s public pronouncements that his movie aims to cast a skeptical (yet also sympathetic) eye over the bewilderingly complex ethics and politics of postwar German reconstruction. A markedly melodramatic story about the rebuilding of an individual face allows for a simultaneous, and highly modulated, examination of the rebuilding of an entire place. Thus, while Nelly’s situation and psyche are remarkable, as is Nina Hoss’s bravura rendition of them, Phoenix resists the temptation to abase itself in adoration at the feet of such things. Each of the film’s central characters is given space to embody radically different responses to the historical project of reconstruction, and it is notable that each approach comes with its own particular form of injury and impossibility in tow.
Reconstruction as competing forms of rejection (Lene), reanimation (Nelly), and revision (Johnny) are variously explored and found wanting in different ways as Phoenix’s narrative unfolds. Lene’s utterly understandable recoiling from her native cultural heritage (“I can’t stand German songs anymore,” she confesses to Nelly at one point) stems from the fact that the forensic legal investigations she conducts allow her a far more detailed knowledge of the Holocaust’s mechanics and amorality than any other character in Phoenix is able or willing to achieve. Yet, the resultant anger that helps her to save others also renders her incapable of rescuing herself. Elsewhere, Johnny’s arguably unlikely failure to recognize Nelly becomes psychologically plausible because it is symptomatic of an all-too-believable form of collective amnesia. How, when, and why to remember WWII from the vantage point of those who lived under a defeated dictatorship becomes “a question of morality,” in Petzold’s words.
Ultimately, whether or not Johnny knows Nelly’s true identity becomes something of a moot point by the time that he plans to forcibly remove the camp prisoner number from her arm. The ideological symbolism of this readiness to erase evidence of past state-sponsored violence in the name of present-day financial prosperity comfortably outstrips the competing claims of tantalizing plot-based ambiguities…
Cinema
Scope | The Face of Another: Christian Petzold's Phoenix Adam Nayman, includes an interview,
Summer 2015
Nina Hoss has one of the great faces in cinema, so it’s perverse to see it swaddled in gauze at the beginning of Phoenix. Strapped into the passenger seat of a car being driven over the Swiss border into Germany at the end of World War II, her Nelly Lenz is a figure of morbid curiosity for both the American roadblock crew and the audience, but only the soldier onscreen gets a look beneath the bandages, at which point he quietly apologizes and waves the vehicle on its way. In a few short, precise strokes, Christian Petzold sketches his protagonist as a tragic victim as well as a survivor whose countenance has a terrible power—a paradox that burns white-hot approximately 90 minutes later in the film’s remarkable and indelible final scene.
Co-written by Petzold and the late Harun Farocki (based on Hubert Monteilhet’s novel Le retour des cendres), Phoenix is quite simply a perfectly conceived and structured film, balancing narrative suspense and thematic complexity without tipping over into either cliché or convolution. It’s also this congenitally referential German director’s most virtuosic display of allusive cinephilia to date, enfolding no less than three classic film noirs into its action where previous works like Yella (2007) and Jerichow (2009) more rigorously pastiched a single American classic each (Carnival of Souls [1962] and The Postman Always Rings Twice [1946], respectively). The early sequences of Nelly stalking the halls of the Berlin hospital where she’s gone to have surgery on her ruined face conjure up Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage (1953), and not only visually; just as Franju’s film mobilized mad-doctor tropes to evoke the medical atrocities of the Holocaust and the spectre of Aryan racial purity, Phoenix frames Nelly’s operation in metaphorical terms: “a new face,” the surgeon assures her, “is an advantage.”
A former nightclub singer of Jewish extraction who was arrested by the S.S. and sent to Auschwitz (where she received her injuries right before her liberation), Nelly doesn’t need her new visage to evade the authorities à la Humphrey Bogart’s wrong-man character in Dark Passage (1957). But as in Delmer Daves’ film, it proves useful in exposing the guilt of another. No sooner have her wounds healed—revealing Hoss’ convincingly sunken and sallow but still hauntingly beautiful features—than Nelly goes searching through the literal rubble of Berlin for her husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), who she knows from her friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) believes her dead. Now working a menial job in a cabaret club called Phoenix, Johnny doesn’t recognize her but sees in this near-doppelganger an opportunity: he’ll ask this stranger (who tells him her name is Esther) to pass for his dead wife and thus access her frozen fortune.
It’s here that Phoenix comes down with a distinct case of Vertigo (1958) and also becomes brutally moving, as Nelly is instructed by a man she has reason to suspect may have been behind her incarceration how to act more like “herself”—already wearing the face of another, she begins to see herself through a different pair of eyes as well. A towering, physically gifted actress, Hoss has always been excellently suited to Petzold’s semi-minimalist style, because she can hold the camera when there isn’t much else to look at; here, it’s harder than ever to focus on all the negative space in Hans Fromm’s static, sparsely furnished interior shots because of the endless and scrupulously controlled (by character and performer both) activity on Nelly’s face. It’s painful to watch Nelly desperately watching Johnny as if at any second, he’ll see her for who she really is. It’s a testament to Zehrfeld’s performance that the open-faced appeal he displayed opposite Hoss in Barbara (2012) is supplanted here by a callow obliviousness; Johnny’s myopia here is moral as well as perceptual, and it gradually becomes clear that he’s strenuously repressing his perceptions of himself, as well.
What’s remarkable about Phoenix is how its Farockian didacticism—the fact that Nelly would rather try to reclaim her place and her identity in a German society that tried to exterminate her rather than go with Lene to settle in Palestine—is blended into its drama so that it becomes a film of ideas that is also a film of emotions. For this critic, at least, the feelings in Jerichow, with its cuckolded Turkish version of Cecil Kellaway, and even the markedly superior Barbara, which trapped Hoss’ eponymous heroine in an East German hospital while she harboured fantasies of the West, were mostly theoretical: the films, and their social critiques, were so neatly turned out that they didn’t leave any residue. Phoenix is neat, too, and perhaps even more chokingly claustrophobic than its predecessors—not least of all when Nelly revisits the spider-hole where she hid from the Nazis—but it also has a plangency that’s distinct from being simply and expertly spartan. In wondering why this excellent movie was missing from the motley competitions in Cannes and Venice (as well as the main slate of the New York Film Festival), critics have cited its climax as Exhibit A in the case for an after-the-fact defense, and while it’s definitely a hell of a scene—a showcase for Nelly and Hoss both to break the fourth walls of their respective performances—the fact is that its power is not generated in a vacuum. Phoenix is a slow burn, perhaps, but it’s also a scorcher; its heroine rises from the ashes, but she doesn’t manage to brush them off.
Cinema Scope: I think Les yeux sans visage is a good starting point to talk about Phoenix, since they are both movies about women’s faces that are also images of nations in wartime—the idea of trying to graft a more beautiful face onto a ruined one.
Christian Petzold: I didn’t show the Franju movie to the actors. I don’t want to show them movies like Les yeux sans visage or Dark Passage, because they’re too near to their characters, and too faraway in the same moment. The first movie we watched during the rehearsals was Jacques Demy’s Les demoiselles de Rochefort (1967). I said to them “Jacques Demy was Jewish. Part of his family was killed in the camps. He’s living in a society where he can make a musical with Gene Kelly, and you feel the Algerian war in it—you can dance and have fantastic colours and camera and songs, but the war is there and the experience of the fascist occupation in France. We don’t have musicals in Germany. Why don’t we have them?” Les yeux sans visage, you’re right, it’s there. I thought also the word “persona”—not the Ingmar Bergman movie. At one of the Q and As in Toronto, Nina said that she felt like she had to simplify her character because the story is so complicated, and she’s right. I had to simplify it so as not to destroy the complexity.
Scope: I also thought about Barbara, and how it feels like between these two movies you’re working backward in time to a kind of primal scene: the divided country in Barbara is built on the ruins of the society we see in Phoenix.
Petzold: You’re right. Five or six years ago, I didn’t like to talk about my work that way, in terms of the connections between it, but I don’t think I’m going to lose my innocence about that now. Harun Farocki and I had wanted to make this movie for 25 years. It’s the longest project I’ve ever had. While we were doing The State I’m In (2002), we were talking about Nuit et brouillard (1956) by Alain Resnais. I’d seen the film as a pupil in school. When it screened at Cannes in 1956, all the Germans at the festival left, because of the movie. Harun told me that for people of his generation, the left-wing students, it was the movie that showed them what had happened in the concentration camps, and so it was the movie that divided them from their parents. They understood that the German state, even the modern German state, was based on fascistic structures. When we started to talk about making Phoenix again, we knew that we wanted to make a movie that took place “in the cut”—the cut that happened between those two generations.
Scope: You talk about the idea of “in the cut,” and it’s the cuts in Nuit et brouillard that show the difference between the time of the Holocaust and the years afterwards, but also links them. They are the same landscapes. I’ve always thought that Resnais’ movie was about the impossibility of ever going back to the way things were before, and that seems to be the theme of Phoenix as well.
Petzold: Yes. But we have a protagonist who wants to go back. In so many of the biographies that I’ve read, including Primo Levi’s, you have people who say that they dream of going back, to a time before someone said, “This is Jewish and this is not Jewish.” They want to go back to a time when there was a mixture of culture. Fascists want to end mixtures. They want clear lines. But no, it’s impossible to go back, because everything has changed. You see in the last travelling shot in Nuit et brouillard a barber’s chair, and it’s just a chair, but it now seems like the most horrible torture implement you’ve ever seen in your life.
Scope: Nelly isn’t just a German woman trying to stay in her own country; she’s also literally trying to climb back into her old life. I feel like Hoss acts the part as if she really believes that she can do this, and that she’ll be able to just jump back over the cut, as you put it.
Petzold: There is the scene where she’s on the boat where she’d hidden herself. She now looks like she did before. She’s made the jump over the cut. She has her hair back, and her skin and her clothes, and there is a man who looks at her a little bit. Her identity is coming back. She can maybe dance a little bit, maybe sing. And then she’s on the ship and she opens the door and she knows that there is no chance to go back in time. Because there is the hole. And then Johnny comes in and asks, “What are you doing?” and you see the fear, as if she is in the camp again. It’s all in Nina’s acting, and it’s something that I was very impressed by.
Scope: A lot of critics have remarked upon the script’s similarities to Vertigo, the idea of a man remaking a woman in the image of somebody else, even though it turns out that she’s exactly the same person who he’s thinking of in the first place. It’s as if you’ve re-done Vertigo from Kim Novak’s point of view.
Petzold: Yes. In Vertigo, Kim Novak is like an invention of Jimmy Stewart’s subjectivity. But also of Hitchcock’s as well. Marilyn Monroe was very expensive and difficult to work with, and so the studios wanted to rebuild her out of somebody else, like Frankenstein’s bride or something. So Kim Novak is playing herself in Vertigo a little bit, and when she’s not playing Madeleine—or Marilyn—when she’s playing a secretary or something, she’s actually really great!
Scope: I also admired Ronald Zehrfeld’s acting in a difficult role. He doesn’t try to make Johnny sympathetic. He’s almost a zombie.
Petzold: It was hard for Ronald. He was like a child. He worked so hard. He looked at 25 movies from the time. He always had cigarettes and dollars in his pockets, because he wanted Johnny to be a real person. But Johnny is dead. From the first moment on the set, I said to him that the tragedy for him as an actor is the same as the tragedy for Johnny as a person—that he’s dead. The end of the movie is not him coming back to life; it’s that he knows that he’s dead. That’s the only development that the character has, and it was very hard for him.
Scope: In Barbara, you have a character who chooses self-effacement; she lets somebody else leave in her place, she sacrifices herself and sort of disappears into captivity. She’s alive but she’s hidden. Here you have, as you say, a woman who is thought to be dead, but in the end she chooses life in a way—she finds a way to let everyone who had abandoned her and forgotten about her know that she’s come back. And when she says it, the way that she says it, those people are destroyed. I think that the audience is destroyed. I was destroyed.
Petzold: Yes, me too. We shot for three or four months, and then Nina and I have had no connection to each other. It’s not because we don’t like each other any more. It’s because the directing of a movie starring a blonde actress and what goes on in Johnny’s basement…the two things are not so far away from each other. At the end of the movie, it wasn’t just Nelly who was going away, it was also Nina saying goodbye to my fantasies as well. When the shooting ends on my films, there is always a party, and the Barbara party lasted for days. With this party, everyone went home after 12 minutes. Nobody talked to each other. We all like each other, but there was an impression left by the film, on all of us, and it was very strong.
Scope: I want to address some of the criticisms I’ve heard of the film, either in reviews or even from some of my colleagues, which is that the plot strains credibility. It seems to me that the story in Phoenix is a very movie-ish story, which is the point—it’s a contrived narrative but it hints at a larger and entirely credible reality of denial on a societal level.
Petzold: We had long discussions with producers, and they said, “We have to see the destroyed face.” I said no. This is not the point. There are two questions that people can ask about the movie. One is, “Where is her face?” The other is, “Why didn’t Johnny recognize Nelly?” My answer to both is that people who ask these questions don’t like movies. It’s what Hitchcock called “the plausibles.” There’s a German word for it too, and it’s a bad word. But it’s also a question of morality that he doesn’t see her face.
Scope: I think he does recognize her, but he’s repressing it. It’s too painful to see that the woman he betrayed is still alive. It is safer for him in every way if she’s dead.
Petzold: She’s dead. He’s dead. They’re two ghosts. They can’t recognize each other.
Scope: I feel like after Jerichow and especially Barbara, your films are becoming sparer and sparer as they go along. I wonder if that’s because as you move backwards in time, from the present to the early ’80s and now to the ’40s, the worlds you’re filming get further and further away—so the style becomes more minimal, and at the same time, more mythic.
Petzold: There was a picture from the Shoah Foundation of a Russian soldier in a Polish forest. It looks like Manet because it’s out of focus. It’s very Romantic. And then you see that there are all of these dead bodies lying around. I was impressed by the picture. I showed the picture to everyone, and told them that they had to take two looks at it to see what was really in it. I liked it very much. I said that we would begin the film with a sort of remake of this photograph: a forest, in February, a little bit of snow, it looks very peaceful, and then we are shocked. On the first day of shooting, I had Russian soldiers and German soldiers, and guns, costumes—concentration camp costumes. People from the press were there, they say it looks so great. After two or three hours I knew it was a big, big mistake. It was the same as with Yella, when I originally shot the first scene as a remake of Marnie (1964), but then realized that it had nothing to do with the story, that it was just a quotation. This time, though, it was like an infection of bad morality, to try and remake a photograph like that. It was wrong. Perhaps we had to make this sort of mistake to locate the sort of ellipsis and space that was necessary to produce Phoenix.
Scope: You must have a very forgiving producer.
Petzold: He’s outside right now. Now he’s happy. But it cost us 75,000 euros.
Scope: One section of the film that does emphasize the period detail is the material shot in the nightclub, which evokes Fassbinder but also Christopher Isherwood’s stories and Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972).
Petzold: Harun said that if Cabaret was the last movie that took place in Germany before the Nazis came, that we would just stay in the club and tell another story.
Scope: In Cabaret there’s that amazing scene in the beer garden where the blonde boy sings “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” and you see that fascism arrives in Germany under the guise of enthusiastic cultural affirmation and a kind of wholesome pride. There are so few German films since the end of World War II that show any kind of pride in the country, not even really in its progress or its changes. It’s all guilt, regret, analysis. Do you think that that will ever change? Can it?
Petzold: Harun and I were watching the World Cup in Brazil. The first time I saw our team, I was really proud. They were playing great football. They destroyed the Brazilian team. I saw Germans who were calm and friendly, and very gracious in victory. We were really proud. I was proud that we didn’t enter the war in Iraq either, but this is the first time that I really had that sort of feeling. Three or four days later, they won the championship against Argentina and came back to Berlin, and there was a big party and then there were all these jokes about Argentina. You know what I mean. Really bad jokes. And everything went back. I said to Harun, I think we need 20 more years to make movies about proud Germans.
Scope: I’m going to ask you about your two major collaborators. Firstly, with Nina Hoss. It seems that your last two films with her have either deglamourized her or else complicated that movie-star glamour that she has. It’s an interesting way to use a leading lady, and I wonder how conscious that is, for both of you.
Petzold: After our first three movies together, I saw something in her that was like a partisan. She didn’t want to be so beautiful. She doesn’t want to be in love. She doesn’t want to show emotions. She doesn’t want to show her body. She wants to hide herself. She doesn’t want to do advertisements. I liked what I saw on the editing table. She isn’t playing to the light. She’s going to the darkness. She’s always playing. We talked about it and reflected on it and she liked that idea.
Scope: Do you think that Nelly’s new face—which is Nina Hoss’ face—is more beautiful than her “real one?” We never see her played by another actress, but it’s something that I was wondering about the whole time.
Petzold: Yes, I do. I told Nina that Lauren Bacall was 19 or 20 when she did To Have and Have Not (1944) but it’s not till Written on the Wind (1956) that she’s really an adult, and so she’s pretty in another way. She’s pretty because of the experiences that she’s had. So at the end of Phoenix, we see Nelly, and she’s on her own, she seems to be an adult, and she’s beautiful.
Scope: I also wanted to ask you about working with Harun Farocki, but I imagine it might be difficult, as he’s just recently passed away.
Petzold: He died five weeks ago. I don’t reflect about it. In the future when I’m writing, I’m going to go to his grave like in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). There is no other collaboration that I can think about. I’m going to take a break next year. We had started a movie together but I’m going to put it on hold.
Interview: Christian Petzold - Film Comment Nicolas Rapold interview, February 26, 2015
This Saturday, Christian Petzold’s Phoenix has its U.S. premiere in Film Comment Selects. The acclaimed German filmmaker’s borrowings from melodrama and noir are key to his latest feature, in which a scarred concentration camp survivor returns home and is inexorably drawn into looking for her husband. But that husband firmly believes that she is dead, and their meeting leads to some bewildering demands. Petzold muse Nina Hoss plays Nelly, the fragile survivor, and Ronald Zehrfeld is her shifty spouse, Johnny, the two circling one another in a ruined Berlin.
FILM COMMENT spoke with Petzold about Phoenix last fall at the Toronto film festival, in a discussion driven by the director’s exhilarating style of storytelling and spitballing.
Thanks for sitting for an
interview—I know you’ve had a long day already.
Film Comment! I have old Film Comments from the Sixties and the Seventies! I bought them at a flea market. Yeah, my English has been getting better, since I’ve talked all day. Three hours ago there was one German interview, and all of a sudden I can’t speak German anymore. I can’t remember things—it’s like a computer, you need links in your own language, and if you don’t have them, you don’t have a memory… like the Germans after ’45, they just lose their memory.
The way your movie works with memory is very interesting. You’ve found such a bold structure for dealing with it—it’s as if you took a Hollywood melodrama for a starting point. Do you know the one [No Man of Her Own] where Barbara Stanwyck gets in a train crash and switches identities with another passenger?
Yeah. This is interesting, because I never talk about Barbara Stanwyck, I always talk about other American actresses. But there’s another Barbara Stanwyck film, where she’s on a ship with Henry Fonda…
The Lady Eve?
Yes, Preston Sturges! It’s a film about two women, but really it’s one woman—Henry Fonda just doesn’t recognize her. I think I told Nina [Hoss] to look at this movie, I’m not sure. The first film we watched together was by Jacques Demy, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort. It’s a musical, and I said, how is this possible after 1945? In the film, we see the war in Algiers, and it’s a political film, made by a Jewish director. But the people can still sing and dance. It’s not reality, but it’s real. I said, this is what we have lost in Germany; therefore we should look at this and start writing about it, because it’s fantastic.
The second film we saw was Out of the Past by Jacques Tourneur, because the protagonists, Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, have “double light” in their eyes. They are betrayers, they are liars, they are tired, but their eyes are soft and deep. So you see two things—a mask and a soul—in the same moment. This is something that happens in our movie. For example, Ronald Zehrfeld, he has heart, but he has lost his empathy. He’s tired like Burt Lancaster in The Killers, the opening sequence. In his eyes, there’s something—there’s the whole story of 1945.
In the beginning of the
film, Nina Hoss has to act with bandages on her face, and since she’s such a
recognizable actress, you have that moment of anticipation of when you’ll see
and recognize her. It seems as if the whole film is built around these scenes
of recognitions.
Yeah, we were thinking that this movie has to have development for each character. For the main character, Nelly, it starts in a car, with a soldier looking in [at a checkpoint]. Nowadays, there’s a pregnant woman in the car, and the soldier says, “Okay, drive on,” and the next scene is at the hospital, the birth—then my first room of my own, then I go out in the night because I want to see the world outside of my parents’ house, then my first boyfriend, my first love affair, and then I’m an adult. This was not exactly the idea, but it came to us automatically. During the fourth or fifth day of shooting, I told Nina, when you’re an adult, you have lost the innocence of youth.
What’s interesting is she
wants to go back to her romance with that same innocence. Is Johnny a character
who’s already corrupt, or has his empathy disappeared with the war?
It’s a long story, but I can shorten it up a little bit. During the rehearsals, we read an autobiography by a German essayist, who was 20 years old in 1933, studying for the bar. Two days after Hitler won the election, he was sitting in a courtroom, working for an attorney, and the SS comes into the building and starts to beat all the Jewish attorneys. And he’s hearing all the shots and screams of the people, and he says to himself: “Now I’m in a tunnel. I have nothing to do with the things outside. I’m not guilty, because I don’t beat people, I’m just not part of the society any longer.” This is a little bit of Johnny. But one moment, the door opened, and two SS people were there with iron sticks and dogs, and they asked him, “Jewish or not Jewish?” and he said “not Jewish.” And 50 years later, he said, this is the moment where I was guilty. It’s the same choice Johnny made. He accepted the selection of the Nazis, and destroyed love, and that’s guilty, I think.
That makes me think about
past German films about World War II and the Holocaust. Did you feel a burden
to approach the period with a rigorous ethical standard, or did you just want
to forget what people might say or talk about?
I didn’t think about the burden. I thought about Fassbinder, when he made his period pictures like The Marriage of Eva Braun—I mean Maria Braun!
He should have made that
movie!
Yeah! I’ll make that movie in five years, an Eva Braun movie, but not in a Fassbinder way, not in a Downfall way. Actually, with Eva Braun, I saw a really, really good thing. This has to be our next script. We have found some material from 1958—because they didn’t find Adolf Hitler’s body right away, they started to say, he’s Elvis Presley. [Laughs]
Like conspiracy theories?
Yeah, but there were so many witnesses from the bunker who saw him dead. And they have so many interviews with the witnesses from the bunker, so they wanted to re-create the suicide of Hitler and Eva Braun, and not how it happened, because no one was inside the room, but how the witnesses found the bodies. So we want to make a movie about this scene, and the people who reenact this scene—a weekend of two policemen who reenact the deaths of Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler.
I’d watch that. Have you
seen the documentary about Hitler’s secretary?
Yeah, she’s another witness. I don’t like all these witnesses from the wrong side. Something is a little bit wrong about Hitler and the bunkers. In German history, all the dictators live in caves, and there are so many tales where there’s a shepherd who goes into a little cave, and finds Barbarossa, Red Beard, with his 10,000 soldiers, waiting for a thousand years, and he asks: “Are they waiting for me? Do you need me, Germany?” And it gets tied to Adolf Hitler, like: “We need you, Hitler.” So I just hate it. In the caves, there are the German monsters. But the ghosts, and the phantoms and the survivors—they need stories, too.
Speaking of stories,
that’s something else I really noticed watching this film: Nelly wants to
continue her life story, but Johnny’s forcing her to follow a different story.
I like those dueling stories.
A lot of it happens in a basement, like a laboratory. We always said, Frankenstein was also created right there, Pygmalion was created right there, and all the artists working on their sculptures. There’s always the same male subjectivity, and the male artists always create their own projections of women. This woman, Nelly, wants to be created, but she also wants to tell her story, of the camps. It’s like a dance—she’s dancing around the table, trying to catch his eye.
The basic conceit is
fascinating in all its layers. It’s also as if Nelly’s story is being turned
false for others because Johnny is turning it into a lie. It’s a waking nightmare.
That’s also why it felt like a film noir to me.
It is a film noir! Fassbinder needed the Douglas Sirk films to make his period pictures, and I need film noir to make mine. Douglas Sirk was a German, of course, and the light in film noir comes from Berlin. There’s a fantastic German essay by Frieda Grafe called “The Lights from Berlin,” and this song by Kurt Weill, “Berlin im Licht,” that says, “The light from Berlin is going to Hollywood.”
You co-wrote the film with
your collaborator, the late Harun Farocki. What ideas did each of you bring to
the table? I could imagine that you each could bring quite different
perspectives.
Well, this particular story was his idea. He wanted to do it by himself in the Eighties, but he lost his connection to feature films. He was my best friend, and we’d meet daily. He always said, it cost him 10 years to understand that the mainstream is the true home of the avant-garde. You can find more experimenting in the films of Hitchcock or Fritz Lang than in experimental films. Whereas the Surrealists were against novels, in three years they were writing sentences like, “It was six o’clock in the morning when Lady Ashford took her tea.” So I think Harun was right: feature films are grammatical. You have to fight against the grammar, but that’s just part of the story.
What was the reception of Phoenix
in Germany?
I don’t know. Some reactions were positive, but you know, Germans don’t like each other.
Phoenix: Just Be Yourself Criterion essay by Michael Koresky, April 27, 2016
Phoenix
(2014) - The Criterion Collection
J.
Hoberman Reviews Christian Petzold's Devastating ... J. Hoberman from Tablet magazine
In
my end is my beginning – Christian Petzold's Phoenix rises – IN A ... In a
Lonely Place, December 3, 2015
Phoenix - Reviews -
Reverse Shot Michael
Koresky, July 24, 2015
Nina
Hoss Illuminates Petzold's Great Thriller 'Phoenix ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice
Film Review:
Phoenix | FilmJournal International
Maria Garcia
Review:
Christian Petzold's 'Phoenix' Will Take Your Brea ... Nikola Grozdanovic from The Playlist
Phoenix
(Christian Petzold, 2014)
Melissa Tamminga from Seattle Street Scene
theartsdesk.com [Graham Fuller]
Phoenix
· Film Review · The A.V. Club A.A.
Dowd
Phoenix ::
Movies :: Reviews :: Paste - Paste Magazine
Tim Grierson
The Collaboration of
Director and Actress in "Phoenix"
Jake Cole from Movie Mezzanine
Phoenix
(2014) A Film by Christian Petzold
Carson Lund from Are the Hills Going to March Off
Slant
Magazine [James Lattimer]
A
Holocaust Survivor Searches For Her Past In Christian ... David Edelstein from NPR
Scott
Reviews Christian Petzold's Phoenix [Theatrical Review] Scott Nye from Criterion Cast
Seongyong's
Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
Phoenix | Reviews | Screen - Screen International
Review:
PHOENIX, A Noir Revenge Flick - Twitch
Dustin Chang
World
Socialist Web Site [Joanne Laurier]
The
Film Stage [Martin Jensen]
Little
White Lies [David Jenkins]
Filmaluation
[Hemanth Kissoon]
Re-Make/Re-Model Melissa Anderson from Artforum
Independent
Ethos [Hans Morgenstern]
Film-Forward.com
[Nora Lee Mandel]
Reviews Phoenix
Christian Petzold - Exclaim! Robert
Bell
Review: Phoenix | Filmmaking
Review Jordan Baker
A.V.
Club [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
Digital
Journal [Sarah Gopaul]
Day
6: Defying Expectations / The Dissolve
Mike D’Angelo
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Amber Wilkinson]
Reel
Film Reviews [David Nusair]
The
House Next Door [Jake Cole]
Film
Comment Nicolas Rapold
Phoenix - Film Society of
Lincoln Center
INFLUX
Magazine [Martin Hafer]
Film
Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]
Guilt
And Rubble: 15 Essential Post-War Films | The Playlist Jessica Kiang and Oliver Lyttelton
Daily |
Christian Petzold's PHOENIX | Keyframe - Explore ... David Hudson from Fandor
World
Cinema: Christian Petzold's 'Phoenix' haunted by ... Jeffrey Fleishman interviews the director
from The LA Times, July 29, 2015
The
Hollywood Reporter [Jordan Mintzer]
'Phoenix'
Review: Christian Petzold's Haunting Postwar Melodrama ... Scott Foundas from Variety, also seen here: VARIETY
[Scott Foundas]
BBC
- Culture - Christian Petzold: How Germans today ... Christian Blauvelt from The BBC
Phoenix,
film review: A Berlin thriller with hints of Hitchcock ... Geoffrey Macnab from The Independent
Phoenix
review – a complex mystery of disguise and deceit ... Ryan Gilbey from The Guardian
Phoenix
review – noirish game of cat and mouse | Film | The ... Mark Kermode from The Observer
Glasgow
Film Theatre [Allan Hunter]
Vancouver Obsever [Volkmar Richter]
Toronto Film Scene [Eric Marchen]
TIFF Review: Petzold's “Phoenix” Soars – City By Heart Michelle Pinchev from City By Heart
The Huffington Post [Erica Abeel]
Not Quite 'Vertigo': 'Phoenix' is an unflashy investigation of German identity Lee Gardner from Baltimore City Paper
From the Ashes a Betrayal: Director Christian Petzold shows ... David Riedel from The Santa Fe Reporter
'Phoenix' - LA Times - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
World Cinema: Christian Petzold's 'Phoenix' haunted by WWII ghosts ... Jeffrey Fleishman from The LA Times
RogerEbert.com [Brian Tallerico]
Review: 'Phoenix' Shows Rebirth and a Ruse in Postwar ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times
Phoenix (2014 film) Wikipedia
Pevney, Joseph
SHAKEDOWN B- 80
USA 1950 (80 mi)
There is an interesting aspect to film noirs in the way they exaggerate masculinity, which is particularly noticeable in this film where Howard Duff as photographer Jack Early, in his shoulder padded suit, walks confidently into a San Francisco newspaper office looking for a job, turning women’s heads standing at every door. Even more dramatic is the support and admiration he receives from a newspaper executive Ellen Bennett (Peggy Dow), who after a flirtatious introduction drops all moral standards and not only goes to bat for him with her editor David Glover (Bruce Bennett), but agrees to go out on a date with him, inviting him to her place for dinner. These kinds of mixed signals are rarely received in real life, especially from an intelligent, well balanced, good looking and independent woman. But the film’s introduction gives the audience a clearer picture of the man’s moral character, as we see him get the snot beat out of him at a vacant waterfront pier, apparently for taking a picture of a gangland beating—but he persists, using the photo to get his foot in the door at the paper, claiming he just happened to be in the neighborhood at the time, weaseling his way into a one-week trial period. While Glover distrusts him from the outset, Bennett has other ideas and quickly turns into his love interest, despite her claim that her real love is a dentist living in Portland. Duff is a fairly wooden actor, but he gives a maniacal performance here as a man ruthlessly driven to step over anybody to get what he wants. Wearing his ambition on his sleeve, he’s little more than a cynical opportunist, which is particularly evident in the next two photos he provides, where he basically instructs accident victims in peril to pose for his camera, always getting the shot he wants.
With Bennett leading the charge, Early is hired full-time as a photo editor, all but ignoring the others at the newspaper, where he’s continually driven to get an “exclusive,” quickly making a name for himself, but also boosting newspaper sales. In something of an ironic twist, Glover decides to have a little fun at Jack’s expense, sending him to the criminal courts building to photograph a criminal, Nick Palmer (Brian Donlevy), who notoriously refuses to show his face to photographers. The film takes on a different air when Jack strikes up a distinctly inappropriate conversation with Palmer’s wife sitting in the waiting car, Nita, Anne Vernon, easily the best thing in the film, a French actress in her only American appearance, perhaps best known as Catherine Deneuve’s mother in THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1964). Not only is she gorgeous with a distinct French accent, adding a touch of class and sophistication to what is otherwise a rather crude depiction of an overzealous craving for the American Dream, but she takes no guff from the guy, showing she has the balls to stand up for herself. After promising Palmer a positive newspaper slant if he’d stop hiding and come clean, showing he has nothing to hide, Jack surprisingly gets that exclusive photo, which is little more than a pose, where Palmer invites him to his house with a proposition. Early often comments how Ellen’s living room, with a picture window view of the city, or Palmer’s lavishly decorated home, is exactly what he’d like, including the woman (Nita) sitting on the sofa. She, of course, encourages his foreplay, more likely curious what kind of deep shit it will get him into.
Palmer promises to offer tips on the criminal underworld,
knowing where they will strike before it happens, where Jack can get his
exclusive photos, which Palmer figures is a way to get rid of some of his rival
enemies, but Jack has other ideas, playing each side against the other, as he
gets his photo of men coming out of a heist, but rather than take it to the
newspaper, he decides to blackmail Palmer’s ex-partner, Harry Coulting
(Lawrence Tierney), who committed the department store robbery, which is a much
more lucrative, though dangerously ambitious con, which nearly gets him killed,
but instead they only make him sweat in a beautifully constructed scene at a
bowling alley where as he cautiously exits Coulting’s office with a bag of
money, you can hear the sound of the pins explode with each strike, a
suspenseful reminder of the fearful anticipation pounding in his head. Jack’s head swells with his apparent success,
turning down the regular gig at the newspaper, despite Ellen’s protestations,
believing the sky’s the limit for him now that he’s made a name for himself,
where as an independent photographer he can sell to the highest bidder. While playing such a dangerous game, Jack’s
amorally loathsome character comes into question, as even Ellen decides he’s a
callous opportunist where it’s only a matter of time before he falls from
grace. What’s interesting is the way the
war plays on Jack’s post-war noir character, as a guy who witnesses the
devastation of war comes home numbed by the experience with his values altered
and disoriented, where his ambition erodes any personal integrity, developing
an insatiable appetite for sordid sensationalism, which brings him a quick
buck, but likely an early demise, as he continually flaunts and disparages the
wrong kind of people. The finale is more
comical irony, as it’s hard not to root *against* this guy.
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Aspiring photographer Jack Early (Howard Duff) so desperately craves success that, like a modern-day Yojimbo, he pits two rival crime bosses against one another in an elaborate scheme designed to catapult him to the top of the journalistic food chain. Alas, Early is such a smug little twit that it’s difficult not to wholeheartedly root for his demise during the entirety of Joseph Pevney’s Shakedown. As contentious mob adversaries, dapper Brian Donlevy and human bulldozer Lawrence Tierney bring some steely ruthlessness to this clumsily melodramatic noir, even as Duff – whose resemblance to John Garfield is only skin-deep – proves unbearably annoying and his snow-white love interest Ellen (Peggy Dow), employed as a newspaper “picture editor,” serves as a constant reminder of the story’s less-than-modern attitude towards women. Sluggish and not nearly sordid enough for a tale of tabloid deceit and corruption, the film at least offers up a supremely hilarious climactic death scene, in which Early’s undoing nonetheless fails to prevent him from capturing one last picture-perfect criminal snapshot.
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Joseph Pevney adequately directs this minor film noir about a ruthless opportunistic shutterbug, Jack Early (Howard Duff), who will do anything to get his foot in the door of a San Francisco newspaper. It's adapted by writers Martin G. Goldsmith and Alfred Lewis Levitt from a story by Nat Dallinger & Don Martin.
Jack Early (Howard Duff) snaps a photo of a gangland beating by the docks and talks his way into a probationary job for a week with the San Francisco Daily Record. The editor, David Glover (Bruce Bennett), reluctantly hires him against his better judgment when newspaper executive Ellen Bennett (Peggy Dow) goes to bat for him. By stepping over other photographers on the newspaper Jack delivers two more great photos that boost newspaper sales. Glover assigns Jack to get a posed exclusive photo of shady businessman Nick Palmer (Brian Donlevy), who never poses for such photos. The fast-talking Jack gets the photo and works a deal with the hood to get an incriminating photo of Nick's ex-partner Harry Coulting (Lawrence Tierney) while he's committing a department store robbery so he can be cleanly removed from Nick's turf without suspecting who it was that tipped him off. Jack takes two photos, one a blurred one he gives to the newspaper and the other a clear shot of Coulton's gang in action which he keeps hidden in Ellen's apartment to blackmail the crime boss for $25,000 from ever being published. Jack also begins a romance with Ellen, breaking up her relationship with a Portland dentist. Ellen fights for him to get a permanent job on the newspaper, which Glover agrees to but shows disdain for Jack's blind ambition and total disregard of others. When Jack tips Coulton off that it was Nick who framed him, Coulton's hoods detonate a car bomb killing Nick while Jack is there to get the photo. Jack is riding high with national professional recognition and turns down the newspaper job despite Ellen begging him to take it. The ambitious guy becomes a famous freelance photographer and gets hired to be the exclusive photographer for socialite Mrs. Worthington's house party, where he arranges for Coulton to rob the place of its million dollar worth of jewels. Jack is in love with Nick's beautiful widow Nita (Anne Vernon), and hopes to get enough money from this heist to live with her in Europe. But Coulton double-crosses Jack and informs Nita that her hubby was killed by Jack. In the end, Jack gets his comeuppance in a wild shootout at Mrs. Worthington's mansion, where Jack gets a snapshot of the thug who killed him.
It was a routine story that is more about a depiction of the American drive for material success than an exposé newspaper story. Howard Duff does a credible job as the cad, while Lawrence Tierney is in his element as the menacing hood.
Where Danger Lives [Mark Fertig]
In Shakedown, Howard Duff plays the aptly named Jack Early, a driven
news photographer out to make a name with one of the big San Francisco papers.
His ambition is such that he’s willing to do anything in order to get his foot
in the door, including taking a vicious beating. The film opens with verve:
Early is chased along the waterfront by a group of hoodlums. Just before losing
the footrace with the thugs, we see him round a corner and hastily stash his
real camera while pulling a dummy rig from his coat pocket. The thugs throw the
dummy off the pier and proceed to wallop the daylights out of Jack before
tossing him into the path of an oncoming dock train. He staggers out of the
way, retrieves his treasured camera from its hiding spot, and the scene cuts to
his dark room where he appraises his handiwork, a series of freshly printed
negatives. The snaps are good enough to land Early his dream job: a one-week
tryout on the paper, which he quickly makes the most of.
The
protagonist of Shakedown is the quintessential anti-hero. His flaws are so
damning that he can only find redemption in death, and so apparent that his
ultimate doom is never in question, the film moves determinedly towards Early’s
date with destiny. Yet the more fascinating aspect of the film, and by
extension film noir, is the way in which the second World War and its effects
on American culture and the individual fighting man loom unspoken over the
film. The implied wartime experiences of the male leads in post-war noir were
so universally taken for granted by audiences that the protagonist’s combat
record not only goes without saying, but his jaded and cynical attitude is
intuitively understood. Having participated in the war first hand Early is so
desensitized by his experiences that recording horrible images of carnage and
calamity for an eager (and likewise numb) public seems a natural way to earn a
living. His moral system has been so skewed by the war that he thinks nothing
of exploiting his photographic ‘victims’ in order to make his images more
sensational and consequently more attractive to his public. Their insatiable
appetite for the sensational and their complicity in empowering Early makes his
profession not just an acceptable meal ticket, but also a fast track to fame
and fortune.
The
character development of Jack Early occurs in two generally distinct phases: in
the first third of Shakedown Early is a rising photographer, shooting those
sorts of ubiquitous urban calamities like burning buildings or a smashed taxis,
and using his warped sense of theater to create a more sensational tableau — by
offering ‘direction’ to the woman in the window of the building and the man trying
to escape the wrecked cab. These scenes in particular bring to mind the opening
sequence of the 1952 Broderick Crawford film Scandal Sheet, in which reporter
John Derek and shutterbug Harry Morgan glibly deceive and manipulate the
distraught sister of a murder victim in order to get the most sensational and
visually horrifying photograph possible. Both films deal indirectly with the
ethics of journalism and the ways in which the blind ambition of the men in the
news racket have powerful repercussions on public morality and the erosion of
personal integrity.
The much
more contrived second two-thirds show Early’s machinations after achieving
success and some warped degree of professional notoriety. The transition
happens when Jack receives a tip from a slick racketeer (Brian Donlevy) that
places him in the ‘right place at the right time’ to snap a crew of department
store heisters. Early gets the precious shot of the gang (led by Donlevy’s
rival Lawrence Tierney) at the moment of their getaway. Instead of sharing the
incriminating photograph with his editor or the authorities, Early burns the
candle at both ends — providing his paper with an obscured image while using
the clear shot to blackmail Tierney. Early’s big leap into full-blown
criminality steers the narrative into more convoluted territory after he
double- and triple-crosses his underworld contacts, each time believing an
incriminating photo will keep him off the hook. The ironic and fatal flaw of
Jack’s scheme is that while his plans are indeed logical, he fails to grasp
that is not in the nature of hoodlums (particularly those brought to vivid life
by Lawrence Tierney) to solve problems rationally. So in the end, Jack Early
falls victim to one of the greatest character flaws of the film noir heel: he’s
simply too smart for his own good.
And
although in the ingeniously ironic climax he finds redemption, he lacks the
good nature fate demands in order to allow one to save his own life.
Shakedown (1950) - Notes - TCM.com
Philibert, Nicolas
TO BE AND TO HAVE
To Be and To Have Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine
Nicolas Philibert observes life inside a one-room schoolhouse in
northern
BACK TO NORMANDY
Back To Normandy (Retour A Normandie) | Review | Screen Allan Hunter from Screendaily
Any documentary is an act of remembrance. Back To Normandy
has a special personal significance for director Nicolas Philibert because it
allows him to return to the scene of his earliest filmmaking experiences and
also to pay homage to his mentor Rene Allio.
The film displays the
curiosity and generosity of spirit that have come to characterise Philibert's
work but the subject matter lacks the universal appeal and instant charm that
made Etre Et Avoir such a stellar success. Interest in Back To
Philibert was hired as
an assistant director on Moi, Pierre Riviere in 1975 when he was just
24. The film has a unique flavour because of the location shooting and the
decision by Allio to use non-professional local farmers and their families to
portray the notorious 19th century murderer and members of his family. Thirty
years later, Philibert returns to capture the memories of those who remain and
paint a portrait of their lives then and now.
He is typically
unobtrusive in his interview technique, capturing individuals in their most
comfortable surroundings. He doesn't lead or coax but merely allows them to
share their own memories in their own words. We learn of the community's pride
in the project and some of the tragedies that have befallen cast members.
Philibert also seems intent on honouring Allio's decision to create an honest,
accurate portrait of country life. Philibert emphasises the muck and mud of
farm life as we are shown the details of cider production and subjected to the
slaughter of a pig.
Back To Normandy is a very gentle, smoothly flowing production
in which scenes from Moi, Pierre Riviere are allowed to interrupt the
narrative. In a strong tradition of European rural dramas from that period {Akenfield
(1974), Tree Of Wooden Clogs (1978)}, it appears to have held up well
and will convince viewers that it is well worth re-visiting or trying to see
for the first time. Production diaries, stills and material from the late
Allio's papers provide a detailed background to the production, and Philibert
scores a small coup in tracking down the lead actor Claude Hebert who is now a
priest working in Haiti.
A self-effacing
figure, Philibert never imposes himself on the film, preferring to stress the
communal experience of its creation and the very human stories that have
emerged from his return journey. He does allow himself to save the most
personal reason for his return until a final touching moment.
Pialat, Maurice
While much admired by Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut,
Pialat was considered a problematic director, difficult to work with on a set,
claiming as many detractors as fans. “I
don’t like you either,” he allegedly snarled at a
A volatile realist who’s often compared to John Cassavetes, though their works have very different tones and effects, both share a tendency to observe extreme behavior with an objective, realistic eye. According to Film Comment editor-at-large Kent Jones: “Where the breaks in a Cassavetes film are strictly behavior-oriented, getting at the essential unpredictability of people...Pialat’s often feel like the exquisite agony of the moment, which must always come to an end, the transience of experience, eternally invigorating and just as frustrating—few filmmakers have ever come as close to capturing it on film…Of his 11 features, three — WE WON'T GROW OLD TOGETHER, A NOS AMOURS, and VAN GOGH — are among the finest films made in France or any other country in the last half century, and the rest aren't far behind.”
Maurice
Pialat - Director - Films as Director:, Other Film:, Publications Ginette Vincendeau from Film Reference
Described by Alain Bergala in Cahiers du Cinéma as "Renoir's true heir today," Maurice Pialat is squarely in the tradition of French auteur cinema. Like Renoir, Feyder, and Grémillon in the 1930s, and Godard, Resnais, Varda, and a few others after the war, Pialat is an artisan who works both within and against the French film industry. He has often acknowledged his "debt" to Renoir, as well as to Pagnol, in terms of both working methods and a certain conception of realism. However, unlike the benign humanism of these two predecessors, Pialat's work is marked by harshness, violence, and conflict, both on and off screen.
From his first feature ( L'enfance nue , on deprived childhood), Pialat's films have shown an almost ethnographic concern with unglamorous areas of French society: difficult adolescents ( Passe ton bac d'abord ), semi-hooligans ( Loulou ), the bitter breakdown of a couple ( Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble ) and cancer ( La gueule ouverte ), combining a quasi cinéma-vérité approach with the reworking of deeply personal matters. Although Pialat has claimed to be "fed up with realism," and even though he has made forays into genre films with Police and Sous le soleil de Satan , his cinema is still within a realistic idiom, fusing the New Wave (and neo-realist) concern with location shooting and contemporary setting with the "intimate" realism of the central European cinema of the 1960s. His films draw on basic realist strategies such as the use of non-professional or little-known actors (sometimes alongside stars like Gérard Depardieu, and on occasion—Renoir-style—the charismatic Pialat himself), the frequent recourse to improvisation and colloquial language, hand-held camerawork, long takes, and shooting without a finished script. If these strategies traditionally produce a sense of immediacy and authenticity, they often combine, in Pialat's films, with a rare violence.
Pialat has earned a reputation as a "difficult" director. To some extent, this is an inherent part of the myth of auteur cinema which stresses the romantic pains of creation. Yet Pialat's career is littered with well-publicized working and personal conflicts: with actors Gérard Depardieu ( Loulou ) and Sophie Marceau ( Police ), with scriptwriter Catherine Breillat over Police , and with technicians on many occasions. But part of his method consists precisely of inscribing his own personal relationships within the fabric of his films, as epitomised in A nos amours by the Pialat/Bonnaire couple (on several professional and personal levels).
" Pialat le terrible ," as he was dubbed by a French paper, sometimes makes headlines, and occasionally the courtrooms. This would be mere gossip if it did not echo the very subject matter of his films. In the same way as Sam Fuller defined cinema as "a battleground," Pialat's filmmaking might be described as belonging to the boxing ring. He has repeatedly stated his preference for situations where people have rows, where they clash, where "there is trouble," and this is borne out by all his films, where conflict is the preferred element, a type of conflict which moreover assumes a great physicality. In Pialat's cinema, contact is more likely to be made through violence than through tenderness, particularly within the family, where the boxing ring overlaps with the Oedipal stage. This is true both thematically (families and couples tearing each other apart) and in the way Pialat's films address their spectators. A predominance of indoor scenes shot in claustrophobic medium close-ups, and the deliberate inclusion of "flawed" episodes, of moments of rupture or tension in the films, are ways of capturing "the truth" of characters or situations, sometimes with little regard for narrative continuity. Pialat does not pull his punches, and his cinema, in the words of editor Yann Dedet, "tends more towards emotion than comprehension."
If Pialat's films, in their bleak examination of some of the least palatable aspects of contemporary French society and personal emotions, make for difficult viewing, their reward lies in an emotional and documentary power rare in French cinema today.
Lightning in a Bottle - Film Comment Kent Jones, May/June 2004
Why is Maurice Pialat considered a giant in France and just another French director here?
Outside of the relatively
small circle of American cinephiles who know his work well, he’s “the French
Cassavetes,” or the director of Loulou, or the guy who made that weird
movie about Van Gogh, the one where he doesn’t cut off his ear. That’s Van
Gogh, damned with such faint praise by the then all-powerful Vincent Canby
(“made with intelligence and acted with earnest conviction”). Astonishing that
such a ferocious film could elicit such a tweedy response. But then, Pialat has
always been out of sync with someone or something.
Perhaps it’s just a quirk
of history. Pialat was what we call a late bloomer. After a failed career as a
painter, he dabbled in theater and documentary filmmaking before making his
first notable short, L’Amour existe, in 1960 at the age of 35. His first
feature didn’t arrive until the New Wave had crested, much to his endless
chagrin. Resolutely small-scale, stubbornly devoted to rendering the emotional
life of a foster child, firmly fixed within the universe of “la France
profonde,” L’Enfance nue was about a million miles from May ’68. To say
that Pialat marched to the beat of a different drummer is to put it mildly. In
fact, he didn’t really march at all. He ambled, and fuck anybody who got it
into their head that they’d like to amble along with him. Or behind him. Or
ahead of him.
Even more than Jean
Eustache (for whom he did a typically hard-nosed acting turn as a teacher in Mes
petites amoureuses), Pialat was an irascibly private artist, charting a
twisted, crook-backed path with each new movie, almost always emerging with
works in which the mind-bending vitality of immediate experience trumps all
belief systems, allegiances, plans. Elsa Zylberstein, who played a prostitute
in Van Gogh, once told me that working with Pialat was like trying to
walk a straight line in a funhouse after downing a quart of vodka. Lightning in
a bottle—a motto, a working principle, an instinct, a way of life. “Stop—what
you’re doing now, that’s exactly what I want,” he would tell Elsa. “What?” she
would ask. “You just lost it!” “What did I just lose?!?”
More than Cassavetes,
more than Renoir, Pialat wanted every frame of celluloid bearing his name to be
marked by the here and the now. Yet unlike Renoir, he was a profoundly
inelegant filmmaker. Peter Handke once judged him a very bad storyteller, which
isn’t wrong (he was also lousy at comedy and even worse with sex). The irony is
that Pialat himself would doubtlessly have agreed—proudly. He was always
willing to bend his narratives around experience. And the frequent ruptures,
discontinuities, perspective shifts, and ellipses in his work are less
single-minded than those of Cassavetes, more far-reaching in their
implications. Where the breaks in a Cassavetes film are strictly
behavior-oriented, getting at the essential unpredictability of people,
Pialat’s often feel like frayed-edge manifestations of Tarkovsky’s “pressure of
time.” The exquisite agony of the moment, which must always come to an end, the
transience of experience, eternally invigorating and just as frustrating—few
filmmakers have ever come as close to capturing it on film. Pialat’s background
as a painter was a key weapon in his assault on unfolding reality. Not that he
ever pursued visual effects or flourishes—light, color, and motion are at the
core of his films in the same way they’re at the core of life for anyone with
an aesthetic bone in their body. The boy in the small wallpapered rooms in L’Enfance
nue, Sandrine Bonnaire sunning herself on the boat at the beginning of À
nos amours, the dying woman cloistered in that austere room in La Gueule
ouverte, the riverside dance filtered through dusty summer sunlight in Van
Gogh, not to mention the “formal” dance in the brothel, the last,
bittersweet word on the position of the artist in bourgeois society—visions
snatched from the fleeting beauty of everyday, banal existence, endowed with
exactly the right dimensions and proportions in space and time.
Breaking into the moment.
Rupturing the flow. Freedom and entrapment. The instant captured and the
instant gone. The push/pull of Pialat’s seemingly instinctual cinema is all of
a piece with his parade of prickly, discontented heroes. After Jean Yanne in We
Won’t Grow Old Together, Dutronc’s profoundly pissed-off Van Gogh
was Pialat’s most impressive alter ego—alternately endearing and misanthropic,
hungry for experience yet fed up with life, looking for community but shunning
the company of others. Aside from those milestones, Pialat’s heart is with
children and adolescents: Raoul Billerey’s Roby in L’Enfance nue, the
teenagers in Passe ton bac d’abord, his own son Antoine, preciously
immortalized at the age of four in Le Garu. And, of course, Sandrine Bonnaire—if he had never done anything else,
Pialat would deserve a fixed place in the heavenly firmament for discovering
her as an adolescent, not to mention building a masterpiece around her with À
nos amours. Of his 11 features, three—We Won’t Grow Old Together, À nos
amours, and Van Gogh—are among the finest films made in France or
any other country in the last half century, and the rest aren’t far behind. As
a body of work, it’s neither optimistic nor pessimistic, neither affirmative
nor negative—one gets the impression that for Pialat to arrive at a fixed position,
a “point of view,” would have been but one small step short of an artistic
living death. In every conceivable way, from every possible angle, Pialat’s
cinema is all about the shock—startling, violent, eternally and teasingly
promising—of being alive.
email about Maurice Pialat Devon Dickau e-mail interview with Dan Sallit on Maurice Pialat from The UCLA Daily Bruin, January 28, 2005
Below is an interview by a UCLA student
with Dan Sallitt, who is a long-time admirer of Maurice Pialat and who helped
the student with a few questions when the films toured out in LA. Thought you
might find their exchange interesting:
In a few sentences, who was Maurice Pialat?
A film director. His first
art was painting, though he was a film enthusiast from early adulthood, and
made amateur 16mm films with his friends while working day jobs.
Eventually he began making documentaries for French TV, and then, rather late
in life, feature films. Though he had difficulty raising funds all his
life, he managed to turn out 11 full-length fiction works in the years between
his great 1967 debut L'ENFANCE NUE and his final film, 1995's LE GARCU.
He died, of kidney problems, early in 2003.
His style, sometimes called
"rough," "vibrant" or "passionate," often features long takes and medium
close-ups to study his actors' faces. What
did this style achieve? How was his style different from other French filmmakers from the past
several decades?
Pialat's occasional use of long
takes is a characteristic of his early films; after 1974, he uses a more
fragmented style. In all his films, though, he tries to generate a great
deal of contradictory material on his characters, playing with improvisation
and drawing on biographical and autobiographical material. He then
assembles this material in an imbalanced way, with big chunks of time removed
from the story, and the characters' contradictions emphasized rather than
explained. What he sacrifices in drama, he makes up in a powerful sense
of immediacy.
What do you know about Maurice Pialat's
personal life? Do you think his "nastiness"
influenced how his films were received throughout
Pialat was said to be moody and
difficult to work with, and his confrontational and sometimes belligerent
interviews certainly reinforce that idea.
I do not believe that his films would have been received much differently had
he been a different person. If anything, his celebrated (in
Why do you think Pialat, such a talented filmmaker, is
usually considered lesser-known?
His films are difficult. In
one way or another, they are all about death, about time going away. They
are not films for people who need to relax after a hard day at work.
Comment on Pialat as a bridge between the
New Wave and contemporary French
cinema. How influential was he? Should he have been more
influential?
Like Eustache and Breillat,
Pialat came after the New Wave and had to make his own way without the benefit
of a publicized movement. I believe he was a bridge only in the sense
that a generation of young, daring filmmakers in the 90s were inspired by the
integrity and consistency of his career, despite his relative obscurity.
Pialat is unique, and other filmmakers are likely to trip up badly if they try
to do what he does. His honesty and his penetrating view of life are
inspirational to many, but perhaps it's best that his influence is not too
direct.
If
you have seen his films, what especially intrigues you about his work? Are there any aspects that may make
it harder to speak to a wide audience?
This relates to questions and
answers above. Wide audiences usually don't come to filmmakers who deal
with painful subjects and actively undercut the dramatic/storytelling aspects
of their work.
Of the many things that intrigue me about his work, one that I haven't touched
on much is the way he uses biographical material. One gets the sense that
he doesn't trust screenwriters, including himself, to come up with material
that is lifelike enough to make a good movie. So he often started from
his own life experiences, or those of his collaborators, just to have material
random and erratic enough to satisfy himself.
What did his passing in 2003 as the end of an era
signify for French film and
world cinema in general?
He died at a time when a new
generation who loved his work had begun to make good films of their own.
Why do think the UCLA Film Archive is bringing
a Film Series of his feature films to
Pialat has recently become a name
among film writers, and yet his films are still little seen. He is in the
process of passing directly from relative obscurity to the status of a great
master, without ever having gone through a period of reappraisal and gradual
appreciation. One hopes that his death will cement his standing in the
critical world, so that these great films will continue to be shown.
What can future filmmakers learn from
Pialat?
They can rediscover the
relationship between art and poverty! His is a hard path to follow.
The Relentless Vision of Maurice Pialat (Web Exclusive) — Cineaste ... Adam Bingham from Cineaste magazine, 2009
In his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson describes Maurice Pialat as “a wounded, battered humanist, one of the few links we have now to the heritage of Ozu, Mizoguchi and Renoir.” Conversely, in a review of his film Police for Time Out, critic Chris Peachment echoes what has become a more widespread reaction to Pialat when he offers a contrasting heritage within which to position and understand the director: that of French culture’s perceived strain of overt misanthropy. Both the commonalities and the discrepancies between these competing viewpoints—each writer’s elucidation of Pialat’s lineage in diametrically opposed terms—bespeaks something of the ambiguous position this director occupies within the annals of French filmmaking, and the tenuous balance of antinomies that define his career.
He was a fiercely independent figure who nonetheless sporadically worked with big stars in recognizable (if frequently distorted) generic frameworks. He combines elements of fiction and documentary modes, and is a director of naturalistic, domestic, ostensibly realist narratives that manage to open windows onto grander themes and concerns: from the structures of patriarchal culture to the transience of time and the viability of an interior, spiritual life in a frequently hostile or debased milieu. Furthermore, within the films themselves, one finds characters and scenes that mirror such extrafilmic dichotomies by progressing in an uneasy tension and marked symbiosis between contrasting states: between, for example, tenderness and violence, or between quietude and closeness on the one hand, and dislocation, alienation, and despair on the other.
If several of the above features call to mind Robert Bresson, this is far from coincidental. Indeed, the comparison is rather illuminating. Both directors began their artistic lives as painters before moving on to filmmaking, and both began anomalously with comedic works (Bresson with a now-lost comedy of manners entitled Les Affaires Publiques in 1934, Pialat in 1957 with a stylized, silent slapstick short called Funny Reels that looks back to René Clair and forward to the work of Richard Lester). Both directors worked selectively on very personal projects over a period of around four decades, their careers often intersecting with notable trends and movements (particularly the Nouvelle Vague and thereafter the emerging canonical European art cinema) without ever becoming a part of these prevailing cinematic winds. And both filmmakers are elliptical storytellers whose films are built as much around absences as around what is present, what is left out as opposed to what is realized.
It is this final point that is perhaps Pialat’s most salient and striking narrative technique: the aspect of his style that is most immediately apparent when considering his work as a whole. It is also a dichotomy that can be applied to Pialat himself, who attained name recognition as a director while his work remained relatively little seen, and only rarely written about. The heretofore lack of availability of his work has certainly contributed to the ongoing dearth of critical discourse on Pialat in English language criticism (one short book thus far, published in the U.K. in 2006 as part of a series on French filmmakers). Thanks to Eureka’s Masters of Cinema series, Artificial Eye, and Criterion, however, one can for the first time begin to discover Maurice Pialat on DVD, and it proves a welcome, long overdue opportunity.
Viewed today, six years after his death and twelve years since his last work, he emerges as a key figure in the development of that austere, uncompromising strain of French cinema that would achieve prominence in films like Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien, Sandrine Veysset’s Will it Snow for Christmas?, and Bertrand Tavernier’s The Bait, and which today finds its nadir in such figures as the Dardenne brothers and Bruno Dumont. Pialat’s early works anticipate these films’ microcosmic stories of broken families and corrosive personal relationships, their emphasis on predominantly working-class characters and environments, and their concern with existential self-definition and the extent to which characters’ identities and subjectivity can be shaped by personal agency as opposed to the environment and familial/social milieu in which they live. What is surprising, no less than it is astonishing, is how early in his career Pialat cemented this particular esthetic, and at a time when there was almost no audience for works of committed social realism.
By the time of his first feature, Naked-Childhood in 1969 (which was a commercial disaster upon its theatrical release), Pialat had already developed and refined the stylistic and thematic features that would continue to dominate his subsequent work. Naked-Childhood concerns a young orphan and juvenile delinquent and his protracted and problematic attempts to fit in within two contrasting foster homes: one a young family with their own child, the other an elderly couple with experience of fostering who have other children already living with them. Given this subject matter, Pialat’s film clearly takes its place within a well-worn genre in French cinema—the drama of adolescence. It is a dramatic framework that has seen notable films by Jacques Feyder (The Faces of Children), Jean Vigo (the seminal Zéro de conduite), René Clément (Forbidden Games), Louis Malle (Zazie on the Metro), Lucile Hadzihalilovic (Innocence), and the aforementioned Sandrine Veysset (Will it Snow for Christmas?), in addition of course to numerous works by Truffaut (The 400 Blows, The Wild Child, Small Change).
With Truffaut as coproducer on Naked-Childhood, one can but refer back ten years to his own feature debut as a point of comparison to Pialat’s first film, and the two prove fundamentally different. Truffaut follows Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Antoine Doinel step by step through his fractured adolescent existence: from unhappy home life and troubled schooling, through close friendship, juvenile delinquency, and ultimately on to capture, imprisonment, and escape. At each successive stage of the story, he carefully elucidates the incidents and familial/environmental hardships that impact upon his young protagonist, and thereby stresses the concrete specificity of this particular case. Pialat, by contrast, employs an elliptical narrative form and a more distanced, dispassionate tone, leaving gaps in action and motivation that require an active viewer to invest in the film to fill in its myriad empty spaces.
Most overtly, Naked-Childhood set the template for almost all Pialat’s subsequent films insofar as its stark opening throws the audience straight into a story in medias res, a narrative already underway within which we have to work hard to orient ourselves. There is no exposition regarding young Francois’s real family, nor does Pialat endeavor as his narrative develops to explain his protagonist’s contradictory, self-destructive behavior, such as his constant reversion to acts of delinquency even when he seems to be finding happiness in his new home. As such, Pialat’s elliptical style becomes both narratively and thematically motivated, as it is a marked absence (of a secure home and family) that continues to define Francois’s life. Conversely, the abrupt, disorienting opening further reflects this young character, someone who himself has been, and will again be, suddenly thrown into a new environment and left to make his own faltering way. By the end, he himself has become an absence, the writer of a letter to his last foster parents whose positivity it is up to each of us to decipher for ourselves.
Pialat’s third film, The Mouth Agape, followed Naked-Childhood by proving unpopular on its initial theatrical release. Made in 1974, just two years after Cries and Whispers, the film covers ostensibly similar territory to Bergman’s drama: that of a woman’s protracted, agonizing death from (presumably) cancer, and the effect this has on those around her. Otherwise, however, there is little commonality between the two films. Narratively, Pialat replaces the sisters in Bergman’s film with his middle-aged protagonist’s estranged husband and adult son, while stylistically he completely overhauls Bergman’s design. Working for the first and only time with the great cinematographer Nestor Almendros, Pialat forgoes the stylized blood red and pure whites of Bergman’s mise-en-scène, not to mention the rich natural tones of his DP’s work with Terence Malick and Eric Rohmer. Instead, he develops a desaturated, almost monochromatic color palette of dull browns and greens and murky grey-whites, the increasing lack of color an objective correlative to the life draining away from the central character.
Moreover, where Bergman’s characters in Cries and Whispers wrestle with spiritual, divine questions of faith and belief, The Mouth Agape is the least spiritual film one could imagine. It is unblinking in its focus on the corporeality of human identity, on earthly, corruptible flesh as the repository of self-definition. It is, quite obviously, the decay of the woman’s body that anchors Pialat’s film. But against this is set the husband and son’s ceaseless desire for women and sex, their constant need for healthy female bodies, which is underlined in a sequence shot showing the son, Phillipe, undressing and desperately kissing and caressing a prostitute before collapsing on a bed in premature excitement. This is not seen to be motivated entirely by their wife/mother’s condition—it is made clear that both have long behaved in this fashion. But their actions are exacerbated by her encroaching death, and as such relate to a crisis of masculinity in which a consumption of sex becomes an attempt to negate a fundamental lack, specifically the Lacanian lack associated with the symbolic order of subjectivity in which the child enters the realm of the father (underlined by the commonality of their actions in this film) and seeks out sexual substitutes for the mother. In effect, they are seeking a measure of respite through control of other women, as death becomes figured as a chasm (the woman’s gaping, consuming mouth) that wrests power away from them and negates their status as living, desiring subjects.
Connected to this is the sense that the mother’s debilitation proves analogous to the behavior of these men. As noted above, the title of the film comes from a scene in which the now-incapacitated woman is being fed, and opens her mouth wide to receive the food that she then mechanically chews as a kind of residual instinct divorced from emotion or enjoyment. Eating is thus signposted as a significant feature of The Mouth Agape, and accrues a symbolic import in the equally residual sexual urges of the two men, in their own appetites which they seek to fulfill as if acting out a preordained fate. Given the preponderance of mealtime scenes in Pialat’s work (more so even than Chabrol), and their frequent basis as a site for tense scenes of domestic antagonism, this particular film could well be argued to be a key to the cinema of Maurice Pialat.
This primal male/female dimension reappears in the third film available from Eureka: Pialat’s seventh, and, on the surface, most uncharacteristic film. Police was an original screenplay by Catherine Breillat, who subsequently fell out with Pialat and saw her script worked over by a number of other writers (even after production had commenced) in order to flesh out the masculine aspects of the story. The film initially seems to be a narrative anomaly in Pialat’s oeuvre, a particularly rigorous and detailed but otherwise not terribly unconventional French policier. What emerges, however, is arguably one of the most radical genre films in French cinema. It is a film of two distinct halves, in which an investigation by Gérard Depardieu’s determined cop Mangin into drug-trafficking by three North African immigrants and a French woman named Noria (Sophie Marceau) suddenly transforms into a tale of obsessive love and personal loss as Mangin begins a desperate affair with Noria, whom he could not convict.
Beginning in typical Pialat style with an interrogation already underway, the first part of Police proceeds with an almost documentary veracity and enormous attention to the details of the case. There are several more lengthy interrogations, and through the movement between these interviews the dynamics of the hypermasculine environment of the police station is laid bare. This, however, proves misleading when the case against Noria fails and the narrative dynamic changes to antipathy and investigation within the fraternity of the criminals, who know Noria has stolen their money. This is where the emphasis on intense interrogations in the first section of the film emerges as crucial, as they throw into relief the figurative interrogations that define its latter half, wherein Mangin attempts to uncover the truth about Noria, about her actions and feelings. And thus, like The Mouth Agape, it is the elusive, unknowable woman that dictates masculine behavior, and the crises that arise therein.
Alongside this ambitious structure, however, comes a feeling that Police’s thematic focus is not well-served by its narrative (something perhaps derived from its various authors). The metamorphosis of Sophie Marceau’s Noria from object of interrogation to object of lust and desire, from the focus of an institutional to a personal gaze (so clearly signaled as two sides of the same coin), is never entirely satisfactorily worked through with regard to her narrative context. Beside her, Depardieu’s protagonist remains too distant and opaque a presence to fully elucidate and explore by contrast the rich potentiality of male arrogance, impotence, and need for control that the earlier drama We Will Not Grow Old Together so successfully mined. One may regard this as a presentation of essential emptiness, just as Noria is thematically positioned as unknowable and distant. But for an almost two-hour film these points become belabored, the characters mere thematic ciphers rather than the flesh and blood people so convincingly etched elsewhere by Pialat. And, as a consequence, they would appear to become default settings for a director working in a new and alterior narrative and generic universe and feeling himself to be alienated within it, a director too markedly falling back on the familiar with the kind of residual urge that afflicts a number of his characters. Nonetheless, at a time when the policier in France had passed its successive heydays of Becker, Melville, José Giovanni, and Jacques Deray, and entered a heritage-dominated national cinematic wasteland in which it would remain until the likes of Olivier Marchal and Jacques Maillot rescued and redefined it, Police was a timely genre film. And it remains interesting as such because implicitly it simultaneously unpicks and comments on its generic status and foundation, and in so doing offers a gift to connoisseurs of both genre and auteur theory as an example of how the two can clash and run counter to one another.
The two most recent Eureka releases in the Masters of Cinema Pialat series are also in many ways the most valuable, representing as they do a pair of films that have never before been available in the U.K. or the U.S., and indeed that have rarely been seen even in theatrical screenings. Pass Your Exams First and the aforementioned We Will Not Grow Old Together can be regarded as companion pieces to two other Pialat films with which they form particularly revealing parallels. Following on from Naked-Childhood, the former could well have been called Naked-Adolescence. It shares with its progenitor a candid, unflinchingly naturalistic, unsentimental tone and quasi-véritéstyle, along with a focus on troubled, damaged youth in a run-down working-class milieu (in this case Lens). In contrast to Naked-Childhood’s focus on a single young boy, however, the latter film features a multitude of characters, centering as it does on the plight of a group of aimless teenagers who are thrown into the deep end of the real world after finishing school, and who struggle with how best to proceed with their lives while similarly despairing over their troubled home lives and personal relationships.
Pass Your Exams First is noteworthy for refusing not only to sentimentalize or romanticize its youngsters, but also to conceive of their lives in anything other than the most immediate, sensory terms. Unlike the myriad young characters in Italian neorealism—unlike even those in the aforementioned Nouvelle Vague films by Truffaut and Malle (which both celebrate the potentialities of singular youthful subjectivity and innocence by depicting Paris as an exclusive playground)—Pialat’s teenagers here carry almost no subtextual weight or symbolic baggage. They are represented and defined as “youth” in so far as the travails of their lives and actions carry a recognizable charge, but are not used as narrative signifiers or signposts to anything beyond the denotative. As Bruno Dumont would do in his debut The Life of Jesus (itself released on the Eureka Masters of Cinema label just prior to these works), Pialat trades off specificity against abstraction, the concrete details of location, time, and place against the universality of the problems on view. Thus, the film’s deceptively free-style structure, which adds to an air of discursive observation, compares and contrasts various problems facing teenagers. Pialat simply drops in apparently arbitrarily on the characters, picks out his subjects, then moves on to consider others as is his wont, leaving several stories and lives suspended in narrative animation. This leads to specific formal contrasts and juxtapositions, such as those between the various relationships that develop and disintegrate over the course of the film, and these as opposed to the case of one boy who voraciously chases any and every girl he possibly can, including those he has already been with.
The result is a narrative methodology that destabilizes its own prototypically binding laws of causality and spatio-temporal coherence, something that emerges as an especially connotative move in that it ultimately testifies to Pialat’s desire to explore post-high-school youth as a particularly, paradigmatically interstitial time. In other words, such extrafilmic devices and dichotomies (particularly the fact/fiction divide) provide an objective correlative to characters who are caught in a push/pull of opposing forces: between school and work, family life and independence (two characters leave Lens for a new start in Paris at the film’s end), and between youth and adulthood, the past and the future. With this, Pialat is taking a significant step towards the realization of his long-cherished project À nos amours, and prefigures what will be that film’s defining image (in French cinema’s second most iconic freeze-frame ending) of life as an endless negotiation of the aforementioned dichotomies. Pialat’s adult characters tend to collapse before the weight of their own extremes of feeling and behavior, action and reflection (that is, they cannot negotiate between opposing states). But taken together with the earlier Naked-Childhood and later À nos amours, one can see in Pass Your Exams First the director’s hope that, for his younger protagonists at least, the possibility of progress exists. It may not be much, but it is as positive as Pialat gets.
We Will Not Grow Old Together, based on Pialat’s own autobiographical novel, is a sober study of the end of a relationship between two people, a middle-aged man and a younger woman. Their tempestuous liaison, already six years old when the film begins, finally approaches its overdue conclusion as the narrowly-focused narrative progresses. Or, to be more precise, it begins irrevocably to break down and disintegrate, and in so doing gives rise to all manner of physical and emotional violence between a couple who can’t live with or without each other, who seem increasingly to retreat into one another out of a fear to move on with, indeed to live, their lives. Much of the film is given over to this curious, masochistic stasis, in which several intense and tumultuous confrontations repeatedly give way, in a series of short, concise scenes—elliptically strung together so as to dispense with any narrative context—to reunions and joyous returns, only to return to violence and discord as quickly and as surely. As such, We Will Not Grow Old Together becomes one of Pialat’s most diagrammatic explorations of the in-between time that afflicts many of his protagonists, and makes the film a fascinating counterpoint to The Mouth Agape’s portrait of the forced breakdown of a marriage between a woman succumbing to terminal illness and her ceaselessly philandering husband. Both films unfold in a nether world, an eternal present caught between remote past and uncertain future, and in both the woman moves beyond the man and out of his life, leaving him stranded at the film’s end without any real hope of progress or personal fulfillment.
We Will Not Grow Old Together takes its place in a well-worn variant on the genre of the melodrama, one that may in fact be termed antimelodrama for the harrowing, claustrophobic, chamber-dramas of recrimination, hurt, loss, and violence (both emotional and physical) that comprise their typical register. Pride of place within this form must go to Rossellini’s masterpiece Voyage in Italy and Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, which together crystallized the template of focusing on masculinity in crisis as the ground zero of domestic discord. It is a schematic that variously defines Agnes Varda’s La Pointe Courte, Godard’s Contempt, Claude Chabrol’s Pleasure Party—which plays out an uncomfortably real scenario featuring writer Paul Gégauff and his actual ex-wife—and more recently Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives, Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, Ryosuke Hashiguchi’s All Around Us, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates, Andrei Zvyagintsev’s The Banishment, and Sam Mendes’s adaptation of Richard Yates’sRevolutionary Road.
Typically, however, Pialat offers variations on this theme. Chief among these is the fact that his protagonists are an unmarried couple, suggesting that the link between them is an entirely physical tie, not the legally-sanctioned union of man and wife, nor even a fulfilling emotional bond: just a physical reaction as marked as the wife’s need for food and the husband and son’s for sex in The Mouth Agape. Therefore, the aggressive masculinity on view in Jean Yanne’s protagonist, especially in the rhyming scenes of near assault in which he first rejects and later almost rapes his partner, becomes an even more desperate, naked attempt at control that can but fail, at dominating a partner who will ultimately elude his grasp.
Relationships between men and women are without exception volatile entities in Pialat’s world, ritualistic sites of both intense conflict and, just as strongly, feelings of desire and passion. But they are always doomed, always exist (as the title of this film ably and amply suggests) in the here and now without any possibility of growth or development. They exist as arenas wherein (especially male) needs and hungers have to be satiated, in the manner of an addict craving a hit, where turbulent emotions are played out only in extremes, and from which respite is sought like a weary soldier from the frontlines or the trenches. We Will Not Grow Old Together is, in this regard, the foundation from which other Pialat films grow, the touchstone for a career built around a very literal battle of the sexes.
Taken together, Eureka’s Masters of Cinema titles offer just about as comprehensive an introduction to Pialat as it is possible to find. Perhaps mindful of the fact that much of this work will be new to a majority of viewers, each of the first three DVD releases (Naked-Childhood, Police, and The Mouth Agape) come in two-disc special editions, and as such each contains a wealth of supplementary material. Much of this takes the form of interviews—some with Pialat, but a majority with the cast and crew involved in the making of the films—which, given that a number of them were conducted shortly after Pialat’s death, tend to focus on the man himself as much as on the works at hand. As interesting as these undoubtedly are, however, the real treasures of these releases are a collection of Pialat’s shorts and discursive essays, ten in all that appear alongside two of the three films. Accompanying The Mouth Agape are Pialat’s very earliest shorts—Funny Reels, The Familiar Shadow and the Eric Rohmer-esque Janine—along with the six brief but rewarding filmed essays he made in Turkey in 1964 (which capture perfectly his documentarian’s eye and poet’s heart). The DVD of Naked-Childhood contains only one short, Love Exists (made in 1960), which is notable for prefiguring the later sojourn in Turkey with its poetic focus on a Parisian working-class suburb.
Each film also features a dense booklet containing a useful essay on the film and newly translated interviews with Pialat, trailers, and an assortment of outtakes and behind-the-scenes footage. In addition, there are two detailed documentaries about Naked-Childhood and Police. The former, entitled Observations: Around Naked-Childhood, was made immediately following production on the film, and features not only an account of its making (via interviews with Pialat and the actors), but also scrutinizes the plight of real-life cases of neglected, abandoned children, and the effects of perpetually being uprooted to live with different families. The latter, Zoom onto Police, is a 2002 featurette consisting of interviews with several of the cast and crew, who all speak candidly about the film’s complicated genesis and troubled production. To complement this documentary short, there is an excerpt from a French television show featuring footage of Pialat and the actors at work during the seventeenth day of production onPolice, which gives a brief glimpse of the director’s instinctive approach to his craft and meticulous working methods.
Pass Your Exams First and We Will Not Grow Old Together are available only in single-disc editions, rather than the two-disc sets of the three other Eureka films. This drop in quantity, however, does not negate the standards of quality established in the earlier releases. Each film is accompanied by substantial interviews that expound on the background to, and making of, the films, while a worthwhile documentary on Pass Your Exams First by Serge Toubiana catches up with the setting and the cast almost thirty years later, and, like the film itself, finds interesting connections between past and present.
The three other DVDs currently available, all of which predate those in the Masters of Cinema series, cover Pialat’s later career, and represent some of his better known, more internationally successful and acclaimed works. From Artificial Eye there is Loulou and the magisterial Van Gogh, and from Criterion a two-disc special edition of À nos amours. These films display most overtly the paradigmatic balance of dichotomous elements, feelings, and impulses that animate Pialat’s body of work, none more so than Van Gogh, in which there arises an even more striking structural antinomy that animates the entire narrative. Here, at least in Pialat’s quietly radical conception (the film covers only the final three months in the painter’s life, his time at Auvers under the watchful, admiring eye of Dr. Gachet), Vincent is a painter who apparently paints only sporadically. Over the course of a two-and-a-half-hour film, there are comparatively few scenes depicting Van Gogh at work. And even those that do appear are either filmed in extreme close-up, showing only paint being daubed onto or scratched away from an already vivid canvas (as in the film’s opening image), or are interrupted, as a multitude of different characters keep frustrating his attempts at painting and thereby denying his expressive needs, his primary emotional outlet.
Of course, in reality this was far from true: his final months in Auvers saw Van Gogh at his most prolific, producing almost a new work every day. Pialat is canny enough, however, to take this knowledge for granted, and thus the fact that he rigorously eschews and elides the scenes of feverish, tortuous creation that figured heavily in both Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life and Robert Altman’s Vincent and Theo feeds into a thematic presentation of Van Gogh as divided soul unable to reconcile his life and his art. In other words, here in his penultimate film, one finds arguably Pialat’s boldest, most narratively pervasive absence—that of the artist away from his art. In place of such scenes, Pialat concentrates on naturalistic moments of domestic life: mealtimes, moments of lust with his prostitute lover or of companionship with prospective partner Marguerite Gachet, and instances of private introspection and torment.
The most striking instance of this approach occurs relatively early, and highlights Van Gogh’s status as Pialat’s most beautiful film. It is a series of scenes depicting Vincent’s brother Theo’s visit from Paris with his wife and newborn child. Over the course of their morning arrival, lunch in the garden, afternoon by the river, and departure in the evening, Pialat and cinematographers Giles Henry and Emmanuel Machuel (with whom he was working for the first time) capture the deepening colors and progressively rich play of light and shadow on water and through foliage to create a simple but palpable sense of the passage of time: “sculpting in time,” to quote the title of a book by Andrei Tarkovsky. At no point does Pialat emphasize or insist upon either a subjective vision (as in the spurious and self-aggrandizing dream narratives of Carlos Saura’sGoya in Bordeaux or Raoul Ruiz’s Klimt) or an objective, distinct sense of the overwhelming beauty of the natural world. The film never cuts away from the characters to survey their sublime surroundings, being content instead to casually observe them as the environments in which the characters act and through which they move. As a result, the film’s keenly felt transience becomes all the more moving and affecting, and its landscapes all the more beatific as a representation of something simple and tangible forming a stage on which tortured characters act out their ritual dramas of death and destruction.
Van Gogh takes its place at the head of Pialat’s career by virtue of the fact that it echoes a number of the director’s earlier films. Most overtly, Vincent Van Gogh himself becomes something of a cinematic brother to François, the foster child protagonist of Pialat’s debut Naked-Childhood. Both have spent a great deal of time being shunted between different homes and surrogate families, and the behavior of both alternates between a longing for love and intimacy, and violent outbursts that alienate those closest to them. As in The Mouth Agape, Van Gogh’s narrative traces a drawn out, incremental slide into inexorable death, while the film calls to mind Police insofar as the central character is torn between his work and his increasingly fractious personal feelings. And finally, the film’s presentation of Theo, his wife Jo and Vincent as a figurative and tense familial unit of parents and problematic, rebellious child has marked overtones of À nos amours. It is for this reason, coupled with Van Gogh’s focus on a painter (Pialat was himself a painter, and remained devoted to art even above filmmaking), that one senses the director here distilling a lifetime’s obsessions and preoccupations. Indeed, it is tempting to conclude that, in one of cinema’s supremely autobiographical oeuvres, it is in fact the real-life tortured artist Vincent Van Gogh with whom Pialat feels the deepest affinity. By turns childlike and aged beyond his years, desperate for love yet unable to keep from alienating those closest to him, shunning family yet incapable of independence and self-sustenance, he is a man and a painter of immense turmoil and deep-seated contradictions. And as a consequence, it is fascinating to read Pialat into him, to speculate on the connection between filmmaker and subject in a work in which the symbiosis of life and art occupies center stage.
If Van Gogh demonstrates the extent to which Pialat’s films can often be seen to reflect and refract one another in their narratives and thematic concerns, the earlier Loulou and À nos amours are particularly apt companion pieces. Like Van Gogh, Loulou is named after its protagonist, in this case a hedonistic, unemployed ex-con (Gérard Depardieu) involved in a fractious relationship with a young woman named Nelly (Isabelle Huppert) who has left her bourgeois home and married life to be with him. (Interestingly, the role of Loulou was originally conceived for Jacques Dutronc, who went on to play Vincent Van Gogh, suggesting a further connection between the two films.) The focus, though, begins more and more to drift onto Nelly, whose divided self (she continues to return to her husband even as she yearns for the earthy, animalistic sexuality on offer from Loulou) marks her out as the true protagonist by dint of the commonality of this characteristic across a majority of Pialat’s central characters.
Nelly thus occupies a figurative place at the center of a conflict between post-women’s-lib social politics and sexual freedom, and perceived entrapment within domesticity. It is problematic for her because, as she says early in the film, she needs both, but can find little room for maneuver as she is perpetually assailed and assaulted by the positions in which she is placed by the men around her. Pialat effectively undermines any anticipated stereotypes, however. The husband Nelly leaves is also her boss at work, which amply connotes the status of their relationship, but he is the one who is also savagely violent with her on a number of occasions. Loulou, in contrast to the cliché of an unreliable, dangerous, sexually available but emotionally closed off thug, is actually given to moments of affection and romance; he introduces Nelly to his mother, and even tells her that his wish is to marry her. And in fact it is only his paranoid belief that Nelly regards him only as a sexual partner that precipitates disillusionment with the relationship on his part.
Typically for Pialat, this sense of competing opposites feeds into a presentation of life as a battleground between uncontrollable emotions and impulses—between action and reflection, violence and tenderness. This is underlined in the person of Nelly’s husband, who three times in the opening thirty minutes violently berates and attacks both his wife and Loulou, only to calm down and talk openly and meekly with them immediately following his outburst. Ultimately, the heart of the film resides in such moments, redolent as they are of a pronounced irreconcilability between emotion and action, between self and other—and of feelings and interior states that cannot be adequately expressed and are corrupted in translation. Each character in Loulou tends to see projections of themselves rather than others. And with the titular figure perhaps on the cusp of a return to prison, it is useful to speculate here (as it is often in Bresson’s films) to speculate on the extent to which the characters are imprisoned within both themselves and their society.
The portrait in Loulou of a young woman precariously poised between sexual proclivity and the constricting nature of her staid, quasibourgeois home life is, in À nos amours, taken up by Pialat and Arlette Langmann (coscenarist on both films) and reworked into what is by common consent among his greatest works. The film centers on fifteen-year-old Suzanne, whose violent and broken home life leads her into a series of sexual encounters with a number of different partners as she tries to compensate for her domestic hardship and absent father (played by Pialat himself). The implied Oedipal thrust behind Suzanne’s trajectory over the course of this film is further underlined and answered in the person of her brother, whose attachment is to his mother, and who beats Suzanne for the contempt she shows toward her.
It is little surprise that Catherine Breillat was initially to work with Pialat on this project, as it ostensibly bears comparison with her own directorial debut, A Real Young Girl. As it is, the fantasy sequences found in Breillat’s film do not materialize in À nos amours. It is, again like Loulou, a raw, semiimprovised slice of life in which the unstable balance of this quasiincestuous family is writ large as a statement on the need for people in close proximity to dominate and consume each other (appropriately, this climactic scene of familial meltdown takes place at a dinner party). It is also, like other Pialat films, a semidocumentary. Where Naked-Childhood contained aspects of discursive material on foster children, and Police on the interior dynamics of a police station and its investigative practices, À nos amours is a documentary about an actress, Sandrine Bonnaire, here making her film debut. A number of the opening shots—of Bonnaire/Suzanne rehearsing a play, lounging on a boat or walking in the sun—resonate with a sense of erotic contemplation and potentiality, and it is tempting now to read them as markers of a performance aimed directly at Pialat’s eagerly receptive and voracious camera. Indeed, the fact that Bonnaire went on to essay very similar roles in two subsequent Pialat films, Police and Under the Sun of Satan, speaks volumes about what she represented for her director.
Indeed, the notion of performance is also inscribed into the thematic core of the film itself. Suzanne is first seen reading for a play at a summer theater camp, and thereafter plays a number of roles for a number of different characters, most overtly in the way she parades her sexuality for a litany of adoring suitors-to-be. In the last instance, this is what makes the warm, positive closing scenes of father/daughter bonding so moving: it is arguably the only time that Suzanne has been allowed to be herself, which in the various battlegrounds of Pialat’s families and relationships is a prized commodity.
The DVDs of Van Gogh, Loulou, and À nos amours are somewhat less exhaustive than their counterparts from Eureka, despite the fact that two of the three films (Van Gogh and À nos amours) exist in two-disc sets. The image quality of the transfers is certainly impeccable, especially À nos amours, which typically for Criterion features a painstaking high-definition digital transfer. With regard to extras, the stress is for the most part on quality over quantity. Loulou has only a short interview with Isabelle Huppert, whilst Van Gogh features a newly-recorded interview with Jacques Dutronc, in addition to over thirty minutes of (mostly short) deleted scenes, complete with a fascinating video introduction by Pialat’s long-time editor Yann Dedet. Also included in this package is a gallery of Pialat’s own drawings and paintings, which proves a useful collection to peruse alongside the film, as Pialat drew on his painter’s sense of light and composition in Van Gogh above all his work. The paintings themselves are mostly impressionistic rural landscapes in the mould of Sisley or Pissaro, but they evince the same feeling of intimacy, of a private, lived-in world being opened up and anatomized, that defines his films.
À nos amours comes replete with a 1999 documentary on the film entitled The Human Eye, in addition to an archival excerpt from a French television show featuring behind-the-scenes footage and interviews, a 2003 interview with Sandrine Bonnaire, and new video interviews with Catherine Breillat and director/academic Jean-Pierre Gorin. The documentary, directed by Xavier Giannoli (who recently made The Singer with Gérard Depardieu) covers the chaotic style, shooting, and meaning of the film, while Breillat and Gorin both touch on Pialat’s cinema, with the latter further outlining his views of Pialat’s place within French filmmaking. Rounding out the set is the usual Criterion booklet, which features critical essays and interviews with both Pialat and cinematographer Jacques Loiseleux.
The cinema of Maurice Pialat, so very well represented by these DVD releases, is long overdue for international recognition and celebration. He is a director whose fierce independence, unflinchingly personal conception of cinema, and abiding emphasis on ragged, imploding families place him easily alongside Fassbinder or Bergman, even if such a comparison does little to elucidate the intimate, often documentary (indeed almost home-movie) tone and mode of address of his cinema. That this aspect of Pialat’s work was in evidence from the very beginning, with his feature debut Naked-Childhood, is all the more remarkable. And it would go on to animate almost all his subsequent features, leading to an oeuvre that as a whole mimics its constituent works in being exquisitely, at times disturbingly, poised between conflicting states. If such an interstitial thematic is Pialat’s abiding interest, then it can be seen to apply to his career and to himself as well as to his films.
It is ultimately in this area that the true worth of Maurice Pialat can be most keenly felt: here was someone for whom filmmaking was an expression, an extension, of the soul, who was compelled to lay himself prostrate before his art and unpick his life before his camera’s unblinking eye. Filmmaking was for Pialat a way of life, less as an obsessive cinephile in the manner of his Nouvelle Vague contemporaries, less even as a simple mode of self-expression. Rather, one senses that for this director cinema was something of a mirror, an arena of self-exploration, even self-exorcism, in which he could look at and assess, question and reprimand himself: in other words, follow Van Gogh in needing his art to bridge a gap between interior and exterior, self and other. Such a body of work is, to say the least, a rarity in modern world cinema: before Three Monkeys one would perhaps have pointed to Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and one may approach, say, Terence Davies or the leading lights of the Chinese sixth generation (especially Jia Zhangke and Wang Xiaoshuai) along these lines. But beyond such marquee names there are few major auteurs that spring readily to mind as offering anything like the gut-wrenchingly personal yet never self-regarding cinema of Pialat. And this fact only serves to heighten the belief that this DVD retrospective is a major event, that it fills a hitherto gaping hole not only in the French, but in the European canon, and either introduces or crystallizes the work of one of the great directors.
Maurice Pialat Resource official website (mostly in French, with many English features)
Passe ton bac d'abord Extensive overview of his work by Tony McNeil from Pialat website, also here: Maurice Pialat: Passe ton bac d'abord
essay Tony McNeil biography from Pialat website
Maurice
Pialat - biography and films - Films de France biography and film reviews by James Travers
Maurice Pialat |
Biography, Movie Highlights and Photos | AllMovie biography from Sandra Brennan
Maurice Pialat: Information from Answers.com biography page
Maurice
Pialat - TCM.com Michael T.
Toole on Maurice Pialat
MAURICE
PIALAT - Films & Bio - French New Wave Director brief bio from French New Wave
Maurice Pialat Aquarello film reviews from Strictly Film School
Maurice Pialat Acteur et réalisateur - Biosstars biography (in French) and filmography (in English)
Maurice
Pialat: Acts of Grace • Senses of Cinema
Max Nelson, March 18, 2002
Maurice Pialat, 77; French Film Director - Los Angeles Times Obituary from Myrna Oliver from The LA Times, January 13, 2003
Obituary:
Maurice Pialat | Film | The Guardian
Brian Baxter, January 15, 2003
Maurice Pialat
(1925 – 2003) – A Tribute • Senses of Cinema Fabien Boully, Noël Herpe, Maximilian Le Cain
and Glen W. Norton from Senses of
Cinema, March 21, 2003
Maurice Pialat, we will grow old without him - France-Diplomatie Serge Kaganski obituary from France-Diplomatie, May 2003
Maurice
Pialat: A Cinema of Surrender - Rouge
Fergus
Daley from Rouge, June 2003
Unhappy ever after | Film | The Guardian Jean Roy from The Guardian, July 25, 2003
Maurice
Pialat - Österreichisches Filmmuseum
May 1 – 11, 2004
To the Bitter
End | Village Voice Michael
Atkinson from The Village Voice, June
29, 2004
Pialat's
Pointillist Pictures - ReelTalk Movie Reviews Don Levit on Loulou, Van Gogh, and To Our Loves/À nos amours, July
2004
The Films of Maurice Pialat - filmlinc home Film Society of Lincoln Center, July 9 – 29, 2004
Maurice Pialat - BAM/PFA - Film Programs September 3 – 30, 2004, including brief film comments
French Chronicles and Early Shorts BAM/PFA Program, September 11, 2004
Maurice Pialat. Articles. Analyses filmiques. Cries, whispers ... Cries, whispers, silence and space: death and the family in films by Pialat, Bergman and Ozu, by Maximilian Le Cain from the Pialat website, October 2004
Series Details UCLA Film Archive Pialat retrospective, bio summary and film comments, January 7 – February 9, 2005
Movies | Broken lines, interrupted movements Chris Fujiwara on Pialat retrospective from The Boston Phoenix, February 25 – March 3, 2005
Maurice Pialat and John Cassavetes • Senses of Cinema Philippe Lubac from Senses of Cinema, April 15, 2005
Facets
: Cinémathèque: The Films of Maurice Pialat April 22 – May 3, 2005
Facets spotlights career of Maurice Pialat - Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington from The Chicago Tribune, April 22, 2005
Every
Man for Himself: The Films of Maurice Pialat | Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, April 29, 2005
• View topic - Maurice Pialat Criterion forum discussion group, July 30, 2005
Maurice Pialat - Google Books Result biography by Marja Warehime (182 pages), 2006
Police • Senses of Cinema Robert Keser from Senses of Cinema, July 2006
La Gueule ouverte
• Senses of Cinema Miguel
Marías from Senses of Cinema, July
31, 2006
Van Gogh • Senses of Cinema Darragh O’Donoghue from Senses of Cinema, July 31, 2006
Pialat Regained on Notebook | MUBI Daniel Kasman from Mubi, October 14, 2008
Book
Review: Maurice Pialat (French Film Directors) | Film Ireland Nicola Marzano reviews a new book on Pialat
by Marja Warehime from Film Ireland,
November 21, 2011
Maurice Pialat - Cinema Real - Film Forum on mubi.com Mubi film discussion forum, April 26, 2012
Maurice
Pialat retrospective in L.A. shows French director's influence ... Kevin Crust from The LA Times, September 25, 2015
Cinemasparagus:
Passe ton bac d'abord... The War of Art, by Craig Keller, October
1, 2015
À Nos Amours Dan Sallitt, October 3, 2015
Police Dan Sallitt, October 3, 2015
Cinemasparagus: Notes on Pialat's Short Films Craig Keller, October 12, 2015
Naked
Childhood, Naked Lives: Maurice Pialat Exposed What Makes ... Melissa Anderson from The Village Voice, October 13, 2015
La
gueule ouverte (Pialat) - Essay by Adrian Martin + A Brief Interview ... Devastation,
by Adrian Martin (2009); The More Movies
You Make, the Harder It Gets!, a brief Interview with Maurice Pialat (1973),
translated by Craig Keller, October
13, 2015
Cinemasparagus:
Sous le soleil de Satan (Pialat) - Essay by Gabe ... From
Moment to Moment: A Close Analysis of a Fragment from Sous le soleil de
Satan by Gabe Klinger (2010); also from Maurice
Pialat: A Reflection in Motion, quotations from an Interview with Michèle
Halberstadt (1987);
Sandrine Bonnaire Looks Back, excerpts from an Interview with Olivier
Joyard just one week after Pialat’s death on January 11th, 2003; and finally from The Captive Lover, an excerpt
from an Interview with Jacques Rivette by Frédéric Bonnaud in 1998, translated by Craig Keller, October 14, 2015
Nick Pinkerton on a
retrospective of Maurice Pialat at MoMI ...
Nick Pinkerton, October 15, 2015
Cinemasparagus:
Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble (Pialat) - Essay by ... Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble
(1972, by Pialat) – Essay by Emmanuel Burdeau, Pialat n'est pas là, (2009);
Interviews with Maurice Pialat, Pialat Says...by Maurice Pialat (1972);
from Three Encounters with Maurice Pialat, excerpt from an Interview by
Stéphane Lévy-Klein and Olivier Eyquem in 1973; Maurice Pialat in
Conversation, 1973, concluding with the opening paragraph of Pialat’s
novel, Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble, translated by Craig Keller, October
16, 2015
The
Misunderstood Maurice Pialat | The New Yorker Richard Brody, October 16, 2015
Maurice
Pialat: Moments of Truth - Features - Reverse Shot Julien Allen, October 16, 2015
L'enfance-nue
(Pialat) - Essay by Kent Jones + Interview with Maurice ... L'enfance-nue (1968, by Pialat) – Essay by Kent Jones, (2008); from Interview
with Maurice Pialat, excerpt from an Interview by Dominique Maillet in 1972;
from Three Encounters with Maurice Pialat, excerpt from an Interview by
Stéphane Lévy-Klein and Olivier Eyquem in 1973, translated by Craig Keller, October 18, 2015
Cinemasparagus:
Van Gogh (Pialat) - Essay by Sabrina Marques + ... Pialat & Van Gogh: Fellow Outsiders,
by Sabrina Marques (2013); Letter to Pialat, by Jean-Luc Godard (1991); Words
from Pialat, excerpts of Pialat in conversation with Michel Ciment and
Michel Sineux – by Pierre Hodgson (1992), translated by Craig Keller, October 20, 2015
Beauty
and Romanticism in the Films of Maurice Pialat - The Film Stage Ethan Vestby, October 22, 2015
Not
Growing Old - Maurice Pialat's Cinema of Immediacy - Harvard ... Harvard Film Archive, November 29, 2015
Central Outsider: The
Films of Maurice Pialat | Gene Siskel Film Center January 30, 2016
Cinemasparagus:
Ten Films by Maurice Pialat
includes a long interview with Pialat from 1974, conducted by Stéphane
Lévy-Klein and Olivier Eyquem, on the subject of La Gueule ouverte, translated by Craig Keller, April 20,
2009
Cinemasparagus:
Passe ton bac d'abord... — Dossier
Interview with Maurice
Pialat: Excerpt from an Interview by Danièle Dubroux, Serge Le Peron, and Louis
Skorecki from 1979; Interview with Maurice Pialat: by Jacqueline
Lajeunesse in 1979; Interview with Maurice Pialat: Excerpt from an
Interview by Mireille Amiel and Dominique Rabourdin in 1979; and Maurice
Pialat’s responses to “20 Questions for Filmmakers” that appeared in the June
1981 issue of Cahiers du cinéma, translated by Craig
Keller, October 4, 2015
Cinemasparagus: À nos amours. - Dossier: The Pialat Code + Pialat ... interview between Maurice Pialat and Jean-Luc Godard was published in its complete form in Le Monde on February 16, 1984, translated here by Craig Keller, October 6, 2015
Cinemasparagus:
Police - Dossier: The Zebra's Stripes
“The Zebra’s Stripes: An Interview with Maurice Pialat,” excerpt from an
Interview by Alain Bergala and Serge Toubiana (1985); excerpt from an Interview
with City Limits (1986), translated
by Craig Keller, October 7, 2015
Interview
with Kent Jones • Senses of Cinema Steve
Erickson interviews film critic Kent Jones, discussing Pialat, from Senses of Cinema, May 22, 2003
Cahiers du Cinema - Best Movies 1951 - 2008 | cinemarealm.com
Cahiers du Cinema: Top Ten Lists 1951-2009
Andrew Sarris' Top Ten Lists 1958-2006
Maurice
Pialat (1925 - 2003) - Find A Grave Memorial
Maurice Pialat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
ISABELLE AUX DOMBES
Sous Le Soleil De Satan OOoD, February 5, 2010 (excerpt)
SPECIAL TWO-DISC EDITION INCLUDING: * Gorgeous new anamorphic transfer of the film in its original aspect ratio * New and improved English subtitle translations * Isabelle aux Dombes [Isabelle in La Dombes] Maurice Pialat’s first film, an 8-minute work from 1951 Congrès eucharistique diocèsain. [Diocesan Eucharistic Congress.] an 8-minute short film by Maurice Pialat from 1953
DVD Outsider: Sous le soleil de Satan DVD review Joseph Ewens (excerpt)
A pair of early silent black & white films, tentatively
labelled as Pialat's first work, also make an appearance. Isabelle aux
Dombes (
Cinemasparagus: Notes on Pialat's Short Films Craig Keller, October 12, 2015
Maurice Pialat. Filmographie. Les courts-métrages Pialat website
CONGRÉS EACHARISTIQUE
Sous Le
Soleil De Satan OOoD,
SPECIAL TWO-DISC EDITION INCLUDING: * Gorgeous new anamorphic transfer of the film in its original aspect ratio * New and improved English subtitle translations * Isabelle aux Dombes [Isabelle in La Dombes] Maurice Pialat’s first film, an 8-minute work from 1951 Congrès eucharistique diocèsain. [Diocesan Eucharistic Congress.] an 8-minute short film by Maurice Pialat from 1953
DVD Outsider: Sous le soleil de Satan DVD review Joseph Ewens (excerpt)
A pair of early silent black & white films, tentatively
labelled as Pialat's first work, also make an appearance. Isabelle aux
Dombes (
Cinemasparagus: Notes on Pialat's Short Films Craig Keller, October 12, 2015
Maurice Pialat. Filmographie. Les courts-métrages Pialat website
L’AMOUR EXISTE (Love Exists)
L’Amour
existe (1960) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
Maurice Pialat’s first film is this remarkably perceptive
pseudo-documentary which, in retrospect, was way ahead of its time. The
film evokes the concerns which would preoccupy his contemporary New Wave film
directories (most notably Jean-Luc Godard), such as the cost to the individual
of living in an increasingly commercialised world.
The film is both accurate yet satirical in its presentation, capturing the
social change whilst delivering an intensely personal message, with Pialat’s
customary tongue-in-cheek wit. The poignant shots of the featureless
high-rised living quarters housing the less well off (who apparently have no
appreciation of beauty) makes a powerful condemnation of modern architecture
and social engineering. The homely images of a comfortable suburban life
appear equally tragic, with its mindless routine and uniformity.
I was somewhat surprised to discover that Maurice Pialat's
1960 short film debut, L'amour existe, was not the minimal
dialogue-based drama I would've expected as a starting point for his career.
Indeed, for his first film, Pialat forgoes narrative altogether, crafting a
free-associative essay film that has much more in common with the first efforts
of Alain Resnais than I ever would've guessed based on their respective later
work. The film begins with an elegiac childhood remembrance. A romanticized
voiceover narrates a series of key childhood moments — afternoons in the
cinema, a map that aroused fantasies of far-off places — while Pialat's camera
tracks across the suburbs of Paris. The film is an endless series of such
stately tracking shots, the grand romance of the camera's gestures serving as a
counterpoint to the general squalor that Pialat is depicting.
His film is essentially a recounting of the full life cycle of a lower-class
suburban laborer, commuting into the city and back for hours every day, working
hard for little pay, given exceedingly little free time and nothing of
substance to fill it with. The film's introduction, in boyhood, is relatively
brief, and then, the voiceover says, "the suburbs grow up" and the
time of carefree adolescence comes to an end. From there, his camera roams freely
across the streets of Paris and its surrounding environs, while the narration
presents a poignant depiction of post-war Paris and the plight of its workers.
The bulk of the film is taken up by this discussion of the working life,
exploring the disconnection of workers from culture and art, the long hours,
the decrepit neighborhoods outside Paris, the cramped public transportation.
After all this, Pialat suggests, the workers are released into the relative
peace of old age, which he depicts as a pale shadow of childhood's carefree
spirit.
This is a lovely, understated cinematic poem that combines an evocative tone
with a probing social conscience. Its an interesting start for Pialat, but on
reflection not quite as odd as I initially though. All of his films display a
sharply honed moral sense and an interest in the seeming banalities of
existence, even if later on he would turn to narrative features rather than
documentary essays.
Strictly Film
School Acquarello
The sound of a rattling, mechanical alarm bell seemingly ushers a silent wave of anonymous, early morning commuters heading towards metropolitan Paris at the crack of dawn as they follow the ritualistic procession of informal queues leading to the subway station, pack into crowded, unconditioned trains, transfer through a coordinated maze of mass transportation, traverse rain soaked sidewalks and intersections, and navigate through high-traffic streets. The chaotic montage culminates in a dizzying shot of the dispiriting visual monotony of the impersonal cityscape from the window of a passing commuter train. From the upstairs terrace window of an unidentified home, an off-screen narrator (Jean-Loup Reynold) witnesses the fleeting sight a passing train and begins to recount the familiar (and haunted) images of his youth in the suburban town of Courbevoie. Once laid to ruins in the aftermath of war, a new and insidiously consuming operation - the imperative of urban assimilation - now devastates the architectural, social, and cultural landscape of the working-class region as old buildings are demolished to make room for new, high population density residential construction and popular sources of low-cost communal entertainment, such as matinees at the local cinema, become increasingly nonexistent, statistically relocating to the hypersaturated venues of Paris. However, it is not only structures, but also people who are increasingly displaced by rapid industrial expansion, as humanity becomes valued through levels of productivity, and the elderly are relegated to the role of inutile pensioners searching for inclusion and purpose in the new modern society (in a wry shot of a group of elderly citizens passing idle time by sitting on a park statue that ironically celebrates their role as nurturers of the younger generation). Meanwhile, an idyllic shot of a wooded park that continues to be deforested for high profit, real estate speculation is contrasted against the subhuman conditions of migrant worker "apartments" in a nearby shantytown (juxtaposed against of an advertising banner that boasts of all rentals as including all modern conveniences) as residents evacuate in the wake of a rapidly spreading fire. Inevitably, the figurative tale of two cities emerges, as the image of postwar Paris becomes a complex portrait of ambitious policy and human disaffection.
Maurice Pialat creates an acerbic and unsentimental, yet hauntingly poetic and profoundly engaging exposition on urbanization, alienation, reconstruction and cultural transformation in L'Amour existe. Using parallel imagery of large-scale industrial and (often empty) public spaces, Pialat intrinsically correlates the alienating and demoralizing toll of rapid modernization: the uniform tracts of suburban houses that represent an illusory, yet attainable working-class measure of success; the shot of a passenger train traversing the horizon against a foregrounding image of a derelict railway car that has been transformed into a squatter's hovel; the compromised structural integrity of pre-fabricated materials used for large-scale urban residential construction that is repeated in the image of the primitive, tinderbox construction of crude shantytowns near Paris (with the dream of a better life figuratively disintegrating in flames); the enumeration of statistical data that reflects a nationwide pattern of declining recreation and education that corresponds to the rise in abstract measures of productivity and trends toward metropolitan centralization. Furthermore, note an earlier image of automated dredging equipment that cuts to a (reverse direction) traveling shot of row seating at an empty cinema that visually suggests the inverse relationship between industrial production and leisure activity: a similar idea that is later reinforced in the tongue-in-cheek juxtaposition of artificially hurried, rushing commuters against an anonymous woman's tranquil swim in an empty pool. It is this recurring theme of impersonal institutionalization and conformity that invariably propels the thoughtful and elegiac tone of the film: the cultural trauma of depopulation, marginalization, and loss of identity in the face of delusive prosperity, socially regressive national policy, and dehumanized progress.
Cinemasparagus: Notes on Pialat's Short Films Craig Keller, October 12, 2015
Home Cinema @ The Digital Fix - L'Enfance nue Noel Megahey, also seen here: DVD Times
DVD Outsider Slarek
User reviews from imdb Author: snucker
Maurice Pialat: L'amour Existe Review - Read Variety's Analysis Of ...
Maurice Pialat. Filmographie. Les courts-métrages Pialat website
Maurice Pialat. Articles. Analyses filmiques. Texte de L'Amour existe Pialat’s film script (in French)
L'amour existe (Maurice Pialat on YouTube (19:03)
DRÔLES DE BOBINES (Funny Reels)
France (17 mi) 1957
Home Cinema @ The Digital Fix - La gueule ouverte Noel Megahey (excerpt)
Disc 2 contains two early short films by Maurice Pialat from 1957 and 1958. Drôles de bobines (17:16) is a randomly amusing silent slapstick based around an assistant manager and a feisty old lady who gets mixed up with a foreign delegation visiting his factory. In L’ombre familière (23:59), a young TV and radio producer comes under the influence of an enigmatic young poet, much to the consternation of his girlfriend. With its sci-fi soundtrack, desolate suburban setting and drained swimming pools, it seems to pre-date J.G. Ballard in a Nouvelle Vague sort of way.
Cinemasparagus: Notes on Pialat's Short Films Craig Keller, October 12, 2015
Maurice Pialat. Filmographie. Les courts-métrages Pialat website
L’OMBRE FAMILIÈRE (The Familiar Shadow)
France (24 mi) 1958
Home Cinema @ The Digital Fix - La gueule ouverte Noel Megahey (excerpt)
Disc 2 contains two early short films by Maurice Pialat from 1957 and 1958. Drôles de bobines (17:16) is a randomly amusing silent slapstick based around an assistant manager and a feisty old lady who gets mixed up with a foreign delegation visiting his factory. In L’ombre familière (23:59), a young TV and radio producer comes under the influence of an enigmatic young poet, much to the consternation of his girlfriend. With its sci-fi soundtrack, desolate suburban setting and drained swimming pools, it seems to pre-date J.G. Ballard in a Nouvelle Vague sort of way.
Cinemasparagus: Notes on Pialat's Short Films Craig Keller, October 12, 2015
Maurice Pialat. Filmographie. Les courts-métrages Pialat website
JANINE – made for TV
France (16 mi) 1961
MoMA | Elevator to the Gallows and Janine
1961. France. Directed by Maurice Pialat. Screenplay by Claude Berri. Music by René Urtreger. With Berri, Evelyne Ker, Hubert Deschamps. Another nocturne filmed on location throughout Paris, about two men, one melancholy and the other smitten with a prostitute. In French; English subtitles. 17 min.
Cinemasparagus: Notes on Pialat's Short Films Craig Keller, October 12, 2015
Maurice Pialat. Filmographie. Les courts-métrages Pialat website
Janine - Maurice Pialat - 1962 Dailymotion, on YouTube (16:35)
Les avant-dernières choses: Janine | Maurice Pialat (1962) on YouTube (16:35)
JARDINS D’ARABIE
France 1963
Cinemasparagus: Notes on Pialat's Short Films Craig Keller, October 12, 2015
Jardins d Arabie 1963 - wildscreen.tv :new generation quality ... Wildscreen TV
Maurice Pialat. Filmographie. Les courts-métrages Pialat website
TURKISH CHRONICLES
France (74 mi)
1964
A collection of 6
short films shot by Pialat in Turkey from 1962 to 1964.
Turkish Chronicles BAM/PFA Program
Before he turned to feature filmmaking in 1968 with Naked
Childhood, Pialat worked on a series of short films, many of them financed
by French television. "Turkish Chronicles" is a compendium of poetic
and visually striking pieces shot in Turkey. Byzance uses a text by
Stefan Zweig to describe the Ottoman conquest of the city in 1453. Maître
Galip is a typically perceptive study of children, and includes a poem by
Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet.
Home Cinema @ The Digital Fix - La gueule ouverte Noel Megahey (excerpt)
Disc 2 also contains Pialat’s six short Turkish films from 1964 - Bosphore (13:29), Byzance (10:52), La corne d’or (12:17), Istanbul (12:48) Maître Galip (10:59) and Pehlivan (12:53) - poetic reflections on the history, character, traditions, buildings and the people of Istanbul, bustling and full of life. The films are sometimes rather random and impressionistic, but have an elegant and painterly quality in the cinematography of Willy Kurant. A recent Interview with Willy Kurant (15:35) looks at the work that went on behind overcoming the technical obstacles in the making of the short films. Cyril Collard conducts an interesting interview with the director in the Pialat Interview about the Cinématèque (13:55), talking about his earliest film memories and the films that influenced him. Cinephiles beware – there is disturbing footage of film reels being shredded in here. Old and not looking in the best of health in 2002, Pialat is nevertheless engaging and funny in an Excerpt from Pialat Masterclass (9:25), where he discusses Maître Galip and the making of the Turkish films.
BOSPHORE (Bosporus)
France (14 mi)
1964
BYZANCE (Byzantium)
France (12 mi)
1964
LA CORNE D’OR (The Golden
Horn)
France (12 mi)
1964
ISTANBUL
France (13 mi)
1964
MAÎTRE GALIP (Master Galip) – made for TV
France
(11 mi) 1962
PEHLIVAN (The Wrestler)
France (12 mi)
1964
User reviews from imdb Author: Lalit Rao
(cpowerccc@yahoo.com) from Paris, France
Instead of an over the top, overblown film review, I would like to just write a couple of my observations. I saw this short feature at FEMIS (famous French film school). I later spoke to master cameraman Willy Kurant who not only shot this film but also "Sous le soleil du Satan" directed by Maurice Pialat. According to him Pialat paid great deal of attention to the way he liked his films to be shot. Pehlivan means "Wrestler". This is a short film about a wrestling competition. We see a lot of people in the crowd both men and women alike appreciating, applauding and cheering wrestlers who have come from all parts of Turkey. A lot of honor is at stake as no body wants to lose. For this reason there is a fierce competition. The wrestling matches are held with loud drums playing in the background. A couple of belly dancers also join when there is a break after a wrestling bout. All in all, Pehlivan is a good piece of ethnographic cinema made by a great visionary of French cinema who is no more with us.
Only
the Cinema: Maurice Pialat's Turkish Chronicles Ed Howard
Cinemasparagus: Notes on Pialat's Short Films Craig Keller, October 12, 2015
Maurice Pialat. Filmographie. Les courts-métrages Pialat website
LA CAMARGUE
France (6 mi)
1966
DVD Times - Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble Noel Megahey
Pialat’s short film, La Camargue (1966) (6:07) obviously has relevance, no doubt being the real-life film he was making in the region, depicted fictionally here in the film. The film emphasises the almost wild west qualities of the unspoiled region (also seen in Albert Lamorisse’s childhood fantasy White Mane).
Cinemasparagus: Notes on Pialat's Short Films Craig Keller, October 12, 2015
NAKED CHILDHOOD (L’ENFANCE
NUE) A 95
aka: Me
A dead serious, non-judgmental and unsentimental portrait of a ten-year old problem child, in the manner of Truffaut’s 400 BLOWS (1959), abandoned by his parents, then rejected by his foster parents, as they can’t control his violent nature, as he fights, he steals, he breaks things, and is cruel to his sister. The interview with the family discussing with Child Welfare why they no longer want this child in their home is stunning in its stark, single-minded cruelty, showing no regard to the child’s needs. Is it any wonder the child continuously misbehaves? When he is sent to another family, this one a grandparent couple who shows him respect and attention, he continues to misbehave in ways that may not even be comprehensible to himself. The formal structure of the film is very much like viewing real life, in a documentary style, where there is strict adherence to filming only the essentials, so what the child does is completely understandable to the viewers, and is, in fact, a statement of his ferocious independence and honesty, as he expresses his anguish openly, sometimes cruelly, but these feelings reflect the cruelty that have been shown towards him all his life. In this very detailed and surprisingly authentic film, told in a completely objective light, we are immersed inside the core fabric of his being, seeing the world through his eyes, experiencing it as he does, ending in a marginally uplifting, but completely ambiguous voiceover where he reads a letter written from a reformatory to his aging foster parents.
Naked Childhood | Jonathan Rosenbaum
A volatile realist who’s often been compared to John
Cassavetes, Maurice Pialat started out as a painter and a documentary
filmmaker, though in contrast to most realist works (as well as most paintings)
his movies are too intimate to date very much. He was 43 when he made his first
feature, Naked Childhood (1968, 82 min.), a nonjudgmental and unsentimental
look at a troubled, abandoned ten-year-old boy who’s shuttled between foster
parents. (Francois Truffaut served as coproducer, though Pialat was a sworn
enemy of the New Wave.) In French with subtitles.
Time Out review Tom Milne
Pialat's first feature is a wonderfully delicate study of a
ten-year-old boy and his decline into delinquency when boarded out with foster
parents after being abandoned by his mother. With Truffaut as co-producer,
comparisons with Les Quatre Cents Coups are inevitable, but there is
really little resemblance between the two films except in theme and refusal to
sentimentalise. Instead of focusing on the child, Pialat concentrates on the
adults: the foster parents puzzled by the boy's delinquency since he so clearly
responds to their affection; the ancient grandmother with whom he breaks
through to a special relationship (very warm and funny); the welfare and
adoption officers, carrying out their jobs with weary patience, but tending to
treat the children as pets rather than as human beings. It's a film in which
nuance is everything; amazingly, given that Pialat was working exclusively with
non-professionals, the performances are stunning.
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kathleen Sachs
We need to talk about Antoine. And François. The first two are the antagonistic pre-teen protagonists of François Truffaut’s THE 400 BLOWS (1959, 99 min, 35mm widescreen; Saturday, 3pm and Tuesday, 6pm) and Maurice Pialat’s NAKED CHILDHOOD (1969, 82 min, archival 35mm print; Saturday, 5pm and Wednesday, 6pm), respectively. The relationship between the films is well established: Truffaut co-produced Pialat’s first feature-length film almost ten years after his seminal New Wave masterpiece, and their plots are somewhat similar. In THE 400 BLOWS, Antoine is back living with his mother and stepfather after being raised by his grandmother until her death. It’s semi-autobiographical and thus documents the experiences of a troubled boy and his friends as they rebel against authority and seek refuge in the cinema. NAKED CHILDHOOD, which Pialat claimed was autobiographical despite the fact he’d never been in foster care, depicts François as he goes from one foster home to another, having been kicked out by the previous family for being generally reprobate. François seems to find a more suitable home with the next family, an older couple and their infirm mother, though endearing sequences of love and tenderness are sharply juxtaposed with his escalating debauchery. Many critics say that the primary difference between the two, aside from Truffaut’s political predilection, is that THE 400 BLOWS humanizes its troubled hero while NAKED CHILDHOOD is unyielding in its depiction of egregious antisocial behavior. This is somewhat true: Antoine is more fully characterized, François is id personified. That’s not to say he’s a monster, just that he seems to operate solely on the “pleasure principle” as a result of his abandonment and society’s failure to nurture him. But Pialat never suggests that François or his caretakers are beyond reproach; there’s a touching moment between his elderly foster parents during which they tell their “kids” about how they fell in love. Neither does the mise-en-scene depict a totally bleak outlook. The characters are often adorned in bright clothing, and the set design is almost cheerful with the artfully clashing patterns, bringing to mind the films of Pialat’s contemporary Jacques Demy and the contemporarily derivative Wes Anderson, both of whose work examines similar social dilemmas in similarly ambiguous ways. Truffaut’s widescreen camera maintains a loving distance from Antoine, giving him freedom to explore both the geographic and cinematic space. Pialat’s distance, however, is more stoic, almost vacant; his background as a painter is evident in how he embraces stillness to convey the callow simplicity of his subject. Truffaut examines childhood, but Pialat lets it exist in all its contradictory sublimity.
L’Enfance
nue (1968) James Travers from
FimsdeFrance
Abandoned by his own parents, François, a nine-year old boy,
is placed in the care of Mr and Mrs Josselin, an ordinary working class family
with a young daughter of their own. The Josselins learn that François has
serious behavioural problems and he soon becomes too much for them to cope
with. As the boy’s unruly conduct worsens, he is returned to social
services and ends up with another adopted home. His new foster parents
are Mr and Mrs Minguet, an old couple who already have their hands full with
their elderly mother and another foster child, Raoul. For once, François
appears to become settled and manages to find a genuine friend in the Minguets’
frail but kind-hearted mother. However, when the latter dies, François’
behaviour suddenly takes a turn for the worse…
Maurice Pialat’s first full-length film, L’Enfance nue is
a remarkably effective piece of social realist drama featuring a disturbed
young boy failing to integrate with the world around him. The film is
almost a re-make of François Truffaut’s celebrated Les 400
coups (1959), but takes a far more realist line, using non-professional
actors and much cruder editing and photography. Pialat acknowledges the
support given to him by Truffaut (both moral and financial) by naming his
principal character François, a reference to Truffaut’s own troubled and
largely loveless childhood.
The things which best characterise Pialat’s work are amply illustrated in L’Enfance
nue, which, with its raw brutality, uncompromising truth and
non-judgemental stance, deserves to be rated as the director’s best film.
Every character is portrayed with an extraordinary sense of realism, to the
extent that you feel you know him or her as a personal acquaintance – nothing
in this film feels staged or artificial. What Pialat does and does so
well is to take a slice of life and to preserve it perfectly on film, adding
nothing, taking nothing away. It is this which makes his cinema so
powerful and so pretty well unique. Who could fail to be moved by the
plight of the unloved François and his well-meaning foster parents, the
Minguets? Whilst Pialat’s unconventional style has a tendency to alienate
the spectator in some of his later films, here his approach works perfectly and
the result is nothing less than a humanist masterpiece.
JEAN-PIERRE GORIN ON L'ENFANCE NUE Jean-Pierre Gorin from Film Comment, 2004
Pialat: "All modesty
aside, L'Enfance nue (69) was done under Lumière's influence. As I was shooting
L'Enfance nue I was thinking Baby Has a Snack·" It's right there with the
first shot, a union march through the streets of a mining town. It takes its
time. No rushing through it. No hunger to reach a drama within the scene, to
tag it to someone or something. But there's some meticulous carbon dating
taking place (the clothes, the style they confer and how much it s-p-e-l-l-s
1969). The first shot turns sequence. We understand very fast that the set up
we enter is not going to be hijacked by the constraints of plot. Whatever it
is, it is going to follow its own groove, bang out its own tempo. No drama to
reach for or, to be more precise, life as drama. The setup as drama. Thank you,
Mr. Lumière. A footnote: Lumière filmed his workers coming out of the factory.
Pialat looks at them almost a century later, parading down
The first shot again, but the soundtrack this time. Mixed in the collective
brouhaha of the union march (and at a level that fluctuates between prominent
and receding/barely audible) are the voices of an older couple and two young
boys. An intimate story. The two older voices: it's about love, and children,
and adoption. The two younger voices: it's about questions. What we don't know
yet is that later on, more than halfway through the film, we will be witness to
this conversation. The two boys seated across from the old couple in a kitchen,
the woman, smiling, seated on the man's lap; the boys smiling, too, across the
table; the whole room filled with patches of yellow and blue, falling somewhere
between Courbet and Cézanne. Yes, never forget that Pialat started as a
painter. But to go back to the soundtrack, the intimacy of a couple's story
weaved sonically in and out of the collective noise of the march. Two things to
say about that: the word "class" yet again (in
Let's stay in this kitchen for a while. On the wall, there's this swat of
yellow, aggressive enough to make the retina squirm (if not "scream,"
as Pialat would have it). But that's the least of it. It's patterns all around.
On the old woman's kitchen frock, on the tablecloth, on the curtains. And it's
the same baroque accumulation in every room we'll visit. The minimal simplicity
of this working-class home, where the drama of the foster child, Francois, is
at loggerheads with the visual complexity of the patterns that fill and mold
the space. A simple story, simply told and awkwardly played, in an amazingly,
almost maddeningly, texturally busy space. What is Pialat doing? There is, of
course, the anthropologist at work. A monograph on working-class taste, with
its "and · and · and" fractured aesthetic (a "this pattern plus
this pattern" accumulation where each element is savored for itself and
vies for its own and where the whole and its aesthetics never operate by
blending). But more important, there is someone who wants the retina to work
anew every time. The film is entirely in this directorial gesture that forces
the eye into a constant deciphering of patterns and thus imbues the space with
a constant unfamiliarity. A Pialat scene in L'Enfance nue always puts the
viewer through the same paces: we enter a space that is so texturally busy that
it gains a surreal foreignness; we are given time to get familiar with it (the
fact that life is the drama and that the scenes drone at the pace of life is a
condition of this gift of time); and then we move again. We are made to experience
what is at the core of the foster child's life:
unfamiliarity/deciphering/displacement/unfamiliarity again. For Pialat, visual
strategy derives from and contributes to drama. The pleasure of Pialat's film
is, among other things, to see a director who never falls prey to the
decorative, to see someone for whom visual strategy never collapses into the
mournfulness of eye candy. A footnote: The radical difference between 400 Blows
and L'Enfance nue? We are looking at Truffaut's imp. But we are seeing through
the eyes of Pialat's.
Let's stay with the footnote for a moment. Because we are looking at the world
as François does, we have little time to spoon too much saccharine onto him.
L'Enfance nue is astonishingly devoid of sentimentality. We are with François
in the world and just as eccentric to it as he is (in effect, the character
spends more of his film life at the edge of the screen than at its center).
Thus the fact that the pathos of Pialat's film is all the zig and the zag of
disconnection and thwarted emotions. It has at its core an instability, a
muted, latent violence, a skittish oscillation between love and emotional
flight. And because we visually experience the world as François does, the only
familiarity we gain is a familiarity with the fits of violence that punctuate
his life. Pialat's problem is to get us there, not to provide judgment about
it. To give us the normality of it and the nakedness of François's response. To
throw light on a life molded by institutional fiat. The film gains its poignancy
by eschewing all the trite and true paths to poignancy. Footnote: If Lumière
enters the psychological realm, do we call him D.W. Griffith?
The kitchen scene, yet again. The old couple and the two boys. Nobody has been
sent over by central casting. The nonpro, the amateur is, welcome here, in all
his or her sumptuous awkwardness. The only rule seems to be authenticity. The
shapes and looks of bodies and faces, the accents and tones are perfect on both
sides of the age divide. And, yes, yet again, a strong sense of class fuses the
whole thing together. But what's most interesting is the way Pialat makes it
function, working off the awkwardness of these bodies and the unsettled
delivery of these voices. The space he creates is a space where documentary and
fiction mingle. And one gets a strong sense of how we got there. This old
couple was listened to, patiently and carefully. And then they were asked
gently to go through it again for the camera. And a setup was offered to anchor
the scene: the woman sitting on the man's lap with the boys across the table. A
spatial fictionalization of a documentary moment. And the scene will hit the
right note with its very precarious staginess. There is with Pialat the sense
that things are always cooked to order, that the scene is the result of some
words just pronounced in front of the director, some gestures made just a day
or so ago that have been collated in a visual setup of disarming simplicity.
And it is in this simple setup that the transmutation of the real into the
fictional happens, the subject turning actor of his or her own life (or some
elements of it) onscreen. Thus this very peculiar feel of a Pialat scene,
almost like watching a butterfly unfolding out of the chrysalis. One gets the
sense that things have been rehearsed but rehearsed just enough not to get
stale. Or more adequately said, that the director is intimately persuaded that
it would be ridiculous to ask this old couple or these boys to "fall into
character." It's simply (and here's where the heavy lifting comes in) a
matter of providing adequate framing to flows of emotions all the more intense
that they are not mimicked, that they are delivered by awkward gestures and
voices that feel so completely authentic for always sounding as if they stood
an inch to the left or the right of their own emotion. In L'Enfance nue,
because nothing is strictly said and the ill fit between emotions and their
expression is constantly explored, the body plays as crucial a role as in any
Cassavetes film. Another footnote: A man who explores the potential of the
amateur with such zeal and pleasure in his first film can only become addicted
to it. It could not but make for stormy relationships with the pros he
encountered later in life. Pialat's shoots were famous for their tension and
the epic tussles he got into with his stars. He did well by them and managed to
give them back some rough edges. A third footnote (thrown in as a contemporary
signpost):
Insist on the fact that poignancy is achieved and taken away in the same
gesture. In Pialat's film, one doesn't rush onto the beach to see the sea à la
400 Blows, one is a voiceover that writes from the reformatory to a couple of
aging foster parents. A perennial in-betweener hoping to be freed by Christmas.
There is a ferocious cinematographic intelligence behind the conclusive
inconclusiveness of L'Enfance nue, its refusal to submit to the pathetic of the
fictional, and its incessant oscillation between fiction and documentary. An
intelligence that likes to articulate drama more than it cares to illustrate
it, and one that revels in triangulating its subject matter to do so. To talk
about Pialat's realism, as some are fond to do, is only half of it. What's important
is how much maneuvering gets into it, how Pialat circles around the material
and multiplies the angles of attack. That's where its currency and its
modernity lie.
L’enfance
nue: The Fly in the Ointment Criterion essay by Phillip Lopate, August 17,
2010
Leaving
the Color in L’enfance nue Criterion essay by Lee Kline, August 13, 2010
L'enfance
nue (1968) - The Criterion Collection
L'enfance-nue
(Pialat) - Essay by Kent Jones + Interview with Maurice ... L'enfance-nue (1968, by Pialat) – Essay by Kent Jones, (2008); from Interview
with Maurice Pialat, excerpt from an Interview by Dominique Maillet in 1972;
from Three Encounters with Maurice Pialat, excerpt from an Interview by
Stéphane Lévy-Klein and Olivier Eyquem in 1973, translated by Craig Keller from Cinemasparagus, October 18, 2015
The Relentless Vision of Maurice Pialat (Web Exclusive) — Cineaste ... Adam Bingham from Cineaste magazine, 2009
Maurice
Pialat and John Cassavetes • Senses of Cinema Philippe Lubac from Senses of Cinema, April 15, 2005
Maurice
Pialat: Acts of Grace • Senses of Cinema
Max Nelson, March 18, 2002
notcoming.com | L'Enfance-nue Ben Ewing from Not Coming to a Theater Near You
ruthlessculture.com [Jonathan McCalmont] September 27, 2009, also seen here: L'Enfance Nue (1968) - Truth beneath Theory
L'Enfance-Nue (1968) Adam Batty from Hope Lies, September 16, 2009
Maurice Pialat's “L'Enfance Nue,” review : The New Yorker The 401st Blow, by Anthony Lane from The New Yorker, April 5, 2010
Pialat Regained on Notebook | MUBI Daniel Kasman from Mubi, October 14, 2008
Home Cinema @ The Digital Fix - L'Enfance nue Noel Megahey, also seen here: DVD Times
Criterion
Reflections - L'enfance nue (1968) - #534 - CriterionCast.com David Blakeslee, Criterion
CriterionConfessions.com
[Jamie S. Rich] Criterion
Slant Magazine DVD [Fernando F. Croce] Criterion
DVD Talk [Casey Burchby] Criterion
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Tuesday
Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "L'Enfance Nue," - Mubi Glenn Kenny, March 3, 2009
Maurice
Pialat: Moments of Truth - Features - Reverse Shot Julien Allen, October 16, 2015
The
Misunderstood Maurice Pialat | The New Yorker Richard Brody, October 16, 2015
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
The Lumière Reader Tim Wong
Film International [Zachariah Rush]
The Celluloid Highway [Shaun Anderson]
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
Moviemartyr.com [Jeremy Heilman]
The Aesthetics of Maurice Pialat's 'L'Enfance Nue.' | The Irish Critic Kathy from The Irish Critic, April 27, 2010
Pialat,
or: Realism(s) #2 Landscape
Suicide, August 28, 2009
Naked Childhood BAM/PFA Program
L'Enfance-nue - Catalogue | The Masters of Cinema Series
The New York Times (Renata Adler) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Henry Kedger
(Visual) Quotes of quotes of quotes of quotes, 1/1 film photos from Cinemadison
VILLAGE D’ENFANTS
France (40 mi) 1969
Maurice Pialat Omdb
Cinemasparagus: Notes on Pialat's Short Films Craig Keller, October 12, 2015
Maurice Pialat. Filmographie. Les courts-métrages Pialat website
THE HOUSE IN THE WOODS (La Maison des Bois) – made for TV A 98
7 Episodes, 53 min, 47 min, 40 min, 53 min, 53 min, 56 min, 58 min
If
I had to choose the one film that best allows the viewer to penetrate into
Maurice Pialat's universe, I would unhesitatingly choose THE HOUSE
IN THE WOODS.
This series happily combines a profound naturalism and a strange sense of
fantasy, a liberty in its tone where hidden or manifested suffering alternates
with an astonishing happiness to be alive.
—Joel Magny from Cahiers du Cinema, May/June 2004
Easily my favorite Pialat film is this expansive six-hour
film made for French television, 7 episodes of 52 minutes each, where the
length of the film allows the director to meticulously detail the rhythms of
small-town life in the countryside during WWI, from 1914 to 1918, completely
absent any sentimentality, building interest and emotion through time and
through the presentation of the smallest details, by observing ordinary family
life, much like Olmi’s THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS (1978), but less spiritual and
more realistic, utilizing a series of vignettes to paint a large,
impressionistic portrait of a community, ultimately revealing a remarkable view
of humanity. The film, written by René
Wheeler, then re-written by Pialat and Arlette Langmann, who also co-edits the
film, follows young, rambunctious all-male schoolchildren and the close
scrutiny provided by their teacher, played by the director himself, the
Catholic priest and the goings-on behind the scenes with the altar boys
stealing a bit of the Father’s wine, a rotund gamekeeper (Pierre Doris) and his
nurturing wife (Jacqueline Dufranne), along with their sensitive teenage son
(Henri Puff) and strikingly beautiful daughter (Agathe Natanson), who take in
two young Parisian boys left abandoned during the war, their fathers called up to the front, whose
mothers write regularly and come to visit bearing gifts every Sunday, as well
as another troubled child, Hervé (Hervé Levy), who was dropped on their
doorstep, who hates the visiting mothers, as he has no family contact or visits
of his own, yet his warmth and spontaneity infectiously draws us and others to
him, the leading character in the film, as most of the action is seen through
his eyes.
Using plenty of character development and charming personality, always utilizing humor by revealing the idiosyncrasies of everyone involved, especially among the playful and mischievous boys, whose authentic realism is simply phenomenal in this film, who curiously want to see the arrival of ambulances bringing wounded soldiers, or the aristocratic Marquis (Fernand Gravey) who lives on a gigantic estate continuing to live a life of refinement as if there is no war on, whose wife is killed early on in a suspicious roadside fatality, or a grumpy socialist barkeeper who is filled with cynical suspicions of the Marquis, or the frail postman on his bike who regularly delivers letters to the family while muttering nonsense to himself, or the visiting Parisian mothers, who may as well be tottering fools, so out of place are they in the country wearing their flamboyant, feathered hats, or a local airman and his girlfriend who befriend Hervé and even allow him up in the air to fly, not to mention pastoral picnics in the countryside filled with languid moments where time, and the war, seem to drift away entirely.
All of this layered backdrop sets up who lives in the town so that we grow to know and care about its inhabitants. This is especially significant by the fourth episode, which brings the war and its ramifications to the door of this sleepy country town, opening with a long line of soldiers walking slowly through the countryside, where the kids run and greet them and ask for photographs and other mementos before the young men from the town are enlisted themselves, including the gamekeeper’s son. This is an exquisitely filmed episode, including an aerial sequence between a German and a French plane, balancing the loneliness and the quiet of the soldiers against the mothers and families hugging and kissing their young sons goodbye. Of course, many never return. The cost of war is shown in painfully intimate detail, not by any graphic war imagery or disfigurement, but in the mayor’s arrival at the gamekeeper’s doorstep to report the death of their son, which sets off an agonizing chain reaction which is stunning in its emotional range from screams to silence, where we can feel the weight of the world hanging on their shoulders. When the Armistice is signed, the town weeps in a joyous celebration of flag-waving and relief as the soldiers return home. There’s an interesting juxtaposition of the town’s quiet memorial tribute with the teacher reminding the schoolchildren of the human price paid for freedom.
When the war is
over, the children are rounded up by their families and returned to Paris, even
Hervé’s father arrives with his step-mother and step-sister, leaving the
gamekeeper’s residence suddenly empty and alone. In Paris, Hervé’s new parents throw a welcome
home party, where one women sings several soprano arias to the slightly
off-tune piano, but eventually, the unspoken grief from the loss of their
original spouses becomes painfully evident, and they fight and argue with each
other. So after hearing that the
gamekeeper’s wife is seriously ill, Hervé runs away back to the countryside. His quiet return to their home, and in
particular, the unspoken emotions created by reducing the images strictly to
the essentials has a profound effect, literally inducing a transforming
religious experience without anyone ever mentioning the name of God, something
out of the transcendent poetry of Bresson (Introduction
to Bresson). But as his family
arrives to bring him back to the city, we are left with the ravishing beauty of
the country home, with its life force abruptly removed once again. The use of music, the dark voice of the
soprano in Ravel’s “Trois Beaux Oiseaux du Paradis” 3 Beaux Oiseaux du Paradis ,
Ravel - YouTube (3:21) is also extremely well chosen, usually opening and
closing each episode in a wordless still image of haunting beauty.
The Captive
Lover – An Interview with Jacques ... - Senses of Cinema Frédéric Bonnaud interview with Jacques
Rivette, including comments on Pialat films, from Senses of Cinema, September 18, 2001
Pialat is a great filmmaker - imperfect, but then who isn't? I don't mean it as a reproach. And he had the genius to invent Sandrine - archeologically speaking - for A nos amours (1983). But I would put Van Gogh (1991) and The House in the Woods (1971) above all his other films. Because there he succeeded in filming the happiness, no doubt imaginary, of the pre-WWI world. Although the tone is very different, it's as beautiful as Renoir.
The Films of Maurice Pialat - filmlinc home Joel Magny from Cahiers du Cinema, May/June 2004
Accepted as a commission from French television, THE HOUSE IN THE WOODS is one of Maurice Pialat's best-loved works. Working with Arlette Langmann, Pialat sets about re-writing the script, but production had to begin so quickly that by the time the cameras start rolling not even half the episodes were completed. Yet the circumstances proved fortuitous: the sharp characterizations and precise narration of the early episodes eventually give way to a looser, more improvisatory style, as once Pialat creates this world he simply allows the audience to experience it. Set during WWI, the basic plot concerns the daily life in a French village, as experienced by a local gamekeeper and his wife who take in children left abandoned in the war. Some children grow accustomed to their new surroundings; others never lose that look of sadness at having been abandoned. At times the war is very far away; at other times, it's right outside their door. "If I had to choose the one film that best allows the viewer to penetrate into Maurice Pialat's universe, I would unhesitatingly choose THE HOUSE IN THE WOODS. This series happily combines a profound naturalism and a strange sense of fantasy, a liberty in its tone where hidden or manifested suffering alternates with an astonishing happiness to be alive."
La maison des bois aka The House of Wood (mini-series) (1971) The Wild Boys
Set in the French countryside during the Great War of 1914-18 Pialat's extraordinary seven episode TV serial extends the themes of his debut feature L'Enfance Nue (Naked Childhood), the director however having much more freedom and time to explore the nature of childhood and the impact on children abandoned by their parents. The series focuses on the experiences of three children - Herve, Bébert and Michel - (including Michel Tarrazon, the young star of the earlier movie) living out in the country with gamekeeper Albert and Maman Jeanne on the country estate of a Marquis. Hervé Gardy - the middle boy - can be viewed as the protagonist of the series. The gamekeeper and his wife have their own older children, Marcel and Marguerite, and the three boys have been sent there by their parents who have been caught up in the war, the fathers called up to the front, the mothers simply unable to look after them in the present climate.
As there is no English in these rips, here's a capsule (rough) translation of the action of each episode:
Episode 1: 1917. With Marcel, their son, and Margaret, their daughter, Jeanne and Albert Picard, the gamekeeper, live in a house in the woods. They also house three small Parisian boys whose dads are at the front. If Albert and Michel receive regular visits from their mothers, Herve has not heard from his. The children divide their time between school and the forest, unearthing birds in their nests and playing at war. The young Marquise just died, leaving the old Marquis very sad and alone in his castle. The preacher praises the love of the fatherland: "France is my country, I love it like my father and mother," with the sexton laughingly guzzling the altar wine in the back with altar boys.
Episode 2: An air base is located at the edge of the village. Caught stealing food from the officers' mess, the game warden is finally cleared by the intervention of the Marquis. One Sunday, while Michael and Albert take lunch with their mothers, Hervé is invited to the residence of the Marquis, who immediately takes a shine to the boy. While reading a letter to Picard, Hervé learns that his father intends to marry a young war widow ...
Episode 3: The sun is shining. It's Sunday. A happy day in the country greets the inhabitants of the house of wood. After passing the review board, Marcel is conscripted into military service. On the station platform, it is the last farewell, stirred by little flags. The train departs, taking conscripts to the front ...
Episode 4: A garrison that has foundered stops near the village. Children are greeted by the fatherly soldiers away from their own families. An officer of the air base provides Hervé his first flight. An enemy aircraft crashes in a field.
Episode 5: Panic begins to set in the village as the "Boches" approach. Fortunately, this is a false alarm. A letter from Marcel: all is well. After several years of absence, dressed in his smart uniform, Hervé's father Paul enjoys a leave to visit his son. Awkwardly they both master their emotions. Then Hervé learns about the death of Marcel.
Episode 6: 1918, Armistice. Flags and fanfare, we celebrate the return of children in the country. Ever leaving the house of wood, Albert and Michel return to Paris with their mothers. Hervé found his father and gets to know Helen, his new mom, and Brigitte, his future stepsister. Hoping to brighten up the empty house, "Papa Albert" and "Mama Joan" collect their little orphan. It's the end of the summer holidays, it's the end of the war ...
Episode 7: Paris, time has passed. Paul resumed his trade as a cabinetmaker. He returned later and often drunk, and fights with Helen. Hervé is politely bored playing with Brigitte. "Papa Albert" leaves one day like a gust of wind. "Mama Joan" is very ill, affected by the death of Marcel. Hervé runs away and returns to the house in the woods ...
A Manifesto in a Miniseries - The New Yorker Richard Brody, November 2, 2015
MUBI's Notebook: Tony Huang October 30, 2015
Reel Movie Critic [Pam and George Singleton]
Maurice Pialat - BAM/PFA - Film Programs Judy Bloch, September 3 – 30, 2004, also seen here: The House in the Woods
Cinemasparagus: Ten Films by Maurice Pialat Stéphane Lévy-Klein and Olivier Eyquem interview from Masters of Cinema, 1974, posted April 20, 2009
Ten Best Films Michael J. Anderson (see 1971)
top70.html Steve Erickson Top Ten lists
WE WON’T GROW OLD TOGETHER (Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble) B+ 92
France Italy (107 mi) 1972
Somewhat in the vein of Jean Eustache’s bleak confessional outpourings in The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1973), this chilly and impersonal film is based on the director’s own autobiography, an unsparing portrait of a cad, an odious, self-absorbed, and domineering man, emblematic of the director himself, starring the dour and despondent Jean Yanne (winner of Best Actor at Cannes), wearing the same wide sideburns from Godard’s WEEKEND (1967) and Chabrol’s LE BOUCHER (1970), as well as the more energized photographic cover girl Marlène Jobert from Godard’s MASCULIN FÉMININ (1966), who also played opposite Charles Bronson in René Clément’s RIDER ON THE RAIN (1970). She’s seen here playing the buoyant yet continually hurt mistress along with another Godard actress Macha Méril from UNE FEMME MARIÉE (1964) as the overly critical wife, that pushes and pushes us further inside a failed relationship until it’s impossible not to identify with the characters’ inner world, a film in the manner of Truffaut’s later film THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN (1977), complete with delusions of love, which is really nothing but self obsession, and once disappointed, and he’s always disappointed, he’s filled with self-loathing, which he usually takes out on Jobert with abusive, contemptuous comments designed to destroy any sense of her self-esteem.
According to the director, this film has
only 25 shots, a fact which, alone, suggests this is not an ordinary film,
rather it’s a quasi-experimental film about endless breakups and makeups, much
like the repetitive rhythm of Ravel’s “Bolero” -
Maurice Ravel BOLERO - Wiener Philharmonic - YouTube (17:23). Shot along the streets of Paris, told in an
impersonal manner, always standing outside the action, the camera follows the
predictable rhythms and routine
of a loveless marriage with Françoise (Macha
Méril), with whom he still lives, while Jean simultaneously pursues a long and
unhappy 5-year affair with a much younger Catherine (Marlène Jobert), a poisonous
relationship filled with acts of abuse, bullying, and intimidation. The film consists of endless scenes of
tortuous repetition, picking up Catherine, trying to entice her to bed, growing
angry when she’s not interested, leaving or slamming the door in her face,
seeing her again, starting the same process all over again, which happens so
often that it eventually becomes ludicrous.
In a frustrating portrait of interdependency, the couple is together
again, we have no idea how much time has passed, no explanation is
necessary. But neither one can end
it.
And when we think it’s over, it’s not, as they continue to keep seeing one another, where they over-analyze every move and thought. Once she finally leaves him for good, only then does he get serious about finding her attractive, only when he realizes he’s lost her does he begin to treat her nicely, but it’s too late. His visit to her parent’s house is excruciatingly uncomfortable, as they just don’t know how to politely get rid of him. The structure of the film is a slow build up of the claustrophobic feelings where there is no escape, where one is choking on the familiarity of growing tired with one another, largely expressed (twenty years before Kiarostami) through their repeated confinement in a tiny, perpetually parked car Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble - YouTube (2:56), the picture of motionless and emotional paralysis and the basis of this comic, but lethally serious confessional examination. The film was a particular favorite of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, with a similar sadism used for the male protagonist of MARTHA (1974), where Pialat expressly forbid the actor Jean Yanne from displaying even a hint of tenderness. The use of Haydn’s music from “The Creation” Hermann Prey - Die Schöpfung - Joseph Haydn YouTube (6:07) is enthralling at the finale, playing over flashback images of Jobert swimming alone in the choppy waves of the sea. After the final break up, all that’s left are these memories.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE
Chicago Josh B. Mabe
The story is simple and repetitive: An aging, stagnant filmmaker berates his much younger girlfriend. They cycle between breaking up and then getting back together. Then she leaves for good. The story is a harshly autobiographical one based on Pialat's own novel. It's brilliantly written and performed—but once you get past the yelling, the more interesting qualities of the film stem from Pialat's great eye and rhythms. Originally a painter, and trained as a filmmaker by almost two decades of making short films and documentaries, Pialat came to narrative feature-length filmmaking with a fully developed compositional style and sense of movement and space. As for the rhythms: scenes go on for too long, or end abruptly. Emotional tones shift unexpectedly. The story is linear but still disorienting, as almost nothing but the "bad times" are shown. It's a profoundly unsettled and economic film.
Nous
ne vieillirons pas ensemble (1972) James
Travers from FimsdeFrance
For several years, Jean, a middle-aged filmmaker, has been having an affair with a younger woman, Catherine. In spite of this, he continues to live with his wife Françoise. Catherine accepts the arrangement, and even allows Jean to bully and intimidate her. But, during a filming tour in Camargue, Jean’s outbursts of anger drive Catherine away. A short while later, the couple are together again. How much longer will the stormy relationship last…?
For his second full-length film, Maurice Pialat adapted his auto-biographical novel, casting Jean Yanne to play him on the strength of their physical similarity. As in most of Pialat’s better work, the film chronicles a volatile relationship between two seemingly incompatible characters, in an emotionally charged and painfully honest piece of drama. Jean Yanne is seldom as impressive as he is in this film, giving what could fairly be rated as his best screen performance. The standard of acting is high generally, with a memorable contribution from Marlène Jobert, allowing Pialat to create one of the most perfect pieces of cinema in his impressive and sadly underrated oeuvre.
Maurice Pialat - Cinema Real - Film Forum on mubi.com Mubi film discussion forum, April 26, 2012
Maurice Pialat’s powerful romantic drama examines the final period of a long and ultimately unhappy affair. Jean (Jean Yanne) is an unpleasant, domineering man. Though he still lives with his wife, their marriage has been over for a long time. For six years, Jean has had an affair with the much-younger Catherine (Marlene Jobert). The dynamic of their relationship is moving it toward disintegration also, but Catherine resists it. Scenes of alternating recriminations and reconciliations unveil the anatomy of their breakup. Rare is the film in movie-history that can announce the entire movement of its ‘plot’ with its title alone. But Pialat’s second feature, Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble [We Won’t Grow Old Together] does exactly that, encapsulating all the turmoil, and the final end-point, of a couple who among themselves once made a commitment — and in living together will come to make another one yet. Jean (Jean Yanne, of Godard’s Weekend) and Catherine (Marlène Jobert, of Godard’s Masculin Féminin) are the couple whose every move charts an advancement deeper into an emotional war zone. Theirs is the classic and the tragic case of an emotional abuse centered around a perplexing, but powerful, interdependency. At last the point arrives that determines the relationship, with all its weekend holidays, its apologies and submissions, can go no further — and, in a final shot of genius, Pialat discloses all the ways in which the future might be at once liberated, and enslaved, by the past. Based on a novel by Pialat himself, and on the trauma of his own personal life in the years leading up to the film, Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble was a smash-hit at the time of its release — and yet is arguably one of the most upsetting films ever made.
Maurice
Pialat's We Won't Grow Old Together - Film Comment Dave Kehr, May/June 2004
Maurice Pialat's second feature, We Won't Grow Old Together, became an unlikely commercial success upon its release. Far from viewer-friendly, it tells the story of the endless breakups and makeups of a highly unstable yet apparently indissoluble couple. It's a sort of love story told in inverted terms, depicting the protracted end of a five-year affair, with its arbitrary disagreements, sudden mood shifts, moments of irrational anger, and displays of stinging contempt, presented with a genuine, unmeasured violence.
"You’ve never succeeded at anything and you never will," says Jean (Jean Yanne), a 40-year-old married filmmaker, to his younger, working-class lover Catherine (Marlène Jobert). "And do you know why? Because you are vulgar, irremediably vulgar, and not only are you vulgar, you are ordinary." These are the film's most celebrated lines, quoted in the original trailer as well as on the back of the DVD recently released in France—a sort of brutalist alternative to the famous line from Love Story: "Love means never having to say you're sorry"
Certainly, no one says they're sorry very often in Pialat's film, or at least means it for long. The director summed up the film's structure in a 1983 interview with French Prémiere's Marc Esposito: "It was very repetitive—it was really like Ravel’s 'Bolero.' A lot of people who saw the film and liked it asked themselves how I could have sustained something so slight: a guy drives a girl crazy who finally leaves him. So it's necessarily the same scenes that come back again and again." Violent rupture is followed by casual reconciliation, and after one of Pialat's unmarked ellipses—a jump cut in a Pialat film can cover five seconds or five months, and there is little in the narration to tell us which—the couple is together again. No explanation necessary.
The plot, as in many of Pialat's films, was a direct transposition from his personal life. Like Jean, Pialat was married at the time but having an affair with a young, uneducated woman; like Pialat, Jean visits the south of France to make a documentary on the Camargue region (Pialat's 1966 short, La Camargue, is offered as an extra on the DVD). Marlène Jobert, an actress usually cast in genre films (opposite Charles Bronson, fore example, in René Clément’s Rider on the Rain), was asked to play a character close to her own working-class origins; as Jean, Jean Yanne models his performance so closely on Pialat's own appearance and demeanor that one wonders why Pialat didn't simply play the role himself, as he was to do later in À nos amours.
But for autobiography, We Won't Grow Old Together remains chilly and impersonal. The camera stands out the action, taking the point of view of neither protagonist (though, naturally enough, the audience tends to side with the abused and far more emotionally open Christine). Because the couple has no place of their own, they are forced to meet in cafés, hotel rooms, and—most expressively—in Jean's car, a boxy blue Renault with dirty, smudged windows (the greasy fingerprints on the glass seem like a direct affront to mainstream moviemaking, where such “mistakes," otherwise known as points of reality, would never be permitted).
Just like Kiarostami 20 years later, Pialat is intrigued by the dramatic pressure cooker that the confined space of the car provides, but where Kiarostami's characters generally look straight ahead as they drive and talk, Pialat's actors sit in a parked car, facing each other—a shift from a sense of life as a journey to life as a static condition, from the freedom of the road to the claustrophobia of the couple. Pialat's characters, like their vehicles, are going nowhere fast.
In the final sequence of We Won't Grow Old Together Jean's car finally moves—he's dropping Christine off and for once the camera is in the back seat, looking at the two characters from behind. The shift in point of view suggests that the rupture has finally become complete; there will be no more reconciliations. Christine gives Jean a quick buss on the cheek and hops out; as Jean drives away, Pialat employs the film's only nonlinear cut, to a flashback of Christine swimming alone in the choppy waves of a chilly sea during the visit to Camargue. For Pialat, this shot represents what may be a uniquely subjective moment in his resolutely objective cinema; the image represents the Christine that Jean will always carry with him, the Christine who will live on in his memory. Here, for once, Pialat is "making cinema," using a rhetorical device to make a point that his studiously plain image and sound alone cannot. An emotional rupture becomes a stylistic rupture as well, in one of the most anomalous and moving moments in this uniquely stubborn and uniquely brilliant filmmaker’s work.
This
Is What You Want, This Is What You Get: The Terrifying Sexual ... Glenn Kenny from Mubi, August 20, 2009
"Breaking up is hard to do," Neal Sedaka once sang, in syrupy tones. Just how hard it is to do is the subject unrelentingly dissected by writer/director Maurice Pialat in his 1972 film Nous ne viellirons pas ensemble, which he adapted from his own autobiographical novel. A brutal film without a dollop of sweetness, syrupy or not, it chronicles a love affair that has nowhere to go, and yet refuses to stop. The protagonist Jean simply will not leave his wife for his lover (and occasional professional assistant) Catherine—they will not grow old together. But they won't get too far away from each other any time soon, either.
Jean, as befits the autobiographical nature of the piece, is a filmmaker, sort of; he seems unable to complete a work, and various money toubles are alluded to. He often seems enervated, but on the other hand displays a bottomless capacity for resentment. He's played by the great Jean Yanne, who once again sports the Wide Sideburns Of French White Male Privilege that he wore so memorably in Godard'sWeekend. Given his insistently gruff demeanor here—Pialat expressly forbid the actor from displaying even a hint of tenderness—one can imagine that Jean actually is Weekend's rough, crass Roland Durand, resurrected and given his chauvinist mojo back.
But it's quite a bit more complicated than that. Beginning with a weekend seaside outing that includes a long visit from the parents of his lover, Catherine (Marlene Jobert)—and yes, this is one of those pictures that any number of Americans can watch and think, "Boy, French people put up with a lot—if I were her dad, I'd kick the crap out of him"—we witness, over and over, an intimacy that can turn on a dime. Jean curses out Catherine when she can't hold a microphone properly in a street-scene documentary shoot. He later explains his flip-out by saying, "You know what I'm like." He harangues her in a parked car—15, maybe 20 percent of the film is enacted in one parked car or another—excoriating her looks, her "ratty thighs," her freckles, and so on. (That Jobert is a beauty with a body that any young man of the Maxim generation would unhesitatingly characterize as "killer" underscores the hideous irony of his vituperation.) He calls her a mediocrity, and despite his viciousness, her clinginess, blankness, seeming lack of ambition outside the relationship give one queasy pause as to whether he's got a point. In the wake of his rants, he writes her love letters; we don't hear much of them (as their alliance deteriorates, one weapon Catherine uses against Jean is her refusal to read them), but perhaps we recall the letter Jeanne Moreau reads to Marcello Mastroianni at the end of Antonioni's La notte. Perhaps we imagine the saturnine Pialat snickering at us for making such an association.
But there you have it. While one is normally wary of taking certain DVD supplements at their word when grappling with a film, there's a bit during a videotaped conversation with Pialat and "associates" made for French television (imagine an iteration of Dinner For Five that you'd actually watch) that acted as something of an "open sesame" for me. One of said associates, an unnamed woman, offers a feminist interpretation of the film, saying that Catherine's decision to enact a definitive break from Jean represents the character coming into her own. (Never mind that the way she makes the break is by throwing herself into what will in all likelihood be a typically complacent bourgeois marriage.) But Pialat won't have Catharine being put into the position of a one-time victim emerging triumphant.
Allowing that the character Jean is "odious," he insists that Catharine knew this the whole time, that there's no causal link between Jean's behavior and his relationship with Catherine. And this is something the viewer intuits throughout. It's not a matter of Catherine bringing out the worst in Jean; shes just there, and she continues to be there. As for Jean's consistently deferential behavior towards the wife he's betraying (played by Macha Méril, so much meeker here than she was in Godard's Une femme mariée), it is a mystery; difficult to tell whether it's the product of respect, disinterest, or just habit. He believes he's paying her what's due by not divorcing her, and yet she is as thoroughly unhappy as Catherine. And this is the weirdest, most uncomfortable thing, finally, about the emotional arrangements and power relations presented in the film: Although he is the supposed oppressor of both his wife and his lover, he is also the only person of the three who did not, as it were, sign up for this. We don't know what it is he wants, exactly, and he sure as hell doesn't, but we do know that the situation as it stands is not that thing. Whereas Catherine, and, we gradually learn, Françoise, are willing participants in their own miseries. They know the score, or the scores, and they respond, for the most part, with passivity.
I understand that I'm treading on thin ice here, approaching the untenable notion that women in abusive relationships are somehow "asking for it." Pialat's cinema teems with head-on depictions of emotional states that are immediately...discomfiting, and unpleasant to try to make sense of. Catherine and Françoise are, undeniably, emotional masochists, colluding in their own misery. But is Jean, in fact, a sadist? He is, for sure, thoroughly dislikable, and I for one rather enjoyed watching him squirm in the film's final scenes, as he searches for Catherine and is informed by various parties, her parents included, of her plans.
But by the same token, one would have to be made of very stout stuff indeed to merely shrug off the odd sense of loss Yanne shoulders at the film's end, made all the more palpable by the end credit sequence, shots of a swimming Jobert pulled by sea currents...which are gradually subsumed by views of her standing thigh-deep in water, clearly out of character and taking direction. A testament to Pialat's regard for the actress, or a reflexive curio of his own loss? (In an interview included on this remarkable Eureka!/Masters of Cinema Region 2 UK disc, part of the label's exemplary Pialat series, Jobert says that she looks very much like her real-life analog.) While it's arguable that the film truly transcends sexual politics, one also has to admit that it could very well have shared a title with a great, little-known-in-these-parts novel by Jean Dutourd: The Horrors of Love.
The Relentless Vision of Maurice Pialat (Web Exclusive) — Cineaste ... Adam Bingham from Cineaste magazine, 2009
Cinemasparagus:
Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble (Pialat) - Essay by ... Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble
(1972, by Pialat) – Essay by Emmanuel Burdeau, Pialat n'est pas là, (2009);
Interviews with Maurice Pialat, Pialat Says...by Maurice Pialat (1972);
from Three Encounters with Maurice Pialat, excerpt from an Interview by
Stéphane Lévy-Klein and Olivier Eyquem in 1973; Maurice Pialat in
Conversation, 1973, concluding with the opening paragraph of Pialat’s novel,
Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble, translated by Craig Keller from
Cinemasparagus, October 16, 2015
Are the Hills Going to March Off?: Carson Lund November 19, 2012
The Dissolve: Scott Tobias August 11, 2014
Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble (1972) | Cinema Talk Jake Savage
Beauty
and Romanticism in the Films of Maurice Pialat - The Film Stage Ethan Vestby, October 22, 2015
Maurice
Pialat: Moments of Truth - Features - Reverse Shot Julien Allen, October 16, 2015
The Village Voice: Melissa Anderson October 13, 2015
The Chicago Reader: Ben Sachs September 18, 2012
VideoVista review Jonathan McCalmont
DVD Times - Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble Noel Megahey, also seen here: DVD Times
MyReviewer - Masters of Cinema DVD Review [David Beckett]
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Jordan Cronk]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
We
Won't Grow Old Together - Film Society of Lincoln Center
We Won’t Grow Old Together BAM/PFA Program
South China Morning Post [Edmund Lee]
DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
(Visual) Quotes..., 1/14 film photos from Cinemadison
THE MOUTH AGAPE (La Gueule ouverte) C 73
Seems to me anybody doing truly vital work is bound to piss some people off, or at least bore some people, which Pialat does here. Hard to figure how film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum considers this his “favorite” in the Pialat repertoire, as I can’t imagine ever wanting to sit through this snoozer again. Is there an audience out there for a film about a woman slowly dying from cancer, told in a realistic venue with long takes of her lying in bed and with only occasional humorous interruptions, that make this dreary, endless film seem like it will never end? What’s lacking here is any emotional connection at all to the people onscreen. This is a film about how people deal with death, basically, by not dealing with it, as a woman with cancer has a short life expectancy, and when her husband and married son gather to be by her side, her condition only grows worse. But both guys are self-centered brooders, who barely spend any time with her at all, instead they drink and chase the nurses or any girl they can get their hands on, including local call girls, and relish each opportunity with the sins of the flesh like there’s no tomorrow. A memorable early scene shows the son (Philippe Léotard) groping a gorgeous, well-endowed young woman as they enter a doorway, and it’s all over before they can even get on the bed. The woman, obviously proud in her nakedness, struts to the bidet and squats, completely unashamed.
The husband, Hubert Deschamps, is superb, especially when he does a little dance after copping a feel from one of the younger ladies in town, showing chutzpah, rising above the ordinary, actually getting pissed at his wife for staying alive so long, while the son, on the other hand, just seems so ordinary, so average, and has so little to offer. He and his wife (Nathalie Baye) seem to barely know each other, though they were real-life lovers at the time of the filming, and she apparently improvised a scene in an attic where she is sobbing as he reads old love letters between his mother and father, awkwardly confessing that he never wrote her any love letters. There’s a memorable long, early scene, perhaps ten minutes in length, early in his mother’s diagnosis, where the two of them casually sit at a table eating grapes or spooning yogurt, discussing jealousy and marital fidelity of all things, before the conversation stops and they listen to a record of Mozart’s opera Cosi Fan Tutti, a scene where jealous, unfaithful lovers are parting.
My favorite scene seems like an outtake, because it’s completely out of place and has nothing to do with the rest of the story, is actually very brief, and is a bit of deadpan. The husband and an older female neighbor are standing in a small garden patch wearing farmer’s clothes. She mentions it’s time for the grapes to be harvested—and nothing happens, neither of them moves a muscle. After she dies, there’s a memorable long take at the church where the camera slowly creeps around the side of the church, following a line of mourners, stopping at the hearse where the family looks awkward in anxious anticipation. There is a scene in a restaurant after the funeral, where the father and son are sitting silently in anguish, disgusted at being held captive by a long and endlessly meaningless conversation about flowers. While this film may accurately depict how many family members avoid coming to terms with the death of their loved ones, who actually see it as a personal inconvenience, and while this is not an ordinary film, certainly not one that equates death with sex,
the overall tone of this film was way too detached and removed to ever generate much interest. Personally, I was hoping this film would end "before" the woman died, so that all the gyrations and histrionics to avoid grief would still be going on, kind of like Herzog's documentary LA SOUFRIÈRE (1977) about an island where a volcano is about to blow, and he creates all this dramatic build up, but then it never does.
The
Mouth Agape Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Reader
The Mouth Agape (1974, 82 min.), my favorite film by Maurice Pialat, concerns a middle-aged woman dying of cancer and how her illness affects her husband and son; its details about sex as well as death are recognizable, embarrassing, moving, and occasionally funny. In French with subtitles.
Pialat's third feature takes up a theme which, on the face of it, could not seem more uninviting: a middle-aged woman dying of cancer, and how this affects her husband and son. But what Pialat makes of this is so recognisable, embarrassing and moving - even, on occasion, funny - that he more than justifies his use of a forbidding subject. He has ideas about how emotions involving sex and death are intimately related - and about the clarity and lack of it that they shed on everything else, as son and father each go lusting after every woman in sight. He has ideas about cinema, too, and an expressive style that can encapsulate a lifetime of memories in a single shot. Without a trace of sentimentality or easy effect, this seemingly semi-autobiographical work is as intense in its way as The Mother and the Whore, and unforgettable.
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Ben Sachs
Maurice Pialat's follow-up to WE WON'T GROW OLD TOGETHER, is just as personal and emotionally volatile as its predecessor. It's based on events that occurred around the death of Pialat's mother, beginning not long before she fell into the final stages of cancer and ending not long after she passed. The film reaches an extraordinary climax early on when the mother, not yet infirm, vents recriminations about her husband at length to her increasingly exasperated son; this sets the tone for a narrative filled with angry outbursts, uncouth behavior, and surprisingly funny moments. (“I will really talk about death in a scandalous way,” Pialat promised an interviewer at Positif before MOUTH AGAPE was released. “Crudeness is a necessary thing today.”) Marja Warehime, in her 2006 book about the director, notes that, “like Pialat's earlier films, THE MOUTH AGAPE is a fragmented linear narrative vectored by the movement of the characters... yet despite the constant references to movement, arrivals and departures, the plan séquences follow the characters' efforts to kill time as they wait for the inevitable, when the inevitable can neither be hurried nor delayed.” In other words, the film derives its shock value not only from its violent emotional content, but also from its daring to acknowledge the passages of empty time that occur while waiting for a loved one to die. Another jolt of MOUTH AGAPE comes near the end, when Pialat unexpectedly shifts focus from his autobiographical stand-in to the character's father. Warehime notes that the shift arose from practical reasons, as Pialat grew frustrated on set with the work of lead actor Philippe Léotard and decided to devote more attention to supporting player Hubert Deschamps. This sort of thing was common for the director, who often revised the structures of his films during shooting and editing; the practice was instrumental in giving his films their invigoratingly jarring shapes.
Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second Adam Batty, May 21, 2009, also seen here: La Gueule Ouverte (1974) «
Maurice Pialat is a largely unknown commodity of French cinema. His work is reaching larger audiences at the moment due to a project by the Masters of Cinema line, in which they have decided to put 6 of his films out over the course of a year or so. La Gueule Ouverte is the third of these titles, and a welcome addition to my collection.
Being a huge fan of Pialat’s L’Enfance-Nue and A Nos Amours I approach each subsequent Pialat picture with the kind of optimism reserved for the very greats. While La Gueule Ouverte doesn’t reach the dizzy heights that those features do, it remains a magnificent achievement. The tale of the last few months in the life of Monique (portrayed incredibly by Monique Melinand) the matriarch of a family unit, and the way in which the lives of her family around her are affected as she undergoes a critical illness.
The film is interesting in the respect that the story doesn’t actually focus on the key character of Monique, but on those around her. As such we see the way in which her husband Roger (Hubert Deschamps) coming to terms with her death in huis own unique way and the decline of her son Phillipe’s marriage to Nathalie which runs concurrently with her personal degradation. The personal nature of the struggles within La Gueule Ouverte remind of the work of John Cassavetes, a filmmaker that Pialat has been compared to on numerous occasions, but it never rings more true than in this piece. The sheer scale of the breakdown of the persona’s on screen is comparable to the likes of A Woman Under The Influence and Faces in their breadth and honesty. As such La Gueule Ouverte is incredibly draining emotionally, although there are brief touches of humour amongst the hardship (something which again reminds of Cassavetes).
The film opens with silence over the opening credits. Silence is a big factor in La Gueule Ouverte, with their being only one use of music throughout, which is used as an emotional indicator as statement, and as such proves effective. There are lots of awkward silences throughout the film, with the audience effectively participating within these silences by being forced to bear witness to them. The first one comes during the playing of the record in the aforementioned scene, and plays nicely against the final one of these “moments”, which comes between father and son as they witness Monique’s final resting spot on the bed that has become a character itself within the film. The accompanying cry of “It’s over” from Roger to notify his son is heartbreaking, and yet a huge statement; throughout the film many conflicts have arisen at the behest of the situation Monique’s illness has brought upon them, yet with this final act the preceeding tension and issues are all forgotten. The way in which the character of Monique seemingly becomes of lesser and lesser importance throughout is interesting too, with her slowly settling into the background, and becoming a catalyst for the scenario around her than an actual part of the world we are witnessing.
La Gueule Ouverte follows no formal rules of time. That is to say that it doesn’t follow the traditional route of telling a story by the medium of cinema. A scene could be followed by one several weeks later, with no indication brought on to the audience other than a shift in the mise-en-scene. While deliberately trying at first, it eventually becomes an effective narrative tool, and adds immeasurably to the success of the film.
The film ends with the most beautifully shot scene in all of Pialat’s oeuvre, in which Phillipe and Nathalie drive away from the family store, and effectively the situation that they have been a part of for the past 85 minutes. The free flowing tracking shot is a stark contrast to the still, precise camera movement that has preceeded it, and genuinely feels we the viewer are being given the opportunity to break free from the shackles that have encaptured the characters on screen.
La
gueule ouverte (Pialat) - Essay by Adrian Martin + A Brief Interview ... Devastation,
by Adrian Martin (2009); The More Movies
You Make, the Harder It Gets!, a brief Interview with Maurice Pialat (1973),
translated by Craig Keller, October
13, 2015
La Gueule ouverte
• Senses of Cinema Miguel
Marías from Senses of Cinema, July
31, 2006
The Relentless Vision of Maurice Pialat (Web Exclusive) — Cineaste ... Adam Bingham from Cineaste magazine, 2009
Maurice
Pialat: Acts of Grace • Senses of Cinema
Max Nelson, March 18, 2002
Maurice Pialat. Articles. Analyses filmiques. Cries, whispers ... Cries, whispers, silence and space: death and the family in films by Pialat, Bergman and Ozu, by Maximilian Le Cain from the Pialat website, October 2004
Only The
Cinema [Ed Howard] May 3, 2009
ruthlessculture.com [Jonathan McCalmont] September 4, 2009, also seen here: La Gueule Ouverte (1974) – Part of the Furniture
Home Cinema @ The Digital Fix - La gueule ouverte Noel Megahey, also seen here: DVD Times
179 movies that make you think [Jugu Abraham]
Maurice
Pialat: Moments of Truth - Features - Reverse Shot Julien Allen, October 16, 2015
The
Misunderstood Maurice Pialat | The New Yorker Richard Brody, October 16, 2015
Beauty
and Romanticism in the Films of Maurice Pialat - The Film Stage Ethan Vestby, October 22, 2015
The Village Voice: Melissa Anderson October 13, 2015
Tuesday
Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "La Gueule Ouverte ... Glenn Kenny from Mubi, May 26, 2009
La gueule ouverte: The Masters of Cinema Series (DVD) - MyReviewer.com My Reviewer.com
Blu-ray.com [Jeffrey Kauffman]
User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil
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DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
GRADUATE FIRST (Passe ton bac d'abord) C+ 76
France Canada (85 mi) 1979
AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973), French-style, only without the cars, without the music, or the fun or the humor—in other words, something like Bakersfield, California, where the only gathering place for kids is a Dairy Queen, and in the automobile world of America, the kids drive around and around the same parking lot all night long cruising for chicks. But this is France, in the small, working class mining town of Lens, where no one has a car and there is nothing to do for teens except hang out in bars and drink and flirt before getting into someone’s pants, even though it’s having sex with the same people you’ve been sick of being with your entire life, and the next night, you hang out some more, each night pretending to have fun. The cyclical universe of this meaningless existence becomes apparent immediately in this plotless story of disinterested kids dropping out of school, thinking they can live on unemployment for awhile until they get a job, but soon enough, they quit their jobs as well. Some get married to a working guy just to get out of the house, away from their parent’s old-fashioned lectures, as all these kids fight and argue with their parents, as they really don’t know how to listen to anybody, so they never really learn anything. Girls get attached to a guy, get knocked up, and get married for all the wrong reasons, then in a few months, they’re ready to call that quits.
One such married girl laments to the most proficient “love’em and leave ‘em” seducer in town, “Love sucks. Why can’t you ever love the ones you want to love?” It’s really not love they’re talking about here, it’s life. It’s a stinking dead end town where nothing ever happens, and people are stuck here for the rest of their lives being miserable, and the mistakes they make, the consequences of casual sex, may be what prevents them from ever having the opportunity to leave. Again, the style of the film is realistic, though not up to the previous high standards, instead this film was emotionally flat and unengaging, without the poetry of say, THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (1971), which tackled the same subject from an even bleaker vantage point, but in that film, there was a connection to the characters, both the adults and the kids. No one cares about anyone or anything in this film, least of all themselves, and that’s the point, it makes no difference whether they graduate or not, as there’s no jobs, and their life will be the same anyway, so it serves as a kind of time capsule for an era of lost dreams.
Best known in Britain for La Gueule Ouverte and Loulou, Pialat is a major, though unfortunately marginalised, French talent whose realist eye here lights on provincial teenage life, producing something like a cross between Ken Loach and a Gallic Gregory's Girl. The non-professional kids, on communal holiday from the title's exhortation to concentrate on their school exams, show a lively disregard for any notion of adolescent angst, despite dead-end prospects, while Pialat never indulges the exploitative clichés of the native genre of 'nostalgic' teen-sex low comedy.
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Ben Sachs
Not only did Maurice Pialat and co-writer Arlette Langmann cast GRADUATE FIRST with non-professionals from the working-class town of Lens, where the movie was set and shot—Langmann developed the script by hanging out with the teenagers in the cast and asking them about their lives. This immersive, yet informal creative process spawned an immersive and deliberately messy film, which moves between several major characters without granting favor to any one of them, the way you might pass time with a bunch of people who have congregated at a cafe. “The characters appear, disappear and reappear somewhat unpredictably from sequence to sequence,” notes Marja Warehime in her 2006 book on the director. “In this sense there is a certain narrative aimlessness that reflects the young protagonists' own lack of direction, but which also corresponds formally to the existential question—reiterated in various forms throughout the film—‘What are you going to do?'” The story takes place over the main characters' last year of high school; few, if any of these kids is in any hurry to graduate, since no one has any illusions that their lives will get any better in adulthood. Despite its overall pessimism, GRADUATE FIRST contains some of the most lighthearted moments of any of Pialat movie. According to Warehime, it was a modest hit in France when it was first released, and it continues to turn up fairly often on TV there.
VideoVista review James A. Stewart
In French education parlance 'le bac' is akin to graduation
and in the insightful Passe ton bac d'abord we follow the dreary lives
of a bunch kids near school-leaving age in bleak northern France, as they fight
the twin evils of apathy and boredom.
Made in 1979, this film has been re-mastered to coincide with its 30th
anniversary. The gritty realism of the period comes across in bounds, and
whilst the French didn't suffer the same level of financial meltdown as Britain
did, it was still a time when the socialists in Europe were under increasing
attack for some of the many postwar policy failures. The consensus period had
well and truly ended by 1979.
Against this backdrop, a group of schoolmates are depicted doing exactly what
apathetic youths did at the time. They take school with about as much
seriousness as a Jack Black film, wandering with aimless lethargy from
relationship to relationship. One marries for want of a better thing to do, not
for love. They all see their parents as unfair bullies who preach job stability
and common sense. Not what a teenager wants to hear.
They have dreams and grand plans but no energy to follow them through. They
want everything but don't want to do anything achieve their desires. Director
Maurice Pialat delivers a real life-affirming piece here by not delivering much
action or suspense. Instead, in documentary style, he follows the mundane
actions of the teenagers as they set about their daily lives. By avoiding
dramatics he gives us a movie in which the ennui of rural living in northern
France is highlighted. The hope is extraneous, and the dreams just that. In an
understated way, Pialat captures beautifully the mood of the era with its lack
of hope and choice. The expectations to lead a 'good life' and assimilate, and
the smothering burdens of parental and social presumption, are sublime in their
representation as the overarching themes of boredom, laziness and
procrastination, are drip-fed to the viewer.
At times, Passe ton bac d'abord comes across as a documentary following
the lives of the youth of the day with subtle observations on characters, life
and attitude being the main aim on the film. Pialat's ability to make this
action-less piece enthralling is testament to his guidance and light touch on
the small details throughout. There are moments of genuine humour and angst,
and I can imagine this movie would have caused serious bouts of introspection
amongst French teenagers upon its release.
It doesn't take a genius to guess that this movie is filmed in French with
English subtitles, and I personally feel that any non-English language movie is
best watched in its mother tongue in order to get some of the universal
intonations and quirks of how the dialogue is being delivered. This is an
excellent introduction to the work of Pialat.
DVD extras include theatrical trailers for other Pialat films which are to be
converted to DVD and a retrospective piece with some of the original cast of Passe
ton bac d'abord.
Passe Ton Bac d’Abord (1979) « Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second Adam Batty from Hope Lies, March 9, 2009
In advance of this months article in conjunction with The Cineastes on
Maurice Pialat’s L’Enfance-Nue
I
have written a brief piece on that films spiritual follow-up, Passe Ton Bac d’Abord. Its not as long an essay
as I would usually produce for a film of this quality, but I have decided to
incorporate a big part of it into my piece on L’Enfance-Nue, so consider this a
teaser of sorts.
Produced in the wake of Maurice Pialat’s first flop, La Gueule Ouverte, a film seen by just 12,000 people upon it original release, Passe Ton Bac d’Abord saw the master filmmaker return to territory familiar to that of his earliest work.
Initially conceived as a follow-up to 1968’s L’Enfance-Nue, Passe Ton Bac d’Abord evolved into a very different film during it’s production. The story follows a group of teenagers, around the time of their baccalauréat, the examinations that a French student would sit at the end of their time at high school. We follow the lives of several teens, as they begin to take the steps that will shape their adult lives. Some of them marry older men, some flee the small town in which they have grown up to the almost mythical nirvana of Paris, and some simply stay the same.
As mentioned above, Passe Ton Bac d’Abord started life as a sequel to L’Enfance-Nue, with the character of Simone from Pialat’s debut being the focus, in her almost adult years. Alas the actress that portrayed Simone, Linda Gutemberg decided against returning to the role, and so Pialat simply adapted to this by changing the characters. The character that most closely resembles Simone would be Elisabeth (Sabine Haudepin), the initial core protagonist of Passe…, although the fleeting timeline, and ensemble nature of the film dictates that Elisabeth isn’t the main focus of the film for very long. Every character gets their moment, with Patrick’s vignette being a personal favourite. The actor who portrayed Patrick, Patrick Lepcynski’s parents played his on screen parents, adding a layer of authenticity the likes of which one would expect from Pialat, a filmmaker often spoken of in the same breath as John Cassavetes for his ability to portray a sense of realism lacking from most pictures. I noted during the earliest of sequences, one which charts a game of netball as giving off a sense of pure verite, in that it feels completely real, it lacks the staging that even the most authentic of documentary-like features could be accused of. It feels honest.
Passe Ton Bac d’Abord is a beautifully shot film, and one that is very much in line with the rest of Pialat’s body of work. The manner in which the mundane can be projected in such an interesting manner is inspiring. That Pialat can somehow make a scene involving a man watching television of great awe is testament to this. There is a tracking shot that opens up the street (and indeed world) of our protagonists, which is not only revealing in its nature, but incredibly satirical too, such is the use of a Rolls Royce to chart this journey. The way in which Pialat delayed our introduction to the locale to so late in the picture reinforces the notion relayed in the “trapped” aspect of the film. So much so, that when two of the characters do finally flee to the heights of Paris, the manner in which their drive away from the scene of their upbringing bears the hallmarks of some far greater occasion (in terms of transport maneuverment!). When the van does finally make it free, the long road ahead gives a glimpse into the world they are heading towards.
Location is an incredibly important aspect to the structure of Passe Ton Bac d’Abord. The film is reliant on it’s locations as a catalyst for the drama of the situation, and the manner in which it exploits the narrative is as effective as the vignette nature in which the form exists. Similarly, the actual structure of the film is separated by unpredictable time skips that dictate as to where the story’s focus will be. It is the appliance of these unconventional techniques that separate Passe Ton Bac d’Abord from similar fare.
Maurice Pialat
(1925 – 2003) – A Tribute • Senses of Cinema Fabien Boully, Noël Herpe, Maximilian Le Cain
and Glen W. Norton from Senses of
Cinema, March 21, 2003
Cinemasparagus:
Passe ton bac d'abord... The War of Art, by Craig Keller, October
1, 2015
Cinemasparagus:
Passe ton bac d'abord... — Dossier
Interview with Maurice
Pialat: Excerpt from an Interview by Danièle Dubroux, Serge Le Peron, and Louis
Skorecki from 1979; Interview with Maurice Pialat: by Jacqueline
Lajeunesse in 1979; Interview with Maurice Pialat: Excerpt from an
Interview by Mireille Amiel and Dominique Rabourdin in 1979; and Maurice
Pialat’s responses to “20 Questions for Filmmakers” that appeared in the June
1981 issue of Cahiers du cinéma, translated by Craig
Keller, October 4, 2015
Passe ton bac d'abord Extensive overview of his work by Tony McNeil from Pialat website, also here: Maurice Pialat: Passe ton bac d'abord
The Relentless Vision of Maurice Pialat (Web Exclusive) — Cineaste ... Adam Bingham from Cineaste magazine, 2009
These/Those
Damn Kids: Pialat's "Graduate First" on Notebook | MUBI Glenn Kenny from Mubi, August 26, 2009
MyReviewer - Masters of Cinema DVD Review [David Beckett]
Blu-ray.com [Jeffrey Kauffman]
Graduate First BAM/PFA Program
Passe ton Bac d'abord - Catalogue | The Masters of Cinema Series
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
LOULOU A 96
A leap forward in terms of style, leaving behind the documentary style and feel, replacing it with a blisteringly honest, yet fairly simple fictionalized story written by Pialat and Arlette Langmann, where the power of the film is in the way he tells the story, advancing the action with mostly handheld camera shots, utilizing mood, intense, realistic atmosphere, and brilliant, explosively real and spontaneous performances from the two lead characters, Isabelle Huppert and Gerard Depardieu. In a dance club, a very young Huppert, in already her 25th film, the most memorable of which was the 1977 Swiss film THE LACEMAKER where she shot from a minor actress to an international star, resents her husband’s bossy and domineering manner and leaves the comforts of her boring, middle class husband (Guy Marchand) on the spur of the moment, replacing him with an animalistic, unemployed, black-leather clad, small-time hoodlum (Depardieu) who attracts her eye, seen as a man who won’t work, but he’ll steal. Her husband is furious and behaves badly, reacting with violence and ultimatums, which just about seals the deal in driving her away from him.
What follows is an obsessive sexual affair that is held together by sex alone, as the two have little else in common. Even he acknowledges that she only wants him around for his “cock,” nothing else, as much of the film features them sitting around drinking in bars, or laying around doing nothing, waiting for their next escapade. Eventually, Huppert ends up supporting not only Depardieu, but also his gang of petty criminals. Huppert doesn’t completely separate from her husband, and continues to pop in on him from time to time, usually for some degree of peace and comfort, but his ingratiating comments lead her to remark: “I prefer a loafer who fucks to a rich guy who bugs me.” Interestingly, the seemingly improvised dialogue feels as fresh today as when the film was released, considered shocking in its day.
Their sizzling sexual encounters, however, don’t lead anywhere, except perhaps into a deep moral crevasse. As time goes on, we seem caught up in an emotional void, which is particularly evident during an outdoor family dinner, as both partner’s families wonder where this will all lead, and for the most part, it doesn’t seem to be heading anywhere, certainly not towards happiness. With a relationship initially bubbling with energy and life, appearing to be more than it really is, it can only lead to a dead end, expressed through her admission that she’s had an abortion, that she couldn’t trust him to take care of a child, and the relationship is enveloped in sadness by the end. Nonetheless, it’s a scathing indictment of French society, utilizing sexual frankness to contrast and examine upper and lower class relationships.
Loulou |
Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
Maurice Pialat's 1980 film is a study in erotic revolution;
in it, sex becomes a force that shatters not only class allegiances and social
patterns but even the order represented by traditional narrative structure.
Isabelle Huppert is a model middle-class wife who leaves her possessive husband
(Guy Marchand) for street tough Gerard Depardieu; he lives off her money, but
Pialat artfully blurs the line between exploiter and exploited—it's hard to say
who is using whom. The film, shot largely in handheld long takes, addresses the
question of possession—of how much our society, and even the stories we tell,
depends on the notion of one person's “right” to another. It's one of the most
original French films of the period, and, I think, a great one. In French with
subtitles. 110 min.
‘Loulou’ is a challenging, absorbing example of the awkward beauty of the late Maurice Pialat. Superficially, it’s a keenly observed, naturalist, semi-improvised, hand-shot ‘slice-of-life’, set in the post-Women’s Lib Paris of the late 1970s, depicting class- and culture-clashing passion. A young accountant (a still-flushed-cheeked Isabelle Huppert, in one of her most sensual and mysteriously protean performances) leaves her incredulous, angered bourgeois husband for the bed of an earthy, unemployed petty ex-con (a superbly uningratiating and still equine and cocksure Gérard Depardieu). As such, it seems a little dated, but on a deeper level, it’s fully part of the influential Pialat’s audacious, experimental attempt to intersect the too-often parallel lines of inquiry of realist and ‘spiritual’ cinema – imagine an unholy marriage of, say, Cassavetes and Bresson. Thus ‘Loulou’s’ non-judgemental insights into such universal concerns/mysteries as happiness or attachment or love for others or ourselves (in a given social context) may seem initially too momentary, accidental or even casual or voyeuristic – but, beware, they have a tricky habit of haunting you long after it has ended.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE
Chicago Ben Sachs
Maurice Pialat once averred that he would edit a film by cutting all footage that didn't feel true. This would explain the unique rhythm of his movies, which are propelled unpredictably from one moment of intense emotion to another and then another. Pialat never set out to capture the pace of life as it felt to those living it—the films progress too jarringly for that; it's even often difficult to parse how much time has elapsed between scenes and even cuts. What he came closer to was the sense of living under heightened awareness, be it from extreme passion, anger, or regret; and LOULOU, one of Pialat's greatest films, is revelatory in its understanding of all three. The story is of an unhappily married bourgeoise (Isabelle Huppert) who embarks on an extended affair with the title character, a petty thief played by Gerard Depardieu at the height of his charismatic appeal. The film captures the narcotizing power of ill-advised romance, but the dangerous euphoria of the early passages lead neither to tragedy nor redemptive allegory. Pialat realizes the characters so three-dimensionally that they resist easy interpretation. This is largely a result of Pialat's incredible employment of his actors, whom he encouraged to improvise to gain an immediacy of emotion that could not be pre-arranged. (All of Pialat's movies contain numerous can't-believe-they-caught-that images, as unsettling in their way as the moments of institutional cruelty Frederick Wiseman captured in his 70s documentaries.) But one shouldn't overlook the courageousness of the film's inspiration. LOULOU was suggested by an episode in Pialat's relationship with partner Arlette Langmann—his co-writer here, unbelievably—and the film's willingness to depict all the characters at their ugliest makes this a work of profound auto-critique as well as observational study.
Loulou (no 46) « Wonders in the Dark Allan Fish from Wonders in the Dark, August 15, 2009
Much misunderstood at the time, Maurice Pialat’s film never attempts to be remotely conventional, either in its central characters or its plot structure, deliberately ending on an ambiguous note that many will find unsatisfactory, and emphasising the seedier aspects of turn of the eighties Parisian life. His film lifts up a stone to stare at the underbelly of Parisian culture and finds a festering cancer underneath. Worse still, it finds a blasé, almost nihilistic attitude about it staring back at him.
Nelly is a middle-class bourgeoise wife who works in advertising in the same company as her rather staid husband, André. One evening, out dancing in a club, Nelly deliberately provokes André by dancing up to a loutish thug, nicknamed Loulou, and André loses it by slapping her. Laughing at him as if to view him as impotent and not worthy of respect, she goes off with Loulou and spends a night of energetic sexual activity with him. Returning home the following morning, her husband at first seems calm, but eventually throws her out on the spot and she and Loulou set up together. André believes she will come to her senses, but Nelly prefers her loafer lover as, though she has to pay for both of them, he’s better in bed, and this is all that maters to her at this moment in time.
The very notion of masculine virility is at the heart of Nelly’s attitudinal stance, observing that she’d rather have “a loafer that fucks to a rich man who bugs me.” Loulou fucks, and does it often and well enough to make everything else immaterial. Her husband berates that she can’t discuss literature or cultured things with him, and cannot understand what she sees in him. This very contradiction is summed up perfectly in the sequence where Nelly gets prepared for bed on the floor. She wants to read, but she also wants to be ready for love if Loulou is, as expected, up for it. She keeps her top on and prepares to dive under the covers to put on her glasses and begin to read, but she makes a point of removing her knickers. She needs Loulou because he is so good in bed, but she cannot totally disassociate herself with her previous life, and a brief return to work with her husband is a disaster, while his repression becomes almost masochistic, not only in turning to playing the saxophone to symbolise his depression, but wandering around after her in a very humiliating fashion.
Pialat and Langmann make a point of not explaining every action, and allow the viewer to make their own mind up about the characters. Nelly is selfish and hard to like, but her sexual appetite, immodesty and very European candour towards sex mark her out as one of the most memorable female characters in eighties French film. It also marked a serious reversal for Huppert from her usual sort of roles – compare it to her roles in La Dentellière and Violette Nozière, for example; both icy, controlled and passive. She was always a very unconventional object of desire, with her freckles, natural red hair and – here – very unglamorous underarm hair, but she radiates an undoubted erotic intensity. For his part, though embodying a type of role he’d mastered for Bertrand Blier several years earlier, Depardieu is surprisingly sensitive as the lout. One can really feel the pain in his eyes when Nelly announces that she’s aborted their pregnancy, and all this in a character it’s impossible to like. It was famous at the time for the bed-breaking scene and the outtake which the stars then adlibbed, where Huppert falls between two parked cars, but it has more than that. Forget the fact that it ends abruptly, for the characters were the observance here, and it was an observance borne out of instinct. An instinct that makes it, as Andrew Sarris observed, “a masterpiece of subtlety and eroticism.”
Maurice Pialat
(1925 – 2003) – A Tribute • Senses of Cinema Fabien Boully, Noël Herpe, Maximilian Le Cain
and Glen W. Norton from Senses of
Cinema, March 21, 2003
The Relentless Vision of Maurice Pialat (Web Exclusive) — Cineaste ... Adam Bingham from Cineaste magazine, 2009
Pialat's Pointillist Pictures - ReelTalk Movie Reviews Don Levit on Loulou, Van Gogh, and To Our Loves/À nos amours, July 2004
Beauty
and Romanticism in the Films of Maurice Pialat - The Film Stage Ethan Vestby, October 22, 2015
Maurice
Pialat: Moments of Truth - Features - Reverse Shot Julien Allen, October 16, 2015
The Digital Fix [Noel Megahey]
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]
CineScene.com [Chris Dashiell]
The
Spinning Image [Graeme Clark]
Loulou (1980) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
Short Film Corner: Pialat Regained | Facebook October 14, 2008
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
Fulvue Drive-in [Nicholas Sheffo]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna
User reviews from imdb Author: Cristi_Ciopron from CGSM, Soseaua Nationala 49
Gerald Peary - interviews - Gerard Depardieu December 4, 1980
Loulou BAM/PFA Program
BBCi - Films Matthew Leyland
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Per-Olof Strandberg
À NOS AMOURS (TO OUR LOVES) A 97
It’s as if my heart has run dry… —Suzanne (Sandrine Bonnaire)
Maurice Pialat is not a household name in America, though he is revered in France, instrumental in having a visible effect on the work of filmmakers such as André Téchiné, Olivier Assayas, and Arnaud Desplechin, three more internationally recognized French directors. Despite being a contemporary of the French New Wave, he is never included with their names, though he is staunchly opposed to artificiality and convention in all forms, literally defying categorization and becoming a strict devotee of cinematic naturalism. Following a different path to filmmaking, he studied painting and wrote a novel, the basis of his third feature WE WON’T GROW OLD TOGETHER (1972), while also making several documentary and fictional shorts before making his first feature at the age of 35, reminiscent of Eric Rohmer who was nearly 40 when he made his first feature. But in a culture dominated by cinéastes, Pialat stood out, an uncompromising and often abrasive man that seemed immune to the comfort of life’s illusions. Making only eleven features in his lifetime, all of them are essential, as each is a testament to his own search for intelligence and gut-wrenching honesty. Often compared to John Cassavetes, both violated the rules and rejected any needless beautification of the human condition, preferring instead to capture the messy and completely unpredictable aspects of life, always taking the most emotionally daring and risky path, allowing the emotional and psychological aspects of character to determine the rhythm and flow of their films, often appearing raw and unpolished to the uninitiated, but people with flaws intact represent a freer and truer picture of humanity. With Pialat, he allows the use of script to evolve during shooting, especially this film where he decided at the last minute to play the role of the father himself, and then altered the plot midway through the film when that character was originally scheduled to die. Not only does he keep him around, but he’s essential to the most unforgettable scene, reappearing out of the blue in a completely unscripted and spontaneous dinner sequence, becoming as much of a shock to the actors as the audience. This fluid style of filmmaking defines his working method between the actors and their characters, carefully weaving between the reality of making a movie and the fiction being dramatized.
Made after LOULOU (1980), this is another highly accomplished film which, among other things, introduces us to the radiant beauty of the incomparable Sandrine Bonnaire in her screen debut, who simply lights up the screen in a magical and electrifying performance, perhaps the best of her entire career as she is so central to the film. Opening during a summer holiday, she is performing a classical play about the pain of betraying your beloved by placing one’s lips on another, while the ultra-dramatic, hauntingly beautiful opening theme “The Cold Song” Klaus Nomi - The Cold Song (film frag.) YouTube (1:04) from Purcell’s 300-year old opera King Arthur is magnificently performed by legendary counter tenor Klaus Nomi (who died the year of the film’s release, one of the first known artists to die of AIDS), music that sends chills down your spine, adding foundation and dramatic force to the otherwise youthful transgressions that we are about to witness. This introduces us to a recurrent theme that will follow young Suzanne, played by a 15-year old Bonnaire, a confused and promiscuous teenager who is a man-magnet, attracting men like flies, who all seem to enjoy hovering around her and she is only too eager to accommodate their sexual appetites, using sex as a means of rebellion and escape. Staying out late, sometimes for days on end, she constantly changes partners, leaving her family troubled. Her father, brilliantly played by the director himself, is the real love of her life, and no one else can live up to her expectations. In perhaps the most intimate moment in the film, the father speaks to her as she comes home late one night and remarks that she doesn’t smile as much any more before announcing very quietly that he will be moving out, that he can endure no more. This is surprising, as the film has shown little reference for this marital split. The flurry comes afterwards.
After the father moves out, all dysfunctional family hell breaks loose. Her mother, the brilliant Evelyne Ker, (an actress Pialat first used 20 years earlier in his 1960 short film L’AMOUR EXISTE, and an actress who genuinely detested Bonnaire’s instant stardom, actually attacking her on the set, “And you really want to make movies? Who do you think you are?”) pulls out the Blanche Dubois neurotic tears and grows to furiously detest Suzanne, throwing fists and insults as well as a feigned suicide attempt all in one breath. Much of the story and its conflicts are based on the life of Arlette Langmann’s family, Pialat’s co-writer and live-in companion, where Suzanne’s overprotective older brother, the chubby Dominique Besnehard, is actually the casting director melodramatically playing the part of Langmann’s real brother, filmmaker Claude Berri, who tries to protect his mother before delivering a few fists of his own at Suzanne, turning home into a knock down, drag out slugfest, leaving her no place to go but back into the arms of another man. “The only time I'm happy is when I'm with a guy,” she confesses, her only consolation, but she doesn’t pretend to experience love, only moments of peace. What’s distinctive about the film is the physical and emotional cruelty inflicted by the dysfunctional family members on each other, reminiscent of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, where especially unique is Bonnaire’s performance, how utterly natural she feels, as it seems like she’s living her life onscreen, where none of it feels like a façade. The revolving door of men come and go, drifting into the not so distant past, but she’s the real deal, one of the more explosive performances in recollection. If one thinks of all her later performances where she’s older and more mature, she’s usually more reserved and intellectually calculating, where she has a habit of keeping things to herself. Not so here, where she hides nothing, becoming as emotionally transparent as a character can get, which makes the film all the more intimately appealing and dramatically powerful.
For reasons known only to her, perhaps thinking it will bring her peace, Suzanne actually marries a decent guy, and the family celebratory dinner is *the* sequence of the movie, as it is filled with so many spills and thrills and twisting turns that it resembles a roller-coaster ride, something akin to the legendary scenes of the last supper from VIRIDIANA (1961), or the son confronting the overbearing, incestuous father during the long, drawn-out dinner sequence of THE CELEBRATION (1998). The dinner discussion is already a boastful dispute over art, as the various in-laws argue about the merits of Picasso and see things differently, where Suzanne departs from the more modernistic views of others and lays her claim to having a preference for the soft sensuality of Pierre Bonnard. Add to this the now over-protective, foppish brother who sits next to Suzanne after smelling her, asking others to smell her as well, then places his odious arm around her and won’t let go with a look as if she’s carrying his incestuous child. Enter the returning father, who incredibly enters the scene purely by accident, and starts measuring the premises with a prospective buyer. “”Don’t mind us. You won’t even know we’re here,” he utters humorously a few moments before he sits down for dessert and challenges the pretentious nature of each and every person at the table. Like director Mike Leigh entering his own improvisational rehearsal without any of the actor’s knowledge ahead of time, and without throwing a single blow, the table tension explodes into sparks flying fast and furious in every direction. Pialat unflinchingly devastates his own set, laying waste to everything, clearing a dubious path for another one of his daughter’s classic exit scenes. Her exit, like the rest of the film, is a thing of beauty.
Time Out review also seen here: Time Out Capsule Review
15-year-old Suzanne (Bonnaire) seems unable to progress beyond a
rather doleful promiscuity in her relations with boys. Alone of her family, her
father (played by Pialat himself) understands her, but when he leaves home for
another woman, family life erupts into a round of appalling, casual violence,
until Suzanne escapes into a fast marriage, and finally to America. Pialat's
methods of close, intimate filming may place him close in many ways to our own
Ken Loach, but his interests are rooted in a very cinematic approach to
personal inner life, rather than any schematic political theory. The message
may be that happiness is as rare as a sunny day, and sorrow is forever, but a
counterbalancing warmth is provided by Pialat's enormous care for his
creations. The rapport between father and daughter is especially moving. Pialat
once acted in a Chabrol film, and one French critic's verdict on his
performance can stand equally well for this film: 'Massive, abrupt, and
incredibly gentle'.
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Max Frank
“You've changed these last few weeks. I don't know. You don't smile much anymore.” Pialat's enrapturing exploration of the sexual awakening of teenage girl Suzanne (Sandrine Bonnaire, in an incredible debut performance that made her an instant star) is, alongside 1980's LOULOU, one of the great films to dive into a female perspective. But unlike the more class-based approach he takes in LOULOU, À NOS AMOURS is thematically a bit looser. It's a film comprising sketches of teenage life, frustrations, parties, love—all subjects that Pialat returned to throughout the course of his career (you could say that this movie, along with PASSE TON BAC D'ABORD and his debut L'ENFANCE NUE [NAKED CHILDHOOD], are kinds of spiritual predecessors of works like Richard Linklater's DAZED AND CONFUSED, and that Pialat is an underrated forefather of the “teen” movie). It's also a frustrating one—not everything in it feels completely committed to as in PASSE TON BAC or L'ENFANCE NUE, but it almost doesn't matter; the film itself is about frustration and angst, maybe more so than any other Pialat film. There are moments that feel like the celluloid itself might burst, sandwiched between some of Pialat's gentlest accomplishments (particularly every moment he himself is on the screen, playing Suzanne's father). Although one could rationalize that this is far from Pialat's greatest work, all I know is it's the one that's the most imprinted on my memory, as though I didn't watch it so much as I felt it.
À nos
amours (1983) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
15 years old, Suzanne goes out with boys, and sleeps with whoever she fancies, except the boy who actually love her – despite objections from her parents and over-protective brother. Then, one day, her father announces that he is going to leave home...
This is a profoundly perceptive and believable film about a young
girl’s troubled journey into womanhood, in a crumbling and unsupportive family
environment. Sandrine Bonnaire is quite simply stunning as the
emotionally confused Suzanne. The quality of her performance, coupled
with Pialat’s apparently improvised style of film making, gives the film a
sharp-edged, documentary feel, which heightens the emotional impact and drama.
Pialat’s style is a little unsettling to those who are not familiar with his
work, bearing more than a passing resemblance to the fresh, unpolished style of
the French New Wave directors of the early 1960s. To some extent, the
film lacks structure and a coherent narrative, and appears to grind to a halt
on a few occasions. However, the Pialat shows a genuine flair for
capturing the raw emotions and revealing the distress in an adolescent’s
confused mind. For this approach to work at all, he is very reliant on
some great acting talent. In Sandrine Bonnaire, the director has just
that, and Pialat and Bonnaire form a very successful combination, emphasised by
Pialat’s portrayal of Suzanne’s father.
"A nos amours" Jared Rapfogel from Cineaste (link lost)
One of the most confounding of film cultural mysteries is the
neglect shown in this country to the work of Maurice Pialat, a filmmaker
revered in his native
The only persuasive explanation for the continuing neglect shown towards his oeuvre is that he was simply too singular and isolated a figure for distributors to embrace—never a part of the French New Wave, despite being contemporary with it, staunchly opposed to conventional dramatic construction and characterization but nevertheless devoted to a form of cinematic naturalism (unlike Godard for instance), and indifferent to popular opinion, Pialat has always resisted categorization, even if time has demonstrated that he ultimately created a category of his own, one elaborated upon by Téchiné, Assayas, and their ilk.
Happily, Criterion has taken the first step in redressing the injustice of Pialat’s obscurity by enshrining 1983's A nos amours in their pantheon. Pialat made only ten features in his lifetime, all of them essential, but A nos amours is in some ways the ideal place to start, thanks to the unforgettable performance by a young Sandrine Bonnaire as Suzanne, but above all because of the presence of Pialat himself in the crucial role of Suzanne’s father—it seems appropriate that those unfamiliar with Pialat should begin with a film in which he is doubly present. And as if in atonement for taking so long to celebrate this indispensable filmmaker, Criterion has given the film a deluxe release, including an extra disc that features The Human Eye, Xavier Giannoli’s hour-long- documentary analysis of A nos amours, as well as an excerpt from a French TV program on Pialat, interviews with Sandrine Bonnaire (a truly illuminating and moving bit of testimony), Catherine Breillat (who collaborated with Pialat on his following film, Police), and Jean-Pierre Gorin, and a booklet with excellent essays by Molly Haskell and Kent Jones and two reprinted interviews, with Pialat and his cameraman Jacques Loiseleux.
Though a contemporary of the French New Wave directors, Pialat followed a very different path towards filmmaking, studying painting, writing a novel (the basis for his second feature, Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble), and making several documentary and fictional shorts before eventually making his first feature, the great L'Enfance nue, in 1968 at the age of thirty-five. Appearing just as the novelty of the New Wave was subsiding, Pialat was in any case an outsider from the beginning, a painter and novelist in a film culture dominated by cinéastes. But his isolation was not simply one of circumstance or timing—Pialat was by nature a solitary figure, uncompromising, abrasive, and combative. An artist with a pitilessly penetrating, unsparing vision of human experience and relationships, a vision he did not hesitate to turn on himself, Pialat seemed immune to those comforting illusions most of us depend on in order to withstand life. And he was incapable of making a movie without committing himself psychologically, emotionally, and even physically to the fullest – every film in his filmography seems wrested from deep within, each a testament to his profound honesty and his searching intelligence.
Pialat is often compared to John Cassavetes, and not without reason. Like Cassavetes, Pialat exploded the conventional cinematic notions of dramatic structure and characterization, concepts that had traditionally been conceived of as useful (if not necessary) vessels for expressing human experience and psychology, but which Cassavetes and Pialat rejected as constricting, falsifying constructions, ill-fitted for the job of capturing the slippery, messy, unpredictable nature of human behavior. By letting the emotional and psychological lives of their characters determine each movie's shape and trajectory, they created films that by conventional standards appear poorly structured, unpolished, and even incoherent. But for those attuned to their goals, these ‘flaws’ represent new forms, freer, truer, and more vital.
Pialat’s work though was in some ways more radical than that of Cassavetes—both directors foregrounded the process of acting, but Pialat went further in allowing the script to evolve and become transformed during the filming, perhaps never so dramatically than on A nos amours. Bonnaire and Breillat both reveal that Pialat increasingly dispensed with the script during the course of the shoot, deciding relatively late in the game to play the role of the father himself, and then changing the plot of the film so that this character, who was originally intended to die midway through, would remain alive. Indeed, though he disappears for much of the film’s second half, the father reappears in dramatic fashion in the movie’s most unforgettable scene, a moment that was reportedly not only unscripted but entirely spontaneous, coming as a (visible) shock to the actors, just as it is for the viewer.
For Pialat, making a movie was not a matter of filming a preconceived screenplay but of generating situations on the set, of creating drama in the here and now, and striving to capture the truth of these confrontations, the actors' truth as well as the characters'. Every scene in his films is animated by this cross-pollination, this fluidity between the actors and their characters, between the reality of the shoot and the fiction being constructed.
If human behavior and the nature of human relationships are at the center of Pialat's project as a filmmaker, in A nos amours these concerns find their focus in the character of Suzanne, the youngest member of a spectacularly dysfunctional, if publicly presentable bourgeois family, who attempts to cope with her emotionally fraught existence by entering into a series of relationships with various men, searching in vain for a measure of satisfaction and peace. A nos amours is a portrait of an emotionally crippled young woman, and to call it a portrait is to use that term with more justice than usual when speaking of narrative cinema. Like other portraits, either painted, photographed, or (as in the case of Warhol's screen tests) filmed, the emphasis is not on telling a story but on shedding light on the psychological and emotional qualities of a particular person. In bringing to life his protagonist, who anchors nearly every moment of the film, Pialat willfully neglects the most hallowed laws of cinematic storytelling, encouraging us not to be distracted by things like continuity and a precise orientation in time and space as we strive to understand Suzanne as fully as possible.
To say that A nos amours begins in media res is an understatement – in fact, almost every scene plunges us into a situation, a time frame, and a context we're unprepared for. Pialat approaches Suzanne not by building a narrative around her, but by gathering together shards of her existence. Though he never strays from chronological succession, he resists narrative momentum—the effect is of an accumulation of perceptions, experiences, insights, rather than a dramatic arc. Immediacy is all-important – he prefers to focus on the rhythm and the shape of each moment rather than on its place in a narrative structure. If these shards were rearranged, the process of learning about Suzanne would occur differently, but our understanding of her would be largely the same. Nor does Pialat strive to connect each sequence smoothly or organically—each cut in A nos amours is a momentous event, signifying (without specifying) a temporal jump of perhaps an hour, perhaps a day, but sometimes a month or more. Indeed, it often feels as if more has been cut out than left in. Suzanne becomes involved with several men throughout the course of A nos amours, and most of them appear and disappear without comment. How they come into and how they drift out of her life is of little importance; what counts is their significance for her, the searching, the yearning that their presence signifies.
The dominant presence in Suzanne’s life is her father, a strikingly complex and ambivalent figure as embodied by Pialat. His decision to take this role is typical of Pialat’s inclination towards frank self-interrogation, of his willingness to present himself in a profoundly unflattering light—the father's manipulation of his family mirrors the director’s manipulation of his actors. In Pialat’s hands, the father is as towering a figure in the film as he is in his daughter’s life. Almost from the first moment he appears on screen, Pialat shocks us into a realization of how superficial, simplistic, and reductive most cinematic characterizations are. This character is profoundly paradoxical—authoritarian yet protective, at times monstrously selfish, at times deeply generous, desperate for his daughter’s affection but also brutally honest in his diagnosis of her plight (in the film’s final scene, he tells her, not without affection, “You’ll never really love anyone… You think you’re in love but you really just want to be loved.”). He doesn’t make sense in conventionally dramatic terms, but his failure to make sense rings unmistakably true. He could be said to be a monster or a loving father, but in fact it would be a fallacy to say that he is anything—like most human beings he’s capable of acting monstrously and he’s capable of acting generously. What he or anyone else truly is is a mystery, even to themselves.
This embracing of contradiction, of multiple truths, extends to the relationship between Suzanne and her father (which, according to both Bonnaire and Breillat, partakes liberally of the real-life relationship between Bonnaire and her director). Pialat has the perceptiveness and the courage to portray a father-daughter relationship as something less than sacred, to strip it of all the deeply ingrained assumptions and myths of what such a relationship should be. He acknowledges that, however close the tie that binds them, a father and daughter are separate, autonomous beings, and that their relationship is in essence like any other, a network of shared or conflicting needs, demands, and expectations. Suzanne’s father loves her without a doubt, but it is a love that coexists with (or encompasses) neediness, jealousy, a yearning for control, and even latent desire. And by the same token, it is because Suzanne loves and admires her father so deeply that she feels both afraid of and oppressed by him. Pialat understands that where there’s love there’s need, and where there’s need there’s fear of loss—and that love can as a result lead just as easily to violence and abuse as to nurturing and affection.
Indeed, the turning point in A nos amours, the first palpable shock in a film full of shocks of one kind or another, comes when Suzanne craftily tries to persuade her father to let her go out with her friends (in fact a cover for a date). What seems like a relatively innocuous moment, the tension perceptible but restrained, suddenly erupts into violence as the father, up until this point a seemingly benevolent figure, strikes Suzanne in the face, with little provocation and no warning. This is the first instance of violence, though many more are to come, and Pialat’s treatment of it is strikingly unique. Just as he cuts from scene to scene without bothering to link each passage in a narratively logical sequence, so her refuses to ‘dramatize’ these instances of conflict, filming them objectively, without fabricating a false distinction between the peace that has been interrupted and the tumult that follows. What is shocking is not simply the brutality, but the ease with which it erupts (and subsides). In A nos amours violence is not aberrant or unnatural, it involves no transformation in the environment or in the course of the characters’ lives. Only a few minutes later, in perhaps the most moving scene in the film, Suzanne and her father are engaged in an intimate late-night talk that affectingly (but unsettlingly) demonstrates the intensity of their bond.
Superficially, A nos amours resembles any number of other films (mostly French), which portray a precocious young woman’s sexual awakening. But A nos amours is distinct from almost all of them, above all because of this quality of violence: both the literal and the emotional cruelty inflicted by the family members on each other, as well as the more subtle forms of violence Pialat practices as a filmmaker—his abrupt, disorienting editing, his manner of plunging us into the movie and into each scene within it, and his embracing of the contradictions at the heart of each of his characters. Pialat is one of the least complacent of all filmmakers, his unflinching honesty taking him into emotional and psychological waters too rough to accommodate the weak of heart. This may well be what dooms him to a marginal existence in film culture, but it is also what gives his films their convulsive, near-animalistic vitality and ensures that they will remain essential, while those films that flatter and indulge our illusions wither with age.
À nos amours: The Ties That Wound Criterion essay by Molly Haskell, June 5, 2006
À nos amours (1983) - The Criterion Collection
The Relentless Vision of Maurice Pialat (Web Exclusive) — Cineaste ... Adam Bingham from Cineaste magazine, 2009
Maurice Pialat and John Cassavetes • Senses of Cinema Philippe Lubac from Senses of Cinema, April 15, 2005
Maurice Pialat
(1925 – 2003) – A Tribute • Senses of Cinema Fabien Boully, Noël Herpe, Maximilian Le Cain
and Glen W. Norton from Senses of
Cinema, March 21, 2003
À Nos Amours Dan Sallitt, October 3, 2015
À nos amours - Reviews - Reverse Shot Nick Pinkerton, September 1, 2006
Maurice Pialat's À Nos Amours on Criterion | The House Next Door ... Fernando F. Croce, while an excellent shorter review can be seen here: Cinepassion.org
The A.V. Club: Michael Sicinski
Pialat's
Pointillist Pictures - ReelTalk Movie Reviews Don Levit on Loulou, Van Gogh, and To Our Loves/À nos amours, July
2004
Digital Journal [Sarah Gopaul]
Maurice
Pialat: Moments of Truth - Features - Reverse Shot Julien Allen, October 16, 2015
The Village Voice: Melissa Anderson October 13, 2015
The
Misunderstood Maurice Pialat | The New Yorker Richard Brody, October 16, 2015
DVD
of the Week: À Nos Amours | The New Yorker
Richard Brody, January 25, 2011
The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] Criterion Collection, 2-disc
DVD Savant Review: À nos amours - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson, Criterion Collection, 2-disc, also seen here: To Our Loves (1984) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Nate Meyers) dvd review Criterion Collection, 2-disc
DVD Verdict [Steve Evans] - Criterion Collection Criterion Collection, 2-disc
Film 365 (The Masters of Cinema Series DVD) David Beckett, also seen here: MyReviewer.com [David Beckett]
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov] Criterion Blu-Ray Collection, 2-disc
Le Mot du Cinephiliaque [Michaël Parent] (English)
Moviemuser.co.uk [David Steele]
A nos amours BAM/PFA Program
A nos amours. Masters of Cinema
À nos amours (1983) Graeme Clark from The Spinning Image
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
Brooklyn Magazine: Elise Nakhnikian
The Chicago Reader: Dave Kehr capsule
The Captive
Lover – An Interview with Jacques ... - Senses of Cinema Frédéric Bonnaud interview with Jacques
Rivette, including comments on Pialat films, from Senses of Cinema, September 18, 2001
Mick LaSalle : Cultural Literacy -- The Way I'd Really Teach the Class Mick LaSalle from SF Gate, August 6, 2009
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review also seen
here: Movie
Review - - 'A NOS AMOURS,' BY MAURICE PIALAT - NYTimes ...
Maurice Pialat-À nos amours (1983) in AvaxHome film photos
POLICE
France (113 mi) 1985
A superficially genial cop (Depardieu) cross-examines a
Tunisian drug-dealer. The can of worms is opened, and Depardieu plunges in,
laying about the Parisian Arab community, doing deals with their corrupt
lawyer, and with a woman (Marceau) who has stolen a suitcase of money. It is
all going tougher and more furious than any other recent policier, when the
film abruptly changes gear and becomes the chronicle of Depardieu's ill-fated
amour for Marceau, a chronic liar, and deep in sin. Pialat is heir to the
misanthropic strain in French culture, and dwells at great length on the
uncomfortably real. There is no one else who pushes his actors to such
uncomfortable extremes. If you want a thriller, then you're in for a rough
ride; this is about tension, conflict and hostility, and almost all of it
between man and woman.
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Ben Sachs
Pialat made a similar revision to POLICE (1985, 113 min, 35mm) when he had a falling-out with Sophie Marceau, whom he'd intended to play the lead role, and shifted the film's focus to one of her lovers, the detective played by Gérard Depardieu. (It wasn't the only falling-out that occurred during the film's making; Pialat also clashed with Catherine Breillat, who worked on the script and conducted much of the research on undercover police officers that influenced POLICE's dramaturgy.) Concerned with the relationships between cops and robbers, this is one of the few Pialat films that can be said to rest comfortably in a popular genre. (Incidentally, it was one of the director's biggest commercial hits in France.) Yet it's hardly a work-for-hire; the explosive, unpredictable interrogation sequences bear Pialat's unmistakable stamp, as does the brutishness of the main characters. Writes Warehime: “POLICE internalizes the violence of the polar [French cop movie], making it a family affair—one family, constituted by the police, pitted against that of the Tunisian drug dealers. The violence is also more personal, even intimate, frequently played out during police interrogations, or in exchanges between betrayer and betrayed, whether in business or in love.”
Police (1985) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
A rough police inspector, Mangin, is determined to smash a drugs trafficking syndicate operating between Paris and Marseilles. By ruthlessly hassling his informants, he gains the evidence he needs to arrest a Tunisian drugs baron, Simon, and his girlfriend Noria. The latter is released thanks to the intervention of her lawyer, Lambert, but not before attracting Mangin’s interest. As Mangin pursues her, driven by an uncontrollable animalistic attraction, Noria hatches a scheme to run off with Simon’s bounty…
Maurice Pialat’s most improbable film is this daring variation on the film noir thriller genre, which strangely presages the tough post-noir thrillers of the 1990s. Although the characters and the plot are familiar cinema stock, Pialat gives the formula a striking and stylish slant by allowing his cast to improvise much of their material. This approach gives the drama a natural spontaneity and allows both of the lead actors Gérard Depardieu and Sophie Marceau to give an exhilarating and convincing performance. The film’s naturalistic, unpolished style and absence of any clear moral perspective makes it a shockingly realistic depiction of the criminal underworld and police brutality.
Pialat Regained on
Notebook | MUBI Daniel Kasman
from Mubi, October 14, 2008
Giant steps are being taken in the English-speaking cinema world to help us poor audiences finally get to see the many, many masterpieces of human vivacity and emotion created by French director Maurice Pialat. That the work is currently being done over the pond by The Masters of Cinema DVD company in Region 2 and not here in the U.S. in our neglected region is a blessing obviously mixed but optimistic: the films look great, and this is the only place we will get to see them subtitled in English. (Note that two amazing films by Pialat, À nos amours, and Van Gogh, are available in handsome R1 DVDs.) So rejoice, if also in the hope that MoC is not only bringing these films closer and closer to American audiences, but that their appearance in an English-language market will finally bring Pialat the recognition over here that he deserves, that of one of the greatest of filmmakers.
First in the forthcoming deluge of wonderful releases in MoC's series is L’Enfance-nue (Naked Childhood), the only possible film that could follow and stand up to Truffaut's 400 Blows (and served, in a magnificent double feature, as an invigorating counter-point to Jean Eustache's Mes petites amoureuses in the recent traveling Eustache retro). But more idiosyncratic—if one could possibly think of comparing Pialat's sharp-edged, unkempt films by which is more idiosyncratic than its raw brethren—is the second release, 1985's Police, scripted in part by Catherine Breillat and "confined" by the genre and vocation implied by the title. I really cannot do better justice to the film than to link to Senses of Cinema's article by Robert Keser on the film. Keser captures Pialat's energy in his own critical prose, in an excerpt from the article's opening:
Police opens with the jolting energy of a bull charging out of the gate, using sheer pent-up momentum to sustain its first hour’s torrent of intensely verbal and physical confrontations. The director fills the screen with entrances and exits and dislocations, as drug squad detectives shout questions to bully their arrestees, while the latter blithely and transparently lie, yet no one seems to change much for all the station house tumult."
He points out what seems quite obvious after watching the film, that the police setting and even the plot in general is an arbitrary, if not fundamentally commercial concern and starting point, used to give a lifestyle routine to a number of characters (principally played by Gérard Depardieu and a very young Sophie Marceau), smoothly express their desires and sadnesses, and then let them interact in an amorphous, unstable, but somehow barely circulating milieu, much like the families that center the settings of À nos amours or L’Enfance nue.
It was Police's more conventional setting that helped me wrap my mind around the startling pleasures and pains of the two Pialat's I had seen previous to it. The film surprisingly connected in my mind this most brusque and electric of directors to contemporary filmmakers I like very much, such as Hong Sang-soo and Hou Hsiao-hsien (disciples of Ozu, both), in that all found their stories of intense emotion in the banality of life. But Pialat's work is not in the same contemplative vein as those two. Through an immersion in regular human movements (in life but also in gesture), stories, and settings, and with a style that is abrasive in its jagged, semi-elliptical cutting and the constant, non-bravura camera movement, Pialat is able to pin-point and reveal with a paradoxical subtlety the extreme movements, suppressions, and eruptions of emotions between people. Like Hou and Hong before him, Pialat's films have been notoriously difficult for American audiences to see on DVD, and these two releases are a significant towards English-language audiences having the chance to catch hold of the lightening-on-film that is the cinema of Maurice Pialat.
Police • Senses of Cinema Robert Keser from Senses of Cinema, July 2006
The Relentless Vision of Maurice Pialat (Web Exclusive) — Cineaste ... Adam Bingham from Cineaste magazine, 2009
Police Dan Sallitt, October 3, 2015
Screen Slate [Cosmo Bjorkenheim]
Maurice
Pialat: Moments of Truth - Features - Reverse Shot Julien Allen, October 16, 2015
The New Yorker: Richard Brody October 12, 2015
ruthlessculture.com [Jonathan McCalmont] October 5, 2009, also seen here: Police (1985) - Two Faces, Neither of Them Real
DVD Talk [Christopher McQuain]
Short Film Corner: Tuesday Morning Foreign DVD Report: Police ... October 14, 2008
Blu-ray.com - Region A [Dr. Svet Atanasov]
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [3.5/5]
Police BAM/PFA Program
Police - Catalogue | The Masters of Cinema Series
Washington Post [Paul Attanasio]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
Maurice Pialat - Police (1985) in AvaxHome film photos
UNDER SATAN’S SUN (Sous le soleil de Satan)
capsule Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Reader
Maurice Pialat's high-powered adaptation of Georges Bernanos
(whose fiction has previously provided the basis for two Bresson films) won the
best film award at the Cannes film festival in 1987, which occasioned a great
deal of controversy. A dark film both literally and figuratively, it follows
the spiritual crisis of Father Donissan (Gerard Depardieu) and his curious
relation to a young woman named Mouchette (Sandrine Bonnaire); Pialat himself
plays the father superior. Uncompromisingly rigorous and harsh, Pialat's
remarkable film isn't for every taste—acceptance of Bernanos' world isn't an
easy matter—but it is certainly a major work by a major filmmaker, with one of
Depardieu's strongest performances.
Adapted from Georges Bernanos' novel, Pialat's ascetic meditation on faith, sainthood, and the nature of evil is a film of shattering intensity. Depardieu plays troubled Father Donissan, whose chance meeting with an insinuating horse-dealer (the Devil?) and confrontation with pregnant teenage murderess Mouchette (Bonnaire) convince him that human actions are governed not by God but by a manipulative Satan. The worries of Donissan's concerned superior (Pialat) about the priest's excessive physical and psychological self-flagellation are tempered by intimations of an unorthodox saintliness. Is Donissan motivated by a divine calling or merely by mortal pride? Through the coldly-lit images and restrained flesh-and-blood performances, self-confessed atheist Pialat insists on the absolute reality of events, an approach which allows something intangible (spiritual?) to seep in at the edges of the frame. Despite the confusing cutting from scene to scene, the narrative's rigorous logic, the performances, and the stark visual beauty yield profound pleasures.
Sous Le Soleil De Satan OOoD, February 5, 2010 (excerpt)
Positioned somewhere between Bresson’s immortal Journal d’un
curé de campagne and Dieterle’s The Devil and Daniel Webster, Maurice Pialat’s
staggering Sous le soleil de Satan [Under the Sun of Satan] addresses the
torrent of spiritual and intellectual turmoil unloosed among the denizens of a
little country parish. It is a film by turns calm and violent, buoyant upon the
tears of mercy and gurgling with the blood of the Lamb. Gérard Depardieu
(Loulou, Le Garçu) is the self-abasing curate tortured by questions about his
role in God’s plan before an encounter with a material Satan touches off a
powerful revelation. At the crux of his vision is Sandrine Bonnaire (A nos
amours., Police), the madly profligate brewer’s daughter whose fate ruptures in
a blast of gunpowder and the slash of a razor. As events unfurl, Maurice Pialat
himself provides witness as the seasoned cleric who pronounces the words: “God
wears us down.” One of the great films of faith made by a non-believer, Sous le
soleil de Satan left an indelible mark on spectators from the very moment of
its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 1987 where it won the Palme d’Or
for Best Film.
Cine-List
- CINE-FILE Chicago Ben Sachs
The response was certainly nicer than the one Pialat received for his previous film, UNDER THE SUN OF SATAN (1987, 98 min, 35mm; Saturday, 6pm and Thursday, 8:15pm); even though that movie won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, the director got booed by a sizable portion of the audience when he went to accept his award. Richard Brody posited in The New Yorker that this infamous event has come to eclipse the achievement of the movie, which he considers one of the great films about religious faith made by a nonbeliever. “[Gerard] Depardieu plays Donissan, a priest whose intense physical self-punishment is rendered all the more terrifying by the actor's manifest physical strength and appetites,” Brody writes. “The fury of Donissan's religious devotion, an utterly non-amiable, relentless quest for Christian suffering, alienates his parishioners even as he seems to sense the presence of the Devil more clearly than that of God.” The film is an adaptation of a novel by Geroges Bernanos, whose books Diary of a Country Priest and Mouchette were adapted by another great painter-turned-filmmaker, Robert Bresson. But, as Brody observes, “whereas Bresson's naturalistic religion condenses a vast force into an infinitesimal gesture, Pialat expands spiritual power to a large-scale struggle that bursts out in physical and emotional violence.” Highlights of this intense, challenging film including a murder, an encounter with Satan, and a volatile performance by Pialat's extraordinary discovery, Sandrine Bonnaire.
Sous
le soleil de Satan (1987) James
Travers from FilmsdeFrance
1926, in a rural French village. An inexperienced Catholic priest, Donissan, has doubts about his suitability for the priesthood. He encounters Mouchette, a 16 year old girl who has recently murdered the marquis de Cadignan, one of her illicit lovers. Donissan sees the Devil in Mouchette and taunts the young girl, who soon after kills herself. It is the first step in Donissan’s painful journey towards grace...
Winner of the coveted Palme d’or at the 1987 Cannes film
festival, Sous le soleil de satan is a film which, much like its
director, Maurice Pialat, continues to arouse controversy and divide the
critics. Some regard the film as a masterpiece, an intensely spiritual
film which tackles the complex themes of religious belief, redemption and
divinity with remarkable lucidity and power. Many others, however, take a
different view, some dismissing it as emotionless, contrived and lacking both
conviction and interest value.
It is certainly a very difficult film to sit through. The film is heavy
in dialogue, most of which consists of philosophical discussions which are
quite difficult to follow. As a result, the film lacks humanity and, to
many, will appear pretentious, lumbering and unforgivably introspective.
For others, the intelligent dialogue will be spell-binding, particularly as it is
accompanied by some fine performances, most notably from Depardieu and
Bonnaire.
The film’s most memorable feature is the extraordinary photography,
particularly the location scenes shot in rural France. The raw barrenness
of the setting provides an appropriate backdrop against which to set the inner
torment of a priest searching to find meaning in his ministry. Here at
least the film displays an undeniable touch of genius.
Notes on Older Films Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
I don't want to come off like a lily-livered auteurist, but I really feel like I need to see more Pialat films before I can fully evaluate the greatness of this one, even though, as the first of his films I've seen, its power is pretty undeniable. Pialat is in conversation not just with Bernanos here, but Bresson and Dreyer, a tradition of pessimistic religious inquiry and miraculous materialism. (Similarly, Brisseau seems to be Pialat's heir in this arena.) Depardieu's lunkheaded hulk of a priest is himself Pialat's presentation of the conundrum. Would a modern saint be loved, feared, ostracized, or even comprehensible? The problem is staged as a series of conversations, all brutal contests of will. When Father Donissan (Depardieu) encounters Satan Incarnate as a traveller on the road (Jean-Christophe Bouvet), Pialat shoots the night scene as a composition of black on black, the frame almost completely unreadable. Donnisan's paranoid protestations emerge from a void. Are they a part of our world? On the other hand, Donissan's confrontation with Mouchette (the amazing Sandrine Bonnaire) takes place in broad daylight, in what looks like a roadside field. The only unbridled, self-aware presence in the priest's whole sorry parish, she is condemned by Donisson as possessed. The intricacies of verbal parrying, the balance (it appears to me) between scripted guidelines and extemporaneous sparring and reaction, lends the entire film an awkward documentary quality, as though we are witnessing a record of a very particular set of actorly interactions. I can see where the "French Cassavetes" tag comes from, but the tenor, and the stakes, are completely different. Whereas Cassavetes interrogates human behavior as a form of acting -- cinema's Erving Goffmann, if you like -- here Pialat is using Bernanos' novel and its worldly implausibility in order to force his characters into improbable, uninhabitable human states. If Satan controls the game, action is impossible, and yet action must continue. In this framework, one is giving into evil simply by continuing to exist. That's the double-bind of classical Freudian paranoia, and Pialat, in theme and execution, has produced the perfect paranoiac film.
Cinemasparagus:
Sous le soleil de Satan (Pialat) - Essay by Gabe ... From
Moment to Moment: A Close Analysis of a Fragment from Sous le soleil de
Satan by Gabe Klinger (2010); also from Maurice
Pialat: A Reflection in Motion, quotations from an Interview with Michèle
Halberstadt (1987);
Sandrine Bonnaire Looks Back, excerpts from an Interview with Olivier
Joyard just one week after Pialat’s death on January 11th, 2003; and finally from The Captive Lover, an excerpt
from an Interview with Jacques Rivette by Frédéric Bonnaud in 1998, translated by Craig Keller, October 14, 2015
About twenty minutes into Sous le soleil de Satan, Mouchette (Sandrine Bonnaire), a teenager who has just left her family home to stay with an older man, the Marquis de Cadignan (Alain Artur), strolls leisurely into a room while biting into an apple. In an elliptical moment preceding this shot, it is suggested to us that Mouchette and her aristocratic lover have just been intimate. Hence Mouchette’s casual manner, which implies that she is already quite at ease with her new — albeit temporary — living situation. Distracted, Mouchette fixes her gaze on the Marquis’s shotgun, which sits on a table next to an ammunition belt. Mouchette sets her apple down and lifts the weapon into her two hands, gleefully aiming it into the air, and then setting it back down on the table. Still idly chewing, she decides she is not done with the shotgun, picking it up again. The camera pans into the adjacent room, where the Marquis is putting his clothes back on. In this unbroken shot, the camera follows the Marquis as he heads toward Mouchette (who remains offscreen). He looks at her and asks, calmly, that she put down the gun. There’s no sense of any impending danger from the inflection of his voice as he says to her “You’re a pain.” And yet, just as these words leave his mouth, we hear a blast.
Meditated act or pure misfortune? Without so much as a cut to black or moment of stillness, such as branches of a tree rustling in the wind, or water dripping from a faucet, or any number of other false gestures that would plant ambiguity into this story, or aid us in digesting such an abrupt action, Pialat moves us right into the next, even more devastating image (still the continuation of the same shot):
Mouchette, crying hysterically, continues to grasp the shotgun.
She trembles and sets down the gun. In the next shot, she kneels around the
Marquis’s body, snorts, and gets up. Cut. Mouchette, looking anxiously around,
washes her bloodied slipper in a river. In roughly a minute and a half of
screen-time, Pialat has opened up an entire world of associative images that
would look and feel contrived in the work of nearly any other filmmaker. He has
revealed to us again, with surprising tactile force, the cruel outcome of a
random act. It’s the dagger in the wall in Pialat’s debut feature, L’enfance-nue
[Naked-Childhood, 1968]; or the ferocity with which the character
thrusts layers of paint onto a canvas in his penultimate film, Van Gogh
[1991]. These images belong to the same world.
The objects of a still life: a shotgun and an apple; a candelabrum, a large
vase. Mouchette ponders the objects, dances beside them. One gets the sense
that these inanimate table items will, at any moment, be rendered active in the
scene. There’s no close-up or over-emphasizing of any detail; in Pialat, it’s
all about the way the actor chooses to interact with her environment. So while
one might not think twice about the heavy thumping sound of the shotgun as
Mouchette haphazardly places it back on the table, it is an important aspect of
the scene for two reasons: first, as an indicator to the audience that this
deadly tool does not alarm her; and second, it makes the ensuing discharge of
the gun more palpable. This physicality comes from the sound, not from the
silent movement of pointing and aiming. The power of the object comes entirely
from this clank and the eventual blast.
These sounds may be invisible in Pialat, the same way the circling movement
around the room is. The visual eloquence with which we return to the initial
point of view of the start of the shot is partly what makes the image of a
hysterical Mouchette so shocking. We depart from this...
.... and return to this:
Note the change in the way she holds the gun. The weight of the
metal is carefully built into the composition.
In a scene from Pedro Costa’s Où gît votre sourire enfoui? [Where
Does Your Smile Lie Buried? / Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?,
2001], the filmmakers Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub study a shot from
their film Sicilia! [1999]. Freezing the shot on a flatbed, they observe
how a woman supports her hand on her waist. They comment on the tension in her
wrist. What is it about this tension, which may appear insignificant, that
becomes so crucial to the character in that moment? No detail should be wasted,
Huillet and Straub seem to suggest throughout the film. Pialat takes a similar
approach, sacrificing immediate comprehension for a gesture that, to paraphrase
the critic Dan Sallitt, emphasizes the contradictions of a moment. Mouchette
goes from holding the gun proudly to barely being able to lift it in her hands.
