Ugás, Marité
THE KID WHO LIES (El Cico que
Miente) B+ 90
The director is a Peruvian filmmaker with a background from the Cuban film industry, which suggests she’s familiar with depictions of social realism, which are put to good use here from a country that only makes about a dozen films a year, as this is largely a Venezuelan road movie highlighted by the exquisite remote locations and the use of local non-professionals from the region that inhabit the screen, where she captures the vitality of the region through the people that populate these small ocean villages. The impetus for making the movie was recreating the impact of the 1999 Vargas mudslides on the northern Caribbean coast of the country, a natural disaster of torrential storms killing more than 10,000 people, leaving many neighborhoods buried under 10 feet of mud while others were simply swept away to sea. Reminiscent of Kiarostami’s LIFE AND NOTHING MORE (1992) from his Earthquake Trilogy, which made brilliant use of the aftereffects of the Manjil-Rudbar earthquake of 1990 in Iran, also using actual locations to accentuate his film, Ugás takes a different approach, telling the story through the wrenchingly personal travails of a young 13-year old boy, Iker Fernández, who has been left orphaned by the tragedy wandering alone through the countryside. Mixing flashbacks of what he remembers about his past, some of which was told to him by his father when they lived in a gutted building complex afterwards, and some of which he had to discover for himself, the movie moves backwards and forward in time, all part of his personal journey.
In the opening
scene, shot in the enormous waves of the ocean, the boy and his dog struggle to
survive, where in his anxiety he unfortunately loses the dog, his sole
companion, a harrowing moment that offers an introductory portal to the mood of
tragedy that awaits the viewer, as the boy will find nearly everyone he meets
has been affected by the mudslide. But
since he’s such a young kid, people generously offer him food and water, people
who have little themselves, which is a prominent theme of the film, where he
has opportunities to become part of extended families, but he keeps searching
for any trace of his missing mother. As
he meets people along the way, he reveals what he remembers about the tragedy,
which keeps changing along the way, as he embellishes certain aspects of the
story or changes it outright, where it soon becomes clear he really doesn’t
know the full truth, as he was only 3 when it happened. As he hitchhikes or is offered rides, he
keeps searching for a woman who sells oysters, who he believes could be his
mother, though much of what he knows about her was told by his abusive father
who had little use for her after she left him.
But he survived afterwards, while she may have lost her life protecting
the boy. But he left his father soon
after realizing he was being told a pack of lies. Part of the road journey is adding to the
mythology of what will become his true life story.
One of the
intriguing aspects of the film is the tone of naturalism, beautifully shot by
Micaela Cajahuaringa, where the villages are tiny, but inhabited by authentic
people who have likely never been on camera before, where we witness local
festivities, annual tributes to the Patron Saint of Disasters, which includes
music and decorated boats. Nothing feels
forced, where the fluid change of scenery or the abrupt discovery of new
characters is enhanced by the kindness offered by the women, where some cook
for him, others sing, others try to make him their own, taking the place of
their own missing son, while others try to exploit his labor services. He’s a friendly guy, but he catches on
quickly when people try to take advantage of him, another familiar theme of the
film, as the movie is filled with people who exploit those who have been hurt
the most, thinking they are easiest to manipulate. Perhaps the most lasting friendship he makes
in the film is with a local black fisherman kid, Aldrin Sterling, who
continually calls the boy Blondie, taking to him right away as he’s equally
friendless and alone, but he’s a bit older and has an easy-natured style of
hustling about him, where he’s always trying to con somebody.
What’s most
fascinating is the film introduces us to a side of
Residents watch the premiere of "El Chico que Miente" outside a municipality clubhouse in Ocumare
Residents watch the
premiere of "El Chico que Miente" (The Kid Who Lies) outside a
municipality clubhouse in Ocumare
THE
KID WHO LIES
A 13-year old kid starts
a journey along the Venezuelan coast and, in order to survive, he captivates
people by constantly reinventing his own story in the mudslide. His true past,
however, will gradually become clearer. Ten years ago the mudslide took his
mother, now he thinks he can find her. He has a difficult road ahead of him,
but there is also a world yet to be discovered.
Director's CV: She was born in
Variety Reviews - The Kid Who Lies - Film Reviews - Berlin - Review ... Peter Debruge
With: Iker Fernandez,
Francisco Denis, Maria Fernanda Ferro, Beatriz Vazquez, Laureano Olivarez,
Dimas Gonzalez, Gladys Prince, Aldrin Sterling, Yugui Lopez, Beto Benites,
Valerie Weilheim.
The story changes every
time someone asks "The Kid Who Lies'?" 13-year-old protag what
happened to his parents. In time, however, the boy's personal history begins to
take shape as he travels across
Despite its titular
teenager (the magnetic heart of the film, unaffectedly played by newcomer Iker
Fernandez), "Kid" isn't really aimed at young auds, as the
opening-scene drowning of a dog immediately suggests. Instead, Ugas reaches out
to those still trying to reconcile the mudslides' effect by rearranging her
road-movie premise into a more complex (and potentially confusing) nonlinear
form: The boy's progress through a series of raucous encounters with young
people met en route is interrupted by dark flashbacks that belie the serious
side of this otherwise carefree coming-of-ager.
Camera (color), Micaela
Cajahuaringa; editor, Ugas; music, Camilo Froideval; art director, Matias
Tikas. Reviewed at
BBC News - The films inspired by Venezuela's 1999 disaster Sarah granger from BBC News in Caracas, February 9, 2011
Vargas tragedy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Marité Ugás | director website
I have to say I was a little disappointed here, as I was
fully prepared to love this film, as I did BEST INTENTIONS, and most
particularly PRIVATE CONFESSIONS, my personal favorite of the bunch - largely
due, I think, to the phenomenal performance in a somewhat supporting role
of Max von Sydow to Pernilla August's lead, who Lena Endre bears an
uncanny similarity with in oh so many ways, not the least of which is her
maturity and pure magnificence in acting, but despite the brilliance of the
actors here, I’m sorry, I felt there was something missing, emotionally, and I
attribute it to the intellectual style and form of the presentation, sort of a
Bergman version of Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape," with Erland
Josephson (Bergman) filling in for Krapp - no pun intended...this was also an
extremely similar style, conjuring up his own personal demons, conjuring up
the clown in the film IN THE PRESENCE OF A CLOWN - but in all those
films there was an overwhelming passion that ran throughout the film. However here, as we keep returning to the
writer's empty pages which he has to fill, and the use of the continuously
interwoven narratives, the sequences simply stop altogether as we return to the
writer and the passion is not sustained, we see 4 walls and the emotional
connection keeps being drained out of what's happening on screen. I would compare his use of reading from the
entries of a diary in this film with CRIES AND WHISPERS where the screen images
matched the unbelievable power and intensity of the what's being read
from that diary, and there were simple fade outs, fade ins to the next
sequence, the rhythm kept a continuous burst, like rekindled emotional
flames, alive on the screen. In
FAITHLESS the flame would go out and have to be re-lit again and again, so by
the time Lena Endre pours her guts out, it's to an empty page - no one is
responding, no one - really - is even listening, it's a soliloquy. Now that may very well be the point in this
film - but that's really overly intellectual and about the exercise of writing
itself, which is not a particularly dramatic enterprise, a man sits alone in a
room for extremely long periods of time, the action that he is writing about
happened long ago and the sense of urgency in his life has long since passed,
it's now a reflection passing overhead, like a cloud, that's about to drift out
of sight, death whispers to him at night, & his memories - all
that is keeping him alive - make him
tremble meekly with fear. I guess
intellectually, I comprehend that, in my head, but in my heart, I didn't really
feel connected to any of them, and I found that so sad, all subjective content
was extracted so that pure objective evil could prevail - the evil in men's
souls - and while her summoned presence could forgive him, she also says:
"I do not much like your Marianne."
Did you see young Bergman grilling her all night, looking
like the sadistic
BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Faithless (2000) Philip Strick from Sight and Sound, February 2001
Liv Ullmann's Bergman-scripted Faithless shows sex as power and pain
The enigma that is Faithless has been created by at least seven story-tellers, none of whom can be trusted. At its simplest, the film consists of the fantasies of an ageing writer who constructs - perhaps from his remembered past - a quartet of recalcitrant fictions: three adults, one child, and their involvement in a series of misdemeanours, in particular an extra-marital affair. Although of central concern, the child can be presumed an innocent bystander, already garrulous with her own stories but also anxious to learn from example. This scenario offers a painful if open-ended meditation on the pleasures and perils of infidelity and its impact on the next generation. If this were all, the single and singularly unhelpful lesson Faithless appears to offer would be that parents can only be relied on to indulge in strange behaviour which we seldom survive unscathed.
The director, however, has other claims. "I don't really believe," says Liv Ullmann, "that a film should have a message", but to avoid the risk of reducing Faithless to a collection of inconsequential anecdotes, she grants that an observer's response is likely to be: "I will treat people around me more carefully." Less tritely, she also suggests that "the light in the story is that we can forget the hours that were full of suffering" - yet the film's characters are laden with painful memories which show little sign of fading away. On the contrary, a more persuasive theme might be that past errors are recycled, with fresh suffering as a result. Faithlessness, in short, is more pain than gain.
From a child's point of view, the peculiar compulsion that drives adults to disregard this truism must seem incomprehensible. The void at the centre of Faithless is caused by the hardly avoidable discretion with which sexuality is portrayed, or rather overlooked until the shock of explicit description when the wife tells of her husband's attack (he rapes her when she agrees to meet him to discuss the custody of their child). Earlier the illicit couple squirm beneath the overhead camera like specimens on a slide, frantic to cover themselves from our gaze or perhaps from that of a higher authority. Erotic tension, which should provide the pulse for their affair, is instead implied by a banality of suffocating red drapes, a silk nightgown and some sinuous bedsteads. Sex itself, instead of being its own reward, becomes symbolic - of complicity, habit, power, control and punishment.
As a result, the rationale behind the film's assorted betrayals appears less physical than hedonistic, a desire for what Marianne, the devoted wife, describes as "fun". Why she should suddenly propose such diversion to David, the platonic friend of all the family, is a mystery as much to her as to the rest of us, and grows no clearer from what we learn of her secure marriage to composer Markus and attentive motherhood. (David's initial proposal to her, on the other hand, is recognisably in keeping with an amiable lack of principle.) "Can't we just see how it goes?" she lightly asks her agitated lover, who after their first romantic adventure wants total possession. And she later declares with some amusement, before the repercussions begin, that having two men in her life is easier than she expected. Both in risk-taking temerity and in vulnerability she shares characteristics with the heroines of Ullmann's other films, ensnared in a muddle of longings like the sufferers in Sophie (1992), Kristin Lavranssdatter (1995), Private Confessions (1997) and the yet-to-be-filmed Anne Frank project. But her vocabulary, as in Private Confessions, originates elsewhere - with Ingmar Bergman.
Scripted by Bergman, who even lends his name to the reclusive author portrayed by his frequent on-screen alter ego Erland Josephson, Faithless offers itself, with appealing guile, as authentic autobiography. The first signs are that it reconstructs the summer of 1949, when the volatile genius, two families already in collapse behind him, turned 31 and gatecrashed another marriage by way of a Parisian interlude, seemingly with few pangs of conscience. His new partner's husband furiously attempted to win her back, finally resorting to rape. Afflicted (as he tells it in his memoir The Magic Lantern) by retrospective jealousy, Bergman gave the girl not the slightest sympathy, later married her, and in due course ran off with Harriet Andersson. Over the years a gradual penitence overtook his disregard for conventional restraint, charted in his films by a succession of anguished couples who, like the wretched Almans in Wild Strawberries (1957), subject each other to endless humiliation.
Bergman couldn't forgive himself, according to Ullmann, for the "rape and rage" episode, yet to interpret Faithless as exorcism would seem mistaken. "Much of it," she says of his script, "did not happen, that I am sure of", while in his Magic Lantern description of the crucial scene Bergman himself admits, "I have never found out what really happened." On screen, Marianne's description of her ordeal is luridly detailed, enough to raise questions about the level of her compliance but also aligning her with the many confessors in Bergman's work (the nurse in Persona, 1966, for instance) who reveal dark secrets direct to camera. If, by simple omission (other than the occasional church bell) Faithless reflects on the melancholy condition of a literally faith-less society - despite Bergman's claim to be no longer concerned with such matters - the ritual penance of the confessional is scrupulously observed by all the film's characters.
In an unexpected reversal, the screen Bergman asserts at one point that he
never met Marianne's husband Markus, whose manipulative influence turns out to
have infected their collective behaviour for so long he almost has best claim
to being the author of the piece. Since we've been given every reason to
suppose that 'Bergman' and David are one, and we know David has been a family
friend for years, this denial is either mischievous or mistaken, either a
fanciful confirmation that the characters are primarily fictions dreamed up by
'Bergman' (we only properly hear Markus' voice by letter, after all), or an
absent-minded throwback to the realities of 1949. Or it could simply be that
remembered fact (the visit to
Marianne's luckless daughter Isabelle, to whom Ullmann claims to have devoted more attention than Bergman when she revised his screenplay, similarly has no place in The Magic Lantern (the custody battle was fought over two small sons). Even so, her forerunners are to be found everywhere else in Bergman's work, from the entranced redhead who punctuates The Magic Flute (1975) to the wandering youth in The Silence (1963), the raptly attentive schoolboy at the end of To Joy (1949, a preface to Faithless just as Scenes from a Marriage, 1973, is its clearest rehearsal), and, of course, Fanny and Alexander (1982). The collision between generations is as much a part of Bergman's iconography as rowing boats, music boxes, the proscenium arch and the Fårö shoreline. Knowing them well, Ullmann fits them all into her film.
It looks just as Bergman might have filmed it: formal, precise and demanding of its cast an astonishing surrender to a gallery of unflinching close-ups. Nothing in the camerawork is overstated, although every lighting change (gold to blue at the flick of a switch, ominous shadows when a window blind is lowered) is of calculated significance. When the camera moves, it's with reluctance (in keeping with the mature Bergman's dislike of tracking shots) but with exemplary relevance, as in the prowl around an apartment that ends up in the bedroom or the sudden retreat into the air above the writer as he recognises the full horror of what he's done.
If Ullmann has unquestionably appropriated from her years with Bergman (and Josephson) a magnificent empathy with her players, she is also rewardingly attentive to visual detail. Note, for instance, the framing of the hospital sequence, the deployment of sculptures in the lawyer's office, or the timing of the 'discovery' as the lovers giggle helplessly in embarrassment and desperation. By design, the final Mozart theme plays to a halt during the end credits, not two shots earlier while the writer wanders towards the sea. It is the project, with all its ambiguities, that has been put to rest, not the troubled spirit that conceived it.
Peter Bradshaw on Trolösa, The Guardian, 9 February 2001
Edgar G. Ulmer • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Erik Ulman, January 24, 2003
Kaleidoscope of the B-film Director: Edgar G ... - Senses of Cinema Lance Duerfahrd, September 19, 2009
The Black Cat Josh Vasquez from Slant magazine
Did
you ever want to forget anything? Did you ever want to cut away a piece of your
memory or blot it out? You can’t, you
know. No matter how hard you try. You can change the scenery, but sooner or
later you’ll get a whiff of perfume or somebody will say a certain phrase or
maybe hum something. Then you’re licked again! —Al Roberts (Tom Neal)
While the IMDb catalog lists 52 films directed from 1930 to the mid
1960’s, director Edgar G. Ulmer worked on closer to 127 features, starting his
career in Germany as a set designer for early Fritz Lang films of the 20’s and
30’s including METROPOLIS (1927) and M (1931), also F.W. Murnau’s SUNRISE
(1927), before emigrating to Hollywood in 1931 and making a name for himself in
America by directing THE BLACK CAT (1934), an atmospheric horror film adapted
from an Edgar Allen Poe tale starring both Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. But of all the films he directed, only DETOUR
was chosen to the National Film Registry, the first B-movie to be chosen, as it
carries the distinct imprint of the post war, German Expressionist style mixed
with the bleak fatalism of an American film noir. Supposedly shot in a week for less than
$20,000, a road movie with no location shots, this lighting and production
design is remarkably inventive in a morality tale of an unlovable loser stuck
in a nightmarish, Kafkaesque world, featuring a down-on-his-luck loner, Al
Roberts (Tom Neal), the victim of bad luck and trouble and an ill-fated future,
paralyzed by the poisonous venom from the Queen Bee villainess, Vera (Ann
Savage), a mysterious hitchhiker whose cold-blooded, in-your-face, blackmailing
technique overwhelms him and keeps him stymied throughout the film, suffocating
him with her sting, toying with his guilt and paranoiac delusions, unable to
claw his way out of her web. A mere 68
minutes, the film reflects an era of utility and purpose, where nothing
extraneous is added to this taut psychological thriller, something unheard of
today, as they would add plenty of character development. Not so in this film, which in an
uninterrupted shot shows the open road stretching out to the horizon through
the opening credits, where the camera is distancing itself from the road left
behind.
Using an overly morose inner narration throughout, Al is a jazz pianist
down in the dumps and seen hitching across the country from New York to
Hollywood, broke and hungry, with little to show for himself, hoping to unite
with his girlfriend Sue (Claudia Drake), a pick up singer last seen when both
were literally immersed in a fog bank. A
brief flashback sequence shows an amusing quality that is interestingly used
later in The Blue
Dahlia
(1946), where the sound of American jazz music is a sign for mental agitation
(recall William Bendix screaming “Turn off that monkey music!”), as emotional
and psychological scars have obviously left their mark as Al screams to shut it
off when someone plays a song on the jukebox that recalls better times, Detour (1945) - Can't Believe
That You're In Love With Me - YouTube
(1:50), suggesting a happier world and a better life that he remains
exiled from in the present. This device
was also used in
As a B-movie, the clarity of image is lacking, the soundtrack has a
noticeable hiss throughout, and the razor-sharp dialogue at times
resembles screwball comedy with the frenetic pace, where the dialogue is not always in synch
with the actors and at times has such an amusing, overly hard-edged, noirish
language to it that it feels as if Al and Vera are talking in code. Their tough guy, stone-faced approach to one
another, filtered through the extra layer of haze caused by excessive alcohol,
creates a kind of dysfunctional paralysis, where neither one of them makes a
bit of sense and instead exposes viciousness and raw desperation, where her
overly aggressive stance keeps him cornered, even though any reasonable person
would simply walk away at any number of opportunities, but he remains ensnared
by the very nature of her deviousness. The
contrast between the two is markedly different, as is the contrast between the
two women, where Al and Sue are both viewed as innocent and naïve next to the
willfully crass amorality of Vera, nonetheless, the world closes in on them both with
a dizzying claustrophobic hysteria.
Audiences must love hating Vera, as she’s so over the top, one of the
more evil and diabolic femme fatales who fittingly gets what she deserves,
which only ends up tightening the noose around his neck, casting him out into
the world chasing shadows, where behind every dark corner is someone searching
after him. The entire film is saturated
in layers of guilt and self-loathing, where Al is seen as such a weak,
miserable wretch that no good can come to him, where he will forever wander the
streets like a ghost stripped of his worldly existence, where a wrong
turn somewhere distanced him from ever having a future, leaving him instead
lost, eternally wandering the wasteland.
As
fatalistic a film as you’re ever going to find, perhaps the biggest irony is
what actually happened to actor Tom Neal, a former boxer, who was ostracized
from the Hollywood community in the early 50’s for his hair trigger temper,
alcoholism, and history of physical assault, eventually charged with the murder
of his own wife. After serving his
sentence, he died of a heart attack less than a year following his
release.
Detour Nick Schager
Tom Neal's Al has the sourest puss in all of noir, and his perpetual frown and whiny, unreliable narration give the low-budget Detour its evocative dourness. Shot on the cheap in six days, Edward G. Ulmer's Poverty Row tale of woe is an archetypal exercise in post-war pessimism, detailing the pathetic downfall of a two-bit piano player (Neal) doomed by his cowardice. With its overcooked dialogue, makeshift sets, jagged performances (including Anne Savage's crazy-eyed femme fatale), and endless rear-projection car scenes, this coincidence-laden suspense yarn has no business being as irresistibly moody as it is. Like great garage rock, however, Ulmer's landmark film ultimately derives its raw, jittery vitality from its very crudeness.
Detour Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London
The kind of film (made in six days,
almost entirely in a Poverty Row studio, its extensive road scenes shot with
back projection) that would be impossible to make today, even as a TV movie.
Now it would require 100% locations (the 'art' of studio shooting having been
discredited and thus lost), and the minimal narrative would never justify a
go-ahead (pianist Neal is bumming from
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
The strongest B-noir of the 1940s, Detour incorporates
all the restrictions and setbacks of its shooting schedule into an
extraordinary anti-aesthetic of sordidness, or impoverishment, in which the
bourgeois self-hatred of classical noir is replaced by two, desperate
journeys from
Even in the rickety, dodgy, scratched-to-hell print shown at
But Detour only really takes off with the sudden arrival on the scene of its most famous element, the well-named Ann Savage as screeching femme fatale hitchhiker Vera. First-time viewers primed for Savage's movie-stealing turn may be surprised at just how late in the day she appears – Al's girlfriend has so much screen time they'd be forgiven for reckoning that she is the prominently-billed Savage. They'd be dead wrong: Vera and the nicey-nicey girlfriend (whose name the viewer soon forgets) are chalk and cheese, or rather sour whiskey and warm milk.
Trampy 'bad girl' Vera exudes a kind of malevolent, misanthropic energy that's startling to encounter in a 60-year-old movie, barrelling the picture along to its rug-pulling conclusion which it wouldn't be fair to reveal here. God only knows what Martin Goldsmith's source novel is like, but in Ulmer's no-nonsense hands Detour is enthrallingly enjoyable nightmare of frustrated desires and inescapable self-defeat.
"Detour
Movie Review" A Life At The
Movies,
When I was watching the entire series of Blondie films a while
back, I was surprised to see Anne Savage in Footlights Glamour, one of
the later Blondie films. She was still a glamour girl with a contract at
The plot of Detour is quite simple. Al Roberts is a down-on-his-luck piano player is hitchhiking across the country to meet up with his old flame when he is picked up by a Haskell, a bookie in a fancy car. Al takes the his turn at the wheel, and when he stops to put the top up, he notices Haskell is dead. Fearing the police would pin a murder on him, he hides his body in the desert and takes his money and car and assumes his identity. He later picks up a female hitchhiker, “who looked like she is had fallen off of the dirtiest freight train.” She had previously ridden in the same car with Haskell, and sees through Al immediately and sets about blackmailing him to join her plan to get all of Haskell’s money. Finally, he is involved in another accidental death that makes him look even more guilty. While the story is simple, it has been suggested that it may be related by an unreliable narrator, as the only information comes from Al, who may be altering the events to cover up his own guilt. Near the end of the film, there is scene in which Al looks around the cheap hotel room which he has been held as a virtual prisoner, with the objects, or evidence, around him going in and out of focus, revealing that he is not entirely conscious of what he is doing. But aside from the plot, director Edgar G. Ulmer successfully (and cheaply!) creates an atmosphere of total seediness and despair, and that, along with Ann Savage’s remarkable performance, is really which made this film an unexpected classic.
Director Ulmer and Savage later said that the entire film was shot in six days, but this claim has been challenged, prompting Peter Bogdanovich to quip, “so what did he have, seven?” In the documentary Edgar G. Ulmer: The Man Off-screen, the director’s daughter Arianne Ulmer presents a shooting script with with a title page reading “June 14, 1945-June 29. Camera days 14.” In any case, the film was shot cheaply and quickly, and Ulmer used innovation and resourcefulness to get around these limitations. Or, as Ann Savage said decades later, “well, we didn’t waste any time.”
"Magic
on a shoestring" Geoffrey
Macnab from the Guardian,
Edgar G Ulmer was
In his 40 years as a director, Ulmer made some of the most ingenious and disturbing B movies in Hollywood history. His best-known picture, Detour, was shot in less than a week for under $20,000 and yet boasts production design and lighting as inventive as anything found in the huge budget German silent era classics, on which he served his apprenticeship.
It's symptomatic of the neglect into which Ulmer has fallen in Britain that the only one of his films readily available on DVD is The Naked Venus (1958), a tiny budget tale about a French artist's model who joins an American nudist colony. It seems an unlikely assignment, but Arianne Cipes Ulmer, the director's daughter, explains: "My mother and father were both nudists. Part of the Germanic fresh air movement of their lifetime."
With its shots of naked Americans playing volleyball and creaky courtroom scenes in which the model makes a stirring plea on behalf of nudists everywhere, the film is a poor advertisement for its director's abilities: there are, for instance, few of his trademark lighting effects or elaborate tracking shots. But Naked Venus is an intriguing introduction to Ulmer's work.
Ulmer was born in 1904 in Moravia. His father, Siegfried Ulmer, served in the Austrian army during the first world war, and died when Edgar was 12. As an adolescent in war-ravaged Vienna, he experienced poverty and anti-semitism; but such was his precocious talent that he found a job as a stage designer for director Max Reinhardt. Before long he established himself in the German film industry of the 1920s, working as a production designer (a role he created) on The Golem, Metropolis and Sunrise.
The crowning glory of his first stint in Hollywood was The Black Cat (1934), a typical Ulmer mish-mash, combining gothic elements, incongruous romantic comedy and Bauhaus design. The film is genuinely scary, setting Bela Lugosi as a traumatised man returning home from the war against Boris Karloff as an architect with satanic leanings. Although The Black Cat was a notable box-office success, Ulmer was forced into exile when he fell in love with Shirley Castle. She was married to Max Alexander - Universal chief Carl Laemmle's nephew. Ulmer and Shirley eloped to New York during the depression, leaving their careers in tatters behind them. "He never reconciled with Laemmle. Nor did my mother with the entire Laemmle family," says Arianne.
Just when he was close to despair, Ulmer was hired to make a series of films for the booming Yiddish-language market. In the early 1940s, he was lured back to Hollywood to work for Producers' Releasing Corporation (PRC). Thus began his years on what was nicknamed "Poverty Row", making films in flea-pit studios on tiny budgets. Arianne says he didn't feel bitter about this: "Fame and money were not issues. He really only wanted to have the opportunity to work and express himself."
Perhaps Ulmer's masterpiece was Ruthless (1948), his "low-rent Citizen Kane" as it was dubbed. This is a quintessentially American tale about a kid from the wrong side of the tracks. Horace Woodruff Vendig (Zachary Scott) escapes his impoverished background, makes it rich, but ruins the lives of everybody with whom he comes into contact in the process. Told in flashback, it's a dark and depressing tale about the hollowness of success.
Though his background was as a designer, Ulmer worked brilliantly with actors, eliciting a pathetic but deeply moving performance from Sydney Greenstreet (the rotund, well-spoken villain from Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon) as the financier whom Vendig cuckolds, humiliates and bankrupts. In one scene, as Greenstreet realises that his wife is about to leave him, we see him staring in despair at his own reflection. In another, though broken and overweight, he makes a feeble attempt to throttle his tormentor.
For many, though, the quintessential Ulmer film remains Detour. He described it as a morality fable about "an absolute loser". Al Roberts (Tom Neal) is a New York pianist who hitchhikes across country for a reunion with his girlfriend. En route, Al takes a ride with Haskell, a bookie who dies unexpectedly. Al steals the car and the man's identity, but then he picks up Vera (Ann Savage), a young delinquent who knew Haskell. Convinced that Al killed him, she begins to blackmail him.
The film has the warped, nightmarish feel of a Kafka story. In fact it was adapted from a "very bad book" by Martin Goldsmith. Ulmer transformed the material, cutting large chunks of the original narrative. His casting was astute. Neal and Savage bring just the right measure of desperation, viciousness and vulnerability to their roles. (In a gruesome case of life imitating art, Neal was later charged with the murder of his wife.)
Detour alone would be enough to sustain Ulmer's reputation. By his own calculation, though, he made 127 other features. This month's season at the National Film Theatre includes only a fragment of his lifetime's work. His films reflected his protean imagination. "My father was a deeply sensitive European mind wounded by war," says Arianne. "He could laugh until the tears rolled down his cheeks and be so jovial or rage like bull or withdraw into his shell. Today we would have probably labelled him as manic-depressive. He was a workaholic but he had enormous capacity for joy, anger, humour and sensuality."
Detour • Senses of Cinema Dana Polan, July 19, 2002
Detour - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Glenn Lovell from Film Reference
Parallax View [David Coursen] Originally published in Movietone News, February 1976
Images Movie Journal Gary Morris, January 2001, also seen here: Bright Lights Film Journal :: Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour on DVD
BFI | Sight & Sound | Mr Pink, Mr Indie, Mr Shhh Philip Kemp from Sight and Sound, August 2001
Film
Court: Detour - Culture Court
Detour
(1945) - TCM.com Jeff
Stafford
CultureCartel.com - Edgar G. Ulmer - 1945 - Detour Movies Review John Beachem
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
DVD Savant review Glenn Erickson
Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips Jr.]
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
John Ulmer also seen here: Movie Vault [John Ulmer]
The Films of Edgar G. Ulmer [Michael E. Grost]
Dennis Schwartz also seen here: Ozus' World Movie Reviews
Chicago
Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
Detour (1945 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Detour (1945) Film Noir Thriller [HD] National Film ... entire film may be seen here
This is easily my least favorite of the three, largely due to the rehashing of already familiar themes and the near complete absence of little kids. Instead, this film has a feeling of alienation from the outset, toys in exile, no longer loved or needed, themes that were beautifully explored in TOY STORY 2 (1999) over a decade ago, still the best chapter in my view, as the depth of the emotional connection is so unbelievably compelling. As Andy is now old enough to go to college, he has to clean out his room, which includes deciding what to do with his old toys that he hasn’t touched in years. It’s the same old gang of toys, minus a few who haven’t survived, who are now a nervous wreck thinking this is the end of the line, as they may end up in the trash. While they were destined to go into the attic, mom mistakenly throws them out for the garbage truck, miraculously rescued by Woody at the last moment, and then like always, no one believes him when he tries to tell them they were destined for the attic, not the garbage. This is little consolation, as they all heard Andy call them “old junk,” so they (again mistakenly) end up in a box of toys meant for the local day care center, which seems like a paradise, as kids will play with them all day long and they’re initially welcomed by all the other toys, led by a strawberry smelling red bear named Lotso, where Barbi swoons over her first look at Ken who lives in a giant playhouse, and everyone, except Woody, has high expectations. Woody is still trying to bring them all back home, but he has no takers, so he escapes on his own, where he’s accidentally picked up by an effectionate little girl named Bonnie who brings him home and is thrilled at pulling his string and hearing those corny old cowboy sayings, where Woody soon meets an entirely new set of toys who greet him warmly. Meanwhile the old gang is treated to the rude awakening of pre-schoolers who bash them around and smash them to bits, then leave them around in pieces for someone else to clean up afterwards. By the time day is done, they are in for a few more surprises, like being locked in where they can’t escape, taking a page out of the CHICKEN RUN (2000) scenario, while the strawberry bear, in a reprise of the evil character Stinky Pete the Prospector, turns into their worst nightmare, turning the facilities into a locked down prison camp at night run by a few of the privileged toys.
Much of the humor completely disappears during the harrowing prison segment, which even includes a torture sequence with Buzz where they reprogram him back to his original status when he was following orders to protect the universe. They erase his memory and turn him into the ideal prison guard, where each of the toys are actually locked into little iron cages. All hope appears lost until Woody reappears on the scene to help them escape. In what can only be called a moment of comical genius, the gang can’t figure out how to change Buzz back to the way he was, so instead they find him a stellar new personality that only speaks Spanish (subtitled), dances the tango with an incredibly captivated Jessie, and whispers sweet nothings in her ear, constantly rescuing her from every manner of mayhem, where Buzz has become a sensuous, smooth-talking Latin lover, though still not recognizing his old gang. As they make their great escape, there are indescribable adult style difficulties to overcome, including several destruction sequences, where the threat of total annihilation is paramount. And that’s ultimately the undoing of this chapter, as the mood has shifted so completely from originality and subversive adolescent humor to Michael Bay or James Cameron style entertainment reaching a point where a vicious new horror prevails, so completely the thoughts of an adult world, as the gang is continuously tortured and terrorized for a good portion of the film, capturing an unnerving bad guy mood for children while still relying upon ingenious solutions to save their lives. Still, the change in Buzz’s personality is a spectacular addition, easily the best thing in the film and probably the only original new idea, including a Gipsy Kings Spanish rendition over the end credits of “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” para Buzz Español. Without it, the film is stuck in a dire mode and lacked the humor it needed, never really developing any emotional connection until the final scene when it finally reverts back to childhood.
The Onion A.V. Club review [A] Tasha Robinson
Deep into Toy Story 3, there’s a moment where some of the toy protagonists realize that in spite of all their cleverness and determination, there’s no way out of the fatal trap into which they’ve fallen. In any other children’s film, this would be a time for comedic panic, long-withheld personal confessions, or dramatic statements that would immediately turn out to be ironic. In any other children’s film, the moment would quickly peak and pass. But Toy Story 3 director Lee Unkrich (Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc.) holds for long, excruciating moments on the silent characters, as they pass from disbelief into sorrowful resolve, then take each others’ hands and wait. And wait. And wait.
It’s a shockingly grim sequence, but this is what Pixar films do best: find a place of deep emotion and explore it without blunting it, overexplaining it, or passing it off with a laugh. Toy Story 3 never gets darker than this moment, but time and again, it similarly finds real, resonant emotion in the antics of a bunch of children’s toys having adventures when nobody’s looking.
That emotion starts with the toys’ pathetic desperation as their owner, now 17 and headed to college, fails to play with them, no matter what ruse they try. While loyalist cowboy Woody (Tom Hanks) insists they should stand by the boy even if he wants them all in a trash bag in the attic, his blinkered devotion is more creepy than sweet. But the film never plays this for humor, either; his dedication is as real and important to him as his friends’ burning desire to move on, find new kids, and get played with again. Which sets up a lot of conflict and frantic hijinks involving a day-care center, separations and reunions, and action that playfully evokes films from The Great Escape to Cool Hand Luke.
TS3 doesn’t entirely dodge some of the current kid-movie standards; Unkrich brings in an astonishing crowd of celebrities to voice even the most minor characters, and lets a pop song express the comedy of one moment. But the film never lets banter, visual gags, or the usual manic kid-flick running about interfere with its more delicately handled thoughts on loyalty, longing, broken relationships, and generational continuity. It honestly earns its emotion, moment by painstakingly executed moment.
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [2.5/4]
Midway through Toy Story 3, Hayao Miyazaki’s most
beloved creation, Totoro, makes a cameo appearance. The nod seems to be borne
out of the Pixar creators’ stated respect for
This theme of rejection has arguably been central to the Toy Story series since Buzz displaced Woody in the first entry, making the sequels’ focus on the same material feel redundant. More troubling than that continued lack of thematic imagination, however, are the characters and plot elements in this third entry that seem to have been cribbed from the previous franchise entries. Once again, space hero Buzz Lightyear reverts to factory settings and turns on his fellow toys. Lotso, a malicious Teddy bear, comes off as a Stinky Pete retread. The basic plot, which recycles numerous prison escape films, is a tired inversion of Toy Story 2’s rescue operation. That the overall level of invention would be reduced is to be expected in a second sequel, one could argue, but that makes this film feel no less stale.
Toy Story 3 strives to invoke the audience’s sense of nostalgia, both for the characters in the film and for the retail products that they signify. Watching the movie, however, the nostalgia that I felt most strongly was for animated features produced in the pre-Shrek era. Toy Story 3 frequently indulges in the cheap brand of crass humor that has defined that series, with fart jokes, ethnic jokes, and gay jokes throughout its run time. All of this seems well beneath the level of sophistication that people insist Pixar films possess, and suggests something of a shark jump for the studio.
Beyond such quibbles, the threadbare plot of Toy Story 3 raises another cause for complaint. While the series’ willingness to grapple with the disposability of toys is commendable, the sappy ending, in which Andy, on the verge of manhood, regresses considerably, renders much of the complexity of what has come before moot. Since the emotional core of the film is left over from its predecessors, the focus of the movie falls on its action set pieces, all of which are pitched at the same level and grow redundant. This is unfortunate, because Toy Story 3 has little to offer adult viewers beyond those endless chases, coy referentiality, and its sole thematic obsession. For children, and children at heart, it might be enough. At best, Toy Story 3 stands as a refinement of Toy Story 2, a movie which was an unnecessary sequel to begin with.
New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review
Back in the sixties and seventies, before films became “franchises” and “tent poles,” before Jaws and Star Wars and corporate-studio ownership changed everything, the “summer blockbuster” wasn’t a genre unto itself, a megabudget cartoon tooled to help us escape from our lives. It hadn’t been commoditized yet. And escapism took different forms. I spent my childhood in an upper-middle-class suburb, one of those doomed artificial constructs in which the outside world is kept vigorously at bay. Isolated from the counterculture, the war, the racial upheavals of the big cities, I went to blockbusters like In the Heat of the Night, Easy Rider, and Woody Allen’s Bananas to escape to reality. There was lots of crap, but of a different order than this season’s The A-Team and Killers and Shrek XXV and Iron Man 2—which cost hundreds of millions and are not so much made as microengineered.
I’ve never blamed Jaws for what happened: It’s the best summer
movie ever made. People forget how real it seemed. It was shot in a beach
resort (
No, the beginning of the end was Star Wars, synthetic then as now, clever but never exhilarating, infinitely merchandisable. With any luck, this summer’s most merchandisable blockbuster, Toy Story 3, will be the last of the Toy Story movies. Yes, there will be pressure on Pixar to squeeze out sequels. But the chances of topping this one are infinitesimal. It’s another paradoxical Pixar beauty: the high-tech ode to the old-fashioned, the vintage, the stuff of childhood fantasy play when kids and not computer programmers supplied the imagination.
I don’t think of the Toy Story pictures as “escapism,” even though they’re rooted in a child’s dream of what happens when the lights go out and the toys come to life. At heart they’re about aging, impermanence, loss, and death. Pixar likely borrowed the premise from Thomas M. Disch’s The Brave Little Toaster: Objects once prized lose their newness and become disposable. But they have spiritual properties, and to discard them carelessly is to dishonor the past that shaped us. It’s almost Buddhist in how it invests all matter with a life force worthy of reverence.
Toy Story 3 has another dimension, probably the upshot of creators John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, and director Lee Unkrich’s getting older and having families. The toys—especially the cowboy Woody (with the voice of Tom Hanks)—see the boy who owns them, Andy, through the eyes of parents with kids who are ready to move on. After a wild prologue with Woody and Tim Allen’s Buzz Lightyear and Joan Cusack’s cowgirl Jessie saving a trainload of orphans from the evil pig mastermind—which comes to a halt when young Andy is called to dinner—we jump a decade ahead. Andy no longer plays with toys; he’s going off to college. His room is being cleared for his younger sister with her MP3 player and computer. Should the toys be stuck in the attic? Donated to Sunnyside, a children’s day-care center? Or left on the curb for the garbage truck? The gang, which includes the sister’s cast-off Barbie (voiced by Jodi Benson), is scared by the prospect of all those possibilities.
After mix-ups and chases, they end up at Sunnyside, where the toy who calls the shots is the formidable huggy bear, Lotso, with the great southern stentorian voice of Ned Beatty. Lotso is a character with stature—a toy shattered by abandonment who has purged himself of sentiment. And soon our gang discovers he runs Sunnyside as a kind of prison. The big bald baby doll functions as a spooky enforcer and looks like the Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson in Ed Wood movies. A cymbal-clashing monkey is the prison guard of nightmares. Horror of horrors, Buzz is reprogrammed to be his old pompous self to help Lotso keep everyone in cages. Suddenly, thrillingly, Toy Story 3 becomes a prison-break movie.
As usual with Pixar, the little things win your heart, like Woody escaping out the bathroom window but pausing to put down a sheet of toilet paper before stepping on the seat. At Sunnyside, Barbie meets Ken (Michael Keaton), and all our culture’s Ken-is-gay jokes get a new spin: He’s a metrosexual elated at finding someone to whom he can show off his disco wardrobe. The gags are all of a piece, right up to the forlorn yet enchanting finale.
Kids will love Toy Story 3 for its cliff-hangers and slapstick spills. But for grown-ups, the film will touch something deeper: the heartfelt wish that childhood memories will never fade. This lovely, wistful movie weaves together our joyful fantasies of the past, the ones that helped form us, and our darker fears of being forgotten—and offers hope that we can somehow reconcile those poles of existence for ourselves. The slight autumnal chill makes the warmth of summer all the sweeter.
Toy
Story 3 and the Long Recession
zunguzungu,
The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
Window to the Movies (Jeffrey Chen) capsule review [10/10]
CHUD.com (Devin Faraci) review
Cinefantastique [Steve Biodrowski]
Hating
the Player, Losing the Game: The Armond White Meta-Review Paul Brunick from The House Next Door,
TIME Magazine (Richard Corliss) review
Christian Science Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [A]
Eye for Film (Scott Macdonald) review [5/5]
Cinema Autopsy (Thomas Caldwell) review [4.5/5]
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
The Village Voice [Eric Hynes]
Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [4/4]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
Cinema Blend review Josh Tyler
Monsters and Critics [Anne Brodie]
Cinematical (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review also seen here: Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [3.5/4]
The House Next Door [Elise Nakhnikian]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [4/4]
DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) review [4/5] [3-D Version]
DVD Talk (Tyler Foster) review
[5/5] [3-D Version]
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [3.5/5] Richard Scheib
User reviews from imdb Author: diac228
(diac1987@netscape.net) from
User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: MisterWhiplash from
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [5/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [5/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [5/5]
eFilmCritic.com (David Cornelius) review [5/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]
Cinema Viewfinder (Tony Dayoub) review
Black Sheep Reviews [Joseph Belanger]
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [A] also seen here: EricDSnider.com [Eric D. Snider]
Cinema Crazed (Felix Vasquez Jr.) review
eFilmCritic.com (Brian Orndorf) review [4/5] also seen here: DVD Talk [Brian Orndorf] and here: Briandom [Brian Orndorf]
The Parallax Review [Matt Wedge]
Movie-Vault.com (LaRae Meadows) review [8/10]
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B+]
RopeofSilicon (Brad Brevet) review [A+]
CineSnob.net (Kiko Martinez) review [A-]
Movie Cynics [The Vocabulariast]
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Film Monthly (Sawyer J. Lahr) review
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Entertainment Weekly review [A] Owen Gleiberman
Variety (Peter Debruge) review
Time Out New York [Joshua Rothkopf]
Time Out London (Ben Walters) review [4/5]
The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [5/5]
Toy
Story 3: fitting finale or tired rehash?
Ben Child from The Guardian,
Why
Toy Story 3 makes men weep Tom
Teodorczuk from The Daily Telegraph,
The Daily Telegraph review [4/5] Sukhdev Sandhu,
The Boston Phoenix (Peter Keough) review
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul (Eric Hynes) review
Austin Chronicle review [4/5]
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [4/4]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Tribune [Michael Phillips]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
TANGERINES (Mandariinid) B+ 92
Estonia Georgia
(87 mi) 2013 ‘Scope
I
want to be with you again
Even when I fight, I am with you in my dreams
I´ll be back, I´ll sail back on a paper ship
I´ll come back to you from over the seas
Don´t believe it if they say I won´t come back
I will come back to you
—Qavagadi Navi (A
Paper Boat), by Georgian poet Irakli Charkviani, a song
that was hugely popular among fighters during the war in 1992
Films have a way of resurrecting periods of history that
time forgot, though those involved will never forget. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in
December 1991, the Caucasus region was the site of endless conflicts, as the
suddenly independent nation of Georgia broke out into a bloody civil war, where
those on the far western part of the country known as Abkhazia, a
conglomeration of Armenian, Greek and Turkish descent bordering on Russia and
the Black Sea, were fighting for their own Christian and Islamic independence
from Orthodox Christian Georgia in the 1992–1993 War in Abkhazia. Russia sided with the Abkhazian separatists,
sending in mercenaries from Chechnya to fight against the Georgians, while
caught in the middle was a small community of Estonians, mostly farmers, who
had lived there peacefully for more than 100 years, though they were originally
part of a colonialist Russian resettlement program in the mid-19th
century. When war broke out, most
Estonians returned home to be repatriated in their own suddenly independent
nation in the Baltics, which is a good distance away (about 1500
miles, across the bay from Finland, see here on a map: Countries
). But not everyone went. While the film might recall Danis
Tanović’s NO MAN’S LAND, an
insightful look at the absurdity of the 1993 Serbian-Bosnian conflict, this
approaches the madness of war from a far more humane view, becoming what is
arguably the most polite anti-war film on record, one that accentuates a more
civilized and genteel approach to resolving conflicts. The first Estonian film to be
nominated for an Academy Award, it was nominated in the Best Foreign Film
category, and is also the first joint Georgia-Estonia film production. Set
somewhere in rural Abkhazian territory, two elderly Estonian farmers work feverishly to harvest their tangerine
crop before the war draws near. Ivo
(Lembit Ulfsak, recently awarded male performer of the century in Estonia) is
busy making wooden crates while Margus (Elmo Nüganen) is up on a ladder working
in the orchard. Realizing it’s only a
matter of days to safely sell their crop in town before most everyone flees the
region, they take a moment to marvel at the beauty of the tangerines.
Their meditative moment, however, is interrupted by the arrival of a military jeep, where Ahmed (Giorgi Nakashidze), a Chechen mercenary fighting with the Abkhazians, hails Ivo and demands food for himself and a fellow soldier. Surprised anyone’s remained on their farms in the middle of a war zone, Ahmed affectionately calls him “Grandpa,” showing respect for his generosity and his bravery before heading back to the front. After another brief pause, thunderous gunfire erupts in front of the house, where a shootout leaves bloody casualties, including a severely wounded Ahmed, who can’t walk, while his friend and all of the Georgian fighters are dead. “You shouldn’t yell,” Ivo warns the soldier, “Otherwise you might die.” With the help of his neighbor, Ivo brings the wounded man into his home and dresses his injuries, while disposing of the jeep, driving it over a hill and letting it tumble down into a protective ravine. “I thought it would explode,” Magnus observes with a touch of wry humor. “They explode in the cinema.” To which Ivo replies, “Cinema is a big fraud.” While burying the dead, Ivo realizes one of the Georgians is still alive, though he remains unconscious, a soldier named Niko (Mikhail Meshki), who is brought into a separate bedroom with his wounds treated as well. Slowly he feeds them and nurses them both back to health, each vowing to kill the other when they gain enough strength. Ivo, however, lays down the law that no one will be killed in his home, demanding each man swear an oath to that effect. Begrudgingly, both agree, but that doesn’t stop all the verbal taunts and hate threats that seem to accompany every meal. The infusion of hatred is not something that exists in a vacuum, but is part of the ethnic animosity that has contaminated the region seemingly forever, where both sides eye the other with outright suspicion and contempt. After a while, Ivo exclaims, “What is it with you guys, what gives you the right to kill?” Suggesting both have family members back home, he literally scolds them for disrespecting their memory and acting so childish.
Filmed in Guria, Georgia, part of the appeal is the haunting beauty of the rural region, beautifully shot by Rein Kotov, mostly with a static camera, who seems to admire those special moments when night turns to day and the sun tries to push through the hovering fog, providing painterly outdoor images, while most of the action is confined indoors, giving the film a theatrical feel, where the lengthy recovery period for each soldier adds to the timelessness of their hostility, which after awhile becomes ridiculous, especially since they’re being treated with the utmost respect by Ivo, whose extraordinary generosity and kindness is above and beyond anything either one of them deserve. This is a completely different portrayal of honor than that expressed in American Sniper (2014), an American movie that has made a half a billion dollars, which glorifies a soldier participating in the bloodbath of wartime Iraq, and then bestows him with medals for having killed so many of the enemy, not one of which leaves him with any regrets, or any sense of personal satisfaction. If anything, the film represents a hollow sense of heroism, one that glorifies war as nationalistic patriotism, and then condemns anyone who might criticize or suggest otherwise as anti-American. This sense of self-righteousness and moral high ground is not reserved for Americans, but motivates any number of suicide bombers and religious zealots who all too eagerly sacrifice their lives for what they believe is a noble cause. This kind of thinking, however, is not only shortsighted, but is largely fueled by hatred and religious animosity, where bigotry seems to guide the actions in war-ravaged regions. Similarly, Ahmed vows to take revenge on Niko for the death of his comrade, “It is a holy thing for us. You will never understand.” Showing Biblical wisdom, Ivo inquires, “To kill a person who is sleeping, even if he is unconscious? This is holy for you as well? I didn’t know.” As it turns out, both recovering soldiers have a fierce devotion to their ideals of honor, each respecting the fair-mindedness of Ivo and an appreciation for having been kept alive, where honoring their pledge to him on a daily basis seems to drain them of their mutual hatred. Nonetheless, the abruptness of the finale comes as something of a surprise in this strange parable about heroes and villains, where it’s hard to tell one from the other sometimes, leaving one to ponder whether we should be so quick to condemn and annihilate one another, especially those we know so little about. The Georgian music provided by Niaz Diasamidze, Niaz Diasamidze - Mandarinebi (HQ) (14:25), provides a kind of mournful, almost Béla Tarr solemnity that only heightens what transpires onscreen, while the extraordinary final sequence that includes Irakli Charkviani’s Qavagadi Navi (A Paper Boat), Mandarinebi - Ending Soundtrack YouTube (4:02), is used to stunning effect, like a requiem for the dead, honoring and paying tribute to those who were never able to return to their homeland, including Charkviani himself, who died prematurely, reportedly of heart problems in 2006, posthumously awarded Georgia’s most prestigious Rustaveli Prize in 2013 for “his significant contribution to the development of contemporary Georgian culture.”
Tangerines | Chicago Reader | Movie Times & Reviews JR Jones
An Estonian box maker, left behind in the Caucasus Mountains after most of his countrymen have fled the Georgian civil war, gets pulled into the conflict when he shelters a Georgian soldier and an Abkhazian rebel who are both badly wounded in a nearby skirmish. Stuck under the same roof, these two enemies hiss at each other as they convalesce, each hoping to recover first so he can kill the other man, while their taciturn host shames them both with his own courage and humanity. Writer-director Zaza Urushadze turns this fragile premise into a superior chamber drama (2013), the mutual antipathy between the two fighters gradually cooling even as the war outside their door constantly threatens to inflame it. I've seen this kind of story play out before, but never in someone's living room. In Russian, Georgian, and Estonian with subtitles.
TANGERINES (2014, d. Zaza Urushadze) *** 1/2 Ken Rudolph Site
The Caucasus in 1992 was the site of one of an endless series of conflicts...this time between Orthodox Christian Georgia and the Russian supported Islamic Republic of Abkhazia. Caught in the middle was a settlement of ethnic Estonians, mostly farmers and villagers on the Black Sea coast, who settled in the area over a hundred years before. At the start of the war, most of the Estonians fled back to their now independent country. However, a tangerine farmer and an elder stayed with the farm to bring in the crop. The war obtrudes on that task when opposing sides have a skirmish outside their doors, and they take in two badly wounded mortal enemies. That is the set-up for a dramatic chamber piece which speaks volumes about human nature in the process of making war. The acting and direction are first rate. This is the kind of anti-war story which packs an emotional wallop.
Because it's such a beautiful crop — Wader Saulius Kovalskas, March 19, 2014
To talk, let alone write, about films like Tangerines is difficult. The trouble comes from inability to pinpoint exactly what was so amazing, because all elements of the film are simple by themselves and the quality seems to stem from something in-between, rather than the frames themselves. This is one of those films, which you describe to your friends as a “must see” and abstain from giving arguments to explain why.
For me, seeing a poster of Tangerines outside of a local Tallinn shopping centre Solaris was enough to know that not only I want to see this film, but that it will also be an unforgettable experience. For others – hearing the main theme might be enough. And for those, who are still not convinced or want to read more, the following paragraphs are here exactly for that.
The film opens up with a beautifully shot scene of a carpenter Ivo (starred by a famous Estonian actor Lembit Ulfsak, who has been continually working in both theatre and film industry for over 40 years) crafting crates for tangerines in his simple workshop. Just like Ivo, the Georgian director and scriptwriter Zaza Urushadze isn’t pretentious either. He knows his craft well and instead of attempting to make something ground-breaking, he directs in an honest way, focusing on simple things.
Written in only two weeks and filmed in a bit more than one month, Tangerines is exactly that: unsophisticated, yet effective techniques completely dedicated to the service of the story. Almost nothing is taken too far in this film and yet nothing is lacking.
It’s 1992 and Georgian – Abkhazian conflict has just broken out. Small Estonian villages in Abkhazia, where Estonians lived for more than a century, were abandoned as the exiled citizens took the offer to repatriate. The stupidity and animosities of the warfare are portrayed by focusing on an individual tragedy. The film introduces us to two Estonians who stayed behind and are now trying to continue their unpretentious lives in the midst of an armed conflict: the carpenter Ivo and an owner of a tangerine orchard – Margus, who is starred by another famous Estonian, a theatre director Elmo Nüganen. Both of these characters are working hard to harvest the tangerines in time. “Not because of the money”, as Margus puts it, “but because it’s such a beautiful crop”.
Life is just as beautiful and just as cheap as tangerines in the times of war. Ivo and Margus are trying to save not only the crop, but also the value of life, driven by the belief that people should remain humane to others, in spite of all the differences. This ideology is brought to a practical test as the deadly shootout ensues right next to the orchard. The Estonians manage to save two fighters from different sides of the conflict – Ahmed (Giorgi Nakashidze) and Nika (Misha Meskhi). Both of them are gravely wounded and both of them are bent on killing each other.
As their health improves under the vigilant care of Ivo, so does their attitude towards each other. Hatred is slowly replaced by attempts of understanding one another, slowly leading both characters and viewers to recognise the stupidity of war. The development is acted well and is interesting to watch, but regrettably, more is revealed by characters talking about themselves, than by their actions. The acting department also suffers from a feeling that character consistency is sometimes sacrificed in order to generate a laugh from the audience.
However, this isn’t a major shortcoming, as the director seems to know well how very thin the line between laughter and cry is. He utilizes this knowledge well, making dramatic situations happen moments after funny ones, thus intensifying the effect and constantly keeping grip on the audience and its feelings. This impact is supported by an amazing soundtrack. While it consists of only three songs and the main theme is repeated often, it doesn’t feel repetitive at all – the notes of it will affect viewers just as strongly by the end as it did when they first heard it.
The cinematographer of Tangerines is Rein Kotov (best known from 2012’s light Estonian comedy Mushrooming) and visually, the film truly is pleasing – it brings pleasure to see how beautiful light falls on beautiful faces full of life. It seems that the director knew exactly what and how he wanted it to be filmed, as the constant slow movement of camera has been used in his previous films and here as well. While the film has a small cast and was shot in just one location, it doesn’t feel claustrophobic at all. Director shows us glimpses of an outside world by introducing new characters, who quickly disappear again after their contribution to the story development.
It is always a unique experience to watch Georgian films. Not only haven’t their films yet been castrated from their national identity, but it is something that they take pride in and emphasize often in the movies they make. You can feel that Georgian films are really from Georgia and this experience can’t be transmitted from any other country.
Tangerines takes one step further – being the first co-production of Georgia and Estonia, it manages to capture both Georgian and Estonian spirit and portray it in an appealing and touching way not only to the audiences of these two countries, but to the viewers from all around the world.
Featuring a song that was popular amongst fighters back in the war in 1992, Irakli Charkviani’s Qavagadi Navi (A Paper Boat) – a promise to return no matter what, this film is guaranteed to make a lot of returns to one’s mind long after leaving the cinema. Not because of sophisticated techniques and stunning effects, as these things tend to fade, but because it transmits the importance of such human virtues as dignity, respect and willpower from somewhere in-between the captivating images. Because it tells so much by saying so little.
Deep Focus: Tangerines | Film Comment Michael Sragow, April 15, 2015
Most Western moviegoers think that Abkhazia was where the wizards kept their prison in the Harry Potter saga, but Tangerines, a potent, intimate war movie about this contested pocket of the former Soviet Union, has the emotional force and intelligence to break through apathy and ignorance.
A co-production of Georgia and Estonia (and the first Estonian film to be nominated for an Academy Award), it unfolds during unpredictable pitched battles between Georgian soldiers and Abkhaz separatist forces in 1992. The movie’s central figure, Ivo (Lembit Ulfsak), is a sexagenarian carpenter in a rural area whose residents, fearing random atrocities as well as “ethnic cleansing,” have returned to Estonia, their ancestral home. Ivo and his neighbor, Margus (Elmo Nüganen), a tangerine farmer, and Juhan (Raivo Trass), a doctor, are the only other Estonian holdouts (and Juhan leaves with his wife a third of the way through). Margus plans to exit once he harvests and sells his crop. Ivo helps him by building crates and picking fruit, but he aims to stay in Abkhazia, even after a firefight breaks out between Georgians and Chechen mercenaries employed by Abkhazia, right in front of Margus’s orchards. Ivo nurses the wounded survivors: one burly, bullet-headed Chechen, Ahmed (Giorgi Nakhashidze), who must recover from a body shot, and one shambling, baleful-eyed Georgian, Niko (Mikheil Meskhi), who almost dies from a shell fragment in his head.
Georgian writer-director Zaza Urushadze’s triumph is to extract a tough-minded, lucid, even gravely beautiful drama from this panorama of Eurasian chaos. His choice to put an Estonian at the center is inspired. It fuels a plague-on-all-your houses approach to a dispute that generated barbarities in every quarter. As Andrew Mueller, one of the few Western reporters to visit Abkhazia, writes in his book, I Wouldn’t Start From Here: The 21st Century and Where It All Went Wrong, “Abkhazia’s 1992-93 war with Georgia was as hideous as it was obscure . . . Human Rights Watch had declared both sides responsible for ‘gross violations of international humanitarian law.’” Up to 10,000 Abkhazians perished at a time when their population numbered perhaps 250,000. Roughly 300,000 ethnic Georgians fled the territory. So did other ethnic groups, like the Estonians.
The filmmaker’s decision to pit a Chechen mercenary instead of an Abkhazian against a Georgian soldier is both historically accurate and evocative. “Abkhazia’s eventual victory was achieved with the assistance of some dubious customers,” Mueller notes. “The Russian military joined in, as did a poetically named outfit called the Confederation of Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus, an amalgamation of Islamist hillbillies from the region’s more ornery corners, notably Chechnya.” This jumble of racial, political, and religious attachments keeps Urushadze’s characters on their toes and his audiences guessing. When Margus says near the beginning that a major has offered troops to load his tangerines in carts, you can’t guess from which army.
With this volatile background, it would have been twisted for Tangerines to become a drippy fantasy about the brotherhood of man or a simplistic pacifist parable. Instead, it’s flavorful, sinewy, and replete with real-life contradictions, right up to the bitter and semisweet end. Urushadze manages to dramatize the central source of armed conflict in our time—the battle between rival nationalist forces over shared terrain—around the kitchen table of a man who disdains petty tribal allegiances. All the action occurs organically. It’s embedded in Ivo’s quiet determination to hold onto his home and moral sanity, and his refusal to let military forces breach his integrity, though they threaten to turn his and Margus’s tracts into a no-man’s-land.
No mere mouthpiece for the filmmaker, Ivo is a majestic character, rooted, sardonic, compassionate, and wary. Even more than the charged setup of enemies recuperating beneath one roof, Ivo’s personality draws an audience in. He may open his doors to men in need, but he’s savvy, private, and in his own way, territorial. He gets Ahmed and Nika to abstain from killing each other in his house, precisely because it is his house, and he’s their “savior” (as Ahmed puts it, sarcastically). Ivo is always straight with them, so the Chechen knows he means it when he says Abkhaz soldiers would kill him for harboring a Georgian (just as Georgians would for harboring an Abkhazian or Russian soldier or Chechen hired gun). But Ivo also keeps his distance from them. To him, they’re just “boys,” not merely because of their ages, but also because their patriotism is puerile—a weaponized version of “anything you can do, we can do better.” The older man proudly keeps a picture of his blossoming granddaughter in plain sight, but his guests must earn his trust before he reveals her name or anything else about her.
Lembit Ulfsak gives a greathearted performance. He’s a writer-director as well as an actor, and his presence alone, like Victor Sjöström’s in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, suggests a lifetime of experiences absorbed through the pores. Without any actorly giveaways, he conveys Ivo’s ability to address a person on different levels, according to his closeness and reliability. Ulfsak’s performance can also be spontaneous and visceral. The panicked widening of Ivo’s eyes when he sees a small explosion down the road puts across all the shock and violation of life during wartime. After Ivo, Margus, and Juhan push a wrecked Georgian combat vehicle down the hill and out of sight, Juhan says he was expecting it to ignite, the way it would go off in the movies. In one of several mordant, funny strokes, Ivo drily says: “The cinema is a big fraud.”
Tangerines is anything but. It’s the rare film that’s sensitizing as well as horrifying. Nothing human is taken for granted. When Ivo and Margus bury Georgian bodies, Margus, though fed up and weary, folds each man’s arms over his chest. At Ivo’s request, he checks their uniforms for papers that could identify the corpses for family members who may search for them. Nuganen creates a modified Sancho Panza character. Initially he seems semi-ridiculous as he frets over his crop, but he comes off wiser as the movie goes along. He sees the awful irony of killings so ruinous and bloody being nicknamed “The Citrus War.” (Who knew that Abkhazia had a climate that was friendly to tangerines and eucalyptus trees?) When musing that his orchards survive everything, including the armies that surround them, he could be an Estonian cousin to the Carl Sandburg who wrote, “I am the grass; I cover all.”
In fact, Urushadze is sharp as a carpenter’s tack with all the characters and actors. He renders the growth of grudging respect between Ahmed and Niko incrementally and believably. Nakhashidze’s Ahmed at first seems all aggression, and Meskhi’s Niko all passive-aggressive arrogance. Then both actors prove adept at the poking and prodding that leads these hard guys to understand each other.
As a writer-director, Urushadze has the vision to come up with lingering images—like Ivo’s long, sensitive hands guiding pieces of wood to a buzzing saw—and the taste and the film sense to pick them up again only when needed. It’s quietly devastating when we realize that the carpenter must go through the same process whether making tangerine crates or coffins. Even narrative details as unassuming as Niko’s attempt to repair his favorite audiocassette tape have apt and often unexpected payoffs. Visually, the film is alive with autumnal colors and textures that are vibrant and changeable. Urushadze and his cinematographer, Rein Kotov, capture how the setting sun can make trees burst into red-orange colors, and their images of mist and cloud hanging near Margus’s home are as memorable as the Maloja Snake in Clouds of Sils Maria.
Best of all, Urushadze’s embrace of humanity includes a healthy dose of mordant comedy. It reminded me of an Abkhazian joke from the Soviet era that Mueller recounts in his book: “The Russians launch a lunar mission. So, the first two Cosmonauts land on the moon. When they get there, to their surprise, they find an Abkhazian. They ask him, ‘What are you doing here?’ He replies, ‘I heard there was a funeral on.’” There are several impromptu funerals in Tangerines, but this movie is a cause for celebration.
East European Film Bulletin [Julia Zelman]
PopMatters [Renée Scolaro Mora]
159 Movies that make you think [Jugu Abraham]
Review of
TANGERINES movie by Lady Gaga Enguri
Independent Ethos [Hans Morgenstern]
'Tangerines': Enemies On Neutral Territory In A Time Of War ... Tomas Hachard from NPR
Warsaw 2013 Review: TANGERINES, An Engrossing ... Patryk Czekaj fromTwitch
Joshua Reviews Zaza Urushadze's Tangerines [Theatrical ... Joshua Brunsting
Tangerines / The Dissolve Mike D’Angelo
'Tangerines': Review | Reviews | Screen - Screen International Lee Marshall
Slant Magazine [Clayton Dillard]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]
Film Review: Tangerines | Consequence of Sound Blake Goble
Film Review: Tangerines - The Awards Circuit Shane Slater
The Oscar-nominated Tangerines is more interesting befor... Adam Nayman from The Onion A.V. Club
Big-Hearted
Indie Tangerines Stands Up to War by ...
Marsha McCreadie from The Village
Voice
Tangerines : An in-depth exploration of honour and ... Laurence Boyce from Cineuropa
Zaza Urushadze's Tangerines - kinocaviar.com Diane Sipple interview (2014)
'Tangerines': Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter Stephen Farber
Review: 'Tangerines' - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
Tangerines - Roger Ebert Susan Wloszczyna
Review: 'Tangerines' Is a Tale of War and Honor - The New ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times
Tangerines (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Originally a stage actor, and also a part-time journalist and screenwriter, Roger Vadim came to film as an assistant to movie director Marc Allegret, and subsequently married Allegret's most well known discovery, Brigitte Bardot, whom he also starred with in numerous films of the 1950s. Vadim became internationally known for his 1956 debut film And God Created Woman, which trod new ground in eroticism during the 1950s, and also starred Bardot. His later films luxuriated in their lushness and decadence, a process that continued with Vadim's subsequent marriage to Jane Fonda, who also became one of his most renowned leading ladies. However, since the late 1960s, with the general opening up of American films to more overtly sexual content, Vadim's popularity and success outside of Europe have fallen off markedly, and an American remake of And God Created Woman (1988) provoked yawns as much as curiosity from critics and the public alike. Vadim and Fonda have since divorced.
With Et . . . Dieu créa la femme Roger Vadim created the commercial climate which made the nouvelle vague possible. Despite this, his reputation as director has always lagged behind that as a connoisseur of the beautiful women who inhabit his films. His relationships with Brigitte Bardot, Annette Stroyberg, Catherine Deneuve, Jane Fonda, and others established him, in English-speaking countries at least, as the archetypal "French" director. The American retitling of Le Repos du guerrier as Love on a Pillow, and Chateau en Suede as Nutty, Naughty Chateau, glumly emphasizes his raffish image.
Vadim claims in his fanciful autobiography that a prostitute provided by producer Raoul Levy to relieve the tedium of screenwriting furnished him with rationale for Bardot's character in Et . . . Dieu créa la femme—unselfishness. "If she's not interested in money, people won't think she's a whore." This motive recurs in Vadim's work, where generous, warm-hearted, and sensual women lavish their favors on indifferent, often evil love objects. Fulfillment comes only with death. In La Jeune Fille assassiné, Vadim even makes death in the throes of orgasm the sole ambition of his heroine, and his first American film, Pretty Maids All in a Row, casts Rock Hudson as an improbable mass-murdering psychiatrist in a girls' college.
For an artist with a single subject, Vadim has proved
remarkably imaginative. Sait-on jamais exploits
Vadim is at his best in the high style, where the material encourages grand gestures. Bardot in Le Repos du guerrier standing like the Winged Victory in a ruined church, face turned into a torrent of wind; Stroyberg in an eighteenth-century white gown gliding through the cypresses of Hadrian's Villa to Jean Prodromides's score of harp and pizzicati strings in Et mourir de plaisir—these are images that briefly transcend the novelettish material from which they spring.
Cautiously titled And
Woman...Was Created for its British release, this was the film that started
the Bardot thing. Basically a clever piece of pre-New Wave programming with its
St Tropez locations, 'daring' sex and amoral youth, it adds up to little more
than a series of semi-nude posturings as the sex kitten flits nymphomaniacally
from man to man and back again. But the lively characterisations and wry wit
make the first half a good deal more watchable than most of Vadim's abject
later creations.
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer)
The release of the late Roger Vadim's debut film Et
Dieu... créa la femme (...And God Created Woman) marked the turning point
in the rise to fame of Brigitte Bardot, then 21, and skyrocketed her to the
status of international sex symbol. Bardot's character, Juliette Hardy, is
introduced stretched "bottoms up" across the 2.35:1 frame in all her
naked glory (though skillfully avoiding any "obscene" exposure). I'm
sure this scene caused heart failure for more than one censor, and an equally
impressive response from the male audience of the time. The film is often
credited as Bardot's screen debut, though it is actually her seventeenth
(according to the enclosed booklet). ...And God Created Woman
revolutionized the foreign film market, and may have single-handedly bashed
down the prudish standards of the cinematic world, and opened the doors to more
risqué work for future filmmakers.
Bardot plays a young woman raised in an orphanage and, now in her late teens,
causes quite a stir with her behavior, attracting the attentions of men. The
first suitor we meet is the much older Eric Carradine (Curt Jürgens), a rich
land baron set on building a new casino in town. His plans are being hampered
by the Tardieu family that owns a small shipyard on the stretch of land he
requires for his development. Michel, the eldest Tardieu son, returns home for
the weekend from
Vadim (Bardot's husband at the time) captures Bardot's pure sensuality without
any cheap devices. The nude scenes are handled with tactfully placed props or
camera compositions. There are several sequences where Bardot's seductive
qualities are highlighted, especially in her dance numbers. There is no denying
her sex appeal, and though the storyline is far from overshadowed, it is easy
to be distracted by the presence of one of film's most beautiful women
occupying the screen. The St. Tropez locations are beautifully shot, and
Vadim's use of composition shines in this widescreen presentation. He makes
full use of the wide aspect ratio, often with characters occupying the extremes
of the shot, or, as in Bardot's first appearance, by filling the screen with
her. ...And God Created Woman is a feast for the eyes in more ways than
one.
And God
Created Woman Criterion essay by
Chuck Stephens, July 17, 2000
And God
Created Woman (1956) - The Criterion Collection
Brigitte
Bardot on DVD: Plucking the Daisy; The Night Heaven Fell ... Alan Vanneman from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 1, 2002, also reviewing THE
NIGHT HEAVEN FELL and PLUCKING THE DAISY
The Criterion Contraption: #77: And God Created Woman Matthew Dessem
...And God Created Woman (Criterion Collection) | Film at The Digital Fix Raphael Pour-Hashemi
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)
Nitrate Online (Eddie Cockrell)
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin] also reviewing THE NIGHT HEAVEN FELL
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
User reviews from imdb Author: drbobgold from
I have been waiting to see this movie again for fifty years, and now I find
that it was shown at MOMA in 2008. I was originally drawn to No Sun in
The music album is widely available on CD and DVD (though I am still playing
the LP), but it goes so wonderfully with the gorgeous photography that it is a
shame that the movie has never been released in the
User reviews from imdb Author: pstumpf from United States
Rather puzzlingly, it begins with a full-screen presentation of a Gerald
McBoing Boing animation; about halfway through it, there's an insert shot of an
audience laughing in a cinema, and the rest of the cartoon is shown on the
smaller screen that the audience is watching. This sets up the flirtatious
encounter between two exiting patrons Sophie (Francoise Arnoul) and
Michel(Christian Marquand)(and also prompts the question - why a cartoon at the
end of the show?). Despite a confrontation with Sforzi (Robert Hossein), who
pretends to be Sophie's brother, but acts more like a jealous lover, Sophie
brings Robert home to her room in a Venetian palazzo, which is owned by the
reclusive Baron von Bergen (O.E. Hasse), protected by two comically ineffectual
bodyguards. The baron is also jealous of Sophie, and Michel sensibly decides to
treat his night with Sophie as a one-night stand. However, they can't keep away
from each other; soon enough, money and murder lead to chases down Venetian
alleyways and across rooftops and a predictably violent denouement.
Sumptuous settings and skillful cinematography keep the visuals consistently
interesting; there's a wonderful shot, framed by an archway, of the lovers
walking through the Piazza San Marco, with the pigeons erupting and flurrying
about them. One surprising element is John Lewis's elegant score, played by the
Modern Jazz Quartet; given the trashy story, one would expect a fully
overstated sturm-und-drang score of the most old-fashioned kind. Lewis's spare
and sparkling tunes lend a sophisticated patina to the junk on screen.
Seen, in a faded print with heavy magenta overtones, at MoMA on
Thanks for the Use of the Hall - Archive: Nakahira vs. Vadim, and ... Dan Sallitt from Thanks for the Use of the Hall, June 3, 2008
Vadim's follow-up to And
God Created Woman casts Bardot as a virgin sprung from convent school to
live with her aunt and uncle, aristocrats of Franco's Spain. The impetuous
cream puff falls in love at first sight with a hunky local (Boyd), and soon
they're à bout de souffle - and on the run from the police. Whether
bullfighting in a push-up bra or wrangling with a wayward towel, Bardot is
gorgeous (the entire point, after all) and so are the azure CinemaScope skies
of the Andalucia locations. (From a novel by Albert Vidale.)
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell)
Director Roger Vadim stands along the likes of Francois Truffaut,
Louis Malle and Jean-Luc Godard as one of the dominant names in the French New
Wave school of filmmakers from the late 1950s through the 1960s. Like his
compatriots, Vadim made daring films, especially to the relatively prim and
proper American audiences of that time. In the States, his films were relegated
to art houses, where his rebellious sexual themes would be theoretically
nestled away from the eagerly impressionable minds of American moviegoers,
despite the fact that audiences would seek out Vadim's works to ogle his latest
starlet.
Here is one of my favorite Vadim quotes: "You wouldn't ask Rodin to
make an ugly sculpture, or me to make a film with an ugly woman." He
knows of what he speaks, since he is the man that chiseled the unbridled
sexuality of Brigitte Bardot into celluloid with his 1956 directorial debut of ...And God Created Woman. Vadim
and Bardot had been married since 1952, and though they would divorce in 1957,
the two would continue to work together on a number of films. With the launch
of international cinema's newest sex symbol, Vadim quickly cast the stunning
Bardot in his 1957 release of Les
Bijoutiers du Clair de Lune, or The
Night Heaven Fell, remastered and released on DVD by Home Vision
Entertainment.
Based on Albert Vidalie's novel The Moonlight Jewelers, Bardot stars as
Ursula, a sexy, but virginal, young woman who leaves her convent(!) to vacation
in a small village in rural Spain, where she is to stay with her Aunt
Florentine (Alida Valli) and Uncle, the Count Ribera (Pepe Nieto). On her first
day in Spain, Ursula meets rugged Lamberto (Stephen Boyd), a man who has some
major issues with the Count, whom he blames for causing the death of his
sister. This doesn't prevent Ursula from falling in love at first sight with
Lamberto, and of course this leads to some dramatic confrontations. The Count
is a perverted creep, constantly pawing at his niece Ursula, and Lamberto's
anger leads to violence, which turn him into a wanted man.
But The Night Heaven Fell is not
simply the story of Ursula and Lamberto, and their lusty, bad boy/good girl
attraction to each other. Aunt Florentine herself is a wee bit on the sexually
frustrated side, and it is her own desires for Lamberto that stirs things up.
As the two women struggle with their feelings, it becomes evident that Lamberto
the stud is drawn to both. Secrets and betrayal bubble beneath the surface, and
by the time the film hits midpoint, it is unclear as to where his true feelings
lie.
Much can be said for Vadim's filmmaking skills, though this film certainly
pales to the far superior ....And God
Created Woman (the original, not his tepid 1988 remake). Here, the
sweeping Spanish scenery, shot in the vastness of Cinemascope, seems to often
overpower the actors, and that is not something you wish to see in a Bardot
film. Likewise, the script lurches around awkwardly during the first twenty
minutes, enough to really test my mettle about actually wanting to finish the
film.
The downfall is the agonizing pacing of the script, which meanders here and
there, with only occasional scenes of substance. This is not indicative of a
typical Vadim film, though his strong visual style is always present. For the
most part, the acting is adequate, with Valli proving her worth as a truly
underrated actress. It's just that the overall experience is not entirely
engaging.
However, a Vadim film, if anything, is a study in beauty, and Bardot is really
what The Night Heaven Fell is
all about, when all is said and done. She literally makes Marilyn Monroe look
like a frumpy librarian. Bardot, with those wonderfully pouty lips, exudes sex
appeal like no one else, and while perhaps not the world's best actress, she
does manage to combine a steamy blend of young lust and innocence. Vadim
provides many tempting shots of Bardot throughout, but it was her brief nude
scene here that was considered "scandalous" in 1958, and only served
to escalate her notoriety as a wanton sex symbol.
For me, a highpoint of The Night Heaven
Fell was the pairing of Bardot with Alida Valli. Valli, who in her
twilight years would appear in Suspiria,
first captured my eye with her stellar turns in The Third Man (1947) and most notably The Paradine Case (1949). I recall watching The Paradine Case years and years ago,
and being utterly transfixed by Valli's performance, and her timeless beauty.
Here Vadim cast her as the not-quite middle aged aunt, who Ursula convinces can
still be a sexual being. Valli can deliver more intensity with a single stare
than most actresses can do with six pages of dialogue.
The Night Heaven Fell is not a
completely memorable film, and the script is burdened with barely enough
content to last 93 minutes. From a historical perspective though, it is easy to
understand the unabashed sex appeal of Bardot, and how she became the fantasy
woman for so many men. Thanks to Vadim, we still have that to hold on to.
User
reviews from imdb Author: ironside
(robertfrangie@hotmail.com) from
In 1956, Roger Vadim made a sensational debut as a motion
picture director with 'And God Created Woman', a daringly erotic film that
challenged conventional views of romanticism... Vadim presented the nude body
of his young wife, Brigitte Bardot, in all the splendor of CinemaScope with
beautiful Technicolor photography...
Along with Francois Truffaut, Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Demy and
Agnes Varda, Vadim was one of the founding members of the revolutionary French
New Wave, to push the sexual archetype...
His subsequent films revealed him to be an accomplished European filmmaker with
an eye for visual beauty and decorative elegance, but in content, his films
have often been superficial and lacking in narrative strength... Sexual
relations have been a recurrent theme in his films, the plot of which have
often revolved around the undisputed beauty of his succession of wives - Brigitte
Bardot, Annette Stroyberg, and Jane Fonda...
"The Night Heaven Fell" is the second collaboration between Vadim and
Bardot... Vadim seems to have attempted to recapture the freshness and essence
of the 'B.B.' he had helped to shape, but the re-creation escaped him, despite
the careful choice of Albert Vidalie's novel and the casting of Stephen Boyd as
leading man...
Bardot's innocently natural mannerisms had disappeared, and it seemed that she
no longer needed Vadim to make use of her talents as an accomplished actress...
Claude Autant-Lara succeeded much more with his film, 'Love Is My Profession,'
playing Brigitte opposite Jean Gabin and Edwige Feuillere... Bardot came off as
more than a sexual image, her persona giving life to the character she portrayed...
Filmed in Franco's
Bardot plays Ursula, a beautiful convent girl vacationing in a small village in
rural
The sexually repressed Florentine desires intensely Lamberto who kills her
husband, seduces her, and escapes with her rebellious, capricious and highly
provocative niece Ursula...
The air of harshness is at the heat of all of the main characters: Ursula's
challenging sexuality; Count Ribera's lecherous advances; Lamberto's acts of
vengeance; and most of all, the unusual beauty and natural charm of Florentine,
played by the great Italian actress Alida Valli, from Carol Reed's The Third
Man.
There's a scene in the film that takes place during the Count's funeral where
we see Alida Valli stopping in the village streets and a veil covers her
face... In front of Boyd, she takes off her dark veil, and stares, in silence,
at his face... Her new feminist disposition was loading all her unconscious feelings...
In the fifties, Bardot emerged as a new type of sex symbol, flashing her sexual
exuberance... Her performances as a child of nature responding to the call of
sensuality, were a deliciously strange elixir to all of us growing up in that
time...
Clothed in a breakaway towel, décolletage, bathing suits, or nude, this truly
luscious coquette was enough to drive us into a kaleidoscope of dynamic
excitement...
Brigitte
Bardot on DVD: Plucking the Daisy; The Night Heaven Fell ... Alan Vanneman from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 1, 2002, also reviewing THE
NIGHT HEAVEN FELL and PLUCKING THE DAISY
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)
Flipside Movie Emporium [Michael B. Scrutchin]
DVD Verdict Barrie Maxwell
A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle)
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600")
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) also reviewing PLUCKING THE DAISY
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin] also reviewing AND GOD CREATED WOMAN
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
Anyone familiar with
the Frears (Dangerous Liaisons) and Forman (Valmont) versions
will immediately see the problem about updating this story. The innocence and
lack of guile which the preyed-upon characters must embody is not convincingly
available in a contemporary setting and neither, therefore, is the cruelty
which exploits those qualities; and Annette
Vadim's flight into madness would surely have lacked conviction even in
1782, when de Laclos was writing. Though this is the weakest of the three
adaptations, it does have in Moreau and Philipe the choicest of scheming
monsters. The Thelonious
Monk score natters on, without discernible relevance; and Vadim himself
appears at the start to put us right about men and women, deploying with
exquisite negligence his cigarette holder, the overcoat draped around his
shoulders. What did all those gorgeous women see in this noodle?
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)
Surprisingly, Roger Vadim's "contemporary"
pseudoadaptation of Choderlos de Laclos' 18th-century masterpiece Les
liaisons dangereuses--the film's title now in English and the year of the
original
filmcritic.com Christopher Null
Roger Vadim, who
showed a remarkable lack of self-restraint in films like Barbarella and Don
Juan (or If Don Juan Were a Woman),
was far more muted in his jazz-infused updating of Dangerous Liaisons,
set in then-modern-day Paris but keeping the guts of the story nearly intact.
In Vadim's rendition, Valmont (Gérard Philipe) is married to Juliette de
Merteuil (Jeanne Moreau), and together they get their kicks by preying on the
weaknesses of other high-society types. Juliette sets her sights on Cecile
(Jeanne Valérie), soon to be married to someone who has crossed her in the
past, and sets Vamont onto turning the innocent (but naive and manipulatable)
girl into a sexpot-in-training. Meanwhile, Valmont falls in love with the
genuinely virtuous Marianne (Annette Vadim), and a love-quadrangle soons spins
out of control.
The film has a few key departures -- and a somewhat more satisfying ending --
that make it worthwhile, even if you've seen the three other major adaptations
of the infamous book. Philipe is the most effective member of the cast -- the
three female leads don't really distinguish themselves from each, with the mild
exception of Moreau, who's always worth watching in anything she does. The
soundtrack by Thelonious Monk is outstanding, worth listening to even if the
film itself doesn't interest you.
Whether the film's "liaisons" manage to titillate you is debatable.
The book's darkness and cynicism are largely lost here, and the actors play
their characters far too sweetly. By the last act, few surprises remain in
store for us, though it's been a considerably pleasant (and very French)
experience in getting there.
Twenty-nine years before British director Stephen Frears's recent wig-and-powdered "Dangerous Liaisons," with Glenn Close, John Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer, there was "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," a rompy French version directed by Roger Vadim, who was just over a dangerous liaison himself with Brigitte Bardot.
Updating Choderlos de Laclos' novel (written 177 years before that), Vadim set the bedroom intrigue against a Parisian eve-of-the-'60s world of jazz and sexual permissiveness, cast French siren Jeanne Moreau as predatory Juliette (the Close role in Frears's film) and gave his wife Annette Vadim the innocent-prey role (later played by Pfeiffer).
What Vadim couldn't have known was how his movie, now retitled "Dangerous Liaisons 1960" (and made in 1959), would have played at Key Theatre 1989 with its dated air of finger-snapping cool; or how he comes across now, sauntering on-camera in a ham-fisted director's introduction, casting aside a black cape and saying things like, "Ah don' wan' yoo to sink that in France, all women be'ave lak Juliette."
Uh, Roger . . .
To watch the movie, though, is still fabulous -- not because it's a Great Film -- but because it bounces along as if it were a great film. Made during the heyday of the French "Nouvelle Vague," the movement that launched Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and several other directors, it aspires to cinematic hipness -- the camera peeps at the sexual players from behind chairs, even from under the sheets, and there's a wonderful music track supplied by Thelonious Monk.
But, as with so many other French movies and songs, "Liaisons 19-whatever" is blithely unaware of its French prissiness -- which makes it all the more fun to watch.
Picture then-young vixen Moreau parading around in an ocelot fur coat and married to fellow sexual hunter Gerard Philipe (imagine "Hawaii Five-0's" Jack Lord imitating "The Thin Man's" William Powell imitating Maurice Chevalier); the two swinger-vampires are constantly sniffing the city lovescape for fresh blood. Or a young Jean-Louis Trintignant playing a geeky, marriage-shy mathematician. Or the jazz club-den where, as a climactic death takes place, inspired "Negro" jazzmen -- frequently movie metaphors for "decadence" -- wail and jam in the background, amorally oblivious to the foreground hanky-panky.
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
PopcornQ Review Jenni Olson
Annette Vadim stars as the sexy
Carmilla in this lush and provocative Italian-made feature. Seduced by her
lesbian vampire ancestor who takes over her body, the lusty Carmilla first
jumps a young maid, and then her beautiful cousin. Although the cousin is
engaged to be married, the women make eyes at each other throughout the film
(in that Euro-soft-porn sort of way), and director Roger Vadim plays up every
lesbionic inch of it. Not as dirty as the Hammer Studio's lesbian vampire
movies (The Vampire Lovers, Twins
of Evil, and Lust for a Vampire), much more lively and very well produced.
User
reviews from imdb Author: Matthew Patton (mp99)
from
To call BLOOD AND ROSES Roger Vadim's best film is probably
not saying that much, when you consider what you're working with. Suffice to
say, he pays more attention to plot and character than usual and never allows
his attraction to decorative visuals to overwhelm the story (wispy as it is).
The wisp of story here is derived vaguely from Sheridan LeFanu's
"Carmilla." A young woman (Annete Stroynberg), passionately attracted
to her cousin (Mel Ferrer), becomes enraged at his engagement to another (Elsa
Martinelli), and may be possessed by the spirit of a vampiric ancestor, Mylorka.
Certainly, people begin dying after a fireworks display that caps a ball held
to celebrate the engagement goes wrong and disturbs Mylorka's tomb. And as the
time of the wedding approaches, it looks as if Martinelli may join all of the
unfortunate women who died just before they tried to married Ferrer's ancestor,
possibly victims of Mylorka.
The film, shot on location in some of the prettiest stretches of the French and
Italian countryside by Claude Renoir, has a wonderful burnished look to it,
like an expensive luxury item. The gowns that the ladies wear, courtesy of
couture designer Marcel Escoffier, certainly help, and the musical score by
Jean Promides, obviously inspired by 18th-century French and Italian sources,
gives the whole enterprise an extra note of grace. There is little or no overt
violence, and, rare in a Vadim film, no nudity, although he certainly goes out
of his way, as ever, to make his leading ladies as enticing and glamorous as
possible (and because of his discretion, succeeds more than usual). Mel Ferrer
is his usual amused self, not a great actor by any means, but a pleasant
presence. Annette Stroynberg was hardly an actress at all, but her very
placidity, occasionally disturbed by odd little flickers of something
unsettling, is rather effective here. Elsa Martinelli, even dubbed as she is
here, is quite effective, bubbly, sweet, and brimming with imperilled
innocence, just as the heroine of a vampire movie should be. All in all, a
horror movie tasteful enough that the kids can probably watch it (at least the
older ones) and adult enough to keep Mom and Dad awake as well. Not something
one can say for AND GOD CREATED WOMAN (which I, at least, consider to be a
horror film--or at least a horror OF a film . . .)
Cinebeats [Kimberly Lindbergs]
Communist Vampires Thomas M. Sipos
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The New York Times (Howard Thompson)
Doug Pratt's DVD Review (excerpt)
The Collection is a boxed set includes all four films along with a 63 documentary profile, Brigitte Bardot...Take One . The films are all lightweight entertainments, but they have enough eccentric features to attract fans, and they all have the Marilyn Monroe of France--Bardot, who, especially in these features from the late Fifties and Sixties, looked and often acted like a flirtatious child in an adult woman’s body.
We had a near-constant grin on our face as we watched Roger
Vadim’s 1961 romantic comedy, La Bride sur le Cou, or Please Not Now! . The film’s theme
music is a folk rendition of La Bamba , and that is the tone the show
follows, playing almost like a Richard Lester movie or something. Although it
has moments of pure, delightful absurdity (there is a marvelous comical
sequence involving levitation), the narrative maintains the breathless logic of
a brook running downhill. Bardot is an easily distracted model whose lover has
become engaged to another woman. When she protests by throwing a pie in his face
at a restaurant, a young surgeon becomes smitten with her and begins to woo her
as she plans further revenge against the lover who jilted her. The balance of
attention on one idea or one scene to the next is near perfect. The 89 minute
film begins with a car rushing through the streets of
The picture quality is also outstanding. The black-and-white image is spotless and contrasts are precise. Except for some tiling in the shadows on walls that disrupt an otherwise bouncy dance scene, there are no artifacting flaws. The presentation is in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. The monophonic sound is okay and the film is in French with optional English subtitles that appear beneath the image. There is an original American full screen trailer that emphasizes the film’s teasing nude scenes, and a profile of Bardot.
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer)
In 1961, when Bardot was despairing and attempted suicide,
she was still doing romantic screwball comedies such as Please Not Now, a picture directed by her former husband, Roger
Vadim. While these sexy comedies are somewhat formulaic, this one is energized
by a vivacious performance by Bardot and a properly wacky supporting cast,
including an out-of-control hypnotist.
Model Sophie (Bardot) is in love with her photographer boyfriend, Philippe
Belmas (Jacques Riberolles). But Philippe has other plans, which involve
running off with American slaughterhouse heiress Barbara Wilbury (Josephine
James). Bardot, already the animal lover, comments that Wilbury "looks
like the kind of person who would kill little animals." Running into
Alain (Michel Subor) at a restaurant, she soon uses Alain to plot her revenge,
first by making Philippe jealous, and then by taking Barbara out of the picture
permanently, in the tradition of Sophie's murderous Corsican grandmother. The
action gets wild and woolly on the slopes of Villars-de-Lans, as Sophie plots
to get even while Alain plots to get Sophie for himself. Topping it all off is
a lengthy fantasy sequence which features Bardot dancing first with only a
towel and then without.
Bardot is at her most iconic here, with impossibly long eyelashes, elaborate
wigs and pouty beestung lips. She seems to be having a good time with the role
and puts a good deal into it. She has some fun slapstick moments, such as
brainlessly blowing up the gas stove in her apartment. Riberolles is a
typically colorless romantic interest; Subor is marginally better since he is
willing to stop at nothing to win Sophie (in a decidedly non-PC moment of
desperation, he forces her to disrobe at gunpoint). Serge Marquand is
entertaining as Prince Shribouyoune Bayane, an Indian prince reduced to using
his hypnotic powers in a nightclub act; unfortunately, he doesn't have the best
control over his powers. Mireille Darc inexplicably gets third billing even
though she has two brief scenes as Philippe's assistant, and displays no
particular interest in the part.
Vadim's direction is for the most part pedestrian and workmanlike. He does,
however, have his moments; one of the best of these is an amusing split-screen
effect where we see both of the couples warring; as they push against the
barrier, it moves and crowds the other couple tightly until they push back. The
stylized nude sequence was notorious at the time and often severely cut. It's
fairly modest in retrospect, filmed through a heavy fog which leaves most
everything to the imagination.
Please Not Now! Michael den Boer
DVD Review e-zine Guido Henkel
Fulvue Drive-in Nicholas Sheffo
France Italy (113 mi) 1962 co-directors: Philippe de Broca, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Demy, Sylvain Dhomme, Max Douy, Jean-Luc Godard, Eugène Ionesco, Edouard Molinaro
User reviews from imdb Author: Bob Taylor (taylor9885@sympatico.ca)
This is a blend of the bad, commercial work of journeymen
French directors and the exciting new wave of Godard, Chabrol and Demy. Anger
is the first sin to be treated, and Sylvain Dhomme does a terrible job with
this silly story of flies in the soup provoking world catastrophe. Molinaro's
version of Envy is no better. Philippe de Broca gets a fine hammy performance
from Georges Wilson in Gluttony; some great satire of French country eating
habits here. Jacques Demy is next with Lust, and he loses steam with a static
visual style (none of the grace of Lola) and stiff acting. We can only surmise
what he could have done with a better script.
Godard has the best segment, he's got Eddy Constantine playing a loafer for a
change, not his Lemmy Caution-like nerveless violence. The cheesy Hawaiian
music suits the story well. It's more verite than we are used to from Godard.
After Sloth, we get Pride from Roger Vadim, and the banality of the story is
relieved by some good acting by Sami Frey and Marina Vlady. I always thought it
was a shame Vlady wasn't more popular; she had a gorgeous sleek cat's face and
could do comedy. Chabrol is last with Greed, and he shows the usual facility
and empty social commentary we have come to expect from him.
User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil
This is a pretty mediocre film made up of sketches. Julien
Duvivier did a lot better with "le diable et les dix commandements," and
he did all the segments single-handedly .
Only Godard snubs can enjoy the sloth sketch which is a saddening bore, with
Eddie Constantine, an actor who made duds by the dozen.The anger sketch recalls
the silent movies era,that is to say it's modern! Philippe De Broca's part is
vulgarity itself, which is amazing coming from a director known for his
elegance. There's nothing to expect from Roger Vadim, whose movies have not
worn well, it's the least we can say.
Edouard Molinaro will be dismissed by the "connoisseurs" just because
he's not part of the new wave; however his sketch is not that much bad. But the
two best segments are Chabrol's and Demy's .
Demy's "lust," abetted by two peerless thespians, Laurent Terzieff
and Jean-Louis Trintignant, blends present and past when the latter, still a
young kid, didn't know what "lust" meant. This is the most daring
sketch, even featuring furtive nudities.
Chabrol's segment ends up the movie on an unpretentious welcome note .The
"polytechniciens" putting their problem -how can we sleep with the de
luxe prostitute?- in equation is one of the funniest moment of the whole movie.
Two sketches and a half: you make it on
the percentages but lose out on the bonuses.So why don't you try Duvivier's
"le diable et les dix commandements" instead? No, Duvivier is no part
of the new wave. It's not a crime, is it?
User reviews from imdb Author: asgardsrei1 from Deutschland
This film is classic Roger Vadim, down to the sexual theme, the gorgeous cinematography, and the incomparable Brigitte Bardot. A young heiress becomes involved with an abusive, power-hungry alcoholic. She loves this crude man, though he treats her savagely, until she begins to realize her own power. When she leaves this man to his own devices, he falls apart, and realizes that he, in fact needs her, and loves her. Basically a battle of the sexes, and she wins. This sounds like a simple story, but Roger Vadim elevates this into a thing of power and beauty, with his extraordinary film technique. His admiration for Bardot is apparent, as he films her 'god-like'. This is classic cinema, and very French in it's style. Feauturing some wonderful late 1960's jazz music, this is a very sexy film, one of the finest Bardot/Vadim efforts. I don't understand the negative reviews. I think it is unfortunate that the DVD for this one is so rare, and goes for over a hundred dollars if you can find it. Along the lines of films like "The Servant", and "Nine & a Half Weeks" in the subject matter of the sexual power struggle between two people. A fine film, worth a look.
User reviews from imdb Author: writerasfilmcritic from western US
"Love On a Pillow" is a dubbed French film starring
Brigitte Bardot at her most beautiful and alluring. An existentialist writer,
artist, and musician from
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) reviewing the 5-film Brigitte Bardot Collection, also seen here: Turner Classic Movies
1962's Love on a Pillow (Le repos du guerrier) reunites
Bardot with director Roger Vadim, now no longer her husband. The story is
interesting but ponderous; it seems to go on much longer than its 102 minutes.
In
The original title translates to The Warrior's Rest and the original book source probably related Renaud's soul-sickness to wartime experiences. Roger Vadim covers the narrative but doesn't provide a satisfying ending. The pace slows as Geneviève's trials become more predictable. Vadim indulges in titillating near-nudity and decorative camera angles effects unconnected to the characters. A split diopter allows a giant close-up of Bardot to share the screen with action in the distance, keeping both in focus.
The interesting Houssein has an acting edge on Bardot; it's really his movie. He convinces as a selfish creep with unlimited reserves of hateful remarks: "Love is an abyss. I don't care." Bardot has only her signature pout and some tears to work with; she's either happy or unhappy with few gradients in between. We so thoroughly despise Renaud that the ending reconciliation doesn't work. Vadim stages it in a windswept Florentine ruin, an overly dramatic gambit that can't mask the absence of a real character conversion.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| DVD review: Brigitte Bardot 5-Film Collection (0) Tim Lucas, December 2009
CRITIC'S
CHOICE; New DVDs Dave Kehr from The New York Times
De Sade was all over
the publicity for this film, but is excluded from its credits. Nevertheless,
it's Justine and Juliette updated to 1944-45. Justine (Deneuve),
churchgoing, loyal to her fiancé in the Resistance, is forcibly consigned to an
SS brothel in the Tyrol. Meanwhile her sister Juliette (Girardot) is infatuated
with a Gestapo brute who lets her sit in on his torture sessions. Only the cast
makes this worth a look. The sex contrives to be both tame and vulgar, and
Vadim's fancy lighting effects - dimming out the set in mid-scene and putting a
spot on the characters - just looks silly. What with this and Pasolini's odious
Salò, it's clear that Sade and WWII are subjects best treated
separately.
User reviews from imdb Author: Rod Evan from Amsterdam, Netherlands
Anybody who has seen Pasolini's 'Salo' will realise that
Pasolini owed a debt to Vadim as the similarities in certain sections of the
film are perfectly obvious. The key scene in relation to 'Salo' is when the
'victims' enter the chateau and once they are in the chateau suffer the same
sort of torments as in Pasolini's film.
The basic difference between the two films is that despite the horrific subject
matter Vadim retains a sense of romanticism which Pasolini rejected. It is a
great pity this film is not more widely available on video as it is beautifully
shot in scope with a delirious score that mixes Gotterdammerung with 'Les Parapluies
de Cherbourg'!
The acting, especially from Annie Girardot is exemplary. You can see why this
actress gave a such a terrific performance recently in 'La Pianiste'. It was
however one of Deneuve's first roles and like all her early films she was not at
her best, but clearly decorative.
A 'must-see' film for all those film lovers who have appreciated the likes of
'The Night Porter' and Visconti's 'The Damned'.
User reviews from imdb Author: dbdumonteil
Outside the fact that both works ("le vice et la
vertu" and "salo' ) take place during WW2,it's absolutely impossible
to compare an auteur like Pasolini to a mediocre third-rate drudge whose works
have not worn well at all:"And God created woman" and the first
version of "les liaisons dangereuses" are dated old hat stuff.
Vadim's movie is entertaining,if it's not taken literally:it's a farce which
recalls erotic comics of the sixties,particularly the scenes in the baroque
castle where Hossein and Girardot give the victims (including the latter's
clueless sister Justine-Deneuve- and the future Bond villainess Luciana
Paluzzi) a rough time .
Pasolini's work will hurt you,shock you,leave you completely depressed and
exhausted .Vadim's will make you laugh ,and wonder why all these talented
actors got lost is this masquerade.
The New York Times (Eugene Archer)
Jean-Luc Godard was right when he said Roger
Vadim was "with it." The man didn't make good movies but he knew what
audiences wanted to see. Scarcely a master of social interrogation, Vadim was
content hawking middlebrow smut, which usually meant parading whatever women he
was fucking in front of his camera. One could say that the only pulse he was
particularly good at taking was his own. La Ronde grafts the sexual
exploits of a close-knit gaggle of bourgeois dopes into a lifeless vision of
art-nouveau
Roger Vadim was
Most of Roger Vadim's movies are about seduction in one form or another. His update of Les liaisons dangereuses with Gérard Philipe and Jeanne Moreau is one of his best films. When classical inspiration dried up Vadim turned to genre work and finally to softcore tease pictures. La ronde is literally one seduction after another in an amorous chain of genteel couplings. With variations, the formula served Vadim again in Pretty Maids All In a Row.
A prostitute (Marie Dubois) picks up a soldier (Claude
Giraud), who seduces a housemaid (Anna Karina), who seduces the son of her
employer (Jean-Claude Brialy), who visits his lover (Jane Fonda), who sleeps
with her husband, who takes a casual pickup (Catherine Spaak) to a private
dining room. The pickup is promoted by a playwright (Bernard Noël), who renews
an old affair with an actress (Francine Bergé), who is visited by a Count (Jean
Sorel), who meets the prostitute. "La ronde" is presented as a cycle
of seduction and pleasure.
La ronde started life as a play by Arthur Schnitzler, whose other turn-of-the-century scandal Traumnovelle eventually became Stanley Kubrick's film Eyes Wide Shut. Although progressive and thoughtful for 1900, both stories have dated central themes. La ronde's cyclic progression from one partner to another, an erotic relay, no longer seems fanciful or even desirable in a world with better knowledge of STDs. Schnitzler's ever-changing skit format would be lifted as a recurring motif for message movies: There have been several pictures about a stolen handgun moving from owner to owner, or a banknote passing through a series of illicit transactions. Tales of Manhattan is a Julien Duvuvier classic that creates a portrait of society by following a fancy topcoat through a succession of owners.
The classic adaptation of La ronde is Max Ophuls' far wittier version done back in 1950. It uses a stream of clever visual jokes to enliven Schnitzler's confectionary structure. A master of ceremonies character seemingly arranges the liaisons between the lovers, and shows us a carousel representing the evanescent allure of sex. When one character experiences impotence, the carousel breaks down. When a scene threatens to become too erotic, the master of ceremonies halts the film, and physically edits out the offending segment!
Vadim's La ronde is a literal version of Schnitzler's play in period dress, without theatrical intrusions or satiric jibes at its adult content. A simple waltz theme is used to link the stories. Screenwriter Jean Anouilh adds a few philosophical observations that merely underline the basic games that are being played. Vadim's only visible objective is to make the seductions as attractive as possible. The women seem well aware of what is going on, and are often in control of the situation. The seduction of Anna Karina's meek housemaid is revealed to have been mostly consentual, when we later see her invite the attentions of her employer's son. Catherine Spaak's afternoon pickup turns out to be a master manipulator, and Francine Bergé's actress is an old pro at juggling lovers.
Thus Vadim's film is a mild oo-la-la trifle best suited as an ice-breaking date movie for frustrated Frenchmen: Everybody seems to be having sex, an activity that leaves only beautiful memories. As all the lovers remain ignorant of the game beyond their own two 'connections,' their infidelity and selfishness never becomes an issue. Unwanted children and other unpleasant complications are drowned out by pretty color and charming waltz music.
Vadim's main directorial contribution is to make all of his actresses look attractive and distinctive. His picture moves slowly and the format bogs down at least two links before the circle of lovers is closed. The episodes lack variety. Each takes place on its own set, lasts about the same time, and ends with a discreetly ellipsed, implied love scene. Vadim's paramour Jane Fonda is the only actress to flirt with nudity. Catherine Spaak comes off as intelligent, Karina as kittenish and Benoît as spirited. Francine Bergé's slightly bored actress mirrors our feelings about the proceedings; Vadim just doesn't have much of a sense of humor. When in need of a visual gag to cap a sex scene in his Pretty Maids All In a Row, the best he came up with were rows of lawn sprinklers turning on.
DVD Talk [Stuart Galbraith IV]
The New York Times (Eugene Archer)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Roger
Vadim's "The
Game Is Over" is a tedious and ridiculous film of great physical
beauty, directed with Vadim's unfailing bad taste and photographed by Claude
Renoir with breathtaking virtuosity.
In type, it is not unlike the early vehicles in which Vadim starred his former
wife, Brigitte
Bardot. Indeed, one must look again in many scenes to be sure current wife Jane
Fonda is not a post-adolescent reincarnation of
The plot is still another retelling of the "Phaedra" myth, lifted
this time from Emile Zola. One wishes "Electra" would come back into
style and give everyone a change of pace. But, no, we must watch again as a
young woman (Miss Fonda) marries an older man and then falls in love with his
son (Peter
McEnery).
Her husband, ably played by Michael
Piccoli, wouldn't dream of stooping to violence to keep his wife. Instead,
in the approved 19th Century French manner, he explains that all of her money
is invested in his business. In Euripides' play, the woman commits suicide and
the son dies for his sins, but Vadim has a more painful treat in store for us.
Miss Fonda flies off to
Vadim, as usual, has no feeling for the border between the bizarre and the
merely ridiculous. One gradually comes to suspect that he will do anything on
the screen. While Euripides spins in his grave, we are given such lines as:
"It's all right to deceive my father while he's here, but I don't want to
take advantage of his absence. It's immoral." And, honest, "Can you
imagine what he'd say if he caught us -- good Lord, my wife and my best
son."
Renoir's photography saves more than one scene. There are stunning shots as the
lovers drive through the countryside; Miss Fonda's not extraordinary beauty is
made the most of, and boudoir passages show unmistakable signs of Vadim's
vulgarity bested by Renoir's taste.
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer)
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null)
Cleveland Press (Tony Mastroianni)
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
aka: Tales of Mystery and Imagination
Vadim
segment: Metzengerstein
A compendium of
three Poe stories. Vadim's (Metzengerstein) carries with it an aura of
perversity, due not so much to the fetishistic clothes and decor as to the
casting of Jane
Fonda and brother Peter as the lovers. With his death, she resorts to a
totem black stallion as a substitute, and the film itself falls apart. Malle's
piece (William Wilson), a not particularly riveting variation on the
Doppelgänger theme, has Alain Delon
1 (looking slightly bewildered) being chased by Alain Delon
2 (looking even more bewildered). Bardot puts in an appearance, looking odd in
a black wig. Meticulously done, but not much to do with Poe; only Fellini (Toby
Dammit) really manages to make much of his source. Stamp comes to Rome as
the actor chosen to play Christ in the first Catholic Western (a cross between
Dreyer and Pasolini, with a touch of Ford). He plays a man at the end of his
tether, and as his obsessions take over, so do Fellini's. In many ways the
sequence foreshadows Roma. It's overdone and strained, but worthwhile
for Stamp's curious performance.
filmcritic.com communes with Spirits of the
Dead Christopher Null
A rare '60s oddity, Spirits of the Dead takes a
weird premise and makes it even weirder. How weird? Try classic Edgar Allen Poe
stories given a 1960s spin -- one that lambasts the whole free love/no morals
movement the way that only the Frenchies could do. And stars some of the
biggest stars of the era -- Fonda! Bardot! Delon! -- and is told in
three short pieces, courtesy of three big-time directors -- Fellini! Malle!
Vadim!
Roger Vadim takes his Barbarella star Jane Fonda through a very loose
interpretation of "Metzengerstein," with Fonda as an aristocrat bored
of the constant orgies and swift executions of her enemies. She ends up falling
for her cousin, but when he rejects her, she burns down his stable, taking him
along with it. Strangely, the cousin ends up possessing the spirit of a horse,
which the countess ends up fascinated with anew. It's the weakest of the three
shorts, but it's worth seeing if for no other reason than to see Barbarella
trot out her French. (To be honest, that might be the only reason -- the story
just doesn't make much of an impact.)
Louis Malle heads the second segment, a version of "William Wilson,"
wherein a barbaric Alain Delon finds himself chased by an alternate version of
himself throughout his life, his own conscience casting judgment upon him. And
for good reason -- Delon's Wilson is incorrigible, tormenting classmates with
live rats as a youth, nearly performing an autopsy on a live and buxom patient,
and cheating at cards so he can get revenge on a beautiful card sharp (Brigitte
Bardot). The story works well as a parable about how the evil that men do
always catches up with them in the end, and Malle tells it with flair --
low-budget '60s flair, but flair nonetheless.
The final act of the triptych is pure Fellini as only Fellini can be. A
revision of "Never Bet the Devil Your Head," his Toby Dammit (Terence
Stamp) is a famous modern-day actor, as well as a drunk and a soulless
libertine. Everything about Fellini's mini-universe is sketchy, from a bizarre
awards show ("The Golden She-Wolf Awards") to the little redhead he
sees in his frequent visions... whom he sees as Satan, naturally. Reminiscent
of 8
1/2 and La
Dolce Vita, Fellini's segment is both beautiful and surreal,
with Dammit's self-destruction leading us inexorably toward a foregone
conclusion.
Spirits of the Dead is something of a historical anomaly. In a year when
films like The
Graduate told us that, hey, anything goes, Spirits of
the Dead says that it doesn't. I'm not sure I would have expected this from
the directors of Barbarella, 8 1/2, and Pretty
Baby -- none of which is exactly known for moral restraint --
but hey, we are defined by our contradictions, no?
Apollo Movie Guide [Scott Weinberg]
To say that motion pictures have not been kind to the legacy
of Edgar Allan Poe is quite an understatement. More than 100 movies have been
based on (or more often than not, “inspired by”) the tortured writer’s tale of
crime and the macabre, but very few of these adaptations are even worthy of
searching out. Roger
Corman managed to produce a few entertaining variations on Poe’s more
popular stories, but it’s pretty alarming that this legendary author’s finest
‘modernization’ came courtesy of The Simpson’s superlative version of
“The Raven”.
While Spirits of the Dead doesn’t do much justice to Poe’s source
material, fans of bizarre French cinema should have a pretty good time. This
anthology contains segments directed by three well-known European filmmakers (Roger Vadim,
Louis Malle and Federico Fellini) and, as is often the case with anthology
movies, the result is a mixed bag.
Vadim’s ‘Metzengerstein’ is loosely based on Poe’s tale of the same name, and
it features a young Jane
Fonda (Vadim’s then-wife who would also appear in his Barbarella)
as a decadent and cruel aristocrat who delights in the suffering and discomfort
of her various contemporaries and servants. The beautiful countess oversees
some surprisingly downcast orgies and behaves like an insufferable bitch before
surprisingly falling in love with her cousin. When he dismisses her advances,
the countess exacts a cruel revenge that contains some decidedly ironic
results.
Louis Malle (
The last feature, ‘Toby Dammit,’ is based on Poe’s ‘Never Bet the Devil Your
Head’ and it focuses on a drunken and insufferable lout who also happens to be
a world-famous actor. Since Fellini brings this tale to us, you can of course
expect something truly bizarre. Suffice to say that as Toby appears on an
arcane talk show and begins an inner descent into madness, all sorts of wild
visual stuff goes on and things end badly.
Unfortunately, Spirits of the Dead is a muddled and altogether bizarre
movie. Fans of Poe adaptations and late-sixties French cinema will undoubtedly
find more to enjoy than others, but as a whole this one veers between truly odd
and painfully dull. The appearance of a few recognizable faces (Fonda, Terence Stamp,
Peter Fonda,
Brigitte Bardot)
offers something of interest, but on the whole, Spirits of the Dead is
simply more “weird” than it is “entertaining.”
digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews Mark Zimmer
Edgar Allan Poe's writings have proven notoriously
difficult to adapt for the screen, though not for lack of trying. Part of the
problem is that most of his notable works are short stories that cannot fill an
entire feature's running time. Here three of the greatest European directors
try their hands at a Poe anthology.
In Metzengerstein by Roger Vadim, the baroness Metzengerstein (Jane
Fonda) is notoriously sensual and cruel. She has everyone under her thumb,
until she meets her cousin, Wilhelm (Peter Fonda). Shortly thereafter, he is
killed in a stable fire, trying to rescue a favorite horse. A tapestry in the
baroness' home has a black horse mysteriously burned out of it, and then a
black stallion makes its appearance, to her utter fascination. Is it a
reincarnation of Wilhelm, or something more sinister?
Louis Malle's William Wilson takes the subject of the double. In a
framing device set in a confessional, Wilson (Alain Delon) recounts his life of
sin and villainy, punctuated by periodic appearances of his exact double, also
named William Wilson. In an extended segment,
The least literal transcription is, unsurprisingly, that by Fellini. In Toby
Dammit (adapted from Never Bet the Devil Your Head), the title
character (Terence Stamp) is a dissolute Shakespearean actor brought to Rome by
the promise of a new Ferrari to make a Catholic western. Dammit goes from one
bizarre experience to another, ending in a lengthy and wild ride through the
Roman environs. But Dammit cannot escape the devil, who appears to him in the
form of a little girl with a white ball (Marina Yaru).
Self-consciously arty, the three tales tend to be fairly heavy going. Vadim
plays lengthy dialogue sequences with music only; Malle gets bogged down in the
confessional scenes and the card game and doesn't develop the relationship
between the doubles in a satisfying manner, and of course Fellini's production
is his usual freak show. The picture definitely has its moments, however.
William Wilson's debauched attempt to dissect a live woman, as well as his
vicious caning of Giuseppina are notable, and the image of the devil in Toby
Dammit is utterly chilling in its portrayal of the ultimate wickedness in
the guise of innocence.
While this is a French-language print, oddly enough the titles are in English
(the onscreen title is Tales of Mystery and Imagination).
The content seems to be identical to that of the earlier Image disc, with the
exception of the titles and the narration over the closing credits of Poe's Spirits
of the Dead by Vincent Price, added for the US release by AIP, which is
missing here, but was included on the Image disc English language track. That
disc, however, was from a PAL master and thus the running time was abbreviated
by over four minutes.
Spirits
of the Dead - TCM.com Jeff
Stafford
Tales
of Mystery and Imagination (1968) aka Spirits of the Dead ... Richard Scheib from Moria
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)
Communist Vampires Thomas M. Sopis
DVD Drive-In [Christopher Dietrich]
Spirits of the Dead John White from 10k bullets
MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin] also reviewing DON JUAN (OR IF DON JUAN WERE A WOMAN)
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
"Barbarella
psychedella, there's a kind of cockle shell about ya."
In
the 41st century Barbarella (Jane Fonda) is sent to thwart the schemes of the
evil Black Queen. After surviving several kinky encounters, including tantric
sex with a blind angel who can no longer fly and an attack by killer dolls with
razor-sharp teeth, Barbarella defeats the Black Queen and the galaxy is
restored to peace.
If
you like camp/kitsch or the thought of a semi-clad Jane Fonda c.1968 then
Barbarella is the film for you. If you like meaningful content, stylistic
innovation or any of that serious cinema stuff then it isn't (unless, of
course, you happen to be interested in constructing a thesis about how the
casual sexism of Barbarella maybe isn't really all that harmless deep down when
you think about it; something Fonda herself probably got more into a few years
later in the wake of "Hanoi Jane", Klute and Tout va Bien). It's not
a film that tries to break barriers or provide deep and meaningful commentary
on the nature and meaning of life - it's a film which sets out to entertain and
does so with considerable panache. What more do you need to know?
How
about that Barbarella's director, Roger Vadim, might just be the most important
director since 1950 without ever actually making an outstanding film, although
he did produce some highly enjoyable films. His Bridget Bardot star-vehicle And
God Created Woman (1956) created an atmosphere conducive to low-budget films
from young directors in
Film
- Bright Lights Film Journal Quickies:
Random Short Reviews from Barbarella
to Liquid Sky to The Weather Underground, by Gary
Morris, July 31, 2003
Film Freak Central Bill Chambers
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
The Sci-Fi Movie Page James O’Ehley, including the film’s script
Mutant Reviewers From Hell Shalen
All Movie Guide [Brian J. Dillard]
Vern's review also reviewing DANGEROUS LIASONS and DON JUAN (OR IF DON JUAN WERE A WOMAN)
The New York Times (Renata Adler)
Somebody's knocking
off girls at the high school in this sex-comedy-thriller, which doesn't get far
in any of these directions. The sex is an updated equivalent of the kind
indulged in by Rock Hudson
in innumerable bedroom comedies. The comedy consists largely of Telly
Savalas wearing his dark glasses on the top of his bald head, plus a few
gags about embarrassing erections. And the thriller aspect derives from a
couple of close-ups of Hudson looking dangerously manic. In one shot, the boom
microphone hovers in full view for several seconds; an indication of the
general sloppiness and pointlessness of Vadim's first American-made feature.
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The Osmonds chirrup over the title, which is tattooed, via
zoom, on a coed's ass -- Roger Vadim lines his gals to sing "
Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford
Among the many peculiar assemblages of cast and crew in Hollywood
history, Pretty Maids All in a Row
(1971) is in a class by itself. A black comedy set in a California high school
where someone is murdering female students, the film marked the U.S. film debut
of French director Roger Vadim (Barbarella, 1968) with Star Trek
creator Gene Roddenberry producing and writing the screenplay. Mix in a number
of seasoned
In a sly bit of casting, Rock Hudson plays "Tiger" McDrew, the high
school football coach and guidance counselor who enjoys countless private
liaisons in his office with selected female students. When the affairs get too
serious or threaten to involve his wife, he terminates them abruptly - usually
by strangulation. Yet, despite his busy schedule, he still finds time to mentor
a few promising students and his current protégé is
While neither completely successful as a murder mystery or satire of high
school life (George Axelrod's Lord Love a Duck [1966] was much sharper),
Pretty Maids All in a Row does
work on the level of soft core erotica which is no surprise considering Vadim's
expertise in that area. But the chic, high-class decadence and art-house
respectability of previous Vadim features such as Les Liaisons dangereuses
(1959) and La Ronde (1964) is completely missing here. Instead, Pretty Maids All in a Row is crass,
overstated, infantile and enormously entertaining at times for all the wrong
reasons. It's as if Vadim is reflecting his own impressions of American society
back at us in this sex-obsessed fantasyland where the
More than anything, Pretty Maids All in
a Row espouses the Hugh Hefner Playboy approach to life and is
unapologetically sexist in every male-female encounter in the film. When the
camera isn't ogling female breasts and buttocks, it's reveling in visual
metaphors for sex;
In his autobiography, Memoirs of the Devil, Vadim recalled the casting
of the students in Pretty Maids All in
a Row: "...I had auditioned over two hundred boys and about the
same number of girls. Most of the girls who applied were aspiring actresses,
though some were students who merely found the whole thing amusing. For a man
recovering from lovesickness [Jane Fonda had just divorced Vadim], this
succession of young beauties should have been an excellent tonic. It was not
unpleasant, of course, but I have never believed in strength in numbers."
Not one of the "pretty maids" emerged as a major star but several
went on to enjoy minor film careers with several exploitation and cult films on
their resumes: Brenda Sykes (Black Gunn [1972], Mandingo [1975]),
Margaret Markov (Black Mama, White Mama [1972], The Hot Box
[1972]), Joy Bang (Play It Again, Sam [1972],Cisco Pike [1972]),
June Fairchild (The Student Body [1976], Up in Smoke [1978]),
Aimee Eccles (The Concrete Jungle [1982], Group Marriage [1973])
and Gretchen Burrell, whose main claim to fame was as the one-time girlfriend
of country rocker Gram Parsons.
At the time Rock Hudson made Pretty
Maids All in a Row, his film career had completely stalled. The
multimillion dollar box office bomb Darling Lili with Julie Andrews
hadn't helped matters and neither had the Italian-produced war adventure, Hornet's
Nest (both 1970). He was just a year away from his successful transition to
television with the hit series McMillan & Wife but he was no longer
a guaranteed box office draw - Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman and Ryan O'Neal
were the rising new stars. Regardless of his circumstances,
But Rock Hudson wasn't the only one going through a career crisis in 1970. It
was a year of major transitions in the film industry and every major studio was
desperately struggling to keep up with the rapidly changing audience
demographics. After the surprise success of Easy Rider (1969), Five
Easy Pieces (1970) and other indie hits, everyone was trying to cater to
the "youth market" and MGM was no exception though their shaky
financial situation was worse than most (the studio would completely cease
production by 1976 and by 1979 MGM was primarily a hotel company). Vadim
recalled, "When I started shooting Pretty
Maids All in a Row for MGM, there was not a single other film being made
in any of the six main
Part of the problem was the outdated assembly line approach to filmmaking that
worked so well during the height of the studio system days. Vadim described a
perfect example of this during the filming of Pretty Maids All in a Row: "I had to shoot three takes of a
boy on his Vespa. In the morning a motorized column consisting of four trucks,
the generator set, makeup vans, actors, extras, the producer, the director,
costumes and mobile kitchens, plus six or seven production cars, set out from
the studio. The drivers' union refused to allow me to drive my own car. I
managed to slip away unseen, accompanied by my director of photography, who had
become a friend and accomplice. The actor followed on his Vespa. In an hour,
with a hand-held camera, we had all the takes I needed. By the time the column
arrived the shot was all finished. The studio had been figuring on two whole
days of shooting."
Needless to say, Pretty Maids All in a
Row didn't save MGM from its downward slide. The film reviews were
decidedly mixed; West coast critics tended to be more positive while East coast
critics were extremely negative on the whole. Roger Ebert wrote, "One
thing you can say about Pretty Maids All in a Row. Rock
If nothing else, Pretty Maids All in a
Row is of interest as an evocative snapshot of another time and place, a
signpost signaling the end of old Hollywood and announcing the new one. For
Vadim, however, it was something more: "I found it a thrilling
experience...It was the most enjoyable piece of filmmaking I have ever done in
my career."
Scoopy's Movie House reviews Pretty Maids Johnny Web
Cleveland Press (Tony Mastroianni)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
User
reviews from imdb Author: pressman from
I saw Helle in a theatre in
Don Juan ou Si Don Juan était
une femme...
filmcritic.com [Christopher Null]
So what if Don Juan were a woman? I'm not sure if
she would behave something like Brigitte Bardot's 1973 rendition of the famed
lover, but it's considerably fun to watch her strut her stuff.
In Roger Vadim's interpretation of the Latin lover, Jeanne (Bardot) eats men
for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She takes a married politician and
immediately ruins him by having him photographed at one of her orgies. She uses
a hapless folk singer for sex and then leaves, prompting him to slice his
wrists and bleed to death while strumming his guitar. She even extends her
wiles to corrupting women, luring the innocent wife of a grotesquely
self-absorbed businessman into the sack, then turning the tables on both
members of the couple.
Vadim imbues his film with a balls-out seventies sensibility, all bell bottoms
and shag rugs. Bardot, one of the ultimate vamps of world cinema, is at her
unmistakable best here, bored with the world around her yet overflowing with
wanton lust. Unfortunately, the film never totally gels -- is the point to show
us how Jeanne jumps from one encounter to another without any remorse at all?
That's what Vadim gives us -- and his ending tries to wrap up her life with a
bit of deus ex machina that doesn't satisfy at all.
Still, Don Juan is a rare shocker that turns the table on age-old
expectations about gender and morality. There's no surprise ending and little
mystery along the way -- just brash sexuality courtesy of one of cinema's most
notorious vixens.
User
reviews from imdb Author: Adam Bernstein
(mendips_1999@yahoo.com) from Northwest,
Brigitte Bardot stars here in her last film along with Jane
Birkin, the other singer who recorded the Serge Gainesbourg hit, "Je
t'aime". This film is worth seeing, as we see BB's and Vadim's evolution
from "And God Created Woman" to this post-sixties over-the-top
comedy-drama.
We get some great nude scenes with Brigitte and Jane, and BB's character Jeanne
is someone fed up with men, so she resorts to seduce and destroy tactics. As in
"And God Created Woman" she's pretty much playing herself, but with
an exaggerated storyline of driving men to ruin, murder, and suicide. The campy
ironic humor is there in such scenarios as seducing a priest as well as setting
up a fake menage-a-trois to madden a bete homme. Also a scene with Robert
Walker Jr. (Charlie X in Star Trek TOS) where the price she asks for making
love is no less than his life, which he takes seriously. The ending is a
multiple meaning one as BB saves a man who makes her "pay for her
sins" (though he's unappreciative). I think the end hits home for Brigitte
in real life saying in effect, "look you male-dominated world, you've made
my life hell". And it's the last scene she ever did on film. Worth seeing
for it's erotic quality (but what BB film isn't), the submarine home, the early
'70s fashions, and the camp.
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer)
The origins of Don Juan date back to a play entitled The
Seducer of Seville, written by Spaniard Tirso de Molina in 1630. The story
spread throughout 17th Century Europe, and inspired a number of variations,
including The Stone Feast, a 1665 play by Moliere, the lengthy Byron
poem (pronounced Jew-en), and Mozart's 1787 opera, Don Giovanni. As a
film subject, the IMDB lists 57 titles pertaining to the character, and the
1926 Warner Bros. version starring John Barrymore is credited as the very first
sound feature film, which used the Vitaphone to play music and sound effects.
According to the legend, Don Juan met his match after seducing the daughter of
a Commander, whose ghost returned to take him to hell after the lover had slain
the father in a duel.
For his 1973 effort, Roger Vadim would cast his ex-wife, and the woman he
helped turn into a sex goddess, Brigitte Bardot, in her last starring role, in Don Juan 1973, released here under
its UK title Don Juan (Or If Don Juan Was A
Woman). Maurice Ronet (Purple Noon) reunites with Bardot after working with her on Jean
Auriel's Les Femmes.
Bardot plays Jeanne, a woman whose satisfaction comes not from seducing men,
but from possessing them. Living off her inherited wealth, and residing in a
stylish bachelorette pad in a submarine, her conquests are innumerable, but the
stakes are getting higher. She appears at a church where her cousin is
performing a eulogy. He is not happy to see her, knowing the type of character
she possesses. Still, he can't help but be drawn to her confession, especially
when she confides she has killed a man. In the sanctity of her abode she begins
to unravel the tale, not in a boastful manner, but as a consequence of her
obsession for controlling and destroying men.
Her first prey is Pierre (Maurice Ronet), an upstanding and faithful husband
and father, and while not adverse to one night stands, is not to be coerced
into any kind of emotional attachment. The pursuit is relentless, but the
lengths to which she will go to ensnare her victim drive the man to ruin, and
when done with her fun, he is brushed aside as yesterday's challenge. Others
will follow, each with their own plots for the undoing.
Vadim's talent for exploiting his leading ladies continues here, and though
Bardot's titillating though non-explicit performances in earlier productions
make way for more nudity in this film, the voyeuristic will be thankful the
subtitles are removable, as these moments are rare and short. The look employed
here is reminiscent of earlier Vadim works such as Barbarella, or Radley Metzger's Camille 2000, with similarly
eccentric set dressings, and the choice of shooting into mirrors or using
abstract reflections in metal, through objects or simply focusing on inanimate
objects while the love scenes play off screen. Rack focus, odd angled long
shots, and a variety of stylistic effects up the artiness of the film from a
straight erotic subject, but also limit the amount of nudity actually seen,
with the encounters focused on the set up, then cut away for the main event.
As some have noted, this may have been Bardot's revenge, and a fitting retreat
from her film career, with a role reversal that objectifies males, rather than
using her as the subject. Despite her sexual appeal to the men in the film,
Bardot is no longer the vixen, she is portrayed with the morals and thought
patterns of a male, freed of emotional entanglements, her motives are strictly
superficial. There is no passion in her characterization, she proceeds in a
somber, calculated fashion, with each of moves preconceived to meet her own
goals. This comes across as a lack of depth, leaving the viewer with less
attachment for her or her fate. The spin on the legend is interesting, and is
certainly visually engaging, but the movie falls into a nether region between
erotic cinema and art film, and doesn't seem to gel in either. For Bardot fans,
this is a more serious and mature portrayal, lacking the jovial innocence of
her previous Vadim work. Outside the flirtatious and playful context, even her
two brief nude scenes lose their reward value to an extent. Don Juan is
entertaining, but its atmosphere is much more downbeat than the comedies that
showcased a lustful exuberance in the past—still a must for her fans, but more
for completist reasons than its own merit.
Don Juan or If Don Juan Were a Woman Michael den Boer from 10kbullets
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600")
Flipside Movie Emporium [Michael B. Scrutchin]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)
Vern's review also reviewing DANGEROUS LIASONS and BARBARELLA
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin] also reviewing SPIRITS OF THE DEAD
Vail, Pegi
GRINGO TRAILS B- 81
USA Bolivia Thailand Mali Bhutan (79 mi) 2013 Gringo Trails Official Site
Take only memories, leave only
footprints. —Chief Seattle
More than ten years in the making, the film explores the effect of
institutionalized tourism in remote regions around the globe, where the tourist
mindset, especially when they arrive in droves, alters the natural landscape
and turns whatever natural beauty the site offers into a money-making theme
park, where instant gratification outweighs long term gains or benefits. While the director is an American
anthropologist who is also Associate Director of the Center for Media, Culture and History at
Another British tourist enthralled by
The most egregious example of beauty turned to ruination
started out as an unspoiled paradise, where National
Geographic travel editor Costas Christ describes his own unbridled
enthusiasm about visiting Ko Pha Ngan
Doc Gringo Trails Argues Why Backpackers Aren't Too ... Diana Clarke from The Village Voice, also seen here: New York : Gringo Trails - Village Voice
In the late 1970s, Costas Christ, now an editor at National
Geographic Traveler, took a boat down the river in southern
The film suggests that these travelers, often characterized as young, un-wealthy,
and adventurous, are more like traditional tourists than they'd care to admit.
In 1981, Israeli backpacker Yossi Ghinsberg survived a month lost in the
Amazon; after his memoir was published, hordes of young people arrived in
An uneven examination of paradise(s) lost, Pegi Vail's Gringo
Trails showcases the tourism industry's encroachment on the natural beauty
and modest livelihoods in undeveloped areas within countries such as
The doc's spotty episodic structure causes the film to repeatedly shift focus, and one of the more fascinating products of the backpacking phenomenon that Vail too briefly explores is how a country's tourism industry sells natural danger as a harmless attraction. Using Yossi Ghinsberg's remarkable 1981 survival in the Bolivian jungle after nearly a month as a launching pad, the Bolivian people in that area have turned Ghinsberg's experience into guided tours for thrill-seeking backpackers, disregarding the fact that Ghinsberg was lost and facing death before being rescued. This is echoed later in a bizarre scene featuring a crowd of tourists surrounding an anaconda in a marsh, where everyone attempts to touch the fearsome predator; the creature's notorious image is suddenly subverted when a tour guide subtly warns that the insect repellent on the tourists' skin is toxic to the snake and may kill it if it's touched.
Perhaps the most tragic story told in the film involves the transformation of Ko Pha Ngan's Haad Rin, once a long stretch of virgin beach and now home to Full Moon Parties that suggest a frat boy's Disneyland. Vail counters images of Haad Rin's barely inhabited past with the present ebb and flow of the sea of beer bottles that litter the beach after a party, a juxtaposition that becomes an undeniably powerful indictment of how countries will brazenly sacrifice both heritage and pristine land to serve the touristic needs of the outsider. Though the tourists are presented as nothing more that single-minded party animals (which the film dubiously presents as an exclusively American and European phenomenon), and the native Ko Pha Nganians see this tourism as a financial opportunity, Vail never proposes a resolution or alternative to the issue, which suggests the director is content to rest on a moral high ground with her images. Haad Rin's story encapsulates Vail's increasingly unsatisfying reserve toward her subject matter, and this beautifully edited film somehow addresses a lot, but ultimately says little.
Gringo Trails is a term used in South and
The story starts with the tale of Yossi Ghinsberg who heard about a stretch of
uncharted Amazon while in Bolivia in 1981 Ghinsberg was looking for the remote,
tribal and unusual headed out to explore getting lost in the jungle. He was
swept away in one of the worst rainstorm in the history of the area but manage
to survive 25 days alone in the jungle near Rurrenabaque before rescue.
He turned his experience into a 1985 book which started a trend of
Israelis coming to the area to see if the story was true and try to gain their
own taste of the Ghinsberg experience.
Director Pegi Vail presents the development of tourism in many hotspots
normally plot into three stages: the initial sprinkling of travellers that
discover a spot, which leads to increased popularity amongst backpackers then
total saturation. The narrative touches on the effect on the land, the
habitat of the local animals inhabitants. The film also includes antidotal
stories from travel book writers, TV hosts and bloggers. Be sure to catch the
running gag of backpackers standing around brushing their teeth in the morning
sunlight to start their day.
The next point of interest is Salar de Uyuni also in
The worst example in the piece is
The film includes two examples of locations that followed the
right approach. Bhutan opened up to tourism in 1974 but they targeted a
specific market. They looked for older tourist mainly the well to do,
retired University professors and Hollywood types who had means had done the
party thing in the past therefore more likely to respect their culture and
traditions. Tourist are charged $250.00 per day and can be told to leave if
they do not respect the country's traditions and rules. The other is Chalalan
Lagoon in Bolivia. The guides are well trained explain to tourist what the
land, animals and nature means to them, their parents and grandparents
generation. They engage in Eco-tourism, Yossi Ghinsberg retuned to Bolivia in
1992 and is working with the group at Chalalan Ecolodge alongside some of the
people that were in the search party to save him. He raised money from the U.S.
to support their project of community based tourism.
Gringo trails is a fascinating look at modern tourism and the impact of the
traveler on the destinations that they visit. It's a unique take as they find
as much fault with the locals for not educating the tourists but instead
looking to make a quick buck as with the tourist for disrespecting local
customs and traditions. A key rule for the host is to set the ground rules
early, limit numbers, have a clear plan on what to do with waste and keep a
close eye on the effect on wildlife and culture. A good tip for the
traveller when they come across a supposed exotic local with volleyball courts,
bars on the beach and restaurant serving western fare is to ask a local what's
going on at the island or village next door. Gringo trails is a documentary
that I highly recommend.
Gringo Trails - PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
'Gringo Trails' Illuminates Our Travel Footprint - Outside Online Mary Catherine O’Connor
Gringo Trails ~ a documentary by Pegi Vail | Coffee-Stained ... Oliver from Coffee Stained Journal
Don't go there? Film chronicles destruction of travel - CNN ... Zoe Li from CNN
Joshua Reviews Pegi Vail's Gringo Trails [Theatrical Review] Joshua Brunsting
Planet in Focus Review: Gringo Trails | Cinema Axis Francis McKay
Film Review: Gringo Trails - Film Journal International Eric Monder
Facets : Cinematheque Schedule: Gringo Trails
Film
'Gringo Trails' looks at whether tourism harms ... - Today Brooke Lefferts interview,
Filmmakers
Explore Tourism's Toll On Our Planet - NBC News Sandra Guzman interview,
Who
Ruins the World? Travelers? A Chat with "Gringo Trails ... Adedana Ashebir interview from The Huffington Post,
Are Backpackers Destroying the World? Gringo Trails ... Bret and Mary interview from Green Global Travel, March 1, 2014
Gringo
Trails: Is tourism destroying the world? - CNN.com Zoe Li interview,
'Gringo Trails': Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter Frank Scheck
'Gringo Trails' Examines Tourism's Fallout - NYTimes.com Ben Kenigsberg
Valdivia, Juan Carlos
SOUTHERN DISTRICT C- 67
The vulgar crassness
of the wealthy bourgeoisie is on full display with this unhappy examination of
a socially dysfunctional family that lives inside an immense home surrounded by
gardens where off in the distance the Altiplano Bolivian mountains can be
seen. This feels like a wretched version
of De Sica’s THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS (1970), portraying the last vestiges
of the aristocracy, like the passing of an era, which in my view can’t come
fast enough in this Bolivian film. The
Southern District of La Paz houses the wealthy, where here a family lives
inside a glass house protected from the outside world by iron bars on the
windows. Headed by a thoroughly
despicable mother who dotes over her children like a mother hen, smothering
them with unneeded and unheeded advice, she has three children who couldn’t be
more selfishly spoiled, one who has sex round the clock, one who follows her
lesbian instincts largely to spite her mother, and the youngest child who talks
to an imaginary friend named Spielberg, all of whom emit an air of entitlement
even as their lives undergo a downward spiral of financial misfortune, which is
barely even acknowledged, as the family is in utter denial about their
unthrifty spending habits, where they accumulate so much debt on credit,
expecting this to be perfectly acceptable, that they actually blame the
merchants when they are unable to continue without actually paying for what
they need. Their lives continue, as
before, with little acknowledgement of reality.
Using a French style
of long, monotonous dialogue, this film is advanced by unending, mindless
chatter, as if this could be a play, as it nearly all takes place inside the
confines of the large and enormous rooms of the glass house, where their
pretentions, prejudices, and hedonistic lack of self-awarenenss are on full
display, where at some point there is a shot with each character set in front
of a different glass window of the house helplessly looking out. As the film attempts to find a rhythm of
daily routine where the house becomes a bubble of social protection from the
outside world, the mother flirts with her long-time indigenous manservant, a
butler who shops, cooks, helps pick out the clothes people wear, while
generally taking orders from his flighty and overbearing boss who is simply
used to ordering other people around even as her moral authority to do so
slowly disappears. If anyone has seen
Gaspar Noé’s ENTER THE VOID (2009), then you will be familiar with this 360
degree overhead shot that hovers above the world below like an out of body
experience, which is used all too frequently here, as if to represent the split
in reality. While there are many somewhat
theatrical camera shots, and an extremely interesting architectural glass house
on display, the stunningly empty dialogue taking place within the family itself
is horribly detached not only from the rest of the world but from any audience
in the seats, as what they have to say from start to finish is mindlessly
boring, alienating any hint of interest with what’s happening onscreen. I kept hoping some outsider would arrive with
an ax and put all of them out of their misery, but it was not to be. In the end, it doesn’t really matter, as
their air of arrogance and racial superiority is so dismissive of others that
it ends up being the film’s undoing, as many found dozing off preferable to
staying awake for this snoozer.
User reviews from imdb Author: Chris Murphy from
I saw this film on the last day of the Berlinale and it's seduced me right
away. The room by room 360 degree rotating camera scenes did remind me slightly
uncomfortably of estate agent guides however the film deserves a lot of credit
for its subtlety and restraint. The characters are entirely realistic and
multi-dimensional, a rarity in films dealing with class and race. In particular
the exchanges between mother and daughter for me exemplified the balance and
impartiality of the film.
I would thoroughly recommend this whether you are looking for an examination of
class, race and family or just wish for a couple of hours of stunning scenery,
endearing characters and beautiful music.
Set in an upper class
zone of the Bolivian capital, Southern District takes us inside the house of a
family as they go through their daily lives.
Carola (del
Castillo), the mother and head of the house, lives with her children Patricio
(Koria), Bernarda (Vargas) and Andrés (Fernández).
They also share the
house with Wilson (Loayza) the butler, who has become a conflicting father
figure of sorts and Marcelina (Condori) the maid.
We see as Carola
deals with her daughter's disdain for her social class, Patricio's overpowering
sex drive (his girlfriend is played by Luisa de Urioste) and little Andrés'
fantastical existence.
Within their problems
we encounter a microcosms of what
If at first glance
the plot sounds familiar, the director gives it a new perspective relying on a
camera formalism that might recall Godard and Antonioni.
Aided by
cinematographer Paul de Lumen, the director comes up with a visual plan during
which the camera never leaves the family house.
Every scene is
composed of long shots, dollies and crane shots that move around the sets,
sometimes in complete disregard of the characters (which leaves us with
beheaded actors, dialogues heard behind closed doors and a restless mobility
that both explores and seeks escape).
The director, who has
worked in Mexican soap operas, has no trouble creating dramatic tension in the
obvious set up of family quarrels and confrontations but Southern District's
brilliance lies in its reevaluation of the familiar.
The film's key scene
might be one where Patricio wants to tape a sexual encounter he has with his
girlfriend. At her reluctance he tries to ease her into it by telling her to
imagine "there's two people", one who makes love to her and the other
who films it.
Valdivia's camera
works in the same way as it moves throughout the house caressing the mementos
and characters, while it tries to absorb all the information it can to help us
understand, if not empathize, with these people's superficial existence.
During one chilling
moment the camera shows us how all the characters, except Andrés, stand inside
the house looking out behind clear glass windows.
We are instantly
reminded of an earlier moment where we saw a bunch of bottled butterflies in
Andrés' room.
The little boy who
wants to fly away (literally with a pair of wings he built) and figuratively as
he dreams of becoming a filmmaker and discusses this with his imaginary friend
appropriately called Spielberg (the nods to E.T.: The Extra-terrestrial and
other Spielbergian themes speak for themselves).
Andrés is the only
family member who at one point leaves the house-learning about a social reality
he practically ignored-and as such we wonder if
The Hollywood Reporter review James Greenberg at Sundance
The crumbling of the
aristocracy in his native
Nuances of the Bolivian culture may be lost on American moviegoers, but the
larger concerns are universal.
At the top of the food chain is Carola (Ninon Del Castillo), the matriarch of
the family. Orbiting around her are her libidinous son Patricio (Juan Pablo
Koria), rebellious daughter Bernarda (Mariana Vargas) and young son (Nicolas
Fernandez). As a counterpoint, also living in villa are two Aymara Indians,
Wilson (Pascual Loayza), the butler, chef and housekeeper, and Marcelina
(Viviana Condori), the gardener.
The once-grand and now threadbare house with its lush grounds, designed by
artist Perez Alcala and outfitted by production designer Joachin Sanchez, also
plays an important role in this domestic drama. Day by day, the viewer gets to
live with these people as they complacently hold on to their fading glory.
Patricio seems to have sex around the clock with his gorgeous girlfriend (Luisa
De Urioste) while Bernarda has a lesbian fling with her schoolmate (Glenda
Rodriguez). Their younger brother Andres, who is dark-haired and almost seems
to be from another family, escapes to the tiled roof of the house where he
talks to his imaginary friend named Spielberg.
But it's Carola who rules the roost with a stern will and often-foul temper as
she exerts her power on those around her. Going about her business as if
nothing has changed, she refuses to acknowledge her growing debt as her circle
of influence closes in on her. Interestingly, her ex-husband doesn't make an
appearance and the only man in the house is the servant Wilson, who plays an
intricate role in their lives but doesn't figure in the social strata.
The characters are neither likable nor totally evil, and
What makes the film unusual and sometimes fascinating, despite its glacial
pace, in the specificity of time and place
CIFF 2010: Southern District (Zona Sur, 2009) Marilyn Ferdinand from Ferdy on Films
Variety (Robert Koehler) review
BFI | Sight & Sound | Embezzler Of Hearts David Robinson from Sight and Sound, June 2004
In this celebrity-driven time, actors are the aspect
of film-making that gets the obvious attention. But their craft remains
mysterious and their cultural input is rarely taken seriously. Sight & Sound wants to change that. In this new series we ask writers to respond to
actors, not only as icons of their age, but also in terms of their expertise,
their physical presence and their importance to the films of their day. We
begin with David Robinson on the ultimate star, Rudolph Valentino.
He was born on 6 May 1895 at
Castellaneta, near Taranto, beneath the heel of Italy. In later years
publicists would boast that he was baptised Rodolpho Alfonzo Rafaelo Pierre
Filibert di Valentina d'Antonguollo Guglielmi - which is unlikely, though the
'Pierre Filibert' is a reminder that his mother Maria Berta Gabriella Barbin
Guglielmi was probably of French origin. His father Giovanni was the village
vet, and supported the family in comparative comfort until his death in 1906.
Rodolpho was the third of four children: his elder sister Beatrice died in
infancy; his elder brother Alberto and you-nger sister Maria kept contact with
him throughout his years of success. The young Rodolpho seems to have been a
minor delinquent, and records of his schooling are doubtful, though his claims
of having attended an agricultural college are probably true, if only because
so improbable.
On 9 December 1913 Rodolpho set
out for New York on the S.S. Cleveland. Arriving penniless, he was glad to
accept the hospitality of Castellenatans who had preceded him to the New York
ghettos until he found work as a gardener on grand estates - which probably
gave him the opportunity to observe, envy and emulate the rich and elegant.
Meanwhile, he worked on his innate dancing skills, mastering the crazes of the
day - the maxixe, the cakewalk and above all the American and Continental
tangos. The handsome, charming and graceful boy easily found work as a taxi
dancer in the 'cabarets' that flourished in New York. Almost certainly
additional service as a gigolo would have been demanded. He quickly made it to
the fashionable Maxim, where he was able to earn $100, with handsome tips, when
he pleased the ladies.
Probably humiliated by this
rental status, he accepted a considerable cut in salary to replace Clifton Webb
as partner to the exhibition dancer Bonnie Glass. He moved on to partner Joan
Sawyer, but soon became involved in a complex sex scandal involving millionaire
Jack de Saulles, his wife Blanca, the actress Mae Murray and Joan Sawyer
herself. Rodolpho was a divorce witness for Blanca, which abruptly ended his
partnership with Sawyer. Soon afterwards Rodolpho himself was arrested and
gaoled. When he became famous Metro arranged for the police records to
evaporate, so the details of the case are unknown, though they seem to have
involved blackmail and extortion. Soon afterwards Blanca de Saulles shot her
estranged husband dead; with his vulnerable immigrant status, Rodolpho decided
it was best to leave town before her trial.
He got a part in the chorus of
the touring musical The Masked Model and when that collapsed found a three-week
job in the chorus of Nobody Home, playing in San Francisco. The Seven Little
Foys were appearing in vaudeville, and 20-year-old Bryan Foy (later to become a
prominent film producer and 'Keeper of the B's') took a fancy to Rodolpho,
convinced him to try his luck in Los Angeles, and put him up in his apartment
on 6th Street, near the Elks Club.
For a year or so he lived from
hand to mouth, working as a dancer and occasional mechanic and endeavouring to
break into movies, starting with an unbilled role as a dancer in Alimony in
late 1917. Over the next two years he appeared in a dozen or so films,
sometimes unbilled, otherwise getting secondary roles in minor pictures or bit
parts in bigger productions. His name was rarely spelled the same way twice on
the credits: he was M. Roldolpho De Valentina, Rudolph Volantina, Rudolph
Valentine. Only on two films at the end of 1920 does his screen name appear in
more or less its definitive form of Rudolph Valentino (though there remained
uncertainty about the 'ph').
It has generally been stated that
he was frustrated at being typecast as Latin heavies and co-respondents, but in
fact he had his fair share of characters with good American names like Jimmie
and Maurice and played sympathetic Italians (Prince Angelo in Passion's
Playground, 1920) as well as the neurotic (Juliantimo in Once to Every Woman,
1920) and plain nasty (Jose Dalmarez in Stolen Moments, 1920). The last role of
1920, as a crook called Jimmie Klingsby (and still billed as Rudolph
DeValentino), was in the aptly titled The Wonderful Chance.
Having paid Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
$20,000 advance against 10 per cent of the eventual gross for the film rights
to his best-selling epic novel The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Metro was
regretting it, as war films plummeted in public favour. Nevertheless, Metro's
star writer June Mathis produced a clever adaptation, suggested Rex Ingram as
director and proposed the unknown Rudolph Valentino for the leading male role
of Julio Desnoyers. Mathis seems never to have met Valentino, but to have been
impressed by his cameo role in 1919's Eyes of Youth. Metro accepted, confident
that the film was guaranteed by its female star, Ingram's wife Alice Terry.
Almost as soon as shooting began, and definitively after shooting the extended
tango scene, Ingram recognised the singular magnetism of his new actor. Julio's
role was progressively filled out - and when the film opened in 1921, the
public saw only Valentino. Myth and star alike were born overnight.
Valentino is the perfect screen
actor. He moves with extraordinary grace and skilfully adapts his elegant mime
to the age or mood of his character. With his fine skin and slicked-back hair,
he has a commanding facial beauty that transcends a misshapen bruiser's ear and
a scar on his right cheek (which can even serve as a beauty spot). He seems to
absorb himself completely into every character, though he always found a
costume helped: he preferred not to play contemporary roles, and even when he
did usually sought to introduce some fantasy sequence that permitted him to
retreat to a distant and exotic place or era. His playing appears exceptionally
restrained for the time, and at the same time acutely expressive. His clinical
myopia may have contributed to the depth of his melancholy eyes, under eyebrows
often quizzically drawn together. Although the intensity of his passions is
rarely compromised by humour or cynicism, he nevertheless had an elegant style
in light comedy, seen at its best in Monsieur Beaucaire (1924) and The Eagle
(1925).
From the moment of his first
entrance in Four Horsemen, hijacking his partner for the tango, he brought a
new eroticism to American cinema. As Life said, for women newly emancipated by
the Great War, he was "the symbol of everything wild and wonderful and
illicit in nature". Beside him, his American predecessors and
contemporaries were domestic dull-pots, while Douglas Fairbanks, though
dedicated in other ways to glorifying the male physique, seemed always to be
doing all those things recommended to adolescent boys to take their minds off
sex. Valentino's erotic play ranged from the exquisitely gentle to the no less
exquisitely brutal. He was attentive, considerate - and impetuous. His lips
just brushed the fingers of a married woman's hand, or kissed the palm (a trick
taught him by Elinor Glyn when he was making 1922's Beyond the Rocks) of one
who might be more attainable. He would seize his partner, bend her backwards
dangerously, then tenderly arrest the movement to plant a kiss. He was the
Sheik and the Great Lover.
The heterosexual American was
inevitably uneasy; Dick Dorgan spoke for many when he famously wrote in
Photoplay: "I hate Valentino! All men hate Valentino. I hate his oriental
optics; I hate his classic nose; I hate his Roman face; I hate his smile; I
hate his glistening teeth; I hate his patent leather hair; I hate his Svengali
glare; I hate him because he dances too well; I hate him because he's a
slicker; I hate him because he's the great lover of the screen; I hate him
because he's an embezzler of hearts; I hate him because he's too apt in the art
of osculation; I hate him because he's leading man for Gloria Swanson; I hate
him because he's too good-looking." Just the same, screen lovers - and not
just Valentino's Latin rivals like Ramon Novarro and Gilbert Roland - changed
their ways with women after Valentino.
Valentino's private sexual life
is enigmatic, but not irrelevant to the on-screen erotic charisma that still
endures. Everyone who met him emphasises his boyish, unaffected charm and
sincerity; and there's a good deal of evidence that he cherished an Italian
bourgeois ideal of a well-ordered home and a dutiful wife to supervise it. Yet
in Hollywood he seemed to be drawn into a sexual maelstrom and to be dominated
throughout his career by strong women, starting with Mathis. The Russian-born
stage star Alla Nazimova snubbed him in 1919 when someone attempted to
introduce the then-unknown young man in a restaurant. It seemed almost
unconscious revenge when he immediately married Nazimova's most recent lover
Jean Acker (herself irked, it seems, by Nazimova's dallyings with Dorothy
Arzner, the editor on her latest film). Acker instantly regretted her error,
locked the door of the bridal suite and went back to another girlfriend. With
astonishing naivety, Valentino seems to have continued to plead for her return.
Nazimova changed her attitude
after Valentino's success in Four Horsemen and persuaded him to play Armand to
her Camille. The production was dominated by another of Nazimova's lovers,
Natacha Rambova (in reality Winifred Shaughnessy, the stepdaughter of cosmetics
tycoon Richard Hudnut). Valentino was bewitched by this forceful, pretentiously
high-brow young beauty - and married her. When shortly afterwards he was
charged with bigamy (his divorce from Acker was not yet legally concluded) the
couple had no difficulty in establishing there had been no consummation, while
Rambova's biography of Valentino - admittedly largely devoted to communications
from beyond the grave - persistently refers to his "childlike"
qualities and never hints at a mutual erotic attraction.
Outside these two marriages,
Valentino was untouched by the usual Hollywood scandal machine, with no
suggestion of sexual affairs with any other women or men - though he openly
enjoyed the companionship of his own sex, with (not surprisingly) a number of
homosexuals among his most faithful chums.
Rambova's pretentions and
ambitions were to have a seriously adverse effect on Valentino's career. After
Four Horsemen he made three more films for Metro: Camille (1921); Uncharted
Seas (1921), a melodrama set in the Arctic; and The Conquering Power (1921),
directed by Rex Ingram, who clearly resen-ted being eclipsed by Valentino and
was determined to cut him down to size. When Metro refused to raise his salary
despite the huge profits of Four Horsemen Valentino was happy to be part of a
package that Mathis sold to Famous Players-Paramount, which involved starring
Valentino in The Sheik (1921) at a considerably larger salary than he had
earned at Metro. Edith Maude Hull's 1919 novel had garnered a notoriety that
sold millions of copies; to have read this slyly pornographic tale was the mark
of the New Woman. It relates how a liberated young aristocratic lady is
abducted in the desert by a handsome sheik. Borne off to his tent, she yields -
but happily discovers he is really an English nobleman in mufti. The story has
everything - sin, miscegenation and a last-minute racial corrective.
With The Sheik Valentino's fame
and popularity soared; but Rambova thought such stuff below her husband's
dignity and from then on made more and more difficulties between Valentino and
Famous Players, encouraging him to be increasingly demanding about his projects
and their visual qualities (with Rambova, naturally, the preferred designer and
artistic adviser). There were some good films nevertheless - a finely played
contemporary role in Moran of the Lady Letty (1922) and a return to Ibáñez with
Fred Niblo's admirable Blood and Sand (1922). Immediately before this last
film, and while relations with the studio were still comparatively cordial, Sam
Wood directed Valentino and Gloria Swanson in Beyond the Rocks, from Elinor
Glyn's 1906 novel. The film was long lost, but has just been rediscovered by
the Nederlands Filmmuseum, which is in the process of restoring it. Swanson
herself always longed, vainly, to see it again, since she had such happy
memories of its making. She was 25, Valentino was 27, and she found him modest,
endearing and fun; the two youngsters would run off for tennis games together.
Valentino plays the English Lord Bracondale, who saves the life of the
beautiful Theodora (Swanson), the young wife of an elderly millionaire, when
she slips off an Alpine precipice. They fall in love, with predictable
complications that are eventually resolved when the millionaire husband is
slain by bandits in Arabia. Madame Glyn, the author of this farrago, was on the
set to offer tips on the finer points of romantic love-making, and her hand is
also evident in an article signed by Valentino in the March 1922 issue of
Photoplay.
Goaded by Rambova, Valentino
broke completely with the studio after the decorative but unbearably tedious
The Young Rajah (1922), alleging Famous Players' tyranny over his artistic
creation. For a year and a half he survived by doing exhibition dances as a
cosmetics commercial. Valentino was still a valuable property, however, and in
1924 there was a reconciliation with the studio, which knuckled under to most
of his demands. Monsieur Beaucaire, made at Paramount's New York studios, is a
touch weighed down by Rambova's design and A Sainted Devil (1924) and Cobra
(1925) are among his least successful films. Famous Players was clearly not too
disappointed when it finally parted with what one executive called "the
double hernia".
Recruited to United Artists by
Joseph Schenck (or rather coerced - Schenck had providentially covered some of
the huge debts incurred by Valentino's extravagance), Valentino was to make
only two more films. The Eagle, directed by Clarence Brown, remains one of his
most sophisticated; he plays a young Russian officer slyly evading the
attentions of the lustful Catherine the Great (Louise Dresser). Finally he
returned to the lurid world of Edith Maude Hull for The Son of the Sheik
(1926). It is old tosh, but Valentino is at his best, finely differentiating
his double roles, his mime beautifully characterising the old Sheik gracefully
yielding to time.
Valentino went east for the
premiere. He was unhappy. He and Natacha, who was forbidden by the contract with
Schenck from even entering the studio, had quietly separated. He had been cut
by nasty press attacks on his virility - despite his increasing insistence on
posing with boxers and athletes and on showing off his body (not always easy,
as from early days he had a constant weight problem). Most surprising was the
still from The Young Rajah in which his knitted swimming trunks reveal a
display of manliness at which even contemporary newspapers might jib. After his
death the "powder-puff" jibes were largely blamed for his distress,
but H.L. Mencken, who interviewed him at the time, felt it was the experience
of The Son of the Sheik which had knocked him so low. He had risen from
nothing, and had striven to be an artist, only to find that what he had done was
worthless.
On 15 August 1926 Valentino was
rushed into the Polyclinic Hospital New York and operated on for a gastric
ulcer and ruptured appendix. On 23 August he died, setting off a mass display
of necrophilia such as had never been seen before. Vast crowds (most of them,
it was noted, under 35, with some of the men in gaucho costume) converged on
Campbell's Funeral Church on Broadway and 66th Street. Three hundred and fifty
policemen and a horde of private detectives attempted to control them, but
there were at least a hundred casualties and Campbells opened a temporary
clinic. For three days people - more in carnival mood than in mourning - filed
past the bier at the rate of 9,000 per hour. United Artists, with its big
investment in The Son of the Sheik at stake, did not discourage the spectacle.
Nor did Paramount, anxious to promote Pola Negri's next film Hotel Imperial,
raise any objection when the diva announced that she and Valentino had been
engaged, and embarked on a much publicised cross-continental pilgrimage,
weeping, swooning, screaming, giving press conferences and doing re-takes for
the news camera by turns. A song 'There's a New Star in Heaven Tonight' was
rushed out and proved a best-seller.
After a memorial service in the
Church of St Malchy the body was taken west by train, stopping for further
memorial services at Chicago. Finally, in Hollywood, the funeral took place in
the Church of the Good Shepherd, and the double bronze coffin was laid to rest
in June Mathis' crypt in the Hollywood cemetery as an aeroplane dropped a hail
of blossoms to cover the ground below.
Valentino died at a time of
revolution in communications technology. The furore over his last illness,
death and lying-in-state was to a large part generated by the new medium of
radio. The image of his corpse was the first press picture to be transmitted
across the world by wireless. Seventeen days before his death Warner Bros. had
premiered its first Vitaphone programme in New York: sound films had arrived.
Valentino would certainly have
survived the revolution. Some broadcasts and rather amateur but sweetly
engaging recordings of 'The Kashmiri Love Song' and 'El relicario' had shown he
had a pleasant voice. He had mastered perfect English, with an exotic accent
which was said to sound more French than Italian.
Valentino would have survived the
revolution - but would the legend? "We had faces then. We didn't need to
talk," said Norma Desmond. These mythical figures - Chaplin's tramp,
Fairbanks' Thief, the Lillian Gish of Broken Blossoms, Theda Bara, Negri,
Swanson, Musidora and Mozhukhin - existed outside ordinary reality, larger far
than life, and not chained to nationality by common speech. Valentino's exotic
contemporaries Nazimova and Ramon Novarro were to end their careers as ethnic
character players; Negri's last role was in Disney's The Moon-Spinners (1964).
Rudolph Valentino lived, died, and remains a legend.
Bright Sights: Recent DVDs - Bright Lights Film Journal The Valentino Collection, by Gordon Thomas from Bright Lights Film Journal, November 1, 2007
Critic's Choice: New DVD's BEYOND THE ROCKS, by Dave Kehr from The New York Times
By John Anderson C.R.A.Z.Y. from Cinema Scope (link lost)
The various successes of C.R.A.Z.Y.—a Québecois smash that deals with real things and attracts people who don’t ordinarily go to movies (something essential for a long shelf life)—put it in a heavyweight classification somewhere between Titanic (1997) and Mambo Italiano (2003). It’s about family, to which everyone can relate. And if you don’t see the outcome looming, like an iceberg with “ICEBERG” written on its side, you might have been surprised when the ship sank, too.
But it’s sweet. It’s redemptive. It made $6 million in Québec
alone and is the Canadian nominee for Oscar’s Best Foreign Film. Yes, it has
English subtitles for the non-Québec audiences, ordinarily the kiss of death in
that large movie market south of
The wild success of a predictably popular movie like C.R.A.Z.Y.—and it is predictable, sadly enough—represents not a revisionist past, but a revisionist present. It is made by what has become a tried-and-true technique: take an issue, in this case homophobia, and view it through a prism of, say, 30 years. What do you get? “Oh,” thinks C.R.A.Z.Y.’s audience, “weren’t people ignorant?” When? Today at lunch? Right, you mean way back then. Before we all came to understand each other and live in peace, tolerance, and domestic tranquility.
It’s a standard ruse, one based on sociological cowardice.
Tackle a controversy, yes, but place it somewhere safely in history where it
can be viewed as if through glass. It’s an approach we’ve seen in dozens of
movies over the last dozen years or so, ones as disparate as the recent Disney
product The Greatest Game Ever Played—in which cruel class distinctions
are treated as some extinct monster, rather than the ethos by which certain
governments operate—and Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven (2002), which, for
all its greatness, behaves (yes, OK, ironically) as if racism was something
we’d cured, like polio, sometime in the 50s. Ang Lee’s
Not to give Mel Gibson any more credit that he’s not earned
already, but what he did in The Passion of the Christ (2004) was take a
crucifixion out of a muddled, romanticized, gauzy past and put it in your face
as if it were an underdone, badly abused pork chop. What movies like
C.R.A.Z.Y. director Jean-Marc Vallée (who said before a screening at the recent Vancouver International Film Festival that his little film had enjoyed a $600,000 music budget) approaches gayness as if with tongs: nothing sloppy, nothing graphic—nothing, in other words, to put off an audience that might not quite be ready for the messy realities of what is, for the movie’s featured family, a distinctly alternative lifestyle. For Zach (Marc-André Grondin), the fourth of five sons born to the charming, aging, homophobic hipster Gervais (played wonderfully by Michel Côté), bias isn’t some artifact of an ancient civilization, but an ongoing crisis. In one of Vallée’s cuter moments, Zach actually hides in the closet, observing the seemingly hourly heterosexual conquests of his rebellious older brother Ray (Pierre-Luc Brillant). When Zach comes out—literally, not figuratively—he gets a punch in the face. But his sexual emergence is so late in coming, his character so conflicted rather than decidedly queer, that the filmmaker ends up making a big fat sitcom out of a serious social crisis.
Lest we get distracted by all the low-rent domestic comedy, classic rock, and contrived anguish, C.R.A.Z.Y. has some good performances, notably by Côté, even if his character’s homophobia doesn’t quite reconcile with the out-there characteristics that make him so charming, and ultimately so awful. The straight Gervais has some curious fetishes: a penchant for Patsy Cline, for his cool black Cutlass, and for singing along, quite unabashedly, with Charles Aznavour records at the climax of family functions. He is not a Homer Simpson-esque dope; he follows fashion, however badly (Côté’s haircuts are hilarious). He obviously knows what’s going on in the world outside Québec. He is the kind of man who might expect—as Irish mothers once did, vis-à-vis the priesthood— to offer up one son to homosexuality. God knows, with five sons, the odds are that he’d have no choice. But he never understands Zach, and he never really tries.
Just as Côté dominates the cast, his character’s bias dominates the movie’s ethos and, like so much else, this feels forced (as does much else in a movie so dominated by a soundtrack featuring, among others, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, and the Rolling Stones). But let’s face it: does anyone in this movie seem to be related to anyone else? The brothers—the title of the film is an acronym of their names (Christian, Raymond, Antoine, Zachary, and Yvan)—aren’t just a diverse group, with each Central Casting slot occupied (jock, brain, drug addict, homo, acerbic fat loser). They’re from different planets. They don’t look alike. They don’t share any similarities. And although their variety might be a statement about Zach’s right to be who he is (no one else is bothered about who he is), people in families do, in fact, sound alike, walk alike and share an exposure to the same ideas which manifest themselves somehow, if not necessarily in enthusiastic agreement.