Does Mouchette’s swift change in body language actually relieve her of the suspicion
that this was a meditated act? Pialat does not make the Marquis sympathetic
enough for the audience to conclude otherwise. And he does not rush to make
Mouchette coherent enough for the scene to be simply left alone. He propels us
forward to a shady Mouchette occulting the evidence of her act in the woods. In
the next scene, Mouchette is seen in the office of Dr. Gallet (Yann Dedet),
with whom she is having an affair. It may as well be the same day or weeks
since the killing, since the only visual indicator is Mouchette’s change from a
white shirt with a bow to a buttoned-up embroidered shirt:
Pialat seems to create this confusion intentionally. He wishes
for us to discover the temporal shift only when Mouchette confesses to Gallet
several minutes later. After her lucid recounting of what the audience has
witnessed in the earlier scene, Gallet shoots back that, true or false, the
story might as well be a dream. Mouchette shrieks in desperation. Is it the
refusal of her culpability that she cannot accept and finds so morally vile in
Gallet’s character? Or is it that she needs to feel, the way the audience needs
to feel that this character is real, that the clank of the gun is real, that
her actions are real? Pialat decides to cut from Mouchette in mid-scream,
leaving any questions that might surge in the audience’s mind intact despite
having already learned that the character will likely not suffer any legal
consequences for her actions. It’s a way of Pialat stripping the story from
such predictable narrative problems and returning it to larger philosophical
issues of the characters.
If only this ten minute fragment from Sous le soleil de Satan survived
one hundred years from now, one would still be able to derive from it Pialat’s
entire approach to filmmaking. A close look at these scenes reveals a complex
strategy of accumulating violent eruptions and then burying them for long
stretches of time while the film reveals other details. Few filmmakers are able
to leave so much unresolved from scene to scene, moment to moment, without
losing coherence. Pialat’s relationship with the audience is one of truth, and
his deeply intuitive cinema achieves this by avoiding conclusions as much and
as often as possible. •
Three frames from Pedro Costa’s Où gît votre sourire enfoui? — although a colour film, the frames are reproduced in greyscale within the MoC booklet from which they've been taken. The bottom two frames provide a close-up on an editing deck’s screen as Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub analyze a particular span of footage in the course of assembling one of the versions of their 1999 black-and-white film Sicilia!
Maurice
Pialat: Acts of Grace • Senses of Cinema
Max Nelson, March 18, 2002
The Relentless Vision of Maurice Pialat (Web Exclusive) — Cineaste ... Adam Bingham from Cineaste magazine, 2009
Tuesday
Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "Sous le soleil ... - Mubi Glenn Kenny from Mubi, March 30, 2010
The
Misunderstood Maurice Pialat | The New Yorker Richard Brody, October 16, 2015
Maurice Pialat: Moments of Truth - Features - Reverse Shot Julien Allen, October 16, 2015
Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "Sous le soleil ... - Mubi Glenn Kenny, March 30, 2010
MyReviewer.com [David Beckett]
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]
Blu-ray.com [Jeffrey Kauffman]
Real Movie News - Blu-ray [Ryan Russell Izay]
Slant
Magazine Blu-ray [Jake Cole]
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
eFilmCritic.com review [4/5] The Ultimate Dancing Machine
Spirituality & Practice (Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat) review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The Captive
Lover – An Interview with Jacques ... - Senses of Cinema Frédéric Bonnaud interview with Jacques
Rivette, including comments on Pialat films, from Senses of Cinema, September 18, 2001
Under Satan’s Sun BAM/PFA Program
Sous le soleil de Satan Masters of Cinema
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
VAN GOGH
France (158 mi) 1991
The Captive
Lover – An Interview with Jacques ... - Senses of Cinema Frédéric Bonnaud interview with Jacques
Rivette, including comments on Pialat films, from Senses of Cinema, September 18, 2001
Pialat is a great filmmaker - imperfect, but then who isn't? I don't mean it as a reproach. And he had the genius to invent Sandrine - archeologically speaking - for A nos amours (1983). But I would put Van Gogh (1991) and The House in the Woods (1971) above all his other films. Because there he succeeded in filming the happiness, no doubt imaginary, of the pre-WWI world. Although the tone is very different, it's as beautiful as Renoir.
A revisionist look at the last 67 days of Vincent van Gogh's
life by the highly talented writer-director Maurice Pialat (The Mouth Agape,
A nos amours, Under Satan's Sun), with singer-songwriter-actor
Jacques Dutronc—the “Bob Dylan of Paris” and the lead in Godard's Every Man
for Himself—in the title part. Ironically, this 155-minute French art movie
shows the painter's existence, including his sex life, to be a lot happier than
is generally depicted—much sunnier, in fact, than Vincente Minnelli's or Robert
Altman's films on the same subject; in any case, it certainly qualifies as a personal
work. (The period re-creations of Jean Renoir and John Ford remain the key
reference points.) While the results shed little light on van Gogh's painting,
some painters I know are smitten with this film, and the mise en scene and the
period flavor are both quite remarkable. With Alexandra London,Gerard Sety,
Bernard le Coq, Corinne Bourdon, and Elsa Zylberstein (1992). In French with
subtitles.
This stunningly photographed and skilfully acted film uses an accretion of naturalistic detail to present an emotionally restrained but utterly compelling account of the last three months of Van Gogh's life. Living in Auvers-sur-Oise with his sensitive and knowledgeable patron Gachet (Sety), Van Gogh (Dutronc) works quietly and steadily, meanwhile flirting with Gachet's precocious daughter Marguerite (London). However, his ill health, a brief return to the debauchery of brothels and drink, and his irrational resentment of his brother Theo's failure to sell his work, provoke erratic swings from brooding introspection to frustrated anger. Since Pialat has no desire to canonise the artist, there is no attempt to trace the origins and development of his 'creative genius'; nor, avoiding the hazards of biopic cliché, does he seek to illuminate these dark corners of his subject's troubled soul. In the leading role, Dutronc has exactly the right quality of physical frailty and stooped sadness to complement Pialat's beautiful, poignant images.
Cine-List
- CINE-FILE Chicago Ben Sachs
“[Maurice] Pialat's background as a painter was a key weapon in his assault on unfolding reality,” wrote Kent Jones in a 2004 memorial for the great French filmmaker, the current subject of a month-long retrospective at the Siskel Center. “[His most memorable moments] are visions snatched from the fleeting beauty of everyday, banal existence, endowed with exactly the right dimensions and proportions in space and time.” This sense of everyday existence is crucial to Pialat's sole narrative film about a painter, the biopic VAN GOGH (1991, 158 min, 35mm; Friday, 6:30pm and Saturday, 3pm), which considers the final months in the subject's life not as a period of agony, but as a relatively normal time marked by social engagements, romance, arguments, and work. The film still pulses with emotion as all of Pialat's movies do; it's just in a quieter register than something like WE WON'T GROW OLD TOGETHER or A NOS AMOURS. Like most of the director's protagonists, Jacques Dutronc's Van Gogh is angry with the world and with himself (quite a few critics have read the characterization as an act of self-portrait on Pialat's part), yet this anger is tempered with moments of tenderness and resignation. In fact, VAN GOGH contains some of the most optimistic passages of Pialat's filmography: the lunch on the grass at Dr. Gachet's home, the third-act visit to the brothel, the moments of reconciliation between the hero and his brother/patron Theo. This might explain why the film was a whopping critical and commercial success in France, selling roughly one and a half million tickets and garnering 12 Cesar nominations.
There is one mesmerizing element in French director Maurice Pialat's otherwise rambling, unfocused new film portrait, "Van Gogh," and that is the face of actor Jacques Dutronc.
A face like Dutronc's is one of the little miracles of moviegoing. It is magnificent, yet without a trace of handsomeness. At times, it seems almost inhuman, more like the face of a dog than a man. At others, it appears almost saintly, Christlike, the face of beatific suffering. It's a face you could explore endlessly without resolution, a face of infinite possibilities.
It is Dutronc's quality of volatile unpredictability that gives "Van Gogh" its quixotic edge. It feels at times as if scores of movies have been made about Vincent van Gogh. (A friend called him the "Amy Fisher of the art world.") And most previous movie van Goghs have been depicted as vibrating masses of genius, bundles of spitting nerves. But Pialat's van Gogh is more complete and believable and much more human than the others; for the first time on screen, he's allowed to breathe, laugh, clown around and chase girls.
It's great fun to see van Gogh joke around playfully with his brother Theo (Bernard Le Coq), and, in places, the film has an improvised, lighter-than-air feel. But a sense of dread can always be felt too, because we know that the painter's mood might suddenly shift, turning the tide of the moment violently back upon itself. In those moments, it's truly as if an entirely different person has appeared, and Dutronc executes these transformations so effortlessly that we never know where the movie is going to take us.
Dutronc's van Gogh doesn't know when or how or to what extremes his emotions will take him, either. He's mad as a loon, but he's a real person, and Dutronc makes his pain the pain of a real man and not of some distant, abstract suffering genius. This van Gogh is someone you've known or might have known, and that, alone, is an accomplishment.
Pialat's probing, voyeuristic camera draws his subject in close, but his elliptical narrative style is too sketchy and without context, leaving confusing gaps in the chronology. Because van Gogh was an impressionist, Pialat is just banal enough in his thinking to shoot the film impressionistically. But what is the viewer who's not aware that van Gogh shot himself going to make of the scene in which, after focusing on a single tree in a field along a path, Pialat observes van Gogh as he struggles down the path with a bright scarlet stain on his white shirt? That somebody hit the great man with a tomato?
There is something gained in Pialat's style, though, and perhaps better than any film on the subject, this one captures the spirit of scandalous abandon that defines the era of the cancan and the impressionists. The film's atmosphere may be vivid -- as it is in the vibrantly staged brothel scenes where, drunk on absinthe, the patrons dance and carouse openly with their prostitute friends, or in the almost shockingly frank scenes between van Gogh and his mistress, Maguerite Gachet (Alexandra London) -- but it is also often perplexingly scattershot. Still, though "Van Gogh" may be puzzling and, at times, tiresome, it rips aside a layer of artifice to reveal the raw genius of the man, not the legend.
Van Gogh (1991) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
In the spring of 1890, the impoverished artist Vincent Van Gogh moves to Auvers-sur-Oise, not far from Paris. He stays at a modest inn and places himself under the care of the kindly Dr Gachet. Although outwardly his life appears to be well-ordered and peaceful, the painter is tormented by inner demons which cause him to mutilate himself. Vincent receives a visit from his brother Theo, who seems to be the only person who believes in his talent as an artist. He has an affair with Gachet’s young daughter, Marguerite, Theo’s wife Johanna and a prostitute, Cathy. Returning from a trip to Paris, which resulted in a quarrel with Theo, Vincent fails to recover his peace of mind...
Van Gogh was the penultimate work from Maurice Pialat,
one of France’s most controversial film directors of the 1980s and 1990s.
Pialat established himself with his uncompromising social realist dramas, which
include Loulou (1980) and A Nos amours (1983). These films
tend to concentrate exclusively on marginalised individuals – social outcasts
or vulnerable adolescents – portraying the world through their eyes.
Whilst such bold auteur-ism has earned Pialat mixed criticism, it is an
approach which appears to suit the film biography genre, as Van Gogh –
possibly Pialat’s greatest work – amply demonstrates.
The story of Vincent Van Gogh naturally admits a romanticised or melodramatic
interpretation, and previous films of the artist’s life have certainly not
played down the dramatic periods in his life. Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 film, Lust
for life, although rated the best biographical film of Van Gogh’s life,
opts for the easier path of melodrama than the one chosen by Pialat, which is
one of dogged unsentimentality and realism.
Pialat is far more concerned with portraying Van Gogh as an ordinary man, not
the stereotypical image of the insane tortured genius we are all taught at
school. The film concentrates on the ordinary day-to-day events which
filled up the artist’s last two months, showing how he lived, the nature of his
relationships with others, and how he saw the world.
Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh has the feel of authenticity about it which
Minnelli’s film seems to lack. This is partly down to Pialat’s striking
minimalist style, brought to life by some extraordinarily beautiful
cinematography, and also the first-rate acting performances. Jacques
Dutronc makes a surprisingly convincing Van Gogh – alternately intense and
playful, anything but a naïve stereotype of the celebrated artist.
Alexandra London is also impressive in the role of Marguerite Gachet (although
this character’s role in the film is, as Pialat admits, largely
fictional).
For those expecting something on similar lines to Lust for Life, this
film will be a shock. Pialat’s cold, detached treatment of his subject,
the film’s slow pacing and near-epic length (nearly three hours) prevent the
film from being accessible to all but a narrow spectrum of enthusiasts.
Which is not to say that it is a bad film – quite the reverse. Pialat’s Van
Gogh has a daring genius about it which, in a strange and subtle way, has a
natural resonance with its subject. Maybe this is fortuitous, or
maybe it reflects Pialat’s own profound interest in painting – he has stated he
would have preferred a career as an artist to that of a film-maker.
There is certainly some overlap between the destinies of Van Gogh and Pialat –
both being creative talents who were sorely misunderstood and underrated for
their achievements during their lifetimes. In making Van Gogh,
Pialat is perhaps unconsciously reflecting on his own frustrated career.
In any event, there is a sense that this is a film adaptation of Vincent Van
Gogh’s life which Van Gogh himself might have appreciated.
Cinemasparagus:
Van Gogh (Pialat) - Essay by Sabrina Marques + ... Pialat & Van Gogh: Fellow Outsiders,
by Sabrina Marques (2013); Letter to Pialat, by Jean-Luc Godard (1991); Words
from Pialat, excerpts of Pialat in conversation with Michel Ciment and
Michel Sineux – by Pierre Hodgson (1992), translated by Craig Keller, October 20, 2015
Van Gogh • Senses of
Cinema Darragh O’Donoghue
from Senses of Cinema, July 31, 2006
Pialat's
Pointillist Pictures - ReelTalk Movie Reviews Don Levit on Loulou, Van Gogh, and To Our Loves/À nos amours, July
2004
Shooting Down Pictures » Blog Archive » #905. Van Gogh (1991 ... Kevin Lee from Also Like Life, January 29, 2007
‘Life isn’t so bad. There’s even room for the village idiot.’ Kevin Lee from Also Like Life, February 2, 2007
‘In a short time, the gentlest of men has become irritable and bitter’ Kevin Lee from Also Like Life, February 2, 2007
The production of the world Kevin Lee from Also Like Life, February 4, 2007
9
1/2 Weeks with Van Gogh | Jonathan Rosenbaum May 12, 1993
TrustMovies: Maurice Pialat's masterpiece? Maybe. In any case, VAN ... James van Maanen
Talking Pictures [Howard Schumann]
The Independent Critic [Richard Propes]
Maurice
Pialat: Moments of Truth - Features - Reverse Shot Julien Allen, October 16, 2015
The New Yorker: Richard Brody September 07, 2015
DVD Times Noel Megahey
DVD Verdict (Joe Armenio) dvd review
DVD Town (James Plath) dvd review
Talking Pictures (UK) review Nigel Watson
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]
Real Movie News - Blu-ray [Ryan Russell Izay]
Blu-ray.com [Jeffrey Kauffman]
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Carson Lund]
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]
The Lumière Reader Tim Wong
Ron Hogan review reflected upon in a review for BAD LIEUTENANT
Van Gogh BAM/PFA Program
Van Gogh - Jacques Dutronc, Alexandra London, Bernard Lecoq Phase 9 TV
BBC Films review Jamie Russell
Austin Chronicle (Pamela Bruce) review [2/5]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Per-Olof Strandberg
Van Gogh (1991
film) - Wikipedia
Maurice Pialat: peintures a few Pialat paintings (commentary in French)
Vincent Van Gogh’s complete catalog his entire painting collection is viewable online
letter to Théo Van Gogh, 21 May 1890 Van Gogh’s Letters
25 May Van Gogh’s Letters
letter to Théo Van Gogh, 3 June 1890 Van Gogh’s Letters
12 June Van Gogh’s Letters
letter to Vincent Van Gogh, 22 July 1890 Van Gogh’s Letters
Maurice Pialat-Van Gogh (1991) in AvaxHome film photos
(Visual) Quotes..., 2/16 film photos from Cinemadison
LE GARCU
France (102 mi) 1995
Simultaneous dreamlike and dedicated to a elliptical sense of realism, this film recalls Ozu heavily. Like similar final films like Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice and John Cassavetes’ Love Streams, there is a simultaneous mellow style and urgency to the questions posed. Facing death, Pialat is forced to confront his demons.
The story is minimal as Pialat doesn’t wish to plow over his characters with too much action. This is a film of small moments which point toward larger things. The audience sees the seeds of larger things in the seemingly uneventful moments Pialat films. Tellingly, he also leaves out major events…they’re implied by staging, body language, and small cues in the dialogue. Little to no dialogue is wasted on exposition. As in Love Streams, relationships between characters are kept as ambiguous as possible so that the finer points of their interactions aren’t glossed over by actors’ unconscious projections or audience’s expectations of certain codified behaviors.
The story briefly summarized is that of a man(played brilliantly by Gerard Depardieu) whose wife calls for an end to their relationship; she can’t deal with him anymore. The audience is left in the dark as to why until the film unfolds and we see that though he loves both his wife and child very much, he can’t love them in a way that allows them to live their lives; he’s too impulsive and controlling over situations. The child is portrayed brilliantly; Pialat makes a real recognizable child here, not a precocious miniature adult or cheap visual recourse to sentimentality. The child is energetic, easily distracted, and very arbitrary in his allegiances, and to Pialat’s credit he follows him around as much as any other character in the film.
Heavily recommended, though unfortunately unavailable in the US outside rare theatrical screenings.
Reel Movie Critic [Pam and George Singleton]
This 1995 production is in current release as part of a retrospective of Maurice Pialat films. It was the last film directed by Pialat, who died in 2003. Somewhat autobiographical in content, "Le Garcu" concerns the mid-life of a self-possessed man, who is attempting to outrun his younger days, sometimes with self-delusion.
Gerard and Sophie (Gerard Depardieu and Geraldine Paihas), a not so happily married couple with a young son named Antoine (Antoine Pialat) lives a sophisticated and somewhat complicated life in Paris. They shop at upscale designer stores and vacation in the islands where the service is hand and foot. The rose is off the bloom, as the mystery and frequency of hot sex has been interrupted by a pregnancy and a demanding and precocious child, who runs everywhere at full speed, screaming at the top of his lungs.
Sophie has some emotional issues that are probably related to Gerard’s lust for other women. When he wants to make love to her, she’s often in an emotionally dark place. When she’s hot for him, he’s either away on business or on the phone with his mistress, Cathy (Fabienne Babe, now that’s a name if we ever heard one).
Gerard is not a person that is easy to like. Fatherhood has come later in life for him, and he’s jealous of anyone his son likes to spend time with. He attempts to buy his son’s love and attention with costly gifts and overindulgence, though he’s often involved with business or his lover, or even his former wife, Micheline (Elisabeth Depardieu). Gerard is obviously a bit older than Sophie. He’s oafish and verbally abusive to her as well. When he moves out on Sophie, he goes to Micheline’s house. He’s not there to seek comfort but to use her only for what he wants, room and a bed. Gerard even calls Cathy to join him at Micheline’s, and when Cathy arrives she promptly disrobes and jumps in the sack with Gerard, as Micheline raves in the bedroom door.
Gerard laments to his friend Jeannot (Dominique Rocheteau), while in the bar at a hotel where they are at a business conference, that the pretty female pharmaceutical reps, who all look like models, are there to have sex with doctors so they will buy their products. Later, when Gerard slips into bed with Sophie, in the wee small hours of the morning, he unceremoniously gives her a drill sergeant slap on her naked rear end so she will stop snoring.
Gerard’s father is dying, and he and Sophie travel to his hometown to see him for the last time. When they return to Paris, Jeannot, who has moved in with Sophie, is upset because she has not called for three days. This film is not a flattering portrait of French men. "Look at Me" is another film, in current release that provides a critical view of the French bourgeoisie.
Quick-cut editing takes you from one location and situation to another, sometimes requiring that your mind fill in the gaps. From time to time, the subtitles are difficult to read because they are printed in white over a background that provides very little contract. This seems inexcusable when there are great subtitles in the current films "The Other Side of the Street" and "Kung Fu Hustle."
In the end, Gerard and Sophie care for each other again. Although the movie concludes at that point, one believes that nothing really has changed. It’s a family affair, as Pialat’s wife, Sylvie Danton, co-wrote the screenplay with him, and their son, Antoine is the young boy in the film. Depardieu’s former wife, Elisabeth, co-stars as Gerard’s ex-wife Micheline on-screen as well. Art imitating life. We hope it was also therapeutic.
Like many American cinephiles, we have only recently discovered French director Maurice Pialat. Although we liked this film, it’s not in the same league as "House in the Woods." That said, if this is an example of one of his lesser films, we for sure want to see his others. When a retrospective of his films comes to your city, we suggest you see as many as you can. You won’t be disappointed.
Maurice Pialat (1925 – 2003) – A Tribute • Senses of Cinema Fabien Boully, Noël Herpe, Maximilian Le Cain and Glen W. Norton from Senses of Cinema, March 21, 2003
Maurice
Pialat: Moments of Truth - Features - Reverse Shot Julien Allen, October 16, 2015
Brooklyn Magazine: Jordan Cronk October 14, 2015
User reviews from imdb Author: conannz
from Auckland, NZ
Variety (Lisa Nesselson) review
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
Le Garcu Dance Sequence YouTube (2:49)
Pilon, Benoît
THE NECESSITIES OF LIFE (Ce qu'il faut pour vivre) B+ 90
Baffin Island is located due north of Hudson Bay in Canada,
with a large opening from the Labrador Sea leading to the Atlantic Ocean, which
is part of the Northwest Passage, an arctic sea route that connects the
Atlantic and Pacific oceans, oftentimes impassable due to frozen ice. To this day there are disputes over this
territory, as
After 3 months at sea,
Tivii inexplicably arrives in a sanatorium in French-speaking Quebec City,
where they immediately cut his hair and throw away all his belongings, where there
is no one who understands his language, yet they continually speak to him in
French, leaving him imprisoned and completely isolated, yet he has never before
seen a world such as this. Through a
kind of pantomime, he understands he may be there for as long as two years,
which leaves him completely disheartened, so he attempts to escape in the snow
and walk back to his home, but he is soon returned. This is followed by his refusal to eat, as in
his mind he no longer has a reason for living, where one of the nurses, Éveline
Gélinas, finds a young Inuk orphan, Kaki, Paul-André Brasseur, who is a fellow
patient fluent in both languages.
Tivii’s spirits rise immediately from this simple act of kindness, where
he becomes a father figure who is adept at fixing mechanical clocks, making
animal carvings, and telling Inuit stories.
What’s most impressive, however, are the magnificent beauty of Tivii’s
dreams, which are a prominent feature of the film, recurring half a dozen
times, each time in a barren polar landscape engulfed in ice and snow,
accompanied by austere music reminiscent of Arvo Pärt. If there are people in his dreams, they are
so tiny they can barely be seen in the enormity of the endless white sheet of
ice. Since Tivii says little in this
movie, this is the most authentic expression of his thoughts, which are, of
course, worlds apart from where he is.
Natar Ungalaaq has an extremely expressive face, one that grows curious
about each and everything he sees. One
really has to see this film to appreciate the range of emotion that is
generated from his near wordless performance.
Surprisingly, despite the potentially dour medical subject, this is one
of the more tender films, as it’s a coming of age film where the audience
slowly begins to appreciate the complexity of this man who takes it upon
himself to raise Kaki as if he was his own son, continually describing his
world to him, where from the mountains you can see across the entire landscape
unimpeded by trees or buildings that block one’s vision, and there are seals,
caribou, and geese, “all the necessities of life.”
Note - - By 1956 the
largest year-round Inuit community in
NewCity Chicago Ray Pride
(Ce qu’il faut pour vivre) Based on an actual tuberculosis
epidemic that swept the Far North of Canada in mid-century, “The Necessities of
Life” is set in 1955, when Tivii, an Inuit hunter (Natar Ungalaaq, “The Fast
Runner”) is diagnosed and taken from his village on remote
The Tuberculosis in First Nations Communities page
During the early decades of the 20th century, a terrible epidemic of tuberculosis (TB) occurred in the Canadian First Nations population. It is probable that First Nations people had less immunity to European strains of TB, and drugs to cure TB were not yet available. Malnutrition increased the risk of disease, and confinement on crowded reservations allowed the disease to spread rapidly. Death rates were in excess of 700 per 100,000, among the highest ever reported in a human population. Death rates from TB meningitis in children aged 0-4 years ranged from 500 to 2000 per 100,000, and overall TB death rates among children in residential schools were as high as 8000 per 100,000, during the 1930s and 1940s.
Inuit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia or Inuit - New World Encyclopedia also seen here: Inuit: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article
In the 1950s a process of relocation was undertaken by the
Government of Canada for several reasons including protection of Canada's
sovereignty in the Arctic, lack of food in the area currently occupied, and an
attempt to solve the "Eskimo problem," meaning the assimilation and
end of the Inuit culture. One of the more notable relocations was undertaken in
1953, when 17 families were moved from Port Harrison (now
Inuit Dreams, Inuit Realities: Shattering the Bonds of Dependency [1] Janet Mancini Billson from American Review of Canadian Studies (2001) (excerpt)
Elsewhere, I have referred to three main periods of Inuit
history from a mainstream point of view. For thousands of years during the
"Free Reign" period, the Inuit eked out a nomadic, hunting and
gathering subsistence, living in what amounts to approximately one-fifth of
When the government placed the Inuit into settlements over
thirty years ago, the people became almost completely reliant on government
policies and support. A rash of social problems emerged from the dramatic
changes in lifestyles and livelihood. The ramifications of moving from very
small, isolated groups to larger communities include changes in family
structure and parent-child relationships; rising levels of education and
diversity of occupation; and disconcerting rates of alcoholism, suicide, drug
abuse, domestic violence, and unemployment. Many Inuit believe that role
reversal and male loss of the provider role have led to higher rates of
substance abuse, depression, and violence among males.
User reviews from imdb Author: Blondmonkey5 from
Review: The Necessities of Life/Ce qu'il faut pour vivre 9*/10
It's a tale of hopelessness, terror, confusion and desperation, and Ungalaaq
makes you feel all of that. The Necessities of Life has done well on the
festival circuit and was Canada's entry for Best Foreign Language Film Oscar
this year, although it didn't make the final cut to be in the running Sunday.
Language barriers are no problem with sub-titles, but even without them I think
the film would still work just in how Ungalaaq manages to get so much across
with expression and pitch. Éveline Gélinas as a sympathetic nurse is also very
good, as the relationship between her and Tivii shows that common language is
not an impediment to either friendship or understanding. I also liked Denis
Bernard in a small role as a sympathetic priest that tries to help Tivii adapt
an orphaned Inuit that's also a patient in the hospice; some genuine laughs are
mined out of their visit to the monsignor.
This proves that things aren't all black and white in the story. The actions of
the government are not driven by I think some imperialist mentality, but by the
notion that they were genuinely doing all right by the Inuit by taking them far
from home and treating them in spite of everything. Their self-deluded altruism
may have blinded them to certain facts on the ground, but Necessities isn't a
story about the right-or-wrong of government policy. It's the story of one
man's struggle to get some semblance of control of his situation, and whether
or not he can maintain a sense of self so far from home. It's a simply powerful
story that works its magic in small and unexpected ways.
At times filled with humor and warmth and at others feeling compounded by
isolation and a hint of claustrophobia, Necessities of Life reaches out from
the past and across cultures to remind us how fragile we are in a number of
equally important ways. Is one's health worth a trip hundreds of miles away
from home and being thrown into the deep end of some strange culture? It's a
tough question, and while I think I know my answer, it's up to the audience to
make up there own minds as to whether Tivii's journey made him the worse for
ware, or worn for the better
In examining what constitutes the necessities of life, Pilon presents a variety
of options – communication, belonging, acceptance and family. But chief among
them is dignity.
Seen at the
The Gazette B. Kelly
In lesser hands, Ce qu'il faut pour vivre (The Necessities of
Life) could've easily degenerated into a rather trite melodramatic tearjerker.
But director Benoit Pilon and Bernard Émond, who wrote the original screenplay,
avoid the obvious clichés and instead make a point of underlining the subtle
nuances in this story of two cultures clashing and then sort-of reconciling in
1950s
That said, many will still likely need a few hankies to make it through this one because it is indeed one sad drama, all the more affecting because it's inspired by real events that scarred Canada's Inuit population 50 years ago.
Pilon, who is one of Quebec's best documentary auteurs, makes an assured feature fiction directorial debut with this deceptively simple story about an Inuit man, Tivii (the just-brilliant Natar Ungalaaq of Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner fame), living in the Far North in the '50s and suffering from tuberculosis. One day, a Canadian government ship arrives in his small community to test the locals for this terrible disease, and all those who test positive are immediately brought down south to be treated.
That's exactly what happens to Tivii and it goes without saying that he's almost in a state of shock when he suddenly arrives in a sanatorium in Quebec City, hundreds of miles from his wife and kids, surrounded by people who don't understand a word of his language.
That's really all there is to this deceptively simple story, but Pilon handles it with such care and finesse that it's impossible not to be moved by a film that is part invaluable social document, part old-fashioned melodrama and most importantly a downright fascinating exploration of two completely-alien cultures - Inuit and Québécois - meeting up in a church-run hospice jam-packed with people who have one thing in common whatever their ethnic roots - they're all suffering from a debilitating disease.
What's great about the film is that Pilon and Émond, who worked on the screenplay together, make every effort to not provide a black-and-white portrait of this dark slice of Canadian history. The film doesn't shy away from making it clear that it's a terrible thing that Tivii is brutally wrenched from his family and community, but this is not just another tiresome exposé of the white culture's exploitation of aboriginals.
The sanatorium's head doctor, Dr. Montpetit (Guy Thauvette), underlines the lack of compassion of the system when he notes that he has no time to be a missionary. But Tivii's main nurse Carole (Eveline Gélinas) goes well beyond the call of duty in her efforts to heal her patient, notably by introducing him to a young Inuit boy Kaki (Paul-André Brasseur), who helps Tivii come to terms with his new environment.
It probably wouldn't work nearly as well if it wasn't for Ungalaaq, who just has this unbelievable presence on the screen (as you already know if you've seen Atanarjuat). He has one of the most expressive faces ever to grace a movie screen and he ropes you in from the very first second you see him. You simply can't not care about what happens to this man.
It's hard to imagine this fine film, which had its world premiere in competition at the World Film Festival, will come away from the fest awards ceremony Monday night empty-handed and there is already plenty of talk about Ungalaaq nabbing the hardware as best actor. I certainly wouldn't quibble with that choice.
Inuit were moved 2000 km in Cold War manoeuvring - thestar.com Paul Watson from The Star, November 29, 2009
CBC News - North - Quebec director's film falls short of Oscar ...
filmsoundoff.com [Alex Roberts]
Full Story Liz Braun from JAM! Movies
Film-Forward.com Nora Lee Mandel
exclaim! [Katarina Gligorijevic]
THE NECESSITIES OF LIFE Facets Multi Media
Chicago Reader Cliff Doerksen
TimeOut Chicago Hank Sartin
Toronto Star (Linda Barnard) review
The
Necessities of Life Sonia Gunderson
from The
Chicago Tribune Dennis Harvey
Baffin Island - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Are the Inuit Healthy? - International Polar Year (IPY): Canadian ... Dominique Forget from Canadian Geographic, January/February 2010
Ovilu
Tunnillie: High Heels, Airplanes and Other Inuit Legends Maureen Flynn-Burhoe from Inuit Art
Webliography,
Honouring Sarah Ekoomiak, (b. 1933 Umiujaq, Nuanvik) « Speechless Maureen Flynn-Burhoe from Ocean Flynn, August 2007
CultureCanada.gc.ca Cultural Heritage and Recreation,
Polio
epidemic strikes Northern Canada Polio patients from
Tuberculosis
in the Inuit community of Quebec, Canada
American Journal of
Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, September 18, 2003
Jouvert 7.2: Helen
Gilbert, "Great Adventures in Nursing" Great
Adventures in Nursing: Colonial Discourse and Health Care Delivery in
THE SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF ELEVATED RATES OF SUICIDE AMONG INUIT YOUTH Jack Hicks from Indigenous Affairs, April, 2007 (pdf format)
Trek to Baffin: UOHI Practises Cardiology in the Far North University of Ottawa Heart Institute Journal, The Beat (2007) (pdf format)
A Long Way from Home: The Tuberculosis Epidemic Among the Inuit - Google Books Result by Pat Sandiford Grygier (272 pages)
Pinkaew, Prachya
ONG-BAK
Thailand (105 mi) 2005
Ong-bak Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Tony Jaa is awesome. When he is being chased by a gang
through the back alleys of
Time
Out London review
Nong Pra-du village, northern Thailand. Once every 24 years the festival of Ong-Bak comes around, but this year the Buddha statue known as Ong-Bak is missing its head; an errant former son of the village has severed it as a sacrifice to his crime boss in Bangkok. This is bad news for the villagers, who face drought without their godhead’s head. Orphan martial-arts prodigy Ting (Tony Jaa) is sent to retrieve his fellow stone-face from the big bad city. Excelling in the ancient body-busting art of Muay Thai (or ‘Nine Body Weapons’), he has made a solemn vow to his monk master never to put his skills to use. Thankfully for the film’s commercial prospects, Bangkok is not a city that encourages such abstinence, and Ting soon sets his tutor’s advice aside for further consideration at a quieter time.
Pitched as Bruce Lee’s latest heir-apparent, Jaa works an authentic no-wires fight schtick, with a preponderance of elbows and knees; the director has a particular admiration for a falling elbow-to-head manoeuvre, which we’re repeatedly invited to admire from multiple angles. Jaa is a deadpan performer in other respects, but the film throws in various OTT opponents – I liked the bar fighter who made full use of the furniture, electrical wires and spectators – and semi-slapstick chase sequences. Womanhood gets raw treatment, but the mob lord who speaks and smokes through his tracheotomy pipe is a splendid update on the trad movie villain. Not the most ecumenical of picture-postcards – ‘Thais are Thai because of Thai boxing,’ proposes the closing-credits ditty – the film is scrappy fun.
The Onion A.V. Club review Scott Tobias
It takes a reel or two for the creaky exposition to get out of the way, but the bone-crunching martial-arts saga Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior finally hits its stride by recognizing a cliché and exploiting it for all it's worth. Normally in cinema, any chase scene through narrow alleyways or urban bazaars involves obstacles—a fruit cart, two men carrying a plate of glass, or maybe a small ring of barbed wire hanging from a pole for some reason. In a sequence that recalls the best of Jackie Chan, fleet-footed Thai sensation Tony Jaa evades a throng of gangsters by springing through a crowded marketplace and sidestepping all these hoary pitfalls. In Ong-Bak, the only thing more exciting than watching Jaa fight is watching him flee, which he does with the combined skill of a dancer and a physical comedian.
Though martial-arts movies typically waste time overcomplicating the conflict—in Chan films, this often involves a government lackey reeling off a page-long monologue—Ong-Bak starts in a near-slumber. Before Jaa can demonstrate the ancient system of Muay Thai ("Nine Body Weapons") on some poor thug's skull, director Prachya Pinkaew dawdles in a rural Thai village, where a scoundrel has just stolen the head of a precious Buddha statue. After some consternation, the town elders agree to send Jaa, the most promising local warrior, to Bangkok to retrieve their lost treasure. For help, Jaa turns to his city cousin Perttary Wongkamlao, an unrepentant gambler and lovable lowlife who owes money all around town, including to a ruthless crime boss who happens to have the missing head. This sets off a wild trip through the underworld, where Jaa confronts innumerable waves of mob henchmen and unwillingly participates in a series of Bloodsport-style bare-knuckle brawls.
A refreshing return to inventive, earthbound choreography after the successes of ornate wire-fu imports like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Zhang Yimou's Hero and House Of Flying Daggers, Ong-Bak makes up in action what it lacks in storytelling finesse. The ads are anxious to exalt Jaa as the next Chan or Jet Li, but he falls somewhere between the two in demeanor, putting Jet's stone-face to work in comedic situations that Chan would use as an occasion for clowning. Left to his own devices, Jaa seems more comfortable letting his knees and elbows do the talking, and his quick, compact fighting technique dazzles in every thrice-repeated multiple-angle shot. It's hard to tell whether the creative choreography comes from him or the director, but clearly his body can pull off just about anything.
Kung Fu Cinema review [8/10] Mark Pollard
Kamera.co.uk review Leon Hunt
Ong Bak Tarun from Asian Cinema Drifter
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
The New York Sun (Nathan Lee) review
Movie-Vault.com (Avril Carruthers) review [9/10]
The New York Sun (Grady Hendrix) review
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [4/5]
DVD Outsider Slarek
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Wilson) dvd review
VideoVista review Jeff Young
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3/4]
DVD Clinic (Chris Bumbray) dvd review [3.5/5]
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Nate Meyers) dvd review [Director's Cut]
H.K. DVD Heaven (Chris Gilbert) dvd review [Platinum Edition]
DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Talk (Todd Douglass Jr.) dvd review [3/5] [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Verdict (David Johnson) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review George Wu
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
Talking Pictures (UK) review Nigel Watson
Eye for Film ("Kotleta") review [3/5]
FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [B+]
RopeofSilicon (Brad Brevet) review [B+]
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [5/5]
Alternative Film Guide [Andre Soares]
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B]
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B]
eFilmCritic.com (Jason Whyte) review [5/5]
Movie Cynics [The Vocabulariast]
filmcritic.com (Eric Meyerson) review [3.5/5]
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
stylusmagazine.com (Jen Cameron) review
Coming Soon Edward Douglas
Exclaim! review Travis Mckenzie Hoover
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Entertainment
Weekly review [B+] Lisa Schwarzbaum
Variety (Derek Elley) review
BBCi - Films Mike McCahill
Boston Globe review [2.5/4] Ty Burr
The Boston Phoenix review Brett Michel
Washington Post (Desson Thomson) review
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker
San Francisco Chronicle [G. Allen Johnson]
LA Weekly David Chute
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Leonard Norwitz
Pintilie, Lucian
CARNIVAL SCENES (De Ce Trag Clopotele, Mitică?) B 86
aka: Why Are the Bells Ringing, Mitică?
Romania (132 mi) 1979
Lucian Pintilie is a Romanian-born director whose career
began in
Based on a darkly absurdist play by Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale
(1852-1912), that is interestingly framed at beginning and end by the filming
on a movie set, literally a killer beginning and ending, where in between
it turns into a deliriously ribald farce, an overblown, frenetically paced,
madcap comedy that is so completely over-the-top in maniacal energy that only
films of Emir Kusterica match this kind of former Eastern bloc Balkan
intensity. The orgiastic wildness has
such a sarcastically mocking tone of absurdity, but also an inherently bleak
nature, where the setting is a tiny settlement on the edge of “civilization,”
where many structures remain in an incomplete state of construction. These makeshift buildings sit alongside an
almost empty, garbage-filled lake, suggesting all are part of a toxic
existence. The film is full of nasty and
vulgar characters that intentionally lie and deceive one another, often taking
on assumed roles in order to carry out their deceit, where the central
character, Gheorge Dinica as Nae Girimea, is a barber and the town lothario who
continually eludes Pampon (Victor Rebengiuc), who ends up hopelessly searching for him
throughout the entire movie, discovering early on that the man has been
sleeping with his own kept woman, Didina (Tora Vasilescu), believing all
along that Mitica (Stefan Iordache) is the conniving culprit. The story turns into a free-for all of
mistaken identities, where Nae continues to elude what’s coming to him by playing
a kind of Pagliacci character, a clownish rake who cowardly and deviously slips
into various disguises. The real comic
talent is displayed by Miriana Mihut as Mita, the Rubenesque and bosomy woman
who thought she had Nae all to herself (while belonging to Mitica), who
continually reveals her furious discontent by swinging an axe around. This shocking portrait of whiners,
backstabbers, gossipers, and all around general lowlifes fill the screen with
their screaming mania, as characters rarely talk, instead they shout, each one
louder than the next, often all at the same time in a display of utter
buffoonery.
While the dialog is non-stop and can get overwhelming after awhile, the comic timing of the actors couldn’t be more in synch, where the performances, as well as the endless delirium onscreen, is unlike the stripped-down realism of Romanian films today, as it’s a unique example of unstoppable anarchy, which under an overly controlled, totalitarian Soviet system must have felt like the supreme liberation. The sexual betrayal unearthed in the opening few minutes of the film drives the entire action, as Pampon has the ferocity of a Russian Cossack, always in attack mode, where he has to decipher who the conniver is in a Turkish bath filled with naked men, any one of whom could be who he’s looking for, eventually settling for Mitica, who’s paralyzed with humiliation to discover his wife is deceiving him, all too willing to accept punishment meant for someone else, as Pampon and Mitica are both deceived by the same man. The search for the backstabbing womanizer reaches epic proportions at an extended costume ball where everyone is disguised, where Nae continually changes costumes to keep away from trouble, where out of nowhere Didina breaks out into a French Cancan, leading the audience in a rousing version of La Marsellaise La Marseillaise YouTube (3:08) followed by The Internationale THE INTERNATIONALE (in Russian) YouTube (3:51). This carnival party sequence couldn’t be more outlandishly liberated, as the no-holds-barred revelers are scandalously inebriated, where any sense of balance has been lost, all leading to what has to be the most infamous dog scene in the history of film, where two poodles walk exclusively on their hind legs wearing army hats, one with a gun in its mouth, where the narrator describes them as “Romanian trained dogs, as they go back into their cages on their own afterwards,” before getting carried away with dog theatrics, recreating a Turkish massacre taking place on what resembles a puppet show set, where in their state of aroused frenzy, the audience starts beating another dog, leaving it lying outside as a corpse, where one performing dog, still on his hind legs, stops to examine his fallen comrade, as the other looks forlornly out the window, while the crowd of spectators wanders away and disperses into the bowels of the backwater town, disappearing into the movie set of smoke and fog, to the suddenly disquieting music of Mozart’s Requiem Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Requiem K. 626 YouTube (53:28).
The Search for
Identity, essay by Magda Mihăilescu (excerpt)
In Carnival Scenes, men and women lose their identities as if they were trapped in a never-ending, carnivorous carnival which, when deprived of nourishment, turns everything that comes its way into grotesque matter. But how can one arrive at this carnival? By going through the swamp, by becoming immersed in it, with a paradoxical delight which, in time, turns into lust. The cineaste moves away from the brilliance of “ironic drive.” The realism of Caragiale’s slums, colorful and boisterous, no longer exists. It is now replaced with fictitious space, a wasteland filled with garbage and dirty water, shared by people and animals alike. This is a world in which normalcy means delirium; a world which goes berserk if this “normalcy” is questioned or threatened. And here resides that terrifying tension of absurdity which feeds itself with itself. In 1979, ten years before the fall of the communist dictator, Lucian Pintilie assails us with full-blown shock treatment. He couldn’t have suspected, back then, but the bridge to his future films was becoming visible.
THE CINEMA OF LUCIAN PINTILIE (A Complete Retrospective) Facets Multi Media, also seen here: Lucian Pintilie Retrospective
Based on a theatrical text by Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale (1852-1912), who was a bitter and funny witness of the turn-of-the-20th-century Romanian bourgeois mores, Carnival Scenes manages to preserve and further enhance the slightly hysteric atmosphere of his plays. Pintilie creates a strange combination of carnival scenes which is brought to the screen as a burlesque, fast-paced, screwball comedy with a meditative undertone. This film was banned in Romania for a decade until the death of Ceausescu in 1989 and was only released after the 1989 revolution.
'Carnival Scenes' by Lucian Pintilie – a banned classic of Romanian ... Romanian Culture Centre, also seen here: HOT LOVE, COLD HEARTS - The Romanian Film Festival in ...
Didina Mazu, the kept woman of Pampon, is in love with barber Nae Girimea, the Don Juan of the district. But Nae is also the lover of Mita Baston, who is the mistress of Cracanel. A letter of Mita’s, sent to Nae (who lost it) is found by Pampon at Didina’s, sending him on a false trail, and creating a scandal. Everything develops against the backdrop of Carnival days, a major event of the suburbs. A world in which survival is incessantly conditioned by people playing the fool, and by people fooling each other.
Based on a theatrical text by Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale (1852-1912), this cruel portrait of Romania was censored for a decade, and was only being released after the 1989 revolution.
User reviews from imdb Author: dromasca from Herzlya, Israel
I was expecting for quite a while to see this movie, which is kind of a
legend in the history of the Romanian cinema. Filmed at the beginning of the
80s and inspired by the work of the genial humorist and play-writer Caragiale,
the film was banned until the fall of the Communist rule. Caragiale who lived
and wrote 80-90 years ago was too actual and too subversive for the Romanian
censorship, and so was the treatment he received under the hands of Pintilie,
one of the greatest film and theater directors of Romania.
And yet I was disappointed, because the film is too much marked by the poor
technical means of the Romanian cinema of that time. It is not that the film
lacks vision. Using texts from Caragiale's plays and short stories Pintile
creates a vision of Romanian low class suburbs ('mahala') which is both true to
the past and present but also somehow prophetic for what Romania went through
after the fall of the communism. An exquisite team of the best Romanian comedy
actors gives great performances, with Mariana Mihutz shining over all other.
And yet, the story telling lacks fluency, and the rhythms and colors are too
often broken by the confusion created by poor technical quality. Too bad - this
could have been a masterpiece of the Romanian cinema.
User reviews from imdb Author: Mihnea the Pitbull from Romania
The basic value of this movie is rather conjectural than intrinsic. It acquired a mythical subversive quality, simply because the communist censorship of Romania brutally and unfairly banned it (going to such lenghts as even locking all the copies into a safe, where they stayed until the 1989 Revolution). In truth, the movie had nothing subversive, being only too brutal, misanthropic, naturalist and frivolous for the communists' taste. Pintilie's main (and childish!) mistake was to bring to open an essential dimension of Caragiale's satire that consisted in SUBTLETY. The great playwright's pieces seem to depict a vaudeville-like reality, in an innocuous and harmless comedy style - being based, in truth, on a very profound critical vision to the most essential vices and fallacies of human nature. Tempted by a shallow ambition to shock the sanctimonious communist censors, Pintilie raised this implicit element to a violently explicit level. Well, what he sought, he got! At a professional level, the movie is extremely in-equal, combining a really valuable stage heritage (powerful characters, exquisite performances, atrocious humor), with a totally amateurish movie-directing. Without any legitimate reason, it compiles onto the main play's storyline several other alien subjects from various short stories, thus becoming chaotic, messy and over-the-top. The mise-en-scene is usually skillfully conducted (Pintilie being a good theater director), but compromised by too many awkwardly framed and timed shots. Towards the end, everything becomes redundant, over-lenghtened and boring... And the final shot is a complete failure: without any aesthetic justification, Pintilie takes an auctorial distance, including in the picture his own camera-crew (only as a cheap and tacky trick), and himself, with the parting-shot: "Let them die stupid!" Such an attitude towards his own characters, by turning the critical distance into petty wickedness, is intolerably unprofessional.
User reviews from imdb Author: Mirel Palada from Bucharest, Romania
Although not so well-known as others East European cinemas (Polish or Czech,
for instance), the Romanian school managed to produce several high-quality
movies. One of them -- some would say the best -- is "Why do they ring the
bells, Mitica?".
Inspired by the work of the Romanian play-writer I.L. Caragiale, a bitter-funny
witness of the 20th turn-of-the-century Romanian burgeois mores, the movie
manages to grasp the cheap, frantic, colourful and slightly hysteric atmosphere
of Caragiale's plays.
The movie's director, Lucian Pintilie, is one of the few success stories of the
Romanian cinema. He turns the classical, linear plot of the play into a
zigzagged scenario, combining it with several other Caragiale's short-stories.
The result is a weird combination of crazy carnival scenes and short, alienated
insertions reminding of Antognioni's "Red Dessert". A burlesque,
fast-paced, snowball-like comedy (because, after all, *it remains* a comedy)
with plenty of post-modernist auto-reflexivity and deep meditative undertones.
In fact, these undertones made the Communist regime to ban the movie during the
'80s, considering it as having a strong subversive potential. (This was not the
first Pintilie's banned movie in Romania: during the '70s, another one,
"Reconstituirea", a satyric critique of the totalitarian Communist
regime, was added on the black list of forbidden movies).
But, IMHO, the strongest part of this movie is not the director or the fact
that it spoke up against a totalitarian regime. Its best moments reside in the
tremendous performances of the actors. Rebengiuc, Dinica, Mihut, Diaconu,
Vasilescu -- to name just a few -- give their best acting experience in this
movie. It is a pity that they are not so well-known outside the Romanian
cultural sphere...
Think of this movie as a Romanian "Firemen's Ball" or a Balkanic
"Il Vitelloni", but with a finger stuck on the fast-forward button,
and you'll have a good approximation of it. :o)
Lucian Pintilie by Viorica Bucur
Coming soon: the films of Lucian Pintilie | The Bleader Ben Sachs
User reviews from imdb Author: Mihai Pop from Romania
MoMA | Lucian Pintilie also seen here: Lucian Pintilie Retrospective @ MoMA - ICR NY and here: INTELect si ARTa: Lucian Pintilie la MoMA
Lucian Pintilie Mubi
Romanian auteur Pintilie in Facets' spotlight - Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
Fifth Annual Romanian Film Festival at Tribeca Cinemas - NYTimes ... A.O. Scott, December 2, 2010
Lucian Pintilie - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mitică - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
NIKI AND FLO
Romania France (99 mi) 2003
Niki and Flo Michael Sicinski and the Academic Hack
Pintilie, as far as I know, remains
Pitts, Rafi
THE HUNTER (Skekarchi) B 85
Iran Germany (92 mi) 2010
Whenever there is a country under political turmoil where
suppressing freedom of speech is an issue, it’s easy for the West to read into
it what they want to believe, often making exaggerated claims of political
ramifications, or offering overpraise. Filmmakers in
Pitts seemingly divides his film in half, where the opening sequences are filmed in Tehran, something of a concrete jungle, seen as a series of interconnecting highways, each one loaded to capacity with speeding cars dizzyingly moving back and forth in a rather pointless use of one’s time, isolated from the real world, nearly invisible behind an everpresent toxic sheen of smog that bleaches out all color, leaving only the briefest outlines of a city landscape. Pitts himself plays the lead character, nearly wordlessly throughout, apparently a last minute fill-in for someone who didn’t show up to work on time. There is a heavy reliance on an automobile, like 70’s cult flicks VANISHING POINT (1971), TWO-LANED BLACKTOP (1972), or THE DRIVER (1978), where this one similarly features multiple shots of a car zooming through various tunnels, getting groomed in an automatic car wash, driven by an urban loner who works the midnight shift as a night watchman, unable to work the dayshift, apparently, due to his ex-con background. So he lives a solitary life largely excluded from his wife and young daughter, seen together only briefly before they mysteriously disappear, where he can be seen futilely searching the streets and hospitals, apparently hiding the truth from his mother (the director’s own mother), when he excuses their absence during a planned visit for his daughter’s birthday. Later he’s told by the police they were accidentally killed in a shootout between police and demonstrators in the lead up to the 2009 Presidential election, news that seems to light a fuse of inner rage. Grabbing his rifle, which we’ve seen him use for hunting in earlier scenes, he uses this time for target practice, picking off two police officers in a random act of retaliatory violence, quickly fleeing the scene.
In a soupy fog, the car can be seen racing through back highways and small country roads, chased by a swarm of police cars after him, where he eventually slides off the side of the road in a hairpin turn and crashes his car, retreating into the forest where he’s quickly apprehended by two uniformed officers. Strangely, the entire focus of the film shifts as the police lose all sense of direction in the dense forest, where the two police officers start arguing among themselves, both angrily making accusations, blaming the other for their unfortunate predicament, made even worse by a steady downpour of rain.
This turns into an existential power struggle with these two
guys at each other’s throats, with all sense of morality lost and adrift in the
serene beauty of the woods, beautifully shot by cinematographer Mohammad
Davudi, where the prisoner is nothing more than dead weight, extraneous baggage
to carry, where he may as well already be dead, according to one officer, already
labeling him a cop-killer. This turns
into an eerie chamber drama between the three characters, where the wordless
prisoner is like a blank wall reflecting the attitudes back onto the other two,
where each grows more suspicious of the other, descending into a hellish
cesspool of contempt and disgust, where their inner rage seems to parallel the
criminal mentality of the prisoner, showing how easily people can lose their
bearings. The natural environment
provides no more sanctuary than the urban jungle, each one just as indifferent,
where by the end all three are mere skeletons of their former selves, veering
into George Romero zombie territory where one wonders what will be left of the
last traces of humanity. While offering
occasional stylistic flourishes, the film is entertaining enough, but remains
overly ambiguous and slight, offering hints rather than real observations, led
by a murky character we never come to identify with, leaving instead the
alienated impression of a Stranger in a
Strange Land. The film is dedicated
to another Iranian exile, author Bozorg Alavi, who left
David Fear Time Out New York
An ex-con brooding his way through endless night shifts at a crap factory job, Ali (writer-director Pitts) finds solace in the company of his wife and daughter, and the occasional solo hunting trip. A personal tragedy sends our hero off the deep end; quicker than you can say Charles Whitman, this disgruntled prole takes out two cops with a sniper rifle and leads two more police officers on a chase through the woods. Mining as much suspense as possible out of a minimalist aesthetic, narrative ambivalence and his own primo hangdog mug, Pitts expertly guides his God’s-lonely-man protagonist through a Kafkaesque Iran full of paranoia and moral pitfalls. Though its climax courts cheap irony, The Hunter’s seemingly laissez-faire creep up to a last act of round-robin desperation makes for thrilling existentialist pulp. By the time you realize how stealthy the film’s critique has been, you’ve already fallen right into its trap.
THE
HUNTER Facets Multi Media
Recently released from prison, Ali (writer-director Rafi Pitts)
attempts to make the most of his return to Tehran, as there is considerable
political anxiety about the upcoming elections and promises of change. Still,
in the first sign that fate will trip him up, he cannot get a job on the day
shift as a guard due to his ex-con background, so he is forced to work nights.
However, he still tries to spend as much time as he can with his wife and their
young daughter, escaping the stress of urban life through hunting trips to the
secluded forest north of the city. But one day, Ali's family goes missing, and
after a long and frustrating experience with the police, Ali's own search for
his missing daughter pushes him over the edge into an act of terrible violence.
He flees the city, pursued by the police, and soon the line between hunter and
hunted becomes difficult to define.
The Hunter has a very lean narrative which shows the dehumanising
connections between the individual and urban space, on the one hand, and the
conflict between the individual and the state, on the other. It concentrates on
exploring the pressures of life in a time bomb society, represented by the
cries of the opposition which penetrate Ali's apartment, while in his car he
hears a speech whose promise of change sounds like mockery. As Rafi Pitts, has
stated, "Such an urban environment combined with technological progress
promotes isolation, which can eventually bring about a kind of madness."
Notebook Reviews: Rafi Pitts's “The Hunter” on Notebook | MUBI Fernando F. Croce
Early in The Hunter, the brooding protagonist (played by writer-director Rafi Pitts, his face clenched like a fist) sets camp in the woods in the outskirts of Tehran, and the still, silent composition switches abruptly from day to night in the instant he takes to cock his rifle. Pitts, a chronicler of coiled despair with a limpid sense of negative space, maintains this terse combination of naturalism and impressionistic distillation as the taciturn character absorbs the injustices and tensions around him. The only job available for an ex-con is night watchman at a car factory, which leaves him with little time to see his wife and daughter. Set in the midst of Iran’s 2009 elections, the film sees the city as a procession of suffocating spaces—tunnels, industrial assembly lines, orphanages with endless rows of abandoned kids, narrow bureaucratic corridors—that can claim loved ones without batting an eye, as when an officer coolly informs Pitts that his wife was killed in a skirmish between the authorities and “insurgents.” (Two splendid shots: A high-angled view of a busy intersection at dusk, filmed with a distorting lens so that the four crossings are squeezed into a diamond shape; and a few seconds of a vehicle swerving in and out of the fog on a winding road, easily the most inventive car chase since Gray’s We Own the Night.) Yet the trajectory from city to wilderness isn’t one of contrasting corruption and purity as in Ray’s On Dangerous Ground, but one of different types of mazes and the emptiness that binds them. Fleeing into the forest after a shooting spree, the desperate protagonist is joined by a couple of Mutt and Jeff policemen whose irritated banter (“You’ve got a watch but no time! Where would you be without a uniform?”) voices with redundant explicitness what the images and editing have already articulated with subtlety and dread. The Hunter closes on tidy irony, but Pitts’s striking visual control ensures that the divide between institutionalized injustice and personal revenge remains volatile, thorny terrain.
Currency | The Hunter (Rafi Pitts, Iran) Jonathan Rosenbaum from Cinema Scope, Spring 2011
Underneath the Persian credits, over heavy metal music, the camera roams around inside a colour photograph, grazing over pointillist surfaces and male faces—finally pulling back to reveal the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps in 1983, getting ready to drive their motorcycles over a huge replica of the American flag on the pavement in front of them. Cut to black and the film’s title, The Hunter.
Cut to a highway tunnel, then to a rifle being loaded in the woods, then to the same title hero (played by the writer-director, Rafi Pitts) holding the rifle in front of a raging campfire at night. Cut to an overhead shot of a busy Tehran freeway—then to a sinister carwash that seems to be located in the general vicinity of Hell, smoky fumes rising from the spray. And finally to the hero being told by a potential employer that as a convict he doesn’t qualify for a day job, he has to take the night shift. But as we discover a little later, his wife Sara already has a day job, meaning that when he takes the night watchman job, he’ll have little time to spend with her and their six-year-old daughter.
It’s amazing how many reviews of Pitts’ fourth feature have been confidently—and, I think, inaccurately—calling it minimalist. With so much going on in terms of sound and image, and all that is conveyed about living in Iran today (including a view of Tehran in all its modernist, polluted disarray that captures the city I visited a decade ago better than any other film I’ve seen), what could they be thinking of? Even though a few details towards the end of The Hunter (e.g., a plaintive and percussive electric guitar accompanying figures in a labyrinthine forest) evoke Dead Man (1995)—a film that can plausibly be called minimalist, along with Jim Jarmusch’s other films—I would argue that the main thrust of this film is anything but minimalist; in this case, an implied insult that seems predicated on a misunderstanding.
It’s true, however, that Pitts’ singular performance in the title role—poker-faced except for when he’s seen with his family—is a bit of a Rorschach test; indeed, this is part of its peculiar strength, making his character sympathetic and terrifying at the same time. But we don’t need to know why he went to prison in order for his repressed and barely contained violence, his resemblance to a walking time bomb, to become meaningful. It’s also true that the plot, however fluidly and economically presented, is full of other unanswered questions. What does the opening photograph—which I’ve partially identified according to its description in Alissa Simon’s Variety review—have to do with the remainder of this film? What is the lead character’s name? What is he doing with a rifle in the woods? If he’s a hunter, why do we never see him hunting? (In fact, the only indication that he’s a hunter, apart from his possession of a rifle, is the denied request of a youth at his job that he come along on one of his hunting trips.)
Should we find political significance in the fact that the hero’s car and the walls of his apartment are both green? If so, the film never clarifies this. When his wife and daughter both mysteriously disappear, he’s told by a police official that his wife was accidentally killed in a shootout between police and rebels (this is during Iran’s last presidential election campaign, before the election and subsequent crackdown); they’ll need an autopsy to determine whether the bullet came from the police or the rebels, and they don’t know anything about his daughter. Some time later, after he’s been asked to identify his wife’s body in the morgue, he’s asked to identify his daughter’s body there also—and on both occasions he gazes at the off-screen bodies, from the same oblique camera angle, without any visible sign of emotion. But by then we have already seen him walking the streets and driving through neighbourhoods with a photograph of his daughter, which he forlornly shows to strangers, hoping to come up with a clue; and when he checks at a hospital, all that he (or we) can find is other lost or abandoned children.
Not knowing—a central facet of the hero’s helplessness, including the fact that the police remain accountable to no one—is, in fact, an important part of what this film is about. And, as in much of contemporary life, the explanations that we’re waiting for and hoping for never arrive. When the hero pays a visit to his mother (played, incidentally, by Pitts’ real-life mother) around the time of his daughter’s birthday, he invents excuses for her and his wife not being with him, choosing to conceal the fact of their disappearances and (probable or actual) deaths, but we aren’t privy to any of his rationale for this behaviour; the underlying impression is only that repression has become an integral and necessary part of his existence. Later, we find him either “remembering” or imagining his wife in a flashback confessing to some unidentified, off-screen listener that she lied to her husband, whom she now visits in prison, about being pregnant, adding, “I’d rather die than for him to know I lied. Please help me—I must have a child.” (Presumably, she’s pleading to be allowed to have sex with her husband when she visits him in prison.) But like so much else in the film, this is a narrative trace rather than part of a narrative.
Yet when the hero randomly shoots two cops on a distant freeway and flees to the country, where he’s pursued and captured, it’s more than just a change in locale like those in On Dangerous Ground (1952), Nightfall (1957), or Tirez sur le pianiste (1960). It’s also a shift in genre that eliminates most of the unresolved questions that have been piling up, through a strategic shift in focus. The major emphasis now is on the enmity between the two cops who arrest him—a volunteer who wants to kill him right away and a draftee who insists on his being tried in court. (Similar issues involving Iranian cops can be seen in the last two features of Jafar Panahi.)
What persists in both parts of the film is a snapshot of contemporary Iran with some of the precision, poetry, and despair that Ebrahim Golestan brought to Brick and Mirror in 1965, including the same horror of absurdist bureaucracy (and a comparable vision of abandoned infants in a hospital)—which hardly seems accidental given that this film quotes both Golestan’s A Fire (1961) and a film he produced the following year, The House Is Black. (Both films are seen on television, in the hero’s flat and at the home of his parents, respectively).
I would guess that some reviewers have been misdescribing The Hunter as “minimalist” because they haven’t considered the concept of essentialism—the process by which inessential narrative details get eliminated for the sake of greater force and clarity. Sticking to basics isn’t the same thing as reducing or simplifying basic ingredients. Bresson—another essentialist commonly mistaken for a minimalist, especially during the ‘60s, when his rigour was widely regarded as eccentric mannerism—characteristically sought to make his actors expressive according to what they were and what their bodies said, not according to what they might consciously project as actors. (It’s worth adding that Pitts took over the film’s leading role from the non-professional he had in mind at the last moment and out of practical necessity, not according to his original design.)
Pitts’ essentialism, moreover, has a vital ethical dimension. The hero shooting two cops at random on the freeway becomes morally equivalent to the draftee cop shooting him from a distance in the final sequence, simply because he’s dressed in the other cop’s uniform. In both cases, one could say that blind hatred trumps and makes irrelevant whatever position one has, whatever side one happens to be on, just as blind and arbitrary injustice is what sets the other wheels of this tragedy in motion. A country in a state of potential or actual civil war describes a good many places today, and not just Iran or the United States or Egypt. For Pitts, it would appear that this civil war and the hatred it engenders has a way of levelling all the other issues; leaving many questions unanswered ultimately becomes both cause and effect.
Christopher Bell indieWIRE Playlist
Ruthless Culture [Jonathan McCalmont]
Steve Erickson also
seen here: Into
the Woods - Gay City News
Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin
Slant Magazine
[Chuck Bowen]
Salon.com Andrew
O’Hehir
for this week's TRIBUNE : 'Involuntary' [8/10]; 'The ... - Jigsaw Lounge Neil Young
Little White Lies Magazine [Jason Wood]
The
Hunter Artificial Eye
Anthony Lane The New Yorker
Noel Murray The Onion A.V. Club
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]
Film review – The Hunter (2011) « Cinema Autopsy Thomas Caldwell
Village Voice
Melissa Anderson
Filmstalker Richard Brunton
Best For Film Georgina Lavers
TrustMovies: From Iran, Rafi Pitts' THE HUNTER proves DIY ... James van Maanen
Coming soon: Rafi Pitts's The Hunter | Bleader Ben Sachs
Rafi Pitts's "The Hunter" on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson from Mubi
Pitts’s open letter to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Rafi Pitts from Mubi
World Socialist Web Site [David Walsh] including an interview with the director, October 14, 2010
Director interview
Trevor Johnston interviews the director from Time Out London
The Hunter Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Trevor Johnston
The Hunter – review Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, October 28, 2010
The Hunter – review | Film | The Observer October 30, 2010
Independent.co.uk
[Anthony Quinn]
DVD: The Hunter (15) - Reviews - Films - The Independent Nick Clark
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] also seen here: Roger Ebert
New York Times Stephen Holden, also seen here: Stephen Holden
Rafi Pitts - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pla, Rodrigo
THE DESERT WITHIN (Desierto Adentro)
The
Desert Within Dan Fainaru in
Sweeping the main awards in the Mexican section of this
year's Guadalajara Festival, Rodrigo Pla's second feature (shot before his
award-winning debut La Zona but completed later) is a strangely
compelling anti-religious parable.
The winner of best
feature, screenplay, actor, actress, cinematography and the Mezcal award also
took the audience prize at Guadalajara, suggesting it may even have a commercial
future on top of a strong festival career - even if The Desert
Within's forbidding, Biblical-scale subject matter means it isn't quite
destined for the multiplex.
With sales agents
circling and invites to larger festivals assured, Pla's feature is based on his
own screenplay written with Laura Santullo and uses as a starting point the
atrocities perpetrated during Mexico's 1926 Cristero War when a fervently
Catholic population rose up against the anti-clerical regime.
But The Desert
Within soon ditches any pretence of historical accuracy and moves on to an
entirely metaphorical level, dealing with the idea that the sins of the fathers
are visited on their sons. Pla, however, doesn't see this as a punishment of
the Lord, but the result of man's own fear, poverty, traditions, ignorance and
– of course – religious superstition.
Elias (
The family's life
there is related by Elias' youngest son, Aureliano (played as a child by Memo
Dorante and later by Diego Catano) in five chapters. Because of his frail
health, Aureliano seems destined to become the first victim of the family curse
and is kept locked in a hut to stop him from catching any diseases. There, he
must work on the paintings and ornaments that will finally decorate the church
that the rest of the family is working on.
Life as a vale of
tears, lived in the shadow of guilt for an unspecified sin and the fear of
imminent punishment, is not entirely a foreign concept to many religions. And
as such, Pla's film may annoy some, while delighting others; either way, it
will certainly provoke discussion given that, due to its allegorical nature, it
doesn't exactly follow a logical plot. Eve n make-up isn't concerned with
accuracy, as Elias looks younger at the end of the film than the beginning,
despite his beard.
Imaginatively shot and
intensely directed by Pla, the picture is given yet another dimension through
Juan Medina and Rita Basurto's animation sequences, which add a surrealistic
touch to the proceedings. Mario Zaragoza's tormented Ellias, a kind of Saturn
devouring his own children in a hopeless search for an unattainable pardon,
offers an impressive, well-deserved award-winning performance, and the rest of
the cast isn't far behind.
Plácido,
João Pedro
VOLTA
À TERRA (Return to Earth) B+ 91
aka: Be(Longing)
Portugal (78 mi) 2014 Official
site
Co-written, shot, and directed by João Pedro Plácido, a Lisbon-born director raised by his maternal grandparents who began shooting music videos at the age of 19, attending film school in both Lisbon and Germany, as he is fluent in five languages. Most of his previous work has been as a documentary cinematographer, where this is his first venture as a director. Perhaps as a tribute to his grandparents, who are originally from the region explored in northern Portugal, the life depicted hasn’t changed much through the centuries, with farmers raising cattle and living off the land, where rising early and capturing the ritual of their daily routines comprises the majority of this somewhat slight work. By exploring the four seasons in the remote village of Uz, in many respects it treads on similar territory as Michelangelo Frammartino’s wordless Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times) (2010), where the cycle of life feels unchanged since Biblical times. In modern day Portugal, most have left these rural havens to seek work in the cities, leaving the arduous work to the large families that actually have the manpower to perform all the necessary chores, where a good deal of the film is witnessing family members out in the fields plowing or harvesting their crops, offering a communal feel to their lives that resembles Dovzhenko’s EARTH (1930), especially the jovial talk that they provide, continually teasing one another, making jokes at someone else’s expense, all in good fun, where the older family members continually ridicule the laziness of youth, as they have it so much easier than previous generations. What’s remarkable are scenes where workers toiling at their backbreaking farm work break out into song at a moment’s notice, perhaps playing to the camera, but it happens with regularity, with the men often choosing saucy songs, like the kind sailors might sing at sea. In fact, there’s a good deal of profanity expressed, usually when something doesn’t go as it should, but they use it as comic relief, where there’s a surprising amount of humor involved in just getting through each day. One might attribute this to being a close-knit family, where they meet regularly over meals, where joking with one another is what comprises the dinner conversation.
Most of the film focuses upon Daniel (Daniel Xavier Pereira), at twenty-one, one of the youngest members to pull his own weight out in the fields, who dropped out of school in the 9th grade to help work on his family farm, where we see him at the crack of dawn, with fog still lingering in the air, as he lets the cattle out of their stables and leads them down a rocky pathway, up a few stairs, and out into the rolling hills where they can graze all day on fresh grass. Calling each by name, swearing profusely when they ignore him, he is a modern day shepherd that spends his days tending to a prime herd of cattle while lost to his own dreams and ambition. The film offers a mix of rural solidarity within a strong family unit that must work together to survive, but also moments of solitude, where the presence of the land is paramount. Daniel jokes about an aging bull that finds it more difficult to procreate, claiming it needs some Viagra while being teased relentlessly about how he needs to offer a helping hand. Part of what attracts the filmmaker’s interest is the eccentricities of the elders, who develop their own habits, where one interestingly walks to one of the town’s celebratory festivities with a scythe still in his hand. One of the more amusing scenes features Daniel attempting to communicate with a young French boy, where they seem to do nicely by speaking only their own languages, where the young kid is not in the least persuaded to learn Portuguese. While there are scenes of gathering wheat, tying them into stalks, there are also sheep that are individually sheared by hand, while a gigantic pig is butchered into various sized cuts of meat, where nothing seems to go to waste. As they work, pulling a stalled tractor out of the mud, people from town can be seen standing around the road shooting pictures of them, where a centuries-old tradition collides with the modern era, as if farmers have become an endangered species. It appears the village was founded about 700 or 800 years ago, but the population has dwindled recently, with a current population of under 100 residents, where one farmer can be heard lamenting, “Those that work the most, earn the least.”
The film is surprisingly more upbeat than one might think, filled with jovial moments, none more electrifying than the annual village festival, where Daniel encounters an attractive former classmate (Daniela Barrosa) now living in a neighboring town, where they hang out together, walking in a candle-lit church procession, each carrying their own candle, where Daniel can’t remember the words to the songs, as it’s been so long since he’s been to mass. She reminds him that it’s like riding a bike, sarcastically telling him “You’re the man, Daniel” when he remains clueless, continuing into the church service where he noticeably sings off-key. But he’s cool with it, even if she’s embarrassed, where there is music and dancing afterwards, with old people sitting on the sidelines gossiping, followed by an extremely loud fireworks display. He, of course, hears about it from his family the next day, where he constantly takes a ribbing from his elders who are curious if he feels strongly enough to run off with her to live in her town. Suffice it to say, Daniel is happy where he is, where he’s in line to inherit a sizeable piece of the farm, and he obviously enjoys the way of life that he’s grown accustomed to. As he takes the cattle out into the fields the next day, he pulls out a cellphone and calls his sweetheart, but she has no real interest in becoming a farm girl, leaving him to wonder about what might have been. Realizing potential wives are scarce, Daniel tries to save face by indicating he might have to seek a bride over the Internet, perhaps from China or Brazil. But as the summer winds fade, the season’s change, where a female cow gives birth, where the stable is full of young calves, offering hope for the future as the winter snow settles in. While ostensibly a documentary on the unchanging landscape in a constantly changing world, it’s also a coming-of-age story rooted in family traditions while also being influenced by the luxuries and temptations swirling all around from a more contemporary urban life.
(be)longing
- AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center
Documentarian João Pedro Plácido captures the look and feel of rural life in this portrait of a tight-knit community of farmers in the village of Uz in northern Portugal. Daniel is a young farmer, who, unlike many his age who have left Uz for the city, has chosen to stay home and continue the traditional working of the land. The film follows Daniel across a year's time as the seasons change and as the possibility of love with a girl from a neighboring village blooms. Official Selection, 2015 London Film Festival. DIR/SCR João Pedro Plácido; SCR Laurence Ferreira Barbosa; PROD Luís Urbano, Sandro Aguilar. Portugal/Switzerland/France, 2014, color, 78 min, DCP. In Portuguese with English subtitles.
The 2015 European Union Film Showcase | Film International Gary M. Kramer from Film International
Lastly, João Pedro Plácido’s observational documentary (Be)longing (Volta à Terra) is set in Uz, a rural village in northern Portugal. Daniel is a 21 year-old farmer who has been working the land since dropping out of school in the 9th grade. This gorgeous film, shot over a year in Daniel’s life, shows the beautiful scenery, from stony paths and misty (or muddy) fields, to the stables where sheep are sheared, or cows give birth. Plácido lets his subjects’ express their lives and thoughts, as one farmer laments about money and the EU, stating, “Those who work the most, earn the least.” Daniel, who enjoys his work (for the most part), is seen tending to mating cows, bleeding pigs, and attending threshing contests. (Be)longing takes viewers into village meetings and parties, where Daniel eventually reconnects with a former classmate whom he finds himself attracted to. This quiet, unhurried film unfolds naturally, like the seasons do, providing an interesting slice of life of the difficult but rewarding life Daniel and his family leads.
Film
- Volta à Terra | Northwestern University Arts Circle
A community of subsistence farmers in a mountainous village of northern Portugal is endangered. The younger generation is leaving the village for cities and there is a lack of interest in what is seen as an antiquated pursuit. Caught between the evocation of the past and their uncertain future, the film follows the 49 inhabitants of this rural community through four seasons. Among them is António, a former emigrant who fulfilled his dream of returning home, who prepares the village festivities for the coming summer, and Daniel, young shepherd who dreams of love at dusk. Winner of the Gold Hugo award for best documentary at the 2015 Chicago International Film Festival.
Introduced by João Pedro Queiroga, Graduate student MFA Documentary Media
Uz is a small village of Minho stone houses and where you can still see buildings covered with thatched roofs. After almost the entire population have emigrated, there were only 49 inhabitants, which still subsist on agriculture and pastoralism. Between the memory of the past and hope for the future, this film document shows how to follow the lives of these people during the four seasons a year. Among the inhabitants of Uz found Antonio, an emigrant who has realized the dream of returning to the origins and dedicated to prepare the feast of the village for the summer, and Daniel, a pastor who longs to find the love of your life.
With realization of João Pedro Plácido, according argument your in partnership with Laurence Ferreira Barbosa, a film that honors the village of grandparents Placido and where it is celebrated what it considers to be "the symbiosis between Man and Nature".
Critique
de Volta a terra de João Pedro Plácido :: Volta a ... Nicolas Bardot
At Uz, mountain hamlet in northern Portugal cleared by immigration, remain few dozen peasants. As the community gathers around the traditional August holidays, the young shepherd Daniel dreams of love. But the immutable cycle of seasons 4 and field work quickly regain the upper ...
A PLACE ON EARTH
The decor of Volta terra, first documentary Portuguese João Pedro Plácido selected in ACID, is particularly charming: a hamlet lost in the terrain north of Portugal. But Placido is not there to do a portrait of a bed & breakfast croquignolet campaign. The young filmmaker tells a deserted area, and in fact hollow portrait of a young farmer who resembles a species endangered. Placido observes the life everyday: a shorn sheep, pig is cut, cows quarreling, a calf born ... however that was the feeling often see this type of documentary festivals in recent years, without Placido reaches truly transcend this cycle of seasons as could accomplish with poetry Michelangelo Frammartino with the superb Le Quattro volte. If Terra Volta also just a little to keep the length, the film is not without qualities. The filmmaker is endearing, especially when the unexpected is invited to the camera: the attempted discussion with a French boy or the possibility of a romance with the arrival of a young girl. The village, one hears, was founded there 700 or 800 years, the traditional feast is prepared there seems to be celebrated since always, but terra Volta succeeds in its best moments, a capture what remains of life.
First-time director João Pedro Plácido’s freshman effort, (Be)Longing, strives to capture the jarring juxtaposition that occurs when a lifestyle rooted in centuries-old traditions collides with the realities of youth’s modern-day expectations. The subject of this documentary is 21-year-old Daniel, a farmer with a ninth-grade education living in the rural Portuguese countryside who prides himself on working the land and lacks the desire for urban living held by most others of his generation.
The action is centered in the tiny farming village of Uz, a tight-knit and insular community. Daily life revolves around an ongoing series of tasks that range from the rigorous (harvesting wheat, pushing a stalled tractor out of the mud) to the gruesome (slaughtering livestock). Daniel is one of a few bachelors in the village; while clearly capable in his farmhand duties, he endures regular teasing from his elders about everything from his “lazy” 7am wake-up time to his weak style of tilling soil. The world he inhabits is focused on the values of work and family and Daniel is satisfied with this.
While this study is interesting enough, it is not sufficiently engaging for a full 78 minutes. The most intriguing part of the film is the peek into the dating norms of this society. At the village festival, Daniel encounters a very attractive former classmate, who lives in a neighboring town, and becomes smitten. While their chaste exchange is undoubtedly charming, it is not entirely lacking in contemporary courtship rituals (as it turns out, even twenty-something Portuguese farmers have cell phones). Their connection emphasises the stark contrast between young adults who crave to seek the perceived spoils of technology-centric urban life and those who consciously choose to pursue an existence strongly rooted in times gone past.
In addition to directing, Plácido is also credited as cinematographer. There are distinct moments of true beauty: the seasonal changes to the landscape, from lush to gloomy to snow-covered picturesque, are skillfully captured with care. If the overall narrative had only reflected a similar approach to provide a more insightful exploration of these individuals’ lives, it’s likely that it would have resulted in a more compelling feature.
ACID presents (Be)longing , João Pedro Plácido's first ... Vitor Pinto from Cineuropa
Volta a Terra - L'acid -
Association du Cinéma Indépendant ...
12th Doclisboa 2014 festival review • Senses of Cinema Jorge Mourinha, December 7, 2014
'A Childhood' 'Volta à Terra' 'Underground Fragrance' Win ... Vimooz, October 24, 2015
Volta
À Terra - Chicago International Film Festival
Daily | Chicago 2015
| Keyframe - Explore the world of film. Fandor
CIFF
2015: "Nahid" Wins Roger Ebert Award, "A Childhood ...
Plisson, Pascal
MASAI: THE RAIN WARRIORS B 88
A film that bears some haunting similarity, especially visually,
to the recent festival circuit favorite, Rolf de Heer’s TEN CANOES (2006), which
similarly examines an indigenous people, careful to provide historical accuracy
in every detail, in this case an East African tribe, the Masai, using their own
people, their own language, their own lands, and their own past, reenacting a
tribal fable in the present age. Using
a voiceover narration that provides the basic elements of the myth, the viewer
becomes aware of a life threatening drought that is killing off their
livestock. The village begins to panic
when their most legendary warrior never returns, and is reportedly killed by an
equally legendary lion, Vitchua, that is known to possess God-like powers. The village elders believe that only by
slaying Vitchua will the rains come. So
they gather a secondary tier of eight warriors, who are all teenage boys who
have never even carried a spear, but the survival of their tribe rests on their
shoulders. They are all eager and
fearless, but inexperienced. Most of the
entire film depicts their journey, which is ravishingly photographed in
The brother of the fallen warrior leads the way, where they have painted their bodies and hair, adorned themselves in jewelry, and each has been given a spear which they plunge into the ground at every resting point. As they sleep, a wall of spears protects them from the elements. Playing out like RABBIT-PROOF FENCE (2002), this journey feels endless, taking them further and further away from their homes, leaving them in a state of being perpetually lost. The group is joined by the new leader’s best friend, a goat herder in love with his friend’s sister, who would be off limits to him unless he is the one to slay the lion. Joined by an older warrior in retirement, who is ridiculed by the younger boys, but who offers wisdom, the party grows to ten. As we see them cutting through the high grass of the African plains, off in the distance may be one solitary tree that stands alone all the way to the horizon. Occasionally, a lone giraffe cuts across the landscape, or a herd of elephants, even another warring tribe, but mostly it is their own uncertainty that continues to rise to the surface. Some doubt this lion even exists, one wants to win the hand of a girl, or the emblem of the strongest warrior, another has lost his nerve in the last fight, one is wounded and needs medical help, all contributing to their lingering state of mind which is continually put to the test.
Once the journey begins, the narration stops, and the story is told in a documentary style revealing their everyday lives as the young men face new challenges. There are lengthy segments that are wordless, or sparing of words, where if someone has something to say, they all gather around and listen, usually in the form of a personal confession or truth, other times as a story, where questions may be asked as to its accuracy. When the eldest realizes the severity of the medical need of the wounded, he suggests turning back, but they all continue to plunge forward, come what may. “This is crazy,” he tells them, “but just like good warriors.” There are sun drenched images that resemble GERRY (2002), where the endless landscape seems to swallow them up whole, where the stunning imagery always looks like it’s shot in the early morning light of dawn, or just before dusk, accentuating the richness of the saturated colors. The distinctive personalities of each young man begin to take shape, sometimes in humorous fashion, or in sorrow, other times by an exhibition of skills or leadership. So long as this film remained true to the African spirit, even in myth, it was a delight to experience, but by the end, certain Christian themes of a NARNIA nature rose to the forefront and changed the tone of the whole film, as this was such a stark contrast to everything that came before. This is not a dealbreaker, but unfortunately it certainly stops dead in its tracks any real question of authenticity.
Masai:
The Rain Warriors Andrea Gronvall
from The Reader
Nine teenage boys embark on a lion hunt across southern
Good-hearted but dull and a slave to its director's
outsider-looking-in bias, Masai: The Rain Warriors follows the struggle
of a group of Masai men in the deepest heart of Kenya to appease the vengeful
Red God by slaying a great lion known as Vitchua. These men, among them
adolescents and a former warrior who is now the target of great ridicule, set
out across the desert to avenge the death of the war chief Tipilit, hoping of
summon rain from the heavens. The film unravels as a string of babyish
serio-comic sketches, some more cloying than others: The men will receive milk
from a nomadic tribe, slaughter an adorable baby gazelle even though one man
states that a warrior does not kill wild animals for food, and come under
attack from a warthog, a cobra, and the evil Turkanas. Director Pascal Plisson
is a great lover of
Shadows on the Wall
[Rich Cline]
With a documentary-like authenticity and major movie
production values, this gorgeous drama takes us deep into the life of the Masai
in
In an isolated village, drought is threatening both life and livelihood, so a team of warriors needs to go kill the lion Vitchua, a symbol of revenge. The problem is that the warriors are all mere teenagers, led by the young Lomotoon (Muntet), who's rather unsure but knows his place as a leader. His best pal Merono (Mako) isn't allowed to join the group, because of his role as a shepherd, but Papai (Sekenan) sees his natural abilities, and together these two set off across the plains to help in the epic quest.
The simple storyline belies the film's depth--these young men have yearnings and desires that strike a universal chord, as well as familiar feelings of insecurity, fear, cockiness, vanity, you name it, plus a lively sense of humour in their interaction. These teens have yet to prove themselves; they feel the enormous burden on their shoulders, and yet are sure they're incapable of accomplishing the task. And for a group of non-actors, they do a remarkable job conveying this in an honest and engaging way.
Meanwhile, the filmmakers shoot it with a lush sense of
colour, catching the parched orange earth and the textures of the stone, mud,
clothing, jewellery, paint, hair. But this isn't merely a museum piece: all of
this is used to make the story richer and more meaningful. Their societal
events and rituals need no translation--the film engulfs us with a sense of
place in a way Out of Africa never did. The story is like The Lion
King with the Disney/Hollywood stripped out of it. And as a result it has a
much stronger resonance than either of those films. It's a tale of honour,
respect and loyalty--a little sweet and sappy perhaps, but unforgettable.
Los Angeles Times (Michael Ordoña) review
A group of Masai warriors sets out to kill a mystical lion to
end the drought that is threatening their village's existence. Simple. Or not
so simple.
The warriors are untested teenagers, and the village's war chief has just died.
No one is sure where the lion is — or if killing it really will appease the Red
God and end the drought. And as their dangerous trek through savannah and
desert wears on, the boys have to admit that no one is sure if the lion
actually exists.
Still, director-writer Pascal Plisson and cowriter Olivier
Dazat recognize the power of simplicity in the handsomely shot adventure,
"Masai: The Rain Warriors," a 2004 Kenyan/French production. They
send their young nonprofessional actors on their mission and largely get out of
the way. Except for a distinctly European score, Plisson avoids excessive
embellishment.
Because of the blank-slate presentation, viewers are free to read into the
story as they will. There's a "Moby-Dick"-like quality to the quest
as the warriors press on despite every good reason to turn back. "Wipe
[the lion] from your mind," says one of the only boys willing to give up,
"it's the only way to be rid of him."
Clearly, each is facing down his own white whale: One believes that killing the
lion will save his ailing sister; one must succeed to ascend to the role of war
chief; and the central character, Merono, sees a chance to break out of his
family's lower-class status as sheepherders and marry his warrior friend's
sister.
The novice Masai cast delivers strong, unselfconscious performances. As
emerging leader Merono, then-18-year-old Ngotiek Ole Mako is an appealing hero.
Musurpei Ole Toroge is thoughtful as Njaro, settling into his family's witch
doctor legacy. And elder statesman Paul Nteri Ole Sekenan, as discarded veteran
Papaï, is a sympathetic, steadying force.
The film has its flaws — the length of the arduous journey certainly could be
conveyed with greater economy, the action is not dynamically depicted and the
lack of character development makes it occasionally difficult to follow — but
the earnest minimalism of "Masai" makes it an unusual moviegoing
experience.
DVD Talk (Randy Miller III) dvd review [2/5]
Variety (Lisa Nesselson) review
The New York Times (Laura Kern) review
Poitras, Laura
CITIZENFOUR B+ 92
Germany USA (114 mi) 2014 Official site
This is as much a glimpse into the future as anything you’re likely to see at the movies, where honestly, this will play just as well on a laptop or any sized computer screen as a theater experience, as what we’re dealing with here is coded in such technical terminology. Perhaps this is the 21st version of Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION (1974), only with more chilling implications. While the whole concept of Windows computer technology was supposedly to open doors and avenues into new terrain that was previously unavailable and off limits, creating a multitude of endless possibilities where curiosity would only be rewarded, the idea of looking out into open cyberspace also allows other unnamed entities, otherwise known as governments, to look in at you, since the computer is the device that keeps us all connected. It’s a hard to conceive idea, but this is a film that specializes in the latest, most sophisticated surveillance techniques ever devised by humankind, where this window into each person’s personal identity and information is just like wiretapping every citizen without a warrant. Perhaps the strangest piece of sci-fi in this film is the extent to which these individuals protect their secrecy, where literally any and all electronic gadgetry can be used as an eavesdropping device, where rarely has paranoia been elevated to this level of counter sophistication in order to prevent detection. The third film in a post 9/11 Trilogy, following MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY (2006), about life for Iraqis under American occupation, which follows a Sunni Arab doctor as he prepares to run for the early 2005 elections in Iraq, a film that got the director placed on watch lists at airports when entering the country, where she has been stopped and detained regularly ever since, but was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary, also THE OATH (2010), which documents the legal ramifications of an Iraqi detained at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp as an enemy combatant, the first to be tried by U.S. military tribunals, eventually transferred to Yemen, as the case was appealed to the Supreme Court which ruled the military charges that led to his arrest were not war crimes by international law at the time he committed them, making the detention and subsequent prosecution unconstitutional.
What do we know about this filmmaker? She comes from a wealthy background, where her parents donated $20 million dollars in 2007 to found The Poitras Center for Affective Disorders Research at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while being raised at an experimental private school in Massachusetts, the Sudbury Valley School. While she planned to be a chef, spending several apprentice years at a French restaurant in Boston, she changed her mind, moving across the coutry to the San Francisco Art Institute, where she studied with experimental filmmaker Ernie Gehr, eventually moving back to New York where in 1996 she graduated from The New School in Greenwich Village. Bearing the distinction of being a 2012 MacArthur Fellow which partially funded her work on this film, she is part of a new social movement rising out of the ashes of a dying newspaper business that challenges conventional language of media, which limits the idea of personal freedom of expression, as the communications industry itself has become a protected corporate interest that sets its own standards of acceptability that are rarely challenged. For instance, in the use of drone “signature strikes,” conventional media through international wire services have settled upon the supposedly acceptable terminology of “targeted killings” as opposed to calling the actions “assassinations,” a term most all newspapers would simply not print. However, Journalist Glenn Greenwald in Salon articles as early as America's drone sickness - Salon.com, April 19, 2012, suggest drone attacks kill far more civilians than reported, as the government maintains a policy of secrecy, suggesting assassination is a more apt term for what’s going on, further elaborated upon by Erik Wemple from The Washington Post, February 10, 2014, "Glenn Greenwald and the U.S. 'assassination' program, where Greenwald’s explanation is “the accurate term rather than the euphemistic term that the government wants us to use…I’d say anyone who is murdered deliberately away from a battlefield for political purposes is being assassinated.” The broadened position used by governments is that the battlefield in the War on Terrorism exists everywhere, where this expanded definition intrudes upon the lives of literally everyone. Enter Edward Snowden.
In January 2013, filmmaker Laura Poitras was still in the process of developing a final chapter in her film trilogy about abuses of national security in post-9/11 America when she started receiving encrypted emails from someone identifying himself as “citizen four,” who was ready to blow the whistle on the massive covert surveillance programs run by the NSA and other intelligence agencies. Apparantly motivated by the stream of lies and denials from upper echelon military brass and intelligence officials to various congressional inquiries asking about the extent of the government’s reach into the private lives of ordinary citizens, extending the reach of the USA PATRIOT Act, implemented immediately after the devastating effects of 9/11, designed to prevent terrorists from striking again on American soil. However, Poitras began receiving highly detailed yet secretive information that would implicate the White House, the NSA, tech companies, and a variety of other American institutions in a broadranging initiative of illegal wiretaps, computer access and listening devices to spy on every American citizen as well as government officials abroad without any of them ever knowing of it. While the Act itself requires judicial overview, where wiretaps and various other surveillance methods require court approval, this rapidly developing surveillance phenomena was already having a massive impact on the rights of privacy while taking place without any apparent oversight or accountability. This not only captured the attention of the filmmaker, but the whistleblower, who turned out to be Edward Snowden, a 29-year old NSA contractor who demanded utter secrecy in all subsequent contacts, eventually meeting six months later in a hotel room in Hong Kong, along with two journalists working for The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill. Meeting him for the first time with the cameras rolling is a tense moment where no one really knows what to expect, but it becomes one of the historical and perhaps defining events in our lifetimes. It turns out Greenwald was initially sent encrypted emails some months earlier, but he dismissed them as junk mail, so the contact established with the filmmaker allows us a window into this moment, along with audiences for generations to come.
What’s immediately fascinating, once Snowden starts engaging the journalists, is the extraordinary level of caution, meticulous detail, and intelligence, where the mindful nature of protecting themselves from anyone who might be listening in on them is just stunning, elevating the level of paranoia not seen since those tense atmospheric thrillers of the 70’s, like THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974), THE CONVERSATION (1974), CHINATOWN (1974), THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975), and ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN (1976), yet this is real life unfolding before our eyes. All of this lends a certain theatricality to the geeky and overly technical nature of much of the material Snowden intends to make public. Poitras seems to realize this and maintains her focus more on the man than the nature of his revelations, allowing the journalists to do their jobs (where The Guardian was subsequently awarded a Pulitzer Prize in public service), which by the time viewers see the film will have already been thoroughly debated and analyzed in public and speak for themselves. What’s curious about what the audience sees is that none of this is actually known yet, but is about to unfold in the upcoming days and weeks ahead. Condensing material gathered over the course of eight days, we learn that Snowden is highly articulate and displays a natural brilliance, where his ease with his own conscience suggests unassailable convictions, which will certainly be challenged in the upcoming days and years ahead. While Snowden never intended to become the focus, preferring instead to remain on the sidelines, it’s interesting to see his reaction once the secret revelations are exposed, where suddenly a construction crew has mysteriously moved around his home, his family and friends are questioned, and the government is awkwardly caught offguard, searching for answers, eventually introducing a smear campaign against him, where he is subsequently charged as a “traitor” for violating the Espionage Act that was passed after America’s entrance into World War I. The film doesn’t enter the discussion of whether Snowden is a hero, a whistleblower, a dissident, a patriot, or a traitor, all labels that have been attributed to him, but it’s certainly ironic that those artists and journalists that effectively conspired with him to help expose these public revelations have all been lauded and acclaimed. Greenwald has separated from The Guardian, and joined forces with Poitras, fellow journalist Jeremy Scahill and others to form an independent news website called The Intercept, where they’ve delved further into the ramifications of Snowden’s documentation, which includes the fact that 1.2 million people are currently on Homeland Security’s watch list, reminiscent of similar tactics practiced by J. Edgar Hoover during his tenure with the FBI. The government’s hardball tactics used against Snowden have also been applied to journalists and their families as well as the filmmaker in the room, where they or their loved ones are routinely stopped and interrogated at length at airports, practices so intrusive that Poitras now lives in Berlin while Greenwald had already chosen to reside in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.
Citizenfour
Captures Urgent, Nerve-Racking History in ... Alan Scherstuhl from The Village Voice
Director Laura Poitras's Citizenfour boasts an hour or so of tense, intimate, world-shaking footage you might not quite believe you're watching. Poitras shows us history as it happens, scenes of such intimate momentousness that the movie's a must-see piece of work even if, in its totality, it's underwhelming as argument or cinema.
Here's Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and, offscreen, Poitras herself, holed up in a Hong Kong hotel room, plotting the revelation of the National Security Agency's spying on our phone calls, emails, Web searches, Amazon purchases, and everything else. Here's Snowden, the activist, conferring with Greenwald, the journalist, about how to make the story about Snowden's leaks rather than Snowden himself. And here's Poitras — journalist and activist — capturing their elation, their seriousness, their idealism, their spy-story jitters. Snowden unhooks a land-line telephone from the wall, explaining that even with the receiver down, a dedicated snoop could listen in; later, he huddles with his laptop beneath a blanket as he enters the password for an NSA database he's mining for documents. A couple days in, a fire alarm clangs, and for a heartbeat nobody breathes: Are the powers that be trying to flush them outside?
The planning is both thrilling and mundane. Snowden explains the massive scale of government spying, with the stolen files to back it up, but also lectures Greenwald about not keeping the same sensitive SD card jacked into his laptop for months at a time. Trim and proud, given to stiff pontificating, Snowden relishes this seizing of history, just as Poitras's camera relishes him. He's become the outsider hero he's imagined willing himself into.
But then, once Greenwald publishes his first Guardian story on Snowden's revelations, we see cracks in the whistleblower's principled serenity. Even before he's claimed public responsibility, his girlfriend back home is being interrogated. His voice scrapes in his throat as he tries — and fails — to describe to Poitras the difference between knowing this might happen and knowing she's actually going through it. Soon after that, Greenwald interviews him, on camera, introducing Snowden to the world — and removing him from it. Condemning yourself for a cause you know to be just is still condemning yourself, and by his last day in that hotel room, Snowden appears wan and harried, his face breaking out. Just watching, you might feel the same. Soon, that phone — plugged back in, for some reason — won't stop ringing, and Snowden realizes his freedom is now dependent on people who don't take it as seriously as he does: Witness the Hong Kong lawyer who suggests that Snowden could just cross town in a cab.
Poitras steeps us in these scenes. As in her previous films The Oath and My Country, My Country, she's adept at illuminating multiple angles of complex, even prickly people. Here, though, she's a convert rather than a journalist, and she never bothers with some of the basics: The film takes as its given the NSA's perfidy and Snowden's heroism, offering little to persuade anyone unconvinced of either. More troubling, here Snowden never faces any tough questions about which documents should be released, and to what end — he's the expert, and Greenwald is trying to keep up. Citizenfour marvels at what it could be probing.
It’s difficult to critically engage with Citizenfour, as—experienced in the here and now—Laura Poitras’ landmark documentary about Edward Snowden isn’t a film so much as a big fucking deal. A primary account of how the world learned that the NSA has been spying on United States citizens, and also a meta-text that implicitly validates the information it uncovers, Citizenfour offers a remarkably intimate look at history as it happened. In fact, the immediacy of Poitras’ film is so remarkable that, at least for the immediate future, her craft is likely to be overshadowed by her access, her storytelling overshadowed by her opportunity.
Citizenfour is inextricable from its topicality in a way that no documentary has been in recent memory. Its existence announced a mere month before its world premiere, the film’s first public NYFF screening—which was held simultaneously with its first press screening—was attended by a number of journalists who were there not to evaluate the quality of Poitras’ work, but to report the revelations contained in its final scene. When was the last time a long-form documentary served as a mechanism for breaking news? The experience felt like a throwback to when audiences would learn about the latest developments of World War II from the newsreels screened before an evening’s feature presentation.
Before he was a household name (and charged with violating the Espionage Act), Edward Snowden was a 29-year-old NSA contractor. By some accounts a “low-level analyst,” but by his own estimation a genuine spy, Snowden worked at a job that presented him with one of the most urgent stories about post-9/11 America, and he was desperate for the help he required to tell it.
Citizenfour begins at the moment when Snowden identified Poitras as the perfect person for the job, and effectively summoned her into history. One day in early 2013, Poitras received an encrypted email from an anonymous source (an email similar to the one that journalist Glenn Greenwald had mistaken for spam when it was sent to him a few months prior). The message may have been unsolicited, but it wasn’t necessarily unprovoked. At the time, Poitras was already in the process of making a film about America’s ongoing slide toward becoming a surveillance state, the third chapter of a trilogy about the government’s global response to the 9/11 attacks. The anonymous tipster promised Poitras the kind of information that would have a seismic effect on her latest documentary. Less than six months later (and roughly 30 minutes into her movie), Poitras flew to Hong Kong to meet her source, who until that point had identified himself only by his web handle: “Citizenfour.”
This cryptic exchange snakes its way through the first act of Poitras’ clearly segmented film, which plays out with the thick paranoid tension of The Conversation. In between snippets of ominous archival footage, Poitras presents the text of her communications with Citizenfour. She reads the words aloud with an unnerved voice that sounds like an NPR host with a gun to her, or a self-avowed vérité filmmaker finding herself becoming an implicit part of her story. In agreeing to film Snowden, Poitras all but puts herself in his position. Improbably, and with great skill, Citizenfour eventually becomes more of a window into the violation of civil liberties than it does a mirror of the people who helped bring them to light, but the real and phenomenally rich human drama helps catalyze the film’s whistleblowing polemic.
Of course, it’s once Poitras, Snowden, and Greenwald hole up in that Hong Kong hotel room that Citizenfour becomes bluntly extraordinary. Over the course of eight days, Poitras’ camera observes that anonymous junior suite in downtown Kowloon metastasize into the eye of a global shitstorm, her focus trained on the furtive but hyper-articulate man sitting on the unwashed bed in front of her. Snowden is nothing if not an improbably cinematic subject. He’s smart to a fault—brilliant, even—and yet somehow still precocious at the brink of 30. His convictions are almost robotically unassailable, and yet uncertainty begins to creep in as he prepares to confront the next stage of his life. There’s a profound disconnect between the anonymity with which he enters the hotel, and—after vigorously defending the right to privacy—the worldwide super-fame with which he leaves it a week and change later.
If Snowden’s performance smacks of martyrdom, it’s a perception that Poitras takes advantage of without necessarily cultivating. Poitras’ decision to confine the Snowden footage to her film’s second act rather than allowing for his escape to serve as the climax makes for an inevitable downshift that borders on boredom. And yet, the risky structural gambit reaffirms where Poitras’ allegiances really lie: not with a person, but with the people. She values Snowden for his courage, not for his celebrity, and the film’s end stretch—including the “bombshell” announcement nested in its final scene—bends over backwards to deliberately diffuse the plot. This story, Poitras asserts with a small mountain of shredded paper, is not over. Not even close.
Sight & Sound [Nick Bradshaw] November 28, 2014 Sight & Sound [Nick Bradshaw]
For those who do not recognise Edward Snowden’s revelations of enhanced domestic spying capabilities as intrinsically terrifying, the assurance largely goes that if you’ve nothing to hide then you’ve nothing to fear from machines built to record all possible data about you. Snowden also has his critics who argue that his flight from both line-managers and prosecutors undermines his moral case and forfeits what President Obama, excerpted here, po-facedly dreams could have been an “orderly… thoughtful, fact-based debate” that would have “led us to a better place”.
Convicted WikiLeaker Chelsea Manning is not
mentioned, but these notions are otherwise countered in Laura Poitras’s film by the
experiences of NSA veteran-turned-dissident William
Binney (the subject of her previous short The
Program), never questioned by Congress but escorted from his shower one
morning by government agents at gunpoint, and by AT&T customers’ class-action
suit against warrantless governmental wiretapping, stalled in court for a
decade.
Snowden and others verbalise many of
the actual and hypothetical arguments for privacy – the chilling, self-policing
effects of “the expectation that we’re being watched” on online intellectual
exploration; the improbability of “meaningfully opposing” changes to
surveillance policy once the systems have been built. Brits recently regaled
with revelations of undercover officers spying on murder victims’ families and infiltrating
the beds of environmental campaigners may also be inspired to imagine the
worst.
But far from just trading in conjecture
and abstraction, Citizenfour
self-reflexively dramatises the dangers that Snowden wants to warn us about.
Built around the eight days in June 2013 he spent with the filmmaker and
Guardian journalist Glenn
Greenwald in a Hong Kong hotel room divulging his secrets, the film plays
like a reality cat-and-mouse spy thriller, with the trio out to expose the
dragnet before it catches them. Electrifyingly, the film shows us history in
the making. Has such a political actor ever before gone direct to a filmmaker
in the heat of the action?
To be sure, there are questions of
nuance and balance you’ll not find in this film, with its self-selecting cast
of liberty advocates. Poitras had already wised up about US government
watchlists the hard way, after 40-plus airport interrogations in the years
following her work filming Iraq’s 2005 elections and their boycott in My Country, My Country. She
was already exploring a film about US surveillance (to complete a trilogy about
American policy after 9/11, following 2010’s The Oath, about Yemeni
ex-jihadis and Guantanamo Bay), and came to Snowden’s attention through her
film about Binney. Her journalistic ally Greenwald had written about her
travails before Snowden recommended that she bring him with her to their Hong
Kong rendezvous, and he constitutes one of the most strident, and eloquent,
voices in the film; he leaps on the information trove and immediately,
brilliantly, sets to battle.
This Hong Kong hotel chamber drama is,
unsurprisingly, the heart of the film. Poitras tops and tails with other voices
(Binney and hacker Jacob
Appelbaum, as well as security chiefs James R. Clapper and Keith Alexander) and
locations, from the supersize
data centre the NSA is building at Bluffdale, Utah, to the Guardian’s
basement and the parliaments of Brazil and Germany. But Snowden, in sundry
monochrome T-shirts and later a hotel robe, is the earnest, fresh-faced,
unlikely calm at the centre of his storm.
Unlike in Poitras’s earlier studies of
decision-making in the moment, Snowden has already set out his stall: we watch
him watch the consequences. He’s remarkably lucid setting forth his motivations
and defending his methods: he’s entrusting professional journalists to decide
what’s in the public interest and wants to “remove his bias from the equation”;
you could torture him and he wouldn’t be able to divulge encrypted passwords;
if he were doing this for profit there’d be far easier ways; he doesn’t want to
become the story but “anything to get this out”; and he wants the target
painted “directly to my back” to take the heat off his family. He must have
endlessly rehearsed all this to himself.
A wry paranoia often prevails – in
Snowden’s attempts to teach Greenwald basic computer-security sense; in the
cloak, termed by Greenwald his “mantle of power”, under which Snowden hides to
input computer passwords; and in the black-comical barrage of phone calls and
fire alarms that later interrupt their discussions. Snowden is at his most
shaken after an update from his forsaken girlfriend, and perhaps when the
prospect of an escape route finally presents itself. But the basic optimism of
his actions is reflected in one characteristic exchange, when he responds to
Greenwald’s rallying cry about not being bullied into silence by expressing
hope that the “internet principle of the Hydra” will apply, and that “seven
more will step up when I’m gone.”
As it happens, Poitras is able to end
on something of that note, finding Snowden now in his Russian sanctum, rejoined
by his girlfriend. The news from Greenwald is that a more senior whistleblower
has emerged from another part of the US government.
Details are scanty, partly because this
brings the film into the present moment, and partly because Greenwald and
Snowden communicate here in handwritten notes which they then shred, though the
information in question seems to relate to recent revelations about the
government’s terrorism watchlist and a direct command line to the US president.
Just as Alex Gibney’s We
Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks (2013) cautioned against blind faith
in leaders, so Citizenfour is shadowed by an erstwhile reformer who rode social
and digital optimism to the White House. Poitras ends on a shot of the shreds
of paper. The revolution will not be emailed, or recorded, or spoken. But it
could still make thrilling cinema.
The Holder of Secrets - The New Yorker George Packer, October 20, 2014
Indiewire Eric Kohn
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Owen Van Spall]
Slant Magazine [Elise Nakhnikian]
Next Projection [Ryan J. Gimarc]
Erik Lundegaard [Erik Lundegaard]
“Citizenfour”: Laura Poitras' secret Snowden ... - Salon Andrew O’Hehir
Citizenfour Review | Vanity Fair Richard Lawson
World Socialist Web Site [Robert Stevens]
Citizenfour / The Dissolve Scott Tobias
DVDTalk.com - theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
Can't Stop the Movies [Andrew Hathaway]
Little White Lies [David Jenkins]
Film-Forward.com [Nora Lee Mandel]
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
HBO's political call to arms: “Citizenfour” has more in ... - Salon Sonia Saraiya
Politically charged will not play at all movie theaters [Jerry Saravia] November 12, 2014
New York 2014 Review: CITIZENFOUR, The ... - Twitch Christopher Bourne
CITIZENFOUR leads Cinema Eye Honors nonfiction ... - HitFix Matt Patches
Screen Comment [Pang-Chieh Ho]
Krell Laboratories [Christianne Benedict]
Citizenfour - Cinemablographer Patrick Mullen
Monsters and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]
Dog And Wolf [Dave O'Flanagan]
Why You Should Watch Oscar Winner CITIZENFOUR On ... Devin Faraci from Badass Digest
The Focus Pull Film Journal [Maximilien Luc Proctor]
Daily | NYFF 2014 | Laura Poitras's CITIZENFOUR ... - Fandor David Hudson
Laura Poitras: “I knew this was going to piss off the ... - Salon Andrew O’Hehir interview with director Laura Poitras, Ocober 23, 2014
Laura
Poitras on the exclusive Edward Snowden access ... Interview by David Ehrlich from The Dissolve,
October 20, 2014
The Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy]
The Observer UK [Mark Kermode] October 19, 2014
WashingtonPost.com [Ann Hornaday]
Washington
Post [Steve Dollar]
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
San Francisco Chronicle [Thomas Lee]
Citizenfour
Review - Los Angeles Times Kenneth
Turan
Los Angeles Times [Steven Zeitchik]
RogerEbert.com [Godfrey Cheshire]
New York Times A. O. Scott's Top 10 Movies 2014
best films
of 2014 Sight & Sound
TIME Magazine Top 10 Best Movies 2014 [Richard Corliss]
Polanski, Roman
DVDBeaver Director’s
Chair: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/direct-chair/polanski.htm
Since his breakthrough film "Knife in the Water", Polanski has been investigating the darker aspect of co-existence: sociopath neurosis. His core themes are centered around an antagonism between the self and the other. His protagonists are often frail, neurotic individuals fighting against a real or perceived threat from their milieu and a fear of impending loss: loss of offspring in "Rosemary's baby", of identity in "The Tenant", of virginity in "Tess", or rationality in "Chinatown" etc. In this struggle, they find themselves isolated, trapped, unable to trust or forge alliances with anyone. Through voyeurism, ambiguous sexuality, Satanism and obsession, Polanski creates a cyclical world where the end is often worse than the beginning, where accepting and being accepted rarely come to completion, where the frustrated self finds its nightmares spring to life. While not horror films per se, Polanski's works often probe the same territory with creativity and precision, leaving behind them a long-lasting, horrifying discomfort.
Polanski, Roman Art and Culture
With an unerring ability both to describe evil and to place
himself in its path, Polanski has created a body of work that never fails to
elicit shudders and raise questions. He possesses a mordant insight into the
politics of sex and violence, an inherent feel for the macabre, and an
eccentric and perverse aesthetic that gives his films the pulse of life.
"Knife in the Water" (1962), his debut feature, rocketed him to the
forefront of Polish New Wave cinema. He then moved to
Polanski's work delves into the darker side of human nature,
telling taut stories that always keep one eye on the wicked subtext. "
Polish New Wave @ Art + Culture
In 1954 Truffaut's now famous essay "A Certain Tendency in French Cinema" appeared in the subversive journal Cahiers du Cinema and rocked the foundations of the film world. He called for an end to the "cinema de papa" (the glossy and impersonal cinema produced by the studio system) and insisted instead that the director act as auteur, using film as a means for personal artistic expression. The method preferred by French New Wavers, mise-en-scène, involved the creation of mood and ambience through camera placement and movement, and with it began the cinematic reign of the long shot.
At approximately the same time, Polish film, which had
hitherto been a toothless affair under the control of Soviet censorship, began
a transformation made possible by the death of Stalin (1953). While the French
and Polish political climates were clearly disparate, the Polish New Wave
warmed to the aesthetic principles put forth by Truffaut and company. In 1956
the Polish Communist Party Chief, Wladislaw Gomulka, decreed a complete
de-Stalinization of
In
BFI Feature Michael Brooke from BFI Screen Online, includes a feature page on each movie BFI Feature
When Jack Nicholson was asked why he allowed his director to
dictate his performance in
This intensity is inextricably linked to his life. Although
born in
Polanski's film-school shorts revealed an unmistakable if
disquieting talent, but one unlikely to find favour in Marxist Poland, so he
used the success of Knife in the Water (1962) as a ticket to the West.
In
But the 1970s were bookended by tragedy, when his wife and
three friends were murdered by Charles Manson's gang in 1969, and when he was
arrested for drugging and seducing a 13-year-old girl in 1977. Faced with the
prospect of a lengthy prison sentence, he jumped bail and fled to
His films since then have been patchy, with only Tess (1979) and the flawed Bitter Moon (1992) matching his earlier work before The Pianist (2002) marked a watershed, being in part an evocation of his own traumatic childhood. Will the new Oliver Twist continue this trend?
Roman Polanski's official webpage
Home :: Roman Polanski :: Polish film director and actor
Roman Polanski Vision dedicated to Roman Polanski
Anja's Roman Polanski homepage fan website
fUSION Anomaly. Roman Polanski another Polanski website
TRIBUTE TO ROMAN POLANSKI yet another
Roman Polanski > Overview - AllMovie bio by Sandra Brennan from All Movie Guide
BFI
Screenonline: Polanski, Roman (1933-) Biography Jamie Sexton, Directors in British and
Irish Cinema
Roman Polanski - Director - Films as Director and Scriptwriter ... profile by J. P. Telotte, updated by John McCarty from Film Reference
Roman Polanski • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Jeremy Carr, March 6, 2015
Roman Polański biography by Jerzy Armata from History of Polish Cinema
Roman Polański -
Biography | Artist | Culture.pl
biography, also seen here: Polish
culture: Roman Polański and here: Polish
Culture Profile
Roman Polanski The Oscar Site, biography from Baseline's Encyclopedia of Film
Roman Polanski: Biography from Answers.com Biography page
Brain-Juice | Biography of Roman Polanski
Roman Polanski - Yahoo! Movies biography and filmography
Roman Polanski - Overview - MSN Movies biography and filmography
Roman Polanski Biography - Biography.com
Roman Polanski bio from NNDB
Roman Polanski - Filmbug brief bio
Roman Polanski (1933 - ) Jahsonic Polanski page, brief film comments
Brainy Quote Polanski quotes
The religion of director Roman Polanski Adherents
Polanski The Predator - The Smoking Gun: Archive
Roman Polanski Media Reports Archive: The Zero 5.0laf - The ...
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired - The Official Website for the ...
Roman Polanski news - Telegraph News links from The Telegraph
Roman-Polanski | /Film Story links from Slash Film
HISTORY OF POLISH CINEMA - ARTICLES - POLISH FILM ACADEMY A few words about Roman Polański and his films, by Ewelina Nurczyńska-Fidelska (Undated)
Out
of the Past: Dance of the Vampires - Parallax View Robert C. Cumbow, October 24, 2015, originally published in Movietone News,
July 1974
Roman Polanski Media Reports Archive opening with The Washington Post, March 13, 1977
Document: 1977 Indictment Original Polanski indictment, from Find Law
BBC
ON THIS DAY | 11 | 1977: Roman Polanski charged with rape BBC
News,
On
Stage and Off Rick
Lyman from The New York Times,
Polanski Wins Top Prize at Cannes J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, May 28, 2002
Cul-de-Sac • Senses of
Cinema Christopher Weedman,
February 8, 2005
Judge the
Movie, Not the Man - Los Angeles Times
Samantha Geimer from the
CNN.com - Polanski's victim says she wants case resolved - Feb. 25 ... CNN News, February 25, 2003
The Eye Boundary:
Repulsion • Senses of Cinema
Didier Truffot, April 22, 2004
Kinoeye | Roman Polanski,
The Pianist & the victim's double vision From
the Eye to the Hand, by Gordana P
Crnković from Kinoeye,
Roman Polanski: interviews - Google Books Result edited by Paul Cronin (211 pages), 2005, also seen here: Roman Polanski: Interviews
Le Locataire
(The Tenant) Criterion Forum discussion
group,
Oliver Twist Criterion Forum discussion group, June 13, 2005
The
Guardian profile: Roman Polanski | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian,
From
Paris, Polanski Testifies In Libel Case
Sarah Lyall from The New
York Times,
The Ninth Gate Criterion Forum discussion group,
FILM;
A Face Lift for Wretched Old Fagin Michael Joseph Gross from The New York Times,
Independent
Article (2005) The Artful Dodger, by Neil Norman from The Independent,
Great
Director #12: Roman Polanski
Nighthawk News, September
25, 2009
Repulsion Criterion Forum discussion group,
Bitter
Moon Criterion Forum discussion
group,
FILM; The
Judge and the Auteur: Revisiting the Polanski Case Charles Lyons from The New York Times,
• View
topic - Roman Polanski Criterion
Forum discussion group,
Roman Polanski: the cinema of a cultural traveller - Google Books Result book written by Ewa Mazierska (230 pages), 2007
Polanski in Motion: “Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural ... Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural Traveller, by Ewa Mazierska, book review by Michael Goddard from Senses of Cinema (2007)
Roman Polanski - Google Books Result book written by James Morrison (191 pages), 2007
Review:
Polanski by Christoper Sandford | Books | The Guardian Chris Petit book review, October 13, 2007
ARTS,
BRIEFLY; Polanski To Film the Ghost
Motoko Rich from The New York
Times,
HBO: Roman Polanski: Home HBO 2008 Documentary Films Series, screened on HBO June 9, 2008, theatrically July 11, 2008
IFQ Magazine- Marina Zenovich—Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired Marina Zenovich: A Glimpse Behind Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, interview with the director by Nicole Holland (2008)
Sundance 2008: Roman Polanski: Wanted & Desired | SpoutBlog Karina Longworth from SpoutBlog, January 19, 2008
Redeeming Roman Polanski - TIME Rebecca Winters Keegan from Time magazine, January 24, 2008
The view: Is Roman Polanski still getting away with it? Danny Leigh from The Guardian, January 25, 2008
Andrzej and Krystyna go
Boating: Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water ... Matthew Clayfield, March 16, 2008
Rosemary's Baby •
Senses of Cinema Pedro Blas
Gonzalez, March 16, 2008
Dance of the Vampires/The Fearless Vampire Killers • Senses of Cinema Darragh O’Donoghue, March 16, 2008
Macbeth • Senses of Cinema Martyn Bamber, March 16, 2008
Painterly Moments in Roman
Polanski's Tess • Senses of Cinema
Arthur Rankin, March 16, 2008
Movie Review: 'Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired' Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, March 31, 2008
Roman Polanski Documentary Is Deft, Subtle Film - Newsweek.com Cathleen McGuigan from Newsweek, June 2, 2008
Motives and Excuses for Roman Polanski - June 6, 2008 - The New ... Bruce Bennett from The New York Sun, June 6, 2008
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired reviewed. - By Troy Patterson ... Slate, June 9, 2008
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews Roger Ebert, July 23, 2008
Polanski Asks Prosecutor To Consider Film's Claims Michael Cieply from The New York Times, July 17, 2008, also see: The Court Documents (pdf)
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired | FANZINE (Film) Kevin Killian from Fanzine, August 27, 2008
Polanski in Motion: Roman Polanski: The Cinema ... - Senses of Cinema Michael Goddard book review of Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural Traveller, by Ewa Mazierska, 2007, August 27, 2008
Film Cited in Request to Dismiss Polanski Case Michael Cieply from The New York Times, December 2, 2008
Roman Polanski: A Life in Exile - Google Books Result book written by Julia Ain-Krupa (179 pages) 2009
Polanski
Requests New Setting for Hearing Michael
Cieply from The New York Times,
Prosecutors
Urge Polanski To Surrender in Sex Case Michael Cieply from The
“Roman
Polanski: Wanted and Desired” – DVD for the Week 1/27/09 Sean Axmaker from Parallax View, January 26, 2009
ARTS, BRIEFLY; Judge Won't Dismiss Polanski Case (for Now) Michael Cieply and Dave Itzkoff from The New York Times, February 18, 2009
Whitewashing
Roman Polanski Bill
Wyman from Salon, February
19, 2009
Roman Polanski Reviews 'Hannah Montana' Roman Polanski article, May 2009, posted by Screen Junkies, September 29, 2009
Regarding that Roman Polanski doc - LA Observed Kevin Roderick from LA Observed, June 11, 2009
A Woman Repulsed, a Man Convulsed Dave Kehr from The New York Times, July 22, 2009
ROMAN POLANSKI'S PIRATE DAYS - Vice Magazine Harry Benson from Vice magazine, September 2009
Polanski’s Arrest Could Lead to Extradition Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes from The New York Times, September 27, 2009
News: Roman Polanski arrested in Switzerland 31 years after fleeing trial Esther Addley and Kate Connolly from The Guardian, September 27, 2009
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Roman Polanski in Swiss detention BBC News, September 27, 2009
BBC News - Roman Polanski: Film's dark prince BBC News, September 27, 2009
Polanski arrested in connection with 1970s sex charge - CNN.com CNN News, September 27, 2009
Peter Bradshaw on Roman Polanski – a master of fear pursued by his past Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, September 27, 2009
PostPartisan - The Outrageous Arrest of Roman Polanski Anne Applebaum from The Washington Post, September 27, 2009
Should Roman Polanski Be In Prison? | Psychology Today September 27, 2009
Roman Polanski's life of crime | Melissa McEwan Melissa McEwan from The Guardian, September 28, 2009
Roman Polanski: a life touched by tragedy and controversy slideshow and links to the story, from The Guardian, September 28, 2009, also more links here: More on Roman Polanski
Should Roman Polanski be above the law? John Henley from The Guardian, September 28, 2009
Feature: Those who arrested Roman Polanski have ignored his victim Duncan Campbell from The Guardian, September 28, 2009
Peter Bradshaw: Polanski's arrest takes me back to Hollywood Babylon Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, September 28, 2009
David Thomson on Roman Polanski and the 31-year-old legal headache David Thomson from The Guardian, September 28, 2009
News: Roman Polanski in 'good spirits' after arrest in Switzerland Helen Pidd and Esther Addley from The Guardian, September 28, 2009
Q&A: Roman Polanski arrest Helen Pidd from The Guardian, September 28, 2009
Roman Polanski's Arrest: Why the French Are Outraged - TIME Bruce Crumley from Time magazine, September 28, 2009
Blog: Hollywood unites in Polanski's defence Jeremy Kay from The Guardian, September 28, 2009
Common Roman Polanski Defenses, Refuted - The Sexist - Washington ... Amanda Hess from The Washington City Paper, September 28, 2009
Reminder: Roman
Polanski raped a child - Salon.com Kate
Harding from Salon, September 28,
2009
Roman Polanski — Crooked Timber Kieran Healy from Crooked Timber, September 28, 2009
Whoopi On Roman Polanski: It Wasn't 'Rape-Rape' Lindsay from Jezebel, September 28, 2009
Should Roman Polanski Be Held Accountable to His Own Guilty Plea ... Nick Gillespie from Reason, September 28, 2009
The Volokh Conspiracy » Roman Polanski, George Orwell, and ... Jim Lindgren from The Volokh Conspiracy, September 28, 2009
Roman Polanski and Roman Catholics » GetReligion Mollie from Get Religion, September 29, 2009
Editorial: The
Polanski Case The New York Times,
Room
for Debate: The Polanski Uproar The
Editors from The
About New
York: Time Deserved for a Crime Committed Jim Dwyer from The New York Times,
Robert Harris: Why Arrest Roman Polanski Now? Robert Harris from The New York Times, September 29, 2009
my own briefer statement Jonathan Rosenbaum in response to the Harris article, September 29, 2009
Powerful Player Joins Polanski Team Michael Cieply and Doreen Carvajal from The New York Times, September 29, 2009
News: Polanski was not guilty of 'rape-rape', says Whoopi Goldberg Maev Kennedy from The Guardian, September 29, 2009
News: Polanski faces weeks in prison before appeal Matthew Weaver from The Guardian, September 29, 2009
Feature: How did the law catch up with Roman Polanski? Clare Dyer from The Guardian, September 29, 2009
Roman Polanski arrest and the UBS link | Business | The First Post Edward Helmore from The First Post, September 29, 2009
Roman Polanski: Art trumps life? - scanners Jim Emerson from Scanners, September 29, 2009
Hollywood Backs Roman Polanski | Pajiba - Scathing Reviews for ... Dustin Rowles from Pajaba, September 29, 2009
Letters From Hollywood: Roman Polanski's Rape Of Child No Big Thing Kate Harding from Jezebel, September 29, 2009
Does jail remind Roman Polanski of the Holocaust? | Hollywood Jew ... Danielle Berrin from The Hollywood Jew, September 29, 2009
Eugene Robinson - Giving Roman Polanski What He Deserves ... Eugene Robinson from The Washington Times, September 29, 2009
Refighting the Culture War over Roman Polanski | spiked Brendan O’Neill from Spiked, September 29, 2009
Roman Polanski: What if He Were 'Father Polanski'? David Gibson from Politics Daily, September 29, 2009
Liberal Catholics Blast Roman Polanski's Lefty Defenders: What if ... Liberal Catholics Blast Roman Polanski's Lefty Defenders: What if He Were a Priest? by Dan Gilgoff from US News & World Report, September 29, 2009
For Studios, Polanski's Box Office Is the Key Brooks Barnes from The New York Times, September 30, 2009, also slideshow: Roman Polanski: A Look Back
Lawyer in
Polanski Documentary Now Says He Lied Michael Cieply and Brook Barnes from The New York Times,
Unforgivable Roman Polanski | Sady Doyle Sady Doyle from The Guardian, September 30, 2009
Does the Brotherhood of Fame Endow You With a Lifetime Exemption From Accountability? Eve Ensler from The Huffington Post, September 30, 2009
Polanski’s
Defenders Lose Sight of the True Victim (Los Angeles Times) Steve Lopez from The LA Times,
2008 Film
Plays Role in Polanski Case Michael
Cieply from The New York Times,
October 1, 2009
The New York Times throws Roman Polanski to the wolves David Walsh and David North from The World Socialist Web Site, October 1, 2009
In Roman Polanski case, is it Hollywood vs. Middle America? John Horn and Tina Daunt from The LA Times, October 1, 2009
Heartbreakers Jill answers the LA Times article from Feministe, October 1, 2009
Roman Polanski Has a Lot of Friends Katha Pollitt from The Nation, October 1, 2009
Rape
Is a Feminist Issue Melissa Silverstein
from Women & Hollywood, October
1, 2009
Are Anti-Polanski Celebs Afraid To Speak Up? Kate Harding from Jezebel, October 1, 2009
Backlash builds against support of Polanski Lisa Respers from CNN News, October 1, 2009
Polanski, Evil and Creativity: Does Talent Redeem Bad Behavior? Psychology Today, October 2, 2009
On the Arrest of Roman Polanski [updated, 10/2/09] Jonathan Rosenbaum, October 2, 2009
Chris Rock On Roman Polanski: "It's Rape! Rape!" - Chris rock ... LaToya Peterson from Jezebel, October 2, 2009
Chris Rock Tears Into Roman Polanski on The Jay Leno Show -- Vulture October 2, 2009
SNL Mocks Whoopi Goldberg For Uninformed Roman Polanski Defense ... Alex Leo from The Huffington Post, October 2, 2009, including a SNL Weekend Update video clip (2:44)
ABROAD | CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; A Gallic Shrug, Preserve of Artistes Michael Kimmelman from The New York Times, October 3, 2009
Roman Polanski, Hollywood and Justice - WSJ.com Terry Teachout from The Wall Street Journal, October 3, 2009
News: The Hollywood backlash Paul Harris from The Observer, October 4, 2009
Nick Cohen: Why Roman Polanski just loves the English courts Nick Cohen from The Observer, October 4, 2009
Did I say that? Polanski quotes by John Hind from The Observer, October 4, 2009
What does Roman Polanski's victim have in common with a Yemeni ... Save the Children, by Christopher Hitchens from Slate, October 5, 2009
Roman Polanski refused bail by Switzerland Matthew Weaver from The Guardian, October 6, 2009
What Whoopi Goldberg ('Not a Rape-Rape'), Harvey Weinstein ('So ... Calvin Trillin poem from The Nation, October 7, 2009
In Polanski Case, '70s Culture Collides With Changed World Michael Cieply from The New York Times, October 10, 2009
Once Upon a Time in the Cinema: The Tragedy of Roman Polanski Jimmy Gilmore, October 10, 2009
What Kind Of Sentence Is Roman Polanski Facing? John W. Dean, from Find Law, October 16, 2009
Roman Polanski's rape - The Boston Globe E.J. Graff from The Boston Globe, October 17, 2009
Roman Polanski loses appeal for bail Adam Gabbatt from The Guardian, October 20, 2009
Polanski May Choose to Face Charges Doreen Carvajal from The New York Times, October 21, 2009
Roman Polanski may agree to face US justice, says lawyer Matthew Weaver from The Guardian, October 21, 1009
Chinatown's 35th Anniversary Edition and the Polanski Scandal William Bradley from The Huffington Post, Ooctober 23, 2009
U.S. Demands Polanski's Extradition Doreen Carvajal from The New York Times, October 23, 2009
ByronCrawford.com: Quoted: Gore Vidal on Roman Polanski quotes from an Atlantic Monthly interview, October 29, 2009
Bright Lights Film Journal :: Roman Polanski: What's on Trial? Karin Luisa Badt, November 2009
Polanski's victim asks to be left alone Mary Elizabeth Williams from Salon, November 2, 2009
An evaluation
of Roman Polanski as an artist—Part 1
David Walsh from the World
Socialist Web Site, November 18, 2009
An evaluation of Roman Polanski as an artist—Part 2 David Walsh from the World Socialist Web Site, November 19, 2009
An evaluation of Roman Polanski as an artist A compilation of both articles, by David Walsh from the World Socialist Web Site, November 20, 2009
Roman Polanski and The Catastrophe of Public Discourse Jonathan Rosenbaum, December 4, 2009
Roman Polanski begins house arrest in Swiss chalet The Guardian, December 4, 2009
December 4, 2009 - Roman Polanski Living Large in Million-Dollar Swiss Chalet While L.A. Prosecutors Wait Their Turn Ryan Smith from CBS News
California Justices Hear Arguments in Polanski Case Michael Cieply from The New York Times, December 10, 2009
Roman Polanski's Rape Victim Samantha Geimer Fights for Him in ... Carlin DeGeuerin Miller from CBS News, December 11, 2009
Roman Polanski wins privacy damages Lizzie Davies from The Guardian, January 19, 2010
A Sentencing Request By Polanski Is Denied Michael Cieply from The New York Times, January 22, 2010
The genius of Roman Polanski Wally Hammond from Time Out London, February 2, 2010
Swiss official says Roman Polanski extradition proceedings on ... Harriet Ryan from The LA Times, February 13, 2010
BBC News - Roman Polanski wins best director award at Berlin BBC News, February 20, 2010
"The Ghost Writer" Director Roman Polanski, Turkish Film "Bal ... Michelle Kung from The Wall Street Journal, February 20, 2010
Honey' Wins in Berlin; Polanski Best Director - indieWIRE Eugene Hernandez and Brian Brooks from indieWIRE, February 20, 2010
Roman Polanski wins best director prize in Berlin | Film | The ... Kate Connolly from The Guardian, February 21, 2010
Polanski Appeal Alleges More Secret Dealings by Judge in '77 Case Michael Cieply from The New York Times, March 18, 2010
Ewan McGregor on Roman Polanski - Times Online Interview by Kate Muir from Times Online, April 2, 2010
End game for Roman Polanski | Film | The Guardian David Thomson from The Guardian, April 15, 2010
Roman Polanski's Appeal to End Sex Case Denied The New York Times, April 22, 2010
Roman Polanski asks President Obama for clemency - Monsters and ... Nicola Pittam from Monsters & Critics, April 22, 2009
Roman Polanski's appeal rejected by California court The Guardian, April 23, 2010
L.A. NOW | Roman Polanski | Los Angeles Times Kate Linthicum from The LA Times, May 2, 2010
Roman Polanski's Statement Andre Soares from Alt Film Guide, May 2, 2010
Roman Polanski Speaks Out: Privilege Over Justice Colleen Claes from Salon, May 4, 2010
A Few Thoughts on Roman Polanski Cranky Cuss from Salon, May 6, 2010
Roman
Polanski avoids extradition to U.S.
Swiss Reject U.S. Request to Extradite Polanski Nick Cumming-Bruce from The New York Times, July 12, 2010
Swiss grant Polanski his freedom Edward Cody from The Washington Post, July 12, 2010
Roman Polanski goes free Kate Connolly from The Guardian, July 12, 2010
Roman
Polanski: Auteur or Brand Name? | videoccult Daniel N. Goldberg, June 15, 2011
Polanski
and Perception, Davide Caputo • book ... - Senses of Cinema The
Psychology of Seeing and the Cinema of Roman Polanski (2012), reviewed by Davide Caputo, November
3, 2012
The dazed brutality at the heart of Roman Polanski's films | Film | The ... Leo Robson from The Guardian, December 28, 2012
Roman
Polanski Rape Victim Unveils Startling, Disturbing Photo for ... Roman Polanski Rape Victim Unveils Startling,
Disturbing Photo for Book Cover, by Andy Lewis from The Hollywood Reporter, July 24, 2013
Samantha
Geimer on Roman Polanski: 'We email a little bit' | Film ... Emma Brockes from The Guardian, September 18, 2013
A
Film School With a Sense of Place - The New York Times The
New York Times, October 27, 2013
The
Films of Roman Polanski, Ranked Worst to Best | IndieWire Max O’Connell, June 18, 2014
Roman
Polanski's rape victim to ask LA court to end the case against ... The
Guardian, June 8, 2017
Macbeth, superstition, whether family tragedies have shaped him or his filmmaking Kenneth Allsop audio interview from BBC 1, January 26, 1972 (5:48), also seen here: BBC Audio Interview (1972), which includes a brief bio here: Read more
Roman Polanski Vision - Chinatown Interview 1974 Penthouse interview with Polanski, 1974
Click here to read Cynthia Fuch's interview with Roman Polanski. Nitrate Online, March 10, 2000
Interview
with Roman Polanski director of The Ninth Gate Interview by Todd R. Ramlow for Pop Matters
(2000)
Martin Amis interviews Roman Polanski | Film | The Observer 1979 Paris interview after fleeing America, posted at The Observer, December 6, 2009
Roman Polanski - Interview Magazine Francesco Vezzoli and Christopher Bollen interview from Interview magazine, January 22, 2009
Roman
Polanski Speaks: His New Movie, His 2009 Arrest, and the ... James Fox interview from Vanity Fair, September 19, 2013
Gerald Peary's Magnificent Seven (2006)
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
Roman Polanski - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Roman Polanski sexual abuse case - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Roman Polanski: Early Years - Photo Gallery - LIFE
Roman Polanski Pictures - Roman Polanski Photo Gallery - 2010
YouTube - Roman Polanski: A Tribute a slide show of stills on YouTube (9:26)
MURDER (Morderstwo)
Poland (1 mi) 1957
DVD Times Anthony Nield
The collection opens with Polanski’s first completed film. Totalling just over a minute in length, Murder (1957) presents the viewer with just one scene: a man walks into an apartment and stabs another man who is sleeping. Reminiscent of a particularly violent moment from a fifties film noir, the sheer audacity of the piece is remarkable. Completely silent, without even musical accompaniment, the viewer can’t help but be drawn into the action which is immensely shocking even though it’s over almost as soon as it begins.
Short Films BFI Screen Online (excerpt)
Between 1957 and his feature debut in 1962, Polanski made a number of distinctive short films, most of them at the Lodz Film School.
His first completed films reveal that his interest in
violence and voyeurism dates from the very start of his career. The
context-free Murder shows a man being stabbed while sleeping, Teeth
Smile observes a Peeping Tom's discomfiture when the beautiful woman in
the bathroom is replaced by her husband, while Breaking Up The Ball
records a genuine gatecrashing that the young director set up without the
knowledge of the legitimate guests.
Roman Polanski Short Films, Roman Polanski Short Films Movie Reviews Hugo Barbosa from Wild Sounds
The first student short Polanski made during his years at the State Film School in Poland features one of the director’s favorite themes. It is a film in Black & White emulsion that bears a clever use of the camera and the actors, it fairly presents the short’s story in three shots that can be compared with the classic three act structure that work perfectly. Film opens with a doorknob that twists to let the door open and in comes the predator, a big man who’s face we aren’t allowed to see; with a panning we discover that another man lies over a bed. Next thing we know is that the man takes a small knifes and pierces with it on the naked man’s chest. Then we see the man at the bed dead and bleeding from the punctured chest and the murderer’s face is revealed as he walks out of the place and shuts the door as he finds his way out.
Watch
the 3 Best Roman Polanski Short Films From the 1950s Christopher Campbell from Film School Rejects, June 20, 2014
Horror View Blackgloves
User reviews from imdb Author: ccthemovieman-1 from Lockport, NY, United States
YouTube - Roman Polański - Morderstwo on YouTube (1:27)
Morderstwo and Usmiech Zebiczny MURDER followed by TEETH SMILE on YouTube (3:20)
TEETH SMILE (Usmiech zebiczny)
Poland (2 mi) 1957
DVD Times Anthony Nield
The second short, Teethful Smile (1957), is similarly brisk. Again without any audio accompaniment this presents a young man spying on a naked woman through her bathroom window. Distracted by a neighbour he turns away, only to discover a man brushing his teeth when he goes for a second look. This and Murder make good bedfellows; both present two of what were to become favourite Polanski themes (violence and voyeurism) in very small doses, and both prove to be extremely funny, owing to the disbelief that the director is doing this. The most shocking thing is, of course, the fact that no context is offered for either event, yet Polanski gets away with it through sheer verve. For fans of reductionist cinema, these are two classics.
Roman Polanski Short Films, Roman Polanski Short Films Movie Reviews Hugo Barbosa from Wild Sounds
Open to discover a stairway, a man comes down and while he is on his way down, something grabs his attention. He comes closer to a window nearby and finds out that it has a view to a bathroom. Inside, a woman is drying her hair with a towel as she stands naked in the bathroom. The man smiles giving into his voyeur instincts and devours the woman with his eyes. In a second, he is suddenly distracted by another man, apparently the woman’s husband, who arrives at home. As the voyeur realizes this, he continues to walk down the stairs, but as soon as the man enters his house, the man comes up and approaches the window again, only that this time there is a man brushing his teeth who smiles as he looks back at the man at the window. Thus, the man decides to simply walk away.
This short is said to be made as homework.
Watch the 3 Best Roman Polanski Short Films From the 1950s Christopher Campbell from Film School Rejects, June 20, 2014
Short Films BFI Screen Online
Horror View Blackgloves
User reviews from imdb Author: nora_nettlerash from Ruritania
Roman Polanski "Teeth Smile" [Usmiech Zebiczny] 1957 on YouTube (1:52)
WE DESTROY THIS PARTY (Rozbijemy zabawe)
aka: Breaking Up the Ball
DVD Times Anthony Nield
Let’s Break the Ball (1957) is a different matter entirely. Largely shot documentary style, it similarly displays another Polanski trait in miniature: his cruelty. Essentially, the plot follows the ball of the title, until a gang of thugs gatecrash and proceed to cause havoc. What’s interesting is how Polanski created this film; according to his autobiography ‘Roman by Polanski’, not only did the director organise the ball, he also invited the gang without telling any of the guests. As is noted in the extensive liner notes that come with the box-set, this short sees Polanski playing with the conventions of the documentary form. Whilst the piece may appear at first glance to be a straight-forward piece in the “Free Cinema” (a British documentary movement that saw works from the likes of Linday Anderson and Karel Reisz) sense, there was in fact a little manipulation going on in the background.
Roman Polanski Short Films, Roman Polanski Short Films Movie Reviews Hugo Barbosa from Wild Sounds
This little treat is supposed to be shot as a tongue in cheek homage to cinema veritè (a growing trend those days), it opens with a man who hangs strange lamps at a garden, camera zooms out and we discover that there are also other men helping as they are arranging the place for a party, they even hang a big doll. There is a tiny shot in which we see a homage to a very classic gag that was first created in the cinema’s silent era. We then cut to see a man’s hands breaking the tickets of the newcomers at the ballroom. The music is heard as the couples come into the dancing grounds.
The door is then locked as all people is dancing, as the doorkeeper is about to enter the place, a gang of hooligans comes in, they ask to be let in. The doorkeeper ignores them.Inside, nice people is having a ball! Everyone dances or drinks, smiles, laughs and even flirts. Musicians, students, dancing couples and a very famous tune is about to be disturbed as the hooligans plan to get inside no matter what, they just climb up the door and jump into the dancing grounds. As soon as they find the doorkeeper, they call him out of the crowd and then beat him up and tear his clothes into rags. The whole place is turned upside down as the fight heats up.At the end the place is ruined and empty, and the doll floats lonely over the water.
Roman Polanski Shorts - TCM.com Jeff Stafford from Turner Classic Movies
Watch
the 3 Best Roman Polanski Short Films From the 1950s Christopher Campbell from Film School Rejects, June 20, 2014
Horror View Blackgloves
Criterion Confessions [Jamie S. Rich]
Short Films BFI Screen Online
User reviews from imdb Author: krorie
from Van Buren, Arkansas
User
reviews from imdb Author: nora_nettlerash from Ruritania
User
reviews from imdb Author: ccthemovieman-1 from Lockport, NY, United States
"Rozbijemy
Zabawe" [1957] : Roman Polanski : Free Download ... (7:41)
Roman
Polanski - Rozbijemy Zabawe (We Destroy this Party) (7:41) on YouTube
TWO MEN AND A WARDROBE (Dwa ludzie z szafa)
Short Films BFI Screen Online (excerpt)
Polanski first came to attention with Two Men and a Wardrobe, made for the 1958 Brussels Experimental Film Festival, where it won third prize. This parable of two men emerging from the sea carrying a large wardrobe was the earliest Polanski film to show unmistakable signs of his talent for unnervingly dislocated imagery (the trompe l'oeil shot of the fish apparently floating in the sky), and Polanski's cameo as a young thug who beats up one of the wardrobe-carriers foreshadows a similarly abrupt and violent scene in Chinatown.
DVD Times Anthony Nield
The “Free Cinema” reference is pertinent as the next short, Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958), was once included in a collection of that movement’s films. However, the surreal tone of Polanski’s best known pre-feature work seems at odds with the British efforts. The tonal shifts in particular make this film unlike anything else before or since. From the bizarre opening scene of the two men coming out of the sea, their travels with the piece of furniture veer from anti-authoritarian humour (attempting to take the wardrobe into a cafe or on a tram) and free-spirited clowning that wouldn’t seem out of place in an early Godard film to a remarkably cruel scene that sees a cat get stoned to death and our two heroes beaten up. Tellingly, the main attacker is played by Polanski himself, serving two purposes. Firstly, it’s remarkable to see just how young the director was at the time, making this and the earlier shorts seem all the more impressive; and secondly, it allows the film to act as precursor to the infamous scene in Chinatown when Polanski slits open Jack Nicholson’s nose with a razor. The unpredictability of that scene and the ones that appear in Two Men once again reveal that the director was working out his favourite themes even in his earliest work.
Roman Polanski Short Films, Roman Polanski Short Films Movie Reviews Hugo Barbosa from Wild Sounds
First shot to be screened outside the film school. It was also the first one to receive awards as it achieved five awards in Brussels, San Francisco and Oberhausen.
The film presents the credits over a shot of the sea as two men come out from it carrying what is soon to be known as a wardrobe. The two men dry themselves and dance graciously as to celebrate their arrival.
They are then seen trying to get the wardrobe into the train, but they can’t manage to do so. As they keep moving, they find a beautiful girl and try to get her attention but fail to do so and must keep on their way. Briefly, they get inside restaurant and try to get some service, but they are soon taken out from the place because of the wardrobe.
The whole short is about these guys trying to get a place where they can go into without leaving the wardrobe behind.
We then discover that Polanski himself is part of a gang who
try to harass the beautiful girl as she walks on the street. The men with the
wardrobe happen to be passing by and try to defend the girl from the gang, but
end up being beaten up, one of them is brought to the floor by Roman, who fists
the guy down and then leaves with his friends.
Even after being beaten up, the two men keep on walking trying to find a place and end up resting in what appears to be a wasteland. As they rest, a policeman comes by and beats them out of the place.
After many turns, the men return to the shore, and decide to make their way back to where they came from.An entertaining piece that’s still fun to watch.
A Sharper Focus [Norman Holland]
Roman Polanski Shorts - TCM.com Jeff Stafford from Turner Classic Movies
Watch
the 3 Best Roman Polanski Short Films From the 1950s Christopher Campbell from Film School Rejects, June 20, 2014
Horror View Blackgloves
Criterion Confessions [Jamie S. Rich]
"Two
Men and a Wardrobe" ["Dwaj Ludzie z Szafa"] [1958] : Roman ...
(14:16)
(1958)
Dwaj ludzie z szafa (Two ... Pt I of
2 parts on YouTube (
(1958)
Dwaj ludzie z szafa (Two Men and a Wardrobe) (2 of 2) Pt 2 of 2
(6:59)
LAMPA
Short Films BFI Screen Online (excerpt)
Most of his other shorts are absurdist comedies very much in the vein of Beckett, Ionesco and even Buster Keaton, while the fascinating and inexplicably-disowned The Lamp delves into full-blown surrealism with its recurring images of broken and decaying dolls more reminiscent of later work by the animators Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Svankmajer.
DVD Times Anthony Nield
Perhaps the oddest short present, The Lamp (1959) is, according to the liner notes, the one film Polanski is reticent to discuss. The plot is remarkably simple, indeed it’s near non-existent: the workshop of a toy maker gradually catches fire and all the toys are destroyed. As with When Angels Fall, a remarkable sense of atmosphere is created with very little, though the lightweight quality it possesses leaves the viewer rather unfulfilled. That said, it offers a fascinating counterpoint to Walerian Borowczyk’s Renaissance or, more perversely, George Pal’s stop-animation shorts of the forties.
Roman Polanski Short Films, Roman Polanski Short Films Movie Reviews Hugo Barbosa from Wild Sounds
This short opens to the store of a doll maker who happens to be occupied with his labors.
It is expressionist, surrealist and full of craft. It’s a trip inside the doll maker’s studio. We see him work on the dolls, he puts the eyes in their sockets and then places the wig over the head’s void to finish the doll.
He then goes and works on placing and rigging a lamp for him to keep on with is work.
As the lamp is turned on, the time inside the place seems to stop.
Then the true magic of the cinema comes in as the man closes the shop at night and leaves towards his home to rest. The dolls apparently “talk” in surreal imagery as we travel through the shelves to find out that something strange is about to happen as the radio starts emitting noises and ends up in flames, burning down the dolls inside the store- outside, the rain stops the people from noticing the fire.
Watch the 3 Best Roman Polanski Short Films From the 1950s Christopher Campbell from Film School Rejects, June 20, 2014
Horror View Blackgloves
User reviews from imdb Author: Ben_Cheshire from Oz
User reviews from imdb Author: MisterWhiplash from United States
User reviews from imdb Author: nora_nettlerash from Ruritania
Lampa (7:22) on YouTube
WHEN ANGELS FALL (Gdy spadaja anioly)
Poland (21 mi) 1959
Short Films BFI Screen Online (excerpt)
His graduation piece When Angels Fall was much more ambitious, crosscutting between the present-day existence of an elderly lavatory attendant and her rather more colourful past as young lover and victim of war twice over. Until The Pianist over four decades later, this was the only Polanski film that evoked his wartime childhood (underscored by the intriguing decision to play the woman himself in drag when the narrative reaches the Second World War) while the climax, alluded to by the title, contains a rare instance of explicitly religious imagery.
DVD Times Anthony Nield
When Angels Fall (1959) once more offers a change of pace. Apparently inspired by the report of an old woman’s death in a newspaper, Polanski takes the image of a urinal assistant and offers her increasingly bleak life in flashback. Strikingly, these reminisces are presented in colour, though as the woman progresses from the country to the city, and the flashbacks take in the events of World War II, the colours get gradually more muted (as though Polanski’s Thomas Hardy adaptation Tess had been suddenly invaded by Repulsion). Whilst not quite in the same league as some of the other shorts in the collection, When Angels Fall still shows Polanski to be an assured filmmaker, even at this early stage in his career. Indeed the sense of place he creates, especially in the framing scenes, is remarkable; it’s worth noting that in a Sight and Sound interview the director once stated that atmosphere “was the most important thing...in cinema. Without it, it’s all dialogue and movement.”
Roman Polanski Short Films, Roman Polanski Short Films Movie Reviews Hugo Barbosa from Wild Sounds
As we fly over a maquette in the first shots of this short, I can’t do but keep wondering if this shot was what Roman had in mind when he did the titles for Rosemary’s Baby. Anyway, this short tells the story of an attendant, a very old one by the way, who has the hability to forsee things. As the people comes in she has visions (in color – the rest of the story is in B & W).
It’s sort of an epic short, because of all the places we get to see in the old woman’s visions. There is even war.
This film was Roman Polanski’s Thesis film, it is a bit odd, but it is because of the fact that we aren’t really told that the woman has visions.
Crafted carefully, this film shows the growing potential of the soon to be one of the greatest filmmakers of all times. What is supposed to be reality gets fleshed with an overall fairy tale feeling (that might be reinterpreted again in the film mention above.
It does have many surreal moments and sketches, but it also has some brief thoughts about war and the language barriers. It has some wonderful moving shots that weren’t really present before on Polanski’s work, the remarkable style in the photography shows the power in his vision and his skills as a director and creator.
Roman
Polanski Shorts - TCM.com Jeff
Stafford from Turner Classic Movies
Horror View Blackgloves
User reviews from imdb Author: nora_nettlerash from Ruritania
YouTube
- Gdy spadają anioły (1959) - part 1 on YouTube (
Gdy
spadają anioły (1959) - part 2
(
THE FAT AND THE LEAN (Le gros et le maigre)
Poland (4
mi) 1961
Roman Polanski Short Films, Roman Polanski Short Films Movie Reviews Hugo Barbosa from Wild Sounds
Short time after film school, Polanski directed and composer
Kryztof Komeda (who worked also in Two men and a wardrobe) and who years later
did the score for Rosemary’s Baby. Jean Pierre Rousseau co-directs as Polanski
stars in the film as a man who lives to entertain, attend and feed a fat man.
Short Films BFI Screen Online (excerpt)
His last two shorts, The Fat and the Lean and Mammals,
return to this theme of the uneasy relationship between decidedly odd male
couples in bizarre settings. The first is set by a house on the outskirts of
Paris, with Polanski himself playing the 'lean' servant of the indolent 'fat'
master in his most explicit physical tribute to silent comedy. Mammals
is set in a featureless snow-covered landscape, into which one of the characters
disappears at one point in an inspired visual gag.
Criterion Confessions [Jamie S. Rich]
To extend the notion of some of these shorts as parables for Polanski and his film career, then we could also see "The Fat and the Lean," with its young man (played by Polanski himself) enslaved to a brutish, corpulent older fellow with the dazzling Parisian skyline always within eyeshot as the Polish filmmaker yearning for a more discerning film industry than his homeland provided. Though, obviously, the short is most likely intended as a political allegory about the abuses of power and the way people begin to accept that abuse as compassion.
Roman
Polanski Shorts - TCM.com Jeff
Stafford from Turner Classic Movies
The fifteen minute short, The Fat and the Lean [1961],
came about through Roman Polanski's fundraising efforts for his first feature
film, Knife in the Water [1962]. A French Canadian producer who was
searching for a new project was interested in financing the latter film but
couldn't raise the funds so he agreed to back this short film instead. Expanded
from a story idea by Polanski and Jakub Goldberg, who had written the script
for Two Men and a Wardrobe, The Fat and the Lean was a return to
the absurd, experimental style of that earlier work.
A psychological study of dominance and servitude, the film depicts two
individuals locked in a master-slave relationship. A huge brute of a man
(played by French actor Andre Kattelbach) is waited on by his barefoot
attendant who attempts to keep him entertained by playing a flute, beating a
drum and performing pirouettes for his amusement. While the unappeased master
sits on a broken-down rocking chair in front of a decaying mansion, his
diminutive servant attends to his every need, wiping his sweaty brow, washing
his feet, protecting his head from the sun and even tending to the toilet details.
Biographer Barbara Leaming wrote that "The Fat and the Lean is
Polanski's first explicit comment on the mechanisms of power and humiliation,
the strange symbiosis that joins master and slave." She also pointed out
"that the slave comprehends, even identifies with, the master's brutality
is suggested when, momentarily tied to a goat, he kicks the beast cruelly,
thereby assuming the role of aggressor." (from Polanski, Simon and
Schuster)
Filmed in France, The Fat and the Lean was Polanski's first film outside
Poland and it won prizes at various film festivals, but was not a commercial
success and didn't achieve the international recognition Polanski had hoped
for. That would come later with the release of Knife in the Water which
would receive an Oscar® nomination for Best Foreign Language Film (it lost to
Federico Fellini's 8 1/2, 1963). In the meantime, Polanski would return
to the short film with his next project, Mammals [1962]. Once again,
employing an austere look with an absurd sensibility, the film would mirror Two
Men and a Wardrobe and The Fat and the Lean in its two-person
narrative involving a journey through the snow on a sled.
DVD Times Anthony Nield
Horror View Blackgloves
Watch the 3 Best Roman Polanski Short Films From the 1950s Christopher Campbell from Film School Rejects, June 20, 2014
User reviews from imdb Author: debblyst from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
User reviews from imdb Author: nora_nettlerash from Ruritania
"The
Fat and the Lean" ["Le Gros et le Maigre"] [1961] : Roman ... (15:08)
YouTube - The Fat The Lean and The Extra (4:02)
SSAKI (Mammals)
Roman Polanski Short Films, Roman Polanski Short Films Movie Reviews Hugo Barbosa from Wild Sounds
This short was awarded at Oberhausen and Melbourne, it is also the last short filmed by Polanski, his next film was in feature.This short opens with graphic titles in black fonts over white background and then fades to an open shot of a man running as he pulls another man who is sitting over a sledge.
It has an older film look as the image flickers all the time but it helps in creating this silent film feeling that is clearly the intention of the artistic use of cinematography.
As in The Fat and the Lean, the short presents the story in a cycle of vignettes, in between farce and sketch, the relationship between the two men is presented alongside a very jazzy soundtrack.
User reviews from imdb Author: nora_nettlerash from
Ruritania
After Two Men and a Wardrobe and The Fat and the Lean, this is third of
Polanski's early short features to take on the style of a silent comedy. Ssaki
(Mammals) actually goes as far in mimicking the look by recreating the flicker
of silent films. However, while Two Men and a Wardrobe was at least mildly
entertaining, and Fat and Lean was genuinely funny, Mammals is the least
effective of the trio.
Setting the film in a field of snow, Polanski has a completely pure white space
for the action to take place in. This frees the image of any background clutter
and encourages us to focus solely on the two protagonists and their half dozen
or so props. The white background also allows for a rather clever sight gag in
which one of the men makes himself disappear by wrapping himself from head to
foot in bandages.
Apart from that one little moment there is really very little to hold the
viewer. There is presumably some kind of metaphor going on, but if the film
isn't entertaining, there seems no point in looking for it.
Criterion Confessions [Jamie S. Rich]
DVD Times Anthony Nield
Horror View Blackgloves
Watch the 3 Best Roman Polanski Short Films From the 1950s Christopher Campbell from Film School Rejects, June 20, 2014
"Mammals"
["Ssaki"] [1962] : Roman Polanski - Internet Archive (10:22)
Ssaki (Mammals) (10:22) on YouTube
KNIFE IN THE WATER
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Polanski's first feature, a model of economic, imaginative
film-making which, in many ways, he has hardly improved upon since. The story
is simplicity itself: a couple destined for a yachting weekend pick up a
hitch-hiker, and during the apparently relaxing period of sport and rest,
allegiances shift, frustrations bubble up to the surface, and dangerous
emotional games are played. Like much of Polanski's later work, it deals with
humiliation, sexuality, aggression and absurdity; but what makes the film so
satisfying is the tenderness and straightforward nature of his approach. With
just three actors, a boat, and a huge expanse of water, he and script-writer Jerzy
Skolimowski milk the situation for all it's worth, rarely descending into
dramatic contrivance, but managing to heap up the tension and ambiguities.
About
World Film Jürgen Fauth
Roman Polanski was fresh out of film school when he shot his 1962 debut, but the film already shows the psychological exactitude and deft storytelling of a master. "Knife in the Water" is a tightly observed and mercilessly accomplished film, as sharp and double-edged as the weapon it is named for.
A wealthy couple on its way to spend a night on their sailboat picks up a strapping young hitchhiker (Zygmunt Malanowicz), innocent but daring. Immediately, the husband (Leon Niemczyk), a cynical, ornery sportswriter, locks horns with the youth and invites him on to the boat -- if only to show off his superior seamanship and humiliate the kid. In the meantime, the wife (Jolanta Umecka) sheds layer after layer and seems to enjoy the presence of the third passenger. Over the course of the day, tensions aboard the sailboard rise.
The ensuing psychological thriller, written by Polanski with Jerzy Skolimowski, is a taut, tightly photographed drama that earned Polanski world fame and an Oscar nomination in 1964 (he lost to Fellini's "8 ½.") The restored version of "Knife in the Water" issued by Criterion comes with a frank introduction by Polanski and Skolimowski, but unfortunately lacks a commentary track. The second disc features a collection of Polanski's short student films, a treat for any fan.
Knife in the Water
| BFI Distribution BFI Screen
Online (older version, link lost)
Roman Polanski's
first feature Knife in the Water, a masterful study of sexual tension
and paranoia, is available from the bfi in a new print.
The story is
simplicity itself: a married couple Andrzej (Leon Niemczyk) and Krystyna
(Jolanta Umecka) setting forth on a yachting weekend give a lift to an
attractive young hitch-hiker (Zygmunt Malanowicz).
During what was
intended to be a relaxing break, competition builds between the two men as they
vie for the attentions of the alluring young wife. Allegiances shift, jealousy
and frustration intensify and none too innocent games are played. Krzysztof
Komeda's unnerving jazz score memorably underlines Polanski's vision of menace
and desire.
Knife in the
Water was one of the most
outstanding feature debuts of 1960s. A model of economic but richly imaginative
film-making, it introduced many of the themes that would recur in the
director's later work: sexual attraction and insecurity, antagonistic
aggression, humiliation and violence.
With just three
actors, a boat and an eye-catching expanse of water, Polanski creates one of
his most subtle and satisfying films.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago
While it's worth reiterating that Roman Polanski's first feature is one of the most adept debuts in cinema--achieving a constantly escalating sense of dread with a minimum of means--it's also worth noting that the film owes its importance to more than beginner's luck. What's most remarkable about KNIFE IN THE WATER is that Polanski, at only 26, introduces in the film themes and tropes that he would build upon for the next 50 years. Set almost entirely on a yacht (which Polanski shoots ingeniously, from practically every conceivable angle), the movie creates a claustrophobic brand of suspense that would come to underlie all of Polanski's subsequent work. Likewise, the ever-shifting power dynamic between its three main characters (rooted in absurdist drama and carrying an undeniable erotic fascination) can be felt in Polanski's films, pretty much unceasingly, through THE GHOST WRITER. This remains Polanski's only Polish feature, and it's indicative of his contrarian nature that the film makes no reference to Communism nor, for that matter, to any political orientation (though it's possible to read the movie's materialistic central couple as a subtle critique of Poland's then-rising "Red Bourgeoisie"). This aspect of the film irked State authorities, who branded Polanski an "individualist pessimist" (not that far from the truth, actually) and gave him a proverbial slap on the wrist. Since Polanski was able to start working abroad on the international success of this feature, his troubles with the Communist state ended there. Nevertheless, a sense of persecution colors all of his best work (including this one), the most palpably paranoid movies outside of Alfred Hitchcock.
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [7/10]
A feuding couple - fortyish-but-virile sportswriter Andrzej (Leon Niemczyk)
and his younger wife Krystyna (Jolanta Umecka) are heading to a lakeside marina
for a long day's yachting. En route, they pick up a reckless young hitch-hiker
(Zygmunt Malanowicz) who joins them on the lake. The hitch-hiker proves a less
than competent sailor, despite Andrzej's attempts to (literally) show him the
ropes. As the hours pass, unspoken tensions between the men - generational,
class, sexual - slowly approach breaking-point.
After a handful of acclaimed shorts, Polanski burst onto the world cinema
scene with this debut feature. Nominated for the Foreign Language Oscar, it
paved the way for his departure to
In each instance, the narrative and geographical focus is remarkably tight:
most of Repulsion takes place within a single
Similarly, Knife in the Water plays out as a terse infidelity-nightmare, with Andrzej and Krystyna constantly hovering on the brink of an all-out row: a simmering dysfunction which the Young Man's presence eventually brings to a head. Though moments of black comedy are to be found in all three films - Cul de Sac especially - these are not, on the whole, comfortable experiences for the viewer.
With Knife in the Water, however, Polanski and his screenwriting collaborators (Jakub Goldberg, Jerzy Skolimowski) take this discomfort a little too far. The three characters - and we never see anyone else - are annoying to various degrees: an annoyance is felt just as keenly by the viewer as it is by the characters themselves. A further level of irritation is added by Krzysztof Komeda's gratingly repetitive, incongruously jazzy score - which often (deliberately) seems to belong to a different film altogether.
And although north-east Poland's expansive Mazury Lakes provide a striking natural backdrop for Jerzy Lipman's (often hand-held) cinematography, light-levels are invariably either too bright (in the open-water daylight) or too dark (in the early-morning, nocturnal or dusk scenes) for them to constitute anything approaching a conventional idea of the 'picturesque'. (The contrast-levels also play havoc with the English subtitles on many prints - they're near-illegibly white-on-white, a problem which thankfully doesn't occur on the subtitling for versions shown on TV and released on video and DVD.)
In addition, attentive viewers may notice something 'off' about the dialogue: Umecka and Malanowicz's lines were in fact dubbed by other performers: Umecka by Anna Ciepielewska and Malanowicz by none other than Polanski, who had initially hoped to play the role of the disruptive, immature hitch-hiker himself. And Umecka isn't exactly the most expressive of performers - she reportedly wasn't a professional actress at all, and at one stage Polanski had to have an aide fire off a flare in order to stimulate a certain reaction from his star (who from certain angles bears a distracting resemblance to Natalie Wood, herself the victim of a yacht-trip drowning).
The script, meanwhile, also takes care to avoid conventional dramatic development: the sombre mood with its undertones of violence and hostility seems to point towards a tragic conclusion - indeed, at various points it appears that first Andrzej and then the hitch-hiker have drowned. But nothing plays out quite as we expect: the final shot conveys, if anything, a sense of depressing, Beckettian stasis, with the characters trapped in a moral cul-de-sac, stewing in their own repulsion.
The cumulative effect is undeniably stimulating, but also very off-putting: this is a film to be respected and admired, rather than liked or enjoyed: see Philip Noyce's 1990 ocean-faring three-handed Dead Calm for a more conventionally satisfying multiplex-oriented variation on this theme. Knife in the Water, squarely aimed at the arthouses of its time, represents an impressive calling-card from the then-27-year-old Polanski - who clearly lacked for nothing in the ambition department. Making any kind of film on water is always a nightmarish experience for a director, and here Polanski was also clearly operating on a restricted budget, and under less-than-perfect weather conditions - presumably the script was rewritten 'on the hoof' to accommodate any sudden change in the elements. It's telling that Polanski identified more with the hitch-hiker than with the older, more experienced Andrzej : for both character and director, the yacht is the setting for a learning-curve that's steep, often painful, but ultimately highly productive.
Knife in
the Water Criterion essay by Roman
Polanski, from his 1984 autobiography, Roman, June 12, 1991
Knife in
the Water Criterion essay by Peter
Cowie, September 29, 2003
Now
Showing on Hulu Criterion comments,
April 16, 2010
Knife in the Water (1962) - The Criterion Collection
Nóz W Wodzie - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications V. Merhaut from Film Reference
Andrzej and Krystyna go Boating: Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water ... Matthew Clayfield, March 16, 2008
Knife in the Water (1962) – Deep Focus Review – Movie Reviews ... Brian Eggert, May 11, 2010
Roman
Polanski | Nóz w wodzie (Knife in the Water) - World Cinema ... Douglas Messerli, August 24, 2012
Knife
in the Water (1962) - #215 | Criterion Reflections David Blakeslee
Roman
Polanski BFI Retrospective – Knife in the Water (1962) Simon Columb from Flickering Myth
Roman
Polanski's Knife in the Water: Triangles to the Nth Degree - Diana Drumm from The Retro Set
Knife
in the Water (1963) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Paul Tatara
Knife
in the Water - TCM.com
Margarita Landazuri
DVD Verdict (Bill Gibron) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
Illumined Illusions--Seeing Cinema in a New Light [Ian C. Bloom]
DVD Journal Clarence Beaks, Criterion Collection, 2-disc
Criterion Confessions [Jamie S. Rich]
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
A Sharper Focus [Norman Holland]
Horror View Blackgloves
DVD Times Anthony Nield
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection, 2-disc
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review Criterion Collection, 2-disc
DVD Town (Yunda Eddie Feng) dvd review Criterion Collection, 2-disc
DVD Talk (Matt Langdon) dvd review [5/5] [Criterion Collection]
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review [Criterion Collection]
Electric Sheep Magazine Virginie Sélavy
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4.5/5]
filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [65/100]
Urban Cinefile dvd review Andrew L. Urban
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Edinburgh U Film Society (Danny Carr) review
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] also reviewing THE TENANT
Mondo Digital also reviewing REPULSION
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]
BBC Films review Andy Jacobs
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
FILM/DVD'S;
'Knife in the Water': Trapped on a Boat With Polanski ... The New
York Times, November 16, 2003
DVDBeaver dvd review Per-Olof Strandberg
REPULSION A 100
Great Britain
Creepy, excruciating attention to detail, startlingly original, Catherine Deneuve is extraordinary, terrific use of sound as well as Chico Hamilton music
Repulsion Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Reader
Roman Polanski's first film in English (1965,
105 min.) is still his scariest and most disturbing--not only for its
evocations of sexual panic, but also because his masterful employment of sound
puts the audience's imagination to work in numerous ways. Catherine Deneuve
gives an impressive performance as a quiet and quietly mad beautician living
with her older sister in
Roman Polanski's British-made, London-set horror film
records the deterioration of a murderous, terrified Belgian girl, played by
Catherine Deneuve. The script, by Polanski and Gérard Brach, seems completely
shaped for the camera; the approach is so objective, so external, that the film
doesn't raise questions about this foreign girl's estrangement and loneliness,
doesn't offer explanations of her madness. It just stays on her--on her
hallucinations and her fantasies of being in danger, and on the actual
reprisals she takes against anyone who comes her way. It's clinical Grand
Guignol, and the camera fondles the horrors: the high spot is a man being
slashed in the face with a straight razor--until he's cut to death. (If you're
too scared to look you still hear the slashing sounds.) Undeniably skillful and
effective, all right--excruciatingly tense and frightening. But is it
entertaining? You have to be a hard-core horror-movie lover to enjoy this one. With
Yvonne Furneaux, John Fraser, Ian Hendry, Patrick Wymark, Renée Houston, James
Villiers, and Polanski in a bit. Music by Chico Hamilton; cinematography by
Gilbert Taylor.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Still perhaps Polanski's most perfectly realised film, a
stunning portrait of the disintegration, mental and emotional, of a shy young
Belgian girl (Deneuve) living in London. When she's left alone by her sister in
their Kensington flat, she becomes reclusive and retreats into a terrifying
world of fantasies and nightmares which find murderous physical expression when
she is visited by a would-be boyfriend (Fraser) and her leering landlord
(Wymark). Polanski employs a host of wonderfully integrated visual and aural
effects to suggest the inner torment Deneuve suffers: cracks in pavements,
hands groping from walls, shadows under doors, rotting skinned rabbits, and -
as in Rosemary's Baby - the eerie, ever-present sound of someone practising
scales on a piano. And despite the fact that the girl's manically destructive
actions derive from a terror of sexual contact, Polanski never turns his film
into a misogynist binge: the men she meets are far from sympathetically
portrayed, and we are led to understand her fear and revulsion by the surreal
expressionism used to portray her mental state. All in all, one of the most
intelligent horror movies ever made, and certainly one of the most
frighteningly effective.
Roman Polanski's still-thrilling Repulsion
is an experiment in sang-Freud—its two-way prism of audio-visual embellishments
intuits a woman's fractured psyche and catches super-cool flashes of the
audience's perverse cine-desires. The interior and exterior environs of the
film are locked in heady combat, a commentary perhaps on the push-pull effect
of the movies. Outside the apartment Catherine Deneuve's Faberge blonde shares
with her older sister, Polanski reveals a smooth and jazzy world simmering with
casual but richly observed behavioral and dramatic incident. Detail is no less
meticulous inside, but the space is fleshier and ever-shifting, with Polanski
kneading his audience and main character like lumps of Play-Doh. The feeling
the film elicits is tense, totalitarian, and allusive: Polanski's warping
aesthetic is pure obstruction and the audience's search for significance in it
becomes a means of deciphering Carole's repulsion for men. But the rationale
for Carole's sickness comes to matter less than the evocation and evolution of
the sickness itself—from the woman's "abandonment" by her sister to
the most memorable rotting corpse the movies have ever seen (sorry Bernie!).
(Abel Ferrara's unofficial remake Driller Killer is a cruder but
similarly intense vision of the world and the individual in symbiotic crisis.)
A searing, clockwork synergy, the lucid sights and sounds of Carole's world are
conduits and conspirators of madness and pleasure. Polanski's triumph is a
weird, tense depolarization of space, a chipping away at psychological walls so
that fear and desire become synonymous: Carole fantasies about the construction
worker that cat-called her days earlier (a crack on the sidewalk seemingly
radiates from her vagina) and, later, puts on make-up to welcome one of her
fantasy rapists. The film is like a slyly misanthropic theme part ride for the
sane—a satiric, disturbing approximation of insanity by way of a master-class
mosaic of aural detail and visual sleights of hand.
Edinburgh U Film Society (Keith H. Brown) review
In the 1960s Polanski, like a number of foreign directors,
was drawn to the
Repulsion's plot is simple: Carol (Catherine Deneuve), a young Belgian woman, lives in a London apartment with her older sister, Helen. Carol is a bit unhinged, with a revulsion to men and sex. Naturally, then, nice guy Colin's attempts to chat her up don't get very far. Helen, meanwhile, is carrying on with a married man, Michael (trivia buffs might care to note that Repulsion features the first orgasm ever heard in British cinema). Helen and Michael go off on holiday, leaving Carol alone in the flat. It doesn't take long for her to crack up completely...
Repulsion is one of those rare horror films which manages to transcend its genre ghetto to be a must see for the anyone with an interest in cinema generally. In this, and many other ways, it follows in the footsteps of Hitchcock's Psycho (also being shown - check it out on the big screen) and Powell's Peeping Tom. Like Hitchcock's film, Repulsion is a prime example of the cinema as shock machine: Everyday sounds - dripping taps, ticking clocks, and bells - resonate with menace. Phantom attackers suddenly appear. Walls split open, or have hands emerge from them. An intruder is slashed up with a straight razor. But, like Peeping Tom (with which it shares an opening shot of an eye, along with Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou) there's little mystery about what's going on. Instead, the emphasis is upon exploring the lead characters insanity. And here Repulsion, with its more straightforward plotting, is more believable than Powell's film.
Repulsion is perhaps Polanski's and Deneuve's finest hours. Polanski's direction is simply masterful. Here, he's a virtuoso who manages to avoid simply showing off. Near every shot is in there for a good reason. Progressively, we're taken deeper and deeper into Carol's psyche, as her apartment is rendered both her prison and the landscape of her mind. Deneuve is utterly convincing in her role. Largely mute, she accomplishes so much through gestures and looks.
"Polanski's most perfectly realised film... one of the most intelligent horror movies ever made." - Time Out
`Repulsion's'
nightmare qualities endure beyond the swinging '60s ... Michael Wilmington from The Chicago Tribune, May 26, 2006
Few films are more unsettling than Roman Polanski's
"Repulsion." A spine-chilling 1965 shocker about an emotionally
fragile young woman's descent into madness, it shows London's "Swinging
'60s" in a different, darker light: not the playful or vibrant era of the
exuberant young Beatles and the irreverent Rolling Stones but a more sinister
time of dissolving moral barriers and deadly anxieties. Only Polanski's second
feature and the first in English for both him and star Catherine Deneuve, it's
an all-out assault on the audience's nerves, one of the great nightmare films.
"Repulsion" is the story of the growth of a psychosis, of the
overwhelming obsessions that lead an isolated emigre woman--a naive young
Belgian manicurist named Carol Ledoux (Deneuve)--into a swamp of bloodshed and
horror. A French-speaking foreigner hesitant in English, Carol seems separated
from her surroundings: from the grotesque customers at her beauty parlor, the
wolfish street workers who whistle at her, even the sensitive but pushy young
suitor, Colin (John Fraser), who keeps pestering her for a date. Carol, who
lives with her older sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux) in a city that obviously
bewilders and repels her, is a spellbinding beauty terrified of sexuality and
the men who constantly approach her--including Helen's sly and brutal
boyfriend, Michael (Ian Hendry).
The 22-year-old Deneuve, in her first great movie performance, was shatteringly
beautiful but also opaque and numbed-looking. The camera, seemingly infatuated,
rarely leaves her face and body except to reveal her nightmares--and Polanski
packs the film with symbols of her anxiety, images both exquisite and
terrifying: ominous cracks in the sidewalk outside and the walls within, shadowy
corridors that elongate and erupt with groping hands, a rotting rabbit carcass
cast aside on some telephone books turned into a haven for flies and, strangest
and spookiest of all, the two huge close-ups of Carol's eye that begin and end
"Repulsion."
"Repulsion" is only superficially a psychological drama. It has far
more in common with the absurdist, fear-filled comedies of then-contemporary
European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Harold Pinter
and the anarchistic dream films of Federico Fellini or Luis Bunuel. But it
feels real as you watch it. In "Repulsion," Polanski scored in his
own dark arena, creating an unforgettable portrait of erotic panic and mounting
insanity. Deneuve's Carol is a character who haunts and fascinates us still.
Together, director and actress fashioned a nightmare in black and white, a
nocturne of dread, an eerie '60s song of fear and desire.
Repulsion
(1965) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
Glenn Erickson, also seen here:
DVD Savant Blu-ray
Review: Repulsion
Director Roman Polanski burst forth onto the international
scene in 1964, adapting instantly to the demands of commercial filmmaking. As
the subject for his first English-language effort he chose grisly psychological
horror. The distributors were Compton-Tekli, an exploitation outfit previously
responsible for pictures like The Yellow Teddy Bears and The Black
Torment. The young director's reputation from Knife in the Water
attracted an unusual mix of top talent. Cameraman Gilbert Taylor was fresh from
Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and the celebrated jazz musician Chico
Hamilton provided the film's nervous music. Hot actress Catherine Deneuve was
signed to star, along with the beautiful Yvonne Furneaux, who outside of France
was still associated most closely with the Hammer horror film The Mummy.
Polanski was perfectly primed to advance the horror genre, which had becomes
mired in repetitive Hammer efforts. The classic era of Eurohorror was coming to
an end as continental filmmakers ran out of ideas for Barbara Steele films.
Polanski's direct competition were American psycho-thrillers derived from
Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 Psycho: Guignol efforts like William Castle's Strait-Jacket
and Robert Aldrich's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. Made on a low
budget but delivering more than its share of pure fright, Polanski's 1965 Repulsion
is a marriage of horror and art film aesthetics. As if announcing his arrival,
Polanski superimposes his credit over an enormous eye, as Hitchcock had done in
Vertigo. The difference is that Polanski's name slides horizontally
across the pupil, evoking surreal memories of Luis Buñuel's Un chien Andalou.
Repulsion centers on the mental breakdown of a beautiful but disturbed
Belgian woman newly arrived in London. Unlike the other psycho thrillers that
explain insanity through Freudian back-stories, Roman Polanski and Gérard Brach's
script looks at madness from the madwoman's own subjective viewpoint. Catherine
Deneuve is the introverted and confused Carole Ledoux, whose psychological
isolation (a prime Polanski theme) reaches crisis proportions when her older
and more worldly sister Hélène (Furneaux) leaves on a romantic holiday with her
boyfriend Michael (Ian Hendry). Neither Hélène nor anyone else is aware that
Carole is severely disturbed. The girl holes up in her Kensington apartment,
terrified of most everything outside. Unfortunately, Carole's shyness is
misinterpreted by Colin (John Fraser), an admirer who'd like to get to know her
better.
Polanski's adept handling of progressive techniques advances Repulsion
into the front ranks of horror. A nervous hand-held camera tracks with Carole
as she walks the same pathways through her neighborhood, trying to ignore the
jeers of sweaty workmen. Polanski puts all of his tools to use in the search of
original ways to express Carole's mania. Extreme close-ups of the wrinkled
faces of the customers in the beauty salon evoke the cruel effects of aging,
which seems a horror in itself. Distorting fisheye lenses express Carole's
paranoia -- the world seems to literally be retreating from her. When Carole's
fears take over completely, Polanski makes use of specially constructed
distorted sets to transform her modest apartment into a mind-bending haunted
mansion.
Without psychology lectures or other explanations, Polanski makes it clear that
Carole's mania is rooted in sexual anxiety. She's repulsed by Michael, and
covers her ears when she hears him making love to her sister in the next room.
But her hallucinations include what might be a wish-fulfillment scenario of
Michael smashing through a barricaded door to rape her. Carole becomes obsessed
with a telltale crack in the ceiling, which she imagines making horrible
cracking noises. She sees the same exact crack in the sidewalk down in the
square, proving that for her, reality is a subjective illusion. The film only
occasionally breaks from this one-on-one identification scheme. For most of the
picture we experience madness from inside the brain of a psychotic: what's the
difference between the rotting carcass of a rabbit, and that of a human being?
Polanski has total command of the audio track as well, a dimension that
couldn't be appreciated on old 16mm non-theatrical prints of Repulsion.
He understands the way that ticking clocks and dripping taps become louder when
one is in a certain psychological state. Carole's psychotic "fever"
is sometimes indicated by uncanny silences. But just when we think that the
director's tricks will all be of the subtle variety, the film will hit us with
a jolting shock image, accompanied by a blast of music guaranteed to startle. Repulsion
synthesizes elegant visions from Cocteau fantasy and Val Lewton horror to chart
Carole's headlong fall into the pit. By the time Polanski resorts to overt
Guignol, we're locked in a horror landscape with rotting corpses and murders by
straight razor.
Polanski avoids horror clichés while revealing his personal visual obsessions.
Carole Ledoux is both beautiful and murderous, yet Repulsion does not
reinforce the conservative genre notion that sexually aware women are evil by
definition. The large chest of drawers blocking the door is a motif that
repeats in various forms in four or five Polanski films. It is easily traced to
the director's short film Two Men and a Wardrobe, but its personal
significance for the director remains obscure.
When all is said and done, Polanski offers a clue to the mystery of the
catatonic Carole with the use of an extreme zoom into a family photo. This
compromise for viewers in need of closure is a major improvement on Hitchcock's
epilogue with the psychiatrist. The big mystery is why Stanley Kubrick would
copy it so lazily for his later The Shining.
Smaller roles in Repulsion go to capable players. Helen Fraser (Billy
Liar) performs a Charlie Chaplin imitation, the only thing in Carole's life
that makes her smile. James Villiers (These Are the Damned) is a pub
friend who unhelpfully encourages Colin to press his affections on Carole. And
unlucky landlord Patrick Wymark has the misfortune to interpret Carole's
behavior as a sexual tease. One of Repulsion's subtle psychic scars is
its image of a baby-doll nightie spattered with flecks of blood.
Roman Polanski moved on to The Fearless Vampire Killers, an affectionate
spoof of Hammer pictures. He then conquered Hollywood in a single bound with
the superior Rosemary's Baby, mainstream horror's next major milestone.
Only much later did he stumble with The Tenant, a far too similar replay
of Repulsion with Polanski himself in the starring role.
Criterion's DVD and Blu-ray of Repulsion
is a terrific transfer of this carefully filmed widescreen horror / art
attraction. As with George Franju's Eyes without a Face, visual texture
is everything. Gilbert Taylor's B&W cinematography is particularly
fascinating when dwelling on the wrinkled faces of Carole's clients, and
finding reflections in shiny objects.
Producer Karen Stetler organizes a satisfying set of extras, all of which
center on the exceedingly talented director. The new disk reuses the excellent
Polanski - Catherine Deneuve commentary track from Criterion's 1994 laserdisc
release. David Gregory's 2003 docu A British Horror Film is an
illuminating, professional interview piece with Polanski, Taylor and producer
Gene Gutowski, first seen on a Region 2 Blue Underground release.
Interesting snippets of behind-the-scenes footage from Repulsion are
featured in a fine French TV show directed by Claude Chabrol. Showing a fully
developed instinct for promotion, Polanski offers intelligent comments while
making certain that his two beautiful actresses are showcased "for the TV
people". Topping off the extras is a pair of original exploitation
trailers that nevertheless reveal the film as quality goods. The insert essay
by Bill Horrigan Repulsion is understandingly admiring of one of the
best horror pictures ever made.
Critic Ivan Butler long ago offered an acute analysis of Repulsion *
that illuminates the psychological significance of a bit of business with Ian
Hendry at the film's conclusion. Stunned by the horrors he finds in Carole's
apartment, Michael encounters a particularly intolerable sight in her bathtub.
He recoils in disgust and is about to beat a hasty retreat. But he changes his
mind, steels himself and turns back, leaning in close to get a better look.
It's a mature horror film moment. Some things must be faced and understood, to
prevent them from becoming unending nightmares.
Repulsion Criterion essay by Michael Sragow, January 7, 1991
Repulsion: Eye of the Storm Criterion essay by Bill Horrigan, July 28, 2009
PRESS NOTES: REPULSION Criterion comments, August 6, 2009
Repulsion (1965) - The Criterion Collection
Kinoeye | Roman Polanski,
The Pianist & the victim's double vision From
the Eye to the Hand, by Gordana P
Crnković from Kinoeye,
The Eye Boundary: Repulsion • Senses of Cinema Didier Truffot, April 22, 2004
Repulsion - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Peter Hutchings from Film Reference
Sunset Gun: Erotic Rotting Rabbit: Repulsion Kim Morgan from Sunset Gun, March 13, 2009
Sunset Gun: Rage, Roman and Repulsion Kim Morgan with an updated intro from Sunset Gun, September 29, 2009, also seen at The Huffington Post, September 27, 2009, here: Kim Morgan: Roman Polanski Understands Women: Repulsion
Building a Better Bomb: The Alternatives to Suspense Peter Gelderblom from The House Next Door, January 7, 2005
Cinematic Vocabulary – The Psychotic Break from Repulsion (1965 ... April 6, 2009
not coming to a theater near you (Ian Johnston) review
Repulsion
- TCM.com Stephanie Zacharek
PopMatters (Matt Mazur) review
A Bell Jar Etude – IFC Michael Atkinson, July 28, 2009
Catherine
the Great | Village Voice
Michael Atkinson, April 4, 2006
The House Next Door [Dan Callahan]
Roman
Polanski BFI Retrospective – Repulsion (1965) Simon Columb from The Flickering Myth
Roman
Polanski BFI Retrospective – Projections: A Psychoanalysis of Polanski’s
‘Apartment’ Trilogy Simon
Columb from The Flickering Myth
DVD Times Anthony Nield
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [5/5] Richard Scheib
The New York Sun (Nicolas Rapold) review
filmcritic.com (Rob Vaux) review [5/5]
Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [4.5/5]
British Horror Films (Chris Wood) review
BFI Screenonline: Repulsion (1965) Michael Brooke
DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [4/5] [Criterion Collection] also seen here: Criterion Confessions
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/4] Criterion Collection
DVD Verdict (Tom Becker) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
DVD Talk (Stuart Galbraith IV) dvd review [5/5] [Blu-Ray Version] [Criterion Collection]
High-Def Digest - Blu-ray Review [Joshua Zyber]
DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Verdict (Gordon Sullivan) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] [Criterion Collection]
Horror Digital - Blu-ray Review [Rhett Miller]
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo, Criterion Collection Blu-Ray
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [A]
Notes of a Film Fanatic [Mat Viola]
The World's Greatest Critic [J.C. Maçek III]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
The Spinning Image (Andrew Pragasam) review
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [74/100]
Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
MSN Entertainment [Sean Axmaker]
Classic Horror review Nate Yapp
Moderns and Classics Movie Reviews [Brian Bell]
Mondo Digital also reviewing KNIFE IN THE WATER
Repulsion Criterion Forum discussion group, April 18, 2006
Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [A] Chris Nashawaty
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]
BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) dvd review
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4.5/5]
San Francisco Examiner (Barbara Shulgasser) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
A Woman Repulsed, a Man Convulsed Dave Kehr from The New York Times, July 22, 2009
DVDBeaver.com Blu-ray review [Gary W. Tooze]
CUL-DE-SAC
aka: Blind Alley
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Shot through with the same surreal, absurdist wit as Polanski's shorts, this bizarre variation on a classic theme - a couple who have withdrawn from the world (Pleasence and Dorléac) to live on an isolated island are visited by gangsters on the run (Stander and MacGowran) - centres around the director's abiding concerns: sexual perversity, insecurity and humiliation, the eruption of nightmarish chaos into a seemingly ordered world, human betrayal, corruptibility and self-destruction. If the subject matter is bleak and bitterly serious, the tone throughout is darkly comic, while the precise imagery effortlessly conveys the tension, the claustrophobia, and the madness of the situation.
The Chicago Reader: Jonathan Rosenbaum
Roman Polanski's second British film (Repulsion was the
first) is a mean little absurdist comedy (1966) set on a remote Northumberland
island; it's also one of the best and purest of all his works. An odd couple (Donald
Pleasence and Francoise Dorleac) living in an isolated castle find their world
invaded by two doomed gangsters on the run (Lionel Stander and Jack MacGowran),
and the ensuing standoffs are funny, cruel, disquieting, and unpredictable,
especially after various other unwelcome guests turn up. Stander is especially
good--this may be the definitive performance of the blacklisted gravel-voiced
character actor, best known for his 30s and 40s work. With Robert Dorning and
Iain Quarrier; watch for Jacqueline Bisset as one of the guests.
Edinburgh U Film Society (Matthew Bull) review
A couple (Pleasance and Dorleac) retreat from the world by living on an isolated island. Their peace is shattered, however, by two gangsters on the run...
In many respects, Cul-de-Sac resembles the brilliant Death and the Maiden, Polanski's most recent film. Most of Polanski's films bear marks of his main themes - sexual perversity, humiliation, and fear (nowhere better analysed than in Repulsion), corruption, the cracking of the thin veneer of normality which hides the seething chaos beneath, and his knife theme which appears in all his films to some extent But they seem to be realised in similar ways in Death and the Maiden and Cul-de-Sac. The same notion of claustrophobic isolation prevails in both, while the sense of tension and uneasiness is skilfully captured.
Cul-de-Sac is a dark and powerfully pessimistic work, yet one which retains a sense of surreal wit and very black humour. Perhaps not Polanski's best, but still very watchable.
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review
[9/10]
Polanski’s comedy of (very bad) manners shows life a series
of scenic, absurdist jokes. And the butt of most of them is the hapless George
(Donald Pleasence), a nervy, well-spoken former businessman who sold his
factory, left his wife Agnes and retreated from modern life by buying the
castle on
Cul-de-Sac can be interpreted on countless different levels, packed as it is with clues, signs and creative ambiguities. Polanski and his screenwriting collaborator Gerard Brach endow their simple story with the quality of a fable, one populated by a range of characters who are all at least mildly stylised. The dazzlingly precise use of language (no film has so much terrific dialogue) dramatises how the film’s situations rely on the interplay of people differentiated by nationality (George is very English, his wife very French, Dickie American, Albie Irish) and by class.
The aggressively unsophisticated Dickie takes particular pleasure in mocking George’s airs and graces: “Oh I see – his lordship wishes to split hairs? Quit gabbin!” Theresa – whose own past and motivations are, at the very least, suspect – may sound chic, but her vocabulary is full of British working-class slang: during the film’s classic ‘Felix Bee’ exchange, Dickie’s claim to have “borrowed” his getaway car is greeted with a derisory “Borrowed? My arse!” from the demure Theresa.
We also soon realise that George, for all his cut-glass vowels, isn’t quite what he appears – when his snooty neighbours come a-calling, he’s as unnerved by his social inferiority and his general cuckold’s insecurities (alongside the silky-suave William Franklyn, especially) as he is by “servant” Dickie’s glowering presence. It’s no surprise that, in the film’s final shot, the one-time King of the Castle has seen his dominion reduced from an island to a sea-lapped sand-dune. “Agnes!” he cries – one of the film’s many key references to prominent characters who are no less vivid for the fact that they never actually appear on-screen.
There’s Albie’s late wife Doris (who can’t have been much to look at, as the delirious Albie thinks he’s seeing her again when he glimpses George in garish make-up and drag), plus the enigmatic Katelbach – a truly Beckettian non-presence as Dickie and Albie’s capo: not for nothing was this film called ‘When Katelbach Comes’ in Germany. “He doesn’t love us any more,” opines Albie on his deathbed, and the boss’s final message to Dickie: “You’re on your own, count me out” confirms Katelbach as the harsh God of Cul-de-Sac’s world, abandoning mankind to his own devices. Polanski’s triumph is to present this existential despair in terms of comedy – life as a cosmic prank at our expense.
“I lost it,” wails Albie, staring up at the night sky. “What have you lost?” asks Dickie urgently. “The Little Bear. I can’t find it any more.”
Cul-de-Sac • Senses of Cinema Christopher Weedman, February 8, 2005
Sunset Gun: Kim Morgan March 07, 2016
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4]
BFI Screenonline: Cul-de-Sac (1966) Michael Brooke
Roman
Polanski BFI Retrospective – Cul-de-sac (1966) Simon Columb from The Flickering Myth
Cinema Viewfinder (Tony Dayoub) review
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Horror View (Region 0 PAL) Blackgloves
CinePassion:
Fernando F. Croce
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Mondo Digital The Films of Roman Polanski
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BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) dvd review
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Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
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DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS
aka: Fearless Vampire Killers or: Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck
aka: Dance of the Vampires
Time Out review Tom Milne
Messy vampire spoof-cum-homage to Hammer, which doesn't
really come off on either count. On the other hand, no film can be all bad
which has a screen credit reading 'Fangs by Dr Ludwig von Krankheit'; and
Polanski does pull out some gems, like the very Jewish monster menaced with a
crucifix who cheerfully gloats, 'You got the wrong vampire, girl!' Other pluses
include very attractive sets and Douglas
Slocombe's camerawork, Krzysztof
Komeda's bat-winged musical score, and the marvellous sequence of the great
vampire ball, in which the guests rise from their graves to embark on a stately
minuet that ends in front of a vast mirror reflecting only the three human
interlopers. With all its faults, an engaging oddity.
Chicago
Reader (capsule) Jonathan Rosenbaum
Subtitled Pardon Me, but Your Teeth Are in My Neck, and also known as Dance of the Vampires, Roman Polanski's macabre send-up of the vampire movie (1967, 108 min.) never got a fair shake in this country, because it was originally released in a mutilated and redubbed version that tended to flatten many of the film's eastern European nuances and ironies (if memory serves, a few of the kinkier gags were lopped off as well). A comic duo composed of a bumbling professor (Jack MacGowran) and his awkward assistant (Polanski) go after a family of Transylvanian vampires, and the film amiably runs through all the standbys associated with vampire movies, putting a personal and goofy spin on most of them. Sharon Tate also appears, at her most ravishing.
Edinburgh U Film Society [Keith H.
Brown]
Two incompetent vampire hunters travel through the Transylvanian winter in search of their prey. Arriving at Shagal's inn Professor Abronsius (Jack MacGowran) soon realises that vampires are near - garlic festoons the walls and the locals are strangely reticent when asked if there is a castle nearby. Meanwhile his assistant, Alfred (the director) has taken a keen interest in the innkeeper's pretty daughter, Sara (Sharon Tate). When Count Von Krolock abducts Sara, the "fearless vampire killers" resolve to destroy the vampire and rescue the girl.
Dance of the Vampires is basically an affectionate parody of the Hammer horror films we all know and love from late-night TV. The irony is that Polanski and his co-screenwriter Gerard Brach seemed intuitively to know Hammer horror better than Hammer itself. Not only is Dance of the Vampires a far better horror-comedy than Hammer's own lamentable attempt at self-parody, The Horror of Frankenstein (1970), it also highlights ideas that Hammer would subsequently pick up on in later films. So rather than the professional savant of Dracula (1958) or a dozen other early Hammer films we get Abronsius. His insensitive and ineffectual interventions usually serve only to make matters worse, thereby prefiguring revisionist Hammer savants in the likes of Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (1971). With the likes of Herbert, the openly gay vampire who is interested in Alfred rather than Sara, the sexual deviations implicit in early Hammer films like The Brides of Dracula (1960) and Kiss of the Vampire (1964) are brought out. Hammer would increasingly exploit this in their lesbian vampire' films of the early 1970s.
In common with its models, Dance of the Vampires displays an impressive eye for detail in its production design and features a particularly effective score. Indeed, Krystov Komeda's music has been acclaimed as "the most innovative and haunting score ever devised for a horror movie" by the heavyweight Aurum Film Encyclopedia.
Dance of the Vampires is probably best known today for the wrong reason: Sharon Tate. Tate and Polanski fell in love during the making of the film and were married in 1968. Then in August 1969 the heavily pregnant Tate became the most well-known victim of Charles Manson's murderous cult.
The
Fearless Vampire Killers - TCM.com Jeff
Stafford
When Roman Polanski's horror comedy was first released in the
United States, MGM wanted to make sure everyone knew it was a farce by saddling
it with a longer title - The Fearless Vampire Killers, Or Pardon Me, But
Your Teeth Are in My Neck (1967). The director was less than pleased and he
had reason to be upset. Not only did Martin Ransohoff, the American executive
producer, change the original title from the more eloquent Dance of the
Vampires, he also chopped out 16 minutes of footage, redubbed some of the
actors' voices, and tacked on an opening animated credit sequence which
features the famous MGM lion as a grinning, fanged vampire.
Despite Ransohoff's changes, The Fearless Vampire Killers remains one of
the most visually dazzling and entertaining horror parodies in the history of
the genre. At a glance, the plot appears fairly conventional. A vampire hunter
(Jack MacGowran) and his inept assistant (Roman Polanski) conspire to rescue
the beautiful Sarah (Sharon Tate) from the clutches of the evil Count von
Krolock (Ferdy Mayne), a vampire who has been terrorizing the local village.
Polanski, however, takes the traditional vampire myth and spins some hilarious
new variations on it, like his introduction of both a Jewish vampire (he's
immune to the sign of the cross) and a homosexual bloodsucker into the plot.
Most striking of all is the way Polanski is able to transition smoothly from
knockabout slapstick sequences to scenes that are genuinely dark and disturbing,
like von Krolock's descent through the snow-covered skylight as Sarah takes her
bath.
It was always Polanski's intention to parody the genre in an affectionate
manner and he had very definite ideas about the casting as well. He conceived
the part of Professor Abronsius for Jack MacGowran (they had worked together
previously on Cul-de-Sac, 1966) and envisioned that character as "a
snow-dusted Albert Einstein." The part of Sarah was originally slated for
Jill St. John, but the producer had a "new discovery" he wanted
Polanski to cast in the role - Sharon Tate. The director was doubtful at first
whether she could handle the role, but he soon discovered that Tate was
"more than just stunning to look at." (They fell in love on the set
and married a short time later.)
In his autobiography, Roman, Polanski discusses some of the difficulties
in filming The Fearless Vampire Killers: "Our first month's outdoor
filming became a series of ingenious improvisations, mainly because the
last-minute switch from one location (Austria) to another (Ortisei, an Italian
ski resort in the Dolomites) had left us so little time to revise our shooting
schedules. The fact that we were filming in Italy entailed the employment of a
certain number of Italian technicians, and that, in turn, bred some
international friction. Gene Gutowski (the film's European producer) rightly
suspected that the Italians were robbing us blind.
"One of my minor problems was Terry Downes. I'd hired this young former
middleweight boxer because his face and physique were perfect for Kukol, Count
von Krollock's hunchbacked servant. Terry was one of the gentlest men
imaginable, despite his looks, and his part required no previous acting
experience. He did, however, develop a couple of quirks when drunk. One was to
perform a weird striptease act, the other to vent his hatred of Germans....He
celebrated his first night on location by picking a fight with some German
guests in the hotel bar....from then on, he was never left unsupervised in the
evenings.
"Hans Mollinger acted as stuntman for all the really dangerous scenes. Our
trickiest moment came during the sequence in which Kukol tries to prevent
Abronsius, Alfred, and the inn-keeper's daughter from fleeing the vampire
count's castle. Hans, doubling for Terry Downes, had to grab a coffin and
hurtle down the snow-covered slopes to cut them off at the pass. We made
several takes with Hans using a coffin mounted on runners - the three of us
galloping along in our horse-drawn sleigh, Hans overhauling it on his bizarre
toboggan. The first time he was a little early. I altered the timing slightly
to bring him in closer. On the fourth take I overdid it: Hans shot across our
front, shaving the shaft of the sleigh with his head and only narrowly missing
the horses' hooves. That, needless to say, was the take I used. Roy Stevens and
I played stuntmen, too. I ignored Filmways' s instructions and did all my own
skiing as Alfred."
Despite numerous production headaches, Polanski had a marvelous time making The
Fearless Vampire Killers. His cinematographer, Douglas Slocombe, was quoted
by Ivan Butler in his book, The Cinema of Roman Polanski, as saying,
"I think he (Roman) put more of himself into Dance of the Vampires
than into another film. It brought to light the fairy-tale interest that he
has. One was conscious all along when making the picture of a Central European
background to the story. Very few of the crew could see anything in it - they
thought it old-fashioned nonsense. But I could see this background....I have a
French background myself, and could sense the Central European atmosphere that
surrounds it. The figure of Alfred is very much like Roman himself - a slight
figure, young and a little defenseless - a touch of Kafka. It is very much a
personal statement of his own humour. He used to chuckle all the way
through."
Dance of the Vampires/The Fearless Vampire Killers • Senses of Cinema Darragh O’Donoghue, March 16, 2008
Out
of the Past: Dance of the Vampires - Parallax View Robert C. Cumbow, October 24, 2015, originally published in Movietone News,
July 1974
Alternative
Film Guide [Dan Schneider]
VideoVista
review J.C.
Hartley
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
Movie-Vault.com (Mel Valentin) review [8/10]
Scifilm Review Steve
Classic Horror review Nate Yapp
Dance of the Vampires BFI Screen Online
Xiibaro
Productions (David Perry) review
[3.5/4]
filmcritic.com (Jake Euker) review [3.5/5]
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [2/5] Richard Scheib
Behind the Couch James
The
Fearless Vampire Killers - TCM.com Jeff
Stafford
DVD Verdict (Mitchell Hattaway) dvd review
DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Guido Henkel
dvdfuture.com (Randy Spiros) dvd review
CHUD.com (Casey Robinson) dvd review
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Exclaim! dvd review Graham Duncan
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [55/100]
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [1/4]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDBeaver.com - Full Review [Gregory Meshman]
The Fearless Vampire Killers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I long to see st. judy's comet sparkle in your eyes « A & H Sharon Tate tribute
ROSEMARY’S BABY B+ 91
Fresh from her lurid role in the immensely popular but trashy night time soap opera of Peyton Place (1964 – 1969), Mia Farrow’s fame from her role as the introverted Allison Mackenzie just took off afterwards, where intense interest in her offscreen marriage to Frank Sinatra (thirty years older!!!) became tabloid fodder. But after two years of trying to get out of her contract, she used his clout to finally get released from the show. When she refused to quit her role in ROSEMARY’S BABY to work in his forgettable film THE DETECTIVE (1968), Sinatra served her divorce papers on the set, though years later he did offer to have Woody Allen’s legs broken during their highly contentious divorce where Allen ended up sleeping with and ultimately marrying Farrow’s adopted daughter. All of this is simply background information for the abundantly youthful character she plays in this film, a beautiful wide-eyed innocent who is the picture of joy, but who eventually transforms to an older, more cautiously wiser woman who spits in the face of her husband (John Cassavetes).
Shot in that loopy, early 60’s style, the opening credits have that ultra colorful Hullabaloo TV show look, using light pastels to project a world that is all cheerful and bright. But when Satanic chants can be heard through the walls of their overly spacious New York apartment, followed by a young woman in the building who falls over a balcony to her death, the audience suspects something a little creepy is going on in that building. Made by the director of REPULSION (1965), which features a similar eerie psychological transformation by the stunningly gorgeous Catherine Deneuve who grows delusional when left alone inside an apartment, but here Farrow’s flashback-style delusional dreams slowly become her reality, where she is left alone to contend with and ultimately embrace a hellish nightmare that becomes her life, with no possible way out. This from a man whose wife (Sharon Tate) was stabbed a year later more than a dozen times in a brutal murder by the Charles Manson clan just weeks before she was expected to give birth. Somehow, all the melodramatic hysteria and trauma surrounding Polanski’s real life comes front and center into this movie, where the audience is projecting all that information onto the screen to create their own nightmarish scenarios.
Knowing the salacious appetite of the public, Polanski, to his credit, slows the film down from the outset, showing the happy couple mired in the most mundane details of ordinary life, where they search for a new apartment, begin refurbishings, and meet their new neighbors down the hall, where being sociable starts becoming a chore, especially for Rosemary who finds the continual intrusions draining, especially the extreme familiarity immediately established from wrinkled, overly made up Ruth Gordon, the diminutive elderly neighbor who takes bad taste and being nosy to an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Because of how eerily uncomfortable she makes you feel with each successive appearance, growing more forward over time and more menacing, her role has become iconic. Her husband, meanwhile (Sidney Blackmer), is a smooth talking man of the world, seemingly a perfect gentleman, though both hide under the shroud of normalcy where no one would suspect they were involved with foul play. That Rosemary’s husband would take such an interest in their company is something of a surprise, as it is his love and fidelity that she is counting on, especially when she decides to get pregnant, which they turn into an intimate night alone. But that all changes when Rosemary is drugged, leading into a creepy hallucination sequence where a figment of her imagination that she is being held captive by a coven of naked Satan worshippers becomes stunning real, especially when she is raped by Satan himself, all mysteriously forgotten by the next morning except for the marks left on her body. While this is bizarre enough, Cassavetes takes no interest whatsoever in his wife’s condition, constantly making excuses for his mind being elsewhere, when out of nowhere, an actor with a lead role Cassavetes covets is suddenly struck blind, making the part instantly available for him. His sudden success is staggering, as it matches his indifference to Rosemary who is swooning in a delirium of confusion and forced isolation. Ruth Gordon is behind a gift of jewelry for Rosemary which contains a bizarre and foul smelling root, also a sudden switch in doctors, and an herbal concoction that she is to drink daily. All involved ignore the serious labor pains she undergoes, everyone calmly reminding her that this is “normal.”
Rosemary undergoes a radical shift in her appearance, cutting her long hair to a short pixie cut, which everyone around her immediately finds ugly and a terrible mistake. It’s clear she’s entering new territory, constantly guarded by Gordon or one of her friends, presumably for her health and safety, but all avenues to the outside world are eventually shut leaving Rosemary completely alone. Like Deneuve in REPULSION, Rosemary suffers an internal crisis of anxiety, where she’s tempted by the thought of the conspiring witches from her dreams, but she soon dispels these notions, finding them too incredible. But as Polanski continues to lay out new clues, she is repeatedly lured back to the same suspicions, that literally everyone has been lying to her to cover up dark and insidious practices. How this can happen in the modern era seems incredulous, but Rosemary’s journey only grows more deliriously feverish as she has nowhere to turn, becoming a psychological nightmare with no relief. The pressure on her shoulders is enormous, but she carries this weight with tremendous tact and intelligence, even as she is outnumbered and outmaneuvered. What she discovers is that the nightmare is real, that deception is the reality, that there is nowhere to turn, in short, that she has been deceived in order to deliver the devil’s child. Despite this horrific discovery, it still leaves her few options, as the Satanists eventually reveal themselves for what they are, and her husband for the dolt that he is for making a deal with the devil, and they have taken root in her building where she is perched near the top like a bird in a nest, only without the needed wings to fly away. She remains doomed to a life of unending torment, controlled by the powers that be, where the idea of motherhood in captivity becomes synonymous with David Lynch’s creepy industrialized black & white vision of parenthood in ERASERHEAD (1976).
Ernest Hardy from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
When a gaunt, hollow-eyed Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow)
exclaims with relief, “It’s alive,” about a third of the way into the film, the
baby growing in her womb finally kicking, her insides before that eerily still,
her husband Guy (John Cassavetes) recoils in horror touching her belly. In her
excitement, Rosemary doesn’t notice his response. Even more important, she
quells both her better instincts and her growing suspicion that her husband,
their new apartment and neighbors, and even her pregnancy are all somehow
mysteriously and darkly linked. In doing so, she stays the course for what it,
arguably, one of the finest horror films ever made.
Crystallized in that one scene are many of the familiar and
defining concerns of director Roman Polanski—betrayal, corruption, the
boundaries of sanity, and the “mysteries” of women. Polanski’s magnificent
weaving together of these elements elevates the mildly pulpy source (Ira
Levin’s hugely successful novel) into a cinematic classic. Time has done
nothing to diminish the film’s taut, focused, building sense of dread, and
familiarity with the movie only keeps one that much more in awe of Polanski’s
detail, his rhythm and pacing, his skill with his actors, and the fine script
he adapted for the screen. Revisiting the film uncovers humor that is sly and
intentional. The casting of the now iconic Cassavetes—an ever-glowing symbol of
the pure artist in life at the time—playing a man who has sold his soul to the
devil for show-biz success. The humor that has been layered on over the years
and after the fact; Mia Farrow’s desperation to be a mother now inspires uneasy
giggles in its own right, thanks to her midlife tabloid travails.
Scenes and characters from Rosemary’s Baby are etched into memory: Farrow hunched over a
kitchen sink, her mouth bloody as she gnaws raw animal flesh, catching herself
in shock; the dreamscape rape/consummation of Rosemary far more unsettling for
what is suggested than actually shown; Ruth Gordon’s dithering senior citizen
slowly evolving into something much more sinister; Rosemary, near the film’s
end, entering the gathering of the tribe with a knife, desperate to see the
baby that she’s been told is dead. Still, it isn’t only the Satanic aspect of
the film that makes your skin crawl. Predicated on the abuse of marital trust,
on the idea that the security of family and friends might all be an illusion, a
force to be used against rather than for you, Rosemary’s Baby taps into visceral fears. We can’t really know the
people around us. We can’t trust anyone, not even ourselves. There is no sure
protection. Polanski’s masterful manipulation of these existential fears gives
the film its power. And who among viewers can help but feel that Rosemary is
their proxy as she watches the good people around her fall dead or ill, all
while discovering just how pervasive the evil is around her?
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
A supremely intelligent and convincing adaptation of Ira
Levin's Satanist thriller. About a woman who believes herself impregnated by
the Devil (in the guise of her husband), its main strength comes from
Polanski's refusal to simplify matters: ambiguity is constant, in that we are
never sure whether Farrow's paranoia about a witches' coven is grounded in
reality or a figment of her frustrated imagination. Sexual politics, urban
alienation, and a deeply pessimistic view of human interaction permeate the
film, directed with a slow, careful build-up of pace and a precise sense of
visual composition. Although it manages to be frightening, there is little gore
or explicit violence; instead, what disturbs is the blurring of reality and
nightmare, and the way Farrow is slowly transformed from a healthy,
happily-married wife to a haunted, desperately confused shadow of her former
self. Great performances, too, and a marvellously melancholy score by Krzysztof
Komeda.
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam
Adams]
The disappointment of The Exorcist’
re-release only makes the virtues of Roman Polanski’s 1968 chiller stand out
all the more. Unlike William Friedkin’s ponderousness, Roman Polanski’s
languorous pacing has a purpose. It’s doubtful anyone (in the audience) doesn’t
know that Rosemary’s nosy neighbors are Satanists, or that her husband (John
Cassavetes) has made a deal with the devil, but waiting for the penny to drop
is actually pleasurable; every few minutes, another tiny clue falls into our
lap, and Polanski has his finger so squarely on the audience’s pulse that he
knows just how long he can make us wait until the next one. Ruth Gordon won an
Oscar for her performance as Rosemary’s devil-worshipping neighbor, and it’s
almost astonishing to realize how little her character changes once we realize
that she’s in league with the Antichrist; rather than throwing off a cloak and
baring her teeth, she still looks like the pain-in-the-ass woman next door,
even when she’s yelling "Hail Satan!" It’s a masterful choice, and
one you can hardly imagine an actor making (or being allowed to make) today.
Rosemary's Baby Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York
Nothing in Rosemary's Baby is quite as terrifying as the pixie haircut Mia Farrow inexplicably adopts midway through the movie—I don't imagine Cassavetes had to rely on sense memory to produce a shudder of revulsion—but the film remains singularly creepy all the same, a magnificent exercise in escalating unease. Polanski's poker-faced adaptation of Ira Levin's neo-Gothic best-seller bathes Farrow's beaming expectant mum in soothing yellows, then ever so gradually turns jaundiced. Granted, Rosemary's hallucinogenic tryst with the devil resembles a Woody Allen parody of a Bergman dream sequence, but the movie achieves the bulk of its unsettling power from scenes of humdrum domestic discord, thanks in large part to Cassavetes's smugly self-satisfied performance. A frustrated artist playing a frustrated hack, the actor seems terminally distracted, as if expecting his agent to appear on the set at any moment with a better offer. His callous indifference, whether intentional or fortuitous, is far scarier than the prospect of an infant with little horns and cloven hooves.
Given the general absence of overt ooga-booga and the emphasis on Rosemary's enforced isolation (old friends dismissed, trips outside the apartment discouraged, books confiscated), it's tempting to read the witchcraft angle as a pointed allegory for emotional abuse. (Levin's The Stepford Wives was unquestionably meant as a coded attack on men's fear of women's lib.) In any case, Rosemary's descent into madness, though not as viscerally gripping as Catherine Deneuve's in Repulsion, serves as a welcome reminder that Polanski is at his best when evoking subtle, insidious terror, as opposed to the rote victimization that pervades his latest prize-winning effort, The Pianist. Anybody can create a "powerful" scene from Nazis tossing elderly men off high balconies. A director who can make us turn pale at the entrance of Ralph Bellamy's avuncular obstetrician is considerably more valuable.
March 13 Mark Harris from Patrick Murtha’s Diary,
March 13, 2010
There are
plots against people, aren't there?
I watched Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby over the past couple of
nights -- somehow I had missed seeing it before. It is very skillfully done,
but I think Danny Peary is right to call it "really an ugly film."
Rosemary's ordeal is so private, help is so lacking or thwarted, that the movie
is a truly paranoid, claustrophobic experience -- watching it is like being
smothered with a pillow. The Exorcist is as atmospheric and scary, and
has ugly dimensions, too, yet it's not quite so utterly hopeless; there are
people who care, and there are things they can do (including give up their
lives). The devil is routed at the end of The Exorcist, at least
temporarily; at the end of Rosemary's Baby, his dominion is just
beginning.
The movie looks backward and forward in interesting ways -- backward to Val Lewton's and Mark Robson's The Seventh
Victim with its Greenwich Village satanists; forward not just to a slew of
"spooky children" films but also to Alan J. Pakula's famous paranoid films of the
Seventies (Klute, The Parallax
View, All the President's Men, Rollover), for which it
practically provides a template. In Pakula's
universe as in Polanski's, you are being watched by many sets of eyes, almost
no one you encounter can be trusted, and people who might help or at least tell
you something are silenced or killed. This all looks back to the JFK
assassination, of course, and although the connection of the Pakula films to paranoid politics is rather
obvious, the connection of Rosemary's Baby to politics is no less
strong. Those closest to you will sell their souls and sacrifice you in order
to get ahead, and will enlist others (or be enlisted by them, it almost makes
no difference). "There are
plots against people, aren't there?" Rosemary helplessly asks one of her
doctors; it is a post-1963 question (Ira Levin's novel came out in 1967, the
movie in 1968).
One other small note on the film: William Castle produced (originally he wanted
to direct), and his cameo appearance is not only funny as heck, but brilliantly
staged. It's a great moment for buffs.
Rosemary's Baby - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Ralph Anthony Valdez from Film Reference
Based on Ira Levin's 1967 best-selling novel of the same name, Rosemary's Baby , in Roman Polanski's hands becomes a multi-layered, seminal horror film that exposes collective subconscious fears and cultural anxieties. Satanism and motherhood are only the obvious starting points of inquiry for Polanski, whose body of work includes complex psychological studies such as Knife In The Water (1962), Repulsion (1965), Cul De Sac (1966), Chinatown (1974), and The Tenant (1976).
Polanski's penchant for inverting and subverting clichés serves him particularly well in telling this story of modern city living juxtaposed against ancient rites of witchcraft and devil worship. The paradoxes, dualities, and contrasts are immediately apparent from the film's title sequence as the camera moves slowly across a bright, contemporary New York city skyline, finally coming to rest on an ominous and dark building of old-world style and construction. The ancient looking apartment building, so out of time and place, is called the Bramford, and is every bit as much a character in the story as Rosemary's baby itself. Though working from his own screenplay, Polanski has commented that Rosemary's Baby was "less personal" than other films because it didn't begin as his own project. Yet he managed to integrate his themes of paranoia, alienation, identity confusion, and "otherness" so effectively as to make Rosemary's Baby an important work in his oeuvre. The unexpected success of his film adaptation of Levin's book initiated an entire genre of similarly themed "devil/child" horror films, including The Exorcist and The Omen. Rosemary's Baby started a trend in popular movies which succeeded in tapping into a collective subconscious fear of all things Satanic.
A newly wed, self-described "country girl at heart" from America's heartland is drawn unsuspecting, into a possibly occult web of conspiracies when she and her husband move into the Bramford and become entangled in its dark history. Mia Farrow, as first-time mother, Rosemary Woodhouse, gives the character a remarkable childlike frailty coupled with surprising strength, making it easy for the audience to identify with her predicament. Unlike Levin's book, in which the religiosity is clear-cut, Polanski depicts Rosemary's plight as an ongoing balancing act between fearful fantasy and stark reality. In his autobiography, Roman , Polanski explains:
The (Levin) book was an outstandingly well-constructed thriller, and I admired it as such. Being an agnostic, however, I no more believed in Satan as evil incarnate than I believed in a personal God; the whole idea conflicted with my rational view of the world. For credibility's sake, I decided that there would have to be a loophole: the possibility that Rosemary's supernatural experiences were figments of her imagination. The entire story, as seen through her eyes could have been a chain of only superficially sinister coincidences, a product of her feverish fancies.
Using pregnancy as a device—a hormonal, physical change that alters both the mind and the body—Polanski provokes his audience with situations that question the mind/body dichotomy, the nature of good and evil (God and Devil), the instinct for survival, and the ultimate essence of motherhood. These questions give Polanski's treatment of the material an ambiguous, open-ended and surreal edge which he masterfully exploits. The audience is forced to ask, "How can something ancient and unholy exist in this peppy and bright young couple's world?" Rosemary continuously sinks into a nightmare of shadows, symbols, and whispers that keep her—and the audience—questioning her sanity. Did she dream or hallucinate a demonic rape? Could there really be a coven of witches living in the Bramford?
Rosemary's main motivation from the beginning of the film is the desire to have a child, and this propels her into the diabolical plot that seems to be taking shape around her. She even unwittingly offers that she is of "fertile stock" when describing her family to her nosy, elderly, and suspiciously friendly neighbor, Minnie Castevet. Before long, Minnie and her husband—named Roman—have insinuated themselves into the Woodhouse's lives, and especially Rosemary's pregnancy. As the joy of her pregnancy slowly turns to fear, we begin to understand what an outsider Rosemary has been all along. In a sense, she is a double outsider and this provides Polanski with the essentials for a protagonist with which he can readily identify. Transplanted from Omaha, Nebraska, Rosemary is not nearly as worldly or cosmopolitan as her new husband. Guy, a struggling actor from Baltimore, is completely at home in the big city, while Rosemary merely attempts to adapt. Secondly, Rosemary is an outsider in the mysterious Bramford. She is naive and open, while the Bramford is sly and full of secrets. She is unlike anyone else in the apartment building, whose tenants all seem to be over fifty. The one woman her age, that she meets in the basement laundry, soon winds up a suicide on the sidewalk.
The feelings of aloneness and alienation that Rosemary is experiencing only escalate with her pregnancy. She is an "Alice" gone "Through the Looking Glass" of her own body. As her body grows, so does her paranoia and her separation from the world she once knew. Rosemary works frantically to put the pieces together and solve the mystery that threatens her life and the life inside her. Polanski wants us to feel her victimization at the hands of everyone she trusts. As viewers, men and women alike are unsettled by the dilemma of this soon-to-be mother. Her peril resonates strongly the mother-child bond that lies deep within us all. After giving birth, Rosemary is told that the baby has died, despite the sounds of an infant crying in the distance. By solidly identifying with Rosemary's manipulation, whether real or imagined, the audience expects a resolution. But, in the end, instead of typical Hollywood cathartic vengeance, we are left with more questions. Did Rosemary have a complete mental breakdown, or did the Devil actually take human form and impregnate an unsuspecting, drugged, Manhattan housewife? The final shot in the film is of Rosemary surrounded by the coven as she feels herself drawn to her crying child. Will she follow an impulse to comfort, or kill the infant? By reintroducing the opening lullaby over a close-up of Rosemary's smiling face, Polanski slyly suggests that only motherhood is real, and a more powerful magic than evil. With the lullaby taking over the scene, the close-up dissolves into an exterior shot of the Bramford and we are back, full circle, where we began.
Rosemary's Baby •
Senses of Cinema Pedro Blas
Gonzalez, March 16, 2008
The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]
Taste Test: Rosemary's Baby (1968) vs. The Exorcist (1973) Joe Valdez from The Distracted Globe, June 17, 2009
MovingPictureHistoryBlog: Rosemary's Baby (1968) Joe Leydon, March 2, 2009
Rosemary's
Baby - TCM.com Jeff Stafford
not coming to a theater near you (Ian Johnston) review
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [5/5] Richard Scheib
VideoVista review Andrew Darlington
Hollywood Gothique Steve Biodrowski, also seen here: Cinefantastique Online
Movieline Magazine review Stephen Farber
Gone to Seed | Village Voice Jessica Winter, January 21, 2003
Rosemary's Baby Turns 40 | Village Voice Tim Grierson, October 29, 2008
Roman
Polanski BFI Retrospective – Projections: A Psychoanalysis of Polanski’s
‘Apartment’ Trilogy Simon
Columb from The Flickering Myth
Classic Horror review Elizabeth Sanderson
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [4/4]
MyReviewer - DVD Review [David Beckett]
DVD Journal DK Holm
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/4]
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Norman Short) dvd review
Audio Revolution (Bill Warren) dvd review
DVD Talk (Geoffrey Kleinman) dvd review [3/5]
DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Mike Long
DVD MovieGuide dvd review Colin Jacobson
What I learned from 'Rosemary's Baby' - The Villager Will McKinley
Rosemary's Baby
(1968) | BFI BFI Screen
Online
Rosemary's Baby previously at Film Forum in New York City Film Forum
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4+/4]
Rosemary's Baby Horrorphile
Viewpoints Chris Jarmick
Apollo Movie Guide [Brian Webster]
Eye for Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [4/5]
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) dvd review
The Celluloid Highway [Shaun Anderson]
Film School Rejects (H. Stewart) dvd review [A] also seen here: Cinepinion [Henry Stewart]
Urban Cinefile dvd review Keith Lofthouse
Rosemary's Baby Review - Horror Movies Bella Online
Movie-Vault.com (Cyrus Banerjee) review [10/10]
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
eFilmCritic.com (Chris Parry) review [5/5]
Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar
Edinburgh U Film Society (Stephen Cox) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Click here Andrew Sarris from The New York Observer
Mondo Digital The Films of Roman Polanski
Rosemary's Baby > Overview - AllMovie Lucia Bozolla
Cathy Whitlock: Rosemary's Baby Revisited Cathy Whitlock from The Huffington Post, October 28, 2009
Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [A-] [Collector's Edition] Mark Harris
There's Nothing to Be Scared About: Ira Levin's Park Pad Sells for ... Chloe Malle from The Observer, January 5, 2010
Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [5/5]
Rosemary's
Baby: No 2 best horror film of all time | Film | The Guardian Anne Billson, October 22, 2010
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (Renata Adler) review June 13, 1968
RUSHES; A Devil of a Marriage, Scarier Than Ever Karen Durbin from The New York Times, January 19, 2003
DVDBeaver.com [Arvid Sollenby]
MACBETH
aka: The Tragedy of Macbeth
Slaughter is the star; Shakespeare's offstage corpses and
murders are added to the onstage ones, and they so dominate the material that
it's difficult to pay attention to the poetry. The director, Roman Polanski,
shows such literal horror-and always a shade faster than you expect, so you're not
prepared-that there is no horror left to imagine. He treats the play not as a
great cautionary nightmare but as an illustration of how power normally changes
hands. The film says that nothing is possible but horror and more horror, and,
at the end, the cycle of bloodletting is about to begin again. It's well-acted,
but it reduces Shakespeare's meanings to the banal "life is a
jungle." With Jon Finch, Francesca Annis, Martin Shaw, Nicholas Selby, and
John Stride. The screenplay is by Polanski and Kenneth Tynan. Playboy
Productions and
The opening shot of a yellow, withering moonscape stretching away to infinity - revealed to be a desolate sea-shore on which the three witches proceed to the ritual burial of a noose, a severed arm and a dagger - effortlessly establishes the cold, barbarous climate of Shakespeare's play. Polanski's imagery, evoking a characteristically cruel, irrational and blood-boltered world, is often magnificently strange and hieratic: the death of the Thane of Cawdor, for instance, hanged by way of a massive iron collar and chain from a high tower in a courtyard ringed by cloaked soldiers; or the almost pagan ritual of Macbeth's coronation, starting with his bare feet stepping into the huge footprints embedded in the sacred stone. The relative weakness is that Polanski's evident desire to elicit understated, naturalistic performances from his cast also underplays the poetry of the play, which as a result never quite spirals into dark, uncontrollable nightmare as the Welles version (for all its faults) does.
Macbeth Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York
Hamlet may be more profound; King Lear more poetic; Romeo
and Juliet more poignant; A Midsummer Night's Dream more, well,
puckish. But none of these—nor any of Shakespeare's other plays, for that
matter—is half so potentially cinematic as is the Bard's exceedingly bloody
portrait of ruinous ambition, Macbeth. A low-budget adaptation by Orson
Welles, circa 1948, and Akira Kurosawa's samurai rendition Throne of Blood (1957)
are the best-known of the many films based on The Play Whose Name Actors Dare
Not Speak, but Roman Polanski's rarely screened, remarkably vivid take on the
material, being dusted off for a week-long run at Film Forum, deserves to be
mentioned in the same breath—which is to say, as one of the greatest
Shakespearean movies ever made.
We all presumably know the storyline
by now: dude meets some witches, who prophesize that he'll be king; dude tells
his wife, who eggs him on to regicide; dude goes berserk, resulting in his
downfall. So let's skip the Cliffs Notes and get directly to what makes
this flick more satisfying than the usual iambic-pentameter fare: Polanski's
superlative direction. Simply put, there isn't a single frame that's less than
stunning to behold. The mud-soaked battleground upon which the action opens
sets the tone for a visceral, spectacularly desolate depiction of greed gone
awry. Macbeth's visit to the witches' coven alone is worth the price of
admission, provided that you don't mind risking weeks of disturbing dreams.
If the movie has a significant flaw, it's that the performances are often
merely adequate. Jon Finch, who'd go on to play the lead in Hitchcock's Frenzy
the following year, does some first-rate panicking and scheming in the title
role, but his weaselly demeanor doesn't exactly suggest the fierce warrior we
hear praised in Act I. Nor is Francesca Annis's Lady Mac one for the ages, even
if she does perform the "Out, damn spot!" scene stark naked. Still,
with Polanski in his prime working behind the lens—he made this baby between Rosemary's
Baby and
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [6/10]
Scotland, the 15th century. Young nobleman Macbeth (Jon Finch) is a loyal warrior in the service of King Duncan (Nicholas Selby). Returning from battle one rainy evening, he encounters a trio of old women who prophesy that he will take over the throne. At home, his ambition is further stoked by the goadings of his wife (Francesca Annis) and, when Duncan pays a visit to their castle, Macbeth murders him and pins the blame on two drunken royal guards. Fearful of coming under suspicion, Duncan’s sons Malcolm (Stephan Chase) and Donalbain (Paul Shelley) flee the country. Macbeth is duly crowned King of Scotland – but things do not run smoothly for the increasingly power-mad monarch…
While one of the more ambitious film versions of Shakespeare, the now rarely-screened Macbeth (a ‘Playboy Production’ funded by Hugh Hefner, of all people) counts among Polanski’s lesser works: certainly not in the same league as Cul-de-Sac (1966), Rosemary’s Baby (1968) or Chinatown (1974). Then again, it’s unfair to be too critical: the director suffered shattering personal tragedy just before filming when his pregnant wife Sharon Tate was murdered by Charles Manson’s “family” during the notorious ‘Tate-LoBianca’ killings of 1969.
Knowing this biographical information makes certain scenes in Macbeth - especially the sequence in which the wife, children and servants of Macduff (Terence Bayler) are slaughtered – very difficult to watch. And it contributes to the ‘dark’ aura that has always been associated ‘the Scottish play.’ In Polanski’s version, this ominous atmosphere is most powerfully felt during the outdoors scenes that make up much of the action, with evocative use made of windswept settings. Oddly, none of these are actually in Scotland itself (everyone speaks with conspicuously English accents): Northumberland and Wales provide the backdrop, with Porthmadog beach a suitably desolate “blasted” site for the opening scene in which the three ‘weird sisters’ perform a grisly, vaguely Masonic low-tide ritual.
Polanski and cinematographer Gil Taylor’s on-location work – augmented by the sparely-used, discordantly eerie score by folkie-improv troupe Third Ear Band – rivals the likes of The Wicker Man (1973) and Witchfinder General (1969) as a depiction of an underpopulated, ruggedly beautiful rural Britain where evil forces have the upper hand. Striking set-pieces include Macbeth’s coronation at Scone in the middle of a very Wicker Man-ish stone circle; a very trippy hallucination scene in the witches’ cave; and the final siege of Macbeth’s castle as “Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane” while a tiny copper sun glows on the distant horizon.
But when the action moves indoors – to sets at Shepperton Studios – much of the air goes out of the production, both literally and metaphorically. The interiors scenes are of the type over-familiar from theatrical and small-screen versions of Shakespeare, and the emphasis is much more on the playwright’s dialogue – some of which may seem opaquely convoluted to modern audiences. This isn’t a complete rendition of the original text, however: the script (by Polanski and theatre-critic Kenneth Tynan) is a skilful condensation, saving time by converting many of the play’s numerous soliloquies into ’silent’ monologues in which we “overhear” the characters’ inner thoughts – often so forceful they spill into audible speech.
These duties are handled with professionalism with a cast that wouldn’t look out of place at the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company, though there are no particular stand-outs (bar perhaps Andrew McCulloch’s cameo as ‘Second Murderer’) and Annis does seem a little young and fragile for the Machiavellian schemings of Lady Macbeth. Then again, the play’s slightly lopsided structure means this pivotal character does fade from the action rather too quickly after Macbeth’s coronation: tumbling into insanity, she leaves Macbeth isolated and easy prey for his own inner demons – stretches in which the pace noticeably flags.
The climactic battle with the vengeance-crazed Macduff is stirring stuff, however: nimbly choreographed by National Theatre fight-arranger William Hobbs and culminating in a satisfyingly grisly – and graphic – demise for the now-despicable Macbeth. Polanski and Tynan then close with an invention of their own, a downbeat, rain-swept, dialogue-free coda in which Donalbain creeps around to the weird sisters’ hideout… Macbeth II, anyone?
Macbeth: Something Wicked Criterion essay by Terrence Rafferty,
September 24, 2014
Macbeth (1971) - The
Criterion Collection
Macbeth • Senses of Cinema Martyn Bamber, March 16, 2008
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
Teleport City Cinematics (Keith Allison) review
British Horror Films (Chris Wood) review
Hollywood Gothique Steve Biodrowski
Not
Coming to a Theater Near You: Leo Goldsmith
BFI Screenonline: Macbeth On Screen Michael Brooke
BFI
Review – Macbeth (1971) Simon
Columb from The Flickering Myth
Brooklyn Magazine: Jaime N. Christley January 13, 2016
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]
filmcritic.com (Jeremiah Kipp) review [3.5/5]
Horrorview Suicide Blonde
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review
KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review
Macbeth Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Svet Atanasov
Criterion
Blu-ray review: Polanski's Macbeth (1971) | Cagey Films Kenneth George Godwin
Macbeth (1971)
Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest
Stevn Cohen
Macbeth | 1971 | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Jake Cole
Macbeth: The Criterion
Collection (1971) (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review ... Thomas Spurlin
REVIEW:
POLANSKI'S "MACBETH" (1971), CRITERION BLU-RAY ... Raymond Benson from Cinema Retro
Cinepassion:
Fernando F. Croce
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
Edinburgh U Film Society (Stephen Townsend) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Mondo Digital The Films of Roman Polanski
Jeonju 2016
film festival review • Senses of Cinema Marc Raymond, September 14, 2016
Brooklyn Magazine: Max Kyburz January 20, 2016
The Chicago Reader: Dave Kehr capsule
The Boston Phoenix (Jeffrey Gantz) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
DVDBeaver dvd review Gregory Meshman
WHAT?
aka: Che
aka: Diary of Forbidden Dreams
Italy France Germany (114 mi) 1972
Polanski takes American innocence (Sydne Rome) abroad to Italy, and places her in the middle of a droll and inconsequential sex (or perversion) comedy. What lifts the film out of its one-joke level is Polanski's civilised handling of his material. Avoiding obvious laughs, he opts for a mixture of satire and comedy of embarrassment (as our heroine finds herself more and more preyed and pryed upon), with everyone playing games where only you don't know the rules. All suitably throwaway, it's held together by our own curiosity and Polanski's obvious delight in observing such strange goings-on in rich summer villas.
What? BFI Screen Online (link lost)
Polanski's most obscure film was made quickly and cheaply shortly after completing Macbeth. Set in a sprawling Mediterranean villa (owned in real life by producer Carlo Ponti), accessible only by birdcage-shaped cable car, ingenuous American hitch-hiker Nancy (Sydne Rome) encounters jaded millionaire Joseph Noblart (Hugh Griffith) and his nephew Alex (Marcello Mastroianni), a former pimp.
While waiting for an afternoon assignation with the latter, Nancy meets the villa's other equally peculiar residents and discovers a whole gamut of obsessions ranging from lesbianism to the fetishising of harpoon guns to a desire to paint one of her legs blue. At her rendezvous with the impotent, possibly gay Alex, Nancy turns him on to sado-masochism in a relationship that recalls George and Teresa's in Cul-de-sac.
There's a strong hint of both Lewis Carroll and Luis Buñuel in its presentation of a mad world where conventional rules have been upended, and some of it is very funny, especially when Polanski falls back on familiar comedy-of-embarrassment staples.
Che?
(1973) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
Glenn Erickson
After the personal tragedy suffered by Roman Polanski in
1969, the director's next two films would seem to document the extremes of his
life experience. His 1971 Macbeth was a literal bloodbath that brought
all of Shakespeare's off-stage slaughter front and center before the camera.
Reviews couldn't help but theorize that Polanski was exorcising his violent
demons -- or indulging them.
Polanski's next film, produced by Carlo Ponti and set in sunny
It takes this nubile Little Girl Lost a couple of days to realize that the
villa is owned by the aged Joseph Noblart (Hugh Griffith), a shut-in attended
by a German nurse while his hedonistic offspring indulge their various
eccentricities. Two cheerful sons live upstairs. One cooks while the other
engages in constant sex with a female we never get a clear look at. Mosquito
(Roman Polanski), an odd fellow with an unclear relationship to the household,
sleeps in a hammock and pulls practical jokes on the other two. Meanwhile,
various hangers-on wander through the villa, showing up for the pleasant meals
served on the ocean-view porch: a disapproving priest (Guido Alberti), a
statuesque French nudist and her companion, and various non-communicative
workmen. Without provocation, a painter paints one of
What? is billed as a comedy but proceeds like a half-dreamed nightmare,
sort of Kafka-lite with a heavy dose of eroticism (but no on-screen sex per
se). Roman Polanski's notion of comedy has always been more of an uneasy
affinity for the absurd. His film school shorts from
What? surprises us with completely unexpected developments, and if
laughter results, it's likely to be a residual side effect. When that crazy
painter slaps a broad blue stripe down the back of Nancy's naked leg, it's
really one more mini-tragedy -- she's just lost her pants to some practical
joker and has been wandering around the house practically nude for two days.