But if you’re looking for cinéma vérité, or even plausible
fiction filmmaking, you’re not going to be cuckoo for C.R.A.Z.Y. Does it
work on any level? Sure, but likely not for people who really care about the
issues raised, because the issues raised are used as devices. Why does it take
Zach most of the movie to even accept that he’s gay? Because then he can have a
heterosexual relationship for most of the movie with the rather
less-than-perceptive redhead who loves him. (Honey, anyone that much
into
Apparently this story has been lying around for awhile, as in the mid 90’s Dennis Hopper was initially signed on to direct the film with Woody Harrelson as Ron Woodroof, but the money never came together. While uncredited, which is a bit unfathomable, the origin of the movie comes from a lengthy newspaper story called Buying Time written by Bill Minutaglio from the Dallas Life Magazine, published August 9, 1992, which can be read in its entirety on Robert Wilonsky’s Pop Culture Blog, For Matthew McConaughey, next up is true-life tale of 'The Dallas .... The timing of the article was significant as Woodroof died just a few days after the article appeared in print. Writers Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack are credited with writing the story, but they are actually adapting someone else’s story who should be compensated for their work. Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey), described by Minutaglio as a man “who cursed like four sailors,” is an enigmatic figure, as he’s your typical redneck Texas homophobe who hated “faggots” throughout his lifetime, as he was likely killed by a bisexual partner having sex with his girlfriend, as both were diagnosed as HIV+ in 1985 at a time when the expression hadn’t even been invented yet, as everyone was still labeled under the single AIDS category, as contracting the disease at that time meant sure death, as there were no medications offered. Woodroof was a licensed electrical contractor and part-time rodeo rider known for his fearless nature while living a hard life of boozing, smoking, sniffing cocaine, and womanizing. The film leaves out a girlfriend, where she’s replaced by any number of attractive women for hire, where using condoms was exclusively something for kids. When Woodroof ends up in the hospital for a work-related injury, his white blood cells are nearly non-existent, where doctors can’t even scientifically offer an explanation for why he’s still alive, informing him that he has 30 days remaining to live. Angry and in denial about being told he has a “faggot’s” disease, he’s even more disappointed to discover there’s no treatment.
Showing amazing foresight and resiliency, he spends his time
in Dallas libraries researching all the known information about the disease,
discovering there is a government trial program administering AZT, which is the
only known drug to have any effect, though there are significant side
effects. Also, this was still in the
clinical trial stage, which takes months and years before results can be
tabulated. When you’ve been diagnosed as
terminally ill, somehow the side effects aren’t your real worry, as it’s more
about what’s killing you. Losing 40
pounds for the role, McConaughey is an emaciated skeleton of a man whose life
is slipping away from him. Unable to
legally buy AZT, he’s able to obtain some on the black market, as he has ready
cash, but this pipeline closes when they lock it up in the hospitals. He is, however, given a doctor’s name in
While the film does show the Texas aversion to homosexuality, where discrimination is the rule, not the exception, Woodroof is initially skeptical to even be seen in the company of gays, but eventually he makes it into gay bars, where nearly all his customers hang out. He and Rayon are a love/hate relationship in progress, continually getting on each other’s nerves, but they make a ton of dough while offering people the only known product that inhibits the progress of the HIV virus, so there are literally lines out their door for help. While the film takes a shot at how the pharmaceutical business pays the FDA for what they want marketed and distributed, where AZT became the most expensive drug available, even with horrific side effects, the movie muddles any real developing connection in this area, as eventually it was determined the initial doses of AZT used were too high and the lowered doses used today have been much more successful. In the early days of AIDS research, little was actually known, and what was known wasn’t released to the public fast enough. Woodroof represents an anti-government strain at the time, especially since President Reagan and his Republican conservatives, largely supported by rabidly anti-gay religious fundamentalists, didn’t believe in government help, where by 1984 there were 2000 deaths and more than 4000 reported cases of AIDS in America, yet he remained indifferent to a national health crisis, only addressing the issue in 1987 near the end of his second term, forming a year-long commission to study the devastating effects of the disease, when by that time nearly 21,000 were dead and 36,000 Americans were diagnosed with AIDS. The politics of the era are completely left out of the film, as are the medical statistics, where HIV currently infects 34 million people worldwide per year, where 10% of them are children.
The use of Jennifer Garner is little more than a generic Hollywood treatment that demands a leading lady, and while she is terrific as a sympathetic hospital doctor who grows suspicious of the deadly effects of AZT, she also develops friendly relations with Woodroof, becoming a kind of romantic interest, especially since her normal looking physique stands out among streams of skeletal AIDS patients. While the film can get ghoulish, with ghostly looking, overly emaciated clientele that resemble concentration camp survivors, the film interestingly adds the mysterious music of T-Rex, “Main Man” T. Rex - Main Man - YouTube (4:21) and “Life Is Strange” Marc Bolan and T. Rex - Life is Strange - YouTube (2:10), also an interesting joke where Rayon plasters their office with photos of lead singer Marc Bolan on the wall that Woodroof amusingly mistakes for Boy George. After making the trip to Mexico some 300 times over the course of his lifetime, the life-saving network of smuggling underground experimental AIDS medications eventually comes to an end when the FDA tightens their restrictions, preventing medicines from other nations from entering the country, forcing AIDS patients to enter a bureaucratic maze of governmental dead ends and disillusionments. The film is shot by cinematographer Yves Bélanger, who filmed Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyways (2012), yet here his use of handheld cameras expresses the restless anxiety of the characters who are racing to find a way to combat this disease, having literally no time to waste. Despite the film’s best efforts, it doesn’t capture the nation’s dreaded fear of the disease, where no one was prepared for this, when at the time people were even afraid to touch AIDS patients, much less hug them. It was an era when hospital workers were instructed to wipe down seats with Clorox where AIDS patients sat, where there was so much homophobia and racism surrounding the disease, creating terrible times, when no one would talk openly about the disease, including the government. The film eulogizes Woodroof as an AIDS activist who’s something of a saint, while also portraying him as an utterly contemptible human being and a lifelong bigot, yet his predicament raises the question of when is breaking the law actually for the public good, as his underground pressure did shed needed light onto the government’s inactions, as they’d been dragging their feet for nearly five years, eventually forcing them to act more responsibly (which the film never shows) by providing needed medications to all American HIV patients, which by now effectively suppresses the spread of the virus.
With all of the medical breakthroughs made in the past few
decades, HIV is no longer the death sentence it once was. Today, most take for
granted just how devastating an HIV diagnosis could be, and the corresponding
societal ostracization. The '80s weren't that long ago, but the differences in
how HIV patients were treated then versus now are worlds apart.
In Dallas Buyers Club, the year is 1985 and AIDS is still largely known
as "the gay disease." Texan Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey), a
cocky, hustling, homophobic ladies man that enjoys fornicating with the local
skanks — the film opens with a scene of him and two women in a rodeo bullpen —
suddenly finds himself in uncharted waters when he's diagnosed with HIV. Told
he only has 30 days to live, he not only has to deal with the medical blow he's
dealt, but must also face (often violently) his former buddies and co-workers,
who assume Ron was gay all along.
Initially in a state of denial, Ron quickly accepts his condition and seeks
help from the sympathetic Dr. Eve Saks (Jennifer Garner), taking control of his
fate in an attempt to save and prolong his life. AZT (the only drug at the time
that showed some success in combating the virus) was in clinical trials, but
Ron finds ways to get his hands on it. Quickly discovering the drug has
numerous negative side-effects, he heads to
When the
Initially seen as an outsider within the local gay community, Ron enlists the
assistance of transsexual AIDS patient Rayon (Jared Leto), connecting him to
the scene and establishing a level of trust. The Club quickly gains momentum,
establishing Ron as an unlikely champion of not just the gay community but for
the rights of patients seeking treatment.
Playing out as a dramatic retelling of the true story of Ron Woodroof, with the
usual
With McConaughey and Leto both losing obscene amounts of weight for their
respective roles, the inclination normally might be to scoff and label it
gimmicky. However, in the case of Dallas Buyers Club, their
transformations only serve to add to the authenticity of the story. Their
performances are without a doubt Oscar-worthy and utterly captivating. That
their unlikely business relationship leads to such personal introspection — on
both sides — makes this one of the most unusual and emotionally compelling duos
seen on screen.
Dallas Buyers Club is much more than just the usual epiphanies and life
lessons found in similar films. It succeeds through the smallest moments of its
story — those that not only acknowledge Ron Woodroof's memory, but pay homage
to an entire assemblage of human suffering, communities and well-being.
Who is it that we have to thank for Matthew McConaughey’s career resurgence? His agent? His mom? His smoking partner Woody Harrelson? His own fevered mind? Whomever or whatever it might be, they deserve a raise, a plaque, a medal, or at least a shout out during the Oscars when McConaughey’s picking up a statue at long last. We have to know that’s coming. Look at the man’s resume over the past three years: his stellar supporting turns in Magic Mike, The Paperboy, and Bernie, and his starring performances in Killer Joe and Mud. An amazing hitting streak, and maybe enough to finally wash away the bad taste of all those romantic comedies he’s stumbled through.
Add to this peerless run, his latest effort is a starring with a capital “S”
role in Dallas Buyers Club. In this film, McConaughey plays Ron
Woodruff, a good ol’ boy hustler whose careless ways with women, drink, and
drugs comes back to haunt him when he is diagnosed with HIV and told he has, at
best, 30 days to live. Rather than swallow this humbly, Woodruff fights back,
at first scoring some AZT (in clinical trials at the time) and then departing
for
As with most of McConaughey’s performances, how he centers himself within this role is through his physicality. That meant dropping 30 pounds and looking downright skeletal. As Woodruff, he moves with a bit of a swagger that slowly gets chipped away as the story moves forward. With that core in place, McConaughey brings the rest of his performing gifts to bear, being at times charming (particularly with actress Jennifer Garner who plays a local doctor that supports Woodruff’s effort), gruff, angry, and desperate. McConaughey beautifully underplays it all, making his character’s journey even more special to witness.
And his performance is especially, shockingly great when the rest of the film is taken into account. Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallee does his level best with this rough sketch outline of real events, but too often relies on moments stretched to the breaking point for maximum heart string yanking effect. This could have been especially bad in the case of Rayon’s dramatic arc. But again, the acting saves the day: Leto has never been better in any role as he is here. Every time you think he’s going to devolve into camp, he reins it in enthrallingly. Even in the big scene, when Rayon sucks up her pride and slips her frail body into a suit to seek help from her estranged father, Leto threads the emotional needle so carefully. He’s a true match for McConaughey’s brash and bold work.
On top of a compelling character study, Dallas Buyers Club also provides a subtly scathing indictment of the FDA’s foot-dragging during the first years of the AIDS crisis. Sure, the big bad fed who comes a-knockin’ on the club’s hotel room/office is played up for villainous effect, but there are enough underlying issues dredged up about the dangers of early AZT trials and how hospitals and clinics were laid under the thumb of the pharmaceutical industry that this would make for a fantastic double feature with How To Survive A Plague.
You’ve seen “Dallas Buyers Club” before. Regardless of how good its performances are (quite good), apart from how worthy its story is of being told (very worthy), it’s the classic David vs. Goliath underdog narrative repurposed as a socially conscious drama – one that’s just crying out for Oscar attention. It’s a weightier version of “Erin Brockovich,” but without the kind of bold artistic choices that the heaviness of the story suggests. That said, it’s rather good for what it is – a straightforward but well-acted documentation of one man’s fight against the FDA on behalf of AIDS patients everywhere, himself included.
Much has been made of Matthew McConaughey’s massive weight loss for his role here. In the late 90s and early 00s, stars like Tom Hanks and Christian Bale began turning cinematic weight loss into a selling point, a gimmick, and as a result, it doesn’t surprise us like it once did. Thusly, the weight loss of McConaughey and his co-star, Jared Leto, seems tired despite being inherent to the story.
Inspired by true events, the film is set in 1986. McConaughey plays Ron Woodroof, a hard-living rodeo rider – and a virulent racist and homophobe. When Ron is diagnosed with HIV and given 30 days to live, he immediately goes into denial. He refuses to believe that he could have a disease associated with gay men, a fear only stoked by his friends’ homophobic taunts. Soon, he begrudgingly accents his nasty drug and alcohol regimen with AZT – the only FDA-approved drug for AIDS patients.
As his health spirals out of control, Ron’s stubbornness takes
over – seemingly the first time it’s ever done him any good. He scours the
black market for alternative medicine and finds luck in
It’s Leto that really spreads his wings here. In his first role since 2009 – he left acting to focus on his band, 30 Seconds To Mars – he puts a frail, human face on the AIDS crisis, doing more than McConaughey with less screen time. Rayon isn’t nearly as charismatic as Ron, but the performance is more genuine and more surprising. Unfortunately, the screenplay betrays some of Leto’s work by sidestepping some of the horror that is AIDS – most of the character’s physical anguish presumably occurs offscreen.
Jennifer Garner supports as a doctor who serves as a conduit between Woodroof and the FDA, while the rest of the cast reliably fills out a variety of functional but genuine supporting characters. Director Jean-Marc Vallee does well in shuttling back and forth between people and places, often overlapping audio in an attempt to give the film an appropriately austere, indie vibe. But a handful of creative visual and audio cues don’t assuage the feeling that “Dallas Buyers Club” is content to play things safe.
The screenplay – by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack – is disappointingly one-dimensional, their words doing little more than setting the stage for McConaughey and Leto. Aside from these two characters, the script is a dearth of energy, moving sluggishly from point A to point B. Without its two stars realizing their characters so well, the film would be instantly forgotten by critics and audiences alike. And much of that blame would sit rightfully at the feet of its screenwriters.
But even though the narrative lacks propulsion – and it’s overlong, to boot – “Dallas Buyers Club” is a welcome acting showcase for two likable leads, both of whom are writing unlikely comeback stories of their own. These aren’t the best performances of the year, but they’re certainly worthy of recognition – as are the real people they’re portraying. And in that light, the film is a resounding success. Audiences that don’t fall victim to hype will find plenty to enjoy here.
For
Matthew McConaughey, next up is true-life tale of 'The Dallas ... Robert Wilonsky from the Pop Culture Blog,
The Dallas Cowboy Behind The Real 'Buyers Club' : NPR Elizabeth Blair
The true story behind dallas buyers club: meet the real ron woodruff Andrew Romano from The Daily Beast
David Edelstein on 'Dallas Buyers Club' - New York Magazine
Pick of the week: A Texas cowboy faces AIDS - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir from Salon
Ferdy on Films [Roderick Heath]
Dallas Buyers Club / The Dissolve Tasha Robinson
Dallas Buyers Club and the history of AIDS on film / The Dissolve Noel Murray and Scott Tobias conversation from The Dissolve
Review: Smart & Entertaining 'Dallas Buyers Club' Starring Matthew ... Kevin Jagernauth from The Playlist
The Steve Pulaski Message Board [Steve Pulaski]
The House Next Door [Nick McCarthy]
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Dallas Buyers Club (2013) Movie Review from Eye for Film Jennie Kermode
The Simple Grace of 'Dallas Buyers Club' - The Wire Richard Lawson
Paste Magazine Tim Grierson
Slant Magazine [Jesse Cataldo]
The Film Stage [Jared Mobarak]
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
Movie Mezzanine [Anna Tatarska]
'Dallas Buyers Club' Review: Pulling Punches - Pajiba Daniel Carlson
Dallas Buyers Club - HitFix Drew McWeeny
DVDTalk.com - theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
MonstersandCritics [Anne Brodie]
Dallas Buyers Club (2013) - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
Movie Review - 'Dallas Buyers Club' - : NPR Bob Mondello
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Film-Forward.com [Jack Gattanella]
FilmFracture [James Jay Edwards]
The Reel Critic.com [Lisa Minzey]
Dallas Buyers Club : The New Yorker David Denby (capsule review)
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
'Dallas Buyers Club' movie review: Matthew ... - Washington Post Ann Hornaday
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Pamela Zoslov]
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Reagan's AIDS Legacy / Silence equals death - SFGate Allen White from The San Francisco Chronicle, June 8, 2004
Dallas Buyer's Club Review: Matthew McConaughey Shines as an ... Stephanie Zacharek from The LA Times
Dallas Buyers Club Movie Review (2013) | Roger Ebert Glenn Kenny
Matthew McConaughey Stars in 'Dallas Buyers Club' - NYTimes.com A.O. Scott
Ron Woodroof Biography - Facts, Birthday, Life Story - Biography.com
WILD B- 80
I
chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told.
—Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, 2012
Adapted from the 2012 memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
by Cheryl Strayed, this is a case where literature is the better format than
film, as most of the story is told through seemingly disconnected,
stream-of-conscious thoughts that continually feel fragmented in the film,
randomly pulled together through music and flashback sequences, but it all
feels so cliché’d, especially the choices of music, which are mere snippets,
where the audience never gets a feel for how or why this journey is so
essential, other than on a superficial level.
It’s not unusual for people’s lives to fall apart from time to time, but
this is certainly an unusual method to put the missing pieces back together
again. By the end, despite the grand
poetic gesture, supposedly finding transcendence in the final moment, there’s
little reason to believe this character is really any different, as she’s
always been the sum of her parts. The
film pales in comparison to the male counterpart, Sean Penn’s Into the
Wild (2007), where the characters throughout are more deeply fleshed out
and complex, offering more memorable performances, where here it feels more
like a mother and daughter film, where neither one is fully revealed, but
remain abstract configurations. Reese
Witherspoon purchased the rights to the book, while Oprah listed it on her Oprah's Book Club 2.0 in June, 2012, becoming
a #1 best seller for seven weeks, where Witherspoon plays the lead character
(author Cheryl Strayed) and is also a producer on the film. While the backstory is only revealed in
flashback, the film counts off the days in 1995 as 26-year old Cheryl begins
her journey alone in the
While Cheryl Strayed is a novelist and essayist, someone extremely familiar with words and language, this adaptation by Nick Hornby is a poor substitute, as the various sequences never feel connected, but remain isolated moments, as people Cheryl meets along the road simply vanish from view without a word, where they, along with her memories, are like ghosts following her along the trail, where they never materialize into living, breathing human beings that matter to the audience. Instead, the camera focuses entirely on Cheryl 100% of the time, where everything else is incidental, even the vastness of the wilderness, beautifully photographed by Yves Bélanger, where despite the continuing timeline, there is no real comprehension of time and distance, as the film really takes place inside her head. While the experience is a document of mood swings, resembling Danny Boyle’s 127 HOURS (2010), it lacks that film’s intensity and sense of desperation as well as the degree of difficulty encountered, though both rely upon the interior world of flashbacks. In the end it becomes a road movie, where Cheryl’s initial encounters with her own naiveté reflect just how angry and unprepared she is to make such an extreme journey, where the F-word is littered throughout, but she receives needed help and excellent advice along the way. One of the more unusual scenes is seeing Cheryl and Paul (Thomas Sadoski), her husband of seven years, getting matching tattoos, something they can share forever even as it comes on the day they are getting divorced. Their familiarity with each other is touching, especially when Cheryl acknowledges she cheated on him, obviously recognizing the cost at that moment, adding that she actually cheated on him a lot. This may be their closest moment together throughout the film, though it only hints at her own personal descent into reckless drug abuse and a rampant proclivity for sleeping around with any man that so much as looks at her. Much of these self-destructive experiences are narrated as she hikes along the trail, becoming a parallel world of soul searching through her past that she carries with her throughout her long and arduous ordeal.
Perhaps the heart of the film is her close relationship with
her mother Bobbi, Laura Dern, who rescued her and her little brother from an
abusive and alcoholic father, yet maintained her dignity and self-esteem
throughout the ensuing years of struggle, sacrificing all to make sure her
children had a brighter future than her own, suggesting she would never change
a thing if it produced something as beautiful as her two children, but she dies
quickly at the age of 45 after being diagnosed with lung cancer, fueling a
period of rage and self-destruction. Her
own history of sexual violation leaves her even more exposed as a lone traveler
through such remote territory, where she has to instantly assess her encounters
with various men, where the possibility of sexual violence is always on the
back of her mind, yet it’s the terrain she’s chosen to navigate on her own
terms. What’s perhaps most surprising is
how few negative encounters she has, where most everyone she meets is helpful
and overly friendly, except for a couple of leering, beer guzzling DELIVERANCE
(1972) guys carrying bows and arrows, who find it most peculiar to run into a
woman alone in the woods, though we
Georgia Straight [Craig Takeuchi]
In the wake of the acclaimed Dallas Buyers Club, Québécois
director Jean-Marc Vallée takes a misstep with screenwriter Nick Hornby's
adaptation of Cheryl Strayed's memoir. While the film recounts Strayed's solo
trek along the Pacific Crest Trail, from the
If therapy comes in many different forms, Jean-Marc Vallée's Wild demonstrates that some of those are
fairly unorthodox. Does one really need to hike over a thousand miles to find
oneself? The aptly named Cheryl Strayed did, as she detailed in her memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific
Crest Trail. Excising the subtitle, Vallée's film follows Strayed (Reese
Witherspoon), a recovering heroin addict, on her hike through
“It must be hard for you to see that I’m so much more intellectual than you were at your age,” a college-age Strayed says to her mother Bobbi (excellently played by Laura Dern). It’s an awfully condescending and immature comment to make, but one that characterizes Strayed’s constant evaluation of herself. Wild is not about the why, but rather the how, since Strayed won’t even pretend that she’s halfway prepared for the trek. Cheryl’s honesty throughout is disarming: She refuses to blame anyone but herself, willingly accepting that she was out of control and aware of the pain she was causing, but selfishly unable to drag herself up from drug-induced indignity.
Wild is greatly enhanced by Vallée's unfussy direction and shrewd editing, breezing between time periods of Strayed as a girl, in college, in mid-marriage crisis, and in post-addiction solitude with a wondrous ease. As Strayed, Witherspoon damps down her usual peppy charm, exercising humility and naturalism, a feat that has roundly and rightly been declared her best dramatic work to date. Though the film occasionally veers into preachy territory, for the most part Wild successfully avoids the sort of shallow self-help homilies that plagued Julia Roberts' similarly themed pilgrimage in Eat Pray Love (2010).
Wild / The Dissolve Scott Tobias
“I’d rather be a hammer than a nail,” croons Paul Simon in the Simon & Garfunkel song “El Condor Pasa (If I Could).” “Yes I would, if I only could, I surely would.” The track pops up more than once in Wild, an adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 memoir, and it becomes a kind of mantra for a young woman who presses through hardships and bad choices, angling for a firmer grip on the handle. As played by Reese Witherspoon, whose excellence is by now a given, Cheryl is a bundle of contradictions—hapless and determined, directionless and down-to-earth, a hot mess on the road to getting her head straight. She’s such a full-bodied, multi-faceted character, in fact, that it’s a shame there has to be an accounting of each aspect of her personality. But this being an adaptation of a memoir—and what’s more, an externalization of a struggle that half resides in the author’s head—those psychological elements are spilled onto the table like the contents of Ally Sheedy’s purse in The Breakfast Club. We see it all.
Scripted by High Fidelity author
Nick Hornby and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, who also mildly arted-up last
year’s Dallas
Buyers Club, Wild is an episodic adventure of self-discovery in
the vein of Into The Wild or Tracks, an
Outback journey that was released earlier this year. In a sense, it’s like the
inverse of the latter: Tracks follows a lonely 1,700-mile trek to the
Indian Ocean; Wild follows a lonely 1,100-mile trek along the Pacific
Crest trail between Mexico and Canada. Both interrupt the walk frequently by
doling out flashbacks to explain why their intrepid journeywomen have embarked
on such a dangerous voyage. The main difference is that unlike Mia Wasikowska
in Tracks, Witherspoon’s Cheryl is woefully underprepared for the
undertaking. There’s a recklessness to her endeavor that goes beyond a lust for
life, an almost deliberate naiveté that spins off into spontaneous moments of
danger and comedy.
Less spontaneous is the backstory,
which Hornby’s script sketches in via flashbacks, voiceover, and echoes from
past to present. Looming largest in Cheryl’s mind is her mother Bobbi (Laura
Dern), who raised her and her little brother after fleeing their abusive
father, and who died quickly after being diagnosed with lung cancer at age 45.
Bobbi’s death fuels a period of self-destruction for Cheryl, wherein she abuses
the shameful pleasures of heroin and rough trade, and sabotages her
relationship with her decent, caring husband Paul (Thomas Sadoski) in the
process. Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail is both a means of escape and
rejuvenation for Cheryl, who’s totally lost her bearings. When a freelance
journalist for Hobo Times requests an interview, she objects to being
dubbed a “lady hobo,” but has no good counterargument.
Cheryl’s lack of preparation is a
tragicomic well from which Wild repeatedly draws, from an overstuffed backpack
dubbed “the monster” to the wrong cooking equipment to a pair of too-tight
hiking boots that ravage her feet. But for as much trouble as the film has
gracefully conveying her past and her interior life on screen, her encounters
on the trail double as a bracing allegory for how single women must navigate a
world that’s alight with hostility and threats. Her vulnerability as a lone
traveler in extreme isolation at first feels like dramatic manipulation, a way
of goosing up an innocuous encounter with a liquor-swilling (and
licorice-eating) workman. But time and again, she has to assess the possibility
of sexual aggression and violence in order to make her way safely down the
path. Sometimes guile is her saving grace; sometimes, it’s just plain luck.
Hornby and Vallée never quite solve the
daunting problem of fully explicating Cheryl’s troubles and motives without
stalling the film’s momentum or making it seem like she’s daydreaming at
dramatically convenient times. No doubt she’s haunted by the things that have
happened to her, but Wild has her gazing at thought bubbles, which
siphons some of the urgency and ardor from the journey itself. The trade-off is
ultimately worth it: Cheryl is a thoroughly realized, warts-and-all character,
and the flashbacks contribute to that. But like their heroine, the filmmakers
do some fumbling to get to their destination.
The New Yorker [Richard Brody]
National Review [Armond White]
Reese Witherspoon Hoboes Through the Winning Wild ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice
Review: Reese Witherspoon is the one being tamed ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny
Wild, reviewed: Reese Witherspoon takes an epic ... - Slate Dana Stevens
Review: Reese Witherspoon goes for it all in Wild - HitFix Gregory Ellwood
The House Next Door [Michael Nordine]
The Steve Pulaski Message Board [Steve Pulaski]
World Socialist Web Site [Joanne Laurier]
Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
ErikLundegaard.com [Erik Lundegaard]
Wild | Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
Blu-ray.com [Jeffrey Kauffman]
Reel Insights [Hannah McHaffie] also seen here: Hannah McHaffie [Hannah McHaffie] and here: Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Hannah McHaffie]
Digital Spy [Stella Papamichael]
Cinema365 [Carlos deVillalvilla]
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
Wild Review Toronto Film Festival | Vanity Fair Richard Lawson
[TIFF Review] Wild - The Film Stage Sky Hirschkron
Wild Jennie Kermode from Eye on Film
Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]
Wild
puts Reese Witherspoon on an epic walk, and the audience in her shoes Mike
D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
"Wild's" Cheryl Strayed Becomes One With Reese ... Maddie Oatman interview with Reese Witherspoon from Mother Jones, November/December 2014
Talking
With the Authors of 'Gone Girl' and 'Wild' - NYTimes ... Interview from The New York Times,
Reese
Witherspoon, from rom-com queen to 'Wild' woman Betsy Sharkey interview from The LA Times,
'Wild': Telluride Review - The Hollywood Reporter Stephen Farber
Film Review: 'Wild' - Variety Justin Chang
South China Morning Post [Yvonne Teh]
Westender Vancouver [Curtis Woloschuk]
Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]
‘Wild’ movie review: Reese Witherspoon struggles to bring an emotionally distant character to life Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Pamela Zoslov]
Austin Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]
'Wild' takes Reese Witherspoon into raw, bracing new territory Betsy Sharkey from The LA Times
Wild Movie Review & Film Summary (2014) | Roger Ebert Susan Wloszczyna
New York Times [A. O. Scott] als seen here: 'Wild' Stars Reese Witherspoon - NYTimes.com
Blu-ray.com [Jeffrey Kauffman]
'Wild,'
a Hiking Memoir by Cheryl Strayed - NYTimes.com Dani Shapiro book review,
Cheryl Strayed - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
'Trail angels' help keep Pacific Crest hikers on path Chris Erskine from The LA Times,
The Silent Army Lee Marshall at Cannes from Screendaily
It’s an ethical stretch to make a campaigning film about the plight of African child soldiers that is also in some ways an action movie – especially with a Dutch pop singer in the lead role. But The Silent Army mostly rises to the challenge, thanks to a strong script, some gritty performances and a welcome avoidance of sentimentality.
Some difficult-to-watch sequences which chart the brutalisation of child soldiers as they are turned from kids into killing machines raise the age-old question of whether showing such horrors on the screen can educate without being exploitative. But Van De Velde’s film is clearly well-researched, and has a sensitive, at times even ironic approach to the white man’s burden of guilt about suffering Africans – and most audiences will give it the benefit of the doubt.
In fact The Silent Army is a fast-paced film
with commercial appeal – far more so than another recent African child
soldier drama, Heart of Fire. In the
A snappily edited prologue establishes the set up:
Eduard (Borsato) owns a restaurant somewhere in an eastern African city
(the film was shot in
Abu is abducted during an attack by rebel soldiers, leaving Thomas distraught. Eventually Eduard is spurred into shutting down his business and searching for Abu – his trump card being the fact that he knows rebel leader General Obeke (Abby Mukiibi Nkaaga), who was a regular client of Eduard’s restaurant back in the days when he was Minister of Defence.
A big singing star in the
Matt Bochenski White Little Lies
The
Silent Army David Hudson at
Kirk Honeycutt at
Telling Stories
From Africa Joan Dupont at
Gust Van den Berghe’s beautifully shot black-and-white re-imaging of the story of the baby Jesus and the three wise men - itself based on Felix Timmerman’s work - is an engaging oddity, though one bound for a future on the festival circuit rather than at a cinema near you.
The story’s theatrical origins are clear to see in this modest-length tale, and while the underlying story is undoubtedly well known, the film is given a certain intriguing poignancy by the casting consisting mainly of mentally handicapped performers.
The Flemish backdrop balances modern-day bars, plumbing and music with a feel of a medieval rustic past in terms of the rural buildings and landscape. The film showed in Directors’ Fortnight.
The three wise men of this version - played enthusiastically by screen newcomers Paul Mertens, Jelle Palmaerts and Peter Janssens - meet in a bar for a little good-natured drinking before heading off into the snowy woods.
They eventually come across a mother and her baby, and dubbing themselves the Three Wise Men, decide to make offerings of crumpled cigarettes and opt to give away their modest gains in tribute to the arrival of the miraculous child.
The film is developed from debut writer-director Gust Van den Berge’s graduation film, and while elegantly staged and full of striking black-and-white compositions, it does have that underlying sense of an ambitious student project. Certainly there is a good deal of skill and ambition on show, but its target is certainly not a general filmgoing audience.
Midway through the threesome find themselves in a bar where we are treated to a striking - and brief - scene of a musical performance from a transvestite singer shot in lustrous colour, but before you know it the wise men are back in black-and-white, It is a striking and memorable moment, but one which again feels contrived and affected rather then integral to the modest storyline.
The performances by the Down’s syndrome cast are all sound and appropriate to the story, though even at a mere 74 minutes this slight and self-consciously arty affair stretches the attention.
Van den Berge has claimed he intends to feature the film as part of a triptych that are united in an umbrella theme of ‘humanity’, but look out for them at an art space rather than a cinema.
A bizarre, morbid film that features brief moments of nihilistic heavy metal music that sounds so wretched it’s as if it’s supposed to make you want to vomit, and those are the film’s best scenes. Follow that train of thought and you’re right on track with this raunchy teen flick, the kind of film that plays on late, late, late night TV while you’re smoking pot, and it comes to life because, in an otherwise “B” movie, or even “C” movie production, the darkened photography, like something out of TALES OF THE CRYPT, is oddly compelling, and the mix of sound, image, and general creepiness all come together in a weird sort of sense where absolutely nothing needs to make sense. In an EU co-production in English where the leads don’t even speak the same language, this is another one of those Hansel and Gretel variations with improbable happenings in the woods that looks like no one was paid anything on this production except the photographer, who was paid the entire budget.
Van Eecke, Pieter
SAMUEL IN THE CLOUDS B- 81
Belgium
Netherlands Bolivia (70 mi)
2016 Official
site
A North American premiere, an especially
spare and meditative film that finds fascination with a particular mountain,
the Chacaltaya
(bridge of ice, or cold gate in the Aymara Indian
language) that measures at 17,785 feet in Bolivia (higher than the Mt. Everest
base camp), just 20 miles from La Paz, a city with a metropolitan population
(including neighboring towns El Alto and Viacha) of over two million people. What’s particularly unique is that there is a
road where cars can drive to 17,115 feet, a practice of many mountaineers,
where they simply have to climb the last 660 nearly vertical feet to the
summit. It’s also home to what was once
the world’s highest ski resort, as a ski lift was installed in 1939, running
with a car engine, where the ski season was from November to March each
year. We are introduced to Samuel
Mendoza, an Aymara Indian who lives with his family in El Alto, as he is the
only surviving employee of the Club Andino Boliviano, the Bolivian national ski
club that used to organize South American championships to determine the best
skiers from Argentina, Chile, or Colombia on the highest slope in the
world. Since he was a small child,
Samuel only had to look up, as he could see the top of Chacaltaya, the mountain
where his father worked, as did previous generations of his family, where it
was always covered by a crest of white snow.
Samuel and the Aymara believe in ancient mountain spirits, or
Achachillas, wise grandfathers who belong to Mother Earth and protect their
children, so they make offerings to the gods and offer prayers. Nearly every day the 52-year old Samuel walks
the four-hour, nine and a half mile hike to the top of the mountain from his
home, leaving before daybreak, working long hours at the lift, helping tourists
or anyone interested how to ski, then walking home again at night for another
four hours, as he has done for the past 30 years. But something happened in that period of
time, as the snow on the glacier completely disappeared after 2009, leaving
behind only a sandy soil. Without the
snow, the skiers are gone, as only a handful of tourists show up, or a
collective of scientists measuring the air quality.
Despite being the lone witness to the disappearance
of the glaciers, Samuel does not believe in global warming, and prays that the
snow will somehow return to the top of the mountain. Climate experts predict that the
disappearance of the glaciers in the Andes Mountains will lead to severe water
shortages in the region that could affect as many as 80 million people, where
already Bolivia’s second largest lake has dried up and disappeared (Bolivia's
Lake Poopó Disappears : Natural Hazards). Since
2011 the world’s highest scientific air monitoring station was built on
Chacaltaya peak that includes a collection of research groups from France,
Italy, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland, all part of the Global Atmospheric
Watch that measures changes in atmospheric composition, monitoring of gases,
characterization of particle properties, as well as radiation and meteorology,
conditions for which the world has yet to provide any real solutions. Even as several scientists regularly visit
with Samuel, they are only a part of the mountain’s mystery. Other families have been mining the mountain
for minerals such as tin or zinc for decades, where individual families own
certain mines that as the year’s progress dig deeper and deeper into the heart
of the mountain. Interrupting the quiet
calm of the view from the top are intermittent dynamite blasts that can be
heard throughout the film. At the very
top is an old wooden house sitting precariously on edge, with windows looking
outwards in all directions, a place where Samuel can prepare a pot of mate, offering
cups to any guests that arrive, while still housing all the old ski medals and
sports memorabilia. Several of the
recent arrivals are experiencing altitude symptoms, feeling light-headed and
faint, with racing heartbeats, as the body takes some serious adjustments to
sudden changes in altitude, as there is less oxygen in the air. Many Olympic and world class athletes train
in these conditions, hoping to increase their endurance by forcing their bodies
to produce extra red blood cells, which aids in the delivery of oxygen to their
muscles.
It rarely snows at the top of the mountain anymore, yet Samuel recalls
as much as 3-feet of snow would accumulate overnight. The director was fortunate to be filming for
the first snow in eight years, where people had to learn how to get used to it
again. Cars and tour buses had to be
pushed out of snow banks, emptying the passengers, who then had to climb their
way up the mountain. On this occasion, a
bus was delivering a group of musicians, but also another group of performing
dancers, including women in brightly decorated native costumes. After hiking up the mountain in the snow,
they performed outdoors in the snow, as planned, creating a colorful,
celebratory festivity. The mood of the
mountain changes throughout the film, engulfed in a mist of fog or snow,
capturing the sunrises and sunsets from distant horizons, or simply offering an
awe-inspiring view from on high, as the mountain provides a view of the world
one rarely ever sees, becoming a picture of meditative serenity. Samuel sadly points out the spot where his
father fell off the cliff and died, indicating there was no safety netting or
railing in those days, where accidents were more commonplace. He also makes a calling sound for an eagle
that drops out of the sky onto a wooden ledge at the side of the cliff, where a
wild animal becomes a constant companion.
Still, it’s the image of the little rickety house sitting atop the mountain
that holds the most fascination, sitting on a precipice, reminiscent of Chaplin
in THE GOLD RUSH (1925), where he has to run to the other side of the cabin to
keep it from tipping over and tumbling down the mountainside. The mountain seems to defy time, standing
firm for several million years, yet now suddenly at the center of a great
warming trend that could have dramatic effects on the next generation of human
life. Yet, like Samuel, people tend to
not want to believe these things will happen, remaining resigned to the
inevitable course of nature for incidents like storms, famine, or flood, but
this new possibility remains out of sight, something most people prefer not to
think about, perhaps still hoping for the best.
It recalls a meditative line from a Donovan song, “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is,” where something
so obvious gets lost from sight, such as the view of a mountain when you are on
a journey struggling to “climb” the mountain, yet once you reach the top,
everything is clear again.
Film: Samuel in the Clouds
| BRUZZ Niels Ruëll
Metaphors sometimes are up for grabs. The Flemish filmmaker Pieter Van Eecke opens with fanfare members in red-black uniform clambering on the Chacaltaya. This is a mountain in the Andes, a stone's throw from the Bolivian capital La Paz. A bare mountain top to be exact. Only the ski lift and a dilapidated shanty remember that we are in the highest ski resort in the world. The snow also kept skiers away. A thousand times greater catastrophe is that for the first time no longer a glacier thousands of years and no meltwater makes fertile the lowlands. Van Eecke upholds the principle that beautiful cinema documentary should not tell but show. He succeeds lift driver Samuel, who fused like his ancestors with the mountain and help invoking of old mountain spirits. What further monitors scientists from around the world the change in the atmosphere. Knowledge is power, but knowledge is apparently not enough. The band members are from the opening scene and the orchestra kept playing as the Titanic sank.
Samuel In The Clouds
- 2016 - Mooov
Samuel, a 50-year-old Aymara man, everyday steps from El Alto to the former Ski Resort on the top of the Chacaltaya (5400 meters high) and it welcomes international tourists in a ski lodge. From there they have a breathtaking view of La Paz. For thirty years the ski lift attendant Samuel; In recent years the glacier melted completely. The man remains hopeful of new snow in the highest ski slope in the world. A hundred meters below the highest climate laboratory in the world, where scientists study climate change.
This author documentary brings a touching portrait of a mountain, a man, their shared past and the disappearance of their future. SAMUEL IN THE CLOUDS is the director an allegory of how humans deal with climate change. With the story of Samuel flying high above the clouds dreaming of new snow, climate activist and director Pieter Van Eecke draws attention to the environment and contributes creatively to the social debate.
Cinemagazine
[Monica Meijer] (Dutch)
Climate change touches
every earthling, all is still not everyone there consciously. We continue to
take the car to pieces that also by bike or on foot to the mountains of plastic
waste collected fortnightly in many Dutch municipalities for recycling seems
not to diminish - although it can be as easy (!) - There lie kilos of meat on
the barbecue and the energy consumption per household has never been so high.
It remains a far-from-our-bed-show for many. Documentary 'Samuel in the Clouds'
admittedly takes place in a land far-from-our-bed, Bolivia, but shows with a
lot of feeling and compassion how the people there, with far fewer luxury goods
than we their lives in the wealthy West have appointed, already firsthand feel
what the disastrous consequences of climate change.
On what was once the highest ski resort on earth, Chacaltaya, the roots of title character Samuel. Samuel was lift attendant and even more several times a week the four hour trip (and four hours back!) From his modest home in El Alto to the 5,000 meter high mountain in the Andes. Mostly on foot, but if he's lucky, he gets a lift for part of the trip. His father died on the spot ( "That was a difficult year"), and Samuel, type of still waters run deep, holding off the boat when he is told that his vision goes back and he might have to quit his job.
Now that the snow has
melted faster during the last decades, he receives no presidents or Olympic
athletes, but every now and then about a minibus full of tourists (climbers,
hikers). He makes tea for them and makes occasional chat. Since commuting still
takes its toll, he remains ever sleep in the hut built of wood, which seems to
lean precariously over the abyss. Various bowls and buckets have to absorb the
moisture seeping through the roof, and thereby is that there is less oxygen is
in the air. An attempt on his body so, but Samuel does not complain, he simply
adapted himself. He strongly believes in the spirits of nature and the snow so
on his retina. Armed with his skis - a surreal sight - he continues to believe
in the return of the snow.
In sharp contrast, we
are introduced to a group of scientists, which is slightly lower on the
Chacaltaya their research packed with the most advanced measuring equipment.
Scientist Isabel Moreno takes air samples and talk with colleagues around the
world about the seriousness of the situation.
All of this comes to us in the most beautiful views you could ever wish for. Sweeping shots of the literally breathtaking scenery, so beautiful that you almost seem to breathe in the thin air. What 'Samuel in the Clouds' by Belgian filmmaker Pieter van Heecke doing so well is that the public is not printed freezing to face the alarming facts. It's a personal story - even though Samuel remains something of an enigma, which is symbolic of the impermanence of our planet and the consequences of what we are dealt, and still do now. It ensures that you - just to pick out the human story - sees the big picture of climate change. Impressive.
Recensie Samuel in the Clouds -
Review op Filmtotaal.nl Jelle Fastenau
The Chacaltaya, Bolivia. Samuel wistfully looking out from the control of the former ski resort on the highest mountain in the country on the hoist those years ago, dozens of skiers transported daily to the top of the glacier. Today, that image hard to imagine. The previously snow-white, snow-covered mountain has turned into a huge pile of sand.
The ski resort was unique in several respects its kind. Not only is it the only thing you'll find in Bolivia, in addition, it is about five kilometers above the highest near skiing with lift facility in the world. However, the glory of the past is reflected little more. The top is left and creaky wooden houses, which are still full of old medals and memorabilia, eyes dropped. The ski resort being run by the family of the fifties Samuel, who acts as protagonist in the documentary by Belgian director Pieter van Eecke.
Samuel's day starts early with a four-hour hike from his home to the top of the mountain. Although there are no skiers are more to be seen on the mountain, drive there every day several buses with tourists who come to visit the top of the mountain. Other visitors are international scientists who reveal the obvious cause of headaches Samuels: the warming of the globe. A solution to the problem is not there, but Samuel tries to ask the gods produces various rituals of slaughtering animals to complete with brass bands in native costumes, dancing men and women, some as strange as beautiful pictures.
Anyone looking for pretty pictures, this documentary is also at the right place, because of Eeckes film packed with beautiful wide shots is of the mountain landscape. The glacier may no longer be snowy, the peak still offers some breathtaking views fully come into their own on the big screen. Visually, the documentary also perfectly fine, but the great strength, however, lies in his message. Impressively is a major social problem created suddenly palpable, the small, personal scale of one man has suddenly whose entire way of life uncertain.
In that respect it is perhaps unfortunate that the distance between the viewer and the protagonist remains something big. Although here and there still some personal issues will be discussed - the misfortune of his father, Samuel's own deteriorating condition - you would afterwards still more to draw from Samuel. He sees the change with sorrow, but he would not have to create more pressure for its own future and that of his family, is now his livelihood at stake? What goes through the man, and what inspires him to hell again and again those hours long trek to the top of the mountain?
Somewhere it is frustrating that we as viewers have to guess at the answers, but at the same time of Eeckes approach is correct all the more striking. Sometimes it's more powerful for certain things to unspoken and images to do the work. Because really, what better place to be alone with your thoughts than five thousand meters high peak?
De Filmkrant :: Samuel in
the Clouds (Pieter Van Eecke over) Mariska Graveland
Samuel in the Clouds makes impressive show what thick
climate report fails: the impact of climate change on the lives of the
individual, in this case a lift attendant at a ski slope in the Andes. No more
snow falls, so the lift is stationary. Documentary filmmaker Pieter Van Eecke:
"We can understand climate change, but the acceptance is almost
impossible."
Mount Chacaltaya in La Paz was at 5400 meters the highest ski resort in the
world, but snow has been here for years far away. The glacier melting faster
than thought, much to the chagrin of the Bolivian Samuel, who here once
operated the ski lift and the snow disappear. Now he receives tourists walking
in his leaky hut literally on the brink of a precipice. How symbolic you have
it.
The maker of the visually powerful documentary Samuel in the Clouds, the Belgian Pieter Van Eecke, says Skype that he visited the mountain many years ago and stood transfixed. "The hut is already a few decades, and adorned ever on the cover of the Lonely Planet Bolivia - it is indeed a very compelling picture I have lived ten years in Latin America and arrived in 2012 at the top right. An otherworldly place, and suddenly a man came out, Samuel, I exchanged a few words with it. I just knew that there was a ski, and only then I discovered the whole story of the glacier that recently there melted and that there was near a laboratory environment that poorly maintained cabin Samuel has such a strong metaphorical power. The house of the man nearly falls over. "
While the near-based scientists for their climate research mountain air collected in plastic bags, Samuel sees regular mountain spirits. "I gradually discovered the magical world of Samuel Samuel is a man of few words, it was a chore to visualize his magical world of nature has been inhabited for Samuel by ghosts -. Too stones, rivers and trees I show. The two approaches to the world, the magical and the rational, side by side, without choosing. What I gradually have discovered that both Samuel and the scientists actually be amazed by the changes. We would expect the science settled by his rational approach land would have underfoot, but researchers are still more disorientated than Samuel, because they are so imbued with the pace of change. Samuel was left, he can better deal with impermanence.
"Samuel has a different perception of time, knowing looks to
the future, while Samuel the future is something you do not see, therefore,
that lies behind him, what he sees before him is the past, like his deceased father,
but I wanted Samuel to imagine an indigenous man who has a relationship with nature
that we no longer have. The reality in La Paz is the Aymara Indians still
neoliberal recent years and have a desire for wealth. the dividing line that
used to be made between indigenous peoples who are close to nature and the
runaway beaten Western society is currently not so sharply drawn."
symbol Glacier
Van Eecke will save through the perspective of Samuel climate change back to a
human scale, without an alarmist or pedantic tone or to announce the
Apocalypse. References to climate change are subtle. For example, through a
patch of a call on the radio when someone says that he can not comprehend the
scope of climate change, and find it difficult to continue normal daily life
while there is something big going on. Samuel hopes to turn still coming back
the snow. If a problem is too big, we try to deny it or to extend for us.
"We can climate change understand, but the acceptance is almost
impossible. Like the mountain Chacaltaya has disappeared from Kilimanjaro snow.
Actually, all tropical glaciers are melting much faster than previously thought
twenty years ago. Chacaltaya is actually a symbol glacier since he first was
melted by a combination of climate change and pollution. The city's soot ensure
that sunlight is more absorbed by the snow making it melts faster. All the glaciers
in the Andes are melting. The prospects in the short term are dramatic, the
drinking water supply of millions of people come to the altiplano in danger
because the glacier does not fill more Lake Titicaca. As a result, many people
will be dependent on the rains. We do not know how it will develop, probably
there is a lot of rain quickly followed by long dry periods. This will mean the
end of many agricultural areas. The expectation is that will attract more
people to the city, which is even worse when there is less water available. The
government should also take preventive measures to channel mudslides and
washouts counter, but that is not the case. There is no adaptation strategy.
"The difficulty is that if you are not next to a glacier or
on a small island live where sea levels are rising, climate change remains
invisible, even show reports on how fast it all goes. In Bolivia remains for
city dwellers still fairly invisible, but that will not be long. Just tropical
countries will be the first affected by climate change, Europe still has only
to contend with bare slopes that must be pollinated with nepsneeuw."
vote
Van Eecke sees itself as a climate activist, but did not activist documentary.
"In daily life, I am aware of the need to see if the growth that lies at
the basis of our economic system is still tenable. The making of this
documentary made me even more with my nose pressed to the facts, and although
the film is poetic and activist, I hope the documentary can contribute to
awareness among the viewers. I would be delighted if the man can continue to
walk around a few generations on this globe. "
What does Van Eecke think of the small group of activist
shareholders Shell wants to change from within by thinking how the company can
sustain? "We have all the strategies needed, but I do not know whether the
greening of Shell practicable, after all it is a fossil fuel company. If we are
in the year 2100 no more than 2 degrees global average temperature increase
like we should stop using fossil fuels, but of course that is not from one day
to another. I also have a lot of sympathy for activists to halt mining, or for
climate protesters last here in Belgium. I think it all has to happen at the
same time, supported by political figures who have the courage have put climate
change on the agenda. the difficulty is that all politics but is working on a
mandate for four years, so the one who put climate change on the agenda is the
one who risks losing votes."
Super Organism
Van Eecke previously made a documentary about the aftermath of the earthquake
in Haiti, where he lived for four years. "It interests me that human life
is in extreme situations, where certain things more strongly reflected. Samuel
in the Clouds is about climate change, of course, but it's also about
impermanence and the life that is transient. I Samuel and scientists therefore
sometimes small filmed in panoramic shots of the mountain. "
We feel so often king of the world, but there are also people with other views. Geologist Peter Westbroek example, in his inspiring book The Discovery of the Earth calls for more wonder about the earth, which can be viewed as a superorganism where humans have a symbiotic relationship with it. We need not be afraid of the planet Earth, we are part of. "Definitely. The whole way of consumption that has us all wrong and placed outside nature has developed so much in the last century, our contact with them is quite clear. We consider the nature for a long time as something subordinate, to be a mining object in the service of man. That idea has many wortels- capitalism, in certain religious ideas which nature has been explicitly at the service of man, as the woman had to be the man in the service. The alienation that we known in Western society towards our own environment, the air we breathe, the food we eat, which alienation is huge. You simultaneously see that a lot of people's worth going to see in gardening in the city, and beehives on put the roofs, you see these two movements together. "
Why these ideas are actually so slow? If the whole world within a year has fallen to the smartphone, we can not massively embrace sustainable technologies which we all better? "There are a lot of positive initiatives and technologies that fantastic offer alternatives, such as solar energy, only the government grants that are now massively invested in fossil fuels have to go all the way towards sustainable development, which would already be a great step. The alternatives have not been invented to that already exist. It is not too late, we should not do defeatist, we can adapt. "
Klimaatverandering:
'Soms vertelt één documentaire meer dan ... Kathleen Van Brempt
The
World's Highest Elevation Ski Resort = Chacaltaya, Boliva ... Snow Brains
In
Bolivia, World's Highest Ski Resort Melting Away - Planet Ark Helen Popper, March 27, 2006
REVIEW |
cineMÁS 2016 | SPHINX CINEMA | Tumult
interview, April 27, 2016
Bolivian
Ski Resort On Downward Slide Climate ... - Washington Post Helen Popper, April 2, 2006
Bolivia's
Only Ski Resort Is Facing a Snowless Future - The New York ... Simon Romero from The New York Times, February 2, 2007
Van Groeningen, Felix
THE MISFORTUNATES (La
Merditude des Choses)
Boyd van Hoeij at Cannes from Variety,
May 17, 2009
Calling the Strobbe clan a working-class family would imply
that some of its members worked (or had class), but none of the lowlife protags
do in the visually robust and often hilarious Flemish tragicomedy "The
Misfortunates." Based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Dimitri
Verhulst, pic offers young helmer Felix van Groeningen ("Steve +
Sky") a solid base -- and plenty of lowest-common-denominator humor --
from which to spin another ravishing-looking tale of the ordinary lives of extraordinary
Belgians. Flemish and foreign interest should follow a similar trajectory to
those of other recent local successes such as "
Helmer was the perfect choice to adapt Verhulst's bestseller, as both the book and van Groeningen's earlier work successfully combined a high level of artistry -- and, to an extent, artifice -- with an exploration of everyday, almost banal subjects. However, the helmer's previous films had a slight tendency to ramble, which is curbed here by the underlying thematic connective tissue of Verhulst's novel.
Few subjects could be more banal than the small-town Strubbe clan. Mother Strubbe (Gilda De Bal), whose "heart is bigger than her pension," has four good-for-nothing adult sons (Koen De Graeve, Wouter Hendrickx, Johan Heldenbergh, Bert Haelvoet) who have all moved back in with her because of money troubles. They spend the day getting drunk, eating raw sausages and singing vulgar songs.
Looking to grow up amid the fumes, vomit and stench of stale beer is 13-year-old Gunther (Kenneth Vanbaeden), the son of Marcel (De Graeve). As in the novel, this narrator is more of an observer than an active participant as he tries to discover what being family means -- even if his relatives make the Beverly Hillbillies look well-adjusted.
Triggering this search is a crisis in the boy's life some 14 years on, when Gunther, now an aspiring novelist (Valentijn Dhaenens), is about to become a father himself. Pic slides smoothly between the late '80s and early 2000s, and the narrative jumble is nimbly edited by Nico Leunen.
Van Groeningen uses an anecdotal, vignettish approach that underlines Gunther's search for connecting themes, rather than a desire to paint psychologically refined portraits of characters who are anything but. The director also applies this to the visuals, which effortlessly mix a variety of styles, suggesting the effects of hindsight and memory.
Ace d.p. Ruben Impens fully exploits the possibilities of his Red One digital camera, evoking everything from saturated film stock to playful black-and-white to crystalline contempo lensing.
Like the novel, "The Misfortunates" starts out as an extremely lowbrow comedy (highlights include several variations on beer-drinking contests) but morphs into a bittersweet meditation on whether familial love and pride are enough to sustain a proper upbringing.
Thesping is appropriately brawny, with De Graeve's loose-canon father emotionally anchoring the picture; only legit vet De Bal seems out of her depth. Production and costume design are spot-on, and Jef Neve's score nicely enhances the various moods.
Pic's international moniker replaces the equally awkward earlier translation "The Alasness of Things," which was a closer approximation of the novel's original title.
Cannes.
"The Misfortunates" David
Hudson at
Duane Byrge at
THE BROKEN CIRCLE BREAKDOWN B 87
If
I needed you would you come to me,
Would you come to me, and ease my pain?
If you needed me
I would come to you
I'd swim the seas for to ease your pain
In the night forlorn the morning's born
And the morning shines with the lights of love
You will miss sunrise if you close your eyes
That would break my heart in two
The lady's with me now since I showed her how
To lay her lily hand in mine
Loop and Lil agree she's a sight to see
And a treasure for the poor to find
—“If I Needed You,” written by Townes van Zandt, 1972, seen
in a live performance in 1975, Townes Van Zandt - If I
Needed You - YouTube
One of the more affecting films about grief, breaking it down into tiny fragments, where the film plays out like a memory play, as images sporadically hit the screen in what seems like no particular order at times, where the timeline is fractured, but events are recalled with significant impact. Seen just a day or so after the death of legendary American folk singer Pete Seeger, this integration of music and message seems particular well integrated, where performance scenes of bluegrass music pop up throughout the film, where like a Greek chorus they mirror the emotional truth of the surrounding events. While the Coen Brothers O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) may have been a manic romp through the American South during the Great Depression, where the movie was responsible for a bluegrass revival in America, this European film takes its cue from the highly successful musical format of blending bluegrass performance footage into the storyline. In fact, this film draws upon a series of films, in particular John Carney’s ONCE (2006), where the music becomes the heart and soul of a budding romance that develops onscreen, beautifully expressing the fluctuating moods of the characters. But it also follows familiar patterns set by various films like the grief stricken parents in RABBIT HOLE (2010), or the public marriage challenges facing Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash when performing onstage in WALK THE LINE (2005), and even the nightmarish descent into a kind of Hellish mindset of REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000). It’s interesting that the Coen brothers set a production standard of meticulous perfection when it comes to lip-synching, including their current film Inside Llewyn Davis (2012), but this is one of the noticeable deficiencies of this film, a minor blip in a film that otherwise has excellent production values.
Felix Van
Groeningen, film director:
Didier and Elise play in a bluegrass band and that is no
accident.
We have tried to let the songs find their spot in the scenario in a more organised manner and by doing so, give them the greatest possible dramatic impact. Sometime a song is purely narrative and helps to tell the story... In other places, we select a given song because it underpins the emotions.
The Broken Circle Breakdown : The New Yorker Anthony Lane
By rights, this should be the most annoying movie of the year. A tattooist (Veerle Baetens) falls in love with a banjo player (Johan Heldenbergh), they have an adorable daughter (Nell Cattrysse), who is stricken by cancer, there is a ruinous scene in which our hero halts in mid-concert and starts ranting about stem-cell research, and the whole thing has been put through a chronological blender, so that we never stay still in time. And yet, from all this, the director Felix Van Groeningen has created something not just plausible and affecting but sharp and alert in its distress. The two leads throw themselves into the emotional mix, and the music that they make—both of them sing, in English, with the band that supplies the movie’s title—feels less like a backdrop and more like the essential binding of the tale. For any viewer who, for one reason or another, has been shamefully ignorant of Belgian bluegrass, here is your opportunity to make amends. In Flemish.
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
The Broken Circle Breakdown details the relationship between a fledgling bluegrass singer (Johan Heldenbergh's Didier) and an impulsive tattoo artist (Veerle Baetens's Elise), with the movie, which unfolds in a non-linear fashion, exploring the pair's initial coupling and their eventual efforts at coping with their child's health concerns. Filmmaker Felix Van Groeningen does a superb job of immediately drawing the viewer into the deliberately-paced proceedings, as the director, working from a script cowritten with Carl Joos, has managed to transform the movie's two central characters into intensely compelling and thoroughly sympathetic figures - with this vibe heightened by the stirring performances from both Heldenbergh and, particularly, Baetens. It's clear, too, that The Broken Circle Breakdown is often a far more emotionally devastating piece of work than one might've initially anticipated, as the narrative's decidedly downbeat nature is heightened by Van Groeningen's unflinching treatment of the material. There's little doubt, however, that the film does start to lose some momentum once it passes a certain point, with the inclusion of a few questionable scenes and sequences - eg Didier unleashes a virulent rant during a concert - resulting in a final half hour that feels somewhat padded out. The movie recovers with a powerful and palpably heartrending closing stretch that more than compensates, which ultimately confirms The Broken Circle Breakdown's place as a difficult-to-watch yet thoroughly rewarding foreign drama. (Oh, and the bluegrass music sprinkled throughout is awfully good, too.)
The Broken Circle Breakdown / The Dissolve Keith Phipps
Sometimes a shot early in a film doubles as a signpost, announcing what kind of movie it is, and where it will go. The Broken Circle Breakdown, Belgium’s submission for Academy Award consideration this year, contains one such shot—a young girl’s arm as she receives an injection in a hospital—that seems to reveal the path ahead. But while it isn’t entirely inaccurate, it’s a blurry signpost in a movie that knows exactly where it’s going, but doesn’t want to share the destination too soon. The movie is a heartbreaker, but not the sort of heartbreaker the image suggests. Or at least not just that.
The film began as the play The Broken Circle Breakdown Featuring The
Cover-Ups Of Alabama, written and originally performed by Johan
Heldenbergh and Mieke Dobbels. Here, Heldenbergh reprises his role as Didier,
half its central couple alongside Elise (Veerle Baetens). After an opening
musical number, director Felix Van Groeningen first shows them caring for their
daughter Maybelle (Nell Cattrysse) in 2006, when they learn she needs
chemotherapy. From there, the film takes its first narrative leap, flashing
back to 1999. Didier lives alone in a caravan outside
From there, the film flits across the timeline of their relationship, showing their marriage, their united front as they support Maybelle during chemo, their initial apprehensiveness at learning they’ll be parents, and later, their fracturing lives at the other end of Maybelle’s illness. Van Groeningen brings a graceful touch to the editing, letting one moment comment on another without overdoing the connections. At its best, The Broken Circle Breakdown has the feel of life as it’s remembered—moments out of time tethered together by the feelings of those living them.
The performances capture that feeling, too. Heldenbergh and Baetens play Didier and Elise’s story as that of lives meshing together, initially thanks to Didier’s infectious enthusiasm for music and Elise’s infectious enthusiasm for life itself, and then through their love for their daughter. Underscoring it all: the music, an alternately rollicking and heartbreaking selection of bluegrass songs performed by Heldenbergh, Baetens, and the actor/musicians playing the members of their band, which finds a growing following as the film’s timeline progresses.
The film expertly weaves all those disparate elements together until, unfortunately, it seems to forget how. Grief flattens the characters. Didier becomes increasingly defined by his atheism, and Elise by her desire to believe. The back half of the film becomes dominated by heated exchanges that feel more written than lived, and moments that only underscore how many themes the film suggests without fully engaging. Beyond that conflict between belief and reason, The Broken Circle Breakdown touches on what it means for Europeans infatuated with American culture to live through the last decade, and for a man with no faith to sing songs of devotion.
Still, though it’s filled with missed opportunities, it isn’t defined by them. Van Groeningen brings a filmmaker’s eye to material that began onstage, making scenes set in the sun-drenched Flemish countryside and in cramped interiors feel equally cinematic. The cast matches his work, with Baetens and Heldenbergh creating a shared sense of history that elevates even some awkward later scenes, and everyone’s efforts feeding into an atmosphere of heightened emotion that starts with the film’s first scene and never really recedes, as Van Groeningen rides the crests and troughs of a love that may not survive the battering life hands it. Like one of the songs its characters perform, The Broken Circle Breakdown recycles some familiar material—young lovers, sick kid—but earns its heartbreak honestly.
Review: Surprising, Beautiful Berlin Film Fest Winner 'Broken Circle ... Jessica Kiang
An immaculately observed, desperately moving story of love, loss,
and bluegrass music, it's easy to see why Belgian film "The Broken Circle Breakdown" has
been picking up awards: Best Actress and Best Screenplay from Tribeca and the Audience Award
and the Europa Cinemas Award from
Elise (Veerle Baetens)
is a tattoo artist (boasting quite a bit of ink herself), into whose store one
day strolls Didier (Johan
Heldenbergh, also the co-writer of the play on which the film is based),
a sort of Flemish cowboy who plays in a bluegrass band and has an unabashed
love of
Again we understand how, told in bare chronological outline, it might seem like the film is that overfamiliar form of tragedy porn which layers on the pathos in its inevitable downward trajectory toward miserabilism. But the brilliance of Van Groeningen's approach is in the assured and fluid way he cuts around in time, not so much back-and-forth as elliptically loop-the-looping, telling the stories of, roughly, three different time periods. He proves himself a master of counterpoint, editing the sad scenes of the parents’ hospital visits right up against scenes that show the first flush of giddy love between the two: the result is to make the highs higher and the lows lower by contrast and it is devastatingly effective. It put us much in mind of Derek Cianfrance's "Blue Valentine" in that changing the manner in which the story is told in time also changes the tone of the film overall, making sometimes surprising connections that provoke more complex and nuanced thoughts and emotions then a more linear telling ever could.
Very occasionally, though, the juxtaposed chronology becomes muddled, especially toward the last third of the film when the third time period "strand" is introduced. In fact this portion of the film does prove the most problematic, with the film’s characters once or twice resorting to speechifying to lay out a little too clearly the subthemes. It’s a pity because the subtler way those undercurrents had been handled to that point (largely to do with Didier becoming ever more ferociously anti-religious while Elise starts to find comfort in a kind of undefined spirituality) had proved one of the film’s great strengths: where a lesser movie might concentrate solely on the character’s emotions, this one wants to deal with tragedy’s effect on their ideals too. The impulse, however, is noble even if the execution has uncharacteristically clumsy moments later on: Van Groeningen shifts the nexus of the film’s tragedy away from Maybelle (hard to do as a sick child will always exert a gravitational pull on our emotions), and onto Elise and Didier as they lose first each other, and then perhaps themselves. It’s a mark of how much these two fine actors have made us care for their characters that we feel those losses as deeply as we do anything else.
And of course, there’s the music. The soundtrack has apparently
been a bestseller in
We’re not too proud to admit we cried, more than once and less than tidily, and at sometimes odd junctures: the world’s most poignant rendering of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” the striking up of an almost shockingly upbeat tune around a certain hospital bed; and simply the saddest, most grief-ridden but loving sex scene we’ve seen in a long time. There’s no escaping that the film will jerk tears, but it doesn’t deserve the pejorative label that might suggest—there may be some stumbles but in broad strokes, Van Groeningen seems to innately understand that sorrow truthfully communicated and shared can be cathartic, rather than depressing. The song may be sad, but when we're invited to join together in raising it, it can lift our hearts even as they are gently broken. [B+]
Film
of the week: The Broken Circle Breakdown | BFI Gilda Williams, November 2013
Videophiled:
'Inside Llewyn Davis' Folk and 'The Broken Circle ... Sean Axmaker from Parallax View, March 11, 2014
Discussions from the After Movie Diner: Broken Circle Breakdown
Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
Filled with Excess, The Broken Circle Breakdown ... - Village Voice Jon Frosch
Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]
Film-Forward.com [Melina Gills]
[Review] The Broken Circle Breakdown - The Film Stage Nick Newman
THE BROKEN CIRCLE BREAKDOWN Review - Badass ... Britt Hayes from Badass Digest
The Amazing Little 'Broken Circle Breakdown' |Caryn James
DVD Verdict Review - The Broken Circle Breakdown Michael Nazarewycz
Review: 'The Broken Circle Breakdown' - Film.com William Goss
Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
theartsdesk.com [Kieron Tyler]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The Broken Circle Breakdown - Combustible Celluloid Jeffrey M. Andersom
Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
Hollywood Reporter [David Rooney]
The Broken Circle Breakdown, review - Telegraph Tim Robey
The Broken Circle Breakdown – review | Film | The ... - The Guardian Mark Kermode
The Broken Circle Breakdown – review | Film | The Guardian Mike McCahill
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Milan Paurich]
Austin Chronicle [Louis Black]
The Broken Circle Breakdown Movie Review (2013) | Roger Ebert Joyce Kulhawik
'The Broken Circle Breakdown,' by Felix van Groeningen - NYTimes ... Manohla Dargis
Van Hees, Peter
LEFT BANK (Linkeroever) D 59
You could probably make several new films just out of the loose ends left
by this movie, as it’s not exactly a taut thriller, instead it’s a film that
changes course midstream and becomes less about the attractive young lead
actress, Eline Kuppens as Marie, whose fresh exuberance dominates nearly the
entire length of film time, and more about the weird circumstances regarding
the disappearance of a young girl who lived in the same apartment in a high
rise building built on the Left Bank, a place just outside Antwerp where exiles
lived in medieval times. Early on we see
eerie dream sequences that appear to be premonitions, though they are
continually ignored up until the end, as in an introductory sequence Marie is
wandering around a filthy basement wearing a red dress, eventually walking into
a pitch black crawl space, which is like entering through a keyhole. Marie is a world class racer who is weeks
away from running in the European track championship, as she qualified by
coming in second in a preliminary round, but collapsed shortly afterwards. Her diagnosis is an infection of her immune
system mixed with a blood disorder, requiring plenty of tests and follow up
rest instead of training. She meets a
young archer at the track, Matthias Schoenaerts as Bobby, a car salesman with
bizarre Russian roots who convinces her to go out with him and in no time,
she’s moved in with him. For the most
part she’s happy and they spend plenty of time making love, which is shown with
a great deal of naturalistic nudity, though she soon notices weird people
around the building, but pays them no mind.
She also takes a spill and has a horrible bloody gash on her knee that
only seems to get more infected over time.
In one of her dreams, she appears to be running through a toxic waste
zone, which could explain her health problems, but in another she finds an
abandoned newborn baby which she suckles to her breast, with a quick image of a
naked Bobby sucking as well, while in another she’s drowning down an oily
sinkhole. Despite occasional vomiting
and the view that she might be pregnant, her blood tests throughout the film
continue to be inconclusive.
Like the still shots in Von Trier’s BREAKING THE WAVES (1996), this film
has several pans overlooking the city at night, or other landscape shots which
showcase a natural beauty, but there are also crevisses where an oily liquid is
spewing up from out of the deep, or the lapping waves of grey, colorless water
to counteract that beauty in a natural world.
Seemingly insignificant, Marie finds a letter addressed to a former
resident of the apartment, someone she soon discovers has disappeared
altogether without a trace, where a few of her things are still stored there,
some of which suggest medieval pagan rites, including the sacrifice of a young
girl. When it was discovered that the
building itself was built over a cesspool, the troubling signs start pointing
to Von Trier’s THE KINGDOM (1994), an iconic TV mini-series about a haunted
hospital with ghosts and a devil child. But
the film this most resembles is Roman Polanski’s ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968),
eliminating all sense of well-earned character build up from the first half and
veering slowly into the absurdity of ritualistic satan worshippers. This move proves fatal, as the film spirals
into utter nonsense, not that there aren’t such cults that could be living
anywhere, but because the payoff to all the well crafted dream sequences is so
lame and amateurish. Not a single member
of this group appears to have any brains whatsoever, yet we’re expected to
believe they’ve outsmarted the police for years. Based on what we see, leaving a trail of
murders left and right, including the disappearance of several police officers
while investigating this group, all signs would point to this group, yet
nothing stops them. The historical
references to medieval darkness are fairly standard, with barely an ounce of
supporting material, as are the actual satanic rituals themselves, which more
closely resembles the actions of primitive cave dwellers. Kuppens and Schoenaerts are a terrific pair
of young lovers, but totally wasted in this occult ritual gone wrong
movie.
User comments from imdb Author: Coventry from the Draconian Swamp of Unholy Souls
My beloved
Eye for Film (Keith Hennessey Brown) review [4/5] also seen here: EdinburghGuide.com and here: Picture Show Pundits [Keith H. Brown]
With a few notable exceptions, like
Harry Kumel's magnificent lesbian vampire art piece Daughters Of Darkness,
The story centres around Marie, a young
Finding it impossible to stay cooped up at home with her mother, an ageing hippy type who runs a health food store, Marie spontaneously decides to move in with Bobby, an archer and used car salesman she met at the athletics park. They make love and Marie, living a life of not having to worry about what she eats, drinks, smokes or does for the first time, falls for Bobby.
Then Marie starts to uncover the secrets of the building, centring around the disappearance of the last inhabitant of the apartment, built on the Left Bank of the River Schelde atop a former dumping ground for the city's poor and diseased. But is it already too late.
Although the film features many images of Marie naked or in her underwear, almost as many as there are of her clothed, these prove as much naturalistic as voyeuristic and exploitative. I particularly appreciated the way in which, getting up in the morning after making love with Bobby for the first time, Marie didn't move to pull the covers over herself but instead just got out of bed naked and went about her business: for once we didn't get that Hollywood self-consciousness about the body, with those double-height sheets that conveniently cover up the same parts that were on display on screen only a few moments previously.
The horror, suspense and mystery elements could be described as reminiscent of Polanski - most obviously Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant - and The Wicker Man, all classics of realist / mundane horror, crossed with the more supernaturally inclined work of H P Lovecraft and his disciples (think “Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young”). After an opening stinger we start off in the mundane world, before the gradual accumulation of little signifiers - flowers, Bobby's Ouroboros medallion, Marie's strange vaginal discharges and non-healing wounds - combines to build an atmosphere of mounting doubt, dread, paranoia and helplessness in the face of an ancient, unknowable evil.
This said, genre fans are likely to guess what's going on sooner that the characters, as when a sealed box labelled samh--n with two letters obscured crops up. Like everyone else they will still be wondering how it's all going to pan out, however.
This ending - which I won't spoil - itself proves vaguely reminiscent of Fulci's Lovecraftian masterpiece The Beyond, in which the heroes found themselves in flat landscape, devoid of detail bar the mummified corpses on the ground that revealed the space to extend in all directions and none, into infinity. While the same doesn't happen here, in line with the more earthly, maternal, circular and grounded approach that director Pieter Van Hees takes in contradistinction to The Beyond's transcendental, there's the same ambiguous sense Fulci spoke of - having neither a happy ending nor an unhappy one.
The filmmakers also keep you wondering about the characters and their motives throughout: if the references to the black hole as “the devil's vagina” (or c-word; seeing as vulgar / vulgate latin doesn't get the more vulgar English translation in the subtitles) are a by-now predictable invocation of monstrous feminine formulations for the critics to hang their theoretical hat upon, as is the invocation of the cellar as a womb-like space to be read through your favourite theory (my own would be Gaston Bacherlard's Poetics of Space) the way in they also play upon movie stereotypes of Russian migrants as gangsters, pimps and people-traffickers makes for a pleasing reversal or two.
Technically the film is well put
together, with some nice use of contrasting techniques in Marie's dreams /
nightmares and other subjective sequences, some of which accelerate into an
impressionistic blur of fast cuts and camera movements. The scoring is also
effective, being harsh and loud without adopting the nu-metal stylings that
have marred so many recent
The performances also work, with newcomer Eline Kuppens making for a credible heroine even if some of the things Marie does do not quite convince, while Mattheas Schoenarts giving Bobby a convincingly attractive bad boy air. The supporting players exude an air of authenticity: if these are black magic cultists, then they look just like your friends and neighbours, being downright average in every other respect.
User
comments from imdb Author: Dries Vermeulen (dirtymoviedevotee@live.nl)
from
Though the Brussels Fantastic Film Festival is renowned worldwide,
Getting off my high horse and back to LINKEROEVER, Van Hees has liberally
borrowed elements from Roman Polanski's THE TENANT and ROSEMARY'S BABY, Robin
Hardy's one-off THE WICKER MAN and the recent glut of J-Horror (DARK WATER
especially) for a story that still manages to considerable feat of seeming
authentic and somewhat unpredictable even to the seasoned viewer's eye. At
least some of the film's success must be attributed to its location, the left
bank of the River Schelde in
Eschewing expected shocks for most of its running time, LINKEROEVER slowly
initiates audiences into its outwardly normal but seriously askew universe
through identification with its strong, sympathetic heroine. Secrets are never
revealed to us before Marie learns of them, leading to an ending few will see
coming. Speaking of which, and without giving away to much, this must surely be
one of the most hauntingly beautiful codas in recent memory. Stubbornly
refusing to make sense on a logical, cerebral level, it does so perfectly from
an emotional point of view. What's more, with all the darkness that has
preceded it, this actually lets viewers leave the theater with a strange sense
of elation approaching happiness though this is by no means a traditional happy
ending ! Did I arouse your curiosity ? Good ! Van Hees beautifully sustains the
mood of impending dread by all means at his disposal. Cinematographer Nicolas
Karakatsanis makes splendid use of the cloud-packed skies adding to the
oppressive atmosphere in exquisitely effective contrast with the golden light
that dominates the latter part of the picture. Music is sparingly and equally
effectively employed, with a jarringly edited party sequence tearing your
senses to shreds. As with everything else here, this aural and visual assault
serves a definite purpose, to pull away all vestiges of the familiar for
characters and viewers alike. In interviews, the director and his entourage
have claimed this film as some sort of "dry run" for their upcoming
DIRTY MIND with comedian Wim Helsen. If so, that should be awesome. A
remarkably assured work, LINKEROEVER already stands as one of the finest films
of 2008 right out of the gate.
Variety (Leslie Felperin) review
BAADASSSSS! B+ 91
In 1971, Mario Van Peebles's father, Melvin Van Peebles, made the X-rated
blaxploitation movie "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song," starring
himself as a bordello stud performer who kills two white cops and manages to
escape (the movie concluded with Van Peebles running endlessly across hill and
dale). "Baadasssss!" is Mario's layered re-creation of the making of
"Sweetback" and the convulsive life around the production, which
became a sizable hit. He plays his father, appropriating Melvin Van Peebles's
body, his attitudes, his actions, and his treatment of his family (i.e., Mario
himself, as a thirteen-year-old boy). The result is a complex homage: Mario
turns his father into a sly, guarded, egotistical son of a bitch who
nevertheless had to be that way to get the movie made; and he tries, at the
same time, to top him as a filmmaker and a human being. The movie captures some
of the manic desperation and easy pleasures of the period—the tumbling-into-bed
sex as well as the crummy self-delusions by which people having a good time
convinced themselves that they were making a revolution. The movie quickly
reaches a pitch of manic activity and stays there for its entire length. It's
an exhausting, and exhaustingly pleasurable, entertainment.
Or My Old Man Can Lick Your Old Man and the Whole Motherfucking System Too. There's a compelling tension at work in Baadasssss!, one that ultimately overcame my reservations about the project. It's a film about filmmaking as radical racial politics, 70s style, filled with manic energy and black-cowboy bravado (Melvin describes Sweetback as a "ghetto Western," and the same could be said of this film), and no small amount of macho posturing. And yet there's an undercurrent of tenderness, emanating both from the production's homemade, hand-crafted feel (the most traditional-looking scenes, like the poolside meeting with Adam West, ironically look more porno than Sundance), and from the sheer conviction of its intra-familial mythmaking. Yes, Melvin Van Peebles' film changed the face of cinema in ways the white establishment still hasn't fully acknowledged. (It should be regarded as a touchstone equal to Easy Rider.) But the power of Baadasssss! stems less from its film historical counter-narrative and more from the complex, heartfelt tribute Mario constructs by stepping into the old man's shoes, chomping his unlit cigar, and trying to re-envision his own childhood with the benefit of maturity and understanding. (In this regard, the film resembles Makhmalbaf's A Moment of Innocence.) Mario lived through the dress rehearsal so he could give Melvin his close-up.
Introduction BFI
Screen Online
Mario Van Peebles
stars as his charismatic father, showing Melvin Van Peebles' increasingly
desperate attempts to make his pioneering film 'by any means necessary'. A
triumphant evocation of the tough, uncompromising world of guerrilla
film-making, Baadasssss! shows us what one black man had to do to put
put the 'hood' into Hollywood. Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War,
Woodstock, hipsters, hustlers, free love, afros and funk music, it is a
hilarious yet considered portrayal of a seismic period in history following the
assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.
The year was 1971
and Melvin Van Peebles had had 'enough of the Man': while most scripts
portrayed African-Americans as helpless slaves or 'super-Negroes', Melvin
pitched to Hollywood a celebration of urban black power - the story of a black
street hustler turned revolutionary who goes on the run after killing two
racist cops. Hollywood wasn't ready, but Melvin wasn't in the mood to give up.
Van Peebles Senior raised a shoe-string budget from friends and contacts
(including Bill Cosby) and shot the film in 19 days. In order to secure a
multi-ethnic crew, he had to disguise the production as a porn flick, thereby
dodging the all-white unions. He even had to bail out his camera crew after
they were arrested because a white cop decided that a 'bunch of negroes and
hippies couldn't have come by that camera equipment honestly'. Despite death
threats and losing the sight of one eye, Melvin managed to lick his crew into
shape and persuaded a young band looking for a break, Earth, Wind & Fire,
to record a soundtrack. At the film's completion he had just $13 to his name,
and only two theatres in the US agreed to play it. Opening weekend bombed, but
the film was declared to be required viewing by the Black Panthers whereupon
students, Yippies and Hippies flocked to see it, making Sweetback the
top grossing indie of 1971 (outperforming Love Story). Its success
caught Hollywood off guard, forcing the studios to rethink black audiences and
paving the way for an entire new genre: Blaxploitation.
One of those who
saw it first time round was Michael Mann on a first date with his wife-to-be,
Summer. And thirty years on it was Michael Mann who, in the words of Mario Van
Peebles, "was the one cat that got the (Baadasssss!) script",
going on to become the film's executive producer. Shot in only 18 days (one
less than Sweetback itself), the result is a critical yet affectionate
tribute from a son to his father - an honest, unhagiographic portrayal of a singleminded
film-maker who let nothing stand in his way. Above all, it illuminates a vital
chapter in film history, reflecting a key moment in Black America's battle for
cinematic representation.
BAADASSSSS! Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine
Director bio The Black List Project
Melvin Van Peebles was born
Van Peebles was born Melvin Peebles in
After Van Peebles completed his first short films, he took
them with him to
In
In 2005, Van Peebles was the subject of a documentary entitled How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It). In 2008, Van Peebles completed the film Confessions of a Ex-Doofus-Itchy Footed Mutha, and appeared on All My Children as Melvin Woods, the father of Samuel Woods, a character portrayed by his son, Mario. Van Peebles' next project will be a double album with Madlib, to be released on Stones Throw Records. The first disc of the album will be Brer Soul Meets Quasimoto and the second disc will be the Madlib Invazion remix. Madlib had previously sampled Van Peebles heavily on both of his albums under the Quasimoto moniker.
Melvin Van Peebles bio
from NNDB
Melvin Van Peebles says he was disgusted more than "inspired" to make films -- disgusted by not seeing any representations of black people in screen that seemed at all like black people he knew in life. Generally thought of as a film director, Van Peebles is also a screenwriter, actor, composer, playwright, novelist, and painter. He was the first African-American to work as a trader on Wall Street, and later started his own investment firm.
He was born Melvin Peebles, raised in
Eventually, his marriage dissolved, and his wife and children returned to
Retitled The Story of a Three-Day Pass, it was his first
feature-length film, telling the story of a black American soldier who is
promoted for being "trustworthy", and given three days off duty in
In Watermelon Man, Godfrey
Cambridge played a racist white insurance salesman who wakes up black one
morning.
Van Peebles was now ready to make his landmark film, Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song. His script told the story of a male prostitute -- "Sweet Sweetback" -- who sees police beating a black activist, and intervenes. It isn't clear whether Sweetback kills the policemen or merely beats the hell out them, but Sweetback spends the rest of the screenplay on the run, having explicit sex with every woman he meets along the way.
Not surprisingly, Columbia Pictures was not interested in making Baad
Asssss, so Van Peebles used his substantial Watermelon paycheck to
leverage financing for his labor of love. To save money, Van Peebles played the
lead himself, and the film was made without Screen Actors Guild certification,
after Van Peebles told the union he was making a porn film. Baad Asssss
was clearly a low-budget effort, shot guerilla-style over less than three weeks
on location in some of
Still, it was a remarkable film for its time. "Dedicated to all the Brothers and Sisters who have had enough of the Man", Baad Asssss made a statement that black audiences had never seen on the screen before. It showed minority life in a respectful light, reveled in its rage, and launched what came to be known as blaxploitation, the low-budget genre of black action films of the 1970s. Van Peebles was offered a substantial sum and a distribution deal if he would agree to edit out the last moments of Baad Asssss, but he refused. As a result, the film was rarely screened beyond theaters in black neighborhoods, and in many cities it played in porno theaters. But it earned more than $15 million, a huge amount for an independent film in that era, and Baad Asssss remains Van Peebles' most famous work.
After Baad Asssss, Van Peebles began writing plays. He was nominated for Tonys twice, for Don't Play Us Cheap and Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death. He wrote an early draft of the Richard Pryor film Greased Lightning, but was fired for "artistic differences." He provided the voice for Louis Armstrong in Satchmo, a PBS documentary, and played the bartender father of his son Mario Van Peebles' character on the TV series Sonny Spoon. He occasionally wrote teleplays for TV movies, and wrote the 1995 film Panther, based on his novel about the Black Panthers, and directed by his son.
In the 2003 film Baadasssss!, Mario Van Peebles played his father in the backstage story of how Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song was made. The film was based on Melvin Van Peebles' book.
Director site Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death
Melvin Van Peebles - : : MelvinVanPeebles.com : : another Director site
Melvin Van Peebles: How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company yet another director site
Melvin Van
Peebles • Great Director profile - Senses of Cinema Garrett Chaffin-Quiray from Senses of Cinema, March 21, 2003
Melvin Van Peebles's oral history video excerpts biography from the National Visionary Leadership Project
MVP Foundation Melvin Van Peebles Foundation
Melvin Van Peebles - Zimbio central website for pictures, articles and links
Melvin Van Peebles - Filmbug biography
Melvin Van Peebles - Overview - MSN Movies biography
Blaxploitation.com | A soulful Tribute... influential website
The Melvin Van Peebles Collection by Melvin Van Peebles - Rhapsody ... musical downloads
Melvin Van Peebles | LifePart2 | PBS (Undated TV clip)
Viddied Reviews Alex Jackson essay on Watermelon Man from I Viddied It On the Screen (1970)
Original Review: 'Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death' (Oct. 21, 1971) [pdf] Clive Barnes from The New York Times
A blaxploitation theater Anatomy of a blaxploitation theater, by Demetrius Cope from Jump Cut, 1975
Blaxploitation’s high school audience Blaxploitation films and high school youth, by M. Washington, M.J. Berlowitz from Jump Cut, 1975
Melvin
Van Peebles: Original Notes In a Spare Space Suzanne Slesin from The New York Times,
Melvin
Van Peebles Retrospective Stephen
Holden from The New York Times,
FILM
VIEW; Sweet Sweetback's World Revisited
Stephen Holden from The New York
Times,
POP
REVIEW; A Down-Home Philosopher Makes Old Songs His Own Jon Pareles from The New York Times,
The Blaxploitation Era | Harvard Magazine January-February 2003 Craig Lambert from Harvard Magazine, January/February 2003
A
Controversial Musical's Sweeet Comeback Song Lola Ogunnaike from The New York Times,
Spectacle,
masculinity, and music in blaxploitation cinema Amanda Howell from Screening the Past,
Madlib & Melvin Van Peebles - Brer Soul meets Lord Quas | Stones ... Stones Throw, October 1, 2005
The MVP of
Black Cinema Greg Tate from The Village Voice,
Portrait of an
Independent Spirit, Versatile and Baad
How to Eat Your Watermelon in
White Company (and Enjoy It) (2005), A.O. Scott movie review from The New York Times,
'Ain't
Supposed to Die a Natural Death': Return of a Funky Assault on the Senses Phoebe Hoban from The New York Times,
The
PopcornReel.com Spotlight Interview: Melvin Van Peebles Omar P.L.
Moore from The Popcorn Reel,
melvin and me | Bryant Terry April 2008
Van
Peebles’s Street Serenade Rachel Saltz
from The New York Times,
melvin van peebles – ISSUE Project Room August 10, 2009
Happy
Birthday, Melvin Van Peebles, Writer, Director and Actor Sarah Amandolare from Finding Dulcinea,
Melvin Van Peebles brief book excerpts including a video interview from Good Day, NY, August 21, 2009
FilmInFocus | Film News | Melvin Van Peebles born Movie News ... brief bio info, August 21, 2009
Melvin Van Peebles Undated interview by Kam Williams from The African American Literature Book Club
Evening
with Melvin Van Peebles and Dick Gregory
Video interview with Melvin Van Peebles,
Charlie Rose - Melvin Van Peebles 60 minute TV interview by Charlie Rose, March 15, 1995
Melvin
Van Peebles: Interview and biography
Melvin Van Peebles and His Pals, interview by Mike Zwerin from Culture
Kiosque,
Baadasssss!
- Mario and Melvin Van Peebles Interview
"Legacy":
Film Freak Central Interviews Baadasssss! Filmmakers ... Walter Chaw interviews Melvin and Mario from
Film Freak Central,
Interview at
SuicideGirls.com Interview by Daniel
Robert Epstein,
Red Bull Music Academy - Melvin Van Peebles - Session Transcript Interview from the Red Bull Music Academy, Barelona, 2008, video interview may be seen here.
Melvin Van Peebles Talks about his new graphic novel and film ... Interview by Felicia Pride from Books on the Root, June 3, 2009, also seen here: The Itchyfooted Melvin Van Peebles | Blog | Felicia Pride
Melvin Van Peebles « The Michael Eric Dyson Show Radio interview, July 16, 2009
A
Living Legend Still Working Independently: Melvin Van Peebles ...
Flashback
Fridays: Melvin Van Peebles - Essence.com
TimeOut: Director interview Taking
Confessions, interview by Novid Parsi, from TimeOut
Chicago,
Melvin Van Peebles - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
X-rated
movies, by Melvin Van Peebles as a
Channel 5 news guest commentator, 1985, DVD extra on YouTube (
User comments from imdb Author: pkael from Philadelphia, PA
Melvin van Peebles' first short is
a deliberately aimless slice of life, mainly consisting of several men walking
the streets of an American city. Most interesting aspect is the disjointed,
atonal harmonica score. improvised by van Peebles himself. A small slice of
this film can be seen (unidentified as such) in the documentary "What It
Was... Is" on the Sweetback and Don't Play Us Cheap DVDs. Along with his
first feature, Story of a 3-Day Pass, this movie shows that Van Peebles' roots
were as much in European and "art" film as so-called
"blaxploitation," and that the style of Sweetback was calculated
primitivism, not merely inexperience.
THE STORY OF A THREE-DAY PASS
(La Permission) B 83
Melvin Van Peeples is something of a living history of independent films, nearly single-handedly revitalizing the American black film movement of the late 60’s and early 70’s, where his self-financed classic SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSS SONG (1971) opened the door for stronger and more militant black characters in film, while also offering opportunities behind the camera for directing as well both in television and the movie industry. This earlier film would have to be described as a more whimsical Van Peeples, as he was still learning his craft. To hear Peeples tell it, he was unable to find work after a brief stint in the Air Force flying bomber planes, so he worked as a gripman on cable cars in San Francisco, eventually writing a book about the experience, The Big Heart, in 1957, making several short films afterwards that in the mid 60’s caught the eye of Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque Française, who invited him to make films in France. As there were no comparable opportunities in America, he joined several other American black artists that were also allowed greater freedom of expression in France through a racial tolerance that simply didn’t exist in the United States, like Josephine Baker, Richard Wright and James Baldwin, where Peeples taught himself French, actually wrote stories for a social activist newspaper there as well along with a few plays and novels, one of which, La Permission in French, was adapted into his first feature film, receiving a $60,000 grant from the French Cinema Center. Shooting in 36 days for a cost of $200,000, the film reflects a bilingual sensibility, as several characters conveniently speak both. The story concerns Turner (Harry Baird), a friendly black American soldier stationed at an Air Force base in France, where all things considered, it’s surprising Peeples didn’t play the part, as Baird has an un-American sounding accent from Guyana The initial signs of self-deprecating humor are the conversations Turner has while looking in the mirror with his alter ego, who calls him a “good” Negro and an Uncle Tom, explaining how he was chosen for a recent promotion. When we meet his captain (Harold Brav), a highly intense white man constantly on the verge of a breakdown, where everything must be exactly in place or he suffers from apoplexy, he describes Turner as a man he doesn’t have to worry about, rewarding him with an unheard of three-day leave.
Overjoyed, Turner is off to Paris, where after visiting a carnival and a
strip club he bashfully meets a similarly shy white French girl, Miriam, Nicole
Berger, Charles Aznavour’s suicidal wife in SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER (1960), over
drinks in a dance club,
where smiles and holding hands are their means of communication, but he’s
amazed that she agrees to take a trip to the ocean in Normandy, staying
together at a beachfront hotel. Mind
you, they’re afraid to even touch each other at first, as so much is swirling
through their heads. The moment they’re
alone, however, their respective fantasies kick in, where Turner is a robust Three Musketeer figure cutting a manly
figure on a horse as she’s waiting for him by the fire in his chateau, while
she’s running through the jungle chased by black natives, where she’s presented
as a gift to their handsome chief (Turner).
These humorous visions help cut the ice, using an overhead ceiling shot
to reflect their awkwardness and distance.
When she excuses herself to brush her teeth, he goes through another
half dozen changes of clothes, each with a different intentionally
sophisticated look, like something seen out of Esquire or Playboy
magazine, turning the bed down, then changing it back the way it was, all
taking place in split seconds inside his head.
Their shy tenderness with each other is refreshing, where they obviously
have respect, and things go pretty much they way they’d like, happy to be in
each others arms. At dinner, still
holding hands, they’re always seen with a bottle of wine, initially eating
Chinese, where the waitress yells out the order, amusingly interrupted by an
oversized guest placed at their same table who orders a week’s worth of
food. When it’s a Spanish restaurant the
next night, with a flamenco guitarist and dancer, everything appears friendly
and nice, until Turner (in his head) hears a racial insult (that was never
spoken), launching himself headfirst at the guitarist, burying his face with
his fists, only to be pulled off the man and beaten to a pulp, seen limping
down the street afterwards. It’s curious
how Peeples chooses to show racial antagonism, as something he carries around
largely in his head, where it’s an ingrained and programmed response, as this
overreaction is largely a riff on how the word “black man” sounds in French, as
to Turner it just sounds insulting.
When they’re alone, the couple couldn’t be happier together, but Peeples
loves to show how attitudes change in the presence of others, altering how they
are perceived, as not everyone approves of interracial couples, even in France,
especially Turner’s over-demanding captain who reflects typical American
bigotry. While the two are enjoying a
perfect day at the beach, a few fellow soldiers on leave interrupt their
apparent bliss, as they are appalled at what they see, bringing American racial
prejudice front and center into their otherwise happy lives, where Turner is
quickly stripped of his promotion and confined to barracks until a traveling
church choir from Harlem visit the base and they need a friendly black tour
guide. Peeples co-writes, with Mickey
Baker, his own funky musical soundtrack, where the overt nature of the music
offers a take on the character’s personality, a highly theatrical device used
by Peeples, something more commonly seen in live theater. Easily the highpoint of the film is when they
finally consummate their sexual attraction, where 60’s newsreel style images
flood the screen in a flash of quick cuts, offering a glimpse of the era in a
mini-movie, offering a bit of social realism in what is otherwise a
lighthearted romp through the French countryside, including a pastoral hayride
with a friendly farmer more in harmony with nature who’s all too happy to chat
with them. While the film has a
pronounced innocence and humor to it, mixed with a sprinkling of racist
sentiments, it does play to stereotypes and can’t match the radical influence
of SWEETBACK, which literally changed the look of cinema in America, allowing
blacks to redefine themselves in a healthier image in a predominate white
society. SWEETBACK’S biggest influence
on Hollywood was that it made money, opening a cash flow to blacks for a
change, paving the way for more diverse films and attitudes to come. This film earned Peeples a contract
with
User comments from imdb Author: John Seal from Oakland CA
Burdened though it is by director
Melvin Van Peebles typical editing foibles, Story of A Three Day Pass is
nonetheless his greatest film, buoyed by superb performances by handsome Harry
Baird, lovely doomed starlet Nicole Berger, and the unheralded Harold Brav as
Baird's apoplectic commanding officer. A romantic comedy about love, racism and
the United States Army, the film will raise you up only to drop you down, but
it rarely resorts to cinematic cliche and will appeal to idealist and cynic
alike. Beautifully shot by Michel Kelber, the film also features an absolutely
top notch score which deserves some sort of recognition and is instantly atop
my list of 'soundtrack most in need of a CD (re)issue'. Strongly recommended
for all.
Baltimore
City Paper (Bret McCabe) capsule
review
Independent filmmaking vanguard Melvin Van Peebles didn’t arrive
in American theaters fully formed with the one-two punch of 1970’s Watermelon
Man and 1971’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. He actually whet
his cinematic chops with this French-made 1968 gem, which follows the various
misadventures of African-American GI Turner (Harry Baird), who’s stationed in
France and getting a three-day pass before being awarded a promotion. Turner
heps it to Paris, where he gets absolutely mod in a pair of tapered slacks,
plaid sport coat, porkpie hat, and dark black shades. He skims through the city
alone for his first day, and meets the friendly, gamine Miriam (Nicole Berger)
that night, and they decide to alight to the beach for two days of off-season
sun, sand, and alone time and where they encounter some sidelong glances. Less a
poignantly incisive race commentary than a lighthearted romp, Three-Day
is most notable for Van Peebles’ nascent visual panache. You can see the
director trying every idea in his head for his first feature, and it turns out
some luscious results: Note the scene when Turner enters the
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Melvin Van Peebles had already toiled in a trade-hopping career
(U.S. Air Force, painting in
Hammer to Nail [Brandon Harris]
In 1967, Melvin Van Peebles became the first African-American to
direct a narrative feature film in twenty years, following DIY pioneer Oscar
Micheaux’s final film, The Betrayal,
with his Story of a 3-Day Pass (La
Permission). Ironically, this stretch of time coincides with the era
of studio decline that followed
Harry Baird, tall and stark, in turns morose and goofy looking,
is Turner, a black American GI stationed in
Turner strolls the streets of
Story of a 3-Day Pass is Van Peebles’ most stylistically assured and emotionally satisfying film. There is a joy in the freewheeling aesthetic conceits. He unpacks scenes using highly subjective techniques like split-screen, subject-on-dolly moves, freeze frames, abrasive, looping musical interludes, and extended POV shots, allowing us to enter the world of Turner in a way he never again explored with such elegance. Relying heavily on direct address to the camera, Van Peebles finds a nice analog to the black suspicion of the white gaze—we constantly inhabit Turner’s perspective as people talk to him.
Van Peebles arrived in
User comments from imdb Author: Mike Nolan (homed@js-net.com) from Lake Arrowhead, California
The
Story of a Three Day Pass (1968)
Renata Adler from The New York
Times, also seen here: New
York Times
NOTABLE FILMS BY BLACK DIRECTORS - Movie List on mubi.com
Time Out review Tom Milne
Cambridge plays
(admirably) a high-powered all-American insurance salesman, bursting with
health, dirty jokes, and bigotry, who wakes up one morning to find that his
skin has turned black. His frenzied attempts to explain the metamorphosis as an
excess of tan and/or soya sauce won't wash any more than his skin will, so he
finds himself forced to adjust. Often very funny in its topsy-turvy comments on
racism, the script unfortunately has to battle against a director determined to
use every gaudy trick in the book. The real pity, though, is that it fails to
follow through on the logic of its premise whereby the hero is so heartily
extrovert that everybody (wife and kids included) dislikes him. When he turns
black, he also turns sympathetic, so nobody's reflex responses are really
tested.
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
The story of a smug white insurance salesman who wakes up one day with black skin, 1970's Watermelon Man was originally planned as a vehicle for a white actor like Jack Lemmon or Alan Arkin. The film also originally featured an upbeat ending in which the salesman's stint as an oppressed minority is merely a dream, albeit the kind designed to teach Rod Serling-approved values of tolerance and equality. When Melvin Van Peebles came onboard as director, however, he transformed a white liberal morality play into a cinematic howl of rage. The result is a strange combination of sitcom and tragedy, black anger and sanitized shtick. The conflict between what Van Peebles was given and what he delivered gives the film a bracing, caustic tension that carries it through trying patches of hackneyed comedy, clumsy sermonizing, and cartoonish attempts at satire.
The film's degree of success stands as a tribute to the skill
and comic chops of star Godfrey Cambridge, whose motormouth salesman comes off
as simultaneously obnoxious and endearing, a self-infatuated predecessor to
Ricky Gervais in The Office. Transcending mere caricature,
Intriguingly,
Watermelon Man grows bleaker as it progresses, pushed
by Van Peebles' unhinged score, which asserts his personality and sensibility
as strongly as his direction. "This ain't
not coming
to a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor) review
Jeff Gerber, a
financially secure, confident, and healthy white male, races the bus on his way
to work. He meets it at its final stop before a highway, pays a reduced fare,
championing himself among colleagues whose curiosity for this practice is
equivalent to their annoyance. He is a deeply bigoted character. To Jeff,
racial slurs may function as accepted titles, and racial differentiation is
overtly evident to him, perhaps even necessary. Aptly, he is an insurance
salesman. His is the art of bullshit and insincerity, and he’s very good at it.
Watermelon Man is ostensibly a comedy of contrived
situations. The same concept has been repeatedly made, in which a bigoted man
is forced (often through fantasy) to confront his racism. Watermelon Man,
however, is hugely significant as the product of filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles.
Though Van Peebles would achieve the position of an influential and important
filmmaker with his subsequent effort, Sweet Sweetback’s Baad
Asssss Song, this precursory film exhibits his polemics and interest in
exploitation.
Jeff is introduced
in a quick montage of frantic exercise. He has purchased a tanning bed,
stretches a chest exerciser, and counts reps with concentrated speed. He is
efficient and athletic. The next morning, he finds he has inexplicably morphed
into a black man.
The comedic
potential of this scenario is contrived to its very extent. However, I relent
to isolate Watermelon Man strictly as a comedy; its premise is more
valuable as a thematic exercise. It is not the most stalwart ethnological study
of its time (it bows in comparison to something like To Kill A Mockingbird,
eight years its elder), though it is significant for its heritage, its
confrontation, and its violation of taboos. It is tame by contemporary
standards, but there is a rough edge beneath the comedic façade, a desperation
and anger.
Unexpectedly, once
the comedy is spent, the finale of the film is dark, if not downright
threatening (it is appropriately evocative of Sweetback’s final promise to The
Man). It is a film made under the auspices of a predominately white industry
that depicts a race which had been hitherto unrepresented in commercial film by
an allied director. Van Peebles was enlisted to film a second ending (in which
Jeff awakes, realizing his strife has been dreamed) which he refused to
deliver, maintaining the purpose and integrity of his film. In this
thinly-veiled manner, Watermelon Man is a bite at the feeding hand.
Jeff Gerber is
angry not because of his mistreatment but because of his self-loathing. He has become
the very source of his intolerance. It is the most fitting poetic justice that
can be given to a racist character. This resolution is also quite disparaging
as it denotes an inability to conform; by this measure, Watermelon Man
is a timeless polemic.
User comments from imdb Author: Brandt Sponseller from New York City
In Watermelon Man, director Melvin
Van Peebles expresses complex ideas about race and racism in a sophisticated
but humorous way. At that, however, if you do not have a strong taste for
grotesques--in a formal sense ("outlandish or bizarre; ludicrous or
incongruous distortion")--you may not enjoy the film as much as I did. It
is something of a surreal, occasionally psychedelic caricature, but as such, it
does what all good caricature should do--it emphasizes the truth without being
strict realism or "naturalism".
Watermelon Man is the story of Jeff Gerber (Godfrey Cambridge). He's something
of a strange dweeb who nevertheless has a stereotypical white-bread suburban
existence. He's got a wife, two preadolescent kids, a nice home with a
manicured lawn, and so on. He's also something of a health nut (although humorously,
Jeff presents himself as happy-go-lucky and quite a joker, but he's a bit
obnoxious and boorish, plus he shows himself to be racist and a male
chauvinist, although he's not exactly gung ho about sleeping with his wife.
Just as we're learning about Jeff's routine, something unusual happens--he
wakes up in the middle of the night as a black man. At first he thinks it's a
nightmare, but it doesn't go away. He blames it on the sun lamp. He blames it
on food he's ingesting. The bulk of Watermelon Man has Jeff trying to at first
conquer, then later deal with his newfound "problem".
If you've seen both films, you might find it odd that Van Peebles made
Watermelon Man before Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971). Unlike Sweet
Sweetback, which is intriguing in its own way, but not near as good of a film
artistically and technically, the direction in Watermelon Man is finely nuanced
and sophisticated, the cinematography is crisp and attractive and technical
elements such as sound are superb. I suppose this might be an interesting
lesson in how crucial budget and "legitimacy" can be for film-making.
It gives access to the finest materials and resources, including a large stable
of professionals with narrow specialties. At that, however, Watermelon Man is
not nearly as respected now as Sweet Sweetback because of what Sweet Sweetback
represents, both ideologically and influentially in the film industry. Sweet
Sweetback was something of a revolutionary (and very psychedelic) cry for
African-American rights, and it helped launch not only the blaxploitation craze
of the 1970s, but also fiercely independent film-making.
Yet, Watermelon Man is just as unique and important in what it has to say about
race, even if it's not violent or pornographic, and not bizarre in the same
way. Once Jeff becomes black, everything about his life changes. There isn't a
person around who doesn't relate to him differently, with many having a polar
opposite reaction to him--both his white friends (and family, of course) and
his black acquaintances (they weren't friends, exactly, when Jeff thought he
was white). Everyone wants to exploit his newfound state, including his boss.
Van Peebles makes a sly transition from the beginning to the end of the film
that goes from white-bread sitcom to something of a militant blaxploitation
flick in a way that you barely even notice.
A large part of what makes Watermelon Man so odd is Godfrey Cambridge. His
performance is way over the top and consistently bizarre, but for some of us,
in some contexts (such as for me in this context), this kind of bizarre, over
the top material works extremely well--in fact, I tend to prefer this to
realism. The other performances are at least interesting, even if they're not
all good in a conventional wisdom evaluation, but
Equally bizarre and a bit disturbing is
Van Peebles' direction is extremely admirable. He's not afraid to take all
kinds of thrilling chances, including such unusual moves as quick pans to go
from character to character in a conversation and odd intrusions of
psychedelia, such as the scene that suddenly starts flashing different negative
exposure images, or the scene that stops to insert commentary that resembles
silent film intertitles.
Van Peebles also did the music here, as he did in Sweet Sweetback, and it's
just as weird. Near the end of the film, there's an extended version of a song
that rips-off "Heard It Through The Grapevine" that features a vocal
that even The Residents would raise an eyebrow to. Again, I love weird stuff,
so I was happier than a pig in, um, mud.
If there's anything less than satisfactory about Watermelon Man, it's that it
engenders sadness that Van Peebles wasn't able to talk the helm more often. He
made a controversial move in this film by changing the ending in the original
script, as he rightfully should have done (Columbia originally wanted an
"it was all a dream" ending, which would have been ridiculous and
insulting, to say the least), and that, combined with his independent
production of Sweet Sweetback the following year, didn't exactly put him on
Hollywood's successful brownnoser list.
Viddied
Reviews Alex Jackson essay from I Viddied It On the Screen
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Mark Zimmer) dvd review
DVD
Talk (David Walker) dvd review
[4/5]
Stuff White People Do
User comments from imdb Author: definitedoll from East Windsor CT
Godfrey
Cambridge's 'Watermelon Man' Arrives at 2 Houses The New
York Times
—Sweetback
(Melvin Van Peebles)
Melvin Van Peebles exhibits his own kind of infectious joie de vivre, displaying an indomitable spirit that refuses to be deterred, an example being he felt tired of seeing black people show up at lynchings with a hymnal and a Bible, so he decided to do what he could to change people’s perceptions. SWEET SWEETBACK was a film that in its day was endorsed by the Black Panther Party, analyzed from a revolutionary perspective by Huey P. Newton in the Panther newspaper, and at least according to Spike Lee, was extremely influential on today’s black filmmakers, including his ability to market himself.
Arguably the most important black American film of its age, yet it's remained virtually unseen in Britain. In part that's because it is truly independent, shot on a shoestring and determinedly flouting Hollywood conventions of self- censorship. A 'Yeah Production', 'starring The Black Community', and dedicated to 'all the Brothers and Sisters who had enough of the Man', it's not what you'd call 'bourgeois art'. The story, such as it is, concerns a stud, Sweetback (Van Peebles), who's moved to fight back when two white cops casually beat up a political activist in front of him. He's on the run for the rest of the movie, with occasional stops for sex and/or further police brutality. Totally uncompromising and grindingly repetitive, the film nevertheless accumulates a kind of hallucinatory groove, with unexpected shafts of bizarre humour and vigorous, experimental new wave direction (psychedelic negative images, split screen and so forth). Written, composed, produced, directed and edited by Van Peebles, it remains one of a kind.
CineScene.com
(Mark Netter) review
In the middle of watching this movie, nearly two decades
after its release, the elderly white woman in the next seat turned to me and
whispered, "This movie is dangerous!" Melvin Van Peebles
self-financed (with some help from Bill Cosby), starred in, wrote and directed
the first completely unrestrained African American cinematic utterance, and it
still shocks all these years later with raw sexual and violent imagery, and an
incendiary point of view. In Sweetback's world, rich white folks come up to
Classified X (Melvin Van Peebles) Laurence Kardish from Film Scouts
In 1971 with one startling film, Melvin Van Peebles, writer, director, producer, and musician, forever changed the face of American film. Before Sundance and a network supporting American independent filmmakers were even conceivable, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song wore its "X" rating like a badge of honor and swept through urban theatres like a house on fire. It proved at once there was an enormous audience for independent films, ones where blacks did something they had not done in earlier American films: fight back. Sweetback is the first American film with a black protagonist who refuses to adapt to the daily humiliations of racism. He is neither passive nor good: He is a brother who dares to get "the Man's foot out of his ass." Melvin Van Peebles' Classified X, the startling new documentary written and performed by Van Peebles and directed by Mark Daniels, is about the nightmare images of self that Hollywood offered up to African-Americans in dream palaces across the country before Sweetback, and surprisingly, after.
Movie images sustain racism. Over and over again,
Exclaim! dvd review David Dacks
This groundbreaking movie launched the blaxploitation
movement in American cinema. But just five minutes in you'll realise that every
other blaxploitation movie was tame compared to this freewheeling psych-out.
Although director Melvin Van Peebles maintains that this was a chance for black
User comments from imdb Author: Brandt Sponseller from New York City
Considered the first blaxploitation
film, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song features Melvin Van Peebles (who also
directed, wrote, produced, edited and did music for the film) as Sweetback, a
Los Angeles-area "male prostitute"/"sex performer" (who
only has relations with females). He agrees to be taken in to a police station
as a suspect just to make a couple cops look good (because they are tolerant
towards the cathouse he lives in). On the way, they pick up a Black Panther and
start beating him senseless. Sweetback bludgeons and stabs the two cops with
his handcuffs (one end is open) and the bulk of the film has him on the run.
Can he make it to
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song has a lot of historical significance. It is
an early independent film in what's considered the current "modern"
style, it is one of the earliest mostly black films of its era (there were all
black films earlier, such as Oscar Micheaux's work, but they disappeared for
awhile), it was controversial (it initially earned an X rating (later changed
to an R) and touted that fact proudly as a tagline), it was made for $150
thousand but grossed $15 million, and most importantly perhaps for some film
lovers, it is credited with starting the blaxploitation craze in the 1970s. It
is worth watching for students of film on those merits alone.
But none of those facts alone make it a good film, and none affect my rating.
In terms of quality, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song gets my vaunted 5 out of
10 rating, which is usually reserved for "so bad they're good" films.
Although it is loaded with flaws, as one might expect from a low budget film
from the era shot guerilla-style on the streets of
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is firmly mired in the psychedelic era.
Peebles gives us frequent shots with negative or false colors near the
beginning of the film. More frequently, he directs scenes so they have various
"altered reality" allusions--time stretching, repeating, stopping and
stuttering, bizarre actions and reactions from various characters, rambling
nonsense, and so on--which for the viewer approximate the perception of someone
who is wasted almost to the point of passing out. These scenes often play like
some kind of avant-garde performance art, and are as much a focus of the film
as any of the usually cited "political" messages rooted in racially
oriented turmoil and disparity. Perhaps the intended theme was that race
relations, and the urban reality of blacks to that point were as bizarre as
acid trips, some good, some bad.
The music is equally bizarre (which I love), with a recurrent jazz/funk piece
with an almost atonal saxophone melody being the unifier. Some of the vocal
music is a veritable Greek chorus, narrating action and emotions, providing
critiques and so on. Peebles also frequently layers musical tracks, so two or
more can be playing at once for a minute or two.
The film is also notable and admirable for its abundance of almost graphic sex
scenes and gratuitous nudity. The opening scene is particularly groundbreaking
and laudable. Throughout the film, Sweetback is an unstoppable stud, with
almost any woman he desires dropping her drawers for him, even towards the end
of the film, despite the fact that he has an oozing, infected sore running up
the side of his body, not to mention that he's filthy, and he's been drinking
mud and eating raw lizards. The ladies still find him hot enough to give him a
poke in the bushes. We need much more of this kind of material in contemporary
films.
At one point, Peebles and/or director of photography Robert Maxwell appear to
have hit the streets of
But the problems with the film are legion. Maxwell's camera frequently goes in
and out of focus (being generous, we could interpret it with psychedelic
intent, but I'm skeptical). Night scenes (which are thankfully avoided for the
most part) tend to be seas of blackness where a viewer can only occasionally
make out enough of an image to piece together the scene in their mind. The
sound is awful--I couldn't make out about half of the dialogue (at one point I
thought "this is more like watching a silent film"), and it doesn't
help that some characters "jive talk"; if ever a film needed
subtitles, it's this one. The camera occasionally has a spot, a hair, or some
other gunk on the lens. There isn't much to the story; after awhile, it starts
to play more like an odd music video. A lot of shots--scenery, cityscapes,
etc.--look like they may have been randomly taken by Peebles with his home
camera with the hopes of one day using them in a film.
Still, for fans of weirdness and "so bad they're good" films, not to
mention any blaxploitation fan with his or her weight in barbecued ribs, Sweet
Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is a must see. Make sure you also check out How to
Get the Man's Foot Outta Your Ass (aka Baadasssss!), Peebles' son Mario's 2003
film about Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song.
Movie Vault [Friday and Saturday Night
Critic]
I could start out Sweet Sweetback talking about its
historical significance, with what it was the first to do, but doesn’t that
always imply that a film only holds up when you take its place in history into
consideration? Doesn’t that always imply that it’s a little bit, well, boring
and incomplete if you don’t have a history book right next to you? Certainly Sweetback
is a groundbreaker, but let’s not think about all that now. Let’s think about
what it IS, which is an intense and startling montage of sounds and images,
powered and driven by indignation, about a people sick of getting trampled on.
Or, as the movie puts it, “all the Brothers and Sisters who are tired of being
held down by the
Another title card that appears after that one claims the movie is “Starring
The Black Community.” Ostentatious, perhaps, but this is back when movies could
make grand and sincere statements, as opposed to now when a movie can be as big
as it wants, perhaps even win 11 Academy Awards, only if it can be easily
proven to mean nothing at all. Sweet Sweetback is not about character or
story—neither Sweetback himself nor any other character is really developed—so
much as it is a journey through the iconography of the urban 1970s, which was
largely poor and black and, up until this point, hadn’t gotten much silver
screen time. Oops, I played the history card after I said I wouldn’t.
The basic plot is simplicity itself, the kind of thing that would take about
five or ten pages in Toni Morrison and then pop up again for a couple of
paragraphs fifty or sixty pages later.
Nighttime during Sweetback’s flight is a neon
Sweetback is eventually joined on his exodus by the suspect he rescued, who is
apparently a political revolutionary, although I’d be lying if I said I didn’t
have to read the back of the box to figure that out. He’s called the
“ringleader” by a cop in a quick line of dialogue, but there’s nothing to
indicate the cop isn’t just making fun of him in a “crown-of-thorns” kind of
way.
Sweet
Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song is very much a movie of the late
1960s and early 1970s, with real locations instead of sets, detached, almost
documentary-style camera angles, and plenty of experimentation with lighting,
overlapping images, conversations directly to the camera, and even some
animated negative images. It’s as trippy as Easy Rider from two years earlier and
in many ways not unlike what Nicholas Roeg was doing on the other side of the
world with Walkabout.
It is also a dirty cheap production entirely shot in 19 days; to call it rough
around the edges would be merciful. Certainly a lot of the script was probably
built around necessity, around which locations the filmmakers could access and
their limited ability to record sound. But even Leonardo da Vinci was limited
by the colors that he had.
Sweetback’s life as a joyless sexual commodity is summarized in a clever and
surreal early sequence, in which we see him climb into bed with a woman as a
teenager and stand up a grown man. Sweetback is hounded by music wherever he
goes, like all the voices he’s ever heard in whole life, including traditional
spirituals, militant diatribes, and contemporary funk, all run together and
overlapping. The music is provided by no less than Earth, Wind and Fire, with
contributions by Van Peebles and his son and daughter. Also, as part of its era,
Sweet
Sweetback features a lot of nudity—the movie was justifiably
rated X, although there’s no actual coitus—and one could make an easy and
convincing argument that not all of it is necessary. The “ban” on nudity in
American films only lifted in 1967, I think, and, like a painter getting brand
new color, the heretofore inaccessible form of self-expression is used perhaps
too liberally.
And now to play the history card: Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song is a
groundbreaking step in the modern idea of independent film. With very, very
limited resources and equipment, it’s as guerilla as anything by Robert
Rodriguez. Stanley Kubrick was filming outside studios and backlots as early as
1955, but if history has taught us anything it’s that just because Kubrick does
something it doesn’t mean anyone else can. The making of Sweet Sweetback
is chronicled by Melvin Van Peebles’ son Mario in the new film Baad Asssss!
in which the father is played by the son. A tale of broken cameras and bounced
checks, Baad
Assss! is about how you basically have to be a tyrannical
S.O.B. to get a movie made in 19 days for no money. With its tone of
determination and irreverent whimsy, it definitely qualifies as a “dram-edy,”
and modern audiences will probably find it more compulsively watchable than the
film upon which it is based.
Of course, Sweet
Sweetback also gave birth to “blaxploitation” films. The phrase
“exploitation film” is tossed around a lot without anyone bothering to define
it, but this is what I think an exploitation film is: a cheap, inferior, even
campy copy of a cheap, sincere, original that made a lot of money. It is the
genre that is being exploited. It took me about the first third of Sweetback
to start taking everything at face value. Movies like Coffy
and
not coming to
a theater near you (Rumsey Taylor) review
Sweet's
Back Again Nicky Baxter from Metro
Active Arts,
The Blaxploitation Era | Harvard Magazine January-February 2003 Craig Lambert from Harvard Magazine, January/February 2003
Spectacle,
masculinity, and music in blaxploitation cinema Amanda Howell from Screening the Past,
'Rated X by an All-White Jury' Stewart Home from Mute magazine, January 5, 2006, also seen here: Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song review of DVD
Marcia
G. Yerman: Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song at Von Lintel ... Marcia G. Yerman essay from The Huffington Post,
Electric Sheep Magazine [Virginie Sélavy]
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song - The Deuce Popeye Pete from The Deuce
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3/5]
America
the Critical: 15 Movies That Show What's Wrong With U.S. (Part Three) Andrew Osborne from Nerve Screengrab,
A Wasted Life Bryin Abraham
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Blaxploitation
Pride: Melvin Van Peebles - Sweet Sweetback's ...
<Sweet Sweetback> SBBFC
The Aspect Ratio [Pete Roberts]
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [2/5]
Livejournal [ I Hate Movies] Steve Clark
Bad Movie Night [Ken M. Wilson] One of the most horrible films to endure by any one
person. There should be support groups for viewers who intend to sit through
the movie.
All Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola]
Bright Lights Film Journal | Blaxploitation Gary Morris, March 1997
Melvin Van
Peebles and the Black Panthers
Director Joe Angio and Producer Michael Solomon [How to Eat Watermelon
in White Company (and Enjoy it)] interview Black Panther Billy “X”
Vue
Weekly : Edmonton's 100% Independent Weekly : Sweet ... Sweet
Sweetback’s Baadasssss! Son, by Minister Faust from Vue magazine,
FrontPage Magazine - Panther: An Interview with Mario Van Peebles Mario shares thoughts about his father from Front Page magazine, July/August 1995
SWEET
SWEETBACK'S BAADASSSSS SONG Roger
Greenspun from The New York Times,
April 24, 1971
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review May 9, 1971
FILM
VIEW; Sweet Sweetback's World Revisited
Stephen Holden from The New York
Times,
FILM;
Can Black People Fly? Don't Ask 'Soul Plane' A.O. Scott from The New York Times,
Melvin Van Peebles - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Image results for Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song photos
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (soundtrack) - Wikipedia, the ...
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song by Melvin Van Peebles : Reviews ... musical comments from Rate Your Music
Blaxploitation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Blaxploitation.com | A soulful Tribute...
itsabouttimebpp.com. Black Panther Party Official Website
User comments from imdb Author: tomadeek29 from Detroit, Mich
If you enjoy avant-garde films
and/or cult and/or low budget black (afro-american)comedy, then you are
probably already a fan of Melvin Van Peebles. I love telling people about this
film because it's so simple yet profound and a whole lot of fun! It feels like
this film was originally a stage play cause it all takes place in one flat. The
music is bluesy, gospel and folk and yes chile it's low budget, but that's the
point. It's great to see black actors like Mabel King and Esther Rolle doing
work that you can tell they actually enjoyed doing for a change!!!! Not only
did Melvin Van Peebles write the script, but he also composed all of the music.
With the exception of Esther Rolle the cast has great, soulful voices, but even
the monotoned throaty voice of Rolle adds great character to the film. It's the
rawness and honesty of this movie that makes it so great...Besides I'm sure
Miss Rolle knows she can't sing!
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Made shortly after Sweet Sweetback's Baadassssss Song, this
Melvin Van Peebles musical follows the exploits of two devils who seem to
specialize in breaking up parties. When they turn their attention to a raucous
birthday party in
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
After pulverizing stylistic conventions in Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Melvin Van Peebles could only go back and piece the narrative shards together. Not that his follow-up, an adaptation of his own popular Broadway musical-comedy, is anywhere near Bazinian: despite the one-set constraints, Van Peebles still manages to continually carve the plot -- two devil bats materialize in human shape at a raucous Saturday night Harlem party, bent on souring the fun -- via changes in stock, spastic zooms, superimpositions, constant ruptures between sound and image. Barely released, the film's irrepressibly ethnic vaudeville is irreplaceable Soul Capsule circa 1973: former Ikette Joshie Jo Armstead doing "You Cut Up the Clothes in the Closet of My Dreams," Esther Rolle laying down the law with "It Makes No Difference," Cotton Club staple Avon Long running around, Joseph Keyes' uvula-flaunting "I'm a Bad Character," toothpick-legged ingénue Rhetta Hughes' mock-pliant "My Man," George (Ooppee) McCurn letting his gospel basso soar. Less incendiary in its polemics than Watermelon Man or Sweetback, the film is just as concerned with exploring tensions within black culture, its harmony threatened by elements of class, religion, the male image, even the myth of malevolent tricksters. (For a more subtly stylized treatment of similar themes, devilish intruder included, see Charles Burnett's splendid To Sleep With Anger.) Also with Mabel King, Thomas Anderson, Robert Dunn, and Frank Carey.
User comments from imdb Author: BOND245 from United States
One of the worst movies I have ever
seen. I realize it is supposed to be a farce, but COME ON! The audio sounds
like it was recorded on a wax record. The acting is terrible. No wonder Wyatt
from Weird Science quit the movie business. This movie wants to make me quit
the movie watching business. The budget seems to me small, but I have seen
student films shot on NO BUDGET that have better effects than this movie.
Particularly bad is when the boat explodes. GEESH!
Melvin Van Peebles also cast himself as the know-it-all detective with the hot
wife, AND as the narrator which is both confusing as a plot detail and wildly
unsuccessful. So if you haven't gather it by now, avoid this movie at all
costs.
User comments from imdb Author: raymond-15 from Australia
What young man has never yearned
for a shiny motor bike and a special girl friend? In this short film Leroy has
his dreams fulfilled in an unexpected way following a brave and courageous act.
Voodooism working on his mind transforms his unexciting life into episodes beyond
his wildest dreams.
The film is unmistakably suggestive as Leroy sits astride his powerful machine
which responds in a highly sexual fashion.
I found the computeristaion of the images quite imaginative, although the
"sexy" transformation scenes were obviously created in a studio and
not that convincing.
The film will probably appeal to young men whose dreams have not yet been fully
realised.
GANG IN BLUE – made for TV
User comments from imdb Author: Woodyanders (Woodyanders@aol.com) from The Last New Jersey Drive-In on the Left
Honest black cop Michael Rhoades (a
fine performance by Mario Van Peebles) takes a stand against a racist group of
white vigilante police officers called the Phantoms and does his best to
acquire the necessary evidence to bust these guys. Of course, Rhoades
immediately finds himself in considerable jeopardy. Directed with real style
and assurance by Mario and Melvin Van Peebles, with a strong script by Rick
Natkin and David Fuller, a credible sense of pervasive moral baseness and
corruption, a tough, gritty tone, slick cinematography by Rhett Morita, an
engrossing plot, a moody score by Larry Brown, a provocative subtext about the
abuse of power, a snappy pace, and several exciting action scenes, this movie
makes the grade as a tense and compelling cop flick. The picture further
benefits from sound acting from a top-rate cast: Josh Brolin as sadistic former
marine Keith DeBruler, Cynda Williams as helpful FBI agent Anita Boyard, the
always great J.T. Walsh as smarmy Lieutenant William Eyler, Stephen Lang as the
slimy, venomous Moose Tavola, Sean McCann as venerable old-timer Clute
Mirkovich, Melvin Van Peebles as wise, amiable veteran Andre Speier, and Bruce
Smolanoff as hateful jerk Theo Jensen. A solid and satisfying film.
It's gang time
within a police precinct as the Phantoms , a secret group of thugs in blue,
sustain a white supremacy mode. The worthy subject is not exactly a revelation,
but it bears retelling; too bad the teleplay by David Fuller and Rick Natkin is
so simplistic and the production itself so obvious. Michael
Rhoades (Mario Van Peebles) knows that, as a black cop, he's not the
precinct's pinup boy, but he tumbles to the real truth the hard way. Fuller and
Natkin let truths eke out, and Rhoades moves from plot point to plot point.
As co-directors,
Peebles and his dad Melvin Van Peebles apply speed and pressure, but it's
familiar territory. An incident at a Chinese eatery opens the action and
Rhoades'eyes to civilian treatment. The Bund tries eliminating him because he's
curious and black. He calls on his FBI ex-girlfriend Anita (Cynda Williams) to
help expose the ring, but she's into other things. The
Phantoms, practicing their excesses in everything from drug busts to
gambling raids, have their own secret clubhouse. Gang members are led by Moose
Tavola (Stephen Lang, spitting out unconditional hate), with SS-like aides
delighting in beating up anyone violating their snow-white code. An ex-Marine,
Keith DeBruler (Josh Brolin), joins the troops, and Moose moves to collect
another member. Keith's willing, and a conveniently plotted move makes him
Rhoades' partner. The Van Peebles pair, who also co-produced, send down ample
grit and gore, and there's plenty of cursing, bashing and blood and whizzing
bullets in well-choreo'd action scenes.
Production
designer Rocco Matteo has created a pungent, claustrophobic feel that's
fitting, and Rhett Morita's camerawork is effective. Mario Van Peebles wastes
his talent with a limiting, stereotyped role. Melvin Van Peebles plays veteran
cop Speier, and their verbal exchanges are flat or old hat, though the senior
actor gets off an old-fashioned truism that he makes work: "This ain't
about black, this ain't about white; it's about right, man!" Brolin's
undemanding rookie passes muster, J.T. Walsh is effective as the assured Lt.
Eyler, and Sean McCann as a depressed retiring officer succeeds. Lang's Moose
is a threatening and unsurprising meanie, and Williams' FBI character is OK. A
badly conceived proselytizing officer played by Peter Kosakais best forgotten.
Natkin and Fuller have incorporated a couple of surprises, but they can't help
a basically routine cops-and-cops meller. Larry Brown's intelligent score tries
coming to the aid, too, but it's no use. Unconvincing vidpic doesn't do much
for justice's cause.
Variety (Lisa Nesselson) review
A subversively
entertaining take on keeping up appearances via carefully spun racism and
prejudice, Melvin Van Peebles' "Bellyful" is an
original look at what transpires when closed-minded conservative hypocrites
pretend to be open-minded humanitarian liberals. Sly French-lingo venture based
on helmer's novel uses digital video to its advantage in re-creating the look
and feel of small-town France circa 1967. Pic preemed as a special presentation
in Cannes' Critics Week and opens Wednesday in Gaul; fests will find this a
welcome addition.
Respectable
middle-aged couple Loretta (Andrea Ferreol) and Henri (Jacques Boudet) tell the
director of an orphanage they've been overwhelmed with work at their bistro, Le
Ventre Plein (The Full Belly), since their daughter went to stay with a sick
aunt. Although they live in an insular, all-white community, the pair are
unnervingly eager to offer a waitressing job to a young black woman. Sweet,
trusting Diamantine (Meiji U Tum'si) fills the bill. She's about to turn 18 and
has lived her entire life at the orphanage.
Solicitous to the
point of smarminess, Loretta and Henri tell their live-in employee that she's
"one of the family," yet seem to go out of their way to encourage the
townsfolk to disapprove of the accommodating young lady. One evening, they ask
if Diamantine would be willing to repay their kindness by pretending to be
pregnant. The girl goes along with what she's been assured is a joke, wearing
increasing layers of padding under her clothes.
Loretta can barely
contain her joy when Jan (versatile Dutch musician Herman van Veen), a Flemish
friend who spent seven years in prison on a smuggling charge, comes to stay.
Jan keeps asking about their daughter but is told she's in Toulouse tending to
a sick aunt. Some 45 minutes in, the reasons for the pregnancy charade are
revealed -- and they're mighty twisted, in a quasi-upstanding sort of way.
Scripter-helmer
Van Peebles sustains an agreeably conspiratorial mood and has a field day
chipping away at the allegedly pious, self-described "pillars of the
community." Ferreol simply couldn't be better, and U Tum'si is grounded
and delightful as goodness incarnate. By setting his tale in a cultural
backwater back in the mid-'60s, when unwed mothers were automatic pariahs, Van
Peebles draws a subtle map of how intolerance can be either fanned or stamped
out.
Digital lensing is
very good, as is the film transfer. A few wacky flashbacks -- including one in
which an elderly woman permanently lends a hand to her jealous husband -- are
particularly memorable for their narrative chutzpah. Helmer also composed the
score, which ranges across several styles but favors jazzy, effusive piano
music.
Nearly three decades have passed since Van Peebles released
his X-Rated revolutionary diatribe SWEET SWEETBACK’S BADASSSS SONG (1971),
basically establishing the black independent movement in American cinema,
leading to a plethora of commercially successful blaxploitation flicks in the
70’s, but this feels like an offshoot from that film, using nearly the exact
same film style, a near indecipherable, fuzzy and rambling account of a black
man on the run, no longer using political invective, also fewer guns and less
sex, but it still feels like an underground film style continuously editing
together multiple images superimposed over the same frame, a device he uses
throughout the entire film, using music that sounds like it was recorded in the
same recording session as his earlier film.
Melvin appears in nearly every frame of this film, curiously shot in his
present age for every earlier stage of his life as he ruefully recounts the
story of his life from childhood to adulthood, using a denigrating tone to poke
fun at himself, but despite the comical title and exaggerated avant garde
style, this film makes it difficult to connect with the life experience of the
screen Melvin, who has to pursue his dream of traveling around the world in
order to discover that his true love lived in his home town neighborhood all
along. Much of this is more than a
little over the top, but it’s all in good fun, as Melvin’s life resembles a
travel brochure, as he learned to read travel periodicals in the library
instead of watching movies every week in order to avoid getting beat up by
local bad boys, something that was part of his everyday experience. Despite finding the love of his life in
Time
Out New York [David Fear]
Yousuresaidamouthful there, Melvin. The iconic director of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song recounts how his younger self—played by the preternaturally revved-up septuagenarian—gave in to a perpetual wanderlust. Then the semiautobiographical elements involving adolescent indiscretions get pushed to the side; cue crazy misadventures with pirates, African dictators and a horny ape. There’s something admirable about the anything-goes energy that Van Peebles brings to this tall tale, but the amateurishness and Video Toaster–era technical tricks start to grate after a bit. It’s a funky, free-form fairy tale, but one that only a mutha could truly love.
NewCity Chicago Ray Pride
It’s grand that a physical, mindful force of 1960s American alternative cinema like Melvin Van Peebles can tell a story at the age of 75 about being an anti-Hollywood “maverick” with an epochal success like 1971’s “Sweet Sweetback’s Badassss Song.” With “Confessions of A Ex-Doofus-Itchy Footed Mutha,” the grand old man and inveterate trickster figure becomes an unregenerate youth forever on the run. Based on his 1982 Broadway production, “Waltz of the Stork,” this partly musical semi-autobiographical fantasia uses the lower rungs of digital-video imagery to compile Van Peeble’s imagination from boyhood to middle age to mixed result. “Ex-Doofus-Itchy” is a mass of hardly digested material about twentieth-century African-American cultural experience that rings both true and deadly. Peebles looks tired. He’s lived a life. Then he made this movie. 75m.
Village Voice (Nick Pinkerton) review also here from
Zimbio: Confessionsofa
Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha Directed by Melvin Van Peebles
In Melvin Van Peebles's homely home-video-art love-story
curio, incorporating fragments of his 1982 stage musical Waltz of the Stork,
the seventysomething star-writer-director plays the lead role from age 15 to
45, opposite actors who are, in every case, younger. This makes the scenes of
teenaged sexual discovery particularly eyebrow-raising. Like practically
everything in the movie, the device only really "works" on a
theoretical level, though it's transfixing for a time, in a slightly sad way.
Van Peebles's unnamed protagonist narrates back on his life from middle age,
talking over reenactments of his running away from
CONFESSIONS OF A EX-DOOFUS-ITCHY FOOTED MUTHA Facets Multi-Media
Melvin Van Peebles-filmmaker, playwright, composer, crooner,
ladies' man, and living legend-returns to the screen with this picaresque yarn
about a boy from Chicago who wants to see the world and get rich but discovers
that all he needs is the love of a good woman. Based on Van Peebles' 1982
Broadway show Waltz of the Stork, Confessions chronicles the
adventures of a man who, armed only with a can of contingency cash, swims his
way to
User comments from imdb Author: Alex P (miskatonic86) from Baltimore, Maryland
I got to see CONFESSIONSOFA-EX-DOOFUS-ITCHYFOOTED MUTHA, Melvin van Peebles
first American film in a long time, as the closing film of the
The director himself plays an old man and former adventurer who begins to
recall his wild and wacky adventures from his teenage years to middle-age. We
see flashbacks of his life throughout. Instead of getting other actors to play
his character in these different flashbacks, van Peebles plays himself
throughout. He is a 75 year old man playing himself from ages 14 to 45ish.
Melvin van Peebles will always remain an essential figure not only to
African-American cinema but to independent cinema. I like to think of him as a
combination of Spike Lee and John Cassavetes. And CONFESSIONSOFA
EX-DOOFUS-ITCHYFOOTED MUTHA is a real independent film.
The adventures created for van Peebles' character are some of the most creative
ever. There are so many ridiculous things throughout it becomes comedic. I got
to hear a talk from the man himself after the film, and he is just like the
character he played in CONFESSIONSOFA. Must see!
Tribeca
Film Festival Review: "Confessions of an Ex-Doofus-Itchy-Footed
Mutha" Phil Nugent from Nerve Screengrab,
Melvin
Van Peebles has been well-established as a maverick independent filmmaker and
provocateur since at least 1971's Sweet Sweetback's Badassss Song. His
new film, Confessions of an Ex-Doofus-Itchy-Footed Mutha, confirms that
he's also still got a way with titles. He also still has an admirable
willingness to make a public jackass of himself and an impressive ability to
coax other people into coming along for the ride. Aside from that, though,
there isn't a lot else to say about this smeared-looking video fantasy, spun
off from one of his old stage shows, Waltz of the Stork. There might
have been a few things that should have been said to Van Peebles before he made
it, but I don't know who would have been deputized to say them. When the man's
own son, Mario, has signed off for a cameo appearance as a pirate, it's hard to
say who might have been best qualified to stage an intervention.
Confessions makes full use of the quality that has always been Van
Peebles's secret weapon and that has outweighted everything else he's ever
brought to the table, which is his absolute and fearless shamelessness. The
seventy-five-year-old auteur plays the vagabond hero from the time he's
fourteen through his mid-forties. This conceit might have been fun if Van
Peebles were an actor, but he's usually gotten by on being a presence, and
aside from the occasional outbreak of eye-popping, face-pulling hamminess, he
doesn't have any idea what to do with himself here except stand around looking
slack, sad-eyed, and grizzled. (As for costuming, Van Peebles tends to favor
either one of two looks, the funeral director and the rodeo clown.) It's less
amusing that embarrassing to watch him stealing apples as if he were in an Our
Gang comedy or acting out his character's sexual initiation and confirming
that, however long ago Sweetback was, once a stud, always a stud. (Yes,
there are sex scenes. Yes, you do get to see Melvin with his shirt off and
snuggling with the ladies, though a body double arrives in the nick of time
when things get steamy. And no, none of this is as bad as the scene with the
apple: Van Peebles has to be one of the movies' least photogenic eaters this
side of Mr. Creosote.) I understand that Van Peebles is so taken with himself
and his legend that he thinks the last thing in the world he needs is some
distance and perspective in relation to himself, but the fact remains that
Mario Van Peebles's swaggering performance as his dad in his own movie BAADASSSSS!
from a few years back was both the best work Mario's ever done in movies and
the smartest performance ever given by someone purporting to play Melvin Van
Peebles. It is indeed a tribute to Melvin Van Peebles's spirit that, at
seventy-five, he's still getting movies made and trying to use them to raise
hell. But anyone who cares about him ought to pay him the soundest tribute they
can by pretending that his latest movie doesn't exist.
Hammer
to Nail [Cullen Gallagher]
Slant
Magazine review
Bill Weber
TimeOut: Director interview Taking
Confessions, interview by Novid Parsi, from TimeOut
Chicago,
Variety Ronnie Scheib
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review
The New York Times review Mike Hale
Director site Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death
Boyd van Hoeij at
Crossover hits from
Safarian is Matty, a fierce fortysomething whose life seems to come apart after
a minor collision (the “aanrijding” of the Flemish title) with a truck
transporting Italian lollipops. The 29-year-old redhead driver Johnny (Jurgen
Delnaet) has not only bruised her car but also her sense of self. Her art
teacher husband Werner (Johan Heldenbergh) is
trying to work out whether he prefers Matty to one of his 22-year-old students,
while their three children are trying to figure out where they stand in
relation to the opportunities and pratfalls of puberty. As Johnny worms his way
into the heart of Matty and the lives of the other members of this
dysfunctional but lovable family, it becomes clear that everyone has a right to
happiness but that this right can only be obtained by making choices, which is
not always easy.
The screenplay was written by the novel-writing duo Pat van Beirs and
Jean-Claude van Rijckeghem. Beirs also translated several animated comedies
into Flemish, including Chicken Run and
Monsters Inc,
while Van Rijckeghem also had a hand in the equally warm-hearted yet truthful Man zkt vrouw (A Perfect Match). In their
screenplay, comedy, drama and nicely observed character-building moments are
finely interwoven in the first hour, with the loose yet composed camera
movements of cinematographer Ruben Impens following suit. When buried secrets
surface and romance, drama and comedy are forced to awkwardly intermingle at a
crucial dinner scene, however, Van Rompaey creates something of a dent of his
own in this otherwise utterly pleasant surprise from Flanders.
Essential
Gus Van Sant (& His Influences) | NW Film Center April 23 – June 5, 2015
Over the last three decades, Gus Van Sant has created an extraordinary body of film work. His first long-form films of the late 1980s and early 1990s, known as the “Portland Trilogy”, feature rebellious characters on the fringes of mainstream society who yearned to form new communities. The films became instant cult classics, earning Van Sant acknowledgment as one of the most talented and imaginative filmmakers of the indie film renaissance. Over the next decade, he directed a number of films that brought him critical and commercial success (the hugely popular Good Will Hunting and his bold remake of Hitchcock’s Pyscho), before embarking on a re-evaluation of his artistic process and a return to his early indie roots. This later remarkable group of films features innovative visual style and groundbreaking sound explorations. Along with this survey of his films, we offer an exciting selection of works by filmmakers that have influenced Van Sant’s film practice, including works by Stanley Kubrick, Werner Herzog, and Béla Tarr.—Mario Falsetto.
Gus Van Sant - Director
- Biography.com
Gus Van Sant
(1952-) - The Oregon Encyclopedia
biography by Edwin Battistella
Gus Van Sant |
American film director and writer | Britannica.com biography
The Remake of Psycho (Gus Van Sant, 1998) - Senses of Cinema Constantine Santas, November 5, 2000
Gerry,
or all Roads Lead to the “Thing” – Offscreen
Donato Totaro, March 2003
Gus Van Sant's brutal, confusing Elephant. - Slate Magazine David Edelstein, October 24, 2003
Blindsided
[ELEPHANT] | Jonathan Rosenbaum
November 7, 2003
ELEPHANT |
Jonathan Rosenbaum February 2, 2004
Too Cool for
School: Social Problems in Elephant • Senses of Cinema Tony McKibbin, July 26, 2004
Beauty
and the banal | Art and design | The Guardian Steve
Rose from the Guardian, January 28,
2004
Too Cool for
School: Social Problems in Elephant • Senses of Cinema Tony McKibbin, July 26, 2004
My Own
Private New Queer Cinema • Senses of Cinema Mark
Adnum from Senses of Cinema, February
8, 2005
Sublime
Anarchy in Gus Van Sant's Elephant • Senses of Cinema Neera Scott, July 22, 2005
Gus Van Sant’s Elephant: an ordinary high school movie, except
that it’s not John P. Garry III from
Jump Cut, Winter 2005, also seen
here: "Elephant"
by John P Garry III print version - Ejumpcut
Minimalism
and art-cinema narration in Gus Van Sant's Gerry ... 54-page Master’s Thesis, Minimalism and art-cinema narration in Gus
VanSant's Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days, by Matthew John Alberhasky, 2006
(pdf)
Observable
Death: Gus Van Sant's Last Days • Senses of Cinema John Lars Ericson, February 7, 2006
On the
Terminal in Cinema • Senses of Cinema
Andrew Schenker, May 19, 2008
His
Own Private Universe - DGA.org Shawn
Levy profile of the director, Summer 2008
Gus Van Sant - The Daily Beast polaroid images, May 10, 2010
Gus
Van Sant on Young Love and Young Death - The New York Times May 13, 2011
Museum
of the Moving Image - Programs - Gus Van Sant September 9 – 30, 2011
5
best Gus Van Sant films - The San Diego Union-Tribune Christy Lemire, September 15, 2011
Gus
van Sant: the last king of the underground | Film | The Guardian John Patterson, October 20, 2011
Things
I've Learned: Gus Van Sant's Six Golden Rules of Moviemaking Gus van Sant from Moviemaker magazine, June 18, 2013
Weekly
Top Five: The films of Gus Van Sant | Bleader Drew Hunt from The Chicago Reader, September 1, 2013
Realism
of the Senses in World Cinema book review
Films for the Senses: Realism
of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Reality, by Tiago
de Luca, book review by Troy Bordun from Senses
of Cinema, December 18, 2014
mono.kultur | GUS VAN
SANT Winter 2014/2015
Don’t
Underestimate My Point Of View Jen
Mitas on My Own Private Idaho from The Brooklyn Quarterly, 2015
inside
gus van sant's major new retrospective - i-D Emily Manning from i-D, April 13, 2016
The
true story behind Gus Van Sant's forthcoming gay activism ... The
true story behind Gus Van Sant’s forthcoming gay activism miniseries, by
Meagan Day from Timeline, April 26,
2016
Gus Van Sant's
Young Hollywood Icons, Revisited - The Cut
Danielle Cohen from The Cut,
June 26, 2016
See
Gus Van Sant's Major Muses in His New 'Icons' Book - artnet News Eileen Kinsella, June 28, 2016
'My
Own Private Idaho' Is a Queer Masterpiece - The Ringer K. Austin Collins, September 29, 2016
BOMB Magazine — Gus
Van Sant by Gary Indiana Gary
Indiana interview, Fall 1993
Gus
Van Sant - Salon.com Cynthia Joyce
interview, October 24, 1997
Gus
Van Sant interviews David Foster Wallace | Electric Cereal May 1998
Gus
van Sant's Gerry - Filmmaker Magazine - Winter 2002 Scott Macauley interview
Interview:
Gus Van Sant Talks Gerry, Béla Tarr, J.T. Leroy, and More ... Ed Gonzalez interview from Slant magazine, June 15, 2003
Gerald
Peary - interviews - Gus Van Sant - Elephant November 2003
Simon
Hattenstone talks to Gus Van Sant | Film | The Guardian Simon Hattenstone interview, January 23, 2004
Howard Feinstein on Gus Van Sant's new film, Last Days - The Guardian Death Trip, Howard Feinstein interviews the director from The Guardian, May 5, 2005
His Own Private Biopic | Village Voice Rob Nelson interview with Gus van Sant, July 5, 2005
The Work of Hildegard
Westerkamp in the Films of Gus Van Sant ...
Randolph Jordan interviews sound designer Hildegard Westerkamp on her
work in van Sant films, from Offscreen,
September 2007
Gus van Sant at the New York Film Festival minutes of a Van Sant Q & A at the New York Film Festival, October 9, 2007
How
Acclaimed Indie Director Gus Van Sant Finally Got Milk - LA Weekly David Ehrenstein from LA Weekly, November 26, 2008
Gus Van Sant -
Page - Interview Magazine Armistead
Maupin interview from Interview magazine,
November 26, 2008
The
MoJo Interview: Gus Van Sant – Mother Jones
Tony Dushane interview, December 5, 2008
Milk:
Interview With Director Gus Van Sant | Emanuel Levy December 8, 2008
Gus
Van Sant on the making of Milk - Telegraph
John Hiscock interview from The
Telegraph, January 2, 2009
Transcript
of the Guardian interview with Gus van Sant at the BFI ... Briony Hanson interviews Gus van Sant along
with to screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and actor James Franco from The Guardian, January 16, 2009
Gus Van Sant | The Talks August 21, 2012
Mala Noche, directed by
Gus Van Sant | Film review - Time Out
Van Sant's winning feature debut (made on 16mm for an incredible $25,000) tells the tale of a shabby store-boy's brief encounter with two desperate wetbacks. Walt (Streeter, excellent) spends most of his time selling liquor to the bums of Portland, Oregon. He becomes obsessed with 16-year-old cock-tease Johnny, who doesn't speak a word of American but knows the difference between 15 and 25 dollars. Walt pursues him in his dreams and through the rainy nights, but only manages to put up (yes, that way too) his gun-toting friend Pepper, who is in his turn pursued by the cops. Walt's pawky commentary brings out the equivocal nature of his fragile relationship with the two boys: he may nurse Pepper when he's ill, let Johnny swipe food when he's hungry, but as a comparatively wealthy gringo Walt is nevertheless exploiting the situation. Even so - as one sweaty scene reveals - a Mexican can still make 'white butt squeal'. Offbeat, offhand, and at times off-the-wall, this sad and funny film recalls Streetwise and Stranger Than Paradise, but in its own unabashed way is better than either.
I've always thought that there was a profound disconnection in
Gus Van Sant's career between his more recent masterpieces starting with 2002's
Gerry, and everything he'd made previously. Even Drugstore Cowboy
and My Own Private Idaho, as worthwhile as they are, seem to have little
to do with his recent spate of languid, existential tone poems — and this is to
say nothing of the more commercial films he made in the intervening years. But
seeing his debut feature, Mala Noche,
for the first time is a truly revelatory experience in terms of Van Sant's
career arc. This moody, lyrical ode to homosexual desire among the down and out
in Portland is something of a missing link for those who, like me, had only
seen the films Van Sant made after this point. In this film, Van Sant was
already sowing the seeds that would flower into the thematic territory of films
like Drugstore Cowboy, but more importantly this film represents the
aesthetic foundation of Van Sant's mature style.
Evocative, elliptical, and narratively rootless, the film wanders aimlessly
around a central love triangle involving a gay store clerk, Walt (Tim
Streeter), and two illegal Mexican immigrants, Johnny (Doug Cooeyate) and
Pepper (Ray Monge). Walt provides the film's narration, with a wry,
self-deprecating wit and a knack for finding the poetic in his prosaic struggles
to get laid. His first lines inform us that he wants Johnny, but he winds up
sleeping with the much more readily accessible Pepper instead, while continuing
to pine after his love. The film's aesthetic is dark, shadowy, its protagonists
constantly lost in black with only fleeting flashes of light to illuminate
their features. The high-contrast photography, truly black and white with very
little gray in between, heightens the film's low-budget noir atmosphere. The
noir reference serves as a metaphor for the outsider status of these
characters, and the gun which gets passed between them is an icon of both death
and sex.
But this should not imply that Mala Noche comes across as some kind of
radical gay political statement. As in all of Van Sant's films, there are
traces of social and political commentary, especially on society's treatment of
its marginal and outsider figures. There's also a potent examination of race
and immigration, and the sexual exploitation that can take advantage of
desperation — although the issue is complicated by the question of whether Walt
is exploiting his objects of desire, or whether they're exploiting him because
his desire makes him need them. Of course, Van Sant never allows these
political and social subtexts to overwhelm either his story or his chiaroscuro
style. The film's most radical statement, in fact, is its casual acceptance of
these characters' gay or borderline gay lifestyles as a simple matter of fact,
without making it a point of explicit commentary. In Van Sant's later films,
possibly excepting My Own Private Idaho, I've always felt that he has
made homosexuality something of a peripheral matter, one facet among many in
his complex aesthetic. It's an arguable subtext in Gerry, and it's given
brief self-contained scenes — much mis-interpreted and endowed with greater
significance by all quarters — in Last Days and Elephant.
It can also be said that Mala Noche avoids treating its gayness in the
usual ways. Homosexual desire is the film's central theme, and this desire is
explored in the most sumptuous, sensual manner possible, capturing the true
feeling of desire and lust in the richly textured visuals. The film's most
memorable scene is its only love scene, between Walt and Pepper, which Van Sant
portrays in extremely tight close-ups that only rarely betray any sense of
space. Instead, the scene is built around brightly lit areas of bare skin,
flashes of facial expressions mingling pain and lust, bodies pressing together
either fighting or loving. Surrounded by total darkness, and hidden by it, the
two men come together for a night of near-violent desire, and the frisson
between them is palpable on-screen in the flashing light-and-dark compositions
that hardly reveal a thing. It's a deeply erotic scene, but the effect of the
focus on bare skin and shadowy close-ups is to generalize this depiction of
desire. In the absence of context — and without the mid-scene break for a
Vaseline run — it could just as easily be a man and a woman, or two women for
that matter. The important thing is all the bare skin touching, the hands
grasping, the smiles and gasps, the shuffling around in the sheets. This is
desire, pure and simple.
Indeed, there has hardly been any greater cinematic ode to desire than this
one. Van Sant's grasp of this material is prodigious, and for a novice director
he seems remarkably in control of every aspect of the film. The film's low
budget occasionally shows through in its touch-and-go audio and the amateurish
performances (actually its biggest asset), but the lush imagery and carefully
paced visual storytelling make this an essential touchstone for all Van Sant
admirers. I'd even venture to say that it's his finest film prior to his recent
re-birth with Gerry, far surpassing his better-known early works.
Mala Noche (1986) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Sean Axmaker
Gus Van Sant's intimate
black and white tale of l'amour fou has been hailed as a precursor to the
American wave of queer cinema that started to swell in the late eighties. Its
credentials are established in the opening lines as Walt (Tim Streeter), a
counter jockey at a hole-in-the-wall liquor store, gazes upon Johnny (Doug
Cooeyate), an illegal Mexican immigrant with fleshy lips, a wide, youthful
grin, and a streak of juvenile machismo. "I want to drink this Mexican
boy, Johnny Alonzo," he rhapsodizes in voice-over, and he spends the rest
of the movie doing all he can to get next to this beautiful boy ("He says
he's 18, but he's probably 16," Walt confesses). Johnny is full of
attitude and sass and contempt for his gay admirer, but not too proud to take
advantage of Walt's desire for his company to score a handout at the store or a
turn behind the wheel of Walt's car (which he pilots with the reckless mania of
a teenager on a video game).
Walt's homosexuality isn't a statement, it's a given, and the sexual politics
are presented with such matter-of-fact directness that they simply become part
of the cultural chasm between Walt and Johnny and the social landscape of the
skid row of Van Sant's adopted Portland, Oregon, home. The film is a study in
infatuation and rejection, euphoria and frustration, and Van Sant observes
their dance of desire and dismissal and wary coexistence without judgment. But
it's also a portrait in life on the streets, of survival on the lowest rung of
the social ladder.
Mala Noche also harkens from a time when independent cinema was often
regional cinema and films could grow from within a community, drawing identity
and color from the crucible of local culture and the physical world of its
environs. Shot for $25,000 on 16mm black-and-white film, it captures the
physical and social atmosphere of Portland's run down Northwest area, of transient
motels and liquor in corner stores and a homeless population loitering in the
streets, with such vivid detail that you can recognize the authenticity without
ever having set foot in the real life location.
Mala Noche was Van Sant's debut feature, though by his own admission it
wasn't his first attempt at a feature. He shot a comedy in Los Angeles in the
seventies called Alice in Hollywood, which he ended up cutting down to
under an hour and then just gave up on. "It really didn't get anywhere, it
wasn't that good," he confesses in a 2007 interview. It was a comedy and
it really wasn't that funny." After getting some attention with a short
called The Discipline of D.E., adapted from the William Burroughs short
story, he headed to Portland, Oregon (where he had spent some time during his
childhood, one of the many places his salesman father moved the family for his
job). After meeting Portland "street poet" Walt Curtis on a film job,
serving as a sound recordist on a 1979 film called Property, he read his
quasi-autobiographical novel "Mala Noche" and decided to adapt his
work.
Curtis was originally slated to play himself but Van Sant started having second
thoughts as the shooting neared. He thought that, though Curtis is a good
screen presences, "it's a little schizophrenic paying yourself" and
decided to cast around. He found his Walt in Tim Streeter, who had been
performing locally in a Sam Shepard. Doug Cooeyate, who looks so perfect in the
part of the young Mexican immigrant Johnny, was actually a Native American high
school kid from the middle class Portland suburb of Beaverton who simply showed
up at a casting call. He didn't speak a word of Spanish and his dialogue was
all dubbed (which explains the curious credit: Arturo Torres as the voice of
Johnny). Ray Monge, who plays Johnny's buddy "Pepper," was found in a
Portland boxing club.
Van Sant shot on the streets of Northwest Portland and rural areas outside the
city, scouting locations on the fly and shooting as they went with a minimal
crew – for the most part
limited to Van Sant, cinematographer John Campbell, and sound recordist Pat
Baum – and the small cast. In
his own words, "It was pretty unorganized." He describes his
adaptation more as a sketch than a conventional script and he worked largely from
storyboards. Rehearsals were minimal and lighting, limited to a small
collection of spotlights and a soft fill light, was kept simple and practical.
For the dusky store interiors and night scenes, it resulted in a high contrast
look, a small island of hard light on the action while the rest of the image
faded into inky blackness. It gives the film a dramatic palette that pushes the
largely handheld camerawork and loose, improvisational performances into a
state of heightened naturalism.
The 1984 production never had real theatrical distribution or a home video
release until Criterion, working with Van Sant, brought it to DVD in it's
"Director-Approved" edition. The high definition transfer is, in a
word, gorgeous, revealing a crisply shot daytime scenes with a wide range of
gray tones, and high contrast night scenes and interiors with a dynamic
chiaroscuro palette. Van Sant sits down for a 24-minute interview recorded for
the DVD, where he describes the origins of the project and the production of
the film, and briefly talks about the culture of gay cinema of the time and the
direction of his career. He describes his most recent films - Elephant, Last
Days and Paranoid Park - as a return to the freedom and evocative
simplicity of Mala Noche.
The disc also features Walt Curtis: The Peckerneck Poet, a 1997
documentary feature on the author of the novel Mala Noche by Portland
animator and filmmaker Bill Plympton, a gallery of Gus Van Sant's storyboards,
and the original trailer, which Van Sant edited himself. The accompanying
booklet features a new essay by film critic Dennis Lim.
Mala Noche: Other Love criterion essay by Dennis Lim, October
06, 2007
Mala Noche (1985) - The
Criterion Collection
Mala Noche | PopMatters
Meremu C.
Mala Noche - Archive
- Reverse Shot Jeff Reichert, November 10, 2007
In the
Beginning | Village Voice Nathan Lee
Mala Noche | Film
Review | Slant Magazine Rob Humanick
Surrender
to the Void-[Steven Flores]
Mala Noche Antonio
Pasolini from Kamera
DVD
Talk - Criterion edition [Jamie S. Rich] also seen here: Criterion
Confessions
Summer
of '88: Mala Noche | The House Next Door | Slant Magazine Drew Hunt
The
Criterion Collection Database [Paul Schrodt]
Mala Noche - AV Club Film Noel Murray
Mala noche Chuck Aliaga from digitallyOBSESSED
Mala noche Gary Couzens from Video Vista
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Emma Slawinski]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Review/Film - 'Mala Noche' on Skid Row - NYTimes.com Vincent Canby
For
all the boredom the straight life brings, it’s not that bad. —Bob Hughes (Matt Dillon)
God
bless you. May you go to heaven. —Tom the Priest (William S.
Burroughs)
One of the early Van Sant indie films shot in and around Portland, Oregon, giving it that shadowy gray feel of the Pacific Northwest, a glum movie based on the real life exploits of author James Fogle, a junkie who has spent a good deal of his life in prison for making a living by stealing pharmaceuticals from west coast drug stores, whose first hand experience adds a core of authenticity to what we see onscreen. Matt Dillon as Bob, a junkie all his life, narrates while leading us on his journey of petty crime, something like a junkie’s GOODFELLAS (1990, made a year later), exposing the habits of a small outlaw gang that includes Kelly Lynch as his wife Diane, and obedient partners in crime Rick (James Le Gross) and Nadine (Heather Graham), both a few screws loose upstairs. Whenever they score and divide up the drugs afterwards, Nadine always gets the short stick, as she’s not considered a lifer, someone that’s been at it since they were kids. In fact, we’re never sure if she even likes to get high, so she doesn’t get much respect and is considered the group’s weak link, and she resents it, which has its own devastating consequences. The gang itself resembles romantic outlaws Bonnie and Clyde, as they all hide out and commit their crimes together, never really leaving one another’s side except when they get high, veering off into their own clouded stratospheres before planning another score.
Bleak and uncompromising, the film plays out like a road
movie with plenty of dark-edged, absurdist humor. Set in the early 70’s when
drugs were a more commonly accepted way of life, it was also a time when rents
were still cheap enough for young kids to live communally in small groups and
not draw suspicion. This is an
unsentimental, non-judgmental portrayal of people living on the fringe of
society balanced against the
The film turns into a moral dilemma for Bob, who’s been there, done that, and sees fewer and fewer options up the road ahead, as he grows tired of repeating himself, doing the exact same things over and over, and having to think and be accountable for his 4 person family, which grows all the more tiresome after awhile, especially when you’re constantly on edge. Even the drugs don’t feel all that great after awhile, constantly nagging you for more. So he decides to go straight, quitting the gang and heading for a methadone program back in the city, which everyone thinks is some kind of scam, as there must be an ulterior plan. Even the cops don’t believe him. But the true joy of this picture is Bob meeting notorious junkie writer William S. Burroughs in the flesh, a ghostly presence who looks like death warmed over as Tom the Priest in a fleabag hotel for recovering addicts, where the first thing Tom asks him is if he’s holding? Burroughs himself is the voice of legitimacy, a former Beat Generation writer whose creepy drug-warped mind is responsible for writing Naked Lunch, but is also the role model for other drug-crazed paranoid isolationists who are too weirded out by the straight life, like Hunter S. Thompson, guys who simply don’t play by any rules. Burroughs in real life was probably the longest active patient in the history of methadone maintenance programs, and as Father Tom he most certainly represents the ghost of Christmas future, as that’s where Bob is heading if he doesn’t change his ways. Balancing a downbeat, jazzy score by Abbey Lincoln singing “For All We Know” with the upbeat Desmond Dekker reggae classic “The Israelites” to great effect, Van Sant also includes his signature time-lapse photography while adding surreal animation layered over the image for drug-induced visions. Without ever becoming moralistic, this is a true Van Sant movie, unrelenting in its authenticity, beautifully portrayed by the cast who simply inhabit their roles, there isn’t an ounce of artifice here as the director takes us on the road least traveled.
Musical Soundtrack
"For All We Know"
Written by J. Fred Coots
& Sam Lewis
Vocal Performance by Abbey
Lincoln
Piano Accompaniment by Geri Allen
Used by permission of SBK Feist Catalong, Inc. and Cromwell Music, Inc.
"Little Things"
Written & Performed by Bobby
Goldsboro
Used by permission of SBK Unart Catalog, Inc.
Under license from CEMA Special Markets, EMI Records, Inc.
"Psychotic Reaction"
Written by Ken Ellner, Roy Chaney, Craig
Atkinson, John Byrne & John Michalski
Performed by Count Five (as
The Count Five)
Published by Drive-In Music
Courtesy of Original Sound Record Co., Inc.
"Put a Little Love in Your Heart"
Written by Jimmy Holiday, Randall Meyers (as Randy Myers)
& Jackie DeShannon
Performed by Jackie DeShannon
Used by permission of SBK Unart Catalog, Inc.
Under license from CEMA Special Markets, EMI Records, Inc.
"TV Commercial Music"
Written and Performed by Will
Kaplan
"Piu Amore Romantico Per Anna"
Composed & Produced by Jeff Levi
Published by Laughing Cloud Music
"The Israelites"
Written by Desmond Dekker
& Leslie Kong
Performed by Desmond Dekker
& The Aces
Courtesy of Island Records, Inc.
"I Am"
Music & Lyrics by Roky
Erickson
Produced by Craig Luckin & Karl
Derfler
Performed by Roky Erickson
& Jack Johnson
Courtesy of Restless/Pink Dust Records
"Judy in Disguise"
Written by John Fred & Andrew Bernard
Performed by John Fred and His Playboy Band
Published by Su-Ma Music
Courtesy of Janus Records
c/o Original Sound Entertainment
"Cherry Lips"
Written by Scotty Moore (as
Winfield Scott)
Performed by The Robins
Published by Neil Music, Inc.
Courtesy of GNP Crescendo Records
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Bob (Dillon), his wife Dianne (Lynch), Rich (Le Gros) and
Nadine (Graham) are junkies who survive by robbing pharmacies in
User reviews from imdb (Page 4) Author: jmorrison-2 from Farmington Hills, MI
I actually grew up with people like this. Not all, but I knew people like
this. People who had nothing, going nowhere, living on ratty beds and couches,
with parents who barely noticed, or weren't around. Now on their own, with
absolutely no skills or abilities (or desire) to head in any other direction but
the pursuit of the next high. Always scheming to get their next stash. Hiding
and ducking in their own living room, from imagined threats and paranoic
fantasy. Characters who would show up, and act bizarrely, with hangers-on who
desperately wanted to be accepted by this aimless bunch. Barely hanging on to
any semblance of a "regular life", one half-step away from scrounging
in garbage cans.
I never got too close to those people, and ended up joining the service, and
never looked back to what happened to them.
Matt Dillon was exceptional, and a decent job by the cast all around. Dillon
captured the essence of a smart guy, who knew what a dead-end existence he
lived in, but was unwilling or unable to yet break free. Brilliantly directed
by Gus Van Zant. He captured this ugly life well.
The deadpan comic buzz you get from Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy is practically narcotic. The movie heightens your senses and mildly anesthetizes them at the same time, like a potent mixture of stimulants and depressants. One of the most invigoratingly original American comedies since Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise, Drugstore Cowboy follows druggy, irregular rhythms all its own. Whether in a heavy-lidded daze or wired with giddy, post-high paranoia, Drugstore Cowboy displays an uncanny alertness to detail and texture -- yellow-white bus headlights that barely penetrate the slate-gray, late-afternoon gloom on a rain-drenched northwestern road; the surreal surge of blood into a hypodermic syringe as it enters a vein in intensified close-up... But the film's vibrant aliveness to such minute sensations is submerged beneath a cold, clammy complexion: the blue-gray pallor of a day-old corpse.