The funniest bits are just throwaways. An ancient, senile housekeeper just
stares when
The movie encourages creative interpretation. The private cable car is the
equivalent of
What? is airy, light and maddeningly illogical, with the sunny villa
being as anti-Gothic a location as one could imagine. Nothing makes sense to
Nancy, especially not Alex. Marcello Mastroianni plays him as a somewhat
infantile, aristocratic slacker. Wide-eyed Sydne Rome, with her curly hair and
unavoidable body, transcends expectations with her easygoing acceptance of the
insanity around her. The part was described during casting as "Little
Annie Fannie" but
Severin's PAL Region 2 DVD of What? -- not playable in standard American
DVD machines -- is a fine enhanced transfer of one of Roman Polanski's
hardest-to-see features. Colors are excellent, from Sydne Rome's pallid blue
eyes to the rich interiors of the dream-villa where the film is set. The clear
audio track is predominantly in English, with occasional Italian we aren't
meant to understand. The source picture element is an Italian original, as
brief inserts of
Severin's DVD shows the difference between an indifferent Public Domain disc
and one properly licensed from rights holders and given a quality presentation.
Besides the spotless transfer (which appears to be HD originated and free of
PAL's usual 4% speed-up), the menus are attractively designed to mimic
Disc producer David Gregory also provides interviews with composer Claudio
Gizzi and cinematographer Marcello Gatti (The Battle of Algiers, Queimada!).
We're told that the villa in the film is decorated with art masterpieces from
the collection of producer Carlo Ponti. He'd deliver the paintings in the
morning, and then take them home every night after filming wrapped!
Review: Diary of Forbidden
Dreams (aka What?) Robert C. Cumbow
from Parallax View, February 24,
2010, originally in Movietone News,
December 1979
Tuesday
Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "What ... - Mubi Glenn Kenny, November 10, 2009
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
10kbullets - Italian DVD review Michael Den Boer
10kbullets - UK DVD review Christopher O’Neill
Mondo Digital The Films of Roman Polanski
User
reviews from imdb Author: david melville
(dwingrove@qmuc.ac.uk) from
User reviews from imdb Author: MisterWhiplash from United States
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [0.5/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
CHINATOWN
The hard-boiled private eye coolly strolls a few steps ahead
of the audience. The slapstick detective gets everything wrong and then
pratfalls first over the finish line anyway. Jake Gittes (Jack
Nicholson) is neither - instead he's a hard-boiled private eye who gets
everything wrong. Jake snaps tabloid-ready photos of an adulterous love nest
that's no such thing. He spies a distressed young woman through a window and
mistakes her for a hostage. He finds bifocals in a pond and calls them Exhibit
A of marital murder, only the glasses don't belong to the victim and the wife
hasn't killed anyone. Yet when he confronts ostensible black widow Evelyn
Mulwray (Dunaway) with the spectacular evidence, the cigarette between his
teeth lends his voice an authoritative Bogie hiss. Throughout, Gittes sexes up
mediocre snooping with blithe arrogance and sarcastic machismo. It's the
actor's default mode, sure, but in 1974 it hadn't yet calcified into
Schtickolson, and in 1974 a director (Polanski), a screenwriter (Towne) and a
producer (Evans) could decide to beat a genre senseless and dump it in the
wilds of Greek tragedy. 'You see, Mr Gits,' depravity incarnate Noah
Cross (Huston) famously explains, 'most people never have to face the fact
that, at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything.' As
is Chinatown. The last gunshot here is the sound of the gate slamming on
the Paramount lot of Evans' halcyon reign, and as the camera rears back to
catch Jake's expression, the dolly lists and shivers - an almost imperceptible
sob of grief and recognition, but not a tear is shed.
Set in the 30s, this nostalgic thriller, in the style of Hammett and Chandler, draws on the history of Los Angeles, specifically the water-rights and real-estate swindles. You can feel the conflict between the temperaments of the scriptwriter, Robert Towne, and the director, Roman Polanski. In Towne's conception, the audience discovers the depth of the corruption along with the romantic-damn-fool detective J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson). Polanski, whose movies don't leave you anything to hang on to, turns the material into an extension of his world view: he makes the LA atmosphere gothic and creepy from the word go. The film holds you, in a suffocating way. Polanski never lets the story tell itself. It's all overdeliberate, mauve, nightmarish; everyone is yellow-lacquered, and evil runs rampant. You don't care who is hurt, since everything is blighted. And yet the nastiness has a look, and a fascination. There's a celebrated background story to the film. The script had originally ended after Gittes realizes what horrors the woman he loved, the twitchy liar Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), had been through. And then she kills her incestuous, baronial father (John Huston) in order to save her daughter from him, and Gittes helps the young girl get to Mexico. But Polanski, an absurdist, seals the picture with his gargoyle grin. He ends it with the death of Evelyn Mulwray and the triumph of the Huston character, who had raped the land, raped his daughter, and would now proceed to corrupt the daughter's daughter. Polanski's temperament dominates (and he seems indifferent to some of the plot points). Yet Towne's temperament comes through, too, especially in Nicholson's Jake Gittes, the vulgarian hero who gives the picture much of its comedy: Gittes gets to tell wittily inane, backslapping jokes, and to show the romanticism inside his street shrewdness. With Polanski as the vicious "midget" hood who takes his knife and slits open Gittes' nose, Burt Young as the man looking at pictures of his faithless wife, John Hillerman, Perry Lopez, Joe Mantell, and Diane Ladd. Cinematography by John A. Alonzo; production design by Richard Sylbert; editing by Sam O'Steen; music by Jerry Goldsmith. (A sequel, THE TWO JAKES, was released in 1990.) Robert Evans produced, for Paramount.
Movie-Vault.com (Vadim Rizov) review [10/10]
Although
Prolific script doctor and uneven director Robert Towne had the second big
triumph of his career with this film, following the previous year's The Last
Detail, which also starred Jack Nicholson, who'd directed 1971's Drive, He
Said, which Towne had polished. Previously Towne had written some Corman films and
polished, among other things, Bonnie And Clyde. Nobody could have predicted the
complexity of this film from a man with that pedigree. Although it makes sense
when you're watching it, you realize later that all sorts of things about the
film's central mystery are confusing you - things that are, really, totally
irrelevent. The film was also the triumphant debut of Bob Evans as producer,
having just left as head of
Trivia aside:
Slant Magazine review Jeremiah Kipp
The dialogue by Robert Towne has become part of the pop
lexicon, "Forget it, Jake—it's Chinatown!" a catch phrase for being
in over your head, or for hurting the one you were trying to help. One of those
classic American movies from the 1970s, when studios were churning out themes
instead of properties for theme parks,
This heavy material is handled with a light cinematic touch by director Roman
Polanski. With no stylistic affectations, no deep shadows or German
Expressionistic camera placements, all of the elements of the crime story are
instead brought out into the sunlight. Scenes are often filmed at Jake's eye
level, placing the audience at a similar vantage point to his as he untangles
the various lies and scandals. Polanski doesn't shy away from throwing the
violence right in our faces, direct and immediate. When Jake gets his nose
sliced open by a thug (played by Polanski himself, smirking all the while) the
camera doesn't flinch, and less than a minute later we see a full-on close-up
of Nicholson the movie star with his nose crisscrossed by a white bandage.
There's also an eccentric sensuality that runs through the film, with the
characters getting turned on by strangeness. This cuts both ways, since the
central discovery about Evelyn is both illicit and amoral. But that's what
gives the film its staying power—not just the shock of discovering those
peculiar depths of humankind, but that slight intangible thrill of moving
toward it. "There's something black in the green part of your eye,"
says Jake, right before he kisses Evelyn for the first time. She completes
their odd seduction by referring to it as a flaw in the iris. While her
revelation has become almost a joke in movie culture, with Nicholson slapping
the truth out of Dunaway, her performance reaching the heights of hysteria, the
moment retains its power in context. It's forceful because in addition to the
sick hunger of the villains, there's also Jake's hunger to understand.
All of the scenes involving Jake rifling through newspapers and visiting
offices, hat in hand, attending meetings and interviews with clients and cops,
ground
eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley) review [5/5]
Any film critic, amateur or otherwise, will probably tell you
that the hardest films to review are the average films, or those that are
neither particularly good or bad. The films that suck considerably, they're the
easy ones, as any critic can unleash an avalanche of hate upon them. But then,
at the absolute other end of the scale, is a film like '
Seriously, if someone came up to me today and said "So
what's so great about Chinatown?", my answer would be
"Everything".
Because it's true, everything is great about 'Chinatown'. The acting,
the direction, the editing, the cinematography, the music, the script, the
production design...flawless, each and every one. Okay?
Oh, alright then, I'll put some more meat on the bones. 1930's LA and Jake
Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is a private eye, making a comfortable living
investigating adultery and cheating partners. When he's hired by Evelyn Mulwray
(Fay Dunaway) he thinks it's another bread and butter case. But, as plans to
construct a new dam to ease the city-wide drought begin to get involved in the
case, bodies start to mount up, and more and more questions need to be
answered, Jake discovers that this case is going to take him into a place far
darker and nastier than anywhere else he's ever been.
What's immediately interesting about 'Chinatown' is that this is a 30's private
eye flick, shot through with a 70's sensibility. By the 1970's Vietnam had
disillusioned the entire nation, and suddenly you didn't know who to trust.
Paranoid thrillers like 'The Manchurian Candidate' and 'The Parallax View'
found a receptive audience, and now 'Chinatown' showed that even in the past
nothing was as it seemed. Polanksi floods the film, in bright, unceasing
sunlight, but this is far from a sunny, picturesque, cinematic view of an age
where everything was more innocent. Instead, Polanski shows that this LA is a
corpse, rotting and being bleached dry by the sun. Disease and corruption lurks
everywhere from city politics to Evelyn's father, Noah Cross (John Huston).
Towne's script paints a cynical streak a mile wide right through 'Chinatown',
leading to a downbeat, bleak ending that ranks alongside 'Night of the Living
Dead' or 'Se7en' but for entirely different reasons.
It's clear, though, that Polanski and Towne aren't merely rehashing another era
as a metaphor for the current times, they know the detective genre inside out.
The period detail is outstanding, but never falls into parody, while the script
is a delight. Teasing the audience with its complexities, throwing them one way
then the other, with a particular left-turn blinding everybody, it's
reminiscent of 'The Big Sleep' or 'To Have and To Have Not' at their finest.
This is not a film that will have a pointless amount of exposition, or handily
recap everything for you every five minutes, instead Towne trusting that you
can remember events from 15 minutes ago.
If you got any group of film-lovers together in a room, and then asked them to
name the greatest actor ever, you can guarantee that there'd be an almighty
fight about it. And you could pretty much guarantee that either Pacino or De
Niro would be declared the winner. But for this reviewer, Jack Nicholson would
take the crown without breaking a sweat. Whereas, underneath their intensity
and outstanding performances you can sometimes see the cogs turning and the
tricks with Pacino and De Niro, you never get that with Nicholson. He slips
into each role with a naturalistic ease and never seems out of place or
mis-cast. I firmly believe that whereas De Niro and Pacino probably couldn't do
the roles that Nicholson has, Nicholson could do theirs.
But I digress, Nicholson is superb here, as barely a scene goes by without him
in it, and he dominates the screen with his towering and intelligent presence.
But he isn't merely channeling the memory of Bogart here, Gittes is someone
entirely different. A little more charming, a little less self-confident, it's
difficult to imagine Bogart's Marlowe taking the beatings that Gittes does
here, or letting his outward mask of control and confidence slowly slip and
fracture, as Nicholson does, when events start to get out of his control.
Meanwhile, Dunaway does fine work that could proudly sit alongside Bacall, as
the damsel in distress who knows more than she's letting on. But special praise
should also go to the villian of the piece, John Huston, who should be at home
in this genre after helping to create it with 'The Maltese Falcon'. Despite
having a mere two scenes, his hulking form throughs a shadow over the film, and
it's only by the end that we realise just how vile this guy is. If Polanksi's
LA is a rotting corpse, Cross is the cancerous maggot burrowed deep in the
centre of it.
The private eye flick is one that was thought to be dead and buried after the 1950's, but Towne, Polanksi and Nicholson, prove that there's life in it yet. But this isn't simply a repackaging of another style, or a homage to an era long gone, it's something much nastier, much murkier and much more relevant. It's also an absolute work of art, that entrances you under its seedy spell from beginning to end.
Kinoeye | Roman Polanski,
The Pianist & the victim's double vision From
the Eye to the Hand, by Gordana P
Crnković from Kinoeye, November 29, 2004
Parallax
View [Richard T. Jameson] October
10, 2008, originally published in Movietone
New, July 1974, also seen here: “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown”
Chinatown Other places, other times, by James
Kavanaugh from Jump Cut, 1974
Chinatown “Do as
little as possible” Polanski’s Message and Manipulation, by
Chinatown
dialogue Chinatown’s Sexism, by Barbara Halpern Martineau from Jump Cut, 1974
Chinatown - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications John McCarty from Film Reference
THE CIRCLING, SHADES AND SHADOWS OF POLANSKI'S CHINATOWN 7-page essay on a 7-minute sequence in the film by Katie Ryan (pdf format)
The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]
Chinatown
- film review (Old Yorker) Archives - Old Yorker April 8, 2016
Chinatown
- TCM.com Felicia Feaster
Film-Daily: Chinatown, Roman Polanski, USA 1974 Martin Sauter from Film-Daily, October 25, 2009
Village Voice (Jessica Winter) review Death Valley ’74, August 5, 2003
Roman
Polanski BFI Retrospective – Chinatown (1974) Simon Columb from The Flickering Myth
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [4/4]
Chinatown - Archive -
Reverse Shot Tom J. Carlisle,
July 23, 2006
Home Theater Info (Doug MacLean) dvd review Special Collector’s Edition
PopMatters (Shaun Huston) review [Centennial Collection] 2-disc
Rio Rancho Film Reviews *potentially offensive* Ricky Roma, April 3, 2008
A Sharper Focus [Norman Holland]
Rape, power and Polanski's
“Chinatown” - Salon.com
Andrew O’Hehir, October 13, 2009
forget it, jake: the key ways in which polanski's "chinatown ... forget it, jake: the key ways in which polanski's "chinatown" (1974) reflects the "classic" film noir period, by Tracy Taylor from Theater 2k, 2003
Chinatown's 35th Anniversary Edition and the Polanski Scandal William Bradley from The Huffington Post, October 23, 2009
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
tonymacklin.net [Tony Macklin]
Film Noir of the Week review Steve-O
100 films Lucas McNelly
Film Freak Central dvd review Bill Chambers, also seen here: Bill Chambers, Epinions.com
Chinatown BFI Screen Online
Movieline Magazine review Edward Margulies
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review
DVD Review Guido Henkel
DVD Verdict (Nicholas Sylvain) dvd review
VideoVista review Gary Couzens
DVD
Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
Special Collector’s Edition, also seen here: Chinatown
(1974) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review Special Collector’s Edition
DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review Special Collector’s Edition
DVD Verdict (Tom Becker) dvd review [Special Collector's Edition]
Cinema Blend dvd review [Special Collector's Edition] Brian Holcomb
Ultimate Guide to Disney DVD dvd review Luke Bonnano, Special Collector’s Edition, also seen here: DVDizzy.com - Special Collector's Edition DVD Review with Pictures
homevideo.about.com (Ivana Redwine) dvd recommendation Special Collector’s Edition
UpcomingDiscs.com (Gino Sassani) dvd review [3.5/5] [Special Collector's Edition]
Movieman's Guide to the Movies (Elyusha Vafaeisefat) dvd review [4/5] [Special Collector's Edition]
411mania.com - Centennial Collection DVD [Chad Webb] 2-disc
DVD Verdict (Brett Cullum) dvd review [Centennial Collection] 2-disc
DVD Talk (Thomas Spurlin) dvd review [4/5] [Centennial Collection] 2-disc
Chinatown Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Martin Liebman
Chinatown Blu-ray Review -
DVDizzy.com Luke Bonanno
Chinatown Blu-ray
Review | High Def Digest David
Krauss
Chinatown (Blu-ray) :
DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray
Christopher McQuain
Chinatown |
Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Budd
Wilkins
Salon (Andrew O'Hehir) dvd review Chinatown, February 6, 2001
Film School Rejects [Matthew Alexander]
IndependentCritics.com [Jacob Hall]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Eye for Film (Stephen Carty) review [4/5]
Apollo Guide (Dan Jardine) review [91/100]
filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [96.6/100]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Screen Scene (Keith Dumble) review
Viewpoints Chris Jarmick
SBCC Film Reviews » Blog Archive » Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974 ... Kathleen Amboy from SBCC Film reviews, April 5, 2009
The Ending Roman Polanski's Chinatown Was Supposed to Have ... Retro Daddy, September 30, 2009
Movie Masterworks » Blog Archive » Chinatown by Roman Polanski 1974 Movie Masterworks, June 16, 2006
Edinburgh U Film Society (John Curtis Estes) review
Big House Film (Roger Westcombe) review also seen here: CHINATOWN
Is Chinatown Polanski's best in your opinion The Auteurs film discussion group, March, 2010
the last lullaby (and) peril: 1974: Chinatown (Roman Polanski) CahiersPositif film discussion group, March 26, 2010
SparkNotes: Chinatown: Context background info on the film and director
Roman Polanski Vision - Chinatown Interview 1974 Penthouse interview with Polanski, 1974
Roman Polanski Vision - Chinatown synopsis from a Polanski website
"101 Greatest Screenplays" Writers Guild of America (West), #3 on all-time list, includes additional info
- conversation with sceenwriter Robert Towne On Refining Story: A Conversation with Robert Towne, by Robert Towne from the American Film Institute, published by Fathom (1973)
San Francisco Chronicle interview with Towne Steve Barnes interview of screenwriter Robert Towne, from SF Gate, September 25, 2009
"Robert Towne: The Hollywood Interview" Alex Simon interviews Robert Towne from The Hollywood Interview, November 5, 2009
Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [A+] Chris Willman
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]
BBC Films review Jonathan Crocker
Story of the scene: 'Chinatown' Roman Polanski (1974) - Features ... Roger Clarke from The Independent, May 2, 2008
Chinatown:
the best film of all time | Film | The Guardian Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, October 22, 2010
The 10 best last lines - in pictures Philip French #9 from The Observer, January 28, 2012
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4] June 1, 1974
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies] February 6, 2000
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
Chinatown
Blu-ray - Faye Dunaway - DVD Beaver
0xdb - Chinatown (Roman Polanski) film facts
Chinatown (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Chinatown by Polanski, 1974 « Ktismatics photos from the film, Ktismatics, June 28, 2009
Roman Polanski-Chinatown (1974) in AvaxHome a few film photos
Chinatown Screencaps Gallery - Roman Polanski (1974) extraordinary film photo site
THE TENANT (Le Locataire)
Time Out review Tony Rayns
With Polanski becoming a naturalised Frenchman, it was logical that he should start tackling specifically French subjects, and this small-scale return to the territory of Repulsion seemed a promising beginning. But it's precisely because Polanski and urban paranoia were made for each other that The Tenant is so disappointing. The tenant (Polanski himself) takes over the lease of a gloomy Parisian apartment from a suicide victim, and soon finds himself at the centre of a real or imagined conspiracy that pushes him into assuming the identity of his predecessor. The twist is that the last tenant was a girl, and our nervous, virginal hero's exploration of his latent bisexuality hits the one new note in an otherwise formulary catalogue of bizarre coincidences, inexplicable appearances, and hints of the supernatural. Everything except the dubbing of the French supporting cast is a model of craftsmanship, but as the plot escalates into increasingly arbitrary excesses of fantasy and heads for the predictable pay-off, the movie looks more and more like a potboiler.
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
Roman Polanski's 1976 English-language, Paris-set creepfest—revived for a week in a new 35mm print—was adapted from a novel by the French graphic artist Topor, but it may be the director's quintessential movie. It's an exercise in urban paranoia and mental disintegration that echoes or anticipates everything from Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby to Bitter Moon and The Pianist. Indeed, the movie is a true psychodrama: Polanski himself plays the eponymous protagonist, a furtive Polish-born Frenchman named Trelkovsky who rents the apartment of a recent suicide and is gradually driven mad by his mysteriously hostile neighbors.
Understated, at least at the beginning, The Tenant is also unrelenting as the hapless Trelkovsky is flummoxed or humiliated by one unsettling interaction after another. (The stellar international cast includes Isabelle Adjani, Shelley Winters, and Melvyn Douglas.) Naturally, The Tenant is a comedy—inspired, perhaps, by the joke that Trelkovsky is nowhere at home (least of all in his own skin) or by the Kafka wisecrack "In the fight between you and the world, back the world."
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam
Adams]
Paramount's Tenant disc
is a cheapie by comparison, but its bargain-bin price conceals one of
Polanski's most viscerally troubling movies. The plot, about a lodger who
becomes convinced that the other residents of his apartment building are out to
do him harm, has obvious similarities to Rosemary's Baby, but the
familiar form is merely a vehicle for Polanski's neuroses, never unveiled so
nakedly as here. The first movie Polanski directed after fleeing sexual assault
charges in California, The Tenant is consumed with repulsion for its
title character, not at all coincidentally played by Polanski himself (his only
self-directed lead). As the weasel-faced Trelkovsky, renting a room in
small-minded Paris, Polanski begins as a sympathetic victim, but as the plots
against him grow ever more baroque, we begin to suspect that the persecution
may in fact be in his own mind. When he responds to a slur against his
nationality with a desperate, 'But I'm a French citizen now!' no translation is
needed. And luckily so, since the dialogue track is a poorly dubbed mishmash,
with American actors (Shelley Winters, Melvyn Douglas) speaking English,
Isabelle Adjani poorly re-voiced and the rest of the French cast recorded in
their native tongue. (Switch to the French audio track for verification.) In a
sense, though, the disembodied voices might only add to the profound sense of
dislocation, which rises at times to terrifying heights. With Trelkovsky's
delusion growing ever greater (no fair spoiling the end), The Tenant
goes off the rails in its last third. But damned if it doesn't almost take you
with it.
Slant
Magazine review
Ed Gonzalez
Roman Polanski survived the Warsaw
ghetto by wandering the Polish countryside, lived through the brutal slaughter
of his wife Sharon Tate at the hands of Charles Manson's disciples, and fled
the United States in 1977 in order to dodge jail time for statutory rape. His
cinema has forever mirrored the many physical and psychological obstructions in
his life. Just as Rosemary's Baby seems to eerily portend Tate's death
and the sacrifice of her unborn child, 1971's brilliant Macbeth can be
read as Polanski's metaphoric attempt to fully exorcise himself of his wife's
murder. 1976's Le Locataire (The Tenant) is the final film in
Polanski's unofficial trilogy of films (before Rosemary's Baby there was
Repulsion) about apartment dwellers slowly succumbing to their
claustrophobic and terrifying surroundings.
Polanski stars as Trelkovsky, a Polish-born French citizen who moves into an
apartment whose previous tenant committed suicide. Over the course of the film,
Trelkovsky comes to believe that his tenants are engaged in a conspiracy to
drive him to suicide by forcing him to take on the personality of the dead
woman. Unlike Catherine Deneuve's Carole Ledoux from Repulsion, the
timid Trelkovsky remains somewhat of a cipher. But The Tenant isn't so
much a psychological portrait of grief as it is an unnerving acknowledgement of
the ambiguous nature of the world. Unlike Rosemary Woodhouse's
all-of-them-witches nightmare fulfillment, Trelkovsky really is a victim of his
own paranoiac fantasies.
When a man comes to visit the previous tenant, Trelkovsky mentions her suicide.
The man discusses the woman's fascination with Egyptian culture and how upset
he is that she passed into the realm of the dead without her ever knowing about
his affections for her. Between this scene and a series of philosophical
ruminations about grief, it's clear that Polanski is still dealing with Tate's
death. When Trelkovsky and the man stop at a restaurant, two drunkards offer
free drinks to everyone in the room except the man who yearns for the
dead tenant. Via this absurd and seemingly simple exchange, Polanski
brilliantly evokes an evil society's almost supernatural ability to recognize
weakness in others and to punish all that is good.
The film's nihilist point is clear: It's the world against Trelkovsky and not
the other way around. There's an overwhelming sense here that the world is a
stage and the people in Trelkovsky's immediate realm are in constant
performance mode. Because everyone in the film seems to exist solely for his
benefit, it's sometimes easy to brush Trelkovsky off as an egomaniacal loser.
(Imagine a more uptempo remake of the film with Tom Cruise in the lead.) The
film's actors stand in center frame, staring not only at Trelkovsky but at the
spectator as well. They pass judgement, whisper mischievously, and spread their
idle gossip. This is the power of Polanski's image—to so chillingly summon the
self-consciousness and fear of the individual and the pervasive gaze of
threatening others.
Kinoeye [Aaron Smuts] Sympathetic Spectators, February 4, 2002
Kinoeye | Roman Polanski, The Pianist & the victim's double vision From the Eye to the Hand, by Gordana P Crnković from Kinoeye, November 29, 2004
Roman Polanski BFI Retrospective – The Tenant (1976) Simon Columb from The Flickering Myth
Roman
Polanski BFI Retrospective – Projections: A Psychoanalysis of Polanski’s
‘Apartment’ Trilogy Simon
Columb from The Flickering Myth
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4]
Hollywood Gothique Steve Biodrowski
PopMatters (Jake Euker) review
The Tenant Gerald Peary
Lucid Screening Alex
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Horror View Head Cheeze
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib
FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3.5/4]
The Digital Bits capsule dvd review Barrie Maxwell
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Apollo Guide (Dan Jardine) review [62/100]
Mondo Digital The Films of Roman Polanski
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
Movie Magazine International review Monica Sullivan
Needcoffee.com - DVD Review Scott C.
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4/5]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
The Tenant -
TCM.com Dave Kehr
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] also reviews DEATH AND THE MAIDEN and BITTER MOON
Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers] also reviews DEATH AND THE MAIDEN and BITTER MOON
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] also reviewing KNIFE IN THE WATER
Bright Lights Film Journal review Disturbing Movies, or, The Flip Side of the Real, by Robert Castle, May 2004
Le Locataire (The Tenant) Criterion Forum discussion group, April 2, 2005
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [1/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver.com - Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]
TESS
France Great Britain (190 mi) 1979 ‘Scope
Chicago Reader (capsule) Dave Kehr
This lushly photographed Franco-British production comes on like an overbudgeted episode of Masterpiece Theatre, but seen in the context of Roman Polanski's career it becomes something rich and strange, shaded into terror by the naturalistic absurdism that is the basis of Polanski's style. It's the familiar Polanski tale of an innocent adrift in a hostile, chaotic environment, though it is realized here with more subtlety and sympathy than he had managed in a decade. The film, three hours long, is remarkably faithful to the Thomas Hardy novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, upon which it is based, yet it has been totally transformed in spirit. With Nastassia Kinski, Leigh Lawson, and Peter Firth (1979).
Having all the strengths and excesses of a middlebrow film
(visual beauty, lush soundtrack, arty direction), this adaptation's appeal to
the senses leaves them cloyed. Although true enough to Thomas Hardy's novel to
become a useful aid to 'O' and 'A' levels, Polanski omits small but vital
details (such as the initial cause of Tess' guilt, which does much to explain
her ensuing acquiescence), and misuses those he includes (the landscape, in
Hardy both a part of and a mirror to the protagonists, is relegated to a
pastoral backcloth, and was furthermore filmed in Brittany and Normandy instead
of Dorset), thus removing substance from this hollow film. Finally, Tess
tells one rather more about its director's much publicised preoccupations than
about Hardy's themes.
Tess BFI Screen Online
No-one could ever accuse Roman Polanski of playing safe. In self-imposed exile in France, he not only took the 15-year-old Nastassia Kinski as a lover, but two years later he gave her the title role of his next film, a three-hour adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbevilles. Since this is a story that pivots around the rape of a young peasant girl after she follows up rumours of her noble lineage, it's unsurprising that US distributors were initially wary, though it turned out to be a surprise box-office hit.
Given Polanski's past, not least his ultraviolent take on Macbeth, what most surprises about Tess is its reticence. Tess's budding sexuality is depicted as much metaphorically as literally, with Polanski finding visual equivalents of Hardy's view of her as being tied to nature's rhythm. Similarly, her violation is deliberately obscured in terms of both action and motivation - which is also true to the original.
Because Polanski feared extradition from Britain, Tess was filmed in Normandy, which turned out to be closer to nineteenth-century Dorset than the genuine article. Much less happily, cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth died during shooting and his replacement Ghislain Cloquet shortly afterwards: both won posthumous Oscars.
Mondo Digital The Films of Roman Polanski
A radical change of pace following the psychological
holocausts of The Tenant and Macbeth, this was Polanski's
surprising first project after his flight from the
Despite its protracted running time, Tess amazingly contains no narrative fat and represents an impassioned labor of love from everyone involved. In her starmaking role, Kinski is magnificent to behold, thanks in no small part to the ravishing Oscar-winning cinematography. The English countryside has never looked more astonishing, with each scene as perfectly composed as a Corot painting and filled with fascinating visual details. Also noteworthy is Philippe Sarde's delicate score, which made him an internationally recognized name and benefits from the skilled conducting of Carlo Savina (Lisa and the Devil). Though Tess was enthusiastically received upon its theatrical release in the US, it has become surprisingly obscure during its tenure on cable and home video. However, it has been held in much higher esteem overseas, where full frame laserdiscs have remained constantly in circulation in Japan. A welcome letterboxed release finally appeared on Region 2 Japanese DVD and finally preserves the necessary original scope dimensions of the film; outside of a theatre, there is simply no better way to see it. The surround audio tracks are fairly subdued, with a few ambient sound effects and Sarde's music providing most of the activity. The widescreen image is slightly raised above center to make room for the optional Japanese subtitles.
Painterly Moments in Roman
Polanski's Tess • Senses of Cinema
Arthur Rankin, March 16, 2008
Tess A Tess for Child Molesters, by Jane
Marcus from Jump Cut, December 1981
Tess
- TCM.com Margarita Landazuri
PopMatters (Michael Healey) dvd review [Special Edition]
The DVD Journal DSH, Special Edition
DVD Town (Yunda Eddie Feng) dvd review Special Edition
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review Special Edition
DVD
Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
Special Edition, also seen here: Tess
(1979) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
DVD Clinic ("JaneBlo") dvd review [2.5/5] [Special Edition]
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]
Spirituality & Practice (Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat) review
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [0/4]
All Movie Guide [Derek Armstrong]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
Nastassja Kinski - Actors and Actresses - Films as Actress ... Joseph Milicia from Film Reference
PIRATES
France Tunisia (121 mi) 1986 ‘Scope
Polanski won the Palme d'Or at Cannes with The Pianist in 2002. The last time he was in competition there was with Pirates. Few would disagree that he won with the right film. In genre terms, Pirates is undoubtedly a pirate movie, not a mystery film, yet it's a mystery why Polanski swapped urban paranoia for the skull and crossbones. Polanski and Gérard Brach had collaborated on scripts for Repulsion and The Tenant, but their sure touch deserted them on the high seas. Shipwrecked Captain Red (Matthau) and his sidekick the Frog (Campion) are picked up by a Spanish vessel and clapped in irons, but Cap'n Red foments unrest in the crew by smuggling a rat into the men's soup. Cue swashbuckling and choreographed scrapping. It's fun intermittently, but a bit of a stretch at two hours, and Matthau's Cockney accent is about as convincing as the rubber sharks. Perhaps the key to understanding what it's about lies in considering Polanski's displacement: of Polish extraction, exiled in Paris, faced with arrest should he return to the US. The only flag he could comfortably wrap himself in was the Jolly Roger.
On the set of Polanski's Pirates, 1985 Pete Conrad from The Observer, April 18, 2010
Consider this a joke without a punchline. Behind his beard, Walter Matthau is grinning. But is Polanski laughing or crying? Is he a merry elf or a feral munchkin? If the subject is the script open on his knees, any combination of laughter and tears would be appropriate. He had spent a decade planning Pirates (eventually released in 1986). It was stalled by the piratical salary demands of Jack Nicholson, originally cast in Matthau's role, then called off when Polanski decamped from the US to escape arrest.
Eventually the curly-topped moppet – then aged 52, which explains why an unenchanted colleague called him "the male Shirley Temple" – put it back together, only to deliver one of the all-time duds: Pirates cost $40m (£26m), and earned $2m. The money was lost by the Tunisian producer Tarak Ben Ammar, who ran a company based in North Africa called Carthago Films. Didn't he know about the Roman battle cry "Carthago delenda est", which called for the city to be razed and the ground sown with salt?
The backstory, however, is less interesting than the surreal incongruities of the image. The nautical tackle is contradicted by the plastic sheeting and the geometrical slabs of the studio buildings, a reminder that films nonsensically blend magic and engineering. Though the galleon in Pirates looked like a barnacled curio above the waterline, it had a steel hull and a 400hp engine. Superimposition creates other mismatches. A golden pinnacle that belongs to a discarded prop gives Matthau's floppy hat an Asiatic topknot. And notice the thrust of the anchor that juts from his groin: one appendage has turned to wood, while another stiffens into iron. Perhaps Polanski is screeching in pain because that metal bar has pierced his skull. But that would be a scene from another, probably better film.
KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review [Region 2]
Way back in the mid-eighties, Cannon Films was in the midst of a huge push to court internationally respected directors and give them carte blanche to make a film. Any film, it often seemed. The industry trades were filled with Cannon's hugely optimistic and boastful ads and proclamations, yet as several of these completed projects reached theatre screens, critics savaged the films, and they kind of disappeared… maybe popping up on badly panned & scanned VHS tapes and TV airings, but pale venues to see the films close to their theatrical exhibition. The longer European cut of Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce, for example, did enjoy a widescreen laserdisc release, but Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear and Roman Polanski's Pirates were trapped in lousy full frame transfers.
Cannon's Go-Go boys were naïve in believing the rebellious Godard would bring money into the company's coffers and some prestige, but their decision to offer Hooper and Polanski film deals wasn't reckless; the former was just coming off the massive popularity of Poltergeist, and the latter had been idling after making his critically acclaimed Tess (1979).
In short, Polanski seemed set for a return after a long hiatus from film directing, but instead of a stately historical drama, noir thriller, or straight genre entry, Polanski opted to make a comedy, and like his sex comedy What? (1972) and the vampire spoof The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), his film divided fans and critics, and seems to be regarded as either a misunderstood mini-masterpiece, or a bloated, unfunny mess by a writer/director who should've learned a decade earlier that broad comedy is not his forte.
What's surprising about Pirates is how it's aged better over the past years, and that may be due not to the success of Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, Disney's self-conscious action/comedy franchise, but how less of an indulgent, unfocused mess Pirates clearly is, given the Disney films started out big, got bigger, and then ran out of story to justify almost 9 hours of pirate chess – that ridiculous convention involving characters constantly shifting alliances, and being in a constant state of rebellion or arrest.
Polanski and co-writer Gerard Brach tried to evoke the silliness of Richard Lester's Musketeers diptych – even casting a key member of Lester's stock company, lovable Roy Kinnear, as a bean-counting pirate bemoaning the recent downturn in hostage payments – and while their efforts lacked Lester's perfect timing for knocks, grunts, tumbles, and winsome grimaces capping acts of tumbling buffoonery, Pirates has its share of low jabs at religious piety and aristocratic snobbery, and Polanski gave Walter Matthau several meters to create his own broad version of a wisened pirate with a drive for acquiring a manageable stash of golden treasure.
To match Matthau's giddy performance, there's Damien Thomas, best-known for playing a loathsome Spanish priest in the mega-TV miniseries Shogun (1980). With his refined diction and pompous costumes and pouffant wig, Thomas is the perfect foe everyone tries to beat, and his characterization bears great similarities to Rochefort (played by Christopher Lee), the equally slimy but more blue-collar villain in Lester's Musketeers films who always managed to avoid embarrassment and incarceration throughout his ongoing efforts to torment and grind into dust the titular heroes.
Lester also didn't shy away from violence in the Musketeers' duels, but Polanski goes a bit farther in trying to balance nuanced buffoonery with people seen stabbed, garroted, and axed; there's no gore, but ax-wielding is one of those elements that raises a film's main aim towards entertaining adults, whereas Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy stuck to a more neutral PG realm.
Polanski also pays homage – or rather steals a gag – from Burt Lancaster's Crimson Pirate (1952), arguable a pioneering genre spoof that established a buddy formula using action and humour. The director borrows a one-time gag of a peg-legged pirate getting stuck in the grating of a hatch cover, and applies it several times when Matthau attempts to climb from a life raft onto the Spanish brig, and later during two battle scenes on the ship.
Is Pirates a misunderstood masterpiece? Heck no, but it seems far more contemporary than when it first debuted, distinguished by its own band of better-defined characters and plotting; even at just under two hours, there's less pirate chess going on, and its filmmakers seemed more concerned in creating an epic comedy instead of an action blockbuster, as Renny Harlin tried with his dull revisionist actioner Cutthroat Island (1995).
Charlotte Lewis has nothing to do beyond sing and look mildly upset in her few scenes, and she's the weakest character among the lot. Just as grating is Philippe Sarde, who beats his main theme over our heads, though his love theme is lyrical and quite exquisite.
Polanski's use of rear projection is something that either came from budget and production issues as the film went through a long film schedule (Charlotte Lewis' aging is evident in some shots), or was a deliberate evocation of old conventions, including some lighting schemes that has a beachfront pirate enclave lit up by a carbon arc moon, positioned just above a blue night cyclorama.
Released on DVD throughout Europe , this Spanish DVD sports an anamorphic widescreen transfer, with optional English and Spanish dub tracks in Dolby 2.0. (The Spanish track is actually quite scratchy, and lacks the cleaner definition of the English track.) Spanish subtitles pop up with the English audio, but flipping back to the audio menu and selecting ‘no subtitles' knocks them out.
Pirates - Archive -
Reverse Shot Damon Smith from Reverse Shot, September 29, 2011
Tuesday
Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "Pirates ... - Mubi December 8, 2009
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Bad Movie Night Ned Daigle
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [1/4]
The New York Times (Walter Goodman) review
FRANTIC
Polanski's thriller boasts several superb set pieces, even if it doesn't quite snap shut on the mind the way Chinatown did. Dr Walker (Ford) checks into a Paris hotel with his wife (Buckley) to attend a conference. She has collected the wrong suitcase at the airport, their problems escalate, and to watch how Polanski calibrates the build-up of disquiet in a standard hotel suite until the wife disappears is deeply satisfying. Walker is suddenly alone with the unimaginable in alien territory, asking for help. Officialdom won't take him seriously and he resorts to clues lit by match flares. We are in film noir territory. The wrong suitcase leads him to a corpse, and then to Michelle (Seigner), a swinging chick who attaches herself to his quest. Polanski's penchant for the surreal goes adrift on one dislocation involving the Statue of Liberty through a porthole, but scores heavily with Ford's increasingly disreputable returns to base, a discreet, tiptoe hotel into which he creeps shoeless, and with a bubblegum punkette in tow. Funny and unsettling.
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
UNDER A fancy Parisian hotel shower, Harrison Ford sings Cole Porter's
"I Love Paris." It's about as close as he gets to Gay Paree. In Roman
Polanski's smart thriller "Frantic," the City of
Which is a problem for visiting conventioneer Dr. Richard Walker (Ford). He doesn't speak French and, stepping out of that shower, he finds his wife Sondra's been kidnapped.
Cowritten by Polanski and longtime collaborator Gerard Brach,
"Frantic" is chock full of Hitchcock (rooftop vertigo, the precious
widget everyone's after, the perils of showering).
But they're only trappings. "Frantic" is vintage Polanski, with its relentless paranoia, irony, diffident strangers (the smug bartender, the sullen embassy Marine) and nutty cameos (including that culty punk from Jean-Jacques Beineix's "Diva" as a drunken witness, and a Jah-jivey Jamaican who mistakes Walker's wife-search for a cocaine hustle). And Polanski forgos the mood-marshalling Hitchcock cellos for his own brand of good old quiet tension -- here made eerier by Witold Sobocinski's high and low camera angles.
Near movie's end, a meaty conflict lies unresolved. This world of
null-and-voids makes wacky but warm Michele the most appealing mate for Dr.
Walker, and she obviously outshines Mrs. Walker (Betty Buckley). Well, Polanski
solves that problem as only he can. He also leaves us with the least romantic,
culture-shocking tour of
As well as being only one of two Polanski films from the 1980s (the other being Pirates in 1986), Frantic is also noteworthy for Harrison Ford's performance as Dr Richard Walker, coming from a time when Ford was pursuing atypical, unheroic roles, such as the obsessive-destructive father in Peter Weir's The Mosquito Coast.
Frantic begins with Walker and his wife Sondra (Buckley) arriving in Paris for on a business trip. Whilst Walker takes a shower in their hotel room, his wife receives a telephone call and leaves the room. When Walker finishes showering, he finds that his wife has mysteriously vanished. At first Walker thinks she has simply left the hotel for a moment, but he soon has to cope with the growing realisation that his wife may have been kidnapped. Stranded in Paris and unable to speak French (unlike his wife, who was fluent), Walker struggles to find out what has happened. He uncovers cryptic clues from the citizens of Paris and encounters bureaucratic obstacles from the American Embassy. Eventually, he teams up with Michelle (Seigner), who may hold the key to his wife's fate.
Although Walker takes on the heroic mantle that we expect from a star like Harrison Ford, he is hardly a Han Solo/Indiana Jones figure. We watch Walker as he's cut adrift in a Paris unseen by tourists like himself; a mysterious, threatening, almost alien environment. The clear influence on this film is Alfred Hitchcock, with the suspenseful rooftop sequences echoing North by Northwest , a film, like many of Hitchcock's thrillers, that also features an ordinary protagonist who is thrust into an extraordinary situation. However, Frantic also echoes other Polanski films like Repulsion, which chronicled the mental disintegration of a young French woman (Catherine Deneuve) who felt trapped in a city (London) where she felt out of place, and The Pianist, which featured Adrien Brody's pianist adrift in a hostile world (war-torn Warsaw) who has to survive on his wits. Walker isn't trapped in the middle of a war and doesn't have a mental breakdown, but his patience and endurance are pushed to the limit.
From the opening scene, when a taxi taking Walker and Sondra to their hotel gets a flat tyre (and Walker cannot communicate with the French-speaking driver), we get a sense that the couple's visit to Paris is not going to be a smooth ride. Ford and Buckley expertly encapsulate this couple's marriage in only a few minutes of screen time during the opening moments, with the early hotel room scenes expertly filmed in long takes by Polanski. These extended shots allow the actors to perform uninterrupted, making their behaviour and relationship seem more natural.
When Walker's wife disappears, the events in the film are seen almost exclusively through Ford's eyes. By keeping strictly to the Doctor's point of view, Polanski heightens our identification with Walker, and we only visit locations, meet characters and discover information when he does. Polanski's best thriller is undoubtedly Chinatown, but Frantic is a film that has curiously been overlooked and underappreciated in the careers of both its director and leading man, and is surely due for a reappraisal.
Film Intuition Jen Johans
Mark R. Leeper review [high +1 out of -4..+4]
Movie-Vault.com (John Ulmer) review [6/10]
Audio Revolution (Bill Warren) dvd review
DVD MovieGuide dvd review Colin Jacobson
JoBlo's Movie Emporium ("JoBlo") review [7/10]
Frantic Michael Den Boer from 10kbullets
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [3.5/5]
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4/5]
Mondo Digital The Films of Roman Polanski
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Siskel & Ebert (video)
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Gary W. Tooze
BITTER MOON
Bitter
Moon Terrence Rafferty from The New Yorker
Bitter Moon—Roman Polanski's rivetingly weird new movie tells the story
of two married couples who meet on a cruise ship. Nigel (Hugh Grant) and Fiona
(Kristin Scott Thomas), a proper pair of Brits, are obviously a little bored
with each other; voluptuous Mimi (Emmanuelle Seigner) and her wheelchair-bound
husband, Oscar (Peter Coyote), are locked in a destructive relationship in
which their mutual passion can be expressed only as cruelty. Polanski can't quite
muster the icy absurdist rigor that made his early pictures so distinctive, and
the big erotic set pieces play like an "SCTV" parody of "Last
Tango in
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Like Polanski's debut feature Knife in the Water, this is set partly on a boat, and charts the shifts in power between characters performing complex sexual/emotional manoeuvres. Nigel (Grant) and Fiona (Scott-Thomas), a wealthy English couple on a second honeymoon, meet Oscar (Coyote) and Mimi (Seigner) on a Mediterranean cruise. The wheelchair-bound Oscar is determined to regale Nigel with a lurid tale of his awful love for Mimi, and exploits her charms to ensure that Nigel hears the story to its bitter end. Characteristically, Polanski treats this slightly protracted tale of erotic obsession partly as deeply ironic black comedy. But there's also real seriousness in the way the film condenses a whole range of feelings into one crazed, cruel relationship and its effect on another couple, so that it becomes both a grotesque portrait of love's variety and a queasy commentary on the perverse pleasures we derive from the suffering of others. Rich and darkly disturbing, it's also wickedly entertaining.
Edinburgh U Film Society (Andrew Abbott) review
Roman Polanski is one of the most uncompromising, arrogant, erratic and brilliant directors working today. Bitter Moon represents a return to form after the rather formulaic Frantic, and is also the best first date movie since In the Realm or the Senses.
On a cruise ship, a repressed British couple struggle to save their marriage. Nigel falls under the spell of Oscar, Peter Coyote's crippled, chain smoking American writer, who gradually relates the tale of his tempestuous relationship with Mimi (Emmanuel Seigner, the femme fatale from Frantic and Polanski's latest flame). This story of bad sex, obsession and revenge brings Nigel out in a series of progressively colder sweats, but he keeps coming back for more. And so do we. A master story teller, Polanski keeps us on the edge of our seats despite ourselves. The leering, yellow-toothed Oscar is the director himself manipulating us and laughing as we squirm. The fact that Bitter Moon could be a watered down account of much of Polanski's life makes it all the more perversely compelling. Potentially offensive to those with an underdeveloped sense of irony, this is a film that delights in its own depravity. Come along for the ride.
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]
A disturbing, spare story and a return to Polanski's
earlier thematic grounds; it's not Knife in the Water, but it does
feature fragmenting marriages and a big boat. Nigel and Fiona (Grant and
Scott-Thomas) are a prosaic British couple, steaming their way to
Slant
Magazine review Eric Henderson
Roman Polanski's 1992 ode to perversion, Bitter Moon,
doesn't have the reputation of some of his other masterpieces like Rosemary's
Baby, Repusion, or even Knife in the Water (its closet kin
considering the film's equal obsession with pent-up sexual claustrophobia). As
easy as it would be to make rude connections between the film's raunchy
shenanigans and Polanski's own history, the fact is that Bitter Moon
doesn't feel like either an explanation, an apology, nor a defense of the kinky
sexual games adults play. Think of it as Polanski's Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf. The Nick and Honey of this version are Nigel and Fiona (Hugh Grant
and Kristen Scott Thomas), who attempt to rub some Lidocaine on their
seven-year itch by taking a cruise to
The film's George and Martha are Oscar and Mimi (Peter Coyote and Emmanuelle
Seigner, Polanski's wife). Married but obviously horn-locked in mutual hatred,
they impose upon Nigel and Fiona at every opportunity. Oscar calls Nigel to his
cabin repeatedly to reveal to him the long and twisted tale of his relationship
with Mimi. Their affair, told in Oscar's subjective flashback, moves with
sickening momentum from their meet-cute, passionate love affair, sexual
obsession with each other, and the moment when they begin get so tired of each
other that they swirl deeper and deeper into a cycle of betrayal, abuse, and
torture.
The most transgressive aspect of Bitter Moon is how Polanski's
presentation of the lurid material (widely derided by critics as being too
misanthropic and extreme) is far more successful when dealing with the
self-loathing, self-destructive Oscar than in trying to make Nigel's overblown
indignation believable. Even so, the balance between celebrating Oscar's sexual
fantasies as they come true and exposing the violence that constantly undercuts
them ensures that no one can accuse Polanski of condescending to Nigel for his
offended reaction.
One of Polanski's most celebrated directorial motifs, the decimation of human
bodies as a reflection of their withering spirits, is brutally forthright in Bitter
Moon. Whereas the hollowing-out of Rosemary Woodhouse as she begins to lose
her notions of sanity was in many respects as much self-imposed as it was
inflicted upon her by her egotistical husband, Mimi's devastation is
unmistakably the work of Oscar's cunning and ruthless psychological demolition.
In a supremely dark joke, this devastating section of the film (in which Mimi
begs Oscar to abuse her) is the most vicious update of the Albee play. In Virginia
Woolf, George makes "the insulting, the hurtful mistake" of
loving Martha enough to enabler her. In Polanski's version, Oscar makes the
mistake of not killing Mimi when he gets the chance.
Sex Games (on
Polanski's BITTER MOON) | Jonathan Rosenbaum Jonathan Rosenbaum, April 8, 1994
Film Court (Lawrence Russell) review
Movieline Magazine dvd review Keith Simanton
Cine-Moi Dennis Toth, October 6, 2008
Reelviews [James Berardinelli]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Rio
Rancho Film Reviews *potentially offensive*
Ricky Roma, August 4, 2007
Eye for Film (James Benefield) review [3.5/5]
Movieline Magazine review Stephen Farber
DVD Talk (Jason Janis) dvd review [4/5]
DVD Verdict (Erick Harper) dvd
review
The Rued Morgue Ross Ruediger
Apollo
Movie Guide [Elspeth Haughton]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz)
review
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Apollo Guide (Elspeth Haughton) review [50/100]
Georgia Straight (Mark Harris) review
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4/5]
Pedro Sena retrospective [3/5]
MediaCircus (Anthony Leong) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review
Bitter Moon Criterion Forum discussion group, June 23, 2006
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] also reviews DEATH AND THE MAIDEN and THE
TENANT
Film Freak
Central Review [Bill Chambers] also reviews DEATH
AND THE MAIDEN and THE TENANT
Entertainment Weekly review [C-] Owen Gleiberman
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Washington Post (Joe Brown) review
Bitter Moon Movie
Review & Film Summary (1994) | Roger Ebert
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
DEATH AND THE MAIDEN
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
In a newly democratised South American country, Escobar (Wilson) heads a commission investigating the abuse of political prisoners. One such prisoner was his wife Paulina (Weaver). When one night Escobar comes home late, having been given a lift by seemingly liberal Dr Miranda (Kingsley), Paulina is convinced that their guest is the tormentor who 15 year ago subjected her to sexual humiliation and violence. Escobar feels duty-bound to defend the stranger from the woman he loves, but who may be lying, even insane. In filming Ariel Dorfman's adaptation of his own stage hit, Polanski wisely never opens out the action from the remote clifftop house. In keeping things claustrophobic, close-up and ambivalent, he heightens the suspense (not to mention the sexual tension) and allows for a fluent, lucid exploration of notions of justice, responsibility, forgiveness, and corruption by power. At the same time, the three powerful, sensitively nuanced performances ensure that the characters never become mere mouthpieces for an ethical enquiry.
Edinburgh
U Film Society (Stephen Cox) review
Ariel Dorfman's hit stage play Death And The Maiden contains plenty of material in action, character and themes to make it an obvious choice for the director of Cul-De-Sac, Repulsion and Knife in The Water; with its three central characters in an isolated and enclosed area, a possibly neurotic, gun touting female playing sinister power games, and a slowly unwinding mystery.
In an anonymous South American country Paulina Escobar (Sigourney Weaver) prepares a meal for her husband Gerardo (Stuart Wilson) in their beach house. He is late. When he does arrive the electricity has been cut off, the phone lines are down and a storm is brewing. Gerardo has got a lift from a Dr Miranda (Ben Kingsley) whom Paulina instantly recognises as the man who tortured and raped her incessantly to the sound of Schubert's Death and the Maiden during the country's former military regime. She proceeds to put Miranda on trial at gun-point with Gerardo as his defence lawyer in order to extract a confession.
At times the film is too obviously based on the stage play, the script by Dorfman and Rafael Yglesias who wrote Fearless is too verbose in places and occasionally Polanski gets stuck with the shot-reverse shot format. Nevertheless Weaver and Kingsley both give blistering performances, Weaver especially despatches viscious lines laced with wit, and Kingsley is excellent as the weaselly, Nietzsche-quoting doctor. The dark menacing camera work of Tonino Delli Colli helps to create the right mood, and the film is full of moral niceties and character contradictions to keep the audience's brains mulling over.
Central to the play was the unanswered question of whether Miranda was actually guilty of the crimes of which he was accused; unfortunately Polanski answers that question, and while it rounds off the film it leaves the audience in effect with nothing to think about.
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [4/5]
Adapted from the stage play by Ariel Dorfman, this spare, hideously intense film is Polanski's version of a cinematic roller coaster: up, down, sideways, it leaves your heart pounding and your palms clammy and it's very, very disturbing. Set in an unnamed South American country, the film centers around Paulina Escobar (Weaver), a woman who, 15 years earlier, was tortured and raped by the since-deposed governmental regime. Weaver plays the character straight, focusing on the inner demons that haunt her to this day. When the power goes out one stormy night at her isolated, peninsula household, she's quick to light candles and crank up the portable radio while waiting for her husband Gerardo (Wilson) to come home. Soon, a strange car pulls up in front of the house and she frantically douses the flames, grabs a pistol, and cowers, terrified, behind a curtain. Her horrifying experiences at the hands of the former junta have left her a paranoid shell. The car, as it turns out, belongs to Dr. Robert Miranda (Kingsley), a stranger who gave her husband a lift home in the storm. When she hears the doctor's voice, however, she recognizes it as belonging to her chief torturer, the man who viciously savaged her time after time, years ago. Turning the table on her alleged tormentor, she knocks him unconscious, ties him to a chair, and puts him on trial with the confused aid of Gerardo, a prominent lawyer who, coincidentally enough, has recently been named to head a commission on human rights violations during the previous government. The question, of course, is this: Is Paulina mad, lashing out at this pitiably helpless stranger in the night just because she's finally cracked? Or is Dr. Miranda indeed her grand inquisitor, her nightmare from the past inexplicably delivered to her doorstep, awaiting punishment? To his credit, Polanski -- and, to an even greater degree, Weaver and Kingsley -- keep you guessing up to the very end. Weaver proves what most of us have known all along, that she's an Oscar-caliber actor capable of more than battling aliens and messing around with gorillas. With only three characters in the whole film, each part is vitally important to the story, and it's a joy (albeit a nerve-wracking one) to watch Kingsley, Wilson, and Weaver interact. Polanski's direction is equally powerful, his editing quick, sure, and flawless. Death and the Maiden is a streamlined razor-ride of a movie: taut, riveting, and a psychological horror show that will leave nail-marks in your palms for days afterwards.
Kinoeye | Roman Polanski,
The Pianist & the victim's double vision From
the Eye to the Hand, by Gordana P
Crnković from Kinoeye, November 29, 2004
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
Slant Magazine review Nick Schager
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
eFilmCritic.com (Chris Parry) review [4/5]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2/4]
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [3/5]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Michael Rankins) dvd review
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review
The Tech (MIT) (Carrie E. Perlman) review
Mark R. Leeper review [high +2 out of -4..+4]
Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]
Georgia Straight (Mark Harris) review
Direct Cinema R.A. Naing
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4.5/5]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] also reviews THE TENANT and BITTER MOON
Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers] also reviews THE TENANT and BITTER MOON
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Tucson Weekly (Zachary Woodruff) review
San Francisco Examiner (Scott Rosenberg) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Caryn James) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
THE NINTH GATE B 87
France Spain USA (133 mi) 1999 ‘Scope
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
When Dean Corso (Depp), a cunning and accomplished New York
rare book dealer, agrees to do a little job for rich publisher and demonologist
Boris Balkan (Langella), he little suspects what's coming. Balkan already owns
a copy of the 17th-century Satanic text, The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of
Shadows - reputedly an aid in summoning the Prince of Darkness - but fears
it's not authentic. Corso is to track down the other two extant copies and
compare their engravings. But Balkan's not the only one after the book, as
Corso's encounters with a mysterious girl who seems to be following him
(Seigner) and the widow of a previous owner of the text (Olin) make clear.
Polanski's film is as elegantly assembled as one would expect, and there's an
engagingly understated irony to a number of scenes that suggests the director
didn't see the story - from Arturo Pérez-Reverte's novel The Dumas Club
- as fodder for a serious study in metaphysical evil. That said, for the most
part Polanski plays by the rules, refusing to show anything explicitly
supernatural despite the superstitions of everyone involved (save Corso, of
course), and preferring to rely on old-fashioned mood and telling details for
effect. Fun, but a pale shadow of Rosemary's Baby.
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
For years, it's been critical commonplace to sum up a film by describing it as a combination of two other films, a trend exacerbated by the tendency of studios to continue turning out projects that simply throw the best parts of two movies together. But rarely has a director made a movie that invited comparison to two of his own films as readily as Roman Polanski has with The Ninth Gate: It's Rosemary's Baby meets Chinatown any way you look at it. Adapted from novelist Arturo Pérez-Reverte's popular supernatural thriller The Club Dumas, Gate stars Johnny Depp as an unscrupulous rare-book dealer contracted by Frank Langella, a collector of satanic literature, for a mysterious task. Unsure of the authenticity of a 17th-century manuscript reputed to have the ability to summon the devil, possibly because he can't make it work, Langella dispatches Depp to Europe to compare his copy to the only other two known to exist. But once there, he finds himself trailed by a mysterious woman (Polanski spouse Emmanuelle Seigner, whose acting skills remain noticeably unsharpened) and the forces of another interested party, a femme fatale played by Lena Olin. With the assurance of a pro, Polanski teasingly draws out the suspense, moving Depp from one copy of the book to another, and then back again, as if ashamed of where the story ultimately had to go. Of course, he should be. A patently ridiculous bit of hokum, a diabolical shaggy-dog story chasing its own tail, The Ninth Gate has nowhere to go but down. Polanski, however, knows this well and wisely refuses to let the film take itself seriously while just as wisely avoiding self-parody. For all its unabashed trashiness, The Ninth Gate remains an expertly crafted, eerily effective bit of satanic noir from its start to somewhere just before its finish, helped at every turn by Depp, who seems even more aware of Gate's inherent absurdity than Polanski himself. It may be the sort of film enjoyed against your better judgement, but The Ninth Gate is hard not to enjoy anyway.
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Tom Block
The Ninth Gate opens with a short and simple camera movement that finds the crepe-edged comedy in the final moments of a man’s life – it’s vintage Roman Polanski. The horror genre has been degraded for so long that having Polanski (Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown) back in charge feels like the restoration of a monarch. The Ninth Gate maintains this triumphant feeling for half of its running time, and not even its self-mocking climax can fully extinguish the glow. As it is, it’s a letdown of a movie that’s worth seeing for its hundred marvelous touches.
Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) is a rare book broker who brings an ambulance-chasing mentality to his trade: he lulls his moneyed clients to sleep with talk, then beats them out of their first editions. It’s this lean and hungry attitude that attracts demonology scholar Boris Balkan (Frank Langella) to him. Balkan has acquired a 17th Century text held by legend to be capable of invoking the Devil. Believing that his copy may be a fake, Balkan instructs Corso to travel to Portugal and Paris, where two other copies of the book reside in private collections, and to compare the three texts to test their authenticity. Corso’s search brings him into contact with an array of people who have hidden agendas: a widow (Lena Olin) who’s desperately trying to reclaim her copy of the book; an aging baroness (Barbara Jefford) who bitterly rejects Corso’s efforts to examine her volume; and a mysterious woman (Emmanuelle Seigner) whose appearances have the fortuitous timing of a guardian angel.
Everything clicks on the surface of The Ninth Gate. After the modest Bitter Moon and Death and the Maiden, Polanski has made an expensive-looking, voluptuous movie that revels in its decadent atmosphere. Visually the movie is completely thought out, down to the way a crumbling estate reflects the personality of its gray, receding owner. And Polanski is still the master of those poisonous touches – a flickering light in a telephone booth, a little girl’s unnerving stare – that seem like rents in the veil of a malignant universe.
The movie’s troubles begin with its casting. Depp fits the look of the movie so well that he’s like a piece of production design, but he delivers such a clouded, somnambulant performance that even the sight of Lena Olin hitching her skirt up to her waist barely elicits a twang from him. Coupling him with the flavorless Seigner makes for a lot of narcotized scenes where the vibes just hang in the air; it’s as if Polanski tried to produce a chemical reaction by mixing flour with flour. (In the meantime, Langella and Jefford absolutely romp through the movie, bringing just the right shade of seriousness to some supremely unserious lines.)
But if Depp hasn’t done anything to shape his role, Polanski hasn’t given him much clay to work with. Dean Corso gets none of the loving detail that Polanski usually lavishes on his characters; instead, he consists of a few shorthand flourishes, not all of which make sense. (Even if the swanky Corso would eat a TV dinner, why would he shove one into the microwave without removing it from the box?) More importantly, we can tease out of the story the idea that Corso’s assignment has turned him into a modern-day Faust, but we never really glimpse the contours of his obsession, and neither Polanski nor Depp let us know why or when it takes hold of him. Without a human being in the picture to give it psychological scale, we can’t even muster a sense of dread when Satan himself is being conjured up.
These slights to his protagonist are the surest sign that
Polanski is not fully himself here, but The Ninth Gate is careless even
with its central mystery. Visual clues that ought to remain subliminal until a
second or third viewing are conspicuous during the first one, so that we’re
forced to solve the movie’s riddles prematurely, against all of our moviegoing
instincts. And where we want the script to punish us for our presumptuousness,
it only gives us speeches confirming what we’ve figured out for ourselves.
The Ninth Gate gets punchier the farther along it goes. Seigner’s goddess-like descent from the sky is a lovely conceit (and the most affectionate view that Polanski’s ever given us of his real-life wife), but the magic is immediately dispelled by a wretchedly staged fistfight. Later on, Corso and his angel steal a high-powered sports car, and we brace ourselves for a high-concept car chase, Polanski-style. But when Corso’s quarry effortlessly gives him the slip, we realize that Polanski is only taking a minimalist’s dig at the absurdity of the car-chase convention. (It’s a punchline without a joke in front of it.) When Corso infiltrates a coven of devil worshippers, Depp in his outsized robes and pendant looks like he’s in a live-action version of "The Sorcerer’s Apprentice." It’s a hit that no movie could fully recover from, but things go even farther to pot in a brief scene that occurs late in the picture. Polanski has often mocked the idea that sex is the devil’s handiwork, but never before has his sense of satire worked on such a perfunctory, first-draft level.
Polanski has always ridden a savory line between horror and
black comedy in a style that’s unmistakably his. No one else would have
Rosemary still the creaking bassinet with the point of a butcher knife; no one
else would stick a corpse in a motorized wheelchair and send it smashing
through a pair of French doors. All of his talent and obsessions are on display
in The Ninth Gate, but he winds up relying on the tropes of younger (and
lesser) directors, as if at 66 he feels some need to prove his relevance. Some
people will like The Ninth Gate because it’s weighted more toward parody
than artful dread, but that’s the tamest, easiest route a Polanski picture can
take. It’s painful to watch The Ninth Gate’s meticulous tone and rhythms
go for naught in its final half-hour, until it can’t dig into us the way his
movies usually do – until it can’t sting. We may still feel inclined towards
laughter, but this time it’s not sticking in our throats.
BFI | Sight & Sound | The Ninth Gate (1999) Philip Strick, September 2000
“The Ninth Gate” - Salon.com Charles Taylor, March 10, 2000
“The Ninth Gate” - Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek, August 4, 2000
Cinescape dvd review Steve Biodrowski
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review
AboutFilm.com (Jeff Vorndam) review [C+]
Nitrate Online (Paula Nechak) review
Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs) review also seen here: another review of The Ninth Gate by Cynthia Fuchs
PopMatters Ars Diavoli
DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr
Plume Noire review Fred Thom
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3/4]
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3/5] Richard Scheib
Reelviews [James Berardinelli]
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [2/5]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [2.5/4]
DVD Verdict (Norman Short) dvd review
DVD Talk (Scott Weinberg) dvd review [3/5]
DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Ed Peters
Movielocity Movie Reviews (Blake Kunisch) dvd review [8/10]
DVDActive (Holly E. Ordway) dvd review [8/10]
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review Special Edition
DVD Authority.com (Vince Hanada) dvd review [Special Edition]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Blu-Ray
DVD Verdict (Clark Douglas) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
Mark R. Leeper review [low +1 out of -4..+4]
Movie House Commentary Tuna and Johnny Web
Urban Cinefile review Andrew L. Urban, Jake Wilson, and Richard Kuipers
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [2/5]
Movie-Vault.com (Matthew Coats) review [8/10]
Movie Magazine International review Moira Sullivan
Film Journal International (Kevin Lally) review
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B]
Mixed Reviews: The Arts, The World, and More (Jill Cozzi) review
Xiibaro
Productions (David Perry) review
[3/4]
SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [2/4]
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) review [73/100]
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [2.5/5]
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Chris Parry) review [1/5] It's
clear that Roman Polanski is a dried up old whore; sold out, short of new
tricks, of no worth to anyone but the desperate. France can keep him.
Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review
Cinemaphile.org (David Keyes) review
MediaCircus (Anthony Leong) review
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [C]
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [3/4]
Mondo Digital The Films of Roman Polanski
The Ninth Gate Criterion Forum discussion group,
Click here to read Cynthia Fuch's interview with Roman Polanski. Nitrate Online,
Interview
with Roman Polanski director of The Ninth Gate Interview by Todd R. Ramlow for Pop Matters
(2000)
Entertainment Weekly review [D+] Lisa Schwartzbaum
Variety (Lisa Nesselson) review
BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) dvd review
Memphis Flyer (Ashley Fantz) review Memo to Johnny Depp
Austin Chronicle (Russell Smith) review [1.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Examiner (Wesley Morris) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Bob Graham) review
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2/4]
The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review
DVDBeaver
dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
THE PIANIST B+ 92
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
An adaptation of concert pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman's memoirs about his experiences in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, Polanski's cinematic return to the ravaged world of his childhood starts inauspiciously, lumbered with the clichés of Ronald Harwood's script. The actors (mostly from British TV) who play the musician's doomed family squabble to order about how to react to events. Once Szpilman is left behind, however, and forced to hide in empty apartments in the ever more unrecognisable city, his struggle simply to survive is rendered with increasing subtlety, and Brody's lead performance steadily comes into its own. Old-fashioned in both visual and narrative style and in its overall restraint, the film clearly benefits from the director's first-hand knowledge of the territory.
Film Comment Magazine review Richard Combs, May/June 2003
"If they cut off my head,
what do I say? Me and my head, or me and my body?" muses the hero of Roman
Polanski's The Tenant, at the point where his intrusive neighbors have
so whittled away his peace of mind and integrity of body that he might be about
to disappear up just such a conundrum.
A lot of whittling goes on as
well in The Pianist, on a much grander scale. The city of
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [6/10]
The remarkable true story of Wladislaw “Vladek” Szpilman (Adrien Brody), one
of the persecuted, ghetto-ised Jewish population of
Based on Szpilman’s autobiography, this is a painfully personal project for
director Polanski, himself a survivor of the
Unsurprisingly Polanski is strongest at conveying the mounting desperation
in
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
After surviving
the bombing of Warsaw and witnessing his parents being taken to the
concentration camp where his mother eventually died, a 7-year-old Roman
Polanski escaped the Krakow ghetto through a hole in a barbed-wire fence and
took refuge in Catholic homes around the countryside. In terms of his age and
cognizance, to say nothing of responsibility, Polanski's story doesn't quite
rhyme with that of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a young Polish pianist who managed to
elude death through resilience and startling good fortune. But Szpilman's
memoirs have provided Polanski with a clear, objective window back to his
childhood, allowing him to conjure up his own harrowing memories and filter
them through someone else's story. For obvious reasons, The Pianist must
be considered his most personal film, but it's also his most stylistically
impersonal; it's flattened by the same middlebrow tastefulness that stifles so
many other films about the Holocaust. Polanski isn't the first director to be
tamed by such a grave subject, but it's disappointing to see one of cinema's
liveliest and most provocative directors reduced to a mere skillful craftsman.
The surprise winner of the Palme D'Or at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, The
Pianist does have a few subtle grace notes, many of them from the soulful
Adrien Brody, who plays Szpilman like a sad-eyed specter that haunts the
streets of Warsaw, cheating death as if through divine will. Always a master of
point of view—as evidenced by classics like Repulsion and Rosemary's
Baby—Polanski reveals Warsaw's changing complexion entirely from Brody's
perspective, which makes the quiet spaces between each new atrocity fraught
with uncertainty. Opening with the Nazi invasion of Poland and closing at the
end of the war, The Pianist sticks close to the experience of ordinary
middle-class Jews as their liberties are methodically stripped away and they're
deposited in walled ghettos before getting shipped off to labor camps. Partly
through resourcefulness and charm, mostly because of dumb luck, Szpilman
escapes the dire fate of his parents and siblings and survives in the Warsaw
ruins, relying on the hollow walls and secret flats of non-Jewish sympathizers.
Polanski takes an enormous risk by building his movie around a hero who isn't
remotely heroic, a mostly passive observer whose survival allows him to bear
witness to one small corner of history. (In this respect, Szpilman is the
anti-Schindler: He doesn't want to make a difference in the war, just live to
see the end of it.) Through Brody's remarkably controlled, self-effacing
performance, Polanski succeeds in making his hero an invisible man, but the
sights he conjures are surprisingly artless and ordinary, familiar from a dozen
other Holocaust dramas. Among the casualties in The Pianist is a great
director's imagination.
BFI | Sight
& Sound | The Pianist (2002) David Thompson, February 2003
Warsaw, 1939. Wladyslaw Szpilman
(Adrien Brody), a concert pianist and composer, is performing at a radio
station when a bomb blast announces the imminent Nazi invasion. The German army
takes control of the city and forces the Jewish population into a ghetto.
Szpilman makes a living playing in a café, and witnesses the increasing poverty
and mounting atrocities in the streets. When his family is rounded up for
deportation in August 1942, Szpilman is dragged away by a Jewish police officer
from the crowds being herded into trains.
After finding work as a labourer,
Szpilman manages to escape from the ghetto and go into hiding. By May 1943 a
street battle outside forces him to take refuge in a second apartment. In
August 1944, Szpilman flees the building when an insurrection breaks out in the
street and he takes cover in a hospital. To escape the Nazis, he makes his way
into a devastated part of the city, and hides away in the attic of a house. But
he is discovered by a German officer, Captain Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas
Kretschmann). Learning Szpilman is a pianist, Hosenfeld invites him to perform
at a grand piano in the house. After hearing him play a Chopin ballade,
Hosenfeld protects Szpilman and gives him food supplies. The Nazis move out,
and Szpilman is found by Russian troops. Hosenfeld is detained in a camp and
pleads with a friend of Szpilman's to ask him for help. When Szpilman visits
the site of the camp, it no longer exists, and his friend says he did not
clearly hear the officer's name.
Review
Winning the Palme d'Or at last
year's Cannes Film Festival apparently did Roman Polanski few favours. Many
critics dismissed The Pianist as a conventional exercise in
Holocaust horror, displaying little of the Polish director's expected flair for
the macabre and absurd. Basing his film on a memoir by Wladyslaw Szpilman, a
Jewish pianist essentially known only in Poland (and then largely for his
legacy as a composer of popular songs), Polanski declared himself at last able
to filter his own childhood memories of the war through a personal story of
survival in the ghetto. In effect then, the historical situation brings with it
such a brew of fear, suspicion and the arbitrary nature of death that the
flamboyant dramatics of Repulsion (1965) or The Tenant
(1976) should be an unnecessary superimposition. The director was also
impressed by the "surprising objectivity" of Szpilman's book, which
describes appalling human misery, including the loss of his family, without any
false rhetoric or sentimentality.
Re-reading Polanski's notoriously
dispassionate autobiography, it's not surprising to find a similar attitude -
that survival in the face of genocide is down to single-minded determination
and often sheer luck. Polanski was six when war broke out, and escaped bombing
in Warsaw with his father to be reunited with his mother in the Cracow ghetto.
Like Szpilman, the young Polanski was saved by non-Jewish patrons of variable
loyalty, he lost his mother (though not his father) to the camps, and then
after the war he left his experiences behind him. Many images from his own life
are echoed in Szpilman's account: watching the wall of the ghetto being built
from an upstairs window; the sudden shootings; the round-up of deportees in a
square; and the physical impact of a bomb blast. All of these are faithfully
evoked in The Pianist, along with Polanski's personal memory of evading
mass deportation, when Szpilman is casually advised "Walk, don't
run".
The absolute conviction of its
detail is what gives Polanski's vision of life in the ghetto its almost
hallucinatory quality. This is, in part, due to the triumphant production design
(some of it on the original locations in Warsaw), but it also stems from a
palpable sense of precise recollection from both parties. The enforced dancing
at the road crossing between ill-matched Jewish couples might at first seem the
indulgent invention of the prankish director of Dance of the Vampires
(1967), but it is in fact a faithful realisation of Szpilman's account.
Szpilman's 'scientific' descriptions of events - brutish Nazis tipping an old
man out of his wheelchair from a high balcony, a woman shot in the street
falling into a crouching position - find their perfect cinematic counterpoint
in Polanski's unerringly direct placement of his camera. And just as that
camera always stayed very close to Jack Nicholson's private eye in Chinatown
(1974), making the film a compelling subjective experience, Szpilman himself is
virtually always the point of reference throughout the film. Like Catherine
Deneuve in Repulsion or Polanski himself in The Tenant,
Szpilman becomes a lonely, desperate victim of alien, peeling apartments,
disturbing voices beyond the walls, and menacing neighbours.
Pace those first critics then,
the power of The Pianist derives largely from its dogged adherence
to fact as well as its grim humour and restraint. Music is very sparingly
applied, so that even a soaring crane shot over the devastated city of Warsaw
is denied a swelling John Williams score of Spielbergian dimensions, but simply
comes to rest with a plaintive clarinet solo. When Szpilman finally is allowed
to play a Chopin ballade in order to prove his identity, music has been such a
'lost' sound that the performance has a rare emotional intensity. The lighting
of this scene, in which Adrien Brody's nose seems almost transparent in its
frozen redness and the bitter cold is palpable in his steamy breath, is
perfectly judged. Brody gives an admirably selfless performance throughout,
conveying the unexceptional nature of Szpilman's personality without ever
suggesting he is undeserving of our interest.
The least impressive aspect of
the film is Ronald Harwood's English language script, which is frequently more
functional than inspired. The early family scenes have been attacked in some
quarters for their heavy-handed exposition (compounded by casting that leans
too heavily for some British viewers on familiar television faces). But this
section of the film is relatively short, and the greater part dealing with
Szpilman's lonely struggle to survive is free of such connotations, and often
wordless. Ultimately, The Pianist is a far greater film than
Polanski's recent variable track record suggested it might be, a work of
sustained tension and ferocious clarity, and as near-perfect a marriage of
subject and artist as could be imagined.
Kinoeye| Polish film: Roman
Polanski's The Pianist (2002) Weirdness Through Simplicity, by Wojtek
Kość from Kinoeye, December
16, 2002
Kinoeye | Roman Polanski,
The Pianist & the victim's double vision From
the Eye to the Hand, by Gordana P.
Crnković from Kinoeye, November 29, 2004
The Atheist's Shoah – Roman Polanski's The Pianist • Senses of Cinema Christos Tsiolkas, May 2003
Portraits
of the Artist | Village Voice J.
Hoberman, December 24, 2002
Polanski's
Holocaust Stuart Klawans from The Nation,
The
Pianist is the best film of 2002. - Slate Magazine David Edelstein
World Socialist Web Site review Fred Mazelis
The Film Journal (Peter Tonguette) review
Decent Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review [A+]
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [4/4]
Mixed Reviews: The Arts, The World, and More (Jill Cozzi) review
Images (David Gurevich) review
“The Pianist” - Salon.com Charles Taylor, December 27, 2002
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere
Nitrate Online (Elias Savada) review including an
interview by Cynthia Fuchs with actor Adrien Brody
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
AboutFilm.com (Carlo Cavagna) review [A-]
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [5/5]
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [A]
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review
The Filmsnobs (James Owen) review
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
eFilmCritic.com (Stephen Groenewegen) review [4/5]
filmcritic.com (Amit Asaravala) review [4/5]
CineScene.com (Shari L. Rosenblum) review
DVD Times Mark Boydell
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [4/4]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review
DVD Town (Tim David Raynor) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Bryan Byun) dvd review
Future Movies (Nik Huggins) review [7/10] Nik Huggins
homevideo.about.com (Ivana Redwine) dvd recommendation
DVD Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]
DVD Verdict (Brendan Babish) dvd review [HD-DVD Version]
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo, HD-DVD
DVD Talk (Jason Janis) dvd review [1/5] [Canadian Version] 3-disc
Mark R. Leeper review [+3 out of -4..+4]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
TNMC (John "Batman" Shea) review
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
stylusmagazine.com (Scott Plagenhoef) review
Movie-Vault.com ("Le Apprenti") review [9/10]
Karina Montgomery review [4.5/5]
hybridmagazine.com review Roxanne Bogucka
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani) review [3.5/4]
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [A-]
eFilmCritic.com review [5/5] Slyder
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [A]
Moda Magazine (Brian Orndorf) review [8/10]
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [5/5]
Window to the Movies (Jeffrey Chen) review [7/10]
The World's Greatest Critic! [J.C. Maçek III]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Jonathan F. Richards review [4/5]
Cinema Blend review Joshua Tyler
FilmJudge (David Mercier) review [4/5]
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [C+]
eFilmCritic.com review [3/5] The Ultimate Dancing Machine
Offoffoff.com review David N. Butterworth, also seen here: David N. Butterworth review [3/4]
SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [3.5/4]
Movie Habit (Marty Mapes) review [3.5/4]
Ruthless Reviews review Erich Schulte
Killer Movie Reviews (Andrea Chase) review [5/5]
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
Talking Pictures (UK) review Jap Mees and Howard Schumann
Exclaim! dvd review Joshua Ostroff
State of the Arts review Emrys Hughes
CultureCartel.com (John Beachem) review [2.5/5]
Media-Assault.com (Sean Caszatt) review [5/5]
Plume Noire review Sandrine Marques
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [4/5]
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review also reviewing THE GREY ZONE, MAX, and BLIND SPOT: HITLER’S SECRETARY
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/4]
The 50 greatest World War II movies with Time Out Film - Time Out ... Films 50 to 41, Time Out London, August 10, 2009
Click here for 40 through to 31...
Click
here for 30 through to 21...
Click here for 20 through to 11...
Click here to see numbers ten through to two...
Click here to reveal the number one film...
Entertainment Weekly review [A-] Lisa Schwarzbaum
The 50 greatest World War II movies: part two
BBC Films review Laura Bushell
Boston Globe (Ty Burr) review [4/4]
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [4/5]
Las Vegas Review-Journal (Carol Cling) review
The Seattle Times (Moira Macdonald) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review
Movie review, 'The Pianist' Michael Wilmington from The Chicago Tribune
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
Los Angeles Times (Manohla Dargis) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
OLIVER TWIST
As a novel, ‘Oliver Twist’ is episodic and often sentimental, especially in its wish-fulfilment ending – all too easy to serve up as saccharine ‘family-friendly’ stuff. What’s most impressive about Roman Polanski’s new adaptation is that it retains the book’s emotional punch and darker elements – the spectre of the gallows is a running motif – and presents them in a way likely to engage younger viewers without patronising them. From realist flourishes (the deterioration of Oliver’s feet as he hikes to London) to witty contrasts (the workhouse master spitting out a mouthful of food when Oliver asks for more), it’s a film that does its emotional work through bold, resonant image-making.Tracing the young orphan’s progress from workhouse to the East End slum where he falls in with Fagin, the Artful Dodger et al, Ronald Harwood’s adaptation is an efficient trim-job, initially picaresque then streamlining the narrative (and excising the fairytale genealogy). Visually the film takes its cue from the George Cruikshank caricatures and Gustave Doré engravings associated with the novel, offering a heightened, picture-book feel. Varnished but still grubby, its backstreets are ripe with squalor, its impeccably cast villains no less menacing for being faintly clownlike: Mark Strong shines briefly as toothy, flame-haired dandy Crackit and Jamie Foreman makes a suitably snarly Sykes. But clownlike need not be pantomimic, as Ben Kingsley’s centrepiece turn as Fagin demonstrates. Jocular ringmaster and exploitative arch-opportunist, he’s never sympathetic but always compulsively watchable – especially when at his literal wit’s end in the climactic jailhouse reunion with Barney Clark’s Oliver. It’s a truly pitiable scene that makes clearer the film’s connection to Polanski’s earlier work. As in ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, ‘Chinatown’, ‘The Pianist’ and others, Polanski presents a threatening, rotten world as viewed through the eyes of a vulnerable innocent; he tackles jealousy, suspicion and corruption as surely in storybook mode as through suspense, investigation or horror.
Village Voice (Jessica Winter) review
Early in the new rendition of Charles Dickens's novel of social injustice, a camera shot briefly holds the friendless orphan between the bars of the workhouse gate. Oliver Twist (Barney Clark) is in prison, where he was born and where he is destined, though not absolutely guaranteed, to die. Previous attempts to adapt the harsh and problematic Oliver Twist for the screen have not aged well: Alec Guinness's grotesque portrayal of Fagin, with a huge hook nose prosthetic in a key supporting role, deformed David Lean's lavish 1948 try, while the musical revue Oliver! (1968) wore itself out with frenetic camp. If a 21st-century version is necessary, then Roman Polanski's your man: In his films, as in Dickens, the strong prey upon the weak with a monomaniacal glee that often borders on the grimly comic, while the director's own blighted childhood lends an inevitable autobiographical frisson to Oliver's travails.
Accomplished if lacking in urgency, this Oliver Twist (scripted by Ronald Harwood, who also wrote The Pianist) showcases Polanski's proven gift for Dickensian caricature, beginning with the jowly ranks of the workhouse board, a quivering pile of gluttonous entitlement. Harry Eden conjures a spry, confident, yet vulnerable Artful Dodger (and pulls off a delightful meat-under-hat trick to boot); Jamie Foreman's Sykes is a discomfiting marvel of dead-eyed contamination; and Ben Kingsley's wizened Fagin is a deeply ambivalent figure—at once Oliver's benefactor and curse, he's by turns impish, repellent, avuncular, terrifying, and pathetic, and Kingsley simply disappears into this musty rag-and-bone shop. The film's real star, though, is Prague in the role of East End London, which has rarely looked so infernal: a diseased tangle of cobblestone arteries choked with shit and trash and squalling herds of misery. Oliver Twist is a horror movie, but as its potent last scenes attest, there's a twinge of the supernatural about its hero's resilient goodness. The quality of mercy is strained, but by some strange feat it doesn't dissolve entirely.
The Onion A.V. Club review Tasha Robinson
It doesn't take
much to play Oliver Twist—soulful eyes, a pretty face, and a
beleaguered-but-hopeful expression pretty much sums up the character of Charles
Dickens' most famous orphan. Born into a 19th-century British workhouse and
thrust at age 10 into a life of slavery and crime, he's a cipher victimized by
more dynamic and nuanced characters, who bounce him between them like a hapless
pinball. Dickens' rags-to-riches novel Oliver Twist has been adapted to
film and television more than 20 times already, and each new version has to
grapple with the same problem: The central character doesn't feel much like a
character, and each adaptation has to find a compensatory center.
Director Roman
Polanski looks for his in Ben Kingsley, who cackles, gibbers, and generally
hams it up in his role as Fagin, the greedy old man who absorbs Oliver (played
with the requisite blank-faced soul by Barney Clark) into a stable of underage
pickpockets whom he dispatches to the streets of London to do his dirty work.
But Kingsley is one of very few lively things about Polanski's plodding,
by-the-numbers Oliver Twist. And in this dreary setting, he comes across
more as a desperate clown than a saving grace, which makes it all the more
awkward that no one else is clowning along with him.
Polanski is no
stranger to adaptations; his last film, 2002's The Pianist (which earned
him the Best Director Oscar), capped a long career of acclaimed books-on-film,
including Rosemary's Baby, 1979's Thomas Hardy adaptation Tess,
and the graphically perverse Bitter Moon. But Polanski shows no
particular engagement with Oliver Twist, and no interest in bringing it
to anything more than a turgid half-life. Pianist cinematographer Pawel
Edelman films it all in rich earth tones and fussy detail, and every frame
looks like some gorgeously oppressive, low-lit Rembrandt painting, but the
story moves with paint-drying slowness, and most of the cast seems to be posing
rather than acting. Pianist screenwriter Ronald Harwood sticks closely to
Dickens' original text, striking only some of the more far-fetched plot twists
that gave the original book a contrived, almost fairy-tale quality. But maybe
Polanski's Oliver could use some magic. Instead, it's flat, joyless, and
artificially proper, unobjectionable but unexceptional as well. Like Oliver
himself, it seems hollow, no matter how dutifully it goes through the motions.
It's seldom a good sign when a director announces that he has
made a movie primarily for his own children - and Oliver Twist, reportedly
designed to delight little Morgane and Elvis (!) Polanski, who
both also appear in tiny roles, duly proves a decidedly
underwhelming and perfunctory adaptation of Charles Dickens' ever-popular
novel. It certainly doesn't help matters that Barney Clark is a somewhat colourless presence as the cipher-like title character, a
young orphan personifying "goodness and innocence" who finds cruelty
and kindness in roughly equal measure on the mean streets
of mid-19th-century London.
For budgetary reasons the production was mainly filmed in Prague, and it shows:
as with the similarly Czech-lensed From
Hell, there's something naggingly phoney about the many street-scenes
(not least that the light is never quite right). The indoor stuff
works much better: here, among the mostly gloomy, convincingly unhygienic
interiors, we can concentrate more fully on the "turns"
from a cast packed full of reliable Brit character-actors. Misleadingly
top-billed in what's really a beefed-up supporting role as Fagin, the wheedling
criminal mastermind of a pickpocketing gang which (briefly) welcomes the
hapless Oliver into their midst, Ben Kingsley - sorry, Sir Ben
Kingsley - seems to be channelling (the great) Wilfrid Brambell's Albert Steptoe as a gentle-voiced,
disarmingly sympathetic old coot who even gets a heartstring-tugging jailcell
farewell.
As Fagin's kind-hearted junior colleague Nancy, Leanne Rowe contributes perhaps
the most striking performance in what is, admittedly, a showcase of a tragic,
doomed-tart role, while Harry Eden (from Pure) has some fun as star pickpocket The Artful
Dodger. At the other end of the age spectrum, the indefatigable Liz Smith gets
a brief, nice cameo as 'Old Woman', while admirers of four-legged
performers will be delighted by the contributions from white mastiff
'Turbo' as Bullseye, not-so-faithful hound of hissable cock-er-nee villain
Bill Sykes (Jamie Foreman, somewhat indulged).
Ronald Harwood's script takes some daring liberties with the source material,
but nevertheless falls short of successfully
transferring Dickens' sprawling, quintessentially literary material into
the very different cinematic form. What results is an intrusively
scored, episodic, only intermittently watchable affair that while
improving in the somewhat grim final third, constantly suffers in comparison
with the still-fresh memories of the last major Dickens adaptation, Douglas
McGrath's underrated Nicholas
Nickleby (2002).
In the wake of his critical, commercial and Oscar-laden success with The
Pianist, Polanski presumably had pretty much carte blanche to
pursue whatever project he wanted: it's therefore baffling and disappointing
that the man once capable of terrific pictures like Chinatown,
Cul
de Sac and Rosemary's Baby, and who himself had such
a famously nightmarish childhood, should now serve up
such a lukewarm, inert Oliver Twist.
American Cinematographer essay ["A Boy’s Will"] Benjamin B from American Cinematographer, September 2005
DVD Times Mike Sutton
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]
“Oliver Twist” - Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek, September 23, 2005
Pajiba (Phillip Stephens) review
The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review
Oliver Twist Edward Lamberti from Kamera
The New York Sun (Eric Grode) review
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
Kids
get the shaft in two new movies.
David Edelstein, September 23, 2005
PopMatters (Lara Killian) review
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]
Eye for Film ("Themroc") review [3/5]
Eye for Film (Anton Bitel) review [3.5/5]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Wilson) dvd review
DVD Town (James Plath) dvd review
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [4/5]
Cinema Signals (Jules Brenner) review [3/4]
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Jesse Paddock
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [2/5]
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [C+]
Tiscali UK review Paul Hurley
Film Journal International (Rex Roberts) review
Cinema Blend review Scott Gwin
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B] also seen here: Eric D. Snider
Celluloid Dreams Simon Hill
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
The Spinning Image (Keith Rockmael) review
Georgia Straight (Ken Eisner) review
Comingsoon.net review Edward Douglas
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Future Movies (Michelle Thomas) review [7/10]
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Exclaim! review Travis Mackenzie Hoover
Oliver Twist Criterion Forum discussion group, June 13, 2005
Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Lisa Schwarzbaum
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [3/4]
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
BBCi - Films (DVD review) Stella Papamichael
The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [3/5]
Boston Globe review [2.5/4] Ty Burr
Austin Chronicle (Steve Davis) review [3/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
Los Angeles Times (Carina Chocano) review
Chicago Tribune [Michael Phillips]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review September 23, 2005
FILM; A Face Lift for Wretched Old Fagin Michael Joseph Gross from The New York Times, August 21, 2005
THE GHOST WRITER B+ 91
White
wine—I've never seen the point of it. —The Ghost (Ewan McGregor)
Polanski has perhaps subliminally given us his view of the world through his latest film, in particular his thoughts about America, where he remains exiled and under indictment for standing rape charges of a minor since 1977, charges that, at least in Polanski’s eyes, must pale in comparison to America’s complicity in kidnapping potential terror suspects, torturing them through CIA authorized interrogations, and leading a war into Iraq based on bogus intelligence information which has killed tens of thousands of innocents, all of which subject American leaders to potential war crimes violations, except that the United States is one of the few countries that doesn’t recognize the authority of the war crimes tribunal. Polanski’s latest wraps itself around these topical political issues as a central point from which a fictional story develops that includes a mysterious death that remains unsolved. Ewan McGregor is the mystery or ghost writer hired to write the memoirs of a former British Prime Minister, Pierce Brosnan as Adam Lang, who bears a strange familiarity to Tony Blair, especially his unpopular support of the U.S. actions in Iraq, subject to constant protests back home, which quickly jettison him back into the news when he’s accused of complicity in war crimes. Adding to the murky intrigue, McGregor is replacing the previous ghost writer who drowned under mysterious circumstances, leaving behind a partially completed memoir that exists only in a draft form that remains under lock and key.
The dark and atmospheric setting is a heavily secure, private compound on the beaches of Martha’s Vineyard, though shot in Germany on the North Sea island of Sylt, with giant floor to ceiling glass windows overlooking the constantly overcast skies hovering over a horizon of sand and ocean, a fortress where every act is scrutinized by a team of highly trained political staff and an arm of security detail that is a constant companion to Lang and his wife Ruth (Olivia Williams). There isn’t an ounce of sunlight anywhere to be seen in this film, instead the windows are pounded by a deluge of rain while the interiors reveal dark shadows that may as well define the state of mind of the inhabitants, most all of whom seem to be guarding deep secrets, not the least of which is a dried up marriage to his college sweetheart, a starkly frank and keenly intelligent woman who has always had the ear of the Prime Minister, but she’s been kept out of the mix of late, replaced by an über personal aide, the near makeup free Ameila (Kim Cattrall), whose dominating sexual presence irks Ruth every time she sees her, pretty much hating her husband in the same breath. Enter the ghost writer into this myriad of egos and ancient history, and from his initial encounter with Lang, a shamelessly overconfident man with a freshly squeezed glass of carrot juice in hand, sweating from a recent workout, a ballsy Brit who schmoozes and simultaneously sizes up people for a living, it’s clear the writer is in over his head, but he attempts to sort out certain clues and details that were left behind by his predecessor.
Polanski is a man who relishes dark secrets, so this menacing film quickly turns into a murder mystery of sorts, but Polanski slowly enlarges the canvas from an obscure ghost writer mysteriously washed ashore to the standard operating procedure for how governments get things done in the world today, as there are nefarious forces at work that operate in the stealth of night, that have their own secret agendas and answer to no one but themselves. Clearly this is how Polanski views the CIA, and it’s interesting how these dark outside forces start infiltrating the story with chilling effects, initially seen through skeptical eyes, but eventually the presence of odd, peripheral characters take on greater dimension, beautifully realized in an extended car ride sequence where technology offers its own rewards. McGregor is excellent as he attempts to piece together the mystery, the truth behind the façade, as his own view of the chosen subject goes through a transformation from idle curiosity to a hound-dog-like nose for detective work. Eli Wallach (at 93!!) makes a curious appearance in a rain soaked beach house, as does Tom Wilkinson, evasive as always, as he cleverly dispatches the writer with the ease of swatting a fly, all contributing to this glorious return to the paranoid political thrillers of the 70’s, like THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975), only with a modern twist. The way Polanski personalizes the material with a dour, gloomy mood is a thing to behold, as like Lang, both remain clever, coolly detached, yet exiled from the world community at large, resigned to the murky details of memory and memoirs, where the truth about one’s past, much like world history, is as much a hindrance as it is one’s personal obsession.
The Village Voice [Nicolas Rapold]
It's hard not to picture Polanski under house arrest
in Gstaad editing his diverting new thriller, in which a former British prime
minister dodges extradition while having his memoirs rewritten. Then again, when
your life is like a mash-up of the History Channel's entire catalog of shock
programming, autobiography will probably influence your fictions, and Polanski
seems inspired as he maintains implausible momentum with a cloudy premise. Ewan
McGregor diffidently plays the so-called ghost to exiled politician Adam Lang
(Pierce Brosnan), living in cushioned seclusion off the gray
Time Out New York (Keith Uhlich) review [4/5]
We’re so used to amped-up white-knucklers that the controlled approach of a filmmaker like Roman Polanski is immediately seductive. The director responsible for such mainstays as Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby (and of course his own real-life news cycle) turns Robert Harris’s political potboiler involving a ghostwriter (McGregor), a former British prime minister (Brosnan) and an isolated island home into a slow-burn near-masterpiece. Shot in claustrophobic widescreen, the film showcases Polanski’s mastery of even expository scenes: A revealing conversation between McGregor’s so-called ghost and a shady figure played by Tom Wilkinson is so fraught with tension that you expect those malevolent Cocteau-esque hands from Repulsion to burst out of the wall and drag someone into oblivion.
The film stays more grounded than that, though it certainly doesn’t lack for perverse Polanski flourishes. There’s a great bit of carnal business with the prime minister’s wife (Williams) that’s filmed in a deadpan long shot. Eli Wallach pops up—frail-looking though spirited—as an old-timer who stokes the writer’s paranoia about his employer’s plans for him. And more than one character has a wry aside on the protagonist’s heritage (“Oh, you Brits!”), as if it was both a badge of honor and a reason for condescending suspicion.
There are all number of similarly colorful touches (the sick-joke ending alone is worth the price of admission) that help to deepen what one colleague suggested is the greatest airport novel ever filmed. It’s true that The Ghost Writer doesn’t possess the lingering profundity of the director’s best work—the War on Terror window dressing is just that. Yet Polanski has made a genre piece with a verve and vitality that’s in sadly short supply.
An impresario of widescreen framing, Roman Polanski has been obsessively filtering his personal traumas through his camera eye since his feature-length debut, Knife in the Water, announced him as a major film artist. His unique visual imprint is felt immediately in the opening shot of The Ghost Writer, which begins with a barge pulling up to a dock, appearing almost anxious to spit out its cargo of commuter cars onto a mysterious island retreat but also seeming as if it were going to penetrate the surface of the screen. Even before a body washes ashore and a group of men gather in an office to give Ewan McGregor's nameless lead character the job of finishing a disgraced ex-Prime Minister's memoirs, this taut little thriller already has you by the neck.
Ghost Writer is a film with shades of political intrigue. It links a British politico's handling of terror suspects with America's rejection of ICC jurisdiction, but unlike Tony Gilroy's fashionably self-serious Michael Clayton, in which George Clooney saves his soul by exposing a corporation's malfeasance, it isn't enthralled by the complicated villainy that ties many powers that be. After Pierce Brosnan's Adam Lang is called out for his alleged wrongdoing, McGregor's "ghost" sets out on his own to unravel a seemingly tangled web that links his boss to a Cambridge scholar and reveals cracks in Adam's story about his political origins, but he doesn't do so out of any sort of self-righteous moral duty. What compels the character is sheer curiosity, then his fiercely primal desire for survival.
Ghost Writer suggests a game of chess played delicately and with great precision. The score, by the great Alexandre Desplat, is racked with as much tension as Polanski's prismatically askew images, notable for their remarkably absorbing depth of field: However McGregor is framed, whether it is before a vast, toiling ocean or against a huge wall-sized window, there's always a sense that he's unsafe, that someone, something, could sneak up behind him at any moment, from around some corner or sand dune, even from out of the sea, and take him way. The machinations of plot are realistic in their humdrumness, but they obviously matter less to Polanski than mood—creating a suffocating aura of eerie tranquility that's bound for inevitable collapse.
Ninth Gate sans the goofy giallo flourishes, Ghost Writer is in many ways a cynical vision, assuming as it does political, even human, corruptibility as a given, but the struggle of McGregor's character is hauntingly reflective of Polanski's lifelong traumas, from his surviving the Holocaust to, well, his surviving the murder of Sharon Tate and their unborn child. Holed up inside Adam's island manse, subjected to all sorts of security checks, his every behavior scrutinized, McGregor's ghost writer becomes not unlike, yes, a ghost. His is a particularly nerve-jangling existential crisis, and it's one that you feel in one's bones—and could not have been conceived by anyone other than a man that has moved throughout life from one prison to next, many of his own construction.
There's an odd synchronicity between the two big film
releases of this week, Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island and Roman
Polanski's The Ghost Writer (Summit Entertainment). Both are
directed by men who were titans of the resurgence of American-made film in the
early '70s. Both movies are thrillers about young men who become entrapped in
webs of paranoia and deceit while stranded on islands off the coast of
With its slow but taut pacing and muted tone, The Ghost Writer evokes the feel of '70s classics like The Conversation or Polanski's own Chinatown. But rather than sampling and remixing these movies in the breathless, avid postmodern style, Polanski remembers them—what they felt like and why they mattered. The principal character, who's never given a name, is played by Ewan McGregor. (A generation ago, Michael Caine would have played the role.) He's a skilled ghostwriter (and, it's implied, a failed novelist) who's brought in to whip into shape the impossibly dull memoir of a former British prime minister in time for publication. The previous ghostwriter died before the manuscript was finished, drowning off the coast of the island where the politician, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), lives with his brilliant, frustrated wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams). The Ghost takes the job, unable to resist the $250,000 paycheck. But the check comes with strings attached—so many strings that the Ghost is soon desperately entangled in the Langs' political and marital quagmires.
Holed up at their stark modern beachfront property (whatever house plays the house should win the Academy Award for best house), the embattled Langs watch on cable news as a political enemy implicates Adam in a torture scandal and the International Criminal Court threatens to prosecute. The Ghost, at the Langs' behest, writes a press statement on Adam's behalf—at which point, as he's sweetly informed by Adam's personal assistant and mistress (Kim Cattrall), he becomes "an accomplice." The disgraced PM's resistance to extradition, and his equivocal justification for his past actions, can't help but remind us of Polanski's own legal and moral limbo, but the analogy isn't pushed too far (audiences that want the film to be a mea culpa for the filmmaker will say it isn't pushed far enough).
The intrigues, suspense, and reversals that follow this setup are best left to unfold at their own stately clip. Polanski collaborated on the screenplay with the mystery writer Robert Harris, who wrote the novel the film is based on, and Polanski's signature elements are all here: the plausibly tightening web of coincidence, the sense of constant low-level menace, and the mordant humor. There's a marvelously satisfying sequence that uses a car's GPS device to advance the plot with an economy that would have had Hitchcock clapping his hands in delight.
The casting is note-perfect, with one big, blond exception: Kim Cattrall. If this were a silent movie, Cattrall would be fine—she certainly looks the part of the icy, hyperefficient personal assistant—but her stab at a British accent is 10 degrees short of half-assed, and all you can think of as she purrs her lines is Samantha ordering a second Cosmo. Everyone else in the cast, down to the unknown actors who play the Langs' domestic staff, seems born to play just the role they have. Pierce Brosnan, in particular, is an inspired choice to play a slick, shallow actor-turned-politician who's half Reagan, half Tony Blair. When Eli Wallach, now 93, shows up in a tiny part as the local who warns the Ghost about the sketchy circumstances of his predecessor's death, you don't think, "Cool, a cameo by Eli Wallach!" You think, what an eerily fascinating old man that is.
The composer Alexandre Desplat is on a tear. In the past year, he has scored three terrific movies (Fantastic Mr. Fox, A Prophet, and this one), and two more that, whatever you think of them, were musically memorable (Julie & Julia and The Twilight Saga: New Moon.) His music for The Ghost Writer, full of Bernard Herrmann-esque arpeggios and tinkling bells, is at once witty and genuinely suspenseful. It's one of the best things about the movie.
I'm getting tired of saying nice things about The Ghost Writer, so I'll throw in a quibble: The denouement, in which the Ghost learns just how high the conspiracy goes, pivots on a plot point that feels over-elaborate and contrived. But the very last shot—perhaps the best last shot of a movie since Before Sunset—redeems everything. Except, of course, for Roman Polanski himself.
The
Perils of Polanski: The Ghost Writer - Film Comment Andrew Sarris, May/June
2010
After half a century of filmmaking marked by an inordinate number of interruptions, disruptions, and self-imposed exiles, Roman Polanski, now 76, has emerged with a comparatively meager output of 18 features and about half as many shorts. Most of the latter were completed from 1959 to 1962, when his first feature, Knife in the Water, made him an overnight film-festival celebrity and earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Since then, most of his movies, shot both here and abroad, have been in English.
Polanski was born August
18, 1933, in Paris to Polish-Jewish parents, who returned to Krakow when he was
3, thus inadvertently precipitating him into a terrifying childhood. When he
was 8, his parents were taken to a concentration camp, where his mother died and
his father somehow survived. Left alone, the child escaped from the Krakow
ghetto just before it was liquidated, and roamed the countryside, living on the
generosity of Catholic families who sheltered him from Nazis.
Oddly, Polanski had never
made a film directly concerned with the Holocaust until The Pianist
(02), which garnered multiple Oscars. And even then it was someone else’s
life-and-death story he filmed. Adrien Brody plays the title character,
Wladyslaw Szpilman, whose 1946 memoir of his survival in Warsaw from 1939 until
the end of World War II was adapted by Ronald Harwood. Yet even though the
story was not autobiographical, Polanski infused the film with a sense of his
own horrific ordeal, having survived, as does his protagonist, by a cynical awareness
of the casual cruelties inflicted by the Nazis.
Indeed, Polanski’s entire
career could be seen in its predominantly dark ironies as a series of perpetual
struggles in a too often insane and indifferent world. Polanski’s first
English-language film, Repulsion (65), for example, cast Catherine
Deneuve as a lonely, repressed young woman becalmed in her sister’s London
flat. Her means of disposing of unwelcome suitors are especially gruesome given
Deneuve’s generally sunny temperament in her previous screen appearances.
Polanski co-wrote the strangely unsettling screenplay with Gérard Brach, with
whom he subsequently collaborated on Cul-de-sac (66). A less successful,
but still chaotically engrossing comedy, it concerns a placid, boring couple
played by Donald Pleasence and Françoise Dorléac, whose island hideaway is
invaded by two fugitive gangsters played by Lionel Stander and Jack MacGowran.
This time, however, the feeling of menace in the situation is virtually
obliterated by Polanski’s farcical treatment of everyone’s hopeless awareness
of a terminal dislocation.
In still another
collaboration with Brach, Polanski wrote, directed, and acted in The
Fearless Vampire Killers (67), part chilling horror and part uneven send-up
of the genre, including an awkwardly self-conscious joke about a Jewish vampire
who scoffs at the power of the Christian cross to exorcise vampires of his own
religious persuasion. MacGowran and Polanski himself head a cast that includes
an ill-fated Sharon Tate, soon to become a casualty of the Manson family’s
real-life horror.
Even when Polanski has
adapted literary classics by Shakespeare (Macbeth, 71) and Thomas Hardy
(Tess, 79), he has managed, for better or worse, to achieve a level of
visual and emotional virtuosity that reflects his personal demons. Polanski
made the guilt-ridden agonies of Tess his own to such an extent that the film
remains a sublime emotional highlight of his career—second only to the epiphany
of Chinatown (74), the greatest of all Hollywood political film noirs.
The earlier film is graced with a knowledgeable screenplay by Robert Towne, and
charismatic performances by Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, and John Huston.
Polanski is credited by Towne and others with insisting on a tragic ending by
which evil and corruption are triumphant, instead of a more “moral” ending, and
this made all the difference. Only Polanski with his own bitter experiences
could have banished the curse of the Hollywood happy ending.
Nonetheless, the most
popular success in his aborted Hollywood career was Rosemary’s Baby
(68), which he adapted very skillfully from Ira Levin’s best seller. It was
hardly a leap for the director to depict the devil’s triumph. After all, he had
lived through the rise of Hitler.
The tangled web in which
the co-protagonists of Polanski’s The Ghost Writer are enmeshed bears an
eerie resemblance to the scandal-ridden predicament in which Polanski now finds
himself. Under house arrest in Switzerland, he faces possible extradition to
Los Angeles for sentencing in a 1977 sex-crime conviction involving a drugged
underage female victim. It is therefore conceivable that The Ghost Writer,
completed in Europe just before his ill-advised trip to the Zurich Film
Festival, may serve as the writer-director’s cinematic swan song.
Pierce Brosnan plays Adam
Lang, a former British Prime Minister patterned after caricatures of Tony Blair
as a mere toady of George Bush and his disastrous foreign incursions, who finds
himself facing potential prosecution as an alleged war criminal. Polanski’s
nameless protagonist and alter ego is played inscrutably and anonymously by
Ewan McGregor as the second ghost writer after the mysterious drowning of the
first on a ferry ride to Martha’s Vineyard, where Lang lives in self-imposed
exile.
Obviously, Polanski could
not shoot on the real Martha’s Vineyard, and so Germany’s North Sea Coast had
to double for the off-limits American location, while Berlin sound stages with
their mirrored wizardry had to simulate American interiors. It all goes by so
fast we don’t have time to notice.
In the total context of
Polanski’s hard life and grim ordeals, and admittedly errant behavior, The
Ghost Writer constitutes a miracle of artistic and psychological
resilience.
World Socialist Web Site [Stefan Steinberg]
A further comment
on Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer - World ... David Walsh from the World Socialist Web Site, March 5, 2010
Critic After Dark: The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski, 2010) Noel Vera
Prime Suspect
| The New Yorker David Denby
“The Ghost Writer”:
Polanski strikes back - Salon.com
Andrew O’Hehir
The Onion A.V. Club review [B+] Scott Tobias
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
theartsdesk.com [Sheila Johnston]
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Screen International (Fionnuala Halligan) review
CHUD.com (Devin Faraci) review
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
Film School Rejects [Neil Miller]
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [2.5/5]
Daily Film Dose [Blair Stewart]
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [C+]
The Cinema Source (Ryan Hamelin) review [A]
Olivia Williams: 'It can be unnerving working for Polanski' Euan Ferguson interviews actress Olivia Williams from The Observer, April 11, 2010
Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Lisa Schwarzbaum
The
Ghost Writer -- Film Review | Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
The Ghost Writer | Film review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
The
Ghost Writer: The secret life of the man who wasn't there - Telegraph Charles Moore
Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review
Austin Chronicle review [3.5/5] Marjorie Baumgarten
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
The Ghost Writer
Movie Review (2010) | Roger Ebert
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
The
New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review February 19, 2010
Polanski’s Visions of Victimhood Dennis Lim from The New York Times, February 12, 2010, including an interesting timeline: Milestones: Roman Polanski
CARNAGE B 87
While Polanski’s hilariously frenetic trailer, sarcastically set to the
same music as Kubrick’s A
Clockwork Orange (1971), Rossini's “Thieving Magpie,” Carnage Trailer 2011 HD -
YouTube (2:02), is one of the best seen over the Christmas holiday season,
the same cannot be said about the film, which is smartly written and fun but
also occasionally flat, based on Yasmina Reza’s play, God of Carnage (initially
written in French), which focuses on two sets of wealthy New York City parents
who attempt to resolve an incident between their children who get into a minor
scuffle. What starts out as a polite and civilized conversation soon
takes a turn for the worse, where fingers are pointed, pastries get eaten, cell
phone’s rudely interrupt, alcohol is consumed, and in no time the behavior gets
out of hand, turning this into a madcap farce about privilege, power, and
social class, where society no longer plays by the “rules of the game,” instead
playing the blame game where it’s somebody else’s fault, anyone other than
their own. This kind of overprotection is typical of children of privilege,
raised by nannies, where often chauffeured limos may drop off the child to and
from school, where the parents remain clueless as to who their children really
are and what personality characteristics they exhibit, as they’re completely
obsessed with providing the finest schools, planning their college and career
path before they even get into pre-school. With this in mind, Polanski
has set into motion a whirlwind of emotional carnage, each side inflicting as
much damage while also exhibiting as much human contempt as possible, all while
attempting to remain above the fray. But both sides are dragged into the
mud, resorting to what amounts to verbal jousting, using vindictive elements of
slapstick humor to render each side ridiculously inept. Except for the
opening and closing shot, a held look at the Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York
City (the scene of the crime) overlooking the Hudson River where children play,
parents walk by with strollers, old folks sit on benches, and people walk their
dogs, the entire film takes place within the four walls of an upscale New York
condominium, the home of Penelope and Michael (Jodie Foster and John C.
Reilly), whose 11-year old son was hit in the face with a stick by Zachary
(Polanski’s son Elvis), the child of Nancy and Alan (Kate Winslet and Christoph
Waltz).
This kind of chamber drama is all about casting, as these four remain
front and center in real time before an audience the entire time, where the
original Broadway cast was Marcia Gay Harden and James Gandolfini as Penelope
and Michael, while Hope Davis and Jeff Daniels played Nancy and Alan,
though at times the two men switched their roles. The conflicting
personalities is what generates the sparks that fly, so it’s all about
character development in an extremely compressed period of time, as the entire
film runs only 79 minutes. Polanski began working on the film while under
house arrest in Switzerland after his 2009 arrest (subsequently released as
Switzerland would not extradite him to the United States for decades-old sexual
assault charges), where confined to four walls himself allowed him to develop
various strategic elements of how to properly stage the play on camera.
If truth be told, having seen the 73-minute One Act play in Chicago at The
Goodman Theater ('God
of Carnage' at the Goodman Theatre: A fight over the kids ... Chris
Jones review from The Chicago Tribune, March 14, 2011), the theatrical
experience is far superior, where the changing tone from bland pleasantries to
fever pitch hysteria feels more spontaneously evolved, as this frenetic back
and forth pace can be more easily achieved onstage, as there are no edits or
cuts. Polanski, on the other hand, has fun with the idea of a couple that
will never leave, as they’re seen leaving the apartment at the beginning, where
they’ve apparently already had their say, and both families are still
exchanging pleasantries, but some small detail remains missing from their
follow up plan, which, like rewinding a clock, brings them back to the
beginning where they scramble back inside and start all over again, a process
that happens repeatedly throughout the film, each time getting progressively
less civil.
Michael is a relaxed, friendly, relatively unambitious guy who sells
housewares, a kind of guy next door, while his wife Penelope is a type-A
perfectionist personality that hides her obsessive compulsive behavior under
the guise of being a do-gooder, a self-righteous, morally indignant liberal who
believes there’s an answer for every problem under the sun. Nancy is the
gorgeous trophy wife who sits there looking beautiful, who maintains her calm,
blank expression until after a few drinks when she switches into full assault
mode, a tigress on attack, while her husband Alan is a corporate attorney, the
kind of nonchalant weasel that gets mega-corporations off the hook by hiding
the evidence and cooking the facts, a guy that lives on his cell phone 24/7,
where we constantly see him on the phone finagling his way through a potential
gross negligence pharmaceutical lawsuit. Pure and simple, what eventually
happens is that once they allow themselves to get sidetracked, which is every
time the cellphone rings, they reset the scene from a slightly different
vantage point, eventually forgetting the matter with the children altogether
and launching into a frontal assault exposing the hypocrisy in each other’s
lives, which they do exceptionally well. They’re exceedingly good at
tearing each other apart, while ridiculously amateurish at finding common
ground, where it’s impossible to disguise the fact that they find each other
revolting, probably making despicable parents, where of course they’re to blame
for their son’s behavior, where Penelope at one point indicates Zachary’s
behavior violates Homeland Security. The exaggerated element of farce has
a few exquisite moments, a good bit of politically incorrect hilarity, but also
several flat moments where someone keeps talking but nobody’s laughing.
Winslet is probably the weakest in the cast while the other three have a field
day of crudely undermining their opponent’s credibility. Another film that
takes this same theme to the next level is Fassbinder’s exotic visual labyrinth
and camera tease Chinese
Roulette (Chinesisches Roulette) (1976), which is much more savagely
brutal, exposing husband and wife marital infidelities face to face through a
truth or dare game, having the tables turned on each of them during what was
supposed to be a secret weekend getaway with their significant
other.
Short Takes: Carnage - Film Comment Nicolas Rapold, November/December 2011
Roman Polanski’s experience in theater as performer and director
before his star-making American run arguably left just as big an imprint on his
visual and thematic habits as his mind-boggling personal history. The spatial
and psychological traps so familiar from his films (distilled in a 1958 short Two
Men and a Wardrobe) can be read as a productive displacement of experiments
on stage. A veteran of stage-to-screen adaptations from Macbeth and Death
and the Maiden, the filmmaker in exile turns to Yasmina Reza’s God of
Carnage for his latest and shortest feature, but on this occasion, the
translation harvests little from its perhaps meager source.
In the story’s gossip-ready premise, a violent incident between two kids leads to a parental showdown during a failed attempt at conciliation. Nancy (Kate Winslet) and rich husband Alan (Christoph Waltz) visit Penelope (Jodie Foster) and middle-class Michael (John C. Reilly) at their Brooklyn apartment. As an engraved invitation might have it, “drinks, recriminations, hysteria to follow.”
Class tensions are enacted for our benefit, insults hurled for titillation. It’s an entertaining, cathartic fantasy of bad manners rather than something genuinely challenging or perverse. A grimacing Foster goes for it, and Reilly’s easygoing routine holds the attention more than Waltz’s smarm. But Polanski’s characteristic claustrophobia comes not out of psychological intrigue but from the narrow confines of predetermined ideas and character trajectories worthy of Neil LaBute.
Carnage Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Dave Calhoun
Roman
Polanski’s caustic and witty new film, ‘Carnage’ is a captivating and comic
exercise in confinement and hysteria. Polanski has directed French writer
Yasmina Reza’s hit play ‘The God of Carnage’ and embraces its roots in the
theatre, running with the claustrophobia and immediacy of a war of words
between two metropolitan couples that plays out in one place, in real time.
It’s an acting face-off for the film’s four actors – Kate Winslet,
Christoph
Waltz, Jodie
Foster and John C
Reilly – who are on screen almost the whole time – but Polanski harnesses
any thespian one-upmanship to make it integral to each character’s need to
dominate a deteriorating scenario.
‘Carnage’ shifts the story from Paris to New
York, but the events are the same: a couple, Nancy (Winslet), a
personality-free, high-flying city worker, and Alan (Waltz), a harried
corporate executive chained to his mobile phone, come knocking at the apartment
of Penelope (Foster), a self-consciously liberal writer, and Michael (Reilly),
an amiable peddler of ‘flush mechanisms’, to discuss a fight between their
young sons. Each couple attempts diplomacy, but words become weapons,
prejudices rise to the surface and the evening collapses into a storm of anger,
vomit, drunkenness and violence.
Polanski has always been a master of turning domestic
spaces into characters, from the South Kensington home of Catherine Deneuve in
‘Repulsion’ to the coastal retreat of Pierce Brosnan in ‘The Ghost’. Here, the
apartment is the fifth protagonist: a quiet witness to petty human resentments
and a symbol of the lifestyles each character does or does not aspire to.
Only the credits sequences take place outside this
middle-class hothouse. For the opening, we see the row between the two boys
that kicked everything off and, for the closing, we witness another
indecipherable encounter between them. Perhaps Polanski was thinking of the
closing, credits scene of Michael Haneke’s ‘Hidden’, in which we also witness
an unclear interaction between the offspring of parents in conflict. Both films
prick at the sides of bourgeois entitlement. The big difference is that
Polanski plays his film more for laughs than dread.
‘Carnage’ is a master-class in choreography as our four
actors do a power dance around this New York apartment. If there’s an element
that lets it down a little, it’s that the film’s final third feels too
accelerated and mannered compared to the more sly gear changes of the earlier
parts. The drunkenness and shouting come on too quickly and the shifts in
allegiances, as gender gangs up on gender and partners start looking out for
their counterparts, feel too rapid and neat.
No character emerges looking pretty from the film’s
ugly scenario – but there’s a clear winner in the acting stakes. Waltz steals
the show with his weasel wit, phone games and barely concealed amorality. He
has one of the film’s best lines, too, when he half-smiles at Foster, who is
forever beating her progressive drum, and says: ‘I saw your friend Jane Fonda
on TV the other day.’
Carnage (2011) - Filmcritic.com Movie Review Chris Barsanti from FilmCritic
What does a parent do when their child whacks another child in the mouth with a stick? Teeth are lost, scarring ensues, and the machinery of modern American over-parenting rolls into action. Two sets of parents meet in a painfully tasteful Brooklyn apartment in Roman Polanski's rollicking screw-tightener Carnage to resolve that question. The answer isn't even close to being discovered by the film's end, but one thing is clear: not one of the four adults yammering and needling and passive-agressive-ing the others has got it right.
A bouncing Alexandre Desplat score clicks into action over the credit sequence, just about the only thing in the film that happens outside that apartment and the hallway outside. As the credits roll over a cold day in Brooklyn Bridge Park, some children silently confer, argue, group, and split apart; then the stick is swung, and teeth lost. Next, the Longstreets (parents to the boy who was hit, Ethan) and the Cowans (whose Zachary did the hitting) are gathered in the Longstreets' apartment going over the wording of a statement. Penelope Longstreet (Jodie Foster) is battering away at the keyboard, her face pulled so tight you can practically hear her teeth clicking.
Meanwhile, Alan Cowan (Christoph Waltz), a lawyer of the gleefully soulless variety who can't decide whether he's bored or irritated and settles on a combative brew of the two, quibbles with the judgmental tone of her phrasing: "Armed with a stick?" Penelope thinks that the issue needs discussion and analysis and resolution, while Alan couldn't care less: "Our son is a maniac," he shrugs, before taking another in a series of abrasive phone calls that punctuate the film like water-torture. Slightly on the sidelines are Alan's wife Nancy (Kate Winslet) and Penelope's defensively dopey husband Michael (John C. Reilly), though with a little prodding they get right into the thick of battling for the moral high ground.
Yasmina Reza adapated her play God of Carnage for the film with Polanski, and has kept nearly all of it intact. On stage it was just about as much a farce as it is on screen now. Reza's play was one of those occasional sensations that sweeps through Broadway wherein the genteel, well-bred characters on stage nip and wheedle at each other until the gauzy trappings of civilization are thrown aside so the raging beasts within can roar out. It was very much of a piece, which is not a criticism -- that would be like dismissing a skillfully frothy new musical for being nothing more than that. (Though one does wonder why playwrights don't pen more works about, say, pathology-ridden working poor characters who turn out to be more civilized than some predict.) If there weren't many surprises to be found by the end of the evening, that doesn't mean it was any less fun than a particularly misanthropic Mamet or Pinter effort. It was a social comedy where what's striking is not so much the rawness of what's being said but how these people, whether repressed scolds or over-compensating braggarts, have managed to keep it held in for so long.
Polanski's take doesn't dwell over much on the substance of what's being discussed, which ranges from cell-phone etiquette to genocide in Darfur. He angles in on the tension that's thick as smog in the apartment, leering his camera at the actors so you can see every jittering nerve and narrowing of the eyes. It all unspools in almost real time, with the moral calculus flipping quickly from one moment to the next and spouses taking advantage of the hostilities to air some long-held grievances.
It's an actor's playground, with Winslet and Foster practically leaping off the screen with the fearsome ridiculousness of their performances. Egged on by the barely civilized boors they've saddled themselves with, when the reckoning comes it's a sight to behold. After the gloves have come off and Michael asks Penelope whether drinking wouldn't be bad for her, and she cracks back with "No, it's great for me," that sound you hear is the sound of relief that Foster came both to play and to take no prisoners. Nobody in Carnage does.
Intentional or not, the sly punchline to Roman Polanski's Carnage calls bullshit on Michael Haneke's Caché. Both films are meditations on collective guilt, one an allegory for a colonialist France's relationship to Algeria, the other a disquisition on the degradation of modern discourse. But Carnage rebuts what Armond White accurately, mercifully described as the pretentiously metaphoric Caché's "moral listlessness" by insisting on complete transparency. One doesn't have to look too closely at Carnage's final shot to marvel at the way Polanski refuses to haughtily indict his audience in the pettiness of his characters' behavior.
Wry to its succulently written bone, Carnage, an adaptation of Yasmina Reza's Tony-winning God of Carnage, begins on the war zone of a playground, where a dispute between two boys leaves one with two missing teeth and a nerve in his mouth partially exposed. From there, Polanski moves us to another war zone: a warmly posh Brooklyn apartment where the parents of both boys wear at each other's "sense of community." Just as the implications of what happened on the playground have been parsed to the satisfaction of all parties and a door has been opened, or an elevator button has been pushed, someone insists on a provocative last word and the dispute resumes. The ego sets no one free.
Almost Buñuelian by design, this satire of decivilization finds Nancy (Kate Winslet) and Alan (Christoph Waltz), parents of the "victimizing" boy, drawn back, over and over again, to the apartment belonging to the "victimized" boy's parents, Penelope (Jodie Foster) and Michael (John C. Reilly). Throughout this most uncivil discourse, which plays out almost entirely in Nancy and Alan's living room, more than words will be hurled back and forth between the bourgeois couples. Everything—day-old cobbler, a bottle of 18-year-old brandy, a persistently ringing cell phone, an out-of-print art book, a dozen yellow roses, even a spray of vomit—becomes a loaded weapon, a means of justifying one's allegations and derailing others' arguments.
The play, it must be said, is not the thing. Though Reza, who co-adapted God of Carnage for the screen with Polanski, shares with Edward Albee an obsession with words as arms and the physicality of the dramatic experience, her vision of domestic warfare is more conventional than the more barbed and surreal surfaces of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Zoo Story, and Seascape. But if there's little metaphoric weight beneath Carnage's war of words, it's because the play is about surfaces—how our snap judgments are informed by how others dress, how they sit on our furniture, how they arrange their flowers, how often they chose to pick up their phone in mixed company, and what fruit besides peach they put into their cobbler.
Alan and Michael will attack their women because of their sex, forcing Nancy and Penelope to form an allegiance around the time brandy and a box of Cubans initiates a truce between the men, and though Penelope is assailed for her political correctness, and Alan for his lack of it, Reza, unlike too many modern playwrights, doesn't use her characters to score cheap political points—understanding sex and politics, like Penelope's cobbler and Alan's cell phone, as a distraction from the crux of their conflict. Regardless of what their occupations, personal tastes, and overall demeanors may or may not reveal about their values, Penelope, Michael, Nancy, and Alan are equally complicit in the degradation of everything they claim to stand for.
As on Broadway, the acting fleshes out stock characterizations. The cast makes rich sense of the allegiances that repeatedly form and evaporate between the characters, and a ferociously committed Foster, remarkable in the role that won Marcia Gay Harden a Tony, brings to earth what felt on stage like a nerdy caricature of shrill East-Coast liberalism. But the play also benefits from Polanski's own shrewd perspective. The director, whose films are all about space as a prison, evokes through his unnerving collaging of visual planes along diagonal lines and use of mirrors and windows a spiderweb inside Penelope and Michael's apartment tangling its victims. His customarily remarkable visual aesthetic gives the couples' war of semantics the feel of something brutalizingly physical, ensuring that Carnage's images, like its words, cut through us like a knife.
Capital New York [Sheila O'Malley]
White People Problems in Roman Polanski's Carnage - Village Voice Karina Longworth
Polanski's Carnage at Venice: No, You're Beastly! - Time Magazine Richard Corliss
Award-Winning Play God of Carnage Grows Up On Screen | The ... Rex Reed
Twitch [Peter Gutierrez] also seen here: NYFF 2011: CARNAGE Review
The House Next Door [Simon Abrams] also seen here: New York Film Festival 2011: Carnage | The House Next Door
Carnage review: Roman Polanski's beautifully ... - Slate Magazine Dana Stevens
2 or 3 Things I Know About Film [Alan Vallows-Dancy]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anne-Katrin Titze]
Carnage - DAILY FILM DOSE Greg Klymkiw
Ruthless Reviews » CARNAGE Matt Cale
AFI FEST Review: 'Carnage' - Film School Rejects Allison Lohring
NYFF Review: 'Carnage' Offers Serious and ... - Film School Rejects Robert Levin
Combustible Celluloid Review - Carnage (2011), Roman Polanski ... Jeffrey M. Anderson
Film Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]
REVIEW: Brisk, Disciplined Carnage Is Good — Not Great - Movieline Stephanie Zacharek
Paste Magazine [Shannon M. Houston]
London 2011: CARNAGE Review Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg from Twitch
Fourth Row Center [Jason Bailey] also seen here: DVD Talk [Jason Bailey]
Carnage | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Nathan Rabin
Venice '11 Review: 'Carnage' Is Fun While It Lasts, But Insubstantial ... Oliver Lyttelton from The indieWIRE Playlist
Carnage | The House Next Door R. Kurt Osenlund discusses the movie’s Oscar chances
ShowBiz Forum - messages #24637 .1 - CompuServe.com Harvey Karten
Carnage - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
BeyondHollywood.com [James Mudge]
Thoughts on… Carnage (2011) Rohan Morbey from The Flickering Myth
Second
Opinion – Carnage (2011) Matt Smith from
The Flickering Myth
Movie
Review – Carnage (2011) Jake Peffer from
The Flickering Myth
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
Living in Cinema [Craig Kennedy]
Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
'Carnage' Movie Review | Rope of Silicon Brad Brevet
Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol | Carnage ... - Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
CARNAGE Review Peter Martin from Twitch
FilmFracture: What's Your Time Worth? [James Jay Edwards]
Bina007 Movies [Caterina Benincasa]
Film Review Online [James Dawson}
Film-Forward.com [Yana Litovsky]
Smells Like Screen Spirit [Linc Leifeste]
The Daily Rotation [Sean Canfield]
Carnage (2011) — Inside Movies Since 1920 - Box Office Magazine Vadim Rizov
Battleship Pretension [David Bax]
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
“Pina,” “Carnage” Reviews : The New Yorker Anthony Lane
Carnage | Film Blather Eugene Novikov
ColeSmithey.com [Cole Smithey]
Spectrum Culture [David Harris]
Criticize This! [Andrew Parker]
Cinemablographer [Patrick Mullen]
Critical Movie Critics [Mark Zhuravsky]
Screen Comment [Lita Robinson]
Temple of Reviews [Nathan Adams]
The Independent Critic [Richard Propes]
Shalit's 'Stache [Matthew Schuchman]
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
The L Magazine [Henry Stewart]
The Incredible Suit [Neil Alcock]
Yasmina Reza: 'There's no point in writing theatre if it's not accessible' Elizabeth Day interviews playwright Reza from The Observer, January 21, 2012
Carnage Review | Movie Reviews and News ... - Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
The Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy]
Roman
Polanski's 'Carnage': What the Critics Say
Sophie A. Schillaci from The
Hollywood Reporter, September 1, 2011
Carnage, Venice Film Festival - Reviews - Films - The Independent Geoffrey Macnab
Carnage – review Xan Brooks from The Guardian, September 1, 2011
Roman Polanski's Carnage is a joyously unpleasant film John Patterson from The Guardian, January 27, 2012
Roman Polanski's Carnage fizzles - The Globe and Mail Rick Groen
'Carnage' draws dramatic battle lines - BostonHerald.com James Verniere
Review: Carnage - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Critic Review for Carnage on washingtonpost.com Ann Hornaday
Austin Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]
'Carnage' review: Bad parents - and premise Amy Biancolli from The SF Chronicle
New York Film Festival: Changes in 'Carnage' surprise - latimes.com James C. Taylor, October 2, 2011
'Carnage' review: Civilized adults descend into ... - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan, December 16, 2011
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
Carnage - Movies - New York Times December 16, 2011
'God of Carnage' Is at Hudson Stage Theater ... - New York Times November 11, 2011
'God of Carnage' at the Goodman Theatre: A fight over the kids ... Michael Phillips from The Chicago Tribune
Review: God of Carnage/Goodman Theatre | Newcity Stage Brian Hieggelke review from New City, March 14, 2011
VENUS IN FUR (La Vénus à la
fourrure) B 86
France Poland (96 mi) 2013 ‘Scope Mars Distribution [France]
No
man is worthy of dominating a goddess.
He’s only worthy of being subjugated by her.
Consider this part of Polanski’s current fascination with the modern stage, initially seen in DEATH AND THE MAIDEN (1994), but more recently coming on the heels of the claustrophobic, single-room setting of Carnage (2011), which began when the director himself was confined to four walls while under house arrest in Switzerland after his 2009 arrest and subsequent release several months later, as Switzerland would not extradite him to the United States for decades-old sexual assault charges stemming from March 1977 (Roman Polanski sexual abuse case). This film is more of a gift to his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, 33-years younger, perhaps a continuation of the sexual power dynamics they explored in the film BITTER MOON (1992), where their last work together was THE NINTH GATE (1999), where Seigner played a demented satanic seductress with the supernatural ability to float through the air. Here she plays a more mundane role of a Parisian actress with a few surprising tricks up her sleeve, bringing with her a bottomless bag of costumes and props, as well as unique insights into the female mystique, where rarely has she been utilized to better effect. The film is an adaptation of the 2010 David Ives Broadway play, which itself was adapted from the 1870 novel Venus in Furs by Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, from whom the term masochism originated, where he describes his own experiences as the submissive servant Severin being aroused sexually by dominant women wearing furs, willingly becoming their obedient slave following a childhood incident of being scolded and beaten on a bed of furs by his aunt while ogling servants watched approvingly. Sacher-Masoch, a great-great uncle of Marianne Faithfull, took his pathology with him to the grave and died insane. The two-person play about sexual domination has been transported from New York City to Paris, Polanski's first non-English language feature film in forty years, with Seigner playing the role of Vanda, an actress auditioning before the writer/director Thomas (Mathieu Amalric). Both previously worked together in THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (2007), while coincidentally, Amalric’s mother was born in Poland to Jewish parents, raised in the same Polish village as Polanski’s family, making him the perfect stand-in for the director. Both, by the way, share a certain mousy quality, where the idea of being sexually dominated makes perfect sense, where Polanski has been quoted as saying, “Normal love isn’t interesting. I assure you that it’s incredibly boring.”
While Polanski has insisted that Venus is a comedy about the vanity of directors doing auditions and the Sado-Masochistic dynamic of the director hiring and controlling actors, he also likes to arrange shots from the protagonist’s perspective and slowly pan around the room to points of interest as the character notices them, where the fun of the film is to imagine that every single word of the film is seen as a reflection of the director himself. Polanski is a director that makes exquisite use of limited space, restricted here to the stage of an empty theater, where the cinematography by Pawel Edelman in the dark theater is elegant throughout, the first Polanski feature shot in digital, where it interestingly mixes in close-up glimpses of Renaissance paintings, specifically Titian’s Venus with a Mirror (854 × 1,024 pixels), as the painting was the inspiration for the protagonist Severin’s imagination in the 1870 novel. It is this artistic interplay, a painting commenting upon literature, which impacts a modern era play while delving into the imaginations of the actress and the director as they read aloud passages from the play, easily losing themselves in the original source material where the line between fiction and reality is continually blurred. The film wraps itself around the genteel nature of European civilization, which relies upon centuries of cultural tradition, where a work like this is considered scandalous, flying in the face of the highest artistic standards, while continually looking down upon these two lowly subjects as the goddess Venus would from her heavenly perch, offering her own commentary on all that is considered beautiful as the mythological embodiment of sex, love, beauty, enticement, seduction, and persuasive female charm. Opening on the director Thomas pacing the floor in an agitated state of disbelief, as he is the last person left in an empty theater after a day of auditions went badly, where he’s angry that no one seems to understand the lofty ambitions of his steamy, sex-charged period piece, which is obviously a highly personal labor of love, though filtered through the prism of his own arrogance. Just as he is complaining on his cell phone that he can’t find a woman with both the intellect and sex appeal for the role, Vanda enters the theater like a gust of wind pushed her in, where she is drenched from head to toe, wearing a dog collar around her neck and chewing gum, throwing in the occasional slang, sounding more like someone who was accidentally pushed off the public transit system for being an annoyance. Unable to take no for an answer, she finagles her way into an audition even though her name is not on the director’s list, reading the lines of the sultry dominatrix Vanda (coincidentally sharing the same name) while Thomas assumes the part of Severin.
Though visibly annoyed that she is clearly wasting his time, his scorn turns to shock the instant she starts reading her lines, literally transforming herself before his befuddled eyes into this mystifying, larger-than-life creature of feminine guile and beauty. In utter amazement, he asks her to read on, where she continually entices her way into his fertile imagination before abruptly breaking character, offering her own modern contextualization to the part, where the two argue and jostle for position, each attempting to gain the upper hand as they negotiate their own power dynamic between them. Vanda is a master of surprise, pulling a 19th century smoking jacket out of her bag for him to wear along with several of her own vintage costumes, where her familiarity not only with the script but the intimacies of the director’s personal life simply catches him off guard, where she seems to have an intuitive knowledge of all his carefully guarded secrets, many of which are expressed in the play they are rehearsing. When Vanda suggests the play is about child abuse, as it all springs from the imagination of that whipped child wrapped in furs, one can’t help but think of Polanski’s own criminal past, where Thomas leaps to his own defense, “What the fuck does the maltreatment of children have to do with this story?” One does have to wonder why Polanski chose to adapt this particular story, resurrecting long ago thought insignificant notions of sexual correctness into the political realm, where Thomas continues to vent his anger, “Stereotypes! What are you going to throw at me next? Racism, sexism, class struggle?” Vanda tactically responds with a line from the play, “Well you’re certainly unique, Herr Kushemski,” flattering his ego and bringing them both back into character. This use of sexual innuendo and sly manipulation of character is at the heart of the film, where never far from the back of your mind is the fact that Polanski *is* a convicted sex offender, also known for his egotistical and tyrannical behavior, as well as his personal magnetism and charm, yet he’s the one pulling the strings here, where the probing conversations between Thomas and Vanda are indistinguishable from the characters they are playing onstage. Vanda intriguingly points out that in this 19th century era, people didn’t so easily engage in sex, all they had was conversation, where the act of seduction was expressed through words. This becomes the raison d’etre for the film, where the characters continually mask their real intention, which is sexual dominance or submission, expressed through a continuously interweaving thread of conversational fantasy and reality, beautifully captured in the sublime eloquence of the musical score by Alexandre Desplat. In the end, the film can’t escape its campy feel, despite the vigilance of the extraordinary performances, where its modern social relevance may be lost on the viewer. While the 19th century setting bears some resemblance to the sense of lavish refinement and gorgeous interior decors of Bertrand Bonello’s equally artistic yet more insightful film, House of Tolerance (L’Apollonide – souvenirs de la maison close) (2011), Polanski’s fantasy-tinged music box miniature, like dancing porcelain dolls, barely skims the surface of the sexual humiliation and degradation that women were actually forced to endure in that era, much of which still lingers into the present.
Senses of Cinema [Sarah Ward] March 2014
Roman Polanski’s La Vénus à la fourrure (Venus in Fur) aligns with the director’s current fascination with works for the modern stage, seen first in Death and the Maiden (1994) and most recently in Carnage (2011), but his film is more a gift to his wife, actress Emmanuelle Seigner, than a manifestation of those interests. Seigner featured in Polanski’s Frantic (1988), Bitter Moon (1992) and The Ninth Gate (1999), and has enjoyed a fruitful career outside of her husband’s gaze, yet rarely have her talents been on such full-bodied display. The framework of David Ives’ two-person play aids immensely, as does its comedic interplay with and interpretation of Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novel Venus in Furs, widely accredited as the spawning point for the term masochism. Pitted against an exasperated – in character, not in performance – Mathieu Amalric, Seigner not only steals the show, literally in the context of the film’s narrative, but proves an ample embodiment of the many attitudes towards carnality surveyed in the film, even as the movie devolves into a parade of developments that prove a little too overdone and schematic. The film’s overarching style is too beholden to the material’s origins to really benefit from the influence of its director, though his mastery of conversations remains. And what is La Vénus à la fourrure if not the ultimate riff on the power balance between the sexes, concentrated through a bickering, bantering, preening, performative discussion?
Slant Magazine [Jesse Cataldo]
Roman Polanski's Venus in Fur opens and closes with long, sinuous dolly shots, on-rails moments which feel both magically cinematic and self-consciously silly. Like the proudly low-rent special effects of Alain Resnais's late films, these paired movements—one a zooming POV shot in which the camera whisks its way into a darkened Parisian theater, doors swinging open before it, the other the same shot in reverse—establish the overt artificiality of a world which, despite a surface similarity to our own, will not be beholden to the same rules of conduct and decorum. The film's sole setting, the theater becomes a performative location in more ways than one, an internalized space within which the act of creation is manifested as a confused, circling process of communion and detachment. After years of respectable filmmaking, it's refreshing to witness a reinvigorated Polanski willing to once again delve deep into seedy psychodrama.
In this case it's Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), an overtaxed first-time theater director recovering from a day of dreadful auditions. Complaining to his wife on the phone, he's interrupted by a late-arriving actress who seems like yet another annoyance, embodying all the entitled-actor qualities about which he'd just been griping. Yet while she initially appears rude, coarse, and clueless, Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner) is also oddly suited for the lead in an adaptation of Leopold Van Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, down to sharing the character's name and sporting a full bondage outfit, complete with studded dog collar. Thomas ends up impressed with Vanda's dedication to the role, a sentiment which grows into obsession after she coerces him into an audition, the quick reading transforming into a protracted two-person performance.
The moment that Thomas and Vanda pick up their scripts, Venus in Fur transforms from a straightforward clash of personalities to a manic psychosexual tête-à-tête. Itself adapted from David Ives's similarly structured play, the film builds on its source material, joining text and subtext in the same visual sphere, wiping out any easily conceivable border between the two. As the sense of performance deepens, the two principals become indistinguishable from the characters they're representing, and vice versa, and Polanski reflects that assimilation by turning the film into an inter-textual hall of mirrors. Exhibiting a spryness that seemed to have vanished from his repertoire, he transforms the bare stage into a classic Polanski space, in which a crisis of identity upends traditional power structures, causing constructs like gender, class, and identity to lose all functional meaning.
The spectacle of people consumed by the supposedly fictional characters they're portraying may not be the most original concept, but it's leaps and bounds beyond the rote reproduction of Carnage, reflecting similar simmering social tensions in a more twistedly cinematic context. Where that film was burdened with prestige strictures (an A-list cast, an internationally successful play), the interpretation here is far looser, gearing Ives's source material toward maximum madness. Departing from that film's static, often pedestrian setups, here Polanski goes wild, multiplying the confusion with weird compositions as these two clashing personalities repeatedly fuse and break apart. This culminates with a bit of gonzo stagecraft involving Thomas strapped to a giant cactus, a garish phallic symbol repurposed from a comedic stage remake of John Ford's Stagecoach. It's the sort of surreal touch that pushed the director's early work toward such a specific nexus of humor and horror, a sense that fleetingly returns here, in a film that feels maniacally inspired by the joys of perversity.
Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]
If it's stagebound, Roman Polanski's Venus in Fur, an adaptation of David Ives's play that is itself an adaptation in part of the Leopold von Sacher-Masoch novel, is at least not stagebound without a purpose. It reminds of Adaptation. in its awareness of itself as an object open to deconstruction (and Derrida is mentioned in the text to make it metacritical in that sense as well); the fact that it's a play captured on film only underscores its conceit. Venus in Fur is also a career summary for the octogenarian director at a point where his contemporaries are declining steeply in their dotage. Spry and clever, surprisingly funny at times, and at all times indisputably alive, it finds Polanski's themes of gender subversion in high dunder, opening with a quote from the Apocryphal Book of Judith where the titular heroine seduces enemy general Holofrenes and decapitates (read: emasculates/castrates) him as he reclines in post-coital bliss. Polanski casts an actor who could be his younger doppelgänger, Mathieu Amalric, and opposite him in this two-person drama Polanski's own wife, Emmanuelle Seigner--transparent, vulnerable, courageous casting that reminds very much of Hitchcock in his late masterpiece period. Venus in Fur is Polanski's Marnie: a grand survey of all of his sexual peccadilloes that works as apologia, confession, and explication, eventually conveying Polanski's acceptance of himself as deeply flawed, but better for the wisdom.
Thomas (Amalric) is a playwright, wrapping up a disastrous day of auditioning leads for his hyphenate debut when Vanda (Seigner) enters, late, dishevelled, begging for a chance to strut and fret her hour upon his stage. She plays the damsel in distress--scantily-clad, apparently ill-bred and under-educated--to worm her way in. Once the reading starts, she undergoes a transformation not unlike that of the Naomi Watts character in Mulholland Drive. She's a knockout, and Thomas is mesmerized by a woman/critic who appears to understand his work. The rest of Venus in Fur is the interplay between power positions, all of it interwoven with sex and creation and the dynamics of masculine/femine. Its staging is akin to Dogville, the production reducing itself to gestures and subtle sound design. Watch for a moment where Vanda moves to the lighting board to deliver another moment of apparent weakness when, all the while, it is she who controls the environment, pulling the levers and lighting the lights. Polanski transforms a statue of Venus mentioned in the text into a phallic cactus, then ties Thomas to it in a climax that sees female sexuality, freed from male desire, as genuinely horrifying. The delight of Venus in Fur is that it's every inch a Polanski.
A proper companion piece to Polanski's Bitter Moon, Venus in Fur earns comparison, too, to his Repulsion in its complementary movement of female sexuality from the victim aspect to the predator through the agency of sexual violence. In Venus in Fur, Vanda challenges Thomas's (i.e., Polanski's, our own) desire for meek objects to venerate or save, only to subvert it as Vanda reveals herself an able manipulator of expectation. In an "ad-libbed" moment, she assumes a German accent, so that Thomas wonders aloud if the Germans have again invaded his homeland. It's a loaded moment in a film full of them, recalling Polanski's own upbringing in the midst of Nazi occupation and suggesting that fetish has everything to do with sometimes-traumatic personal experience. The film is about Polanski, of course, but it's also about its characters, its audience, and what, exactly, Vanda represents: the idea of Woman, certainly; the image of Her at war with the reality of her. Venus in Fur is built on that eternal push-pull. It's not surprising or deep, necessarily, but it's carried off with tremendous aplomb and an almost gentle good humour. A mature film but not an elderly one, it's a pleasant surprise for all its wisdom, to be sure, but mostly for its barbs and spirited thrusts. There's life in Polanski yet--infernal, yes, but that's only as it should be.
Venus in Fur, directed by Roman Polanski, reviewed. - Slate Dana Stevens
Before you even start watching Roman Polanski’s Venus in Fur, an adaptation of David Ives’ Tony-nominated 2010 play inspired by the 1870 novel by Austrian author and kink pioneer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, there are a lot of layers to peel back. There’s the awareness that Polanski—by choosing to adapt this story of an erotic S&M standoff between a theater director and an auditioning actress—is exploring, perhaps as directly as he ever has on film, his own history with women. There’s the knowledge that that history includes a guilty plea to unlawful sex with a minor, and three decades spent abroad evading sentencing for that crime. There’s the fact that Polanski has cast his wife of 25 years, Emmanuelle Seigner, in the role of the actress who would be Venus, and Mathieu Amalric—whose small stature, elfin face, and wide-set eyes unmistakably recall the filmmaker’s youthful physiognomy—in the role of the director who at once scorns, desires, and fears her.
All of that may be enough to turn you off Venus in Fur (if you haven’t already decided to boycott all of Polanski’s work on principle, in which case nothing I write here will make a difference). But before you conclude that this playfully self-referential adaptation must be little more than a misogynistic act of retroactive self-justification, give Venus in Fur a chance. If anything, the film offers a thoughtful critique of misogyny, not to mention a surprisingly nuanced exploration of the complex theater of contemporary gender relations. But above all else, Venus in Fur is a sharp, sexy comedy (adapted by Ives and Polanski from a translation by Abel Gerschenfeld) performed by two superb and superbly in-tune actors, and directed with a sure hand by a filmmaker who’s clearly not cowed by the challenge of blowing up a two-person chamber piece for the screen.
From the moment an opening tracking shot takes us down a Paris boulevard at twilight and through the door of a decrepit theater whose sign reads simply “T EATRE,” it’s evident we’re entering a performance space with its own rules. For the next hour and a half, we’re soon made to understand, the line between theater and film—like those between reality and fantasy, dominance and submission, male and female—will be less clearly drawn, and more permeable, than we’d thought. Polanski (whose last movie, Carnage, was a four-character, one-set stage adaptation that never managed to transcend its own dramatic airlessness) gets around the problem of how to film a play by foregrounding it as a problem. His camera (wielded by longtime DP Pawel Edelman) tirelessly prowls the confines of the empty theater, defining the characters’ changing power relations with subtle shifts of angle or frame, using space in a way a stage production couldn’t while never letting us forget the theatrical artifice of the setting.
The woman entering that shabby theater as the film begins (accompanied by Alexandre Desplat’s witty carnivalesque score) is Vanda (Seigner), a blowsy actress who’s late for the audition, soaking wet from rain, and not even marked down on the director’s list of scheduled candidates. But she half-guilts, half-cajoles the playwright and first-time director, Thomas (Amalric), into hearing her read for the lead role of the icy dominatrix, who, coincidentally, shares her first name. To feed Vanda her lines, Thomas, though visibly annoyed by this gum-snapping philistine, wearily agrees to assume the part of Severin, the love-struck latent masochist who will eventually take on the role of her subjugated sex slave. As the audition progresses, Thomas’ scorn turns to shock: Vanda not only seems to know the entire script by heart, but the instant she begins performing it, she transforms from a slang-spewing modern-day woman into the cool, elegant aristocrat of Sacher-Masoch’s novel. (She’s also brought along a pair of tatty costumes—a ruffled thrift-store gown for her, a smoking jacket for him—to help aid in the transformation.) Vanda—the “real” one, that is—is also prone to breaking character at any moment to remark, often derisively, on the unacknowledged sexism of the play and, by implication, its author: “He’s a perv and she’s an object, just like every woman in 18-whatever.”
Over the course of the film, Vanda and Thomas—or are they the other Vanda and Severin?—will slip in and out of character, exchange roles (and relative power positions) over and over again, and enter into the strange intimacy of two people engaged in a long-form game of make-believe. I won’t reveal any more of the wicked reversals and stratagems involved in their psychosexual game of one-upmanship, because it’s those moments that make for the film’s small surprises. In a general way, we can see where the story is headed (put it this way: things don’t get less perverse and violent as we go along), but thanks to the actors’ zesty performances and evident delight in the material, every micro-shift in their dynamic provides a fresh burst of pleasure.
The 47-year-old Seigner, who was savaged by many critics back when she appeared as an insatiable femme fatale in her husband’s campy 1992 thriller Bitter Moon, has grown into a vibrantly self-confident comedienne. Her earthy yet gimlet-eyed Vanda owes something to the secretly whip-smart ditzes of classic Hollywood, like Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday. And Mathieu Amalric is one of those actors who, like Paul Giamatti or Philip Seymour Hoffman, never turn in an uninteresting performance. If his piercing, slightly bug-eyed gaze shows up in a movie, you know at least one good thing is going to be happening onscreen (usually more, since he tends to select his projects with care.) Here Amalric gets to pull out all the stops, playing a character who’s by turns a persecuted artist, a selfish hypocrite, a victim of his own depraved appetites, and an obliviously sexist salaud—all roles Venus in Fur’s infamous 80-year-old director has either been assigned or taken upon himself over the course of a five-decade career. Who better to adapt a play about theater as an infinite succession of masks?
Review: Venus in Fur - Film Comment Amy Taubin, May/June 2014
Purely through casting, Roman Polanski doubles down on the personal and makes the play-within-a-play narrative structure of Venus in Fur a more twisty hall of mirrors than it appears on the page. Adapted by the director and David Ives from the latter’s 2010 stage play of the same name, the film stars Emmanuelle Seigner as Vanda, a brassy, still struggling but no longer young actress with a dubious resumé, and Mathieu Amalric as Thomas, the writer-director of a play based on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novel, again of the same name and with a mirror structure much like the film’s.
Given that Seigner has been married to Polanski for 25 years and Amalric could easily pass for the director’s younger brother, one can’t help wondering if the sexual dynamic that develops on the screen, and is indeed the film’s raison d’être, might have something to do with daily life chez Polanski. Since the film is fiction, and therefore evidence of nothing outside itself, one feels guilty for even allowing the thought to cross one’s mind. And yet the casting pushes the fantasy in our faces, much as Vanda pushes herself on Thomas, hovering above him so that her voluptuous breasts, spilling out of her décolletage, overwhelm his field of vision.
Venus in Fur opens amid thunder and lightning, the camera tracking along a desolate Paris boulevard, propelled by the sound of a dissonant cabaret-like polka (Alexandre Desplat’s spare score provides a dark undercurrent throughout). Without missing a beat, it enters a theater and remains there, à huis clos, through the mockingly grotesque conclusion. An expertly staged and edited chamber piece, the film fails only in its last-minute straining for significance. It is the filmmaking that delights, and not the tired reveal that some men long to be dominated by a beautiful woman, nor Vanda’s unconvincing feminist update—that such a woman will oblige if only to prove that the desire for submission belongs to the man himself rather than to the woman’s insatiable quest for power and revenge.
Vanda does not at first appear to be the fulfillment of a fantasy harbored by the intellectual but not particularly introspective Thomas. She blows into the theater, drenched by the storm (seemingly a victim rather than a ruler of nature) just as Thomas is packing up from a long, fruitless day of auditions. Although she claims to have an appointment, her name is not on the call sheet. She does however have a copy of the script, acquired mysteriously since Thomas insists it was not given out to anyone, and by some strange coincidence the same name—Vanda—as the femme fatale of Thomas’s play. Perhaps because he’s intrigued by these unlikely circumstances, and more likely because she is so aggressively insistent on auditioning, Thomas agrees to let her read and, since the stage manager has gone home, to read the part of Severin opposite her.
If the supposed real-life Vanda is a loud-mouthed vulgarian (a French version of one of New Jersey’s “real housewives”), her metamorphosis into the cultivated, insinuating 19th-century courtesan of Sacher-Masoch’s novel stuns Thomas, and makes him hers completely. Not to mention that she comes prepared not only with her own tatty costume and “shiny boots of leather” (Lou Reed is not the source of his play, Thomas insists) but also an 1869 Viennese smoking jacket that fits Thomas perfectly. As Thomas and Vanda work their way through the play, the film becomes increasingly fluid in its shifts between stage fantasy and life as fantasy, and in the power struggle between metteur en scène and actress. Polanski’s Venus in Fur is neither profound nor erotic (at least not for this viewer) but it is wonderfully witty and a generous gift from the director to his two stars. Seigner has the more difficult role—Vanda is written in extremely broad strokes—and if she begins shakily, she eventually finds a place of truth and power. Amalric, as usual, underplays magnificently, even in the gender-fuck finale where he transforms, not into Vanda, per the script, but into Polanski in The Tenant.
East European Film Bulletin [Julia Zelman]
Roman Polanski and the man who invented masochism ... Nicholas Blincoe from The Guardian, May 23, 2014
Venus In Fur - Indiewire Jessica Kiang from The Playlist
Sight & Sound [Roger Clarke] May 30, 2014
Venus In Fur (2013) Movie Review from Eye for Film Anne-Katrin Titze
Roman Polanski's Venus in Fur is a Wicked Power Play ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice
Cannes Review: Roman Polanski gets frisky in smart ... - HitFix Guy Lodge
Lisbon & Estoril 2013 Review: Polanski's VENUS IN FUR ... Pedro Ponte from Twitch
Dog And Wolf [Dave O'Flanagan]
Concrete Playground [Sarah Ward]
Slant Magazine DVD [Budd Wilkins]
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]
Film-Forward.com [Daniel Glenn]
The Film Stage [Raffi Asdourian]
Tribeca: Roman Polanski's Erotic, Furious Venus in Fur and ... Nick Schager from The Village Voice
Grolsch Film Works [Joseph Walsh]
FilmSchoolRejects [Daniel Walber]
Spectrum Culture [David Harris]
Little White Lies [David Jenkins]
MUBI [Adrian Curry] movie posters
Venus in Fur: Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter David Rooney
Venus in Fur review – Polanski's witty take on sexual politics ... Jonathan Romney from The Guardian
Venus
in Fur, review: 'flirts with submissiveness' - Telegraph Robbie Collin
The Japan Times [Giovanni Fazio]
Time Out New York [Keith Uhlich]
'Venus
in Fur' movie review: Vanda takes charge in Roman Polanski's ... Ann Hornaday fromThe Washington Post
Austin Chronicle [Steve Davis]
Review:
Polanski knows the ropes in 'Venus in Fur' - LA Times
Venus in Fur - Roger Ebert Matt ZollerSeitz
RogerEbert.com [Michal Oleszczyk] at Cannes
In 'Venus in Fur,' Polanski Adapts a Sexually Charged Play ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times
DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
Venus in Furs. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch - Cordula's Web Venus in Furs, novella by Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, 1870
'Venus in Fur' turns seduction game into tiresome cliche ... Heidy Weiss on the Goodman Theater production from The Chicago Sun-Times, March 18, 2014
Love hurts in Goodman's Venus in Fur | Theater Review ... Tony Adler on the Goodman Theater production from The Chicago Reader, March 19, 2014
Polish, Michael
NORTHFOLK B 83
Northfork Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
It’s pretty easy to see why so many people despise this film, and my experience of viewing it frequently entailed a degree of astonishment that things I was seeing, which were so overweening and precious and clever-clever and self-satisfied, things that should have infuriated me or annoyed me, simply didn’t. The silly stuff, like the angelic interludes, were never less than intriguing oddities, which represented an intricate, loving realization of fundamentally bad ideas, ones which any fully functioning idea-and-taste-machine would discard. In the end, the “bad” stuff transcended its badness, because it evinced a level of sincerity which, for me, compelled belief. (This is partly because the angelic stuff has an obvious purpose. The film as a whole is about dealing with death, and little Irwin, lacking adult knowledge, can only interpret death through a fairy tale version of religion.) And then there’s all the stuff that works – the emptied-out landscapes, abandoned homes, the Hopper-plus-Magritte visual logic governing the main narrative thread. Dennis Harvey’s review likens Northfork to the Cremaster films, and going into this film with that filter made all the difference. Like Barney, Northfork subordinates story values to big, overstuffed, almost swaggering visual conceits, a pseudo-mythic pageant which can at times elicit chuckles but is never less than interesting. The script, sadly, is less capable than the images of absorbing the brothers’ self-satisfaction – what to do with a film so heavy-handed as to make a pun about heavy-handedness? – but these slips were nestled against silly humor which leavened the proceedings. And while this is not a film which even allows for strong performances as such, James Woods’ quiet, subtle work offers a sturdy foundation. I would not go to the wall for Northfork. But for all its flaws, it emerges as something honest and true, and that was quite a surprise.
Pollack, Sydney
David
Ansen Remembers Director Sydney Pollack
from Newsweek magazine, May
28. 2008
"The
only thing that really interests me is the relationship between men and women,
because it's a metaphor for everything else in life," Sydney Pollack
told a NEWSWEEK reporter in 1985, just before "Out of Africa" opened.
He won two Oscars for that movie—as producer and director—and it cemented his
position at the top of Hollywood's A list, a consummate professional who could
make films that were both glossy and intelligent, commercial and adult. But
whatever the subject or genre, there would almost always be a love
story—usually star-crossed and impossible—at the heart of it.
"There
aren't a lot of good love stories left," he went on to say, but he found
ones that resonated deeply with audiences—whether turning Isak Dinesen's
memoirs of Africa into a tale of doomed romance between Meryl Streep's proud
Danish aristocrat and Robert Redford's
dashing, commitmentphobic Denys Finch Hatton, or creating the explosive,
odd-couple romantic chemistry of Redford and Barbra Streisand in his madly
popular "The Way We Were," a touchstone for a generation of women.
Pollack
worked with the biggest stars in Hollwood, but Redford was his main man. They
met, as fellow actors, in the 1962 film "War Hunt." Redford starred
in seven Pollack movies, beginning with his Tennessee Williams adaptation
"This Property Is Condemned" in 1966. Their peak may have come with
the taut, autumnal, paranoid thriller "Three Days of the Condor" in
1975, the first mainstream studio movie to show the CIA in a villainous light
(a portrayal that later became a commonplace). Even in the midst of this
suspense movie, Pollack created an intriguingly off-beat romance, tinged with
sadomasochistic undertones, between Redford and Faye Dunaway, who plays a woman
he's hijacked to hide him in her apartment while assassins track him down.
Pollack
made only one comedy in his career, but it's become a classic.
"Tootsie" works so well in part because it's played for emotional
realism, not cheap laughs; the love story intrigued him more than the farcical
cross-dressing gags. Pollack, who had trained as an actor under the legendary
Sanford Meisner (and later became his assistant) understood actors as few
directors do, and he got great work out of them. Everybody in
"Tootsie" is at the top of their game, from Dustin Hoffman and
Jessica Lange down to Bill Murray and Pollack himself, who plays Hoffman's
agent. Jane Fonda credits Pollack's "They Shoot Horses Don't They" as
a turning point in her evolution as an actress. (Gig Young won an Oscar for his
work in that film.) Take a look at "The Firm," his solid 1993 John
Grisham adaptation. It's not the best or the worst of Pollack's movies, but the
depth of talent is extraordinary. He wisely made Tom Cruise a team player and
surrounded him with indelible supporting performers like David Strathairn,
Holly Hunter, Gene Hackman, Ed Harris, Gary Busey, Jeanne Tripplehorn and
Wilford Brimley. The acting gives what could have been a routine thriller its
quirky humanity. He lost his touch for a time after that success;
"Sabrina" and "Random Hearts" were badly misconceived. But
Pollack bounced back, taking the camera in hand himself to make the
illuminating personal documentary "Sketches of Frank Gehry" (2005).
Though
he didn't take his own acting career seriously, Pollack was always a delight to
watch when he did pop up in other peoples' movies. Perhaps his greatest role
was in Woody Allen's 1992 film "Husbands and Wives," as an unhappily
married man trying to become a swinger a little too late in life. Stanley
Kubrick used him well in "Eyes Wide Shut"; he lent worldly-wise
weight to "Michael Clayton" (which he also produced). And it was a
wonderful surprise to see Pollack steal scenes in "The Sopranos" as
the wife-killing oncologist Dr. Warren Feldman.
Onscreen
you can sense the man's intelligence, his toughness, his sense of humor, his
lack of pretension—all qualities that came through when you met him. I once had
the pleasure of watching a UCLA-USC football game with him in my hotel room in
Denver, where we were both attending a film festival. Pollack was a sports fan,
and he wasn't about to miss the big game to promote his movie.
It was
widely known that Pollack had been gravely ill, but his death still came as a
shock—and something of a double blow, following on the heels of the premature
death of Anthony Minghella, his partner in his production company, Mirage. As
the producer of such movies as "Sense and Sensibility," "The
Talented Mr. Ripley," "Iris," and the low budget Sundance winner
"Forty Shades of Blue," Pollack encouraged both new talent and
resolutely grown-up entertainments. In Hollywood the sense of loss was
palpable, coming at a time when his kind of movies—and his kind of
in-his-marrow professionalism—increasingly feel like endangered species.
SydneyPollack.com a tribute website
Sydney Pollack - Film Actor, Director, Actor, Television Actor, Producer ... biography
Sydney Pollack |
American director, producer, and actor | Britannica.com biography
Sydney
Pollack - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films:, Publications Patricia Erens profile, updated by John
McCarty from Film Reference
The History of Cinema.
Sidney Pollack: biography, reviews, links reviews from PIero Scaruffi
“From ‘Tootsie’ to ‘Eyes Wide Shut’” Michael Sragow from Salon, July 15, 1999
Legend of the 1970's Dave Kehr from The New York Times, April 23, 2003
Commencement Speeches Sam Dillon from The New York Times, June 1, 2003 (Pollack is on Page 2)
Sydney Pollack's niche Sydney Pollack, The Professional, by Bryan Curtis from Slate, April 21, 2005
Big
Stories - DGA.org Telling Big Stories, by Jeffrey Ressner,
Summer 2006
MOVIE REVIEW | 'MICHAEL CLAYTON'; They Call Him The Fixer In a World That's a Mess Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, October 5, 2007
Director Sydney Pollack Dies Richard Schickel from Time magazine, May 26, 2007
In Memory:
Sydney Pollack | Interviews | Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert, May 26, 2008
Sydney
Pollack, Film Director, Dies at 73 - The New York Times Michael Cieply from The New York Times, May 26, 2008
Times Topics: Sydney Pollack The New York Times, May 26, 2008
Remembering Sydney Pollack Stephanie Zacharek from Salon, May 27, 2008
Sydney Pollack's alternative cinema for the old. Bryan Curtis from Salon, May 27, 2008
Sydney Pollack: One of Cinema’s Finest Actors David Edelstein from The New York magazine, May 27, 2008, also seen here: Sydney
Pollack: One of Cinema's Finest Actors -- The Projectionist
Sydney
Pollack dead at 73, Director, Out of Africa, The Way We Were ... Dennis McLellan from The LA Times, May 27, 2008
Sydney Pollack
obituary | Film | The Guardian
Brian Baxter, May 27, 2008
Sydney Pollack: a Hollywood life of twists and turns David Thomson from The Guardian, May 27, 2008
From
Tootsie to Gehry: the films of Sydney Pollack | Art ... - The Guardian Xan Brooks from The Guardian, May 27, 2008
Obituary:
Sydney Pollack - Telegraph
May 27, 2008
Sydney
Pollack - The Atlantic
Jeffrey Goldberg, May 27, 2008
Redford on Pollack Gilbert Cruz from Time magazine, May 27, 2008
Dave Kehr Sydney Pollack, 1934 – 2008, by Dave Kehr, May 27, 2008
Bill Gibron Genuine Class – Sydney Pollack (1934 – 2008), from Pop Matters, May 27, 2008
Glenn Kenny Sydney Pollack, 1934 – 2008, from Then Came Running, May 27, 2008
Sydney Pollack, RIP Dana Stevens from Slate, May 28, 2008
Kenneth Turan remembers Sydney Pollack from the LA Times, May 28, 2008
Sydney Pollack's films exhibit a versatile, collaborative hand Susan King from the LA Times, May 28, 2008
An Appraisal Sydney Pollack, Filmmaker New and Old A.O. Scott from The New York Times, May 28, 2008
Mr. Mainstream, RIP Ross Douthata from The Atlantic Monthly, May 28. 2008
THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR and Sidney Pollack interview by ... Hollywood uncovers the CIA, including an interview by Patrick McGilligan from Jump Cut, 1978
DGA: Interview with Sydney Pollack by Jerry Roberts from DGA, November 2000
Anthony Mighella Interviews Sydney Pollack at the National Film Theater from BFI, April 14, 2005
Sydney Pollack on “Charlie Rose” video interviews in 1995, 2002, 2005, and 2006
Sydney
Pollack: Hollywood's Quiet Icon | The Hollywood Interview Interviews by Alex Simon; SYDNEY POLLACK’S SKETCHES, Interview by Alex Simon, originally appeared in Venice magazine,
June 2006; SYDNEY POLLACK: HEARTS AFIRE, Interview by Alex Simon, originally
appeared in Venice magazine, October 1999; posted December
5, 2012
Sydney Pollack, a Life in Movies photo gallery
Sydney
Pollack (1934 - 2008) - Find A Grave Memorial
Sydney Pollack - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED
USA (110 mi)
1966
Considering the wealth of talent that participated in this Tennessee Williams adaptation, the results are disappointing in the extreme. It was co-scripted by Francis Coppola, produced by John Houseman, photographed by James Wong Howe, and features a more than acceptable cast. But despite the array of talent, it's a very banal reworking of Williams' one-act play about a tragic Southern belle longing for a handsome gentleman caller to whisk her away from the family boarding-house to glamorous New Orleans, but who dies disillusioned of a lung complaint. Originally a two-hander, the play told her tawdry story entirely through the eyes of her younger sister, magically transformed through romantic adolescent reminiscence. On screen, inevitably and disastrously opened out, it is constructed as a series of long, unmemorable flashbacks.
It is always of interest to see a film that has been re-evaluated years after it was classed as a flop and an artistic failure. was not well received upon its cinematic release in nineteen sixty-six and did not even gets a DVD release until two thousand and three. Looking back it is difficult to understand why the film was considered to be so poor as the film was an interesting watch and a rather good story.
The story is told as a flashback by the young girl Willie Starr. She recounts the tale of how her home went from a bustling and noisy home to a derelict shell of a house. Owen Legate (Robert Redford) arrives in Dodson, Mississippi during the early nineteen thirties and takes up residence at the local boarding house run by Hazel Starr. The town has one source of work. The railroad. Everyone who lives in the town has links to it. As Owen settles in he encounters the Hazel’s eldest daughter, the stunningly beautiful Alva (Natalie Wood). A connection is immediately made but comes to nothing as Alva is distracted by a rather rowdy birthday party that is going on all around her. It soon transpires that Owen is in town to make a decision of paring down the Railway workforce. Remember this is the depression. This revelation bring s him into conflict with the entire town and in turn brings him closer to Alva who is looking for a way to escape the small town nightmare she has found herself in.
This was a real surprise to me. I went into it expecting a standard nineteen sixties melodrama but actually got a much deeper and interesting experience. The story is based on a stage play by the superb playwright Tennessee Williams. It was adapted for the screen by a young Francis Ford Coppola in one of his early writing jobs. The main characters are well written and give the actors plenty to work with. Outside of them the support cast is not so well drawn. The locals including Charles Bronson are left a little one dimensional is they have no real part to play in the unfolding drama.
The leads, Redford and Wood, work very well together. At the time Natalie Wood was the major star having been at hte top of her profession for over ten years. This is arguably her strongest screen role. She plays the part of the gold digging small town girl with relish and is the centre of attention throughout. Redford, in comparison, was not yet the leading man and in this film he gives a very restrained and measured role which is the perfect foil to the larger than life character of Alva.
The look of this film is something quite unique. It comes as no surprise to learn that the cinematographer on the movie was James Wong How. In a career stretching over fifty years he was responsible for shooting some of the most visually appealing films including Hud and The Old Man and the Sea. For a superb sequence check out the opening to the nineteen fifty seven classic, The Sweet Smell of Success. Simply stunning. In This Property Is Condemned he uses a number of visual techniques to engage the viewer. Long shots from inside a building, close ups of the main protagonists and two very different pull away shots. Impressive work.
The film was held together by director Sydney Pollack. His attention to detail and the need to tell the story in the most efficient way ensures that he film tells its story in a straightforward, no nonsense way. In only his second feature in the main chair he carries of the task with apparent ease. This film marked the beginning of a successful working relationship with Robert Redford that would produce some classic films from the seventies including one of my favourite films, Three Days of the Condor.
Overall a stylish and absorbing drama which is well worth seeking out. Recommended.
This Property is Condemned - TCM.com Margarita Landazuri
Robert Redford had appeared in several television and film roles
in the early 1960s, but it was not until he had a huge success in the Broadway
show Barefoot in the Park (1963) that Hollywood really took notice of
him. Redford's performance as a bisexual movie star opposite Natalie Wood in Inside
Daisy Clover (1965) earned him a Golden Globe as best new star, as well as
Wood's admiration and friendship. The following year, the two co-starred again
in This Property Is Condemned, based
on a Tennessee Williams one-act play.
Executive Producer Ray Stark wanted Elizabeth Taylor to star, with John Huston
directing. She agreed, but wanted her husband Richard Burton to direct. Both
Huston and Taylor (who was too old to play the teenaged Alva Starr) bowed out,
and the part went to Wood. A fan of Williams's work, Wood was happy to step in,
saying in an interview, "It's probably the closest I'll ever get to playing
Blanche DuBois, so I'd better make the most of it."
The original play was a twenty-minute conversation between two characters,
Willie, Alva's 13-year old kid sister, and Tom, a boy she meets on the train
tracks next to her mother's abandoned boarding house for railroad workers in a
small Mississippi town. The film uses Williams's play (and dialogue) only as a
framing device for a flashback to the poignant love story between Alva and Owen
Legate, sent by the railroad to handle mass layoffs during the Depression.
Wood, who had co-star and director approval, chose Redford to play Owen, and
Redford suggested his friend Sydney Pollack to direct. The two men met in 1960,
when both had acting roles in the independent black and white feature, War
Hunt, Redford's film debut. Pollack had just directed his first feature, The
Slender Thread (1965), starring Anne Bancroft, which had received good
reviews. Redford later told his biographer Michael Feeney Callan that This Property Is Condemned was in
"development hell." He recalled that "Ray Stark threw every
writer he had at it, from John Huston to Francis Coppola, but none of them
managed to get over the fact that it was a one-act play." Coppola was one
of three credited writers, along with Fred Coe and Edith Sommer, but the actual
number was about a dozen, including James Bridges, Charles Eastman, and John
Houseman, who also produced. Finally, Pollack locked himself in a motel room
with the multiple drafts of the script, literally cut and pasted a new version,
then turned it over to another writer, David Rayfiel, to smooth, polish, and
cobble together yet another draft. Tennessee Williams was so unhappy with the
final film that he wanted his credit removed. He only succeeded in having it
read "suggested by a play by Tennessee Williams," instead of
"based on a play by."
Mary Badham, who played Willie, later recalled that shooting on location in
Mississippi was stressful. "It was a very tough shoot...Nat was going
through a really difficult period in her life. We had script changes daily. It
was unbelievable. It was a madhouse....There was so much tension on that set
you could cut it with a knife." Redford wrote in his diary that he hoped
Wood would get fed up enough to walk off the film. Such a prima donna move, of course,
was unthinkable for the always-professional Wood. Soon after production ended,
despondent about her career and personal life, the high-strung Wood reportedly
took an overdose of sleeping pills.
In spite of the problems during production, Wood is lovely and touching in This
Property Is Condemned, and the chemistry between her and Redford is potent.
Pollack told Wood biographer Suzanne Finstad that she had qualities that
enhanced her portrayal. "There was a fragility in her, and the emotions
were very close to the surface....you can feel a kind of quivering just below
the surface, a very appealing and vulnerable part of her." Canadian
actress Kate Reid gives powerful performance as Alva's manipulative mother.
Robert Blake and Charles Bronson are excellent in complex supporting roles. And
James Wong Howe's burnished, masterful cinematography emphasizes the elegiac
mood of the film.
The reviews were mixed, at best. Variety found the film "a
handsomely-mounted, well acted Depression era drama....The production is adult
without being sensational, touching without being maudlin." But Bosley
Crowther of the New York Times called it "As soggy, sentimental a
story of a po' little white-trash gal as ever oozed from the pen of Tennessee
Williams." Newsweek offered faint praise. "Natalie Wood has a
few admirable moments, but most often seems a well-scrubbed debutante who has
strayed into the wrong side of town."
The Harvard Lampoon delivered the ultimate blow. Taking note of Wood's
recent string of badly-reviewed films, the satirical college magazine voted her
"worst actress of this year, last year, and next." Wood may have been
mortified, but she played the good sport and showed up in person to accept the
"award," the first star to actually do so, even giving a gushing
acceptance speech. She turned embarrassment into triumph, and won over her
detractors.
Scopophilia: Movies of the 60's,70's,80's [Richard Winters]
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Moderns and Classics movie reviews Brian Bell
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Movie Scope [Patrick Ivers]
New
York Times [Bosley Crowther]
THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T
THEY?
USA (129 mi)
1969 ‘Scope
Jigsaw
Lounge [Neil Young] Vienna Film Festival
Though less than four decades old, Pollack's movie holds up rather less well than the 1935 novel by Horace McCoy on which it's based – and, unless you're a very slow reader, you'll rip through the book in about half the time it takes to watch the film. The shortness of the book isn't coincidental – its brevity stands in mocking contrast to punishingly lengthy 'dance marathon' in which most of the characters are engaged throughout the narrative. These events, popular in the USA during the Depression years, offered penniless folk activity, food and shelter – at the price of taking part in a last-couple-standing contest for the entertainment of better-off spectators, with sleep snatched only during brief rest-breaks.
The result: a gruelling vision of exploitation whose more horrific moments Pollack captures with nightmarish vibrancy – making up for the grinding literalism of his prologue in which an injured horse is shot. But the picture does become something of a slog for the viewer as well as the performers – many of the actors look as if they're really being put through the mill, especially during the second half. It doesn't help that main duo Jane Fonda and Michael Sarrazin are somewhat miscast – Fonda is merely sassy, stroppy and gloomy, whereas McCoy's anti-heroine was a viciously misanthropic cousin of the harpy-like Ann Savage character from Detour. Gig Young – who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar – fares rather better as the rabble-rousing master-of-ceremonies, although even he reveals a somewhat unlikely softer side in a picture which looks into an abyss of sardonic cynicism only to timidly pull back into sentimentality.
This
Island Rod [Roderick Heath]
Sydney Pollack’s
film of Horace McCoy’s novel manages to be the ultimate in both
retro-Depression gothic and late-‘60s fatalism. Comparisons to Reality TV are
inevitable in contemplating this movie’s subject today, if only to remind us
that a taste of gawking, patronising exploitation in spectators entwined with a
desperate need for attention and riches on the behalf of the participants
wasn’t invented by Survivor and Big Brother. But They Shoot
Horses, Don’t They? is larger than a mere mordant satire on modish
huckstering and carnivals of humiliation, becoming a metaphor for both a
prostituted version of the “American Dream” and, finally, the human condition
itself, asking how much any individual can be expected to withstand or see
inflicted. Bracing in its unblinking gaze on assailed humanity and even more
depressing then you expect, Pollack and screenwriters James Poe and Robert E.
Thompson can’t quite avoid overstating the themes, and dilute the finale’s
dread import by telegraphing it all the way through, but in general they did an
excellent job in transposing an almost unbearably Darwinian tale to the screen,
communicating livid physical exhaustion and spiritually corrosive straits.
A marathon dance
contest held in an LA pavilion pier pits hard-as-nails survivor Jane Fonda,
dreamy wanderer Michael Sarrazin, platinum-haired wannabe starlet Susannah
York, energetic but fragile old-timer Red Buttons, Oakie couple Bruce Dern and
Bonnie Bedelia, and sundry others in competition for $1500 and the chance of
perhaps being noted by a Hollywood big, medium, or little shot. This horror
show drags on for two months and grinds everyone down into pits of physical and
moral exhaustion, a process watched over by Gig Young’s indelible Emcee, who
mixes glimmers of compassion with a flimflammer’s casual psychopathy in such a
way that eats away at without quite dispelling his slick façade.
The acting is uniformly excellent, sporting what is probably Fonda’s most sustained and forceful performance, with Dern maniacally convincing, York appropriately pathetic, and the later ill-used Sarrazin lucid as the young man whose idea of common feeling can encompass mercy killing. The film builds to hideous punchlines: Fonda dragging Buttons’ dead body on her back to win a “derby” race, York washing with her clothes on and cowering before Young’s soothing entreaties, and the final fade-out that leaves the Emcee’s hype ringing like the death knell of civilisation. By comparison, the bullet Sarrazin puts in Fonda’s head really is merciful, for people for whom the competition has long since gone beyond being a means to end and has instead revealed all their secret weaknesses. What the film finally says is that although the marathon eats people up, it only speeds up the normal social process. If there’s a fault to all this, shared with works based in scabrous rage of the ‘30s, like Day of the Locust and Johnny Got His Gun, it’s that it so broadly reverses the Good Ship Lollypop for crushingly cosmic horror. Which is not an excuse to avoid it.
They
Shoot Horses, Don't They? - TCM.com Mikita Brottman and David
Sterritt
It's no secret that modern culture has a strong voyeuristic
streak, often focused on public competition and humiliation-think Jerry
Springer and Survivor, for just two examples. A few decades ago, this
morbid fascination found a popular outlet in dance marathons, wherein a roomful
of couples would dance (or shuffle, or wobble, or just try to stay vertical)
until they literally dropped, hoping to win a cash prize or at least 15 minutes
of meager fame. Although dance marathons have existed for centuries, they were
all the rage during the Depression years, when many unemployed Americans found
participating in these Social Darwinist exhibitions no more onerous than other
forms of grunt labor for getting three meals a day and maybe some pocket money
at the end of the ordeal, which typically lasted for weeks and even months of
painful, nerve-killing toil.
They Shoot Horses, Don't They?,
directed by Sydney Pollack in 1969, is the Gone with the Wind (1939) of
dance-marathon movies. Based on a 1935 novel by Horace McCoy, it gave Jane
Fonda her serious-acting breakthrough as Gloria, a cynical cookie who enters a
California marathon as a way of staving off poverty until her totally
unpromising movie career gets going. When her partner gets disqualified for
health reasons, she latches onto a young man named Robert (Michael Sarrazin),
who just wandered in to watch for a while. Soon they're trudging around the
dance floor with a motley crew of competitors including a wannabe Hollywood
star named Alice (Susannah York), an aging Navy man called Sailor (Red
Buttons), and a working-class stiff (Bruce Dern) and his pregnant wife (Bonnie
Bedelia), who actually won a marathon once. A smooth-talking emcee named Rocky,
played with tragicomic brilliance by Gig Young, presides over the show.
And a show it is, rather than a genuine contest. Gloria and Robert learn this
the hard way, when Rocky reveals that he ruined Alice's pretty dress so she'll
look as wretched as the audience expects her to. As another way of boosting the
marathon's sadistic visual appeal, Rocky interrupts the day-to-day drudgery of
ordinary dancing with special "derbies" of high-speed walking,
ousting the three couples who come in last. This eliminates the herd's weakest
members and pleases the paying spectators by making the entrants look even more
ridiculous and pathetic than usual.
McCoy's book was best received in Europe, where it was seen as one of the first
American novels to reflect the existentialist ideas-viewing life as essentially
absurd and purposeless-then gaining ground among philosophers and writers.
Credit goes to the filmmakers for following the story's grim outlook to its
logical conclusion, ending it on a note of dismal violence (foreshadowed in
stylized flash-forward scenes) that Hollywood has never surpassed for sheer
bleakness. Only in the adventurous 1960s era would mainstream production
outfits like ABC and Palomar Pictures expect to earn their money back with such
a downbeat conclusion.
McCoy knew the dance-marathon scene first hand. After stints as a sports
journalist and pulp-mystery writer, he headed to Hollywood in the early 1930s
for an acting career, which ended almost as soon as it began. He got the idea
for a story about marathon dancers while working as a bouncer at a Santa Monica
amusement pier. He went on to a long screenwriting career, specializing in
westerns and crime dramas, but the two major movies adapted from his books--They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and the
1950 James Cagney vehicle Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye--bear out his reputation
as quite a gloomy novelist.
The strongest asset of They Shoot
Horses, Don't They? is its casting, especially of the Gloria and Rocky
characters. Fonda wasn't crazy about the script, but her then-husband Roger
Vadim was among the many French left-wingers who admired the novel, so she
signed on. She was surprised when director Pollack solicited her creative ideas
about the story's underlying issues, and he was probably surprised by the
thoughtfulness of the responses he got from an actress known mainly for comedy
and sex-kitten roles in pictures like Cat Ballou (1965) and Barbarella
(1968). She and Buttons decided to get a taste of the subject matter by dancing
to exhaustion, but she reports in her 2005 memoir My Life So Far that
she was hallucinating after a mere two days. In any case, she credits the
seriousness of her work in this project for encouraging a new sense of
independence and self-reliance that paid large dividends in her personal and
political life.
Pollock was apparently worried that Young would be too lightweight as Rocky,
preferring gravel-voiced Lionel Stander for the role. Young himself was
hesitant when he got the offer from a former agent who'd moved over to ABC's
feature-film division. But fear of departing from his usual romantic-comedy
mold faded when he realized what he could do with the role. It earned him a
deserved Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor-perhaps because the film's
depictions of self-destructive people struck a chord with his own weaknesses of
alcoholism, hypochondria, and drug abuse.
Pollack also benefited greatly from the project, which cemented his position as
an A-list director-and a daring one, not afraid of confining a whole feature
film to a single setting that's as sleazy as it is claustrophobic. In a characteristic
review, Pauline Kael of The New Yorker said that while Pollack wasn't an
"imaginative" or "inventive" filmmaker, he staged the derby
material "terrifyingly well" and "kept the grisly central
situation going with...special energy and drive." Kael also trumpeted
Fonda as the potential Bette Davis of the '70s, possessing "the true
star's gift of drawing one to her emotionally even when the character she plays
is repellent."
Kael was right about the derby scenes, which still carry cringe-inducing power,
and almost right about Fonda, who continued to mature as an actress despite
counterproductive projects and career moves. Seen today, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? remains a fascinating and troubling
film, etching many haunting characters while spotlighting the dark side of
capitalism and memorializing a Depression-era fad that has fortunately died
away. By popularizing the title of McCoy's novel, it also gave American argot a
catch-phrase that's as recognizable today as when the movie first caught on. Not
many pictures can boast as much.
Dreams
Are What Le Cinema Is For [Ken Anderson]
Images
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Easy
Riders… : They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969) - Row Three Jandy
Hardesty
DVD Savant
Review: They Shoot Horses, Don't They? - DVD Talk Glenn
Erickson
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Review: They Shoot Horses, Don't They ... - Digitally Obsessed Mark
Zimmer
MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman
Ain't
It Cool News [EliCross/Christopher Bligh]
Movie
Magazine International [Monica Sullivan]
EyeForFilm.co.uk Keith Hennessey Brown
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
New
York Times Vincent Canby
JEREMIAH JOHNSON
USA (108 mi)
1972 ‘Scope
Robert Redford’s iconic presence dominates Sydney Pollack’s Jeremiah Johnson, a mountain-man Western, and adds immeasurably to its success. Johnson is a man of few words and only an actor with Redford’s charisma could carry off this decidedly oblique character. The narrative, told against the backdrop of epic vistas, proceeds largely through encounters with Indians and various eccentrics, including the great Will Geer as an old-timer. John Milius wrote the screenplay for the film and although it was revised, it still contains numerous Milius touches – notably the nature of myth and the primal need for man to prove himself against nature. The attitude to the Indians is ambiguous and this was apparently deliberate on the part of the filmmakers. Sometimes the film becomes sentimental, particularly in the scenes with the squaw wife, but on the whole it’s compelling, entertaining and memorable.
Jeremiah
Johnson, directed by Sydney Pollack | Film review - Time Out Tom
Milne
A flawed but immensely appealing film adapted in part from Vardis Fisher's Mountain Man, a superb historical novel which explores the myth and the reality of the tough trappers who roamed the unconquered West in the 1850s. Shot on location in fantastically beautiful, desolate snowscapes in Utah, the first part of the film is terrific: tenderfoot Redford's first, baffled steps in the battle for survival; the weird encounter with a corpse frozen upright in the snow which provides him with his first real gun; the old man of the mountains who takes time out from hunting grizzlies to teach him how to fish, trap beaver, tell one Indian from another, and stay alive. After this things switch from documentary to picaresque adventure, and John Milius' script begins to stumble uncertainly. But it does come back on course towards the end as the Indians, half-worshipping and half-contemptuous, begin their hunt for the strange white man who has broken their taboos and disappeared into the snows - the legend of the West in the making.
Jeremiah Johnson - TCM.com Rob Nixon
With a story that both mythologized man-in-nature and shed a
somewhat harsh light on the "Manifest Destiny" that drove white
people across the continent taking land from the Indians, Jeremiah Johnson
(1972) was perfectly in sync with the prevailing counter-cultural attitudes of
the time. The film's environmental themes (close to the heart of star Robert
Redford) and its anti-establishment, Thoreau-like message struck a chord with
audiences and made this a hit, another worthy entry in the Vietnam-era cycle of
Westerns - among them Arthur Penn's Little Big Man (1970) and Robert
Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) - that were critical of
civilization's negative effect on the wilderness.
Redford and Sydney Pollack became close friends when they appeared together in War
Hunt (1962). Pollack first directed Redford in This Property Is
Condemned (1966), and since that time the two had been looking for another
property on which to collaborate. Pollack wanted Redford for his film Castle
Keep (1969), but the actor passed on it. Redford, in turn, hoped Pollack
would direct him in The Candidate (1972), but the director wasn't very
interested in the project. Finally they settled on this script, purportedly
based on the life of a real trapper known as "Liver-Eatin' Johnson,"
so called because of the way he disposed of his victims. The screenplay, based
on both a novel and a story, was adapted by Edward Anhalt and John Milius, who
later wrote Apocalypse Now (1979) and directed Conan the Barbarian
(1982).
In this adaptation, Johnson moves into the Rocky Mountains in 1830 to escape
civilization. After learning survival techniques from a grizzled old trapper,
he heads deeper into the wilderness, encountering a settlement that has been
wiped out by marauding Indians, leaving only a deranged woman and her son
alive. Johnson takes the boy under his wing, and the two rescue another
trapper, who slips some Indian scalps into Johnson's saddlebag when he sees
Indians approaching. The friendly tribe, however, hails Johnson as a hero for
having taken the scalps of their enemies and presents him with a bride. For a
time it seems as if Johnson will settle into some semblance of a home life with
his adopted son and wife, but when he is forced to escort a cavalry unit across
sacred Crow burial grounds, the Crow take their revenge by killing the woman
and boy. Consumed by hatred for the tribe, Johnson becomes a vengeful killer,
picking off the Crow one by one. Finally weary of years of killing, he rides
off farther into the Canadian wilderness after a last encounter that
demonstrates a grudging respect the Crow have gained for their mountain-man
enemy.
After advancing Redford $200,000 for the picture, Warner Bros. panicked over
the cost and informed Pollack he would have to shoot it all on the back lot.
But the director and star insisted it could only be shot on location in Zion
National Park, Utah (near Redford's Sundance home). The studio finally agreed
when Pollack guaranteed to shoot it in Utah for the same cost as a backlot
production. That put severe budget constraints on the project, leaving them no
amenities (such as dressing rooms, wardrobe, or even a bathroom for much of the
shoot). Pollack finally had to mortgage his home to complete the picture.
Money wasn't the only problem, however. The harsh mountain conditions and
uncooperative weather nearly brought them to disaster time after time. Heavy
snows prevented riding horses, so they improvised by laying a thousand yards of
chain link fence on top of the snow and covering it with white material so the
horses wouldn't sink into the heavy drifts. Even worse, the director and star
felt their script still needed work and weren't sure how to pull all the
narrative threads together. The biggest problem was that in the original story,
the Crow attack against Johnson's family was unmotivated. True to the spirit of
the times and their own consciences, Redford and Pollack agonized over how to
motivate Johnson's killing spree without having it seem as if the Indians were
merely savages who asked for it. Finally, Anhalt came up with the idea of
having Johnson unwillingly violate the burial ground.
Redford had at least one moment of fear for his life while filming. Near the
end of production, with only Redford, Pollack and a helicopter pilot remaining
of the 70-person crew, the director decided he needed one last shot of Johnson,
photographed from high above, as a tiny figure disappearing across a field of
snow. They dropped Redford off high in the mountains and while he was walking,
the copter disappeared (having to return to base for more film). Redford had no
idea what happened. Turning his fear into a spiritual experience, he lay down in
the snow and waited, savoring "the soundlessness of every moment - nothing
but an occasional echo over the tip of a glacier."
The film was made before The Candidate but held up until the second
picture could be released to take advantage of election-year publicity. Upon Jeremiah
Johnson's release, Warner Bros.
did little to promote it, but Redford broke his own rule and traveled
extensively to generate interest in what he considered one of his favorite
projects. The tactic paid off; the film got mostly rave reviews and earned more
than $22 million in the U.S. and Canada alone. Redford and Pollack went on to
make five more pictures together.
not coming to a theater near you Steve Macfarlane
'Jeremiah
Johnson' Hollywood's Most Beautiful – and Saddest ... Bill
Mesce from Pop Optiq
Sydney
Pollack: Mountains and the Man | News | The Harvard Crimson Pril
Patton, January 11, 1973
Scopophilia:
Movies of the 60's, 70's, 80's [Richard Winters]
The
Digital Bits Barrie Maxwell, Blu-Ray
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Graeme Clark
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- Story Notes for Jeremiah Johnson - AMC
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Video Vacuum [Mitch Lovell]
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Times Roger Greenspun
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- Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
Jeremiah
Johnson (film) - Wikipedia
THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR
USA (117 mi) 1975 ‘Scope
Set in the world of
CIA power games and scientific hardware, but dominated by an intriguing
Borges-like riddle: why should a mystery thriller that didn't sell be
translated into obscure languages? And why should the American Literary
Historical Society in New York be massacred while one of their readers
(Redford) is out getting lunch? With the telephone his only method of contact
with Olympian and untrustworthy superiors, Redford becomes lost, unpredictable,
even sentimental. He holes up in Dunaway's apartment and starts making
mistakes. Thanks to an intelligent script, partly by Lorenzo
Semple Jr (Pretty Poison, The Parallax View), the action rarely
falters, and at its best the film offers an intriguing slice of neo-Hitchcock.
A certain gloss irritates, but enough scenes compensate for the chic portrayal
of the Redford/ Dunaway relationship: Redford's sudden intrusion into
civilisation when he visits a dead man's apartment, and finds the wife
preparing her husband's dinner; the postman whose pen won't work; Redford in
the strange, darkened house of his quarry, taking the initiative by blaring
soul music from the hi-fi.
Three Days of the Condor (1975) Mark Harris from Patrick Murtha’s Diary
This 1975 spy thriller directed by Sydney Pollack was
already at the top of my Netflix queue when word came of Pollack's death. He
was a very respectable presence in
I had long wanted to see Three Days of the Condor because it is
described as one of the "paranoid thrillers" of the early Seventies,
but I can't honestly say that it matches up to the definitive examples directed
by Alan J. Pakula (Klute, The Parallax View, All the
President's Men). Pollack was always a craftsmanlike director, but I
haven't yet seen a film of his that got my juices flowing.
It's the little things that make the difference. Owen Roizman's cinematography
in Condor is effective, but scarcely at the brilliant level of Gordon
Willis's work in the three Pakula films. Dave Grusin's music does nothing for Condor
atmospherically -- it's just throwaway pop jazz -- while Michael Small's music
in the first two Pakulas and David Shire's in the third contribute hugely to
the ominous atmosphere of those movies.
Three Days of the Condor is based on a well-regarded novel by James
Grady which I haven't looked at, but the plotting seems a little weak. Robert
Redford's spy-on-the-run "reads" one situation involving a mail delivery
really stupidly, so that key scene seems forced. The whole business about his
roping in "innocent bystander" Faye Dunaway seemed to me a dramatic
cul-de-sac, although it occupies a huge portion of the running time.
Where Condor pays off is in some of the dialogue exchanges. Redford
has two great scenes late in the film, one with Max von Sydow as a civilized
Belgian hit-man, the other with Cliff Robertson as a CIA executive; the latter
scene is prescient in the way that Robertson lays it on the line about Peak Oil
and resource depletion -- looking forward to roughly where we are now.
Three
Days of the Condor - TCM.com James
Steffen
Joe Turner (Robert Redford), a lowly researcher for the
CIA, returns from a lunch break to discover all his coworkers assassinated for
no apparent reason. Seeking help from the CIA, he finds himself utterly alone,
unable to trust anyone. Even when he turns to trusted friends, he merely puts
them in danger. Kidnapping a stranger, Kathy Hale (Faye Dunaway), at gunpoint,
he holes up in her apartment while trying to craft a survival strategy and buy
himself time to uncover the truth behind what happened. Turner, a loner by
circumstance, and Hale, a loner by nature, are gradually drawn to each other.
Turner is forced to muster all of his knowledge and experience, including his
previous work as a telephone lineman, in order to outthink his would-be
assassins. Finally, it becomes a game of wits between him and other CIA agents
such as Higgins and Joubert, the tireless and patient freelance gunman who is
pursuing him. The reason behind the assassinations, he soon learns, has global
implications.
Three Days of the Condor
(1975) was one in a series of political conspiracy thrillers to appear in the
wake of the Watergate scandals. Other well-known examples include The
Parallax View (1974) and All the President's Men (1976), both
directed by Alan J. Pakula. At the time Three Days of
the Condor grossed more than $20 million, testifying to the film's
success as a tightly crafted thriller. However, like many of the political
thrillers of the day, it also offers serious commentary on the corrupting
influence of power. In light of recent events such as the Iran-Contra scandal
and the Persian Gulf War, today the film's resolution seems more disturbingly
plausible than ever.
James Grady, author of the 1974 novel Six Days of the Condor on which
the film is based, was born in
Director Sydney Pollack and star Robert Redford have had a long and fruitful
collaboration, starting with the Tennessee Williams adaptation This Property
is Condemned (1966) and continuing through
Three Days of the Condor
was shot on location in
Three Days of the Condor - James Bowman comparing the film to The Manchurian Candidate
Scopophilia: Movies of the 60's, 70's, 80's [Richard Winters]
Why Three Days of the Condor is the Christmas classic no one's ... Daniel Harmon from Slate, December 9, 2016
Three Days of the Condor | Electric Sheep Paul Huckerby
Blueprint: Review [David Brook]
This Island Rod [Roderick Heath]
Krell Laboratories [Christianne Benedict]
Review for Three Days of the Condor (1975) - IMDb Dragan Antulov
3 Days of the Condor DVD review | Cine Outsider Camus
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]
Three Days of the Condor Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Joshua Zyber
DVD Talk - Blu-ray [Adam Tyner]
Big Picture Big Sound - Blu-ray [Chris Chiarella]
AVForums - Blu-ray [Cas Harlow]
DVD Movie Guide - Blu-ray [Colin Jacobson]
Film Intuition - Blu-ray [Jen Johans]
Fulvue Drive-in - Blu-ray [Nicholas Sheffo]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The Stop Button [Andrew Wickliffe]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]
Moderns and Classics movie reviews Brian Bell
THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR and Sidney Pollack interview by ... Hollywood uncovers the CIA, including an interview by Patrick McGilligan from Jump Cut, 1978
Three Days of the Condor Movie Review (1975) | Roger Ebert
Movie Review - - THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR - NYTimes.com Vincent Canby, also seen here: New York Times [Vincent Canby]
Three Days of the Condor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
TOOTSIE
USA (119 mi) 1982 ‘Scope
Hoffman plays an
actor, quite as temperamental and impossible as Hoffman himself evidently is in
real life, who pretends to be a woman just to get a part in a daytime TV soap
opera. Numerous writers came and went in production conditions that were
apparently agonising, but for once little of this is apparent on the screen.
The tone is quick-witted and appealing, with some of the smartest dialogue this
side of Billy Wilder, and a wonderfully sure-footed performance from Jessica
Lange (as her/his girlfriend). But the film never comes within a thousand
miles of confronting its own implications: Hoffman's female impersonation is
strictly on the level of Dame Edna Everage, and the script's assumption that
'she' would wow female audiences is at best ridiculous, at worst crassly
insulting to women. Provided you ignore this central idiocy, Tootsie is
certainly one of the most polished situation comedies in recent years. But then
the field has hardly been over-crowded.
To Die in Madrid to Torrid Zone Pauline Kael
Marvellous fun. Dustin Hoffman is both the hero and the
target of this satirical farce about actors. He plays Michael Dorsey, a
brilliant, "uncompromising"
filmcritic.com pinches Tootsie Rachel Gordon
Dustin Hoffman has been nominated for seven Oscars and has
won two for roles in Rain
Man and Kramer vs. Kramer. With an inescapable nose and smallish
stature, he’s one of the few talents able to prove that the business of
entertaining isn’t always dependent on looks. He’ll play boring or annoying
roles every now and then, such as Captain Hook, but whatever he takes on, he
does it with style.
Before Tootsie, Hoffman had been known more for his dramatic appearances
in such films as All the President’s Men and The
Graduate. He hadn’t been involved with all-out comedy yet,
whether for lack of industry faith or blind luck. So Tootsie was his
first venture into this more mainstream audience area, and he more than filled the
part. Which brings us to one of the greatest role-reversal movies of the
1980’s, for which Hoffman was nominated by the Academy again (though he didn’t
win).
Michael Dorsey (Hoffman) is an unemployed actor. He is passionate about his
career, if only he would be given a chance! He becomes so frustrated, in fact,
that he decides it is probably easier for a woman to get an acting job than a
man, so dresses like one in an audition. His struggles begin with the famed
casting couch as he must keep his femininity intact while still using wiles to
get the part.
Now Dorothy Michaels, he lands a supporting role in a soap opera and fame
arrives instantly. As his star rises, so does his love for his costar Julie
Nichols (Jessica Lange, who did win an Oscar). As incestuous turmoil
breeds on set, Dorothy becomes more popular. And as Michael takes turns being a
mother to some, confessor to others, best friend, and object of lust, his
respect for what he thought would be easy grows. There is a specific individual
part Michael he must play for each person he works with, otherwise his paycheck
will be gone, along with the woman he loves.
It may be a predictable story by now, almost 20 years later, but much of the
humor still stands the test. What keeps this movie so entertaining is not the
plot, which has been seen time and again, but the comedic writing (penned by
Larry Gelbart, also famous for M*A*S*H) and the fine acting of Hoffman
and Bill Murray.
Hoffman’s growth is earned instead of just a slew of easy plot devices thrown
in to say, “Look, he’s different now!” The character that Dorsey creates in
Dorothy has three dimensions as well, instead of being a mere alter ego. Where
Lange could simply have been the object of desire at the end of his tunnel, she
lends a pleasurable presence whenever she walks onscreen before she even opens
her mouth.
The scenes that take place behind the camera of the soap opera also never get
long or boring. There is constant movement and attitude swirling in the
environment. And where some of the secondary characters become a bit like
caricatures, they are each charismatic enough to be able to affect great
reactions from the protagonist.
A great movie for couples or those who like a good laugh at stereotypes and
sexual mores, Tootsie is as wonderful of a romantic comedy today as it
was 20 years ago.
Tootsie -
TCM.com Frank Miller
Most actors would say that their job consists largely of
learning to walk around in another person's shoes. In Tootsie (1982),
however, Dustin Hoffman did that quite literally, learning to walk in heels and
gaining a new appreciation for what it meant to be a woman. As an unemployable
actor who achieves stardom when he becomes leading lady on a daytime soap, he
scored one of his biggest hits. The 1982 film was an almost instant classic and
remains one of the top-grossing comedies of all time.
Hoffman got the idea for Tootsie while working on Kramer Vs. Kramer
(1979), in which he won an Oscar® for playing a man who had to be both father
and mother to his son. When he discussed the idea with playwright Murray
Schisgal (Luv), the project was born. Schisgal was hardly the only
writer to work on the story, though. By the time the film was ready for
release, the Writers Guild had to sort through three boxes of scripts to assign
the writing credits. They finally went to Schisgal and Larry Gelbart (creator
of the M*A*S*H television series), with Gelbart and Don McGuire credited
with the story. Elaine May probably could have earned a credit, too, but she
didn't want one, happy with a $450,000 check for three weeks of work adding a
woman's perspective to the story. Tootsie also went through several
directors, including Hal Ashby (Being There, 1979) and Dick Richards (The
Culpepper Cattle Company, 1972), before going to Sydney Pollack (They
Shoot Horses, Don't They?, 1969), who co-produced with Richards.
But more than any personnel, the make or break deal for Hoffman was his female
characterization. If he couldn't turn in an acceptable screen test as the woman
eventually named Dorothy Michaels, he was going to step aside in favor of
another actor (Dudley Moore was mentioned most often). Through weeks of work
with makeup men, costumers and two coaches (drag performer Holly Woodlawn and
television star Polly Holliday of Alice and Flo) he finally came
up with an acceptable performance. During one test, when Dorothy admitted she
was too old to have children, he even broke down in tears. He modeled the
characterization largely on his mother and even took the film's title from a
childhood game in which she would throw him in the air and say, "How's my
tootsie wootsie." Originally, he could only do the female voice with a
French accent. Anything else made him drop into his male register. Then in the
shower, he discovered he could get an equally feminine effect with a Southern
accent.
During location shooting in and around
Filling out the rest of the cast were newcomers like Jessica Lange, finally
scoring a comeback after her disastrous film debut in King Kong (1976),
and Geena Davis, making her film debut as an actress on Dorothy's soap. Pollack
also cast comic experts like Teri Garr, Dabney Coleman, Charles Durning and
Bill Murray, who improvised most of his lines as Hoffman's roommate.
With delays caused by Hoffman's makeup and his frequent quarrels with Pollack,
the film's budget rose to $21 million -- high for a comedy at that time. But it
was well worth the effort when the picture was hailed by critics and earned
almost $100 million domestically, the highest take Columbia Pictures had ever had
for a comedy. It was second only to E.T. in the end-of-year box-office
standing. It also cleaned up at award ceremonies, with Golden Globes for
Hoffman, Lange and the picture itself (as Best Picture -- Musical/Comedy);
National Society of Film Critics Awards for the film, the script, Hoffman and
Lange; New York Film Critics Awards for Pollack, Lange and the script; and a
Writer's Guild Award. It also picked up ten Oscar® nominations, though it only
won for Lange's supporting performance, confirming her arrival as a major
dramatic star (she was also nominated for Best Actress that year for
Illumined Illusions--Seeing Cinema in a New Light [Ian C. Bloom] 4-page essay (pdf)
The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1982 [Erik Beck]
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
"Tootsie" by Deborah H. Holdstein - Jump Cut Mixed Messages, by Deborah H. Holdstein from Jump Cut, April 1983
Classic
Film & TV Cafe [R.B. Armstrong]
Film Freak Central Review [Ian Pugh]
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Debi Lee Mandel)
DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle
DVD Talk - 25th Anniversary Edition [Kurt Dahlke]
DVD Movie Guide - 25th Anniversary Edition [Colin Jacobson]
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]
DVDTalk.com - Blu-Ray [Jamie S. Rich] also seen here: CriterionConfessions.com
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chuck Bowen]
AVForums - Blu-ray [Simon Crust]
Flickering Myth [Matthew Lee] Blu-Ray
Tootsie (1982) - Articles - TCM.com
MovieMartyr.com [Jeremy Heilman]
Qwipster's Movie Reviews [Vince Leo]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Blueprint:
Review [Jim Whalley] also reviewing
IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT
MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman, also reviewing SOME LIKE IT HOT
Tootsie |
Variety Todd McCarthy
New York Times [Vincent Canby]
THE MEDIUM; Speak, 'Tootsie' Virgtinia Heffernan from The New York Times, March 2, 2008
DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
THE INTERPRETER B 85
Taut,
well-directed suspense thriller about trying to uncover a plot to assassinate a
scheduled United Nations speaker, featuring another amazing performance by
Nicole Kidman in the title role, this time opposite Sean Penn, who leads the
FBI security detail. While the two do
not exactly sizzle onscreen, separately, they are each excellent. Kidman plays a character who grew up in Africa
and can speak several dialects, working as a UN translator, and late one night,
she overhears a plan to kill a fictitious African country’s leader, someone who
is about to be brought up on charges of genocide, exterminating half the
population in his own country. The film
provides a gripping opening backdrop, where, interestingly, news of the African
intra-governmental in-fighting becomes known to the audience before it is known
to the world. There is a unique use of
the sprawling interiors of the UN itself, the slow warming of the two major
players, and a whirlwind interweaving of several minor characters, many of whom
are extremely relevant to the outcome even though they have very short screen
times, creating a good deal of tension throughout. Up to a point, this was a terrific film,
constructing a known accident waiting to happen, then piecing together the
little details that eventually create a steamroller effect where no one can
stop it from happening, along the lines of THE PELICAN BRIEF or THE MARATHON
MAN, but when the story starts to mirror THE PARALLAX VIEW, and Kidman’s
character spins out of control, defying all credibility, an epic goof-up in
screenwriting, it just defuses the built-up suspense and the story meekly
unravels into a disappointment. Too bad
– this could have been a contender.
The Interpreter
(2005), directed by Sydney Pollack | Film ... - Time Out
Silvia Broome (Nicole Kidman) is a translator at United Nations HQ in New York. One evening, she’s working late and overhears a sinister conversation filtering through the main chamber’s microphone system: there’s a plot afoot to assassinate Edmund Zuwanie (Earl Cameron), the reviled president of the African state of Matobo, who is due to make a controversial visit to the UN within days…
Who you gonna call? Enter the Secret Service and hard-boiled, recently bereaved special agent Tobin Keller (Sean Penn), a man who wears conspicuous dark glasses and has a sign on his desk that reads ‘Secret Agent’. Is Broome – who is herself Matoban, speaks the native Ku language and harbours a radical political past – telling the truth? And what about exiled Matoban dissident Kuman-Kuman (George Harris), who now lives in Brooklyn? What’s he up to? It’s time both for Broome to enjoy round-the-clock protection and for director Sydney Pollack to indulge in the internal machinery of the UN building (allowing in movie cameras for the first time) and some impressive helicopter shots of NYC.
Matobo? Ku? Kuman-Kuman? All fictional, of course – but we must assume that Matobo is a post-revolutionary, now corrupt sub-Saharan state along the lines of, say, Zimbabwe and, in turn, that President Zuwanie is a thinly veiled portrait of a Robert Mugabe-type figure. This is largely a competent, successful thriller, but observing global politics from this perspective is an uncomfortable, frustrating experience. The world-view on display here is much more considered than, say, in a Bond movie, but the film still lends nothing to our understanding of postcolonial Africa or the UN (discounting the decor of its more private corners).
And as for the will-they/won’t-they chemistry between Broome and Keller…
Interpreter, The
- Pajiba Jeremy C. Fox
The Interpreter is a slick, suspenseful political thriller with a huge problem at its center: Nicole Kidman. Kidman plays Silvia Broome, a United Nations translator born of a British mother and white African father and raised in the fictional, strife-torn nation of Matobo. Silvia came to work for the U.N. out of her belief that diplomacy, not violence, was the solution to the world’s ills. One night she returns to the interpreters’ booth after hours to pick up a bag and happens to overhear a conversation in Ku, a (fictional) dialect spoken in Matobo and a few other countries in southern Africa. Two men are planning to kill the Matoban president, Dr. Edmond Zuwanie, during his address to the U.N. General Assembly announcing democratic reforms, a speech Zuwanie hopes will forestall efforts to bring him before the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide. It seems the Matoban military, under Zuwanie’s orders, has been massacring the followers of two revolutionary leaders, Ajene Xola (Curtiss I’Cook) and Kuman-Kuman (George Harris). The U.S. Secret Service’s diplomatic detachment sends in agents Tobin Keller (Sean Penn) and Dot Woods (Catherine Keener) to investigate. Initially they’re suspicious of Silvie’s story, and their doubts only deepen when their investigation turns up evidence of her connection to one of the revolutionary leaders.
The problem here isn’t Kidman’s performance, which is a well-wrought balance of restraint and indignation, or her accent, which captures the inflections and the percussive consonants of many English-speaking Africans. It isn’t her glamour, though she looks in every scene as if her hairdresser is hovering just off-camera, and it isn’t even the impossibility of believing Kidman as a gun-toting revolutionary. The problem is quite simply that she’s white.
The decision to use a white actress in the lead upends the movie, changing the meanings of countless scenes and raising issues that the film doesn’t bother to address. What’s intended to be about genocide becomes about race. Rancid whiffs of colonialism hang in the air, unaddressed except for one truly topsy-turvy moment when Silvia complains that the color of her skin was “inconvenient” for her former lover, a black revolutionary leader. What a burden it is to be white.
It’s particularly troubling that the film evokes the massacres in Rwanda and the Sudan as backstory, elements that give the film that ripped-from-the-headlines feel of Lifetime movies and bad “Law and Order” episodes, while setting up a beautiful, healthy, financially secure white woman as the face of African suffering. Throughout the film, we’re expected to empathize with Silvia over the deaths of people close to her and the anguish she feels over the genocide in Matobo. This works as long as it’s kept on an intimate, personal level. Kidman communicates her loss through Silvia’s refusal to address it openly; we see she’s a woman who’s survived by putting the past out of her mind, envisioning herself as a different person with no ties to that world. But when Silvia must make a larger statement, particularly when she’s accusing Dr. Zuwanie (who’s black) of betraying and slaughtering his countrymen, there’s a powerful sense of dislocation. How are we to feel that he owes anything to this daughter of colonialism? Watching that scene, I started picturing Alfre Woodard as Silvia and thinking how much better the movie in my head was.
Charles Randolph, the film’s original screenwriter (Scott Frank [Minority Report] and Steven Zaillian [Schindler’s List] rewrote significant chunks), said in a recent Entertainment Weekly feature, “I chose a white African because I felt that’s a story that really hasn’t been told. I think we’ve historically dismissed white Africans as racists. And I wanted to portray someone who loved her country, felt an intimate connection to it, but didn’t happen to be black. I never really worried about it that much.” Yeah, I’m getting pretty sick of all these big Hollywood movies about the experience of black Africans — how about some variety?
On its surface, the movie is steadfastly PC, making many supporting characters black, never openly condescending to them, making the shadiest villain white, even giving Silvia that black ex-lover. (Though we never see them together, so no one has to be unsettled — or turned-on — by the contrast of dark lips against Kidman’s porcelain skin. Wouldn’t it be fun if there were a flashback and he were played by Lenny Kravitz?) But there’s no escaping the fact that we’re watching a beautiful woman with lily-white skin being menaced by large, scowling black men, an image that reaches back to white men’s antique fears about black potency. And we’re being asked to identify with her love of Africa. How friggin’ schizophrenic is that?
If one is willing to overlook the several elephants in the room, there are elements of the film to enjoy. The director, Sydney Pollack, keeps the pace lively while still allowing for quiet, intimate scenes between the major set pieces, and he never lets the suspense or paranoia slacken. Many scenes are cross-cut with simultaneous events happening elsewhere, so that we’re constantly busy making connections and figuring out who’s up to what.
It’s nice to see Sean Penn playing a smart, competent character for once, and he gives his role interesting shadings. He’s a bit stuck — like all movie law-enforcement officers, Keller’s bearing a heavy weight of personal tragedy that will inevitably connect with the theme at the film’s climax — but Penn doesn’t get carried away with the pathos, nor does he get tangled up in macho posturing. He leaves that to Catherine Keener, who plays Keller’s partner as the most hard-bitten agent in the movie, a woman who got where she is by being tougher than any man around her. Pollack also develops memorable bits for a number of minor characters, particularly one who has the misfortune to be in the middle of the film’s most shocking sequence — an act of terrorism as horrifying as anything I’ve seen in film.
Pollack is a New Yorker, and his view of the city is that of an uxorious lover. Manhattan seems to preen before his camera; even grimy alleyways look glamorous. (The cinematographer is Darius Khondji, a favorite of grime fans David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.) Pollack persuaded the U.N. to permit filming inside its headquarters for the first time ever, and he makes the most of the opportunity, capturing the grandeur of the General Assembly chambers and the ’50s modernist elegance of its lobbies and lounges. The movie takes an extremely pro-U.N. stance, suggesting that it’s the major, perhaps the only, venue for serious, positive changes in world affairs. It’s a timely shot in the arm for the beleaguered institution, a reminder of its humanitarian goals and an argument for boosting its waning influence. Perhaps John Bolton will have a chance to catch a showing while the Senate is in recess.
American
Cinematographer: The Interpreter - The American Society of ... The
Interpreter, an urban thriller photographed by Darius Khondji, becomes the
first feature production to shoot in United Nations headquarters, by
Patricia Thomson, 2005, Page 1
American
Cinematographer: The Interpreter - The American Society of ... Page 2
American
Cinematographer: The Interpreter - The American Society of ... Page 3
American
Cinematographer: The Interpreter - The American Society of ... Page 4
American
Cinematographer: The Interpreter - The American Society of ... Khondji
Enters the DI Suite, by Stephanie Argy, Page 5
What world is
this? - World Socialist Web Site
Joanne Laurier, May 7, 2005
Penn,
Kidman Gain Political Thriller Diplomatic Immunity | Village Voice J. Hoberman, April 12, 2005
“The Interpreter” -
Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
The Interpreter
(2005) | PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
The
Interpreter: high-minded stodginess, no thrills. - Slate Magazine David Edelstein
Slant Magazine [Akiva Gottlieb]
ReelViews
[James Berardinelli]
Flipside
Movie Emporium [Rob Vaux]
Movie
House Commentary Uncle Snoopy
The
Interpreter | Film at The Digital Fix
Anthony Nield
Film
Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]
The
Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Lessons
of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
Austin
Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Arizona
Reporter [Harvey Karten]
San
Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
A
Coup de Hollywood at the United Nations
Warren Hoge from The New York
Times,
Her Mission:
Save the World Without Offending Anyone
A.O. Scott from The New York
Times,
The
United States of Tiny Sam Knight
from The New York Times,
CRITIC'S
NOTEBOOK; A Thiller Stars the U.N., as Itself Caryn James from The New York Times, April 28, 2005
SKETCHES OF FRANK GEHRY – made for TV
USA Germany (86 mi) 2006
Sketches of Frank Gehry, directed by Sydney Pollack ... - Time Out Dave Calhoun
Director Sydney Pollack takes his MiniDV into the life of pal and architect Frank Gehry and offers intimate conversations, but little in the way of penetrating detail or analysis. Still, for fans or just the curious, Pollack’s documentary is a friendly affair that presents some stunning footage of several Gehry projects (the Bilbao Guggenheim, Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA) and darts about his ideas, working methods and background with ease. The film operates as a pleasant career testimonial, with high-level contributions popping up from the likes of Dennis Hopper and Ed Ruscha. (The lone dissenting voice of a journalist feels token.) Gehry himself is a gent. ‘Should you meet an architect at a party, the best thing you can do is hit them,’ says talking-head Bob Geldof, paraphrasing Auberon Waugh. On the strength of this, we should instead shake Gehry’s hand. ‘What bugs me are these goddamn rules,’ he complains of the world of architecture in which he works.
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
Sydney Pollack's Sketches Of Frank Gehry belongs unashamedly to the "let us now praise great men" school of hagiography. An accomplished character actor and middling middlebrow auteur, Pollack maintains a respectful distance from his friend and subject, architect Frank Gehry. No surprise that fawning reverence seldom leads to penetrating insights. After all, how much weaker would Crumb have been had director Terry Zwigoff decided against possibly offending his old pal R. Crumb by delving into his tormented upbringing or sexual quirks?
Pollack's loving tribute alternates between grimy digital-video footage of Gehry and his friends and admirers, and sumptuous film footage that lovingly caresses every curve of Gehry's fantastical buildings, which look like they're assembled from flubber and pixie dust instead of steel and concrete. Gehry's whimsical creations suggest a collaboration between Picasso and Dr. Seuss, and the rapturous shots of light reflecting just so on his shimmering surfaces qualify as architectural porn of the first order.
Gehry is a fascinating subject, a strangely magnetic combination of rumpled, aw-shucks humility and Herculean ambition and hubris, but every time Pollack stumbles onto a fascinating topic like Gehry's battles with anti-Semitism, he pulls away instead of delving deeper. Pollack might think he's being objective in allowing a sole opponent of Gehry's work to briefly interrupt the lovefest. But the simpering detractor conveys all the dignity and intellectual authority of Arnold Stang, and his mealy-mouthed criticisms are vague to the point of being meaningless. Scattered throughout Sketches are some interesting insights into the creative process and the tricky business of balancing art and commerce. But they're outnumbered by unenlightening testimonials to Gehry's genius from people like Julian Schnabel, whose white bathrobe and shades make him look like the pompous art-world answer to Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski. A famous quote holds that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Now Pollack has made an overly reverent but intermittently compelling homage to an iconoclastic genius whose architecture danc
Sketches of Frank Gehry Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
I'm the last person you'll hear defending "documentary
objectivity," which is usually just a slightly more skillful way of
disguising authorial bias from the inattentive viewer. Nevertheless, Pollack's
overly-chummy portrait of leading post-Postmodern architect Frank Gehry is
essentially a New York Times Magazine fluff-piece on video. (The film was made
for PBS's "American Masters" series, but several such productions
over the years have profiled their subjects in far more substantive ways. The
assignment itself isn't the problem here.) As Sketches never stops
reminding the viewer, Gehry and Pollack are longtime friends, and although
Pollack admits to having little knowledge about architecture (as well as never
having made a documentary before), Gehry asserts that that makes him perfect
for the job. Well, yes, if the "job" is to provide a fawning
great-man portrait with virtually no analysis, no context, and no real
dissenting voices. Hal Foster, one of America's preeminent art critics, is
given about ten seconds in which to articulate his disapproval of Gehry's work,
just enough time to allow Pollack to set him up. Almost immediately, Sketches
cuts to painter Julian Schnabel, practically a parody of himself swirling his
brandy snifter in a white terrycloth bathrobe. He dismisses Gehry's critics
(and all critics, really -- which may be the ultimate point of Pollack's film)
as "flies buzzing around the neck of a lion." What value Sketches
might've had, despite its smug anti-intellectualism, is diminished due to
Pollack's inability to use the camera to describe Gehry's buildings in space.
Truly remarkable-looking structures (the
A Nutshell Review Stefan S.
Frank Gehry is the world renowned architect who designed the
Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. This documentary, directed by his friend
Sydney Pollack, takes a quick look into the man himself, as well as to showcase
some of the designs of the past 20 years or so, including the Guggenheim, which
is given plenty of airtime.
Nearer to home, the Kerzner-CapitaLand's Sentosa Integrated Resort bid boasts
of having its architecture designed by Gehry. Response has been mixed that it
resembles one of his earlier pieces, but hey, it's Frank Gehry, and having one
of his designs here, if it gets awarded, will be one heck of an attraction in
itself.
Gehry mentioned during the interview that Pollack was given the
nod to do the documentary was because of his lack of knowledge in the field.
Perhaps it's because coming from the outside, he would be able to provide a
fresh perspective into how architecture is viewed, from a layman. There's
nothing much to shout about in this film, except to drool at the various
eclectic designs and buildings Gehry built, and to go behind the scenes to try
and pick his brain about the processes and idiosyncrasies he lives by.
And watching the master at work is amazing. From his squiggly sketches, they
evolve into grand monuments, often undergoing countless of changes on the fly.
There are plenty of hacks on models, and the amount of material spent making
these models is simply staggering. It's no wonder he has a dedicated team of
professionals working under him, and together they create art. I'm also
impressed by Gehry's vast knowledge on materials, as they are equally important
in bringing to life the designs from paper to the actual building.
Watch this documentary if you want to have a glimpse of how Frank Gehry goes
about his work combining art with architectural design, and of the little
nuggets of information he shares about his work and design philosophy, as well
as a rare glimpse into this life from interviews and dialogues with colleagues
and friends.
Now I'm rooting for the Kerzner-CapitaLand bid, just to have a Gehry designed
building on our shores :-)
Pollack's
cinematic depiction of architect Frank Gehry Witold
Rybczynski from Slate, July 26, 2006,
also seen here: A
closer look at Sketches of Frank Gehry.
Sketches
of Frank Gehry by Sydney Pollack (2005) | PopMatters Noah Davis
'Sketches
of Frank Gehry' | Village Voice Rob
Nelson
Sketches of
Frank Gehry - Digitally Obsessed Jon
Danziger
Sketches
of Frank Gehry by Sydney Pollack : DVD Talk Review of the ... Holly Beeman
Sketches
Of Frank Gehry in August | Film at The Digital Fix Dave Foster
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Sketches of Frank Gehry | Art and design | The Guardian Mark Kermode, July 1, 2007
Austin Chronicle [Marrit Ingman]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
San
Francisco Chronicle [Kenneth Baker]
Sketches
of Frank Gehry Movie Review (2006) | Roger Ebert
FILM
REVIEW; Design for Living Large, and Its Architect A.O. Scott from The New York Times, also seen here: Sketches
of Frank Gehry - The New York Times
Sketches of Frank Gehry - Wikipedia
Polley, Sarah
AWAY FROM HER B+ 91
Scenes from a marriage that play out
like a Bergman chamber drama, filled with somber chilly undertones and
brilliant performances from the leading actors, the resplendent Julie Christie
who, as a member of the hospital staff points out, is still “a lady,” elegant
and regal, smart and inquisitive, delivering one of the most powerful
performances of her career, vulnerable yet always eloquent in her manner, and
her husband Grant, Gordon Pinsent, an Erland Josephson stand in with the same
beard, a retired English professor with a stern countenance, a stodgy old guy
who taught Icelandic myths, always with a bit of frostbite in his look. The two live on a cabin overlooking Lake
Ontario where they enjoy cross-country skiing until one day Fiona (Christie)
can’t remember her way back, a telling sign after several earlier signs all
leading to the same truth, that she’s suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and
needs long term care, announcing at a dinner party “I think I may be beginning
to disappear” after she can’t remember how to pronounce the word “wine.” After visiting Meadowlake, an upscale
assisted living facility, Grant is devastated, expressed in an excruciating
time lapsed scene when the residents are sitting around with their families,
all crowded into a common room, but one by one the various family members
disappear, erased from the image, leaving the residents isolated and alone,
distraught and helpless, all common themes in the film. Grant doesn’t like the place, but Fiona is
wise enough to realize they’ll never find the kind of place they like, but this
one will do, as what she really needs is a place where she can retain some
sense of grace.
Adapted by the director from the Alice
Munro short story, “The
Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the film
flows in intersecting threads, each intercutting the other, using brief
flashbacks as well as spoken reflections from earlier times, all of which feed
into the present, which is rapidly deteriorating. The observant nurse, Kristen Thomson who is
nothing less than a revelation in each and every scene, cheerful and helpful in
every respect, empathizes with the family, whose time and visits are only
fleeting, making it difficult to let go, a contrast to the staff administrator
who is stiff and artificial, always remaining aloof from it all while enforcing
the Meadowlake policy that forbids visitors of any kind for the first 30 days,
allowing the residents time to settle in and discover their own comfort
zones. When Grant returns, she’s
transferred her feelings of affection to one of the other residents, a nearly unrecognizable
and uncommunicative Michael Murphy, who is confined to a wheelchair, the two
becoming inseparable, treating Grant like a pestering visitor who won’t leave
them alone. Again, Grant who was never
comfortable with the idea of bringing her there, becomes even more
flabbergasted, feeling more alienated than he could ever imagine, as if forces
were conspiring against him, believing she may be punishing him for a long
since past indiscretion which may now be the re-prioritized focus of her
attention. Despite being heavily racked
in guilt, he keeps visiting, trying to maintain his 44-year marriage, but he
blends so comfortably into the background that one of the other visitors just
assumes he’s a lonely resident without any visitors. In an unusual scene, using humor to assess
emotional devastation, one patient is a former hockey play-by-play announcer,
who offers his amusingly unstoppable play-by-play commentary of his experience
being whisked down the hall, interjecting upon seeing Grant hiding his face
against a wall, “There’s a man who is heartbroken, his heart broken into a
million pieces,” before continuing his monologue. Throughout this ordeal, the role of the nurse
takes on greater impact, where she possesses a kind of down-to-earth realistic clarity
that Grant lacks, where all his education brings him no closer to grasping the
effect of his sudden insignificance in his wife’s life. There’s a wonderful conversation between
Grant and the nurse when he realizes that much of what he previously felt
mattered now feels so superficial, aware that what was a comfortable distance
between them now feels like an insurmountable gulf. This event is eerily similar to childbirth,
only with an agonizing grief of loss instead of the joy of the newborn, where your
life suddenly feels small and secondary to the more pressing needs of this
“other.”
While there are no startling directorial
innovations or lapses, there are repeated motifs, such as the director’s
preference for close ups, some lit in a glowing white light that suggests
transcendence, hospital corridor sequences utilizing slow tracking shots that
follow the eyes of a visitor, or an overhead camera looking down on inhabitants
in bed, a similar Atom Egoyan device (a producer on the film), while most of
the film takes place in the slow frozen chill of winter. While there is a beautiful and tender use of
K.D. Lang singing Neil Young’s song “Helpless”Away from Her & Helpless
- YouTube (4:10), this is not a film with attention-grabbing fireworks or
melodrama, but instead respects the slow descent into forgetfulness, where the
dignity of the characters is maintained throughout. There are wonderful literary passages Grant
reads to his wife, with his eloquent, perfectly enunciated words, which adds a
bit of poetic reflection, not to mention an appreciation for the written word,
which after all is the sacred tool of communication. Without it, we are all at a loss, caught in
the emptiness of an unending void. Even
the Apostle John from the New Testament of the Bible recognizes this epic significance, “In the beginning was the
Word.” This film is a different kind of
journey, one with no real political or religious message, but is a human story
that anyone can understand, as it respects the ties that bind us together, the
memories, the shared lives, an assembly of lifelong experiences. So when all that suddenly vanishes and
disappears without a trace, what are we left with? How do we continue to know each other? Anyone who’s ever visited the elderly in
hospitals or nursing homes knows just how lost they can become from the rest of
us. How do we keep them from slipping
away? Of course, it’s “our need” to hold
onto them, while in the later stages of life it may become “their need” to let
go. It’s a daunting distinction
swallowed up in a fragile and ever elusive realm that is largely outside all
human comprehension, and therein lies the unexplored territory that is the
unusual focus of this highly intelligent and quietly tender film.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
"Don't worry, I'm just losing my mind."
Fiona (Julie Christie, aging with more majesty than anyone has a right to), makes a joke of absently placing a frying pan in the freezer after her devoted, doting husband, Grant (Gordon Pinsent), quietly removes it, but it reverberates with a gravity neither wants to confront.
The directorial debut of Canadian actress Sarah Polley, "Away From Her" (adapted from the short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" by Alice Munro), is less a drama about Alzheimer's disease than a cinematic poem of love and loss.
"I think I may be beginning to disappear," Fiona comments to dinner guests at their dream cottage in the snowy woods, the guests made suddenly uncomfortable at such a vivid illustration of human mortality. Grant, a man who has fallen in love all over again, just wants to hold onto her, so she makes the decision to move into a retirement home and go "with a little grace."
Thirty days later, their life together has been lost in the haze and her affections shifted to a mute artist (Michael Murphy). Pinsent's exquisitely sad gaze tells everything about Grant's quiet torment.
Polley creates a film of moods and tones and pools of feeling, full of moving moments in an almost too-pretty portrait of human deterioration, photographed through a lens as forgiving and idealizing as Grant's adoring gaze. There's nothing messy or unkempt about the beautifully, quietly heartbreaking story of unconditional love and emotional sacrifice.
Yet beneath the placid surface are hints of Fiona's subconscious struggling to keep lost memories suppressed while Grant confronts the guilt of his past betrayals. It gives "Away From Her" a powerful poignancy and a hushed, devastating beauty.
The Village Voice [Ella Taylor]
In the superbly tacit chamber piece Away From Her, intolerable pressure is brought to bear on the 44-year marriage between a college professor and his homemaker spouse after she is diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.
Grant Andersson (played by veteran Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent) and his wife Fiona (an artfully wrinkled and radiant Julie Christie) have weathered a difficult but durable union in which much, wisely or not, has gone unsaid, and now they've settled into placid companionship in their Northern Ontario house, reading and cross-country skiing together. They make a handsome, Nordic-looking, low-key couple against the snowy landscape: Grant with his white beard and steady, enigmatic, possibly smug gaze; Fiona with her elegant mane of perfectly coiffed silver hair. When Fiona starts putting frying pans in the freezer, not much is said, either. But after she starts wandering off and placing herself in danger, Fiona firmly and efficiently decides—with quietly anguished opposition from her husband—to enter a high-end nursing home whose gleaming surfaces and smooth-talking director (the excellent Wendy Crewson) stand in creepy contrast to the comfortable disorder of the Anderssons' home. There, just as efficiently, Fiona seems to forget who Grant is and takes up with Aubrey (Michael Murphy), a near-catatonic inmate she claims to have known in her youth. "He doesn't confuse me at all," she tells her bewildered spouse, whom she now treats as a slightly pesky guest. That lack of confusion, Grant will dimly grasp, says as much about the shortcomings of their marriage as it does about the loss of his wife's faculties. In Away From Her, short-term memory may be going, going, gone, but the distant past that floods in to take its place can be devastating and, in its way, sublime.
Away From Her, which is adapted from Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," is the first feature written and directed by the fiercely talented young Canadian actress, Sarah Polley. Far from being the look-at-me calling card so many first-time filmmakers feel obliged to turn out, it's a precociously assured and mature work, at once humble and bold, that keeps faith with Munro's precise, graceful prose while tailoring its linear progression into shapely cinematic form. Polley's quick, impressionistic flashbacks to the breathlessly hormonal early stages of Grant and Fiona's romance, to Grant's serial indiscretions (Munro has never been kind to the '60s, and Polley bears her out with a wicked bit of business involving sandals), and to the crisis that drove the couple out of the university and into a secluded country life, all mimic the elisions and eruptions of memory—and of marriage itself, with its betrayals, blunders, and periodic tumult smoothed out by time and diplomacy, only to surge back up when least expected.
A less-attuned writer might have betrayed Munro—who is as severe with her characters as she is sympathetic to their clueless thrashings—by turning Alzheimer's into a metaphor for life, complete with eleventh-hour uplift. Here, Fiona's illness, with its attendant confusion, loneliness, and fitful oblivion, is real and specific, funny, and utterly heartbreaking. With unobtrusive skill, Polley weaves the couple's suffering into a great love story that begins with Grant's terrified denial and ends—perhaps—with unconditional devotion. Munro has never been an enthusiast for earth-mother wisdom, but she is slyly fond of female practicality; helped along by two women who have his number—a friendly but brutally candid nurse (Kristen Thomson) and Aubrey's pragmatic wife (Olympia Dukakis)—Grant comes to understand that, one way or another, he has always been "away from her." And so he gives Fiona a gift that's either a ploy to bring her back, or proof of his arrival at a hard-won state of grace. Knowing Munro, it's probably both: At the end of this lovely movie, with a plaintive K.D. Lang singing Neil Young's "Helpless" on the soundtrack, there's a meeting between Grant and Fiona that may be a reward for his selflessness, a punishment for his sins, or another turn of the screw in a life without guarantees.
There is a town in
north
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind
I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.
—Neil Young, “Helpless”
I’m going, but not gone.
—Fiona (Julie Christie)
Away from Her begins
very close to her. At least, this is how Grant Andersson (Gordon Pinsent)
imagines himself, close to his luminous wife Fiona (Julie Christie). They’ve
been married 44 years. At film’s start, he’s driving and speaking, in
voiceover. “She said,” he remembers, “‘Do you think it’d be fun if we got
married?” I took her up on it, I never wanted to be away from her.” Now, he
faces exactly that prospect: Fiona is moving away—from him.
While the change is
precisely chosen, Grant’s memories are selective, like all memories. Still, he
has them and they flood toward him seemingly unbidden, rendered in home-movieish
close-ups of Fiona’s very youthful face, when she was his student and bride to
be, or in moments of their late-life closeness, making dinner or cross-country
skiing near their home, tucked away in snowy northern
Fiona, however, has
done research, and anticipates more loss. “I think I’m beginning to disappear,”
she says, with some fear in her voice, but mostly, with seeming insight. In
Sarah Polley’s first feature—which she adapted from a short story by Alice
Munro, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”—Fiona’s loss, the very process of
losing, is conveyed in delicate fragments. Mostly filtered through Grant’s
longing, Fiona is lovely and poignant, if increasingly uncertain. Grant
realizes that his own identity—once so independent and predictably selfish—is
wrapped up in hers, and it frightens him to lose that part of himself. This
even when, or perhaps especially when, she does remember emotional details, the
pain she felt when he embarked on serial relationships with his English class
students, younger and blonder and wearing sandals, their marriage throughout
the 1960s wracked with aches and promises.
As much as Grant
tries to preserve his life with Fiona, she sees her future differently. “When I
look away, I forget what yellow means,” she murmurs. But even if she can “look
again,” to rediscover yellow, she also comprehends what’s inevitable. “There’s
something delicious in oblivion,” she asserts. Grant’s face falls, as if he
feels she’s doing this to him.
In part, as he eventually confesses to Kristy (Kristen Thomson), the managing
nurse at the facility Fiona finds for herself, he believes her forgetting is a
“charade,” and moreover, “a kind of punishment” for his past infidelities and
self-indulgence. Kristy sees in his response the sort of self-interest that can
hardly be helped, but she also advises him that this is precisely when he must
put Fiona’s needs before his own, to let her go.
The home, named
Meadowlake, lays out what’s coming in a disturbingly orderly fashion: Fiona,
instructs the efficient, seen-it-all director Madeleine (Wendy Crewson) during
their initial visit, will go through stages. The facility is designed to accommodate
these stages, indeed, to ease her way into forgetting, making it more
comfortable for her without much regard for him. To that end, Grant is told he
cannot see Fiona during her first month at the facility; as Polley acknowledges
in an interview
with Fresh Air‘s Terry
Gross, such enforced separation is not typical in Canadian public facilities;
rather, it is, Polley says, “an important device in the film.” As such, it
underscores Grant’s experience of abrupt severance, as well as his feeling that
Fiona is looking for a way to move on without him.
When he protests the
facility, suggesting they find another, she philosophizes. “I don’t think we
should be looking for something we like,” she says, “All we can hope for is a
bit of grace.” Grant accedes, grumbling. And when at last he sees Fiona again,
she is transformed. It’s a bit of a jump, her newly established relationship
with fellow resident Aubrey (Michael Murphy). But it makes the thematic point
acutely: Grant comes to understand and even feel another sort of love for his
wife, an unconditional and generous love that has no need of her acknowledgment
or desire. It’s nearly impossible. Grant hardly finds solace in learning that
the disease proceeds “like a series of circuit breakers in a very large house,
going off one by one.” But he sees it, with each visit, as Fiona recedes from
him.
And so, Grant finds
himself, or rather, another version of himself who is unfamiliar, consciously
attuned to Fiona’s ever more distant rhythms. He watches her watch TV, or hover
over Aubrey as he plays cards. When she spends any brief moment with Grant,
Aubrey moans in upset, and she returns to him, looking after him. Grant’s own
erstwhile romance with Fiona was, he sees, tangled in his own sensibility and
projection. At first he struggles to preserve this, bringing along books for
her to read, reminders of her Icelandic origins, which he imagines tie her back
to him: he brings grand photo books and Auden’s Letters from Iceland, from which he reads, not completely
patiently, as if to reignite the past he seeks. But she’s gone somewhere else,
wearing sweaters he deems “tacky” (that is, not her previous taste, which
matched his), and found another enraptured audience for what Grant calls her
“spark of life.”
In his pursuit of his
Fiona, Grant visits Aubrey’s wife Marian (Olympia Dukakis), who is, in her way,
also troubled by the new relationship, as it means her previous life is now
lost. She looks on Grant with skepticism ("What a jerk,” she sighs, while
closing her front door after their first meeting), but also understands his
grief, as it matches hers. Lonely in their own ways, Marian and Grant resent
the constant present in which their spouses now reside, yet it is where they
are. “It’s life,” says Marian, “You can’t beat life.” More precisely, it’s a
movie, life refracted. Both careful and contrived, Away from Her paints marriage as a series of losses,
fulfillments, and compromises, infinitely rewarding and painful.
Away From Her - Chicago Reader JR Jones
IN A CULTURE obsessed with youth, we're constantly informed that sex is the glue that holds a good marriage together. But as the years pass and desire fades, most happy couples will tell you the stronger bond is shared memory: it's the history spouses draw on every day, informing all their in-jokes and knowing glances and loving accommodations. Without memory there's no real understanding, because the past is where all lessons dwell, and there's no real intimacy, because the present belongs to everyone. Old friends are the best friends not because they're old but because they remember us young.
Away From Her, a powerful Canadian drama adapted from
Alice Munro's 2001 story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," asks
whether any love can endure once that shared history is wiped away by
Alzheimer's disease. The two central characters, Grant (Gordon Pinsent) and
Fiona (Julie Christie), have been married for 44 years and enjoy a fond and
intimate relationship, living out their retirement in a comfortably rustic
house in small-town
The movie is the feature writing and directing debut of
accomplished Canadian actress Sarah Polley (The Sweet Hereafter, Don't
Come Knocking, Dawn of the Dead), who, at only 28, proves remarkably
attuned to the texture of a relationship that's weathered decades. Grant and
Fiona have been together so long they barely need to speak; their telegraphic
conversations are seasoned with little conspiratorial jokes, and observations
can be rendered with the slight raise of a chin. Their playfulness springs from
a deep well of hard-won wisdom.
But the memories uniting the two aren't always pleasant. Grant is a retired English professor, and when they're driving to Meadowlake Fiona makes oblique reference to his affairs with his students. "All those bare toes, all those sandals," she recalls, conjuring up a vivid image of temptation in the classroom. Grant is silent, consumed with guilt, but Fiona is gracious: instead of torturing him with recriminations, she thanks him for having stuck around when all his colleagues were ditching their wives for younger women. "People are too demanding," she says. "People want to be in love every day." The scene is beautifully underplayed, a casual moment fraught with conflicting emotions. Fiona may have forgiven Grant for his philandering, but she sure as hell hasn't forgotten.
Unfortunately, Meadowlake seems almost purposely designed to erase the past. As the nursing home's starchy director explains to Grant, no visitors are allowed for the first 30 days; the policy is supposed to help newcomers "settle in," but as one nurse points out, it benefits the staff more than the residents. A big-screen TV provides constant present-tense distraction, and the bland contemporary music seems to have been chosen by the young staffers. Eventually Grant realizes that the laundry service carelessly redistributes the residents' clothing, so they wind up wearing one another's things. Most of them are too far gone to notice, but he's appalled when he arrives one day to find Fiona wearing a tacky sweater she never would have tolerated at home. For the sake of others' convenience, her personality is being pried away from her.
The couple's initial separation is heartrending: out in the parking lot Grant begs Fiona not to go, but she gently admonishes him, puts on her bravest face, and announces herself at the front desk as if she were merely checking into a hotel. Shown to her room, she asks the director for some privacy and makes love to Grant. When they've finished, she implores him to leave: "If you make it hard," she says brightly, "I might cry so hard I'll never stop." Back at home, alone for the first time since they were married, Grant stares at himself in a mirror, and its reflection shows him as a young man, Fiona appearing from behind to slip her arms around him.
As the public's understanding of Alzheimer's has increased, the disease has made its way into movies that range from tragedy (Richard Eyre's British drama Iris, about the slow deterioration of fiction writer Iris Murdoch) to schmaltz (Nick Cassavetes's three-hanky hit The Notebook). But Alice Munro is a tough-minded storyteller, and the twist that occurs midway through Away From Her precludes any sentiment. When Grant returns to Meadowlake after the 30-day separation, not only has Fiona forgotten him entirely, she's attached herself to another resident, a mutely glaring old man named Aubrey (Michael Murphy). The nurses have clearly coached her to expect a visitor, and while she welcomes Grant, she does so with the formal politeness of a stranger. Grant can only look on in shock as Fiona and Aubrey sit in the TV room together, watching a golf match, her responses matching his as if they were the old married couple.
This nightmare continues with each successive visit, and eventually Grant begins to wonder if Fiona might be exacting her revenge for his past infidelities; even a scenario as cruel as that seems preferable to the idea that 44 years of marriage can evaporate in a month. Once Fiona has forgotten their history, it becomes a heavy burden to Grant. The horror never seems to end: as Fiona pushes Aubrey down the hall in his wheelchair, a sheet of paper sails off his tray, and Grant, following behind them, scoops it up to discover a lovely pencil sketch of Fiona that restores her to her youthful beauty. Later, when Aubrey's harshly disappointed wife (Olympia Dukakis) decides to care for her husband at home, Grant walks in on Fiona comforting the distraught old man, stroking his hair and calling him "dear one."
For a movie about the importance of memory, Away From Her is appropriately sophisticated in its treatment of time. Polley has broken the chronological story into three sections of unequal length and woven them together, approximating our own mercurial journeys through the past. (Her own husband, David Wharnsby, served as editor on the film.) The longest section finds Grant driving out to Aubrey's house to ask the wife to take him back to Fiona. For Grant it's the supreme sacrifice, yet that spirit of generosity is what enables a marriage to flower for decades, and the wise spouse eventually learns to see sacrifice as an investment rather than a loss. In this case the gift seems all the more poignant because Fiona may never recognize it, much less remember it. But Grant will, and he's the only one who has to live with the past. His decision adds a necessary note of hope to an otherwise agonizing tale: you can never rewrite your history, but you can always amend it.
A
Sharper Focus [Norman Holland]
Away from Her -
Pajiba Jeremy C. Fox
Memory Loss | Village Voice Alla Taylor, April 24, 2007
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Matt Cale
Canadian Screenwriter [Matthew Hays] also seen here: Santa Fe Reporter [Matthew Hays] and here: Montreal Mirror [Matthew Hays]
The House Next Door [Dan Callahan]
“Away
from Her”: Julie Christie in a film based on an Alice Munro story. Anthony Lane from The New Yorker
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
The Onion A.V. Club [Tasha Robinson]
Commentary Track [Rishi Agrawal]
DVD Talk Brian Orndorf
Film Journal International (Shirley Sealy)
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Speak,
Memory | Filmmaker Magazine
Jason Guerrasio interview, February 8, 2008
Away from Her | Film
| The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
'Away From Her': A marriage adrift | Toronto Star Geoff Pevere
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
San Francisco Chronicle [Ruthe Stein]
Los Angeles Times (Carina Chocano)
Away from Her Movie
Review & Film Summary (2006) | Roger Ebert
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
"A Role About Winter for Julie Christie, a Star in Eternal Spring" Alan Riding from The New York Times, April 27, 2007
TAKE THIS WALTZ B+ 90
And I'll dance with you in
Vienna
I'll be wearing a river's disguise
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder
My mouth on the dew of your thighs…
Oh my love, oh my love
Take this waltz, take this waltz
It's yours now, it's all that there is
—Take This Waltz, (excerpt) by Leonard Cohen, take this waltz leonard cohen - YouTube (5:37)
The Queen of Existential Melancholy makes a film after her own heart, improving radically over the previously acclaimed Blue Valentine (2010), also starring Michelle Williams, another married couple on the rocks film, which despite the superb performances and heralded reviews was something of an empty disappointment, especially considering the talent in the film, featuring poorly matched characters going nowhere. This is another break up film by a better director, one that avoids clichés without a hint of sentimentality and without the intensely uncomfortable nagging arguments of one character blaming the other, where the writer/director/producer shows the same effect without the manipulation, where despite the happy moments and continual pledges of love, there is a decided accumulation of disinterest through marital attrition, where a near anonymous character states the theme of the film in a communal female shower sequence after a pool aerobics workout, where the shower lady says “Everything that’s new gets old.” From the outset, a somewhat comical visit to a historical re-enactment at the fortress and lighthouse of Louisbourg in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, we see Margot (Williams) develop an amusingly intimate rapport with a fellow traveler, Luke Kirby as Daniel, flirting on the plane and sharing a cab when they return home to Toronto, turning this into a kind of adulterous love fantasia when she discovers the guy lives right across the street from her home, where she’s supposedly happily married to Lou, Seth Rogen, a guy who writes cookbooks on the various ways to cook chicken, which he cooks night after night, leaving her wanting more. But it’s the kind of love that has to be repeatedly reinforced, inventing a playful game where they try to outdo the other in depicting the most gruesome way to maim or disfigure the other, suggesting they love the other person that much. Clearly they have an on-again and off-again relationship, lost in a fog of melancholia, where she likely married too young, falling for a guy she’s barely attracted to anymore, where both seem to have intimacy issues where they don’t like people touching them or getting too close.
What’s apparent is what a middle of the road couple this is, as neither express their feelings well, where their days consist of awkward moments where Margot tries to get suggestive, putting her arms around her husband while he’s cooking, but he’s oblivious, more concerned about the chicken than her intent, which goes unnoticed. While they’re still in their twenties, only married five years, they have surprisingly little to say to one another, as Lou simply avoids any discussion about children. Into this void walks Daniel, who greets her walking down the street, offering to get coffee, where they discover both are early risers, and they familiarize themselves with each other’s routines, as Daniel walks to the beach every morning, where they meet from time to time. Their conversations are engagingly playful, where it’s obvious there’s a certain spark that doesn’t exist at home. Nevertheless, she refuses to cross the line, something she makes inherently clear, but always returns to meeting Daniel, who responds in kind, such as sitting in the balcony of her all women swimming aerobics class at the gym, creating something of a fuss, as these mostly married women aren’t used to having someone, especially other than their husbands, paying attention to them. In the shower scene afterwards, Polley shows women’s bodies, young and old, where they’re free to carry on personal conversations while stark naked in the shower and no one gets judgmental, as nobody cares. It’s here that Margot is reminded that everything runs its course and eventually the novelty wears off, but she’s not ready for that to happen yet, instead spending an entire day at an amusement park with Daniel, where they go to Center Island, a fifteen minute ferry ride from Toronto, where like little kids they ride a roller coaster to the music of the Buggles Take This Waltz - Video Killed the Radio Star - YouTube (2:05), re-igniting a sexual chemistry that exists between them which they still choose to ignore.
Margot continues to offer suggestive signs to Lou, which he continually ignores, but on their anniversary dinner, when she points out they have nothing to say to each other, he’s not at all surprised, which she finds all too baffling. While neither one of these characters is particularly complex, what is evident is the closer she gets to Daniel, the unhappier she is at home with Lou, so eventually she flat out tells him, but not until Daniel has made a quick exit from the neighborhood, surprising and confusing Margot, who clearly has to make a choice. Unfortunately for Lou, she runs to the beach to find Daniel. Their new life together is a series of fast forward or freeze frame images that have a provocatively suggestive quality about them, occasionally adding a threesome partner, but all of this is wordlessly shown, using snippets of Canadian indie songs throughout, almost like a sexual pastiche of wish fulfillment dreams, where her new life takes on a heightened quality about it, but there’s no actual reality shown, as it remains brand new rather than an accumulated understanding. While Polley clearly creates an adulterous fantasia, it’s not without consequences, as when she returns to the old neighborhood to see family and friends, and Lou, the old gang is a supportive and close-knit group, where she is seen as a betraying vixen, something of a heartbreaker, as Lou is continually seen as a sweet natured guy that wouldn’t hurt anyone, including Margot, so in their eyes, the fault lies with her, as she’s broken up the gang.
Continuing this existential dilemma, there is a price you pay for freedom of choice, and in this case, it may mean dumping the old and acquiring an entirely new set of friends, a practice common among recovering substance abusers or former gang members. In the end, it’s a big question mark what she’s getting herself into, where the idealized new guy could end up worse than what she’s leaving in the first place, so you never know when you make that leap of faith into the void, as all that really seems to matter is it’s the first time in her life when she’s been able to choose what pleases her, and ultimately, according to this film, that’s what matters the most—cue the 1970’s women’s liberation anthem, Helen Reddy: "I Am Woman", from "The Midnight Special", 1975 ... YouTube (3:11). No, not really, excuse the viewer flashback, more likely something grounded in a kind of cowboy sense of alienation: Doug Paisley - Wide Open Plain - YouTube (5:35), as the film is about filling that empty sense of loneliness in our lives, even in supposedly stable marriages. The reality of the film is the inner world of Michelle Williams as she experiences the various steps, as the entire film is seen through her eyes. It's entirely a character development film, where what’s to like here is Polley's attention to the internal world of Williams. She is always an ordinary person, as is her husband, but she dreams of more. With choice comes responsibility, and to get what you want, you're going to have to hurt people. While it’s an expression of female individuality and personal independence, it’s interesting that Polley does include the emotional cost involved, which remains a heavy weight on her back even as she feels light as a feather.
Take This Waltz Soundtrack List | Soundtracks listing of songs in the film
1. Stand Tall by Burton Cummings
2. Underground by A Man Da Band Feat. Marco DiFelice
3. Closing Time by Leonard Cohen
4. Santa Lucia by A Man Da Band Feat. Marco DiFelice
5. Don’t You by Micah P. Hinson
6. Take this Waltz by Leonard Cohen
7. Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles
8. Green Mountain State by Corinna Rose
& The Rusty Horse Band
9. Rave on Sad Songs by Jason Collett
10. Close Your Eyes by Micah P. Hinson
11. Victoria by Charles Spearin
12. Mahi Ve by Josh
13. Rise Up by The Parachute Club
14. Wide Open Plain by Doug Paisley
15. Secret Heart by Feist
The House Next Door [Phil Coldiron]
Michelle Williams, dutifully trudging her way through the crayon-vomit mise-en-scène of Take This Waltz, a minefield of artfully cluttered apartments, patterned dresses, and garishly lit spaces, once again proves that, through the sheer force of the honesty her face, she can elevate anything. Sarah Polley's structure, a slyly bifurcated romance that wedges in the entire second love in the space of one ludicrous montage of boho privilege and sexual liberation set to the Leonard Cohen song that gives the film its title, works better in the mind than on the screen. And that's fine, because for all its annoyances as a movie—and some of these, like the way that its characters all seem to live exponentially beyond their means (it's so overplayed that it becomes a critique of the financial dream world of so many recent romantic comedies), are actually virtues—Take This Waltz turns out to be a pretty sharp corrective to the usual movie setup: Here it's the woman who's allowed to fuck up, break some hearts, and still find happiness, and she doesn't need a man to do it.
Take This Waltz - Page 1 - Movies - New York - Village Voice Melissa Anderson
Sarah Polley’s second feature, much like her first, the superb Away From Her (2006), thoughtfully probes the pitfalls of coupledom and third-party threats. Five years into their marriage, Torontonians Margot (Michelle Williams) and Lou (Seth Rogen) have regressed fully into sexlessness, heat and mystery having been supplanted by baby-talking, bathroom-oversharing, and weirdly aggressive verbal game-playing. For one of her infrequent freelance-writing gigs, Margot leaves their home—a spacious cocoon where cookbook-author Lou perfects chicken dishes in the kitchen—for a quick research trip at a historic site in Nova Scotia. There she meets lean, hungry Daniel (Luke Kirby); seated next to each other on the flight back to TO, sparks fly—particularly when they discover they live across the street from each other. Yet where Polley’s debut benefited from the solidity of the Alice Munro story on which it was adapted, Take This Waltz wobbles at times with the writer-director’s own credibility-straining choices: Daniel isn’t just a rickshaw driver but an aspiring painter; signpost dialogue—“I don’t like being in between things,” Margot says of her fear of flight connections—abounds in the film’s first third. But there are enough unexpected delights, such as repurposing “Video Killed the Radio Star” during a critical moment between Margot and Daniel, to keep us interested in their drawn-out, teasing, tantalizing courtship.
Review: Michelle Williams is heartbreaking in sensational ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny
Earlier today, I was at the press day for "50/50,"
shooting video interviews with the cast, and one of the people working at the
event was a local. As we were talking about movies I'd seen at the fest,
I mentioned Sarah Polley and "Take This Waltz," and immediately, she
got defensive, before I even offered an opinion on the film. "Sarah
Polley is one of our treasures," she said, a good Canadian protecting one
of her own. Thing is, no one need to protect Polley, because she's
carving out one hell of a career, and there's nothing to be defensive about.
We have very few women writing and directing personal work on a regular basis
these days, and if you look at the percentages of women to men in those jobs,
it's truly upsetting. I love all of my boy movies, certainly, and I know
when a filmmaker is playing right to my interests or my worldview. I
don't just go to the movies to have my perspective endlessly reinforced,
though. I want to be challenged. I want to be knocked out of my
comfort zone. I want to hear a voice I haven't heard before. I want
to understand the world through other people's eyes.
"Take This Waltz" is absolutely the work of a strong film artist with
a perspective and a voice that should be heard, and I think Sarah Polley is
someone we need to encourage and support. This is delicate, beautiful
work, well-observed and powerful, and I walked out of the theater emotionally
rocked by the movie. It tells the story of Margot (Michelle Williams) and
Lou (Seth Rogen), a young married couple who are still defining their lives
together. Lou is working on a cookbook about chicken, and Margot is
working various freelance writing jobs while waiting to find something to write
about. The way Polley shows the small moments of their relationship, the
things that they share, the rituals that connect them, is very smart, very
subtle. Margot loves her husband, and she loves to play. There is a
sense that she needs someone who can meet her halfway, someone who needs the
same constant affection that she does, and Lou is able to be that person for
her.
Sometimes.
There is nothing that can poison a marriage more than when priorities are
different between two people. A marriage is an agreement, a unity of
purpose, and if both partners aren't moving in the same direction, wanting the
same things, it can crumble without anyone realizing it. Margot finds
herself constantly testing Lou, and not intentionally. It's just the way
she's wired, and she can't even identify the things she feels like she's
missing until she meets a guy named Daniel (Luke Kirby) while she's on a
working vacation. It's just a passing encounter, but then she runs into
him again on the plane back to Toronto, and the chemistry between them is
immediate and easy and, most importantly, utterly unlike what she's got with
Lou. She's intrigued, but at first, she professes that she's married, and
even when it turns out that this guy lives across the street from them, she
refuses to accept that it's any sort of sign or that there's any significance
to this strange attraction.
Lou's extended family has a big presence in the film, and his sister
Geraldine (Sarah Silverman) is a recovering alcoholic who serves as a sounding
board for Margot for a while. What Polley does so well that no male
director would be able to do in quite the same way is externalize the inner
lives of these women, and it's a very intimate movie, start to finish.
The struggles they're dealing with are never cranked up to melodrama, but
instead stay small scale and personal. Also, the way she shoots women,
the details she chooses to focus on, there's a whole different sensibility at
work here. I'm never more aware of "the male gaze" than when
it's absent, and a perfect example is a shower scene after a very funny
sequence at a swim class. There are all these women in the showers, and
it's very matter of fact. If a guy was directing a movie with Sarah
Silverman and Michelle Williams standing around naked, it wouldn't be shot like
this. There's something almost celebratory about the way Polley packs the
frame with all these different ages and body types, and that extends to the way
she shoots small acts of affection or the way people watch each other.
What she focuses on is not the same as what I would focus on, and being aware
of that makes me aware that I am seeing the world through Margot's eyes.
I find there's no actress working today who is better at projecting her inner
life than Michelle Williams. I think she's remarkable, and whether she's
playing joy or pain, curiosity or fear, it's right there under the surface, and
it's crystal clear. There are times where she still looks 17 years old,
and other times where something in her eyes makes her look like she's got a
hundred years of life experience bouncing around in there. She seems to
have absorbed Polley's script on a molecular level, and I don't see anything of
her prior performances here. Rogen doesn't exactly play against type, but
there's such a gentle quality to Lou that it feels like he's growing up, like
he's become the best version of the man he could have been, and he never
reaches for an easy laugh in the film. It's a mature, considered piece of
work. The same is true of Sarah Silverman, who drops the acerbic edge
she's known for to play this woman struggling against her own desires, a lovely
mirror of what it is that Margot is going through.
While someone might make the surface comparison between this and "Blue
Valentine" as both being films about marriages in crisis, this is totally
different from the DNA up. In this film, she genuinely loves Lou, and she
knows how good a man he is, and she's not looking to escape from him.
He's kind, he's gentle, and he finds small ways to show her each day how much
she means to him. It's Margot who needs something else, something she
can't put a name on, and the way she keeps dancing closer and closer to this temptation
that's entered her life and the way she grapples with her heart versus her head
is compellingly illustrated. Daniel is a worthy adversary for her,
someone who engages her in a way that Lou doesn't, and as much as I normally
hate to watch movies about infidelity because it's so alien to my own
sensibility, here I can see the struggle that Margot faces. She's not
running from Lou at all. Instead, she's running towards something she
can't even define.
Some of the writing is on the nose, including the first scene between Margot
and Daniel, but there's so much in the film that is so strong that it doesn't
matter to me. This movie burrowed deep under my skin, and the
contributions from cinematographer Luc Montpellier and composer Jonathan Goldsmith
and editor Christopher Donaldson are all impressive, supporting this singular
vision. I hope Polley makes another dozen films, and I hope she keeps
this voice of hers sharp and supple. That girl at the junket today was
right, but it's true for any fan of film, not just a Canadian. Sarah
Polley is, indeed, one of our treasures.
“Take This Waltz”:
Michelle Williams' daring, contemporary ... - Salon Andrew O’Hehir
Take This Waltz | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Tasha Robinson
Film Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]
Sarah Polley Is a Major Directing Talent. You Should Go See Her New Movie, Take This Waltz Dana Stevens from Slate
DVD Talk [Jason Bailey] also seen here: Fourth Row Center [Jason Bailey]
Klymkiw Film Corner [Greg Klymkiw]
DustinPutman.com [Dustin Putman]
Take This Waltz - Film School Rejects Kate Erbland
Take This Waltz - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
Movie Review: ‘Take This Waltz’ Danny King from The King Bulletin
Film-Forward.com [Megan Fariello]
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
FILM REVIEW: Take This Waltz - The Buzz - CBC Eli Glasner
Take This Waltz (2011) Movie Review from Eye for Film Amber Wilkinson
Take This Waltz Movie Review | Shockya.com Perri Nemiroff
The MacGuffin [Spencer Fornaciari]
Shalit's Stache [Matthew Schuchman]
The Film Emporium [Andy Buckle]
Boxoffice Magazine [Nick Schager]
Paste Magazine [Annlee Ellingson]
Culture Blues [Jeremiah White]
Napierslogs' Movie Expositions [Anne Campbell]
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
Combustible Celluloid Jeffrey M. Anderson
Sarah Polley on Take This Waltz's big ambiguities and - The AV Club Tasha Robinson interview, July 12, 2012
'Sarah Polley on Take This Waltz, Canadian Pride, and Always Keeping the Bathroom Door Closed' Rebecca Milzoff interview from Vulture, June 29, 2012
The Hollywood Reporter [David Rooney]
The Guardian [Catherine Shoard]
Review: Take This Waltz - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough
Take This Waltz movie review -- Take This Waltz ... - Boston.com Ty Burr
San Francisco Examiner [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Take This Waltz rogerebert.com - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times
'Take This Waltz,' Directed by Sarah Polley ... - The New York Times A.O. Scott
STORIES WE TELL B+ 90
Canada (108 mi) 2012 Official site
We
talk and talk … without conveying what we are really like. —Michael Polley
The
true story lies
among
the other stories,
a mess of colors, like jumbled clothing
thrown off or away,
like hearts on marble, like syllables, like
butchers’
discards.
—Margaret Atwood, Canadian novelist, essayist, literary
critic, environmental activist, and poet, excerpt from True Stories, 1981
An extremely personal and heartfelt film, something of an experimental memory play that gazes into one’s own past, where curiously it’s not at all what it seems, despite everything that one’s been led to believe. Similar to Clint Eastwood’s THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY (1995), the extra-marital love affairs of our parents are rarely, if ever spoken about while they’re alive, often discovered in a series of romantic letters found stuffed into an old trunk that no one’s opened in decades, or found personal diary entries that can be a startling revelation. Sarah Polley goes on a search to learn more about her mother who died from cancer when she was only eleven years old, where so much of what she knew and remembered about her had been told to her by others, including the possibility that her mother may have had an affair that resulted in her own conception, so she set out to investigate further. What she discovers about her mother is simply marvelous stuff, as she’s a flailing actress with energy to burn and a wonderful enthusiasm for life, a free-spirited woman who lived and loved openly, always displaying her feelings, seemingly without a secret in the world, most often remembered as the life of the party. As a mother she adored her children and had a knack for performing multiple tasks simultaneously. She married a fellow actor, Michael Polley, whose internal clock was the exact opposite, a social recluse who only expressed himself through the characters he played onstage, as otherwise he was reserved, rarely expressing any emotion. When they had children, he redefined his life around financial responsibility and fatherly obligations instead of the changing vicissitudes of art, to his wife’s lament, as she felt he was giving up on his craft. This tempered the romantic aspect of their marriage, where they remained respectfully joined together as parents, but something remained missing between them. This may actually define marriages in the socially conservative era of the 50’s before the onset of divorce became a socially acceptable alternative. In this sense, her parents were like many others, where they internally drifted apart, but also where her own siblings often teased her about having a different father, as she bore so little resemblance to the one she had.
Stylistically the film blends actual
interview footage of Polley with her brothers and sisters, her father, as well
as her aunts, but for the character of her mother, which may be the most beautifully
crafted aspect of the picture, she resorts to artificially recreated Super 8
footage, using actors playing the part, simulating scenes using a faded, grainy
home video look from the era, as if we were seeing actual archival
documentation, where her mother, Diane Polley, played by Rebecca Jenkins, is
always seen smiling, talking on the phone while cooking dinner, dancing, or
singing, continuously expressed with a special warmth and affection, seen here
described by her own children, STORIES WE TELL - Clip 1 YouTube
(1:28). At some point, with her
husband’s silent approval, her mother traveled from Toronto to Montreal to
perform in a play, where a red-haired actor was always thought to be a possible
suspect as the director’s father, so tracking him down after all these years
felt like the central focus of the movie.
As he fondly recalled the director’s mother, and gave the usual “she was
a lovely gal” speech, but somewhat awkwardly insisted he could not be her
father, instead referring her to a movie producer that spent more time with
her, Harry Gulkin. Meeting him for
lunch, he’s an Einstein looking guy with frazzled hair that looks like he stuck
his finger in an electric socket, but soft-spoken and extremely cordial, where
they comfortably chat for hours before Polley asks if he knows anyone her
mother could possibly have had an affair with in the actor’s ensemble. Surprisingly he does, suggesting he was waiting
for that question, as he thought that was the reason for the interview. When he shockingly tells Polley that her
mother was the love of his life, the director resorts to Silent era melodrama
for her reaction, as she goes speechless, where her mouth is moving but no
words can be heard, only the soft rumble of the voice of the man sitting across
from her at the table, someone she has reason to believe, for the first time in
her life, could be her actual father.
The featured speakers playing themselves in
the film are her actual family members seen today, while simultaneously
simulated footage continues to run of her mother with Harry, seen onstage,
having drinks after the performance, frolicking at parties, playing with her
own children, swimming in a backyard pool, or singing a slow and melancholy
version of “Ain’t Misbehavin,’” the only footage in the film that shows her
actual mother, reflecting a kind of shy and child-like quality. But it’s especially poignant when we learn
that this affair in real life cost her mother the two oldest children, one of
the first women in Canada to lose custody of her children due to charges of
adultery, where newspaper headlines of the era scream about her moral
shortcomings, as she was only allowed to visit her lost children once a month,
eventually forced to raise the baby Sarah alone. What is not in dispute are everyone’s
recollections of her mother, always warm and affectionate, where as children
they were all more drawn to her than to their father, but her early demise
changed everything, bringing them all back together again under one roof
without a mother, where Polley, a child actress, always felt something vital
was missing from her life. In many ways
this film attempts to get underneath the veneer of melancholy that has followed
her throughout her own career. The most
telling scenes in the film do reveal a unique personal characteristic about the
director, where both her father and Harry reveal an ecstatic rush of enthusiasm
when they were initially approached, hoping they could revitalize what amounted
to non-existent relationships, But even
now, they rarely get a chance to see her, as she barely shows either one of
them any affection, largely maintaining a relationship through e-mails. While her father Michael’s seemingly endless
narration seems to drag on far too long, continually seen in sound studio shots
like this one STORIES WE TELL (Clip) YouTube (50 seconds),
recalling memories alone in a vacuum where this hermetic-like existence may be
where she feels most comfortable, where she seems to defer to Michael’s
solitary and aloof nature more than Harry, as he always seems pained and
exasperated by an everlasting sense of mounting loss and regret that perhaps
best expresses the impact death has on these albeit brief lives together. Polley gives her mother the last word, making
what amounts to a Valentine’s Day card remembrance for a woman she knew all too
briefly, and without the help of others, could barely recall at all.
Canadian director Sarah Polley is known for
tackling themes that inspire introspection, whether in Away From Her,
where she dealt with the effects of Alzheimer's on a marriage, or Take This
Waltz, where she tackled the nature of passion versus love.
They are uncomfortable themes that are experienced the
world over, yet are rarely displayed on screen with such acuity. Polley's
latest film, Stories We Tell, comes in documentary form, delving into
familial memory comparison, detailing how each person recalls a story and how
their individual truths can differ, which can ultimately lead to similarities
and occasional contradictions over the years.
The subject of the documentary is Polley's family,
centering upon her mother, Diane, who lived a colourful life until her death in
1990. Her late mother's infidelities eventually surface, bringing into question
the identity of her biological father.
Driven by firsthand accounts of the past by family members
and loved ones, the most powerful story comes from her father, Michael Polley,
as he reads his memoir in a recording studio under the direction of his
daughter. This narration subsequently acts as the framing device for the film.
Polley frequently juxtaposes specific accounts of the past
with her subjects to further the notion that memory is specific to the
individual and that people rarely remember something in the same manner.
Original home movies of her family are showcased, blended
with re-enactments of remembrances on a grainy Super-8 camera to give the
illusion of films from days gone by. Polley paints a portrait of a marriage and
family that have their ups and downs, but hones in on the fact that there were
secrets the core. Once her biological father is established and brought into
the fold, the examination of memory compounds and it is here that a true
recollection of Polley's mother is established.
The documentary's trajectory is sound, as Polley has
created a cohesive narrative of a family that peels back their roots for the
world to witness. It is a true examination into the many versions of a story,
how people retain their memories and stories, and how important it is for
people to create a narrative in their mind in order to make sense of it all.
Stories We Tell | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club A.A. Dowd, also seen here: Stories We Tell
On paper, Stories We Tell sounds like an epic overshare: Sarah Polley, the Canadian actress who directed Away From Her and Take This Waltz, turns her camera on a network of close and distant relatives, encouraging them to ramble on about the complicated relationship between her parents. “Who fucking cares about our family?” Polley’s sister asks early on—and it’s tempting, at the onset anyway, to share her skepticism about the universal appeal of the project. Yet there’s much more to Stories We Tell than navel-gazing. Polley’s fledgling foray into documentary filmmaking is also an investigative mystery, a real-life soap opera, and—most compellingly, perhaps—a searching “interrogation” (the director’s word) of the hows and whys of storytelling itself.
From the opening scenes, in which the interviewees break the fourth wall to address their interviewer, it’s clear that this will be an especially self-reflexive glimpse into personal history. While his daughter, the filmmaker, watches from behind the glass of a sound studio, British-born actor Michael Polley reads passages from his memoir. These eloquent musings will blend with, and occasionally contradict, the testimonials of the film’s other talking heads. The narrative they’re collectively relaying is a whirlwind, decade-spanning romance—the tale of how Michael wooed and married a fellow thespian, the stage actress (and later casting director) Diane MacMillan, with whom he fathered several children. There’s a big twist lurking at the heart of the story, a revelation that sent shockwaves through the entire family. Though Polley has spoken publicly about this identity-shaking discovery, Stories We Tell may work best for those who go in blind, and stumble onto the secret organically.
Haunting every frame of the film is Diane, who died of cancer two days after Sarah’s 11th birthday, but lives on through rhapsodic remembrances and grainy fragments of celluloid. Polley examines her mother with a certain ambivalence, celebrating her infectious spirit, while also acknowledging the ways that her often-impulsive behavior rocked the foundation of the family. Mixed in with the real home movies of Diane are authentic-looking recreations, shot on Super 8 and featuring actress Rebecca Jenkins as the deceased. Likely designed to provide visual accompaniment to some of the anecdotes, this staged footage also speaks to Polley’s point about the unreliability of memory. Jenkins isn’t playing the real woman, but an impression of her, conjured up in the minds of those whose lives she touched. While one interview subject insists that Diane knew she was dying, another swears up and down she had no idea. The truth, the film suggests, is lost in time.
Discrepancies are the point in Stories We Tell, which seems most concerned with the way the past is distorted by those remembering it, and how the desire for ownership of a story creates multiple versions of “what really happened.” If there’s a dominant voice here, it belongs to Michael, whose candid reflections provide the film with a sturdy emotional backbone. Sarah, on the other hand, leaves most of the talking to her kin. Self-aware to a fault, and plainly worried that airing her family’s dirty laundry might be an embarrassing act of narcissism, the director comes close to apologizing for the terrific essay-film she’s made. That’s a shame; Polley has taken a big leap forward by looking inward, and she can now be mentioned in the same breath as the great Agnès Varda. Sometimes “too much information” is just the right amount.
Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, Canada) - Cinema Scope Adam Nayman from Cinema Scope
Even if they didn’t say it in print, there were plenty of Toronto critics who suspected that Sarah Polley was being disingenuous when she claimed her sophomore feature Take This Waltz (2011) contained little to nothing in the way of autobiography. That Polley crafted her Parkdale-set Scenes From a Marriage after the dissolution of her own partnership may well have been a coincidence of timing, and the torrent of speculation to the contrary symptomatic of a need to reframe the artworks of famous people as self-portraits. But whether the very articulate filmmaker’s demurrals to that effect were themselves carefully calculated—or if they only had that ring because they were reprinted word for word in the usual festival-time publicity roll-out—it seemed that Polley was adamant that the work’s openness to interpretation had a definite cutoff point. And that, more specifically, it was located at the intersection of the romantic indecision being portrayed onscreen and the details of the director’s personal life.
Fair enough, but the roundly acclaimed Stories We Tell could still be read as Polley’s attempt to corner both sides of this argument. It’s a documentary that features Polley onscreen alongside multiple members of her extended family (siblings, step-siblings, aunts, and uncles), and it very much concerns the clan’s personal affairs, literally. In the middle of it all, Polley casts herself as acted-upon subject and string-pulling puppet-mistress (she’s most frequently glimpsed standing behind a studio mixing board, like Rick James in the “Party All the Time” music video). There’s surely something juicy in that dynamic, as well as a built-in escape hatch against charges of mere navel-gazing narcissism.
For Stories We Tell is not only about the discovery of this Canadian theatre scion’s parentage—a story the self-describedly private star sat on until the film’s Venice and TIFF bows—but also the revelation of exactly how unlikely her birth was under the circumstances. Not only was Polley’s DNA a 50-50 proposition, as her mother slept with two different men during the weekend she was conceived, but there was also, according to those in the know, some serious talk of terminating the pregnancy. Who wouldn’t have some sort of existential crisis upon hearing that bit of news?
As somebody who judged Take This Waltz to be not altogether awful and perhaps at best a split decision—with the Leonard Cohen-scored money-shot sequence being the aesthetic equivalent of a standing eight-count for both filmmaker and her audience—I’m most intrigued by how Stories We Tell serves to vindicate Polley’s claims about the earlier film. If Michelle Williams’ fragile, impulsive character seemed a case of authorial self-projection, I’m now convinced that she’s at least a pale shade of Polley’s mother Diane, who, as we learn in Stories We Tell, also fled an early, unhappy marriage (which, unlike the one in the film, yielded two children). She then settled down with actor Michael Polley, easily seduced by his roughneck stage persona, and they had two more kids before settling into a stagnant co-habitation. (Recall the dark punch line of Take This Waltz, where the mad dash for total fulfillment leads into another cozy dead end.)
The first half of Stories We Tell is a sort of séance in which Diane, who died at a young age, is reanimated through the words of her husband, children, and friends. The picture that emerges is of a vivacious, beautiful, and surpassingly sad woman who loved her family fiercely but restlessly, as if she might fly away at any moment. It’s the fallout of that restlessness that gives Stories We Tell its big twist and its true hook: Diane’s death from cancer when Sarah was 11 didn’t quell the clan’s shared but only half-whispered doubts that she’d conceived her youngest daughter with someone other than Michael. Sarah’s subsequent adolescent inquiries yielded a revelation to that precise effect, although not the one that some had anticipated.
What’s important in considering Stories We Tell is not to tally up the turns of the story, which are numerous and compelling enough both on paper and onscreen (and are duly inventoried in just about in any other review), but rather the way that Polley chooses to present them: as a thick, interlaced tapestry. There are intimately shot interviews, eloquently scripted and delivered voiceovers (one of which is written and delivered by Polley père in his plummy stage actor’s voice), authentically degraded old home movies, and also elaborately degraded fake old home movies featuring well-cast actors as the younger versions of the major players.
Editor Michael Munn does excellent work lining all these ducks up into a row (whereas Take This Waltz was much more laxly cut together, as if its director didn’t want to lose a single moment). The technique is impeccable, but the movie is enervating—not entirely, but enough that its good points become obscured. In his productively against-the-grain review for The Globe and Mail, Rick Groen suggested that there was a “smug patina of self-congratulation” overlaid on Stories We Tell. I would argue that it’s less a case that the film has a slightly tarnished exterior than that it’s a rusty old vehicle masquerading as a new, tricked-out model. Polley’s decision to operate the documentary machine with the hood so conspicuously popped is not in and of itself inappropriate, but there are cues that this is more of a victory lap than an exploration. “It’s an interrogation process,” says Polley to a sibling who asks (understandably) about why the family laundry is being aired in a documentary. The implication in Polley’s choice of wording is that the form itself is going to break under all of the pressure.
On the contrary, Stories We Tell is almost perfectly structured: for all the assumedly volatile emotions on display, there’s nothing messy about it at all. This carefully wrought economy of effects would be more impressive if it wasn’t so clearly straining to be just that, or if Polley didn’t so assiduously annotate her accomplishments in real time. Leaving aside the half-dozen instances where one of the subjects comments on just how remarkable the stories they’re telling are—sound bites that Polley might easily have left on the cutting-room floor—the film’s tactics smack of self-regard. For instance: a montage revealing which of the home-movie flashbacks to Diane’s past and fateful affair with a Montréal-based film producer were faked is placed about three-quarters of the way through the proceedings. It’s too early to be a truly climactic gotcha moment (that would be gauche), but late enough that it feels like point-scoring: it lets us know that we’ve been punked.
The pointedly blink-and-miss-it presentation of this information feels like grandstanding. And the reality-blurring technique might have been even more provocative if the director hadn’t called attention to it at all. As it is, the emphasis is not on how easily we accept the visual codes of documentary filmmaking, but rather how skilfully they’ve been manipulated. Similarly, the decision to give one of the film’s most important participants a platform to call the whole enterprise into question serves a deceptively dualistic purpose. Her father chides Polley that her choral, he-said/she-said structure might detract from rather than enhance the value of the truths being unearthed, and the fact that she doesn’t cut away could be taken as a gesture of humility in the face of lucid criticism. Except that the larger implication is that by leaving it in, Polley proves herself to be a humble, receptive artist, and the proverbial bigger person. Duly satisfied by this carefully engineered episode, we’re supposed to ignore or at least accept the fact that the film keeps doing the very thing the interviewee was so persuasively dubious about in the first place.
There are things here that are moving, like the way that Polley frames her heightened mutual infatuation with her biological father as a replay of sorts of his long-ago clandestine romance with her mother. Polley compassionately depicts the specificity of this déjà vu sensation for one of the parties while retaining a fine perspective on her own behaviour. Because she so clearly sees how her own sudden and urgent daughterly attachment to a man she’d just met was an unconscious act of imaginative self-projection, we see it too. The operative word here is most definitely “see,” because, quite rarely for this extremely verbose movie, it’s not something that we’re also told.
Polley’s need to explicate so much of what she’s doing while she’s doing it may come from a very honest place. It may be a way of convincing herself, along with her audience, that the endeavour has been worth the effort. And when she says in interviews—or in an epic-length blog post on the NFB’s website—that making Stories We Tell was a truly arduous process, I’m as inclined to believe her as I was about Take This Waltz, without losing sight of the fact that someone who’s been doing interviews since she was a child star is uniquely equipped to help spin the reception of her work. But there are limits to control, and Stories We Tell is finally a film that, for all its careful integration of disparate elements, feels at cross-purposes with itself. It’s hard to practice sleight-of-hand when you also insist on giving yourself a thumb’s up.
Slant Magazine [Nick McCarthy]
Klymkiw Film Corner [Greg Klymkiw]
Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell, reviewed. - Slate Magazine Dana Stevens
Pick of the week: Sarah Polley's family secrets - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir
Review: Sarah Polleys Stories We Tell emerges as an early ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny
[Review] Stories We Tell - The Film Stage Danny King
'Stories We Tell': Sarah Polley Ponders Movies and ... - PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Sarah Polley Gets to Know All the Women Her ... - Village Voice Stephanie Zacharek
Stories We Tell: A post by Sarah Polley Sarah Polley from The National Film Board Blog, August 29, 2012
Movie review: 'Stories We Tell' uncovers family secrets and surprises Al Alexander from The Norwich Bulletin
Up close and personal: Sarah Polley's 'Stories We Tell' explores her ... Maria Garcia from Film Journal
Stories
We Tell and stories we don't JR
Jones from The Reader
Paste Magazine [Annlee Ellingson]
Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell: Secrets and Lies - Entertainment - Time Mary Corliss
The House Next Door [Gabrielle Lipton]
Combustible Celluloid Review - Stories We Tell (2013), Sarah ... Jeffrey M. Anderson
Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
FILM REVIEW: Stories We Tell - The Buzz - CBC Eli Glasner
Stories We Tell : The New Yorker Anthony Lane (capsule review)
Sarah Polley talks about the artistic freedom that led to her ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny interviews Polley from Hit Fix, April 14, 2013
Further Illuminating the 'Stories We Tell': An Interview ... - PopMatters Jesse Solís Mayén interviews the director from Pop Matters, May 15, 2013
Sarah Polley on laying her family history bare in the ... - The AV Club A.A. Dowd interviews the director, May 17, 2013
Stories We Tell: Venice Review - The Hollywood Reporter Neil Young
'Stories We Tell' movie review - Washington Post Ann Hornaday
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Bob Ignizio]
'Stories We Tell' review: Filmmaker's candid look at ... - Pioneer Press Chris Hewitt
Movie review: 'Stories We Tell' - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
Los Angeles : Stories We Tell - LA Weekly Stephanie Zacharek
RogerEbert.com [Sheila O'Malley]
Stories We Tell - Movies - The New York Times Family Opens Its Diary, With Mother as Subject, by Manohla Dargis
A Messy Look at the Family Mystery Mary Jo Murphy from The New York Times
Polonsky, Abraham
FORCE OF EVIL A 97
Whatever
he tries to do is wrong. Because it has to be wrong. Because the situation is
such that whatever you do is wrong. All films about crime are about capitalism,
because capitalism is about crime. I mean, quote-unquote, morally speaking. At
least that's what I used to think. Now I'm convinced.
—Abraham Polonsky, from Red
Hollywood (1996)
One of the neglected gems of the 1940’s and a unique experience
in American film history, described as “one of the fiercest dissections of
laissez faire capitalism ever to come out of Hollywood” by Nicholas Christopher
in his book Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City,
this is a
brilliant Black and White film noir with John Garfield at his best as an
attorney who works for a mobster and finds himself, and his brother (Thomas
Gomez), caught in a numbers racket scheme.
When one points to cynicism, this may be what they had in mind, as this
film is all about attitude, trying to get over in a foolproof way of beating
the system. Screw the other guy, as in
the Wall Street jungle, it’s all about self preservation. Very few films compare to Bogart and Bacall,
with Out of the
Past (1947) being one of them, and this is another. Particularly notable for its unusual, highly
stylized and poetic dialogue, where one can almost hear the voice of Bogie
reading them, with a standout voiceover that compares with the best, becoming
one of the more radical inventions of 1940’s cinema. Having written the intense screenplay for
Garfield in Body
and Soul (1947), a boxer who defies the mob and refuses to throw a fight, seen as a
victim of a ruthless capitalistic system where the fix is in, the film is as
much Polonsky’s as director Robert Rossen’s, where Polonsky allegedly prevented
the director from altering the finale. FORCE
OF EVIL is Polonsky’s sole example of his directing brilliance before he was
blacklisted and could only work as an uncredited screenwriter for both films
and television over the next twenty years.
Garfield suffered a worse fate, having grown up in poverty in the streets of New York during the
Depression, where he became associated with gritty, hard-nosed, and
working-class characters, and while his wife was a communist, there’s no
indication Garfield was ever a member, nonetheless the House Un-American
Activities Committee hounded Garfield to his death, as after his original
testimony, he learned they were reviewing his testimony for possible perjury
charges, where he died at the age of 39 of a heart attack, allegedly aggravated
by the stress of the blacklisting. Both
Polonsky and Garfield were blacklisted as much for the tone of their films as
their politics, where Polonsky’s heroes are cocky, self-assured loners who are
outside the mainstream of society, the kind of guys that break the rules in
order to get ahead, often disregarding the interests of others. These were not the cardboard cut out
caricatures of morally righteous men that dominated
Released as a B-movie, adapted from Ira Wolfert’s 1943 novel Tucker’s
People, this is an underworld
thriller completely ignored in its time, while it’s now seen as a cult classic,
where The Hollywood Reporter
complained that the direction was “more concerned with plugging the verbose
dialogue than in achieving action and dramatic values,” while modern critics
now praise the film for exactly those same qualities. An outgrowth of the Group Theatre collective of the 1930’s
where its New York City members agonized over whether film work in Hollywood
was tantamount to selling out, the work was a major influence on director
Martin Scorsese who called the film a seminal influence on his own gangster
dramas Mean
Streets (1973) and Goodfellas
(1990), claiming nobody played guilt better than Garfield, where Garfield’s
conflicted anti-hero brought a cynical edge to the picture. Something of a morality play, Garfield plays Joe
Morse, a selfish, Wall Street lawyer who grew up on the streets of New York and
whose sole client is mobster Ben Tucker (Roy Roberts) who controls the numbers
racket, a man with an office so high that it’s practically “in the clouds” overlooking
Wall Street, while his brother Leo (Gomez) is a small-time numbers
operator. Both become casualties of
their ultimate desire for success, where organized crime becomes the family
business, corrupted by the process while seeking the American dream. Looking behind the veneer of fair play, these
men align themselves with outlaws and criminals, trying to catch a break by
cheating and fixing the books, which is seen as the real American way in a
cutthroat capitalistic system. Polonsky was the son of a Jewish
pharmacist growing up in New York, graduating from City College and Columbia
Law School while developing a strong political conscience early in life when
nothing had a greater social impact than the Great Depression, “I came of age
in a country that had come to a standstill, with fifty million unemployed and
the banks closed.” Polonsky landed a
career writing for radio in the late 1930’s, including Orson Welles’ Mercury
Theatre of the Air, before deciding to work as the educational director and
newspaper editor of a regional CIO union north of New York City. Even after being hired as a screenwriter by
The film opens with the matter-of-fact offscreen voice of
Joe Morse speaking over an overhead shot of Wall Street where cars and
pedestrians are seen like ants scurrying below, “Tomorrow, July 4th, I intended
to make my first million dollars...temporarily, the enterprise was slighty
illegal, you see I was the lawyer for the numbers racket...The suckers bet on
any combination of three numbers. Twenty
million bettors a day in the United States, an annual income of over
$100,000,000...it seemed a shame so much good money to go to waste in other
people's pockets...” The mob controls
the gambling racket, and the fix is in for popular number “776” to come up a
winner on the 4th of July, a scheme that will force the small time
operators to go out of business when they’re unable to make all the winning
payouts, allowing Tucker to swoop in and gain a controlling monopoly. Morse has developed his own philosophy where
he believes the only “natural” human reaction is greed, not guilt, calling
anyone not included in their scam “suckers,” where he’s completely dismissive
of ordinary people. Morse’s conflict,
however, is he wants to save his brother Leo from going under, like the other
small-time operators expected to go belly up, so without revealing the actual
details of the scam, he tries to get him in on the swindle, but has little luck
convincing him, as Leo is a proud and seemingly morally upright business
operator who has to be reminded by Joe that he’s actually working for a
criminal enterprise, where characters keep forgetting that they’re not
actually honest men, that they're crooks.
The
duality of their relationship is built into the script, one feeling forced into
evil and the other talking himself into believing he’s a good man even though
both are complicit in the same corrupt system, where one wants millions while
the other is content to settle for thousands, making the point that
racketeering is not so different from other businesses in a capitalist society,
except it’s theft on a grander scale, exactly like The
Emperor Jones (1933), where a moral distinction is made between the nickel
and dime small-time theft and the real thieves that steal millions, major
players who always seem to come out on top smelling like roses. Drawn into the conflict is Leo’s secretary
Doris (Beatrice Pearson in her film debut, before eventually returning back to
a life on the stage), who overhears the brother’s argument in Leo’s office,
whose naïve innocence attracts Joe, who is otherwise having a sordid affair
with Tucker’s scene stealing femme fatale wife, Edna (Marie Windsor), where
there’s an interesting parallel between the women and the good/bad dichotomy of
the brothers. The role of
The driving force behind the film is
Adrian Martin from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
Like The Night of the
Hunter, Force of Evil is a unique event in the history of American
cinema. Its director, Abraham Polonsky,
made two subsequent movies much later and scripted others, but this is the sole
film in which the full extent of his promising brilliance shined, before being
snuffed out by the MaCarthy-era blacklist.
Force
of Evil sits uncomfortably within the film noir genre, despite the
presence of a star (John Garfield) associated with hard-boiled, streetwise
movies. It is above all a film of
poetry, captured by a “blank verse” voiceover and a highly stylized singsong
dialogue, which are among the most astounding and radical innovations of 1940’s
cinema, anticipating Malick’s Badlands (1973).
This is a story of amorality, guilt, and redemption,
dramatized through the near-Biblical device of betrayal between brothers. Polonsky breaks up the fatalistic gloom of
the piece (its final image of a descent to a corpse among garbage is chilling)
with a touching and very modern love story between Garfield and Beatrice
Pearson.
The film is stylized down to the smallest detail in line
with its poetic ambition: to liberate sound, image, and performance and have
all three interact in an intoxicating polyphony.
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Anti-mob and capitalism morality play, nicely written and directed by soon-to-be blacklisted Abraham Polonsky. Only homogenously poor acting and fairly regular mawkish slips of Polonsky's pen keep it from being a masterpiece. He does a great job of representing how capital regulates law "enforcement," and nearly as good blurring the lines of right and wrong as they must surely appear to his characters. He's also got an incongruously pubescent take on the interplay between carnal sin and morality. Maybe that's how everyone was before Marilyn Monroe. Anyway, great black and white shadows and light in New York when organized crime (or is that capitalism) really was a family business.
Time Out Tom Milne
One of the key films of the '40s. From a novel by Ira Wolfert (Tucker's People), it extracts a clinical analysis of the social, moral and physical evils attending on the numbers racket, centering this on a remarkably complex portrayal of the mutual guilt of two brothers caught at opposite ends of the same rat trap: one (Garfield) torn by the realisation that his corruption means the destruction of his brother, the other (Gomez) by his awareness that he was responsible for that corruption in the first place. If their conflict has the authentic ring of tragedy, it is partly because Polonsky uses the iconography of the underworld thriller so skilfully that his touches of allegory and symbolism - like Garfield's last bleak descent down a stairway to discover the reality of his personal hell - are natural outcroppings rather than artificial injections; and partly because the dialogue, terse and unpretentious but given an incantatory quality by its calculated hesitations and repetitions, has an unmistakable tang of gritty urban poetry that floods the entire film. Like no other film of the period, it stands as a testament, its mood - as Polonsky has confessed - being compounded on the one hand by fear of the McCarthy witch-hunts, and on the other by conflict in potential victims doubting the absolute justice of their cause.
Raging Bull Movie Reviews Mike Lorefice
Moralistic underworld tale that uses two guilty brothers caught up in the numbers racket to challenge the corrupt underpinnings inherent in capitalism. John Garfield is an ultra successful highly corrupt lawyer who is the mastermind in a scheme to break all the numbers banks. By having the favorite 776 hit on the 4th of July his syndicate can float only the banks they want, combining them into a corporation that will be legalized because the unpaid winners will demand federal safeguards ensure future winnings. Thomas Gomez is Garfield's older brother, a small time numbers banker in the slums who could have been a big lawyer if he had forsaken Garfield when their parents died and didn't have aspirations to being an honest businessman. The triumph of the film is in depicting how being a businessman has not only corrupted both, but wrenched the two brothers 180 degrees apart. Both are essentially good men who are loyal to one another, but Gomez hates Garfield largely because Garfield didn't use the opportunity he provided to be the legitimate lawyer Gomez always envisioned he would have been. Gomez can't bring himself to join Garfield, to scrap all his illusions of honesty and simply flaunt his shadiness in order to make millions rather than thousands. The noir aspect comes from a combination of Garfield refusing to forsake his brother and allow him to be bankrupt with the other small bankers and miscalculating his personal worth to the syndicate. Unfortunately, Polonsky's bleak lyrical directorial debut was practically the only film he'd direct, as his all pervasive leftist criticism of capitalism got him blacklisted (for 20 years) in 1951
CINE-FILE: Cine-List -
Cine-File.info Kyle A. Westphal
Too often today's affection for film noir comes off like a fashionable shortcut to cynicism or an alibi for spouting sexist cant. Although noir is often credited with bringing a downbeat post-war skepticism to Production Code-constrained Hollywood, very few noirs nurtured their musky weariness into a genuine critique of American society. FORCE OF EVIL is the real deal—the left-wing "business noir" that envisions the numbers racket as a representative species of predatory American capitalism. For a film that flopped upon its improbable Christmas 1948 release, FORCE OF EVIL became shockingly influential—suggesting the mafia-as-big-business synecdoche of MURDER BY CONTRACT and THE GODFATHER, laying out the first draft for the fraternal schism of ON THE WATERFRONT, and sparking the Lower East Side morality play showboating of so much early Scorsese. Allegedly fashioned from a blank verse script that Polonsky won the privilege of directing himself in the wake of the enormous box office success of BODY AND SOUL, FORCE OF EVIL applies an unexpectedly fierce Group Theatre intensity to its fastidiously melodramatic material. Strangely, its pretensions burnish its sui generis realism, which in turn supports its instinctively argumentative (and deeply Jewish) moral investigation. Even more than BODY AND SOUL and HE RAN ALL THE WAY, FORCE OF EVIL exploits the guilt-ridden magnetism of John Garfield, too long shoehorned in earlier pictures as a generic romantic lead. But even he pales next to Thomas Gomez, whose turn as Garfield's sweaty, fatally righteous older brother is simply the greatest supporting performance in American movies. Gomez's Leo Morse lurches forward with his whole anxious body, a highly technical performance that channels a consensual futility, a man unworthy of his own ideals. Marie Windsor's b-girl is largely decorative, but the penetrating plainness of Beatrice Pearson enlarges a thankless and underwritten role. The sharp, solid photography of George Barnes serves mainly to emphasize Polonsky's text; the fact that Polonsky subsequently complained that David Raksin's magnificent musical score crudely undermined his text demonstrates anew the fallibility of a great artist. Unfortunately, the blacklist soon silenced that artist, fallibility and all, and inadvertently elevated FORCE OF EVIL to a miracle production. We would not see its like again for a very long time. (1948, 78 min, Restored Archival 35mm Print)
Force
of Evil - TCM.com Felicia
Feaster
A relentlessly grim and mesmerizing film noir, Force of Evil
(1948) presents a world thoroughly steeped in corruption. Director Martin
Scorsese has called the film a seminal influence on his own gangster dramas (Mean
Streets, 1973, Goodfellas, 1990). Especially impacting Scorsese's
own movie antiheroes was Force of Evil's star John Garfield, as corrupt
lawyer Joe Morse, a man whose face is "a landscape of moral
conflict."
In a role that typified the harsh, cynical edge he could bring to his pictures,
Garfield is a powerful, selfish Wall Street lawyer who grew up on the streets
(like Garfield himself, a product of Bronx street gangs) but has risen to a
place of undeniable importance.
But that rise has been as underhanded as that of a classic Pre-Code gold digger
sleeping her way up the corporate ladder. Garfield's "office in the
clouds" was bought through allegiance to a criminal mob who use him as
their brains in a scheme to gain control of the city's smalltime illegal
gambling trade. Fixing the July 4th gambling racket so that the popular bet of
"776" comes up the winner, Joe and mob boss racketeer Ben Tucker (Roy
Roberts) plan to drive all of the small time numbers racketeers out of business
when they are unable to pay out the winning bets.
Director Abraham Polonsky makes a bitter comparison between the money-oriented
corruption practiced by lawyers like Joe with the more explicit graft of
mobsters like Tucker. Both refer to the men not included in their scam as
"suckers." And that casual dismissal of ordinary people is also seen
in the film's opening overhead shot of pedestrians whose ant-like scurrying
down on the street below only reaffirms Joe's God-like roost.
Joe's one attempt to reach out to the "little man" backfires and ends
up jeopardizing the entire criminal plan. Joe's older brother Leo (Thomas
Gomez), who¿ in ill health, operates a small time racket out of a miniscule
office, and Joe is determined to bring him into Tucker's scheme before his
office is wiped out with the rest of the small-change money-rackets. But Leo
will have nothing to do with the scheme. A line is drawn in the sand, with both
brothers engaged in a battle that soon has disastrous and bloody consequences.
Also drawn into the turmoil is Leo's pretty, naive secretary Doris Lowry
(Beatrice Pearson). Joe is drawn to her innocence despite being involved in a
sordid relationship with Tucker's wife Edna, played by one of the classic film
noir femme fatales - Marie Windsor (The Killing 1956, The Narrow
Margin, 1952), whose performance in the film was highly praised.
Force of Evil was Polonsky's first directing effort after a successful
screenwriting debut with the hit film Body and Soul (1947). Polonsky
wrote the script for Force of Evil, along with Ira Wolfert who also
wrote the novel, Tucker's People, that the film was based on. Their
first draft of the screenplay was deemed so harsh that the censorial Breen office
demanded a rewrite. Though it received mixed reviews upon its original release,
the movie has since become highly regarded; noted critic Andrew Sarris called
it, "one of the great films of the modern American cinema."
Polonsky had a remarkable vision both pictorial and thematic that he brought to
the screen in Force of Evil. The film's punchy, stylized visuals and
pessimistic tone have made it into a film noir classic. Unfortunately, Polonsky
was never allowed to flourish as a director.
It is unfortunate that Polonsky, a member of the Communist Party, fell out of
favor in the industry after he was deemed an uncooperative witness during the
HUAC trials in 1951 and blacklisted from working in Hollywood. Though Polonsky
went on to write TV scripts under an assumed name and eventually returned to
movie work in the late Sixties with such notable efforts as Tell Them Willie
Boy Is Here (1969) and Romance of a Horsethief (1971), the
blacklisting significantly jeopardized his career arc.
Garfield was also branded an "uncooperative" during the HUAC trials,
suspected of being a Communist or supportive of Communist causes along with
actors such as Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni, Sylvia Sidney and Melvyn Douglas.
Garfield's career was not destroyed as some were by the HUAC trials, but he did
turn to the stage as a momentary sabbatical from film work. Garfield was
initially discussed for the lead as Stanley Kowalski in Elia Kazan's Broadway
direction of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. But
Garfield's insistence on also starring in the film and his desire for a
short-term theater run led to a negotiating deadlock. The role eventually went
to a little-known actor named Marlon Brando.
Force of Evil • Senses of Cinema Mike Robins, July 22, 2005
Plumbing
the Depths of Capitalism: On Force of Evil - Bright Lights ... Imogen Sara Smith from Bright Lights Film Journal, July 31,
2008
Force of Evil Clute and Edwards from Noir of the Week, March 2, 2008
Westminster Wisdom Gracchi, January 23, 2007
Images Movie Journal Grant Tracey
Force of Evil (1949) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com John Garfield in FORCE OF EVIL, Quintessential Film Noir from 1948, by Jay Carr
Force of Evil (1949) - Notes - TCM.com
Jake Weird/Cinema also seen here: He Ran All The Way: The Life of John Garfield ("A ...
Abraham Polonsky - Director - Films as Director ... - Film Reference Rob Edelman
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Joseph Jon Lanthier]
DVD Savant - Blu-ray [Glenn Erickson]
DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] Blu-Ray
Blu-ray.com [Jeffrey Kauffman]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Film Notes From the CMA The Hollywood Screenwriter, by Dennis Toth
TCM's MovieMorlocks.com Richard Harland Smith
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide
Baltimore City Paper Bret McCabe
San Francisco Chronicle [Ruthe Stein]
The New York Times Bosley Crowther
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Ole Koefod]
Polsky,
Gabe
RED
ARMY A- 93
USA Russia (85 mi)
2014 Official
site
Hockey
players are not cowards!
This is about as much fun as you can have in the documentary format,
where it has the feel of the madly inspired Guy Maddin on a mission, whose
obsession with hockey, having been born and raised in Winnipeg, is nothing less
than an ecstatic lifelong passion.
What’s perhaps most surprising is the degree of poignancy registered by
a sports story. The brilliance of the
young director is not only the accumulation of such amazing archival material,
but framing the subject matter as the examination of a historical event as seen
through the eyes of a sports figure, where the transformation of an entire
nation was happening simultaneous to events happening in his own life, creating
an extraordinary look at how history can effect us all. Perhaps what’s most unique is the degree of
access into a period of Soviet history that is otherwise secretive and not
easily revealed, where the filmmaker’s background, born and raised in the
United States by Soviet immigrants might help explain the filmmaker’s inquisitive
drive to uncover the mysteries of his own past, where his curiosity was bent on
discovering how and why this Soviet hockey team of the 70’s and 80’s was so
good. Most are familiar with the Miracle
on Ice, when a group of amateur and collegiate kids from America, barely
together for a few months, played the hockey game of their lives and won the
gold medal at Lake Placid in the 1980 Olympic Games, beating one of the
greatest Soviet hockey teams of all time 4-3, gold medal winners in six of the
previous seven Olympics, an event so improbable that Sports Illustrated called it the Top Sports Moment of the 20th
Century. Few, however, have taken an
insightful look at just how good that Soviet team was that dominated the sport
of hockey during the Cold War, where successful sports teams and players, much
like the Space
Race, were used as propaganda tools to demonstrate supposed ideological
superiority. Traditionally the Soviets
didn’t even have a hockey team, as historically they played Bandy, an outdoor
winter game that resembles field hockey on ice.
Since that game was never recognized at the Olympics (hockey was
introduced in 1920), after World War II, the Red Army assigned
Anatoli
Tarasov to found a Moscow hockey club at the army sport’s club, CSKA
Moscow, which represented the Red Army, while he served as the original coach
of the Soviet national team for thirty
years beginning in 1946, becoming the “father of Russian hockey,” developing a
passion for the game, equally influenced by the mental dominance of chess
masters and the athletic grace of ballet, where the Soviet style of hockey has
an emphasis on skating skills, offense and passing, an amazingly creative and
improvisational style where they move fluidly on the ice, working collectively
as a team, turning the game into an art form.
While Tarasov was the dynamic builder of the team which started to have
some success in the 50’s, winning their first World Championship in 1954 and
first Olympic gold in 1956, he was beloved by his players, seen as a paternal
father figure, as he embraced each of them as young men full of potential,
“You’ll become great hockey players…and great men,” where his job was to
unleash that potential with inspired play on the ice. One of his young protégé’s, Vyacheslav
“Slava” Fetisov, was only 12-years old when he was chosen for the Dynamo youth
hockey team, the oldest sports and physical training society of the Soviet
Union. Born in Moscow, he is one of the
most decorated* hockey players that ever lived, the greatest
defenseman the Soviets ever produced, where the list of his accolades amusingly
overflow off the screen, like medals on the chest of a heavily decorated army
officer. To our amazement, Fetisov opens
up like he’s never done before, literally befriending this young American
director with a heavy mix of deadpan humor and Russian sarcasm, but also
providing enlightening and sometimes eye-opening information about his storied
life, where today his name is literally synonymous with hockey. When he is introduced in front of the camera
today at age 55 in a face-to-face interview with the director, he waves the
camera away, as he’s busy taking a call on his cellphone, claiming it’s
business, joking that Americans don’t know the meaning of work. While his good-natured wit is appreciated
today, it was not always the case, even in his home country, where he was a kid
that grew up only blocks away from the rink, always the first to arrive, the
last to leave, where so long as he was playing hockey he was happy. As we are introduced to several former
players, journalists, sports commentators, and even a retired KGB officer sitting in
front of an immense statue of Lenin, they are each initially identified in the
Russian language of Cyrillic and then in English, where there’s a constant
interplay between Soviet and American, as the two nations were so much at odds
during the Cold War. Feeling personally
connected to both worlds, Polsky, with a great deal of visual style, creates an
often funny and always enjoyable film that is quick, witty, and fast moving,
almost always with lively Russian music playing in the background, where
there’s a joyous and festive spirit as we take a spin through Fetisov’s
childhood, filled with strange and unusual training techniques, all designed to
build teamwork and bring players closer together, to have each other’s backs,
to look after one other, where players on the same lines stayed together
off-ice as well as on-ice, becoming best friends in life, where the intensity
of the experience is also connected to winning and being proud to represent
your country.
Interweaving plenty of archival footage from the 70’s and 80’s along
with amusing and insightful contemporary interviews, the Soviets were extremely
successful in the sport, winning gold in 7 out of 9 Olympic Games (Olympic
record 62–6–2), winning the World Championships 19 times, where the players
were honored with flowers and medal ceremonies each time they returned home to
Moscow and treated like national heroes.
Even though they eventually lost the series, the Soviets surprised the
world in the 1972 Summit Series, finally going face-to-face
with the best NHL Canadian players and initially making it look easy, as the
Canadian goalies had never seen the kind of choreographed movement on the ice
before, where the puck could come from all directions. To slow them down, the Canadians began
engaging in a more physical style of North American play, resulting in disputes
over officiating, roughhouse tactics and finally dirty play, where Philadelphia
Flyer center Bobby Clarke deliberately injured the star Soviet
forward, Valeri Kharlamov, intentionally slashing his
skates, fracturing a bone in his ankle, where the Soviets were winning the
series 3–1–1 when the injury occurred, figuring prominently in the Canadians
winning the last 3 games. Kharlamov was
the most popular Soviet player at the time and his injury in front of a Moscow
crowd had a chilling effect, only adding to the already existing East-West
drama. The Soviets returned to form for
the 1974 Summit Series and won 4 games to one, where
the Canadians wouldn’t win another head to head competition until 1989. The interest generated by the international
stage led to the next generation of Soviets, headed by new team captain Slava
Fetisov and the Russian Five who helped win three consecutive World
Junior Championships from 1976—78 as well as the 1981
Canada Cup, despite being led by Canadian phenom Wayne Gretzky, arguably the
greatest player in history. Despite the
improbable loss to the Americans in the 1980 Olympics, the 70’s and 80’s were
the period of greatest Soviet domination, where the International Ice Hockey Federation
conducted a poll in 2008 asking a group of 56 experts from 16 countries to vote
on the greatest team of the century, IIHF Centennial All-Star Team, which
included four Soviet players on a team of six, with Fetisov and Gretzky the two
leading vote getters at one and two respectively, including two Soviet
forwards, Valeri Kharlamov and Sergei Makarov, legendary Soviet goalie
Vladislav Tretiak, and Swedish defensiveman Börje
Salming.
Despite the honors, there was trouble brewing behind the scenes, where
in the late 70’s Tarasov was suddenly replaced by a more dictatorial style of
coach beholden to the KGB,
Viktor Tikhonov, as the
Soviet leadership feared defections, so they needed him to keep a close eye on
all the players. Housed in a prisonlike
barracks 11 months out of the year, Tikhonov trained them relentlessly,
refusing to let one player leave even for the impending death of his father,
where according to Fetisov, the players won despite their coach, as they
unanimously hated his approach, calling him an accountant due to the fastidious
notes he was always taking, believing he suffocated their creative style and
instead instituted a strict regimen and the threat of discipline, instilling
fear instead of any love for the game.
Fetisov holds Tikhonov responsible for the Soviet loss to the Americans
in the Miracle on Ice, claiming he favored the Moscow
Dynamo players, who represented the KGB over the more skilled Russian
Five CSKA Moscow players who represented the Red Army, which explains why
he pulled the Soviet’s greatest goalie, Vladislav
Tretiak, after the first period, pulling him for Moscow Dynamo goalie
Vladimir Myshkin, suggesting it was the KGB players that allowed
three of the four American goals. But
rather than being sent to some Siberian gulag after the loss, as people in the
West might think, Tikhonov was actually honored and rewarded. One of the curious side effects of the
international exposure of the Soviet skill players was the interest by the NHL,
as they wanted these players in the North American league, tempting them with
big money contracts, but the Russian government wouldn’t let them go, though
they initially tempted Fetisov with a contract similar to basketball player Yao
Ming from Communist China, where they earn a huge million dollar contract, but
50% or more, depending on the terms, belongs to the government. Fetisov, on the other hand, combining
business and political sense, insisted on receiving every penny he earned. So he stayed put.
Drafted by the New Jersey Devils, Fetisov was initially promised by
Tikhonov that he would be released to play in the NHL if they won another gold
medal at the 1988 Olympics, which they did, but he refused to let him leave the
country, even after a visit to Moscow, contract in hand, from the Devil’s
President and General Manager Lou Lamoriello, who was even prepared to help him
defect, if necessary, but Fetisov was a proud Russian that refused to leave
under those conditions, never able to return home. Fetisov’s wife Lada recounts a story of what
happened in Kiev after Fetisov publicly refused to play any more for Tikhonov,
where he was arrested, handcuffed to a car battery and beaten until 4 am, with
the police eventually calling Tikhonov who informed them they could lock him up
or do whatever they wanted, but he was not allowed to leave the country. Finally he was called into the office of the
Minister of Defense Dmitry Yazov, second only to the Soviet President
(ironically dismissed from his post after a failed 1991 coup d'état attempt), who
screamed and cussed him out for wanting to play for “the enemy,” but Fetisov
instead offered to resign his position in the Red Army, where in 1989 he became
the first Soviet citizen granted a work visa that allowed him to play hockey in
the west, paving the way for literally thousands that followed. At age 31, he began his second career in the
NHL, which was hardly an easy transition, as he was forced to endure
red-baiting hostility when the American fans initially hated him for not becoming
an instant star and winner for their team, where he had difficulty adjusting to
a more individualistic playing style. He
played nine seasons in the NHL, the final three in Detroit where he reunited
with yet another Russian Five to win two Stanley Cups in 1997 and 1998,
once again retiring a champion.
According to the director, “Soviets play hockey the way Brazilians play
soccer. It’s improvisational, it’s
fluid, it’s beautiful. It’s extremely
difficult, but looks effortless.”
Legendary Hall of Fame Detroit Coach Scotty
Bowman was so impressed by their play at the time that he acknowledged, “I
don’t know who taught you to play this way, but whatever you do, don’t change a
thing.” Transforming his life where he
went from a national hero to a political enemy, Slava Fetisov eventually
returned home to Moscow a Stanley Cup champion, chosen by Putin to be the
Minister of Sport for Russia from 2002 to 2008, where his story reads like
something out of a Tom Clancy novel.
*Vyacheslav “Slava” Fetisov Notable Achievements and
Awards:
•
Member of the Organizing Committee for 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.
•
Hockey Hall of Fame Inductee
•
IIHF Hall of Fame
•
USSR Hall of Fame
•
14 Soviet Hockey Championships
•
9 Time Soviet League All-Star
•
9-time IIHF All-Star
•
5-time IIHF best defenseman
•
7 Hockey World Championship Gold Medals
•
1 World Championship Silver
•
2 Olympic Gold Medals
•
1 Olympic Silver Medal
•
1 Canada Cup Championship
•
3 World Junior Championships
•
2 World Championship Bronze Medals
•
2 Time CCCP Player of the Year
•
2-time Soviet MVP
•
9 Years Soviet National Team Captain
•
3 Golden Stick Awards
•
Order of the Red Banner of Labour
•
Soviet Order of Honor
•
Soviet Order of Friendship
•
Silver Olympic Order
•
Order of Service to the Fatherland 4th Class
•
Order of Service to the Fatherland 3rd Class
•
2 Orders of the Badge of Honor
•
IIHF International Centennial All-Star
•
Honored Master of Sports
•
UNESCO Champion for Sport
•
Russian Diamond Award
•
Order of Lenin Award
•
2-time Stanley Cup Champion as a player
•
3-time Stanley Cup Finalist as a player
•
Stanley Cup champion as an assistant coach
•
2-time NHL all-star
•
Asteroid 8806 was renamed “Fetisov”
Sports Illustrated Nicole Conlan
Viacheslav Fetisov has two Stanley Cup, two Olympic gold medals, the Order of Lenin, and an asteroid under his belt, and now he can add a movie in the estimable Cannes Film Festival to his long list of accomplishments. Red Army is a documentary about the sociopolitical changes underwent by the Soviet Union as it turned back into Russia filtered through the adventures of the national hockey team. The film premiered out of competition at Cannes this week, out of competition.
The film's director, Gary Polsky, said of the film's inspiration:
“You, know I preferred [the Russians' unique] style of play and I think it really evolved sport and hockey to another level,” said the director in an interview here last week. “That really piqued my interest about the Soviet Union and my roots, through hockey, and I wanted to explore why, how they got so good and what was going on over there.”
Fetisov was one of the most important figures in ending the restrictions prohibiting Soviet players from playing in the NHL, and the film focuses largely on his transition from the USSR to American soil. The transition wasn't easy for the Russian player, who spoke no English. He was viewed as a traitor in Russia and unwelcome in American locker rooms, but he ultimately bloomed into a captain who would lead the Detroit Red Wings to two Stanley Cups.
A quick and personal
history of Russian hockey and hockey players from the Cold War through Glasnost
and beyond
Anyone interested in the nexus of sports and politics during a key period of
the modern era must want to watch Ukrainian-American Yale hockey player and
filmmaker Gabe Polsky's Red Army. But bear in mind: archival footage and
hockey reels, tight editing, and humor notwithstanding, this is a standard
talking-head documentary.
The story is interesting and the principal talking head is an impressive guy.
At 56 Viacheslav "Slava" Fetisov, who takes over the film in the
first few minutes, has led a richer life than most. For thirteen years 1976–89)
he played for the Red Army Russian national ice hockey team, the best of the
best. Then he quit the team because of conflicts with the coaching, and played
in the US with the NHL (1989–98), pioneering in this sports immigration process
that had been strictly forbidden under Soviet rule. Former teammates came to
the NHL, which enabled him for a while to play again as part of legendary
Russian Five, one of the most powerful units in hockey history, including
himself, high-scoring right-winger Sergei Makarov, left-winger Vladimir Krutov
(AKA "the Tank”), tough and wiry center Igor Larionov (“the Professor”)
and fellow defenseman and best friend Alexei Kasatonov. He helped win two
Stanley Cups in '97 and '98. Then he coached for four years (1998-2002) --
leading his American teams to great successes. In 2002 he returned to Russia
with his wife, going on on to coach the Russian national team in the totally
different post-Soviet world, under Putin serving (till 2008) as the Russian
Minister of Sport.
The villain of the piece is coach Viktor Tikhonov, a cruel task-master who
hardly treated his players as humans, insisting on having them live apart from
family eleven months a year and forbidding Fetisof from visiting his father on
his deathbed. Tikhonov was brought in after the notorious defeat of the Russian
national team by a group of relatively green US college players in the Winter
Olympics at Lake Placid in 1980. The benevolent, and more complex, spirit of
the film is legendary coach Anatoly Tarasov, who introduced metaphors from
chess and ballet into play, along with imaginative and fun training methods
that were at the same time rigorous and grounded in socialist concepts of
placing teamwork over individualism. The great players were like brothers and
somehow fundamentally the same.
A shortcoming of this fast-moving film is that despite describing the unique
features of classic Russian hockey style -- intricate, complicated, inventive,
balletic, relying a lot on passing back and forth -- this is never
satisfactorily contrasted with American (or European) style, not in a manner
than anyone not thoroughly familiar with the game would perceive. A major
strength and a key to its warmth and life is the friendly, humorous, almost
father-son relationship between young Polsky and big shot Fetisov -- whose
gently Russian-accented but articulate English dominates the film and who tends
to use talking on his cell phone as an excuse when Polsky asks him an
uncomfortable question. Fetisov never defected, and he represents Russia,
despite his years in the US. He is critical of the chilly Tikhonov, but never
of the Russian system. He has been involved recently in managing the many
hirings of Russian hockey players abroad, but seems even more proud of having
supervised establishment of a wide infrastructure of hockey stadiums throughout
Russian during his Sports Minister tenure. In some ways he is clearly nostalgic
about a Soviet system that pointed him, as an anointed national athlete from
age 16, toward an illustrious career. Back in the day, after that freak 1980
defeat, his team smashed Gretsky and his Canadian team.
The Tale Of The Hockey Players For Whom 1980 Was No ... Andrew Lapin from NPR
Gabe Polsky's richly entertaining documentary Red Army asks American sports and movie fans to do the hardest thing they may ever do: root for that eternal repository of villainy, the Russians. The film follows the Soviet Union's superhuman ice hockey squad, the winningest team in the sport's history and the envy of the world throughout the 1980s. Along the way, Polsky, himself the son of Russian immigrants and a former varsity hockey player at Yale, builds a case for the humanity of the athletes, national heroes instilled with patriotism who still had their passports confiscated by the Soviet authorities when they played overseas. With dark humor and an epic sweep characteristic of Executive Producer Werner Herzog, Red Army sides not with nations or ideologies but with the transcendent powers of sport.
As good a jumping-off point as any for this thesis is the "Miracle on Ice": the U.S. hockey team's legendary upset over the U.S.S.R. at the Lake Placid 1980 Olympics. What was a famous, symbolic victory for Americans — one of the greatest wins in sports history, later Disneyfied in the 2004 film Miracle — becomes in Red Army's telling a humiliating personal defeat. The Soviet players weren't out for capitalist blood so much as the simple opportunity to do right by their country on the world stage, to show off their influential crisscrossing, balletic playing style.
Many sequences are exemplars of sharp, funny documentary filmmaking. During the "Miracle," Polsky cuts between footage of the game and his interviewees' present-day silent faces to show how the loss shamed and, later, galvanized the team into a nearly decade-long global dominance. Editors Eli B. Despres and Kurt Engfehr get great mileage from both archival and present-day footage (players crawling across the ice on their stomachs during training; a former KGB agent chatting on a park bench as his young granddaughter fidgets around him). They reveal the complicated nature of patriotism, and the absurdity in treating sports as a chest-thumping global battle of wills.
Though Polsky spends time with several of the country's top skaters, the film's de facto hero is Hall of Famer defenseman Viacheslav "Slava" Fetisov, who frequently interrupts his interview sessions to take calls on his cellphone. Fetisov left his team, weathered threats on his family, and stared down the Soviet minister of defense to leave his country and play in the NHL. Polsky demonstrates an apt gift for weaving the personal narrative with the political, showing how Festiov valued his relationships with his teammates, family and country in equal measure.
As Fetisov and his teammates journey in the public eye from hometown heroes to capitalist pigs and back again, the film uses hockey as an allegory for communism: The ambitions of the individuals and the lure of freedom (well, free agency) ultimately overpowered their collective usefulness to the Soviet Union. The story of Soviet coach Viktor Tikhonov drives the metaphor home even further: After replacing beloved hockey visionary Anatoli Tarasov, the KGB appointee exerted strict control over his players, forcing the team to spend 11 months of the year at training camp and, according to Fetisov, abusing them mercilessly and teasing them with false promises of a future in the NHL. That someone with such apparent disregard for his players could churn such legendary success out of them is presented by Polsky not just as a story about sports but as a provocative question about communist leadership.
Red Army moves at the frantic pace of a Russian hockey game: Setbacks can suddenly slip into opportunity, and vice versa. If anything, at only 76 minutes, the film is too brisk; Polsky could have done more with his brief epilogue, which sees several top stars return to a very different Russia following their own retirement from the game. Fetisov's tenure as Vladimir Putin's minister of sport is a strange attempt at a happy ending given the country's current climate. A more thought-provoking finish comes earlier, recounting how none of the individual Russian players found success in America until they reunited in the mid-'90s as the Detroit Red Wings starting line. The Russian Five brought home back-to-back Stanley Cups, cheered on by Detroit fans sporting pins reading "Believe" in Russian. Another miracle, or sports as usual?
"Red Army documentary a compelling and riveting film" Ken Campbell from The Hockey News, September 2, 2014
In the final minutes of Red Army, director Gabe Polsky pulls out some footage of Alex Ovechkin’s first season in the NHL. As part of a publicity stunt, Ovechkin is firing pucks at Russian dolls filled with Russian dressing. As the dolls explode and Ovechkin celebrates with glee, former Soviet hockey legend Slava Fetisov opines, “We lost something. We lost our pride. We lost our soul.”
Some will portray Red Army, which makes its North American debut at the Toronto International Film Festival next week and will hit theatres in February, as a clash of cultures. Some will take note of how Russia is back to its adversarial ways in Ukraine and compare it to the Cold War version, one that saw hockey and sports as an extension of the Communist propaganda machine and its best weapon in proving to the world that the ideals of socialism worked.
But more than anything, Red Army is so compelling because it is about the people, the most central character being Fetisov, and how complicated the relationship between hockey and politics is in that country. On one hand, Fetisov speaks of how intrusive and dictatorial the hockey system was under Viktor Tikhonov, then speaks about his country losing its soul when players such as Ovechkin are free to come to North America and chase millions of dollars. (It’s interesting that Ovechkin footage is displayed during Fetisov’s musings about the loss of Russian pride. There might not be an NHL player who is as loyal to and passionate about his country as Ovechkin, who answers the call of duty whenever it is made. In fact, some NHL fans complain Ovechkin cares more about Russia than he does the Washington Capitals.)
It all makes for an incredibly riveting 85 minutes of history and hockey. Seen primarily through the eyes of Fetisov, the greatest defenseman Russia has ever produced and one of the greatest of all-time, Polsky’s film is a study of the progression of the Soviet-Russian game from the 1950s through its deterioration in the 1990s to today. It has incredible footage of early hockey players going through drills under coaching legend Anatoli Tarasov, executing somersaults on the ice in full equipment with Tarasov on his knees in the background saying, “You’ll become great hockey players. And great men.” (The biggest strength of the film is the archival footage, which comes courtesy of Paul Patskou.)
There is film of Tarasov moving chess pawns on a hockey rink diagram – a subtle glimpse of how the players would feel playing later for the dictatorial Tikhonov – and dancing with members of the Bolshoi Ballet. A Red Army recruit from the age of eight, Fetisov talks about his career and the bond he shared with the other members of the Russian Five – defense partner Alexei Kasatonov and forwards Sergei Makarov, Igor Larionov and Vladimir Krutov. One of the most gripping parts of the film comes when Polsky goes through footage of the game between USA and Russia at the 1980 Olympics. At times, Fetisov looks away as though he’s living the nightmare all over again. Other times he appears concerned and despondent. And by the end he has tears in his eyes.
Most of all, the film provides an illustration of the steely resolve the players had, particularly the ones who had to play for Tikhonov. (The former coach, who declined to be interviewed for the film, easily comes off as the biggest villain of the story. Fetisov recounts a time when Andrei Khomoutov was not allowed to leave the compound to visit his dying father. Fetisov’s wife tells of a time her husband, on the verge of playing in the NHL and growing more frustrated with being stonewalled, was captured by police in Kiev, handcuffed to a car battery and beaten until 4 a.m. According to Fetisov’s wife, Tikhonov then showed up and told police to do whatever they wanted, including throwing him in prison, but do not allow him to leave the country.)
Fetisov, it should be remembered, never defected. But he would also not go to the NHL with the government’s blessing if it meant he had to surrender any of his salary to the Soviet Union. Although Fetisov and Larionov, in particular, enjoyed wonderful NHL careers, the feeling is that once the players were separated, they were never the sum of their parts. That is, of course, until Detroit Red Wings coach Scotty Bowman formed his own version of the Russian Five with Fetisov and Larionov joined by Vladimir Konstantinov on defense and Sergei Fedorov and Slava Kozlov at forward.
All in all, Red Army is well worth the time spent. Polsky, the son of Russian immigrants who played collegiate hockey at Yale, has made a movie raw with emotion and truth that totally hits the mark.
Film Review: Red Army - Film Journal International Doris Toumarkine
Film Corner, The [Greg Klymkiw] also seen here: Electric Sheep [Greg Klymkiw]
Slant Magazine [Kenji Fujishima]
Cinema365 [Carlos deVillalvilla]
Nonfics [Christopher Campbell]
Review: Red Army tells the other side of Miracle's underdog ... David Ehrlich from The Onion A.V. Club
'Red Army' Review: Of Ice and Men, One of Them a Legend ... Joe Morgenstern from The Wall Street Journal
Stellar Doc Red Army Showcases the Height of Soviet Hockey Amy Nicholson from The Village Voice
Cannes 2014 Review: Soviet Hockey Movie RED ARMY ... Jason Gorber from Twitch
Movie Review: Red Army -- Vulture Bilge Ebiri
Red Army / The Dissolve Noel Murray
HitFix Article [Drew McWeeny] (ENG)
Red Army | Reviews | Screen - Screen International Lee Marshall
Film-Forward.com [Ted Metrakas]
Red Army :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste Tim Grierson
'Red Army' Review: In Soviet Russia, Hockey ... - TheWrap Inkoo Kang
“Red Army” delves into the mystique of Soviet hockey Bob Verdi from Blackhawk Blog
The MacGuffin [Adelaide Blair]
The Wall Street Journal Article [Megan Buerger] (ENG)
Time Magazine Article [Mary Corliss] (ENG)
Slava Fetisov: KGB is to blame for Miracle on Ice - USA Today Steve Schrader, January 22, 2015
Georgia Straight [Mike Usinger]
Spectrum Culture [David Harris]
Blake Williams Cinema Scope
Daily | NYFF 2014 | Gabe Polsky's RED ARMY | Keyframe ... David Hudson
Interview: Gabe Polsky On RED ARMY | TwitchFilm Jason Gorber interview from Twitch, January 29, 2015
Gabe Polsky interview Steve Erickson from Studio Daily, January 22, 2015
A conversation with Gabe Polsky, director of the new hockey ... Interview by Nicole Conlon from Sports Illustrated, September 8, 2014
The Hollywood Reporter Article [Stephen Dalton] (ENG)
Film Review: 'Red Army' | Variety Justin Chang
The Associated Press Article [Nicki Finlay] (ENG)
The Guardian Article [Henry Barnes] (ENG)
The Irish Times Article [Donald Clarke] (ENG)
Westender Vancouver [Thor Diakow]
The Associated Press Article [Nicki Finlay] (ENG)
'Red Army' movie review: Documentary on Soviet hockey team balances play and politics Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Pamela Zoslov]
The Detroit News Article [Ted Kulfan] (ENG)
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
Review: 'Red Army' a winning look at Soviet era's storied ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times
Red Army Movie Review & Film Summary (2015) | Roger ... Godfrey Cheshire
'Red Army,' the Rise and Fall of a Soviet Hockey Dynasty ... A.O. Scott
The New York Times Article [Manohla Dargis] (ENG)
Red Army (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Soviet Union national ice hockey team - Wikipedia, the free ...
Valeri Kharlamov - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Boris Mikhailov (ice hockey) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pölsler, Julian Roman
THE WALL (Die Wand) C+ 79
Germany Austria (108 mi) 2012 ‘Scope Official site [at]
Films often turn to literary sources, and to the extreme, like Chilean director Raúl Ruiz’s final film Night Across the Street (La noche de enfrente) (2012), the entire film becomes read passages from selected literary works, where the result is so literary that the experience is consumed with reading subtitles, where there’s so much narrated material that you’re literally reading a movie instead of watching it. While THE WALL (Die Wand) was originally filmed in German, Music Box Films, in their infinite wisdom, decided to convert the film entirely into English language, which alters the distinct mood and tone of the film, though the film is so literary the intent is likely to prevent viewers from otherwise reading a movie with subtitles. Instead, the entire film consists of spoken narration, words from a diary entry, where the monotonous drone of the narrator drifts through the entirety of the film, where occasionally one simply tunes out and stops listening. The excessive verbiage has a detached, experimental feel, as it’s obviously not for everyone, but it’s beautifully read and otherwise wordlessly acted by German actress Martina Gedeck, from THE LIVES OF OTHERS (2006), in what turns into a one-woman show on screen. Adapted from Austrian author Marlen Haushofer’s 1962 novel, the film is set in the Alpine forest region of the author’s birth 6 months after World War II ended, actually filmed in the Salzkammergut Mountains and the adjacent Dachstein Mountains of Austria, both part of the Northern Limestone Alps. The mountainous setting is enormously significant, balancing the surrounding natural beauty with the dark and dreary tone of the narration which has an end of the world, apocalyptic feel about it. Without explanation, unnamed protagonist Martina Gedek wakes up one morning only to discover the entire surrounding mountainside is encircled by an invisible wall, where she is left to figure out her fate alone in a rustic cabin setting which at least initially has plenty of stored provisions. Told in flashback, the ominous opening finds her essentially a castoff from the world after an extended period of seclusion and isolation, paying particular importance to sitting in her darkened cabin and writing her “report,” hoping others would somehow discover her literary and philosophical revelations as perhaps the last human thoughts on earth.
Initially, because of the date so close after the war, one might assume she’s been somehow stranded in a remote region with no way out, perhaps even a former prisoner, as her hair is cropped so short, distinctly different from the flowing hair we see in the flashbacks. Her tone and demeanor immediately suggest a sense of desperation, where writing in her report is the only way left to communicate the essence of what is human. There may even be the sense that she is the last human left in the world, but this is left unexplained and ambiguous. Once she realizes her prisoner status, it’s an interesting contrast to the natural abundance that surrounds her. But she leads an orderly existence, planting potatoes and wheat, working hard while keeping active and busy, where her character wanders through the mountainside in all seasons of the year with her dog Luchs, who becomes her only friend left in the world. Over time, she also collects a cow that wanders out of the forest and a cat, where the cow at least requires considerable care and effort to milk and feed, where just keeping it alive matches her own unique fate. Later she favors a white crow that frequently visits nearby, especially as this crow is also isolated in its existence, continually harassed and picked on by the other black crows, becoming shunned in much the same way as she feels herself. A rhythmic cycle of writing in her report is established throughout the film, which becomes the most essential part of her existence, in her view, so a great deal of importance is placed on the content. Reading so many lengthy passages, the film has the air of an introspective and contemplative work, but the pervading sense of doom and quiet resignation has an endlessly monotonous tone of futility about it, literally drenched in abject hopelessness and despair, where between read passages, the viewer sees a natural cycle of life blooming through the various seasons as she continuously roams the mountainsides.
Once the pattern of reading is established, it only repeats
itself throughout the film, becoming ever more predictable and routine,
lessening the suspense or dramatic impact, where after awhile the viewer may
actually stop listening, as despite the explorative intellectual quality, it
becomes endlessly tiresome, like waves lapping upon the shore, which initially
hold a hypnotic rapture, but eventually you need to move on. Just as she feels herself a prisoner, the
viewer is similarly held hostage by this continuously repeating cycle of
hearing the sound of her voice, which haunts the viewer throughout, often with
beffuddled amazement at her predicament.
Since her voice is elevated to such prominence, perhaps the last
remaining human voice on earth, hearing her speak in English feels off-putting
and downright peculiar, an artificially imposed lie, as she speaks German,
where it would be infinitely preferable to read the subtitled passages and hear
the sounds of her own voice, not some substitute. This same argument has been raised with
Miyazaki animated films, among the most beautiful ever created, where the dumbed
down American preference is to have everything translated into English,
rationalizing that this allows more time to watch the luscious
visualizations. But this essentially
eliminates the efforts made by the original actors who were the choice of the
director to convey what amounts to his closest vision of perfection. The Americanization of this original form is
an alteration from the director’s vision, a substitute version which changes
the tone and the director’s original intentions. A beautiful Japanese song, for instance,
which concludes SPIRITED AWAY (2001), remains untranslated in the English
version, so the inherent poetry is simply lost.
This artificial imposition is reminiscent of Ted Turner’s 1980’s
attempts to colorize Black and White films, a project that was eventually
scuttled due to an outcry from the film community. The Criterion Laserdisc of
Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]
Narration can be a great tool for filmmakers, but unless you're using it in a particularly clever or potent way, I always feel it should be a last resort. Surely filmmakers working in this visual medium should look for non-verbal ways to tell their story or express their protagonist's thoughts and feelings? All of which leads us to The Wall, a very promising film that's crippled by its appallingly misjudged use of the central character's interminable voiceover, which is a terrible pity as it hardly puts a foot wrong elsewhere. The film starts with an ingenious premise: an unidentified woman (Martina Gedeck) is spending a few days at a remote alpine cottage with friends, but when her companions fail to return from their trip into town her attempts to look for them are thwarted by an invisible wall that has somehow sprung up around this location, trapping her inside. She sees cars and people on the other side of this barrier but she is unable to reach out and communicate with them; she must learn to adapt and survive alone. Director Julian Pölsler confidently lets the film unfold slowly without the need to accelerate matters or generate any sense of false drama. We see this woman care for the few animals that remain trapped with her, toil away on the land, learn to hunt and do all she can to stave off the mental and emotional effects of complete isolation. The film is narrated in flashback, with the character musing on the events of previous months (she is unsure how much time has passed) as she writes in her journal, but in a huge misjudgement, Pölsler uses far too much of this text as voiceover. Gedeck's tough, emotionally dextrous performance is compelling enough on its own and perfectly capable of making us understand the state her character is in, but running lines like "I was overcome by despair" over a shot of her weeping uncontrollably only dilutes the effect. This storytelling choice is even more baffling because The Wall's incredible visuals are often its strongest asset, with gorgeously composed shots filmed across a variety of seasons capturing the surrounding landscape in all of its magnificence and danger. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that it looks so good, though – an incredible nine people are credited with the film's cinematography.
Screen International [Jonathan Romney]
You don’t see many films that so overtly address the Human Condition –
with capital letters – as intense, contemplative Alpine drama The Wall (Die Wand), essentially a one-woman turn by German star
Martina Gedeck. But, if you can buy the bizarre metaphorical premise that gets
the film going, then Julian Roman Pölsler’s spectacularly-shot, highly
intelligent adaptation of Marlen Haushofer’s early 1960s bestseller is riveting
and emotionally involving from start to finish, though offering few
conventional narrative pleasures.
The novel’s lack of profile in many territories (notably English-speaking) means that many distributors won’t be able to play on the recognition factor. But the superb solo achievement of Gedeck (best known outside Germany for The Lives of Others) will help boost prestige appeal to upmarket, serious-minded audiences.
Gedeck barely speaks, other than in the voice-over narrative threaded throughout. She plays an unnamed woman first seen sitting in a darkened cabin writing her ‘report’, as she puts it, on an extended period of seclusion. In a flashback, we see her insouciantly enjoying a car journey through the Austrian mountains with two older friends. The others drive off to the nearest village, leaving the Woman in the company of their dog Luchs (Lynx), which mysteriously chooses to stay behind.
Searching for her missing hosts the next day, the woman finds the road blocked by an invisible ‘wall’ – a sort of force field that Gedeck first evokes by doing a sort of Marcel Marceau mime routine (though some shots appear to use an actual transparent surface). Weirder still, in an eerie sequence, we later learn that people on the other side of the wall have been frozen in time – meaning that the Woman is not only trapped alone, but also quite possibly the last person left alive on earth.
Once we accept this odd premise, somewhere between sci-fi and Kafka, then the existential dimensions of the Woman’s situation become increasingly resonant – all the more so because the film’s exploration of her plight is so concrete. As the Woman explores her new domain – like a Robinson Crusoe of the mountains – Pölsler examines her world, and her daily life, in detail.
The woman finds both emotional and physical sustenance – a cow’s sudden appearance betokens a sign of life, and a source of milk, while two cats and the quietly boisterous Luchs (played by the director’s own pet) offer a further connection with the world. This bucolic idyll doesn’t last long, however, and over several seasons, things get tougher, both physically and spiritually.
The voice-over offers some quietly provocative - if perhaps, ultimately pessimistic – cogitations on solitude, sanity and mankind’s relation to time, nature and the universe. The film was shot over several seasons – presumably one reason for its phalanx of credited cinematographers, although its visual tone is extremely consistent.
Gedeck’s performance, which must have been physically demanding in the extreme, is phenomenal – only occasionally does she directly express outward emotion, but in her interaction with animals and the landscape (including the seemingly real delivery of a calf), she creates a powerful impression of her character’s coming to merge with the Great Outdoors.
The landscape photography, stunning without any traces of postcard beauty, merges with the voice-over to create a narrative that’s partly existentialist, partly indebted to the German Romantic tradition. Sparse music includes Bach partitas played by violinist Julia Fischer; but sound design is paramount, from the ambient landscape noise to the wall’s unsettling electronic hum. Pölsler is a veteran TV director, but The Wall is intensely cinematic – a high-risk, high-intelligence drama that will be intensely rewarding for viewers willing to scale its rarefied but heady heights.
The Wall (2011) Movie Review from Eye for Film Anton Bitel
"Die Wand": Spurensuche in Marlen Haushofers Heimat in . Andreas Lesti book review from Der Spiegel
Literary Corner Cafe: Book Review - The Wall by Marlen Haushofer
Marlen Haushofer :: Books :: Reviews :: Paste book review from Paul Vandecarr
Horror Movie Diary [Maynard Morrissey]
Hollywood Reporter [Neil Young]
Marlen Haushofer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Poltermann, Barry and Frank L. Anderson
THE LIFE OF REILLY A- 93
A film with real show business schlock, filled with a steady stream of
personal anecdotes and jokes, where the audience can get a front row feel for
the greasepaint in a small intimate theater, literally expecting Ethel Merman
to walk onstage at any time and belt out a little number knocking our socks
off, this is actually a condensed version of a live three hour one-man revue by
the usually flamboyant Charles Nelson Reilly, who tones it down here with
amazingly poignant insight into his own intimately personalized life story,
revealing the incredible journey of the unseen man behind the mask as well as carefully
drawn portraits of others around him who helped him along the way. Among the last performances of his 2004 show
entitled Save It for the Stage, the
aging Reilly died shortly after the film’s release. It’s beautifully balanced between drop dead
humor and quiet heartwarming intimacy, but the portrait of his immediate family
is a real show stopper, from his wretchedly bigoted, yet loving mother who
ventured outside only accompanied by a baseball bat for protection, his drunk
and disorderly, but also mentally unstable father who was at times removed from
the home in a straightjacket, or his lobotomized aunt, yet amidst this family dysfunction
he was the one considered odd.
Starting with recollections as a child working his way through his life
and career, the camera veers in and out following Reilly as he stands behind a
podium and talks to an unseen audience, moves to a sofa on an otherwise near
empty stage, then back to the podium, intermixing some of his memories with
video archival footage. Frank L.
Anderson wrote the original music, which is largely composed of background
piano music with just a touch of the rising arpeggios resembling Philip Glass,
always quietly contained in the background, yet adding an appealing pulsating
energy while also operating one of the cameras and providing animated visual
effects, while Barry Poltermann, who shares the directing duties with Anderson,
also edits the film. What they’ve
captured is a slice of life of working in the theater, where bearing one’s
naked soul to a new audience night after night is the nature of the business,
sometimes leading to fame, but more often to abruptly shortened theater runs
and broken dreams.
A loner as a child, he eventually found comfort, and acceptance, in the
theater. Told early on that queers would
never be shown on television, he quickly disproved that, as he built his career
beginning with stints off Broadway, leading to Broadway productions where he
won two Tony awards, and where he eventually became a fixture on TV quiz shows
as a guest with a flair for one-liners and wildly outrageous outfits, something
of a loudmouth with a lisp. A guest on
the Johnny Carson show over a hundred times, appearing on television as often
as fifty times a week, his iconoclastic, wise-cracking humor had a unique
nebbish quality and a suprising intelligence etched with an autobiographical
stamp of humanity, not much different than what you might expect hearing Woody
Allen in his BROADWAY DANNY ROSE mode reveal personal anecdotes of his upbringing,
describing aunts and uncles and their embarrassing life situations, where clever,
self-deprecating humor leads us through each new window of his life. At the screening I attended, people rose from
their seats and applauded at the end of the film.
The Village Voice [Aaron Hillis]
The late Charles Nelson Reilly directed five Broadway plays,
won a Tony for acting, was nominated for three Emmys, and knew full well that
his legacy would be as a flamboyant double-entendre machine on '70s game shows.
Shot before he died in May at the age of 76, this warm and hilarious adaptation
of Reilly's acclaimed one-man show, Save It for the Stage, is almost
entirely without reference to Match Game. Rambling, blithe, nostalgic,
and out for revenge, Reilly presents a witty anecdotal timeline of his life,
and the bittersweet milestones play like a Spalding Gray monologue loosened up
with a few shots of tequila. There are the stories of his racist mom,
lobotomized aunt, and a TV exec who told him he'd never find work as a
homosexual—and the more charming tale of his Uta Hagen acting class, which
yielded nothing but future A-listers (Steve McQueen, Jason Robards, Jack
Lemmon, and Anne Meara, to name a few). Directors Barry Poltermann and Frank
Anderson aren't exactly reinventing the wheel here style-wise, but by
introducing the performance with man-on-the-street interviews that emphasize
how little most of us know about Reilly's talent, they give their film and
subject added poignancy.
The funniest and most poignant documentary of
the year is The Life of Reilly, the final will and testament of the
great Charles Nelson Reilly, who most Gen X and Yers know from his kitschy game
show appearances and roles on countless sitcoms, from Car 54, Where Are You?
and The Ghost & Mrs. Muir to The X-Files and SpongeBob
SquarePants. Directors Barry Poltermann and Frank Anderson asked the
Broadway legend, who died earlier this year due to complications from
pneumonia, to provide audiences with a gift of rare emotionalism by asking him
to perform his one-man show Save It for the Stage one last time.
Reilly's performance is the crux of the film, shot with a minimum of fuss by
Poltermann and Anderson, who interject haunting home movie footage and film
clips throughout the documentary as a means of accenting Reilly's candor and
wit. To Reilly, his life was a movie and everyone in it was played by a famous
star: Shirley Booth starred as his pessimistic, controlling mother, Hume Cronym
as his alcoholic father, Claire Trevor as his lobotomized aunt, and, most
amusingly, Maureen Stapleton as the registrar for the future-stars-of-tomorrow
acting class he took at HB Studio in the '50s. From the Bronx to suburban
Connecticut to Hollywood, the funnyman stitched together the tapestry of his
family's life and his rise to celebrity with a richness of imagination and a
sense of bittersweet understanding—for the regret that consumed his father
after the old man was forced to turn down a job with Walt Disney, the
grandparents who made him feel as if he lived his adolescence in an Ingmar
Berman movie, and the mother who Booth herself once called "the most
horrible woman in the world" (take that David Sedaris's mom!).
"This is some plot," says a coyly amused Reilly. Indeed, Save It
for the Stage's riches are innumerable, among them an acknowledgement of
experience shaping creative vision and testaments to friendship, the comforts
of moviegoing for the outsider, and talking to pelicans.
The
Life of Reilly Michael Sicinski from
the Academic Hack
This is going to have to be one of those "up is
down" moments in my criticism, but for what it's worth, it's less of a
rhetorical gesture than a deeply felt, personal conviction, one that in its own
weird way clarifies little stray bits of thought and perception I've had
rattling around in my brain since I was a small child. The thing is, as a film
and on a purely technical level, The Life of Reilly is pedestrian at
best and incompetent at worst. Poltermann and Anderson often fail even to find
the most logical angle from which to photograph Charles Nelson Reilly's
not-very-complicatedly-blocked one-man stage show, Save It For the Stage.
In most any other case, I would be incapable of overlooking flaws such as
these, since as a reviewer I am addressing The Life of Reilly, the film,
and not Reilly's stage show as such. However, these deep flaws, and the fact
that Reilly's final performance of his poignant, frequently hilarious autobiographical
monologue was both instigated and captured for posterity by two guys of
middling talent as filmmakers, is not only telling. It's perfect. It sums up
everything unfair and less than dignified about the career of Charles Nelson
Reilly, an intelligent, erudite man of the theatre who was often forced to pay
the bills by mincing like a bug-eyed nelly for Sid and Marty Krofft or teaching
acting classes to insufferable little twerps who knew him only from "The
Match Game," and sneered accordingly. The first thing any halfway astute
viewer realizes in the first few minutes of The Life of Reilly, as CNR
begins to spin the tale of his childhood (a story often told -- of being the
little boy everyone knows is somehow "different" -- but seldom with
this degree of wit or genuine Renoirian affection for his tormentors), is that
as a monologist, Reilly is equal to the late, great Spalding Gray. But Reilly's
trip through showbiz always sent him through seedier channels, kept him on that
strange rung of semi-celebrity that strands you between stardom and artistic
achievement. He was, in short, a "panelist." And this is unfair. It's
unfair, appropriately unfair, that The Life of Reilly is not as good as
it should have been, because it wasn't shot by Steven Soderbergh or Jonathan
Demme. It's also appropriately unfair that many people won't bother to see this
film, since even its poster gives it the vague lacquer of faux-Vegas, a
preening "chat with an old queen" veneer that disguises its deeper
emotional resonance.
And what is that, exactly? It's hard to quantify, but I
think it has to do with unlikely dignity and the joy of friendship, of living
life on your own terms and learning to be so completely comfortable in your own
skin, against all odds, that many of the world's cruelties can be viewed in the
light of their basic pettiness. Reilly is a case study in self-mockery as a
defense mechanism in a hostile world, but there's more to it than that, which
may be the film and the monologue's biggest revelation. Some reviewers (notably
Noel Murray and Nick Pinkerton) have made the logical connection between Reilly
and Paul Lynde, two gay performers of the same era (late 60s through the 70s),
both flamboyant talk- and game-show fixtures whose sexuality was an open
secret. Both were susceptible to charges of mincing or gay minstrelsy, I
suppose. But
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Film Journal International (David Noh)
Creative Loafing [Curt Holman]
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Adam Balz]
Cinematical [Christopher Campbell]
Movie Magazine International [Joan K. Widdifield]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
Boston Globe Ty Burr
New York Times (registration req'd) Matt Zoller Seitz
Pons, Ventura
WOUNDED ANIMALS D- 52
A film that’s meant to be seen in elevators, hotel lobbies, and airplanes, but that’s about it. This doesn’t even rise to the level of mediocre, despite the fact it probably had a bigger budget and will draw a bigger audience, yet for this film to be selected to a film festival is a programming disgrace. A light-hearted, breezy sex comedy on the bored and empty lifestyles of the rich and famous, where consequences ensue from inappropriate sexual trysts, accentuated by an FM Lite musical soundtrack that grows more and more repetitious, as if it’s air-headedness is actually driving the pace of the film. Within two minutes, the oppressive artificiality of the film begins to get on your nerves, but nausea sets in at the point you realize you’ll have to contend with the increasingly grating obnoxious narration that continues unabated throughout the entire film. It’s never witty or clever, but retains a tone of smarmy smugness, as if we in the audience wish we were as rich and carefree, and as if we wish our lives resembled what we are witnessing onscreen, but nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, the audience is alienated immediately, beyond the point of no return. By the end, when we realize that the rich end up unhappy and alone, despite all their advantages, this comes as a surprise? The 60’s films of Fellini or Antonioni are legendary masterworks capturing this middle class ennui, so what does this film have to offer? Arguably the worst film I’ve ever seen at a film festival, this is little more than an extended version of “Entertainment Tonight.”
Ponsoldt, James
THE SPECTACULAR NOW B+ 92
USA (95 mi) 2013 ‘Scope Official site
I
open my arms wide and let the wind flow over me. I love the universe and the
universe loves me. That’s the one-two punch right there, wanting to love and
wanting to be loved. Everything else is pure idiocy—shiny fancy outfits,
Geech-green Cadillacs, sixty-dollar haircuts, schlock radio, celebrity-rehab
idiots, and most of all, the atomic vampires with their de-soul-inators, and
flag-draped coffins.
Goodbye to all that, I say. And goodbye to Mr. Asterhole and the Red Death of
algebra and to the likes of Geech and Keeeevin. Goodbye to Mom’s rented tan and
my sister’s chargecard boobs. Goodbye to Dad for the second and last time.
Goodbye to black spells and jagged hangovers, divorces, and Fort Worth
nightmares. To high school and Bob Lewis and once-upon-a-time Ricky. Goodbye to
the future and the past and, most of all, to Aimee and Cassidy and all the
other girls who came and went and came and went.
Goodbye. Goodbye. I can’t feel you anymore. The night is almost too beautifully
pure for my soul to contain. I walk with my arms spread open under the big fat
moon. Heroic weeds rise up from the cracks in the sidewalk, and the colored
lights of the Hawaiian Breeze ignite the broken glass in the gutter. Goodbye, I
say, goodbye, as I disappear little by little into the middle of the middle of
my own spectacular now.
—The Spectacular Now, ending paragraphs from the
book, by Tim Tharp, 2008, The
Spectacular Now - Page 294 - Google Books Result
Like S.E. Hinton’s young adult novels, this Tim Tharp novel is also set in Oklahoma, but has been transported to movie director James Ponsoldt’s home town of Athens, Georgia, as he explained: “The script didn't identify where it was set—the setting just wasn't a big city. It felt vaguely suburban—or kind of like a college town. It seemed to me that the script had a sense of place in the way that Breaking Away (1979) did. Athens was such an obvious candidate as a setting to shoot the film in—and it was really the only place I wanted to make the film. Filming in Athens was incredibly meaningful to me. We shot in the streets and houses of my childhood!” While the movie is filmed in Georgia, there are no accents, no southern hospitality give-aways, no local beer references like Terrapin Beer Company, and nothing specific to identify a location, although we learn it’s not Texas, California, or Philadelphia, and is in a place that seems far away from those places. But the beauty of it all is that it could be anywhere, as it’s a rite of passage story, one that takes us to a place most of us have already been before, as we’ve probably lived it. What distinguishes this small little indie film from others is that the voices ring so true, as there’s nothing fabricated or Hollywood contrived about these characters. These are beautifully written people that have not yet been corrupted by a movie business that long ago forgot to tell their stories, so at least for a brief moment in time, what you experience here feels genuine. Opening and closing with the voice of Sutter Keely, Miles Teller from John Cameron Mitchell’s RABBIT HOLE (2010), a high school senior that is narrating a college application essay where he’s asked to mention experiences about any particular hardships he’s had to overcome. This immediately jettisons us directly into his life which is expressed as a sustained flashback. His is not an ordinary story, but there’s also nothing truly exceptional about it either, as it could be any one of us. What makes it so compelling is the naturalistic strand of realism exhibited throughout, where there are even noticeable scars left intact on actor Teller’s face incurred from a real life car accident that figure prominently in how the film refuses to whitewash reality.
Sutter begins his story by describing how he loses his girlfriend Cassidy (Brie Larsen) by trying to get Ricky (Masam Holden), one of his smart but geeky friends “some action,” setting him up on a double date where he’s unfortunately caught by his girlfriend. As Cassidy is one of the prettiest girls in school, Sutter has ties with the more popular “in crowd,” where he’s such an easy going kid that he seems to connect with everyone, as his friendly, overly gregarious nature makes him extremely likeable, where at his age he exhibits an unshakeable confidence, often dispensing advice to others. When we see him at parties, he and Cassidy have always been the life of the party, the ones other kids come to hang out with for fun. But she’s not cool with what she’s seen, so Sutter spends a night bravely trying to drink away his difficulties, ending up asleep the next morning on somebody’s front lawn, completely in the dark about where he left his car. He’s discovered by Aimee, Shailene Woodley from Alexander Payne’s The Descendants (2011), a smart but overly shy girl that knows him from school, as they’re in the same classes, but he hasn’t a clue who she is. Nonetheless, she’s cute and he’s without a girlfriend at the moment, so he takes an interest and discovers she’s an amazingly sweet listener who’s uncomfortable talking about herself, which for an amiable guy like him is something of a challenge, so he grows more curious about her. By this time, we realize Sutter has a habit of pulling a flask out of his coat pocket and pouring alcohol into his soft drinks, something he regularly does at his job at a shoe store as well, where we begin to realize why he’s such a happy go lucky guy, a friend to everyone except himself. Aimee is much the same way, exhibiting low self-esteem, never wanting to draw attention to herself, where the two, perhaps surprisingly, hit it off immediately, even though it’s obvious he still has his eye on Cassidy.
What’s perhaps more surprising is Cassidy
still likes him, enjoys speaking candidly with him like they’re still good
friends, but expresses no interest in going out with him again, as she’s
currently going out with Marcus (Dayo Okeniyi), the black football star who’s
also class president. So even though the
audience knows he’s waffling about his strong feelings for Cassidy, the
relationship with Aimee is genuinely motivated and utterly sincere, where she
can even help him with his failing geometry, but they both have parental
anxiety issues, as Aimee wants to go to college in Philadelphia, and has been
accepted, but her mom insists that she stay at home and help support the
family, while Sutter hasn’t a clue where his father is, but knows his mother
(Jennifer Jason Leigh) won’t even speak about him since he left. What we discover are two unhappy kids who
literally need one another, where both are in denial about major issues in
their lives, each one shrugging it off as if it’s an everyday part of being
normal. Sutter’s family, including his
friends, all have broken marriages, where he’s not aware of any happy adults,
making him a bit leery about the future, where he instead concentrates on today
and forgets about tomorrow. There are
some extraordinary scenes of extended conversations that have a way of
including the audience in the impact of the moment, where our reactions will
surely conflict with the notions of teenage kids, but some of these scenes are
simply heartbreaking. The secondary characters
are hardly window dressing, but feature significantly into their lives, where
their influence matters, as these are genuinely helpful people who are
concerned about their welfare but may not know how to help. The film is something of a portrait of unseen
and unspoken tragedies, as Sutter is perfectly fine on the outside, popular and
liked by all, where even as others are passing him by on their roads to having
a future, making plans to go to college and choose a career, he’s perfectly
content with being where he is, knowing “We’ll never be this young again.” Even as the façade starts crumbling around
the edges, where his life is a tragedy waiting to happen, we sense an
incredible sadness in his ultimate fatalism, a lost soul where all that matters
is this day and this moment, as nothing else exists. There are no existentialist cues here, as
this is still just a kid, but one we’re not apt to forget.
Sutter Keely (Miles Teller) is always the
life of the party. Making the most of every moment without thinking about the
consequences, he coasts his way through a C-average high school existence and
sneaks liquor into every aspect of his daily routine. Quick to categorize his
peers as "the rich kid" or "the stoner," he never takes the
time to ask how they might be categorizing him.
After one of many benders, he winds up passed out on
someone's front lawn where Aimee Finicky (Shailene Woodley) finds him during
her morning paper route. Full of bashful awe and naïve innocence, she plays as
the perfect audience for Sutter's endless stream of one-liners and
inappropriate behaviour, embodying the very propriety and sheepishness he
unconsciously tries to subvert.
Though everyone in Sutter's life points out that his
interest in the brainer girl with a bright future is callous, insomuch as he's
likely to devastate her eventually, he's too preoccupied with the now and the
pleasure he's getting from her interest to care. Even as their friendship and
relationship begin to blossom, with some of the most naturalistic and
convincing extended takes of dialogue (you genuinely feel like you're watching
two people fall in love during a protracted single take of conversation)
captured on film, Sutter messages and flirts with his more conventionally
attractive ex-girlfriend Cassidy (Brie Larsen).
The tone of The Spectacular Now, James Ponsoldt's
devastatingly sincere and astoundingly powerful teen love story about
insecurity, denial, self-hatred and the pain of maturity, shifts ever so
slightly with the degree of awareness the characters demonstrate.
Initially comical and touching, it captures the excitement
of nascent romance and the presentation, or veneer, that people give to those
they first meet. But as Sutter and Aimee get to know each other, we learn of
absent fathers and deeper scarring on both ends that both parties either shrug
off with comedy or distort into a convenient truth.
Once we start to understand the sort of lasting emotional
damage that Sutter can, and likely will, inflict on Aimee, the tone becomes for
more intense and honest, reflecting the painful and unflinchingly astute
realities these well-developed, entirely convincing, characters are
acknowledging about themselves.
And if the tone and absolutely brilliant writing weren't
enough to make The Spectacular Now a rare and memorable cinematic
experience, both Woodley (in particular) and Teller deliver career-defining
performances with the nuance and certainty of professional actors twice their
age.
This deceptively accessible, presumably "teen"
movie is a true rarity, capturing the pains and heartaches of self-awareness
and personal insignificance with utmost aplomb. Just as Sutter is told that
he's "not the joke that everyone says he is," we experience his pain
and the tangential assumed pain of Aimee, along with the truth about living
only in the "now." The Spectacular Now is a masterpiece of
human truth.
The late John Hughes was the man in Hollywood who understood teenagers and teen angst better than anyone else in the industry. He knew how to tell beautiful stories about how sometimes being young can be weird and confusing, and brought this to life on film flawlessly. The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles are timeless classics, not only because they're good storytelling and star Molly Ringwald, but because their depiction of high school life is still accurate to this very day. The older the audience is, the more the films become relatable. This brings me to James Ponsoldt's The Spectacular Now, which is perhaps the most important adult-oriented film about the victories and woes of high school life in the last decade.
Free spirited closet-alcoholic high schooler Sutter Keely (Miles Teller) has many talents, but making good decisions is not one of them. At the near-end of his senior year in high school, his really hot girlfriend dumps him for a silly reason (and possibly for another guy). Like any other recently dumped closet-alcoholic who lives on a steady diet of whiskey, he pursues exciting opportunities in the field of getting piss drunk and waking up dazed and confused on strangers' front lawns. Standing over him during his latest outing is Aimee Finicky (Shailene Woodley), who stops on her morning paper route to check to see if he's dead. After collecting his thoughts, she helps him find his car, which he somehow lost during his drunken slumber the night before.
Aimee's not the most popular kid in school. In fact, she goes unnoticed by even the uncoolest of uncool kids, and the closest she's had to a guy flirting with her is when he asked if she'd tutor him in Math (it was Sutter, the day after they first met). Seeing something special in her, Sutter begins an unlikely friendship with Aimee, which takes them on a journey of something much deeper and more satisfying than both originally imagined.
Sutter and Aimee's chemistry is dynamic and they hit it off immediately. What helps is Sutter's fearless resolve to live in the now, which in turn helps Aimee loosen up to embellish her life a little bit.
Director James Ponsoldt really knows how to bring out the spectacular wow in his actors. Last year, in his sophomore feature, Smashed, he gave Mary Elizabeth Winstead room to shine in a career-defining performance. After seeing her poignant and courageous performance of a struggling alcoholic, I will forever be a part of the MEW fan club. MEW, by the way, peeks briefly into this film.
The lead in Ponsoldt's latest is Teller. He had a very small role in John Cameron Mitchell's Rabbit Hole, and his little screen time showed he had a lot of bite in him. In The Spectacular Now, he chews up every scene he's in. His performance as the cool Sutter is effortless and the most entrancing portrayal of a calm but persevering high schooler I've seen in years. Sutter really winds around the heart - his pizzazz is surprisingly unassuming, which makes every guy want to be him. He's so adventurous, he even commits the unspeakable crime of falling in love with the school dork. He lives how he wants to live and that's in the now - right in this moment. But remember, he's heavy on the sauce, so a lot of hard life lessons lie ahead of him. No matter how daring you are, life will still suck the proverbial donkey dick when it wants to.
Shailene Woodley co-starred in last year's hit, The Descendants. She's not even 21 and already on her way to leading lady status. She may play the harmless loser here, but Aimee's determination to win at life is incredibly endearing. This is due to Woodley's onscreen charisma. Big things are coming her way. There's also a great cameo from Kyle Chandler as Sutter's deadbeat father. His screen time is short, but it's one of the best performances he's ever given.
The Spectacular Now is adapted from the novel of the same name by (500) Days of Summer scribes Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber. These two gents clearly know a thing or two about heartache. They say a movie will never be as good as the book, but perhaps they've broken that trend with the aid of Ponsoldt. I haven't read the book, but when I left the theater, I felt like I was punched in the heart and strangely enough, loved it.
There are dozens of teen films that stop being appreciated at a certain age. I can't remember the last time I watched Drive Me Crazy for its profound and important underlying messages. Films like Drive Me Crazy are fun when you're 16, but lose their appeal when you've grown up and realize the only cool thing was the soundtrack, which now sucks. The Spectacular Now will be remembered as a high school movie with a determined message - that living in the now is a constant change, whether we're ready or not. This is the most important coming-of-age movie you'll see this year. It's so beautiful it hurts my feelings.
The Spectacular Now - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Victoria Large
If you have been – or are currently — a teenager, you may very well have met a kid like The Spectacular Now’s Sutter Keely. Brash, loud, and quick to declare himself the life of the party, he’s in full force when the film begins, recounting how his quest to get his friend Ricky “some action” apparently led Sutter to a break-up with his girlfriend, Cassidy. If this were a different, more conventional, movie, it would probably continue in this same vein, focusing on Sutter’s hijinx with Ricky and his quest to win Cassidy back. But director James Ponsoldt isn’t interested in glorifying a teenage party animal. Instead, he uncovers the big-hearted, unhappy kid behind Sutter’s Dionysian persona, and he does it without turning his film into an afterschool special.
The story changes course when Sutter wakes up from a night of debauchery, mysteriously separated from his car. His quiet and extraordinarily sweet classmate Aimee, who usually sits the local parties out, discovers him sprawled on a lawn, and the two become surprisingly fast friends. The film doesn’t turn gooey when that friendship becomes a courtship, partly because Sutter seems to think that he’s still trying to win Cassidy back, but mostly because Ponsoldt gets some little moments (like Sutter deciding to buy and read Aimee’s favorite manga) and some big moments (including a spontaneous first kiss) just right.
Yet as a love story, The Spectacular Now is more complicated than it first appears. Yes, Sutter admirably urges Aimee to stand up to her controlling mother and pursue a better future, and in some regards, we see her start to blossom. But Sutter is also a kid who is constantly, worryingly sipping from a flask or a spiked cup of soda. He says that his father, who has since left the family, gave him his first sips of beer when he was six, and it’s clear to us that Sutter is now an alcoholic. As he and Aimee continue to date, she starts drinking too, and when Sutter gives her a personalized flask of her own before prom, it’s funny but also deeply sad.
Aimee is an academically gifted dreamer, while Sutter is caught, as his boss says, “in neutral,” uncertain about his plans, occasionally pecking at a probably long-overdue college essay, but mostly avoiding any thoughts of the future. At one point, Sutter selects Faron Young’s “Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young” on a jukebox, and he seems to think that the song offers a viable blueprint for life. Sutter is headed for a literal and figurative crash, and as much as we don’t want to see that, we also don’t want him take Aimee down with him.
Some of the above may look, on paper, like a kind of public service announcement, but Ponsoldt and 500 Days of Summer screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (adapting a novel by Tim Tharp) do their best to sidestep the heavy moralizing that could have derailed the film. They also have the advantage of a really gifted cast, including Shailene Woodley of The Descendents as Aimee, and Miles Teller as Sutter. Woodley and Teller have remarkable chemistry, and they sound like authentic teenagers — rather than jaded screenwriters — when they speak. Both actors are up to the task of handling comic scenes and much heavier moments.
Teller has some noticeable scars from a real-life car accident, and they aren’t hidden with makeup here. Instead they serve to subtly underscore Sutter’s self-destructive streak by hinting at past scrapes, and they also help to heighten the film’s sense of realism. During his Q&A session after The Spectacular Now’s opening night screening at IFFB, Ponsoldt emphasized his intention of presenting more realistic teenagers than those found in Twilight or American Pie, and that a (relative) lack of gloss really does do wonders.
The film’s supporting cast is also marvelous, with many of the actors making vivid impressions in only a handful of scenes. Kyle Chandler avoids overplaying Sutter’s absentee dad, and Jennifer Jason Leigh is excellent as Sutter’s exhausted single mom who works as a nurse. There are also great thumbnail sketches from Bob Odenkirk as Sutter’s boss, Andre Royo as his math teacher, and Masam Holden as his friend Ricky, though my favorite of all may be Mary Elizabeth Winstead (who also starred in Ponsoldt’s feature Smashed) as Sutter’s big sister Holly. Winstead tells us half of what we need to know about Holly just by the way she daintily fusses over a few flowers in her backyard. These performances are so strong that we occasionally wish we could spend a bit more time enjoying each of them, but in the end, the story doesn’t belong to these characters. Indeed, one of the largely unspoken tragedies of the film is the fact that Sutter seems to be surrounded by a lot of good, caring people who aren’t at all sure how to help him.
As good as the movie is, there is one somewhat unrealistic plot development near its conclusion, and viewers may be divided on whether The Spectacular Now is too pessimistic, or conversely, whether it lets its characters off too lightly. But ultimately, the film works to maintain a very delicate balance between despair and hope, and it largely succeeds. It gives us characters to care about and believe in, and along with some other recent films concerning high schoolers — including Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower — it reminds us that movies about teenagers aren’t necessarily just for teenagers, and that the kids themselves deserve more honest, compassionate movies like this one.
The Spectacular Now / The Dissolve Scott Tobias
“The Spectacular Now”: A potent, painful teen romance - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir
The Spectacular Now, directed by James Ponsoldt, reviewed. - Slate Dana Stevens
'The Spectacular Now': High School and Consequences | PopMatters Chris Barsanti
Edelstein on The Spectacular Now - Vulture David Edelstein
The Steve Pulaski Message Board [Steve Pulaski]
Review: James Ponsoldt's 'The Spectacular Now ... - Blogs - Indiewire Rodrigo Perez from The Playlist
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
Slant Magazine [Andrew Schenker]
Movie Mezzanine [Kevin Ketchum]
Spectacular Now, The (2013) - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
The Spectacular Now Is This Summer's Best Romance - Village Voice Alan Scherstuhl
Coming-of-age
grows up in The Spectacular Now
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Paste Magazine [Jeremy Mathews]
David Denby: “The Spectacular Now,” “The To Do ... - The New Yorker
Cinescene Howard Schumann, also seen here: Critical Movie Critics [Howard Schumann]
Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Movie Shark Deblore [Debbie Lynn Elias]
Movie Mezzanine [Christopher Runyon]
The Spectacular Now Review - Sundance 2013 - Film School Rejects Allison Loring
School Library Journal [Kent Turner]
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
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To make The Spectacular Now as personal as ... - The Dissolve Scott Tobias interviews the director, July 29, 2013
The Writers of The Spectacular Now on Miles Teller's Likeness to ... Andrea Cuttler interview the screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber from Vanity Fair, August 1, 2013
Shailene Woodley, Miles Teller revel in 'The Spectacular Now' - Los ... Nicoile Sperling interviews the two leads from The LA Times, August 1, 2013
The Spectacular Now Review - Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy
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Review: 'The Spectacular Now' - Featured Articles From The Los ... Betsy Sharkey from The LA Times
Why a screenwriting team adapted 'The Spectacular Now' - latimes ... Screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber from The LA Times, November 21, 2013
The Spectacular Now Movie Review (2013) | Roger Ebert
In 'The Spectacular Now,' Growing Pains Precede Graduation ... The New York Times
THE END OF THE TOUR B 89
USA (106 mi) 2015 ‘Scope
There’s something altogether uncomfortable about this film, and not in the obvious sense, where the construct of the film allows the audience early in the film to understand the featured character commits suicide, leaving an empty feeling in the pit of our stomachs as we then go back, retrace our steps and digest the life of a man who would eventually take his own life. The format is reminiscent of a similar occurrence in Gus van Sant’s ELEPHANT (2003), where early on the audience hears the sound of triggers being pulled in a high school film resembling the Columbine murders. In a sense, what follows is an artful snuff film, as it’s all about what leads us into certain death, unfamiliar territory for anyone, to be sure. Based on American author David Foster Wallace, who took his own life September 12, 2008, his suicide is the source of the discomfort, as no words and certainly not a movie could possibly do justice to the surviving family that has to continue to deal with his loss. Imagine having to watch a fictional version onscreen that would only reignite the pain and passion associated with that death, not to mention having to hear all the superficial talk generated by the film’s publicity, where people might describe the actors and their performances, the music, what stood out in the film, the quality of the writing, and how they may or may not have even heard of the man whose life story the film is based upon. As the movie gets caught up in the fictionalized Hollywoodization of reality, they have to contend with the staggering loss of someone they knew and loved. It’s admittedly a sticky situation where the director is walking upon dangerous ground, creating an unauthorized version against the expressed wishes of Wallace’s family (Alison Flood from The Guardian, April 22, 2014, before shooting of the film began, David Foster Wallace's family object to biopic The End of the ...), and the results are to some extent uneven, partially due to the source material upon which the film is based, written by Donald Margulies, a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and the director’s college professor at Yale, adapting journalist David Lipsky’s 2010 book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace, a collection of conversations they had while on the road together promoting Wallace’s book, published two years after Wallace’s death. The film recreates a 5-day road trip Wallace took in 1996 with Rolling Stone writer and struggling novelist David Lipsky right after the publication of his heavily acclaimed masterwork Infinite Jest, where it’s impossible not to be reminded of Cameron Crowe and his film ALMOST FAMOUS (2000) that showcases the experiences of a young, wild-eyed Rolling Stone reporter still in his teens who goes on the road with an emerging band in the early 1970’s, a fictionalized yet autobiographical recreation of Crowe’s own experience of going on the road for three weeks with the Allman Brothers Band at the tender age of 16, where he was the magazine’s youngest-ever contributor. This film treads on similar territory, but explores an entirely different landscape, where the artist being depicted, were he still alive, would probably have found this a contemptable exercise, as he was intensely suspicious of fame and reverential celebrity worship as the potentially dehumanizing impact of having a public persona, writing extensively about how artists lose control over their own identity and ideas when they get sucked up in the world of entertainment and Internet technology, preferring the ideas “inside” his head to the steady stream of ideas swirling around “outside” that he had no control of that were attempting to label him or easily define him using conventional pat phrases that change the meaning altogether. “The more people think that you’re really good, actually the stronger the fear of being a fraud is,” he tells Lipsky, which is similar to author Jonathan Franzen, one of the few literary figures with whom Wallace kept in touch, deciding “not” to go on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2001 when his book The Corrections was selected to her heralded “book club,” questioning the merits of placing the book club’s “logo of corporate ownership” on the cover, as it would be betraying his core audience of readers.
While the film never indicates, the piece was never published in Rolling Stone magazine for reasons that are never given, but one can only speculate that either the publisher felt he never had a legitimate story or the writer never figured out how to present the material. It evokes a phone conversation Lipsky has with his editor during the Tour, when he gets scolded for not asking the tough journalistic questions, reminding him “You’re not his best buddy. You’re a reporter.” A huge fan of the novel, considered one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years, Wallace is one of the director’s personal heroes, the same man who made The Spectacular Now (2013), where his motivation for making the film is largely filled with the same youthful rush of enthusiasm that Lipsky must have felt when he read the novel. As played by Jesse Eisenberg, Lipsky is himself well-educated, but he is dwarfed by the intellectual stature of this brilliant literary sensation, always feeling as if he was in the presence of greatness. Jason Segel is nearly unrecognizable behind the persona of Wallace, who almost always downplays his enormous intelligence and presents himself as just a regular guy, living an ordinary and unpretentious life in a modest central Illinois home with his two dogs. The down home, folksy nature of the Midwest continually saturates the screen throughout, where the East coast bred Lipsky must feel like a fish out of water, never really finding his bearings, where the claustrophobic interior of Wallace’s home literally swallows him up, with cavernous gulfs left unfilled. A writing professor at a local college, following in the footsteps of his parents, Wallace grew up in an exceptional academic household, remembering his parents reading Ulysses out loud to each other when they went to bed. His father would read Moby-Dick to Wallace and his younger sister when they were 8 and 6, graduating from Amherst with the highest GPA in his class. From an early 1987 profile written by Bill Katovsky, "David Foster Wallace: A Profile":
“Writing fiction takes
me out of time,” he explains. “I sit
down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll
ever get. I’m scared of sounding pretentious
because anyone who writes fiction is saying, ‘Look at this thing I’ve
written.’”
This is precisely the kind of thing Lipsky and Wallace discuss when they finally meet during a winter snow in Normal-Bloomington, Illinois at Wallace’s home and begin to interact, overcoming their initial tentativeness and natural shyness as they attempt an intellectual rapport. The mammoth implications of success have already begun to be felt by Wallace, as he realizes his life is quickly changing beyond his control. While the discussion feels overly safe, the adulation of female attention after publishing a successful book, including his views on the down-to-earth nature of Alanis Morissette whose poster graces a wall in his home, the question of a lasting relationship comes up, and his views on kids, while Lipsky never goes anywhere without his handheld, cassette-driven tape recorder whose red light is invariably always on. While both are exceedingly polite, it’s clear that Lipsky is awed by this one-of-a-kind mentor, wondering what it would be like to be him, where his mind is filled with naiveté and childish illusion, often stunned by some of the unintentional revelations of a man who has spent the better part of his life fighting an ongoing war with depression, including suicidal idealizations. Lipsky longs for Wallace’s success while completely missing the profound nature of his thoughts on depression. The depth of these private confessions have a way of separating the two, as one is in possession of this kind of devastatingly intimate personal knowledge while the other doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about, but can only imagine, as in his mind all he sees is a heralded “genius.” On their flight to Minneapolis, Lipsky follows up by asking about Wallace’s hospitalization for suicidal thoughts, which has the effect of stopping the conversation dead in its tracks. For one, it’s a routine question he feels required to ask, but to the other it’s a shocking invasion of privacy coming from someone he barely knows. Clearly Wallace has been hurt and wounded by the starkness of the question, which didn’t develop in private context, but seemed to come out of nowhere in a very public place. While the difficulty of Lipsky’s job is evident in every frame of the film, what’s also apparent is his lack of maturity and tact, including an ability to process the severity of this information in a more suitable fashion. The man across from him is a walking time bomb, where deep-seeded inner turmoil is literally eating away at him, which he’s able to confide openly to a certain extent, but Lipsky, clumsily enough, is unable to figure out what to do with this gesture of openness. Making matters worse, rather than defer to Wallace’s comfort zone, Lipsky openly socializes with his friends and acquaintances, as if he has free reign to interview them as well. While Lipsky is clearly around someone he greatly admires, Wallace on the other hand has to endure this rude intrusion into his life, come what may, where occasionally he’s not too happy about it, losing patience with the innocence of his young protégé, registering his concerns, “If you wanted, I mean, you’re gonna be able to shape this essentially how you want, and that, to me, is extremely disturbing. Because I want to be able to try and shape and manage the impression of me that’s coming across.” The distance that ultimately develops between these two men is of cataclysmic proportions, like man and boy, where clearly Lipsky is out of his element.
To say that this film is dialogue-driven is an understatement, as it recalls the lengthy dinner conversation of Louis Malle’s MY DINNER WITH ANDRE (1981), which is more of a free spirited, two-person conversation, where they’re free to discuss anything, while Wallace and Lipsky don’t actually engage in conversation, as Lipsky is on an assignment of limited duration, where he’s free to shape the interviews as he sees fit. So the structure throughout is centered around questions and answers, though they do occasionally spend free time with others, improbably taking a side trip to the Mall of America to watch John Travolta in John Woo’s nuclear bomb fantasy, BROKEN ARROW (1996), where Wallace is literally entranced by what he sees onscreen. Something of a television junky, where there’s no sign of a TV in his home, he allows himself to get lost in thought as if retreating into another world. Segel is amazing transforming himself into another figure, much like Philip Seymour Hoffman playing Truman Capote in CAPOTE (2005), and at times he can be so captivating, where words literally flow out of his mouth like literary morsels, but what continually dominates his thoughts are outcast feelings of loneliness and self-loathing. Lipsky truly misses the mark in identifying the tormented soul of this man that continually cries out for help, but is greeted only with the sheer emptiness of silence. A man alone with an empty page, day in and day out, is a daunting task that grows more and more ominous, especially when it becomes expected that he is supposed to fill those empty pages with unending ideas of literary wit and candor. Instead of ever getting behind the man in the mask, the genius who has the capacity to understand what no one else can, this film centers more on the limitations of a mortal man, becoming a portrait of the flawed man asking all the curiously irrelevant questions, as they’re not leading him anywhere, as it’s never clear how truthful either one is being with each other. Despite a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, writing a feature Rolling Stone article on a brilliant contemporary writer, something the magazine had never done before, with the chance to expose an open vein of literary terrain the readers have never experienced, there’s simply no focus in what he’s trying to accomplish. While Lipsky is smart and clever, the gulf of knowledge between the two men who are nearly the same age is enormous, where Lipsky is so awed by the stratosphere of his intellectual superiority that he never quite sees the man, as if he’s already communicating from the beyond. On the other hand, Lipsky’s mix of anger and jealousy, where he’s painfully aware of his own human limitations, provide the emotional journey of the film, which is largely seen through his eyes. His frustration becomes our frustration, as he’s never able to unlock the key to Wallace’s cleverly concealed mind, or even ask what inspires him, or to share a favorite passage, including other influential literary works. We’re never able to tap in on what drives this man to write except to escape the loneliness of his own anguished soul, having fought so many of his battles alone locked in a tiny room. Lipsky actually has a chance to befriend a comrade in arms, but refuses to enter the field of battle. There is something cowardly about that, where only in death does he summon the courage to reveal the contents of these conversations that form the basis of the film. It’s a sad portrait, where Wallace’s family, friends, and associates are not involved in any way, where the final image, set to the music of Brian Eno’s “The Big Ship,” Brian Eno "The Big Ship" - YouTube (3:04), exactly the same music used in the enthralling finale of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015), but here, instead of a transforming moment, it resorts to illusion and fantasy, believing the feel good myth that Wallace suspected he wanted to hear all along, foregoing the agony of the truth.
Postscript
To clarify a few lingering issues. That dance sequence never happened - - is what I mean. It was all an invention, telling the young reporter exactly what he wanted to hear by telling him a fictitious feelgood story, the kind of thing his readers would love to hear. But it’s just a story. By that time, things between the two men had deteriorated to the point where there simply wasn’t any truth left in the relationship between them. So yes, I am questioning Lipsky’s account as unreliable. Not that he didn’t say it, but that he didn’t mean it. By that time he couldn’t tell the difference. While it’s clear that an entire life is filled with peaks and valleys, where a joyful moment may have been chosen as a final image to remember. I just got the feeling this one was completely made up. And Ponsoldt bought into it hook, line, and sinker, as if it was true, which is a myth that he’s feeding to the viewers. In my view, it’s all just part of a dishonest vein that I believe runs right through this film, which is why I’m not as high on it as others.
We may not see a film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival that gets its key casting as right as James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour does. Based on Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, David Lipsky’s chronicle of five days spent with David Foster Wallace as he was becoming a literary superstar, the picture stars Jesse Eisenberg as Lipsky and Jason Segel as Wallace. Both are working familiar grooves: Segel is the shambling, likable, aw-shucks guy plagued with uncertainty, Eisenberg the seemingly cocky yet clearly brittle smart guy with the chip on his shoulder. To say that they’re working within familiar types is not to diminish their work here; if anything, they push their screen personas into new territory, while Ponsoldt tries (and mostly succeeds) to capture something of the Wallace mythos.
The opening passages are a bit unsteady; they provoke something akin to the response you might’ve had to those on-set photos that leaked a while back, where something about seeing Segal’s familiar form donning Wallace’s long hair and bandana was just a little jarring. But the more time Segel spends on screen, the easier it becomes to buy him in the role; he often plays characters who don’t quite seem comfortable in their own skin, and Wallace is much the same way. He’s perpetually apologizing and pre-apologizing (“Don’t expect any fireworks”), undercutting, covering, worrying. He’s uncomfortable about being interviewed, and about what it says about him that he’s becoming famous enough to be interviewed.
Lipsky still has the tapes that he made on that five-day journey, and Segel had access to them while crafting the performance. He also told me, at the Q&A following its Sundance premiere Friday night, “I read, and I read, and I read. I started a book club in the little town that I live in, with three really great book dorks who’ve read Infinite Jest like five times, and we talked through it… I think that one of the things about David Foster Wallace, that was so special about his writing, was that he touches on some very universal human feelings. So I tried to really pay attention to the parts of us that are the same.”
And while the film will certainly be of interest to Wallace superfans and other “book dorks” (“I say ‘book dorks’ with such love, you know,” Segel noted), there is much of it that’s not specific, that is more about those “universal human feelings.” David and “Dave,” the two writers, one on the rise and one still struggling, spend a good deal of time circling each other and sniffing each other out; there are few things on their earth more awkward that introverted writers interacting. They develop a rapport eventually, in fits and starts, though it seems to get tense whenever the tape recorder is brought out or mentioned, as though the exposing the construct of conversation immediately renders it false.
But it is very good conversation, and there’s a lot of it—in fact, I’m hard-pressed to think of a recent semi-mainstream film, aside from the Before series, with such an interest in the rhythms and give-and-take of conversation between two smart people (each trying to impress the other, even). And when things get sticky between them, the talk gets trickier; when they have a loaded conversation about Wallace’s “regular guy-ness,” they’re both so eloquent and so bristlingly intelligent and yet so clearly hypersensitive, you’re hard-pressed to figure out who’s actually “right” or “wrong.”
Because much of the film is two people in a single place talking, it’s perhaps a bit surprising that the screenwriter, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies, chose to adapt Lipsky’s book for the screen rather than the stage. “I felt that writing this as a two-hander would not do it justice,” he explained after the premiere. “I was very compelled by the idea of placing David Foster Wallace, one of the great chroniclers of American culture, on the American landscape. I thought that was a thrilling idea. The fact that he’s in a car on highways, and stopping for fast food, and going to the Mall of America, I thought, this is too fantastic.”
He’s right, but the film really comes together once they’re off the road, back in Wallace’s house in Indiana, where Segel has a pair of monologues about himself and his life that are keenly felt, intelligently delivered, and rather extraordinary. By the time we’re at the end of The End of the Tour, it’s arrived at something thoughtful and true about being a writer—and, even better, about being a real person.
Film-Forward.com [Ted Metrakas]
Since David Foster Wallace’s suicide in 2008, a few comforting items have trickled out to fill the Wallace-shaped hole in the hearts and minds of his legion of obsessive, overly cerebral readers. In 2009, a version of a commencement speech he gave was released in book form (This Is Water), and in 2013, an excellent biography, Every Ghost Story Is a Love Story, was published. There was also the poorly received film version of Wallace’s short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009). But probably nothing compared to journalist David Lipsky’s 352-page transcription of his recorded conversations with Wallace from 1996, released in a 2010 book called Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. After Wallace’s death, Lipsky’s book was one of the closest ways to really get inside Wallace’s head, as page after page of his real-life dialogue leapt out at you, making you realize that the writer was just as compelling as any of the characters in his magnum opus Infinite Jest.
Wallace fans have been rewatching and relistening to key interviews to see and hear him in action, like his Charlie Rose interviews and appearances on Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm radio show. But with the new film, The End of the Tour, adapted from Lipsky’s 2010 book, forlorn readers now have their best piece of consolation and remembrance yet. Directed with sensitivity, intimacy, and intelligence by James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now), the film takes viewers into Wallace’s world in a way they haven’t quite experienced before.
Readers may feel like they know all about Wallace’s world, but they were privy only to the hyperliterate, impossibly intellectual side he presented in his writing. Of course, that is not the self he lived with on a daily basis. His everyday life was almost shockingly normal, and the film brings that Wallace to life vividly.
Wallace’s fans, of course, will love this movie, as will fans of literary culture in general and anyone who gets a kick out of peak 1990s nostalgia, circa 1996. There are conversations about Alanis Morrisette and hours spent cruising around in station wagons smoking cigarettes listening to local radio. This was a time when Rolling Stone was considered a culturally important magazine (there actually were important magazines), the idea of being an “important fiction writer” was still alive, no one cared about organic food or gluten, and smartphones hadn’t turned everyone into cyborgs yet.
Jesse Eisenberg plays David Lipsky, a Rolling Stone journalist frustrated with writing 500-word gush pieces on boy bands. He convinces his bosses to send him to interview Wallace as he completes the book tour for Infinite Jest. Jason Segel portrays Wallace, who at the time of that book’s publication in 1996 was living in Normal (literally), Illinois, in a sparsely furnished, one-level house with his two enormous dogs and teaching at Illinois State University, when he could have been teaching at any school in the country.
Segel nails the part down to every last detail—the stringy hair popping out from a sweaty bandana, the oddly hulking presence, the way his voice kind of tapers off and disappears at the end of sentences. Segel’s Wallace alternates between long stretches of trying very hard to put everyone at ease with jokes and pop culture references and adolescent, sensitive flare-ups at perceived slights. Wallace seems like a very easy person to be around, like a fun uncle who just wants to drink soda and watch TV all day, until he accuses you of violating his meticulous moral code and not Being a Good Guy.
There are really only two characters, the Davids, but the third is probably Wallace’s addictions that pop up in nearly every scene. They center on cigarettes, chewing tobacco, soda, fast food, candy, Hollywood movies, TV movies, and TV reruns. In one telling scene, after hanging out at the Mall of America and seeing one of the dumbest Hollywood action movies ever (Broken Arrow), his companions ask him what he wants to do next, and he asks if they have a TV. They then go back to their apartment and Wallace guzzles soda and candy while watching The Late Shift TV movie. Though his writing was relentlessly focused on dissecting the corrosive effects of the capitalist culture industry, Wallace was hopelessly addicted to popular entertainment.
Lipsky’s bosses press him to ask Wallace about the rampant rumors of heroin addiction in his youth, but Wallace insists he was never interesting enough to have a proper heroin addiction. “I spent most of my life in libraries,” he says, “and the closest thing to an addiction I ever had is television.” Everyone knows how much of a gifted writer Wallace was, but we didn’t really know what a deeply normal, average Midwest American he was, too. The tension of the two made his writing incredibly unique and attractive, but must have been dizzying and bewildering to live with.
If there’s any narrative tension, it’s in Lipsky’s jealousy of Wallace’s unquestioned status as the apex predator of the literary world and Wallace’s envy of how Lipsky could adapt to any social situation with charm and ease. Wallace had the talent that Lipsky wanted, and Lipsky had the freedom that came with not being viewed as an otherworldly super prodigy. The film does a nice job of building this tension slowly and subtly, and though it never boils over into a full-on confrontation, their chummy relationship noticeably changes.
All we can do is thank David Foster Wallace for being so endlessly generous with his prodigious talent while he was alive, and thank Segel, Ponsoldt, Eisenberg, and Lipsky for bringing him back to life in a whole new way.
The
Rewriting of David Foster Wallace -- Vulture Christian Lorentzen from Vulture, June 30, 2015
Nobody owns David Foster Wallace anymore. In the seven years since his suicide, he’s slipped out of the hands of those who knew him, and those who read him in his lifetime, and into the cultural maelstrom, which has flattened him. He has become a character, an icon, and in some circles a saint. A writer who courted contradiction and paradox, who could come on as a curmudgeon and a scold, who emerged from an avant-garde tradition and never retreated into conventional realism, he has been reduced to a wisdom-dispensing sage on the one hand and shorthand for the Writer As Tortured Soul on the other.
For someone who has long loved Wallace’s writing, as I have, one of the ironies of this shift is that, whether he intended to or not, Wallace started the process himself. First, he embarked on a series of publicity campaigns in which he performed his self-conscious disdain and fear of publicity campaigns, a martyr to the market culture and entertainment industry he was satirizing in his books. Then there was a treacly commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005 that became a viral sensation and later, a few months after his death, a cute, one-sentence-per-page inspirational pamphlet, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life. And now comes a bromantic biopic, The End of the Tour, starring Jason Segel as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as David Lipsky, the novelist Rolling Stone sent to write a (later abandoned) profile of Wallace in 1996. The movie’s theme is the bullshit-ness of literary fame — which Wallace, the permanently unsatisfied overachiever, nonetheless craved (not to mention it might get him laid, which he also thought would be a phony achievement). The movie is based on Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, the book of transcripts Lipsky published in 2010. And since much of its dialogue is transferred directly from the tapes, it does have a claim on the authentic Wallace.
None of this is entirely new; Wallace has always been an unstable commodity. For two decades, the writer and his writings have been at the center of a cult with several branches. The first branch is other fiction writers, who also tend to be the most serious readers. This makes a certain obvious sense. Infinite Jest is, on its face, the most daunting of novels; 1,079 pages, 96 of them endnotes; text in small type pointing you constantly to text in smaller type, necessitating multiple bookmarks; an immersion in two subcultures, junior tennis and addiction recovery; a time commitment to be measured in weeks, not days — two months for serious readers, Wallace thought. Writers took to it like Marines sprung from a sort of literary boot camp, hunting for something beyond the minimalist vogue of the 1980s.
The second branch are the magazine writers for whom his essays renewed the possibilities of a fast-aging New Journalism by clearing away Tom Wolfe’s cynicism and replacing it with a dazzling faux-amateur act.
The third are the academics; English professors hadn’t received the gift of fictional worlds so rich and susceptible to their hermeneutics since Nabokov, Beckett, or Joyce.
But before his suicide he compared his own fame only to that of a high-profile classical musician. It’s just since the Kenyon speech became the sort of chain email your dotty uncle forwards you that Wallace has been transformed into an idol of quasi-moral veneration, the bard of ironic self-loathing transformed into a beacon of earnest self-help. And now that he comes to the screen, bandanna and ad hoc spittoon in tow, he stands to become a hero to audiences who haven’t read a word of his work. The cult could become a church.
The Wallace estate (he is survived by his widow, the painter Karen Green, and his sister, Amy Wallace-Havens) has said it doesn’t support the movie, didn’t consent to it, doesn’t even “consider it an homage.” What would Wallace himself have said of the film, which follows him on his Infinite Jest tour, a movie about his efforts in book promotion that also accelerates his canonization? “The whole going around and reading in bookstores thing,” he told a German television interviewer in 2003, “it’s turning writers into kind of penny-ante or cheap versions of celebrities. People aren’t usually coming out to hear you read. They’re coming out to sort of see what you look like, and see whether your voice matches the voice that’s in their head when they read. None of it’s important. It’s icky.” Icky not because he felt he couldn’t play the game but because he found himself playing it so well. In 1996, he went on Charlie Rose, with friends and rivals Mark Leyner and Jonathan Franzen (long-haired and quite baby-faced back then), offering alternating monologues on the state of the American novel and the role of the novelist in a culture addicted to television. Wallace later wrote a letter to Don DeLillo saying the appearance had been a mistake. “I wanted to stay on my side of the screen,” he said.
In a 2011 New Yorker essay, Franzen named Wallace’s relationship to his own fame as the central battle of his adult life. He also gave voice to more than one “interpretation” of Wallace’s death that most journalists have been careful to avoid and many others probably found unseemly, that Wallace “had died of boredom and in despair about his future novels”; that his suicide “took the person away from us,” his loved ones, “and made him into a very public legend”; and that he had therefore, in hanging himself, “chosen the adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him.” Franzen said it might well have been “suicide as career move” — the “Kurt Cobain route.”
Although I can’t deny Franzen’s sense of the long game, I have a hard time reckoning “career advantage” as the motive in the deaths of Wallace, Cobain, Plath, Hemingway, or Van Gogh. But, then, your life rights go with you when you die. There have been at least 40 versions of Hemingway on film and television since his death, each a stand-in for our idea of the tortured artist as romantic adventurer. In The End of the Tour, Segel plays Wallace as he is now more and more remembered, a man solicitous of acclaim but made uncomfortable by attention, trying to figure out a way of living in a culture that has made him a hero but also seems designed to enhance his loneliness. Which is fitting, really, given that Wallace is now known to the public mostly as the author of that This Is Water commencement address.
A word on that speech and why I dislike it. Wallace begins with two parables: one about a pair of fish who are asked how the water is and don’t even know what water is (i.e., they don’t appreciate the wonder of the world around them), and another about an atheist who believes that God didn’t answer his prayers when he was lost in the blizzard and that he was instead saved by two Eskimo who happened to be passing by (i.e., he’s too set in his beliefs to recognize the hand of God when it saves his life). Wallace apologizes at the start for delivering “banal platitudes,” then asserts their “life or death” importance as he delivers a message about overcoming self-centeredness. It’s all breathtakingly obvious, as Wallace keeps pointing out. And then he gets to an example of one of the adult challenges this virtuous thinking will help you overcome: an unpleasant after-work trip to the grocery store. “And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cowlike and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.” The horror! Perhaps I’m an outlier, but I’ve mostly enjoyed my visits to grocery stores over the years. In any event, it strikes me that there are more difficult things about adulthood than navigating the express-check-out line, and more that it demands of us than overcoming self-centeredness and reflexive sourness. What Wallace describes as a universal rite of passage into maturity seems more to me like the daily struggles of a serious depressive, which he was. To me, it’s the least interesting version of himself he ever put to the page. But an unquantifiable number of online readers, millions of YouTube viewers, and thousands of bookstore shoppers disagree. Among the more dispiriting aspects of the Wallace canonization is how much it has been built out of his suffering — the way the cult has revived, for precisely the post-therapy, post-Romantic, self-help-soaked culture Wallace described and intermittently deplored, the Romantic picture of the depressive as a kind of keen-eyed saint.
Little wars have meanwhile been going on about Wallace’s writing. He’s dominated the discourse about the novel for two decades. A short and crude version of the story might go like this. Infinite Jest appeared in 1996 and was followed the next year by Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. Here were three enormous books, two by acknowledged masters and the other by their brilliant apprentice. But whereas his elders were looking backward — DeLillo to the Cold War and Pynchon to the 18th century — Wallace was looking ahead, to a time when the corporatization of North America had brought about an era of Subsidized Time, such that the calendar now measured out the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, and so forth.
It was a politically desperate vision — one of pervasive personal atomization and cynicism. If you listen to Wallace’s post–Infinite Jest radio and television interviews, he’s constantly emphasizing that he was trying to write a book about loneliness and sadness and that many of his reviewers were missing that and pointing instead to his obvious comic talent and the book’s dauntingly fractured majesty (James Wood famously described its style as “hysterical realism”).
As it turned out, it was the book’s melancholy that trickled down, detached from the structural excesses. Look at the stories collected in Granta’s “Best of Young American Novelists 2” issue of 2007, and what you see is a garden of sad tomatoes. “Is it possible that sadness can make people graceful?” the narrator of Nicole Krauss’s contribution, “My Painter,” asks. Many young writers thought the answer was “yes,” which is something Wallace himself had predicted in his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram,” in which he foresaw a new sincerity as the most viable direction for the generations of “anti-rebel” fiction writers raised on television’s corrosive irony. We have new problems now, and even the valence of the term “hysterical realism” has shifted, such that critic Adam Kirsch recently applied it to Joshua Cohen’s novel Book of Numbers as a compliment. Cohen had redeemed the style, he said, by fusing it to another: autofiction, in which the line between the author and the narrator is unstable, as in the books by Sheila Heti and Ben Lerner.
Of course, Wallace, too, wrote autofiction, but it was called journalism. A common reflex among readers is to divide Wallace’s fiction from his nonfiction — to treat them almost as the product of two separate brains. In fact, the projects have a lot of overlap, which has brought its own complications. When D. T. Max revealed in his 2012 biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story that some facts were fudged and characters made composite in the famous cruise-ship and Illinois State Fair essays, many said, “Oh, so that’s why they ran in Harper’s rather than The New Yorker. They wouldn’t pass the fact-checkers.” But as Thomas Kunkel’s new biography of Joseph Mitchell has shown, Wallace wasn’t up to anything new or all that criminal — as a nonfiction writer, he wasn’t right for The New Yorker mostly because he wasn’t a creature of anyone’s house style. What distinguishes Wallace’s journalism is not all that different from what distinguished his omnivorous, polymath fiction, which is probably one reason journalists liked it so much. Wallace called it his “giant floating eyeball” method, and if you look around, you can still see its traces everywhere, especially since the vogue for “longform” has taken hold. See, for example, the opening of Leslie Jamison’s recent essay on Sri Lanka for Afar and its echoes of Wallace’s cruise-ship essay. Here’s Wallace’s first paragraph:
I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as ‘Mon’ in three different nations. I have seen 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked computer-enhanced. I have (very briefly) joined a conga line.
Here, in part, is Jamison’s:
I have whale-watched in the rain, or whale-sought in the rain, while our boat hit waves as tall as houses and their spray left me storm-drenched and salt-soaked and blinking against the sting. I’ve watched a Chinese woman sit beside me at the prow, clenching the railing with one hand and a plastic baggie of her own vomit with the other, undeterred, scanning the horizon for unseen blowholes … I’ve eaten mangoes sweet as candy, licked the orange stain around my mouth after sucking their pits for the last flesh.
It’s a fairly simple rhetorical trick, the comic laundry list of the traveler’s experiences, but it also calls attention to the writer’s powers of observation and establishes that the writer’s voice, rather than the subject matter, will be the star of the show. But it brings with it the risk of seducing the reader into loving the narrator and loathing the people described. Wallace called this “the Asshole Problem.” In a letter to a student who pointed out that the chubby Midwesterners in his State Fair essay seemed “animal-like,” he answered, ashamedly, “It’s death if the biggest sense the reader gets from a critical essay is that the narrator’s a very critical person, or from a comic essay that the narrator’s cruel or snooty. Hence the importance of being just as critical about oneself as one is about the stuff/people one’s being critical of.”
Reviewing Wallace’s 2012 posthumous collection of essays Both Flesh and Not, Gideon Lewis-Kraus argued that Wallace had taught the generation of journalists who came after him — writers like Jamison, Elif Batuman, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Tom Bissell, and Wells Tower — to “perform the overcoming of contempt.”
But there’s no version of this formula without contempt as an essential element. A large part of Wallace’s appeal, for me anyway, was that you could always tell that he was kind of an asshole, ever on the verge of being cruel, and not just to himself. Banishing contempt entirely may be a good way to live, but it’s another kind of death for writing. Which is one reason it’s worth remembering, as the image of Wallace as slacker saint and liberal sage hardens into Hemingwayesque concrete, that he was a Reagan voter and a Perot supporter; a jealous guy who once contemplated buying a gun to knock off a woman’s husband; and a person who put to paper both the notion that the “good thing” about 9/11 was that it brought Americans together, and that “AIDS’s gift to us lies in its loud reminder that there’s nothing casual about sex at all.” Wallace never wanted that piece republished in a collection — in fact, he wanted it forgotten. He’d probably be the last person to argue for his own sainthood.
None of these arguments would be worth rehashing if the dead man’s sentences, written in what he liked to call “U.S. English,” weren’t still so gloriously alive. There was something in him that could absorb American language in all its registers and compound it into a voice that in its every deployment said more about the country than whatever Wallace himself happened to be saying. One of the most frequently aired complaints about Wallace was that he was a show-off, that his own voice drowned out those of his characters, that there was something self-indulgent about his massive forays into antic cultural comedy. But I think he knew, having the self he had, the only thing to do with it was to put it to work, like crippled Hephaestus, hammering together his warped and magnificent books.
There will always be readers who look to novels and novelists for instruction on how to lead their lives. Wallace, foremost among his contemporaries, seems especially to attract these readers (whatever the other pleasures to be had from his books). He courted them with bromides about brains beating like hearts, literature as a salve for loneliness, and novels comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, etc. And so it’s easy now to find online documents like this:
My name is infinitedetox and I am an addict.
Some time around May, 2004, I willfully entered into a relationship with pharmaceutical opiates. It began as a sort of experiment, quickly escalated into a recreation, and from there vectored toward present-day dependency on a straight line whose slope was gradual, but unwavering.
In December of last year it became apparent that this line would never flatten out or stabilize on its own, that it would just keep trundling on upwards, tending toward infinity given infinite time. This is when I started to get scared.
David Foster Wallace had just passed away and I decided to re-read Infinite Jest over the holidays, and something difficult to explain happened … Somehow the book — and now brace yourself for one of those clichés that Wallace seems so interested in IJ — made me want to be a better person.
I confess that this chunklet of text makes me sad, but the thing I do like about it is that in the way it vectors into the language of geometry, you can tell that here’s someone who’s internalized a little bit of the Wallace prose style.
The same could be said for The End of the Tour, assembled in part from his actual speech. On the festival circuit, the movie has garnered glowing reviews, and, whatever its complicity in softening Wallace so he’s easier to chew, it’s certainly in a league with films like The Theory of Everything and Dallas Buyers Club, essentially high-gloss true-story after-school specials for adults. Segel does a creditable impression of Wallace; you can tell he’s done his homework, watched the extant video. His innovation is to turn Wallace’s frequent wincing into the beginning of a snarl, signaling bottled rage or torment. This is the film’s version of the Asshole Problem, of Wallace’s tilting on the prickly-cuddly axis. Segel’s Wallace says he can’t stand the “enormous hiss of egos” in New York and he doesn’t want to be a guy at book parties saying, “I’m a writer! I’m a writer!” He asks, “What if I become this parody of that very thing?” Too late now.
The
End of the Tour Is a Gen-X My Dinner With André - Slate ... Dana Stevens
'The
End of the Tour' Finds Almost Enough of David Foster ... Alan Scherstuhl from The Village Voice
'The End of the Tour': Has the Internet Deprived Us of Another David Foster Wallace? Megan Garber from The Atlantic, August 11, 2015
The Best Part of End
of the Tour Isn't David Foster Wallace ...
K.M. McFarland from Wired
magazine, August 7, 2015
Consider
the Movie About the Book About David Foster ... Consider
the Movie About the Book About David Foster Wallace, by Jason Tanz from Wired magazine, July 29, 2015
David Foster Wallace's Closed Circuit - Los Angeles Review ... David Foster Wallace’s Closed Circuit by Anna Shechtman from The Los Angeles Review of Books, July 15, 2015
Farther
Away - The New Yorker Jonathan
Franzen from The New Yorker, April
18, 2011
David
Foster Wallace was right: Irony is ruining our culture ... Matt Ashby and Brendan Carroll from Salon,
April 13, 2014
The 'Real' DFW: Three Visions of David Foster Wallace « Mike Powell from Grantland, July 31, 2015
ErikLundegaard.com [Erik Lundegaard]
Slant Magazine [Jesse Cataldo]
David
Foster Wallace's Favorite Lie - Slate Magazine Forrest Wickman from Slate, July 31, 2015
The
End Of The Tour | Reviews | Screen - Screen International Anthony Kaufman
Sundance
Review: James Ponsoldt's 'The End Of The Tour ... Rodrigo Perez from The Playlist
The End of the Tour | Film
Review | Tiny Mix Tapes 80’s Tom
Hanks
'The
End of the Tour' Offers A Hint Of David Foster Wallace's ... David Edelstein on NPR
The
End Of The Tour · Film Review · The A.V. Club A.A. Dowd from The Onion A.V. Club
Fuse
Film Review: “The End of the Tour” — David Foster ... Matt Hanson from Art Fuse, which also includes a Michael de Zayas book review of
David Foster Wallace’s last published book, The
Pale King, Fuse
Book Review: The Pale King– David Foster Wallace Finds the Magnificent in the
Mundane
Next
Projection [Derek Deskins]
Review:
THE END OF THE TOUR, Pulling ... - Twitch
Ryland Aldrich
Spectrum
Culture [Erica Peplin]
Sound
On Sight [Lane Scarberry]
The
Reel Critic.com [Lisa MInzey]
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Amber Wilkinson]
“Mission:
Impossible—Rogue Nation” Review - The New ... Anthony Lane from The New Yorker
'The
End of the Tour' Movie Review | Rolling Stone Peter Travers
The End of the Tour
Review: Jason Segel is Amazing as ...
Germain Lussier from /Film
Film-Forward.com
[Michael Lee]
Daily
| Sundance 2015 | James Ponsoldt's THE END OF ... David Hudson from Fandor
Karen
Green interview: 'David Foster Wallace's suicide ... Karen Green: David Foster Wallace’s suicide turned him into a “celebrity writer
dude,” which would have made him wince, interview of Karen Green, David
Foster Wallace’s widow, by Tim Adams from The
Observer, April 9, 2011
James
Ponsoldt on David Foster Wallace and the objections ... Peter Croatto interview from The Onion A.V. Club, August 5, 2015
The End of
the Tour Review - Hollywood Reporter
David Rooney
Sundance
Film Review: 'The End of the Tour' - Variety Dennis Harvey
Sundance
2015 review: The End of the Tour – Jason Segel ... Jordan Hoffman from The Guardian
David
Foster Wallace's family object to biopic The End of the ... Alison Flood from The Guardian, April 22, 2014
Why
The End of the Tour isn't really about my friend David ... Glenn Kenny from The Guardian, July 29, 2015
Review:
<i>The End of the Tour</i> - Philadelphia City Paper Sam Adams
The
David Foster Wallace movie 'The End of the Tour': A ... Dorie Chevlin refusing to see the film out of
respect for David Foster Wallace, from The
Baltimore City Paper
The
End of the Tour, Reviewed - Washington City Paper Noah Gittell
The
Cleveland Movie Blog [Pamela Zoslov]
Movie
review: 'End of the Tour' a moving work of beauty ... Colin Covert from The Minneapolis Star Review
Austin
Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
'The
End of the Tour' review: Jason Segel plays a brilliant ... Jeff Baker from Oregon Live
Review:
'The End of the Tour' - Los Angeles Times
Sheri Linden
The End of
the Tour Movie Review (2015) | Roger Ebert
Matt Zoller Seitz
New
York Times [A. O. Scott] also seen
here: Review:
'The End of the Tour' Offers a Tale of Two Davids ...
The
Grunge American Novel - The New York Times
Frank Bruni profile of author David Foster Wallace from The New York Times, March 16, 1997
David Foster
Wallace, Influential Writer, Dies at 46 - Obituary ... The New
York Times, December 14, 2008
'The
David Foster Wallace Reader,' a Compilation - The ... The New
York Times, December 17, 2014
Jason
Segel Makes a Career U-Turn as David Foster ... The New
York Times, July 22, 2015
David Foster Wallace - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
DFW fan
resource website since 1997 "The Howling Fantods"
Charlie Rose interview with David Foster Wallace 1997 (32:39)
German TV unedited 85-minute interview with Wallace (with visual) November 2003
Interview with DFW in 2004, when he was 42 (28:24), which includes this written story, "The Soul Is Not a Smithy,"
"This
Is Water" by David Foster Wallace Full Speech Commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005
that became a viral sensation (22:43)
One Brian Eno song perfectly closes two very different movies Greg Cwik from The Onion A.V. Club, July 31, 2015
Pontecorvo, Gillo
Gillo Pontecorvo - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films ... Rob Edelman from Film Reference
Gillo Pontecorvo is concerned with the oppressed, those kept
down by the unjust and cruel use of power—and who will eventually rebel against
the oppressor. "I've always wanted to look at man during the hardest
moments of his life," the filmmaker has stated. An examination of his
filmography indicates that he has been true to his goals and ideals. Kapò ,
for example, is the story of a young Jewish girl and her attempt to survive in
a Nazi concentration camp. But Pontecorvo's masterpiece is The Battle of
Algiers , a meticulous recreation of the historical events surrounding the
successful rebellion against the French by
Shot in authentic locales with both actors and non-professionals in a cinéma-vérité style, Pontecorvo's black-and-white images seem like newsreels rather than staged sequences; the viewer can easily forget that the film is not a documentary. Additionally, the villains (chiefly the French Colonel Mathieu, played by Jean Martin) are not sadistic, one-dimensional imperialists, thugs and goons who abuse the rights of those they have colonized. While Mathieu is far from benevolent, he is believable and sympathetic, as much the victim of an exploitative society as the Algerians; the colonel even admits that the Algerians are destined to win—this is a lesson of history—and his job is just to temporarily put off the inevitable.
The same is true for the most visible tyrant in Burn! ,
Sir William Walker (Marlon Brando), a confused, self-destructive British
adventurer who betrays the slaves who revolt on a Portuguese-controlled,
sugar-producing
Pontecorvo is a Marxist: in 1941, at the age of twenty-two,
he became a member of the Italian Communist Party. His initial film, the
"Giovanna" episode from Die Windrose , is a women's rights
movie shot in
Gillo Pontecorvo > Overview - AllMovie profile by Nathan Southern
Gillo Pontecorvo: Information from Answers.com extensive biography
Gillo Pontecorvo: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article biography and filmography from Absolute Astronomy
StateMaster - Encyclopedia: Gillo Pontecorvo biography
Biography
for Gillo Pontecorvo - TCM.com
Gillo Pontecorvo - Club of Budapest: Members brief bio
Battle of Algiers and Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth generic 9-page essay (Undated, in pdf format)
La Battaglia di Algeri - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Janet E. Lorenz from Film Reference (Undated)
Sight & Sound: David Wilson Politics and Pontecorvo, Summer 1971
One
Struggle, Many Fronts
BFI | Sight & Sound |
One Deadly Summit Patrick Kennedy
from Sight and Sound, September
2001
A
Nasty Business - The Atlantic Bruce
Hoffman, January 2002
The Battle of
Algiers - Archive - Reverse Shot At Arm’s Length, by Saul Austerlitz from Reverse Shot, June 20, 2003
Kevin
Berry on The Battle of Algiers Kevin
Berry from LewRockwell,
A
new look at The Battle of Algiers.
Charles Paul Freund from Slate,
August 27, 2003
Sheila
K. Johnson: The Battle of Algiers and Its Lessons Common
Dreams,
The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo | Waggish Waggish, September 11, 2003
Revolution Now (and Then)! J. Hoberman from American Prospect magazine, January 1, 2004
The Village Voice: Michael Atkinson Rocket the Casbah, January
07, 2004
Filmjourney Doug Cummings,
Flak Magazine
[Elbert Ventura]
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul (Matthew Wilder)
review Life During Wartime, by Matthew Wilder,
Alan A.
Stone: Last Battle Alan A. Stone
from The
World Socialist Web
Site review Richard Phillips on Battle of Algiers,
Gillo
Pontecorvo's Burn! - The Brooklyn Rail
David N. Meyer from The
The Battle of Algiers: Bombs and Boomerangs Criterion essay by Peter Matthews, October 11, 2004
Punishment
Parks: The Battle of Algiers on DVD - Bright Lights Film ... Omar Odeh from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 31, 2004
Gillo Pontecorvo: from resistance to terrorism - Google Books Result book by Carlo Celli (139 pages), 2005
Gillo Pontecorvo's Return to Algiers Carlo Celli from Film Quarterly, Winter 2004, first page posted online January 10, 2005
Democracy Now: The Battle of Algiers—1966 Film Depicting Algerian War of Independence Against French Occupation Parallels Brutal U.S. Occupation of Iraq Democracy Now, November 9, 2005
Gillo
Pontecorvo, 86, Director of 'Battle of Algiers,' Dies - New ... Elisabetta Povoledo from The New York Times,
Obituary:
Gillo Pontecorvo | Film | The Guardian
Sheila Whitaker from The Guardian,
Gillo
Pontecorvo, 86; Movie Director Best Known for `The Battle of ... The LA
Times,
Film
Director Gillo Pontecorvo; 'Battle of Algiers' Broke Ground ... Adam Bernstein from The
Alexander Billet,
"A Marxist Poet: The Legacy of Gillo Pontecorvo" Alexander Billet from The Monthly Review,
The Village voice film guide: 50 years of movies from classics to ... - Google Books Result Dennis Lim (320 pages), 2007, includes his online review of Battle of Algiers
Westminster
Wisdom Gracchi on
“The
Battle of Algiers” – blueprint for revolution ... “The
FilmInFocus
| The Casbah, Rocked: Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of ... book extract from Peter Cowie’s Revolution! The Explosion of World Cinema in the
Sixties, from Film in Focus,
Queimada/Burn! (1970 - Gillo Pontecorvo) Spaghetti-Western, film discussion group, March 2, 2009
The
Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo 1966) No More War Film Tank, a film discussion group,
The
Dictatorship of the Lens: Notes on Gillo Pontecorvo's Queimada Benjamin from No Useless Leniency,
'Kapò': portraying the unthinkable in art - Los Angeles Times Dennis Lim from The LA Times, April 11, 2010
Rock
The Casbah: Telegraphing An Uprising In THE BATTLE OF ... Tom Augustine from Birth Movies Death, August 3, 2017
Yes,
'The Battle of Algiers' Speaks to Our Times, but It's ... - Village Voice Eric Hynes, October 5, 2016
Rock the Casbah:
"The Battle of Algiers" Turns 50 | Movie Mezzanine Vikram Murthi, October 7, 2016
Interview with Gillo Pontecorvo Gerald Peary interview both in 1991 and 1993
Daniel Rothbart - An Interview
with Gillo Pontecorvo Gillo Pontecorvo and the Cinema of Revolution, by Daniel
Rothbart, 2000
Interview with
Gillo Pontecorvo at the World Socialist Web Site Maria Esposito interview
Gillo Pontecorvo: The Dictatorship of Truth | Link TV Gillo Pontecorvo: The Dictatorship of Truth, a documentary film
Gillo Pontecorvo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE
Pontecorvo's debut inhabits a middle ground between political
consciousness and star-driven melodrama, making it an interesting marker post
for Italian cinema between the austerity of classic Neo-Realism and the
international art house successes of the '60s. Although the film's
ideologically on the side of the fishermen who form themselves into a
collective to stop the wholesalers paying them less than their due, its heart
is with loner Montand, driven by the same low prices to using dynamite to blow
the fish out of the water. Ultimately, it's about personal tragedies shaped by
economic inequalities, but, like its Neo-Realist forebears, isn't above using
cute kids to up the emotional ante. Montand's a rock of integrity throughout,
though you can understand Pontecorvo's surprise when he confessed during the
shoot on the Dalmatian coast that he couldn't actually swim. (From the novel Squarciò
by Franco
Solinas.
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Usually obscured when not scoffed off as a botched La Terra Trema, Gillo Pontecorvo's first feature lacks the moral passion and hair-trigger dynamics of the director's better-known works, but its humanizing of political lines remains sharply stirring. Set in a rocky island off the Dalmatian coast, the story follows rugged fisherman Yves Montand, whose muscular individualism (to say nothing of his deep-sea dynamiting technique) sets him against the net-throwing locals (led by childhood buddy Francisco Rabal) and makes him the target of the coastal guard. Heads got bumped behind the scenes as well, and it isn't hard to see where Pontecorvo, a committed leftist, and the profit-minded producers clashed -- the filmmaker originally planned to shoot the project in black-and-white grit with actual locals, while the moneylenders imposed tourist-pamphlet hues and big-star wattage. Actually, the film's basic flaw lies on a conceptual level: Pontecorvo and his frequent collaborator, writer Franco Solinas, display a problematically mixed attitude toward their main character, admiring (or at least eulogizing) Montand's independence while condemning it to subjugation for the good of the Group. (The lone-seagull-vs.-flock imagery bookending the plot is symptomatic of the film's occasional clumsiness.) Seen today, the most striking elements are exactly those criticized for running against the film's neorealist template -- Montand, Rabal and Alida Valli (as Montand's wife) imbue their characters with a roundedness that nonprofessionals could hardly summon, while the supposedly vapid pictorialism grounds the ideals with a harsh physicality. In moments such as Montand's dignified farewell to the failed officer, one spots the seeds of the complex relationship between oppressor and oppressed that Pontecorvo brilliantly documented in The Battle of Algiers. With Umberto Spadaro, Peter Carsten, Federica Ranchi, Ronaldino Bonacchi, and Giancarlo Soblone.
The
Wide Blue Road - TCM.com Jeff
Stafford
After 44 years, Gillo Pontecorvo's debut feature, The
The Wide Blue Road is heavily influenced by the Italian neorealism
movement, particularly the films of Roberto Rossellini, but it also predates
the French New Wave of the late fifties in its stylistic approach to the social
and political issues of its story. On the surface, the film is a beautifully
photographed melodrama about conflicts within a peasant fishing village, but
underneath is another scenario that pits capitalist ingenuity against Communist
collectivism. Regardless of his intentions, Pontecorvo reportedly was very
disappointed with his first feature, saying in a New York Times
interview with Bill Desowitz, "I was so sad that it didn't turn out the
way I wanted. I wanted to shoot it in black and white, and I felt Alida (Valli)
was too exquisite to play the wife of a fisherman, and I felt it had too much
melodrama. But Rossellini told me: 'Don't be stupid! This is only your first
film. It's not that bad. There will be more.'" Pontecorvo would go on to
make such controversial films as Kapo (1960), which was set in a Polish
concentration camp; the internationally acclaimed The Battle of Algiers;
and Burn! (1969), starring Marlon Brando as a diplomat trying to
suppress a slave revolt on a Portuguese-controlled
For anyone unfamiliar with French actor/singer Yves Montand, The Wide Blue
Road is a great introduction to this magnetic screen presence. While
deservedly famous for his macho portrayal of a dynamite-carrying truck driver
in The Wages of Fear (1953), Pontecorvo's film is an even better
showcase for Montand's talents. Interestingly enough, the actor's own
background is very close to the outsider character he plays in The Wide Blue
Road: the son of Italian immigrants living in France, Montand grew up in
poverty and supported himself with a variety of occupations - busboy,
bartender, factory laborer - before gaining fame as a chansonnier in Paris
under the "sponsorship" of internationally renown singer Edith Piaf.
Pontecorvo recalls that during the filming of The Wide Blue Road,
"Yves was such a showman. He was not only very patient with me, but he
served as my assistant. He would do anything you asked. He couldn't swim and
was afraid at first, but we attached a rope to him and he made it look so easy
with that graceful body of his." Graceful might not be the best word to
describe Montand's famous dog-paddling scene but everything else he does in the
film looks effortless, and inspired New York Times critic Stephen Holden
to write that Montand gives "a star performance radiant with macho
glamour." In addition to Montand and the beautiful Alida Valli, as his
wife, Rosetta, The Wide Blue Road also features an early performance by
Mario Girotti who would later change his name to Terence Hill and become an
international star, thanks to his appearances in such popular spaghetti
Westerns as They Call Me Trinity (1970) and My Name Is Nobody
(1973).
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Gloria Monti
Film Journal International (Daniel Eagan) review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
About World Film Jürgen Fauth
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review
Wide Blue Road, The - Gillo Pontecorvo's (La Grande Strada Azzurra) Milestone Films Movie Playbill, including a synopsis, cast, director biography and filmography (pdf format)
Washington Post [Stephen Hunter]
Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
KAPÒ
Susan Strasberg is the Parisian Jewish teenager who's orphaned by the Nazis and, in order to save herself, becomes in time the heartless 'Kapo' of a Polish concentration camp. The Red Army advances and an escape is effected during which the Kapo (who has by this time fallen in love with Russian inmate Terzieff) redeems herself through self-sacrifice. Pontecorvo, a former commander in the wartime Italian resistance, who co-scripted this luridly realistic film with Franco Solinas, strives to say something about the nature of survival in the pit of degradation, but becomes mired in an overloaded plot peopled with stereotypes and filled out with signposted moral questions. Five years later, having made his mistakes here, the director executed his flawless, harrowing masterpiece, The Battle of Algiers.
DVDs
- Al Jolson's 'Mammy,' in New DVD Edition
Dave Kehr from The New York Times,
Nominated for an Academy Award in 1960 but not shown
commercially in the
Starring Susan Strasberg, who played Anne Frank onstage but not in the film, “Kapò” seems almost sadistically determined to express all the horror that had been left out of “Diary.” Where the Stevens film has only one brief shot set in a concentration camp (when Millie Perkins’s Anne strains to imagine the fate of a friend), “Kapò” depicts a full range of atrocities, from camp guards raping prisoners to bodies heaped in lime pits.
A kind of anti-Anne, Strasberg’s Edith is a virginal
14-year-old rounded up by the Nazis in
This is not a movie that believes, despite everything, that people are really good at heart. The prisoners fight over scraps of bread, and only one, a frail, saintly figure played by Emmanuelle Riva of Alain Resnais’s “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” seems capable of feeling shame and compassion, and inevitably kills herself. And yet all the gruesome detail only serves to make you more aware of how much Pontecorvo (the future director of “The Battle of Algiers”) has left out, in order to make his film even marginally bearable. “Kapò” bears out the wisdom of Claude Lanzmann’s reasoned approach in “Shoah”: If you can’t show everything, and you can’t, it is better to show nothing at all.
Writing in Les Cahiers du Cinéma in 1961, the director Jacques Rivette took Pontecorvo to task for embellishing Ms. Riva’s suicide scene with a fussy little camera movement: the man who would do that, Rivette wrote, “deserves nothing but the most profound contempt.” Those words seem harsh in a world that has since seen far greater aesthetic distortions of the Holocaust — what fate would Mr. Rivette reserve for the director of “Life Is Beautiful”? — but the point is valid. Some content remains resistant to form.
Kapo - TCM.com James Steffen
Edith, a 14 year-old Jewish girl living in
Gillo Pontecorvo's underappreciated Kapo (1959) a French, Italian and
Yugoslavian co-production, was one of the earliest feature films to focus on
life inside the concentration camps apart from Eastern Bloc productions such as
Wanda Jakubowska's The Last Stop (
Pontecorvo (b. 1919) has made only five feature films to date: The Wide Blue
Road (1957), Kapo, The Battle of Algiers, Burn! (1969)
and Operation Ogre (1980). Born into a Jewish family in
By the time Susan Strasberg (1938-1999) made Kapo in 1959, she had
already established a strong reputation with the lead role in the original
Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank and her performances in The
Cobweb (1955) and Picnic (1955). The daughter of Lee and Paula
Strasberg of Actors Studio fame, she also befriended Marilyn Monroe and later
wrote about their friendship in the 1992 book Marilyn and Me.
Strasberg's large, expressive eyes were undoubtedly one of the features that
attracted Pontecorvo to her in the first place. In her 1980 autobiography Bittersweet,
Strasberg recalls that upon first meeting her in
Kapo's reputation has been decidedly mixed since its initial release.
Strasberg recalls that the film received a standing ovation at the Venice Film
Festival and she was called "La Strasberg." She was also awarded Best
Actress at the 1961
The Tracking Shot in Kapo • Senses of Cinema Serge Daney from Senses of Cinema, February 12, 2004, originally published in Trafic, Fall 1992
The Story of a Myth : The “Tracking
Shot in Kapò” or the Making of ... Laurent Jullier et Jean-Marc Leveratto,
« The Story of a Myth :
The “Tracking Shot in Kapò” or
the Making of French Film Ideology », Mise au point, April 1, 2016,
3quarksdaily Robin Varghese responds to Axmaker’s article, April 28, 2010
jacques-rivette.com: On Abjection Jacques Rivette review from Cahiers du cinéma, June 1961
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
DVDs.
"Kapò," "Earth," More
David Hudson from The Auteurs,
Dzenis
on Postcards from the cinema Serge
Daney, Postcards from the cinema, review by Anna Dzenis
from Screening the Past, July 19,
2007
'Kapò':
portraying the unthinkable in art - Los Angeles Times Dennis Lim from The LA Times,
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
BATTLE OF ALGIERS
God
be with you. —Jaffar (Saadi Yacef ), FLN
military chief as he sends women with explosives in their baskets to bomb
French targets
It’s
hard enough to start a revolution, even harder to sustain it, and hardest of
all to win it. But it’s only afterwards, once we’ve won, that the real
difficulties begin. —Si Ben M’hidi, FLN
leader
Legality
can be inconvenient. —French
reporter at a news conference, commenting on the methods of torture used by
Colonel Mathieu
Should
France stay in Algeria? If your answer is still yes, then you must accept all
the consequences.
—Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin) in 1957, followed by a
montage of graphically horrific methods of torture, shown to the music of a
Bach organ Prelude
Often imitated, but never equaled, as bold and raw a film as one is ever likely to see, a thrilling, in-your-face examination of the last bloody vestiges of the French colonial occupation in Algeria in the 1950’s, street by street, house by house, shown with such realism that it resembles a documentary. This strikingly original Black & White film proves you don’t need a big budget, great actors, or beautiful photography to produce a masterpiece, instead this film relies on precise and meticulous direction which relies on suspenseful storytelling which never lags, using real people and locations and what resembles a hand-held, cinema vérité camera style to lend an extraordinary authenticity to the people inhabiting the streets of the Arab Casbah region of Algiers. Also noteworthy is the objective balance in getting both sides right, where neither side's conscience survives unscathed, from the exhilaration of the Arab resistance fighters, who rely on terrorist measures in their battle for liberation, including moments of horror when the bombers themselves realize that, by their actions, Arabs would be killed alongside the French, to the French, who express an admiration for the determination of the opposition, yet they rely on their much greater military firepower, turning the region into a police state, but are reduced to using methods of terrorism and torture themselves to counter a largely invisible enemy whose ability to stay united with what seemed like so little was shocking to an established European power that inhabited Algeria for 130 years. This is Frantz Fanon style filmmaking, as never has there been a more Wretched of the Earth style exposé of the devastating effects of Colonialism, where the Motherland pretends to be paternalistically friendly and helpful while draining the nation’s wealth and resources, continually undermining the colonized citizens with humiliating and demeaning racist depictions, where the colonizer continues to exploit the colonized as second class citizens. The similarities to Iraq and the Gaza Strip remain powerfully unsettling. The film was banned in France at the time of its release while winning the Golden Lion as the Best Film of the Venice Film Festival in 1966.
The film remains the seminal work on documenting revolutionary tactics, which includes targeted assassinations of police and bombings in heavily populated European areas, including a truck driver showing early signs of the inclination to become a suicide bomber, while also depicting the anti-terrorist police methods as well, which also include bombings, mass arrests, guarded security check points, and the routine use of torture in interrogation methods. Wasting no time, the film gets into the heart of the action with an opening segment of torture that could just as easily be from Rossellini’s OPEN CITY (1945), leading the French to the hiding place of the last head of the Algerian Resistance movement in 1957 before telling the rest of the story in flashback motif, going backwards in time and showing the earlier meetings of organizing the structure of various militant cells which were designed specifically so that information was spread to as few people as possible, limiting the knowledge that each individual may know while still allowing the entire organization to make strategic strikes. My guess is that this technique is still used today, which shows how relevant the film really is, offering what amounts to a timeless perspective while actually documenting a specific historical event. Structurally, the film plays out much like Eisenstein’s BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925), which shows the mutiny on a Russian battleship and the rallying of the sympathetic masses in 1905 only to lead to their crushing defeat, documenting the preliminary events that led to such outrage that it sparked the Russian Revolution in 1917. Similarly, Pontecorvo, an Italian Marxist director who commanded the anti-Fascist Milan Resistance in 1943, painstakingly reconstructs actual events that visualizes the birth of Algerian independence, which began as an idea, requiring education of the masses, mobilization of contacts, acts of resistance, and eventually a call to arms. But the French response was swift and demonstrably harsh, turning Algiers into an occupied police state where citizens could be rousted out of their beds at any time and subject to brutal interrogations, with their leaders targeted for arrest, assassination, or extinction. The irony, of course, is that some of the heavy handed French police were former Resistance fighters themselves against the Nazi occupation or survivors of the Holocaust.
Much of the accuracy and rich detail comes from Saadi Yacef, playing Jaffar, who was the actual FLN military chief in 1956 and ‘57, the brains behind the resistance operation until he was captured and sentenced to death, writing his memoirs in prison, Souvenirs de la Bataille d'Alger, published in 1962, the year Algeria obtained their independence, which were used in the making of this movie, where he is also one of the film’s producers. Yacef was eventually pardoned when Charles De Gaulle returned to power and currently serves as a Senator in the Algerian National Assembly. One can’t say enough about the sheer artistry in making this film, where the construction of the story and the use of editing is simply outstanding, while the cinematography by Marcello Gatti shooting without a tripod captures the seedy authenticity in a manner that is unrivalled, taking Italian realism to new heights, displaying the vibrancy of the impoverished Arab quarters like its rarely been seen, using all non-professional actors (except for the French Colonel played by Jean Martin, himself a fierce critic of the French occupation), who comprise a multitude of human faces, showing narrow streets that are always crowded and overpopulated, like a labyrinth where the density is unimaginable, with women dressed from head to toe in long, flowing robes, where the French police in their uniforms couldn’t appear more out of place. Particularly compelling is the integration of sound and music, using the bold percussive sounds of Ennio Morricone to move the action along contrasted against the soft, spiritual sounds of a Bach Passion or an organ Prelude while prisoners are being tortured, also the opening movement of Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony, which was written to commemorate the eerie calm outside the Palace Square in 1905 before unarmed protestors were massacred by the Tsar, mournful music which is heard as the French are conducting raids to round up Resistance fighters who would later be tortured or killed. The film retains an impassioned honesty and a no-nonsense sense of outrage using a staggering, newsreel-like authenticity, providing us with a time capsule view of history in the making. Really, nothing this riveting has ever been made—either before or since.
The Chicago Reader: Jonathan Rosenbaum
Gillo Pontecorvo's
powerful and lucid 1965 docudrama about the Algerian struggle for independence
in the 1950s was screened for Pentagon employees last August, though one
wonders how helpful it might have been; the terrorists in this film aren't
suicidal or religiously motivated, and their orientation appears to be quite
different from that of contemporary Middle Eastern terrorists in other
respects. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't see this--it's one of the best
movies about revolutionary and anticolonial activism ever made, convincing,
balanced, passionate, and compulsively watchable as storytelling. The French
aren't depicted as heavies, despite their use of torture, nor are the Algerian
rebels, who set off bombs in cafes. In fact the French colonel here (Jean
Martin, the only professional actor in the cast) expresses admiration for the
rebels, who ultimately achieved their goals when Algeria won its independence.
In French and Arabic with subtitles. 123 min.
Time Out London (Dave Calhoun) review [5/5]
Gillo
Pontecorvo’s stirring anatomy of an urban uprising – the violent
nationalist revolt in
Peter Thompson from Australian Sunday Online (link lost)
The Battle of Algiers is more than just a film. It’s an
important document in the history of ideas that have shaped our world. But
simply as a film, it’s a knockout. It recreates the battle for independence
fought in the streets of
Pontecorvo was given unlimited access to the streets of
One of the many features admired over the years is the way the film is
structured. As the last of the guerilla leaders is betrayed and hunted down, we
stare into their faces, contemplating their imminent deaths.
And from there we go back three years in time to the beginning of the terror
launched by the FLN, the National Liberation Front. Illiterate petty criminal
Ali La Pointe is recruited and his loyalty tested. He’s given a gun to kill a
policeman, unaware that it’s not loaded.
Having proved he’s not a police collaborator, he’s part of increasingly violent
acts against the colonial authorities. Battles are fought in the narrow alleys
of the town’s Arab quarter, the Casbah.
Most confronting of all, Arab women are recruited to deliver bombs into
civilian areas. They’re chosen for their European looks and dressed
accordingly. At the heavily guarded checkpoints, they slip past the guards, who
treat them with respect and consideration.
These are some of the most controversial scenes in the film. In her typically
hysterical way, famous film critic Pauline Kael wrote that The Battle of
Algiers was "probably the only film that has ever made middle-class
audiences believe in the necessity of bombing innocent people."
Perhaps for a naïve audience, that might be true. But if you look at it
carefully, Pontecorvo never says that. He takes care to personalise those who
are about to die, emphasising their ordinary humanity.
What does seem inevitable is the escalation of violence. In one of the most
striking scenes, French paratroopers march through the streets, proudly led by
Colonel Mathieu, who will orchestrate a ruthless campaign of torture and
intimidation.
He's a fictional character based on the real life General Jacques Massu and
played by the only professional actor in the film, Jean Martin.
And again, it’s Pontecorvo’s characterisation of Mathieu that makes the film
much more than a propaganda tract. Mathieu knows he can win against the
terrorists, but he’s also aware that the methods he has to use might ultimately
cost him victory.
One of the things that most impresses other filmmakers about The Battle of
Algiers is the crowd scenes. Pontecorvo was fortunate to have hundreds of
willing volunteers. Many had been part of the real events just a few years
earlier. But his choreography and direction of the key players is remarkable.
The Battle of Algiers is an extraordinary film and it’s worth seeing
simply as a film. But there are no simple answers to the wider questions it
raises. Any euphoria at
The
Battle of Algiers Harold Clurman
from The Nation,
Gillo Pontecorvo's realistic recreation of
Innocent that I am, I enjoyed every one of the seven features I
saw during the first week of the Fifth New York Film Festival at
What I appreciated most of all was the relevance of virtually all the exhibits to the worlds which produced them. They are much more expressions of our day than most of the plays we see in the theatre.
We expected the festival to begin with "experiment", it began with excellence The Battle of Algiers is a first-rate picture. From the specialist's point of view this film—the work of a 35-year-old Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo—is remarkable for being an entirely convincing "documentary" of which not one foot is composed of stock shots or newsreel material Yet one finds that one is there in the midst of the moment. A sense of the actual is never compromised by the taint of contrivance for effect. An expert may also admire the organizational capacity the picture demonstrates. In appearance and movement, the crowd scenes convey reality more strikingly than do the techniques of cinéma vérité.
The Battle of Algiers creates the impression of total
objectivity. Folks with a particular political bias will contradict this (A
Parisian journalist told me that the picture was under official ban in
The picture mirrors events in the Algerian uprising against French dominance of their country. At first we witness incidents in the terrorist campaign initiated by members of one cell of the National Liberation Front (the FLN). We are shown parts of the French counter-terror — bombings, etc. The Algerians kilt a number of the French-European policemen; the French retaliate with even greater ferocity. The Algerians then blow up several cafes and an air terminal largely frequented by the Europeans.
The French army formally intervenes through a paratroop division headed by a Colonel Mathieu With quiet and deadly efficiency he rounds up the leaders of one of the most active of the terrorist units Though the army code does not contain the word, torture is resorted to. When the last of the terrorists is trapped (along with his aides) the group is liquidated: the FLN rebellion is quelled. All this happens in 1954. After two years of "peace," massive and apparently spontaneous street rioting breaks out. The struggle takes on wider scope. We know the end: in 1960 the Algerians gain independence.
No matter who is being destroyed, we shudder at the tenor of the events. We take little satisfaction at the "triumph" of one side or the other in the mutual slaughter. (We even pity the poor cops.) In one of the cafés we see a crowd of Europeans (French) at their drinks and a baby licking an ice cream cone. When the place is blown up we remember that child. We are outraged at the wantonness of this "senseless murder."
We of course are equally infuriated by the French when we witness the terrible pain inflicted on the Algerian prisoners from whom their captors are determined to elicit information. The variety and ingenuity of the means employed add to the horror of the procedures We admire the cool austerity, the intelligence and soldierly self-discipline of the French colonel but we realize that he is a killer. (He points out that he was a member of the underground against the Nazis and is thus no Fascist.) We respect the terrorist leaders for their determination, courage and steely pragmatism, but they are as ruthless as the French. Even in its most violent scenes the film indulges in neither sentimentality nor delight in cruelty. It contains none of the sadism common to so many pictures presented as entertainment.
The objectivity of The Battle of Algiers is not indifference. We might conclude that the picture's final statement is pacifist. But I doubt that that is its intention. Pacifism is an untenable position unless one is willing to die rather than to resist evil through fighting. Only the saintly are capable of such a course, and very few of us are that.
In the context of the picture alone I found myself partisan of
neither side. Some in the audience equated the struggle in
Is the picture "revolutionary" then, as we understood the term in the thirties? Not precisely Still what it communicates is not nebulous or indeterminate in its implications What we may gather from it politically is that ultimately no people will allow itself to be ruled by alien force. In many respects the Algerians profited from the French presence in their country and were treated better than we have treated the black man in ours. They still wanted to be free of any governing class not of their stock, language, tradition or religion.
Even this, however, is not the picture's true import. Its content
has classic and tragic dimensions beyond politics. Wars are as unreasonable as
they are terrible. For it may be argued that they rarely achieve the benefits
that both sides sincerely claim they are battling to bring about (Are not many
now shocked at
War and revolutions may not be inevitable. We pray and plan to avoid them but from time immemorial they have not been avoided. In that sense they are all too human. Understanding and wisdom are impossible without an initial recognition of this tragic fact. We can accept it without condemning ourselves to hopelessness, to an impotent fatalism or to a hawkish militarism
Much of this may be strongly contested. On another occasion I might contest it myself! That I should he impelled to say this now is simply evidence of the picture's sober eloquence, its modest power. Its acting, as well as its other elements, is in the vein of a simple and direct expressiveness.
Particularly striking in this regard are Jean Martin as the French colonel dignified, hard, tempered, keen, and the two men of unalterable commitment and resolution who play the FLN leaders. (Are they professional actors?) The brave 10-year old Algerian boy who is part of the rebel equipe is also perfectly cast and directed. All in all then The Battle of Algiers is a film of which it may be said without absurdity that it is a masterpiece of epic realism.
My only demur relates to the musical score about which Poniecorvo was especially concerned and on which he is said to have collaborated. The music is not "bad"—it will not interfere with anyone's appreciation of the picture—but in respect to the rest it is rather conventional and not stylistically consonant with the whole.
The
Battle of Algiers: Bombs and Boomerangs
Criterion essay by Peter Matthews,
Jean Martin, 1922–2009 Criterion tribute, February 12, 2009
Criterion Collection: Battle of Algiers
Rock the Casbah: "The Battle of Algiers" Turns 50 | Movie Mezzanine Vikram Murthi, October 7, 2016
Yes,
'The Battle of Algiers' Speaks to Our Times, but It's ... - Village Voice Eric Hynes, October 5, 2016
Rock
The Casbah: Telegraphing An Uprising In THE BATTLE OF ... Tom Augustine from Birth Movies Death, August 3, 2017
Sight & Sound: David Wilson Politics
and Pontecorvo, Summer 1971
One
Struggle, Many Fronts
World Socialist Web Site review Richard Phillips, May 29, 2004
A
new look at The Battle of Algiers.
Charles Paul Freund from Slate,
August 27, 2003
Westminster
Wisdom Gracchi,
The Battle of
Algiers - Archive - Reverse Shot At Arm’s Length, by Saul Austerlitz from Reverse Shot, June 20, 2003
The
Battle of Algiers - TCM.com Michael
Atkinson, also seen here: Read
TCM's article on The Battle of Algiers
The Village Voice: Michael Atkinson Rocket the Casbah, January
07, 2004
La Battaglia di Algeri - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Janet E. Lorenz from Film Reference
Revolution Now (and Then)! J. Hoberman from American Prospect magazine, January 1, 2004
Flak Magazine
[Elbert Ventura]
Kevin
Berry on The Battle of Algiers Kevin
Berry from LewRockwell,
Sheila
K. Johnson: The Battle of Algiers and Its Lessons Common
Dreams,
A Nasty Business - The Atlantic Bruce Hoffman, January 2002
The
Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo | Waggish Waggish,
Filmjourney Doug Cummings,
Punishment
Parks: The Battle of Algiers on DVD - Bright Lights Film ... Omar Odeh from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 31, 2004
Revolution
in the Mirror: Life Imitates Art in the Middle East and North Africa Timothy Ledwith analyzing Potemkin and The Battle of Algiers in a modern Middle East context from PopMatters,
Alexander
Billet: A Marxist Poet--The Legacy of Gillo Pontecorvo Alexander Billet from Monthly Review,
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul (Matthew Wilder)
review Life During Wartime, by Matthew Wilder,
Democracy Now: The Battle of Algiers—1966 Film Depicting Algerian War of Independence Against French Occupation Parallels Brutal U.S. Occupation of Iraq Democracy Now, November 9, 2005
“The
Battle of Algiers” – blueprint for revolution ... “The
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [4/4]
The Village voice film guide: 50 years of movies from classics to ... - Google Books Result Dennis Lim (320 pages), 2007, includes his online review of Battle of Algiers
Algiers Jenny Haines from Oz Left, also seen
here: BELLACIAO - The Battle of
Algiers - Jenny Haines
ONE MAN'S FREEDOM FIGHT Saadi Yacef 's battle for Algerian ... ONE MAN'S FREEDOM FIGHT Saadi Yacef 's battle for Algeria, by Barry Didcock from The Sunday Herald, May 20, 2007, also seen here: Saadi Yacef interviews
Battle Cries -
Page 1 - Movies - New York - Village Voice
Leslie Camhi from The Village
Voice,
The Battle of Algiers (1967) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com James Steffen
The Battle of Algiers -
New York Movie Review - NYMag Peter
Rainer
PopMatters (Todd R. Ramlow) dvd
review [Criterion Collection]
Really
Rocking the Casbah: 'The Battle of Algiers'
W. Scott
VideoVista review Tom Matic
Movie-Vault.com (Mel Valentin) review [9/10]
BFI | Sight & Sound |
One Deadly Summit Patrick Kennedy
from Sight and Sound, September
2001
filmcritic.com Jules Brenner
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Images (Donald Melanson) review
Culture Wars [Philip Cunliffe]
Film Freak Central review Travis Mackenzie Hoover
Harvey S. Karten retrospective [A-] also seen here: Harvey S. Karten
DVD Times Mark Boydell
DVD Verdict (Bill Gibron) dvd review [Criterion Collection] 3-disc
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection, 3-disc
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/4] Criterion Collection, 3-disc
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Matt Peterson) dvd review Criterion Collection, 3-disc
DVD Talk (David Walker) dvd review [4/5] [Criterion Collection] 3-disc
MovieFreak.com (Dylan Grant) dvd review [10/10] [Criterion Collection] 3-disc
DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Brandon Grafius, Criterion Collection, 3-disc
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review [Criterion Collection] 3-disc
filmcritic.com (Jules Brenner) review [4/5] also seen here: Cinema Signals (Jules Brenner) review [3/4]
Offoffoff.com review Joshua Tanzer
Bill's
Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
hybridmagazine.com review Nathan Baran
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [A-]
A Film Odyssey [Robert Humanick]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
CNN Showbiz (Paul Clinton) review Barbara Keenlyside
Celluloid Heroes [Paul McElligott]
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [5/5]
Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [5/5]
Ethics
on Film: Discussion of "The Battle of Algiers" | Carnegie Council ... May 5, 2009
The
Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo 1966) No More War Film Tank, a film discussion group,
Dialogic:
Battle of Algiers/Battaglia di Algeri, La (Algeria/Italy ... Thivai Abhor from Dialogic,
Battle of Algiers and Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth generic 9-page essay (Undated, in pdf format)
The
Battle of Algiers - English blog | By Algeria Channel
THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS page Film Forum
Movie Magazine International review Moira Sullivan
All Movie Guide [Brendon Hanley]
Interview with Gillo Pontecorvo Gerald Peary interview both in 1991 and 1993
INTERVIEW WITH SAADI YACEF | Electric Sheep – Features, essays ... Virginie Sélavy interview from Electric Sheep magazine, May 13, 2007
Entertainment Weekly review [A-] Owen Gleiberman
BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) dvd review
The prescience of
The Battle of Algiers | Film | The Guardian Ian Jack, July 29, 2005
Gillo Pontecorvo: The Battle of Algiers | Film | The Guardian Derek Malcolm’s Top 100 Films, from The Guardian, July 20, 2000
6. The Battle of Algiers (1965, Gillo Pontecorvo) A masterly ... #6 of the 100 Best Films from The Independent
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [5/5]
Washington Post article about the Pentagon’s screening of THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS October 31, 2003
The Boston Phoenix review Steve Vineberg
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
San Francisco Chronicle (Walter Addiego) review
Click here to read Emory Holmes II’s article on THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS from The Los Angeles Times
The
Battle of Algiers' - MOVIE REVIEW - Los Angeles Times ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times,
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4] May 30, 1968
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies] October 10, 2004
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review September 21, 1967
What Does the Pentagon See in 'Battle of Algiers'? - New York Times Michael T. Kaufman, September 7, 2003, also seen here: New York Times article about the Pentagon’s screening of THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS
FILM - FILM - Lessons of the Pentagon's Favorite Training Film ... by Stuart Klawans from The New York Times, January 4, 2004
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Saadi Yacef - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Algeria 1956 a portrait of Ali-la-Pointe from Yacef’s book
Gillo Pontecorvo-La Battaglia di Algeri (1966) in AvaxHome terrific photos from the film
The Battle of Algiers script by Gillo Pontecorvo & Franco Solinas from Daily Script
Gillo Pontecorvo's Return to Algiers Carlo Celli from Film Quarterly, Winter 2004, first page posted online January 10, 2005
BFI | Film & TV Database | GILLO PONTECORVO'S RETURN TO ALGIERS (1992)
General
Jacques Massu | Times Online Obituary
Times Online,
Frantz Fanon Wikipedia
Postcolonial and Postimperial Literature: An Overview
Battle of Algiers: Clips YouTube clips
BURN!
aka: Queimada!
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Pontecorvo's memorable sequel to Battle of Algiers sees Brando in finely ambiguous form as the drunken, cynical Sir William Walker, a British agent sent to the Caribbean island of Queimada in the mid-1800s to stir up a native rebellion against the Portuguese sugar monopoly; ten years later, he is forced to return there to destroy the leader he himself created, in order to open up trade with Britain. Falling between epic adventure and political allegory, the film is occasionally clumsily structured and poorly focused; but Pontecorvo, working from a script by Franco Solinas, provides a sharp, provocative analysis of colonialism, full of telling irony, bravura set pieces, and compelling imagery, while Brando's stiff-lipped performance, emphasising his character's confused mixture of dignity and deceit, intelligence and evil, determination and disillusion, never allows the allegory to dominate the human content. A flawed but fascinating film.
QUEIMADA/BURN! (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1969) « Dennis Grunes Dennis Grunes
In Queimada there is a cockfight, where domesticated
birds battle to the death because others—men—have set them to it. Queimada is a
fictional
Drawing upon Joseph Conrad and Karl Marx, Gillo Pontecorvo, working from a script by Franco Solinas and Giorgio Arlorio, raises parallels between the power coordinates here and those in play in the then-current Vietnam War. At one point Walker even explains that, if José Dolores isn’t taken down, other countries in the area will succumb to the revolutionary spirit he represents and counter European capitalistic prerogatives—the U.S. “domino theory.” A former leader in the Resistance, and one of those pesky Jewish Italian communists, Pontecorvo knows a freedom fighter when he sees one. Perhaps the greatest virtue of his powerful epic is its portrait of an oppressed people who rise up to oppose what they ought to oppose.
Marlon Brando, as an overemphatic
Burn - Film Comment Amy Taubin from Film Comment, September/October 2007
You can't have everything, at least not in one format. While I was working on a piece about Marlon Brando ("Orpheus Ascending") for the Sept/Oct issue of FILM COMMENT, I bought (for $6.95 via Amazon ) a VHS copy of Gillo Pontecorvo's Burn! issued in 1991 by MGM/UA and currently out of print. The color is faded, the image not letterboxed. Nevertheless, it is an invaluable relic of one of Brando's most complicated performances. The VHS is the American version, which was regarded as "butchered" by both the director and the star (who managed to agree on little else). UA eliminated 20 minutes from Pontecorvo's cut (which was released in Europe under the title Queimada), thus undermining the sweep of the action and rendering the film's attempt to map the historic cycles of white colonialist oppression and black insurgency fairly incoherent.
Through October 7, Film Forum is screening a restored print
of the uncut Italian version of Burn! (A DVD release of the restored
version will likely follow.) In all respects save one, this Burn! is preferable
to the out-of print VHS. For the first-time, American audiences will be able to
appreciate Pontecorvo's blending of cinematic romanticism with an analysis of
black revolutionary struggle which is part Marx and part Franz Fanon. Unlike The
Battle of Algiers, which made use of a cinema vérité style to tell the
story of an actual liberation struggle, Burn! is a political allegory,
styled like a costume action-adventure picture. The setting is a fictional
sugar cane-producing
As we learn in the opening scene, Queimada (which means "burn" in
Portuguese) has had a history of conflagration. In the 17th century, the
Portuguese put down an uprising of the indigenous population by killing almost
everyone and reducing the cane fields to scorched earth. They then rebuilt the
labor force with slaves imported from
All this comes to pass in the first half of the film in scenes that are
sometimes overly schematic but just as often thrilling. Here, as in The
Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo is masterful at conjoining camera movement
and the choreography of large groups of people so that the screen becomes
charged with collective desire. Ennio Morricone's score, similar in its
insistence and repetitiveness to the one he composed for The Battle of
Algiers, employs the choral harmonies and modalities of Gregorian chants
with a syncopated beat that has you just about leaping out of your seat when
the victorious slave army, ragtag and radiant, comes dancing and prancing on
the backs of plumed horses to claim the prize for their hard-won, bloody
rebellion. The prize, of course, will not be theirs. The fork-tongued
Twelve years pass in a few seconds of black screen. The
second half of the film is the mirror inverse of the first.
Burn! is such an ambitious film and parts of it are so inspiring that
one can't help forgiving its unresolved contradictions, the largest of which is
the attempt to fit a dialectical reading of history into the form of an action
drama with the opposing forces of colonizer and colonized embodied in the two
leading characters. Brando often remarked that he was proudest of his work in Burn!,
and certainly it's his performance that makes the film more than just a series
of visually spectacular set pieces, and riveting from beginning to end. In
terms of Brando's career, one can look at Burn! as a match with Reflections
in a Golden Eye, which was made just two years earlier. In both films,
Brando plays a member of the ruling elite who is eaten up by self-loathing and
fights desperately against his attraction to another man. Reflection is
specifically about repressed homosexuality. In Burn!, sexual desire is
an undercurrent of the power game between Walker and Dolores.
Brando plants the notion right at the start when we see him
looking at Queimada from a boat arriving in the harbor and fingering a lavender
scarf flung casually around his throat. Brando knew how to communicate entire
subtexts through a prop and the way he handled it. You can bet he didn't choose
lavender because it was a pretty color. There is, however, a behind-the-scenes
story: Pontecorvo, who was reputed to be highly superstitious, felt about
lavender the way John Ashcroft feels about calico cats - that they are signs of
the devil. Brando was at war with Pontecorvo throughout the production, and he
may have chosen to make that bit of lavender silk the focus of the film's
opening shot just to spite him. Nevertheless, a suggestion has been planted in
the viewer's mind, and it's reinforced in the scenes that follow where we begin
to see that
And so
Brando's greatness rests in his ability to invest his body and his gaze with
multiple layers of meaning. His voice was part of that physical apparatus.
Walker is vocally one of Brando's most risky and inspired constructs - the
English accent plummy to the point of self-mockery (or mockery of the privilege
it signifies), its whispery tone oddly intimate as if the person he is talking
to is the only person special enough to understand what he's saying. The great
deficiency in the restored version of Burn! is that all the actors'
voices - Brando's included - have been dubbed into Italian. Which is why I
suggest that in addition to going to the Film Forum you get hold of one of
those few remaining VHS copies.
Alan A. Stone: Last Battle Alan A. Stone from The Boston Review, April/May 2004
The Dictatorship of the Lens: Notes on Gillo Pontecorvo's Queimada Benjamin from No Useless Leniency, February 14, 2010
Gillo
Pontecorvo's Queimada a.k.a Burn!
Gillo
Pontecorvo's Burn! - The Brooklyn Rail
David N. Meyer from The
Queimada/Burn! (1970 - Gillo Pontecorvo) Spaghetti-Western, film discussion group, March 2, 2009
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
Movies
that make you think [Jugu Abraham]
Projections Valerie,
Laramie Movie Scope (Robert Roten) review [3/4]
Georgia Straight (Mark Harris) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
The Village Voice [Elliott Stein]
filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [69/100]
UpcomingDiscs.com (Ryan Keefer) dvd review [2/5]
Reel Film Reviews (David Nusair) capsule review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [C]
BURN at Film Forum in New York City
Washington Post (Michael O'Sullivan) review
Washington Post (Stephen Hunter) review
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
Gillo Pontecorvo-Queimada (1969) (Reupload) in AvaxHome film photos
Pool, Léa
SET ME FREE (Emporte-moi) A 95
Chicago Reader Guide to the 1999 Chicago International Film Festival Patrick Z. McGavin (October 9th)
The films of
Pooley, Leanne
THE TOPP TWINS: UNTOUCHABLE GIRLS B 83
There
are some times [when] getting people to laugh, the whole crowd, that’s about
the most political thing you can do.
—Jools Topp
Can a film be harmed by feeling too harmonious and upbeat? Apparently not, as with barely an abrasive note to be seen anywhere in this loving portrait of twin sisters Jools and Lynda Topp, performing cowgirls who grew up on a dairy farm outside Auckland, touted as the country music loving, yodeling lesbians, they eventually become cultural institutions in New Zealand. Their natural inclination for Vaudeville novelty acts as filtered through the Grand Ole Opry makes both of them something of a ham, each developing alter ego, comic side characters, but they couldn’t be more comfortable in front of an audience. Perhaps the best footage in the entire film is shown early on when they sing on the streets as teenagers with Jools on the guitar busker style, where they are simply an adoring sister act with unstoppable energy and voices that blend marvelously together as one, where it’s hard to tell who sings what part, but as they stare into each others eyes as they sing, they couldn’t be more of a joy to watch. It’s immediately obvious that they’re quite talented, especially for street musicians. Realizing early on that they were both gay, with a brother who’s also gay, this was apparently quite natural for the two performers to be upfront and honest about it, never really having to come out of the closet, while it took their parents a little more time to process this surprising revelation.
As American folk musicians identified with various causes
and protest movements in the 60’s, the Topp twins identified with
The twins topped off the decade with their 1989 Gypsy
Caravan Tour, where they toured neighboring small towns while traveling in a
small caravan on wheels pulled by a tractor, where at night in town halls they
were met with swelling crowds, eventually leading to their own TV show where
they introduced a variety of home grown characters, including cross-dressers
performing comic skits. While they are
an odd choice to be the performers identified with a nation’s identity, their
constantly upbeat, good natured humor apparently reflects that indomitable Kiwi
spirit. Their only apparent setback is
when Jools develops breast cancer, forced on a heavy regimen of chemotherapy,
losing most of her hair and energy for awhile, but
Chicago Reader Ben Sachs
Like the Smothers Brothers in the
Time Out New York [Nick Schager]
Imagine a cross between the Indigo Girls and the Smothers
Brothers, and you’d have the Topp Twins,
Director Leanne Pooley’s documentary on the sisters and their “anarchist variety act” is definitely a formulaic bit of portraiture, but given its engaging, pioneering subjects, gimmickry is hardly needed to spice things up. Structured around a retrospective concert, the film offers an affectionate career recap full of clips, fan testimonies and reminiscences from the untouchable ladies themselves; if neither the personal novelty of the Topps nor their professional successes and failures is fully investigated, it’s to the film’s credit that these elements are never milked for undue pathos, either.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List Josephine Ferorelli from Cine-File
For the hardest working sisters in show-business, this
documentary serves as a welcome victory lap. After thirty years of busking,
hosting 4H rodeos, touring in 15mph tractors and traveling to nightclubs across
the globe, Jools and Lynda Topp have earned their claim to a warm-hearted
documentary. In their native
Jools and Lynda Topp's popular act, performed on television, on stage, and on the streets of New Zealand, is a mix of stand-up comedy, protest folk songs, and, most interestingly, Absolutely Fabulous-type sketches in which they play stereotypical New Zealanders who might find their unabashedly butch aesthetics objectionable. The documentary The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls takes on the challenge of introducing the unlikely duo of yodeling lesbian twins to an international audience.
Given most people's unfamiliarity with
They're unabashedly rural folk lampooning fellow rural folk whose
socio-political bite we certainly only partially understand, but they also
double as cringe-inducing representatives of an identity-politics generation so
willing to find existential relief in the pleasing of heterosexual audiences
who are, most likely, just interested in queerness-as-spectacle. The film,
which is produced by the twins' longtime manager, Arani Cuthbert, paints them
as a perfect and palatable hybrid of political awareness and universal
entertainment: "People will listen to a song before they will listen to a
speech." They take on
But while the film seems to think of the duo's project as one
that queers the red-neck ethos into acceptance of diversity, we never learn how
their shtick might translate in the lives of real queers in
Boxoffice Magazine [John P. McCarthy]
If Grand Ole Opera comedienne Minnie Pearl and crooner k.d. lang
ever had twins, they'd be dead ringers for Lynda and Jools Topp, lesbian
Country & Western performers from New Zealand and the subjects of Leanne
Pooley's documentary. A conventional portrait of an endearingly unconventional
sister act—with
roots in music halls and the dairy farm on which they were raised (and became
expert yodelers)—The Topp Twins is a piece of hagiography. Reportedly, it
holds
Since the early-1980s, the Topp siblings have been entertaining audiences with their folk songs and comedy routines, while speaking out on progressive social issues. They began busking on the streets of Auckland and are now fixtures in New Zealand's pop cultural firmament as well as beloved activists. In addition to concert and cabaret appearances, they've had many successful TV shows and toured the English-speaking world to much acclaim. Their favorite gigs are A&P (agricultural and pastoral) shows, the equivalent of American county fairs, where sheep dyeing is a favorite activity and where the Topps' lack of pretension and rural roots go over especially well.
Traditional in many respects, their act is a combination of twangy balladeering and broad comedy that wouldn't be out of place in a Pantomime show, on a Vaudeville stage or in an episode of Hee-Haw. They strum guitar, harmonize and perform sketches featuring a stable of characters such as The Two Kens, Camp Mother and Camp Leader, country bumpkins Belle and Bell Gingham and snobby socialites Prue and Dilly Ramsbottom. The material entails plenty of audience interaction and energetic, knee-slapping tomfoolery.
Their satirical edge is sharp, yet no one gets hurt. Beneath each ditty there's a real-life story and often a social message. Over the years, the Topps have come to be identified as champions of gay rights, Maori property claims, plus the anti-Nuclear and anti-Apartheid movements. They've never made a secret of their homosexuality or their liberal outlook in general, but their down-to-earth values and love for their homeland has put them in good stead with a wide cross-section of the New Zealand public. It doesn't hurt that they're talented musicians and very witty. One interviewee describes them as an "anarchist variety act." Once upon a time, during their prime, that may have been true. Nowadays however the Topps feel positively mainstream.
Relying on archival footage plus original interviews with admirers and the Topps themselves, Pooley paints an unabashedly adoring picture that succeeds in replicating their brand of fun-loving, bawdy and gently provocative entertainment. She doesn't attempt to place the duo in the context of New Zealand entertainment history, or reckon with their musical training and influences. While the film's subtitle comes from one of their songs, Pooley treats them like untouchables in the sense she avoids anything that might be unflattering or controversial, glossing over substantive issues, private and public. It might be edifying to hear from someone who doesn't care for their act or to hear more objective assessments of their careers. With one or two exceptions, only people close to the Topps or who have worked with them testify. Their parents, other musicians, and their respective domestic partners each get a brief moment in Pooley's spotlight.
The documentary gets its structure from a commemorative concert during which Lynda and Jools reminisce. This event was staged for the movie and not mounted independently, which underscores that, for all their alleged (and evident) universality, The Topp Twins is a very insular project. (Producer Arani Cuthbert has managed the Topps for nearly two decades.) It's also one of those documentaries destined to win a slew of audience awards at festivals due to the virtues of those it profiles and not on the basis of the filmmaking, best described as safely competent.
Because Lynda and Jools are so likeable, and because it's so difficult to distinguish between their personal and professional personas, you're led to wonder about a possible darker side to their collaboration. A passing reference is made to how they're wont to fight amongst themselves, and it would be interesting to witness a row between them, or hear them discuss some source of friction in their relationship.
When Jools is shown battling breast cancer, the siblings' Gemini bond comes to the fore with heartbreaking tenderness. Seeing how intertwined the sisters are, one imagines it would be impossible to come between them. Perhaps understandably then, Pooley is loathe to consider anything that might be divisive or could strike a note of disharmony. Yet The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls would be a deeper, more compelling movie had she broached a few topics that, as it stands, appear to lie out of bounds.
Urban Cinefile (Australia) [Andrew L. Urban]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Susanna Krawczyk]
Review of "Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls" | Movie ... - AfterEllen.com Danielle Riendeau
Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls - Movie Review of ... - Documentaries Jennifer Merin from About.com
Cinebanter [Michael Cummins and Tassoula Kokkoris]
Topp Twins - Untouchable Girls Stephanie Schroeder from About.com
Village Voice
Melissa Anderson
NewCity Chicago Ray Pride
THE
TOPP TWINS: UNTOUCHABLE GIRLS Facets
Multi Media
TimeOut Chicago Andrea Gronvall
'The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls' review David Wiegand from The SF Chronicle
Chicago Sun-Times Bill Stamets
The New York Times [Jeannette Catsoulis]
Bio | The Topp Twins - Official Site
Setting the
scene: Homosexual Law Reform in New Zealand
Popogrebsky, Aleksei
HOW I ENDED THIS SUMMER A- 94
In John Carpenter’s THE THING (1982), it’s the Norwegians
who are the first to go bat shit crazy from an attack, as The Thing can assume human shape and turn into the body of your
best friend, only to turn on you when you least suspect it, a film that shifts
the pervading sense of fear from the outside, as expressed by a grotesque
excess of blood and gore, to the inside, where a gloomy sense of dread hangs in
the air like being engulfed in a cloud of fog.
In this film, it’s the Russians who take a stab at the remote isolation
of a polar science station in the Arctic region. Inspired
by the diaries of Nikolai Pinegin, a painter, journalist, and the filmmaker who
made the first documentary films about the Arctic, who also accompanied Arctic
explorer Georgy Sedov on his fatal attempt to reach the North Pole in 1912,
writing a book “In Icy Expanses,” which the filmmaker read as a teenager,
fascinated by polar explorers and
“their ability to come to terms
with the monstrous vastness of time and space,” eventually moving the
actors and film crew to live for three months at the science station in
Chukotka at Russia’s northeastern most tip.
This film grabbed the attention of the jury at the
Much like the region itself, the film moves at a glacial
pace where not much ever happens except the slow, plodding rhythm of taking
scientific measurements and sending the results by radio communiqués. Sergei has a vast knowledge of the region and
a history of those who lost their lives working there, some ended up shooting
one another, others were killed by a polar bear, where the rigors of the
routines become endlessly monotonous, where Sergei records all entries by hand
while Pavel uses his computer, occasionally playing video games which puts a
charge into the slow pace of the film.
The location itself is set on the
At this point, the director ratchets up the tension and suspense, poisoning the atmosphere with dread, all happening within Pavel’s anxiously unsettled mind, as a helicopter is sent out to find them, where Pavel has 24 hours to find Sergei’s fishing location and send up flairs, where he walks through a vast wilderness of snow, ultimately finding himself on a mountainside engulfed in a patch of fog, where he hears the thunderous sound of the helicopter flying overhead and he lights up a flair, waving it in his arms, yelling and screaming, but it’s useless, as he’s invisible from the air, but the director holds the shot as Pavel walks away in disgust, eventually throwing his flare to the ground, which sends up a cloud of smoke that he walks through, but the shot is held as the smoke clears and a distinct outline of his surroundings can be seen, still holding the shot until the entire composition is perfectly clear, but the sound of the helicopter is long gone. This is a transfixing shot that in its execution recalls the compositions of Tarkovsky, many of which required a lengthy choreography of perfect timing. The unfathomable mental paralysis only grows more serious, as Pavel is bordering on the deranged, unable to face Sergei without running away, even as he has no place to go, hiding in dilapidated, ramshackle huts that haven’t been used for years, starving or freezing to death or both, where the mood of the film veers into the horror genre, a mental deterioration shown with meticulous precision, an eerie descent into a place where only nightmarish catastrophes can happen, where all that exists is the unthinkable, where the director uses time-lapse photography to speed things up to a fevered pitch, before carefully slowing things back down again and once more, holding the shot longer than what we’re anticipating, changing the configuration before our astonished eyes.
The Flickering Wall [Jorge Mourinha]
An inexperient meteorologist in a remote Arctic weather
situation receives an urgent message for his older, gruffer colleague, but
doesn't know how to break it to him. Technically accomplished suspense
two-hander, hinging on a somewhat misjudged plot twist and insufficient scripting;
still, the remarkable location-shot visuals, confident handling and strong
performances go a way to redressing some of the balance.
Filmmaker Magazine | Filmmaker Blog
Immersing us in the
frozen wilds of the Russian Arctic, writer/director Alexei Popogrebsky makes an
impressive addition to the canon of films about man's extraordinary ability to
cope with harsh nature and extreme isolation. Young Pavel (Grigory Dobrygin)
arrives at a remote research station for a summer of adventure under the
tutelage of the wise and crusty Sergei (Sergei Puskepalis), whose multi-year
assignment to the post is coming to an end. Misplaced confidence and youthful
immaturity lead to a string of potentially deadly deceptions. The deliberate
pace of life in the
The Lumière Reader [Steve Garden]
Those who have seen Alexei Popogrebsky’s Koktebel
(2003) will have some idea of what to expect from his new film, How I
Ended This Summer. Exquisitely framed images of the natural world (an
Arctic coastline in
Central to the narrative development (and ultimate meaning of the film) is the theme of miscommunication. The poor radio link between the isolated men and the mainland mirrors the communicative dysfunction between the two. The toxic relationship of the men and the radioactive pollution of their environment are implicitly linked, a metaphor that speaks to our treatment of the planet—and, of course, each other. There is little doubt that if it comes to a face-off between man and nature, our planet has a significant advantage. We may ruin our chances of survival, but the Earth will endure. In this light, the title (which comes from a mocking and deliberately ungrammatical comment from Gulybin) could suggest a quite different meaning.
How I Ended This Summer has a very deliberate pace. It requires patience to begin with, but Popogrebsky’s sure hand builds intensity with impressive expertise. The outstanding digital cinematography (by Pavel Kostomarov) has a remarkable film-stock feel to it, giving the images a beautiful, almost tactile textural quality. Great to look at, very well acted, intelligently constructed with thoughtful philosophical overtones, Popogrebsky’s psychological thriller is a superior thinking boy’s own adventure. Well worth a look.