Set under the oppressive, overcast skies of Portland, Oregon, in 1971, Drugstore Cowboy boldly stakes out a piece of cinematic fringe territory, as seemingly remote as the chilly little corner of the world in which this dead-end road movie takes place. In a late-'80s America obsessed with winners, and a contemporary climate of anti-drug sentiment verging on hysteria, Van Sant has made a devastatingly funny, melancholy but unromanticized picture about a bedraggled band of doped-up losers -- with no apologies to (or excuses for) anybody. It's a shame you even feel the need to mention that this isn't a revisionist anti-drug tract, or a seductive glamorization of narcotics use/abuse. That much ought to be as apparent as it is irrelevant to what this movie's up to.
The first shot fixes us inside the consciousness of Bob Hughes (Matt Dillon, in a perfectly modulated performance), the 26-year-old leader of a scruffy, four-person pharmaceutical burglary ring. Staring semi-catatonically into the camera from his mattress, with hallucinatory lights playing across over his cold-sweat-glistened face, Bob appears to be either high or dying. Or both. He's fully aware of what is happening to him, and how he got here, but he doesn't (or can't) move. For the moment, he's just along for the ride. And he takes us with him, down a convoluted and dope-sodden memory lane.
"I was once a shameless, full-time drug fiend," Bob recalls in voiceover as he reminisces about his druggie days of not so long ago, when his family circle included his loyal partner/girlfriend Dianne (Kelly Lynch), his earnestly dense, Saint Bernard-like buddy Rick (James Le Gross) and Rick's restive teenage girlfriend Nadine (Heather Graham). All of these terrific performers -- along with William S. Burroughs as a defrocked, zoned-out junkie priest, James Remar as Bob's cop nemesis, Grace Zabriskie as Bob's scolding mom and Max Perlich as a neighborhood weasel -- inhabit their roles organically, never betraying any sense of superiority to their characters.
We first see Bob's crew in grainy, shaky 8mm home-movie memories, self-consciously goofy images of youthful, stoned innocence. These compulsive outlaws aren't greedy career criminals; they're benumbed rather than hardened. As they see it, they're just trying to make a living the best way they know how. And living, for them, means forever scrambling from one fix to the next, searching to sustain that elusive chemical high. Bob can't even wait until he gets home after pulling a job. He shoots up in the backseat of the getaway car and slumps against the window as little silhouetted, refrigerator-magnet images of cowboy hats and syringes slide down the glass, like shadowy floaters gliding across the surface of your eyeballs.
While the rest of the gang provides distraction, Bob trusts only himself to do the hands-on work, rifling through behind-the-counter pharmacy drawers for prime pills and injectables. He's ecstatic after a score, bragging about the street value of the loot, but he never gets around to selling any of it because of the insatiable habits of his consumer household. Dianne gets a sexual thrill from the drugs, but like the impotent Joe in Andy Warhol's Trash (one of this movie's funny, dopey ancestors), Bob isn't interested. He's already planning the next job, the next challenge. Looking for that imaginary pot of pharmeceuticals at the end of the rainbow, Bob gets as big a kick from stealing as he does from the illegally obtained substances themselves.
Bob and Dianne, who have settled into their roles as old man and old lady to the childlike Rick and Nadine, take their parental responsibilities seriously. In one hilarious living-room family conference, the stoned "parents" give the "kids" a wacked-out lesson in survival, solemnly explaining the oblique but somehow uncontestable reasons behind such superstitious house rules as No Dogs and Never Put a Hat on the Bed.
There's so much going on here: Bob and Dianne, intent upon impressing Rick and Nadine with the gravity of the matters at hand, seem to be talking themselves into believing their own implausible explanations, recalling the tragi-comic tale of a beloved housepet as if it were a nearly forgotten bad dream they once shared. Gullible Rick sincerely wants to believe them, but is surprised to find himself mildly skeptical. Still, he's good-natured enough to give Bob the benefit of any doubt. And Nadine -- like a brattly little girl who's always spoiling illusions by asking 'Why?' -- doesn't swallow a word of it, though she's too scared and insecure to admit it. She's tired of being Bob's scapegoat, the source of the hex he claims is bringing them bad luck.
Needless to say, this is not a movie about the "Just Say No" generation, although it does reveal some of the glibness behind that specious motto. "Just Say No" may make a fine slogan for a publicity campaign aimed at schoolchildren, but for junkies already driven by the desperate (and inevitably doomed) need to string out a perpetual chemical high, it's simply not a realistic option. Bob eventually decides to "Just Say No" -- but it takes a junkie's full-blown nightmare come true (smuggling a corpse out of a motel room during a sherriff's convention) to turn him around. Rather than face a lifetime hex, he decides trade in his illegal habit for an authorized methadone maintainence program and a regular job, even though he knows it means breaking up the family.
Bob's conversion isn't a triumph for sobriety, just another manifestation of his innate integrity. For Bob, the straight life proves scarcely any different from the high life -- you just trade one form of lucidity for another, one form of numbness for another. Drugs, he reasons (without irony), are just things people use "to relieve the pressures of everyday life, like tying their shoelaces." The toughest thing is learning to live with the uncertainty: "Most people don't know how they're gonna feel from one moment to the next. But dope fiends have a pretty good idea. All you gotta do is look at the labels on the little bottles..."
Drugstore
Cowboy - Archive - Reverse Shot
Nathan Kosub, November 11, 2007
The Tech (MIT) (Annabelle Boyd) review
Edinburgh U Film Society (Alistair Harkness) review
Movieline Magazine dvd review F.X. Feeney
eFilmCritic.com (Chris Parry) review [5/5]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer) dvd review
DVD
Talk (Marc Girdler) dvd review
[3/5]
A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd review
DVD Authority.com (Matt Brighton) dvd review [Special Edition]
Medium.com: Drew Hunt March 09, 2015
eFilmCritic.com (Jack Sommersby) review [5/5]
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [3.5/5]
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
Drugstore Cowboy Hal Erickson from All Movie Guide
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]
Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
Siskel & Ebert (video)
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
Filming Locations for Drugstore Cowboy
Drugstore Cowboy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
William S. Burroughs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
William
S. Burroughs | Literary Kicks Levi
Asher from Literary Kicks,
William S Burroughs: The Biography Project
William S. Burroughs Books and Writers biography
Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoo
Hoo Hoo
You're living in your own Private Idaho
Living in your own Private Idaho
Underground like a wild potato.
Don't go on the patio.
Beware of the pool,
blue bottomless pool.
It leads you straight
right throught the gate
that opens on the pool.
You're living in your own Private Idaho.
You're living in your own Private Idaho.
Keep off the path, beware the gate,
watch out for signs that say "hidden driveways".
Don't let the chlorine in your eyes
blind you to the awful surprise
that's waitin' for you at
the bottom of the bottomless blue blue blue pool.
You're livin in your own Private Idaho.
You're out of control, the rivers that roll,
you fell into the water and down to
Get out of that state,
get out of that state you're in.
You better beware.
You're living in your own Private Idaho.
You're living in your own Private Idaho.
Keep off the patio,
keep off the path.
The lawn may be green
but you better not be seen
walkin' through the gate that leads you down,
down to a pool fraught with danger
is a pool full of strangers.
You're living in your own Private Idaho,
where do I go from here to a better state than this.
Well, don't be blind to the big surprise
swimming round and round like the deadly hand
of a radium clock, at the bottom, of the pool.
I-I-I-daho
I-I-I-daho
Woah oh oh woah oh oh woah oh oh
Ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah
Get out of that state
Get out of that state
You're living in your own Private Idaho,
livin in your own Private....
B-52's
Private Idaho - YouTube (
I'm
a connoisseur of roads. I've been tasting roads my whole life. This road will
never end. It probably goes all around the world.
—Mike Waters (River
This is an extremely personalized vision, only van Sant’s
third film, but the one that offers him the largest range of expression, using
the entire cinema vocabulary, as he knew it, supposedly inspired by the B-52’s
song B-52's Private Idaho
- YouTube (3:21), creating this odd,
truly off-the-wall, mystifyingly unique film, but one that sets the foundation
for so many van Sant themes that he would continue to return to throughout his
career, like loneliness, adolescence, alienation, sexuality, gay love, freedom,
identity, and outsiderism. But here it’s
like there’s no tomorrow, so he throws everything into this film, cramming it
with surrealistic detail and stylish flourish, using a documentary style
realism mixed with an experimental or underground feel, using a frequent return
to dream sequences, some of which resemble home movie memories, while others
are more surrealistic where buildings fly and porn magazines talk, mixing
plenty of street slang and improvised dialogue with bits of Shakespearean
reference to Falstaff and Prince Hal’s musings from Henry IV, where the weakness may be the sense that it’s not really
about anything, that it’s allowed to drift, not so much telling a story as
aimlessly airing out one’s imagination, reflected in the vast emptiness of a
road movie. The heart of the film lies
in the central character, River
Mike suffers from narcolepsy, where conflict and aggravated
stress cause him to pass out, which comes on much like a seizure, leaving him
openly vulnerable and alone on the side of the road. For most of the film, his best friend Scott
(Keanu Reeves) picks him up and comes to his aid, where they run the streets
together as male sex hustlers, picking up customers whenever they can, where
Mike’s condition is bad for business, but Scott is there to cover his
tracks. Scott is the Prince Hal heir to
the throne, as he’s the mayor’s son, but rejects all the trappings of wealth
and status and prefers the freedom of running the streets, partying and getting
high with a gang of homeless misfits living in a vacated condemned building,
where they have their own street mayor, Bob (William Richert), who’s the
Falsaff king of the drunks, prone to tales with excessive exaggeration, usually
the butt of all jokes. The true standout
of this group is the 92-year old Sally Curtice as Jane Lightwork, whose spry
wit would happily fill any movie screen, making the rest seem like pure
amateurs in comparison. But for true
eccentricity, no one is any weirder than Udo Kier as Hans, a strange guy who
keeps popping up in this movie, if for no other reason than he stands for the
old world style of male hustler, now more settled and refined, but still a
connoisseur of young boys. Moving
periodically from Seattle to Portland to Idaho, Scott and Mike hit the road on
a whim in search of Mike’s long lost mother, leaving behind the strange and
eccentric sexual practices of their seedy customers who certainly add bold new
images to the idea of peculiar. Again
it’s Udo Kier that takes the cake with his own spectacularly deviate rendition
of a lamp dance, seen here: Mr. Hans performs Der Adler
(My Own Private Idaho) - YouTube (
The overriding theme of the film seems to be expressed by the crushing isolation of River Phoenix’s character, where perhaps the moment of the film is a stunning campfire sequence with Keanu Reeves, largely improvised by Phoenix, where he accepts initially that they’re best friends, but slowly acknowledges that he feels a deeper personal connection, where the setting of the two of them under a darkened sky out on the open road adds even more to the special poignancy of the moment. It’s an interesting contrast between the two characters as they seem to be breaking new ground but in separate ways, an agonizingly intense confession for one, while something of a strange and awkward moment for the other. Eventually the search for Mike’s mother takes them to a remote farm in Italy, where like a scene out of THE GODFATHER (1972), Scott immediately falls in love with a beautiful young Italian girl Carmelia (Chiara Caselli), where he has a belated effect from the campfire scene, leaving Mike all alone once again to fend for himself.
Van Sant curiously intersperses various sequences with patriotic music, like America the Beautiful, adding a touch of personal irony when needed. The Shakespearean coronation takes place when Scott acquires his inheritance upon turning 21, where the world of money and prestige and a lovely new girlfriend leads him through the open doors of affluence and social distinction, leaving the world of Bob and the underground street misfits behind, having no use for them anymore. It’s a disquieting moment, made all the more chilling by Keanu Reeves and his impassive yet typically wooden expression. In the end, love may come and go, but all you have is yourself, the open road in front of you, and the freedom to take it.
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
Gus Van Sant searched for and found a new vocabulary
in this utterly seminal, decade-defining punk of a movie, as restless, densely
inhabited, and full of half-cocked brilliance as a tweak house in springtime.
The ostensible subject at hand is
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
A lyrical portrait of aimless youth painted with touches of
Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho is
cold and uninvolving, which isn’t to say that it’s wholly unsuccessful. Rather,
if one can look past the filmmaker’s affected Bard adaptation – which has the
raggedy, improvisational feel of a community theater production – and his
insipid romanticizing of gay street hustlers into icons of grungy, sexy
coolness, there exists a quite stark, poetic rumination on the unyielding
desire for home. Narcoleptic Mike (River Phoenix) lives life in a fugue state
between sleep and consciousness, and his days in the Pacific Northwest are
spent whoring himself out to johns and hanging out with his Prince Hal-ish
cohort Scott (Keanu Reeves), an heir to political power and wealth slumming it
as a male prostitute. Their episodic journey from Portland to Idaho to Italy
and back in search of Mike’s mom puts them in contact with an assortment of
strange characters – including the Falstafian Bob Pigeon (William Richert) and
a German auto parts salesman (Udo Kier) – but Van Sant’s film never assumes a
straightforward narrative, instead using primary-colored intertitle cards,
symbolic insert shots, and an elliptical structure to foster a dreamlike
atmosphere that, like his Bela Tarr-inspired trilogy of recent years, strives
to situate viewers in a distinct time and space. Such an endeavor is
all-too-often undermined by his clunky Shakespearean conceit and his quickly
wearisome habit of cinematographically drooling over the posing Reeves and
Freewheeling and mercurial, this engaging compilation of
writer-director Van Sants fads and fancies dances along the narrow line between
inspiration and affectation. In the chilly Pacific north-west (
Its hard to know which aspect of
The picture does sag a little whenever Richert and Kier are off-screen,
but there’s always something going on even if its just rushing clouds.
Because, while occasionally capable of striking visuals and moments of
hallucinatory, poetic intensity (most famously, a shack landing on an Idaho
backroad in one of Mikes many fantasies), Van Sant more often doesn’t just
flirt with clich, he drags it home with him: whenever Mike has a narcoleptic
seizure (which is repetitively often) we get hackneyed, grainy 8mm-style
flashbacks to his infant years with Mom in Idaho. And, while undeniably a
talented director (as confirmed by his previous and subsequent films) there are
times when he comes across like the gauchest of indie poseurs, such as the
arbitrarily tilted camera-angles deployed to film the
filmcritic.com Jake Euker
Mike Waters (River Phoenix) is a narcoleptic street hustler who
lives in the bus terminal, streets, and abandoned buildings of
There is no very good reason that My Own Private Idaho should succeed:
It's unfocussed and wildly improbable, its narrative is willfully ungainly,
and, in its second half, much of the dialogue is written in a kind of
impromptu, ersatz Shakespeare. (Time, says Scott at one point, is 'a fair
hustler in black leather'; one assumes that neither
I credit Van Sant. Most directors, I imagine, would balk at a concept that
requires a story of male prostitution to transform suddenly into Elizabethan
theater halfway through, or that transports its homeless protagonists to
In My Own Private Idaho there's a lot more hip, oddly hopeful poetry
where that came from. This milestone independent film is now available on DVD
from the Criterion Collection (including a mountian of goodies: a two-hour
interview with Van Sant (audio only), new making-of retrospective, interviews
galore, deleted scenes, and an impressive booklet with essays and printed
interviews). Welcome back.
My
Own Private Idaho: Private Places
Criterion essay by Amy Taubin,
Gloomy Gus Criterion essay
My Own Private Idaho (1991) - The Criterion Collection
My Own
Private New Queer Cinema • Senses of Cinema Mark
Adnum from Senses of Cinema, February
8, 2005
'My
Own Private Idaho' Is a Queer Masterpiece - The Ringer K. Austin Collins, September 29, 2016
My Own
Private Idaho - Archive - Reverse Shot
Marianna Martin, November 12, 2007
My Own
Private Idaho - Archive - Reverse Shot
Travis Mackenzie Hoover, November 12, 2007
'My Own Private
Idaho' Is Anything but a Conventional ... - PopMatters Sarah Boslaugh, November 19, 2015
“The Golden Suicides,” Nancy Jo Sales from Vanity Fair, January 2008
Psychedelic Papas and the Oedipal Mama: Lonesome Trajectories Psychedelic Papas and the Oedipal Mama: Lonesome Trajectories and Psychic Topographies within the Flesh and Psyche in Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho, by Kaizaad Kotwal from The Film Journal (Undated)
Surrender to the Void-[Steven Flores] (DVD) Criterion Collection
The Film Journal DVD review J.D. Lafrance, Criterion Collection
The QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick] Criterion Collection
My Own Private Idaho - Criterion Collection : DVD Talk Review of ... Francis Rizzo III from DVD Talk
Film-Forward.com [DVD review] Steven Cordova, Criterion Collection
Cinema Blend - DVD Review Scott Gwin
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Joel Cunningham)
dOc DVD Review: My Own Private Idaho (1991) - digitallyOBSESSED Joel Cunningham from the Criterion Collection
Movie Poop Shoot [D. K. Holm] Criterion Collection
DVD Verdict Brett Cullum, Criterion Collection
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Edward Copeland on Film (Jonathan Pacheco)
Turning
Shakespearean Tricks David Ansen
from Newsweek,
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
My Own Private Idaho Chris Dashiell from CineScene
Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]
Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
Siskel & Ebert (video)
Movie Review - My Own Private Idaho ... - Movies - New York Times Vincent Canby
My Own Private Idaho - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Private Idaho (song) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
What's
the point in doing something good if nobody's watching? —Suzanne
Stone (Nicole Kidman)
DEAD CALM (1989) introduced a young 22-year old Nicole
Kidman to movie screens, but it’s her outrageous performance as a celebrity obsessed
small town television wannabe in Gus van Sant’s TO DIE FOR that introduced her
to the world and remains her most stunning performance in her much heralded
career. Kidman’s range is impressive as
she wears so many hats in this film (and stunning outfits) that it seems like
she suffers from personality disorder, but what she’s really doing is
introducing a character that is literally performing all the time, in every
situation she finds herself, just hoping for that rare opportunity of being
discovered and becoming a TV star. It’s all
she ever thinks about as van Sant presents this film in overlapping layers,
beginning with the montage of tabloids that have a field day with photographs
of Suzanne Stone, this glamorous woman who is suspected to have been involved
in the murder of her husband, which is seen in the beginning of the film, so
everything that’s shown afterwards is seen in flashback, like the renowned
structure for Joan Crawford in MILDRED PIERCE (1945). Based on a novel by Joyce Maynard, the film is unofficially
based on the story of Pamela Smart, a 23-year old
Kidman is seen as a pampered Barbie-like beauty queen who’s used to having her way, something of a socialite who is trying everything she can to be noticed, as she’s amazingly ambitious, a woman who has had her career mapped out in front of her since childhood. She marries the cutest guy in town, Matt Dillon as Larry, who works in his father’s bar and also plays drums for a local bar band, which is where Suzanne stands out from the rest, all decked out in a provocatively skimpy outfit so Larry can’t take his eyes off of her, even after they get married, where her dreams of becoming a TV celebrity couldn’t make him prouder. But instead she gets a job at a nickel and dime local cable channel that just needs someone to run errands from time to time. But she keeps pitching ideas for the station to run, which they deny, becoming so persistent that the 2-man operation is eventually worn down and put her on the air as the weather lady, where she begins pitching ideas from that forum, one of which is a documentary photo shoot with local high school kids, who are seen as little more than deadbeats. Always good at discovering new talent, this is Casey Affleck’s first screen appearance, playing a smart mouthed juvenile delinquent, also Alison Folland who plays the mildly overweight girl with no friends that is continually made fun of, while Joaquin Phoenix is given his first major role in his fourth film, playing a completely alienated high school kid whose sullen nature leaves him largely strung out and disconnected from reality. All three have a crush on Suzanne, always wearing killer outfits, where their teenage hormones are simply aroused by her open sense of sexual provocation. In contrast, these kids wear drab indistinguishable sweat gear, but these are the kids who agree to be in the movie, and despite working on this film day and night, it’s clear there’s no substance to it as these kids have nothing to say. Instead, it may be a front for other ambitions.
When Larry suggests Suzanne give up the Hollywood dream and come work in the bar with him, it’s as if she has a Stepford wife moment, where she coolly doesn’t reveal what she really thinks, but she finds this insult so personally degrading that she really has no use for her husband any more after that, where instead he needs to be removed as an obstruction to her path of achieving success. Suzanne is simply not a woman who takes no for an answer, eventually plotting behind the scenes with these teen kids to have him removed from the picture. Larry is right, however, as she is so determined and single-mindedly sure of herself, rock solid in her belief in herself, yet has nothing to show for it. Her pathetic attempts to manipulate a few socially disconnected teenage kids borders on pandering and sexual indecency, perhaps even rape, but they’re not the types that go running to the authorities. Besides, they’re delusionally inclined to think she’s a cool adult who may actually have some interest in them. The way this all plays out has a unique feel to it, as the sick sarcasm is so pronounced, at moments hilarious, yet darkly disturbing the next, like the sequence when Suzanne receives the news of her husband’s death, making a beeline to the awaiting reporters as the telelvision plays “The Star Spangled Banner,” where it’s as if she’s performing a screen test. It intentionally makes the audience feel uncomfortable, where their more mature perceptions will not likely match those of adolescent teenage kids who every day are the targets of every advertising campaign across the nation, where they have yet to establish individual identities, as they’re still so confused at being bought, sold, and influenced through the market place. David Cronenberg makes a somber, late appearance in the movie, but his actions are disturbingly decisive.
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Gus Van Sant directed this sharp black comedy about the obsession with television and celebrity culture. Nicole Kidman stars in perhaps her first great role as a wannabe small-time weather anchorwoman who kills her husband and gets away with it because of her awesome television presence. She deliciously matches her stunning looks with a nasty wit that we can't help fall prey to. She gets a gleam in her eye when she is working, and a nasty scowl when she has to deal with real life. Despite her villainy, we can't help dreamily following her every move, lost in a daze of snakelike charm. Buck Henry (The Graduate) wrote the screenplay, and director David Cronenberg has a funny little cameo as a hit man.
To Die For Geoff Andrew from Time Out London
For
To Die For Cindy Fuchs from
The cleverest aspect of Gus Van Sant's movie, which is
generally clever, cute and cynical, is Nicole Kidman's relentless referencing
of done-to-death mediapeople. She plays stardom-obsessed weather girl Suzanne
Stone with engaging precision and nods to Sharon Stone, Meg Ryan, Jane Pauley,
Barbie, Serial Mom, Tonya Harding and probably Madonna. Based loosely on the
Pamela Smart case, Buck Henry's script doesn't exactly break new ground
(tabloids amok, yeah yeah) and gives him a small part as a high school teacher
who abuses a "slacker." Matt Dillon is perfect as Suzanne's doomed
lug of a husband (a favorite moment: she looks at him through a constricting
iris as he brandishes a TV remote and a beer, imagining their future as Mr. and
Mrs. American Dream). When focused on Suzanne and her fluffy lap dog, the movie
is pretty ferocious, but when it turns to the teenagers she seduces, the tone
goes a little soft. Ironically, it's the emotional effectiveness of the kids'
performances (especially Alison Folland and Joaquin Phoenix) that makes for
this shift; they seem so vulnerable that it's harder to laugh at them than at
Kidman's obviously targeted ice queen. Then again, this discomfort may be to
the film's point: condescension is at least as complicated a business as media.
Reelviews [James Berardinelli]
Following the disastrous Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (my selection for the worst film of 1994), it's a safe bet that Gus Van Sant's next move had to be a proverbial "step in the right direction." In fact, with the biting satire To Die For, the director has made a significant move towards regaining his reputation. This movie is no masterpiece, but it is an electric, colorful production that roasts the media and those obsessed by it over an open flame. It also does a far better job than Oliver Stone's bloated Natural Born Killers at satirizing the American public's unending fascination with the televised glamor of crime.
Told in an effectively disorganized fashion that jumps back and forth in
time and includes pseudo- interviews and pieces of "actual" story, To
Die For gradually unravels the tale of TV weatherperson Suzanne Stone
(Nicole Kidman), who gains national notoriety as the result of a murder conspiracy
rap that she beats. Her face and story are everywhere -- Donahue, USA Today,
and smaller talk shows across the country. For someone with Suzanne's vapid
philosophy that "You're not anyone in
More than a year before the end of the film (which is also the beginning),
Suzanne is a single young woman in the town of
Van Sant, whose previous efforts include Drug Store Cowboy and My Private Idaho, is not an accomplished satirist, but his screenwriter, Buck Henry (adapting from a book by Joyce Maynard), is. The humor in this film is more often intellectually tantalizing than laugh-aloud funny. Suzanne is the embodiment of the extreme celebrity worship that has made the O.J. Simpson circus into the biggest TV event of all time. In the main, Van Sant and Henry know just how to exploit that element of their film. Yet the ending is a letdown. Unlike The Player, which invited the viewer to chuckle all the way to the fade-to-black, To Die For abandons parody for a disappointingly traditional wrap-up (although there is an in-joke for those who recognize David Cronenberg). Fortunately, this shift in tone doesn't happen until late in the proceedings.
Nicole Kidman does a wonderful job as the vacuous, vicious Suzanne, and a trio of young actors -- Joaquin Phoenix, Alison Folland, and Casey Affleck -- are suitably vacant-eyed as the dunces she manipulates into murder. It takes a strong performance to successfully portray a character with so little mental capacity, and these three come across as completely clueless. Kidman, however, steals the film, playing Suzanne with a seductive gusto that results in her best work since Dead Calm.
To Die For has its share of truly delicious sequences, and some biting dialogue worth killing for. The best moments occur during a taped interview with Suzanne where she discusses her frighteningly shallow theories about life, death, television, and keeping her maiden name for on- air work. In the end, however, To Die For doesn't go quite far enough -- there are times when Van Sant stays a little too conventional, and this causes the picture to have only teeth when it could have had fangs.
The Two Faces of Joaquin Phoenix: A Tour Through the Actor's ... Durga Chew-Bose from Grantland, December 11, 2014
A
great ending: Gus Van Sant's 'To Die For' (1995) – Movie Time Guru Joe Sommerlad, July 19, 2017
To Die For - Reverse
Shot Chris Wisniewski
To Die For (1995) by Rob Gonsalves
Crazy for Cinema Review Lisa Skrzyniarz
m3review
- TO DIE FOR Mike’s
Review for To Die For (1994) James Brundage
To Die
For (1995) Bryant Frazer from
Deep Focus
To Die For
Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com Michael
Reuben
Edinburgh U Film Society [Ben Stephens]
To Die For Ken Eisner from Georgia Straight
To Die For — Inside Movies Since 1920 Christine James from Box Office Magazine
Movie Magazine International [Monica Sullivan]
CNN Showbiz Carol Buckland
To Die For Doug MacLean Home Theater Info dvd review
To Die For |
Jonathan Rosenbaum capsule review
To Die For Movie
Trailer, Reviews and More | TVGuide.com
To Die for - Film Listings - AustinChronicle.com Marjorie Baumgarten
Tucson Weekly [Zachary Woodruff]
San Francisco Examiner [Barbara Shulgasser]
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
To Die For Movie Review & Film Summary (1995) | Roger Ebert
Movie
Review - - FILM REVIEW; She Trusts in TV's Redeeming Power ... Janet Maslin from The New York Times
Pamela Smart - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Psycho, directed by Gus
Van Sant | Film review - Time Out
As original, and as personal, as a Warhol screen print, Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock's seminal shocker takes an established text and recontextualises it 38 years on. The choice of Psycho is a shrewd one; the original hasn't a shot out of place. It stands as the first truly modern American film: Hollywood movies lost their innocence here, in the ruthless brutality of Marion Crane's murder. Van Sant allows himself only about half-a-dozen fractional variations from Hitchcock's storyboard - most blatantly during the murders - though in some respects the mise-en-scène is quite distinct, and in colour (out goes the black lingerie, in comes orange nail varnish). Fascinating to watch Heche and Moore riff on Marion and Lila Crane, though Vaughn has an impossible job supplanting Anthony Perkins' indelible performance. Appropriately, given the schizophrenia theme, you end up watching it in mental split-screen, and of course the b/w version in your head is far superior to the intermittently effective academic exercise playing before your eyes. Hitchcock probably wouldn't tell this story if he was making films today, and he certainly wouldn't tell it this way, with internal 'voices', back projection, minimal nudity and violence.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Psycho (1998) Gavin Smith from Sight and Sound, February 1999
Gus Van Sant's remake of Alfred Hitchcock's canonical 1960 film Psycho –
in which thief-on-the-lam Marion Crane (Janet Leigh in the original, Anne Heche
here) is murdered by hotel-owner Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins then, Vince
Vaughn now) – isn't the self-defeating, perverse exercise it might seem at
first glance. It's more a work of 'metacinematic' research. By remaking Psycho,
the film-makers have managed to replay formally notions of transgression and
difference that manifested themselves in Hitchcock's original as themes and
subtexts. So Van Sant's Psycho is both more and less than a remake. More
in the sense that it literalises the notion of remaking by copying or
transcribing Hitchcock's 1960 film, less in that it denies the standard remake
strategy which demands that the remake transcend its origins by revision (
On the contrary, Van Sant's Psycho, with its ritualistic attention to detail, could be described as a re-enactment or, as he has suggested, as the equivalent of a cover version of a classic song. But critically, given that contemporary cinema has been permeated by the strategies and tactics of the original film, Van Sant can neither reproduce the effect Hitchcock's film had on its contemporary audience – its impact – nor escape the burden of its place in film history. If the theme of Hitchcock's Psycho is the terrible power of the past and how it blights the present, then it is doubly so for Van Sant – indeed this becomes the new Psycho's organising principle. The weight of the past on the present and the loss of autonomy afflicting Norman Bates become Van Sant's point of departure for this radical project.
Director and cinematographer (Chris Doyle of Chungking Express fame) have imposed on themselves a set of extremely tight expressive constraints to minimise deviation from the original movie. Their film uses the same score, is more or less the same running time and, most crucially, employs the same screenplay. If anything, Van Sant's strategy is subtractive rather than additive. Although several anachronisms are wilfully permitted to survive, Joseph Stefano's original script has been subtly abridged and pared so that, despite several enigmatically superfluous added lines, there is even less dialogue here than in the already sparse original.
On the other hand, given that the original derived much of its power from its no-frills black-and-white shooting style, Van Sant's film is in colour and therefore has a completely different effect. And although many scenes are reproduced exactly, this is by no means a shot-for-shot remake. Many shots only approximate those in the original, and in general the pacing seems faster – dialogue is more clipped, shot duration more varied. In many instances, though, there are significant embellishments: the shower scene (from Marion stepping into the bathtub to Norman descending from the house) is now a full minute longer and although many shots are identical, it includes a number of new images (a close-up of Marion's dilating pupil as she is stabbed; a blurred Marion's-eye-view of her killer departing; a fleeting, enigmatic image of billowing storm clouds). Van Sant and Doyle's shots, even those reproduced exactly from the original, seem comparatively casual and indefinite, lacking the starkness, deliberation and measurement of Hitchcock's. And the two films have completely different senses of space, particularly interior space. It is in such distinct yet unquantifiable differences that Van Sant's inquiry or research finds its form. The same is true of the film's determinedly muted, enervated tone and air of inconsequentiality.
Van Sant's Psycho is fundamentally an investigation of the expressive and thematic possibilities of nuance. Given the same script and more or less the same visual architecture, casting and direction of actors become key. Sure enough, Van Sant gets considerable mileage from the redeployment and reassignment of character values, enough to achieve a small but significant shift of meaning. Rather than using the modern equivalents, he selects actors who largely counter or contradict the original cast's qualities and associations. (Two exceptions: the perfect substitutions of William H. Macy for Martin Balsam as the private detective Arbogast, and Robert Forster in a bad hairpiece for Simon Oakland as the psychiatrist at the end of the film.)
Anne Heche, whose gay sexuality has become a matter of record, emphatically
does not project the same sexuality that Janet Leigh brought to the role. Her
Conversely, Julianne Moore, as
Just as
These weapons are part of a chain of visual associations that extends from
the toy soldiers, toy musket and poster of a Blackbird military reconnaissance
plane in
The Remake of Psycho (Gus Van Sant, 1998) - Senses of Cinema Constantine Santas, November 5, 2000
A Tale of Two
Psychos (Prelude to a Future Reassessment) • Senses ... Steven Jay Schneider from Senses of Cinema, November 5, 2000
What Value is there in Gus Van Sant's Psycho – Offscreen James MacDowell, July 2005
Re-staging
the Cinema: <em>Psycho</em>, Film Spectatorship and ... Re-staging
the Cinema: Psycho, Film Spectatorship and the Redundant New
Remake, by Megan Carrigy from Screening
the Past, August 2012
Hack Job [The PSYCHO
remake] | Jonathan Rosenbaum
December 25, 1998
Psycho |
Chicago Reader Lisa Alspector,
review referenced by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Critic
After Dark Psycho Squared, by Noel Vera
Comparing
The 1998 Psycho Remake with Hitchcock's 1960 Original ... Travis Wakeman from Reel Rundown, May 31, 2014
Spark
The Dark: Film School: Psycho (1998) vs. Psycho (1960) XDarkSparkX, November 21, 2011
Cinema
de Merde Psycho vs Psycho
Psycho
(1960) vs. Psycho (1998) - Spectrum Culture
Tina Hassannia
Gus
Van Sant's Psycho Just Turned 15 — and is More Fascinating ... Gus Van
Sant’s Psycho Just Turned 15 — and is More Fascinating than You Remember,
by Vern from The Village Voice,
December 4, 2013
Double
“Psycho” | The New Yorker February
28, 2014
Psycho - Reverse Shot Michael Koresky, November 17, 2017
Nick's
Flick Picks (Full Review)
Moria
- The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]
Nitrate
Online Sean Axmaker
Surrender
to the Void-[Steven Flores]
My
Year Of Flops Case File #103 Psycho (1998) - AV Club film Nathan Rabin
In Defense of Gus Van Sant's Psycho Remake - Slash Film Chris Evangelista
Bloody
Disgusting [Chris Coffel] 6
Nights At the Bates Motel: I Reviewed All 6 ‘Psycho’ Movies!
Kinetoscope
Film Journal [Matthew Deapo]
Foster on Film - Slashers Matthew M. Foster
The
UnPopular Opinion: Psycho (1998) - Movie News | JoBlo.com Alex Maidy
Oh, the Horror! [Brett Gallman]
EyeForFilm.co.uk Anhus Wolfe Murray
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Psycho
– 'Psycho' Analysis: Van Sant's Remake Slavish But Sluggish ... Godfrey Cheshire from Variety, December 6, 1998
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
San Francisco Examiner [Walter Addiego]
San Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]
Psycho Movie Review &
Film Summary (1998) | Roger Ebert
FILM
REVIEW: PSYCHO - The New York Times Janet
Maslin
Blu-ray.com
[Dr. Stephen Larson]
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Two guys get lost
in the desert in Gus Van Sant's conceptually bold and rapturously beautiful Gerry,
a minimalist landscape film that's unlike anything on the American independent
scene. After squandering his immense talent on drearily conventional Hollywood
projects like Finding Forrester and Good Will Hunting, Van Sant
retreats to a plot so spare it couldn't fill a haiku, leaving him to conjure
images with the simple, elemental force of silent movies. Since its debut at
last year's Sundance Film Festival, screenings of Gerry have led to a
steady stream of walkouts, but that can only be expected from a movie that's
not a slave to narrative, that instead adopts a rigorous visual language that
may strike some as a foreign tongue. Van Sant challenges viewers to recalibrate
their perceptions and sink into the film's hypnotic rhythms, but he makes the
transition easier with eye-catching topography, intricate sound design, and
spare, improvised dialogue that bristles with offhand wit. With apologies to
Samuel Beckett and Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr (Sátántangó), his two
clearest influences, Van Sant mounts his own theatre of the absurd on an
ever-changing stage, covering unnaturally diverse terrain that shifts from arid
canyons to desert sand to the eerily abstract surface of a science-fiction
movie. Gliding toward a "Wilderness Trail" in a hand-me-down
Mercedes, Matt Damon and Casey Affleck are two blinkered young men who embark
on a hike that seems oddly joyless and obligatory, the wan gesture of city boys
trying to get in touch with nature. Once they wander off the well-worn path,
they lack the wherewithal to find their way back; the harder they try to
"crow's nest" for water sources and signs of civilization, the more
they're swallowed by a vast expanse of unsullied land. Before the situation
grows dire, Van Sant and his cast riff brilliantly on the often-hilarious
disconnect between man and nature, with Damon and Affleck as a dumb-and-dumber
duo that improvises half-baked solutions from their scant knowledge of the
natural world. In a particularly funny scene, Damon tries to rescue a marooned
Affleck from the top of a canyon rock by fashioning a "dirt mattress"
(collected by his "shirt basket") to break his fall. As thirst and
heat exhaustion take their toll, the film slows down in kind, marked by long
wordless stretches that give the impression of time grinding to an excruciating
crawl, with no progress to validate its passing. Movies rarely demand that sort
of patience, but Van Sant and ace cinematographer Harris Savides compensate
with location shooting (partly in Argentina, mostly in Death Valley) that's
alternately magisterial and abstract, yet always mesmerizing in its variety and
expressiveness. Having floundered throughout much of the '90s, Van Sant returns
with his most daring and auspicious film to date, an existential comedy that
slowly morphs into a doleful statement about a generation that has lost its
compass.
Gerry | Film Review |
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
Gus Van Sant's Gerry begins on the kind of incredible
high note that's usually hard to top. Accompanied by Arvo Pärt's remarkable
"Spiegel im Spiegel" (also heard last year in Tom Tykwer's Heaven), Van Sant's camera follows a car as
it travels down a desolate desert highway. The camera suddenly yet gracefully
shifts gears, staring at the passengers inside the car (Matt Damon and Casey
Affleck, both nicknamed "Gerry") before taking on the point of view
of the passengers itself. The whole of Gerry has been seemingly pieced
together from such elaborately simple "movements" of sound and image.
Van Sant has never shown this much confidence behind the camera and there's an
overwhelming sense here that the director's eye is everywhere. The effect of
these divine moments is all-encompassing: to thrust the audience as much as
possible into the existential crisis faced by the film's two Gerrys when they
lose themselves (easily and perhaps willingly) to a nameless desert landscape. Gerry
has drawn obvious comparisons to Beckett's Waiting for Godot; Gerry I
and II walk through the desert in pursuit of "the thing" (because,
like Estragon and
Van Sant refuses to sentimentalize their friendship though the obvious
camaraderie that exists between the two Gerrys brings to mind the tender and
uncomfortable relationship between River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves in My Own
Private Idaho. Affleck's Gerry repeatedly gets into trouble and seeks to
find a way out of the desert as if to impress Damon's Gerry. Their relationship
evokes the dynamic between a nurturing older man and the younger brother (or
lover) who idolizes him, and as such Gerry reveals itself as a ravishing
mix of mystic fairy tale, modern-day alienation, and gay allegory. Affleck's
Gerry puts great trust in the other Gerry's ability to save him from a physical
quandary and to later elevate him to a spiritual one.
Because Gerry is an homage to Bela Tarr, the film will likely be
approached with the same kind of trepidation and discomfort that have prevented
the Hungarian director's epic masterpieces from receiving proper stateside
releases. But if you toss any mystic comparisons to Tarr aside, Gerry
bears a more fascinating resemblance to Herman Hesse's Demien, the story
of a pubescent schoolboy's transcendental obsession with what could be his alter
ego. Something Van Sant shares with Hesse is his uncanny ability to profoundly
talk about sex without ever really talking about it, let alone showing it (in
the film, a final act of mercy is not without its erotic overtones). Like
The two Gerrys playfully reference the film's existential quest before it
quickly turns into crisis. As the young men move slowly across the desert, a
ravishing hallucination seemingly ushers them into a cosmic netherworld. It's
here that they must negotiate an icy and expansive rift between themselves and
civilization. One man facilitates the other's spiritual journey and, as he
stares into the heavenly horizon, there's a notion that he has freed himself
from the burdens of a cloying and weaker version of himself. Not since his
first film, Mala Noche, has Van Sant produced a film so pure,
uncompromising, and ravishing to watch.
Two friends, both named Gerry,
follow a wilderness trail in search of what they refer to as "the
thing". They soon decide to turn back towards their car, but become lost.
The following day, Gerry (Casey Affleck) gets stranded on top of a rock, and
must be coaxed down. They try to follow what they believe to be animal tracks.
They improvise a map in the dust. They spend a further two nights in the
desert. Without food or water, their health deteriorates. On the fourth day,
they collapse. Gerry (Matt Damon) chokes Gerry, possibly accidentally. Finding
a road in the distance, the surviving Gerry hitches a lift with a father and
son.
After announcing himself as a
unique voice with his first three films (Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy, My Own
Private Idaho), Gus Van Sant has in recent years developed a sideline in
ventriloquism. His frame-by-frame remake of Psycho was deliriously enjoyable,
but he responded to its commercial failure with Finding Forrester, a rehash of
his biggest hit, Good Will Hunting. The recent Palme d'Or winner Elephant
borrows its title, its Steadicam wooziness and its dispassionate eye from Alan
Clarke's 1989 television film. And now Gerry, shot between Finding Forrester
and Elephant but shipwrecked by the demise of Film Four, arrives bearing the
influence of Béla Tarr, as well as a 'thank you' in the end titles to that
Hungarian auteur.
In preparation for this
self-consciously arthouse project, Van Sant and his actors Matt Damon and Casey
Affleck, who share co-writing and co-editing credits with their director, also
swotted up on the films of Tarkovsky and Chantal Akerman among others.
Fortunately Gerry is intriguing enough to survive the potentially damaging mental
image of its makers lounging around chez Van Sant demolishing nachos and
six-packs and picking through Stalker.
The picture can be read as a
warning about the perils of improvisation a neat joke given how fruitful that
method proves here. Two friends, both named Gerry, abandon their Mercedes to
join a desert trail that they anticipate will lead them to "the
thing". The first line of dialogue, after a menacing driving sequence that
recalls other nightmares prefaced by road trips (The Shining, The Vanishing,
Funny Games), cautions against departing from the beaten track. "Gerry the
path," says one Gerry to his companion, who has strayed into the brush.
When they decide to return to the car, they find the path has disappeared
beneath their feet.
Studio executives will admire the
brevity with which Gerry could be pitched think The Blair Witch Project at
Zabriskie Point but little else. The film has all the narrative logic of The
Exterminating Angel (1962), and is as oppressively agoraphobic as Bunuel's film
is claustrophobic; deep into their ordeal, Affleck even announces "I'm
leaving," like one of Bunuel's deluded party guests. Despite being a
two-hander, there is less dialogue than in the first course of My Dinner with
André, and what there is remains predominantly absurdist. Affleck's campfire
monologue that begins "I'd ruled this land for 97 years..." deserves
to become a stoner classic, while oddball phrases such as
"dirt-mattress", "shirt-basket" and "scoutabout"
as well as the multi-purpose word Gerry, suggest mouth-watering fragments from
a Martian vernacular.
Like their characters, the actors
are working without a compass, with none of their usual charismatic tricks to
rely on. Even their designer stubble exists only to measure time, like the
vivid yellow star on Affleck's jumper which becomes increasingly dulled a
reference to the treatment that Van Sant is doling out to his own 'stars'.
Actors crave close-ups, but here the camera's attention becomes punitive,
closing in on their roasted faces like a magnifying glass frying ants on a
lawn. In the blurred or unsteady tracking shots, the two Gerrys become
indistinguishable from one another, adding to the impression that, like the
three Cissie Colpitts in Drowning by Numbers, they are separate facets of the
same person. This orchestrated anonymity works wonders for Damon, whose charms
have been all but exhausted. He has done nothing in his career as fine as the
scene in which he weeps solemnly from behind an improvised veil.
In the absence of character arcs
and story, the eye reads narrative and meaning into the landscape, photographed
coolly by Harris Savides. It was a misjudgement to use time-lapse images of
speeding clouds rolling in like smoke off Dr Jekyll's nightcap, when the
picture already achieves disorientation by more furtive means. One of Van
Sant's most effective methods is to allow the scenery to loom on screen long
enough for its magnificence to be slightly depleted a mottled mountainside,
bunched into folds and creases, comes to resemble a leopard-skin coat dumped on
a bedroom floor.
The hazards of the open road have diminished since My Own Private Idaho, which ended with River Phoenix's Mike being driven off to a possibly unsavoury fate. Now it is the dawn that carries sinister connotations, bringing with it as much promise of obliteration as it ever did in any vampire movie. A protracted sequence of the two men plodding across salty plains in the half-light provides the most uncomfortable moment, and not only because Arvo Pärt's minimalist score has acquired some Eraserhead-style industrial chugs and echoes. That shot, gradually lit by an implacable rising sun, represents one of the few instances in cinema when you can find yourself recoiling from illumination, praying for the darkness to endure.
My favorite newspaper article about
Gus Van Sant, whose films I adore (with a few exceptions), describes him as a
director who’s unique among American auteurs for being more loved than admired.
The piece posits that this love stems primarily from My Own Private Idaho
(1991), whose grab bag of grunge-psychedelia gathered in Van Sant’s adopted
hometown of Portland became a key signifier of early 90s alterna-culture – the
cinematic corollary to all that racket coming from the filmmaker’s immediate
north. That
Still, the director did take to
calling himself “a hired gun” when, nine years later, it came time to promote
his film Finding Forrester (2000) – a Sean Connery vehicle that, like Van
Sant’s preceding trilogy (To Die For [1995], Good Will Hunting [1997], and
Psycho [1998]), could have been made by someone else. Indeed, Psycho was made
by someone else. Van Sant, borrowing not only from Hitchcock but from Warhol,
simply put his name on it.
Which reminds me: Some of the words
in the two paragraphs above have been lifted directly from the aforementioned
newspaper article about Gus Van Sant – my favourite such article, which
appeared two years ago in City Pages courtesy of critic Peter S. Scholtes.
Others of those words – a few of them, anyway – were written by myself. But in
this brand new context (a magazine, after all, not a newspaper), I dare say
that every one of the words is mine. In any case, I take them as my own in the
spirit of Van Sant himself, whose well-known habit of artistic appropriation
began during his tenure at the Rhode Island School of Design in the early 70s;
continued with his debut feature Mala Noche (1985), freely adapted from a
novella by Portland street poet Walt Curtis; and remains to this day with the
upcoming release of Gerry, his film inspired by the work of Béla Tarr, Abbas
Kiarostami, Chantal Akerman, and Jacques Tati (give or take Derek Jarman).
Whether or not it would qualify for
extra credit at RISD, Gerry – a bleak and beautiful drama about a pair of
pretty boys (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck) who wander lost in the desert
without food and water for the better part of a hundred minutes of screen time
– marks a triumphant return to form for a director whose recent round of
goodwill hunting at the studios appears, at least for the moment, to be on
hold. In fact, Gerry finds the director daring to cash in the industry chips
he’d won five years ago while betting at the Miramax table. For what Van Sant
has accomplished here – better than anyone since Jim Jarmusch with Dead Man
(1995) – is to import (or smuggle, really) the rhythm and texture of the more
rivetingly snail-paced and site-specific world cinema into an American
commercial feature perversely toplined by a major Hollywood hunk.
Yes, Gerry is an act of subversion.
Cast as a pair of hopelessly naive recreational hikers – both named Gerry – who
immediately stumble off trail and then drag themselves in near silence through
an immense and unforgiving wasteland (the film was shot in remote
What Gerry communicates to the
audience seeking pleasant diversion – another Good Will Hunting, perhaps – is
precisely what the situation itself communicates to the characters: How dare
you take the natural elements for granted? Suffused with the inevitability of
death – and comprising a mere 100 shots – Van Sant’s film is shocking, and then
exhilarating, for how matter-of-factly it exposes the essential truth that
commercial art and entertainment so often seek to conceal: The basic narrative
of all our lives is that we wander, desperately seeking sustenance and, if we’re
lucky, we occasionally find it. The End.
Minimalism
and art-cinema narration in Gus Van Sant's Gerry ... 54-page Master’s Thesis, Minimalism and art-cinema narration in Gus
VanSant's Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days, by Matthew John Alberhasky, 2006
(pdf)
Gerry,
or all Roads Lead to the “Thing” – Offscreen
Donato Totaro, March 2003
Realism
of the Senses in World Cinema book review
Films for the Senses: Realism
of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Reality, by Tiago
de Luca, book review by Troy Bordun from Senses
of Cinema, December 18, 2014
“Gerry” - Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek, February 14, 2003
Gerry - Archive -
Reverse Shot Adam Nayman, November
19, 2007
Gerry (2002) | PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Oggs'
Movie Thoughts Oggs Cruz
Ruthless
Reviews ("potentially offensive")
Matt Cale
Gerry
and All the Real Girls David
Edelstein, February 14, 2003
notcoming.com | Gerry - Not
Coming to a Theater Near You Rumsey
Taylor
Gerry Ben Walters from Kamera
The
Desert of the Real | Village Voice
Ed Halter
Surrender
to the Void-[Steven Flores]
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Movie Magazine International [Casey McCabe]
Nitrate Online [Carrie Gorringe]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Gerry | Variety Todd McCarthy
Gerry
| Reviews | guardian.co.uk Film - The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Gerry Movie Review &
Film Summary (2003) | Roger Ebert
Movie Review - - FILM REVIEW; Playing Desert Solitaire With a Friend ... Stephen Holden from The New York Times
First and foremost, there is Scott Tobias’s insightful view
from the Onion, Elephant - AV Club film:
First thing’s first: Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, though a rapturous and terrifying memorial to the Columbine massacre, brings nothing to the discussion on high-school violence. No causes, no solutions, no moral or intellectual perspective, none of the facile politicking that immediately followed in the incident’s wake. Those looking for answers, or even insights, are certain to be disappointed by Van Sant’s audacious experiment, which offers a delicate and uninflected meditation on high-school life during a not-so-ordinary day. A natural companion piece to Gerry, his minimalist landscape film about two men lost in the desert, Elephant creates gorgeous, wide-open spaces that allow viewers the freedom to reflect without having a point-of-view imposed on them. In that sense, the film does the important service of stealing Columbine back from pundits and politicians on both ends of the ideological spectrum, all of whom seized upon the event so opportunistically. With ace cinematographer Harris Savides’ elegant Steadicam prowling the halls, Van Sant quietly restores some humanity to the victims and perpetrators alike, if only to account for their existence. Using a mostly non-professional cast, he tracks all the students involved in this fateful day, which begins with mundane routine and ends in bloody mayhem. Because there’s no time to get past first impressions and truly understand these characters, many appear as Breakfast Club-like stereotypes (The Jock, The Nerd, The Bulimic Princesses), reduced to their place on the high-school caste system. Van Sant spends more time with John Robinson, a wispy blond boy who looks out for his alcoholic father (Timothy Bottoms), and Elias McConnell, a yearbook photographer with an unerring eye for beauty. In the film’s most problematic sequence, he also follows the two killers (Alex Frost and Eric Deulen) in the moments leading up to the massacre, using the opportunity to check off all the usual “causes” — violent video games, gun proliferation, Nazism, repressed sexuality — that are commonly attached to such rampages. But collectively, all the players are brought together under the same umbrella, their lives intersecting in a way that none of them could have anticipated. While it seems that Van Sant is merely leading his lambs to the slaughter, Elephant has a gentle, hypnotic tone that’s insistently sweet and elegiac, in spite of the horrors that overwhelm the frame. In its juxtaposition of the serene and the violent, the beautiful and the brutal, the film achieves a balance that’s exquisitely judged, tiptoeing artfully through a cultural minefield.
I am hard pressed to find that same beauty or “sincerity.” I have a hard time getting past the seemingly made up on the spot dialogue, also prominently featured in his earlier release GERRY, without thinking how lame and superficial it sounds. However, the visual artistry in GERRY, compounded with some hallucinogenic-inspiring music, along with a few bouts of humor, make up for having to endure a couple of knuckleheads who could just as easily be Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But ELEPHANT is a totally different story. And I admit to being overly surprised at what “isn’t” there, featured in Scott’s opening remarks, as opposed to what is. Again, problematically, I felt a surprising disinterest in what I was viewing onscreen. But, having said that, my views are not nearly as eloquent as Scott’s or Gabe’s, which sense the sublime. I am still searching for the beauty in this film. Instead of tears, I felt emotionally denied, pushed away, and intentionally disconnected from what I was seeing on screen. It could just as easily have been called DISTANT.
Probably the most divisive film of the year, another film the critics may love, some even call this a memorial tribute, but the viewing public is likely to find this film completely forgettable. Perhaps at best, this is an experimental film where parts of it work, and parts of it don’t. Winner of Best Film and Best Director at the Cannes Film Fest in 2003, it seems like this over-rated film is being awarded based on the subject matter alone, a somewhat ambiguous recreation of a Columbine-like high school massacre. Similar in style to THE SON, the camera follows behind as various kids walk through the school halls, in focus on the back of the neck while around the fringes of the image, everything is softly out of focus. But unlike that film, which painstakingly moved to a huge emotional climax, this film follows the criss-crossing lives of various kids, sometimes over the same time frame, but without establishing any real connection to any of them. With streams of seemingly insipid dialogue, we have the emotional frame of mind mostly of bored kids, but then Van Sant leaves us there, as if everything that happens afterwards is filled with the same detached indifference. Even as the shooters are walking through the emptied hallways, there’s a surprising lack of interest in what they are doing, like a blank canvas emptied of all feelings. So what we really have is a rather dry, uninvolved look at a couple of idiot kids who went on a gun rampage for no apparent reason. The film attempts to frame their lives on a fascination with guns which can be delivered to their door, taking target practice in the garage against a woodpile, playing violent computer games, or watching Hitler and the Nazi’s on TV. What, no heavy metal, as we have all the other cliché’s? Another is the scene with the token "black" kid who, after helping others escape, intentionally wanders through walls of blood right up to a shooter with an automatic weapon in his hand, with predictable results. What, are we in a teen horror genre now?
It was these predictable points which left me extremely cold to this film, as they don’t explain anything, but they were put in the film as if they do. But assuming they are completely meaningless, and the film is about a state of mind which, at the core, is completely ambiguous, then what do we have? We have an exercise in style with little substance. Do we really need to use cinema now to void or negate our own feelings on a given subject? Will that be the technique for the next Holocaust film? Ultimately, we’ll all just become dispassionate film viewers. Anyone read Sartre? “Being and Nothingness” — no wonder the French loved this film, but do we really need a completely detached, existentialist glance at a day in the life of a couple of normal kids mixed with a couple of cold-blooded killers? And having experienced it in this manner, will our lives somehow be the better for it? The use of Beethoven, initially, worked wonders, specifically the introduction of Beethoven's “Moonlight Sonata,” which plays while kids are out on the giant, grassy athletic fields, cheerleaders are practicing, kids are working out and playing, and this immediately recognizable music begins to play, which gives these everyday, ordinary moments in kid’s lives a sense of something grand and noble, a poetic look at adolescence-as-innocence, portrayed with cinematic eloquence. The largesse of this moment is quickly extinguished, however, followed later by the continued repetition of Beethoven played over and over again by one of the shooters, which did not just de-sensitize, eliciting a Fuck you finger at one point, it left us in a state of “nausea.” O yeah, that was the name of the Sartre novel. Perhaps, as best I can surmise, the film attempts to connect with the nauseating indifference of the shooters themselves, who basically must reject everyone and everything. What’s perhaps most troubling is how the film’s detached style may unintentionally serve as a knd of teaching moment, helping viewers grow numb and indifferent to the horrors of a grotesque mass muder.
Afterwards, I did read the Jonathan Rosenbaum Four Star Masterpiece review, which is impressed with the “way” this story was told, how it unfolds in overlapping layers where the viewer can only partially see the events on screen, suggesting none of us ever has a completely clear view, that even when all the different viewpoints are put together, we’re still blind to what happened. Our perspective will always be skewed by something we do not anticipate or can not see. But this style is completely unnecessary, in my view, as what difference is method, good or bad, if the story itself is so uninspiring? What Rosenbaum fails to consider is whether this film, as it is told, is of any “interest” to the viewer, and shockingly, I have to say it isn’t. This film actually thwarts all attempts at interest, as if this is some kind of anti-cinema. Provocative, divisive, particularly by its lack of revelations, to be sure, but memorable, hardly, not even as good as the pink elephant sequence in DUMBO.
I really didn’t find anything very special here at all. On 2nd viewing, while I still feel the film
falls apart with the introduction of the barfers and the shooters, who bring
the interest level way down, almost to slow motion, this time around I kind of
liked the first half, and found the eerie electronic sounds heard in the
hallway sequences especially interesting. On the other hand, I may never
find ANY film on that topic that shows the killings of much interest to
me. Perhaps that was the problem.
But I do love the detached style of Hou Hsiao-hsien or that African
wonder, WAITING FOR HAPPINESS, which was equally detached, or, (to
remind Fred Tsao who failed to see this film!) the unbelievably good PORT
DJEMA — these films are
unbelievably expressive, with imaginative narratives, extraordinary use of
color, camera work, and music —
they’re unbelievably sensuous with rivetting stories to tell which makes for
very attractive films.
ELEPHANT seems like a quiet, little film about nothing, but then, o yeah, a
bunch of kids get murdered for no apparent reason. In a Hou Hsiao-hsien film, using the same
story, he would likely never show the murders — onscreen would be something totally different, like images of
the families of the victims seen in their daily routines, while a reference to
the murders would be heard on the radio.
In a long, static, medium shot, not a pandering close up, all we would
need to see are their faces.
Post Addendum
What Gus van Sant left out of his film.
This is a fairly astute analysis of the two killers, apparently made
public 8 years ago, but this is the first I’ve seen of it. What’s
especially chilling is the grand scale of the massive assault they actually
envisioned, which thankfully never happened as their planted bombs never went
off. Interesting supposition to imagine what might have happened had
they lived and NOT carried out Columbine.
Despite the passage of time, I remain unconvinced of Elephant’s
(2003) cinematic greatness, though van Sant is one of my favorite
directors. I’ve simply never seen what others were awed by in such a
simplistic portrait. I was much more blown away by the portrait (yes,
from an adolescent male point of view) of high school in Paranoid Park,
for instance, a much superior film in my view, or any number of other films,
like say Laurent Cantet’s The Class (2008), than I was in
Elephant, as Cantet balanced his film (written by a teacher)
with views from both students and teachers alike, making it a more
accurate and complete picture, closer to the truth, which one would think is a
goal of filmmaking.
Nonetheless, when van Sant made the film, this article was still a year
away, and he would most likely have ignored it anyway, as he was after
something different altogether. The article suggests the media and most
of the chatter was targeted down the wrong path, as people got carried away by
the school setting, believing it had to be based upon school difficulties or
troubles with teachers or other kids instead of looking at topping Timothy
McVeigh’s body count. Most of the other school shootings do seem to be
the motivated by revenge, or getting back at someone at the school, like a
specific teacher or person, but not these guys. They just wanted to kill
people.
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
Of course a movie about
a tragedy that does not explain the tragedy -- that provides no personal of
social “reasons” and offers no "solutions" -- is almost against the
law in the American entertainment industry. When it comes to tragedy,
So true, but one wonders what one gains from such a minimalist
visual/aural exercise, all of which is a supposed version of
the truth, even stripped down as it is. Supporters of the film claim
it’s one of the best portraits of high school they’ve ever seen, that it’s
closer to “the truth” than they could have imagined, so van Sant’s angle was to
supply a supposedly naturalistic high school setting that would be familiar in
any town in America, ad libbing some of the classroom scenes and conversations,
which drew rave reviews, some emotionally moved to tears.
It’s a relatively experimental film, and when Uncle Boonmee won
the Palme d’Or as the first experimental film, a case could be made that this
film paved the way. Nonetheless, if some universal truth is the key to
greatness, I find the film lacking, especially having read this article, as it
would suggest we’re looking in the wrong place. Yes, it happened in a
school setting, but it apparently wasn't about the school other than that’s
where a lot of people are. I suppose it could just as easily have taken
place at a shopping mall, but the kids were more familiar with their school, so
they used it to their advantage.
Since the action of the film makes such a clear connection to a
Columbine style incident, right down to the similarity of the two guys, I’m
wondering if these psychological revelations from Dave Cullen diminish in some way all
of the attention paid to the school setting itself, where van Sant
basically creates an homage to high school, like a lament, or a loss of
innocence. If it turns out these guys were simply sick bastards who would
have ended up killing anywhere, how much truth can be invested in van Sant’s
poetic evocation? Especially one that paints a high school portrait
that could just as easily have happened anywhere in
I acknowledge sometimes less is more, which would be the summation of
Bresson’s influence on film in general, but I could never fathom why such
a big deal was raised by the relative small town charm of this film, using a
copy cat, straight from the headlines story to supposedly raise larger implications,
when perhaps there aren’t any larger implications from the film, just the
copy cat horror of the incident itself, which the film uses, one must say,
to provoke the audience.
I accept film as art, where people draw different conclusions as to what
they like and why, but this film won the Best Prize at
Elephant | Film
Review | Slant Magazine Ed
Gonzalez
There is a scene in Gus Van Sant's elegiac and
controversial Palm d'Or winner Elephant where two teenagers stay home
from school, waiting for the weapons they’ll eventually use to wipe out their
teachers and classmates. On the television: a propaganda film that addresses
the Nazi party’s uncanny ability to feed its captive audience predetermined and
biased information. In the end, Elephant has about as much to say about
the media’s manipulation of high school shootings than it does about the
motivations of teenage killers like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold of Columbine,
Colorado. But Van Sant’s Gerry is to Bela Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies as Elephant is
to Almanac of Fall: an ethereal evocation of
life under siege by the enigma of high school violence.
According to Van Sant, the film’s title is a reference to Alan Clarke’s 1989
35-minute BBC film about the violence in Northern Ireland, which compared the
chaos in the region to a “metaphorical elephant in the room no one wanted to
recognize.” Van Sant spots said elephant but chooses to summon the motivation
for the film’s violent last act using seductive absences. The closest physical
approximation for this metaphor is the rotunda in one of the high school’s
hallways the characters repeatedly circle throughout the film. Van Sant’s
graceful camera doubles back on the same action, but this isn’t a gimmick he
uses to reveal plot points unknown to the audience during a previous swell of the
camera, but to evoke the fiber that connects the high school’s collective
student population as they spiral menacingly into a hollow and unforeseeable
void.
Van Sant is fascinated with the innocence of the adolescent ritual, whether it’s
a lengthy stroll down a locker-lined hallway or girls cheerleading and boys
playing football. Just as a series of thunderous clouds threaten the light of a
sunny day, the director has a subtle way of encoding the “whys” of the film’s
violence in his mise-en-scène. A discussion between members of a gay-straight
alliance speaks volumes about perception (it’s as if Van Sant is forcing us to
pick out the gay boy in the room, using the lisp in the boy’s voice, as his
camera circles the group), and because this is a more provocative and
mysterious exchange than the controversial kiss shared between the film’s
killers inside a shower stall, the tenderness and mystique of Elephant
is often betrayed whenever Van Sant moves too far from the implicit to the
explicit.
One of the film's killers plays Beethoven's “Für Elise” on the piano on the
morning of the slaughter, a far cry from the Marilyn Manson CDs right-wing
zealots blamed for inciting the Columbine massacre. By subversively inducing
terror in a Beethoven sonata, Van Sant deflects attention away from the wrong
elephant and subsequently points to our fear to look beyond the surface of that
which is in front of us. The other killer trains for their murder spree by
playing a shooting game that brings to mind the director’s Gerry. This in-joke (the boy shoots at two
men walking in suspended animation across a white landscape) is a funny one,
but the movement of the characters within the videogame also chillingly
parallels the suspended step of the film’s Gerry-walkers. The film’s
victims are easy targets not because they move so slowly, but because they’re
so self-absorbed. They’re powerless and oblivious because they can’t see the
world of hurt that lies beyond the stretch of the camera Van Sant uses to
imprison them.
Elephant has been criticized for not offering enough justification for
its violence when, in actually, it seems to offer too much. This is why
the film’s gay kiss is so problematic. Because Van Sant remains relatively
unconcerned with assigning blame throughout the film, the kiss comes off as a
preposterous, last-ditch attempt to contextualize a crime that should have been
evoked with the same kind of mystique as the scenes that lead to the final
bloodshed; either give us more context or none at all. As such, more
interesting than this wet kiss and the relaxed, straightforward final minutes
of the film is how Van Sant can so easily summon a world of hurt with as little
as a boy taking over the control of a swerving car from his drunken father.
And far scarier than the violence that closes the film is how Van Sant’s camera
charts the school’s topography (what with all the bizarre noises and nature
sounds that drown the film's soundtrack, what else can it be called?) and sets
up the film’s characters as sitting ducks. By the time the two killers lay out
a map of the school on top of a table, the audience is already too familiar
with the layout of the school, not to mention its potential safe zones: the
photo department’s darkroom, the kitchen’s meat locker, and the girl’s
bathroom. However disconcerting and seemingly sadistic Van Sant’s approach may
be, that these zones are not as safe as the director leads us to believe that
the elephants in our rooms must be confronted.
Mark
Peranson is the editor of Cinema Scope, posted
“Vive la
The worst
Cultural exception. The daily
reviews in the two most influential French dailies, the right-wing Le Monde and
the left-wing Libération, told a somewhat different story. Every day, a rave
from Jean-Michel Frodon in Le Monde, and an equally enthusiastic reaction from
the Libé crew, even if all were in unison about the racist abomination of
Fanfan la tulipe, and its Bessonian-produced brother, the festival’s true
embarrassment, Les côtelletes. Even with my Ontario-school French, I could
glean more depth of thought about the festival’s offerings from the French
dailies, as opposed to their English-language, industry-obsessed counterparts.
McCarthy proffered a conspiracy theory about the inordinate power held by the
French dailies in determining the selection, with the selection preferring
auteurs that have received past support. The divide between the French and the
Americans, he argued, was more “cultural” than “political.”
I suppose I agree, if by “cultural
divide” he means the French have a far advanced, mature, sensitive, film culture.
And better taste. As exemplified by L’affaire lapin brun, more than a star
system, American film culture is obsessed by commercial concerns, the vestiges
of a classical, industrial heritage, and heavens forefend anyone who attacks
this decidedly conformist mentality. Whatever you think of
actor-director-screenwriter-ad infinitum Gallo’s film – narcissism is a facile
put-down, hasn’t anyone heard of the avant-garde mode of production? – the
infinitely analyzable The Brown Bunny was the apogee of non-conformism, the
most anti-establishment film in the festival (Frodon: “dense, courageous,
singular…”). Sure enough, the barbarians arrived with their bottles of ketchup
to drench on the roadkill (Ebert: “the worst film ever in
The idiocy in the general rhetoric
is nothing new, but the rhetoric seemed more forceful, and the stakes higher –
as if the atmosphere of conflict had enforced the sense that cinema is at some
turning point, some kind of battleground. With the looming threat of an airline
strike, and French schoolteachers marching in the streets at the efforts of the
government to raise the age of retirement, shell-shocked French scribes
protested in the dailies, declaring war, with Libération attacking McCarthy
twice, Gilles Jacob himself consenting to be interviewed about Variety, and, as
if that wasn’t enough, Le Monde publishing Gallo’s revision of his so-called
“apology,” his coming out as a conservative Republican (ensuring even the
French will have something about him to hate), and a proclamation of a new
McCarthyism; one assumes Joe, though Todd certainly applies. Meanwhile, to
little support, I tried to rally the dispirited press corps to walk off the
job, but there was still a Greenaway to be continued. At
Animal love. In a way, every film at
Vive la Québec libre! Already a huge
box-office hit in Québec – I think you see where this one is going – Denys
Arcand’s Les invasions barbares, the crowd-pleaser that won the final two
awards as part of the jury’s statement, won’t even be one of the two or three
best films released in its week. It warmed the hearts and re-irrigated the tear
ducts of many in the herd, but underneath the big group hug is a disturbing big
chill. The merry band of sex-obsessed cohorts from The Decline of the American
Empire (1986) reunite, some years later, as dying, smarmingly sensual socialist
Remy reconciles his past. The most crucial bond, though, is between generations,
as Remy makes up with his successful capitalist son Sebastien, whose ability to
buy everything from healthcare to heroin reveals where Arcand’s heart resides.
The shallow, sub-par Woody Allen
anti-intellectualism on view does little to compensate for Arcand’s characters’
painful desire to be viewed as humans of depth, integrity and meaning. Though
it pretends to question a those-were-the-days nostalgia in a meaningful manner,
it’s actually as deep as Stardom (2000), though Stardom’s incessant formalism
at least led to an uneasy ending. When asked about the film’s defining scene,
where his characters wistfully reject those pesky “isms” of their radical
pasts, Arcand replied that he, too, felt the same way, especially regarding his
own former separatism; he conflates political and intellectual activity with
gadflying, analogizing between Remy’s bed-hopping and his movement from, say,
communism to deconstructionism. A baby boomer’s wet dream, Les invasions
barbares was the people’s choice at Cannes 2003, which says a lot about the
critical mass, and about what people today want when they go to the movies. It
was bought by Miramax. Libération hated it.
The 800-pound gorilla. Van Sant’s
chilling, formally self-conscious film – a stylistic tour-de-force, really –
alienated many, infuriated a vocal few (McCarthy: “pointless at best and
irresponsible at worst…gross and exploitative), and, of course, wowed
Libération. As Van Sant notes, Elephant is a tabula rasa, an off combination of
an aestheticized presentation of high school students (with a few looking like
models), with an entirely real portrait of “high school,” in the abstract. It’s
a horror film about Columbine, where the horror emanates naturally from
reality. But as Van Sant’s always the art student, it’s also a little bit of
Alan Clarke (whose 1989 telefilm Elephant, an abstraction on Northern Ireland
violence, was partially this project’s impetus), a bit of Frederick Wiseman
circa High School (1969), and a touch of Fassbinder’s Why Does Herr R. Run
Amok? (1970), combined with an aesthetic more common to photography than
narrative cinema.
Van Sant’s critics ignore that the
very things they’re criticizing – the film’s reliance on clichés, such as the
jock, the loser, the popular kids, the bulimic bitches – are themselves
systemically constructed high-school stereotypes, and Van Sant presents them to
illustrate an oppressive system in operation. The film’s key scene is a
lunchtime meeting of the Gay Straight Alliance, where a discussion transpires: How
can you tell a gay person walking on the street? (They’re wearing pink?) Of
course, you can’t, just as you can’t tell a Für Elise-playing killer passing
you in the hall, or you can’t tell which of your fellow students will be
successful later in life. But, maybe even more to the point, question the
socially constructed beliefs that you have, as most certainly they’re just
plain wrong.
Exteriors and interiors. Van Sant’s
documentary-photographic style may seem too cool for school, often trailing
behind his lonely, tight-lipped teens as they traverse the
The long takes, presented in Gerry
as aesthetic lifts from the Béla Tarr school of fluid time elongation, then
here serve a distinct purpose: they give us the time to absorb the various ways
the students look – and they are real students – and the different ways they
have of presenting themselves. (It fits into the puzzle almost too perfectly
that one doomed youth, Eli – who, in a superb example of the film’s real world
touch, wears a fork around his wrist as a bracelet – is an amateur
photographer). Elephant resonates as a film about self-image and
self-presentation, and rightly regards this process as dialectical: because
people are branded a certain way by the group, they start to feel that way
about themselves; then they begin to carry themselves in that manner, absorbing
these designations into their mental and physical identities. You are what you
think.
The fog of war. Errol Morris’ The
Fog of War presents 20th century American history as a vertiginous echo
chamber, one where Robert McNamara and Kennedy find their latter-day
correspondents in Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush. Elephant’s high school is
strangely out of time, the crystalline form of its presentation serving to
obfuscate the truths beneath the shiny surface: Columbine hangs over affairs
like a dark cloud, but specificities seem slapdash (the killers’ names, Eric
and Alex – not Eric and Dylan – their “gayness” and “Nazism,” are accompanied
by the usual disclaimer at the end expressing all resemblance to real people is
merely accidental). Van Sant takes the wider view, and when his characters
enter the high-school halls, its beehive of activity takes on the feel of a
social microcosm.
Elephant expresses a deep feeling of
disappointment with
Nailed to the cross. As the festival
crawled to a close, it could hardly have been accidental that I found myself
seeking solace in one of the festival’s restorations, finishing the fortnight
under the piercing gaze of one of history’s most notorious anti-conformists,
Jesus himself. The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1964) was made, as Pasolini
remarked at the time, in “a furious wave of irrationalism.” (Perhaps Bonello
was in the audience, as he ends his own furiously irrational Tiresia, and why
the hell not, with the birth of the baby Jesus.) Pasolini’s is a Jesus that
nobody dare fuck with: he comes bearing a sword, not a dove. Like I did for a
number of films in the competition, I admit to fleeing before the foretold
conclusion. Hell, with the feeble strength of my soul at the time, I feared
conversion.
By awards time, though, none other than the crucified Vincent Gallo had become the festival’s emblematic figure. (It’s too bad Mel Gibson already has cast Jim Caveziel as his Christ.) Danish Camera d’Or winner Christoffer Boe (Reconstruction) expressed his solidarity, proclaiming, “Vincent Gallo, please don’t give up. You’re a one-man army, and we should all fight conventional filmmaking. Keep up the war!” Over on IFC, Ebert’s nattering made these combative words impossible to decipher. In my head, good ol’ Jesus’ memorable words played over, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” All I could think was: What would Pasolini do?
Minimalism
and art-cinema narration in Gus Van Sant's Gerry ... 54-page Master’s Thesis, Minimalism and art-cinema narration in Gus
VanSant's Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days, by Matthew John Alberhasky, 2006
(pdf)
Too Cool for
School: Social Problems in Elephant • Senses of Cinema Tony McKibbin, July 26, 2004
Sublime
Anarchy in Gus Van Sant's Elephant • Senses of Cinema Neera Scott, July 22, 2005
Gus Van Sant’s Elephant: an ordinary high school movie, except
that it’s not John P. Garry III from
Jump Cut, Winter 2005, also seen
here: "Elephant"
by John P Garry III print version - Ejumpcut
The Work of Hildegard
Westerkamp in the Films of Gus Van Sant ...
Randolph Jordan interviews sound designer Hildegard Westerkamp on her
work in van Sant films, from Offscreen,
September 2007
Blindsided
[ELEPHANT] | Jonathan Rosenbaum
November 7, 2003
ELEPHANT |
Jonathan Rosenbaum February 2, 2004
A convenient
vagueness - World Socialist Web Site
David Walsh, November 12, 2003
“Elephant” - Salon.com Charles Taylor, October 24, 2003
Being and
Nothingness | Village Voice J.
Hoberman, October 21, 2003
Gus Van Sant's brutal, confusing Elephant. - Slate Magazine David Edelstein, October 24, 2003
Elephant Henry Sheehan
Elephant (2003) | PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Elephant - Reviews -
Reverse Shot Matthew Plouffe,
October 24, 2003
Elephant - Archive -
Reverse Shot Ohad Landesman,
November 21, 2007
Oggs'
Movie Thoughts Oggs Cruz
Gus
Van Sant's ELEPHANT is Still Cinema's Best Answer for the "Why ... Matt Barone from Tribeca Film, October 6, 2015
Milk
Plus: A Discussion of Film Daniel
Kasman
Elephant (2003). Director -
Gus Van Sant. High School Shooting. Stars ... Richard Scheib from Moria
Surrender
to the Void-[Steven Flores]
Milk Plus: A Discussion of Film Private Joker (Zach Ralston)
Elephant - In the Cut - New York Movie Review - NYMag Peter Rainer
Elephant Review |
CultureVulture - CultureVulture.net
George Wu
Elephant - kamera.co.uk Todd Harbour
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Movie Gazette review [Anton Bitel]
Elephant Blu-ray
(United Kingdom) - Blu-ray.com
Svet Atanasov
Offoffoff
-- The Guide to Alternative New York
Joshua Tanzer
Plume-Noire.com
Film Review Sandrine Marques
onderhond.com [Niels Matthijs]
Culture Wars [Nathalie Rothschild]
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Elephant Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
Daily Film Dose [Blair Stewart]
Elephant |
Variety Todd McCarthy
Beauty
and the banal | Art and design | The Guardian Steve
Rose from the Guardian, January 28,
2004
Elephant
| Reviews | guardian.co.uk Film - The Guardian Peter
Bradshaw
The
Japan Times [Giovanni Fazio]
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
Austin
Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
San
Francisco Chronicle [Ruthe Stein]
'Elephant' - MOVIE REVIEW - Los Angeles Times
- calendarlive.com Manohla
Dargis
Elephant Movie
Review & Film Summary (2003) | Roger Ebert
Movie
Review - - FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; 'Normal' High School on ... Elvis Mitchell from The New York Times
DVDBeaver
Blu-ray review [Gary Tooze]
Elephant (2003 film) - Wikipedia
LAST DAYS B+ 92
USA (96 mi)
2005 Official
site
fame as an isolating force
Not nearly up to the
standard of Fassbinder’s definitive IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS, an
unimaginably compelling and agonizingly personal response to his lover Armin
Meier’s suicide, the 2nd such suicide in
Fassbinder’s life, an original work where shooting actually began only a month
after his death, but van Sant’s work is powerful nonetheless. It must be said that one brings their own
preconceived notions into the theater on films like this, a fictionalized
recreation of the last days of a blurry-eyed, socially isolated rock legend who
happens to be named Kurt Cobain, errr actually Blake in this version, but
Cobain it is, whose name alone cannot be mentioned without already having some
ideas about who he is and how one feels about him, a celebrity recluse who shot
himself with a shotgun while under the influence of drugs, depression, and an
upcoming European tour. Even as one
watches this film, as oblique and depersonalized a version as one is ever
likely to see, de-mythologized and completely removed from ideas of commerce,
using a Bela Tarr style of long takes, allowing the viewer to observe
everything within the frame rather than resorting to cutting and editing
techniques or offering commentary of any kind, one still thinks it is somehow
riding on the coattails of a legend, calling attention to his millions of fans,
most of whom are likely to laugh and think witnessing this abhorrent behavior
is funny, or just outright think it’s a colossal bore, as throughout the film,
nothing really happens, a guy walks around the premises of a huge estate until
he can walk no more. Van Sant filmed at
Played by an identical
looking, blond hair-in-the-face Michael Pitt, from DAWSON’S CREEK for Christ’s
sake, this film does an excellent job in establishing his ever declining state
of mind, in a paranoid panic like a cornered animal, attempting to avoid others
at all costs, becoming more and more disoriented, such a complete
recluse that a connection to anything is no longer possible, be it a box of
cereal, a person, a friend, anything said to him eventually has absolutely no
meaning at all. Even his music,
expressed extremely well here without using any Cobain or Nirvana music,
probably due to the litigious nature of his wife, Courtney Love, but the
musical sequences are terrific, as they’re not as scrambled as his brain. One scene shows him playing different
instruments, as seen from outside the house, where he moves alone, like a
shadow, inside. A scene of him playing
guitar alone, a song written and performed by Pitt himself, is actually
brilliant, as it essentially defines him in the moment better than anything
else in the film, and in my view, despite the obtuse film style which viewers
may or may not like, everyone in the theater can connect to that singular
musical moment. But even that moment,
where he speaks of death to birth, looking backwards at his life, there’s
nothing more to come – not in his eyes.
Much of how he looks
reminded me of images of Hunter S. Thompson, a paranoid, hopped on drugs maniac
that is completely flipped out, who answers to a different universe than this
one, flopping around in boots and a woman’s slip, or a giant hat and overcoat
around the house, or a winter coat outside when everyone else is in T-shirts,
or pointing a rifle at the heads of his sleeping friends, these are clues that
clearly something is amiss. Van Sant’s
Steadicam just follows him while he wearily makes his rounds around this
gigantic estate, in his circular universe going nowhere. The use of off-screen sound is
brilliant. Initially we hear the sound
of church bells ringing loud and clear, or airplanes, trains, and car noises,
but eventually the sound is altered, changed, as he doesn’t hear it that way
any more. Other sound effects are
equally effective, especially the powerful sounds of nature, from the
thunderous waterfall against his rambling incoherency to the birds chirping in
the early morning as his life comes to an end, even a Boys II Men television
video makes it quite clear how little interest it holds to Cobain. Where he goes, we are there, the camera
obediently following behind, visually sumptuous, especially the nature shots,
taking a walk through the woods, swimming in a river, through forest paths, to
the side of a lake to elusively slip away from others, or walking just to be
walking, even in the middle of the night, as he doesn’t know what else to do,
walking to a concert in town, where Harmony Korine, of all people, is a fan
that recognizes and latches onto him like the leech that he is, one of many
useless and worthless one-sided conversations that inhabit this film, which
causes him to eventually walk away, back to the mansion in the woods, until he
just stops walking. In this film, van
Sant makes it clear: where else does he
want to go?
What the film doesn’t answer
is accountability. Why was no one there
to help him? Why was the answer to just
leave him alone, as that obviously was no answer? Even in the rock star aura of drugs and rock
and roll, where gargantuan amounts of self-indulgence are the norm, Cobain was
so over the edge that he was actually reverting to infantilism. As wasted and disoriented as others in the
film are, his so-called friends that are with him during the final days, they
are able to converse, socialize, make love, drive a car, do things in a group,
all things that Cobain was completely unable to do. Instead he was reduced to crawling around the
house on the floor in slow motion, stopping from time to time, but completely
lost in a drug stupor, mumbling incoherently, speaking and answering to no
one. The film reveals no premonitions of
danger, only offers up its vision of reality, the one mode this dysfunctional
group was unable to read. In the end,
his fellow band members and friends behaved just like the business moguls that
were pressuring him on the phone to get ready to go on tour in a few days, even
though he couldn’t utter a single word, like soulless creeps who can only think
of themselves.
The camera seems to be moving backwards in time, showing something, then the something that came before, and occasionally van Sant rewinds the same sequence which is seen a little differently. There’s a stunning scene where his friends sit around and listen to Lou Reed’s “Venus in Furs,” where one just listens mouthing the words, “I am tired, I am weary, I could sleep for a thousand years..,” which could easily stand for the empty mansion or Cobain himself, while others are happily falling over each other on the floor doing God knows what, but Cobain is not there, it is of no interest to him, even for the disoriented, S & M mind-altering, drug enhanced sounds of “Venus in Furs.” Later, in another look at the same sequence, he’s been approached separately by both of the members of his band, each asking him for something, but by that time he is unable to communicate with either of them. In the van Sant world, the two others go upstairs and get naked together in bed, establishing their connection, while Cobain sings his isolated song about death to birth, the only moment in the entire film where he rises to the occasion and becomes human, sounding strong and vibrant, where we can see a personal transformation and identify with what happens to this man onstage. It’s like he becomes a completely different persona, one everyone can look to for power and strength, a Jimi Hendrix, a Marilyn Monroe, an icon. But eventually, to go on tour again, he must rise to the occasion night after night, and do it on cue. This is who he is – alone in a room – where his muddled ramblings take voice and his feelings can ring true. But this is who he can never be on tour, which is an assembly-line recreation of how others define and package him. Interestingly, the film never shows anyone using drugs. Again, my guess is due to the litigious nature of Ms. Love. No one wanted a law suit. Yet after Cobain himself, drug use is the next most prominent character in the film, the unseen, unspoken force that has his hooks in the man who is unable to take another step. A recording of Jancquin's “La Guerre,” a powerful 14th-century French chorale piece that very briefly opens the film, plays with a startling gusto over the credits.
Film | Village Voice Dennis Lim, July 12, 2005
To mark the release of Last Days, MOMA is screening Gus Van Sant’s good-looking-corpse trilogy in its entirety. Shot in a semi-improvised style with a small crew, all three films are open-ended mysteries, radical attempts to mesh form and content with elastic manipulations of time and space. Gerry (2002), a road to nowhere that led the director out of a creative dead end, is a nightmare wilderness hike indebted to Béla Tarr, Chantal Akerman, and Andy Warhol. The Palme d’Or–winning Elephant (2003), like Gerry, watches spellbound as its protagonists walk—and walk and walk—toward a terrible fate, and draws on another set of influences: William Eggleston, Alan Clarke, and Frederick Wiseman. Last Days synthesizes the lessons of the first two into an organic aesthetic that is entirely Van Sant’s own: It’s the crowning achievement in the most remarkable career reinvention in modern movies.
Howard
Feinstein on Gus Van Sant's new film, Last Days - The Guardian May 5, 2005 (excerpt)
Last Days is the last in a trilogy of spare, low-budget
independent movies shot in contained settings that began with Gerry (2002) and
continued with Elephant (2003). "They're each about death," the
Portland, Oregon-based Van Sant says. "Gerry is about death by accident.
Elephant is about death by insanity or retribution by someone else's hand. The
third is about death by one's own hand." All are derived from real events
covered in the media: Gerry, on the death of a youth lost in the desert;
Elephant, on the Columbine high school shootings; and Last Days, on the suicide
of Cobain, who lived in
His Own Private Biopic | Village Voice Rob Nelson interview with Gus van Sant, July 5, 2005 (excerpt)
If you’re thinking that Kurt actually did
kill himself, without any outside forces coming in and assassinating him, then
there’s a good case to be made that his having been given whatever he asked for
would have been difficult [for him]. In
five years, he had gone from not being able to afford a $600 recording session
to being able to demand covers on every music magazine in the world. It’s not supposed to feel bad when you get
what you want. And when it does, the
rage can come from a really weird place.
You can be pissed at yourself.
You have no right [to feel angry], and yet, you have no other way to
feel, either. That’s not a very good
place to be. And maybe a troubled
marriage on top of it doesn’t help.
Last Days | Review | Screen Lee Marshall from Screendaily
We sort of suspected that Gus Van Sant would not pull off
another Elephant: he’s one of those directors that needs a little
breathing space between masterpieces. But Last Days, Van Sant’s new
film, which is inspired (in the words of the final disclaimer) “in part... by
the last days of Kurt Cobain”, builds slowly to a sort of rough heroism – for
those viewers that have the patience to stick with it.
Using many of his familiar tricks – narrative backtracking,
unusual sound textures, the undermining of traditional
The main problem for most viewers will hinge on whether or not one cares about the self-destructive rock star that is its focus. Elephant drew much of its power from the audience’s prior, shared knowledge of (and shock over) the Columbine high school massacre; Last Days also derives authority from a media ‘tragedy’; here, though, it is not a cruel culling of future generations but the self-inflicted end of a mixed-up guy whose music and myth left many indifferent.
Nirvana fans risk coming away frustrated, as none of the
band’s music is featured, and Van Sant is not interested in giving those who
make a cult out of Cobain fuel for their altars. Though it will reach most of
the territories touched by Elephant, Last Days – which competed
in
Disclaimer or not, Michael Pitt is Kurt Cobain. He has the same long straw-coloured hair that flops over his face, the same scraggly beard, the same uncoordinated walk and wardrobe. And his character, Blake (named, presumably, after the visionary, unhinged English Romantic poet), has the same tendency to mumble his words – most of which are addressed to himself, or his demons.
One has to go back to Ralph Fiennes’ character in Spider
for similar depths of cinematic inarticulateness – and at the
We first encounter our hero wandering through a dank, tangled
forest, in true Dantean mode (“In the middle of the walk of our life, I found
myself in a dark wood”). But this is no Divine Comedy, and Blake finds
no Virgil to lead him out of his own private
It’s inhabited by a dysfunctional family of friends and hangers-on: Asia Argento, Lukas Haas, Scott Green, all playing same-name characters, all wasted and barely able to help themselves, let alone reach out to Blake. (Enfant terrible director Harmony Korine also mucks in with a cameo as a friend Blake meets in a grungy club).
Blake shambles around the house and grounds, digs in the garden, fixes himself a bowl of Coco Rice Krispies (there’s no word yet on the Kellogs tie-in campaign), then goes upstairs, puts on a lacy back dress and picks up a shotgun. It’s as if Van Sant is taunting us with Godard’s line: “all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun”. But this teaser is immediately followed by comic bathos, as a Yellow Pages advertising rep pays a call, and proceeds to sell directory ad space to a near catatonic rock star in a black dress, who he believes is the head of a firm specialising in locomotive parts.
The visual style is similar to that of Elephant, combining long ‘walking’ Steadicam shots with fixed views in which (possibly) significant events take place off-screen. The most striking technical aspect of Last Days is the sound design: generally diegetic noises (church bells, traffic noises) have no apparent source within the scenes we’re watching; the effect is eerie, hinting at other realities, dragging us away from the apparent mundanity of this rock and roll swansong.
Another parallel with Elephant – Van Sant’s tendency to step back in time and show us part of the same scene from a different viewpoint – has less dramatic relevance here, and seems little more than a directorial tic.
As in Elephant, there are scraps of narrative satisfaction, traces of plot: Blake wears a hospital armband, and we know he’s been in rehab; a private detective (played by magician and paranormal author Ricky Jay) is looking for him; at one point, an older woman who may or may not be his mother tries to persuade Blake to go away with her, and asks him if he’s spoken to his daughter.
But these teasers are less incisive than the red pills, blue pills and green pills of explanation that Van Sant offers the viewer in Elephant, because more rides on why two young kids should kill their classmates and teachers than on why Cobain topped himself.
And yet Last Days has a kind of authenticity to it, a refusal to take refuge in either the temptations of post-mortem myth-making (though it plays with them) or those of media-fuelled cause and effect. Van Sant almost loses our sympathy when he makes some cod-religious, Blake-as-Christ parallels (including a ghostly resurrection) that would have been better left out.
But Pitt is utterly believable in the role, and in the end it is the way he inhabits Blake/Cobain’s skin that delvers the necessary shot of pathos.
Last Days is a film sure to be sprinkled liberally throughout many year-end top
ten lists, "one of this year's indisputably great films" according to
Manohla Dargis. But based on the evidence, how could I not dispute its
greatness, and why aren't more people doing so? It certainly strives for
greatness, but mires itself in ill-conceived mythology. Likely to be my single
biggest disappointment of the year, Van Sant's latest represents a slightly
different solution to the creative problems he assayed with Elephant,
and yet it is every bit as problematic. Whereas his previous film was more
formally assured in every way, and at times managed to achieve conjunctions of
sound and image that were hypnotic and undeniably breathtaking, Elephant
as a whole felt overdetermined, too willing to play into stereotypes and Gap-ad
airbrushed surfaces instead of simply turning the audience loose to contemplate
the horror it orchestrates. With its ominous sound design and gathering clouds,
Elephant subtly told its audience that Van Sant didn't really trust
our intellect enough to set us free in the halls of "Columbine." We
might get lost. In Last Days, oddly enough, Van Sant's formal chops
are considerably diminished (despite what you may be reading, the film's use of
follow shots, slow tracking shots, and looping chronology are quite clumsy
here), providing fewer purely cinematic pleasures than the somewhat questionable
aestheticism of Elephant. But this doesn't result in greater freedom
for the viewer. Instead, Van Sant dips into sturdy conceptual tropes borrowed
from
So, does this sound heady and
philosophical to you? Personally I find it too symbolic, too literary for a
film that purports to be a "tone poem" or some other kind of
non-narrative exploration, a slice of looping free-range time. And although Last
Days has passages of stately beauty (such as Blake's acoustic rendition of
"From Death to Birth," or the driving shot with Ricky Jay and Ryan
Orion), and even some successful comedy (Yellow Pages guy: yes; Weezer guy:
no), there's still a maddening half-assedness to the whole thing. Van Sant
keeps getting his formalist chocolate in his mythopoetic peanut butter, and the
two never gel. The film provides the Chantal Akerman reference, with Blake in
the kitchen pouring Cocoa Krispies, but none of the intellectual purpose or
spatial integrity of Jeanne Dielman. Blake isn't trapped in
stultifying ritual; he's hungry and wants some cereal, and this in itself is
apparently supposed to be vaguely pathetic. (Kurt! Eating cereal!) Similarly,
the reverse tracking shot away from Blake's rehearsal space is not only poorly
executed but wrongheaded. I think it's supposed to render Blake's creativity
mythic or unknowable, but all it really does is point to Van Sant and DP Harris
Savides' own sense of what a "good idea" it is. Its formal audacity
doesn't gel with the subject matter, or the unique properties of this
particular filmic moment. It's as though they just wanted to do a zoom-out
somewhere, so they could check off the Michael Snow reference. Ironically, the
DVD provides a deleted scene that shows an alternate view of the same scene, a
fixed-frame shot form above. Less ostentatiously "virtuosic" than the
reverse tracking shot, it actually provides a better sense of Blake as a
working body, moving around, figuring things out, no more or less unknowable
than anyone else. This is rigor, anti-humanist style. It displays
creativity as work, and shows the man doing it as equally capable of catatonia
and clarity. This clear-eyed, warts-and-all approach is telling, because it
points to what Last Days might have been. But it seems that Van Sant
simply can't maintain this kind of objectivity when dealing with the
overly-loaded content of real human beings. If for some tastes Elephant was
too hard (and I personally don't think that's what the problem was), Last
Days is certainly too soft. Only Gerry approximated the cruel,
unforgiving formal power of Snow, Akerman, and Béla Tarr. That's because the
two Gerrys were fictional pretexts, giving Van Sant the freedom not to care for
them protectively, to strand them (and the audience) inside harsh compositions
and tracking shots -- that is, inside formal problems. Van Sant's artistic
rebirth isn't over, not by a long shot. But I think he's moving in the wrong
direction. To operate on the level of his cinematic heroes, he needs to temper
his reverence for mankind and locate his inner formalist hard-ass. Then again,
it's entirely possible that my preference for cool rigor is a cliché of a
different sort, and that Van Sant is just driving in my blind spot.
Guided
by Voices: Gus Van Sant's Last Days - Film Comment Chris Chang, July/August 2005
A few months prior to the release of Last Days significant chatter emerged on the Internet. It seems that fans of either Michael Pitt or Kurt Cobain had located an MP3 file of the song “From Death to Birth.” Sung by Pitt—in character as a shadowy Cobain analogue named Blake—the tune forms something of a sonic centerpiece to the film. Much frantic web activity focused on deciphering the lyrics—no mean feat since some are mumbled with appropriate Cobain-esque unintelligibility. Anyone who has struggled with interpreting the aural poetry of a Nirvana song knows the sensation—and (most likely) enjoys it.
Speaking of pleasure: if you are looking for a modicum of narrative satisfaction Last Days will—by design—deny it. There is no story. The tragic tabloid elements that inspired the film are fairly well known, but Van Sant cannily chose a sharply oblique angle: the key narrative crux—Cobain’s will-to-death decision—is something that occurs prior to anything seen onscreen. We, the viewers, are privy only to the aftermath, i.e., the events that occur after the man has made up his mind to kill himself. A moment of soul-shattering significance is presented as a mere denouement—or, perhaps more appropriately, as an echo. The mumbling and stumbling Blake makes his way through the fading shockwaves of his own private volition.
Van Sant’s Elephant, Gerry, and Last Days form a trilogy of films sharing similar structural strategies. All three are blessed with the roving kino-eye of DP-extraordinaire Harris Savides. Each relies on the exquisitely nuanced sound design of Leslie Shatz. Attentive listeners will note that Elephant and Last Days share music by composer Hildegard Westerkamp, specifically her “Türen der Wahrnehmung” (“Doors of Perception”). It’s a song that can perform wonders as a visceral enhancement to uneasy states of mind. The piece is actually defined as “a radio environment” and was originally commissioned for the 1989 edition of the annual Austrian experimental sonic showcase, Ars Electronica. In Last Days the use of Westerkamp achieves hyper-poignancy: Blake, the tortured musician, lives in a ramshackle mansion where, for example, doorbells and ringing telephones are aspects of a constantly invasive sound environment. They are irritating reminders of the outside world—a place that exists only to make impossible career demands on Blake’s fragile psyche. When we hear the first tones of “Doors”—a series of grandfather clock chimes—the sounds could easily be mistaken for diegetic phenomena originating from within the walls of the rock star’s crumbling estate. But soon after they start, the timbres slow with Doppler shiftiness, melt in the air, and add an almost palpable liquid queasiness to our hero’s rudderless drifting. Blake frequently appears on the verge of literal disintegration—and those moments are always accompanied by a hovering background of sound effects, all ready to be summoned to serve as psychic solvents.
Westerkamp’s 1974 article “Soundwalking” provides a few handy pointers to her spatiotemporal acoustic process, insights that could be interpreted (retroactively) as motivations for some of Blake’s peregrinations in Last Days: “Start by listening to the sounds of your body while moving. They are closest to you and establish the first dialogue between you and the environment. If you can hear the quietest of these sounds you are moving through an environment that is scaled to human proportions. In other words, with your voice or your footsteps you are ‘talking’ to your environment, which in turn responds by giving your sounds a specific acoustic quality.” The idea of a symbiotic play between personal noise and the contextual ambience of location is a type of interaction—I would argue it is the defining component—experienced in Van Sant’s trilogy. Think of the sonic sense of the hallways in Elephant; or the duet of crunching footfalls in Gerry’s extraordinary salt-flats tracking shot; or poor Blake, haunting the stairwells of his decrepit domicile, aided, abetted, and finally undone by the atmospherics of Westerkamp.
Last Days is a strange creature: it’s an extremely abbreviated biopic with zero details, a tribute to a man and his music without a trace of his songs, a tragedy without an arc, etc. It’s also dynamite artistry. It understands the unlimited potential for sound to advance thought and emotion into the filmic firmament. And, in its own odd way, it rocks.
Minimalism
and art-cinema narration in Gus Van Sant's Gerry ... 54-page Master’s Thesis, Minimalism and art-cinema narration in Gus
VanSant's Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days, by Matthew John Alberhasky, 2006
(pdf)
Observable
Death: Gus Van Sant's Last Days • Senses of Cinema John Lars Ericson, February 7, 2006
On the
Terminal in Cinema • Senses of Cinema
Andrew Schenker, May 19, 2008
Last Days 2005 - Not Coming
to a Theater Near You Jonathan
Foltz
End of the Road
| Village Voice Dennis Lim, July 12,
2005
Last Days - Archive -
Reverse Shot Sarah Silver, November
20, 2007
Last
Days (2005) Film Review – Andy Mckendry
August 9, 2014
Last Days | Film Review | Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
Ruthless
Reviews ("potentially offensive")
Matt Cale
Last Days (2004) |
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Kurtsploitation
[LAST DAYS] | Jonathan Rosenbaum
August 12, 2005
Back to the future, or the vanguard meets the rearguard Bert Cardullo from Jump Cut, Spring 2007
Michael
Pitt plays Kurt Cobain, even if the film doesn't call him that Jesse Hassenger from The Onion A.V. Club, August 5, 2014
All This Useless Beauty | Village Voice Robert Christgau, July 5, 2005
Beyond the Multiplex - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, July 21, 2005
Opting Out | The
New Yorker Anthony Lane
Surrender
to the Void-[Steven Flores]
Flipside
Movie Emporium [Jeremiah Kipp]
Oggs'
Movie Thoughts Oggs Cruz
Last Days - AV Club film Scott Tobias
Plume-Noire
- review Sébastien Bénédict
dOc DVD
Review: Last Days (2005) - Digitally Obsessed Joel Cunningham
Shameless
Self Expression [Ryan McDonald]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Future
Movies [Michelle Thomas]
'Last Days' (2005) | Kurt on Film: A Guide to Cobain's Cinematic ... Daniel Kreps from Rolling Stone, April 8, 2015
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
HannahMcHaffie.com [Hannah McHaffie] also seen here: ReelInsights.co.uk [Hannah McHaffie]
His Own
Private Biopic | Village Voice Rob
Nelson interview with Gus van Sant, July 5, 2005
Walk like a junkie | Film | The Guardian Dan Halpern interviews actor Michael Pitt from The Guardian, August 11, 2005
Howard Feinstein on Gus Van Sant's new film, Last Days - The Guardian Death Trip, Howard Feinstein interviews the director from The Guardian, May 5, 2005
Last
Days | Variety Leslie
Felperin
Last Days (2005), directed
by Gus Van Sant | Film review - Time Out
Peter Bradshaw The Guardian, September 1, 2005
Philip French The
Observer,
Rock
and reel Paul Morely from The
Observer,
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
'Last
Days': Kurt Cobain in Thin Disguise - Washington Post Ann Hornaday
Austin Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Los Angeles Times [Carina Chocano]
Last Days Movie Review & Film Summary (2005) | Roger Ebert
Sorrow in Harmony With the Sublime - The New York Times Manohla Dargis
Last Days (2005
film) - Wikipedia
An impressionistic portrait of a moody, self-absorbed
teenage male who remains disinterested and aloof from just about every
connecting social fabric of society, not the least of which includes girls and
sex, absent parents who are separated and heading for divorce, a school that
offers little incentive, and a mall in town where kids meet that’s pretty much
just like any other mall, so instead he immerses himself in skateboard culture,
filled with other outsider kids who are as bored as he is with nothing better
to do. The sense of alienation in this
film is palpable and artistically expressed, from slowing down the speed of the
film as a character walks in slow motion through school hallways, but even more
through an inventive sound design that includes odd electronic sounds, like an
updated Antonioni RED DESERT (1964), and the unmistakable sounds of Fellini’s
musical nonpareil Nino Rota. Abstract to
the core, van Sant adapted Blake Nelson’s novel, reducing it to mere fragments
in a reconstructed kaleidoscope mosaic, while also directing and editing the
film. Shot in
Much of the film revolves around Alex’s face, youthful, innocent, open like a book but completely unreadable, remaining detached throughout, while the camera follows him wherever he goes, occasionally accompanied by his internal thoughts from his notebook, but more often from a unique sound design configured by Leslie Shatz, who has worked with van Sant since GOOD WILL HUNTING (1997). Told out of sequence, Alex is called out of class and questioned by a police detective who is investigating a rail yard death near Paranoid Park, an undulating design of rolling curves and rising walls underneath a highway overpass where adolescent boys congregate with skateboards, a kind of free form improvisational expression created in a grungy part of town by the kids themselves, described by Alex as: “They’d built the Park illegally, all by themselves. Train hoppers, guitar punks, skate drunks, throwaway kids. No matter how bad your family life was, these guys had it much worse.” Alex recalls his whereabouts on a certain Saturday night to the detective with a natural high school specificity, what food he ate, how it was prepared, how much it cost, but due to his fractured state of mind, one suspects he is leaving something out. We meet his high strung girl friend Jennifer, Taylor Momsen, through a phone call where he’d rather hang out with his buddy Jared (Jake Miller) than be with her, where even this partial glimpse reveals plenty about the tangential state of their affairs. Later in the company of his buddies he can be overheard calling her a drama queen. Little if any emotion is ever expressed by the boys who all but dominate this film, as Jennifer is a discardable part in his life while Macy, Lauren McKinney, who he meets at Paranoid Park, is more of a tomboy who fits in as one of the guys.
What happened that Saturday night is the key to the film, alluded
to frequently though not necessarily in any coherent order throughout the film,
as Alex gets separated from Jared and meets Macy and a few other guys at
Paranoid Park, including an older boy named Scratch (Scott Patrick Green) who
offers him a beer and a ride on a freight train. The idea of hopping a freight appeals to him
and despite what the filmmaker decides to show us, an accidental death bordering
on the surreal, it’s all ambiguously unclear what actually happened due to the
hazy state of Alex’s mind. Following
right on the heels of this sequence is another of Jennifer losing her virginity
to Alex at a party, where Alex couldn’t be less interested, but of course she’s
thrilled to run off and tell her girl friends.
Later, depicted like a scene from the silent film era as mouths move but
no words are heard, Alex breaks up with her in front of her cheerleader girl
friends dressed in uniform after school, seen standing out of focus in the
background, all told with the zany music of Nino Rota running through his mind. This second scene suggests more happened at
the first, but is being repressed due to the blunt emotional trauma, which is a
lot for one kid to endure alone. Both
were likely sexual encounters gone wrong. There’s a fascinating way to bring all this
together, as all the skateboarders in school are called in to see the
detective, where in a slow motion shot in the hallway, more keep being added to
the frame in a humorous montage of their scruffy, free spirited approach to
life. It becomes emblematic, like a
poster shot for the movie, as there’s something alluring yet completely under
the surface about the appeal
Tip of the Week Ray Pride from
Like "Elephant," Gus van Sant's masterful "
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Gus Van Sant is the current auteur of choice over at Cahiers
du Cinema; the magazine selected this as 2007's best film. It's a departure
from his "Bela Tarr" cycle, and the long, sustained, traveling takes
of Gerry
(2003), Elephant
(2003) and Last
Days (2005), into a more jagged, free-flowing narrative. The action
centers on skateboarder Alex (newcomer Gabe Nevins), who one night ventures to
an underground skate park built illegally by renegade skaters. That same night
a security guard is killed, and the cops try to find out which teens were
there. The story runs entirely out of order, so the dead body and the
investigation don't even come up until we get to know a bit about Alex,
including his pretty, blond, bossy girlfriend (Taylor Momsen) and the more
laid-back, alternative Macy (Lauren McKinney). Alex occasionally narrates from
his journal. Van Sant employs underground and experimental film techniques and
lots of unique music (including Nino Rota's scores for Fellini films). The
great Christopher Doyle photographs everything in a variety of styles, and
frequently with a grungy Super-8 look. As with his notorious remake of Psycho
(1998), Van Sant uses the grisly killing to get people into the movie, but once
there, he's more interested in its process, the preliminary decisions and the
psychological aftermath. For example, in a brilliant scene in which a detective
(Daniel Liu) questions Alex about his night, Van Sant's point is not how to
solve the crime, but rather Alex's state of mind, his behavior and the cadence
of his speech. No other director has been so consistently fascinated with the
faces, bodies, lifestyles and rhythms of boys -- forever moving outward to
younger generations even as Van Sant himself reaches his mid-50s -- and Paranoid
Park is a vivid, powerful attempt to get close to one boy's tortured soul.
Paranoid Park | Films
| musicOMH Anton Bitel
Known to those who frequent it as Paranoid Park, the East Side Skate Park is a network of ramps and tunnels built by skaters for skaters - a sometimes frightening hang-out for the disaffected, dispossessed and disconnected youth of Portland Oregon. It is also very near the location of a rail security guard's recent, violent death under suspicious circumstances.
Richard Lu (Dan Liu), a good-natured detective, is interviewing known skaters from the local school, in the hope of getting background information on the underground community. Alex (Gabe Nevins), a dreamy kid with a troubled homelife, knows more than he is saying, and is trying to sort out his confused feelings about what happened by writing it all down in a notebook.
A few days earlier, when his slightly older friend Jared
(Jake Miller) suggested they pay their first visit to the urban playground,
Alex replied, "I don't think I'm ready for
As fragmented and disordered as the writings in Alex's notebook, Paranoid Park is a moody, somewhat otherworldly study of the confusion, alienation and furtive secrecy of adolescence - which, despite depicting Alex's indifferent sexual initiation with Jennifer and his graduation to the park for older skaters, comes across more as a not-coming-of-age tale.
While there is the merest skeleton of a crime buried at the film's core (and it opens with a noir soundtrack mash-up), director Gus Van Sant is far more concerned with disinterring on screen his protagonist's feckless disorientation - as well as with supplying a homoerotic subtext for Alex's disinterest in humping the local girls, and eagerness to watch all the skating at the ramps (shot in slo mo to accentuate the kinetic grace of all those male bodies). If nothing else, Alex is all about keeping his secrets in the closet, and we are left to wonder whether the openly gay Van Sant may have imported a metaphoric bent to Alex's illicit ride on a freight train with the older, more experienced Scratch (Scott Green).
Adapted by Van Sant from Blake Nelson's Young Adult novel and
cast with fresh faces via a MySpace page,
Languid, lyrical and haunting
Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Jenny
Jediny]
Analogous to
2003’s Elephant, Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park is set in a
self-contained high school universe, primarily dwelling on mundane activities
that have been or will be punctured by an unexpected and in both cases tragic
event. While my initial reaction to Elephant was lukewarm, Paranoid
Park, albeit not overburdened with a recent, polarizing national incident,
struck me as a tighter, more intricate meditation on teenage oblivion. It is
undoubtedly more accessible than Van Sant’s recent work, particularly the
haunting and often impermeable Last Days, but by no means does this
detract from Paranoid Park’s potency as an absorbing, brief impression
of a rash action and its aftermath.
Revealing Alex’s
mistake will not spoil the film, as Van Sant is far more interested in its
consequences. At the center of Paranoid Park is a fatal error:
confronted by a security guard while illegally riding a freight train, Alex
accidentally causes the man’s death and flees the scene of the crime. This is
the mistake the film – and Alex – unravels, moving backward and forward in
time, often repeating itself to express the confusion and denial surrounding
the incident. Unlike Elephant, the film lacks the dread of waiting, the
expectation of an inevitable horror that will eventually unfold—instead, the
encounter between Alex and the security guard has already occurred when Paranoid
Park begins and is only fully seen in flashback about halfway through.
Removing the homicide as a focal point allows the film to breathe and take
shape around Alex’s alternating distress and disengagement.
Van Sant’s
portrayal of teenagers is incredibly astute; casting via MySpace sounds
gimmicky, but actually lends more credibility to the film. There are no
distractions that might have occurred if Van Sant had cast the latest teen
sensation as Alex (Shia LaBeouf, anyone?), and the awkwardness stemming from
some of the performance feels more like teenage fumbling and self-consciousness
than unconvincing acting. The kids are center stage throughout, through both
script and cinematography. The framing is often tight, literally and
figuratively blocking out adults in the background and essentially any part of
the outside world that is not Alex’s immediate concern.
This beautifully
expressed state of self-absorption enables a greater sense of isolation after
Alex commits his crime. One of the most visually eloquent scenes is a tightly
shot close-up of Alex’s face while he showers, directly after leaving the train
yard. As the stream of water forms seemingly solid strands that flow past his
long hair, the rushing sound of water surges with the cacophony of tropical
birds—a gorgeous noise, it envelops Alex just as his guilt overwhelms him.
Leslie Shatz, the sound designer who has worked with Van Sant on numerous
films, layers Paranoid Park with terrific, palpable sounds that overtake
scenes and directly contribute to the film’s inward focus.
While Alex
experiences an immediate guilt, it becomes buried under the apprehension of
being found out. The police visit his high school after finding his skateboard,
which they correctly suspect as a link to the crime, and question not only Alex
but his fellow skateboarders. Skateboarding is passionately portrayed, another
aspect of Alex’s life unaccompanied by adults, but not nearly as solitary.
Christopher Doyle, Wong Kar-wai’s cinematographer of choice, films the
skateboarders in operatic slow motion, with expansive shots that encompass the
wide community that has built up around the sport, and the local skating park
itself. Van Sant, adept at capturing subcultures (perhaps my favorite being the
male prostitutes of My Own Private Idaho), often skews the outsiders not
necessarily as acceptable, but far more in touch with philosophy and able to
better communicate than those adhering to the status quo. While Alex wouldn’t
necessarily confess to the police, it doesn’t help that the visiting detective
talks to him as if he was a small child, and uses the cringe-inducing phrase
“When I was your age.” The adults in this film are out of touch, not simply
because their children envision them so; both the police and Alex’s parents,
wrapped up in their divorce, demonstrate a noticeable, if unintentional,
ignorance.
Alex must confess
though, if only to himself, and does so in a journal that is expressed to the
audience through voice-over. Unpolished and meandering, the journal is
addressed to a friend who will never read it, as Alex writes to assuage his own
guilt and perhaps to try to make sense of what exactly has occurred, not
what he has done. Alex’s conscious decision to remain silent establishes
a significant moral ambiguity that is applicable beyond the circumstances of
what has happened to one boy in Portland, Oregon. As with his recent work, it
becomes clear that Van Sant has become not only an essential auteur, but more
specifically an American one, concentrating on and drawing from emotional
rhythms that pulse within this country. As Paranoid Park concludes, the
punishment that is threatened never materializes, and it becomes all too easy
to push actions under the rug. Life will in fact continue, in the same way that
Van Sant has captured it throughout: indifferent, unfocused, and with little
concern for consequence.
Amy Taubin on Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park - artforum.com / in print Amy Taubin, March 2008
GUS VAN SANT emerges from the moving-camera, long-take
minimalism of his “death trilogy”—Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003), Last
Days (2005)—with a lyric, associatively edited portrait of a teenage
skateboarder caught in an agonizing crisis of conscience.
Nelson’s novel is nothing more or less than this very long letter, couched in the first person and the past tense, the events described chronologically. The film is a far more complicated object. Its narrative is structured by Alex’s intermittent reading of the letter in voice-over, but rather than sticking to the chronology, Van Sant, who is the editor as well as the director and writer, leaps around in time, evading, except for a few brief ambiguous images, the traumatic event in the train yard until well past the midpoint of the film, just as the boy might evade confronting it in his mind as he writes.
While the voice-over gives us access to Alex’s subjectivity,
Despite the fictional narrative of Paranoid Park, the aesthetic problem that Van Sant is grappling with here is precisely that of portraits, whether painted or photographed, in which the subject is anonymous: How does the artist represent the exterior so that it speaks to the mystery of interiority? And whose interiority—the artist’s or the subject’s?
Thus we have a remarkable montage in which we watch Alex
through the windshield of his mother’s car as he drives alone around downtown
Non-Realism
and Ontology in Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park Alessandro Zir from Kamera
Paranoid Park Returns Gus Van Sant to his Roots | Village Voice J. Hoberman, March 4, 2008
Year
in Review: Paranoid Park, Skating For Dummies | Village Voice letter from an interested reader, Benjamin
Strong, December 23, 2008
Paranoid Park -
Reviews - Reverse Shot Michael
Koresky, November 22, 2007
Only
the Cinema: Paranoid Park Ed Howard
Paranoid Park |
Film Review | Slant Magazine
Akiva Gottlieb
On
the Circuit: Paranoid Park | The House Next Door | Slant Magazine Kevin B. Lee, October 11, 2007
Paranoid Park: Take 1 | The House Next Door | Slant Magazine Zachary Wigon, March 7, 2008
Paranoid
Park: Take 2 | The House Next Door | Slant Magazine Vadim Rizov, March 7, 2008
Violence,
and Silence, in Nelson's 'Paranoid Park' : NPR excerpt from the book by Blake Nelson on which
the film is based, March 27, 2008
Paranoid Park (Gus
Van Sant) - Film Reviews - No Ripcord
Lewis Parry
Cinepinion [Henry Stewart] also seen here: Film School Rejects [H. Stewart]
Paranoid Park |
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs,
March 12, 2008
Paranoid Park |
PopMatters Kirby Fields, November
13, 2008
Dispatch from
the 45th New York Film Festival :: Stop Smiling Magazine Michael Joshua Rowin, October 15, 2007
Paranoid Park - Snow Angels - Married Life -- New York Magazine ... David Edelstein
Paranoid Park |
Reviews | Screen Lee Marshall from Screendaily
Paranoid Park (TIFF 2007) | PopMatters Matt Mazur, March 14, 2008
Surrender
to the Void-[Steven Flores]
ReelViews
[James Berardinelli]
BeyondHollywood.com James Mudge
Ferdy
on Films [Roderick Heath] also
reviewing MILK
New
York Sun [Darrell Hartman]
Indie directors wrestle teen
angels - Salon.com Andrew
O’Hehir, March 6, 2008
Beyond the Multiplex -
Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, his
ill-tempered review at Cannes, May 28, 2007
Mighty
Hearts and Dark Deeds - TIME an
open letter to Gus Van Sant by Mary Corliss from Time magazine, May 21, 2007
Electric Sheep Magazine Todd Huddleston
Paranoid
Park (2007) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
Glenn Erickson
Paranoid Park - AV Club film Keith Phipps
Paranoid Park
Blu-ray (United Kingdom) - Blu-ray.com
Svet Atanasov
Paranoid Park
(UK Import) Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest
Paranoid
Park (2007) « Silver Emulsion Film Reviews
Will Silver
PARANOID PARK | Film Journal
International Maria Garcia
Paranoid Park -
Pajiba Phillip Stephens
Paranoid Park Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Paranoid Park - Cinescene Chris Dashiell
Film-Forward.com Elizabeth Bachner
Strictly Film School Acquarello
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Vienna Film Festival
FilmJerk.com Review [Brian Orndorf] a near hateful review, rates an F
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Cinemattraction.com [Robert Levin]
Paranoid
Park | Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum, capsule review
Gus
van Sant at the New York Film Festival
minutes of a Van Sant Q & A at the New York Film Festival, October
9, 2007
Paranoid Park
- Movie Reviews and Movie Ratings | TVGuide.com
Film review: The Kite Runner and Paranoid Park - Telegraph Tim Robey
The
Japan Times [Giovanni Fazio]
Hartford
Advocate [Ann Lewinson]
Paranoid Park review - Weekly Alibi Devin D. O’Leary
Austin
Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
Review:
Van Sant's astute 'Paranoid Park' - SFGate David Wiegand
Los Angeles Times [Carina Chocano]
Paranoid
Park: The Soundtrack of Their Lives | L.A. Weekly Randall Roberts from LA Weekly
Paranoid Park Movie
Review & Film Summary (2008) | Roger Ebert Jim Emerson, editor of Ebert website
Style,
Substance In 'Paranoid Park' - tribunedigital-dailypress Michael Phillips from The Chicago Tribune
Manohla Dargis at
Cannes from the New York Times
Paranoid Park - Movie - Review - The New York Times Manohla Dargis
DVDBeaver.com - DVD Review [Gary Tooze]
DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
Paranoid Park
(film) - Wikipedia
Van Sant returns to commercial form, where his distinctive
imprint is nowhere to be seen in this biographical feature, but it’s a powerhouse,
tour de force performance by Sean Penn that brilliantly guides this picture
from start to finish. Using carefully
chosen archival footage from the 1970’s, the audience is initially introduced
to an America without a single openly gay official anywhere in the country, a
time when gays could be fired for admitting to their homosexuality and where
gays were routinely rousted by police in bars for creating a public
disturbance. Into this world we are
introduced to corporate executive Harvey Milk (Penn) as he nears his 40th
birthday and picks up someone (James Franco) on a
With the help of street activist Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch)
and the late addition of a clever lesbian campaign organizer Anne Kronenberg
(Alison Pill) whose political expertise was desperately needed, his popularity
in the neighborhood led him to make several failed runs at the city supervisor
position, also a California congressman, before finally getting elected to the
San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, the first openly gay official in
America. Simultaneous to his victory was
the passage of several notable state constitutional amendments around the
country banning gay rights led by orange juice spokesperson Anita Bryant and
well-financed Christian conservatives who demonized gays by calling them child
molesters and perverts who weren’t entitled to civil rights. This led to the Proposition 6 vote in
The only time Van Sant pulls out all the stops is playing
Judy Garland’s rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” during archival
footage of a festive gay rights parade, a colorful dreamlike fantasy that at
its core remains heart-renderingly sad, even to this day. That’s the social reality that Van Sant wants
to change by being as non-threatening as possible, which gets at the root of
why make his film and why now. Van Sant
released two films this year, the other being
Lessons
of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Gus Van Sant’s squarest work since Finding Forrester, Milk turns out to be that rare, heartfelt biopic disinterested in egregious chronological compression or psychological reductiveness. Gone is the avant-garde experimentation that characterized much of Van Sant’s previous decade, here replaced by an uncomplicated – if nonetheless finely crafted – aesthetic that conventionally and empathetically considers its trailblazing subject’s final eight years, during which he (Sean Penn) became disillusioned with his mundane 9-to-5 NYC existence and, in 1972, moved to San Francisco’s burgeoning gay mecca, the Castro District, in search of a greater purpose. His subsequent campaigns for public office – culminating in his successful 1977 run for City Supervisor, making him the country’s first openly gay elected official – forms the nucleus of Van Sant’s film, a saga whose only excessive embellishment is an operatic Danny Elfman score that italicizes the true story’s importance. Otherwise, save for a few auteurist from-behind tracking shots (including a late one that eerily echoes Elephant), Van Sant mostly sticks to the facts, a tack that mercifully keeps the proceedings (aided by some expertly integrated archival news clips) from devolving into self-righteous mawkishness. Penn’s performance similarly avoids cheap awards-baiting theatrics; his flamboyant mannerisms and earnest proclamations of belief are infused with a respectful humanism, with the actor consistently striving for accuracy and honesty rather than saintly lionization. The same largely holds true for the rest of the supporting cast’s turns, including a rather unbearable one by Diego Luna as Milk’s insecure, clingy, unstable boyfriend Jack. From its loving portrait of 1970s San Francisco (its outrageous fashions treated nonchalantly and its story free of the usual period-music montages) to its even-handed treatment of Milk’s assassin, city government colleague Dan White (Josh Brolin), Milk engenders engagement through unfussy directness, a quality that also allows its piercing present-day parallels – Milk’s repeated calls for “hope,” and his fight against a California proposition aimed at criminalizing homosexuality – to resonate with the force of a ten-ton hammer.
Time Out New York (Melissa Anderson) review [4/6]
In a cinema season
filled with stories of larger-than-life leaders, none are more outsize and
hopeful than Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in
the U.S. (Milk became one of San Francisco’s supervisors in 1978). Gus
Van Sant’s deeply moving, archival-footage-rich biopic of the slain
leader—he was killed 11 months after taking office by cosupervisor Dan White
(Brolin, excellently depicting the ex-cop’s simmering rage)—doesn’t break any
new ground. Milk, like several political biopics, contains its share
of awkwardly shoehorned-in speechifying.
But what the film
lacks in daring narrative it makes up for with its electric portrayal of its
radical subject. Harvey Milk was more than just a galvanizer of SF’s queer
population; he was a committed activist, forging strong alliances with labor
and speaking out for the elderly. His fire and flamboyance are magnificently
captured by Sean
Penn, who plays gay perfectly, calibrating certain nellie gestures so that
they never devolve into mincing-queen stereotypes. Though Milk’s
man-man love is shown somewhat chastely—a long kiss with boyfriend Scott Smith
(Franco); randier ass-slapping with another lover, Jack Lira (Luna)—the heat
missing in the bedroom scenes burns up the political stage: “My name is Harvey
Milk and I want to recruit you,” Penn roars.
Momentous political
events earlier this month have amplified Milk’s significance. I saw
the film two days after the election, leading to an even more heightened
response after Penn says, “You gotta give ’em hope.” California’s homophobic
Proposition 8 also won on Election Night; in one of Milk’s pivotal scenes,
Proposition 6, which would have banned gays from teaching in California public
schools, is solidly defeated. Would an October release date of Milk
have helped to ensure Prop 8’s defeat? Probably not; the notion itself is
magical thinking. But Milk could achieve something far more
wide-reaching. As the film powerfully shows, Harvey Milk believed that one of
the most radical acts a gay person could commit was to come out. But the action
didn’t stop there; it was merely a first step toward demanding what everyone
should have: justice, equality, fairness.
His
time. Our story. - SFGate
Mick LaSalle
With "Milk," a great
Director Gus Van Sant uses the account of one of the country's first openly gay public officials, who was assassinated in 1978, to invest the gay rights movement with mythic grandeur, as a successor to all the heroic social protest movements in American history. Van Sant's point of view may be a matter of politics, outside the scope of a review, but his success in putting over his point of view is a question of art.
His success is complete. His shaping of the material is seamless, and the images he evokes are inspiring.
At the center of everything is Sean Penn, who disappears into the title role. Gone are his familiar facial expressions. Gone are the pursed lips and the covered, compressed quality. He has Harvey Milk's hair, and from some angles - particularly when Milk is in the public arena - the physical resemblance is uncanny. But what's more striking is the spiritual transformation. Penn gives us a man who was once closeted and now, as if in response, lives his life completely in the open. He's spontaneous as Penn has never been spontaneous. He's emotional, vulnerable and generous with his laughter. Penn plays him as an utterly liberated man, and this liberates Penn as an actor.
Milk's openness, which makes him an endearing figure, gives the movie latitude to paint a complex portrait without losing the audience's interest or affection. The Milk who emerges is at times vain and frivolous. His personal life is often messy and sometimes downright farcical, and his Machiavellian streak isn't becoming, even if impressive. He's no saint, but he has courage and self-knowledge, and you get the feeling that both qualities were hard earned. Van Sant's Milk is essentially an average man who gets the call. By chance, by accident of history, by some strange meeting of disposition and location, Harvey Milk, in the 1970s, finds himself to be the one person best suited to lead the gay rights movement.
The movie begins with him in 1978, making a tape recording to
be played in the event of his assassination. We then flash back to 1970, when
Milk, at 40 years old, decides to throw off his closeted life and move from
Van Sant mixes archival footage with new footage - at times,
it's impossible to tell one from the other - and it's fascinating to see
By the time he arrives in
"Milk" contains a second remarkable performance (unless you also count James Franco's, for looking totally OK about having Sean Penn kissing him like he means it). As Supervisor Dan White, who ultimately murdered Milk and Mayor George Moscone, Josh Brolin presents a chilling study in weakness. White's intelligence is limited. His self-conception is rigid and inaccurate. His anger is unspecific but towering, and he might be gay, though his homosexuality could be hidden even from himself. Brolin lets us see White's thought processes, which are slow and easily derailed by self-protective anger. Last month, Brolin played George W. Bush in "W." This week he's Dan White. He must wonder sometimes what casting directors are reading into him.
Van Sant's goal in "Milk" is to give the gay rights movement the grandness and impact of the civil rights movement. To do that, Milk must be made into the gay equivalent of Martin Luther King Jr., who led a moral crusade, fully knowing that he might be murdered along the way.
In truth, the King comparison only goes so far. Yes, Milk led a crusade that involved physical risk, and the real Harvey Milk did make tapes (in 1977) to be played in the event of his assassination. But it would be stretching things to say Milk was killed because he was gay. His death was more like a fluke, part of a macabre workplace crime that also robbed the city of its mayor. It's evidence of the film's effectiveness, its power to incite emotion, that Milk's death is made to feel like the inevitable consequence of his being a visionary.
One truth "Milk" doesn't need to amplify or
manipulate: It's that Harvey Milk's story is part of the
Amy Taubin on Gus Van Sant's Milk
- artforum.com / film November 25,
2008
Milk, a biopic of the first openly gay man elected to an important political office in the United States, opens on Wednesday, a day short of the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of its protagonist, Harvey Milk. Directed by Gus Van Sant, the movie is an elegantly constructed, emotionally volatile piece of storytelling, which combines agitprop how-to with classic tragedy: It begins with the death of the hero foretold and ends with a proper mix of pity, terror, and catharsis—the whole schmear, as Harvey might have said. At its center is the most life-embracing performance Sean Penn has given since his irresistible, star-making turn as Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982).
The film opens with a collage of newsreel footage of police raids on gay bars and clubs beginning in the late 1950s and ending with the 1969 Stonewall riots. We then see Harvey Milk (Penn), alone in his Castro Street apartment in 1978, making a cassette-tape recording of his last will and testament—to be played only in the event of his assassination. Cut to more newsreel footage—this time of Dianne Feinstein, Milk’s colleague on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, tearfully announcing that Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk have been shot dead by another supervisor, Dan White. Flashback to New York in 1970, where Harvey, on the cusp of his fortieth birthday, picks up a much younger man, Scott Smith (James Franco), and overwhelming Smith with a combination of self-mocking wit and sexual hunger, locks lips with him in tight close-up. In an instant, we are disobliged of any prurient expectations that somewhere in the course of this movie we will be treated to the spectacle of a reputedly heterosexual star engaging in hanky-panky with another man. Milk is matter-of-factly gay from start to finish, as is Penn’s performance. And if there’s no fuss, there’s also, perhaps, too little muss. Indeed, I had to ask a friend who was part of the scene around Harvey’s Castro Street camera store (lovingly re-created for the film in its original location) whether Harvey might have sublimated his libido almost entirely into politics or whether the young men who became part of his grassroots political team and alternative family were quite as chaste in their flirtations as they appear on-screen. After he finished laughing, he reaffirmed that the Castro in the ’70s was specifically about sexual liberation, rather than a polite quest for civil liberties.
I can understand how one might see Van Sant’s barely carnal representation as a cop-out, but since I’m not keen on seeing people fucking their brains out on screen, I really didn’t mind. Rather, I chalked it up both to sensibility (Van Sant’s movies are modest even when they’re most desirous) and to a political strategy akin to Harvey’s, when he cut his hair and donned a suit before beginning his campaign for public office. The conventional packaging is intended to disarm the straight world, making it more hospitable to a militantly gay message. Speaking to the San Francisco Teamsters, whose union representative became a loyal Milk supporter after Harvey organized a Coors boycott in the Castro, he begins with his signature line, “I’m Harvey Milk and I want to recruit you”—thus embracing the verb used by homophobes to incite panic, as in “They want to recruit your children.” He then quips, “I’m sorry I left my high heels at home.” For Milk, coming out was an absolute necessity—the key to personal strength and political power—and the film makes that point repeatedly. He was forty when he came out, inspired by the Stonewall movement, and he believed that his life truly began at that point.
Penn burrows inside his character, capturing not only Milk’s Long Island Jewish intonations and his gay body language but also the intensity of his beliefs and the particular mix of fear and desire through which he viewed the world. He carries the film in the same way that Milk shouldered the fight for gay rights in the Castro. Van Sant loves his actors—he gives them the time and space to breathe on the screen—and the ensemble cast is so vivid and true to one’s memory of the period that it seems unfair to single anyone out, but the warmth and wicked humor that Emile Hirsch brings to Cleve Jones (Milk’s young activist protégé) is particularly memorable, as is the combustible mixture of confusion, resentment, and repressed rage in Josh Brolin’s Dan White. With his sideburns and hair swept diagonally across his forehead, Brolin looks more like Van Sant than he does the real-life murderer of Milk and Moscone. Someone was being very perverse.
Dustin Lance Black’s exceptionally well-researched script (Jones was an important source, as was Rob Epstein’s 1984 documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk) homes in on Milk’s years in the Castro (1972–78), racing through his first three losing campaigns and his victorious one in 1977, then ratcheting up the intensity when Anita Bryant’s anti-gay-rights “orange juice” bandwagon comes to California in the form of Proposition 6, a ballot initiative that sought to ban homosexuals and their supporters from teaching in public schools. In his militant struggle against Prop 6, Harvey secures his place in the history of the civil rights movement, and the film finds its most intense moments of political drama.
When asked what he would do if Prop 6 succeeded, Harvey responds, “Fight in the streets.” The film, thus, supplies opponents of Prop 8, California’s 2008 anti-gay-marriage ballot initiative, with a clear answer to the question “What would Harvey have done if he had failed at the ballot box as we did?” Indeed, Milk has such resonance with contemporary politics—the final words of Harvey’s testament are “You’ve got to give them hope”—that its strengths as a work of art are nearly upstaged by its topicality. But thanks to the fluidity of Harris Savides’s camerawork, the images have surprising vivacity throughout. Similarly, the work of another Van Sant regular, sound designer Leslie Shatz, while not as conspicuous as in the director’s more formalist films such as Paranoid Park and Elephant, adds a nearly subliminal emotional coloration.
In the final scenes, Van Sant moves from the conventions of realism to a register that is both more emotive and more abstract. Harvey’s face, shown in lingering close-up as he sits alone at the back of the San Francisco Opera, gripped by the finale of Puccini’s Tosca, is a tragic mask. Dan White’s murder of Mayor Moscone, his walk—as the camera tracks behind him and then in front of him—down the long corridor between the mayor’s office and the room where an unsuspecting Harvey is engaging in morning chitchat, and his shooting of Harvey at point-blank range replay the horror of Elephant in a world of adults. The film ends with a candlelight vigil the night after the murders, in which thirty thousand people walked from the Castro to the steps of City Hall. Just as some have argued that the film’s depiction of gay sex should have been more explicit, others have criticized Milk for not including the White Night Riots, the furious reaction that followed Dan White’s sentencing. (He got off with seven years.) I prefer the formally satisfying catharsis of a candlelight vigil. The facts about White and the riots are duly noted in the end titles. The fighting is better left for the streets.
Fatalistic Tendency -
Film Comment Nathan Lee, November/December 2008
Harvey Bernard Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in America, was assassinated on November 27, 1978. He always knew he would die young; Milk’s biographer, Randy Shilts, finds evidence of his fatalism going back to his early days as a closeted Wall Street conservative. Nearly a year to the date before he was killed, the city supervisor–elect sat in the kitchen of his Castro Street apartment and recorded a political will to be played “only in the event of my death by assassination.” Largely concerned with his envisaged succession—favoring, as Milk had throughout his entire career, those who came up in the grassroots gay movement over conciliatory career politicians—the tape recordings further addressed themselves to the rage and despair sure to be vented at his murder. Riots had more than once broken out during the Mayor of Castro Street’s rise to power, as the people who rose with him, no longer cowering from injustice, unleashed their power on the streets of San Francisco. Milk asked for that anger to be redirected into the one thing that “would do more to end prejudice overnight than anyone could imagine”: coming out.
Maybe that’s why Milk, directed by Gus Van Sant from a screenplay by Dustin Lance Black, fails to show the White Night Riots. When it was announced that Dan White, the disgruntled city supervisor who had assassinated both Milk and mayor George Moscone, would receive minimum sentencing (thanks, in part, to the notorious “Twinkie defense” that claimed junk food had temporarily addled his mind), the peaceable crowd that had gathered in front of San Francisco city hall awaiting the verdict proceeded to smash shit up and set it ablaze. There is amazing footage of these riots, as there is of the stone-silent, incandescent candlelight march that engulfed Market Street the night of Milk’s death. The Times of Harvey Milk, Rob Epstein’s superb 1984 documentary, summons its emotionally shattering force from the rhyme of these lights. For once, they called us flamers for good reason. The fires complete each other. One without the other tells half a story.
Van Sant was equivocal when I asked why he chose not to film the riots. Black’s script, he explained, was obligated by the richness of Milk’s biography to certain parameters. Most of their choices are good, if limited by the scope of a conventional narrative feature. And Milk is nothing if not conventional. It begins with the tape-recording session, returning to it throughout—while taking great liberties with its content—so that Harvey (Sean Penn) might narrate his own saga. It begins on the night of his 40th birthday, picking up a cutie (James Franco as Scott Smith) in a New York subway station, and quickly heads west to a burnt-out, post-hippie, working-class Irish neighborhood in San Francisco’s Eureka Valley known as the Castro. On setting up a small camera shop below the apartment he shares with Scott, Harvey is drawn into local business politics and the burgeoning gay scene that would soon revitalize the Castro as a thriving queer mecca. Milk rushes through this late-blooming springtime of Harvey’s career, glancing at his formative alliance with the local labor union, and averting its eyes completely from his enthusiastic sampling of San Francisco treats. “No more pot and bathhouses,” Harvey soon declares, clean-shaven and suit-wearing, as he readies for a run at political office.
The rest makes for solid political procedural: a well-edited and handsomely staged look at how the grassroots grow. Milk is the first movie Van Sant has made about adults since Psycho (98). And perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the biopic, like the remake, is a reflection or simulacrum of preexistent figures. Milk is clearly motivated by getting its story and message across with maximum clarity. No Béla Tarr abstractions here, no Leslie Shatz soundscapes—and no major improvement over The Times of Harvey Milk except insofar as talented movie stars enacting a colorful historical drama command attention, and this movie deserves it. It’s the straightest thing in Van Sant’s career, not unlike Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. The framing device—Milk testifying from beyond the grave—nearly feels regressive coming from a filmmaker who spent the last decade rethinking how to frame an event. Accepting Milk as prophet on top of hero, figurehead, and martyr, Van Sant has gone from meditating on inscrutable saints to something quite close to overdetermined hagiography.
But isn’t Milk, like Elephant and Last Days, another doom-laden chronicle of a death foretold? You know going in that all three, for one reason or another, will end in annihilation. As such, Milk is a natural outgrowth of Van Sant’s wandering in the experimental woods, though it strikes out in significant ways from both the earlier films. Suspense forgone, what remains for the viewer of these movies is an engagement with the experience of dying, an intellectual and sensory involvement with the process of demise. External, social, historical, and optimistic where <em>Elephant and Last Days are internal, private, hallucinated, and pessimistic, Milk, a very old-fashioned kind of picture, establishes a new direction in the death-trip movie.
By the middle of the current decade, the shock of apocalyptic terrorism had fully seeped into the imagination of filmmakers, and there came in response a series of movies predicated on foreknowledge of death: Elephant (03), The Passion of the Christ (04), The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (05), Last Days (05), United 93 (06). In each case, an unrelenting fatalism gets tied up with pronounced formalist strategies. Despite a variance of surface effect and ideological purpose, they all operate on similar principles.
Consider a pair of mortality procedurals whose very titles indicate their implacable narrative trajectory. Opening, with uncanny coincidence, the same week in April 2006, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and United 93 arrived at shared territory from opposite poles of the cinematic landscape. One emerged from nowhere, via a triumphant debut at Cannes: the entropic tour-de-force, at once hyperrealistic and blatantly allegorical, in which an ailing alcoholic is shuffled through the Romanian hospital system en route to his final breath. The other came from everywhere, via ubiquitous coverage in the press and a queasy opening-night slot at the Tribeca Film Festival: the propulsive tour-de-force, at once hyperrealistic and inscrutably motivated, in which an airplane full of Americans is hijacked by terrorists for a rendezvous with Pennsylvania dirt at 580 miles per hour. Where Cristi Puiu underpins his tragicomic material with shades of Kafka, Dante, and the Stations of the Cross, Paul Greengrass executes his grim conjecture vis-à-vis the terms of the contemporary technothriller: 24, the Bourne pictures. The difference, then, is a contemplative mode (reflection, culture, spirit) versus a visceral strategy (gut reaction, contemporaneity, anxiety), even as both deploy a scrupulously engineered naturalism to grip the audience in a tactile approximation of the death voyage. “Nothing if not visceral,” observed J. Hoberman of Lazarescu. “All the talk about smells make one grateful that the movie’s verisimilitude doesn’t extend to aroma-rama.” Confronting United 93, a rattled Stephanie Zacharek confessed to curling her hands into fists at the sight of a passenger lunging at one of the hijackers, “as if expressing some atavistic desire to choke the life out him myself.”
The Passion of the Christ attempts the contemplative by means of the visceral. Like United 93, it aspires to the status of documentary gospel (“it is as it was”). Like Mr. Lazarescu, it attempts to make suffering resonate with spiritual value. Represented in graphic, unflinching detail, the trauma of Christ traumatizes, in turn, the audience. For the faithful, this conflation of hurt transcends mere empathy to function (miraculously?) as an act of transubstantiation: the physical reaction to extreme violence is felt as a metaphysical convulsion.
Van Sant’s ways through the death trip of Columbine students in Elephant and of Kurt Cobain in Last Days—for it is Columbine we are meant to think of, it is Cobain we are meant to see—is to abstract the flows of time, space, and sound so that our relationship to iconic scenarios is destabilized, internalized. (The Gerry trip doesn’t factor into this discussion, as the element of suspense adheres.) The intention is the opposite of explanation; you can describe the experience of watching these movies but not their “meaning.” All attempts to do so break down into either imprecise spiritual/emotional musings, metaphysics, or procedural discourse. Conundrum: they conjecture the texture of an event using tools (Béla Tarr, structuralism, musique concrète) that pry things open to reveal surfaces beneath surfaces, opacity on opacity, the legitimate enigma under the false mystery. Just as faith permits some viewers of The Passion to charge the spectacle of rent flesh with divine voltage, intensely private feelings are brought to bear on the slo-mo traumas of Elephant and Last Days. There is, in my eyes, a kind of angelic eroticism to the former that lends it emotional weight. (Imprecise musings!) Four viewings on, I have never found a foothold in the moody formalism of the latter, and never less than in the risible, ostensibly transcendent ladder-to-heaven moment. It all leaves me stone cold, but I can no more defy the response of others than of a spectator of United 93 whose husband died on the flight. These death-trip movies are, by design, addressed to individuals.
Milk, by contrast, is communal in theme and spirit. “I have always considered myself part of a movement,” Milk says in his will, “part of a candidacy. I’ve considered the movement the candidate.” This is a more credible version of sentiments expressed in Hillary Clinton’s peacemaking speech at this year’s Democratic National Convention, when she admonished her supporters to recognize the agenda, not the individual, as the sustaining engine for change. Indeed, it’s impossible to watch Milk and not think of another wildly charismatic community organizer who rose from obscurity with a burden of minority status—one whose electrifying ascent, moreover, is haunted by widespread if largely unspoken fears of assassination.
Milk alters the death-trip paradigm in that it very much speaks to the meaning of a life heading toward known extinction. You feel this first in the use of archival footage. In that opening scene with the tape recorder Van Sant intercuts the famous footage of Supervisor Dianne Feinstein announcing the death of Milk and Moscone. The movie keeps slipping into documentary mode, keeping touch with the texture of its milieu, grounding itself in a trace of lived experience. Shot on location in San Francisco with a fidelity to historical fact that extended to re-creating Castro Camera on its original site (now a gift shop), Milk invites us to relive not just an era but an ethos. Again, Van Sant was equivocal when I asked him if making Milk during the 2008 presidential campaign resonated in any conscious way with current events. But just as his earlier death trips are inextricably, if only intuitively, tied up in the inward-turning despair of their times, so Milk is fortuitously, if inevitably, a movie of its moment.
The last words in Milk’s will: “You’ve got to give them hope.”
Milk, identity politics and Gus Van Sant's art - World Socialist Web Site Joanne Laurier
"Milk" and gay political history by Harry M. Benshoff - eJumpcut.org Harry M. Benshoff, 2009
Gus Van Sant's Milk Recaptures Californian ... - Village Voice J. Hoberman, November 26, 2008
Michael Wood reviews Harvey Milk · LRB 1 January 2009 Michael Wood from The London Review of Books, January 1, 2009
Review of Gus Van Sant's “Milk” | NewNowNext Brian Juergens
Milk - CinemaQueer / Gay Film Reviews / Reviews Of Gay, Lesbian Michael D. Klemm
Milk | Film Review | Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
Milk - Salon Andrew O’Hehir, November 26, 2008
Reviews - Reverse Shot Chris Wisniewski, November 27, 2008, also seen here: REVIEW | A Hero for Our Time: Gus Van Sant's “Milk” | IndieWire
Milk Review - Pajiba Ted Boynton
Movie Review: Milk | Movie Review | Chicago Reader J.R. Jones, November 27, 2008
'Milk's Legacy More Timely Now Than Ever | PopMatters Bill Gibron, December 11, 2008
Milk - Twilight - Australia -- New York Magazine Movie Review - NYMag David Edelstein
'Milk' Is
Much More Than A Martyr Movie : NPR David Edelstein
Milk
Is Great, but Would Be Even Tastier With More Penn Smooches ... Rex Reed from The NY Observer
Milk – Deep Focus Review
Brian Eggert
True Love | The
New Yorker David Denby
Milk | PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs, November 26, 2008
Beautiful
Dreamer: Milk, Take 1 | The House Next Door | Slant ...
Lauren Wissot, November 25, 2008
It
Does No-Body Good: Milk, Take 2 | The House Next Door | Slant ... Dan Callahan, November 25, 2008
Ferdy
on Films [Roderick Heath] also
reviewing PARANOID PARK
Got
Milk? - | National Review Mark
Hemingway
Best
Picture Nominee Review Series: Milk | Bitch Flicks Drew Patrick Shannon
REVIEW: Milk [2008] |
www.jaredmobarak.com
Gus Van Sant s
Milk :: Stop Smiling Magazine Sarah
Silver
Kevin's
Review: Gus Van Sant's Milk - A Tall Glass of Emotion ... Kevin Powers
Sean
Penn as Harvey Milk Analysis - Review of Milk Movie - Esquire Chris Jones
Movie Review: Milk – /Film David Chen
Out, proud
and fighting | SocialistWorker.org
Sherry Wolf
Sean
Penn hopes film on America's first openly gay ... - PopMatters Rick Bentley, December 4, 2008
Reviews -
Reel American History - Films - List - Lehigh University links to film reviews
Review:
'Milk' - CSMonitor.com Peter Rainer
MILK (d. Gus Van Sant) *** 3/4 Ken Rudolph’s
Movie Site
MILK Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
Milk - AV Club Film Scott Tobias
Milk | Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
Milk | Reviews | Screen - ScreenDaily Mike Goodridge
'Milk' exposes paradox for screen's leading men | PopMatters Mark Caro, November 26, 2008
filmcritic.com (Sean O'Connell) review [3/5]
CBC.ca Arts review Katrina Onstad
Newsweek Christy Lemire
Gus Van Sant's Milk reviewed. Dana Stevens from Slate
Should Milk Have Starred a Gay? | Village Voice Michael Musto
Why Milk Stars a Hetero! | Village Voice Michael Musto
Why Milk Isn't the Great Film Everyone Says It Is | Village Voice letter from an interested observer, Benjamin Strong
Milk - Cinescene Howard Schumann
Student Film Reviews » Blog Archive » Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2008): USA Aleksandra Mraovic
Queering the Closet: Queer Review: Milk (2008) Jeremy Redlien
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
CNN Showbiz (Tom Charity) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Harvey
Milk's Unlikely Message Man Albert
Williams from the Reader
How
Acclaimed Indie Director Gus Van Sant Finally Got Milk - LA Weekly David Ehrenstein from LA Weekly, November 26, 2008
Gus Van Sant -
Page - Interview Magazine Armistead
Maupin interview from Interview magazine,
November 26, 2008
Harvey
Milk's friend and confidant celebrates the film ... - PopMatters Lauren Viera interview with activist and
former Harvey Milk confidant Cleve Jones, December 3, 2008
The
MoJo Interview: Gus Van Sant – Mother Jones
Tony Dushane interview, December 5, 2008
Milk:
Interview With Director Gus Van Sant | Emanuel Levy December 8, 2008
'Milk'
co-star James Franco is in love with ... acting | PopMatters Carla Meyer interview with actor James
Franco, December 11, 2008
Gus
Van Sant on the making of Milk - Telegraph
John Hiscock interview from The
Telegraph, January 2, 2009
Transcript of the Guardian interview with Gus van Sant at the BFI ... Briony Hanson interviews Gus van Sant along with to screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and actor James Franco from The Guardian, January 16, 2009
Entertainment Weekly review Owen Gleiberman
Milk - Movie Reviews
and Movie Ratings | TVGuide.com
Film
Review: Milk | Hollywood Reporter
Kirk Honeycutt
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
Milk (2009), directed by
Gus Van Sant | Film review - Time Out Dave Calhoun
Film review: Milk | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
The challenge of making Van
Sant's Milk - The Telegraph Kate
Soloman
The Globe and Mail (Rick Groen) review [3/4]
Boston Globe review [4/4] Wesley Morris
Movie Review: "Milk" - Washington Post Ann Hornaday
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
Movie
Review: Acting redeems dry "Milk" | OregonLive.com Douglas Perry
The critics
weigh in on Gus Van Sant's "Milk" -- warmly | OregonLive.com Barry Johnson
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Milk Movie Review & Film Summary (2008) | Roger Ebert
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
The Times of Harvey Milk Rob Epstein 1985 film documentary website
Harvey Milk - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Briggs Initiative - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia in 1978
California Proposition 8 (2008) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia in 2008
Harvey Milk commemoration website
glbtq >> social sciences >> Milk, Harvey biography from an encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, & queer culture
Harvey Milk - The Assassination of Harvey Milk Ramon Johnson from About.com
The Forgotten Populist, Harvey Milk Gregory J. Rosmaita, 1993
TIME 100:
Harvey Milk John Cloud at Time magazine,
PICTURING HARVEY MILK / Filming of movie evokes memories, emotions ... Steven Winn from The San Francisco Chronicle, January 30, 2008
'Milk'
world premiere benefit at Castro Theatre
Steven Winn from The San Francisco
Chronicle,
Rob
Epstein: What Harvey Milk Tells Us About Proposition 8 The
Huffington Post,
Marriage on the
Rocks Maureen Dowd editorial from The New York Times,
It's
the right time to tell Harvey Milk's story, and Gus Van Sant ... Rachel Abramowitz from The LA Times,
YouTube
- Got Hope? Harvey Milk. Harvey Milk
was the first openly-gay man to be elected to public office in the
Not sure why this film has received some of the most blisteringly negative reviews in van Sant’s career, as while it’s not one of his best, it’s easily not one of his worst either. The film is a love poem on the subject of death, coming after the death of Dennis Hopper, to whom the film is dedicated and the father of Henry Hopper who plays Enoch, the lead teenage character who is filled with his own haunting personal reverberations from the loss of his parents in a tragic car accident, while Mia Wasikowska is Annabel, a terminally ill cancer patient with only three months to live. These two meet while attending funerals for complete strangers, where they oddly find they have something in common before they really have a chance to get to know one another. This downbeat theme of finality underlines the rest of the film, but not in any morose sense, like we see on Hallmark card movies of the week all the time, filled with wretched excess. Instead it adds a tone of fragility and tenderness, where these two damaged souls have no one else on the planet they can relate to, where they can act like teenagers, get a bit goofy, and they’re not afraid to make fun of themselves, always fully aware of their tragic situation. While Annabel is facing the inevitability of a rapidly approaching death, Enoch has already survived the experience, where he was in a coma for months after being pronounced dead for a few minutes. What he recalls is not a desire to move toward the light, but a complete emptiness, where his entire world was reduced to nothing.
Morbidity is not a subject to send people away in droves, as Annabel may be a stand-in for Annabel Lee, the last complete poem of Edgar Allen Poe from 1849 that explores the theme of the death of a beautiful young woman, where the narrator expresses an intense feeling of longing for her even after her death, where they remain forever united in their hearts. This expresses the tone of the film, as there’s a haunting feeling of everafter, beautifully expressed by a ghost seen only by Enoch after his coma, Hiroshi (Ryo Kase), a Japanese kamikaze pilot from WW II who has befriended him, as he’s someone who can actually feel the depths of Enoch’s loss, having sacrificed his life during the war. There’s a zany conversation when Annabel actually tries to have a conversation, through Enoch, with his invisible ghost, which gets rather tricky, as Enoch has never had to share or explain his friend to anyone. Annabel, on the other hand, knows what it’s like to spend time in the cancer wing of the hospital, people given no time to live, where the rest of the world instantly avoids them, as if they’re already invisible. She’s a brilliant young girl with a thirst and unquenchable spirit for life along with a passion for Darwin and the science of water birds, as they can go places none of the other birds can reach besides air and land, adding a special dimension to their lives. The two gravitate towards one another instantly, where the dark divide that separates them from the rest of the world is instantly recognizable, as both appear haunted by the specter of death.
Without ever expressing their pain, they can’t help but enjoy one another’s company, where their offbeat humor and gentle nature is expressed through a kind of fantasia, where her upbeat mood is as close to happy as she’s ever been in her life, which is exactly how one would like to spend their final days. Many may think this goes over the edge into the surreal, as their perfect world couldn’t possibly be all that perfect. Perhaps their most special moment together feels highly illusory, like a dream fantasy, yet this expression of rare intimacy is aided by the use of a flashlight, which added to their continually moving faces in close up changes the focus onscreen, where the image literally dissolves and melds into one another, a beautiful expression of their souls becoming one. Of course, the balloon eventually bursts from an unseen force, as reality keeps pushing itself into their world, breaking down the walls of make believe, until eventually they are flooded by forces beyond their control. What’s especially effective is that their lives do not become fodder for some melodramatic moment sure to evoke tears, as this character driven film is more sparing than that, where they each have to fight their inner demons, some not so successfully, but the bottom line is that until she dies they still have each other. This is beautifully expressed, and not with tragic overtones, but with a kind of irreverent spit in the eye of death. Don’t underestimate the significance of Hiroshi, a guy with powerful instincts and a pervasive spirit of humanity, who acts as a guide through this complicated and interwoven blend of different worlds, like a seeing-eye dog for humans too scarred and blind to see.
Plume-Noire.com [Moland Fengkov]
As you might have noticed, Gus Van Sant has
abandoned the intellectual experiments of the Elephant
and Last Days-era
to turn to a more sober, conventional and less sophisticated cinema, continuing
that trend with Restless,
the story of a young couple confronted to their fate. Following a long coma,
Enoch has been living with his aunt since his parents died in a car accident.
Since he was unable to attend their funeral, he haunts those of others. It's at
one of them that he meets Annabel, who's terminally ill with cancer.
Restless
tells the encounter of two people facing death, each of them reacting with
opposing forces to this matter. Just like the Yin and the Yang, positive and
negative forces complementing perfectly each other, the couple releases an
energy that celebrates life, perhaps a little too naively, but certainly with a
communicative freshness. While Enoch lives in a lonely and morbid imaginary
world (his only friend is none other than the ghost of a world war 2 suicide
bomber), Annabel faces her fate with the serenity of a child who intends to
take advantage of every moment he/she has left. Together, these two energy
forces invoke the imagination to better face the inevitable. It's a great
lesson about the love of life that they provide, with the help of Hiroshi, the
ghostly Japanese friend.
Supported by Henry Hopper's irradiating the talent (he's
the son of Dennis) and Mia Wasikowska - their beauty and thirst for life are
intoxicating - the film defies bravely destiny. Even its title challenges the
epitaph commonly used American on tombstones (rest in peace). Creating an ode
to love, Gus Van Sant offers a warm look to better illuminate the complicity
between the couple. From small impromptu dialogues to inspired games, Enoch and
Annabel have fun, taking advantage of every moment they spend together. The
pathos has no place here, since the film confronts the issue of death with such
force that it reduces it to an end too futile compared to the love and
happiness that can fill a life.
Critic's Notebook [Martin Tsai]
Gus Van Sant seems to have devoted much of his filmography to rehearsing for that inevitable River Phoenix biopic. Indeed, the filmmaker has explored how young outcasts grapple with mortality from just about every angle — even the price-of-fame slant in the quasi-Kurt Cobain biopic “Last Days” — except one directly invoking Phoenix himself. Mr. Van Sant’s latest, “Restless,” continues this journeying, albeit this time in the timeworn boy-meets-terminally-ill-girl variety.
From the little-seen “Mala Noche” to the highly commercial “Good Will Hunting,” he has always been preoccupied with waifish offscourings. It’s almost perverse how he ogles each and every one of his twinkish, marginalized protagonists by lovingly doting on him with warm lighting and soft-focus close-ups courtesy of Harris Savides. But since Phoenix’s passing, Mr. Van Sant seems to literally work through his grieving process by adding the element of fatality to his favorite milieu, such as in “Gerry,” “Elephant,” “Last Days” and “Paranoid Park.”
It’s curious that Mr. Van Sant chooses to revisit the subject again after the triumphant “Milk,” but “Restless” does demonstrate that he has gotten a bit older and wiser. Henry Hopper (son of Dennis) is Mr. Van Sant’s muse du jour, playing the porcelain-skinned, perpetually nappy-headed and always-dressed-in-black high-school dropout named Enoch. Crashing funerals as a hobby, he meets the cancer-stricken but nevertheless pixie-like Annabel (Mia Wasikowska). He gradually lets down his guard and confides in her about the personal tragedy that has made him so antisocial.
Though it’s as unsentimental as Mr. Van Sant’s other films, screenwriter Jason Lew at least doesn’t keep the characters at arm’s length the way Mr. Van Sant does in his own scripts. In fact, one can safely conclude that Mr. Van Sant is most accomplished when directing other people’s screenplays. “Restless” exudes the maturity that eludes Mr. Van Sant’s previous fusions of youth and death. It’s too bad he still hasn’t learned to shower his female leads with the same adoring attention he lavishes on his male ones. The relatively more seasoned Ms. Wasikowska is neglected throughout the film, which lessens the impact of Annabel’s eventual demise.
Movieline [Stephanie Zacharek] Stephanie Zacharek at Cannes, May 12, 2011
Overheard in the mad crush to get into this morning’s overcrowded
screening of Gus Van Sant’s Restless: Woman A says to Woman B, in
French-accented English, “What is your problem?” Woman B says to Woman A: “Your
being a bitch is my problem!” Ah,
But it’s all good. The crowd seemed to have simmered down by the time the Restless end credits rolled, and many responded with affectionate applause. I feel warmly toward Restless too: The picture (which opens the festival’s Un Certain Regard sidebar) is so fluttering and tender, so guileless, that you almost can’t believe it was made by an old hand like Van Sant. Then again, maybe you can. Annabel (Mia Wasikowska) and Enoch (Henry Hopper, son of Dennis) play somber teenagers who meet at a memorial service. Enoch is haunted by the death of his parents — he lost them suddenly in an accident. Annabel has her own secret, spilled early on: She’s dying of cancer. They fall in love, quickly and fervently, knowing only doom and sadness await them — and they’ve never even seen Love Story.
Restless is ever-so-silly. When Enoch accompanies Annabel to the hospital on a “date” — she has to have a transfusion — they wile away the time playing Operation. He gazes at her sensitively: “Does it hurt when they…?” The question trails off, delicately. It probably does, but Annabel isn’t about to belabor the point. Elsewhere, they run hand-in-hand down a hospital corridor, merrily and mischievously, and sneak into the morgue. Ah, young love!
Do they still make young people like this? I’m not sure. But Van Sant, I think, is wishing they did. It’s hard to say exactly when Restless is supposed to be set, but it doesn’t feel contemporary. Annabel and Enoch romp around in the kinds of vintage clothes many of us wore in the ’70s and ’80s (and some of us even beyond): Old silk dressing gowns, lacy flapper dresses, loose woolen coats in soft plaids. Hopper’s Enoch has blondish, every-which-way hair and a sultry pout — he could be the Boy with the Thorn in his Side that Morrissey sang about so long ago. And, perhaps most remarkable of all, neither of them ever use an electronic device — they talk face-to-face all the time, and actually seem to enjoy it.
Hopper and Wasikowska (the latter seen recently in Cary Joji Fukunaga’s fine adaptation of Jane Eyre) are sweet together, and emerge relatively unscathed from the heartfelt absurdity of the movie around them. They sure don’t make ‘em like they used to. Which is why, every once in a while, it’s nice to see someone try.
Restless | Reelviews Movie
Reviews James Berardinelli
The most surprising thing about Restless, the latest film from indie director Gus Van Sant, is how conventional it is. Of course, this is not the first time Van Sant, whose penchant is for offbeat productions with little widespread appeal, has entered the mainstream. His Good Will Hunting, for example, was a crossover hit, filling auditoriums in both art house theaters and multiplexes. Restless is among a handful of readily accessible motion pictures. In an effort to keep the story, which sounds like a Nicholas Sparks novel when reduced to a one-sentence summary, from seeming too much like a generic romantic drama, Van Sant has sprinkled the movie with "indie markers" - a somewhat obnoxious musical soundtrack, a distant tone some may find off-putting, and an unhurried approach to advancing the plot. These elements are at times distracting - calling cards crying out "This is still an indie film!" - but they don’t detract from the things that ultimately make Restless an emotionally rewarding experience: strong performances from leads Henry Hopper and Mia Wasikowska and a tender love story conveyed with genuine feeling.
Both Enoch (Hopper) and Annabel (Wasikowska) are fascinated by death. Considering their circumstances, it's understandable. Enoch's parents were killed in a car crash that nearly claimed his life as well - he was clinically dead for a short time and no one expected him to survive. Annabel has terminal cancer; the doctors have given her three months to live. This keen sense of mortality casts a pall over Restless - even in its lighter moments, one can never forget how closely the characters waltz with the Grim Reaper.
They meet, appropriately enough, at a funeral. Annabel was a friend of the dead boy. Enoch has made a hobby of funeral crashing. Some view this as disrespectful to the corpse, but Enoch shows up and quietly pretends to grieve while hoping to find a greater understanding of death. Annabel recognizes that he's not a legitimate mourner and chooses to join him on his next outing. They become friends and something more - then she tells him about her date with mortality. He in turn reveals that his best friend is a ghost - a Japanese kamikaze named Hiroshi (Ryo Kase) who died during World War II. The movie leaves it up to the viewer to determine whether Hiroshi is real or a figment of Enoch's imagination.
It's difficult to like Enoch. He is introverted, uncommunicative, and belligerent. We warm to him over time, primarily as we get to see his softer side through his interactions with Annabel, who, despite her pragmatism, remains sweet and charming. She wants to experience as much of life as she can in the days remaining to her, but there's no bucket list. Like a song bird she idolizes, she sees every morning when she awakens as a gift.
Hopper and Wasikowska give credible, down-to-earth performances, and they mesh well with one another. They have all the passion one might expect from two young people caught up in a doomed romance. For Annabel, this is one last chance to latch onto something she might otherwise have missed. It's more difficult for Enoch, who is used to keeping his emotions shuttered and who goes into this affair with the certainty that it will end painfully for him. The audience is aware of this as well, and it makes the love story heartbreaking.
This is the first serious role for Hopper, the son of Dennis Hopper; his presence is forceful and at times a little fearsome. Wasikowska, who has been enriching her resume with mainstream roles like the title ones in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland and the classically-minded Jane Eyre, is as good as she has been in anything else, and she appears decidedly pixie-like (and a little like Carey Mulligan) with her short hair. The supporting cast includes Schuyler Fisk (as Annabel's sister) and Jane Adams (as Enoch's aunt), but the movie is all about Enoch and Annabel, and it is at its best when they share the screen, with or without others.
Van Sant salts the film with moments of macabre humor, but never goes beyond the bounds of good taste. His directorial touch is restrained. The obligatory sex scene is handled delicately, expressing sensuality but nothing more overt. The filmmaker is respectful of the characters and their circumstances, and gets the most out of his actors by this approach. By curbing his independent flourishes, he is making a movie more for the Good Will Hunting/Milk crowd than for those who have sought out Elephant or Paranoid Park. As compromises go, this one results in a dramatically and emotionally solid 90 minutes.
Review: Restless - Film Comment Paul Brunick, September/October 2011
Let’s start with the bad news. The screenplay isn’t good. We suspected as much from the coverage at Cannes and our in-house appraisal of the Internet trailer. But we’ve now seen the press screening, and, I’m sorry to say, the script’s terminal-illness and teen-angst clichés are more aggressively malignant than we feared.
The details recycled from better films, the maudlin emotional overreach—those we were prepared for. But there are . . . additional complications. We never expected that an inspirational romance this contrived could be this confused, this confusing. I mean, we’ve seen it twice now and there are major plot points we still don’t understand, supporting players whose presence baffles us.
We anticipated the excess of sympathetic hardships, the unsustainable levels of manufactured pathos. As we feared, the hyper-histrionic scenario is cannibalizing itself like some autoimmune disorder; the harder it tries to make us invest in the characters’ plight, the more transparently calculated each scene feels. But we had never guessed that a disease-of-the-week weepie could metastasize so much meaningless quirk in so brief a running time.
Henry Hopper (son of Dennis) plays shaggy-haired Enoch. His character is orphaned in a car crash and spends months in a coma; is cruelly bullied at school, fights back, and is promptly expelled; becomes fixated on death, is borderline suicidal, and starts crashing strangers’ funerals, dressed in bespoke suits and Doc Martin sneakers, Edwardian jackets and drainpipe trousers, wide-spread collars and black skinny ties.
And did I mention that his near-death experience was a real-death experience, that he legally died, was resuscitated, and returned from the afterlife with the friendly ghost of a kamikaze pilot named Hiroshi (Ryo Kase)? (Magical realism? Schizophrenic delusion? The ambiguity makes it art!) Shades of Donnie Darko? Maybe. Bud Cort’s Harold? Definitely. James Dean’s Rebel? Daddy Dennis was one of the greasers!
So Enoch and the Girl, Annabel, meet cute at a funeral. She’s played by Mia Wasikowska, a luminous gamine sporting a Mia Farrow crop, Jean Seberg sailor shirts, and Diane Keaton derby hats, plus 19th-century cameos and lots of autumnal tweeds. (“People like to wear bright colors these days,” she explains.) Chromatic contrasts aside, these symmetrically elfin beauties make quite the couple, with their complementary androgyne coiffures, chicken chests, and neoclassical hipster ensembles, not to mention matching his-and-her tragedies. Because Annabel—who has an absentee father and an alcoholic mother, and has lost at least two friends to cancer—is dying of cancer herself. Beautiful-people cancer, that is. No chemo, no invasive surgery, though in one scene she plays the board game Operation and symbolically removes her own brain.
Thus we return to Van Sant’s primal scene: a moribund beauty photographed before high-school sports fields, under overcast fall skies, in tree-lined suburban streets dappled with wet leaves. I have to admit that I find the nostalgic waxing lyrical of Van Sant’s Americana irresistible, that I swoon to his classical studies of ephebic beauty, the shades of sexuality too languorous to be carnal, as if all the camera wanted was to lean in and kiss them softly on the head.
No cinematographer has better meshed with Van Sant than Harris Savides, who shot this and five other of the director’s films. The softly underexposed naturalism the the two have perfected is a delicately revelatory aesthetic. It transcends language, transcends the plastic deformations of “style,” and, frankly, transcends this script. Though Restless will remain a minor Van Sant title, it’s still recognizably his, and contains as much irreducible, irresistible beauty as that implies.
Restless | Film
Review | Slant Magazine Nick Schager
TIFF 2011: RESTLESS Review Kurt Halfyard at Toronto for Screen Anarchy
In Theaters: "Restless" - Film Writings by Jason Bailey Fourth Row Center, also seen here: In Theaters: "Restless" - Film Writings by Jason Bailey
Review:
Mia Wasikowska is luminous in Gus Van Sant's sweet 'Restless' Drew McWeeny at Cannes from HitFix, May 13, 2011
Cannes 2011 Review: Gus Van Sant's Restless | Film School Rejects Simon Gallagher
Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]
Surrender to the Void-[Steven Flores]
SBS Film [Lisa Nesselson] at Cannes
We Got This Covered [James Powell] at Cannes
CANNES REVIEW | 'Restless' is a Good Actors Showcase, But Nothing Special for Gus Van Sant Eric Kohn from indieWIRE, May 12, 2011
Cannes Review: Gus Van Sant's 'Restless' Is An Endless Number Of ... Kevin Jagernauth from indieWIRE
Battleship
Pretension [David Bax]
Cancer
is better funny than mawkish | Movie Review | Chicago Reader J.R. Jones, September 29, 2011
Film-Forward.com
[Michael Lee]
Review: 'Restless' is Confoundingly Bad | Film School Rejects Dustin Hucks
Restless (2011) - Efilmcritic.com - eFilmCritic! Peter Sobczynski
Restless - AV Club Film Keith Phipps
Restless Blu-ray
Review | High Def Digest Luke
Hickman
Movie
Review - 'Restless' - Love And Death, Going Hand In Hand ... Ian Buckwalter from NPR
Restless
| Reviews | Screen - ScreenDaily Mike Goodridge at Cannes from Screendaily
Tonight at the Movies [John C. Clark]
FilmFracture: What's Your Time Worth? [James Jay Edwards}
Restless (2011) — Inside Movies Since 1920 - Box Office Magazine Pete Hammond
Restless:
Gus Van Sant Draws a Blank Mary
Corliss at
The Film Stage [Raffi Asdourian] at Cannes
#TIFF11 Review: Gus Van Sant's RESTLESS, starring Henry Hopper ... Robert Eric Tinch from Birth.Movies,Death
Can't
Stop the Movies [Andrew Hathaway]
Sound On Sight Laura Holtebrinck
Digital Spy [Mayer Nissim - Cannes 2011]
Gus Van Sant's Teen Romance <i>Restless</i - Village Voice Mark Holcomb
The House Next Door [Fernando F. Croce] at Toronto
Cannes 2011. Gus Van Sant's "Restless" on Notebook | MUBI Daniel Kasman at Cannes, May 15, 2011
Cannes
’11, day two: an evil child, a new Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and a TV pilot that
isn’t Mike D’Angelo at
Cannes
2011: Teenage Death Trip Double Feature
Karina Longworth at
The L Magazine [Henry Stewart]
Georgia Straight [Patty Jones]
FirstShowing.net Cannes 2011 [Alex Billington]
Melissa Anderson on day two of the 64th Cannes Film Festival ArtForum, May 12, 2011
Pros
and Cannes: Upcoming Festival Highlights and Lowlights John Lopez at
Gus Van Sant on Restless, Test-Screening Nightmares and Why He Went Out For Breaking Dawn S.T. VanAirsdale interview from Movieline, September 15, 2011
Restless Movie Trailer, Reviews and More | TVGuide.com
Restless Review.
Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London
Dave Calhoun at
Cannes 2011 review: Restless Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, May 12, 2011
Restless –
review | Film | The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
Restless – review | Film | The Guardian Philip French
Restless,
review - Telegraph Robbie Collin
Restless, Cannes Film Festival - Reviews, Films - The Independent Kaleem Aftab at Cannes from The Independent, May 16, 2011
The Japan Times [Giovanni Fazio]
Santa Fe Reporter [Ann Lewinson]
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Portland Mercury [Jamie S. Rich]
'Restless' review: morbid and mawkish Walter Addiego from The SF Chronicle
"Restless" by Gus Van Sant: movie review - Los Angeles Times Sheri Linden
Restless Movie Review
& Film Summary (2011) | Roger Ebert
'Restless'
With Mia Wasikowska - Review - The New York Times A.O. Scott, September 15, 2011
Annabel Lee - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe - Poemhunter.com
Annabel Lee- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More
Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe - The Literature Network
Gus van Sant helped make Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s
careers by directing them in their Academy Award winning first screenplay, GOOD
WILL HUNTING (1997), coming to the rescue again at the last moment filling in
for what was to be Matt Damon’s initial foray into directing, pulling out with
just 5 weeks before shooting began, but van Sant admirably pulls off a
respectable small-town picture set in the rural farm country of Western
Pennsylvania. While the film has a
conventional structure of big city corporate honchos visiting small time
farmers eager to buy up farmland leases in order to drill for natural gas,
promising large sums of money, in some cases millions, to farmers whose land
may already be leased due to the hard economic times. Seemingly easy pickings, two corporate sales
personnel are sent in from Global Solutions, a rising West coast star Steve
Butler (Matt Damon) and his partner Sue Thomason (Frances McDormand). Buying flannel shirts and a pick up truck to
look the part, they set out to convince the town to accept the company’s offer
of money in exchange for drilling rights.
This has all the makings of a David vs. Goliath scenario, especially
when an aging town spokesperson, the plain speaking Hal Holbrook as Frank
Yates, a local science teacher, suggests this offer could ruin their land and
water supplies. When
The subject is reminiscent of Laura Israel’s recent documentary
WINDFALL (2010) about installing giant wind turbines in upstate
What’s intriguing about the film is the audience tends to side with Matt Damon, even if he’s a corporate shark, because he’s just an Iowa farm boy himself whose town lost everything when the Caterpillar plant went belly up. In his mind, he’s actually helping these people, offering what they need, but audiences also tend to be suspicious of $9 billion dollar corporations that rarely tell the whole truth. It’s also easy to side with Noble’s counter arguments, as no one likes to see dead livestock, but his arrogance in continuing to show up the corporate superstar is infuriating. Despite their high powered reputations, there’s little evidence of it on display, as instead this corporate duo seem like a beaten team, especially when they construct a country fair and carnival, complete with a Ferris wheel, pony rides and pig races, even a tractor pull, all the things local farmers and their families adore, but a downpour of rain puts an end to that dream, leaving them hopelessly outclassed by a smug amateur. The picture of the rural locale is beautifully captured by Linus Sandgren, while the melancholic score by Danny Elfman is quietly in reserve, leaving a sad tinge to this picture, as there was never much of a fight. The only face to face discussions take place at that initial town meeting, where the voice of Frank Yates becomes the conscious of the community, as he demonstrates a knowledgeable foresight in not jumping at the money. But the overall picture is clouded somewhat by a mysterious plot twist that suggests the argument is not fully resolved, that it is still developing, and that each community will have to deal with a similar story. What’s perhaps most surprising is how close this story resembles the predictable plot to THE MUSIC MAN (1962), where a swindling outsider comes to sell a bill of goods to the unsuspecting people of River City, Iowa, where the town’s goodness and moral righteousness, not to mention the attractiveness of the town librarian (Shirley Jones), makes him see the light, turning a con man into a productive citizen. A similar state of enlightenment adds a touch of ambiguity to this picture as well, where the moral seems to be “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” 70s Mother Nature *Chiffon* Margarine Commercial - YouTube (31 seconds).
Promised Land | review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out Keith Uhlich from Time Out New York
Steve Butler (Matt Damon) isn’t a bad guy. Oh sure, he may work as a corporate lackey for a natural-gas company that wants to frack the hell out of economically depressed U.S. farming communities. But as the son of a grower himself, he’s so aw-shucks personable it’s infectious, and—for good measure—he makes sure to say, “I’m not a bad guy” to many of the people he meets.
Gus Van Sant’s didactic drama, by contrast, is quite a bad
movie, though it takes a little while for that to become evident. When Steve
and his business partner, Sue (Frances McDormand), arrive in the rural
But the moment John Krasinski’s mischief-making environmentalist
shows up, Promised Land becomes the kind of earnest, oversimplified
big-issues drama that
Promised Land | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias
Using film to advocate for one side of an issue or another is a
tricky business: “If you want to send a message, try
Retaining a bit of Midwestern paunch from The
Informant—enough to require a reassuring pair of dad jeans, anyway—Damon
stars as an ace salesman for a natural-gas company, skilled at reassuring
skittish sellers with stories of his roots in rural
Though Van Sant is firmly in for-hire mode, as he was back when he helped make Damon and Ben Affleck’s careers with Good Will Hunting, he and the actor/screenwriters do their best to evoke the pride, hardship, and sly opportunism of their iconic heartland setting. Some information comes out indelicately—Krasinski straight-up lectures an elementary-school class on the toxic effects of shale-drilling on groundwater—but both sides get an airing, and more importantly, the situation seems plausible. But Damon and Krasinski throw it away on a third-act reveal that trades all the skillfully faked ambiguity for a lesson on environmental exploitation, thinly cloaked as a morality tale. No one seems to recognize the irony of making a film about corporate rigging that is itself outrageously rigged.
At its best, Gus Van Sant's "Promised Land" channels environmental politics into an agreeable drama about small town America facing down the forces of capitalist greed. In lesser moments it trumpets that tension with a complete disregard for the powers of subtlety. Co-written and starring Matt Damon and John Krasinski, the movie centers on the efforts of a corporation to gain drilling rights in a rural town, setting the stage for a classic showdown between environmentalism and commerciality. While the stakes are clearly drawn, with the potential of hydraulic fracturing to dilute the local water supply placed front and center, "Promised Land" can't help but preach its cause in obvious ways that continually hold back an otherwise well-acted, swiftly paced drama.
An unofficial companion piece to "Gasland," Josh Fox's Oscar-nominated documentary about the largely unacknowledged dangers of fracking on unwitting farm communities, "Promised Land" complicates the issue by putting a likable face on the presumed bad guys in the equation: Steve (Damon) and Sue (Frances McDormand) arrive at the small town of McKinley as representatives of the fictional drilling company Global, eager to convince its citizens to sign a lucrative deal let the conglomerate drill there without discussing the details. They seem to understand the danger involved in fracking, which includes the injection of chemicals that can ruin fertile ground, but shrug it off as a workplace hazard.
Despite his affable demeanor, Steve initially comes across as a no-nonsense dealmaker eager to pay off the town's mayor to let the deal pass. But the cool-headed corporate operative's confidence gets tested at a town meeting, when retired Boeing engineer Frank (Hal Holbrook) voices his disdain for fracking, convincing a majority of the locals that they should put the deal to a vote. While Steve and the equally aggressive Sue struggle to push their agenda, the campaign is further complicated by the arrival of frumpy activist Dustin (Kraskinski), a grinning rabble-rouser eager to assure Global will lose.
So far, so engaging, but once "Promised Land" competently assembles its central conflict, the story has nowhere to go. For a while, Steve and Sue's vain attempts to one-up the sly efforts of the fact-spouting foil Dustin, who arrives bearing tales of dead cattle and lives ruined by fracking, sustain an enjoyable comedic levity. Ultimately, though, "Promised Land" caves to pressures and stiffens up, with the Holbrook character delivering a weepy monologue about the purity of the land in a bid to pull at Steve's heartstrings. If you're wondering if Steve has second thoughts about the morality of his profession, consider this: When was the last time Matt Damon played a bad guy? (Answer: "The Departed," but this is no crime movie.)
Needless to say, once "Promised Land" assembles its key ingredients the momentum stalls for good, stumbling further by playing up a treacly romance between Damon's character and a local elementary school teacher played by Rosemarie Dewitt. Divided between the task at hand and his evident humanity, Steve's odd positioning as the leading man in spite of his ignoble calling makes for compelling viewing until it gets blatantly obvious that he'll cave. The screenplay's intelligent raison d'être -- outing the corporate agenda behind fracking and the way it preys on gullible blue collar towns -- never quite merges with the flimsy storyline.
Still, the weighty context makes "Promised Land" a substantial step forward in terms of thematic complexity for Van Sant after the amateurish "Restless." Tackling a decidedly old-fashioned story by Dave Eggers, Van Sant's straightforward direction makes up for a lack of narrative mastery by focusing on character depth rather than complex filmmaking trickery. While the chemistry between Damon and Dewitt fizzles, the former's continually rocky back-and-forths with his cantankerous co-worker avoid turning either of them into stereotypes. Convinced they can justify the work with the generous paychecks that await them, their state of denial is comically represented by a routine inability to start their car as they cruise around town begging for votes.
It's certainly fun to watch them flounder, but the movie follows suit once it tries to get real by pushing homespun values to the forefront with cheap nuggets of wisdom ("You can't lose a game that's still being played") -- and consolidates most of them into a closing speech in which one character addresses the entire town while weepy close-ups accentuate each point. As clichés go, this one is particularly gratuitous; in Frank Capra's heyday, it might have gotten a pass, but with the contemporary setting it breaks the illusion of watching a genuine conflict in favor of sentimental moralizing, pushing a message more crassly than the corporate menace at its center.
The
Fracturing of Pennsylvania - NYTimes.com - The New York Times The
Fracturing of
Burning
Love - The New Yorker Elizabeth
Kolbert from The New Yorker,
E.P.A.
Links Tainted Water in Wyoming to Hydraulic Fracturing for ... E.P.A.
Links Tainted Water in
Add
Quakes to Rumblings Over Gas Rush - The New York Times Add
Quakes to Rumblings Over Gas Rush, by Henry Fountain from The New York Times,
The 'Promised Land' Is Just a Signature Away | PopMatters Chris Barsanti
"Happy
Feet Two" Star Matt Damon Taught Me About ... - Mother Jon Asawin Suebsaeng from Mother Jones,
On
a Wyoming ranch, feds sacrifice water for uranium Abrahm Lustgarten from Salon,
Op
Ed: Matt Damon's Fracking Fiction
Jillian Kay Melchior from The
National Review,
How
fracking is corroding small-town America
Andrew O’Hehir from Salon,
Sound
On Sight ‘Promised Land’ Promises Are All Lies, by Michael Ryan,
Promised Land's Hard Sell - - Movies - New York - Village Voice Nick Pinkerton
Movie Review - 'Windfall' - Wind-Power Documentary Takes A ... - NPR Mark Jenkins from NPR
Flavorwire
[Jason Bailey] ‘Promised Land’ and the Pitfalls of Political Cinema
Promised Land Review: Big Fracking Deal - Pajiba Daniel Carlson
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
Movie Shark Deblore [Debbie Lynn Elias]
Monsters and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]
Screen International [Tim Grierson]
Promised Land (2012) - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]
Film School Rejects [Neil Miller]
Promised Land (2012) Movie Review from Eye for Film Jennie Kermode
Paste Magazine [Annlee Ellingson]
Digital Journal [Sarah Gopaul]
FilmFracture [James Jay Edwards]
California Literary [Brett Harrison Davinger]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Hollywood and Fine [Marshall Fine]
Georgia Straight [John Lekich]
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
Matt
Damon: man of the people Tim Lewis
interview with Matt Damon from The
Observer,
Promised Land Review - Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy
Promised Land | Movie review - Film - Time Out Chicago Ben Kenigsberg
Promised Land – first look review | Film | guardian.co.uk Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, February 8, 2013
Colorado goes fracking free: we have the power Mariel Hemingway from The Guardian, October 23, 2012
China
planning 'huge fracking industry' Jaeah Lee from The Guardian,
How
the North Dakota fracking boom shook a family James William Gibson from The Guardian,
This
fracking fantasy is the delusion of fossil fuel addiction Damian Carrington from The Guardian,
Fracking campaigners fear government will give go-ahead to shale exploration The Guardian, December 13, 2012
Fracking for shale gas gets green light in UK Fiona Harvey and Adam Vaughan from The Guardian, December 13, 2012
Fracking
for shale gas: the right way forward? Mark Lynas and David Santillo from The Guardian,
Fracking:
a flash in the pan? Terry
Macalister from The Guardian,
Fracking splits coalition over future for British energy Terry Macalister from The Observer, December 15, 2012
Fracking offers a risky salvation for America's hard-pressed heartlands Edward Helmore from The Observer, December 15, 2012
Fracking
lobbyists prepare case against Matt Damon's Promised Land Suzanne Goldenberg from The Guardian, December 17, 2012
When
fracking came to suburban Texas Suzanne Goldenberg from The Guardian,
'Frackademia':
how Big Gas bought research on hydraulic fracturing Richard Schiffman from The Guardian,
Fracking debate draws Yoko, Lennon and Sarandon to rural battlegrounds Adam Gabbatt from The Guardian, January 18, 2013
On
the frontline of Poland's fracking rush Andrew Wasley from The Guardian,
Anti-fracking
protesters set up drilling rig in George Osborne's constituency Martin Wainwright from The Guardian,
Greenpeace occupies George Osborne's Conservative headquarters in fracking protest – in pictures photos from The Guardian, March 4, 2013
The Star-Ledger [Stephen Whitty]
Philadelphia Inquirer [Steven Rea]
Critic Review for Promised Land on washingtonpost.com Ann Hornaday
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Pete Roche]
Kansas City Star [Ann Lewinson]
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]
THE
SEA OF TREES
USA (110 mi) 2016 ‘Scope Official site [Japan]
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Richard Mowe]
Although the material has, on the surface, plenty of visual and emotional appeal there is a hollow heart to Gus Van Sant’s examination of a lecturer’s quest to end his own life following his wife’s death.
Matthew McConaughey is the lost soul bereft after dealing with his spouse’s demise despite the fact that the marriage appeared to be on the rocks through her alcoholism and an environment of domestic hostility. There looked as if there might be a reconciliation when she is diagnosed with a brain tumour but Van Sant and screenwriter Chris Sparling have a convenient exit strategy for her up their sleeves.
The film cuts back and forth with interior monologues from McConaughey as he looks back on his marriage and what brings him to the brink of suicide in Japan’s famous Aokigahara forest, a lush expanse leading up to Mount Fuji which, apparently, is also known as the Suicide Forest and even carries a sign with a user warning: “Please think again, so that you can make your life a happy one”.
McConaughey’s character arrives ready to commit the deed until he encounters a Japanese man (Ken Watanabe) also staggering through the undergrowth and in need of care. After a series of escapades straight out of a television survival programme, the two of them gradually get to know each other and the reasons for each one being there.
The flashbacks pile up as Van Sant sketches in the details of the breakdown of the marriage to Joan (a feisty Naomi Watts), who castigates her husband for his low paid job in academe while she brings in the bucks from being an estate agent.
The twists and turns of this narrative fail to ring true with too many implausibilities in the plotting to give any credibility.
Certainly it looks impressive but Van Sant relies on just one too many shots of the incredible forest for comfort while his relationship with Japanese culture appears to be no more than cursory.
It has been the first film of the Competition to be greeted with boos at its media screening which should give the film’s creative team pause for reflection about exactly where they went so badly awry.
Gus Van Sant’s name seems to conjure wildly different reactions depending on how accustomed one is to his varying filmography. Whether you’re a fan or detractor of his period of ‘slow’ films, including 2003’s Palme d’Or winning Elephant, or his mainstream appeal with beloved dramas like 1997’s Good Will Hunting, one can’t argue with a certain amount of dexterity on his part as a filmmaker. But those hoping for a sensational return to any tone in particular are in for a pointedly disappointing time with his latest, The Sea of Trees. Hopelessly melodramatic and embarrassingly affected, it’s a film so emotionally tone deaf it makes Finding Forrester (2000) seem miraculous by comparison. Headlined by a high pedigree cast, awkwardly shuffled about in a revolving charade, the title is a major disappointment from the beloved filmmaker.
Struggling writer Arthur Brennan (Matthew McConaughey) mysteriously books a one way ticket to Tokyo in order to enter a dense forest, Aokigahara, known as The Sea of Trees. As he makes his way into the lush foliage, we realize the region is a place people come to kill themselves. At least we assume judging from the variety of corpses he stumbles upon before he takes out a bottle of pills and a yellow envelope with his wife’s (Naomi Watts) on it. Interrupted from his misery by the sound of a human in distress, Arthur assists Takumi Nakamura (Ken Watanabe), who has been struggling to make his way out of the forest after a failed suicide attempt. As the men help each other, we come to find what it is exactly that brought Arthur to such desperation.
Certainly, the enigmatic locale lends a certain ambience early on, with our grief stricken protagonist wandering about the lush forest as if stumbling onto the same swath of dumping grounds from The Ballad of Narayama. But as soon as the dazed and confused Ken Watanabe joins McConaughey, acting as if he was transported from the set of Godzilla to resume bumbling around, things start to head south real fast. Many of the moments in the forest feel brief, as if Van Sant is all too aware that intense focus here will quickly reveal the banality of the situation. And so we spend an extensive amount of time in flashbacks of Arthur Brennan’s. We’ve become readily accustomed to tell-tale signs of the stale, crumbling marriage, which screenwriter Chris Sparling (ATM) believes to be best conveyed via drunken skirmishes, particularly a cringe inducing dinner party that finds even the lovely Naomi Watts falling flat. And then we go on and on with their generalized middle class problems, leading, of course, to a medically related dilemma and a greater tragedy the film is so eager to divulge we see it coming a mile off.
Van Sant and Sparling save the best for last, however, in a third act wherein McConaughey outdoes his crying jag from Interstellar in multiple sequences. Such agony should be reserved for characters actually developed into entities we can feel something for, but the emptiness of The Sea of Trees instead only makes us feel bad for McConaughey, since we’re left wondering instead how many takes each of those overwrought sobs took to complete. The cherry on top is the finale, a dose of schmaltz so high it flies over the horizon of camp into the realm of concern—how did no one question the abject silliness of this endeavor? The Sea of Trees sinks under the weight of this maudlin conceit, so candy contrived it will make your teeth ache.
In a career that has seen its share of ups and downs, Gus Van Sant’s new film is right near the bottom. Having won the coveted Palme d’Or back in 2003 for Elephant, he finds himself almost inexplicably in the running (and I say that only in the sense that it is at least in the competition category) with The Sea of Trees, a comically trite drama that sees Matthew McConaughey trapped in a magical suicide forest.
The forest is Aokigahara in Japan, also known as the Sea of Trees. A genuine suicide hotspot – that’s worth pointing out as nothing in this film is easy to believe – the forest is swept for bodies annually and signs are placed all over encouraging the desperate to think again. McConaughey’s faltering scientist/teacher Arthur Brennan is one such desperate soul. Having given up on life, he decides to end it in a beautiful location following a promise made recently to a loved one. Aokigahara itself has no particular meaning. It’s simply the first result that comes up on google when he types in “a perfect place to die”.
Van Sant sets the clunky tone from the start. We first meet a morose Arthur driving to the airport. Just to make clear what he’s up to, multiple opportunities are taken to show a one-way trip. There’s the parking ticket left in the car while an announcement informs drivers to take it with them followed by a refusal to buy a return fare. He even leaves the keys in the car while his lack of luggage is pointedly highlighted. Everything is pointedly highlighted from hereon in.
Funnily enough for a man set on ending it all, he goes about it pretty slowly. Not only does he decide to cross the Pacific first, he then searches for the perfect spot before popping pills individually. This inefficient approach allows time for a dishevelled Ken Watanabe to stumble in as Takumi Nakamura, a similarly disenchanted businessman who slit his wrists only to recant. Now he needs Arthur’s help to escape from under the trees.
What follows is a bizarre odyssey as the unlikely duo stagger around falling off ledges and nearly drowning in caves. In between regular scrapes with death, they hold ham-fisted debates about faith – Arthur is a scientist and Takumi believes in the forest spirits – while stumbling across the bodies of multiple suicides left lying unceremoniously around. In such a mawkishly sentimental film, the discovery of corpses is remarkably clinical, Arthur looting them for anything he can carry away. If that’s not enough, the story offers up a series of flashbacks revealing the events between Arthur and his alcoholic wife Joan (Naomi Watts) that led him out here in the first place.
The whole thing is a mess, compounded by a horrible score that veers between nature ringtones and the kind of music you might find in an insurance advert. Van Sant captures several nice shots, but he’s too easily distracted by the foliage. The camera often breaks away to admire light filtering through distant branches. At least the performances are good, but nothing less should be expected from actors of the quality of McConaughey, Watanabe and Watts. They play their roles with admirable gusto, even if Chris Sparling’s screenplay leaves them high and dry.
When this fiasco finally comes to an end it does so with two awful twists; one that became apparent within the first 20 minutes, the other so cheap and pointless it’s impressive anyone let it remain in the final cut. This begs further questions. Amidst all the spiritual posturing, family drama and Freeview channel survival footage, did anyone actually watch the film before accepting it into competition for the Palme d’Or? And if so, did they manage to keep a straight face?
It's official: This is the worst movie ending of all time Nico Lang from Salon, August 29, 2016
Cannes
Review: Gus Van Sant's 'The Sea Of Trees' Starring Matthew ... Oliver Lyttelton from indieWIRE
The Sea of Trees – first look review - Little White Lies Adam Woodward
Cannes
Review: 'The Sea of Trees' is Gus Van Sant's Worst Movie ... Eric Kohn from indieWIRE
Review:
Matthew McConaughey and Gus Van Sant get lost in The Sea ... Gregory Ellwood from Hit Fix
The Film Stage [Giovanni Marchini Camia]
The House Next Door [James Lattimer]
Cannes
2015 Review: SEA OF TREES, Glimpses Of ... - ScreenAnarchy Jason Gorber
We Got This Covered [Matt Donato]
The MacGuffin [Allen Almachar]
PlumeNoire.com [Moland Fengkov]
The Upcoming [Christian Herschmann]
The
Sea of Trees Movie Review : Shockya.com Chiara Gabardi
Charlie's Blog Charlie Bury
First
Reviews: Gus Van Sant's 'The Sea of Trees' Is Cannes' First ... Sam Adams from indieWIRE
Daily
| Cannes 2015 | Gus Van Sant's THE SEA OF TREES | Keyframe ... David Hudson from Fandor
Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy]
Gus Van Sant's 'Sea of Trees' Booed at Cannes Premiere | Variety May 15, 2015
The
Sea of Trees review: a fantastically annoying and ... - The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
The Sea of
Trees review - The Telegraph Tim
Robey
Gus
Van Sant's maligned 'Sea of Trees' is a ... - Los Angeles Times Gary Goldstein
The Sea of Trees
Movie Review (2016) | Roger Ebert
Brian Tallerico
Review:
Love, Loss and Spiritual Torment in 'The Sea of Trees' - The ... Jeannette Catsoulis from The New York Times
The Sea of Trees -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
BORGMAN B- 81
They
descended upon earth to strengthen their ranks. —opening inner title sequence
Van Warmerdam continues his obsession with surreal black comedies that
border on the absurd, where this one assumes near comic book proportions as it
is essentially a politely told extra-terrestrial earth invasion movie, told
with a deadpan humor and a playful spirit that borders on the ridiculous, where
one wonders how this was chosen among the elite films to premiere in
competition at Cannes, the first Dutch film in 38 years to do so. Playing out more like a bedtime story for
adults, though it has a captivating, near hypnotic effect on children, the
story concerns oddball characters that we might find in a Kaurismäki movie,
including the director himself who plays one of the intrusive “visitors.” Earth is apparently under siege by strange
and eccentric characters that we initially see sleeping underground, but at
present there are only a handful of them, and only a few know about them, as
they’re able to move undetected among earth’s population by disguising
themselves as ordinary humans, often dressed in snappy suits. Much like Giorgos Lanthimos’s acclaimed
DOGTOOTH (2009), this film has a vernacular and story logic all its own, but
many will be hard pressed to make anything out if it. A cult film even upon its release, it likely
falls into the acquired taste category, as its zany horror antics grow tiresome
and nonsensical after awhile. While it
may be some sort of commentary on the evils of the bourgeois upper class
society, who have all presumably lost their souls, this film suggests there are
many laying in wait to inhabit the emptiness left behind. “There’s something surrounding us. It slips
inside now and then,” a worried wife tells her husband, as if the forces of
evil are already upon them, but only unleashed a bit at a time so as not to
arouse suspicion.
The opening has an almost medieval feel to it, as we see a man
swallowing whole a jar of pickled fish before heading off into battle, led by a
determinedly solemn, axe-wielding priest, as they storm through the forests
giving chase to spirits or demons or subterranean creatures that communicate by
cell phones. Camiel Borgman (Jan Bijvoet),
a beady-eyed wretch of a monster with straggly hair and a sunken face that
makes it look like he could be hundreds of years old, is the leader who has to
warn all the others who apparently have their phones on sleep mode, unearthing
their underground lairs with his own axe while leading them to safety, where
they all escape. Still encrusted with
dirt, he finds himself in the affluence of suburbia ringing doorbells asking if
he can take a bath, where the overall impression he makes is not very inviting,
getting kicked senseless by one offended resident, Richard (Jeroen Perceval),
who apparently speaks for the entire community.
However later that evening when Richard is away, the apologetic wife
Marina (Hadewych Minis), apparently shamed by her husband’s behavior, invites
him in and offers him food and shelter, so long as he keeps out of sight of her
husband, where her sheer goodness opens the door for eventual calamity. The family also
consists of three television engrossed children and a lethargic Danish nanny
that already appears hypnotized. While
the story concerns the strange and hypnotic powers of the otherworld, Marina’s
constant state of flux, secret attraction to Borgman, and overall instability
carry the emotional weight of the film, where we often wonder if she’s one of
them, as she’s continually making things easier for them. Quickly ridding the family of their gardener,
Borgman gets a hair trim and a shave and quickly takes his place, bringing in a
few accomplices that live in a utility shed in the back. In no time, they’ve converted this
architecturally impressive suburban home to their home base of operations,
often assuming the shape of hounds, while hypnotizing women and children.
The director himself plays one of Borgman’s many helpers (Ludwig), all
of whom look like members of the Leningrad
Cowboys, who happen to be a satiric invention of Aki Kaurismäki, eventually
becoming an internationally acclaimed Finnish rock band that continues even
today to tour the world. If only they
were that much fun, as whatever enjoyment the viewers might initially have with
this madcap group of eccentrics quickly wears thin when we discover they’re
little more than a group of professional assassins, an intergalactic mafia,
where we see a collection of bodies accumulating at the bottom of the lake,
faces head down in a pile of cement, feet dangling upwards, swaying with the
current. So whatever silly antics we
thought we were enjoying is actually a sadistic group of supernatural killers
without a hint of remorse or human empathy.
Once this becomes inherently clear, all the silliness stops being
amusing, yet the absurd tone continues throughout till the end. In effect, this turns out to be an extended
version of a highly artificialized, yet thoroughly malicious Brothers Grimm Hansel and Gretel fairy tale, a
continuation on earlier themes that began with van Warmerdam’s particularly
gruesome earlier film GRIMM (2003). But
like that film, this one is also erratic, never really establishing a serious
overall theme, as sinister clues are everywhere, while certain developed
storylines go nowhere, and the subject never really connects or comes alive
with the audience. When
Cannes
2013 Day 6 George the Cyclist
Its a rare year with no Hanake or Von Trier film in Competition.
The Dutch film "Borgman"
partially fills the void with elements from each--a family of affluence
terrorized by a team of wackos and a quick-tempered husband and wife off and on
at each other's throats. A long-haired homeless guy knocks at the door of the
wealthy family asking if he can have a bath. The husband answers and
categorically says no. The homeless guy says he knows his wife. A moment later
she approaches the door herself. She denies knowing him. He says she once
tended to him as a nurse in the hospital. She says she has never worked as a
nurse.
The husband shoves the the guy out, knocks him down with a couple of punches
and then repeatedly kicks him. His wife is appalled by his uncharacteristic
response and later goes out to tend to the homeless guy. She gives him refuge
in their small guest house and smuggles him into the house for a bath. The next
day she says he ought to leave, but he refuses. She relents. The homeless guy
eventually brings in several comrades leading to a diluted form of Haneke
terror. Despite interesting characters all round, including a Dutch nanny and
her military boy friend, the director Alex van Warmerdam had seemed to fully
digest his material and lacked the firm and precise vision that could have made
this more than a small curiosity.
Short
Takes: Borgman - Film Comment Nicolas
Rapold, May/June 2014
Call it the id unleashed or simply evil incarnate, but either way, the force that descends upon Borgman’s affluent Richard and Marina in their secluded, spacious slab of a house is definitely implacable. Once the strange tramp of the title (Rasputin-ish Jan Bijvoet) has insinuated himself into the household by provoking a beating from Richard (Jeroen Perceval), director Alex van Warmerdam, a deadpan satirist, sets a course that moves past Boudu and Buñuel into a realm of black comedy so purposefully dark it’s disorienting.
Borgman quickly mesmerizes homemaker Marina (Hadewych Minis), an artist with three children by her quick-tempered partner; meanwhile, his cohorts, demons in suits, assist in committing murders that isolate the household. He then gets himself hired as a gardener for the grounds and slowly takes control. Though it’s flecked with deadpan humor, the sketchy psychologization of the deterioriating Marina and her family is overshadowed by the film’s ruthless narrative drive and violence.
This is some macabre enchantment, but to what end? Van Warmerdam has built a visually clean, efficient, modern version of a fairy tale of the sort that blurs together the pagan and Christian. But he does so without really opening up the metaphysics (or the pretenses) of, say, a Carlos Reygadas trip. At the very least, though, the film confirms the veteran Dutch filmmaker as an under-sung, if perhaps old-fashioned, practitioner of that trusty art-house staple, the twisted domestic allegory.
TIFF
2013 | Borgman (Alex van Warmerdam, Netherlands)—Vanguard Jordan Cronk from Cinema Scope, September 2013
Alex van Warmerdam’s Borgman opens not simply in media res
but in mediam tumultus, as an unidentified mob (led, in true van Warmerdamian
fashion, by a priest in full regalia) run roughshod across a dense forest floor,
uncovering a hidden bunker outfitted with a small militia’s worth of assault
weaponry. Roused from his slumber by the invading gang, a weathered, bearded
man—identified later as the eponymous Borgman—flees his apparent assailants,
seeking sanctuary in the home of a family soon to be divided over their
visitor’s dubious motivations. This kinetic opening, besides being an
effectively disorienting table-setter, is also a lofty bar to set for oneself,
and despite van Warmerdam’s best efforts to maintain an atmosphere of
suggestive ambiguity, Borgman ultimately becomes yet another of the
director’s quaint allegories. Van Warmerdam’s allegorical conceits, however,
have proven acute over the years, and in Borgman, the Dutch satirist’s
preoccupation with class divisions and the effect individuals from different
social strata have on one another is delivered in perhaps its angriest
iteration yet. Borgman’s time spent on the lam is presented in van Warmerdam’s
familiar mixture of dark comedy and absurdist drama, although this time with a
heightened sense of the macabre, like Aki Kaurismäki retrofitting Pasolini’s Teorema
through the lens of modern European capitalism. Once Borgman’s cadre of thugs
join him in his suburban hideout, slowly “replacing” the hired help, the film
inevitably sacrifices a bit of its previously suggestive tone. But judging by
the film’s third-act turn towards brutality, coupled with that breathless
opening sequence, it’s clear van Warmerdam has less whimsical intentions with
this archly didactic fable of cultural contradiction.
User Reviews from imdb Author: roselaar from Netherlands
Alex van Warmerdam's darkest and most disturbing film to date is also his best, perfectly balancing black humour and psychological terror. After having been rooted out of their carefully hidden underground lairs, a group of strange vagabonds led by the calculating and enigmatic Camiel Borgman (fabulous performance by Flemish actor Jan Bijvoet) slowly but surely infiltrates the life of a well-to-do family. The titular character himself manipulates his way into the house of a rich but bored married couple (Jeroen Perceval and Hadewych Minis) by getting himself brutally beaten up by the husband, after which the wife, driven by both guilt and curiosity, secretly invites him into their lives. The stranger's mystique grabs hold of her more and more, until she begs him to stay when he tells her he is leaving. After that moment, there is no turning back for the family, as Borgman and his co-conspirators stop at nothing to take over, with deadly consequences. The result is an hallucinatory film that holds the middle between being an absurd comedy and a nightmarish horror movie about the seemingly familiar but ultimately inexplicable 'Other' permeating everyday life completely until it has utterly changed into something else entirely. It's 'them' versus 'us', the unknown world outside corrupting the familiar surroundings inside, but which side we are (supposed to be) on is never clear: do we go with this bizarre revolution of the dispossessed have-nots against the haves, or will we choose the side that lives a safe but dull life of complacent banality and conservative conformity? Bijvoet's Borgman is a cold and unfathomable force of nature, a subtle instigator of change who will stop at nothing to achieve his goal, though it's never clear just what his aim is. Opening with a citation we are to assume is Biblical – '…and they came down to Earth to replenish their ranks', which in the end is exactly what has transpired – the film suggests Borgman and his minions (which includes Van Warmerdam himself in a supporting performance) may be something other than human. You might even be inclined to think they may not even be there at all, existing only as cruel manifestations of the wife's psychological angst, but they are also destructively active outside of her direct environment as well. It's this surreal confusion about the protagonist's goals and existential status, combined with outrageous but thoroughly hilarious instances of dark humour and sombre witticisms that make Borgman an unusual but intriguing horror story, not to mention one of the finest Dutch films in many years.
Indiewire
[JESSICA KIANG] Jessica Kiang at
Cannes from The Playlist, also seen here:
Cannes
Review: 'Borgman' Delivers A Deliciously Dark, Twisted Cannes Competition Treat
Caustic, surreal, creepy, and blackly funny, Dutch polymath Alex
van Warmerdam’s “Borgman” is the trickster god in this year’s
With pitch-perfect performances across the board, and boasting crisp photography and editing, the film never ceases to twist, turn and surprise, taking wicked joy in constantly switching us back on ourselves and our expectations of the characters. Appropriate, then, that it popped up at us like a jack-in-the-box this morning to prove one of the biggest unexpected pleasures the festival has thus far provided.
The prologue to the main story begins as a priest with a shotgun,
a young man carrying a sharpened pole and a third man armed with an axe, go
hunting in the woods. They’re tracking Camiel Borgman (Jan Bijvoet, in a
brilliantly ambivalent, underplayed turn), who is hiding in a pit dug into the
forest floor and hidden from view. Borgman, seemingly a wildman cross between
Boudu from Renoir’s “Boudu Saved from Drowning” and Rasputin, evades
his pursuers, and, alerting two cohorts also hiding in the forest, he flees for
pastures new. Turning up later on Richard and
From here it might seem that we are to get a sort of class comedy of manners, as the trampish, seemingly indigent Borgman assimilates, or fails to, into civilized society. But the narrative turns its face from that option and heads in a much more original direction, gradually revealing Borgman to be a creature of unusual, malevolent powers and uncanny abilities. As he makes first Marina, then the children and their nanny (Sara Hjort Ditlevsen) complicit in his enigmatic plans, he is also aided in their more murderous contingencies by a set of brilliantly deadpan, offbeat accomplices (including van Warmerdam himself playing a small role as Ludwig).
There are a few times the steady progress of events is interrupted by a sudden new piece of information about Borgman’s powers, but the film’s black, ironic tone is so smooth (except for the occasional intrusive and kind of baffling music cue) that it doesn’t snap us out of the mood. Instead, as Marina struggles against then eventually succumbs to his suggestive power, we start to build a picture of Borgman as a Dracula-esque seducer of women (which makes sense, with the priest and the sharp pole from the prologue); as a Sandman with the ability to influence dreams and invoke nightmares; as a Pied Piper figure who exerts a fascination on children; and even possibly a shapeshifter, though that notion is later slyly shrugged off as a red herring.
Basically Borgman becomes the single incarnation of maybe the top ten bogeymen to ever trouble our collective unconscious, but while he’s a creature of malevolence and evil, perhaps most dreadful to us is that it’s really down to his droll sense of mischief. “I want to play” he says, deadpan, at a pivotal moment, before the murders start and things get really weird, and that’s as much a justification as we ever get for his actions. He is unknowable and malicious, a flesh-and-blood Loki whose motivations and goals are beyond our ken but who makes our tragedies his playthings.
This is really what sets ”Borgman” apart from some of its aforementioned brethren. In its fancy-house-being-invaded, psychological-and-physical-torture-ensuing, it has drawn a lot of comparisons to Haneke’s “Funny Games,” and yes, there is a certain similar cerebrality that works its way through, a relentless logic that is opaque to us at every step, but retrospectively feels like it makes perfect, chilly sense. But its differences from the Haneke film are more telling: aside from being a sight more enjoyable to watch, van Warmerdam’s movie doesn’t actually seem overly concerned with social commentary. There isn’t necessarily an assertion that it’s this family’s bourgeois complacency that has led to their undoing, instead the focus is on the mercurial and mysterious Borgman, and his semi-supernatural powers of influence and persuasion. So the didactic tone that can sometimes, let’s be honest, make Haneke feel a bit of a slog, is absent here in favor of a playfulness that permeates even the film’s darkest moments (viz the stupidly beautiful and surreal shot of the dumped bodies in the lake shimmying gently in the current like aquatic plants in a fish tank). It’s not a film that despises its audience or wants you to ask particularly deep questions of yourself, instead it’s a fable, a good-looking parable about the mysterious ways in which evil can work.
Van Warmerdam is no stranger to award success, with his last
feature “The Last Days of Emma Blank” picking up Best European Film in
“Borgman”
is a deeply disturbing look at the dark side of suburbia ... Andrew O’Hehir from Salon, June 6, 2014
Movie Review:
Borgman -- Vulture Bilge Ebiri
Review:
BORGMAN Fiendishly Recounts The Time The Devil Went Up ... Brian Clark from Screen Anarchy
Borgman | Film Review |
Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard
Borgman | Reviews |
Screen - ScreenDaily Allan Hunter at
Cannes
Little
White Lies [David Jenkins¨] also
seen here: Cannes 2013: Borgman – Review
The
Dutch curiosity Borgman strains too hard for instant cult appeal Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club
At
CIFF: The exquisite corpses of Alex van Warmerdam's Borgman ... Ben Sachs from the Chicago Reader
Karlovy
Vary Film Festival 2014 review • Senses of Cinema Cerise
Howard, October 4, 2014
Fabien Lemercier at
PlumeNoire.com
[Moland Fengkov]
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Richard Mowe]
The
Academic Hack: Michael Sicinski Rating (3)
Cannes
2013, Day Four: The Coen brothers return to the festival with a folk-rock
flashback Mike D’Angelo at Cannes
from The Onion A.V. Club
Borgman
(2013) Cannes Movie Review - Film School Rejects Shaun Munro
Reel Film Reviews
[David Nusair]
Jigsaw
Lounge / Tribune [Neil Young]
Georgia
Straight [Adrian Mack]
Fabien Lemercier
interviews van Warmerdam for Cineuropa, May 20, 2013
Hollywoord
Reporter [David Rooney] also seen
here: Borgman:
Cannes Review
'Borgman'
Review: Alex van Warmerdam's Sly, Insidious ... - Variety Maggie Lee
Cannes
2013: Borgman - first look review Catherine Shoard at
Cannes
2013: Is 'Borgman' this year's 'Holy Motors'? - Los Angeles ... Steven Zeitchik from The LA Times
Borgman Movie Review
& Film Summary (2014) | Roger Ebert
Brian Tallerico
Violence,
War, Death: Cannes Report, May 19 | Cannes | Roger Ebert Barbara Scharres
In
'Borgman,' Van Warmerdam Looks at Good and Evil - The New York ... Joan Dupont from The New York Times, May 23, 2013
'Borgman,'
Alex van Warmerdam's Adult Fairy Tale - The New York ... The New
York Times, June 5, 2014
A film with constant camera movement and odd angles from above, including a VERTIGO-like view from a cathedral tower, with a social message, that opens as staff, trustees, and kids from an orphanage are lining up to take a photograph together, but one of the kids plays a prank on an adult, which she finds outrageous behavior and wants the child punished. Immediately there is a difference in opinion between the adults as to how to handle the situation, those in the enforce discipline and send the kid a message through severe punishment camp, and those who would rather understand the nature of the problem and encourage the kid to participate in a socially appropriate manner. Interestingly, it is the latter camp that prevails, as they send several kids to redirect the energies of the young boy, making friends with him, making him feel a part of the group. As the adults argue, they take a look at the files of the children, and examine what parental tragedy led them there in the first place, told largely through flashback sequences for the remainder of the film, as we see the troubled state of the parents.
The narrative can be confusing at times, as they mix the
stories of two young children, a boy and a girl, both of whom were troubled
kids at first, but who grew to enjoy the attention they received at the
orphanage. This certainly brings to mind
an identical philosophy of Father Flanagan (“There are no bad boys!”) from the
1938 American film BOYS TOWN: "When parents fail to do their job, when
they allow their children to run the streets and keep bad company, when they
fail to provide them with good examples in the home, then the parents and not
the children are delinquent." This
film is set in the structure of socialism, where having responsibilities,
contributing to the collective at the orphanage is better than living at home
with a parent who hasn’t a clue what to do with you. There is an everpresent image of the lout for
a father, who carouses with other women and spends all their money on good
times, blaming the wife and kids as he goes out and drinks his life away in
irresponsibility. The images of the
night club scene are highly advanced, revealing decadence of the first order, a
subterranean world where adults carry out their underhanded get rich quick
schemes. Even as there are images
reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s classic 1931 film M, or a Punch and Judy puppet
performance for kids at a zoo, there’s a rousing orchestral theme that plays
throughout that has the same energy as one of Dvorák’s “Slavonic Dances,” which
keeps the mood of the film upbeat even when dealing with such dire themes as
suicide or child neglect and abuse.
There’s a joyful tone to this film, largely due to the playful and
uninhibited nature of the children and the constantly life affirming musical
score, a film that suggests a societal problem takes a societal cure.
CZECH MODERNISM IN FILM: The 1920'S to the
1940's Charles
Coleman, Facets Film Programmer
One of the great
masterpieces of early Czech sound cinema, this experimental classic combines
elements of Soviet montage, Buñuelian surrealism, and Czech politics in this
examination of a state home for children. The plot is nominally about the
arrival of new kids from a broken home, but this is just a framework for a
series of otherworldly tableaus, frightening set design, and
ahead-of-their-time camera angles that make the whole film an exercise rich in
symbolism and imagery. With Jindřich Plachta, Václav Vydra, Zdeňka
Gräfová. Directed by
Village Voice J. Hoberman (excerpt)
The leading literary exponent of Czech expressionism as well
as a pioneer of Czech independent cinema, Vancura (executed by the gestapo
during World War II in reprisal for the assassination of Reichsprotektor
Reinhard Heydrich) made an even more experimental film in his 1933 On the
Sunny Side (December 1). Most simply put, On the Sunny Side uses a
The Reeler Peter Hames
FAITHLESS MARIJKA B+ 90
A film that has the feel of a documentary, a time capsule featuring bold images in the style of Russian filmmaker Alexander Dovshenko, who himself was born in the Ukraine, whose father was an illiterate farmer descended from the Cossacks, a tribe of warrior horsemen that dominated Ukrainian history, whose films feature peasants in harmony with the immensity of their natural environment, where nature is always portrayed as all powerful, dwarfing man’s presence on the screen, usually requiring heroics just to survive. This film is shot in the Carpathian Mountains of Western Ukraine, using non-professional actors who overdramatize, strike poses, and at times look silly, featuring a compelling mixture of languages from the region such as Czech, Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish, each expressing their own separate orthodoxy, including the long bearded Jews from the region who are depicted here as stereotypically money-grubbing, while utilizing a musical score written by the brilliant Czech innovator Bohuslav Martinů, rich and historically rare music that appears to have been written specifically for this film.
Using a simple story that reminded me a bit of Dreyer’s 1943 film DAY OF WRATH, both films feature a marriage with a huge age discrepancy. In Dreyer’s film it may be forty to fifty years, here it’s more like twenty years, where the older man appears to have arranged a marriage with a much younger woman, resulting in an emotionally bleak existence for the woman completely void of love, as the man is first and foremost married to his work, where the opportunity to spend time with younger men more her age might be the first such occasion she’s ever had like that in her lifetime, and where a stern mother oversees all with a dour visage. The instant the wife strays from the iron fisted rules, there will be hell to pay, which is the accepted practice in the community, rules that are disproportionately applied which allow men to stray from the law, but never the women, who must always be kept in line. In Dreyer’s film, women straying from the flock were subject to the threat of witchcraft, a label tagged to anyone that didn’t belong, while in this film, the men are the ruling judge and juries of their own households, free from any outside interference. It more closely resembles tribal law.
Marijka appears to have never performed a day’s work in her life, her delicate hands are noticed by all the women in the region, yet her husband is a woodsman who carries a cutting ax with him at all times, and who has a loud, boisterous personality, not one to be outdone by anyone. As the Ukrainian men gather in the mountains on a work assignment for a Czech-owned timber company, Marijka stays behind where a young man near her age helps complete work on their house. While the men work hard, enduring rotten food and a cut in wages, which results in a violent strike where the Czech police are brought in to quell the rebellion, Marijka is fondled and kissed openly by the young handy man, drawing the ire of the mother in law, who sends notice to her son in the mountains. After the work assignment of cutting timber is complete, they need to float them down river, tied in bundles, with two or three men in front with long oars that guide them through the rapids. These images are among the most powerful in the film, as the rapids are fierce and ferocious, requiring a strong hand to guide them through. There are tainted hands, however, when an accident occurs, which feels less accidental than inevitable, as the violent nature of the ax-carrying men seems like something out of the medieval era where they intend to match and tame the awesome power of the world around them.
CZECH MODERNISM IN FILM: The 1920'S to the
1940's Charles
Coleman, Facets Film Programmer
A breathtaking drama
about life lived on the edge of civilization, Faithless Marijka takes
place in mountain solitude where a young woodcutter must journey into the
woods, leaving his young wife with another man. The film was shot in the
Village Voice J. Hoberman (excerpt)
More fascinating from an ethnographic point of view, Faithless Marijka (December 10) was made the same year as The River by novelist-filmmaker Vadislav Vancura in the mountains of the Subcarpathian Rus, using a mixed cast of Czech actors and local nonprofessionals speaking a variety of languages, including Ruthenian and Yiddish. The movie is a tale of backward development and backwoods passion but, despite a few awkwardly interpolated studio shots, its stark premise is secondary to an evocation of the wild Carpathian landscape.
The Reeler Peter Hames
Varda, Agnès
Despite a body of work that now spans almost half a century, director Agnès Varda has never fit comfortably into the French film industry. Although generally considered to be the only female member of the French New Wave, she completed her first feature, La pointe-courte, several years before colleagues Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, and Jacques Demy (who became her husband) were able to do so. Only in the Sixties, in the wake of the New Wave's liberating influence, did she seem to find a place.
Even then, Varda's uniqueness--particularly her feminist
perspective and her interest in using documentaries and shorts as
experiments--was obvious. Unlike many of the New Wave auteurs, she wasn't a
film critic or even much of a cinephile. Her interest in filmmaking sprang out
of a background in photography rather than hours spent at the fabled Cinémathèque
Française or the offices of Cahiers du cinéma. In 1964 she even composed
a half-hour film, "Salut les Cubains," out of 1,500 stills she had
taken on a trip to
Varda's oeuvre is so eclectic that it's difficult to single
out any one film as offering the best point of entry for newcomers. The
director herself implicitly suggests that The Gleaners and I--which
introduces the concept of gleaning (foraging fields for post-harvest leftovers)
as a metaphor for Varda's own DIY aesthetic--might serve as an introduction to
her ethos. (Alas, the
Focusing entirely on the gleaners might have been a wise
decision, since the "and I" portion of The Gleaners and I is
more problematic. Aiming for the eclectic range of Marker's film and video
essays, Varda throws in a host of issues that crossed her mind while making it:
reflections on the prehistory of cinema, the exciting possibilities of new
video technology (including the wonderful image of her lens cap
"dancing" before her camera), and her own mortality. Unfortunately,
Varda never quite integrates such introspection with her interest in the
gleaners' lives. Instead of fitting into a larger package, these asides feel
gratuitous at best and self-indulgent at worst. Additionally, the filmmaker
sets up false parallels between gleaning and her shopping excursions. Buying
souvenirs in
Varda's most underrated film is Le bonheur (which screened at the Walker last Saturday, but is readily available on video), undoubtedly because it can easily be misinterpreted as an ode to the très français pleasures of picnicking, fine wine, and adultery, rather than a critique of them. Handsome carpenter François (Jean-Claude Drouot) leads a seemingly idyllic existence with his equally attractive wife Thérèse and their two children (played by Drouot's real-life family--a documentary touch in an otherwise ultra-stylized film). François is living the French Dream, complete with a mistress on the side, and he couldn't be happier. Cinematographer Jean Rabier's landscape compositions draw from impressionist painting, while his blazing palette--complete with fades to red and blue--nearly outdoes the colorful excess of Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort. Flowers bloom in the background of almost every scene.
Le bonheur has often been taken for a mash note to its protagonist's complacency, but Varda's style offers some clues as to her real agenda. In her book The Cinema in France, the generally perceptive feminist critic Jill Forbes calls it "an [ideologically] unforgivable film," adding the aesthetic complaint that "it is filmed in an idiom that sets one's teeth on edge." But that's precisely the point. The pastoral setting, the bright colors, and the wall-to-wall Mozart are so relentlessly and hyperbolically cheerful that the film comes to resemble a feature-length douche commercial. Inevitably, a crack appears in this façade, as François's affair ends badly. Nevertheless, his happiness continues. Beneath its sunny surface, Le bonheur delivers a scathing attack on male self-absorption and stupidity, and on the reduction of women to interchangeable objects. (The finale--a replay of the opening scene's picnic, with another woman in Thérèse's place--could hardly make the latter point clearer.) Family values and le bonheur march on, heedless of the individuals who are trampled under foot.
Structured as an investigation into the final days of Mona
(Sandrine Bonnaire), a young homeless woman who freezes to death in a ditch, Vagabond
(Wednesday, February 21 at
Sympathetic without being particularly likable (cf. Le bonheur's François), Mona is needy, selfish, and prone to using people for temporary access to food, shelter, money, or drugs, and then running away as quickly as possible. Even so, men tend to desire her, while women view her as a symbol of liberation--an impression often tinged with class condescension. In their own ways, people of both genders objectify Mona, rather than accepting her own, admittedly prickly terms. Her moments of real connection are few, far between, and short-lived.
Two other films in the
Varda's next major work, Jacquot, is far more cheerful, even though it was made while Demy was dying of AIDS. An enormously generous gesture, this biography would be the first of Varda's three films about her husband. (Disappointingly, if not surprisingly, neither it nor Varda's 1993 documentary The World of Jacques Demy acknowledges his bisexuality.) Weaving together three strands, Jacquot mixes documentary footage of Demy speaking about his childhood, Varda's fictional re-creations of his youth, and clips from his films.
Inspired both by a puppet show and Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Demy found his métier early and pursued it with a relentless single-mindedness. Although he insists he had a happy childhood, Demy had to struggle against his father, a garage owner who forced him to attend technical school and scoffed at his ambition. Alas, Jacquot largely ignores Demy's inner life in order to track his dogged pursuit of his craft. (Growing impatient with other people's unreliability, Demy turns to animation and finally finds his voice.) The film is not likely to mean much to an audience unfamiliar with Demy's work, since most of its emotional resonance stems from the rhymes between his childhood and the images he came to create. Additionally, Varda's mix of black and white with color (often in the same scene, with no apparent rationale) can be confusing, especially if one doesn't recognize the origin of the clips. Nevertheless, Jacquot is a moving elegy that avoids the coming-of-age genre's sentimental pitfalls.
Judging from the youthful joie de vivre of the early New Wave films (including Varda's Cléo From 5 to 7), it's surprising how well the directors of this movement have aged. (I'd gladly take The Gleaners and I over the vast majority of work by Francis Ford Coppola or Brian De Palma during the past 20 years.) The wide range of Varda's oeuvre makes it nearly impossible to offer any sort of cursory summary, but one thing many of her films have in common is that their modesty belies their ambition. At the beginning of a new century, The Gleaners and I has as much to say about life in the century's first decade--especially the chinks in corporate capitalism's armor--as Cléo From 5 to 7 and Le bonheur did about the need for women's liberation, and Vagabond did about the aftermath of the Sixties. If The Gleaners and I should turn out to be Varda's final film, it would be a fine epilogue to an uneven but hugely valuable body of work.
Interview: Agnès
Varda - Film Comment Violet Lucca
interview, May 11, 2015
Since her 1955 debut feature La Pointe Courte, the work of Agnès Varda has managed to reflect the interior and exterior worlds of her and her subjects in playful, insightful ways, regardless of genre or format (feature or short, digital or film). Her voiceover narration in documentaries like The Gleaners and I (00), The Beaches of Agnès (08), and the five-part series Agnès Varda: From Here to There (12) is direct and conversational, breaking down complex subjects of repurposing in the context of Western capitalism, loss, and art history into understandable and funny pieces. This wry sensibility is also evident in the portmanteau words that pepper these voiceovers, or how she describes her own practice as cinécriture or “cinema writing.” This avowed feminist’s approach isn’t necessarily a refutation of dominant aesthetics, but rather what simply flows forth, depending on where she is in her own life: the challenges faced by the unhappy couple of La Pointe Courte, made when Varda was in her twenties, are geographically and emotionally distinct from the type of problems the divorced, single mother of Documenteur: An Emotion Picture (81) is struggling to find answers to, but both are painfully “real.”
On Saturday it was announced that Varda would receive an honorary Palme d’Or at the close of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which begins on Wednesday. While it’s an impressive accolade—she’s only the fourth director to be given this award—the 86-year-old Varda in my experience has little interest in proving anything to anyone, and still insists on doing everything in a manner that lives up to her own rigorous standards. I note this with the utmost respect: at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s recent retrospective as part of Art of the Real, I spoke with Varda near the end of her shorts program. We were chatting about Ulysse (82) while walking to a quiet place to conduct the interview—in a way that I thought was totally informal—when, upon seeing me pull out my recorder, she suddenly looked me straight in the eyes and asked with surprise: “You’re not [already] recording this? Let’s go!” What follows is our lively exchange, beginning in medias res…
[Varda continues] Each film has its history, its beauty or not beauty, and its meaning. The meaning can change over the years for people who watch the film, because there is a lot of evolution in the sense of history, the sense of understanding. But when you speak about 35 millimeter or DCP or video, it’s unimportant. The film is what it is, but what is different are the people who made the film. I change. I wouldn’t do the same film today about Cuba or about the planters or about women. Each film has a date glued to it. And what we try is to overcome the date and make a meaning that can be more than ’62 or ’61 or whatever. But still, even Cleo from 5 to 7, which deals with a temporal history about being afraid of an illness, being afraid of dying, still has in the film itself a purpose— we include for example the radio broadcasts telling the news of the time. Or in Kung-fu Master!, you have the awareness of AIDS in ’87. I think that we try to escape the limits of history and the time, but still I like to have a point that gives a date to the film, and not make believe that it’s nowhere, no time.
Your 1983 series One Minute for One Image deals with that time-specific aspect. There’s a photograph, followed by someone’s interpretation in voiceover, and then only at the very end you give information about when it was taken, who shot it, and who was interpreting it.
Yes, because as you know, if I tell you it’s a famous photograph—Atget, Cartier-Bresson, Mapplethorpe—you will be impressed. You will say “Masterpiece!” It was important for me not to say who took the picture, and not to say who’s speaking. And people would go: “Oh! I didn’t know he made that kind of photo.” Or “I didn’t know he would say that.” And sometimes people couldn’t recognize the voice. That series is rarely seen because it’s difficult to access now. When it came out, One Minute for One Image was on every night at 11 p.m. just before the news. People were faithful to the series, and then the day after, Libération would reproduce the photo with part of the narration and the name. We were like a team with the TV and newspaper, and we did it 170 times. I worked on it in a hurry every day to made sure we delivered.
I learned a lot about how people can look at an image and load it with different feelings—the same image. Even in Ulysse which you just saw, I leave the photo on screen for 15 to 20 seconds—with nothing—so that as a viewer, you start to question: “What is the goal? Is she dead? What is this shot looking at? What is the man looking at?” Then you build your own view, impressions, story. Maybe you think it’s beautiful or meaningless, and that’s so important. That’s what I worked on in this film. Even if I do my narration, which leads you here and there, then the image comes back with no words and you look at it anew. I don’t know how you, Violet, saw that image of Ulysses.
I thought it was a sad image of absence, the absence of women. I didn’t assign a gender to the goat immediately. There were only these outlines of masculinity, facing away from the camera and not really looking at each other.
See, one of my interpretations is that it’s an image of a father and mother, like the mother lying with a big belly, which is one of the images of motherhood, hot and uncomfortable. And the man standing, looking at the future and the child in between those. What impressed me is that when that child [Ulysses] made the drawing after the photo, he brought the figures together so that little boy is touching the man. In the photo, the boy’s separated from the man. It’s so interesting: nobody wants to be alone. And that child grew up to be a man who doesn’t remember that day, but that child was saying something.
I love that film, and especially that part where the children are talking about what they think. The different meanings they come up with are fascinating.
I like when they say: “Photography is more true.” It’s interesting because it seems obvious that photography is the truth, but it was not obvious for them to look at the image and the painting, and then decide: “It’s more human. It’s true.” I always learn a lot through what people see in films, in images, in whatever. I allow myself some time to express what I had in mind, but that doesn’t mean that people who view the film have to have it. In one of my films that’s about to be re-released, Kung-fu Master!, it’s a story about a woman of 40, played by Jane Birkin, who falls in love with a boy of 15.
With your son, Mathieu Demy.
Yes, played by my son. I purposely separated the scenes with a pause—not silence, maybe some music and noise—just some time for the viewer to react to what he just saw. Is he disturbed? Does he agree? Is it painful or curious? And then we go again. I intentionally gave the viewer the distance to remain himself or herself, and enjoy what they saw and be themselves the way that they look at it. I think it’s very important, but it cannot be in action films, which are very, very [makes her hands shake]—the story grabs you so much that you are just into the story from the beginning to the end. You are hooked. You are addicted. I was trying to make a cinema in which people are not “stolen.” I don’t steal you. I like people to remain themselves in the theater and feel that maybe they’ll enjoy themselves, maybe they’ll cry, but that they’ll have something to say. That seems what’s important to me. Even in Vagabond, you have these witnesses speaking. Then she walks. When she walks, there are no words. While she walks, 13 times in the film for one minute, you have time to yourself to feel something about her. Or maybe you don’t like her. You have no sympathy for her because she is not sympathetic. Maybe you feel sorry for her. Maybe you feel mad at her, et cetera. And I like the idea that you remain yourself, conscious of who you are.
In Vagabond, these testimonies are separated by 13 tracking shots, which reminds me of 7p., cuis., s. de b., … à saisir (84), the short film you did about the doctor and his family living in a hospice. There are similar tracking shots, moving left to right across different windows, that also break up the vignettes.
You see that trees surround the house, like they’re imprisoning the family. It’s not like: “Ah! Beautiful to have a tree in front of the window.” Sometimes, the leaves in the trees blow in a peaceful way. Sometimes when there’s anger, or when the father slaps his daughter, there is a tempest outside. I had to wait to take advantage of the real weather. It’s using the natural movement of nature as an interpretation of what we feel or what they feel or what the character feels. It’s using observation and at the same time the presentation of the image. In itself it says nothing, but if you use it to say something, it says what you wish.
Is that the key to cinécriture?
Cinécriture means “cine-writing.” I say that many times because people say when they speak about a film, they say, “It’s well-written.” They think about the dialogue, which can be well-written or bad. For me, a film is not written by the screenplay or the dialogue, it’s written by the way of the filming. The choices that you have to make between still shot or traveling shot, color or black-and-white, speedy way of acting or slow-motion or whatever, all these choices, and the lens you choose, and the camera you choose, and then the editing, and then the music or not, and the mixing—all these choices all the way through the film, all through the making of the film, that’s what cine-writing is. It’s like the style in a way. I never say “it’s well-written” because I know then people think about dialogue. So, I say, “it’s well cine-written.”
You’re talking about building on an emotion, rather than a story. For someone who maybe wants to unlearn what they were taught in film school, where they emphasize story and having precise motivations for every creative choice, what would you suggest?
It’s not bad that they teach how to express emotion, how there are some tricks—and they are good tricks too—speed up the process of rhythms or to build an emotion or build fear. It’s good to make it well. We have seen Hitchcock films—which are not bad to tell the truth—made with the system that are really organized and masterful. But I’m more touched by people who don’t really use the technique and the system. Some of Cassavetes’ films put me to tears. A Woman Under the Influence is beautifully shot. It’s not that it’s not technique, but it follows emotions more than the trick to make it believable. I think that schools are good to learn. The American system or the French system for the mainstream are good, and they do good films. I really love some films. We had Jonathan Demme visit, and I remember The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia. He has a film right now that I’d like to see, Ricki and the Flash, the film he just made with Meryl Streep as a rock singer. Some years later, she comes back to her family that she has sort of abandoned. So I’m sure it’s good. But the same Jonathan some time made some documentaries. And like I said, we are at the service of what we shoot when we do a documentary.
But in a fiction, we are the master—the writer, the author, the king of everything, the queen of everything—even though we are timid and not knowing if we’re doing it well and not sure of what we do. I’m not totally sure, I just do it the way I think it should be, but that doesn’t mean I have the right to do so. I say, when you do a fiction, tell yourself it will go well and it will. Going back to documentary is a school of modesty, and going back to the people that you’ve filmed, and listening to them. They have a lot to say. Sometimes it seems stupid. Sometimes they think you don’t want to even hear, but that’s what teaches us. It teaches us that we know nothing about the world. Everybody has something to tell… I really like Ulysse. Ulysse is such an interesting consideration about what an image is. Did you see it that way?
Yes, definitely. I wanted to ask you, because you get into the subject of using a still image versus a moving one a little bit in the TV series From Here to There, in the first episode.
Yes, and I speak about the photo in this.
Yes, and you demonstrate the difference between still photography and moving images for the viewers. When you’re creating a documentary, how do you know—
Yes, but how do we know about people? When I took that image, another one on a terrace, I [took a] snapshot. And I asked myself: why did he come in that time and that place? Why did I happen to do this and get six people in the image? The little boy with the parents, a woman taking a snapshot, a woman and a man, maybe they meet. They didn’t know themselves at all. I used my imagination [for what happened] before the snapshot [was taken].
Once, at a film school, they gave the students the same image of the terrace, and asked them to invent a screenplay from that image, without showing them mine. And my interpretation could be true, could be totally fake, we will never know, because that was in ’54, and I will never know—’56 I think. It’s not a question of memory. I didn’t know. I should’ve asked at the time. “OK, do you know each other? What is your name? How old are you?” which is not the case. Now it’s become fashionable to take an agency photo, analyze it and ask, “Hey, you see that, think it over. In the corner, you see that? OK, this is a shot that we took in the streets of Hanoi.” And then, what do we see in it? What could we imagine?
We are interpreting all the time, and cinema and photography are a reproduction of reality. It’s not reality, it’s a reproduction. And the way we look at it, we make another step, by interpreting what we see, and discovering meanings that maybe were never in that image or never in the situation. But with a simple situation, you can make it a drama, because you noticed she had a strange look and you start to build some meaning. I think besides cinema and photography, everybody’s relationship with images is very important. What you build is based on your own personality, no?
Yes, definitely. And I think that’s also true of music. To return to Ulysse for a moment, you used the music from La Pointe Courte. In the film, you are talking about how you have a very distinct memory of making La Pointe Courte, but you don’t remember the motivations behind that photo, which was taken the same year.
Yes, but that’s why I made the film, because the image was questioning me. I had the painting of the boy in my closet. He remembers the painting as an adult, because it was in my place. Look at the other man [Fouli Elia]: he remembers his shirt, his shoes. And he doesn’t remember who he was. We have strange ways of dealing with memory. We remember details, things of no importance, I would say.
Would you talk briefly about the decisions, or your philosophy, behind choosing music for your documentaries?
It depends. Sometimes it’s better silent, as it is. On some documentaries, it fits the subject, like in the Gleaners [which features Varda rapping]. I know all these people who rap. They’re rap singers. They are on the side of contestation. They are on the side of being mad at society. They are the side of recovering what’s being wasted. They are the ones who have been related clearly to the gleaners, so I asked [who could] do it. I gave them some words, and they rapped about what it is if you have nothing and have to find something.
I try to understand what fits the subject. For Ulysse, the music of La Pointe Courte fit perfectly because it’s the same era and feelings. For Kung-fu Master!, I had very sweet music by Joanna Bruzdowicz, the same woman who did Vagabond—very strong, very difficult music. We even called it “difficult music,” but it’s beautiful because I hate when the music is just accompanying the action. Sweeping violin and then love, and then, boom, boom, boom for fear. So with Vagabond, I separated the music. It’s only when she walks, so you could only hear the music, and her steps on different material in the field, on the street, on the dry leaves, on the sand, so that we know the material she walks on and the music, nothing else. The action isn’t underscored by the music. I thought about all these things, and in many films I thought of a way to use the music to push with the same feeling.
And with that, Varda was whisked away to take questions after a screening of Salut les Cubains (63). The theater was packed.
Agnes Varda | French
photographer and director | Britannica.com
biography
Agnès
Varda - Director - Films as Director:, Other ... - Film Reference profile essay by Louise Heck-Rabi, updated by
Rob Edelman, also seen here: Agnes
Varda facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles ...
Agnès Varda -
biography and films - Films de France
James Travers
Filmmaker Bio | The Beaches
of Agnès | POV | PBS biography
Agnès Varda Great
Director profile • Senses of Cinema Helen
Carter, October 4, 2002
"New Wave Film Guide: Nouvelle Vague & International New Wave Cinema - Where to Start"
BEST AGNES VARDA FILMS - Top 10 with synopses - New Wave Film
La Cinetek Varda’s list of 50 favorite films
Agnes Varda — Filmspotting Agnès Varda podcast
The History of Cinema. Agnes
Varda: biography, filmography, reviews ...
Piero Scaruffi reviews
Agnes Varda -
Strictly Film School Acquarello
reviews
The Films of Agnès Varda - by Michael E. Grost
Vagabond - Isthmus |
Madison, Wisconsin Kent
Williams, May 31, 2002
The
French New Wave Revisited / Nouvelle Vogue moviemakers were ... Phillip Williams from Moviemaker magazine,
Portrait of a Vagabond: An Appreciation of Agnès Varda | International ... Lynne Lyttman from Documentary, December 2002
Vagabond • Senses of Cinema Holly Willis, April 2004
Agnès Varda's
Open Harbour Yvette Bíró from Rouge, September 2006
Cine-Varda - Harvard Film Archive March 8 – 16, 2009
Top 5
Movies by Agnes Varda - France Today
July 21, 2009
Agnès Varda: 'Memory is like sand in my hand' | Film | The Guardian Richard Williams, September 24, 2009
The
Quietus | Film | Film Features | Agnès Varda: Walking Backwards ... Robert Barry from The Quietus, October 14, 2009
Michael Wood reviews Agnès Varda · LRB 5 November 2009 Michael Wood from The London Review of Books, November 5, 2009
Federation of
European Film Directors » Who's afraid of Agnès Varda? Elisabeth O. Sjaastad, June 1, 2010
Female
Homelessness in Agnès Varda's Vagabond and Kelly ... Female
Homelessness in Agnès Varda’s Vagabond
and Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, by Tina Hassania from Cléo, July 25, 2013
Agnès Varda's California - Los Angeles Review of Books Agnès Varda’s California, by Lauren O’Neill-Butler, April 8, 2014
Auteur
of the Week: Agnès Varda-Photography, Biography, Feminism ... Miranda Brickner from Facets Cinematheque,
June 13, 2014
End
of the End of the End: Agnès Varda in Los Angeles - East of Borneo End of
the End of the End: Agnès Varda in Los Angeles, by Sasha Archibald from East of Borneo, September 15, 2014
Agnès Varda -
Galerie Nathalie Obadia art exhibit,
Miami Beach, 2015
Director Agnes Varda
to receive honorary Palme d'Or - BBC News
May 11, 2015
Agnès Varda: The Punk-Spirited Grand-Mère Terrible | AnOther Laua Havlin, July 9, 2015
A
Vanishing Place: Agnès Varda in California | Demanders | Roger Ebert Steve Erickson, August 10, 2015
Color
Snapshots: Agnès Varda in California | PopMatters Michael Barrett, October 1, 2015
Chicago celebrates the films and photography of French master Agnès ... Ben Sachs from the Chicago Reader, October 7, 2015
Still Agnès David Bordwell takes a look at the recent
book, Agnès Varda (208 pages), by
Kelley Conway, from Observations on Film
Art, November 23, 2015
Agnès
Varda: Six Films by the “Grandmother of the French New Wave ... The Vancouver Cinematheque, May 1, 2016
Essential
Viewing: the Films of Agnès Varda - Feministing Cassie da Costa, June 23, 2016
Agnès Varda in
California: Documenteur / Black Panthers / Uncle Yanco screening of three Varda shorts at SFMOMA,
October 8, 2016
Agnès Varda | Blum & Poe art exhibit, March 2 – April 15, 2017
Grandmother
of French Cinema Agnès Varda on Becoming an Artist at ... Craig Hubert from Artsy, March 6, 2017
Agnès
Varda's Playful Recycling of Her Art - Hyperallergic Tanner Tafelski, March 23, 2017
Life's
a Beach: With Her First Show in New York, Agnès Varda Gives ... Alex Greenberger from Art News, March 27, 2017
New
York Fetes French New Wave Filmmaker Agnes Varda With ... Forbes
magazine, March 31, 2017
Agnès Varda
in Californialand – France-Amérique Félicien
Cassan, May 25, 2017
Agnès Varda's Art of Being There | The New Yorker Richard Brody, May 27, 2017
Old, plump,
talkative: Considering Agnès Varda - The Pantograph Punch Doug Dillaman, July 18, 2017
Putting Agnès Varda, David Lynch, and Janis Joplin in focus - The ... Peter Keough from The Boston Globe, August 4, 2017
The Long
Reigning Queen of French Cinema - Film School Rejects Angela Morrison, August 7, 2017
French
New Wave Pioneer Agnès Varda Will Be First Woman to ... Hazel Cills from Jezebel, September 8, 2017
Agnès
Varda - DGA.org 4-part Lynne
Lyttman video interview, June 30, 2009 (3 hours and 27 minutes total)
Agnes Varda: A Conversation Barbara Quart interview from Film Quartely, Winter 1986/1987 (pdf)
Agnes Varda on Demy / Director busy with her -- and her late ... - SFGate Edward Guthmann interview, April 24, 1996
Decade:
Agnes Varda on “The Gleaners and I” | IndieWire reprint of an Andrea Meyer interview, 2001
Hannah Westley
talks to artist Agnès Varda | Film | The Guardian Hannah Westley interview, August 28, 2006
Listen: Agnès Varda podcast from Frieze magazine, 2009 (1:27:52)
Agnès Varda - AV Club film Noel Murray interview, June 30, 2009
Agnès
Varda, The Beaches Of Agnes | Filmmaker Magazine Nick Dawson interview, July 1, 2009
Agnès Varda: 'Memory is like sand in my hand' Richard Williams interviews Varda from The Guardian, September 24, 2009
Agnès
Varda talks about her autobiopic - Financial Times Tobias Grey interview, September 25, 2009
The Believer - Interview with Agnès Varda Sheila Heti interview from The Believer magazine, October 2009
The
Tide Turns for Agnès Varda - MovieMaker Magazine Jerome Henry Rudes interview, November 19,
2009
Agnès Varda - Hobo
Magazine Lisa Robertson,
January 2012
BOMB Magazine — Agnès Varda by Sabine Mirlesse Sabine Mirlesse interview, December 16, 2014
Interview:
Agnès Varda Talks Career and Blending Fiction and ... Clayton Dillard interview from Slant magazine, October 15, 2015
Questionnaire: Agnès Varda interview from Frieze magazine, October 21, 2015
Agnès Varda on
her life and work - artforum.com / video Varda discusses her life and work, video
interview, March 2017 (16:25)
Agnes
Varda, French New Wave cinema pioneer, says being a ... Anne Quito interview from Quartz, March 5,
2017
Kirsten
Johnson (Cameraperson) Talks with Agnès Varda for The ... filmmaker Kirsten Johnson interview on
podcast from Talkhouse, March 14,
2017
AGNÈS VARDA with
Alexandra Juhasz | The Brooklyn Rail
Alexandra Juhas interview, April 1, 2017
Time
is Part of the Work: An Interview with Agnes Varda — Bright Wall ... Aaron Stewart-Ahn interview from Bright Wall/Dark Room, April 10, 2017
"It's
the Miracle of Cinema!": Agnès Varda and JR Bring Us 'Visages ... E. Nina Rothe interview from The Huffington Post, May 27, 2017
Chris
Marker par Agnès Varda ~ Chris Marker
reviewing Chris Marker's photography retrospective at Arles, followed by
citations from Tobi Haslett on politics of their generation (7:45)
Les Fiances du Pont Mac Donald
(1961) Agnès Varda short featuring
Jean-Luc Godard and Ana Karina, 1961 (4:52)
U B U W E B : Agnès Varda - Ubu.com Plaisir
d’amour en Iran, 1976 (5:38)
the short film - Miu
Miu Les 3 Boutons, 2015 (11:14)
Agnès Varda -
PARIS PHOTO Agnès
Varda on camera for a Paris exhibition, November 9 – November 12, 2017 (10:34)
France (86 mi) 1955
La Pointe courte, directed by Agnès Varda | Film review - Time Out David Jenkins
This intoxicating feature debut from Varda is often cited as one of the very first manifestations of nouvelle vague tropes, mixing a loose, realist depiction of the impoverished populace of the titular Southern fishing community with a hyperstylised chronicle of a marriage (between a youthful Noiret and Monfort) in terminal decline. What the skilful smelting of these two opposing styles (with Alain Resnais on editing duties) yields in terms of originality and visual novelty, it doesn’t quite achieve in emotional cohesiveness, as the link between the two ‘stories’ feels mercilessly obscure at best. Yet as first movies go, this is a remarkably assured, gutsy and conceptually ostentatious piece of filmmaking.
Daily
Plastic - Festival Report [J. Robert Parks]
La Pointe Courte was Agnes Varda’s debut. As she admitted in the Q&A afterwards, she not only knew very little about making movies back in 1954, she hadn’t seen many films. That lack of background, as well as her photography experience, meant that she wasn’t bound by traditional film style, and it shows in this striking black-and-white feature.
The movie is about a traditional fishing village and the modern Parisian couple who come to visit. Those two aspects — village life and modern romantic ennui as only the French can do — sit uneasily next to each other, as Varda alternates back and forth. How much you enjoy Pointe Courte depends somewhat on how much you enjoy hearing a couple talk endlessly about their situation, though Varda livens things considerably with genuinely unusual and beautifully high-contrast compositions. One scene in the hull of a boat is both spectacular and metaphorically dense. Still, I agree with Varda’s delightful post-film comments that the sound is awkward, as are some of the performances. La Pointe Courte is an interesting debut, particularly put in the context of Varda’s later work, but it’s not a total success when seen alone.
La Pointe Courte (1956) - Articles - TCM.com David Sterritt
Agnes Varda wasn't much of a moviegoer before she started making
movies. That helps explain the amazing originality of her debut film, La Pointe
Courte, which premiered at Cannes in 1955 and then dropped out of sight for
many years, overshadowed by flashier French productions like Franois Truffaut's
The 400 Blows (1959) and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960), not
to mention Varda's masterpiece Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), the follow-up
feature that made her internationally famous.
Those films are rightly celebrated for their energy, spontaneity, and
earthiness, but Varda's first picture set the pattern for a great many of the
innovations that cascaded out of France throughout the 1960s and beyond. Made
on a miniscule budget by a twenty-something woman who'd been earning her living
as a still photographer, La Pointe Courte is now hailed as a foundational work
of modern cinema. And it's still a joy to behold, pulsing with vibrant sights
and sounds from start to finish.
Named after the district where it takes place, La Pointe Courte tells two
stories connected only by their location - a small fishing community in Ste, a
Mediterranean city tucked into France's southeast corner. One story chronicles
the loosely strung experiences of local citizens as they ply their demanding
trade, run their modest households, and grapple with bureaucrats who make up
rules that can be hard for business. The other story centers on a young
Parisian couple, known only as Him and Her, coping with a crisis in their
marriage. He grew up in La Pointe Courte and still loves the place, while she
was raised in Paris and has cosmopolitan tastes. Together they visit the man's
old neighborhood, working through their differences in quiet, meandering
conversations.
The movie's drama hinges on small but important questions. Will the father let
his daughter marry the man she loves, even if he's kind of a wimp? Will the
cops arrest the guy who harvested his shellfish from an off-limits stretch of
water? Will the big-city couple stay together or split up? The climax coincides
with the water-jousting tournament that actually happens in Ste each year, a
sort of slow-motion skirmish where men knock each other off boats with
medieval-style lances while onlookers cheer their favorites.
Varda directed the two parallel stories of La Pointe Courte in notably
different styles. The scenes centering on the fishing families have a strong
flavor of Italian neorealist cinema, which was a powerful influence on the Left
Bank Group filmmakers of the 1950s and '60s - including Varda, Alain Resnais,
Chris Marker, and Henri Colpi - as well as the New Wave movement formed by
Godard, Truffaut, ric Rohmer, and their colleagues. The fishing people are
played by nonprofessionals - regular people just like the characters they
portray - and the inquisitive camera records each face, expression, and gesture
in meticulous detail, not in a fussy way but with the loving care of an
attentive friend who wants to absorb and appreciate everything in sight.
By contrast, the city folks are played by professional actors: Silvia Monfort
had worked with Robert Bresson and Jean Cocteau, and Philippe Noiret who would
soon become a major movie star. Their scenes are presented in formal, precisely
calculated compositions, and the soundtrack follows similar rules, playing the
reserved, almost poetic intonations of the visitors against the casualness of
village speech. Some critics have complained about the apparent stiffness and
artificiality of the Him and Her episodes, but Varda had good reasons for using
two different styles, which embody her view that there is a wide gap between public
life, represented by the village, and private life, represented by the
husband and wife.
Ricocheting between these modes, Varda underscores the subtle differences
between the lifestyles and mindsets on display in the film. The divergent
styles also prevent the polished performances by Monfort and Noiret from making
the locals seem comparatively crude or amateurish, and they keep the poised
professional actors from overshadowing the unvarnished reality of the
environment. Most important, the alternation between formality and informality
conveys a core message of the film - that the casualness of the villagers and
the correctness of the visitors are equally valid ways of living in the world,
just as their different kinds of speech are equally poetic in the essential
humanity they express.
Varda credited some of her techniques here to the great German playwright
Bertolt Brecht, who felt that instead of just appealing to the emotions, a
movie or play should open up a critical distance between the story and the
audience, interrupting the show to encourage thought, reasoning, and
reflection. She was also helped by brilliant contributions from composer Pierre
Barbaud, whose spiky music is an ideal counterpoint for various scenes, and
Resnais, an experienced film editor and short-film director who would start his
own feature career with the towering Hiroshima mon amour (1959) four
years later.
La Pointe Courte is as moving and entertaining as it is intelligent and
audacious. Varda was intimately acquainted with the neighborhood, where she and
her parents lived when World War II forced them into hiding. Her collective
portrait of the community is always dynamic and sometimes hilarious, and you
can't help loving a place where a fisherman who broke the regulations gets to
turn himself in to the police on his own schedule, and then gets a leave of
absence from the jailhouse during the water-jousting festival. Life is far from
perfect in the neighborhood, as the death of a sick child poignantly reminds
us, but the resilience and good spirits of the denizens are unstoppable.
It's sadly ironic that this paradigm-changing movie, years ahead of its time in
style and substance, didn't instantly launch Varda as a world-class filmmaker.
The only opportunities that came her way in the next few years were offers to
direct documentary shorts, which she enjoyed but saw as the second-tier
projects they were. Her greatness was finally recognized when Cleo from 5 to
7 became an international success, and in her subsequent career - from the
daring Le Bonheur (1965) and Vagabond (1985) through such later
treasures as The Gleaners & I (2000) and The Beaches of Agns
(2008) - she has glided between fiction and documentary with consummate grace,
often erasing the boundaries between those arbitrary categories. La Pointe
Courte set the standard for her artistry in that way too.
Varda has always made films that engage and entertain the viewer while
requiring active thought from us as well. La Pointe Courte is a glowing example
of her skill at establishing a particular kind of relationship with the
audience. She stated this eloquently in one of my many conversations with her.
"I see a film as a dialogue and an art object," she told me in a 1977
interview, "but not as a lecture. My films don't get passive audiences. I
don't want people to watch my film as if they were putting on my gloves, still
warm from my hands. I want them to have an opinion while watching, not be
carried along by a sentimental story." Precisely. And to have a wonderful,
memorable time in the process.
La Pointe Courte: How Agnès Varda “Invented” the New Wave Criterion essay by Ginette Vincendeau, January 21, 2008
Agnès
Varda Is Everywhere! October
09, 2015
La Pointe Courte (1956) - The Criterion Collection
4 by Agnès Varda -
The Criterion Collection
Federation of
European Film Directors » Who's afraid of Agnès Varda? Elisabeth O. Sjaastad, June 1, 2010
The Long
Reigning Queen of French Cinema - Film School Rejects Angela Morrison, August 7, 2017
La Pointe Courte Joanne Kouyoumjian from Reverse Shot, September 22, 2016
La Pointe Courte (1954) - #419 | Criterion Reflections David Blakeslee
Only
the Cinema: La Pointe-Courte Ed
Howard
LA POINTE COURTE - Agnes Varda - New Wave Film
Criterion
Confessions: 4 X AGNES VARDA (#418): LA POINTE ... Jamie S. Rich
Surrender
to the Void [Steven Flores]
Vague
Visages on Varda's 88th: 'La Pointe Courte' (Agnès Varda ... Justine A. Smith from Vague Visages
Beautiful
Trash: Agnès Varda's Les Glaneurs et la ... - Senses of Cinema Virginia Bonner, November 25, 2007
French cinema's prickly stepmom -
Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir on 4 X Agnès Varda, April 8, 2008
4 By Agnès
Varda | DVD Review | Slant Magazine
Eric Henderson, Criterion
La Pointe Courte [DVD] James Kendrick from QNetwork, Criterion
DVD Savant Review: 4 by
Agnés Varda - DVD Talk Glenn
Erickson, Criterion
DiscLand
[Jonathan Doyle] Criterion
4 X Agnès Varda - Film - The AV Club Noel Murray, Criterion
dOc DVD
Review: Four by Agnes Varda (La pointe courte / Cleo from ... Jeff Wilson, Criterion
DVDBlu Review [Christopher S. Long] Criterion
ColeSmithey.com (Cole Smithey)
Memories of the Future [Jesse Ataide]
Cinepassion.org
[Fernando F. Croce]
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
France Italy (90 mi) 1961
Cleo
From 5 to 7 | Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Agnes Varda's 1961 New Wave
feature--recounting two hours in the life of a French pop singer (Corinne
Marchand) while she waits to learn from her doctor whether she's terminally
ill--is arguably her best work, rivaled only by her Vagabond (1985) and The
Gleaners and I (2000). Beautifully shot and realized, this film offers an
irreplaceable time capsule of
Ten
More Key Moments | Jonathan Rosenbaum December 15, 2006
Scene
1962 / Cleo from 5 to 7 -– Cleo sings a song.
France/Italy (Ciné Tamiris/Rome Paris Film). Director: Agnes Varda. Cast: Corinne Marchand, Michel Legrand, Serge Korber. Original title: Cléo de 5 à 7.
Why It’s Key: All of a sudden, the title heroine sees her life anew, and the film changes key.
Cleo from 5 to 7 supposedly charts the two hours during which the title heroine (Corinne Marchand), a pop singer, waits to learn if she has terminal cancer. But it’s characteristic of Varda’s playful shifts between objectivity and subjectivity that the film only lasts 90 minutes. Despite chapter headings that claim almost scientific precision (“Chapter VII, Cleo from 5:38 to 5:45 pm”), there are plenty of ruses for changing the registers of reality, sometimes even in the middle of shots.
The preceding chapter, “Bob from 5:31 to 5:38,” half an hour into the film, charted the arrival at her Paris digs of her pianist-composer Bob (played by Michel Legrand, the film’s pianist-composer) and lyricist (Serge Korber). They carry on like clowns while running through a lovely repertory of possible songs for her —- including a catchy waltz in which Varda’s camera keeps time by swinging back and forth between the characters. Then Chapter VII ushers in “Sans toi,” a tragic torch song Cleo sings with sheet music while the camera slowly traces a crescent shape around her. But midway through the shot, the piano’s replaced by an unseen orchestra, the lighting shifts to theatrical, and she’s no longer reading the lyrics. By the time the song’s over, Cleo’s mood has darkened considerably, and she promptly shifts her wardrobe from white to black and sheds her wig. According to Varda, this sequence is “the hinge of the story,” and “the circular movement which isolates Cleo is like a huge wave carrying her off.”
Cine-File
Chicago: Kian Bergstrom
Cléo, a stupid and prodigiously influenced
rising pop singer, believes she is dying of stomach cancer, a fear that
overwhelms her for the majority of the film's real-time running time and
which functions as the movie's primary organizing device. The opening
scene features Cléo at a tarot reading (the only scene in color), setting
up a kind of aesthetic thesis statement on Varda's part: all of existence,
in this work, is intimately orchestrated, choreographed, and
meaningful, but, crucially, only for this one moment. The
fortune-teller is no mere character but a marker for a structural division that
cleaves the entirety of the film. The first two-thirds of it are intensely
kinetic--mirrors everywhere, setting up bizarre pseudo-split screens, jump cuts
unmotivated by plot or psychological concerns, self-reflexive insertions within
the narrative (a song performance, a silent film)--and an effect of this is to
make the film's constructed nature unmistakable. As Cléo leaves the tarot
reader's apartment, for instance, her footsteps are in perfect synchrony with
the nondiegetic music we hear, and in a remarkable move Varda repeats the same
shot of her descending stairs multiple times in a row, drawing her film into
the orbits of such hyper-controlled avant-garde artworks as Duchamp's Nude
Descending a Staircase and Murphy and Léger's 1924 film BALLET
MÉCHANIQUE. But after a puzzling encounter with a friend who works as a
nude model for sculpture students, Cléo enters a wooded park for the first time
and meets a soldier on leave about to return to
The Lumière Reader Brannavan Gnanalingam, also a review by
Steve Garden of THE BEACHES OF AGNÈS
IT’S NOT HARD when
you’ve got a beautiful person in Paris to make a beautiful film. But when
that’s all you’ve got, it takes a special director to make something that’s not
only resonant but a classic. But then Agnès Varda is one of those directors.
She’s a director of moments, of the little pieces that people tend to forget, a
gleaner who can become entranced with an accidental jiggling of a camera lens,
a director who has been confronting mortality since this, her first feature. I
am a little biased – her 2000 documentary The Gleaners and I (Les
glaneurs et la glaneuse) is one of the most emotionally wonderful pieces of
cinema ever made. And a film like Cléo from 5 to 7 shows just how
important these themes of mortality, of wringing beauty out of the discarded,
of being a hopeless dreamer in an otherwise cruel world, have been throughout
her career.
The titular character (Corinne Marchand) is a trapped canary.
She’s a blonde singer in a pretty cage, so the metaphor is reasonably obvious.
Cléo is waiting for results from a test, and she fears that it might be cancer.
She’s caught in that cruelty of beauty, where she thinks her relationships,
success and lifestyle are solely thanks to her beauty. Her biggest fear is becoming
ugly, disfigured, even old – as the beauty will have disappeared. She lacks
proper human relationships, thinks retail therapy is a way to feel better about
facing possible death, and pretends to be someone she’s not (her real name is
Florence, and her intricate hair is a wig). The film progresses by Cléo
breaking free from the confines of her own making, towards something that
accepts the liberating simplicity of the world around her. The film is shot in
real-time (take that 24), as the two hours that Cléo is forced to wait
for her results unfold in front of us. Varda skilfully uses her soundtrack to
maintain continuity – the overlap of sound (often ‘off-screen’) gives her the
ability to experiment with the film’s visual style.
Agnès Varda was a member of the so-called Left Bank filmmakers (also featuring
the likes of Chris Marker and Alain Resnais) who were prominent during the
Nouvelle Vague. They were less fashionable than the more well-known Cahiers
du Cinéma filmmakers (Godard, Truffaut etc.) but some of the Left Bank
films are undoubted classics (La Jetée, Hiroshima, Mon Amour). The
influence of figures like Godard however is obvious in Cléo from 5 to 7.
Jump cuts, improvised camerawork, homages, gritty realism thrown alongside
romanticism in full-flight, self-reflexivity, the use of the city as a
character are all evident in the film. It’s not surprising that Varda gets
Godard to cameo in the film-within-a-film (along with Godard’s then wife, Anna
Karina) as a result. There’s also a cameo from Michel Legrand (famous for the
soundtracks he provided for Varda’s husband, Jacques Demy, and who provided a
soundtrack for this film). Cléo from 5 to 7, while full of Nouvelle
Vague trickery, is never flippant or half-baked – and perhaps this explains why
the Left Bank filmmakers perhaps feel less dated than their counterparts.
Instead, Varda produces one of the more moving odes to life in the face of
death, pulling out the most romantic notions out of the most banal.
Slant
Magazine [Eric Henderson]
The beret brigade of French New Wave film
directors may have been socially progressive and intellectually inclusive, but
when it came to gender lines, Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut were
decidedly less interested in channeling Dorothy Arzner, Ida Lupino or any other
esteemed female Hollywood directors than they were in paying tribute (in both
their Cahiers criticism and film pastiches) to the hyper-masculinity of
Howard Hawks and John Ford. For whatever radical advances they were responsible
for (and, make no mistake, they are countless), the ditch-diggers of the
Nouvelle Vague movement were still responsible for crafting prototypal movies
for guys who like movies. (Wasn't Anna Karina more Audrey than Katherine
anyway?) By most accounts, photographer-turned-director Agnès Varda is
considered the archetypal girl who crashed the big boys' clubhouse, and Cléo
from 5 to 7 was the film that paid her membership fee.
Cléo (Corinne Marchand), a Parisian pop singer with three minor hit singles to
her name, begs a wild-haired psychic to tell her something good about her
future. The soothsayer's first deal of the cards is a lackluster one, and the
only finite detail she can relate is that a dark stranger will enter Cléo's
life sometime in the near future. She eventually draws the death card (which
may imply an impending personal upheaval, she assures Cléo) and then the tower
(indicating what could be a violent expulsion of false beliefs and
assumptions). Now frightened out of her wits and presumably interested in her
lifeline, Cléo asks to have her palm read. The woman hesitates and then
refuses. After an unsatisfied Cléo leaves (the customers outside glare at her
as if she's messed with their auras), the fortuneteller confides to her
roommate that Cléo is doomed. Indeed, as the film unspools in real-time
conveyor-belt fashion, Cléo from
Despite the dire premonitions that point to the titular heroine's grueling
psychological marathon, Cléo from 5 to 7 moves with grace from one
emotional extreme to the next. Whenever she finds herself drifting too far into
melancholic self-pity, she blithely puts on a devil-may-care grin (most
stunningly in the penultimate scene in the park when she sashays Marilyn
Monroe-style down the Bois-de-Boulogne stairs in order to face her impending
diagnosis). And when she reaches the cusp of true giddiness, she quickly
reverts back to superstitious pessimism. Varda's protagonist truly embodies a
pop star's theatrical flair, as she seemingly passes time by going through
emotions for only as long as she senses her friends (her captive audience) are
willing to pay attention.
All throughout, Varda captures the fairy-tale essence of early '60s
There's a heightened urban suavity to an early scene inside a trendy hat shop
that tips its, well, hat to Citizen Kane. Varda allows a group of
mirrors to reflect images off each other until Cléo appears to be shopping in a
giant kaleidoscope (a prelude of sorts to the geometric fantasias of Tati's Playtime).
In multiplying Cléo, the mirrors predict the wide variety of emotional masks
she will wear and learning experiences she will go through during her two-hour
wait. As the tower card from the tarot predicted, some of Cleo's inner
discoveries are potentially shattering, as when grotesque street performers
call to Cléo's attention the vulgarities of artistic performance. The film's
camerawork is so ravishing that some of Varda's isolated shots have more to say
than some of the more famous New Wave montage effects (though Varda does use
the jump cut during a few choice moments).
The push-pull effect of Cléo's good looks alternately builds and destroys her
credibility as a feeling, free-thinking woman, a force set into motion as she
walks away from the fortuneteller's parlor and exclaims in an inner monologue
that she will always consider herself healthy as long as her looks are intact.
In fact, a clever Varda uses to her advantage the notion that the audience is
likely to ignore or reason away Cléo's extremely superstitious persona when, in
general, most of her superstitious beliefs are physically validated. This
cavalier approach to understanding Cléo as a person places the burden of her
dilemma (not being taken seriously as an assembly of beliefs, attitudes, and
behaviors) square in the laps of the audience. (If we can't take Cléo at face
value, why should we expect any of the films' characters to?) Without
admonishing, Varda manages to let the audience in on how frustrating it can be
for characters like the Bob (played by the film's musical composer Michel
Legrand) and Angèle (who largely fuels the singer's obsession with
superstitious beliefs) to deal with someone as high-maintenance as Cléo. And
only then does she plunge the audience headlong into the oft-terrifying
world of being constantly watched. Varda evokes this paranoia through a
celebrated montage of first-person shots from Cléo's point-of-view as she walks
down the street.
One of the most provocative aspects of Cléo from 5 to 7, at least for
modern audiences accustomed to more prickly feminist statements (Baise-moi
and the works of Catherine Breillat come immediately to mind), are the
unresolved hints of feminism that are sometimes countered with
anachronistically traditional gender politics. Hardcore feminists are likely to
be alienated by the final chapter, in which Varda seems to be making the case
that a reliable guy (here, Antoine) is really all Cléo needs to make right in
her world. The ending is actually much trickier than that, but it's certainly
food for thought that the Michel Legrand songs that Cléo earlier derided as
misguided attempts to mold her persona also happen to underscore her emotional
epiphanies in the park.
Finally, what does one make of the fact that this real-time film, which
purports to detail two vivacious and harrowing hours in the life of its title
heroine, is actually 30 minutes short of said two hours? In reel time,
Varda's scenario is actually Cléo from
Another interpretation, and one that stems from that idea, is that the missing minutes
following Dr. Valineau's diagnosis are left unrepresented as a comment on the
inevitable change in Cléo and Antoine's budding relationship. Cléo has just
made a connection with someone outside her circle of comfort and shared a
moment of total emotional candor. But that moment still seems to depend on
Cléo's nigh-pathological dependency on the concern of strangers. When that
concern dissipates, then it's Cléo's turn to step into the role of
compassionate caretaker. The uncomfortable silence that precedes the terse
"fin" end title seems to suggest that Cléo still isn't ready to
interact with paramours at that level. This interpretation challenges the
belief that Cléo from 5 to 7 is either a consciousness-raising feminist
primer or a socio-sexual retrograde by eliding easy categorization into either
(detractors would say "disappointing") bin.
In the four decades since Cléo from 5 to 7, Varda has directed many
films, and created at least three other esteemed masterpieces: 1977's One
Sings, the Other Doesn't, which is the overtly feminist message movie Cléo
is often given credit for being; 1985's Vagabond, one of the key art
house films of the '80s; and recently, 2000's The Gleaners and I, a
widely-lauded essay film somewhat in the style of Chris Marker. In a way,
Marker was probably always the Nouvelle Vague/"
Cléo from 5 to 7: Passionate Time Criterion essay by Adrian Martin,
January 21, 2008
Cléo from 5
to 7 Criterion essay by Molly
Haskell, May 15, 2000
Agnès
Varda Is Everywhere! October
09, 2015
Cléo from 5 to 7
(1962) - The Criterion Collection
4 by Agnès Varda -
The Criterion Collection
3quarksdaily:
The Humanists: Agnès Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) Colin
Marshall, December 15, 2008
Reflections:
Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) – Cinematic Scribblings Erin, March 26, 2017
Federation of
European Film Directors » Who's afraid of Agnès Varda? Elisabeth O. Sjaastad, June 1, 2010
The Long
Reigning Queen of French Cinema - Film School Rejects Angela Morrison, August 7, 2017
All
These Stories We Simply Can't Understand on Notebook | MUBI Marc Saint-Cyr from Mubi, June 21, 2017
A
View Out: The Search for Identity in 'Cléo from 5 to 7' | PopMatters David Charpentier, November 15, 2012
Cleo from 5 to 7 |
Criterion Collection | Foreign Film | Movie Review ... Matthew from Classic Art Films
The
Criterion Contraption: #73: Cléo from 5 to 7 Matthew Dessem
The Dark Time: Director Agnes Varda's “Cleo from 5 to 7” Elgin Bleecker
Surrender
to the Void [Steven Flores]
The
World Cinema Guide [Alister Burton]
Cleo from 5 to 7 - TCM.com Rob Nixon
notcoming.com | Cleo From
5 to 7 - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Matt Bailey
Film Notes - Cleo From 5 to 7 - University at Albany Kevin Hagopian
PopOptiq Drew Morton and Landon Palmer
Images - Agnes Varda: Cleo From 5 to 7 and Vagabond Craig J. Fischer
Close
Up: The Work of Film Director Agnès Varda | The Arts Desk Sheila Johnston, October 5, 2009
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] November 13, 2009
Jigsaw Lounge / Tribune [Neil Young] April 30, 2010
notcoming.com | Cleo from 5 to 7 - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Jenny Jediny
Beautiful
Trash: Agnès Varda's Les Glaneurs et la ... - Senses of Cinema Virginia Bonner, November 25, 2007
digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews Daniel Hirshleifer
French cinema's prickly stepmom -
Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir on 4 X Agnès Varda, April 8, 2008
4 By Agnès
Varda | DVD Review | Slant Magazine
Eric Henderson, Criterion
La Pointe Courte [DVD] James Kendrick from QNetwork, Criterion
DVD Savant Review: 4 by
Agnés Varda - DVD Talk Glenn
Erickson, Criterion
DiscLand
[Jonathan Doyle] Criterion
4 X Agnès Varda - Film - The AV Club Noel Murray, Criterion
DVD
Movie Central Michael Jacobson,
Criterion
dOc DVD
Review: Four by Agnes Varda (La pointe courte / Cleo from ... Jeff Wilson, Criterion
DVDBlu Review [Christopher S. Long] Criterion
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Jeff Robson]
ColeSmithey.com [Cole Smithey]
The History of Cinema. Agnes Varda: biography, filmography, reviews ... Piero Scaruffi reviews
Cleo de 5 a
7 - Cleo from 5 to 7 - Agnes Varda ... - Films de France James Travers
Spotlight on Fandor: This Week's Picks | Movie Mezzanine Jake Cole, July 9, 2015
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Daily Film Dose [Blair Stewart]
16mm Shrine Ash Karreau
MUBI [Adrian Curry] movie posters
Cléo from 5 to
7 (1962) | Film review - Time Out
This film ranked #24 in Time Out’s
list of the 100 greatest French films. Click here to
see the full list, by Wally Hammond
Film
review: Cléo from 5 to 7 | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
Cléo
from 5 to 7 Movie Review (1962) | Roger Ebert
Cleo
From 5 to 7 - The New York Times
Bosley Crowther
Le Bonheur, directed by
Agnès Varda | Film review - Time Out
The sheer visual elegance and romantic splendour of Varda's film aroused the kind of critical suspicions that quite rightly surround Un Homme et une Femme. But although the sexual politics of its plot (about a man trying to love two women) may seem stilted, the film retains two huge advantages. In the first place, Varda is trying to explore on film the kind of romantic areas that have so often (and so wrongly) been the exclusive province of male directors. And in the second, the overwhelming beauty of the movie's surface is not so much used to glamorise its characters as to illuminate their own dream worlds.
Le Bonheur |
Jonathan Rosenbaum
A beautiful and disturbing 1965 feature by Agnes Varda about family happiness, full of lingering and creepy ambiguities. A happily married carpenter (Jean-Claude Drouot) with a beautiful wife (Claire Drouot) and two small children (Sandrine and Oliver Drouot) falls in love with a beautiful postal clerk (Marie-France Boyer), who becomes his mistress. After the wife dies for mysterious reasons (whether by accident or suicide isn’t clear), his idyllic family life continues with the postal clerk. Provocative and lovely to look at, this is one of Varda’s best and most interesting features (along with Cleo From 5 to 7 and Vagabond).
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kathleen Sachs
Note: spoilers! What do Yasujir? Ozu's EARLY SPRING (1956, 144 min, 35mm) and Agnès Varda's LE BONHEUR ("HAPPINESS") (1965, 80 min, DCP Digital; New Restoration) have in common? Both are about marital infidelity, and both use it as a motif with which to examine broader social themes, even though their plots are diametrically opposed. EARLY SPRING is about a disaffected salaryman who starts an affair with another worker after becoming increasingly estranged from his wife, while LE BONHEUR is about a happily married man who begins cheating for seemingly no reason other than simple attraction. Ozu's longest film, EARLY SPRING represents a thematic shift from his previous work into what many consider the most fruitful period of his career. The magnificent and similarly paced TOKYO STORY, which he made three years prior, focuses on the older generation, while EARLY SPRING and many of his other films from this later period focus solely on the young--reportedly at the urging of the Shochiku Company from a desire to appeal to this emerging culture. Ozu uses the infidelity to explore the salaryman's postwar malaise and existential discontent as a middling white-collar employee; his identity as a worker and former soldier seems to eclipse his role as a husband and even a grieving father. If TOKYO STORY merges themes of tradition and modernity, EARLY SPRING begins to separate them, revealing a national anxiety that's further agitated by the tectonic plates of change. Perhaps another similarity between the two directors' films is that Varda's was perceived as much of a departure as Ozu's; what's arguably her best film is certainly her most divisive. The wife dies of an apparent suicide after discovering her husband's affair, and he lives happily ever after with their kids--and his mistress. It's unclear whether Varda intended this as a commentary on hypocrisy or a depiction of reality. In one interview, she says, "I sometimes think that...these people with their illusions are much happier in fact than other people who know and can't face it," hinting at it being a subversive deconstruction of social mores. (She also says in another interview, "Women have become upset and asked, 'How could you replace a woman with another woman?' That's what life is about. A man is replaced by another man in war. A woman is replaced by another woman in life," again hinting that there's a logic to the professedly uncharacteristic work.) But in yet another interview on the subject, she says, "It is true that I can now see my own films with a new vision because of things which I have read, because I did a kind of self-education of feminism, which we all do now, because we have opportunities to do so. Things are clear now. But they weren't so clear ten years ago when I made LE BONHEUR...," suggesting that it came from a place of misguided earnestness rather than artful irony. Adding to the confusion is its vibrant cinematography, the beauty and superficiality of which is perhaps the most intentional--and disconcerting--aspect of the film. In many ways, its effect is similar to that of Ozu's signature style, which favors an aesthetic harmony that complements his attenuated subversion. Both are deceptively simple in their depiction of human nature and its myriad of complexities; the happiness of Chicago's rather late spring will seem all the more poignant after watching them.
Le Bonheur - TCM.com Margarita Landazuri
French director Agnes Varda's deceptively idyllic third feature, Le Bonheur (Happiness), ignited a
firestorm of controversy and catapulted Varda to international acclaim and
notoriety when it was released in 1965. Varda, who has been called the
"Grandmother of the French New Wave" because her first feature, La
Pointe Courte (1954) used production methods and storytelling techniques
that anticipated those of the Nouvelle Vague, had followed that film
with the critically-acclaimed Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962). She had also made
several well-regarded documentaries.
Le Bonheur on the surface appears to
tell a fairly straightforward story. Francois, a carpenter living in a suburban
village, is blissfully married to lovely blonde Therese, and they have two
well-behaved young children. When Francois meets Emilie and begins an affair
with her, his happiness only increases. "Happiness works by
addition," he tells Emilie. Noticing his joyfulness during one of the
family's country outings, his wife questions him about it. He tells her about
Emilie, explaining that the relationship is no threat to their family, that he
has more than enough happiness to satisfy everyone. Therese appears to accept
the situation, but a cloud comes over the family's seemingly perfect existence.
"I don't think I've ever worked so quickly. I wrote it in exactly three
days," Varda later recalled. "I wrote the film fast and shot it fast,
like the vivid brightness of our short-lived summers." The film's visual
design was inspired by the light-splashed colors and images of the
Impressionist painters, starting with the iconic closeup of a sunflower that
opens the film. She even includes a scene in which Jean Renoir's 1959 film, Dejeuner
Sur L'Herbe, which is both a satire and a tribute to the Manet painting of
the same name, plays on a television. At the same time, Varda noted that
"Impressionist paintings emanate such melancholy, though they depict
scenes of everyday happiness." She describes her vision for the film:
"I imagined a summer peach with its perfect colors, and inside there is a
worm."
Jean-Claude Drouot -- then the star of a "Robin Hood"-like French
television series, Thierry La Fronde -- and his real-life wife Claire
played Francois and Therese in Le
Bonheur, with their own children playing the movie couple's children.
Reminiscing about the film at the time of its restoration in 2006, Drouot, who
had been married to Claire since 1960, said "I believe the film actually
helped us as a couple, as a family. One makes the choice of denying
oneself."
In interviews, Varda has said that she set out to understand "What is the
meaning of happiness, this need for happiness, this aptitude for happiness?
What is this unnamable and slightly monstrous thing?" But she has
steadfastly refused to explain the film, allowing viewers to put their own
interpretations on it. Many critics at the time found it disturbing at best,
and amoral at worst. A.H. Weiler's review in the New York Times was
typical: "At once joyful and moving but crucially immature, disturbing and
tragic.... a seeming idyll sheathed in irony, [it] is obvious and tender,
irresponsible and shocking and continuously provocative.... blithely flouts
moral values and Hollywood conventions but, nevertheless, constantly captivates
the eye and mind, if not the heart."
Le Bonheur became a succes de
scandale all over the world, playing for nine months in Argentina and a
year in Japan. The film cemented Varda's reputation as an important filmmaker
of wide-ranging interests, equally adept at narrative film and documentary, and
she remained active well into her eighties. Nevertheless, she has never
achieved the kind of fame and acclaim that many of her New Wave colleagues
enjoyed.
Over the years the confusion that critics expressed about Le Bonheur persists. Does Varda seem to be supporting Francois's
claim that he can provide perfect happiness to both women? Or is the film a
commentary about the impossibility of happiness? Made in a pre-feminist era, is
it a feminist film or an anti-feminist one? Film scholar T. Jefferson Kline, in
his introduction to a collection of Varda's interviews, thinks that "her
film is intended to provoke a series of moral and psychological questions
rather than tell a satisfying 'moral' story. It is perhaps this tendency that
has best characterized Varda's cinema and may be the reason she has never
reached a larger 'popular' audience."
Le bonheur: Splendor in the Grass Criterion essay by Amy Taubin, January 21, 2008
Agnès
Varda Is Everywhere! October 09,
2015
Le bonheur (1965) - The Criterion Collection
Exclusive
Cahiers du Cinéma Reviews In English: Agnes Varda and ... French
director Paul Vecchiali (“Femmes femmes”) wrote the following essay, “Raymond
Bernard, the Hermit,” for the December 2013 issue of Cahiers du Cinéma. “Gold and Mauve,” written by novelist Claude Ollier, is the original
review of “Le Bonheur” published on the film’s release in 1965, by Nicholas
Elliot from indieWIRE, May 12, 2014
Not Coming To A Theater Near You [Ian Johnston]
Le bonheur - Archive -
Reverse Shot Jeff Reichert,
September 23, 2016
Criterion
Reflections [David Blakeslee]
The
Films of Agnes Varda [Michael E. Grost]
Criterion Confessions: 4 X AGNES VARDA (#418): LE BONHEUR - #420 Jamie S. Rich
Adultery is “happiness”—and then the other shoe drops - AV Club film Brandon Nowalk
The
Cold Light of Day: On Agnès Varda's 'Le Bonheur' - Vague Visages Mónica
Belevan, July 13, 2017
Vague Visages [Josh Slater-Williams] May 31, 2016
World Cinema Review: Agnès Varda | Le Bonheur (Happiness) Douglas Messerli
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
DVD
of the Week: Le Bonheur | The New Yorker Richard Brody, June 8, 2010
French cinema's prickly stepmom -
Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir on 4 X Agnès Varda, April 8, 2008
4 By Agnès
Varda | DVD Review | Slant Magazine
Eric Henderson, Criterion
La Pointe Courte [DVD] James Kendrick from QNetwork, Criterion
DVD Savant Review: 4 by
Agnés Varda - DVD Talk Glenn
Erickson, Criterion
DiscLand
[Jonathan Doyle] Criterion
4 X Agnès Varda - Film - The AV Club Noel Murray, Criterion
dOc DVD
Review: Four by Agnes Varda (La pointe courte / Cleo from ... Jeff Wilson, Criterion
DVDBlu Review [Christopher S. Long] Criterion
Cagey Films [kgeorge] Kenneth George Godwin
Le Bonheur Acquarello from Strictly Film School
Le Bonheur - Happiness - Agnes Varda - 1965 - film ... - Films de France James Travers
Le
bonheur Gene Moskowitz fromVariety,
March 2, 1965 (pdf)
Le Bonheur
(1965 film) - Wikipedia
aka: Lion’s Love (…and Lies)
France USA (110 mi) 1969
The New Yorker: Pauline Kael's review
Agnès Varda is probably the finest technician among women movie directors and her first American feature (financed independently, it cost less than a quarter of a million dollars) is pleasantly loose, and with a sunny, lyrical quality. But it's short of substance-and what there is makes you regret that there's any. Set in Los Angeles, it's about make-believe and would-be movie stars (Viva, the wilted flower of the underground, and Gerome Ragni and James Rado, the authors of Hair). They play house, cuddle in bed, watch the television coverage of Robert Kennedy's death, and murmur inanities. The film is occasionally funny but it lacks a sense of the fitness of things: we don't want to hear Viva make vacuous little remarks about how sorry she feels for the orphaned Kennedy children. With Shirley Clarke. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Deeper into Movies.
A film bedevilled by its intellectualism. It attempts to analyse the media-Unwelt of fringe Hollywood in June '68, the material being: avant-garde theatre (Michael McLure's The Beard), experimental art film (Shirley Clarke), the hip-hype pop musical (Rado and Ragni of Hair), underground superstardom (Viva), and the TV news. Varda's presentation is a peculiarly confused mix of ancient Godard, cliché'd surrealism, '50s pop, and a half-arsed imitation of Warholian stylistics, with some rancid cream - an unconvincing triangular love trip à la Le Bonheur - thrown in for good measure. Set off against the love triangle garbage is a neat doom package of assassination (Robert Kennedy), attempted murder (Andy Warhol) and attempted suicide (Shirley Clarke). A nakedly bad film, a melange of incompatibles that induces embarrassment or irritation, but hardly humour or interest.
Cinema
Scope | Global Discoveries on DVD | Mostly About Extras Jonathan Rosenbnaum
It’s tempting to identify Agnès Varda in California, a new Criterion Eclipse set, as all extras and no main course—namely, Uncle Yanco (1967) and Black Panthers (1968) on disc 1, Lions Love (1969) on #2, and Mur Murs (1980) and Documenteur (1981) on #3. It’s a mixed bag any way you slice it, and Criterion hardly helps matters with its confused and confusing printed matter. For the first time, the arch and flippant Lions Love has acquired an even more cryptic subtitle—given as Lions Love…and Lies on an added intertitle, and as Lions Love (…and Lies) on the box—and neither gets explained in Michael Koresky’s pro forma notes, which also make no mention of the film’s cinephiliac cameos (e.g., Carlos Clarens, Eddie Constantine, Peter Bogdanovich), which I find far more enjoyable than Varda’s lazy imitations of Warhol, her awkward uses of Shirley Clarke playing herself, or her expedient appropriations of Robert Kennedy’s assassination and the attempted assassination of Warhol into her makeshift storyline. As for the ungainly subtitle, this turns out to be a slightly subliterate rendering of an early patch of dialogue—“Are we really the jungle of lions, love, and lies?”—which loses all coherence without its commas. Maybe Varda prefers it that way—in which case Koresky should be credited for perpetuating this incoherence, even if he doesn’t get around to explaining it.
Los Angeles, 1969, as filtered through the auteur-tourist couple: Jacques Demy sees dreams being manufactured in The Model Shop, Agnès Varda sees the same thing here, through another kind of artifice. Frizzy-nasal Warhol ingénue Viva and furry Hair penners Jim Rado and Jerry Ragni play the guides through counterculture fauna and flora, so the shenanigans begin already deep in the Age of Aquarius, the wacky trio arriving late to catch McClure's The Beard. Then incantatory credits -- "Can we be actors and be real?/Can we be real and be in love?/ Can we be in love and be actors?" And so on. Viva and the fellas hang out in their L.A. villa and let fly with the ad-libbed whimsy, a stream-of-consciousness deluge of punning, mooning, whining and assorted faux-naif "ings"; Viva ponders becoming a mom, but changes her mind after some rented tykes piss in the pool. Lost Horizon plays on their TV set, yet Hollywood is their Shangri-La, as elusive to the glamour-mad kooks as to New York City underground auteur Shirley Clarke, who drops by (playing "Shirley Clarke") in tinted glasses, scarves and artiste-cap to bring cinema-vérité to Tinseltown. The Design for Living hippiness saunters on, cramming in zeitgeist, Le Bonheur triangulation, and whoever happened to be on the set (Eddie Constantine, Peter Bogdanovich, Jim Morrison, etc.); elsewhere, gray studio heads worry about audience response, final cut, and this thing called "new cinema." "Which comes first, the movie or reality?" Then, later: "I don't know the dream begins... and where it ends." Self-reflexive about her own self-reflexivity, Varda hops in front of the camera to act Clarke's suicide scene, as the times elbow their way into the meta-doodling -- the Bobby Kennedy and Warhol shootings interrupt the trio's dress-up, Viva moaning about everybody around her dying. Unendurable if not for Varda's indolent casualness, the movie is about (a movie about) childlike fringe preening, devoured by the filmmaker's curiosity for life, her camera thoroughly engrossed by the spectacle of Viva offering one loooong minute of breathing.
AT its best, Agnes Varda's "Lion's Love" is a beautiful, cockeyed movie about a ménage à trois—Viva, Jerome Ragni and James Rado—who live on a Hollywood hilltop in a rented house with a giant bed, a heated swimming pool and plastic plants, mixed with real ones, both indoors and out.
The three performers, who ostensibly play themselves as they wait for the big Hollywood break, couldn't care less about the new morality as defined in a sniggery movie like "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice." Viva and Jerry and Jim have passed beyond that frontier into a new innocence. Like three children on an extended sleep-out, they loll about in bed together in the morning, arguing cheerfully about who's going to get the coffee and making crank telephone calls ("Hello, Bank of America? I'd like to order $200 to go").
Later Viva decides they should have children, but she regards the prospect of pregnancy without enthusiasm. "Do you think I could go through nine months of it and only come out with one?" Instead, they borrow some children to see what the experience might be like—and it's disaster. The kids refuse to take naps, urinate in the pool and eat nothing but french fries drenched in catchup. "I think," says Viva, "we have to find another way to spiritual life."
In all of these random details, "Lions Love," which was shown at the New York Film Festival Saturday night and again yesterday afternoon, is very funny, not much different from a television situation comedy, but one that is cool and loose and honest, more adult than most. It also possesses a sense of time and place. It's ironic that Miss Varda, whose husband, Jacques Demy, the gifted French director, tried unsuccessfully to capture the banal beauty of Los Angeles in his "The Model Shop," does just that in "Lions Love" without seeming to try very hard.
For about half the time, "Lions Love" is a kind of meta-Warhol movie, which is charming. Miss Varda has taken Viva, Warhol's most valuable found object, and lit and framed her in a way that brings out the gentle pre-Raphaelite beauty suggested but never realized in things like "Bike Boy," "Lonesome Cowboy" and "Blue Movie." Miss Varda has also found two perfect foils for Viva in the two stars and authors of "Hair." Rado, blandly handsome and comparatively reserved, and Ragni, who looks and acts like a liberated member of the Three Stooges, share Viva's talent for the magnificently convoluted non sequitur.
Unfortunately, Miss Varda has not been content just to doll up a simple, native American genre. The director, whose French films "Cleo from 5 to 7" and "Le Bonheur" aspired to a seriousness never successfully communicated, has sought to give both Pirandellian and social dimensions to her contemporary fairy tale.
"Lions Love" tries to suggest multiple levels of reality by posing as a movie within a movie. Shirley Clarke, the real-life director ("The Connection," "The Cool World"), plays herself, newly arrived in Hollywood to make a New York style underground film with Viva as star. Throughout "Lions Love" the actors talk to Miss Varda behind the camera and at one point Miss Varda steps in to show Shirley how to play a scene, a suicide, which Shirley says "is not my style."
Earlier Miss Clarke has observed: "I don't know whether I'm in a movie or directing one." Since the audience is never in doubt, this sort of thing is simply precious. Miss Varda goes further astray with an extended sequence devoted to the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, as reported and reduced to comprehensible terms on television.
At this point, you might as well turn away from the movie, which has gone glum and fake in all the wrong ways, and read an interview with Miss Varda, a five-page copy of which was given to the press by the producer.
Among other things, she says, "Lions Love" is about stars, movies, rented houses, freedom in love, plastic flowers, freedom of final cut, trees, television and the shooting and death of Bobby Kennedy. It is about stars and movies, all right, but it's no more about any of the other things than the telephone directory is about the names it lists.
In addition to the players already mentioned, "Lions Love" includes brief appearances by Eddie Constantine and Carlos Clarens, the film buff extraordinary (author of the excellent "An Illustrated History of the Horror Film"), who acts as Miss Clarke's walking Guide Michelin to Hollywood and narrates a delightful montage of views of Lotus Land as it is today. There is so much that is so pleasant in "Lions Love" that I wish Miss Varda hadn't tried to give it a larger significance, which—I'd like to add at the risk of sounding chauvinistic — seems paradoxically very naive and very French intellectual.
Eclipse
Series 43: Agnès Varda in California Criterion essay by Michael Koresky, August
13, 2015
Agnès
Varda Is Everywhere! October 09,
2015
Lions Love (.
. . and Lies) (1969) - The Criterion Collection
End of the End of the End: Agnès Varda in Los Angeles - East of Borneo End of the End of the End: Agnès Varda in Los Angeles, by Sasha Archibald from East of Borneo, September 15, 2014
Agnès Varda's California - Los Angeles Review of Books Agnès Varda’s California, by Lauren O’Neill-Butler, April 8, 2014
A
Vanishing Place: Agnès Varda in California | Demanders | Roger Ebert Steve Erickson, August 10, 2015
Color
Snapshots: Agnès Varda in California | PopMatters Michael Barrett, October 1, 2015
Bohemian
Requiem: How Agnès Varda's 'Lions Love... - Musings ... Judy Berman from Oscilloscope, August 31, 2016
Lions Love ( . . .
and Lies) - Archive - Reverse Shot
Eric Hynes, September 28, 2016
Not Coming
to a Theater Near You: Leo Goldsmith July 27, 2010
not coming to a theater near you [Matt Bailey] July 11, 2004
The New Yorker: Richard Brody May 26, 2017
Lions Love (1969,
Agnes Varda) – Brandon's movie memory
DVD Savant Review: Agnès
Varda in California: Eclipse Series 43
Glenn Erickson
Slant Magazine DVD [Jordan Cronk]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
SF Weekly: Jonathan Kiefer August 19, 2015
Seeing
California Through Agnès Varda's Lens, in a Criterion Set ... J. Hoberman from The New York Times, August 6, 2015
It’s all the rage these days to blur the lines between fiction
and documentary films, where leading contenders Jia Zhang-ke or Ulrich Seidl
frequently blend fiction, and even fantasy, into otherwise ultra realistic
portraits of human behavior. In this
manner they are extending the limits of understanding, pushing the boundaries
of the imagination so it’s not simply a true life exposé, but more of a poetic composite, like personal glimpses pulled
from a diary, becoming an inquiring essay on time, memory, and human
compassion. Among the New Wave
obsessions, particularly for Varda, was this grey area between fiction and
documentary, often resulting in startling contradictions. Unlike many in the French New Wave, Varda’s
artistic roots were in the realm of photography, using a photographic eye in
the opening shot of pastoral farmlands and jarringly discordant classical music
from Joanna Bruzdowicz, where VAGABOND
begins with the discovery of a young girl found frozen to death in a ditch in
the wintry farmlands of southern France, usually known for excessive
sunshine. After the police determine it
was natural causes, Varda’s own voice interrupts, explaining little is known
about the young woman, where people offer typical reminiscences through a
series of flashback sequences recalling the final three months of her
life. These snippets from interviews
reveal little about the young girl, often adding greater insight into the
social mindset of the observer, as small prejudices about young girls out on
their own looking for trouble are a commonly held view, or she’s angrily
denounced as having no direction and no self worth, while some were disgusted
by her smelly appearance, thinking that she needed a bath, while others found
her defiant independence strangely liberating, but few ever asked or inquired
into her motivation. In hindsight, some
wished they had done more, yet few even remembered her name. Written and co-edited by Varda, the film uses
a similar narrative structure as CITIZEN KANE (1941), where the devastation of
growing old, filthy rich and dying alone in the comforts of one’s own bed is no
less tragic than dying young, penniless, and alone in a ditch, ultimately
succumbing to the frigid wintry elements.
Varda’s bleak and melancholy film plays out as a road movie, where people drift in and out of the life of Mona Bergeron, Sandrine Bonnaire at 17 in one of her most defiantly bold roles, a woman hitchhiking alone through the region in the cold of winter, working for scraps, scrounging for food, living outdoors in her tent where finding water is a daily concern. She only exists peripherally in the lives of others, many barely showing any concern whatsoever, as she’s simply one of many people encountered everyday that walk in and out of people’s lives with barely a thought to their existence. Never a fully realized character, yet the film raises the question about woman's freedom in such a naturally unassuming manner, a lingering question that punctuates every scene, expressed through a collection of fragmented impressions, where she remains aloof and detached, yet she unhesitatingly prefers it that way, having worked as a secretary, having to answer to a boss, feeling too confined and claustrophobic, preferring the freedom of the open road. Openly rejecting bourgeois comforts for the adventurous spirit of the unknown, her rebellious nature defines her views, as she refuses to be tied down by associations with others, yet openly displays her uninhibited charms for all to see, where she can be seen emerging naked from the sea in a long shot, nothing salacious, then striding confidently onto the sandy beach for her towel, spied upon by a couple of lecherous boys, yet leaving behind conventional sexual attitudes, fully in control of her own feminine sexuality. While enjoying a drink whenever possible, she also has an easygoing attitude about sleeping with guys, as well as smoking grass, where she can be seen joining in small groups of like-minded kids who hang out together for brief durations until they eventually each disappear into the night. We learn nothing of Mona’s past, as no one is allowed into her interior space, but she’s an intriguing example of those who consciously dropped out during the 60’s with a counterculture mentality, seeing the world without preconceived notions, opening her life to strangers, expressed through a unique tolerance of others, while challenging society’s traditional benefits like security and comfort, which she has little use for. Her indomitable spirit is built by achieving a supreme self-confidence, where she often defies description, yet she also remains isolated and alone, often vulnerable to savage male predators who see her simply as a target. VAGABOND develops a kind of tumultuous interior power that slowly creeps up on you, one that few movies can match, where Bonnaire’s blustery performance is itself a force of nature.
One of the more curious acquaintances is with Macha Méril as Mrs. Landier, a science research professor studying a spreading tree fungus epidemic caused by rotting ammunition crates left behind by American soldiers during WW II. But rather than take an interest in her career, Mona grows more content sitting in the front seat of her car, playing the radio, smoking cigarettes, eating the food and many treats offered to her, even a bottle of champagne that Mrs. Landier pilfers from a local celebration. Making herself at home, it appears she may never leave, and by the time she’s dropped off at the side of the road, Mrs. Landier only regrets she couldn’t do more. She makes a commitment to work in the fields for awhile, pruning the overgrown branches in the massive vineyards under the tutelage of a friendly Tunisian immigrant, but when the rest of the Moroccan migrant worker team arrives, they refuse to work with a woman, especially sharing sleeping quarters, forcing her back out on the road. Perhaps the most amusing segment is meeting a frustrated housesitter named Yolande (Yolande Moreau) that looks after a senile elderly woman, Aunt Lydie (Marthe Jarnias). While Yolande steps out for a minute, Mona makes herself at home and drinks cognac with the elderly woman, where the two laugh the afternoon away making fun of her family that can’t wait for her to die so they can have her house, exuding a special vulnerability and warmth not seen in the rest of the picture until the more serious, rule-oriented Yolande returns to put a stop to their fun, sending her packing back out onto the road again. The beauty of the film is hearing the full range of interview comments, but also having the ability to judge for ourselves, as we’re able to see brief vignettes of her life. What’s ultimately confounding is Mona’s insistence upon defying better judgment, moving from one travesty to the next, where her life seems to slowly erode before our eyes until she becomes the walking dead. One can’t help but think of Bresson’s Mouchette (1967), perhaps his bleakest film, a portrait of a young adolescent lost to an unsympathetic world, but Mona is surrounded by natural splendor, where the camera has a habit of panning over a vast landscape before Mona walks into the frame, where she remains off to the side, seen as a small, lingering presence in a much larger world around her. In one of the earliest scenes, she’s given a ride by a truck driver who tells her that no one hitchhikes in the winter when there’s literally nobody around. “But I am here,” she tells him, which may as well be her mantra until her final breath. Winner of the Golden Lion at the 1985 Venice Film Festival and a Best Actress César for Bonnaire, the film’s original French title translates to “Without Roof or Law,” a hint into the short-lived freedom associated with the days of youth, where a drifting aimlessness becomes the only appropriate response to an aimless society.
Joshua Klein from 1001 MOVIES YOU
MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
An erstwhile participant in the French New
Wave, Agnès Varda lacked some of the credentials of her former film critic
peers like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Rather, she came from a photography
background, and although she didn’t know much about filmmaking when she began,
Varda quickly demonstrated a style of her own. Perhaps best known for earlier
films such as Cleo from 5 to 7
(1962), a real-time wait for a woman to get the results of her cancer test,
Varda actually veered back and forth between nonfiction and fiction filmmaking.
Vagabond followed a long stretch of the former, which explains its hybrid
merger of documentary style and more traditional cinematic techniques.
One morning, a farmer discovers a frozen body
of a female drifter curled up in a field, her face blue and glazed with frost.
Once the police arrive, Varda’s own voice interrupts. She explains that little
is known about the young woman, then proceeds to enact a series of faux
interviews and flashbacks, each revealing small facts and passing details about
the doomed girl. Nothing, of course, is really known about the woman Mona
Bergeron (played with icy disaffection by Sandrine Bonnaire). She’s merely a
construct of Varda’s elliptical narrative.
Yet Varda enlists the drifter as a metaphor for
how little we actually know about many of the people we encounter on a
day-to-day basis. Bonnaire’s drifter comes across a number of people while in
search of food and shelter, but she rarely makes an effort to know them. She’s
sullen and unthankful, slinking across the frigid French landscapes away from
who knows what and toward her telegraphed tragic end. In the “interview”
segments, characters recount bits and pieces of her behavior and demeanor but
nobody can offer a complete picture of the enigmatic girl. Varda arranges each
scene and bleak landscape with a photographer’s eye, frequently placing her
increasingly feral protagonist (and sometimes antagonist) at the margins of the
frame—just as the mysterious Mona also exists in the periphery of the world
itself.
Vagabond Peter Keough from The Reader
The road movie takes a
somber turn in this austerely beautiful 1985 French drama by Agnes Varda. Mona
Bergeron (Sandrine Bonnaire) hitchhikes aimlessly through the unearthly winter
landscape of southern France, surviving on handouts and ephemeral liaisons with
strangers., Varda maintains a detached mood of melancholy and dread with
lingering shots of etiolated plains and stunted vineyards, but at times her
tracking shots of diseased trees, abandoned chateaus, and rusted fences become
a bit relentless in their message that contemporary life is blighted and
confining. At times Varda also slips into the bogus Brechtian posings of her
earlier, execrable One Sings, the Other Doesn't—Mona's brief
acquaintances stare into the camera and utter profundities such as “I often
think of that hitchhiker: she was free and I am not. Where did she come from?
Where did she go?” But in Mona, Varda has created an everyperson worthy of
Samuel Beckett.
Vagabond - BAM/PFA - Film Programs Judy Bloch
(Sans toit ni loi). Varda created a chilling fiction
around the true story of a young woman who froze to death in the south of
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kat C. Keish
Many feel that not all who wander are lost, but it could equally be said that not all who wander wish to ever find or be found. Some are happy to be forever sans toit ni loi (the film's original French title)—without roof or law. Such is the case of Mona, the protagonist of Agnes Varda's auteurist narrative VAGABOND. The aimless wanderer in question is played by a teenaged Sandrine Bonnaire; her greasy-haired, fresh-faced lack of naïveté brings a decidedly enigmatic element to the film's already elusive structure. The plot accounts for Mona's last weeks before she freezes to death in a ditch, with Varda employing a combination of narrative enactments and documentary-like interviews with those who encountered her before she died. A mysterious narrator voiced by Varda herself declares that no one claimed her body after she died and that she seemed to emanate from the sea; Mona is then seen emerging naked from a cold ocean while two boys admire her from afar. Thus begins the film's overarching point of view, one in which the vagabond is little known and used only as a blank slate onto which her acquaintances project their own expectations and disappointments. Though it opens with Mona's death, the rest of the film is not at all hampered by the inter-film spoilers. She lived just as randomly as she died, and the details of her life just weeks before her demise present another slate onto which the viewers can project their hopes for the seemingly apathetic drifter. Varda's poetic filmmaking encourages the disconnect between the viewers and the characters and even between the characters themselves. Slow tracking shots imitate voyeuristic gaze and first-person interviews reveal some deceit among the fictional subjects. Even Varda's use of nonlinear structuring suggests such discord, as the confusion imitates Mona's mysteriousness. A string-heavy score betrays underlying anxiety, while songs from the The Doors and Les Rita Mitsouko highlight her rebellious nonchalance. The film's disarray comes together to present only one knowable fact about Mona: that no one really knew her or what she wanted to find. (1986, 105 min, 35mm)
Vagabond (1985) Mark Harris from Patrick Murtha’s Diary
This is a sterling film in every way --direction,
screenplay, acting, cinematography, the works -- but also one of the most
depressing movies you will ever see, so be forewarned. It is not a pleasant
matter to watch someone's march toward and arrival at extinction. Vagabond is
really a long suicide scene.
Writer / director Agnes Varda keeps the dramatic situation simple. A very young
woman (Sandrine Bonnaire) who has decided to "drop out" of bourgeois
society (somewhat in the manner of the Summer of Love pilgrims I referred to a
couple of posts back, though with less of an end in mind; there's no San
Francisco) encounters a series of people who take varying degrees of interest
in her, but none of whom influences her to take a more definite path than the
one leading her to nowhere. The vagabond's rejection of structure is absolute
and unnerving, and clearly comes with a heavy price. The folks she encounters
could be said to represent a range of accommodations to the pressures the
"real world" imposes. One of them, a philosophy student turned
goatherd, is the most articulate about the need for making some compromises, in
his case as small as possible but still important ones; and he is the most
disgusted when the girl spurns his efforts to help, by setting her up in
small-scale potato farming, or having her assist with his family's herding and
goat cheese-selling, or something.
The movie presents a pointedly unromantic view of "freedom," set
against a bleak (but not snowy) wintry harshness. (Snow would be too pretty;
snow is a blanket.) Sandrine Bonnaire was only 17 when the movie was shot --
not for Varda that typical form of movie cheating when actors play roles ten
years their junior -- and her youth, counter-balanced at first by the brash
attitude of the dropout, becomes more desperately apparent as hopeless scene
follows hopeless scene. Her boots fray to the point where she can scarcely walk
in them, her scared emotions get closer to the surface, until by the last scene
when she trips and cries, it's almost too deeply upsetting to watch.
Agnes Varda's Vagabond Nancy Keefe Rhodes from Critical Women
From the start she has liked these tracking shots that seem to go
rogue. Agnès Varda had no formal training in cinema when she made her first
feature in 1954, but in the opening moments of La Point Courte she
turns a seaside village’s sleepy summer ambiance to sudden visual exhilaration
with one such shot. We are all settled on the figure of a man standing at a
corner when another emerges casually from the background, walks up an alley and
enters a house. Varda’s camera swerves to follow the second man, flying along
outside in the street as he walks from room to room within, catching him
briefly through successful windows before finally we’re allowed inside at the
meal too.
In Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Varda tracks a glamorous singer awaiting a
cancer diagnosis in real time through a series of encounters – sometimes
following a little girl up the street and sometimes coming to rest on a
bickering couple at the café table – as she circumnavigates the city of Paris
(wonderfully re-created with a map and a motorcycle in the 2007 Criterion
Collection DVD’s extras), much as Joyce’s Leopold Bloom circles the city of
Dublin in Ulysses.
Before turning to film, Varda had worked as a photojournalist, a fact often
remarked upon to explain her gorgeous framing. But surely these tracking shots
are a further masterful adaptation of the demands of still, two-dimensional
composition to the moving image’s additional realms of space and passing time.
When Varda made Vagabond in 1985, she used a series of twelve linked
tracking shots – each begins with an image that echoes how the previous one ended
– combined with variations on the theme of Polish composer Joanna Bruzdowicz’s La
Vita quartet, as a quiet scaffold for her story, the rapid disintegration
of a young vagrant named Mona (17-year-old Sandrine Bonnaire) who freezes to
death in the vineyards of southern France during one of the coldest winters on
record.
Emerging from the near-freezing sea after an impromptu bath in the film’s first
flashback after the discovery of her body – and even here she is spied upon by
two guys on scooters who idly consider whether raping her is worth their
trouble – Mona encounters a number of people in her last weeks, losing the
accoutrements of hippie wandering as she goes. Some offer assistance and care,
some have other ideas bordering on depraved indifference and worse. Their
impressions of her – much as in Welles’ 1941 Citizen Kane – piece
together a sort of portrait, which Varda inserts documentary-like, with some
individuals facing the camera, after a narrator (Varda herself) explains early
in the film that she sought out their remarks upon the discovery of Mona’s body
in a ditch, much as the police search Mona’s pockets.
Vagabond will screen to great fanfare this Saturday in Santa Monica,
California, part of American Cinematheque’s major retrospective of Varda’s
half-century-plus career (June 24 – July 1). Now 81, Varda has a heavy
post-screening talk-back schedule and will also introduce a sneak preview on
the retrospective’s last day of her new film. The Beaches of Agnès,
which won
A look-back at her life and work with the through-line of beaches that have
been important to her personally and figured in some of her films, The
Beaches of Agnès is replete with clips from Varda’s many earlier films.
Those from Vagabond are especially telling by their very judicious
brevity – a series of moments when Mona kicks a metal door, punches a building
and vigorously gives a lecherous truck-driver the universal sign for “Up
yours!” as she departs his cab when he throws her out in the middle of nowhere.
Sandrine Bonnaire’s Mona – a bravura performance that won awards then and
remains fresh and gripping – was neither sentimentalized nor softened, even in
her best moments. But the clips from this film that Varda chose for Beaches
suggest we should take another look at how deeply angry and alienated such a
woman might actually be – whether a female drifter, apparently few in number in
mid-80s France (though Varda did research their existence), or those for whom
such a figure might stand even now – whether she has a thought-through
philosophy to go with his destitution or not.
While containing some of Varda’s most masterful filmmaking innovations, Vagabond
also has some of the heftiest performances she’s directed. Besides Bonnaire,
there’s a very young Yolande Moreau as a gullible maid (the Belgian comedienne
currently stars in the well-received drama Séraphine, just opened here
in the US) and Macha Méril as the fastidiously manicured ecologist Mme.
Landier, who befriends Mona during a field trip, recounts by phone from her own
luxurious bathtub how much the girl stunk, and wakes in the night from tearful
guilt at having left her alone in the woods.
Vagabond also displays Varda’s signature use of local non-actors in
pivotal supporting roles, often essentially playing themselves. These include
the rollicking elderly brandy-drinker Aunt Lydie (Marthe Jarnais), the
soulful-eyed Tunisian farm worker Assoun (Assouna Yahiaoui), a drop-out
scholar-turned-goat-herder and his wife (Sylvaine and Sabine Berger), a pair of
father and son garage mechanics (Pierre and Richard Imbert), and Setina
herself, the young drifter upon whom Mona was modeled.
It would be a good idea to get ready for Beaches, and Vagabond is
not a bad place to start.
Criterion
Collection film essay [Sandy Flitterman-Lewis] Criterion
essay,
Criterion
Collection film essay [Chris Drake] Freedom and Dirt,
Vagabond (1985) - The Criterion Collection
4 by Agnès Varda -
The Criterion Collection
Vagabond • Senses of Cinema Holly Willis, April 2004
The Long
Reigning Queen of French Cinema - Film School Rejects Angela Morrison, August 7, 2017
Vagabond - Archive -
Reverse Shot Justin Stewart, October
17, 2016
Images - Agnes Varda: Cleo From 5 to 7 and Vagabond Craig J. Fischer
Raging Bull Mike Lorefice
Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Jenny Jediny]
Some Thoughts
on Agnès Varda's “Vagabond” – BIG OTHER A.D. Jameson
In Review: VAGABOND (Agnes Varda, 1985) at The One One Four ... Marc Raymond from The One One Four
Agnès
Varda's Vagabond — a film that leaves no trace - 3:AM Magazine Richard Skinner
Women in Film: The Search of True Liberation for Women Maria Wagner Pearse
Travel Films Week: "It Seems to Me That She Came From the Sea": A ... Rachael Johnson from Bitch Flicks
Female
Homelessness in Agnès Varda's Vagabond and Kelly ... Female
Homelessness in Agnès Varda’s Vagabond
and Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, by Tina Hassania from Cléo, July 25, 2013
The House Next Door [Elise Nakhnikian]
What a Feeling! [Robert Horton]
Ruthless Reviews (potentially offensive) Alex K.
Vagabond - Isthmus |
Madison, Wisconsin Kent
Williams, May 31, 2002
MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman
Surrender to the Void-[Steven Flores]
The Films of Agnès Varda [Michael E. Grost]
The Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem]
notcoming.com | Vagabond - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Timothy Sun
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Strictly Film School Aquarello
Old Reviews: Agnes Varda's Vagabond | MAO's Reviews Maicolordonez
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
David Perry - Cinema-Scene.com
Talking Pictures [Howard Schumann]
Great Movie Reviews [Pseudonymous author Ankyuk]
Vagabond Review 1985 | Movie | Contactmusic.com
Scopophilia:Movies of the 60's, 70's, 80's [Richard Winters]
Vagabond Review (1985) - The Spinning Image Graeme Clark
Sans toit ni loi (1985) / Agnes Varda / film review James Travers from Films de France
Vagabond (Agnes Varda, 1985) - Is it a Feminist Movie? Film Tank
Beautiful
Trash: Agnès Varda's Les Glaneurs et la ... - Senses of Cinema Virginia Bonner, November 25, 2007
French cinema's prickly stepmom - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, Criterion 4 X Agnès Varda
James Kendrick - QNetwork Entertainment Portal Criterion 4 X Agnès Varda
DVD Savant Review: 4 by Agnés Varda Glenn Erickson, Criterion 4 X Agnès Varda
4 by Agnès Varda - Criterion Collection : DVD Talk Review of the ... Chris Neilson, Criterion 4 X Agnès Varda
4 by Agnes Varda :: Stop Smiling Magazine Jared Rapfogel, Criterion 4 X Agnès Varda
DVD Verdict [Clark Douglas] Criterion 4 X Agnès Varda
DiscLand [Jonathan Doyle] Criterion 4 X Agnès Varda
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] Criterion 4 X Agnès Varda
dOc DVD
Review: Four by Agnes Varda (La pointe courte / Cleo from ... Jeff Wilson, Criterion
Vagabond: Information from Answers.com
Three by Agnes Varda | Film | reviews, guides, things to do ... - Time Out Keith Uhlich
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
DVD review: '4 X AGNÉS VARDA' - SFGate Mick LaSalle
Vagabond Movie Review
& Film Summary (1986) | Roger Ebert
SCREEN - AGNES VARDA'S 'VAGABOND' - The New York Times Caryn James
Michel Piccoli: 10 essential films | BFI Craig Williams, December 23, 2015
Les Cent et une nuits de Simon Cinéma – Agnès Varda’s playful take on the history of motion pictures – stars Piccoli as man who hires a young film student (Julie Gayet) to come to his castle to help his ailing memory by telling him the stories of various films. Featuring everyone from Alain Delon to Robert De Niro, it’s possibly the starriest French film ever made, but Piccoli is the heart of the picture, giving the most flamboyant performance of his career. There are innumerable highlights, but cinephiles will relish the comparison between the bath scenes in Fellini’s 8½ (1963) and Godard’s Le Mépris, with Marcello Mastroianni and Piccoli debating the genesis of the idea.
One
Hundred and One Nights (dir. Agnes Varda, 1995) | 4:3 Brad Mariano, February 27, 2015
In our regular column, Less
Than (Five) Zero, we take a look at films that have received less than
50 logged watches on Letterboxd, aiming to discover hidden gems in independent
and world cinema. This week Brad Mariano looks at Agnes Varda’s
forgotten celebration of cinema, One
Hundred and One Nights.
Last week I looked at Jacques Demy’s peculiar A Slightly Pregnant Man for this column, and this week forms a spiritual sequel in some sense, the second of a two-part series, or however else you may wish to conceive of it. The connection to last week’s film (which is to say, how I came to discover this) is twofold – the first being that Agnes Varda is of course Demy’s widow, a filmmaker who in her own right is both a clearly significant filmmaker in post-war France, but also who has a varied body of work between her narrative features, documentaries and shorts, many of which still aren’t widely discussed (a particular absurd favourite is 1966’s Les Creatures, one of the weirdest films of the New Wave era, and one that bombed so disastrously that she was unable to make a fiction film for another decade). The second reason is yet another appearance from Marcello Mastroianni in a winking, self-caricature mocking his own screen persona in a different way than his gender-bending lead role in Demy’s film.
One Hundred and One Nights was made in the not insignificant year of 1995, to mark the centenary of cinema, and the film celebrates the art form in its own peculiar narrative – our central character is Monsieur Cinema (Michel Piccoli), a centenarian in a mansion losing his memory, who wants to relive cinema while also being a very obviously allegoric personification of cinema itself, assuming the look of characters as varied as Nosferatu and Norma Desmond. He hires a young cinephile (Julie Gayet) to come each evening (“between the hours of 5 and 7”, a cheeky reference to Varda’s own landmark film, Cleo from 5 to 7) to come and remind him of films past – describing the legendary opening shot of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, for example.
In between he is visited by a parade of legendary film stars who stop and talk, some as themselves, some as characters, in what becomes a showcase revolving door for a who’s who of post-war European cinema. In addition to Piccoli and Mastroianni with the meatiest parts, we are joined by Catherine Deneuve, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Gerard Depardieu, Jeanne Moreau in addition to Robert De Niro and blink-and-you’ll-miss cameos from Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford, amongst many others. Some are instantly recognisable, others less so (Belmondo did not age as gracefully as come of his colleagues) as they swap stories, relive moments. It’s flimsy and paper-thin as a gimmick, but too enjoyable and luminescent in its star power, while never taking the film too seriously, with the actors addressing the camera continuously and going in and out of character – Piccoli, not only is Monsieur Cinema, but himself; he takes his wig off with Marcello as they compare their respective bath scenes in both Contempt and 8 ½.
This last part is confusing – Piccoli’s resume is impressive to the extent that he has as compelling a claim for the title of “Monsieur Cinema” as anyone, but a no-name blank slate actor might have been more useful in steadying the film’s shaky narrative. As it stands, it’s centered around him to the extent that the cameos mostly revolve around relationships or shared films with Piccoli, making the film occasionally feel like a celebration of Michel Piccoli, rather than cinema itself. Not that he doesn’t deserve one, but it seems to skew the film’s objective. But in its grander vision its point is clear – a celebration of cinema and cinephilia, and the film feels like a living, breathing document of the cinema as embodied by Monsieur Cinema’s mansion, full of lobby cards, posters and other film paraphernalia, making cinematic reference in just about every shot. It also anticipates the direction in which film culture would proceed following film’s centenary. Monsieur Cinema’s amnesia can be clearly read as an analogy for a collective cultural one, showing the continuing importance of cultural preservation and discourse of cinema past and present, and the film nicely precedes the two technologies – DVD and the Internet – that would revolutionise cinephilia in ways previously unimaginable. The other interesting thematic element is its connection to notions of storytelling more general, as the obvious allusion in title and plot to One Thousand And One Nights draws the correlation between cinema and storytelling that has existed for hundreds of years.
In the context of Varda’s own filmography, the film is somewhat awkwardly placed, and Varda feels like an unusual figure to make this. Of all the New Wave and Left Bank filmmakers, she is the least historically fascinated with cinephilia – she was, after all, a director who claimed to have seen almost zero films when she made her debut feature, La Pointe Courte, and whose interests in photography and documentary were never totally consumed by a love of gangster pictures, Hitchcock flicks or MGM musicals in the same contagious ways they affected her friends. This may lead to one weakness, which is for all the dozens upon dozens of references and allusions, it doesn’t dip particularly far or wide within the hundred years of cinema, and the film tends to limit these towards big Hollywood films or key European arthouse auteurs. It’s a narrow, canonical conception of a centenary of film, neither broad enough to capture a good sense of cinema’s history as a whole (and completely depoliticised, as if one hundred years of cinema came about in a vacuum, Big-Bang style), nor idiosyncratic to give an interesting conception of what Varda sees cinema like – it’s easy to imagine Godard hijacking such a project with non-stop references to Johnny Guitar, which at least would have some personal spin. But I’d ultimately recommend this film – it’s silly and ultra-kitsch fun, with a shallow celebration of cinema history that focuses on the joys of film watching more than anything much deeper, and the sheer talent in one place is near unprecedented.
One Hundred and One Nights - Archive - Reverse Shot Nick Pinkerton, November 21, 2016
digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews Debi Lee Mandel
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
FILM
REVIEW; Movies' Greatest Hits, With the Big Hit Makers Janet Maslin from The New York Times, April 16, 1999
One
Hundred and One Nights - Wikipedia
The Gleaners and
I, directed by Agnès Varda | Film review - Time Out
The French title of this delightful, encouraging documentary underlines how Agnès Varda identifies with her subjects - social marginals who 'glean' a living, from the earth (caravan dwellers) or from refuse (the teacher of Malian and Senegalese immigrants whom she befriends at a Paris street market). The veteran film-maker is newly inspired and energised by the freedom her DV camera brings. The film is marked by youthful freshness, and the integrity and sympathy of both the images and the commentary, as Varda hurtles us to Arras, Beaune or Paris in search of the new generation of foragers. Cheekily, she places a frocked lawyer in a crop field, so he can declaim on section 12.26.10 of the penal code enshrining the historic right to take harvest leftovers; persuades an art gallery to disinter a painting of glaneurs from its vaults; takes tips from a young Michelin chef who gleans herbs for his restaurant; or marvels at the totem towers of a nonagenarian Russian 'poubelle' artist. It's as if, in following the line of her inspiration, Varda has re-mapped France, her demography of 'marginalia' uniting a diverse community of individuals who're unearthed and celebrated with an intimacy and discretion that is essentially political.
Varda, arguably the first filmmaker of the French New Wave, builds an easy rambling and revelatory road movie in THE GLEANERS AND I, an essay film about the historical French custom of gleaning, the act of collecting crops left to waste after the harvest. Varda takes to the motorways with her digital camera and captures gleaning as it is in contemporary French life. She interviews potato farmers, crust punks, gypsies, grocers, justices, vintners, and artists, illuminating lots of sympathetic thematic tensions along the way. Varda doesn't linger in interviews; she brings us only snippets of the people she speaks with, capturing their charm in a few juicy clips. Varda uses GLEANERS to consider her own aging, revolving technology, the ethics of waste, and, probably most poignantly for viewers in 2013, the sliding economic realities that brought gleaning back as a common practice.
The Village Voice [Amy Taubin]
A side-door entrance into the French character and
economy, Agnès Varda's eccentric and thoroughly winning The Gleaners and I
is jam-packed with information, personalities, and affecting images, and its
downbeat, slightly bedraggled air is perfectly married with its subject. Varda
spent nearly a year touring
For some of the
interviewees, gleaning is their only means of sustenance. Others, like the chef
of a two-star restaurant or the painter whose work is collaged from found
objects, glean out of frugality, ecological commitment, aesthetic beliefs, or
an aversion to middlemen and conventional trade practices. If gleaning cuts
across class lines, it doesn't necessarily obliterate class differences. At one
point, Varda wonders, skeptically, whether the privileged children who use
recycled paper and plastic in their crafts class have ever shaken hands with
their neighborhood garbage collectors.
In her travels, Varda
visits a descendant of Etienne Jules Marey (the 19th-century photographer and
pre-cinema experimenter), who keeps one of his great-great-grandfather's
"riflecameras" in his farmhouse basement, and Jean Laplanche, the
psychoanalyst and writer, who looks after the gleaners in the vineyards he
inherited from his father. While Laplanche shrinks into his chair with
embarrassment, his wife of 50 years explains that she was analyzed by Lacan so
she would better understand her husband's work.
Tied together by Varda's voice-over narration, the film allows all kinds of digressions from its central subject: whether individuals can sustain themselves on society's discards and waste. Throughout, Varda likens her filmmaking to the gleaning of ideas and images from interior and exterior journeys. A woman in her early seventies working in a profession that is as youth-oriented and male-dominated as when her first feature, Cléo From 5 to 7 (1962), made her the only female director of the New Wave, Varda is in some ways as marginal as most of her subjects. "I have the feeling that I'm an animal," she comments over a close-up of her wrinkled hand, accidentally caught by her own camera. "Worse, an animal I do not know."
Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse / The Gleaners and I Antti Alanen
I saw Agnès Varda's exhilarating masterpiece Les Glaneurs et la
glaneuse for the first time. It belongs to the late inspired achievements of
radical French film-makers who started in the 1950s and never lost their
enthusiasm to create and invent something new and different - Chris Marker,
Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, and Agnès Varda. Their spirit is forever young.
Yet Varda's movie is on one level a meditation of getting old. It is a movie
prefiguring the selfie generation: with the mini DV Varda can easily record
herself, and there are candid close-ups of her wrinkled hands, also demonstrating
how easy it is to shoot one's own hand with the other hand. But while Les
Glaneurs et la glaneuse has a subjective dimension it is also a travel film, an
investigation, and an essay on the theme announced in the title.
Le glanage / Ährenlesen / Nachlese / gleaning / خوشه
چینی is a habit most deeply rooted in France, with an
official status since the Middle Ages, but it also goes back to the Bible, to
the Torah. Olive trees shall not be beaten multiple times, and what remains
should be left for the poor, the strangers, the widows, and the orphans. (There
is no established concept like that in Finland. Jean-François Millet's painting
Des glaneuses is known here as Tähkänpoimijat which means just gatherers
of ears/spikes/cobs. Instead of an institution of glanage in the French sense
we have something different, yet with partially the same function: jokamiehenoikeus
/ freedom to roam, everyman's right, also to fruit, berries, mushrooms, fish,
etc. in the nature within a decent distance to someone's home.)
Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse is a social documentary showing how acute and
topical the ancient tradition is still today and how it is getting new
manifestations in modern society.
We visit wheat fields, oyster beaches, and vineyards. We see how it goes with
potatoes, cauliflowers, almonds, figs, and cabbages.
On our way we meet ordinary people and extraordinary ones. Single mothers,
alcoholics, gypsies. The marginalized and the have-nots. There are expert
dumpster divers (roskisdyykkari in Finnish). There are master chefs and
wine connoisseurs. We learn about the codes, the rules, the regulations, the
distances, and special legislation on res derelictae, things
deliberately abandoned. Lawyers with their thick red code books are met
regularly during the movie.
There is a surprise meeting of Jean Laplanche and his wife. Laplanche was a
great psychoanalyst; Das Vokabular der Psychoanalyse by Laplanche &
Pontalis I always have at hand; it is still the standard work almost 50 years
after its publication. In France Laplanche was also a famous winemaker, and in
that function we meet him here.
Varda takes us also to the former estate of Étienne-Jules Marey, and there is a
digression with samples of the work of the early precursor of the cinema, his
moving image series shot with his chronophotographic gun.
There are digressions, songs, and wordplays, and they all add up. We learn
about the phenomenon from all angles, also from the farmers' and the owners',
and from the trashmen also, because they have the big picture of this side of
life. This is about rummaging but also about salvaging valuable metal from
junk, and recycling, about "les rois de recoup". The most remarkable
person in the film is the teacher Alain, a methodical urban gleaner and a teacher
of the French language to immigrants.
From the start to the end Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse is an essential film
about art. The obvious art dimension is about the famous paintings on glanage
which we keep facing through the film. In the end one of the most fascinating
ones is discovered in cellar storage. But even more importantly the film is a
discussion of the art phenomenon of the objet trouvé, trouvailles,
invented by Marcel Duchamp a hundred years ago. We meet fantastic artists such
as Louis Pons and Sze who create entire worlds from trash or found objects.
All the time Agnès Varda, the glaneuse, identifies with the glaneurs. She
"gleans information". Like Marker and Godard she is a master of the
compilation, the collage. "I make images from salvaged material".
The low definition of the digital mini video is used here as an intentional
means of expression. The transfer to 35 mm photochemical film adds warmth to
the image of this poignant, compassionate, witty, and humoristic film which is
even more topical today than when it was made.
Trash And Treasure: The Gleaners And I • Senses of Cinema Jake Wilson, December 12, 2002
Beautiful
Trash: Agnès Varda's Les Glaneurs et la ... - Senses of Cinema Virginia Bonner, November 25, 2007
Matter,
Time, and the Digital: Varda's The Gleaners and I - Scholarship ... 18-page essay by Homay King from the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Fall
2007 (pdf)
“The Gleaners and I” | On the Commons David Bollier, November 21, 2009
The Long
Reigning Queen of French Cinema - Film School Rejects Angela Morrison, August 7, 2017
Precious Leftovers (THE GLEANERS AND I) | Jonathan Rosenbaum May 11, 2000, also seen here: Precious Leftovers | Movie Review | Chicago Reader
notcoming.com | The
Gleaners and I Leo Goldsmith
The Gleaners and I -
Archive - Reverse Shot Ohad
Landesman, November 28, 2016
The Films of Agnès Varda - by Michael E.
Grost
“The Gleaners and I” - Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek, March 8, 2001
A
Movie a Day, Day 80: The Gleaners and I | The House Next Door ... Elise Nakhnikian
Les
Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (The Gleaners and I) - Forgotten Classics ... Nathanael Hood from Forgotten Classics of
Yesteryear
#99: The
Gleaners and I – 100 Films | 100 Scenes
Jeffrey Overstreet from Christianity
Today
This Week on MUBI:
"The Gleaners & I" | Movie Mezzanine Jake Cole
World
Cinema Review: Agnès Varda | Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse ... Douglas Messerli
Vagabond - Isthmus | Madison, Wisconsin Kent Williams, May 31, 2002
Film
Notes -The Gleaners and I - University at Albany Kevin Hagopian
Vague
Visages on Varda's 88th: 'The Gleaners & I' (Agnès Varda ... Jacob Oller
* OFFOFFOFF film review
THE GLEANERS AND I (Les Glaneurs et la ...