World Socialist Web Site [Ismet Redzovic}
How I Ended Last Summer is set in a run-down weather station on an Arctic island during the summer. Written and directed by Alexei Popogrebsky, the movie has only two characters: Sergei (Sergei Puskepalis), a hard-bitten rather unapproachable weather station veteran, and a youthful Pavel (Grigory Dobrygin), who is fresh out of school. The two men measure the radioactivity of the island’s isotope beacon and report the data via a two way-radio. The film never discloses what may be buried on the island.
The first part of the film sets up the dynamics and routine of Sergei and Pavel and convincingly dramatises a developing tension between the men. The latter is serious, professional, intolerant and taciturn; the former a bit careless, prone to making silly mistakes with the readings and naively looking for some adventure which he can brag about when he returns to the city.
When Sergei goes off fishing and Pavel (now in charge) is given the difficult task of informing his colleague that his wife and child have just been killed in a car accident, things go awry. The nervous young man delays telling Sergei the news and then in order to conceal the tragic news from him sabotages the two-way radio. Pavel finally blurts it out in an angry confrontation with Sergei. The film’s second half consists of a bizarre chase between the two men with Pavel convinced that his colleague is out to kill him.
How I Ended Last Summer is a technically proficient work. Both
actors and the cinematographer, Pavel Kostomarov, won Silver Bear prizes at the
recent
Director Popogrebsky has said that he decided to make the film after reading a wide variety of literature (including diaries from weather station technicians from early parts of the twentieth century) on people enduring harsh conditions. From this standpoint the movie is a success and competently captures the striking natural scenery, psychological tedium and the characters’ generational clashes.
According to Popogrebsky, however, the most important difference between the two characters’ is their attitude to nature: “The older man has been there for 8 to 9 years and he’s in union with nature ... he’s still an individual entity but he’s part of nature. The younger man, comes there as a consumer from the city. He wants to get excitement, experience, something to put up in his blog. So we have a clash of two people with a completely different attitude to and relationship to nature. So in a way, it’s a triangle.”
While this is mildly interesting, How I Ended Last Summer is
unsatisfying and leaves one puzzled as to why it has been so widely praised by
various film critics. This year’s jury for
How I Ended This Summer (Kak Ya Provel Etim Letom) | Review | Screen Jonathan Romney from Screendaily
It’s a cliché to say that the landscape is the star of the film, but it’s
undeniably true of How I Ended The Summer, a Russian drama set in
one of the bleakest, most windswept terrains imaginable – Chukotka in the
Arctic Circle. But Chukotka has two extremely compelling co-stars in this
remarkable drama by Alexei Popogrebsky (co-director of 2003’s Koktebel).
Set at a remote meteorological station, Popogrebsky’s film proves that, even in the CGI era, film-making can still be an outward-bound muscular adventure. Narrative drive and rugged, male-angled subject matter should spread Summer’s appeal beyond the art-house niche, to pick up some of the market that relished true-adventure documentary Touching The Void.
The setting is an Arctic island in summer where two men operate a run-down weather station. One is taciturn, grizzled veteran Gulybin (imposing Puskepalis, best known as a theatre director), who occasionally sends terse messages to his wife and son on the mainland via his radio contact.
The other is lackadaisical young Danilov (Dobrygin), on a temporary posting, first seen listening to indie music on his headphones while measuring the radioactivity of the island’s dangerous isotope beacon.
Gulybin reluctantly tolerates the younger man, but reads him the riot act when Danilov’s data readings prove wildly inaccurate. While Gulybin is away fishing, Danilov takes a radio message of extremely bad news from the mainland - but for whatever reason, whether from fear or something more complex, he fails to pass it on to Gulybin. When Gulybin finally gets the news, Danilov goes AWOL, camping out on the island in forbidding conditions, eventually driving himself to the edge of sanity.
Rich in resonance, the story can be read partly as a brutal coming-of-age story, with the two men as a surrogate father-son duo; as a quasi-religious ordeal in which Danilov must go through earthly hell to redeem himself; or as a King Lear-type epic of madness and the elements. But the film also works as a nail-biting yarn, a tale of extraordinary endurance both for Danilov and for the actors, who are called upon to dive into icy water, climb sheer rock faces - even eat eggs from a disturbingly rusty frying pan.
The opening half-hour is slow-burning, evoking the repetitive life at the station, with technical talk abounding. But the play between the two men – each initially shot in claustrophobic close-up – gets us hooked psychologically.
As the story develops, Popogrebsky takes a bold risk on having us root for a hero whose motivations are unclear from the start, who seems at first callow, then apparently develops a case of hysterical cowardice.
The film was shot over three months at a real weather station and DoP Pavel Kostomarov, using the Red digital camera, captures landscapes that are striking but never aestheticised, from fog-steeped valleys to murderous rocky cliffs. Sparing use of time-lapse photography is memorable, especially in the heart-stopping closing shot.
Slant Magazine [Andrew Schenker]
115.
Russian director Aleksei Popogrebsky’s film “Kak ya provyol etim letom” (How I
Ended This Summer) (2010): Psychological cinematic perspectives on old vs. new,
and duty vs. freedom Jugu Abraham
from Movies That Make You Think
Eye for Film : How I Ended This Summer Movie Review (2010) Anton Bitel from Eye for Film
How
I Ended This Summer David Perilli
from sneersnipe
How I Ended This Summer - Daily Film Dose Alan Bacchus
How I Ended This Summer Review By harveycritic - MovieWeb.com Harvey Karten
User reviews from imdb Author: trof22 from
User reviews from imdb Author: dslacker
(dslacker@tularosa.net) from
How I Ended This Summer Kino Glaz, including an interview with the director
How I Ended This Summer Press Kit - HOW I ENDED THIS SUMMER film press kit (pdf)
AôkôLMôBYô!LEXEIô0OPOGREBSKY film press kit (pdf)
How
I Ended This Summer -- Film Review
Kirk Honeycutt from The
Variety (Leslie Felperin) review
St.
Petersburg Times Alisa Ballard,
February 26, 2010
'How I Ended This
Summer,' Arctic Thriller - Review - NYTimes.com Stephen Holden from The New York Times
Valkarkai Polar Station, Chukotka, Russia
Images for Valkarkai Polar Station, Russia photos
Chukotka Autonomous Okrug - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Poppe,
Erik
A
THOUSAND TIMES GOOD NIGHT (Tusen Ganger God Natt) C 75
Norway Ireland Sweden
(111 mi) 2013 Website
Unfortunately we’ve seen Juliette Binoche
take on this kind of overwrought material before in Amos Gitai’s DISENGAGEMENT
(2007), but this is even worse, as what’s most troubling about this film is the
way whites use a crisis in Africa to draw attention and add intensity to their
films, which are largely about white relationships, where the parallel between
the two worlds couldn’t be less appropriate, that is more like commercial
exploitation, especially when the filmmaker glosses over the historical African
context with a lot of self-serving moralizing that sounds more like lectures
than anything remotely resembling real life.
Binoche did just the opposite by capturing the world’s imagination in
her breakout film, THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING (1988), another film that
explores personal relationships, but one that beautifully blends dreams of
freedom and democracy and the possibility of artistic expression during
Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring in 1968 with images of Soviet tanks
occupying the streets, all but thwarting that dream in the August 1968 invasion, continually
placing the characters and their
ideals within a specific historical context.
If anything, this film has a naïveté about it that is equally
troublesome, and while it raises issues of the number killed in the seemingly
unending Congolese Civil War, pointing its finger at the United Nations and the
world for doing nothing, it neglects to point out how the Belgians under King
Leopold more than a hundred years ago killed as many as ten million people,
including the mutilation of children, all while ravaging the region for rubber
and other precious resources. While this
is a particularly well meaning film, beautifully photographed by John Christian
Rosenlund in Ireland, Morocco, Kenya, and Kabul, it tends to generalize with
what amounts to a dogooder’s perspective.
Binoche plays Rebecca, a driven and seemingly
obsessed war photographer who throws caution to the winds and finds herself
sent to trouble spots all over the globe, seen taking extraordinary risks in
the outset as she’s been given remarkable access by the Afghan insurgency to
photograph a young teenage suicide bomber as she prepares for her mission,
receiving a purifying bath, prayers from her elders, and goodbyes from her
family as she straps a self-detonating vest of explosives under her robe and is
driven to the heavily populated streets of Kabul. When Rebecca is let out of the van, her
instincts to continue to snap photos draws the attention of the police,
creating momentary panic where the young bomber prematurely detonates her bombs,
injuring Rebecca, seen rising from the mayhem and ashy debris in slow motion,
regathering her camera and snapping a few more photos before she collapses—all
in a day’s work. When she awakes, she is
recovering at a hospital in Dubai with a punctured lung, visited by her husband
Marcus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), though he offers a noticeably chilly reception,
a complete contrast to her greeting back home in Ireland, living in a beautiful
house by the ocean, where her youngest daughter is overly excited to see her,
hanging up a “welcome home Mom” sign, while her older teenage daughter Steph (Lauryn
Canny), easily one of the best things in the film, and yes, about the same age as the suicide bomber,
remains standoffish. The gist of it is
Marcus has had it with Rebecca playing Russian roulette with her life, not
knowing whether she’ll ever come home from an assignment, creating nothing but
nervous anxiety in the two girls, where he threatens to leave her and take the
girls, “for the sake of the children.” Somehow,
if the shoe were on the other foot, and the man was the brave and heroic war
photographer, this wouldn’t be playing out this way, where she’s literally
blamed by being the best in her profession, something that’s completely
overlooked, and she’s likely been good at it since before they started a family
together, so there’s something awfully contrived about these sudden crocodile
tears, yet this personal outrage at her career, surprisingly, becomes the
emotional centerpiece of the movie.
As Marcus is something of an unyielding,
immovable force, Rebecca actually agrees to give up her work in dangerous
areas, something that her family finds hard to believe, thinking she’s an
adrenaline junkie addicted to the thrill and immediacy of danger. So while she recovers she becomes a stay at
home Mom, reestablishing harmony and equilibrium within the family, but
immediately recognizes “I'm not good at life ... being normal.” In an attempt to breach the emotional divide
with Steph, who is working on an African project at school, Rebecca offers her
free use of photos she’s taken in the region, and introduces her to people with
specialized knowledge of the region.
Incredibly, this is not enough, as Steph overhears her mom receiving a
job offer taking pictures of refugee camps in Kenya, and suddenly she decides
this would be a good idea for a mother/daughter adventure, especially after
hearing promises that the region is “safe.”
Mind you, what family would run off to Africa for a kid’s high school
project? This isn’t just privilege, but
defies belief. Nonetheless, what begins
as an exotic adventure into strange and mysterious lands suddenly turns ugly
when the inevitable happens, as the supposedly safe region is attacked by rebel
forces, and Mom’s instincts kick in while her daughter is ushered off into
safety in an uncontrollable state of tearful anxiety. When Marcus finds out, off course, all bets
are off in their marriage, as he has what amounts to a hissy fit, claiming
irreconcilable differences. While
Rebecca is truly conflicted, where Binoche beautifully captures the
psychological complexity of her character, Marcus remains one dimensional,
where his emotional recalcitrance is equivalent to close-mindedness and
intolerance, exactly the kind of person who remains heartlessly unaffected by
the photos Rebecca takes, which are earth-shatteringly powerful. While the director himself was a war
photographer, where his photos of the Congo are used in the film, the overly
privileged characters in the film are not only the wrong people to be informing
the audience about Africa, where the conversations aren’t the least bit
natural, but the inflexible absolutism expressed by Marcus, believing the
children are better served by removing the mother from the home, where his idea
of a better solution is separation and divorce, isn’t about to make his
children’s anxieties go away.
User reviews from imdb Author: Samin Sadr
In a warm sunny day in
All the people may encounter a paradoxical situation between their family and
their job. This fact is more realizable when you are a war photographer. The
first scenes of A Thousand Times Good Night are too devastating. You can feel
the horror, anger, and self-sacrifice behavior in those Afghan extremists. It
seems that the suicide bomber just jumped to her destiny as she had been told
to do and in parallel she was scared to death. These paradoxical situations
just began from the very first scene and moves through the film. The
photographer, Rebecca, had her own dilemmas between her enthusiast and her
family life. I think the symbolic scene which shows Rebecca plunging in reverse
was frequently displayed to show how it would be difficult to decide in
dilemmas. You may watch it or refuse to watch it but it worth to watch because this
is life as it is!
A
Thousand Times Good Night: Montreal Review
John DeFore from The Hollywood
Reporter
Juliette Binoche plays a photographer who must choose between combat zones and family life.
MONTREAL – An affecting drama made more poignant by honest-feeling autobiographical elements, Erik Poppe's A Thousand Times Goodnight examines the choice between family and career when that career represents work of real social importance. A standing ovation greeted Montreal's world premiere of the film, which went on to earn the jury's Special Grand Prix. Stateside, its art house appeal is strong, with Juliette Binoche's complex performance deserving particular attention.
Binoche plays Rebecca, a photojournalist whose work in conflict zones has made her (as one of the film's rare bits of too-on-the-nose dialogue puts it) "one of the top five photographers out there." We meet her in a transfixing opening sequence that establishes both the thorny ethical questions inherent in the character's life and the way being good at her job is tied to being bad at self-preservation: Having made contacts within a Kabul-based militant group, she is allowed to document the haunting ceremony in which a woman makes herself spiritually ready for a suicide attack. Insisting on traveling with the bomber partway to her target, she winds up in the blast zone and is badly wounded.
(Poppe notes that Afghanistan's first-ever incidence of a female suicide bomber occurred on the first day of production, eerily justifying a scene written much earlier.)
Rebecca is sent home to Dublin, where she's welcomed by two charming daughters and husband, Marcus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). When Marcus says he can no longer live with a woman whose career leaves him and the girls waiting for The Call, Rebecca decides to quit working in danger zones.
No one quite believes her, but in a sequence of encounters we see Rebecca work to settle into the small talk and parenting trivia of daily life. "I'm not good at life ... being normal," she admits. When her daughter Steph (Lauryn Canny) asks Mom to take her to Kenya, where an offer to photograph a refugee camp would dovetail with a school project on Africa, it's clear that -- even though her boss guarantees the trip will be 100 percent safe -- Rebecca isn't going to be able to keep her promise.
Poppe has himself been a war photographer (some of his work from the Congo appears here, as does a sad anecdote about that work being overshadowed in the media by Paris Hilton), and he and co-writer Harald Rosenlow Eeg make a fine case for the importance of going after the raw images of warfare and suffering. Binoche conveys how those ethical ideals aren't the only thing in play: When confronted with danger, the actress becomes visibly single-minded, deaf to everything around her but the action. In one scene, her transformation is as unsettling as the violence she's chronicling.
Poppe and Eeg ignore the most obvious argument suggested by Rebecca's dilemma: that those called to this sort of work shouldn't start families in the first place. But accepting that choice as given, they're clear-eyed about the pain Rebecca causes those she loves -- fully making the case for what she's doing while dramatizing the ugliness of her failures at home. Though conversations with Rebecca's New York editor are baldly designed to up the ante, they're balanced by domestic scenes that have more chance to breathe.
Throughout, Poppe's prior experience results in top-notch visuals. His thoughtfully selected images -- both scenic and, in a heartbreaking instance of Steph turning the camera on her mother, dramatic -- are perfectly captured by John Christian Rosenlund's camera.
CIFF 2013: A Thousand
Times Good Night (2013) Marilyn
Ferdinand from Ferdy on Films
Good
Night, Montreal, from Poppe - - English
Norwegian Film Institute
Montreal
Film Review: 'A Thousand Times Goodnight' | Variety
Homecoming
as hard as surviving a crisis - Montreal Gazette Jeff Heinrich
Erik Poppe - Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
Popper, Frank
CAN MR. SMITH GET TO WASHINGTON
A positively refreshing look at one man’s attempt to unseat the political establishment in the recent political campaign for Missouri Congressman replacing the vacant seat of the retiring Richard Gephardt. Jeff Smith has never run for anything before, and he picks a campaign staff with absolutely no experience, but their idealistic exuberance is overwhelming, as despite the fact they have no money, they started their campaign at least six months earlier with no name recognition, no commercials, but a plan to go door to door every day and introduce himself to the voters of the district. Face to face, he makes a favorable impression because he speaks directly about his positions without sound bites, yet has a simplified way of making himself understood without a combative attitude. He’s positively upbeat most of the time, as is his young staff which is filled with an appealing eagerness.
We’re reeled into his life immediately when we discover no
one in his family supports his run for Congress and they believe it’s a waste
of his intelligence, offering him no help whatsoever. Contrast this with his opponent, Russ
Carnahan, who comes from a legendary political family, the son of a Governor
and a former
Smith was raised to expect nothing in life, that you have to
earn everything. Despite being a short
five feet six inches, his father always wanted him to be a professional
basketball player, and we see images from high school where he competed among
the state’s best. Later we see him
dribbling down the street with inner city kids attempting to drum up support
for his campaign. Few can take the ball
away from him. Smith had a history of
teaching troubled youths from disadvantaged households, actually creating
schools specifically targeting their unequal educational opportunities,
attempting to rectify the imbalance. Yet
despite seven years of this kind of service, he has difficulty getting the endorsement
of the black owned
Throughout the film, we see him standing alone in a parking lot making one cell phone call after another, or knocking on doors, even campaigning on election day. In one call near the end of the campaign, obviously to his mother, she complains that she’s tired of being asked to make calls, asking him why he doesn’t do that? Always appealing, he offers a fresh spirit that is devoid of cronyism and corruption and offers instead a vision of optimism, service, and sacrifice. When I saw the film, there were ten of his former campaign workers in the audience, applauding each time one of them appeared onscreen.
Portabella, Pere
Official site Portabella’s home site
Rare and
Revelatory | Jonathan Rosenbaum
November 10, 2006
Portabella
in the U.S. | Jonathan Rosenbaum
January 9, 2008
Portabella
and Continuity | Jonathan Rosenbaum
April 10, 2009
UMBRACLE
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Pere Portabella's
mystifying El Umbracle mixes wartime melodrama with a critique of
government censorship, joins Dadaist sound poetry to footage of silent film
comedians, and features Christopher Lee (Lord of the Rings' Saruman)
reading "The Raven" and singing in French. Described as a central
figure in the Catalan avant-garde, Portabella will be featured twice more in
the screening series; perhaps by week two we'll crack the code.
Rare and
Revelatory | Jonathan Rosenbaum
November 10, 2006
Portabella
in the U.S. | Jonathan Rosenbaum
January 9, 2008
Portabella
and Continuity | Jonathan Rosenbaum
April 10, 2009
VAMPIR (Cuadecuc, vampire)
User
comments imdb Author: Ted
Newsom from Burbank, California
Noted
I think there are a lot of things going for it: non-linear approach,
uncomfortably dissassociative sound track, surreal juxtaposition of unexpected
images, etc. Anyone expecting a linear documentary will be disappointed, even
angry. This is a stand-alone work of cinema art, not a monster movie.
I think it's far more interesting and unsettling than, let's say, the 4 minute
behind-the-scenes promo shot for DRACULA 72 AD, though it has a lot in common
with it superficially. Both the promotional short and the Portobella film are
shot silent; the only sync dialogue is a bit of Christopher Lee speaking about
Dracula. Both show the practicalities of film making, the crew and cast in an
"unreal" setting with lights and cameras; both place the Victorian
central character in an uncomfortable contemporary location. The major
difference is intent. The promotional short, "Prince of Darkness," is
intended to hype a movie. Portabella's film is a ghostly work of art.
User
comments imdb Author: inkybrown
This is an avant-garde experimental documentary about the
filming of Jess Franco's Count Dracula. There is no dialogue, only an
atmospheric background score and sound effects (except for at the end, when
Christopher Lee reads an excerpt from Bram Stoker's novel). The movie is hard
to describe; it shows footage of scenes from Count Dracula being filmed, the
actors preparing, special effects, and so forth. It is the only footage of
Soledad Miranda as the person she was in real life. In one of the film's most
magical moments, director Portabella captures the filming of Lucy's staking,
including the precious preparatory moments of
Rare and
Revelatory | Jonathan Rosenbaum
November 10, 2006
Portabella
in the U.S. | Jonathan Rosenbaum
January 9, 2008
Portabella
and Continuity | Jonathan Rosenbaum
April 10, 2009
THE BRIDGE OF
WARSAW
User
comments from imdb Author: Oliver
from Chicago, IL
There are some very nice things about this film. There are
moments where images and sound complement one another; the images are soft,
evocative and pleasant.
Then, there's the rest of the film. I personally find it considerably disconcerting
when image and audio are not synced, like a dodgy download from the Internet.
The dialogue is pretentious and unimaginative, the acting a little better.
To mention
Verdict: Like a 15-year-old who has just discovered the thesaurus function in
word, this film tries too hard to be something clever, and it just isn't.
User
comments from imdb Author: 61876
from NY, NY
I saw this film last night and I am still wondering about it.
But that's a good thing. The film sort of follows one man around who I believe
is a journalist. Emphasis on the "sort of." He constitutes a very
thin thread of a plot and sort of provides a very loose unifying theme for the
film.
The film begins with a conversation between a writer and his wife and the next
20 minutes could be a very fragmented conventional film. A lot of characters
are introduced, a lot of talking is done, a lot of possible exposition occurs,
there is some beautiful photography of
After the credits are done we are treated to a surreal montage of scenes which
are both confusing, beautiful and moving. I'm not sure yet if these scenes have
some deeper meaning or if they are just there for the visual and emotional
impact. Again the journalist provides a very loose thread appearing in
conversations in between the meat of the movie which are these absurd yet
deeply affecting scenes of seemingly random and absurd things.
The film almost seems like a meta-comment on itself. The scenes with dialog are
mostly about the choice of a writer between writing for profit and writing for
art and what responsibility he bears and what role he plays in society. Many of
the interspersed, seemingly unrelated scenes feature music and people watching
music being performed. While I have no interpretation of this film yet I can't
help but think it is some sort of comment on art.
Regardless this film is incredible visually and emotionally. Definitely not for
the fan of
Rare and
Revelatory | Jonathan Rosenbaum
November 10, 2006
Portabella
in the U.S. | Jonathan Rosenbaum
January 9, 2008
Portabella
and Continuity | Jonathan Rosenbaum
April 10, 2009
¡HAY MOTIVO!
Portobella segment "El plan hidrológico"
User
comments from imdb Author: SUPERNOVA HEIGHTS from
¡Hay Motivo! is the perfect example about the communications
and how they could be the fourth power.
These Directors are members of the left parties and they wanted to destroy the
Popular Party (the right party) in the 14-M elections. Always is the same
thing, critic the bad things that the government could have did but forgetting
the bad things that the left side did in the past. They have stolen the taxes
for thirteen years and corrupt the Spanish politic.
I can't understand their position so I hate this movie and I think that They
practiced the best opportunism.
User
comments from
imdb Author: jarpo_marx
from Spain
These short films are not about the last days of Aznar
Government like some people say. These short films were political
advertisements against the Popular Party which was being in power at that time
in
Rare and
Revelatory | Jonathan Rosenbaum
November 10, 2006
Portabella
in the U.S. | Jonathan Rosenbaum
January 9, 2008
Portabella
and Continuity | Jonathan Rosenbaum
April 10, 2009
THE SILENCE BEFORE BACH (Die Stille vor Bach)
european-films.net Boyd van Hoeij
Catalan master Pere Portabella's delightful audiovisual
meditation Die Stille vor Bach (The
Silence Before Bach) is unapologetically made for the arthouse
and museum crowds. The film is an exploration of Bach's music and European
identity through various unconnected vignettes set between Bach's lifetime
and the present. It is about as far away from a conventional composer biopic as
Kraft's products are from real cheese. Die
Stille vor Bach will never break any boxoffice records -- at least
not on the high end -- but it will provide its target audience with some
mesmerizing images and a starting point for some
intense after-film discussions. The film premieres in the
Portabella, who has never let a need for narrative get in the way of what he has to say, has crafted an ingenious little work that reflects on both Bach's music and on the way Europeans try to give their cultural icons a place in the monotonous greyness of their everday lives -- often taking the icons down with them in the process. The absoluteness of music is also hinted at, most clearly in a hypnotic sequence in which a playing pianola moves through an empty white space that could be a museum or a gallery.
The director has collaborated with several figures of the contemporary music scene on the film, including composer Carles Santos, who collaborated on the screenplay with Portabella and Xavier Albertí; German organist Christian Bembeck who plays Bach and Spanish pianist Daniel Ligoria, who plays Felix Mendelssohn in a delightful sequence in which the probably apocryphal story of the discovery of the manuscript of Bach's St Matthew's Passion on paper used to wrap some meat for Mendelssohn is played out. The discovery would lead to a Bach revival in Mendelssohn's lifetime.
Cinematographer Tomàs Pladevall alternates the matter-of-fact simplicity of the historical sequences and the greyness of modern Europe with breathtaking shots that include a piano plunging into water from a great height and a scene in which one of Bach's cello suites is played by a group of young musicians in a moving underground carriage.
The exact meaning of Die Stille vor Bach is not clear and is clearly not meant to be so. Instead, it offers some very interesting points of departure for a discussion of European identity, music and how nothing is quite as absolute as silence.
Slant Magazine [David Pratt-Robson]
The film's purpose is nothing more than to demonstrate the
reach of Bach everyday, everywhere, and for everyone—twaddle pitched somewhere
between a music appreciation class and a modernist experiment attesting to
art's ability to ennoble the quotidian. As if Bach were a new totalitarian, and
Pere Portabella his propagandist, The Silence Before Bach doesn't
glorify everyday living but substitutes it altogether for a world governed by
Bach devotion. The film opens with a manic player piano in the throes of
stop-motion and the Goldberg variations chasing the camera back through a
white, barren corridor; later, in a melodramatic interlude, a piano falls
silently into the sea, as all sound, per the title, is presumably impossible
without pianos to play Bach. Human influence and action are negligible
throughout this collection of skits: Regretting the rest of their lives, humans
exist as tools to play and create music, but it is the instruments themselves
that produce the sound. Spinning anecdotes and kitsch, Silence Before Bach
plays something like another Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Bach
enthusiasts snatching the place of the zombies.
In one scene, a spick-and-span subway carries an orchestra diligently playing
Bach, with nobody else aboard. In another, the camera successively creeps up on
a beautiful woman as she takes a shower in a white empty studio, as she blows
her hair while naked in a white empty bathroom, and once more as she plays Bach
in a white, nearly-empty bedroom, just after her husband makes breakfast and
tells her that all mankind will turn to dust. The minimalist
design—medium-shots of actors in front of blank walls, and long shots of
symmetrically arranged musicians—isn't much in an era of iPod commercials and
Ikea's pervasive, schematic mise-en-scène. But the fantasy is perversely
revealing of Portabella's homogenized, whitewashed, dehumanized
The upside is Bach. The best, most mesmerizing segments assume the simplicity
of Straub-Huillet's majestic, mundane—and superb—The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach: The
camera watches in place as music is produced materially from mathematical
diagrams. But Straub-Huillet took it that if the music was to be the
inspiration, the music would be the most inspired element; the only mystery
needed would be watching it be made. Yet even one of Portabella's best tales,
in which Mendelssohn (Daniel Ligorio) discovers "The St. Matthew
Passion" as his butcher's Wrapping paper, is a gimmick that works nearly
as well on paper. Only one anecdote achieves anything like the calculated touch
of Bach's music. A German man in stereotypical 18th-century garb goes into a
modern bar, leaves, and begins telling the camera about Bach's life; he turns
out to be a tour guide to Bach's home. Suddenly, Portabella, waking up, takes
on history's repetition as farce, so persistent throughout the rest of the
film. "There must have been a world…before the partita in A minor,"
one character says later. "But what was that world like? A
The Gospel According to Pere Portabella | Village Voice J. Hoberman, January 22, 2008
Portabella
in the U.S. | Jonathan Rosenbaum
January 9, 2008
Portabella
and Continuity | Jonathan Rosenbaum
April 10, 2009
not coming to a theater near you Cullen Gallagher
Film Journal International (Maria Garcia)
Metroactive.com [Michael S. Gant]
The Silence Before
Bach - Movie - Review - The New York Times
Manohla Dargis
Porter, Edwin S. – Film Editor
BFI | Sight & Sound
| The Innovators 1900-1910: Time After Time Charles Musser from Sight and Sound, March 1999
We've all heard of D. W.
Griffith, Eisenstein, Kurosawa and Disney, but who really made a difference to
film history? Was it the technicians, the hustlers or the artists? In the first
of a new series highlighting one key innovator from each decade of the
twentieth century, Charles Musser looks at the storytelling achievements of
editing pioneer Edwin S. Porter
Renowned as the maker of The
Great Train Robbery, Edwin Stanton Porter has sometimes been called the
"father of the story film" and the "inventor of editing".
Such reductive claims ignore the contributions of his contemporaries - many of
whom have been credited with the same achievements by rival historians.
Nonetheless, Porter can with reasonable accuracy be called "America's
first major film-maker".
Born on 21 April 1870 in
Connellsville, Pennsylvania, the future film-maker was named Edward by his
parents. A pudgy boy known as "Betty", he had changed his name to
Edwin Stanton after Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, by
the time he joined the US Navy in 1893. In the 1890s he worked as an exhibitor
and equipment manufacturer and enjoyed considerable success as an operator at
the Eden Musee entertainment complex - the leading showcase for motion pictures
in New York City. Operators in those days were responsible for acquiring films
from an array of often obscure sources and assembling them into individual
programmes - what we now call post-production. Porter's programme The
Passion Play of Oberammergau, for instance, integrated magic-lantern
slides and some 23 short films into a coherent show that lasted 40 minutes or
longer, accompanied by a lecture and music sung by a choir. Another favourite, Panorama
of the War, offered a historical account of the Spanish-American War
through a wide range of news films and re-enactments.
In the summer of 1900, as motion
pictures were reaching a new low point in popularity, Porter tried his luck as
a travelling showman. A fire at his New York City workshop further added to his
woes. Meanwhile, inventor and businessman Thomas Alva Edison was having his own
difficulties and came close to selling his motion-picture interests to the
rival American Mutoscope & Biograph Company. In the end Edison renewed his
commitment to the film business, and a few days before Thanksgiving hired
Porter to improve the Edison Manufacturing Company's equipment (notably its
Projecting Kinetoscope projector). Edison had built a glass-enclosed rooftop
studio at 41 East 21st Street in New York City; Porter was asked to outfit the
studio and then stayed on to work in the company's production unit as principal
cameraman alongside actor and scenic designer George S. Fleming.
Porter and Fleming were typical
of the collaborative production teams working in the US before 1908-09. As
cameraman, Porter was responsible for all the filmic elements: not only
cinematography but developing the negative and editing, which at first was
little more than "trimming" the individual shot which constituted the
film as a whole. In addition he worked with Fleming on the selection of subject
matter and on story development. The Porter-Fleming team demonstrated a fiair
for making comedies and other acted films. Kansas Saloon Smashers
(February 1901) re-enacted and lampooned the widely reported antics of Carrie
Nation and her brigade of hatchet-wielding prohibitionists. The women in this
film were played by men in drag. Somewhat later, when Nation's husband was
reported to be demanding a divorce, they made the obvious sequel, Why Mr
Nation Wants a Divorce (May 1901), in which Carrie catches her husband
taking a drink and treats him the way her brigade treated the saloon. These
topical films fitted into a general conception of cinema as a visual newspaper.
Between 1899 and 1903
responsibility for key aspects of post-production shifted from exhibition
services to production companies, making possible a new kind of storytelling.
Those most responsible for this shift were a handful of men who had experience
in film exhibition and film-making but were increasingly committed to the
latter, including Edwin Porter in the US, James Williamson and G. A. Smith in
Britain and Georges Méliès in France. Porter enjoyed a virtually unique
position: Edison had sued all his rival production companies for violating his
motion-picture patents, putting many of them out of business. So the Edison
Manufacturing Company enjoyed total hegemony from mid-July 1901, when his
patents were upheld in the circuit courts, to March 1902, when they were
declared invalid on appeal.
In the first part of 1901 Porter
and Fleming made a number of two-shot films. Terrible Teddy the Grizzly
King (February 1901) burlesqued president elect Theodore Roosevelt's
media-conscious activities on a hunting trip. The first shot of The
Finish of Brigit McKeen (February 1901) shows a thick-headed Irish servant
girl pouring kerosene into a stove and blowing herself up (ethnic gags permeate
many of these early comedies). In the last shot a painted backdrop displays a
tombstone, on which is inscribed: "Here lies the remains of Brigit McKeen
who started a fire with Kerosine." The first shot imitated the Biograph
film How Brigit Made the Fire (June 1900); the last literalised
the ditty on which both films were based.
Having worked as a film editor
for a number of years, I have always found Porter's surviving productions from
1901-02 - in which we can trace his evolving understanding of film editing, his
unfolding approach to the temporal and spatial organisation of shots - deeply
moving. In The Sampson-Schley Controversy (August 1901), based on
an incident in the Battle of Santiago Bay during the Spanish-American War,
Porter depicted the temporal relationships between three shots all taken in the
studio. The opening scene represents Commodore Winfield Schley on the bridge of
the battleship Brooklyn directing gunfire against the Spanish enemy. The second
is of a gun crew on the Brooklyn firing their cannon at the same distant ship.
The third, added a few weeks after the initial release, shows Admiral William
Sampson sipping tea with a group of old ladies. Although Sampson was apparently
at a tea party while the Battle of Santiago Bay was fought, he received credit
for the victory - a fact Schley (a populist hero) and his fans resented. This
film thus consists of three successive shots showing actions occurring more or
less simultaneously in three different locations. But this simultaneity is
clear only to audiences who know about the underlying political controversy.
Like Griffith in the post-1908 period, Porter was interested in exploring ways
of depicting simultaneous actions in different shots, in different locations
and/or from different perspectives. But their solutions were radically
different.
The Execution of Czologosz (November 1901) was one of many films
made around the assassination of President William McKinley. His assassin, Leon
Czologosz, was executed on 29 October 1901 at Auburn State Prison. According to
Edison advertisements, Porter filmed two exterior shots of the prison that
morning, using sweeping camera pans. Back at the New York studio he and Fleming
filmed two more 'scenes', of Czologosz being led from his cell to the execution
chamber and of the condemned man's electrocution. This film involved a
sustained spatial progression from outside to inside the prison and then to a
confrontation with the electric chair and deadly justice. In the interior
scenes the action moves between two contiguous spaces, though the precise
spatial relationship of cell to execution chamber is evident only from a
reading of the newspapers. Since The Execution of Czologosz could
be purchased with or without the opening panoramas, one question had been
raised but not fully resolved: could the production company dictate the terms
of the larger narrative unit or was editing the final responsibility of the
exhibitor?
Despite the groundbreaking
achievement of these two films Porter and Fleming undertook nothing as
ambitious for another six months. They were employees, and it may have been
that company executives - given their monopoly - wanted to curtail unnecessary
production costs. But once Edison lost his patent-infringement case, renewed
film-making at rival US companies sparked production at the Edison studio as
well. Appointment by Telephone (2 May 1902), Jack and the
Beanstalk (20 June 1902), How They Do Things on the Bowery
(31 October 1902) and Life of an American Fireman (21 January
1903) each represented an impressive step forward. With editorial control more
firmly located in the production company, the storyline could unfold in more
coherent and unified ways.
How They Do Things on the
Bowery and Life
of an American Fireman are fascinating primarily for their ways of
depicting time. Life of an American Fireman contains a number of
shots which have overlapping action: firemen wake from their beds and go down
the firepole in the third shot; in the fourth we again see them come down the
firepole, then get on to their fire engines and drive off. In the fifth the
door of the fire station opens and the fire engines come out and race off to
the fire. From the point of view of classical Hollywood cinema this creates a
kind of stutter that made Porter's work seem awkward and old-fashioned. From a
different perspective, however, we can see how Porter treated each shot as a
self-contained unit that was also part of a larger film. As No'l Burch
described him, Porter was a two-headed Janus who looked backwards (editing the
film as if he was still an exhibitor) and forwards (taking advantage of
centralised creative control to plot continuity of action across shots in a way
that created a coherent fictional world).
The last two shots of Life
of an American Fireman, which show a fire company rescuing a mother and
child from a burning building, are particularly interesting. The rescue is
shown first from the inside (shot 8) and then from the outside (shot 9). So the
last shot is a replay of the same event from a different perspective, enabling
the spectator to see everything that happened. (As in Méliès' A Trip to
the Moon, 1902, which has the spaceship landing on the moon twice, from
two different perspectives.) Porter thus shows us actions unfolding in two
contiguous spaces, but rather than cutting back and forth between them as
Griffith did in The Lonely Villa (1909) he keeps the scenes
unified in a way now familiar from instant replays of sporting events.
Nonetheless, when actions occur off-screen (the journey to the fire) time is
condensed. Time is not verisimiliar, but highly malleable.
Immediately Life of an
American Fireman was completed Edison competitor Sigmund Lubin won a
court case that invalidated established ways of copyrighting films. Once again
Edison curtailed production for a number of months until this was reversed in
the court of appeals. Meanwhile George Fleming left the Edison company. In
autumn 1903 Porter began to collaborate on a freelance basis with actor Gilbert
M. Anderson (later Broncho Billy Anderson). Their best-known project was The
Great Train Robbery (1903). A contribution to the newly popular crime
genre that had come out of Britain, The Great Train Robbery depicted
the process of robbing a train in exciting detail. Its temporal organisation
and the successive depiction of two separate lines of action (the train
robbers, the posse) make it exemplary of pre-1908 cinema's method of
representation. And it was without doubt the most commercially successful film
of the pre-nickelodeon era, perhaps of any film prior to The Birth of a
Nation (1915).
The Great Train Robbery arrived at an opportune moment. The US
film industry was beginning to take off and the number of exhibition outlets
was expanding rapidly. At the beginning of 1905 Porter found a new full-time
collaborator in Wallace McCutcheon, previously production head at the American
Mutoscope & Biograph Company. In this period Porter continued to make occasional
films in the tradition of The Great Train Robbery, though not as
many as is sometimes thought: Capture of Yegg Bank Burglars (1904)
and The Train Wreckers (1905) are the two principal examples. In
the longer one-reel format he displayed a continuing fiair for comedy (The
Terrible Kids, May 1906; Getting Evidence, September 1906)
and a new one for family melodramas (Stolen by Gypsies, July
1905). In his search for subject matter he borrowed from a wide range of
popular entertainments: postcards (The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog,
May 1905), songs (Waiting at the Church, May 1906), newspaper
cartoons (The Rivals, August 1907) and films by competitors (Dream
of a Rarebit Fiend, March 1906, is heavily indebted to Gaston Velle's Rêve
à la lune, 1905).
An important element of Porter's
work in the 1904-08 period was his sustained engagement with the world of
theatre. As part of a larger change within film-making, his conception of
cinema gradually shifted from having an affinity with the newspaper to one with
the stage. In this period he reworked a number of popular plays, beginning with
The Ex-Convict (November 1904). Porter took No. 973,
a one-act drama highly dependent on dialogue, and transformed it into an
eight-scene film with brief intertitles. A moving tearjerker, in which a child
the ex-convict saves in an earlier scene in turn saves him after he
unsuccessfully tries to rob her father's house to feed his family, it is the
oldest film ever to make me cry. Other reworkings of plays included The
Miller's Daughter (1905), Kathleen Mavourneen (1906), Daniel
Boone; or Pioneer Days in America (1907) and The Devil
(September 1908). Life of a Cowboy, which refigured Royale's The
Squaw Man (1905) through a series of substitutions and inversions, was
according to Porter the first film Western. The hero is the lone cowboy who
displays a range of Western skills (lassoing, horse riding, gun fighting) and
wins the girl from back east, even as he retains the devotion of the local
Indian maiden.
The rising popularity of cinema
and the demand for more and perhaps better films put increasing pressures on
Porter and the Edison company. In May 1907 Porter found a new collaborator in
playwright and stage manager James Searle Dawley. The two worked together for
the remainder of Porter's Edison career, moving into the company's new, more
spacious studio in the Bronx on 11 July 1907. Sets could be larger, and in
films such as A Race for Millions (August-September 1907) a car
could appear on stage. Edison films were becoming more elaborate (Stage
Struck, August 1907), but what company executives really wanted was for
Porter to increase his rate of production. This he found difficult to do.
In June 1908 new top management
at the Edison company started a second production unit. Porter was designated
studio head and oversaw both units even as he remained head of one. Meanwhile
D. W. Griffith began to work as a director at the rival Biograph organisation,
single-handedly outperforming both Edison units in terms of output. This was
also the moment when film was becoming a form of mass entertainment with a
quite different system of representation - one that served as the foundation
for subsequent Hollywood cinema. This involved linear structures that
eliminated overlapping actions and narrative repetitions, unfortunately a
Porter trademark. Consistent screen direction, never one of Porter's concerns,
also became important. And films were expected to display a narrative clarity
that was not dependent on an audience's prior knowledge of the plot - again at
odds with Porter's reliance on well-known stories. This new way of
motion-picture storytelling was embraced by Griffith and resisted by Porter.
Porter's films received
consistently positive reviews until June 1908, after which they were more and
more criticised. The Edison company was losing ground rapidly, turning out more
pictures but selling fewer and fewer prints. Edison executives soon concluded
that the maker of The Great Train Robbery was washed up and over
the hill. In February 1909 they removed him from his responsibility as studio
head and in November 1909 he was fired.
The first decade of the twentieth
century must have ended on as depressing a note for Porter as it began. In the
interim, he played a key, at times dominant role in the development of the
American film industry. The decade saw a transition from long-standing
practices in which exhibitors provided their own form of individualised screen
entertainment to cinema as a recognisable form of standardised mass
entertainment. Porter's deep commitment to a system of production and
representation - as well as his resistance to the large-scale, corporate
mentality that followed - make him an exemplary figure of that time.
The Best of the
Decade...One Hundred Years Ago (First Installment) Gabe Klinger from Mubi,
The Great Train
Robbery on YouTube (
Porterfield, Matthew
I want to tell stories about real people in their real
environments. I guess it’s an interest in the world first and storytelling
second.”
—Matthew Porterfield
The
Village Voice [Anthony Kaufman]
Kaufman interviews 3 indie fimmakers, including Porterfield,
Matthew Porterfield’s Nostalgic Realism Pamela Cohn interview from BOMBLog, June 9, 2010
Matt Porterfield's
'Putty Hill' Opens in New York - NYTimes.com Dennis Lim feature and interview with the
director,
HAMILTON B+ 91
Worthy of a #9 spot on John Waters’s Top Ten List for 2006, which turns out to be an undiscovered gem that’s beautifully set in a suburb outside Baltimore, a near wordless film that follows the lives of a few people before they leave town to visit Grandma for awhile. Set in the summer heat, featuring few cuts and plenty of long takes, to the everpresent sound of nearby highway car noise, we follow the movements of children at play, swimming in a backyard pool, hanging out on a nearby riverbank, bicycle riding, jumping on a trampoline, or swinging on a swingset, all establishing a unique rhythm, capturing the languid pace of summer. We find a curious racial mix of two black girls and an older white sister with her own newborn baby, along with their white mother, also another younger white boy with his mother. Missing from this collective are the fathers, though we do find one hanging out at his house mowing the lawn, playing with his dog, the picture of nonchalance, telling his mother on the phone and the two black girls that come visiting that he’s busy working, an amusing excuse. There’s a wonderful long shot of this guy walking through a nearby patch of trees past a riverbank over a bridge to the other side. Eventually they all sit together at church, an amusing sight, especially considering his complete passivity, which is only highlighted when the mother takes the crying baby outside, and we see their shadows reflected through the windows.
The film is relatively mainstream, not making any particular political statement, but observes people as they connect and equally disconnect with one another, is something of an understated joy of a film expressing a beautiful spirit that lies just under the surface, but rarely captured as it is here, feeling much like the short films of Lynne Ramsay, who observes this same kind of disassociation. No one smiles in this film, not even the children at play, instead there’s this grim determinism of life in a working class town. When the mother and father do meet alone, presumably to have sex, he seems more interested in playing video games, a self-indulgent attitude that aptly expresses his detachment towards others. This is quite a contrast to the hugs and kisses that the children receive from Grandma, as they pile into a rusted, beat up truck on their way out of town. The music over the end credits by Animal Collective (“Winter’s Love”) is wonderfully upbeat, just brimming with life, easily the happiest aspect of the film, a joyous contrast to the more detached mood of the film.
John Waters | ArtForum | Find Articles at BNET John Waters #9 Film of the Year from Artforum, December 2006
A tiny, minimalist art film from
Baltimore City Paper (Eric Allen Hatch) review
Matthew Porterfield’s exquisite
Hamilton Richard Brody from The New Yorker
A minor miracle.
Matthew Porterfield's first film, barely an hour long, made for a pittance in
his native Baltimore with nonprofessional actors on 16-mm. film, is one of the
most original, moving, and accomplished American independent films in recent
years. The story alone is touchingly simple—a teen-age mother, about to leave
town for a month, wants her baby's young father to pay her a visit—but
Porterfield's genius is revealed above all in the way he brings it to life.
Exquisitely composed, unfolding gradually, suffused with light and color, his
tender yet unsentimental images convey the graceful rhythms and quiet sorrows
of young lives on hold. Porterfield is a master of time: here, an eight-minute
trip takes eight minutes, but its progress is rich in visual epiphanies. The
film builds to an unlikely, wondrous chase, and leaves the viewer astonished,
hungry for more, and eagerly anticipating what Porterfield, who is still in his
twenties, will do next.
The Village Voice [Joshua Land]
Regional indie cinema, at least of the American
variety, has deservedly gotten a bad rap in recent years. First-timer Matthew Porterfield's
Slant Magazine review Paul Schrodt
The
kids here, like their young parents, cope with frustrated relationships
agitated by hard wage-earning. It's a convincing community Porterfield knows
well, and he makes a point to emphasize the compassion underlying its
inhabitants' lives. Most times, Joe, a begrudging father, would rather get
away; in the film's opening shot, he swooshes around the lens performing bike
tricks, conspicuously absent from the lively house where his girlfriend
searches for him. Still, their love is never questioned—Porterfield refuses to
paint in broad strokes—and during the last shot, Joe uses his bike to rush
apologetic flowers to
If
first impressions mean anything, however, Porterfield is not destined to become
a David Gordon Green, though superficial similarities to Green's debut George Washington exist; like
that film,
Hammer to Nail [Michael Tully]
The New York Times (Jeannette Catsoulis) review
PUTTY HILL B 89
This is what you might call spur-of-the-moment filmmaking,
because as the filmmaker was set to begin filming one movie called METAL GODS,
the financing from grants for that project fell through at the last
minute. But since a camera crew and a
group of non-professional actors were ready to go, they instead shot this film
on the fly from a hastily put together 5-page script, costing $20,000, shot on
HD Cam in less than two weeks in
This approach offers a broader range of social fabric,
including kids coming in from out of town who fit right into their little
cliques that they were a part of when they left. Unlike the spoiled brat rich kids seen on TV
shows or in
Nonetheless, much like
PUTTY HILL | siskelfilmcenter.org Marty Rubins
Few recent movies immerse the viewer in a place with more
authority and authenticity than PUTTY HILL. Set in a raw-edged
AFI Fest 2010: Naturalistic Baltimore, No Wave Cinema, and Herzog’s latest! Matthew Groves from The Alternative Chronicle
Naturalism (or more of a neo-naturalism) has become a big strain in
independent film in the last ten years, and has produced filmmakers such as
Debra Granik, Ramin Bahrani, Kelly Reichardt, Lance Hammer and many more; and
includes many films of high critical acclaim. So to say that Putty
Hill is original in its modus operandi is an understatement, but that
doesn’t mean it is derivative or should be dismissed either. The film
gives us a look at
User reviews from imdb Author: sc_hijinx from
Putty Hill did everything right.
I'll skip any in depth discussion of formal excellence -- real critics like
Roger Ebert and Richard Brody have already said much about that -- and just say
that almost every shot, every element of the film is fantastic. Porterfield has
a great instinct for composition, for length of shots, for what to focus on and
what to leave off the screen. He introduces a few unique elements, including a
lot of lingering shots away from prevalent dialogue. The visual style alone is
reason to see the film.
But it's not the most important reason. Putty Hill accomplishes something very,
very exciting on the level of the heart. In a brief Q&A after the film
screened, Porterfield was asked about his decision to shoot the neighborhood
and people he did, rather than any of the "shine" that the city of
Putty Hill is the greatest current example I have seen of art treating the
lives of the working class with both realism and respect. It's not coddling,
it's not political, it's not a shock piece. The camera rolls, and what we see
is Life, with all of its imperfections, problems, and beauties intact.
When this accomplishment of subject is combined with stunning formal elements,
what results is one of the most exciting, important films I've seen in years.
The Front Row: The Thrill of Putty Hill : The New Yorker Richard Brody
This isn’t the time or the place for a regular review, just for a report of the rarest sort: good news. Last night, at the Tribeca Screening Room, Matthew Porterfield unveiled his second feature, “Putty Hill” (which premièred earlier this year at the Berlin Film Festival), and it’s extraordinary—quite as extraordinary as his wondrous first feature, “Hamilton,” would lead one to expect. Filming, once again, in a working-class district of Baltimore, his home town, and working, once more, with young people who are struggling with dispersed families and dim prospects, Porterfield broadens and deepens the perspective of his local view to tell the story of friends and relatives of a young man who has died of a drug overdose. As those who remain begin to cluster and converge for his funeral, Porterfield traces their stories (with a very personal technique of simple ingenuity) and, in the process, invokes, with slight and tender gestures—and with the remarkable, confessional performances he elicits from his young actors—worlds of experience and feeling.
It’s quite as beautiful to look at as is “Hamilton,” due both to Porterfield’s incisive vision and the camerawork—it’s shot by the same cinematographer, Jeremy Saulnier, and it’s no exaggeration to say that their collaboration is as fruitful and as essential as that of Jean-Luc Godard and Raoul Coutard in the nineteen-sixties, in that it’s not about lighting but, rather, about light. Saulnier’s daring attention to light and acceptance of shadow (no mere stunt but an essential aspect of Porterfield’s compositions and, for that matter, emotional world) should be a model for young directors of photography everywhere.
It’s great that “Putty Hill” will play at the South by Southwest Festival next week. But here’s the question: if there’s an independent cinema, this movie is it, and if there’s a new director, here he is. Why isn’t “Putty Hill” playing in the forthcoming New Directors/New Films series at Film Society of Lincoln Center and MOMA? Who’s minding the store?
P.S. I’ll ask the same question of our DVD distributors: “Hamilton,” one of
the finest recent American independent films, has been around for a few years,
but nobody has yet seen fit to release it for home video. Last year, Union Docs
had a full house for a screening of it, at which I had the privilege of
moderating a post-screening discussion with Porterfield. Stay tuned for word of
another screening of “
With
the stunning Putty Hill, Matthew Porterfield announces ... Michael Sicinski from The Nashville Scene,
There is so much independent American cinema these days, you'd think it was really simple to make a film. It's enough to prompt even the most populist souls among us to stop and question whether certain "revolutions" of the past few decades — such as the advent of inexpensive DV equipment and the one-two punch of Sundance and SXSW — have ultimately been to the good. Netflix and VOD channels are clogged with heartfelt but solipsistic and painfully similar stories: coming of age here, working a dead-end job there. It becomes difficult to even want to try to keep track.
What a restoration of faith it is, then, to discover a truly world-class talent, and have the opportunity to watch him grow. The two feature films to date by Baltimore's Matthew Porterfield are unusually exquisite examples of poetic regionalism — works that explore the lives of the U.S.'s rapidly expanding lower classes with a sense of rigor and purpose. Some have compared his work to David Gordon Green's early films George Washington and All the Real Girls — back when Green was aping Charles (Killer of Sheep) Burnett instead of Danny (Dude, Where's My Car?) Leiner.
But Porterfield's observation of the lower-class habitus is more organic and far less self-satisfied. His first film, 2006's Hamilton (named for a lower-middle-class neighborhood in northeastern Baltimore), is a free-form mood piece held together by equal parts anxiety and natural awe. There is not much in the way of a story. Rather, we observe a few key days as 17-year-old new mother Lena (Stephanie Vizzi) and her friend / future sister-in-law Candace (Sarah Siepp-Williams) care for the baby, while Lena worries whether Joe (Christopher Myers), her semi-AWOL baby-daddy, is going to face up to his responsibilities.
But Porterfield's second film, Putty Hill (again, named after a working-class Baltimore subdivision), represents a bracing evolution. The filmmaker has retained his loose, poetic mode of observation, depicting fragments of a mostly disenfranchised community without judgment or undue romanticization. At the same time, Porterfield has introduced a new layer of formalism that provides a kind of armature for his open-text style.
Relying mostly on nonprofessional actors, Putty Hill is a portrait of a community coming together in the wake of a young man's death by overdose. Friends remember him, long-gone young family members come back to town. Those in the immediate circle (many of whom hadn't seen much of the guy since he'd done jail time) try to figure out what meaning, if any, this sudden loss has for their lives.
Porterfield's major gamble, the formal element that sets Putty Hill apart so dramatically, is the introduction of a faux-documentary structure, in which an unseen interlocutor engages the characters in direct-to-camera interviews. The method is light years away from "reality TV" bullshit. In fact, Putty Hill is the first film I can think of since the "counter-cinema" heyday of the 1970s that displays the direct influence of Peter Watkins (The War Game, Edvard Munch). Porterfield has, in fact, triumphed by forging a most unlikely hybrid: Watkins meets late Gus Van Sant.
And yet, despite those pre-existing touchstones, he's achieved something completely his own. Putty Hill is a stern yet moving reminder that no human being can be excised from our orbit without unforeseen ramifications. Unexpectedly, Porterfield's methods of distance only redouble the emotional punch of the various kinds of loss he depicts. The result is a singular film, and unquestionably one of the year's very best. It gives hope for what other stories and voices might be out there — bold, clear signals in the buzzing static of our prolific indie cinema.
Primitive Urges Craig Hubert from The NY Press
Hammer to Nail [Cullen Gallagher]
Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin
Putty Hill - Reverse Shot Benjamin Mercer, February 2011
“Putty Hill”: An
off-the-radar indie breakthrough - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir
“PUTTY
HILL,” “ZERO BRIDGE” OPEN IN NYC | The Filmmaker Magazine Blog Scott Macauley,
Armond White's review of Putty Hill directed by Matt Porterfield
National Public Radio [Ella Taylor]
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Radar Redux » Cory's Wake: At Putty Hill's Hometown Premier ... John Barry, March 6, 2011
Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Andrew Robertson]
Putty Hill The Projection Booth
Film-Forward.com [Michael Lee]
The Village Voice [Mark Holcomb]
Tracking Shots [Larry McGillicuddy]
The
Village Voice [Anthony Kaufman]
Kaufman interviews 3 indie fimmakers, including Porterfield,
Matthew Porterfield’s Nostalgic Realism Pamela Cohn interview from BOMBLog, June 9, 2010
PUTTY HILL:
The Biggest Release of 2011 (for me)! | IFP
Matthew Porterfield from IFP,
Putty Hill -- Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter Peter Brunette
Variety Reviews - Putty Hill - Film Reviews - - Review by Ronnie ... Ronnie Scheib from Variety
Time Out New York [David Fear]
Putty Hill - Film and Video - Baltimore City Paper Michael Byrne
Washington Post [Mark Jenkins]
Movie review: 'Putty Hill' - Los Angeles Times Sheri Linden
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden
Matt Porterfield's
'Putty Hill' Opens in New York - NYTimes.com Dennis Lim feature and interview with the
director,
Porumboiu, Corneliu
12:08 EAST OF BUCHAREST B+ 92
Enjoy
the snow today, it will be mud tomorrow.
A brilliantly written film that uses a hilarious minimalist mix of Kaurismaki and Kustarica’s madcap black comedy to make a point about the current interest in Romanian politics, which, as the title reference suggests, has been reduced to nothing, as there is nothing East of Bucharest. Instead there’s a strange fascination with roving bands of kids planting fireworks in doorways and hallways, which usually results in an earful of stinging profanity from the intended target. Using plenty of self-deferential humor, such as repeated references to the snow in Bucharest leaving nothing but the ugliness of muddy streets, or a foreigner’s observation that Romanian citizens are routinely rude to one another, the script is a revelation of fully developed character flaws that are both tragic and hilarious at the same time. Opening with a clarinet that has a mind of its own, a sleepy town comes awake as rows of lights, one by one, are turned off, leaving the citizens their first look at a new day.
The wry mood, brilliant acting, and acerbic tone is set by
following the daily routine of local townsfolk, pointing fun at their eccentric
behavior. Manescu (Teodor Corban) awakes
with a ferocious hangover, unable to recall the events of the night before,
then gets a phone call from a friend asking if he was out drinking last
night. He is a school teacher who is
assigned to the kids who flunked the exam on the
As it turns out, Manescu and Piscoci are the two guests on Jderescu’s live call-in show. When he arrives at the station, he sees his cameraman using a hand-held camera of a student orchestra that is performing a Leningrad Cowboys-style song with a Latin beat, which irks Jderescu, ordering the camera to stay on the tripod and the band to play a Romanian song. When his guests arrive, they fumble over having a drink first, while Piscoci makes a federal case about where to put his hat. The TV show is a work of simplicity itself, as it speaks volumes with so little, much of it a laugh riot as Piscoci, who is largely ignored, can’t stop making paper boats which are suddenly ripped out of his hands by an unseen person just offscreen while Manescu, who is called a liar on the air, nervously starts ripping tiny pieces of paper which has a subtle, yet annoying effect. The show also asks serious questions about what happened 16 years ago when Nicolae Ceausescu, their former Communist dictator, was whisked away by helicopter from the Presidential Palace at precisely 12:08, subsequently shot to death two days later by an irate mob. The question asked was whether any revolutionary presence was felt prior to that moment, or if mobs of people stormed the capitol only after they watched what happened on TV? Manescu made the case that he was there ahead of time, although every call-in listener disputed his claim, while Piscoci recalled a poignant argument with his wife that morning, where he brought her flowers afterwards when he saw Ceausescu whisked off on the television news broadcast, making the case that the exact moment was meaningless, that what matters is that it happened at all, even if everyone’s perceptions of the events have changed over time. Of interest, there was complete memory loss about Romanian history, but plenty of personal recollections about what people were doing on that day.
12:08
East of Bucharest | Film | The Guardian Andrew Pulver
A dry little satire from Romania, poking fun at the vanities of smalltowners trying to claim credit for derring-do during the 1989 uprising against Nicolae Ceausescu. This is done through the medium of a local TV chat show - arguably the shoddiest programme ever portayed on screen - during which a couple of the local gentry try to account for their movements at the magical moment of 12.08pm on the day of the overthrow. It's amusing stuff - though not as funny as it would like to be - even if rather obviously studio-bound. It won the best first film award at Cannes; somehow, it doesn't seem quite substantial enough to justify that accolade.
Cinematical (Martha Fischer) review Martha Fischer
Despite the slot reserved for it in my personal (and beloved)
"depressing Eastern European films" file, 12:08 East to Bucharest
was in fact the funniest movie I saw in
Set in a small town outside of Bucharest on December 22, 2005 -- the 16th
anniversary of the fall of Ceausescu -- the movie documents the efforts of
Jderescu (Teodor Corban), a
textile engineer/TV station owner, to assemble a panel for a live TV show on
the revolution, and then to keep that show in order, once it goes on-air. When
he's let down by the "prestigious" panel he'd originally lined up,
Jderescu, out of desperation, digs up two last-minute guests: Manescu (Ion Sapdaru), a weary college
professor who claims to have spear-headed the town's "revolution" in
1989, and Old Man Piscoci (Mircea
Andreescu) who gets the call, it appears, mostly because he's old, and
Jderescu happens to see a picture of him the morning of the show.
Dryly funny throughout its first half, the film truly comes to life in its
final 45 minutes, after the TV show begins. The movie moves inside the
television cameras, and the helpless amateurism of the photography combines
with the banality of the show to create some truly hilarious moments. The focus
slips in and out, the frame either eliminates panelists entirely or cuts them
in half, and close-ups come apparently without rhyme or reason. In front of the
camera, meanwhile, the host recaps the rewards of his morning mythological
research, spewing incomprehensible nonsense comparing the Romanian revolution
to Plato's The Cave, among other things, while his guests drink, fall into
despair, or built paper boats to pass the time. The boat-building, in
particular, is beyond wonderful, and the constant, nervous motion of the camera
is the sort of thing that makes you laugh out loud over and over again.
Time Out London (Dave Calhoun) review [4/5]
Romanian cinema is so hot right now. Last year, Cristi Puiu’s excellent ‘The Death of Mr Lazarescu’ carved cinematic excitement from terminal cancer, and then at this year’s Cannes, Cristi Mungiu’s ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days’ did the same for illegal abortion under communism (and won the Palme d’Or), while Cristian Nemescu’s posthumous ‘California Dreamin’ ’ topped the Un Certain Regard section by taking a wry dig at American intervention, both recent and historical, in eastern Europe.
Is it too early to talk of a new wave? These films certainly share the eye of the historian and the gaze of the auteur as they each consider a people emerging from a past defined by foreign power-games and local hardship. Their stories are different, but they display an immediacy and an energy in common. As Puiu, the director of ‘Lazarescu’, suggested in these pages in June, four films do not make a movement, but it’s hard not to assume that something exciting is happening in Romanian film at the moment.
Hot on the heels of these titles comes Corneliu Porumboiu’s debut feature ‘12:08 East of Bucharest’, in which the motley participants of a small-town television chat-show reminisce reluctantly about their role in the country’s 1989 revolution and reveal along the way that popular myth can easily overtake political reality. It’s December 22 2005, and pretentious regional television host Virgil Jderescu (Teodor Corban) has invited two unlikely locals to join him on his low-budget show: Tiberiu Manescu (Ion Sapdaru) is a sad school-teacher with a drink problem whose pupils ignore him and whose wife demands that he hands her his pay-packet, while Emanoil Piscoci (Mircea Andreescu) is a snowy-haired retiree with time on his hands and a request from locals that he dust off his Santa costume and revive the Father Christmas act that was popular a few years earlier. It’s this pair – a cocktail of the depressed and the distracted and the disturbed – that Jderescu for some unknown reason decides to quiz live on air about their recollections of exactly where they were and what they doing either side of the critical hour on December 22 1989: 12:08pm was the time that President Caeusescu was overthrown in Timisoara, so heralding the coup d’etat that began the end of communist rule.
But the burning question is: did any locals set out to protest in the local square before the clock struck 12:08pm? Or were the residents of the small city of Vaslui merely followers and not instigators of the revolution? Roughly half of the film unfolds in the claustrophobic theatre of a one-camera TV studio, allowing each gesture and expression to take on significance. Piscoci does origami; Manescu looks suicidal; callers to the show accuse each participant of exaggerating their involvement in the revolution. The only decoration in the studio is a blown-up photo of the city square in question. This is black comedy with a subtle political edge.
As a director, Porumboiu is perhaps less daring and more modest in his storytelling than his other feted compatriots, but he’s no less incisive in his commentary on Romania’s recent history, no less dry in his intermittent and unexpected humour and no less pleasing in his direct and uncluttered style of presentation. Brief moments have wider significance – such as the lawlessness of Manescu’s classroom, where the pupils set off firecrackers – and it’s only when the film’s over that you fully become aware that Porumboiu’s introduction of his three main characters in the film’s first half offers a distinct social tour of present-day small-town Romania. His aim is to compare his country’s current state with its pre-revolutionary past. The final, dour images of the city as dusk arrives finally suggest stasis, not change. The question Porumboiu seems to be asking is: did the revolution ever happen at all?
Good News From Romania? Stuart Klawans from The Nation, June 25, 2007
The
Revolution Must Be Televised | Village Voice J. Hoberman, May 29, 2007
12:08
EAST OF BUCHAREST (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2006) | Dennis ... Dennis Grunes
stylusmagazine.com (Frank Rinaldi) review
The Onion A.V. Club review Noel Murray
Slant Magazine review Nick Schager
Electric Sheep Magazine Sarah Cronin
Corneliu
Porumboiu – Brandon's movie memory
Beachwood Reporter [Marilyn Ferdinand] Chicago Film Festival comments, October 17, 2006
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [3.5/5]
Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [4/5]
DVD Times Noel Megahey
DVD Outsider Slarek
DVD Talk (David Walker) dvd review [3/5]
DVD Verdict (James A. Stewart) dvd review
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [3/5]
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Rotterdam Film Festival notes
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Bright
Lights Film Journal [Robert Keser] Chicago Film Festival comments by Robert
Keser, November 1, 2006, also seen here:
Chicago,
je t'aime: The 42nd Chicago International Film Festival ...
Entertainment Weekly review [B-] Owen Gleiberman
Variety (Deborah Young) review
BBCi - Films David Mattin
Time Out New York (David Fear) review [5/5]
Time Out Chicago (Cliff Doerksen) review [4/5]
Boston Globe review [3.5/4] Ty Burr
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Austin Chronicle (Toddy Burton) review [3.5/5]
San Francisco Chronicle (Leba Hertz) review
Los Angeles Times [Robert Abele]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Daniel Mott
POLICE, ADJECTIVE B 86
Another film about the pointlessness of living in
Romania. One thing that must be said
about Romanian films: while other
directors strive to find color and beauty in their works, think Assayas or the
recent Téchiné, Zhang Yimou, or especially the sumptuousness of Jane Campion
who still shoots on 35 mm, and then take a look at what comes out of Romania,
films that couldn’t look drearier, where gray concrete slabs are prevalent,
decaying tenement buildings left over from the Soviet era, each uglier than the
next, where the interior walls couldn’t be more colorless, where the look of
the film serves to remind the viewer of the dour and depressing world people
live in, a place where beauty and free will are nonexistent. This is a police procedural film, a primer
for learning how to be a spy, with roots to the East German Stasi secret
police, where nearly all citizens were watched and reported on to the secret
police, who waited for the appropriate moments to swoop in and arrest people in
their weakest moments. Citizens were
expected to denounce other citizens, all of which represents the backwards
hysteria of the American McCarthyism era where people were arrested or lost
their jobs simply on information obtained from unsubstantiated rumors. Kieslowski captured the essence of this kind
of Kafkaesque authority throughout his career.
This film owes much to Michael Haneke’s CACHÉ
(2005) which was basically a series of strung together pieces of surveillance
video which the movie audience watches in real time, consisting of long static
shots with little movement, where nothing much is happening, but a key to
understanding the film is maintaining a watchful eye and continuing to find the
hidden clues. In Romania they probably
can’t afford to pay for all the camera technology, so they use human labor, in
this case Cristi (Dragos Bucur), a detective who spends his entire days following
a young high school kid Alex (Alexandru
Sabadac), who is suspected of smoking hashish on the
street and distributing it to other kids.
Despite Cristi’s shadowing presence, shown throughout the film in real
time, he’s never caught the kid in the act so is reluctant to arrest him,
despite the hovering presence of his superiors who want to make the arrest
anyway, as an informer has allegedly seen him share a hashish cigarette on one
occasion which police officials determine is distribution, since it was passed
among friends. Cristi compiles detailed
reports discovering no evidence of wrongdoing while reminding his superiors
that nowhere else in Europe would a kid smoking pot on the street be arrested
except in Romania, a country where he’d be sent away for seven years, perhaps
ruining his life. So he continues to
track the victim, hoping some new clues will emerge, and that he could arrest a
more deserving criminal, such as a supplier.
But all he finds the kids smoking are cigarettes, so he strings along
the case and avoids speaking to his boss, who wants him to arrange the
arrest. The police station itself is
this eerie, claustrophobic building with hallways lined with a series of doors,
each leading into cramped rooms overstuffed with papers and insufficient
space. Cristi himself never uses the
computer on his desk, which looks so old it may not even work, instead he locks
all relevant material in his police locker and keeps the office door locked at
all times.
Breaking the monotonous doldrums, there are
brilliant bits of hilariously absurd conversations spread throughout the film,
perhaps the best is when Cristi comes home one night and his wife is listening
to a repetetively mindless pop song about everlasting love on the home
computer, playing it three or four times (in real time – yes, we hear the
entire song each time) while we watch Cristi fix himself something to eat,
growing more irritated each time it starts all over again. The audience is in hysterics even before he
gets into an argument suggesting the lyrics make no sense, that they’re simply
dumb, meticulously picking out objectionable phrases interrupting his wife’s
rapturous listening. They go back and
forth, he claiming it’s ridiculous while she claims it’s metaphoric poetry, all
leading nowhere. In much the same
manner, Cristi’s boss finally gets him in the office and insists upon an
arrest, which Cristi refuses to do, claiming it’s a stupid law and it’s just a
kid. Why ruin his life? So his superior brings out a Romanian dictionary
and spends twenty minutes going over terms like “conscience,” “moral,” “law,”
“police,” reading the full definition of each until his boss concludes Cristi’s
making moral judgments instead of strictly enforcing the law, which as his
superior, he is ordering him to do.
While it’s hideously funny in the worst possible way, because Cristi is
forced to either arrest the kid or leave the police force, all based on flimsy
hearsay evidence and the conclusive interpretation of reading the
dictionary. Again, based on a series of
clues, it may become evident why Cristi doesn’t wish to arrest the kid, as his
friend is actually supplying the police with credible informant information,
but by the end, it’s either a SWAT team operation or it’s say hello to a new
job—all fun and games and following the letter of the law in the chilly cold of
Romania.
eye WEEKLY capsule review [5/5] Jason Anderson
Pretty much the only film at Cannes that everyone loved (give it up for Romania once again!), Corneliu Porumboiu’s masterly follow-up to 12:08 East of Bucharest may also be the most riveting movie to ever hinge on matters of semantics. The dry and meticulous depiction of a young cop’s investigation of a small-time pot dealer (complete with a rendering of police bureaucracy and drudgery that betters even The Wire) leads to a climactic discussion that is frequently hilarious yet ultimately as serious as cancer. You’ll never look at a dictionary the same way again.
NOW Magazine capsule review [5/5] Paul Ennis
Like Porumboiu's previous film, the wry inquiry into
revolution
The surprise ending turns on the dictionary definitions of "police,"
"conscience" and "law." Rarely has the mundane act of
reading the dictionary been used to such unsettling effect. The vitality and
originality of the Romanian new wave continues in the unlikely dramatic sphere
of uncovering the real meanings of words.
Michael Tully Hammer
to Nail, New York Film fest, September 28, 2009
Porumboiu’s second feature, following 2006’s 12:08 East of Bucharest, puts the “procedure” back into “police procedural.” Cristi (Dragos Bucur), a cop in the sleepy city of Vaslui, is assigned to investigate a high school student rumored to be a hashish dealer. Porumboiu films the action in patiently observant long takes that sometimes last for several minutes; like Cristi, we wait, we watch, we ponder what we’re watching. Instead of the usual dramatic clichés of the policier, we get real-time stakeouts, endless negotiations over paperwork, everyday workplace squabbles and shit-shooting. Porumboiu does bring in one familiar genre element, the old theme of the letter versus the spirit of the law, but even that gets a devastatingly original twist in the film’s climactic scene. An ingenious formal experiment masquerading as a naturalistic docudrama, a quietly hilarious deadpan comedy, and, of all things, a thought-provoking rumination on language, Police, Adjective marks yet another stunning success for the new generation of Romanian filmmakers.
Graphic,
Controversial, Yucky: Lars von Trier's Antichrist Can't Save This Year's
Cannes J. Hoberman from The Village Voice,
There has been, so far as I've seen, only one such movie in
Porumboiu, who won the 2006 Camera d'Or for his first film,
Predicated on a series of routines and staged for maximum objectivity, Police, Adjective has something of the deadpan theatricality that characterized early Jim Jarmusch. But the movie is also a deadly serious analysis of bureaucratic procedure and particularly (as presaged by the lengthy analysis of a pop song's lyrics and grammar put forth by the cop's schoolteacher wife), the tyranny of language.
Police, Adjective is the least violent movie I've seen
at
Cannes
2009: Questionable Observation ("Politist, Adjectiv ... - Mubi Daniel Kasman at
The emphasis on observation in the recent upsurge Romanian cinemas has, in the films I’ve seen, always been a style and not a commentary. Corneliu Porumboiu’s enthralling Politist, Adjectiv changes that quite simply, and does so by telling a policier so banal that its participants—and the audience—really has little else to do but question the interpretation of facts, images, and text. It is not just a matter of the meaning of what is seen, but its moral interpretation as well, seemingly all our lead detective is left to do during a time-wasting case trailing weed smoking teenagers. When one’s work, one’s life, is this pointless, the distance between the facts and a philosophical view of these facts is very small indeed. Indeed, Politist, Adjectiv’s dedicated, commonplace genre routine asks the same from its audience as the central case’s normalcy asks from its investigator. And what is a cinema audience but investigators?
The process—the film and the investigation—begins with single shot scenes of uneventful reconnaissance of minor unlawful activities with no action and little room for mystery. Yet, gradually, these are set against stunning insert shots panning down the full length of our detective’s written police reports recapitulating and interpreting the images we just saw, and later against hilarious dialogs between the detective and his wife on the meaning of vague, idealistic romantic song lyrics, revised Romanian grammar, and, much later, a never-ending lesson by the detective’s captain on the true meaning of “conscience,” “law”,” and “moral.” Considering the amount of time wasted on this case, there seems little to do in the world but talk about the accepted meaning of phrases, feelings, thoughts, and events.
Through Porumboiu has an axe to grind about overly strict and outdated Romanian law, the potency of Politist, Adjectiv lays in the unsolved, cubic and multimedia key-to-the-puzzle aspect of these interstitial scenes, where petty events are cast and recast in minute ways by interpreting them differently through song, written text, computer reports, dictionaries, and drawings. The solution isn’t the solving of the crime, but rather in determining one’s own philosophy in life by taking a stance in interpreting it, as in Martin Ritt’s The Molly Maguires—observing the facts and finding one’s own matrix to understanding them. The subjectivity of this attitude, in the face of the often naïve realism, or naturalism, or invisible style of these Romanian films is a startling relief that aggregates powerfully as Politist, Adjectiv proceeds. It is a necessary dose of consciousness in a cinema that has been working towards seeming unaware.
Simon Abrams The House Next Door,
I can forgive Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective for its
didacticism because it feels well-earned. Beginning as the Romanian answer to
24—a police procedural presented in "real-time," for the most part
through long takes and even longer scenes—Porumboiu's film is very much an
argument, but it's not, as one character suggests, a dialectical one. That
would require a sustained, coherent position to counter the film's prevailing
utilitarian statement, which is revealed in a protracted climax involving a
sneering superior and a Romanian dictionary. (Resolved: When a judgment of
one's own conscience comes into conflict with a judgment that maintains the
status quo, the status quo wins.) It sounds as much fun as being hit
continuously upside the head for 115 minutes by a rolled-up newspaper and then,
to help you understand what it's all for, being whacked in the face several
times by a rock-hard icepack.
The dual-nature of that blunt trauma is, however, a
blessing in disguise. First, the director effectively numbs you into a trance.
It's hard not to struggle while Porumboiu hypnotizes you with long take after
long take, but he does it very effectively thanks to some tantalizing bait. We
follow Cristi (Dragos Bucur), blue collar and flatfoot supreme, throughout his
daily routine—trailing a bunch of kids believed to sell and consume some small
amount of pot. Though it's unbelievable to think that an officer could only be
responsible for one case at a time, Cristi devotes all his time on duty to trailing
these kids, staking out where they'll go next, getting more information about
their surroundings and preparing paperwork, of course.
The unnaturally elongated pace of these scenes don't force
but rather allow your mind to wander, to explore the frame, only to discover
that your lazy eye is, in its own time, latching onto what Porumboiu wants you
to look at. The dreary post-industrial neighborhood Cristi tramps through is
filmed with Porumboiu's instinctive, painterly skill: he consistently finds the
best place to put his sedentary camera and cast a spell on you.
The lulls between Cristi's fits of speech and his actions
effectively elicit the moral haze in which his routine envelops him. He refuses
to bust a couple of kids for smoking pot because of a law that he's sure will
change in a couple of years. But Cristi has to because the law is the law and
he must abide by it since he's the tangible extension of that law. If you can't
tell already, Porumboiu's view of the world (where grunts have to make all the
big decisions, whether they know it or not) is very much an intellectual one.
Porumboiu thankfully does not condescend to Cristi, making it clear to us that
his confusion is not due to his low social class, but rather his extensive
involvement in the case.
That experiential proximity we share with Cristi, our
guide to this particular corner of Romanian New Wave purgatory, is thus the
extent of his certainty, a gut reaction which is effectively squelched in the
film's devastatingly deadpan finale. Like Cristi's reports—which are shown to
the viewer in close-up as if they were documents of unimpeachable truth—it
hammers out any doubt from Cristi's mind and ours with the grace of a
bulldozer. The overt nature of the scene is a perfect example of why Porumboiu
is the foremost miserablist of his New Wave colleagues. It lends Police,
Adjective a complementary affinity to Kafka's style of bullishly grinding his
characters into the ground with the absurdity of the police states that his
stories comment on. It's a hard film to cozy up to, but one I look forward to
rewatching.
Cinema Scope | Corneliu Porumboiu Jay Kuehner
Please note that the director’s familial relation to former football referee Adrian Porumboiu has in no way influenced the consideration of this report; it may be pertinent that the notion of fairness figures prominently in their respective vocations.
It should be stated that the work under consideration has, for the purpose of this report, been conducted when possible under optimal circumstances. 12:08 East of Bucharest, the director’s 2006 feature with elderly Romanians (some drunk) disputing the revolution on a talk show, was first viewed at Telluride, where the director proclaimed, “We Romanians invented absurdity.” His second feature, Police, Adjective (2009), which “focuses on policeman Cristi who, investigating a teenage boy who has been smoking hashish, begins to question the ethical ramifications of his task,” was re-viewed on a non-theatrical DVD format, on which playback was possible after admittedly falling asleep two times during viewing.
But it is upon the content of the director’s work to date that we base our consideration, and thus it is toward the notions of history, language, morality, and absurdity—all words that have been applied, as descriptive attributes, to the director’s work, that we turn our attention. Presently there is insufficient evidence to suggest that these themes have reached full maturation in the director’s work, which often favours long passages and lugubrious dramatic action without punctuation. Police, Adjective contains an inquiry into criminal activity and its potential punishment, and is therefore moral in nature, but its nominal plot of an investigation, or procedural, is stalled by irreconcilable “qualms of conscience” and ultimately resolved by an ineffectual police force with recourse to a dictionary.
For all the insistence on language, definitions, and the political/moral implication of consensual usage, it is often in an everyday or “quotidian” context that the theme is broached. Again in Police, Adjective, Cristi engages in a futile argument with his new wife about the lyrics of a popular song; it is not clear if the inclusion of this exchange has elucidated our understanding of the power of language, or merely alienated us as viewers from the drama that, to be candid, the director has done little to usher into urgent purview. But to be fair it also worth crediting the director with the insight that unrequited love may very well be like toothpaste without a toothbrush.
Therefore, while there are reasons to suggest that Corneliu
Porumboiu has engaged with his work in a technically competent manner as befits
his potential induction into future cinematic canons, and he has questioned the
ethical ramifications of his task, this report remains inconclusive. But go
easy on him. He’s just a kid
Police,
Adjective | Corneliu Porumboiu | by Andrew ... - Film Comment Andrew Sarris, November/December 2009
There has been a relatively recent artistic upsurge of Romanian movies released in the U.S., following the fall of the repressively Stalinist Ceausescu regime late in 1989 when the dictator abandoned the presidential palace in Bucharest. This time and place of political upheaval has been commemorated in the title of Corneliu Porumboiu’s first feature, 12:08 East of Bucharest (06).
Previously, the writer-director’s two short films, A Trip to the City (03) and Liviu’s Dream (04), had won awards at film festivals in a number of countries. 12:08 East of Bucharest was selected for the Directors’ Fortnight at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Camera d’Or for best first feature, then went on to amass over 20 awards in festivals around the world, and was eventually distributed in more than 30 countries.
The odd thing is that Porumboiu, now 35, and his compatriots in the Romanian film industry have not seized the opportunity to celebrate the joys of liberation from a hateful tyrant. Instead, they have turned out a succession of somber dissections of a still malfunctioning society, beginning (to my knowledge) in 2005 with Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, a searing indictment of haphazard medical procedures in Romania, but one not without a degree of tolerance and understanding for the various characters caught up in the shortcomings of a system.
Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest came out the following year with a more satirical approach to the issue as seen from the vantage point of the director’s hometown of Vaslui, northeast of Bucharest, and the town’s ill-equipped television station, at which one of the forlorn characters attempts to conduct a talk-show discussion on Vaslui’s debatable role in the 1989 revolution. The three pathetic panelists are bombarded with angry telephone calls from aggrieved viewers questioning the claims and credentials of the show’s amateurishly presented participants.
Now, in 2009, Mr. Porumboiu has returned with his second feature, Police, Adjective, which won the Un Certain Regard prize this past spring at Cannes, and has subsequently been shown at the Toronto International Film Festival and, most recently, the New York Film Festival.
In his latest foray, Porumboiu has returned to Vaslui, which is now the scene of a mostly low-key policier involving a taciturn plainclothes detective named Cristi (Dragos Bucur) and his painstaking shadowing of hashish-sniffing students at a local high school. His superior, Anghelache (Vlad Ivanov), is pressing him to make arrests more quickly. But Cristi is beset with doubts about the permanence of Romania’s stringent drug laws that punish even offering hashish to a companion without asking for recompense. He’s not sure that he wants to ruin a young man’s life over an offense that might be decriminalized in the near future. Instead, Cristi prefers to wait until he can nab a drug kingpin, who is making money off of the student’s criminal endeavors.
The moral dilemma Cristi faces is very slowly developed through the seemingly endless bureaucratic drudgery of compiling detailed files on a methodical surveillance of the suspect and his companions. The film proceeds at Detective Cristi’s pace, stopping and starting, hiding and emerging, scanning and staring, as the languid camera surveys the dismal neighborhoods with undisguised ennui.
Cristi’s home life with his fanciful wife, Anca (Irina Saulescu), is no more scintillating than his tedious tasks at the “office.” But yes, Virginia, there is a climax, and it is richly achieved with the assistance, of all things, of a Romanian dictionary, which Anghelache exploits to box in Cristi’s conscience with a network of words, words, words. It is difficult to describe or even to believe, but their endgame contains a parable of society’s mechanisms designed to bring all its citizens to heel. In short, the New Romanian Cinema has become a searchlight illuminating not so much our immediate fears as our eternal doubts.
Police, Adjective Shadow Play, by Damon Smith from Reverse Shot, September 2009
Tativille:
The 47th New York Film Festival: Police, Adjective Michael J. Anderson from Tativille, September 30, 2009
Slant Magazine review Andrew Schenker
Henry Stewart The L magazine
Jigsaw Lounge : Cluj film-festival report [Neil Young] in Transylvania
not coming to a theater near you review Mike D’Angelo
not coming to a theater near you review Cullen Gallagher
Police, Adjective Dan Fainaru from Screendaily
Moving Pictures magazine [Ron Holloway] at Cannes
Acquarello Strictly Film School
James Hansen Out 1 Film Journal
Brandon Harris Cinema Echo Chambers
Boyd van Hoeij at Cannes from Cineuropa, May 15, 2009
Lingua Romania: “Police, Adjective” Makes for Arresting Tour-De-Force Anthony Kaufman at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 17, 2009
Cannes. "Police, Adjective" David Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 16, 2009
The Hollywood Reporter review Deborah Young at Cannes, May 16, 2009
Variety (Jay Weissberg) review
David Fear Time Out New York
Cannes '09 Day 7: Almodovar, Adjective Wesley Morris at Cannes from The Boston Globe, May 19, 2009
Scott Foundas Dreaming in Film: At Cannes and Its Renegade Festivals, from The LA Weekly, May 20, 2009
Where Art Trumps Industry Manohla Dargis at Cannes from The New York Times, May 17, 2009
THE
TREASURE (Comoara) B 87
Romania France (89 mi)
2015 ‘Scope
A simple story, but cleverly told, one where the audience continually
provides different outcomes in their heads as the story plays out, where our
thoughts of what might have happened may actually be far more intriguing than
what eventually does, but the director provides the time and space for these
audience thoughts to develop. Each
individual will likely have a differing response to this film, which appears to
be the sly intent of Corneliu Porumboiu, Romanian director of absurd deadpan
comedies 12:08 EAST OF BUCHAREST (2006), winner of the Caméra d’Or (Best First
Film), and POLICE ADJECTIVE (2009), Jury Prize (2nd place) winner of
Un Certain Regard. With THE TREASURE,
his third film to premiere at Cannes and winner of the Un Certain Regard Talent Prize,
this slight moral tale is once again set in the social realist milieu typical
of Romanian films, where a droll family drama turns into a wild goose chase
about the obsessions that take hold when breaking out of the suffocating
restrictions of bureaucratic conformity and following one’s dreams. Costi (Cuzin Toma) is an ordinary everyman,
seen reading a bedtime story to his six-year old son, which is an illustrated
version of The Adventures of Robin Hood, a
fairy tale that is likely to produce wild dreams of heroism in the imagination
of a young boy. However, this routine is
interrupted when a neighbor knocks on the door needing to speak to him. Adrian (Adrian Purcărescu) needs to
borrow money, explaining his publishing business has gone under and he’s on the
verge of losing his home. The two get
into a detailed discussion on fixed mortgage rates that homeowners around the
world can relate to, especially the differing interest rates applied to each
owner, where Adrian got unlucky, as his interest rates are twice that of
Costi. Sympathizing with his plight,
Costi is a civil servant without much wiggle room when it comes to paying
bills, so he politely indicates “Sorry, neighbor, but there is nothing I can do,”
and goes back to the bedtime story with his eagerly waiting son. Again there is a knock on the door as the
neighbor has returned, this time indicating it has nothing to do with mortgage
payments, which he’s avoided paying for several years, but rather the cost to
hire a professional metal detector, claiming there is a hidden treasure
concealed somewhere in the backyard garden of a house owned by his grandfather,
which he was forced to hide when the Communists arrived in 1944, and died before
he had a chance to retrieve it. While
hard to believe, with scant evidence to support this theory, Adrian offers him
half of whatever they uncover.
While the audience remains skeptical, sensing little more than a home
grown fairy tale, nonetheless Costi discusses the proposition with his wife,
who learns the land is located near the 1848 Proclamation of Islaz, a historical
site in Romanian history when they attempted to break away from Russian and
Ottoman authorities, increasing the chances of finding something
worthwhile. From his humdrum job at
work, sitting at a desk with an obligatory computer, we begin to see what a
stifling existence he must lead with a life defined by the same routine. In order to meet with the metal detectors,
Costi has to invent an excuse to leave work early, concocting what he thinks is
a harmless lie, though it’s easily scoped out by his boss who surmises he is
having an affair with his female coworker.
Despite his outright denial, the boss refuses to be made a fool of, as
this would explain his recent work lapses, demanding with utter certainty that
he knows what’s going on, forcing Costi to admit he’s having an affair—but with
a female counterpart at the metal detector company, wiping his moral conscience
clean of work fraternization. This
fictional slippage opens the door to multiple narratives, almost compelling the
audience to play along. His little trip
to the metal detectors is eye-opening, as not only is he informed that legally
he’s required to report any historical findings to the police, but if the
contents are revealed to be of national interest, they remain confiscated by
the state, where the finder is only allowed a 30% finder’s fee. Additionally, because of the obvious
discouragement involved, one of the workers offers a little black market deal
on the side, doing the same job for half the price, claiming no police
obligations. Without question Costi and
his neighbor choose Door Number 2, arriving together at the location, adding a
bit of luster to the narrative, as we learn this used to be an industrial site,
a school, and one of the most popular strip bars during the communist era, all
of which suggest we are dealing in an area of moral ambiguity. As soon as the metal detector arrives and
pulls out his equipment, all eyes are on this guy and his machine, repeatedly
pacing back and forth, sending out wailing electronic noises when it detects
something. Porumboiu puts suspense on
hold, allowing expectations to linger as the man patiently carries out his
duties in real time, where the audience remains transfixed to learn what this
all means.
Expect giggles from the audience, as the sound of this detection device
seems to have a life of its own, sounding like a sick siren that is low on
batteries, yet erupting into a feverish pitch with nearly every step. With an amusing degree of overconfidence, he
points out the most likely spot to begin digging. While all along we knew it would come to
this, to actually sit there and watch guys dig a hole isn’t exactly
enthralling, as it’s a kind of anti-theater, becoming ridiculously absurd after
a while, as the hole only grows bigger.
Continuously told there is something under there, with the device
already ringing in their ears, this begins to test the men’s patience, as
Adrian’s frayed nerves are ready to explode, quickly growing tired of this guy,
claiming he doesn’t know what he’s doing, where the two get into little squabbles
that escalate into something more, where Adrian accuses him of the mindless
ineptitude of the communist era, where you were expected to work without
thinking. The director, however, seems
to relish the idea of extending the length of this scene, testing the
audience’s patience, becoming a mental test of endurance. This allows the audience to fill in the
blanks and reach their own ideas on likely outcomes, playing on the audience’s
expectations, where this is the inherent beauty of the film. Thriving on minimalist absurdity throughout,
the digging continues well beyond reason, where Adrian was ready to give up
hours earlier, but Costi keeps at it, driven by unknown dreams of ambition,
where this is his only chance to break out of that constricting routine of
feeling forever boxed in. How it
unravels is curiously unexpected, where the mind races to project even more
unlikely outcomes, each more deliciously cynical than the next, as this style
of film seems to favor a projection of dark thoughts. It’s an odd parable on unrealistic
expectations, with Romanians having already felt the historical wrath of a
communist inflicted ideology of shared poverty, so is it that unusual to dream
of capitalist wealth? The underlying
motivation behind all this is extremely clever, perhaps an envious view of how
those restricted to life in the East view the capitalist excesses of the West,
where they dream of having a piece of it.
Presented as an inherent conflict between aspiration and reality, Porumboiu
foregoes the dark themes and typical dreariness of Eastern European miserablism
and instead searches for the light while excavating the past, with often
amusing results, which are especially exaggerated by the song booming over the
closing credits, where most everyone will leave the theater with a smile. It’s
interesting that the film began as a documentary, where Porumboiu learned about
a plot of land that had a similar history, supposedly containing buried
treasures of the past, but he was unhappy with the results, so he added a
fictionalized context that makes all the difference. A bit slight, but certainly amusing.
CINE-FILE:
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Eric
Fuerst
The story of Robin Hood is the appropriate framing device in
Corneliu Porumboiu’s latest film, which plays as sincere parcel of wish
fulfillment in the midst of a recession. Romania’s economic struggles and
governmental incompetence form the backdrop of this fable involving two average
men (Toma Cumin and Adrian Purcarescu) searching for treasure believed to be
buried in the same location as an 1848 progressive revolution. Porumboiu
brought moments of dry social comedy to 12:08 EAST OF BUCHAREST and POLICE,
ADJECTIVE, but in THE TREASURE he fully realizes this potential, with the
repetition of simple motifs, such as the hellish wail of a metal detector, that
displays a comic intuition worthy of Jacques Tati.
Cannes 2015: My
God, It's Full of Stars! - Cinema Scope Mark
Peranson
Last but not least, there was that reliable Romanian footy fan
Corneliu Porumbiou, a national treasure indeed. The winner of the most
befuddling and insulting prize of the year, the Un Certain Talent (thanks for
the assurance, guys), Porumboiu constructs films made entirely of small,
memorable moments that accrue into trenchant social/communal comedies. He saves
his boldest, most atypical gesture for the last shot of The Treasure,
which also happens to be the only camera movement of the film: a crane shot
that hovers above a Bucharest playground, a shot whose sheer unfamiliarity in
the Porumbouian context initially caused me to scratch my head. But then
Laibach’s grandiose version of Opus’ 1985 classic kicked in on the soundtrack
for the last laugh, and it all made sense. “Live Is Life” indeed, and Cannes is
Cannes.
Cannes Film
Festival 2015: Part Two - Reverse Shot Jordan
Cronk from Reverse Shot
Rather than advance to competition status with his fifth feature
(and his third to premiere at Cannes), Romanian director Corneliu Poromboiu
instead returned this year to Un Certain Regard, where he won the top prize in
2009 for Police, Adjective. The most adventurous and slyly political
of the New Romanian guard, Poromboiu has of late been applying in increasing
measure his self-reflexive sensibility to what might be called absurdist
parables, pitting archetypes against unseen (and occasionally self-conceived)
institutions in alternately humorous and biting fashion. His sense of
situational satire reaches perhaps its most deceptively whimsical height yet in
The Treasure, an allegorical morality play that, like his last
narrative film, When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism, makes a
virtue of its economy of gestures. With the help of a metal detector expert
(Corneliu Cozemi), neighbors Costi (Cuzin Toma) and Adrian (Adrian Purcarescu)
embark on a dig of the latter’s family home, where his grandfather was said to
have buried a small fortune. Rather than turn up treasure, their search—which
Poromboiu films in long takes with little action—amasses a bounty of incidental
humor, as clever visual and aural cues reorient the film’s dramatic properties
into circumstantial comedy. Lengthy stretches of the film consist simply of
these three characters engaged in this by turns complimentary and contemptuous
endeavor, the blind logic and dogged determination of their quest intensifying even
as their reward appears to be growing ever more elusive, as if the promise of
any ill-defined honor is satisfactory enough to distract from their otherwise
mundane existences. In the end, Poromboiu isn’t so devious as to deprive the
characters (or the audience) their prize, but the results of their efforts are
satisfyingly ironic, which proves to be the wryest joke of all.
Review:
The Treasure | Corneliu Porumboiu - Film Comment Max Nelson, January/February 2016
Corneliu Porumboiu has a genius for hitting on subjects as wide in their implications as they are small in scale: a single episode of a local TV news show (12:08 East of Bucharest, 06); a routine drug arrest (Police, Adjective, 09); a soccer match (The Second Game, 14). His new film is both another testament to his eye for telling details and his most seamless combination yet of fiction and fact.
The film’s subject was suggested by Porumboiu’s friend Adrian Purcarescu, one of The Treasure’s lead performers. The story the fictionalized Adrian recounts to his comfortably married neighbor Costi (Cuzin Toma) barely differs from the one the real Adrian told Porumboiu before the film was made. Generations ago, Purcarescu’s ancestors built a house in the village whose land-owning residents inspired the Wallachian Revolution of 1848. Prior to the 1948 Communist takeover of Romania, he claims, his grandfather buried a fortune there. Now, years after the country’s return to democracy in 1989, Adrian wants to dig it up.
The Treasure’s centerpiece is the duo’s excursion to this crumbling country home, for which they recruit an amateur metallurgist (Corneliu Cozmei) whose ironic, hangdogish attitude sets the movie’s tone. Originally, Porumbiou did in fact undertake a similar search with Purcarescu and Comei; they came up empty-handed. That the dig on screen does yield a kind of treasure is the twist that fuels the film’s third act—as surprising and grimly funny a denouement as anything in Porumboiu’s previous work.
The Treasure | 4:3 Ivan Čerečina
More than anything, audiences will be struck by the simplicity of Corneliu Porumboiu’s newest feature, The Treasure, a film that recalls the clarity of the parable or children’s story in its unadorned yet subtly suggestive narrative. A man is approached by his neighbour to lend him some money for a metal detector, the neighbour insisting that he needs it to find “treasure” buried on a plot of land that belongs to his family. After agreeing to split the findings between them, the two set out to the site to see what they can dig up with the help of a somewhat shady metal detector operator. While going any further with this plot synopsis may put this review into spoiler territory, it would suffice to say that the denouement is in keeping with the unfussy first two-thirds of the film. To Porumboiu’s credit, he has fashioned a fine film that draws its strength and humour from the significant restraint he displays in keeping the story simple, subverting our habitual engagement with more conflict-driven narrative forms.
In an interview given at this year’s Cannes film festival, where The Treasure premiered in the impressive Un Certain Regard section, director Corneliu Porumboiu spoke about the film’s origins not as a work of fiction, but rather as a documentary. The director was told by a friend about a particular plot of land that was charged with Romanian history; not far from the site of the Proclamation of Izlaz in 1848, the site was also said to contain buried contents from its past as an industrial site, a school, and two kinds of bars that were built during the communist era. Much like his characters in The Treasure, Porumboiu set out to the site with a metal detector in hand and a small crew to shoot the excavation. According to the director, after looking back on his materials, he was unhappy with the results; he returned to the site with the intention of fictionalising a dig on this peculiar piece of land.
The Treasure maintains the rigorous procedural structure of the expository documentary but exploits it to humorous ends, emphasising and even exaggerating its step-by-step procedural nature. This comes through in large swathes of expository dialogue but also in the level of detail the director puts into the story. From the minutiae of Romanian law with regards to finding historical artifacts of interest to the state, to the cost of metal detector rentals (800 euros if you want to keep it strictly legal, 300 if you can find someone to do it under the table), to the properties and functional benefits of different types of metal detectors, Porumboiu doesn’t hold back. From one perspective, this is pointless narrative baggage, something that another director would have cut in the interest of propelling his story forward. But it is precisely this almost infuriating level of detail that makes the film so funny, making it not so much a procedural that swiftly progresses step-by-step, rather one that moves at a crawl.
Much as he undercuts the smooth flow of the procedural narrative, Porumboiu also nips potential sources of conflict in the bud, giving us the possibility of tension before taking it away. When it seems as though some antagonising force will thwart our protagonists’ efforts — as in a scene where the police briefly detain the two leads after their dig — Porumboiu quickly rights the ship, with equilibrium re-established before it ever seemed like something would really go wrong.
These subversions of classical narrative form mean that it’s hard to pin down exactly what Porumboiu is suggesting with this exceedingly simple story. The connections to Romanian history are there to be made for the viewer, of course — the characters are literally digging up the past — but at the same time The Treasure never feels like an all-too-obvious political allegory. To his credit, Porumboiu doesn’t force any of these connections upon the viewer, but rather almost floats them dreamily by us. It’s a strange experience, but at the end of the film one has the impression of having seen something quite unique from a director that has forged a singular path in the current batch of Romanian directors.
[Cannes Review]
The Treasure - The Film Stage Giavanni
Marchini Camia
Though regularly grouped with the directors that comprise the Romanian New Wave, Corneliu Porumboiu’s brand of social realism is all his own. Dispensing with the shaky cam so popular amongst his peers, his fictional features capture the world through contemplative long takes, their duration and frequent immobility allowing for careful observations of the subjects’ relationship to their environment, which is always reflective of wider-reaching concerns. The Treasure, his fifth feature and the winner of this year’s Un Certain Talent Prize, is the latest gem in the director’s exquisite filmography — another tightly focused, minimalist and enchantingly humane story of individual struggle within the broader social reality of contemporary Romania.
Costi (Toma Cuzin), the film’s protagonist, is one evening approached by his neighbor, Adrian (Adrian Purcarescu), who tells him that his great-grandfather had buried a treasure in their garden in 1947 before their family was deported by the Communists. Both men are struggling financially and Adrian offers Costi a deal: if he pays for the cost of hiring a metal detector and helps him dig up the treasure, they will split what they find. Once the metal detector has been procured, they drive out to Adrian’s family’s house in the countryside with the detector’s operator, Cornel (Corneliu Cozmei), and spend the night digging a huge hole.
That’s pretty much the extent of the narrative, and the bulk of The Treasure is dedicated to the men’s scanning and digging-up of the garden. What’s extraordinary is how delightful a story Porumboiu can draw out of such minimal means. A large part of the credit goes to the director’s characteristic droll humor, which could be described as a more realistic version of Aki Kaurismäki’s – the jokes are so subtle and sneakily deployed that the laughter catches you by surprise every time. The idea of two grown men seeking treasure is played completely straight, though the responses they get from others are priceless — particularly Costi’s boss, who assumes this is a ridiculous excuse that Costi’s invented to cover up an extramarital affair. Cornel’s ineptness with the metal detector is the most extended and possibly funniest gag in the film, and Porumboiu somehow manages to play it as both deadpan and slapstick.
Despite the absurdity of this premise, The Treasure is actually based on events that happened to Porumboiu and Purcarescu, who is himself a director. Much like in the film, the latter told Porumboiu about a family treasure, which they went out to find with the intention of shooting a documentary. When their quest proved fruitless, Porumboiu turned the whole experience into a fictional feature. Cozmei was the person they’d hired to operate the metal detector in real life, and his incompetence had been so hopeless and comical that he was asked to play himself.
The script is peppered with references to Romania’s past, including World War II, Communism, and the revolution that overthrew Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1989. These, together with the fact that they’re seeking to unearth a treasure whose history stretches back over three generations in Adrian’s family, endow the men’s digging with an understated allegorical dimension. It would be unfair to reveal the outcome of their undertaking, so let’s just say that, on a symbolic level, the implications of the search are brought into a perspective that’s turned towards the future.
As with Porumboiu’s previous features, The Treasure is dominated by long takes with a movement that’s rare and limited to unassuming pans. In its conclusion, the film gradually sheds realism and begins taking on the air of a fable (significantly, Costi reads Robin Hood to his son in an early scene). For its closing image, the camera is taken off a tripod for the first time and soars upwards in a wondrous crane shot. Simultaneously, the film’s only instance of soundtrack music is played, kicking off a song so unexpected, yet so perfect, that it ends things on a heartfelt and fantastical note. Within Porumboiu’s formal restraint, these conspicuous devices have an impact so affective that it makes one almost wish directors’ use of showy techniques were regulated by strict quotas so that they can always retain such power.
Interview: Corneliu Porumboiu - Film Comment Dan Sullivan interview, October 19, 2015
Arguably one of the most
consistent directors working today, Corneliu Porumboiu has proven himself to be
something like the anchor of the Romanian New Wave, an audacious miniaturist
who astounds with his ability to work through the legacy of Romania’s Communist
past and the Kafkaesque backwardness of its present.
Porumboiu is perhaps best
known here for his (sort of) metaphysical detective comedy, Police,
Adjective (09), a sui generis shaggy-dog investigation of language and its
relation to the Law. His two most recent features, When Evening Falls on
Bucharest, or Metabolism (13) and The Second Game (14), were,
ostensibly, formally opposed works: the former was a fiction feature comprised
of approximately 19 long takes, charting the plight of a Romanian filmmaker
trying to determine where art ends and life begins amid an off-the-set romance
with his leading lady; the latter was a found-footage documentary that found
Porumboiu and his father discussing the days under the Communist regime while
watching a VHS recording of a fateful chapter in the Eternal Derby between the
country’s two most popular football clubs, FC Dinamo Bucharești and FC
Steaua Bucharești, a contentious and snowy match refereed by Porumboiu’s
father. Both films seemed to pick up where Police, Adjective left off in
distinct ways that nevertheless bore pronounced affinities, continuing
Porumboiu’s engagement with his country’s history and political here-and-now
with a singular, deadpan sense of humor and an escalating formal rigor.
His latest, The
Treasure, represents an inspired addition to his delightful cinema of
contradictions: it is at once hilarious yet rigorous, moving yet droll, patient
yet lean, and unapologetically political yet tactful in how it dissects its
subject. The story of two neighbors, Adrian and Costi, brought together by a
combination of economic circumstance and boredom, who set out to dig up
semi-mythical treasure in the backyard of an old family property, The
Treasure was one of the highlights of the Main Slate of this year’s New
York Film Festival. FILM COMMENT caught up with Porumboiu the morning after the
film’s U.S. premiere there.
Logically, I wanted to start by having you talk about the
origins of The Treasure, because I understand that it began as a
documentary but mutated into something else altogether. This is especially
interesting in light of the fact that your previous film, The Second
Game, was itself a rather unorthodox documentary.
In fact, I started work
on The Treasure right after The Second Game because I’ve known
Adrian [Purcarescu, who plays the character by the same name in The Treasure]
for a long time: he’s also a filmmaker and an actor. He started to make a film
10 years ago, and he acted in, directed and produced that film. So he used to
shoot a few days per year. Whenever he had money, he’d shoot another scene from
his film, but he never finished it. Years later, he realized that he would
never finish it, so at one point I said to him: “Okay. Let’s start to finish it
together.” He had like 14 minutes edited from his film and we tried to do
something with the footage and complete it without the sequences he never shot.
We started like that, but
at one point we realized that it wouldn’t work and for him it was very hard to
do it. So we said: “Okay, let’s go.” I knew about the legend of the treasure,
so we said: “Let’s go and try to find the treasure.” So I called someone in my
hometown that I knew had this company and this metal detector, and the guy came
there. And we started to shoot in that garden. I had never gone there before.
It was a very fast decision. He told me the story of the garden, and we were
shooting nonstop, trying to find the treasure. And at one point, I felt like we
were trapped there, like it was a kind of dark hole. Because the garden’s quite
labyrinthine in a way, I had a strange feeling.
And after that, when I
edited the material back home in Bucharest and looked at it again, I had the
same impression, that we were trapped there. I had an instinct: “Okay, I have
to do something to get out of here.” So I started to write the script. It
started from that garden and what was happening there. Because it really has
all this history. The space of the garden was established by the Communists, and
afterward it served as a kindergarten, a pharmacy, a drugstore, and after that,
it was like a street bar, etc.
And the decision to have your characters find the treasure at
the end was a way of redeeming reality through cinema?
Yes, I think so. I had
this instinct to get out. That was the first stage. Of course, when you start
to write, I think you must have this starting point. From the beginning, it was
something fictional, and this notion: “We have to find something.”
Perhaps beginning with When Evening Falls on Bucharest or
Metabolism and then on through The Second Game and now with The
Treasure, one has the sense that, unlike many filmmakers who expand their
scope in a grandiose way as their careers progress and they become more
renowned, your focus fascinatingly seems to be both narrowing and intensifying.
I was curious if this is something that you think about, this intensive
attentiveness to fewer and fewer elements, and whether you consciously impose
certain parameters on yourself as an artist.
When I’m making a movie,
the first instinct is visceral. That was the case with The Treasure and 12:08
East of Bucharest [06]. First, it’s something that I really want to speak
about. Of course, I’m Romanian and I come from a culture which is very
in-between, a marginal culture. I’m conscious of that and I want to use it in
this way. I am like that. At the same time, I pay a lot of attention to
details. Maybe it’s my culture, my way of being which makes me go in that
direction. Maybe for my next project, I’ll do something a little bit bigger.
But I never think about that. It probably has to do with culture.
Your way of presenting the narrative in The Treasure
seems very concentrated to me. It’s not digressive or all over the place. It
feels very hard and nuclear, lean and efficient.
You could see reality
from the sky, from the ground level, or you can do a painting-like structure,
almost like a work by Kazimir Malevich. Maybe I’m more interested in a
microcosmos that reveals other things, you know?
When you were moving away from the documentary origins of the
film, did you always have the two male protagonists in mind as the two centers
of the film?
For Adrian’s character,
yes. When I started to fictionalize the film, I started to think about and
write a living character, but I invented the second one. And I did a casting
for him.
Could you talk about casting this film?
I knew that Adrian would
play Adrian, and I held auditions for the other main actor. So I started the
casting and saw a lot of actors. And at one point, I saw Toma Cuzin, who plays
the main character, Costi, in a museum with his family. I liked all of them—I
liked the contrast between him and his son, the physical appearance of all of
them. He’s very thin in a way, and his lifestyle is very stable. So the body
language was right. Then I cast the family because I liked the relationships
between them, the energy they had together. So I cast all of them.
And for Cornel [the metal
detector guy], I also did an audition with actors, and I showed them the documentary
footage that I had edited, and I said: “I’m interested in a certain type of
body language, and I want to have a character for whom the metal detector is a
part of his body.” Cornel [which is also the actor’s name] came in the
beginning to explain the metal detectors to the actors. I auditioned the
actors, but at some point, I turned to Cornel and said: “Would you like to
audition?” And I chose him.
Could you say a bit about directing your actors? I think they
obtain this funny, deadpan vibe that’s very unique to your films.
I spend a lot of time
casting. And mainly in the casting process, I go through almost the entire
script with the actors. It depends on the actors. In this movie, I have a lot
of nonprofessionals, like Cornel, the wife, the woman from the bank, etc. But I
also have professional actors. With the actors, I usually speak with them about
the characters after the casting. I spend a lot of time with them to see what
they have in their own biographies, and it’s a long process. After that, I
might change the text for them. And when I shoot, I might change it from take
to take. I don’t know, it’s a long process. But I always know the tone that I
want for their performances.
I was wondering how quickly you shoot and how you think the
pace of the production informs the final product. With the last few films, one
gets the sense that you’re working quite quickly and efficiently, and the films
themselves are studies in economy of expression.
We shot The Treasure
for four weeks. I’m quite precise about the framing and composition. I know
what I want. I don’t do too many takes. But I want my actors to have a certain
kind of freedom, so I change a lot of things from take to take. At the same
time, we have very good, productive rehearsals beforehand. On set, in a way I
want to surprise the actors, as the actors can sometimes get too technical, too
mechanical.
For me, a movie is made
there on the set, you know? But of course, for every movie that I made, I took
out a lot of scenes in editing. This is how I build the pace.
From 12:08 East of Bucharest on, but especially in The
Second Game and now here, there’s a kind of political through-line running
across the films. This film feels more political than Metabolism,
although perhaps you’d disagree. Could you comment on whether you think there’s
one strong political thread that unifies your films or if you think if it’s
many disparate threads, some of which are present in one film, absent in
another, and so on?
There are things that
change, even in my perception of and my relation with others. All my movies are
political. In Metabolism, I was interested in a certain type of
microcosmos which reveals something bigger—but this was also political, in a
way. [The protagonist] makes movies and he has this type of limit, which is
also a certain type of excuse. So his way of being is the way an artist is in a
society and is perceived by a society. It’s political also, no? After all, in
Romania, all the funding is provided by the state.
In a way, the threads are
separate, but at the same, they are linked. It seems I have an obsession with
laws and with the Law. So it’s instinctual that it recurs, you know? But I
think it evolves, and my perspective changes. But it remains quite obsessional
. . . All my characters are subordinate to something. All my movies are about
the concept of freedom. They try to define it. But with each movie I make, I
cannot seem to answer a question without opening another question.
That’s a great, honest way to move forward, I suppose.
I don’t know. But it’s
not very conscious because, as I told you, I’m inspired by real people and
events. I was speaking with my wife about my next project and she started to
laugh: “Another one about language?” But it’s not on purpose. Every time we
look at things, we look with our own eyes and with our own obsessions.
I wanted to ask you about the final scene, because the entire
narrative takes a turn at that point toward something a bit fable-like. But
what really interests me is the crane shot there, which is formally quite
unlike the rest of the film’s visual style.
I think that the crane
shot was supposed to be there from the beginning because I wanted to have a
camera movement like in a old movie—a movement out of the story. The movie was
also supposed to start with a crane shot, for descriptive reasons, to establish
the setting, but I took the scene out. I was of course watching some movies
with my team, with the DP, the production designer and all… The Treasure of
the Sierra Madre, some genre movies, because in a way… [The Treasure]
is a certain type of Western, you know? In a Western, they go to search for a
treasure, to conquer a space somewhere. But here it’s funny because they have
to conquer the same place each time.
And at one point the guys
from my team started laughing because I was saying: “We have to see Full
Moon in Paris.” It’s a movie that I love a lot, and we watched it for Police,
Adjective and again for Metabolism. And they said: “Again?” That
film starts with this type of descriptive shot as well, outside the suburbs of
Paris . . . It’s funny, because this movement takes you out of the story
normally, but it moves you toward the sun and it’s like another story is
starting. I like to have this poetry, not merely to accentuate. Because the film
has this fascination with gold—it’s almost like the sun buried in the ground,
you know?
Any other treasure-hunting movies you watched?
No, after that we saw
some things that had more to do with natural lighting and mise en scène. It was
important at one point to have the sun in the garden, so I wanted for the
foreground to be cloudy and for the sun to rise behind this. And the mise en
scène is built in a way according to the trajectories of the certain times of
the day when we had access just to natural light. So we saw The Stranger by
the Lake because Alain Guiraudie was working like that, with natural
lighting. I read that in an interview in the Cahiers du Cinéma. He
thinks of the movement of the characters in terms of the movement of the sun
throughout the day. We did that for this reason, and also for technical
reasons, the look on the digital and to find a certain type of frame and
colors. What else were we watching? Moonfleet, the Fritz Lang movie.
There was a kid there also. What else? After that, I think I was watching
things on my own, but I don’t remember right now. For the framing, I knew that
I wanted it to be very perpendicular…
Very frontal.
Yes, very frontal. But I
think that also, in a way, the texture of the images comes from Full Moon in
Paris. Artificial light, too. We wanted to have that to fill in the
artificial light in the beginning of the film. Light is very important in this
film. And we wanted to have artificial light from above to fill it in a little
bit, even in Adrian’s office, even the artificial light in the first part, and
after that, you go into the natural light. And after that, in the night, when
they’re still searching for the treasure.
Finally, could you talk about your use of Laibach’s rendition
of “Life Is Life”
over the end credits? Is there an element of irony to the use of that song?
Of course. I’ve known
Laibach for a long time. I like it very much and I think the words are very
good. They fit in a way because it has a certain type of march-like rhythm. I
think I knew from the beginning that I wanted to finish with that song because
it has a kind of solemnity… It’s something that’s frightening, but at the same
time, has humor and spirals a bit, and the movie [also] has this structure.
Cannes Review:
Corneliu Porumboiu's Surprising, Delightfu ... Jessica Kiang from The Playlist
Cineuropa.org
[Fabien Lemercier]
Screendaily.com
[Unknown] also seen here: 'The Treasure': Review - Screen Daily
The Treasure | 2015
Cannes Film Festival Review - Ioncinema
Blake Williams
Liveforfilms.com
[Piers McCarthy]
Thedissolve.com
[Mike D'Angelo]
Daily | Cannes
2015 | Corneliu Porumboiu's THE TREASURE
David Hudson from Fandor, also seen here: Fandor.com [David
Hudson]
Corneliu Porumboiu
interview • The Treasure • Senses of ... Amir
Ganjavie interview, June 12, 2015
A
Historical Background: An Interview with Corneliu Porumboiu on ... Daniel Kasman interview from Mubi, June 23, 2015
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[Jordan Mintzer]
'The Treasure'
Review: Corneliu Porumboiu's ... - Variety
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[Michal Oleszczyk]
The Treasure (2015
film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Posey, Parker – actress
A
Chat With Parker Posey Noel Murray
from the Onion,
Potter, Sally
YES A 95
A film that many critics have called pretentious, I didn't find pretentious at all, it’s just stylistically using a different means to express feelings, like lighting or music, or experimental imagery, all are just a means to express an end. Despite what I found to be flaws in the unending similarity of style alone, which by repetition, seems to lose some of the inventive originality, which may be a flaw in my own limitations of perception, and not really one found in the film at all, this is an odd, yet astonishingly insightful, poetic film, one of the most unabashedly sensual films I’ve ever seen that sticks in your imagination for days afterwards by using multiple techniques to persuade, hint at, touch and ultimately move the audience into embracing “love” on so many different levels. Apparently, Potter started writing this film the day after 09-11, and the result is her personal response as an artist, providing an off-setting, yet unforgettable feeling of reconciliation. While the language of the film is written entirely in rhyming iambic pentameter, spoken so softly at times that it’s nearly a whisper, producing an effect like it’s barely there, where one doesn’t catch each and every word or phrase, but only bits and pieces, as many other characters also speak in a thick London cockney-style accent where words are equally lost, instead, the film immerses us in a distinctive, startlingly inventive stylistic flow, not dependent on dialogue but oftentimes enhanced by it. The cinematography by Aleksei Rodionov creates a succession of unusual cuts and oblique camera angles, from images of a white room reminiscent of the finale of Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, equally cold and sterile, lifeless, there’s an undercurrent of distrust and discontent, something not right, so Potter fills the room with the unlikely sounds of BB King singing the blues each time we pass through there, to a blur of brightly colorful, impressionistic stills that project a mosaic of feelings and tones that help us find our way later in the film. But mostly, there’s a brilliant musical score, some written by Philip Glass, the song "Paru River" from "Aguas de Amazonia," but some written by Potter herself, which I found astoundingly hypnotic and fragile, connecting to the moods of the characters in every respect, reminding us of what lies underneath the boundaries of human understanding.
Story wise, inside the white room lives a loveless and
lifeless couple, Sam Neill, an English politician at his dreary, uptight worst,
and in the performance of her career, the luminous and ubiquitous Joan Allen,
from Belfast, Ireland, who grew up in
They have a blistering argument at one point, perhaps the focal point of the entire film, suggesting love alone cannot transcend differences, where they challenge each other’s misguided perceptions of themselves, coming from cultures that are diametric opposites, from lands where people kill one another in the name of God, and where he rightly observes she can’t even correctly pronounce his name. There are two side characters that play prominently, Stephanie Leonidas, Allen’s attractive young God-daughter who instinctively trusts her, but who is strangely manipulated in a calculated scene by an out-of-sorts, two-timing husband drunkenly attempting to undermine Allen’s stature in her eyes, while in another, Sheila Hancock, Allen’s aunt, lies in a coma in a Belfast hospital, yet words come sputtering out of her in a long, interior monologue like the stream-of-conscious language from James Joyce, where she reveals her bitterness in an odd kind of rapture, where her subconscious thoughts force Allen to promise her that she will visit Cuba some day. “I want my death to wake you up and clean you out,” acknowledging that her politically beloved communism has failed, yet heaping scorn on what took its place: “a load of greed, a life spent longing for things you don’t need!” And in a tribute to BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB, Allen emerges from the picture of Cuba on the record jacket, and through impressionistic images, she merges with the sounds and colors of a completely alien culture, one where neither Allen nor Abkarian has an advantage over the other, where both are strangers, and where both can begin anew with the language of a single word. Sally Potter, apparently succumbing to the eternal grace and power of Molly Bloom’s unforgettable soliloquy in the final pages of Joyce’s Ulysses, which ends with the most affirming of all words, has said, “I think yes is the most beautiful and necessary word in the English language.”
From the maid:
And,
in the end, it simply isn’t worth / Your while to try and clean your life away.
/ You can’t. For, everything you do or say / Is there, forever. It leaves
evidence. / In fact it’s really only common sense; / There’s no such thing as
nothing, not at all. / It may be really very, very small / But it’s still
there. In fact I think I’d guess / That “no” does not exist. There’s only
“yes.”
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Yes (2004) Leslie Felperin
from Sight and Sound, August
2005
London, the present. A
Belfast-born woman scientist who grew up in the US, named only 'She' (Joan
Allen), is married to Anthony (Sam Neill), an English politician who cheats on
Her. The two of them hardly speak to one another. Her cleaner (Shirley
Henderson) describes to camera secrets she discovers about them in the course
of her work. One night, at a function where She rows with Anthony, She meets
the similarly unnamed 'He,' (Simon Abkarian) a Lebanese chef who was once a
surgeon in His native land. He flirts with Her. The two make a date to meet,
and end up in bed one afternoon.
The affair becomes more
passionate, but the lovers find the cultural differences between them, as well
as the infidelity, a strain. At His work, racist comments from a colleague,
Whizzer (Raymond Waring), lead to a fight and He leaves his job. Anthony makes
a half-hearted pass at Her teenage god-daughter Grace, which enrages Her and
precipitates a final breakdown of their marriage. At the same time, He feels
drawn back to his roots and estranged from Her western world view. He returns
to Beirut.
Meanwhile, She is summoned to
Belfast to the deathbed of Her aunt (Sheila Hancock), a staunch communist in
her youth, who raised Her as a child. With her dying words, the aunt enjoins
Her to visit Cuba and She decides to go. Over the phone, She offers Him an open
ticket to join Her, but He refuses, having already flown to Beirut. She travels
to Cuba, and discovers a new way of life there. He reconnects with His old one
in Beirut. However, one day He arrives at Her building in Cuba, and although it
is unclear what the future holds, the reunion is a tender one.
Review
Films written in verse are
precious few in number, a slim volume made up mostly of adaptations of
Shakespeare and other Renaissance-to-Restoration playwrights, Cyrano de
Bergerac and bits of My Own Private Idaho. So, if nothing else, director Sally
Potter is to be applauded for her audacity for making Yes, a film written
entirely in iambic pentameter, with a present-day setting. Risking accusations
of pretentiousness as hardly any British films (invariably cautiously
naturalistic, however visually stylised) do, the film's versifying gambit works
surprisingly well, finding its occasionally clumsy but mostly dainty feet in a
compact space.
However, getting the balance
between such formal brio, deep-dish themes and a simple emotional accessibility
is a tall order. The decision to write Yes in verse, according to Potter, arose
from a need to find a way to create "a flow to things that naturalises...
[the film's] big ideas," which concern, among other things, the impact of
global politics and microscopic biology on intimate human relations.
A potentially hackneyed story of
a cross-cultural love affair between an Irish-American scientist (Joan Allen)
and a Lebanese doctor-cum-chef (Simon Abkarian) thus becomes a tightly
choreographed minuet of ideologies, ideas and imagery, in the shadow of an
unmentioned 9/11. This necessitates a lot of nifty footwork as the characters'
dialogue and internal monologues range across the structure of cells, the
nature of dirt, the feel of skin and the scars of war, the shifting of gears
mostly smoothed over by the clutch of rhyme and rhythm. All the same, the
occasional awkward construction stalls the ear, for instance when the main
female character, known only as She, tries to reassure her goddaughter about
her weight with, "I did not infer that you were overlarge," a truly
atrocious line, semi-iambic or not.
Similarly, the would-be
semi-realist male banter in the chef's kitchen, peppered with plenty of swear
words, feels more contrived than the lovers' harmonising couplets. When it
comes to rendering how men in that environment spar with each other, however
much experience Potter has had as a lyricist, musician and film-maker, the
evidence here suggests she has spent less time hanging out in restaurant
kitchens than she has reading Tony Harrison's saltier verse.
But when Yes is in full flow, its
force approaches the torrential. Much credit for this is due to the excellent
lead performances by Allen and Abkarian, adeptly massaging the lines to put
across meaning more than measure, and Alexei Rodionov's elegantly contrapuntal
digital cinematography, which occasionally tinkers with camera speed to create
correspondingly poetic visual moments, enhanced by simply edited fades and slow
jump cuts. Despite her occasional faults as a director (self-indulgence,
humourlessness), feminist film-making icon Potter has always shown rare taste
in casting and DoPs, from her breakout Orlando through to the flawed if
ambitious last The Man Who Cried, and her key collaborators here smooth over
the script's sometimes too-schematic shape-shifting.
Thanks to the onscreen chemistry between the leads, Yes convinces best as a study of passion, sparingly shot, that conjures the lovers' rapture best in wordless moments, such as Him dancing on a table draped in a sheet, or Her glowing with erotic reverie as she peers into a microscope. Allen's fine-boned, parchment-white face is a sufficiently calibrated instrument in itself to bring the verse alive, never more so than when she mutely cries at the bedside of her dying aunt, whose soliloquy spoken with an Irish twang by Sheila Hancock conjures Beckett more than Joyce even though the last word of the latter's Ulysses is said by Potter to have partly inspired the title of her film. Yes ultimately affirms the talent of all involved.
Love in the Time of Terror [Sally Potter's YES] | Jonathan Rosenbaum July 8, 2005
GINGER
& ROSA A 95
Great Britain Denmark Canada
Croatia (90 mi) 2012
‘Scope
Sally Potter sees the breakdown of moral order not only as an expected
part of the human condition, but also equally problematic is the way humans
obsess over the impact. Any film that
starts with the picture of an H-bomb explosion, followed by shots of an
obliterated Hiroshima shortly afterwards in 1945, could hardly be considered
subtle, and this film parallels the shattering aftereffects in an equally
devastating portrait of human callousness and careless disregard. By creating a story of two British mothers who were
pregnant in the hospital at the time, she frames the original incident as
having impact over the rest of their lives, and more importantly, their
children’s lives. While YES (2004) was
an artist’s personal reaction to the 9/11 attacks, where she started writing
the story the day after, this film is about growing up in the late 50’s and early
60’s when the world was dominated by the imminent threat of nuclear attack,
culminating with the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the closest the
world has ever come to an all-out nuclear war.
As someone who grew up during this era, mainstream magazines featured
photo essays displaying the ghastly effects of deformed thalidomide
babies, with constant references to survivalist methods and building backyard
bomb shelters, showing a concern about the rise of building nuclear reactors,
especially after the SL-1
disaster of
1961, the only known fatal reactor accident in United States history, when a
steam explosion killed three plant operators.
Both adults and children were constantly fed end-of-the-world images,
where popular books of the era with post-apocalyptic
themes were
On the Beach (1959), Alas, Babylon (1960), and Fail Safe (1964), while Godzilla movies
became all the rage in Japan, becoming one of the most recognizable symbols of
Japanese popular culture, the only nation to suffer the effects of a nuclear
bomb. Perhaps the ultimate black comedy
to grab the public’s attention was Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), a laceratingly dark comedy that
satirizes the theory of mutually assured destruction, aka the doomsday
device which leads to complete, utter and irrevocable annihilation. In England, where this film takes place, the
trauma from World War II remains, where recollections are still prominent of
underground subway stations being used as air-raid shelters from The Blitz,
prolonged nightly bombing attacks of London by Nazi Germany at the start of
World War II, causing a sudden rise of built-in cellars afterwards in larger
houses. It took until the reign of Prime
Minister Tony Blair (1997 – 2007) to pay off the reconstruction post-war debt
to the United States, where a national program of shared sacrifice was the
rule, so part of the character of the country is defined by the arduous
challenge to rebuild their lives. Anyone
who has lived through this era realizes what a profound effect it had on all
age groups, which is the setting for Potter’s film.
While this director has a career in experimental (and somewhat autobiographical)
films, where her film YES (2004) was strangely written in iambic pentameter,
this may be her most conventional and audience friendly effort, beautifully
shot in ‘Scope by Robbie Ryan, where it’s primarily a character study that
accentuates strong performances all around, one of the director’s strengths, in
particular Elle Fanning (who was 13 when the film was shot) as Ginger and Alice
Englert (Jane Campion’s daughter) as Rosa, both born on the same day in the
same hospital seventeen years earlier.
Set in London in 1962, the film races through their earlier childhood
where the two are seen spending all their time together and remain best friends
for life. Rosa never knew her father,
having abandoned his child at birth, while Ginger’s parents have a rocky
marriage, where her mother Natalie (Christina Hendricks) suspects her husband
Roland (Alessandro Nivola) of sleeping around with younger women, usually with
good reason, as he’s something of a libertarian, especially where his sexual
interests are concerned. Nonetheless the
girls are intelligent, well educated, and highly individualistic, often giggly
when they’re together, going through typical teenage stages like kissing and
smoking together, also ironing (straightening) their hair, while also taking an
active interest in various social causes, like the campaign for nuclear
disarmament, also attending Ban the Bomb demonstrations, as this takes place
during the era of the Cuban Missile crisis.
This social conscience developing so young pleases her father, as he is
a pacifist activist and a former conscientious objector who spent time in jail
for his beliefs, writing articles advocating that young men refuse to serve in
the military, a thankless job that keeps him busy and away from home for lengthy
spells. Ginger somewhat idealizes her
father, as he’s a man of ideas, and mostly locks horns with her mother, as
she’s the one that has to keep an eye on her daughter, as Ginger and Rosa are
mostly out on their own, keeping their own schedules, doing pretty much
whatever they want. Ginger expresses an
interest in poetry and is seen reading constantly, hoping she might be a poet,
while Rosa is less introverted, finding it easier to meet boys.
What makes this film especially interesting is how effortlessly it sets
up the youthful idealism as an extension of 50’s conformism, perhaps best
expressed by the superbly inventive jazz music soundtrack that perfectly
expresses a liberation of the spirit, a literal transformation in sound,
beginning with Dave Brubeck’s Take Five - The Dave
Brubeck Quartet (1959) (5:20), but also in short order Bird Gets The
Worm / Charlie Parker The Savoy Recordings (2:38), Sidney
Bechet - Petite fleur - JazzAndBluesExperience (3:19), Thelonious
Monk - (I Don't Stand) A Ghost Of A Chance (With You) (4:22), and Miles Davis - Blue In Green
(HQ) - YouTube (5:33), where this pair of friends is a perfect example of
tolerance and open mindedness in an era when the women’s movement had not yet
begun, and no one had yet heard of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. They were flower children before the term was
invented and attracted to worldwide peace movements before they were in vogue
by the end of the decade. Potter then
turns the screws on their friendship, allowing reality to intervene, which is
shockingly discomforting, becoming the dramatic thrust of the film, blossoming
from their carefree youth into attractive young women vying for the attention
of the same man, becoming more intensely serious and dramatically complex,
evolving much like a stage play. Rosa
grows sick and tired of hearing Ginger continually talk about her Dad, having
never had one, so she decides to do something about it just as Ginger declares
her independence from her mother, blaming everything on her small-mindedness,
moving in with her Dad. But her day of
liberation is jeopardized by her best friend, who suddenly takes a romantic
interest in her father, exposing a free-thinking man of the 60’s for what he
is, a sexual predator of young girls whose ego is stroked and vainly flattered
by all the attention, disgustingly rationalizing his actions even as Ginger’s
interior world is shattered and destroyed.
Interestingly, the mother she felt was the cause of all her teenage
troubles ends up being her staunchest ally, but at seventeen, an age of
awkwardness and emotional turmoil, life is never what it seems. While Ginger’s attention was on nuclear
fallout and the end of the world, her innocence is demolished into smithereens
in a Cassavetes-like scene from A
Woman Under the Influence (1974). As
an interior journey, the film turns extraordinarily bleak, especially the way
secondary characters rarely seen in 60’s popular culture (a radical feminist
and gay lovers) are used as a kind of Greek chorus to comment upon the moral
abyss of the age, where complacency becomes a substitute for destroyed
ideals. With eloquence and poetry, the
film ends on a grace note with Thelonious Monk playing Thelonious Monk -The man I love
(5:20).
Ginger
& Rosa – review | Film | The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
A lovely, open performance from 14-year-old Elle Fanning, playing
a troubled British teenager at the time of the October missile crisis in 1962,
lifts this movie from Sally Potter. Despite being a
Fanning is Ginger and newcomer Alice Englert is her best friend Rosa; they are best friends for ever, and their parents are faintly alarmed at how much time they spend together.
But then Ginger notices that her roguishly handsome and smug leftie dad, played by Alessandro Nivola, seems to be very taken with Rosa, who is in turn simperingly flattered. Fanning shows how Ginger is deeply wounded by the double betrayal, and channels her rage and hurt into campaigning for CND, as the world fears incineration by the Cuban missiles.
The older generation in the movie, and the audience, are left to
wonder if Ginger's passionate idealism is just a symptom of emotional pain, or
if it deserves respect, or if, in some difficult third sense, emotional
displacement is partly behind all radical protest. This is a teenage movie that
could in other hands have been precious; instead it has delicacy and
intelligence.
Navigating the sexually-charged and politically-shifting
dynamic of '60s London, England, best friends Ginger (Elle Fanning) and Rosa
(Alice Englert) bridge the gap between idealistic youth and adult
disappointment in Sally Potter's surprisingly straightforward, but thematically
rich coming-of-age tale, Ginger & Rosa.
Having a more grounded, realist feel than Potter's most
notable and oblique works, like Orlando and Yes, there's
something indirectly autobiographical about her latest that makes it readily
accessible while thoughtful and astute.
The heart of this story is aspiring activist Ginger, whose
preoccupation with the Hiroshima attack is exacerbated by the Cuban Missile
Crisis and her academically motivated, pseudo-libertarian father, Roland
(Alessandro Nivola).
Her thirst for knowledge and quiet resentment of
artist/housewife/mother Natalie (Christina Hendricks) is juxtaposed with
lifelong best friend Rosa's religious simplicity and overt use of sexuality to
compensate for a lacking father figure.
But more than just a tale of two young girls with vastly
different ideologies coming to terms with the world around them, this clever
character study finds its strength from power dynamics and perspectives
shifting as heroes and ideals crash down around them.
Initially enamoured by her witty, freethinking father,
Ginger starts to see faults in his persona, whether it's his callous twisting
of his less articulate wife's words when she expresses her hurt for his
inability to appreciate a meal she's made for him or his tendency to use an
argument as justification for his id impulses.
Similarly,
Despite the eventual climactic blow out, Potter's handling
of the material and her characters is mostly through body languages,
expressions and veiled commentary. Similarly, Fanning's complicated depiction
of a young girl reluctantly acknowledging the many faults in the world around
her is restrained and acutely observed.
These two well-balanced approaches to moderately familiar
material are what make this intimate tale something special and undoubtedly
timeless.
The
House Next Door [Gerard Raymond]
Though Ginger & Rosa is arguably Sally
Potter's best work to date, it's certainly the English filmmaker's most
accessible. But that's not to diminish her past experimental, more iconoclastic
movies. Her previous work has clearly enriched this finely observed and
affecting tale about two teenage girls coming of age in early-1960s
Ginger & Rosa opens with stock footage of the mushroom cloud
over
If Potter's previous movies have focused on style and structure, the true strength of Ginger & Rosa lies is in its performances. Holding the emotional center of the movie, Fanning is breathtaking, her face alone speaking volumes during many unflinching close-ups. Newcomer Englert, director Jane Campion's daughter, is equally assured. Alessandro Nivola, as Ginger's cool but self-centered father, is the other standout, playing a character with whom the audience will readily identify on an intellectual level, but who's also the person who causes the most damage. He says all the right things, in the best liberal sense, and yet he will cross a moral and ethical line that's inexcusable. Providing support in somewhat underwritten roles are Timothy Spall and Oliver Platt, playing a gay couple, and Annette Benning, as their activist friend, all three functioning as Ginger's surrogate parents.
Potter has said that she was interested in the "grand passion of teenage friendships." She has certainly succeeded in Ginger & Rosa in capturing the extremes of adolescence, the period in these two girls lives where God, politics, and jeans are discussed with equal intensity. She's also recreated an era less familiar in the movies than the now-clichéd Swinging '60s. But it's the lovingly detailed portrait of a female teenage friendship that should strike a chord with audiences.
Ginger
And Rosa (2012) Movie Review from Eye for Film Anne-Katrin Titze
Sally Potter's Titian-tinted Ginger And Rosa radiates positive energy through an electric Elle Fanning as Ginger.
We begin at zero hour, 1945, with bombs and births.
Ginger is only a nickname, we find out, the girl's birth name is
The girls take a bath in their skinny jeans to shrink them, while talking
about Simone de Beauvoir. In matching duffle coats and turtlenecks they walk on
the pebbles at a wintry shore. "I think we should protest," says
Ginger. "I think we should pray," says
At the New York Film Festival press conference, Potter pointed to the "grand passion" of these early friendships, that can reach "the scope, the dimensions of a Greek tragedy".
When Ginger comes home to her mother playing the accordion and singing The Man I Love, she knows her father might not be working or demonstrating. Although the most horrible heartbreak occurs, Potter manages to create an atmosphere of all but ethereal calm. Partly the soothing jazz, partly the warm coppery colors of the women's hair, even the peeling walls that reveal some blue paint under the amber - all work together to pull you deep into Ginger's tale. Fanning's sincere face in happiness and disbelief is the essence of the film.
Her mother cooks for the family, the father's favourite pie is on the table:
"You want to shame me again with this display?" he asks, unable, or
rather unwilling, to see how much he hurts everyone in his righteous path. When
JFK is on the radio, the Cuban missile crisis is in full swing, and a young girl starts to wear eyeliner and cut bangs to betray what she never thought possible.
Klymkiw
Film Corner [Greg Klymkiw]
Village
Voice [Melissa Anderson]
Cine
Outsider [Timothy E. RAW]
Moviefreak.com
[Sara Michelle Fetters]
theartsdesk.com
[Emma Simmonds]
Ginger
& Rosa: Elle Fanning Has Arrived as a Major Talent Dana Stevens from Slate
[Review]
Ginger & Rosa - The Film Stage
Forrest Cardamenis
Slant
Magazine [Andrew Schenker]
Critic's
Notebook [Sarah Manvel]
FilmSchoolRejects
[Daniel Walber]
Smells
Like Screen Spirit [Anna Bielak]
Film-Forward.com
[Nora Lee Mandel]
Review:
Elle Fanning cant save the soapy mess of Ginger and Rosa Gregory Ellwood from HitFix
Blu-ray.com
[Dr. Svet Atanasov]
Ozus' World Movie
Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The
Spinning Image [Graeme Clark]
The
London Film Review [Rosanagh Griffiths]
Sound
on Sight [Josh Slater-Williams]
Digital Journal
[Sarah Gopaul]
Sally
Potter: 'I dreamed about the nuclear threat most nights' Catherine Shoard interview from The Guardian, October 4, 2012
Sally
Potter interview - Ginger and Rosa - Time Out Film Cath Clarke interviews the director
Entertainment
Weekly [Melissa Maerz]
Hollywood
Reporter [Todd McCarthy]
Ginger &
Rosa | review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out Cath Clarke
Ginger
& Rosa – review Philip French
from The Observer
Ginger
& Rosa - The Globe and Mail Rick
Groen
Review:
Ginger & Rosa - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough
Movie
review: 'Ginger & Rosa' - A&E - Boston.com Ty Burr from The Boston Globe
The
Star-Ledger [Stephen Whitty]
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
Washington
Post [Ann Hornaday]
'Ginger
& Rosa' review: All's Elle that ends well ... - Pioneer Press Chris Hewitt
Austin
Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]
San
Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Los
Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]
DVDBeaver
Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
Vainzine:
SOUNDTRACK: Ginger & Rosa 2012
Poutte,
Manuel
DISTANT
TREMORS (Les Tremblements Lointains) B 86
A film that explores the cultural and psychological fissure left over
from the days of European colonialism in Africa, where whites continue to
reject in absolute rationalist terms the tribal customs and superstitions of
the African nations, adhering strictly to science, while African people still
maintain a certain link towards their traditions, which might include masks and
tribal costumes, oral historians, and even a bit of sorcery, where it’s still
possible to fall under good and bad spells.
Adhering as close as possible to existing Senegalese beliefs, a young
boatman Bandiougou (Papa Malick N’Diaye) feels his life has been placed under a
curse after he receives a letter from a girlfriend in France that tells him no
travel visa is possible and he should forget about her altogether. Little does he realize that the letter
actually reads the opposite, but Marie (Amélie Daure), a young French woman
raised in
The film carefully examines both worlds, the wealthy white inhabitants
of the plantation style home who maintain African domestic servants and the
street culture of young African men sleeping in straw huts on the beach all
vying to make a living transporting white tourists in their boats. Marie’s father all but forbids her from
befriending Bandiougou, but this only drives her closer to him, always
inventing reasons to seek out his assistance.
When one of her father’s friends guarantees a French travel visa in
exchange for obtaining a rare tribal fetish carving, Bandiougou hesitates,
knowing the dark side of the request, how the tribal spirits would be angry
with him, but he’s also consumed by the thought of the visa, so he agrees to travel
back to his home village. Both Marie and
her father accompany him on an illuminating journey down the river, where each
individual is seen in a different light, their motives and intentions under
question, including a shift in the power structure where the whites are
suddenly dependent on the black African, perhaps for the first time in their
lives. As this shift occurs, so does the
true nature of their character, which also undergoes a radical transformation,
though not necessarily for the better.
Nothing is revealed through typical narrative threads, but by a surreal
blend of symbolism, offscreen sound, and a tense, illusory mood of formless
ambiguity, an eerie, psychologically shattering world where the supernatural
might still exist.
Powell, Michael and Emeric Pressburger
DVDBeaver the
Director’s Chair: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/direct-chair/powell.htm
The collaborations of Michael Powell (director) and Emeric
Pressburger (screenwriter) have left monumental impacts on viewers for decades
with their own esoteric romanticism and visionary cinematic expression. The
films range from bearings on a complex relationship of national identity, to
pragmatic and structured explorations of war, fantasy, art and escapism. Often
described as "pure cinema", by championing notables like Martin
Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, the partnership of Powell and Pressburger
use extensive imagery to create encompassing and sublime atmospheric design
elements. With recent exposure of their works and critical interest worldwide,
modern generations of new admirers have discovered and observed their
aesthetically unique films of organic melodrama and subtle artistic
expressionism.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| The Storyteller Ian
Christie from Sight and Sound, September
2005
Michael Powell is a lead
candidate for Britain's greatest-ever film-maker. To commemorate the centenary
of his birth, in this month's edition of Sight & Sound,
we publish for the first-time ever Powell's semi-fictional memoirs. In this
exclusive unfinished fantasia, written at a time when he was down on his luck
as a filmmaker, Powell describes his life in the studio, his love of women and
his passion for cinema.
Here, Ian Christie explains how
Powell channelled his frustrations into writing these memoirs.
All film-makers have a visible
and an invisible career. Michael Powell probably had fewer early unrealised
projects than most, but in the 1950s the balance changed and too much of his
later career consisted of chasing chimeras and writing scripts that would never
be made. From William Sansom's 'The Loving Eye', a Kensington romance that
could have starred Paul Scofield and Natasha Parry, to Michael Frayn's 'The
Russian Interpreter' with Peter Sellers; or 'The Tempest' with James Mason,
Frankie Howerd and Mia Farrow - what riches lost to British cinema! And for
television, collaborations with Dylan Thomas, Stravinsky, Graham Sutherland,
Mervyn Peake - all sketched with optimism but ignored, until Francis Coppola
and Martin Scorsese offered Powell the sanctuary and recognition denied him in
Britain.
The only happy product of this
long period of frustration was his determination to write about what it was
really like to be a film-maker when cinema was at its zenith. And at the same
time to write an uninhibited memoir of his life as an artist, a gypsy, a
mountebank, and a truly sensuous man. Powell's willingness to write frankly
about the many women he had loved, and who had loved him, struck a note that
jarred with some. It seemed very pre-1960s - and very Powell, in its innocent
willingness to shock.
The earliest draft of Powell's
memoir dates from 1956, when his partnership with Emeric Pressburger was
crumbling, and is called 'Prisoner at the Bar'. It's a dramatised
self-evaluation in which he boldly declares that there are only five great
film-makers - Griffith, Fairbanks, Chaplin, Disney and René Clair - and rates
himself "one of the best". Two years later the framework has changed
to a nocturnal meditation in the cutting room, where editing serves as a
controlling metaphor for scrolling back through a life-stock of scenes.
Powell was always sceptical about
documentary and believed in the higher power of the imagination: better
colourful lies than mere journalism. The 1973 version of his memoirs published
here retains the dramatic structure of an editing-room fantasia, weaving
recollection, history and fantasy into the beginning of a novel that could have
stood comparison with Christopher Isherwood's 'Prater Violet'. Between 1970 and
1973 in successive drafts Powell switched from third-person to first-person
narration. The die was cast in favour of memoir - and we have 'A Life in
Movies' (1986) and its posthumous sequel 'Million-Dollar Movie' to be grateful
for. But the earliest working title was 'The Storytellers' and that remained
Powell's goal: to tell the adventure of cinema in a way we wouldn't forget.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger - Director - Films by Powell ... Stephen L. Hanson from Film Reference
Between the years 1942 and 1957, English director Michael Powell and his Hungarian partner, Emeric Pressburger, formed one of the most remarkable partnerships in cinema. Under the collaborative pseudonym "The Archers," the two created a series of highly visual and imaginative treatments of romantic and supernatural themes that have defied easy categorization by film historians. Although both were listed jointly as director, screenwriter, and frequently as producer, and the extent of each one's participation on any given film is difficult to measure, it is probably most accurate to credit Powell with the actual visualization of the films, while Pressburger functioned primarily as a writer. The latter, in fact, had no background as a director before joining Powell. He had drifted through the Austrian, German, and French film industries as a screenwriter before traveling to England in 1936.
Many of the gothic, highly expressionistic characteristics of the films produced by the partnership seem to trace their origins to Powell's apprenticeship at Rex Ingram's studio in Nice in the 1920s. There he performed various roles on at least three of the visionary director's silent productions: Mare Nostrum (1926), The Magician (1926), and The Garden of Allah (1927). Working on these films and subsequently on his own features in the 1930s, Powell developed a penchant for expressionism that manifested itself in several rather unique ways. The most fundamental of these was in his use of the fantasy genre, as illustrated by A Matter of Life and Death , with its problematic juxtaposition of psychiatry and mysticism. Another manifestation was an almost philosophical sadism that permeated his later films, such as Peeping Tom , with a camera that impales its photographic subjects on bayonet-like legs. The mechanical camera itself, in fact, represents still another Powell motif: the use of machines and technology to create or heighten certain aspects of fantasy. For example, the camera obscura in A Matter of Life and Death and the German warship in the Pursuit of the Graf Spee (which is revealed through a slow camera scan along its eerie structure, causing it to turn into a metallic killer fish) effectively tie machines into each film's set of symbolic motifs. In doing so, a technological mythology is created in which these objects take on near-demonic proportions.
Finally, the use of color, which most critics cite as a trademark of the Powell-Pressburger partnership, is shaped into an expressionistic mode. Powell chose his hues from a broad visual palette, and brushed them onto the screen with a calculated extravagance that became integrated into the themes of the film as a whole. In the better films, the visual and technological aspects complement each other in a pattern of symbolism. The mechanical staircase which descends from the celestial vortex in A Matter of Life and Death , for example, blends technology and fantasy as no other image has. Similarly, when the camera replaces the young pilot's eye in the same film and the pink and violet lining of an eyelid descends over it, the effect is extravagant, even a bit bizarre, but it effectively serves notice that the viewer is closing his eyes to external reality and entering another world. The audience is left to decide whether that world is supernatural or psychological.
This world has been most palatable in popular Powell-Pressburger fantasies like The Red Shoes , a ballet film used as an allegory for the artist's unremitting dedication to his art; and The Tales of Hoffman , in which the moody eccentricities of style have been kept in bounds by the built-in circumscriptions of the fantasy genre. At least one critic, however, has noted a strange morbidity in The Red Shoes derived from the directors' use of certain peculiarities of color, a criticism that has been magnified when some of Powell's and Pressburger's fantastic techniques occur in more realistic films. Their appearance in otherwise veracious contexts usually upsets normal audience expectations. Black Narcissus and Powell's Peeping Tom both created some problems for critics, for both films went to extremes in the exaggeration of otherwise plausible storylines.
Thematically, Powell and Pressburger operate in a limbo somewhere between romance and realism. The former, characterized by technical effects, camera angles and movements, and the innovative use of color, often intrudes in the merest of details in fundamentally naturalistic films. In the eyes of some, this weakens the artistic commitment to realism. On the other hand, the psychological insights embodied in serious fantasies like A Matter of Life and Death are too often dismissed as simply entertainment. Most of the Powell-Pressburger efforts are, in fact, attempts at fundamental reconciliations between modern ideas and the irrational, between science and savagery, or between religion and eroticism. This dichotomy usually occurs in one character's mind—as with Peter Carter in A Matter of Life and Death or the sex-obsessed nun in Black Narcissus —and hinges upon a second character such as A Matter of Life and Death 's Dr. Frank Reeves, who effects a degree of movement between the two sides of the dichotomy, particularly through his own death.
Although such mergings of reality and fantasy met with approval by the moviegoing public, Powell and Pressburger were less successful with the British film establishment. In a sense they were alienated from it through their exercise of a decidedly non-British flamboyance. To some degree, the Clive Candy character in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp embodies the British film community during the period after the war. Powell and Pressburger's visual and thematic extravagances of style conflicted with the self-consciousness of the film industry's strivings for a rigid postwar realism not to be embellished by colorful and expressionistic ventures.
The team broke up in 1957 after Ill Met by Moonlight , and although Pressburger subsequently made some films by himself, they were not well received. Powell, though, continued in the vein established by his collaboration with the Hungarian director. Luna de Miel and The Queen's Guards pursue all of the philosophical concerns of his earlier efforts, while Peeping Tom , which is now regarded as his masterpiece, indicates a certain morbid refinement of his thematic interests. Unfortunately, the film was perhaps ahead of its time—a problem that plagued the director and his collaborator for most of their careers.
Michael
Powell & Emeric Pressburger • Great ... - Senses of Cinema The Director as Peeping Tom: A Matter of Life,
Death and Cinema, by Adrian Danks from Senses of Cinema, May 21, 2002
The
Powell & Pressburger Pages Steve
Crook, also seen here: Michael Powell & Emeric
Pressburger - Pure Genius
BFI Screenonline: Powell, Michael (1905-1990) Biography extensive biography by Kim Newman, Reference Guide to British and Irish Film Directors, also seen here: screenonline: Powell, Michael (1905-1990) Biography
BFI Screenonline:
Pressburger, Emeric (1902-1988) Biography
Kim Newman, Reference Guide to
British and Irish Film Directors
Michael Powell | Biography (1905-1990) biography by Lenin Imports
Michael Powell: Information from Answers.com biography page
British
Cinema Greats | Sir Michael Powell - | His Films | Movies ... biography page from British Cinema Greats
Biography
for Michael Powell - TCM.com biography
page from Turner Classic Movies
Michael Powell biography BritMovie biography and filmography, with brief comments on every film
Michael Powell > Overview - AllMovie biography by Brude Eder from All Movie Guide
Michael Powell bio and filmography from British Pictures
Michael Powell brief bio from NNDB
Reviews of Powell and
Pressburger works a plethora of articles, links, and reviews
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Landscape Michael Powell's spiritual fascination with British landscape, by Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Pressburger: The War Years The work that cemented The Archers partnership, by Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: 49th Parallel (1941) Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The (1943) Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Black Narcissus (1947) Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Pressburger Creators of some Britain's most vivid and imaginative cinema, by Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Classic Powell and Pressburger The golden years of the Archers partnership, by Sergio Angelini
BFI
Screenonline: Late Powell and Pressburger by Sergio Angelini
PnP : Powell & Pressburger Appreciation Soc Yahoo Group Site
Michael
Powell Emeric Pressburger Action Suspense Movies Steve Badger
"Features: The BFI 100." BFI list of the top 100 British films of the 20th century
EuroScreenwriters - Interviews with European Film Directors ... Look at the Sea (Peeping Tom), by Jean-Paul Torok from Positif, 1960
Michael
Walker, 'Black Narcissus', From Framework 9, Winter 1978/79 The
Powell & Pressburger Pages
Film
Comment; May-Jun 1979 - Peerless Powell
Peerless Powell, by Nigel
Andrews and Harlan Kennedy at The Powell & Pressburger Pages, originally from
Film Comment, May-June 1979
A
Very Tender Film, a Very Nice One - Powell and Pressburger Very
Tender Film, a Very Nice One: Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, by Elliott Stein from Film Comment, September, 1979 (pdf)
Powell
& Pressburger: English To the Core | Jonathan Rosenbaum
December 3, 1980
The Seduction The
pornographic impulse in slasher films, on Peeping Tom, by Patricia Erens from Jump Cut, April 1987
Re-Vision: Essays in
Feminist Criticism Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, on Peeping Tom, edited by Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp
and Linda Williams, reviewed by Ellen Seiter from Jump Cut, February 1988
Book
Nook: Scorsese On Scorsese « The Seventh Art Michael Powell’s Introduction to the Scorsese
book, from The Seventh Art, March
1989
Director Michael Powell; Stylish British Filmmaker - Los Angeles Times Burt A. Folkart from The LA Times, February 21, 1990
"The
Life and Death of Colonel Blimp Reconsidered." James Chapman from
The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and
Television, March 1995, fromThe
Powell & Pressburger Pages
Cinema: A genius without a job - Arts & Entertainment - The ... David Thomson from The Independent, October 1, 1995
Contexts in which to
Place They're a Weird Mob ... - Senses of Cinema Contexts
in which to Place They're a Weird Mob and into which You Might Never Have
Placed it Before, by Quentin Turnour from Senses of Cinema, July 22, 2005
POWELL BUILDING - Naming Event film maker Michael Powell - News ... Caterbury Christ Church University, October 15, 1999
Stephanie
Hemelryk Donald, ‘Seeing white: female whiteness and the purity of children in
Australian, British and Chinese visual culture’, Social Semiotics, 10:2, 2000,
157-171 15-page essay (pdf)
Primitive Spectacle in Black
Narcissus - York University Anh Hua,
June 2000
The Communal Balancing Act [THE EDGE OF THE WORLD ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, June 9, 2000
Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus (1947) - Bright Lights Film ... Gary Morris from Bright Lights Film Journal, July 1, 2001, also seen here: Gary Morris, 'Black Narcissus', Images Journal, Issue 10
kamera.co.uk - feature item - Michael Powell at San Sebastián by ... Agata Skowronek from kamera, 2002
Michael Powell: Interviews book edited by David Lazar (186 pages), 2003
Michael Powell: Interviews book edited by David Lazar (186 pages), 2003
The Beauty of Uncertainty - Bright Lights Film Journal Megan Ratner on I Know Where I’m Going, April 30, 2003
Michael Powell Award - britfilms.com Brit Films, August 6, 2003
Mary Bowen,
'Blue Nun/Red Desire: The Palette of Piety, Passion, and Monstrosity in Black
Narcissus', Powell and Pressburger.org, 2004 The Powell & Pressburger Pages
The Archers Hit a Bull's-eye: Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life ... The Archers Hit a Bull's-eye, by Paul Brand from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 30, 2005
Michael Powell: International Perspectives on an English Film ... The Cinema Of Michael Powell: International Perspectives On An English Film-Maker, edited by Ian Christie and Andrew Moor (303 pages) May 2005
A
River Runs Through It - Film Comment
Richard Combs from Film Comment, May/June, 2005
The New York Times > Movies > A Director for Whom Nothing Exceeded ... Terrence Rafferty from The New York Times, May 1, 2005
'Under
control'?: Black Narcissus and the Imagining of India 13-page essay by Kelly Davidson and John Hill
from Film Studies, Summer 2005 (pdf)
Dancing with the Devil You Know: On Powell and Pressburger's The ... Dancing with the Devil You Know: On Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes, by Karli Lucas from Senses of Cinema, July 2005
Flipkart.com:
The Cinema Of Michael Powell: Ian Christie, Andrew ... The
Cinema Of Michael Powell: International Perspectives On An English Film-Maker, edited by Ian
Christie and Andrew Moor (295 pages), July 2005
Macmillan:
Michael Powell: International Perspectives on an ... The
Cinema Of Michael Powell: International Perspectives On An English Film-Maker, edited by Ian
Christie and Andrew Moor (295 pages), July 2005
Dancing with the Devil You Know: On Powell and ... - Senses of Cinema Dancing with the Devil You Know: On Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes, by Karli Lucas from Senses of Cinema, July 22, 2005
An Airman's Letter to His Mother • Senses of Cinema Tony Williams from Senses of Cinema, July 22, 2005
The Edge of the
World • Senses of Cinema Darragh O'Donoghue from Senses of Cinema, July 22, 2005
Contraband • Senses of
Cinema Alexander C. Ives from
Senses of Cinema, July 22, 2005
Gone to Earth •
Senses of Cinema Martyn
Bamber from Senses of Cinema, July 22, 2005
Peeping Tom • Senses of Cinema Peter Wilshire from Senses of Cinema, July 22, 2005
All for
Art(-ifice): The Tales of Hoffmann • Senses of Cinema Peter H. Kemp, July 22, 2005
Oh Boy! Oh
Rosalinda!! and The Boy Who Turned ... - Senses of Cinema David Cairns from Senses of Cinema,
July 22, 2005
Age of Consent • Senses of Cinema Christopher Bourne from Senses of Cinema, July 22, 2005
JG Ballard on Michael Powell's postwar movies | Film | The Guardian JG Ballard from The Guardian, July 23, 2005
BFI | Library | Exhibitions and Events | Michael Powell Michael Powell Display from BFI, August 10 – September 7, 2005
All for Art(-ifice) Peter H. Kemp from Senses of Cinema, September 2005
Offscreen
:: The Whole Film Dances: The Criterion Collection ... Cinema Does Opera, The
Whole Film Dances: The Criterion Collection edition of Powell and Pressburger’s
The Tales of Hoffman, by
Paul W. Salmon from Offscreen,
December 31, 2006
Black Narcissus: A Post-colonial Empire Film? - Doors 19-page essay by Robert Cross from Doshisha Society for the Study of Language and Culture, 2007 (pdf)
More Powell -
AGE OF CONSENT - Bright Lights Film Journal
C. Jerry Kutner from Bright
Lights After Dark, February 13, 2007
Entertainment | A life in transition: 2 films by Michael Powell ... Moira Macdonald from The Seattle Times, February 13, 2007
Powell & Pressburger: The Archers - The Bluffer's Guide - Stylus ... Patrick McKay from Stylus, March 22, 2007
Everyman and no man: white, heterosexual masculinity in
contemporary serial killer movies Nicola Rehling on Peeping Tom from Jump Cut, Spring 2007
• View topic - Michael Powell Criterion forum, a film discussion group, July 13, 2007
Genuine
Artificiality Greg at Cinema Styles, December 17, 2007
The Waiting Game Peter from Coffee, Coffee and More Coffee, December 18, 2007
Reel
Bad Arabs: How
Issue
11: June 2008 - University of Nottingham
5-page essay on Black Narcissus
by Peter Coyne, 3rd article listed on Acrobat Reader, Click here: All film reviews
Watching The Directors Radio show on Michael Powell, MP3 Audio Podcast, June 3, 2008
Film Festival Quadruples Prize Money For Brit Filmmakers ... The Edinburgh Guide, June 9, 2008
Somers Town Scoops Michael Powell Award at Edinburgh Film Festival ... Dylan Matthew from The Edinburgh Guide, June 29, 2008
• View topic - Michael Powell's The White Swan reconstructed Criterion film discussion forum, August 30, 2008
Ronald Bergan: A matter of Powell and Pressburger | Film ... Ronald Bergan from The Guardian, September 26, 2008
The AGE OF CONSENT and STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN (Aka A MATTER ... Erich Kuersten from Bright Lights After Dark, January 3, 2009
Critic's Choice - Michael Powell's 'Matter of Life and Death' and ... Dave Kehr from The New York Times, January 6, 2009
Powell and Hitchcock Richard T. Jameson from the Northwestern Film Forum, May 15, 2001, reprinted in Parallax View, January 7, 2009
DVD Savant Article: Celebrating Michael Powell Glenn Erickson, January 12, 2009, also seen at Film.com: Celebrating Director Michael Powell - Film.com
Black Narcissus •
Senses of Cinema Karli Lucas
from Senses of Cinema, March 10, 2009
Top 100 Directors: #78 - Michael Powell Nighthawk from News from the Boston Becks, April 23, 2009
Scorsese: my friendship with Michael Powell | Film | The Guardian Steve Rose from The Guardian, May 14, 2009
Michael Powell Award MOON – Duncan Jones | The New Current The New Current, June 28, 2009
The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960 • Senses of ... John Orr from Senses of Cinema, July 9, 2009
Michael Powell Down
Under: Norman Lindsay's Age of Consent ...
Scott Murray from Senses of
Cinema, July 9, 2009
BFI | Sight & Sound | Seeing red: restoring The Red Shoes Ian Christie from Sight and Sound, August 2009
Ballet’s Mean
Streets Maureen Dowd from The New York Times,
Kino Obscura — The Restructuring of Visual Narrative in Michael ... The Restructuring of Visual Narrative in Michael Powell’s ‘Peeping Tom,’ by David Liu from Kino Obscura, December 12, 2009
Michael Powell's Canterbury Tales - Britmovie - British Film Forum Michael Powell's Canterbury Tales Setting the Scene for a Classic Wartime Movie (140 pages), new book by Paul Tritton, posted by Steve Crook from Brit Movie, January 4, 2010
One from the archive: Filmmakers That Think Outside the Film ... Christy Dena from WorkBook Project, April 27, 2010
Michael Powell's Peeping Tom - Bright Lights Film Journal Mark Chapman from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 30, 2010
"The
Music of Words: Storytelling in Two Powell & Pressburger Films." Imogen Sara Smith from Bright Lights Film
Journal, January 31, 2013
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Powell & Pressburger Ian Christie from Senses of Cinema, September 2013
TSPDT - Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
Powell interviews Interview by Kevin Gough-Yates January 10, 1971, and also Ian Christie interview July 28, 1985, from BFI Screen Online
A Woman of Paris Michael Brownlow interview of Powell after seeing Chaplin’s film in 1977
Powell and Pressburger: The War Years David Badder interview with Powell from Sight & Sound, Winter 1978/79
TRANSCRIPT A PINEWOOD DIALOGUE WITH MICHAEL POWELL Richard Koszarski interview at the Museum of the Moving Image, August 13, 1989 (pdf format)
New Print of AMOLAD - Interview with Thelma Michael Ellison interviews Thelma Schoonmaker, Michael Powell’s wife, from The Guardian, March 17, 2000, reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
1 August 2005: Long-lasting love through a lens Catherine Shoard interview of Thelma Schoonmaker, Michael Powell’s wife, from The Telegraph, August 1, 2005
Thelma Schoonmaker: Life on the cutting edge of film - Features ... Cathy Pryor interview with Thelma Schoonmaker, Michael Powell’s wife, from The Independent, March 25, 2007
'I fell in love with Martin Scorsese's hero' - Telegraph Horatia Harold interview of Thelma Schoonmaker, Michael Powell’s wife, from The Telegraph, March 25, 2007
GEORGE A. ROMERO, DIARY OF THE DEAD - Filmmaker Magazine ... Interview with George Romero where he acknowledges after seeing TALES OF HOFFMAN that he’s a big Powell & Pressburger fan, from Filmmaker magazine, February 15, 2008
Cannes
film festival: Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker on restoring The Red Shoes
Charlotte Higgins video interview with
Powell’s widow and Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker from The Guardian,
Scorsese:
my friendship with Michael Powell
Steve Rose interviews Scorsese from The
Guardian, May 13, 2009
Michael
Powell's home movies: 'He always said whisky tasted best on the hill' Thelma Schoonmaker, Michael Powell’s widow,
narrates a series of film clips that resemble home movies, from The Guardian,
The
Peeping Tom timebomb Xan Brooks
interviews Powell’s widow and Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker from The Guardian,
Martin
Scorsese talks to Mark Kermode about his love of Michael Powell movies: 'My
mother would ask - is it necessary to watch that again?' Video interview by Mark Kermode and Cameron
Robertson from The Observer,
Michael Powell (director) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
TWO CROWDED HOURS
Great Britain (43 mi)
1931
Two Crowded Hours (1931) BritMovie
Michael Powell’s first feature as director, Two Crowded Hours was produced by Jerry Jackson for the Film Engineering Company and distributed by the British arm of Fox Pictures. With accomplished players John Longden (star of Blackmail) and Cockney character actor Jerry Verno, shooting was completed in 12 days in April 1931 in and around London’s Soho. ‘It was played for laughs and thrills’, Powell said, ‘and we were paid £1 per foot by Fox. We got £4,000 on delivery so obviously we had to make it for £3,000′. Although a few stills survive, there is no known print of Two Crowded Hours in existence.
The film was a comedy drama about a murderer (Michael Hogan) out to gain revenge on those who gave evidence against him. Fielding rescues his fiancé Jane Walsh from Scarnmell, who is later killed in a car crash. A simple plot similar to Will Hay’s last film My Learned Friend.
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
RYNOX
Great Britain (48 mi) 1932
Rynox (1931) BritMovie
Within a week of completing Two Crowded Hours, Michael Powell began shooting on Rynox. Not a quota-quickie production, it was a British feature, financed and distributed by Ideal Films, a respectable British film-maker. Further improvements included a slightly larger budget of £4,500 – and a stronger storyline with a screenplay by Philip Macdonald, Powell and Jackson from Macdonald’s rather convoluted novel. The story is about a business tycoon F.X. Benedik, claiming he has been threatened by mysterious stranger Boswell Marsh, F.X. Benedik is found murdered. Tony Benedik takes over the business and discovers that Marsh never existed but was created by Benedik Senior who intended to commit suicide after learning that he had only a year to live.
Forty years later, Micky Powell hailed Philip Macdonald as ‘the best thriller writer in those days and he still is, as far as I am concerned, one of the best’. Long considered lost, a print of Rynox was discovered in 1990 after 50 years languishing in the vaults at Pinewood Studios, acquired by the National Film Archive and transferred on to safety film the earliest surviving example of Powell’s work as a feature director.
Rynox (1931) Sergio Angelini from BFI Screen Online, Show full synopsis
Rynox (1931) is the earliest surviving of Michael Powell's films and it benefits enormously from an interesting cast, stylish filming and an ingenious plot. The film was based on a novel by Philip MacDonald, one of the most popular thriller writers of his day (he published seven novels in 1931 alone). He and Powell eventually worked on five films together.
When first released, Rynox was greeted with extravagant praise by the British press. C.A. Lejeune in The Observer famously claimed that "Powell's Rynox shows what a good movie brain can do... this is the sort of pressure under which a real talent is shot red-hot into the world." John Grierson, writing a review in the Everyman, entitled 'As Good as Hollywood', boldly stated that "there never was an English film so well made."
Powell's direction already shows his characteristic energy and visual imagination, as well as his debt to the German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s. Rynox is full of quick cuts, tracking shots, unusual angles as well as montages, all of which help effectively to draw attention away from Benedik's disguise as Marsh as well as the film's small budget (it all takes place on only six main sets, with few location shots added). Although nowadays one of the film's principal delights is seeing radio announcer Leslie Mitchell in an acting role, the film also boasts an excellent performance by Stewart Rome who totally convinces in the dual roles of Benedik and Marsh.
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
MY FRIEND THE KING
Great Britian (47 mi) 1932
My Friend the King (1931) BritMovie
Michael Powell’s third film as director, My Friend the King – another comedy starring Jerry Verno – was finished and on release while editing took place on the just-completed Rynox. The unlikely plot concerning a kidnapped young Ruritanian prince and a London taxi driver, masquerading as a countess the taxi driver rescues the nine-year-old ruler from revolutionaries led by Count Huelin. During his first year as a feature director, Powell worked on five pictures. ‘They couldn’t all … be good and they weren’t', he later wrote, considering this ‘a very weak story … I only remember it as a complete failure’.
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
THE RASP
Great Britain (44 mi) 1932
The Rasp (1931) BritMovie
The Rasp was a murder thriller from a Philip Macdonald story – ‘refused to become a film and remained a book’, according to Powell, although by this time Macdonald became interested in us and volunteered to write two or three original scripts for us’. The ‘Rasp’ of the title refers to the file-like tool of that name which is the murder weapon in the story. When Cabinet Minister John Hoode is murdered at his country house, his secretary, Alan Deacon is arrested by Inspector Boyd. Journalist Anthony Gethryn uncovers the real murderer – business rival Sir Arthur Coates. Deacon is reunited with his fiancé, Dora Masterson and Gethryn proposes to Dora’s sister Lucia.
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
THE STAR REPORTER
Great Britain (44 mi) 1932
The Star Reporter (1931) BritMovie
Lord Langbourne is persuaded by Mendel to claim the insurance money on a ‘lost’ diamond belonging to his daughter Lady Susan Loman, planning to steal the jewel himself. The scheme is foiled by Lady Susan’s chauffeur Major Starr, actually a newspaper reporter. Mendel falls to his death following a rooftop chase and Starr marries Lady Susan.
The Star Reporter, Powell later recalled was "fun and I was not ashamed of it". Harold French was a real pro. He understood comedy timing and I learned from him every day’. This now ‘lost’ film was released as support to Frank Capra’s Platinum Blonde. ‘It scarcely has the sparkle of the big feature’, said one review, at which Powell was delighted.
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
HOTEL SPLENDIDE
Great Britain (53 mi) 1932
Hotel Splendide (1932) BritMovie
Jerry Mason, a publicity manager, inherits a seaside hotel but is approached by a gang of crooks who have buried their loot from a robbery on the site where the hotel now stands. Mason manages to find the loot before the gang and claims the reward.
Hotel Splendide was the first of Powell’s films for Gaumont-British who had recently invited Michael Balcon to take charge of production at their Lime Grove Studios in Shepherd’s Bush. Balcon later produced such classics for Gaumont as The 39 Steps and Rome Express before taking command at Ealing Studios. Hotel Splendide was another vehicle for Jerry Verno who here fell into the tradition of comedy thriller heroes whose screen characters invariable use their own real first name – later examples of this include George Formby and Norman Wisdom – in an effort to establish some sort of screen ‘identity’. A print of Hotel Splendide was recovered from Pinewood Studio vaults in 1950 and restored by the National Film Archive.
Hotel Splendide
(1932)
In Hotel Splendide, Jerry Verno plays a character dear to the filmmakers and audiences of the quota/depression years: an impoverished go-getter trying to improve his station in life.
Before entering films, Michael Powell (like the Verno character) had worked in a boring desk job, and went on to live and work with his father, who owned a hotel, the Voile d'Or at Cap Ferrat, near Monte Carlo.
One can't help but sympathise with Verno's disappointment when he first lays eyes on the Hotel Splendide, and with the filmmakers too. The makers of this 'quota quickie' wanted to make real films, not simply enough celluloid to satisfy the legal requirements of the Quota Act. In this sense the hotel, and Verno's enthusiastic attempts to help revitalise and refurbish it in order to attract as many customers as possible, echo the enthusiasm and ambition of its young director. Powell even appears in a small role as 'Marconi', one of the gang of thieves.
The script is often over complicated, with writer Philip MacDonald taking his characteristic interest in disguises and false identities to bewildering extremes. It can be seen in Powell's Rynox (1931), in which the whole plot depends on a disguise, and reached its zenith in The List of Adrian Messenger (US, d. John Huston, 1963), with all the guest stars unrecognisable under heavy make-up. Practically every character in Splendide is not what they seem (even Verno is seen pretending to be his own boss at the beginning of the film). In addition, an almost campquality is introduced, with the lead villain, named 'Pussy' Saunders for his trademark cat, spending practically the entire film in drag.
The film has a number of nice visual touches, especially in the last part, which is very atmospherically filmed, with an effective use of high angle shots and low-key lighting. This section also features Gounod's 'Funeral March of the Marionettes', best known today as the theme tune of the American TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
C.O.D.
Great Britain (64 mi) 1932
C.O.D. (1932) BritMovie
Fantastic and unconvincing crime story. When Frances discovers her stepfather dead in the library, she pays Peter Craven to help hide the body. When the body turns up again, Frances is suspected of murder but Craven discovers the real criminal to he Frances’ cousin Edward. Critics of the day did, however, consider the direction of Michael Powell to be ‘brilliant’.
C.O.D. was the first picture made by Westminster Films, the company formed by Michael Powell and producer Jerry Jackson. The opening logo, showing Big Ben, anticipated Alexander Korda’s use of the same landmark for his films a few years later, by which time Westminster Films had folded.
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
HIS LORDSHIP
Great Britain (79 mi) 1932
A dozen or so under-rehearsed chorines in suspenders shuffle through a bit of a number involving buckets and mops, and that's as near as this quota-quickie musical gets to Busby Berkeley. Long considered a 'lost' Powell and only lately rediscovered, it confirms the director's 'never say die' credo, here applied to a sluggish scenario which draws on such '30s indicators as a plumber who's really a lord, a publicity-mad film star and some comic Bolsheviks. (There can't be many English-language movies with a heroine named Leninia.) The songs are quite amusing in the cabaret style of the day, and the low key, fretful persona of Jerry Verno is not unattractive.
His Lordship (1932) BritMovie
In this musical comedy, Bert Gibbs becomes a Lord but, for the sake of his mother, agrees to pose as the fiancé of movie star Ilya Myona. Bert’s girl Leninia eventually wins him back. His Lordship was Jerry Verno’s fourth film for Michael Powell, and his last appearance for the director until The Red Shoes 16 years later. A 1936 British film of the same title starring George Arliss has no connection, with Powell’s His Lordship, a musical comedy considered ‘broad’ by reviewers.
His Lordship
(1932) Mark Duguid from BFI Screen Online, Show full
synopsis
This light musical comedy was thought lost for many years until its reappearance in the early 1990s after a hunt initiated by the British Film Institute.
His Lordship was not well-received on its release in 1932 (when it was reportedly booed by audiences), but it has a certain charm, and is interesting for the way it anticipates Powell's experimentation with musical cinema in later works like Tales of Hoffmann (1951) and Oh... Rosalinda!! (1955). It is also a rare example of Powell explicitly tackling issues of class - of his major works, only The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) has much to say on the subject.
The screenplay by Ralph Smart - from a novel by Oliver Madox Hueffer - has an interesting premise: a humble and well-meaning plumber, Bert (Jerry Verno), attempts to hide the peerage he has inherited from his father, a leading Labour politician, from his fiancée, the uncompromising idealist Leninia (Janet Megrew).
But the film is undermined by a weak attempt at political and social satire, peddling a selection of stereotypes, including a pair of corrupt fake revolutionaries - played as over-the-top pantomime villains by Michael Hogan and V.C. Clinton Baddeley - a status-obsessed Hollywood starlet and her ruthlessly manipulative agent, and a gormless aristocrat.
Star Jerry Verno made four films with Powell in the 1930s,
and reappeared 15 years later with a supporting role in The Red Shoes (1948).
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
BORN LUCKY
Great Britain (78 mi) 1933
Born Lucky (1932) BritMovie
The story of a humble girl’s (Renee Ray) rise to stage fame. Mops is a waitress who becomes a successful singer and marries writer Frank Dale. The supporting cast is adequate and plenty of music and songs are included. Michael Powell recalled this final Westminster production as ‘real schmaltz’.
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
THE FIRE RAISERS
Great Britain (77 mi) 1934
The Fire Raisers (1933) BritMovie
Fire assessor Jim Bronson uses unscrupulous tactics to build his own business. When he loses it all at the gambling table he joins a group of arsonists but later helps the police to round them up. Though this film is by no means a continuous blaze, its fires are certainly worth seeing, Francis Sullivan plays the part of the chief villain with real imagination, the road to ruin is described with some plausibility and not without some entertainment on the way.
With nine releases in the previous two years, Michael Powell surprisingly made only one film during 1933. The Fire Raisers was the first production in a four-picture deal between Powell/Jackson and Gaumont-British. Not a ‘quota quickie’, The Fire Raisers, at Powell’s estimation, cost around £12,000 to produce and featured a much stronger cast than the director had previously had at his command led by West End star Leslie Banks, just back from a starring role in RKO’s The Most Dangerous Game (Hounds of Zaroff) in Hollywood. ‘It was the first time that I had worked with a great actor’, Powell later wrote. An original screenplay, described by Powell as ‘a sort of Warner Brothers Newspaper Headline Story’, The Fire Raisers was a success attracting considerable and favourable attention from critics who remarked that ‘Michael Powell has economical ideas on continuity that save his producers hundreds of pounds a week’, although they felt he had yet to prove he can think big. A nitrate print of The Fire Raisers was among those films rescued from the Pinewood Studio vaults in early, 1990.
Fire Raisers, The (1933) Ann Ogidi, with thanks from Sergio Angelini, from BFI Screen Online, Show full synopsis
The Fire Raisers was the first production in a four-picture deal between Michael Powell and his writing partner Jerome Jackson and Michael Balcon's Gaumont-British studio. Gaumont-British was then one of the two biggest companies in the British film industry (alongside British International Pictures), so this was a considerable step up for Powell and Jackson.
The film cost around £12,000 to produce, a bargain even in those days, and featured West End stage star Leslie Banks in the lead role. "It was the first time that I had worked with a great actor", Powell later wrote. "He was an actor's actor. He had speed and he created magic." Banks appeared in three further Powell films, including Powell's early favourite, Red Ensign (1935).
Described by Powell as "a sort of Warner Brothers Newspaper Headline Story" and based on a contemporary scandal about Leopold Harris an insurance assessor convicted of arson, The Fire Raisers is a mixed success. The narrative moves at great speed, and Banks' performance is restrained and elegant. But the direction is often crude and lacks the subtlety and genuine insights of Powell's later work.
Two scenes do stand out, however. In the first, Bronton's assistant Bates (Henry Caine) is tied up and interrogated by Stedding (a chilling Francis L Sullivan) and his men, who suspect him of double-crossing them. We don't see Bates being beaten. Instead, Powell cuts from Bates to the faces of each of the interrogators. As the camera gets closer and closer to the men's faces, the editing gets faster, until holding on an extreme close-up of Bates' face, at which point he faints.
In the most atmospheric scene, Bronton (Banks) returns to his office looking for Bates. The office has been wrecked. As Bronton takes this in, he hears a faint tapping sound. Bronton looks around, and sees a window blind cord tapping against the glass. He pauses and realises that there is another noise, coming from inside the large wall safe. He opens it to find Bates inside, bruised and near death. The scene, played without music, convincingly underscores an air of brutality.
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
RED ENSIGN
aka: Strike!
Great Britain (69 mi) 1934
Red Ensign (1934) BritMovie
David Barr is a ship builder aiming to launch a new type of vessel. When the board of directors back out of financing the project, Barr puts forward his own money but is later caught forging his chairman’s signature on a cheque and is sent to gaol. On his release, the ship is finally launched and he is reunited with his fiancée June who stood by him.
A third film in quick succession starring Leslie Banks, again with an original screenplay by Powell and Jackson based on a newspaper article, Red Ensign was more fondly recalled by Powell than many of his works of this period. Set in a Clyde shipyard, Powell surrounded his star with authentic Scottish actors and proudly boasted of ‘the elaborate staging of the shipyard, the big, sweeping exteriors (filmed on location in Glasgow), the high standard of the performances and the sincerity of the actors, the overall seriousness of my approach to directing our story’, the effect of which was that ‘people just didn’t know what to make of (it).’
Released on home video in 1992, Red Ensign was loosely remade by British National in 1943 as The Shipbuilders, directed by John Baxter and starring Clive Brook.
Red Ensign (1934) Mark Duguid from BFI Screen Online, Show full synopsis
In his twelfth film in four years, Michael Powell directed his own story of an ambitious shipbuilder, David Barr (Leslie Banks), and his attempt to turn around the fortunes of the British shipping industry during the depression of the 1930s. Visionary and uncompromising - and not afraid to break the rules - Barr can be seen as the first of a number of Powell's screen alter-egos, who would include Eric Portman's Colpeper in A Canterbury Tale (1944) and Roger Livesey's Dr Reeves in A Matter of Life and Death (1946), and culminate in his own appearance in Peeping Tom (1960). Like Colpeper, Barr is a morally complex hero, who is prepared to commit fraud in order to overcome the opposition of his narrow-minded colleagues.
With a campaigning tone which would become familiar in his wartime dramas such as 49th Parallel (1941) and "One of Our Aircraft is Missing!" (1942), Red Ensign (1934) was one of the director's favourites of his early works. The film's attitude to labour relations - a trade union activist is exposed as a plant representing an unscrupulous rival, and the workers are expected to go without pay for the good of the company - adds some weight to critic Raymond Durgnat's claim that Powell represented 'high Tory' values. At the same time, the film draws on the work of the Soviet master Sergei Eisenstein in its romanticism of industry.
Made for Gaumont-British as a 'quota quickie', the film has been read as a plea for intervention to develop the British film industry, as well as a kind of manifesto for Powell's kind of cinema, challenging the emerging documentary movement - the film even includes a character called Grierson, in a nod to John Grierson, one of the most prominent British documentarists. As Powell himself put it,
"It was the first time that Michael Powell himself realised that there was something special about a Michael Powell film, something going on on the screen, or behind the screen, which you couldn't put your finger on, something intriguing, aloof, but in the long run memorable."
'Classic British Thrillers' | CinemaSpy Michael Simpson from Cinema Spy, October 19, 2008
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review
Red
Ensign (1934) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Jeremy Arnold, also reviewing THE PHANTOM
LIGHT
DVD Verdict- Classic British Thrillers [Dylan Charles] also reviewing THE PHANTOM LIGHT
MSN Entertainment [Sean Axmaker] also reviewing THE PHANTOM LIGHT
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
CRITIC'S CHOICE; New DVDs: Early British Cinema Dave Kehr from The New York Times, September 29, 2008
SOMETHING ALWAYS HAPPENS
Great Britain (69 mi) 1934
Something Always Happens (1934) Brit Movie
Unemployed car salesman Peter Middleton is encouraged by his girlfriend Cynthia to approach the head of a car factory with his suggestion for making petrol stations more attractive to customers. When the owner rejects the idea, Peter joins a rival company and becomes a great success. He is eventually taken home by Cynthia to meet her father – the first company’s manager – who realises his mistake and gives the pair his blessing.
Despite being a return to quota pictures at Warner Brothers’ new Teddington Studios, Michael Powell nevertheless considered Something Always Happens "a very good comedy". We played it all out for laughs and great speed, excellent dialogue. It was about a chap (lan Hunter) who never paid for anything… Ian was a very good comedian’. Reviews were surprisingly good for this 69-minute picture which contained all of the ingredients which made many ‘quickies’ attractive to audiences. The performances of Ian Hunter, Nancy O’Neill and Peter Gawthorne were highly praised, as was Michael Powell’s ‘imaginative’ direction.
Something
Always Happens (1934) Sergio
Angelini from BFI Screen Online, Show full
synopsis
Something Always Happens, a comedy where authority figures get taken down a peg or two while the poor get rich quick, neatly encompasses many of the recurring themes of Depression-era cinema in 1930s Britain. In fact most of the 23 low budget films Michael Powell directed between 1931 and 1936 focus on money and class in some way. A third element, which obliquely combines the two, is hypergamy, marriage to a person of a class higher than one's own, which appears in Night of the Party (1934) and Her Last Affaire (1935), but is nicely reversed in Something Always Happens.
The film tries to have its cake and eat it, its amiable but lackadaisical hero (Ian Hunter), blissfully unconcerned by his lack of money or prospects, eventually still becoming hugely rich. His seemingly imperturbable character prefigures the one Hunter would play in Lazybones (1935), where once again he has to prove himself by getting a steady job and making a success of it. This foregrounds the aspirational tendencies of most moviegoers of the time, showing that even those without money can become a success through perseverance and ingenuity
The nexus between high and low society had already been ingeniously explored by Powell in Rynox (1931), in which the rich Benedik and the working-class ruffian Marsh aren't just two sides of the same coin, but actually turn out to be the same person, part of a complicated scheme to save Benedik's ailing company. Brock Williams' tightly structured screenplay for Something Always Happens goes out of it way to draw parallels between rich and poor, young and old, as dialogue and actions are repeated or developed in adjacent scenes, constantly juxtaposing contrasting situations and characters to draw out the links that tie them together. This is emphasised in the early scene in which the destitute hero pretends to be rich while the fabulously wealthy girl he's just met lets him believe she is a poor shop girl.
This slick, fast moving comedy makes good use of its location filming (especially the market scene) and offers, despite a rather insipid leading lady, a variety of incidental pleasures, such as casting George Zucco (shortly before he decamped for Hollywood) as an Italian restaurant owner. Powell himself remembered it affectionately: "We played it all out for laughs; great speed, excellent dialogue and it was about a chap who never paid for anything".
User
reviews from imdb Author: Tryavna from United
States
This innocuous little comedy concerns a ne'er-do-well
salesman, played by Ian Hunter, who decides to stop living hand-to-mouth on
commission work and get a permanent job when he rescues a 10-year-old orphan.
While trying to impress a woman named Cynthia, who happens to be the daughter
of petrol (gas) station magnate, he stumbles upon an idea that would double the
profits of petrol stations by transforming them into one-stop shopping plazas.
After being rebuffed by the woman's father, he takes his idea to a rival
company, which hires him, puts his plan into action, and begins running the
competition out of business. The comedy arises from the fact that Hunter never
knows that Cynthia is the daughter of his business rival and hires her as his
own secretary.
It's typical B-film fodder, but entertaining enough to while away an hour
before bedtime or a rainy Saturday afternoon. The real attraction for most film
buffs is that it happened to be director by the great Michael Powell (of
"Red Shoes"/"Black Narcissus" fame). This was very early on
in Powell's career; between 1931 and 1936, Powell directed two dozen
"quota quickies" -- cheap films produced by Hollywood studios in
Britain in order to get around British quota laws that required UK cinemas to
show one British-produced movie for every Hollywood movie they imported. Later
in life, Powell was largely dismissive of these films, claiming that he didn't
really come into his own until his 1937 independent production "The Edge
of the World." However, "Something Always Happens" reveals that
Powell was already a director of distinction, with an eye for impressive shots.
In fact, more than anything else, "Something Always Happens" also
reveals the extent to which Powell had already been influenced by German
Expressionist cinema. In particular, it seems heavily indebted to Fritz Lang's
"M," which was released only three years earlier. For one thing,
Powell employs the associative audio edits that made "M"'s sound
design so innovative. Scenes in "Something Always Happens" shift by
linking what one character says in one location to what another character is
saying in another location. (In Powell's movie, this technique is for comic
effect, though.) Also, the opening shots of "Something Always
Happens," like the opening shots of "M," are dominated by an
overhead crane master-shot of children playing in the street. Considering that
Powell, like Hitchcock, was a fan of inter-war German film-making, these points
of comparison can't be accidental.
Unfortunately, even Powell can't make this movie entirely coherent. Its best
moments occur early on, when Hunter's character and the 10-year-old orphan he
rescues meet and become friends. In fact, these early scenes almost seem to be
setting up an entirely different movie. Once Hunter's character meets Cynthia,
the movie suddenly shifts focus and gradually settles into formulaicism. It's
still fun, but you get the sense that Powell himself was growing rather bored
with the plot after the much more interesting first third. If you want to see
Powell more fully engaged with the material he was assigned during his early
years as a director, you should watch "Crown Vs. Stevens" instead.
(There are some ideas in that movie that Hitchcock seems to have lifted for
"Suspicion" and "Shadow of a Doubt.")
Something
Always Happens (1934) - Articles - TCM.com
Jeff Stafford
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
THE GIRL IN THE CROWD
Great Britain (52 mi) 1935
The Girl in the Crowd (1934) BritMovie
Bookseller David Cordon’s new wife Marian has never met David’s friend Bob but by telephone advises him on how to attract women by following the first attractive girl he sees. Unfortunately, the girl turns out to be Marian and Bob is arrested for insulting behaviour and taken to court, but his police friends manage to sort things out for him.
The Girl in the Crowd was another ‘lost’ Warner Brothers quota picture which Michael Powell claimed was ‘forced’ on him. ‘They were American B pictures without the slickness and confidence that genuine American B’s have got’, he said later. A cast less polished than in his more recent films nevertheless yielded a new British actress and future star. ‘I’ll always say that Michael Powell really was the man who started my career’, recalls Googie Withers. ‘I was seventeen, and I’d never even done a play’.
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
LAZYBONES
Great Britain (65 mi) 1935
Time Out review Tom Milne
Adapted from a play by Ernest Denny, this is a slow starter, with Hunter as an indolent baronet being urged by his impecunious family to marry an American heiress (Luce). He loves her, but scruples won't let him propose until he learns that she has lost all her money, whereupon he whisks her off to the registry office before his family can object. Complications arise, since she is led to believe he thought she was only pretending to have lost her money as a test; and her crooked cousin (Nedell) turns up to involve her in his theft of oil-related diplomatic papers from Hunter's brother-in-law (Shepley). Hereabouts, earlier moments of puckish humour escalate as Hunter rouses himself from his lethargy to resolve all problems; and graduate into dotty fantasy as he proves his ability to provide for a wife by turning his stately home into a 'Work Centre for the Wealthy Weary', where the idle rich can pay to enjoy honest toil as butlers, gardeners, etc. Modest but intelligently directed, the result is very engaging.
User reviews from imdb Author: ukjf from United
Kingdom
An example of a "Quota Quickie" - one of the hundreds of
low-budget B movies that British studios churned out to receive government
funding between 1927-1937.
Making allowances for the financial and time constraints this film was clearly
made under (many of the "Quota Quickie" films were shot around the
working schedules of actors who were simultaneously engaged in theatrical
work), the film still falls a bit short due to a weak script and
(unsurprisingly) rather stagy performances by the cast. On the plus side, the
film does have quite an engaging plot and rattles along at a cheery pace.
In conclusion, Lazybones is worth viewing for 3 reasons: 1) a fantastic little
cameo appearance by the wonderful British character actor Miles Malleson 2) for
Michael Powell fans to catch his early directorial work 3) for Alfred Hitchcock
fans to realise just how far ahead of the game he was! (The 39 Steps was
released in the same year)
Lazybones (1935) Sergio Angelini from BFI Screen Online, Show full synopsis
Lazybones, a typical depression-era comedy of impoverished aristocracy, was widely dismissed when first released. The Monthly Film Bulletin complained that "such an incredible story needs more pace and a lighter touch all round", while Kine Weekly wittily commented that "the producer makes the common mistake of thinking that an Englishman's home is a castle." Michael Powell wasn't even credited as the director by Picturegoer, which instead mistakenly gave the honour to Julius Hagen, the film's producer. More recent assessments have not been much kinder. Jeffrey Richards damningly called it "just the sort of film that got the British cinema a bad name", while Raymond Durgnat called it the "runt of the litter", pointing out that it "abounds in continuity bloopers".
Looking at Lazybones today, it is worth noting that Powell had to shoot most of the film in 13 nights: common practice at Hagen's studio, which operated 24 hours a day. The schedule was necessitated by the fact that the film's two stars, Ian Hunter and Claire Luce, were appearing in West End plays at the same time.
There is some gold to be mined in this occasionally amiable comedy however, such as Powell's long and ambitious tracking shot that crosses a courtyard and then moves through two separate rooms before reaching its destination; a hilarious cameo by Miles Malleson, in which he is a witness to a wedding, all the time trying to talk the couple out of it; and, for today's audiences, there is the amusing line, "it's about time there was a channel tunnel!"
The film's generally stage-bound nature does, unfortunately, weaken the comic potential of its outrageous conclusion - in which Hunter turns his palatial abode into a recreation home for the wealthy by giving them servile jobs - which mostly occurs offstage and is otherwise dealt with extremely cursorily. In its dottily Marxist presentation of the rich and powerful succumbing to a fantasy of poverty and lowly disenfranchisement, it anticipates the Hollywood classic My Man Godfrey (US, 1936) and even such grisly modern-day TV spectacles as I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here (ITV, 2002-).
Lazybones (1935) BritMovie
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
THE LOVE TEST
Great Britain (63 mi) 1935
User reviews from imdb Author: malcolmgsw from london
Quite apart from the fact that this is an early outing in the career of Michael Powell it is also notable for featuring 3 actors who would go on to bigger and better films in the future,Googie Withers,Louis Hayward and Bernard Miles.Withers is very funny in her attempts to take off a wisecracking American secretary.There are a few interesting directorial touches such as the way Hayward is introduced at the beginning of the film by an extended tracking shot.Dinner at a big restaurant is shown by way of a waiter serving at the table with curtains in the background and music on the soundtrack.This is a very enjoyable film which you should make every effort to see if it comes your way or appears again on TV
Time Out review Tom Milne
A romantic comedy set in a chemistry lab up against a deadline to produce a formula for fireproof celluloid. Hoping to be made department head, Thompson (Hutcheson) stirs up chauvinist resentments when the appointment goes provisionally to Mary (Gunn), a serious young woman with no time for men; and he ensures that John (Hayward), already interested in Mary, is elected in a plot to distract her from her work. With the pair soon head-over-heels in love, Thompson throws another spanner in by telling Mary that John is actually making a play for her job, meanwhile ensuring that work comes to a standstill. Only John, though repulsed by the angry Mary, goes on working selflessly to find the formula... Scripts like this were the bread-and-butter of British movies, the difference being that Powell's stylishness, invention and impeccable direction of actors turn this one into a real charmer. Hayward and Gunn are touchingly sincere as the lovers, and Googie Withers (among several fine supporting performances) contributes a gem of a cameo as a pertly predatory secretary.
The Love Test (1935) BritMovie
Mary Lee is appointed head of a laboratory looking for a process to fireproof celluloid. Resentful of her position, Thompson and his male colleagues plan to make her fall in love with John so that she will neglect her work, but the couple really do fall in love. Thompson tricks Mary into firing John just as he has discovered the formula, and attempts to claim the work as his own, but Mary realises what has happened and John is reinstated.
Made for Fox-British at Wembley Studios, The Love Test is a lightweight but enjoyable romantic comedy with several notable features. Star Louis Hayward was soon bound for Hollywood and a starring career in swashbucklers like The Man in the Iron Mask and Son of Monte Cristo. ‘He was a business man really and did very well in Hollywood’, said Powell, who also claimed The Love Test as ‘the first appearance of Bernard Miles in films or anywhere else for that matter’. Googie Withers featured as a flirtatious secretary (‘Brings sunshine into dull lives, makes the bald grow hair!’) in her second film for Powell, while the handling of a sequence showing the ‘glamorising’ of the attractive Judy Gunn by her sophisticated neighbour Kathleen (Eve Turner) can be seen as a forerunner to the erotic transformation of Sister Ruth in Black Narcissus 12 years later. Another of Powell’s films rediscovered in the late 1980s, The Love Test was screened at the 1990 London Film Festival.
Love Test, The (1934) Sergio Angelini from BFI Screen Online, Show full synopsis
Michael Powell sometimes used the very circumstances of the cinema in which he worked for story material. In The Red Ensign (1934) for instance, the quota act is the basis for a plot about a shipbuilder determined to stop the beleaguered British shipping industry being run down by ships flying under foreign flags. The Love Test (1935) instead revolves around attempts to render celluloid less flammable, the highly combustible properties of nitrate film stock being one of the reasons why so many movies from the period have vanished.
What is impressive about The Love Test is not so much the hackneyed story (at a research lab, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl), but rather its sexual subtext and frequently stylish presentation. Powell's visual grace notes (with credit also due to cinematographer Arthur Crabtree) include a complicated opening tracking shot (over a minute long) that snakes all around the central research lab; 'framing' the lovers (in a taxi, in the corner of a restaurant, or through a gap in the laboratory equipment) to create more intimate romantic scenes; and giving the climax a small stylistic fillip by having the hero's voice, when suddenly heard in the office through a heating shaft, matched visually by a series of quickly edited shots of the grille to heighten the impact of the scene.
This is the earliest of Powell's films to point to the sensuousness and sexuality which later became so prominent in his work. While using incendiary nitrate dolls for transitions in the stages of the couple's love affair is plain enough, a real surprise is the subtle but clear suggestion of lesbianism in the character of Mary's neighbour, who 'feminises' her with new clothes, make-up and hair-do and is then permanently excluded when Hayward arrives. This is contrasted amusingly with scenes in which Googie Withers gives Hayward kissing 'lessons', in a role that Variety magazine, in its inimitable style, described as "a gum-chewing secretary-vamp who crank-starts Hayward's engine".
These elements reveal the enthusiasm, vigour and humour that mark many of Powell's surviving quota features. In the movie, Hayward finds a commercially viable solution to making nitrate film less flammable; sadly, the film industry itself wasn't able to do so until 1951. The Love Test, a film long thought lost, was, fortunately, restored and re-presented at the London Film Festival in 1990.
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
THE NIGHT OF THE PARTY
aka: The Murder Party
Great Britain (61 mi) 1935
Time Out review Tom Milne
'The script was a stinker,' was Powell's justifiable comment in his autobiography. A whodunit in the most antiquated sub-Agatha Christie mode, it has a lecherous newspaper baron (Keen) try to blackmail an indiscreet girl (Keats), daughter of the Commissioner of Police (Banks), into submitting to his unwelcome attentions. During a game of 'Murder' at a society party, the lecher, unsurprisingly, is murdered. The routine expository labour of setting everybody up with a motive (there's even a sinister butler) is leavened by Powell's willingness to give the actors time and space; he makes a mini bravura triumph of the party sequence by shooting the 'Murder' game in darkness, with intermittent illumination by firelight and a flickering neon sign; and the final court scene, after the usual routine of police interrogation and politic confessions, is enlivened by a magnificently dotty performance from Ernest Thesiger at his most malignantly epicene. The end result is much more fun than it has any right to be.
The Night of the Party (1934) BritMovie
Ruthless newspaper owner Lord Studholme gives a dinner party in honour of a foreign princess. When a party game of murder organised by Studholme ends with the host actually murdered, it seems that each guest has a motive for wanting him dead.
Michael Powell reluctantly accepted Night of the Party for Michael Balcon as an already complete script called Murder Party, convinced that had been tricked into making the picture after Balcon claimed that the studio was standing idle. With the pick of any of the actors on a Gaumont- British contract including Leslie Banks, lan Hunter and Ernest Thesiger, Powell recalled it was one of those stories, where everybody’s a character and it ends up with an Old Bailey court case with all the wrong people. ‘I was bored to death with it but I did the best I could’. The film remained unreleased while Powell worked on The Fire Raisers. ‘We went back to Night of the Party and did the days extra retakes on it which made a little more sense of it’. Missing for over years, a copy of Night of the Party was discovered at Pinewood in early 1990 deposited with the NFA, whose new print was seen for the first time at the London Film Festival.
Night of the Party, The (1934) Sergio Angelini from BFI Screen Online, Show full synopsis
Cavalcanti and Ernst Lindgren's survey of realism and documentary, Film and Reality (1942) uses Love From A Stranger (d. Rowland V. Lee, 1937) as an example of films which are overburdened with dialogue, lacking in 'realism' and acted and directed in a heavily theatrical manner. In truth, they could have picked many of the dozens of stage adaptations that proliferated in 1930s British cinema. It is certainly true for critics of Michael Powell's The Night of the Party, unquestionably the least distinguished of the quartet of films he made at Gaumont-British.
The first of these to be released was The Fire Raisers (1933), but Night of the Party was actually started first. According to Powell, its release was delayed because it was under-length, and so he shot three days of extra scenes after completing Fire Raisers. Based on a play with the prototypical title 'Murder Party' (which was used for the American release instead), this is a whodunit in which a party game turns fatal after the lights go out. Needless to say, all of the guests have good reasons for hating the victim.
Almost completely studio-bound, the majority of the action is confined to only six sets. To offset this, Powell and cinematographer Glen MacWilliams use many compositions privileging mirrors in an effort to make the dialogue scenes more visually varied and dynamic. The crucial party sequence is well-staged and fluidly filmed and the scenes set in darkness for the game are atmospherically photographed. Powell later called it "a bad film from a bad script, from a very poor play and not very successful". It does, however, feature a gleefully impish performance by Ernest Thesiger, who gets all the best dialogue (asked to turn a noisy record off, he bemoans that "these dance tunes want louder needles if one is to taste real misery"). The film also represented several important 'firsts' for Powell: the first of four films Leslie Banks made for him and the first of five with Ian Hunter. Most importantly, though, it was here that he had his first contact with art director Alfred Junge, later a crucial member of his Archers team.
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
User reviews from imdb Author: F Gwynplaine MacIntyre
(Borroloola@earthlink.net) from Minffordd, North Wales
THE PHANTOM LIGHT
Great Britain (76 mi) 1935
A creaky stage play is transformed by Powell into a cheap but splendidly atmospheric comedy thriller. Gordon Harker stars as a Cockney lighthouse-keeper who, with the aid of an insurance investigator (Hale) and a naval officer (Hunter), sees off a gang of wreckers intent on no good. The leader of the wreckers is one 'Dr Carey', the setting is Wales, and the climactic confrontation is intercut with a ship heading for the rocks. Any party, even the Welsh Nationalists, could interpret this allegory to their own ends.
The Phantom Light (1935) BritMovie
New keeper Sam Higgins is sent to North Stack lighthouse where ships have been lost on the nearby rocks. Jim Pearce deliberately, maroons himself on the rock along with Alice Bright. When the light is later smashed, Jim reveals that his brother’s ship is the wreckers’ latest target, while Alice is a detective tent to investigate. Jim alerts the coastguard as Sam and Alice relight the beacon and avert a tragedy. Trapped on the lighthouse, saboteur Dr Carey leaps to his death rather than face capture.
Completing the Gaumont-British deal, The Phantom Light was by far Michael Powell’s most accomplished picture to date. Well photographed by Roy Kellino – later a director himself – and sharply edited by Derek Twist, the film also benefited greatly from an expert comic performance by Gordon Harker, a great character of British cinema described by Powell as ‘wonderful in silent films, but even better in talkies. Close-ups were made for him, and we both took full advantage of it’.
For the role of Jim Pearce, Powell had wanted to cast Roger Livesey, then at tile Old Vic in a company which included Charles Laughton and James Mason. After shooting a test of the actor, Powell was overruled by Michael Balcon who announced that he did not like Livesey’s voice, which Powell considered one of his most attractive features! The role fell to the Gaumont contract player Ian Hunter. Of the film itself, Powell later enthused, ‘I said "yes" to this one right away, and never regretted it. I enjoyed every minute’. So, too, did audiences.
Phantom Light, The (1935) Mark Duguid from BFI Screen Online, Show full synopsis
Michael Powell's last film in his contract for Gaumont-British/Gainsborough was a fascinating taste of things to come from the young director. The Phantom Light (1935) was a comic thriller adapted from the stage play The Haunted Light by Evadne Price and Joan Roy Byford.
It seemed the perfect project to Powell, who later admitted, "I am a sucker for lighthouses. The lonelier and inaccessible, the better. And I love comedy-thrillers. I said 'yes' to this one right away, and never regretted it. I enjoyed every minute. The less said about the plot the better."
It's true that the film was interesting less for its slim plot - which, though entertaining enough, could almost pass for an episode of Scooby Doo - than for its effective use of location and atmosphere. Particularly impressive are the night sequences of the lighthouse and bay, and an evocative opening sequence which suggested that Powell had been paying attention to the Universal horror films of the period (e.g. Dracula, US, 1931; Frankenstein, US, 1933). The effective editing - notably in the sequence in which a ship narrowly escapes disaster on the rocks - also hints at greatness to come, but the film is far from a masterpiece.
Gordon Harker, a favourite of British audiences in the '20s and '30s thanks to his versatile comic skills, is good value as the no-nonsense lighthouse keeper, and Ian Hunter is suitably heroic, if a bit stiff, as a naval officer (a role that Powell had hoped to offer to the inexperienced Roger Livesey, but was overruled by studio head Michael Balcon), while there is a likeable performance from Donald Calthrop as a dour coastguard official. All three actors had been Hitchcock regulars.
Alex
Vetchinsky - Writer - Films as Art Director/Production ... John Baxter from Film Reference
Reviews of
"The Phantom Light (1935)" - Powell and Pressburger
'Classic British Thrillers' | CinemaSpy Michael Simpson from Cinema Spy, October 19, 2008
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Landscape Michael Powell's spiritual fascination with British landscape, by Mark Duguid
KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review
Red
Ensign (1934) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Jeremy Arnold, also reviewing RED ENSIGN
DVD Verdict- Classic British Thrillers [Dylan Charles] also reviewing RED ENSIGN
MSN Entertainment [Sean Axmaker] also reviewing RED ENSIGN
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
User
reviews from imdb Author: Gary170459 from Derby, UK
User
reviews from imdb Author: Neil-117 from Melbourne, Australia
User
reviews from imdb Author: ptb-8 from Australia
User reviews from imdb Author: Terrell-4 from San Antonio, Texas
CRITIC'S
CHOICE; New DVDs: Early British Cinema
Dave Kehr from The New York Times,
September 29, 2008
THE PRICE OF A SONG
Great Britain (67 mi) 1935
The Price of a Song (1935) BritMovie
Refused a loan by his songwriter son-in-law Nevern, Arnold Grierson murders Nervern as he is playing his latest composition. Michael Hardwick discovers the body and is accused of the murder. At the reading of the will, Grierson, is revealed as the murderer when he whistles Nevern’s new, unpublished composition which he could only have heard on the night of the murder.
After the full-scale British feature The Phantom Light, The Price of a Song was again a return to a modest thriller, ‘When a thriller’s too ingenious it becomes a little picture’, he said later. ‘When it’s simple it’s got a chance of being big. It was a beautifully worked out thriller, almost Henry Jamesian… but in quota quickie terms’. The Price of a Song is a murder mystery of the type Columbo would solve on television some 40 years later by means of an apparently insignificant string of clues. Sadly, this intriguing little picture is another ‘missing’ item in the Powell catalogue.
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
SOMEDAY
Great Britain (68 mi) 1935
Someday (1935) BritMovie
Lift operator Curley is in love with Emily, a cleaner working in the same block. When Emily is released from hospital, Curley arranges a surprise dinner for her in the flat of Mr Carr who is away. When Carr returns unexpectedly, a fight breaks out, with Curley being charged with illegal entry and assault. They are rescued by Curley’s playboy employer, Canley.
This well-received romance provided Margaret Lockwood with one of her earliest leading screen roles at the age of 19. She went on to become Britain’s most popular film star of the 1940s in films like The Man in Grey, The Wicked Lady and Love Story. Someday brought Michael Powell into contact with Esmond Knight once more and was another of the director’s films for Warner Brothers at their Teddington Studios.
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
HER LAST AFFAIRE
Great Britain (78 mi) 1936
A body lies crumpled on the floor. Enter maid, carrying breakfast tray. Scream! Crash! Ah, but not when the maid is Googie Withers. Without batting an eye, she steps across the corpse and trawls the room for clues, only then discharging her scream 'n' crash obligation. An adaptation of Walter Ellis's play SOS, this sample of Powell juvenilia turns on such issues as Sir Jervis's reputation, Lady Avril's weak heart, the secretary's secret. That the hero (Williams) is so dislikeable can be attributed to writing and casting, but Powell can be credited with encouraging what amounts to a comedic putsch by the supporting cast: John Laurie, a-quiver with Calvinist rectitude, Cecil Parker being, as ever, put upon. And of course the redoubtable Googie.
User reviews from imdb Author: max von meyerling from
New York
This is a very early and entirely inconsequential Michael Powell film. There were some influences from Hitchcock in its self consciously 'clever' use of sound, and the plot might have been thought "Hitchcockian' by the way others understand that term, but its interesting to note that when Hitchcock characters feel and act guilty its never as specifically spelled out as it is here. This is because all Hitchcockian guilt can be traced back to original sin and in this instance everything connected to guilt seems implanted by a social system which seems positively pre-historic. The guilty feeling chap in this one actually talks to himself and imagines how he would appear guilty to other people and senselessly flees even though its obvious to anyone and everyone that he didn't 'do it.' Still a not witless effort. One character says to Sir Julian, a politician- You're sure to be made foreign secretary, to which he answers that he hopes he isn't because he prefers his Geneva in a bottle. In the pub someone can be heard singing - She was only a bookmakers daughter until she came in at five to four. As its usually said, some expert milling about by some fine and familiar actors.
Her Last Affaire (1936) BritMovie
Lady Avril Weyre, the wife of a promising politician, is found dead at a country inn where she had been accompanied by her husband’s secretary, Alan Heriot. Heriot is immediately under suspicion, although he had taken her there solely to gain information which would exonerate his father. He is eventually cleared, and marries Lady Avril’s daughter Judy.
Powell was less happy about Her Last Affaire, ‘a social comedy on a very old theme’, made at Beaconsfield Studios, but was pleased to be working with Hugh Williams. On screen since 1931, Williams had been an impressive Steerforth in MGM’s David Copperfield (1935), but had immediately returned to England, seemingly unimpressed by Hollywood. A later sojourn took him back across the Atlantic to play the dissolute Hindley Earnshaw of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights for Samuel Goldwyn in 1939, but his best work was to he seen in British pictures like Rome Express (1932), Brief Ecstasy and Bank Holiday (both 1937). Powell found him to be ‘an extremely polished, arrogant young actor’.
The original stage play of Her Last Affaire had been a great success, with Gracie Fields taking her first straight role. Googie Withers took the part in the film which was not well received on release although Powell claimed ‘We worked very hard on it’. A rogue print of Her Last Affaire with a cast drawn largely from the West End stage was discovered in the mid 1980s and restored by the National Film Archive.
Her Last Affaire (1935) Sergio Angelini from BFI Screen Online, Show full synopsis
In Her Last Affaire, Hugh Williams plays the secretary to a powerful man whose daughter he plans to marry, against the father's wishes, and who then gets mixed up in a mysterious death. Although recalling Ian Hunter's predicament in Powell's The Night of the Party (1934), the film was actually based on the play 'S.O.S.', produced by Gerald Du Maurier, which had not only provided Gracie Fields with one of her first dramatic roles in 1928, but had already been filmed under that title later the same year.
Williams' character is more interesting than Hunter's, however, because it is treated rather more ambiguously; for the first twenty minutes or so we believe he really is having an affair with his employer's wife (Viola Keats, in the role originally played by Gracie Fields). These scenes are played with surprising directness by Williams and Keats, and it is almost disappointing when we discover that he actually has an ulterior, altogether nobler, motive.
When Keats and Williams meet for their weekend in the country, the film is at its best, with strong support from John Laurie, as the innkeeper, and Googie Withers. She provides the comic relief, constantly at odds with the stern, moralising innkeeper who threatens to dismiss her, but who is really jealous of her popularity with the customers. She ends up being Williams' main ally, covering up for him when he is recalled to the inn after Lady Avril's death. The sequence is at once comical and suspenseful in the best Hitchcock manner, as Williams tries to hide from Laurie so as not to be implicated.
Leslie Rowson's cinematography contains a number of intriguing visual flourishes, such as when Williams awaits the phone call to hear of Avril's death, the tension nicely evoked by shooting with strong horizontal shadows all over the room, contrasting with the light and airy settings that have dominated before. Rowson also gets the most from the low wooden beams and strangely curving staircases of the inn and its bedroom which, all wooden paneling and furniture and dominated by a large four-poster bed, is strikingly similar to the sets and atmosphere of the pub in A Canterbury Tale (d. Powell and Pressburger, 1944).
Long thought lost, the film has been available again since the late 1980s, affording new audiences the chance to assess the most prestigious film Powell had directed up to that time.
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
THE BROWN WALLET
Great Britain (68 mi) 1936
The Brown Wallet (1936) BritMovie
Penniless John Gillespie is refused a loan by wealthy Aunt Mary, but on the way home finds a wallet containing £2,000 which he keeps. Visited later by police investigating the suspicious death of his aunt he is placed under suspicion of murder until it is discovered that her butler is the real killer. Left a considerable sum in his aunt’s will, John returns the original £2,000 to its owner.
Michael Powell later claimed to have been talked into many of his films for Warners – of which this was another – either by Jerry Jackson or Irving Asher, production head of the British studio. The Brown Wallet, from Stace Aumonier’s crime story, was reviewed as a ‘good story with a twist in it. Some accomplished acting. An easy support feature’ and featured an early screenplay by Ian Dalrymple, later a successful writer/producer in the 1940s.
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
CROWN V. STEVENS
Great Britain (66 mi)
1936
Crown V Stevens (1936) BritMovie
Doris Stevens commits a murder and then tries to poison her husband, involving his employee Jansen who was a witness to the earlier crime. Jansen saves Stevens and persuades Doris to give herself up to the police.
Following his roles in The Brown Wallet and now, Crown v Stevens star Patric Knowles was soon to follow the same route out to Hollywood as that taken by Errol Flynn, who had been recommended to Jack Warner by Irving Asher after making one British quota picture, Murder in Monte Carlo (1935). Fulfilling one of the ‘indirect’ aims of the British film units of the major American companies Asher now ‘discovered’ Knowles and later Ian Hunter, both of whom would appear with Flynn in Warner Brothers’ Hollywood production of The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938.
Crown v Stevens, meanwhile, gave smaller roles to Googie Withers and Glennis Lorimer, whose chief claim to fame was as ‘The Gainsborough Lady’ in the opening logo of that studio’s films. Powell recalled Beatrix Thomson – the heroine/bad girl of the story – as ‘a very good actress’ who was ‘fantastically good in this, but that was all it had’.
Crown v.
Stevens (1936) Sergio Angelini from BFI Screen Online, Show full
synopsis
Crown v. Stevens was made by Michael Powell with an eye firmly set on the light at the end of the tunnel. In fact, Crown proved to be his penultimate 'quota' film and the last of these that survives intact. His following assignment, The Man Behind The Mask (which does exist, but in a much truncated form with a private collector) was released only three weeks after Crown, and it importantly served as an introduction to producer Joe Rock, who would fund Powell's first truly 'personal' project, The Edge of the World (1937).
Crown v. Stevens was one of five Powell films made for producer Irving Asher at Warner Brothers' Teddington studios, and is a crime melodrama that, had it been made a few years later, would probably have been labeled a film noir. Based on a recent novel by the popular and extremely prolific novelist Laurence Meynell (it had been published only a few months before production began), it tells the story of a naïve young man who becomes involved in the machinations of a murderous and ultimately unrepentant femme fatale, played with strength and conviction by Beatrix Thompson, a theatre actress in her only starring role for the cinema.
The rich cinematography is by Basil Emmott and the screenplay is a typically polished effort by Brock Williams; both also worked in the same capacities on three earlier films Powell had made for Asher: Something Always Happens (1933), and two currently 'lost' films, The Girl in the Crowd (1934) and Someday (1935). The Girl in the Crowd gave Googie Withers her first film role, and she turns up again in Crown, having great fun in a comic role as a breathless party girl with a lust for money, cigarettes and alcohol. The role of the 'good' woman is taken by the perky Glennis Lorrimer, who is rather charming in one of her last roles as Patric Knowles' interior decorator girlfriend; Lorrimer is probably best remembered today as the Lady in the Gainsborough Studios' opening logo. Although admittedly lightweight, in its ambiguous tone and suggestive cinematography, Crown recalls Powell's superior Her Last Affaire (1935) and, with the latter, is notable as one of the few comparatively 'dark' films he made in this period.
Crown vs. Stevens - TCM.com Jeff Stafford
Chris Jansen (Patric Knowles), a struggling, underpaid office
clerk, gives his fiancée Mamie (Mabel Poulton) an engagement ring which he
acquired on approval from Bayleck (Morris Harvey), a notorious moneylender.
When Mamie runs off with another man without returning the ring, Jansen is
forced to reveal the bad turn of events to Bayleck who demands the full amount
of the ring in 24 hours or he will report Jansen to the police. Unable to
secure a raise or a salary advance from his boss Arthur Stevens (Frederick
Piper), Jansen returns to Bayleck to beg for an extension on his note but finds
him murdered - shot in the head. The killer, hiding behind a curtain, is
suddenly discovered by Jansen. Still holding the murder weapon in her hand, the
woman threatens Jansen with it before fleeing, leaving a key piece of evidence
- Bayleck's account book - burning in the fireplace. Jansen also slips away
from the murder scene unnoticed and decides not to go to the police for fear of
being implicated or fired from his job. Later he is sent on an errand to his
boss's home and comes face to face with the murderess - Stevens's wife Doris
(Beatrix Thomson). She is equally shocked to learn that Jansen works for her
husband but then begins to spin a web of lies and deceit to cover the tracks of
her crime, using Jansen as a pawn in her schemes.
Crown v. Stevens (1936) is one of the last of Michael Powell's
"quota quickies" for Teddington Studios before moving on to a project
of his choosing, The Edge of the World (1937), which marked the
beginning of a remarkable directorial career. Based on a novel by the prolific
Laurence Meynell, the film is a highly melodramatic but entertaining thriller
that features several plot elements that were already being popularized by
Alfred Hitchcock in such films as The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The
39 Steps (1935) and Strangers on a Train (1951) - i.e. an innocent
man caught up in dangerous circumstances beyond his control and the duality of
good and evil expressed through the protagonist and his double. Of course, the
Hitchcock connection is no coincidence. Powell had previously worked for the
British director as a stills photographer on Hitchcock's Champagne
(1928) and Blackmail (1929). In addition, Crown v. Stevens also
looks ahead to the film noir cycle of the early forties with the character of
Doris Stevens serving as a prototype for the quintessential femme fatale.
Cast in the lead role, Patric Knowles was a rising young British actor at the
time who bore a resemblance to Errol Flynn. Crown v. Stevens was his
last film for Teddington before being brought to Hollywood by Warner Bros. who
signed him to a contract and cast him in Give Me Your Heart (1936) with
Kay Francis and George Brent the same year. He followed it up with what is
possibly his best known film, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), in
which he plays Errol Flynn's brother and ends up with Olivia de Havilland at
the fadeout. Flynn himself had gotten his first real start at Teddington
Studios appearing in an uncredited bit in I Adore You (1933) followed by
the lead in Murder at Monte Carlo (1934). After that producer Irving
Asher recommended Flynn to Jack Warner who brought him to the U.S. for his
first U.S. film, The Case of the Curious Bride (1935). Asher was also
responsible for Knowles and Ian Hunter being signed by Warner Bros. Ironically,
all three actors - Flynn, Knowles and Hunter - ended up together in The
Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).
On the other hand, Beatrix Thomson, who easily steals Crown v. Stevens
away from her co-stars, was primarily a stage actress. This was one of her few
film roles but her portrayal of Doris Stevens as a habitual and deadly liar
bears favorable comparison to Mary Astor's poisonous Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The
Maltese Falcon (1941).
Other actors you may recognize in Crown v. Stevens are Googie Withers as
a fun-loving party girl and former theatre acquaintance of Doris Stevens and
Glennis Lorimer as a company client who becomes Jansen's girlfriend during the
course of the police investigation. Withers would later become a leading lady
of British cinema in the forties with such memorable films as Michael Powell
& Emeric Pressburger's One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942), Dead
of Night (1945) and It Always Rains on Sunday (1947). Glennis
Lorimer was almost at the end of her screen career when she made Crown v.
Stevens. Her last feature was Alf's Button Afloat in 1938 but she is
best remembered as the woman featured in the Gainsborough Studios' opening
logo.
In his autobiography A Life in Movies, Michael Powell is quick to
dismiss Crown v. Stevens and the other low-budget features he made for
Teddington toward the end of his tenure there. He does admit, however, that
compared to his earlier B-movies these "were a damn sight more honest and
more entertaining, because they were not trying to be anything but what they
were, and they were tailored from first-class scripts."
Mark Duguid of Screenonline noted that toward the end of his life "Powell
joked that if any more "lost" films were to reappear, his reputation
would be in tatters - but they reveal a talented and fast-learning young
filmmaker struggling to transcend the limited tools at his disposal, reaching
for something magical and, just occasionally, brushing a fingertip or two
against it."
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
User reviews from imdb Author: max von meyerling from New York
THE MAN BEHIND THE MASK
User reviews from imdb Author: malcolmgsw from
I suppose that that the majority of quota quickies were crime films because this limited the size of the cast and the number of sets required. This is a mystery drama with a difference. Not only is the story a mystery drama the actual film is a mystery as it is totally unfathomable. At the beginning of the film Hugh Williams is attacked so that someone can use his costume for a masked ball. Why the thief didn't hire his own costume is not explained. At the ball a shield is stolen and Jane Baxter is abducted. Why she is abducted is never made clear. The shield has been stolen for a mad astronomer who falls out with the crooks. Don't expect me to explain why,and so on. Maybe the original 79 minute version would explain all. Till then we will be kept guessing.
The Man Behind the Mask (1936) BritMovie
Nick Barclay and June Slade plan to elope from a masked ball when Nick is attacked by a man who takes his mask and kidnaps June, also stealing the Shield of Kahm, which June’s father Lord Slade has just acquired. Nick manages to rescue June and the Shield, but then both are tricked, along with Lord Slade, into going to a house where the leader of an international gang intends to retake the Shield. The police arrive and the crooks are arrested.
A feature, as opposed to another ‘quickie’, The Man Behind the Mask was ‘a very old-fashioned thriller’, said Powell. ‘It was actually a story published in magazine form of four or five episodes rather after the style of A.E.W Mason detective thrillers’. Finding the material unpromising, the director ‘did my best to make it into a really rather sort of a German-type expressionist thriller. It was very hard work indeed because we had no money … The only good that came out of it was that I met Joe Rock’. Michael Powell’s final work before embarking on his career as a major feature director, The Man Behind the Mask was made by a small independent company.
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
THE EDGE OF THE WORLD A 99
Powell's first major movie, shot on location and as much an
account of the harshness of life on the isolated Shetland Isles as the story of
two friends torn apart by the elements they struggle against for sustenance. In
an interesting move in 1978, Powell was commissioned by BBC TV to return to the
island of Foula and film a new introduction and epilogue to his original film.
The resulting 'bookends', in colour, give Edge of the World (retitled Return
to the Edge of the World) even greater strength, pushing the story further
back and emphasising the mysterious and frightening poetry that Powell captures
in his search for images that define the waywardness of nature. (The film was
later recut by Powell to 65 minutes.)
Slant Magazine Eric Henderson
One of the most unassumingly solid directors of Britain's
early period (and, with 1960's astonishing Peeping Tom, its middle
period as well), Michael Powell entered the golden age of his career with The
Edge of the World. Though he had already made over 20 films, it
represented one of his first successfully realized and (perhaps more
importantly) self-actualized stabs at what would become one of his chief
directorial strengths: the ability to film a very specific and localized
environment in a manner that emphasizes its otherworldly fantasias and,
paradoxically, remains faithful to the area's ethnographical features. To watch
The Edge of the World is to bear witness to Powell's unique alchemy,
as he infuses his setting—a weather-battered island community off the coast of
Scotland on the verge of abandonment—with off-kilter camera angles, dreamily
gauzy cinematography and a becalmed detachment that lets the characters and
scenario do the work for him. Which is not to say that Powell occasionally
indulges in a few melodramatic flourishes that he managed to avoid in later
masterpieces like I Know Where I'm Going and Black Narcissus.
For instance, he superimposes a montage of mournful reminiscences over a
character's thoughtful close-up not once but twice. And, for all the
near documentary-like attitudes Powell the director exercises when filming the
island's close-knit community, Powell the screenwriter too often lapses into
overly plotty solutions to various conflicts (he hadn't yet joined forces with
his future compadre in archery Emeric Pressburger). But in general, The
Edge of the World is rife with the sort of miraculously unforced moments
of enchantment one has always come to expect from the United Kingdom's most
underrated auteur.
Edge of the World,
The (1937) Sergio Angelini from BFI Screen Online, Show full
synopsis
Having made two dozen low budget pot-boilers over the preceding five years, Michael Powell finally got the chance to make his first really personal film with the ambitious drama The Edge of the World (1937).
Powell based his script on the true story of the evacuation of thirty-six people from St. Kilda, an island ten miles off the west coast of Scotland, on 29 August 1930. The film was made over four months during the summer of 1936 on the island of Foula, in the Shetland Isles. Permission was denied to film on St. Kilda, which is in the Hebrides, and where they actually speak Gaelic, while on Foula they speak Norse. Powell was adamant that local people be in the film, and that it all be shot on location (which, except for some pick-up shots back at the studio, turned out to be the case). Powell himself told the story of the filming in his first book, 200,000 Feet on Foula.
The mixture of documentary and drama, location footage and studio filming is occasionally awkward, as is the mixture of professional and non-professional actors. However, despite its simple and rather melodramatic story, The Edge of the World still stands up today, particularly for its stunning location cinematography, as well as the film's opening scenes in which we see various ghostly apparitions on the now deserted island. Also notable is John Laurie's brooding, yet sympathetic performance as Peter Manson, the film's most complex role, one which is shown to be inextricably linked with the fate of the island itself. Powell's script and direction also give the first real indication of the love of nature and his mystical use of landscape to shape and comment upon human stories, which would be developed further in his celebrated collaborations with Emeric Pressburger.
In 1978 Powell and members of the cast and crew revisited Foula for a BBC documentary, Return to the Edge of the World.
The Edge of the World Ray Young from Flickhead
After directing over twenty features, and two years shy of
his partnership with Emeric Pressburger, Michael Powell (left) was inspired to
make The Edge of the World by events that had occurred in the
archipelago of St. Kilda. Located in the remotest part of the
Although Powell shot his film on the (populated) Shetland
Island of Foula — its farmers and fishermen helping out in
front of and behind the camera — he nonetheless found a primitive ethos and
community similar to that of St. Kilda. With its spectacular images of
mountains and cottages and the sea, and regardless of being a narrative
picture, The Edge of the World veers close to the cultural anthropology
of Robert Flaherty, especially Man of Aran (1934), and, given Powell’s
romanticism, Flaherty and F.W. Murnau’s Tabu (1931).
Changing the location’s name to Hitra — Celtic for ‘death’
— the story recounts the circumstances prompting the exodus and demise of the
island’s civilization. Competition from commercial fishing, declining finances,
lack of health care, a thinning population, and deteriorating farming
conditions make the already-rigorous existence insufferable. Through several
astutely composed characters, each one a distinct personality, Powell analyzes
the value of tradition and the inevitability of modernization. While this theme
has been worked endlessly in the cinema — from Josef von Sternberg to Sam
Peckinpah — Powell’s grounding as poet and quixotic fantasist, combined with
his apparent admiration for the proletariat, lend purposeful nostalgia to an
atmosphere of hardship.
If The Edge of the World is the director’s first
‘personal film’ as is often declared, it shares those themes of trepidation,
isolation, longing and eroticism that run through much of his subsequent work.
From the Himalayan mission in Black Narcissus (1947) and Wendy Hiller’s
inescapable stopover port in I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), to the
cavernous apartment in Peeping Tom (1960), Powell’s characters appear
forever perched on various edges of the world, struggling with their inner
demons of fear and desire.
On Hitra, two families serve to represent the issues,
values and attitudes of its people. As Peter Manson’s (John Laurie) beliefs are
embedded in tradition, his opportunist son, Robbie (Eric Berry), intends to
move to the mainland. James Gray (Finlay Currie) is accepting of change, while
his son, Andrew (Niall McGinnis), is far less liberal-minded. Connecting them
all is Ruth Manson (Belle Chrystall), Robbie’s sister, who loves and intends to
marry Andrew. From the start, the actors (Laurie and Currie especially) convey
the influence of ancient bloodlines and superstitions and legacy. Their
interaction invites events shared among the community — birth, death, church, farm
life, and a primeval duel — all staged by Powell, respectful of the mundane and
enchanted by the spiritual.
British cinema of the 1930’s is not renowned for its
technical proficiency, but the clarity of sound and image in The Edge of the
World is formidable. Startling vistas, cliffs ascending to the clouds,
intricate tracking shots somehow managed on rocky plains all captivate the mind
and eye. Now digitally mastered from the original 35mm nitrate negatives,
presented on DVD by Milestone Films, the film commemorates the
historic value of its subject, the acumen of its director, and the skill of his
crew.
Among the DVD bonus features, Milestone provides a gallery
of stills, Powell’s six-minute An Airman’s Letter to His Mother (1943),
his twenty-three minute Return to the Edge of the World (1978), and a
supplemental audio track. The latter, shared by Ian Christie, Daniel Day-Lewis
and Thelma Schoonmaker-Powell, balances brief production and technical
anecdotes with Day-Lewis reading from the director’s written account of the
picture’s creation. Ms. Schoonmaker-Powell, Michael’s second wife, speaks
eloquently of her late husband’s art, especially when describing his
experiments in double exposure (McGinnis facing island ghosts), a haunting
montage sequence (Chrystall’s prospective suicide), and an elaborate dolly shot
(following Currie during the celebration of a newborn). An informal
documentary, Return to the Edge of the World gathers the surviving cast
and crew members with Foula islanders after forty years. (Of particular note is
John Laurie, who seems weirdly trapped in character.) This short feature may be
a minor and eccentric inclusion to the director’s oeuvre, but watching it
surely magnifies his achievements of 1937.
The Edge of the
World • Senses of Cinema Darragh O'Donoghue from Senses of Cinema, July 22, 2005
The Communal Balancing Act [THE EDGE OF THE WORLD ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, June 9, 2000
The
Edge of the World - TCM.com Jeremy
Arnold
BFI Screenonline: Early Michael Powell Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Landscape Michael Powell's spiritual fascination with British landscape, by Mark Duguid
DVD Times Gary Couzens
PopMatters (David Sanjek) review
The
Edge of the World - TCM.com
Jeremy Arnold
F L I C K H E A D:
12/01/2007 - 01/01/2008 The Powell
& Pressburger Blog-a-Thon, December 17, 2007
EdgeofWorld.html Fernando F. Croce from Cinepassion
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Foula's Archaeological Sites Foula – The Edge of the World, from Foula Heritage
Edge of the World - Shetland's first feature film James MacGregor from Penultimate Poductions
DVD Talk [Stuart Galbraith IV]
DVD Savant review Glenn Erickson
DVD Verdict Mike Pinsky
Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review
Rescuer Down Under Stuart Klawans from The Nation (Page 2)
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
The
Edge of the World Dave Kehr from The Reader
The Edge of the World (1937) BritMovie
User
reviews from imdb Author: jotix100 from New York
User
reviews from imdb Author: gut-6 from Brisbane, Australia
User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil
User
reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: sol from Brooklyn NY USA
User
reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: nora_nettlerash from Ruritania
User
reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: dougdoepke from Claremont, USA
User reviews from imdb (Page 3) Author: eoftw from United Kingdom
Milestone Films - Movie Details - Edge of the World, The - by ... Milestone Films
The Edge of the World 1937: Movie and film review from Answers.com
Inching Along the Edge of the World - Necessary Steps Blog ... Will Self on a trip to the Shetlands from The New York Times, October 23, 2008
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
THE SPY IN BLACK
aka: U-Boat 29
Great Britain (82 mi) 1939
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review
This offbeat 1939 British B film was the first collaboration of director Michael Powell and writer Emeric Pressburger, whose partnership would continue through the 50s (The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus). Most of the Powell-Pressburger perversity is already in place in this story of a German spy ring at work in England, told entirely from the villains' point of view. The film is dark and beautifully textured, though not as visually rich as the later, higher-budgeted Powell pictures. With Valerie Hobson and Conrad Veidt, Mabuse-like in a black slicker and slouch hat. 82 min.
Darkness, foreboding and regret, rather than any sense of propaganda, dominate this extraordinarily atmospheric World War I spy story made on the eve of World War II. It signals the end of a peacetime era even more clearly than The Lady Vanishes. Daringly, the audience is asked to sympathise with the 'enemy' as the magnificent, shadowy Veidt moves through remarkable Scottish sets on a mission to Scapa Flow to destroy the British fleet. Intrigue, uncertainty and confused loyalties build to a bitter, ironic climax, and along the way Powell effortlessly produces more memorable shots and scenes than can be found in a dozen contemporary films.
The Spy in Black (1939) BritMovie
German submarine commander Captain Hardt lands at Malkirk, one of the Orkney Islands on the northern coast of Scotland, where his contact, the schoolmistress, tells him that he is to sink ten British ships in the local harbour with the help of a treacherous British seaman, Lieutenant Ashington. Unknown to Hardt, both Ashington and the girl are working for British intelligence, who have intercepted the real German spy and replaced her with a British agent.
Ashington arranges for the girl to leave on a ferry carrying prisoners-of-war, but Hardt escapes on the same vessel and leads a group of Germans to mutiny and take over the ship, only for it to be torpedoed by his own submarine. A British destroyer lifts the passengers off the stricken ferry, but Hardt refuses the offer of help. His submarine, meanwhile, has been sunk by the British fleet, its crew perishing in the same waters as their captain.