Joshua Tanzer
'The
Gleaners and I,' a French Food Waste Film | Sustainable America Amy Leibrock
The Gleaners And I
- AV Club Film Scott Tobias
REVIEW: Les glaneurs et la glaneuse [The Gleaners and I] [2000 ... Jared Mobarak
The Gleaners and I | Larsen On Film
The L Magazine: Jeremy Polacek
The Gleaners
And I Review | SBS Movies
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Decade:
Agnes Varda on “The Gleaners and I” | IndieWire reprint of an Andrea Meyer interview, 2001
The
Gleaners and I | Variety
Brendan Kelly
The Gleaners and I | Film | The Guardian Xan Brooks
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
San
Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]
The Gleaners and I Movie Review (2001) | Roger Ebert
Movie
Review - - FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; A Reaper of the Castoff ... The New York Times, September 30, 2000
Film - Agnès Varda - Living for Cinema, and Through It - NYTimes.com A.O. Scott from The New York Times, June 25, 2009
The Gleaners and I -
Wikipedia
Cinévardaphoto | Film Review | Slant Magazine Akiva Gottlieb
In 2002, the then 74-year-old Agnès Varda—known, perhaps reductively, as the grandmother of the French New Wave—executed a lovely feat of self-mythological reinvention called The Gleaners and I. This diary-style DV documentary provided a new context for her storied career; a playful film about aging and the march of time, it redefined her modus operandi to that of a cinematic gleaner, collecting France’s scattered stories and ephemera as if from the ground after a harvest. Her new collection Cinévardaphoto—a trio of short documentaries presented in reverse chronological order—explores this capacity for gleaning through Varda’s original medium, still photography. Ydessa, The Bears and Etc., the newest film in the triptych, chronicles a deeply eccentric woman’s museum exhibit: photos of teddy bears with their owners, stacked from floor to ceiling. In her role as collector, curator, and artist, Ydessa forges a haunting narrative of world memory, and places a frighteningly vivid sculpture of Hitler in the adjacent room to emphasize the markings of history on innocence. Varda frames the film like an essay, and through her commentary she forms an aesthetic bond with a passionate gleaner of history. Ulysses, made in 1982 and shown at Cannes a year later, recontextualizes a photo Varda took in 1954 showing a naked man, a child, and a dead goat on a seashore. Attempting to investigate the image and perhaps revise her own memory, Varda revisits her models, one of whom, the child Ulysses, seems unwilling to remember the photo, despite the fact that he painted an image of it as a child. As Varda offers personal and political commentary linking the photo with its date in history, she provides a metonymic definition of the cinema: photography given context. The final film, Salut Les Cubains, is shaped like a Chris Marker travelogue, a series of still photos representing artistic and cultural shifts in Castro’s Cuba, circa 1962-1963. Though Varda’s constant narration is unintentionally obfuscated by the placement of white subtitles on white imagery, this often confounding work still speaks volumes about the importance of context. Forty years later, the infective enthusiasm of Salut Les Cubains is tempered by the darker chapters of recent Cuban history. As Varda asserts in the press notes, the film when viewed today highlights all the sadness caused by the lost illusions, rather than the idealism and joie de vivre originally celebrated by her travelogue. Cinévardaphoto abounds in these ambiguities, highlighting a photo’s ability to freeze a moment in time while time inevitably marches on.
CINEVARDAPHOTO
(Agnès Varda, 2004) | Dennis Grunes
Cinévardaphoto comprises a trio of documentaries by Agnès Varda, each of which involves photographs. These short films were made at different points in Varda’s career.
The first one is amazing. “Ydessa, the Bears, and Etc.” revolves around Toronto curator Ydessa Hendeles, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, whose exhibit of voluminous photographs including teddy bears, especially in Varda’s thrilling long-shots of rooms in the exhibition space in a Munich museum, evokes Alain Resnais’s All the Memory of the World (1956), about France’s national library. The lion’s share of the photographs, quite old (for instance, in sepia), pair children and their teddy bears—but not all do this: one wonderful photograph shows two men playing chess, with a teddy bear on top of the table, behind the two chess players and facing us. The stuffed toy’s blank stare contrasts with the men’s demeanors, which remind us of young children’s absorption at play, which is additionally thrown into relief by our knowledge of the game’s mental demands and sophistication. Similarly, the photographic pairings of young children and teddy bears evoke a poignant atmosphere of innocence—in the context that both Hendeles and Varda conjure, the innocence that the Holocaust peculiarly assaulted. Hendeles notes that her exhibit exists betwixt fantasy and reality. Gradually, Varda’s film devastates.
The springboard for “Ulysse” is a photograph, taken by Varda on a beach, in 1953 or 1954. A naked man approaches a young boy, also naked, who is tending to his own thoughts and space; a third figure, a dead goat, participates in the image. About thirty years later, Varda interviews the man whom the boy has grown up to become. He doesn’t recall the incident at all—not even the goat. Varda’s fantastical photograph doesn’t cross the interviewee’s “reality.”
Finally, “Salut les Cubains” consists of photographs taken by Varda in Cuba in 1963. Castro having swept away Batista’s vicious regime, the images, collaged about a decade later, capture such hope for the future. Where does fantasy end and reality begin? Chris Marker assisted Varda with the editing.
This is an odd film to review just in terms of format, since it's not even clear that it's entirely Varda's creation. While I'm sure she had a hand in the compilation, it actually seems more like a foreign sales company's unique marketing plan. The new Varda piece is under an hour, so why don't we release it with two of her older shorts that also deal with photography? Now, this isn't to take anything away from Cinévardaphoto, an impressive collection from one of the greatest documentary filmmakers of the last fifty years. But one has to puzzle over whether to take it as one work, or three, or something in between like the Holy Trinity. And for me part of this confusion, the insistence of this question, comes from the enormous differences between the three short films. Yes, Varda's parallel career as a photographer and her facility with image analysis is a common denominator, but one may was well yoke three Chris Marker projects together based on the presence of cats. (Cinékittiemarker?) As it happens, I saw most of the latest piece, Ydessa, The Bears and Etc., at the Toronto IFF last year but had to duck out to see another film. At the time it struck me as an interesting enough work, although Varda's careful examination of the random, fugitive details in the photographs (part of a curated display by Toronto artist / collector Ydessa Hendeles) -- those once-insignificant teddy bears now invested with piercing personal meaning -- seemed like a fairly direct application of Roland Barthes' method in Camera Lucida. Having seen the whole piece, I still think this is the case, although Varda goes in the opposite direction at the same time. She isn't only prioritizing the singularity of Hendeles' images, but also foregrounding their sameness through indexing and typology (the very heuristic Hendeles refuses). Ydessa, The Bears and Etc. is a film that has certain themes in common with Varda's last major work, The Gleaners and I (refuse as cultural memory, the insignificant repurposed as the most personal form of expression), but Varda doesn't explore these issues in nearly enough depth. Parts of the video are devoted to unenlightening, off the cuff responses from gallery-goers, stilted interviews with Hendeles, and poorly articulated thoughts on the teddy bear project's relation to the larger art world. (A last-minute revelation that Hendeles has chosen to display a Maurizio Catalan sculpture of Hitler in the next room is left virtually unexplored; the piece isn't even identified as a Catalan until the end credits.) When examining the images of the European 20th century and what they still have to say to us across the historical divide, Varda is a witty, casually erudite companion, and time spent in her company is always rewarded. But Ydessa, The Bears and Etc. is an underdeveloped film-essay.
Contrary
to what most reviews will tell you, Ydessa is the weakest of the three compiled films. The strongest by far,
quite nearly a masterpiece, is Ulysse from 1982, a film built around an early photograph Varda took in
Wellington
Film Society - CINEVARDAPHOTO
James Quandt
notcoming.com |
Cinevardaphoto Rumsey Taylor
Picture Book: Agnès Varda's Cinevardaphoto | IndieWire Erik Syngle, Michael Joshua Rowin, and Michael Koresky, February 8, 2005
Ways of Seeing
| Village Voice Melissa Anderson,
February 15, 2005
Beyond the Multiplex - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, February 17, 2005
CINÉVARDAPHOTO | Film
Journal International Maria
Garcia
Cinevardaphoto: Agnes Varda in Short(s) – seanax.com Sean Axmaker, also seen here: Playing for Time, Exploding Kazan and CinevardaDVD - DVDs of the ...
Yellow
Barrel: Thoughts on Film [Jon Cvack]
Film-Forward Review: [CINEVARDAPHOTO]
Chicago
celebrates the films and photography of French master Agnès ... Ben Sachs from the Chicago Reader, October 7, 2015
Cinévardaphoto - AV Club Film Noel Murray
Cinevardaphoto :
DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video
Glenn Erickson
Festival
Express | Village Voice J.
Hoberman
Combustible Celluloid Review - Cinévardaphoto (2004), Agnès Varda ... Jeffrey M. Anderson
Artforum Top Ten List
- Tim Davis
Cinevardaphoto
- Movie Reviews and Movie Ratings | TVGuide.com
Cinevardaphoto
| Variety Lisa Nesselson
Philadelphia Weekly [Matt Prigge]
Agnes
Varda News - The New York Times
Manohla Dargis
Agnès Varda has a grandmotherly appearance at this stage in her life
where we see her cheerfully celebrating her 80th birthday, but she’s
been making movies since the mid 50’s, and was embraced by the French New Wave,
though she has never received the same accolades as most of the men
involved. Her filmmaking is more
experimental, only occasionally of feature length variety, oftentimes
documenting whatever she finds fascinating at the moment, reflecting a spirit of her own curiosity and
growth, where art has a way of altering the underlying tension or personal rage
at whatever’s troubling her or doesn’t make sense in the world. What this film shows is a generous heart, as
Varda reflects upon all the people she has known and worked with throughout her
life, including many who have died along the way, like her filmmaker husband
Jacques Demy. What’s interesting is that
no one gets preferential treatment, neither movie stars, film directors,
neighbors, family nor friends, as all have had an impact in her life, so she
includes everyone in this impressionistic memory piece that includes
reenactments of various events, film clips from her movies, and a veritable
trunkful of photographs that turns this into an autobiographical reverie on her
own cinematic journey. Varda has always
had a fascination with photography and is especially gifted at capturing the
people she has known, where the selections she chooses to share reveal a
special intimacy of the moment.
Completely at ease in front of a camera, with little or no inhibitions,
this translates to a few naked moments with Viva, the Andy Warhol heroine, but
also a naked reenactment of her own young love affair, as portrayed by an
anonymous naked couple, where as the camera pulls away the guy’s erection is
impossible to miss. In much the same
way, she’s undaunted by facing the reality of death, feeling comfortable enough
with a camera to shoot a tender close up of her husband’s face, which includes
seeing a disfiguring lesion brought on by the late stages of AIDS. Varda is a practitioner of interactive art,
complete with video installations set up on the city streets, where electronic
imagery along with a selective sound design generates a unique style of
performance art
Lovingly presented and highly inventive, this is
certainly a contrast against some of her blisteringly bleak films, where watching this
movie is much like picking up an old cinema magazine from the 60’s or 70’s and
flipping through the pages, where stills from a certain movie set might catch
your eye, but turn the page and there’s a stunning photo of Catherine Deneuve
in the flower of her youth looking positively gorgeous, or a brief piece on
some rare, hard to find Varda film that you never heard about. Clips of most all of her films are included,
where Varda amusingly provides relevant backdrop information on what was
happening in her life at that time, with appropriate photos, while at other
times she’ll stage a reenactment 50 years later where the children in the film
have now become elderly senior citizens.
One thing that’s readily apparent is that despite personal setbacks, or
the bleak, incredibly depressing mood that pervades throughout one of her best
films, Vagabond
(Sans toit ni loi) with Sandrine Bonnaire in 1985, Varda is a
genuinely warmhearted and happy human being, whose joyful outlook is evident as
she cheerfully turns camera shy film essayist Chris Marker into an animated
grinning cat, but one that continuously offers serious, deeply probing
questions. British actress Jane Birkin
hams it up in a rollicking Laurel and Hardy cross-dressing comedy routine at
one point. But this is also a travelogue
across the world, as Varda’s snapshots take her to places like Cuba, China or
Japan, where she discovers babies are dressed in luxuriously colorful outfits,
dressed as if they are heir to the throne, unlike babies back home that are
continually dressed in pinks and blues, or Los Angeles during the late 1960’s
where she observes anti-war demonstrations and Black Panther rallies
firsthand. An ardent feminist, her
outrage is eloquently expressed in a brief cut to Bonnaire’s rage in Vagabond
(Sans toit ni loi), where her enduring work is a living testament to what she’s loved
through. Told through a mosaic of
personal adventures, Varda simply encapsulizes her life in this film through a
collection of images, some of them sad, such as a visit to her husband’s grave,
or some joyously elevating, such as many of the visits with her own
family. Through humor and sheer
inventiveness, she keeps this interesting.
My own personal favorite is creating a backyard family game, like at a
carnival, where her own kids can throw balls at giant cardboard pictures of
herself, knocking them down and flattening them in a second, which obviously
has a cathartic effect for everyone involved.
Varda’s life can be measured by the joy and curiosity she has brought to
others, having missed little in her lifetime, as she’s still acutely aware of
the world passing by with an ingenious capacity to playfully interact with all
its inhabitants.
The Village Voice [Scott Foundas] at
Thankfully, not all of the masters present at
Time Out London (David Jenkins) review
This tactile and amusingly
confessional auto-portrait from Agnès Varda – that eccentric grandmother of
French cinema – feels like a vast, colourful jigsaw puzzle in which all the
pieces have been connected in the wrong way, but the resultant whole is more
meaningful, poetic and plain beautiful than we could have ever expected. ‘The
Beaches of Agnès’ is at once a career summation, a casual meet-and-greet with
friends, family and fleeting associates, and a lightly fictionalised interior
commentary on the modern world as seen through Varda’s curious and artistically
discerning eyes. She visits the set of her remarkable 1954 debut, ‘Le Pointe
Courte’; she sails down the Seine – on her own – in a small sailing boat; she
builds a whale on a beach and a house out of celluloid; and she remembers her
late husband, Jacques Demy. It all feels like a joyful couple of hours in the
company of an old friend, and it's all shot-through with humour, grace and
enough charm to sink a battleship.
The Lumière Reader Steve Garden, also a review of CLÈO FROM 5 TO
7
THE WORD ‘escapist’ is often used in connection with movies,
but to really engage with cinema is to actively engage with the world. One
filmmaker who vividly expresses this is Agnès Varda. All of her films –
including the Nouvelle Vague classic, Cléo from 5 to 7; the politically charged
Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi); the love letter to her partner, Jacquot de Nantes;
the documentary on consumption and waste, The Gleaners and I – are responses to
the times in which they were made. As such, they invite the viewer to enter a
discussion about the sort of world we want on the one hand, and the aesthetics
and responsibility of cinema on the other. The Beaches of Agnès (Les plages
d’Agnès) is no different, except that this time the subject is Varda herself –
well, sort of. She uses her life as a pretext to playfully ruminate on all
manner of things, and indeed her canvas is considerable.
Ostensibly autobiographic, Beaches is a highly aestheticised cine-collage
(composed with relatively broad-brushstrokes) in which everything is
essentially Varda-ised! She re-imagines her life as a colourful, at times
surreal (almost fantastic) cinematic journey where memory and fiction are
indistinguishable. In one scene, she dresses her family in identical soft pale
fabric while she floats around them in deep earth tones. It’s a romantic,
slightly portentous tableau, but it sits comfortably with the eclectic tone of
the work. Varda has said that Beaches will be her last film, and one senses
that this is how she would like to be remembered – and why not? It’s a gorgeous
piece of work, and it expresses genuine, vital affection for people, art, and above
all, cinema.
The Hollywood Reporter [Neil Young]
It's surprisingly rare for directors to make retrospective
documentaries on their own artistic careers, but if Agnes Varda's "The
Beaches of Agnes" is any guide more should consider doing so.
A genuinely playful wander down memory-lane by one of
Made to coincide with 2007's 80th birthday for Belgian-born, half-Greek
photographer/director Varda -- here a genially wise, slightly batty kind of
bohemian granny, who's seldom off-screen for long -- "The Beaches of
Agnes" ("Les plages d'Agnes") neither presumes foreknowledge of
its subjects nor bogs down in excessive info about the artistic notables on
view. Instead it nimbly treads a path between these hazards, just as the ever-sprightly
Varda herself is seen wandering along the shoreline on the various beaches that
are central to many of her reveries.
Elfin and perpetually bob-haired, she's terrific company as she "walks
backwards" through her colorfully well-traveled life, along the way pausing
to discuss friends and collaborators -- a starry bunch including Gerard
Depardieu, Alexander Calder, Harrison Ford and Jim Morrison. Much time is
devoted to key figures of the French New Wave (Godard, Truffaut, etc), the
parallel Left Bank school to which Varda belonged along with Chris Marker, who
amusingly 'appears' here in the form of a giant cartoon tomcat, and her
beloved, much-missed filmmaker husband Jacques Demy.
Varda co-directed Demy's 1967 "Umbrellas of Cherbourg," and her 1990
tribute-doc "Jacquot de Nantes" was completed as Demy was dying of
AIDS. Death is, indeed, a semi-constant presence here, but never in morbid or
depressing fashion. The tone is defiantly bright and breezy despite the
undercurrent of "bonjour, tristesse." Best of all, Varda shows no
sign of slowing down as she strides nonchalantly, inspiringly, into her ninth
decade.
Agnès Varda is an impressive woman, whose present self is woven throughout her latest film, the poetic autobiography The Beaches of Agnès. At eighty (a surprise birthday celebration decorates the end credits) she is spry of body and vigorous of mind, inventive and alive, looking forward as well as back. In the film she blends living tableaux, installations, old footage, voice-over, interviews. She is ever present, talking, inventing, directing, symbolically (and actually, on camera) walking backward. The result is far too beautiful to call a mere "documentary portrait."
Remembering the film, one thinks of Agnès at various ages, always with the same shiny dark cloche of hair (allowed to grow white in some shots) and the same solid, mobile form. One also remembers circus acrobats performing on a beach; a carnivalesque film office set up in the sand. One thinks of Agnès with her late husband, director Jacques Demy, and his sweet, sad face; her children and grandchildren, dressed in white and cavorting around her for the camera contre jour, into the sun, on the sand with the sea behind them, glorious and handsome and Mediterranean. This is a celebration of cinema and of life.
She does not forget to talk about the Nazis and the
extermination camps, or her schoolgirl songs celebrating the collaborationist
government of Pétain and
But The Beaches of Agnès is also not without deliberate lacunae. How did the love of her life, her husband, her co-director on his famous The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, happen to die of AIDS? Everybody is talking to her, so they tell her what she wants to hear. There's nothing wrong with that, because we want to hear it too. Yet with the poetry and beauty one's left in a bit of a daze, because film fiction and film fact and reenactment and chronology are interwoven so cunningly and rapidly you need a time outline and a stop button, which are not provided. The fluidity of it is quite enchanting. But it doesn't exactly leave you with a precise knowledge of this wonderful, long life that's probably not near its creative end. (After all, we already live in an age of 80-something and 90-something filmmakers. And here is a woman, and women live longer than men.)
To hold together such a rich life, Agnès Varda needed a theme, and she feels that in everyone there is a landscape, but in her there are beaches; her life has often revolved around them. The eternal theme of woman and water, weave, wave, wife. And if it was difficult to provide unity, that only reflects the richness of the life.
Her father was Greek, her mother French; her first name was
Arlette; she legally changed it to Agnès at 18. She was born in
She covered the Cuban and Chinese revolutions, fought for
abortion and other women's issues, was grouped with Marker and Resnais as part
of the Nouvelle Vague, lived in and loved LA and was filming the Black Panthers
when Paris was in turmoil in June of '68. (In '67, the Summer of Love, she made
Uncle Yanco, about her bohemian painter uncle who lived on a houseboat
in
In 2006, at 78, she was invited to do a video and stills installation, L'Ile et elle (the island and her: she likes such punning titles), about the island of Noirmoutier--a step forward in a new career that's reflected in the various tableaux vivantes and installations of this film that evoke her past poetically, express her vision, and simply enchant and avoid forever the boredom of the conventional filmed autobiography. She begins with rich use of mirrors on the beach, moving among them and directing and talking to her typically attractive young film crew. In one remarkable sequence, she has the men who worked in one of her early films reassembled, pushing a large cart through the street at night, with a projector mounted on it showing the film.
She can be a bit maudlin, as she is throwing down roses in a huge installation of her old much enlarged black and white portraits of Gérard Philipe, Philippe Noiret, and other departed stars of her firmament and French cinema's. And when talking about Jacques Demy, she weeps. But mostly she is joyous, and smiles. The fact that the cause of Demy's death, AIDS, was kept secret then and for years after she attributes to the stigma attached to the disease in the Eighties.
Varda's eliding of distinctions between real and imaginary, documentary and fiction, present and past can be very confusing: distinctions don't mean enough to her. But though things could be more organized and expository, her confusions and conflations are still beautiful and fascinating to watch.
BEACHES OF AGNES, THE – Hammer to Nail Holly Herrick
1956, François Truffaut wrote a short essay in Cahiers du cinema about La Pointe Courte, the first film by the then young photographer and art historian Agnès Varda. In his piece, Truffaut describes the film as “a cinematic essay, an ambitious experimental work” and claims: “If, by the nature of its ambitions, La Pointe Courte joins the family of films that are outside cinema… it is nonetheless superior to these because the result matches the director’s intentions.” Truffaut’s exacting summation of La Pointe Courte applies in a general sense to the extraordinary career of Varda, whose nonfiction work willfully and triumphantly reaches beyond cinema’s conventional borders.
Despite the heartily ambitious new terrain that has now begotten nonfiction filmmakers all over the world, at 81 years of age, Varda still creates films that stand apart. A fresh and innovative essay structure lies at the base of her newest film, The Beaches of Agnes, her most far-reaching and thoroughly autobiographical work to date. Yet, simply stated, “autobiography” is a misnomer. Playfully linking together experiences and memories, observations and thought, culminating in revelations that are far outside the limitations of a linear biography, The Beaches of Agnes may be Varda’s most completely realized cinematic essay. In it, she establishes a distinct relationship between the different objects of memory, connecting photos, films and pieces of art as the purveyors of slippery and ephemeral meaning. This personal tour of past films, blurry photographs, historically repeated images and her own staged memories—all the products of a still wildly dynamic imagination—is a confrontational affront to definitive biography. Fitting for the playful Varda, Beaches is an anti-biography, a fluid and non-linear tapestry where memory, fantasy and verité each vie for equal recognition and authority over the narrative.
Touring her own memory by staging it through a series of objects, films and installations, Varda can’t prevent herself from thoroughly exploring the possibilities of the present, thus denying any narrative license to her past. In visiting what she describes as the “landscapes” of her memory, she is consumed by new discovery. At the house where she spent her childhood, she becomes more interested in its current inhabitants—a toy train collector and his wife—than uncovering revelations from her own earliest years. The most explicit recollections of her past are evoked through excerpts from her films, from the voice of a young Jane Birkin or Yoland Moreau.
Often Varda’s supposed visits to the past take the form of an artistic
installation, as in the film’s introduction, when she and an eager team of
collaborators set up a number of mirrors on a
Early in the film, Varda articulates the belief that cinema for her has always been a game. This declaration is in perfect congruence with her frisky nature, but furthermore, it discloses her trust in cinema to bear her most valiant artistic efforts, and to contain her meaningful, textured puzzles. Almost innocent in its sincerity and open-mindedness, the experiments and play staged in Beaches are rooted in a genuine desire to dig deeply into profound human emotion and experience.
The strong emphasis on transience perfectly complements the deep sense of emotional loss that is at the heart of the film; Varda’s love for her deceased husband Jacques Demy provides the emotional keystone. Demy’s perpetual stronghold on her heart is pieced together through many fractured and disparate moments. Intimately confiding his permanence in her memory, the film’s narrative finds Demy everywhere: his photo on a trading card at a yard sale, Varda’s final portraits of him, a flower for a dead friend transforming into another flower on his grave, and the reflections of his life that they each captured in their own films.
Along with her literal memorializing of Demy, Varda expresses her grappling
with the confusion of loss by incorporating an installation piece into the
film. “L’Ile et Elle”, a play on words meaning literally “The
The Beaches of Agnes closes with yet another Varda installation, a house of discarded film stock. While cinema has been for her a game, it is an instrument that has enabled her to play with her own world. Varda’s cinema as essay, her house made of images, subverts the walk backwards through time that she takes in this film. Her joyful interaction with the medium substantiates cinema as a constant companion and eager playmate.
Michael Wood reviews Agnès Varda · LRB 5 November 2009 Michael Wood from The London Review of Books, November 5, 2009
The Beaches of Agnès - Archive - Reverse Shot Genevieve Yue, November 30, 2016
Wave
Goodbye: Agnes Varda's “The Beaches of Agnes” | IndieWire Michael Koresky, June 30, 2009
notcoming.com | The
Beaches of Agnes Ben Ewing
Agnès
Varda Turns Her Life into a Beautiful Waking ... - Village Voice J. Hoberman, July 1, 2009
Relish
Agnès Varda's Travelogues for Free | Village Voice Melissa Anderson, May 28, 2014
POV: The Beaches of Agnès (Les plages d'Agnès) | PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Agnès
Varda's Art of Being There | The New Yorker
Richard Brody, March 27, 2017
The Beaches of Agnès | Film Review | Slant Magazine Eric Henderson
The Hurt Locker - The
Beaches of Agnès - Cheri -- New York ... - NYMag David Edelstein
Review:
'The Beaches of Agnès' - Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
DVD
of the Week: “The Beaches of Agnès” | The New Yorker Richard Brody
'Beaches Of Agnes' Fetes An Aging Queen Of Tides : NPR John Powers
Eternal
Sunshine Of The Logical Mind [Bob Turnbull]
The Beaches Of Agnès - Film - The AV Club Noel Murray
A
Lioness and Her Love: The Beaches of Agnès | The House Next ... Dan Callahan from The House Next Door
Rendez-Vous
with French Cinema 2009: 35 Shots of Rum, The ... Vadim Rizov from The House Next Door
The
Beaches of Agnes - Film Journal International
Critic's Notebook [Robert Levin]
Confessions
of a Pop Fan [Jamie S. Rich]
Film-Forward.com
[Nora Lee Mandel]
Les
Plages D'Agnes | Reviews | Screen - ScreenDaily Dan Fainaru
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
The Beaches of Agnes Agnes Varda - Exclaim! Robert Bell
Edward
Copeland's Tangents: An unexpectedly cinematic life Edward Copeland
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Midway Through the Toronto Film Fest, and Things ... - Village Voice Scott Foundas
Daily Plastic - Festival Report [J. Robert Parks] also seen here: TIFF '08, Day 8
Jigsaw Lounge : Viennale '08 capsules Neil Young
The Beaches of Agnes | Chicago Reader JR Jones, capsule
Agnès Varda - AV Club film Noel Murray interview, June 30, 2009
Agnès
Varda, The Beaches Of Agnes | Filmmaker Magazine Nick Dawson interview, July 1, 2009
Agnès Varda: 'Memory is like sand in my hand' Richard Williams interviews Varda from The Guardian, September 24, 2009
Agnès
Varda talks about her autobiopic - Financial Times Tobias Grey interview, September 25, 2009
The Believer - Interview with Agnès Varda Sheila Heti interview from The Believer magazine, October 2009
The
Tide Turns for Agnès Varda - MovieMaker Magazine Jerome Henry Rudes interview, November 19,
2009
The Beaches
Of Agnes Movie Trailer, Reviews and More | TVGuide.com
Entertainment Weekly review [A] Owen Gleiberman
Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [4/6]
Time Out Chicago (Hank Sartin) review [3/6]
Film review: The Beaches of Agnès | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
The
Beaches of Agnes, review - Telegraph
Sukhdev Sandhu
The Boston Phoenix (Peter Keough) review
Philadelphia Weekly [Matt Prigge]
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Los Angeles Times [Betsy Sharkey]
The Beaches of Agnes Movie Review (2008) | Roger Ebert
The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review
Film - Agnès Varda - Living for Cinema, and Through It - NYTimes.com A.O. Scott from The New York Times, June 25, 2009
Agnès Varda
Sifts Memories in Cinematic Self-Portrait - NYTimes.com June 30, 2009
The Beaches of
Agnès - Wikipedia
VISAGES VILLAGES (Faces
Places)
France (89 mi) 2017
Cinema
Scope | Faces Places (Agnès Varda & JR, France) — Masters Jordan Cronk from Cinema Scope, September 3, 2017
The unexpected kinship between 33-year-old visual artist JR and octogenarian Left Bank legend Agnès Varda is infectiously explored in Faces Places, the latter’s first feature since her 2008 personal-poetic landmark Les plages d’Agnès. Inspired equally by JR’s youthful joie de vivre and the large-scale photographic portraits he produces in his makeshift mobile photo booth, Varda enlists her young counterpart for an impromptu cross-country road trip through France. Along the way, the duo befriends a variety of locals and assorted lovable characters, whom they proceed to enshrine in enormous cut-out images and then plaster them on the sides of nearby homes and buildings. With its travelogue approach and interest in the iconographic potential of everyday people and places, the film plays as a quasi-sequel to Varda’s 1980 L.A. street-art classic Mur murs, which lovingly reflected the city’s cultural diversity through an under-recognized art form.
In Faces Places, Varda and JR take an equally inquisitive approach to their provincial settings and the personalities they encounter during their travels. There’s the church-bell ringer, the cheesemakers, the truck drivers, and even JR’s own aging grandmother, whom the two visit in a touching moment of multi-generational accord. Without dipping into sentimentality, the film casually accumulates an emotional magnitude that fills to bursting by its final two episodes. In the first, the spouses of a group of male dock workers are the subject of inquiry; their plight as the invisible support to not only their husbands but an entire industry is put in sharp relief as the women stand at the base of their 50-plus-foot-tall likenesses, which now decorate the port’s metal shipping trailers. But it’s the duo’s final visit, to the home of Varda’s former friend and artistic compatriot Jean-Luc Godard—whom the pair pay tribute to earlier in the film when JR pushes Varda in a wheelchair through the halls of the Louvre in loving homage to Bande à part—that finally brings a tear to the eye of our 88-year-old tour guide. It would be a shame to spoil the circumstances that lead to that tearful moment, but suffice it to say it amounts to one of the most bittersweet, affecting sequences Varda has ever captured.
Cannes Brief: Varda & Denis - Film Comment Amy Taubin, May 22, 2017
Yes, this year there are more films at Cannes by directors who do not identify as male, most notably in the Competition, which in the past has been ludicrously blind in this area. Still, of the five or six compelling films I’ve seen in the first four days, two were by major French directors, Agnès Varda and Claire Denis, who happen to be women, and neither was in competition. Denis’s Un Beau soleil intérieur opened the Directors’ Fortnight and was immediately acquired by Sundance Selects, which may or may not be responsible for its inappropriate, box-office-killing English-language title, Let the Sunshine In. But I shouldn’t complain: at least it will have a theatrical release in the U.S. What I’ll refer to, for the moment, as the Denis movie, stars Juliette Binoche (in her most subtle performance in years) as a painter of a certain age, whose midlife crisis takes the form of a search for true love, so determined that it scares off all prospects in her social milieu, which is defined by commitment phobia, and not just in matters of sex and romance. I don’t want to weigh down a delicate comedy of manners by comparing it to the greatest French film of all time, Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, but there are parallels. Denis’s focus is narrower, but like Renoir, she depicts a society whose every action is a denial of the looming threat to its very existence. In the Renoir, the unacknowledged specter is World War II. In the Denis, well, take your pick, but the story I’ve been obsessively checking on my phone is about the irreversible collapse of the Antarctic ice shelf. (That’s what it is like at Cannes this year: see a movie, then check the apocalyptic WaPo and NY Times headlines on your phone. Repeat five times daily.)
Varda received a 10-minute standing ovation in the Grand Théâtre Lumière, where her collaboration with visual artist J.R., Visages Villages (Faces Places), showed out of competition. Varda said she thought it was the best slot for the film (so who am I to argue?), but in her magnificent, groundbreaking, nearly 60-year career, this is one of her most profoundly personal and exuberantly populist works. A tour de France that is both a romp and a meditation on photography, cinema, and mortality, with brief appearances by Mimi, the scene-stealing cat, it is at once poetry and the naked truth, shape-shifting before one’s eyes, and promising ever more pleasure with each viewing.
The Speed of Light in a Vacuum: Cannes 2017 - Film Comment Amy Taubin, July/August 2017
Any festival that programs one unassuming masterpiece; two vibrant, pulse-racing American indies by relatively unknown directors; one exquisite, wonderfully acted depiction of New York history by an indie veteran; two romantic comedies of manners by French veterans at the top of their game; one epic TV series; and one genre-busting Korean/American production that outraged both critics and guardians of the movie business status quo should not be dismissed out of hand. While the favorite films of my colleagues from around the world may not correspond to mine, most critics did find a few films to at least like very much at the 70th Cannes Film Festival.
Sadly, that’s just not
enough. When one watches an average of four movies a day for 12 days, and the
vast majority of them are mediocre at best, one might wonder why one is wasting
one’s time, especially since the length of the wait-in-line to get a decent
seat at said mediocrities can be over an hour, given the heightened level of
security—metal detectors, bag searches—for which we were all grateful. To
summarize, I saw eight films that gave me enormous pleasure and I would have
been satisfied with that, had I summoned up the energy to walk out after the
first 20 minutes of most of the others. But inertia prevailed.
The weather, however, was
perfect.
The unassuming
masterpiece mentioned above is Agnès Varda and JR’s Visages Villages
(Faces Places). An 88-year-old Varda teamed up with the much younger visual
artist JR in a tour of France, built around JR’s practice of making huge
blow-ups of his photographs of ordinary people and affixing them to the places
where his subjects live or work. Like Varda’s groundbreaking The Gleaners
and I, Visages Villages is both personal and populist, a celebration
of artisanal production (including cinema), worker solidarity, and the
photographic arts in the face of mortality. Varda and JR wielded cameras
themselves but they were also documented in their travels by multiple image and
sound recordists. Out of this often spontaneous jumble, Varda and her editor
Maxime Pozzi-Garcia created a work that is vivid, lyrical, and inspiringly
humanistic.
At the gala for Visages
Villages in the Lumière, Varda received a prolonged standing ovation,
making its out-of-competition slot all the more inexplicable. Cannes has been
under pressure to put more female-directed films in the Competition. This year
there were three out of 19, which, I guess, is a step forward. (And no, the
Oscars have not been any better.) The Competition jury, which was headed by
Pedro Almodóvar and included Maren Ade—robbed last year when her Toni
Erdmann, by far the festival favorite, failed to win anything at all—were
pretty vocal about wanting to support work by women. Had Visages Villages been
eligible, the jury might have been spared the embarrassment of giving the best
director prize to Sofia Coppola for her pretty but stultifying and purposeless The
Beguiled and a screenplay award to Lynne Ramsay for her ludicrous Taxi
Driver gloss, You Were Never Really Here. (To be fair, it was
rumored that Ramsay’s film was rushed to Cannes unfinished and will be somewhat
reedited.) Two years ago, Varda became the first woman to win an Honorary
Palme, but that shouldn’t have disqualified her from competing with a specific
film. In the entire history of Cannes, only one woman, Jane Campion, has ever
been awarded the Palme d’Or. In 1993, Campion won for The Piano,
although she shared the award with Chen Kaige, the director of Farewell My
Concubine.
The humanism, which
Varda’s work exemplifies, was in short supply at Cannes.
ScreenAnarchy.com
[Shelagh Rowan-Legg)]
The Grand Dame of French cinema, Agnès Varda's work has ranged from the New Wave in Cleo from 5 to 7, to feminism and friendship in One Sings, The Other Doesn't, to documenting the life of the poor in The Gleaners and I. Her recent work has had a more introspective feel, and she continues somewhat in this vein in her new film. A joyous and bittersuite look at the role of art in everyday life and work, as well as the role of the artist in society, Faces Places is a wonderful addition to Varda's canon, an expansion of her work in self-reflection and her love and attention to French rural and working life.
Varda and photographic graffiti artists JR, having only recently met, team up to take a new kind of art show on the road. Travelling in a van that's shaped like an old-model camera, and equiped with a photo booth and a gigantic photo printer, they visit various towns and spaces around France. They take pictures of locals and paste them in unusual places: the sides of buildings, huge rocks on the beach, shipping containers. In between these stops, they discuss their role as artists, and their life histories and their connection to their art forms.
These stops are not random, nor are the photos they display meant only to look pleasing. As usual with Varda, their is always a covert or overt political message. In one town, where houses that were built for miners are on the verge of being demolished, they reprint old photos of the miners and lay them across the buildings. In the shipyards of northeast coast, photos of the women, wives of dockworkers, are dispyaed several feet high across shipping containers (likely visible out at sea). IN a town of only a few hundred, with one of the last local farmers, Varda and JR post his image on his barn. Many of these places are those forgotten by politicians in power, where work is scarce and money lacking; but these are still citizens of France, and their images are part of the landscape.
But there are moments of whimsy as well, such as when the pair recreate the famous run across the Louvre in Bande à part (albeit with Varda being pushed in a wheelchair by JR), or when JR takes Varda to visit his beloved grandmother. There might be a 50-year age gap between these two, but their friendship and connection, both as people and artists, is clear and carries the film to a higher level. Much as in The Beaches of Agnès, Varda is looking back on her life as a woman and an artist; perhaps looking to JR as the future, of someone who can do some of the same things she did in art, of connecting the larger public to that which is disappearing in France, as well as the artist and art to those, as stated, too often neglected in favour of the urban crowds.
In one sad scene, they have made arrangements to visit Varda's old friend and fellow filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. But as befits his reputation, he doesn't show up, upsetting Varda with a cryptic yet hurrtful note, referencing her late husband Jacques Demy. This says as much about Godard and his feelings towards any potential audience (i.e. His disdain for them) as it does about Varda, and her love of people.
Indeed, it is not only the love between these two artists that shows, but their love of people, and how they want their art about and for the people. This does not mean dumbing it down, or making of fun of those they encounter. It's also about finding art in the everyday, and placing art in the everday; finding it in the cowfields, the shipping yards, the quiet beaches, and the abandoned towns. Faces Places stands as much as a tribute to Varda's philosophy of work and art as it does to the people and stories she has shared: smart, kind, political, magical, and full of joy with a hint of sadness.
Visages
Villages review: Agnès Varda and JR big up the country ... - BFI Isabel Stevens from Sight and Sound, May 20, 2017
During the Women in Motion talks at Cannes this year, Isabelle Huppert had this to say about female directors (of whom, it must be said, she has worked with quite a few): “Male directors go on the highway. Women have to take the side roads. But they are freer on the side.”
One female director who has always fiercely cruised the backroads of the film industry, gobbling up every inch of freedom to fuel her furiously independent and idiosyncratic cinema, is Agnès Varda. As Huppert was divulging her experiences and desires (Kelly Reichardt, take note: she wants to work with you!), further along the Croissette Varda’s first new film in nine years, Visages Villages, was unspooling.
Until her honorary Palme d’Or in 2015, you always had the feeling that Varda had been somewhat overlooked by Cannes (her husband and filmmaker Jacques Demy collected the Palme d’Or in 1964). Only a handful of her films (Cléo de 5 à 7, Mur murs, The Beaches of Agnès) have been showcased here and even one of her greatest, The Gleaners and I, was relegated to an ‘out of competition’ screening (though this speaks equally of Cannes’ documentary blindspot). Indeed, Visages Villages, her first new film in nine years, this year receives the same treatment. Throughout her long career, Varda has received much greater recognition at other festivals – it was at Venice where she won the Golden Lion for Vagabond in 1985. (And perhaps, as cinema’s premier cat lover, she cherished that Lion as much as the belated golden frond from Cannes.)
If, like I, you had any worries that by collaborating with an artist like JR (whose large-scale photographic murals rather pale in comparison to Varda’s filmic folk art) Visages Villages would dilute Varda’s spirit, fear not: from the moment she appears with a cat perched on her shoulder in the opening credits she steals the show. JR has some cheeky chutzpah about him, and their bickering and banter bring a nice chemistry to the film, but it’s Varda who wants their documentary collaboration to have no plan: “Chance has always been my best assistant.”
And it’s she who decides that their road trip in JR’s camera-van (a photo booth that prints out large-scale portraits of its subjects) will encompass the French countryside and its villages rather than cities. Together they collaborate taking photographs of the people they find, from goat farmers to factory workers, enlarging them and displaying these huge black and white tributes on the walls of their subject’s homes and workplaces. Varda’s aim: “To meet new faces so I don’t fall down the holes in my memory.”
Outsiders and women have always been at the heart of Varda’s cinema and that holds here: when she and JR visit the grave of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, Varda dedicates equal attention to fellow shutterbug Martine Francke, whose tombstone stands next to her husband’s. Later it is Varda’s idea to usher the wives of the Le Havre dockworkers into the all-male space of the port, emblazoning their giant figures on the sides of shipping containers. “Why do you say you stand behind your husband?” she queries one of the wives when they are discussing recent strikes at the dock. “Don’t you mean beside?”
Inevitably, the film is a memory trip for the 88-year-old: she revisits and remembers places and people she has photographed, and in some of the most lovely scenes recalls films and filmmakers (Godard looms large) from her past. If some of the art occasionally falls on the hokey side, the film’s piece de resistance is the pair re-enacting the Bande á part Louvre scene with Varda flying through the museum in a wheelchair.
That the tone of the film is mostly breezy and charming leaves you quite unprepared for the sharp, brutal jab of its ending – a surprise that I won’t ruin here. The only nagging sense of sadness that permeates their capers throughout is the spectre of Varda’s increasing mortality as she struggles to mount stairs or to see clearly. Her indefatigable spirit invariably triumphs, though. “I think about it a lot,” she replies when JR asks her if she is scared of death. “I’m looking forward to it.” Watching the film, you really hope it won’t be her last.
The Long
Reigning Queen of French Cinema - Film School Rejects Angela Morrison, August 7, 2017
Still Agnès David Bordwell takes a look at the recent
book, Agnès Varda (208 pages), by Kelley
Conway, from Observations on Film Art,
November 23, 2015
Observations on Film Art: Kelley Conway May 27, 2017
Cannes
Review: 'Visages, Villages' | Another Gaze
Daniella Shreir, May 30, 2017
AGNES VARDA “FACES PLACES”
2017 | THE VOICE OF A WOMAN
March 1, 2017
Faces
Places Review: Agnès Varda's Wonderful New Film May Be Her ... David Ehrlich from indieWIRE
Agnès
Varda's Whimsical 'Faces Places' Is Endlessly Charming ... Bradley Warren from The Playlist
Cannes
Film Festival Review: Agnès Varda and JR's 'Visages, villages ... Benedict Seal from Vague Visages
'Faces
Places (Visages Villages)': Cannes Review | Reviews | Screen Allan Hunter from Screendaily
Little White Lies: David Jenkins
Film-Forward.com
[Kent Turner]
Review
of Agnès Varda's Visages Villages – agnès films Moira Sullivan
Notes and Observations: Geoff Andrew Festival wrap-up
Filmmaker: Blake Williams Festival wrap-up
The Brooklyn Rail: James Lattimer Festival wrap-up
'Visages
Villages' ('Faces Places') Review | Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy
Cannes:
Agnes Varda's 'Faces Places' Takes Golden Eye ... Rhonda Richford from The Hollywood Reporter
'Visages
Villages' Review from Cannes: Another Gem from Agnès ... Owen Gleiberman from Variety
Agnes
Varda, Street-Artist JR on Cannes Documentary 'Visages - Variety Leo Barraclough
Visages,
Villages review – Agnès Varda, people person, creates a self ... Jordan Hoffman from The Guardian
The New York Times: Manohla Dargis May 24, 2017
Vatican film list Steven D. Greydanus from Decent Films Guide
for
the 100th Anniversary of Cinema Pontifical Council for Social Communications
1995
Andrei Rublev * Andrei Tarkowsky (1969,
The
Mission * Roland Joffé
(1986,
La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc) * Carl T. Dreyer
(1928,
La vie et la
passion de Jésus Christ (Life
and Passion of Christ) * Ferdinand Zecca and Lucien Nonguet (1905,
Identified
on the
Francesco, giullare di Dio (The Flowers of St. Francis / Francis, God’s Jester) * Roberto
Rossellini (1950,
Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Matthew) * Pier Paolo
Pasolini (1964, France/Italy)
Thérèse * Alain Cavalier (1986,
Ordet (The Word)
* Carl T. Dreyer
(1955,
Offret — Sacrificatio (The Sacrifice) * Andrei Tarkowsky
(1986, Sweden/UK/France)
Francesco * Liliana Cavani (1989, Italy/Germany)
Ben-Hur [A Tale of the Christ] * William Wyler
(1959,
Babettes gæstebud (Babette’s Feast) * Gabriel Axel
(1987,
Nazarín * Luis Buñuel (1958,
Monsieur Vincent * Maurice Cloche
(1947,
A Man for All
Seasons * Fred Zinnemann
(1966,
Gandhi * Richard Attenborough (1982, UK/USA/India)
Intolerance * D. W.
Dekalog (The Decalogue)
* Krzysztof
Kieslowski (1987,
Au Revoir, Les Enfants (Goodbye, Children) * Louis Malle
(1987,
Dersu Uzala * Akira Kurosawa (1974, Japan)
L’albero degli zoccoli (The Tree of the Wooden Clogs) * Ermanno Olmi
(1978, Italy/France)
Roma, città aperta (Open
City) *
Roberto Rossellini (1946,
Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries) * Ingmar Bergman
(1957,
Det sjunde inseglet (The
Seventh Seal) * Ingmar Bergman (1957,
Chariots of Fire * Hugh Hudson
(1981,
Ladri di biciclette (The
Bicycle Thief) * Vittorio de Sica (1948,
It’s a Wonderful Life * Frank Capra
(1946,
Schindler’s List * Steven Spielberg
(1993,
On the Waterfront * Elia Kazan (1954,
Biruma No Tategoto (The Burmese Harp) * Kon Ichikawa
(1956, Japan)
2001: A Space Odyssey *
La Strada * Federico Fellini (1954,
Citizen Kane * Orson Welles (1941,
Metropolis * Fritz Lang (1927,
Modern Times * Charlie Chaplin (1936,
Napoléon * Abel Gance (1927,
8½ *
Federico Fellini (1963,
La grande illusion (Grand Illusion) * Jean Renoir
(1937,
Nosferatu * F. W. Murnau
(1922,
Stagecoach * John Ford (1939,
Il Gattopardo (The Leopard)
* Luchino
Visconti (1963, Italy/France)
The Wizard of Oz * Victor Fleming (1939,
The Lavender Hill Mob * Charles Crichton
(1951,
Little Women * George Cukor
(1933,
A film with the overt
melodrama of a Russian novel, but thrown together with a rather flimsy and
preposterous Hollwood exaggeration, featuring the always overacting Lída
Baarová as Hana, “the virgin,” who is kicked out of her own mother’s home after
discovering her drunken husband’s lecherous hands all over her. She is chosen from an unemployment agency by
her looks to work as a counter girl at a local deli, but even after a mishap in
the kitchen breaking some dishes, she is promoted by the owner, which arouses
suspicion among staff, and she is instantly recognized as an appealing new face
by the local customers. As if given
magical charms, all the men are lured by her presence, or her innocent
“virginity,” and one elderly customer brazenly offers her gifts. The other counter girls set her straight,
schooling her on the manipulative behavior of men, offering gifts first, but
demanding sexual favors later. But it’s
another young man who catches her eye, a struggling composer who works himself
into the wee hours of the night, leaving him in ill health. For some bizarre, unexplained reason, she
asks him to take her to a club where she can observe the absolute lowest class
of woman, where women commonly fleece the men for money without having to put
out, using drunkenness to their advantage.
Hana’s response to witnessing open sexuality drives her to near
psychosis, swirling into a Freudian nightmare that resembles Hitchcock’s
SPELLBOUND (1945), with an extreme close up of her eyes along with startling
percussion notes, but she quickly recovers, albeit hesitating to show much
affection other than a girlish goodnight kiss.
When Hana discovers
the guy she likes needs treatment in a TB sanitarium, which is extremely
expensive, she vows to raise the dough, enduring the humiliation of the elderly
customer’s advances before her psychosis sets in again, where she violently lashes
out at the man, perhaps leaving him paralyzed by the blow. Later she discovers her guy’s treatment is
already paid for by her boss as a generous loan, who then proposes marriage,
offering her a large sum of money. She
actually goes through with the sham marriage, hoping the money would cure
everything, but of course, it doesn’t solve anything except to lure her ever
deeper into the filth and mud of her own immoral actions. The film is overly grim and a bit too over
the top with the girl’s naiveté, but does have an interesting take on post
traumatic stress, revealing how the subconscious shame from an earlier rape
attack affects her behavior later in life, even without her awareness or
knowledge, and can end up plaguing her life forever.
CZECH MODERNISM IN FILM: The 1920'S to the
1940's Charles
Coleman, Facets Film Programmer
A shimmering
tragedy in the
Village Voice J.
Hoberman
That Czech filmmakers were making montage-driven melodramas
as late as 1937 is evidenced by the glossier but not dissimilar Virginity
(December 9). Shot in
The Reeler Peter Hames
Director bio Susan Doll
Guy Lodge announces FIPRESCI winners at Cannes from In Contention, May 22, 2010
Variety (Leslie Felperin) review
This 1979 Cuban film explores the conflict between a husband's machismo and his wife's growing feminism. He's a TV repairman, she works in a textile factory, and their disputes are unexceptional: he refuses to help with the housework and thinks his affair (with a young woman who wants her TV fixed immediately) should be judged by a different standard than hers. Director Pastor Vega uses bland long takes to develop an almost theatrical space, providing little of cinematic interest, though his wife, Daisy Granados, supplies just the right amount of anger as Teresa.
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
Teresa (Daisy Granados) is a textile worker in
Sexual equality was becoming a major issue in
This all seems rather programmatic, especially looking back on it today. And Vega's technique is anything but daring. (It's interesting to see how the typical 1970s film style - right down to the cheesy music and use of freeze-frame - extended even into Castro's Cuba.) But the film succeeds more often than not, due to the matter-of-fact naturalism of the performances, and the attention to little details of everyday life in a struggling, working class family. Granados is fine in the title role - the scenes of conflict between Teresa and her husband are compelling and emotionally honest.
The conflict ends up being more about sex and the double standard concerning infidelity (shades of The Divorcée, except much more realistic) as it is about equality and independence. And that's par for the course in 1979, I guess, or even today. Portrait of Teresa is, in fact, a little flat, like a TV message movie. The difference is that it doesn't go quite where you expect it to - things aren't so easy in life as they usually appear in films, and this is one movie that recognizes that.
Portrait Of Teresa Double
day, double standards, by B. Ruby Rich from
Jump Cuts
Linda Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies)
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
Veiel, Andres
IF NOT US, WHO (Wer wenn nicht wir) B 83
Why is it so hard
for films to get the 60’s right? Very
few capture the right tone of the era, such as Eustache’s THE MOTHER AND THE
WHORE (1973) or Coppola’s APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), both of which blend a surreal
surge of initial optimism with a fatalistic, Kafkaesque emptiness, exposing a
void of leadership or hope, where those responsible for leading social
movements were out of the picture by the end of the decade, assassinated,
arrested, or dead, yet the Vietnam War was still raging out of control, and no
one apparently could stop it, despite the dead bodies and disgust it brought to
so many Americans, whose mistrust of their government would only grow larger
with Watergate and Nixon’s resignation.
Andres Veiel started with the idea of making a documentary about the
German (RAF) Red Army Faction, including the radical Baader-Meinhof offshoot
which moved from taking political action to planting bombs and explosives, but
he encountered difficulty with one of the central characters, Gudrun Ensslin’s family, where no one would speak about her on camera,
probably for good reason. This film is a
good example, as Weiel accentuates the irrational side of Gudrun and the
movement, never really offering a balanced or comprehensive view of the
politics that was driving the student movements of Europe and America, and in
particular Germany. As recent films like
Uli Edel’s THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX (2008) and Olivier Assayas’s mammoth
5-hour made-for-TV exposé of CARLOS (2010) both explored the political
dynamics, Veiel decided to take a more personal approach. Initially this idea succeeds beautifully, as
his picture of Bernward Vesper (August Diehl), the intellectually curious son
of Nazi novelist Will Vesper (Thomas Thieme), is chilling in its portrayal of
German manners on display twenty years after the war was over, where nostalgic
Nazi sentiment still prevailed within the war generation.
Veiel’s screenplay
is adapted from Gerd Koenen’s book, Vesper, Ensslin, Baader: Prehistory of
German Terrorism, where at
Tübingen University in the 1960’s Bernward takes an interest in literature,
deciding to form a small publishing house that would usher in a new era of
intellectual thought, where he meets fellow student Gudrun Ensslin (Lena Lauzemis), also interested in the expression of radical ideas,
quickly becoming lovers, but not the most stable of couples as both venture
into sexual affairs with others, which has a crippling effect on each partner,
as both attempt suicide at different points preceding their full commitment to
political action. Gudrun is more
impulsive and seems driven by whatever feels good at the moment, not willing to
invest the time or energy to build alliances, believing a political elite is a
necessary vanguard to lead the masses, while Bernward is a more deliberate
planner, as he’s really a literature specialist who has faith in the written
word, initially the more motivated and driven between the two. Over time, Gudrun’s politics grew more radical, focusing on the massive bombings and
brutal atrocities used by the United States in the Vietnam prison camps,
claiming the previous German generation looked aside when the Nazi’s came to
power and acquiesced to the atrocities of the death camps, but this modern era
had to do all they could to stop these unjust acts, eventually cutting herself
off from her family and advocating violent acts of terrorism, as German society
remained impassive and complacent in the face of the injustices of the
continuing war.
The Flickering Wall [Jorge Mourinha]
Generally misunderstood
upon its premiere at the 2011 Berlinale, documentary filmmaker Andres Veiel's
second feature suggests a roundabout way to look at the troubled history of
post-World War II Germany and the inevitable meddling of politics and
personal life, as it traces the arc of a 1960s love story in the university
town of
Whether that channeling
was done correctly or not is besides Mr. Veiel's point, since he is aiming at a
portrait of a generation stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea, aware
that they could not live their lives in the heart of Europe without accepting
the role of history and politics; coming as it does from a documentary
director, If Not Us, Who? is not so much about judgement as it is about
understanding and contextualising the
If Not Us, Who | Review | Screen - Screen International Jonathan Romney
The making of 1960s
German radicals is explored - one more time - in If Not Us, Who, (Wer
wenn nicht wir) a first fiction feature from documentarist Andres Veiel,
who delved into similar terrain with his 2001 study Black Box BRD. A
portrait of Baader-Meinhof militant Gudrun Ensslin and her lover Bernward
Vesper, the film covers territory already familiar from the broader period
panorama of Uli Edel’s The Baader Meinhof Complex, which may deter
some markets.
On the other hand, that film’s international profile, along with that of Olivier Assayas’s Carlos, has rekindled interest in radical politics of the 1960s and ’70s, and that may do Veiel’s film some good – along with the fact that it’s considerably better than Edel’s glamour-laden, mythifying version of events. What could damage the film’s international chances is the fact that it contains so many specifically German political and literary references.
But where it loses out on sales, this consistently intriguing, if
occasionally pedestrian feature, will stir interest on the festival circuit as
well as garnering much media coverage in
Where The Baader-Meinhof Complex was a group portrait, this film’s concentration on two key figures – one notorious, the other less so – allows for greater psychological depth, and more time studying the gradual emergence of the couple’s radicalism and its attendant contradictions. The film starts in 1949, with a traumatic moment in the childhood of Bernward Vesper (Diehl), the son of a notorious Nazi author (Thieme) who tells the boys that cats are “the animal kingdom’s Jews.”
In Tübingen in 1961, Bernward is a passionate student of literature, and a staunch defender of his father – and other now-forgotten German authors – who is so keen to rehabilitate Vesper Sr’s reputation that he starts his own press to rehabilitate him. He enlists as a helper Gudrun Ensslin (Lauzemis), and the pair become lovers – initially as an on-off triad with another girl. As the film skips through the 1960s, world events – notably the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam and the advent of Black Power – radicalises both partners, although Bernward’s commitment to his father’s memory continues to be a source of trauma.
As Gudrun becomes ever more politically involved, she becomes the lover of a charismatic advocate of violent action, Andres Baader (Fehling), and the rest is history. Gudrun leaves Bernward and their baby son, in favour of the domineering and sometimes abusive Baader, but Bernward still passionately defends her as a witness in court – though still has to witness his partner kissing Baader in the dock.
Despite the intimate tenor of this story of amour fou, the film is far more considered than the young-militants-in-love story that it could easily have been. The leads are incarnated in persuasively contradictory detail, with Diehl commandingly evoking Bernward’s tormented psyche and eventual descent into despair.
But it is to Lauzemis that the film really belongs, with her unsettling portrayal of Ensslin as a sexually and politically passionate woman, as well as a habitual self-harmer who is as traumatized as Bernward by the sins of their parents’ generation. As Baader, Fehling offers an unashamedly rebarbative portrait of the militant as macho (and unexpectedly, as an aficionado of drag cabaret).
The film is less confident in providing its overview of the political turmoil of the 1960s, opting for a hackneyed series of newsreel interludes that set key events to pop hits of the period (plus a touch of Billie Holiday). The film is provocative – and will no doubt cause controversy in its home territory – in its depiction of political radicalism as akin to, or informed by, personal psychosis.
But Veiel’s script – informed by Gerd Koenen’s book Vesper, Ensslin, Baader: Prehistory of German Terrorism – displays impressive cogency in examining the relations between words, beliefs and action in a cultural context that is as influenced by literary as by political allegiances. The art direction is never excessively hung up on the potentially camp aspects of period detail, and Judith Kaufmann’s solid, unglamorous photography suits the overall seriousness of a film that is consistently involving, if occasionally studious in tone.
BERLINALE ’11 wrap-up A.J. Goldmann
Velázquez,
Gabriel
ICEBERG B 88
This is a uniquely stylized experimental film that simply omits a
narrative structure and instead defers to an atmospheric mood piece that
attempts to get under the surface of teenage adolescence where the viewer often
feels like they are assembling a jigsaw puzzle, finding and fitting together
the missing pieces. While there’s a
potential to be much more, this may ultimately be too spare and emotionally
oblique for most viewers, little more than a dizzying array of images, yet the
empty spaces in between are especially intriguing. Beautifully shot by David Azcano in the
director’s hometown of Salamanca, Spain, music by Pablo Crespo, much of the
film is wordless and only randomly intersects, telling the story of four young
teenagers, all non-professionals, including 13-year old Mauri (Jesús Nieto), a
moody kid seemingly left alone, where his bizarre behavior is borderline
disturbing, considering he has free access to a stash of weapons, seen from
time to time toying with a large knife or a rifle, also chasing after a German
Shepherd dog that may have swallowed something valuable. We infer he is the surviving victim of an
opening car crash, the cause of which is never shown or explained, only heard,
losing his parents when the car swerved off the highway and ended up in the
nearby Tormes River, which is then featured prominently throughout the film,
like a central character weaving in and out of the various stories. Rummaging through a pile of discarded
belongings scattered along the riverbank, he finds his father’s ring, wearing
it around his neck as a keepsake.
Isolated and alone, we rarely see this kid ever speak to anyone, but he
breaks into the local swimming pool only to lose his ring at the bottom of the
pool, chased out of the area by noises before he could retrieve it. Instead he observes two troubling older
teenage boys, Jota (Víctor García) and Simón (Juanma Sevillano), both
incendiary experts that love blowing things up who appear to be living in an
abandoned boathouse, whose pastime includes needlessly gouging fish at a nearby
hatchery. They are typical rebellious
hoodlums seen in any town, but in this case also parentless kids, so they spend
their time committing petty crimes just for the thrill and satisfaction. They find the ring at the bottom of the pool
and abscond with the merchandise.
Perhaps the most poignant section revolves around a young 12-year old
girl, Rebecca (Carolina Morocho), initially seen playing with a group of other
girls all wearing the pink coats and black pants of a Catholic girl’s school
uniform. Apparently abandoned by her
parents as well, the film interestingly never shows any adults in the picture,
so the viewer remains continually subject to the mindset of any one of the
teenagers, often feeling haphazardly constructed, moving quickly from each
character’s point of view as we watch moments of their lives unfold. At one point Rebecca breaks out in
fashionable attire with a girlfriend applying makeup, where three girls romp up
the steep steps into the city nightlife area, with one returning back down the
steps accompanied by a boy, where in a quick cut afterwards it appears she’s
had a sexual incident, seen alone by the riverside cleaning blood off her
thighs, certainly a sad expression for her own carelessness. Jota and Simón are seen arriving by
motorcycle at gunpoint with Mauri, though they easily overpower him. When asked for his ring back, they throw it
in the middle of the river, where converging stories eventually meet. Rebecca, now dressed as a white angel with
wings, the picture of innocence or innocence lost, takes a pregnancy test where
the results fall into the river floating away at the same time Mauri wades in
searching for the ring. Ironically it’s
one of the older boys seen later in the film meeting with a pregnant
girlfriend. While there’s no definitive
outcome to any of the narratives, the film uses a minimalist kaleidoscope of
impressionistic images to reconstruct a scathingly empty interior landscape of
broken lives drifting aimlessly, where callousness, blighted emotions, sexual
curiosity, and the disturbing behavior of heartlessly unaffected Catholic boys
suggest a moral vacuum, creating a mixed portrait of loneliness and adolescent
indifference, where solitary souls appear like ghosts searching to find a way
in this soulless moral landscape.
Iceberg |
Filmlinc.com | Film Society of Lincoln Center
Mauri searches for a German Shepherd that swallowed a ring
belonging to his late parents; waking one morning with blood on her thigh,
Rebecca thinks she might be pregnant; Simon and Jota live out a survivalist
fantasy, hiding in a small shack and catching fish to survive. Beautifully shot
in and around
The 16th
Annual European Union Film Festival Welcomes: The ... Marty Ruben from the
“Challenging but extremely rewarding...evoking with memorable power and compassion the enormous trauma that hides beneath the surface of its young protagonists’ lives.” —Jonathan Holland, Variety
The title refers to the film’s wintry setting and, metaphorically, to the
emotional depths that lie hidden beneath the visible surface of its teenage
characters. Three plotlines intersect along the lonely banks of the Tormes
river in
Iceberg
< Films < SIFF Cinema < Seattle International Film Festival also seen here: This
Weekend at MBC: The FESTIVAL of NEW SPANISH CINEMA!
"Adolescence is like a second birth. In the first a
child is born, in the second, a man or a woman. And it's always painful."
—Jean Jacques Rousseau
The most significant part of an iceberg is unseen. Icebergs
are the world of adolescence, of which only a tip appears, a small part of the
vast universe that lies behind them. Iceberg is three interwoven stories
of “teenage silence” in a winter river as it flows by a small city. Shot in
Gabriel
Velázquez's Iceberg docks in Rotterdam - Cineuropa Boyd van Hoeij
Six years after the Dutch port city showed his Sud Express [trailer, film focus], Spanish director Gabriel Velázquez returned to the International Film Festival Rotterdam(IFFR) for his latest feature, Iceberg.
The film, shot in the
13-year-old Mauri (Jesús Nieto) feels lost after his father has died in a violent car accident that is shown in just a couple of enigmatic shots in the film’s wordless opening. The accident has left the boy with a giant scar on the back of his head.
Rebecca (Carolina Morocho), who’s a year younger than Mauri, tries to survive during her first year in a Catholic boarding school for girls, which comes with its own kind of pressures.
Two older adolescent boys, Jota (Víctor García) and Simón (Juanma Sevillano), hang out in a small boathouse near the river and occasionally venture into a fish farm to steal live salmon for dinner.
The stories of the four protagonists occasionally intersect but even in these moments, the film often prefers meaningful glances and non-verbal cues to actual dialogue. That said, the meaning of the initially perhaps surprising title quickly becomes clear: all four have hidden depths underneath the surface. The winter setting is a further explanation of the title.
The film was written by Velázquez and Blanco Torres and impressively leaves any kind of adult presence off-screen, letting the youngsters face the enormity of adulthood and the world on their own.
ÄRTICO (
Having
a kid at 16 ruined my life.
—Simón (Juanlu
Sevillano)
The final installment of Gabriel Velázquez’s trilogy about
disaffected youth, following AMATEURS (2008) and Iceberg
(2011), using a boldly experimental style where the story is told almost
exclusively through striking imagery, offscreen action, and an occasional
Flamenco style rhythm established naturally from the beating of one man’s hands
on a table. This mix of old world ritual
and modern life intersect onscreen, suggesting it’s extremely hard for young
people to find their place in today’s society.
While his previous film was shot in three weeks, this was shot in two,
largely due to budget restraints, using only two cameras, shot with meticulous
precision in mostly long static shots by cinematographer David Azcano. The trilogy is all shot around the director’s
hometown of
Simón and Jota are both characters that appear in Iceberg as
well, where they play a couple of incendiary experts. In a fascinating visual sequence, we see a
musical chairs sequence with birds fighting with each other for their own perch
to stand on in a wall of birds, followed by the sound of gunshots as the birds
flurry into the air where Simón and Jota proudly round up their catch of the
day, where we later see them plucked and eaten for dinner. Jota and Debi find an abandoned shed in the
country not far from town and make it their own home, though we hear nothing
but nonstop arguments emanating from the walls, where she continually threatens
to kill the child growing inside her.
The mood of the film could be described as instantaneous moments of rage
followed by the stillness of the natural world around them. Set in the 1980’s, shot more as a documentary
than a work of fiction, the near wordless style has a haunting effect, if only
due to the novelty of presenting a film in this way, where there is no
narrative to speak of, but only randomly occurring incidents that appear
onscreen, where the viewer may only see the lead-up to an incident, which then
occurs offscreen along with the sound describing what’s happening. It’s an unorthodox and unfamiliar experience,
but one that sends something of a shock to the senses, which are elevated by
the stark reality of the images, but also a fascinating sound design that
effectively incorporates the eloquence of a musical score by Pablo Crespo and
Eusebio Mayalde. The film does have a
Bressonian austerity, viewed as a formal exercise using nonprofessional actors,
but there’s more of a sinister presence lurking behind every shot, where the
violence can be startlingly brutal, reflecting how deeply rooted the
hopelessness is built into the fabric of society, where women are continually
mistreated and spend hours at home while the men are out drinking and carousing,
an example of how the sexism of the older generation is handed down with a
similar emphasis on male abuse and domination.
For whatever reasons, largely based on personal dissatisfaction, where
drugs, violence and shattered dreams intersect, both Simón and Jota are victims
of their own poor decisions, setting in motion a series of disasters from which
there is no escape. Using a pastoral
backdrop of rural fields, forests and rivers, the characters, many of whom are
introduced by staring coldly straight into the camera, couldn’t be more
alienated from the natural world around them.
Uneducated and unemployed, continually seen riding a scooter aimlessly
around the countryside, these kids lead sad and abandoned lives, where the lack
of dialogue adds to their disconnectedness, offering a vision of a confusing
and loveless world. Simón wanders alone
into a factory, seen from a distant camera, moving with a head of steam,
climbing up the steep side stairs into a side door, where a series of gunshots
are heard before we see him being hauled away.
It’s a surprising moment that takes the audience by surprise, as it’s a
quick burst of action happening offscreen.
This is followed by a long, extended sequence
of Debi wandering away from home with her suitcase, seen in real time as she
makes her way through green verdant fields into a stretch of trees down by the
river, which is always prominently featured in films by this director, usually
in scenes with a sense of dramatic urgency.
In what is perhaps the most extraordinary sequence in the film, an
impassive long still shot reveals an excruciating moment only through sound,
while at the same time Jota arrives in the house to find her missing, running
in the same path taken by Debi, where their parallel worlds couldn’t be on more
opposite trains of thought. The film is
expressed entirely through rhythm and atmospheric mood, offering breathtaking
visuals that are themselves an observing commentary on the bleakness of the
human condition, where the barren interior worlds couldn’t be a more hostile
environment to bring new life into this world, where these characters are
doomed before they ever have a chance to live.
The Salamanca Gabri Velázquez is one of the few Spanish voices in
the Berlinale (quite common in
Ärtico
: cold existences - Cineuropa David
González
Most probably, you think that the natural atmosphere of tales on
youth lost because of violence, drugs and fallen dreams needs to be shown
through dark alleyways where destinies falter never to re-emerge.
These cold lives filmed by Velázquez are of Simón (Juanlu Sevillano) and
Jota (Víctor García), two youngsters trapped in between adolescence, maturity
and delinquency, who are looking to find their own space in rural
Ärtico chooses to be a portrait presenting characters in a voluntary way. Each one of them looks into the camera for a few seconds, with their name and a sentence that accompanies them (like “I was behind bars and not even my mother came to visit”). Because of this, the film is as naturalist and radical as it is artificial: a look towards the camera in the middle of a crying scene (or something similar) is too destabilizing. The game of Ärtico is also to reverberate like the rhythmic percussions of a gunshot originating from the virtuous hands of a peasant. This contributes towards the film overcoming both natural and artificial elements and mounting into a tense crescendo crucial to the film’s screenplay.
Produced by Escorado
Producción and sold abroad by Agencia
Freak, Ärtico fires shots point-blank, in the middle of
Ärtico
– Gabriel Velázquez | El Destilador Cultural Jose Luis Muñoz
That all stories have been told it is quite true.
That, fortunately, there are still many ways to count,
too. The
The director is allowed in those four personal
traits and characters with which Carlos Saura could have filmed a remake
of Hurry, hurry, a final full of hope: the output of the children at the
school yard. And amid the Tormes, Salamanca
Cathedral by the single camera movement, a circular traveling, and a soundtrack
made from gypsy moans and frenzied pace of the horse dealer hands over wood is
allowed a table that seals the deal. Hunger and
cold
Críticas
de ärtico (2014) - FilmAffinity
Movie
Review: ärtico (2014) If Anything Even More Potently ... Movie Disclosure
Velez,
Pacho and Stephanie Spray
MANAKAMANA B 85
Along with SWEETGRASS (2009), LEVIATHAN (2012), and The
Iron Ministry (2104), this is another film to come out of the Sensory Ethnography Lab :: Harvard
University (SEL), a unique collaboration between the Department of
Anthropology and the Department of Visual & Environmental Studies programs
established in 2006, which is distinct from other graduate visual anthropology
programs in the United States in that it promotes experimentation with
culturally inflected, nonfiction film.
The Lab is comprised of graduate students mostly making films that are
not for exhibition, but are seen only among themselves, but a surprising number
of acclaimed documentaries have come out of the Lab. The subjects can be traced back to the works of
Robert J. Flaherty, considered the forefather of
ethnographic film, the maker of the first feature
length documentary film, NANOOK OF THE NORTH (1922), which was an attempt to
realistically portray Inuit people in northern Canada, though it required quite
a bit of staging before the camera. The
same could be said for these films, which lend themselves to stark realism, shot
in real time, using raw footage, unedited and unadorned, using no explanatory
talking heads, where the films aren’t meant to explain what we’re seeing, but
to simply take the viewer into a mysterious world where they’ve likely never
been and allow them to fully experience what it’s like. To this end, like Flaherty, they succeed
brilliantly, as they are a time capsule documentation of an existing reality in
some faraway small corner of the globe.
This notion of capturing reality has haunted filmmakers from the
beginning, where according to French film critic, film theorist, and longtime
editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, André
Bazin, each era looks for its own realism, its own technique and aesthetic
which can best capture it, where there may be numerous realisms, but there is
also past realities, present realities and future realities — all of which
cinema creates or mediates and explores continuously, while another Cahiers editor, Jean-Louis Comolli, offers his own views:
The basic deception of direct
cinema is really its claim to transcribe truly the truth of life, to begin the
position of witness in relation to that truth so that the film simply records
objects and events mechanically. In
reality the very fact of filming is of course already a productive intervention
which modifies and transforms the material recorded. From the moment the camera intervenes a form
of manipulation begins.
While these documentary films offer the appearance of truth,
the ultimate question is always finding the best way to achieve it. Once more, Bazin claims in his book What is Cinema? - Volume 2 - Page 26 - Google
Books Result that realism in art can only be achieved in one way —
through artifice — that every form of aesthetic must necessarily choose between
what is worth preserving and what should be discarded, and what should not even
be considered. MANAKAMANA is set in
Chitwan, Nepal, where the filmmakers set up a Super 16mm camera in a fixed
position inside a gondola lift cable car that takes passengers up to and
from the Manakamana
Temple, with the filmmakers themselves riding in the same cars recording the
various passages in real time, relying upon a strict formal precision of a
series of unbroken shots, in this case 11 shots, each about 10-minutes in
length, each trip containing a different group of passengers. The trips alternate between ascents and
descents, with blackout periods where the car goes through a turnaround at each
of the terminal points, allowing for an undetected editing process, creating
the illusion that the whole film was done in a single take. Curiously, in a discussion with the
filmmakers afterwards, we learn that there were 35 shots in all, that the
original cut was 3 and a half to 4 hours, eventually edited down to 11
shots. People in the film were not
chosen at random, as one might presume, but were selected ahead of time and
rehearsed by the directors and their team so they’d feel comfortable in front
of a large and cumbersome 16 mm camera staring at them for the duration. So exactly like Flaherty, there was a certain
amount of staging incorporated into the realist aesthetic, though the extreme
minimalistic approach makes it appear completely naturalistic. As the film does not provide any narration,
there is no history provided of how the cable system was installed, as
previously the only way to reach the 17th century Manakamana temple,
the sacred place of the Hindu Goddess Bhagwati (who has the ability to grant
pilgrim’s wishes),
What sustains our interest is the unique characteristics of each passenger, most of whom are from the Nepal region, offering a cross-section of people who would come to visit the temple, some of whom sit in complete silence, their attention drifting off into the mountainside below, while others may hold continuous conversations throughout, many dressed in hats and colorful attire, some bringing a variety of objects with them, including musical instruments or animals. The film opens in complete darkness, where only the mechanical sounds, mixed with the noise of people stirring about, can be heard, as movement can be detected by signs of light until there’s an abrupt lift into the sky, offering a rare vantage point of the lush green foliage below, where there’s a sign of dirt roads and smaller trails carved out in the mountainsides, clusters of houses clinging to hillsides, and terraced farming on the foothills of the Himalayas. The sky is everpresent, where one can see the lines the cable cars travel upon strung out into the distant horizon, often seeing many cars coming in the opposite direction, where it’s a quiet ride, like floating on air, until they hit one of the stabilizing towers, which makes a jarring noise. The ride uphill is slower, requires more power, and takes a bit longer, while the descent is quicker, though during the filming one often can’t tell if they’re moving up or down, where we’re lost in an optical illusion. Of note, we never actually see the temple, the object of the passengers’ destination, but are instead stuck in a series of continually linked sequences that automatically recycles before the next journey begins.
Anyone who has ridden in a similar contraption realizes that initially there is an element of fear, where it takes awhile to feel safe while hoisted up into the air like this, as there is no way out until you reach the final destination, where the initial passengers of an elderly man and a young child sit in silence, where no one speaks at all in the opening twenty minutes. But people carry offerings, like flowers in a basket, or a live rooster, while three Asian metal rockers bring a weeks-old kitten with them that keeps wailing throughout while they humorously take a series of selfies, talking excitedly about making a music video here before complaining that there’s no a/c. In another instant we’re in the presence of several bleating goats in a cart, where initially it appears they could anxiously leap out of the car in a panic until we see they’re all tied together. Midway through is a shot in total darkness, where all you hear are the screeching mechanical noises associated with turning the car around, where the stereo sound design has front and back speakers that add to the sensuousness of the moment. Two women attempting to eat ice cream bars turns into a comedy of errors as one has it smudged all over her face while the other simply can’t stop the constant dripping all over herself, while afterwards two seasoned musicians heading for the temple tune and play their stringed sarangis. One of them recalls hiking up the mountain in earlier times. While one never knows what to expect and there is an element of anticipation waiting to see who or what comes next, there’s some question whether this is enough, as this remains a smaller film about subtle distinctions where some viewers may feel trapped seeking cultural insights through such a self-contained, claustrophobic environment, where it remains an open question whether any liberating or transcendent moments are achieved in this manner.
MANAKAMANA - Gene
Siskel Film Center Barbara Scharres
Mesmerizing from start to finish, this new documentary from the
producers of LEVIATHAN is destined to become an instant cult classic. A cable
car swoops and soars through a remote region of
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE
Chicago Doug McLaren
The latest quasi-anthropological joint from the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard (which also produced SWEETGRASS and LEVIATHAN), MANAKAMANA is at its core an austere formalist experiment: nearly a dozen full-length trips up and down a cable car in Nepal. The execution of this formal component alone would be enough to qualify it as some filmmakers' completed work (In fact, it already has: in Marika Borgeson's delightfully slender and surprising short ELEVEN FORTY SEVEN). Though the word "sensory" in the laboratory's moniker should reassure anyone who is concerned that this film might be an ascetic pilgrimage to a remote mountainous temple. MANAKAMANA's rich sound design draws the viewer in to the car's cabin, projecting the sound-space of the journey into the auditorium, subsequently allowing the audience to project themselves into the cable car alongside the passengers onscreen. And those passengers! A fascinating and sometimes hilarious variety of sojourners sit facing the camera, the minutiae of their stationary demeanor on display for an entire nine-minute ride. It's difficult to describe the continual revelation of each new passenger without ruining the surprise of who (or what) takes the ride up/downhill, but the less one knows about any subjects the better. It's best to lose count of the trips taken as well, allowing each successive trip into the darkness of the wheelhouse to bring with it an infinite potential.
Spectrum Culture [David Harris]
We go to the movies to watch people. Manakamana, the most
recent film from
The first two trips are completely silent. In fact, no one speaks in Manakamana’s first 20 minutes, giving us time to settle into the film’s rhythm by foisting the most difficult journeys on us first. Naturally, the rides with talkative inhabits are easier to watch, but that’s the whole point of Manakamana. By forcing us to step away from our technology-laden lives of instant updates, we can settle into a groove where watching people simply traverse a mountain in near silence can be interesting. It leaves you to draw connections between all the riders, young and old, making associations that may or may not actually exist. Multiple riders comment on the same things as they float past. Young metal heads and old ladies alike complain about their ears popping as they gain altitude.
Of course, the geography is also part of the picture, some beautiful green mountains that actually play second fiddle to the riders in the cable car. As we take the same trip, we begin to memorize the topography, even gleaning the godlike ability to guess when a rider will comment on a village, wince when the cable car bounces near a tower or marvel when the ascent becomes sharp near the journey’s end. But nothing is more stunning than watching people who live in a third world nation ride a first world technological marvel. But that dichotomy isn’t the main thrust in Manakamana. Instead, we are invited to look deep as two ladies try to devour some rapidly melting ice cream bars, giggling as they run down their arms in milky streams.
If you have seen Sweetgrass or Leviathan, you know the Sensory Ethnography Lab does not make conventional films. But while Sweetgrass and Leviathan have a definite political slant, Manakamana is deceptively simpler in its conceit. There is no monstrous fishing vessel chewing up an ocean full of animals or an end of an era sheep run here. Instead, Manakamana is a dare, a challenge to its audience, one that trusts us to fill in the story, bring our perceptions and prejudices to what we see on the screen. One that never once tells us what or how to think.
2013 Toronto International Film
Festival Michael Sicinski
I find myself feeling a little lonely on this one, given that I consider it to be "only" a quite interesting fiction / ethnography experiment, and not The Film of the Year. Having said that, the fact that many if not most of my friends and colleagues are over the flipping moon for Manakamana doesn't trouble me in the least, although I do wonder whether its basic procedures (duration, the hard stare of fixed-camera portraiture) are being read as revelatory because of the Nepalese context alone. In other words, we have not yet had our Andy Warhol Screen Tests from the two-thirds world, and so the flat fact of Spray and Velez's juxtaposition (or the renewal / revision of the Robert Gardner aesthetic, an under-utilized weapon in the radical ethnographers' arsenal) has provoked the sensation of absolute newness. Nevertheless, there is an undeniable rhythmic pleasure at work in Manakamana's 11-part long-take organization. Every 11-minute shot, every scene, is a single cable car journey either to or from the titular temple, and the space of the cable car functions as a doubling of the cinema frame. Spray and Velez are to be commended for their absolute precision. At the same time, there is a sense of spatial dislocation and anxious anticipation that seasons the early shots with a frisson that cannot be matched as the film goes on. The first shot (grandfather and boy) moves in reverse, so that we watch as the mountains and trees fall out behind them, giving way to a vertiginous void. Moreover, we can never see the structural poles coming, with their disruptive, car-shaking rattle. Each one is a surprise, although we know they are coming and may try to anticipate their arrival through mental timing of the trip. With the very second shot (tired woman with flowers), we are henceforth facing toward the tensioner poles, so this anxiety is effectively quelled. But more importantly, Manakamana begins to naturalize the cavernous movement of space outside the cars.
Either by increasing activity within the car, or simply by repetition, the film becomes a case of diminishing returns. The phenomenological force of the mobile cable car / camera as a device that swallows up and flattens out cavernous film space is a shock that cannot hold. Nevertheless, the content of many of the shots is compelling enough to compensate. Manakamana is never boring. There are the most obviously surprising shots, such as #6 (the goats) and #9 (the two women struggling to eat ice cream bars as they melt), practically operating as blackout comedy sketches orchestrated for maximum exploitation of the close quarters and the building tension of the uninterrupted ride. But there are less ostentatiously bravura shots, such as #5, which give a clearer hint as to what Spray and Velez are actually up to. In this sequence, three goth-metal guys and their pet kitten speak about having been up to the temple, the impressive view, the awe of nature, and other semi-random chitchat. However, at certain points, one of the young men begins nervously repeating lines from earlier in the scene. The tone and timbre of his reiteration of his very random remarks makes it fairly evident that he isn't just repeating himself. The behavior strongly indicates that the remarks are rehearsed, and this leads us to conclude that much (if not most) (if not all) of what we see in Manakamana is coached and / or staged. This would also explain the connection between shots #3 and #10, the former showing a glum middle-aged couple going up to the temple with a live rooster, the latter showing them returning holding disembodied chicken feet. It stands to reason that a film as formally exacting as Manakamana would require more advance preparation and performative reenactment than some idealized, point-and-shoot ethnography. But as a hybrid work, Manakamana pushes the bounds of its own genre even further than even the most postmodern ethno-fictions. As I mentioned at the start, Spray and Velez might have made a film that, more properly understood, is a contribution to the structuralist avant-garde, distinguished chiefly by content that, from a semiotic standpoint, has traditionally been the province of the ethnographic. I am not sure this is enough of a breakthrough to place Manakamana in a class by itself (where a lot of folks seem to find it), or to mitigate the minor variations in interest level across its multiple iterations of a single form. To put it another way, modularity is a bitch, and sometimes there aren't goats to pimp your 11-minute ride.
Sight & Sound [Nick Pinkerton] December 11, 2014
The House Next Door [Clayton Dillard] also seen here: Slant Magazine [Clayton Dillard]
[TIFF Review] Manakamana - The Film Stage Peter Labuza
Manakamana / The Dissolve Noel Murray
The best 2014 films that made under $100,000 / The Dissolve
Little White Lies [David Jenkins]
CriterionCast.com [David Blakeslee]
'Manakamana' and the Delights of Experimental ... - Pajiba Corey Atad
Next Projection Jacqueline Valencia
A Critical Movie Critic [Howard Schumann]
In Review Online [Kenji Fujishima]
Film-Forward.com [Nora Lee Mandel]
The Metropolist [Jean-Baptiste de Vaulx]
Blueprint: Review [David Brook]
TIFF 2013 Review: MANAKAMANA Transcends The ... - Twitch Kurt Halfyard
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]
White City Cinema [Michael Smith]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Georgia Straight [Adrian Mack]
MANAKAMANA Ken Rudolph Movie Site
Manakamana: Toronto Review - Hollywood Reporter Boyd van Hoeij
Film Review: 'Manakamana' - Variety Scott Foundas
Manakamana review – more art installation than cinematic ... Mark Kermode from The Guardian
Manakamana review - The Guardian Henry Barnes
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Milan Paurich]
Manakamana Review - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
In 'Manakamana,' Pilgrimages by Cable Car to a Hindu Site ... Manohla Dargis from The New York Times
If
this refrigerator-freezer is turned off for sound or whatever it must be turned
back on after shooting. It was off all Thursday, Thursday night and Friday and
by the time I found it after work on Friday it was really horrible so please
don’t forget. —Gena, note left on home refrigerator
An intimate documentary shot during the making of Cassavetes last major film Love Streams (1984), the film title comes not from a Cassavetes character but from a line spoken over the phone by Gina Rowlands character Sarah Lawson, “Jack, I’m almost not crazy now,” to her divorced husband Jack (Seymour Cassel), where after a long absence abroad she’s eager to reunite. Jack’s classic response is “I just don’t care” as he hangs up on her. There’s a terrific scene shot with Cassavetes and his script girl as he attempts to write these lines, where’s he’s already got Rowlands lines, but he can’t think of the retort, nevertheless, the camera holds on him for several minutes awaiting his line which never comes. This is an utterly conventional film about an utterly unconventional man, a guy driven by the best of intentions, who was sick of the way movies manipulate and lie and resort to convention, trying to discover a new way to tell some of the same stories, but from a more personal point of view. Cassavetes intention, as expressed ably by Cassel, was for people to care. For or against, love or hate, so long as his films provoked a personal response he thought they’d be remembered 10 to 20 years down the road. To that end, he made about 9 films that truly “mattered,” in the Cassavetes sense of the word.
Besides Cassavetes, who has a kind of infectious personality, whose energy and enthusiasm for life feels endless, one of the real revelations here is his wife Gena Rowlands, as it shows the two of them working together, where the director couldn’t be more supportive and understanding of his star actress, showing keen personal insight into how to spring an improvised scene on her - - at the last minute with barely any time to rehearse. Rowlands acknowledges she likes to spend time with her characters, allowing them to infiltrate into her normal life, where she spaces in and out of character, where her daughter Zoe affectionately has to remind her, “Earth to mom, earth to mom, come in please.” The scene in question is the first dream sequence of the film, perhaps the most memorable in the entire film where Rowlands does a 60 second vaudeville routine in front of her movie husband and daughter who were instructed ahead of time not to laugh, which was based on a game Cassavetes regularly plays with his daughters. Rowlands, on the other hand, is cracking up throughout, where she realizes the absurdity she’s up against, but she fights for that laugh anyway. Separately, it’s clear they each have a unique understanding of one another, as Cassavetes’s films live and breathe through Rowlands’ characters, as she’s the force that carries the film, while she trusts her husband’s instincts implicitly. The rare intimacy that they share together is captured in the time capsules of his movies.
Ventura had never made a film before, but Cassavetes had
already asked him to write a book, knowing he’d already been diagnosed with
cirrhosis of the liver, so he prodded him into doing the filming on the set as
well, probably taking him aside and showing him what to do, as he did for so
many of his regulars working on the set.
Some of the editing is truly exceptional, especially the brief clips
chosen from the major works of the director.
Each one is set up very well in advance by information revealed in
User reviews from imdb Author: Mr E Train from
I had been searching for this film for a while before finally getting hold of a bootleg copy. After seeing it, I have to say that any fan of Cassavetes the director must see it at any cost. There have been other Cassavetes documentaries, but most are posthumous and feature Cass. only in old filmclips. "I'm Almost Not Crazy..." was shot during the filming of the director's final masterpiece, "Love Streams", giving the viewer a first-hand account of the filmmaker's directorial style. Also very valuable are candid interviews with Cassavetes himself. This documentary, more than any other, proves that he was one of the most original, honest, creative geniuses of our time.
User reviews from imdb Author: bobby cormier
(aeolipile1@aol.com) from
This is a must see for any serious Cassavetes fan. It makes a fascinating companion to Ray Carney's excellent new biography "Cassavetes On Cassavetes". Ray Carney is not in favor with the John Cassavetes estate at the moment, but don't let that dissuade you from reading his excellent book, if you are interested. It's really an autobiography by Cassavetes since it is almost all material that was edited down from endless hours of interviews Carney tape recorded of Cassavettes discussing the circumstances and story of his own life, along with his own insightful and very candid comments on his own work in film and in acting and directing and writing. But this is not, I know, supposed to be a review of a book. "I'm Almost Not Crazy" shows Cassavetes at work on "Love Streams, his last important work because it was the last one he wrote as well as directed. Ignore that last mob film or whatever the hell it was; he didn't write it and it shows. He's clearly not committed to the material there and he did it to raise money for a next film of his own that he didn't make because of his death. And this is a truly convincing documentary (to me) because I believe Cassavettes felt he had nothing to loose by discussing his very own truths. The only problem is trying to track this one down. Very hard to find. Try very hard.
John Cassavetes died on February 3, 1989 but his spirit lives on in this fine documentary Dangerous Minds, February 3, 2012
I’m Almost Not Crazy: John Cassavetes - The Man and His Work directed
by one of the finest writers on the planet Michael Ventura was shot during the
making of Cassavetes’ final personal film Love Streams in 1984. One of
Cassavetes’ best and most underappreciated films (so what the fuck else is
new?), Love Streams is inexplicably and appallingly unavailable on DVD
in the
I think
Cassavetes’ obsession to get at the “heart of the matter,” to find the essential truth that animates our being, to cut through the bullshit, is as spiritual a journey as any in the history of film. As a young man pounding my fists against the walls of my own masculinity, I found Cassavetes films liberating. Beneath the machismo and testosterone-fueled angst of his male protagonists, there exists a tenderness, vulnerability and uncertainty that belies the inherited social concepts of masculinity. Cassavetes’ men are tough guys clawing at their macho veneer like caged animals desperate to find that one exist point where they can burst free.
Cassavetes died on this day in 1989 and we present this very special
documentary in honor of one of
And there is no honoring Cassavetes, without giving equal honor to the phenomenal Gena Rowlands. Has there been a more dynamic collaboration between husband and wife in cinema? And that is not a rhetorical question. Let me know what you think.
Love Streams is available on import DVD. Michael Ventura’s book “Cassavetes Directs: John Cassavetes and the Making of Love Streams” can be purchased here.
Places
in the Heart: Where Does It Happen? John ... - Senses of Cinema Brad Stevens from Senses of Cinema, October 28, 2004
I'm Almost Not Crazy: John Cassavetes — The Man and His Work ... Flavorpill
John Cassavetes Retrospective - freedomrightsfilms.com - Tripod
I m Almost Not Crazy John Cassavetes The Man and His Work Hal Erickson from Rovi
I'm Almost Not Crazy: Outsider Cinema by Hollywood Insiders: Mary ... Block Cinema
R U THERE
A European computer-game geek finds his inner mojo, or nirvana, thanks to
an obliging Asian escort girl in R U There, a gentle and narratively paper-thin two-hander.
Cyber-world background and matching visuals provide a veneer of glossy modernity, but the film does little to convince us of its message that the real world is more vital than the virtual one: both look equally hackneyed in this Taiwan-shot vignette. Commercial prospects are slender for a film more likely to tweak attention at festivals with Asian and/or cyber specializations.
Jitze (Koomen) is a professional computer gamer visiting
But something gets to him: first he suffers an inexplicable shoulder pain, then blows a vital match. Suspended from the team, Jitze bumps into Min Min (Ke), a hooker working his luxury hotel, and hires her to give him a massage, although there are strictly no trimmings involved.
Jitze becomes a regular customer, and the two strike up a platonic relationship that only turns romantic online, as they meet as avatars in the virtual fantasy world ‘Second Life’. In this garish, sugar-sweet sector of the digital domain, Min Min appears as a pink-haired fairy with a cat on her shoulder, infusing the film with a dose of kitsch that will be a deal-breaker for many viewers.
Eventually, Jitze pays Min Min to let him accompany her to her family home in the country, where he loosens up considerably. By the time the film reaches its mawkish fantasy ending, Jitze seems to be a whole new man - but what’s in it all for Min Min, except a healthy fee, is never quite clear.
The film’s message is brought home with sometimes painful
clarity - we need to forget digital dreams and get back on good terms with
reality. Verbeek reminds us of this by juxtaposing the on-screen imagery that
preoccupies Jitze with shots of the
Min Min herself remains an enigma throughout - which is a
shame, as Ke proves a much more warmer and more nuanced performer than the
stiff, sullen Koomen. Mixing sparse Dutch and English dialogue with unsubtitled
Chinese, the film only touches on the element of touristic exploitation in the
couple’s relationship, and Min Min never emerges as more than a convenient
conduit for Jitze’s awakening. Although Verbeek seems very at ease in urban
You'll be at an advantage, watching
this remake, if you've already seen Hideo Nakata's classic modern chiller Ring.
The Japanese original is more creepy for being insidiously mysterious. To be
fair, however, Verbinski's more expensive revamp treats it with a surprising
degree of respect. The central conceit is the same urban legend teaser: the
video tape which brings death to all those who see it, exactly seven days
later. Watts grits her teeth again as a newspaper reporter whose niece is among
a spate of perplexing teenage fatalities. At first she's sceptical about the
notion of a killer vid connecting the victims, but the enigmatic images on the
tape convince her to take it seriously. If the testimonies are true, however,
she has only a week to live. It's symptomatic of this version that the said
video plays more like conspicuously art directed MTV surrealism than Nakata's
haunting, rough-hewn artefact. Heavier on back-story, the remake loses some of
the goose pimple factor through dogged over-elaboration, even muffling what was
its predecessor's hairiest set piece. Not everything it might have been, then,
but decent enough to have you tracking down the original.
Reel.com dvd review [2.5/4] Tor Thorsen
The Ring is one of the few
films that's scarier on video than in the theater. Sure, that's largely because
it's about a videotape which kills everyone it watches. However, another big
reason is the sound design on The Ring DVD. Featuring both Dolby 5.1 and
DTS versions, the disc generates a supremely spooky atmosphere; its subtle
rear-channel noises make the coziest den feel like a yawning chasm of doom.
While surround sound is just icing on all too many films' cakes, it's an
essential part of The Ring experience; if you don't have a good home
theater system, find a friend that does to watch it with.
However, given The Ring's sheer terror quotient, you might want to make
sure that friend doesn't have a heart condition. Based on Ringu, the highest-grossing
film in Japanese box-office history, The Ring profiles Rachel Keller (Mulholland Drive's Naomi Watts),
a
Although director Gore
Verbinski (MouseHunt,
The Mexican) lets the
pace lag at times, The Ring delivers the best cinematic sucker-punch in
years. First it lures you in by pretending to be just another Sixth Sense rip-off
featuring an discomfortingly mature boy (David Dorfman).
However the third act contains a premise-altering twist that ranks alongside
those of Seven and Prince of Darkness in its
stark horror. Screenwriter Ehren Kruger (Scream 3, Reindeer Games) takes a few
missteps in reworking Kôji Suzuki's source novel and Hiroshi Takahashi's
screenplay, but all in all, The Ring is one of the spookiest thrillers
in years — and one that shouldn't be spoiled by an overly descriptive review.
Given its impressive $130 million theatrical gross, you'd think The Ring
would have got the deluxe treatment on DVD. Maybe it will when the inevitable
Special Edition comes out in a few months. That disc may be worth buying —
however, the current Ring DVD is not. Besides the audio and first-rate
1.85:1 widescreen image (a full-screen version is also available), the DVD has
precious little to offer. There's a spooky menu laced with the killer
videotape's imagery, which mimics Luis Buñuel's famous
surrealist film Un Chien
Andalou, and trailers for Ringu, 8 Mile, and Catch Me if You Can. Other
than that, however, the only other extra is a montage of deleted scenes called
"Don't Watch This." That teasing title is sound advice to people who
haven't seen the film, since the sequences contain more than a few spoilers.
However, it's also a semi-accurate warning to those that have, because the
scenes bring nothing of importance to the story. Not including such extraneous
details made The Ring a leaner, meaner film. However, excluding bonus
features like a making-of featurette or commentary tracks make The Ring
only a rent-worthy DVD.
filmcritic.com (Sean O'Connell) review [4.5/5] Collector’s Edition, adding a 15-minute RINGS
short
There’s something inherently creepy about children and the
supernatural. Poltergeist
knew it. The
Sixth Sense knew it, too. Both movies make their presence known in The
Ring, though I wouldn’t necessarily use them – or anything else – to
describe this remarkably original and terrifying ghost tale.
Following a number of false starts that establish the film’s unbalanced mood, The
Ring rehashes an urban legend about a videotape. Very few people know its
contents, though it’s believed that the images found on the tape recap one
person’s nightmare. Initially I thought that tape was Police Academy 5:
Assignment Miami Beach, but I was wrong. Once you watch the video, the
phone rings and a child’s voice on the other end of the line whispers, “Seven
days.” You now have one week to live.
When a close friend of the family dies following a viewing,
The Ring is based on Japanese director Hideo Nakata’s horror film Ringu,
which has become one of the highest grossing films in Japanese history. Aided
by dreary
Then again, so do elements of Ehren Kruger’s screenplay. There aren’t a slew of
gratuitous jolts and shocking scares, just a parade of bizarre events that keep
us guessing the entire time. Children discuss another child’s death as if they
were recounting the last episode of VeggieTales.
One boy communicates with the dead. Characters in The Ring know things
they never could or should, which proves unnerving for both Rachel and the
audience.
David Dorfman delivers a creepy, mature performance as Aidan, Rachel’s son.
He’s the type of kid who calls his mother by her first name and has a pitch
black stare you feel in the back your spine. Late in the film, the always
reliable Brian Cox shows up to deliver a crucial plot twist with just the right
gravitas. Still, it’s
The Ring delivers a chilling murder mystery brimming with restless
spirits and undead souls that unfolds piece by piece and gets under the skin as
it does. Just don’t think you’ve figured this one out before it ends. Chances
are you haven’t.
The
The Ring on DVD is pretty fully immersive in the whole "spooky
tape" experience. Even the FBI warning is interrupted by static... creepy.
Two extra features appear in the menu -- "don't watch this," a short
film comprised of outtakes that adds a minor amount to the movie's mythology,
and "look here," which is actually the trailer for Ringu,
which is also just now released on DVD in the U.S.
A new collector's DVD set adds a second disc of extras, including a short film
called Rings that connects this movie with its sequel, along with the
footage of the cursed videotapes in the movies, and a handful of new interviews
and featurettes.
“Before you die, you see The Ring”: notes on the immanent
obsolescence of VHS Caetlin Benson-Allott from Jump Cut, Spring 2007
Flipside Movie
Emporium (Rob Vaux) review [B]
Movie-Vault.com
(Scott S.) review
Xiibaro
Productions (David Perry) review
[3/4]
Film
Freak Central dvd review Walter Chaw and Bill Chambers, also reviewing
the original Japanese RINGU
Nitrate
Online (Paula Nechak) review
SF, Horror and
Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib
Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [3/4]
Reel.com review [3/4] Mary Kalin-Casey
CultureCartel.com
(Lee Chase IV) review [4/5]
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2/4]
The Horror
Review [Egregious Gurnow]
Slant
Magazine review
Ed Gonzalez
KFC Cinema JoE Shieh
d+kaz.
Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [D]
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [5/5]
New York Observer
(Andrew Sarris) review
Kamera.co.uk
review Bob
Carroll
Turner
Classic Movies review Lang Thompson
Brilliant
Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
The
Filmsnobs (James Owen) review
DVD Town
(John J. Puccio & Yunda Eddie Feng) dvd
review
DVD
Review e-zine dvd recommendation Guido Henkel
The
Digital Bits dvd review [widescreen] Dan Kelly
DVD Talk
(Ron J. Epstein) dvd review [4/5]
DVD Verdict
(Eric Profancik) dvd review
DVD Talk (Holly E. Ordway) dvd
review [3/5] [Collector's Edition] adding a 15-minute RINGS short
DVDActive (Casimir Harlow) dvd review [8/10] [Collector's Edition] adding a 15-minute RINGS short
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [3/5]
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) review
[2.5/5]
Foster on
Film - Ghost Stories also reviewing the original Japanese RINGU
hybridmagazine.com
review Cole
Sowell
Bloody-Disgusting
review [4.5/5] Mr. Disgusting
Jigsaw
Lounge (Neil Young) review [6/10]
CultureCartel.com
(Brandon Curtis) review [3/5]
FilmStew.com review Susan Michals
Classic
Horror review
Matt Mulcahey
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Village
Voice (Michael Atkinson) review
Eye for
Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review
[3.5/5]
Movie ram-blings (Ram Samudrala) review
Entertainment
Weekly capsule dvd review [B] Brian M. Raftery
CNN Showbiz (Paul Clinton) review
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[3.5/4]
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
The Globe and Mail review [2.5/4] Liam Lacey
The Boston Phoenix review Peg Aloi
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
Washington
Post [Stephen Hunter]
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Chronicle (C.W. Nevius) review
Los Angeles Times review Kenneth Turan
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2/4]
The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review
I doubt even Verbinski’s mother thinks these
movies need to be so long. They do,
however, need Depp – desperately. This
resourceful and eccentrically charismatic actor is doing some priceless hamming
in “Dead Man’s Chest,” striking a mighty blow for overacting employees of theme
parks, Rennaissance Faires ands children’s theater troupes everywhere.
Shot at the same time as the second in the series, this one is largely fun, goofy, and a rollicking good time, where the “civilized world” is ganging up on all the pirates from around the world, where the only way for a pirate to make a living anymore is by betraying other pirates, eventually forcing them to band together in order to survive. The opening sequence has an eerie truthfulness about it, as pirates, or anyone associating with pirates, are rounded up and hanged, as one by one, an armed officer reads out loud the latest proclamation that all rights have been suspended. When last we left him, Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) was devoured by the giant sea octopus Kraken and left to rot in the hell of Davey Jones’s locker, a kind of permanent purgatory of the dead. Pirate captains are meeting to unite against their pursuers, the British East India Company, led by the duplicitous Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander), memorable for being the only character throughout the entire series who is more treacherous than any pirate, who, after all, have a code of honor that they keep on breaking in humorous fashion. One of those captains, Sparrow, is needed at a secret Pirate conference, so they, Geoffrey Rush as Captain Barbossa, Orlando Bloom as Will Turner, and Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Swann, joined in this episode by Chow Yun-fat as a mysterious pirate from the East, all conspire to rescue him from the dead, basically an agreement made by doublecrossing one another. This theme of lying and treachery persists throughout the series, but really outdoes itself here.
The trip to “the other side” is very much in keeping with the spirit of Disney’s theme park, and when we find Sparrow, he’s commanding a ship run by a crew of Jack Sparrows, a hilarious hallucinogenic romp through his own split personality that has origins in the digitally enhanced carbon copy oompa loompa clones from Tim Burton’s CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY. Not only does Sparrow talk to himself, but he kills various versions of himself without batting an eye, as there will always be more versions to follow. As Barbossa wisely and strangely points out as he leads them across mysterious barriers, the trick is not getting to the other side, it’s getting back. Only Jack has the madness to truly understand this feat, and he’s anything but grateful for their rescue, as all point their daggers at one another in a madcap gesture of utter futility. Only then do they start plotting against one another, which leads to stranger bedfellows and further wild action sequences at sea, where Chow Yun-fat is killed off early and transfers his captaincy command to Knightley of all persons. Soon we’re immersed in the all-world pirate conference that looks like something out of the MAD MAX series, where Knightley is anointed as the voice of reason and where Keith Richards makes his entrance as the keeper of the Pirate Codes, which is as stupid as it is silly, but always in humorous jest, especially his brief but weird reunion with his son, Captain Jack Sparrow.
The provocative Naomi Harris returns in her role as the reader of the dark spirits, as if she is somehow able to communicate with the spirits of the dead and the otherworldly, and is soon turned upon by the other pirate captains, as they believe her to be the infamous Calypso, a possessor of spirits so powerful that at the last pirate conference she was supposedly stripped of her powers, as she was too dangerous. So after a brief, somewhat charming appearance, she is suddenly sent to the brig where she is met by none other than Davey Jones, as the two have unfinished business between them. All of this leads to spectacular sequences at sea, where they are forced to free Calypso as a last hope against what appears to be insurmountable odds, where she explodes into a million tiny walking crabs that lunge into the sea. She conjures up a maelstrom, evening the odds a bit by forcing the combatants to fight amidst a typhoon, where crew members are jumping ship left and right, all supposedly fighting for God knows what, where as the decks are ablaze with swashbuckling swordfighting, Bloom suddenly realizes he’s in love and wants to be married on the spot to Knightley, who in a preposterous response calls for Barbossa to marry them amidst the mayhem, where the chaotic services take place among the slaying of bodies to the left of them, bodies to the right of them, a neverending parade of enemies. After a relentless parade of battles, where Captain Jack and the familiar rousing musical theme come to the rescue, the frenetic pace fizzles out a bit near the end, as does much of the interest and humor, as it simply goes on too long, where some characters may as well have been cast to sea, as they simply disappear, and where Bloom returns with his best Errol Flynn impersonation before he too disappears, leaving the finale to be nothing more than a humorous afterthought. Still and all, this was much more fun than I ever would have realized, much like a long, enduring theme park ride, and Depp, for all his loonyness, is the engine that drives this whole operation, as he remains nuttier than a fruitcake, but endearing just the same.
Confessions
Of A Child Of The Century Lee
Marshall at
The calamitous miscasting of
But whereas that Binoche and Magimel starrer focused squarely on the scandalous relationship between De Musset and female writer and saloniste George Sand, on which the novel is based, Verheyde rewrites the characters in order, one can only guess, to big up the decadent post-Romantic mood and not distract us with real historical people. The problem is that we’re left with little except mood; precious little drama or audience-engaging emotion ripple the surface of this extended style exercise.
The Doherty tie-in might be expected to raise some interest in English-speaking territories for this English-language film, but actually the opposite could be true. With the lead actor’s mumbled lines dubbed or subtitled, audiences have a slightly better chance of not constantly being beaten about the head by his wooden performance.
A modicum of theatrical action is inevitable in the film’s co-production territories, and spot-on costumes, some nicely grainy handheld photography and a pleasant enough soundtrack at least make the film worthy of the big screen on a purely audiovisual level. But distributors elsewhere who embraced Verheyde’s previous, the delicate coming-of-age story Stella, are unlikely to rise to the bait this time.
Period and place are initially difficult to pin down in a film
that dispenses with excess baggage like dates or recognisable geographical
references. The characters are in
When he discovers his fiancé Elise (Cole) playing footsie with another man, a duel ensues, in which Octave is wounded. After expounding his ennui to best friend Degenais (Diehl), the languorous youth meanders into some rather prettily-shot debauchery in a series of receptions that descend into decorous orgies.
When his father dies, Octave heads for the country, where he bonds over a baby goat with Brigitte (Gainsbourg), a widow ten years his elder. After a struggle between passion and conscience which only ever seems believable on Brigitte’s part, the two become lovers. They go on being lovers for quite a long time, occasionally agonising about whether one really loves the other.
With a more or less permanently bored expression, Doherty looks like he’d rather be somewhere else; he only really comes alive in a few passages of what look like improvised laddish dialogue. If the intention was to play on Doherty’s notoriously chaotic lifestyle in casting him as a libertine (also playing on the name of his former group, The Libertines) the effect is to show him up as a rather timid schoolboy. At least Gainsbourg gives the role her best shot, mining depths of emotion that occasionally persuade us that there is something tragic going on beneath the surface.
But the episodic script does nothing to back this up; Verheyde’s decision to focus claustrophobically on her lovers’ tiffs and bondings to the exclusion of the rest of the world means that the dramatic stakes are set low. There’s little suggestion that Brigitte is compromised by her relationship with this younger man; even the aunt she lives with seems to melt away as soon as Octave comes onto the scene. Rarely has decadence seemed so dull.
Verheyen,
Jan
THE
VERDICT (Het Vonnis) B+ 91
This is a film that wastes no time and gets the viewer right into the
middle of the action, introducing Koen De Bouw as Luc Segers, an ambitious
corporate executive that his risen to the top of the corporate ladder and is
about to be named as the successor of the retiring CEO at lunch the next day,
but not before the company throws a celebratory office party. On the ride home, with his daughter asleep in
the back seat of the car, they stop to fill up for gas while his wife runs
across the street for a loaf of bread in a 24 hour automat. While the floor is strewn with litter, a man
with an icepick in his hand appears from behind the shadows, assaulting her
instantly, literally beating her to death.
When Segers runs across the street to check what’s taking her so long,
the man coldcocks him with a whack across the face, knocking him out cold,
while his daughter gets hit by a car running to help her Dad. Segers survives after a 3-week coma, but the
other two perish on the scene. When he’s
well enough to visit the local police station, he finds the man thumbing
through mug shots, Kenny De Groot (Hendrik Aerts), a career criminal with a
lengthy rap sheet where he’s spent his life in and out of prison, who is
immediately arrested, but instantly released on a technicality when the
indictment papers are inadvertently left unsigned. Segers goes ballistics when his own attorney
(Johan Leysen) explains the error, as does the public at large, who are outraged first
over the brutality of the crime, but then that such a vicious criminal could be
released to the street.
The incident is seen through a cross segment of society, from news broadcasts and their legal experts, to talk shows with their opinionated audiences, as well as the bulldog prosecuting attorney (Jappe Claes), and the the publicly elected District Attorney, all of whom find the event disgusting, but the legal analysts argue that the laws of a democracy are not a perfect system, but adherence to the rule of law provides society’s moral compass. Making matters even worse, Segers is simply not the same after De Groot is released, where he’s listlessly inattentive at work, and his mind seems elsewhere. As a result, someone else is chosen as the successor CEO, while Segers begins stalking the De Groot garage, eventually following him back to his garage where he empties the chambers of an 8-round automatic pistol into his chest, killing him on the spot. His arrest creates even more outrage, as he’s a sympathetic public figure, where a near unanimous consensus believes he never would have killed the man had the arrested criminal not been released by a bureaucratic bungling. Nevertheless, the prosecutor wants a conviction, calling a murder a murder, as he doesn’t want to see the start of vigilante justice where victims, such as rape or assault or kidnap victims, who have been wronged or harmed begin taking the law into their own hands. However, Segers has other ideas, as he intends to challenge a system that allows an identified murderer to be placed back on the streets again, as that certainly doesn’t represent the larger public interest.
The film uses a cool and detached style showing only what’s essential,
becoming a taut thriller, much like American conspiracy thrillers of the 70’s,
where the overall production values feel meticulously designed, which give the
film a vividly realistic detail. The
ensemble cast feels naturalistic and doesn’t resort to stereotype, where the
courtroom scenes are riveting. All the
principles are excellent in presenting the case, where Segers takes a gamble by
choosing to use a defense covered under Article 7.1 of the Belgian
Constitution, where a traumatic incident can cause a person to instantaneously
snap, usually on the spur of the moment, such as a man raping your wife or
attacking your child, where any harm caused under these narrowly defined
circumstances may be deemed lawful. The
problem here is that it was not spontaneous, but premeditated, as Segers
stalked De Groot for several days waiting for his opportunity. The evidence presented is starkly compelling,
but much like Sidney Lumet’s film by the same name, THE VERDICT (1982), it’s
the closing arguments that really shine.
Perhaps most interesting is the presence of De Groot’s defense attorney
(Veerle Baetens) who is protecting the rights of the deceased, who brilliantly
makes the case that legal technicalities are no small errors, providing a
narrative of De Groot’s troubled childhood that is quite simply devastating,
while the prosecutor argues that similarly harmed victims of sex crimes or
drunken drivers or senseless assault don’t have the right to enact revenge on
their perpetrators, as this is a matter for the police and the courts, not individuals
taking the law into their own hands. On
the other hand Segers’ lawyer suggests that when the system fails to protect
its citizens, as they are constitutionally mandated to do, it inflicts further
harm on top of trauma that already exists, often forcing people to deal with
the impossible. At nearly two hours, the
film feels concise and beautifully edited, moving at a rapid pace, where the
director knows how to ratchet up the tension and sustain it throughout in this
complex legal exposé.
'The
Verdict' Review: Jan Verheyen's Accomplished Legal ... - Variety Dennis Harvey
An assertive yet wobbly mix of old-fashioned love-triangle melodrama and
quasi-religious parable ill suited to the gritty realism of its Dogma 95-style
execution, “The Miracle” is an odd duck that
neither quite convinces nor emotionally satisfies. Danish director/co-writer
(with Peter Birro) Simon Staho’s latest feature harks
back to Scandinavian silent cinema in its elemental conflict between devotion
and passion, as a country minister’s wife finds herself overpowered by desire
for a lifelong love who’s returned after decades of absence. Critical response
will be mixed, offshore sales spotty.
Actually the marriage between pastor Erik (Peter Plaugborg) and local native Johanna (Sonja Richter) seems pretty passionate itself, on the evidence of their frequent couplings after having been together for many years. This, despite her paralyzed legs (from a car accident some time before they met), as well as his somewhat strange pleas to have God heal her in front of the church congregation each Sunday. They have a happy sole offspring in young Christian (William Lonstrup), and Johanna is as fulfilled teaching children’s dance classes as Erik is tending his mostly elderly flock.
Her job, however, is threatened when the owner of the building those classes are held in passes away, and the lady’s son, Jakob (Ulrich Thomsen), arrives to gruffly announce he’s tearing the place down. What’s more, Jacob turns out to have been Johanna’s teenage beau and dancing partner before her accident. Despite all vows of eternal love, they broke up over her choice of another partner in order to win a ballroom competition — a pretty silly reason, but oh well. In a huff Jakob left town, never to be heard from again until now.
Initially embittered and dismissive, he soon caves in to her entreaties, deciding to remodel rather than raze his mother’s property. It’s almost immediately clear to both parties that two decades’ separation hasn’t dimmed the spark between them; they begin meeting in secret as Erik grows more and more suspicious. When the prayed-for miracle actually does occur — seemingly as a result of this forbidden love rather than any divine intervention — the increasingly unstable, jealous husband snaps to become a holy terror.
Though the film takes place in 1971 (it’s presumably set as well
as largely shot in
Thomsen and Richter try to summon the desired star-crossed-lovers
abandon, but their characters’ amour fou recklessness never transcends
narrative contrivance. Plauborg (who duly won an acting prize at
Sebastian Wintero’s lensing provides some attractive verdant-landscape shots in a presentation that arguably should have aimed for a greater lyricism throughout. Musical backing consists entirely of well-chosen classical excerpts by Arvo Part, Grieg, Messian, Mahler, Wagner, Sibelius and so forth.
CIFF 2013: The Verdict (Het
Vonnis, 2013) Marilyn Ferdinand from
Ferdy on Films
One of the things I love about the Chicago International Film
Festival is having a chance to see what issues are on the minds of filmmakers
in different countries, because no matter how small the world may seem to be in
these days of the worldwide web, we most definitely do not live and see things
the same way. The Verdict is a film that shows the yawning cultural
chasm between life in the
The Verdict opens with a man crouched in a doorway. His face is drawn, and his hands are shaking. The scene ends with a B-roll to a static frame of the man, a technique director Verheyen uses throughout the film to create a patchwork of impressions and amp the intensity of each scene. The next scene shows the man in a very different, very happy frame of mind. He is Luc Segers (Koen De Bouw), an executive who is enjoying a company party with his wife Ella (Joke Devynck) and daughter (Nell Cattrysse). Luc expects to be named CEO to succeed his mentor, and the two men are set to meet about it the next day.
On the way home from the party, Luc stops to refuel his car. His wife goes to an automat across the street to get something to eat. She encounters a man who is burglarizing the machines. She resists him when he tries to grab her purse, and he beats her to death with his bare fist. Luc, wondering what is taking Ella so long, goes across the street and runs into the assailant, who kicks him into unconsciousness. Luc’s daughter runs to help her father and is struck and killed by a passing car. When Luc awakens from a three-week coma, he learns that he has lost everything—his wife, his daughter, and the promotion.
With Luc as an eyewitness, the assailant, Kenny De Groot (Hendrik Aerts), is apprehended quickly at the auto repair shop where he works. Unfortunately, the case is thrown out because a magistrate failed to sign a necessary document. De Groot is out free and clear. Furious that the system failed to secure justice for him and his family, Luc stalks and kills De Groot and gives himself up to the police without a fight. Rather than plea bargain his way to a short sentence, Luc seeks to put the system on trial by going for an acquittal with a defense that his was a crime of passion despite the premeditated nature of his actions.
I love looking at the workings of jurisprudence in other
countries because they all have their unique qualities. In
Nonetheless, the trial is extremely compelling, as the testimony is intercut with scenes of the days leading up to the murder and culminating in the murder itself, thus slowly revealing the action we thought we might be denied. The scene of Ella on the floor of the automat looking as though she is preparing to die is doubled with a similar shot of De Groot; however, the brutality of the first murder by a habitually violent man is contrasted with the shaky hand and wild shooting of a man who has never killed anything in his life. Nonetheless, he manages to pump four bullets into De Groot and stands over him as the life bleeds out of him, showing that violent anger is available to us all if given the right set of circumstances.
American audiences are very used to films and television programs of vigilante justice and revenge, so we expect Luc to act as he did. The film, however, doesn’t make this crime seem like an inevitability. Koen De Bouw’s performance is a tour de force that keeps our expectations slightly off balance because he’s a real person, not a stock character, whose emotions are volatile and realistic. Indeed, the entire cast take overly familiar characters—the lady judge, the barracuda defense attorney, the pragmatic chief prosecutor (Jappe Claes), Luc’s understanding family lawyer (Johan Leysen)—and manage to individualize them to a considerable degree. The closing argument Leysen gives is spellbinding, and almost completely won me over from the equally compelling arguments made by the two prosecutors of the case. The writing and fervency of the actors couldn’t have been better. The tight construction of the film turns a routine procedural into an edge-of-seat experience.
Nonetheless, the closing title cards that warn of the problem the
Belgian criminal justice system faces from procedural errors left me feeling
queasy. Equal justice under the law underpinned the prosecution’s case, and
Luc’s trial represents a slippery slope away from it. As an American who has
just seen the U.S. Supreme Court deal a severe blow to the Fourth Amendment of
the Constitution and the Miranda warning requirement, learned that 55 people
have been in custody in my state for more than five years awaiting trial, and
despairs that the prison population nationwide has quadrupled since 1980 to a
total of 2.4 million, I shudder to think what Belgium is toying with.
Hopefully, this activist film will see people who commit procedural errors
dealt with through education and disciplinary action and not an erosion of the
rights Americans once had but lost.
The
Verdict | Reviews | Screen Mark
Adams
Jan
Verheyen wins 'Best Director' award for The Verdict at Montreal ... Eyeworks
Paul
Verhoeven - Director - Films as Director ... - Film Reference Frances Gateward
Paul Verhoeven, a director of international acclaim who has achieved both critical and commercial success, is also one of Hollywood's most controversial. His films, characterized stylistically by his use of deep focus, Christian iconography, and sensuous mise en scène , are perhaps better known for their graphic representations of violence and sexuality.
Verhoeven began his filmmaking career as a director of short subjects and, while serving with the Royal Dutch Navy, documentaries. After returning to civilian life, he continued to work with both fiction and documentary forms, expanding his scope to television. Though his first feature-length motion picture, Business Is Business (1971), was a commercial success, Verhoeven did not receive international attention until the release of his second feature, Turkish Delight (1973).
Nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Turkish Delight not only established Verhoeven as a skilled director, it also began his association with films of explicit sexual content. He continued to receive international critical acclaim with the release of Soldier of Orange (1979), which was nominated for a Golden Globe Award and was named Best Foreign-Language Film by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
Graphic acts of sex and violence were also integral to his two subsequent films: Spetters (1980), a film about teenage alienation in Holland; and The Fourth Man (1984), winner of the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, the Toronto Film Festival's International Award, and the Jury Prize at Avoriaz.
Controversy surrounding Verhoeven's work became more heated with his move to the United States in 1986. His first American feature, Flesh and Blood , started a long-running battle between the director and Jack Valenti's Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rating authority. Flesh and Blood 's brutal depictions of sixteenth-century battles and candid sex scenes began a battle over ratings that would continue through Verhoeven's next three features.
Considered one of the most violent films of 1987, Robocop , a post-modernist blend of science fiction, action-adventure, and the Western, is often viewed as a critique of corporate and consumer capitalism. Verhoeven's subsequent film, Total Recall (1990), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, is one of the most expensive feature films ever produced. The negative cost and worldwide marketing budget has been estimated to be over $100 million. Both these films were given the highly restrictive rating of "X"—prohibited to viewers under the age of seventeen—due to what was judged to be excessive violence. The films were then re-edited to meet the requirements of the "R" rating—under seventeen admitted with the accompaniment of an adult.
Perhaps the most controversial film of Verhoeven's career is Basic Instinct , released in 1992. The story, with a $3 million script written by Joe Eszterhas, concerned a bi-sexual woman suspected of several murders who engages in a sexual relationship with the male police detective investigating the crimes. The MPAA again found Verhoeven's work problematic on the grounds of both sex and violence. Basic Instinct was only the second release from a major studio to receive a rating of "NC-17"—no children under seventeen admitted (the first was Henry and June , directed by Philip Kaufman). Like the X, which was abolished in 1990, an NC-17 rating threatens the economic viability of a motion picture at the box office. Many theaters refuse to screen the films, community presses and television stations may reject advertisements, and some video rental outlets will not carry films thus rated. Again, the film was cut to meet the standards of an R rating.
In addition to the ratings controversy, the film was protested by several national gay and lesbian organizations for its stereotypical representations of lesbians and bi-sexuals. The film was criticized because, like many films of the period, it depicted sexual relations outside of the traditional heterosexual marriage as excessive and dangerous, linking homosexuality with violence.
Verhoeven was reunited with the creative team behind the commercially successful Basic Instinct in 1995 with the production of Showgirls. It was a landmark film, as Verhoeven became the first director in the United States hired by a major motion picture studio to deliver a film without the obligation of achieving an R rating. Showgirls was released with an NC-17 rating and generated considerable interest, but generally negative reviews.
Bodies
and Super-Bodies: The Hallucinatory Physicality of Cult Cinema Lesley Chow from Cineaste, Winter 2008
From one point of view, the word “cult” connotes the simply oppositional. From this perspective, cult is as generic a term as cool—a way of explaining obvious badness or plainness, or of injecting flavor into an otherwise bland product. It is a way of riding over narrative schisms, or classifying a film that’s inexplicably busy or zany (hence the perceived craziness of Hong Kong films with odd subtitles.) If cult is mixed in with camp, it becomes a way of enshrining a seemingly impassive or oblivious subject—in which case, no end of things might be reclaimed as cult. Cult could be defined as a special pleasure in against-the-grain readings: for instance, ironically inflating the reputation of a soap, or the quiver of Faye Dunaway’s voice.
If cult is to be understood as more than just a contrarian stance, however, it might be useful to consider the word in light of its formal roots: that is, a rapt and devoted attention to the image. In cinematic terms, this indicates something regarded with unusual intensity, rather than just defiantly liked. In this sense, a cult film might be identified as one which involves a deep immersion in strangeness, leading to a genuine confusion of values.
While the question of the entire range of defamiliarization of normative values in cult film is too broad a topic for the scope of this article, I’d argue that one of the most intriguing disturbances created by cult occurs at the level of its excited attention to the body, and the similarly intense attention it solicits from the audience. In cult film, audience attention to body parts is analogous with the way we identify routinely with characters. In a cult movie where fixations abound, our feelings of surprise, dread, and arousal leap not only from person to person but from body part to body part. Is it any wonder that cult films make such a fetish of mouths: the red lips of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)—on a par with the Rolling Stones’ tongue as an archetype—have come to symbolize the psychic and sexual transfers of that film. More recently, Showgirls (1995)—the only film comparable to Rocky Horror as a “midnight movie” phenomenon—offers an equally arresting yet confounding sexual image. Paul Verhoeven creates a race of glazed, surgically perfected dancers—like blonde androids—whose manic thrusts and gyrations suggest a crazed distortion of the Hollywood ideal. Such films destabilize our normative relationships with our bodies.
To a large extent, these films function as cults of the odd body. They shatter old norms of cinematic physicality. The hyperbolic bodies in these films serve as guides to fixation for the audience, suggesting ways we might extend ourselves through action or prosthetic enhancement. The films urge us to consider uncanny new uses for the body, both spectacular and mortifying. Yet not every film with spectacular bodies is a cult film. Cult movies also rely on a careful modulation of mood—a sense of being absorbed in their own oddity. Even a film as hardened as Showgirls slips between cynicism and the delirium of its ventures into dance and a rhapsodic style of Forties filmmaking. This standard gives us a way of separating films that have valid cult preoccupations with the body and films that barely cause a ripple in our perceptions of the flesh.
An example of the latter is Harold and Maude (1971) the cult reputation of which depends in many ways on the potentially controversial relationship between an adolescent and an eighty-year-old sexpot at the center of its narrative. The actual movie, however, contains little real physical display; even the “shock” of its romance depends on a series of reaction shots of purse-lipped skeptics within the film. There might be a certain interest in the fact that its bodies are inert and starchy rather than sensual, but director Hal Ashby lacks faith in this nonconformist vision; each scene is held too long as the camera circles ponderously around the misfits. The film has no tentacles—nothing to connect this one case to further themes and possibilities. I’d liken it to recent releases such as Secretary (2002) and Lars and the Real Girl (2007) in its tame treatment of fetish. All three films provide a cool overview of obsession; the cozy art-house style of Lars is totally detached from a voyeur’s intimate understanding, while Secretary is an all too sane version of deviance, with a generic look that requires no decoding.
Compare this with the truly disruptive force of Rocky Horror: Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry) is a mythic monster, in that he displaces female traits onto a masculine structure, resulting in an appearance both attractive and abject. His lips and the curve of his upper legs are pillows of softness, encouraging libidinal investment. There is an abundance of lush signifiers affixed to a butch body, or hidden in interior compartments. Frank-N-Furter inhabits not only the role of drag goddess, but a level of pagan myth: he’s almost a succubus in his sex-changing pursuits, invading the bridal chambers (coded blue and red) of the virgin man and woman.
When it comes to the outré connotations of bodies, Paul Verhoeven is a meticulous stylist of female parts. Perhaps more than any current director, Verhoeven is engrossed in the look of women: the appearance of his female leads is the most important in a complex mélange of style elements. One long look is enough to tell us what kind of reality each film is grounded in, from the toothy and opaque Denise Richards in Starship Troopers (1997), to the angular Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct (1992), whose appearance makes you crave linearity. In Black Book (2006), the blonde played by Carice van Houten is more naturalistic, but still a “type” whose dramatic potential can be apprehended at first glance—her profile is that of a windswept woman in a melodrama. The degree of subtle shading of each woman lets us know exactly what investment to make in her world; it’s as if the emotions suggested by her face are a microcosm of the film’s concerns. Throughout his career, Verhoeven has honed numerous variations of the blonde: seeming to delight in her decorative nature, power, and the style factor she signifies above all.
For Showgirls, even the film’s poster image clues us into the state of Verhoeven’s unreality. The “s” of the female nude is all sheen and body tone—sinew rather than voluptuousness. In the film, the naked body of the protagonist, Nomi (Elizabeth Berkley), is revealed with little sense of vulnerability. Her face is often immobile so the concentration is on her mouth, with its highly textured, artificial gloss, and her bizarre fetish for nails. Nomi’s blank look is malleable; her lips can be metallicized, her cheeks rouged like a dominatrix. While many of the film’s women are surgically tooled, the one girl (Nomi’s love rival) who appears untouched seems dopier, slower than the rest; it’s as if her “natural” body has made her less streamlined or alert. In Vegas, a pure beauty is a look without novelty—hence the film finds room for an oversize burlesque performer with trick breasts, or a male lead who looks like a melting Ken doll. The entertainers are a group of writhing, polysexual dancers—like extras in a Madonna video, whose nudity is listlessly dangled about (the film’s esthetic is a throwback to ’80s Madonna, with her powerful robotic body, an assembly of chiseled parts.)
Yet Verhoeven’s universe is even more particular than this: all these bodies are showcased in a setting reminiscent of Thirties studio glory, a Selznick world of volcanoes and mythic sensuality. For all its skin, Showgirls is not a very lascivious film—its sex tends to be futuristic and unusual rather than provocative. The choreography is frenzied, and the nudity consists of a remorseless classifying of types. Surprisingly, none of the women are prey to masochism—as in, say, Shohei Imamura, or the first half of Death Proof (2007). The Vegas panorama, with its neon and Egyptian stylings, is largely available to frame moments between women; each vista settles to accommodate an aspect of female drama. Onstage, as well as behind the scenes, the film runs through the spectrum of female genres: the women’s prison drama, the rape-revenge movie, the Forties picture based on female friendships, blackmailing, and alliances. The film’s hierarchy is that of All About Eve (1950), with bitchy backstage antics, and a reigning brunette queen deposed by an outsider. Verhoeven applies the old showbiz scale to the business sphere; within a corporate, impersonal domain, the film insists on uncovering the dreaminess of a Forties woman’s picture. In this, Showgirls displays one of the hallmarks of the cult film: it makes decadence a homely place, the base for a family of “freaks.” With its maternal guiding figures, the film turns sexploitation into a space of domestic and familial interaction.
Also genuinely cultish in its investigation of the female body is Tarantino’s fiery, comparatively obscure Death Proof. While its companion film, Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror (2007), was more obviously cultish in its approach to women’s parts—it converted Rose McGowan’s thigh into a pulsing machine gun—its bodies were candied and unreal compared to those of Tarantino. I felt this most acutely when watching one of Tarantino’s frequent leg shots, where a woman’s feet tap on a car window, stretched out in idle relaxation. What happens to women with “lazy legs”? In a film with the threat of a serial killer, these are “moral” shots as much as cheesecake ones. Lazy legs denote freedom and a certain languid irresponsibility; in Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945), the character named “Lazy Legs” had an indolence that was chronic, capable of infecting men and driving them to neurosis.
Tarantino excels at showing women at rest and play, in love and
in fear. The film’s first half has a deep, tense atmosphere, reminiscent of
magazine ads for Kool cigarettes: those insidious campaigns which feature a
man’s arm and fist in the foreground, while a woman in his eyeline cowers in
aroused awe. It’s a form of fetishism which advertising encourages us to
internalize: the erotic lingering on a sadistic scene. In Death Proof,
Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) is the fist—a surly, aggressive man who unnerves
women by working on their vulnerabilities. He unlocks the sexual masochism in a
seemingly confident young woman; she succumbs to the extent of giving him a lap
dance. Shortly afterwards, she and her group of friends are drawn into a fatal
encounter with him. This, the film suggests, is one of the dynamics between men
and women; certain girls can be aroused by being troubled and intimidated.
Women who are exhilaratingly free plunge into the madness and messiness of
sexual
violence. As this first segment closes, that dynamic seems inescapable.
Then the morning comes, and the sunny flipside of the film begins: with a quartet of chatty, upbeat women on a road trip. In their bright T-shirts, they look like pink and yellow sundaes, but their talk is earthy and everyday (no artist has mined the style of African-American women like Tarantino, outside of hip-hop.) With their aerobic forms, they suggest a clean, energy-efficient form of girl power, which easily trumps the hubris of Mike. One of the protagonists is a “real” woman, Zoe (Zoe Bell), a New Zealand stunt double. Raw in body and her roughhewn accent, she’s a strange presence in a genre film: one of Tarantino’s cabinet of cult objects. The multicultural world of filmmaking has apparently brought us a new range of curiosities—including Antipodean stuntwomen who cruise small towns. In battle with Mike, this woman mounts her car like the prow of a ship. The formerly unassailable male figure turns panting and anxious, more than the women in the first segment. It’s asif those sad, slain women have been airlifted into a new breezy chapter. Where those characters saw no end to their despair, the girls in the second half turn the tables on that reading. Mike is whipped from every direction by a pack of taunting girls. Significantly, these women are effortless rather than emotionally invested: they’re triumphant but somewhat detached in rejoicing over the fallen man. This light, angst-free mood is here to stay.
None of the films I’ve discussed, however, have really been willing to lose their preconceptions in relation to sexual identity. Showgirls and Death Proof are body-conscious films, willing to play variations on the existing gender game, rather than redefine those oppositions. Redefinition is hard to find, and it is not necessarily in films that are widely recognized as cult. In fact, the most radical cult films I’ve come across are two fantasias of female imagery by Irvin Kershner, Up the Sandbox (1972) and Eyes of Laura Mars (1978). Eyes of Laura Mars has received some attention as a cult film, while Up the Sandbox has not. But both films present us with a cultish focus on the body that ought to be acknowledged as central paradigms of the body in the cult film. They both take place in a murky night world, where a woman encounters a parade of strangely distorted stereotypes: monstrous mothers, cult activists, and icons of sex and death. Up the Sandbox is a one-off in that it combines sophisticated feminist theory with a mood of babyhood: a feeling of being incredulous at sexual difference.
The film begins with a young mother, Margaret (Barbra Streisand), washing her infants in the tub; a soundtrack plays, which resembles a warped version of tinkling toys. This moist, hazy atmosphere persists, and gradually infuses us. We internalize Margaret’s childlike surprise at the appearance of men and women—her curiosity about the body and its behavior, which extends to speculation about matriarchal Amazonian tribes, or the mating habits of insects. During a daydream, she envisions meeting an amorous Fidel Castro with breasts. It appears that her imagination has a particular bent; after deconstructing bodies, she reassembles the parts incompletely or incorrectly, resulting in new forms.
Margaret lapses into fantasies which range from a reworking of topical issues—polyamory, abortion, the Black Panthers—to a more generalized sense that borders between bodies have been erased. Throughout these visions, the film remains utterly focused on interiority: fixed in a half-awake, soupy state, even as it takes what now seems like a peculiarly period interest in women’s experience. The issues of daycare and equal parenting are regarded as neither tiresome nor politically correct, but of puzzling interest: the substance of myth rather than modish social life. The movie also has a particular, wiggy fascination with Africa; while it’s wary of academics who sample tribal cultures, Margaret’s paranoia often bleeds into fantasies of Africa, linked to her feelings of being crowded and forced into inexplicable rituals. It’s strange for a major studio film to have such private, discomfiting obsessions, but Kershner simply folds them into the mix, stirring them into the Altman-like chatter. As such, Margaret’s visions of Kenyan birth rites seems like an extension of the bizarre maternal models closer to home, such as her own, intrusive mother. When viewed through a heated hallucination, the world can seem like a floating procession of bellies and torsos, breeders and offspring, nothing more than combinations of psychoanalytic tropes. The film often resembles a version of Alice in Wonderland, with its series of archetypes inflated to different scales. Body parts are misplaced; everyday objects take on fantastical power. Mothers can be soft and tactile, or gargantuan and insatiable (with her knowing genie eye, Streisand signals mood changes very effectively.) Occasionally, this stay-at-home mom feels dumbly obdurate, like a heavy body outwitted by sharp minds; at other times, she loves her warm immersion in the biological world.
With its Helmut Newton photos and ditzy, gorgeous models, Eyes of Laura Mars should be a camp fashion artifact—so what makes it a cult? For a start, Kershner’s interest in fashion is far from cursory: he goes deep into that rarefied sphere, where every kind of marvel is catered for. Laura (Faye Dunaway) is a Newton-esque photographer, who specializes in chic references to sadism and oppression. She shoots models as cadavers and designer car- crash victims. The girls look stylishly lifeless and manipulated; their tortured expressions result in fabulous, contoured cheekbones. An actor turns up cheerfully to play a corpse, while daffy assistants run around asking, “Where do you want the blood?” This is a night carnival, where cross-dressing and theatrical fanaticism are the norm.
Yet the movie recognizes no separation between the esthetic of high fashion and the outside world. The film is simultaneously a plausible reality and a consistent fashion portfolio, frame by frame. Everything is interpreted in terms of a photographic eye; pockmarked cops and drivers seem like extras on location. Even the docks and scummy surrounds of New York look like sets, with art-directed ambience. Laura presides as empress over this labyrinthine world, which is almost a sect: a group of people who gather to stage macabre tableaux. At its centre is a convincing, close family of eccentrics and fashionistas; at the edges are New York’s wild-eyed stalkers, like Weegee figures come to life. Each scene contains layer upon layer of stylistic reference. A detective’s face is framed against a black slash of canvas; we focus on a static image in front of a felt and acted scene. Before a model is killed, her pink, glowing skin is viewed through slitted blinds—a nod to the black joke of editorial photography. But Laura isn’t in control of every image; she’s possessed of a clairvoyant vision which wraps her like a visor. As it turns out, her creative drive transmits real-time killing; her shots are re-creations of actual crimes. So this magazine culture is serious stuff: while others might dismiss Laura’s vision as trivial, this movie claims it’s a psychic experience of interiority.
One the most fascinating things a film can do is to coopt the interests of a minority, and project them onto a collective screen. Like Up the Sandbox, this film perceives a specialist fetish as universal; it focuses on a particular, narrow stream—in this case, fashion ephemera—and insists on finding it haunting. This society of perversion and theatrical decadence is the only world the film knows; thus every detail of fashion life becomes iconographic. The language of high fashion is seen as an elaborate, consistent mythology which augurs death. When “Let’s All Chant” is played at a shoot—with its compulsive “ooh-ooh” refrain—the song seems less like a disco hit then a hymn to the dizzying loss of identity. Murder gives impetus to what might otherwise be a free-flowing, contentedly hedonistic world; if anything, real violence enlivens and animates the stock poses. Photography is read as a world of symbolism, so that images which come to life in the darkroom are the signs of psychic phenomena. There is no barrier between the public stage and the hallucinogenic creations of the mind.
These are two films which could be deemed superficially cultish, due to their costumes and the histrionic potential of their stars. With Faye Dunaway in Laura Mars, however, the film refuses to go camp: instead of focusing on her operatic manner, Kershner instead studies her hooded eye shape, and asks what mysteries it encodes. Cult cinema can be divided into films that are “knowing”—a movie that keeps its head, sanity and superiority, like Showgirls—and those that are less certain, preferring to identify with the amorphous body. Both Kershner films feature radical switches across gender and class, with body confusion and psychic merging occurring as part of an ostensible fantasy plot. Yet amidst all of this subversion, the films maintain their serene glide; the camera acknowledges no disturbance as it moves between margin and center, protected and public selves. Of Up the Sandbox, Kershner has said that he worked hard to create a consistent atmosphere—rather than an obvious mood swing, he wanted to give us the subtle, quiet feeling that “something isn’t quite natural.” That’s an understatement—nothing in this film is “natural”, not even biology. When nature does appear, it spills and gushes out, in the form of ripe, overinflated bellies. On the other hand, “alternative” models of thought produce feminists of outstanding peculiarity (Margaret’s “sisterhood” with her husband’s suspected lover, as well as her stint with the Black Panthers.)
What’s special about the Kershner films is that rare quality of unknowing—the feeling of a film being too preoccupied and distracted to take account of us. As Jonathan L. Crane has proposed in his work on Russ Meyer, one definition of a cult film is that it “doesn’t seem to have a clue to whom it is speaking”; in seeming not to notice or recognize the audience, it encourages us to “become strangers to ourselves.” By communicating largely with itself, the cult film posits and fashions a new viewer—one willing to be entranced by its mumbling self-talk. With Kershner, neither film can keep its gaze off the specific obsessions of a minority group.
Cult gives us the sense of a special interest coded into cinema, the marginal encrypted in the mainstream. In Showgirls, that interest runs counter to a commercial sensibility; the film signals that its real pleasure is in re-creating the dramas of the woman’s picture, while going through the moves of sexploitation. Rocky Horror appears to care very little for its disposable cast of lanky ingénues, compared with the demonic glory of Frank-N-Furter. In Death Proof, Tarantino’s agenda goes against the current, sadistic mood of pulp and action films. He places four women in the muck of sexual politics and violence, only to reinvent them as an elite squad of uncomplicated feminists—as relaxed and talkative as they are fierce. Both Kershner films deal with women facing kinky sexual disturbance, while preserving a strange veneer of calm and domesticity. Yet the aura of magical ease and comfort in all these films is key. The characters of cult are fully rounded in their oddity: a warm home of misfits, the family of freaky voices that chatter on.
Paul
Verhoeven - New Netherland Institute
biography
Paul
Verhoeven - The NAF biography from
the Netherland-American Foundation
Paul Verhoeven
• Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema
Dan Shaw, January 24, 2003
Paul Verhoeven
biography and filmography | Paul Verhoeven movies biography
Paul Verhoeven |
Biography, Movie Highlights and Photos | AllMovie biography
Paul
Verhoeven and his Hollow Men - Screening the Past Angela Ndalanis, December 1, 2001
BFI | Sight & Sound | Sleeping With The Enemy Linda Ruth Williams from Sight and Sound, February 2007
Bodies and Super-Bodies: The Hallucinatory ... - Cineaste Magazine Lesley Chow, Winter 2008
The
Films of Paul Verhoeven | Ruthless Culture
Jonathan McCalmont, July 13, 2012
Career Arc:
Paul Verhoeven « - Grantland Alex
Pappademas, February 12, 2014
Cinema
Scope | The Rules of the Game: Paul Verhoeven's Elle Adam Nayman, September 02, 2016
The Films of Paul Verhoeven Ranked From Worst to ... - Slant Magazine Jaime N. Christley, November 9, 2016
Perfect Perversion: The Feature Films of Paul Verhoeven (Part One ... Jacob Knight from Birth.Movies.Death, November 30, 2016
Perfect
Perversion: The Feature Films of Paul Verhoeven (Part Two ... Jacob Knight from Birth.Movies.Death, December 1, 2016
Paul
Verhoeven: cinema's mischievous satirist is more vital than ever ... Ben Walters from The Guardian, February 3, 2017
The
Violent Satire of Paul Verhoeven - One Room With A View Kambole Campbell, March 7, 2017
Misogynist
or feminist? The murky world of director Paul Verhoeven ... Tobias Grey from The Spectator, March 18, 2017
RoboCop (1987) • Paul
Verhoeven • Senses of Cinema
Christian McCrea, June 22, 2017
Basic Instinct
(1992) • Paul Verhoeven • Senses of Cinema
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, June 22, 2017
Starship Troopers
(1997) • Paul Verhoeven • Senses of Cinema
Dan Shaw, June 22, 2017
Zwartboek (Black
Book) 2006 • Paul Verhoeven • Senses of Cinema Martyn Bamber, June 22, 2017
Talking with the “Hollow Man” -
Salon.com Dave McCoy interview with
actor Kevin Bacon, August 1, 2000
Paul
Verhoeven Interview | Neil Young's Film Lounge - Jigsaw Lounge Neil Young interview, April 18, 2002
Cinema Scope | Interviews | Vulgar Moralism: Paul Verhoeven's Black ... Robert Koehler interview, 2007
indieWIRE INTERVIEW | “Black Book” Director Paul Verhoeven ... Howard Feinstein interview from indieWIRE, April 2, 2007
'Showgirls':
Paul Verhoeven on the Greatest Stripper Movie Ever Made ... Jennifer Wood interview from Rolling Stone magazine, September 22,
2015
Interview:
Paul Verhoeven - Film Comment Margaret
Barton-Fumo interviews the director, January 12, 2016
Paul
Verhoeven interview: the director continues to stoke up ... Geoffrey Macnab interview from The Independent, May 20, 2016
Cinema
Scope | The Rules of the Game: Paul Verhoeven's Elle Adam Nayman interview, September 02,
2016
Pumping
It Up: Paul Verhoeven Discusses "Elle" on Notebook | MUBI Daniel Kasman interview, October 14, 2016
The
Film Comment Podcast: Paul Verhoeven - Film Comment Film
Comment podcast: Violet Lucca shares comments with a group of Verhoeven
connoisseurs, including Cinema Scope critic Adam Nayman, Film
Comment Deep Cuts columnist Margaret Barton-Fumo (also the
editor of a forthcoming book of interviews with Verhoeven), and Fort Buchanan director
Benjamin Crotty, while in the final part, Margaret Barton-Fumo speaks
to Verhoeven about the uncomfortable eroticism that pervades Elle and his
Brechtian influences, November 15, 2016 (1:17:30)
Paul
Verhoeven on Elle, satirizing Trump, and why his movies feature ... Jeffrey Bloomer interview from Slate, November 23, 2016
Paul Verhoeven:
'Hollywood studios think audiences are so stupid' Matt Thrift interview from Little White Lies, Fall 2016
Flesh & Blood,
directed by Paul Verhoeven | Film review - Time Out
Although shot in Spain, this was Verhoeven's first English-language movie and a stepping stone to Hollywood (Orion put up half the budget). Not that the Dutchman seems to have borne American sensibilities in mind: a medieval anti-romance about a virginal heiress (Leigh) who falls into the grip of a rapacious band of superstitious mercenaries led by the brutal Martin (Hauer), the film overflows with pestilence, plague and pillage. The girl's fondness for her rapist won't commend the film to feminists either. It's hamstrung by leaden dialogue and the motley international cast - Python and the Grail are never that far away - but it's admirably unsentimental and by no means stupid.
Flesh + Blood - AV Club Film Noel Murray
The wonder and the
curse of Paul Verhoeven is that so many of his films are tough to appreciate,
let alone enjoy, except by viewers who've spent time with the director's entire
body of work. Although Verhoeven mostly makes violent, sexy genre pieces, his
love of the punishing and the absurd can look ridiculous unless it's placed in
the context of the far-reaching moralistic pessimism he's expressed in Dutch
thrillers like The Fourth Man and Hollywood blockbusters like RoboCop
and Starship Troopers. Aside from established fans, the only people
likely to enjoy Verhoeven's 1985 English-language film debut Flesh + Blood—the
last of his theatrical features to reach DVD—will be those who like mud,
misery, and grating barbaric laughter. Rutger Hauer plays an early-16th-century
mercenary who leads a troupe of bandits and whores in a revolt against a lord
who owes them money. Jennifer Jason Leigh is a virginal lady pledged to
nobleman Tom Burlinson, but she's kidnapped by the rebels and becomes Hauer's
mostly willing mate. Flesh + Blood contains a heavy religious component
(Hauer fosters loyalty by insisting that he can spot signs from God), but since
Verhoeven believes in God but not religion, he makes Christian ritual look as
vulgar as possible: Hauer pounds down Eucharist like cocktail peanuts before
heading off to pillage. Verhoeven emphasizes his characters' obsession with
sex, their fear of plague, and their fascination with the clever inventions
that facilitate war. The rebels aren't so much crude as emotionally stunted,
and when they raid a castle, they behave like hormone-drunk teens having an
unchaperoned house party. Though Flesh + Blood tells a terrific story,
written by Verhoeven with his longtime collaborator Gerard Soeteman, the
presentation is rough, and not just because the film is packed with gore and
rape. Verhoeven doesn't believe in tasteful framing that implies nudity; he
prefers the bare-assed variety, the kind that makes the body's frailty plain.
The most vivid moments stem from such lack of restraint, as when Leigh talks
romance with Burlinson while she searches beneath two rotting, hanged corpses
for roots that reportedly grow from the semen of dead men. But the depiction of
social chaos in Flesh + Blood extends to the film's noisy, busy,
sometimes confusing style. It's enlightening to watch the DVD with Verhoeven's
commentary track, which veers off into an eloquent discussion of medieval
Christian history, a summary of the Biblical view of human sexuality, and an
analysis of European filmmaking vs. American filmmaking. With Verhoeven serving
as tour guide, Flesh + Blood more obviously fits into his persistent
vision of a world of mass delusion where self-interest masquerades as good
intentions, a hell on Earth where the poor die while the rich get paid.
Maybe the only thing more remarkable than the blu-ray release of 1985 schlock-fest Flesh + Blood is the fact that the film ever got made at all. Directed by Paul Verhoeven before his successes with Robocop and Starship Troopers, this movie manages to rival 1986’s Howard the Duck in terms of sheer (for lack of a better word) suckitude.
Okay, it’s not quite as bad as that, but it’s a hot mess nonetheless, and a pretty good primer in how not to make a movie.
The year is 1501 and the location is helpfully specified as “Western Europe”, but really the film is set at some murky point in “the olden days”, a time and place that owes more to Monty Python and the Holy Grail than any specific historical era. Rutger Hauer, never an actor known for particularly nuanced performance, takes center stage as Martin, a solder in the service of a down-on-his-luck nobleman named Arnolfini. “Down on his luck” in this case means “without his city and castle that he lost in the last war and now is trying to get back”. With Hauer’s help, along with a couple hundred extras, Arnolfini regains his city, but then engages in a devious betrayal that shows him for the scoundrel that he really is. Hilarity ensues, much of it fairly predictable. Viewers who remain uncertain as to whether Arnolfini gets his comeuppance will no doubt remain glued to the screen to the very end.
Amidst all the blood there is also, as the title promises, a fair amount of flesh, most of which comes in the form of a subplot involving the maidenly Agnes, who has been wedded to Steven, Arnolfini’s son. Agnes gets caught up in the revenge plot against her father-in-law, and finds herself placed in an extended damsel-in-distress scenario as a result. Do you think she’ll grow to have mixed feelings about her captors? Only time will tell.
The whole movie has a low-budget, direct-to-video cheapness to its look, with a muddy color palette and a constantly-moving camera that still manages to makes the scenes feel static. More problematic still are the performances, which are overly broad and tone-deaf in their attempt to inject levity into scenes that are entirely lacking in humor. If you get a chuckle from watching poor peasants learning how to use cutlery, then hey, this is the movie for you.
The script’s occasional forays into darker imagery or tone fail utterly as a result of the director’s inability to resist a corny joke or hammy performance. When the movie swerves into something genuinely disturbing, such as an act of sexual violence, this juxtaposition is even more jarring. The presentation of gang rape is never something to be taken lightly, and the movie’s willingness to go there is unfortunate to say the least.
Hauer does his best—which admittedly isn’t very good—with weak material, and some of the minor players are competent, such as character actor Brion James as one of the soldiers and Jack Thompson as Hawkwood, captain of the army. But Tom Burlinson’s Steven is bland beyond words (his feathered-and-layered haircut doesn’t help any), and the normally reliable Jennifer Jason Leigh as love interest Agnes is equally vapid.
Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray release looks about as good as the film can, with a mostly-clear picture (although some some speckling shows up during certain shadowy scenes) and sound that is clear enough, though somewhat flat. Bonus features are surprising for such a minor film, including a lengthy featurette on the writing of the film’s score, just in case viewers who have sat through the movie haven’t heard enough of it. More interesting is the audio commentary from director Verhoeven himself, who manages a number of pithy observations and a good deal of insider info about the $6.5 million-dollar movie that he is discussing.
Fans of Verhoeven’s later work might be interested in seeing this early effort, but viewers should resist the impulse unless they are fans of “so bad it’s good” historical pictures. Even then, they’re apt to be disappointed: Flesh + Blood isn’t so bad it’s good, as much as being simply bad. Tone deaf and overacted, it nonetheless contains competent cinematography and a few genuinely compelling sequences (as when the revenge-seeking soldiers storm a castle midway through the movie). But these sequences are inevitably undermined sooner rather than later. Despite its promisingly cheesy pedigree, this is one that can be safely missed.
eFilmCritic Scott Weinberg
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Budd Wilkins]
The Spinning Image [Graeme Clark]
Legends of the Silver Screen [Mitch Lovell]
Junta Juleil's Culture Shock [Sean Gill]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Jennie Kermode]
In this, his one true masterpiece,
auteur-of-excess Paul Verhoeven wanted to show "a society where...gender
has not always a sexual connotation." Such a remark might come as a
surprise considering that this is the director who insists on crossing lines of
propriety (he made Basic Instinct and Showgirls, remember), but
it's also one of RoboCop's many virtues. Progressive gender politics
aside, the film (1987) rings most true as a parodic paean to corporate values,
technology, and Reagan-era privatization and deregulation.
RoboCop Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus
On the commentary
track that accompanies the Criterion Collection's new DVD version of RoboCop,
director Paul Verhoeven kicks things off by admitting that, on a first read of
the film's script, he declined the project, mistaking it for just another
"B-level science fiction movie" from the Hollywood crap factories.
Verhoeven's comments are closely followed by those of producer Jon Davison, who
imagines Verhoeven simply reading the first 20 pages of the script by Ed
Neumeier and Michael Miner and then throwing the damn thing across the room.
(From RoboCop, Verhoeven advanced to the far more swollen melodrama of
Basic Instinct and Showgirls -- his active philosophy where
Verhoeven credits
his wife with a closer reading of the screenplay, leading to the realization
that there was something very humanistic dwelling below the surface of this
cruel urban potboiler. When Neumeier himself weighs in to describe the film as "fascism
for liberals," he's only half joking. RoboCop is a grand guilty
pleasure for cinephiles -- a stops-out tub-thumper of an action movie that's so
brutal it's scary, but which doubles as social commentary and stirs the viewer
on its own melodramatic terms.
A major theme is
greed and careerist machinations in the context of a privatized police force
and a military-industrial complex gone absolutely nutso. RoboCop's
world is one driven by the inexorability of the bottom line, one where the
bestselling American car is a cheerful gas-guzzler called the "6000
SUX" and where TV programming that makes Benny Hill look like Robert
Benchley inspires catch-phrases like "I'd buy that for a dollar."
All of that is
pretty funny, if not necessarily cutting-edge satire. But it's the cynical
backdrop for an ultimately optimistic story about humanity lost and regained.
Neumeier calls it a story of "a sensitive cyborg with an identity
crisis."
Peter Weller plays
the unfortunate cop Murphy, who's sacrificed in the name of technological
progress. When Murphy and partner Nancy Allen arrive at what looks like a
toxic-waste-ridden abandoned steelyard, Murphy is captured and blasted to bits
by the criminals. It's a nasty scene, one whose most striking bits were trimmed
for an R rating but have been restored in Criterion's version. Verhoeven
imagined it as a crucifixion, and shoots it with a carnal sort of reverence.
Murphy is
"resurrected" as RoboCop, an experimental cybernetic version of a
human being, with body armor and robotic limbs supporting the leftover bits of
humanity. He seems to be inspired as much by the quintessentially American myth
of Dirty Harry as by Judge Dredd, then something of a sensation in the
world of British comics. (The Judge Dredd comic books were far, far better than
the subsequent Stallone film, and exhibit a dryly comic sense of future
"justice" that prefigured Neumeier's screenplay to the extent that,
as I recall, some comic book readers considered the film a rip-off.)
RoboCop's journey to
redemption, by vanquishing the criminals and giving his corporate overlords
their violent comeuppance, is imagined with consistent sensitivity, humor, and
an unerring instinct for the grossout. The participants in Criterion's
commentary track go on at some length about the enthusiasm of audience response
to their film, and rightly so. When film students or serious fans want to
analyze the ways that an action film can be made to push all the right buttons,
they could scarcely do better than to look at RoboCop. From the script's
canny positioning of Murphy as a stainless steel underdog to the deft technical
credits (makeup FX wunderkind Rob Bottin, who designed RoboCop, and stop-action
guru Phil Tippett, who animated the surprisingly comic ED-209
urban-pacification droid, both made invaluable contributions), the film works
on pretty much every level.
The film's missteps
are in its most obligatory scenes. The gang of bad guys led by a game Kurtwood
Smith really isn't very interesting, as villains go, and a few of the action
sequences certainly would have benefited from a little more time and money. But
even the clunkier scenes are buoyed by a guileless B-movie efficiency that
keeps the picture rolling along.
Criterion's
essential DVD edition of the film is basically their 1994 laserdisc presented
with no side breaks and gussied up with a couple of theatrical trailers. The
image is quite good, although a brand-new transfer may have made the picture
pop off the screen a bit more. (Like all Criterion releases to date, it is a
non-anamorphic transfer, which raises the ire of videophiles who have invested
in widescreen TV sets.) An exhaustive article on the creation of the film from
an old issue of Cinefex magazine is reprinted here with appropriate
sound effects, still frames, and video clips, answering just about any question
you could have about the film's formidable FX work. Also included are
storyboards for two scenes that were deleted before shooting began. Most
engrossing of all is the commentary track, which covers everything from
location shooting in
Late in the film,
Verhoeven proffers one striking image that's composed to suggest that
Murphy/RoboCop is actually walking on water. While that turned the Christ
metaphor up another notch, it was never clear what, exactly, was the point. In
his commentary, Verhoeven is finally allowed to explain that it has something
to do with his thoughts on Christianity in the contemporary United States, and
the ways that people who claim to be doing God's will advocate violence, which
was never part of the original Christian teachings. Well, whatever. That's
probably too much subtext for one movie. Far more stirring, and easier to
swallow, is our vivid imagining of RoboCop's pain as he's gunned down by his
peers in the Detroit Police Force, who are acting on orders from the very top.
As RoboCop crawls toward the camera, listing like a wounded animal, audience
identification with his plight becomes complete. In a split second, the movie's
points about violence, hypocrisy, and humanity all crystallize in one perfect,
mythmaking image.
RoboCop Crieterion essay by Carrie Rickey,
September 08, 1998
RoboCop (1987) - The
Criterion Collection
RoboCop (1987) • Paul
Verhoeven • Senses of Cinema
Christian McCrea, June 22, 2017
Robocop Murphy's law, Robocop's body, and capitalism's work, by Julie F. Codell from Jump Cut, March 1989
Robocop In the ditritus of hi-technology, by Steve Best from Jump Cut, March 1989
John
Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Film and Television November 15, 2005
The Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem]
notcoming.com | RoboCop - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Rumsey Taylor
Robocop
revisited: Paul Verhoeven's caustic political wit feels as ... Dana Stevens from Slate
Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
RoboCop | 2014 | Film Review | Slant Magazine Eric Henderson
RoboCop / The Dissolve Scott Tobias
Cinema de Merde Scott Telek
Scopophilia:
Movies of the 60's, 70's, 80's [Richard Winters]
Robocop - TCM.com James Steffen
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Robocop
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PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs reviewing the Trilogy
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DVD Verdict - The Robocop Trilogy Patrick Bromley
Rock! Shock! Pop! [Ian Jane] Trilogy, also seen here: Robocop Trilogy : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video
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PopMatters [Cyrus Fard] Blu-Ray Trilogy
Robocop
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Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Chris Cabin] Trilogy
ScreenAnarchy [Charles Webb] Blu-Ray Trilogy
Film Intuition: Blu-ray Trilogy [Jen Johans] Trilogy
Movieman's Guide to the Movies - Trilogy Blu-ray [The Movieman]
DoBlu.com 4K Blu-ray [Matt Paprock]
DVD Talk - Blu-ray [Joshua Zyber]
Highdefdigest.com [M. Enois Duarte] Blu-Ray
Qnetwork.com -
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The Steve Pulaski Message Board [Steve Pulaski]
filmcritic.com hires RoboCop Mark Athitakis
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MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman
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Ruthless Reviews ("potentially offensive") Plexico Gingrich
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Robocop
- The New York Times Walter Goodman
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Basic Instinct
| Jonathan Rosenbaum
Reviewing Paul Verhoeven’s 1979 Dutch feature The 4th Man, Dave Kehr objected to conceptions of women as castrating harpies and of gays as predatory beasts that are insulting to all the sexualities involved. Working from a script by Joe Eszterhas, Verhoeven did an even better job of hammering home those notions 13 years later with Basic Instinct. I hated this movie when it was released, but on reflection I think that his appreciation of Sharon Stone as dominatrix/superwoman had a lot to do with what made her a star. Verhoeven also treats Michael Douglas, playing a gullible cop, with the kind of comic-book flourishes that might easily pass for derisiveness and sometimes come across as just plain hilarious. Despite (or maybe because of) his obligatory nods to Hitchcock, this is slick and entertaining enough to work as thriller porn, even with two contradictory denouements to its mystery (take your pick—or rather, ice pick). George Dzundza and Dorothy Malone are among the other actors along for the ride. R, 127 min.
Basic Instinct,
directed by Paul Verhoeven | Film review - Time Out
Nick Curran (Douglas) is a cop on the edge. Investigated for an over-zealous approach to his work, saddled with a drink and relationships problem, he becomes slowly embroiled with the case, then with the suspect, when a former rock star is found murdered at the climax of some bondage-style sex. Catherine Tramell (Stone), an ultra-clever, ultra-rich author and bisexual free spirit, is at the core of all the basic instinct paraded in the film. One scene in which she teases and bosses a roomful of hard law enforcement men is probably the best illustration of post-feminism in action that Hollywood has offered. Yet the film's depiction of not one but several bisexual women with murky, murderous pasts has angered activists, and does illustrate that sensitivity is not always the strong suit of Verhoeven or scriptwriter Joe Eszterhas. But if you like things unrestrained, hard, adult and off-the-rails, then Douglas and Stone are superb, and George Dzundza (as sidekick Gus) delivers another classic hard-boiled cameo.
The Steve Pulaski Message Board [Steve Pulaski]
Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct opens with the vicious
murder of a retired rock star during sex by an unidentified blonde women,
resulting in a blood-soaked, ejaculate-soaked crime-scene - a perfect mixing of
bodily fluids for any erotic thriller. Assigned to the case is Detective Nick
Curran (Michael Douglas), a veteran in his field, who immediately suspects
author Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), the musician's girlfriend who penned a
novel about killing a rock star with an ice-pick during sex. Catherine's
innocence is only assisted by the thought that committing a homicide identical
to that in her novel would be senseless and would fault any attempt at an
alibi.
Nick believes from the get-go she is guilty, but her manipulative,
smooth-talking ways that ooze sensuality and incite arousal make any conviction
about her hard to maintain. Catherine begins playing mind-games with Nick,
emphasizing the time that Nick shot two tourists while high on cocaine,
something he is still going to counseling for and a memory he'll never forget.
His counselor is psychologist Dr. Beth Garner (Jeanne Tripplehorn), who Nick
also had an affair with before his wife's death, all fuel for Catherine's fire
in order to get him to go mad. It doesn't help that Catherine knows how to use
her beauty and her caress as a means of master manipulation to the point where
Nick begins to fall in love with her, the only thing that could truly distract
from his detective work.
Basic Instinct is a well-done erotic thriller largely because it has
both - a great deal of events that effectively arouse and provoke the sexual
senses and a compelling mystery that provokes the part of the brain that
demands answers. With all that, Douglas winds up being a strong presence
throughout the film; a great leading man who is tasked with being emotionally
unstable, in love, a competent worker, and a man bogged down by the many
possibilities and alternate paths of a case that initially seemed cut, dry, and
solved.
But the star here is Stone, and Verhoeven, writer Joe Eszterhas, and Douglas
all know it. Her ability to embody such a devious but admirably sinister
character leaves her with the most power and the most character interest. Stone
is also a terrific screen presence when it comes to being believably controlled
and collected when everyone around her is progressively growing madder,
particularly Nick, who began as level-headed and calm but rapidly descended
into being a loose-cannon. The slow, methodical progression of Basic
Instinct's characters winds up being one of the most interesting things to
watch over the course of the film, and with a liberal two hours to kill,
Verhoeven and Eszterhas can just sit and observe the characters rather than
rushing them into any kind of conclusion or state.
The sex here is detailed and graphic, as it should be for the genre.
Verhoeven's love for the human form is communicated here damn-near as well as
it would be in Showgirls three years later. Verhoeven has always been an
appreciator for sex in cinema and examining such a vice as a way of business
and unadulterated pleasure and having a character that oozes sex and mystery
puts him in top form. He directs the sex scenes in Basic Instinct with a
sense of vulnerability and danger, where both characters find themselves
opening up to someone they shouldn't have or allowing themselves to be touched
and caressed by someone who might hurt them in the future. Sex kills more than
it does sell in this film.
Basic Instinct has been called Hitchcockian in its form and aesthetic,
and some have even asserted that it borrows from the Hitchcock classic Vertigo.
While remaining stylish and sexy throughout the entire film, Verhoeven doesn't
so much as channel Hitchcock as he does mimic him, and when he does, he's not
as polished or as narratively inventive as he was either. Admittedly few are,
but the ending in Basic Instinct feels all too cleanly wrapped up and
Catherine's rapid and successful manipulation of Nick feels a bit too easily
accepted on Nick's end, something I wouldn't necessarily expect from a seasoned
detective. If it was the sex and the beauty of Catherine that had Nick
mesmerized and nothing else, I would have a much easier time believing the
story, but being that mind games, manipulation, and Catherine's extensive prior
knowledge on Nick indicates otherwise, Verhoeven and Eszterhas makes mind games
a bit too easy to be believed and fallen for here.
Most importantly however, Basic Instinct winds up being a successful
erotic thriller that goes most of the full mile without copping out in either
department. This is so important as it is so rare in the modern day to see a
film of this genre, let alone a successful one that doesn't lean to far towards
softcore porn or full-blown murder-mystery/crime-drama. Eszterhas's gentle
screenwriting hand that allows for the narrative to build and Verhoeven's
unmistakable visual style of elegance and danger, coupled with two strong
leading performances, make Basic Instinct a commendable success,
shortcomings and all.
Basic Instinct
(1992) • Paul Verhoeven • Senses of Cinema
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, June 22, 2017
Everyman and no man: white, heterosexual masculinity in contemporary
serial killer movies Nicola Rehling
from Jump Cut, Spring 2007
The
Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks
How
to Write a $3 Million Script [BASIC INSTINCT] | Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, April 3, 1992
Edward
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Nick's
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Web
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Basic Instinct - Movie reviews
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Basic
Instinct (Special Edition) | Film at The Digital Fix Raphael Pour-Hashemi
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Journal Gregory P. Dorr, Special
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USA France (128 mi) 1995 ‘Scope
Showgirls
| Chicago Reader Jonathan
Rosenbaum
Director Paul Verhoeven and writer Joe Eszterhas's fresh meat market—a sleazy Las Vegas porn show with clunky production numbers that resemble body-building exercises, backed by heaps of big studio money. The story, a low-rent version of All About Eve, charts the rise of one bimbo showgirl (Elizabeth Berkley) at the expense of another (Gina Gershon); alas, the only actor who seems comfortable is Kyle MacLachlan. I must admit that, as with Basic Instinct and Starship Troopers, which I also underrated initially, this 1995 movie has only improved with age—or maybe it's just that viewers like me are only now catching up with the ideological ramifications of the cartoonlike characters. In this case, the degree to which Las Vegas (and by implication Hollywood) is viewed as the ultimate capitalist machine is an essential part of the poisonous package. With Glenn Plummer, Robert Davi, Alan Rachins, and Gina Ravera.
Cine-File
Chicago: Kian Bergstrom
Beautiful as money, Nomi Malone hitches a ride to Las Vegas in this film's opening moments, vividly asserting, switchblade at the ready, that she's going to be a dancer. Already she's a commodity, a body circulating through a network of temporary owners for a price, though this won't be fully clear until her past's revealed near the end of the narrative. Vegas proves exactly her equal, a hometown for people rejecting their origins, a city that Verhoeven shows to thrive precisely on the dissemination of dashed dreams and rude awakenings. Any sense of what a 'real' Vegas might look like, how an actual dancer's career trajectory might be completed, is jettisoned in favor of a variegated torrent of imagery drenched in kitsch, in expertly ham-handed appeals to emotional response, in intricate and deadening formal maneuvers. But SHOWGIRLS isn't interested in characters, in narrative, but in glamour, in work, and in the tremendous effort that sexual entertainment takes to produce. 'You like her? ... I'll buy her for you,' the film's substitute Svengali says of Nomi, watching her gyroscopic breasts and buttocks slide around a stripper pole. This is of the falsest of films, constructed out of a series of intersecting surfaces utterly evacuated of substance. Its performers blandly dissemble wide, desperately erotic smiles, force their bodies into simulations of arousal, sweat through humiliating routines of grunt-and-thrust choreography, paint and festoon themselves with lacquer-thick make-up and acres of rhinestones. Verhoeven has always been a master of the physical object, at understanding human relationships as systems of conflicting and merging material engagements, but there has elsewhere always been the underlying hope that reason could see its way clear to an unmediated, somehow genuine connection between real people, could abolish, could transcend the mere appearances of things and give us access to ourselves as whole. Robocop finding, recuperating his family. Doug Quaid claiming interplanetary heroism. Nick Curran catching the killer. SHOWGIRLS will have none of this. It is the ne plus ultra and culmination of Verhoeven's cinema, a film that allows us no escape, that finds beneath every skin and layer nothing other than yet more sequins, glitter, ejaculate, and grime. No film takes American mass culture more seriously, or skewers it more dispassionately.
Showgirls
Lives - Hollywood Elsewhere Jeffrey
Wells, May 25, 2008
In an interview with Margy Rochlin in the N.Y. Times, Elizabeth Berkley -- now the host of Bravo's new competition series Step It Up & Dance (Thursdays at 10 pm) -- is again given the old Showgirls grilling. Naturally.
Rochlin notes that Berkley "has watched Showgirls go from a
movie synonymous with Hollywood tastelessness to what some -- most notably the
French New Wave filmmaker Jacques Rivette -- argue is a
misunderstood art film about surviving in a coarse, venal world. 'For something
that was supposed to die on the video shelf, it certainly has had legs,'
Rivette's Showgirls praise, found in this The Captive Lover - An interview with Jacques Rivette with Jacques Bonnaud, are as follows:
"I prefer Showgirls (1995), one of the great American films of the last few years. It's Verhoeven's best American film and his most personal. In Starship Troopers, he uses various effects to help everything go down smoothly, but he's totally exposed in Showgirls. It's the American film that's closest to his Dutch work. It has great sincerity, and the script is very honest, guileless. It's so obvious that it was written by Verhoeven himself rather than [Joe] Eszterhas, who is nothing. And that actress is amazing!
"Like every Verhoeven film, it's very unpleasant: it's about surviving
in a world populated by assholes, and that's his philosophy. Of all
the recent American films that were set in
Joe "Woman Trouble" Eszterhas reteams with ace stylist Paul Verhoeven, who should know better, to create this bumbling epic of a skin flick. The bulk of the movie is pretty dopey, albeit kind of entertaining. But the World According to Eszterhas, as revealed in an unbearably hostile, stridently righteous final reel, is so smelly and distasteful that Showgirls is, finally, truly and thoroughly repellent.
The last time screenwriter Eszterhas worked with director Verhoeven, the two of them came up with Basic Instinct, an effective if nonsensical vehicle for Michael Douglas's sex-paranoid White Guy and Sharon Stone's supercool, omnisexual psycho bitch. The mark of an Eszterhas script seems to be that nothing in the first half of the movie really syncs up with anything in the second half of the movie -- that's how he concocts them surprise endings, and why the conclusions of his Jagged Edge, Basic Instinct, and Sliver scripts are so unsatisfying, even in the context of our low expectations. (In Basic Instinct, is Stone the killer? Well, it depends on exactly when we fade to black.)
Showgirls eschews cheap murder mystery in favor of
cheap soap opera, and the results are about what you'd expect. It's the story
of Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley), a presumably wholesome girl from
That's actually the best reason to see Showgirls -- the scene where Cristal pays $100 to take Nomi into a back room and have her grind crotches with Agent Cooper, er, I mean Zack, will no doubt be writ large in the annals of camp cinema, and it is something of a spectacle. But for the rest of the movie, even the horniest viewer may feel a little like Alex in A Clockwork Orange -- if you're strapped down with your eyes peeled open and forced to pay attention to all 132 minutes of Showgirls, you may find yourself clinically desensitized to cinematic displays of breasts and pubic hair. (Fear not for the penis, which is conspicuously absent from this bold sexual extravaganza.) If it's naked girls you want, I recommend you grab some direct-to-video soft porn and view it with pride -- Showgirls is the kind of film that makes Zalman King (of Red Shoe Diaries fame) look like a real humanitarian.
Usually, a high-profile Eszterhas script sucks in some fairly
talented performers who can help mitigate the mediocrity somewhat, but is it
possible that a warning bell went off in
Given her apparent lack of real talent, brains or conviction,
we're hardly surprised when Nomi crosses over to The Dark Side, enticed by
Cristal's comfortable smugness. But Eszterhas' idea for Nomi's comeuppance --
which actually involves her best friend -- is indefensibly ugly in its
brutality and gratuitous detail. No matter how much of a hoot you might expect Showgirls
to be, take this as a warning: it's ultimately depressing, and most definitely
not a date movie. We can only wonder what sort of lesson we're supposed to have
gleaned when, at film's end, Nomi sets out to hitch her way into that other
cesspool of the American West,
The final insult? Eszterhas was surely paid millions for this script, which was supposed to open up the theatrical market for mature, responsible, NC-17 Hollywood productions by proving that audiences would flock to see an intelligent, sexy picture. Not only is this movie really dumb, but it's barely sexy, and not even close to explicit. The adults-only rating is well earned, but I'd argue it has more to do with wanton hatefulness and misguided moralizing than sex and nudity, which are usually fine by me. More than any self-consciously "sexy" production I've seen yet, Showgirls puts the rot in erotic.
Showgirls | Film
Review | Slant Magazine Eric
Henderson
Gleefully inspiring audiences everywhere to
challenge conventional definitions of "good" and "bad"
cinema, Showgirls is undoubtedly the think-piece object d'art of its
time. It is Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas's audaciously experimental
satire-but-not-satire, an epically mounted "white melodrama" (to
borrow Tag Gallagher's description of Sirk's early, less mannered, and more
overtly humanistic comedies of error) and also one of the most astringent,
least compromised critiques of the Dream Factory ever unleashed on a
frustrated, perpetually (and ideologically) pre-cum audience. Many things to
many people, and absolutely nothing to a great deal more, Showgirls'
proponents and detractors still square off, digging nine-foot trenches in the
sand (some planting their heads therein instead of their feet) and lobbing
accusations of elitism and anti-pleasure. It is perhaps one of the only films
to bridge that critical gap between Film Quarterly (which hosted a beyond
extensive critical roundtable on the film last year) and Joe Bob Briggs. It is
a film that will continue to bend brains and drain dicks long after the
golf-clap (and Clap-free) cinematic "excellence" of your Jane Austen
bastardization of choice is long dismissed. It is the very definition of the
term "essential."
Okay, I'd probably be a lot more worried about the possibility that I'm
overselling Showgirls if it wasn't already patently clear that most
people have already closed themselves off to the pleasures the film has to
offer. Unimpressed that Joe Eszterhas cribbed copiously from All About Eve
and 42nd Street, viewers don't even stop to address the notion that he
and Paul Verhoeven—who most of the auteurist crowd have given a pass to by this
point, but it doesn't matter because Showgirls exists outside of and
beyond auteurism—are directly commenting on these "Star is Born" pipe
dreams and their culpability in force-feeding the American Dream to an audience
of pop junkies. (I'd love them to try to digest the notion that a third major
influence is Jean Renoir's French Cancan.) Showgirls establishes
its structural patterns so quickly that it seems ludicrous that one could spend
more than 10 minutes ruminating on the obvious narrative parallels. Nomi
Malone, an aspiring bon vivant and full-time cheeseburger consumer, arrives in
From there on, Nomi rides the roller-coaster of ambition and success as she
climbs the ladder of showgirl notoriety, moving from the sleazy, low-rent
Cheetah club (which the film depicts as squalid but honest) to the Taj Mahal of
the Miracle Mile, the Stardust and its sensational "Goddess" floor
show. But to get her name in lights, she'll have to lie and/or backstab
everyone she meets: Molly, the sweet girl who discovers Nomi vomiting in the
street after having her luggage stolen; James, the club bouncer who recognizes
Nomi's burning "talent"; and, ultimately, Cristal Connors, Vegas
legend the current "Goddess" headliner. As quickly as Eszterhas
introduces characters, Verhoeven introduces generic devices and archetypes:
sexhibition, backstage musical, screwball farce, self-actualization melodrama,
diva worship. The constant push-pull effect of mixing genres, tonal shifts and
paradoxes in the name of political incorrectness masks some of Verhoeven's most
sincere directorial choices. Showgirls is a catalogue of professional,
cinematic grace notes. The song Nomi dances to at the Cheetah that entices
Cristal for the first time is Prince's "319," which turns out to be
the number of Cristal's hospital room late in the film (the tables have turned,
but the seduction is still ongoing). At the beginning of the film, it's
Halloween and an utterly down-and-out and French-fry-tossing Nomi is sans
costume (read: identity). When Nomi steps outside after her first night as a
member of the "Goddess" dance troupe, literally reborn as a woman in
charge of her destiny, it's unsurprising to see that it's Christmas in
Verhoeven's unheralded earnestness (the same that undoubtedly inspired him to
personally accept his Razzie for Worst Director) also applies to his canny
casting perception. Everyone pays lip service to how "ironic" it was
for Verhoeven to cast Saved by the Bell's Jessie Spano in the very
physical role of a seemingly bipolar hooker-cum-dancer. This admittedly
fabulous stunt casting ends up leading most to shortchange Berkley's equally
internal portrayal of Nomi's transformation from fallen woman to, well,
re-fallen woman (see the evil, lowered-eyelid geisha shtick she develops). On
the other hand, no one ever seems to comment on how perfectly Gina Gershon was
cast as her brash, Bette Davis rival and how she embodies her role in an
entirely forthright, non-snarky manner. Gershon's blousy performance is
miraculous, one element from which even Showgirls' biggest detractors can
all find some worth. Like
Even those who are willing to look at Showgirls without falling back on
espousing its patently obvious camp charms (which need no defense from us, so
go ahead and insert your favorite Eszterhas couplet
of choice here) end up acknowledging that the film is an outlandish,
albeit obvious, satire of Hollywood/America. ("In
Anyone who's found their "in" with the film by means of settling for
the pungent sexuality of its cast and its equally voluptuous cinematography (Showgirls
rivals Suspiria for sheer, eye-popping color rush)
or enjoying the film for its unabated "badness" inevitably reaches an
impasse once Eszterhas reminds hedonists of the existence of rape. When Molly,
Nomi's second banana, meets her rock star sexual fantasy (earlier in the film
she squealingly strokes his billboard image and jokes about not being able to
hold a needle straight from how many times she's masturbated thinking of him)
and follows him into his hotel room and the gang bang waiting inside, it's a
rude interruption for those who haven't managed to work up any empathy for
anyone in the film up to that point. The scene is suitably horrifying, doubly
so considering it's the moment that she realizes her own fault in creating a
sexual fantasy that can't exist in a shitty star-struck caste system in which
she's nothing more than a seamstress. (Lars von Trier only wishes he
could dream up a rape scenario with as much political and psychosexual
mindfuckitude.) What is even more problematic is the porny vigilante
sequence that follows, because it asks us to accept a very contradictory set of
terms of engagement: (a) that Nomi uses the fantasy structures of Las Vegas
royalty (already clearly defined as corrupt) to exact a tidy, "let the
punishment fit the crime" revenge, and (b) that her experience, her win
ends up validating that corruption, simply by virtue that she succeeded in gaining
the upper hand.
But not so fast. Verhoeven and Eszterhas use this sequence, what with
Ultimately, Showgirls is one of the most honest satires of recent years
because, as Noël Burch wrote in the aforementioned FQ roundtable, it
"takes mass culture seriously, as a site of both fascination and struggle.
And it takes despised melodrama seriously too, as indeed an excellent vehicle
for social criticism." Unfortunately, the critical and public brickbats
thrown at Showgirls (to say nothing of the hosannas foisted upon those
concurrent Austen travesties) demonstrates that most prefer satire when it's
dealing with the distant past to the extent that one can feel morally superior
to the subject of ridicule without recognizing oneself in the mix. I can't
decide whether it's a sad comment on the vapidity of pop culture or merely a
reflection of business-as-usual that VH1's "I Love the '90s" series
studiously ignored including the film in its year-by-year roundup (it certainly
inspired as big a shitstorm as the Snapple Lady, for God's sake). But it's an understandable
omission, since Showgirls is truly one of the only '90s films that
treats pop culture as a vibrant field of social economics and cerebral pursuit,
and not merely tomorrow's nostalgia-masturbation fodder.
Bodies
and Super-Bodies: The Hallucinatory ... - Cineaste Magazine Lesley Chow, Winter 2008
From one point of view, the word “cult” connotes the simply oppositional. From this perspective, cult is as generic a term as cool—a way of explaining obvious badness or plainness, or of injecting flavor into an otherwise bland product. It is a way of riding over narrative schisms, or classifying a film that’s inexplicably busy or zany (hence the perceived craziness of Hong Kong films with odd subtitles.) If cult is mixed in with camp, it becomes a way of enshrining a seemingly impassive or oblivious subject—in which case, no end of things might be reclaimed as cult. Cult could be defined as a special pleasure in against-the-grain readings: for instance, ironically inflating the reputation of a soap, or the quiver of Faye Dunaway’s voice.
If cult is to be understood as more than just a contrarian stance, however, it might be useful to consider the word in light of its formal roots: that is, a rapt and devoted attention to the image. In cinematic terms, this indicates something regarded with unusual intensity, rather than just defiantly liked. In this sense, a cult film might be identified as one which involves a deep immersion in strangeness, leading to a genuine confusion of values.
While the question of the entire range of defamiliarization of normative values in cult film is too broad a topic for the scope of this article, I’d argue that one of the most intriguing disturbances created by cult occurs at the level of its excited attention to the body, and the similarly intense attention it solicits from the audience. In cult film, audience attention to body parts is analogous with the way we identify routinely with characters. In a cult movie where fixations abound, our feelings of surprise, dread, and arousal leap not only from person to person but from body part to body part. Is it any wonder that cult films make such a fetish of mouths: the red lips of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)—on a par with the Rolling Stones’ tongue as an archetype—have come to symbolize the psychic and sexual transfers of that film. More recently, Showgirls (1995)—the only film comparable to Rocky Horror as a “midnight movie” phenomenon—offers an equally arresting yet confounding sexual image. Paul Verhoeven creates a race of glazed, surgically perfected dancers—like blonde androids—whose manic thrusts and gyrations suggest a crazed distortion of the Hollywood ideal. Such films destabilize our normative relationships with our bodies.
To a large extent, these films function as cults of the odd body. They shatter old norms of cinematic physicality. The hyperbolic bodies in these films serve as guides to fixation for the audience, suggesting ways we might extend ourselves through action or prosthetic enhancement. The films urge us to consider uncanny new uses for the body, both spectacular and mortifying. Yet not every film with spectacular bodies is a cult film. Cult movies also rely on a careful modulation of mood—a sense of being absorbed in their own oddity. Even a film as hardened as Showgirls slips between cynicism and the delirium of its ventures into dance and a rhapsodic style of Forties filmmaking. This standard gives us a way of separating films that have valid cult preoccupations with the body and films that barely cause a ripple in our perceptions of the flesh.
An example of the latter is Harold and Maude (1971) the cult reputation of which depends in many ways on the potentially controversial relationship between an adolescent and an eighty-year-old sexpot at the center of its narrative. The actual movie, however, contains little real physical display; even the “shock” of its romance depends on a series of reaction shots of purse-lipped skeptics within the film. There might be a certain interest in the fact that its bodies are inert and starchy rather than sensual, but director Hal Ashby lacks faith in this nonconformist vision; each scene is held too long as the camera circles ponderously around the misfits. The film has no tentacles—nothing to connect this one case to further themes and possibilities. I’d liken it to recent releases such as Secretary (2002) and Lars and the Real Girl (2007) in its tame treatment of fetish. All three films provide a cool overview of obsession; the cozy art-house style of Lars is totally detached from a voyeur’s intimate understanding, while Secretary is an all too sane version of deviance, with a generic look that requires no decoding.
Compare this with the truly disruptive force of Rocky Horror: Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry) is a mythic monster, in that he displaces female traits onto a masculine structure, resulting in an appearance both attractive and abject. His lips and the curve of his upper legs are pillows of softness, encouraging libidinal investment. There is an abundance of lush signifiers affixed to a butch body, or hidden in interior compartments. Frank-N-Furter inhabits not only the role of drag goddess, but a level of pagan myth: he’s almost a succubus in his sex-changing pursuits, invading the bridal chambers (coded blue and red) of the virgin man and woman.
When it comes to the outré connotations of bodies, Paul Verhoeven is a meticulous stylist of female parts. Perhaps more than any current director, Verhoeven is engrossed in the look of women: the appearance of his female leads is the most important in a complex mélange of style elements. One long look is enough to tell us what kind of reality each film is grounded in, from the toothy and opaque Denise Richards in Starship Troopers (1997), to the angular Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct (1992), whose appearance makes you crave linearity. In Black Book (2006), the blonde played by Carice van Houten is more naturalistic, but still a “type” whose dramatic potential can be apprehended at first glance—her profile is that of a windswept woman in a melodrama. The degree of subtle shading of each woman lets us know exactly what investment to make in her world; it’s as if the emotions suggested by her face are a microcosm of the film’s concerns. Throughout his career, Verhoeven has honed numerous variations of the blonde: seeming to delight in her decorative nature, power, and the style factor she signifies above all.
For Showgirls, even the film’s poster image clues us into the state of Verhoeven’s unreality. The “s” of the female nude is all sheen and body tone—sinew rather than voluptuousness. In the film, the naked body of the protagonist, Nomi (Elizabeth Berkley), is revealed with little sense of vulnerability. Her face is often immobile so the concentration is on her mouth, with its highly textured, artificial gloss, and her bizarre fetish for nails. Nomi’s blank look is malleable; her lips can be metallicized, her cheeks rouged like a dominatrix. While many of the film’s women are surgically tooled, the one girl (Nomi’s love rival) who appears untouched seems dopier, slower than the rest; it’s as if her “natural” body has made her less streamlined or alert. In Vegas, a pure beauty is a look without novelty—hence the film finds room for an oversize burlesque performer with trick breasts, or a male lead who looks like a melting Ken doll. The entertainers are a group of writhing, polysexual dancers—like extras in a Madonna video, whose nudity is listlessly dangled about (the film’s esthetic is a throwback to ’80s Madonna, with her powerful robotic body, an assembly of chiseled parts.)
Yet Verhoeven’s universe is even more particular than this: all these bodies are showcased in a setting reminiscent of Thirties studio glory, a Selznick world of volcanoes and mythic sensuality. For all its skin, Showgirls is not a very lascivious film—its sex tends to be futuristic and unusual rather than provocative. The choreography is frenzied, and the nudity consists of a remorseless classifying of types. Surprisingly, none of the women are prey to masochism—as in, say, Shohei Imamura, or the first half of Death Proof (2007). The Vegas panorama, with its neon and Egyptian stylings, is largely available to frame moments between women; each vista settles to accommodate an aspect of female drama. Onstage, as well as behind the scenes, the film runs through the spectrum of female genres: the women’s prison drama, the rape-revenge movie, the Forties picture based on female friendships, blackmailing, and alliances. The film’s hierarchy is that of All About Eve (1950), with bitchy backstage antics, and a reigning brunette queen deposed by an outsider. Verhoeven applies the old showbiz scale to the business sphere; within a corporate, impersonal domain, the film insists on uncovering the dreaminess of a Forties woman’s picture. In this, Showgirls displays one of the hallmarks of the cult film: it makes decadence a homely place, the base for a family of “freaks.” With its maternal guiding figures, the film turns sexploitation into a space of domestic and familial interaction.
Also genuinely cultish in its investigation of the female body is Tarantino’s fiery, comparatively obscure Death Proof. While its companion film, Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror (2007), was more obviously cultish in its approach to women’s parts—it converted Rose McGowan’s thigh into a pulsing machine gun—its bodies were candied and unreal compared to those of Tarantino. I felt this most acutely when watching one of Tarantino’s frequent leg shots, where a woman’s feet tap on a car window, stretched out in idle relaxation. What happens to women with “lazy legs”? In a film with the threat of a serial killer, these are “moral” shots as much as cheesecake ones. Lazy legs denote freedom and a certain languid irresponsibility; in Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945), the character named “Lazy Legs” had an indolence that was chronic, capable of infecting men and driving them to neurosis.
Tarantino excels at showing women at rest and play, in love and in fear. The film’s first half has a deep, tense atmosphere, reminiscent of magazine ads for Kool cigarettes: those insidious campaigns which feature a man’s arm and fist in the foreground, while a woman in his eyeline cowers in aroused awe. It’s a form of fetishism which advertising encourages us to internalize: the erotic lingering on a sadistic scene. In Death Proof, Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) is the fist—a surly, aggressive man who unnerves women by working on their vulnerabilities. He unlocks the sexual masochism in a seemingly confident young woman; she succumbs to the extent of giving him a lap dance. Shortly afterwards, she and her group of friends are drawn into a fatal encounter with him. This, the film suggests, is one of the dynamics between men and women; certain girls can be aroused by being troubled and intimidated. Women who are exhilaratingly free plunge into the madness and messiness of sexual violence. As this first segment closes, that dynamic seems inescapable.
Then the morning comes, and the sunny flipside of the film begins: with a quartet of chatty, upbeat women on a road trip. In their bright T-shirts, they look like pink and yellow sundaes, but their talk is earthy and everyday (no artist has mined the style of African-American women like Tarantino, outside of hip-hop.) With their aerobic forms, they suggest a clean, energy-efficient form of girl power, which easily trumps the hubris of Mike. One of the protagonists is a “real” woman, Zoe (Zoe Bell), a New Zealand stunt double. Raw in body and her roughhewn accent, she’s a strange presence in a genre film: one of Tarantino’s cabinet of cult objects. The multicultural world of filmmaking has apparently brought us a new range of curiosities—including Antipodean stuntwomen who cruise small towns. In battle with Mike, this woman mounts her car like the prow of a ship. The formerly unassailable male figure turns panting and anxious, more than the women in the first segment. It’s as if those sad, slain women have been airlifted into a new breezy chapter. Where those characters saw no end to their despair, the girls in the second half turn the tables on that reading. Mike is whipped from every direction by a pack of taunting girls. Significantly, these women are effortless rather than emotionally invested: they’re triumphant but somewhat detached in rejoicing over the fallen man. This light, angst-free mood is here to stay.
None of the films I’ve discussed, however, have really been willing to lose their preconceptions in relation to sexual identity. Showgirls and Death Proof are body-conscious films, willing to play variations on the existing gender game, rather than redefine those oppositions. Redefinition is hard to find, and it is not necessarily in films that are widely recognized as cult. In fact, the most radical cult films I’ve come across are two fantasias of female imagery by Irvin Kershner, Up the Sandbox (1972) and Eyes of Laura Mars (1978). Eyes of Laura Mars has received some attention as a cult film, while Up the Sandbox has not. But both films present us with a cultish focus on the body that ought to be acknowledged as central paradigms of the body in the cult film. They both take place in a murky night world, where a woman encounters a parade of strangely distorted stereotypes: monstrous mothers, cult activists, and icons of sex and death. Up the Sandbox is a one-off in that it combines sophisticated feminist theory with a mood of babyhood: a feeling of being incredulous at sexual difference.
The film begins with a young mother, Margaret (Barbra Streisand), washing her infants in the tub; a soundtrack plays, which resembles a warped version of tinkling toys. This moist, hazy atmosphere persists, and gradually infuses us. We internalize Margaret’s childlike surprise at the appearance of men and women—her curiosity about the body and its behavior, which extends to speculation about matriarchal Amazonian tribes, or the mating habits of insects. During a daydream, she envisions meeting an amorous Fidel Castro with breasts. It appears that her imagination has a particular bent; after deconstructing bodies, she reassembles the parts incompletely or incorrectly, resulting in new forms.
Margaret lapses into fantasies which range from a reworking of topical issues—polyamory, abortion, the Black Panthers—to a more generalized sense that borders between bodies have been erased. Throughout these visions, the film remains utterly focused on interiority: fixed in a half-awake, soupy state, even as it takes what now seems like a peculiarly period interest in women’s experience. The issues of daycare and equal parenting are regarded as neither tiresome nor politically correct, but of puzzling interest: the substance of myth rather than modish social life. The movie also has a particular, wiggy fascination with Africa; while it’s wary of academics who sample tribal cultures, Margaret’s paranoia often bleeds into fantasies of Africa, linked to her feelings of being crowded and forced into inexplicable rituals. It’s strange for a major studio film to have such private, discomfiting obsessions, but Kershner simply folds them into the mix, stirring them into the Altman-like chatter. As such, Margaret’s visions of Kenyan birth rites seems like an extension of the bizarre maternal models closer to home, such as her own, intrusive mother. When viewed through a heated hallucination, the world can seem like a floating procession of bellies and torsos, breeders and offspring, nothing more than combinations of psychoanalytic tropes. The film often resembles a version of Alice in Wonderland, with its series of archetypes inflated to different scales. Body parts are misplaced; everyday objects take on fantastical power. Mothers can be soft and tactile, or gargantuan and insatiable (with her knowing genie eye, Streisand signals mood changes very effectively.) Occasionally, this stay-at-home mom feels dumbly obdurate, like a heavy body outwitted by sharp minds; at other times, she loves her warm immersion in the biological world.
With its Helmut Newton photos and ditzy, gorgeous models, Eyes of Laura Mars should be a camp fashion artifact—so what makes it a cult? For a start, Kershner’s interest in fashion is far from cursory: he goes deep into that rarefied sphere, where every kind of marvel is catered for. Laura (Faye Dunaway) is a Newton-esque photographer, who specializes in chic references to sadism and oppression. She shoots models as cadavers and designer car- crash victims. The girls look stylishly lifeless and manipulated; their tortured expressions result in fabulous, contoured cheekbones. An actor turns up cheerfully to play a corpse, while daffy assistants run around asking, “Where do you want the blood?” This is a night carnival, where cross-dressing and theatrical fanaticism are the norm.
Yet the movie recognizes no separation between the esthetic of high fashion and the outside world. The film is simultaneously a plausible reality and a consistent fashion portfolio, frame by frame. Everything is interpreted in terms of a photographic eye; pockmarked cops and drivers seem like extras on location. Even the docks and scummy surrounds of New York look like sets, with art-directed ambience. Laura presides as empress over this labyrinthine world, which is almost a sect: a group of people who gather to stage macabre tableaux. At its centre is a convincing, close family of eccentrics and fashionistas; at the edges are New York’s wild-eyed stalkers, like Weegee figures come to life. Each scene contains layer upon layer of stylistic reference. A detective’s face is framed against a black slash of canvas; we focus on a static image in front of a felt and acted scene. Before a model is killed, her pink, glowing skin is viewed through slitted blinds—a nod to the black joke of editorial photography. But Laura isn’t in control of every image; she’s possessed of a clairvoyant vision which wraps her like a visor. As it turns out, her creative drive transmits real-time killing; her shots are re-creations of actual crimes. So this magazine culture is serious stuff: while others might dismiss Laura’s vision as trivial, this movie claims it’s a psychic experience of interiority.
One the most fascinating things a film can do is to coopt the interests of a minority, and project them onto a collective screen. Like Up the Sandbox, this film perceives a specialist fetish as universal; it focuses on a particular, narrow stream—in this case, fashion ephemera—and insists on finding it haunting. This society of perversion and theatrical decadence is the only world the film knows; thus every detail of fashion life becomes iconographic. The language of high fashion is seen as an elaborate, consistent mythology which augurs death. When “Let’s All Chant” is played at a shoot—with its compulsive “ooh-ooh” refrain—the song seems less like a disco hit then a hymn to the dizzying loss of identity. Murder gives impetus to what might otherwise be a free-flowing, contentedly hedonistic world; if anything, real violence enlivens and animates the stock poses. Photography is read as a world of symbolism, so that images which come to life in the darkroom are the signs of psychic phenomena. There is no barrier between the public stage and the hallucinogenic creations of the mind.
These are two films which could be deemed superficially cultish, due to their costumes and the histrionic potential of their stars. With Faye Dunaway in Laura Mars, however, the film refuses to go camp: instead of focusing on her operatic manner, Kershner instead studies her hooded eye shape, and asks what mysteries it encodes. Cult cinema can be divided into films that are “knowing”—a movie that keeps its head, sanity and superiority, like Showgirls—and those that are less certain, preferring to identify with the amorphous body. Both Kershner films feature radical switches across gender and class, with body confusion and psychic merging occurring as part of an ostensible fantasy plot. Yet amidst all of this subversion, the films maintain their serene glide; the camera acknowledges no disturbance as it moves between margin and center, protected and public selves. Of Up the Sandbox, Kershner has said that he worked hard to create a consistent atmosphere—rather than an obvious mood swing, he wanted to give us the subtle, quiet feeling that “something isn’t quite natural.” That’s an understatement—nothing in this film is “natural”, not even biology. When nature does appear, it spills and gushes out, in the form of ripe, overinflated bellies. On the other hand, “alternative” models of thought produce feminists of outstanding peculiarity (Margaret’s “sisterhood” with her husband’s suspected lover, as well as her stint with the Black Panthers.)
What’s special about the Kershner films is that rare quality of unknowing—the feeling of a film being too preoccupied and distracted to take account of us. As Jonathan L. Crane has proposed in his work on Russ Meyer, one definition of a cult film is that it “doesn’t seem to have a clue to whom it is speaking”; in seeming not to notice or recognize the audience, it encourages us to “become strangers to ourselves.” By communicating largely with itself, the cult film posits and fashions a new viewer—one willing to be entranced by its mumbling self-talk. With Kershner, neither film can keep its gaze off the specific obsessions of a minority group.
Cult gives us the sense of a special interest coded into cinema, the marginal encrypted in the mainstream. In Showgirls, that interest runs counter to a commercial sensibility; the film signals that its real pleasure is in re-creating the dramas of the woman’s picture, while going through the moves of sexploitation. Rocky Horror appears to care very little for its disposable cast of lanky ingénues, compared with the demonic glory of Frank-N-Furter. In Death Proof, Tarantino’s agenda goes against the current, sadistic mood of pulp and action films. He places four women in the muck of sexual politics and violence, only to reinvent them as an elite squad of uncomplicated feminists—as relaxed and talkative as they are fierce. Both Kershner films deal with women facing kinky sexual disturbance, while preserving a strange veneer of calm and domesticity. Yet the aura of magical ease and comfort in all these films is key. The characters of cult are fully rounded in their oddity: a warm home of misfits, the family of freaky voices that chatter on.
Book
Excerpt: It Doesn't Suck: Showgirls | Balder and Dash | Roger Ebert an excerpt from Adam Nayman’s book It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls, March 31, 2014
It
Doesn't Suck by Adam Nayman - Moving Image Source an excerpt from Adam Nayman’s book It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls, June 11, 2014
It Doesn't Suck, Adam Nayman's defense of Showgirls, reviewed. Lara Zarum reviews Adam Nayman’s book It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls from Slate, June 3, 2014
The Beachwood Reporter - The Secret Subversion of Showgirls Marilyn Ferdinand, May 1, 2006
Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For...[Ken Anderson]
Alive and kicking - Salon.com Charles Taylor, March 31, 2004
Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Megan Weireter]
Nitrate Online Carrie Gorringe
All Guilt, No Pleasure: 'Showgirls' 20 Years Later - PopOptiq Nathan Smith
Showgirls
at 20: Misanthropic Verhoeven Goes Old-School | Collider Brian Formo
Flavorwire
[Jason Bailey] July 24, 2015
Going
Dutch: Suss Out the Subversion in the Work of the Man Behind ... Melissa Anderson from The Village Voice, November 8, 2016
Saturday
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Reviews and Movie Ratings | TVGuide.com Harlan Jacobson
Review: 'Showgirls' - Variety Todd McCarthy
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REVIEW / Cynical `Showgirls' Falls on Its Face - SFGate Mick LaSalle
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REVIEWS : The Naked Truth About 'Showgirls' - latimes Kenneth Turan
Showgirls Movie Review & Film Summary (1995) | Roger Ebert
The New York Times: Review by Janet Maslin
Starship Troopers | Chicago Reader Lisa Alspector
Four friends just out of high school join the military: Denise Richards wants to pilot enormous spaceships, Casper Van Dien wants to be near her, Dina Meyer wants to be near him, and Neil Patrick Harris wants to pit his brain power against that of giant enemy insects—if they have brains. The plot of this 1997 feature may sound like silly, conventional science fiction and soap opera romance, but director Paul Verhoeven blends the conflicting elements of intentional camp and perverse sincerity into a single tone—and he doesn't resort to simple irony. Instead he revels in the contradictions and defies us to see fascist ideology in a story that allows us to identify with warmongering characters. Ed Neumeier's screenplay was based on the novel by Robert A. Heinlein.
Starship Troopers,
directed by Paul Verhoeven | Film review - Time Out
High school graduates Johnny Rico, Dizzy, Carmen and Carl enlist in the armed forces of the Federation. Training takes its toll, and Johnny is on the point of throwing in the towel when space insects wipe out his home town Buenos Aires. The infantry are despatched to the outer limits of the galaxy to give 'em what for, but...you guessed it. An adaptation of a Robert A Heinlein novel, this replays World War II as sci-fi spectacular - and this time we're rooting for the fascists. Presumably director Verhoeven meant it as a sour, ironic joke. If so, he's kept an admirably straight face. His totalitarian utopia looks like a daytime soap: bright, clean, empty. And his lead players might be caricatures of Aryan perfection. It falls to Ironside's motivational teacher/commander, Rasczak, to whip them into shape ('If you don't do your job, I shoot you!'). It says a lot about the director that the movie only kicks into life when the carnage starts. The bugs make up in numbers what they lack in charm, the scale of the battle scenes takes the breath away, and the violence is unremittingly gruesome. On the surface, this is grotesque, reactionary trash, yet by the end, when Verhoeven turns a giant brain-sucking maggot into an object of pity, it's hard not to be impressed by the sheer perversity of the enterprise.
Starship
Troopers (1997) Bryant Frazer from
Deep Focus
I'm making it
official -- I've given up on Paul Verhoeven.
Yeah, he showed some
stuff in his early Dutch features, which dealt with sex and psychology and
violence. Sure, he had the chutzpah to coax Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rutger
Hauer into Flesh + Blood, a trashy medieval potboiler with a rape
fetish. And he topped all of them with his big budget debut, a nifty, very
violent little satire called RoboCop that emerged as one of the better
science fiction films of the 1980s -- a bombastic, perversely humanist response
to Dirty Harry.
His follow-up was
the amiable Total Recall, which I could have done without. Basic Instinct
was a bit of a guilty pleasure, although I've never mistaken it for a good
film. (And who's been managing Sharon Stone's career, anyway?)
But then how were we
to deal with the blithe disaster called Showgirls? Easy to blame screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, who
probably talked his Basic Instinct comrade into it. Even so, Verhoeven
should have known enough to demand a rewrite. But since he's Dutch, maybe there
was a language barrier that kept him from noticing that the script wasn't, as
they say, Oscar material. Or maybe it was his impulse, as a European
expatriate, to caricature Las Vegas as a microcosm for the greater kitsch that
is American culture, thus justifying the bad dialogue, the garish caricatures,
the overwrought symbolism, and the gang rape as, um, social criticism.
You can tell that I
was perfectly willing to accept excuses. After all,
And in reel one, I
gotta admit, it looked like Verhoeven might have been able to pull it off. No
doubt as a sop to impatient audiences, Verhoeven dropped us into the fray right
away, with a newsreel-style report on the earthlings' Normandy-style invasion
of the planet Klendathu and fragments of a well-developed campaign of wartime
propaganda. From the immediate maiming of the TV newsman through Michael
Ironside's entrance as a one-armed high school teacher, Starship Troopers looked
to be sharp and cynical. Even the Aaron Spelling Productions-style business
about a romantic quadrangle and a pledge among painfully cute teenagers (Hey!
Isn't that Doogie Howser!?) to remain friends forever seemed like an
interesting idea, given the violence to come.
According to Starship
Troopers, earth in the 23rd century is a sunny, happy, and very, very
white place.
And so it is that
protagonist Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) balks at his parents' wishes (they
want him to go to Harvard) and decides to enlist. Actually, he's enlisting
because he hopes to stay close to his sweetheart, the toothy Carmen Ibanez
(Denise Richards). But Carmen has the math scores to be a pilot, while Rico is
doomed to serve as a grunt in mobile infantry. Making matters worse, a smirking
hotshot named Zander Barcalow (Patrick Muldoon) has eyes for Carmen, and also
has the stuff to fly alongside her. Pal Carl Jenkins (Neil Patrick Harris) is
assigned to intelligence and tactics, and will show up later in a sleek black
trenchcoat. The likable Dizzy Flores (Dina Meyer) makes no secret of her longing
for Johnny, and winds up alongside him in combat.
The early scenes
parody the concentrated earnestness of a "Why we fight" propaganda
movie. Verhoeven's gone so far as to hire a bunch of adorable television actors
to act on their collective hatred for the enemy. The major shortcoming, I
think, is that Verhoeven never makes us really understand how it feels to be a
member of this society, or of this army. We're third-hand witnesses to the
alien-engineered destruction of
These early scenes
reveal Verhoeven's satirical agenda as well as his abiding weakness for camp
and/or kitsch — including, of all things, a football game! His thing for these
nubile kids spills over into boot camp, where a co-ed shower scene adeptly
demonstrates society's progress in terms of gender equality. Later, I love it
when Carmen crushes Johnny by announcing, thoughtlessly, that she and Zander
have become a "flight team," neatly advancing the soap opera and
illustrating the subordination of personal lives to the function of the
military unit. And I had to admire his unblinking efficiency in showing us
about these kids' perfect lives, their squeaky clean hopes and dreams, only to
let $100 million worth of flesh-ripping, bone-crunching, brain-sucking special
effects have their way with them in the final reels.
Problem is, there's
no flesh-ripping, bone-crunching, brain-sucking payoff. Yes, there's plenty of
all of that stuff -- including some pretty colorful shots of post-bug carnage
-- but, with the exception of an accidental shooting in boot camp, none of it
is shocking or surprising or even much fun to watch. (You want carnage? Try Braindead.)
The battle scenes are so reliant on computer graphics that they take on a
two-dimensional appearance -- it actually made my eyes cross. Worse, they just
go on and on.
In one sequence, a
group of a couple dozen humans is defending a compound against an advancing
ocean of bugs as they wait for a transport ship to arrive. The visuals are
actually pretty awe-inspiring, and you might start to squirm a little as the bugs
-- literally hundreds of thousands of them -- start to climb over piles of each
other's bodies, to clamber up onto the platform. Why, then, do they only
scramble over the railing one or two at a time, all the better for our teenage
heroes to pump them full of bullets? Bug attacks; humans pull out machine guns;
rat-a-tat-tat; bug disintegrates and collapses; surprise, another bug attacks.
It's a Sisyphean task, and it reminded me of playing a video game into the wee
hours of the morning, an electronic entertainment that requires nothing of you
except that you keep hitting that "fire" button over and over again,
just as fast as you can. Starship Troopers doesn't even ask you to
press the button.
Verhoeven's
satirical vision kicks in again at the very end of the movie, when the
soldiers' bloodlust finally becomes a little bit chilling. (For that matter, so
might the audience's.) But his satire gets in the way of his storytelling.
Starship Troopers has its moments, and it's certainly not stupid. But there are
only so many places the movie can go without tipping its hand, and Verhoeven
seems dead set against allowing his film to consciously acknowledge its own
subtext. Ironic that in order to stay true to its blandly militaristic premise,
it's guilty of underwriting its action, figuring, erroneously, that the
full-tilt special effects will deliver on their own terms. They don't. A couple
of slam-bang action sequences in exactly the right places, revealing tension
and desperation among the aggressors instead of the same old rat-a-tat-tat,
might have made all the difference.
Starship Troopers
(1997) • Paul Verhoeven • Senses of Cinema
Dan Shaw, June 22, 2017
1997
Starship Troopers - John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Cult ...
Starship
Troopers: One of the Most Misunderstood Movies Ever - The ... Calum Marsh from The Atlantic, November 7, 2013
Nitrate
Online Eddie Cockrell
PopMatters
[Jeremy Griffin] 'Starship Troopers' and the Politics of
Science Fiction, April 28, 2015
Multinational
Pest Control [STARSHIP TROOPERS] | Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, November 21 1997
Starship
Troopers - Archive - Reverse Shot
Suzanne Scott, June 22, 2003
Starship
Troopers - TCM.com Michael Atkinson
Starship Troopers |
Reelviews Movie Reviews James
Berardinelli
Starship Troopers Movie
Review Doyle and Macdonald
The
Fascist Gleam of Starship Troopers | HistoryNet Mark Grimsley
Fantasia
Fest 2012 Review: 'Starship Troopers: Invasion' Kills Bugs ... Brian Salisbury from Film School Rejects
Starship
Troopers Remake: Paul Verhoeven Slams as Fascist, Trump ... Chris O’Falt from indieWIRE, November 16,
2016
Krell
Laboratories [Christianne Benedict]
Images
Movie Journal Gary Johnson
The
Steve Pulaski Message Board [Steve Pulaski]
“Starship Troopers” -
Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, June 20,
2000
Feo
Amante's Horror Thriller [Kelly Parks]
Cinema
de Merde Scott Telek
Robert
Heinlein's 'Starship Troopers' & The Cold War | Kirkus Reviews Andrew Liptak book review
Starship
Troopers Is Perfect — and Therein Lies the Problem - io9 Josh Wimmer book review
SF REVIEWS.NET: Starship
Troopers / Robert A. Heinlein Thomas
M. Wagner book review
Big
Picture Big Sound - Blu-ray Review [Chris Boylan]
High-Def
Digest - Blu-ray Review [Joshua Zyber]
Movie
House Commentary Johnny Web
Junta
Juleil's Culture Shock [Sean Gill]
Digital
Retribution Mr. Intolerance
iofilm.co.uk Erdnase
Lessons
of Darkness [Nick Schager]
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Jennie Kermode]
Starship
Troopers: No 25 best sci-fi and fantasy film of all time | Film ... Phelim O’Neill from The Guardian, October 21, 2010
Irish
Cinephile [Eamonn Rafferty]
Montreal
Mirror [Matthew Hays]
Metro
Pulse (Knoxville TN) [Coury Turczyn]
San
Francisco Examiner [George Powell]
San
Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Starship
Troopers Movie Review (1997) | Roger Ebert
New
York Times [Janet Maslin] also seen
here: Movie
Review - - FILM REVIEW; No Bugs Too Large For This Swat ...
Starship
Troopers (film) - Wikipedia
Hollow
Man (2000) Bryant Frazer from
Deep Focus
Just a few minutes
into Hollow Man, my jaw hit the floor. Paul Verhoeven, who advanced
the technique of computer animation by requiring scores upon scores of alien
bugs to do interplanetary battle with a human army in Starship
Troopers, now turns the same
fearsome energy loose on the interior of the human body. He's directed an
invisible-man story that's decided we should see the man's physical form
disappear from view one layer at a time, taking us on a visual tour of guts,
organs, and sinew. I'm not a fan of CGI, but the intricacy of these visions are
really something -- gross enough to make me wince a little, but beautiful
enough that I hardly want to blink. At that point, I swear, I was hoping I'd
walk out of the theater convinced that Hollow Man would rate as one of
my favorite movies of the year.
The idea is sound --
I even like the title, a double entendre with some literary pedigree that hints
at the moral bankruptcy of protagonist Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon), a
government researcher who can't resist pulling some improper strings to test
out his invisibility formula on himself. For a fellow of uncertain moral fiber
and lightweight deviance, the resulting freedom to take advantage of others is
an invitation to depravity. Directed by Paul Verhoeven? Oh, yes, that does sound
good.
Well, sort of. Ever
since RoboCop, Paul Verhoeven has managed to disappoint me.
However, despite my initial distaste for Basic Instinct, Starship
Troopers, and especially Showgirls, I've found myself returning to the films on
videotape, DVD, and late-night cable. Beyond the de rigeur smugness --
and Verhoeven's unfortunate choice of Joe Eszterhas as collaborator -- repeat
viewings show that there's something comforting in the very absurdity of these
films. It could well be that Verhoeven is deliberately mocking the whole of
film history, and I'm just too uptight to laugh at the joke. Going into Hollow
Man, I figured if Verhoeven could recapture the caroming menace of his
earlier films, it could be a provocative break from predictable summer fare.
Despite a fairly
terrific half-hour or so, punctuated by those astonishing special effects as
well as a sense of percolating evil, Hollow Man eventually fizzles.
Sexual jealousy is the driving force behind Caine's ultimate madness (he
carries a torch for pretty scientist Elisabeth Shue), and the characters just
aren't strong enough to sell the relationships. Some crafty action scenes could
have picked up the slack, but the latter half of Hollow Man is long on
look-what-we-can-do imagery and short on logic and tension.
Verhoeven's approach
to the material is straightforward in most respects, save for a few violent
flourishes. What stands out is that he can't help slipping into confrontational
mode when it comes to matters of sexuality. Verhoeven plays the voyeur card in
the early reels, when we learn that Caine's apartment is situated conveniently
opposite that of a woman who has a habit of undressing in front of the window.
Bacon does everything but bite his knuckles Porky's-style to signal
his unwholesome lust for this Playboy-caliber, purple-underwear-clad
girly. Once he becomes comfortably invisible, he first feels up a sleeping
co-worker (in what feels like a 21st-century update of Barbara Hershey's most
embarrassing role in The Entity, her naked breast is manipulated using
CGI), and then decides to pay the neighbor a visit. His escapade moves quickly
from the playful to the sadistic, and the camera cuts away just as what we can
only assume is a full-on rape begins. It comes across not as coy, but
condescending -- in his mercy, Verhoeven, auteur terrible of the
American cinema, has chosen to spare us the details.
In retrospect, I
thought maybe Verhoeven was trying to mock me, the viewer, Haneke-style, for my
alleged arousal at the prospect of rape. Fair enough, except that I don't need
Paul freakin' Verhoeven, celebrity spokesman for celluloid murder and rape, to
tsk-tsk my bloodlust or my hard-ons. (OK, when Michael Powell did it in Peeping
Tom it carried some weight.) However, not only does Verhoeven turn away
from the act itself, his film never again considers the apparent crime, its
aftermath, or its ramifications. Verhoeven thus misses this opportunity to ramp
up tensions between Caine and his scientist pals, who would benefit from the
knowledge of what a sick bastard he has become. Further, in declining to follow
through on his provocation, Verhoeven actually lets the audience off the hook.
Compare Verhoeven to
Brian De Palma, for instance, whose best moves -- the endings of Blow Out
and Carrie, or the drill-through-the-floor routine in Body Double --
make you feel absolutely used. Verhoeven's style is that of a lecher
rather than a pervert. He gives you sickness with a nudge and a wink, whereas
De Palma remains largely uncompromising on his own terms. Both Verhoeven and De
Palma are severely limited filmmakers, but De Palma's use of nudity and grand
guignol imagery to express ideas in purely visual terms seems altogether
less self-conscious than Verheoven's, which ostentatiously tweaks the
audience's sensibilities while serving up fairly conventional mayhem. I prefer
the high melodrama of RoboCop to anything Verhoeven's done before or
since, largely because the script remains the craftiest satire he's ever gotten
his hands on but also because the story plays out with a ferocity and
singlemindedness that's missing from his later work.
That said, there are
a couple of moments in Hollow Man that hint at the gravity of the
title character's behavior. But they're fleeting, and the last half hour or so
is dominated by the modified slasher movie scenario memorably advanced by Alien,
in which the members of a disparate and bitchy group are picked off one by one
by a nasty and largely unseen villain. (Compared to Alien, which
criticized the military-industrial complex, made points about class relations
on board the spaceship, and defied expectations by placing a woman in the hero
role, Hollow Man has absolutely nothing on its mind.)
The final set piece,
which involves an elevator shaft, is no less inventive than your average
Paul
Verhoeven and his Hollow Men - Screening the Past Angela Ndalanis, December 1, 2001
Men Will Be
Boys | Village Voice J. Hoberman,
August 8, 2000
Triumph of
the Ill | Village Voice Dennis Lim,
August 15, 2000
“Hollow Man” - Salon.com Charles Taylor, August 4, 2000
Hollow Man (2000) |
PopMatters Jon Munn
Ancient
Mariners David Edelstein from Slate, August 4, 2000
Hollow Man | Reelviews
Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
Hollow Man (2000).
Director - Paul Verhoeven. Stars: Kevin Bacon ... Richard Scheib from Moria
Hollow Man Review |
CultureVulture - CultureVulture.net
Scott von Doviak
HOLLOW MAN movie
review - Feo Amante's Horror Thriller
Kelly Parks
Hollow Man - AV Club Film Keith Phipps
DVDizzy.com
- Double Feature Blu-ray with Pictures
DoBlu.com
Blu-ray Review [Matt Paprocki]
Junta
Juleil's Culture Shock [Sean Gill]
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
World
Socialist Web Site John Andrews
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Angus Wolfe Murray]
Paul
Verhoeven Interview | Neil Young's Film Lounge - Jigsaw Lounge Neil Young interview, April 18, 2002
Talking with the “Hollow Man” -
Salon.com Dave McCoy interview with
actor Kevin Bacon, August 1, 2000
Hollow Man -
Movie Reviews and Movie Ratings | TVGuide.com
Hollow
Man | Reviews | guardian.co.uk Film - The Guardian Andrew Pulver
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
Austin
Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
San
Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]
Hollow Man Movie Review & Film Summary (2000) | Roger Ebert
New York Times A.O. Scott
DVDBeaver.com - Blu-ray DVD Review [Gary W Tooze]
Netherlands Belgium Great Britain Germany (145 mi) 2006 ‘Scope
Verhoeven returns to the Netherlands, given a seemingly unlimited budget in the Hollywood style, the largest in the history of the country’s film industry and proceeds to make a largely overblown Spielberg film, not too far removed from the Indiana Jones genre, about the Dutch resistance in WWII. The only thing that keeps this film afloat is the constantly changing double cross factor, as by the end it seems nearly everyone has either informed or been ratted out by one of their own. Carice van Houten stars as Rachel Stein, a Jew whose family is wiped out in an attempted escape across the border early in the film, a nauseatingly ugly scenario where they were set up by an imposter sympathizer to bring as much as they could carry, then murdered and robbed for their money and valuables in order to support the Nazi war regime. Van Houten falls in with the Dutch resistance, though her political sentiments seem more bourgeois than radical, as throughout the war years she spends nearly all of it perfectly attired in what amounts to a 1930’s Jean Harlow wardrobe. Especially near the end after the Allied liberation, the film is mired in mere spectacle, much of it laughable, where the hideous behavior of the dizzyingly frenzied crowd grows more grotesque by the minute and where the neverending revelations of yet another character consorting with the enemy becomes nothing more than standard operating procedure. And because there’s a brief prologue set in a Jewish kibbutz of the 1950’s starring our lead character, this wipes out any thought of suspense, as despite her narrow forays with near death experiences, we always know that she’ll survive unscathed.
The depth of the audacity of what the audience is asked to believe is dumfounding, as Ms. van Houten not only gets involved with the resistance and agrees to infiltrate the Nazi’s, but also agrees to sleep with the enemy, and not just with any Nazi, but with the head of the SS in the Netherlands, Sebastian Koch, who, by her apparently sincere affections for the man is turned into a generous, warmhearted James Bond-style English gentleman who was wrongly set up by a few of his ingrate fellow officers. A spy thriller turned love story, this film has the look of a fairly typical big budget action adventure movie, where plenty of money is spent on lavish costumes, make up, vintage cars, an immense Nazi headquarters, including a fabulous set piece utilized for an extravagant Hitler birthday party that resembles the decadence of Berlin in the 20’s, but it comes near the end of the war when dwindling funds had supposedly all but vanished, this story borders on the ludicrous. Whatever confiscated money was stolen by secretly transporting Jews would have come early in the war, not at the end when there were very few Jews left alive, let alone still carrying loads of cash, yet this film would have us believe that it’s all based on true events.
From the outset, there’s a swaggering style that resembles
Michael Curtiz films from the thirties and forties, where men had to be
dashingly handsome, Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, Humphrey Bogart, exuding the
masculinity of a swashbuckler movie, and the women were overly aggressive
pursuers using sexually provocative dialogue, Lauren Bacall, Bette Davis, Joan
Crawford, femme fatales in heat, eager to use their feminine allure to
manipulate the guy and steal the goods.
This tried and true Hollywood formula has been around for over 50 years
and retains its lure of soap opera melodrama at the expense of hard-edged
realism, which is how exploitive films like this are made, accepted, and even
critically lauded, as this film was one of the 5 nominated in the Foreign Films
category of the recent Academy Awards. Instead
of using the
The House Next Door [Keith Uhlich]
In
Black
Book -- the Film Comment Selects closing night screening -- when
the Jewish double agent Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten), her cover
irretrievably blown, is drenched head-to-toe by the largest vat of lumpy, milk
chocolate-tinted shit this side of Pasolini’s Salò, one might
be surprised at how, well, safe it all feels. This is not something one expects
or hopes for from Paul Verhoeven, whose best
films are triumphs of instinct over intellect, consistently flirting, and quite
often fucking, with the dark side of life. Expectations can be dangerous and
damaging, but I feel confident saying that Verhoeven is better than this
big-budget prestige picture -- his first Dutch film since The Fourth Man,
done in the grand-'n'-bland style of a creaky Hollywood war epic. It’s most
potent and telling image: the brunette Rachel bleach-blonding her pubic hair,
becoming something she’s not. Black Book has similar golden dreams,
though to no subversive or lasting purpose. One longs for Nomi Malone to
enliven the proceedings with her ketchup bottle of doom.
Paul Verhoeven tries to go respectable with the WWII drama Black Book, and the question that persists is: Who wants a respectable Paul Verhoeven? Naysayers be damned, the Dutch firebrand’s finest work remains his disreputable American films – Robocop, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers, and the undervalued (and, by some revisionists, now slightly overvalued) Showgirls – which never failed to deliver an electric mixture of combustible action thrills, hysterical sexuality, cunning satire, and pop-melodrama intensity. The director’s latest (shot in his native homeland and tongue) feels like an apology of sorts for the giddy fun of those triumphs, though it’s not without its own Hollywood elements, as its tale – about a beautiful Dutch Jew named Rachel (star-in-the-making Carice van Houten) who infiltrates Nazi HQ as part of the Dutch resistance – is cut from a classic big-studio cloth. Full of intrigue, deception and amour, Black Book follows the ordeal of Rachel as she straddles the line between rebel and collaborator during her mission to seduce Gestapo chief Müntze (Sebastian Koch) as the blond Ellis. It’s a high-wire act of identity reconfiguration and confusion that Verhoeven lays out with technical aplomb but not enough emotional impact. As his protagonists and peripheral players boast sketchy interior lives, they prove unable to fully transcend their two-dimensionality, and his often-cloudy characterizations are complemented by his narrative’s exploitative use of heinous Nazi war crimes as mere plot-forwarding devices. In Rachel/Ellis’ half-clothed romantic roundelays (as well as a scene in which she dyes her pubic hair golden), Verhoeven’s lewd impulses bubble to the fore, just as revelations about the story’s “good guys” and “bad guys” exhibit his familiar cynicism about human nature. In the end, however, there’s too little heat and even less dramatic vigor to this “return to form,” which may function as a remedial response to the implied anti-Semitism of 1977’s Soldier of Orange, but which also serves as an unnecessary and unsuccessful attempt at prestige-picture atonement for making some of the past two decades’ most clever and exciting genre films.
Two decades as
Widely acclaimed as a bravura return to form at last fall's
Black Book - AV Club Film Noel Murray
Paul Verhoeven's
signature blend of irony and hyper-sincerity confuses some viewers, who aren't
sure whether to laugh with him, laugh at him, or just drink in his heady brew
of sex, violence, and bad behavior. And by the time Verhoeven wrapped a 15-year
Hollywood sojourn with the muddled Hollow Man, even he didn't
seem to know what he was aiming for. So when Verhoeven announced that he was
going to try to get his head straight by returning to his native Holland for a
movie about a Jewish woman dodging Nazis, a lot of Verhoeven fans feared that
he was taking the dry prestige-picture route, while his detractors imagined
something garish and tasteless, one step removed from Ilsa, She Wolf Of The
SS.
As it happens, the
Verhoeven skeptics were closer to the truth, though not in the way they
suspected. Working again with longtime screenwriting collaborator Gerard
Soeteman, Verhoeven makes Black Book into a rollicking wartime movie-movie,
replacing awards-bait clichés with a strong dose of two-fisted action, frank
sexuality, and coal-black cynicism. Carice van Houten plays a Jew in hiding who
survives a double-cross and winds up in the seemingly safe arms of the Dutch
resistance, where she immediately draws a dangerous assignment, working as a secretary
for the Nazis. When she's ordered to distract her boss, Sebastian Koch, with as
many feminine wiles as she can muster, van Houten soon learns that Koch may be
more sympathetic to her cause than her fellow rebels are. Before long, she
isn't sure who she's pretending to be, or why.
Van Houten gives a
daring performance, and while "daring" is often critic-code for
"gets naked a lot"—which indeed she does—sex appeal isn't all she's
selling. Black Book establishes its tone the first time van Houten cracks
a joke in the face of impossible terror, and Verhoeven continues to let the
character's wit, sensitivity, and resolve define the movie, even as he's
sadistically heaping on humiliation after humiliation. (Brace yourself for the
bucket-of-shit scene.) With all its clay-footed heroes and brilliantly
conceived plans that don't quite come off, Black Book can be a little
exhausting, especially in the final half-hour, which tidies up the plot via an
overload of Hitchcockian suspense sequences. But everything builds to a gutsy
final shot, which re-emphasizes Verhoeven's persistent hopelessness. In the
end, Black Book may be one of the most fun movies ever made about how
people basically suck.
european-films.net Boyd van Hoeij
Dutch Director Paul Verhoeven returns to his native
Jewish cabaret star Rachel Stein (a magnificent Carice van Houten, from De
passievrucht/A Father's Affair), her family and numerous other wealthy
Jews try to escape from German-occupied Holland in 1944 to the liberated south
by water, under the cover of night. A Nazi patrol boat prevents them from ever
arriving on destination, and all on the boat are killed, except for Rachel who
has jumped ship. She has to return into hiding and will finally join a Dutch
resistence cell that uses a soup kitchen for cover. When the son of their
leader Kuipers (reliable Ducth veteran Derek de Lint) is imprisoned by the
Nazis and their cover is blown, Stein (rebaptised Ellis de Vries and now with
peroxide blond hair) is asked to work her charms on the local Nazi officer
Müntze (Sebastian Koch, from Das Leben der Anderen/The Lives of Others) whom
she met when she audaciously maneuvered her way out of a luggage search on a
train.
Things become complicated when Müntze is about to bed her
and notices she dyes her hair. He asks her straight if she is Jewish. The scene
is neat showcase for Verhoeven's trademark combination of sex and violence
(which are often connected in his universe), but his maturity has toned both
down to carefully dosed suggestions of menace and eroticism that are a lot more
effective than any full-blown extravaga. To further complicate matters, Stein
and Müntze are really attracted to one another, beyond issues of race, creed or
conviction. This central conceit could have been worked out a bit more, since
especially Stein's attraction to the Nazi needs to overcome several hurdles,
including the fact that the Nazis killed off her entire family and a Christian
family that had kept her in hiding at their farm. All Verhoeven and
co-screenwriter Gerard Soeteman (who co-wrote Verhoeven's far more patriotic Soldaat
van Oranje/Soldier of Orange) give us is the sad story of the fate of
Müntze's own family, which is explained in two sentences, which is not nearly
enough.
The action is set during and immediately after the war, and
shows how there is not really a clear break between "before" and
"after" but that after the liberation a lengthy and messy aftermath
ensued. The same idea is also behind Verhoeven's approach to the Dutch and
Germans: none are simple war heroes or evil invaders, with even Stein and those
who could be considered the heroes of this story not immune to the satisfaction
of revenge, even on a small scale. Who the heroes are exactly is never really
clear until the end, but the story's many twists, turns and double-crosses are
so carefully plotted and clearly told that Zwartboek is never
confusing -- or boring. In fact the 135 minutes fly by, bookended by two short
sections set in
With a budget of over €17 million, Zwartboek is
the most expensive Dutch-language production ever and is also the
Cinema Scope | Interviews | Vulgar Moralism: Paul Verhoeven's Black ... Robert Koehler interview, 2007
The arrival of Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book, his first European film since the medieval softcore epic Flesh+Blood (1985), forces viewers to reconsider World War II in particular, and Verhoeven in general. It’s true that, as many a wag has noted and Verhoeven long ago confirmed, his great twin obsessions are Hitler and Jesus (in perhaps that order); Black Book doesn’t necessarily alter the Hitler side of the equation nor the priorities Verhoeven set for himself in 1968 when he made his first officially professional film, Portrait of Anton Adriaan Mussert, a documentary about the head of the Dutch fascist party during World War II. A surface glance at Black Book, seen merely as the cloak-and-dagger tale of a Dutch Jewish singer, Rachel Stein (Carine van Houten), swept up into the wartime underground resistance movement and recruited to be a mole inside the Nazi’s Dutch military headquarters, would suggest nothing out of the ordinary as far as Verhoeven the entertainer is concerned.
But Verhoeven likes to fuck with his viewers, placing his films within a seemingly conventional genre framework only to suddenly reveal his true intentions and ideas. When the in-hiding Rachel is made a refugee by a Nazi bomb attack and narrowly survives a nighttime ambush of a boatload of fleeing Jews, her decision to sign up with the underground resistance at first suggests a mere variation of the heroics displayed in Soldier of Orange (1977). Soon, thought, an involved game of sexual desires and wills plays out when Rachel becomes a mole inside the Nazi high command, and the fact that she’s almost too good at her poses sets her against her resistance brethren. As often happens in Verhoeven’s cinema, but more dramatically in Black Book than ever before, presumably “good” and “bad” characters not only become less clear-cut as time goes on, but even switch moral positions. As skillfully as any living director, he revels in cinema’s powers of deception, to conceal and then reveal reality, to cover subversive ideas inside the armour of genre. Those bourgeois fans of sexually titillating foreign films (preferably French or Swedish, preferably with enough but not too much nudity) were screwed by Verhoeven with Turkish Delight (1973) and Katie Tippel (1975), in which sex became something too dangerous for refined sensibilities. When critics and audiences figured that they had Verhoeven down as the new Dutch wild man, along came Soldier of Orange (1977) and its forthright, flag-waving fictionalized account of Dutch anti-Nazi hero Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema’s wartime exploits. Nobody at that time could have forecast that Verhoeven would become Hollywood’s most interesting science fiction director over two decades—from RoboCop (1987) to Hollow Man (2000)—as well as a collaborator with two of Hollywood’s most oversized personalities, Arnold Schwarzenegger (with Total Recall in 1990) and Joe Eszterhas (with Basic Instinct in 1992 and Showgirls in 1995). But just as the brilliant Starship Troopers (1997) shreds every conventional notion of what both a science fiction and a war movie should do, and RoboCop is the actual Jesus movie that Verhoeven strived to make for years, the woefully misunderstood Showgirls creates a bizarre hyper-reality gloss on top of the backstage drama that makes Turkish Delight’s anarchism appear tame. And make no mistake: People hate Verhoeven for all of this.
It’s because of the history that Verhoeven lived through as a young child in The Hague during the Nazi occupation, Allied liberation, and subsequent invasion of American capitalism—not some childish inner demon—that makes him congenitally unable to ever play by the rules. Black Book goes much further, though, by reviewing the myths of history and the audience’s internalized myths of what to expect in a historical film—a film about the Holocaust, no less—that poses as a spy-thriller. Like Rossellini revisiting the liberation of fascist Italy in Era notte a Roma (1960) that he first captured in Paisan (1946), or Ford turning his view from US horse soldiers to the Native Americans they massacred in Cheyenne Autumn (1964), Verhoeven and his screenwriter Gerard Soeteman return to the ground they explored in Soldier of Orange to reveal something entirely different: That the Dutch underground was marbled with anti-Semitism, that some high-ranking Nazis knew they were trapped in a matrix of insanity, that war can be fun, that liberation can be terrible, that revenge against Nazi collaborators can unleash new forms of ugliness no less horrific than Nazism itself, that Israeli kibbutzim offer no refuge from permanent war. Black Book becomes a study, in the thriller context, of the harsh reality that to survive a war is to live though a chain of moral contingencies, so that the Nazi you are trying to defeat today may be the one that you love tomorrow, and that even your closest friends may have things to hide. Verhoeven likes to call this his return to “reality,” by which he means his flight from Hollywood’s fantasy machine. We are just at the beginning of the latest phase in Paul Verhoeven’s lifelong pursuit to reframe himself, and us.
CINEMA SCOPE: It’s thought that Black Book is your second film about the Nazis and the Dutch resistance after Soldier of Orange, but it’s actually your fourth, including your early documentary, Portrait of Anton Adriaan Mussert, and your short film Gone, Gone (1979). What was the impulse for your two returns—to Europe and to World War II?
PAUL VERHOEVEN: Black Book was a very old project that I and Soeteman, who has written all of my Dutch movies, had been holding onto since the ‘70s. During our research for Soldier of Orange and Gone, Gone, we gathered a lot of darker and shadowy material about the Dutch resistance that we could never use. We tried to carve out some new scenario, but we never could solve the story problems and so we put it aside. This also coincided with me gradually leaving Holland and moving to the United States. But then, five or so years ago, I decided to bring it back to Soeteman so we could try again.
The plot problems hadn’t gone away, of course, and Soeteman suggested a different approach, starting with a young sailor who had survived a boat attack early in the story and a young woman named Rachel, who died. He realized that this had to be reversed: the boy should die and she should live. I wouldn’t say that, from this point on, the script wrote itself, because it took an enormous amount of time to organize a complicated plot. This represented another, darker WWII that fascinated us and was in sharp contrast to Soldier of Orange which is much more heroic and a bit patriotic perhaps, and with a lighter touch in general.
What led me back to Europe was that, after Hollow Man, I couldn’t find another movie to do in the US that I cared about. And after having done a lot of science fiction, I wanted to return to reality. I had long felt that I should make more realistic films, which I couldn’t find in the US. I was experiencing what had happened to Hollywood after 9/11, with the shift toward fantasy action, from Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter to Spider-Man. They weren’t making anything like Lawrence of Arabia (1962). That was entertainment too, but it was also about reality.
SCOPE: And a form of history.
VERHOEVEN: “History” is a word you don’t use anymore. I wonder if it’s not forbidden in most places now.
SCOPE: Does this dichotomy between your Hollywood work and your generally more historical work in the Netherlands say something about the differences between the two places?
VERHOEVEN: I’m not sure. You could also argue that I was typecast after RoboCop and that as long as it was in Fantasyland, I could get projects. But if I wanted to do something realistic—and the most realistic one was Showgirls. It’s very interesting to consider that. A lot of the events in Showgirls are taken from real incidents, which is perhaps why so many people hated it. Mario Kassar, who ran Carolco, which produced a number of my films, knew my Dutch work and that I could do something like Basic Instinct, but after RoboCop and Total Recall, the studios wouldn’t have even thought of me as a thriller director. So I got out of that mode, and then after Showgirls, I couldn’t go there anymore. All the doors that opened with Basic Instinct closed with Showgirls. Not all was lost: I could continue to make expensive and interesting movies like Starship Troopers and Hollow Man. But I also think that once people in Hollywood see Black Book, they’ll be able to trust me with material beyond science fiction.
SCOPE: One of the many ironies about Black Book is that it marks your first separation from Hollywood in 20 years, and yet it celebrates the verities of classical Hollywood storytelling, a tradition that Hollywood now makes a habit of dishonoring.
VERHOEVEN: The interesting thing about what you say is that I came to the United States in 1985, having made movies in Holland that were realistic and biographical, but they weren’t plot-driven. Like in some Japanese movies, there was a big scene followed by another big scene, rather than a driving narrative. After working in the US for 20 and returning to Holland, what I appreciated in the US was the narrative. At the same time, as you say, the narrative has been abandoned in Hollywood for spectacle. I brought to Soeteman my desire for a compelling narrative and plot, something I would have never felt had I not spent time in the US. I have a feeling with Black Book that I somehow combined my desire to do a realistic film about where I came from with a respect for the American film industry, where narrative has always dominated. It also meant that with Black Book I didn’t have to rely on extravagant editing and startling devices to keep the audience awake, as I did in Soldier of Orange.
SCOPE: In Black Book, you exercise something quite new with your subversive side, which is what I believe is what got you in trouble with Hollywood. You really give it to the Dutch Resistance here. For example, when the Resistance cell members overhear Rachel on the surveillance line and get the exactly wrong impression—that she’s changed sides—their anti-Semitism instantly surfaces. This is a fascinating, shocking detail.
VERHOEVEN: Yes. So is another scene where a character says, “When is an ordinary Jew more important than a good Dutchman?” It isn’t translated in the subtitles. It raises a moral issue, and suggests that not everyone had a clear understanding of what was happening in the concentration camps at that point. Using that aspect in the film was like sticking your hands in your dark heart. There’s always been a latent anti-Semitism in Europe, for centuries. I thought it was interesting and audacious to explore that, especially with people who in principle you should respect and like because they do engage in this work. These people aren’t exactly good.
SCOPE: There’s a sense running through Black Book that a person actually can change and not betray others but betray him or herself. The “good” Nazi, Müntze, played by Sebastian Koch, does betray himself.
VERHOEVEN: Or you could say that he was a realist, since it was April 1945. The writing was on the wall. Müntze was based on an actual character named Münt; the lawyer is real; the doctor with the black book is based on a Mr. De Boer. On the other hand, the doctor’s relationship with Rachel is invented, and Rachel’s relationship with Müntze is derived from one of three women we used as a composite to create her character; this woman also had a thing with a German officer, but a different one than Münt. Some of them were in Rotterdam and some in The Hague, so we put them together. Only Rachel was assembled from three different characters.
SCOPE: She does feel like a fictional creature.
VERHOEVEN: Only one of the women was Jewish. None of the three survived the war. Another example of this blend of fact and fiction is the escape by coffin near the end of the film. It was based on an actual event, but it didn’t happen to this person. The actual guy escaped to Spain with a lot of pearls and cash in the coffin with him. We came upon this pamphlet about him in our research.
SCOPE: How can you not use that? Over three years of working out who these characters were and how they would work together and figuring out the plot mechanics, how many drafts did it require?
VERHOEVEN: Once we finally figured that Rachel was the protagonist, we spent two years working out the details and rewriting. Soeteman would do a first draft, fax it to me—we did all of this handwritten because I feel it’s more creative—then I did a draft, sent it back to him, and so on, until he did the fifth and final draft. The plot was difficult, since you want to avoid explaining too much and never be boring.
SCOPE: Not only that, but you have this remarkable irony in the third act when, as the war ends and “peace” breaks out, things get really dangerous.
VERHOEVEN: This reflects an emotion I had since I was a child experiencing the war and its end. In our neighborhood in The Hague were people who were not so bad but had gotten along with the Germans, and they were punished in the most awful ways. All of the horrors in the film are based on reality, but there were far worse things than what we see in the movie. It was always the idea that we would create a situation where the worst would happen after the liberation. So we thought that to contrast Rachel’s danger with the crowds singing the national anthem, and to develop something even worse than what had happened before, would create an interesting and strange quality. To have a character who’s in danger during the war, but in even worse danger once the war ends always felt like a beautiful idea. It takes you deeper and deeper. At moments like that, I feel the pleasure of creation. It was extremely important to me from the first time I had the idea for this story 30 years ago.
SCOPE: Was the framing device always in the story?
VERHOEVEN: Our original story did have a framing device, but it depicted some in the Resistance reuniting to dedicate a street in honour of a colleague who had just died.
SCOPE: Good thing that you abandoned that. It sounds like a Spielberg idea, though you did have it before Spielberg.
VERHOEVEN: I never really liked it, to be honest. The framing became Rachel’s new kibbutz home in Israel, and it was much more appropriate, since it seemed true to her and gave you more information about her, that she had turned her back on her fellow Dutchmen. You could enter the movie in a more philosophical way.
SCOPE: And then a new movie begins at the very end. The war never ends.
VERHOEVEN: For a Jewish girl who goes to Israel, certainly, that’s the reality. It doesn’t look like it will end for at least another 50 years or more at this rate. I wanted to show that she had achieved a new life with her husband and kids, but also that it was not paradise—it’s a tough world.
SCOPE: It also illustrates that history never ends.
VERHOEVEN: And also tells you that chaos will always be there.
SCOPE: It looked like you directed this movie much differently than your previous work.
VERHOEVEN: Since Basic Instinct and Showgirls, I had staged in long shots with a moving camera, usually a Steadicam. I abandoned that here. There’s much more cutting. Wide shots then cut to a slightly closer shot then back to wide, for instance. It’s like in Gone With the Wind (1939). I used multiple cameras to shoot scenes at slightly different distances—some closer, some further away. It’s not even a matter of going from master to medium to close up—they’re more subtle shifts than that. If it’s done right, you’ll never notice. This was the result of working with a new cinematographer, the German Karl Walter Lindelaub, after 35 years with, first, Jan de Bont, and then Jost Vacano. I choose a DP stylewise.
SCOPE: And you stick with them: you’ve worked with only three cinematographers your whole career, and minus Black Book, only two. Even Bergman worked with more lighting cameramen than that over thirty years.
VERHOEVEN: Yes, I started with Jan and then switched between him and Jost, who retired two years ago. Hollow Man was his last film.
SCOPE: His work on Hollow Man is amazing: the images are so intensely sharp and with such saturated colors.
VERHOEVEN: And with as close as you can get to true blacks and ochres. The shooting style for Hollow Man carried over on Black Book, in the sense that I started with one camera, and then after a week Karl Walter pushed me to add two and three cameras. I found myself changing during the shooting. There was a practical as well as aesthetic advantage, I learned. If you shoot this way, you get in more minutes each day. It’s done a lot now, because shooting schedules seem to be getting shorter and shorter. Certainly in Europe. I shot Black Book in 42 days. Smaller budget films have no more than 20-22 days. You can thus survive within your budget by shooting with more cameras. There’s no need to stage another set-up. The catch is that you can’t grasp the editing as well. With one camera, I always had a clear sense of when I needed to cut. But with material shot on two or three cameras, I can’t choose, so I give it to my editors, and see what they do with it.
I ask the editors to do a cut, a final cut so to speak. I’ve always worked this way. I don’t believe in assemblies, since they’re so loose and you don’t really know what you have. I want my editors to think that this is the real final cut; of course, it’s not actually the final, but I also don’t want them to make a loose, provisional assembly. If we did that, then we would go through another three or four months until a firm cut. I really believe in the editor. How can it be creative if I tell them exactly what to do? It’s more important to let them go. I’ll whittle it back if I think a scene is going the wrong way, but that practically never happens if you choose the right editor. I never want to push myself in the face of the editor, or the DP or the composer. They can only be creative when they have absolute freedom. And I give them that.
SCOPE: Given that Hitchcock is your idol, what you’re describing is so different from how he worked, issuing firm instructions to every collaborator.
VERHOEVEN: He went through even more extreme changes, from the continuous shooting in Rope (1948) and gradually moved more and more toward staging for shots and more and more cuts. By the time of Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959), he’s completely committed to montage and only moves the camera when he absolutely has to.
SCOPE: And on to The Birds (1963), where there’s more montage than ever before.
VERHOEVEN: Yes. For me, a little chaos, a little not knowing, can help. Don’t be so fixated that it has to, has to be this way. And I learned a lot from Karl Walter in guiding me to do something completely different from staging everything in front of the single camera. The takes in Showgirls, for example, required an enormous amount of time to rehearse and set up.
SCOPE: Do you get a sense of the actual reception to the film when you’re at a festival?
VERHOEVEN: You can measure it by applause. Is it polite, or is it real? In Toronto and Venice, it was very genuine. A large percentage of people like it. I’ve never had this before where I walk on the streets in The Hague or Amsterdam and people stop me and tell me that they liked it. It seems that equal numbers of older and younger people are seeing it. People seem to greedily want to know more about WWII, either because they lived through it or because they want to learn more about it. I always want to create the sense in my films that you’re entering a world. In this case, I think people seem to like this. This is despite some harsh criticism from Dutch critics, but some of them have always held me in deep suspicion because they think I’m superficial. Everyone in the Dutch press hated Spetters (1980). There wasn’t even a contrary voice. There was even a committee called The National Anti-Spetters Committee. It was just like Showgirls.
SCOPE: Joe Eszterhas has written that Spetters was the basis for Flashdance (1983).
VERHOEVEN: Yes, I’ve seen that although funnily enough he never told me that. He’s very good at changing the reality, and altering the parameters. When he writes about me, either negatively or positively, Joe is very amusing. He makes things up sometimes, or adds to it. He’s done that all along. He did this when he was a journalist.
SCOPE: In all of Eszterhas’ references to you in his book, he would refer to you as “my friend Paul.” So are you friends?
VERHOEVEN: We have very much a love-hate relationship, I would say. He’s written things that are completely untrue. I know because I was there. This may also be the case when he writes about others as well.
SCOPE: Speaking of legends, this recalls your magnificent commentary for the Soldier of Orange DVD, where you discuss the need to embellish the facts of Eric’s (Rutger Hauer) adventure.
VERHOEVEN: And these events were embellished to begin with. Embellishment is unavoidable when you’re turning actual events into a film. Look at Truman Capote writing In Cold Blood, which is beautifully dramatized in Infamous (2006). “You’re making things up here,” people would complain to him. “Stick to the facts.” Well, yes, you stick to the facts in some ways but then you push them. I would never say, Black Book or Turkish Delight or Soldier of Orange—“a true story.” That would be falsification. “Based on a true story,” yes. Or “Inspired by.” Look at how Bolt rearranged events in Lawrence. It’s both based on The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and on Bolt’s own research and writing. Normally, I wouldn’t even think of inserting a phrase “inspired by true events”—that was the idea of one of the Black Book producers.
SCOPE: Given the shift in your activities, what’s your current perspective on working in Hollywood and working in Europe, and how the systems differ?
VERHOEVEN: Simply, in Holland I can really do what I want, but there’s no money. In Los Angeles, I have to do what they want, but there’s money. To gain, you lose, and to lose, you gain. In Europe you have more artistic freedom and you don’t have people telling you to tone down a scene because it’s too extreme. In the US, especially in the last ten years, you serve as a director of a movie developed by a studio. Of course, this isn’t fixed. There are big- budget, artistically restricted films made in Europe, and there’s filmmaking in the US that’s free and clear of studios.
SCOPE: Which do you prefer?
VERHOEVEN: I don’t think I have an answer, because both have their advantages and disadvantages. Just getting the money together in Europe is really difficult. The financial arrangements on Black Book, it’s just a horror story. Many times I was concerned that we would have to stop shooting because the crew hadn’t been paid. It was horrible and unpleasant. The gains are that you are your own master and commander. In Los Angeles, you work in a larger operation with the producers and levels of executives weighing, but the money is there. I think that this is also fantastic. I’ve made a lot of movies here, and most of them were actually quite interesting and pleasant to make. But Black Book is more me, just as Turkish Delight and Soldier of Orange is more me. Yet I would never be able to make the science fiction movies I’ve made anywhere in Europe. On the other hand, I could find enough personal possibilities making American movies to be happy. So I would never reject out of hand any American movie that I found interesting. The system has been very pleasant for me since the studios have let me be to a large degree. I’m exaggerating a bit with all of this, but if you don’t exaggerate, then there’s nothing to life.
SCOPE: Something that’s frequently overlooked in discussions about you is your academic background in math and physics. How did this training affect your filmmaking?
VERHOEVEN: I earned a math doctorate. I did physics first, then mathematics. It trains you to think in big structures, you’re given a proposal and then you build an entire structure and concept on top of that—that’s the working process. That could have been handy in helping me think about two hours and constructing a whole film in my head. For the rest, I might have had better training for filmmaking by being a New York taxi driver for seven years rather than studying mathematics. I had no idea what I could do with it. I did it because I could do it. I know physics helped me understand the optics of lenses and the use of light in cinematography, but the truth is that I rely a great deal on my cinematographer.
When I was 17, I wanted to attend a film school in Paris, because after my last year in a French high school to learn French I had a teacher who had a film club. I realized, beyond just watching movies, I could make them. But I had no idea how they were made. It seemed like a nice job. I had been interested in the movies since I was a child. I was drawing comic books a lot since I was 13. That wasn’t a bad training actually. But when I applied to the film school, I was much too late for the year. My father suggested that instead I should go to university in Leiden, and do mathematics or physics, which everyone did at that time.
SCOPE: Everyone majored in physics?
VERHOEVEN: Yeah, physics especially because you could get jobs. My hands weren’t good for doing experimental physics, so I abandoned that immediately. Then I thought I would do theoretical physics, such as particle physics, but it was so enormously difficult and with so much competition, that it didn’t leave anytime to do something I really liked. So I abandoned that too. I did what was required in physics and then switched to abstract mathematics. I knew for sure that I didn’t want to be a teacher—my father had been a teacher—and I was also sure that I would never create new mathematical formulae. This was 1965, and then I was drafted into the Navy. I got myself into the Navy’s film department and that’s how I made my switch.
SCOPE: That’s where you made your first war film, wasn’t it?
VERHOEVEN: Yeah, about the Dutch Marines.
SCOPE: And you were effectively a commander over troops.
VERHOEVEN: I could get whatever I wanted. I could ask for 100-200 marines. We were in the islands of Curaçao, then a Dutch protectorate off the coast of Venezuela.
SCOPE: Then you had this strange encounter with Pentecostal Christianity. How did that happen, and how did your reaction to that experience prompt your concern for reality and even hyper-reality?
VERHOEVEN: My then-future wife Martine got pregnant in 1966, and we didn’t want a child at the time. I was just starting my film career, and the prospect of an unplanned child might force me to abandon film at least temporarily. To a large degree, it was disturbing: during that period, I had a sense that I was losing my mind. I wouldn’t say a psychosis, but it felt close to that. My response was to become a member of a Pentecostal church, for a month. It was an existential need. This wasn’t common in Holland in the ‘60s.
SCOPE: What made you leave?
VERHOEVEN: When an artist friend heard my problem, he told me that it wasn’t much of a problem. His father is a doctor of anaesthetics at the Red Cross hospital in The Hague, and he could help us. So reality and pragmatism brought me out of it. This encounter with spiritual, mystical Christianity had an enormous impact on me. As a result, to get out of this dangerously sectarian thinking in which the subconscious elements of my brain were seeping into my conscious, I felt that I had to close the doors of perception, as Huxley calls it. The subconscious elements can be very powerful, and if one isn’t careful, they can take over the conscious parts of your brain. This is what happened to Nietzsche when he lost his mind in Turin. I wanted to protect myself by concentrating for years of my creative life on reality. That explains something of my enormous interest in the reality of everything, and my sense of the reality of violence, an aspect of my work that some people continue to have enormous problems with.
SCOPE: And the body. I would argue that it reached its apotheosis in Hollow Man where the fascination with the body becomes so completely biological that the body itself finally vanishes.
VERHOEVEN: Yes, the body. The physical self, the cruelty of the world, to recognize that and put it on screen was my means of warding off my subconscious. In 1985, I started to be able to think about these things again, and open them a little bit, so some of that stuff could drip in. Now, I’m writing a book about Jesus.
SCOPE: What kind of book?
VERHOEVEN: What I think happened. The last years, based on research. I’m a member of the Jesus Seminar, based in Santa Rosa. Their seminars are twice a year, and I’ve attended a lot of them and have presented several papers. I’ve become really pretty good in theology. Although I would say that my focus is more on history than theology per se.
SCOPE: So your Jesus would be closer to Pasolini’s reading?
VERHOEVEN: Perhaps a more Marxist approach. I also love Monty Python’s reading, in Life of Brian (1979), which is just brilliant.
SCOPE: Your Christianity, though, seems compartmentalized from your filmmaking, except perhaps in RoboCop…
VERHOEVEN: Where he walks on the water at the end, and its theme
of the search for the lost paradise. Twenty years ago, I wanted to make a movie
about Jesus, but I gave it up. Yet I was so curious about how the events
surrounding him were perceived at the time that they happened, or could have
happened, that I decided the best way to consider all of this was in a book.
Soeteman told me that if I made the Jesus movie I wanted to, that I might not
survive. He suggested I write a book first. The book is turning out OK, but a
movie would be so much more powerful than a book. The book will be out in Dutch
next year, and then hopefully translated into English. It might be interesting
to people that the guy who made Showgirls has done a Jesus book.
Zwartboek (Black Book) 2006 • Paul Verhoeven • Senses of Cinema Martyn Bamber, June 22, 2017
BFI | Sight & Sound | Sleeping With The Enemy Linda Ruth Williams from Sight and Sound, February 2007
Black Book (2006) – Deep
Focus Review – Movie Reviews, Critical ... Brian Eggert
Going Dutch |
Village Voice J. Hoberman, March 27,
2007
Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Tom Huddleston]
Black Book | Deep Focus | Movie
Reviews for the Internet Bryant
Frazer from Deep Focus
Beyond the Multiplex - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, April 5, 2007
Black Book (Zwartboek) (2006) | PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
REVIEW
| Crass Course: Paul Verhoeven's “Black Book” | IndieWire Nick Pinkerton
Ferdy
on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Going Dutch: Paul
Verhoeven's Resistance Thriller Black Book :: Stop ... Lawrence Levi from Stop Smiling
Black Book | Film Review | Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
Film-Forward.com
[Nora Lee Mandel]
Black Book Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
BeyondHollywood.com Brian Holcomb
Screen Slate [Cosmo Bjorkenheim]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
A Nutshell Review Stefan S
Black Book (Zwartboek) | Film at The Digital Fix Kevin O’Reilly
DVD
Talk theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
Black Book (Zwartboek) [DVD] James Kendrick from QNetwork
DVD Talk (Blu-ray) [Adam Tyner]
DoBlu.com Blu-ray Review [Matt Paprocki]
Black Book | Nothing is Written Groggy Dundee
Cinemattraction.com
[Tim Hayes]
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
The Stop Button [Andrew Wickliffe]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
indieWIRE INTERVIEW | “Black Book” Director Paul Verhoeven ... Howard Feinstein interview from indieWIRE, April 2, 2007
The Japan Times [Giovanni Fazio]
Montreal Mirror [Matthew Hays]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Austin Chronicle [Marrit Ingman]
San Francisco Chronicle [Ruthe Stein]
New
York Times Manohla Dargis, also seen
here: Black Book
- Film - Review - The New York Times
ELLE C- 69
France Germany Belgium
(130 mi) 2016 ‘Scope
One sick fuck of a movie, one filled with disturbingly violent,
adolescent male sex fantasies that degrade women, creating an ugly, highly
exploitive, misogynistic atmosphere throughout, that is redeemed somewhat by a
stupefyingly dark performance by Isabelle Huppert that is so over-the-top that
it has comical elements, but honestly, despite all the accolades, this is a
mindlessly excessive provocation that will end up doing more harm than good, as
it normalizes criminal behavior, makes it blend in with normal bourgeois
society where the participants often can’t tell the difference. While that should be ridiculous, or
hilarious, it is neither, as instead it sets a fatalistic tone of gloom that
pervades throughout the entire picture, as if saturated by toxic air. When considering the source, Dutch film
director Paul Verhoeven, this is par for the course, as he seems to specialize
in morally transgressive material, usually crossing the line into distasteful
territory, where some obviously have no problem with it, but it remains
surprising how something this revoltingly emptyheaded can be dressed up in
arthouse production values, a stellar cast, and somehow the offensive material
is considered acceptable. Sorry, but it
falls into the crassly exploitive territory, where this is one of the overrated
films of the year, including Huppert’s performance, which is all show and
surface texture, more a display of the grotesque, as the film has little
redeeming value. The film shows a rape
scene not once, twice, or even three times, but four times, showcasing it for
exploitive purposes, then immediately shifting gears, turning to Huppert’s
blasé attitude afterwards, ordering sushi by phone, asking incredibly, “What is
a holiday roll?,” before somehow blending rape into normalized sexual relations
with people preferring a hard-edged, sadomasochistic kick in the head for their
pleasure. On top of this, the rape
victim (Huppert) owns a video-game company that saturates its graphic content
with increasingly violent, sadistic rape imagery that she criticizes at one
point as “too timid,” where we then have to deal with the startlingly shallow,
comic book personalities of the few insipid characters that create this kind of
junk for a living. Before long, all of
this has been mixed into an acceptable middle class attitude, where repeated
rape attacks go unreported to the police, where violent sex becomes normalized
in existing relationships, where the bottom line portrayal of men is so cliché
driven, as if all they have is a penis, and nothing else matters or defines
their character, as if this pervasive culture is contaminated by nothing but
sick and disgusting men, suggesting the world would be better off without them,
as who really needs them? End of
story. And to further delineate a line
of demarcation, let’s call the picture ELLE (She).
The idea that one can tastefully trivialize and make a mockery of rape
culture in glossy arthouse cinema is simply a bad idea, as is the idea of
Huppert being an appropriate feminist response to violently inflicted trauma,
applying vigilante justice to her perpetrator, encouraging him to do it without
the mask on, as her character is too internally damaged to be relatable or
believable, but again remains in the comic book world of delusion and
adolescent fantasy, where the ridiculous nature of the film simply can’t be
taken seriously. Overall, people are
getting sucker punched with this one.
Ostensibly a film about a middle-aged businesswoman Michèle Leblanc
(Huppert), seen at the opening getting brutally raped in her own home by a man
coming through the window in a ski mask dressed all in black, leaving her
battered and bloodied. But instead of
going to the police, we learn she distrusts and despises them due to her past
history, as her father is a convicted serial killer from the 1970’s who forced
her, at the age of ten, to assist in the burning of all their belongings
afterwards, where she was literally covered in ash when discovered by the
police, becoming a subject of harassment, with her father serving out the rest
of his life in prison, though he does have parole hearings every ten
years. Whenever her father’s infamous
deeds appear in the news, Michèle is dragged through the mud as well, with the
public reviling her and expressing their scorn.
As if in protest to good taste, Michèle along with her best friend Anna
(Anne Consigny) are literary book editors who develop a brutally violent
video-game business catering to teenage boys that exploits grotesque rape
imagery, complete with ecstatic moans, appealing to the lowest element of male
fantasia and delusion, which, of course, makes them highly successful, allowing
her to live alone, along with her cat, in a lavish home surrounded by dozens of
open windows allowing the intruder to appear.
As if to place her in a moral purgatory for which there is no escape,
she is sleeping with her best friend’s husband, Robert (Christian Berkel),
while separated from her own, Richard (Charles Berling), while raising an
oblivious grown son who seems to have more psychological issues than anyone
else in the film, which of course remain completely unaddressed. At the same time, her elderly mother (Judith
Magre) relies upon plastic surgery and paid young male escorts to make her feel
young, a habit Michèle finds revolting and disgusting.
While this rapist is on the loose, he chooses to continue to send sick
and twisted messages on her phone and in her bed, all of which suggest she
remains a target, along with crude, mocking messages from within her own
company, affixing her face to the animated female character getting raped,
which is sent to the working computers of the entire staff.
Everything described thus far is simply the set-up, the terms of the
game from which Michèle must maneuver and operate in order to turn the tables
and regain a position of power, changing all the locks in her home, buying a
small axe and some toxic spray while taking target practice at a gun range in
order to protect herself, while Verhoeven has surrounded her with a myriad of
possible subjects, any one of which have a strong reason to hate her, while
also protruding into her dreams, where we see various revenge scenarios playing
out in her imagination. As for Michèle
herself, she thrives on other people’s discomfort, exploiting their weaknesses,
developing a casual disregard for conventional morality and has no problem
snooping into the computers of her coworkers searching for clues, masturbating
in a Buñuelian moment while watching a neighboring couple set up a Nativity
scene, reaching orgasm exactly when the lights come on, or launching into a
lengthy discourse on her own personal role in her father’s infamous deeds that
she relates dispassionately at a party to one of her neighbors, Patrick
(Laurent Lafitte), a stock trader with a beautiful but devoutly Catholic wife,
Rebecca (Virginie Efira), where she may as well be describing a list of items
on a shopping list, acting as if there is nothing inappropriate about it while
at the same time carefully gauging his response. Rather than offer any relevant comment on
rape or societal conventions, Verhoeven is content to see the world through the
disfigured life of Michèle, a tragic figure in every respect, considering what
happened to her at a young age, yet the director refuses to see her as a victim
and instead uses her psychological trauma as an excuse to explore all manner of
human degradation, including sexual humiliation or those who are aroused by
being beaten and raped, where he is trivializing human behavior, suggesting
it’s all part of a wide-ranging collection of bizarre sexual behavior,
suggesting I’m OK if you’re OK, yet it’s an excuse to display sadomasochistic
male fantasies onscreen, suggesting what’s taking place behind closed doors
could be anything, aberrant or otherwise, suggesting it’s all part of the human
face. What this adds to any discussion
on human behavior is negligible, as it’s all been done to much better effect by
Olivier Assayas in Demonlover (2002), one of the few artists to examine the
detrimental effects of brutally violating porn on the Internet, suggesting it
goes beyond mere desensitizing but is more about dehumanization, combining the
deep-seeded ramifications of a soulless Internet entity with the ruthless
ambitions of capitalism. By comparison,
Verhoeven’s revenge saga is deceptively shallow and a major disappointment,
working in the French language for the first time in the director’s career,
reduced to an offensive onslaught of hateful and demeaning imagery, yet it is a
rather faithful adaptation of the 2012 Philippe Djian novel Oh…, the same writer who wrote Betty
Blue (37°2 Le Matin) (1986), an author who is extremely popular in Europe
but utterly overlooked in the United States, where there are few revelations anywhere to
be found that distinguish this from typical male sexist content, instead
becoming an opportunity to plaster the screen with exploitation genre,
fetishistic rape imagery that is meant to be shocking, all in the name of
entertainment. Perhaps Dr. Verhoeven
could move into pedophilia next.
Senses of Cinema: Daniel Fairfax July 10, 2016
Thankfully, my festival did not end on this note, as, before flying home on the Saturday afternoon, I managed to catch a projection of Paul Verhoeven’s Isabelle Huppert-vehicle Elle. The film may prove to be controversial, given that it plays rape revenge fantasies for laughs, and at times even seems to connect the phenomenon with female cat ownership. But Verhoeven’s brisk direction is so assured, striking just the right note between erotic thriller and campy comedy, and Huppert is so obviously ideal for the part of an icy, manipulative corporate woman who can only derive sexual satisfaction from acting out rape scenarios, that the film is supremely enjoyable from start to finish.
Film Comment: Amy Taubin July 03, 2016
If Stewart’s particular screen acting gift allows her to function convincingly as a medium for narrative forces that her character neither fully understands nor controls, in Paul Verhoeven’s Elle it is Isabelle Huppert who runs the show. Verhoeven would not have a film with-out her. As adept in the comedy of sadomasochism as she has been in melodramas and tragedies along the same psychosexual spectrum, Huppert plays Michèle, who has escaped from publishing into the more lucrative field of video games. The film we are watching may or may not be analogous to the most successful game she’s produced and the ones she will produce in the future. In the opening sequence, Michèle is surprised by an intruder who rapes her. The rapist is dressed head to toe in black rubber; the rape itself involves a lot of slapping and punching. It would be just plain terrifying except that the rapist flees without pulling up his pants completely and his exposed muffin top is the tip-off that this is sex as comedy, replete with ambiguity, irony, and, eventually, consequences for the rapist. Make no mistake, the comedy is dark, but Michèle, who’s at least as damaged as everyone around her, takes control, or at least as much control as the ambivalence of her desire allows. Elle walks the sexual-politics tightrope with sophistication and wit, largely thanks to Huppert. It is, at the least, a movie worth arguing about—and seeing again.
Cinema Scope: Mark Peranson June 27, 2016
Last in Cannes in 1992 with Basic Instinct (now that was an opener!), Paul Verhoeven surely benefitted from casting former jury president Isabelle Huppert, as I think the Cannes by-laws mandate at least one Huppert title per year. Huppert is as good as she’s ever been in Elle as, yes, a woman who comes to enjoy being raped. But as it’s a Verhoeven movie, things are much more complicated than that: Huppert’s Michèle is a complex character indeed. Elle is a full-blown feminist film, fully immersing itself in the ambiguous actions of a grounded, divorced, strong businesswoman—the male characters are incredibly stupid (her son), violent (well, the rapist, but also her father, a jailed serial killer), or sex objects (her lover, who is also the husband of her business partner). It’s also a film that grants Verhoeven the space to engage in a number of his own personal fetishes (there’s a Starship Troopers allusion that stands as my highpoint of the festival). Verhoeven’s long-gestating project—his first French film—had to wait until the last day of the festival to reveal itself, and despite rumours of a guaranteed negative reaction from the crowd, Elle was met with much applause and ended the Competition on a well-deserved high note.
Film Comment: Dennis Lim July 03, 2016
Paul Verhoeven’s up-and-down career has accommodated several cycles of derision and rehabilitation. His most notorious films started out as punching bags (or punch lines) before being reclaimed as misappreciated critical causes. But no redemption seems necessary with Verhoeven’s first feature in a decade (and his first in French), Elle, which emerged in the home stretch of this year’s Cannes Film Festival as an unlikely favorite among the press corps. Is the audience no longer shockable? Or are these simply more compatible times for this instinctive provocateur’s brash cynicism, blithe amorality, and nothing-is-sacred worldview?
On paper, Elle would seem to be one of Verhoeven’s more incendiary concoctions: a wry, almost-screwball comedy of manners about one woman’s rather unusual response to a rape. Adapted by David Birke from the French novelist Philippe Djian’s Oh… (and conceived as an English-language film before Verhoeven was turned down by every American actress he approached), Elle begins in extremis, amid screams and grunts, as we first hear, then see, Michèle (Isabelle Huppert) being brutally violated in her kitchen by a hooded intruder (her cat watches, along with us). In the aftermath, she calmly sweeps up the mess, takes a bubble bath, orders in sushi. Is she in denial, or is the film suggesting that, for Michèle, being raped was no big deal? As a more conventional film would, Elle goes about unmasking and punishing the perpetrator, but it takes a circuitous route there, via a push-pull mind game of domination and submission and an exploration of sadomasochistic desire that ranks with Blue Velvet in its black-comic audacity.
In a festival that began with a rape joke at Woody Allen’s expense (by opening-ceremony host and Elle star Laurent Lafitte) and that featured competition titles (by Cristian Mungiu and Asghar Farhadi) in which sexual assaults serve as convenient plot instigators, Verhoeven’s film stood apart for the unflinching directness with which it addresses its central trauma. In fact Elle returns over and over to the rape, each time altering the dynamic between perpetrator and victim: first Michèle flashes back to it, rewriting it in her head as an avenging fantasy, then she effectively invites her attacker to reenact it.
As with Verhoeven’s best work, Elle sustains a tension between the brisk certainty of the filmmaking and the ambiguity of its heroine’s actions and motivations. Michèle, no less resilient than the Holocaust survivor of Black Book (06), refuses the mantle of victimhood. Elle situates this contradictory woman within a constellation of personal and professional relationships: with her sexually avid mother, her ex-husband and clueless son, the female colleague whose husband she’s sleeping with, and the mostly male employees devising misogynistic scenarios at the video-game company she runs. What exactly this woman wants, thanks in no small part to Huppert’s impish performance, is a continual source of mystery and comedy. Verhoeven is often called a misanthrope, but it may be more accurate to consider him a gleeful connoisseur of human psychopathology; it is hardly a surprise that Elle, a veritable encyclopedia of wayward impulses and desires, is also his most playful and tender film.
Interview:
Paul Verhoeven - Film Comment Margaret
Barton-Fumo interviews the director, January 12, 2016
The following interview with Paul Verhoeven was conducted in 2015 to conclude a career-spanning anthology of interviews with the director that will be published in 2016 by the University Press of Mississippi. Speaking from Holland as he prepared to edit the film, Verhoeven elaborated on the plot and the process of shooting Elle, which he referred to with promising hesitation as “a movie that is . . . not ordinary.”
After his 2012 experiment in crowd-sourced filmmaking, the made-for-Dutch-television Tricked, Elle represents an entirely new phase for Verhoeven. It is his first French-language production, his first collaboration with the inimitable Isabelle Huppert and his first feature in 10 years since Black Book (06). Little is known about Elle, other than the fact that it is an adaptation of the French novel Oh . . . ! by Philippe Djian, who also wrote the source novel for Betty Blue (86), and that it’s scripted by David Birke (who wrote the 2014 remake of 13 Sins). The project was first announced two years ago at Cannes by the head of Wild Bunch, Vincent Maraval, who sought financing for the film during the pre-production stage. At the time, Wild Bunch pitched the film as “a psychological game of cat-and-mouse between a businesswoman and a stalker who raped her, a crime for which she is seeking revenge” while Maraval described the script, perhaps a little too enthusiastically, as “pure Verhoeven, extremely erotic and perverted.” Verhoeven himself described Elle in subsequent interviews as both a “nuanced thriller” and possibly his “most subversive film,” and the following year at Cannes, it was announced that Saïd Ben Saïd’s SBS Productions (which backed recent productions by Brian De Palma, Philippe Garrel, and David Cronenberg, among others) would both produce and distribute the film. With Cannes 2016 a few months away, one can only hope for an imminent festival premiere.
When we last spoke about a
year ago, you told me how you experimented with the Alexa camera and new
filmmaking techniques on Tricked, and that you intended to use those
techniques again on Elle. How did the shoot go?
The shoot went well and I shot it exactly as I did with Tricked. These days the amount of time a director is given to make a move has diminished by 40 to 50 percent. Working with two cameras solves part of that problem while giving you the opportunity to do things that you wouldn’t do before.
I received a lot of support from my producer Saïd Ben Saïd, who knew that I was trying to do something different and appreciated that. Even the cameraman, Stéphane Fontaine, had not worked in that style at all before. In fact, he told me that it was really unusual in France to use two cameras simultaneously, but we did it anyway and I am very happy with the results. Filming with the two cameras next to each other as close as possible gives you the same access point—that way you can do a long shot and a medium shot at the same time and you can cut anywhere because the movement of the actors, their expressions, etc., are the same, just recorded in two different ways. It’s really an old trick that was used already in Gone With the Wind and I do it all the time now. I started using this technique on Tricked, and hopefully I perfected it on Elle, where you have a long shot, medium shot, then a long shot and so on, in and out and you really don’t notice these cuts. Of course, the point is that if you look precisely, you will see it. The shoot was about 50 days long and half of that time was spent on location in the house of Isabelle Huppert’s character, Michelle. The rest was shot in Paris.
Was this a small-scale
production?
Well, it wasn’t that small of a scale. Although it certainly wasn’t a special effects movie, either. I would call it a normal film with a lot of interiors. There aren’t any big action scenes but rather big scenes with actors sitting around a table. It’s not all that simple . . . We shot it in France, as you know, with French actors and a completely French crew.
Did you have to brush up
on the language before going into production?
Well, when I was younger I spent a year in France. I had forgotten what I learned there but it wasn’t completely gone, you know? So I took a course at a language institute here in Holland to establish a certain kind of routine. When I was young, my French was much better than my English but now I think they’re about the same. [Laughs] It’s always a bit difficult to direct in another language, of course, but ultimately I think it worked out very well.
Are you planning to
premier Elle at any festivals this year? There’s Cannes in the spring .
. .
Yeah, sure, it could be Cannes. That’s possible—if it’s selected! I leave that completely to Saïd, who is a very capable producer and also very interested in what the director is doing. He makes a lot of critical remarks and in general makes very good points. I was impressed by him, he’s really a special man.
There’s a general
excitement in the air—a rumor that Verhoeven has made another erotic thriller.
Those people who think that this is an erotic film will be disillusioned. They are in for a strange confrontation with a movie that is . . . not ordinary. I don’t think the story is erotic; it’s about rape. An erotic thriller would be a bit weird, right? I mean, it might be erotic for the person doing it, but I don’t think that rape in general is something you would call erotic.
The source novel, Oh .
. . ! by Philippe Djian, has yet to be translated into English, but the
plot description alone is very provocative. I got the impression that the novel
is written in a way in which information is initially withheld, then doled out
selectively in the form of a mystery.
It is partially written as a thriller, because the rapist wears a mask and the main character doesn’t learn his identity until later on in the story. Djian gives you the information piece by piece and for a long time you don’t even know exactly what happened, so yeah, it is written like a thriller in a certain sense. But on the other hand, it is also a story that has a lot to do with the main character’s social connections. She is caught in a web that includes her father, her mother, her son, her daughter-in-law, her lover, her ex-husband, etc. These relationships are all rotating around her, most of which have nothing to do with the rape and nothing to do with the thriller genre.
You’ve filmed several rape
scenes over the course of your career and quite a few of them were
controversial, raising troubling questions of the characters’ consent. The
scene with Michael Douglas and Jeanne Trippelhorn in Basic Instinct, for
example, or the scene with Rutger Hauer and Jennifer Jason Leigh in Flesh+Blood
. . . .
Well, in Flesh+Blood the consent is clearly fake: Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character pretends to enjoy it so that Rutger Hauer’s character will protect her from being gang raped afterwards. By pretending to enjoy it she took initiative and committed what I consider an act of survival. But it wasn’t something that she actually enjoyed—not in any way.
Did you storyboard the
film?
Yes, I storyboarded this one myself. I showed the storyboards to the assistant director and to the DP, so they had a complete idea of what I was doing with these scenes from the first shot to the last. Every morning I would give them my drawings, so that basically every scene in the film was choreographed.
Did you choreograph the
rape scene in Elle?
It had to be choreographed because it was so violent. You really have to figure out beforehand what can be done by the actors and what has to be done by stunt performers. You cannot have the actor—or the actress, in this case—thrown to the ground. She might break something! Then you won’t be able to finish the movie.
Did you collaborate well
with the actors? Were you particular in your direction of the lead actors, or
did you allow them room to improvise?
No, I would never be so demanding with Isabelle Huppert—she knows what to do! She’s one of the most brilliant actors I’ve ever met in my life. She’s so extremely special and is able to avoid any cliché in any situation, always finding a different way of doing things. She comes up with all kinds of extra details that you wouldn’t even dream of, that I would never come up with on my own. She’s not only a great actress but she is also especially imaginative and creative in her approach to the character. I didn’t have to tell her anything about Michelle because it was clear from the first shot that she knew exactly what her character would do and how she would behave in whatever circumstance. She is extremely audacious and she really had no problem with anything that was in the script, so I have an enormous respect for her.
Reading through all of
these interviews with you dating back to 1968, you’ve always claimed to
incorporate what you call realism into your films.
Sure, because in order to feel comfortable I want to give my films a certain amount of realism, or a sense of reality—within the framework of science fiction or action or whatever—but I still believe in researching for details, finding out what’s more or less possible in the story and how things would go if the film were to go in a certain direction. I’ve said this before but it really comes from my Dutch background that includes the realist school of painting in Holland. If you compare the Dutch painters of the 17th century with the Italians or even the English, you can see that the Dutch had a better sense of representing reality than other Europeans. I think that if you come from a country where you are aware of that and you can feel that difference—I think that’s something that I took with me to the United States. I certainly utilized it in Elle, which I shot in a completely realistic way—you don’t even get the feeling that the film is lit. Of course I used lamps here and there but you can see that the cinematographer used as much natural light, or suggested natural light, as possible throughout the shoot. The dark in the film is really dark.
You’ve always blended this
type of realism with stylization, though, especially when it comes to the
camerawork in your films.
Well, everything is blocked of course. It’s too distracting to move the camera all of the time while the characters are talking to each other, isn’t it? When we shot Elle, both cameras were handheld throughout. The camera would be on the DP’s shoulder so that it could be a free instrument, never on a dolly, or set on a pole, or whatever. It was basically just in the hands of the operator, never completely steady, which creates a sense of observation. If you’re holding the camera on your shoulder and you’re breathing or whatever there’s always a slight movement of the camera that gives you a feeling of incertitude—perhaps a bit voyeuristic—which I also did in Tricked. That film was also shot without dollies or poles or anything like that, all handheld.
Elle is more of what you might call a “European” movie because it’s not completely plot-driven like, say, Basic Instinct, where you’re always trying to figure out the identity of the killer. Was it Sharon Stone, or perhaps Jeanne Tripplehorn? Everything in the whole film is dedicated to that mystery. In Basic Instinct you don’t meet any of the characters’ families. You have no idea, for example, about George Dzundza’s character—is he married? Does he have any children? There’s really none of that, and as such, Basic Instinct is more in the tradition of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett mysteries, where you never learn about the social environment of any of the characters because that’s not really the point; it’s about the detective solving the case. In Elle, Isabelle’s character wants to find out who did this to her but that’s only part of the story. The other part has to do with her place in the middle of this social network—what is she doing there, and how do all of these people around her relate to each other?
I expect the dialogue must
be very important in this film.
Much more important than in Basic Instinct. And certainly more than in any of the science-fiction movies that I’ve made [chuckles], where the dialogue is mostly, “Let’s go!” and the like, always very rudimentary.
You first left Europe to
work on larger projects in the United States. The creative limitations here
proved to be too strict, and now you’re back in Europe . . .
I don’t think that a movie like Elle would ever be proposed in the U.S.! They stay far away from such projects there. As I get older I’ve grown more interested in doing things that are beyond the norm. I’ve already made too many science fiction films, action-oriented movies or whatever in the United States and I think that to a certain degree this return to Europe has to do with being able to make the kind of movies that I want to make. I’m looking for things that I haven’t done before, which is certainly the case with Elle.
Cinema
Scope | The Rules of the Game: Paul Verhoeven's Elle Adam Nayman, September 02, 2016
In Elle, Michèle (Isabelle Huppert) slaps her adult son in the face, sleeps with a hammer under her pillow, deliberately smashes into her ex-husband’s car and later pepper-sprays him, accidentally crashes her own car, buys a gun, and forces a much younger male employee at her video-game company to show her his penis as a penalty for insubordination—and that’s only a partial inventory of the ways in which she acts out over the course of the film. It’s unclear whether Michèle’s relentlessly aggressive behaviour is in response to her having been sexually assaulted in her home by a masked assailant in the very first scene of the film, or the result of psychic wires that got crossed a long time ago; the key is that Paul Verhoeven doesn’t ask us to choose. Yes, Elle is a movie about a woman who gets raped, and to some extent, the very specific ways in which she reckons with that experience—including, after some hesitation, an attempt to discover the rapist’s identity and take revenge. But it’s more accurate to say that, as its title implies, Elle is simply a movie about a woman, full stop. As skillfully and flawlessly acted by Huppert, who at this point can seemingly do no wrong with a halfway decent part, Michèle is one of the strongest and strangest movie characters in a long time.
Working from a surprisingly witty and literate script by David Birke—whose previous credits on Gacy (2003) and Freeway Killer (2010) didn’t exactly prepare us for this—Verhoeven has finessed Philippe Djian’s 2012 novel into a hybrid comeback vehicle for himself and a showcase for Huppert, who supposedly coveted the role from the beginning of the development process. Imperious despite her dinky stature and almost always in motion, Michèle is a well-coiffed powerhouse who slices through her domestic and professional environments like a well-honed blade, albeit one with (c.f. former Verhoeven accomplice Joe Eszterhas, who knows from knives) a jagged edge. Nothing slows her down or softens her up, but it’s not necessarily confidence that drives her so much as a flinty inscrutability that is by turns amusing, disturbing, admirable, and absurd. Unlike Huppert’s title character in Michael Haneke’s La pianiste (2001)—a film whose sadomasochistic shadow surely falls over certain parts of Elle—she’s not a pathological case, nor is she any sort of symbolic figure. Michèle evinces a variety of post-feminist stereotypes—bourgie culture-vulture, man-eater, sleek careerist—without fully inhabiting any of them, and her ability to take in stride both serious trauma and workaday annoyance feels like its own form of bristling defiance.
If La pianiste comes to mind because of Huppert, Elle is more generally reminiscent of another Haneke joint, Caché (2005), from which it borrows both its well-heeled Parisian setting and insinuating multimedia (sub)textures, with baroquely violent video games swapped in for creepy surveillance videos as ontological counterpoint to the main action. Verhoeven’s admiration for Haneke makes sense insofar as they’re both artists who enjoy using genre to implicate their audiences, except that the Dutchman is—and always has been—more honest and up front about what attracts him to extreme images and situations; it would never occur to him to hover judgementally above the fray. (The inclusion at one point of a YouTube fetish video for those who like seeing bugs being crushed underlines this, and also directly and hilariously invokes Starship Troopers [1997].) Haneke typically works very hard to reach the conclusion that people are self-interested hypocrites living in denial—basically, that they’re assholes. For Verhoeven, that’s not an insight, it’s a given, and after that a jumping-off point.
Taking its cues largely from Huppert’s beautifully vituperative line readings—many of them viciously sotto voce in the company of Michèle’s ostensible loved ones—Elle is very funny, and in ways that are new for Verhoeven. In his breakthrough Turkish Delight (1973), the director torqued Jan Wolkers’ downbeat realist novel into a springy, New Wave-inflected picaresque that pitted beautifully bawdy young Amsterdam hipsters against tight-assed emissaries of his country’s middle-class repression; the push-pull between fleshy rebellion and buttoned-up decorum was a warning shot across the bow of Dutch society. Crossing the ocean for RoboCop (1987), he unmasked a decade’s technocratic cruelty and ended by literally going for the jugular. Forty years later, Verhoeven’s point of view has pivoted away from impudent critique (in both his Dutch and Hollywood films) towards a more relaxed line of attack, which started in the little-seen experimental mini-feature Tricked (2012). There are scenes and scenarios in Elle that are completely outrageous, including the revelation of Michèle’s Gothic family history, which not only explains to some degree why she doesn’t go to the police after being attacked but also makes unexpected incursions into exploitation-flick territory. Yet the overall impression is of the serenity and elegance of plot points and reversals whirring away and locking tidily into place, even as the essential messiness of life—Michèle’s, certainly, but also potentially anybody’s—keeps oozing into view like an uncauterized wound, or blood bubbling to the surface of an ivory-white bubble bath.
On the level of craft, Elle is excellent, with clear, gleaming digital cinematography by Jacques Audiard’s usual DP Stéphane Fontaine and fleet editing from Job ter Burg, who cut Verhoeven’s Black Book (2006) and seems allergic to drag (the tightness is also a by-product of the script). The long-standing claims of Verhoeven’s “classicism,” which started around the time he came to Hollywood, don’t really square with the agile DV aesthetic on offer here (Fontaine had two HD cameras going at all times). However one would describe the style—I’d call it glossy, Buñuelian quasi-realism—it is simply a means to an end, because Elle is essentially a drama of ideas, expressed dialectically via each of Michèle’s major ongoing relationships, including at least two men who she suspects might secretly be her attacker.
If there is one scene that fully clarifies Verhoeven’s project, and also crystallizes his true influences, it’s a late exchange between Michèle and a female neighbour, who has plenty of reason at that point in the story to give her a wide berth. Instead, standing together in the middle of a quiet suburban street, the two women have an exchange that’s at once startling in its everything-on-the-table frankness and chilling because of the extra little bit that’s being withheld, or only acknowledged in a sideways way. That the quasi-confessional aspect of the dialogue is framed by a plastic statue of Jesus not-quite-hiding in plain sight is very Verhoeven—it’s in line with the resplendently full-frontal Christ manqué in The Fourth Man (1983), or RoboCop’s climactic walk over the water to finish off his foe, or the myriad crucifixes adorning Black Book. But the philosophy (such as it is) that passes between the characters and hangs over the final shots is finally very close to the humanist equanimity of Renoir’s La règle du jeu (1939), and its famous maxim that “Everybody has their reasons”—a ruthlessly pragmatic worldview located precariously between indulgence and indignation, and thus right in the sweet spot of a director who somehow always manages to have it both ways.
Cinema Scope: The original plan was for Elle to be shot and set in the United States, correct?
Paul Verhoeven: Yes, absolutely. When I was sent the book, I recognized the name of the author, Philippe Djian, because there was another movie based on one of his novels, Betty Blue (1986). I didn’t know his work, though, because he’d written 30 books, one every year. My producer Saïd Ben Saïd sent me Oh… and asked me if I was interested in making a movie out of it. I thought, “OK, this is different. I haven’t done something like this before.” It was more character-oriented. The human beings were more important than the action. And I thought it would be interesting to do a movie in Paris—or at least at the beginning, when I got the book. When we started to talk about it, we came to a different conclusion, which was that it might be interesting to a general international audience, and we should make the film in the US. There was a writer that I knew in Los Angeles and who I was working with on another project that didn’t go forward; his name is David Birke, and I like him very much. He’d done a really good rewrite for me of another script. I asked David to do the script, and we translated the whole novel into English for him. We discussed it, every chapter, what we liked in it. We had the understanding that it would all be American, whether it was going to be Chicago, Boston, or New York, or whatever. It could have been Seattle or something. I’m more European than American, but David is fully American, so I just let him go, and he transformed it. We were all satisfied, and we thought it was really good. Maybe a bit provocative or dangerous, but that was very attractive, I thought. The morality, or the lack of morality, attracted all of us. Saïd tried to see if he could find American financial partners, and I was looking for an American actress who was willing to play the part, which is audacious of course. We found out that on financial terrain and artistic terrain there was no enthusiasm, neither from the actresses nor the financiers. Nobody wanted to participate in this venture.
After a couple of months, Saïd called me and said that this wasn’t going anywhere in the United States. We had approached five or six top, A-list actresses and they all immediately refused: “No, no, no, absolutely not, we won’t do this.” So we realized we were on the wrong track. It seemed to be impossible to do it in the US. But from the beginning of the project—from the very beginning—I had had conversations with Isabelle Huppert. I talked to her in Berlin, at the festival there. And she was really enthusiastic about the book, and really wanted to do it. Now, confronted with the enormous lack of enthusiasm—or fear—from the American side, we decided to rewrite the script, and put it back in French, back through the French filter, with a French writer. We had to translate things back from the cultural deformation that we had applied to the novel. That took another month at least. Then we found out that in France, there were zero problems with financing it. We had an actress who was not afraid of the part, or the nudity, or the amoral—or non-moral—attitude of the main character! From that moment on, after “re-Frenching” it, there were no problems anymore, and it was a smooth route. Everything was very fast after this long loop through the American culture. We ended up with a French film about French culture that was very close to the French book.
Scope: Was the video-game subplot part of that “cultural deformation?” That seems like a very American invention, although I suppose they play video games in France, too.
Verhoeven: That was not in the original novel. In the book, Michèle is the CEO of a company that writes scripts. She has 20 writers working for her, doing scripts for television, and she supervises, sometimes in a very harsh way. We felt that in a movie, talking about scripts and stories and all that stuff—about characters and dramatic structure—would be extremely boring for an audience. My daughter told me that it should be something better than that. She’s a painter, and she suggested changing Michèle to somebody who is in charge of a company that makes video games. I asked David what he thought, and he turned out to know everything about video games. He likes video games. He plays video games. He knows the grammar of games and how you talk about them, and the tricks of the trade. So we changed it immediately!
Scope: Some of the imagery in the video game is similar to Starship Troopers, especially the alien with the tentacles. It looks like the Brain Bug.
Verhoeven: We invented a video game for the movie, but we were shooting in the offices of a Paris-based video-game company and we used some of their material. We didn’t have the money to create something totally new. That would have been way beyond our budget. We adapted one of their games that they had launched a year before. We started to realize as we were working that the video game was a kind of counterpoint or a parallel to the main issue of the film, which is rape. We made the story of our video game mirror the main narrative.
Scope: In the video game, though, there’s this very obvious ending with this triumphant act of vengeance, where the warrior woman is reborn…
Verhoeven: The Dark Force, yes.
Scope: But Michèle’s story doesn’t play out that way…
Verhoeven: Well, it depends. You can see it—and I saw it—that there is a sort of a divine punishment at the end. I looked at it that way. It’s very important how Michèle looks at the end of the last scene. The way Isabelle Huppert looks, in her eyes, there is a touch of a smile. She is not shocked. She’s like, “Well, you had this coming.” In some way, she is triumphant.
Scope: I’d say that Elle is more dependent on a single character—or a single performance—than any of your other movies, even Katie Tippel (1975) or Showgirls (1995), which also have these female protagonists. Michèle is sort of the whole movie.
Verhoeven: That’s because I had an actress of superb quality. She’s one of the most talented actresses in the world. I knew that because I’d seen so many of her films. Isabelle taking the part added a level to the movie that I doubt I would have gotten anywhere else.
Scope: The point of the movie seems to be that Michèle never backs away or retreats from the things that are happening to her. It’s strange to see a movie about a character who’s going through so much and who remains totally self-possessed the whole time.
Verhoeven: She refuses to be victimized. I think she sets the tone of the movie from the very beginning. We don’t see the rape; we see the aftermath. And then she gets up, she starts to clean up the broken cups on the ground, and takes a bath, and orders sushi. And that’s her character. She says: “OK, this happened to me.” She fought the guy, but he was too strong—we see that in the flashback. But she refuses to be the victim. When she goes to dinner with her friends, she says that she was raped, and when they start to comment on it she stops the whole conversation two seconds later to order. They react with shock, and she doesn’t want that to happen. She’s with her lover and her ex-husband, and yet she refuses to be thrown into the part that she’s been given, of somebody who has been raped.
Scope: You’ve never had female characters who let themselves be victimized, though. The women in your Dutch movies always fight back, and they win.
Verhoeven: That’s true of the men, too. The male character in Turkish Delight loses the love of his life to another guy, and then when she dies he takes the wig he’d given her and throws it in the garbage. He survives. He refuses to stop his life because this horrible thing has happened. He won’t accept it. That’s true in Soldier of Orange (1978) too. In all the movies I did with Rutger Hauer, he’s a survivor.
Scope: I guess I was thinking more of Rachel in Black Book.
Verhoeven: It’s true. I don’t know if it’s female-oriented, but in general, the Dutch movies are about survivors.
Scope: And what would you say about the various men in Elle?
Verhoeven: They’re not so great. Michèle’s ex-husband is ineffectual, and her son is a bit silly. He doesn’t see that his girlfriend is dominating him from the very beginning.
Scope: There’s a real focus on parental relationships—and guilt—in the film. Michèle is very critical of her son, but she’s also coping with the legacy of her father and the embarrassment of her mother dating a younger man. The family dynamics are complex…
Verhoeven: We took all of Michèle’s relationships—with her son, her mother, her father, her husband, her daughter-in-law, her secret lover, and the rapist—very seriously. For me one of the key aspects of the movie was drawing all those relationships, because I usually don’t go that far with my characters, or with them interacting in that way. If you look at Basic Instinct (1992), we don’t know anything about Michael Douglas’ partner, or even about Michael Douglas! Here, I thought it was good to go deep inside a group of people, where Michèle is at the centre and they all move around her. That’s in the novel, though, and that’s what attracted me to the novel, which is that it was partly a thriller, and partly social commentary.
Scope: You told me last year that you were a big fan of Caché, and I thought that Elle was like Caché without judgment. You don’t judge the characters for what they do.
Verhoeven: No, I try to let them be.
Scope: I also thought of Jean Renoir’s La règle du jeu.
Verhoeven: That was the film that I had in mind while I was shooting Elle.
Scope: Really?
Verhoeven: Yes! I mentioned it many times to the actors, who knew it of course. They were all French, so the reference was easy for them. La règle du jeu was extremely modern in 1939, and it still is. The way that the wife of the main character talks to her husband’s mistresses—that was the sort of talk that I was going for.
Scope: You’ve never made a totally class-based comedy—maybe parts of Turkish Delight, but there’s a level of social observation that’s different here. The satire isn’t as broad as it is in, say, Starship Troopers. It’s lighter and maybe more realistic.
Verhoeven: It’s a look at the bourgeoisie. That’s a word in French, right? Not quite aristocratic, but not working-class—the people are bourgeois.
Scope: So you could also cite Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972)…
Verhoeven: That’s the other film! You’re on target. That’s the other movie that was in the background the whole time. I think Saïd sent me the book because he thought I could work in a Buñuelian way. Belle de jour (1967) was one of the movies that I studied very closely.
Scope: What’s Buñuelian in Elle are all of the dreams, or the daydreams—Michèle’s fantasies. She keeps slipping into these reveries throughout the movie, which is strange, because I don’t know if there are dream scenes in any of your other movies. There are hallucinations in RoboCop.
Verhoeven: There are dream scenes in The Fourth Man. For the rest, no. I do like Buñuel’s dreams, and I like Ingmar Bergman’s dreams, especially in the movie about the old guy, Wild Strawberries (1959), which is a very beautiful dream! But in movies, dreams need to be at that level, or else it’s a bit kitschy. In this case, her dreams are sort of wish-dreams, like when she kills the guy with the ashtray. She thinks of what she could have done.
Scope: There’s a very unusual mix of memory and desire, and a kind of fantasy projection.
Verhoeven: It’s sort of her wish-fulfillment.
Scope: Some people have—admiringly—described Elle as a “rape comedy.” I think that the movie is funny, but in your other movies, I think rape has been treated very seriously: it’s a big part of Spetters (1983) and it also happens in Showgirls, in a scene that’s meant to be incredibly ugly. I wondered what you thought of Elle being called a comedy.
Verhoeven: I think it’s stupid when they describe it as a “rape comedy.” That suggests that the rape is comic. It’s a movie about life, and where things are happening simultaneously, or one after the other. There is violence everywhere. There is sexual abuse everywhere, 1,800 times a day in the US. These things happen. And then at the same time people are going to parties and to restaurants, and they have fun with each other, and they make love, and they’re basically amoral. It all happens together. So the movie is about the rape, but it’s also about how people live. I think I look at it in a critical way, or maybe in an amused way. But I don’t ever look at the rape in an amused way. The rape is extremely harsh, direct, and violent. There’s nothing comical about it!
You have to accept that life consists of several elements at the same time. If you say “rape comedy,” it’s a refusal to accept reality, or an attempt to put the movie into a genre. It’s not a genre movie, and there is no genre that you could put it in. It’s three or four different things. Basic Instinct is genre. It’s a thriller with a lot of genre. Elle is about rape, and the response to it, by a very specific woman, who has been through very specific, horrible things in her life before that. She has relationships, and love, and hate, and interests that have nothing to do with the rape. The movie is also about what Michèle does in the world. With genre, you have to stay inside something. I try to break with genre all the time.
Scope: The idea of Michèle in the world…is that why you changed the title of the book from Oh… to Elle? Because it’s totally about “her?”
Verhoeven: The original title is Oh… and I thought it wasn’t a good title. David said we should change it to Elle. It’s funny because we have an “elle” with “Isabelle.” And “Michèle” is also an “Elle,” right?
Scope: Can you talk about working with Isabelle? I’ve noticed that even when she works with strong directors, like Claire Denis or Michael Haneke, she sort of takes over what we see onscreen. I think she’s an example of an actor as an auteur, and I wonder if that was a different sort of experience for you, even after so many other movies and different sorts of movie stars.
Verhoeven: I had no problems with Isabelle ever. We agreed on everything. We didn’t discuss the part, really. We talked maybe half an hour about it, and maybe a bit on the set or in the makeup room. We’d talk about what we were doing that day, but with Isabelle I sort of just let her go. I thought that the less I said, the better I could get from her. She went so deeply into character, and I put my confidence in whatever she would do, even if it was breaking or changing the script. She would do that stuff. She would do things from other scenes, or continue with scenes after they were over, and I let her do it because she was so into that person. I had more confidence in her ability to perform and to express than in my own directorial supervision. I was so amazed by what she was doing that I often forgot to say “Cut.” It was so good, and better than what I had in my head, and better than what I thought could happen. It was extraordinary. I’ve never seen so much strength and inspiration in the right moments. It all came out of her being the character, and I tried to use every moment that she gave me.
Scope: Is this sort of collaboration—or this sort of movie—what you’re hoping to duplicate going forward? You told me last year that you keep watching Hollywood blockbusters because you want to see how they’re using digital special effects. Do you want to do something special effects-driven again?
Verhoeven: I don’t want to make one…or maybe I would do that if there was something, a script, that could be innovative, and so I wouldn’t feel like I was doing the same thing that everyone else has been doing for the last ten years. I have the feeling that we’ve exhausted the possibilities of special effects. Nothing amazes me, or suggests another possibility. That doesn’t mean that somebody won’t come up with something beyond what we see every week in the theatre. I want to be prepared, if necessary, to do something with special effects, but it has to be something new.
Scope: Elle is the first film you’ve made to be invited to Cannes, or at least to play in Competition there.
Verhoeven: Basic Instinct was at Cannes, but it was the opening-night film. It didn’t compete.
Scope: So maybe this is the beginning of a phase where you’re officially an “art” filmmaker.
Verhoeven: If it could go in that direction in the next couple of years—however much time I have—then I would certainly do that. I’m much more interested in people than I was before. I look more at people, and the way that characters treat each other, and betray each other—it was all in my movies before anyhow, but more so now. I would love to move in that direction, and I would love to stay there. The industry doesn’t give you what you want, though. You have to find the book. You have to find the script. Something challenging, something that hasn’t been done—in genre or outside of it—I would take it. I won’t sit for ten years until something like this comes again. That would be silly. You’re lucky to get a book, a script, and an actress like we did in Elle. It’s comparable for me to Turkish Delight or to RoboCop. The moments where you get a present like this are rare, and it’s rarer that you’re able to do it, or that you’re inspired to do it. Sometimes you make movies because you make movies, and that’s it. You’re waiting for the real challenge.
Scope: You sound as if you’re up for anything.
Verhoeven: If I like it, I think can do it. And if I like it very much, then I will do it.
The New Yorker: Richard Brody November 15, 2016
Reverse Shot: Genevieve Yue October 14, 2016
The A.V. Club: Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
International Cinephile Society [Marc van de Klashorst]
Paul
Verhoeven's Elle, reviewed. Dana Stevens
from Slate
Verhoeven's
Twisted, Fascinating Rape Thriller
Jada Yuan from Vulture
Johanna
Fateman on Paul Verhoeven's Elle - artforum.com / in print Johanna Fateman from Artforum magazine
The Village Voice: Melissa Anderson
Slant
Magazine [Diego Semerene]
Inside
Elle: The Rape-Revenge Film Seducing Cannes
Richard Porton from The Daily
Beast
MUBI [Daniel Kasman] (Cannes 2016:Top Picks)
MUBI's Notebook: Fernando F. Croce September 10, 2016
Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]
'Elle':
Paul Verhoeven on Why You Have to Embrace and Fear Your ... Dylan Dempsey, No Film School
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anne-Katrin Titze]
The
House Next Door [Sam C. Mac]
Cannes
Review: Paul Verhoeven's 'Elle' - Indiewire Eric
Kohn, also seen here: Indiewire
[Eric Kohn]
Little
White Lies [Katherine McLaughlin]
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
Observations on Film Art: Kelley Conway October 13, 2016
Time:
Stephanie Zacharek November 10,
2016
Cannes Film Festival:
Part Two - Features - Reverse Shot
Jordan Cronk, June 07, 2016
Movie
Mezzanine: Kenji Fujishima
Filmmaker: Vadim Rizov September 07, 2016
Filmmaker: Blake Williams May 23, 2016
Sight
& Sound [Geoff Andrew] May 22,
2016
The
Film Stage [Giovanni Marchini Camia]
AwardsCircuit.com [Clayton Davis]
The Cinemaholic Nikhil Letha-Soman
EmanuelLevy.com
[Emanuel Levy] also seen here: EmanuelLevy.com
[Emanuel Levy]
'Elle'
Director Paul Verhoeven's Rules of the Game | IndieWire Anne Thompson, November 18, 2016
Cineuropa.org [Fabien Lemercier]
queerguru.com
(Roger Walker-Dack)
Film Corner, The [Greg Klymkiw]
Sight & Sound: Nick James October 04, 2016
FilmFracture [James Jay Edwards]
The Chicago Reader: Leah Pickett
The Talkhouse: Zach Clark October 13, 2016
Daily | Cannes 2016 | Paul
Verhoeven’s ELLE David Hudson from Fandor
Hollywood
Reporter [Jordan Mintzer]
Critic's
Notebook: Why Cannes' 'Elle' is the Most Empowering "Rape ... Leslie Felperin from The Hollywood Reporter
Hollywood
Reporter [Todd McCarthy]
Critics
Say 'American Honey,' 'Elle' the Standouts of 2016 ... - Variety discussion between Owen Gleiberman and Peter
Debruge
The
Guardian [Lisa Schwarzbaum]
Paul
Verhoeven on Elle: 'It is not a rape comedy' | Film | The Guardian Benjamin Lee, May 27, 2016
Elle
review: Paul Verhoeven's brazen rape revenge comedy is a dangerous delight Xan Brooks from The Guardian
Cannes
2016, Elle, review: 'unnerving' - The Telegraph Robbie Collin
San Diego CityBeat: Glenn Heath Jr. November 16, 2016
Los
Angeles Times [Justin Chang] also
seen here: Cannes:
'Elle,' with Isabelle Huppert,
brings competition to a strong ...
Rogerebert.com
[Sheila O'Malley]
Cannes 2016:
"Elle" | Cannes | Roger Ebert
Barbara Scharres
Review:
In ‘Elle,’ Isabelle Huppert Subverts the Role of Rape Victim A.O. Scott from The New York Times
'Elle,'
Starring Isabelle Huppert as a Rape Victim Who Turns the Tables, Rivets Critics
Rachel Donadio from The New York Times
The
Enduring Allure of Isabelle Huppert - The New York Times The New
York Times, November 30, 2016
Elle (film) - Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
Vermut,
Carlos
DIAMOND
DIAMOND
FLASH - DISAPPEARING ACT BLOG Javier
Loarte from The Disappearing Act Blog
As you all know the situation in
Under these circumstances it was a miracle to make a film in Spain in 2011. The writer and director of Diamond Flash, Carlos Vermut, coming from the world of comics, used 30 thousand dollars he earned from creating an animation series to make this film. The average cost of a Spanish film is around two million euros. But before jumping into the unknown and making the film by himself he had tried the usual way: he sent the screenplay to three producers, he waited a month and didn’t get even an answer. So he decided not to wait. He saved on art direction and crew members and gave priority to the story and the actors. He even became the Director of Photography of the film to save the last penny. But if this film is here today is not because it only cost 30 thousand dollars. This movie is here today because it is a great film.
The lack of support gave the filmmaker the freedom needed to make such a film possible. More technical quality would have required more money. More money means more investors and more investors mean more opinions. Opinions bigger than a guy in his late twenties with only a 3 minute short film in his pocket.
He made a casting through the internet. He posted an ad on the web and actors would send him tapes with scenes. Among all the candidates the director contacted 7 of them for each role and then held a more conventional casting to choose the final cast. One of the most amazing features of this film is the discovery of unknown actors that together give the best ensemble performance seen in the last years of Spanish cinema.
Maybe the most interesting thing of the film we are about to see is that it is almost impossible to classify. A puzzle whose different pieces create diverse layers that give the story a hypnotic quality where you are going be constantly challenged. Because first things first, this is not an easy movie. It’s demanding. It’s going to ask you to be active, smart, playful. It is a great journey, and as every great journey there is a price to pay.
It’s difficult to guess where this movie is going to take you. The pleasure is to keep your eyes opened and LET-YOUR-SELVES-GO.
“Diamond
Flash” (Carlos Vermut, 2011) - Blogs EL PAIS Marcos Ordóñez
Diamond Flash, first feature film Carlos Vermouth and underground
where they exist, is one of the Spanish productions that have most impressed me
lately: for their efforts, for its architecture, its dialogues between the
extreme naturalism and stylization frost; for his byline humor and excruciating
pain for his acting work and leaving the sediment in memory.
Its author, for all I know, is a young artist and cartoonist
Flash Diamond is a strong alcohol, which suggests mazes Rivette, in claustrobóficos worlds Paulino Viota (other king of patriotic underground), in the dream perfume Judex Franju. You can talk about some of your plot comes because, in my opinion, the unpredictable in their domesticity, that is, the underground everyday, what happens to us and can not be counted. It is unpredictable what happens underground between brother and sister of the first part of the story, and the darkness that beat under both female partners of the second, and what lies under the male superhero that gives title, just So there is a bad librarian wearing glasses and frequent neighborhood bars Polynesians, and the evil of female incarnation has over a super-evil that only know the telephone voice and in image worthy of Lynch, hand painted red (a lump, without profiles) An angel plaster, like one of those aunts second that everyone who lives far away in the trough or Sant Andreu, surrounded by crochet doilies. The numerical superiority of women in Diamond Flash can make believe, at first glance, it is a feminist or monothematic programmatically movie: A movie about women, for instance, as collective suffering and abused. The issue of abuse, which takes Vermouth deeply serious, is present, of course, but not Manichean generic way, and if not they should ask the brother of the pharmaceutical of the first part, or battered wife who falls into hands of the dreaded addicted to the Polynesians bars.
Evil and ferocity therefore take many forms and embody a random
mode but seems to have determinism in the first part: the family as a nest of
inheritance and patterns which is very difficult to escape, alternating roles
victims and executioners.
I would say the truly central issue of Diamond Flash is the ability to
do harm. Worse, the need to hurt. Never mind that the damage is exercised by
revenge, by longing for justice, for money or outright pathology: the damage is
damage for many reasons that you throw. It is perhaps the axial topic but
clarified, is not alone, and this is why it is so exciting film: because it has
many layers and many shades because it is ambiguous, because it seems made to
illustrate or defend a single postulate.
Diamond Flash is not my cup of tea: it is one of the darkest movies, disturbing and hopeless I've seen. Disturbing because their levels of unrest and violence (physical but mostly psychological) border on the unsustainable; black because another of his themes is the amorality of the evil that even guilt arises; hopeless because none of his characters seem likely to achieve entrevisión a little light, except in a fleeting encounter or an equally fleeting childhood remembrance. There are not many good people in the world it portrays, which does not prevent us to suffer to see when you go wrong and end up worse, and we feel it proves that Carlos Vermouth knows what you do as a writer and director: if your characters were flat or plasterboard, otherwise provoke empathy, if they were not true, ten minutes desconectaríamos of the frame by considering jumbled, overloaded, or impossibly melodramatic. On its side, and we retain in the chair, the intensities of the story, the firmness of his strange architecture, and the secret joy but expresses its achievements: the happiness they exhale their interpretations, the urge to tell, its staging , the project itself. I remember feeling something with Argentina subterranísima recent film, which has no known commercial distribution: Extraordinary Stories of Mariano Llinás. I really want to see what lies Carlos Vermouth in the future, but its future is already here and is called Diamond Flash.
The
Pain in Spain Part II | Dazed Begona Gomez Urzaiz interview from Dazed Digital,
Carlos
Vermut • Director - Cineuropa
Alfonso Rivera interview September 23, 2014
MAGICAL
GIRL
Digital Journal [Sarah Gopaul]
‘Magical Girl’ throws conventional narrative structure out the window and makes audiences work to put together the pieces of the puzzle.
Sometimes life comes full circle too soon. When it's not sudden, it can allow for time to make some dreams a reality. But not all desires are the simplest to fulfill. In Magical Girl, a father goes to extremes to try and give his dying daughter her only material want.
Luis (Luis Bermejo) is an average guy. The unemployed teacher is a single parent with one daughter, Alicia (Lucía Pollán), who has leukemia. When he comes across his daughter's wish book, he discovers that of the three hopes she's recorded he can make one come true. Alicia wants a designer dress worn by her favourite anime character. Unfortunately the pink frock costs a small fortune, which Luis cannot afford. Determined to get Alicia this one thing before she dies, he decides to get the money by any means necessary. Though he could never know his encounter with Barbara (Bárbara Lennie) would change the course of his life.
Writer/director Carlos Varmut does not present a traditional narrative. Instead, it's structured like a puzzle that viewers must piece together. In this sense, the script is smart, mysterious and captivating. In order to understand the individual’s trajectory, audiences must read the clues and figure out former relationships and characters' histories. Some are made clearer than others, while some elements are left entirely to the viewer's imagination. Strangely, this doesn't feel like plot holes in the story but rather a device intrinsic to the narrative.
There is a dark sense of humor that runs through the story as Luis tries to raise the funds to buy the dress. But it's mostly just dark, featuring characters who are different proportions of good and bad but definitely composed of both. For example, Luis is on a quest to buy his daughter's happiness in spite of everyone's recommendation that he simply spend time with her. Barbara is a victim, but she also has a mean streak that surpasses the average woman scorned.
Bermejo gives a multifaceted performance as he confidently steps into the world of blackmail. Perhaps it's his love for Alicia that allows him to embrace criminality with such ease, but maybe there's some underlying reason that's just not as obvious in the stimulating script. Lennie's Barbara is equally more interesting and diabolical than her initial introduction in the film would suggest – or than the viewer could realize.
Magical
Girl : three people under the influence - Cineuropa Alfonso Rivera
Having been brought up on a diet of fanzines and comics, Carlos Vermut, the director of this film, claims that he was diagnosed with attention deficit as a child: he is unable to follow the narrative thread of a movie if there are too many stories going on within it and if it has a complex plot. This is why his only two films so far are divided into chapters, which, he admits, assists him in lending his narrative some kind of order. In Diamond Flash, there were three plots: Family, Identity and Blood. In Magical Girl [+], meanwhile, the three sections are part of the same plot, which follows a character and then links up with another, although there are various points of view involved and ellipses are plentiful. Just like the record by the 1960s Spanish group Los Brincos, the film’s three parts are named “Mundo, Demonio y Carne” (literally “World, Devil and Flesh”), constituents that were the three enemies of the soul (money, Satan and sex), according to the catechism that this professed atheist was forced to study at school. This was originally going to be the movie’s title, since it represents the three obstacles encountered by its protagonists: for the father of a terminally ill daughter (Luis Bermejo), the world is his enemy because he doesn’t have any money. In the case of the femme fatale (Bárbara Lennie), the devil is the unbalanced force lurking inside of her. And for the teacher being released from prison (José Sacristán), flesh was what brought him down in the first place.
We are thus presented with a film that
appeals to the symbolic, the irrational and the intuitive; a film that places
its trust in the viewer, letting him or her flesh out the suggestions, the
silences and the gaps in the narrative. This even extends to the mysteries that
the movie is riddled with, which, when inflated further by the audience’s
imagination, can end up being more than terrifying. Because Vermut – a playful
nickname given to this Madrilenian director – is interested above all in
characters, rather than storylines. This is the reason why people’s faces take
centre stage in his shots, clean and devoid of any unnecessary embellishments:
he wants us to experience the full intensity of every gaze, conversation and
expression. And he wants us to get to know his world, a world in which beauty
can be found and appreciated even in the seediest of neighbourhood bars: and it
is precisely in these surroundings that one of the movie’s tensest moments
takes place.
The fact is that misfortune pervades Magical
Girl, just as it can take hold of any one of us if we are pushed beyond the
boundaries of our comfort zone, as happens to a father who is in way over his
head as he gets involved in something too big for him, very much à la Fargo,
a film whose black – and even pathetic – humour Vermut attempts to reclaim for
his own movie. In Magical Girl, disaster is triggered by the most
intense passion that you could ever imagine: the unbridled love that a father
has for his daughter, which leads him to get caught up in a terrible dynamic
that he has no idea how to handle. It is also passion (albeit a more
unmentionable one that is buried deeper down) that causes a schoolteacher to
lose control over his life and repeat his offence. We can glean this from the
film: depending on what happens to us, we can even end up becoming potential
murderers.
All of this – and much more besides –
makes Magical Girl one of the most surprising, original and unsettling
titles of the Spanish film season that is just getting under way. It is a
tragicomedy in which the audience starts off laughing, but little by little,
they feel as if their grins are somehow fizzling out, thus confirming that what
we are witnessing is the beginning of a career that is as brilliant as it is
atypical. This movie is evidence of a filmmaker with his own style and
aesthetics who, after just two features, is already a benchmark for new Spanish
cinema, which is breaking away from the most old-fashioned tenets of what came
before it. Let’s hope that the San
Sebastián Film Festival, where he is competing alongside highly renowned
names, rewards him for his bravery and talent.
'Magical
Girl': Toronto Review - The Hollywood Reporter Jonathan
Carlos Vermut’s
debut Diamond Flash has been a cult item in
The opening scene establishes the quietly tense atmosphere which defines the film’s tone as schoolteacher Damian (fruity-voiced vet Jose Sacristan, playing it very seedy) asks the young Barbara (Barbara Anduix) to hand over a note which then mysteriously vanishes from her hand. She’s the film’s first magical girl (‘magical girl’ is a genre of anime of which which Vermut is a fan). The second is 12 year-old Alicia (Lucia Pollan), dying of leukemia, and who dreams of possessing a magical girl dress once worn by the Japanese singer Megumi.
The dress is extremely costly, but Alicia’s father Luis (Luis Bermejo), an unemployed schoolteacher, decides to buy it for her at any cost. While standing there forlornly holding a brick outside a jeweler’s window, he is vomited on from an upper balcony where the older Barbara (Barbara Lennie), now a committed masochist, has just thrown up, after being left by her controlling psychiatrist partner Alfredo (Israel Elejalde) and smashing her head into a mirror.
The disturbed, emotionally remote Barbara invites Luis inside, they have sex, and Luis spots the perfect opportunity to raise a little cash for Alicia’s dress by blackmailing Barbara. In one of several moments of authentic wit that stand out, Luis tells Barbara to leave the money in a library copy of the Spanish Constitution, because it’s one book that nobody will ever take out.
This is an obscure, quiet little world on the margins where everyone, as they are in the early films of David Lynch or Todd Solontz, is somehow damaged and just a little odd, but at the same time entirely recognizable. Luis, for example, doesn’t contemplate actually asking Barbara his reasons for wanting the money, and the consequences of his not doing so turn out to be pretty appalling for all concerned.
Behind the offbeat surface of Magical Girl, and underneath its extended, trembling silences, there’s a lot going on in terms of satire and critique. The supposed psychiatrist controlling his own partner with pills, Barbara’s open confession that she watches TV because she enjoys seeing people who are more miserable than she is (a tough call in Barbara's case), and a friend’s perception of Barbara’s scar as merely decorative all add up to a distinctive view of a screwed-up society, the most damning aspect of which is the increasing gap between rich and poor. The Spanish financial crisis, which has indeed damaged many lives beyond repair, is never far away, and to an extent it indeed drives the plot forward.
Despite the grueling focus on love's darker side, the early scenes show that Vermut is capable of rendering human tenderness, too. In an early exchange, Alicia asks Luis for first a cigarette and then a gin and tonic. Her father offering them to her in the knowledge that if she doesn’t try them now she never will. It is typical of the film’s strategy to shock us briefly before the underlying emotional impact is felt.
But Vermut seems more interested in the sordid than the beautiful. Too much time is dedicated to Barbara’s trips to a mansion where a very rich but unspeakably bad man, Oliver Zoco (Miguel Insua) pays lots of money to do unspeakable things to women. When he’s not doing them, he’s delivering self important speeches about rationality versus instinct in the Spanish psyche which are presumably intended to be a key to the film’s deeper purpose, but which are really just so much dramatically dead time. Zoco feels borrowed, and is the film’s weak link: for some reason, it was also deemed necessary to stick this arthouse Ernst Stavro Blofeld into a wheelchair.
Lennie’s expressionless as Barbara is deceptive, a mask for the confusion inside her just as the film’s calm, untroubled surface masks the churning turmoil beneath. Bermejo, meanwhile, has created a heartbreaking hangdog Luis, a figure marked out for misfortune at every turn.
D.P. Santiago Racaj is best-known for his work with Spanish auteur Javier Rebollo, and here employs a similarly disorienting use of space, mostly built around beautifully-framed, pale interiors. (The contrast between the impoverished austerity of Luis’s apartment and the designer austerity of Barbara’s is well-made.)
The abstract, troubling twists of the first hour are stronger than the film’s last twenty minutes, where its two-plus hours start to show the strain, with Vermut struggling to wrap things up and taking a more formulaic approach by submitting to excess. The carefully-curated soundtrack features extracts from Bach, the flamenco singer Manolo Caracol, and Pink Martini amongst others.
[TIFF
Review] Magical Girl - The Film Stage
Brian Roan
Sitges
2014 Review: MAGICAL GIRL, Dark, Twisted Magic ... Shelagh Rowan-Legg from Twitch
Review:
'Magical Girl' is a Razor-Sharp Tale of Unintende ... Steve Greene from indieWIRE
Magical Girl | Reviews | Screen Fionnuala Halligan from Screendaily
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]
kalafudra.com [Lena Lisa Vogelmann]
'Magical
Girl' Review: Spanish Thriller Has Tricks Up Its ... Peter Debruge from Variety
Magical
Girl (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The year was 1919, the locale was Soviet Russia, and the mood was positively revolutionary. Luckily for him, Dziga Vertov was on the right train, filming Soviet Chairman Mikhail Kalinin on a propaganda tour.
As a young filmmaker and theoretician, Vertov was at the forefront of a roaring debate about the role of art in Soviet society. How would artistic endeavors best serve the ideals and practices of the people and the State? With the 1919 publication of the "Kinoks-Revolution Manifesto," Vertov announced his solution to the aesthetic conflict, and Soviet cinema was never the same.
Attacking
And so it did. In 1922, the State established the Lenin
Proportion, which developed a fixed ratio between the number of entertainment
narratives and the number of documentary-like productions. Soon after, Vertov
founded the screen magazine Kino-Pravda (Cinema Truth) and put his principles
to work. "Man with a Movie Camera" (1929) stunned audiences with its
highly self-conscious use of the camera as the eye to replace the human eye. A
day-in-the-life of an urban metropolis like
Critics pointed to Vertov's heavy reliance on editing and shot manipulation as proof of his own hypocrisy -- can the truth ever survive the hand of the director? Vertov responded that he sought "the purest possible essence of truth," not plodding verisimilitude.
Following the introduction of sound to Soviet cinema, Vertov flourished, with successes like "Enthusiasm/Symphony of the Donbas" (1931), a look at the miners of the Don Basin, and "Three Songs about Lenin" (1934), a poignant tribute to the Soviet leader through the eyes of the Russian peasantry.
Success was sweet, and then came Stalin. All artistic
production found its way under the sturdy umbrella of the State, which declared
Socialist Realism as the official style of the
Vertov's remaining years on the outskirts of Soviet cinema did not taint his reputation or diminish his influence on the international community. Often deemed the "Father of Cinema Verité," Vertov's liberal editing style and highly sophisticated camera techniques ensured his venerable spot on cinema's timeline.
MoMA | Dziga
Vertov notes from museum curator,
Charles Silver, April 20, 2010
Dziga Vertov (1896–1954) presents some unusual problems with regard to his inclusion in this series. If we define an “auteur” as a filmmaker with a vision who places the stamp of his personality on his work, that presumes that there is a discernible personality or way of looking at the world. While no one could possibly miss the fact that from a technical standpoint, Vertov was a great innovator and expander of the medium (a rival to D. W. Griffith, F. W. Murnau, Sergei Eisenstein, or Alfred Hitchcock), there is reason to question who this guy really was. We do know he was born Denis Arkadievitch Kaufman in what is now Poland (then part of the Czarist empire) and was the elder brother to two other distinguished filmmakers, Mikhail (cameraman on several Vertov films and later a director) and Boris Kaufman (cinematographer for Jean Vigo, Abel Gance, Elia Kazan, and Sidney Lumet).
Vertov was essentially a crusader against the concept of the filmmaker as an artist, and for the idea of the filmmaker as a machine—a conduit for capturing (and shaping) reality. This appealed to Lenin, and Vertov produced a series of Kino-Pravda (Cinema-Truth) “newsreels” in the early 1920s, a selection of which are in this program. However sincere he may have been, Vertov still relied on the manipulative possibilities of the movies. While Georges Méliès had sought magical entertainment and Griffith authentic human emotion, Vertov put his skills at the service of the Bolshevik Revolution.
The pseudonym Denis Kaufman chose suggests in Russian a kind of perpetually spinning top or, in human terms, a Whirling Dervish. This seems quite appropriate given the energy level of his most famous film. Chelovek s kinoapparatom (The Man with a Movie Camera) (1929) is generally considered his masterpiece, and to some it is the high-water mark of cinematic imagination and purity. Although Eisenstein called the film “unmotivated camera mischief,” it is unquestionably dazzling. Yet to me it is as much of a dead-end as some of Eugene O’Neill’s most ambitious experiments from that same period—Strange Interlude, with its spoken thoughts, for example. I find myself impressed but wondering, Where does all this innovation lead? Is it eye-candy or spinach? One thing it does not seem to be is emotionally affecting. Who is this man with a camera whose shadow we see and who tells us, “I, a machine, am showing you a world, the likes of which only I can see.” Critic Sharon Lee put her finger on Vertov’s limitations when she claimed “he has shown us reality; he has expanded our vision of life, but it is a reality that only exists on film.”
With the coming of sound, Vertov became more political, making Entuziazm (Enthusiasm) in 1933 and Tri pensi o Lenine (Three Songs of Lenin) in 1934. His apprentice, the American Jay Leyda (later on the staff of the MoMA Film Library, author of Kino, and Professor of Cinema Studies at NYU) saw these as his most personal and successful films. Leyda believed that their use of sound was a realization of the boy-poet Vertov’s childhood dream of somehow marrying cinema with poetry, “of making an art of the sights and sounds of the world around him, arranging harmonies and dissonances out of these realities.”
As was the case with so many of his contemporaries, Vertov gradually ran afoul of Stalin, and his career dissipated. However, for good or ill, he had an enormous influence on documentary and other filmmakers, both in the Soviet Union and abroad. Thanks to him we can celebrate the rationality of Jean Rouch or Frederick Wiseman, but perhaps we can also mourn the inanity of television news.
Dziga Vertov - Monoskop extensive biography and profile, July 26, 2017
Dziga Vertov -
New World Encyclopedia
biography
Dziga Vertov | Soviet
director | Britannica.com biography
Dziga
Vertov - Director - Films as Director:, Publications - Film Reference profile essay by Erik Barnouw, also seen
here: Dziga
Vertov facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles ...
Dziga Vertov • Senses of Cinema Jonathan Dawson from Senses of Cinema, March 2003
Dziga Vertov | Biography, Movie Highlights and Photos | AllMovie Sandra Brennan biography
Dziga Vertov ::
people :: Russia-InfoCentre brief
bio
Collection
Dziga Vertov - Österreichisches Filmmuseum biography, filmography, and more
Vertov, Cinema, and Constructivism brief comments on his work
Dziga Vertov | The
Charnel-House an assortment of early
Soviet propaganda posters from 1918 to 1939
Dziga Vertov - Vertov Industries a research paper on Vertov's work
Österreichisches
Filmmuseum: Dziga Vertov's Kinonedelja | European ... collection of early newsreels that may be
viewed online
Watch
Dziga Vertov: The Man with the Movie Camera now | Kanopy a streaming service
Dziga
Vertov: Kino-Eye (1924) – Seventeen Moments in Soviet History video (3:06)
Shooting
the Revolution: Dziga Vertov, A Sixth Part of the World (1926 ... also seen here: A Sixth Part of the World
Dziga Vertov: Kiev 1 Sept[ember] [19]28: Storyboard - Rouge Roland Fischer-Briand, September 1, 1928
Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man With A Movie Camera ... entire 1929 film may be seen here (68 mi)
" Man With a Movie Camera " by DZIGA VERTOV - 1929 on Vimeo entire 1929 film may be seen here (67 minutes)
File:Man
With A Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929).ogv - Wikimedia ... 1929 film in the public domain may be seen
here (67 mi)
Television: the new weapon for the imperialist war by Sam Brody, reprinted in Jump Cut from The Daily Worker, June 14, 1930
Three Songs
About Lenin by Dziga Vertov by Paul Nizan 1935
1 Dziga
Vertov, “Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye” III. Montage means ... 3-page excerpt from Annette Michelson’s Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov,
2014
Two Radical Filmmakers: Luis Bunuel
and Dziga Vertov Joe Castleman, 1992
The Machine Art of Dziga Vertov and Busby Berkeley Nicole Armour from Images, November 1997
Futurism, Formalism and Communism in Dziga Vertov's The Man with ... Derek P. Rucas, September 29, 2003
Universal pictures | Film
| The Guardian Jonathan Jones, July
1, 2005
Order From the Collection to the Database and the Catalogue, by Barbara Wurm and the Austrian Film Museum from Rouge, 2006
Dziga Vertov: The Idiot • Senses of Cinema C.J. Chamberlin, November 5, 2006
Dziga Vertov and the Soviet Avant-Garde - Harvard Film Archive March 3, 2008
2009 DV/GDV (de Dziga Vertov au Groupe Dziga Vertov) - FID Marseille Dziga Vertov and the Dziga Vertov Group, from the Marseille Film Festival 2009
Vertov's World |
Film Quarterly Nina Power on two
short films, A Sixth Part of the World (1926) and The Eleventh Year
(1928), July 1, 2010
Dziga Vertov Films at Museum of Modern Art - The New York Times April 8, 2011
Celluloid
Manifesto by Yuri Tsivian - Moving Image Source April 12, 2011
Saluting
the Supreme Soviet Filmmaker, Dziga Vertov | Village Voice J. Hoberman, April 13, 2011
Movie
Posters of the Week: The Posters of Dziga Vertov on Notebook ... Adrian Curry from Mubi, April 15, 2011
BOMB Magazine —
Vertiginous Vertov by Zack Friedman
Zack Friedman, April 20, 2011
Dziga
Vertov: Wild Man of Soviet Montage | White City Cinema Michael Glover Smith, May 4, 2011
SPINNING
TOP The Legacy of Dziga Vertov Keeps Moving | The ... Mónica Savirón from The Brooklyn Rail, May 4, 2011
More
than 40 films of Russian avant-garde artist Dziga Vertov are ... Ruiling Erica Zhang from The Daily Bruin, February 10, 2012
Dziga
Vertov and Constructivist Cinema · Lomography Jilly Tanrad, June 14, 2013
Dziga
Vertov's The Eleventh Year - MIT Press Journals 35-page essay, The Metabiotic State: Dziga Vertov’s The Eleventh Year, by Devin
Fore, October 2013 (pdf), also seen here:
The
Metabiotic State: Dziga Vertov's The Eleventh Year | Devin Fore
Life
As It Is: The Dziga Vertov Collection · British Universities Film ... Adelheid Heftberger, February 3, 2014
The
Niles Files: Dziga Vertov's Doors of Perception | l'etoile Niles Schwartz, May 28, 2014
Dziga
Vertov's Silent Film Voted Best Docu Ever in Sight & Sound Poll ... Leo Barraclough from Variety, August 1, 2014
Eight Free Films by Dziga Vertov, Creator of Soviet Avant-Garde ... Colin Marshall from Open Culture, September 14, 2014
Beyond
Narrative: When Cinema Stops Making Sense | Movie ... Charles Bramesco from Movie Mezzanine, September 29, 2014
Propaganda
in Motion. Dziga Vertov`s and Aleksandr Medvedkin`s ... Propaganda
in Motion: Dziga Vertov’s and Aleksandr Medvedkin’s Film Trains and Agit
Steamers of the 1920s and 1930s, by Adelheid Heftberger from Apparatus, 2015
Dziga
Vertov: The Man with the Movie Camera and Other Newly ... Jake Cole from Slant, June 15, 2015
Dziga
Vertov: The Man With The Movie Camera And Other Restored ... Noel Murray from The Dissolve, June 15, 2015
Dziga
Vertov's 'The Man With the Movie Camera' Remains a ... Sarah Boslaugh from Pop Matters, July 17, 2015
Dziga
Vertov: How a Soviet avant-garde filmmaker became a world ... Mikhael Viesel from Russia Beyond, January 2, 2016
Unstaged
Events: Dziga Vertov's <i>Man with a Movie Camera</i ... Unstaged
Events: Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera Gets a Hip-Hop Score, by Lee Purvey from Crosscuts, August 19, 2016
Dziga
Vertov | Visual Anthropology - ScholarBlogs - Emory University Dalia Caudle, September 20, 2016
Five
wonderful effects in Man with a Movie Camera... and how they're ... Ben Nicholson from BFI Sight and Sound, January 17, 2017
Dziga Vertov's
The Man with a Movie Camera: One of the films you ... David Walsh and Joanne Laurier from The World Socialist Web Site, May 6,
2017
Men
with movie cameras: why documentary cinema owes everything ... Samuel Goff from The Calvert Journal, February 13 – December 17, 2017
Actividad
- The Eye in Matter - Dziga Vertov and Early Soviet Cinema October 2 – November 23, 2017
Rhythm
Machines: John MacKay on Dziga Vertov | Idiom During a lecture on Vertov, Stephen Squibb interviews John
MacKay, author of Inscription
and Modernity: From Wordsworth to Mandelstam, also Four
Russian Serf Narratives, from Idiom
magazine, December 7, 2010
Dziga
Vertov (1896 - 1954) - Find A Grave Memorial
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
As part of its
five-title series of Soviet avant garde reissues, Kino has released, for the
first time on video, the restored, newly scored version of Dziga Vertov's
hypnotic masterpiece Man With A Movie Camera. First released in 1929, Man
With A Movie Camera is one of the most daringly experimental films ever
made. Though their proper use was the subject of considerable debate, the
greatest innovations of silent Soviet cinema came in the form of editing
techniques, and Vertov takes a number of these techniques to their dizzying
extremes with this film. A brief prologue announces that Man With A Movie
Camera will contain no intertitles, plot or theatrical devices—Vertov
considered fictional projects untruthful and counter-revolutionary—and will be
an attempt "at creating a truly international, absolute language of cinema
based on its total separation from the language of theater and literature."