Monthly Film Bulletin Review BFI Screen Online, March 31, 1939, also here: Synopsis
U Boat espionage drama set in the Orkney Islands during the Great War. Captain Hardt, German submarine commander, is ordered to become a spy, to proceed to the Orkney Islands, and there to make contact with a German agent posing as the village schoolmistress. With information he receives from a British naval officer turned traitor, German submarines will be able to locate and sink a large number of British warships. Actually the British Secret Service has learnt of this scheme. The wife of a naval officer takes the place of the German agent, and her husband enacts the part of the traitor. Too late Captain Hardt discovers the truth. Making a desperate effort, he escapes on the local ferry-boat disguised, releases the German prisoners on board, and tries to reach the German Fleet to warn it. The ferry-boat is pursued by a British submarine, and sunk by his own U boat, after which the U boat is sunk by the British submarine. This intricate story is gripping from beginning to end, and very skilfully directed. It has abundance of thrilling incidents, effective suspense values, and spectacular seascenes. The climax is grim but logical. The acting is outstandingly good. Conrad Veidt is brilliant in the lead. He is throughout a tragic if slightly sinister figure, and wins respect and sympathy as a patriot with the qualities most admirable and admired in soldier, sailor, or airman of any nationality-loyalty, courage, obedience, and steadfast endurance. Valerie Hobson is delightful as the schoolmistress showing resource and humour. The remaining players are all excellent in their different ways. The technical qualities are very good indeed. The atmosphere is realistic and convincing, the photography noteworthy. Pictures of Scapa Flow, of the Orkney Islands, and of the Fleet are particularly effective.
The
Spy in Black (1939) James Travers
from FilmsdeFrance
In 1917, a German U-boat captain, Captain Hardt, is sent on a secret mission off the coast of Scotland. He meets up with a German spy posing as an English schoolmistress, who has enlisted the help of an embittered Royal Navy officer, Ashington. Together, they intend to guide a German U-boat into the British fleet and cause as much destruction as possible. Unfortunately for Hardt, things are not quite what they seem...
This atmospheric wartime thriller marked the first
collaboration of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, a duo who would have an
enormous impact on British cinema in the 1940s, with films such as The Life
and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Matter
of Life and Death (1946) and The Red Shoes (1948).
In marked contrast to the obvious propaganda agenda of Powell and Pressburger’s
later wartime films, The Spy in Black is strangely ambiguous in its
messages about war. With its frequent digressions into the morality of
warfare, there is a strong suggestion of anti-war sentiment, and it is
interesting that the film’s most sympathetic character is a German officer,
portrayed by Conrad Veidt with a depth and nobility that is lacking in later
war films.
Released within a month of the outbreak of World War II, the film had
propaganda value and proved to be an enormous commercial success. Strong
performances from Valerie Hobson and Conrad Veidt, along with a taut narrative
culminating in a suspenseful climax, make this a compelling film, which
explores notions of betrayal and the conflict between desire and duty with
great sensitivity and intelligence. Hobson and Veidt would subsequently
appear together in another Powell-Pressburger film, Contraband
(1940).
Spy in Black,
The (1939) Mark Duguid from BFI Screen Online, also here: Show full
synopsis
For his first project at Alexander Korda's London Films, Michael Powell was introduced to young Hungarian screenwriter Emeric Pressburger for this World War I drama. The pairing was a propitious one - The Spy in Black was a hit both here and in the US (under the name U-Boat 29), and one of the most successful partnerships in British cinema was born.
Released on the eve of World War II in August 1939, The Spy in Black makes an interesting contrast with the later 49th Parallel (1941), made as an unambiguous propaganda film. Although both feature a U-boat commander as a villain, Captain Hardt (Conrad Veidt) is a very different character to his counterpart in 49th Parallel, Lieut. Hirth (Eric Portman). The film goes to some lengths to humanise him in the early part of the film, showing his easy friendship with his colleague Schuster (Marius Goring), and he is altogether a more honourable German.
Filmed in the Orkneys, The Spy in Black marked Powell's second visit to the Scottish islands, following his breakthrough film Edge of the World (1937). He was already completely in love with their bleak beauty, and he was back again a few years later to film "I Know Where I'm Going!" (1945).
By now, Powell was almost a veteran - Spy was his twenty-sixth film as director - but this was his first major project, and the light touch and confidence he displayed is surprising. Notably, the minor characters are rounded, believable and treated with respect, quite different from the crude caricatures common in British films of the period, and a step forward from the more stereotyped Welsh villagers in Powell's earlier The Phantom Light (1935).
In one particularly impressive sequence, in which Hardt makes his way past patrolling guards to establish contact with the 'schoolmistress' who he believes to be his ally, Powell showed a rare ability to blend humour and suspense, a gift most commonly associated with Hitchcock, whose position as undisputed master of British cinema was now vacant following his departure for Hollywood.
The starstruck Powell and Pressburger were thrilled to be working with a hero of the German cinema, Conrad Veidt, star of the expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Der Cabinett des Dr Caligari, Germany, d. Robert Weine, 1919). A strong cast also included Valerie Hobson, June Duprez and Marius Goring; all would work with Powell again.
d+kaz.
Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [A-]
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Landscape Michael Powell's spiritual fascination with British landscape, by Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Pressburger: The War Years The work that cemented The Archers partnership, by Mark Duguid
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
KQEK.com Film Review [Mark R. Hasan]
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review
[4/5] also seen
here: Jay's Movie Blog
User reviews from imdb Author: theowinthrop
from United States
User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England
Ozus' World
Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Channel
4 Film capsule review
Variety review
SMITH
The Launch Party plus Review The Powell & Pressburger Pages
Smith, a short film setting forth the aims and achievements of the Embankment Fellowship Centre, was shown privately at the House of Comons yesterday, after a luncheon at which Field-Marshal Lord Milne, who is a vice-president of the centre, presided. The centre exists to care for destitute and friendless middle-aged ex-Service men - the minimum age limit is 45 - and the film discusses, with the aid of Mr. Ralph Richardson, Miss Flora Robson, Mr. Alan Jeayes, and Mr. Wally Patch, the case of a typical ex-Service man who is helped by the centre.
The film is to the point, and it naturally includes a brief account of what the centre has effected. In the four years of its existence it has dealt with 3,000 cases, 2,000 of which have resulted in re-employment after an average stay in the centre of six weeks. Last year emplyment was found for 549 men, of an average age of 53; and as for the rest, men who are too old and, to use Lord Milne's words "have no chance of getting into the turmoil of the labour market again," these are being trained "in the smaller things of life."
Lord Milne first apologised for the absense of Lord Hollenden, the chairman of the centre, who was recuperating abroad. He said the officials of the centre hoped they might be helped by some of the many distinguished members of the film profession who were present to get the film into general distributionb all over the country. He emphasized that the Embankment Fellowship Centre was essentially a national undertaking. Rather less than 20 per cent. of the men came from London, and the rest came from all parts of the country. The film, he said, showed how the typical ex-Service man in need was housed, fed, and reclothed by the centre, which trained him for new work, and finally found him new employment. By general distribution of this picture it was hoped to secure a substantial sum towards the total of £50,000 sought by the centre for purposes of organization. Part of this sum would be devoted to the acquisition of a country home for veterans with good records who had no pensions and were too old to work.
Sir Patrick Hannon, M.P., replied, and said that with many of his colleagues he had made determined efforts to induce the Chancellor of the Exchequer to moderate taxation on the film industry. It would be an act of gratitude on the part of the film industry, he said, for what the Chancellor had done if it would cooperate in showing the film in cinemas throughout the country.
After the film was shown, Lord Milne announced that three of the most important men in the film industry had said they would give every assistance they could in showing the film.
The Story of Smith A Film Called Smith, by Mark Fuller from The Powell & Pressburger Pages, January 29, 2003
The missing link | Film | The Guardian Xan Brooks from The Guardian, June 23, 2003
"Smith" being shown in Canterbury A Great 8 Days in Canterbury, from The Powell & Pressburger Pages
Smith (1939) Powell & Pressburger site
The Launch Party plus Review 2 brief reviews from 1939, from The Powell & Pressburger Pages
Contemporary Review brief 1939 review from The Powell & Pressburger Pages
THE LION HAS WNGS
Great Britain (76 mi) 1939 co-directors: Adrian Brunel, Brian Desmond Hurst, and Alexander Korda
The Lion Has Wings (1940) BritMovie
A semi-documentary, opening with scenes of everyday life in 1937 Britain and focusing on families who have connections with the Royal Air Force, in particular Wing Commander Richardson, his wife and their young Canadian cousin Bobby who is engaged to Merle’s friend June. As the Nazi rise in Germany spreads across Europe, so in 1939 war is declared. The RAF is shown ready to defend the nation, raiding Kiel before the film closes with a demonstration of Britain’s defences against air attack.
This picture was sponsored by the Ministry of Information and produced in six weeks by Alexander Korda, can best be described as a tour de-force… it is a supreme example of what can be done by skilled cutting and direction. Even more, it admirably fulfils its object – to inspire quiet confidence in the hearts of those who see it.
The Lion Has Wings - TCM.com Jeremy Arnold
In late August 1939, at Denham studios outside London,
producer Alexander Korda assembled together his contract artists, several of
whom - including director Michael Powell - were in the middle of making The
Thief of Bagdad (1940). Everyone in the room, not to mention all of
England, knew that war with Germany was inevitable and would probably happen
very soon. Korda announced to his team that months earlier, he and Winston
Churchill had made a verbal agreement that on the day war was declared, Korda
would use all his resources (and his own money) to immediately start producing
an anti-Nazi propaganda film. In exchange, Churchill promised to use the
British film industry as a weapon throughout the war, eventually providing
funding for more propaganda films. In this way, Korda thought, the industry's
survival through the war would be assured. (In World War I, the British film
industry had effectively been shut down for the duration.)
Michael Powell, in his memoir, recalled Korda's instructions to his team:
"When war was declared, filming on The Thief of Bagdad would stop.
The next day, everybody at Denham would start working on a feature propaganda
film which Alex had promised Churchill would be ready in one month. During this
month, Alex guaranteed the salaries of all his contract people. All he asked of
us was that we would go with heart, mind and soul into making his new picture,
and work with whomever we were assigned to. The coordinator of the whole
production was to be Ian Dalrymple...one of Korda's associate producers.
Dalrymple's brief was to build the main case against Hitler as a warmonger and
butcher of his fellow men, to show Britain's potential for men and munitions in
the coming struggle, and above all, to star the Royal Air Force. The film was
to be called The Lion Has Wings [1939]."
At the time of the Denham meeting, the studio was already a classified area.
When, a week later, Hitler invaded Poland and Britain declared war on Germany,
production on The Lion Has Wings began as planned, and under a shroud of
utmost secrecy. (A newspaper article of the time refers to directors at Denham
walking around "with fingers on their lips.")
Dalrymple assigned three directors - Powell, Brian Desmond Hurst, and Adrian
Brunel - to shoot the film simultaneously in various locations. Shooting lasted
twelve days. The film was completed within five weeks, and was in theaters in
less than eight. The content was a mixture of documentary-style footage,
scripted narrative featuring Merle Oberon and Ralph Richardson among others,
and footage from two earlier films, Fire Over England (1937) and The
Gap (1937). Powell directed the flying sequences (including actual British
bombers returning from the "Kiel Raid" on Germany) and most of the
Nazi raid on London and the British defense; Brunel did the documentary
sections; and Hurst shot the narrative scenes between Merle Oberon and Ralph
Richardson. (Oberon, incidentally, had recently married Alexander Korda.)
Powell described the film as "a hodgepodge. A good third of it was a
reconstruction...of the way Europe in the last five years had crawled to lick
Hitler's boots. England, the great appeaser, was as much to blame as
anybody.... Another important section was the industrial section, which showed
the Midlands swinging into war production. It was mostly done by clever montage
technique, and was mostly lies. Our war production and war preparation was
completely illusory."
Indeed, The Lion Has Wings was designed as a blatant propaganda film,
made to inspire confidence in those who saw it that England was totally
prepared to swing into war mode. In reality, it wasn't. Time was needed to build
the Royal Air Force, and especially the Navy, into the powerhouses they needed
to be. As Michael Korda (Alexander's nephew) later wrote: "In England, the
movie was widely regarded as overoptimistic, since the public did not as yet
have any reason to believe in the efficiency or strength of the R.A.F., having
been told by both the appeasers and the anti-appeasers that it was too weak to
confront the Germans."
Powell knew next to nothing about combat aircraft, and he was given a Royal Air
Force liaison to show him around some air bases and meet RAF fliers. On the
last day of peace, his liaison came to the Thief of Bagdad set to meet
Powell, who was shooting the magic-carpet sequence. "Flying carpets?"
said the officer. "We'll have you flying on something better than this
before you're finished, Mr. Powell."
In his research, Powell was especially fascinated by the new invention of
radar, which for the moment remained secret. It not only appears in The Lion
Has Wings but is depicted as operational and widespread, a piece of
propaganda designed to scare the Nazis. "By cross-examining fighter
pilots," wrote Powell, "I learnt enough about how the system worked
to put on a show. The system was not in operation, but very soon would be. No
reason why it should be 'top secret.' Night fighting up to that time had been a
matter of who had the sharpest eyes and quickest wit. If we could make Jerry
think that we could already shoot his pilots down before they sighted ours, we
would shake his nerve. I told Dalrymple that I was going to exploit this
magical radar thing in the flying sequences in the film.
"We decided that my sequences in the film were to show an all-out attack
by Nazi bombers, supported by fighters, was completely wrecked by the use of
radar by the fighter squadrons of the RAF (as actually happened nine months
later). Of course, it wasn't known as radar then, nor did I explain it. It was
this 'new thing' - 'this electric eye.'"
In all, Powell wrote, The Lion Has Wings "was an outrageous piece
of propaganda, full of half-truths and half-lies, with some stagy episodes
which were rather embarrassing and with actual facts which were highly
distorted; but the will to fight was there, and I think The Lion Has Wings
can claim to have caused a lot of people all over the world, who were inclined
to support the Axis, to stop and think again. The making of this piece of
popular propaganda also saved the British film industry from eclipse."
The film premiered in London on Oct. 31, 1939. Critics and audiences all knew
it was propaganda, but the public ate it up, wanting to feel inspired. It
received enormous publicity and was a huge hit. Churchill praised it, and,
according to Michael Korda, "a print smuggled into Germany produced from
Hitler a threat to bomb the British movie studios."
In a Nov. 19, 1939 New York Times article about the state of the British
film industry, British writer C.A. LeJeune wrote: "Not quite documentary,
not quite newsreel, not quite adventure tale, it combines all three in an hour
of vivid journalistic cinema. We live again the Sunday morning of Sept. 3, the
Prime Minister's broadcast, that first air-raid warning that ended the old
order. We see the silver balloon barrage over London... Then comes the high
spot of the film - a reconstruction of the Kiel Canal raid, from information
supplied by the actual flyers, who are seen taking off and returning to the air
field... By and large, we feel that Mr. Korda has got something in The Lion
Has Wings that this country's propaganda can very well do with. As a nation
we find it hard to roar, but this time we have opened our mouths and let out a
good one."
The film's American opening, on Jan. 13, 1940, produced a similar response,
with The New York Times declaring it "a tremendously interesting and
exciting motion picture. It is Miss Oberon...who makes the film's ultimate
plea, on behalf of England's wives and mothers, for a speedy and honorable end
to this war for the right to freedom and justice and human dignity. And Mr.
Richardson, with typical British reserve and dislike for emotional displays,
falls asleep as she makes her little speech. The scene is illustrative of the
general spirit of the film: purposeful, proud, firmly resolved, yet not so
sober about it all as not to indulge in a grin now and then.... Labeling it
propaganda doesn't alter the fact that it makes an interesting, informative and
thrilling show."
Both The Lion Has Wings and The Spy in Black (1939) (Michael
Powell's first collaboration with screenwriter Emeric Pressburger) were in
release at the same time, and both performed very strongly at the box office,
which helped Powell's career considerably. It gave him added clout and
credibility as he (and Pressburger) produced another winner, Contraband
(1940), then 49th Parallel (1941) and a slew of classic films through
the rest of the decade and beyond.
The Lion Has Wings features voice-over narration by E.V.H. Emmett in the
British version, and by Lowell Thomas in the American version. Both were famous
broadcasters in their home countries.
The Lion Has Wings: The Lion Triumphant Criiterion essay by Ian Christie, May 26, 2008
KQEK
(Mark R. Hasan) dvd review
The Lion Has
Wings| WWII Movies | Liberty Lady
User reviews from imdb Author: James
Hitchcock from Tunbridge Wells,
England
User
reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England
User reviews from imdb Author: Cinema_Fan from An English Shire.
The New York Times (Frank S. Nugent) review
The Lion Has Wings -
Wikipedia
CONTRABAND
aka: Blackout
Great Britain (92 mi) 1940
Contraband (1940) BritMovie
Neutral Danish steamship Helvig, returning from America, runs foul of British contraband regulations and is led to a control port where Captain Andersen grudgingly allows by British officers with the promise that the ship will be allowed to proceed in the morning. Discovering that his landing passes have been stolen and two passengers are missing Mrs Sorensen and Mr Pidgeon, both agents for British Naval Intelligence Andersen rows ashore, following the two escapees on to a train bound for London. Pidgeon escapes in the London black-out but Andersen catches up with Mrs Sorensen. Both are captured by German intelligence, who substitute false plans for those carried by Mrs Sorensen. Andersen escapes and recruits help from a Danish restaurant nearby They rescue Mrs Sorensen who then slips away to inform the of the true message which she is carrying. Passengers and crew return to the Helvig in time to sail as arranged the next morning, when Andersen learns that Naval intelligence had been monitoring the events of the previous evening and he is congratulated oil his night’s work.
Contraband
(1940) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
November, 1939. Captain Andersen is on his way back to Denmark when his cargo ship is impounded by British Contraband Control. When landing passes are stolen by two of his passengers – Mrs Sorensen and Mr Pidgeon – he sets off in pursuit. His journey takes him to London where he learns that Mrs Sorensen is a secret agent working for British military intelligence. Andersen’s hope of making a hasty return to his ship is thwarted when he and Mrs Sorensen are captured by enemy agents...
Anyone familiar with the better known films of Michael Powell
and Emeric Pressburger will be somewhat surprised by this stylish comedy
thriller, one of their early collaborations made at the outset of WWII.
Indeed, you could easily be fooled into thinking that Contraband came
from the same stable as the early British sound films directed by Alfred
Hitchcock, such as The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady
Vanishes (1938). This was intended to be a propaganda film, but
it’s harder to make this epithet stick than with some later Powell-Pressburger
offerings.
It could be argued that the film is about the impossibility of adopting a
neutral position during wartime. The hero, Captain Andersen (wonderfully
played by the great German actor Conrad Veidt), starts out determined not to
get caught up in the intrigues of war, but ultimately has no choice but to get
involved – rather like Rick Blaine is Casablanca
(in which, incidentally, Veidt also appeared, as the bad guy). However,
this message is somewhat masked by the John Buchan-style thriller heroics and
barely restrained comic interludes.
Contraband is not a polished piece of cinema – it is uneven and at times
confusing, occasionally let down by poor production values and some weak
characterisation. However, on the plus side, Conrad Veidt and Valerie
Hobson make an enjoyable double act – picking up where they left off in the
earlier P&P production The Spy
in Black (1939) – and it is hard not be impressed by the film’s
imaginatively shot expressionistic sequences, which bring a seductive touch of
film noir.
Contraband
(1940) - TCM.com John M. Miller
London Films' Contraband (1940) was produced in the last months
of 1939 and is considered to be the first British fiction film to deal directly
with World War II. It was the second collaboration of Michael Powell and Emeric
Pressburger, who had scored a hit with The Spy in Black (1939), a World
War I drama starring Valerie Hobson as the love interest and famed German actor
Conrad Veidt as a villainous U-boat captain. The filmmakers were tempted to
create another crackling spy yarn reuniting Hobson and Veidt (but updated to
the present struggle) and at the same time produce a patriotic picture touting
the defenses of the Royal Navy in much the same way that the recent anthology
documentary (directed in part by Powell) The Lion Has Wings (1939) had
touted the RAF. The witty and exciting Contraband accomplished both goals and
also provided a rare heroic role for Conrad Veidt.
The Blitz did not begin until September of 1940, but since the start of the war
blackout conditions had been instituted in London in anticipation of such
bombing raids. Powell and Pressburger knew that a chase staged in a blacked-out
city would be a novelty and that cinematographer Fred Young could make the most
of the possibilities. The film begins at sea, however, as Captain Andersen
(Conrad Veidt), skipper of a Danish merchant ship, tries to outrun a British
Contraband Control ship. Andersen has nothing to hide; he is bound for
Rotterdam, a neutral port, and has already been delayed by moving in a zigzag
pattern to avoid a German U-boat attack. The British fire a shot over his bow,
and the Captain becomes cooperative when boarded by the efficient British
inspectors. At the prospect of being held at the port overnight, the British
give Andersen two passes allowing he and his first mate to leave the ship, but
the passes are stolen by two passengers, Mrs. Sorensen (Valerie Hobson) and Mr.
Pidgeon (Esmond Knight). The two disappear into the darkened London during
blackout, and Andersen follows, encountering assorted spies, kidnappers, fifth
columnists, and assorted colorful Londoners gamely going about their nightlife
activities under adverse wartime conditions.
In his book A Life in Movies: An Autobiography (Faber & Faber,
2001), director Powell notes that "Emeric [Pressburger] wrote and was
credited with the original story. We wrote the shooting script together, as we
had on The Spy in Black, laughing and fighting, biting and scratching,
with frequent consultations with Valerie and Connie." The film was shot at
Denham Studios and on some locations around London. Crates holding film
equipment sent to location were already stamped with LONDON FILMS, but, as
Powell later admitted, "...I had a stencil made - CONTRABAND in big
letters - and we used it extensively on all the boxes, cases and mysterious
pieces of equipment that a big film unit carries about with it. This particular
gag delighted the real Contraband Controllers at Ramsgate, and they insisted on
stenciling our crates with their own provocative stencils, like EXPLOSIVES,
EXAMINED, CONDEMNED."
The production schedule called for six weeks of shooting, and all went smoothly
except for the first day in the studio. Powell decided to shoot one hectic
sequence with many people scurrying about Contraband Control in one long take.
Producer John Corfield observed hours of rehearsals but no filming. He was
beside himself as the day wore on but none of the seven scene numbers scheduled
for the day had been shot. Finally, as Powell later wrote, "At twenty past
five, we started shooting and got it in the third take." Seven scenes and
three minutes and twenty-two seconds of finished film were in the can and the
producer was able to relax. The picture ultimately came in on schedule and
under budget. In his book, Powell had high praise for all on his crew, but
reserved particular notice for art director Alfred Junge. "As the
headquarters of the spy circus," he wrote, "Emeric had asked for a
modern office building with a lot of action around the elevator. Freddie
[Young] and I were perfectly prepared to trick this with moving shadows, etc.,
but Alfred pooh-poohed this and gave us a full working elevator, from basement
to ground floor, and the unit never tired of using it. He had a large number of
sets to build and he was always on time and always ready."
Contraband opened May 11, 1940 at the huge Odeon Leicester Square, where it
played for four weeks to packed houses; it was equally successful outside
London. Michael Powell would later call the film "pure corn" but he
also saw it as statement of national pride. He wrote that "it explained
how the Contraband Control was being operated against neutrals, and why the
Royal Navy had set up the control at Ramsgate, on the east coast of Kent...I
thrilled to my Kentish toes at the prospect of showing how my country, with her
long and vulnerable seacoast and her defenseless harbours, was already taking
the war against Hitler into what he had the cheek to call 'the German ocean.'
[Pressburger and I] saw a chance to prove once more that films can be a weapon
of war."
Powell may have sold Contraband a bit short in the non-propaganda department.
Once Veidt and Hobson are navigating the backstreets of London, looking for
trouble and finding plenty of it, the film is a fast-paced delight. Veidt
obviously relishes his role as the heroic and unlikely spy smasher; when he
engages in a lengthy crawl of West End nightclubs in an effort to recognize the
sounds surrounding the spy ring's hideout, he and an unlikely band of Danish
restaurant employees witness a dizzying array of exotic floor acts. Veidt and
Hobson also make for an appealingly quirky romantic couple; they are at odds
onboard the ship as Mrs. Sorensen refuses to wear a life jacket to dinner and
the Captain threatens to put her in irons, while later in the film the couple
find themselves both in irons, at the mercy of spies, and amusingly sensual
while writhing to free themselves. Powell has a bit of fun with verbal and
visual nods to German expressionist films of the past; a key spy character is
named "Lang," and when Captain Andersen is initially subdued, he
blacks out and sees grotesque distortions of his captors, like something
straight out of Veidt's own The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Powell
also noted, "...we made the conditions of London, blacked out but still
getting on with its night life and private life, so interesting and so
fascinating that they called the film Blackout when it was released in
America, and I wish we had too. With its double meaning it's a much better
title for the story."
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Pressburger: The War Years The work that cemented The Archers partnership, by Mark Duguid
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer) dvd review
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Contraband Lloydville from mardecortesbaja,
Contraband:
Powell, Pressburger, Veidt, Hobson, Junge and others ... Tony Williams from CineAction,
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [B-]
User reviews from imdb Author: ekarle
from
User
reviews from imdb Author: max von meyerling from
User
reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI
(marrod@melita.com) from
User
reviews from imdb Author: chrisart7 from
User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign from London, England
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Film Noir: Five Classics from the Studio Vault
DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich] Film Noir: Five Classics from the Studio Vault
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] Film Noir: Five Classics from the Studio Vault
THE THIEF OF BAGHDAD
A delightful hocus-pocus of colour,
dashing adventure, and special effects, this Korda-produced epic for grown-up
kids is basically Star Wars meets The Arabian Nights with its
plot of an all-seeing eye stolen from a Tibetan temple. The highlight has to be
the genie (Ingram) who escapes from the bottle, though Sabu the
elephant boy lends just that dash of imperialist sentiment to lift it into
camp. Magical, classically entertaining, and now revalued by Hollywood moguls
Lucas and Coppola, it was made fitfully in Britain during the World War II
Blitz (but completed in Hollywood) by a team of directors spearheaded by the
remarkable Powell.
Thief of
Bagdad, The (1940) Mark Duguid from BFI Screen Online, also here: Show full
synopsis
Producer Alexander Korda originally assigned this Arabian
Nights-style adventure - which had been a hit in its 1924
In the end, no fewer than six directors were involved in
the picture. Powell handled many of the most spectacular sequences, including
the celebrated scene in which the djinni (Rex Ingram) is released from the
bottle. American Tim Whelan shot the battle scenes, and Berger was left with a
few love scenes, most or all of which were later re-shot by Korda himself. When
the production moved to
Despite its troubled production, The Thief of Bagdad was a great success when it was released in
December 1940, its colourful fantasy offering audiences a welcome escape from
the grim daily reality of war, at a time when both colour film stock and
genuine fantasy were a rarity in Britain. As well as the spectacular effects,
for which Laurence Butler won one of the film's three Academy Awards (the
others were for cinematography and art direction), the film featured spirited
performances, particularly from Sabu, already a star thanks to Korda's The Elephant Boy (d. Robert
Flaherty/Zoltan Korda, 1937) and The Drum
(d. Zoltan Korda, 1938) and the German star Conrad Veidt, whose sojourn in
Britain had already included appearances in Powell and Pressburger's Spy in Black (1939) and Contraband (1940).
Decent
Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review
[B]
More
an homage to than a remake of the classic
silent original starring Douglas Fairbanks, this British-made color version
of The Thief of Bagdad is a beloved family adventure standard, though
not quite as charming or as magical as the original.
In this version, the romantic lead who falls in
love with the princess is not the titular thief, but a beggar named Ahmad (John
Justin) who is actually the rightful king of
The remake includes parallels to many of the best elements in the original, including the flying carpet, the flying horse (here a mechanical horse without wings), the climb up a giant statue to steal a magical crystal eye, and a battle with a giant spider. Best of all are Abu’s adventures with a baleful genie (Rex Ingram), whose meeting on the beach with Abu is an unforgettable highlight.
Unfortunately, despite its golden reputation, this Thief of Bagdad suffers from a number of defects that detract from the fun. Justin is wooden as the boring Ahmad, and his love-at-first-sight romance with the princess is far less romantic than that of the silent version. Abu is a far livelier character, but why is he wasting his time with this guy? The film’s final image says it all.
There are other problems as well. Even in the annals of foolishly wasted wishes, when a kid who’s sharp enough to outsmart a genie bent on squashing him goes on to waste his first of three wishes on sausages, it’s especially jaw-dropping. And even magical fantasies need rules, but when Abu gets into a tight spot and smashes a magical artifact with wholly unexpected and unexplained results, it’s too arbitrary to seem magical rather than contrived.
Families today will note how heavily Disney’s Aladdin borrowed from this version of The Thief of Bagdad: Disney’s treacherous grand vizier Jafar is overtly modeled on Veidt’s Jaffar, who similarly plots to marry a princess who is in love with a beggar who claims to be a prince, and whose dwarfish, childlike sultan father (Miles Malleson) is the archetype for Jasmine’s father. Robin Williams’ genie is, of course, a far more affable version of Ingram’s fearsome character. And Sabu’s nimble thief Abu becomes Aladdin’s monkey sidekick by the same name!
The Thief of Bagdad (1940) - TCM.com John M. Miller
One of the great fantasy films, The Thief of
Bagdad (1940) is also included on that short list of movies which had long,
complicated production histories of false starts, script rewrites, and multiple
directors (Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell, Tim Whelan), yet managed to emerge as
a special entity, effortlessly carrying off a unique single vision. In this
case, that vision belonged to London-based Hungarian producer/ director
Alexander Korda. By the late 1930s Korda had amassed an impressive crew of
artists and craftsmen around him at London Films' Denham Studios, and much like
his American counterpart David O. Selznick had with his production of Gone
With the Wind (1939), Korda sought out a property to showcase the talent
under his wing.
Inspired by the success of his personal discovery - Indian actor Sabu - in his
films Elephant Boy (1937) and The Drum (1938), Korda hit upon the
idea of casting the energetic youth in an Arabian Nights fantasy. In 1924,
Douglas Fairbanks had scored one of his biggest hits as The Thief of Bagdad.
The title, which
The elegant final screenplay for The Thief of Bagdad was by actor/
writer Miles Malleson, (who also took a major role in the film, playing the
befuddled Sultan of Basra). We are introduced to Abu (Sabu), a thief amongst
the many merchants in the marketplace of
Sabu was a stable boy for the Maharaja of Mysore when he was discovered by
Korda and cast in The Elephant Boy at the age of 13. The success of that
film, co-directed by Zoltan Korda and the great documentarian Robert J.
Flaherty, led to several more starring roles in Korda productions: The Drum,
again directed by Zoltan Korda; The Thief of Bagdad; and perhaps his
most famous role, that of Mowgli in the Korda brothers' adaptation of Kipling's
Jungle Book (1942). (Sabu appeared in several low-budget Hollywood films
before his death in 1963, though along the way he worked again with director
Michael Powell in the Powell-Pressburger classic Black Narcissus, 1947).
Korda had only one choice in mind for the villainous Jaffar in The Thief of
Bagdad: Conrad Veidt. As Michael Powell was later to write, Veidt was
"a legendary figure. For us, he was the great German Cinema...he
was invention, control, imagination, irony and elegance."
To oversee his original conception of The Thief of Bagdad, Korda brought
in German theater director Dr. Ludwig Berger. Berger envisioned a lyrical,
black-and-white fantasy film. Korda saw the sketches his brother Vincent was
creating and determined instead to film the picture in Technicolor. In his
autobiography, A Life in Movies, director Michael Powell writes,
"Alex was not going to sit in his office and let Dr. Berger make a
stylishly directed, modestly black and white, decorated film. As his mind
cleared and crystallized under the influence of Vincent's magnificent designs,
he realized that what he wanted was a great, big colourful
extravaganza..." Korda brought Powell in on the pretense of having him
shoot footage of Sabu with the Genie's bottle, in order to have something to
show to the film's backers. The actual assignment, though, was to take over the
picture. Powell wrote that Korda told him, "'...there are a thousand
decisions for which I need Dr. Berger here with me. Now, I would like you,
Micky, to take Sabu and a film unit down to
Aside from Michael Powell, Korda enlisted several others for design, directing,
and supervising on The Thief of Bagdad. The third credited director was
Tim Whelan, who "was particularly good at action comedy scenes,"
according to Powell. Exerting additional influence (as well as directing
chores) were associate producers Zoltan Korda and the wonderful production and
effects designer William Cameron Menzies, fresh from his design work on
Selznick's Gone With the Wind. As a young man, Menzies had also served
as Art Director on the 1924 version of The Thief of Bagdad.
Before The Thief of Bagdad could be completed, war was declared between
Released in December, 1940, The Thief of Bagdad won Oscars® for special
effects, color cinematography, and art direction, as well as a nomination for
Rozsa's score. The film also won near-universal praise from the critics. Bosley
Crowther of The New York Times echoed the general sentiment when he
called it a "beguiling and wondrous film" and wrote that "the
least one can do is recommend it as a cinematic delight, and thank Mr. Korda
for reaching boldly into a happy world." Coming as it did just at the
outbreak of World War II, The Thief of Bagdad eventually came to
represent for many a cinematic last gasp of Old World innocence, magic, and
adventure, forever lost during the horrors of war.
The Thief of Bagdad: Arabian Fantasies Criiterion essay by Andrew Moor, May 26, 2008
The Lion Has Wings: The Lion Triumphant Criiterion essay by Ian Christie, May 26, 2008
The Thief of
Bagdad Criterion Collection
Reel
Bad Arabs: How
BFI
Screenonline: Powell and Pressburger
Creators of some Britain's most
vivid and imaginative cinema, by Mark Duguid
The
Thief of Bagdad (1940) James Travers
from FilmsdeFrance
Slant
Magazine review
Bill Weber
filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [3.5/5]
Criterion Confessions [Jamie S. Rich]
SF, Horror and
Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib
The New York Sun (Gary Giddins) review
Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon
The Onion A.V.
Club dvd review
Scott Tobias
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
Cinematical [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
DVD
Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd
review
DVD Verdict (Barrie Maxwell) dvd review
PopMatters (Chris Barsanti) review
[Criterion Collection]
DVD Talk (Jeffrey Kauffman) dvd
review [5/5] [Criterion Collection]
DVD
Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
[Criterion Collection]
DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd
review [Criterion Collection]
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review
[3.5/5]
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Verdict (Clark Douglas) dvd review
[Criterion Collection]
DVD MovieGuide
dvd review [Criterion Collection] Colin Jacobson
The Digital Bits capsule dvd review [Criterion Collection]
Barrie Maxwell
The Thief of Bagdad
(1940) BritMovie
Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton
Trapp]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review
Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review Ken Tucker
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[5/5]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
AN AIRMAN’S LETTER TO HIS MOTHER
Great Britain (5 mi) 1941
User reviews from imdb Author: princessorig from
Columbus, OH, USA
Powell might have to lay on the pathos, but it is not to this short piece's detriment. Except for the RAF cloud-formation at the end, which is admittedly a bit much, his use of a very sparse cinematic vocabulary (for instance, there are no "performances", per se) can pack a minor punch, making five minutes seem even shorter.
An Airman's Letter to His Mother • Senses of Cinema Tony Williams from Senses of Cinema, July 22, 2005
An
Airman's Letter to His Mother | Project Gutenberg Self-Publishing ... film profile page
An
Airman's Letter to His Mother - Wikipedia
49TH PARALLEL
aka: The Invaders
Time Out review Tom Milne
Commissioned by the Ministry of Information in hopes of swaying public opinion in favour of America's entry into the war, this now seems a little dated in patches, with the characterisations all too self-consciously tailored to the propaganda notion of providing a cross-section of ethnic types united in their resistance to Nazism (Leslie Howard's stereotypically laconic Englishman suffers most). But the episodic account of a stranded U-Boat crew's brutal foray into Canada still grips (Emeric Pressburger's script is beautifully structured), and the running debate on democracy versus dictatorship is conducted in terms far from simplistic. What really lifts the film, though, is what David Thomson calls 'a primitive feeling for endangered civilisation': a feeling very much akin to the passionate concern for England's green and pleasant land which flowered in the marvellous A Canterbury Tale three years later.
Monthly Film Bulletin Review BFI Screen Online, October 31, 1941, also including: Synopsis
After sinking many merchant ships in Canadian waters, Nazi U-boat 37 is trapped and sunk by the Royal Canadian Air Force in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The only survivors are six fanatical Nazis who went ashore to reconnoitre before the attack. These reach an Eskimo village, where are the Scottish Factor and his Eskimo servant and Johnnie Barras, a French-Canadian trapper. They allow the Factor to play his radio chess game with a friend in Winnipeg, but Johnnie shouts into the microphone for help and is accordingly shot. The Germans capture the 'plane sent to investigate and kill the pilots, but the 'plane crashes, one of them is killed and the remaining four arrive at a Hutterite settlement, nearly all of whom are fugitives from Nazi oppression. One of the Nazis is so impressed by their sincerity that he defends them against his commanding officers, who shoot him in the name of the Third Reich. The three survivors make for Vancouver. One is captured by Mounted Police, the other two meet Philip Armstrong Scott, charming, cultured friendly expert on Indian affairs, and a well-known writer. They destroy his pictures, burn his manuscripts, tear up his life's work and leave him tied up. Released by his servants, Scott captures one and gives him the thrashing of his life. The last survivor gets aboard a train bound for the American border, in which he finds a Canadian soldier who finally shows what a decadent British Empire can produce in the way of he-men who can use their fists. Michael Powell is to be congratulated on his persistence with this at first apparently ill-starred film. It is an admirable piece of work from every point of view and credit should be given to everyone connected with the finished product. The story is excellent propaganda and most sincerely and dramatically unfolded, and the camera work is excellent. The acting throughout is admirable; even so there is a temptation to say the honours go to Eric Portman as the leader of the Nazis. His performance right through the film puts him in the star class of film actors.
49th Parallel Eric Henderson from Slant magazine
Before Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life
and Death of Col. Blimp and A Canterbury Tale, there was 49th
Parallel. This tale of rogue Nazis roaming the Canadian pastoral
countryside after their submarine is bombed to smithereens offers slim to none
of the trademark whimsy of the WWII films Powell and Pressburger later made
under The Archers banner. Yes, the film is clearly propaganda (though it's not
apparent to whom the propaganda is aimed at: Brits, Canadians, or the
The stranded Nazis in the film are ruthlessly devoted to their cause (with one
notable exception), and they cut a bloody path from the Hudson Bay all the way
to Winnipeg, but they are also fully-rounded characters who stay true to their
impulses. The Archers cannily cast charismatic stars in roles on both sides of
the ideological divide to ensure that, even when the script voices clear
opposition to Hitler's positions (first calmly by Anton Walbrook's Hutterite
commune leader, later with the everyman "sez you" bluntness of
Raymond Massey's put-upon GI), there remains a tenuous dialogue between sides.
The powers that be at whichever ministry was in charge of commissioning pro-war
no doubt balked at the film's conceit—Nazis as unscrupulous protagonists are
still protagonists. And they especially couldn't have been too happy
with the Niall MacGinnis character's sympathetic story arc: he alone among the
group of Nazis comes to find that the gentle democracy of the once-German
Hutterite community makes more sense than the Third Reich's rampant
nationalism. His untimely end at the hands of his fellow soldiers, accused of
treason for simply wanting to bake bread instead of murder women and children,
registers as the only arguably tragic demise of the film's entire (rather high)
body count. It's one thing to resist the urge to simply paint the Nazi menace
as dark shadows and demagoguery. It's entirely another to dare your audience to
shed a tear for the enemy.
While it might not seem so on the surface to those weaned on Why We Fight
and, conversely, The Eternal Jew, 49th Parallel is wholly valid
as propaganda. Its rhetorical power stems from its earnest plea for those
watching contemporaneously to fight a political movement in order to save all
human souls being possessed by it. Incidentally, the film was nominated for a
Best Picture Oscar but predictably lost to the one-sided domestic drama Mrs.
Miniver.
49th Parallel
(1941) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
Early in WWII, a German U-boat surfaces off the east coast of Canada. Only six members if its crew survive when RCAF bombers destroy the submarine in a fierce raid. These six head for the 49th parallel, the unguarded frontier between Canada and the United States, hoping to seeking sanctuary in the latter country which has yet to enter the war. On the way, they stop at a trading post where they are forced to kill several of the locals to avoid capture. Next they come across a Hutterite community which welcomes them until their fanatical adherence to fascism is revealed. As they press on, the original group of six Nazis is gradually whittled away, until only one remains, Lieutenants Hirth. Nothing that happens can shake his resolve that he will return to Germany a hero...
On the strength of his previous wartime films, The Spy
in Black (1939) and Contraband
(1940), director Michael Powell was invited to make a war propaganda film by
the British Ministry of Information. The result was 49th Parallel.
The intention was that this film would foster the Anglo-Canadian
alliance and encourage the United States to enter the war and join the fight
against fascism, whilst also boosting morale at home in Britain. It was
one of a number of propaganda films set during WWII which Powell made in
collaboration with his screenwriter, and later co-director, Emeric Pressburger.
49th Parallel is quite unlike virtually any other wartime drama made
during the war. The plot was inspired by Agatha Christie’s Ten Little
Niggers and essentially comprises a series of self-contained sketches, each
with strident anti-isolationist and anti-Nazi messages. In comparison
with many such films, the Germans are portrayed not as monsters but as
believable, and at times sympathetic, human beings who have been corrupted by
an evil ideology.
The film is particularly memorable for its stunning Canadian location, the
unspoiled beauty of which lends the film its striking poetic quality. The
travelogue sequences were shot with a handheld camera, giving the film a touch
of scale and modernity that was lacking in British cinema at this time.
The film’s editor was none other than David Lean, who would soon embark on a
hugely successful career as a director. The cast includes some of the finest
actors of the period, most of whom give excellent performances. The one
notable exception is Lawrence Oliviver, whose contribution is (as in many of
his early film appearances) overly theatrical and marred by a hideous attempt
at a French accent.
Whilst the anti-Nazi rhetoric may not be subtle, it is highly effective at
showing why democracy, despite is manifest laws, is infinitely preferable to
the soulless and destructive alternative espoused by Hitler and his
cohorts. The screenplay, one of Pressburger’s best, won the film’s only
Academy Award, in the Best Original Story category. Of the many wartime
dramas that Powell and Pressburger made together, 49th Parallel is
possibly the most enduring, on account of its technical brilliance, its entertainment
value and its humanity.
49th Parallel: The War Effort Criterion essay by Charles Barr, February 19, 2007
49th Parallel Criterion essay by Bruce Eder, December 9,
1990
49th Parallel Criterion Collection
BFI Screenonline: 49th Parallel (1941) Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Landscape Michael Powell's spiritual fascination with British landscape, by Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Pressburger: The War Years The work that cemented The Archers partnership, by Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Classic Powell and Pressburger The golden years of the Archers partnership, by Sergio Angelini
49th
Parallel - TCM.com Rob Nixon
49th
Parallel (1941) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Lang Thompson
Home Cinema @ The Digital Fix - 49th Parallel Noel Megahey from DVD Times
DVD Outsider Camus
BFI David Lean feature Mark Duguid Introduction
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [4/5]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection
DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [4/5] [Criterion Collection] also seen here: Criterion Confessions
DVD Verdict (Dylan Charles) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (David Krauss) dvd review Criterion Collection
DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review Criterion Collection
filmcritic.com (Jay Antani) review [3/5] Criterion Collection
Powell and Pressburger Appreciation Society a collection of links to reviews
Keep Calm and Put the Kettle On « vivien leigh & laurence olivier ... Kendra from Keep Calm and Put the Kettle On, February 26, 2010
The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1942 [Erik Beck]
Bil Antoniou's review My Old Addiction
49th Parallel (1941) BritMovie
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Chicago Reader Review Dave Kehr
User
reviews from imdb Author: Alan Donald
(donald@portal.ca) from Vancouver,
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reviews from imdb Author: (gavin@thepsychoticreaction.fsnet.co.uk)
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User reviews from imdb Author: robert-temple-1 from United Kingdom
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reviews from imdb (Page 3) Author: JoeytheBrit from www.moviemoviesite.com
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reviews from imdb (Page 4) Author: drystyx from United States
User reviews from imdb (Page 4) Author: dbdumonteil
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reviews from imdb (Page 4) Author: theowinthrop from United States
Contemporary Article Edith Mepean from the British Studio News, March 8, 1941 review from the Powell & Pressburger pages
Contemporary Article Picture Post, October 4, 1941 review from the Powell & Pressburger pages
Contemporary Review October 9, 1941 review from the Powell & Pressburger pages
Henry Coombs Reviews July 1, 1999 review from the Powell & Pressburger pages
"Radio Times" film guide from the Powell & Pressburger pages
What the critics said when it was released a few catch phrases from the Powell & Pressburger pages
Operation Elster the true account of a Nazi sub in Canadian waters, from the Powell & Pressburger pages
Ralph Vaughan Williams and 49th Parallel Rolf Jordan of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society, from the Powell & Pressburger pages
Plot Synopsis from Progress of British Films, Part 1, from the Powell & Pressburger pages
Cuts to first American release Hugh O’Brien describes the extent of American cuts to the film, from the Powell & Pressburger pages
Fascinating trivia (and any goofs) connected with the film mainly from the Bruce Eder laserdisk commentary, Powell & Pressburger pages
Having a gay time in Canada - By Stephen Bourne from Brief Encounters : Lesbians and Gays in British Cinema 1930-1971, from the Powell & Pressburger pages
All location & studio details known Powell & Pressburger pages
Olivier's accent comments on Laurence Olivier’s accent, from the Powell & Pressburger pages
Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review Tim Burtell
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]
TV Guide review original review, from the Powell & Pressburger pages
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Film on Google video entire film is viewable
ONE OF OUR AIRCRAFT IS MISSING
Great Britain (102 mi)
1942 co-director: Emeric Presssburger
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Though not top-notch Powell & Pressburger, an ambitious low-key wartime thriller that totally transcends any propaganda considerations, thanks to sharp characterisation and imaginative scripting. The crew of a British bomber sent out on a mission to Europe (by air controller Powell, making a symbolically revealing guest appearance) are forced to bale out and make their way back overland through the Low Countries. No simple task, given that - as so often in Powell's movies - the enemy is not merely external but also internal: tensions mount among the Brits, while distrust abounds in their dealings with apparently sympathetic Dutchmen. Rather like 49th Parallel without the epic sweep, an impressively directed and beautifully performed piece of work.
One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942) BritMovie
A British bomber crew returning from a raid on Stuttgart bails out over occupied Holland. Aided by a friendly Dutch family, the men are taken to the local church where they are helped by resistance worker Els Meertens, the local schoolteacher. Dutch network helps them to travel, disguised, across the occupied countryside, avoiding the German patrols until, reaching the North Sea coast, they are hidden at the house of Jo de Vries who – although the Germans believe she is loyal to them – is working with the Allies. Undercover of an air raid, the crew escape by rowing boat, finally making a landing on the newly situated ‘lobster pots’ – floating stages placed to help grounded air crews waiting to he picked up by patrol vessels. Reaching England, they prepare for their next bombing raid over Germany.
An embarrassed Rank was forced to admit a definite error of judgement when One of Our Aircraft is Missing, released by British National in June 1942, met with great public and critical acclaim. Cut by about 20 minutes for US release, it became Powell and Pressburger’s second consecutive picture to win a Best Screenplay nomination at the American Academy Awards – the only time in his career that Michael Powell would find his name put forward for an ‘Oscar’ – the film this time losing out to Casablanca.
One
of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942)
James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
1941. In a raid over Nazi Germany, the crew of an RAF Wellington bomber are forced to bail out when their aeroplane is damaged by enemy fire. They land in occupied Holland and have the good fortune to meet up with a fiercely patriotic resistance group. However, one of the airmen has managed to get himself separated from the others. If he is caught by the German patrols, all of their lives will be in danger. Their new Dutch friends insist that the airmen must leave the country as soon as possible and contrive a scheme to get them back to England...
One of Our Aircraft Is Missing is one of the great
wartime propaganda films of British cinema, an effective drama that provided a
much-needed boost to the morale of the British people in the early years of
WWII. It was the first film that Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
made for their newly formed production company, The Archers, although they had
collaborated on three previous films, all wartime propaganda films.
Although slightly less well regarded than Powell and Pressburger’s other war
films, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing still has a great deal to commend
it. After an intriguing pre-credits sequence, the film’s opening
segment plunges the audience straight into wartime drama with a spectacularly
realised recreation of an RAF bombing mission. What this sequence has,
and which many similar war films lack, is the human dimension. The
characters are portrayed not as action heroes but as ordinary men doing an
extraordinary job. They chat casually about girlfriends and life back
home whilst steering a course through enemy fire and preparing to bomb an
unsuspecting town below. The film’s naturalism is perhaps the most
striking thing about it – war is portrayed not as a great adventure but as life
as it happened to be at the time. In some ways, the film presages the
trend for social realism that would significantly impact on British cinema
after the war.
The film’s excellent cast includes some familiar faces – Googie Withers,
Bernard Miles and, in his first film role, Peter Ustinov. Michael
Powell also appears in the film, briefly as a radio operator. The editing
was undertaken by David Lean, one of the best technicians in his field at the
time, who would soon embark on a highly successful career as a film
director. The film’s stunning photography – which achieves an
effective synthesis of documentary realism and expressionistic lighting – was
by Ronald Neame, one of
BFI
Screenonline: Powell and Pressburger: The War Years The work that cemented The Archers
partnership, by Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Classic Powell and Pressburger The golden years of the Archers partnership, by Sergio Angelini
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz)
review
not coming to a theater near you (Tom Huddleston) capsule review
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reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Robert J. Maxwell
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Variety review
The New York Times review T.S.
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP
At a time when 'Blimpishness' in the high command was under suspicion as detrimental to the war effort, Powell and Pressburger gave us their own Blimp based on David Low's cartoon character - Major General Clive Wynne-Candy, VC - and back-track over his life, drawing us into sympathy with the prime virtues of honour and chivalry which have transformed him from dashing young spark of the Nineties into crusty old buffer of World War II. Roger Livesey gives us not just a great performance, but a man's whole life: losing his only love (Deborah Kerr) to the German officer (Walbrook) with whom he fought a duel in pre-WWI Berlin, then becoming the latter's lifelong friend and protector. Like much of Powell and Pressburger's work, it is a salute to all that is paradoxical about the English; no one else has so well captured their romanticism banked down beneath emotional reticence and honour. And it is marked by an enormous generosity of spirit: in the history of the British cinema there is nothing to touch it.
Monthly Film Bulletin Review BFI Screen Online, June 30, 1943, also here: Synopsis
Clive Candy, a young Army officer, wins the V.C. in the South African War and then in a quixotic mood sets out for Berlin to allay the rumours of British atrocities which are rife. As a result he has to fight a duel, from which he forms a lifelong friendship with his opponent, Lt. Kretschmar Schuldorff of the 2nd Uhlans, to whom he loses the woman he loves. In the 1914 war he rises to the rank of Brigadier, and, coming home, marries a young V.A.D. who reminds him of his first love.
When the present war breaks out he is a widower but still in the Army, and his German friend, now a refugee, is living with him. Before the film ends he is retired, joins the Home Guard; but even there turns out to be too clean a fighter for modern ideas. The virtue of this film lies in the skill with which the joint authors, producers, and directors - Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger - have taken the butt of the cartoonists and turned him into the sympathetic figure as played by Roger Livesey. Its message may be obscure, but its emotional appeal is high - a fact which is due in no small measure to Deborah Kerr's presentation of the three women in Candy's life. Anton Walbrook manages to make the German officer-cum-refugee a sympathetic figure and grows old gracefully. The colour is admirable; the script, and its delivery by the actors, brilliant; and the English atmosphere of understatement well maintained throughout. Each individual part is carefully built up and the film as a whole (if a trifle unsatisfying in retrospect) repays the evident care which has been lavished upon it.
Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The (1943) Mark Duguid from BFI Screen Online, also here: Show full synopsis
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp was Powell and Pressburger's second feature for their new Archers production company, following "...One of Our Aircraft is Missing" (1942). The film was their most ambitious collaboration so far, loosely inspired by a popular cartoon series by David Low, lampooning the military establishment as personified by an ageing, buffoonish officer.
This was the first time that the duo had been able to make use of colour stock (although Powell had had a taste of Technicolor with Thief of Bagdad (1940)), and the film is notably short of the creative use of colour in their films after A Matter of Life and Death (1946).
Beginning in the present day with young officer Lieutenant "Spud" Wilson (James McKechnie) showing demonstrating his ambition and understanding of modern warfare when he steals a march on the ageing, complacent Colonel Clive Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey), during military exercises.
In flashback, the film follows Wynne-Candy's life and loves over forty years, from his beginnings as a dynamic and decorated young officer returning triumphantly from the Boer War, taking in the Great War, his long friendship with a German officer, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook) and his attempt to find a replacement for the love he lost to his friend. Returning to the present, we find Wynne-Candy a confused and frustrated old man, unable to come to grips with the horrific realities of modern war.
Pressburger's script portrays, with a mix of sympathy and exasperation, a well-meaning but hopelessly out-of-date old man, who stubbornly fails to recognise the nature of the enemy and the cost of failure. The film is an implicit criticism of an officer class which insisted on seeing the war as a game, fought according to 'gentlemen's rules'.
The film so incensed Winston Churchill - who saw it as unpatriotic and a threat to morale - that he tried to have it banned and, when he failed, did his best to spoil its success overseas. Nevertheless, Blimp was a great success.
Roger Livesey, until then an all-but unknown contract player for Alexander Korda, managed to convey Wynne-Candy's development over forty years with the help of little more than make-up and a shaven head. In an early sign of the playfulness which would increasingly characterise the Archers' films, all three of the women in his life were played by the 21 year-old Deborah Kerr.
The
Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
London, 1943. Humiliated in a Home Guard training
exercise by an impulsive young army officer, General Clive Wynne-Candy casts
his mind back forty years to the time when he too was a dashing man of
action. In 1902, just after serving in the Boer War, Clive Candy defies
his superiors by going off to Germany to single-handedly deal with an agent who
is spreading anti-British propaganda. Very soon, Clive runs into
difficulties. He falls in love with his informant, Edith, offends the
entire Germany army and ends up having to fight a duel with a German officer he
has never met before, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff. Fortunately, the
dispute is resolved amicably, although Clive loses Edith to Theo. During
World War I, Clive encounters a nurse who has the exact likeness of Edith.
Convinced this woman is his ideal, he pursues her on his return to England and
marries her. When his next war comes along twenty years later, Clive is
an old man, but he is still determined to do his bit for his country.
Unfortunately, times have changed and the values he sets so much store by make
him an object of ridicule...
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is one of the
remarkable films to come out of the legendary partnership of Michael Powell and
Emeric Pressburger, two of the most important figures in British cinema.
Although it belongs to the impressive series of wartime dramas made by Powell
and Pressburger in the 1940s, it stands apart. It isn’t so much a
conventional war film as a light-hearted character study and a satirical
comment on how military ethics changed between the Boer War and WWII.
Many regard this as one of Powell and Pressburger’s greatest achievements.
The film takes its title from the cartoon character Colonel Blimp (created by
David Low) who featured in the London Evening Standard. Blimp was a
caricature of the pompous, old-fashioned army officer types who had a very
visible presence in Britain at the time and who always complained about how
things only ever changed for the worse. In the film, Blimp is
personified by General Clive Candy, an idealistic army officer who fails to
change with the times, with tragicomic consequences.
From the outset, the film’s production met with fierce opposition from
Britain’s War Office. Having seen the screenplay, the Ministry of
Information formed the view that the film was unpatriotic and would have a
demoralising effect on the armed services. Not only did the film poke fun
at British army officers, but it also showed a German officer in a sympathetic
light. The War Office refused to allow Laurence Olivier to take the part
of Clive Candy and made it difficult for the film’s producers to get hold of
military staff and hardware for the film. Prime Minister Winston
Churchill (who had many Blimp-like traits) was incensed by the film and tried
unsuccessfully to ban it. Although Churchill did manage to impose an
export ban, this was later removed when the film proved to be successful in the
UK. Another problem was the shortage of colour film, which compelled Pressburger
to remove around 20 minutes of material, resulting in the loss of the flashback
narrative structure. The film was restored in 1986 by the British
National Film Archive.
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is a sublime example of British
cinema with many strong selling points - a great screenplay, impeccable
direction, imaginative art design, gorgeous colour photography, etc. What
makes the film so memorable, and so enjoyable, are the performances,
particularly those of Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook. Far from being a
figure of fun, Livesey’s Clive Candy is an immensely complex character of great
charm and nobility. Walbrook’s Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff is just as well
played, but with an extra note of pathos which makes some of his scenes
exquisitely poignant. Deborah Kerr also has a strong presence in the
three very distinct roles she plays in the film. All three actors would
appear in subsequent Powell-Pressburger productions – Livesey in I
Know Where I’m Going! (1945) and A Matter
of Life and Death (1946), Walbrook in The Red Shoes
(1948) and Kerr in Black
Narcissus (1947).
Watching the film today, the antipathy that was shown by the War Office towards
it appears to be unfathomable. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
is manifestly one of the most patriotic films that Powell and Pressburger
made. The values of Clive Candy – traditional British values of fair
play, honour and decency – are shown in a positive light, not ridiculed.
The point the film is making is that whilst we should try to live up to these
values whenever we can, there are circumstances when this is
impossible. If the Nazis are prepared to use any means to secure
victory, we would be foolish to adhere to a moral code which will only result
in our defeat. For all its charm and humour, The Life and Death
of Colonel Blimp is actually a remarkably effective piece of wartime
propaganda, using reasoned arguments rather than the usual didactic (and often
xenophobic) approach employed by the War Office.
The
Life and Death of Colonel Blimp Criterion essay by Ronald Haver, October 21,
2002
The
Life and Death and Life of Colonel Blimp Criterion essay by Molly Haskell,
March 20, 2013
The
Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
Criterion Collection
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Powell & Pressburger Ian Christie from Senses of Cinema, September 2013
"The
Music of Words: Storytelling in Two Powell & Pressburger Films." Imogen Sara Smith from Bright Lights Film
Journal, January 31, 2013
"The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp Reconsidered." James Chapman from The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, March 1995, fromThe Powell & Pressburger Pages
BFI Screenonline: Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The (1943) Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Pressburger: The War Years The work that cemented The Archers partnership, by Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Pressburger Creators of some Britain's most vivid and imaginative cinema, by Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Classic Powell and Pressburger The golden years of the Archers partnership, by Sergio Angelini
The
Life and Death of Colonel Blimp - TCM.com
Paul Tatara
The
Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) - Home Video Reviews ... Scott McGee
The Guardian [Derek Malcolm] Derek Malcolm’s Century of Films, April 20, 2000
The Life and
Death of Colonel Blimp - Archive - Reverse Shot Andrew Tracy from Reverse Shot, July 15, 2006
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4]
DVD Times [Mike Baker] Special Edition
The DVD Journal [D. K. Holm] Criterion Collection
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review Criterion Collection
DVD Movie Central [Michael Jacobson] Criterion Collection
GreenCine Guru [Craig Phillips] Criterion Collection
About.com Home Video/DVD [Ivana Redwine] Criterion Collection
Acting Up: Anton Walkbrook Greg from Cinema Styles, August 16, 2007
Sensual
Propriety Brian Doan from Bubblegum
Aesthetics, October 18, 2007
Joey's Film Blog [Joey Laura] December 18, 2007
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) BritMovie
filmcritic.com (Matt Langdon) review [4/5]
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Blimp & AMOLAD Sarah Knight reviews both The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and A Matter of Life and Death from Scope magazine (Undated), reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]
Powell
and Pressburger: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp Derek Malcolm from The Guardian,
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies] October 27, 2002
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
RIP Deborah Kerr Bob from Forward to Yesterday, October 18, 2007
In
Memoriam: Deborah Kerr, 1921--2007
Self-Styled Siren, October 18, 2007
Edward Copeland Deborah Kerr (1921-2007), October 18, 2007
THE VOLUNTEER
Great Britain (45 mi) 1944 co-director: Emeric Pressburger
The Volunteer (1943) BritMovie
Following a performance in the title role of Othello at the New Theatre, Ralph Richardson is approached by his dresser Fred Davey, asking if he will sign an autograph for his girlfriend. Next day, Fred tells Ralph that he has joined the Fleet Air Arm and will no longer he able to work for him. Fred becomes a hero, rescuing a pilot from a blazing plane on the deck of an aircraft carrier, and receives his medal at Buckingham Palace where Ralph requests an autograph for his girlfriend (his daughter).
User reviews from imdb Author: Lester May from Camden
Town, London, England
This wartime propaganda film, made by "The Archers"
and dedicated to the Fleet Air Arm, will have wide interest. The drama
documentary starts with footage of Ralph Richardson with his careless dresser,
Londoner Fred Davey, preparing for Othello in a London theatre. It follows the
story, told by Lieutenant-Commander (A) Ralph Richardson RNVR – A for Air
Branch and RNVR for Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve – as Fred volunteers and
joins the British Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm as a Naval Air Mechanic (E) – E
for Engineering.
It's war and the theatre management announces the closure of Othello on 9
September 1939, "owing to present conditions". Thus a pipe-smoking
Ralph Richardson (RR) narrates a tale that is "the end of one world and
the beginning of another".
Fred goes to Denham Film Studios, in Buckinghamshire, to meet his former
"guv'nor" and, after walking past famous actors of the time, has tea
with RR, costumed as a Beefeater, and announces his joining the Fleet Air Arm
(FAA). Laurence Olivier appears at the window – he, too, became a pilot in the
FAA.
RR flies a Vought Kingfisher catapult-launched float-plane over an unidentified
naval training establishment on the coast and lands on the sea nearby. There is
footage of the parade ground with some of the 2,000 trainee naval ratings.
Later the training establishment's Captain addresses trainees before an evening
concert party. There are close-ups of trainee naval and WRNS ratings and
footage of Naval Airman Bennett and NA Lloyd playing a table tennis match. RR
meets Fred doing his workshop training.
Then it's two years hence. Note that the "two and a half stripes" RR
wears on his uniform jacket sleeves are "Wavy Navy"; a wartime saving
measure was that the gold stripes went only half way round the sleeves. RR
wears his naval raincoat as he climbs into the cockpit of a Supermarine Walrus
amphibious biplane, which he flies over the old aircraft carrier HMS Argus,
whose deck was used often for landing practice, landing his seaplane in the
water. Ralph Richardson became known as "Pranger" Richardson for his
lack of skill as a naval pilot! RR boards an aircraft carrier (possibly HMS
Indomitable (commissioned late 1941), but certainly of the same
"Illustrious" class) and she sails for exercises. There follows
footage of Supermarine Seafires (naval versions of the famous Spitfire fighter aircraft)
and footage of the flight deck, aircraft lift and hangar.
Rare footage between decks of the carrier is seen as RR, wearing No.5 uniform
with winged collar and bow tie (a substitute for evening dress – mess kit –
when the latter was not available), goes in search of NAM (E) Fred Davey.
RR goes to the hangar, where many of the ship's company are assembled to watch
recently developed film of the aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean and North
African waters. The narrator on board of this film within a film is Lieutenant-Commander
Tommy Woodroffe RN, famous for his drunken commentary, lasting more than four
minutes, on BBC radio of the Fleet Review of 1937: "The Fleet's All Lit
Up!". We see footage of sailors on a beach party, swimming and messing about,
as well as footage of entering Algiers and the city's foreshore (a wartime
merchantman, probably a Liberty ship, is alongside in port). Ordinary Seaman
Jacob, the ship's Captain and the French pilot are seen on the pilotage
platform right forward as the ship enters harbour and then there is
"exclusive" footage of General Charles de Gaulle arriving by car in
the city. A wardroom "calling party" of officers goes ashore
"all in the wrong rig (uniform) except, of course, the Royal Marine!".
He describes the portly figure of the carrier's First Lieutenant ("Number
One") as he goes ashore.
In Gibraltar, there's hockey on the flight deck and fencing, too, followed by
"Up Spirits" – the traditional daily issue of Navy rum. The film
takes us ashore to the Casbah and then the Band of HM Royal Marines plays on
the flight deck as the aircraft carrier sails.
At sea off Gibraltar there is footage of the Fairey Albacore torpedo bomber and
another aircraft type, with "goofers" (idlers) watching, and of the
Grumman Martlet fighter aircraft.
What Tommy Woodroffe describes as "good old Calpe going full out" is
actually her sister ship, the Hunt class escort destroyer HMS Farndale (L70);
HMS Calpe was L71. The destroyer was on plane guard duty, something undertaken
by a helicopter today.
Flying operations continue and a Supermarine Seafire takes off and a Grumman
Martlet lands on, its nose hitting the flight deck; we see a
"pranged" (crashed) Fairey Albacore and flight deck operations.
The aircraft carrier arrives at Gibraltar in a Levanter, a strong gap wind, and
battleships are alongside in the naval dockyard. The captain berths the carrier
at Coaling Jetty and then, while alongside, the Band of HM Royal Marines
arrives on the flight deck at "Hands to Church" and we see a church
parade too on the nearby battleship HMS Howe.
At sea again and there is footage of air attacks on the carrier, a near miss
and casualties on deck. Later, RR asks an RPO (a Regulating Petty Officer – a
naval policeman) to help him find Fred in his messdeck, where there is a music
party in progress. We pass a Royal Marine sentry and hear the pipe "Out
pipes … Pipe down" indicating that it's time for lights out and bed. RR
and the RPO find Fred asleep in his hammock, which he has slung in the aircraft
hangar rather than the messdeck.
Back in London RR walks with a young girl called Joan in St James's Park and
ends up outside Buckingham Palace where the King is holding an investiture and
we again meet Fred Davey.
"Secure from Flying Stations"!
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Pressburger: The War Years The work that cemented The Archers partnership, by Mark Duguid
A CANTERBURY TALE
Great Britain (124 mi) 1944 co-director: Emeric Pressburger
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review
Very nearly plotless, this 1944 film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger represents one of the few times the narrative cinema has approached the lyrical ideal. Crossing wartime Britain, a group of travelers—including an American GI, a young woman from London, and an English officer—linger in a small farming village, ostensibly to solve a peculiar mystery (someone is putting glue in the local girls' hair), but really because of the spell (quite literal, in P and P's mystical vision) cast upon them by the countryside. Over the hill lies Canterbury Cathedral, and as parallels begin to emerge with Chaucer's pilgrims, the characters find themselves being drawn to it, for a soft-pedaled climax that represents the fulfillment of their individual quests. Strange and wonderful. With Eric Portman, Sheila Sim, John Sweet, and Dennis Price. 124 min.
Michael Powell's extraordinary film proceeds from the faintly bizarre story of three characters (a land girl, a British sergeant and a US sergeant) who, arriving by the same train in a small Kent village, make friends and set out to unmask the mysterious 'glue man' who pours glue on to the hair of girls out late at night with servicemen. But the film shows a sharp awareness of the tensions underlying a country community in wartime - from rural resentment of the influx of outsiders to more long-term fears of the decay of a traditional social order. An assertion of stability to counterbalance these is provided by Powell's almost mystical sense of historical continuity, epitomised by Canterbury Cathedral and the Pilgrims' Way as captured in Erwin Hillier's lyrical photography. Though infuriatingly difficult to categorise, the film is bold, inventive, stimulating and extremely entertaining.
BFI
Screenonline: Canterbury Tale, A (1944)
Mark Duguid, also here: Show full
synopsis
Probably Powell and Pressburger's most personal and unusual film, A Canterbury Tale (1944) bewildered critics and audiences on its release, but has since come to be seen as one of their very best; Pressburger himself later declared it his favourite.
The film is structured as a mystery story, but its real purpose is to add a spiritual dimension to the propaganda message of earlier films like 49th Parallel (1941) and "...One of Our Aircraft is Missing" (1942). There are no Nazis in A Canterbury Tale and, although the war provides its backdrop, the focus is on identifying a distinctively moral and spiritual English identity, in direct opposition to the harsh material objectives of fascism.
The film offers a vision of an England with its spiritual roots in the countryside exemplified by the beauty of Kent - the county of Powell's birth - an England which its increasingly urban population have neglected for too long. Evoking Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the film charts the progress of a select band of modern pilgrims. As the trio of land girl Alison (Sheila Sim), American officer Bob (John Sweet) and British officer Peter (Dennis Price) converge on Canterbury Cathedral, each receives a 'blessing', bringing his or her most fervent wish to life. The film's peculiar power owes much to Eric Portman who, as the enigmatic Thomas Colpeper - local Justice of the Peace, prophet and one of Powell's many screen alter-egos - delivers an intense and complex performance, just as he had in 49th Parallel three years earlier.
Despite the trappings of Christianity, particularly the grand finale in the cathedral, the film's strange atmosphere seems at times closer to paganism than Anglicanism, and the most memorable character, a mysterious man who pours glue in the hair of local women who fraternise with soldiers, resembles a fairytale bogeyman. Critics were particularly uncomfortable with the morally ambiguous figure of the glue man, and many remembered this in their outrage at Powell's 'unsavoury' solo work Peeping Tom (1960) sixteen years later.
Eerie and resonant, A Canterbury Tale is perhaps the most complete expression of Powell's fascination with the mystical power of landscape, which is also visible in works like Edge of the World (1937), "I Know Where I'm Going!" (1945), Black Narcissus (1947) and Gone to Earth (1950).
A
Canterbury Tale (1944) James Travers
from FilmsdeFrance
One summer during WWII, three complete strangers are thrown together when they get off a train one evening at Chillingbourne village, several miles from Canterbury. Bob Johnson, a sergeant in the American army, had intended to spend part of his leave visiting Canterbury but disembarked at the wrong station. Peter Gibbs is a sergeant in the British Army whose unit is stationed in the area. Alison Smith has given up a job in a London department store to work as a farm labourer. Within minutes of their arrival, someone throws glue into Alison’s hair. When she learns that she is not the first victim of the mysterious "Glue Man", Alison persuades Bob and Peter to help her track down the culprit. The finger of suspicion points to Colpepper, the local magistrate...
Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th Century work The Canterbury Tales
was the inspiration for this lyrical wartime drama from the celebrated
independent filmmaking duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, a.k.a. The
Archers. Like many of their productions, the film has a distinct
propagandist slant, and it’s not difficult to see that this one is intended to
help cement Anglo-American relations by showing England in the most favourable
light. As it turned out, this particular bolt from the well-meaning
Archers’ bow arrived somewhat late in the day – the film was released two
months after the Normandy Invasion in 1944.
If it were just a propaganda film, A Canterbury Tale would probably have
been long forgotten, of interest only to a handful of film historians.
The mere fact that it was Powell-Pressburger production ensured that there was
far more to it than that. The film is a beautifully evocative (albeit
idealised) portrait of everyday life in England during the war, a multi-layered
morality tale (which admits various interpretations), and an entertaining
satire on the clash of American and English cultures.
It is also a film which has a great intrinsic beauty, with some wonderfully
inspired touches. It opens with a Medieval pilgrimage and fast forwards to
1944 in a shot which inspired Kubrik for the famous opening sequence of his 2001:
A Space Odyssey (1968). This seductive opening provides the keynote
for much of what follows – the notion that our present experiences are strongly
shaped by past events.
Michael Powell grew up in Kent, and this accounts for the overwhelming sense
sense of nostalgia in this, his most personal film. The England
that he and Pressburger portray in this film is not one that most English
people of the time would have recognised. The England of A Canterbury
Tale is a romanticised, picture postcard one, with gently rolling hills,
pretty villages and happy farm workers.
Yet, interestingly, whilst this view predominates, it is not the whole
picture. The image of a dreamy demi-paradise is frequently subverted in
the film. Firstly, there is the bizarre Glue Man episode, in which the
culprit is readily shown to be one of the most important members of
community. We learn that three of the main characters in the film would
never have thought to visit the countryside if the war hadn’t dragged them to
it. And, when we get to Canterbury, one of the first things we see is the
devastation wrought by German bombs. If this is Eden, it’s a very strange
Eden – imperfect, in peril, and full of contradictions.
The main thrust of the film’s pretty vague and meandering narrative involves
the journey the four main characters undergo, a pilgrimage of sorts.
Alison, Colpepper and the British and American sergeants each experience an
emotional crisis which is resolved, seemingly by divine intervention, in
Canterbury. Alison is struggling to come to terms with the death of her
pilot fiancé, Bob is hurt that his girlfriend hasn’t written to him, Peter
regrets not having been given a chance to fulfil his musical ambitions, and
Colpepper awaits retribution for his misguided glue-throwing adventures.
Once we get past the mildly tedious "Hunt the phantom glue thrower"
part of the film – which has all the sophistication of an Enid Blyton Famous
Five story – the film’s true charms and its underlying messages become
apparent. Thereafter, the film’s emotional hold on the spectator
gradually intensifies, culminating in the beautiful closing sequences in
Canterbury Cathedral, where order is restored to a troubled universe.
Whilst A Canterbury Tale has some flaws (notably in the plotting), it
wins through in other areas. The main strength is the
cinematography, which, even for an Archers film, is of exceptional
quality. The photographer director was Erwin Hillier who had cut his
professional teeth on the German expressionist style – he had worked as an
assistant cameraman on Fritz Lang’s M (1930). His
distinctive use of chiaroscuro bring an extraordinary, almost ethereal,
splendour to even the most banal settings, although it is the film’s exteriors
where he excels. It is the extensive shots of the Kent landscape which
provide the film with its heart and soul – the most sensually bucolic depiction
of the English countryside you can imagine, achingly poetic but with a strong
impression of realism. As an evocation of that mythical England of
rolling hills and sleepy sun-dappled pastures, this film is virtually
unsurpassed.
On its first release, A Canterbury Tale was ill-received by both critics
and cinemagoers. In a desperate bid to make the film more attractive to
an American audience, it was drastically re-edited (losing 20 minutes of its
runtime) and had a soppy additional scene (in which Bob is reunited with his
girl) tagged on at the end. The film’s spectacular failure at the box
office meant that it was quickly forgotten and only resurfaced in the 1970s,
when it was restored and quickly earned the recognition it deserved.
Today, the film is as highly regarded as Powell and Pressburger’s other great
works – an enjoyable and beautifully composed piece of cinema showing us an
England that has long passed away – if, that is, it ever existed.
A Tribute: A Canterbury Tale Criterion essay by Peter von Bagh, July 24, 2006
A Canterbury Tale Criterion Collection
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Landscape Michael Powell's spiritual fascination with British landscape, by Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Pressburger: The War Years The work that cemented The Archers partnership, by Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Pressburger Creators of some Britain's most vivid and imaginative cinema, by Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Classic Powell and Pressburger The golden years of the Archers partnership, by Sergio Angelini
A
Canterbury Tale - TCM.com Rob
Nixon
not coming to a theater near you (Tom Huddleston) review
lights in the dusk: A Canterbury Tale May 19, 2009
A Canterbury
Tale Neil Fulwood from The Agitation of the Mind, December 21,
2007
A Canterbury Tale (1944) BritMovie
DVD Times Noel Megahey
DVD Outsider Camus
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd
review Criterion Collection, also seen here: A
Canterbury Tale (1944) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [4/5] [Criterion Collection] also seen here: Criterion Confessions
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3/4] Criterion Collection
DVD Verdict (Steve Evans) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review Criterion Collection
DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review Criterion Collection
Cinema Blend dvd review [Criterion Collection] Jason Morgan
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review [Criterion Collection]
The Onion A.V. Club dvd review Criterion Collection, Noel Murray
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
Laramie Movie Scope (Patrick Ivers) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4/5]
Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [A-] Ken Tucker
My favourite film: A Canterbury Tale | Film | The Guardian Xan Brooks from The Guardian, October 25, 2011
A
Canterbury Tale at 70: a ray of English sunshine - Telegraph Christian House
Critic's
Choice: New DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times, July 25, 2006
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING!
Great Britain (91 mi) 1945 co-director: Emeric Pressburger
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Alongside A Canterbury Tale, Powell's most eloquent tribute to the mysteries of the British landscape. Hiller is the headstrong young girl who travels to Scotland to marry a wealthy but elderly man, only to be confused and distracted by the presence of dashing young laird Livesey. Full of well-integrated symbols (islands, hawks, a whirlpool) and lyrically shot in monochrome by Erwin Hillier, it's all quite beautiful, combining romance, comedy, suspense and a sense of the supernatural to winning effect.
I
Know Where I'm Going Dave Kehr from
the Chicago Reader
Michael Powell's 1945 film resists easy classification: it opens as a screwball comedy, grows into a mystical, Flaherty-like study of man against the elements, and concludes as a warm romance. Wendy Hiller, in one of the best roles the movies gave her, is a toughened, materialistic young woman on her way to meet her millionaire fiance in the Hebrides; Roger Livesey is the young man she meets when a storm blows up and prevents her crossing to the islands. Funny and stirring, in quite unpredictable ways, with the usual Powellian flair for drawing the universal out of the screamingly eccentric. 91 min.
BFI Screenonline: 'I Know
Where I'm Going!' (1945) Mark Druid,
also here: Show full
synopsis
After the relative failure of A Canterbury Tale (1944), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger allowed themselves, for the first time since 1940, a break from propaganda filmmaking. The war is barely acknowledged in "I Know Where I'm Going!" (1945), an unconventional romance set in the Western Isles.
For Powell, "I Know Where I'm Going!" meant a third visit to the Scottish islands, scene of his breakthrough films Edge of the World (1937) and Spy in Black (1941). The film once again demonstrated Powell's unusual sensitivity and respect for the lives and ways of remote island communities, and his spiritual feel for landscape.
It was perhaps the pair's most personal film to date: a metaphysical love story which confirmed their continuing departure from Britain's realist tradition. IKWIG (as the Archers themselves referred to it) is a full-blown critique of materialism, continuing themes identified in A Canterbury Tale, to which it is, in many ways, a companion piece.
In both films, a city girl is transplanted into a rural environment and comes to question her preconceptions. But whereas Alison in A Canterbury Tale is already sensitive to the spirituality of rural England, Joan, the single-minded young heroine of IKWIG, takes some time to wake up to the essentially self-denying effect of her material ambitions. Alison is a willing traveller on the path to self-discovery; Joan resists until the elements - and her long-suppressed feelings - have drained the fight from her.
Joan is a complex character, whose desperation to fulfil her goal - marriage to a wealthy industrialist - ends up risking not only her future happiness, but the lives of herself and others. Wendy Hiller's performance is such that although Joan is at times insufferable, we warm to her as she gropes towards self-knowledge.
Like Alison, Joan is guided on her spiritual journey by a mysterious stranger. Torquil (Roger Livesey), the absentee Laird of Killoran, is, however, a more straightforward and less sinister figure than Canterbury's glue-man. He is a gentle and patient man, easy in his environment, with a calm wisdom which is the mirror of Joan's recklessness.
The film's strange atmosphere - the plot abounds with superstition, folklore and curses - confused audiences at the time. In retrospect, however, IKWIG is one of the duo's best films, with excellent performances from Livesey and Hiller, and beautiful cinematography from Erwin Hillier.
I
Know Where I’m Going! (1945) James
Travers from FilmsdeFrance
For her entire life, Joan Webster has always known where she is going. Now aged 25, she intends to make her fortune by marrying Sir Robert Bellinger, one of the richest men in England. Having broken the news to her father, she takes a train northwards, since her wedding is to take place on the Hebridean island of Kiloran. She gets as far as the Isle of Mull before a storm breaks and she is prevented from crossing the small stretch of sea to her final destination. She meets a young navel officer, Torquil MacNeil, who is also bound for Kiloran, for a holiday. Whilst waiting for the weather to improve, Joan and Torquil get to know one another, and Joan learns something of the region’s culture. Fearing that her growing attraction for Torquil may imperil her marriage, Joan decides she cannot wait any longer and determines to cross the sea to Kiloran, even though it is still not safe to do so...
Powell and Pressburger followed their evocative A
Canterbury Tale with a film which is imbued with an even greater sense
of haunting lyricism and charm. Whereas the former film showed us an
idealised England of the 1940s, I Know Where I’m Going! gives us a
portrait of a mythical Scotland – a poetic land of bleak landscapes, craggy
mountains, velvet mists and Celtic legends – the perfect setting for a delicate
romantic drama.
What links these two very distinctive films is the notion that a location can
alter the life of an individual, achieving a spiritual transformation for the
better. The heroine of I Know Where I’m Going! starts out as a
headstrong young woman who thinks that money is the key to a happy
future. Her arrival on a Scottish island opens her eyes to this tragic
self-deception and shows her that true happiness lies elsewhere, deep within
the human heart.
The only reason why I Know Where I’m Going! was made was because Powell
and Pressburger found themselves at a loose end whilst waiting to get hold of
colour film for A Matter
of Life and Death - all existing colour film in England had been
requisitioned by the air force for training purposes. In the interim,
they decided to make a simple, low budget black and white film, developed from
an idea they had been considering for some time. Famously,
Pressburger wrote the entire screenplay for the film in six days.
The casting of Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey was an inspired choice.
Both actors play their parts with great subtlety and restraint, downplaying
their characters’ mutual attraction so that the film’s ending is all the more
surprising and poignant. (Owing to West End commitments, Livesey was
unavailable for the location sequences, so these were filmed using a double –
not that you would ever notice.) In the background, there are a host of
colourful characters, such as the eccentric falconer Colonel Barnstable, played
wonderfully by C.W.R. Knight. 13-year old Petula Clark appears briefly,
some years before she made a hugely successful career as a singer.
Much of the film’s soul-stirring power lies in its alluring black and white
photography. Cinematographer Erwin Hillier surpasses his work on A
Canterbury Tale and manages to evoke both the poetry and bleakness of the
Hebridean setting. His shots of figures silhouetted against the brooding
Scottish landscape show the sheer insignificance of man in this vast arena of
unfathomable wonder and beauty, whilst the raging sea that pummels the coastline
relentlessly conveys the raw untamed power that Nature has at her disposal,
should she ever need to remind man of his place in the scheme of things.
With its narrative simplicity, engaging characters and highly evocative
cinematography, I Know Where I’m Going! is a captivating work, less
idiosyncratic and ambitious than other Powell-Pressburger productions, but
every bit as emotionally satisfying and stylish as their other great films.
I Know Where I’m Going! Criterion essay by Ian Christie, February 19, 2001
I Know Where I’m Going! Criterion Collection
The Beauty of Uncertainty - Bright Lights Film Journal Megan Ratner on I Know Where I’m Going, April 30, 2003
"The
Music of Words: Storytelling in Two Powell & Pressburger Films." Imogen Sara Smith from Bright Lights Film
Journal, January 31, 2013
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Landscape Michael Powell's spiritual fascination with British landscape, by Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Pressburger: The War Years The work that cemented The Archers partnership, by Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Classic Powell and Pressburger The golden years of the Archers partnership, by Sergio Angelini
I
Know Where I'm Going - TCM.com Margarita
Landazuri
The Film Journal (Ian Johnston) review
The Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem]
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
Laramie Movie Scope (Patrick Ivers) review
DVD Times Noel Megahey
I Know Where I'm Going! DVD review Camus from DVD Outsider
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/4] Criterion Collection
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer) dvd review Criterion Collection
DVD Talk (Matt Langdon) dvd review [5/5] Criterion Collection
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] Criterion Collection
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review [Criterion Collection]
A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
I Know Where I'm Going! (1945) BritMovie
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Edinburgh U Film Society (Stephen Cox) review
Mondo Digital also BLACK NARCISSUS and THE RED SHOES
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] also BLACK NARCISSUS and THE RED SHOES
I
Know Where I'm Going! changes direction on Mull Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian,
Baltimore City Paper (Eric Allen Hatch) review
Baltimore City Paper (Luisa F. Ribeiro) review
The New York Times review T.M.P.
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Turner Classic Movies review Michael T. Toole on Wendy Hiller
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH A 99
aka: STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN
A divine masterpiece, a candidate for the most romantic film ever made, which opens with a Rod Serling Twilight Zone style introduction, years in advance of Serling, of course, and from a universal, intergalactic perspective, where we find planet Earth during WWII, and a British air force pilot has been hit, all but the pilot are dead and the plane is going down. The pilot, David Niven, sounds delirious, uttering strains of poetry rather than his position to the American WAC air traffic controller, Kim Hunter, turning philosophic, brave, then in love with her, screaming out “I love you June, you’re life and I’m leaving you” he is forced to jump without a parachute, a certain death. But there is a mix-up in heaven, he gets lost in the British fog, and he misses his appointment with death.
As fate would have it, he runs into the young WAC the next morning and they immediately fall in love, until time is stopped and the pilot is visited by one of heaven’s angels sent to correct the mix-up, but the pilot appeals his fate, claiming it unjust on the grounds that now, due to no fault of his own, he is in love. So the angel returns to heaven for further instructions, leaving the couple more time together on Earth, until heaven decides to conduct a climactic trial to decide the pilot’s fate. The film was originally created as a propaganda plea for postwar British-American cooperation, some of which survives in some talky stretches during the trial about law and honor. One of the most gorgeously photographed movies you’ll ever see with a startlingly unique black and white heaven and a lavishly gorgeous Technocolor Earth, with immensely inventive, bold visual set and art design, which, despite its stunning power, does not overshadow the romance and suspense of this inspiring and original story, a film to remember and see again and again.
Sahag Gureghian
(Valley
Produced by the inventive team of The Archers, A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH,
also known as STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN, is a remarkable British fantasy from 1946.
Fresh, innovative, and extremely original, the film inspired such directors as
Brian DePalma, Vincente Minnelli, and Martin Scorsese. It tells a tale about
the powers of love, pitted against the "powers that be." The movie
was supposedly devised to smooth over the strained relationship between
Peter Carter (David Niven) is a WWII pilot returning from a bombing raid, who is forced to jump out of his moving airplane without a parachute after an enemy attack. While deciding his fate aboard the plane, he speaks to American W.A.C. June (Kim Hunter) over his transmitter radio, before finally leaping from the plane to what he thinks will be his death. Peter wakes up to find that he has landed utterly unharmed, which wasn't supposed to happen according to the rules of Heaven. Peter meets June on the nearly deserted beach and they fall in love. Before long, he is payed a visit by Conductor 71 (Marius Goring), a heavenly messenger who informs him that he should have died after jumping from the plane. Peter argues that he is now in love and cannot possibly give up his life, wishing to remain on earth. He is given that chance and a celestial trial is called to decide Peter's fate--whether to claim his life or let him survive.
The curious but artistic choice associated with the production was the decision to film the Earthbound scenes in Three-Strip Technicolor and the Heaven sequences in Black and White. The smooth transition from color to black and white works amazingly well, especially under Michael Powell's brilliant direction. The audience never knows if what is happening is real or not. Are the heaven scenes a part of Peter's imagination, or are they actually taking place? The film plays it both ways and leaves it to the audience to decide. The film does a brilliant job of playing with our emotions and making us care for the characters, giving even the heavenly creatures human qualities. It is a brilliant film, that is both important, and extremely enjoyable...
Matter of Life and Death, A (1946) Mark Duguid from BFI Screen Online, also here: Show full synopsis
After two poorly received films, A Canterbury Tale (1944) and "I Know Where I'm Going!" (1945), Powell and Pressburger restored their reputation with this, their most romantic and magical film to date.
Begun towards the end of the war as a propaganda exercise to encourage Anglo-American understanding, A Matter of Life and Death (1946) follows young airman and would-be poet, Peter Carter, who in the last days of the war miraculously survives when he bails out of his damaged plane without a parachute. By the time the Next World realises its mistake, Peter has fallen in love. The film culminates in a vast heavenly trial, in which Peter's counsel, Dr Reeves, defends his client and England against the prejudice of the prosecution, an American schoolteacher who was the first to fall in the American War of Independence.
Alongside the leads Niven and the unknown Kim Hunter (whose brief appearance in A Canterbury Tale was edited out of the British release), Powell cast favourites Roger Livesey, Raymond Massey and Marius Goring in supporting roles. The task of realising the epic vistas of the next world fell to esteemed art director Alfred Junge, whose long association with Powell began with 1933's The Fire Raisers, and cinematographer Jack Cardiff, who would stay with the Archers - and win an Oscar - for their next film, Black Narcissus (1947).
AMOLAD (as the Archers themselves referred to it) was the duo's first use of colour stock since 1943's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and they were determined to use it creatively. They came up with the idea of mixing colour and black and white to differentiate the two worlds.
This wasn't a completely new idea - earlier films, notably The Wizard of Oz (US, d. Victor Fleming, 1939), had effectively combined colour and black and white. But the Archers' ploy was to reverse the logic of that film - in which the fantasy sequences appeared in colour, while prosaic reality is rendered in shades of grey - making the earthbound scenes in Technicolor, with the 'heavenly' sequences in black and white or, more properly, monochrome. In this way the film contrasts the energy and vitality of life and love with the slightly musty sterility of the 'next world' - as the gloriously camp Conductor 71 (Marius Goring) puts it on his first arrival on Earth, "One is starved for Technicolor up there".
A
Matter of Life and Death (1946)
James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
During WWII, an RAF fighter pilot Peter Carter is returning to England after a raid over Germany when his plane is hit. Realising his has no parachute, he sends one last radio message, which is received by a young American radio operator, June, before bailing out to certain death. Miraculously, he survives and wakes up to find himself on a beach in the south of England, where he meets June and falls in love with her. Soon after, Peter receives a visitation from a heavenly emissary, who tells him that he should really have died and that he must now give up his life. When Peter objects, the mysterious emissary insists that he must submit to a celestial trial to decide whether he should be permitted to go on living…
One of the undisputed masterpieces of British cinema, A Matter of Life and Death was just one of the many accomplishments to come out of the fruitful partnership of the writer-director team Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
The film was made at a time of great international tension just after World War II, and also great relief and reflection for the British, and all this is reflected in the film. The famous trial scene at the end of the film was clearly intended to smooth the water between the Americans and the British, whilst the distinct lack of bombastic moralising and nationalistic jingoism captures perfectly the British post-war mood.
Although some of the dialogue has a tendency to go over the top and now sounds mildly ridiculous, the film is a near-faultless cinematic achievement. The ambitious sets of the celestial world are particularly memorable, especially the imposing heavenly stairway (from which the film’s American title was derived). The acting is no less impressive, with the film featuring some of the best of British and American talent (including David Niven and Raymond Massey).
Perhaps what makes this a masterpiece is the sheer depth of imagination and creativity which Powell and Pressburger bring to it, which involved some courageous risk taking. The decision to shoot the Heavenly scenes in black and white and the Earthly scenes in colour may have been controversial but it works brilliantly. The fact that we never quite know whether what we seen on the screen is taking place in Peter Carter’s mind or in reality is also a stroke of genius – the narrative hints at the former but the audience is led to the other conclusion, and this ambiguity is partly responsible for the film’s engaging humanity.
From the point of view of sheer entertainment value, the film has a great deal to offer, from the daring and imaginative plot, the rich crop of hilarious one-liners, and the larger than life characters (particularly the outrageously camp Conductor Number 71, brilliantly portrayed by Marius “I lost my ‘ead” Goring). All this, and the film’s artistic brilliance, will ensure that A Matter of Life and Death remains an endlessly popular classic.
Milk Plus: A Discussion of Film Stennie
A Matter of Life and Death, aka Stairway to Heaven, 1946 (directed by
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; starring David Niven, Kim Hunter and
Roger Livesley).
I'm fascinated by movies that offer interpretations of heaven and life after
death. I'm not sure why the subject matter interests me so much; I guess
because no one really knows what happens after we die, so there's no right or
wrong answer, just endless speculation and lots of room for imagination.
Powell & Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death is similar in
theme to Here Comes Mr. Jordan (later remade as Heaven Can Wait
and Down to Earth) -– due to a Heavenly administrative error, a mortal
finds himself in limbo and bargaining with the Powers That Be to reclaim his
life on earth.
The opening scenes of A Matter of Life and Death find squadron leader
Peter Carter (David Niven) about to bail out of his burning aircraft. He radios
back to base and reaches an American WAC, June (Kim Hunter), to report his
location. He tells her he's bailing out, but he has no parachute. In what he
believes to be his last few moments on earth, he makes a last desperate and
rather poignant connection with June, who represents the life that he's leaving
behind. June is devastated when he signs off and jumps, knowing his chances for
survival are zero.
So it's a surprise to everyone when he washes up on shore in a heavy fog, quite
alive and unharmed, save for a little scratch on his head. When he finds June
through the Movie Magic of Unbelieveable Coincidence (or perhaps it's just
destiny), it's inevitable that they fall in love.
Meanwhile, up in heaven, Carter's flying buddy Bob Trapshaw has been waiting
for him, but he hasn't shown up yet. It turns out that Peter's Conductor, a
foppish, erstwhile French aristocrat who was executed during the French Revolution
(Marius Goring), simply missed Carter in the fog and failed to collect his
soul. By the time his error is discovered, Peter has met June already and
fallen in love. The Conductor returns to earth to bring Peter to heaven, but
Peter refuses, asking for an appeal to the higher court.
His appeal is granted, but the prosecutor assigned to his case is Abraham
Farlan (Raymond Massey), a Bostonian who was killed by a British bullet in the
American Revolution, who still holds a grudge against the English and is none
too pleased about Carter's dalliance with a nice American girl. Carter will
have his work cut out for him to convince Farlan that he deserves another
chance at life.
It's about at this point that the movie gets bogged down briefly in criticism
of
A Matter of Life and Death is a lush romantic fantasy written and
directed by the famed team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (The Red
Shoes, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus). The sequences
that take place on earth are shot in glorious Technicolor, while the heaven
scenes take place in black & white –- the opposite of what I was expecting.
The black & white photography turns heaven into a cold and clinical place,
which is run by clerks and paper pushers. The camera work (by Jack Cardiff) and
special effects are great, making heaven seem impossibly huge and densely
populated.
Kim Hunter does a good job in an underdeveloped role as June. She has little to
do but gaze lovingly and sob silently and sacrifice heroically, but her
headlong and constantly-in-jeopardy romance with Niven is completely
believeable. She takes a small role and makes it memorable.
David Niven, a highly underrated actor with all the comic timing of Cary Grant,
lends a humanism to Peter Carter, a role that easily could have been bogged
down in overwrought selfless nobility in the hands of a lesser performer. In
fact, the whole movie could easily have collapsed under the weight of the
saccharine theme of love-conquers-death, as many others have (Ghost
comes to mind). And somehow, even though the afterlife is portrayed as a stark
bureaucratic place, it doesn't seem like a bad place to go when it's all over.
Clearly, though, the emphasis in this post-war world is a celebration of life,
in living color.
Not available on DVD in the
A
River Runs Through It - Film Comment
Richard Combs from Film Comment, May/June, 2005
I. Cinema
Where do we stand with Michael Powell—allowing room somewhere inside that question for his partner, and crazy-mirror reflection, Emeric Pressburger? Powell was a defining force in British cinema, between his entering it in the South of France in 1925 as odd-job boy to the Hollywood director Rex Ingram, and leaving it, nearly 50 years later, with two features made in Australia and a featurette for Britain’s Children’s Film Foundation.
But there was never a more unstable definition: Powell’s cinema is shifting, elusive, phantasmagoric, radical but never revolutionary, because what has been called his High Tory value system is not disturbed (it may even be reinforced) by all those strange atmospheres, those spiritual/mystical/historical connections that have delighted and/or disconcerted audiences and critics. For some, the shiftiness, the hiddenness, of Powell’s cinema is what makes it most English; for Powell, probably, it shifts because it is cinema.
As he asserted in his autobiography, A Life in Movies, and in interviews, he is not someone who established a style, a version of himself and his preoccupations, through film, but rather—“I live cinema . . . I am the cinema.” Think of the opening of A Matter of Life and Death (46), with David Niven plunging to earth in his bomber, his crew dead or gone, an inferno raging behind him like the sunset glories of Black Narcissus (47) or Gone to Earth (50), responding to radio requests for his position: “Position nil, repeat nil.”
When he began directing in the Thirties, Powell was more a whirlwind of activity than a force (but then that was par for the particular course), making some 23 films from 1931 to 1936, the earliest of them not even 50 minutes long. These were the “quota quickies,” fostered by an act of Parliament to keep British cinema alive and supplying dirt-cheap supporting features to Hollywood releases. Come the war, and with Pressburger as his screenwriter from The Spy in Black (39), Powell flourished, shucking Thirties genres for the national cause, though with the same speed and puckish dash: combining speeches in which waving flags would be held stiff in a breeze of self-important verbiage with dramatic ambiguity, off-centeredness, and the ultimate pixilation of A Matter of Life and Death.
The man who would be cinema (as advertised in the first volume of A Life in Movies, which is simply divided into three giant chapters: Silent, Sound, Colour) could never be comfortable with a film industry. But what was also English in Powell was an imperial pulse, and there were fervid dreams at the end of the Forties of establishing a base—a solipsistic or national one—to rival Hollywood. These finally vanished as Hebridean and Himalayan mists thickened into a fog of cross-produced compromise. The Fifties saw a narrowing of opportunities for Powell and Pressburger’s Archers company, either the commercial cinema’s wartime retreads or personal (and parlous) experimentation with new combinations of cinema and music, dance or operetta. Then Powell went it alone with Peeping Tom (60), and the resulting furor, so legend has it, just about rang down the sunset on his own career.
Fixing Powell’s position has now become a major critical enterprise, starting slowly in the mid-Sixties and turning into an industry from the Seventies onwards, in which P & P were discovered and discovered again, as if their hiddenness could never be quite overcome. In the process, the extent to which they were the “forgotten men” of British cinema—or had suffered more setbacks than others in a notoriously ungrateful and unforgiving industry—was probably exaggerated. What really explains the effort, what supplied the critical motive force, was the need to disinter British cinema itself, to wrench its history out of the documentary or realist groove and to reassert the tradition of fantasy. The Archers’ quizzical, playful films, both fantastic and self-conscious about their illusionism, could then be asserted as central, and not just a mistaken or eccentric byway.
Does this make it easier to fix our position with regard to, say, A Matter of Life and Death? In an essay in a 1978 BFI publication, Powell, Pressburger and Others, John Ellis describes that opening sequence, which begins with a placid introduction to the cosmos, a track across “thousands of suns, millions of stars,” complete with voiceover guide: “This is the universe. Big, isn’t it?” Then we’re plunged into the maelstrom of David Niven’s apparently imminent doom. According to Ellis, this brings about a violent collision of discourses: “Documentary and fictional narrative provide contradictory positions; harmony is posed in one, a harmony from a position of detached observation; frustration and disorder are posed in the other·”
But in fact there’s no contradiction here, no modernist disruption of discourses. A Matter of Life and Death is a richly variegated and humorous fantasy that holds together very well—but holds together from a position that is itself quite startling. The track across the universe, to begin with, is no documentary but is a jokey tour of the star fields, beautifully simulated—P & P’s scenics tended to be, before the advent of special-effects cinema—finally leading to sight of “the earth, our earth, moving around in its place, part of the pattern, part of the universe.” We then drop in for a closer look, at the point of fire of a burning city that had a “thousand-bomber raid an hour ago,” and then fog rolling in across the English Channel: “I hope all our aircraft got home safely.”
There’s the real collision: two uses of the word “our,” a universe apart in their terms of reference. Since the observer spares no thought for the civilians underneath the thousand bombers, we have to assume that his detachment is only apparent, or that P & P see no problem in yoking a cosmic overview to a nationally specific wartime commentary. This Englishman’s home is our universe (“this” Englishman includes the voice of John Longden, who played the hero in Hitchcock’s Blackmail, on which Powell worked). Perhaps the question of where we stand in relation to Powell needs to be turned around, or understood in relation to another: where does Powell stand, on what ground, literally and figuratively?
A
Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway to Heaven) - TCM.com Jeff Stafford
A Matter of Life and Death - Film (Movie) Plot and Review ... Patricia King Hanson from Film Reference
The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960 • Senses of ... John Orr from Senses of Cinema, July 9, 2009
The Archers Hit a Bull's-eye: Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life ... The Archers Hit a Bull's-eye, by Paul Brand from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 30, 2005
The AGE OF CONSENT and STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN (Aka A MATTER ... Erich Kuersten from Bright Lights After Dark, January 3, 2009
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Pressburger Creators of some Britain's most vivid and imaginative cinema, by Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Classic Powell and Pressburger The golden years of the Archers partnership, by Sergio Angelini
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review also reviewing AGE OF CONSENT, also seen here: The Films of Michael Powell Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film
eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [5/5]
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib
Love/Death, Realism/Fantasy, and Everything In-Between: Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death John Damer submits his college term paper from For Lack of a Better Word, December 13, 2007
Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon
“A
Matter of Life and Death” (The Films of Michael Powell) – DVD of the Week
1/6/2009 Sean Axmaker from Parallax View
A Matter of Life and Death Robert Horton from The Crop Duster, January 1, 2009
A Matter of Life and Death (1946) Stennieville, December 22, 2007
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
DVD Review & High Definition [Felix Gonzalez, Jr.] also reviewing AGE OF CONSENT
DVD Verdict [Dylan Charles] also reviewing AGE OF CONSENT
DVD Outsider Camus
Top 100 Directors: #78 - Michael Powell Nighthawk from News from the Boston Becks, April 23, 2009
A Matter of Life and Death (1946) BritMovie
VideoVista review Alasdair Stuart
Eye for Film (Scott Macdonald) review [5/5]
Brandon's movie memory » Powell & Pressburger double-feature #2 also reviewing THE RED SHOES, Brandon’s Movie Memory, February 27, 2009
homevideo.about.com (Ivana Redwine) recommendation also reviewing AGE OF CONSENT
Michael Powell Double Feature < Reviews | PopMatters Stephen Snart from Pop Matters, also reviewing AGE OF CONSENT
DVD Review: “The Films of Michael Powell” (“A Matter of Life and ... Bob Cashill from Pop Dose, also reviewing AGE OF CONSENT
KBOO [D. K. Holm] also reviewing AGE OF CONSENT
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar
Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Edinburgh U Film Society (Jonathan M. Caryl) review
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4/5]
User
reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Lord Arthur Nameless from UK
User reviews from imdb (Page 4) Author: dbdumonteil
User
reviews from imdb (Page 4) Author: isidore-lucien ducasse
(hitch1899_@hotmail.com) from
montevideo, Uruguay
User
reviews from imdb (Page 6) Author: quatermax-1 from Cyprus
User
reviews from imdb (Page 9) Author: pjyork88 from New York
User
reviews from imdb (Page 9) Author: ackstasis from Australia
Reviews of "A Matter of Life and Death (1946)" links to reviews from The Powell & Pressburger Pages
Contemporary Previews and Reviews reviews from 1946-47 from The Powell & Pressburger Pages
Mysticism and Politics - Review from Kultura i Zhien (Culture and Life) No. 15 (1947) May 30, 1947, from The Powell & Pressburger Pages
Classics of the Foreign Film from the book Classics of the Foreign Film: A Pictorial Treasury, by Parker Tyler, 1962
The view from Moscow - A Soviet perspective Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 9, No. 2, 1989, from The Powell & Pressburger Pages
A Matter of Fried Onions The Story Behind the Story, by Diane Broadbent Friedman from Seizure, 1992, reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
Translation of the Norwegian Review January 20, 1994, reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
AMOLAD on stage Charles Spencer from The Daily Telegraph, November 24, 1994, from The Powell & Pressburger Pages
San Francisco Examiner A Matter of Life and Death' still flies, by Scott Rosenberg, 1995, reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
San Francisco Chronicle Festival's New Look at 1946 Powell Film, by Edward Guthmann, 1995, reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
LA Times Powell's 'Stairway' Still Leads Somewhere, by Kenneth Turan, 1995, reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
LA Weekly Film Pick of the Week, by F.X. Feeney, 1995, reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
Chicago Tribune Screen imagery wins points for 'Stairway to Heaven,' by Michael Wilmington, 1995, reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
Daily News It's Like Heaven on Earth, by Dave Kehr, 1995, reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
NY Post One to die for, by Thelma Adams, 1995, reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
NY Times Between Heaven and Earth, by Janet Maslin, 1995, reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
Michael Powell: Resurrecting a Cosmic Fantasy of Love and Death Bill Desowitz from The New York Times, October 31, 1999, reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
European Coordination of Film Festivals Chosen by Jack Cardiff, comments by Cardiff on the film, reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages (1999)
Henry Coombs Reviews January 30, 2000, reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
New Print: Chips off the old Pressburger - Andrew & Kevin Macdonald Matthew Sturgis talks to Pressburger’s grandsons from The London Evening Standard, March 21, 2000, reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
Review by Anthony Antoniou (6Degrees) April 2000, reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
Alan Bennett on AMOLAD extracts from Yorkshire writer Alan Bennet's diaries for 2002, printed in The London Review of Books, January 2, 2003, reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
Blimp & AMOLAD Sarah Knight reviews both The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and A Matter of Life and Death from Scope magazine (Undated), reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
An impossible romance? Jeremy Robinson (Undated), reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
Restoration - "A Matter of Life and Death" Cathie Christie from Classic Images (Undated), reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
Betty's Wartime Diary Undated review
Statues on a Stairway statues from the film have been attributed to Eric Aumonier, reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
Fascinating trivia (and any goofs) connected with the film from The Powell & Pressburger Pages
All location & studio details known from The Powell & Pressburger Pages
EOFF TV Review Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film and Television credits, from The Powell & Pressburger Pages
The Film Foundation | THE FILMS OF MICHAEL POWELL, part of “The ... DVD release, January 6, 2009
The best DVDs of 2009 (so
far) - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, February
4, 2009
The Auteurs [matthew swiezynski] Cosmic View, opening sequence, November 2, 2009
The story in pictures movie stills, from The Powell & Pressburger Pages
BFI's Top Twenty (British) Films
The 1946 novelisation a private publication of the entire story is available online (click on the novel)
BBC Interview with Kim Hunter about AMOLAD BBC Movie pages, reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
Reworking AMOLAD as a ballet Simon Blow interviews Matthew Bourne about turning the film into a ballet, from The Daily Telegraph, September 27, 1997, reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
New Print of AMOLAD - Interview with Thelma Michael Ellison interviews Thelma Schoonmaker, Michael Powell’s wife, from The Guardian, March 17, 2000, reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
The
film that changed my life: Timothy Spall
Jessica Hopkins interviews Timothy Spall from The Observer,
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]
Time Out London (Dave Calhoun) review [5/5]
New print: A matter of joy and bliss - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian March 24, 2000, reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
Review by Philip French (The Observer) March 26, 2000, reprinted at The Powell & Pressburger Pages
Must-have movies: A Matter of Life and Death Philip Horne from The Telegraph, July 22, 2005
The prophet JG Ballard from The Guardian, July 23, 2005
Ronald
Bergan: A matter of Powell and Pressburger | Film ... Ronald Bergan from The Guardian,
A
Matter of Life and Death: No 25 best romantic film of all time Cath Clarke from The Guardian,
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
Roger Ebert
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
FILM;
Cinema's Vermeer: A Gifted Colorist And Master of Light Bill Desowitz from The New York Times,
“Critics Choice” DVD column
Dave Kehr from The New York Times,
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
GIs in West End were led astray Lewis Smith from The London Times Online, November 1, 2005
How
our Piccadilly Commandos had the GIs surrounded - Telegraph Neil Tweedie from The Telegraph,
Bus to Paradise High Pearman on how the film inspired architectural design, from Gabion
Turner Classic Movies review Michael T. Toole on Kim Hunter
A Matter of Life and Death (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
National Film Board of Canada's web site behind the scenes archival video clips from the film (no sound)
YouTube Simon Pegg, Kevin Eldon, Mark Heap and Amelia
Bullmore spoof of the film from their Big
Train TV show (
On the
beach - on YouTube (
BLACK NARCISSUS
Black
Narcissus | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
A story of damaged faith and rising sexual hysteria (1946) set among a group of nuns in India who are working to convert a sultan's palace into a convent. Films on this subject are generally solemn and naive, but director Michael Powell and writer Emeric Pressburger bring wit and intelligence to it—the title, for example, refers not to some campy romantic theme but to a cheap men's cologne worn by the local princeling. The film's lush, mountainous India, full of sensual challenges and metaphorical chasms, was created entirely in the studio, with the help of matte artist Peter Ellenshaw. Powell's equally extravagant visual style transforms it into a landscape of the mind—grand and terrible in its thorough abstraction. With Deborah Kerr, David Farrar, Jean Simmons, and Sabu. 99 min.
What better theatre in which to explore desire, hysteria, temptation and sexuality than a remote convent high up in the Indian Himalayas? And theatre this Michael Powell film most certainly is, as stressed by the gothic melodrama of the story and the acting, the studio setting with its beautiful backdrops and vivid colours and the most deliberate of characters and events. ‘There’s something in the atmosphere which makes everything seem exaggerated,’ says Mr Dean (David Farrar), the nuns’ charming local nemesis. Indeed there is, Mr Dean, and what superbly crafted, elemental and entertaining theatre this Powell and Pressburger film remains almost 60 years on.Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) is taken by surprise when asked to select four nuns from her convent in Calcutta with whom to travel to distant Mopu at ‘the back of beyond’ and found a small, rural nunnery. It’s Sister Clodagh’s experience that forms the intellectual heart of this film, which appears deceptively light at first. Flashbacks reveal the reason behind her decision to become a nun: she fled a well-heeled, rural life in Ireland when a longed-for marriage failed to materialise. Which makes her relationship with bare-legged, rugged Dean – a local charmer and know-it-all – all the more stimulating. ‘Don’t you like children?’ asks Dean provocatively. Another nun, Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron), who we know is ‘sick’, is a violent cauldron of conflicting desires and acts as a mirror to Sister Clodagh’s repression. Their relationship contributes to the film’s most terrifying, artful scenes at its dramatic close.
Monthly Film Bulletin Review BFI Screen Online, May 31, 1947, also here: Synopsis
Five Anglo-Catholic nuns in a disused palace remote in the Himalayas opened a school and a hospital. It prospered superficially. Then one sister began planting flowers instead of vegetables. The beautiful native girl pupil ran away with the young local ruler (also a pupil). Another sister treated a village child who died - and none of the villagers would go near the nuns again. Finally, Sister Ruth, whipped to near-madness by frustrated nature, threw off her nun's robes, painted her lips scarlet and went off to the local English agent. He insisted she return to the convent. There she found the Sister Superior, Sister Clodagh, pulling the bell, on the parapet above a mighty precipice. She attacked Clodagh, but in the struggle herself went tumbling to death. The theme of frustrated womanhood in what is rarely more than a pseudo-religious atmosphere may be unpleasing, but the polish, the unquestionable style of its exposition, mark this an outstanding production. Camera and colour make a great combination. The natural colour is beautiful; but, more, the rhythm of camera movement is recurrently used in combination with an overtinting of the whole scene, at significant dramatic moments, to produce an emphasis we have not seen before. The mounting too is impressive. The lofty precipice and the exotic interiors of the palace would be mere melodrama, but they are backgrounded by mighty mountains and, with the skill of paradox, put into perspective by a closeup of tropical lily leaf. In personal close-ups, brilliant cutting brings an unusual intensity to the moments of crisis between the sisters. In this, of course, acting helps, notably the sustained tension of Deborah Kerr's Clodagh. But the rest of the cast are good too - both those we know and the newcomers, Kathleen Byron as mad Ruth, Jean Simmons as the slinky native girl. David Farrer gives one of his most fluent performances to date.
Black Narcissus (1947) Mark Duguid from BFI Screen Online, also here: Show full synopsis
Powell and Pressburger's delirious melodrama is one of the most erotic films ever to emerge from British cinema, let alone in the repressed 1940s - it was released just two years after David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945), with its more typically 'British' story of desire denied.
Starting from a controversial novel by Rumer Godden - an Englishwoman living long-term in India - Powell and Pressburger fashioned a taut melodrama of unusually fierce passions and barely contained erotic tension. Although the script never directly challenged the strict standards of the censors, it hardly needs saying that the repressed desires of nuns was not a common - or safe - subject for a British film in 1947.
Deborah Kerr, in her third film for Powell and Pressburger (following Contraband (1940) and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)), was nominally the star of the film, playing the emotionally detached Sister Superior, secretly tormented by memories of lost love. But it was an extraordinary performance from the barely-known Kathleen Byron as the deranged Sister Ruth which really stood out. Byron had played an angel in A Matter of Life and Death (d. Powell, Pressburger, 1946), but there was nothing in that role which suggested that she was capable of a performance of such furious intensity.
David Farrar took the role of the agent, Dean, full of macho swagger, and the catalyst for Sister Ruth's madness. It was the first of three parts for Powell and Pressburger, and anticipated his lusty, malevolent squire in Gone to Earth (1950). Among the supporting roles were Sabu, in his first work with Powell since Thief of Bagdad (1940), and an 18 year-old Jean Simmons, fresh from her success in Great Expectations (d. David Lean, 1946), as an native temptress.
In its depiction of young women torn between duty and passion, Black Narcissus has common elements with the Archers' next film The Red Shoes (1948), while its evocation of the mystical power of landscape and geography positions it in a line of Powell's work which includes The Edge of the World (1937), "I Know Where I'm Going!" (1944) and A Canterbury Tale (1945).
With the help of designer Alfred Junge and cinematographer Jack Cardiff - both rewarded with Oscars - Powell convincingly created a Himalayan convent on a Pinewood soundstage, lending the proceedings a tense, claustrophobic atmosphere. An oppressive jungle scene was filmed in a Kent tropical garden.
Black
Narcissus (1947) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
At the invitation of General Toda Rai, Sister Clodagh leads a group of Anglican nuns to a remote part of India to start a convent. High in the mountains of the Himalayas, the nuns convert an old palace into a school and hospital for the local people. Although their arrival is initially greeted with mistrust by the natives, the nuns soon find themselves fully occupied. Unfortunately, it isn’t long before things start to go wrong. When a baby dies as a result of the nuns’ treatment, the natives become unfriendly and stay away from the convent. Then, one of the nuns, Sister Ruth, is driven insane by her love for Mr Dean, a British government agent who has developed an ambivalent relationship with the nuns. Sister Clodagh is helpless as her world collapses around her...
Black Narcissus represents the artistic highpoint of
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the talented duo who formed one of the
most successful partnerships in film history. This film belongs to a
series of beautifully composed, highly idiosyncratic masterpieces they made in
the 1940s, coming between A Matter
of Life and Death (1946) and The Red Shoes
(1948), two of the most highly regarded of British films.
As was typical of Powell and Pressburger’s films, Black Narcissus is a
work with a complex moral subtext which is ambiguous and subject to
interpretation. On the one hand, the film warns of the dangers of
repressing one’s emotions, of the devastation which can result when a passion
is allowed to fester unchecked into dangerous obsession. The film also
prompts us to reflect on what Christianity is about. The nuns we see in
the film take an absurdly narrow view of Christianity – they regard a local
spiritual mystic as a nuisance and are slow to recognise the earnestness of the
Young Prince when he asks to study with them. Which is more important:
cloistered devotion to God or an all-embracing love for humanity? It is
the nun’s narrow reading of the Gospel message which ultimately leads them to
failure.
Black Narcissus affords Deborah Kerr one of her most memorable screen
roles. In a mesmeric performance as the flawed Sister Clodagh, Kerr
manages to convey, with remarkable subtlety and impact, the tension her
character experiences between her faith, her ambition and her emotional
weaknesses. There are some equally fine contributions from David
Farrar and Sabu, and Kathleen Byron is utterly chilling when her character,
Sister Ruth, appears to succumb to a demonic possession in the film’s
unforgettable climax.
The film was based on a novel by Rumer Godden, whose other well-known work, The River,
would subsequently be adapted by French director Jean Renoir in 1951.
Jack Cardiff’s sumptuous and highly evocative colour photography makes Black
Narcissus one of the most visually arresting films of all time -
Technicolor has never looked so glorious. Along with Alfred Junge’s
stunning art direction, the striking cinematography captures the full sensuality
of the film’s exotic setting, lending depth, mystique and a whiff of eroticism
to the compelling narrative. It’s no surprise that both Cardiff and
Junge won Oscars for their work on this film.
Black
Narcissus Criterion essay by Ronald
Haver, July 11, 1998
Black
Narcissus Criterion essay by Dave
Kehr, January 29, 2001
The
BFI Celebrates Cardiff’s Career
Criterion essay, May 5, 2010
Black Narcissus Criterion Collection
Michael
Walker, 'Black Narcissus', From Framework 9, Winter 1978/79 The
Powell & Pressburger Pages
Alton
Jerome McFarland, 'Madness through Music: An Analysis of Sound in Black
Narcissus', Powell and Pressburger.org (date unknown) The
Powell & Pressburger Pages
Reviews of "Black
Narcissus (1947)" - Powell and Pressburger The
Powell & Pressburger Pages
Mary Bowen,
'Blue Nun/Red Desire: The Palette of Piety, Passion, and Monstrosity in Black
Narcissus', Powell and Pressburger.org, 2004 The Powell & Pressburger Pages
Black
Narcissus: A Post-colonial Empire Film? - Doors 19-page essay by Robert Cross from Doshisha Society for the Study of Language
and Culture, 2007 (pdf)
Stephanie
Hemelryk Donald, ‘Seeing white: female whiteness and the purity of children in
Australian, British and Chinese visual culture’, Social Semiotics, 10:2, 2000,
157-171 15-page essay (pdf)
'Under
control'?: Black Narcissus and the Imagining of India 13-page essay by Kelly Davidson and John Hill
from Film Studies, Summer 2005 (pdf)
Issue
11: June 2008 - University of Nottingham
5-page essay on Black Narcissus
by Peter Coyne, 3rd article listed on Acrobat Reader, Click here: All film reviews
Primitive Spectacle in Black
Narcissus - York University Anh Hua,
June 2000
Black Narcissus •
Senses of Cinema Karli Lucas
from Senses of Cinema, March 10, 2009
The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960 • Senses of ... John Orr from Senses of Cinema, July 9, 2009
Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus (1947) - Bright Lights Film ... Gary Morris from Bright Lights Film Journal, July 1, 2001, also seen here: Gary Morris, 'Black Narcissus', Images Journal, Issue 10
BFI Screenonline: Black Narcissus (1947) Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Landscape Michael Powell's spiritual fascination with British landscape, by Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Pressburger Creators of some Britain's most vivid and imaginative cinema, by Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Classic Powell and Pressburger The golden years of the Archers partnership, by Sergio Angelini
Black Narcissus - TCM.com James Steffen
Black
Narcissus (1947) - Articles - TCM.com
The Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem]
DVD Times Noel Megahey
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Ruthless Reviews review Matt Cale
Pajiba (Phillip Stephens) review
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [4/4]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3.5/4] Criterion Collection
DVD Journal Damon Houx, Criterion Collection
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review Criterion Collection
Black Narcissus: Criterion (1947) Colin Jacobson from DVD mg, also here: DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Criterion Collection]
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review [Criterion Collection]
DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review [5/5] [French Release] [Region 2]
DVD Talk (Adam Tyner) dvd review [5/5] [Blu-Ray Version]
Deborah Kerr - Scottish Rose - Black Narcissus Deborah Kerr website
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [8/10]
Black Narcissus (1947) Michael Powell(Dir) Deborah Kerr | Facebook photos from October 18, 2009
ThomasSpurlin.com: Criterions for July: Powell/Pressburger Joy April 15, 2010
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
Black Narcissus, Black Narcissus Movie Review, 1940s Drama Movies ... Kitt McKenzie from Wild Sound
Granada Media, a world leader in television production and ... Restored Black Narcissus to be showcased at Cannes, from Granada, May 13, 2005
Bob, Bing, and the Case of the Traveling Matte - Parallax View Jeff Shannon from Parallax View, March 3, 2009
The
Vertigo-Narcissus Connection - Bright Lights Film Journal C. Jerry Kutner, September 30, 2009
Black Narcissus (1947) BritMovie
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Movie Magazine International review Monica Sullivan
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Edinburgh U Film Society (Stephen Cox) review
The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [4/4]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Mondo Digital also I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING! and THE RED SHOES
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] also I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING! and THE RED SHOES
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]
Film4 Search results for Black Narcissus
BBCi - Films Tom Dawson
Kathleen Byron, star of Black Narcissus, dies at 88 Xan Brooks from The Guardian, January 19, 2009
Baltimore City Paper (Luisa F. Ribeiro) review
Baltimore City Paper (Lee Gardner) review
Chicago Sun Times Foreign Correspondents [Michael Mirasol]
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
THE RED SHOES A 97
A somewhat ordinary story is brought to magnificent heights by some of the most masterful uses of color and art design in film history, creating a timeless work that has become one of the most beloved films ever made about ballet and the obsession of art. Coming just after the end of the war, the world had seen just about enough realism, and this imaginatively idealized dream-like fantasia literally takes one’s breath away at times from the sheer exhilaration of expression, like an exploding color palette onscreen. Some of the most colorful musicals ever made by Americans Vincente Minnelli or Stanley Donen (1950’s), or later Frenchman Jacques Demy (1960’s), had yet to be made, films that similarly set the standard by mixing choreography with the use of color, art production and set design in films. But Powell and Pressburger’s film is not a musical, so the ideas are a natural extension of the storyline, where the idea of live theater is further illuminated by the use of surrealist sets and painterly backdrops, where the viewer gets the sense that they’re literally entering a dream. It’s hard to capture the sheer magnificence of ballet on film, even when filmed by brilliant documentarian Frederick Wiseman who lets his camera roll for hours and hours in BALLET (1995) and LA DANSE: LE BALLET DE L’OPÉRA DE PARIS (2009), as the limitations of film diminishes the conception of space utilized in live theater, where multiple cameras hinder the viewer’s focus to close ups, medium and wide shots. But THE RED SHOES, like Minnelli later achieves in THE BAND WAGON (1953), allows the dance sequence itself to magically transform from the confines of the stage into an endlessly captivating piece of our imagination through inventively original set designs. The beauty of this film is making the most dazzling artificial sequences feel so intimate and personal. The viewer is invested in the outcome.
Shot in authentic locations in
In an unusual move, the film does not climax with the ballet, but continues to reveal the backstage bickering that is commonplace to such a close-knit theater company where they are constantly spending time with one another through endless rehearsals. But the final portion of the film centers on the human impossibility to live under the Lermontov rules, as one has to literally submit to becoming a piece of the theater’s property. Anyone with different ambitions, including marriage or their own careers, would have to leave the company. The two can not co-exist. Lermontov can take undiscovered talent and turn them into international stars, but he can’t keep them happy, as eventually they mature and have their own ideas about how to live their lives. To Lermontov that’s completely unacceptable. While this storyline is fairly generic, the blending of life into the world of art, and into the continuing dance sequences are nothing less than extraordinary. What’s most impressive is the meticulous attention to detail, where one feels a unique vibrancy to the film’s art production which matches the all-consuming commitment to art from the characters onscreen. The film attempts to suggest the artistic passion becomes so overwhelming that it literally takes over the human body, like a possession, where one’s own life feels like a distant memory that we’ve temporarily forgotten in order to continually reach the transcendent heights needed in this line of work. Behind every expression of this film’s spectacular beauty is a story of unlimited committment and personal sacrifice and ultimately human transformation.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Ben Sachs
Powell and Pressburger were the Wes Anderson of their day, constructing dark fairy tales for adults with a museum's worth of references (both classical and private) and the most scrupulous mise-en-scene imaginable. THE RED SHOES, which remains the most beloved of their works, is a tart melodrama about a world-famous ballet company and an Impressionist dream of the beauty it creates. Besides appealing to dance aficionados, the film owes its popularity to an inspired 15-minute sequence depicting the titular ballet, a feat of Total Cinema that brings together the movie's themes and draws on all other art forms for its unique spectacle. (This is not hyperbole: Powell recruited painter Heins Heckroth for the art direction, operatic composer Brian Easdale for the score, and professional ballerina Moira Shearer for the lead; and cinematographer Jack Cardiff is famous for taking inspiration from Romantic painting and theatrical set design.) Most remarkably, all of the justly famous effects here—the slow-motion camerawork, Expressionistic sets, et cetera—bring the viewer closer to understanding the movie's heroine. That woman is a ballerina torn between the love of her composer husband and the rough demands of her profession—represented by Anton Wolbrook as a kingly choreographer. It's a simple premise rendered ornate through dense characterization (Pressburger's script accumulates psychological detail the way Powell delights in visual tricks), making THE RED SHOES one of those rare films as rich for adults as it is for children.
Monthly Film Bulletin Review BFI Screen Online, August 31, 1948, also here: Synopsis
Into the famous Lermontov Company - to join the greatest ballet talent of the world - comes Vicky Page as a young dancer. Boris Lermontov knows she will be a great ballerina and demands iron discipline and the complete dedication of her life. She reaches stardom in the "Red Shoes" ballet, dancing to music by Julian Craster, the young composer whom Lermontov has patronised. Irresistibly Vicky finds herself caught between two lovesbetween the simple human passion that has caught up Julian and herself, and artistic devotion to the ballet and its jealous master, Lermontov. Their three lives are shaken by a torment that is echoed in the story of their new ballet. In her dancing fairy story of "The Red Shoes"and as her real self - Vicky dances to her death. If this film has a fault it is perhaps because it is overlong and inclined to drag a little in places. Moira Shearer has a fragile loveliness and a freshness wholly lacking in almost all the stars of today-she gives a most appealing performance. Her dancing and that of Helpmann, Massine, and indeed the whole corps-de-ballet, is superb. Marius Goring is excellent, and indeed it is impossible to single out any one of the long and talented cast. Anton Walbrook is perhaps least impressive in an exacting "Serge Diaghileff" role and has a number of, at times, irritating mannerisms reminiscent of his performance in the Student of Prague. The specially written music of Brian Easdale is powerful and effective and has been brilliantly recorded. The Technicolor is not too "glorious", but one feels at times in the Red Shoes ballet that a sharper and less kaleidoscopic tone would have been more effective.
Time Out London (Tom Huddleston) review [5/5]
The story was already old-fashioned in 1948: budding prima ballerina Victoria (Moira Shearer) finds herself torn between the divergent demands of art and heart, as represented by two equally headstrong men – tortured control freak and impresario Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) and lovelorn composer Julian (Marius Goring). When they put aside their differences and collaborate, they produce work of awe-inspiring beauty, but ultimately the simmering tension between them leads to tragedy.
The realisation that we’re in the presence of genius comes
just a few minutes into ‘The Red Shoes’, as a gaggle of eager balletomanes take
their places for the inaugural performance of Lermontov’s latest
masterpiece. They settle into their seats, the roar around them fades, a cheery
onscreen ticker reads ‘45 minutes later…’, and Michael
Powell moves us forward in time without even breaking the shot.These
quietly radical directorial flourishes can be found throughout the film– and
Powell’s entire canon – but what sets this greatest of all British filmmakers
apart from the competition is his refusal to thrust his genius in the
audience’s face, subsuming his natural showman’s flair to the demands of story
and character.
Until the time comes to cut loose, at which point Powell unleashes the most
eyepopping visual extravaganza imaginable. Blending impressionist art and
expressionist film, blurring the barriers between theatre and cinema, body and
camera, reality and dream, drawing equally on the avant-garde and the
classical, the centrepiece ballet is a sequence of sheer, reckless
transcendence. It’s here that ‘The Red Shoes’ becomes more than the sum of its
hoary old parts, taking flight as the crowning glory of our national cinema.
Red Shoes, The (1948) Mark Duguid from BFI Screen Online, also here: Show full synopsis
One of Powell and Pressburger's best-loved films, The Red Shoes, released in 1948, is perhaps the definitive ballet movie. The film interweaves the story of an ambitious young ballerina, Vicky (Moira Shearer), with that of The Red Shoes ballet (inspired by Hans Christian Andersen) which forms its centrepiece - the most dazzling flight of fantasy in Powell's career, and scarcely matched in British cinema.
Emeric Pressburger's script had originally been prepared for Alexander Korda a decade earlier. As well as Andersen's tale - in which a young peasant girl falls victim by a pair of magic ballet shoes and ends up dancing herself to death - the film reworks themes from George du Maurier's Trilby (itself filmed several times). Vicky is torn apart by the competing demands of art - represented by the tyrannical, Svengali-like ballet impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) - and love - the talented young composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring) who she marries. Finally she is driven - apparently by the shoes - to suicide.
By this time, the duo were turning increasingly away from realism, and although the film was ultimately a success (it was rewarded with Oscars for its art direction, by Hein Heckroth and Arthur Lawson, and original score, by Brian Easdale), it baffled many critics, and some found its tragic ending in poor taste. Such objections would be remembered twelve years later when Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) was critically mauled.
The lack of enthusiasm from studio boss J. Arthur Rank - who walked out during the gala performance - led to Powell and Pressburger abandoning the Independent Producers organisation they had helped to form and re-signing with Alexander Korda.
Powell assembled an impressive ad hoc ballet company, and took the bold step of casting in the lead role Moira Shearer, at the time playing second fiddle to Margot Fonteyn at Sadlers Wells, and with no acting experience. Her performance made her a huge star, and Powell went on to cast her in Tales of Hoffmann (1951) and Peeping Tom.
After the success of The Red Shoes, the Archers made two further forays into musical fantasy, Tales of Hoffmann (1951) and Oh... Rosalinda!!/Die Fledermaus (1955), but although both contained sequences of beauty and imagination, they failed to capture audiences in the same way.
The
Red Shoes (1948) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
Boris Lermontov, the manager of a world famous ballet company, expects nothing less than total commitment from those he employs. His latest protégés show great promise – Victoria Page, an aspiring young ballerina, and Julian Craster, an ambitious composer. After a successful début, Victoria is offered the leading role in Lermontov’s production of a new ballet, The Red Shoes, for which Craster is to write the entire score. The ballet is concerned with a peasant girl and a pair of magical red shoes. When the girl puts the shoes on, they take over her life and she ultimately dances herself to death. When it opens in Monte Carlo, the ballet is an immense success, but Lermontov is furious when he discovers that Victoria and Julian have fallen in love and intend to marry...
The Red Shoes, arguably the best film ever made about
the world of ballet, marks the creative highpoint of one of cinema’s most
successful partnerships, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (a.k.a. the
Archers). No matter how many times you watch this film, you cannot help
but be impressed by the sheer imaginative genius and beauty of its design, and
the searing poignancy of the story it tells, about the irreconcilable conflict
between art and life.
The film started out as a draft screenplay which Pressburger wrote early in the
1930s for producer-director Alexander Korda (who is believed to be the
inspiration for the story’s main character, the austere impresario
Lermontov). This was intended to showcase Korda’s future wife Merle
Oberon, but was ultimately unused. After the Second World War,
Powell and Pressburger were keen to make an escapist film, quite different to
the realist dramas they had previously produced, and so bought back the
screenplay from Korda. This they hastily developed into The Red Shoes.
The story is based on the well-known fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen.
To give the film as much authenticity as possible, the Archers offered some of
the supporting roles to some very eminent figures from the world of ballet:
Léonide Massine, Ludmilla Tchérina and Robert Helpmann. The leading
role of Victoria Page went to Moira Shearer, who had a promising ballet career
with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet Company. Not only was Shearer a natural
born dancer, but she also proved to have great talent as an actress.
Although she preferred her career in ballet, Shearer would subsequently appear
in a number of other films, including the Archers’ Tales
of Hoffman (1951) and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960).
The film’s other stars are Anton Walbrook, the distinguished Austrian actor who
had previously starred in The
Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), and Marius Goring, who had
appeared in The Spy
in Black (1939) and A Matter
of Life and Death (1946). In one of his most memorable
roles, Walbrook is the personification of the artist who sees himself as God,
brutally suppressing his humanity in an obsessive pursuit for artistic
perfection. Goring is an unusual choice for a romantic lead but he
conveys brilliantly the terrible inner conflict between creative ambition and
romantic love.
The sumptuous and very stylish look of The Red Shoes – quite unlike
anything in British cinema at the time – is the product of Jack Cardiff’s
glorious colour photography and a stunning production design by the acclaimed
German art director Hein Heckroth. The centrepiece of the film is an
unbroken 17 minute ballet sequence – the Red Shoes ballet – which is a
small masterpiece of dazzling surreal fantasy. This inspired and, highly
complex, ballet sequence was choreographed by Robert Helpmann, with a
beautifully evocative score by Brian Easdale.
It’s hard to imagine, given its standing today, but when The Red Shoes
was first released in the UK it fared very badly. This was mainly because
its distributors, the Rank Organisation, were doubtful of its merit and so did
very little to promote it. However, its fortunes changed drastically when
it reached the United States, where it was both a critical success and an
instant box office hit. Subsequently, it became one of the highest
earning films ever made in Britain. The Red Shoes was nominated
for five Oscars in 1949, including Best Picture, and won two – in the
categories of Best Art Direction (Color) and Best Music. Since its
initial release, the film’s reputation has steadily increased and today it is
recognised as one of the true great masterpieces of British cinema.
The Red Shoes Criterion essay from Ian Christie, May 24, 1999
Gothic Riots: The Work of Hein Heckroth original 2005 Criterion essay by Andrew Moor, reposted at Criterion November 30, 2009
Scorsese:
my friendship with Michael Powell | Film | The Guardian Steve Rose from The Guardian, May 14, 2009, also Criterion essay seen here: Michael
and Marty
The
BFI Celebrates Cardiff’s Career
Criterion essay, May 5, 2010
Movie Lines Criterion essay, December 17, 2009
BRAND-NEW SHOES Criterion comments, July 22, 2009
Movie Lines Criterion comments, December 17, 2009
The BFI Celebrates Cardiff’s Career Criterion comments, May 5, 2010
Cannes film festival:
Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker on restoring The Red Shoes Interview by Charlotte Higgins and Shehani
Fernando from The Guardian, May 19,
2009 on YouTube (8:34), also seen here: THE DANCE
GOES ON
The Red Shoes (1948) - The Criterion Collection
Dancing with the Devil
You Know: On Powell and ... - Senses of Cinema Dancing
with the Devil You Know: On Powell and
Pressburger's The Red Shoes, by Karli Lucas from Senses of Cinema, July 22, 2005
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Pressburger Creators of some Britain's most vivid and imaginative cinema, by Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Classic Powell and Pressburger The golden years of the Archers partnership, by Sergio Angelini
BFI | Sight & Sound | Seeing red: restoring The Red Shoes Ian Christie from Sight and Sound, August 2009
not coming to a theater near you (Tom Huddleston) review
The
Red Shoes - TCM.com Paul
Tatara
Electric Sheep Magazine [Frances Morgan]
The Red Shoes
(1948) hal0000, August 4, 2009
Silver Whistle at the Cinema [Doc M]
The City Review [Carter B. Horsley]
DVD Outsider Camus
The Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem] Criterion Collection
CriterionConfessions.com - restored version [Jamie S. Rich] Criterion Collection
DVD Journal JJB, Criterion Collection
Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib
Brandon's movie memory » Powell & Pressburger double-feature #2 Brandon’s Movie Memory, February 27, 2009
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [5/5]
Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [4.5/5]
Screenjabber review Mike Martin
For the Love of Art Richard Brody from The New Yorker, February 3, 2010
The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review (Page 2), February 8, 2010, also seen here: Life and Death Matters
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
homevideo.about.com (Ivana Redwine) dvd recommendation
Laramie Movie Scope (Patrick Ivers) review
KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review
The Red Shoes (1948) BritMovie
Urban Cinefile (Australia) - [Louise Keller + Andrew L. Urban]
The Village Voice [Melissa Anderson]
Edinburgh U Film Society (Stephen Cox) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [A]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Mondo Digital also I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING! and BLACK NARCISSUS
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] also I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING! and BLACK NARCISSUS
Michael Powell's "Red Shoes:" the UCLA Archive restoration July 31, 2009
Scorsese on 'The Red Shoes': 'It's cinema as music' - indieWIRE Eugene Hernandez from indieWIRE, November 5, 2009
ThomasSpurlin.com: Criterions for July: Powell/Pressburger Joy April 15, 2010
A copy of the full-color booklet distributed - Welcome to the UCLA ... 12-page photos and essays on the film restoration (pdf format)
Cannes
film festival: Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker on restoring The Red Shoes
Charlotte Higgins video interview with
Powell’s widow and Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker from The Guardian,
Scorsese:
my friendship with Michael Powell
Steve Rose interviews Scorsese from The
Guardian, May 13, 2009
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[5/5]
Time Out New York (David Fear) review [5/5]
BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) dvd review
Martin Scorsese to present restored The Red Shoes at Cannes Classics Ben Child from The Guardian, April 29, 2009
Charlotte Higgins on watching the restored The Red Shoes in Cannes Charlotte Higgins from The Guardian, May 19, 2009, also seen here: Falling in love anew with The Red Shoes at the Cannes film festival
The Guardian (Phelim O'Neill) review
Surrealist
artwork from The Red Shoes to go on display
Charlotte Higgins from The
Guardian,
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
Cleveland Plain Dealer (Clint O'Connor) review [A]
'The
Red Shoes' shines anew - Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan,
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVD Beaver Blu-ray review by Gary Tooze
Turner Classic Movies review Michael T. Toole on Moira Shearer
THE SMALL BACK ROOM
aka: Hour of Glory
Time Out review Tony Rayns
Powell made The Small Back Room just after The Red
Shoes, and was clearly looking for a 'homely', manageable subject after the
lavish ambitions of the earlier film. He found it in Nigel Balchin's novel
about a military bomb-disposal wizard, and turned in a thriller that would look
like a masterpiece in the filmographies of most British directors. But it rests
on a not-very-interesting dramatic idea: a man whose private life is in ruins
(he's lost a foot in a bomb blast, is having trouble with his girlfriend, and
is becoming alcoholic) gets new drive from the challenge of mastering a new
kind of German bomb. And Powell's characteristic desire to ornament leads to
the inclusion of some bizarre fantasy footage (when the hero suffers DTs) which
simply doesn't belong in this context. It remains extremely tense in a
workmanlike way, and full of good visual and syntactic ideas... but it's a fair
way short of Powell's best.
BFI Screen Online Nigel Arthur, also here: Show full synopsis
The Small Back Room (1948) marked the return of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger to Alexanda Korda's London Films, after a successful but increasingly strained period with Rank. Following the Archers' most colourful and fantastical phase - culminating in The Red Shoes (1948) - the black and white The Small Back Room suggested a return to the more restrained and realistic style of their earlier work, although it retained elements of fantasy, notably in the expressionist whisky bottle scene.
From the outset, this is a rather gloomy story, based on a novel by Nigel Balchin and photographed in a shadowy, film noir style by Christopher Challis. The film follows the personal struggle of Sammy Rice (David Farrer), a former bomb disposal expert tortured by the loss of his foot and of his direction in life, who has taken refuge in the bottle.
The other side of Sammy is revealed in his romantic relationship with Susan (Kathleen Byron). Farrer and Byron had both impressed in Black Narcissus (1947), and although The Small Back Room is altogether more restrained, the scenes of the lovers together in Sammy's flat or at the Hickory Tree nightclub are emotionally charged and erotic. The lovers' grasping embrace suggests the desperate state of their relationship, witnessed by Sammy's white cat who contentedly grooms himself on the sofa.
Archers regular Hein Heckroth, promoted to Art Director for The Red Shoes (1948), took full advantage of the change in tone, and his set designs for Sammy's flat effectively convey the character's squalid existence. He also deserves a share of the credit for the film's most famous scene, in which Sammy, anxiously waiting for Susan, cowers in the shadows of his flat, oppressed by a mass of loudly ticking clocks and the looming presence of a giant whisky bottle.
In his autobiography, Million Dollar Movie, Powell lamented the film's relentless gloominess, suggesting that if it had had a little more humour and less of Farrar's sulky posturing it might have received a more enthusiastic audience.
The
Small Back Room (1949) James Travers
from FilmsdeFrance
In the spring of 1943, Great Britain is losing the war against Nazi Germany. Sammy Rice, a leading bomb disposal expert, is called in to investigate a new kind of bomb that the Germans have begun dropping over England. Disguised as a toy, most of the bomb’s victims so far have been children, but no one has yet been able to get close enough to the device to discover what sets it off. Although brilliant at his job, Rice is afflicted with his own personal demons. He has to take painkillers to counteract the constant pain caused by his tin foot and he begins to suspect that his girlfriend Susan’s motivation for staying with him is pity, not love. His physical and emotional distress sometimes become too much and he takes solace by drinking more than is good for him. Tired of the endless bureaucratic intrigue in the Ministry of Defence, convinced that he has lost Susan forever, Rice gets himself blind drunk. At this crucial moment, he receives a phone call. Two more of the bombs have been found and his assistance in defusing them is urgently requested...
After an acrimonious falling out with the Rank Organisation,
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger returned to Alexanda Korda’s London Films
to make this compelling and almost unremittingly bleak film noir thriller set
in Britain during the darkest days of WWII. The Small Back Room is
a complete contrast to The Archers’ most recent films, Black
Narcissus (1947) and The Red
Shoes (1948), lavish colour spectacles painted on a very large
canvass. It marks a return to the more confined, more realistic dramas of
earlier years.
The Small Back Room is both a tense, enjoyable thriller and a fitting
tribute to the unsung heroes who worked in bomb disposal during the war.
The film is most memorable for the expressionistic sequence in which the hero,
played to perfection by David Farrar, succumbs to an insane craving for alcohol
and imagines himself dwarfed by a gigantic whisky bottle in a black void that
is filled with ticking clocks. The other notable set piece is the
suspenseful sequence near the end of the film in which Rice attempts to defuse
a deadly explosive device. The tension is heightened by the fact that the
audience knows that the character no longer has anything left to live for.
Although smaller in scale than previous Archers productions, The Small Back
Room is by no means a lesser work. The direction and writing are on a
par with previous Powell-Pressburger offerings and the performances are
faultless, particularly those of David Farrar and Kathleen Byron, whose
portrayal of a strained relationship is bleakly poignant. The cast includes
such familiar faces as Leslie Banks, Jack Hawkins, Sid James (future star of
the Carry On
films), Robert Morley and, making his screen debut, Bryan Forbes, who would
become a notable British filmmaker in the 1960s. The Small Back Room
is a powerful, masterfully composed study in human frailty, showing how the
trauma of war impacts on individuals, resulting both in terrible personal
anguish and acts of extraordinary heroism.
Hour
of Glory (1948) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Jeremy Arnold
There are two stories in Michael Powell and Emeric
Pressburger's The Small Back Room (1949). First is the story of a
particularly nasty type of German bomb which keeps being dropped on the British
homeland during WWII. It explodes only when picked up off the ground, usually
by children, and the British military is desperately trying to find a live,
untouched specimen so they can defuse it and learn how it works. Then there's
the story of Sammy Rice (David Farrar), a so-called "back-room boy,"
a military research scientist who is unable to serve in combat because of a tin
foot. A self-loathing creature with a serious drinking problem, Sammy hates
being stuck in London and forced to deal with the bureaucrats of the military
and political establishment. And despite being in a relationship with the
beautiful and intelligent Susan (Kathleen Byron), a secretary at his research
facility, Sammy thinks she stays with him more out of pity than love. The two
stories come together when Sammy - who seemingly wants to die - finds himself
the one who will have to defuse the bomb.
The film has a curious yet clever structure. After introducing the audience to
the bomb plot by having an Army captain (Michael Gough) seek Sammy out and tell
him to be ready on a moment's notice to travel to wherever a bomb might be
found, the movie does not mention bombs again for about thirty minutes of screen
time. Meanwhile, the other story - really the main story - develops, that of
Sammy's anguished existence and his relationship with Susan. We are made to
care quite deeply about this couple, and indeed, despite the wartime setting,
the talk of things military, and a climactic suspense sequence, The Small
Back Room is really a love story.
Director Michael Powell himself described it as such. He also called it
"the story of a dying man who discovers a reason to live." Perhaps
inevitably, with so much going on in one movie, The Small Back Room is
quite a mix visually. There are sequences that resemble American film noir;
there are military scenes with artillery going off; there are intense love
scenes, a strong suspense sequence, and even an expressionistic hallucination
segment that looks like something out of Spellbound (1945).
The mixture, while popular with critics, didn't work at the box office, where The
Small Back Room was a dud. Powell blamed this on the film's timing. He and
Pressburger had originally wanted to make it right after WWII, but it didn't
come together until after the duo had finished The Red Shoes (1948).
After that and their other recent films, Black Narcissus (1947) and A
Matter of Life and Death (1946), Powell felt the need to "escape from
romance into reality" and do a smaller, grittier story.
"We were so full of ourselves at the time," Powell recalled in 1985,
"that I think we thought too much about ourselves and not enough about the
audience. The Small Back Room was a very good film but it was a war
film, and the war was just over and people had had enough of the bloody war.
Particularly in England where there was all sorts of hardship." In his
memoir, Powell was even more blunt: "The public stayed away in droves.
They refused to accept that it was a love story. It was a war film. And war
films were out -- O-U-T."
Nonetheless, the picture remained one of Powell's personal favorites, and time
has been very kind to it. It plays today as an exceptionally mature, adult
drama, quite beautifully written and visually well-crafted, with many moments
of storytelling that border on the lyrical despite the film's seriousness. Take
the moment, for example, in which Sammy gets the phone call informing him that
a bomb has been found on a rocky beach. Powell dissolves to a shot of the beach
which shows us the bomb being guarded by a lone soldier. We think, naturally,
that we have moved on to the next scene, but then Powell dissolves back to
Sammy on the phone, finishing his conversation. Instead of making the audience
hear dialogue explaining that the bomb has been found, the movie shows
us that it has been found and also where it lies. We simply see what Sammy
visualizes from what he is being told. This has the effect of making the bomb
seem real, threatening, dangerous... it makes the force of its danger visceral
and heightens the audience's investment in what is at stake. All this in a
simple dissolve sequence that lasts only seconds! This kind of approach to
movie storytelling almost never happens today.
Powell was very proud of the climactic bomb-defusing sequence. It was actually
the single scene that made him want so much to adapt Nigel Balchin's novel, and
indeed, Powell and Pressburger milk it for a great deal of suspense.
"Seventeen minutes must be the longest time that an audience can hold its
breath," wrote Powell of the finished sequence (though in reality it
actually lasts more like 12 minutes).
The other famous scene here is the "whisky bottle sequence," the
aforementioned hallucination scene. Powell goes all out, filming Farrar being
overwhelmed by a 15-foot-high bottle and visualizing rows of ticking clocks.
One could argue it's a bit out of place in this film, but it does serve well to
illustrate just how deeply troubled Farrar is. The scene was heavily criticized
by British critics when the movie was released. They thought it too Germanic,
too vulgar, and not in keeping with the British tradition. It was not the first
time Powell and Pressburger would upset with the critics, nor would it be the
last. It just came with the territory for these visionary artists.
David Farrar and Kathleen Byron, both Powell/Pressburger regulars, are superb
here, giving their relationship an intense quality of realism. Byron had just
done a memorable turn in Black Narcissus, a role totally different in
every way. Of Byron, Powell later wrote, "She had a strange beauty that
flared and faded while you watched... Kathleen is a close-up girl. Like Myrna
Loy, the luminous intelligence with which her eyes and mouth were endowed
transcended the substance of her scenes with Jack Hawkins and David
Farrar."
Other standouts in the British cast: Anthony Bushell as Col. Strang, who
oversees the bomb defusing, Cyril Cusack as a stuttering researcher with
domestic problems, Robert Morley in a hilarious unbilled cameo as bumbling
defense minister, and Bryan Forbes in his film debut as a dying gunner. He'd go
on to more acting roles but made his biggest mark as a writer and director. (He
was later nominated for a screenplay Oscar for The Angry Silence
[1960].)
The Small Back Room may be quite different from the better-known
Powell-Pressburger masterworks, but it builds into a rich, rewarding experience
that pays off emotionally. Criterion's DVD, featuring a high-definition digital
transfer, looks very good despite a few moments of scratchiness. Criterion has
included a good, informative commentary track with film historian Charles Barr,
audio excerpts of Michael Powell's dictations for his autobiography, and a
written booklet by Nick James. There's also a fantastically interesting
half-hour interview with the film's cinematographer Chris Challis, who is now
89 and speaks of Powell and Pressburger as well as other filmmakers he's worked
with (including Billy Wilder). Challis is lucid, articulate and full of
wonderful insights and remembrances.
The Small Back Room: Whisky Galore! Criterion essay by Nick James, August 18, 2008
Bombs Away Criterion essay, March 10, 2010
The Small Back
Room Criterion Collection
The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960 • Senses of ... John Orr from Senses of Cinema, July 9, 2009
The Small
Back Room (1949) | Film Noir of the Week Guy Savage
BFI
Screenonline: Late Powell and Pressburger by Sergio Angelini
DVD Times Gary Couzens
DVD Outsider Camus
Slant Magazine review Bill Weber
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]
The Onion A.V. Club [Donna Bowman]
The Small Back Room Neil Fulwood from Agitation of the Mind, December 18, 2007
PopMatters (Matthew Sorrento) review
DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [4/5] [Criterion Collection] also seen here: Criterion Confessions
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3/4] Criterion Collection
DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
DVD Verdict (Dylan Charles) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
Associated Content [Stephen O. Murray] Criterion Collection
KQEK.com DVD Review [Mark R. Hasan]
Deja View Becky
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
The Small Back Room (1949) BritMovie
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review
Brand Upon the Brain, The Small Back Room, Twenty-Four Eyes and SALO! DVD releases from Collider
The New York Times review H.H.T.
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
GONE TO EARTH
aka: The Wild Heart
aka: Gypsy Blood
Great Britain (110 mi) 1950 co-director: Emeric Pressburger, also Rouben Mamoulian (US version, 1952, 82 mi)
A film much maligned in its time, not least by producer David O Selznick, who issued an American version retitled The Wild Heart, incorporating additional footage directed by Rouben Mamoulian and running only 82 minutes. Mary Webb's 1917 novel was the archetypal bodice-ripper - wicked squire, pious yokels, adultery and redemption - out of which Powell and Pressburger made a visually spellbinding romance. Christopher Challis' photography evokes Shropshire and the Welsh borders so that you can smell the earth. Menace, the bloodlust of the chase (of the fox or the outcast sinner), is omnipresent as trees bend and wild creatures panic before an unseen primal force. Cruelty besides beauty sweeps these pastoral vistas. Forget Jones' rustic English (Kentucky? Australian?) and the melodramatic clichés (boots trampling posies): the haunting, dreamlike consistency recalls that other fairy story of innocence and menace, The Night of the Hunter.
Gone to Earth (1950) Trish Shell from BFI Screen Online, also here: Show full synopsis
In 1950, austerity and rationing still prevailed in Britain, but the Archers - Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger - chose to continue their series of post-war Technicolor melodramas (following Black Narcissus, 1947, and The Red Shoes, 1948) with an adaptation of Mary Webb's Thomas Hardy-esque novel of 1917, Gone to Earth.
Under a co-production agreement between Alexander Korda (London Films) and David O. Selznick, sultry Hollywood star Jennifer Jones played heroine Hazel Woodus. The conflict for Hazel emerges when her husband and Baptist minister Edward Marston (Cyril Cusack) fails to consummate their marriage, and she is relentlessly pursued by the rich squire and hunter Jack Reddin (David Farrar).
This tragic story articulates the dilemma of female autonomy trapped between conflicting male desires of love and lust. Shropshire writer Webb wrote, "They did not live her life. She had to live theirs," but ultimately, "She wanted neither. Her passion, no less intense, was for freedom".
As a motherless, half-gypsy girl, Hazel's wildness and freedom are expressed through her close affiliation to her pet fox and to the wild landscape of the Welsh/Shropshire borders, the film's main location. This landscape "with its abrupt change from civilisation to savagery" (Powell) is captured by Christopher Challis's powerful cinematography and contributes significantly to the film's thematic and visual impact.
But Hazel's rebellion is finally steeped in blood and suffering. Designer Hein Heckroth's use of reds for Hazel's costumes hint at her final doom, while Brian Easdale eloquently scored this fate in his music.
As the film neared completion, the British Field Sports Society took objection to its perceived anti blood-sports stance and members were advised not to lend hunting packs to the production company. Powell appealed for help in The Times (October 1949) and a Cardiganshire farmer finally lent his own hounds to finish the shoot.
In 1950, Selznick attempted to sue Korda's company for not keeping to the spirit of Webb's novel, but was overruled in court. Consequently, London Films was given the British rights to the film, while Selznick retained the American rights. Selznick later hired Hollywood director Rouben Mamoulian to re-edit the film, which was released in the USA as The Wild Heart.
Gone to Earth (1950) BritMovie
1897. Shropshire girl Hazel Woodus lives with her father Abel and Foxy, a half-tame fox rescued from the hated foxhounds, her life ruled by the superstitions of her dead mother. Walking late one night, she believes herself pursued by the ‘Black Huntsman’ and accepts a lift from Squire Reddin who takes her to his home at Undern Manor and attempts to seduce her. Hazel escapes with the help of the squire’s manservant Andrew Vessons. After meeting Hazel at the local fair, new minister Edward Marston proposes to her. Having vowed to marry the first man who asks her, Hazel accepts. An infatuated Reddin begs that she marry him instead but she cannot break her word, and the wedding takes place. Reddin haunts Hazel until, guided by her mother’s book of spells, she secretly meets him and returns to Undern as his mistress. Edward arrives to reclaim his bride and during the violent quarrel Reddin – himself a hunter – threatens to harm Foxy. Hazel is repulsed and returns with Edward.
When a delegation of church elders demand that he turn his unfaithful wife out, Edward decides to leave the church and start afresh. Meanwhile Hazel, hearing the local hunt in the adjoining fields, rescues Foxy but is herself pursued by the bounds. Reddin follows, trying to lift her out of the hounds’ reach but Hazel refuses to drop the fox in the path of the dogs. Edward races to meet her as she approaches the house, but midway she and Foxy plunge to their deaths in an open, disused mineshaft: as the call from the hunt leader echoes across the fields: ‘Gone To Earth’.
Gone to Earth was released in the UK to mixed reviews – New Statesman dismissed it as ‘the worst bit of kitsch its makers have yet produced’ – and Selznick announced plans the following March to reshoot the film for American release, partly, it was claimed, to satisfy the US censors, but mainly ‘to improve the picture’ which would be retitled Gipsy Blood. Although Powell was approached to direct the new sequences, Christopher Challis says, ‘Micky didn’t want anything to do with it’, which placed the cameraman in a quandary when invited to go to Hollywood for the reshooting. ‘I talked to Michael and Emeric’, he says, ‘and asked, “What am I going to do? Isn’t it disloyal if I go?” but they said “Well we’d much rather you did because at least there’d be somebody there to make sure it looks the same if nothing else”‘.
Rouben Mamoulian directed the new footage while, as Challis recalls, ‘tremendous arguments about the script caused a lot of reshooting – pretty well the whole of the end sequence and additional scenes too’. Selznick eventually discarded all but 35 minutes of Gone to Earth even eliminating some characters altogether until – with yet another new title, The Wild Heart and running at only 82 minutes – it was finally released in May 1952. This version differs from Gone to Earth by the addition of a spoken prologue (by Joseph Cotten) – a typical Selznick device – and a few non-essential plotlines, but loses much of the poetic imagery and mystical quality of Powell and Pressburger’s version.
Pam Cook, in a 1986 Monthly Film Bulletin, asserted that ‘Jennifer ]ones’ utterly convincing performance as the complex and divided heroine… is transformed in the reshot sequences into a virtual reprise of Pearl’s steaming sensuality in Duel in the Sun’. Despite his undeniable reputation as a quality filmmaker, the ever-meddling Selznick was sorely lacking in terms of subtlety when preparing a screenplay, milking dialogue from literary works for the sake of ‘authenticity’ at the expense of the overall spirit of the piece. This clumsy, verbose approach is apparent even in his masterpiece Gone with the Wind. Powell’s direction of Gone to Earth, aided by the handsome camerawork of Christopher Challis and Freddie Francis, made prologues and explanatory titles wholly unnecessary.
Despite Selznick’s efforts, The Wild Heart failed with US audiences although, perversely, this version was released in the UK on home video in 1980, with the original unavailable until the NFA’s glorious new print was seen at the 1985 London Film Festival. Gone to Earth was finally recognised as one of The Archers’ most beautiful movies with stunning photography, superb performances and a terrific, evocative music score by Brian Easdale. In 1971 Powell considered the picture ‘a disaster.. except for Jennifer’s performance which I thought was absolutely wonderful’, feeling that they had ‘never licked the script… it is doubtful if Mary Webb can be licked’.
Gone to Earth Celto Slavica
Gone to Earth •
Senses of Cinema Martyn Bamber
from Senses of Cinema, July 22, 2005
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Landscape Michael Powell's spiritual fascination with British landscape, by Mark Duguid
BFI Screenonline: Powell and Pressburger Creators of some Britain's most vivid and imaginative cinema, by Mark Duguid
BFI
Screenonline: Late Powell and Pressburger by Sergio Angelini
P & P Blog-a-thon: Gone to Earth Philasopherouge, December 17, 2007
The Wild Heart (Gone to Earth) Jennifer Jones website
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2/5] also here: Read DVD Review
The Wild Heart > Overview - AllMovie Hal Erickson
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review
Entertainment | A life in transition: 2 films by Michael Powell ... Moira Macdonald from The Seattle Times, February 13, 2007
The New York Times review H.H.T.
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
THE ELUSIVE PIMPERNEL
Great Britain (109 mi) 1951 co-director: Emeric Pressburger
Time Out review Tom Milne
A reasonably faithful adaptation of Baroness Orczy's tale of the French Revolution and the debonair Englishman who spirited aristos out of reach of the Terror. Somewhat over-elaborated, especially in the lavish court sequences, it contrives to get bogged down in a marshy area somewhere between straightforward boy's adventure and classic P & P territory. Powell's original intention was to make it a musical, but Korda and Goldwyn objected; with relics of this conception surviving in the return to Orczy's adventure yarn, the result was that, as Powell commented, 'it really was a terrible mess'. Not terrible, since it is characteristically vivid and colourful, and sparked by bright flashes of sardonic humour.
The Elusive Pimpernel (1950) BritMovie
In revolution-torn Paris of 1792, ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’ rescues aristocrats from the guillotine and smuggles them to safety across the English Channel. Citizen Chauvelin determines that he will capture and unmask this folk hero and travels to England, suspecting the Pimpernel to he Sir Percy Blakeney. He forces Sir Percy’s wife Marguerite, to help him by threatening to expose her brother Armand.
Marguerite despises her husband as a worthless fop, while Percy for his part mistrusts Marguerite, believing she betrayed a French family to the government. Chauvelin learns the Pimpernel’s identity and, realising the truth herself, Marguerite races to Mont St Michel, the rendezvous of the Pimpernel and his men, only to be captured by the Chauvelin. Percy offers his own life in exchange for Marguerite’s, but escapes the firing squad. As Chauvelin’s men surround the castle they realise too late that the advancing high tide has cut off the Mont. The Pimpernel escapes by boat, he and Marguerite at last confident of each others trust.
User reviews from imdb Author: Igenlode Wordsmith from
England
Having recently seen the 1934 Alexander Korda version of
"The Scarlet Pimpernel", I found it almost impossible to consider
this film other than in relation to its predecessor. It is quite clear in any
case that the Powell & Pressburger version is based firmly upon the earlier
script rather than upon Baroness Orczy's famous novel "The Scarlet
Pimpernel" - or even its sequel, "The Elusive Pimpernel"... Not
only do the two films share a number of scenes which have no origin in the
novel - the episode of the Prince Regent's coat, Marguerite's own victimisation
by the St Cyr family, the firing squad and the ghost, among others - but the
dialogue in several of these scenes is word-for-word identical to that of the
earlier screenplay.
As such, I consider that the 1950 production may fairly be considered a remake;
and like so many remakes of well-known stories, I fear it is not a great
success. The changes made for the later production clearly betray nothing more
than the advances in cinematography over the intervening years, coupled with
what I suspect to have been a bigger budget. In place of blurred sound - the
surviving 1934 print is of very poor quality - monochrome film and static,
staged studio exteriors, we are treated to Technicolour costumes and numerous
location sequences including stately homes on both sides of the Channel, a
curricle race on the Brighton road, a full-size sailing vessel and a climax
shot on and around Mont St Michel. The action, unfortunately, does not gain
thereby. All too often plot elements give the impression of being introduced in
order to showcase the lavish production values, rather than the latter
enhancing the former.
Neither production is particularly faithful to the original text; but then few
great literary adaptations ever are. It is the earlier script, however, for all
its occasionally stilted quality, that manages to come closer to the spirit of
the novel. Oddly enough, it is where the later script picks up dialogue
verbatim, either from its predecessor or direct from the novel, that it
generally sounds weakest; out of context, the old dialogue sits ill with the
more 'modern' visual style.
Armand St-Just, as a character, is reduced to an unappealing cameo that
deprives Marguerite's later actions in his defence of their essential emotional
force - the audience has no reason to care about his fate. Likewise, we lose
the poignant moment introduced by Korda's script where Sir Percy allows the
mask of marital indifference to slip a fraction in the face of Marguerite's
unspoken distress, only for her to shut him out from her confidence and resort
instead to Chauvelin's devil's bargain - with almost fatal consequences for
both of them.
Despite its longer running-time, the remake also contrives to lose many of the
effective 'character scenes' that set the mood of the piece; the aristocrats
being called out one by one to the tumbrils; Armand's relationship with his
sister; the prattle of the bored ladies of fashion as Marguerite poses for her
portrait; the affected, artificial attitudes of the circles in which her
husband moves; the baffled Chauvelin and the sleeping Sir Percy; and even
revolutionary Calais in a snatched peaceful moment, as seen by the 'soldiers'
in disguise. As a result, shorn of all this even the main characters seem
strangely two-dimensional, and the moments of subtle humour are almost totally
lost in favour of a few bald gags towards the end - although the introduction
of the unloaded pistol with which Sir Percy so carefully induces his adversary
to arm himself is a nice touch.
But most crucially of all, David Niven, who should have been no novice in the
art of buckling his swash, totally fails to outshine the memory of Leslie
Howard's performance in the part of the actual Scarlet Pimpernel. It is chiefly
Howard's portrayal of the title character that raises "The Scarlet
Pimpernel" somewhat above the status of dated period piece it would
otherwise hold. 'Fair and foolish', he carries off Sir Percy Blakeney to
perfection as an eighteenth-century Lord Peter Wimsey, a babbling
silly-ass-about-town in public but a quick-witted and resourceful man of action
when it counts. Admittedly the script does Niven no favours; but he is neither
convincingly languid in the part of the fop (the doggerel scene in the
steam-bath, transposed from its original setting in a hide-bound gentlemen's
club, becomes simply embarrassing, with Niven popping up through the steam like
a pantomime demon) nor sufficiently dashing in his other role. This is simply
not a Scarlet Pimpernel that female viewers can hero-worship, or male viewers
long to emulate. And sad to say, Niven doesn't really have the looks for the
part.
Merle Oberon's quick-tongued and imperious Lady Blakeney was also more
appropriate to her part than Margaret Leighton's more colourless blonde
rendition, although again the script must take much of the blame. As for the
appalling French accents inflicted on Marguerite, Chauvelin, and every other
Francophone character in the film... one becomes almost grateful for the
frequency with which Margaret Leighton, at least, forgets to maintain hers.
"The Scarlet Pimpernel" was a minor historical drama, mainly notable
for an outstanding performance from Leslie Howard. "The Elusive
Pimpernel", on the other hand, ranks alongside the 1970s remake of
"The Mark of Zorro" - that is, despite added colour and action
sequences, somewhere along the line they have managed to lose the essential
heart of the story. This version was supposedly planned as a musical - the mind
boggles!
BFI
Screenonline: Late Powell and Pressburger by Sergio Angelini
MediaCircus (Anthony Leong) review
User reviews from imdb Author: Flippitygibbit from Yorkshire, England
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review
DVDBeaver dvd review Zachary Castain
THE TALES OF HOFFMAN
Great Britain (138 mi) 1951 co-director: Emeric Pressburger
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Made at the instigation of Sir Thomas Beecham - who conducts the Offenbach operetta - Powell and Pressburger's follow-up to The Red Shoes lacks the earlier film's coherence and emotional pull, but is equally lavish in its attempts to combine dance, music and film. Basically a trio of stories (plus prologue and epilogue) in which unrequited love figures strongly, the movie is inevitably uneven, and some have pointed to a rather kitschy element in its equation of Cinema and Great Art. But Powell's eye - aided by Hein Heckroth's designs and Chris Challis's camera - is as sharp and distinctive as ever, revelling in rich colours, fantastic compositions, and swooning movements (most notably in the lavish episode featuring a Venetian courtesan). Sumptuous spectacle.
The Tales of
Hoffman (1951) BritMovie
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger met with Sir Thomas Beecham, who suggested that they film Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann. The real Hoffmann, born in Koenigsberg in 1776 and raised by his uncle and grandmother, found refuge in writing bizarre tales which have been compared to those of Franz Kafka. These tales were adapted into an opera by Jacques Offenbach in 1880 as the composer’s final completed work; he died just a few months before the premiere in February 1881. Sir Thomas had given the first UK performance of the work in 1910 and, as its leading authority, became musical director for the film, personally auditioning over 50 singers.
At Beecharn’s invitation, American opera star Robert Rounseville made his first trip to Europe and his film debut as Hoffmann. His only other screen role was to be in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, five years later. Ann Ayars also made her debut as a vocalist, despite having previously made six (non-singing) appearances under contract to MGM. All other vocals would be dubbed and mimed by dancers and actors while, in addition to most of The Red Shoes ballet company, the production secured the services of Sadler’s Wells choreographer Frederick Ashton – his first work for the cinema.
The Tales of Hoffmann is undoubtedly the most opulent, most expensive, most courageous and most exhausting effort yet made to bring opera to the screen. The obvious care and effort that have gone into Hoffmann, the sometimes memorable contrived passages of virtuosity in the first half make one reluctant to insist on the collapse of the work as a whole. Sometimes the sensation is like hurtling through an art gallery in an express train with the steam whistle at full blast. Sometimes it is like sitting on a whirling roundabout sucking a peppermint stick. Not for a single moment will The Tales of Hoffmann move you to laughter or tears. Probably the material itself is quite intractable, but the trouble is that behind all the effects, the strivings, the opulence and the apparatus, there seems no clear sense of direction, no single purpose at all. In this nay it is the most spectacular failure yet achieved by Powell and Pressburger, who seem increasingly to dissipate their gifts in a welter of aimless ingenuity.
The
Tales of Hoffmann (1951) James
Travers from FilmsdeFrance
In Nuremberg, the poet Hoffmann becomes enchanted by the beautiful prima donna, Stella. Whilst awaiting her reply to a letter he sent her, he recounts three tales of his former lost loves. He was a young man living in Paris when he met his first love, the dancer Olympia. She turned out to be nothing more than a mechanical doll created by the inventor Coppelius. Then he fell for a bejewelled Venetian courtesan, only to learn that she was the bait of the evil magician Dapertutto who delights in stealing men’s souls. Lastly, on a remote Greek island, Hoffmann lost his heart to the delicate Antonia, a musician’s daughter who will die if she attempts to sing...
The most audacious and inspired film to come out of the
extraordinary partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger is this
mesmerising adaptation of Jacques Offenbach’s unfinished 1880 fantasy
opera. Although ill-received when it was first released in 1951, the film
is now regarded as one of the Archers’ finest achievements, the most perfect
marriage of opera, ballet and cinema.
This exceptional work is quite different to most other film operas in that the
soundtrack was recorded first, in its entirety, and the images were then shot
and edited together to fit the soundtrack (the reverse to how a film is usually
composed). The result is breathtaking: a piece of cinematic art of
unparalleled charm and beauty.
Although stylistically The Tales of Hoffmann is markedly different from
other Powell-Pressburger productions, it contains themes which we encounter in
their other films. Hoffmann’s hopeless search for the perfect love
mirrors that of Clive Candy’s amorous adventures in The Life and Death of
Colonel Blimp (1943), whilst the tragic conflict between life and art that
we see in Hoffmann’s third tale is echoed in The Red Shoes
(1948). Significantly, the star of that latter film also has a strong
presence in The Tales of Hoffmann – the renowned dancer-actress Moira
Shearer.
It may not be as widely appreciated as the Archers’ other great films, but
there is no denying that The Tales of Hoffmann has an opulence and
grandeur that is rarely achieved in cinema. Every shot is staged with
meticulous precision, the design is sumptuous without ever appearing kitsch,
and the colour photography has a richness and allure that virtually no other
film possesses. This is a work of sublime genius, a unique composition of
visual and musical poetry that is simply magical.
The Tales of Hoffmann - TCM.com Sean Axmaker
A flamboyant cinematic flourish and romantic vitality runs
though all of the films of Michael Powell, who directed his greatest film in
collaboration with screenwriter and co-producer Emeric Pressburger, his
creative partner in The Archers. There’s a delight in their cinema, a love of
the expressionist possibilities of the medium, that lights up their films with
energy, color, and the magic of love and life. The Red Shoes (1948), a
lavish Technicolor ode to the romance and beauty of ballet, was one of their
greatest critical and commercial successes and it inspired in Powell an
ambition to create an entirely "composed" film. That is, a film
designed and shot to serve and compliment music already composed.
Unfortunately, he found little interest from producers until meeting with Sir
Thomas Beecham, the famous British conductor and international music impresario
who had worked with Powell and Pressburger on The Red Shoes. Beecham
suggested Powell look to opera and brought his attention to Jacques Offenbach's
The Tales of Hoffmann, adapted from the strange fantasy tales of E.T.A.
Hoffmann. Beecham had a special connection to the opera – he conducted the
premiere British performance in 1910 – and eagerly signed on as the film's
musical director. The idea and the stamp of artistic pedigree of high art with
a popular dimension intrigued producer Alexander Korda, who agreed to finance
the film, and the production came together surprisingly quickly.
The film opens with the atmosphere of a live performance, the sounds of
orchestra tuning over the credits, and then the score jolts to life and the
camera takes us into the highly stylized set of the framing sequence, a ballet
performance (featuring Moira Shearer) with a smitten Hoffmann (Robert
Rounseville) in the audience. When the curtain falls, our lovestruck hero
retires to a lively beer garden with his school chum, Nicklaus (Pamela Brown),
and tells three tales of doomed, devilish loves: a poet tempted by a life size
doll (Moira Shearer) brought to life by clockwork mechanics, a courtesan
(Ludmilla Tcherina) who helps her lover steal souls with a magic mirror, and a
terminally ill woman (Anne Ayars) who will die if she sings. It's not a slavish
adaptation of the opera, but a creative reworking to marry opera, ballet and
cinema (the part of the living doll was changed from a singing to a dancing
role) and musical director Beecham was a dynamic partner in the collaboration,
shifting music around to match Powell's narrative changes and cinematic
inspirations. Powell paid tribute to Beecham's contribution by ending the film
on Beecham himself conducting the final bars of the score.
There is no dialogue, only a sung libretto, and the entire score was
prerecorded. Rounseville and Anne Ayars were the only cast members to record
their own vocal performances but all of them lip-synched to the playback for
the camera. "We were virtually making a silent film," wrote Powell in
Million Dollar Movie, the second volume of his autobiography. It's an
apt description for a production where the performances are entirely in dance,
mime and song, all stylized expressions closer to the expressionistic qualities
of silent cinema than the realism of even the most fantastic sound films. Even
the special effects were accomplished with simple techniques that recalled the
glorious imagery of silent fantasies.
Powell brought back many of the cast members of The Red Shoes. Along
with featured dancers Moira Shearer and Ludmilla Tcherina were Leonide Massine
(who took dynamic parts in each of the three acts) and Robert Helpmann (playing
Hoffmann's scheming nemesis in the framing sequence and the demonic trickster
behind each of the temptations). The part of Hoffmann's buddy Nicklaus was
traditionally played by a female mezzo-soprano on stage. "The idea of an
androgynous being accompanying a Gothic-style hero in his amatory adventures
appealed to me," wrote Powell, and he cast Pamela Brown, a longtime
collaborator, in the role of the skeptical observer watching his naïve friend
fall time and again into emotional booby traps. The participation of the
internationally acclaimed Beecham helped secure New York opera star Robert
Rounseville, who made his screen debut in the role of the gullible, romantic
Hoffmann.
Powell secured the largest soundstage in Britain, which was unsuited for sound
recording but perfect for a production without a second of live sound. Hein
Heckroth designed the impressionistic sets in broad strokes against open spaces
and deep colors. They are more suggestions than literal locations, executed
with an exaggerated theatricality and a cinematic flamboyance created with
scrims and curtains and painted backdrops and sculpted in the lighting. Powell
secured the services of Sir Frederick Ashton to choreograph the dance sequences
(he also danced two small roles) while Beecham personally auditioned the
vocalists and arranged and recorded the score.
The Tales of Hoffmann has a lavish, rich look, yet the production itself
was relatively inexpensive. "It was a composed film, you see," wrote
Powell. "We all knew what we were doing, and why we were doing it, and the
music told us how to do it." Production was completed in nine weeks, with
two weeks of extensive rehearsals and another two weeks to shoot the puppet
chorus. Powell was well pleased with the finished film, Korda less so, who
found the dramatic energy of the first sequences drained by the static quality
of the final act. That sequence was cut for its British premiere but reinstated
for subsequent showings. Reviews were mixed. New York Times critic
Bosley Crowther, comparing the film to The Red Shoes, described it as
"splendid and cold," and Milton Shulton of the Evening Standard
proclaimed it "the most opulent, most expensive, most courageous and most
exhausting effort yet made to bring opera to the screen" while warning
audiences that "Not for a single moment will The Tales of Hoffmann
move you to laughter or tears."
In many ways, The Tales of Hoffmann is an entire feature film in the
fantastic style of the surreal, almost nightmarish central ballet of The Red
Shoes. Despite the brightness of the production and the fantasy of the stories,
it's a dark, emotionally grim story with a hero felled by his own gullibility
and emotional vulnerability, a pathetic victim of his own romantic idealism and
naiveté. For all the spectacle, it is more abstract than involving and the film
never pumps with the blood of romantic passion that flows through so many
Powell movies. Yet it's also a sumptuous film of rich colors, elegant
camerawork, gorgeous sets and dazzling choreography, and the dark fantasy is
embraced by such diverse directors as Martin Scorsese, Derek Jarman and George
Romero (who sees it as a kind of horror film). Powell’s imaginative and dynamic
marriage of music, movement, and decor is breathtaking and the film is one of
the most dedicated and effectively realized marriage of the arts (opera, ballet
and music) ever put to cinema.
The
Tales of Hoffmann Criterion essay by
Bruce Eder, June 16, 1992
Tales from the Lives of Marionettes Criterion essay by Ian Christie, November 21, 2005
Gothic Riots: The Work of Hein Heckroth original 2005 Criterion essay by Andrew Moor, reposted at Criterion November 30, 2009
The Tales of Hoffmann Criterion Collection
Offscreen
:: The Whole Film Dances: The Criterion Collection ... Cinema Does Opera, The
Whole Film Dances: The Criterion Collection edition of Powell and Pressburger’s
The Tales of Hoffman, by
Paul W. Salmon from Offscreen,
December 31, 2006
All for
Art(-ifice): The Tales of Hoffmann • Senses of Cinema Peter H. Kemp, July 22, 2005
BFI
Screenonline: Late Powell and Pressburger by Sergio Angelini
The
Tales of Hoffmann (1951) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com James Steffen
PopMatters (Chadwick Jenkins) review
Slant Magazine review Jeremiah Kipp
Movie Reviews UK review [5/5] Race Mathews
The Onion A.V. Club [Donna Bowman]
DVD Journal DSH, Criterion Collection
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [2.5/4] Criterion Collection, also seen here: 100 Top Books Sites
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review Criterion Collection
DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [3/5] [Criterion Collection]
DVD Verdict (Joe Armenio) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
Tales of Hoffmann (1951, Pressburger & Powell) Brandon’s Movie Memory, January 25, 2008
Exclaim! dvd review Travis Mackenzie Hoover
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Edinburgh U Film Society (Keith H. Brown) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar
Film-Forward.com [DVD review] Raymond Levy
The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [1.5/4]
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
Tales
of Hoffman Dave Kehr from the Reader
GEORGE A. ROMERO, DIARY OF THE DEAD - Filmmaker Magazine ... Interview with George Romero where he acknowledges after seeing TALES OF HOFFMAN that he’s a big Powell & Pressburger fan, from Filmmaker magazine, February 15, 2008
Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review [B] Sam Adams
The
Tales of Hoffmann review – Powell and Pressburger's purest work ... Philip French from The Guardian, June 21, 2015
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
Turner Classic Movies review Michael T. Toole on Moira Shearer
THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE
Great Britain (13 mi) 1955 ‘Scope
User reviews from imdb Author: MARIO GAUCI
(marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta
This is a ballet short by Michael Powell - "devised and designed"
by Hein Heckroth - in the style of THE RED SHOES (1948) and THE TALES OF
Hoffman (1951). During the Audio Commentary for the latter, it was stated that
Powell was very much influenced by the animated films of Walt Disney; this
short is certainly evidence of that, since the Disney Studios had tackled the
same Goethe story in the most famous segment from FANTASIA (1940) - though the
celebrated Paul Dukas score that's become synonymous with it wasn't utilized
here!
Despite the considerable talent on display, however, the overall concept of the
short is too modest to favorably compare - and, perhaps, it shouldn't be - with
the boundless imagination that is afforded by a cartoon, or the sheer charm of
the Disney classic itself. The film is, in any case, compromised by the
unsuitable widescreen format and the fact that it was shortened from 30 to 13
minutes!
User reviews from imdb Author: boblipton from New York
City
This 13 minute ballet performed to Dukas' "The Sorceror's
Apprentice" is included in the new DVD of the Powell-Pressberger TALES OF
Hoffman. Powell did a movie of it, using the brilliant Freddie Francis as
cinematographer. It provides a telling counterpoint to that movie and clearly
illuminates why TALES is a great picture.
First and foremost, in TALES, camera angles vary in wild and dazzling method.
That lends an excitement, movement and sense of weirdness that Francis'
excellent but far more conventional camera placement in this piece lacks.
Powell started out in silent movies as an assistant to Rex Ingram, and visually
he continued the traditions of silent film. No one except Minnelli ever used
colors as boldly and effectively as Powell and Pressberger, in works like THE
THIEF OF BAGDAD, A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH and especially TALES. Here colors
are used far more prosaically. And finally, Powell and Pressberger knew how to
use sound for its emotional content -- think of the wind in I KNOW WHERE I'M
GOING. Here, the music serves to direct the action.
In net, this is a jazzed up record of a ballet. A good one with a fine prima
ballerina, but nothing more. But watched immediately before TALES -- watching
it afterwards is impossible -- it lets one see how brilliant the Archers were.
A MONTH LATER: I must've been asleep when I wrote the review. Thanks to the
other reviewer for correcting my foolish errors, which I leave here so that
anyone reading this can enjoy a good horselaugh here at my expense.
User reviews from imdb Author: Tryavna from United
States
Many thanks to Boblipton for his earlier review. For the most part, I agree
with his final evaluation. "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" makes an
interesting footnote to Powell's career, but it is in no way essential viewing.
Criterion have indeed included it as an extra on the excellent release of
Powell and Pressburger's "Tales of Hoffmann," which is about all
anyone could expect. However, I want to offer a few corrections/additions to
Boblipton's review:
1.) The cinematographer for "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" was NOT
Freddie Francis; it was Christopher Challis, who was also the cinematographer
for "Tales of Hoffmann." (In fact, Powell was largely successful in
reassembling his crew from "Hoffmann," including Challis and editor
Reginald Mills and production designer Hein Heckroth.) Francis merely served as
camera operator -- a job he filled on both films.
2.) The music for these version of "Sorcerer's Apprentice" is NOT the
famous score composed by Paul Dukas (which most people know through its use in
Disney's "Fantasia"). A relatively obscure German composer named
Walter Braunfels created the score for this ballet. Even IMDb gets this one
wrong....
3.) Part of the reason that this film lacks the panache of "Hoffmann"
is that Powell was brought in to direct the English-language version of this
ballet, which had been created primarily for German television. (It was, in
fact, production designer Hein Heckroth who asked Powell to get involved.)
Powell didn't really have much input and probably took the job while on a brief
hiatus from his partnership with Pressburger, which was still active in
1955-56. Thus I attribute the lack of the typical Michael Powell flair to his
being called in after the fact instead of being involved from the conception
stage onwards.
4.) Sadly, we're still missing about 16 minutes of footage from this film. It
originally ran about 30 minutes -- no doubt due to its television origins. But
it was cut to 13 1/2 minutes before it was widely distributed and then stored
in the BFI archives. I doubt that the missing 16 minutes would add much; we
still get the full basic story. But the fact that so much was cut helps explain
why the film seems so choppy.
OH…ROSALINDA!!
Great Britain (101 mi) 1955 ‘Scope co-director: Emeric Pressburger
'They should have been forcibly suppressed,' spluttered one early review of Powell and Pressburger's update of the Strauss operetta Die Fledermaus, set in four-power occupied Vienna; even the title's two exclamation marks betrayed an unseemly excess. The blatant artifice, sugar-candy sets, and preposterous plot, once deplored by the critical establishment, are now cherished by connoisseurs: what better way to pass a disgracefully self-indulgent Sunday afternoon?
Oh
Rosalinda! Jonathan Rosenbaum from
the Reader
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger transfer the plot of Johann Strauss's opera Die Fledermaus to postwar Vienna for a 1955 musical filmed in Technicolor and 'Scope. Not one of their best movies (cf The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death), but it's certainly an engaging mannerist oddity that calls to mind such contemporary cross-references in delirium as Frank Tashlin and Vincente Minnelli, and the cast—Anton Walbrook, Michael Redgrave, Anthony Quayle, Mel Ferrer, Dennis Price, and Ludmilla Tcherina—is occasionally as enterprising as the candy-box decor
Oh, Rosalinda!! (1955) BritMovie
In Vienna, governed by Russia, Austria, Britain and Prussia, Dr Falke, known as ‘The Bat’, is brought before the four-powered court after being made the victim of practical jokers Colonel Eisenstein and his wife Rosalinda. The authorities send for Eisenstein, who is confined to barracks for eight days.
As further revenge, Falke persuades Eisenstein to attend a masked ball without Rosalinda, who is visited by old flame Captain Alfred Westerman. Major Frank mistakes Westerman for Eisenstein and takes him into custody. Falke telephones Rosalinda and invites her to the ball where Eisenstein, not recognising her, immediately begins to flirt with her. She leaves suddenly, taking with her Eisenstein’s watch. At the barracks, Eisenstein finds Alfred in the cell intended for him, wearing his own dressing gown. He storms out to confront Rosalinda, followed by Alfred and Major Frank.
Falke and his guests eavesdrop as Eisenstein accuses his wife of being unfaithful with Alfred until Rosalinda produces the watch as proof of his own flirtatious ways. They realise that Falke has been behind the entire plot.
Oh Boy! Oh
Rosalinda!! and The Boy Who Turned ... - Senses of Cinema David Cairns from Senses of Cinema, July 22, 2005
BFI
Screenonline: Late Powell and Pressburger by Sergio Angelini
User reviews from imdb Author: jshoaf from Florida
Channel
4 Film capsule review
Variety review
THE BATTLE OF THE RIVER PLATE
aka: Pursuit of the Graf Spee
Great Britain (119 mi) 1956 co-director: Emeric Pressburger
The Battle of The River Plate (1956) BritMovie
In the first weeks of the Second World War, German crack pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, captained by Hans Langsdorff, inflicts heavy damage on British merchant shipping. Discovering the Graf Spee’s position, Commodore Harwood consults with Captains Bell of the Exeter, Woodhouse of Ajax and Parry of the New Zealand ship Achilles, gambling that the Germans will head for the River Plate before returning home.
A fierce battle rages throughout the following day, with Exeter suffering heavy damage. The Graf Spee escapes under cover of nightfall to neutral Montevideo harbour where, after frantic diplomatic negotiations, foreign minister Doctor Guani, acting under the Hague Convention, allows Langsdorff 72 hours to carry out such repairs a will make the vessel seaworthy without enhancing its fighting ability.
British Naval Intelligence meanwhile spread rumours of an advancing fleet awaiting the German ship as soon as it leaves port, although only the still damaged Ajax and Achilles are within striking distance. As the deadline approaches and the Graf Spee moves out of the harbour, the entire crew transfer to a German freighter as a series explosions engulf their ship in flames. The British bluff has worked – Langsdorff has scuttled his vessel, believing escape impossible.
Battle of the River Plate, The (1956) Justin Hobday from BFI Screen Online, also here: Show full synopsis
Made towards the end of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's creative partnership, The Battle of the River Plate is based on the British Navy's triumph over a German 'pocket battleship', the Graf Spee, in the early months of the second world war. Rarely included in discussions of their great works, The Battle of the River Plate was nevertheless Powell and Pressburger's most commercially successful film.
The gallant heroism of both the British Navy and the German Captain Langsdorff, who scuttles his own ship rather than face defeat, strongly appealed to Powell and Pressburger. Indeed, so fond of the story was Michael Powell that he published a novel, The Last Voyage of the Graf Spee, retelling the story in the hope that, as he wrote in the book's introduction, future generations of children would "read it and absorb it into their experience."
Echoing the friendship between the British and German officers Wynne-Candy and Schuldorff in Powell and Pressburger's earlier The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, an important subplot in The Battle of the River Plate explores the relationship of Langsdorff and Captain Dove of the British merchant vessel Africa Shell. Like Wynne-Candy and Schuldorff, Dove and Langsdorff find that, while their two nations are at war, as individuals they have much in common.
Made some eleven years after the end of the war, the sympathetic treatment of the German enemy was less controversial than The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp had been in 1943. Its year of release also meant The Battle of the River Plate was not required to be as propagandist as 49th Parallel. Instead, like so many other war films of the period, it fed the public's insatiable appetite for stories of British victories at a time when the country was still suffering from the economic hardships brought on by the financial cost of the war.
Ending with the amicable parting of Dove and Langsdorff, The Battle of the River Plate omits the tragic final act of the Graf Spee story. In a hotel room in Buenos Aires a few days after scuttling his own ship and, unable to cope with defeat, Captain Langsdorff committed suicide. His body was found dressed in full uniform and wrapped in the battle-flag of his sunken vessel.
The
Battle of the River Plate (1956)
James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
November 1939. When his freighter, The Africa Shell, is sunk by the German pocket battleship Graf Spee, Captain Dove finds himself a prisoner of Captain Langsdorff. Despite the humiliation of his situation, Dove is impressed by Langsdorff’s courtesy and professionalism, and shows him the respect due to a fellow naval officer, albeit one on the opposing side. When the Graf Spee sinks another British ship, Dove is joined by several dozen other prisoners, who are equally well-treated by the German captain and his crew. Meanwhile, three British warships, under the command of Commodore Harwood, have assembled in the South Atlantic, ready to engage the Graff Spee as it heads for South America....
The penultimate collaboration of the legendary
director-screenwriting team Michael Powell and Emeric Pressurger would prove to
be their most commercially successful, although today the film is far from
regarded as their best work. The story of the Graf Spee so
fascinated Powell that in 1956 he would publish a novel The Last Voyage of
the Graf Spee recounting its eventful last few weeks of service.
The Battle of the River Plate is most memorable for its dramatic,
stunningly realised action sequences, which were achieved with the cooperation
of the Royal Navy and the US Navy. These make effective use of
VistaVision – a short-lived rival to CinemaScope – to evoke a sense of scale
and awesome military might as British and German warships lock horns in a grisly
fight to the death.
The film also stands apart from many war films of its time in its sympathetic,
non-stereotypical treatment of German officers, continuing a trend which can be
seen in all of Powell’s war films, even those with an obvious propaganda agenda.
In contrast to many war time stories, this one is less about the heroism of the
Allies and more about the honour and integrity of a German officer.
Far from being an idealistic fanatic and a sadist, which is how Germans are
often portrayed in war films, Captain Langsdorff is the epitome of the
professional naval officer, executing his duty with efficiency without
sacrificing his humanity. This is not a film about the glory and
sacrifice of battle, but rather one about one man’s determination to prevent
the savagery of war from eroding the noble precepts by which he lives.
Pursuit of the Graf Spree - TCM.com Frank Miller
Cult director Michael Powell returned to the military milieu
of such earlier triumphs of his as 49th Parallel (1941) and One of
Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942) for Pursuit of the Graf Spee (1956),
an epic war drama about the naval battle that marked the "twilight of the
gods" for the German fleet. Like all of his films, it combined a startling
use of color with Powell's trademark ability to tell a story through visual
details. And after a string of failures with his producing, writing and
directing partner, Emeric Pressburger, his deft combination of thrilling battle
scenes and the human side of war marked a return to box-office glory.
The British Powell and the Hungarian-born Pressburger had first worked together
in 1939 as co-directors of The Spy in Black. They would continue their
partnership through 15 films on which they shared producing, writing and
directing credits (Powell did most of the directing; Pressburger most of the
writing), forming their own production company, The Archers, in 1942. But after
such international hits as Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes
(1948), they fell on hard times. When they were invited to attend an
Argentinean film festival in 1954, they decided they couldn't take time from
trying to resuscitate their careers unless they made it a working vacation.
Pressburger did some research and suggested that they use the trip to gather
background on the defeat of the German light battleship Admiral Graf Spee
in 1942 off the shores of Uruguay. The legendary naval battle, in which three
smaller British cruisers -- the Exeter, the Ajax and the Achilles
-- outmaneuvered, outclassed and ultimately out-negotiated the impressive
German ship, was considered by many historians to be a major turning point in
the war.
Early in the planning stages, the team was hard-pressed to find a human angle
to the story. They didn't want to do just a pseudo-documentary about ships at
sea. Then, while interviewing one of the surviving British naval officers,
Pressburger was given a copy of I Was a Prisoner on the Graf Spee, a
memoir by Captain Patrick Dove, a merchant seaman whose ship was sunk by the
Germans. During his time on the Graf Spee, he had become close to the
German Capt. Lansgdorff and developed a grudging respect for him. Their
relationship became the story's human focus.
To shoot the naval battles, Powell worked out an arrangement with the British
Navy to film maneuvers in the Mediterranean. He even got shots of the Ajax
and the Achilles, which had been part of the original battle. Since the British
had nothing close to the size of the Graf Spee, they had to use a U.S.
ship, the USS Salem, though that led to complications when the U.S. Navy
refused to let them put any Nazi insignia on the ship. So they shot around any
possible German markings while filming the American ship, then used a British
ship for close-ups.
For the climactic scene, in which the German captain scuttles his ship rather
than hand it over to the British, technicians constructed a six-foot-deep tank
at Pinewood Studios with wave machines, wind machines and a 23-foot-long model
complete in every detail, but only on the side they needed to shoot. After
blowing up the model several times, editor Reginald Mills intercut different
shots so that the explosion would build to a stunning climax over the course of
several minutes, much longer than it had taken the real Graf Spee to go
up. All of this was combined with studio scenes of such British luminaries as
Anthony Quayle and Peter Finch playing officers on opposite sides of the battle
and location footage of the port of Montevideo, where thousands of locals
served as extras for the Graf Spee's arrival and departure.
When Powell and Pressburger finally screened the film for their backers at the
J. Arthur Rank Studios, the results were so impressive they decided to hold
back release for a year. The Royal Command Performance for 1955 had already
been chosen, and they knew Pursuit of the Graf Spee (or as it was called
in England, The Battle of the River Plate) was a natural for that honor.
Indeed, not only was the film chosen for the 1956 Command Performance, but it
became a big winner at the British box office, marking the last great success
for The Archers before Powell and Pressburger decided to dissolve their
history-making partnership.
BFI
Screenonline: Powell and Pressburger
Creators of some Britain's most
vivid and imaginative cinema, by Mark Duguid
BFI
Screenonline: Late Powell and Pressburger by Sergio Angelini
DVD
Outsider Camus
Pursuit
of the Graf Spee (1957) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Glenn Erickson
History
on Film
User
reviews from imdb Author: grafspee from Australia
User
reviews from imdb Author: Robert J. Maxwell
(rmax304823@yahoo.com) from Deming,
New Mexico
User
reviews from imdb Author: Stephen Bailey (diana@bailey6770.fsnet.co.uk)
from Lincoln England
User
reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: bkoganbing from Buffalo, New York
User
reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Terrell-4 from San Antonio, Texas
User reviews from imdb (Page 3) Author: robertguttman from Tappan, New York
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
Channel
4 Film capsule review
Variety review
ILL MET BY MOONLIGHT
aka: Night Ambush
Great Britain (104 mi) 1957 co-director: Emeric Pressburger
Ill Met by Moonlight (1956) BritMovie
On occupied Crete British Major Paddy Leigh-Fermor plans to demoralise the German forces by kidnapping Commander in Chief General Kreipe with the help of Captain William Stanley Moss and the local underground resistance movement. Disguised as German Military Police, they hijack Kreipe’s car and, concealed by a heavy mist, thread their way on foot across the mountains unseen. Kreipe attempts to delay escape by claiming to have injured a shoulder, and sets a trail for his men to follow using his hat, medals and buttons.
The kidnappers find the rendezvous point surrounded by Germans, but after Kreipe has tried to bribe one of the Cretan boys, his plan backfires and the troops leave the spot unprotected. On the beach, Leigh-Fermor and Moss realise that they do not know how to signal Morse to the waiting British ship. Kreipe admonishes them as amateurs until Sandy, a British officer masquerading as a Cretan, signals to the vessel and they are picked up. Once aboard ship, Kreipe is handed his hat, medals and buttons, collected by Moss during the escape, and realises that his captors are not such amateurs as he believed.
Ill
Met by Moonlight (1957) James
Travers from FilmsdeFrance
During WWII, the island of Crete is occupied by the Nazis, although the local resistance groups intend that this will only be a temporary arrangement. One of the groups is headed by Major Patrick Leigh-Fermor, nicknamed Philedem by his Cretan friends. He has a plan to kidnap the German Commander-in-Chief, General Kriepe, and take him to Cairo, with the help of a newly arrived British officer, Captain Stanley Moss. Although the night-time abduction goes as planned, the General proves to be more trouble than anticipated...
Ill Met by Moonlight is the film that marked the end
of the long and fruitful collaboration of the legendary director-writing team
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. A humdrum, pretty inconsequential
wartime drama, the film lacks the stylistic touches, dramatic focus and scale
of previous Archers productions, but is passable entertainment – if you can
live with the jarring mismatch between the real location and the unconvincing
studio mock-ups.
Still shackled with the smooth nice guy image he fashioned for himself in the Doctor
films, Dirk Bogarde is a bizarre casting choice for the part of a murderous
maverick soldier and, far from being the butch action hero, he appears
distinctly camp in certain scenes. Fortunately, P&P regulars Marius
Goring and Cyril Cusack are on hand to bring a touch of realism to the
proceedings and prevent the whole thing from degenerating into a mincing
pantomime. Whilst not the best film to come out of the Powell and
Pressburger stable, and a substantial letdown after the epic Battle
of the River Plate (1956), Ill Met by Moonlight still has a
certain whimsical appeal.
Alex Vetchinsky - Writer - Films as Art Director/Production ... John Baxter from Film Reference
BFI
Screenonline: Late Powell and Pressburger by Sergio Angelini
Ill Met by
Moonlight: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia ... Absolute Astronomy
DVD Outsider Camus
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
User
reviews from imdb Author: Spleen from Canberra, Australia
User reviews from imdb Author: bob the moo from Birmingham, UK
The New York Times (Howard Thompson) review
THE HONEYMOON (Luna de Miel)
Great Britain Spain (109 mi) 1959 ‘Scope
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
The last of Powell's ballet films, unfortunately not a patch on The Red Shoes, or even The Tales of Hoffmann. A slim story - prima ballerina Tcherina travelling on honeymoon with Steel in Spain, and being drawn into performing again by Antonio - is thankfully enlivened by a couple of beautifully shot ballet sequences (music by Theodorakis and de Falla) choreographed by Antonio and Massine. Many of Powell's customary themes are there, including that of the ambivalence of artistic creation, but delivered in fairly lifeless fashion compared to his best work. That said, Georges Périnal's Technicolor camerawork is as stunning as ever.
Luna De
Miel (1959) BritMovie
Honeymooning in Spain with his bride Anna, Australian farmer Kit Kelly (Anthony Steele) offers a lift to a stranded motorist who they discover is a famous dancer. Learning that Anna is a former ballerina, Antonio asks her to join his company, but the newlyweds insist on continuing with their journey. Antonio meets them at every stop and persists with his efforts to persuade her to dance with him. Kit becomes increasingly jealous, more so when he finds Anna rehearsing with Antonio. Anna later dreams of dancing in Antonio’s ballet, but -’sleep-dancing’ out to the edge of the roof of the hotel – is rescued by Kit before the dance reaches its tragic conclusion. They leave Madrid to continue their honeymoon. Antonio announces that his dance company is about to embark on their own world tour, he will be looking for Anna as they travel.
User reviews from imdb Author: Steve Crook (steve@brainstorm.co.uk)
from London, England
Before the restoration it was like a travelogue with a few dance sequences.
Now that it's been restored (by Charles Doble) it is like a totally different
film. Much better balanced than in previously seen versions where much of the
story & the ballets were cut leaving it as little more than a travelogue.
The flamenco between Antonio (I) and Carmen Rojas is the sexiest dancing I've
ever seen on screen.
However, it does still show the lack of Emeric Pressburger. There are plot
holes here & there and nobody can work out why Anthony Steel is there.
But do try to see it, preferably on the big screen (CinemaScope) that it was
made for and makes good use of.
Review
of film as restored by Charles Doble
Steve Crook from Powell & Pressburger Pages
PEEPING TOM
aka: Face of Fear
Time Out review Tony Rayns
In the early '60s, there was one brave film (which had nothing to do with kitchen sinks or working class tragedies) which struggled single-handed to drag the British cinema into the present tense: Michael Powell's phenomenal Peeping Tom. It centres on scoptophilia (voyeurism, or the morbid desire to watch), and so the central character naturally works in movies; but his obsessions are compounded by his childhood experiences at the hands of his father, a psychologist interested in the mechanisms of human fear, and he grows up with a helpless compulsion to kill. Mark Lewis (Böhm, later rediscovered by Fassbinder for Fox) is the most gentle of psychopaths, an eternal victim whose crimes are cries of rage against his father and stepmother, and at the same time pathetic rehearsals for his own inevitable death. A Freudian script of notable maturity teases limitless implications from this premise, while maintaining a healthy sense of humour. First-timers may care to note that Daddy in this Oedipal riddle is played by Michael Powell.
Most Controversial Films of All Time Tim Dirks Film Site
Although now widely praised (like Hitchcock's psychological horror film counterpart Psycho (1960) - and the film's thematic counterpart Rear Window (1954)), this chilling and disturbing film about voyeurism, child abuse, and serial murder by honored film-maker Michael Powell was originally widely hated, universally loathed and denounced, especially by British critics.
They pronounced it amoral, perverted, necrophilic and trashy. It was called nauseating, depressing, and stench-filled -- and allegedly destroyed the career of its director. It suffered from the devastating reviews and was removed from theaters and excised by its distributor. This censored version was briefly available in trashy US theatres in 1962 and in selected arthouse venues, but then removed. Not until 1979 was a full-length version viewable -- at the New York Film Festival. Over time, it has been critically re-evaluated and vindicated, and is now universally regarded as a masterpiece.
It was a twisted portrayal of shy studio cameraman (and morbid serial killer) Mark Lewis (Karlheinz Boehm) who filmed call girls and then killed them with the metal-spiked leg of his hand-held camera tripod (with a mirror attached so that victims could watch themselves dying). In the film's shocking opening, filmed from the point-of-view of the voyeuristic camera's cross-haired viewfinder, a prostitute negotiated, walked upstairs, disrobed, and then gave a look of horror as she was murdered.
The infamous film with dark subject matter was criticized for its unsavory view of the perverted crimes perpetrated (and witnessed almost as "snuff films") upon unsuspecting female victims (a prostitute, an actress-dancer, and a nude model). In a subtle way, it appeared to implicate the voyeuristic viewer and force the audience to identify with the awful and perverse crimes committed by the madman. However, it masterfully told the back-story of how the monstrous killer had a very troubled childhood with a sadistic father (played by director Powell in a cameo) who filmed him for his studies on the physiology of fear in children, and contributed to his son's violent and conflicted subconscious (by observing his reactions to a lizard dropped on his bed, his mother's corpse, or his father's new young wife).
Peeping Tom - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Andrew Tudor from Film Reference
Almost the most remarkable thing about Peeping Tom is the critical reception it provoked. This film, disingeniously described by its director Michael Powell as "a very tender film, a very nice one," was uniformly abused in its own country. Derek Hill's infamous claim that "the only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer" may have been the most violent of critical assessments, but it was all too typical. Powell's career as a feature-film director never recovered from the assault, and the road to critical re-assessment of Peeping Tom has been long and hard. Anyone concerned with the whys and wherefores of this process need look no further than Ian Christie (ed.) Powell Pressburger and Others , where the nature of the affront Powell offered to orthodox criticism is clearly analyzed. Peeping Tom was only the climactic case in a long series.
None of this is to suggest, however, that Peeping Tom is not a disturbing movie. In narrative alone it is immediately problematic: any story about a man who murders women with the sharpened leg of a tripod, filming them as they die, is likely to attract adverse attention. When the young man in question is played straight, as someone with whom we are invited to empathise, and not as some rolling eyed gothic horror, then the difficulties are redoubled. How can we empathise with such perverse pleasures? And when the film-maker involved is such a well-established talent, how can we reconcile his presumed "seriousness" with what is conventionally the subject for a shocker?
Today such difficulties would not be quite as pressing as they were in 1960. Ranges of acceptability have widened, and the line between Art and Exploitation is no longer so easily drawn. Yet even today Peeping Tom is genuinely disturbing. For all our familiarity with violent movie murder, with sexuality, with the psychology of perversion, Powell's movie can still leave a spectator profoundly uneasy. For Peeping Tom refuses to let us off the hook after the fashion of so many horrific movies. Its elaborate structure of films within films implicates us as spectators in the voyeurism that fuels Mark's violence. We see the murders through his viewfinder; later we see them on screen as he projects them for his pleasure. We see his father's filmed record of experiments on the young Mark, experiments which have turned him into a voyeuristic killer. We see the movie studio where he works, the setting where he will murder (of all people) Moira Shearer, star of Powell's The Red Shoes . As the internal cross-references multiply (and they are endless) the implication insinuates itself into our awareness. In watching film, all film, the pleasures that we take are finally no different to Mark's; the gap between his and our voyeurism is too small for comfort.
It was Powell's misfortune to make Peeping Tom at a time when commitment to a one-dimensional notion of realist cinema was at its height. Peeping Tom , like all of Powell's cinema, is founded on a highly self-conscious manipulation of film itself, and it is impossible here to do justice to the resonating visual complexity of films like A Matter of Life and Death , Black Narcissus , and, of course, Peeping Tom . In this cinema it is the medium that is the source of pleasure and the focus of attention, not some instantly apparent moral ingredient. Peeping Tom turns that cinematic awareness back on itself, offering aesthetic satisfactions along with their disturbing implications. It is a film that is paramountly about cinema, about the experience of cinema, a film which makes voyeurs of us all. That is genuinely disturbing.
Peeping
Tom (1960) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
Mark Lewis is a shy young man who works as a focus puller at a film studio but has aspirations of becoming a film director. He supplements his meagre income by taking pornographic photographs for a newsagent and renting out rooms in the house he inherited from his father. Although outwardly normal, Mark is the victim of a dark and dangerous obsession: he derives a macabre pleasure from watching others suffer. One evening, he follows a prostitute back to her home and kills her, filming the whole incident with his portable camera. Not long after, he arranges for a female extra at the studio where he works to stay behind, ostensibly so that he can make a film with her. She meets a similar fate. One of Mark’s tenants, Helen Stephens, takes an interest in the strange young man and is horrified to learn that, as a boy, he was subjected to cruel psychological experiments by his father...
Possibly the greatest British horror film ever made, certainly
one of the most controversial, Peeping Tom marks a surprising departure
for its director Michael Powell. In the 1940s, through his association
with Emeric Pressburger, Powell became one of the leading figures in the
British film industry, crafting such timeless masterpieces as The
Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Matter
of Life and Death (1946) and The Red
Shoes (1948). Peeping Tom is a much darker and far more
psychologically complex film than anything Powell had previously made, although
the magical realism and subtle irony of his earlier films does break through in
a few places. The film was not well received on its first release and the
torrent of adverse criticism that it aroused would effectively end Powell’s
filmmaking career.
Interestingly, Peeping Tom was released just a few months before Alfred
Hitchcock’s Psycho
(1960), a film that has many similarities to Powell’s and with which it is
often compared. Both films feature a dangerous psychopath who is
portrayed as a likeable, albeit slightly sinister, young man; both have scenes
of a graphic violent nature; and both have voyeurism as a central theme.
Whereas Psycho proved to be a major box office success and would secure
the international reputation of its director, Peeping Tom was subjected
to a clumsy reedit and proved to be a commercial disaster. Some critics
described Powell’s film as repugnant, others said it was perverse. When
the film was restored in the late 1970s, thanks mainly to the efforts of some
notable admirers such as Martin Scorsese, it was almost universally hailed as
one of the triumphs of British cinema.
Perhaps the hostile reception that Peeping Tom met with on its first
release had less to do with its horror content (which is negligible by today’s
standards) and more to do with its subtext – that cinema is inherently a
voyeuristic artform, one that depends crucially on the voyeuristic instincts of
the public. Right from the opening sequence, Powell is making an
identification between the central character, who is soon revealed to be a
killer, and the audience. Cinema entertainment satisfies a craving for
vicarious experience to which every one of us is prone. The fact the Mark
Lewis is portrayed not as a villain, but sympathetically, as a tragic victim,
strengthens this viewer identification and we are drawn ever more into his dark
lonely world. We become complicit in the crimes he commits, which he does
not out of malice, but in response to tortured psychosexual impulses arising
from a traumatised childhood. The real voyeur in this film is not
the protagonist, but us, the audience.
Peeping Tom is a much darker, far more unsettling film than Psycho,
surpassing it in narrative complexity, acting performances (both Carl Boehm and
Anna Massey are excellent) and cinematography. It may not have Psycho’s
memorable shock set-pieces, but it is more successful at luring the audience
into the mind of a psychopath, whilst giving a deeper sense of what voyeurism means.
Far from being the cheap exploitation shocker that some critics seemed to think
it was, Peeping Tom is actually a moral film, one that warns of the
dangers of depicting excessive violence in cinema. What it suggests is
that, by pandering to an audience’s craving for titillation, film directors run
the risk of fashioning a society where individuals are inured to violence and
regard all suffering and cruelty, no matter how obscene, as
entertainment. The fact that Peeping Tom no longer has the power to
shock as it once did is proof that these messages have gone unheeded.
Peeping Tom Criterion essay by Laura Mulvey, November 15,
1999
Peeping Tom (1960) - The Criterion Collection
EuroScreenwriters - Interviews with European Film Directors ... Look at the Sea (Peeping Tom), by Jean-Paul Torok from Positif, 1960
A
Very Tender Film, a Very Nice One - Powell and Pressburger Very
Tender Film, a Very Nice One: Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, by Elliott Stein from Film Comment, September, 1979 (pdf)
Peeping Tom • Senses of
Cinema Peter Wilshire from Senses of Cinema, July 22, 2005
The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960 • Senses of ... John Orr from Senses of Cinema, July 9, 2009
BFI
Screenonline: Late Powell and Pressburger by Sergio Angelini
BFI Screen Online Mark Duguid, also here: Show full synopsis
Kino Obscura — The Restructuring of Visual Narrative in Michael ... The Restructuring of Visual Narrative in Michael Powell’s ‘Peeping Tom,’ by David Liu from Kino Obscura, December 12, 2009
PEEPING TOM Blue Iris from Hysteria-Lives
The Seduction The
pornographic impulse in slasher films, by Patricia Erens from Jump Cut, April 1987
Re-Vision: Essays in
Feminist Criticism Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism,
edited by Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams, reviewed by
Ellen Seiter from Jump Cut, February
1988
Everyman and no man: white, heterosexual masculinity in
contemporary serial killer movies Nicola Rehling
from Jump Cut, Spring 2007
Michael Powell's Peeping Tom - Bright Lights Film Journal Mark Chapman from Bright Lights Film Journal, April 30, 2010
Peeping
Tom - TCM.com Felicia Feaster
Electric Sheep Magazine Virginie Sélavy
PEEPING TOM (1959) « Verdoux October 31, 2007
not coming to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor) review
Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (Paul Cronly)
The Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem]
Where the Long Tail Ends Matt Gamble
British Horror Films (Chris Wood) review
Horror Express review Jonathan Stryker
Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon
filmcritic.com (Mark Athitakis) review [4.5/5]
Too Many Projects Film Club: peeping tom, by michael powell August 14, 2008
DVD Outsider: Peeping Tom DVD review
DVD Outsider Camus
VideoVista review Sean Parker
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection
DVD MovieGuide dvd review [Criterion Collection] Chris Galloway
DVD Verdict (Sean McGinnis) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review Criterion Collection
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review [Criterion Collection]
Classic Horror review Nate Yapp
Total Sci-Fi Online review Matt McCallister, also seen here: Dreamwatch Total Sci Fi [Matt McAllister]
Exploded Goat review [Kent Conrad]
Peeping Tom John White from 10kbullets
Bloodtype Online [Jennie Milojevic]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [3.5/5]
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [4/5]
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Edinburgh U Film Society (Keith H. Brown) review
Peeping Tom (1960) BritMovie
Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) review [A]
CineScene.com (Richard Doyle) review
The Thunderdome Crespodamus
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [A]
Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar
Movie Magazine International review Erik Petersen
Classic Film Guide - capsule review
Film locations for Peeping Tom
The Peeping Tom timebomb Xan Brooks interviews Powell’s widow and Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker from The Guardian, November 18, 2010
Martin
Scorsese talks to Mark Kermode about his love of Michael Powell movies: 'My
mother would ask - is it necessary to watch that again?' Video interview by Mark Kermode and Cameron
Robertson from The Observer,
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]
Peeping Tom may have been nasty but it didn't deserve critics' cold shoulder John Patterson from The Guardian, November 12, 2010
Peeping Tom, pornography and the press Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, November 16, 2010
A
peep at Peeping Tom: behind the scenes on Michael Powell's neglected
masterpiece photos from The Guardian,
Peeping
Tom – review Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian,
Peeping
Tom – review Philip French from The Observer,
BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) review
Baltimore City Paper (Ian Grey) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
Peeping Tom :: rogerebert.com :: Great Movies May 2, 1999, also seen in a film discussion group, December 10, 2009: Peeping Tom (Michael Powell) - Blu-ray Forum
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Peeping Tom (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Reference for Peeping Tom (film) - Search.com
Turner Classic Movies review Michael T. Toole on Moira Shearer
THE QUEEN’S GUARDS
Great Britain (110 mi) 1961 ‘Scope
Powell's sad farewell to British features was, by his own admission, crippled by lack of any conviction in the script. In a series of flashbacks from a Trooping the Colour ceremony, a young officer (Daniel Massey) remembers the abiding family problem: his dead brother is forever held up to him as an example by their military father, who is totally obsessed with the pride of the service. Despite an imposing performance by Raymond Massey in this role, neither the period frolics (which include a visit to a 'beat' club) nor the ponderous heroics carry much conviction, with only the faintest whiff of the flair or emotion that infused The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.
The Queen’s Guards (1961) BritMovie
Captains John Fellowes and Henry Wynne-Walton pass through their training at Sandhurst and are sent to the Middle East; John to lead a paratroop regiment while Henry commands a platoon of armoured cars of the Household Brigade. John’s father, a disabled ex-Guards officer, constantly compares him to his elder brother David, killed in the desert during the war, while his mother still hopes that David is alive and will one day return. Discovering the truth about his brother’s death, John determines during his own desert campaign to match his brother’s courage and actions. As the Trooping the Colour ceremony takes place, with John leading the Escort and Henry leading the Sovereign’s Escort, Captain Fellowes watches the parade, finally proud of his second son.
User
reviews from imdb Author: patrickvancleef from
United Kingdom
Quite a poignant movie if I remember correctly and I've only seen it once,
when first released. For some reason I've always thought the title was
"Red letter day" and not "The Queens Guards".Maybe someone
can check it out or maybe I'm like the Raymond Massey character, just getting
old with my memory playing tricks.
Considering it was made at the start of the 60's the generation gap is in full
swing here between father and son, both military men, the father played by
Raymond Massey is a crippled veteran. The son, played by Massey's real life son
Daniel is a Guardsman poised to take the Queen's salute and standard at that
day's ceremony. The storyline involves tradition, honour and indeed bitterness
and the bickering between father and son on the day of the "Trooping of
the Colour", a pageant which takes place every June in London's
"Horseguards Parade" in honour of the Queens Birthday. There is a
flashback sequence telling of the son's ignominious military exploits over the
Suez crisis which the father believes is a blot on the family AND the guards.
There is a dead son who the father believes deserves all the family honour.The
wrong son died syndrome.
The scene where Massey struggles to get to the window using a cane to pull
himself along on bars attached to the ceiling of the apartment overlooking
Horseguards Parade.(Now THAT apartment I would love to have) in time to watch
his son take the Queen's salute is indeed poignant. It is actually quite a
stuffy film but very fine acting from all concerned saves it from complete
obscurity.Not Michael Powell's best effort.
User reviews from imdb Author: Deusvolt from United
States
"Guards! Guards! Call out the Guards!" And this could only mean
the Queen's Guards and the English look to them in times of military emergency.
With their ceremonial uniform of Buckingham red with that unlikely shako
supposedly made of bear skin; with their mounted units wearing polished
breastplates during full dress parades, they are world famous as tourist
attractions. Little do people know that these are the cream of the elite of the
British military corps. If I am not mistaken, their members are selected from
the various services. Thus, they are commandos, paratroopers, tank men,
intelligence specialists, etc.
As a little boy, I was fully taken in by the ceremonial parade at the end of
the movie: "Escort to the colors! Forward!" Somehow when the
goosestep is done by The Guards, it doesn't seem sinister. And the intricate
but highly dignified dressage executed by the commander of the mounted unit is
admirable.
The military action is in the Middle East in connection with the Suez Canal
crisis in 1956. Egypt then took full control of the canal and the British and
French felt that their interests were threatened.
There is a touching scene near the end during a ceremonial parade with the
Queen in attendance. A semi-paralyzed veteran has an apartment overlooking the
square (Trafalgar?). He's bedridden but he manages to put on his military
uniform. There is a series of bars on the ceiling of his apartment and with a
hook or a cane, he manages to get a hold of them and he painfully and
laboriously locomotes himself to the window to get a view of The Guards as they
are honored by the Queen.
PaPAS
Review Steve Crook from Powell &
Pressburger Pages
Channel
4 Film capsule review
HERZOG BLAUBART’S BURG (Bluebeard’s Castle)
Germany (60 mi) 1963
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
An intriguing rarity for Powell completists, this straightforward performance film of Bartok's opera was shot only after the score had already been recorded in Zagreb. As a result, Powell was free to indulge himself with the look of the film, so long-term collaborator Hein Heckroth went to town on the cobwebby gauzes and nets. And indeed, it does look terrific, if rather too busy, a brooding tapestry of browns, blues and greys. That said, it's inevitably of limited interest only, and finally something of a footnote from (two of) the men behind The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann.
Chicago Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum]
After the hostile reception to his 1960 masterpiece Peeping Tom, Michael Powell was virtually banished from English cinema, and most of his remaining oeuvre is a scattered assortment of TV commissions and Australian features. Made in 1964 for West German TV, this rarely seen one-hour adaptation of Bela Bartok's only opera, based on a libretto by Bela Balazs (later known as a film theorist and as screenwriter of Leni Riefenstahl's first feature), is a particular standout, especially for its vivid colors and semiabstract, neoprimitive decor (by Hein Heckroth, who also designed the sets for The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffman). The two performers are producer Norman Foster (not to be confused with the Hollywood actor and director) in the title role and Anna Raquel Satre as Bluebeard's doomed wife, Judith. In accordance with Powell's wishes, the English subtitles briefly describe and clarify the action but don't translate the text.
Filmjourney Doug Cummings
Now that serial killer musicals are back in fashion, LACMA’s screening last Fridayof Michael Powell’s rarely seen Bluebeard’s Castle (1964)–with Powell’s widow and longtime Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker in attendance–seems especially appropriate. Made for West German TV in the doldrums of Powell’s post-Peeping Tom (1960) blacklisting, it’s a startlingly expressionist, one-act, one-hour adaptation of Bela Bartok’s sole opera (with lyrics by film theorist Bela Balazs).
The producer/star Norman Foster (who should not be confused with the Hollywood actor/director of the same name, and whose widow recently approved distribution of the film with Powell’s summary subtitles) plays the mythological duke; Bluebeard’s new wife, Judith (Ana Raquel Satre), unveils his sordid past by unlocking a series of rooms that finally reveal the bodies of all his previous wives, whom he murdered. The opera (and the film) cast the story in tragic terms highlighting the inability of romantic commitment to withstand either the darkest corners of the psyche or the irrevocable forces of fate.
Schoonmaker affectionately quipped that the production cost “about twenty-five cents” and involved “a few students and a lot of polystyrene.” But don’t let that fool you–Bluebeard’s Castle is an intense and visually dazzling film that recalls the most experimental moments of Powell’s (and Pressburger’s) The Red Shoes (1948) and The Tales of Hoffman (1951). Bertrand Tavernier (last seen passionately promoting movies in Todd McCarthy’s documentary on Pierre Rissient) and George Romero both count themselves among the film’s ardent fans.
The sets, in fact, were envisioned by Hein Heckroth, the surrealist painter who designed those two previous movies, as well as Powell and Pressburger’s third opera film, Oh… Rosalinda! (1955). While the decor may be of modest construction, it’s highly effective: shadowy, abstract sculptures, vaguely evoking women’s anguished faces and bodies, which suggest not only the walls of the castle but its very spirit of death. Splattered paint and menacing forms adorn layers of transparent fabrics that appear and disappear according to their illumination by vivid theatrical lighting.
Like a garishly-hued The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the abstract sets are not only striking in two-dimensional, pictorial terms, but also exhibit an immersive, three-dimensional depth by shifting within the film’s space like a hellish phantasmagoria. Each door–resembling a monolithic gravestone–unveils its own degrees of beauty and horror; an armory, a treasury, a garden, even a distant mountain range are suggested through countless layers of complex, sculpted and painted forms, challenging the viewer to penetrate and decipher them like the turbulent emotions swarming within Bluebeard himself. One visual highlight is a pool of tears that Judith leans over, teardrops descending in the foreground painted on a transparent fabric. As she looks at her reflection, a fluid poured into the pool is scattered in jagged, concentric ripples, echoing the general set design before turning blood red. As a matter of fact, blood eventually finds its way behind each and every door Judith enters–and can even be seen in the surrounding clouds.
The opera was recorded for the film in Zagreb (Schoonmaker told us the conductor finished the recording and had to race to conduct a performance of Carmen later that evening) and Powell later shot the film to coincide with the pre-recorded music. (Schoonmaker also claimed Scorsese utilized the same technique for his Goodfellas montage set to Eric Clapton’s “Lela.”)Despite the potential danger of this approach, the camera and editing never seem constrained by it; though the film was obviously carefully planned out, it never feels schematic. In fact, Bluebeard’s Castle is an shining example of how to make a great film out of virtually nothing, a film that reverberates in the consciousness like a haunting death cry, its images and emotions as worthy of scrutiny as the classics of German expressionism.
Incidentally, in surfing the web, I found a fascinating page at the University of Leeds that claims to offer video clips of an academic dialogue surrounding the film, including a lecture and discussion by Powell critic Ian Christie. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be working for me–maybe you’ll have better luck.
User reviews from imdb Author: david melville
(dwingrove@qmuc.ac.uk) from Edinburgh, Scotland
User reviews from imdb Author: tom.hamilton
THEY’RE A WEIRD MOB
Australia Great Britain (112 mi) 1966
They’re a Weird Mob (1966) BritMovie
Arriving in Australia to work on his Cousin Leonardo’s newspaper, Italian-born Nino Culotta finds that Leonardo has fled to Canada, leaving a string of debts behind him. Kay Kelly is one of those owed money and she tells Nino bluntly that she does not approve of ‘dagos’. Nino finds work as a builder’s labourer, and begins to repay Kay what is owed to her. When she is later advised by her solicitor not to accept any more money from him she attempts to return it, causing further disagreement. After sleeping rough in the deserted newspaper offices, Nino moves in with workmate Joe and his family. Meeting at an Italian restaurant, Nino and Kay realise that they have fallen in love. Her father Harry however, insists that he has no time for ‘dagos’, but eventually softens toward Nino, who – after a year in Australia – is now one of the ‘mob’.
Urban Cinefile dvd review Andrew L. Urban
Regarded as a classic, this film takes a kindhearted look at
Sydney in the mid 60s; it was released in 1966 and I can well relate to the
story of a migrant whose job expectations as a sports writer were not met and
ended up digging holes. I arrived that very year and before getting a reporting
job on a country paper, I, too, dug holes. So I can attest to the film's
ambient accuracy as it shows a welcoming and almost universally good natured
Aussie ethos. The homogenous white urban population is variously dressed in
neat frocks or bikinis on the beach, the men in plain suits or singlets ...
It's an Australia that no longer exists, making the film something of a social
document worth watching. Walter Chiari is excellent as the Italian migrant,
avoiding the cliché traps thanks to Michael Powell's direction and a genuinely
warm hearted script. The humour is slight by today's standards but it's sincere
and well developed out of both character and situation. It makes much of the
prevailing Aussie language (fair dinkum, mate) and how it strikes a migrant.
Some films are popular for obvious reasons, but some just hit the right note;
in this case the note of self recognition helped the film to Australian
success, and its exploration of a then rarely seen Aussie society helped it
internationally. A sweet and friendly film about a decent migrant meeting
decent Aussies in a shiny new country. The we were ....
Contexts in which to
Place They're a Weird Mob ... - Senses of Cinema Contexts
in which to Place They're a Weird Mob and into which You Might Never Have
Placed it Before, by Quentin Turnour from Senses of Cinema, July 22, 2005
DVD Outsider Camus
Michael D's Region 4 DVD Info Page
DVD Net
(Jules Faber) dvd review [Region 4]
The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [1/4]
Variety review
AGE OF CONSENT
Helen Mirren in her first screen role gets to prance around naked on the beach at the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, where she and the brilliant natural environment on Dunk Island, including some spectacular underwater photography, are the prime reasons to see this film. Mirren was in her young twenties at the time, fresh off Shakespearean theater roles in England, never having shot in front of a camera before, but Powell’s emphasis on the unpretentious curiosity of her character and the inherent beauty all around them makes for an impressively gorgeous look to this film, shot on wonderfully pristine beach locations, once more utilizing a reclusive island atmosphere where his film career began, with THE EDGE OF THE WORLD in 1937, that supposedly emphasizes the artistic rebirth of a painter (James Mason). With every shot making use of the best light possible, where the everchanging light sparkling off the shimmering water is simply irresistible, as, of course, is Ms. Mirren.
Time Out review Tony Rayns
Not quite Powell's last film, since he
followed it with The Boy Who Turned Yellow for the Children's Film
Foundation, and his revised version of The Edge of the World; but it is
a last return to his favourite theme of the artist taking stock of his life,
which he treats with new mellowness while exploiting '60s liberality to give it
a direct erotic dimension. Mason plays a commercially successful painter who
retires from New York to the Great Barrier Reef; his creative drive is
re-awakened when he finds there an innocent but physically mature teenager,
whom he strips and paints at the first opportunity. The emotional and
psychological results of the encounter are followed through with exemplary
seriousness and wit, in some way anticipating the themes and visuals of Nicolas
Roeg's Walkabout. There are some nervous insertions of redundant comic relief,
but not enough to shatter the prevailing mood: brilliant sunlight illuminating
all the unmomentous ins and outs of a human passion.
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]
Sublime, blissful, comical escapist fantasy of
disillusioned NY painter Bradley Morahan (James Mason) returning to nearly
uninhabited island in Australian homeland seeking scenic solitude only to
stumble upon a nubile teen beauty that reinvigorates him. Trapped in paradise,
the only home the free-spirited orphan living with her bitter old bag of a
drunken grandmother has ever known, crayfish and oyster catching Cora (Helen
Mirren) longs to secure enough money to escape to Brisbane to become a
hairdresser. Trying a lot harder to be honorable than he did as Humbert Humbert
in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, Mason simply helps her attain her dream by paying
the underage girl to model - in the nude - transforming a ragged old shack into
a vibrant tapestry that celebrates the possibilities of art at least as much as
the female form. Based on a semi-autobiographical novel by artist Norman
Lindsay, the subject of the movie Sirens, Age of Consent is a celebration of
liberation on many fronts for both artist and model. Nearly finished due to the
backlash of his voyeuristic masterpiece Peeping Tom, Michael Powell was making
low budget films in
Age
of Consent - TCM.com Jeff Stafford
Peeping Tom, the 1960
psychological thriller about a homicidal cinematographer who uses his camera to
capture the death throes of the models he murders, is regarded today as one of
director Michael Powell's masterpieces. At the time of its release, however, it
was universally reviled by most critics and brought an abrupt halt to Powell's
career. Some even mistakenly believed it was his last film and even Powell
wondered if he'd ever work again. He weathered the storm though and returned to
feature film making working on two low profile projects which are often missing
from his filmography - The Queen's Guards (1961) and Herzog
Blaubart's Burg (1964). He even tried his hand at directing some television
episodes of Espionage (1964), The Defenders (1965) and The
Nurses (1965). Unfortunately, none of the post-1961 features he directed
matched the artistry or popularity of his earlier work with screenwriter and
co-producer/director Emeric Pressburger but he did experience a renewed surge
of creativity when he traveled to
Age of Consent
was based on a 1938 novel by Norman Lindsay who also worked as a political
cartoonist and painter. The story, which dealt with a painter's loss of
interest in his art, might have been a thinly disguised autographical account
of Lindsay's own life but Powell connected with it and also with the idea that
inspiration can spring from the most unlikely circumstances. In this case, the
painter, Bradley Monahan, retreats to an isolated island to escape the commercial
art world and live as a beach bum. Prior to production, Powell told an
interviewer, "My next film is the story of a painter who believes that he
will no longer paint and of a girl who persuades him to begin again...He will
probably end up painting her; but to see a painter sit down and paint a girl,
this could be exciting, but I had the hardest time explaining to my
scriptwriter that this didn't excite me at all. What interested me was the
problem of Creation and the fact that this creation in the case of the painter
was very physical. He will have to struggle, to fight, even more strongly than
he will move away from reality. It will be a slightly bitter comedy that I will
produce with James Mason who will play the leading role."
Powell had wanted to work with James Mason twenty-four years earlier on I
Know Where I'm Going! (1945) but they had been unable to come to terms on
salary. Now both men, entering the final stages of their film careers, seized
the opportunity to make what they hoped would be their first major success in
years. Mason, who was also acting as co-producer, and Powell possibly saw their
film as the antithesis of Stanley Kubrick's Lolita which Mason had
starred in back in 1962; in that film, the relationship between a young girl
and an older man ended in tragedy but in Age of Consent, the relationship leads to a mutually liberating
experience for both parties. The film was also important for Mason in that it
introduced him to his future second wife, Clarissa Kaye, who appears briefly toward
the beginning in a sexual tryst with Bradley.
The filming of Age of Consent
began in March of 1968 in
In the biography James Mason: Odd Man Out, Helen Mirren recalls the
making of Age of Consent:
"James had seen me in a National Youth Theatre season and he and Powell
decided I'd be right for the role, but once we got started Powell kept having
vociferous fits of anger on the set, and James was always there for me, very
gently guiding and teaching as we went along. Having survived that brutal
Clarissa Kaye recalled her bit part and first meeting with Mason in Sheridan
Morley's biography: "I auditioned and got it, despite the fact that they
all said my eyes were too deep, and despite the fact that I was just getting
over pneumonia. The woman in the film was supposed to be an old girlfriend of
James's, and the whole scene was shot in bed, though when I arrived in my
nightdress Powell looked appalled. I told him I was a thirty-six-year-old woman
with a thirty-six-year-old body which sagged in parts and didn't look that good
in the nude, but the real trouble was that because of the pneumonia I rattled
every time I drew breath, and I think even James found it a little strange...Anyway
I shot the scene with a temperature of about 103 and at the end of it we just
got out of bed, said a polite goodbye and I thought that was the end of
it." Several weeks later, however, Mason sent Kaye a long letter,
complimenting her performance, and it marked the beginning of a long
correspondence by mail that eventually evolved into a romance and then
marriage, a much happier one than he experienced with his first wife Pamela.
Mason and Powell were both hoping Age of Consent would be well received in
Powell also pointed out a specific scene in Age of Consent that was a personal favorite and "One of the best
scenes I've ever made in which a dog puts on its own collar. He was a wonderful
dog called Geoffrey, and he had a real old sergeant major owner and a quality I
can only describe as cunning. So when I told him that I wanted the dog to put
on his own collar he said, "I'll have a word with him sir.' I kept hoping
people would remember the film and say, "That's the one in which the dog
puts on his own collar" - but they never did."
It is much easier to assess Age of
Consent now than in 1969 when critics had much higher and
unreasonable expectations for the director behind such masterpieces as Black
Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948). It is true that the film
is very uneven in tone and quality, shifting back and forth between intimate
drama and broad, raucous comedy (especially the sequences with Jack MacGowran).
And a climactic death scene of one of the characters plays like a crude
slapstick routine instead of the tragic resolution of a troubled relationship.
Neva Carr-Glynn's performance as Cora's alcoholic grandmother registers as a
shrill, overbearing caricature and Andonia Katsaros playing a sex-starved
spinster is barely more than a cartoon figure. James Mason, on the other hand,
is immensely likable and laid-back as the purposeless painter, despite an
Australian accent that comes and goes. And Powell is quite correct in praising
the dog Geoffrey, who as Bradley's companion, steals every scene in which he
appears. Most memorable of all is Helen Mirren who has great poise and a
natural beauty that suits her uninhibited character. Never one to avoid nude
scenes, Mirren has several in Age of
Consent but they rarely seem exploitive and often provide a
striking juxtaposition of the human form against the natural beauty of the
One last bit of trivia: Norman Lindsay, whose novel provided the source for Age of Consent, was also the
inspiration behind the 1994 film Sirens which was a fictionalized
account of the painter's life and was actually filmed on Lindsay's estate in
Age of Consent •
Senses of Cinema Christopher Bourne from Senses of Cinema, July 22, 2005
Michael Powell Down
Under: Norman Lindsay's Age of Consent ...
Scott Murray from Senses of
Cinema, July 9, 2009
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review also seen here: The Films of Michael Powell Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film
Notes from a video sleeve Trevor Willsmer from the Powell & Pressburger Pages, 1994
Beyond the age of consent Garry Maddox from The Sydney Morning Herald, June 11, 2005
The Films of Michael Powell : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Jeffrey Kauffman
The Films of Michael Powell (A Matter of Life and Death/Age of ... Gary Couzens from DVD Times
The Films of Michael Powell: The Collector's Choice | DVD Review ... Fernando F. Croce from Slant magazine
DVD Review - The Films of Michael Powell Felix Gonzalez Jr.