This is brought about through a series of glances at modern Russian life,
edited together in a fascinating Möbius strip, with the action moving from
filmed scenes, to scenes of people filming, to scenes of film being edited, to
scenes of an audience reacting to the film and back again with amazing
fluidity. The camera itself is alternately leering, detached, and the subject
of the film. Man With A Movie Camera is something of an impenetrable
masterpiece, and a stylistic dead end, but in the same sense as Joyce's Ulysses.
It's a unique, unforgettable, enlightening experience.
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
It's unusual to praise a DVD for its lack of special features, but it's tempting to do just that with Kino's new edition of Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera. Vertov's 1929 silent may run a close second to Citizen Kane as the most (over)analyzed movie of all time. Vertov, a pseudonym taken from the Rus-sian for "spinning top," proclaimed Movie Camera's "total separation from the language of theater and literature," a tall order to be sure, and one more fully realized in the underground films of the 1960s. But Movie Camera, a staple of collegiate film courses, is a landmark of cinematic history, perhaps the purest distillation of Soviet montage theory. Vertov investigates the camera as a tool for controlling and shaping our perceptions of reality and perhaps reality itself: The film opens with a theater that readies itself for spectators without human intervention, then focuses on still figures willed into motion by the fiat lux of a projector's sparking arc lamp. Still shots of faces turn out to be an editing-room view of footage in the process of being cut; at times, the camera almost seems to be drunk on its own power.
Vertov planned every shot, every cut, meticulously, giving rise to a cottage industry of Man With a Movie Camera deconstructors, but Kino's edition, accompanied by Michael Nyman's Glassian score, allows you to just sit back and enjoy the movie's inventiveness and humor. (Or you can go in the other direction and pick up Image's recently-released disc of Movie Camera with audio commentary and, oddly enough, the Alloy Orchestra score that accompanied Kino's videotape.)
100 films Lucas McNelly
The story behind Dzirga Vertov's Chelovek s
kino-apparatom (i.e. The Man with a Camera) is perhaps more
interesting than the story itself. Billed as a day in the life of the Russian
people, Vertov spent several years filming, then essentially just retired to an
editing bay where he supposedly threw every technique he had at the print, just
to see what would happen. What we have is a film without a story or titles that
shows the possiblities of the cinematic artform. And while we may not be all
that stunned, back in 1929 it was a pretty big deal.
For portions of the film, it really just feels like we're watching a kid run
around with his new camera, filming everything that catches his eyes, and in a
lot of ways we are. The filmmaker that Vertov is filming is looking for images
of everyday Russia, which pretty much requires running around and filming
everything of interest, but Vertov is able to expand that to include other
aspects of the filmmaking process, such as the editor we watch splice together
footage and the audience assembled to view the final product. These images of
everyday life are often intercut with shots of working machinery. Is Vertov
commenting, as some have suggested, on the state of affairs in newly-socialist
The editing is the real draw here. Several of the techniques editor Yelizaveta
Svilova pioneered are decades ahead of their time, and most of them still
aren't used as effectively as she did on the first try. To say the editing here
is influential to visual artists everywhere is a gross misunderstatement. The
number of effects is at times staggering.
To me at least, it's interesting to watch the people who know they're being
filmed, as there's a real childlike giddiness inherent in their actions. Think
back to the first time you saw yourself in a home movie and how absolutely cool
it felt to be on TV, even if it was just being seen by the people in the living
room with you. Now imagine how cool it would have been had you never seen a
video camera before and the invention of the technology had been recent enough
that no one you know had ever been on camera before. That will give you an idea
of just how novel a concept it was for these average people to be in this
movie, and try as they might to re-enact their "normal" activities, nothing
can hide just how excited they are to even be there. It's not often you see
people so happy.
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) *****
Man with a Movie Camera stands as a stinging indictment of almost every film made between its release in 1929 and the appearance of Godard’s Á Bout de Souffle 30 years later – and Vertov’s dazzling picture seems, today, arguably the fresher of the two. In any case, it’s shameful that it took directors three full decades – three full decades of generally static, tedious “movies” – to remember that movies should really move, that the camera can and should be a mobile, vibrant participant in an exciting process: the transmission of events onto celluloid. This is what Man with a Movie Camera is all about. In terms of the use to which the medium was put, it’s a quantum leap forward, one of the rare films that deserves to be called a work of genius.
Luckily for us, it’s also a tremendously accessible and enjoyable cinematic experience. Man with a Movie Camera is scarcely an hour long, but must surely contain more shots per minute than any other commercially released film – towards the end it reaches in intensity reminiscent of the most extreme dance-music videos. It’s neither fiction nor documentary, rather an unclassifiable mixture of the two. It starts, disconcertingly, with an audience entering a cinema and sitting down to watch a film, which we then see running through the projector – then we become part of the same audience, watching a record of a single day in a large Russian city, sometime in the late 20s.
Except the film took over four years to shoot, using locations in
There’s no attempt to craft any kind of narrative – as with a much later Russian classic, Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1974), this ends up working to the film’s advantage, as we must respond on a different level of engagement, concentrating instead, as Vertov insists, on cinema’s apparently unbounded potential. It’s like an experimental showreel, proud of its rough edges, an audacious throwing down of the gauntlet. Perhaps it’s even more than that – perhaps Vertov intends the title to function in anthropological terms. Just as ‘homo erectus’ (standing man) gave way to ‘homo sapiens’ (thinking man), Vertov sees technological innovation providing a possible next step on the evolutionary ladder – ‘man with movie camera,’ or, perhaps, ‘observational man,’ homo kinematensis.
His cameraman (cameramen?) seems complusively driven to seek out new images – occasionally placing himself in physical danger to do so, as when he’s winched out in a basked over a glossy waterfall. There’s nowhere he won’t go, nothing he won’t do – at one thrilling moment a passer-by has to literally jump aside to avoid being mown down as he approaches, camera presumably strapped to the bonnet of a car. It’s typical of Vertov to leave this in – typical of his breakneck sense of humour. Later, during a sequence in a drab government office, one woman continually hides her face with a handbag, steadfastly refusing to go down in cinematic history.
Dziga
and His Brothers and One Day in the Life ... - Cineaste Magazine Dziga and His Brothers and One
Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich, by Darragh
O’Donoghue, November 4, 2011
Dziga and His Brothers: A Family on the Cutting Edge
Produced by Sergei Selyanov and Grigory Libergal; directed by Yevgeni Tsymbal;
music by Roman Riazantsev; narrated by Nikolai Burov. DVD-R, color and B&W,
51 min., Russian with nonoptional English subtitles, 2002. A Milestone release.
One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich
Video footage, narration and editing by Chris Marker; narrated by Alexandra
Stewart. Color and B&W, 55 min., English, 1998. Also included on the same
disc are In the Dark and Three Songs about Motherland.
In the Dark
Produced by Sergei Dvortsevoy; directed, written and edited by Sergei
Dvortsevoy; camera by Alisher Khamidkhodjaev and Anatoly Petriga. Color, 41
min., Russian with nonoptional English subtitles, 2004.
Three Songs about Motherland
Produced by George Herzfeld; directed and filmed by Marina Goldovskaya; written
by Marina Goldovskaya and Daniel Levin; edited by Daniel Levin; songs performed
by Yelena Kamburova. Color and B&W, 39 min., Russian with nonoptional
English subtitles, 2008. An Icarus Films
Homevideo release.
Though he continued photographing films for long-time collaborators Elia Kazan and Sidney Lumet, Boris Kaufman’s last major artistic achievement was Film (1965, Alan Schneider). Here he attempted to realize screenwriter Samuel Beckett’s idea of a metaphysical or existential camera. Film is set in 1929, the year after its star Buster Keaton’s last masterpiece, The Cameraman (1928, Edward Sedgwick), which marked the end of the silent comedy beloved of Beckett and which was reimagined so thoroughly in his literature. But it was also the year of The Man with the Movie Camera, directed by Dziga Vertov (pseudonym of Denis Kaufman), and photographed by Mikhail Kaufman. These were Boris’s brothers, whose existence he had to deny before winning an Oscar for On the Waterfront (1954, Kazan). Film is the negation of Vertov’s celebrated achievement, a depleted surrender compared to the earlier film’s messianic optimism; the all-seeing Man with the Movie Camera flouts the laws of physics and films Russian life from every conceivable (and inconceivable) vantage point; Film hurries from the threatening outdoors to a shabby room as its antihero tries to block the outside world and the “agony of perceivedness.”The Man with the Movie Camera aimed to create “a truly international absolute language of cinema”; Film is the exhaustion of that and any other language. The Man with the Movie Camera climbs huge industrial stacks, confronts a speeding train, and swings over roaring dams as heroically as any Keaton character; in Film, Keaton is demented and old. The brothers’ centrality to half a century of experimental film supports Yevgeni Tsymbal’s claim that the Vertovs were “perhaps the most talented brothers in the history of the cinema.”
The jaunty tone of his documentary Dziga and His Brothers tries to make the grim facts of the Kaufmans’ lives bearable. Grandsons of a rabbi, they were born in the predominantly Jewish town of Bialystok. David (later to become Denis, then Dziga Vertov, 1896-1954), Moisei (later Mikhail, 1897-1980) and Boris (died 1980) witnessed the 1906 Bialystok Pogrom; their mother would later be murdered in the Holocaust. Vertov, having been admired by Lenin and close to the Constructivist movement (Rodchenko designed posters for his films), was increasingly sidelined under Stalin, his works criticized as excessively formalist, censored, and shelved; by the 1940s he was making short films about Stalin’s favorite song. By the end of that decade, he was unemployed during the anti-Semitic campaign. He retreated into paranoia and reclusion; no photograph of him during his last fourteen years exists. Mikhail’s Italian lover “disappeared” during the purges; their daughter was kidnapped, dying soon after. The once exuberant Mikhail was a broken man; his last major undertaking was to film the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, although he would go on to make educational shorts.
Boris was the only brother to truly prosper—a reactionary might attribute this to his being in the West—but faced long years in the wilderness when Jean Vigo died during the making of L’Atalante (1934) and again when he moved to North America after the Fall of France in 1940, having served as a cavalry officer in the French army. Between 1940 and his triumphant “comeback” with On the Waterfront, work was scarce, and included a brief period with John Grierson at the National Film Board in Canada. Later notable credits include Baby Doll (Kazan, 1956), 12 Angry Men (Lumet, 1957), The Fugitive Kind (Lumet, 1960), Splendor in the Grass (Kazan, 1961), Long Day’s Journey into Night (Lumet, 1962), and The Pawnbroker (Lumet, 1964).
The self-reflexivity apparent in works such as The Man with the Movie Camera was clearly genetic; Mikhail was the first Kaufman to be given a camera, and he immediately snapped a self-portrait in the mirror. Vertov believed film should surprise viewers, and to that end he and Mikhail created the first Soviet animation (1924), and experimented with film speeds, stills, split screens, matte shots, montage and, later, sound. Mikhail, unhappy with Vertov’s overall esthetic, finally rebelled to make his own films; one of the delights of this documentary are the generous clips from his In Spring (Vesnoy, 1931), which is closer to the lyricism of contemporary German work by Ella Bergmann-Michel and the makers of People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag, 1930, Curt Siodmak et al.). Boris was sent to Paris by his father to avoid the draft. He studied engineering in the Sorbonne, and worked in both the commercial cinema and the French avant-garde, before codirecting À Propos de Nice (1930) with Vigo. The influence of Vertov on that film is explained by the correspondence on cinema technique kept up by the brothers. Vigo and Boris shot L’Atalante using Vertov’s camera after they’d sold their own to make Zero de Conduite(1933).
Tsymbal charts this life using clips from Yiddish movies, newsreels, and the brothers’ work; photographs; quotes from Vertov’s diary, Vertov’s and Mikhail’s letters, Boris’s notes, archival documents, and interviews with Boris’s son and granddaughter, film historians Bernard Eisenschitz and Lev Roshal, and directors Sidney Lumet and Marianna Tavrog. It is essentially a chronological trot through the brothers’ lives, which offers minimal insight into the films they made but leaves a raging desire to see more of them.
An ideal companion to Dziga and His Brothers would be Chris Marker’s The Last Bolshevik (Le tombeau d’Alexandre, 1992, also available on DVD from Icarus Films), his study of Alexander Medvedkin. Like Vertov, Medvedkin was a loyal Bolshevik sidelined by Stalin, a formal innovator whose filmmaking career was curtailed. Both men began their careers on the agit-trains that crossed the Soviet territories in the 1920s, filming life as they found it (or not), projecting it there and then to their subjects, and generally spreading the Bolshevik message. But the Marker film under review—though featuring footage from an interview with Medvedkin—is One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich, part of the exemplary French TV series developed by André S. Labarthe and Janine Bazin, Cinéma, de notre temps.
Despite shared interests in time and memory, writing and photography, and reworking science fiction, it is difficult to conceive of two more temperamentally opposed filmmakers as Andrei Tarkovsky and Chris Marker. Tarkovksy’s is an art of ponderous symbolism, labored epiphanies, and sequence shots so elaborately preprogrammed that even the dog has his mark. Marker prefers surprising juxtapositions, chance revelations, discoveries, and mistakes, often compiling his films from found materials, or striving for a home-movie esthetic. Where Tarkovsky’s oeuvre is claustrophobically subjective and indifferent to an audience, Marker is always engaged by (and politically engagé with) the outside world, people and events, frequently addressing or conversing with the spectator. Tarkovsky wanted to “place cinema on a par with the other arts,” weighing his films down with Leonardo and Bach; Marker could make a thirteen-part TV series about ancient Greek culture (The Owl’s Legacy, 1989) but is also comfortable with comic books, toys, shopping malls, video, and computers. Tarkovsky labored over a small number of films, his last showing little thematic or stylistic development from his first; Marker is the archetypal KinoEye—interviewees often converse directly to his camera—thriving on new styles, technologies, media, and modes of distribution. Tarkovsky is to Marker as a Russian novel is to a French essay, a dog to a cat.
But from Lettre de Sibérie (1957) to The Last Bolshevik, Russia has been a recurring Marker subject. Opposites clearly attract because the pair were so close that Tarkovsky asked Marker, already shooting him on the set of The Sacrifice (1986), to document his dying weeks, including his reunion with the son banned by the Soviet authorities from travel when Tarkovsky went into voluntary exile during the making of Nostalghia (1983) and his postproduction work on The Sacrifice with Bergman’s cinematographer Sven Nykvist. This material forms the heart of Marker’s One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich, and despite Marker’s best intentions and the assurances of Jonathan Rosenbaum and J. Hoberman, I find this material intrusive and difficult to watch. But that difficulty, that confrontation, is probably what Tarkovsky wanted; after all he “commissioned” the footage, directs it (“Are you getting all this Chris?”) and later commented on it in his diary. With One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich reworking and recommenting on all this, a mise-en-abyme of Vertov proportions begins to open up.
Marker continually links the life and work—most controversially when the Stalker’s harrowing monolog in the film of that name (1979) is crosscut with an image of the dying, writhing Tarkovsky—and focuses on what he singles out as the Russian’s key themes and motifs—children, the four elements, painting and the meaning of art, mirrors, levitation, the Russian figure of the Innocent or Holy Fool, houses, and characters’ aspirations for “the other shore.” Like his earlier essay about Kurosawa, A.K. (1985), Marker offers a virtual film school; he explains, for instance, why The Sacrifice needs to end on a six-minute-sequence shot rather than being broken up into conventional shots, or the difference between Hollywood and Tarkovsky’s camera angles. But it is blessed with a playfulness unavailable to Tarkovsky; a clip from his student adaptation of Hemingway’s The Killersis overdubbed with dialog from Robert Siodmak’s famous 1946 film noir version; a pair of opera glasses stolen by Marker from Covent Garden fails to recapture Tarkovsky’s unfilmed staging of Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov. A séance Tarkovsky attended is recounted where Boris Pasternak, the author of Doctor Zhivago, tells the director he will make seven films (which he did). Nevertheless, this is an account of the artist as singular, timeless genius; there is no attempt to place Tarkovsky with his Soviet contemporaries (e.g., Paradjanov) or in any other context.
One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich was released on DVD in the U.K. with other documentaries relating to Tarkovsky (The Andrei Tarkovsky Companion, 2007, Artificial Eye), and it is interesting to compare it with, say, Alexander Sokurov’s absurdly hagiographic Moscow Elegy (Moscovskaya Elgiya, 1987). This film is haunted with tacit guilt over Tarkovsky’s lifelong harassment by the Soviet authorities. Its whispered narrator leads the camera through the sites of Tarkovsky’s life, work, and death (lingering shots of his tomb), as if on a pilgrimage to some medieval shrine. The narrator’s last words—“Here is a tree. Andrei Tarkovsky planted it some years ago”—is followed by a burst of Russian chorale, at which point the nondevotee might remember Oscar Wilde’s epigram about the death of a Dickens character (“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing”).
Voyage in Time (Tempo di Viaggio, 1983), Tarkovsky’s own “making of” Nostalghia, is arguably his most engaging film. Its self-reflexive framework—he alternates sequences of location scouting and shooting with dialogs with his screenwriter Tonino Guerra—actually creates two Tarkovskys, Tarkovsky the “protagonist” of Voyage in Time, a caricature of the high-minded, pompous director of legend, and the “real” filmmaker, whose silent, visual response to landscape, textures, space, light, and people belie the self-absorbed prattle of the former. But neither has the wit or depth of Marker’s take.
Judging by the back sleeve, this Icarus Films DVD appears to have been curated by Marker himself and is paired with two brilliant, idiosyncratic nonfiction works. Sergei Dvortsevoy’s hilarious and moving In the Dark (V Temnote) is a portrait of the obsolete artist or craftsman; Uncle Vanya (Ivan Nikolaevich Skorobogatov) is a blind widower who patiently makes string bags he can’t give away. The camera patiently records this work, Vanya’s hands and tools, as he negotiates the space of his tiny apartment outside Moscow and time through outside sounds. As with Bread Day (Clebnyy den, 1999) and Dvortsevoy’s celebrated fiction debut Tulpan (2008), the tone and images are sometimes so incongruous you wonder if the film is a shaggy dog story or simply reflects the oddity of everyday life; we are constantly shown apparatus of seeing—mirrors, photographs, cameras—in a film about a man who can’t see. I should say shaggy cat story; the real hero of the film, and I suspect the real source of Marker’s fondness for it, is a white cat who, when it isn’t licking itself and chasing flies, is so disruptive it constantly interrupts Vanya’s work, overturns piles of household objects, steals and plays with balls of string, and even wrecks the illusion of the “objective” documentary process by forcing Dvortsevoy onto the screen to help his uncle clear up, to the irritation of his crew: “Go away Sergei, why are you always in the shot?”
Three Songs about Motherland also features cats, but its main link to Marker (besides director Marina Goldovskaya contributing to The Last Bolshevik) is its central section, which also narrates the death of the director’s close friend, another thorn in the side of the Russian leaders. Anna Politkovskaya was a journalist murdered for repeatedly exposing Russian war crimes and military corruption during the Chechnyan conflict; as with One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich, this film’s poignancy derives from the many conversations with the subject filmed by Goldovskaya, as concerned with bad jokes and worse cooking as it is with the dehumanization of post-Soviet Russia. This central section also alludes directly to Vertov’s Three Songs of Lenin (Tri Prsni o Lenine, 1934), a fervent requiem to a lost leader in a film otherwise charged with Bolshevik optimism. Goldovskaya ranges over today’s Russia where that great dream is dead. Its first section interviews surviving volunteers from the Lenin youth organization Komsomol, who came from Leningrad to the Russian Far East in 1934 to build the city of Komsomolsk-on-Amur. The admiration for Stalin—“So some people got arrested. No big deal”—expressed by some of the interviewees, and the evasive, forgetful or bullish narrations of life under the Terror (including the lynching and murder of their boss) is frightening. The final section—“The city of hope”—looks at another relic of Russian terror, Siberia, former site of political exile, forced labor and ideological reeducation. The descendents of that graveyard of hope have revitalized the city of Khanty-Mansiysk through privatization, in particular oil and the media. New top-of-the-range skiing centers, schools and hospitals are built; there is only the odd homicide. The horrors of the past are exorcised by shiny tour guides in bright museums. But Komsomolsk began with such optimism; Politkovskaya was killed in part for criticizing privatization; and Marker’s own Lettre de Sibérie is very ambivalent about the construction of new towns.
Dziga and His Brothers is part of a new made-on-demand (MOD) series launched in June by Milestone. The image quality is acceptable (except for the muddy clips, which may be due to the original documentary), but the subtitles are nonoptional and there are no chapters. One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich offers only the English dub with subtitles.
Man with the
Movie Camera | Soviet Montage | Foreign Film | Movie ... Matthew from Classic Art Films, June 10, 2013
Vertov » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names Ben Sonnenberg from CounterPunch, November 16, 2002
Celluloid
Manifesto by Yuri Tsivian - Moving Image Source April 12, 2011
Soviet Montage: Eisenstein's theory of 'montage of ... Adrian Perez from Cineast’s POV Press, September 14, 2012
The
Niles Files: Dziga Vertov's Doors of Perception | l'etoile Niles Schwartz, May 28, 2014
Dziga
Vertov's Man with the Movie Camera (SU 1929 ... Stavros Alifragkis (Athens) and François Penz
(Cambridge) 16-page academic paper from Academia.edu (pdf format)
Unstaged
Events: Dziga Vertov's <i>Man with a Movie Camera</i ... Unstaged
Events: Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera Gets a Hip-Hop Score, by Lee Purvey from Crosscuts, August 19, 2016
Five
wonderful effects in Man with a Movie Camera... and how they're ... Ben Nicholson from BFI Sight and Sound, January 17, 2017
Dziga Vertov's
The Man with a Movie Camera: One of the films you ... David Walsh and Joanne Laurier from The World Socialist Web Site, May 6,
2017
Playback:
Dziga Vertov's 'Man with a Movie Camera' | International ... Alan Berliner from Documentary
Images - Man
With a Movie Camera Grant Tracey
from Images
Perry
Bard's "The Man With the Movie Camera: The Global ... On
the Internet, nobody knows you’re a constructivist: Perry Bard’s The
Man With the Movie Camera: The Global Remake, by Seth Feldman from Jump
Cut, 2010
Friday Editor's Pick: The Man With A Movie Camera (1929) Alt Screen
Universal pictures | Film
| The Guardian Jonathan Jones, July
1, 2005
Saluting the Supreme Soviet Filmmaker, Dziga Vertov | Village Voice J. Hoberman, April 13, 2011
BOMB Magazine —
Vertiginous Vertov by Zack Friedman
Zack Friedman, April 20, 2011
SPINNING
TOP The Legacy of Dziga Vertov Keeps Moving | The ... Mónica Savirón from The Brooklyn Rail, May 4, 2011
Dziga
Vertov: Wild Man of Soviet Montage | White City Cinema Michael Glover Smith, May 4, 2011
Dziga
Vertov and Constructivist Cinema · Lomography Jilly Tanrad, June 14, 2013
Man
With a Movie Camera | Film at The Digital Fix Anthony Nield
Michael
Nyman's Man With a Movie Camera | Film at The Digital Fix Anthony Nield
michael nyman's man with a movie camera - review at ... Ellen Cheshire from Video Vista
Dziga Vertov's 'The Man With the Movie Camera' Remains a ... Sarah Boslaugh from Pop Matters, July 17, 2015
Blueprint:
Review [David Brook] Blu-Ray
Dziga
Vertov: The Man with the Movie Camera and Other Newly ... Jake Cole Blu-Ray DVD from Slant, June 15, 2015
Dziga
Vertov: The Man With The Movie Camera And Other Restored ... Noel Murray Blu-Ray DVD from The Dissolve, June 15, 2015
Dziga Vertov: The Man with the Movie Camera and Other Newly ... Matt Hinrichs from DVD Talk, Blu-Ray
Unboxing
the Silents: Dziga Vertov – The Man with the Movie Camera ... Fritzi Kramer from Movies Silently,
Blu-Ray
Dziga Vertov: The Man with the Movie Camera and Other Newly ... Jeff Burnham DVD review from Film Monthly, June 2, 2015
Dziga
Vertov: The Man with the Movie Camera and Other Newly ... Ethan Gates DVD review from Diabolique magazine, Blu-Ray
Men
with movie cameras: why documentary cinema owes everything ... Samuel Goff from The Calvert Journal, February 13 – December 17, 2017
Dziga
Vertov: The Man With the Movie Camera and Other Newly ... Gartenberg Media
Futurism, Formalism
and Communism in Dziga Vertov's The Man with ... Derek P. Rucas, September 29, 2003
Blind Spots Series: Man with a Movie Camera Dan Heaton from Public Transportation Snob
Dziga Vertov: Wild Man of Soviet Montage | White City Cinema Michael Glover Smith
Two Radical Filmmakers: Luis Bunuel
and Dziga Vertov Joe Castleman, 1992
Man
with a Movie Camera: Stylistic Innovation, Substantive Rumination Lorenzo Benitez from The Cornell Daily Sun, November 20, 2016
Man With A Movie Camera - A Shining Brainless Beacon eldritch1313
The
Man With The Movie Camera (1929) ~ reviewed by Nick ... Nick Burton from Pif magazine,
Man with a Movie Camera (1929) – Dziga Vertov Nick Renkoski
Documentary: Man with a Movie Camera (1929)–Best Ever ... Emanuel Levy
Corey's Film & Music Reviews: Grierson's Documentary ... Corey Dufort, November 19, 2006
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
Dziga Vertov: Kiev 1 Sept[ember] [19]28: Storyboard - Rouge Roland Fischer-Briand, September 1, 1928
Man With A Movie Camera | documentary 32 of 100 | Dan ... Dan McComb
Man with a Movie Camera and Other Works by Dziga Vertov - film review Jamie Havlin from Louder Than War
man with a movie camera — Broken Shark
The Man With the Movie Camera | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr, capsule
Dziga Vertov's Silent Film Voted Best Docu Ever in Sight & Sound Poll ... Leo Barraclough from Variety, August 1, 2014
Man With a Movie Camera Movie Review (1929) | Roger Ebert
The-Man-With-the-Movie-Camera - The New York Times Mordaunt Hall
The
Man With the Movie Camera - DVDBeaver.com
Man with a Movie Camera - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man With A Movie Camera ... entire film may be seen here (68 mi)
" Man With a Movie Camera " by DZIGA VERTOV - 1929 on Vimeo entire film may be seen here (67 minutes)
File:Man
With A Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929).ogv - Wikimedia ... film in the public domain may be seen here
(67 mi)
A remarkable abstract avante garde homage to the Worker State, one of the first Russian sound films, also featuring the first sound interview, depicting an idealized, every day, ordinary worker state, filmed in a vast inddustrial area, the Don Bassin, using sounds of the workers, a symphony of sounds, no dialogue, alternate title: SYMPHONY OF THE DON BAS, Chaplin observed: "I would never have believed it possible to assemble mechanical noises to create such beauty. One of the most superb symphonies I have known." Vertov was fascinated by factories, machinery, motion, locomotives, steel mills, coal miners, agricultural collectives, featuring dancing and plenty of marching, with bold, striking imagery. Vertov was the founder of Kino Pravda, later re-invented in the 60's as cinema verité, cinema of the truth. Vertov invented the newsreel in 1918 using subtitled commentary, sending a reporter with a camera to capture news events, then sending the film to the newsroom for editing, a style still used in newsrooms today, Vertov, like Dovzhenko, was also a futuristic poet, much admiring the works of both Miakovsky and Walt Whitman, he deciphered a new way to see the world, life as it is lived, reality, truth, as evidenced by his 1929 documentary A MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA, a film about the making of a film: "I, a machine show you a world such as only I can see...a study in film truth on an almost philosophical level. It does deliberately what others try hard to avoid - destroys its own illusions in the hope that reality will emerge from the process not as a creature of screen illusion but as a liberated spirit."
Enthusiasm and Three Songs of Lenin Dave Kehr from the Reader
Nominally a tribute to the energy of the Soviet people as they
set about the first Five Year Plan, Enthusiasm (1931) was the first
sound film by
Entuziazm
(Simfonija Donbassa) | Film at The Digital Fix Anthony Nield
Entuziazm (Simfonija Donbassa), made in 1930, finds the famed Russian filmmaker Dziga
Vertov toying with sound. He’d done so in the past having prepared “musical”
notes for earlier features (the Alloy Orchestra’s recent score for Man With a Movie
Camera, for example, was made in accordance to such wishes) as well as
toiling away on “sound montages” which pre-figured John Cage. Yet in this case
we’re dealing with a fully synchronous recording and its presence affects the
director in some interesting ways. The two key parts of his cinematic make-up
had always been documentary and the avant-garde, yet the addition of a
soundtrack disrupts the balance somewhat. Intriguingly, Entuziazm’s
accompaniment enhances not the realist qualities, as we’d perhaps expect
through naturalistic sounds and live recording, but rather manipulates such
forms into a less distinctive, more analogous construct. It’s as though all of
the cinematic methods Vertov had previously used visually have bled into the
aural side of things. Indeed, you could argue that as a result Entuziazm
stands out as his most defiant expression of the avant-garde.
Yet at the same time we’re also dealing with a piece of unashamed propaganda.
Vertov documents the effect of Lenin’s “Five Year Plan” by focussing on the
Donbass region, home to the
Within such propagandist realms, however, we do find Vertov operating on
familiar territory. As the subtitle suggests – literally Symphony of Donbass
- we’re also dealing with one of the director’s “city symphonies”, albeit in
slightly altered form. As such the technical dazzle which punctuated Man With a Movie
Camera is very much in play, Entuziazm offering a remarkable
combination of mobile camerawork, canny juxtapositions, multiple exposures,
quaint special effects (the reversed footage looks as though it’s come straight
out of a Cocteau) and plain, honest reportage. Moreover, this final aspect also
retains Vertov’s eye for an image, one that’s just as important as the film’s
overall construction. Indeed, his ability to capture landscapes and faces (both
of which are equally fascinating in this case) remains as astonishing as ever;
the “men at work” section from Man With a Movie
Camera was arguably it’s most powerful in visual terms, and here we
find it occupying the bulk of the picture. In this respect we can also treat Entuziazm
as a fine historical record in spite of its experimental impulses.
It’s the soundtrack which is the key however, and Vertov makes sure that we
never forget it. The film almost judders into life, breaking through from
images of a young woman listening to headphones. In other words he’s keen for
us to remain objective and notice his efforts, though in retrospect such a
device doesn’t seem wholly necessary. Firstly the sound design is so unique,
even to this day, that we can never simply ignore it. It doesn’t have the
crudity which, generally speaking, early talkies suffer from simply because it
refuses to operate along naturalistic lines. (Indeed, Entuziazm could
almost be said to be teaching us how to watch a Vertov film: previous efforts, Man With a Movie
Camera in particular, come with so many different soundtracks, each
offering a different experience, yet in this case we’re guided solely by the
filmmaker and as such can more fully discern his rhythms and editing patterns.)
The second reason for not failing to take Entuziazm objectively comes
down to its roots as propaganda. The message is so proudly proclaimed, and so
overwhelmingly, that only those with an accommodating ideology would be able to
fully immerse themselves with the events onscreen. The rest of us are forced to
permanently keep a step or two back, yet as such we’re never allowed to view Entuziazm
as the complete experience it could have become. Unlike Man With a Movie
Camera it’s a film to greatly admire as opposed to truly love.
Disorganized
Noise: Vertov's Enthusiasm and the Ear of ... - KinoKultura 13-page essay, Disorganized Noise: Enthusiasm and the Ear of the Collective, by John
MacKay,
ENTHUSIASM
(Dziga Vertov, 1931) | Dennis Grunes
Saluting
the Supreme Soviet Filmmaker, Dziga Vertov | Village Voice J. Hoberman, April 13, 2011
SPINNING
TOP The Legacy of Dziga Vertov Keeps Moving | The ... Mónica Savirón from The Brooklyn Rail, May 4, 2011
Enthusiasm,
or Symphony of the Don Basin - The New Yorker
ENTHUSIASM:
SYMPHONY OF THE DONBASS | Electric Sheep
Philip Winter
Dziga Vertov's 'The Man With the Movie Camera' Remains a ... Sarah Boslaugh from Pop Matters, July 17, 2015
Blueprint:
Review [David Brook] Blu-Ray
Dziga
Vertov: The Man with the Movie Camera and Other Newly ... Jake Cole Blu-Ray DVD from Slant, June 15, 2015
Dziga
Vertov: The Man With The Movie Camera And Other Restored ... Noel Murray Blu-Ray DVD from The Dissolve, June 15, 2015
Dziga Vertov: The Man with the Movie Camera and Other Newly ... Matt Hinrichs from DVD Talk, Blu-Ray
Unboxing
the Silents: Dziga Vertov – The Man with the Movie Camera ... Fritzi Kramer from Movies Silently,
Blu-Ray
1930s
Dziga Vertov experimental documentary with new live sounds ... Laura A. from Film Hub North
Edition
Filmmuseum Shop - Entuziazm (Simfonija Donbassa) Edition ...
Dziga
Vertov: The Man With the Movie Camera and Other Newly ... Gartenberg Media
ENTHUSIASM (Symphony of
the Donbas) Dovzhenko Centre
Artists'
Film Club: Dziga Vertov | Institute of Contemporary Arts October 13, 2010
Dziga
Vertov: Enthusiasm (Symphony of the Donbas) ‹ Events ...
Ukranian Film Poster for Enthusiasm by Dziga Vertov
Watch Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass now | Kanopy streaming service
Russia (61 mi) 1934
Three Songs About Lenin | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
Dziga Vertov's 1934 celebration of Lenin, told in a flow of imagery tied to three Russian folk songs. A soaring, sculptured film, regarded by some as Vertov's masterpiece.
User reviews from imdb Author: netwallah from The New Intangible College
Vertov eulogizes Lenin with an idealized view of Soviet progress. There are, indeed, three songs, or three musical movements. The first presents a woman's view of Lenin's legacy, beginning with the movement away from various forms of repression, the joy of women working, the new equality in field and factory. The second records the Soviet mourning for their leader. The third showcases progress, with the refrain if only Lenin could see his country now. With the exception of three or four spoken passages, this is built like a silent film to which a programmatic soundtrack has been added. There are actual songs, with titles furnishing the words, and sections of great music by Russian classical composers, and some music probably written for the film. The continuity comes through the songs and through several thematic sequences of images—there is no plot. The images are fascinating, showing the best side of Soviet culture, the variety of ethnicities, the joy of having enough to eat, the sense of sharing in a wonderful experiment, the determination to succeed, the unselfishness of many individuals, the idealism of the collective. There are thousands of shots of people, agriculture, industry, public works, parades, happy people, hardworking people, landscapes, and every sort of window into a vanished world. Of course it's propaganda. Of course there are essential elements of Soviet history omitted. Of course the very first sequences present the unveiling of Muslim women as a great stride toward liberty. Let the political scientists and historians investigate the significance of what is left out and what is presented in this partial view of life in the 1930s. But remember it was only sixteen years after the October revolution, and the progress the movie highlights did occur. Still, we don't have to accept the propagandistic aspect of the film. Neither do we have to reject the film out of hand because we think Communism is stupid, nor does it benefit anybody to heap ridicule upon it. Three Songs is a (partly) great movie because it shows irreplaceable real images of real people and of vanished technology and vanished historical places. Some of the photography is amazing, and the editing, timed rhythmically to match the music, is unusually good. Even the way the propagandistic themes are built is worth examining—we're all pretty much safe from its baleful influence these days.
Movie
Review - Tri Pesni o Lenine - Vertof's 'Three Songs About ... Andre Sennwald from The
Accompanied by the huzzahs and halloos of the local tovaristchi, the remarkably interesting Soviet film with the lyric title began an American engagement at the Cameo yesterday, two days before its official Bolshevist début. "Three Songs About Lenin," which is a poetico-cinema canonization of the leader, has appropriately been reserved by the Muscovites for the Nov. 7 ceremonies which will celebrate the revolution's seventeenth birthday. The work of Dzega Vertof, founder of the Kino-Eye school of the experimental Soviet cinema, known in this country for his short film, "Man With the Movie Camera," the photoplay is a striking and rhapsodic tribute to the memory of the prophet of bolshevism.
With the exception of the superb middle song, the lament for the dead chieftain, "Three Songs About Lenin," is more impressive in its brilliance of conception than in actual achievement. But even when the picture is viewed without the distortions of the Marxist critical lenses, it emerges as a work of unusual beauty and emotional exaltation.
Employing an intricate blend of newsreels, authentic historical cinema documents and original films, M. Vertof strives to dramatize the soul and meaning of Lenin as they filter through the eyes of the peasants whom the dead prophet liberated from the Czarist chains. He visualizes, in images of warm and tragic beauty, the influence of Lenin as expressed in three folk songs from the Soviet Orient which have evolved out of the soil since his passing. The first is the song of a Tadjhik woman, "Under a Black Veil My Face . . ." and M. Vertof makes of it the touching impressionistic drama of her liberation from the Oriental veil into the sunlight of education and social equality. The second song, "We Loved Him . . . ," is the dirge, and the third, "In the Great City of Stone . . . ," is the song of high hope and achievement, with the refrain, "If Lenin Could See Our Country Now." This third section, encompassing recent newsreels of Soviet industrial triumphs, is a mighty chant of patriotism which ends on Lenin's own inspiring message to his people: "Victory will be ours."
As emotional biography, this is a daring and original work which has a tendency to suffer from its absence of visual flow. Completely successful and extraordinarily moving in the fine lament, it tends to fatigue the eye in both the first and third sections. Chiefly this is because of the endless succession of captions and the abrupt, though meaningful and often stirring, passage from printed caption to visual image and back again.
In the "We Loved Him. . ." lyric, with its
marvelous synthesis of the actual funeral scenes and the manufactured
embroidery of a nation's tragic grief, Vertof lifts his method to a rounded and
beautiful form. As Lenin lies in state, Vertof swings back and forth between
the dead man and enormous close-ups of peasant faces in dark, passionate and
vivid expressions of sorrow. Lenin's own voice, reproduced on dictaphone
records, comes to the audience in one portion. You see the living man exhorting
the multitude in
Certainly "Three Songs About Lenin" is an event in the cinema, and its director blazes a trail into the infinity which represents the undiscovered possibilities of the camera medium. His technical skill in weaving this impassioned document out of a variety of pictorial strands, using the film library as effectively as he uses the studio and the open countryside, is of vast importance to the art of the cinema.
"Allegory
and Accommodation: Vertov's THREE SONGS OF LENIN ... 17-page essay, Allegory and Accommodation: Vertov's THREE SONGS OF LENIN (1934) as a
Stalinist film, by John MacKay from Film
History, 2006
Three Songs
About Lenin by Dziga Vertov by Paul Nizan 1935
Saluting
the Supreme Soviet Filmmaker, Dziga Vertov | Village Voice J. Hoberman, April 13, 2011
SPINNING
TOP The Legacy of Dziga Vertov Keeps Moving | The ... Mónica Savirón from The Brooklyn Rail, May 4, 2011
Dziga Vertov's 'The Man With the Movie Camera' Remains a ... Sarah Boslaugh from Pop Matters, July 17, 2015
Blueprint:
Review [David Brook] Blu-Ray
Dziga
Vertov: The Man with the Movie Camera and Other Newly ... Jake Cole Blu-Ray DVD from Slant, June 15, 2015
Dziga
Vertov: The Man With The Movie Camera And Other Restored ... Noel Murray Blu-Ray DVD from The Dissolve, June 15, 2015
Dziga Vertov: The Man with the Movie Camera and Other Newly ... Matt Hinrichs from DVD Talk, Blu-Ray
Unboxing
the Silents: Dziga Vertov – The Man with the Movie Camera ... Fritzi Kramer from Movies Silently,
Blu-Ray
Dziga Vertov: The Man With the Movie Camera and Other Newly ... Gartenberg Media
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Soviet
Film: Three Songs of Lenin (1934) | The Marxist-Leninist
1 Dziga
Vertov, “Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye” III. Montage means ... photo stills from the film
Three
Songs About Lenin | Variety Deborah
Young
Songs
about Lenin - Bangalore Mirror Chandan Gowda
New
York Times [Andre Sennwald]
Three Songs About
Lenin - Wikipedia
I remember back in the late 80s
and early 90s trying to make the argument that artists such as Jeff Koons and Haim
Steinbach,
who were roundly dismissed by everyone except the collectors and dealers who
got rich off of them, were actually making art that was critical of commodity
capitalism. In retrospect, I was wrong; they really were just making shiny
gewgaws for the Saatchis and
their ilk. Flash-forward to 2006, and I can't say I'm surprised that this same
impulse has fused with the empty star-fucking culture of E! Channel, the
tabloids, and the post-post-Baudrillardian moment that can actually sustain the
celebrity of Paris Hilton. Strangely enough, she doesn't appear in Trailer
for . . . Caligula. If the Whitney Biennial catalog
copy is to be trusted, Paris isn't old enough, since Vezzoli's alleged
critical intervention is the casting of "charismatic, aging divas"
like Karen Black (a given in this context, I suppose), Helen Mirren (who should
know better), and actually Gore Vidal himself (who should really know
better). My goodness, but doesn't this just fly in the face of
Seven Golden Men (Sette uomini d'oro) is an
insanely entertaining 1965 Italian crime caper movie. It deserves to be
regarded as one of the all-time classic heist movies.
The Professor is the diabolical criminal mastermind behind a plan to steal
seven tons of gold from a Swiss bank. Only he’s not really diabolical at all,
he’s quite a nice guy. He just likes robbing banks. It’s a harmless hobby.
He has a few odd little obsessions. Particularly with the number seven, which
is why he wants to steal seven tons of gold, using a team of seven expert
thieves. And the entire team comprises men whose names start with the letter A.
The entire movie consists of the robbery and its aftermath. There’s no
build-up, no time spent on the planning of the operation, no
back story. The movie doesn’t need any of that. It cuts straight to the chase,
which gives it a punchiness and economy sadly lacking in so many modern
thrillers. And the heist is one of the most elaborate, most ingenious and
wittiest ever put on film. It provides more evidence that to do this sort of
thing successfully you don’t need big budgets, expensive special effects or
CGI. What you need is visual imagination and style, and director Marco Vicario
has that in spades.
You also need pacing. And again Vicario has things under control. There are no
dull moments in this film.
Of course you know there will be plot twists, and this one has all the expected
plot
twists. But then it adds even more plot twists and pulls off some genuinely
unexpected ones.
It’s all done in a light-hearted fun way. This is not a movie to be taken
seriously, and it never takes itself seriously, even though the robbery scenes
compare very favourably indeed to any movie in the classic heist-movie mould.
This is a good-natured romp, and these thieves are likeable and engaging.
There’s a mix of action and humour, some great visual gags, and some superb
set-pieces. This being 1965 there’s no sex or
nudity. This is a movie totally lacking in sleaze, or in graphic violence
either for that matter. But of course there has to be a beautiful female mixed
up in such a robbery somewhere, and Rossana Podestà fulfils that role admirably
as The Professor’s girlfriend Giorgia. She has to rely on old-fashioned glamour
and sexiness but she has these qualities in abundance, as well as charm and a
nice line in high-class wickedness.
Philippe Leroy is a delightful master criminal, underplaying his role but
clearly having a great time. The whole supporting cast is excellent and it’s
difficult to single out any particular
performance.
There are cool gadgets, there are scuba divers, there are charmingly odd 1960s
cars, lots of wonderful 1960s fashions and fashion accessories (Giorgia wears
some of the most outrageous eyewear you’ll ever encounter) and there’s lots of
glamour. Everything you ant in a 60s movie in other words. These people are the
cream of the crop when it comes to international crime, all strictly
high-class. This is crime as practised by the very best people.
The soundtrack is bizarre but that just adds to the enjoyment.
This is a movie that captures the spirit of the 60s before the hippies took
over. It’s all style, and it’s all fun. Very definitely an overlooked classic.
The New York Times (Howard Thompson) review
Vidor, King
King Vidor - Director - Films as Director:, Publications - Film Reference Michael Selig from Film Reference
King Vidor began work in Hollywood as a company clerk for Universal, submitting original scripts under the pseudonym Charles K. Wallis. (Universal employees weren't allowed to submit original work to the studio.) Vidor eventually confessed his wrongdoing and was fired as a clerk, only to be rehired as a comedy writer. Within days, he lost this job as well when Universal discontinued comedy production.
Vidor next worked as the director of a series of short dramatic films detailing the reform work of Salt Lake City Judge Willis Brown, a Father Flanagan-type. Vidor tried to parlay this experience into a job as a feature director with a major studio but was unsuccessful. He did manage, however, to find financial backing from nine doctors for his first feature, a picture with a Christian Science theme titled The Turn in the Road. Vidor spent the next year working on three more features for the newly christened Brentwood Company, including the comedy Better Times , starring his own discovery, Zasu Pitts.
In 1920 Vidor accepted an offer from First National and a check for $75,000. He persuaded his father to sell his business in order that he might build and manage "Vidor Village," a small studio that mirrored similar projects by Chaplin, Sennett, Griffith, Ince, and others. Vidor directed eight pictures at Vidor Village, but was forced to close down in 1922. The following year, he was hired by Louis B. Mayer at Metro to direct aging stage star Laurette Taylor in Peg-o-My-Heart. Soon after, he went to work for Samuel Goldywn, attracted by Goldywn's artistic and literary aspirations. In 1924 Vidor returned to Metro as a result of a studio merger that resulted in MGM. He would continue to work there for the next 20 years, initially entrusted with molding the careers of rising stars John Gilbert and Eleanor Boardman, soon to be Vidor's second wife.
The Big Parade changed Vidor's status from contract director to courted screen artist. Produced by Irving Thalberg, the film grew from a minor studio production into one of MGM's two biggest hits of 1926, grossing $18 million. The Big Parade satisfied Vidor's desire to make a picture with lasting value and extended exhibition. It was the first of three films he wanted to make on the topics of "wheat, steel, and war." Vidor went on to direct Gilbert and Lillian Gish, a new studio acquisition, in La Bohème. Encouraged by the popularity of German films of the period and their concern with urban life, Vidor made The Crowd , " The Big Parade of peace." It starred unknown actor James Murray, whose life would end in an alcoholic suicide. (Murray inspired one of Vidor's later projects, an unproduced picture titled The Actor. ) Like The Big Parade, The Crowd presented the reactions of an everyman, this time to the anonymity of the city and the rigors of urban survival. Vidor's silent career then continued with two of Marion Davies' comedies, The Patsy and Show People. His career extended into "talkies" with a third comedy, Not So Dumb. Though only moderately successful, Vidor became a favorite in William Randolph Hearst's entourage.
Vidor was in Europe when the industry announced its conversion to sound. He quickly returned to propose Hallelujah , with an all-black cast. Although considered a politically astute director for Hollywood, the film exposes Vidor's political shortcomings in its paternalistic attitude toward blacks. With similar political naiveté, Vidor's next great film, the pseudo-socialist agricultural drama Our Daily Bread , was derived from a Reader's Digest article.
By this point in his career, Vidor's thematics were fairly intact. Informing most of his lasting work is the struggle of Man against Destiny and Nature. In his great silent pictures, The Big Parade and The Crowd , the hero wanders through an anonymous and malevolent environment, war-torn Europe and the American city, respectively. In his later sound films, The Citadel, Northwest Passage , Duel in the Sun, , and The Fountainhead various forms of industry operate as a vehicle of Man's battle to subdue Nature. Unlike the optimism in the films of Ford and Capra, Vidor's films follow a Job-like pattern in which victory comes, if at all, with a great deal of personal sacrifice. Underlying all of Vidor's great work are the biblical resonances of a Christian Scientist, where Nature is ultimately independent from and disinterested in Man, who always remains subordinate in the struggle against its forces.
Following Our Daily Bread , Vidor continued to alternate between films that explored this personal thematic and projects seemingly less suited to his interests. In more than 50 features, Vidor worked for several producers, directing Wedding Night and Stella Dallas for Samuel Goldwyn; The Citadel, Northwest Passage , and Comrade X for MGM; Bird of Paradise , where he met his third wife Elizabeth Hill, and Duel in the Sun for David O. Selznick; The Fountainhead, Beyond the Forest , and Lightning Strikes Twice for Warner Brothers; and late in his career, War and Peace for Dino De Laurentiis. Vidor exercised more control on his films after Our Daily Bread , often serving as producer, but his projects continued to fluctuate between intense metaphysical drama and lightweight comedy and romance.
In the 1950s Vidor's only notable film was Ruby Gentry , and his filmmaking career ended on a less-than-praiseworthy note with Solomon and Sheba. In the 1960s he made two short documentaries, Truth and Illusion and Metaphor , about his friend Andrew Wyeth. Vidor wrote a highly praised autobiography in 1953, A Tree Is a Tree. In 1979 he received an honorary Oscar (he was nominated as best director five times). In the last years of his life, he was honored in his hometown of Galveston with an annual King Vidor film festival.
King Vidor
official website
King Vidor | American
film director | Britannica.com
biography
cineCollage :: King Vidor biography
King Vidor • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Dan Callahan, February 13, 2007
King Vidor 1894-1982 Film Director Biography - Obscure Hollywood biography
VIDOR, KING WALLIS
| The Handbook of Texas Online| Texas State ... biography from Texas State Historical Society
King Vidor -
Hollywood's Golden Age biography
Overview for King Vidor - TCM.com biography
King Vidor - NNDB filmography
King Vidor | My Favorite
Westerns
The
Top 20 Movies Directed by King Vidor - Flickchart
King Vidor - Director by Film Rank -
Films 101
The History of Cinema. King
Vidor: biography, reviews, links
Piero Scaruffi reviews
Film
Notes -Show People - University at Albany
Kevin Hagopian on Show People,
1929
KING
VIDOR, PRIVATE EYE - NYTimes.com
reviewing an authorized biography, July 6, 1986
King
Vidor, The Crowd (1928)--Analysis Professor Catherine Lavender, Fall 1997
King Vidor - Texas
Monthly Anne Dingus, February 2001
King Vidor • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Dan Callahan, February 13, 2007
How to Share a Hill • Senses of Cinema Tag Gallagher, May 12, 2007
75 Years Ago Today… Allan R. Ellenberger, April 11, 2008
Beyond
the Forest - Bright Lights Film Journal
All-American Medea: The Radical
Pleasures of Beyond the Forest, by Jacob Mikanowski, July 31, 2010
King Vidor: The Editor's Director • Senses of Cinema Peter Tonguette, June 23, 2011
King
Vidor - DGA.org The Man Who Would Be King, by David Thomson,
Winter 2011
King
Vidor – The Leading Light | The Midnight Palace David
W. Menefee, June 20, 2013
Beyond
the Forest - Film Comment Howard
Hampton, July/August 2013
King
Vidor tells of working on ‘The Big Parade’
July 7, 2013
The Fountainhead, King Vidor • Film Analysis - Senses of Cinema Dan Shaw, August 18, 2013
Bette
Davis in Beyond the Forest • Film Analysis - Senses of Cinema David Melville, August 18, 2013
The Crowd, King Vidor •
Film Analysis • Senses of Cinema
Bruce Hodsdon, August 27, 2013
The Big Parade, King
Vidor • Film Analysis - Senses of Cinema
Tony Williams, September 8, 2013
Montage
and Tableau in Stella Dallas Richard Smith1 - Film-Philosophy 22-page essay by Richard Smith from Film-Philosophy (2014) (pdf), also seen here: Download this PDF file
Revisiting Stella Dallas from a
cognitive theory of film perspective ...
Anis Pervez from Offscreen,
January 2014
Self-Styled
Siren: King Vidor, The Crowd, and the Dragon January 20, 2014
King Vidor's
“Hallelujah” - Memphis magazine Greg
Akers, August 28, 2014
Movie
of the Week: “The Fountainhead” | The New Yorker Richard Brody, May 6, 2015
The
King Vidor File – Part One | IndieWire
Peter Bogdanovich, February 21, 2016
Stella Dallas film
analysis • Senses of Cinema Stella Dallas: The Female Hero in the
Maternal Melodrama, by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, March 18, 2016
The
King Vidor File – Part Two | IndieWire
March 27, 2016
5
Classic Movies Directed By King Vidor - ThoughtCo Shawn Dwyer, March 30, 2016
FREDRIK
GUSTAFSSON / King Vidor, An American
Romantic La Furia Umana, Fall 2016
#29.
The Big Parade (1925) – Thousand Movie Project Alex Sorondo, March 6, 2017
#39. The
Crowd (1928) – Thousand Movie Project
Alex Sorondo, April 24, 2017
King
Vidor – The Leading Light | The Midnight Palace Ronald L. Davis interview at Vidor’s Beverly
Hills studio August 4, 1975, published June 20, 2013
King
Vidor (1894 - 1982) - Find A Grave Memorial
King Vidor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
King Vidor - Alchetron, The
Free Social Encyclopedia
USA (140 mi) 1925 co-director: George W. Hill (uncredited)
Time Out Tom Milne
Time has not dealt altogether kindly with Vidor's silent blockbuster which, like All Quiet on the Western Front five years later, made both art and box-office out of the disillusionments of WWI. Too much of it is plain embarrassing: the buddy humour which scriptwriter Laurence Stallings carries over from What Price Glory?; the snatches of all-American whimsy (French girl introduced to the mysteries of chewing gum; the sentimentality of the hero's return minus a leg but plus superimpositions showing his mother remembering him as a child falling and grazing his knee). Yet even if it romanticises the true horrors beyond all recognition, there is undeniable power in Vidor's vision of a doughboy's episodic odyssey through the vast landscape of war. One is never left in any doubt that he was, even then, a major talent.
The
Big Parade - TCM.com Felicia Feaster
King Vidor's The Big
Parade (1925) was an astounding and in many ways unprecedented film, that
captured the human dimension behind war from a grunt's point of view and
offered a masterful picture of the psychological devastation of battle.
Vidor's emotional epic opens as three young men from different walks of life
are thrown together as soldiers and fast buddies during World War I: a son of
privilege James Apperson (John Gilbert), a Bowery bartender Bull (Tom O'Brien)
and a gawky ironworker Slim (Karl Dane).
The trio's experiences billeting in France are initially light-hearted and
charming. James woos a beautiful village girl Melisande (Renee Adoree) who
looks just like his fiance back home. In the meantime, Bull and Slim try to horn
in on Melisande, who doesn't speak a word of English and seems overwhelmed by
all of the romantic attention. The sequences between James and Melisande, as he
shyly flirts and she shyly retreats, made the most of Gilbert's remarkable
flair for understated acting, as well as the pairing of the two charming,
well-matched actors (the duo teamed up one more time in 1930 for Redemption).
The scene where consummate American James teaches Melisande to chew gum
captured the wonderfully light and subtle touch both actors had with comedy.
Vidor has noted that the scene was entirely improvised after he watched his
cameraman chewing gum and decided to use it to embellish an otherwise vague
love scene.
The pairing of these two romantic leads boosted Gilbert's popularity and
allowed Adoree, a veteran of the circus and the Folies-Bergere, to rise from a
respected actress in the MGM stable to star status. Gilbert broke out of his
more typical romantic leads to movingly portray the doughboy James Apperson,
who goes from naive kid to a painfully wizened man over the course of the film.
That image-change only solidified Gilbert's fame and transformed him into a
superstar.
As James, Bull and Slim experience more and more of the war, their youthful
enthusiasm is chipped away. In an absolutely devastating battle scene in
Belleau Wood, the men line up with bayonets ready and gradually march into the
fire of German snipers hidden in the forest. Shot from high angles to capture
the number of men involved, and also straight-on to capture the terrified
expressions of individual men, the sequence has a nightmare immediacy enhanced
by John Arnold's cinematography and Gilbert's effective acting. One by one,
snipers hidden in the treetops and Germans manning machine guns pick off the American
soldiers as they continue to march relentlessly forward. Vidor created the
chilling effect of men marching to their death by using a bass drum during the
shooting to force the actors to keep time to the beat as they marched.
"Everybody was instructed that no matter what they did, they must do it in
time to the beat. It's all so relentless," said Vidor. Sound was also used
to emotional effect during the film's remarkably successful run at the Astor
Theatre on Broadway, where eighteen men with bugles and wagons filled with iron
created sound effects to replicate the experience of actual battle.
As the story progresses the bond between the trio grows tighter and they take
enormous risks to protect one another, including a risk that proves fatal and
ends in a heartbreaking expression of fraternal love. According to a Variety
review of the time, that scene of one friend dying while the other cradles him
in his arms, "had the majority of the audience in tears."
It was the success of Laurence Stallings' and Maxwell Anderson's stage play What
Price Glory? that inspired MGM's adaptation of Stallings' The Big Parade. Vidor stuck close to
the gritty realism of Stallings' wartime recollections when he worked with the
writer on adapting the film. The Big
Parade included scenes of unfiltered violence, like a wounded soldier with
blood running down his head and graphic language in the film's intertitles, to
reflect the realism of Stallings' own wartime experience in WWI where he lost a
leg in Belleau Wood.
"War had not been explored yet from the realistic GI viewpoint,"
Vidor noted, "It was more based on songs like 'Over There' and songs of
that sort."
That The Big Parade was the first
war film told from the doughboy, rather than the officer's perspective, helped
explain its enormous popularity. As testament to its power, The Big Parade was commended again and
again by veterans of WWI for its accuracy.
To convey that wartime authenticity, Vidor relied heavily on Signal Corps
footage of battle and troop movements to help in choreographing his film, and
also incorporated some of that footage into the film itself.
The Big Parade established Vidor as
one of the top directors of the age. The film made MGM a mint, but while it
raised his status in Hollywood significantly, Vidor unfortunately signed away
his percentage share and was thus unable to capitalize on the film's enormous
financial success. Vidor would continue his unique combination of humanism and
technical virtuosity in films to come like The Crowd (1928) and Our Daily
Bread (1934).
The Big Parade, King
Vidor • Film Analysis - Senses of Cinema
Tony Williams, September 8, 2013
The
Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks
Ferdy
on Films [Roderick Heath]
The Big
Parade (1925) Karl Holzheimer from The Midnight Palace
#29.
The Big Parade (1925) – Thousand Movie Project Alex Sorondo, March 6, 2017
A
cinema history [J.E. de Cockborne]
greatwarfilms.wordpress.com
[Paul Evennett]
Allaboutwarmovies.com Nem Baj, also seen here: Auteurs
at War
Immortal
Ephemera [Cliff Aliperti]
Movie
Magg [Mark Gabrish Conlan]
Cagey
Films [kgeorge] Kenneth George
Godwin
King
Vidor tells of working on ‘The Big Parade’
July 7, 2013
We
Got This Covered [Lauren Humphries-Brooks]
Blu-Ray
DVDizzy.com
- Blu-ray [Luke Bonanno]
DVD
Savant - Blu-ray [Glenn Erickson]
DVD
Talk - Blu-ray [John Sinnott]
Blu-rayDefinition.com
- Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]
Slant
Magazine Blu-ray [Jake Cole]
20/20
Movie Reviews [Richard Cross]
Cinepassion.org
[Fernando F. Croce]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
New York Times [Mordaunt Hall]
USA (98 mi) 1928
The Crowd (1928), directed by King Vidor and starring ... - Time Out Stephen Garrett
An office peon (James Murray), hitched after a night at Coney Island, struggles to raise a family in the tiny Murphy-bed confines of a tenement apartment and reconcile his outsize aspirations with the noble modesty of blending in with the urban masses. King Vidor’s stunning silent is a chronicle of crushed hubris.
The Crowd - TCM.com Rod Hollimon
Just a few years before King Vidor thought up the concept for his
1928 silent classic The Crowd, he
was at Universal pictures working diligently as a company clerk by day and
secretly writing comedies at night to submit to the studio under the pseudonym
Charles K. Wallis. Because Universal employees weren't allowed to submit
original work to the studio, Vidor was fired from his clerk position when he
revealed the true identity of the mysterious Charles K. Wallis. After his
termination, Universal quickly hired Vidor as a comedy writer, but that job was
short-lived. A few days after Vidor took the comedy writing position, Universal
stopped making comedies. Vidor would eventually break into directing starting
with a series of short dramatic films that highlighted the work of Salt Lake
City Judge Willis Brown, and later a Christian Science film called The Turn
in the Road (1919) which was financed by nine doctors. Vidor fine-tuned his
craft over the next few years directing films at his own studio, Vidor Village.
Unfortunately, his studio wasn't as financially successful as he had planned
and was closed down in 1922, just two years after it opened. Vidor then went to
work for the newly formed Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studio where he developed a close
working relationship with studio mogul Irving Thalberg. It was at MGM where his
status would go from small-time contract director to renowned screen artist.
Vidor enjoyed his first major success with The Big Parade, an epic drama
about a doughboy's life-changing experiences in the First World War which
grossed more than $18 million in 1926.
Two years after The Big Parade, Vidor directed novice actor James Murray
in The Crowd, a realistic film about
an ordinary man trying his best to survive the defeats and setbacks he
encounters while trying to make a life for himself and his wife in the bustling
metropolis of New York. Vidor wanted an actor who was the perfect embodiment of
a working class citizen and Murray was the real deal; a guy who had worked his
way cross country to California as a dishwasher, coal-shoveler, and boxcar
rider. The director first spotted Murray, who was working as an extra at MGM,
near the studio casting office and arranged a meeting with him. But Murray
didn't think Vidor was really a director and didn't show up for the interview.
Vidor hunted him down anyway with the studio's help and eventually convinced
the actor that he could play the part. In his biography, A Tree is a Tree,
Vidor recalled that "when I showed the test to Irving Thalberg, we both
agreed that James Murray, Hollywood extra, was one of the best natural actors
we had ever had the good luck to encounter."
The making of The Crowd presented
Vidor with some major technical challenges. For the famous scene where the
camera travels up the side of a skyscraper, through a window and into a
sprawling office space with rows of workers, Vidor started his sequence at the
entrance to the Equitable Life Insurance Building in New York City during
lunchtime. In his autobiography, he added, "the camera started its upward
swing and when the screen was filled with nothing but windows, we managed an
imperceptible dissolve to a scale model in the studio. This miniature was
placed flat on the floor with the camera rolling horizontally over it...As the
camera moved close to the window another smooth dissolve was made to the
interior scene of the immense office. The desks occupied a complete, bare stage
and the illusion was accomplished by using the stage walls and floor, without
constructing a special set. To move the camera down to Murray, an overhead wire
trolley was rigged with a moving camera platform slung beneath it. The
counterbalanced camera crane or boom had not yet been designed and built, but
the results we achieved were identical with those of today."
In his quest for authenticity, Vidor insisted on real locations whenever
possible, stating, "For scenes of the sidewalks of New York, we designed a
pushcart perambulator carrying what appeared to be inoffensive packing boxes.
Inside the hollowed-out boxes there was room for one small-sized cameraman and
one silent camera. We pushed this contraption from the Bowery to Times Square
and no one ever detected our subterfuge."
Upon completion, The Crowd proved to
be so uncompromising and unsentimental in its approach that MGM mogul Irving
Thalberg held up its release for a year. Although it was eventually released to
international critical acclaim, The
Crowd hit too close to home to be a success with mainstream audiences who
wanted to escape their everyday problems at the movies. As for James Murray,
his career went into a quick decline due to chronic alcoholism and he became a
skid row bum. Vidor encountered him panhandling on Hollywood Boulevard several
years later and offered him work in his upcoming film, Our Daily Bread
(1934), but the actor refused his help, snarling "Just because I stop you
on the street and try to borrow a buck, you think you can tell me what to do.
As far as I am concerned, you know what you can do with your lousy part."
In 1936, Murray's body was found in the Hudson River and it's never been
verified whether he was a suicide or an accidental drowning. Vidor was so
haunted by his death that he tried to raise money for a film called The
Actor in 1979, which was based on Murray's tragic life but the project
never materialized.
The Crowd | Film
Review | Slant Magazine Fernando
F. Croce
“If you get your head up above the mob, they
try to knock it off. If you stay down, you last forever." So said Allan
Dwan, the veteran Hollywood artisan who understood how much of an endangered
species artistic individuality could become in as market-inclined a system as
the film business. King Vidor lived and fought with Dwan's adage, but, despite
enduring his share of decapitations at the hands of studio heads throughout his
career, he resisted the martyred-auteur pose. To Vidor, the "mob"—the
swarming human mass from which the individual emerges—is but one of the many
surging forces people meet in their continuous metaphysical struggle. It isn't
an easy fight, for the cosmos breathes vividly and fiercely in Vidor's work:
the heaving volcano in Bird of Paradise, the river in Northwest
Passage, the molten steel in An American Romance, and the swamps in Ruby
Gentry, among others, remain as indelible as—and often make even more
forceful presences than—the characters trying to stake their place in them.
This sense of flabbergasted awe at the larger forces of the universe is matched
by the notion that the emotional inner realms of people are scarcely less
staggering supernovas, that frenzies of feeling are seething biospheres of
their own.
The "mob" noted by Dwan is the subject of The Crowd, Vidor's
silent masterpiece. As the follow-up to the director's successful WWI drama The
Big Parade, the film was intended as a vast, ambitious work, yet for all
the overreaching themes at play here, it is supremely intimate. Vidor links the
epic and the personal in the opening scene as the protagonist, John Sims, is
born on
Vidor's characters become aware of the largeness of the world as they hit their
heads on the ceiling of their existences, and young John's first shock of life
comes via death, suspended in a staircase between the curious mass below and
the dead father just off-screen. Geometrically designed and excruciatingly
sustained, the shot is reminiscent of German expressionistic cinema, just as
the bustling
Riding the bus with his date Mary (Eleanor Boardman), John laughs at a juggling
clown he sees in the streets; he fancies himself above the "boobs" of
the crowd, yet his own desire to stand out is connected to his need to follow
the decade's ideals concerning material achievement. (In fact, John proposes to
Mary after spotting the furniture ad on the subway that trumpets "You
furnish the girl—We'll furnish the home.") The couple's tiny working-class
apartment attests to the potential pitfalls of chronic American dreamism, but
Vidor never cleanly pits one as the cause of the other; city life bursts with
excitement as much as desolation, just as the filmmaker never spares us the
hero's complicity in his failures ("Are you sure it's always somebody
else…and not you," his exasperated wife finally asks).
As with Vidor's later H.M. Pulham, Esq., plot in The Crowd is
structured as the progression of a life, with all the undulations of ups and
downs driven by the director's faith in human emotion. John declares his love
for Mary in front of the Niagara Falls, but not before the two have spent their
honeymoon stuffed inside a Pullman sleeping car—the glories and frustrations of
a couple painted with as much offhand beauty as in L'Atalante.
Vittorio de Sica admitted to taking the climax of The Crowd for his Umberto
D., while Roberto Rossellini often declared admiration for the film's
surplus of human veracity. With German Expressionism behind it and Italian
Neorealism ahead of it, Vidor's film remains a veritable compendium of European
influences, even as its interests and approach mark it as unmistakably
American. As Walter Chaw perceptively noted, the toilet in the apartment for
which Vidor had to fight to keep in is integral to the uncovering of the
"mendacity behind the spit-shined promise" of the Jazz Age, of the
grasp for the material that leads to a disconnect from the self. "Face the
front," John's buddy tells him at the elevator, and one of the film's most
lasting images has the protagonist trying in vain to hush the noises of the
city as his ailing daughter lies in bed, facing the onslaught of people as if
holding back a livid deluge.
Dwight MacDonald praised the film's thematic seriousness while chiding Vidor
for burying it underneath a mass of human interest, but to Vidor it is this
same human interest that gives the theme its weight, the concept of a rich,
architectural visual style rattled by the life inhabiting it. How powerfully
the characters strike against the world, and how overwhelmed they are when the
world strikes back. Racked by tragedy, John sinks in self-pity until he's a
broken man contemplating jumping in front of a rushing train, rescued by
another instance of invaluable emotionalism, his little son's simple
affirmation of love. It is in passages such as these that Vidor's energy rivals
Murnau's in
The Crowd moves towards an affirmation of wholeness that is both
personal and cosmic; John's humbling realization that the lofty goals imposed
on him from day one are not nearly as urgent as keeping his family together.
The brilliant concluding movement is one of acceptance and unification which
enriches rather than negates the individualistic thrust of the rest of the
film, a view of catharsis that both posits wholeness and perpetuates the
struggle; it's no accident that the ending, featuring an ascending crane shot
that integrates John, Mary and their son into the laughing masses of a
vaudeville show, can be simultaneously a joyous one and a desperate one. For
Vidor, living with the crowd is less a matter of keeping your head than of
saving your soul.
The Crowd, King Vidor •
Film Analysis • Senses of Cinema
Bruce Hodsdon, August 27, 2013
The
Greatest Films - a comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks
Self-Styled
Siren: King Vidor, The Crowd, and the Dragon January 20, 2014
The Crowd
(1928) – King Vidor – The Mind Reels
T.D. Rideout, August 7, 2016
notcoming.com | The Crowd -
Not Coming to a Theater Near You
Thomas Scalzo
King
Vidor, The Crowd (1928)--Analysis Professor Catherine Lavender, Fall 1997
#39. The
Crowd (1928) – Thousand Movie Project
Alex Sorondo, April 24, 2017
The
Crowd and Deleuze — Critical Commons
Chang Choi
Silent Volume:
The Crowd (1928) Chris Scott Edwards
The Crowd (1928); directed by
King Vidor | The Sheila Variations
Sheila O’Malley
The Crowd | Silent Film Festival Margarita Landazuri essay
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
Sound On Sight David Fiore
Oscarvations D.W. Gardner
Flicks - Cinescene Chri Dashiell
A Mythical Monkey Writes About The Movies
The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1927-1928 (Erik Beck)
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
FILM REVIEW -- Vidor's Silent `Crowd' Still an Urban Masterpiece ... Mick LaSalle from The San Francisco Chronicle
New
York Times [Mordaunt Hall]
An early (dubbed after the fact) sound era Musical drama, set in the deep South and featuring an all Black cast, from director King Vidor, who not only wrote its story but received an Academy Award nomination for his direction. Wanda Tuchock and Richard Schayer wrote the screenplay. After being duped into gambling away his family's cotton crop money to Hot Shot (William Fountaine) under the influence of a juke joint dancer named Chick (Nina Mae McKinney), after which his brother Spunk (Everett McGarrity) is killed, Zeke (Daniel Haynes) goes on a sabbatical of discovery and becomes a preacher. Harry Gray plays his Pappy; Fanny Belle de Night plays his Mammy. But (now) preacher Zekiel, who becomes engaged to Missy Rose (Victoria Spivey), has his respectability threatened (again) by his inability to resist Chick, whose guilt causes her to seek the preacher for her own redemption. The Dixie Jubilee Singers sing, and several Negro spirituals are featured, including: "Let My People Go", "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot", and "Gimme Dat Old Time Religion" in addition to the first song that Irving Berlin ever wrote for MGM, "Waiting at the End of the Road".
filmsgraded.com [Brian Koller]
"Hallelujah" was the first film from a major
studio with an all-black cast. Perhaps we should be grateful that
"Hallelujah" exists, rather than resentful that racism prevented the
production of other films like it. But at least we have "Hallelujah",
which is more dynamic, fascinating and unique than most of the other musicals
from the early sound era.
Daniel Haynes stars as Zeke, who, along with his large family, makes a marginal
living as a cotton picker. Come harvest time, Zeke gets paid for his crop, but
he promptly loses it to a pair of con artists (William Fontaine and femme
fatale Nina Mae McKinney). His brother is also killed. In his despair, Zeke is
born again, and becomes a spellbinding preacher. But his family's new-found
success is again threatened by Zeke's maddening passion for
The soundtrack for "Hallelujah" is excellent. The nightclub scenes
have vintage jazz performances. There are also spirituals, folk songs, and
lullabies. Haynes has a resonant bass voice, reminiscent of Paul Robeson.
Essentially, "Hallelujah" was filmed as a silent, with the soundtrack
later dubbed in. That, along with cultural reasons and amateur actors, may
account for the exaggerated performances. Distribution of the film proved more
problematic, as some theatre owners had fears that 'too many' blacks would see
the film, alienating white audiences.
King Vidor, a successful Texas-born director with a
Hallelujah
(1929) - Articles - TCM.com Kerryn
Sherrod and Jeff Stafford
Obstacle after obstacle was what director King Vidor
encountered while filming Hallelujah (1929), an all-black, major studio
musical and the first of its kind in
At first Nicholas Schenck, the board chairman of Loews Inc. (the owners of MGM)
responded negatively to Vidor's movie suggestion because he felt white theatre
owners in the South would not exhibit the film. After Vidor agreed to invest
his guaranteed salary, dollar for dollar, with the investment of the company,
Schenck approved the project with this inappropriate remark, "If that's
the way you feel about it, I'll let you make a picture about whores."
Schenck was referring to the storyline of Hallelujah, a story about a
sharecropper in a juke joint, Zeke, who falls for Chick, a beautiful dancer.
But Chick is only setting Zeke up for a rigged craps game. His brother, Spunk,
is mortally wounded in the shoot-out that follows and Zeke leaves the
community. He later returns as Brother Zekiel the preacher and his forceful
preaching draws the faithful in such large numbers that even Chick wants to be
saved by him.
Hallelujah was filmed on location in
All the trouble was worth the effort in the end because Hallelujah was a
critical success and won Vidor an Oscar nomination for Best Director. It
subsequently went on to play most theatres just shy of the
King Vidor's
“Hallelujah” - Memphis magazine Greg
Akers, August 28, 2014
On
a theory of "sources" Sam
Brody's “On a Theory of 'Sources” was
written in March, 1930 and sent to the American journal Close Up as a criticism of the film’s depiction of the contemporary
Negro, reprinted in Jump Cut,
February 1988
Weird
Wild Realm Paghat the Ratgirl
A
Mythical Monkey Writes About The Movies
MoMA
| King Vidor's Hallelujah
notes from Charles Silver, film department curator of MOMA
Hallelujah (1929) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Fred Hunter on the DVD release
Digitally
Obsessed [Jeff Wilson]
National Public Radio [Bob Mondello] January 13, 2006
Flicks - January 2004 Chris Dashiell from CineScene
FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia Stralberg]
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Black
Classic Movies | Hallelujah!
The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall) calling a talking picture an audible film, listed in the paper as a Negro Talking Picture
DVDBeaver [Brian Alan Montgomery]
“Inspired by
Headlines of Today” reads the opening title screen, which gives one pause,
begging the question, what headlines?
This is a Depression era film that plays to the pervading sense of
hopelessness and desperation that was spreading across a panicked nation, where
people’s lives were at an economic dead end, seemingly with no future. While shown in a somewhat realistic manner,
with a few exceptions, this film plays out more as social fantasy, a call to
arms offering a utopian dream as a hopeful outlook for the otherwise grim
prospects of the future, where the idea of pitching in and working together is
reflective of the New Deal era ideal of getting people back to work, needing
solutions to help recover from the economic collapse of the banks and major
financial institutions, when the unemployment rate of the nation increased to
25%, where one-third of all employed persons were downgraded to working
part-time on much smaller paychecks, and almost 50% of the nation's human
work-power was going unused. The plain
truth of the matter is that people were desperate for jobs, any jobs, as at
this point in history there was no national safety net in place, no insurance
on lost savings accounts from failed banks, no unemployment insurance, no
Social Security, no help for the poor, as legions of people lost their homes
with conditions worsening year by year.
This film was made just after Franklin D. Roosevelt began serving his first
term as U.S. President,
Written by the director and his wife Elizabeth Hill, Vidor
had trouble getting backers for this film, as the major studios refused to
finance it, making this an independent production that Vidor financed himself,
eventually catching the eye and financial support of Charlie Chaplin at United
Artists, a company ironically run as a cooperative by leading figures in early
Hollywood seeking an outlet to distribute their own works. Showing a certain amount of political naiveté,
Vidor’s intent was to show how ordinary men alone can become extraordinary by
working together in this socialist utopian agriculture melodrama that
originated from a Reader’s Digest
article, with added dialogue by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. The film was made as a sequel to his earlier
Silent film THE CROWD (1928), which presents the reactions of an everyman to
the harsh and impersonal conditions of surviving in the city, where John and
Mary Sims come to realize they are mere faces in an endless sea of humanity
destined to live anonymous lives.
Following the same characters played by different actors, it is now the
Great Depression, where John (Tom Keene) and Mary, Karen Morley, perhaps best
remembered for her role as Poppy, the negligee wearing gun moll in Howard
Hawks’ SCARFACE (1932), are a couple out of work and about to be thrown
out of their apartment for nonpayment of rent.
With no prospects on the horizon, Mary’s wealthy uncle decides to offer
them an abandoned farm that is about to be foreclosed by the government before
he can make any use out of it. Though
John is a city boy with no farming experience, they head for the country and
move to the farm, hoping they can live off the land until the economy
improves. Finding it harder than they
realized, John welcomes a traveling couple fixing a flat in front of their home
who happen to be immigrant farmers from
The initial rush of enthusiasm, where everyone voluntarily pools
their resources and John is elected leader of the group, is tempered by the
youthful gee whiz mentality of their leader, which works fine in times of
plenty, but serves no purpose whatsoever when they run out of money and food,
where people’s spirits are already deflated, made even worse at the onset of
drought. In the face of ruinous
conditions, who should drop in but a platinum blonde, Jean Harlow-style
gangster’s moll, Sally (Barbara Pepper), who is welcomed like all the others,
but refuses to do any work, and instead lies around in her furs listening to
jazz records on her phonograph while also making eyes at the boss man, a
relationship that is inferred rather than shown, but takes place right under
the watchful eyes of Mary who is sorry she ever invited Sally into their
home. This sexual interlude is little
more than an unnecessary distraction to the overall story, but was reputedly
demanded by United Artists to sell tickets.
John is such a wide-eyed idealist filled with hopes and dreams, the idea
that he’d want to run away with this floozy makes little sense, though the
temptation of sin and the city parallels similar themes in F.W. Murnau’s
masterwork
Our Daily Bread | Chicago Reader Don Druker
A marvelously clearheaded bit of Depression-era agitprop, King Vidor's independently financed and produced 1934 fable, about an ordinary young couple who establish a communal society and lick the problems of social strife, hunger, and unemployment, is saved from excessive sentimentality by the straightforward presentation of Vidor's utopian notions and by the stylishness of his mise-en-scene. Ahead of its time, more for its treatment of the theme than for the theme itself, it found echoes in Renoir's Le Crime de Monsieur Lange.
Our Daily Bread | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Even a romantic individualist like King Vidor, who would later film Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, was sufficiently stirred by socialist ideals during the Depression to make this exciting independent effort (1934) about an all-American couple who decide to pool their resources with others and build a collective farm. Beautifully directed and edited, this is one of the best and most energetic of Vidor's early talkies, brimming with hope and enthusiasm and sparked by a wonderful climactic sequence. There's even some melodrama when a love triangle elbows its way into the plot. With Tom Keene (an uneven performance), Karen Morley, and John Qualen.
'Inspired by the Headlines of Today', or at least, the headlines
of 1934, this is a fascinating time capsule from the New Deal period, and a
rare instance of an 'independent' American movie of the time. An established
film-maker with two significant critical hits to his name, The Crowd and The
Big Parade, King Vidor
paid for this picture out of his own pocket when the studios told him it was
'too down to earth'. It's the story of a young couple with no money to their
name who are given an abandoned farm by a relative. John (
“There’s nothing for people to worry about — not when they’ve got the earth!”
During the Great Depression, a destitute city couple named Mary (Karen Morley) and John (Tom Keene) take over Mary’s uncle’s farm. Soon they’ve invited other out-of-work families to join them on their land, and a thriving collective emerges.
As Peary notes, this “unique, politically subversive Depression film by King Vidor” — a sequel to Vidor’s “1928 silent masterpiece The Crowd” (but with different lead actors) — suffers from overly simplistic characters, a naively Hollywood air of “Hey-let’s-get-together-and-form-a-cooperative”, and a contrived conflict involving a femme fatale (Barbara Pepper). (According to TCM’s article — see link below — “director Vidor admitted that the floozy with the Jean Harlow platinum hair was brought in purely for box office.”) It’s frustrating to watch a film based on such an intriguing and original premise devolving into platitudes and easy fixes — there’s potential here for something much greater. With that said, I agree with Peary that “Vidor’s film works on many levels: its sincerity is to be commended, [and] its vision of an alternate lifestyle is tantalizing.” The final lengthy sequence (in which the collective members work together to dig a ditch which will bring water to their drought-ridden crops) shows evidence of Vidor’s cinematic genius — as well as heavy influence of Soviet-era films.
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Ben Sachs
King Vidor’s films, like Frank Capra’s, often gain in intensity from their ideological incoherence. Take a picture like OUR DAILY BREAD, where Vidor arrives at something like socialist utopianism by way of all-American appeals to self-interest and by-your-bootstraps-isms. “Forget what you think of me! Think of yourselves, your families!” shouts John Sims (an everyman protagonist who shares his name with the hero of Vidor’s equally personal and ideologically confounding THE CROWD) at the film’s climax, when he’s rallying the farming collective he presides over to embark on a strenuous ditch-digging project that may well fail. If we all work hard, Sims reasons, our crops might thrive, and we’ll all get plenty to eat. The group cheers. Though one character in OUR DAILY BREAD cynically compares Sims’ collectivist experiment to a boy scout camp, Vidor really entertains the idea in earnest. Living on a farm where everyone works and profits equally is made to seem like good wholesome fun, a big family retreat from alienated city life. Who cares if moral rectitude is maintained with threats and sometimes fists by an escaped convict named Louie, the character who also serves as the film’s symbol of morality? (The film’s appeals to law-and-order feel reactionary, and they make for an intriguing mix with the radical economic ideas.) In their book King Vidor, American, Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simmon praise the director’s films for their commanding sense of life-energy, and OUR DAILY BREAD has plenty of it, encouraging you to revel in the physicality of the actors and the work they do. The final sequence, when the men actually dig that ditch, feels like something Alexander Dovzhenko might have shot and edited, so enthusiastic is its poetry of physical labor and rustic settings. This enthusiasm ultimately outweighs any particular ideology, which might explain why BREAD still feels youthful.
Our
Daily Bread (1934) - Articles - TCM.com
Felicia Feaster
Director King Vidor's social issue drama, Our Daily Bread
(1934) opens with a desperate young couple, Mary (Karen Morley) and John Sims
(Tom Keene), struggling to put a chicken on their dinner table during the Great
Depression.
The couple gets a needed leg up when Mary's uncle tells the jobless John about
some farm land he owns far from their city lives. With no farming experience
but plenty of ambition, John sets out to become a farmer. When an immigrant
Like so many directors before him, Texas-born Vidor began in Hollywood filling
a number of roles, first as an extra, then as a script-clerk and then as a
writer in the story department at Universal. When his mentor, George Brown,
left Universal to start his own company, Vidor was brought on as a director for
his Brentwood Company. His first feature was The Turn in the Road (1919)
inspired by the teachings of Christian Science, a harbinger of the director's
lifelong interest in films with a social message and metaphysical content.
Vidor's first certifiable "smash" was the film he called "an
honest war picture". Until then they'd all been very phony, glorifying
officers and warfare." His The Big Parade (1925) was based on the
Laurence Stallings play What Price Glory? and according to the director,
it "put me on the map." The enormously successful picture led to a
long-term deal with MGM and affirmed Vidor's status as a courted, important
screen auteur.
"There were no Academy Awards at the time," said Vidor in The
Celluloid Muse. "But, had we had them, I probably would have swept the
whole field. It was a tremendous triumph."
Vidor went on to direct a number of notable pictures including the film Irving
Thalberg dubbed Vidor's "experimental" work, The Crowd (1928),
whose star James Murray would end up an alcoholic suicide. Equally innovative
was Vidor's first sound film, the all-black musical Hallelujah! (1929),
although some felt it was condescending toward its characters. The Champ
(1931), Stella Dallas (1937), Duel in the Sun (1946) and The
Fountainhead (1949) all followed.
Vidor was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the
longest career as a film director, spanning 67 years. Vidor also directed the
black and white segments of The Wizard of Oz (1939) when Victor Fleming
left that production to helm Gone with the Wind (1939); Vidor was not
credited for his work.
Taken from a Reader's Digest article, Vidor's drama Our Daily Bread
was, the film proclaimed, "inspired by headlines of today." So firm
was Vidor's belief in the merit of the project he produced it with his own
money. He later said he "just about broke even."
Like his phenomenal silent picture The Crowd, about the soulless,
inhumane machinery of city life, Our Daily Bread has at its heart an
empathy for people, and the daily economic and moral struggles that complicate
their lives, especially during national crises like the Great Depression. The
film's goodhearted message about cooperation and honest work did not, however,
endear it to the Hearst press who dubbed Our Daily Bread
"pinko."
The New York Times was more complimentary, calling the film "a
social document of amazing vitality and emotional impact."
Vidor has remained, along with Frank Capra, John Ford and D.W. Griffith, one of
the essential native voices in American cinema. Charles Higham and Joel
Greenberg rightfully call the director, "a poet of
Vidor saw Our Daily Bread as the second film after The Big Parade
as his War-Wheat-Steel trilogy. An American Romance (1944), about an
immigrant who rises from the iron mines and steel mills of
Nominated for a Best Director Academy Award five times, Vidor was eventually
given an honorary Oscar® in 1979 and was honored with an annual King Vidor Film
Festival in his hometown of
Our Daily Bread | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist Louis Proyect
Our Daily Bread (1934) King Vidor « Twenty Four Frames John Greco
King Vidor • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Dan Callahan, February 13, 2007
King Vidor's Our Daily Bread (1934) more than just a big finish - New ... Cliff Aliperti from The New York Examiner
MoMA
| King Vidor and Pare Lorentz Confront the Great Depression Charles Silver from MOMA,
Self-Styled Siren: The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact With Hitler Self-Styled Siren
Film Essays and Criticism - Page 203 - Google Books Result Film Essays and Criticism, by Rudolf Arnheim (pdf format)
King Vidor, American - Page 149 - Google Books Result King Vidor, American, by Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simmon (pdf format)
Matinee At The Bijou: Our Daily Bread (1934)
Our
Daily Bread (1934) - Notes - TCM.com
King Vidor - Director - Films as Director:, Publications - Film Reference Michael Selig
Working Class Goes To Hell - Movie List on mubi.com Mubi
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Variety’s original 1934 review
NY Times Original Review Andre Sennwald
King Vidor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A pretty millworker with her mind on
upward mobility via a suet-faced, sexless millionaire's son (Boles), Stella
(Stanwyck, wonderful) turns from radiant grisette into a restless wife who
sublimates frustration into maternal martyrdom and ever more outrageous dress.
Meanwhile husband Stephen flees to a wealthy and conveniently widowed old flame
who epitomises pedigree breeding and impeccable (but mean-spirited) good taste.
The film stays tantalisingly undecided whether Stella's vulgarity and wild
narcissism are a fatal flaw or a snook knowingly cocked at country-club
dullness and decorum; and Stanwyck's extraordinary performance keeps open the
cleft between weepy pathos and mocking defiance to the very end when, alone outside
in the rain, she spies on her daughter's high society wedding through a window,
then turns from the puppet-show, striding, smiling enigmatically, towards the
camera.
Exclaim!
[Travis Mackenzie Hoover]
Barbara Stanwyck would go on to better films, but she never
had a greater role than in this classic 1937 melodrama. The titular heroine is
a lower-class young woman who dreams of finer things; it looks as if she’s hit
the jackpot when she marries a rich industrialist, but her tactless vulgarity
scuppers any chance of domestic bliss. But as her daughter (Anne Shirley) grows
up and gravitates towards polite company, Stella’s garish wilfulness will force
her to make a sacrifice. In one sense, the film is incredibly unfair to Stella,
who rightly resists the strictures of high society and raises her daughter on
her own terms; as punishment, it contrives a masochistic ending that cuts her
loose from the daughter she loves. But on another level, it charts the downward
progress of someone who wants it both ways but can’t have it, and in mourning
her inability to make things work the film is immensely moving. Stanwyck
absolutely commits to the character by refusing to condescend to her, and she
makes Stella such a fireball of stubbornness and pride that her final parental
hara-kiri seems less ridiculous than it might be. That ending still is a
sticking point, and it rightly made my old Women’s Cinema prof theoretically
apoplectic. As her drinking buddy, Alan Hale — yes, the Skipper himself — is
such fun and has such moments of surprising pathos you wonder who’s really
giving up what? But the vivid portrait of the character that comes before it is
so much more thought out than most of today’s films that it resonates as if it
were Greek tragedy, and will grip you like no mere soap opera ever could.
Festivals:
Il Cinema Ritrovato - Film Comment
Dan Sullivan, July 25, 2016 (excerpt)
The festival’s growing popularity has trickled down to affect its other plein air screenings, held on the comparatively small Piazzetta Pier Paolo Pasolini. This year ICR introduced a RSVP system to cap the seated audience at around 150, with the less on-it attendees having to make do with sitting on the ground, leaning against a tree, or rooting around for a chair to borrow from the festival’s outdoor café. Stakes were high: the two screenings I caught in this setting were ones for the ages, carbon arc lamp projections (using an antique projector that festival programmer Mariann Lewinsky dubbed “the Grandmother”) of Henry King’s transcendent weepy Stella Dallas (1925) and Jean Epstein’s landmark dockside melodrama Cœur fidèle (1923), the latter shown in the context of a retrospective for Epstein’s sister and frequent collaborator Marie, organized by the Cinémathèque Française and screening from an immaculately preserved 35mm print from its collection. The carbon arc lamp yields a shimmering, inky, rich black-and-white that assumes an inescapably trippy aspect as polychromatic plumes of smoke escape from the apparatus each time the projectionists swap out a burnt-up carbon rod. Incidental psychedelia notwithstanding, Stella Dallas proved a major revelation for many of us, an undeniable emotional tour de force helmed by one of the studio system’s most underrated craftsman. King may have been the directorial regent at Fox for a time, but his reputation has long been negligible among auteurist cults; Stella Dallas’s heartrending tale of maternal love, embarrassing parents, and class-based fatalism, deftly pitched and already bearing several of King’s later-career signatures (ahead-of-his-time location shooting and a refreshingly meandering way with narrative), was evidence enough that a widespread reappraisal of his oeuvre is overdue.
Stella
Dallas (1937) - TCM.com Frank Miller
Prior to Joan Crawford's star turn as the ultimate in
self-sacrificing mother in Mildred Pierce (1945), there was no better
martyr for motherhood than Stella Dallas, the tragic heroine of Olive
Higgins Prouty's novel which inspired several film versions. When Samuel
Goldwyn announced plans to re-make his classic 1925 silent film with Barbara
Stanwyck in the role, most of his contemporaries laughed, believing the story
would be hopelessly out of date. Instead, Goldwyn scored a box office bonanza
with Stanwyck delivering a powerhouse performance as a single mother who drives
her daughter away so the girl can find a better life.
Prouty's novel, Stella Dallas, had been a best seller in the '20s, when
Goldwyn bought the screen rights for a then-impressive $15,000. The story was
quite timely in its day, dealing with the rise of divorce in American life and
the growing prevalence of single-parent homes. With Henry King directing a cast
headed by Belle Bennett as Stella, newcomer Lois Moran as her daughter and
Goldwyn contract star Ronald Colman as her estranged husband, the film was a
smash. In fact, it grossed more than any other Goldwyn silent and helped build
his reputation as a producer of quality films.
When Goldwyn scored a hit with a 1935 re-make of his silent tear-jerker The
Dark Angel, he decided to create a new version of his biggest silent
success. And though most of
But when McCrea tried to convince Goldwyn she was perfect, he objected that
Stanwyck had no sex appeal. McCrea pointed out that Robert Taylor, one of the
handsomest men in movies, obviously didn't think so; he had been her steady
date for some time. Finally, Goldwyn agreed to meet Stanwyck, only to tell her
he didn't think she had sufficient experience with motherhood. Although she had
an adopted son, she had to admit that she had never suffered over a child.
"But I can imagine how it would be," she quickly added (recounted in Stanwyck
by Axel Madsen). That convinced Goldwyn to ask her to test for the role. Though
such a move was unprecedented at the time for a star of her caliber, she
agreed.
By that point, RKO starlet Anne Shirley had been cast as Stella's daughter, so
she joined Stanwyck. They tested with the birthday scene, in which plans to
throw a lavish birthday party for her daughter are ruined when none of the
guests show up, forbidden to attend because of the mother's scandalous
behavior. After screening the test once, Goldwyn realized Stanwyck was perfect
for the role.
During shooting, Stanwyck and Shirley were frustrated by Vidor's lack of
direction. He seemed more interested in camera angles than in their
performances. Stanwyck at least had the experience to develop the performance
on her own, She drew on memories of Belle Bennett's silent performance and her
own concept of a character whose surface commonness masked a warm and generous
heart. Shirley, however, felt lost. Finally, she complained to Goldwyn,
bursting into tears during their meeting. Goldwyn reassured her kindly, but as
soon as she left he called Vidor. "I don't care what you tell the
kid," he screamed. "Tell her she's lousy if she's great or great if
she's lousy. Tell her any damn thing you please. I just can't cope with
hysterical females, and I don't want to be bothered again." (from The
RKO Gals by James Robert Parish).
For his part, Vidor hated working with Goldwyn. He couldn't take the mercurial
producer's temperamental outbursts and sudden mood shifts. Goldwyn would turn
up on the set, screaming at everyone that the rushes were the worst he had ever
seen, then call Vidor that night to apologize because he'd watched them again
and realized he was wrong. When the director finished shooting, he posted a
sign over his desk reading, "NO MORE GOLDWYN PICTURES!"
But once the picture opened to rave reviews and a strong box office all the
frustrations and headaches experienced on the Stella Dallas set were forgotten. Stanwyck was praised for her
no-holds-barred performance and her decision to forego makeup for some of her
character's older scenes. Other critics hailed Shirley's unexpected depth in
the role and insisted that she had stolen the picture. And everyone agreed that
Vidor had kept the old fashioned story from drowning in bathos. Both Stanwyck
and Shirley were nominated for Oscars®. Though she would score three more Best
Actress nominations without ever winning, Stanwyck would always regret her loss
for Stella Dallas
the most, feeling that it was her best work.
Vidor would stay true to his vow never to work for Goldwyn again, but Stanwyck,
who admired the producer's commitment to quality, would be happy to return to
his studios for a change-of-pace comedy role in Ball of Fire four years
later. The success of Stella Dallas
inspired a long-running radio serial about the further adventures of Stella, as
she continued to fight for her daughter's happiness. It would also inspire one
more re-make, Stella, with Bette Midler in the title role, Stephen
Collins as her husband and Trini Alvarado as their daughter. By the time this
version came out in 1990, however, the story really was hopelessly out of date.
It was the only film version of Prouty's novel to fail at the box office and
even brought Midler a Razzie nomination as Worst Actress of the Year.
Montage
and Tableau in Stella Dallas Richard Smith1 - Film-Philosophy 22-page essay by Richard Smith from Film-Philosophy (2014) (pdf), also seen here: Download this PDF file
Stella Dallas film
analysis • Senses of Cinema Stella Dallas: The Female Hero in the
Maternal Melodrama, by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, March 18, 2016
Revisiting Stella Dallas from a
cognitive theory of film perspective ...
Anis Pervez from Offscreen,
January 2014
Reading
against the grain revisited Aspasia
Kotsopoulos from Jump Cut, Fall 2001
All I
Desire by Imogen Sara Smith - Moving Image Source on a Barbara Stanwyck restrospective,
December 2, 2013
The History of Cinema. King
Vidor: biography, reviews, links
Piero Scaruffi reviews
Film
Corner, The [Greg Klymkiw]
Journeys
in Classic Film [Kristen Lopez]
MediaScreen.com
dvd review Nick
Zegarac
KQEK DVD Review [Mark R. Hasan]
Shameless
Self Expression [Ryan McDonald]
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
MovieMovesMe.Com
[Ulkar Alakbarova]
Reel Film
Reviews (David Nusair) capsule review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
USA (129 mi) 1946 roadshow version (144 mi) uncredited co-directors: Otto Brower, William Dieterle, Sidney Franklin, William Cameron Menzies, David O. Selznick, Josef von Sternberg
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton
Trapp]
More famous for being dubbed "Lust in the Dust"
by critics, it should more accurately be considered "Cactus are
Stupid" or some such. Banned at the time for reasons too obsolete to be
comprehended-no it didn't have anything to do with boring people and wasting
their time although avoiding that would have been the greatest good
accomplished. King Vidor probably didn't consider it sleazy either, though it's
no Wizard of Oz , but he doesn't get much out of actors who have been
impressive at other times. Jennifer Jones has white teeth but isn't any good at
trying to act sleazy, unless dancing (and then only slightly). Gregory Peck has
the good lines as the bad brother, but is only terribly offensive once you
realize that the film still isn't wrapping things up. Joseph Cotten is good
clean fun, like tiddly winks. Lionel Barrymore isn't even particularly worth
paying attention to until the very end when he says something like, "It
seems hard to believe, but I was wrong about a lot of things." Yep, like
taking this role, shoulda followed John Wayne's lead who read the script and
walked. Lillian Gish sees Barrymore through most of the error of his ways but
he doesn't let her talk much. Walter Huston presides over the best scenes in
the film as "The Sin Killer," making them funny in ways that were
intended and others besides. I suspect he's the one that really got the censors
hackles up.
Movieline Magazine review Kevin Hennessey
People who love bad movies positively worship David
Selznick's overproduced, overwritten, overwrought Duel in the Sun. This
film was Selznick's futile effort to make a sex symbol out of his Oscar-winning
girlfriend Jennifer Jones by casting her as a wanton half-breed Injun gal who
makes men's blood turn to, well, firewater. And you have to wonder about
the home life of any famed movie producer who writes a script expressly for his
young actress protegee that includes self-appraisals such as: "I'm trash,
I tell ya, trash!" and "I know what ya think, that I'm trash,
that I'm trashy like my ma!" And, best of all, "Trash, trash, trash,
trash, trash!" How do the other characters see her, you ask? A
preacher describes Jones thus: "Under that heathen blanket there's a
full-blossomed woman fit for the devil to make men crazy!"
This two-hour plus saga of what happens when half-caste Jones is brought
to live within the walls of the McCanles homestead--wild son Gregory Peck goes
insane, nice son Joseph Cotton leaves home, decent mama Lillian Gish expires
from all the excitement, and sinister father Lionel Barrymore cracks such
one-liners as, "Is that what they're wearing in wigwams these
days?"--lends itself irresistibly to the interpretation that this is a
Happily, no one can, so she falls in love with the handsome
but psychopathic Peck, who nicknames her his "bobtailed little
half-breed" (she calls him "you varmint"). Peck loves her so
much he kills every one of her decent suitors, including his own brother.
(Presumably, things weren't quite this out of hand around Casa Selznick, since
all the kids survived.)
The jaw-dropping, justifiably infamous finale of Duel in the Sun has
these two bad-for-each-other lovers shooting it out on a mountaintop, then
crawling--slowly,slowly (the sequence lasts a mind-boggling eight
minutes!)--across the rocky terrain for one last embrace. "Lemme hold ya,
little bobcat," Peck says, before they kiss and die. Incredibly,
unbelievably, both Jones and Selznick worked again after Duel in the Sun,
though they never reteamed for another hot-blooded romance. More's the pity.
Duel
in the Sun - TCM.com Frank Miller
Duel in the Sun
(1946) ranks as one of the screen's greatest testaments to obsession. Not only
does it chronicle the doomed love between amoral cowboy Lewt McCanles (Gregory
Peck) and half-breed temptress Pearl Chavez (Jennifer Jones), it was made to
satisfy the two obsessions that drove independent producer David O. Selznick's
career from the '40s through the end of his life: his need to outdo his
spectacular success with Gone With the Wind and his quest to make
protegee (and later wife) Jones into the screen's greatest star.
The story was born in another man's attempt to influence the career of the
actress he loved. Niven Busch wrote the novel, then pitched it to RKO with
himself as producer in hopes that it would provide a career-changing role for
his wife, Teresa Wright, who was typed in "good girl" roles. When
Wright got pregnant, however, the studio had to find another leading lady,
particularly since they'd already signed John Wayne to play Lewt. When their
second choice, Hedy Lamarr, turned down the role because she, too, was
pregnant, studio head Charles Koerner tried to borrow Jones, who was under
contract to Selznick's production company. The choice was unconventional --
Jones was primarily identified with her Oscar®-winning role as St. Bernadette
of
Selznick first considered William Dieterle as director because Jones had just
had a good experience working with him on Love Letters (1945), but then
decided he'd put too much emphasis on the romance. Instead he chose King Vidor,
who'd excelled with westerns and other outdoor films like Billy the Kid
(1930) and
As he worked on the script, however, Selznick's attitude changed. He started
seeing the opportunity for spectacle and became increasingly intrigued at the
thought of presenting Jones to the filmgoing public in a new, sexier image. By
the time the film went on location in
He also had various additional directors -- including Dieterle, Joseph von
Sternberg and William Cameron Menzies -- on hand to shoot additional scenes or
serve as consultants. He even tried to shoot a few scenes himself when Vidor
fell ill. At least that meant there was somebody handy when Selznick's
interference and on-set tantrums finally led Vidor to walk off the film.
Ostensibly there were only two days left, and Selznick got Dieterle to fill in.
Then as the film was being cut, Selznick kept adding scenes that dragged the
production out for almost a year and tripled the budget.
Among the new scenes were a prologue, in which
The entire process was grueling for Jones. On location in February and March,
she had to endure snowstorms and sub-zero temperatures. In the final scene,
Further production delays were caused by a series of strikes, including one at
Technicolor that almost kept the film from opening in time for the 1946 Academy
Awards®. On the day of its premiere, a freshly struck print was rushed to
Loew's Egyptian. Selznick also ran into trouble with his usual distributor,
United Artists, partly over the film's sexual nature. Faced with their refusal
to distribute Duel in the Sun,
he created his own distribution company, Selznick Releasing Organization.
Because all of his money was tied up in the film, he took a chance on a new
releasing pattern, opening the film in hundreds of theaters around the country
rather than starting slowly in a few first-run houses in the major cities, as
was then the custom. Opening the film wide was decades ahead of its time, but
proved a box-office bonanza as audiences, prodded by a $2 million publicity
campaign, raced to see the film wherever it played. Despite pretty awful
reviews, the picture grossed $10 million, making it the second-highest-grossing
film of the year (behind The Best Years of Our Lives).
At the time, Selznick was stung by the poor reviews, jokes about "Lust in
the Dust," as the film was dubbed, and even complaints in Congress about
the picture's unbridled sexuality. He even instructed his publicity department
to find a way to salvage his image. He didn't have to worry. MGM's re-issue of Gone
With the Wind later in 1947 reminded critics and audiences of just how
great a producer he was. In recent years, Duel in the Sun has been re-evaluated by critics, most notably director
Martin Scorsese, who consider the work ahead of its time. In an era in which
filmmakers are expected to put their personal visions and obsessions on screen,
Duel in the Sun
stands as a testament to Selznick and Vidor's ability to use the western as a
vehicle for artistic expression.
The
Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks
The
hypothetical lesbian heroine Chris
Straayer from Jump Cut, April 1990
DUEL
IN THE SUN – Dimitri Tiomkin | MOVIE MUSIC UK Craig Lysy from 100 greatest
musical scores, July 10, 2017
Duel
in the Sun | The Soul of the Plot Melissa Hunter
No
More Mr. Nice Guy! Gregory Peck Swaggers to a DUEL IN THE SUN Sister Celluloid
Saturday Night
Cinema: Duel In The Sun - Geller Report - Pamela Geller
Horses,
Trains, and Carriages: Duel in the Sun (1946) - The Vintage ... The Vintage Cameo
dOc
DVD Review: Duel in the Sun (Roadshow ... - Digitally Obsessed Mark Zimmer
Filmicability
with Dean Treadway
Jennifer Jones a Tribute review
Rio
Rancho Film Reviews Ricky Roma
DVD Savant
(Glenn Erickson) dvd review Standard Edition
DVD
Savant review Roadshow Edition
Duel In The Sun - The
A.V. Club (Film) Keith Phipps
CutPrintFilm
[Jeremy Carr] Blu-ray
Ruthless
Reviews ("potentially offensive") Matt Cale
Crazy
for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
EyeForFilm.co.uk
- DVD Review Angus Wolfe Murray
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
USA (97 mi) 1949
Beyond the Forest,
directed by King Vidor | Film review - Time Out
Rosa Moline (Davis) is a twelve o'clock girl in a nine o'clock town. Loyalton is the burg in question, and Rosa doesn't like it one bit: 'What a dump... like sitting in a coffin and waiting to be carried out!' Her personal rebellion takes the form of adultery, miscarriage and murder, in King Vidor's most demented film from his most frenzied period, immediately after Duel in the Sun and The Fountainhead and before Ruby Gentry. Davis, done up for all the world like Jennifer Jones, is too old for the part, but gives it her all (she used the film for her own rebellion, escaping a Warner Bros contract that still had ten years to run). She's like a caricature of herself, and the movie, too, is soap gone into lather. Laugh it off, by all means, but American melodrama at this pitch of alienation is quite fascinating.
Beyond
the Forest - Film Comment Howard
Hampton, July/August 2013
If they held a pageant for most dyspeptic film of the 1940s, King Vidor’s Beyond the Forest (49) would have been a shoo-in finalist, and Bette Davis easily would have walked away with the prize for Miss Monstrosity. Morbid, strident, bitterly divided against itself, Vidor’s seething ruin of a melodrama is festooned with enough borderline- personality traits to merit its own subcategory in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Beyond the Forest is neither an overlooked gem nor a coherent social statement—although Davis’s evil-incarnate social climber/money-grubber might have sprung from Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory of capitalism—nor merely a camp classic. (This is the movie where she famously sneers, “What a dump,” a phrase both Edward Albee and Carol Burnett borrowed to great effect.) Nor is it a representative women’s picture, film noir, Dreiserian tragedy, or titillating potboiler, though it stirs in (or coughs up) chunks of each. It’s the ultimate bad hangover of a movie: a debris-stuffed grab bag of recrimination, guilt, malice, shame, and generalized nausea.
Davis was 40, at the end of her rope, badly miscast as femme fatale Rosa Moline, and as desperate to get out of her contract with Warner Bros. as Rosa is to flee her cramped little town/home/marriage for the lights of Chicago. She never gave a shriller, more unmodulated performance, though maybe that’s the wrong word: hating the role with every fiber of her being, her performance feels more like an act of resistance than a piece of acting. Miss Davis regrets having to be here, but as she has no choice, she can at least do her best to make sure her boss will regret it as much.
Rosa is a woman born with two fingers down her throat: despising life in every form, she’s the death instinct in heels (which she even wears out when boating on a lake: her motto is apparently “Those shoes! I’d kill for those shoes!”). She’s stuck in a one-sawmill Wisconsin town called Loyalton, and determined to escape at any cost. This she-monster shoots a scampering porcupine out of a tree simply because she detests nature: “They irritate me,” she explains to the old caretaker she’ll later shoot just as nonchalantly. When her saintly sap of a husband (Joseph Cotten at his most obsequiously masochistic) insists that Rosa carry her baby to term, she throws herself down a hill to force a miscarriage. Seducing, blackmailing, murdering, aborting—Rosa is a sermon on what happens to women when they abandon their maternal instinct and give in to the temptations of the flesh and the shopping spree.
King Vidor directed the film as if waking up from the delirium of The Fountainhead and, upon finding himself in bed with Ayn Rand, resolved to expose her doctrine of radical selfishness as a nihilistic threat to the lives of ordinary, decent folk. Beyond the Forest presents its disapproval of Rosa in the most starkly sanctimonious terms possible. Yet the sanctimony is like the weather, or the smoke coming from the mill—the smog of values, a fact of dull life. And everyone here seems to exist in a state of dumb animal instinct: if Bette Davis is playing a rabid little fox, her industrialist lover is the alpha wolf, hubby a faithful veterinary sheepdog, and the townspeople his flock. She isn’t hated by the rest of them, just pitied for her inexplicable dissatisfaction with their ovine existence.
The oppressive tone is maintained by Max Steiner’s music, largely consisting of orchestral variations on “Chicago,” an excruciating device as subtle as an anvil tied to a bungee cord. Meanwhile Vidor spins the narrative back and forth as if it were a lazy Susan, serving up plot points one by one. Rosa deserts her husband; her lover rejects and humiliates her; she goes crawling back to hubby, faking remorse; she becomes pregnant, but her lover reenters the picture after dumping his society bride-to-be, craving Rosa after all.
And so the merry-go-round keeps turning: there’s the Victorian environment, and a nightmarish sawmill looming in the back- ground like a Marxist forget-me-not (or “I-told-you-so”). A gum-smacking Native American servant girl whose jeans and insolent backtalk infuriate Rosa (“No Red Indian’s gonna talk to me like that in my own house!”) is a smirking herald of the coming age of juvenile delinquency and civil disobedience. “I just saved a woman’s life,” the doctor wearily tells his soulless mate. “Saved it for what?” is her snappy comeback.
Here is where the countervailing up-lift of Hollywood wonderful-lifeism is designed to kick in. Yet despite all the disapproval the film directs toward Rosa, nothing in this folksy, cozy Capra corner of the world really rebuts her poisonous contempt. Perhaps because Loyalton’s one tiny blemish is that it is built around a pollution-belching mill that runs day and night, and after dark the sawdust flames turn the townscape into a glowing inferno—the citizens have to close the drapes to sleep at night. When Rosa swears she’d rather be dead than keep living there, silhouetted against the back- projected image of an industrialized hell-on-earth blazing away like Mount Doom, it tends to reinforce her position. She may be an indecent gargoyle devoid of human feeling, but she’s just about the only person in town with a lick of sense.
The Production Code made it certain Rosa would have to die a spectacular, pride-goeth-before-a-fall death, but Vidor cooked up such a protracted doozy that it undermines the “moral” it is supposed to be enforcing. She doesn’t simply expire contritely, but raises up from her deathbed, gets dressed, applies makeup, and goes lurching off to catch the 10 p.m. train to “that toddlin’ town” (with that very song on her lips). Keeling over on the side of the train, both dead and free at last, her final steps amount to a wicked victory lap: Chicago or die trying! This is what earned the film both its undeserved camp reputation and its nerve-jangling transgressive spurs—that queer note of fulfillment in the certainty that death beats domesticity and motherhood. I wonder if Beyond the Forest got away with certain themes because its sympathies were so muddled that the confusion served as camouflage. The monster has the last bitter laugh. Would Jack Warner have made this film bearing in mind the more informative (perchance admiring) title the French used, La Garce (“The Bitch”)? Or would anyone have touched it had Beyond the Forest exchanged names with a film that could be its spiritual descendant: Antichrist?
Bette
Davis in Beyond the Forest • Film Analysis - Senses of Cinema David Melville, August 18, 2013
Beyond
the Forest - Bright Lights Film Journal
All-American Medea: The Radical
Pleasures of Beyond the Forest, by Jacob Mikanowski, July 31, 2010
Beyond the Forest (1949) -
Filmsite.org Tim Dirks
Dreams
Are What Le Cinema Is For...[Ken Anderson]
Beyond
the Forest (King Vidor, USA, 1949) « First Impressions José Arroyo, October 21, 2016
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
New
York Times [Bosley Crowther] also
seen here: Movie
Review - - THE SCREEN IN REVIEW; 'Beyond the Forest' With ...
A thoroughly enjoyable time traveling movie that, like others before it, especially the recent PRIMER (2004), artfully reveals the difficulty of trying to undo the damage done by earlier time traveling missions, where even the smallest mistakes take on heightened proportions when each one must somehow be erased and corrected, all in one take. While not nearly as succinct and well-edited as PRIMER, with audaciously ambiguous, near subliminal clues, this one laughably falls all over itself with a series of clumsy setbacks, each one punishing the traveler even worse than before until eventually he becomes a pulverized human wreck. One needs no Isaac Azimov school of knowledge to appreciate the scientific explanation for all this, as none is offered, instead we tread and retread on familiar territory, each time with a slight variation on the previous journey, where the interchangeable characters beceome even more baffling than before.
Karra Elejalde is Hector, an ordinary, everyman kind of guy who lets his curiosity get the best of him, initated by a pair of bincoculars and a quick glimpse of a naked women, Barbara Goenaga, sure to spice up any B-movie premise, seen through just the briefest opening in the immense hedge in his back yard. Believing there’s no harm in paying her a visit, he gets more than he bargained for when he inexplicably gets caught up in a neverending assembly line of human catastrophes where every variation offers a unique twist, each one leaving him more wretchedly punished than before, like Tom and Jerry or Road Runner and the Coyote, where he remains the butt of all jokes. Sort of like a Brothers Grimm fairy tale where a trip into the woods is likely to lead the innocent into unanticipated measures of cruelty, imagine having to match wits with your own equally deceptive imagination, trying to outsmart yourself, but always being outfoxed by a side of yourself that you never knew existed. This is a low budget thriller where the actual time traveling sequences are entirely believable, where the setting in the woods adds a certain level of intrigue and suspense, and where the director himself pulls the levers on the time machine and is himself caught up in the peculiar nature of his own handywork. Always clever, though occasionally repetitious, this light-hearted drama never takes itself too seriously and seems to be having fun playing with the genre just for the sheer pleasure of it. No startling acting or camerawork here, no major special effects, just some interesting editing and direction, revealing variations on a theme that begins and ends on an interesting original premise.
Bloody-Disgusting Mr. Disgusting
One of my favorite Sundance films of all time is the little
indie pic PRIMER, which set a bar so high I doubt it will probably never be
topped. Welcome to Sundance 2008, where Magnet Releasing shared with us their
recent acquisition, TIMECRIMES, a Spanish Sci-Fi thriller about time travel and
the tangled webs we sew.
In Nacho Vigalondo ‘s film, a man accidentally gets into a time machine and
travels back in time nearly an hour. Finding himself will be the first of a
series of disasters of unforeseeable consequences.
What differentiates PRIMER from TIMECRIMES is entertainment value and the way
the story unfolds. You see, PRIMER is pretty much the smartest movie ever made
and by the end of the film you will feel like a kindergartener that just
watched a film on NASA. TIMECRIMES is much simpler and enjoyable in the fact
that it keeps all time travel terminology to a minimum. In Vigalondo’s script
our character are not only based in the real world, but are introduced into the
dilemma within a very logical thought. Anyone who reads magazines like Popular
Science or visits websites like Slashdot knows one inherent truth… that you
can only travel back in time as far as the machine was created. In TIMECRIMES
our main character appears out of the time machine the second it’s turned on,
which is a hilariously bold assumption of something you think might happen. In
short, I dug that this film is logical, believable and well researched.
However, the one inherent flaw that TIMECRIMES does carry is that it’s so
over-the-top that it becomes slightly slapstick. Like the classic saying, “ah,
the tangled webs we sew,” CRIMES follows our main character as he continues to
try and repair his mistake only further escalating the situation. In the end
it’s so completely far fetched, but it’s all justified in the fact that
everything must happen in order for the future events to occur. Look,
when you see this movie, don’t try and think. Richard Kelly told us when we dug
into him about DONNIE DARKO’s plotholes that it’s impossible not to have
plotholes in a time travel movie. He might be right, because I can’t seem to
understand how our main character ended up in the time travel device in the
first place.
But beyond the deliberation, which can go on for hours, the film itself is
wonderful executed. Such a complex plot is not easily conquered and Vigalondo
did it with ease. Watching a film of this nature should feel effortless, not
strenuous and in the end you should feel as if there’s some level of
resolution. Vigalondo not only ties the story together but also seals it with a
kiss. It’s truly a gem to behold.
Time travel movies are a rare breed as most often they come off cheesy,
unrealistic and just damn stupid – such is not the case with TIMECRIMES. What
you’ll get here in Magnet Releasing’s latest acquisition is probably one of the
best time travel films of all time. Just sit back, relax and watch the madness
unfold.
Variety.com [Jonathan Holland]
Jean Vigo (French film director) -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia
Jean Vigo, (born
April 26, 1905, Paris, France—died Oct. 5, 1934, Paris), French film
director whose blending of lyricism with realism and Surrealism, the whole
underlined with a cynical, anarchic approach to life, distinguished him as an
original talent. Although he completed only three feature films and one short, Taris
(1931), before his early death, his films produced great public reaction. A
Jean Vigo Prize is awarded each year in
Jean Vigo - Director - Film as Director:, Publications - Film Reference Eric Smoodin
It is difficult to think of another director who made so few films and yet
had such a profound influence on other filmmakers. Jean Vigo's À propos de
Nice , his first film, is his contribution to the French surrealist
movement. The film itself is a direct descendant of Vertov's Man with a
Movie Camera. Certainly, his films make political statements similar to
those seen in Vertov's work. Vertov's documentary celebrates a people's
revolution, while
À propos de Nice provides a look at a reality beyond the prosaic, common variety that so many films give us. The movie attempts nothing less than the restructuring of our perception of the world by presenting it to us not so much through a seamless, logical narrative, but rather through a fast-paced collection of only tangentially related shots.
After À propos de Nice ,
Despite the movie's links to two film movements, L'Atalante defies
categorization. It is a masterpiece of mood and characterization, and, along
with Zéro de conduite , it guarantees
Biography of Jean Vigo - Recollection Used Books Jean Vigo Website
Jean Vigo - Recollection Used Books Jean Vigo page from Anarchist Encyclopedia, also seen here: Jean Vigo
Overview for Jean Vigo - TCM.com biography
Jean Vigo: Biography from Answers.com biography
Jean Vigo Films | Jean Vigo Filmography | Jean Vigo Biography ... Eric Smoodin from Film Director’s Website
All-Movie Guide Hal Erickson biography
L'Atalante & the Films of Jean Vigo Artificial Eye
Jean Vigo [kustu.com] biography and influence on Emir Kusterica website
Jean Vigo - Movie List on mubi.com Mubi
Jean Vigo brief bio from NNDB
Centre Jean Vigo Événements (French)
Realism in film history - Realism - actor, children, movie ... origins of realism in cinema, from Film Reference
The Complete Jean Vigo - The Criterion Collection
Jean Vigo - JStor Hollywood Quarterly, April 1947 (lead page only, pdf format)
"L'Atalante" and the Maturing of Jean Vigo - JStor Film Quarterly, Autumn 1985 (lead page only, pdf format)
Vigo's
Secret | Movie Review | Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum on L’Atalante,
March 28, 1991
Jean Vigo • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Maximilian Le Cain, July 19, 2002
L'Atalante • Senses of
Cinema Wendey Haslem from Senses of Cinema, November 5, 2006
Jean
Vigo by Michael Temple • Senses of Cinema Patrick Ellis reviews Michael Temple’s book,
November 5, 2006
The
Fleeting Passion of Jean Vigo - The New York Sun S. James Snyder from The
MoMA
| The Films of Jean Vigo Charles
Silver,
Son
of Anarchy, Father of a Critic: A Tribute to Jean Vigo at UCLA ... Nicolas Rapold from LA Weekly,
Jean Vigo
(1905-1934) « Film & Fermentation
• View
topic - 578 The Complete Jean Vigo
Film discussion group,
French Film Directors: Jean Vigo | subtitledonline.com Katy Stewart previews Michael Temple’s book, May 20, 2011
Jean Vigo Double Bill | www.cinemastlouis.org July 26, 2011
"The
Complete Jean Vigo" coming Aug. 30: A Second Look - Los ... Dennis Lim from The LA Times,
CriterionForum.org:
The Complete Jean Vigo Blu-ray Review
Film discussion group,
'Complete
Jean Vigo'; 'Citizen Kane 70th' - The Hollywood Reporter Tim Appelo from The
Jean Vigo - The ASC -- American Cinematographer: DVD Playback: Jim Hemphill from The American Cinematographer, November 2011
Four Paragraphs
on Jean Vigo | Hydra Magazine
Jose-Luis Moctezuma from Hydra
magazine,
Jean
Vigo | Brief Glimpse of Brilliance From an Abbreviated Life | By ... David Mermelstein from The Wall Street Journal,
Jean Vigo, a 'poète maudit', an avant-garde director | French ... Nargiza Ryskulova from French Cinema London, January 2012
Jean Vigo – A Passion for Life Undimmed | Park Circus' blog Park Circus, January 23, 2012
Jean Vigo:
Artist of the floating world | British Film Institute Graham Fuller from BFI,
Jean Vigo « Talking
Pictures Ken Russell from Talking Pictures,
L'Atalante
and the Films of Jean Vigo – review | Film | The Observer Philip French from The Observer,
Jean
Vigo: Celebrating the father of French New Wave | Film ... Kieron Tyler from The Arts Desk,
Let’s Talk About
Poetic Realism Michael Glover
Smith from White City Cinema,
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
Jean Vigo (1905 - 1934) - Find A Grave Memorial
Prix Jean Vigo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jean Vigo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
According to Dennis Lim in his LA Times essay "The Complete Jean Vigo" coming Aug. 30: A Second Look - Los ..., “Minute for minute, there is almost certainly no more influential figure in all of cinema than Jean Vigo. You could watch all his films in a single sitting in about the time it takes to get through Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011).” Vigo died at the age of 29 from tuberculosis, leaving behind four films, three shorts and a single feature that comprise slightly less than 3 hours in total, yet he had a major impact on the French New Wave movement that resurrected many of his early experimental and avant-garde techniques, which include naturalistic settings, surrealistic dream images, changes of speed, quick cutting, unusual angles, freeze frames, montages, unusual juxtaposition of images, not to mention a stylistic spontaneity the helped define the cinéma vérité method of the New Wave. Vigo himself borrowed heavily from the Bolshevik newsreels of Russian documentarian Dziga Vertov (aka David Kaufman, particularly his first documentary film, À PROPOS DE NICE (1930), which is a direct descendant of Vertov’s A MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (1929), especially considering Vigo’s cinematographer for all his films is Boris Kaufman, Vertov’s younger brother, who went on to work with both Elia Kazan in ON THE WATERFRONT (1954), winning the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, and later Sidney Lumet, including 12 ANGRY MEN (1957). Vigo’s 1930’s films may have originated the use of the term poetic realism, often used to describe the films of Jacques Demy, but overall he stands quite apart from any cinematic tradition, living and working on the fringes of society, the son of a militant anarchist who died under mysterious conditions, quite possibly strangled by authorities while in prison. While Vigo’s unique films may seen raw or technically rough, his wealth of captivatingly new and original ideas from shot to shot are simply astonishing, especially his last two films, Zero for Conduct (Zéro de conduite: Jeunes diables... (1933) and L'Atalante (1934), both of which are among cinema’s greatest treasures. Contemporary French director Léos Carax paid direct homage to Vigo’s L'Atalante in the finale sequence of LES AMANTS DU PONT-NEUF (1991), where the lovers end up on a barge floating down the Seine.
The film quickly veers into a working class section of town
which bears no resemblance to the previous images, Nice’s actual residents with
women in back alleys scrubbing clothes in a communal water trough, laundry
hanging from the line, cats picking through the street garbage, gambling on the
street, open food markets, and men at work, where the pace picks up due to the
more frenetic activity. Vigo then
introduces a street carnival with giant, oversized masks seen in a parade
marching down the street, adding a touch of the surreal to the banal working
existence and the more orderly world of the police in uniform holding back the
crowds. Perhaps most surprising is a
shot of frolicking, costumed revelers joyously dancing, as if in an alcoholic
reverie, where the director even interjects himself in the revelry, kicking his
legs up and dancing a can-can with several of the women. The director intermixes various faces in
close up, be it a proudly haughty elderly woman and a highly decorated military
soldier, both representing a more rigid side of the existing status quo, with
dizzying shots of the dancers, often changing speeds, bringing a sense of chaos
to the established order, again using a mocking tone of the smiling masks, as
if laughing at a dying era. He even
shows a funeral in fast speed, an orderly procession compared to the bawdy
carnivalesque atmosphere of overly delirious merriment. Factory smokestacks interrupt the unbridled
glee with shots of actual workers, also seen in close range, but this time
focusing on people at work, as they are the ones held responsible for building
a new and better society. The film was
screened a few times in
A Propos de Nice Time Out London
The film begins coolly, neutrally with aerial views of Nice and
the
User
reviews from imdb Author: Darragh O' Donoghue
(hitch1899_@hotmail.com) from
Around the late 20s and early 30s, there was a vogue for 'a day in the life
of the city'-type film, which did exactly what it said on the tin; following
the city and its inhabitants from dawn to dusk, showing the breathing pulse of
great metropoli(sic?). Although supposedly objective documentaries, these were
rigidly contrived and structured, and, with the exception of Vertov's THE MAN
WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA, generally tedious.
However, the film is not really like this at all, but a freewheeling melange of
distortion, repetition, subversion. The linearity is chopped to bits, replace
by extraordinary feats of imagery and montage. The film actually starts with a
casino gaming board, and puppets of the typical bourgeois, generally English,
holidaymaker, who, along with the chips, are swept aside.
Patriarchy is mocked by the ludicrous fetishiation of gangly phallic
tumescences, such as tree trunks, or huge chimney stacks. The supposed
objectivity of the documentary mode is undermined by the numerous trick
effects, which perversely tell a greater truth. A dirty old bourgeois is seen
to be mentally undressing the cross-legged women. The recurrent tides, the
circularity, the images of destruction and death (monuments, gravestones) all
give the lie to the bourgeois myth of escape from reality, and immortality.
The most prominent rupture of this civility is a carnival. Bakhtin once argued
that every society allows one day a year for the carnivalesque, in which the
topsy-turvy replaces everyday order - hostility and dissatisfaction is assuaged,
and order is restored. Doubtless this was the case in real life here, but
But as the montage gathers sinister momentum, the distinctions between the
carnivalesque and bourgeois reality blur heavily. The bourgeois resort, with
its games, tides, and exotic animals, is compared to the poor quarter, with its
gambling, rivulets of presumably urine, and skeletal cats. Objects become
subjects and vice versa - a shot of a boat becomes that boat; people looking
into the camera become a shot of that cameraman. The cinema is complicit in the
bourgeoise spectacle - its dismantling is a hope for the overthrow of the dead,
unimaginative bourgeois.
Simple games, such as tennis, become bizarre surrealistic rites. Once our eyes
become attuned, everything looks strange - a man opening his cafe seems normal
enough, but a man flinging umbrellas at tables is unnerving and odd. The
carnival frenzy finally loses its clearcut role and spills into the film's
form, disrupting everything in its wake. Goosestepping policemen are linked to
lewd cancanning dancers, the one a complete mockery of the other.
Rather than the renewal and continuity of most 'day in the life' films, NICE
ends with destruction and fire. And yet it is a refreshing fire, as the hearty
laughs at the close suggest. Blow apart repressiveness, and everybody will be
laughing. The film is an astonishing, inventive, febrile delight - after 20
minutes, you'll find yourself catching your breath - and itching to hit
something.
Jean
Vigo: Celebrating the father of French New Wave | Film ... Kieron Tyler from The Arts Desk,
The release of Jean Vigo’s wonderful L’Atalante on DVD is cause enough to celebrate, but the arrival of everything he committed to film in one place is more than that – it commemorates this special filmmaker’s genius and humanity. Zero de Conduite and L’Atalante are thrilling films, whatever their context and influence on the French New Wave. They need to be seen.
This double DVD set, L'Atalante and the Films of Jean
Vigo, includes A Propos de Nice (1930), Taris (1931), Zero
de Conduite (1933) and L’Atalante (1934). The films are supplemented
by the incredible Nouvelle Vague-flavoured French 1964 documentary Filmmakers
of our Time: Jean Vigo, which is stuffed with people who worked on or
feature in the flilms.
Although his life was short, unsettled and marked by tragedy,
In the late 1920s
The first of
A Propos de Nice is a travelogue. Silent, it runs for 22 minutes and inspired a tribute in 1995, A Propos de Nice, La Suite. It also, obviously, inspired Godard. It begins with aerial shots of the townscape and seafront, interspersed with waves on the beach and a roulette game. Workers sweep the promenade, dust tables off and set up for the day. The promenaders arrive. Sailing boats tack. Cars disgorge their swanky passengers onto carpet lain on the ground. An ostrich peers. Alligators crawl. The clothes of a seated woman change repeatedly until she is naked. The town behind the tourist façade is revealed. A cat scavenges garbage. A factory belches smoke A Propos de Nice travels through societal strata rather than place.
Zero de Conduite though had a fully formed narrative and
is based on
L’Atalante, even though based on a pre-existing script,
was similarly problematic. It wasn’t even originally released under its given
title – it was renamed Le Chaland qui Passe to tie in with a popular
song of the time that was bolted on as a theme tune.
Like the rest of
The Complete Jean Vigo - The Criterion Collection
À propos de Nice and the Extremely Necessary, Permanent Invention of the Cinematic Pamphlet Nicole Brenez from Rouge, 2005
Jean
Vigo | Brief Glimpse of Brilliance From an Abbreviated Life | By ... David Mermelstein from The Wall Street Journal,
Son
of Anarchy, Father of a Critic: A Tribute to Jean Vigo at UCLA ... Nicolas Rapold from LA Weekly,
Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon
Another Cinema Blog [Tony D'Ambra]
DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: The Complete Jean Vigo: À propos de ... Glenn Erickson, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray, also seen at Turner Classic Movies here: The Complete Jean Vigo
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Joseph Jon Lanthier] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
CriterionConfessions.com [Jamie S. Rich] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
The QNetwork [James Kendrick] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
The Complete Jean Vigo | DVD | HomeVideo Review | The A.V. Club Keith Phipps, Criterion Blu-Ray
PopMatters [Jose Solís] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
epinions Criterion DVD [Stephen O. Murray] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Times Noel Megahey, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
Joshua Reviews The Criterion Collection's Complete Jean Vigo [Blu ... Joshua Brunsting from Criterion Cast, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Verdict - The Complete Jean Vigo (Blu-ray) Criterion Collection [Gordon Sullivan]
THE COMPLETE JEAN VIGO Criterion Blu-ray Review ORPHEUS ... Andre Dellamorte from Collider, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
Blu-ray Review: The Complete Jean Vigo | High-Def Digest Stephen Cohen
The Complete Jean Vigo (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Christopher McQuain, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
Rediscover: The Work of Jean Vigo | Spectrum Culture David Harris, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
The Complete Jean Vigo : Nate's Broadcast
UNL | Frame by Frame | Jean Vigo
Jean Vigo films (1930-34) | Brandon's movie memory
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
DVDBeaver.com Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
À propos de Nice - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is a short film commissioned by the giant Parisian film
studio Gaumont as part of an omnibus documentary project called “Journal Vivant
(Living Newspaper),” supposedly a demonstration on various swimming techniques
from an internationally decorated French swimming champion, Jean Taris, who was
then the holder of 23 French records. In
the 1932 Olympic games, as the reigning world record holder, he won the Silver
medal in the 400 meter freestyle, losing the gold to Buster Crabbe who went on
to Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon fame in Hollywood. Using a newsreel style narrator along with
moments in silence, this is a study in human form, where swimming only sets
that form into graceful movement, again changing speeds, also using forward and
reverse motions, methods he would use later in his feature film. Shot almost entirely in a swimming pool, the
film begins above the water before descending underwater for what are easily
the most rapturously beautiful, shots, told in a playful manner, where on
occasion Taris is obviously hamming it up for the camera, but the sheer
rhapsodic poetry of the underwater shots anticipate what is likely the best
known sequence in L'Atalante
(1934). In one miraculous sequence Taris
actually walks on water, so
User
reviews from imdb Author: Martin Teller from
A commissioned short meant to show off renowned swimmer Jean Taris and
demonstrate his technique, but it's more of interest in demonstrating
User
reviews from imdb Author: (edwartell@hotmail.com) from
The second of
The
Olympic Swimmer Jean Taris in "Taris" : The New Yorker Richard Brody from The New Yorker,
At the 1932 Olympic games, held in Los Angeles, the French swimmer
Jean Taris won the silver medal in the four-hundred-metre freestyle (the
event in which he was the reigning world-record holder). The gold medalist, Buster Crabbe,
would soon win fame and fortune in
For
User
reviews from imdb Author: MisterWhiplash from
Jean Vigo knows he can't be too bland with a subject like swimming, no
matter how good the swimmer might be in his style and speed and graceful
varieties of stroke (so to speak). Jean Taris is actually an excellent swimmer,
as
Like his Apropos de Nice movie,
There's even a touch of the absurd to much of it, as is the way of the director
in his works, like when he does show a man trying to swim indoors, on a chair.
And the final images, by the way, are definitely the best, as one last time the
swimmer comes up onto the side of the pool backwards, then is seen in a
business suit, jacket and hat, and in a great super-imposition walks ahead into
the water. Whatever it might mean, I can't say, but throughout as Vigo's eye
follows this man on his lesson to those who wonder 'can I be like him', there
are moments of wonderful exercises in limitless cinematic expression too.
8.5/10
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: The Complete Jean Vigo: À propos de ... Glenn Erickson, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray, also seen at Turner Classic Movies here: The Complete Jean Vigo
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Joseph Jon Lanthier] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
CriterionConfessions.com [Jamie S. Rich] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
The QNetwork [James Kendrick] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
The Complete Jean Vigo | DVD | HomeVideo Review | The A.V. Club Keith Phipps, Criterion Blu-Ray
PopMatters [Jose Solís] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
epinions Criterion DVD [Stephen O. Murray] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Times Noel Megahey, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
Joshua Reviews The Criterion Collection's Complete Jean Vigo [Blu ... Joshua Brunsting from Criterion Cast, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Verdict - The Complete Jean Vigo (Blu-ray) Criterion Collection [Gordon Sullivan]
THE COMPLETE JEAN VIGO Criterion Blu-ray Review ORPHEUS ... Andre Dellamorte from Collider, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
Blu-ray Review: The Complete Jean Vigo | High-Def Digest Stephen Cohen
The Complete Jean Vigo (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Christopher McQuain, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
Rediscover: The Work of Jean Vigo | Spectrum Culture David Harris, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
The Complete Jean Vigo : Nate's Broadcast
UNL | Frame by Frame | Jean Vigo
Jean Vigo films (1930-34) | Brandon's movie memory
DVDBeaver.com Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
Jean Taris, Swimming Champion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
France (44 mi) 1933
Freedom
comes at a high price, and it's very rare. There are maybe ten free men in the
world. Jean Vigo was a free man and, as such, he set an example.
—Jean
Painlevé, colleague and friend of Jean Vigo
Often viewed as the patron saint of French cinema, Jean
Vigo, who died penniless and alone, has been resurrected as a man who boldly
stood for lost causes, a man of vision and social conscience who may as well be
the radical voice of change often overlooked in the nation’s spotty history,
the Vichy government capitulating to the Nazi’s in World War II, bitterly
losing their last colonial interests in the 50’s and 60’s to independence,
second only to the British in what was once a thriving French colonial empire,
where, as so brilliantly expressed in Jean Renoir’s RULES OF THE GAME (1939),
the French aristocracy continues to maintain a mindset resting on the laurels
of its past. As suggested in his earlier
short À PROPOS DE NICE (1930) Two
Jean Vigo shorts, contrasting the vastly different worlds between the rich
and the poor, Vigo saw the wealthy class as entrenched in hedonistic pleasures,
squandering their wealth on a life of leisure while the working class performed
all the necessary functions of making a city run smoothly. Vigo saw no way to break through this
systematic class barrier without revolutionary change, where in the early 30’s
the Great Depression made anti-capitalist ideologies attractive to millions,
making the 30’s the golden era of socialism.
But
Zéro de Conduite is based on Jean Vigo’s own personal childhood experiences, becoming something of an anarchist anthem on adolescence, filmed at the same Millau junior high boarding school he attended, using a non-professional cast, often people he saw walking down the street, basing the story on real people he knew in his youth, including the character Tabard who is based on Vigo himself. The director’s poor health declined during the making of the film and he was unable to complete the editing himself. The story centers on authoritarian rule leading to a school revolt by a group of four boys returning to boarding school after vacation, illustrating the polarizing forces of freedom and authority. The narrative is loosely knit together with memorable shots and sequences, a constant jostling of images in what feels like a raw and recklessly liberating free-for-all, a surrealist extravaganza on display that boggles the mind with the unrestrained spirit of joy that surrounds every shot. The playfulness is not to be discounted, as this is, after all, an examination of suppressed childhood, where what should be the carefree days of youth are misspent stuck in a wretchedly suffocating boys school where beans are served every day, the teachers are tyrants and grossly inept, while the overzealous headmaster is a dwarf with a giant beard, like something conjured up by Buñuel, though a new instructor Huguet, Jean Dasté, future star of L'Atalante (1934), dazzles the students with his Charlie Chaplin little Tramp’s walk, not to mention performing a handstand on his classroom desk. Not altogether rational or lucid, often goofy, the entire film plays out like a chaotic vision in a child’s mind, told with unhesitatingly crude slapstick moving at breakneck speed, where perhaps only Guy Maddin’s legendary short THE HEART OF THE WORLD (2000) The Heart Of The World - Guy Maddin - YouTube (6:08) can compare in producing the same electrifying jolt of energy. Odd, completely unorthodox and strangely beautiful, the film’s reputation lies in exuding a passionate stylistic spontaneity that is nothing less than mind-blowing. Uniquely original, more mayhem is crammed into these breathless 44 minutes than anything else ever imagined.
The boys hatch up a plot to take over the school on Alumni
day, where invited dignitaries will be present in an overly ordered display of
pompous military pageantry, with the idea of creating something an
unforgettable spectacle. The entire film
title offers a clue, calling them “little devils at college,” where if truth be
told, the schoolchildren themselves never listen, constantly misbehave, are
continually plotting mischief of some kind and are hardly innocents (hard not
to think of the Harry Potter trio), but the film makes it clear these acts of
defiance are a natural response to abusive power. Way ahead of its time, a satiric film so
compressed that every single shot matters, each one remarkably unique, Vigo
blends experimental techniques into the narrative, especially evident in a
dream-like pillow fight that erupts after ripping their beds to shreds, throwing white feathers everywhere as if snow
had suddenly fallen inside the otherwise dreary, prison-like dormitory walls,
like those little glass figurines that you shake and turn upside down to
produce the same effect, poetically changing speeds to slow motion in a
dizzying display of pent-up emotions, a striking parady of the military state
and a beautiful expression of the anarchist spirit of youth, the result of long
festering rebellious impulses that have been simmering under the surface
throughout. But there’s more, as this
fearsome foursome climbs to the roof on the day of the Alumni day ceremony, tilting the camera
to show the students triumphantly reaching the top, where they immediately begin pelting all the
guests with garbage and debris, insurrectionists raising hell and disrupting
the proceedings, turning the tables on who’s in charge, creating utter chaos
and pandemonium. Vigo’s rooftop shots
show the gallivanting kids taking charge of their own separate universe, always
framed with the endless sky as a backdrop, leap-frogging across the rooftops to
their escape, where freedom is expressed through seemingly unlimited
horizons. The film is a timeless ode to
freedom and the spirit of youth, where throwing off the shackles of authority
is the first step in accepting what amounts to the reigns of maturity and your
own adulthood, redefining the world at large, filled with a revolutionary
vision of endless possibilities, something of a punk rock anthem years ahead of
its time, where in the entire history of cinema there is nothing else like it.
Adrian Martin from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
“Young Devils at College”:
The secondary title of Zero for
Conduct suggests a mild romp in the Carry
On vein, but Jean Vigo’s classic short film means business. At stake in
this vignette of childhood rebellion against an oppressive school institution
is nothing less than a veritable surrealist manifesto—one whose cosmic
dimension is assured by a final shot in which its young devils, triumphant on a
rooftop, appear ready to take flight.
This is a terrific movie to spring on students unprepared
for what they will see: full frontal
nudity, scatological and body-obsessed humor, antireligious blasphemy,
insistent homoeroticism. But it transcends the simple duality of youth versus
authority (unlike its loose remake, the 1968 film If…) via its vision of inescapable, polymorphous perversity. Even
the stuffiest teachers here are twisted, secretly wild at heart.
The hearty provocation happens as much on the level of form
as content: the experiments with
slow-motion, animation, and trick photography are prodigious and wondrous.
Zero de Conduite | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
Jean Vigo's 1933 masterpiece
charts the rebellion of three young French boys in a sordid little provincial
boarding school. A wholly original creation, the film walks a narrow line
between surrealist farce and social realism. The most famous sequence, which
leads directly to Lindsay Anderson's If . . . , has the boys atop the
school on graduation day, merrily dumping garbage on the assembled
dignitaries--some of whom are cardboard cutouts. In French with subtitles, 44
min.
Zéro de Conduite Time Out London
Zero for Conduct (1933) - Trailers, Reviews, Synopsis, Showtimes ... Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
The shortest of French filmmaker
Jean Vigo's two feature-length films, Zero for Conduct (Zero de Conduite) is
also arguably his most influential. The overtly autobiographical plotline takes
place at a painfully strict boys' boarding school, presided over by such
petit-bourgeous tyrants as a discipline-dispensing dwarf. The students revolt
against the monotony of their daily routine by erupting into a outsized pillow
fight. Their final assault occurs during a prim-and-proper school ceremony,
wherein the headmasters are bombarded with fruit. Like all of
I would rather smell the
way boys smell–
Oh those schoolboys the way their legs flap under the desks in study hall
That odour rising roses and ammonia
And way their dicks droop like lilacs
Or the way they smell that forbidden acrid smell
—Patti Smith, ‘Piss Factory’, 1974
Me? Looking like a
scattered student
I follow exuberant girls through the green chestnuts:
They know I’m there, and turn towards me
Laughing, eyes brimming with indiscretion.
I don’t say a word: I just stare at the flesh
Of their white necks framed by tresses:
I follow the curve of their shoulders down
Their divine backs, hidden by bodices and flimsy finery.
Soon I’m ogling their boots and socks …
Burning with fever, yearning for flesh.
They think I’m silly. They whisper to each other …
-And I feel kisses blossom on my lips …
—Arthur Rimbaud, ‘TO MUSIC: Railway square, Charleville’, 1870
I hated high school. Stupid regimentation and oppressive teachers. Corporal punishment from self-righteous frauds. Six cuts of the cane across the hand you didn’t write with. Basher would sneak up behind you in class and hit you hard on the head with the attendance book. Heinrich the crypto-fascist enforcer of discipline loved to shout and humiliate. “Attention! At ease!” We sotto voce: “Fuck you, Jack”. Prefects in blazers for black shirts.
No girls – just the odd female teacher – if she happened to be young fetishised to distraction. Under stairwells to look up skirts. They knew and slowed down. That fetid smell of grey flannel and ammonia.
The deputy-principal and principal, both Mr Brown’s and both balding old bastards – “Bing” and “Bong”. Bong never soiled his hands, while Bing had a cupboard full of canes: short ones, long ones, thin ones, thick ones. He climaxed each time he hit you – red-faced and on the edge of apoplexy – pausing on each stroke to catch his breath and force up your outstretched hand to inflict the maximum pain. Your hand throbbed for hours. I wish I had had the gumption to climb onto the roof of that hell-hole and pelt those jailers with whatever came to hand.
The French film-maker Jean Vigo (1905-34) hated his boarding school and dreamed a wild dream of schoolboy revolution. The son of a Catalan anarchist, and consumptive, he made only four films in his short life. While his last film, L’Atalante (1934), is his masterpiece, his first and third films À propos de Nice (About Nice 1930) and Zéro de conduite (Zero for Conduct 1933) are exhilarating forays into an artist’s discovery of cinema as personal expression, anarchic joyous experiments in which we enter the world of a magic lantern. A mosaic surprise of the potential of cinema to not only observe the concrete in new ways but to express our humanity, to wonder, to rebel, to satirise, and to laugh.
Zéro de conduite: young devils at school a 45 minute fiction talkie about boys at an elementary boarding school rebelling against the mindless discipline, is not only anarchic, but inspired comic lunacy from a fountainhead of deep love for childhood, and the joy of life lived with spontaneity and without pretence.
A new teacher points the way: he is indulgent and playful. He is awed by everything. In the playground he suddenly starts impersonating Chaplin’s tramp, then grabs a ball from the boys and runs. On an excursion into the town he leads the boys a merry chase after a young woman he fancies, and you see she is having as much fun as the audience.
In their dormitory a gang of agitators instigates a surreal pillow-fight and mock
crucifixion – slowed down on the screen against the musical score played
backwards. Total chaos. A lecherous teacher outed and the
revolution begins: “You’re full of shit!” (
The rebels take to the roof on a civic occasion and pelt the literally stuffed shirts from the Board of Governors on the dais below with rubbish. The stern midget principal – played by a young boy affecting a manly voice and demeanor - with a beard nearly as long as he is short scurries away for shelter.
Surrealism as fun shot at all angles and in frenetic montage, with a liberating asynchronous score of unbridled vitality. Mad strategams, irreverent language, and kids sick of eating beans throwing them at each other. Zero for conduct!
"Zéro
de conduite: Rude Freedom" by B. Kite. Criterion Collection Essay B. Kite,
The Complete Jean Vigo - The Criterion Collection
A Mythical Monkey Writes About The Movies
The
Fleeting Passion of Jean Vigo - The New York Sun S. James Snyder from The
FilmsdeFrance.com Review James Travers
ZÉRO DE CONDUITE | mardecortésbaja.com
DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: The Complete Jean Vigo: À propos de ... Glenn Erickson, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray, also seen at Turner Classic Movies here: The Complete Jean Vigo
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Joseph Jon Lanthier] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
CriterionConfessions.com [Jamie S. Rich] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
The QNetwork [James Kendrick] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
The Complete Jean Vigo | DVD | HomeVideo Review | The A.V. Club Keith Phipps, Criterion Blu-Ray
PopMatters [Jose Solís] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
epinions Criterion DVD [Stephen O. Murray] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Times Noel Megahey, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
Joshua Reviews The Criterion Collection's Complete Jean Vigo [Blu ... Joshua Brunsting from Criterion Cast, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Verdict - The Complete Jean Vigo (Blu-ray) Criterion Collection [Gordon Sullivan]
THE COMPLETE JEAN VIGO Criterion Blu-ray Review ORPHEUS ... Andre Dellamorte from Collider, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
Blu-ray Review: The Complete Jean Vigo | High-Def Digest Stephen Cohen
The Complete Jean Vigo (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Christopher McQuain, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
Rediscover: The Work of Jean Vigo | Spectrum Culture David Harris, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
The Complete Jean Vigo : Nate's Broadcast
UNL | Frame by Frame | Jean Vigo
Jean Vigo films (1930-34) | Brandon's movie memory
Another Cinema Blog [Tony D'Ambra]
Zéro de Conduite Richard Doyle from CineScene
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
DVDBeaver.com Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
Zero for Conduct - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Words can’t adequately describe this film, but it put a smile on my face and left it there all night the first time I saw it, simply an artistic masterpiece filled with the full spectrum of human flaws, yet, a flawless film filled with an indescribable joy and a boundless imagination that is incapable of being dull. L’Atalante was a bridge between the surrealism of 1920’s French cinema and the poetic realism of the 1930’s, one of the best uses of poetry and song, a bull’s-eye reflection of the human heart where the romantic lyricism evolves into something truly avant-garde. Vigo died at the age of 29, three weeks before the release of his final film, where his entire body of work consists of two documentary shorts, a 45-minute surrealistic treatise on childhood rebellion, and one magical feature film, all told in less than three hours of film time. Barely known while making films, overshadowed by his contemporaries Jean Renoir and René Clair, upon release the distributor cut about a third of the film, added a mediocre popular song, then retitled the film after the song, Le Chaland Qui Passe. The film was restored in 1940, but was largely a patchwork of the original with inaudible sound, restored again in 1990 by Pierre Philippe and Jean-Louis Bompoint, discovering a pristine nitrate print of the film prior to any cuts from the archives of the British Film Institute.
A simple story, written by an undistinguished writer named Jean Guinée, is really quite ordinary, but Vigo’s embellishments are so original, his improvisational twists and turns so unpredictable, as if the film is capturing human thought as it is being thought, shot by shot, moment by moment, recreating moments so incredibly fresh and alive, all captured in beautiful cinematography by Boris Kaufman, using Paris, the river Seine, and some fabulous riverbanks as a backdrop, adding a stunning musical score by Maurice Jaubert. Jean Dasté plays Jean, the captain of a river barge named L’Atalante, who marries Juliette, Dita Parlo, from one of the towns on his route, and they travel together in marital bliss down the river Seine, but Juliette turns restless and claustrophobic from the cramped quarters and turns to the ship’s mate, the real master of the ship, Pere Jules, played by Michel Simon, whose performance is one of the great marvels of the film. Something of an original Popeye, an old salty dog complete with a tattoo from every port, he provides endless stories and songs, while his own cabin is a museum of useless yet exotic marvels collected over the years, completely overrun by cats, but this charming and peculiar character becomes fascinating to Juliette, as if he represents the mystery of life itself. In a long, brilliantly sustained sequence, Pere Jules delightfully entertains Juliette with his collection of play things, exuding all his wondrous memories and his enthusiasm for living, what the French would call his Joie de vivre, interrupted by her jealous husband who finds it all so useless, wondering why she should be wasting her time in those dank and dirty quarters.
Juliette sneaks out at night to meet another marvelous character, the peddler (Gilles Margaritas), who is something of a flirtatious magical spirit, wooing her with the wonders of Paris, becoming a one-man band, meeting her at the barge, which is too much for her husband, so he decides to leave without her. But they are both miserable and alone without each other, where Jean remembers when Juliette told him you can see the face of the one you love under water, so he jumps off the barge into the river. In an epic underwater sequence, he has a vision of Juliette in her wedding dress, superimposing her image over Jean’s face, an ingenious way of conveying the two are thinking of one another at that exact same moment, which couldn’t be more sensual and erotic, creating highly surreal, yet intensely personalized film images of love and desire, that in a few seconds reveals exactly how they feel about one other. Using settings that are naturalistic and lower class characters, the film accentuates the use of the imagination, where mere objects, like puppets or fans or a phonograph, otherwise seen as a collection of junk, take on majestic heights, where the ordinary is elevated to the exotic. The dreamy visualization of the underwater sequence also emphasizes the extraordinary powers of using one’s imagination. Jean becomes so depressed, however, that Pere Jules is forced to find Juliette, searching for her on the streets, eventually discovering her alone in a music store listening to one of the couple’s favorite songs. When they finally reunite, this time knowing how much they mean to each other, the viewer is left speechless and in rapturous awe, filled with the exuberance of pure joy, becoming deliriously liberating and one of the most poetic and utterly unique film experiences imaginable.
Adrian Martin from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
Heretical as it may be to say in these enlightened times of gender politics, but Jean Vigo’s masterpiece L’Atalante is the cinema’s greatest ode to heterosexual passion. One cannot enter into its rapturous poetry without surrendering to the romantic series of oppositions between the sexes, comparisons rigorously installed at every possible level—spiritual, physical, erotic, and emotional. It is only this thrill of absolute “otherness” that can allow both the agony of nonalignment between lovers and the sublimity of their eventual fusion.
This is far removed from the typical romance of the time. As
Between these poles of man and woman, however, there is Pierre
Jules (Michel Simon), master of the boat. It is surely the mark of
L'Atalante Tom Huddleston from Time Out London, also seen here: Time Out Capsule Review
Some filmmakers have a lifetime in which to develop their art, to explore their themes, to express their world view. Others do it in a single film. 1934’s ‘L’Atalante’ is the single feature from the then 29-year-old French master Jean Vigo and was made as its director died of TB. The result is not so much a film as an entire artistic vision crammed into 89 of the busiest and most beautiful minutes of celluloid ever shot.
Dita Parlo
plays Juliette, the smalltown girl married off to Jean (Jean Dasté, captain of
L’Atalante, a grubby barge plying the waterways of rural
It’s a traditional set-up, and the film was intended by its
producers as a straight romantic melodrama. But
Son
of Anarchy, Father of a Critic: A Tribute to Jean Vigo at UCLA ... Nicolas Rapold from LA Weekly,
Luce Vigo, the French critic and daughter of the beloved Jean Vigo, finds it funny: At 80 years of age, she's asked to reminisce about her father, who died at a mere 29, when she was but a tot. "It is very strange to be the grandmother of my own father!" the octogenarian quips.
The man behind the newlyweds-on-a-steamboat idyll L'Atalante (1934) and the children's revolution tale Zéro de Conduite (1933) has garnered generations of devotees. Friskily alive, his films — mostly stymied in Vigo's lifetime — have been a tonic to filmmakers and cineastes alike with their visual verve, disarming poignancy and playful humor.
On Sunday at UCLA, the Parajanov-Vartanov Institute will
honor
Born the son of an anarchist in a
"The skin is very important in L'Atalante," Ms. Vigo
says. "
Even now, Ms. Vigo (who herself has been the subject of a tribute video by Jem
Cohen) discovers new things in her father's works — such as a glimpse of
her mother in the
Jean
Vigo: L'Atalante | Film | guardian.co.uk
Derek Malcolm from Century of Films from The Guardian
Jean Vigo made only four films before he died of tuberculosis in 1934, aged just 29. Yet no movie-lover, however eccentric, could compose a list of 100 films through which the cinema should be celebrated without including at least one of his works.
The last and greatest was l'Atalante (1934), butchered for commercial release and, though partially restored, even now unable to be seen exactly as its director intended. He was the epitome of the radical, passionate film-maker who has to fight every step of the way against people of less imagination and sensibility. I'm willing to sweep up the stars' crap, he once wrote when trying for a job as an assistant.
In the end, none of
L'Atalante was originally a simplistic story assigned to
L'Atalante is a barge in which two young newly-weds travel the
waterways of
The distraught husband imagines his wife reflected in the water.
Meanwhile, she tires of wandering the cruel streets of Depression-era
The film is a masterpiece not because of the tragic story of its
maker nor because of its awkward genesis, but be cause, as Truffaut has said,
in filming prosiac words and acts,
The beginning of the inarticulate young couple's life together
has an erotic charge rare in the French cinema of the time. So have the
sequences when, parted by their quarrel, they long for each other in silence.
Added to that,
The poetic power of the film, however, had a lot to do with the
cinematography of the Russian-born Boris Kaufman, who worked on each of
Gaumont found the film commercially worthless, hacked it to pieces and retitled it Le Chaland Qui Passe (The Passing Barge), inserting a popular song of that name into the sound-track. It was advertised as "a film inspired by the celebrated sung so admirably song by Lys Gauty".
Only a few days after the first, disappointing run ended,
"Zéro
de conduite: Rude Freedom" by B. Kite. Criterion Collection Essay B. Kite,
The Complete Jean Vigo - The Criterion Collection
Vigo's
Secret | Movie Review | Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum, March 28, 1991
L'Atalante - Film (Movie) Plot and Review ... - Film Reference Robin Wood
Permanent Plastic Helmet [Edward Wall]
L'Atalante • Senses of
Cinema Wendey Haslem from Senses of Cinema, November 5, 2006
The Crop Duster [Robert Horton]
L'Atalante Lost and Regained Michael Abecassis - Film-Philosophy review of Michael Temple’s book on Jean Vigo (pdf format)
L'Atalante Eric Henderson from Slant magazine
Northwest Chicago Film Society Blog [Kyle Westphal]
Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review)
The Fleeting Passion of Jean Vigo - The New York Sun S. James Snyder from The New York Sun, September 19, 2008
Jean Vigo: Celebrating the father of French New Wave | Film ... Kieron Tyler from The Arts Desk, May 14, 2012
Jean Vigo | Brief Glimpse of Brilliance From an Abbreviated Life | By ... David Mermelstein from The Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2011
Electric Sheep Magazine [Eithne Farry]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: The Complete Jean Vigo: À propos de ... Glenn Erickson, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray, also seen at Turner Classic Movies here: The Complete Jean Vigo
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Joseph Jon Lanthier] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
CriterionConfessions.com [Jamie S. Rich] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
The QNetwork [James Kendrick] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
The Complete Jean Vigo | DVD | HomeVideo Review | The A.V. Club Keith Phipps, Criterion Blu-Ray
PopMatters [Jose Solís] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
epinions Criterion DVD [Stephen O. Murray] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Times Noel Megahey, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
Joshua Reviews The Criterion Collection's Complete Jean Vigo [Blu ... Joshua Brunsting from Criterion Cast, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson] The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD Verdict - The Complete Jean Vigo (Blu-ray) Criterion Collection [Gordon Sullivan]
THE COMPLETE JEAN VIGO Criterion Blu-ray Review ORPHEUS ... Andre Dellamorte from Collider, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
Blu-ray Review: The Complete Jean Vigo | High-Def Digest Stephen Cohen
The Complete Jean Vigo (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Christopher McQuain, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
Rediscover: The Work of Jean Vigo | Spectrum Culture David Harris, The Complete Jean Vigo, Criterion Blu-Ray
About.com Home Video/DVD [Ivana Redwine]
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
L'Atalante Review - New Film Reviews | The Film Pilgrim Rob Fred Parker
Subtitledonline.com [Stefan Pape]
The New Yorker [Pauline Kael] (pdf format)
The Complete Jean Vigo : Nate's Broadcast
UNL | Frame by Frame | Jean Vigo
Jean Vigo films (1930-34) | Brandon's movie memory
User
reviews from imdb Author: Darragh O' Donoghue
(hitch1899_@hotmail.com) from
Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Classic Film Club: 'L'Atalante' (Jean Vigo, 1934) - Time Out London Tom Huddleston
BBCi - Films Jamie Russell
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Movie - L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934) Roger Ebert essay, 2000
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
DVDBeaver.com - Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]
Vildziunas,
Kristijonas
BACK
IN YOUR ARMS (Kai apkabinsiu tave) C+ 78
A common theme in former Eastern bloc Soviet nations, now that they’re
members of NATO and the European Union, is to conveniently blame the Russians
in all embarrassing historical references, as if they’re playing the American
John Birch Society conservative card of the Republican Party back in the
1950’s, which blamed Communism for all the evils around the globe. What’s
missing, of course, in this Lithuanian entry for Best Foreign Film, is any
Lithuanian complicity in their own nation’s muddled affairs. The Lithuanians were notorious Nazi
collaborators in rounding up and exterminating Jews, murdering 190,000
Lithuanian Jews, which comprised 91% of the pre-war population. Taking place in 1961, this is a historical
Cold War drama set in Berlin just weeks prior to the construction of the Berlin
Wall, as citizens from East Berlin are flooding to the West in record numbers,
around two and a half million people alone in 1961, arousing the suspicion of
both sides, but especially the Communist East German side as they need to
implement a plan to keep their citizens at home. Using archival footage of the era, what’s
interesting is the picture of perceived freedom, a kind of idealized state of
mind that doesn’t really exist in the East, as all citizens are under
suspicion, where persons crossing the border walking on the sidewalk in the
Western sector may be stuffed into a Stasi secret police vehicle taking them
back into the Eastern sector where they likely face arrest on some contrived
charge. The director wrote this story,
which could just as easily be a play, as except for the archival street scenes
which could be projected onto the wall of a theater production, most all of it
takes place in various rooms, where the tense atmosphere on both sides of the
border is supercharged with paranoia and a Kafkaesque suspicion.
Elzbieta Latenaite plays Ruta, a Lithuanian-American studying in
Hamburg, who travels to
Again, seen through flashbacks, we see that her father (Andrius
Bialobzeskis) was an actor in Lithuania, seen carrying the cross during a
Passion Play performance prior to the Soviets banning all crosses, icons, and
references to religion. What constitutes
the narrative is the behind-the-scenes chess game taking place by both sides,
each suspecting the other, each trying to out think the other side, where Ruta
finds much of this nonsense, as all she wants is to see her father. However, as people disappear without a trace,
or hop into taxi’s that smuggle people back into the East, it is an uncertain
time, especially for a woman on her own.
Ruta, however, has a network of friends and associates who are
continually looking out for her, while her father, on the other hand, is being
manipulated by Stasi agents in an attempt to lure his educated daughter into
the East where she might be trained as an agent. The film has that heavy handed treatment of
Communist life under a totalitarian system, where her father may as well be in
User reviews from imdb Author: johno-21 from
I recently saw this at the 2012 Palm Springs International Film Festival
where it's writer/director Kristijonas Vilziunas and lead actress Elzbieta
Latenaite were on hand at my screening for a Q&A following the film.