The Films Of Michael Powell | DVD | A.V. Club Noel Murray
More Powell -
AGE OF CONSENT - Bright Lights Film Journal
C. Jerry Kutner from Bright
Lights After Dark, February 13, 2007
The
AGE OF CONSENT and STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN (Aka A MATTER ... Erich Kuersten from Bright Lights After Dark, January 3,
2009
Popdose Robert Cashill
Age of Consent ‹ Little White Lies – Independent Film Magazine Stuart George from Little White Lies, June 25, 2009
Camera Journal: Age of Consent Paul Sutton
The Bottom Shelf by Adam Jahnke The Digital Bits
The best DVDs of 2009 (so
far) - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, The
best DVDs of 2009 (so far)
The Films Of Michael Powell Matthew Orlando from DVD Snapshot
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Some Came Running: Three Compositions By Michael Powell, Hannes ... Glenn Kenny
DVD Review: “The Films of Michael Powell” (“A Matter of Life and ... Bob Cashill from Pop Dose, also reviewing A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Age of Consent « Red Herrings Patrick
The Aisle Seat by Andre Dursin
The Film Foundation | THE FILMS OF MICHAEL POWELL, part of “The ... DVD release, January 6, 2009
Reviews of
"Age of Consent (1969)" - Powell & Pressburger The Powell & Pressburger Pages
All location & studio details known The Powell & Pressburger Pages
Fascinating trivia (and any goofs) connected with the film The Powell & Pressburger Pages
Pictures from the PaPAS Gallery The Powell & Pressburger Pages
Helen Mirren bares it all in Age of Consent reissue Jamie Portman from The Victoria Times Colonist, January 23, 2009
Entertainment | A life in transition: 2 films by Michael Powell ... Moira Macdonald from The Seattle Times, February 13, 2007
Michael Powell's 'Age of Consent' on DVD Ruthe Stein from The San Francisco Chronicle, January 11, 2009
New DVDs: Michael Powell Dave Kehr from The New York Times
Michael Powell + Emeric Pressburger - A Matter of Life and Death ... Gary W. Tooze from DVDBeaver
Helen Mirren Gallery Age of Consent
Travel to Dunk Island Fantasy Island, Amanda Woodard from The Guardian, October 29, 2005
Age of Consent (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Helen Mirren - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Norman Lindsay Gallery Home Page
Helen Mirren YouTube (1:14)
Helen Mirren - Age Of Consent (2:18)
Teenage Helen Mirren (3:11)
Age of Consent, 1969, by Michael Powell (3:51)
Helen Mirren (4:00)
THE BOY WHO TURNED YELLOW
Great Britain (55 mi) 1972
The Boy Who Turned Yellow (1972) BritMovie
Sent home from school after falling asleep during a lesson on electricity, John is suddenly turned yellow, as are his fellow passengers on the Underground. A doctor confirms that there is nothing seriously wrong, and a later television discussion concludes that the cause is ’something from outer space’. During the night, a voice from the television wakes John who switches on the set. ‘Nick’ – short for ‘Electronic’ – appears in the room and takes John travelling on electrical waves to the Tower of London where they recover John’s pet mouse Alice, but John is arrested and charged with treason. He is found guilty and sentenced to be executed, but asks to be allowed to watch television as a last request and escapes on the electrical waves, returning home his normal colour again.
User reviews from imdb Author: Darren O'Shaughnessy (darren
shan) from Limerick, Ireland
This simple children's film, made as a way of educating kids through "fun" means, is a small-scale, very dated piece of fluff that would have long ago been lost to cinema history if not for one very crucial element -- it was the final pairing of one of film's finest partnerships, director Michael Powell and writer Emeric Pressburger. After a string of cinematic marvels in the 1940s (including The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, and A Matter Of Life And Death), their fortunes faded. They kept up their partnership as The Archers until 1957, made one more film together in the mid-60s (They're A Weird Mob, which is probably the least seen and most elusive of all their work), and then surprisingly churned this out in 1972. Anyone hoping for a hint of the old magic will be disappointed. This is weak on all fronts, an odd and unhappy concoction from a pair of geniuses who were famed for their innovation and creativity. Fans will want to catch it anyway, just to be able to say they've seen it, but really this is a very minor PS to a fabulous career which had long since hit its peak.
RETURN TO THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
Great Britain (85 mi) 1978
User reviews from imdb Author: jotix100 from New York
Michael Powell returns to the island of Fulla, in the Shetlands, the setting
for his magnificent "The Edge of the World". Mr. Powell is
accompanied by a few of the members of the original crew that lived in that remote
part of the world in 1936, when the shooting took place. This is a documentary
about how things looked forty-two years later.
Mr. Powell, who appeared as the tourist in the yacht, in the original film, has
fond memories for those challenging days spent there. John Laurie, who played
Peter Manson in the original film is also on hand to share his own memories of
what appears was a magical time for all the people connected with the film.
Unfortunately, only six of the original inhabitants from 1936 were still around
to tell us how they were all changed by the experience. Also appearing in the
documentary is Grant Sutherland, who played the pastor in the film.
This is a melancholy trip to a world that had vanished, but that was etched in
the memory of all of those who participated in Michael Powell's adventure.
User reviews from imdb Author: DVD-TCMjunkie from
United States
Michael Brooke's plot summary for Michael Powell's "Return to The Edge
of the World" indicates that it is essentially a re-release of the 1937
black and white film with color bookends, which explains the 85 min. running
time listed here -- the original runs 72 min. and the "bookends" run
23 min.
Turner Classic Movies (TCM), a cable network in the
I was eager to see at least the original film, first because I'm a fan of the
director, and second because I'm fascinated by black and white outdoor
photography of landscapes of the world made before I was born (think Sergei
Eisenstein, John Ford, etc.).
Although some of the plot points were telegraphed well in advance, "The
Edge of the World" (1937), with fine performances all around, doesn't
disappoint, and I refer readers to the IMDb entry for that film for more detailed
reviews. What's of interest here is the "bookends" portion of the
1978 follow-up.
"Return to the Edge of the World" (i.e., the 1978
"bookends") shows the island of Foula in color, selected cast and
crew from the original but 40 years later, and locals discussing the effects
that the original film had on the island itself, such as neglect by government
officials who withheld services on the expectation that the island of filming
was predestined to experience the same fate as the island of the story. (A
review under "The Edge of the World" indicates they now have full
time electricity, at least.)
Although only two of the original cast appear in this update (John Laurie,
hamming it like a 19th century stage actor who had just seen his first movie
camera, and Grant Sutherland, with very bad teeth), nevertheless in the script,
in the crew, in the supporting players, and even in the review of those who
were missing, the emphasis seemed to be totally on the men involved in the
film, with practically no focus on the women. For example, although her name is
mentioned, we have not one whit of mention of "whatever happened to"
Belle Chrystall, the female lead. (Although she stopped making movies just 3 or
4 years after "The Edge of the World," she lived for decades past the
"Return...", even into the current millennium.)
Although I give the original a "9", I give the return a
"5", averaging out to a "7" for the 85 min. version.
BFI Screenonline: Late Powell and Pressburger by Sergio Angelini
Pozdorovkin, Max and Mike Lerner
PUSSY RIOT: A PUNK PRAYER (Pokazatelnyy protsess:
Istoriya Pussy Riot) – made for TV B- 80
Russia Great Britain
(88 mi) 2013
Art is not a mirror to reflect the world,
but a hammer with which to shape it.
—Bertolt
Brecht
Pussy Riot is an interesting phenomenon, a performance art collective that takes on the persona of a feminist punk band to spread its subversive message of feminist power and freedom, formed on August 2011, the same day Vladimir Putin announced he would be a candidate for Russian President after having already served two consecutive terms, the maximum allowed in Russia. While protests and demonstrations took to the street, none had the impact of this Riot Grrl act, something of an outcry of a rebellious Kathleen Hanna from Bikini Kills in The Punk Singer (2013), as it was clearly designed as a challenge of freedom of speech under the authoritarian rule of Putin, where 3 girls in the band, Nadia Tolokonnikova, Masha Alyokhina, and Katia Samutsevich were sentenced to 2 years in prison for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred,” which is seen as little more than trumped up charges everywhere else in the world except Russia, a country that simply doesn’t understand performance art or punk music. In her testimony before the court, one of the girls (Katia) claimed there was only one single university throughout the entire country of Russia that even acknowledges modern art exists, the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia where she graduated. On the day in question, several Pussy Riot girls wearing ski masks stormed the altar at the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow and tried to plug in their guitars and sing an anti-Putin message, though this protest only lasted 40 seconds before the police hauled them away. That church in particular, according to the group, was chosen as it’s where the orthodox priests gave Putin their blessing over Easter services, uniting the church and state into one absolute autocracy. The film shows excerpts of the arrest, brief performance tapes, the police interrogation, and the ensuing trial where the girls were kept behind a protective glass cage, supposedly for the public’s safety? While they acknowledge they are completely non-violent and have no intent to hurt or harm anyone, their message is simply designed as a provocative act of liberation.
To the West, Russia is synonymous with a 20th century revolutionary uprising, where the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 is one of the notable achievements in Russian history, Ten Days that Shook the World, where the absolute power of the Czar was turned over to the masses. So why would they now be afraid of a few girls with guitars? Pussy Riot had done a few earlier performances, all spontaneously erupting in public places, recorded on YouTube, wearing ski masks, waving banners, holding flares as they create a brash attitude of punk anarchy and rebellion. These events, however, are little more than publicity stunts, designed to go viral over the Internet, where young people are more affected as nearly all of them follow updated events on their iPhones. What set this event apart was that it took place in the largest of the Eastern Orthodox churches in the world, where the church turned to its religious zealots to bring their outrage to the extreme nationalists of Putin, where together they joined forces in declaring Nadia a “demon with a brain,” actually taking seriously the satiric notion that she was out to destroy the church, calling the event blasphemy, suggesting she would have been burned in the 16th century, an act of condemnation they obviously find acceptable, where one of the church elders sums it all up with the chilling commentary, “There have always been witches that wouldn’t repent.” The church floods the streets with outraged parishioners, while State TV shows condemn the group for their religious disrespect, all demanding severe punishment. Even Putin went on record in a television interview and claimed “they got what they asked for.” One of the more interesting segments is the all-male police interrogation, where Katia is asked if she wants to get married and have children (Nadia is already married, while she and Masha already have children), and she responds that this is what they’ve always been “told” what girls should want, that really many girls, including herself, have no interest whatsoever. To many Putinists and orthodox Russians, this belief seems to signify their actual crime.
While the Pussy Riot’s lawyers called the arrests “cynical and unlawful,” the trial itself was seen as a show trial presented before the public, drawing unprecedented international press coverage, where the complaining witnesses, one by one, ended up being a stream of church parishioners, where the outcome felt predetermined all along, as the State’s moral authority, as represented by that infamous alignment between Putin and the Orthodox Church, held their ground. The solidarity of the girls throughout is impressive, maintaining a defiant sense of humor, believing they held the higher moral ground, where their humorous stunts and public TV court appearances declaring the whole process a farce would only earn them legions of supporters. Before pronouncing sentencing, however, each of the defendants was allowed a final comment, where Nadia indicated “Pussy Riot is a form of oppositional art, political action that utilizes artistic forms. It is a form of civic activism against a corporate political system that uses its power against basic human rights.” The three were sentenced to two years in prison. Two of the Pussy Riot members, Nadia and Katia (who was eventually released on appeal as it was proven she “didn’t” do as accused, as she was arrested before she could even get the guitar strap off her shoulder, never singing or playing a single note), were also members of Voina since 2007, an anarchist art collective where one of their earlier stunts posted to the Internet was photographing several members, including an 8-month pregnant Nadia, getting naked and having sex in a Russian Biology Museum, a satirist response to President Medvedev’s announcement to increase the birth rate in Russia. Perhaps the ultimate irony of this made-for-TV documentary about such politically inspired performance artists is such a conventional, by-the-numbers approach in making a movie about them, as they obviously deserve better. Throughout the film, Pussy Riot never actually sings an entire song, even the theme song playing over the end credits turns out to be Peaches and Simonne Jones singing “Free Pussy Riot.”
Postscript
After having served 21 months of a 24-month sentence, the remaining two Pussy Riot girls, Nadia and Masha, were released two days after Christmas of 2013 under a recently passed Amnesty law that allowed their early release without ever admitting to any crime.
Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer Movie Review - Shockya.com Brent Simon
They bear the puckish name of an American liberal arts college group, and their air-quote music — blasts of awkwardly rhymed social complaint that makes Liam Lynch’s “United States of Whatever” sound like a delicate Shakespearean sonnet — is quite honestly dismissible at best, so it’s something of an unlikely surprise that Pussy Riot has achieved the notoriety they have. Formed in 2011 after Vladimir Putin was nominated for a third term as Russian president, this controversial, anonymous feminist art collective took issue with what they deem the excessive nationalism Putin promotes, and well as the various rollbacks in freedoms and general church-sanctioned patriarchy over which he has presided. A series of public performance-art style protests came to a head on February 12, 2012, when masked members of the group jumped up on the altar of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, a place sacred to Orthodox Christians, for a 40-second blast of punk music. Arrests and international hot-button status ensued.
The new HBO documentary “Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer,” then, attempts to peel back a bit of the hype and present the facts of the case, following the trial of Nadia Tolokonnikova, Masha Alyokhina and Katia Samutsevich — each of whom face seven years in prison on charges of “disrupting social order by an act of hooliganism that shows religious hatred.” Directors Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin intercut interviews with the participants, their parents and other figures with courtroom footage and other TV clips that showcase a certain lit fuse of fundamentalist fervor in the country.
The film doesn’t evidence much of a unifying technical aesthetic, but — bolstered as it is by a nice array of performance clips and ancillary protest footage — there is a certain grungy-chic quality to it. There’s a pinch of history herein too (the church in question was torn down in 1931 under Josef Stalin, and only rebuilt in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union), but while dissenting viewpoints are roundly tolerated, “A Punk Prayer” doesn’t really endeavor to delve deeply into the insecurity and offense of fundamentalists. (Then again, maybe it’s a matter of the articulateness, or lack thereof, of the subjects to which it does grant time; one elderly protester compares the Pussy Riot performance to “taking a shit in your apartment.”)
Part of this disconnect and agitation surely relates to there existing no real point of collective reference in the former Soviet Union for performance art or punk music. To many, Pussy Riot seem to come across as a half-step removed from mouth-foaming aliens, so their message of freedom of speech and broader political participation is drowned out by the clamorous means of their expression. A couple figures, including a somewhat sympathetic-sounding prosecutor, seem to grasp this. But, paradoxically, in largely tightening its focus to the women and some of their immediate family, Lerner and Pozdorovkin fail to fully explore the both Russian and international resonance of their message, by way of the protests and counter-protests the trial spawned. Ergo, while interesting throughout, “A Punk Prayer” seems like a bit of a missed opportunity, insofar as its connection to the personal freedoms Westerners so cherish and speechify about.
Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer Proves Punk Lives - Page ... - Village Voice Stephanie Zacharek
Anyone trying to run a civilized country should know that throwing musicians in jail for making music is always a bad idea. That didn't stop Vladimir Putin's government from arresting three members of the punk collective Pussy Riot, after the group stormed the altar of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow in February 2012 to perform a 40-second "punk prayer protest" denouncing the government's melding of church and state in a few bars of ragged vocals and jagged guitar chords.
At least five women took part in the demonstration, but only three—Nadia Tolokonnikova, Masha Alyokhina, and Katia Samutsevich—were arrested. The charges: trespassing, wearing "inappropriate" (sleeveless) dresses, and disrupting the social order. The upshot: A brief, orchestrated flash of anger originally witnessed by only a few shocked worshippers hit YouTube and turned these brazen, previously unknown young women into international free-speech heroes. Who's got egg on his face now, Vlad?
Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin's sharp-edged little documentary, Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer—which played Sundance earlier this year and airs on HBO on June 10—tells the story of the Pussy Riot Three, two of whom are currently serving jail sentences. Lerner and Pozdorovkin outline the genesis of the guerrilla punk-art collective (it was formed the day Putin returned to power), assemble footage from the women's kangaroo-court trial, and conduct interviews with family members. One particularly supportive dad says that he tried valiantly to dissuade his daughter from joining the group. When he realized he couldn't stop her, he instead helped her write lyrics to a Pussy Riot protest song. He takes credit, specifically, for the snappy little line "Shit! Shit! It's God shit!"
Maybe it's not particularly shocking that a few young women could be imprisoned in modern Russia for performing a noisy, disruptive song in a place of worship—that could happen in New York, too. But it remains legitimately shocking that the Putin government would dig its heels in so stubbornly to silence these young women, and to make examples of them even as the world howls. Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer plugs right into that.
In one of the film's most unsettling sections, members of a conservative Russian Orthodox group known as the Carriers of the Cross—a bunch of guys who look like ill-tempered Hells Angels—denounce the Pussy Riot crew in language straight out of the 11th century. "The main one, she is a demon with a brain," says one. Another pipes up, "She's a strong demon—you can tell by her lips, her mouth—she'll fight to the end." They openly liken these women to witches, and it doesn't bother them that they're part of the witch-hunt. WWJD? You can bet it wouldn't be this.
It's Pussy Riot's aim to provoke—you don't give yourselves a name like that unless you want to attract attention. But the official government response affirms that what the group did—pull on some popsicle-colored balaclavas to jump around on an altar for a few minutes—is genuinely subversive. It struck a nerve, and the wound still stings. Lerner and Pozdorovkin tell us that the remaining—that is to say, the unjailed—members of the collective are still active, but they don't clue us in to any of the group's current protests. You can understand why Pussy Riot would want to lie low for a while. But it's dispiriting to think that Putin really has succeeded in intimidating them. (On the other hand, Alyokhina's hunger strike is still drawing international headlines.)
If there's anything heartening to be found in the story of Pussy Riot, a story that's still unfolding, it's in the reminder that the spirit of punk can never be completely co-opted by flaky forces like the Met Ball. In his comprehensive and grand 1991 history of punk, England's Dreaming, Jon Savage quotes the writer Jacques Attali: "Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible; it is not only the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future." The women of Pussy Riot have an idea of what the new Russia should sound like; Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer shows just how hard it is to make that new world audible.
Krell Laboratories [Christianne Benedict]
There's always an awareness of politics in the selections at
True/False. Non-fiction filmmakers are practically the only muckrakers left in
a media landscape dominated by corporate control or authoritarian hegemony, so
any documentary festival is going to program its share of political fire bombs.
The first film I saw at True/False this year was Dirty Wars, one such
fire bomb. It seems only fitting to me that the final two films I saw were
almost as incendiary.
"Punk was a new music, a new social critique, but most of all it was a new kind of free speech. It inaugurated a moment--a long moment, which still persists--when suddenly countless odd voices, voices no reasonable person could have expected to hear in public, were being heard all over the place: sometimes as monstrous shouts in the marketplace, sometimes as whispers from an alleyway. There was an absolute denial of self-censorship in the Sex Pistols' songs that gave people who heard them permission to speak as freely. If an ugly, hunched-over twenty-year-old could stand up, name himself an antichrist, and make you wonder if it wasn't true, then anything was possible."
—Greil Marcus, from the Introduction to In the Facsist Bathroom
Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer (2013, directed by Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin) is a testament to the still-echoing "no" of punk rock. At its core, punk is a negation, it is standing up to power and to conformity and to social manners and saying, Bartleby-style, "I would prefer not." While that element has been largely tamed in the United States, it still resonates where punk is being newly discovered. Once upon a time, The Clash was "the only band that mattered," both aesthetically and politically, back when they were providing a counter-narrative to Thatcherism and the Reagan revolution by raging against the global hegemony of American media, the conformity of capitalism, the demonization and oppression of the poor and the other, and the imperial state of constant war. They sided with the Sandinistas and were bored with the U.S.A., where "the killers in America work seven days a week." I mourn for Joe Strummer. I really do.
These days, the only band that matters is Pussy Riot, two members of whom are currently in gulag for the crime of raging a punk song at uncomprehending churchgoers in the Orthodox cathedral in Moscow. This stunt--this punk/feminist negation of patriarchy and religion and the troubling alliance of church and state--is reverberating in the world, through Russia and the former republics and beyond. The problem for the Putin administration isn't that what they did was sacrilegious, but that it instead pricked at the confluence of a rising religiosity in Russia with an authoritarian state that is using that religiosity to keep the people docile. Plus, they name names.
The film follows the trial of the three members of Pussy Riot that the authorities were able to identify--the band performs in balaclavas both to hide their identities and to create a uniform identity. The ideology of Pussy Riot is anti-oligarchy, anti-homophobia, anti-Putin, and anti-patriarchy. In this last part, they are the children of the Riot Grrls. Kathleen Hanna would certainly recognize the DIY art-collective aesthetic the band affects. The new wrinkle that Pussy Riot adds is a social media component. They are part of the Tumblr/YouTube generation and they turn social media into a weapon. In past years, the Putin administration might have been able to silence them, but these days? It's all over the internet before the government even knows it's a thing to worry about. If they don't worry about it, I would be shocked. The Arab Spring was fueled by social media, too.
The benefit of this for the filmmakers is that there is plenty of archive footage for them to mix with their interviews with the the families of the women on trial. You get a clear idea of what their stunts look like. I can't say if Pussy Riot is a good band or not from this footage; it's almost beside the point. Punk has never valued any kind of surface craft or even musical ability at all. Punk, as it was for the UK punks of the late 1970s, is a kind of shout at power and nevermind propriety or respect. That shit doesn't wash. In this regard, Pussy Riot is among the purest punk acts ever.
The other side of the table is the church and the state. The prosecutors are offended at the idea that they're stooges of the Putin government. They're just doing their job. And they're probably right. The machineries of authority don't really need minders to grind on. The representatives and defenders of the church, though, probably would have done well to stay the hell off camera because they come off as exactly the ignorant patriarchal assholes that Pussy Riot paints them as. With every pronouncement--that Nadia, who they see as the leader of the band, is actually a demon, for instance--they invite the audience to wonder exactly what century they think they live in. This is an instrumentality of the power of old white bigoted men, and from my point of view, they're more butthurt that uppity women might rise to challenge them than any deep offense at alleged sacrilege. Sacrilege is a pretext. The funniest part of the movie is watching them stumble over how to translate the name of the band.
Meanwhile, social media works its magic and the Putin government looks worse and worse as it prosecutes Pussy Riot. When one member of the band finds a loophole in her defense and gets herself released, you can almost feel the relief from the prosecution. One less problem. I'm sure they'd like it all just to go away. I doubt that Pussy Riot will let that happen.
East
European Film Bulletin [Colette de Castro]
HBO's
'A Punk Prayer' Isn't the Pussy Riot Documentary the World ... Tom Hawking from Flavorwire
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Jennie Kermode]
Review: 'Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer' | The Playlist - Blogs - Indiewire Kevin Jagernauth
Paste Magazine [Monica Castillo]
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2013: 'Pussy Riot' + ... - PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
Little White Lies [David Jenkins]
Film Festival Traveler [Nora Lee Mandel]
Author explores how Pussy Riot arrest marked new phase in Russian politics Jeffrey Brown interviews Masha Gessen, author of Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot, from PBS, January 27, 2014
Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer - The Hollywood Reporter Justin Lowe
Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer – review | Music | The ... - The Guardian Catherine Shoard
Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Bob Ignizio]
Movie review: 'Pussy Riot' a gripping primer on Russian Mark Olsen from The LA Times, May 30, 2013
Russian punk band members sentenced to two years in prison Todd Martens from The LA Times, August 17, 2012
Critic's Notebook: Pussy riot is more about message than music Randall Roberts from The LA Times, August 28, 2012
Pussy Riot and the politics of grrrl punk Evelyn McDonnell from The LA Times, September 13, 2012
Pussy Riot band members sent to remote Russian prisons Reed Johnson from The LA Times, October 22, 2012
Still defiant, members of Russia's Pussy Riot band go free - latimes ... from The LA Times, December 23, 2013
Pussy Riot members to shift from music to human rights activism August Brown from The LA Times, December 28, 2013
Screening of 'Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer" doc cancelled in Moscow Mark Olsen from The LA Times, December 28, 2013
Russian amnesty law brings Pussy Riot members closer to freedom Todd Martens from The LA Times, December 18, 2013
HBO's "Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer" - Roger Ebert Max Winter
Pussy Riot - A Punk Prayer - Television - The New York Time Mike Hale
Pussy Riot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Preiss,
Jeff
LOW
DOWN C+ 77
USA (114 mi) 2014 ‘Scope Official Site
One
day we’re walking down the street, passing a newsstand, when I stop and pick up
a magazine (maybe Life) with Thelonious Monk of the cover. I kiss it, and say,
‘Hi Monk.’ Dad, combusting with pride, picks me up, looks at me with those
beautiful gray-green eyes, and says: ‘From now on, you’re not just my baby,
you’re my ace-one-boon-white-coon.’ That, he would claim, was the day we
forever connected, and became more to each other than everything.
I loved him out of all proportion, as only a
daughter could.
—Amy-Jo Albany (Elle Fanning)
There’s usually an intriguing allure to films centered around the outer fringes of society, that delve into a bohemian, neon-lit subterranean world exposing hardships of the human kind that border on madness, where the pursuit of artistic freedom becomes more than a passionate endeavor but a moral obligation, often lost in the smoky haze of narcotics and drug abuse, where in the words of American poet Allen Ginsberg in his epic 1955 poem Howl, Howl, Parts I & II | Academy of American Poets:
I
saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving
hysterical naked,
dragging
themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking
for
an angry fix,
angelheaded
hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who
poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking
in
the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating
across
the tops of cities contemplating jazz
Written by his daughter Amy-Jo Albany (Elle Fanning), Low Down: Junk, Jazz, and Other Fairy Tales from Childhood is a 2003 memoir by the daughter of a legendary but obscure jazz pianist Joe Albany (John Hawkes), one of the few white pianists to play Bebop with Charlie Parker in the 40’s and 50’s, but also a heroin addict and prison convict for a major part of his life. Growing up on the dingy side of Hollywood among addicts, prostitutes, and various social misfits, the film is a dim reminder of what jagged edges some lives become, where every day is a struggle to survive, much of it lost on wasted opportunities. Less about Albany’s chronic drug troubles and run-ins with the law, the film is more about a young adolescent’s rose-colored view of her father, trying to make sense out of the chaotic turmoil that was her life growing up in the 70’s, where she substitutes her interior heartache with larger-than-life embellishments of her father, making him out to be some kind of mythical hero. Blind to the adult realities, her father a junky, her absent mother Sheila (Lena Headey), a former singer and full-time alcoholic, the overall tone is confusing and the story uneven and unfocused, filled with various recollections that rarely get under the surface, basically becoming a primer course on how to destroy your life and the loved ones around you. Through it all, however, she prevails and writes the book, which is the point of the film, though despite a gutty performance by Fanning, she’s not really the interesting part of the story. Joe’s the guy we’re interested in, as there’s so much about him we don’t know, but his life is largely unexplored and for long periods of time he’s not even in the picture, as Jo is shipped off to grandmother’s house, none other than Glenn Close, a six-time Oscar nominee looking surprisingly like Robin Williams in MRS. DOUBTFIRE (1993). On Friday nights Gram is glued to the screen watching boxing matches, and on one wall in her home she has on display that legenday photo of Black Panther Party co-founder and Minister of Defense Huey P. Newton (seen here: Huey Newton.). What’s also uniquely intriguing, but never explored, is the drug addiction of a jazz pianist, as more typically the addicts are horn players and lead singers, or both. The piano is more of a percussive instrument in Bebop jazz, like Thelonious Monk (Jo’s idol in the opening quote), a driving, rhythmic force in simpatico with the drums and bass players, where you’d think they need to be clear-headed and sharp to play some of the more complicated arrangements.
Surrounded by dysfunction, Jo is the worried daughter that spends much of her youth looking after the interests of her father, trying to maintain control and be the adult in the situation. While Joe played with jazz legends Lester Young and Charlie Parker, it was more than a decade ago, as we only hear about it in offhanded conversations or in fan photos that decorate Jo’s bedroom walls. When we see him play, he’s in some anonymous jazz trio in small clubs or off in some dingy bar somewhere playing alone. By the time Jo is old enough to remember her father, the Bebop era is largely over, where the American disinterest in jazz (and repeated parole violations) drove Joe overseas to Europe. After several years of repeated drug offenses, his passport is revoked and he’s sent back to America, revelations that are part and parcel with her growing up stage, as a stream of more unpleasant realities begin to creep into her life. Joe’s life descends into a morass of addiction, where he simply can’t stop himself from using, becoming more gloomy and fatalistic, where by the end of the film each character has a major dramatic moment, as if Jo is revisiting her final moments with each of them, allowing them perhaps to finally just be themselves, naked and unvarnished, and not some embellished memory. Why couldn’t the rest of the film be like that? These brief moments suggest a much better film could have been made without the naïve innocence and child adulation that constantly comes in conflict with overtly traumatic subject matter. While the director attempts to establish a turbulent family relationship, what plays out onscreen is continuously self-destructive and troublesome, leading to dramatic meltdowns and melodramatic overreach instead of real, full-fledged character development. Chalk this up to inexperience.
Despite a brief recording career in Europe and a few more sessions in the 70’s, Albany is largely unrecorded in the prime of his life, where a single 1957 LP exists entitled The Right Combination with Wayne Marsh on tenor sax and Bob Whitlock on bass. The first song we hear in the film is Angel Eyes, where ironically one of the definitive, narcotic-induced renditions of this song Gene Ammons - Angel Eyes - YouTube (8:52) is played by Chicago tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons, another addict who spent much of his life incarcerated for narcotics possession. Albany is a non-stop smoker throughout, as much a part of the jazz scene as alcohol or heroin, where the low ceilings and poor ventilation in the clubs also increased the health risks. The film is infused with classic jazz music of the era, like Coleman Hawkins, Thelonious Monk, and Max Roach, with an extended piece played live before an audience by Albany over the closing credits, shot in grainy Super 16mm by Christopher Blauvelt, where the first-time director attempts to capture the atmospheric look of the dingy rooms and smoky clubs, but next to no insight develops here, as the depressive, downbeat mood overwhelms any attempt to reveal something significant, becoming more of an adolescent diary format from a young girl coming-of-age. Much better films are Bent Hamer’s Factotum (2005), exquisitely shot on 35mm, similarly exploring the seedy world of Los Angeles as it follows a fictionalized world of drunk poet Charles Bukowski, also Philippe Garrel’s I Don’t Hear the Guitar Anymore (J'entends plus la guitare) (1991), an autobiographical film that reveals the ten year romance of the French film director with Velvet Underground singer Nico, much of it spent in the throes of drug addiction and a constant fix, an unglamorous view that is downbeat and utterly sad, where an unsparing confessional tone is mixed with a raw internal dysfunction, with outstanding original music by French jazz pianist Faton Cahen, a piano and a few ascending jazz riffs on a sax, offering an eloquent testament to a narcotic induced haze.
Low
Down | Chicago Reader Drew Hunt
Images express more than words in this beautiful biopic, about the gifted, heroin-addicted jazz pianist Joe Albany (John Hawkes) and his relationship with his teenage daughter Amy-Jo (Elle Fanning), who lived with him in his scuzzy apartment during the 1960s. Based on Amy-Jo's memoir, the film is presented as a string of memories both bad and good, and it doesn't adhere to a typical story structure, but the grainy Super-16 camerawork, intimately capturing sorrowful prison visits and hazy jam sessions in LA flophouses, more than makes up for the flimsy story, which often relies on addiction clichés. The cast lifts this up as well: Glenn Close plays Amy-Jo's grandmother, a nurturing figure in a dingy milieu, and delivers one of her better recent performances, while Hawkes, who bears a striking resemblance to Albany, again proves he's among our most dependable actors. Jeff Preiss directed.
Slant
Magazine [Kenji Fujishima]
At one point during Low Down's first half, Amy-Jo Albany (Elle Fanning) ventures into the illegal hole-in-the-wall apartment of fellow flophouse dweller Alain (Peter Dinklage) and sits on his bed while he spins a record for her. Even with the unexpected kiss she plants on his lips as she leaves to return to her father, heroin-addicted jazz pianist Joe Albany (John Hawkes), this scene at first seems like an extraneous detour—that is, until she later catches a glimpse of Alain, now painted blue, getting into character for what appears to be a porn-movie shoot. Upon discovering this, she angrily breaks a window before rushing back off to her apartment. Alain, it turns out, is as full of secrets as almost every other adult in her life.
Such devastating moments of shattered innocence are par for the course throughout Jeff Preiss's directorial debut. Working from Amy-Jo Albany and Topper Lilien's screen adaptation of Albany's memoir, Low Down: Junk, Jazz, and Other Fairy Tales from Childhood, the film is less about Joe Albany's persistent drug struggles as they are about his adolescent daughter's perception of her father and his troubled adult world. Mostly we see Joe and his similarly drug-addled friends, her alcoholic mother, Sheila (Lena Headey), and other such characters through her point of view. As a result, we get a reasonably vivid sense of how much the adults around her try to shield her from the darkness in their lives, and thus how close she constantly teeters on the edge of a moral abyss hanging around these figures. Cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt contributes to the doom-laden feel with 16mm cinematography that emphasizes velvet colors, smoky interiors, and the occasional overexposed sunlit Los Angeles exterior.
Preiss is himself a former cinematographer, and the look of this film recalls what he achieved in black and white for Let's Get Lost, Bruce Weber's documentary about another self-destructive drug-addicted jazz musician, trumpeter Chet Baker. But Preiss appears to have lavished so much attention on achieving his film's evocative look and naturalistic style that he lost sight of his characters. Dramatically speaking, Low Down never develops any momentum, as the filmmaker seems to approach Amy-Jo's emotionally bruising coming of age in the spirit of a loose Howard Hawks-style hang-out film, content to simply bask in atmosphere and character interactions, trusting his actors to make sense of these sometimes inexplicable characters. But there's only so much that Fanning's vividly expressive face and Hawkes's charismatic sensitivity can mask before we realize how little we truly understand what goes on in anybody's head. It's telling that when, during one emotionally fraught moment for Amy-Jo, her mother relentlessly berates her for a self-loathing streak, this criticism makes no sense to us based on what we've seen from her in the film.
In the end, Joe struggles are as inexplicable to us as they most likely are to his daughter. That's partially by design, considering the film's genesis from Amy-Jo's memoir, and as such her point of view. Nevertheless, such yawning psychological chasms suggest why Low Down adds up to little more than yet another drug-addiction tale, bereft of any unique insights that would distinguish this from Round Midnight, Bird, and other jazz-inflected junkie docudramas.
Despite taking home the best cinematography prize for Christopher Blauvet (who also provided superb camerawork on Kelly Reichardt’s 2013 title Night Moves) after its premiere at Sundance and snagging Elle Fanning a Best Actress award at the Karlovy Film Festival, Low Down is otherwise a rather unremarkable treatment of a slipping down life, bright lights dimmed by the self-induced depravity of drugs and alcohol. Told from the perspective of the teenage daughter of jazz pianist Joe Albany, the film is the first time feature from Jeff Preiss, heretofore a music video director (Mariah Carey’s “Emotions”) and a documentary cinematographer. Perhaps this explains why much of the film feels concerned with superficial detailing of a vintage time and era rather than it does as a chapter in a young woman’s life growing up with troubled yet notable parental figures.
In 1974 Hollywood, jazz pianist Joe Albany (John Hawkes) struggles to remain sober as he battles heroin addiction and cares singlehandedly for his teenage daughter Amy (Elle Fanning). Her mother (Lena Headey) flew the coop long ago, a woman keener on feeding her alcohol addiction, returning intermittently to set up failed fantasies of working as a singer once more alongside her prestigious husband. But as he fails to adhere to the guidelines of his probation, a relapse sends Albany back to rehab and Amy is forced to live with her caring grandmother (Glenn Close), a woman at a loss as to how to help her gifted son. As years go by and Albany absconds to the jazz scene in Europe, only to be deported two years later, Amy begins to realize her parents will never mend their broken ways of existence.
At the center of this autumn hued bauble are a pair of performances that anchor the film without glorifying the dramatic potential of heroin addiction and alcoholism. John Hawkes gives the kind of warm performance that may be one of the most underplayed addicts committed to a film, a charming father figure that rears a Mr. Hyde personality when he’s high. But most of the time, he’s trying to get by and find work as a musician.
Lena Headey pops up as the absent mother, an alcoholic that nails one vicious exchange when her late adolescent daughter goes on a bar crawl to seek her help. And as the young Amy, Elle Fanning proves once again what a fine young actress she is, here playing another child with a loving yet veritably absent father figure. Wallowing in a decrepit Los Angeles hotel, one can’t help but be reminded of her turn in Sofia Coppola’s 2010 Somewhere, lounging around the Chateau Marmont forever waiting for her actor father played by Stephen Dorff. And as her grandmother, a dowdy Glenn Close (who actually isn’t all that much older than Hawkes), resembling a period Cloris Leachman, also gives an underappreciated performance. Other supporting players such as a fetish porn actor played by Peter Dinklage and strung out neighbor Taryn Manning, don’t get much to work with. More noticeable is a nearly unrecognizable Tim Daly as Dalton, a cohort of Albany’s.
With more precision granted to conveying his comfort with the musical influence of Albany, Preiss seems more in tune with recalling the period, a repeated reference to Welsh poet Dylan Thomas also an appropriately timed homage to the tragedy of talent drowned out by addiction and vice.
Recalling the seedy warmth of 1970s Hollywood, Low Down doesn’t quite capture the longing and despair of Albany and his daughter, as they’re never really outlined beyond having to deal with this particular situation. A late introduction of Fanning’s epileptic beau played by the generally arresting Caleb Landry Jones also doesn’t do much to add to the fact that Albany, though he may have loved his daughter, was much too wrapped up in his own failing dreams to grant her the attention she so craved and deserved.
Film
Review: 'Low Down' | Variety Scott
Foundas
Striking a moody, complementary downbeat to electrifying Sundance opener “Whiplash,” “Low Down” traces two years in the life of noted jazz pianist Joe Albany, who played with the likes of Charlie Parker and Lester Young and died after a long battle with heroin addiction in 1988 at age 63. It’s a familiar story of music-world success, failure and addiction, admirably but unevenly told by first-time feature director Jeff Preiss, who certainly knows the music and the milieu, but proves less adept at shaping the material into a consistently compelling narrative. A gallery of very fine performances from John Hawkes, Elle Fanning and Glenn Close should draw deserved critical kudos, but the pic’s measured pace and unyielding depressive air put a definite damper on commercial prospects.
“Low Down” is based on the memoir of the same name by Albany’s daughter, Amy-Jo, who also co-authored the screenplay (with Topper Lilien) and who’s played in the film by the ever-impressive Fanning, heartbreaking here as a girl whose love for her father is constantly challenged by his self-destructive behavior. When the movie opens in 1974, the pre-teen Amy is living with dad in a seedy Hollywood flophouse populated by myriad addicts, artists, prostitutes and other celebrants of la vie boheme. Joe (Hawkes, who bears a strong resemblance to the real Albany) has been in and out of prison on drug charges, and is a little too laissez-faire about his regularly scheduled meetings with his parole officer. Mostly out of the picture is Amy’s mom, Sheila (Lena Headey), a one-time singer who now whiles her days away in the corner bar.
Preiss, who cut his teeth as an editor for photographer/filmmaker Bruce Weber (including on the seminal Chet Baker docu “Let’s Get Lost”) spends most of the film’s first half introducing us to Joe’s world — the two-bit pizza parlors and strip joints where he manages to rustle up gigs, the back rooms where he shoots up, and his network of similarly strung-out friends and associates (including a fellow sideman very well played by red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea). And if “Low Down” is sometimes short on dramatic drive, it’s long on Bukowskian atmosphere, aided immensely by the work of production designer Elliott Hostetter and the Super 16mm lensing of the gifted Christopher Blauvelt (“The Bling Ring”), which has the hazy, amber light of old instamatic photographs.
What you see early on in “Low Down” is pretty much what you get for the next two hours — an addict’s long, slow, steady decline, punctuated by the usual moments of intervention, false hope and relapse. But within that well-worn framework (“Bird,” “’Round Midnight”), Preiss smartly avoids many of the attendant cliches. Like the Coen brothers with their Llewyn Davis, he doesn’t labor to make Joe Albany into an exceptional case: his talent is self-evident, but never inflated to genius levels, and we see that his addiction, too, is one shared by many around him. He is, in short, an all too human, flawed, wounded man, and Hawkes brings a humility to the role that says no one understands this better than Joe himself. Joe likes to get high, he admits late in the film, and when we see the pacific calm that washes over him after he shoots up — the way his body goes slightly limp, as if he were a child back in the womb — we understand exactly why.
Around the film’s mid-point, Joe decides to skip parole and seek better fortune in Europe, leaving Amy in the care of her maternal grandmother (Close, made up to look a touch Edith Bunker-ish), who represents the only constant, stabilizing influence in the girl’s life. Two years later, when Joe returns, deported and sentenced to five years’ probation (the judge was a jazz fan), the family settles into an uneasy threesome. Amy is a young woman now, with a musician boyfriend of her own (excellent newcomer Caleb Landry Jones, also on Sundance screens in “God’s Pocket”), and Joe tries for a while to stay clean, to become the father he yearns to be. You don’t need to know the real-life outcome of Albany’s narrative, though, to see where this is going, and some of the best scenes in “Low Down” are those devoted to Amy’s own dawning realization that she is at a loss to save her dad — even at one putting herself in harm’s way to score him the drugs she knows he craves.
“Low Down” offers no shortage of similarly affecting moments. Close, who’s every bit the equal of Hawkes and Fanning here, has the anguished gaze of a mother who feels she has somehow failed, at one point cradling her adult son in her arms and whispering, “My poor lost boy.” And Heady has one great, astringent scene towards the end — an attempted mother-daughter reunion short-circuited by boozy self-loathing. Yet the film as a whole has an oddly shapeless feel; it doesn’t so much flow from one scene to the next as lurch spasmodically, and it lacks a clear point of view. (The movie opens with Amy’s voiceover narration, and is at its strongest when it seems to be unfolding through her eyes, but too often veers away to scenes that don’t involve her.) It’s also a good 10-15 minutes too long. Preiss may have been trying to infuse “Low Down” with the feeling of jazz — with unpredictable, ever-shifting rhythms — but he only partly succeeds. He’s made a good movie with a better one trapped somewhere inside.
In addition to multiple tracks by the real Albany, the pic’s superb jazz soundtrack, produced by Swiss-Israeli composer/arranger Ohad Talmor, features classic performances by Coleman Hawkins, Thelonious Monk and Max Roach alongside new recordings featuring trumpeter Russ Johnson and pianist Jacob Sacks.
FIPRESCI - Festival Reports - Karlovy Vary 2014 - A Rare ... Marita Nyrhinen from FIPRESCI
LOW DOWN – Hammer to Nail Mike S. Ryan
John Hawkes can't jazz up the jazzman biopic Low Down
Chris Knipp • View topic - Jeff Preiss: Low Down (2014)
The Focus Pull Film Journal [Jordan Brooks]
Low Down / The Dissolve Mike D’Angelo
Indie Drama Low Down Proves It's Hard to Be/Watch a ... Michael Nordine from The Village Voice
Low Down Review (2014) - The Spinning Image Keith Rockmael
Facets
: Cinematheque Schedule: Low Down
Suicide
is Painless - Fipresci Yael Shuv
'Low
Down''s Elle Fanning Wins Best Actress ... - Indiewire
'Low
Down' just had to get made - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan interview with the director,
January 21, 2014
Low
Down: Sundance Review - The Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy
Examiner.com
[Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch
Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]
'Low
Down' - LA Times - Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan
Jazz
films explore the hell and joy of musical perfection - LA ... High Hart from The LA Times
Low Down -
Roger Ebert Matt Zoller Seitz
'Low Down,' on Growing Up With Joe Albany - The New ... Nicolas Rapold from The New York Times
Joe Albany - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Preminger, Otto – director
The Deceptive Director Nathaniel Rich from The New York Review of Books, November 6, 2008 (opening three paragraphs only)
During the filming of Forever Amber (1947), Otto Preminger yelled at Linda Darnell almost daily for two months, until the actress collapsed on the set and was ordered by a doctor to take ten days off to convalesce. In rehearsals for his production of Herman Wouk’s A Modern Primitive—a play that never made it to Broadway—Preminger screamed so violently at an actor who struggled to remember his lines that the man suffered a nervous breakdown and was taken away to spend the next four months in a sanitarium. “I had never seen such terrifying rage in anyone,” said one witness, who described the director with “veins standing out on his forehead” and “literally foaming at the mouth.” On the set of the comedy The Moon Is Blue (1953), Maggie McNamara, “a jittery newcomer with a fragile ego,” was the victim of Preminger’s tantrums. “McNamara was to commit suicide in 1978,” Preminger’s biographer Foster Hirsch ominously remarks. The list of jittery actresses with fragile egos reduced by Preminger to tears also includes Marilyn Monroe, Jean Seberg, and Dorothy Dandridge—all suicides as well, it is perhaps unfair to note.
The image of Preminger as an apoplectic Prussian bully persists to this day. He had himself to blame: it was the result not only of his treatment of actors but of his having performed with great aplomb as a Nazi in a string of films, most memorably as Colonel von Scherbach in Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17. But unlike other directors with larger-than-life personas—Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles, for instance—Preminger’s public image often seemed to forestall serious consideration of his films.
His abilities as a director were also overshadowed by his accomplishments as an independent producer and self-promoter. He crippled the Hays Production Code when his uncertified film, the now quaintly risqué The Moon Is Blue, became a major box office hit; he broke Hollywood’s blacklist by crediting Dalton Trumbo for the screenplay of Exodus (1960); and the success he enjoyed after abandoning the Hollywood studio system brought about dramatic changes in the way American films were financed and made. Yet for all these successes, critics rarely approved of his work. Pauline Kael wrote that “his films are consistently superficial and facile,” and Stanley Kauffmann accused him of “shrewd exploitation of mass tastes.” “The line on Otto Preminger was that he was the greatest producer and the worst director in Hollywood history,” said Roger Ebert. “Both statements contained a measure of truth.” Even Preminger’s obituary in The New York Times could do no better than call him “one of the most competent independent producer-directors of his time.”
Otto Preminger - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films ... Charles Derry from Film Reference
The public persona of Austrian-born Otto Preminger has epitomized for many the typical Hollywood movie director: an accented, autocratic, European-born disciplinarian who terrorized his actors, bullied his subordinates, and spent millions of dollars to ensure that his films be produced properly, although economically. Before the Cahiers du Cinéma critics began to praise Preminger, it may have been this public persona, more than anything else, which impeded an appreciation of Preminger's extraordinarily subtle style or thematic consistencies.
Preminger's career can be divided into two periods. Throughout the first period, Preminger worked as a studio director for Twentieth Century-Fox, where he had several well-publicized conflicts with Darryl F. Zanuck and found it difficult to conform to studio demands or to collaborate without retaining overall artistic control. His evocative and romantic mystery Laura , his breakthrough film, was produced during this period. Among the other eclectic assignments he directed at Fox, the most interesting include a series of film noir features in the late 1940s: Whirlpool, Where the Sidewalk Ends, The Thirteenth Letter , and Angel Face. Throughout the second and far more interesting period of Preminger's career, he worked as one of the first notable independent producer-directors, in the process successfully undermining the studio system in various ways. He fought against institutional censorship by releasing several films without the Motion Picture Association seal (for example, The Moon is Blue ) and he explored controversial subjects the studios might have been hesitant to touch (such as criticism of the War Department in The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell or homosexuality in Advise and Consent ). Preminger also championed the independent producers movement by exploiting the Paramount Divorcement Decree and aggressively marketing and arranging exhibition for his films
Preminger incorporated fresh and authentic backgrounds by promoting location shooting away from Hollywood. He worked diligently to discover new performers (such as Jean Seberg) and to develop properties (such as Carmen Jones and Hurry Sundown ) which would allow the casting of Hollywood's under-used black performers. Finally, he even helped to break the studio blacklist by hiring and publicly crediting Dalton Trumbo as screenwriter on Exodus. Preminger's tastes have always been as eclectic as the disparate sources from which his films have been adapted. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, however, Preminger's films grew in pretention, displaying considerable interest in monolithic institutions (the military in The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell and In Harms's Way ; the Senate in Advise and Consent ; the Catholic Church in The Cardinal ; the medical profession in Such Good Friends ) as well as the examination of social and political problems (drug addiction in The Man with the Golden Arm ; Jewish repatriation in Exodus ; racial prejudice in Hurry, Sundown ; political terrorism in Rosebud ). A consistent archetype in Preminger's films is the quest for truth; indeed, the director's recurring image is the courtroom.
What has especially fascinated Preminger's admirers is the subtlety of his mise-en-scène; his most typical effort is a widescreen film with long takes, no pyrotechnical montage, few reaction shots, fluid and simple camera movements, and careful yet unselfconscious compositions. Preminger's style, though apparently invisible, is one which forces the audience to examine, to discern, to arrive at some ultimate position. Several critics have written persuasively on the ambiguity associated with Preminger's apparent objectivity, including Andrew Sarris, who has characterized Preminger as a "director who sees all problems and issues as a single-take two-shot, the stylistic expression of the eternal conflict, not between right and wrong, but between the right-wrong on one side and the right-wrong on the other, a representation of the right-wrong in all of us as our share of the human condition."
If Preminger's formula floundered in the 1970s and 1980s, an era in which the American cinema seemed dominated by mainstream genre works and overt escapism, one cannot help but feel nostalgia and profound respect for Preminger's serious subjects and artistry. Indeed, his series of films beginning with Bonjour, Tristesse in 1957 and continuing through Porgy and Bess, Anatomy of a Murder, Exodus, Advise and Consent, The Cardinal, In Harm's Way, Bunny Lake Is Missing , and Hurry, Sundown in 1966, constitute one of the longest strings of ambitious, provocative films in American cinema.
Otto Focus |
Village Voice Nick
Pinkerton from the Village Voice, December
25, 2007
Otto Preminger belongs to film history; beyond that, the consensus ends. Was he the artist-crusader who stared down the MPAA, Cardinal Spellman, and Ku Kluxers—or an opportunistic, penny-wise producer with a genius for forecasting the winds of change and handpicking his bouts for maximum headline type? Nor did he help himself by sowing pleasant memories: In a new critical biography by Foster Hirsch, Preminger veterans who weathered the director's infamous outbursts question not only his legacy, but even his very ability.
Alongside this new tome—one of two forthcoming after a long drought of serious writing in English about Preminger—a 23-film Film Forum retrospective attempts to correct a still-lingering underestimation of the filmmaker's corpus. Now, the whole overrated/underrated argument is always the proverbial teapot tempest magnified by the tunnel vision of cinephiles, and it needs to be taken with a smidge of relativity. But the fact remains that Preminger's is a body of work that holds up to most any in American film, undermined by the truth that, per Hirsch, Preminger was that indigestible combination: "a famously hotheaded man who . . . made beautifully restrained films."
The elder son of a well-heeled Jewish family, Preminger was born in Austria-Hungary in 1905 and raised in Vienna. He was an erudite, successful theater director by his 30th birthday, though a premonition of the looming Anschluss inspired his relocation to America. He went to work at 20th Century Fox in 1936, but a flare-up of his famous temper toward Hollywood über-producer Darryl Zanuck meant banishment to New York (Preminger was always partial to Gotham—at the height of his influence, he made his headquarters on 55th Street). After directing for the stage and playing stock SS man, he returned to the studio's good graces with a hit in the classic noir Laura (1944); for the next eight years, the quintessential maverick was a model company man, the go-to guy for thrillers and odd jobs. His noirs are knotty with thwarted sex, characterized by patient characterizations, ellipses of solitude, and the precision- haloed nocturnal photography of Joseph La Shelle. The culmination of this period is 1952's Angel Face, a dyspeptic terror that open-ends onto the abyss. Film Forum's program, however, testifies to the little-acknowledged diversity of Preminger's Fox résumé, with rarely screened one-offs that include a Joan Crawford melodrama (Daisy Kenyon), a Restoration period piece (Forever Amber), and an Oscar Wilde adaptation (The Fan).
Autocrat Otto's great period came with the disintegration of the studio system, from which he emerged as his own industry, an independent producer-director. It's here that his rows with Joseph Breen's censorious Production Code Administration office began—Preminger was the first man of consequence who wouldn't jump through hoops for its Seal of Approval. Self-interest and genuine liberal convictions happily aligned; what was good for Otto's p.r. was almost always good for America, and he helped banish a system that hamstrung popular entertainment with its arcane prudery. From the innocuous but taboo-busting utterance of "virgin" in his farce The Moon Is Blue (for shame!) through the dope-sick Man With the Golden Arm, Preminger uncovered verboten new territory with every new production and found fresh pricks to kick against when he wasn't sparring with Breen. Bucking convention, he shot two big-money all-black musicals in the '50s—Carmen Jones and Porgy and Bess (leading lady Dorothy Dandridge was a longtime girlfriend)—and hired the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo to adapt Leon Uris's Exodus, giving Trumbo his first screen credit since the studios let their people go.
But we wouldn't be talking about Preminger if the controversies disguised a brummagem art: He's first and foremost an apotheosis of cinematic style, though Preminger gradually distilled his technique to a bracing purity scoured of righteousness or moral certitude. He cut sparingly; his strategic sequence shots were elegant but unobtrusive; his shooting style kept the world composed at a contemplative distance(he discovered the vistas of Cinemascope filming his only Western, River of No Return, and the love affair never ended). Preminger's office negotiated for the most disreputable bestsellers, but with sophistication and sensitivity he rendered coarse material fine. His adaptation of a Françoise Sagan titillation, 1958's Bonjour Tristesse, starred David Niven and Preminger discovery Jean Seberg as a sybaritic father-and-daughter duo in one of that decade's great underappreciated films. His epic quartet of institution-protagonist pictures—Anatomy of a Murder (starring "The Law"), Advise & Consent ("Congress"), The Cardinal ("The Catholic Church"), and In Harm's Way ("The U.S. Navy")—all come from doorstop-weight bestsellers. But rather than Michenerian plodding, they represent a run of rarefied ambition and tactically brilliant rolling compositions.
Equally essential to the Preminger aesthetic was his collaboration with New York designer Saul Bass, whom the filmmaker introduced to the cinema. Bass's indelible, logo-like title sequences and posters—the jagged Golden Arm, the geometrically vivisected Anatomy of a Murder figure—which he made for nearly every Preminger production from the mid-'50s on, lent the films an air of signature modernity as inextricable from the texts as Alvin Lustig's covers for New Directions paperbacks. (Concurrent to the Film Forum series, a show of Bass's posters is on display at the Posterati gallery.)
Missing from this unimpeachably curated retrospective are merely the bookends of Preminger's career: Of his apprenticeship works, Under Your Spell (1936) is the lone representative, and the absence of works from his flagging final 15 years of filmmaking is distinctly noticeable (the cutoff is 1965's magnificently ambivalent Bunny Lake Is Missing). However, although there's no excuse for the toxic all-star pileup of Skidoo—a dangerous film to describe, because it almost inevitably sounds more entertaining than it actually is—dysfunctional works like Such Good Friends and The Human Factor deserve a venue for reconsideration. But first things first.
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Velvet Light Trap, 21, 1985 - David Bordwell Widescreen
Aesthetics and Mise en Scene Criticism, by David Bordwell, Summer 1985
(pdf)
Otto Preminger Leaves Bulk Of Estate To Wife - Los Angeles Times April 30, 1986
Otto Preminger's "Bonjour Tristesse," by Fred Camper, a Chicago ... Fred Camper from The Chicago Reader, September 24, 1999
Betty Grable Finally Dances with Baron Leopold ... - Senses of Cinema Martha P. Nochimson on That Lady in Ermine from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2000
Where the Sidewalk Ends •
Senses of Cinema Boris Trbic, July
18, 2000
Let's
Talk About Sex, Baby: Revisiting Preminger's The Moon Is Blue ... Alan Jacobson from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 31,
2004
Jonathan
Rosenbaum, The Essential Critic ... - Senses of Cinema Stephen Teo reviews Essential
Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons, by Jonathan Rosenbaum (2004) from Senses of Cinema, April 15, 2005
Otto Preminger: The method in his madness - Features, Films - The ... Geoffrey MacNab from The Independent, March 25, 2005
Review
of Jonathan Rosenbaum, Essential Cinema: On the ... Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film
Canons, by Jonathan
Rosenbaum, review by Brian Hu from Mediascape,
Spring 2005, also seen here: Taking
Film Studies to the Streets (and Back Again) - Mediascape
BFI | Sight & Sound
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Thomson compares two Lauras in Preminger films, from Sight and Sound, May 2005
"Laura" and the Essential Ninth - Florida State University Laura and the essential ninth: were they only a dream? by Michael Buchler, from Em Pauta, Porto Alegre, July to December 2006 (pdf)
Otto Preminger and the End of Classical Cinema • Senses of Cinema John Orr from Senses of Cinema, July 31, 2006
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Preminger, or The Thinking Gaze, by Miguel Marías from Fipresci magazine, 2006
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Preminger Centennial Tribute Andre
Soares from Alt Film Guide, October
16, 2006
Otto Preminger: the man who would be king - Google Books Result Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King, by Foster Hirsch (572 pages), 2007
Femme/s, Film/s, Noir/e: Revisions - eScholarship | University of ... 14-page essay by Valerie Stulman from the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, February 1, 2007
The Otto factor - Los Angeles Times Liz Brown reviews Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King, by Foster Hirsch (572 pages), from The New York Times, October 14, 2007
Otto Preminger (washingtonpost.com) excerpt from Prologue, Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King, by Foster Hirsch (572 pages), from The Washington Post, November 9, 2007
Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King - Foster Hirsch - Book ... Anatomy of a Director, Richard Schickel reviews Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King, by Foster Hirsch (572 pages), from The LA Times, November 11, 2007
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The world and its double: the life and work of Otto Preminger - Google Books Result Author Chris Fujiwara (479 pages), 2008
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The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger - Google Books Result Author Chris Fujiwara (479 pages)
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World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger ... Author Chris Fujiwara (479 pages), reviewed
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Two Books about Otto Preminger | Jonathan Rosenbaum Rosenbaum reviews of two books, The World and its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger (479 pages) by Chris Fujiwara; Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King (573 pages), by Foster Hirsch, from Cineaste, Summer 2008
'Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema', World Picture Journal, 2, 2008) Christian Keathley, Autumn 2008
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UNDER YOUR SPELL
User reviews from imdb Author: jdeamara from NY, USA
This film is a pretty routine affair, with none of the participants going
out of their way to do anything special. It is Otto Preminger's first English
language film, and contains a scene toward the end in a courtroom, one of
Preminger's favorite settings. Here, the scene is played for laughs and is
easily the film's best.
Lawrence Tibbett was a star of the Metropolitan Opera who tried to bridge the
gap between popular and classical music. He was also actually a film star in
the early days of talking pictures, being nominated for an Academy award for
best actor for 1930's The Rogue Song. Making this B-picture was an indication
of how far he sunk, and how low his previous picture was received at the box office,
1935's Metropolitan. How he could have ever been a star at all is a bit of a
mystery, as he does lack a bit of charisma, not to mention looks.
Wendy Barrie fairs much better in this movie. In fact, a long close-up of her
as she reclines and listens to one of Tibbett's songs on record, is the most
beautiful shot in the movie. She was a gorgeous woman and it's a shame she
wasn't in more vehicles, be they A or B films. She's great here.
Gregory Ratoff and Arthur Treacher, each with their respective schtick, provide
adequate support, which very nearly borders on the annoying.
The New York Times (B.R. Crisler) review
By some unaccountable mischance, perhaps the strangely inept music of Arthur Schwartz or the mediocre lyrics by Howard Dietz, perhaps the absence of well-worn arias by Rossini, Verdi or Leoncavallo, the new Lawrence Tibbett film, "Under Your Spell," has been consigned to the limbo of a secondary billing under a romance, "Give Me Your Heart," with George Brent and Kay Francis. The picture itself is not nearly as black as this fortuitous circumstance has painted it, however.
On the contrary, Mr. Tibbett gives just as good an account of himself vocally, in spite of the words and music, as he did in "Metropolitan," his last film, which was housed comfortably for two weeks at the Music Hall. His manifest weakness as a screen artist has always been his essential incongruity in the conventional "romantic" context, but that is no more apparent here than it was as far back as "The Rogue Song," and if Twentieth Century-Fox has not discovered it by this time it deserves the consequences.
On the most ridiculously romantic or trumped-up occasions, however, his voice remains the richest, the most dramatic, the most beautifully controlled vocal instrument on the contemporary screen, and no amount of soldiering by the Messrs. Schwartz and Dietz can disguise this amazing and gratifying phenomenon. As an overworked singer who tries to escape from it all with the aid of a butler called Arthur Treacher, and, despite a manager called Gregory Ratoff, only to be dragged back to work triumphantly in the soft net of Wendy Barrie, a rather unconvincing celebrity-hunting heiress, Mr. Tibbett acquits himself as satisfactorily as could well be expected. The fact that the Tibbett voice could stand a more studiously thought-out setting will hardly be contested by any one.
MARGIN FOR ERROR
User reviews from imdb Author: JohnHowardReid
Preminger also starred and directed the stage play which ran highly successful seasons both on Broadway (264 performances) and the West Coast, so he was a natural for the movie version. Unfortunately, the play is more than a trifle dated, unlike Mrs Luce's other huge stage success, The Women, which is still pointed and amusing even today. By contrast, the women in Margin for Error are not the least bitchy, feline or self-indulgent. Instead, the comedy (such as it is) centers on the efforts of a Jewish cop to come to terms with his duties at the German consulate. He smiles a lot, wins the heart of a serving girl (the lovely Leisl Handl) and has plenty to say and do, but Milton Berle's interpretation never strikes me as either the slightest bit policeman-like or true-to-life. Otto Preminger's portrait of the evil consul is equally one-dimensional, but at least he gives the role presence and charisma. While Preminger rivets attention, Berle is just plain dish-washy. Admittedly, the plot is full of holes, and the other police officers are likewise ridiculously simple-minded. Thank goodness the rest of the cast are better served by the script, particularly Howard Freeman in his best role ever as the strutting, cowardly Mussolini-like bund leader; dashing Carl Esmond as the secretary; and beautiful Joan Bennett as the wife. Production values, led by Cronjager's velvety photography and Day's appealing sets, impress
The New York Times review T.S.
Although Clare Boothe called her play "Margin for
Error," the margin is not sufficiently ample to excuse the movie version
now playing at the Globe. Less than brilliant when done on Broadway, the script
is now painfully dated. The Nazis certainly are not less villainous, but as
they are shown in the film they are much less interesting. Practically every
character and situation has long been a cliché of anti-Nazi films generally.
There is the heiling bund leader, too ridiculous a dumbskopf to be a menace to
anybody; there is the figure of the Nazi consul himself, impeccable and bald, a
monotonous sadist; there is the character—in this case the consul's wife—who is
chained to a conspirator's role for fear of reprisals against relatives in
As an occasionally witty intrusion into the inner sanctum of a Nazi consulate before the war, Miss Boothe discovered a veritable hotbed of lies, recrimination, mutual distrust and hatred among the members of the consul's staff. When the hated consul was found poisoned, stabbed and shot —in that order— practically all of the characters were suspect and at least two were guilty of intended murder. In the play the killing occurred comparatively early. In the film, however, the greater part of its length is devoted simply to establishing motives, and rather banal motives they are, for the sundry characters. When the murder does finally occur it is cleared up in no time at all. As a story the film has practically no suspense.
It is not greatly helped by the tediously bombastic style of Otto Preminger as the consul nor by Joan Bennett as his suffering wife. Poor Milton Berle—as the Jewish policeman assigned to protect the Nazi he is forced to forsake his comic antics and make sweet speeches on the benefits of democracy, a role for which Mr. Berle seems way out of line. For that matter, "Margin for Error" is way out of line as well.
User reviews from imdb Author: theowinthrop from United
States
I saw this odd "comedy" in the early 1970s when I
was at college. It is not a great comedy - barely a passingly good comedy. But
it has a situation in it that is still somewhat relevant, even if the
characters have changed.
The issue is: if you know a foreign government is evil and hates your country,
your country's governmental philosophy, and most of the people in your country,
how can you formally protect its representatives when they are under diplomatic
title?
Claire Booth Luce wrote one of the best comedies of the 1930s, "The
Women", which was turned into a memorable film comedy with Joan Crawford,
Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, Joan Fontaine, Paulette Goddard, and Mary
Boland. As the film's advertisements said, "It is "The Women",
and it's all about Men!!!", as the film is about the way women manipulate
and fight over men. Despite some dating due to social changes (the social set
is centered on the "gold coast" of
Not so with "Margin For Error". Ms Luce, like her husband Henry (the
publisher of "Time" and "Newseek" and "Life
Magazine"), was a mixture of good and bad ideas. The bad ones included a
snobby anti-Semitism that arose from time to time. Alexander King once pointed
out that every time TIME mentioned Leo Trotsky, Luce would have "(nee
Bronstein)" after Trotsky's name. But Luce and his wife were aware of the
real threat of Hitler's type of anti-Semitism. They were therefore aware that
while they disdained social contact with Jews (and definitely disliked left
wing Jews) they would not plan to kill every Jew. It never crossed their minds,
of course, that the Hitler style of anti-Semitism was aided by the Luce style
of it.
Fiorello LaGuardia, known as
Claire Luce was aware of this, and it is the basis of "Margin For
Error". The consulate of the Nazis, headed by arch Nazi Karl Baumer (Otto
Preminger), is a center of spying against the
After a particularly nasty incident involving anti-Semitic comments, Baumer is
sent word from City Hall that there will be a new police officer protecting the
consulate. Enter Officer Moe Finklestein (Milton Berle). Baumer of course is
absolutely furious at this individual being "given" to him for
protection. Since Finklestein is not a German national or ally, he returns the
comments that Baumer shoots at him with interest.
As you can see the play has many plot lines in it - perhaps too many. The
crisis comes when there is a confrontation scene involving Baumer with his wife
and his Secretary, and Horst, and Finklestein within earshot. Baumer has his
own agenda, including framing Finklestein in an attempt on Baumer's own life to
give a reason for
While it may seem somewhat interesting the film moves too slowly. It is best
served by Preminger (as several reviewers point out) who makes himself at home
as the charismatic but evil diplomat. Freeman adds to it, playing Horst as an
ambitious but rather fatuous type (his bund uniform looks a size too small for
his plump form). Bennett has had far better roles in other films - this is not
in her top 20 films. Esmond is adequate. As for Berle, he really never got into
the swing of film acting until after his success as a television pioneer. He'd
prefer being remembered for "It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World" and
"Who's Minding The Mint" than for this film. Even his sleazy film
agent in "The Oscar" was a surer performance. But then his material
is not great.
Yet for a minor film "Margin For Error" remains on one's mind.
Whenever we have an incident where a country's diplomats (Cuban, or North Korean,
or Libyan, or Iranian) have insulted our population or segments of it, and then
insisted on protection for the same diplomats in their work, we have to grit
our teeth and do it. We are not handing Nazi German diplomats anymore, but the
central issue at the heart of the plot remains with us to annoy us.
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
IN THE MEANTIME, DARLING
User reviews from imdb Author: dougdoepke from
Claremont, USA
Slender little wartime comedy whose best feature is a winsome
young Jeanne Crain and a lively Gale Robbins as new brides. The boys are
training in the desert before being shipped overseas. In the meantime, the
married officers are boarding at what looks like the only house for miles
around. Many of the junior officers are newly married and much of the comedy
comes from their efforts to cope. For the girls, it's a period of adjustment
sharing facilities and household duties with others. For Crain, with her
privileged background, adjustment proves especially difficult.
The premise is promising, but the screenplay remains underdeveloped and never
really gels as a comedy. That's not surprising since the running time is 70
minutes for a production probably chunked out in 10 days and scheduled for
bottom-of-the-bill showing to the eager droves of wartime audiences. Also, cult
director Otto Preminger seems an odd choice for light comedy, his strength
being slow, heavy psychological dramas like Laura (1943). The results here
suggest he was uninterested in the material, to say the least. Nonetheless, for
those interested in how newly-weds adjusted to wartime demands, the movie
offers a generally entertaining if lightweight glimpse.
LAURA
Not just another noir classic of '44, Laura almost succeeds
in pulling the screen apart at the seams, if only to stitch it together again
in a visibly frantic finale. The narrator's a critic, the cop a would-be
necrophiliac, and the femme fatale a faceless corpse... or are they? Less
investigative thriller than an investigation of that genre's conventions -
voyeurism (looking at, and for, Laura), a search for solutions (not just
whodunit but whodunwhat), and the race against time (clues and clocks,
fantasies and flashbacks) - the plot is deliberately perfunctory, the people
deliciously perverse, and the mise-en-scène radical. (From the novel by Vera
Caspary.
Laura (1944) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
One of the most elegant and seductive examples of classic
film noir is this haunting study in obsession. It is unusual in that it
uses the familiar noir motifs to lend a dreamlike character to the narrative,
contrasting with other film noir dramas where these techniques are usually
intended to add a sense of realism through their psychological impact.
The film was based on a popular crime novel by Vera Caspary. Rouben
Mamoulian was initially hired to direct it, but he was sacked by Twentieth Century
Fox executive Daryl F. Zanuck shortly after filming began, and replaced with
Otto Preminger. Zanuck was disappointed with the film’s original ending
and insisted it be replaced with something better.
Laura is both a compelling murder mystery and a dark satire on male attitudes
towards women. The two principal characters Waldo Lydecker and Mark
McPherson are about as different as they would be – the one is a
self-opinionated intellectual, the other a laconic muscle man. Yet they
both have a craving for the female sex which has the power to drive them to
destruction. The obviously gay Lydecker wants a woman he can possess like
a rare ornament, to be admired for its aesthetic and spiritual
qualities. McPherson’s attraction for Laura may have a more natural,
earthier basis, but it is strange that he should fall in love with her in full
knowledge of the fact that she is dead. For both men, it is the
unattainability of Laura which makes her an irresistible object of desire, but
whereas one of the two is driven by his love to kill her, it is the love of the
other that brings her back to life.
All of the central performances in this film are faultless, but the one that
stands out is Clifton Webb’s. His Waldo Lydecker exudes the mix of suave
velvet campness and intellectual pomposity that you only ever find in the
senior common rooms of the older Oxford colleges, yet he delivers venomous
put-down one-liners with the precision and force of an Olympic javelin
thrower. Webb was nominated for an Oscar, one of the film’s five
nominations. As it turned out, the film won just one Oscar, for Joseph
LaShelle’s beautiful and highly atmospheric noir cinematography. In one of
his early film appearances, many years before he became closely associated with
the fantasy-horror genre, Vincent Price revels in the part of a handsome
playboy. He gets to say the film’s best line: "I can afford a blemish
on my character, but not on my clothes."
Slant Magazine review Nick Schager
At the cynical heart of Otto Preminger's Laura is a
murder, yet labeling this elegant 1944 noir classic a whodunit is to ignore its
masterfully complex—and frequently campy—portrait of all-consuming romantic
self-delusion. Laura (Gene Tierney) is a wealthy, mysterious beauty whose
death-by-shotgun instigates an investigation by hard-nosed detective Mark
McPherson (Dana Andrews). McPherson discovers that the victim inspired rabid,
near-incomprehensible devotion from both cerebral newspaper columnist Waldo
Lydecker (Clifton Webb)—who, in a truly bizarre moment, greets the cop by
exiting his bathtub in the buff—and shallow, gold-digging two-timer Shelby
Carpenter (Vincent Price), whom Laura was considering marrying in a week's time.
Either man, as well as Carpenter's caustic, jealous girlfriend Ann Treadwell
(Judith Anderson), might have been the executioner, or, in the film's surprise
twist (spoiler alert), Laura might not be dead at all. It doesn't really
matter, because the who, what, when, where, and why are merely the exquisitely
constructed genre trappings of Preminger's critique of high society and
examination of man's penchant for projecting their fanciful visions of
idealized femininity onto women.
Laura's three suitors are a line-up of varying masculine types: Lydecker
embodies the intelligent, asexual fop; Carpenter the frivolous, frisky idiot;
and McPherson, the gruff, sexually hardy he-man uncomfortable with his urban
surroundings, who, in the film's most perverse twist, falls for the
"dead" Laura on the basis of her alluring portrait and the knowledge
that she inspired such ardent male affection. Each of these smitten saps is, in
one way or another, obsessed with Laura. Lydecker can't stand the thought of the
unrefined McPherson calling his young companion a "dame" because it
clashes with his own image of her as a socialite defined by sophisticated
loveliness. McPherson, meanwhile, is entranced by the glamorous Laura's
inscrutability and magnetism, while Carpenter envisions her as a gorgeous,
expensive bauble to wear on his cheap, philandering arm. And as personified by
the luminous Tierney, Laura—always a passive participant in her own story, and
shot by Preminger in downy lights that cause her deep, dark eyes to twinkle
like mirrors—is the vapid, superficially enticing vessel for these men's
self-generated desires.
McPherson's fascination with Laura, however, isn't born simply from his ability
to see his longings mirrored in her own; rather, his is a rescue mission in which
winning her heart also means saving her from a decadent world of festering
greed, sloth, and moral bankruptcy. The detective's disgust for this
environment explodes from Andrews's stern, disapproving eyes, and Preminger's
film (based on Vera Caspary's novel) subscribes to McPherson's condemnation via
its depiction of Carpenter, a disreputable, wantonly profligate weasel so
indolent that, during their first meeting, he willingly concedes to Laura that
he's wholly indifferent to the idea of work. No better is Clifton Webb's
feminine Lydecker, a hypocritical intellectual ("Haven't you any sense of
privacy?" he caws to McPherson shortly after recounting his own meddlesome
role in Laura's life) who despises McPherson's "muscular and handsome"
physicality, or Treadwell, whose blasé immorality—exemplified by a speech in
which she admits to being "weak," self-centered, and having the
capacity for murder—is emblematic of this social milieu's depravity.
Preminger stages a third-act party attended by arrogant elites with obvious
contempt, and it comes as little surprise when the rough-and-tumble McPherson
ends the festivities by socking the worthless Carpenter in his soft underbelly.
"You're not yourself, darling," coos Lydecker to Laura during the finale,
but this sentiment fails to take into account that Laura really isn't
anyone—she's just a blank slate to be written on by others. Considering that
noirs typically punish those who attempt to alter their own identities, Laura's
status as a cipher turns out to be her saving grace, and thus provides a new
wrinkle to Preminger's otherwise conventional (though nonetheless impressive)
employment of noir trademarks like shadowy black-and-white cinematography,
shifty criminal goings-on, and roiling romantic and class tension. McPherson's
eventual triumph isn't that he solves the case (which becomes increasingly
irrelevant) but that he saves Laura from falling further into a ritzy pit of
wickedness. And the director's denunciation of the upper crust is most
forcefully illustrated by his juxtaposition of the heroic, heterosexually
virile "dick" McPherson and the erudite, homosexual dandy Lydecker—a
clash of simple "normalcy" vs. haughty degeneracy meant to appeal to
WWII-embroiled citizens' hunger for strong (as opposed to fey) men. Webb might
steal the movie with his marvelously arch, snooty performance as the lethally
acerbic columnist, but in the end Laura—closing on a note in which the
titular femme appears on her way toward redemptive domesticity with
McPherson—is nothing if not an affirmation of a traditional, hard-working,
middle-American lifestyle.
"Laura"
and the Essential Ninth - Florida State University Laura and the essential ninth: were they only
a dream? by Michael Buchler,
from Em Pauta, Porto Alegre, July to
December 2006 (pdf)
Femme/s, Film/s, Noir/e: Revisions - eScholarship | University of ... 14-page essay by Valerie Stulman from the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, February 1, 2007
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Impulse David
Thomson compares two Lauras in Preminger films, from Sight and Sound, May 2005
The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]
Laura
(1944) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
Jeremy Arnold
Laura
- TCM.com Andrea Passafiume
ANATOMY
OF A MOVIE: Otto Preminger & Dana Andrews: LAURA ... Michael Guillen from Screen Anarchy, December 3, 2009, also here: The Evening
Class
Goodfella's Movie Blog: #30: Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944) March 26, 2010
American Cinematographer dvd review Kenneth Sweeney
not coming to a theater near you review Thomas Scalzo
Big House Film (Roger Westcombe) review
Laura (1944) Noir Filmography of Otto Preminger
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) dvd review
Film Freak Central dvd review Walter Chaw
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (David Krauss) dvd review
DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [4/5]
DVD Verdict dvd review Amanda DeWees
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nate Goss
DVD Town (John J. Puccio) dvd review
DVD MovieGuide dvd review Colin Jacobson
Eye for Film ("Skyline") review [5/5]
KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review
Laura –
And Mystery Women Generally - Bright Lights Film Journal C. Jerry Kutner, March 9, 2007
Laura Movie Review | Otto Preminger | Gene Tierney | Dana Andrews ... Cinema Merde
filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [82.7/100]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [A]
Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb: Otto Preminger's LAURA ... Andre Soares from Alt Film Guide, May 21, 2010
LAURA (Otto Preminger, 1944) « Film & Felt
Edinburgh U Film Society (Katia Saint-Peron) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [4/5]
Laramie Movie Scope (Patrick Ivers) review
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]
Baltimore City Paper (Eric Allen Hatch) review
Baltimore City Paper (Luisa F. Ribeiro) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies] January 20, 2002
The New York Times review T.M.P. October 12, 1944
MOVIE REVIEW |
'THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES'; Cold Case, Warm Hearts: Death Leads to Romance Argentine film reminds critic Manohla Dargis
of Preminger’s LAURA, from The New York
Times, April 16, 2010
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Laura (1944 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A ROYAL SCANDAL
USA (94 mi) 1945 co-director: Ernst Lubitsch (uncredited)
Time Out review Tony Rayns
This should have been an Ernst Lubitsch film: it's a remake of his 1924 movie Forbidden Paradise, and he had just started it when he succumbed to his fifth heart attack. (He still gets nominal producer credit.) Preminger stepped in, fresh from the triumph of Laura, and obviously had little success in getting Tallulah Bankhead to tone down the fruitiness of her performance as Catherine the Great, torn, as usual, between lust and sentimentality. There are hints of what might have been in the performances of Coburn and Price.
User reviews from imdb Author: blanche-2 from United
States
"A Royal Scandal" from 1945 smacks of its original director, Ernst
Lubitsch, and not much of the director who took over for him when he became
ill, Otto Preminger. Since Lubitsch had rehearsed the actors and prepared the
script, I assume they retained much of what Lubitsch had in mind for this film.
At any rate, it's a wonderfully funny film.
Tallulah Bankhead plays Catherine the Great, who was notorious for taking
lovers and elevating them to great heights while they were in favor. They did
all right when they fell out of favor, too, because apparently she pensioned
them off and they lived quite handsomely. In this film, she takes a fancy to
the Countess Anna's (Anne Baxter) fiancée, Alexei Chernoff (William Eythe), so
much so that she puts off a Marquis from France (Vincent Price). The Countess
Anna is devastated, and Alexei is thrilled as he becomes in charge of the
palace guards. Meanwhile, Chancellor Nikolai (Charles Coburn) has to tolerate
him.
Some of this film is laugh out loud funny, particularly the scene where
Catherine, fearing she has lost Alexei, collapses on the floor and Alexei tries
to pick her up. Hilarious. Tallulah's line delivery is great, and she and
Coburn have wonderful chemistry as they spar. Anne Baxter was only 22 when she
made this film, and she's lovely. The handsome Eythe was a type that 20th
Century Fox loved, but for a variety of reasons, he never hit stardom. Darryl
Zanuck, who was so furious with Tyrone Power for marrying Annabella that he
quashed her career and gave Power a bad film, Daytime Wife, as punishment,
pushed Eythe into a marriage to quell rumors about him, but it didn't help, and
Zanuck lost interest in him. (I mention Power because supposedly he refused to
do this movie - it seems unlikely, because he wasn't back from the war when
this film was made; also, Zanuck would never have put him in a film where he
wasn't the main star.) Eythe was a charming actor, but to my mind, anyway, not
really star material.
Bankhead's costumes and jewelry are to die for. Very good movie, and, as others
have pointed out, a real buried treasure.
User reviews from imdb Author: eschetic-2 from Bolton,
Ct./Jersey City, NJ; United States
NO film with Charles Coburn can really miss, and A ROYAL
SCANDAL has so much more going for it on top of Coburn and top billed Tallulah,
you want it to be as delicious a Lubitsch confection as it promises to be. It
is for at least the first ten minutes while the pacing remains frantically
break-neck (and some necks are nearly broken). Even when it inevitably slows
down, it remains lightly enjoyable for most of its 94 minutes, but Otto
Preminger was decidedly the wrong director to shepherd the Lubitsch project to
fruition, and too much of the blithe banter, even in the hands of such reliable
clowns as Sig Ruman just misses the mark as Tallulah alternately rages at and
romps with alternating 'favorites' while senior minister Coburn protects her
and her country (and keeps French Ambassador Vincent Price frustratingly off
screen waiting his turn with the Empress).
Coburn's scenes all sparkle with his amused knowing looks and quite conspiring,
and "Guard of the East Gate" Misha Auer makes his few scenes comic
gems, but neither handsome William Eythe (a Tyrone Power hopeful who never
quite caught on - bad roles hurting more than rumors about his private life)
nor the raging Tallulah (taking a slight wrong turn into costume farce after a
dazzling contemporary outing for Hitchcock in LIFEBOAT) are given enough
substance or variety in their frustrated - intended to be comic - dance of
seduction to deliver either the hilarity or the sexual tension intended. With
the exception of PORGY AND BESS, did a Preminger film *ever* understand the
comic aspect of sex? His closest approach to subversive comedy may be in
inexplicably showing COBURN more fond of Anne Baxter (William Eythe's on screen
fiancé) than Eythe appears to be - but it would be easy to miss her entirely in
an underwritten role but for Coburn's concern.
Other than the polished LIFEBOAT, the great Tallulah's dozen or so movies
(Bette Davis kept getting to make Bankhead's greatest stage roles in film -
from DARK VICTORY to the LITTLE FOXES) show up so seldom these days, and so few
of them preserve the comic touch which Bankhead was known for on stage (her
Broadway revival of Noel Coward's PRIVATE LIVES is still the longest running
production of that great comedy and her Sabina in Thorton Wilder's THE SKIN OF
OUR TEETH is justly renowned) that no one should miss a chance to see A ROYAL
SCANDAL, but the great misfortune the film originally suffered of opening the
day before President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died (can you think of a WORSE
time for a farce/comedy to open?!) was not the only reason the film is not
ranked among Lubitsch's masterpieces.
Still, a Lubitsch near miss is as good as many another film maker's milestone.
'Well worth a look - and if it adds to our enjoyment to think of Ann Baxter's
later role in ALL ABOUT EVE as a love letter from Tallulah to Bette, well, it
isn't such a bad idea either.
User reviews from imdb Author: tentender from France
Hiding the
Salami in Plain Sight - Bright Lights Film Journal C. Jerry Kutner, July 9, 2005
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
FALLEN ANGEL
Dana Andrews, an advance man for a touring spiritualist, decides to stay on in a small California town when he gets a look at the sex bomb jerking sodas at the local diner (Linda Darnell); his plan is to marry the town spinster (Alice Faye), steal her inheritance, and take off with the waitress. But when Darnell is found murdered, the retired New York detective in charge of the case (Charles Bickford) begins to suspect Andrews. Otto Preminger's 1945 noir is a masterpiece of the postwar long-take style: each scene is mounted with a minimum number of edits, as Preminger sends his actors through elaborately choreographed blocking and his camera moves in and out among them, framing and reframing to highlight emotions without breaking the unity of the performance. The portrait of small-town loneliness and desperation is sharply drawn, while Faye is generally cast as a pure-hearted foil to Betty Grable in Fox's musicals and creates a character of impressive maturity and wrenching vulnerability. 100 min.
Slant Magazine review Fernando F. Croce
The huge success of Laura may have done more ill than good to
Otto Preminger's career, not only for setting expectations high early in the
game, but also for forcing a "noir mystery master" image onto an
artist much more interested in asking questions than in answering them. Fallen
Angel, the director's follow-up to his 1944 classic, is often predictably
looked down as a lesser genre venture, yet its subtle analysis of shadowy
tropes proves both a continuation and a deepening of Preminger's use of moral
ambiguity as a tool of human insight. Linda Darnell, a provocative bombshell
caught behind the counter of a small-town
FALLEN ANGEL (Otto Preminger, 1945) « Dennis Grunes
Written by Harry Kleiner from a novel by Martin Holland, Otto Preminger’s Fallen Angel is a tale of two women living in two different parts of town. The town is Walton, California, which is 150 miles from San Francisco. One of the women is dark, played by a Mexican-born actress on the professional rise; the other is blonde, played by a former American sweetheart hoping for a comeback. The dark woman is a waitress at Pops, a tiny hamburger, coffee and beer joint; she lives in a small apartment in the seedy, dilapidated part of town close to shore. The blonde woman, who is middle-class and moderately rich, lives with her sister in their own house in the clean, manicured part of town. The film identifies the dark woman’s part of town with pitch-dark night; the blonde’s, with sunny daylight. The latter plays classical music; the former listens to honky-tonk. The dark woman has been around the block a lot; the blonde woman is sexually inexperienced. The contrast between the two women and the two parts of town is formally rendered throughout by deep, ravishing contrasts in the black-and-white cinematography that Joseph LaShelle gorgeously conjures. LaShelle was Preminger’s painstaking cinematographer for Laura (1944), for which he won an Oscar.
In Laura, Preminger had wryly approached the contrast in class between his working-class police detective and the society rich making up the detective’s list of suspects in the murder he is investigating. But Fallen Angel investigates its class distinctions with more dedication and brio, arriving at a social critique about two Americas, the festering division in the social American landscape. One group of people consists of relocated individuals, transients and those perpetually poised to become transients, a point underscored by the fact that Stella, the waitress (Linda Darnell, vivid), has a history of disappearing from job and home for days on end, much to the chagrin of her employer, who unabashedly adores her. By contrast, the Mills sisters represent a kind of stability. They have a history in Walton; their deceased father, Abraham Mills, had been the town’s mayor. They are respectable, while Stella is on the make, looking for the one guy who will prove her ticket out of socioeconomic stress.
A rich, ambiguous work, Fallen Angel isn’t at all as schematic as my description thus far has made it sound. For one thing, one of the Mills girls, the non-blonde Clara (Anne Revere, on the verge of winning her Oscar for National Velvet), has been touched by nonrespectability herself, having lost her inheritance, except for the house, to a lover who conned her out of the money. For another, the protagonist, a drifter named Eric Stanton (Dana Andrews), shuffles back and forth between both parts of town, dating both Stella and Clara’s sister, June (Alice Faye), ostensibly to get hold of June’s money so that Stella will accept him as her lucky break. In the meantime, June, whom he mercenarily marries, falls in love with Eric for real. Does love blind her or help her to see with especial clarity? When Stella is murdered, June alone believes in his innocence and takes flight with him, from the police, to San Francisco.
At the core of this film noir, which is one of Preminger’s very best films, is a dream element that anticipates another San Francisco-film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), by positing the possibility—here, in symbolical terms—that the two women, dark Stella and blonde June, are somehow identical, or, perhaps, aspects of a single character.* Kleiner and Preminger pull off this sleight of eye effortlessly. I will recount four of the key elements in the film that forge this identification of the two seemingly disparate women, although, in fact, there are many more. For one, as noted earlier, Stanton dates both characters. One night, he takes Stella dancing, and the next night, having tarried in town longer than planned, he takes June dancing. By coincidence, Stella is on the same dance floor that night, with her own date. “Ditch him,” Stanton whispers to Stella, “and I’ll meet you afterwards.” Stella declines, but the invitation implies the women’s interchangeability, hence, identity. Again, Stanton marries June, but only because he wants to marry Stella, for which to make happen, he believes, he first must get hold of June’s money! Marrying one character because he wants to marry the other is a second way the film implies their identity. It is Stanton’s desire to leave town, to run away with, Stella, but, once she is murdered, he runs away with June instead—a third hint of identity. A fourth point of identity between Stella and June is the redemption of Stanton’s marriage to June by his sleuthing out the identity of Stella’s killer.
Needless to say, in context none of this is schematic, either. The identity between the two women bridges the apparent wide divide between them, creating a poignant undertow. Preminger has found a way, through the identification of the two lead female characters, to reimagine America, to express his egalitarian heart and dream of a single, unified America. The gradual accumulation of this symbolic vision of his makes Fallen Angel a more profound, if unremittingly sober experience than Laura, although, of course, Laura provides more scintillating entertainment.
As is the case with Laura, perhaps the most celebrated of all Hollywood whodunits, the revelation of the murderer’s identity is rigorously, even perfectly logical and yet also comes as something of a shock. When it can surprise you with the most reasonable unraveling of the crime, a mystery delights like nothing else on earth.
* Hitchcock’s Judy (Kim Novak) sounds almost exactly like Preminger’s Stella!
Otto Preminger and the End of Classical Cinema • Senses of Cinema John Orr from Senses of Cinema, July 31, 2006
Film Noir of the Week Bill Hare, July 18, 2005
Fallen
Angel (1945) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Jeremy Arnold
Fallen
Angel (1945) - TCM.com Jay
Carr
4 x Otto Preminger | Film International Chris Fujiwara, also reviewing WHIRLPOOL, WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS, and CARMEN JONES
DVD Times [Mike Sutton] also reviewing WHIRLPOOL and WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS
Undead Backbrain [Robert Hood] also reviewing WHIRLPOOL
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [2/5]
Noir's
Positive Animas - The Guardian Angels - Bright Lights Film ... C. Jerry Kutner from Bright Lights Film Journal, February 18, 2008
Shadows and Fog Aplenty in New Crop of Film Noir Classics
Shadows
and Fog Aplenty in New Crop of Film Noir Classics | Village ... Michael Atkinson from The Village Voice, March 14, 2006
filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [3.5/5]
moviePoopShoot.com great photos
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [B]
User reviews from imdb Author: yardbirdsraveup from Connecticut
User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Robert
J. Maxwell (rmax304823@yahoo.com) from
Deming, New Mexico
User
reviews from imdb (Page 3) Author: Roseofsharon969
(Roseofsharon979@live.com) from
Canada
User reviews from imdb (Page 4) Author: writers_reign from London, England
Time Out review Chris Petley
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review February 7, 1946
Critic's Choice: New
DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times, March 7, 2006
FOREVER AMBER
USA (138 mi) 1947 co-director: John M. Stahl (uncredited)
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review
Linda Darnell, the screen's greatest slut, attacks the court of Charles II in this 1947 adaptation of Kathleen Windsor's best-seller. It's a lush Fox production, photographed in Technicolor by the great Leon Shamroy and directed by a wholly uninterested Otto Preminger. With Cornel Wilde, Richard Greene, George Sanders, Anne Revere, Leo G. Carroll, and Jessica Tandy.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
A cleaned-up adaptation of Kathleen Winsor's novel about a peasant wench's rise to riches - by means of sexual favours - during the reign of Charles II, this was originally planned as a John Stahl film, with Peggy Cummins in the role of the opportunistic Amber. Stahl, in fact, would probably have been better suited to the lurid emotional melodrama than Preminger, though Darnell - blonde for once but as sultrily sensuous as ever - is fine in the central role, while the supporting cast (notably Sanders as the king) is excellent. It's all lavish enough, beautifully shot in Technicolor by Leon Shamroy, but Preminger's direction lacks the sophisticated lightness of touch that Mitchell Leisen brought to the in some ways similar Kitty.
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Back, way back, before rock bands and Hollywood, the pretty and promiscuous had to sleep their way to the top with captains and highwaymen and aging counts and...dare I say it...the king! Entertaining Kathleen Winsor romance novel with the heat turned down (by Ring Lardner Jr.) for public consumption, but the heavy acting talent is kept in the wings with a few lines each (Anne Revere and Jessica Tandy). Linda Darnell nor Cornel Wilde is particularly believable in their rolls as star-crossed lovers in a field of beds, but that's just as well as credible acting would have been wasted on a wilfully incredible plot. Otto Preminger makes sure that things flow smoothly considering and strangely enough you're left with a sense of the time, whether accurate or no I can't say. I wasn't there.
Forever
Amber (1947) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
17th Century England. The Civil War has come and gone,
Cromwell has had his day and the monarchy has been restored. Amber St.
Clair is a poor girl in a nondescript hamlet, dominated by her puritanical
father and forever dreaming of a better life. One day, she has her chance
when she meets the dashing Bruce Carlton and his friend Harry Almsbury, who are
on their way to London to ask favours from their king, Charles II, in return
for fighting on his side in the war. Amber follows Bruce to London
and enjoys a brief love affair with him before he abandons her. Having
given birth to Amber’s son and suffered a spell in prison, Amber decides to make
her fortune as a courtesan...
In its day, this adaptation of Kathleen Winsor’s raunchy
bodice ripper was something of a sensation, winning some notoriety on account
of its subtle eroticism and far from veiled references to illicit sex.
Today, Forever Amber is no more offensive that a child’s cartoon and is
more likely to induce sleep than any kind of arousal, intellectual or
otherwise. The generally stilted performances and Otto Preminger’s
completely uninspired direction are grade A passion killers, but these are at least
partly made up for by the impressive production standards, with sets and
costumes that provide one of Hollywood’s most authentic-looking recreations of
17th Century England.
Seriously over-long and plodding to the point of brain-atrophying tedium, Forever
Amber’s biggest let-down is the casting of Linda Darnell in the female
lead. Peggy Cummins was originally cast in the role but was replaced at
the insistence of studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck several weeks after the film had
gone into production, thinking that she lacked the experience to carry the
role. Darnell is hardly an improvement and gives a one-note performance
which soon becomes painfully tedious to watch. By contrast, George
Sanders is eminently watchable as King Charles II and rescues what would
otherwise have been a total misfire.
User
reviews from imdb Author: bkoganbing from Buffalo, New York
User
reviews from imdb Author: Greg Couture from Portland, Oregon
User
reviews from imdb Author: James Hitchcock from Tunbridge Wells, England
User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: L. Denis Brown (ldbrown1@shaw.ca) from Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DAISY KENYON
Fascinating melodrama (from the novel by Elizabeth Janeway)
which has anguished Crawford torn between the two men in her life, army
sergeant Fonda and married lawyer Andrews. She's a fashion designer (cue
costume changes); as always with Crawford, though, it's her gaunt, angular face
that dominates the screen. She may only have agreed to do the film on condition
that Andrews and Fonda were her co-stars, but fine actors though they are, they
can't match her pitch of intensity.
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review
A high-40s women's picture (1947), with Joan Crawford as a
fashion designer torn between two lovers—calculating Dana Andrews and wholesome
Henry Fonda. Otto Preminger, the slightly miscast director, sets the choice up
like a murder trial, carefully balancing the arguments on both sides. His sober
approach and his fluid camera style do much to redeem the material, for which
he has no apparent sympathy. It's a Preminger film purely by accident, but it
is a fine example of studio craft. With Ruth Warrick, Peggy Ann Garner, and
Martha Stewart. 99 min.
Daisy Kenyon (1947) Mark Harris from Patrick Murtha’s Diary
I sense through various Web references lately that the reputation
of this noir-tinged late Forties "woman's picture" has been growing,
and I'm not surprised. In what seems at first to be a perfectly well-cooked
meal of melodrama, there are all kinds of raw bits. Our heroine Daisy Kenyon
(Joan Crawford) has to choose between two men, one of whom tries to force
himself on her physically (an ugly scene, especially for its time), the other
of whom no less disturbingly forces himself on her emotionally. The neglected socialite wife of the first man
(lawyer/tycoon Dana Andrews) dislikes her younger daughter and abuses her
physically (and the movie doesn't even beat around the bush about this!).
Lawyer Andrews takes on a noble litigation involving a discriminated-against
Japanese-American -- and, counter to the strong movie tradition of nobility
winning through, loses the case.
Meanwhile, the second man (ex-serviceman Henry Fonda) can't shake memories of
his own dead wife and treats Daisy with a bizarre blend of loving attention and
passive-aggression. In the ultimate showdown between the two guys, Fonda at
first seems to have nothing but
proves to be the ultimate slyboots, provoking the question, Can someone be a
throroughly good man and a master manipulator at the same time? (Fonda's final
line is one of the best closing observations in movie history.)
Director Otto Preminger's disciplined visual style serves the material with
real distinction, and the actors are in great form -- all three are appealing,
all three are maddening. (Fonda says perplexedly of Andrews at one point,
"I like him," to which
Crawford responds, "He wants you
to like him. He's good at that.") By the final scene, the movie has moved
beyond melodrama: there can be no "happy ending" because someone is going to be unhappy, and
our final glimpse of Andrews -- great facial acting here! -- casts a troubling
shadow over, well, everything.
Slant Magazine review Dan Callahan
Fairly recently, Otto Preminger's Daisy Kenyon has been starting to get some of the acclaim and attention it deserves, not only as one of the director's best films, but as a troubling and ambiguous portrayal of three real, unknowable characters (and actors) in constant flux, which means constant danger, both emotional and physical. "There's nothing like a crisis to show what's really inside people," says Daisy (Joan Crawford), a tense, willful woman unhappily involved in an affair with a married man, attorney Dan O'Mara (Dana Andrews). Actually, Preminger's film proves through patient, almost medical analysis that people are even more difficult to figure out when they get pushed to their limits.
Daisy tries to keep her angry resentment going whenever she sees Dan, yet she always drifts into self-pitying love for him. On the rebound, she takes up with widower Peter (Henry Fonda), who gets stiffly drunk and tells her he loves her, very seriously, at the end of their first date, then asks her to marry him, much too quickly. After we see him waken from an anguished nightmare, it seems clear that Peter is deeply troubled, but when our supposed heroine Daisy tries to comfort him, her eyes glint as she preaches will power, and she suddenly seems crazy, for just one startling moment. There are no heroes or heavies here, not even Dan's wife (Ruth Warrick), who takes out her frustrations by beating her younger daughter.
Preminger delights in scrutinizing the often inscrutable masks of his three lead actors, gliding his camera like a panther in and out of their lonely, studio-set darkened spaces. The contrast between Preminger's smooth, neutral style and his people's tentative yet brutal interactions starts to become harrowing midway through the film, when Dan forces himself on Daisy. This physical struggle is staged in a relentless way, and Crawford's reaction after the violence feels primal in its hysterical hurt feelings.
Daisy Kenyon, which was generally dismissed as a slick triangle melodrama, has emerged as one of the most adult of all post-war noirs, filled to the brim with subsidiary characters who seem to have their own life and cares. If you want to see what a major director can do with standard material, just watch the way Preminger handles a late restaurant confrontation between his queasy love triangle, alternating close-ups and off-kilter framing until the tension reaches such a boil that it starts to burn away everything but the salient, courtroom-like facts of the matter. Soap opera is distilled to its real-life essence, until what's left is nothing less than the ultimate mystery of art.
The
Velvet Light Trap, 21, 1985 - David Bordwell Widescreen
Aesthetics and Mise en Scene Criticism, by David Bordwell, Summer 1985
(pdf)
Daisy Kenyon THE DAISY CHAIN, A 7-Part Symposium on Otto Preminger's Daisy Kenyon, from 24fps
You, the Jury: Joan Crawford, Otto Preminger and Daisy Kenyon Sheila O’Malley from The House Next Door, January 2, 2008
Daisy
Kenyon - TCM.com Jeremy
Arnold
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Daryl Loomis) dvd review
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
The IFC Blog [Michael Atkinson]
Metroactive.com [Michael S. Gant]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
The Digital Bits capsule dvd review Barrie Maxell
User reviews from imdb Author: imogensara_smith
from New York City
User
reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: James J Cremin (jjcremin@yahoo.com)
from Los Angeles, CA
User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: blanche-2 from United States
San Francisco Chronicle [Walter Addiego]
The New York Times review T.M.P. December 25, 1947
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
THAT LADY IN ERMINE
USA (89 mi) 1948 Preminger took over the direction after the death of Ernst Lubitsch during mid-production
This amusing costume farce — co-starring Betty Grable (the highest-paid Hollywood performer in 1947) and a delightfully tongue-in-cheek Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. — is a heady mixture of fantasy, historical drama, romance, musical interludes, jealousy, and humor, all presented in gorgeous Technicolor. Fairbanks’ performance as the lovestruck Colonel (who knew he was such a natural comedic actor?) is indubitably the highlight of the film (check out his Cheshire Cat grin as he dreams of Francesca/Angelina), while Grable — with her bouncy blonde curls — is appropriately luminous and feisty in the title role, and even manages to show off her million-dollar legs in one fun dance scene (see the poster image). Although there aren’t quite enough songs to classify That Lady as a full-steam musical, the first ditty — “Ooh! What I’ll Do (To That Wild Hungarian)” — is enormously catchy. All in all, this one is great fun.
P.S. Otto Preminger took over direction of the film when Ernst Lubitsch died mid-production, but the transition is seamless.
User reviews from imdb Author: Igenlode Wordsmith from
England
I enjoyed this film far more than anything had led me to
anticipate; from reading other comments here, I suspect it benefits enormously
from being seen on a full-size screen in the cinema, in the company of a
cheerful and enthusiastic audience. I was lucky enough to have that experience,
borne up on ripples of laughter from all around, and had an immensely good time
with this undemanding comedy.
For it is as a comedy that it shines, if it shines anywhere at all. The music
is nothing special -- in fact, I hadn't realised it *was* a musical, and was
very surprised when the assembled ancestors burst into half-spoken lyric -- but
I do have to admit that the half-threat, half-promise of 'Oh, what I'll do...'
has proved far more catchy than it ever seemed at the time, as it's still going
round and round in my head!
The plot, such as it is, largely pivots around the past history of the
eponymous Francesca, a sixteenth-century portrait sporting a distinctly
anachronistic hairstyle and fur-coat. Her idea on the sanctity of marriage
don't quite jibe with those of her distant descendant, the Countess Angelina,
and one can almost hear the storyline creaking at the seams under the strain of
the Production Code in order to ensure that the heroine arrives unsullied in
her much-delayed marriage-bed with the right man...
The romance is scarcely earth-shattering, and in fact the first few scenes,
played pretty well straight, verge on the tedious. But where script and film
really come to life is in the battle of the sexes that follows. The impudence
of Douglas Fairbanks Jr's courtship of Betty Grable's married Angelina is
equalled only by Betty-Grable-as-Francesca's pursuit of him in turn, culminating
in complete role-reversal in the hilarious fantasy sequence where she --
literally -- sweeps him off his feet. This is probably the comic climax of the
plot, although the consequences of the Colonel's understandable confusion are
worked out with a deft touch in the remaining two 'acts' of the
operetta-structure, and the spectacle of Fairbanks' blissful, bemused awakening
is more or less worth the price of admission on its own.
Grable is entirely convincing in establishing her two contrasting characters,
wisely gets almost all the (limited) singing opportunities, and shares the
honours where the swathes of quotable dialogue in the various verbal duels are
concerned. But in the field of unspoken reaction she is really outclassed by
her male supporting leads; Fairbanks in particular is an absolute treat in a
number of wordless sequences whose set-up and humour is worthy of the silent
screen.
This film is too uneven in style to be a classic, varying from sparkling
repartee to hackneyed tedium. But at its best it is quite honestly very funny
indeed, and brought a round of spontaneous applause and laughter across the
auditorium at the end as the lights went up. Out of tune with its times, it may
have failed to draw contemporary audiences -- but, on this showing, really
didn't deserve to be disowned by both Grable and Preminger, the (uncredited)
director. This is no masterpiece, but a thoroughly entertaining minor work, and
I for one found myself grinning in remembrance all the way home.
Betty
Grable Finally Dances with Baron Leopold ... - Senses of Cinema Martha P. Nochimson from Senses of Cinema, April 4, 2000
Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings (Dave Sindelar) capsule review
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
THE FAN
aka: Lady Windermere's Fan
USA (89 mi) 1949
User reviews from imdb Author: beduran from United
Kingdom
The story of "Lady Windemere's Fan" is a touching portrait of repression and hypocrisy in England during the Victorian era. The pivotal character in the movie is the charming, mysterious wise and beautiful middle-age woman played by Madeleine Carroll, who returns to the conservative upper-class milieu that had banished and rejected her decades ago. She manages to come to terms with the most delicate and unresolved aspects of her past, but she has to pay a very high price for that. Nevertheless, she is a survivor and in her eighties she will be able to make a balance and reflect on that crucial episode of her past. Madeleine Carroll and George Sanders are perfectly cast as the middle-age charmers and schemers, and also sound believable as the frail but smart octogenarian survivors, and deliver great performances on the hands of Preminger, who is able to maintain a good rhythm and to capture what we might figure is the Victorian society's aristocratic milieu of gossips and intrigues. I also enjoyed Martita Hunt as a typical upper-class eccentric, manipulative and witty matron; and thought that both Richard Greene and Jeanne Crain were OK as the younger Windemere couple. I think that this underrated little gem deserves a wider distribution. I am very lucky that in Spain the DVD of "The Fan" has been released in September 2007.
The Fan is an early melodrama from Otto
Preminger's long and fruitful 1940s residence at Fox Studios. Loosely based on
Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, the film moves fluidly from past
to present and back again, using a framing story in which the auction of a
delicate, finely crafted fan prompts the reminiscences of the elderly Mrs.
Erlynne (Madeleine Carroll), who then tracks down her old acquaintance Lord
Darlington (George Sanders). Together, they travel back into the past,
lingering on the follies and pleasures of their youth, when they were
attractive and fun-loving and both irrepressible adventurers. Though the bulk
of the film is set in this past, Preminger does not treat the framing story
with the disdain that such conceits usually receive. In these kinds of frothy
Hollywood concoctions, the framing story is usually just a slim pretext for
telling some other story, but Preminger is interested in these people not just
when they're young and witty and good-looking, but when they're old and feeble
and forgetful as well. The film becomes as much about the nostalgia of old age
as it is about the passionate loves and scandals and betrayals of youth.
In Preminger's hands, this is a prime melodrama, the story of a pure, loving,
devoted couple: Lord Arthur Windermere (Richard Greene) and his pretty young
wife Margaret (Jeanne Crain). They've been married a year and are deeply in
love, but their seemingly idyllic marriage is threatened when the slightly
older and notorious Mrs. Erlynne arrives in London. She's a self-described
"adventuress" and delights in shocking people by lighting up a
cigarette — which gives one some idea of just how easy it is to shock the
people in this film's exclusive society circle. The rumors spreading around
town about Arthur and this woman provide the perfect excuse for Darlington, who
had long admired and desired Margaret and now saw his opportunity to take her
away from her husband, who he assumed was being unfaithful anyway. In fact, as
is so often the case in these kinds of fairy tale melodramas, all is not as it
seems on the surface, and Preminger ably handles the twisty, lurid material,
which could have easily boiled over in lesser hands.
His style of languid tracking shots and careful pacing is well-suited to this
mannered drama, in which polite words and stylized gestures disguise the barbed
insults and insinuations of these upper-class gossips. The disgraced and
downtrodden Mrs. Erlynne only wants to make a name for herself in high society,
and she's quite willing to resort to dishonesty and trickery to do so. She's
conniving and manipulative, and she soon wraps the bumbling, stuttering Lord
Augustus (Hugh Dempster) around her little finger. Carroll, the star of early
Hitchcock features The 39 Steps and Secret Agent, is
fantastic here, in her last film role before a brief fading-away in TV work.
It's a shame that there has never been more call for roles like this, which take
advantage of an actress' middle age rather than simply discarding her in favor
of younger girls.
The subtleties of Carroll's great performance become clear in the scene when
Augustus comes to call on Mrs. Erlynne for the first time. She's brusque and remote
with him when he arrives, treating him with a thin gauze of manners that marks
him out as just one in a long line of callers that day; her courtly façade is
starting to wear away. But the minute she realizes that Augustus actually has
something of substance to offer her, that because of his status he could be
important to her, her entire manner changes. She becomes open and ingratiating,
her smile becomes genuine rather than simply polite, and her eyes begin to
sparkle. It'd be easy to sell a scene like this broadly, to make it theatrical
and overt, and in that case it would be comedy: the beautiful shark taking
advantage of a nebbishy bit of chum, and everyone knows it except the poor
victim himself. Preminger is too clever for such broad strokes, though, and the
performance he gets out of Carroll is more naturalistic and subtle. She makes
the scene into character-based drama rather than comedy; instead of laughing,
the audience learns more about her character, about what she's willing to do to
get what she wants.
The film is packed with such moments. Mrs. Erlynne is a complex character,
deceitful and tricky but also decent and good-hearted, self-serving but capable
of tremendous acts of self-sacrifice. The central couple of Arthur and Margaret
is naturally less interesting, since they provide an idealization of romantic
love rather than a pair of convincing characters; they're symbolic and
unspoiled while Mrs. Erylnne and Darlington are flawed, realistic characters.
Still, Crain gives a warm and sweet performance as the lovestruck woman whose
confidence and trust in her husband is shaken by rumors and suspicions. Her
pinnacle comes in a striking shot of her and Mrs. Erlynne towards the end of
the film, as the older woman tries to convince the younger one to go back to
her husband. Preminger stages it as a deep-focus two-shot with Margaret in the
foreground, slightly out-of-focus, her blurry features distorted by tears and
anguish. Mrs. Erlynne is slightly behind her, her face focused into crisp
detail so that the lines of her face are accentuated, calling attention to the
age difference between the women.
With scenes like this, Preminger finds unforgettable images in a story that
would be all too transitory in the hands of another director. The story is a
trifle of a melodrama, silly and contrived, and driven by the oldest of soap
fiction inventions, the return of the missing parent. Preminger wisely
downplays the narrative's more sensational ideas and mines the more understated
and genuine emotions at play here. This has the effect of shifting the focus
away from the syrupy romance of the central couple and onto Carroll's
world-weary Mrs. Erlynne and Sanders' aging cad Darlington, the former
repeatedly beaten down but never broken, the latter maturing into a raffish old
goat, still haunted by the great unconsummated love of his past. The dialogue
is understated and dotted with Wildean bon mots (especially from Martita Hunt
as a chattery duchess), and Preminger's flowing, gracious style complements the
delicate emotions and memories at the story's core.
User reviews from imdb Author: imogensara_smith from New York City
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
WHIRLPOOL
USA (98 mi) 1949
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
This peculiar 1949 thriller by Otto Preminger about a kleptomaniac (Gene Tierney) under the control of a Mabuse-like hypnotist (Jose Ferrer) hasn't much of a reputation in America, and the acting (which includes Richard Conte as Tierney's psychoanalyst husband) and cornball script (by Andrew Solt and Ben Hecht hiding under a pseudonym) help explain why. But the French enthusiasm for this moody and creepy melodrama, sparked mainly by Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard, isn't without defenses: Preminger's ambiguous relation to his characters and his sense of moral relativity have seldom been put to such haunting use. Based on a Guy Endore novel; with Charles Bickford, Constance Collier, and Fortunio Bonanova. 97 min.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
The same themes and the same cool style as in Laura
and Angel Face are at work in this portrait of the wealthy and
sophisticated cracking apart at the seams, under pressure from psychological
hang-ups, repressed passion, and innocent gullibility. When rich kleptomaniac
Tierney turns for help not to her psychoanalyst husband (Conte) but to a
hard-hearted hypnotherapist (Ferrer), she finds herself bereft of memory and
implicated in a murder. Preminger translates the rather daft story (scripted by
a pseudonymous Ben Hecht,
loosely adapting Guy Endore's novel Methinks the Lady) into a typically
unhysterical and lucid examination of people under stress: as the crime is
investigated, currents of distrust, fear, and falsehood disturb the smooth
waters of an apparently happy marriage. Content to observe rather than
moralise, he creates a world of sympathetically flawed characters, the
magnificent exception being the swindling quack, a manipulating charmer whose
underplaying by Ferrer suggests credible evil. With its noir themes
played out in cold, bright interiors, it's a fine example of the way Preminger,
on occasion, managed to deflect routine melodrama into something more personal
and profound.
Whirlpool
(1949) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
Ann Sutton is the wife of a renowned psychoanalyst, who is somehow oblivious to her incipient mental derangement. Leaving a department store one day, she is about to be detained for shoplifting when a smooth-talking stranger, Dr Korvo, intervenes. A hypnotherapist, Korvo offers to help Ann to overcome her kleptomaniac impulses, but another woman Theresa Randolph, warns her that he is a dangerous man. A short while later, Theresa is dead, apparently murdered by Ann. The man who had most to gain from the killing was Korvo, but at the time of the murder he was in hospital, and so he couldn’t possibly be the murderer – or could he...?
Whirlpool would be a very respectable film noir were it not for the brazen absurdity of its storyline (which stretches credibility so far beyond breaking point that you would be well advised to wear a safety helmet) and some equally implausible characterisation. Fortunately, there are some saving graces – the appropriate noir cinematography lends the film a mood of tangled intrigue and dark menace which helps to distract the viewer from the hideous plot contrivances, and Gene Tierney – her second collaboration with director Otto Preminger, after the superb Laura (1944) – brings a touch of class which adds greatly to the film’s enjoyment value. The best performance comes from José Ferrer, who, as the sinister Dr Korvo, exudes an aura of villainous charm which is both irresistibly seductive and deeply disturbing, not unlike a cross between Noel Coward and Peter Lorre. Not a great film, but certainly one that scores highly in the entertainment stakes.
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3/4]
Preminger was able to get away with making films without any real good guys long before it was en vogue. Whirlpool is also one of the first films to take shots at the facade of perfect materialist happiness that began sweeping the country after WWII and became a staple of 50's television. Gene Tierney is the supposed heroine, spoiled rich and stuck as a housewife. Her main problem is she always felt forced to hide things, and believing she had to be dishonest to get what he wanted even though she could easily have afforded the goods made her a kleptomaniac and ate her up inside. Richard Conte plays the supposed good doctor, Tierney's caring psychiatrist husband. He attends to his client's needs, but is incredibly naive about his wife and has created or added to many of her problems by being insensitive and inattentive. Tierney's issues leave her prone to the greasy charm of bad doctor Jose Ferrer, a con artist hypnotist (Preminger seems inspired by Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse) who specializes in taking advantage of wealthy women. An interesting aspect of the film is how Conte and Ferrer are compared and contrasted, in the end both of their sciences seem to be about preying on and exploiting human weakness. After Tierney is accused of murder, Charles Bickford plays another variation of his detective who does things his own way. The results are much different than in Fallen Angel, but the similarity is Preminger switches to one character largely as a way to reveal surprising characteristics and traits in another. Rather than imposing a certain brand of morality, Preminger shows us how the actions of one character dictate those of another, for better or worse. Preminger's examinations of psychosis and neurosis work better when they are less direct, but this exploration of conscious vs. subconscious has a certain brand of maturity despite the out and out silliness of Ben Hecht's screenplay. The dialogue is so obviously scripted it squeezes some of the life out of the picture, but the film works much better in its quite moments, allowing us to observe the shadiness and deficiencies of the characters with a sense of anticipation and amazement.
Whirlpool
(1949) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
Jeremy Arnold
A wealth of superb Otto Preminger movies have found their way
onto DVD in 2005. Laura (1944), Advise and Consent (1962) and Bunny
Lake is Missing (1965) are all here, a deluxe edition of The Man With
the Golden Arm (1955) arrives in October, and Where the Sidewalk Ends
(1950) will hit shelves in December. Compared to these, Whirlpool (1949)
is a minor Preminger film, but it's still a good one well worth a look. Fox
Home Entertainment's fine presentation (as part of the Fox Film Noir series)
makes it even better.
An intricately plotted script establishes Gene Tierney right off the bat as a
closeted kleptomaniac. When she is caught shoplifting at a department store,
oily hypnotist Jose Ferrer is there to see it and intervene. Tierney fears that
her psychoanalyst husband (Richard Conte) will learn of her kleptomania so she
meets with Ferrer in the hopes that hypnosis will cure her. But to Ferrer, a
weak and unstable mind is a pliable mind. And a pliable mind means that Tierney
is just the kind of woman he needs - to frame for a murder, of course!
Eventually a police detective (Charles Bickford) enters the story to try and
solve said murder, and Conte realizes he must save his marriage. All three men
are attempting, in effect, to access Tierney's mind in some way.
On the surface, Whirlpool is a convoluted, implausible melodrama which
even works in an unlikely scene of self-hypnosis. Yet it holds together quite
well on the basis of its underlying, psychological character motivations. The
script has an answer for everything. Ferrer may be creepy and smooth-talking,
for instance, but he's good at what he does, and his diagnoses of Tierney
mental condition are right on the money. Similarly, there is a psychological honesty
in the way Tierney and Conte's marriage is presented. Whirlpool is
really a film about character relationships, which is undoubtedly what
interested Preminger.
Instead of trying to build Hitchcock-style suspense, Preminger approaches the
story more objectively. He generally asks us to observe his characters react to
situations rather than have us participate in the reacting. This is an
engrossing approach which Preminger would take over and over in his career and
which is always fascinating to ponder. In Whirlpool, the bad guy and his
scheme are revealed to us well before they are revealed to the characters.
Normally this would create emotional involvement for the audience, but here it
serves to detach us and cause intellectual involvement. As another example,
watch the simple 20-second sequence in which Tierney, under hypnosis, drives
from her home to a dead woman's house. The camera never shares the car with
Tierney. Instead, we are always watching her from outside, usually in long shot
as her car winds through the streets. Instead of driving with her, we're
watching her drive. The difference is somehow both subtle and glaring.
As for the cast, Tierney is her usual sophisticated self and Ferrer is a bit
over the top but otherwise effective. Richard Conte could, and did, play
villains and good guys very well in a multitude of films noirs around this
period. But he seems miscast as a respectable psychoanalyst, a rather bland
role which is neither sympathetic nor despicable. He gives his character a jolt
of energy, however, with his tough street-guy demeanor still coming through in
his voice and body language. Conte was always dynamic when asked to show anger.
Critic Richard Schickel devotes far and away most of his commentary track to
examining the script's content and themes, with little on the style and
aesthetics of the movie. More of that side would have been welcome, but overall
his commentary is interesting. For example, he makes a good point about the
three men (Bickford, Conte, Ferrer) representing three varying ways of
approaching the story's problem (rational, scientific, and pseudo-scientific),
and three forces which are vying for control of Tierney's fate. He ties this
into the role of women in post WWII American society, which is certainly valid
enough. The technical apects of this DVD are very well handled by Fox, and even
the DVD cover design is beautiful, using Whirlpool's original poster
art.
'Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema', World Picture Journal, 2, 2008) Christian Keathley, Autumn 2008
Film Court (Lawrence Russell) review
Only The Cinema [Ed Howard] April 3, 2009
Film Noir of the Week Steve-O, December 6, 2007
4 x Otto Preminger | Film International Chris Fujiwara, also reviewing FALLEN ANGEL, WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS, and CARMEN JONES
DVD Times [Mike Sutton] also reviewing FALLEN ANGEL and WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS
Undead Backbrain [Robert Hood] also reviewing FALLEN ANGEL
Self-Styled Siren May 17, 2006
Whirlpool (1934) - TCM.com Lorraine LoBianco
Whirlpool
(1949) - Articles - TCM.com Jeremy
Arnold
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Wilson) dvd review
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review Nate Goss
Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings David Sindelar
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
reelist [s.w. black] movie poster
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review January 14, 1950
Critic's Choice: New
DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times, September 6, 2005
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gary W. Tooze]
WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS
A weatherbeaten Andrews gives one of his finest performances
as Detective Mark Dixon, a belligerent cop whose father was a crook and whose
roughhouse tactics appal his bosses. He's a good man at heart, but the fates
are against him and his behaviour becomes closer and closer to that of the
father he abhorred. Mobster Merrill is always on hand to taunt him about his
background. His plight becomes yet more desperate when he accidentally kills a
murder suspect and then falls in love with the widow (Tierney). Preminger's
superior noir boasts hardboiled and sardonic dialogue, courtesy of Ben Hecht,
but also a surprising strain of pathos as Dixon fights against his own nature.
Brutal, fatalistic, but desperate for redemption, he's just the kind of cop
James Ellroy would write about so well a generation later. (Adapted from the
novel Night Cry by William L Stuart.)
Slant Magazine review Nick Schager
For his last picture at 20th Century Fox, Otto Preminger
reteamed his Laura and Whirlpool stars Dana
Andrews and Gene Tierney for Where the Sidewalk Ends, an efficient,
bleak noir with an Oedipal twist. Investigating a homicide at an illegal craps
game run by gangster Tommy Scalise (Gary Merrill), detective Mark Dixon
(Andrews), a cop whose renegade streak drives his lieutenant (Karl Malden) to
explain that his "job is to detect criminals, not punish them,"
accidentally kills a suspect with an uppercut during a scuffle. Fearful of his
unintended actions' consequences,
As was the genre's custom, the film's primary struggle exists within
Where
the Sidewalk Ends (1950) James
Travers from FilmsdeFrance
New York detective Mark Dixon has a reputation for brutality when it comes to dealing with criminals and his boss warns him that unless he changes his ways he can expect a demotion. Called to a hotel room where a man has been stabbed to death, Dixon runs up against an old enemy, the mobster Tommy Scalise. Convinced that Scalise is implicated, Dixon goes after the key witness to the killing – a man named Ken Payne – only to knock him dead in a brawl. Having disposed of Payne’s body, Dixon contrives to pin his death on Scalise, but things do not go quite as planned. First he falls in love with Payne’s ex-wife Morgan, and then the police begin to suspect that Payne was killed by Morgan’s father. As his world collapses around him, Dixon realises he still has one last chance to bring Scalise to book...
Where the Sidewalk Ends was the last in a series of films
that director Otto Preminger made under contract with Twentieth Century Fox in
the 1940s. It is a quintessential film noir, furnished with all of the
familiar noir motifs – cynical cops sparring with tough gangsters, gambling
rooms draped with beautiful women, and an unmistakable stench of masculine
existentialist angst. The taut, well-constructed screenplay was by the
prolific Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht, who had previously collaborated with
Preminger on an earlier film noir Whirlpool
(1946).
The film is typical of late 1940s, early 1950s American film noir in that it
marked a dramatic change in the way in which the detective hero is
portrayed. Here we see the emergence of the maverick cop, the morally
ambiguous anti-hero who was more than willing to step outside the law in order
to dispense his own peculiar notion of justice. Prior to this, the good
guy-bad guy demarcation was pretty clearly defined – by and large, cops were
good, hoodlums were bad. Subsequently, this neat separation of role types
would become less and less noticeable and would vanish altogether, often with
the criminals taking the moral high ground as the cops became more ruthless in
their determination to win.
The subject and style of this kind of film noir would appeal immensely to
French film directors – most notably Jean-Pierre Melville –
and would have a significant impact on the development of the policier
genre in French cinema throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Where the
Sidewalk Ends is very evocative of the early French policiers, with its
hazy delineation between police and mobsters, its bleak neon-lit urban setting,
its no-holds-barred brutality and absence of a well-defined moral compass.
Where the Sidewalk Ends brought together a formidable acting team, Dana
Andrews and Gene Tierney, who had previously starred in Preminger’s earlier, Laura
(1944), a very different kind of film noir. In one of his best
performances, Andrews is convincing and likeable as the taciturn cop whose
determination to prove himself drives him to the point of self-destructive
psychosis. Mark Dixon is an unusually complex character for this
kind of film, and much of the film’s appeal is that some thought has gone into
rationalising the motivation for his behaviour, rather than just pass him off
as a cop who just likes abusing his power, as happened in many subsequent crime
dramas.
Where
the Sidewalk Ends (1950) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Jeremy Arnold
Six years after making film history with Laura (1944),
Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney reunited with director Otto Preminger and
cinematographer Joseph LaShelle to make another film noir, Where the
Sidewalk Ends (1950), which has just been released on DVD in the Fox Film
Noir line. Given the similarities in cast and visual look, it's difficult not
to compare the two movies. But where Laura is romantic, Where the
Sidewalk Ends is gritty. Where Laura is set in uptown Manhattan
among high-class sophisticates, Sidewalk is set far downtown in a world
of cheap hoods and corrupt, aggressive cops. And where Laura stresses
mystery, Sidewalk stresses anxiety and shades-of-gray morality. Laura
may be the better film, but Where the Sidewalk Ends is tougher, more
hard-boiled, and more "noir." It's set almost entirely at night and
asks us to root for a character who has accidentally killed a man and then
covered up the murder. His paranoia at being found out becomes our paranoia,
too.
The comparison is also apt because Andrews works for the law in both - he's a
detective in Laura, and a cop in Sidewalk. Both characters fall
in love with Gene Tierney, but his Mark Dixon, in Where the Sidewalk End,
is mean and angry inside. Dixon became a cop as a way to make up for his
father's criminal ways, but his hatred for criminals and inherited mean streak
have made him overly aggressive with the bad guys (a trait that Robert Ryan's
tough cop in On Dangerous Ground, 1952, would take to even darker
psychological depths). Dixon is so prone to beating them up that his superiors
demote him and threaten to go further. But this is film noir, so the next thing
we know Dixon accidentally kills a murder suspect and, fearing no one will
believe him, disposes of the body and points the finger at a local,
inhaler-sniffing hoodlum named Scalise (well-played by Gary Merrill). As things
play out, Dixon finds himself falling for the dead man's widow, a model played
by Gene Tierney.
Tierney certainly looks beautiful and plays well with Andrews (this was their
fifth and final movie together), but her part is not nearly as well-defined or
interesting as in Laura, and overall her impact is not so great. As far
as the actors go, it's Andrews's movie all the way - with one exception, that
is. Ruth Donnelly, the veteran character actress who had already appeared in
over 80 films, steals all her scenes as the owner of a Manhattan diner called
Martha's, thanks to some fine acting talent and superb Ben Hecht dialogue.
Otto Preminger's fluid and graceful direction further links Laura and Where
the Sidewalk Ends. One of the least showy of great directors, Preminger's
shots were often deceptively complicated because they followed the action so
smoothly in long, continuous takes. Film noir historian Eddie Muller points out
several good examples on his commentary track. Otherwise, Muller offers
interesting information throughout (how many people know that Dana Andrews
started his career as a singer?), though he can be annoyingly smart-alecky at
times. But he does know his subject and as these things go, it's a good
commentary. Further extras include trailers for this and other Fox noirs, and a
swell photo gallery. Picture and sound quality are tops.
Look for Gene Tierney's real-life husband, costume designer Oleg Cassini, in a
bit role in a modeling scene.
Where the Sidewalk Ends •
Senses of Cinema Boris Trbic, July
18, 2000
Novelty
title sequences and self-reflexivity in classical Hollywood cinema Deborah Allison from Screening the Past, November 27, 2006
Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) Otto Preminger « Twenty Four Frames John Greco, April 21, 2010
4 x Otto Preminger | Film International Chris Fujiwara, also reviewing FALLEN ANGEL, WHIRLPOOL, and CARMEN JONES
DVD Times [Mike Sutton] also reviewing FALLEN ANGEL and WHIRLPOOL
Big House Film (Roger Westcombe) review
Where
the Sidewalk Ends | Film Review | Slant Magazine Nick Schager
Gone with the Twins (Mike Massie) review [8/10]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (David Krauss) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Rob Lineberger) dvd review
DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Guido Henkel
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
Exclaim! dvd review Travis Mackenzie Hoover
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review July 8, 1950
MY
CITY; Right Out of Film Noir, A Shadowy New York Wendell Jamieson from The New York Times, December 2, 2005
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
THE 13TH LETTER
USA (85 mi) 1951
In a small town in French Canada, Smith, the wife of doctor Boyer, receives a letter accusing her of having an affair with young doctor Rennie. Soon more poison-pen letters begin to appear elsewhere, all signed with the mysterious pseudonym "Raven," and everyone in town starts to suspect everyone else of being the writer. One letter informs a shell-shocked veteran that he is dying of cancer, causing the distraught man to commit suicide. Suspicion falls on a nurse, who is imprisoned, but the letters continue to be delivered, one falling out of the choir loft while everyone is at church. Boyer assumes control of the investigation and analyzes the handwriting of everyone in the choir, but he is unable to determine the culprit. Finally it is Rennie who learns the identity of "The Raven." It is Smith, who wrote the first letter when the aloof Rennie failed to notice her attraction to him. The real villain, however, is Boyer, who discovered what his wife had done and forced her to continue to write the letters in order to prove some strange theory of his about the "insanity of two." As Boyer himself writes a final letter, the vengeful mother of the suicidal veteran slips up behind him and slits the good doctor's throat from ear to ear. While not nearly as good as the original, Henri-George Clouzot's THE RAVEN (LE CORBEAU), Preminger's film does have some power and a great deal of suspense. Boyer returned to the screen, after a three-year absence, no longer as a romantic idol but rather as a character actor, and embarked on a second career almost as satisfying as his earlier one. His performance and those of the other leads are convincing, especially Rennie's idealistic but solitary doctor and Darnell's clubfooted would-be seductress. For most of the lesser roles, Preminger cast unknowns, most of whom do a creditable job.
The Thirteenth Letter (Preminger, 1951) Derek Smith from Cinematic Reflections
An inferior, yet worthy remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot's The
Raven, The 13th Letter may take many of the prior's original ideas but
Preminger adds a few of his own touches to make it much more of a compliment
than a rip-off. Missing is Clouzot's typically morose, seedy atmosphere
dripping with contempt for (or is just disgrace of?) humanity, the dark shadows
slowly revealing the sneaky people from which they begin, and the town full of
people who almost seem to get what they deserve. Preminger's lightens the
mood taking a bit of the suspense away but leaving for sexual undertones that
seem to dominate the male-female dialogue throughout the film. My
favorite line in the film "If I was your father, I would have spanked
you!" gives you an idea of the double entendre that can be found throughout
the film.
The townspeople, or at least the 3 or 4 major players, feel more like innocent
victims rather than morally unsound characters whose karmic fate is finally
giving them a kick in the behind. There is sympathy for their situation
with less concern, from the audience’s standpoint, for catching the penman and
more of a desire for the characters to simply trust one another. Of
course Preminger's film still takes many of the same twists and turns as The
Raven, but it still feels like a different film - more than simply an
Americanized foreign film. After seeing three Preminger films, it's clear
he knows the material before he attacks it and although I haven't particularly
loved any of them, my complaints tend to be small annoyances rather than large
problems with any single aspect.
The unfortunate news about The 13th Letter is that it just can't be found
anywhere. Given the director's fame I imagine it will get a DVD release
within a year or two, but considering all the bad films I see garnering a
release each month it really should be sooner than that. For now you'll
have to settle for Clouzot's film, which fortunately can be enjoyed on the new
Criterion DVD which will allow you to catch the suspense on the best imaginable
print.
User reviews from imdb Author: bmacv from Western New York
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [C]
ANGEL FACE C+ 79
USA (91 mi) 1952
Otto Preminger is a
heralded director, known as much for his bald, Austro-Hungarian profile, where
he specialized in playing brutal Nazi SS officers in various WWII movies, like
Billy Wilder’s STALAG 17 (1953), as for his dictatorial reputation of being
rude and bullying on the set, where he was also renowned for his efficiency and
work ethic. He is one of the last of the
studio directors, where in this feature he was on loan from 20th
Century Fox to do one picture for Howard Hughes and RKO Pictures. British actress Jean Simmons was unhappy with
the direction of her career, which
They meet when an ambulance
is called to the scene of a palatial estate in
This is known as
foreshadowing. And therein lies one of
the major problems in this film, as the over-explanative dialogue continually
reveals too much, always making sure the audience knows exactly what’s going to
happen before it happens, which actually takes some of the pleasure away from
this film. Some directors simply try to
do too much, as if the audience is incapable of figuring anything out
themselves. Unfortunately in this film,
where the less you know ahead of time the better, none of the so-called
surprises come as a surprise, as all the evil deeds are telegraphed ahead of
time. Frank sees through Diane
instantly, but she continues to use her feminine charms to lure him off his
game, where eventually the two get mixed up in a bit of foul play, where the
story turns on a dime into a lengthy courtroom sequence that slows the film
down and adds little to the drama. See
ANATOMY OF A MURDER (1959) for Preminger’s take on an excellent courtroom
drama. But if truth be told, this film
works best when she is charming the pants off of him and he continually
resists, but then becomes intoxicated with her hare-brained schemes, as if the
thought of their dreams together can somehow weaken ordinary human beings into
committing unethical acts. When Diane is
continually pulling Frank into the dark mysteries of her delusional soul,
everyone in the audience has enough sense to know better, everyone except
Frank. So while they are an improbable
couple, they have a way of flirting with disaster, tempting fate, continually
going against better judgment, but unlike Hitchcock, for instance, there’s not
a hint of suspense, in fact most of this is told in a very matter of fact
manner. This couple could be deliciously
malicious, but instead they’re portrayed as bland and empty, both devious opportunists
who are in over their heads, each trying to use the other, a sleight of hand on
the Beauty and the Beast story, where no one is willing to see the beast
in such a beauty, as everyone continually looks away from the truth that’s
staring them straight in the face.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Superb Freudian crime thriller, noir-inflected in theme but shot by and large in crisp, bright drawing-rooms. Mitchum is the archetypal noir-hero confronted with a devious femme fatale; as an ambulance driver who becomes so infatuated with the outwardly angelic Simmons that he moves in as her family's chauffeur and can't bring himself to admit that she is trying to murder her mother, he gives one of his most restrained and lyrical performances, perfectly offset by Simmons' demonic ingenue. Preminger, as it were, flattens the melodramatics of the story with typically cool clarity, emphasising its psychological complexities and allowing the occasional incursions of violence to emerge with shocking matter-of-factness.
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review
This intense Freudian melodrama by Otto Preminger (1953) is one of the forgotten masterworks of film noir. Jean Simmons, beautifully blank, plays the ultimate femme fatale, a rich girl who seduces her beefcake chauffeur (Robert Mitchum) when daddy (Herbert Marshall) resists her advances. The film is a disturbingly cool, rational investigation of the terrors of sexuality, much as Preminger's later masterpiece Bunny Lake Is Missing is a detached appraisal of childhood horrors. The sets, characters, and actions are extremely stylized, yet Preminger's moving camera gives them a frightening unity and fluidity, tracing a straight, clean line to a cliff top for one of the most audacious endings in film history. With Mona Freeman, Leon Ames, and Barbara O'Neill. 91 min.
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4]
Howard Hughes's RKO studio produced the best American pictures of
their time, even if accidentally. As Hughes would often put something other
than the bottom line first, even if it was silly or vindictive, the final
product was usually more artistic even if that was in spite of him. Preminger
had absolutely refused to do this film, originally titled Murder Story, feeling
it was trash. However, in order to get another picture out of Jean Simmons in
the 18 shooting days he had left and stick it to her for cutting her hair short
by making her wear a long wig, Hughes allowed Preminger to do whatever he
wanted with the picture as long as he didn't hire any communists to fix the
script and conceded to the silly wig. What emerged was one of Preminger's
better explorations of what would eventually go down as his typical themes. He
liked to explore the contrast between the exterior and interior of women, more
specifically seemingly attractive young innocents who were actually mentally
unbalanced. Simmons gets the nod here as the spoiled rich girl, pretending to
be in love with Robert Mitchum while really plotting to use him to help get rid
of her stepmother so she could have her beloved father all to herself again.
Despite the censors, early on Preminger is able to make it clear her interest
in her father is sexual. Simmons is not an actress I've been particularly
impressed with so far, but here she got the last laugh on Hughes giving a
memorably emotionless performance to show she's a black hole inside. Mitchum
once again manages not to play the simple sap, he's too smart for that but once
again he can't stop the women from exerting enough power over him to keep him
from ever making a clean escape. Mitchum's laid back seemingly indifferent
acting style is perfectly suited for the role, where he's torn between Simmons'
character and his previous girlfriend, who worked with him at the hospital (she
too splits her interest between Mitchum and another man from the hospital) but
really isn't that excited about either one. Detachment is the order of the day,
and more than anything that's what makes the film disturbing; it's so matter of
fact about its perversity. Preminger's films arguably had the best blocking in
Angel
Face - TCM.com Paul Tatara
During his hey-day, Otto Preminger was one of the few famous
directors whose face was immediately recognizable to the average movie-goer,
due mostly to his success at playing vicious Nazi commandants in World War II
pictures. But few people realized that he was actually Jewish. Preminger was
always a hard man to pin down. There was a perverse streak running through
almost all of his film work, both in front of and behind the camera. Honestly-
name another accomplished filmmaker who would have agreed to play Mr. Freeze in
the original Batman TV series!
Angel Face, which Preminger directed in 1952, stands as one of his more
memorable projects. The "Angel Face" of the title is Diane Tremayne
(Jean Simmons), the apparently innocent daughter of a wealthy businessman named
Charles Tremayne (Herbert Marshall.) Diane may seem like a sweetie on the
surface, but she also happens to be a psychotic who will stop at nothing to
maintain her own happiness, including killing her stepmother (Barbara O'Neil.)
Diane also sets her sights on the family's hunky chauffeur, Frank Jessup
(Robert Mitchum), even though Frank already has a girlfriend (Mona Freeman.)
Suffice it to say that things don't go well for Frank and Diane. You'll need a
very broad definition of "happy ending" to smile at how this one
wraps up.
The film's harshness isn't surprising, really. Preminger wasn't the only
risk-taker who was connected with it. Howard Hughes, who owned RKO at the time,
set the whole thing up, and for very strange reasons. Preminger was contracted
to 20th Century Fox when Darryl Zanuck told him that he had been loaned out for
one picture to Hughes. When Zanuck handed him the script, which was then
inventively titled Murder Story, Preminger was aghast. He thought it was
awful and refused to be involved. No matter how much Zanuck insisted (and he
welded enormous power in
But he didn't count on a dose of Howard Hughes-style persistence. The next
morning, at
In the end, Simmons basically won the battle. She gives one of the strongest,
most unexpected performances of her career in Angel Face. And Preminger
took some abuse of his own on the set, which may well have been karmic
retribution for agreeing to push Simmons around as a favor to Hughes. One day,
Preminger slapped Simmons in a fit of anger, and Mitchum stepped in to correct
his mistake: he punched the director right in the nose. Later, in his popular
autobiography, Preminger insisted that he very much enjoyed working with Simmons.
He never mentioned the slap, or getting belted by Mitchum. Maybe he just
forgot.
Otto Preminger and the End of Classical Cinema • Senses of Cinema John Orr from Senses of Cinema, July 31, 2006
Film
Reviews | Angel Face - Otto Preminger | No Ripcord ... Gary Collins from No Ripcord,
Film Noir
of the Week Paul M,
filmcritic.com (Paul Brenner) review [4/5]
Catching the Classics [Clayton L. White]
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
Can't Stop the Movies [Danny Reid]
DVD
Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
also seen here: Angel
Face (1953) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
DVD Verdict- Robert Mitchum: The Signature Collection [Dylan Charles]
Angel Face: Jean Simmons, 1/31/1929 – 1/22/2010 | The House Next Door Dan Callahan, January 23, 2010
Self-Styled
Siren: In Memoriam: Jean Simmons, 1929-2010
Classic Film Guide review also seen here: Angel Face (1952) - full review!
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [A]
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
User reviews from imdb Author: bmacv from
User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: seymourblack-1 from
User reviews from imdb (Page 4) Author: Turfseer from
User reviews from imdb (Page 4) Author: dougdoepke from
User reviews from imdb (Page 4) Author: Ilpo Hirvonen from
User reviews from imdb (Page 4) Author: jzappa from
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Robert Mitchum Signature Collection
Otto Preminger: A Slap Too Many | film noir film vignette from Film Noir
The New York Times review H.H.T.
Jean Simmons
Dies at 80; Actress Whose Talent Exceeded the Parts She Played Aljean Harmetz from The New York Times, January
23, 2010
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
THE MOON IS BLUE
USA (99 mi) 1953
Time Out review Tom Milne
Despite the fuss at the time, there's little blue about this except the title: a stage-bound adaptation of F Hugh Herbert's mildly amusing and mildly naughty romantic comedy - typical Broadway 'sophistication'- about a girl retaining her honour while snaring her man. McNamara is the pixie picked up by Holden on top of the Empire State Building (that's the 'opening out' bit), accepting a dinner invitation to his flat, and causing some tiresome altercations when the middle-aged and lecherous Niven (father of Holden's ex-fiancée Addams) happens to drop in. Amazing to think that the power of the Hollywood Production Code (not to mention the League of Decency) was effectively broken because Preminger insisted on retaining such shocking obscenities as 'virgin', 'seduce' and 'mistress' in the dialogue.
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
In the first of his independent features as producer-director (1953) Otto Preminger adapts his most successful stage production, a light romantic comedy by F. Hugh Herbert that ran for over 900 performances. Released without production code approval and condemned by the Legion of Decency for its use of such taboo phrases as “virgin,” “seduce,” and “pregnant,” none of which bothered anyone in the stage run, it's regarded today mainly as a curio. Yet for all the movie's staginess and datedness, it's a more personal and ambiguous work than it initially appears to be. Architect William Holden ogles and picks up “professional virgin” Maggie McNamara at the Empire State Building and brings her back to his apartment, where his next-door neighbors—his former girlfriend (Dawn Addams) and her playboy father (David Niven)—quickly involve this potential couple in various intrigues. A certain prurient (as well as analytical) curiosity in Preminger's distanced and mobile camera style makes McNamara seem slightly corrupt and Holden and Niven slightly innocent, despite all appearances to the contrary, and the sour aftertaste to this frothy material is an important part of what keeps the picture interesting. Incidentally, Preminger simultaneously shot a German-language version of the same film, the stars of which have cameos in the last scene of the American version.
User
reviews from imdb Author: theowinthrop from United States
The problem about censorship is that inevitably it dates.
D.H.Lawrence, James Joyce, Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoi were all censored for
"Lady Chatterly's Lover", "Ulysses", "Madame
Bovary", and "The Kruezer Sonata" when they came out, but today
these books seems very run-of-the-mill in terms of their steaminess. The same
happens with movies. "The Moon Is Blue" is typical. The hubbub in
1953 was the use of the word "virgin" in the film. Maggie McNamara's
seeming willingness to experiment with sex is another reason (although it turns
out she is more talk than action). Nowadays this seems to be relatively
nothing.
Censorship also breeds publicity, and in show business most publicity is good
for the sale of tickets to the public. "The Moon Is Blue" had good
box office. So much for the efficacy of censorship.
Despite some of the favorable comments, most people are bored watching this
film now. It was not terrifically funny. Holden and Niven are chums who are
rivals for McNamara. Their actions in competition over McNamara now seem
witless.
One final point. This film was the subject of a plot in an episode of the
television series, "M.A.S.H." Hawkeye and B.J. hear about how the
censors are against this film, and they have a chance (by trading favors) of
seeing it. When they get the film at the 4077th they are both appalled at how
unfunny and tame it is. Enough said.
Nick's Flick Picks: The Best Actress Project [Nick Davis]
(lost the 1953 Best Actress Oscar to Audrey Hepburn for Roman
Holiday)
Why I Waited: Mike usually has a faultless needle for
what I'll like or dislike, and he made a point of lowering my expectations on
this one.
The Performance: Welcome to the 1953 Best
Actress race, or, as it should probably be known, the Hussies vs. the Pixies.
While Deborah Kerr rolls adulterously in the surf and Ava Gardner (whom I'll
profile later) tries to out-humidify the African highlands, Leslie Caron and
Audrey Hepburn contribute the rather undemanding impressions that not a single
guilty thought has ever crossed their minds; Caron cavorts with puppets and
Hepburn with Gregory Peck, who rate about the same in their potential for randy
distraction or moral compromise. The fifth nominee, Maggie McNamara, finds
herself in the middle ground of this battle in at least a few ways. The
character she plays, an actress named Patty O'Neill, has neither an innocent
nor a salacious nor a neurotic approach to sexuality, which is hardly any rarer
these days in a female lead than it was in 1953. William Holden plays a
bachelor who picks her up, with trouble obviously in mind, at the top of the
Empire State Building. When, after several Broadway-style plot convolutions, he
discovers her canoodling with David Niven, she simply can't see what the
problem is. "Okay, so you found me sitting on his knee and kissing him—is
that so awful?" she asks. Over the course of the plot, she reveals that
she's an unexpectedly dab hand with a post-hangover potion, and we wonder why.
Though she's demure enough to be labeled a "professional virgin" by
one character, with less complex meaning than you might be guessing, and to be
praised by another for her "look of wholesome rapture... the kind of smile
I'd like with my orange juice every morning," she admits that she's mad
about kissing men and seizes any occasion.
Compared to Caron in Lili, that's practically BUtterfield 8, even
if in many another lineup, McNamara's Patty would be the glaring naïf. Kissing
and "professional virginity" wouldn't go very far at imputing a
sexually mischievous streak if The Moon Is Blue itself weren't so
improbably notorious as the film that called the bluff of Hollywood's rating
system, preserving its Broadway dialogue about mistresses, pregnancy,
and yes, virginity. After thereby failing to earn a stamp of good
standing from the Catholic Legion of Decency, director Otto Preminger released
the film anyway, and so a film and a new star that frequently smell like soap
bubbles arrived to the public with a bizarre patina of boundary-pushing. Even
before she knew she was appearing in a Hollywood landmark of anti-censorship,
though, McNamara must have recognized that she was playing a girl who accepts
an invitation from a husky, virile stranger to repair to his private apartment,
ostensibly so she can sew a button onto his coat (!). Good for her for making the
character lucid about her own attractions, seemingly aware of what she's
walking into even as she determines immediately not to go all the way, chiding
Holden for talking down to her while espousing her own conservative convictions
about romantic life: for example, her notion that a wife ought to be half her
husband's age plus seven.
It's intriguing but also a bit disappointing that she elects to play Patty as a
gawky ditz whose chirpiness and fogginess simply don't, in McNamara's approach,
ensure that she is blind to the seductive maneuvers, the rhetoric, or the
practical possibilities of sex. Arriving the same year as Roman Holiday
but also three years after Born Yesterday, she bespeaks a perky but
inexpert meeting-ground between aspects of Hepburn and Holliday, lacking the
credible refinement of the former or the veiled, voluptuous savvy of the
latter. McNamara's dark, beady eyes stay perpetually wide open as part of her
overall posture of breathy buoyancy, though she uses the same basic expression
to communicate pique at the bullishness Holden and the arch cynicism of Niven.
She can be funny and rather dear, even in the absence of tangible personality.
Her well-worked groove of baffled smiles and kooky poise is sometimes charming
enough as a pleasing end in itself, lifting her above the script's silly,
arduous feints at "sophisticated" humor; Niven's at his best in
material like this, absconding with the audience the way Bill Nighy does in
contemporary parts, but McNamara's cheer certainly succeeds better than
Holden's stolidity does at making the dated living-room farce seem halfway
larkish. In general, she seems more spry when she's with Niven. Their brief,
hilarious exchange about whether to kill time watching television ("Is it
in color?" / "Don't be silly, it won't be in color for years!" /
"Let's wait till then") is a memorable highlight of repartee, not
coincidentally because it has nothing to do with the plot. So too with
McNamara's empty-headed melancholy as she stares out of the binoculars on the
top of the Empire State Building: "I want to cry for all those
people." Holden: "What people?" McNamara: "In
Brooklyn." Reader, I chuckled.
McNamara's performance might be ideal for clip-reels, if you can get past the
incongruity of this elongated, ponytailed baby giraffe as an object of
immediate desire from multiple quarters. The problems in her performance are
only detectable with time, but not with much time. For one, she never
connects one iota with the script's conceit that Patty is a professional or
even an aspiring actress. She has no craftiness, no vanity, no ambition, no
obvious regard for how she moves or sounds. Moreover, McNamara plays too many
scenes in an inflexible register of flat but high-voiced affectation, eerily
close to Shelley Duvall in 3 Women but with none of the surreal ironies
or dark shadings. She also lacks Duvall's genuine eccentricity, which at bare
minimum would keep a character like this compelling even as the scenario
repeatedly runs out of gas. What the part really needs is someone who could
generate friction and sparks by heightening the two focal points of this
elliptical character: her amiable oddness, and her amorous excitability. Think
Joan Blondell, or Liza Minnelli. It's one thing to say that McNamara lacks the
inimitable charisma of legends like those, but she actively plays down
the daffy-kid and curious-adult facets of Patty as The Moon Is Blue
wears on, in its bizarrely windowless, unmistakably settish set. She seems more
and more average, like a new toy that wears out its welcome unexpectedly
quickly. It's not even clear that McNamara is having fun with herself, though
she never stops gamely going through the motions.
The other insuperable flaw in McNamara's work here involves how, in its nominal
way, the last third or so of The Moon Is Blue turns on Patty's debates
with herself, her capacity for choice between alternatives, her self-conscious
reasons for acting as she does. McNamara has banked so heavily on the spaciness
of her Patty as a way to get laughs and sell the character that she's left
herself no foundation for showing us Patty's inner life, much less for making
it interesting. She never fully deflates, and the performance never forecloses
entirely on its appeal. But the youthful glow of mischief and the modest glee
in her own shtick, amply evident in the first half of The Moon Is Blue,
either disappear by the second half or become impossible to appreciate in the
same way because they never deepen or evolve. McNamara's own career turned out
to be a bright start with a rapid drop-off, and her story is finally a sad one.
You wouldn't want to watch The Moon Is Blue thinking too much about the
actress's own future, but even her first and most famous performance is a case
study of qualified sparkle giving way to dwindling dividends.
Let's
Talk About Sex, Baby: Revisiting Preminger's The Moon Is Blue ... Alan Jacobson from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 31,
2004
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
User
reviews from imdb Author: Ralph Michael Stein
(riglltesobxs@mailinator.com) from
New York, N.Y.
User
reviews from imdb Author: bkoganbing from Buffalo, New York
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
RIVER OF NO RETURN
USA (91 mi) 1954 ‘Scope co-director: Jean Negulesco (uncredited)
Saloon singer Monroe, two-fisted farmer Mitchum, and the young son he hardly knows, may be drifting down-river by raft from both immediate dangers and their immediate pasts, but the thrust of Preminger's only Western consistently forces them to attempt the 'impossible' return: to restart their variously broken lives and reconstitute the 'ideal' family. While Mitchum's performance is excellent, the film holds most interest as an early appraisal of the Monroe enigma: in revealing analogy to the posthumous cult, Mitchum's ability to see beyond her sex symbol/whore facade extends only as far as her fitness for the role of Mother. There really is no return.
River
of No Return (1954) James Travers
from FilmsedeFrance
It is 1875 and the North American gold rush is well underway. Matt Calder arrives at a gold prospecting settlement to collect his ten-year-old son Mark. Recently released from prison after serving a sentence for murder, Matt has resolved to make a fresh start as a farmer. He meets Kay, an attractive bar singer who has befriended Mark. Kay’s boyfriend is Harry, a gambler who reveals that he has just won a claim on a patch of land believed to be rich in gold. Harry persuades Kay to go with him to the nearest town so that they can file the claim and get married. They go down river by raft, but the river proves to be more hazardous than they had anticipated. They are saved from downing by Matt. Harry repays this kindness by knocking Matt unconscious and running off with his only horse and gun. Kay stays behind to look after Matt and his son. When he regains consciousness, Matt insists that they must leave the area at once, since, without the gun, they are defenceless against the hostile Indians...
The pairing of screen icons Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe
makes River of No Return a popular and lively western, although its
appeal to serious aficionados of the genre is barely skin deep.
Tellingly, neither Marilyn Monroe nor director Otto Preminger wanted to make
this film; both only went along for the ride because of their contracts with
Twentieth Century-Fox. For Preminger the experience of making this film
was so fraught that, once it was in the can, he bought his way out of his
contract with Fox, insisting that he would never again work for a large studio.
For all the backstage tensions and Preminger’s aversion for CinemaScope, the
film holds together pretty well – in fact, far better than it deserves
to. On the plus side, good use is made of the stunning Canadian location
and Monroe gets to sing four enjoyable musical numbers in her inimitable
style. It’s a pity that the script doesn’t come up to scratch. Even
for a genre as prone to cliché as the western this is pretty derivative
stuff. It doesn’t take long before the heavy plot contrivances and
hackneyed dialogue become so aggravating that you just have to ally yourselves
with the inexplicably psychopathic Red Indians and start firing arrows (or the
nearest object at your disposal) at the screen. There is not a character
in the film who has more depth than a sheet of BacoFoil, but that hardly
matters. Monroe and Mitchum are on fine form and, whilst the film is far
from perfect, it is still mildly entertaining – particularly if you approve of
the notion that children should be trained in the use of firearms from the age
of ten.
The Velvet Light Trap, 21, 1985 - David Bordwell Widescreen Aesthetics and Mise en Scene Criticism, by David Bordwell, Summer 1985 (pdf)
DVD
Talk (Holly E. Ordway) dvd review
[2/5] Marilyn
Monroe: The Diamond Collection 2
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Jesse Shanks) dvd review Marilyn Monroe: The Diamond Collection 2
DVD
Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Marilyn Monroe: The Diamond Collection 2
DVD
Verdict (Barrie Maxwell) dvd review Marilyn
Monroe: The Diamond Collection 2
dvdfuture.com (Anthony Clarke) dvd review Marilyn Monroe: The Diamond Collection 2
Needcoffee.com - DVD
Review Doc Ezra, Marilyn Monroe: The
Diamond Collection 2
DVD MovieGuide dvd review Colin Jacobson, Marilyn Monroe: The Diamond Collection 2
Blu-ray.com
[Casey Broadwater]
BRIANORNDORF.COM:
Blu-ray Review - River of No Return
Blu-ray
Review - Forever Marilyn Blu-ray Review - Home Theater Forum Matt Hough
Apollo Movie Guide [Jamie Gillies]
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Brilliant Observations on 2122 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review
Variety review
BBC Films (Almar Haflidason) dvd review
Austin Film Society [Chale Nafus]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
CARMEN JONES
USA (105 mi) 1954 ‘Scope
Prosper Mérimée's fine old tale of high passions and low morals gets re-upholstered Hollywood-style in Preminger's all-black musical. The cigarette-maker with a rose instead of a fag between her teeth is transformed into Dandridge's parachute factory worker, whose romance with GI Joe (Belafonte) is interrupted by Harlem's equivalent of the toreador - a boxer. Given such a lushly familiar score as Bizet's, the dis, dats and deys with which Oscar Hammerstein liberally sprinkles his lyrics seem oddly fey, even when handled by the competent voices of Marilyn Horne and Laverne Hutchinson. The somewhat heavy-handed direction and the ultimately two-dimensional characters leave you admiring the workmanship without plucking at the necessary emotional/romantic heart-strings.
Carmen
Jones - TCM.com Lorraine
LoBianco
Carmen Jones (1954) was a rarity for Hollywood: a
mainstream film with an all-African American cast. It had been done only a few
times before, notably Hallelujah (1929), Cabin in the Sky (1943)
and Stormy Weather (1943). None of these had been a box-office success,
so it isn't surprising that director Otto Preminger had so much trouble
securing financing to make the film. Just coming off of United Artists' The
Moon Is Blue (1953), Preminger approached U.A. executives Arthur Krim and
Robert Benjamin with the idea of adapting the stage show Carmen Jones
that Billy Rose had done in 1943, still using the original music from Bizet's
opera Carmen but with a new libretto. He was turned down. U.A. didn't
think it would be commercially viable. Preminger later wrote, "I could do
anything else I liked for them but not this. I soon discovered that most other
companies would not touch it either." While he was in post-production on
the Marilyn Monroe film River of No Return (1954) at Twentieth Century
Fox, production head Darryl F. Zanuck asked Preminger to let him read his Carmen
Jones script. Two days later, Zanuck committed Fox to the project and
secured an $800,000 budget.
Carmen Jones is a retelling of Bizet's opera about an independent woman
who lives by her own rules and discards men when she grows tired of them. The
characters were changed from Europeans to African-Americans on an Army base in
the deep South. Preminger admitted, "This was really a fantasy, as was Porgy
and Bess. The all-black world shown in these films doesn't exist, at least
not in the United States. We used the musical-fantasy quality to convey
something of the needs and aspirations of colored people."
Fantasy or not, the idea created a stir amongst African-American actors both in
Hollywood and New York. Dorothy Dandridge wrote in her autobiography,
"Earl [Mills, Dandridge's manager] telephoned me to say that Otto
Preminger was about to produce a movie adaptation of the Billy Rose stage hit Carmen
Jones. For days there were rumors on the West Side about who would secure
the lead, and from my informants I gathered I wasn't even being considered.
There was a search for some natural Carmen, a new actress. For example, Ray
Robinson's wife, an attractive girl who wasn't an actress and isn't now, was
mentioned for the part. So were other Negro women based on their personal
charm, looks, or the community position of their husbands. A singer Joyce
Bryant and a Broadway actress Elizabeth Foster seemed to be in the
running." When Dandridge met with Preminger, he admitted that he had not
considered Dandridge because he thought she was too "ladylike" for
the role. In real-life, Dandridge always prided herself on being elegant and
conducting herself like a lady. She had gone to the interview with Preminger
dressed in a fashionable but plain suit and light makeup. He wanted her to read
for the part of Joe's demure sweetheart, Cindy Lou, but Dandridge refused. She
pleaded for the opportunity to return the next day and read for Carmen. He
reluctantly agreed. The next day Dandridge, decked out in floozy garb,
wind-blown hair and heavy makeup showed up late for the interview and shocked
Preminger into giving her a screen test. The test was made with actor James
Edwards. In it, Carmen holds out her leg to Joe and asks him to blow on her
freshly painted toenails, saying, "Blow on 'em sugar. Make 'em dry
faster". Preminger called it "the best screen test I've ever
seen". On May 26th, the official announcement was made. Preminger had
found his Carmen. The other cast members, it was further announced, would be
actor and singer Harry Belafonte, who Preminger had seen onstage in John
Murray Anderson's Almanac for which Belafonte had won a Tony award; popular
singer Pearl Bailey, stage actress Olga James, and two actors making their film
debuts, Brock Peters and 19-year-old Diahann Carroll.
Ironically, as much as Dandridge had campaigned for the role, once she had
secured it she was overcome by anxiety. For days she stayed in her apartment
refusing to see anyone and seriously considered quitting the picture. One of
her concerns was that the role (which in the 1950's might have been termed a
‘whore') would not be a positive portrayal of an African-American. She worried
over what the response from the African-American community might be. It was
only after Preminger drove to her home and assuaged her fears - promising that
he would support her throughout filming - that Dandridge felt secure enough to
play the role.
Although the film would be released through Twentieth Century Fox, filming
would take place at the RKO lot in downtown Hollywood. It was there that the
cast rehearsed for three weeks on the already completed shooting sets and using
the actual props. Preminger knew how important this film was to be and wanted
everything worked out in advance. While both Dandridge and Belafonte were
primarily known at that time as singers, their songs in the film would be
dubbed. As Belafonte later remembered, "Because this was to be a black
movie, and because blacks were still exotic to Europeans - and the movie had to
be a financial success in Europe as well - Otto had to find a way to please the
Bizet estate, which did not like what Hammerstein had done to the original
work. They felt turning Carmen into a folk opera was not servicing the
best needs of the opera, so Otto appeased them by hiring two opera singers to
dub the main voices."
Le Vern Hutcherson, who had starred onstage in Porgy and Bess, dubbed
Belafonte. Dandridge was initially to be dubbed by Katherine Hilgenberg, but
when she failed to please Preminger she was replaced by 20 year old USC student
and future opera mega-star Marilyn Horne. Horne (known as "Jackie" in
those days) was putting herself through college as a singer with Tops Records,
a company that made copy-cat recordings of popular hits using the same
arrangements and hiring singers who could imitate the singer on the hit record.
She recalled, "Even though I was at that time a very light lyric soprano,
I did everything I possibly could to imitate the voice of Dorothy Dandridge. I
spent many hours with her. In fact, one of the reasons I was chosen to do this
dubbing was that I was able to imitate her voice had she been able to sing in
the proper register." Marvin Hayes dubbed Joe Adams' character Husky
Miller, and Brock Peters, who played Sgt. Brown, dubbed fellow cast member Roy
Glenn. Pearl Bailey, herself famous as a singer, and Olga James were allowed to
sing their own parts. Soundtrack recording began on June 18th at Twentieth
Century Fox and filming commenced at RKO on June 30th.
Otto Preminger was a brilliant director, but he had a well-earned reputation
for being a bully on the set. As Geoffrey MacNab wrote, "No one could deny
that Otto Preminger had a temper. When he was displeased, his eyes would bulge,
his cheeks swell, his veins pop, his face turn puce, and you could imagine that
steam was about to come out of his ears and nostrils. What made it worse was
that his dressings-down were always given in public, and he invariably picked
on the most vulnerable. The bigger the audience, the more vicious the
invective. Some actors at the receiving end of one of his tirades claim never
to have recovered from the experience."
"With him, I became a nervous wreck, crying and jumping when the phone
started ringing, incapable of walking calmly across a room," said Jean
Seberg, having been plucked out of Iowa obscurity to play the martyred heroine
in his 1957 film, Saint Joan. Lana Turner, meanwhile, walked out of his
1959 production, Anatomy of a Murder, telling the press that she
couldn't cope with his domineering personality. Turner was also quoted as
saying "I thank God that neither I nor any member of my family will ever
be so hard up as to have to work for Otto Preminger".
The cast of Carmen Jones were not spared the wrath of Otto. Dandridge,
who had become Preminger's lover shortly after they met, wrote in her
autobiography, "Otto had a way of screaming at the performers. He did this
with almost everyone except me. [...] I was sharp with him about one person in
particular. I said, "If you scream at Glennet any more, I'll leave the
set." "Why?" he asked, in consternation. He had no view of
himself at all. "Because Glennet can't defend himself. He's a simple man
who needs a job. When you scream at him, he falls apart, and I want to leave
the set." Two days later, Otto screamed at Glennet. I left the set.
Everything halted. The cameras came to a stop. The actors went off to the side.
There was a hush...Otto came to the dressing room, "Darling, what's the
matter?" "For God's sake, there must be another way of coping with
people without batting them on the head and making them feel stupid in front of
other people! I can't stand it!" Otto was flustered, "I know,"
he said, "I promised I would not, but this man is an idiot....Once more
Otto calmed me. He promised again to be kind to the actors. I walked back to
the set. Once more everything was fine...if anything in the making of Carmen
was fine." The calm didn't last long. One day it nearly led to blows.
Brock Peters and Preminger got into an argument. Peters remembered, "He
chewed me out in front of a lot of people. Crew, cast and extras. He said
something about, ‘This New York actor...' Some disparaging things. And, of
course, I was on the spot. It was my first picture. I was wanting desperately
for it to work. I lost my temper. And I went for him. And Pearl Bailey and
somebody else grabbed me." Bailey warned Peters that he would never work
again - and later told him "Honey, I just saved your life." Joe Adams
received his share from Preminger during the "Stand Up and Fight"
sequence. After several takes, Preminger screamed over a megaphone, "Mr.
Adams. What exactly is it you call yourself doing? I've got a milkman that's a
better actor than you." Again, it was Pearl Bailey who held back an angry
actor, telling him, "Now, honey, you just be cool. You're being paid a
whole lot of money to do something that a whole lot of people would pay money
to do." Adams, who was ready to walk off the set, did one more take, which
Preminger loved. Adams thereafter believed that this was Preminger's way of
goading an actor into a good performance.
Preminger did indeed get good performances from his actors and from Dorothy
Dandridge in particular. When the film was premiered on October 5, 1954, her
portrayal of Carmen Jones made her an overnight sensation with the public and
both the black and white press. Not only was Dandridge the first
African-American actress to be ranked among the world's top beauties, but she
was also the first African-American to be nominated as Best Actress by the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
The
Velvet Light Trap, 21, 1985 - David Bordwell Widescreen
Aesthetics and Mise en Scene Criticism, by David Bordwell, Summer 1985
(pdf)
The mystery and real-life tragedy of Dorothy Dandridge - African ... Walter Leavy from Ebony magazine, December 1993
4 x Otto Preminger | Film International Chris Fujiwara, also reviewing FALLEN ANGEL, WHIRLPOOL, and WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [1.5/5]
Eye for Film ("The Hoodler") review [3/5]
Apollo Guide (Catherine Cantieri) review [80/100]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dale Dobson) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Barrie Maxwell) dvd review
dvdfuture.com (Anthony Clarke) dvd review
The Digital Bits dvd review Dan Kelly
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
The Guardian (Andrew Pulver) review
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review October 29, 1954
TV
WEEKEND; After Climb To Stardom, A Tumble, Then Death Caryn James from The New York Times, August 20, 1999
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM
USA (119 mi) 1955
Time Out review
The first major Hollywood film on heroin addiction, a subject totally proscribed by the Hays Code. Sinatra is excellent as the ex-con junkie trying to make it as a jazz drummer but pulled into a world of pushing, and Kim Novak convinces as his enigmatic mistress; but the casting of Eleanor Parker as his supposedly wheelchair-ridden wife is miscalculated, and Preminger's evocation of the social milieu of the drug user/pusher shows little sign of first-hand observation. There are some great scenes, though, notably Sinatra's audition for a make-or-break drumming job, and the later scene where he suffers cold turkey in Novak's apartment. Notable for its jazz score, too. (From the novel by Nelson Algren.)
The
Man with the Golden Arm (1955) James
Travers from FilmsdeFrance
Frank Sinatra never forgave Marlon Brando for snatching the
lead part in Elia Kazan’s On the
Waterfront (1954) away from him after he had accepted the role.
He exacted a revenge of sorts when he learned that Otto Preminger was
considering Sinatra and Brando for the lead in his next film, The Man with
the Golden Arm. The script was nowhere near completed but Sinatra was
so enthusiastic about the project that within 24 hours of reading the first
fifty pages he persuaded Preminger to give him the part. Not only did
Sinatra win a golden opportunity to prove himself as an actor in his most
challenging role to date, but he was also able to lend his support to an issue
that was close to his heart, to warn the public, especially youngsters, of the
dangers of drug abuse.
The Man with the Golden Arm was always going to be a controversial
film. The Hollywood Production code tacitly prohibited any
reference to drug addiction and so far no mainstream American film had broken
this taboo. By the mid-1950s narcotics abuse had become a serious social
malaise and director Otto Preminger was certainly justified in defying the
censors. By this time, the Production Code, conceived in the early
1930s, was looking increasingly dated and its authority was being challenged in
various quarters. Preminger’s film would be one more nail in the coffin.
Although the film proved to be highly profitable, taking over four million
dollars at the American box office, it was a daring piece of cinema that broke
new ground, both in its style and subject matter. It provoked the critics
and shocked audiences with its harrowingly authentic depictions of drug
addiction and withdrawal. Two sequences stand out as being
particularly courageous – one where the lead character Frankie (Sinatra)
receives his fix at the hands of a ruthless dealer; another where the same
character subjects himself to the ordeal of cold turkey in attempt to cure
himself of his addiction. In both of these sequences, Sinatra gives
an extraordinarily convincing performance, of the kind you would only expect to
find in the grittiest of social realist dramas. The actor was nominated
for an Oscar for his work on this film but on the strength of these two scenes
alone he clearly deserved to win the award (instead he lost out to Ernest
Borgnine for Marty).
The Man with the Golden Arm was a long-overdue reminder of the dangers
of drug abuse and motivated many other filmmakers to tackle the same subject,
often with far greater realism. The central flaw with Preminger’s
film is that it often feels too cautious about causing offence. It lacks
the abject bleakness of Nelson Algren’s novel on which it is based.
Algren was originally hired to write the screenplay for the film, but was
dismissed by the director after just three days. The author was appalled
by resulting film and was incensed with the tagged on happy ending which he
felt destroyed the central message of his story, that drugs destroy
lives. In Algren’s novel, the central character fails to overcome his
addiction and ultimately kills himself. Preminger presumably felt that
such a grim ending would be too hard for an American film audience and so opted
for the more palatable Disney-style denouement in which everyone lives happily
ever after (apart from the villains, who deserve all they get).
Had it not been for the Production Code and the fact that he knew he was
treading uncharted territory, Preminger may have been more inclined to
make a much darker film. At times, The Man with the Golden Arm
feels like a film noir melodrama (of the kind that the director had previously
excelled in) struggling hard to embrace the tenets of social realism but not
quite making it. Some of the performances (notably the two female leads)
are as wooden and unconvincing as the stage exteriors and the ending is so
painfully contrived that it almost appears to have been swiped from another
film. Yet it is the film’s stronger points that win through in the
end. Solid performances from Arnold Stang and Darren McGavin complement
Sinatra’s own remarkable tour de force turn; Sam Leavitt’s stylish noir-like
cinematography subtly emphasises the sheer unremitting bleakness of the
oppressive world in which the hero Frankie exists; and Elmer Bernstein’s
unforgettable jazz score is the perfect accompaniment to the film’s darkest
moments. Not quite a masterpiece but a memorable and hugely
significant film in the history of American cinema, and arguably Frank Sinatra’s
finest hour in front of a film camera.
The Man
with the Golden Arm, Otto Preminger • Film Analysis Rachel Brown from Senses of Cinema, March 16, 2013
Otto
Preminger and the End of Classical Cinema • Senses of Cinema John
Orr from Senses of Cinema, July 31,
2006
Film
Noir of the Week Chris Fujiwara
The
Man with the Golden Arm (1956) - Articles - TCM.com Lang Thompson
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd
review also seen here: The
Man with the Golden Arm (1956) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Phil Freeman
Movie House Commentary Silver Dollar Sam
DVD Talk (Scott Weinberg) dvd
review [4/5]
50th Anniversay Special Edition, 2-disc
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [3/4]
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [3.5/5]
CineScene.com
(Kristen Ashley) review
eFilmCritic.com (Justin Helmer) review [4/5]
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
DVD Savant
(Glenn Erickson) dvd review Frank Sinatra: The Golden Years
DVDTalk -- Frank Sinatra Golden Years Coll [Paul Mavis]
DVD Verdict- Frank Sinatra: The Golden Years [James A. Stewart]
Entertainment
Weekly capsule dvd review [B+] Tim Purtell
Variety review
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review December 16, 1955
CRITIC'S
NOTEBOOK; From Fluff to 'Eternity': The Many Faces of Sinatra on Screen Stephen Holden from The New York Times, August 21, 1998
Critic's Choice: New
DVD's Dave Kehr from The New York Times, October 11, 2005
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Turner Classic Movies review Elmer Bernstein tribute by Michael T. Toole
SAINT JOAN
USA Great Britain (110 mi) 1957
Even hardcore Preminger fans number this stage adaptation
among his lesser works. As usual ambiguity is the theme within the theme - no
big surprise when a play by an agnostic (GB Shaw) is adapted by a Catholic (Graham
Greene). The film inverts the Joan enigma, with a number of ironical
insights. The very production seems equivocal: deliberately bare and skimped to
enable us to concentrate on the text, and/or because Preminger was not about to
splash out on such a dubious box office prospect. The subsequent troubled
progress and self-murder of Jean Seberg
adds a further layer of ambiguity, both as eerie distraction and poignant
complement.
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
King Charles (Richard Widmark) can't sleep, the camera tracks
with him through a bare chamber and back to bed, on the other side of the frame
appears Jean Seberg as Joan of Arc -- a phantom, a concept, a woman. Her story
is recounted wryly, beginning with "a matter of eggs," a miracle
executed by the village girl; she rides to the Dauphin's castle in soldierly
pixie crop and armor, with Otto Preminger resolutely pragmatic about heavenly
wonders even after her zeal changes the winds at the Orleans siege. The
director briskly acknowledges Dreyer with a few close-ups, although he prefers
the eye-level objectivity of analysis to the low-angled subjectivity of
passion: the fevered heroine who "hears voices" is at the center of a
grid of interacting interests, where the Dauphin and the Archbishop (Finlay
Currie) ponder the political advantages of her faith in long takes that make
cinematic space from theatrical set-ups. Joan's military victories are kept
offscreen, the better to focus on her betrayal by the regent (her "There
is some good in you, Charles" is answered with his "Be good... don't
bother us" following his coronation) and her trial at the hands of the
English inquisitors. Preminger mediates Joan and her accusers and also the
agnosticism of George Bernard Shaw's play and the Catholicism of Graham
Greene's screenplay; there's the intonations of John Gielgud and Felix Aylmer
if a faithful transposition of the text is desired, only this is Preminger's
telling, with the story's modernity announced immediately by the pop-art
pendulums and cracked statues of Saul Bass' credits. Widmark, fidgety in royal
robes or playing bow-legged hopscotch (to court applause), is chief in a
gallery of surprising performances, but this is a work about Seberg -- a
document on a restless, rebellious performer who, like her character, found
herself trapped in a role. A reverse tracking shot leads her to the stake then
cranes away as the pyre is lit; the accuser (Harry Andrews) drops to his knees
at the sight, but Preminger is less quick to enshrine Seberg's Joan as just a
saint, just as he refuses to see her Cecile in Bonjour Tristesse as just
a decadent socialite. With Richard Todd, Anton Walbrook, and Archie Duncan. In
black and white.
Saint
Joan (1957) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
Twenty-five years after having been burnt at the stake for heresy, Joan of Arc returns to King Charles VII of France as a ghost and taunts him for having betrayed her. They recall the time when Joan, driven by divine messages, persuaded Charles, then Dauphin, to allow her to lead an army to attack the English at Orleans. Did Charles show gratitude when Joan defeated the English, a victory that enabled him to be crowned king at Reims? No, he only wanted her to return to her village and resume the life of an anonymous peasant girl. When she failed in her attempt to take Paris from the English, who came to Joan’s aid when she was arrested and tried by the Catholic Church for heresy? No one...
The story of Joan of Arc has been told many times in cinema
but this is probably the quirkiest. Adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s
celebrated stage play by Graham Greene, Saint Joan compresses the
well-known story into a slightly confusing story which appears to put the blame
for Joan’s martyrdom squarely on the Catholic Church. Disappointingly,
the battle sequences don’t get much of a look in and the end result is a
somewhat stagy affair that is reminiscent of a 1950s television drama, lacking
passion and focus, and at times veering towards the downright silly.
Courageously, director Otto Preminger eschewed choosing an established actress
for the lead role and instead cast the then unknown Jean Seberg. Seberg
has been criticised for her portrayal of Joan, but her performance is
admirable, particularly when you consider she was just seventeen at the time
and had had next to no prior acting experience. It would be fairer
to criticise Richard Widmark’s painfully over-the-top interpretation of the
Dauphin, a style of acting that would be better suited for a children’s
pantomime than a serious historical drama. Likewise, Preminger is
hardly at his best, his direction showing a distinct lack of inspiration.
It’s an amusing take on a familiar story, but hardly a masterpiece.
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Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review [D]
Otto Preminger - When directors turn dictators! - Movies - Virgin ... photo by Virgin Media, May 27, 2010
The New York Times (A.H. Weiler) review June 27, 1957
FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; Jean Seberg's Life, Most of It True The New York Times, October 11, 1995
FILM
REVIEW;A Nightmarish Ending For a Hollywood Dream The New
York Times, March 1, 1996
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
BONJOUR TRISTESSE
The flirtation with incest at the centre of this adaptation of Françoise Sagan's novel is tame by modern standards, but the evil scheming of Seberg as the daughter set on separating her father and his mistress is still forceful. But is it 'evil' scheming? Preminger's cool, detached camera scuttles between a wintry black-and-white present and Technicolor flashbacks to summer on the Riviera to provide the necessary evidence, but leaves us, the audience, to draw the conclusions.
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The challenge is to portray the subjectivity of Françoise Sagan's novel objectively, and to give a second chance to the fool critics who missed the boat in Saint Joan. Thus, Otto Preminger presents Jean Seberg as teenaged socialite Cecile, off to another high-society soiree in a black-and-white Paris; playboy dad David Niven is her nightly partner for drinking and dancing, yet the Good Life seems oddly doleful as the camera's gaze meets Seberg's, dead-eyed with a tuxedoed dolt on the dance floor. "I'd like to warn him, but he wouldn't understand," she muses, so color suffusions kick in the flashback, a summer interlude set the previous year in the splashy Riviera, and as fateful as Bergman's. The sun-dappled idyll between fun-loving daughter and father, united in plush hedonism, may harbor darker undertones (Mylène Demongeot, Niven's newest fling, calls them "the perfect marriage"), though their frivolity to Preminger is less immoral than amoral, their blissful complacence just a cocoon for a childlike ignorance of the instability of relationships, life and the world. Whether to wear furs or jewels marks the most arduous decision until Seberg's proper godmother, Deborah Kerr, is invited for a few days and ends up as Niven's bride, as well as potential spoilsport for their lifestyle. Told not to see her beau (Geoffrey Horne) again, Seberg rushes up to her room and sticks pins on a doll before chiding herself in the mirror; next, she's tallying up points against Kerr, and decides the woman must go. Pixie Seberg in a red one-piece swimming suit against oceanic blues, the high-angled view of the conga party, the widescreen accommodating Seberg, Niven, and Kerr as the triangle shifts -- Preminger's impressionism, blindly dismissed by reviewers as magazine gloss writ 'Scope but appreciated in France, where it provided budding New Wavers with a few pointers. (À Bout de Souffle is a famous "two years later," though Rohmer, Chabrol and Vadim also took note.) The sadness is one of dawning lucidity, or perhaps the loneliness of "limbo", in any case sublimity in the final close-up, the last of the director's fallen angels and angel faces in tears and facial cream, expressing everything and nothing. With Walter Chiari, and Juliette Greco.
Slant
Magazine review
Eric Henderson
Among favorite cinephile pet auteurs, no one's
reputation has had a rougher ride than that of Otto Preminger's. Having
directed an instant classic (Laura) very early in his career, he remained
highly respected (and loathed) in his heyday for always tackling tough issues
and commendably showing wanton disregard for the state of the Production Code
(for their candor, his films were repeatedly banned in this city or that), but
then mysteriously fell out of vogue for, apparently, making an attempt to keep
up with the times (Skidoo). Even still today many write off Preminger as
a taboo-breaking footnote in the history of film, of little or no artistic
merit. But he's due for an upswing, and Bonjour Tristesse will be one of
the cornerstones of his rejuvenated canonical standing.
As the film opens, the teenaged Cecile (Jean Seberg) is tolerating (albeit
stone-faced) an evening in
For whatever reason, Cecile is shocked when Raymond casually dumps Elsa (who
shared with Cecile a love for a life of play) and announces that he is going to
marry Anne. In no time flat, Anne cracks down on Cecile's carefree attitudes,
imploring that she hit the books for the next round of exams and insisting that
she cut dead her fling with the stud next door, Phillippe (Geoffrey Horne). Even
more disturbing, she starts to encroach upon Raymond's lifestyle as well,
implying that the three should stop hanging with their venal circle of friends.
Clearly, Anne's presence in their lives has changed the narrating,
"present day" Cecile, but mysteriously Anne is no longer part of the
picture. Mastering the flashback structure, Preminger generates an enormous
amount of suspense with the promise of connecting Cecile's two disparate moods.
A first viewing of Bonjour Tristesse (and, to some extent, many other
Preminger films) tends to accentuate the seeming multitude of faults even as
one revels in Preminger's remarkable filmmaking savvy. For instance, Preminger
occasionally seems to be putting undue stress on the most salacious elements of
Francoise Sagan's potboiler, allowing the characters' preoccupations with sex
to be vocalized in censor-baiting, cheeky dialogue, and pushing the vague
suggestions of an incestuous bond between Cecile and Raymond until it can no
longer be ignored (she dances with a paramour, she dances with her father, and
the identical gestures seem to indicate they're one and the same with Cecile).
But, miraculously, most of those faults eventually reveal themselves to be
extraordinary attributes. It seems as though Preminger is working in Sirk
territory, deliberately using the glossy, surface-concerned nature of
At first, one is struck by how badly David Niven appears to be miscast as the
quintessential bad-dad-lothario. The perpetually starchy Niven can't make the
audience believe that he could string along the 36-21-36 likes of Mylène Demongeot,
any more than he can make us believe that he could dupe Kerr's impenetrable
Anne. But, given deeper consideration, and taking into account Preminger's
clear control over every aspect of his production and concern for the way his
characters relate, it becomes all-too obvious that it is precisely
Niven's indolent nebbishness that keeps the women coming. Like so many a Sirk
film, Tristesse is a film about women and their wheeling dealings.
Fassbinder once famously wrote that Sirk films were distinguishable from other
films because "you see women thinking." One has to assume that he'd
come to the same conclusion about Tristesse: Women are constantly in
charge, pulling men's strings (or sailboat towlines), and it is the men
who react and not the reverse. The only incident in the film when Anne
discovers that she doesn't control Raymond is devastating.
Another example of something that feels wrong initially but gradually seems
like a stroke of genius is the use of black-and-white cinematography for the
film's present day sequences and blooming color for its flashbacks. Memories
are typically portrayed as monochromatic in cinema, and though it initially
strikes one as too recherché a gimmick (especially for a film with a
magnificent set of opening titles designed by Saul Bass), it proves nothing if
not modern(ist). Preminger's switch of color schemes is sneaky and telling. The
black-and-white sections gracefully reflect Cecile's newfound view of the world
and her life. Her sadder but wiser outlook is bleak, her rejection of the
untenable moral ambivalence and relativism she embraced in the past is made one
and the same with Preminger's removal of the past's variety of hues. One
suspects that if Anne were narrating the film instead of Cecile, the whole
picture would be in black-and-white.
Jean-Luc Godard, who at the time was still one of France's most notable film
critics, was one of the film's early champions (he even cast Seberg the
following year in his debut Breathless with the notion that she would
basically be playing the same person in both films), and that's all too
appropriate, because, in retrospect, Bonjour Tristesse also reveals
itself to be ahead of what would become a cliché in the European art cinema of
the '60s. Namely, its primary concern is the spiritual and moral decay of the
idle upper class, and it came two years before Fellini's La Dolce Vita
(their very titles conflict with each other) and Antonioni's L'Avventura. And if through their shared
acknowledgment that even a life of immoral blitheness can still be a carnival
(Preminger's staging of the conga line dance sequence is a dizzying riot of
movement) pegs Tristesse as a closer relation with the former film, the
devastating conclusions Cecile comes to discover are every bit as haunting and
life-altering as those in the formidable cinema of Antonioni. And Preminger
also shares Antonioni's fascination with microscopic sociological examinations
of subtly shifting group dynamics and how they can constrict people into a
virtual immobility, only he allows them some measure of freedom. That makes
their tragedy even greater—even without being pinned against Antonioni's
ubiquitous white wall of inevitability, the inhabitants of Bonjour Tristesse
still manage to back themselves into a corner of misery.
Otto Preminger's "Bonjour Tristesse," by Fred Camper, a Chicago ... Fred Camper from The Chicago Reader, September 24, 1999
16:9 - Februar 2009 - In English: Camera Movement Revisited Jakob Isak Nielsen on Bonjour Tristesse, February 2009
Otto
Preminger and the End of Classical Cinema • Senses of Cinema John Orr from Senses of Cinema, July 31, 2006
Films
I Love #3: Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958) Ed Howard from Only the Cinema, September 7, 2008. also here: Only
The Cinema [Ed Howard]
Bonjour
Tristesse - TCM.com Jeff
Stafford
Ferdy on Films [Roderick Heath]
PopMatters (David Sanjek) review
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Erin Boland) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Robert Edwards) dvd review
Needcoffee.com - DVD Review Dindrane
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Pat McGilligan/Arthur Laurents, 'Arthur Laurents: Emotional Reality', Pat McGilligan (ed.), Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) interview with screenwriter Arthur Laurents in 1997
Entertainment Weekly capsule dvd review Tim Purtell
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
PORGY & BESS
USA (138 mi) 1959 ‘Scope co-director: Rouben Mamoulian on “Good Morning, Sistuh”
With a budget of over $6 million, why wasn't this classic American operetta a classic American movie? Perhaps the fault lies in Samuel Goldwyn's decision to fire director Rouben Mamoulian in favor of Otto Preminger--if anyone could muddle a great saga, it was Preminger. The crippled Porgy (Sidney Poitier) loves Bess (Dorothy Dandridge), a floozy adored by many men, including Crown (Brock Peters), a tough stevedore, and Sportin' Life (Sammy Davis, Jr.), who supplies her with heroin and who is always trying to take her away from life in Catfish Row. After Crown kills a man in an argument over a game of craps and must flee the police, Bess settles in with Porgy. When Crown returns, wanting Bess back, Porgy kills him in turn, then hides out, while Bess agrees to follow Sportin' Life to New York. Porgy comes back to Catfish Row, learns that she's left, and is determined to follow her as the film ends--a simple story carried into the stratosphere by the glorious music. Poitier, not yet a star, initially accepted the role of Porgy, then declined, reportedly because of feeling within the black community that the story was racist, until producer Goldwyn and Mamoulian again convinced him to do the project. His singing voice and Dandridge's are dubbed; Davis, Pearl Bailey (as Maria), and Peters all do their own singing. (As Clara, Diahann Carroll, a wonderful nightclub singer lacking operatic range, also has her voice looped.) Shooting was delayed when fire decimated the Goldwyn lot, and in the month it took to rebuild everything, Goldwyn and Mamoulian began to have "creative differences." Thus Preminger was called in to replace Mamoulian, with rather heavy-handed results. The brilliant score by the Gershwins and DuBose Heyward, however, will last forever, while Preminger's veteran cameraman, Leon Shamroy, did a wonderful job and the art direction by Serge Krizman and Joseph Wright is sensational.
homevideo.about.com (Ivana Redwine) dvd recommendation
George Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" is an American opera that opened in New York in 1935 and has several songs I've been familiar with for as long as I can remember, including "Summertime," "Oh, I got plenty o' nuttin'," "It ain't necessarily so," and "Bess, you is my woman now."
Actually, George Gershwin is credited with writing only the music for "Porgy and Bess." The lyrics are credited to George's brother Ira Gershwin and an author named DuBose Heyward. The opera was based on the 1927 stage play "Porgy" written by that author and his wife Dorothy Heyward.
Hollywood released a big-screen "Porgy and Bess" in 1959 that starred Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge with dubbed singing voices. Years later, a couple of versions of the opera were made for television, and I'm writing here about the one of those that initially aired in 1993 on the BBC and was directed by Trevor Nunn.
The BBC version is based on the 1986 Glyndebourne Festival stage production, which was remounted at Covent Garden in 1992. The Covent Garden cast was reassembled at Shepperton Studios, where the filming was done. I think that is to our advantage as DVD viewers because we get enhanced realism and more details than could have been achieved by simply shooting a performance at the opera house.
The story is set at a place called Catfish Row, an impoverished African-American community located in or near Charleston, South Carolina. The opera has four key characters. One is the lonely, crippled beggar Porgy (bass-baritone Willard White). Two of the others are the stevedore Crown (Gregg Baker, a baritone of imposing physical stature) and his troubled lover Bess (soprano Cynthia Haymon). The fourth is the slimy dope-peddler Sportin' Life (tenor Damon Evans). I would say that all four of the singers I've named are right for their roles in the film because of their voices, looks, and acting ability.
The plot is set in motion when the hot-tempered Crown kills a man in a fight that erupts during a game of craps. To escape prosecution, Crown leaves Catfish Row, and his girlfriend Bess moves in with the goodhearted Porgy, which makes the crippled beggar very happy. But Porgy fears Crown will come back to reclaim Bess, and she seems unable to resist the strong and powerfully built stevedore. The situation is further complicated by the presence in Catfish Row of Sportin' Life, a conscienceless dope-peddler who desires Bess and is clever at using trickery and happy dust (cocaine) to get his way.
The charm of "Porgy & Bess" for me is in the excellent performances of the music and lyrics in the context of the story. When Porgy gets happy because Bess is living with him, he celebrates his life of poverty by singing the cheerful "Oh, I got plenty o' nuttin'." And I enjoy the love-duet "Bess, you is my woman now," sung by the title characters. Sportin' Life gets an entertaining comic number about the virtues of skepticism in "It ain't necessarily so." And Porgy captures the notion of resolve as he sets off on a quixotic quest to track down his beloved Bess in the finale "Oh Lawd, I'm on my way." The most famous number is "Summertime," a lullaby sung by the relatively minor character Clara to her baby near the opera's beginning.
"Porgy & Bess" is performed in English, and the DVD provides English, French, Italian, and German subtitles. The orchestra is the London Philharmonic, and the music is conducted by Simon Rattle. The "Porgy & Bess" DVD has no bonus materials except for a scene-by-scene synopsis in text form in four languages: English, French, Italian, and German.
Film Threat Phil Hall
Best Adapted Screenplay: 1959 [Erik Beck]
User reviews from imdb Author: safado from Brooklyn
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
ANATOMY OF A MURDER
Though its title may promise a clinical procedural, ‘Anatomy of a Murder’ cloaks itself in smartly tailored ambiguity and irresolution, and never altogether strips off. Coolly absorbing, nonchalantly cynical, the film incited controversy upon its 1959 release for references to rape, ejaculation, and women’s undergarments, but Preminger refuses the standard payoffs of the courtroom thriller – no impassioned closing arguments here, and the requisite cross-examination bombshell comes as no surprise to the audience. It’s definite that Second Lieutenant Frederick Manion (Ben Gazzara) killed barkeep Barney Quill, but why? Did Manion act out of jealous wrath, having caught his missus Laura (delectable Lee Remick) – a sweet, coltish voluptuary in pedal-pushers – in a compromising position? Or was the young officer spurred by legally defensible ‘irresistible impulse’ after Quill raped his wife? And who gave Laura that nasty shiner – Quill or her cuckolded spouse?
Shabby-genteel defence lawyer Paul Biegler (James
Stewart, again tweaking his wholesome persona a year after ‘Vertigo’) never
appears halfway assured of his client’s innocence, but he’s hardly averse to
subtle witness-coaching: ‘See if you can remember how crazy you were,’ he
suggests to smooth and cagey Manion. Facing off against unflappable prosecutor
Claude Dancer (George C
Scott, like Remick making his first major film appearance), Biegler makes
it perfectly clear that he’d rather be fishing, or playing jazz piano – Duke Ellington
cameos as a duet partner, and provides the sensational score. No one entirely
means what they say, except the presiding judge played by Joseph Welch, whose
impassioned censure of Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings
hastened the senator’s downfall – though here his immortal ‘Have you no sense
of decency, sir, at long last?’ becomes ‘Now, Mr Dancer, get off the
panties – you’ve done enough damage.’ Perched on his bench, avuncular and
wearily tolerant of his charges’ calculated histrionics, he sits atop a lonely
moral high ground.
Introduction BFI
Screen Online (link lost)
Anatomy of a
Murder covers the murder
trial of a young Army officer Frederick Manion (Ben Gazzara), held for the
shooting of a man who has allegedly raped his wife Laura (Lee Remick). A small
town attorney Paul Biegler (James Stewart), aided and abetted by the
down-at-heel but resourceful attorney Parnell McCarthy (Arthur O'Connell),
agrees to defend the suspect, only to encounter seemingly insurmountable
obstacles in finding sympathetic witnesses.
James Stewart (who
worked in every film scene, with the exception of one afternoon, during the 8
weeks on location) is impeccable as the quick-witted and shrewd defence
attorney Paul Biegler, who seems less interested in glory than in fly-fishing
and jazz; Lee Remick (who became a star with the part) plays the saucy Laura
who's either a slut or just a woman who likes to look good and have fun; Ben
Gazzara plays the insolent Lt Frederick Manion who either yielded to an
irresistible impulse when he killed Barney Quill because he raped his wife
Laura, or lost his temper in a fit of jealous rage; and Eve Arden plays Paul
Biegler's wise-cracking secretary Maide Rutledge. Remarkable in the casting are
both the show-stopping entry of George C Scott into the courtroom as the
domineering prosecuting attorney, and the selection of Joseph N. Welch as Judge
Weaver, whose performance brought to the role an authenticity that no actor
could have matched.
Anatomy of a
Murder is based on a
best-selling novel by Judge John Voelker (pseudonym Robert Traver), which
appeared to be based on a real case in which a soldier was tried for the murder
of a man alleged to have raped his wife. (This was flatly denied by Judge
Voelker - no doubt fearing a legal writ.) Preminger shot Anatomy of a Murder
on location in the exact town and place (on the Upper Michigan Peninsula, 400
miles North Detroit, 2000 miles from Hollywood) where the real-life killing
took place - the bullet hole in the bar is apparently the original. In order to
capitalise on the best-selling status of the book, he shot the film in a mere
eight weeks.
Anatomy of a
Murder is a triumph from
beginning to end: the all-time great credit sequences created by graphic design
artist Saul Bass; the exceptional ensemble acting; the wonderfully atmospheric
jazz score from Duke Ellington; the magnificently precise yet expansive
screenplay; and the fluid, choreographed camerawork. Anatomy of a Murder
was both a commercial and critical success for Preminger (receiving unanimous
praise amongst the New York critics) and sees the director at the peak of his
career. But, as David Thomson writes, perhaps the director's real triumph lies
in his recognition of the power of the personality in the courtroom, over
points of law: "Preminger's real daring was to say that the law is a game
or a play determined by the best actors".
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
I had the misfortune to be chosen for jury duty a year ago. I was stuck in the courtroom for over a month on a sloppy, meaningless civil case; a man suing some big companies because of something he did himself. But I got to know the court lingo pretty well--not enough to become a lawyer, mind you, but enough so that I can tell when courtroom movies are fudging it a bit. I happen to love courtroom movies anyway, but since then I've been noticing that some of my favorite films don't quite ring true. How surprising it was then, when I got to see Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959) again recently on a new DVD, to see that all the courtroom details were frighteningly accurate. Normally, I don't care a whit if something is real or not in movies. As long as it seems real, it's fine with me. But I have to give Anatomy of a Murder an extra mark for its effort.
Whether or not the courtroom details are accurate, Anatomy of a Murder has got a hell of a story. It was based on a popular book of a true case, by Robert Traver (a.k.a. Judge John D. Voelker), and Preminger had the iron guts enough to not make it sensationalist or sentimental. He just made a cold, hard movie. It goes on for two hours and forty minutes because it needs to, and that time feels just right. James Stewart, in unquestionably one of his greatest performances, stars as the fisherman lawyer who unexpectedly gets called for the big murder case. A soldier's wife (Lee Remick) is raped, and her husband (Ben Gazzara) is charged with murdering the rapist. George C. Scott, in one of his first roles, plays the prosecutor. Joseph Welch, a real-life judge, gives a marvelous performance as (what else?) the judge.
Preminger takes a while to set up the story, but his pacing and style are perfection. Stewart goes around interviewing witnesses in his laid-back style. We get to see the little town they live in, where people fish a lot and there is only one bar for nighttime entertainment. Then it's into the courtroom for the last two-thirds of the movie. Preminger uses a crystal-clear deep-focus approach that allows us to see all faces clearly at all times, both foreground and background. One striking scene has Scott questioning Remick on the stand, with Stewart in the background complaining about Scott blocking his eyeline.
Strangely, the movie is not a murder mystery. There's no question in our minds that Gazzara has killed the soldier and that Remick has been raped. (We see her with a black eye before the trial starts.) The suspense comes from the trial itself. Do we believe that Gazzara is essentially innocent? Does he deserve to be let off? What will the jury do? And, more importantly, what would we do if it were us? It's a question of morals rather than whodunit, something that rarely occurs in these kinds of movies. Better still, Preminger doesn't milk that for easy sentiment. He treats it as if it were a murder mystery. And to top it off, he leaves the ending ambiguous. But since the actual main character is Stewart, and we know that the ending is a good one for him, we don't mind.
Preminger was also a knockout director of actors. Both Stewart and Remick deliver outstanding performances, among their very best. Remick is sexy, sultry, devious, and terrified. She has a great scene where she takes off her hat and shakes down her luscious hair in the courtroom, much to the delight of everyone, jury, judge, lawyers, and audience. Stewart brings a little of that shrewd darkness he cultivated in films like Winchester '73 (1950) and Vertigo (1958) and combines it with some of his small-town hominess from It's a Wonderful Life (1946).
And how could I forget the score by none other than Duke Ellington, who also appears in a nightclub scene? It's one of the greatest in the history of movies, and it alone is enough to make this movie worth sitting through. But every aspect of Anatomy of a Murder works. It's a rare example of crackerjack Hollywood filmmaking, where every cog in the machine is well-oiled and working perfectly.
Anatomy
of a Murder - TCM.com Jeff
Stafford
Intercourse. Contraceptive. Spermatogenesis. Sexual climax.
Panties. These were not the sort of words movie theatre audiences were used to
hearing on the screen in 1959 but director Otto Preminger changed all that with
his controversial courtroom drama, Anatomy of a Murder. It was a sure
bet that the film's questionable dialogue would not pass through the Production
Code office unnoticed but it wouldn't be the first time that Preminger had
pushed the envelope with censorship issues in his movies. As early as 1951, he
successfully challenged the Production Code over the right to use the word
'virgin' in the sex comedy, The Moon is Blue, and in 1955, he overcame
opposition to his depiction of heroin addiction in The Man With the Golden
Arm. Like the latter film, the more serious and compelling aspects of Anatomy
of a Murder were overshadowed by the publicity surrounding the production
which played up the more unsavory aspects of the rape/murder trial and
sensationalized them. Yet, despite the adult subject matter, the film arrived
on screens with its dialogue intact, became one of the biggest box office hits
of that year, and went on to win seven Oscar nominations.
Based on the best-selling novel by Robert Traver, Anatomy of a Murder
stars James Stewart as a small-town Michigan attorney who agrees to defend an
Army lieutenant (Ben Gazzara) for killing the man accused of raping his wife
(Lee Remick). With the help of his loyal support staff - Arthur O'Connell and
the acerbic Eve Arden - Stewart carefully researches his case before going head
to head with a slick prosecuting attorney (George C. Scott) from the big city.
Even before production began on Anatomy of a Murder, the film made front
page headlines when Lana Turner, originally cast in the Lee Remick part, quit
the film after a major altercation over costumes, though the actress later
stated, "I would not walk out of a picture for anything as trivial as a
costume. It was simply impossible to deal with Mr. Preminger's unpredictable
temper." As for the part of the presiding judge in the film, Preminger
offered the role to Spencer Tracy who turned it down as too small a part. Burl
Ives also passed on the offer but then Spencer Tracy's assistant, Nat Rudich,
came up with a great suggestion for Preminger - why not use a real judge? The
director soon found the perfect 'actor' to play Judge Weaver - Joseph N. Welch,
the eminent Bostonian who clashed with Senator Joseph McCarthy during the
televised Un-American Activities hearings over communist activity in the U.S.
Anatomy of a Murder was filmed on location in two small towns in
Michigan - Ishpeming and Marquette - over an eight week period. The director
also arranged for the film's composer to be present during part of the filming.
In his autobiography (1977, Doubleday), Preminger wrote, "Our presence
created great excitement in those little towns. The special train carrying
cast, crew, and equipment arrived at six-thirty on a March day, but half the
population was at the station to greet us. Duke Ellington arrived a few days
after we had begun to shoot. Usually the producer waits until the filming and
the first cut are completed, then he chooses the composer, who writes the score
in about six weeks. I find it useful to have the composer with me on the set.
By watching the progress of the shooting, seeing the dailies....he becomes part
of the film...Ellington was willing to sacrifice his valuable time and work
according to my system." The director even cast him in a bit part - as a
pianist named 'Pie-Eye,' working at the local roadhouse. The soundtrack album
marked Ellington's first film score in 25 years and the main theme was later
turned into a song with lyrics by Peggy Lee entitled "I'm Gonna Go
Fishin'".
Of all the film's many virtues, James Stewart's portrayal of attorney Paul
Biegler is a key factor in the film's success. According to the actor, he
considered it his most challenging role since Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful
Life (1946). "It was worth all the extra effort," Stewart said in
Roy Pickard's Jimmy Stewart: A Life in Film (St. Martin's Press).
"I spent a lot of time memorizing my lines for that movie. The picture
demanded an awful lot of time and thought. As the defense attorney I knew I had
to be glibber than usual. Trial lawyers are neither shy nor inarticulate. I
read my script each night until I fell asleep." Co-star George C. Scott
also confirmed Stewart's dedication to the role in Pickard's biography:
"Jim was very kind in rehearsing...but what I didn't expect and what
stunned me was what happened after we'd finished the coverage on Jim and the
camera turned around on me. Some actors have a tendency to...sort of phone it
in from there. But not Mr. Stewart...(he) came and stood by the camera and
performed for me alone. It was a lesson I've never forgotten."
Not surprisingly, James Stewart received an Academy Award nomination for Best
Actor for his performance in Anatomy of a Murder (he lost to Charlton
Heston for Ben-Hur) and would go on to play another small-town lawyer in
the TV series, Hawkins (1973-1974). In addition to Stewart, Anatomy
of a Murder received Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Supporting
Actor (Arthur O'Connell and George C. Scott), Best Screenplay, Best Film
Editing, and Best Cinematography, but lost in every category.
Otto Preminger and the End of Classical Cinema • Senses of Cinema John Orr from Senses of Cinema, July 31, 2006
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Impulse David
Thomson compares two Lauras in Preminger films, from Sight and Sound, May 2005
The
Velvet Light Trap, 21, 1985 - David Bordwell Widescreen
Aesthetics and Mise en Scene Criticism, by David Bordwell, Summer 1985
(pdf)
Thanks for the Use of the Hall - Archive: Anatomy of a Murder Dan Sallitt, January 7, 2008
Anatomy
of a Murder (1959) Lolita’s Classics,
November 11, 2009
Balance Of Terror : The New Yorker David Denby from The New Yorker, January 14, 2008
Time Magazine Cinema: The New Pictures, July 13, 1959, also reviewing Bergman’s WILD STRAWBERRIES
The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1959 [Erik Beck]
Film Freak Central dvd review Bill Chambers
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
eFilmCritic.com (M.P. Bartley) review [4/5]
Bill's
Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
DVD Verdict (Barrie Maxwell) dvd review
DVD Talk (Jeremy Kleinman) dvd review [4/5]
DVD MovieGuide dvd review Colin Jacobson
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review
Gone with the Twins (Mike Massie) review [10/10]
Urban Cinefile dvd review Keith Lofthouse
Apollo Movie Guide [Brian Webster]
filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [60/100]
The Tech (MIT) (Raul Gonzalez) review
Film School Rejects [Clayton L. White]
Laramie Movie Scope (Patrick Ivers) review
Anatomy of a Murder (1959) Classic Film Guide
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]
BBCi - Films Jamie Russell
Nashville Scene (Noel Murray) review
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review July 3, 1959
FILM; Jazz on
Screen: The Sparks Are Eclectic Matt
Zoller Seitz from The New York Times,
April 13, 2008
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
EXODUS
Time
Out review
Tom Milne
Touted as a masterpiece by stout Premingerites;
but with one eye on the box-office, the other on avoiding giving offence, this
adaptation of Leon Uris' blockbusting novel about the founding of modern Israel
could hardly be anything but a compromise. Moral issues are raised, only to be
forgotten in urgent deluges of action or romance; characters are all fashioned
strictly to stereotype; and for all its caution, it finally comes across
(especially in view of subsequent history) as a pretty objectionably blinkered
slice of Zionist propaganda. Watchable mainly for the sheer skill and drive of
Preminger's direction, although at 220 minutes even that long outstays its
welcome.
Paul Newman
stars in this epic tale of the birth of the state of Israel from director Otto
Preminger.
With its portentous, biblical title and epic three-hour running time,
Otto Preminger's Exodus tells the story of the founding of the state of Israel
in the late 1940s as underground leader Ari Ben Canaan (Newman) guides a boat
full of Jewish refugees from Cyprus to Palestine in search of the Promised
Land.
From the moment that Ernest Gold's Oscar-winning score kicks in over the
opening credits, it's obvious that this is a lesson in history Hollywood-style.
Headlining the sprawling cast - it includes Eva Marie Saint, Ralph Richardson
and Sal Mineo - Newman first leads the refugees on a hunger strike to protest
against the British forces in Cyprus who are blocking their escape, then takes
up arms in the fight after the partition. Delivering a square-jawed portrait of
steely resolve in the face of difficult circumstances, Newman is at his most
wooden, furrowing his brow while mouthing rousing speeches about the Zionist
cause. Much like Leo Uris's turgid novel, the screenplay tries to reduce a
complex historical moment to an action-packed story of adventure and romance.
Unlike the novel, though, Preminger's film is limited by the constraints of
running time (the film also exists in an extended 220-minute print). As a
result, much of the tale consists of huge chunks of leaden exposition designed
to explain the historical situation to the American audience via Eva Marie
Saint's naive Yankee nurse.
With a screenplay that shamelessly plays each scene for maximum sentimentality,
Exodus also makes some questionable over-simplifications in its attempt to
deliver a poignant, one-dimensional piece of cinematic propaganda (the Arabs,
for instance, are apparently being manipulated by ex-Nazi villains who take
great pride in their "experience of handling Jews"). Blatantly
biased, it's an epic whose sentimental, pro-Zionist sweep has little time for
nuance, subtlety or dissenting viewpoints.
Portentous, bombastic and overlong,
Preminger's film sacrifices objectivity for simplicity in its eagerness to
justify the Zionist cause. Propaganda masquerading as drama, it makes for a
decidedly turgid viewing experience.
Exodus -
TCM.com Deborah L. Johnson
Based on the best-selling novel by Leon Uris, Exodus (1960) focuses on the
birth of
Otto Preminger, director of Exodus,
was certainly no stranger to controversy and almost from the beginning his
screen adaptation of the Leon Uris novel had its detractors. The first flare-up
occurred when he decided to discard Uris's screenplay because Preminger claimed
the author couldn't write dialogue. His remark ignited a feud between him and
Uris for years. He then approached Albert Maltz, another blacklisted writer, to
pen the screenplay but Maltz delivered a version that was 400 pages long. (The
average screenplay runs 150 to 160 pages). Preminger then turned to another
blacklisted writer, Dalton Trumbo, who was hired to write the screenplay for Exodus under his own name.
About the same time, Kirk Douglas helped hire Trumbo to write Spartacus
(1960). The reappearance of Trumbo's name in 1960 helped break the power of the
blacklist.
Trumbo, one of the famed "Hollywood Ten," was blacklisted for
refusing to answer questions of the House Committee on Un-American Activities
in 1947. After serving a year sentence for contempt in 1950, Trumbo moved to
Paul Newman described his experience filming Exodus as "chilly." Newman and director Otto Preminger
had very different styles of work. Newman enjoyed discussing character
motivations with his director, but Preminger only wanted actors to do what they
were told. The two men got off to a rough start when Newman arrived with
several pages of notes for the director. Preminger thought they were
interesting, but replied, "If you were directing the picture, you would
use them. As I am directing the picture, I shan't use them."
The director's non-compromising nature was probably well suited to this
particular production. There were arguments against the film by governing heads
of
When Exodus
was first released, a funny story circulated concerning comedian Mort Sahl.
Supposedly, he stood up in the middle of a premiere screening of the film with
Preminger present and shouted, 'Otto, let my people go' in reference to the
interminable length of the film. Most critics, but not audiences, tended to
agree with Sahl.
Exodus
received an Academy Award for best music score. And Sal Mineo received a Golden
Globe for best supporting actor.
The
Velvet Light Trap, 21, 1985 - David Bordwell Widescreen
Aesthetics and Mise en Scene Criticism, by David Bordwell, Summer 1985
(pdf)
Reel
Bad Arabs: How
Absent Leaders: Heroes and Villains in Otto Preminger's “Exodus ... Absent leaders: Heroes and Villains in Otto Preminger’s Exodus and Amos Gitai’s Kedma, 8-page essay by Larry Portis (pdf)
Isthmus (Kent Williams) review
DVDTalk - Paul Newman Tribute Coll. [Paul Mavis]
DVD Verdict- Paul Newman: The Tribute Collection [Clark Douglas]
DVD Review e-zine dvd recommendation Guido Henkel
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
GREAT MOVIE TITLE SEQUENCES: OTTO PREMINGER'S "EXODUS ... Cinema Retro
Paul Newman & Otto Preminger on the set of the film Exodus (1960 ... photo and film synopsis
Exodus (Otto Preminger 1960) in AvaxHome film stills
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
WATCHING
MOVIES WITH/Harvey Weinstein; Memory's Independent Streak Rick Lyman from The New York Times, April 27, 2001
ADVISE AND CONSENT
Time Out review Tom Milne
A companion piece to Anatomy of a Murder and The Cardinal, tackling Washington politics with the best-selling mixture of sophistication and evasion characteristic of Preminger in his 'problem picture' mood. More McCarthy than Watergate, the exposé of political barter and blackmail not unnaturally looks a little quaint now, but still grips like a vice thanks to the skill with which Preminger's stunning mise en scène absorbs documentary detail. A decided bonus is the fact that the need to let every viewpoint have its say gives a starry cast opportunities gratefully grabbed all round.
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4.5/5]
Everybody loves Henry Fonda -- but what if he was a freakin' commie!?
Otto Preminger turned his eyes from the legal system (Anatomy
of a Murder) to American politics in the underseen and tragically
underappreciated Advise and Consent.
The film plays out on a Red Scare-era senate floor, where the ailing president
has put Fonda up as his nominee for Secretary of State. Naturally, party politics
erupt as the conservatives try to discredit Fonda, eventually turning up a
witness who claims he was involved in a communist party of sorts years ago.
Meanwhile, another plot erupts from the other side of the aisle, accusing
Fonda's main detractor (Don Murray) of equally nefarious activities (at least
for 1962).
Above both of them are senior senators played by Walter Pidgeon and Charles
Laughton (clearly on his last legs here, this was his final movie), who play
puppetmasters over their younger charges.
Advise and Consent may not be completely realistic -- and the timing of Consent's
machinations are uncannily tidy -- but as a time capsule look into American
politics in the '60s it couldn't be more insightful. Preminger may have been
Austrian, but he understood exactly how corruption, dedication, vindictiveness,
and -- above all -- the awfulness of party politics have left America with a
bareful functional democracy today. Though the action, so to speak, takes place
almost entirely behind closed doors and in committee meetings, it couldn't be
more involving. What will become of Fonda -- who ends up being just a minor
player in this drama? We're hanging on until the last frame, until ultimately,
we realize that that decision doesn't really even matter. It was just another
meaningless vote that will be followed by another meaningless vote and another
and another. Spooky.
Great performances all around, with Pidgeon stealing the show as the guy you'd
definitely want as your senator -- if, that is, you had to have one.
Advise and Consent Eric Henderson from Slant magazine
An informative May 15, 2005 New York Times article by
Frank Rich (hysterically titled "Just How Gay is the Right?")
unpacked Advise and Consent—not only the magnificent 1962 film directed
by CinemaScope svengali Otto Preminger but also the original best-selling novel
by Allen Drury (so popular among high school English students at one point in
history that it placed some 10 slots higher on a list of "most influential
books" than the Bible)—for its still-prescient angle on the sacrificial
lambs of American politics; namely, the homosexuals. In the plotline, a
subcommittee to confirm the secretly ailing U.S. President's nomination for
Secretary of State finds itself battered not only from public accusations that
the nominee, Robert A. Leffingwell (Henry Fonda), is a Communist sympathizer
but also the ongoing private blackmailing of the subcommittee chair Sen. Brig
Anderson (Don Murray) over his long ago homosexual dalliance with a fellow
soldier.
Though the near half-century in the interim between Consent's appearance
in the aftermath of the McCarthy witch hunts (which smoked out Communists and
homosexuals with nearly equal vigor) and the here and now has seen a very small
handful of Barney Franks to oppose the Trent Lotts and Rich Santorums
(represented in Consent by Charles Laughton's terrifying Sen. Seab
Cooley), Rich states that "unprincipled gay-baiting has mushroomed into a
full-fledged political movement. It's a virulent animosity toward gay people
that really unites the leaders of the anti-'activist' judiciary crusade, not
any intellectually coherent legal theory (they're for judicial activism when it
might benefit them in
So there's that. But for those who don't know Alger Hiss from Alan Sues, Preminger's
filmed version of the novel makes up for the various excised subplots and
legal-procedural nitty-gritty with a typically unerring sense of spatial
intrigue. Preminger's visual savvy turns that most staid and insufferable of
social terrariums, the floor of the U.S. Senate chambers, into a vibrant,
perpetually shifting Voronoi diagram, charting the variables of influence and
repulsion based on something as cinematographically and topographically
malleable as the positions of the senator's desks. The primary triangle belongs
to Walter Pidgeon (as Senate Majority Leader Robert D. Munson, his party's cool
and collected foundation), Will Gear (the wan but resolutely oppositional
Senate Minority Leader Warren Strickland) and the aforementioned Laughton in
his final film performance. A character actor performance ne plus ultra,
Laughton's unflappable and jowly approach to senate politics (apparently based
closely on the cadence of the contemporary Senator from Mississippi John
Stennis), using passive-aggressive smears and the wind-up pitches of other
Senators as his forum for "fire and brimstone" (his morning
breakfast, as one character jokes), would be all the more entertaining if not
for the nagging suspicion that his example all but wrote the blueprint for the
chambers' "Family Values" crusaders to follow, first and foremost one
Jesse Helms. Unlike that old buzzard Seab Cooley, though,
The
Velvet Light Trap, 21, 1985 - David Bordwell Widescreen
Aesthetics and Mise en Scene Criticism, by David Bordwell, Summer 1985
(pdf)
Advise
& Consent (1962) - TCM.com Jay
Carr
Review by Carter B. Horsley also seen here: The City Review
The DVD Journal | Reviews: Advise and Consent D.K. Holm from The DVD Journal
A
Washington kind of a lie: Preminger's "Advise & Consent" on ... -
Mubi Fernando F. Croce
The Jujube Spotlight M.I. Kim
User reviews from imdb Author: theowinthrop from United States
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (David Krauss) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Maurice Cobbs) dvd review
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review
Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second Adam Batty
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] Controversial Classics
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
IN HARM’S WAY
USA (165 mi) 1965 ‘Scope
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Preminger, having already revealed a taste for excessive length in films like Advise and Consent, Exodus and The Cardinal, here stretches out a relatively conventional WWII drama to the point of tedium. Wayne is the discredited admiral whose reactions to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor finally convince both the Navy's top brass and his alienated, contemptuous son of his worth; subplots include his romance with nurse Neal, and his executive officer Douglas's trajectory towards self-destruction after he learns of his faithless wife's death. It goes on and on, the slowness exacerbated by Preminger's customary long takes and by the endless parade of star cameos. So what's it all add up to? War may be hell, but courage and honour will triumph in the end.
In
Harm's Way - TCM.com Jeff Stafford
"You can't kill John Wayne," Bosley Crowther wrote
in his New York Times review of In Harm's Way (1965).
"That's the message - the only message - that comes through loud and clear
in Otto Preminger's big war film." On the screen, the Duke seemed practically
immortal (even if he did die in a few films) but at the time of In Harm's
Way, his health was in decline. During the filming he was plagued with a
constant cough and it wasn't until the completion of Preminger's film that he
learned he had lung cancer, marking the beginning of an eleven year battle with
the disease. Despite the toll cancer took on the actor, Wayne soldiered on in
his career just like his character Capt. Rockwell Torrey in In Harm's Way.
In some ways, Preminger's film is less about the Pacific campaign of World War
II then it is about the enshrinement of Wayne's screen persona.
Set in Hawaii on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor (December 6, 1941) and
culminating in a decisive naval battle between the U.S. navy and the Japanese fleet,
In Harm's Way was an attempt by Preminger to create a courageous epic.
"After all these anti-war films which seem to have been more defeatist
than pacifist," he said, "the Navy needs a film like this!"
(from Behind the Scenes of Otto Preminger by Willi Frischauer). And who
better than the Duke to play the brash full-speed-ahead Capt. Torrey aka
"The Rock," a career navy man who abandoned his wife and family years
earlier because his duty to country came first. Like Torrey, Wayne was a hawk
and well known for his right wing politics. His choice of screen roles also
reflected his belief that playing weak, ambivalent or villainous characters
would alienate his fans and he was probably right. Wayne couldn't, for
instance, understand why Kirk Douglas would want to play the brooding, deeply
conflicted Commander Paul Eddington in In Harm's Way (he couldn't fathom
why Douglas wanted to play the tormented Vincent Van Gogh in Lust for Life
[1956] either). In a crucial scene, Eddington gets drunk and rapes the fiancée,
Ensign Annalee Dorne (Jill Haworth), of Torrey's estranged son Jeremiah
(Brandon De Wilde). The incident drives Annalee to commit suicide and Douglas
to sacrifice himself for the greater cause but Wayne was very unhappy with how
the screenplay depicted Eddington. Wayne said, "If I were playing this
part, I would want the girl's boyfriend to return, face me, and kill me."
For his own character, Wayne wanted it made clear that he cared about his men.
"I must show that I care about other people. Otherwise, when they go off
and get killed on my orders, people will hate me." (from John Wayne:
Prophet of the American Way of Life by Emanuel Levy).
Wayne was equally adamant about the casting of his female co-star. He had been
particularly uncomfortable with the romantic scenes in Hatari! (1962)
opposite Elsa Martinelli, who was young enough to be his daughter. He no longer
thought it appropriate for a man his age to be cast opposite some young ingénue
so he was particularly happy to learn that the thirty-eight-year-old Patricia
Neal had accepted the part of his love interest, Lt. Maggie Hayes. Neal wrote
in her autobiography, Patricia Neal: As I Am, that In Harm's Way
"brought me back into a working relationship with John Wayne, whom I had
not seen since Operation Pacific [1951]. Those days were not pleasant
for either of us and we had both been through a lot since then. He was
certainly a better man for it, much more relaxed and generous. This time we got
along splendidly."
Surprisingly enough, both Wayne and Neal also enjoyed a good relationship with
director Otto Preminger who had a terrible reputation in the industry for his
often cruel and contentious behavior on movie sets. Hollywood insiders expected
a battle of egos between the director and Wayne but the actor told an
interviewer, "He had my respect and I had his respect. He is terribly hard
on the crew, and he's terribly hard on people he thinks are sloughing off. But
this is a thing I can understand because I've been there...I came ready and that
he appreciated." As for Neal, she admitted, "This will come as a
surprise to some...but Otto Preminger may have been the most generous man I
ever knew." According to the actress, he held up the production of In
Harm's Way until after the birth of her child plus he invited her entire
family to join them on location in Hawaii and covered all the expenses.
Kirk Douglas, however, had a different view of the director
who on this film would strut around on the set proclaiming, "I'm the man
with no hair who shoves around the people with hair." Douglas was
particularly appalled by Preminger's treatment of actor Tom Tryon who had
already been humiliated by the director during the making of The Cardinal
(1963) and should have known better than to work with Preminger again.
"Whispered rumors that Tryon was gay might have inspired Preminger's
venom." (quoted from John Wayne: American by Randy Roberts and
James S. Olson). "Kirk Douglas remembered, "Otto would scream. He
would come right up to Tom, saliva spitting out of his mouth, and he would just
yell. I've never seen anyone treated that way. Tom was shattered." Douglas
begged Tryon to stand up to the old man. "The next time Otto screams at
you," Douglas counseled him, "just yell right back. 'Otto, Go f*ck
yourself!' and walk off the set." Tom Tryon did not like confrontations
and kept his peace, suffering through the abuse. Preminger tried to bully
Douglas a few times, but the star would have none of it. "Once, he raised
his voice in a nasty way toward me. I walked over to him, nose to nose. In a
very low voice, I said, 'Are you talking to me?' That was the end of it. He
never insulted me again."
Preminger gave short shrift to In Harm's Way in his autobiography but he
did admit that "Wayne is an ideal professional: always prompt, always
prepared" and noted with some pride, "The good timetable that we kept
in the making of In Harm's Way helped to save John Wayne's life," a
reference to the fact that Wayne was able to arrange a medical exam (where they
discovered his cancer) because Preminger finished ten days ahead of schedule.
The director also recalled with some amusement (in The Cinema of Otto
Preminger by Gerald Pratley) Paula Prentiss's final scene in the film (she
plays Bev McConnell, the newlywed wife of Tom Tryon's character). "...She
so much wanted to be good that she kept unconsciously kicking herself in the
ankle. When the scene was over, she suddenly couldn't walk, and she was taken
to the hospital. She had broken her ankle, but she was concentrating so hard on
the scene that she didn't realize it."
In Harm's Way, based on James Bassett's best-selling novel, was indeed
an epic undertaking and Preminger was able to count on the US Defense
Department for practically everything he needed in order to recreate the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and other combat scenes. The U.S. Navy
"supplied him with the USS St. Paul, a cruiser, and sailed the entire cast
and crew from Seattle to Hawaii. On the way Preminger shot a number of the
onboard scenes, ordering the St. Paul's captain and crew around as if they were
employees. The naval base at Pearl Harbor became a Preminger set..." The
only obstacles to overcome were mere technicalities: "No importation of
explosives into operational bases and no laying mines in Pearl Harbor by civilians.
Instead, dummies were rigged up on vacant lots and wired with gas and oil for
controlled fires." (from Behind the Scenes of Otto Preminger by
Willi Frischauer). In some battle scenes, Preminger resorted to using
miniatures which some critics realized were obviously toy ships and detracted
greatly from the film's realism; John Wayne also complained to Preminger about
it.
Reviewers were clearly divided on the merits of In Harm's Way. The
New York Times proclaimed "This is a slick and shallow picture that
Mr. Preminger puts forth here, a straight cliché-crowded melodrama.." Mike
Mayo, author of Videohound's War Movies, wrote that the actors were
"all saddled with a convoluted story that's so idiotically written it's
unfair to judge the actors' work...One clue to the bad writing comes in the
place names that were invented for the fictional campaign. When Torrey says,
"You're gonna mop up Gavoobutu and mount the invasion of Lavoovona,"
it sounds even sillier than it reads." Kirk Douglas's volatile character
doesn't come off any better with dialogue like "We've got ourselves
another war...a gut-busting, mother-loving Navy war!"
Weighing in with positive assessments, however, were such respected
publications as The New Yorker, Films in Review, and Variety.
Brendan Gill of The New Yorker wrote, "The picture lasts two hours
and forty-five minutes, nearly every one of which is filled with storm and
stress, both literal and figurative, and it's an honest measure of its success
as a melodrama that I, who am usually irritated by long movies, never once bent
forward in my seat to consult my watch." Wilfred Mifflin of Films in
Review confirmed Preminger's original reason for making the film: "I
was absorbed not because its story is novel....but because I'm starved for
movies which "accentuate the positive"...In Harm's Way is a
pleasure to watch because it makes possible whole-hearted identification
with a hero."
But it has to be said that the movie's major appeal was the Duke. Variety
acknowledged this, stating "This picture was tailored for John Wayne...He
is in every way the big gun of In Harm's Way. Without his commanding
presence, chances are Preminger probably could not have built the head of steam
this film generates and sustains for 2 hours, 45 minutes." Nevertheless, In
Harm's Way was virtually ignored at Oscar® time with the exception of a
well-deserved nomination for Loyal Griggs for Best Cinematography. His
beautiful cinemascope compositions are particularly striking, especially during
the opening sequence that sets up the pre-dawn attack on Pearl Harbor.
Apollo Guide (Ryan Cracknell) review [61/100]
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Kevin Clemons) dvd review
Michael D's Region 4 DVD Info Page
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Baltimore City Paper (Luisa F. Ribeiro) review
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING
Great Britain (107 mi) 1965 ‘Scope
A middling thriller scripted by John and Penelope Mortimer (from Evelyn Piper's novel) in which weary Inspector Olivier cruises a cameo-strewn London in search of Lynley's mislaid (and just possibly non-existent) child, and Preminger characteristically nags away at the minor-key ambiguities as if the investigation were philosophical rather than criminal. A brief appearance by The Zombies places the time of the season quite neatly, though London doesn't so much swing as creak eerily.
Bunny
Lake Is Missing (1965) James Travers
from FilmsdeFrance
A few days after arriving in London, American Ann Lake leaves her four-year old daughter Bunny at a school for toddlers before rushing off to meet the removal men at her new apartment. That afternoon, Ann is unable to find Bunny at the school and discovers that not one teacher has seen her all day. Convinced that her daughter has been abducted, Ann immediately contacts the police, but her brother Stephen assures her that Bunny has come to no harm. Superintendent Newhouse begins his investigation and is surprised to find that Bunny Lake was not even registered at the school. When he learns that all of the child’s possessions have disappeared he begins to wonder whether she ever existed...
The success of Hitchcock’s Psycho in
1960 resulted in a spate of similar psycho-thrillers, most involving attractive
young women in danger from a psychotic fiend who appears determined to go one
better than Norman Bates. Although it was initially ill-received by
the critics and virtually disowned by its director, Otto Preminger, Bunny
Lake Is Missing is one of the best example of this popular sub-genre to be
made in Britain. Set in London, the film evokes something of the
swinging sixties and Noel Coward’s cameo appearance as a whip-loving
sadomasochist with a Pinteresque leer is enough to earn it its enduring status
as a cult classic.
What makes the film so effective is Preminger’s skilful appropriation of some
of the techniques he employed on his earlier film noir thrillers – unusual
camera angles, harsh lighting, disorientating camera movements, etc.
These, together with the discordant soundtrack, all convey a hauntingly
expressionistic dreamlike feel, as if what we are seeing is not reality but a
child’s distorted interpretation of reality. The result is deeply unsettling
and, at times, genuinely terrifying. Few films of this period suggest
extreme mental aberration and the terror of the victim as convincingly as this
one, even if the plot strains credulity to breaking point.
Bunny
Lake Is Missing - TCM.com Jeff
Stafford
Ann Lake (Carol Lynley) is a single mom who has just moved to
London from America. After dropping off her four-year-old daughter at her new
school, Ann returns to her flat to attend to the movers but when she returns to
pick up her daughter, she is nowhere to be found. In fact, no one at the school
recalls ever seeing the child. Scotland Yard Inspector Newhouse (Laurence
Olivier) is immediately brought in on the case but begins to wonder if the
child even existed. In fact, Ann's psychological state soon becomes the focus
of the investigation, as the search for the missing child proves futile. For
solace, she turns to the one person she can trust, her brother Stephen (Keir
Dullea).
Directed by Otto Preminger, Bunny Lake is Missing (1965) starts off as
every parent's worst nightmare but soon detours into a psychological minefield
in which illusion and reality become blurred. Like Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up,
which was released the following year, the event or crime that propels the
narrative may, in fact, be a matter of perception and exist only in the mind of
the protagonist.
Bunny Lake is Missing is a welcome return to form for Preminger after
working semi-successfully on a broader canvas with epics such as Exodus
(1960) and In Harm's Way (1965). Like the taut, small-scale film noirs
he made during his tenure with 20th-Century-Fox (Laura (1944), Whirlpool
(1949), Where the Sidewalk Ends, 1950), Bunny Lake is Missing has
a streak of the perverse running through it, one which is mirrored in its
sinister and eccentric cast of suspects. But Preminger was aiming for something
else as well. In The Cinema of Otto Preminger by Gerald Pratley, the
director said of his film, "It is a small story about a kidnapping. The
mother of the little girl who has been kidnapped is unmarried and unable to
prove the existence of the child. The child's father will not admit to it
because he is already married to another woman and pretends he does not know
the mother. There is a certain social theme here; if you do not conform to the
rules of society, the law does not protect you. That is an important part of
the film."
Based on a novel by Marryam Modell (under the pen name of Evelyn Piper), Bunny
Lake is Missing was adapted for the screen by John and Penelope Mortimer
and filmed on location in London. "I made no attempt...to create a London
mood; with evocative shots of the city," Preminger commented. "The
fact that the story plays there is not particularly essential. It only made it
easier because these two Americans were isolated. There were no friends, there
were no people they knew from the past, and that made the suspense angle
better."
Preminger has always had a reputation for being difficult on sets and the mood
on Bunny Lake is Missing was not exactly congenial. Laurence Olivier,
who accepted the part of the police inspector merely for the money, called
Preminger "a real bully who never let up...a heavy-handed egotist [whom] Noel
Coward and I didn't much like." Author Anthony Holden wrote in his
biography, Olivier, that "one of the younger members of the cast
gratefully remembers Olivier, though plagued by gout throughout the filming,
intervening on his behalf: "I say, old boy, I do wish you wouldn't scream
at the children."
Certainly, Olivier's co-star Noel Coward didn't take his role too seriously.
According to Philip Hoare in his biography Noel Coward, the actor
"told Roddy McDowall, 'I play an elderly, drunk, queer masochist, and I am
in no mood for any wisecracks about typecasting so there.' Dressed like a
tramp, he also carried a Chihuahua 'crooked in my arm. It just lies there
comatose but quivering. I can't stand things that quiver....It only has one
piece of action...it had to wave, but it couldn't do it. I said to it,
"you will never make another Lassie." When Coward wasn't
pontificating, he was playing practical jokes on the cast members. One time he
crept up behind the male lead and said, "Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow"
- an obvious dig at the actor's questionable film career.
In spite of an intriguing premise and an ad campaign that played up the film's
surprise ending, Bunny Lake is Missing failed to generate much interest
among moviegoers. And most critics agreed the movie was uneven, primarily due
to the overwrought performances of the two leads - Ms. Lynley and Mr. Dullea -
which were unfavorably compared to the richly drawn supporting roles, most of
them played by the most prestigious talents of the British stage and cinema.
Olivier, naturally, was the focus of most reviews with critic Alexander Walker
stating rather backhandedly, "only a great actor can make himself this
small. It is a rare sight." Anna Massey, Martita Hunt, Noel Coward and
Finlay Currie also stand out among the British players but what is most
impressive about Bunny Lake is Missing today is the striking opening
credits sequence by Saul Bass and the artful black and white cinematography of
Denys N. Coop.
One interesting piece of trivia: The British pop group The Zombies receive a
screen credit in Bunny Lake is Missing but their only appearance in the
film is on a TV screen in a pub; they're guests on the show "Ready Steady
Go." Three of their songs - "Nothing's Changed," "Remember
You," and "Just Out of Reach" - are heard in the background,
usually emanating from a transistor radio. But, ironically enough, the one tune
which would have been perfect for this film - "She's Not There" - is
missing in action.
Who
is missing in "Bunny Lake"? by Dahlia Schweitzer - eJumpcut.org Dahlia Schweitzer from Jump Cut, Summer 2010
Otto Preminger and the End of Classical Cinema • Senses of Cinema John Orr from Senses of Cinema, July 31, 2006
Bunny
Lake Is Missing (1965) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Nathaniel Thompson
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
Weird Realm Paghat the Ratgirl
The Onion A.V. Club dvd review Tasha Robinson
Cinema Crazed (Lllian Patterson) review
DVD Talk (Stuart Galbraith IV) dvd review [3/5]
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [6/10]
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib
User reviews from imdb Author: Michael Moricz (MCMoricz@aol.com) from Astoria, NY
Horror.com Staci Layne Wilson
Boombox Serenade - Film-Music Reviews [Shannon Coulter]
CultureCartel.com (Stephen Murray) review [4/5]
The Stranger (Charles Mudede) review
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
filmsgraded.com (Brian Koller) retrospective [56/100]
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Movierapture Keith Allen
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Kempa.com » MP3(s) of the week: Otto Preminger Presents Zombies lyrics from the film, at Kempa.com, April 19, 2004
All Movie Guide [Aubry Anne D'Arminio]
STAGE
AND SCREEN; After 50 Years in Acting, Fully Relaxed in His Craft Margo Nash feature on Keir Dullea from The New York Times, April 8, 2007
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
HURRY SUNDOWN
USA (146 mi) 1967 ‘Scope
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
Otto Preminger's grappling with rural Georgia during the civil rights movement—an adaptation by Thomas C. Ryan and Horton Foote of K.B. Gilden's southern gothic novel—might seem hopelessly dated in its depiction of decadent whites and noble blacks. In fact, it seemed hopelessly dated when it was released in 1967, though this doesn't prevent it from having an enjoyable over-the-top quality at various junctures (catch Jane Fonda performing fellatio on Michael Caine's alto saxophone, for instance). The last of Preminger's overblown adaptations of best-sellers (his later films became smaller-scale and much weirder), this may have a lot more juice than sustenance, but at least Preminger keeps the juices flowing. With Rex Ingram, Diahann Carroll, Burgess Meredith, John Phillip Law, Robert Hooks, and Faye Dunaway.
Time Out Tom Milne
Set in Georgia in 1946 and dealing with the attempts of land-grabbers to dispossess a Negro smallholder, this is the sort of film in which the good guys are very, very good, the bad ones just plain horrid, and you recognise the hero because he gazes at his son, pauses for a count of three, and solemnly intones, 'A man's gotta do what his conscience says is right'. When Preminger makes a problem movie, he really piles on the agony: not just black-baiters and black-lovers, but a judge prejudiced to the point of imbecility, a conscienceful white minister serving his black brethren, a child traumatised after being tied up in his cot, and rampant sex all over the place. The Preminger flair which made The Cardinal so enjoyable, despite its hackneyed script, seems to have deserted him in this lumbering melodrama, put together with the sort of crudely opportunistic 'style' which alternates scenes of the rich folks parading in a stately mansion with shots of the poor sitting down to their humble fare while thumping mood music makes sure you get the point.
User
reviews from imdb Author: theowinthrop from United States
In 1967, for some unknown reason, my father took me, my
sister, and my mother to see this film. It was pretty bad. It was also the
first time I saw a film starring Jane Fonda and Michael Caine, and the only
time I saw a film directed by Otto Preminger, in a movie house. As such it has
significance to me - but that is marred by it being such a ridiculous film.
The Civil Rights Movement was in full gear, and Preminger, always wanting to be
on the cutting edge of movie making and current events, made this film about
the "modern south". The heroes are the poor white trash (John Philip
Law) and the poor African American sharecropper (Robert Hooks) who worked
together to build up a bigot-less America. Their enemies are led by sneaky,
greedy, land grabber Michael Caine, as well as George Kennedy, Burgess
Meredith, and most of the other whites. The film ends with Caine discovering
that his villainy kills one of the few human beings he loves.
There was plenty of saxophone playing (supposedly by Caine) who does that to
get into the mood to have sexual encounters. And there was little else that was
memorable.
One thing I did recall was a confrontation in Burgess Meredith's courtroom,
where he is hoping to disengage Hooks deed to the valuable land by typical
southern skulduggery. But Hooks is defended by a Yankee lawyer (Jim Backus, in
possibly the best performance in the film - and a short one), who produces the
original documents that show that Hooks owns the farmland. Meredith tries to question
"this chicken scrawl" signature at the end of the paper. Backus
points out it is the signature of Meredith's grandfather, also a judge. That
was the best moment of the film - you can imagine what the film is really like.
Preminger always seemed to attract heavyweight actors for lightweight films (SKIDDOO!, SUCH GOOD FRIENDS, ROSEBUD, THE HUMAN FACTOR, and a host of other bombs). The reviews of this one were universally damning. Set in the South at the end of WW II, HURRY SUNDOWN features Caine as a mean real estate developer buying up property. Two small lots evade him. One is owned by a poor white family, and the other by a poor black family. Caine sends his wife, Fonda, to the black family's home to convince them to sell. The matriarch, Richards, is her one-time nanny. Richards has a heart attack and dies in a simply ridiculous scene. Hooks, her son, becomes the new leader of the family, and refuses to sell. Caine is enraged and attempts to get Hooks into trouble, claiming that Hooks doesn't have a proper deed to the land. Bigoted judge Meredith tries to nail Hooks, but schoolmarm Carroll arrives with proof of Hooks' ownership. Caine gathers a lynch mob, but when they arrive at Hooks' home, the happy family is eating watermelon and fried chicken and singing spirituals--and this is not intended to be a parody. Not surprisingly, the mob disperses. Caine turns his attention to the property owned by the white family, his cousins, but they are equally adamant in their refusal to sell. Law and Dunaway are in charge of that family and very much in love but quite naive. Hooks and Law decide to team up and farm their land together, and Caine goes through the ceiling. He dynamites the dam above the farms, and Law's son is drowned despite an attempt to save him. Fonda leaves Caine just before this, relinquishing claim to any of the land. They have a retarded son, but Caine was so busy trying to make the deal for the land (a northern canning company wants it for a factory) that he neglected her and the child. In the end, the black and white families join forces to help rebuild the area.
Based on the novel by K.B. Gliden (Katya and Bert Gliden), HURRY SUNDOWN cost about $4 million and never returned its investment. To Preminger's credit, this was the first film shot in the South that had blacks in the leads. State troopers had to guard the set and the motels where the crew and cast lived, but that didn't stop someone from defacing their cars. Although set in Georgia, Preminger chose St. Francisville, Louisiana, a hotbed of KKK activities, as his location.
Time Magazine Cinema: Black + White = Grey, March 31, 1967
User reviews from imdb Author: Jonathon
Dabell (barnaby.rudge@hotmail.co.uk) from
Wakefield, England
User reviews from imdb Author: planktonrules from Bradenton, Florida
Baltimore City Paper (Jack Purdy) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2/4]
It's
Poverty of Imagination to Find Only the South Guilty Peter Applebone from The New York Times, March 16, 1997
SKIDOO
USA (97 mi) 1968 ‘Scope
Austin Chronicle [Jerry Renshaw]
Ever wanted to see Groucho Marx puff a fattie with John Phillip Law? How about Carol Channing (in her mid-fifties) stripped down to her bra and panties?? Or have you ever imagined Jackie Gleason whacked out of his skull on LSD?!? These brain-spraining images and many more are in Skidoo (D: Otto Preminger, 1968; Grouch Marx, Carol Channing, Jackie Gleason), Otto Preminger's monumental misfire of a counterculture comedy. Gleason plays a retired hit man who's pressured by Cesar Romero and young snotnose Frankie Avalon into going to prison to rub out Mickey Rooney (so far, so good). Once in the joint, though, Gleason is accidentally turned on to acid, has some horribly hokey hallucinations, and experiences the great epiphany that all violence is evil, renouncing his mobster life. Along with his cellmates he hatches a scheme to spring themselves out of the thug jug; they wind up dosing the entire prison with LSD, and while everyone's baked to the gills, they make their escape in a balloon stitched out of potato sacks, with garbage cans for a gondola. Things only get sillier from there. A cast of Hollywood once-greats parades across the screen in roles that they'd probably not wish to be reminded of today, while Harry Nilsson sings and plays an acid-swacked prison guard. As the story goes, Timothy Leary himself turned Preminger on to hallucinogens in the Sixties (his reaction was to go home and turn on a bank of TVs tuned to different channels a la LBJ or Elvis) and personally helped produce the trailer for Skidoo. It's funny in a childish, asinine sort of way, but as off-base as a typical Laugh-In episode. Still, it's worth seeing just for the sheer jaw-dropping amazement of it all; a far cry from respected Preminger efforts such as Laura, The Man with the Golden Arm, or Anatomy of a Murder.
Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski) review
This is one of my favorite celluloid misfires of all time! A hip, fab, counterculture wannabee, featuring a severely-screwball line-up of Hollywood cronies, all trying to keep their careers afloat by jumping blindly onto the '60s bandwagon of groovy hippies, free love and hallucinogenic chemicals. While doing research on this flick, director Otto Preminger dosed up with acid guru Timothy Leary, and it certainly shows on the screen. Unfortunately, this all-star embarrassment sank without a trace after playing the second half of one-week-only double bills, plus this work of wrongheaded genius is still unavailable on video!... Jackie Gleason stars as ex-mobster Tough Tony Banks and Carol Channing is his long-suffering wife, and after a lifetime of crime, the mountainously obese Gleason just wants some peace 'n' quiet during his retirement. Unfortunately, there are rival hoods and federal agents on his ass, plus his daughter has invited a pack of body-painted hippies onto his front lawn -- of course, in an effort not to offend Middle-American morons, these hippies are presented as harmless pumpkin-smoking (?) peaceniks who all look like Crispin Glover at the height of his geekdom. It's a pop art assault, funnelled through a studio sensibility, but what makes the film fly is its supporting cast. Since Otto played Mr. Freeze in the BATMAN series, he was able to pull other Bat-Villains outta the Bat-Unemployment Line such as Frank Gorshin, Cesar Romero and Burgess Meredith. Add extended cameos by Mickey Rooney, George Raft, Peter Lawford, Slim Pickins, Arnold Stang, and Groucho Marx as an omnipresent crook named God. Amongst the under-ancient crowd, there's a young (but still huge) Richard Kiel, Frankie Avalon as a slimy Guido and John Philip Law (DANGER: DIABOLIK), who's nearly unrecognizable as a hairball flower child. The story gets substantially subversive when Gleason winds up in prison and meets genius/anarchist Austin Pendleton, who has smuggled L.S.D. into his cell via laced stationary paper. And when Gleason accidentally writes a letter, he suddenly turns into the ultimate tripping, babbling, fat fuck. I LOVED IT! I'm always a sucker for cheapjack drug visuals, but when it's happening to Ralph Cramden, it's a cause celebre! First off, Pendleton shrinks to Lilliputian size and lectures about Existence while standing inside a glowing, purple pyramid, plus cool eyeball imagery and floating carpentry screws with Groucho heads. When Jackie finally returns to this galaxy, he's a changed man -- refusing to kill and giving up his old, criminal habits (says one cellmate: "Maybe if I took some of that stuff I wouldn't have to rape anyone anymore"). Still, he's not adverse to dosing the entire prison in order to escape via a hot air balloon, with the guards totally brain-fried as they stare at the solarized, dancing garbage cans (abetted by Harry Nilsson's "Trash Can Love Theme"). The brain-numbing finale has Gleason, Channing and all the spaced-out hippies rallying to stop God (Sounds symbolic? It ain't) by "loving him to death" as Carol groans the title song, "Skidoo" (thanks again, Nilsson). The most terrifying, cornea-damaging moments involve Channing's mini-skirts and her hideous, scrawny, withered legs -- she even resorts to a striptease at one point, which probably sent audience members running for the nearest vomitorium. Preminger certainly had a lot of guts (or blind clout) to get this mess made, and though I admire its surprisingly positive view of L.S.D. and inspired moments of drug-induced madness, it's still just a faddy gimmick for this Rat Pack-esque caper. But how can you NOT love a movie that ends with Groucho and Austin toking a roach as all the end credits are SUNG!? I guess it all seemed like a good idea at the time -- and while under the influence, it still is. Truly, this is a movie to be cherished by Badfilm Aficionados for centuries to come.
Skidoo (1968)
- Articles - TCM.com Millie
de Chirico
When sixty-three year old film director Otto Preminger set
out to make what would become the most disastrous film of his career and even
more maligned than his megabomb Saint Joan (1957), he had good
intentions. Preminger had read Doran William Cannon's script Skidoo
about the culture clash between the Establishment (who, in this case, were
represented by The Mafia) and the youth culture of the late 1960's, and enjoyed
the irreverent vibe. Preminger himself had always scoffed at conservatism and
was known for breaking the rules in his previous work: from tackling taboo
themes such as rape and drug addiction to employing all African American casts
in the 1950's to hiring blacklisted talent during the height of McCarthyism.
Cannon's script was, in fact, written in earnest. (Cannon would pen another
"head" film just a few years later, 1970's Brewster McCloud.)
At the time, Cannon thought Skidoo, "delivered an important message
of peace and love at a time when America was engaged with the war in
Vietnam." Preminger's desire to take on his screenplay was also sincere.
At the time he was itching to make a comedy and had grown interested in the
counterculture - most importantly, with LSD. Preminger was at the time dabbling
with acid himself, and in 1968, he was not alone. Acid had become the drug of
choice among the nation's youth, and its popularity was beginning to make its
way to the big screen. Preminger no doubt wanted to ride the wave.
1968 in fact was a big year for acid movies. Psych-Out, Wild in the
Streets, Alice in Acidland, Mantis in Lace and others were
released in the wake of Roger Corman's The Trip (1967) and Easy Rider
(1969) was just around the corner . Preminger's unique arrangement with
Paramount allowed him the freedom to tackle the modern subject material; his
record of always delivering on schedule or under budget didn't hurt either.
However, the always-efficient director found himself butting heads with
screenwriter Cannon. The writer wanted the mafia to be depicted in a serious
manner; Preminger saw them as comical cartoon figures. Preminger wanted Cannon
to write in more violence; Cannon, a pacifist, refused. Soon others were
brought in for rewrites (including Elliott Baker, author of A Fine Madness)
and the script further deviated from Cannon's original vision. After the final
and most absurd draft of the film was delivered, it was quickly cast with an
equally bizarre group of old and young Hollywood talent: Jackie Gleason,
Frankie Avalon, Carol Channing, Mickey Rooney, John Phillip Law, Peter Lawford,
Burgess Meredith, Austin Pendleton and perhaps most strangely, Groucho Marx (it
was the comedian's final film role).
As filming began on Skidoo, some cast and crew members immediately
sensed that the story might be too bizarre for its own good: A retired mobster
named Tony (Gleason) is called upon by his former Mafia boss (Marx, simply
referred to as "God") to make one last hit. His one time friend Blue
Chips Packard (Rooney) was sitting pretty in solitary confinement in Alcatraz
after being busted, but has since become an informer against his old gang. Tony
is instructed to sneak into the jail and eliminate Packer.
Meanwhile, Tony's teenage daughter Darlene is in dubious company herself,
hanging out with members of San Francisco's hippie community. She starts dating
a tuned-out long hair (John Phillip Law) and espouses the ideals of peace and
love. Tony's wife Flo (Channing), the more sympathetic of the couple, feels for
her daughter and invites the whole psychedelic clan back to their house to
live. Tony is none too happy about this new crowd, yet befriends a hippie in
the clink known as "The Professor" (Austin Pendleton, the unsung hero
of the film). He turns Tony onto acid accidentally one day, and during his
trip, Tony begins to understand the pitfalls of his violent past. He decides to
"make love, not war" against ol' Blue Chips.
With Tony now enlightened, he wishes to make his final exit from mob life.
Unfortunately he must "take it up with God" and "The
Professor" orchestrates a dramatic escape from the jail for the both of
them, which includes spiking the kitchen soup with LSD. As the inmates and
hacks are floating on Cloud Nine, Tony and Professor do a little floating
themselves: namely, they fly a homemade hot air balloon, made out of bags and
garbage cans up, up, and away – right out of Alcatraz and onto God's yacht,
where the hippies have already made their ambush. In the end, God himself is
not immune to the tenants of peace of love, and is seen on a sailboat in the
distance with "The Professor," smoking a joint merrily.
Even though it looked like Skidoo was quickly turning into some strange
absurdist play, Preminger stood by his new film and presented the film to
Paramount with a straight face; studio heads were more than unimpressed. He had
attempted a fun, topical comedy but was too removed from what he was satirizing
due to his age and life experience. As a result, Skidoo appealed to no
one in 1968. Older audiences found its celebration of drugs offensive and
younger viewers thought it was akin to your grandfather asking to borrow your
records. The film was contrived and overbearing. The hippies seem stilted and
forced while the older cast members overact and ham it up, often resorting to
broad slapstick. The film moved from scene to scene without any real sense of
direction and sometimes relied on weird, sped-up flashback sequences. At the
end of the day the critics and the cinema-going public scoffed at this
sixty-three year old man's pathetic acid trip. It was in theaters a week before
it was pulled, and then Skidoo was buried in film history as a bad
mistake; To this day, the film has not been released on home video.
Ironically, it is the "bad mistake", the overcalculation of Skidoo
that makes watching it such a fun, enjoyable experience today. Much like the
accidental hilariousness of a 1950's education filmstrip, the notion of Skidoo
being made in earnest, that Preminger filmed acid trip sequences the exact way
he experienced them himself, gives the film a strange staying power. A simple
viewing of it will make you think you're on an acid trip of your own. The LSD
sequences are truly bizarre; a surreal mix of muted audio and mind-warping
visuals (the movie's most trippy moment has to be what Preminger himself called
"The Dance of The Garbage Cans"). Most unbelievable however, is the
cast that Preminger assembled for this one-of-a-kind oddity. It's hard to
believe that Jackie Gleason was ever talked into acting out an acid
trip. And between seeing Carol Channing in only a bra and tights and Groucho
Marx's head on a cartoon depiction of a screw, you truly feel like you've
stepped into another dimension. And just when you think you've seen it all, the
ending is interrupted by Preminger himself – imploring you to stay through the
credits as 60's folk troubadour Nilsson actually sings the entire list
of cast and crew.
While Preminger and his cast and crew may have created box office poison with Skidoo
in 1968, it is simply too unique to be ignored any longer. It's become a
hilarious relic of the time period. Consistent bootlegging of the film has
introduced Skidoo to a new generation of viewers, who celebrate it as a
garish clusterf*ck. In fact, Skidoo is the true essence of a cult film:
made with love, immediately reviled and buried, and subsequently rediscovered
by a new audience, basking in its strange, hypnotic allure
Parallax View [Pierre Greenfield] originally published in Movietone News, March 1980
DVD Savant Review: Skidoo - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson, also seen here: Skidoo (1968) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
CleverDonkey.com [EngineerBoy]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Notes of a Film Fanatic [Mat Viola]
eFilmCritic.com review [1/5] The Ultimate Dancing Machine
Bad Movie Night John Weber
The Horn Section Hal
User reviews from imdb Author: Bruce Elliott (brucebox@aol.com) from Los Angeles
User reviews from imdb Author: eminges from mission, ks
User reviews from imdb Author: Matt Moses from Brooklyn, NY
User reviews from imdb Author: max von meyerling from New York
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
With a whimper, not a bang: 15 particularly depressing cinematic ... The Onion A.V. Club
The Unknown Movies review Michael Sullivan, also reviewing CANDY
Channel 4 Film [capsule review]
On the "Skidoo" set with Otto Preminger:<br>"Mr. von Stroheim, do ... Roger Ebert, June 16, 1968
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2/4] December 27, 1968
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
TELL ME THAT YOU LOVE ME, JUNIE MOON
USA (113 mi) 1970 ‘Scope
Another in the great series of disasters with which Preminger seemed intent on finishing his career, this is the tale of three mentally and physically handicapped social outcasts (facially disfigured girl, homosexual paraplegic, introverted epileptic) who set up home together. For all its SAS-like attacks on its audience's desire for charmingly handicapped people - Preminger refuses to favour the 'good' profile of Liza Minnelli's scarred Junie Moon - the script is little but a series of smart aleck exchanges/platitudes.
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review
Otto Preminger's 1970 film of Marjorie Kellogg's novel about three social rejects who try to make a home together: a disfigured girl (Liza Minnelli), an epileptic (Ken Howard), and a paraplegic homosexual (Robert Moore). Typical of the bizarre material Preminger was attracted to late in his career, though the style hesitates between no-stops melodrama and glacial reserve without really finding a meaningful perspective on the action. With Kay Thompson, James Coco, and Fred Williamson.
User
reviews from imdb Author: John Primavera
(jpseacadets@cox.net) from San Diego, CA, USA
This movie may not be on a list somewhere of Liza Minnelli's
best films or Otto Preminger's or one of Kay Thompson(Liza's Godmom)or James
Coco's best efforts. I do think it ranks high on a list of one of the best
movies about introverts ever made. That it wasn't a box office or critical
success doesn't matter. Nor that it did nothing to advance the careers of
anyone connected to it.
But I think TELL ME THAT YOU LOVE ME, JUNIE MOON deserves a special place with
audiences who love quirky movies that go where other movies dare not go. Think
of Altman's BREWSTER McCLOUD or Hal Ashby's HAROLD AND MAUD, for instance.
Movies that deal with characters most others would call misfits because they
are different or eccentric.
One, for example, is a gay man. For a 1970 film, this is rare to say the least.
But to make him a disabled gay man trapped in a wheel chair due to an accident
is a revelation. I can't imagine another such character either before or since
this film came along. Another revelation is a disfigured woman, played by
Minnelli, and not seen on the screen in a leading role since Joan Crawford in
Cukor's A WOMAN'S FACE. Both of these characters completely dominate JUNIE
MOON. They are truly amusing in using their wit to cope with an unkind world.
The third eccentric is an epileptic, played by Ken Howard. His performance is
the weakest of the three and this, unfortunately, weakens the overall impact.
Had this part been cast better, honors would have come its way to be sure. The
scene where the handicapped guy can't negotiate the smallness of his bathroom
is a gem. Another is the vacation scene where these three descend on a hapless
hotel staff. Another where a naive woman is seduced by three hunky members of
an art colony is captivating.
This movie sparked controversy because of a scene where two people are having
sex in a cemetery. A real graveyard is used and relatives of the dead buried
there balked and so a lawsuit ensued. But knowing this to be an Otto Preminger
film...that is not so strange(recall THE MOON IS BLUE and MAN WITH THE GOLDEN
ARM). Preminger ate up such controversy. No doubt such headlines added to his
film's box office. JUNIE MOON is his weirdest movie, but far from his worst.
None of the films after this one are even half as good. Even Saul Bass, whose
title drawings are a trade mark for Preminger films, excels in it.
Judy Garland died while Liza was filming her part in this. A year later she began
work on her greatest role, that of Sally Bowles in Fosse's CABARET. While both
her roles in these films are about introverted and unstable vulnerable
women...CABARET is the first where she gets to show her strongest suit: that of
a musical performer whose star power is as good as her mother's. Her work in
CABARET solidified her image as a singer and dancer the way FUNNY GIRL did it
for Streisand. While TELL ME THAT YOU LOVE ME, JUNIE MOON may not be legendary,
it still boasts having a legend in it.
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
All Movie Guide [Craig Butler]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
Prince-Bythewood, Gina
BEYOND THE LIGHTS B+ 91
USA (116 mi) 2014
Why
you wanna fly Blackbird you ain't ever gonna fly
No place big enough for holding all the tears you're gonna cry
Cos your mama's name was lonely and your daddy's name was pain
And they call you little sorrow cos you'll never love again
So why you wanna fly Blackbird you ain't ever gonna fly
You ain't got no one to hold you you ain't got no one to care
If you'd only understand dear nobody wants you anywhere
So why you wanna fly Blackbird you ain't ever gonna fly
—Nina Simone “Blackbird,” 1966, Nina Simone - Blackbird -
YouTube (3:51)
While women made up roughly half of the directors at this year’s independent Sundance Film Festival, yet they still struggle when it comes to films receiving a wide release, where of the Hollywood studio releases originally slated for the summer of 2014, 37 are directed by white men, 2 by black men and 1 by a woman, according to a recent analysis by Lucas Shaw at The Wrap. That one film, JUPITER ASCENDING, co-written and directed by Lana Wachowski along with her brother Andy, was pushed back to 2015, reducing the summer’s total to zero. Black American director Gina Prince-Bythewood struggled for four years to get this film made, where the first draft was written in 2007, as Sony Pictures originally agreed to produce and distribute the picture, but dropped out when the director insisted upon casting a then unproven talent, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, in the starring role. While she trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, specializing in musical theater where song and dance is her forte, but Sony wasn’t convinced she was destined to become a star and were more interested in names like Rihanna or Beyoncé. As it turns out, the actress received plenty of acclaim in an earlier release, BELLE (2013), and she’s easily the best thing in this picture as a rising pop star singer named Noni. The fact that we haven’t seen her face plastered on billboards, cosmetics advertisements, or music videos suggests she can offer a fresh perspective about the difficulties young women are subjected to when attempting to break into a sexist, male-dominated music industry, where the N-word and the B-word are routinely thrown around in hip-hop lyrics, a business where women have routinely been objectified as sex objects since the advent of music videos on MTV, with images only growing raunchier and more graphic, like the controversial cover to Nicki Minaj’s new release Anaconda, Nicki Minaj "Anaconda" Unaltered Cover Art, Memes, Music ..., where the racy video, Nicki Minaj - Anaconda - YouTube (4:49), is a parody of the exaggerated hypersexualization required by women. This cultural demand for sexist artificiality is at the heart of the film, which plays with the contrasting ideas of image and real black aspirations.
While this female written and directed $7 million dollar black indie film is wrapped in a cliché-driven Hollywood romance that resembles Whitney Houston in THE BODYGUARD (`1992), the film also pays tribute to that troubled artist, one of the great voices of our time who died a tragically premature death, reminding us that the pathway to real success is paved with plenty of inner obstacles along the way. In an introductory prologue, Noni as a young 10-year old girl (India Jean-Jacques), prodded on by her obsessively driven stage mother (Minnie Driver in one of her best performances in ages), finds a black hairdresser just as she’s about to close, desperate to do something with her daughter’s hair before a talent competition. At the performance she sings a song well beyond her years, Nina Simone’s ultra serious 1966 anthem to the black consciousness of the times, “Blackbird,” Nina Simone - Blackbird - YouTube (3:51), winning second prize to an obviously inferior Shirley Temple imitator. Storming out in disgust, her mother orders her to toss out the trophy, barking out “You wanna be a runner-up? Or you wanna be a winner?” Cut to an adult version of Noni starring in the background of a music video for white rapper Kid Culprit (rapper Machine Gun Kelly), where she’s dressed in a skimpy bondage outfit waiting for him to make her one of his many sexual conquests. This, however, is the image of success, appearing on three consecutive #1 hits for the Kid, as she’s soon awarded a Billboard Music Award as a rising star, where her upcoming first album release is all but guaranteed to be a sensation, making her an overnight superstar. No one cares that she can sing, however, but are bowled over by the heat of the sexually suggestive imagery she sells. When she returns to the penthouse suite with her bottle of champagne, she hires a moonlighting cop at the door, keeping everybody else out. When her mother insists on going inside, Noni is about to plunge off the balcony, rescued by the quick thinking of the local policeman Kaz Nicol, Nate Parker, so strong in Denzel Washington’s THE GREAT DEBATERS (2007), who instantly becomes a tabloid hero, rescuing the fair maiden in distress. Except for the cop, who deals with crisis situations every day, no one else senses the extent of her emotional descent, literally drowning in the image she has created, where she feels suffocated and imprisoned. For the camera, however, still pushed by her hard-nosed mother, now her manager, she maintains all professional appearances while behind the scenes she is literally driven into dysfunction and despair.
While the critique of the music business is probably the film’s greatest strength, nonetheless the means by which the message is carried is through the traditional vehicle of a boy meets girl Hollywood romance, seemingly preposterous and yet there it is bigger than life, where the scenes between the star and her protector are exquisitely understated, quiet, disarmingly honest and intense, feeling authentic and natural, while surrounded by a swarming throng of tabloid photographers that follow them both wherever they go. Kaz has his own pressures, as his father is none other than Danny Glover, a highly decorated retired cop, where he’s following in his father’s footsteps, trying to make the most of the opportunities he’s been given, perhaps heading into politics where he thinks he could make a difference. The trust factor and conservative stability of politics however do not go hand in hand with tabloid fanaticism and the cultural obsession with celebrity worship, where both appear headed in different directions, yet there’s a natural chemistry between them, where perhaps what they need the most is the kind of honesty they have with each other. The pressures of fame, ambition, and career have them both on edge, where each is told by friends and handlers that the other is bad for business, that their career would be derailed, so they simply get away for awhile, heading for an isolated beach in Mexico where the media circus around them can stop spinning for a moment. In one of the most beautifully written scenes of the film, shot with such utter simplicity, Noni stands in front of a bathroom mirror and removes her infamous hair extensions, a chic fashion style synonymous with her reputation and fame. While we don’t realize it at the time, it’s the first step of removing herself from the shackles of the past, as she still has to find that familiarity of living in her own skin, which is expressed beautifully at a small karaoke bar when she returns to Nina Simone, a hauntingly powerful moment that transcends any of the over-produced crap that sells millions, yet it’s an intimate, quietly anonymous moment that couldn’t be more captivating. It’s a hint of what’s to come, as it’s not like the music industry allows the players free reign to do what they want when they’re just breaking into the business, as that’s reserved for established stars. However, it’s a small step in the right direction, an act of healing and empowerment, where despite being overwhelmed by the frightening prospects of what lies ahead, she is for the first time in her life truly happy. Doing her own singing, Mbatha-Raw literally inhabits the role with a stunning effectiveness, a breakthrough moment in her career, where her own personal transformation seems to be taking place right before our eyes.
Review: Beyond The Lights is a charming romance from the ... Keith Uhlich from The Onion A.V. Club
There’s something compellingly kitchen-sink about the opening scenes of Gina Prince-Bythewood’s music world melodrama, as U.K. stage mom Macy (Minnie Driver) frenetically shuttles her daughter, Noni (India Jean-Jacques), from the hairdresser to a local talent show. The gifted young girl takes runner-up for her stirring rendition of Nina Simone’s “Blackbird,” but Macy isn’t having it and demands Noni toss her trophy to the ground. Her kid can only ever be the best. Nothing less will do.
This section has an admirable grit and genuineness, especially in the way the restless hand-held camera complements both mother and child’s individual anxieties. The mood is almost immediately, and intentionally, undermined when the film suddenly cuts to a music video in which the grown-up Noni (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is gyrating alongside bad boy rapper Kid Culprit (Richard Colson Baker, a.k.a. Machine Gun Kelly). It’s now several years after her second place showing, and Noni is a pop diva (purple-dyed weave and all) on the verge of blowing up. But success is more devil than angel; returning to her Hollywood hotel after the latest soul-sucking awards show, she climbs over the balcony banister, ready to jump. Only by the grace, and good grip, of moonlighting police officer Kaz (Nate Parker) does she get to live another day. “I see you,” Kaz says with the kind of empathy and emotion Noni’s life has been sorely lacking. Then he pulls her to safety. It must be love.
How easy it would be for Beyond The Lights to turn fully bathetic, and how wonderful that it mostly maintains the promise of that opening section. Prince-Bythewood (Love & Basketball) does a beautiful job sketching in both Noni and Kaz’s antithetical milieus: her stifling affluence—with its many sycophants, paparazzi, and exploiters of all stripes—versus his modest blue-collar existence, which is governed by a father (Danny Glover) who wants to see his son parlay his pillar-of-the-community aura into a political career. (“She’s not first lady material,” he says to Kaz, when it’s clear he’s falling for Noni—as if that’ll stop them.)
A star-crossed love story is only as good as its Romeo and Juliet. Both Parker and Mbatha-Raw have a sweet, smoldering chemistry that’s a joy to witness, especially after they run off together for a rejuvenating sojourn in Mexico. (It’s there that the movie’s best scene occurs, as Noni sings an a cappella solo in front of a rapt karaoke bar audience—a moving act of defiance, reclamation, and empowerment.) This is feel-good populist entertainment at heart, so there’s an element of wish fulfillment to how the duo’s romance plays out that Prince-Bythewood isn’t entirely able to sell. She nonetheless works hard to complicate characters—like Driver’s overbearing Macy—who in a lesser movie would be a hissing demon. And she unearths plenty of emotional truths that ring resoundingly true, notably in regard to the way much of the music industry sells debased and debauched images of women for maximum profit.
I Heard That Movie Was [Justin Morales]
If you are a fan of rap then you might know the difficulties some artists have when it comes to not only putting out an album but putting out an album with music that they want. The problem is, some artists want to put out what they want without a care for selling a million albums as long as their message gets heard. Record labels on the other hand, can care less about what the message is as long as radios play the songs and fans buy the album. Things only get worse when the artist happens to be a female. Prior to signing a deal, a female artist might have been a conservative self-respected individual. After, the record label will try their best to make their new artist into the biggest sex symbol in the game. Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Beyond the Lights discusses this topic within the film and what it is to be a female artist in the money hungry music business.
Beyond the Lights is the story of Noni, the music world’s latest superstar. But not all is what it seems, and the pressures of fame have Noni on the edge – until she meets Kaz Nicol, a young cop and aspiring politician who’s been assigned to her detail. Drawn to each other, Noni and Kaz fall fast and hard, despite the protests of those around them who urge them to put their career ambitions ahead of their romance. But it is ultimately Kaz’s love that gives Noni the courage to find her own voice and break free to become the artist she was meant to be.
Beyond the Lights would only be as good as the leading female role. If the actress who is playing the signed artist does not portray an individual who is both sexy and filled with fantasy but a broken down, depressed individual when she isn’t in front of the camera than the message Prince-Bythewood planned on delivering would have came up short. Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who plays Noni, continues to shine as she already has one hit under her belt with the indie film Belle. She did a better job acting as a pop star than some of these current day pop stars try to act. Opposite of Mbatha-Raw is Nate Parker who plays Officer Kaz, Noni’s hero. This is Parker’s biggest role and best overall character he was given the opportunity to play in his career and Parker ran away with the opportunity to shine. Having Mbatha-Raw and Parker shine proved to be necessary because it added authenticity to the story which at times can be very predictable, cliche and lingers at times.
This is a great film for female empowerment and what makes it better is that Kaz is not only the one who helps her, but he also pushes her in the right direction. It is Noni’s own quest of no longer wanting to be who she pretends to be and show the world who she really is. She does not want Kaz to be the only one to tell her, “I see you,” which is all Noni really wants. The soundtrack of the film duplicates Noni’s journey perfectly as the film starts with pop songs trying to sell different types of fantasies to Noni dropping the gimmick and really singing with passion and heart. I don’t understand why MGK went under a false rap name while other rappers in the film went by their real ones.
With award-season being in full throttle, it is easy to overlook Beyond the Lights as it most likely won’t be nominated for anything but this is a piece of work that everyone who worked on it would be proud to have on their resume. This film could have easily been very cliche and typical but we get genuine performances that keep it afloat.
Showbiz Drama Beyond the Lights Is Familiar but Cutting ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice
Tales of fame and its trappings — and the way they’re never enough to build a life — are as old as show business itself. Maybe for that reason, almost any story about discovering the hollowness of fame is often written off as a cliché. But what’s the difference, really, between cliché and convention? Sometimes the most seemingly conventional stories are the best tools for digging into knotty, everyday truths. Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Beyond the Lights is a deeply satisfying crowd-pleaser about a young singer, Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Noni, who’s on the brink of superstardom but isn’t particularly happy about it. A few days before her debut album is set to drop — and just after she’s won a Billboard award for a single she made with a scrawny, tattooed white rapper — she tries to throw herself off her hotel balcony. The mega-handsome young cop assigned to guard her room, Nate Parker’s Kaz, stops her just in time, though it takes a little doing. Noni is convinced that no one can seeer; Kaz assures her he can. Their eyes meet, and their gaze becomes a kind of pact.
In that early scene, you may think you pretty much know where Beyond the Lights is headed. And you’re probably right. But that doesn’t negate the pleasure of getting there, and writer-director Prince-Bythewood — perhaps best known for Love & Basketball, her smart, provocative picture about a romance between two ambitious athletes — handles the particulars smoothly. Polished but blessedly un-slick, Beyond the Lights opens with a prologue set in South London in 1998. The young Noni (played by India Jean-Jacques), a serious-looking girl with a dark puff of hair, is being ferried by a high-strung white woman we assume, rightly, to be her mom, Minnie Driver’s Macy Jean. She hustles Noni into a hair salon just as the proprietress is closing up: Macy explains, her voice taut with desperation, that her daughter has an important talent show the next day. What can be done about her hair? The stylist takes a moment to show Macy a trick or two. Later, Noni, simply but neatly coiffed, takes the stage — she’s the only little person of color up there — and renders a guilelessly red-hot a cappella version of Nina Simone’s “Blackbird.” She wins runner-up. Macy, furious at the idea of her daughter being only second best, makes her throw the trophy away.
That scene tells us everything and nothing about how Noni will end up. Prince-Bythewood jettisons her heroine into a future of stretch limos, tiny metallic shorts, and glossy purple hair (the best weave money can buy), and introduces a smattering of conflict: That handsome, stalwart, nice-guy cop hopes to build a political career, and a sex-bomb celebrity like Noni isn’t, as his dad (Danny Glover) tells him, first-lady material. But Prince-Bythewood wraps lots of candid insights, some of them quite cutting, around these straightforward trappings. In the movie’s most explosive scene, Noni takes the stage at the BET Awards, only to surprise the audience (and her overbearing mother, now her manager) by refusing to play the shimmying sexpot they expect. She’s humiliated and then struck, onstage, by that white rapper (played by Richard Colson Baker), who’s now her ex. In shaping the story, Prince-Bythewood then takes a step that doesn’t quite make sense. But the mechanics matter less than the naked, pathetic power display — charged both sexually and racially — that she’s just shown us. This is Prince-Bythewood’s way of saying that even long after the Rihanna–Chris Brown gossip has died down, the issues at heart haven’t disappeared, and they’re no less troubling.
Mbatha-Raw (last seen in Belle, based on the true story of a black woman growing up among white aristocracy in 18th-century England) is a captivating presence here, look-at-me sexy one moment and soberly vulnerable the next. But she never lets her character descend into raw neediness or histrionic self-loathing. There’s always something sturdy and earthbound about her fragility, as if she knows she doesn’t have to play the victim, even when she feels like one. Noni’s triumph doesn’t come all at once — it takes awhile for her to stop fighting her hair and find her voice — but her moment of epiphany strikes a resounding chord. Maybe it doesn’t hurt, either, that Prince-Bythewood’s cinematographer, Tami Reiker, is a woman: Her approach to the movie’s sex scenes, and her mode of looking at both men and women in general, is deeply attuned to the pleasures of beauty and movement. A movie isn’t a cliché when it can sing like this.
Can't Stop the Movies [Andrew Hathaway]
Movie Shark Deblore [Debbie Lynn Elias]
Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Beyond
the Lights is the most subversive American movie of the year Ben Sachs from The Reader
Beyond The Lights / The Dissolve Genevieve Koski
Hollywood's “female stuff” problem / The Dissolve Genevieve Koski, November 17, 2014
The Film Stage [Nathan Bartlebaugh]
National Review [Armond White]
Gugu Mbatha-Raw in Beyond the Lights, reviewed. - Slate Dana Stevens
Everyone Loved Beyond the Lights. Why Can't ... - Slate Critics and audiences loved Beyond the Lights. Too bad no one can see it, by Dana Stevens, January 6, 2015
Real Movie News - Blu-ray [Ryan Russell Izay]
Beyond the Lights (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Tyler Foster
Blu-ray.com [Jeffrey Kauffman]
extrabutteronmypopcorn [Mitchell Elling]
Georgia Straight [Janet Smith]
The Roaming Life TIFF 2014 [Jason Stamp]
'Dumb and Dumber To,' 'Beyond the Lights' :Review Revue ... Wall Street Journal Speakeasy
Director Gina Prince-Bythewood on Beyond the Lights, Creating Great Chemistry, and Shooting Love Scenes Bilge Ebiri interview from Vulture, November 16, 2014
'Beyond the Lights': Toronto Review - The Hollywood Reporter David Rooney
Toronto Film Review: 'Beyond the Lights' - Variety Andrew Barker
Beyond the Lights review - The Guardian Jordan Hoffman
Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]
'Beyond the Lights' movie review: A star turn for Gugu ... Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Pamela Zoslov]
Austin Chronicle [William Goss]
'Beyond the Lights' director gave film's star a crash course in diva Amy Kaufman from The LA Times, November 18, 2014
Los Angeles Times [Martin Tsai]
Beyond the Lights Movie Review (2014) | Roger Ebert Odie Henderson
'Beyond the Lights,' a Diva's Romance - The New York Times A.O. Scott
Procházková,
Maria
WHO’S
AFRAID OF THE WOLF C+ 79
One wants to like this whimsical film, as it’s an interesting concept
that could and should work, but it’s undermined by some of this first time
director’s poor choices. Procházková has
worked both as a cartoonist and on children’s TV, but what she’s done here that
is highly imaginative is give the voiceover narration and lead role to a 6-year
old girl, Terezka (Dorotka Dedkova), a wonderfully inventive
kid who spends her time at home with her parents and at school, where the
children’s scenes couldn’t be more colorful, as she interacts with her favorite
friend, a young boy, and together they conclude that Terezka’s mother is an
alien from another planet. This all began innocently enough when her father
makes playful remarks to that effect, but to a child, they immediately start
surmising this must be true. At the same
time, her favorite children’s story is “Little Red Riding Hood,” which continually
plays in her imagination with a cast of interchangeable wolves. My favorite was the one with a granny bonnet
drawn over its head. While Dedkova
couldn’t be more relaxed and natural in front of the camera, literally carrying
the picture on her shoulders, her mother, played by Jitka Cvancarova,
is simply dreadful and is a major casting error. While she’s a beautiful woman, she looks more
like a model who’s hair and make up are perfect all the time, always wearing
dress clothes, even around the house, as if she was born out of a fashion
catalogue instead of real life, a stark contrast to the natural energy and
flair of Dedkova, who tends to draw amusing, childlike drawings directly onto
the celluloid which reflect her own thoughts.
We learn soon enough that the in-home dad, Pavel Reznicek, is not the real dad, and
that mom was a former singing star, where cello virtuoso, Martin Hofmann (the
child’s actual father), has built a career for himself in Japan while urging
her to return with him to the limelight.
The parents and grandmother struggle with the idea of telling Terezka who her real dad is, thinking she may still be too young to
understand. Instead, without telling
her, they introduce the virtuoso who makes such a flat impression that one wonders
why the mom’s considering running off to Japan with this guy, as there’s never
even a hint at romance or affection. The
parents, even the teachers at school, come across as never having enough time
for the kids, barking out orders or instructions all the time, never really on
the same wavelength as the kids, while at school the kids are much more
carefree with one another, inventing alternate universes, drawing colorful
pictures, revealing the latest homelife gossip, all editorialized by little sketches
onto the screen. When one of the girls’
parents is getting an ugly divorce, the kids are highly sensitized to the fact
that one of the parents can no longer come pick her up. The film does an excellent job
differentiating the line between children and adults, where a humorous, playful
tone mixes with more serious, complex issues in these children’s lives.
The problem is the director’s protracted
unwillingness to tell Terezka the truth, where this little problem is endlessly
strung out, causing havoc between
Terezka’s parents, whose ongoing bickering causes
her increasing anxiety, as her parents argue about whether or not the mother
will return to the stage, whether she will move to Japan with the virtuoso, and
whether she should divorce her husband, who, by the way, has an excellent
relationship with Terezka even though he’s away from home at work a lot, still
she apparently adores him. This little
escapade of will she or won’t she grows tiresome after awhile, all completely
outside Terezka’s realm of comprehension.
By the time they get around to it, they stumble upon it purely by
accident, which unleashes a series of unfortunate events all captured in the
urban sprawl of the airport where her dad works, which seen through Terezka’s
eyes feels as if the wolf has escaped from the “Little Red Riding Hood” story
and has no place to go, and is instead running haphazardly through the streams
of customers at the airport, which makes more sense than the adult behavior
onscreen, which is horribly presented.
Nevertheless, there’s plenty to like here in the
natural humor and playfulness of the children, which is the most comfortable
world for a 6-year old. She likes being
around her friends, even as she is scolded from time to time by teachers who
tend to be as clueless as her own parents, blaming her for things that aren’t
really her fault. But the playful
mixture of fantasy and real life is beautifully drawn, with wolves occasionally
running rampant in her alternate life where children rely on stories that they
can relate to and understand, even if made up, instead of real life which
reminds them of the troubles that their parents have. Despite her age, Terezka appears to be the
wisest and most mature person in this movie, as the rest keep bumping into the
same walls of resistance which are largely of their own making.
Special note – lead actress Dorotka Dedkova, art
direction
Cleverly riffing
on "Little Red Riding Hood," charming all-ages drama "Who's
Afraid of the Wolf" looks at serious family matters from the perspective
of a 6-year-old girl. Tightly scripted, beautifully mounted sophomore effort
from Czech helmer-writer Maria Prochazkova ("Shark in the Head") is
wondrously inventive and irresistibly played. An arthouse release at home, it
should appeal to fests and discerning smallscreen programmers offshore in
search of quality material that parents and children can enjoy together.
Prague-set tale
centers on sensitive moppet Terezka (Dorotka Dedkova), whose favorite bedtime
story is "Little Red Riding Hood," even though it gives her bad
dreams. Her family consists of her loving but tightly wound mother (Jitka
Cvancarova), a once-promising singer who put her career on hold; her warm but
workaholic father (Pavel Reznicek); and her elegant, critical granny (Jana
Krausova), who schemes to reunite daughter with her former boyfriend Patrik, a
selfish virtuoso musician (Martin Hofmann).
At kindergarten,
Terezka and best friend Simon (Matous Kratina) excitedly share their growing
knowledge, including important tidbits such as how to identify an alien. When
another tyke lands a new sibling, Terezka becomes obsessed with whether her
mother is really her mother, little suspecting the altogether different
secret surrounding her parentage.
On one level, the
pic skillfully shows the world as it seems to impressionable youngsters who
rely on TV and their own not entirely rational observations for explanations.
Yet on another, it plays perfectly to adults who pick up on the love triangle
between the mother and two men -- one of whom reps safety and routine, and the
other the magic of distance and unfulfilled ambition.
A prizewinning
animator, Prochazkova supplements the lush, color-saturated visuals with cute,
childlike drawings that, along with Terezka's voiceover, illustrate her p.o.v.
Led by one of composer Jan P. Muchow's best scores, the bright, cheerful tech
package is everything it should be.
Camera (color),
Martin Stepanek; editor, Marek Opatrny; music, Jan P. Muchow; art designer,
Prochazkova; set designer, Jan Novotny; costume designer, Katerina Coufalkova;
sound (Dolby Digital), Marek Hart. Reviewed at Berlin Film Festival (Generation
Kplus), Feb. 10, 2008. Running time: 90 MIN. With Dorotka Dedkova, Jitka
Cvancarova, Pavel Reznicek, Martin Hofmann, Jana Krausova, Matous Kratina,
Marie Bokova.
Pront,
Robin
THE
ARDENNES (D'Ardennen) B- 80
Belgium (96 mi) 2015 ‘Scope Official Facebook
A tone poem of malice and wounded masculinity, reminiscent
of several iconic neo noir thrillers, recalling the Coen brothers’ Blood
Simple (1984) and Fargo
(1996), David Michôd’s Animal
Kingdom (2010), Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown
(2011), and Michaël R. Roskam’s 2012
Top Ten Films of the Year: #6 Bullhead (Rundskop) , yet instead of
demonstrating that kind of dazzling cinematic flair, first time director Pront
has created a style over substance film, where he seems to love to rub our noses
in the mud and murk of Antwerp, filling the screen with typical low-life
characters no one gives a whit about.
And therein lies the problem, as we’ve seen this sort of film before,
elevated to much greater heights than achieved here, yet because of our familiarity
of the genre, we kind of like what it’s trying to do, but it just never gets
there. While BULLHEAD director Michaël
R. Roskam was initially on tap to direct the film, instead he ended up as an
associate producer, BULLHEAD star Matthias Schoenaerts was initially chosen to
star, but dropped out when one of the co-writers was given the go ahead to
direct his first film, where these choices make a sizeable difference. The other co-writer is one of the leads in
the film, where they both may be too closely stuck to the material, unable to
offer improvements, which eventually undermines the film. While it has a hyper-masculine, super
aggressive style, the story itself is fairly generic and overly fatalistic, where
it’s all gloom and doom from the outset, opening with an adrenal surge of a man
in a mask crashing into a pool of water, making his way to the getaway car,
informing the driver, “Just drive. There
was nothing I could do.” While we
immediately think he may have left a dead partner behind, subsequent courtroom
sequences reveal his brother Kenny (Kevin Janssens) has taken the rap for a
bunged burglary, sentenced to seven years in prison. Dave (co-writer Jeroen Perceval) managed to
get away scot free, taking advantage of his brother’s absence by moving in on
his girlfriend Sylvie, Veerle Baetens from The
Broken Circle Breakdown (2012), aka the driver. Not only that, both have gotten sober in the
interim, straightened out their lives, and are trying to lead respectable
lives. All that changes when Kenny gets
out after four years.
The brothers are polar opposites personality-wise, as Kenny is a high-strung hot-head with a hair-trigger temper, the enforcer, afraid of no one, while Dave is more reserved and inwardly introspective, the more deliberately thoughtful of the two, most likely the planner of their earlier crimes. While Dave lives separately with Sylvie, he’s never gotten the nerve to tell his brother about their relationship, forced to keep it secret, which eats at him every day, even as he has sworn to his mother that he would look after his little brother. Sylvie on the other hand fends off Kenny’s initial advances, reminding him things have changed, even though she works as a waitress in a risqué strip club for Moroccan owner Khalid (Rachid El Ghazaoui). This announcement shows signs of racial contempt, as the alpha-male Kenny still sees Khalid as a punk kid unworthy to hold an outranking position, though obviously jealous he maintains any kind of existing relationship with his former girl. As the boys rehash old times under their mother’s roof (Viviane de Muynck), an all-too-familiar reminder of Jackie Weaver in Animal Kingdom, Kenny is already exhibiting out of control and abusive behavior, but the more mild-mannered brother seems to think he still has influence, though he is constantly ignored as Kenny simply violates all rules of conduct, getting in all manner of mischief, including a well-choreographed fight scene inside an activated car wash that gets them both fired from the job, a reminder of what a destructive force his brother really is. Dave has to invent a lie, creating a girlfriend that doesn’t exist, which greenlights Kenny’s desires to go after Sylvie, even after she decisively shuts him down and refuses to answer his phone calls, where building tension comes to a head when he visits her on the job, getting a little too close for comfort while dissing Khalid, ridiculing him in front of his patrons while drinking too much, getting high on drugs, being out of control and just generally running amok. When he breaks into one of Sylvie’s recovery meetings, just generally being an abusive ass, all bets are off, as the story only spirals downward from there.
When Kenny meets Dave in an underground garage with a dead body in the trunk, both are pulled into an amoral morass that leads only to hellish consequences, like an involuntary journey into Dante’s Inferno, as there’s only one place to dispose of bodies, apparently, and that’s the Ardennes, a rugged terrain of dense forests and hidden rivers, a popular locale for hunters, so it’s an interesting intersection of natural beauty and guns, while also a place the two brothers fondly remember visiting as kids, perhaps one of the few happy memories they both share. But this is a distinctly different occasion, where the force of Kenny’s criminal acts has pulled his brother into the same toxic wasteland, where they sit around in a bar waiting to meet with Stef. Of course, it’s never as easy as that, as they’re only being sized up by a zealously closed-minded community that instantly recognizes strangers in their midst and has an inherent mistrust. When someone other than Stef arrives, a giant hulk of a man dressed as a woman, named Joyce (Sam Louwyck), the atmosphere immediately turns creepy beyond description, like a turn into a dark alley with no way out. Both brothers are out of their element and out of their league, as Stef, Jan Bijvoet from Borgman (2013) and as the European intruder into the Amazonian forest in 2015 Top Ten List #8 Embrace of the Serpent (El abrazo de la serpiente) , seen earlier in the film as Kenny’s cellmate in prison, turns out to be a barbaric psychopathic who, by contrast, makes Kenny look like a boy scout. Crudely disposing of body parts for sport, his particular specialty is played for laughs, as he has such a good time doing it, yet he maintains a folksy, down home style, exhibiting little to no emotion, but his beady little eyes seem demonic, capable of just about anything. His über masculinity maintains control through utter calm, though the hatefully misogynistic dialogue coming out of his mouth permeates danger, where the tension rises accordingly. Of course, nothing goes as planned, but instead falls off the rails, turning into an apocalyptic vision of hell on earth, as if Pandora’s Box has been opened and all the demons unleashed. It’s a bit preposterous, unintentionally humorous in its hubris, and indescribably contrived, designed to raise eyebrows, yet exists in a hollow universe of emptiness, where there’s little character development, no attachment to any of the less than appealing characters, so let them have at it. At the end of the day, none of it means anything, but it’s viciously conceived, most of it in dimly lit space, with an element of testosterone eye candy.
On My Way to Finding Out You Stole My Girl: 'The ... - Brooklyn Magazine Benjamin Mercer
A crime drama about trouble brewing between two petty-criminal brothers, the Belgian film The Ardennes has scuzzy style to spare but a setup that couldn’t feel creakier. The movie, the feature debut by director Robin Pront, gets underway with a striking shot of a robbery gone wrong: a fully clothed, stocking-masked man emerges, in balletic slo-mo, from a swimming pool, clearly scrambling to get off the posh premises as fast as possible. In the aftermath of this botched job, the brash Kenny (Kevin Janssens) takes the fall and goes to jail, while the more introspective Dave (Jeroen Perceval) takes up with his brother’s girlfriend, Sylvie (Veerle Baetens), unbeknownst to the man behind bars. The new couple have just learned she’s pregnant when Kenny gets paroled four years into his sentence. But as these things tend to go in the movies, no one tells Kenny about any of this, and so he immediately sets about trying to win back Sylvie.
Pront’s film, which Belgium selected as its horse in the race for this year’s foreign-language Oscar (and which shares a producer with one of the country’s most recent nominees, 2011’s similarly aggro Bullhead), naturally includes a number of scenes in which the viewer, privy to the full facts of the situation, must cringe for Kenny, who’s not. The awkwardness is never more painful than during a scene in which Mom, her two sons, and Sylvie all sit down together for Christmas dinner. Were it not for the particular who-knows-what dynamics of such scenes, hair-trigger Kenny would not be a candidate for a share of the audience’s sympathies. During an outing to the warehouse club where Sylvie works, he punches a man for refusing to agree that Jean-Claude Van Damme is “the best”; at Dave’s longtime place of work, a car wash where he’s also recently managed to get his brother hired, Kenny starts showing up late and then winds up brawling with a couple of his co-workers.
All the while, the industrial locations, shot in a sickly-looking pallor by cinematographer Robrecht Heyvaert, and the electronic score, a sort of brutalist pulse composed by Hendrik Willemins, convey a strong sense that things won’t end well for these hardscrabble Flemings. And indeed, for their last act, co-writers Pront and Perceval move the action to the mountains, where Kenny’s former cellmate Stef (Jan Bijvoet, more memorable as the ailing anthropologist in last year’s Embrace of the Serpent) pledges to help the brothers clean up the mess they’ve inevitably gotten themselves into. During this final stretch, Pront’s film amps up the body count (we glimpse the graphic dismemberment of a corpse) as well as a kind of anarchic humor (a pack of menacing ostriches appears during a late showdown), tapping into an unpredictable energy that might’ve benefited the earlier domestic material. Despite such flashes of promise, The Ardennes can’t overcome what feels like a flawed conception—it is, in essence, a plodding domestic soap trying to pass itself off as an adrenalized neo-noir.
The Ardennes :: Movies :: Reviews :: the ardennes :: Paste Kenji Fujishima
If nothing else, last year’s Hell or High Water offered an object lesson in how a welcome attention to detail can help refresh genre clichés, turning character archetypes into people we respond to as flesh-and-blood human beings. Sadly, The Ardennes—a new Belgian crime thriller from co-writer/director Robin Pront, making his feature debut—demonstrates precisely the opposite: just how hoary genre conventions can feel in the hands of filmmakers who either seem unaware that they’re working with boiler plates, or who pretend they don’t exist.
You’ve seen much of this before: the former criminal who desires to turn away from a life of crime; the hotheaded brother who comes out of prison and threatens to drag his sibling back down into the criminal muck; the love interest who represents the kind of stability one brother craves and the other frequently denies. In Pront’s banal vision of twisted family values, though, even the eccentric supporting characters—most notably, a fellow prisoner of the hotheaded criminal brother and his cross-dressing henchman—feel warmed over from Quentin Tarantino and Coen brothers movies.
Actually, those two supporting characters are worth dwelling on briefly, because they suggest the closest the film comes to thematic depth. One of them, Stef (Jan Bijvoet), is first introduced in passing in the film’s opening minutes as the cellmate of Kenny (Kevin Janssens), who has just been sentenced to seven years in prison for participating in a robbery from which his brother Dave (Jeroen Perceval, also the film’s co-screenwriter) and his girlfriend Sylvie (Veerle Baetens) escaped. Stef then reappears about two-thirds of the way through the film, freed, living in the titular Belgian forest with Joyce (Sam Louwyck). Though both of those character names sound conventionally feminine, only Joyce maintains a woman’s appearance. By contrast, Stef is hyper-masculine not only in presentation, but in worldview, one that he most directly articulates in a screamingly misogynistic monologue to Kenny and brother Dave, comparing women to female cranes in order to justify calling them all man-eating whores. These characters, and that moment in particular, aren’t the only ones in The Ardennes who suggest a film that is, in part, a critique of machismo. Kenny at one point justifies a murderous act to his brother by asking, “Do you know how it feels to be humiliated by a woman?” Even Sylvie—who is secretly carrying on an affair with Dave—calls Dave a “wimp” for not immediately telling his brother about their relationship.
But then, if Stef is supposed to be some kind of icon of dangerous hyper-masculinity, why is he hanging out with someone like Joyce in the first place? This is just one of many questions begged by Pront and Perceval’s script, which is chock full of such half-baked notions thrown out willy-nilly. It’s likelier that such characters are there simply so that The Ardennes can suddenly morph into a black-comic variation on Fargo in its third act, complete with a climax featuring body dismemberment played for yucks. Worse than such emptily whimsical gestures, however, is the way character psychologies lapse into incoherence and, eventually, inconsequence.
Pront and Perceval never offer us any compelling reason to emotionally invest in these over-familiar characters’ fates anyway. By the time its third act rolls around, Kenny and Dave begin to engage in a series of recriminations and betrayals more mandated by a twist-happy script rather than seeming organic to these people. In the end, The Ardennes leaves us with little more than an un-edifying wallow in ugliness, illuminating little about family relations or the kind of masculinity in which it spends so much time entrenched.
'The Ardennes' Offers a Familiar Crime Story, but You ... - Village Voice Bilge Ebiri
The Belgian crime drama The Ardennes is predictably tense and violent, but its aesthetic pleasures are also considerable. Director Robin Pront plays a lot of familiar notes, but with just enough verve and variation to keep things interesting. The film opens in the immediate aftermath of a botched robbery, as a masked man and a female getaway driver breathlessly flee the scene without the third member of their crew. The ones escaping are Dave (Jeroen Perceval) and Sylvie (Veerle Baetens); the one left behind is Kenny (Kevin Janssens), Dave's older brother and Sylvie's boyfriend. Kenny keeps his mouth shut about his accomplices, so only he gets sent to prison. Things have changed when he gets out on parole four years later: Dave is now diligently working a legit job at a car wash, while Sylvie is trying to clean herself up, attending group therapy sessions to kick her addiction. Oh, also Dave is now in love with Sylvie, and not only are they planning to move in together, they're expecting a child. Needless to say, the duo don't reveal that to Kenny, who kept a picture of Sylvie on his wall his whole time in prison.
Pront and his cast clearly know how to keep us watching. The director likes to shoot his scenes as moodily lit tableaux, the images like something out of a grisly storybook. The urban milieu here is gray and oppressive — the title refers to a forest that the brothers used to go to as children, during a more carefree time — but there's a rough beauty in it. Meanwhile, each character seems to represent a specific attitude toward the world. Tough, aggressive Kenny is bursting with dark energy — he wants to return to things as they were when he left — and Dave and Sylvie differ in their responses to him: He's pliant, while she turns away. Sylvie wants the younger brother to take a stand, show some guts, and tell Kenny about their relationship. Dave wants to wait till the time is right, but it turns out there's never a good time to tell your psycho ex-con brother that you're shtupping the woman he loves beyond all reason. And the ever-watchful and paranoid Kenny is already noticing things between them.
The "crime" part of this crime drama doesn't really come until the final act. (Shocker: The Ardennes makes an appearance.) Until then, Pront has fun bouncing these characters off one another: a disastrous Christmas dinner here, a nightclub fight there. Little details acquire huge importance. Kenny notices that his mom doesn't have any pictures of him on the wall. "Maybe you're not photogenic" is her playfully snide response, and in their brief interaction you can feel a lifetime of pain for both mother and child.
Pront and his cast also use movement and behavior to set these people apart from your standard-issue crime-flick tough guys. Dave might look like a bruiser, but with his pinched face and almost concave stance, he's no match physically for the restless, overpowering Kenny. The older brother is only a couple of inches taller, but he always seems to take up twice the space as his younger sibling and has way more vigor; you can see how Dave might have spent years in this man's shadow, and you see him once again trying to keep up. Sylvie, on the other hand, is quick, nervous, angry — you feel her frustration with Dave, and you even suspect that, on some deeper level, she may still be drawn to Kenny's alpha-male vitality. The way the film visually translates its fairly schematic scenario is interesting; there's a subtle, dance-like quality to the characters' interaction, and the spare settings and dimly lit spaces highlight the physicality of the actors.
Once things get a little more climactic, The Ardennes enters a strange and less interesting phase — a mixture of boilerplate neo-noir violence with occasional bursts of surrealism. The influence of the Coen brothers (and in particular films like Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing, and Raising Arizona) stamps the film, with its twisty confrontations and jolts of macabre humor. But what makes the Coens special is the mixture of film-nerd playfulness and fairytale sincerity they bring to even their darkest work — they're loose in spirit, but exacting in form. Pront has the precision, but his story merely flirts with the bizarre; it never goes truly crazy. That's why, in the end, for all the artistry on display, The Ardennes is more admirable than inspiring. It has style, and even suspense, but relatively little imagination.
The Ardennes |
Film Review | Slant Magazine Clayton
Dillard
Film Corner, The [Greg Klymkiw]
Movie
Review: The Ardennes - Reason.com
Kurt Loder
THE ARDENNES –
Hammer to Nail Christopher
Llewellyn Reed
The
Ardennes · Film Review The Ardennes is just another stroll down ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club
“The Founder” and “The Ardennes” Reviews - The New Yorker Anthony Lane
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
Cineuropa.org [Aurore Engelen]
The Upcoming [Catherine Sedgwick]
We Got This Covered [Matt Donato]
Next Projection Jacqueline Valencia
'The Ardennes': TIFF Review | Hollywood Reporter John DeFore
'The Ardennes' Review: Brotherly Betrayal in Belgium | Variety Ben Kenigsberg
The
Ardennes review – disappointing Belgian crime drama | Film | The ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian
The Ardennes review – a top new talent | Film | The Guardian Wendy Ide
Belgian
crime drama 'The Ardennes' veers off course - LA Times Robert Abele
The
Ardennes Movie Review & Film Summary (2017) | Roger Ebert Glenn Kenny
Review:
In 'The Ardennes,' a Freed Convict Returns Home to a New ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times
The
Ardennes (film) - Wikipedia
Protazanov, Yakov
AELITA QUEEN OF MARS
aka: Aelita
This was the first
science fiction film to come out of Soviet Russia and became an important
influence on the genre from Metropolis to Flesh Gordon. Young Tsereteli builds
himself a spaceship and travels to Mars. There he hooks up with princess
Solntseva and leads a revolution against her father. But the uprising turns
sour when Solntseva is corrupted by her new power. Aelita was made on
Protazanov's return from Parisian exile and, with complex symbolism, the
director casts a critical eye on the new Soviet society. Politics aside, the
futuristic sets and costumes by Ekster and Rabinovich are a riot.
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson] (excerpt)
This is why we have retro houses— to unleash, amid the handful
of multiplex-squatting gargantua
Subtitled The Queen of Mars, the silent film is a
Soviet production from 1924. It runs 111 minutes and every minute is
enthralling. The movie is actually set in
User
comments Author: Ilya
Mauter
Aelita was the first film made by one of the pioneers of the
Russian cinema Yakov Protazanov after his return from
With Aelita back then young Russian cinema tried to rival foreign European and
American productions, a competition that resulted in the big spectacle, which
Aelita is with its big production values but obviously propagandistic story,
fit in what is basically a Sci-fi film attempting to proliferate communist
ideas. In a way it also marked beginning of dominating influence of Communist
state with its ideals over the art, in this case cinema, which continued nearly
till the end of
Aelita's story is based on a Sci-fi novel by Alexei Tolstoy, who later became
one of the most important Soviet writers though mostly renowned not for Sci-fi
stories, but for his historical novels.
It's about a young scientist Los, who is living with his wife Natasha and is
already for several years is working on a project of a spaceship capable of
going to Mars, while on a background of Russian Civil War occurs with all its
destruction, hunger and, of cause, accentuated by the communist propaganda
class struggle, which is shown in a character of Ehrlich who represents an old
kind of persona with its obsolete bourgeoisie values of already dead Tsarist
Russia, showed opposed to a 'new man' of adhered to communist ideals soldier of
the Red Army Gussev.
While all this happens on Earth, we are introduced to the distant world of
planet Mars with its monarchic regime, somewhat reminiscent of Egyptian
pharaohs or Roman Emperor's rule, where the working class, represented by the
slaves, suffers under tyrannical regime of the ruling class. The world, which
evidently represents the kind of a world against which Bolsheviks where
fighting against. It's from there that Martian princess Aelita observes the
life of other characters in
The film culminates when finally Los' project is brought to life and expedition
is sent to Mars, causing there upon arrival a slave uprising and revolution,
which results in no more nor less than in peaking of communist propaganda
element in the story in a form of establishing of the
Overall, all the propaganda elements put aside, Aelita is one of the most
original classics of not only the Russian, but of the world silent cinema. 8/10
Aelita: Queen of Mars • Senses of Cinema Lisa K. Broad, April 4, 2010
Central Europe Review
- Aelita: The first Soviet sci-fi film? Andrew J. Horton, January 10, 2000
Film
Review: Aelita Queen Of Mars (1924) | SciFi Film Festival
Aelita, Queen of Mars | Silent Film Festival Richard Hildreth
Watch
the First Russian Science Fiction Film, Aelita: Queen of Mars ... Josh Jones from Open Culture
Aelita (1924) aka Aelita: Queen of Mars. Soviet Science-Fiction ... Richard Scheib from Moria
Aelita:
Queen of Mars (1924) A Silent Film Review – Movies Silently Fritzi Kramer
Images - Aelita,
The Queen of Mars - Images: A Journal of Film and ... James Newman
Friday
Editor's Pick: Aelita – Queen of Mars (1924) - Alt Screen
The
Aelita Queen Of Mars Review You've Been Waiting 90 Years To ... Stand By for Mind Control
Aelita
- Queen of Mars (Russian Science-Fiction Film English Intertitles ... Fiona Kelleghan
'Aelita,
Queen of Mars': Feed your Soviet sci- fi fixation with this wild ... Dangerous Minds
16mm Shrine Ash Karreau
Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar
Aelita,
Queen of Mars: Soviet Science Fiction film from 1924 / Boing ... Boing Boing
Aelita:
Queen of Mars | Chicago Reader
JR Jones
Variety.com [Daniel M. Kimmel]
MOVIE
REVIEW : The Rescue of 'Aelita: Queen of Mars' - latimes
Proyas, Alex
I, ROBOT
USA Germany (115 mi) 2004 ‘Scope
Film
Comment
The pairing of perennially bankable Will Smith with Isaac Asimov's Fifties-era
governing laws of Robotics may seem like the forced integration of mainstream
pop and nerd culture. And it is. But throw in a classic murder mystery with a
futuristic twist and you get director Alex Proyas's invigorating, if halting, I,
Robot.
Will Smith ably plays standard-issue against-the-grain detective Del Spooner,
and Bridget Moynahan believably channels Dr. Susan Calvin, the eventual Watson
to Spooner's Holmes. After establishing Spooner as grandma-loving,
nightmare-suffering, and robot-distrusting, Proyas cuts to the chase: Dr.
Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell), über-scientist and visionary at U.S. Robotics,
inexplicably commits suicide, and the subsequent investigation acquaints
Spooner with Dr. Calvin and the spastic robot Sonny, Lanning's pet project,
superbly voiced by Alan Tudyk.
The ensuing 100-odd minutes rumbles through action-flick clichés-a rousing
high-speed car chase, ribcage-shredding, sawed-off shotgun combat, the
discovery of the hero's kick-ass superpower. Unfortunately, the kinetic nature
of these high-octane scenes only makes more apparent the slow pace of Spooner's
investigation. While this alternation of fast and slow, spontaneous and
calculated, reflects the competing plot lines (robotic world domination vs.
traditional murder mystery) it also comments on the differences between man and
machine. A similar duality is found in Simon Duggan's cinematography, which is
calm and incremental when framing robots en masse but frenetic and swooping
when capturing Spooner in action. Similarly, Marco Beltrami's score is by turns
pending and raucous as called for, but it feels unearned - where a John
Williams or Hans Zimmer score would accrete lyrical themes and build to an
aural apex, Beltrami's refrains are underdeveloped and malnourished. The same
anemia weakens the film's integral plot twists and character revelations,
resulting in an overall diminished emotional impact.
Inevitably, this film will be measured against Steven Spielberg's superb Minority
Report. Indeed, both films share several key features: murder detective
protagonists, fragmented underwater dream sequences, the loss of a young child,
defenestration, etc. Even the automobiles of the future in I, Robot bear
a remarkable resemblance to those in Spielberg's film (with the difference that
Audi dominates the 2035 market whereas Lexus seems to have the market cornered
19 years hence). Yet, Minority Report's strengths illustrate I, Robot's
shortcomings. Where Spielberg's film is an intimate tale of the personal
struggles of John Anderton (Tom Cruise), Spooner's prejudice-fueled crusade
against robots ultimately seems more impersonal. Minority Report's
specific, tension-accreting timescale is far more compelling than the
robots-could-strike-at-any-moment ambiguity of I, Robot, and,
consequently, the former narrative is intimate and tightly wound while the
latter evinces a more fractured chronology. And while viewers can identify with
Anderton's personal loss, Spooner's affinity for Converse sneakers and sweet
potato pie come across as shallow attempts at characterization.
I, Robot's other significant downside is its climax. The emotional
payoffs in most murder mysteries and action flicks tend to be structured around
the revelation of the murderer or the villain's comeuppance. Whereas Minority
Report merges both murderer and villain in one character, I, Robot
splits the emotion too many ways. Our supposed villain, U.S. Robotics CEO
Lawrence Robertson (Bruce Greenwood), turns out to be one more victim, so the
screen time devoted to developing him as an antagonist is wasted. As it turns
out, the Butler did it: namely VIKI, the super computer that controls U.S.
Robotics' robot upgrade systems. Confused? Try working it out once the bullets
begin flying and the robots are overrunning the city.
The revelation of VIKI as the puppet master comes off as a deus ex machina -
literally. Usually, the least likely suspect is revealed as the murderer. In I,
Robot, the culprit has barely been present. The film's ending smacks of a
future "suggested by" Asimov's book, but there is only one moral to
this story: when watching this movie, don't shut down your brain - just
minimize and let it run in the background.
I, Robot -- Movie & Asimov Kelley L. Ross
The
mechanical heart of I, Robot. - Slate Magazine David Edelstein
I, Robot · Film Review I,
Robot · Movie Review · The A.V. Club
Scott Tobias
I, Robot | Film Review | Slant Magazine Nick Schager
I, Robot: Star
Will Smith on his Movie | Emanuel Levy
I, Robot | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
I, Robot Movie Review & Film Summary (2004) | Roger Ebert
Movie
Review - - FILM REVIEW; The Doodads Are Restless ... The New
York Times
Pryor, Richard – comedian
"Be
Truthful and Funny Will Come" Brian Logan from
the Guardian, Augist 9, 2004
You'd call him the grandfather of stand-up comedy, if
grandfather didn't seem altogether too cosy. He's Richard Pryor: writer,
entertainer, film star and the man whose incendiary comic interventions into
1970s
Born in 1940, his background is itself the stuff of jet-black comedy. The son of a prostitute and a pimp, he grew up in his grandmother's brothel in poverty-stricken Peoria, Illinois. As a youth, he worked as a shoe-shine, meat-packer, truck-driver and billiard-hall attendant. In 1963, he moved to New York, to practise stand-up in the Bill Cosby vein, and was soon a regular on US TV variety shows. But his legend really began some years later when, frustrated at having to suppress his own identity in the name of light entertainment, he quit New York for counter-cultural California.
When Pryor re-emerged in the early 1970s, it was with a brand of stand-up that no one had seen before. Angry, impassioned, truthful and personal, Pryor spoke about his world: a world of winos, bums and junkies; of black-white inequality; of sex, politics and sexual politics. And then there was the delivery - Pryor delivered comedy like a musician delivers jazz. But it wasn't just stand-up that he radicalised: many credit Pryor with blazing a trail for black people in American life. According to the musician Quincy Jones, he was "a pioneer ... who made us understand the truth about ourselves".
If this coruscating stand-up is Pryor's major legacy, he'll also be remembered for a middling career in Hollywood film (credits include co-scripting Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles and starring in Superman III). His life took a grim turn in the early 1980s, when he set himself on fire while free-basing cocaine, and suffered third-degree burns to over 50% of his body. In 1986, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He continued working as a comedian into the following decade, but the disease currently prevents him performing.
This year at Edinburgh, Pryor will be judging video submissions for the inaugural Richard Pryor award, to be given to the outstanding ethnic minority comedy act on the Fringe. Edinburgh is notoriously under-attended by black stand-ups, a fact that the award seeks to help redress.
Ross Noble: Having heavily emulated Bill Cosby before finding your own voice, how does it feel seeing your influence on subsequent generations?
Richard Pryor: I hope the younger comics will find their own voice. It's the hardest thing to do. It can hide, but keep looking for it.
RN: Having said that you regret using the word "nigger" on and off stage, how do you feel about its use by younger comics today?
RP: I did and do use it at times. The way most comics use it is for shock and all it does is disappoint. The only comic I hear use it to fit a routine is [US comic] Dave Chappelle. He can do it.
RN: After you set yourself on fire, did the physical change affect your performance or the way audiences responded to you?
RP: The fire didn't change a thing - except the way I looked in the mirror. I kept my shit on when I was on stage - people seemed to love me more.
RN: You had monkeys and a miniature horse. Have you got any fun animals now?
RP: My dogs, Homer and Spirit, are fun. They make me laugh.
Richard Herring: Where do you get your crazy ideas from?
RP: My ideas came from my life.
Jimmy Carr: I know you don't perform any more for obvious reasons but do you still write material? If the answer is yes, can I have it?
RP: I think about it but don't really write any more. Except to answer all these questions!
Sarah Kendall: Of all of your recorded performances which one do you feel was your personal best and why?
RP: I love Live in Concert and some of the NBC Shows - 'cause they were raw and make me laugh now.
SK: Have you ever gone through phases when you have hated doing stand-up? If so, what made you enjoy it again?
RP: After the fire, it was hard to get on stage again. But I just kept doing it and the joy and fun came back.
Lenny Henry: Are there any taboos left in comedy?
RP: Taboos? Not really, but doing comedy well is hard.
LH: Did Paul Mooney write the Just Us joke on Is It Something I Said? Or was he a constant collaborator?
RP: Paul takes too much fucking credit for my shit, let him take credit for his own. Just Us, we wrote for [the 1970s US sitcom] Sandford and Son. He was one of the writers on my NBC Shows and a writer on [Pryor's autobiographical movie] Jo-Jo Dancer. But Paul needs to take credit for HIS stuff and leave my shit the fuck alone!
Addy Borgh: Which of your demons have you found hardest to deal with - and talk about on stage?
RP: Which demon? Shit, I dunno his name. The one who fucked me the most. Drugs, women, whoever was winning at the moment.
AB: How much did the women you knew shape or inform your comedy other than in the material?
RP: Women have always inspired my comedy but [my current wife] Jenny actually helped me more than anybody. And thank God for her now.
AB: Which was the best drug you ever did: sex, coke or comedy?
RP: Damn, comedy without a doubt. Sex a close second
Lee Mack: Why did The Richard Pryor Show only last for four episodes in the 1970s?
RP: Four was plenty. The studio started fucking with me too much. It stopped being fun. And I knew it wouldn't be good any more.
Chris Addison: You're seen as an icon of comedy by everyone who came after you. Do you feel like your stand-up was ground-breaking, and did it feel like it at the time?
RP: I just did my work and let it speak for itself. I never stopped to judge how ground-breaking it would be. I was too busy trying to get it right.
Reginald D Hunter: How do you feel about the Richard Pryor award at this year's Edinburgh festival?
RP: Jenny and I are really excited, 'cause the Fringe has got to mix it up a bit. I mean, you are all too white over there!!! I like that this is opening things up a bit. That's what I do.
RDH: You once said that it takes a comic 15 years to find his voice. Do you still believe that?
RP: I think it takes a long fuckin' time to find your voice, hopefully not longer than 15!
RDH: You once described how you could sometimes feel yourself pulling out of jokes, pulling away from areas that are more dangerous or unknown. You panic sometimes because you want to get to the laugh. What is it that you have to overcome - is it fear? Did you ever beat that - and if so, how?
RP: The toughest thing is to wait for that laugh and handle those silences, handle the fear - ride out that silence and don't panic. Have faith. It's like that giant wave those surfers wait for. When it comes, it's heaven.
Bob Wiltfong: It's not unusual after one of your jokes for me to mumble the phrase "That's so true ..." after I get done laughing. When you write jokes, are you consciously looking for truthful things to write about or are you just looking to make people laugh - whether it's truthful or not?
RP: Truthful, always truthful. And funny will come.
BW: When you were coming up, your stand-up was considered cutting edge. Where do you think the cutting edge of comedy is going these days? Do you like or dislike where it's going?
RP: Only a few comics are being really honest and daring, and not just going for the okee-doke. I love Chris Rock, and Chappelle. Colin Quinn is dangerous. There are some I see that will grow or not. I don't know all their names.
Jeff Green: Richard Pryor Live in Concert (1979) was shown late night on Channel 4 in 1983 and was my inspiration for wanting to be a stand-up comic. In my humble opinion it is the greatest stand-up concert of all time - how long did it take you to get the show together and how did it feel on the night?
RP: It took about six to eight months, including many nights at the Comedy Store and on the road. I was nervous but really excited when we shot it. I was glad when it was over, and let down.
Al Murray: What do you think of critics?
RP: I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."
Jason Byrne: You talk about Muhammad Ali in your latest DVD and how frightening it was to be in the ring with him. But do you reckon you could beat him now that the two of you shake like maracas?
RP: That's your fuckin' question?
Jeremy Hardy: What has been the proudest achievement of your career?
RP: I suppose if I had to say, Live in Concert I like the best. Achievement? Making people laugh is a great achievement!
Psihoyos, Louie
THE COVE B+ 90
After seeing the trailer a zillion times in the coming
attractions, I began to think of this as a Stephen King story, as it’s being
advertised where something peculiar and mysteriously secret is taking place
tucked away from sight in a hidden cove in Japan, where obviously a monster of
some sort lurks—of course
really it’s off the coast of Maine—perhaps
guarded by top military special forces, that if discovered would send the
population into a hysterical panic. It
has a George Orwell The War of the Worlds
flavor to it, as if a disaster of an apocalyptical nature was waiting to
happen. The film is told more as a
thriller than a documentary with this same kind of stirred up hype, where you’d
think the end of the world is near, but it turns out to be the unusually brutal
slaughter of dolphins in the rural town of Taiji, Japan. The film is a collaboration between two men, Richard
O'Barry, who actually captured and trained the animals used for the Flipper TV show (1964 – 67), turning
them into friendly “aquatic Lassies,” but who is now an animal activist
claiming dolphins are more intelligent than we realized and don’t belong in
captivity after one supposedly died in his hands, and also internationally
renowned photographer Louis Psihoyos, who worked extensively with National Geographic magazine until
forming his own organization, The Oceanic Preservation Society, and was
enlisted as the film’s director for his specialized skills in getting pictures
from natural environments nearly impossible to photograph. O’Barry is used primarily as the film’s
narrator, as his contentions become the focus of the film, claiming Japanese
fisherman kill as many as 23,000 dolphins every year, herding them into pens
where initially they allow animal trainers to inspect them for use in animal
shows like Sea World, receiving as much as $150,000 each for those chosen,
transporting them all around the world, slaughtering the rest for a mere $800
or so. What O’Barry has discovered is a
secret location where the slaughter takes place, the problem being it’s
impossible to photograph anywhere near that area due to the actions of highly
volatile fisherman and local police who arrest anyone who trespasses or gets
near a vantage point. In years past,
various organizations have sent activists to try to free the dolphins from
their pens, but they have all been arrested and deported permanently from
Dolphins supposedly have a highly developed sense of sonar
hearing, where they supposedly chatter away while in their natural element,
much like whales, as they’re from the whale family only they’re much smaller,
so they travel more often in groups.
There’s exquisite photography of dolphins riding the waves alongside
surfers, where a half dozen or so jump in and out of the waves as they crest
and fall. Fishermen take advantage of
their acute hearing, however, by pounding iron rods that reach into the water,
creating a disastrous clanging sound that sends them into a state of frenzy
before herding them into the narrow cove where they’re trapped. Once called upon by O’Barry, Psihoyos enlists
the aid of various experts and underwater divers as they plan a Navy Seals
special ops style clandestine operation to sneak cameras and microphones into
the sealed off and restricted area of the cove.
From the outset, it’s obviously a difficult task to even ship all the
equipment needed overseas on an airplane without arousing governmental suspicions. O’Barry has brought suspicion upon himself in
the town of
But the film veers offtrack and gets sidetracked discussing
the cover up of mercury poisoning, as toxic levels of mercury are found in
dolphins, making them an extreme health risk to eat, where in the 1950’s, Japan
suffered a serious outbreak of mercury poisoning from industry pollution that
led to Minimata disease, which particularly affects the nervous systems of
children, causing permanent damage. As
Time Out New York (S. James Snyder) review [4/6]
A strong contender
for this year’s Man on Wire, this
nonfiction potboiler follows filmmaker Louie
Psihoyos as he documents the illicit slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan.
“You [could] try to do the story legally,” says the exasperated Psihoyos, as he
researches these killings and the lax oversight behind them. But after being
stymied by government officials, attacked by fisherman and tailed by the
police, the cinejournalist decides to go rogue.
With the help of
Richard O’Barry, a former dolphin trainer for the TV show Flipper, Psihoyos recruits other
animal-rights renegades to rig hidden cameras in a rural cove. It’s no small
feat to mount a guerrilla assault on the protective powers that be, especially
when the local police are watching your every move—but then very little about
this situation seems simple. Psihoyos connects the dots, linking these aquatic
massacres to a lucrative aquarium industry (where a live dolphin can net
$150,000), ignorant Japanese consumers, an impotent global regulatory system
and a rebounding whaling industry. This cove, O’Barry says, is the setting for
the biggest battle in the war against such ecological crimes. Both the animal
activist and the director know that if they’re ever going to slay Goliath, the
fight must begin with exposing the bloody secrets of this remote inlet. That,
and a rousing call to arms.
Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg) review [2/6]
In The Cove’s
much-discussed punch line—there’s no point in not revealing this—former Flipper
trainer turned dolphin advocate Richard O’Barry marches into a conference of
people ostensibly sympathetic to the idea of gutting adorable sea mammals. He’s
got a monitor strapped to his chest, and on it is footage of dolphin slaughter
from the Japanese fishing port of Taiji.
We’ve already seen
this footage, of course, and O’Barry’s associates have gone to incredible
lengths to get it (though a helicopter later appears to fly over the bloody
cove easily enough). The question is: Does this coup bolster the argument, or
merely confirm a suspicion of grandstanding? To be fair, The Cove
alleges a conspiracy so vast that subterfuge is necessary. But that doesn’t
make the presentation any less manipulative or redundant.
Casting himself as
a talking head (not a Michael Moore–like presence, but an actual “expert”
figure sitting in a chair), Psihoyos deserves credit for bringing an
underreported topic to a mass audience. Even so, The Cove makes a point
with which no one, short of those who club seals for a living, could disagree.
There are very good reasons not to kill and eat dolphins. They’re intelligent.
They’re loving. They’ve got more mercury than even tuna. Compared to an
innovative enviro-doc like Darwin’s Nightmare (2004), it’s hard to see The
Cove as anything other than good intentions hampering good filmmaking.
Review: The Cove
Noel
Louie Psihoyos’ agitprop doc The Cove concerns the slaughter of dolphins in a rural Japanese fishing community, but it also records in meticulous, exciting detail how Psihoyos and his team of experts managed to circumvent security and sneak cameras and microphones into a place few people get to see firsthand. It’s impossible to watch the footage of the ocean running red with dolphin blood and not be a little shaken, especially when Psihoyos surrounds the gory bits with hard data about how our over-fished seas are leaving parts of the world on the brink of environmental catastrophe, and how larger ocean-dwellers often contain toxic levels of mercury that make their meat largely unsafe for consumption. It’s enough to make anyone sympathetic to a line spoken by one of Psihoyos’ interviewees: “If you’re not an activist, you’re an inactivist.”
And yet that line also reveals what’s iffy about The Cove. One of Psihoyos’ main allies is Richard O’Barry, the renowned former dolphin trainer whose work on Flipper helped popularize dolphin shows worldwide. O’Barry later had a change of heart, and now fights to have all captive dolphins freed, with a passion that leads him to fight on multiple fronts: railing against dolphin-eaters and against government cover-ups of the mercury levels in dolphins, and generally siding with anyone who wants to protect dolphins, whether they want to shutter Sea World or not. As a result of Psihoyos’ close association with O’Barry, The Cove’s ultimate message gets muddled, especially since Psihoyos limits all counter-arguments to a few inarticulate or thuggish boobs. If documentarians want to indicate their causes are just, it helps to present the strongest case possible for the opposition, rather than just vanquishing any handy strawman.
That said, The Cove offers a lot to think about in terms of the future of fishing, and Psihoyos’ gift for using fiction-feature conventions does make a seemingly unpalatable subject entertaining. While dropping facts and arguments left and right, Psihoyos is simultaneously staging a slick, nail-biting caper film. Yet The Cove hews so close to the mode of an action-adventure film—right down to the clichéd villains and show-stopping confrontations—that after a while, it begins to feel like too much of a movie, not an exposé of an actual problem. Real-world crises require the intervention of real people with legitimate disagreements and personal flaws, not characters yanked from spy movies and two-fisted TV adventure shows.
Village Voice (Ella Taylor) review
Late in the infectiously frisky documentary The Cove, an older man calmly gate-crashes an international conference on whaling with a television screen strapped to his chest, showing bloody images of the mass slaughter of dolphins in a pretty cove off the coast of Japan. It's a show-stopping publicity stunt by dolphin advocate Ric O'Barry, and also one act of an ongoing ritual of public penance by this one-time hunter and trainer of dolphins for the popular 1960s television series Flipper. O'Barry came to understand that dolphins cutting up on TV or in aquaria around the world may provide oceans of fun for audiences, but that it's torture for the sociable, intelligent mammals forcibly separated from their fellows and habitat.
The sleepy-eyed but intense O'Barry—who now spends his days slipping into Japan in silly disguises to avoid getting arrested by the police or attacked by irate fisherman at the infamous cove where dolphins are culled for export or killed—is the perfect star for this forthrightly activist film. But he's far from the only performance artist in the rousing blend of pop entertainment, faux-thriller, horror movie, and naked agitprop that is The Cove, a benign feat of manipulation designed to make you rue every minute you spent ooh-ing and aah-ing at SeaWorld.
It's also designed to make you call for the blood of the Japanese government, which lobbies strenuously against international efforts to protect small crustaceans and secretively protects the fishermen who cruelly trap thousands of dolphins a year to either sell for export or kill for, as it turns out, mercury-contaminated meat that shows up not only in delicatessens around the world, but in the school lunches of Japanese children.
"To my mind, either you're an activist or an
inactivist," says director Louie Psihoyos, a photographer and co-founder
of the Oceanic Preservation Society, whose smooth
skin and emerald eyes make him look more than a little cetacean himself.
Psihoyos possesses the showboating instincts and righteous rage of Michael Moore, but without
"Lovely" is the operative word. Skillful and hugely entertaining as it is, I'm not sure The Cove would be quite as potent as it is if the subject were, say, walruses instead of dolphins—a made-for-Disney sub-species if ever there was one. Programmed by nature to make us go, "Awwwww," dolphins are the Goldie Hawns of endangered species. They're bright, funny, playful, and cute—and, by some freak of nature, they appear to be grinning most of the time. O'Barry laments the anthropomorphization that has turned dolphins into circus clowns in aquariums around the world, but he's not above ascribing human motivation to them himself. When one of the dolphins stops breathing in his arms, he calls its death a suicide. Maybe, maybe not. The Cove is properly enchanting, horrifying, and rousing, but it comes dangerously close to making the narcissistic case that dolphins deserve to be saved because they're cute and breathe air like we do. But then where does that leave the overfished salmon I went home to poach after the movie?
Eye for
Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [1.5/5]
The Cove won the audience award for documentary at 2009's Sundance Film Festival and in many ways it is easy to see why. In terms of camerawork, it is well-made and its thriller elements - which echo the same sort of edge-of-the-seat tension employed so admirably by James Marsh in last year's Man On Wire - are certainly gripping. But scratch the good looking surface and The Cove's contentions start to look very wobbly.
The subject matter is emotive. What's not to love about a
dolphin? With their ready smiles and charming mythology/history of human
rescue, they're one of the few water-based animals for which no PR is needed.
So, the idea of them being slaughtered en masse in the small Japanese fishing
One such fan is Ric O'Barry. Once a handler of the various Flippers for the TV show of the same name, he turned gamekeeper after one of them "committed suicide in his arms" (yes, he really believes this, and tells us in scenes that are eerily reminiscent of Timothy Treadwell's deluded desire to anthropomorphise his furry bear chums in Grizzly Man). O'Barry now makes it his life's work to try to protect them and the film follows his story as he - and the filmmakers themselves - attempt to shoot footage of the village slaughter in a cove kept hidden from prying eyes.
Although the Mission Impossible style antics - involving everything from hiding cameras in 'rocks' specially designed for the process, to sneaking them in under cloak of darkness - are tense in a 'will they get caught or won't they' way, the arguments presented are messy at best and, at worst, dangerously lacking in balance.
For example, we are told early on that 23,000 dolphins are
killed every year but, crucially, there is no indication of what percentage of
the population this is. Look closer on the film's official website and it turns
out just 2,500 of these are killed in the, admittedly barbaric-looking, 'drive
fishing' manner outlined in the film - but then, what method of slaughter of
our fellow creatures wouldn't look barbaric if it was done underwater? Given
that there are only 26 fishermen in the
There's also no indication at all that the dolphin breeds
which are being killed are in any way endangered. The film, irritatingly, drops
in the fact that the
Then there's the issue of why the dolphins are being slaughtered in the first place. The film contends that the fishermen round them up in the hopes of selling off the ones with the cutest smile to dolphinaria and aquaria across the globe for big bucks. The casualties of this are the unwanted mammals, who are then herded off to the cove and culled. All of which makes the filmmaker's decision to target Taiji seem even more odd. It would have been much more interesting for them to chase this particular argument down and find out what those in the West think of the fact that they are complicit in the slaughter.
Maybe it was impossible to get a quote from SeaWorld, or similar - in which case the film should say so - but the niggling suspicion is that director Louie Psihoyos and his supporters, the Oceanic Preservation Society, didn't bother soliciting one because they simply didn't want that side of the argument to be heard. Equally, there is no exploration of the fishermen's contention that they cull the dolphin to protect other fish stocks. This could be a false argument, but you won't find out here.
The film's problems continue as it broadens out its subject
to talk about the dangers of eating dolphin meat. Brief interviews with local
people seem to indicate dolphin is rarely eaten by anyone and suggestions that
the meat is somehow sold on the black market or passed off as other seafood
are, although interesting, not well substantiated. The same can be said of the
patronising generalisations the film goes on to make about
As for the audience award... it just goes to show that you can fool all of the people some of the time.
Standing Witness - Reviews - News - IFC.com (Page 2, 3) Matt Zoller Seitz from IFC
The Globe and Mail (Michael Posner) review [3/4]
New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review
Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [A]
Illuminating 'The Cove': Louie Psihoyos' activist documentary ... Doris Toumarkine from Film Journal International, July 20, 2009
Moving Pictures magazine [Eric Kohn]
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [3.5/5]
Cinematical (Scott Weinberg) review
Slant Magazine review Ed Gonzalez
DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review [Theatrical Version]
The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Exposing 'The Cove': Guerilla Filmmaking Required by director Louie Psihoyos at Sundance, from Moving Pictures Magazine, January 2009
Louie Psihoyos, 'The Cove': An Ecological Crisis and Green ... indieWIRE interview of the director, January 13, 2009
The Cove's Richard O'Barry Bilge Ebiri interview with activist Richard Barry for New York Magazine, January 16, 2009
The Village Voice [John Anderson] Interview with the director, March 24, 2009
MoJo Interview: The Cove's Louie Psihoyos and Ric O'Barry | Mother ... Kiera Butler interview from Mother Jones magazine, August 6, 2009
World-renowned Photographer and Filmmaker Louie Psihoyos Fights ... Jessica Root from Planet Green, August 10, 2009
Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Owen Gleiberman
Boston Globe review [3/4] Wesley Morris
The Boston Phoenix (Chris Faraone) review
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3.5/5]
San Francisco Chronicle (Amy Biancolli) review [3/4]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times review Jeannette Catsoulis
frontline: a whale of a business: interviews: richard o'barry Undated PBS interview (2 pages) with Rick O’Barry
Louie Psihoyos Photography personal website
Minamata disease - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Poisoning of Minamata Douglas Allchin
Flipper (1964 TV series) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pudovkin, Vsevolod I.
MoMA
| Vsevolod I. Pudovkin
Charles Silver April 27, 2010
These notes accompany the Vsevolod I. Pudovkin program, screening April 28, 29, and 30 in Theater 3.
Vsevolod Illarionovitch Pudovkin (1893–1953) was, like Sergei Eisenstein, a pupil of Lev Kuleshov (1899–1970), and all three of them were heavily influenced by the work of D. W. Griffith, particularly his mastery of editing. All three also wrote copiously on film theory, finding intellectual justification for the choices they made in creating their movies. Few American filmmakers made much effort to convey their thought processes, and most seemed happy to leave the impression that their work was largely intuitive. When Peter Bogdanovich asked John Ford how he did a particular shot, Ford replied soberly, “With a camera.”
Of course, Alfred Hitchcock did submit to Francois Truffaut’s book-length interview, and King Vidor did write his own book, King Vidor on Filmmaking, to try to explicate his methods. Neither of these, however, quite matched the portentous tomes that Pudovkin and Eisenstein published. I would suggest that their editing (montage) theories were more amenable to intellectual codification than such subtleties in Ford’s work as evoking resonance and poignancy by using a certain actor in a certain role—to which Ford’s audience could relate memories of previous appearances by that actor in other Ford films. Josef von Sternberg’s charming autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, does include some discussion of his technique and style, but the greatness of such films as Morocco, Shanghai Express, The Scarlet Empress, and The Devil Is a Woman have just as much to do with the unique alchemy of Sternberg’s and Marlene Dietrich’s talents and the “baggage” they carried with them in successive films. Such things are inimitable, and hardly grist for Film Directing 101 textbooks.
Back to Pudovkin, his first released film was the short comedy Chess Fever (1925), and upon its release he was already hard at work on his documentary, The Mechanics of the Brain. His real breakthrough came the following year, with his adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s novel Mat (Mother), a story of a mother-son relationship caught up in the sweep of Russia’s abortive 1905 revolution. Here, he seems to establish his fundamental differences from Eisenstein, whose revolutionary zeal would not permit him to traffic much in sentimentality and emotionalism. Pudovkin was no less a supporter of the Revolution, but he had the awareness that the collective was made up of individuals and that audiences who were attracted to Charles Chaplin or Lillian Gish in the Griffith films might have a need to identify with a character, a personality, and not just a cause. In this, he seemed more astute about the ultimate power of the movies.
If Eisenstein was the preeminent Soviet propagandist, Pudovkin and his Ukrainian contemporary Alexander Dovzhenko (1894–1956) (with whom we will deal in a few weeks) were the epic visual poets of the regime. Pudovkin’s Potomok Chingis-Khan (Storm over Asia) (1928) presents a cathartic spectacle pretty much unprecedented in world cinema. His use of masses photographed with a moving camera and subjected to his theories of editing certainly rival similar scenes in Griffith’s Intolerance, and they possess a contemporaneousness that Griffith’s faux-Babylonians could not equal. Pudovkin was recreating the recent history of Russia and its fringe republics, and he believed in the cause as John Ford believed in America’s destiny. Whether Pudovkin had seen Napoleon, made two years earlier by another Griffith disciple, Abel Gance, both films share a soaring epic quality, and both focus on an unlikely hero who grows to greatness before our eyes. With the coming of sound and Stalinism, Pudovkin never again rose to quite the same heights, but he retains an honorable place in the history of film and film literature.
Vsevolod
I Pudovkin Constructive Editing And Heightened Realism ... April 16, 2017
Although all of the Soviet filmmakers were deeply influenced by Griffith, they were also concerned about the role of their films in the revolutionary struggle. Lenin himself had endorsed the importance of film in supporting the revolution. The young Soviet filmmakers were zealots for that revolution. Idealistic, energetic, and committed, they struggled for filmic solutions to political problems.
Perhaps none of the Soviet filmmakers was as critical of Griffith as V.I. Pudovkin. As Reisz suggests, "Where Griffith was content to tell his stories by means of the kind of editing construction we have already seen in the excerpt from The Birth of a Nation, the young Russian directors felt that they could take the film director's control over his material a stage further. They planned, by means of new editing methods, not only to tell stories but to interpret and draw intellectual conclusions from them."
Pudovkin attempted to develop a theory of editing that would allow filmmakers to proceed beyond the intuitive classical editing of Griffith to a more formalized process that could yield greater success in translating ideas into narratives. That theory was based on Griffith's perception that the fragmentation of a scene into shots could create a power far beyond the character of a scene filmed without this type of construction. Pudovkin took this idea one step further. As he states in his book,
The film director [as compared to the theater director], on the other hand, has as his material, the finished, recorded celluloid. This material from which his final work is composed consists not of living men or real landscapes, not of real, actual stage-sets, but only of their images, recorded on separate strips that can be shortened, altered, and assembled according to his will. The elements of reality are fixed on these pieces; by combining them in his selected sequence, shortening and lengthening them according to his desire, the director builds up his own "filmic" time and "filmic" space. He does not adapt reality, but uses it for the creation of a new reality, and the most characteristic and important aspect of this process is that, in it, laws of space and time invariable and inescapable in work with actuality become tractable and obedient. The film assembles from them a new reality proper only to itself.
Pudovkin thereby takes the position that the shot is the building block of film and that is the raw material whose ordering can generate any desired result. Just as the poet uses words to create a new perception of reality, the film director uses shots as his raw material.
Pudovkin experimented considerably with this premise. His early work with Lev Kuleshov suggested that the same shot juxtaposed with different following shots could yield widely different results with an audience. In their famous experiment with the actor Ivan Mosjukhin, they used the same shot of the actor juxtaposed with three different follow-up shots: a plate of soup standing on a table, a shot of a coffin containing a dead woman, and a little girl playing with a toy. Audience responses to the three sequences suggested a hungry person, a sad husband, and a joyful adult, and yet the first shot was always the same.
Encouraged by this type of experiment, Pudovkin went further. In his film version of Mother (1926), he wanted to suggest the joy of a prisoner about to be set free. These are Pudovkin's comments about the construction of the scene:
I tried to affect the spectators, not by the psychological performances of an actor, but by the plastic synthesis through editing. The son sits in prison. Suddenly, passed in to him surreptitiously, he receives a note that the next day he is to be set free. The problem was the expression, filmically, of his joy. The photographing of a face lighting up with joy would have been flat and void of effect. I show, therefore, the nervous play of his hands and a big close-up of the lower half of his face, the corners of the smile. These shots I cut in with other and varied material—shots of a brook, swollen with the rapid flow of spring, of the play of sunlight broken on the water, birds splashing in the village pond, and finally a laughing child. By the junction of these components our expression of "prisoner's joy" takes shape.
In this story of a mother who is politicized by the persecution of her son for his political beliefs, a personal approach is intermingled with a political story. In this sense, Pudovkin was similar in his narrative strategy to Griffith, but in purpose he was more political than Griffith. He also experimented freely with scene construction to convey his political ideas. When workers strike, their fate is clear; when fathers and sons take differing sides in a political battle, the family (in this case, the mother) will suffer; and family tragedy is the sacrifice necessary if political change is to occur.
Pudovkin first involves us in the personal story and the narrative, and then he communicates the political message. Although criticized for adopting bourgeois narrative techniques, Pudovkin carried those techniques further than Griffith, but not as far as his contemporary, Sergei Eisenstein.
Vsevolod
Pudovkin | Biography, Movie Highlights and Photos | AllMovie biography
Vsevolod
Pudovkin facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com ... biography
Vsevolod Pudovkin | Biography & Movies | Britannica.com biography
Vsevolod Pudovkin -
Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia biography
Pudovkin,
Vsevolod - - kinoglaz online
biography
Vsevolod Pudovkin - NNDB brief profile
Movies
and Film: Avant-Garde Directors and Theorists to Remember
11.
Pudovkin 1 Readings Zabel: “Revolutionary Awakening ... photo stills
5 Relational Editing Techniques by Vsevolod Pudovkin | Film Fu
Cinematic
Storytelling Pudovkin’s Film Technique and Film Acting (1926), Section 4 Editing, is applied to
contemporary films in a 20-page essay (pdf)
Film technique ; and
Film acting : the cinema writings of V.I. Pudovkin ... Pudovkin’s 1954 book, Film Technique and Film Acting, translated into English, may be
freely viewed online from the Media
History Digital Library
Vsevolod Pudovkin, the silent revolutionary | Film | The Guardian Jonathan Jones, August 30, 2001
Ideology and Reality: Society and Vsevolod Pudovkin's Mother ... Cara Marisa Deleon from Senses of Cinema, July 31, 2006
Vsevolod Pudovkin:
Selected Essays - Film-Philosophy
Giuliano Vivaldi 9-page book review essay from Film-Philosophy, December 3, 2007 (pdf)
Editing: Pudovkin - Constructive Editing and Heightened Realism Jessica, February 24, 2010
Screening: Vsevolod
Pudovkin's Mechanics of the ... - Cabinet Magazine April 11, 2010
Film
Gazette: Vsevolod IIariónovich Pudovkin (1893-1953) April 3, 2011
The
Development of Form in Soviet/ Russian Cinema - For Continuing ... MK Raghavendra from Phalanx magazine, August 2013
Pudovkin's
Montage: 5 Editing Techniques That Speak Louder Than ... V. Renée from No Film School, October
12, 2013
Pudovkin on Editing
by Bri Boldon on Prezi Bri Boldon,
October 24, 2013
Vsevolod
Pudovkin, the Russian film director who pioneered the use ... Richard Edwards, November 22, 2014
Visualizing revolution | International Socialist Review Geoff Bailey, Spring 2017
Vsevolod
Pudovkin (1893 - 1953) - Find A Grave Memorial
Pudovkin's 5 Editing Techniques on Vimeo
(11:45)
CHESS FEVER (Shakhmatnaya
goryachka)
Russia (28 mi) 1925 co-director: Nikolai Shpikovsky
User Reviews from imdb Author: Darragh O' Donoghue (hitch1899_@hotmail.com) from Dublin, Ireland, August 26, 1999
An absolute pippin of a short, all the more surprising when you
think of the dour heavy-handedness that mars Pudovkin's most famous work. Just
as delightful is the subject's ambiguity - a welcome break from the wearing,
mathematical propaganda that is much of Soviet cinema.
The central ambiguity of the film is: does it celebrate conformity, or is it a
satire on it? In favour of the former proposition is the fact that everyone's
playing chess. Like the myth that all Dublin cab-drivers are learned Joyceans,
the Soviet populace as a whole seem obsessed with the rigorously intellectual
game of chess. The film opens with some dispiritingly authentic chess
tournaments - yep, just grandmasters sitting at tables, playing chess, and
people watching. Then the comedy begins. Its conflict is that a chess nut's
fiancee loathes the game, and cannot escape from it wherever she turns. Her
only chance of happiness is to conform to society's pleasure.
On the other hand, this pleasure is roundly mocked, and the insanity of the
chess obsession leads the film from documentary realism, into fantasy,
absurdity and the supernatural. The hero is a bonkers chess addict - his cap,
scarf and socks are checkered, as is his cigarette case, while he has miniature
chess boards, rule books and problem setters all over his body. His
straightforward journey to his fiancee is constantly interrupted by
chess-related obstacles, which are quite clearly seen to have a fetishistic
power over him. This power extends to society as a whole: in one particularly
piquant episode, a thief about to be nabbed by a policeman is saved because a
stray chessboard falls his way; the hunter and hunted stop to play. Here the
mixture of chess and chance are seen to have a disruptive effect on the smooth
running of society.
I suppose whatever way you read it depends on how you view the game itself. In
one way it calls for extraordinary intellectual and imaginative powers, the
ability to think of alternatives, which runs contrary to the rigidities of a
police state. However, chess itself is a rigid game, the board a prison with
minutely defined rules. The pieces, like the citizens in a police state, are at
their masters' bidding, forever running around in labyrinthine patterns. The
film might be quite subversive.
What it certainly is is a hilarious treat, full of great visual gags and
in-jokes, as well as a disturbingly logical Alice in Wonderland-like erosion of
structures, and a heroine whose unhappiness is a strange melancholic malaise.
There is an irreverent sense of jeu d'esprit almost entirely absent from Soviet
cinema.
Movie Magg [Mark Gabrish Conlan] July 28, 2017
Charles and I watched The End of St. Petersburg on a
compilation disc of Russian silent classics from Kino with two other films,
Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930) and a comedy short by Pudovkin called
Chess Fever (1925). Soviet filmmakers were inspired by American movies,
but not always in the ways you’d think; they absolutely revered D. W. Griffith
(the great Soviet directors had access to a print of Intolerance and
screened it continually to study how Griffith had intercut between four
separate plot lines, and it’s obvious from films like The End of St.
Petersburg that they’d learned how to dramatize the class struggle largely
from Griffith’s still-powerful Biograph short A Corner in Wheat, with
its intercuts between the speculators making and enjoying their profits and the
ordinary people reduced to penury and starvation by the speculators’ success in
monopolizing, or “cornering,” the market in wheat), and in Chess Fever
it’s obvious that Pudovkin and his writer, Nikolai Shpikovsky, had been
studying America’s silent comedy classics. The basic element of this film was a
real-life international championship chess tournament held in Moscow in 1925 —
the first person we see, playing himself, is Cuban grandmaster José Raul
Capablanca, the actual world champion chess player at the time — and, in the
manner of Mack Sennett grabbing footage of a children’s auto race or a lake
being drained and building a fiction film around it, Pudovkin and Shpikovsky
decided to make a half-hour short about a young man (Vladimir Fogel) who’s so
crazy about chess he plays it by himself, switching sides at his chess table so
he can play both white and black.
About his only other interests are his fiancée (Anna Zemtsova) and a large
number of kittens who share his house and nestle in his coat sleeves and even
his shoes — there’s a screamingly funny scene in which he realizes he’s got so
wrapped up in his solo chess game he’s forgotten he was supposed to meet her at
the registry office to get married at 10 a.m. It’s now noon, and he frantically
gets dressed, only to find cats in his coat sleeves, his pockets and even his
shoes — and it gets even funnier when he’s distracted on the way to the
registry office by a local chess shop. By the time he gets to his girlfriend’s
place it’s already evening and she insists that he’s going to have to decide
between her and chess. He tries — he really tries — in a series of scenes that
briefly make Chess Fever look like a modern-day film about addiction,
but just about everything he has on is in a black-and-white chessboard
pattern, and when he tosses out the books of chess games and problems he has on
him, every one is picked up by someone on the street who himself is so wrapped
up in chess they begin working on the problems and playing al fresco
chess games. Eventually both hero and heroine are so frustrated by the collapse
of their relationship that they plan to kill themselves, him by drowning (which
gives Pudovkin a chance to do more of the shots of a flowing river he also
included in The End of St. Petersburg) and her by poison, which led me
to joke, “Now it looks like a Russian story” — only, wouldn’t you guess
it, the pharmacist she goes to in order to buy her poison is wrapped up in a
chess game, and instead of wrapping the poison for her, the pharmacist wraps up
the queen piece he’s just captured from his opponent. Frustrated at her
inability even to commit suicide without being confronted by something to do
with chess, the heroine wanders the streets of Moscow — where she’s cruised and
picked up by, who else, world’s chess champion José Raul Capablanca. He takes
her to the tournament, where her boyfriend has also gone after he found
himself unable to take his own life, and she suddenly decides that she’s a
chess fan after all and the two reconcile over a mini-chessboard and homemade
pieces.
The influences of American slapstick are obvious, though instead of Charlie
Chaplin (a big favorite of Russian filmmakers because he was not only a
committed Leftist but he incorporated his politics in film after film) the real
models for Chess Fever are Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. Fogel as the
hero is given Lloyd-ish glasses to wear (though with wire rims instead of the
horn rims of Lloyd’s famous pair) but his rambles around Moscow are very
Keatonesque and one could well imagine Buster doing the gag of a whole row of
people desperately clinging to each other to keep up with the trolley car
they’ve hitched a ride from. Dwight Macdonald, in his 1939 essay on the rise
and fall of Soviet filmmaking, said even before Stalin took over and imposed
his “Socialist Realist” style on all Russian art he hadn’t found Russian comedy
films particularly funny — but Chess Fever is screamingly funny
start-to-finish and one could easily imagine Keaton or Lloyd remaking it in the
U.S. Viadimir Fogel turns out to be a first-rate slapstick comedian, though
Anna Nemtsova is a striking screen presence but one who, like Vera Baranovskaya
in The End of St. Petersburg, isn’t obliged to do much in the way of
acting. If these two films are any indication, Vsevolod Pudovkin was a great
director of men but he wasn’t either able or interested in creating truly
multidimensional female characters: it seems all the women in his films get to
do is stand stoically by the action and register suffering. But with that caveat
these are both excellent movies, well worth watching even now — and the true
heirs of films like The End of St. Petersburg today are The Hunger
Games and the other near-future dystopias that assume (probably accurately)
that the current inequalities of wealth and income will only get worse and
that any attempts at revolution will only produce their own, equally arbitrary
tyrannies.
World
Cinema Review: Vsevolod Pudovkin and Nikolai Shpikovsky ... Douglas Messerli
Movies Silently [Fritzi Kramer]
Silver in a Haystack [Fredrik]
MOTHER (Mat) A 100
A landmark film companion to Eisenstein’s POTEMKIN, like Dovzhenko, Pudovkin studied science and was a student of chemistry and physics, making documentary films of Pavlovian experiments until this first feature film. While Eisenstein used non-professional actors to depict heroes to the masses, Pudovkin used professional actors trained in the Stanislavsky method, hoping to obtain a non-professional documentary feel focusing on the role of individuals. All three were members of the Russian avante garde in the 20's which included total artistic freedom before Stalin gained control, all three completely embraced a new vision of Communism and were fighting against Gorky, who represented the old vision. MOTHER was actually an adaptation of a Maxim Gorky novel, Gorky, although revered, was initially opposed to the Bolsheviks and was appalled by this adaptation. But the freedom of this first-time filmmaker choosing NOT to adhere to the contemporary literary product suggests the courage of this film. As 55% of the Russian population was illiterate by WWI, Lenin instructed his Cultural Minister to use cinema to educate the masses, as it was otherwise difficult to effectively get through to what was largely a peasant country. Lenin believed in a peasant revolution directed by a small intellectual party. Cinema was a major instrument of propaganda and education, revealing a particular insight on Lenin’s part, as cinema at that time was considered 4th rate entertainment, along the lines of the circus. Marxism is anti-religious (religion is the opiate of the masses), but Marxist cinema, like religion, creates images, in this case propagandistic images, to teach and instruct a new morality for a new mass culture, rather than the old aristocratic bourgeois culture for the rich, the only individuals who could afford it. Political propaganda revealed the Communist party’s own aims and goals, themes purposefully exaggerated in a very unambiguous manner. Both Eisenstein and Pudovkin chose 1905 struggles, many of which did not succeed, but which featured political clashes between two classes, the workers who were striking and demonstrating against the injustices of a repressive, Tsarist police state, and the capitalists, owners of the mills and factories who brought out the soldiers and police to crush any worker resistance, causing an outrage around the country with so many dead and dying victims, capturing the sparks which ultimately led to the Russian revolution.
This film is an adaptation of a Maxim Gorky novel. Gorky, although revered, was initially opposed to the Bolsheviks and was appalled by this adaptation, but the freedom of a first-time filmmaker not to adhere to the literary product suggests the courage in making this film. Pudovkin was the first to use musical inventions such as Wagnerian leitmotifs, re-occurring symbolic images, and actually constructed this film in a sonata form, a fast movement followed by slow, then another fast. The film begins with his first image, a police officer standing on the street outside the home of a family, each character representing a force in Russian society at that time, the father is a drunk, a reactionary, the mother, in an incredible performance by Vera Baranovskaya, patient and long suffering, while their son is a member of a Communist youth group. There is a Chaplin-like depiction of classes in a bar scene, where the owners of the mill are stuffing themselves with herring and vodka, a scene of absolute gluttony, then the father, with no money of his own, wishes to trade his wife’s iron for a drink. The bartender refuses, but the mill owners buy him a drink in order to coerce him to help put down a planned strike at the mill the next day. As it turns out, the son leads the strike against his own father, leading to a police interrogation in his own home where the mother, hoping to protect her son, unthinkingly betrays him, revealing where he has hidden a cache of arms entrusted to him by his comrades, causing his immediate arrest and imprisonment. This causes a political awakening in the mother as she tries to redeem herself, transforming herself into a cinematic icon of suffering and sorrow, leading a demonstration aimed at provoking a prison rebellion, freeing her son who amusingly escapes on an ice flow, rejoining his mother and the other demonstrators only to be shot and the resistance crushed by the advancing soldiers, the mother holding the flag as the soldiers, with raised sabers on horseback, trample all that remains in their path, leaving a multitude of dead bodies in their wake.
There is an abundance of symbolic imagery used with great effectiveness, pillars of liberty and justice followed by heavy black boots of a soldier, leather-gloved hands of the soldiers, sabers, horses trampling through the mud with the camera effectively placed below looking up revealing the threatening power, poetically adding ice flows, rushing streams, trees and sky, spring, melting snow, the thawing of ice, a natural force about to be unleashed against the concrete and steel images of the mill, suggesting the forces of nature will eventually prevail. The film has a romantic, painful depiction of the realism in the characters, focusing on individuals, on human problems with universal meanings, with great effort made in finding people who perfectly fit Pudovkin’s idea of each character, which adds a warmth and more and a more affecting dimension to the striking images on screen. Rather than explaining concepts through montage as Eisenstein did, Pudovkin orchestrates his shots on the basis of their emotional charge, raising and lowering the pitch of action according to his desired effect. There are many famous, superbly realized sequences, each a virtual textbook on film technique.
Pudovkin’s cinema was created in the manner of a musical symphony, where Pudovkin was the first to use musical inventions such as Wagnerian leitmotifs, re-occurring symbolic images, and actually constructed this film in a sonata form, fast movement followed by slow, then another fast. The father in this film is a drunk, and represents the reactionaries, the son is a member of a Communist youth group, while the mother represents the patient and long suffering Mother Russia. There is an abundance of symbolic imagery in this film, used with great effectiveness, pillars of liberty and justice followed by heavy black boots of a soldier, leather gloved hands of soldiers, sabers, horses trampling through mud with the camera effectively placed below looking up, revealing the threatening power - there were many similar camera shots of humans and animals in EARTH. This film has a romantic, painful depiction of the realism in the characters, focusing on individuals, on human problems with universal meanings, with great effort to find people who perfectly fit Pudovkin's idea of each character, which adds a warmth and a more affecting dimension to the striking images on screen. Rather than explaining concepts through montage, like Eisenstein, Pudovkin orchestrates his shots on the basis of their emotional charge, raising and lowering the pitch of the action according to his desired effect. Pudovkin also poetically adds ice flows, rushing streams, trees and sky, spring, melting snow, the thawing of ice, a natural force about top be unleashed against the concrete and steel images of the mill, where forces of nature will eventually prevail, very similar to the final shot in EARTH.
Mother, directed by Vsevolod
Pudovkin | Film review - Time Out
Tony Rayns
A major work from the heroic age of radical experiment in Russian cinema, this is a much altered reworking of Gorki's novel, about a peasant woman becoming a political militant after betraying her son's cache of arms to the police. Pudovkin tightened the overall structure, introduced the character of the drunken reactionary husband, and drew masterly performances from members of the Moscow Art Theatre.
Mat - Film (Movie)
Plot and Review - Publications - Film Reference Rob Edelman
Mother might rightfully be labelled Soviet propaganda. It is the story of a poor working-class woman at the time of the 1905 Revolution who, through her relationship with her worker son, becomes politicized. At first, she is oppressed, just another anonymous pawn of the power structure; at the finale she is exultant, a heroine and a martyr. However, the film is no boring treatise on the wonders of revolutionary spirit. Mother is a drama of love and conflict that can be universally understood and appreciated. In the scenario, based on a Maxim Gorky novel, a traditional theme—a mother's concern for her beloved son—may be stretched to fit into a propagandistic framework. But this fact does not obscure the heart-wrenching storyline and superior cinematic techniques of its maker, Vsevolod Illareonovitch Pudovkin.
Mother is Pudovkin's first feature produced on his own, independent of his colleagues at the State Film School. Here, under the tutelage of Lev Kuleshov, the filmmaker had defined and sharpened his cinematic grammar, and this film became his initial major achievement; he followed it a year later with The End of St. Petersburg and, thereafter with The Heir to Genghis-Khan . Mother , made when Pudovkin's relative inexperience prevented him from initially receiving adequate funding, is a superior example of the filmmaker's concern with camera angles, montage and editing. He and his cinematographer, Anatoli Golovnya, photographed the actors from every which angle: a military officer's self-importance would be conveyed by shooting him from below; the mother's early frustration would be emphasized by shooting her from above, and at the end, her triumph and liberation is highlighted by shooting from below. When Pudovkin places his camera in this position, the character's upper body and head seem further away, more inaccessible, reaching to the sky and towering over the viewer; when the actor is beneath the camera he becomes inferior, in that the viewer is literally looking down on him. Pudovkin does not shoot his performance straight on, as if he is recording a stage play. Mood and characterization are communicated in Mother not by the actor emoting before the camera; the performer is almost a passive participant in the filmmaking process.
Pudovkin believed that the manner and order in which pieces of film are spliced together can have the most powerful effect on the viewer. Mother is structured like a musical composition: a balance of action and reaction, seemingly disconnected shots—opposites, if you will—coming together to form a coherent whole. For example, the son receives some happy news while in prison. Instead of just editing in a simple reaction shot of his actor, Nikolai Batalov, Pudovkin combines shots of hands energetically in motion and a close-up of the bottom part of Batalov's face with scenes of a sun-lit stream, birds cavorting in a pond, and a happy child. Mother is a creative leap in the advancement of the editing process as an important filmmaking tool.
Pudovkin's individual images are, when contrasted to his cutting, relatively insignificant. But they are not uninteresting. One example: the mother visits the bier of her just-deceased husband. The filmmaker conveys a stark, sad mood by shooting only the dark shape of Vera Baranovskaya (who plays the role) casting an ominous shadow on the nearby grey wall, and a white sheet covering the body.
Pudovkin was also allegedly inspired by artists, painters and printmakers. The mother's characterization is modelled after the creations of Kathe Kollwitz, Picasso (especially the works of his Blue Period) and Degas. A sequence in a prison has its roots in Van Gogh's "Prison Courtyard." The film's influences are also literary: the trial scenes are based more on Tolstoy's Resurrection than in anything from the original source material.
Mother is expertly cast, from the actors playing mother and son (Baranovskaya and Batalov were recruited from the Moscow Art Theater) to the extras on screen for a split second. Pudovkin favored using non-actors in smaller roles, people whose real-life experience would provide a heightened sense of reality. In a sequence depicting the son's arrest after a search of his home, a former tsarist officer plays the colonel supervising the interrogation. After all, who else but an authentic career military man would know how to look the part of a professional soldier?
Interestingly, Mother might easily have been made by another director. Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky was initially assigned to direct the film, but was unable to cast the title role and even requested that scenarist Nathan Zarkhi transform her into a father. Finally, the project came to Pudovkin, who could never have worked independently within, or outside, the Soviet cinema establishment. His films are not pure works of art: Mother is similar to The End of St. Petersburg and The Heir to Genghis-Khan in that its motives are unabashedly political. Every great Russian film of the era, including Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin , Strike and October , are in some way linked to the Revolution. But Mother is the most personalized, and most poetic, of them all.
Ideology and Reality: Society and Vsevolod Pudovkin's Mother ... Cara Marisa Deleon from Senses of Cinema, July 31, 2006
Visualizing revolution | International Socialist Review Geoff Bailey, Spring 2017
The
Development of Form in Soviet/ Russian Cinema - For Continuing ... MK Raghavendra from Phalanx magazine, August 2013
Observations
on film art : The ten best films of … 1926 - David Bordwell December 26, 2016
Women's
Space in Soviet Film Narrative
Judith Mayne from Jump Cut,
October 1980
Film
and Photo League by Russell Campbell - eJumpcut.org 1977
Forgotten
Classics of Yesteryear: Мать (Mother)
Nathanael Hood
1
Vsyevolod Pudovkin: Mother (1926), The End of St Petersburg (1927 .
9-page essay by Peter Cochrane (pdf)
The
Deleuzian Century IV: Vsevolod Pudovkin's Mother (1926) Sporadic
Scintillations
Cinemalacrum:
For Your Awareness: Mother (1926)
Mother
(Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1926) - - kinoglaz online
Mother - Silent
Era : Home Video Reviews Kino Films
Vsevolod Pudovkin, the silent revolutionary | Film | The Guardian Jonathan Jones, August 30, 2001
Movie
Review - - Gorky's 'Mother.' - NYTimes.com
Mother
| film by Pudovkin [1926] | Britannica.com
Mother 1926 - Dictionary definition of Mother 1926 | Encyclopedia.com ...
Mother (1926 film)
- Wikipedia
Mother (1926 film)
- Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia
MECHANICS OF THE BRAIN (Mekhanika golovnogo mozga)
Russia (60 mi) 1926
The
Mechanics of the Brain, directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin | Film review
You need a cold scientific heart to appreciate this documentary of Pavlov's research into the 'conditioned reflex'. A series of agonising animal experiments is elucidated, this being a silent, by an onslaught of inter-titles, five consecutively at one point. Sights include dogs with their faces cut, so their saliva drips externally and measurably, dogs with bits of their brain removed, just to see what happens, chimps given electric shocks to confirm data that might be readily surmised. Pudovkin's chore (his first feature assignment) was to find a mise-en-scène to record these dismal tableaux - in theory an interesting challenge. In practice, except for lab-coat audiences, any screening is likely to be punctuated by the soft thud of the exit door.
Philip
Cavendish: The Men with the Movie Camera. The Poetics of ... Philip Cavendish: The Men with the Movie
Camera. The Poetics of Visual Style in Soviet Avant-Garde Cinema of the 1920s (362 pages), review by Mario Slugan,
2015
Mechanics of the Brain (1926) directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin • Film ... Letterboxd
New York Times [Mordaunt Hall]
THE END OF ST. PETERSBURG (Konets Sankt-Peterburga)
Russia (85 mi) 1927 co-director: Mikhail Doller
Rousing example of Soviet agit-prop cinema, chronicling how WWI and internal economic/political strifes led directly to the 1917 revolution and the transformation of imperial city St Petersburg into Leningrad. Rousingly persuasive stuff, percussively edited, with harrowing scenes of trench warfare intercut with gleeful profiteers observing the values of their investments spiralling upwards on the stock-market as the bombs fall hundreds of miles away. "We've been at war for three years," one exhausted soldier sighs, "and I don't even know what we're fighting for." Plus ca change…
Movie Magg [Mark Gabrish Conlan] July 28, 2017
Our “feature” last night was The End of St. Petersburg,
a.k.a. St. Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad, a 1927 production by the
“other” great Soviet silent director, Veslvolod Pudovkin, who along with Sergei
Eisenstein (the first name that comes to mind when discussing Soviet silent
directors) was commissioned by the Soviet government to make a movie to
commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution that
had brought down Russia’s provisional government just seven months after it had
been established in the wake of the abdication of the last Czar, Nicholas II.
Eisenstein’s film, October, was a dramatization of the Bolshevik leaders,
including Lenin (played by a Moscow butcher with no acting experience because
Eisenstein thought he looked just like the real Lenin) and Trotsky, but it
didn’t get shown until 1928 because in the meantime Stalin had ousted Trotsky
from the Soviet leadership and Eisenstein was obliged to re-edit his film to
eliminate Trotsky and all the other upper-echelon Bolsheviks who had supported
him. (He left in two sequences in which the actor playing Trotsky had his back
to the camera — and at the premiere Stalin’s police goons ordered the film
stopped and the house lights turned on so they could find out who in the
audience had applauded when Trotsky appeared on screen.)
Pudovkin got his film completed and shown on schedule because it didn’t
depict any of the Bolshevik leaders; instead he and his screenwriter, Natan
Zarkhi (though the film’s imdb.com page gives the writer’s first name in its
English form, “Nathan”), managed to create a parable of both rural and urban
oppression and impoverishment that pulled off the trick just about any
political film has to: giving us enough individual characters to identify with
we can see how the repression affects people directly and also giving us
a sense of the largeness of the events overall. A character identified only as
“A Worker” (Aleksandr Chistyakov) and his wife (Vera Baranovskaya) leave the
farming region around Novgorod to come to St. Petersburg looking for work since
his mother has just died and a recently born daughter has just added to the
burden of feeding his extended family. Clearly they’re hoping that he’ll land a
job paying well enough not only to support them in St. Petersburg but give him
money he can send as remittances back to the rest of his family in Novgorod,
and he has a contact — another relative who has a job at the factory of
capitalist Lebedev (V. Obolensky). Unfortunately, his timing turns out to be
rotten: he arrives in St. Petersburg just as a communist agitator at Lebedev’s
plant successfully organizes its workers to stage a wildcat strike in response
to Lebedev’s order that the workers put in longer hours so he can fulfill a
government contract, which he used to bid up the price of his own company’s
stock. (There’s a weird scene early on in which, after we’ve seen only handfuls
of rural peasants and urban proletarians, a whole crowd of stock speculators
masses on the steps outside the St. Petersburg stock exchange and bids up the
price of Lebedev’s stock. It seemed odd, to say the least, that a film about
the class struggle ostensibly taking the side of the 99 percent would show so
many more of the 1 percent. “That’s so they could have fewer superheroes and
more villains,” Charles commented.)
Then World War I starts, the Worker gets drafted and he survives three years at
the front, only when he comes back Russia is in the middle of its revolution,
the Czar has been toppled and the Provisional Government is haplessly hanging
on as best it can against the onslaught of the Bolsheviks, who won the support
of the rank-and-file in the Russian military primarily by promising them an end
to the war while the other parties were pledging to continue it. They also won
the support of the peasants by promising to expropriate the big landowners and
distribute the land to individual peasants — a promise that kinda-sorta got
honored until 1929, when Stalin abruptly decided that the future of Russian
agriculture lay in collective farming, and he implemented that policy with his
usual thug-like determination and fervor. An officer still loyal to the
Provisional Government tries to order his troops to shoot the Bolshevik
militants, but instead the troops switch sides, the crew of the cruiser Aurora
mutinies and threatens to shell the city if the Provisional Government doesn’t
resign in favor of the soviets (the roughly organized workers’ and peasants’
councils through which the Bolsheviks ultimately gained control), the Czar’s
Winter Palace gets stormed and the Worker’s wife finds him in the street, dying
— in a piece of heart-rending (if somewhat predictable) irony, he survived
World War I only to get mortally wounded in the Revolution, but she’s able to
say his last goodbyes to him before he expires and she shows off her collective
spirit by giving the food she’d brought him (it was hard to see what was in her
little bucket — they looked like potatoes but the people she gave the
foodstuffs to were able to eat them immediately instead of having to cook them)
to the other Bolshevik fighters. She strolls through the now-deserted Winter
Palace — obviously Pudovkin got permission from the Soviet government to film
in the real one — and the contrast between her state and the preposterous
decorations of the Palace’s walls makes the point Pudovkin and Zarkhi intended
about the fundamental injustice of a handful of people at the top of a society
living lavishly while most everybody else, whose labor is generating the wealth
that the upper class seizes, is starving.
One French critic said of Russia’s two great silent directors, “Pudovkin’s
films resemble a song; Eisenstein’s, a scream,” and there are certainly some
quite lyrical shots in The End of St. Petersburg, including ones of
rivers flowing and others of farmers tilling fields (still with human-pushed
plows in the early 20th century!). The overall effect of this film
is somber and sad — if you want an exuberant celebration of the revolutionary
spirit, watch Eisenstein’s October instead — and of course it’s
impossible to watch this film today without imagining the sequel, the 74 years
during which the Communist party tyrannized Russia and ruled by force and
terror, then collapsed and led to yet another Russian oligarchy that has
restored St. Petersburg to its original name. (The Russian title St.
Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad reflects that in 1914, since Russia was
fighting Germany in World War I, the Czar’s government decided to change the
ending of the city’s name from the German “-burg” to the Russian “-grad,” both
meaning “city,” and after the Bolsheviks took over they took Peter the Great’s
name off the city he’d founded and put their own leader’s name on it instead,
and since it was the name for only three years almost nobody calls it
“Petrograd” unless they’re writing or talking about the Revolution.) The End
of St. Petersburg is a brilliant film, an acknowledged and deserved
classic; it’s true, as an imdb.com reviewer said, that it’s “great without
actually being entertaining,” though at least part of that depends on what you
consider “entertaining.” Just as Dwight Macdonald once wrote that to him the
French art film Last Year at Marienbad was entertaining (he defined “to
entertain” as “to hold the attention agreeably”) and a Jerry Lewis comedy
wasn’t, so to me The End of St. Petersburg is entertaining and a
modern-day gross-out comedy with farts, belches and semen hair-gel isn’t.
20/20
Movie Reviews [Richard Cross]
STORM OVER ASIA (Potomok Chingis-Khana)
Russia (74 mi) 1928 restored and synchronized (82 mi)
This Soviet film focusing on the British occupied portions of Tibet and Siberia during the time of the Russian Revolution is thematically notable for featuring Mongolian fur trappers, a huge break from the typical depictions of heroic Soviet masses that didn't exactly win Pudovkin a lot of friends. Apparently this rousing action epic that substitutes activities for plot was the first film to record Mongolia's traditional lifestyle. The attention to detail is amazing, but Pudovkin caricatures the evil British capitalists so badly it's more often laughable in unintended ways. The influence of D.W. Griffith is obvious, though Pudovkin's propaganda is perhaps less black and white if for no other reason than he still views the Mongolian heroes through the limited sphere of communist propaganda, which sees their religion as a corrupting influence. Pudovkin refuses to lessen the cinematic impact of any scene even one iota, but the value of the ethnographic depiction of Mongolia is reduced by the fact the authentic scenes of their culture, ceremony, and tradition are depicted in a condescending light. Daily life and suffering are depicted with what the director would like you to believe is documentary-like realism. In some sense that is the case, but as a whole this work is very manipulative in its stirring melodramatic ways, trying to call the audience to action with it's liveliness and verve. Despite it's character and ideological flaws it's still a very humanist film, siding with the few weak against the many powerful. The film is often very naive and dishonest, but in most technical aspect this is a masterpiece. The superb wide-angle panoramics allow the landscape to set the mood of the picture, bring out their effect on the people and depict the human's emotions. The montage is wonderful, perhaps not as good as Pudovkin's Soviet peers like Vertov and Eisenstein but certainly a different worthy style that surpasses them in building anticipation and fluidity. [8/23/06] ***
Film Sphere Shayan, July 6, 2015
Storm Over Asia is a reimagining of contemporary (to
1920s) Central Asia championing the re-emergence of Mongolians as a force to be
reckoned with against exploitative capitalism (embodied in the British). Though
Britain never invaded Mongolia and it was actually the Soviets who had control
of the region. With its portrayal of Soviets fighting the British in support of
the locals, the film ostensibly takes the side of communism against the
capitalist West, but the Soviets are peripheral and the activities the British
are accused of were reportedly actually carried out by the Soviets. Given its
ironical take on all parties the film could well have been intended to mock the
Soviet exploitation of the region, a view that finds support in the banning of
the film by the Soviet Union.
I saw the film without the score in the Kino version that was added later to
get a feel for the original article and it is remarkable how well it stands the
test of time. This is largely the result of a good scripting and acting and
fantastic editing. One sequence that stood out was the one after the
fur-trapper protagonist Bair, the Mongol (Valery Inkijinoff) challenges the
British fur buyer over the price of his fur. In the commotion that follows Bair
knifes the fur buyer's assistant who then runs out and holds his bleeding hand
up in the air in a symbolic low-angle framing following intertitles that say
'Avenge the white man's blood!'. A powerful montage of drum beating, the
hysterically screaming British fur buyer, a general giving orders, marching
army, panicking locals and the iconic bleeding hand tells you everything you
need to know. To really drive home the threat to the locals is a supremely
expressive slowed down turning of soldiers towards the camera, after a shot of
the British commandant (I. Dedintsev) on horseback.
Bair later turns out to be a descendant of Chengis Khan, which would hardly be
a big deal in real life since the number of his descendants run into the
millions, but the film uses this trope to create a hero out of him and to
condemn the British who having captured him, try to use his now mythic status
to strengthen their interests. Pudovkin is ironical in his treatment of not
just the capitalists but the monks (the Buddhist idea of transmigration of soul
is mocked) and even the hero Bair. When Bair lies helpless recovering from a
wound the intertitles mock his newfound status as 'Ruler'. Later Bair's
barbaric nature is hinted at when a shot of him clutching at his fur, now
nestling around the neck of the commandant's daughter is quickly cut with a
shot of the screaming girl.
This barbaric simplicity is championed by Pudovkin in the end with a suggestive
return to the mythical old power of the native Mongol as Bair is shown leading
a (possibly imaginary) horde to drive out the exploitative foreigners. 'Power
to the people' or 'anything but capitalism' is the dream Storm Over Asia nurtures
and the film is a great example of the potency of pre-sound Soviet cinema.
11.
Pudovkin 1 Readings Zabel: “Revolutionary Awakening ... photo stills
New York Times [Mordaunt Hall]
DESERTER (Dezertir)
Russia (105 mi) 1933
DESERTER
(Vsevolod I. Pudovkin, 1933) | Dennis Grunes
The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from the Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis
Proletarian solidarity across borders: German shipyard workers delay striking in order to complete an order that will fortify Soviet defense needs. During the strike, a young dockworker, starving, disillusioned, strays from the cause, deserting the picket-line. Like the farmer in Pudovkin’s End of St. Petersburg (1927), Karl Renn’s class consciousness is embryonic. It develops in Moscow, where he is sent as delegate to an international conference and sees for himself a just society founded in worker solidarity. He returns to help seed such possibilities at home.
A young woman distributes leaflets about the strike on the street. Authorities descend, and she takes off. As she hurriedly walks, every now and then she looks over her shoulder. Intercutting her flight is a police officer’s apparent pursuit of her; but when the sequence is resolved, he is in fact walking towards her, not after her. In effect, the woman’s agitation and fear bring her into the arms of the law—the object of her fear. What seems at first clever becomes psychologically penetrating.
A rapidly edited montage of shipyard labor is strengthened by sound effects, Dezertir being Pudovkin’s first sound film. Sounds burst out of silence and frequently, accompanying one image, derive from action shown in the next image. Based on a theoretical manifesto that Pudovkin and Eisenstein had devised four years earlier, Pudovkin’s use of certain sound effects is based on models of dialecticism and point-counterpoint; asynchronous sound (con)tests rather than reinforces image, with the combination of the two, the tension between them, generating an idea wholly contained in neither the image nor the sound—rather than dialectical montage, dialectical sound-image within a shot. For instance, a striker’s whistling accompanies a shot of another striker’s eating a sandwich: a harbinger of the hunger ahead for the momentarily carefree whistler.
DVD Savant Review: The End of St. Petersburg & The Deserter Glenn Erickson
New York Times Mordaunt Hall
Puenzo, Lucia
XXY B+ 91
Set in such idyllic seaside surroundings, this has a mythical flavor of Eden about it, as if in the midst of such pristine natural beauty, evil lurks and trouble ensues. To counter this illusion, there’s some graphic sexuality right at the outset that would feel right at home in a Carlos Reygadas film. Alex (Inés Efron) is a coming of age adolescent teen who harbors a deep secret, one that has kept the family on the run, dropping out of schools, searching for yet another remote environment where they can be left alone. Based on the short story "Cinismo" from the Argentine writer Sergio Bizzio, it examines the sexual awakening of a young girl who is having particular difficulty understanding her ambiguous sexual identity, a girl who for instance was recently kicked out of school for punching a guy, actually breaking his nose, yet also walks up to another boy, Alvaro (Martín Piroyansky), a complete stranger, and asks if he wants to fuck? That boy is paralyzed with indecision, yet intrigued by the openness of the offer. As it turns out, his parents are visiting Alex’s home for reasons that are not entirely clear, which has cast a cloud of suspicion in the air, especially as the adults remain far removed from the actual lives of their children. Alex appears edgy, reclusive, yet openly rebellious, a girl whose parents allow her plenty of free space, as if they’re used to her perpetual mood swings, and despite her father seeing the two engaged in a sex act, her parents refuse to interfere.
Despite centering on
the lives of the children, exploring the idea of personal choice and free will,
this film is as much about their parents, though at first they are seen only
sparingly, appearing to be more about what they are not doing, or at the very
least hesitating to do in the form of parental guidnace, but by the end they
become the focal point of their children’s lives, each in very different
ways. Efron is terrific in conveying the
sexual ambiguity of her life, brave and bluntly honest in moments, yet
emotionally reserved and totally despondent at other times. Alvaro has his own identity problems, seen
initially as teen confusion, not wanting to be separated from someone that took
such an interest in him, where his awkwardness leaves him isolated and alone. Both look to their parents for support, and therein
lies the heart of the film, as there are beautifully written scenes with both
fathers. The money shot near the end is
a parallel image of the two riding in the back seat of cars driven by their
respective parents sitting in the front, where they resemble prisoners in the
back of squad cars being transported by the authorities, where the contrast of
their freedom and/or incarceration is utterly remarkable. Alex’s father, Ricardo Darín, makes a
stunning transformation of his own by the end of the film, as his stern
countenance and macho bravura is as much what this film is about as anything,
and his performance is thoroughly absorbing.
Shot on the beaches of a remote Uruguayan fishing village, Piriápolis,
Maldonado, Uruguay (Image:Piriápolis,
Maldonado.jpg - Wikimedia Commons), where
incidentally the art house smash WHISKY (2004) was shot as well, this is an
exquisite landscape to explore the unfamiliarity with the human soul, where
it’s hard to decipher what really matters.
George Christensen at
Castration is also an issue in “XXY” the winner of the best picture award in Critic's
Weekly. It is a film about a 15-year old girl directed by a young
woman, both of whom were on hand to gleefully accept the award in the ceremony
preceding the film. The film starts with another teens-losing-virginity theme
when the girl tells a 16-year old boy, who is visiting her family in their
small Uraguayan fishing village, "I've never fucked anybody. Would
you like to?" The boy is shocked and doesn't know how to
react. He initially resists the girl, but in time becomes enamored with
her.
This was far from standard fare and was most deserving in
winning its award. The girl alone [Ines Efron] with
her vitality is a delight (she has just been kicked out of school for punching
out a guy), but she also is not entirely what she appears to be, allowing the
movie to go off into rarely explored territory.
The Guardian (Cath Clarke) review
It takes a little while, in
Argentinean director Lucía Puenzo's knotty and challenging debut, to work out
that teenage Alex is anything other than your average tomboy. Actually, she is
"intersexed" - what they used to called hermaphrodite, born with both
sexual organs but raised as a girl. Now, she seems more boy than girl, to put
it crudely, though Inés Efron as Alex makes the dilemma anything but clear-cut.
She looks a bit like the young Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry, all rangy limbs
and jutty angles, and gives a terrifically subtle performance: at times coy, at
others confrontational, sometimes downright sexually aggressive. Puenzo's real
achievement, however, is to make her film less about Alex's gender than about
families and unspoken anxieties. Unexpected and wonderfully thoughtful.
Jigsaw
Lounge [Neil Young] Edinburgh Film Festival report
Teenage love and angst in a remote Uruguayan fishing village
- the twist being that the romantic protagonists are a hermaphrodite (Ines
Efron) and the son of the surgeon who may perhaps be engaged to operate on
him/her. Low-key, slow-burning affair is shot in muted, greyey-bluey tones and
proceeds as much by significant looks and silences as dialogue. The script
isn't without pretentious undertones - the tormented hero/heroine's dad is an
expert in marine biology whose surname just so happens to be Kraken, and
there's all manner of symbolism involving turtles and other denizens of the
deep. The he/she stuff, while undeniably unusual, is really just an
attention-grabbing pretext to explore the relationships between parents and
children, and on those terms XXY quietly succeeds.
Time
Out London (Trevor Johnston) review
[5/6]
An armful of awards from Cannes,
Edinburgh and elsewhere have flagged up Lucía Puenzo’s
debut feature as something special. And it is. The subject matter’s unusual,
tracing the dilemma faced by parents of a teenage hermaphrodite as resurgent
masculine hormones threaten to change Daddy’s ‘girl’ for ever.
More remarkable though, is the confidence and maturity of its approach, since
what might have been preachy or even sensationalist proceeds through generous
empathy for its various parties, played out amid evocative surroundings on the
rugged coast of southern Uruguay. In an extraordinary central performance,
actress Inés
Efron turns her character’s specific personal issue into a volatile
expression of universal adolescent anxieties, her mannish frame a walking index
of androgynous uncertainty, her feelings churning over both an alienated
present (the family moved from Buenos Aires to keep her from harm) and a future
that promises transformation into…whom exactly?
That great Argentinian actor Ricardo
Darín anchors the proceedings brilliantly as the marine biologist father
who thinks his daughter is perfect as she is, but knows surgery and medication
would be required to sustain her femininity – hence the presence in this remote
enclave of a visiting surgeon and his disaffected teenage son (Martín
Piroyansky, another fearless contribution). Their curdled filial
relationship in turn offers another angle on parents too ready to define their
children through their sexuality, and further encourages understanding for
those outside conventional definitions.
Like Claire Denis’ best work, the film is alive to the precise emotional tenor
of every moment as it unfolds, which it does unpredictably, provocatively and
with affecting reserves of compassion.
San Francisco Chronicle (David Wiegand) review [4/4]
Lucía Puenzo's "XXY," which won the Audience Award
at this year's Frameline festival, as well as the Critics' Week grand prize at
On the surface, the film tells the story of a 15-year-old Argentine girl named Alex (Inés Efron) who was born with what doctors called "sexual ambiguity," caused by an extra X chromosome. Alex has reached an age where she wants to make her own choices about her gender, but her family, as well as a visiting surgeon, all have other ideas.
When Alex was born, her marine biologist father, Nestor (Ricardo Darín), resisted doctors' suggestions that they operate on her to remove her secondary sex organs. As a child, she was able to hide her condition from others, but now that she's a teenager, it has become more of a challenge. She has to take medication to keep her beard from growing, but in a stab at making a choice about her gender, she has stopped taking the pills.
Alex's mother (Valeria Bertuccelli) has invited the surgeon, his wife and his teenage son, Alvaro (Martín Piroyansky), to visit in order to convince her husband that Alex needs to have an operation. But when Alex's new friendship with Alvaro grows into something more, it sets off a kind of chain reaction that prompts some characters to open themselves to life while leaving others more closed to it than before.
Directing from her own script, based on a short story by Sergio Bizzio, Puenzo adopts an almost languid storytelling style. Dialogue is minimal, yet each frame overflows with telling visual detail. Nestor rescues sea turtles from poachers and fishermen. Early on, he slices the shell off a dead turtle to identify its sex. "Female," he announces. Later, he rescues a turtle that has lost a flipper. The creature will survive, but it can never return to the sea again. Alex keeps an aquarium filled with clownfish, a species that begins as male but may later become female. More explicitly, Alex has a collection of dolls, but all of them with rudimentary penises attached.
The genius of the film is that it tells much more than Alex's story alone. In fact, it becomes several stories, all of which focus on free will and personal destiny. We watch Alex's family struggle with allowing her to choose her path in life and, in so doing, find new grounding in their own lives. On the eve of his family's departure, Alvaro attempts to bond with his father. The results seem heartbreaking at first, yet we realize it's the boy's first step toward becoming his own person. The minimalist writing of this scene alone, enacted by Piroyansky with his eyes brimming with tears, is simply shattering.
Puenzo's gently masterful direction has elicited unerring performances from her cast, particularly Efron and Piroyansky. Darín and Bertuccelli are equally fine as Alex's parents.
The major elements of the film - Puenzo's script and direction, Natasha Braier's crystalline cinematography, the entire cast's performances - blend slowly and quietly at first, but once they take hold of our attention, we cannot look away.
indieWIRE review Michael Koresky from Reverse Shot
Though it's as sullen and damp-grey as its morose 15-year-old protagonist, Argentinean filmmaker Lucia Puenzo's directorial debut "XXY" doesn't really get inside the mind of young Alex as much as watch her with an awkward combination of fascination and empathy. It's both a success and a failing on the new filmmaker's part; her intention in making "XXY," to humanely depict a character who might in other films or literature be relegated to oddball supporting status, is undoubtedly noble. Yet by focusing almost exclusively on Alex's differences (she was born with both female and male genitalia), rather than offering other facets of her life for consideration, the film slightly shortchanges what could have been a beautifully full portrait of a teenager going through radical inner and outer turmoil.
Too often Alex feels more like a literary conceit than a person, a succinct embodiment of the confusion of adolescence, the terror of burgeoning sexuality adroitly made external. Puenzo doesn't do Alex (played by Ines Efron) any favors by pointedly placing her family and friends in heavily symbolic roles, all of which underscore rather than dilute her abnormality: her father, Kraken (Ricardo Darin), is a marine biologist given to puzzling over the sex of washed-up turtles; her mother's friend (German Palacios), whom she invites for a weekend at their home at the Uruguayan sea shore, is a plastic surgeon; the surgeon's son, Alvaro (Martin Piroyansky), is also going through frightening stages of sexual maturation and bafflement. Rather than tread lightly around all of this delicate material, Puenzo directs with a frank humorlessness that borders on ponderous.
Rarely is there a conversation in the film's ninety minutes that doesn't pertain to Alex's condition: her and her parents' indecision about whether to excise her male organs, now that she has stopped taking hormone medication (though she identifies as female, would that be cosmetic or simply castration, they wonder?), does form the narrative backbone, but with so many moments devoted to family members simply staring off into ominous, windswept spaces (in one scene, her mother, nicely played by Valeria Bertuccelli, suddenly reminisces about Alex's birth at a cloudy, rocky beach), one would think they had just begun thinking about these difficult choices at the film's outset.
Similarly, when Kraken sorrowfully tries to connect with a local gas station attendant who had a sex-change operation many years ago, he stumbles over his words "I have a daughter . . . a son..."; the thought that an ostensibly loving father hasn't in more than a decade been able to properly identify his own child as either male or female speaks to a certain lack of real-world grounding here.
But it's Alex and Alvaro's desperate stabs at sexual contact and emotional understanding that form the core of "XXY," and Puenzo does depict their inelegant fumbling with penetrating, if still dour, capability. Piroyansky effortlessly enacts the slack-jawed, tortured inwardness of the dizzied teenaged male who doesn't know what to do with his sudden bursts of sexual aggression, and Efron, with her hollowed-out eyes, attenuated bone structure, and intimidating stare (if there's anything confident about her it's her anger) is a compelling figure: shot in gritty, caressing close-ups by Puenzo, she looks at least thirty years old, wise beyond her years yet hobbled by disgust at her own body. Alex dares others to look at her, embracing her oddness as an emotional strength, and Efron cunningly depicts that mix of fragility and self-possession.
If only the entire film were as daring and untidy as Alex. Puenzo's debut is too overdetermined and saddled with explicit metaphor; it's the kind of film that deigns to have a pet lizard crawling over Alex's feet (most lizards are sexually dimorphic...get it?) while she reads to herself (aloud!) from a biology book about the evolutionary and embryonic dominance of the female sex. If Puenzo had found anything compelling about her characters outside of their most sensationalistic traits, then "XXY" might have been a more forceful unorthodox coming-of-age story; instead she abandons them at a particularly gloomy shore.
XXY - Salon Andrew O’Hehir
The House Next Door [Lauren Wissot]
XXY Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
XXY Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
Eye for Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [4.5/5]
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
Village Voice review Nick Pinkerton
Cinematical (Monika Bartyzel) review
XXY Allan Hunter at Cannes from Screendaily
Film Journal International (David Noh) review
The New York Sun (Martin Tsai) review
Cinema Without Borders Bijan Tehrani interviews the director
Time Out Chicago (Hank Sartin) review [4/6]
Time Out New York (Melissa Anderson) review [3/6]
Variety.com [Jonathan Holland]
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
YouTube - PIRIAPOLIS MALDONADO URUGUAY (3:28)
Puiu, Cristi
CIGARETTES AND COFFEE
Cigarettes and Coffee Michael Sicinski and the Academic Hack
At the end of Niki and Flo I was surprised to
discover that Puiu was that film's co-screenwriter. I'd already resolved to
check out his short film, since it won the Golden Bear in
THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU (Moartea domnului Lãzãrescu) B+ 91
Shot with such laser-like realism, many viewers may think this is a searing documentary about the abysmally corrupt Romanian State authorities, as seen through what resembles an antiquated, Kafkaesque health care system. Sitting through this film is like putting in an extra shift at work, as it amazingly resembles the ordinary rhythms and pace of being at work. Viewers should be receiving time and a half compensation, as we’re subjected to the mediocrity and prejudices and everyday mistreatment from several hospital staffs, resulting in a scathing and uncompromising look at class inequity, as the treatment of Mr. Lazarescu would be completely different if he was from another economic scale, or if he was somebody. It recalls the legendary death of blues great Bessie Smith, written about in Downbeat magazine by white record producer John Hammond after she was injured in an auto accident, where she was allegedly refused treatment at three different white hospitals before finally succumbing at a black hospital. This rumor lasted for decades, and was even re-mythologized in Edward Albee’s 1959 play The Death of Bessie Smith. As it turns out, despite Mr. Hammond’s refusal to recant his story, there is no truth to this total fabrication. Yet even if untrue, this mythical tale exposes a truth about Southern racism. LAZARESCU, accordingly, stands as a mythical tale of societal indifference.
LAZARESCU, though seemingly real, is a complete fabrication, shot by Oleg Mutu, scripted by the director and co-writer Razvan Radulescu, using professional actors to recreate two and a half hours of ultra realism to scathingly expose multiple truths about social injustice that could be anywhere around the world, telling the story of a man who survived the American WWII bombing campaign over Romania in 1944, which is his last coherent memory, his last moment of dignity before he loses consciousness from a series of fatal medical ailments, including a swollen liver which is placing dangerous blood pressure against his brain. The film shows how random the quality of medical care can be, where the standard seems to be pawning off patients as someone else’s responsibility, as poor Mr. Lazarescu is driven from hospital to hospital, each distinctly unwilling to deal with him as a patient needing medical care, instead they start creating myths or rumors deconstructing who he is. He’s a drunk, an alcoholic, he smells, he pees on himself, he’s been drinking so he’s getting what he deserves, does he have any family, is he anybody, is he alone, we can’t help him, why not try someplace else?
The same series of 3-minute emergency room tests are performed at each different hospital, and the entire process stops dead in its tracks, turning from chaos to a hushed quiet as the doctors are looked upon as holy shamans, demanding absolute obedience as if sent from on high, to perform this exact same standard medical procedure, yet somehow, in each hospital except the last, the medical teams are not up to helping this hopelessly ill man. They view him as an irritating interruption of their routines. Even when they eventually perform brain and liver scans, it takes a series of bribes and personal favors, even sexual flattery, to finally get him the tests he needs. The last hospital, however, doesn’t mess around. They simply perform professionally according to the need, but by that time, the patient is near death. He isn’t answering any questions, he isn’t making a fuss, he is completely docile and helpless, as patients are so much easier to render assistance to when they can’t utter a word. Earlier in the night, he was something of a chatterbox, confusing friend and foe alike, which as it turned out, only prolonged his humiliating ordeal. Initially, this was expected to be the first of a six part series, but that ambitious project never materialized. The Romanian writer/director, who’s afraid of flying, opted not to show up for the Chicago Film Festival, but his film took home the Silver Hugo 2nd prize.
The
Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2006) Bryant Frazer from
Deep Focus
Saddening but riveting, and possessed of a positively wicked wit, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is executed with the sensitivity of great literature and the panache of bravura filmmaking.
The 63-year-old Dante Remus Lazarescu is stirred from an
alcohol-and-loneliness-induced waking slumber in his filthy
Director Christi Piui takes a documentary-style approach that never feels heavy or oppressive, and the performances are pitch-perfect and sometimes richly funny. Scenes showing Lazarescu stretched out, helpless, on a gurney, while doctors and nurses converse about their personal lives, berate him for drinking, or try to figure out how to get him an MRI, will have a disquieting currency for anyone who’s ever arrived, bewildered, in an emergency room and sweated the diagnosis. But this one-night-long odyssey through the Romanian healthcare system is also a sharp-eyed look at the dissolution of family and other social networks, and the isolation that can come with it.
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
I hate to say it, but the exclamations of "masterwork" on this one may well be the result of Puiu exceeding very low expectations for his national cinema. (Personally I much preferred Pintilie's last film, but that's neither here nor there.) Last year the highbrows flipped for the French "Judge Judy," and this year it's the cruel Romanian "ER" episode, although there's nothing inherently wrong with that. In fact, there's no denying Puiu's supple observational direction. His handheld camera always manages to land up in the right place, and his fluid orchestration of the film's extended sequences (often in nearly real-time) is impressive without undue showiness. Some I've talked to found the film's deliberate pace somewhat frustrating, but I had the exact opposite reaction. From moment to moment, Lazarescu is crammed with incident and detail. Its observational pace is pitch-perfect, since it not only mirrors the blend of tension and boredom unique to the emergency-room experience, but filmically it allows Puiu to slowly escalate the situation, leaving us to watch helplessly as the mythologically-burdened Dante Remus Lazarescu (Ion Fiscuteanu) devolves from a slow burn to a complete fadeout. But the film’s problems are ones of scale, approach, and misjudged means. As Lazarescu is shuttled from hospital to hospital by a beleaguered but sympathetic ambulance driver (Luminta Gheorghiu), the medical neglect increases exponentially, and eventually beggars belief. Unless Romania is home not only to the most overworked and understaffed health care system on earth, but the pettiest physicians ever to mutter the Hippocratic Oath with their fingers crossed behind their back, the world of Lazarescu simply makes no sense. Now, the estimable Lee Walker has called me out for ultra-literalism on this point, retorting, “Yes. And surely some government official would have told Josef K. what the charges against him were.” Fair enough, but Kafka’s very language allowed him to create a world and a context in which the full force of institutional indifference was foregrounded. It’s the basic human problem in Kafka. Others are clearly seeing a similarly convincing comedy of horrors in Puiu’s film, but his fly-on-the-wall approach (which some are comparing to Wiseman, for good reason) implicitly asks us to see in Lazarescu a universe at least tangentially related to ours. Instead, we’re stuck in a kind of horror film with no persuasive premise. Its juxtaposition of mythic grandeur and ordinariness is admirable but unconvincing. It stacks the deck by tormenting a helpless stroke victim and asking us to be angry at tormentors (doctors? alcohol? The Gods?) too vague to identify. And even as I write this, I recognize that I may just be predisposed against Human Condition films, and this one is just whizzing past me as I stand adjusting myself at the plate.
The
Death of Mr. Lazarescu | Film Review | Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
The "real" and the
"reel" are virtually synonymous in Romanian filmmaker Cristi Puiu's
second feature, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which comes on like a force
of nature. Mr. Lazarescu (Ion Fiscuteanu) has a headache, which he
self-diagnoses as an aftershock of an age-old ulcer operation. After a day of futile
self-medication, the man calls 911, at which point Puiu spotlights a subversive
road to hell scarcely paved with good intentions. Radiating a startling
intensity, the film demands to be reckoned with.
In the time it takes for his ambulance to arrive, Lazarescu vomits on himself
and changes clothes, not once but twice, and beckons his next-door neighbors
for help. On the television: a news report about a bus accident that spiraled
out of control, seemingly unconnected to his crisis. The victims of this
horrible accident are now scattered all over Bucharest's hospitals, and it's
into this mess that the lonely old man is swept in. In return, he's callously
swept out again, shipped from one hospital to the next by one browbeating
medical personnel after another—sticklers for red tape who not only glibly
dismiss Lazarescu because he stinks of alcohol but condescend to the ambulance
nurse, Mioara (Luminita Gheorghiu), who bears witness like some frustrated
angel of mercy to the man's dehumanization.
Seamlessly edited and choreographed, the film seems to unspool in a single,
unbroken movement, and though it appears as if the story is simply about the
death of one man, a larger, spectacularly perverse picture—something of a state
of the union address—begins to emerge as the narrative charges forward. Puiu's
images appear to move in slow motion as Lazarescu is absurdly carted from one
location to the next, but like a piece of gum stuck to someone's shoe, they
capture quick flashes of subtext impossible to shake loose: the dying man's
female neighbor complains to Mioara about Lazarescu's deceased Hungarian wife
bringing liquor into their home; doctors and nurses gripe about being
understaffed and underpaid; and as Lazaresu sinks deeper and deeper into
unconsciousness, he begins to ramble about his family and the bombs that once
rocked his world.
Lazarescu's first name isn't Dante for nothing. From hell and back, the man is
subjected to a series of unfortunate events that represents a purgatory of
exasperating ineffectuality and inaction. But Puiu never overplays this
symbolism or loses sight of a larger humanist picture. Forcibly directed, the
film rarely looks away from its main character, and when it does (not least of
which when the lights go out over and over again outside the old man's
apartment), his absence is felt like a punch to the gut, or a beating heart
ripped out from a body politic that's slowly begun to give out on itself.
by Quintín Dial M for Emergency, from
Cinema Scope (link lost)
It took quite a fight, but finally good judgment prevailed, and my Un
Certain Regard jury gave the Fondation GAN prize to Moartea Domnului
Lazarescu, which means The Death of Mr. Lazarescu in Romanian—a
language rarely spoken in winning films of any kind. At the
I’ve never seen Cigarettes and Coffee, but in 2002 I served as a
juror in Thessaloniki where Puiu’s first feature, Stuff and Dough, a
road movie about two young men getting hooked up with the Romanian
Mob—ironically, a film that takes place almost entirely in a car—was in the
competition. (By the way, the dismissal of president Theo Angelopoulos and
director Michel Demopoulos from the
Although I was impressed by Puiu’s debut, I was not prepared for this second
feature, an explosion and an exercise in grandeur. Played by Ion Fiscuteanu ,
often on his back, Lazarescu Dante Remus is a drunken widower who is lonely,
retired, smelly, bad tempered, and surrounded by ugly cats and stupid
neighbours. One day, he wakes up feeling ill, with a headache and stomach pain.
He will end his journey early the next morning lying unconscious, prepared to
undergo an operation that won’t save him, after entering four different
hospitals in the outskirts of
With it endless night that takes two-hours-and-34 minutes in sordid apartments and nightmarish hospitals—most of the scenes are shot in so-called real time, all handheld—The Death of Mr. Lazarescu cannot be described as light. But the film is far from being dull or heavy-handed due to the fabulous, complex, and intriguing construction of slopes that accumulate to an overwhelming effect, even as these slopes cleverly differ. Every doctor, every nurse, every part of every hospital is different, and the multiple portrait of a monster of a thousand faces amounts to more than just a choral film: what’s most striking in The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is the organic behaviour of the medical body. The film, entirely fictitious, can be compared to a documentary by Frederick Wiseman, with its unique ability to make institutions speak.
But Puiu’s work goes way beyond social commentary. Its raw material is not
the hospital, but cinema itself. Puiu’s film is a system where all kinds of
signifiers are allowed to flow, where a continuum of meanings pile one on top
of the other. Take, for instance, the symbolic names: Lazarus, Angel, Virgil,
Dante. These are names that resound powerfully but never have any obvious
associations. As the director points out, for instance, we know that Jesus
resurrected Lazarus, but nobody has ever told the story of his death. And so
on: Remus founded
Lazarescu is only 63, but he is treated as a useless piece of junk. Everything and everyone conspires against him: his bad mood, his drinking habits, the quality of the emergency services, aggravated that night by a horrific bus accident that led to hundreds of victims. But, above all, Mr. Lazarescu’s enemy is authoritarianism, so embodied in Romanian society (and elsewhere), and so easy to adopt as a maxim by the members of the medical profession, leading to the contempt and mistreatment of patients. But the film functions along the lines of a thriller, not only because of the mysteries of medical diagnosis and its procedures based on hints and clues, but also because it’s obstructed by laziness and arrogance. Nobody knows what’s wrong with Mr. Lazarescu, but he slowly and steadily deteriorates until he reaches a state where he can no longer communicate. Ironically enough, everybody puts forward his or her guess before the truth is established, though by that time, maybe it’s no longer important. Puiu’s treatment of the subject is so intelligent that he even builds a suspense that is very difficult to appreciate, although it’s essential for the plot.
While displacements in the city are horizontal, and the descent towards the
circles of hell is vertical, Puiu’s film assumes a tone very similar to the
favorite genre of this year’s
Puiu emerges from this Cannes not only as an extremely competent filmmaker,
capable of delivering a film of such complexity, but also as one of the few in
the world that after two films is very close to a master. The impressive
solidity of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu lies on skills that extend far
beyond technical matters: a sense of deep humanity keeps the film from being
academic, didactic, or cruel, in spite of the weight of its subject. There is
an attitude of restraint, a sense of modesty in the film that doesn’t prevent
the exposure of the truth (to the extent that Puiu doesn’t show death in front
of the camera): the same sense of ethics is required for the proper practice of
medicine. The unforgettable experience of watching Puiu’s film in the worst of
contexts (fatigue, confusion, hypnosis) is a vaccine against frivolity and
manipulation, drugs that emerging filmmakers find easy to use in order to make
a strong impression in
Interview: Cristi Puiu - Film Comment Mark Cummins interview, May/June 2006
Initially conceived under the spell of hypochondria and James Cagney, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is a cinematic experience of singular intensity and vision. A rueful record of its eponymous hero’s final six hours on earth, it depicts the deterioration of Lazarescu Dante Remus as he is shuttled among Bucharest emergency rooms whose indifference to his condition would be darkly comedic if it didn’t have such mortal implications.
When I first saw it last year in the New York Film Festival, Death of Mr. Lazarescu upstaged the solid work of such better known European auteurs as the Dardennes Brothers and Michael Haneke. With its opening at New York’s Film Forum later this month, it will become the first Romanian film to receive a stateside theatrical run since Lucien Pintille’s The Oak in 1994. The director and co-writer of this breakthrough is 38-year-old Bucharest native Cristi Puiu. Death of Mr. Lazarescu, his second feature film, is envisaged as the first in a series of films entitled “Six Stories from the Bucharest Suburbs.”
The film opens in the apartment of Mr. Lazarescu (Ion Fiscuteanu), an aging widower, whose only companions are his cats, a blaring television set, and a potent bottle of spirits. With its lengthy tracking shots, handheld aesthetic, and dreary milieu, Death of Mr. Lazarescu may appear at first glance to be a familiar kind of art film, predictably vérité in its style and social-realist in its content. But whereas such films usually extract a measure of dramatic life from the sameness of existence,Death of Mr. Lazarescu is structured around the illness and impending death of its title character. Shooting such a charged scenario in a close approximation of real time allows Puiu to convert banal material into surreal encounters, as when a doctor wanders into the admitting room and asks for a cell phone battery in order to make a call, all the while ignoring his patient whose life is inexorably ebbing away.
One might appreciate the irony of such situations if everything that happens to Mr. Lazarescu and his custodian (Luminita Gheorghiu) weren’t so damnably petty. Still, the film’s remarkably dark portrait of human behavior and psychology is uncorrupted by misanthropy: Puiu knows to be human is to err. His universe may be whispering on this particular night, but it’s not running a tally on all these sins of omission. To be sure, the story of Lazarescu Dante Remus, pitched somewhere between swallowed laughter and psychic terror, is no divine comedy. Yet curiously, the film’s ending has the effect of a blessing, as though the universe had just been opened up a little more. As with other aspects of the movie, this enigma does not readily yield to scrutiny. But if I had to hazard a guess as to how Puiu achieves this rarified feeling, it would be that The Death of Mr. Lazarescu—at once a meditation on mortality, a portrait of loneliness, and an indictment of moral malaise—is chiefly a film made with faith, hope, and love.
Why do you think this Romanian tale has resonated so much in the international festival circuit?
I don’t think I can give you the right answer, just a supposition which is related to a Truffaut quote: “A film has to tell us something about life and something about cinema.” So this is what I think: the film contains a vision of life—the story about a human being who dies alone, surrounded by the indifference of the others—and a vision of cinema. For me, cinema is less an art form than a technique for investigating reality. And this is not a Romanian tale, but a tale from Romania.
When you say “investigating reality,” what do you mean?
Reality is like a monster with many heads. We are talking about an object that is not defined. I am trying to define reality and what it consists of. So it becomes for me very passionate, very enjoyable, and challenging.
You have characterized your movie as having a “typically Romanian slowness.” Do you mean slowness in the way you tell the story?
It is more about a lack of responsibility than about slowness. We Romanians are as intelligent and stupid and kind and evil and talented as any other people on this planet. The problem we have is related to courage. We don’t have the guts to assume our responsibilities, to accept our failures and our mistakes and our crimes, to accept who we are. I don’t even know if we know the meaning of the word. The concrete expression of this is a long series of hesitations that lead to slowness.
How has this story played in your native country? Has it been well received?
The film was pretty well received and the reactions were rather positive. Nevertheless, some people got really pissed off by the story—the way I portray the characters and the situations—saying that this film affects the image of Romania abroad.
Were there any cinematic or literary models that you were thinking of when you were making the film?
My main influences come from Romanian literature and poetry, artists that have influenced me in general. One is Eugene Ionesco and his Theatre of the Absurd. The others are two poets whom I’d call “the poets of the silent despair,” George Bacovia and Virgil Mazilescu. From universal literature and art I found some other models such as Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi. My conception of cinema is the result of the “lessons” I got from the authors above and the discovery of the works of Cassavetes, Wiseman, Rohmer, and Depardon.
While your film has the naturalism of those of Cassavetes, you film seems wider in scope than his would be. I would compare Cassavetes to a painter’s portrait, but Death of Mr. Lazarescu is more akin to a panorama or tableau.
Could be. I see what you mean. I think that is a secondary effect of the fact that 10 years ago I suddenly decided to make films after I discovered Cassavetes and Direct Cinema, and these kinds of documentaries, Wiseman and Depardon and so on. I would say my film is an expression of the way I understand their work. And the way I understand how to make films as well, because I am following in their footsteps. Step by step, I am interested in going further to discover things they couldn’t discover in their own work. But it may appear to be a panorama because there are so many characters.
A greater ensemble.
Right. And the central story, you might not see that kind of structure in Cassavetes’ work. So much tension, the danger so close—well, maybe in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie—otherwise they’re somehow interior dramas. But here you take part in the drama of this character Mr. Lazarescu. But I prefer to think—and I hope this is true—that I have achieved something to John Cassavetes. To say to Mr. Cassavetes, Mr. Wiseman, and Mr. Depardon, I did my homework.
What first made you want to make a film about the failure of humans to act with kindness to a sick man?
The fear I have of death and of the failure to communicate. The revelation of the loneliness of a certain kind of life. The discovery of the fact that we are acting according to a certain model which is defined by personal priorities. The books of Henri Laborit and Paul Watzlawick.
Do you think of the carelessness shown to Mr. Lazarescu as a collective failure or as a failure of individuals? As a problem of national character? Or is it institutional— the failure of modern health care to provide anything more than a medical cure?
No. In my opinion, there’s no such thing as collective failure or individual failure regarding the carelessness shown in Death of Mr. Lazarescu. And, for sure, it has nothing to do with “national character,” whatever that means. The carelessness you are talking about is a state of fact, a dimension of the individual. This carelessness is the name of the interest we have for ourselves given by others, the dark side of egoism, which is what keeps us alive. Sad but true.
You have said the movie is about the failure to love, but it is also about what Mr. Lazarescu calls “the problem of mortality.” You ask your audience to watch a man die before their eyes. Were you ever worried that this was too much to ask of them?
I worried, yes, but not for long. I conceive of cinema and music and literature and art in terms of testimony. I am interested in an author as long as his work represents a confession. I am making films about myself, and Death of Mr. Lazarescu is an example (a secondary effect) of me thinking about my own death. For years and years I asked myself about the function an artist can have in a community, and I tried to define his status. It is not an easy job, especially when the community is so skeptical about you and your “products.”
Some time ago, rereading the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen to my older daughter, I realized that I had been in touch with one possible definition of the artist for a long time (and since then I am more and more persuaded that it is so), and that is the child who’s shouting, “The Emperor is naked!” So I’m trying to raise myself to the level of this child and tell you, the audience, just what I think and feel—just what I can see from my window (like André Gide’s TITIR).
Earlier you mentioned Ionesco. There is an interesting quote by him as regards the artist: “The basic problem is, if God exists, then what is the point of literature? And if he doesn’t exist, what is the point of literature?” Would you agree with his sentiment?
Yeah, well, this is my problem, you see. People call me a film director now. And before I started doing this I was a painter. And I think it is stupid in both cases. It’s hard for me to believe in this. I enjoy this activity, but it is very hard for me to start because I am questioning the roots, the basis of this activity. What is the point of making films or telling stories? There too many stories already, and all these stories are the same. Well, maybe the point is to tell the same story differently.
There is a character in Kafka’s The Trial, a painter called Titorelli, who paints dozens of paintings of a tree in the middle of a field. So I agree with him: what is the point of making films? But you have to do something, and making films is a part of life as much as teaching people or being a policeman or a doctor. But if you are questioning the foundations of any human activity as Ionesco did, relating this to God as he did, then everything disappears. Everything loses its sense, so I agree with Ionesco. At the same time, he did write.
In the original plan for the screenplay, the sick man is a John Doe, unconscious for the duration of the story. When and why did you choose to give the character a name and a distinctive personality?
We decided (Razvan Radulescu and I) to change the point of view and to focus on the patient when we found out that it would have been impossible to build up this story—the journey from one hospital to another with an unconscious patient. We did some research in various hospitals, and every doctor we met told us that they cannot turn away a patient who’s comatose. And this was, after all, a good thing because it allowed us to develop a second story inside the original story of refusal and indifference, the story of the lonely and senseless life of a flesh-and-blood individual. If we had stuck with John Doe, the entire story would have been a sterile demonstration and a big lie.
Could you talk about Mr. Lazarescu’s deterioration and his disjointed speech? One of the most interesting aspects of the movie to me is the decay of his mind. It is sad but occasionally very funny. I couldn’t help feeling though that the meaning of some of his statements had been lost in the English translation. Does a statement like “my belly swelled out my back” have any greater meaning in Romanian?
During two years of active hypochondria from 2001 to 2003, I thought I had ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). This awful disease affects speech, and this was the reason I chose a neuralgic illness for Lazarescu. The prospect of having ALS, of being unable to express myself, was and remains one of my biggest fears. Hopefully it was just hypochondria.
We did lose some of the meaning in translation, but in the end I feel we preserved the essence. “My belly swelled out my back” has no larger meaning in Romanian, but it is important to relate this line to the actor, who has a very distinct physique. I adapted certain lines according to the profiles of the actors I cast. In the first draft of the script, for example, Lazarescu’s sister had to come from Craiova, which is a town in southern Romania. But after casting Ion Fiscuteanu, I changed Lazarescu’s biography. I moved his sister from Craiova to Tirgu Mures because Fiscuteanu lives in Tirgu Mures (a Transylvanian town, half-Hungarian, half-Romanian). I invented a Hungarian ex-wife, and I took advantage of Fiscuteanu’s accent. In the same spirit, I invented lines and disjointed them according to Fiscuteanu’s profile (cultural, physical, political, etc.).
The ending of the film is very powerful. There seems to be a sense of peace, but can we make peace with all the human folly that has preceded it? Does your movie, as Chekhov proposes is the function of art, “prepare us for tenderness”?
I don’t know how to respond to this. Chekhov’s proposal—no offense—sounds to me more appropriate to the preparation of Wiener schnitzel. But this doesn’t mean he’s not right. I love Chekhov, and, be sure, I love Wiener schnitzel very much.
The film’s final cut is rather abrubt. Did you always have in mind this sort of ending?
This cut may appear perverse to a certain kind of audience—though not to everyone I have encountered. I have met some people have told me this is the best cut of the film.
I think it’s certainly part of the power of the ending, but what is its function? Is this an arbitrary endpoint or must Lazarescu’s story end here?
Well, a film can end anywhere. But I did not want to show him dying. Because I think it could have been pornographic, indecent, and immoral. And stupid anyway. Showing what? The cinematic convention of a character dying? How we die in cinema? We didn’t have so many options. When you are shot by a cowboy, when you are bitten by Dracula, there are conventions. There are not so many options when you are telling the story of someone like Mr. Lazarescu with a really serious health problem. How can you show him dying? Show his breathing stop? Then people would say, “Okay. So he dies finally.”
Which is not the point.
Right, because the point is the slow death. I don’t mean to sound too philosophical; death for me is not abstract. I am very scared of death, this event that is going to happen I hope not for another hundred years. The more you think about it, the more scared you become. Discovering that from the moment you are born, you start dying little by little—it was terrible for me to arrive at this conclusion.
And what is the death of Mr. Lazarescu? It’s the last day of a person who understands how to live his life in a certain way. And his last day looks like his entire life. He loses many things during this last day, and during his life he has lost things, important persons—his wife, his daughter, and so on—so now he’s losing his dignity, his speech, his hair at the end. And he’s caught up in little conflicts with many people, with doctors, his neighbors, with his paramedic. He has his opinions and so on. And it’s so cheap, in fact, everything that happens to him. I think death is the same for anyone, for figures of much greater importance than Lazarescu, Einstein, or Michelangelo, for instance. Yet there is something particularly sad about everything that happens to him.
There are different qualities of sadness, though. I felt angry or frustrated for portions of the movie, but at the end I felt beyond being angry with the characters. The camera is so stable and slow—is this a kind of resignation?
The camera is silent; it has followed him through his last day. When Lazarescu has stopped moving, I told Andrei [Butica] who shot the film that this was an indication of paying respect to someone who is leaving this world. You don’t have to move the camera, I said, you only have to pay attention to what has happened and to pay respect.
When the paramedic says she can’t stay with him any longer, I felt it exposed the limit to human kindness. She has followed his journey, paid attention, but there is a limit to how far she can go.
In terms of scriptwriting, it was very delicate, her exit and also her introduction. We could not have her come and check him very quickly and go to the hospital. We had to keep her in the apartment to make her become part of his life, his intimacy. So that was one problem, how to introduce the paramedic. But then we had the other problem, how to make her leave. All along the nurse is the single person who is paying attention to Lazarescu. She is not fighting for him like a relative would have done perhaps, but she’s staying, she’s very close to him. She is full of compassion. She is human. Some people have written that she is Mr. Lazarescu’s guardian angel, but really she is just a normal person faced with a choice—what is her position, what will she decide.
It was part of the job, but then she has to leave and continue her job. Maybe in real life, a person would think of this for one more day and then forget. So this was a problem. But at the same time her leaving was somehow for the benefit of the film. Why should she have stayed with him? There is no reason; she has to do another job.
It would be another kind of story if she had stayed.
Yes, a melodrama. Telling us what? That there are some good people in the world? We know that. The story of Lazarescu has to end like this.
One of things that struck me on re-watching the film is how much time we spend in his apartment.
Yes, it is 55 minutes before they leave the apartment. I needed this duration to show him alone—especially for the first 15 minutes. You see, I am very scared of this loneliness. I am very scared of separation. The film was invited to 70 or 80 festivals, and I only went to five of them because I don’t like to leave home, to separate myself from those I love. So it was important to me to show him alone.
That said, I think that (though I may not be in the best position to comment on this) when you watch the film for a second time, the beginning of the film is a huge bonus. You know what’s going to happen to Mr. Lazarescu, so you are much more focused on what he is saying, because he is not unconscious, he means everything he says, he is in control of himself.
For me it was very important to establish these facts—I had two years of hypochondria. At the time I was watching a lot of films. Once I was watching a gangster film with James Cagney, The Roaring Twenties. The music and the era and the clothes and the props and the sets and the faces were not my world. I didn’t live in that time. I only know it from the movies. I was really scared of dying at the time, yet I became very involved with this movie. I like James Cagney very much. I feel very comfortable watching him, his acting. He’s full of energy. The story was quite simple, nothing spectacular, but I was enjoying it. And then suddenly I asked myself the question, if I die right now, who will die? Me with my life story or me as a spectator of this film? A guy who identifies with James Cagney on the screen, with this music and that era, a period of time I know nothing about. Everything seemed to me very fake.
This was a sort of starting point for Death of Mr. Lazarescu. I thought this is so fucking absurd: to leave this world with someone else’s stories in your head. You build your identity, your life, your self-image, your way of thinking, way of acting, way of being; and suddenly, when you say goodbye to the world, you hear someone speaking about a football game or a new BMW model. You leave this world with this kind of shit in your head. So what interested me was, what is happening in the head of someone who is dying?
What sorts of things are going through Lazarescu’s head?
I worked very hard on this. To suggest things, for instance, when Lazarescu is waiting for the medicine from his neighbors. While he is sitting on the stairs, a woman and her daughter walk by (my wife and older daughter actually). I put this there because I wanted to make him think of his wife and his daughter. There are pairs of women throughout the film. That’s why, for instance, there are two women washing him in the end. There were some other moments when choosing female doctors was important. It is quite impossible not to think of your own stuff, of your own problems, of your own suffering when you are watching a woman’s face and you know that there are very important women in your life. That’s why it was very important for the film to have at the end three women—this is before the paramedic leaves—as a parallel to his wife who is gone, his daughter in Canada, and his sister who is coming. His life was conditioned by women, determined by women. That is why the scene where he is losing his hair, I would compare to Samson and Delilah. He is losing his energy. Delilah is the woman who is cutting the hair. I wanted this. I wanted a Lazarescu with a life determined by women.
So the story contains foreshadowing and parallels, and you chose a very evocative, allusive name for Lazarescu. Where does this impulse come from? Do you plan to do the same in your next film?
No, I don’t plan to repeat it. In our discussions, Razvan, my co-screenwriter, said that I used to say we live in a perfect world created by God. And if this creation is perfect, it means everything is related to everything. From close or even afar, there is some interaction between us even if we don’t know it. Maybe you interact with the Amazon Delta, though you might never know how. I think there is a certain determinism. The same goes for characters from novels and universal literature.
Razvan thought the contrary. He used to say, even if there is no God, everything is related to everything. It makes sense, of course, that things are related. And in fact what is funny and sad at the same time, is that we are condemned to make sense of and to search for hidden meaning in certain events or certain names. And so we began to play with this: what is the proper name for an anonymous? Is it a banner name? Or, on the contrary, do you give him a name that signifies something? We chose this latter route, playing with names and signs and inserting premonitions of death. For instance, there is the neighbor coming with the drill he borrowed, and the doctor from the CT scan who says Lazarescu has to go to the neural surgeon to have his head drilled.
There are lots of things at the end of the film that relate to the beginning, some in the script and some I discovered in the shooting. That’s why when we shot in the apartment, we chose not to make many changes. They had this washing machine in the kitchen with this round window. I shot Lazarescu speaking on the phone in conversation with a wide angle because I wanted to have this washing machine in the image—it reminded me of the round gate of the CT scan. It was a visual premonition of it. I discovered little things like this because we shot the film in the hospital and then came back to the apartment. Though the last thing we shot was the shaving of his head, which was really delicate.
Your plan for Six Stories From the Bucharest Suburbs reminds me not only of Rohmer but also James Joyce’s Dubliners, which he described as a “chapter in the moral history of his country.” Do you hope to achieve something similar?
Ultimately, I really want to get six films that evoke this period of time with a strong and important documentary dimension. I am searching now for Romanian films made in the Seventies and Eighties. I was born in 1967, so this period of time is very important to me. Romania has changed a lot. It is very hard to find images of old Bucharest in Romanian fiction. From time to time you can see a corner of the university square or the royal palace, old cars and tramways and things like this. And when I see them, I become very nostalgic. It moves me a lot when I see this—even if the film is stupid.
The same thing happened to me recently. While on a trip I went to a movie that was shot in the neighborhood where I grew up—and I was moved just by that, not by the movie.
Yes, and this is important, a film’s background. People, cars, buildings—they move me a lot. I would like to get important parts of Bucharest in my films. This film was Bucharest by night, but I want to shoot the next one during the day with exteriors and open space.
What will it be about?
I want to develop a story about adultery, and it’s not easy at all. Partly because so many films have been made on this topic. And I would like to tell the story of the body of the adultery—usually you start with its head or its tail. The head is how you fell in love with a woman who is not your wife, and the tail is how your wife discovered the adultery and then the action starts. It has to be possible to build a drama based just on the body: a relationship you have with a woman who is not your wife that your wife will never discover. Since it is like this, how do you build the drama when there is no conflict? I am very interested in this. Otherwise it is very artificial—you know, with a narrator who says, “Here I am going to tell you the story of my first experience, how I became a sinner.” I’m really working hard on this, and it is not easy.
I am afraid as I have talked with you about Death of Mr. Lazarescu, I have made make it sound so serious and highbrow. It is not a cerebral film, but an emotional one. Still, were you concerned as you were making it that your film would be seen as something like medicine (which would be ironic considering its subject), something that is good for one, but not something one enjoys? Or do you see this as a false distinction?
I think that every human being has friends and enemies. I am like everyone else and this model applies to the movies I make: some people like them and some others don’t. And this is okay. What is really great in filmmaking (and in art, in general) is that people you have never met, from another corner of the world and a different culture, can write about your film and really get it. They understand every detail of your film, your point of view, your philosophy, your pain. You read the review and your fear of death starts to diminish. I call those people potential friends. Being asked so many times for whom I am making films, I’ll answer now (and to you, too, even if you didn’t ask me this): I make films for myself, for my friends, and for my potential friends.
BFI | Sight &
Sound | The Death Of Mr Lazarescu Mark
Cousins from Sight and Sound, November
2005
BFI | Sight & Sound
| The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) Michael
Brooke from Sight and Sound, August
2006
East
European Film Bulletin [Moritz Pfeifer]
The Art of
Dying | Village Voice J. Hoberman, April 18, 2006
Pick of the week: A natural-born
Romanian killer - Salon.com Andrew
O’Hehir
The
Death of Mr. Lazarescu - Reviews - Reverse Shot James Crawford, May 11, 2006
The
Death of Mr. Lazarescu By Nicolas Rapold - Reverse Shot May 11, 2006
Movies
that make you think [Jugu Abraham]
Not
Coming to a Theater Near You [Leo Goldsmith]
The
Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) | PopMatters
Marisa Carroll
Last
Impressions | The New Yorker David
Denby, May 1, 2006
Surrender
to the Void-[Steven Flores]
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Leeds Film Festival report
BOMB Magazine — Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu by ... Branden King from Bomb magazine, Spring 2006
The Death of Mr
Lazarescu - kamera.co.uk
Antonion Pasolini
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Notes of a Film Fanatic [Mat Viola]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Talking
Pictures [Howard Schumann]
Strictly
Film School Acquarello
'The Death of Mr Lazarescu' directed by Cristi Puiu wins BBC Four ... January 27, 2007
The
Death of Mr. Lazarescu | Variety Jay
Weissberg
Romania's
new wave is riding high | Film | The Guardian Ronald Bergan, March 25, 2008
The
Death of Mr Lazarescu | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
The Death of Mr Lazarescu | Film | The Guardian Philip French
The Boston Phoenix [Michael Atkinson]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
San Francisco Chronicle [Ruthe Stein]
Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]
LOVE & DEATH Scott Foundas from LA Weekly
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu Movie Review (2006) | Roger Ebert
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips)
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu' Tells a Modern Hospital Tale - The New ... Stephen Holden from The New York Times
The Death of
Mr. Lazarescu - Wikipedia
AURORA B 87
Romania France Switzerland Germany (180 mi) 2010
Certain film nationalities are immediately recognizable, such as the
dialogue driven screwball French comedy that plays out as farce, the near
documentary simplicity of Iranian films, the strict adherence to precision and
razor sharp detail in Austrian films, or the Romanian cinema that we have here
that features endlessly long takes of real time drama which focuses on the
absurdity and utter banality of life.
Puiu’s earlier work, THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU (2005) was so searingly
realistic, many left the theater believing they witnessed a documentary, only
to discover afterwards that the whole thing was meticulously scripted. Puiu’s reality is so explicitly realized
onscreen that you barely realize he’s using actors. As if to become even more intimately involved
in his next project, he places himself in front of the camera as the lead actor
known as Viorel, a puzzling, ordinary man with a rather mousy personality
reminiscent of Fassbinder’s WHY DOES HERR R. RUN AMOK (1970), a film shot with
a dull, dispassionate style which is only exacerbated by the three hour run
time of the movie. Viorel is immediately
seen as a guy on the fringe, as early on, he just seems to be in the way,
taking up space, as others are busy living their lives, including a wife and
two daughters, all of whom have a rushed, morning routine while he stands
around doing nothing. His expressionless
face reveals a pathetic figure of a man beaten down to the point of self-pity,
an odd choice for the lead in such a lengthy film. But like LAZARESCU, the director paints a
portrait of a post Communist world that is slowly finding its way out of the
dark, yet reveals scathing examples of the darkness left behind.
What’s immediately striking is the virtuoso piano music by Louis Moreau
Gottschalk, a 19th century American composer whose music is so
lively and upbeat, like a mazurka, that one could joyously prance around and
dance to it as it plays over the opening credits about ten minutes in, a
striking contrast to the otherwise drab and downbeat mood of the film. Violel soon finds himself spending his time
alone in a rutted apartment partially stripped for rehab, where he’s
immediately met with a water leak from the apartment upstairs, as one of the
kids let the bathwater overflow. All we
hear is a berating mother offering an endless barrage of insults to her son as
Violel is obviously pictured as a drowning man flailing away in the forgettable
and rather dubious nature of his own life.
The viewer gets used to seeing him quietly spend time alone, where
visitors, unanswered phone calls, or knocks on the door are all perceived as
meaningless interruptions, where the guy just has no connection to the
world. We see movers in his home
removing certain items, while he instructs them what not to take, signs of a
marital separation. In a disturbing
scene, we see him purchasing a 12 gauge rifle, where buying Czech or Russian
products result in a significant discount, but the scene includes an obvious
disturbance from an offscreen customer who is shouting profanities that are
included in the film’s trailer (Aurora [2010] trailer),
but edited from the actual film’s subtitles, a good example of how a film gets
cleaned up for the foreign market. It’s
an interesting scene, however, as there’s the turbulent suggestion of an
unseen, underlying menace growing out of control. Next thing you know, the guy’s ominously
stalking around his house with a loaded rifle, even taking practice shots,
which surprisingly go unheard and unreported in
Mild-mannered Violel has suddenly turned into a prodigious planner,
where he looms silently undetected in the darkness of a hotel garage,
inexplicably shooting two people on sight.
Puiu’s style is to provide as little background information as possible,
leaving the audience stunned and in a mysterious daze, clueless as to any
motive. As Violel’s behavior gets more
and more disturbing, becoming more aggressive and confrontational with people,
the world around him gets louder and grows more claustrophobic, where he rides
the bus with people literally standing on top of one another or he recklessly
darts across busy city streets, risking his life with each crossing. Perhaps the creepiest scene in the entire
film takes place in a women’s clothing store where he’s looking for someone
who’s not there, but he suspects they’re covering for her, leaving exposed his
fragile male ego that is so indignantly wounded that his behavior becomes
crudely offensive in his animosity towards the female clerks, where our familiarity
with what lies just under the surface only accelerates more horror filled
visions in our heads, the kind we read about all the time. Puiu’s character does not disappoint, as he’s
simply out of touch with the world around him, where he constantly perceives
himself as the harmed party. Like an
exploding time bomb, Violel continues to make the rounds across the city,
always carrying the weapon in his bag, where the city itself is oblivious to
his intentions. Part of the absurdity of
the film is how the director holds back any motives for nearly the entire
duration of the movie, only really becoming apparent by the end, where Violel,
ever the victim, feels his damaged soul is just too complicated for others to
comprehend. Apparently it all makes perfect
sense to him, but his problems are literally drowned out by the systematic
banality in people’s routines, where their already troubled lives leave them
exhausted by the endless accumulation of petty annoyances and on-going needs
that consume their daily lives. In the
end, it’s all a chamber drama of misdirected, undermining psyche’s pushing and
pulling one another away from any meaningful compatibility.
The
Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
A murder mystery in which the killer’s identity is known but his
motives are not, Cristi Puiu’s
Film-Forward.com Michael Lee
At Cannes, the Economy Is On-Screen Manohla Dargis at
The American marketplace is tough even for non-African filmmakers, as Cristi Puiu’s critically lauded but commercially unsuccessful “The
Death of Mr. Lazarescu” showed a few years ago. On Friday Mr. Puiu was back
at
A mystery in which the largest questions are existential rather than procedural, “Aurora” involves a solitary man, played by Mr. Puiu himself with an increasingly disquieting stare, who about an hour into the film buys a gun and then, a half-hour later, fires it. It’s uncertain what haunts the man, whose name, Viorel, like so many other significant details, emerges late or not at all. Instead of pumping up the narrative with familiar thriller (and musical) beats, Mr. Puiu builds tension through absence, creating palpable unease through lingering silences, a dearth of heightened drama — before the gun goes off, the exchanges are fairly banal — and an emptied-out apartment. Only later do you grasp that this man has been hollowed out too.
Phil
on Film [Philip Concannon]
Cristi Puiu's last film The Death of Mr Lazarescu spent
two and a half hours in the company of an ailing man, and by the end of the
film, we felt a closeness and sympathy for him as he breathed his last. His new
film
User reviews from imdb Author: cguldal from US
If you are familiar with Puiu's previous film, Death of Mr. Lazarescu, you
will be well-prepared for the slow pace that draws attention to the nonchalant,
almost cold and disconnected sensibility of the ex-Eastern Bloc. What you will
find extremely different in
2010 Cannes
Film Festival — Cineaste Magazine Richard
Porton at
On the other hand, Un Certain Regard, a sidebar that in previous years often resembled an eclectic grab-bag, was unusually strong this year and offered a partial respite from festival tedium. It was perhaps less surprising that two of the most notable entries were Romanian films.
Cristi Puiu’s Aurora, a serial killer film whose languid pace makes David Fincher’s meditative Zodiac seem positively frenetic, was one of Cannes’ most rewarding long slogs. Although some admirers of Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (which won Un Certain Regard’s top prize in 2005) were clearly disappointed by the new film’s narrower scope and tenuous relationship to genre cinema, Aurora, despite its claustrophobic, maniacally controlled narrative, is equally determined to deploy a rigorous naturalism as a means of critiquing Romanian society.
Puiu himself plays Viorel, the protagonist on a deadly mission. This is no doubt part of a canny plan to make audiences uneasy—and the director impersonates this glassy-eyed dullard with a sardonic gusto. A laconic man full of barely suppressed rage, Viorel, a metallurgical engineer, finds himself adrift in a Bucharest depicted as a gray wasteland. Puiu’s success in draining a sensationalistic premise of practically any whiff of suspense is linked to his belief that most commercial films on this subject “glamorize” killers who are in fact pitifully ordinary. The director also intimates that Viorel’s abrasiveness, as well as the banality of his regimen, reflects some of the less savory aspects of post-Communist Romanian culture. Aurora’s chunks of real time suggest a fictional appropriation of the documentary techniques of Frederick Wiseman and Raymond Depardon for polemical purposes: in Puiu’s words, a moral stance that “denounces how inefficiently the Western model has been applied to a country that had just emerged from the darkness of communism.”
Cannes review:
Aurora Geoff Andrew at Cannes from Time Out London, May 15, 2010, also
here: Aurora Review.
Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London
With just two fiction features (the second being the Cannes
prize-winning ‘The Death of Mr Lazarescu’) and one short, Romania’s Cristi Puiu
had already established himself among the most promising of Europe’s younger
filmmakers. Now, with his bold third feature, he proves that he is one of the
most distinctive artists working in cinema anywhere today.
‘Aurora’ is not exactly an easy movie; it runs for three hours and covers about
one and a half days in the life of a man we first see about to get out of bed
with a woman; she might be his wife, though the way the man lurks in the
shadows when a girl appears calling for her mummy suggests we shouldn’t be too
sure. Indeed, throughout the film there remains a considerable degree of
ambiguity, even mystery, to this man’s actions and motives as he wanders and
drives about the city, always watchfully; who is he, where does he live, what
is his relationship to the various people he encounters, and why is he fixing
up that rifle?
It’s a film of endless questions, then, and only in the last few minutes are
some (but far from all) of them answered. Whatever else you may read about the
film, it’s not so much about the act of killing as about what there might be in
any of us that might just move us, in very particular circumstances, to kill.
The elliptical, mostly dialogue-free narrative simply follows the man around,
observing his gait, his gaze, his unconscious gestures; it is left to the
director’s own extraordinarily eloquent (if unusually taciturn) performance to
suggest the complex tangle of emotions and thoughts going through the clearly
perturbed protagonist’s mind.
‘
CANNES
REVIEW | A Black Comedy with Patience: Cristi Puiu's 'Aurora' Eric Kohn at
A slow burn thriller taken to the extreme, Cristi Puiu’s “
Initially produced under the working title “Scenes of a Crime,” the movie drags that basic concept as far as it can go, although “Scenes Between a Crime” describes it better. A full hour passes before Viorel accomplishes anything other than quietly plotting his violence with a trip to the gun store. He’s constantly at odds with people around him. His basic frustrations include coping with nagging in-laws, his children and other regular acquaintances—all reflected in Puiu’s endlessly droll expression. Many sequences unfold in observational long takes of near-documentary proportions. The world of “Aurora” dominates the tone even more than its eerily calm protagonist, as moments slowly tick by and the environment seeps under your skin.
The challenging pace may define the experience, but suspense and intrigue lurk within Puiu’s temporally ambitious technique. Rather than establish an elaborate backstory and build toward the climax, he bases his entire production around meandering exposition. Since nothing is definite, each hour remains engagingly unpredictable. Expectations of the crime genre suggest that doom awaits Viorel sometime around the third act, but Puiu seems less concerned with his fate than simply getting him there using the most roundabout method possible.
At the Cannes Film Festival premiere, Puiu introduced the movie by confessing that “it’s long…I feel foreign for that.” Notwithstanding his obvious sarcasm, “Aurora” does bear a strong resemblance to many of the recent Romanian features to emerge from the festival circuit, particularly Corneliu Porumboiu’s “Police, Adjective,” which also ends with comically extended judicial interrogation. Both movies, in addition to “Lazarescu,” use plausible conversational flow as a means of satirizing the ineffective nature of all communication.
Puiu’s characters tend to ramble: An early dialogue between Viorel and another woman about whether or not the grandmother in “Little Red Riding Hood” was devoured in clothes or naked sounds like the muffled version of a Tarantino exchange. In his subtle way, Puiu makes mannered dialogue sound fresh and strange.
This strategy comes together in “Aurora” with Viorel’s rambling confession, a finale that inspires laughter for the sheer matter-of-factness of Puiu’s deadpan performance. By offering context on the tail end of a story where a conventional version would have it at the beginning, Puiu invites repeat viewings—although his unhurried style is certain to turn some viewers off for the same reason it will turn others on.
Cannes
Film Festival 2010: Day Three Matt
Noller at Cannes from Slant magazine,
May 14, 2010
Romanian director Cristi Puiu made quite a splash at
I bring this up for two reasons. One, so Lazarescu
partisans can understand where I'm coming from with regard to Puiu and ignore
everything I'm about to say, and two, to explain why I was genuinely sort of
looking forward to his new film Aurora.
Would Puiu harness his clear talent into something more successful, something
more consistent and moment-to-moment compelling? Something more…well, more like
fellow countryman Cristian Mungiu's 4
Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days? No such luck. In fact, not only does
Like Lazarescu,
Puiu's goal, clearly, is to de-romanticize violence, to reveal it
as something at once banal and complex, unsuited for reductive cinematic
representations. This he unquestionably achieves, because the large majority of
Editor’s
Notebook: Cristi Puiu Discusses Aurora
Rob White feature and interview with the director from The Film Quarterly, December 7, 2010
The
House Next Door [Matt Noller]
"The
48th New York Film Festival: Mysteries of Lisbon + Festival Recap (featuring Le
quattro volte, Aurora & The Strange Case of Angélica)" Lasse Winther from the Comment section, which
includes an interview with the director, Harry Tuttle from Tativille,
Aurora - Reverse Shot Matt Connolly, July 5, 2011
Slant
Magazine [Andrew Schenker]
Aurora
| Review | Screen Lee Marshall at
Cannes 2010: A Devil without the
Details: "Aurora" (Cristi Puiu, Romania) May 17, 2010,
also seen here: The Daily Notebook [Daniel Kasman]
Digital
Fix Noel Megahey
Mystery
Killer on the Loose, Observed, in Aurora | Village Voice J. Hoberman, June 29, 2011
The
House Next Door [Kenji Fujishima]
Cinema
Viewfinder: NYFF10 Movie Review: Aurora (2010) Tony Dayoub
Lessons
of Darkness [Nick Schager]
The
L Magazine [Henry Stewart]
Critic's
Notebook [Martin Tsai]
Visit our Blog for
reviews of individual films Doug McLaren from Cine-File,
Cannes
'10: Day Three Mike D’Angelo at
CANNES: ‘Chatroom,’
‘Aurora’ Guy Lodge at
Cannes
2010. Cristi Puiu's "Aurora" + "Slow Cinema Vs Fast ... - Mubi David Hudson at Cannes May 15, 2010
The
Banality of Evil, Romanian-Style
Dennis Lim interviews the director from The New York Times, May
17, 2010
Cannes '10 Day 3: Skill never sleeps Wesley Morris at Cannes from The Boston Globe, May 15, 2010
Louis
Moreau Gottschalk - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Puiu, Cristi
SIERANEVADA
B 89
Romania
France Croatia Macedonia
Bosnia-Herzegovina (176 mi) 2016
Romanian director Cristi Puiu, the
writer/director of the acclaimed film THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU (2007), has
roots that can be traced back to Eugène Ionesco’s theater of the absurd, and while his
earlier film was a scathing indictment of the indifference of the antiquated health
care system, this is an altogether different animal. Anyone who has dreaded the obligatory invite
to large family dinners will have a field day with this film, as it is the
family dinner from hell, easily one of the funniest films of the year, feeling
more like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot,
as it’s the meal that never comes, but is constantly referenced in conversation
by nearly everyone as the very next event to happen, yet the characters are
curiously stuck in a purgatory of paralysis, like Buñuel’s THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (1962), where something that can go
wrong does go wrong, creating an amazingly synchronized tour de force of both
camera movement (by Barbu Balasoiu), seemingly swiveling from a central
corridor in a family apartment yet pointing in all directions, often stuck
behind closed doors where something sinister is happening, or the door swings
open and we hear every single word of a full-blown argument, where the
precision of the verbal assault has literally wounded someone into a swooning
spell, knocked completely off their feet, or something equally paralyzing, yet
also there is a continual eruption of non-stop dialogue, like a percussive
symphony of voices, where the relentless pace of the director’s screwball
comedy timing is impeccable. Romanian
filmmakers have a thing about language, where their art preserves something
unique about their society, where they don’t wish to excise a single word,
which might explain the nearly three-hour length of this drama, which feels
more like a well-written play. The
formal audaciousness of Puiu’s sophisticated balance of camera movement and
sound, however, recalls a similar complexity from the films of Dziga Vertov,
the so-called father of cinéma vérité, using a complex editing scheme to
maximize the impact of the drama. What
Puiu adds to this equation are some of his nation’s best actors, displaying
naturalism with a remarkable stylistic flair.
Some may not find the content all that
elevating, though it’s never less than entertaining and at times is drop dead
hilarious, but the conversational material itself is mired in opinionated
views, old habits, hearsay, prejudices, rumors, gossip, jealousy, conspiracy
theories, questionable information gleaned from the Internet, and even personal
threats, where it seems to probe the banality of human existence at every
turn. The film is a comic satire on the
supposed dark cloud hanging over the rising middle class after the fall of
Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1989, which spelled the end of the communist era in
Romania, where a younger generation is wealthier, more educated, with plenty
more opportunities than their parents and grandparents who remain products of
an old, failed totalitarian system that is now viewed as a disgrace. But while they have been part of the European
Union since 2007 and can afford more things, like cars, modern appliances, or
televisions in nearly every apartment, they also have short memories, as there
is no recollection of how life was lived prior to 1989. When parents or grandparents remind them,
they may as well be from another planet, showing little gratitude for the
oppression and misery that they withstood, as the Romanian standard of living
was near the bottom of the former Soviet bloc countries. The film examines what freedom has brought to
the nation, where the wintry streets of Bucharest seem mired in traffic jams
and petty squabbles, with graffiti on the walls of housing units, while the
family unit remains a picture of dysfunction.
Opening with parents dropping off their young daughter for a dance
rehearsal, they double-park on a narrow street, leaving their car unattended,
where tempers erupt when they block any oncoming traffic, unnecessarily
instigating a chaotic roadside obstacle that angers the back-up of cars that
can’t get through, creating a picture of urban malaise, where we can’t hear
what’s being spoken, but see the obvious confusion in a brilliantly
choreographed comedy of errors. Once
they finally get back in the car, instead of peace and quiet, we hear Lari
(Mimi Branescu) and his wife Laura (Catalina Moga) bicker about the costume he
purchased for his daughter, as it’s all wrong for the show, where he preferred
the Brothers Grimm approach for a Disney production, but as she rightly points
out, the Grimms had nothing to do with Mulan,
so his indifference to what she actually needs only puts added pressure on
their daughter, who doesn’t have an appropriate costume to wear. This serves as a prelude for what’s to come,
as they’re already late for a family dinner.
Once inside, it’s like we’ve been dropped in
the middle of a Russian novel, as we are introduced to more than a dozen
characters, some who just drop in or out, with no regard for establishing names
and relationships, that will continue to be baffling to the audience
throughout. Everything is on hold as
they are waiting for the priest to arrive, as he’s been delayed or is stuck in
traffic, and they can’t eat until he gets there. Making things more ambiguous, initially we
have no idea what the occasion is that is bringing the family together. Is it a christening, a baptism, a birthday, a
marriage, a newborn, or a death in the family?
No one offers a clue. Instead,
it’s a choreography of doors swinging open and closed, with women cooking in
the kitchen while characters are constantly on the move throughout the rooms,
sometimes standing in the hallway, creating a claustrophobic effect of
something that’s about to happen, but everyone’s on hold. Typically, they resort to bickering, creating
a master class of confusion, with Larry’s mother Nusa (Dana Dogaru) tasting the
boiled cabbage to make sure it’s right, but she also seems to be the guiding
force behind adhering to the practices of an Eastern Orthodox religion. Without her, everyone would be at a
loss. More than an hour in, we decipher
that this is a memorial service for her recently deceased husband, where a clue
is observing a suit that’s been laid out for him on the bed, but there’s no
body. Food is everywhere, borscht and
chorba (is there a difference?), cabbage rolls and polenta,
where there’s enough to feed an army, yet no one’s allowed to eat. That doesn’t stop Lari and others from
constantly picking at what they can while they wait. While we hear 9/11 conspiracy theories,
blaming Bush for playing a part in the tragedy, all apparently downloaded from
the Internet, yet no one mentions who or what brought them all together. Easily the funniest character is Evelina (Tatiana
Iekel), a grandmother who lords over the other younger woman by professing nostalgia
and true admiration for the Ceaușescu era, which she
fondly recollects as the good old days, being a party member in good standing,
where she recounts all the good work that created a better life for these
younger woman and their families, which is more than an earful for the rest to
endure, as everyone seems to despise her views, especially since they’ve had to
endure it throughout the entire cooking process. Eventually breaking into tears is the only
thing that stops the old woman, with everyone whispering what rot behind her
back, though she appears to be dressed for a formal dinner with the Czar,
wearing one of those Russian fur hats worn by grande dames to the opera. It’s a good two hours before the priest
finally arrives, walking around every room offering blessings for just about
everything. While you’d think this would
open the floodgates, as people are famished.
Not so soon. If emotions were
stirring while waiting for the priest to arrive, they grow even nastier after
he leaves.
Enter Tony (Sorin Medeleni), rat bastard husband of Nusa’s sister Ofelia
(Ana Ciontea), who’s been accused of sleeping around with someone else’s wife,
and pounding someone into the pavement for the mere mention of it. No one wants to let him in, but he’s let in
anyway, as it’s fitting for the occasion.
Despite the gracious offer, he’s a low-life that belligerently starts
terrorizing his wife and anyone that sides with her, creating a manic
disturbance just as they’re about to settle down for dinner. The aptly named Ofelia breaks into a melodramatic
fit and nearly faints, lying on the couch with Nusa fanning her back to
life. Suddenly it’s high drama, with
exaggerated charges and counter charges, where the event has unraveled in
discord and vicious rumors, yet it’s the kind of thing that happens at family
affairs whether you like it or not.
Accusations are leveled, people’s feelings are hurt, and someone comes
to their rescue, while various family members gravitate to the individual sides
to gain insight, offer advice, and try to calm things down. Women seem to huddle together while the men
do the same, a custom apparently that goes back to the caveman era. Of course nothing gets resolved, but Ofelia
gets to itemize all the things she finds repulsive and disgusting about Tony,
including graphic descriptions of sexual acts he allegedly committed, where his
character suggests he’s done all that and more, yet he’s still a member of the
family, and they’re all in it together.
Lingering resentment is everywhere, with ridicule flying in every direction,
where instead of full-fledged arguments with parties screaming back and forth,
they seem to gnaw at one another, pick at open wounds, and then just dig a
little deeper. In the middle of this
sordid affair, Lari gets a phone call, as he and Laura leave together
temporarily, creating yet another traffic disturbance, this time with more
violent overtones, where both he and Laura are pushed, shoved, punched at, and
threatened, though somehow they survive the onslaught. Having a moment to themselves in the car,
they internalize how they view the day’s events, suggesting Lari’s father was
no saint himself, bringing dishonor and shame to his wife and family, who are
now in the process of honoring him. As
if God had struck him down with a lightning bolt, the heavenly powers are
creating havoc with the day’s events playing out in real time, where we can
only sense from afar just how deep some of the problems are. Dark truths emerge from the family’s past,
grievances are aired, yet the eruptive forces of rage, accusations, absurdities
and laughter seem to have opened everyone’s eyes, releasing some of the
tension, creating a temporary lull in the action, yet is it just a mirage,
surrounded by more of the same?
Meanwhile, the table is set, food is served, but only a meager few are
eating, as the rest are once again embroiled in yet another turmoil happening
in another room. None of this feels
earthshaking, where except for Lari in the car speaking quietly about his
father, there’s little in the way of a cathartic emotional release where some
degree of confessional truth or honesty comes into play, instead, there’s scant
evidence anything ever gets resolved.
While aggravation is the driving force behind the drama, with characters
forever forced to wait, and then wait some more, perhaps in the end they just
get more used to one other after wearing each other down. It’s a grim picture of the oppressive forces
surrounding us, where life is viewed in Sisyphean terms as an endless
altercation of unhappy families, filled with a build-up of psychological damage
apparently learned early on from childhood that we carry into our adult lives,
suggesting there is an extraordinary amount of Romanian discontent, with few
solutions in the works.
Meanwhile, perhaps a few simple instructions about parking in congested
urban areas…
Film Comment: Amy Taubin July 03, 2016
Cristi Puiu’s Sieranevada, Mungiu’s Graduation, and
Bogdan Mirica’s Dogs testify to the continuing energy of Romanian
cinema. Dogs is graced by the
always amazing Vlad Ivanov, who here embodies pure evil as if it were no more
than a matter of fact. But the most formally audacious and emotionally
compelling of the three is Sieranevada.
Taking place during a memorial for the patriarch of a large family, it is
almost entirely staged in a single apartment of perhaps eight rooms, half of
which open off a central corridor. Puiu’s camera, the opposite of
fly-on-the-wall, is in constant movement, wandering through the apartment,
panning left and right, tilting up and down, making its dispassionate presence
known to us, if not to the characters in the film. We’ve seen cameras move like
that before—in Michael Snow’s Back and Forth, or in one scene in
Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, in which the camera roams a corridor
where people on the brink of disaster are playing musical beds. But to separate
camera from narrative, thus distancing us from the drama without diminishing
its punch, takes nerve, virtuosity, and an appreciation of how movies create
and mediate emotion via movement in space. The most seductive movies in Cannes
played with form so that the human comedy—the comedy of mortality—was made
strange and new.
Cinema Scope: Mark Peranson June
27, 2016
A shockingly high number of members in this rogues’ gallery have served on Cannes juries after being welcomed into “le club,” and that goes a long way towards explaining what went on this year, combined with the fact that few actors and directors have the capacity to judge anything when it comes to cinema. I wonder how many members of this jury has seen any films from the Romanian New Wave, as that’s the only explanation for giving Best Director to former juror Mungiu, whose Graduation is, simply put, a boring procession of unglamorously framed two-shots touching on this most well-trod of plot lines and unresolvable moral conundrums. Compared to the great Sieranevada by a master filmmaker, Cristi Puiu, Mungiu’s literal-minded slog looks even worse—which of course, in the Opposite Land of Cannes juries, makes it look better. (Though it’s his first film in Competition, Puiu is the exception that proves the rule.) Stories have always circulated about whispering in ears from on high, or a boss asking the jury to “try again.” But to repeat, gentlemen, don’t think it’ll be different the next time: an educated guess based on past incarnations will see either Mendoza, Farhadi, or Jeff “Oscar Bait” Nichols on next year’s jury, unless Frémaux throws a curveball and seats Best Actress winner Jaclyn Jose (and her co-star, her daughter), and history will repeat itself. Stranger things have happened. Actually, I’ll put my money on Shia LaBeouf.
Filmcomment.com
[Jonathan Romney] May
19, 2016
For the last few years, it’s been fairly easy to assume that we all knew what Romanian film was. In Cannes, the new national cinema made its decisive mark in 2005 with Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, followed two years later by the Palme d’Or win for Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. Both films established a particular mode of slow-burning, aesthetically austere, emotionally downbeat realism, and it’s been easy to assume that works by those directors, as well as Radu Muntean, Calin Peter Netzer, Radu Jude, Corneliu Poromboiu et al, were very much of a piece, especially since these filmmakers tended to downplay directorial flourishes of any sort that might overtly denote a strong personal signature.
Things are clearly beginning to change, however, and our perceptions with them. A decisive moment came in Berlin last year with the unveiling of Jude’s flamboyant, bustling historical drama in black and white, Aferim!, and they’re changing further in Cannes this year, with the premieres of three features in Official Selection.
Two of them are in Competition, both from known names, and judging by snatched conversations since this morning—Thursday—after the second was screened, critical sympathies are starkly divided between Puiu’s Sieranevada and Mungiu’s Graduation (Bacalaureat). Puiu’s film, screened at the start of the festival is without doubt the more formally adventurous of the two, an extraordinary sustained feat of choreography. It’s set largely in a single apartment comprising several rooms, in which a family attend a memorial or blessing service for their late father, with Tudor Vladimir Panduru’s camera floating or zigzagging drunkenly along corridors and between rooms, while a barely containable host of characters shuttle around in different combinations. The end titles include a credit for a “Making of,” which is quite mind-boggling—it’s hard to imagine that anyone could have fitted another camera into this cramped space, as busy with comings and goings as a railway terminal at rush hour. It’s a film I’ll no doubt come back to on its release. For now, I felt it was easier to engage with as a feat rather than as a piece of complex character drama—but it’s also one of the films of Cannes 2016 that I’d be happiest to see again.
Sieranevada
(Cristi Puiu, Romania/France/Bosnia ... - Cinema Sc Jordan Cronk from Cinema Scope
At the dawn of the decade, a brief break appeared in the first wave of New Romanian Cinema. Though of similar historic and cinematic concern, a number of the films produced during this period—including Corneliu Porumboiu’s The Second Game (2013), Cristi Puiu’s Three Interpretation Exercises (2012), and The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (2010), by elder statesman Andrei Ujica—adopted formal strategies unique in relation to the work that had set the movement’s stylistic coordinates in the mid-’00s. Considering the recognizably austere, culturally interrogative output of these and other filmmakers in the years since (see, most impressively, Porumboiu’s The Treasure and Radu Muntean’s One Floor Below, both from 2015), these otherwise fleeting few years have arguably proven as crucial as they were initially deemed cursory—less a wake than an interlude portending an inevitable re-entrenchment.
Cristi Puiu hosts a wake of a different kind in Sieranevada, one of the strongest and certainly most daunting selections in this year’s Cannes Competition (which, instructively enough, also featured Cristian Mungiu’s comparatively pro-forma Graduation). Running 173 minutes, Puiu’s first narrative feature since the polarizing Un Certain Regard standout Aurora (2010) pushes forward as furiously as the earlier film held firm with distinct and disquieting reserve. In an equally provocative manner, Puiu wields dialogue as he once did silence, staging a family gathering (one based loosely on his own experiences) in extended flights of near-real time drama with few of the temporal elisions that effectively posited his serial-killer chronicle as a work of metaphysical recrimination. If this description seems to position the film closer to the headlong narrative momentum of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), then it’s only tangentially; Puiu’s shape-shifting cinema is as prone to the measured as it is the visceral, as taken with the dire as it is the comedic. Few contemporary filmmakers so fluidly negotiate such disparate extremes.
Anticipating the domestic congestion to come, the film opens with a confrontation over an errantly parked car, followed by a petty argument between a middle-aged man named Lary (Mimi Branescu) and his wife Laura (Catalina Moga) as they drive to what we soon gather to be a commemoration for Lary’s recently deceased father, Emil. These are just two of the dozen-plus individuals who eventually descend upon the small Bucharest apartment of Nusa Mirica (Dana Dogaru), a woman of Eastern Orthodoxy who has summoned a host of family and friends for a ritual dinner that will allow her husband’s soul to pass on to heaven undisturbed. Only slowly over the course of the day will the relationships between the many guests be established. Amongst others, there’s Lary’s brother, his sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles, in-laws, children of various ages, and an unwelcome, inebriated Croatian friend of the family’s twentysomething niece—all ostensibly waiting for a priest (Valer Dellakeza) and his deacons to arrive to bless the proceedings and facilitate the father’s forgiveness, something only to be granted once the dead man’s nephew, Sebi (Marin Grigore), dons one of his uncle’s ill-fitting suits.
If this all sounds, as many critics have pointed out, like a send-up of a certain Samuel Beckett play (though Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters also comes to mind, as does Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie [1972]), then Puiu is shrewd enough to exploit the associations to situational and sociopolitically humorous ends. Save for the opening sequence and a key moment late in the film when Lary, again with his wife in the front seat of their car, reminisces fondly and emotionally about the particulars of his father’s past, the entirety of the film transpires in the mother’s cramped apartment. Moving freely from room to room and conversation to conversation, Puiu and cinematographer Barbu Balasoiu capture the ensuing chaos with an observational yet inquisitive mobility, mapping the interior and intergenerational coordinates of the celebration with comprehensive skill. So impartial and mild-mannered as to appear almost apathetic, Lary is the Switzerland in the family’s fraught foundation. Surrounding him is the conspiracy-spewing Sebi, whose theories on 9/11 and the Charlie Hebdo attack (Sieranevada is set in its immediate aftermath) are a source of constant debate; the garishly dressed and opinionated Aunt Evelina (Tatiana Iekel), who speaks positively of the communist ideal, much to the chagrin of Lary’s sister, Sandra (Judith State); Emil’s youngest son Relu (Bogdan Dumitrache), a disillusioned soldier; and the emotionally distraught Aunt Ofelia (Ana Ciontea), who spends much of the film’s second half in hysterics over her philandering husband Toni (Sorin Medeleni), who not only refuses to own up to his indiscretions, but won’t leave the apartment despite resounding encouragement to do so.
As the most formally rigorous of the New Romanian guard, Puiu appears to take particular pleasure in navigating such a confined space. Arranging multiple bodies within typically unadorned compositions, Puiu approaches the film’s mise en scène like an equation to be solved, adding and subtracting characters from the frame with subtle camera movements and an expert sense of tension and release. By this point the Romanian style of long takes, exacting setups, and severe minimalism is ripe for parody, something Porumboiu recognized and wryly satirized in When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (2013), and which Puiu lampoons here with a less pronounced, but similarly perverse, determination. (This satirical touch is something lacking in Mungiu’s often self-serious cinema, prompting questions as to the extent of its creator’s self-awareness.) As doors repeatedly slam shut and discussions trail off, the camera often calmly pans—as if possessed, per Puiu, by Emil’s spirit—to an adjacent room or down a nearby hallway, picking up a new conversation and reorienting the drama in accordance with each break in exposition. As viewers we’re very much at the mercy of the director’s impulses; unlike the characters, we can’t remove ourselves from the action. The narrative’s seemingly ever-elusive feast, along with the deliberately misspelled title—itself an admittedly arbitrary but nonetheless clever choice in the tradition of self-important films flaunting metaphorically loaded titles—further serve the film’s self-reflexive sensibility. Whether this all registers as humorous or taxing (or both) will likely be well determined by the viewer by the time the priest casually extols Polonius’ immortal maxim regarding brevity and the soul of wit, a notion steamrolled by each successive, barbed pronouncement.
Despite the film’s mordant humour, the ghost of communism and the reverberations of the Ceausescu regime continue to be the great themes of contemporary Romanian cinema. Other recent atrocities receive equal airing throughout the film, but as a microcosm of communist influence and the communal ideology it fostered only to eventually betray, the film is a potent portrait of lingering disenchantment and nationalist anxiety. With little hierarchal order to the proceedings—but with distinct delineations between national, political, and theological dispositions—the film manages to hold everyone accountable, including Puiu (whose resemblance to his lead actor further posits Lary as the director’s surrogate), without implicating any one sensibility or ideology. In Puiu’s estimation, family is not simply the most recognizable and applicable corollary for Eastern Europe’s thorny and paradoxical political identity, but a source of personal integrity even as human nature and outside influences threaten to compromise the very ideals upon which such lineages are built. As if to reinforce the futile nature of the bourgeois plight, a majority of the film’s guests have dispersed by the time dinner is finally served. Sitting down to eat as, naturally, another argument commences in the next room, Lary and his brother Relu begin to chuckle contagiously, the incessant chatter once and for all devolving into an involuntary display of amusement. Sometimes all you can do is laugh.
Filmcomment.com
[Nicolas Rapold] (Interview) May 17, 2016
Unlike the man disappearing before our eyes in The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (05), the body in Cristi Puiu’s Sieranevada is already cold—and all that’s left is his suit. Puiu’s new feature, his first in Competition at Cannes, centers on a funeral gathering by an extended family in a warren-like Bucharest apartment. The ceremony entails benedictions by a priest, who takes his sweet time arriving, and the symbolic donning of a suit associated with the dearly departed. In and around these rituals, Puiu spins a comic, tense, and often poignant chamber film—where the chambers host hours of prickly conversation and contain multiple generations of hard-won experience stretching back to the Communist era.
FILM COMMENT spoke with Puiu after the world premiere of Sieranevada at Cannes, six years after his saturnine self-starring time-bomb of a film Aurora (10) and over a decade after Lazarescu first planted a flag there for a rebirth in Romanian cinema.
The action takes place nearly entirely within one apartment,
and so I was a little puzzled when I read somewhere that the time frame is
supposed to be a few days after the Charlie Hebdo shootings.
The precise date is the 10th of January 2015. And I put that in the film: on the radio they are saying, “Tomorrow, there is going to be in Paris the meeting of the heads of state about the terrorist group from September 11th…” But of course it’s in Romanian, so you couldn’t see it.
Was that in the subtitles?
No, it wasn’t. And there are even lots of Romanians who do not get it. You might be surprised by the fact that, 15 years later, some people will talk about 9/11. But I met a lot of people who are talking about 9/11, and it’s a part of the Internet community. For a time, I was looking on the Internet for alternative information regarding all sorts of events, but there’s a problem with this information: you cannot verify it. Now we have this false feeling, false idea, that we know. But to assume you know something, for me, it’s very hard to say that. For example, to say, “I know how to make a film.” I don’t know how to make a film. Every project I am in, I am trying to understand what is happening, why this or that decision… It’s not easy. I can testify about my own experience, but I would never say to others, “I know how to make a film.”
What do you feel you learned with Sieranevada about how
to make a film?
You know, I was very down when I started this project. Very down. People had a lot of expectations, and very strange expectations sometimes—expecting something like The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, but on a different topic.
And you’re talking about the reaction to Aurora
now?
When Aurora was finished and released, there was a good response from the critics, but nevertheless, there was a big disappointment. Then with this film, I felt so down. And I behaved like somebody who could do anything. I allowed myself to do things I never did before. For example, making significant adjustments to the script while shooting, and allowing the actors to do things that, in normal conditions—it’s not improvising, I was writing down the text from day to day.
At the beginning there was no Croatian girl in the script. And we explained [the character of] Simona: she lost her father some years ago, and she comes from the southern part of Romania. They have this ritual we don’t have in the north, where I come from, with the costume and being the ambassador of the dead.
Could you explain that custom a little?
It’s a Christian ritual, and the idea is that when Jesus died and was buried, when they found an empty tomb, they found his clothes but no body. But the clothes were put in the position of the body. So in this ritual you put the costume in the position of the body, and the guy who’s going to wear it states that there is no death. There is this resurrection. So he’s coming as the dead at the table. The costume is impersonating the father. And this sequence was not in the script. I introduced it into the film while shooting.
What made you feel like you needed to add that sequence?
I think we live in a time when we are following a serious bunch of rituals. The ritual is very present in our lives, even if we are talking about, I don’t know, a birthday. There’s the ritual of the cake and candles. It’s like how we are in Cannes: there is the ritual of the red carpet, and there are the signs of royalty—the red and the gold and the palm.
There’s an aristocratic aspect to things here.
Yeah. So our life is made of rituals and, for me, it was important because I noticed in Romania, the reason people are doing this is that it’s a form of liberation. They need to free themselves. When they have lost a close one, they have to pass through these rituals in order to escape, in order to clean the conscience. As the mother says: “I’m doing this for your father, and when I’m going to die, you are going to do your style or the way you like. Bury me your style.” For me, it’s very touching to see people—to see us—do this. For example, in Romania, there is the red-and-white ribbon for the spring. When I was on the red carpet yesterday, I was wearing the black-and-white ribbon because it was the sign that somebody close to us had died—a colleague of ours who took care of transportation in the company for our film. And the actor who plays Tony in the film died last December.
For me, it’s very touching to see how fragile a human being is. To rely on these rituals, to rely on these things—at a certain point, it scares me because it is so thin.
Is filmmaking a ritual for you in any way?
No.
It’s not thin, then—it’s something that’s very rich and
open.
Yes, and I’m trying to do my best in order to stay in contact with life. And then I piss off everybody because I am changing all the time. Well, I can’t help it, because I don’t believe in following the script. I don’t believe in this! I think, when you do this, you are going to get to the point at the end where you come up with a dead body. If you want to stick to the situations of life, they are very unpredictable. And you just have to be aware of this fact, and stay awake, and push the red button to record it. You don’t need to invent metaphors or visuals of huge proportions. I don’t need to make Lord of the Rings 5 in order to tell my story. But I respect the cinema—it is not that I don’t respect it, it’s just not me. The whole process of working on a film is dependent on the situations of life.
The camerawork is so very sensitive to the characters’
situations, but in a different way: you’re holding back and you don’t always
force yourself into a scene.
The position of the camera and generally in cinema is the position of the author. It is also the position with which the spectator will identify because we are looking at the story through the lenses of the camera. And when you put the camera in a place, in a space, you ask the actors not to look at the camera. So the actors are there, relating one to another and creating the drama, and you float over the eyes of the DoP and behave like the camera is not there. I mean, it’s quite comic at a certain point that the camera is playing the role of an invisible man or of a dead person. So, this subject of the film allowed me to assume this identity of the camera as being the soul of the dead man. The soul leaves the body and travels for 40 days, and in 40 days, it goes to meet God and be at Judgment. This is the 40 Days of Commemoration, implying how it would be to look at the world you left behind you. Your loved ones are there in order to prepare the commemoration, and the camera has to have a look that’s full of tenderness.
This is what I was telling Barbu [Bălăsoiu], who was shooting the film: pay attention to everyone in front of the camera and try to look at these people not like characters in a movie but like real humans who are going to die one day. You have to keep this in mind: this person is going to die one day. And it is recording his presence here in this world now, more than his or her presence in the film. This is more essential than Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be,” and cinema allows you to do this. But really, to show someone drinking a glass of water: not to show, not to pretend, to do it.
I’m curious about the set you chose, with the kitchen,
bedrooms, and other rooms, branching off a central common space where the
camera lingers. Is that an actual apartment?
Yes, it’s one of the biggest kind of apartments you could have in communist times, built during communist times. Three-bedroom apartment, 100 square meters in total. Normally, a three bedroom apartment is 80 square meters in communist times. But the reason why I picked this one and not others is that having the central hall allowed me to imagine the mise en scène as being placed in this sort of maze—which is not quite a maze, but at the apartment level, it can be considered as such. There are lots of histories happening, different planets inside the same apartment. Different stories put together, and the thing is that it allowed me to give body to an event, to reimagine—to put an image to the fact that we are hiding things. There are the doors, they are playing a certain role in the film, and behind the doors, the history… There is a certain dialogue in one room, there is a different dialogue in the other room—you have different history, different problems. Somebody’s crying there, somebody’s laughing here. What I tried to do is just restore the feeling I have regarding this kind of family meeting.
I think it’s enough to put the camera somewhere and start to record. Of course, you have to find the right position for the camera, to record and just to listen to what is happening. Inside the image, you are going to record the whole universe. But you have to find the right position. I don’t really believe in imagining and inventing things. Yes, of course, it’s good to exercise, but it’s an exercise meant to be a part of a training for watching the world and listening to the world.
What kind of camera did you use for the shoot?
A digital camera, Arriflex, and this is a good thing because it allowed me not to do the rehearsals and then shoot. We shot everything, and let them be, and I covered with the camera because it’s a bit of Hell inside this apartment. There are lots of rivalries between actors. And there’s tension because you have a sequence, and somebody’s good, and somebody’s not good. They are going to talk about the one who didn’t succeed in delivering the lines, and then he’s going to be angry and is going to feel uncomfortable in front of his colleagues. A complete mess. I think they did a really great job because you don’t have this on the screen.
Did the actors have different backgrounds—TV, theater, movies?
There’s no such thing in Romania. Everybody, when they study acting, has to study it for theater. And some of them succeed in getting parts in TV dramas and so on. So, no. The problem is that people are different—and if you are paying attention to this, you can get a lot from the actors. If you are not paying attention and you think that you are the most important, you are going to impose your way of thinking and it’s not certain you are going to succeed in your work.
What I am happy with on this project, is—and this was a surprise as well—I thought these people were good when I read the script and the story of this family. All of them good. And when they were bad, they were bad in my style, because I introduced some kind of a reaction which is proper to me. And when we started working, I allowed myself to let the actors add what is proper to them. So, the characters in the film now have completely different colors than in the script. It suddenly became new to me.
I remember talking to a couple of other Romanian directors who
were a little frustrated because their movies were received better abroad than
at home. How do you feel about that?
I am making films for Romanian audiences. I’m making films with lots of dialogue, and the Romanian language is important and very dear to me, because I grew up in this language, so I can configure the world a little bit better through it. Otherwise, it’s almost impossible. The perception that Romanian audiences are having about the films we are making is not a gentle one. I mean, for a large audience, cinema is American cinema. The Cannes Film Festival helped a lot of Romanian cinema. The history of Romanian cinema—this New Romanian Cinema—has to be told with this festival as a part of it, because the festival made possible this Romanian cinema. This is a fact.
Sight
& Sound [Geoff Andrew] September
23, 2016
The
Film Stage [Giovanni Marchini Camia]
International
Cinephile Society [Aldo Álvareztostado]
Reverse
Shot [Jordan Cronk] May 18, 2016
Previewing
the 52nd Chicago International Film Festival - Week Two Daniel Nava from Chicago Cinema Circuit
Cineuropa.org
[Fabien Lemercier]
Cannes
opens with the latest star-studded ensemble ... - The AV Club Mike D’Angelo
Filmmaker: Howard Feinstein October 07, 2016
Senses of Cinema: Daniel Fairfax July 10, 2016
Artforum: Dennis
Lim June 03, 2016
User
Reviews From imdb Author: tributarystu
from Timisoara, Romania
Little
White Lies [Patrick Gamble]
The
Playlist [Jessica Kiang / Nikola Grozdanovic]
Cannes
Dispatch #1: Sieranevada, Staying Vertical, Slack Bay, Toni Erdmann Blake Williams from Filmmaker magazine
Daily | Cannes 2016 |
Cristi Puiu’s SIERANEVADA David
Hudson at Fandor
MUBI
[Daniel Kasman] (Cannes 2016:Top Picks)
Screendaily
[Tom Grater] (Screen Jury Grid)
Cannes
2016 Critics Ratings [collected by Reini Urban]
Hollywood
Reporter [Boyd van Hoeij]
Los
Angeles Times [Justin Chang]
Los
Angeles Times [Steven Zeitchik] (on Puiu & Mungiu)
Cannes
2016: "Sieranevada," "Staying Vertical," "I, Daniel
Blake," "Clash"
Barbara Scharres from The Ebert blog
New
York Times [Manohla Dargis]