Latenaite plays Ruta, a Lithuanian-born young woman living in the
Variety Reviews -
Back to Your Arms - Film Reviews - Palm Springs ... Robert Koehler
A Best Films (in
With: Elzbieta Latenaite, Andrius Bialobzeskis, Jurga Jutaite, Margarita Broich, Giedrius Arbaciauskas, Aleksas Kazanavicius, Franz Broich-Wuttke, Sandra Maren Schneider. (Russian, Lithuanian, German dialogue)
Cold War intrigue prior
to the erection of the Berlin Wall injects the occasionally engaging "Back
to Your Arms" with a tension that's nevertheless different from what you'd
expect in a standard spy movie. What that amounts to is an unfulfilled
father-daughter relationship, with dad under the grip of KGB agents and the
American-based, Lithuanian-born daughter trying to reunite with him under
near-impossible conditions. Pic's dry, subdued manner, under Kristijonas
Vildziunas' direction in his third feature, will neutralize fest interest
despite its status as
Studying in
Camera (color/B&W), Vladas Naudzius; editors, Vildziunas,
Valdas Misevicius; music, Antoni Komasa-Lazarkiewicz; music supervisor, Pia
Hoffmann; production designer, Galius Klicius; costume designer, Agne Rimkute.
Reviewed at
The Poetry of Grief - The
Walrus by Melora Koepke, a profile of the director from Walrus magazine, May 26, 2009
Twenty years ago this December, as they finished up their last week of classes before the Christmas break, fourteen young women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique were killed by twenty-five-year-old Marc Lépine, who entered the school with a semi-automatic machine gun sheathed in a garbage bag, and went on a nineteen-minute shooting spree before turning his weapon on himself.
Our shared memories of December 6, 1989, are mostly related to the crime scene as it was shown on the evening news: the ambulances and police vehicles parked on the snowy bank beside the school, sirens flashing; the sobbing parents as they arrived on the scene; and the terrified students as they exited the building, shivering in their T-shirts. But our knowledge of what happened that day has always been limited, as though the locked doors of the institution, sealed with crime scene tape, served not only to hide the bodies from view, but to shield us from the traumatic realities of Lépine’s murderous rage.
While the dearth of first-hand stories about the events at the Polytechnique is notable, even more remarkable is that until this year no feature film had been made about them. “We in Canada think of ourselves as very progressive, especially when it comes to questions of power relations between women and men,” says Denis Villeneuve, whose seventy-seven-minute black and white Polytechnique is the first moment-by-moment recounting of that day. “We like to negate our problems, and we have a lot of trouble expressing our feelings about what happened that day, even so many years later. But rage and violence have their own language, and it needs to be spoken. If you ask me, Polytechnique is a little too late, even; this film should probably have been made a long time ago. For me, [making Polytechnique] was hugely important. It renewed my conviction that cinema has the potential to provide consolation to people in the very depths of their pain.”
Villeneuve’s rediscovered zeal for filmmaking, which has resulted in Polytechnique and another major film this year, comes at the end of a long hiatus. In 1998, when he was thirty, his first feature, Un 32 août sur terre, played at Cannes, and achieved critical and (modest) box-office success. His sophomore effort, Maelström, went on to win the prestigious fipresci prize at the Berlin International Film Festival. Soon afterward, he disappeared.
Well, not entirely. During those years, Villeneuve could be spotted close to home in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood, a young Cannes lion as stay-at-home-dad, with the aquiline, slightly stubbled, soft-lipped handsomeness particular to some French Canadian movie heartthrobs. Though once hailed as Quebec’s hottest young director, the forty-one-year-old has been absent for most of the province’s recent film renaissance, as a new generation of Québécois filmmakers showcased their talents. Ricardo Trogi’s wry, earnest Québec-Montréal and Horloge biologique made waves, as did Jean-Marc Vallée’s explosive C.R.A.Z.Y., Lyne Charlebois’s frenzied Borderline, Louis Bélanger’s earthy Gaz Bar Blues, and Kim Nguyen’s ominous Le Marais and surreal Truffe. Villeneuve’s close friend Philippe Falardeau made Congorama and last year’s C’est pas moi, je le jure!—two movies admired for many of the qualities seen in Villeneuve’s early work.
“After Maelström, I stopped for several years, because I didn’t know what I was doing,” said Villeneuve during the first of several meetings, at a café around the corner from his children’s school. “I had young kids, and that was part of it. I decided to be present for them in a significant way during those years. But it wasn’t just about my private life. To put it bluntly, I thought my writing needed work, and I needed to rediscover my relationship to cinema. I didn’t want to go into a spin where I would just make Maelström 2, Maelström 3, and so on… so I stopped. I went back to school, so to speak, to learn and to reflect, and it was the best decision I ever made. I didn’t care about being [the next big thing in Quebec cinema]. I needed to find subjects that would speak to me. And if I didn’t find them, I didn’t care if I never made another movie.”
His creative passion was reignited by the prospect of adapting Wajdi Mouawad’s play Incendies (Scorched) for the screen. Incendies, which has had successful runs at Montreal’s Théâtre de Quat’Sous and Centaur Theatre Company, as well as in Toronto and abroad, is a magical realist Oedipal tragedy about torture, war, and man’s inhumanity to woman that takes place in an unnamed Middle Eastern country (the playwright was born in Lebanon). Mouawad’s ambitious mise en scène and focus on trans-generational trauma appealed to Villeneuve, for whom discovering the play was an instant coup de foudre (bolt of lightning, or love at first sight). Villeneuve began pre-production on Incendies just before Christmas, while he was still finishing Polytechnique. “Wajdi’s subject is the propagation of rage from one generation to the next, and the way we can be gripped by a spectral fear that isn’t even ours,” he says. “I’m committed to the idea that we aren’t free from our passions, and that in order to attain a certain freedom in our own lives we have to confront our intense feelings of violence.”
Villeneuve shot Polytechnique in the winter of 2008, and last spring his short film Next Floor won the Grand Prix Canal + for best short film at Cannes. Next Floor was produced by Montreal arts impresario Phoebe Greenberg, and shot over a few days in a heritage building in Old Montreal that Greenberg had purchased for renovation as a centre for the arts. She decided that before she gutted her building Villeneuve should have carte blanche to shoot a film there, and to wreak as much havoc as he wanted. With his co-scriptwriter, Jacques Davidts, who wrote Polytechnique, the director conceived a story reminiscent of Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, about a grotesque meal where the guests gather to devour the victuals of unidentified beasts. Between courses, everyone falls through the floor in a riot of plaster, planks, and dust, landing on the floor below, where more glistening carcasses await their dining pleasure.
“When I was a young writer, before I made any films, I existed in a universe much more like Next Floor than 32 août or Maelström,” says Villeneuve. “I love naturalist cinema, but that’s not where I started. I’m much more drawn to the theatrical, and to the relationship the surreal can have with the imagination. Polytechnique is a very realistic movie; the subject demands it. Next Floor was a chance to execute my impulses toward the abstract, and it felt completely freeing. I made it for my kids, because I know they won’t be able to see either of my next two features until they are at least eighteen.”
His early films are about sex and the proximity of death, not necessarily in that order. Both centre on calamitous events in the lives of women—specifically, car accidents that cause his protagonists to drastically change the course of their lives. In 32 août, an elegant perfume model, Simone Prévost (Pascale Bussières), walks away from a vehicular mishap and decides to quit her career and have a baby with her best friend—who agrees, on the condition that they conceive the child in the middle of the Utah desert. They get there, finally—in a taxi. In Maelström, a stylish young boutique owner, Bibiane Champagne (Marie-Josée Croze), is reeling from an abortion. She gets drunk and hits a Norwegian fisherman with her BMW, killing him. When the man’s son comes to Montreal from Norway to mourn him and track down his murderer, they fall in love.
Villeneuve garnishes his narratives with touches of the surreal: August 32, the date and title of Un 32 août sur terre, doesn’t exist in the calendar year. The vivacious irrationality of Simone’s jaunty trip through Utah’s crusty desert doesn’t exactly telegraph the seriousness of his topic; her decisions are tossed off with an insouciance incongruous with the gravity of her near-death experience. And maybe that’s the point. Villeneuve treats his landscapes with as much compassion as he does his characters, or more. The close-ups of human faces are interspersed with wide shots that show the flatness of the desert, with humans appearing as tiny dots on the horizon. At other moments, his people are giants against a burnt, skewed vanishing point that fades into the distance.
With the exception of Incendies, Villeneuve’s latest projects result from other people’s visions of his potential. The actress Karine Vanasse caused a gigantic Quebec-style media frenzy in 2006 when she announced her intention to make a film about the Polytechnique massacre. After a day of sparring with skeptical journalists, when she met with Villeneuve the next morning to offer him the film he was probably the only director in Montreal who had no clue what the meeting was about. He had been sick the previous day and had missed all the headlines.
“Denis was the only director we asked,” says the clear-eyed, twenty-five-year-old Vanasse, who defended her pet project during yet another long day of press interviews when Polytechnique was released in Quebec in February. “For a project like this, you can’t put aside the violence and the horror, but Denis has a sense of poetry—and we wanted a poem about these events, rather than a reportage. In Quebec, when you talk about December 6 it’s so easy to slip into a debate of ideas, because that’s how people are used to processing this tragedy. But Denis navigated it beautifully, with just the right dose of fact and emotion, so that it doesn’t become sentimental or sensational. The film is really focused on what happened, and nothing more than that.”
In a sense, Polytechnique fits perfectly within the continuum of Villeneuve’s movies: his protagonist, a young engineering student named Valérie (played by Vanasse), is a no-nonsense career girl who recalls Maelström’s Bibiane, or Simone from 32 août. Except that Valérie is in no way the cause of her own calamity, and of course she is, to a large extent, real. Valérie and her male counterpart, a classmate named Jean-François, are fictional characters created from an amalgam of oral testimony gathered from survivors of December 6, research that Villeneuve and Davidts gathered over a year of personal interviews. Though the main characters are fictionalized, the chilling voice-over that echoes across quiet scenes of an everyday Montreal school day is starkly real: it is the voice of the Killer (played by Maxim Gaudette), speaking the exact words Marc Lépine wrote in the letter later found on his body, in which he stated his desire to commit suicide, taking as many of the “feminists who ruined his life” as possible into death along with him.
Polytechnique is both a recreation of the events as they unfolded that afternoon, and a poetic meditation on the life- and death-giving properties of violence and fear as experienced in their purest forms. Villeneuve’s rendering is restrained to the point that it’s practically matter-of-fact, and every scene is saturated with the dreadful sense that these things really happened.
Gone are the capricious narrative hooks and bright palettes of 32 août and Maelström; Polytechnique’s grey scale offers a poetic distance, according to the director, that permitted him to show things that would otherwise be unbearable. Gone, for the most part, are the spry and drastic camera angles, as Villeneuve grapples with the moral problem of where to put his camera when shooting the figure of a man who is holding a semi-automatic rifle, so as not to give him too much power in the frame, but not to trivialize him either.
The film begins with Valérie and her roommate, Stéphanie, at home in their apartment, preparing for an arduous but normal day of school. Valérie has an interview for a fellowship in mechanical engineering; she dreams of building airplanes. Stéphanie, who is more skilled at putting outfits together, helps her friend dress up as the serious, capable woman she wishes to someday become. Together they bundle up for a cold Montreal day and emerge from the metro and into the chaotic buzz of the Polytechnique. By the end of the day, one of them will be dead, and one will be changed forever. Meanwhile, in another part of town, a blank-eyed boy starts to compose his letter.
“I realize that the very idea of making a movie about these events is problematic, but to me it also felt necessary,” says Villeneuve. “I also realize it could come off as pretentious—to make a ‘poetic’ film about something that really happened. But I approached the subject with the utmost humility. These are events that happened to us, to people of my generation in my city, and somehow in the act of retelling the story there was a lot of suffering inherent in the process, but there was a healing, too. The subject of the Polytechnique massacre, now, here, is a little bit taboo. There’s a sense that ‘it’s over’ and no one wants to talk about it or touch it. The subject of power relations between men and women in Quebec is like a raw nerve… but I do think there’s a place where cinema can help us talk about these things that haunt us. I think we have to be able to go back into the wound if we are ever to be done with it.”
In Polytechnique, there are two main protagonists, and neither one is the Killer. Besides Vanasse’s Valérie, there is also the figure of her classmate Jean-François, one of the young men in the room who are dismissed by the Killer, who tells the women to stay. Looking back into the room as he leaves, Jean-François is convulsed with panic and guilt. He runs back and forth through the school, first looking for help, and then trying desperately to save his female colleagues as they lie collapsed from wounds inflicted by the gunman. Jean-François, for whom the aftershock of that day doesn’t lead to healing and reconciliation, is Villeneuve’s stand-in for all men, the conduit through which he, and we, are called upon to bear witness.
Some critics have already reacted violently to the fact that Polytechnique does not offer any kind of cohesive explanation or summary of the causes and effects of Lépine’s actions. But for Villeneuve, the very question as to why one should make a film that reopens the old wounds is in itself an answer. In a scene from the middle part of Polytechnique, when the school day is under way and classes are about to begin, Jean-François notices a print of Picasso’s Guernica, clipped to a fence, supposedly part of a poster fair at the school that day. As he stops briefly in front of the image, Villeneuve’s camera pauses with him. “That visual reference of Guernica was important to me, because it corresponds with what my film is trying to do,” says Villeneuve. “I want Polytechnique to bear the responsibility of witnessing. Guernica is Picasso’s refusal of Fascism, but he is also memorializing a massacre in a [Basque village]. And of course, looking at the painting isn’t going to console me. Picasso’s gesture is futile, but also necessary, because it allows me to explore the darkness and attempt the impossibility of consolation.”
Slant
Magazine review
Ed Gonzalez
There's nothing quite like seeing a fetus being
torn and sucked out of a woman especially when your listening to "Good
Morning, Starshine." If you squint and pretend Bibiane
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Plucking its sleek modernism and existential ennui from
Michelangelo Antonioni, its random oddities from David Lynch, and its precious
tale of cosmic coincidence from Krzysztof Kieslowski, Denis Villeneuve's Maelström
doesn't just belong in an arthouse, but suggests an "arthouse" genre
as formulaic as a Western or a heist picture. For a movie about identity to
have no identity of its own leaves the story doubly adrift, lost amid moody
dark-blue imagery, a vacuous lead character, and obscure symbolism, such as the
bloody talking fishes that narrate from the chopping block of a half-naked
Viking. Maelström may have the appearance of high art—it swept
Nitrate
Online (Paula Nechak) review
It's ironic that we're neighbors and yet glimpse so few films
birthed from the creative and iconoclastic cinematic bed of
We never got to see Denis Villeneuve's apocalyptic 1998 film, August 32nd on Earth, despite the presence of international star Pascale Bussieres. And Villeneuve's Maelstrom, which won five Canadian Genie Awards, including best film, direction, cinematography, screenplay and actress, is only now crawling onto half-a-dozen American rep house screens.
Maelstrom is a unique entry from
"He who has killed will be killed," interjects the fish, about to be beheaded by a cleaver. But so happens the cathartic act that will shake up Bibiane's life forever. Maelstrom is about cataclysmic change, shedding the materialism and legacy of having too much rather than self-knowledge and worth. Bibiane, in misery over her carelessness, decides redemption will come by driving her car into the waterway. If she lives "she will begin to live" and indeed, she does survive her self-induced punishment.
As might be expected, Maelstrom is saturated with scenes of surging, gushing water - the shower, a car wash, the ocean: water is the cleansing, purging, purifying entity that washes away demons and the destructive impulse. The manner in which water is used throughout the film lends to a visual feast as well. The film begins its first half hued with sterile whites and blues, and only erodes into warmer tones as Bibiane comes into some sense of place, purpose and awareness and is finally able to shed the sterile, confining chains of a privileged existence and begin, in shucking off the legend of a famous parent, to fathom her own heart and moral compass.
Maelstrom is not a total success as a film, however, despite its wit, visual prowess and intriguing premise. The third act sinks into a morass of clichés and an attempt at cleverness in the final frame falls flat. Yet for the first two acts Villeneuve has crafted a movie that contains a message and metaphor. Bibiane is a symbol for our cultural emptiness, wealth of material possessions, obsession with youth and beauty and the ease and lack of conscience with which we dispose of our guilt and troubles. It is only through an ultimate tragedy that she can wake up from her malaise and begin the process of reevaluating her life.
Actress Marie-Josee Croze, who backslid by co-starring in the fiasco, Battlefield Earth, after the success of Maelstrom, and who has the lead in Ararat, the new Atom Egoyan film, is perilously wonderful as Bibiane. She's a fearless actor, versatile and dimensional and with a strength of will that belies her exterior beauty. She gives us access to the dark and light within Bibiane and isn't at all afraid to be unlikable and hard. It's fun to watch her wake up and open herself to her own vulnerabilities and wants.
Yet even she cannot quite rescue the anticlimactic effect that Maelstrom suffers under. After so much marking of her intimate journey to wholeness, that pesky final act is a slap in the face to the carefully choreographed chaos that has made her trip so compelling. The DVD edition is spare, few frills rather than the usual cast and crew biographies and subtitle selection, but it is pristine and crisp and the color is perfectly balanced despite its second-best status to the movie-theatre experience.
CineScene.com
(Howard Schumann) review
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [3.5/5] Ron Wells
Christian
Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review
The Village Voice [Mark Holcomb]
DVD Talk
(Don Houston) dvd review [1/5]
Eye for
Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review
[2/5]
Variety (Dennis Harvey) review
Washington Post [Ann Hornaday]
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review
Los Angeles Times [Kevin Thomas]
Movie
review, 'Maelstrom' Michael Wilmington from The Chicago Tribune
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
James Rocchi at
Directed by
Polytechnique Denis Sequin from Screendaily
Melora Koepke The Poetry of Grief, a profile of the director from Walrus magazine, May 26, 2009
Polytechnique Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack
Cannes.
"Polytechnique" David
Hudson at
Ray Bennett at
Rob Nelson at
aka: Scorched
The mood is quickly shifted to the present, where an Arab-born Canadian brother and sister, Simon (Maxim Gaudette) and Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin), sit in a notary’s office (Rémy Girard) in Montreal and hear the strangely unique terms of their mother’s will, handing each letters to deliver to family members they never knew existed, Simon to an unknown brother and Jeanne to the father she understood was dead, as only in this way will the mother unearth the buried family secrets and fulfill a lifelong promise to break the continuing cycle of violence and regret. Simon, something of a self-centered grouch throughout, is disgusted by the whole ordeal and finds it a waste of time, the ravings of an embarrassing and unstable mother who never “acted” normal, while the more inquisitive Jeanne immediately sets out for the Middle East in search of her mother’s home town. During her inquiry, her mother’s life of Nawal (Lubna Azabal) as a young girl materializes before our eyes, where her pregnancy with a Muslim is a source of shame to the family, one that requires drastic measures and her exile from the region, but only after she leaves her orphaned baby behind after birth. But years later, she vows to reunite with that lost child, searching for him in a Southern region that has succumbed to annihilation and war, where empty burnt out buildings are still smoldering. As a Christian, she is easily allowed passage back into the troubled region, as there is a logjam of families waiting at a checkpoint frantically trying to get out. What she discovers, however, are Christians massacring Muslims, where the cross around her neck is the only thing that saves her on a bus filled with Muslim women who are all killed on the spot by a roving gang of Christian nationalists before being set on fire, a horribly brutal atrocity she is forced to feebly witness that rocks her to the very core. Interestingly, after all this time, when Jeanne finds her mother’s village, she is bluntly told by the women elders that she is not welcome there, as they are still teeming with resentment, indicating she may be searching for her father, but she knows nothing about her mother.
In fact, no truer words are spoken anywhere in the film, as Nawal developed an intense hatred for the Christian nationalists, where murder and massacres are routinely attributed to the name of Christianity, including infamous refugee camp massacres, eventually being sent to prison for aiding the Muslim subversives, becoming part of a radical resistance movement. As a French-speaking Canadian, Jeanne is way over her head when she begins to uncover even the tiniest pieces of reality, calling her recalcitrant brother to join her, as this was beyond her capacity to comprehend. And like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the further they inquire into this unspeakable realm, the less they understand about their mother, as she was an active participant in the civil war, the consequences of which have only grown immeasurably over time, leaving her family involved, with the siblings no closer to finding what happened to the missing family members, who may have perished somewhere along the way. Like good investigative journalism, the director unleashes only bits and pieces at a time, providing the full ramifications at each stage, where the audience, through flashbacks, have a clearer picture of the kind of desperate life Nawal lived, constantly besieged by forces that were greater than her, but refusing to weaken her resolve, still desperately searching for her missing son, showing no signs of the eccentric portrait held by her family in Montreal, who themselves are getting a taste of the mosaic of ethnic conflicts in the region. The Radiohead song is chillingly utilized several times in the film, each time adding surprising depth and coherency, where there’s a boiling rage still simmering just under the surface, where the director has the audience by the throat and never for a second loosens his grip on the build up of tension and suspense. There is never any indication that this originated from a play, as the powerful tone of authenticity feels like it’s based on a real life experience. Both Lubna Azabal and Désormeaux-Poulin match the elevated intensity with their outstanding performances, but it’s the director who amazingly pulls together all the mysterious elements, sad and heartbreaking, plunging headfirst into this complex and dense material yet achieving balance, with nothing less than spectacular results.
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
Based on a play by Wajdi Mouawad, Incendies follows twin siblings Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) as they're forced to delve into their family's mysterious past after their mother passes away - with the film subsequently detailing Jeanne's ongoing efforts at uncovering the truth. (The movie also boasts a series of flashbacks revolving around the wartime exploits of Jeanne and Simon's mother.) There's little doubt that Incendies does demand a great deal of patience from the viewer, as director Denis Villeneuve has infused the movie's opening half hour with a deliberately paced sensibility that's exacerbated by a lack of clear context and exposition (ie one's attempts at figuring out just what's going on or what's at stake for the characters tend to fall flat at the movie's outset). It's only as Incendies crosses into its engaging midsection - triggered by an absolutely riveting sequence aboard a bus - that the film begins to morph into an unexpectedly engrossing drama, with the slow-but-steady emphasis on revelatory instances of exposition ratcheting up the viewer's interest on a progressively consistent basis. And although the film seems to hit its emotional peak with about half an hour left to go, Incendies concludes with a last-minute twist that effectively compensates for its slightly overlong running time - which, in the final analysis, cements the film's place as a compelling and downright powerful piece of work from one of Canada's most promising up and coming directors.
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
The last will and testament of an emotionally remote mother
sparks an investigation into the past in Incendies, Denis Villeneuve’s
adaptation of Wajdi Mouawad’s play. That inquiry is carried out by
French-Canadian Arab twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim
Gaudette) after they hear from notary and family friend Jean (Rémy Girard) that
their mom Nawal’s (Lubna Azabel) final wish was for them to deliver letters to
the father they thought was dead and the brother they didn’t know existed. These
instructions lead the amenable Jeanne and intractable Simon to leave their
native
New York Magazine [David Edelstein]
For two hours, Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies plays like
an essentially realistic—and riveting—mystery. It’s a dual story: of
French-Canadian brother-and-sister twins compelled by the will of their dead
mother to locate a father they thought died decades earlier and a brother they
never knew existed; and, in flashbacks, their mother’s early life, careering
from bloody horror to bloody horror amid right-wing Christian militias
massacring Muslims and Muslims massacring Christians right back. (The country
goes unnamed but is obviously
Incendies is based on a play by Wajdi Mouawad, who fled
Azabal’s performance is beyond my powers of description, her character bludgeoned to the point where her self-containment is a matter of survival. The movie contains one attack on a bus that builds to a hideous climax, and it’s rife with sexual assaults and the deaths of children. But Villeneuve’s handling of these scenes is subtle, nonexploitative. The opening, in which battered young boys have their heads shaved by what appears to be a Muslim militia, is set to Radiohead’s “You and Whose Army?” and ends with one boy staring balefully into the camera—a stare that eats into the mind. This is an extraordinary film.
Row Three » Review: Incendies Marina Antunes
The time has come for an introduction to a great Canadian talent. Some may recognize his name from the fantastic short film Next Floor but after only three full length features, Denis Villeneuve has marked himself as a force to be reckoned with and any filmmaker who manages to shock with each outing is well worth a little extra attention. And shock he does.
It usually comes at a combination of things: powerful story, exquisite cinematography, brilliant editing, top notch acting and the feeling that the film is unfolding exactly as the director intended with every nuance carefully measured to achieve maximum affect. The results are, without fail, spectacular. Polytechnique, Villeneuve’s dramatization of the 1989 Montreal Massacre, was powerful and respectful while bringing to the screen a terrible tragedy. I was spent walking away from the film and though I loved it, I haven’t found the energy to revisit it – I’m just not sure my psyche could handle it. A year later, Villeneuve has struck again with a film that is no less powerful.
Adapted from Wajdi Mouawad’s award winning play, Incendies is a tale of mystery shrouded in pain. Upon her death, Nawal Marwan leaves behind some very explicit instructions. She is to be buried without a casket, naked, with her face turned to the earth and no headstone. For her children, the twins Simon and Jeanne, she leaves a puzzle: two letters to be delivered to their father and brother respectively – a brother they didn’t know existed and a father they thought to be dead. Simon is angry and uncooperative but Jeanne, a mathematician, is encouraged to fulfil her mother’s dying wishes (pure math won’t flow through a preoccupied mind) and embarks on a trip to the middle east to solve the mystery of her family’s past and what she finds is hardly your run of the mill family drama. Anyone familiar with the play will no doubt already be familiar with this story but for those, like myself, to whom this is new ground, Incendies delivers a mother of a bombshell that left reeling for most of the film’s final ten minutes and speechless through the closing credits.
Villeneuve, like a handful of truly masterful directors, draws you into the world he creates on screen and for two hours, you follow these characters through one harrowing ordeal after another to the point that when you think you can’t handle any more, he lands the sucker punch that takes you down. Even here, where the story is carefully crafted to flow between past and present with little more than a change of cars and outfits, there’s never a feeling of being lost or confused. And then there are the performances most notably that of Lubna Azabal as Nawal Marwan, a role which requires her to oscillate between determined and fragile, much of that emotion coming through in her eyes.
Aside from the fact that Marwan’s story is, in and of itself, captivating, Incendies also questions our notions of love and hate while highlighting the destruction of war, even in the aftermath of survival.
Brilliant isn’t a word to be applied lightly but Villeneuve’s work, not just here but as an entirety, is brilliant and Incendies, as difficult as it is to watch, is not to be missed.
"Incendies" Kevin N. Laforest from the
With "Polytechnique", Denis Villeneuve finally
shook off all his film school tics and misguided attempts at profundity,
instead making a brilliantly crafted picture that took a dark page from History
and made it feel immediate and personal. It wasn't a flawless film, but it
stuck with you. "Incendies" goes even further, both in its filmmaking
mastery and thematic depth. It's still not a perfect film, but it's damn close
to being a great one nonetheless.
Of course, you have to give some of the credit to Wajdi Mouawad, who
wrote and directed the original play this is based on. Then again, from what I
understand, Villeneuve did a real adaptation job on it, stripping it of all its
theatricality and making it truly cinematic.
Right from the opening, a chilling dialogue-free sequence set to Radiohead's
You and Whose Army that shows Middle Eastern boy soldiers being groomed
for combat, "Incendies" is a visually striking experience. Villeneuve
and his faithful cinematographer André Turpin have always been known for
their ability to create beautiful images, but never have they been so evocative
and lyrical, in part thanks to the starkness of the Jordan locations where the
film was shot.
One of the film's weaknesses is the casting of the actors playing those who
initially seem to be the protagonists, non-identical twins Jeanne et Simon.
Now, the fact that Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin and Maxim Gaudette
aren't Middle Eastern may seem bothersome at first, but I went along with it.
Hey, if All-American Charlton Heston can play a Mexican in "Touch of
Evil", I don't see why Québécois can't be convincing as Arabs. No, what
did bother me a bit is that I just don't think they're all that great here.
They're good enough, I guess, but some line deliveries and reaction shots of
theirs made me cringe, and if the film managed to move me, it's generally in
spite of them...
...and because, thankfully, it turns out that they're not
actually the protagonists of "Incendies" - not the only ones, anyway.
Most of the film belongs to the amazing Lubna Abazal, who plays the
twins' mother, Nawal. Even though she dies early on, leaving a will that sets
off Simon and Jeanne's search for the father they thought was dead and for a
brother they didn't even know existed, the numerous flashbacks that make up the
bulk of the story allow us to see her harrowing journey through life, which is
full of disturbing experiences I wouldn't dare spoil here.
There's a Tarantinoesque quality to the non-chronological structure of the
screenplay, not to mention its use of chapter titles, but of course, the tone
and the actual content of the story are very different. "Incendies"
could be described as a Greek tragedy set against the backdrop of a war movie.
It's ostensibly about the Lebanese Civil War, but unless you're already well
versed in the complex series of conflicts between Muslims and Christians that
went on from the 1970s to 1990, don't expect to fully understand the details of
the historical context. The film is intentionally vague about the specifics (
As mentioned, the parts involving the twins aren't as compelling, but
everything that has to do with their mother is riveting. So much so that by the
end of "Incendies", Nawal, as heartbreakingly portrayed by Lubna
Abazal, casts a shadow over the whole film, even when she isn't on screen.
Villeneuve has done his best work yet here, but I'm sure he himself would admit
that that he couldn't have done it without this incredible actress.
The Reel Bits [Sarah Ward and Richard Gray]
“INCENDIES” – A HAMMER TO NAIL REVIEW | The Filmmaker Magazine Blog Michael Lerman
Kansas City Pitch Michael Sicinski
Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin
Incendies,
Water for Elephants, Meek's Cutoff, The Greatest Movie ... Joe Morganstern from The Wall Street Journal
Moving Pictures
Magazine [Elliot V. Kotek] at
Slant Magazine [Andrew Schenker]
Incendies
- Talking Pictures Howard Schumann
from Talking Pictures
Incendies | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Tasha Robinson
Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
Don't Do Acid, Guys [Gaël Schmidt-Cléach]
Urban Cinefile (Australia) [Louise Keller + Andrew L. Urban]
Film-Forward.com [Nora Lee Mandel]
Cinema Autopsy [Thomas Caldwell]
Review: Incendies Harvey S. Karten from CompuServe
the m0vie blog [Darren Mooney]
Incendies: movie review - CSMonitor.com Peter Rainer
Toronto Film Scene [Sarah Gopaul]
Box Office Magazine [Ed Scheid]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]
Tonight at the Movies [John C. Clark]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Georgia Straight [Mark Harris]
Critic's Notebook [Martin Tsai]
Sound On Sight Zornitsa Staneva
Author
of Incendies, the play, praises movie version - thestar.com Nelson Wyatt interviews playwright Wajdi
Mouawad from The Toronto Star,
Denis
Villeneuve talks about 'Incendies' - Los Angeles Times Glenn Whipp interviews the director from The LA Times,
Conversation:
Denis Villeneuve, Director of 'Incendies' | Art Beat ... Jeffrey Brown video interview of the director
from PBS,
Digital
Nation: Amid the rubble, 'Incendies' locates heart of a ... Gary Dreztka interviews the director from
Digital Nation,
"Incendies
is a dialogue between past and present", Denis ... Bijan Tehrani interview with the director
from Cinema Without Borders,
The Hollywood Reporter [Stephen Farber] at Telluride
Entertainment Weekly [Owen Gleiberman]
Time Out New York [Joshua Rothkopf]
Incendies:
A poetic tale of violent trauma and reconciliation ... Liam Lacey from The Globe and the Mail
"Villeneuve’s
Incendies wins eight Genies, including best picture" Gayle MacDonald from The Globe and the Mail,
Incendies leads Jutra nominations - Montreal Gazette Brendan Kelly from The Montreal Gazette
Incendies sweeps stellar Jutra field - Montreal Gazette Brendan Kelly from The Montreal Gazette
Movie review: 'Incendies' - Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey
Incendies :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews
Movie
Review - 'Incendies' - 'Incendies,' Based on Wajdi Mouawad ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times,
Lebanese Civil War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Lebanese Civil War Tanbourit
Lebanon (Civil War 1975-1991) Global Security
Lebanon urged to investigate civil war missing | Amnesty International April 14, 2011
Wajdi Mouawad - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wajdi Mouawad biography from Theater Data Base
Incendies | Wajdi Mouawad | Auteurs | Contemporain playwright profile
You And Who's Army? - Radiohead YouTube 3:14
Radiohead
- Like Spinning Plates video YouTube
(
Like Susan Bier, Lone Scherfig, Tom Tykwer, Nimrod Antal, Oliver Hirschbiegel, Wong Kar-wai, John Woo, Guillermo del Toro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and the latest Nicholas Winding Refn effort before him, not to mention countless others, this is another example of a Hollywood flameout by a terrific foreign director, in this case a Canadian from Quebec making his first big budget Hollywood movie with a $50 million dollar budget and what appears to be a terrific cast, and despite the sleek look captured by veteran cinematographer Roger Deakins, one of the best in the business, the film starts out with a certain amount of intrigue before taking a nosedive into the kind of sadistic territory that America is starting to represent to the world. If charges of torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were not bad enough, Hollywood churns out even more deplorable violent imagery, where at some point one would have to ask who is responsible for writing this kind of depressing stuff, and who wants to film it and make it into a movie? While this movie may have earned back nearly half its production cost in the first week, word of mouth is going to kill it, as this is not a feelgood movie, or a complicated whodunit, but it’s a director who knows how to build suspense, but to what end? Some of the early reviews suggested this was a tense, white knuckles thriller that would have viewers on the edge of their seats, and the story itself, written by Aaron Guzikowski, is a suspense thriller whose interest quickly evaporates, forcing the audience to literally endure nearly two hours of torture that never seems to end. While it may have been an attempt to resurrect the torture argument before the American public, who felt this was a topic of entertainment, or a subject we need to revisit? More likely this is the kind of story idea floating around Hollywood, as torture porn has found its way into the mainstream of the movie industry, viewed by audiences around the world, so no one even thinks to question whether it’s a good idea anymore, they just re-use formulaic ideas from existing financially successful films.
More than a suspense thriller, or even a police procedural,
this is actually a vigilante movie, one where Charles Bronson in the 70’s would
resort to the same kind of savage brutality as the bad guys, but because he was
always on the side of good, avenging his daughter or protecting neighborhoods
and families that the police were disturbingly unable to protect, so audiences
accepted his vicious overkill, including a hair-trigger temper and near samurai
speed and skill with a gun. Despite
heavy obstacles set in his path, Bronson would always kickass and save the day,
becoming an avenging angel, much like the perception of Travis Bickle at the
end of Scorsese’s Taxi
Driver (1976), or Clint Eastwood in his 70’s and 80’s American
westerns. But America after 9/11 has
become a more divided political landscape filled with moral uncertainty, where
Hollywood has resorted to apolitical heroes that include mythical animated
strongmen and women as well as futuristic space adventure epics that save the
universe, where comic book superheroes make megabucks at the box office. Even Woody Allen has spent the better part of
a decade away from
In a weird casting choice, Hugh Jackman plays Keller Dover,
a carpenter barely scraping out a living in the suburbs, but also a hard corps
American survivalist with fundamentalist religious roots, whose family motto is
“Pray for the best but prepare for the worst,” words he takes to heart,
ingraining the seriousness of it into his teenage son with a constant
drumbeat. Dover is the kind of driven,
no-nonsense figure who takes things to the limit, but is also a self-righteous
man that refuses to acknowledge his own mistakes, believing it is his manly
duty to remain strong for his wife and children. The cast is superlative, one of the best ensemble
casts seen all year, though only a few stand out, where one of the most
egregious crimes of the film is the criminal underuse of some of the actors,
especially those of color. Set in the
cold and rainy hills of
Dover, however, hounds the suspect, eventually kidnapping
and brutally torturing him, keeping him locked in an abandoned building,
absolutely positive that he knows something.
As there are no other suspects, the film is largely about taking the law
into your own hands, becoming judge and jury, where the merciless brutality
reveals nothing, only more horrific acts.
When the Birch family acquiesces to the gruesome methods, literally
aiding and abetting, the moral center of the film is blown to bits, becoming
more about the tactics of torture than child abduction. With Dover representing the fundamentalist
conservative, with the liberal Birch family so easily drawn into the fray as
well, the film suggests all bets are off on personal ethics when it’s your kid
that’s been abducted, where in desperation you’ll do anything, cross any moral
line, resort to the ugliest of human impulses short of murder in order to force
the victim to tell you what you want to hear.
The rest of the film concerns itself with human depravity, even as it
continues to build suspense for the missing girls. Even as evidence suggests there may be
another suspect,
Film Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]
Denis Villeneuve comes to
It's hard to say where exactly Prisoners goes wrong, though Dover's dubious reason for kidnapping Alex when Loki is in hot pursuit of a more credible suspect turns out to be an ominous hint of the irrational behaviour to come. Shot through grimy windows and near-constant rainfall, this is, thanks to Roger Deakins, surely the most beautifully-lensed and smartly-composed thriller to come down the pike since Zodiac; Deakins could easily get a co-director credit. The procedural terror of the early moments, as Loki sets about finding his man or woman before time runs out, is also strong stuff, not as precise as David Fincher's depiction of data-mining crime scenes, but about as absorbing.
Too bad, then, about Aaron Guzikowski's sloppy script, which loses track of key characters for long stretches--Loki seems to be breaking the fourth wall when he complains to his superior that he needs to know where everyone is, damnit--and throws out increasingly outlandish plot complications as it struggles to solve its own mystery, from a runaway gun to a casket full of snakes. Neither of these developments has anything to do with the torture alley Villeneuve initially walks us down, making the last act's hopeless attempts to circle back to the poor boy in the box and say something grand about cycles of abuse a little insulting. Although you could blame this insincere showboating on Guzikowski, the howlingly bad justification the real kidnapper gives for the grand scheme feels like vintage Villeneuve: a so-smart-it's-stupid reveal to match the twist that one and one might just might make one in Incendies, which ended in a po-faced rendition of "I Am My Own Grandpa."
There is a scene about two-thirds of the way through Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners that sums up pretty much everything that’s wrong with the picture. Here’s how it goes: Two little girls have been abducted. While the parents (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) of one of them are out, the prime suspect for the crime breaks into their home. Their teenage daughter is at her most vulnerable: naked and taking a bath, talking on her cell phone. Villeneuve cuts away. We then see Howard and Davis return home. They call out for their daughter; she does not answer. They call out more, open doors, flip on lights. A good half-minute of screen time is spent on this exercise before they break down the bathroom door — and discover her walking out, chastising them for not telling her they were leaving. No explanation is provided for her lengthy silence and lack of response, because there isn’t a logical one. She was inexplicably quiet so that Villeneuve could build in a cheap, easy moment of faux-tension that wouldn’t have made the cut in a second-tier horror movie.
But Prisoners is full of stuff like that. After a promising and evocative opening, full of snowy woodlands and torrential downpours and pangs of impending doom, it is slowly revealed as an increasingly sloppy thriller, filled with obvious clues, laughable red herrings, and halfhearted “shock” reveals, played at a snail’s pace that lets far too much air into the narrative. It’s the kind of mystery that the Law & Order crew could bang out in an hour (including commercials), but because Villeneuve has filled the ensemble with Serious Actors, drafted the great Roger Deakins to photograph the film in heavy-hearted darkness, and directed with an air of stifling dread, it’s somehow being treated as first-class filmmaking. It’s not.
The bait-and-switch is easy to understand, though, and there are isolated elements, here and there, that work. Deakins shoots the early scenes, while we’re waiting for the shoe to drop, in a flat, everyday style that’s tremendously unsettling. Paul Dano finds the right key for his bespectacled creep, and never lets you get a read on him. The sequences following the abduction convey a palpable sense of hopelessness. Thought-provoking questions are posed about the troublesome nature of certainty. And it’s got Viola Davis, which almost any movie gets a pass for.
But even she can’t make sense of her half-written character. At one key moment, she discovers that her husband and the other girl’s father (Hugh Jackman) have been conducting their own, morally questionable investigation. She shows up at Jackman’s door, pounding, furious. “What the hell were you thinking?” she demands. He doesn’t answer. And then, after a micro-pause, her voice softens, and she says she wants to come along. There’s no possible motivation for the immediate 180-degree turn; it’s perhaps the most puzzling moment in a film full of them. (Here’s another puzzler: why she and Howard get so much less screen time than Jackman and Maria Bello. Oh, wait, we know the answer to that.)
The rest of the cast fares worse. Howard’s noble teary-eyed schtick has grown tiresome. Jackman seems to have confused “loud acting” with “serious acting.” Jake Gyllenhaal has his moments, but his performance is sidetracked by several odd character choices, like the slow, pronounced, deliberate way he blinks his eyes (it’s as weird and distracting as it sounds) and his ill-fitting wardrobe; stuff like this isn’t acting, it’s affectation.
And yet, somehow, it’s getting raves. David Denby calls it “a somberly impressive thriller” that “digs into the dark cellars of American paranoia and aggression” (but, y’know, Denby). Rex Reed instructs you to “Prepare to be electrified!”; he dubs it “the must-see sensation of the year” and warns, “you will be frozen to your seat with awe” (but, y’know, Reed). Most shockingly, Prisoners took second runner-up at the Toronto International Film Festival. There’s an expression, “festival goggles,” applied to films that lose their luster once out of the rarified film festival air. I’m not saying that’s what happened with Prisoners. But it’s the best explanation I can come up with.
If anyone thought Denis Villeneuve's attacks on his favorite targets might be tempered by his move from the art house to Hollywood-thriller territory, Prisoners should shut that line of thinking down in a hurry.
Though the setting is new — working-class
The vehicle for the director's investigations is similar, too: a tense, many-layered, plot-heavy mystery that he uses to apply a vise grip to the viewer's attention while he hammers away at those themes. In Prisoners, it's the Thanksgiving abduction of two little girls, and the subsequent investigations into their whereabouts.
There's the official inquiry, led by the intense and idiosyncratic Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal). Then there's the unofficial one — a vigilante campaign waged furiously by Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) and reluctantly by Franklin Birch (Terrence Howard), the girls' fathers.
Villeneuve is undeniably a master of slow-build tension. His patient deliberation is such that each time he pushes his camera in, he might as well be turning the crank on a jack-in-the-box, slowly, so slowly that the wait for the next note in the song seems like a breathless eternity. I spent the first hour and 45 minutes of the film nervous, uneasy, fearing the impending doom in my chest.
But Villeneuve's film runs another 45 minutes beyond that, and that's where the strings attached to the director's initially expert manipulations begin to show.
The film's moral and political issues share nearly equal footing with the machinations of the plot for much of the early going. That sometimes risks turning the film's subtext a little too much into the text; long shots held on, say, the cross hanging from Keller's mirror or the gas mask in his basement punch up his Christianity and his survivalist impulses, respectively, in a way that ties them tightly — unfairly? — to the lengths he'll end up going to in his effort to save his daughter.
Those lengths will eventually include some decidedly extralegal measures — vigilantism is too tidy a word for the tactics Keller employs — and it's no stretch to say that the abandoned small-town apartment building he uses as a kind of secret base of operations is an authorial stand-in for both Guantanamo and a CIA rendition site. But as unsubtle as both plotting and subtext are in this early part of the movie, it's as if they cancel each other out, the one distracting from the other just enough to make both work.
As we near the finish, though, the film grows less concerned with its moral conflicts and more with making the plot's too many puzzle pieces come together neatly. Now we notice plot conveniences like the fact that Loki is constantly showing up in dangerous situations without asking for backup.
It doesn't ruin the film, but it does undercut that stellar first two-thirds, as well as a pair of truly remarkable performances from Jackman and Gyllenhaal. The former, an actor of nearly impermeable likability, manages to invoke feelings of both sympathy and antipathy — genuine sorrow for his plight, combined with a sense of being morally filthy just for having watched his actions.
Meanwhile, Gyllenhaal's Loki is a rich collaboration between the actor, wardrobe and makeup to create a character with enough back story to fill a few movies of his own. So much so, in fact, that it's frustrating how little of that background comes to light to inform this movie. As it is, Loki's tattoos, his buttoned-up but tieless sartorial inclinations, his slicked-back hair, his tics — they're all idiosyncrasies masterfully rendered, but weirdly lacking context.
Loki is a skilled creation, but lacking that sense of why, it's hard not to think of him as an artistic construct rather than a character. The same goes for Prisoners, a work of impressive craftsmanship that winds up making us think too much about how it was fashioned rather than what it has to say.
Sight & Sound [Kate Stables] November 2013
'Prisoners,' 'Adore,' 'Insidious: Chapter 2,' and more horrors - Grantland Wesley Morris
“Prisoners”: Hugh Jackman, nightmare American dad - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir
Jake Gyllenhaal Captivates in Overly Ambitious 'Prisoners' - The Wire Richard Lawson
Prisoners' men suffer ambitiously - Page 1 - Movies - Minneapolis ... Amy Nicholson
Telluride Review: 'Prisoners' Starring Hugh Jackman & Jake ... Rodrigo Perez from The Playlist
In Review Online [Kathie Smith]
Review: Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal both dig deep ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny
Prisoners / The Dissolve Noel Murray
1NFLUX Magazine [Steve Pulaski]
At Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]
PopcornReel.com [Omar P.L. Moore]
David Denby: “Prisoners” and “Salinger” Reviews : The New Yorker David Denby
Movie Review: Prisoners -- Vulture David Edelstein
Prisoners - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
Prisoners | Reviews | Screen John Hazelton
TIFF 2013 Review: PRISONERS Is a Tense Thriller With a ... - Twitch Ryland Aldrich
And So it Begins... [Alex Withrow]
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Paste Magazine Tim Grierson
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Prisoners: Telluride Review - The Hollywood Reporter Stephen Farber
'Prisoners' Review: Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal Power ... - Variety Scott Foundas
'Prisoners' movie review: A well-made, pulpy ... - Washington Post Ann Hornaday
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Movie review: 'Prisoners' is captivating and relentless - Los Angeles ... Betsy Sharkey from The LA Times
Prisoners Movie Review & Film Summary (2013) | Roger Ebert Sheila O’Malley
'Prisoners' Stars Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal - NYTimes.com A.O. Scott
Chaos
is order yet undeciphered.
—The
Double (O
Homem Duplicado), by José Saramago, 2002
Based on the novel The Double by José Saramago, whose work was also the source material to Fernando Meirelles’ BLINDNESS (2008), the film is adapted by a Javier Guillón script and Nicolas Bolduc’s edgy cinematography which gives the unsettling futuristic appearance of looming high rise buildings caught in a yellowish brown haze, where in one hallucinogenic image, a giant spider is seen hovering over a gloomy landscape of the city, where the overhanging trolley lines resemble a spider’s web, as if somehow this is an alternate nightmarish version of what’s real. Because of the similar features of the two wives, both attractive young blonds, with marital difficulties expressed in each case, it’s easy to see how these two could be confused as well, except that Helen is noticeably pregnant. Because her husband is hiding behind this incident, Helen grows curious about this other guy, following him to school, where she sees for herself how one is like the cloned copy of the other. Actually, as the film progresses, the men switch identities and Adam exhibits more of the ruthless behavior of Anthony, suggesting interior compulsions that can’t be controlled coming from the subconscious, where we are reminded of Adam’s earlier lecture describing a totalitarian system, claiming one reason they succeed is that “They censor any means of individual expression.” The film plays out as an allegorical nightmare, turning raw, graphic, and intensely real by the end, with an unforgettable final shot. Certainly with an exact double and a parallel existence, it’s suggestive of what life would be like under a totalitarian system, as one could never be an individual again. Saramago was three years old when a military coup overthrew the Portuguese government, living under a fascist regime for the next 48 years, where this is a common theme explored throughout most of his work, “We live in a dark age, when freedoms are diminishing, when there is no space for criticism, when totalitarianism—the totalitarianism of multinational corporations, of the marketplace—no longer even needs an ideology, and religious intolerance is on the rise. Orwell’s ‘1984’ is already here.” If history has a way of repeating itself, fascist regimes occur again and again throughout history, where these historic parallels are patterns of connecting threads, like a spider’s web, where we are caught unawares in a trap of authoritarian rule that has us in its clutches before we realize far too late what’s happening.
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
Based on José Saramago's The Double, Enemy follows Jake Gyllenhaal's bored college professor as he discovers the existence of an exact double one fateful evening - with the movie subsequently detailing the weird and sometimes inexplicable relationship that ensues between the two men. Filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, working from Javier Gullón's screenplay, makes his less-than-coherent intentions clear right from the get-go, as Enemy opens with a striking yet baffling sequence that effectively (and efficiently) sets a tone of oddly-engrossing confusion that persists from start to finish. The movie's compulsively watchable vibe is heightened by both Nicolas Bolduc's dark, Fincheresque visuals and Gyllenhaal's impressively subtle performance, with, in terms of the latter, the actor doing a superb job of stepping into the shoes of two vastly different characters. And despite Villeneuve's decision to employ as deliberate a pace as one could envision, Enemy's grip on the viewer doesn't begin to falter until around the halfway mark - as the film is, past that point, increasingly suffused with elements of a head-scratching and downright nonsensical nature. (It is, for example, awfully difficult to accept or make sense of the protagonist's easy acceptance of his doppelganger's malicious actions.) The movie's lack of context, coupled with an ongoing emphasis on oddball images (ie what's with all the spider stuff?), ultimately confirms its place as an art-house thriller that's often too off-the-wall for its own good, although, by that same token, it's hard to deny that the film, which boasts an impressively memorable final few minutes, lingers in one's consciousness long after the end credits have rolled.
From the many matched antagonists of noveldom to the “identical cousins” of The Patty Duke Show, doppelgängers have helped us explore the mysteries of selfhood through exaggerated artifice. In melodrama, the “evil twin” concept allows actors to compress the extreme ends of their résumés into a single screen (and lets soap-opera producers bring back actors whose characters they’ve bumped off).
All those factors are at play here, although “play” is a stretch when describing this serious-as-cancer take on finding one’s mirror image. You know those movies in which one character calls a long-unseen family member from a payphone and doesn’t know quite what to say? There’s about an hour of that dynamic here, which definitely builds tension, but if you’re Spain’s Javier Gullón, writing for Incendies director Denis Villeneuve—the Quebec veteran who also made Prisoners—it can be a cop-out when it comes to creating meaningful dialogue.
For Prisoners star Jake Gyllenhaal, a paucity of language isn’t
that crucial, since he gets to be two seemingly identical persons wandering
across a yellow-skied
In Frenemy—I mean, Enemy, the filmmakers have fashioned a purposely blank, slow, and style-heavy puzzle that will appeal to the 20-year-old Kafka fan in us all: “The Metamorphosis” meets Eyes Wide Shut, you could say. The movie is too cold-blooded to make the case for eros being man’s masked and kinky motivator, but the shock ending certainly leaves you with questions worth looking at twice, or more.
Denis Villeneuve’s “Enemy” might have the scariest ending of any film ever made. While such a proclamation no doubt seems both wildly hyperbolic and uselessly broad (how to compare the sudden revulsion of “Don’t Look Now”’s final shots with the icy, germinating dread imbued into the haunting last shot of a film like “The White Ribbon”?), viewers of certain predispositions and phobias will invariably sign off on such a statement as “Enemy” abruptly cuts to its closing titles.
A strange and agreeably pretentious adaptation of the late José Saramago’s novel “The Double”, Villeneuve’s film is faithful to the source material in broad strokes, but also enjoyably overeager to spotlight and sexualize the text’s most sinister undercurrents. One of two Villeneuve films starring Jake Gyllenhaal at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival (the more polished but less interesting “Prisoners” being the other), “Enemy” begins like the kind of movie that a slumming Brian De Palma might take to Sundance. The opening title card tells us that “Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered”, a silly pearl of wisdom that needlessly complicates our understanding of the film that follows, but also anticipates the dream logic with which the story will unfold.
Jake Gyllenhaal is Adam Bell, a history professor who lives with his
girlfriend (Mélanie Laurent as Mary) in an anonymous high-rise apartment in
downtown
They do, however, live very different lives. For one thing, Anthony is married (the compulsively watchable Sarah Gadon plays his very pregnant wife, Helen), and where Adam is almost too neurotic to function, Anthony is rather uninhibited. Indeed, it doesn’t take him very long to realize hat he could conceivably seduce Adam’s girlfriend without her being hip to the fact that she’s having sex with a stranger, and the thought is immediately too appealing for him to resist. Meanwhile, Adam’s dreams become increasingly ominous, their horrific imagery exponentially growing in size – one particular shot, which will hopefully remain unspoiled in the lead-up to the film’s release, captures in a single instant the scale that “Pacific Rim” failed to achieve at any point over the course of its two hours.
But the Cronenbergian exercise in splintered personas and metamorphosing bodies is ultimately more concerned with neuroses than plot, its strange but simple narrative almost exclusively devoted to pitting male fear against male desire in a horrifying war of attrition. Likely to prove far more compelling for thirtysomething men than any other demographic, “Enemy” is first and foremost an extended allegory for male infidelity and the permanent residue of guilt that it can leave in its wake.
Gyllenhaal, here delivering both of his best performances (okay, perhaps
save for “Zodiac”. And “
Brimming with borderline ridiculous portent from the very beginning, “Enemy”’s wry hold is a thoroughly unexpected one, as though the film’s self-seriousness is deliberately intended to disarm the viewer into taking it less seriously. Villeneuve wants you to laugh, he wants you to drop your guard, he wants to earn your vulnerability and then prey on it, a spider building an intricate nest in some dark corner of the room you’d never think to check. To that end, “Enemy” is a deviously sneaky success – a blundering B-movie with a wicked bite, Villeneuve’s seedy wank resolves itself as a venomous and universally relatable portrait of how self-analysis can be the quickest road to self-harm. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but it sure is easier to live.
Oh, and did I mention that ending?
Enemy and The Double: Two New Movies About ... - Slate Dana Stevens
What Should We Make of Enemy 's Shocking Ending? - Slate Forrest Wickman
Enemy / The Dissolve Jordan Hoffman
Slant Magazine [Jesse Cataldo]
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Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
Review: Jake Gyllenhaal doubles down in sly ... - HitFix Guy Lodge
Film Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]
Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]
'Enemy' Review: One of Hollywood's Best Known ... - Pajiba Dustin Rowles
[Review] Enemy - The Film Stage Jared Mobarak
And So it Begins... [Alex Withrow]
DVDTalk.com - theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
Next Projection Parker Mott
Movie Mezzanine [Christopher Runyon]
ENEMY Movie Review - Badass Digest Devin Faraci
Twitchfilm.com/Filmfest.ca [Jason Gorber]
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The Two Jakes (Or Are They?). Gyllenhaal in 'Enemy'|Caryn ... Caryn James from indieWIRE
Jake Gyllenhaal Is Inspired in Enemy, a Rhythmic ... Michael Nordine from The Village Voice
Film-Forward.com [Paul Weissman]
Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]
'Enemy' movie review - The Washington Post Ann Hornaday
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Joseph Anthony]
Review: Jake Gyllenhaal plays doubles in satisfyingly weird ... Robert Abele from The LA Times
Enemy
Movie Review & Film Summary (2014) | Roger Ebert Godfrey
'Enemy' Stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Twice - The New York Times A.O. Scott
DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
The Double (José Saramago novel) - Wikipedia, the free encycl
USA (121 mi) 2015 ‘Scope Official Facebook
In the manner of Gerardo Naranjo’s Miss Bala (2011), Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012), and Amat Escalante’s Heli (2013), Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve has made a Hollywood action thriller that brings the audience directly into the Mexican drug wars, giving them a front row seat exposing the nefarious practices taking place by our own government in the name of stamping out criminal activities. While the title of the film is Mexican slang for the word “hitman,” the film paints a dark picture into the skewed moral lines that exist in combatting drug wars, where it’s often hard to tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys, as both are operating in the same toxic cesspool of greed, corruption, murder, and power, as all sides are vying to control the $19 to $29 billion dollars that the Mexican drug cartels receive annually from U.S. drug sales. While this is essentially a high powered, adrenaline-laced film from start to finish, we are drawn into the action in a riveting opening, seen through the eyes of Kate Macy (Emily Blunt), an overly conscientious FBI agent specializing in kidnapping cases leading a SWAT team to an Arizona border town home where they believe people are being hidden. In the process of discovering 40 dead bodies stored vertically in the walls wrapped in plastic body bogs, a planted explosive device wipes out part of the team. After this harrowing experience, Kate is called into a meeting where a special task force of elite agents is considering their next move, where she is told the house is owned by a local cartel boss Manuel Diaz (Bernardo P. Saracino) before being asked to volunteer as an operative on special assignment headed by Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) in the Defense Department, even though she has no real drug enforcement experience. Their goal is to track down the head of a notorious drug cartel, Fausto Alarcon (Julio Cesar Cedillo), kidnapping one of Diaz’s chief operatives named Guillermo (Edgar Arreola) in an attempt to flush Fausto out of hiding. While purportedly flying to El Paso, Texas, their real destination is Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, where an entirely different set of rules operate, as this has been the site of a long and bloody battleground over contested gang turf. Mexican drug cartels control 90% of the cocaine entering the United States, where the Ciudad Juárez cartel had control over prime drug trafficking routes, but they have been under attack from the more powerful Sinaloa Cartel, headed by the recently escaped most-wanted prisoner, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, whose estimated net worth is in the billions, infiltrating the police, government and the military, where they are the largest known mafia organization in the world. Stepping into the middle of this dispute is like walking through the gates of Hell, as over 140,000 people have been killed in the Mexican drug wars since 2006, with nearly 30,000 people still missing. Because it happens on the other side of the border, it may as well be invisible to most Americans, but life in Mexico can be a traumatizing experience.
The director uses a blisteringly intense, cinéma vérité style to express just how brutally violent the world in Mexico has become, including the sight of hacked-off remains of dead bodies hanging from a bridge while Kate rides in a caravan of giant SUV’s and machine-gun implanted vans driving through the city streets of Juárez past astonished bystanders, where a firefight may erupt at any second, as they are being tailed by other suspicious vehicles. Despite this military presence, they are able to surprise Guillermo, literally kidnapping him from his home, then making a mad dash to the border where traffic is backed up due to a car breakdown up ahead, leaving cars in a standstill. In this tense atmosphere, depite the wall-to-wall presence of civilians, their team must identify would-be assassins in the vicinity and strike before being struck, turning into a bloodbath taking place in a sea of innocent bystanders. Horrified by what she witnesses, they are quickly whisked away to safety carrying their prisoner in tow to the security of a nearby army facility. Graver and his all-male team leave Kate out of the information trail, where part of the intentional thrust of the film is that it happens so fast and in such a confusing manner that it’s hard to follow just what’s taking place, where Kate’s mind is stunned by a flurry of improvisational fast action, where her confusion is translated to the audience. It’s here that she meets Benicio del Toro as Alejandro, a native Colombian and former Mexican prosecutor whose presence is shrouded in mystery, though his physical hand shakes with the appearance of a man who has survived torture. Appropriately, he is the man who interrogates Guillermo, bringing in a giant water jug, where in pure Hitchcockian fashion the camera focuses upon a drain on the floor, suggesting either waterboarding and/or an outlet for the stream of blood. Torture is alive and well in the drug wars, where the film provides a searing realism that matches Erick Zonca’s JULIA (2008), especially the back alleys of seedy, gang-infested Mexican neighborhoods where danger lurks around every corner. Into this swath of unending violence, another smaller story is being told, representing the average Mexican family, where a young Mexican kid is always waiting for his perpetually oversleeping Dad (he’s a cop that works nights) to take him to play soccer, where all he’s really asking for is a hint of normalcy. This contrasts with the blurred reality of Kate, who is told by Alejandro that “Nothing will make sense to your American ears. By the end, you will understand,” a clear stand-in for the American public that hasn’t a clue what’s going on, where part of the problem is seeing things exclusively through American eyes, which has a tendency to reveal only what they pick and choose while leaving out the rest. This trip into Juárez is a surreal reminder of moral ambiguity, like the “heart of darkness” descent up river in Coppola’s APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), exposing America’s venture into Cambodia during the Vietnam era, a military excursion shrouded in secrecy taking place simultaneous to a President and Secretary of State repeatedly informing the American public and the world that Cambodia was strictly off limits.
Kate is stunned by the expansion of American authority into Mexico, but receives word from her superiors that for this operation, the rules of engagement have expanded. After learning the whereabouts of Diaz’s hideout from secret torture sessions, Graver’s team also rounds up Mexican migrants attempting to cross the border, checking for the presence of drug tunnels along the route, zeroing in on a specific location. At the same time they freeze Diaz’s American bank accounts, where Kate thinks they have sufficient information to prosecute Diaz, but Graver isn’t interested, insisting it’s his boss they’re after. By being left out of the specifics of each plan, where no one is what they appear to be, all carrying a hidden agenda, while Kate is simply going along for the ride, where the entire mission may have originally been intended to recruit her, but she’s the only one in the entire film that has any sense of a moral compass. Everyone else is totally out of bounds, where they recognize her hesitation and how green she is immediately. It’s not hard for her to realize she’s only in the operation because she’s working “within the law,” as a cover for their cowboy recklessness, somehow making it all legal. While she has an opportunity to simply get out, an awkward moment where Alejandro actually has her back, literally saving her life, she feels compelled to find out where it all leads, as these guys are closer to the heads of the cartels than she’s ever been. Using infra-red photography, a special ops night mission targets the American entrance of the tunnel, located in the middle of an endless desert expanse, where the look of the film recalls the mission to assassinate Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty, both accentuating the military aspect of the raid where these guys mean business, specializing in getting in and out while completing their mission as quickly as possible. While gunfire is heard in all directions, she gets separated from the team, exiting from one of the many tunnels where she sees something she’s not supposed to see, as it appears Alejandro is about to shoot an unarmed Mexican cop named Silvio (Maximiliano Hernández, the father of the little kid) whose police car is filled to the gills with drugs and refers to Alejandro as “Medellín,” a hint as to his true connections. The film belongs to del Toro by the end of the picture, where his sinister presence dominates the screen, crossing the line between both hero and villain, yet his intentions are lethal, reminiscent of Max von Sydow’s coolly precise assassin character in THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975), a man who operates outside all moral laws. Whether this is all a CIA operation or not, one would think the war on drugs has failed, as America remains the largest consumer of the illegal products, so it’s perfectly conceivable that the U.S. government has no conceivable plan to stop the flow of drugs into this country, as the business is simply too lucrative. While it’s treading on murky waters, what’s clear is the war on drugs has brought the cartel wars into our own country, where it’s not about stopping the flow of drugs but instead trying to control and/or influence the powers running the business operation. It’s a chilling ending, where a fatherless kid makes his way to the soccer game, where the everpresent sound of gunfire can be heard from the surrounding neighborhoods, an everyday fact of life that will remain with him always. The cinematography by Roger Deakins is stellar, while the dark musical score by Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson adds a pulsating presence of gloom.
For those who heaped praise on Sicario after its Cannes premiere, all that mattered—in no particular order—were the virtues of Roger Deakins’ cinematography, Emily Blunt’s kick-ass performance as a FBI agent, and Denis Villeneuve’s assured command of the material. What became lost as critics endorsed the most vapid sort of formalism was the shallow and exploitative nature of the material itself. While the film’s defenders extolled the film’s narrative “ambiguities,” it soon becomes clear that certain strategically placed red herrings only temporarily divert us from this drug-cartel melodrama’s essentially conventional and reactionary tenor.
The convoluted narrative propels Blunt’s Kate Macer into a murky scheme in which she partners with the suavely stoic Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), supposedly a defense contractor but a man whose motivations remain as opaque as are necessary to suit the purposes of this implausible thriller. Entering a Mexico that seems to exemplify nothing but barbarism, these representatives of The War on Drugs are revealed as cynical but courageous, self-deluding but thoroughly intransigent in their efforts to ensnare a notorious kingpin. Far from being the cunningly ambiguous moral parable its champions claim it to be, Sicario actually hedges its bets in order to remain shamelessly crowd-pleasing. The shadowy character of Alejandro (Benicio del Toro) sums up the forces of evil that Kate and Matt are opposing: he’s an operator who is introduced as a former Mexican prosecutor, but whose ties to the drug world (and vengeful propensities) make him straightforwardly ghoulish. In other words, Mexico is a heart of darkness that devours well-intentioned, clean-cut Americans. Pristine cinematography and capable performances notwithstanding, Sicario is nothing more than pseudo-sophisticated hokum.
Mexican president Felipe Calderon's time in office—from 2006 to 2012—was marked by violence as soldiers took to the streets and forests, making the war on drugs an especially tragic one. That war was an abject failure, and one with a serious human cost: Military intervention led indirectly to roughly an additional 200 homicides per year nationwide, according to an analysis published last month in The American Statistician.
Researchers Valeria Espinosa, now at Google, and Donald Rubin, a statistics professor at Harvard University, were not the first to wonder whether militarizing the fight against drug cartels brought with it some collateral damage. An analysis in Nexos magazine suggested that the drug war had pushed non-combat homicides higher, hough neither that report nor an earlier visual comparison of homicide rates and military action, also published in Nexos, was very rigorous. Visual comparison isn't really a recognized statistical technique, and neither analysis took into account a variety of potentially important factors, such as when military interventions began in each of the 18 Mexican states involved.
Espinosa and Rubin addressed such concerns by comparing actual homicides in cities and towns where the army had fought drug cartels with predictions of homicide rates had there been no armed conflict. Since the researchers couldn't observe something that never happened, they used murder rates in demographically, economically, and politically similar towns around Mexico where there'd been no fighting as a proxy. That's better than using nearby towns' murder rates, they argue, since the effects of military intervention could have spilled over there.
Overall, Espinosa and Rubin estimated that murder rates in Mexican states where the military had fought cartels went up by 11 people per 100,000, an increase about two and a half times the total murder rate in the United States in 2013. Much of that increase was concentrated in the area around Ciudad Juárez, where military action indirectly pushed the murder rate up by about 86.5 deaths per 100,000 people per year. Even if the murder rate had been zero before military intervention, that increase would put it up there with heart disease and diabetes as a leading cause of death in Mexico.
While the drug war did curb the bloodshed in some places—Espinosa and Rubin estimated that military action cut the homicide rate in Apatzingán by 21 murders per 100,000 people—it wasn't enough to offset the killings in other, more populous regions. Even excluding Juárez, where the increase in drug-war related homicide rates was more than double anywhere else in Mexico, Espinosa and Rubin estimated Calderon's drug war increased the homicide rate by 6.5 murders per 100,000 people per year.
Though the results confirm others' expectations, they also illustrate the importance and challenge of determining what's a consequence of a policy choice—in this case, military action against drug cartels—and what's just a chance correlation, the authors suggest.
Ciudad Juárez lies just across the rio grande from El Paso. It’s almost part of America, but it may as well be Fallujah. Or one of the circles of Hell. Juárez is infamous for its more than 1,000 unsolved murders of young women, but an early sequence in Sicario renders the city far more sweeping in its perils. Naked decapitated bodies dangle from a bridge, welcoming our unlucky heroine, FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt). A traffic jam erupts into a bloodbath with no discernible prompt. And while Mexicans still flock to Juárez because of its plentiful maquiladoras (factories in a free-trade zone), the only financial transactions that matter for Sicario’s purposes are those linking a handful of cartel titans to the millions of Americans with an appetite for narcotics.
Considered “a trooper” by her superiors, Kate is invited to join an elite interagency task force charged with locating a known narcotraficante. The team’s ostensible leader is callous Defense Department contractor Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), though he seems to take his cues from the mysterious Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), a taciturn former attorney. Kate, a scrupulous idealist is shocked to discover that the team is operating outside U.S. jurisdiction, ignoring the rules of engagement, and illegally detaining and torturing prisoners. Sicario, the screenwriting debut of Sons of Anarchy actor Taylor Sheridan, isn’t above the odd hoary portent—“Nothing will make sense to your American ears,” someone warns—and betrays no qualms about exploiting age-old fears of Mexico, characterized here as one vast bogeynation, the toxic sewer of its affluent northern neighbor, pitiable but unsalvageable.
Preying on pervasive fear and paranoia is the business of horror movies, and, if we loosen our definition of the genre just a little, one could argue that horror movies are what Denis Villeneuve, the director of Sicario, has been making over the second phase of his career. It began with Polytechnique (09), a film rooted in real-life horror, and has continued through a series of projects that have taken Villeneuve far from his Quebec roots, to an eerily drab Toronto, a scorched Middle East, the suburbs of Pennsylvania, and now the murder capital of Mexico. (His 2013 Prisoners could have been the title of either of the above films.) “I go where I’m sent,” says one of Sicario’s mercenaries; the same statement of purpose could be applied to Villeneuve, a filmmaker who’s never met a location he didn’t find alluringly alienating. Never flattering any of these places, he seeks out the sinister everywhere. When the material is strong, his dark renderings become a mirror to the world.
In Villeneuve’s debut feature, August 32nd on Earth (98), a woman survives an accident, cancels both a vacation and a modeling career, and goes to Utah to conceive a child. Pregnancy features in every one of his films with the exception of Prisoners, though August 32nd on Earth is the only one in which it is not a source of terror. Maelström (00) opens with an abortion being performed. The extracted pulp is disposed of with only slightly more ceremony than the film’s fanciful succession of talking fishes, each of whom are executed by a butcher’s blade while in the midst of narrating Villeneuve’s fable about a hit-and-run and the subsequent romance between the guilty driver and the victim’s son. Villeneuve’s stories have always been a matter of life and death, but their gravity and grimness would intensify by several degrees of magnitude with his third feature, which didn’t appear until a full nine years later.
I can’t think of a single event that’s occurred in Canada during my lifetime more freighted with trauma than the 1989 massacre at Montreal’s École Polytechnique, when Marc Lépine shot 28 people, killing 14 women, before turning the rifle on himself. His suicide note stated that he was motivated by a hatred of feminism, which he considered responsible for ruining his life. The note is quoted in Polytechnique, which frequently lingers on the visage of the Lépine character, played by Maxim Gaudette and identified simply as “Killer” in the credits. That visage, unsurprisingly, tells us nothing, having been neutralized by murderous resolve, just as Pierre Gill’s black-and-white cinematography neutralizes the film’s outpouring of blood.
If there is meaning amid the carnage of Polytechnique, it lays elsewhere, perhaps in the interspersion of reminders that Lépine’s sexism was not bred in isolation. When one student, Val (Karine Vanasse), applies for a mechanical-engineering internship, her male interviewer asks if she wouldn’t prefer civil engineering, a friendlier vocation for women who want to raise a family. (By the film’s denouement, Val, who barely escaped the campus slaughter, is working as a mechanical engineer and with child.) Everything seems gendered in Polytechnique, down to the names of bands on its soundtrack, Men Without Hats and Sisters of Mercy.
Perhaps meaning is best sought in Villeneuve’s mise en scène. In Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, another film based on a real-life school massacre, form is commentary, with Harris Savides’s cinematography emulating the video games played by the film’s murderers. Polytechnique’s camerawork isn’t so explicitly analytical, but its sideways pans and upside-down swoops through university corridors certainly anticipate the atmospherics that will characterize all of Villeneuve’s ensuing work.
The plot of Incendies (10) could be reduced to one cruel twist of fate after another: a woman (Lubna Azabal) post-humously sends her adult children on a dangerous investigative mission to an unspecified Middle Eastern country through which they will finally learn the truth of her past and their origins—revelations worthy of classical tragedy. Adapted from Wajdi Mouawad’s 2003 play, Incendies roils with atrocities and its third act feels preposterous, yet it leaves an indelible impression, partly because Azabal, an actress of rare talents, exudes a survivor’s fortress-like self-possession, and partly because Villeneuve gives sentimentality no quarter. His rapturous opening sequence, apropos of nothing, story-wise, features child soldiers gearing up to the holy war battle hymn of “You and Whose Army?” by Radiohead. Anticipating the bifurcated geography of Sicario, Villeneuve photographs institutional buildings and freeways in Polytechnique’s Montreal and bombed-out cities and desert prisons on the other side of the planet in Incendies with the same emphasis on desolation.
Which brings us to Toronto and Enemy (13), an adaptation of José Saramago’s The Double, and yet Villeneuve’s most personal and perfect film. Canada’s largest city had never been depicted with so little color, affection, or interest in its cultural spectrum. Enemy concerns only three characters and two of them are played by Jake Gyllenhaal, whose singular gift for externalizing unease meets its ideal interpreter in Villeneuve. This smoggy, jaundiced town is not big enough for the two Jakes, yet its elevated roadways, brutalist buildings, and mirrored facades compose a sprawling opaque landscape ideal for Villeneuve’s fusion of primal anxiety and le fantastique.
Was Sicario made in repudiation of the politics of Prisoners? As risible twists accumulate, Prisoners slowly slips from riveting to ridiculous, but what’s most abhorrent about screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski’s conception is also what makes the film weirdly compelling. In agony over the apparent kidnapping of his daughter, Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) abducts, imprisons, and tortures the prime suspect. Nothing in Villeneuve’s bleak realization of Guzikowski’s script feels at all pro-American, much less pro-Bush, yet our invitation to sympathize with Keller, both in the first early scenes and in its ersatz Vanishing finale, could suggest an apology for the use of torture and unlawful detainment in the war on terror.
By contrast, Sicario’s every moment unambiguously execrates the war on drugs, depicting clandestine U.S. interventions that only help perpetuate a billion-dollar industry at the expense of tens of thousands of Mexicans caught in the crossfire. The film begins with the discovery of over 40 cadavers, all of them bound, heads wrapped in plastic, and propped up within the walls of a bungalow like vertical graves. An entire SWAT team vomits in response. Figuratively speaking, the vomiting never stops for the remainder of Sicario, it’s only the source of nausea that shifts, from the immediate grisliness of bodily desecration to the meta-horrors of the gung-ho American agitation—“shake the tree and create chaos”—championed by Matt.
If Matt is this film’s proponent of the preemptive impulse exemplified by Keller in Prisoners, Alejandro, whose wife and children were casualties of narco warfare, shares something of Keller’s psychic wound and supposed justifications. Alejandro is Sicario’s titular character—sicario being a Mexican synonym for hit man—and among the pivotal achievements in Villeneuve and Del Toro’s interpretation is the way they render Alejandro at once ghoulishly fascinating and, unlike Keller, not at all ingratiating or sympathetic in his appetite for ruthless revenge. Alejandro saves Kate’s life at one point, but she needn’t take this any more personally than the later scene in which he threatens to kill her. Alejandro is among the finest manifestations of Del Toro’s control of charisma and repugnance. It’s latent in his physiognomy, those heavy-lidded eyes that blur sexy and scary, but also in his craft, the distribution of weight in his carriage, the prolonged gazes and pauses that define evocative elision. He’s a heavy of a higher order—his Pablo Escobar in this year’s Escobar: Paradise Lost was the only redeeming factor in one of the stupidest movies I’ve ever seen.
Kate, meanwhile, isn’t exactly a cipher. Like Laura in Miss Bala, another narco-drama set along the Mexico-U.S. border, she’s more a female pawn in a boy’s-club conspiracy that renders criminals and authorities indistinguishable from one another, a heroine caught in a situation she can’t fully comprehend. And like Clarice in Silence of the Lambs, Kate is the female bait in a macabre stakeout, her descent into the underworld climaxing literally underground in a transnational tunnel, a lower intestine that shits out drugs and scumbags. There comes a point when Kate is able to flee, but she stays because she has to know the task force’s true objective. Yet in Sicario’s closed circuit of supply and demand, the truth is finally of no use at all.
Sicario mines the same dismal tit-for-tat trajectories as Prisoners but spares us the thudding ironies. Its moral strength lies in Sheridan and Villeneuve’s resistance to false resolutions and their insistence on maintaining a status quo of controlled chaos. Controlled, that is, for Americans, for whom the war on drugs is largely a cold war. For Mexico, where the war is corrosive and the body count defies belief, where huge swathes of the population live in perpetual fear, it’s just chaos.
PopOptiq Edgar Chaput
Sound On Sight Max Bledstein
The Film Stage [Giovanni Marchini Camia]
Film-Forward.com [Jack Gattanella]
The House Next Door [James Lattimer]
Review: Sicario Timothy Hall, The People’s Critic
JumpCut UK [Jakob Lewis Barnes]
Monsters and Critics [Anne Brodie]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Richard Mowe]
TVandFilmReview.com [Chelsea Workman-Jernigan]
The Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy]
Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Los Angeles Times [Mark Olsen]
Mexican Drug War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mexico Drug War Fast Facts - CNN.com
A murder every half hour in Mexico's drug war - NY Daily ... Roque Planas from The NY Daily News, January 13, 2012
Mexico's Drug War: 50,000 Dead in 6 Years - The Atlantic Alan Taylor, May 17, 2012
US Visas Helped Fuel the Juárez Drug Wars - The Daily Beast Jason McGahan, July 1, 2014
After years of drug wars, murders decline in Mexico Alan Gomez from USA Today, April 30, 2015
ARRIVAL B 88
USA (116 mi) 2016 ‘Scope Official site
Language
is the first weapon drawn in a conflict.
—Louise Banks (Amy Adams)
An old-fashioned love story dressed up in a Spielbergian sci-fi package, like the return of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), where the director has formulated an intriguing opening and closing, which stand out for their novel originality, yet the middle seems to drag under the weight of standard military operations that seem to always suggest anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Only in the movies do people actually live in these picture-perfect locations, like a gorgeous, heavily windowed home on the side of a commercially undeveloped lake, where there’s no neighbors to speak of and a stunning landscape for as far as the eye can see. It’s an idyllic place of retreat that becomes synonymous with home, the place you raise your children and return to night after night when returning from work. In this setting, to the elegiac music of Max Richter - On the Nature of Daylight - YouTube (6:14) that opens and closes the film, also used in a dream sequence in Scorsese’s SHUTTER ISLAND (2010), a narrator announces in somber tones that “I used to think this was the beginning of your story,” with this being the place where a certain child was born, as Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) announces “We are so bound by time…by its order…These are the days that define the story of your life,” as we witness a fast-moving flashback montage of her young daughter Hannah’s life quickly developing through childhood with her single mom until she dies mysteriously of a rare illness. “Now I’m not sure I believe in beginnings and endings.” What follows is an indication that there’s a different beginning, something significant that comprises the majority of the film, though we are caught off-guard, wondering if this all happened in the past, or in the future, or if time has somehow been altered in some way. Recollections of her daughter occur throughout as the film takes an eerie shift to aliens landing in twelve different spots on the globe, where linguist expert Dr. Banks is whisked to the scene by military escort along with physicist Dr. Ian Connelly (Jeremy Renner) to help communicate with these extraterrestrials. Based on Ted Chiang’s acclaimed 1998 short story entitled Story of Your Life, winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 1999, the film has been adapted by screenwriter Eric Heisserer, where Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, fresh from his Hollywood action thriller Sicario (2015) that takes us into the heart of the Mexican drug cartels, Enemy (2013) , a curiously compelling indie film where a supposed body double turns into an allegorical nightmare of a coming apocalypse, Prisoners (2013), an intriguingly cast Hollywood vigilante movie that veers into torture porn, and 2011 Top Ten Films of the Year #7 Incendies, arguably the best of the bunch, a search through a war-torn Middle East for the missing truth about one’s mother, all of which in some way are an exploration of grief.
From a sparsely populated university class by Dr. Banks on the Portuguese language where what few students showed up are completely glued to their cellphones following news updates on the alien landings, panic breaks out across the globe, as students walk out on class, the stock market plunges, fights break out in public, riots ensue, end of the world cults declare a coming apocalypse, while TV demagogues call for radical actions, and everyone immediately calls their moms, as this event has a way of altering the world order, with various nations developing their own way of responding to this unknown presence. While the book never ventures into a military response, that’s simply not the Hollywood way, who after all, sent the military after King Kong (1933), laying its imprint all over this picture that might have been so much better without it. Curiously, the film never shows that actual aliens landing, but instead follows the fierce public outcry, showing images of giant-sized, vertically hanging blimps, showing no signs of releasing toxic gas, while at the same time there is no follow up response from the extraterrestrial creatures, who never leave their ships and are content to sit there passively. By the time Dr. Banks arrives to a rural Montana farmland, a military protocol has been established, as they are the only units allowed close to the landing sites, as the public has been prevented from being anywhere near them, which is why television figures so prominently in the ensuing panic. While there are military officers constantly monitoring the alien ships, Dr. Banks and Dr. Connelly are escorted to the site by Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), revealing as little as possible about their mission, but basically wanting to know why are they here? While Connelly immediately goes into a litany of mathematical possibilities that will be unearthed by their successful interplanetary travels, it’s Dr. Banks that insists upon basic communication first before they get ahead of themselves. Therein lies her specialty, claiming being in the presence of the aliens helps her understand how they communicate. Dressed in bulky biohazard spacesuits, where they are hosed down afterwards to prevent contamination, they are hoisted into the interior of the alien ship, as they soon learn a lower door opens every 18 hours for visitation. The anticipation of the initial contact has an extraordinary suspense factor, as no one, including the audience, knows what to expect. This aspect is deftly handled by the director, elevating the level of expectation to unseen heights, which is arguably the best part of the film. Once inside, they reach what looks like an elevator shaft that they must ascend, where surprisingly they are able to climb up themselves, as gravity disappears, though they stumble from the newness of it all and the bloated awkwardness of their suits. Their destination is enclosed with a large window panel containing the only light, behind which the aliens appear, as if rising out of a haze of smoke, strangely resembling the arachnid creatures hovering over the city seen in Enemy (2013) .
While this is the third time the director has used music
from Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, cinematography by Bradford Young,
who also shot Selma
(2014) and A
Most Violent Year (2014), there are sounds emanating from the
aliens, perhaps resembling oceanic creatures like whales, yet no one has been
able to make any sense out of them.
Described as heptapods, for their seven dangling legs, they actually
resemble jellyfish, but the question remains for viewers, how would any of us
attempt to start a conversation? Dr.
Banks chooses to start with the word “human” written on a notecard, holding it
out for them to see. The movements of
the creatures is a bit unexpected, as they have a star-like appendage at the
end of one leg that emits a cloud of black ink, like a squid, which
mysteriously assembles into a circular image with slight variations around the
edges, like pieces of growing ivy, making each image distinct, which is how
they convey their language. Back in the
science lab afterwards, she and Dr. Connelly pour over the images they received
trying to make some sense out of it, returning again 18 hours later for another
visit. We lose any sense of time, as the
visits are compacted, though Dr. Banks continues to collect her images while we
continue to get mixed messages about what’s happening around the world, as
China and Russia are growing increasingly irritated and militarily belligerent,
where they fear the aliens are threatening their authority, wanting to send a
message through gunfire. Dr. Banks
disagrees, thinking they have initiated no dangerous acts of any kind, and
should be understood accordingly. But as
the military of each nation seems to be in charge, the mere presence of these
extraterrestrials is sending the world into a frenzy, while the real question
is more about humans, asking how are we going to learn to understand “the
other” without being afraid and resorting to violence? This is perhaps the central theme of the film,
all part of the learning curve of discovery, as the military reviews any and
all progress being made, holding a heavy hand over what happens next. Over time, Dr. Banks collects what amounts to
a working vocabulary, with each message conveying multiple meanings, where she
marvels at their originality, claiming “They can write a complex sentence in
two seconds.” But when the military
insists she finally ask why are they here, the answer is surprising, “offer weapon,”
which ambiguously may have multiple meanings, as Banks feels weapon may also
mean tool, while Col. Weber reminds her, “Remember what happened to the
aborigines. A more advanced race nearly
wiped them out,” but the aggressiveness associated with the word “weapon” sends
military units around the world into heightened paranoia, disconnecting from
worldwide communication systems, basically signing off into radio silence,
first one nation, but eventually everyone, where no one wants to share what
they’ve learned, overwhelmed by a sense of national self-preservation.
With rogue military units on the loose, Banks’ missions appears to be spiraling out of control, especially after receiving a much larger image with hundreds more symbols, something they had never seen before that leaves them completely bewildered. Connelly comes up with the idea that maybe each of the twelve sites is communicating only partial messages, which need to be combined to make sense, requiring mutual cooperation if they are to be understood. Of course, that’s not the way military operations see things, and they uniquely, instead of scientists, have control of the operations, while around the globe their heavy-handed approach is winning out. Unfortunately, this military angle diminishes the quality of the film, as it reduces the moral dilemma to black and white, good and evil, with the military representing the one-dimensional superficiality of the latter. This is never a good sign, and might have worked during the surprisingly benign era of Spielberg, where life always seemed to recall the innocence of the Eisenhower era of the 50’s, but in the present day they are too easy a target, with the film placing a bulls-eye on their back, making them the bad guys, including rudely ordering people around, refusing to listen to any other views, and basically being hard-asses. In an event this extraordinary, requiring as many variant points of view as possible, one would think we could rise to more sophisticated levels than this, where perhaps NASA and their people might be involved, as after all, they have actual experience in space exploration. While this element doesn’t ruin the film, but it certainly dampens one’s enthusiasm overall, as this amazing discovery and consequent burst of scientific curiosity has the possibility at least of providing so much more elevated material, where the military aspect simply bogs down the exploration of ideas. Banks, who has flashbacks of her own daughter throughout, as if having visions, suggests the aliens may be able to communicate with her even after she leaves the vessel, or is perhaps suffering unanticipated side-effects, yet it’s all part of the turmoil of the times, where China is on the verge of attack and the military is ending all communications, evacuating the premises, and pulling back from the alien ship. At that moment, when our future as a planet is at risk, Banks has a breakthrough, discovering “Time isn’t linear to them!” With that, she understands that her flashbacks are actually flash-forwards, as she’s seeing the future, something only possible through the use of the alien language. This reassembled concept of how we view time has a beautifully composed final montage filled with miraculous accomplishments and poetic ruminations, where we’re literally able to see inside the soul of Louise Banks, who becomes strangely heroic and vulnerable in the process, becoming an extremely compelling character, something not often associated with scientists in film, but Amy Adams offers the performance of her career, projecting a highly motivated figure who is bold, warmhearted, and resilient, committed to her responsibilities, exuding a maternal sweetness that contrasts with those around her, becoming a moving sci-fi film that explores the future yet searches just as deeply within the hearts of our own humanity.
Film Comment: Nicolas Rapold September 13, 2016
When it came to studio product in Venice, the intergalactic sentiment of Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival also beats out La La Land, showing derivation done well. It’s essentially Interstellar plus Contact (or Close Encounters, depending on your demographic) but powered by Villeneuve’s sensuous audiovisual feel for what might be called emotional claustrophobia. The stakes could not be higher: the fate of the world hangs in the balance after spaceships appear across the globe, enormous slivers resembling Brancusi’s Bird in Space sculptures. Amy Adams is indispensable as a linguist charged with translating E.T.-speak, and she becomes a kind of pure vessel for emotion, increasingly and poignantly transparent as the squid-like aliens exert a mysterious, Nolanian hold on her unconscious. Alongside Tom Ford’s overdesigned Nocturnal Animals—which gives Adams far less to do—that made for two films at Venice in which her character is called upon to reflect upon herself. Arrival also offered the bonanza among the festival’s cephalopod sightings, but I’ll let Jonathan Romney do the honors on The Untamed…
In
Review Online: Kenji Fujishima
The first two-thirds of Arrival suggest that Denis Villeneuve’s new sci-fi epic might be a genre masterpiece. Certainly, its premise—which revolves around linguist Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and scientist Ian Donnelly’s (Jeremy Renner) efforts to learn how to communicate with the aliens that have landed on Earth for mysterious reasons—is like little that has been seen before in the annals of cinematic science-fiction, with its procedural-like emphasis on… learning a foreign language. The sense of tingling anticipation Villeneuve creates as the scientists try to make their first contact with the aliens is vivid enough to remind one of why it is they love movies: Every frame seems to tremble with the possibility of being shown new sights and wonders, of being invited to explore a brand new world. Arrival’s third act, however, veers into New Age-y territory, with a narrative twist that, depending on your point-of-view, is either profoundly moving or monumentally cheesy. There’s no doubt about Villeneuve’s open-hearted sincerity, however, and even if the sci-fi elements ultimately get shorter shrift than some might prefer, the broader human and philosophical implications brought up by this film are bound to linger.
Film Comment: Devika Girish November 03, 2016
A Spielberg-Nolan lovechild of sorts, wondrous and mind-bending in equal parts, Denis Villeneuve’s latest is a quintessential science-fiction blockbuster steeped in genre traditions and made singular by Amy Adams’s transporting performance.
At the outset of Arrival, 12 ovoid monoliths descend upon the earth, as opaque and ominous as their Kubrick precursors. Their puzzling passivity (no flickering lights or power outages, no abducted children) sparks panicked anticipation worldwide. Renowned linguist Dr. Louise Banks (Adams) is summoned by an Army colonel (Forest Whitaker) to communicate with the alien ship, which floats suspended over a vast mea-dow in rural Montana. Amid global paranoia and warmongering, she’s aided in her mission by a theoretical physicist (Jeremy Renner). With limpid determination, Banks insists on probing what may be lost in translation and soon finds herself slipping into a dreamspace of memories and Tralfamadorian temporality that Villeneuve renders with sensuous audiovisual synergy.
Any qualms you might have about Villeneuve directing the new Blade Runner film will be laid to rest, but as is often the case with the genre, two distinct movies compete for space within Arrival. The film begins to grate whenever the meditative, psychological thriller at its core, with its provocative hypotheses about language and time, loses ground to the apocalyptic military showdown raging bombastically in the background. Adams, however, seems to exist in a movie all her own, communicating melancholic wonder with a force that is almost telepathic.
Cinema Scope: Clara Miranda Scherffig September 05, 2016
Sci-fi is a hospitable genre, as it allows filmmakers to both experiment within and reinforce its outer conventions. Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival creatively positions itself within that relationship. Based on Ted Chiang’s short tale “Story of Your Life,” the film employs a voiceover commentary that holds together its major motifs: science and emotion, humanity and individual destiny.
Amy Adams plays Louise, a linguist and professor who closely resembles Jodie Foster’s character in the 1997 Contact (a sure inspiration). Through a first-person narration, accompanied by “Malickian” framing and close-ups, we learn that she’s lost her teenage daughter. Without much time to piece together the larger context—is she still grieving because it’s a recent event? Is there a father?—12 egg-shaped spaceships land in different locations all over the world. Louise is quickly brought on by Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), along with mathematician Ian (Jeremy Renner), to arrange a meeting with the aliens as fear of an attack ramps up. Villeneuve depicts first contact via a classic, Pocahontasesque hand-onto-tentacle scene which initially disappoints in its lack of aesthetic innovation. This familiarity is also felt in the visual representation of the aliens and their written language (a circle-based logogram). To sum up the scientists’ discoveries, an additional voiceover commentary comes in, oddly mocking the style of nature documentaries while serving the purpose of both releasing the situation’s tension and speeding up the storytelling.
The anxiety over the aliens’ intentions and the excitement of the unknown are unbalanced here in favour of the first, more generic impulse. Arrival stages a dilemma where the desire for knowledge clashes with instincts of fear and hostility, but the overarching theme is time and our linear experience of it. It is precisely here that Arrival proves itself an interesting variation. Instead of refreshing the visual tradition of the genre, Villeneuve cleverly uses the oldest means at his disposal—montage and storytelling—to produce a film that, in however modest a way, represents a valid chapter in science fiction’s cinematic evolution.
Film
Comment: Jonathan Romney November
10, 2016
If a science-fiction film featured a scene in which scientists debated the “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis,” what might you expect that hypothesis to concern? The rate of combustibility of rocket fuel required to propel a metallic cigar-shaped object to the edge of the universe? The likelihood that extra-terrestrial beings would come in insectoid or jellyfish-like form? Wrong on both counts. The hypothesis, otherwise known as the theory of linguistic relativity, refers to the idea that the structure of a language affects its speakers’ cognition or worldview. This is clearly not an irrelevant idea to apply to art, in which each new work or utterance has the potential to embody a worldview that’s entirely new and unique. And it’s certainly a useful idea to apply to cinema, in which each newly created on-screen universe carries, through its style and execution, a meaning and outlook entirely its own. Well, if only . . .
It’s tempting to think of Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival as essentially a movie about cinema—especially if you’re one of those critics who has got into the habit of thinking that pretty much every movie is really about cinema. But when Arrival’s earthling boffin heroes venture into a visiting spacecraft, they enter a dark chamber in which the aliens can be seen floating in brightly lit white gas on the other side of a rectangular plate of glass. In other words, they’ve walked into a movie theater to gaze at an illuminated screen. Yet what this particular movie theater has to offer isn’t a VFX blockbuster, but a pensive if emotionally charged story about questions of communication and the ability to read and understand onscreen messages; with much of Arrival taking place in that cinema-like spaceship space, this is quite literally a chamber drama.
That’s perhaps to be expected from Villeneuve, a director whose films are sometimes genre-based, some closer to the mainstream than others, but all of them a little odd (few as odd as his early Canadian films August 32nd on Earth [1998] and Maelstrom [2000]). They also often have a way of taking themselves a little seriously. In mood, this being a film of looming dark skies and solemn signs and wonders, Arrival is not a million parsecs from Enemy (2013), Villeneuve’s conceptual doppelgänger drama—and certainly, the film’s squid-like space creatures look like distant relatives of the mysterious giant spider that loomed at Enemy’s end.
Arrival possibly takes itself more seriously than any Villeneuve film yet—it’s about a big topic, the possibility of our saving the world through mutual understanding and a mixture of quiet compassion and lucid logical thought. But it also has a degree of grace and imaginative elegance—which is why it feels less like an alien-visitation genre movie than a chin-stroking art film in VFX disguise. Tonally, at least, it’s a close relation to Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 Solaris—although in most other ways, it feels like a less sentimental cousin to Robert Zemeckis’s SETI-themed Contact (1997).
The film begins with a montage of the home life of linguistics professor Louise Banks (Amy Adams), fast-forwarding us through her career as the single mother of a young girl: from her daughter’s baby years, through childhood, to tragically young death from illness. Cut to a tense, solemn Dr. Banks lecturing to a sparsely attended university class on the Portuguese language. Suddenly it becomes apparent why the class isn’t paying attention. News stations are announcing that the aliens have landed in 12 locations around the world, including the U.S. These are spaceships that seem, judging by the way they’re shot in silhouette, to be vertically suspended black tubes with a touch of Brancusi in their curvature, although in some shots they appear more like pancakes stood on end. They have a certain, let’s say, monolithic quality that might remind you of other science-fiction films in which galaxy-hopping alien artifacts turn out to have Much to Teach Us.
The visitor’s arrival doesn’t necessarily bode well, not least in terms of the panicked human response it triggers: there’s a boom in agitated cult activity, rioting takes place, TV demagogues call for aggressive human action. In short, the people of earth do not calmly stand waiting for the five-note Close Encounters leitmotif to sound. However, a linguist is needed by the U.S. Army to communicate with the beings, and Banks is called in; she has previously helped out translating Farsi, possibly a wry joke about just how extra-terrestrial the American military might consider Middle Eastern cultures to be.
Under the command of tight-lipped Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), Banks is flown to the spaceship with physicist Dr. Ian Connelly (Jeremy Renner, playing a muted part that’s in sharp contrast to his usual action roles). They debate the correct approach to these creatures, with Connelly theorising and Banks admonishing him, “How about we talk to them before we start doing maths problems on them?” But to talk to the aliens, humans have to understand them, and the deep sighs and whale-like moans emitted by these creatures aren’t easily interpreted.
In fact, the aliens turn out not to speak language as we normally imagine it. Giant octopus-like creatures (they’re actually seven-legged, and so dubbed “heptapods”) with dark, pachyderm-like skin, and star-like protuberances on the tips of their tentacles, which emit clouds of black ink. The ink swirls in the clouds to form circles, each circle having little nubby embellishments around the edges. Banks works out that these circles are their language, but a language that doesn’t represent uttered sounds, and that isn’t linear. Rather than representing a succession of words or ideas succeeding each other in time, each message conveys a multitude of meanings, simultaneously: “They can write a complex sentence in two seconds,” marvels Banks. To stretch the allegorical point one last time, it’s a bit like the way that a mass of information is revealed all in one go in a single frame of a movie.
Eric Heisserer’s script isn’t afraid to dwell on the theoretical. The humans want to ask the question, “What is your purpose on earth?”, but in order to do that, Banks explains, you have to make it apparent to the aliens what a question is in the first place—something that may not be a workable concept in their repertoire. So she breaks down the logical string of concepts by which communication works. “You approach language like a mathematician—you know that, right?” Connelly tells her—clearly ultimate praise coming from him. Heisserer and Villeneuve too approach telling their story like mathematicians, at least theorists. Arrival is overtly about ideas rather than sublime awe, or deep human feelings, or insight into one’s own nature—all of which were, in an unashamedly New Age way, at the heart of Contact. (That film’s alternative tagline might have been, “She looked into deep space—and found her dead dad.”)
Arrival’s ideas about language prove to be related to the question of the reversibility of time; and there’s a fundamental deception in the film’s telling that makes the story not quite what it seems, resolving in a twist perhaps a little less wham-bam than, but certainly as sneaky as, one that M. Night Shyamalan might have attempted. It’s done cleverly, though, and in a way that ties up all the film’s themes. There is ultimately something a bit soft and nebulous about Arrival: for all the forehead-furrowing concepts it entertains, it can’t actually, as a big-budget Hollywood movie, sell us big ideas without packing them in the cotton floss of meaningful intimate experience, which was also the case with Interstellar and even Gravity (one movie where the protagonist could easily have done without a heart-wrenching back story).
Nevertheless, any soppy “human interest” angle is offset by a sober style—although Villeneuve’s sobriety can feel a little trowelled-on. And the key human presence in the story is steely enough: the concerned, candid face of Amy Adams, gazing at the enigmatic other behind the glass not with dumb awe but as if she’s trying to figure it all out piece by piece, a methodical semiotic sleuth.
There are some distinctive special effects: like the climax of Jeff Nichols’s Midnight Special earlier this year, Arrival tries to give us a new visual twist on familiar ideas of the uncanny alien sublime. I’m thinking of the way that the spaceships seem to float like feathers while having a black, stony surface that suggests the weight of lead; and the way that the alien ink swirls in mid-air like diaphanous liquid chiffon. There’s also a nicely portentous effect in Jóhann Jóhannson’s score, a fanfare of deep roaring horns.
The film’s most urgent idea, finally, is that understanding is a unifying, redeeming force: the populations of the world, and the military forces of several nations, including the U.S., all lose their cool and assume the default position that the visiting ships are hostile. It’s only a university lecturer who saves the day. It’s an appealing idea that, in the face of universal paranoid rage, rational-thinking, empathetic intellectual liberals would hold the line for sanity. This week’s events, alas, show that things don’t work that way.
The
Los Angeles Review of Books: Jordan Brower December 12, 2016
Reverse
Shot: Nadine Zylberberg November
22, 2016
Sight & Sound: Adam Nayman November 04, 2016
Fandor:
Chuck Bowen The Shape of Grief, Nonlinear time and narrative structure in Arrival
and Manchester by the Sea, December 02, 2016
Observations on Film Art: David Bordwell November 23, 2016
The Village Voice: Bilge Ebiri
The science
of Arrival: what the film got right (and wrong) | WIRED UK Jonathan O’Callaghan from Wired magazine, November 12, 2016
Slate
(Steve Desch) What Arrival Gets Right
About How Humans Would React to Alien Life, December 19, 2016
How the short story that inspired Arrival helps us interpret
the film's major twist Nick Statt
from The Verge
Arrival
is a stunning science fiction movie with deep implications for ... Alissa Wilkinson from Vox
The Epic Intimacy of Arrival Christopher Orr from The Atlantic, November 11, 2016
'Arrival'
Insists on Conversation, on Communication, on ... - PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Arrival
has arrived to probe your brain and abduct your heart A.A. Dowd from The Onion A.V. Club
Film Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]
Time:
Stephanie Zacharek November 10,
2016
Watching
“Arrival” After the Election - The New Yorker Jia Tolentino from The New Yorker
'Arrival' Is Smart, Stylish Sci-Fi About Language, Not Laser Beams Andrew Lapin from NPR
The Kim Newman Website (Kim Newman)
Movie
Review: Arrival Is a Tantalizing Puzzler -- Vulture David Edelstein
Arrival
starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner, reviewed. - Slate Forrest Wickman, November 11, 2016
Arrival ::
Movies :: Reviews :: Arrival - Paste Magazine Andy Crump
Time: Stephanie Zacharek September 01, 2016
Arrival's director also made Enemy, a movie that argues history
will repeat itself Kaitlyn Tiffany
from The Verge, November 20, 2016
Arrival | Reelviews Movie
Reviews James Berardinelli
Screen Daily: Fionnuala Halligan
Shadowplay: David Cairns November 12, 2016
Arrival
is already a strong contender for the best science fiction film of ... Andrew Liptak from The Verge
For
linguists, the new sci-fi film Arrival can't come soon enough - Science Brice Russ
Movie review: 'Arrival' may be the best film of 2016 Lawrence Toppman from The News & Observer, November 10, 2016
The Film Stage [Rory O'Connor]
The House Next Door [Jake Cole]
Movie Review: Arrival Kurt Loder from Reason magazine, November 11, 2016
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber Wilkinson]
ScreenAnarchy.com (Ryland Aldrich)
Film School Rejects [Rob Hunter]
AwardsCircuit.com [Clayton Davis]
Las Vegas Weekly: Mike D'Angelo
theartsdesk.com [Adam Sweeting]
The Cinemaholic John H. Foote
Is Arrival the Best 'First Contact' Film Ever Made? Megan Garber and Ross Andersen discussion
from The Atlantic, December 16, 2016
Amy Adams in 'Arrival': Venice Review | Hollywood Reporter David Rooney
'Arrival'
Review: Amy Adams Extraterrestrial Drama Bows at Venice ... Owen Gleiberman from Variety
Arrival
review – Amy Adams has a sublime word with alien visitors ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, November 10, 2016, also seen here: The
Guardian [Peter Bradshaw]
Ted
Chiang, the science fiction genius behind Arrival | Books | The ...
Damien Walter from The Guardian,
November 11, 2016
Arrival
review: dazzling science-fiction that will leave you speechless
Robbie Collin from The Telegraph
Punch
Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]
The
Huffington Post [Maddie Crum]
The science behind the movie 'Arrival' Rowan Hooper from The Washington Post, November 14, 2016
Movie Review: 'Arrival' Not As Award Worthy As It Was Made Out To Be Bob Garver from High Country Press
San Diego CityBeat: Glenn Heath Jr. November 08, 2016
'Arrival'
is deeply human, expertly realized science fiction Kenneth Turan from The LA Times, also seen here:
'Arrival' movie review by Kenneth Turan - LA Times
Arrival Movie Review & Film Summary (2016) | Roger Ebert Brian Tallerico
'Arrival'
review: Amy Adams' close encounter with aliens and conflict ... Michael Phillips from The Chicago Tribune
Review: Aliens Drop Anchor in 'Arrival,' but What Are Their Intentions ... Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, November 10, 2016, also seen here: The New York Times: Manohla Dargis
Denis
Villeneuve of ‘Arrival’ Leans In to Strong Heroines Cara Buckley from The New York Times
In
'Arrival,' the World Is Saved by Words Anna North from The New York Times, December 4, 2016
Director Profile: Thomas Vinterberg – The World Cinema Guide an introduction, May 10, 2015
Thomas
Vinterberg | Biography and Filmography | 1969 biography
Denmark's famous directors | Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg & more
The
Best Movies Directed by Thomas Vinterberg - Flickchart
The History of Cinema.
Thomas Vinterberg: biography, filmography ... Piero Scaruffi reviews
Dogmatic
Subterfuge [THE CELEBRATION] | Jonathan Rosenbaum November 13, 1998
No Stories to Tell: Danish Cinema Searches for a Subject • Senses of ... Jack Stevenson from Senses of Cinema, October 28, 2004
Sight & Sound [Geoffrey Macnab] The Hunt, November 30, 2012
Cinema Scope | Men With Guns: Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt Michael Sicinski, August 2013
Sight & Sound [Thirza Wakefield] Far from the Maddening Crowd, May 1, 2015
6 Filmmaking Tips from Thomas Vinterberg - Film School Rejects Landon Palmer, May 2, 2015
The
20 Best Danish Movies of All Time « Taste of Cinema - Movie ... Listed at #3 by Alexander Buhl from Taste
of Cinema, June 12, 2016
10
Danish Films That Will Introduce You to Dogme 95 - Culture Trip Aliki Seferou, March 5, 2017
Interview with Thomas Vinterberg | Dogme95.dk - A tribute to the ... Bo Green Jensen interview, 1998
Well, is it a new
wave, or isn't it? | Film | The Guardian
Brian Logan interview, March 2, 1999
BOMB Magazine —
Thomas Vinterberg by Maria Mackinney
Maria Mackinney interview, Winter 1999
Cannes 2012: Director Thomas Vinterberg on 'The Hunt' (Q&A ... Scott Roxborough interview from The Hollywood Reporter, May 20, 2012
Interview: Thomas Vinterberg on The Hunt, Mads Mikkelsen, and More ... Anna Tatarska interview from Slant magazine, May 23, 2012
Thomas
Vinterberg, interview: journey into the heart of darkness ... Marc Lee interview from The Telegraph, November 30, 2012
Thomas Vinterberg: Dogme Day Afternoon | NOWNESS Alison Chernick video interview, August 12, 2013 (2:46)
Interview:
Filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg on Far from the Madding ... Edward Douglas interview from Coming Soon, May 21, 2015
Berlin
Interview: Thomas Vinterberg - Film Comment
Emma Myers interview, March 7, 2016
Danish director Thomas Vinterberg: 'To some extent, I understand ... Rachel Cooke interview from The Guardian, July 17, 2016
Thomas
Vinterberg on the death of Dogme 95 and the birth of The ... Jason Gorber from Dork Shelf, May 17, 2017
Filmed with natural light and sound and urgently searching handheld cameras, Thomas Vinterberg's black comedy buzzes with enough energy to make you think he has set about reinventing cinema. The problem is the film's story—it's shot through with mold. Three siblings (Ulrich Thomsen, Thomas Bo Larsen, and Paprika Steen) return to the Danish countryside to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of their powerful father (Henning Moritzen); smack in the middle of the big party, they erupt with anger at his past abuse. Vinterberg's jittery technique aims for authenticity in the moment, and he does coax delicious performances from his actors, but take away the style, and this film is monotonous and shallow. In Danish.
Bleak
Houses David Edelstein from Slate
October did choose to release The Celebration, a Danish dysfunctional family drama that treats matters of incest and perversion with a tad more taste. Children, siblings, nieces, and nephews all gather at a prosperous estate to celebrate the 60th birthday of its formidable patriarch (Henning Moritzen), who turns out to have had monstrous designs on two of his own children. You've seen this sort of picture before: People get drunk and drag skeletons out of closets, and the tension between the formal dinner party rituals and the truths that simmer beneath the surface give way to a Walpurgisnacht. The anti-patriarchal content is fairly routine, but you should see the movie anyway because the director, Thomas Vinterberg, is a great, hypersensitive filmmaker whose edgy, grainy, caught-on-the-fly camerawork seems to make the very celluloid shiver with rage.
Festen - Jigsaw Lounge Neil Young
Festen was the first product from the ‘Dogme’ group, a quartet of Danish film-makers who wanted to see what would happen if they stripped away moviemaking to its bare essentials. So far the experiment must be counted a terrific success: the three releases (so far) work because they show how talented directors can transform what appear to be restrictions – no special effects, no voiceovers or added sound effects, no artificial lighting, etc – into mighty liberations.
While the second and third films – Lars Von Trier’s Idioterne and Soren Kragh-Jacobsen’s Mifune – are both powerful and interesting movies, they’re still a light year behind what Vinterberg came up with: in an era of effects-crazy blockbusters that take years to make, Festen is all the more bracing for appearing to have been thrown together in the course of a single day.
Vinterberg’s debut feature The Biggest Heroes was interesting if ultimately disappointingly conventional, but with Festen he well and truly cuts loose, showing a staggering fluency with his hand-held camera. But the rough-edged look of the film isn’t gratutious, it’s entirely in keeping with the subject matter – a rich patriarch’s sixtieth birthday party which opens up the family’s numerous deep emotional wounds – as it becomes a kind of demented home video chronicle of events.
Vinterberg’s astonishingly fresh grasp of technique is remarkable it itself, but Festen goes much deeper – the actors seem as hungry to make the most of the material as the director, who co-wrote the script with Mogens Rukov. Especially noteworthy is Ulrich Thomsen, as the introspective, volatile eldest son whose ‘tribute’ speech to his father sets the ball rolling – he looks alarmingly like Laurence Olivier, and he has the talent to go with it (he was the best thing about Biggest Heroes).
Like all truly great films, Festen resonates on multiple levels without ever feeling forced or clever-clever. It’s what might have happened if Bunuel had ever tackled Hamlet – psychological and political and anarchic and subversive, a punk sensibility grabbing hold of the cinema’s latent potential and smashing down the boundaries.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Festen (1998) Peter Matthews from Sight and Sound, March 1999
Denmark, the present. To
celebrate his sixtieth birthday, wealthy patriarch Helge Klingenfeldt and his
wife Elsa throw a large party at the family hotel. Eldest son Christian, a
successful Parisian restaurateur, and daughter Helene, an anthropologist,
arrive. So does the uninvited younger son Michael - in disgrace for not
attending the funeral of his sister Linda a few months before - with his wife
Mette and their three children. Chambermaids Pia and Michelle try
unsuccessfully to resume their respective love affairs with Christian and
Michael.
Quartered in Linda's old bedroom,
Helene finds an apparent suicide note which she conceals without reading. At
the banquet, Christian announces to the assembled company that he and Linda
were sexually abused as children by Helge. When no one believes him, Christian
retreats to the kitchen where his boyhood friend Kim (now the hotel's chef)
encourages him to stand his ground.
Kim, Pia and Michelle steal the
guests' car keys so that all will be forced to stay. Helene's black lover
Gbatokai arrives, much to the racist Michael's displeasure. Dinner proceeds,
and Christian's next speech charges Helge with Linda's murder. Elsa begs
Christian to apologise. Instead he tells the guests his mother once witnessed
an episode of child abuse and did nothing about it. Eventually, Helene reads
Linda's suicide note: she killed herself because she was still traumatised by
her father's abuse. Michael kicks and beats his father, then reconciles with
his elder brother. Christian invites Pia to come and live with him in Paris. At
breakfast the next morning, the vanquished Helge tells his three children he
still loves them. Michael orders him from the house.
Suspicion is already stirring
that the so-called vow of chastity taken by members of the Dogma 95
group, if not an outright scam, is at least intended with a pinch of irony. To
clarify for those who have not yet plugged into the hype, a few years back Lars
von Trier and some other Danish directors drew up a manifesto where they
protested the decadent illusionism of contemporary cinema. Like so many fiery
Martin Luthers seeking to restore the true faith, the Dogma
directors swore to reclaim reality by a wholesale purge of their aesthetic
means. Such indulgences as artificial lighting, optical effects and
post-recorded sound were strictly outlawed. Location shooting was made
compulsory, while the camera itself must be religiously handheld.
Since no one has ever accused the
slippery and sophisticated von Trier of ingenuousness, it's an open question
whether he and his Dogma cohorts are entirely straight-faced in
proposing these fundamentalist theses or whether they remain merry postmodern
pranksters, committed to nothing but paradox, devious game-playing and
generally having us on. The first of Dogma's scorched-earth
productions, Thomas Vinterberg's Festen, isn't exactly calculated
to settle the controversy. Indeed, the more one thinks about this remarkable
movie, the stranger it becomes.
From neo-realism to cinéma vérité, film history has reliably proved authenticity is
a chimerical goal. Sooner or later, the impression of raw immediacy congeals
and stands exposed as a style like any other. Initially, and for a long
stretch, Festen seems to confirm one's scepticism. Vinterberg
sticks it to the steadicam generation with a jumble of impeccably ugly shots,
ranging from the bleached-out and watery to the muddily indecipherable (it
doesn't help that it has been transferred from video). The vow of chastity
omits to cite editing among its sundry taboos, but he further frays the
audience's nerves by incessant, discombobulating shock cuts.
However, it's absurdly evident
that, far from stripping away the spurious layers of art, the miasmic
cinematography and meat-cleaver continuity comprise nearly the most outré style
imaginable. This would appear to make rather a hash of the manifesto's stern
caveats against auteurism (none of the Dogma directors receives
official screen credit) - especially as Vinterberg comes incestuously close to
plying the same faux-naïf techniques originated by von Trier for The
Kingdom television series and Breaking the Waves.
If a transparency of means is the
true object of Festen, then it bombs out miserably. Peering as one
must through a perpetual celluloid haze and juggled about by the off-kilter,
fun-house framing, one is made highly conscious of the thick material
contrivance of the image. Yet what's perhaps most fascinating about the movie
is the way it seems to incorporate a sense of its own inevitable failure.
The story tells of the disgorging
of a childhood trauma to the eventual rout of a stately upper-class birthday
bash, and this conception allows scenes of unflappable public propriety to
alternate satirically with sordid family squabbles behind closed doors. More
than a few of the screaming and punching matches the siblings engage in feel a
little trumped-up. And you can't quite bury your misgiving that half the
commotion is dictated by the need to justify the camerawork, instead of the
other way round. But Festen means to keep the viewer wavering
precisely between belief and incredulity - sometimes stitched into the
reality-effect, sometimes holding it at a long tether.
What with the house-party
setting, the frisky chambermaids purloining the guests' car keys and the plucky
hero Christian, repeatedly ejected from polite society but ever bouncing back
to deliver another blistering speech, the action frequently resembles a surreal
farce of the order of Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel (1962) and The
Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), where the party goers were
similarly grounded. Yet the formal symmetries of the plot appear so at odds
with Dogma's ditch-water house style you wonder whether that isn't
the whole cynical point: to show that the style can be slapped on and peeled
off as effortlessly as a decal.
In a more crucial sense, however,
Festen eminently succeeds. There can't be much doubt that the
stripped-down home-movie aesthetic forces the actors to dig into themselves.
Their contingent flickers of hesitancy and uncertainty serve very well to
simulate the mask of bourgeois complacency crumbling under the pressure of
truth. At such moments, Festen transcends its own faddish
affectations and becomes triumphantly the near-documentary it purports to be.
Dogmatic
Subterfuge [THE CELEBRATION] | Jonathan Rosenbaum November 13, 1998
Festen - Film (Movie)
Plot and Review - Publications - Film Reference Dan Nissen from Film Reference
Vow
of Chastity: Analysis of 1st Dogme movie - The Celebration(Festen) March 23, 2012
The Celebration | Deep Focus | Movie
Reviews for the Internet Bryant
Frazer
Keynote:
The Celebration / The Dissolve Mike
D’Angelo
Images -
The Celebration David Ng
Surrender
to the Void [Steven Flores]
ReelViews
[James Berardinelli]
The History of Cinema.
Thomas Vinterberg: biography, filmography ... Piero Scaruffi reviews
Film
Notes -Festen (The Celebration) - University at Albany Kevin Hagopian
Dustin Putman's
Review: The Celebration (1998) - [TheMovieBoy]
Film
Review: Dogme # 1 Festen (The Celebration) (1998) Vipul Ralph Shah
The
Celebration (Festen) | Film at The Digital Fix Noel Megahey
The Celebration - The
A.V. Club (Film) Keith Phipps
Film
Walrus Reviews: Film Atlas (Denmark): The Celebration
Review:
The Celebration (Festen) | Patryk's Film Blog Patryk Czekaj
The Celebration Movie Review
by Anthony Leong - MediaCircus.net
Filmicability
with Dean Treadway
Blueprint:
Review [David Brook]
EyeForFilm.co.uk Emma Slawinski
Nitrate
Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell
10
Danish Films That Will Introduce You to Dogme 95 - Culture Trip Aliki Seferou, March 5, 2017
The
20 Best Danish Movies of All Time « Taste of Cinema - Movie ... Listed at #3 by Alexander Buhl from Taste
of Cinema, June 12, 2016
Film makers on film: Chris Weitz on Festen - Telegraph Mark Monahan interviews director Chris Weitz, August 24, 2002
Movies You Might Have Missed: Thomas Vinterberg's Festen | The ... Darren Richman from The Independent
San
Francisco Examiner [Allan Ulrich]
San
Francisco Chronicle [Edward Guthmann]
Disturbing
Party Is Cause for 'Celebration' - latimes Kenneth Turan
The Celebration Movie Review & Film Summary (1998) | Roger Ebert
New
York Times Janet Maslin, also seen
here: Movie
Review - - FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; A Family Making ...
Dear Wendy
Thomas Vinterberg - Exclaim!
Cam Lindsay
Anyone familiar with the Dogme 95 movement will know what can
happen when Thomas Vinterberg and Lars Von Trier team up for a film — a whirlwind of sadism,
confusion and bleakness.
Directed by Vinterberg and written by Von Trier, Dear Wendy doesn't quite
follow the rules they helped establish and enforce years ago but it does give
an example of what can happen when a few million are poured into one of their
productions and they break some of their own "rules."
Set in small-town America (but actually filmed in Copenhagen), the film tells
the story of a group of dense yet eager teenagers who unite as a club of
gun-toting pacifists called the Dandies. Though it reeks of inevitable
violence, the film's obsession with guns actually works, for the most part,
without resorting to carnage. The Dandies spend their time studying the art and
essence of their weapons, even naming them (yes, Wendy is a gun), and providing
pertinent information about marksmanship, exit wounds and strange rituals
(i.e., tying a leather strap around the testicles). However, as we've learned
before, no one lives happily ever after and one mistake places the gang in a
whole heap of trouble.
The final third of the film transcends practicality and it feels like
everything has been fooled with to escape a sense of reality. Dear Wendy is far
from a conventional film; even when it feels like it is delving into normalcy,
Von Trier's script throws in a nonsensical line to keep it off balance. The
performances are all wonderfully carried out. Jamie Bell, who continues to make
interesting choices since Billy Elliott, delivers as the Dandies' unofficial
engrossed leader, Dick, while Bill Pullman is magnificent as a daft, sociable
sheriff.
Of course, many will look to Von Trier's screenplay as yet another criticism of
U.S. culture and its obsession with guns, but when the man's analysis about
such a problem is so accurate, especially in relation to the recent disastrous
events in New Orleans, it's hard to peg him as an unjustified cynic.
Recommended to those who know what they're getting into and those who like
pleasant surprises.
Review: Dear
Wendy - Film Comment Wesley Morris,
September/October 2005
Dear Wendy is a movie about a boy and his gun. But the boy is a
pacifist, the gun is also his girlfriend, and the movie is from
Narrated by
Dickie (Jamie Bell), the film is set in an ambiguously Southern mining town
called Esther Slope. The place is polluted with cartoon accents (thanks, Bill
Pullman) and the occasional unsubtly displayed Confederate flag. Dickie, a
truculent white teen, has lost his father in a mining accident and is
essentially minded by Clarabelle (Novella Nelson), his rotund black
housekeeper. He buys a gun as a present and winds up keeping it for himself. Dickie’s
passion for this pistol inspires him to start an underground gun club with four
other young outcasts in the vast bowels of Esther Slope. They call themselves
the Dandies, and each acquires and christens a gun. Dickie’s is called Wendy,
and his narration is conceived as a letter to her.
The gang’s
days are spent concocting and performing rituals. There is target practice, and
there are dress-up sessions in which the kids wear costumes that look as if
they came from a yard sale at the Little Rascals’ clubhouse. In any case,
trouble closes in on the Dandies’ faux-hippie halcyon days, and the movie goes
rapidly stupid when the local sheriff (
The movie
simultaneously culminates and collapses when the Dandies, Sebastian included,
attempt to transport the newly paranoid and belligerent Clarabelle, who, as
written and performed, makes the maids and mammies in early
What’s
happened to Vinterberg? This is his second consecutive disaster, after It’s
All About Love (01), a movie whose defenders’ critical appraisals
tend to be far more compelling than anything in the film itself. Both movies
are comprised of the bad ideas and grandiose images that the severe aesthetic
commandments of Dogme 95 were apparently repressing in the film that made his
reputation, The Celebration (98). That movie had memorably
complete (or at least interesting) characters and a surpassingly haunted house.
It also had a story, and Vinterberg was extremely convincing in telling it. In
fact, he was quite inventive with the material’s metaphysical ambiguities and
the formal restrictions. That director is nowhere to be found here. There’s a
void at the center of Dear Wendy. It lacks a heart, a mind, and a soul, and yet
it has the ego and narcissism to use style to cover for its inability to
articulate itself.
Sadly, the
real Thomas Vinterberg appears to be standing up. But for what exactly?
Nonetheless, people are comically
susceptible to the movie’s shallowness. At the Sundance Film Festival this past
January, Dear Wendy was introduced
as “a work of cinematic genius.” And in his own pre-screening comments,
Vinterberg offered us a preview—a warning, really—of what to expect. He thanked
BFI | Sight & Sound | Dear Wendy (2004) Roger Clarke from Sight and Sound, August 2005
The mining town of Estherslope,
US, the present. Eighteen-year-old Dick (Jamie Bell) is a loner and misfit. His
father died working in the mines and his own attempts to follow this career
path have proved shortlived. When obliged to attend a birthday party for the
grandson of Clarabelle (Novella Nelson), the African-American woman who raised
him, Dick finds himself in a dusty bric-à-brac shop buying a pearl-handled toy
pistol. He later discovers that it is a real gun; a fellow local misfit
provides him with a bullet to test it. Dick finds himself powerfully drawn to
the gun, which he names Wendy. An avowed pacifist, he recruits other town
misfits of his age into a secret society called the Dandies. They meet in
abandoned industrial buildings at the edge of town and indulge in
shooting-range sessions, read poetry and dress up in theatrical hats and capes.
Dick is asked to look after
youthful criminal Sebastian (Danso Gordon) by the local sheriff - but
Sebastian's presence compromises the purity of the Dandies. Meanwhile
Clarabelle has grown mentally disturbed in her dotage and Dick resolves to help
her leave her house on an errand; Clarabelle panics, draws a gun and shoots a
policeman. The activities of the Dandies are exposed when armed police storm
their hideout. When the local sheriff offers them an amnesty they suspect
treachery, and drop their pacifist credo in a lengthy shoot-out against armed
officers in which all the Dandies are shot.
There's an unavoidable hint of
Billy Elliot as Jamie Bell reaches for his second coalminer's son in five
years. Here is another sensitive soul who does at least try to go down the
mines before devolving into a perfectionist private world of his own (though
this time the moves are not sissonne and battement frappé but the flourishing
of guns, feathered hats and secret marksmanship). He plays an alienated
American 18-year-old named Dick, who forms a fantastical gun club with other
town misfits his own age.
Aside from the dancing boy there
are other 'British' films here too - A Clockwork Orange in
particular (director Thomas Vinterberg acknowledges this), and for all the
filmic references to Westerns such as Red River (in which Montgomery Clift and
John Ireland homoerotically compare weapons) there's more than a nod to Lindsay
Anderson's anarchic If... That foppish grey regency hat that Dick
wears? Perhaps the ghost of James Mason's sadistic Lord Rohan in The Man
in Grey lurks beneath. And when we discover that a chorus of stuttering
is the ultimate embellishment and form of praise in Dick's secret, gun-crazy
society, the rolling eyes of Nikolas Grace in Brideshead Revisited
are evoked.
But let's be clear. This is a
film about America. It may have been made by one of the founder members of
Dogme '95 from a script by Lars von Trier, and may have European funding and
location shoots, but its skewering of American gun-fetishism is perfectly
specific. Not that the owning of guns is shown to be anything less than
seductive; when Dick accidentally comes into possession of a small pistol, and
calls it Wendy, and perceives a kind of richness around the worship of the gun,
the soothing and psychosexual aspects of his obsession seem perfectly readable.
Godard once talked about needing a girl and a gun to make a movie; what
happens, Vinterberg and von Trier want to know, when the girl is the gun?
This feels, through and through,
a von Trier project. Vinterberg has not yet developed a convincing directorial
identity, having quickly abandoned the Dogme strictures that made Festen
such a stand-out success. His 2003 film It's All about Love was a
move towards bracing surrealism, and indicated that he was indeed very
interested in big-canvas ideas and landscapes a mile away from the
literal-minded claustrophobia of Dogme. The very physicality of the town's
central square in Dear Wendy, around which much of the later
action and shoot-outs take place, seems consciously reminiscent of Dogville
(there's one scene with a diagram of the square which clearly echoes the von
Trier film and its floor markings).
Many of von Trier's critics -
mostly American - have detected an anti-American bias to his films, but the
truth is that he is too wrapped up in his own pathologies to be properly
polemical, and is too obscurely human to be called a political humanist.
Vinterberg has rejected all accusations that Dear Wendy is
anti-American; but the fact is he does depict a gun-crazed police force hiding
behind a folksy charm, does show a broken industrial landscape with a broken
working class, and does present a sense of a people whose paranoia and fear of
violence is itself causing violence.
But there's also something very
archaic and non-specific in this notion of objects creating people; Dick's gun
makes him into a man, a self-confident being, and it restores dignity too to
the other frail teenagers whom he enrols in his gun club. Wendy is a
shamanistic totem object that takes him on a journey, and the subterranean 'temple'
of the Dandies (as Dick and his friends call themselves) with its candles and
drapes and poetry is a very Hell Fire Club of evocations. But the purity that
Dick has convinced himself he has found with Wendy - she can hit the bull's-eye
even when he is blindfold, so great is the symbiosis between them - is
compromised as soon as Wendy seems to prefer the hand of the outsider
Sebastian. Dick's determination that the gun should never be used against
another human, his exalted notions of camaraderie, are as nothing when it comes
to the gun's wheedling and dishonest whisper to kill and maim. This is not, of
course, the NRA mantra. People don't kill people. Guns do, because they want
to, of their essence.
Impressively shot by Anthony Dod Mantle and with striking music from the Zombies, this film is so physically dark that I was hard put to take notes during the screening. After a rather slow beginning it gains momentum, and Vinterberg's handling of the last 15 minutes has a sleek sense of action and violence. Subdued anger, bewilderment, raw gobbets of rage, these are themes that recur in Vinterberg's handful of films; and for all the von Trier input they do seem to be very present in this film. There is good ensemble acting here - Jamie Bell is excellent - and the film overall has a fine anarchic energy. But Vinterberg's low output since 1998 is to be regretted, and to find him back with von Trier so many years after Festen suggests a grown-up son who just can't leave his parents' house. He's shaken free from Dogme. Now he has to shake free from von Trier.
Us Crazy Foreigners [DEAR WENDY & REEL PARADISE] | Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, September 23, 2005
Dear Wendy (2005) | PopMatters Todd R. Ramlow
Dear Wendy | Film Review | Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
DEAR WENDY | Indieground Films Alex Cassun
American Cinematographer: Dear Wendy Director of photography Anthony Dod Mantle, technical supervisor/digital colorist Stefan Ciupek, and camera-rig designer Jakob Bonfils
Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Angeliki Coconi]
Dear Wendy: Thomas (The Celebration) Vinterberg's Disappointing ... Emanuel Levy
Dear Wendy Review |
CultureVulture Les Wright
Beyond the Multiplex - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, September 22, 2005
Culture
Wars [Nathalie Rothschild]
Dear Wendy - kamera.co.uk Antonio Pasolini
Film-Forward.com Zachary Jones
TIFF
Report: Dear Wendy Review - ScreenAnarchy
Mathew
Dear Wendy DVD
review | Cine Outsider Slarek
Dear Wendy - The A.V. Club (Film) Keith Phipps
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
eFilmCritic Reviews Erik Childress
Surprise: Film with Von Trier Screenplay Satirizes American Idiocy Jessica Winter from The Village Voice
Prognosis:
Negative | Village Voice
Dennis Lim on Sundance
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
Dear Wendy Movie
Trailer, Reviews and More | TVGuide.com
Dear
Wendy | Variety Todd McCarthy
Dear Wendy | From
the Guardian | The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
San Francisco Chronicle [Ruthe Stein]
Dear Wendy Movie Review & Film Summary (2005) | Roger Ebert
He's
Got to Put It All Down in a Letter (to His Gun) - The New York Times A.O. Scott
In
the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.
Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When He comes to reign:
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty,
Jesus Christ.
Enough for Him, whom cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breast full of milk
And a manger full of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which adore.
Angels and archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Thronged the air,
But only His mother
In her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the Beloved
With a kiss.
What can I give Him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb,
If I were a wise man
I would do my part,
Yet what I can I give Him,
Give my heart.
—Gustav Holst, “In the Bleak Midwinter,” words by Christina
Georgina Rossetti King's College Cambridge 2005
#4 In the Bleak Midwinter Gustav ... YouTube (4:35)
Historically, we think of women accused of witchcraft being burned at the stake, depicted in Carl Dreyer’s THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928) and DAY OF WRATH (1943), where Sweden in the 17th century executed as many as 71 accused witches in a single day, where the vast majority were women, estimated at more than 75%. While the hysteria surrounding these witch hunts is well documented in Europe and North America, there is a similar outcry against those men accused of child molestation, the subject of Fritz Lang’s brilliant police procedural M (1931), where Peter Lorre is the psychopathic pedophile who can’t stop himself from kidnapping and murdering little girls. In Lang’s film, the criminal element detested the crime as much as the police and the general public, actually putting the criminal on trial before a jury of his peers, other criminals, where the police break in just before they are about to put him to death. Another spellbinding effort is Todd Field’s LITTLE CHILDREN (2006), where Jackie Earle Haley is a convicted pedophile who is forced to register his whereabouts with the police, whose address is then posted by community do-gooders throughout the town, notifying his neighbors, writing inflammatory graffiti on his sidewalk, literally hounding him wherever he goes. The hysteria surrounding his presence in a public pool filled with little children is simply unforgettable. In a sense, these are all FRANKENSTEIN (1931) movies with a riled up mob carrying torches, shovels, and pitchforks chasing a monster through the forests, where it all feels like a bad dream or a figment of our imagination, where afterwards we have to ask ourselves: Did that really happen? Vinterberg re-introduces similar thoughts in a close-knit but small town rural atmosphere, where local tradition sends the men into the forests with guns, where the sign of passing from adolescence into manhood is the first instance of killing wild game, where the men get excessively drunk afterwards to celebrate, singing hunting songs and expressing camaraderie while they continually drink themselves into a stupor.
Mads Mikkelsen is Lucas, something of a gentle giant, whose imposing size does not detract from his love of children, allowing all the boys to pile on top of him at school where he works as a kindergarten teacher. One fearfully shy and particularly vulnerable little girl, Klara (Annika Wedderkopp), is often left alone after school where Lucas kindly walks her home, as she’s the daughter of his best friend and next door neighbor, Theo (Thomas Bo Larsen). Lucas oddly lives alone in one of the more palatial estates in town, where he’s going through a particularly messy divorce, rarely able to see his teenage son Marcus (Lasse Fogelstrøm), who he adores, made more difficult by an ex-wife that refuses to talk to him on the phone. Lucas has a newly developing love interest, Nadja (Alexandra Rapaport), a Russian immigrant that works at the school, which coincides with an anticipated visit from Marcus, who would prefer to be living with his father. All happiness is thwarted, however, by a relatively minor incident, where Karla wants to jump on top of Lucas along with the rest of the boys, planting a big kiss on his mouth, where she’s sternly admonished by Lucas afterwards who reminds her that kissing on the mouth is only for parents and family. But this causes a certain hurtful embarrassment to Karla, seen alone sitting in the dark after school, still brooding about the incident, discovered by the school principal Grethe (Susse Wold) when Karla inexplicably starts describing sexual images from a graphic porn site her brother was watching and attributes this to Lucas. While Grethe is a concerned citizen who fears for the welfare of the school children, she calls in a child psychologist. What’s immediately clear by the inappropriately leading questions and the school’s failure to include the parents in the interview is this town has no history in dealing with this matter, where their very lack of professionalism further inflames the situation, where the story only escalates, spreading ugly rumors behind the scenes, as soon other children start describing similar episodes, and before long not only the school and the parents, but the entire town viciously turns against Lucas, making him a pariah, where people are disgusted and revolted by his presence, shunned by his best friend, refused service in the local market, where even his girlfriend has doubts about his character.
Succumbed by the mass hysteria, Lucas is the picture of
disarray and personal turmoil, isolated in his lonely castle, afraid to come
out, where there is nothing he can do or say that anyone would believe, as the
general community belief is that “children don’t lie.” Even as Karla confesses that Lucas didn’t do
anything wrong, adults refuse to believe her, thinking this is a symptom of
sexual abuse, where a child wants to believe nothing happened in order to
protect themselves from the evil that did occur. In all too many instances, that’s exactly
what does happen, as memories are suppressed, and only after years of intensive
therapy can one separate illusion from reality.
It may be 10 or 20 years before some severely traumatized sexual abuse
victims realize what actually happened. Vinterberg’s film is an interesting contrast
to a recent Danish film also starring Mikkelsen, a historical depiction of a
scandalous affair taking place in the 18th century royal court of
Denmark in Nikolaj Arcel’s A
Royal Affair (En kongelig affære)
(2012), while this film recalls Fritz Lang’s FURY (1936), William
Wellman’s The
Ox-Bow Incident (1943), or Hitchcock’s The
Wrong Man (1956), films where someone is wrongfully accused. Vinterberg layers this lynch mob mentality in
Christian beliefs, as Lucas becomes a Christ-like figure who is despised and
rejected in a flurry of hatred, where church music, like Carl Nielsen’s
“ Mitt hjerte alltid vanker -
Carola - YouTube (4:08), the hauntingly sublime Michael Praetorius - 'Es Ist
Ein Ros Entsprungen' - YouTube (2:15), or Gustav Holst’s Christmas carol “In the Bleak Midwinter” King's College Cambridge 2005
#4 In the Bleak Midwinter Gustav ... YouTube (4:35), become not only a countering Christmas
message but also an ode to winter, a contrast to some of the bleakest and most
despicable human behavior. In this way,
it’s hard “not” to identify with the wrongfully persecuted, where much of the
raw and dramatic power of Mikkelsen’s staggering performance is his ability to
absorb and endure the wrath of his enemies. In this manner, there’s a certain texture to
this film, especially the bleakness of winter, poetically rendered through a
silent landscape or a child’s appreciation for the first snow The Hunt [Jagten] (2012) -
Thomas Vinterberg - YouTube (1:28), or
a single church seen as a gathering place where the entire community meets for
Christmas services, where the town’s intolerance is thrust against the Biblical
teachings of Christ, particularly as it reflects upon children, where the
smallest among us have committed no sins, where the ire of indignation is
squarely pointed in our own direction, where the film is in essence a
commentary on evil, and how easily we tend to blame outsiders for all that’s wrong
with the world, while we are the makers of our own misfortune.
theartsdesk.com [Emma Simmonds]
Featuring a towering, Cannes-award-winning performance from Mads Mikkelsen, The Hunt (Jagten) is a humane and horrifying story of the power of accusation from Danish director Thomas Vinterberg (Festen).
Mikkelsen plays Lucas, a kindergarten teacher in a Danish village. Though he’s a natural with the kids and is popular and connected locally, he’s a taciturn, somewhat enigmatic figure whose recent divorce has left him alone and missing his son. When his best friend’s tiny daughter Klara (Annika Wedderkopp) develops a crush on him, his rejection of her causes her to blurt out the most damaging of lies - that he has abused her. To add catastrophic insult, the school’s principal Grethe (Susse Wold) mishandles the matter spectacularly, resulting in a presumption of guilt and even the suggestion that other children have been targeted.
The Hunt highlights the vulnerability of those in the teaching profession to such accusations. It’s a prosaic horror story which puts a small community under a stark microscope. This is a modern day witch-hunt, presented as if it could happen anywhere. Vinterberg's film gets plenty of mileage out of the guilelessness of the catalyst Klara – making a focus of her uncomprehending face, and out of Lucas’ dignity in the face of extreme provocation. There’s never any doubt that he is an innocent man; in fact we are shown quite clearly how the idea formed in Klara’s mind. The Hunt’s strength lies in the potency of the injustice, and the raw cinematic force of Mikkelsen.
Having already tackled social issues like drug addiction (Submarino)
and gun control (Dear Wendy), ex-Dogme proponent Thomas Vinterberg's The
Hunt treads familiar stylistic and thematic ground in detailing the social
anarchy that occurs after a Kindergarten teacher is wrongfully accused of child
molestation.
While bleak and unflinching in its depiction of human nature and herd
mentality, it demonstrates mainly that practice does eventually make perfect
(or better), at least in the realm of auteur theory, where Vinterberg has
finally matched the intensity of his shocking late '90s exploration of a
severely dysfunctional family, The Celebration.
Stepping away from the family unit to assess the nature of community, this
distressing, but grounded, drama finds the affable Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen)
working at the local kindergarten where his best friend's (Thomas Bo Larsen)
daughter, Klara (Annika Wedderkopp), attends.
Popular with the children and his peers — colleague Nadja (Alexandra Rapaport)
makes it clear that she's open to coital shenanigans — he lives a moderately
idyllic life, save for a custody battle with his ex-wife over his teenage son.
Once accused of exposing himself to Klara, things shift gears with an
unembellished naturalism that makes everything unfolding that much more
horrifying. While the fact that the entire town turns on Lucas at the drop of a
hat isn't surprising, the passivity and sporadic rage they demonstrate shock
through sheer believability
People don't immediately pick up pitchforks and storm his house, rather they
engage with him in a haze, still conflicted by their perceptions and the social
"hunting" expectation, defaulting to violence and hostility primarily
when other eyes are on them.
In deconstructing the artifice of a community, suggesting that people will gang
up on the weak at any opportunity, Vinterberg has presented us with an
unflattering mirror of our social behaviour. The strength of this impressively
rendered film lies in its ability to overcome the many defenses and objections
of those that like to tell themselves that people are inherently good without
acknowledging intrinsic human flaws and instincts.
Reflection and self-evaluation are forced through reality unhindered by twee
idealism.
Viruses
biological and psychological Barbara
Scharres at
My last film of the day, Thomas Vinterberg's "The Hunt," screening in competition, was also the best of the day for me. Oddly enough, there is a thematic tie-in of sorts with "Antivirus," since Vinterberg states that he began the film with the idea that "thought is a virus." It's the story of a kindergarten teacher who is falsely accused of exposing himself to a little girl in his class who also happens to be the daughter of his best friend from childhood.
Mikkelsen is a powerful actor especially known for tough guy roles. He's brought something unique to every film, whether it's Nicholas Winding Refn's "Pusher" trilogy, Suzanne Bier's Oscar-nominated "After the Wedding," or Refn's hybrid Viking misfire "Valhalla Rising." In "The Hunt" he plays against type as Lucas, a modest, mild-mannered but fun-loving divorced teacher and father of a teenage son. He's well-liked in his community, has loads of friends, including a core group of male buddies, and is positively adored by his kindergarten students.
Vinterberg came to worldwide attention by co-authoring the Dogme
95 manifesto along with the notorious Lars von Trier, and by winning the
Special Jury Prize at
A good example early in "The Hunt," has Lucas sitting around a table drinking with his friends at an increasingly raucous boys' night out. He receives a phone call from a woman and steps away to talk with her. Returning shy and flustered, he's the object of ribald ribbing by the group. The scene borders on buffoonery and yet the counterpoint of Lucas's good-humored reserve holds it all together.
Once the accusation is made against Lucas, official procedures are put in motion but the gossip machine of the community takes over. He's quickly fired from his job, his ex-wife won't allow him to see his son, his friends reject him, he's banned from local stores, and even assaulted in one of them when he attempts to buy pork chops. His attempts to fight back simply by continuing to be the good man that he is appear to be futile in the face of the thought that has infected every interaction in his life.
"The Hunt" is not a facile film. Each escalation of the disaster that hits Lucas's life has complex roots that reach into many relationships and many households in the town. The virus analogy is very much borne out in every aspect of this plot, and unlike Brandon Cronenberg, Vinterberg is able to drive home his point that once it's in the bloodstream it never goes away.
Paste Magazine [Curtis Woloschuk]
Thomas Vinterberg’s harrowing drama serves as a companion piece of sorts to the documentaries concerning the travails of the West Memphis Three. Whereas the non-fiction work of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky (The Paradise Lost trilogy) and Amy Berg (West of Memphis) examined how deep-seated prejudice could spawn a protracted miscarriage of justice, Vinterberg’s nerve-fraying character study investigates the lingering ramifications of rash actions and rushes to judgement.
But first, it sets a scene not all that unlike
Consequently, despite having known the man for only a few
minutes, we’re heartened when Lucas’ fortunes seem to change for the better. We
do this despite knowing that Vinterberg (who’s in his best form since The
Celebration) is as skillful a manipulator as his countryman and cohort Lars
von Trier. Both men are obviously proponents of the adage “your protagonist is
the character who suffers the most.” Rest assured, Lucas will suffer mightily
because of Klara (Annika Wedderkopp), a little girl who has a crush on him.
When he gently scolds her for being overly affectionate, she responds by
intimating to another teacher that Lucas exposed himself. What follows is a
witch-hunt that
Vinterberg and co-writer Tobias Lindholm (A Hijacking)
have no interest in detailing the legalities at play here. Instead, they’re
fascinated with the way in which conservative communities are willing to close
ranks at the slightest provocation. Furthermore, they fully endorse
In terms of story structure, The Hunt favors the Stations of the Cross over Syd Field, running Lucas through a gauntlet of psychological and physical trials. As scorn and abuse rain down on the pariah he’s embodying, Mikkelsen’s performance proves every bit as physically involved as his turn in the ultra-violent Valhalla Rising. Here, his athletic frame serves defensive purposes, allowing him to absorb whatever’s thrown at him and still maintain an air of resilience. All of which serves to make the scene in which his shoulders finally slump and his head bows all the more devastating.
Brilliantly written and masterfully staged, the climax arrives with the entire town gathered in a warmly lit church on Christmas Eve. As Vinterberg allows the scene to methodically unfold, we watch Mikkelsen’s stony countenance become consumed with indignation. Even within the walls of an institution that hinges on blind faith, there’s not a single person who will give him the benefit of the doubt. The rank hypocrisy glimpsed in the sequence is galling. And yet, Vinterberg never allows his evident disdain for such flock mentalities to affect his steady directorial hand.
Fittingly for a film that deals with actions that can’t be undone, The Hunt leaves you with a sickening feeling that’s almost impossible to shake.
Cinema Scope | Men With Guns: Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt Michael Sicinski, August 2013
“You can be a one-hit wonder, so long as you make it count.” A film programmer friend of mine made this remark a few years back, regarding a particular avant-garde filmmaker who has essentially been dining out on a particular canonical entry for the past twenty-some-odd years. It’s true, no one much minds, simply because that single film is so sui generis and so universally beloved; we can’t imagine our lives without it. I bring up this anecdote here by way of raising what seems to me to be a vital question: Is Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 film Festen (a.k.a. The Celebration) another such indispensible film?
We sometimes forget that Festen wasn’t Vinterberg’s debut feature. That honor goes to 1996’s The Biggest Heroes, a film that didn’t travel very far out of Europe but was nevertheless filled to the brim with many of the luminaries—Ulrich Thomsen, Paprika Steen, Trine Dyrholm, Thomas Bo Larsen—who would define Danish cinema for the next seventeen years. Of course, one of the things Festen had going for it that its predecessor did not was its status as the first official Dogme film, and reiterating everything that entails (the promotional hoopla, of course, but also the undeniable formal freshness and verve) hardly seems necessary.
In its own way, Festen cannot and should not be denied. It is a deft piece of Strindbergian Freudianism, but retooled for late-century middlebrow understanding in the age of TV confessional and overly pointed, explanatory dialogue. If it were a comedy, Festen’s brusque directness would seem like satire or political revue, but as a serious attempt at bourgeois scab-picking, it arranges itself a little too neatly. Return of the prodigal, upstairs/downstairs machinations, and the synecdoche of an elite class in one thick carbuncle of a paterfamilias—Vinterberg’s smug classical diagrams always show through.
Nevertheless, the formal innovations of the Dogme style are not to be taken lightly. Simply the tremulous early-video “grain” and unpredictable movements of Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography electrify Vinterberg’s staid scenario, ducking and weaving with it as if with hands at a potter’s wheel. These days it’s hard to see just what was so genuinely bracing about the key Dogme films (Festen, Lars von Trier’s The Idiots [1998], Søren Kragh-Jacobsen’s Mifune’s Last Song and Harmony Korine’s julien donkey-boy [both 1999]), of course, because their language has been absorbed into contemporary filmmaking to the point of degradation.
But the bottom line, as far as Vinterberg goes, is this: the formal innovations of Dogme served to infuse the conservative attitude of Festen with radical swagger. A film divided against itself, Festen is still a major work. At the same time, much of what made it so was derived collectively (from Mantle, “the Brothers” of Dogme, and from a particular historical moment in Danish cinema), and should probably not be attributed to Vinterberg’s status as some kind of visionary artist. Like him or not, one filmmaker emerged from this unique moment with a truly singular voice (probably because he entered the Dogme collective already in possession of one), and it wasn’t Thomas Vinterberg.
But the contemporary film scene is a funny thing. Unlike his compatriot Kragh-Jacobsen, who has slipped into making Danish TV, or Dogme brother Kristian Levring, who has managed a scant two features since his debut (neither of them very good), Vinterberg keeps on producing. Several of his films have been high-profile projects, the most notable one probably being his 2003 fiasco It’s All About Love. A big-budget Europudding studio vehicle starring Joaquin Phoenix and Claire Danes (with disconnected Greek-chorus drop-ins from Sean Penn), this maniacal whatsit about a Russian skating champion, a global conspiracy, and the dissipation of gravity over Uganda, was deemed unreleasable by Focus Features and auctioned off for scrap. If ever there were a movie I and many others were pre-programmed to adore, it was this one. (And some folks did like it when Richard Kelly tightened it up, added much-needed humour, and remade it as Southland Tales [2006].) But Love, sad to say, really is a total disaster, mostly because Vinterberg has no real artistic sensibility to yoke it all together. You’d expect that a film this unhinged would be the result (for good or ill) of an egomaniacal auteur giving free rein to his flights of fancy. But instead, the whole thing is just sad and dull, like someone was trying to make a tuna casserole and accidentally blew up the house.
As a kind of transitional work, Vinterberg offered Dear Wendy (2004), a highly stylized yet intimate treatise on pacifist gun nuts. Taken from an original script by von Trier, the film, with its stagy sets and declamatory dialogue regarding the Roots of American Violence or what have you, feels quite a bit like a rough draft for some sort of interlude in Dogville (2003) or Manderlay (2005). Another failure, to be sure, but at the very least an interesting one, Wendy finds Vinterberg casting about, trying to suss out his talents. Am I a realist? A mannerist? Do I articulate social problems through abstraction? Or (as in von Trier), are social problems themselves mere occasions for modernist experimentation? Vinterberg’s 2007 comedy When a Man Comes Home offered no real answer, but the tedious Submarino (2010) indicates that he has found his niche in the same sanctimonious dramaturgy that characterized Festen, but with the added macho anguish that made Susanne Bier’s Brothers (2004) such a hit with the furrowed-brow set.
How many semi-comebacks does Vinterberg get? His latest, The Hunt, opened in Competition last year at Cannes, and more than any film since Festen it has put its maker high in the mix of top-flight international auteurs. I suppose it stands to reason that Vinterberg would come full circle. Festen was about the revelation of incest coming to light—a secret no one wanted to believe until the evidence was incontrovertible—and The Hunt is about an honorable man falsely accused of child molestation, the result of a child’s offhanded remark to which a hysterical community is all too ready to lend absolute credence. The titles also parallel one another: the “celebration” is the patriarch’s highly public birthday party which becomes an Independence Day for the new generation; the “hunt” is a men’s wild game-shooting expedition that soon turns on one of its own. The good man pleading for change vs. the good man victimized by the mob. What’s more, even outside the narrow confines of Vinterberg’s oeuvre, the two films mirror shifting cultural priorities: Festen, for all its faults, demanded justice and public atonement for sexual violence, whereas The Hunt is chiefly concerned with defending men from an overprotective victim culture.
The Hunt is the story of Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen), an elementary school teacher and divorced father who is just beginning to grow accustomed to life on his own. He quarrels with his ex over custody of his beloved teenage son Marcus (Lasse Fogelstrøm), begins dating a kind, attractive Russian co-worker (Alexandra Rapaport), and despite the fact that he is the lone male in the school setting (and in an overwhelmingly female-dominated profession at that), everybody likes and respects him. That is until Klara (Annika Wedderkopp), the prepubescent daughter of his two best friends, tries to give him a kiss on the mouth. “No,” Lucas tells her sternly. “You only kiss Mommy and Daddy like that.” Embarrassed, Klara tells another teacher that Lucas tried to touch her. And the ball starts rolling from there.
The fact that anyone is taking The Hunt seriously as a look at community panic around pedophilia, or the mass psychology of scapegoating, or even as a solid slice of middlebrow realism, is truly confounding. The problem, as has been the case throughout Vinterberg’s entire career, is that he has no directorial control, and this results in wild tonal inconsistency. Is The Hunt supposed to be some kind of highly artificial bell-jar, such that the patently absurd plot contrivances that shuttle Lucas off like a pig waddling down a blind chute to the slaughter are intended to be seen by those of us stationed outside the diegesis? My esteemed colleague Robert Koehler, who admires this film, likens it to Ibsen in this regard. But then, how can we square The Hunt’s deeply etched expressionist ley lines with the overall naturalism in its performances, or the fact that, dank hunting lodge aside, most of the film exhibits a rather transparent approach to camerawork and editing?
In light of this, it becomes difficult to treat Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm’s rickety script as an up-is-down experiment in Brechtian gear-grinding. When a relatively reasonable character like Lucas’ principal Grete (Susse Wold) abandons her senses and allows Klara to be patently manipulated by a creepy child psychologist—who, without Klara’s parents present, asks leading and frankly perverted questions with no scientific controls to guard against “false positive” responses from the child—we are outside the realm of responsible realism. When Grete can only feebly offer, “I believe the children,” then Vinterberg’s script is designed to turn Lucas into a helpless victim, over and above any genuine concern for the social problems of both pedophilia and the concomitant conservative mob mentality it can actually engender. Likewise, when Klara tells her mom (Anne Louise Hassing) that she lied about being fondled by Lucas, she conveniently ignores her own child, telling her, “You are blocking it out.” In Vinterberg’s universe, the desire to punish a potential molester obliterates even a loving parent’s concern for the young victim’s emotional health and ability to be heard. This is an artificial dystopia, but one from which we are clearly intended to take invaluable lessons about the treatment of the honourable adult white men in our midst.
Whatever faults there are with The Hunt (and there are indeed many), they are not to be found with its lead actor. Mikkelsen, who has spent the better part of this year reclaiming the Hannibal Lecter character from cultural self-parody, embodies Lucas with just the right combination of indignation, uncertainty, and baseline concern for the true innocents in his charge (Klara and Marcus), his frustration peaking as he becomes unable to keep his loved ones safe from the brutish mob. Mikkelsen’s Lucas is a man, not a symbol, which makes Vinterberg’s writerly and directorial failures all the more galling.
In the end, once Lucas is properly vindicated (more by a defiant assertion of self than by any clear refutation of Klara’s accusation, but whatever), we witness the final scene, which is the absolute inversion of Festen. Lucas, his ex-wife, and the entire community are present for the induction of Marcus as a full member of the hunting lodge. Whereas the son in the earlier movie exposed the father’s sins in order to irreparably tear the fabric of patriarchy asunder, here the father, restored as a healthy and proper man, brings his own son into the masculinist fold. This is accomplished, of course, by blood sacrifice: Marcus is supposed to shoot something in the woods, preferably something they can eat.
The “twist ending,” I guess, of The Hunt is that Lucas hears a gunshot and ducks. He will never feel 100% secure in the patriarchal winner’s circle, certain that he won’t be the sacrificial offering once again. But he really oughtn’t worry. Back in 1998, the Brothers of Dogme gave up their names (The director must not be credited), their means of stability (The camera must be hand-held), and even the past and the future (The film takes place in the here and now). And yet, to this day, white men are still far more likely to turn their guns outward than to eat one of their own.
Sight & Sound [Geoffrey Macnab] November 30, 2012
Both the Accuser and the Accused Are Lost in 'The Hunt' | PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Review: Thomas Vinterberg's 'The Hunt' Starring ... - Indiewire Blogs Jessica Kiang from The Playlist
Thomas
Vinterberg The Hunt Analysis | Truth and Lies in Jagten Lamos Ignoramous
Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Angeliki Coconi]
The Hunt (2013) : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Jeff Nelson from DVD Talk
Film-Forward.com [Michael Lee]
The
Hunt | Reviews | Screen Fionnuala
Halligan at
The Hunt / The Dissolve Noel Murray
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]
theartsdesk.com [Adam Sweeting]
FilmSchoolRejects [Simon Gallagher]
Movie Mezzanine [Anna Tatarska]
Sound On Sight Lane Scarberry
Film School Rejects [Rob Hunter]
Cannes Film Festival 2012: The Hunt | The House Next Door Budd Wilkins
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
Flickfeast [Alice Sutherland-Hawes]
Film Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]
FILM REVIEW: The Hunt - The Buzz - CBC Eli Glasner
Movie Review - 'The Hunt' - A Kindergarten, A Story And A ... - NPR Bob Mondello
Cannes 2012: 'The Hunt' + 'Love' | PopMatters Elena Razlogova from Pop Matters
Film-Forward.com [Dionne King]
Domenico La Porta at
Cannes
'12, Day Four: Bootleggers, transsexuals and falsely accused pedophiles, oh my!
Mike D’Angelo at
DAILY
| Cannes 2012 | Thomas Vinterberg’s THE HUNT David Hudson at
Interview:
10 Questions for Mads Mikkelsen Emma
Dibdin interview from The Arts Desk,
Cannes
2012: Director Thomas Vinterberg on 'The Hunt' (Q&A) Scott Roxborough interview at
Hollywoodreporter.com
[David Rooney] at
The Hunt | review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes ... - Time Out Cath Clarke
Guardian.co.uk
[Peter Bradshaw] at
Telegraph.co.uk
[Robbie Collin] at
Vancouver Weekly [Indrapramit Das]
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Bob Ignizio]
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Pasadena Art Beat [Jana J. Monji] also seen here: Examiner.com [Jana J. Monji]
The Hunt Movie Review & Film Summary (2013) | Roger Ebert Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
The Hunt (Movie);Hunt, The - Movies - The New York Times
FAR
FROM THE MADDING CROWD B+ 91
Great Britain USA (119 mi) 2015 ‘Scope Official site
Far From the madding crowd’s ignoble strife
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;
Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
"Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard", by
Thomas Gray, 1751 (excerpt)
An epic and sweeping romantic story of long-repressed love, based on the 19th century Thomas Hardy novel set in the Victorian period of the 1870’s, his fourth and first successful novel, listed at #10 in a 2007 Guardian poll (Emily Brontë hits the heights in poll to find greatest love story) of the greatest love stories of all time, which follows the exploits of a feisty, determined, and extremely independent woman, Carey Mulligan as Bathsheba Everdene, initially seen confidently riding a horse galloping through the English countryside of rural Dorset, supposedly 200 miles from London, where the idyllic pastoral beauty of south and southwest England is described in the book as Wessex, based on the real locations of the author’s birthplace but given a somewhat fictionalized and dreamlike embellishment. Hard to believe this is the same director whose “vow of chastity” forsook the indulgences of special effects, musical scores, props or sets, special lighting, post-production modifications and other technical wizardry as one of the original founders of the short-lived Dogme 95 movement, the maker of THE CELEBRATION (FESTEN) (1998), one of a small cadre of artists insisting upon naturalism, accentuating the artistry of the performers instead of the influence of the studio. While authenticity was the goal then, this film has all the Hollywood grandeur and style of big budget spectacles made during the height of the studio era, though made for a fraction of the cost. Nonetheless, the look of the film is spellbinding, all shot on actual 35 mm film (and it shows!), beautifully captured by the luminous and vividly textured cinematography of Charlotte Bruus Christensen, who also shot Vinterberg’s previous film The Hunt (Jagten) (2012). As Hardy’s most pastoral novel, a good portion of the book consists of detailed descriptions of the landscape and farming techniques, expressed in the movie through the visuals of green rolling hills and an attachment to the land that is everpresent throughout, paying homage to Dovzhenko’s EARTH (1930) with utterly spectacular shots of peasants working in the fields, yet captured here in glorious color, where the painterly images of harvest scenes are perhaps only exceeded by Terrence Malick’s gloriously filmed masterpiece DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978). While adapting Jane Austen novels may be the preferred pre-Victorian author to grace the cinema screens, usually given a more modernist, feminist perspective, Thomas Hardy has hardly been shortchanged, as Michael Winterbottom’s JUDE (1996), an ultra bleak adaptation of Hardy’s final 1896 novel Jude the Obscure, starring a hauntingly beautiful 20-year old Kate Winslet, remains one of the extraordinary romantic tragedies on record. Hardy novels don’t typically result in upbeat, feelgood movies, as it’s clear Victorian women had fewer choices, so those that actually made the best of their limited options were seen as stronger and more aggressive, making excellent role models for the women of today, and while this may not have the awesome visual power of Roman Polanski’s TESS (1979), whose majestic agricultural scenes are also compared to Malick ("Girl, interrupted; Roman Polanski's Tess (1979)"), Mulligan’s fiercely winning performance is far more likely to produce smiles rather than tears.
Without providing any backdrop for the story, Bathsheba is educated, self-aware, and essentially a modern young woman living on her own with her aunt, having a chance meeting with a neighboring sheep farmer, the introverted, muscular, and hardworking Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts) who is taken by her somewhat out-of-character, bold and proudly defiant manner. They develop a quick friendship, where he makes a surprisingly blunt proposal of marriage, claiming the farm he leases could easily become their home. While flattered, she’s afraid to give up her independence, something she values more than a husband. The winds of change offer each of them a unique twist of fate, where Bathsheba inherits a mammoth estate in Weatherbury from her uncle, one of the largest farms in the region, making her instantly wealthy, while in a dreamlike sequence a crazed and inexperienced sheep dog drives Gabriel’s sheep over a high cliff, a scene made especially dramatic over the rugged coastline of the Golden Cap, killing them all while leaving him penniless. Traveling the roads, looking for a job, he comes upon a blazing fire in the night, where he immediately pitches in and actually saves the barn almost singlehandedly by daringly putting out the fire on the roof. In the aftermath, when asking the owner for a job, he’s surprised to learn it’s Bathsheba, their positions now reversed. She hires him as the foreman in charge, while she is almost never seen again without her own trusted maidservant Liddy (Jessica Barden), from whom she learns all the latest gossip and news. Together they form a female alliance against a bartering monopoly of men, who customarily do all the buying and selling of crops along with the various necessities, including her neighboring landowner William Boldwood (Michael Sheen), a prosperous farmer who is proud and aloof and likely more than twice her age. Despite this difference, he is smitten by her playful and zestful charm, stirring emotions he felt were altogether lost. Offering to combine their estates through marriage, she views it more as a business decision than a matter of the heart, stringing him along while she seeks better offers, which arrives on her doorstep in the form of a gallant soldier, Sergeant Francis Troy (Tom Sturridge), who fits the bill as a dashing Prince Charming. While Gabriel sees through the young man’s veneer and warns Bathsheba not to get too interested, she’s aroused by his charm and masculinity, and perhaps his scarlet red uniform, which he displays in an erotic display of swordsmanship. Knowing little to nothing about him, she loses all self control and finds herself lost in her sudden euphoria, marrying him on the spot, an impulsive act she lives to regret, discovering the pain and humiliation of realizing she can’t control the repulsive actions of others, as Troy quickly leaves her in debt with excessive drinking and gambling problems. When a woman from his past suddenly reappears, but just as quickly dies in childbirth while carrying Troy’s child, he shuns his new wife, brazenly telling her “This woman is more to me, dead as she is, than ever you were, or are, or can be.”
When her husband puts an end to his misery, leaving his uniform onshore and swimming out as far as the fates would have him, his death is considered no loss to anyone. Boldwood renews his interest in pursuing Bathsheba, willing to pay off all her husband’s debts, even agreeing to allow Gabriel to run both farms, as his closeness to Bathsheba is evident, loyal, overprotective, always looking out for her interests, usually expressed in furtive glances, where they are likely the subject of scandalous rumor that Boldwood is too remote from hearing. After a particularly successful harvest, the entire staff has a dinner party, celebrating with drink and song, where Boldwood unexpectedly drops in, hoping for an answer, while Bathsheba is persuaded to perform a song, singing Let No Man steal Your Thyme - Carey Mulligan (From "Far ... YouTube (2:57), a traditional British and Irish folksong that lyrically warns young people of the risks and dangers of taking false lovers. While promising him nothing, Boldwood is emboldened, feeling the time is right, that she will finally accept his offer. Making all the necessary arrangements, he holds a lavish Christmas Eve party sure that he will win her heart, but Bathsheba feels even more suffocated, prematurely walking out of the party when she suddenly encounters her husband, not dead after all, but drunk, broke, and in a ragged state, rudely ordering her about, grabbing her arm, claiming her as his property, causing her to scream in fright. Boldwood shoots him dead on the spot, just as Gabriel had earlier shot his deranged sheep dog. Spared the death penalty, calling it a crime of passion, he’s nonetheless imprisoned and out of her life forever. Despite her best intentions, she realizes she has an impact on the lives of others, even unintentionally. While she’s initially seen as carefree and irresponsible, seduced by her own ideas of freedom, but later becomes more ruthlessly aloof, deluded by her own power, caught up in a battle of wills, completely unaware of the suffering she brings others, who are themselves consumed by thoughts of her that amount to little more than male fantasy, often languishing for years in a state of emotional paralysis, waiting for the right opportunity that never comes. Using Craig Armstrong’s musical score to capture emotions that the characters themselves are unable to express, Bathsheba utters one of the most eloquent lines late in the film, “It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.” Much of this picture reveals the gulf that lies between the words that are never spoken, the hopes, the desires, the repressed dreams, and the unintended consequences that often haunt people to their graves, all shown in a choreography of body language and facial expressions. The Victorian era did not allow straightforward honesty, as people were defined by their class status and social standing, where thoughts were expressed through the power of suggestion. While the lower classes could speak freely amongst themselves, it was considered impudent to speak frankly and openly to one’s employer, unable to cross the class barrier, where it was required to hold one’s tongue. Is it really any different today? The social divide between Bathsheba and Gabriel effects every conversation they ever have, becoming an insurmountable obstacle throughout most of the film, a long-suffering open wound that can only bleed and fester, but concealed and out of sight from everyone else. It was a private world one lived in, lost in their own reveries and rhapsodic thoughts, where any thoughts of reaching a connecting understanding is more of a mirage that rarely intrudes into their actual lives. The liberating, feminist sentiment is provided by our own, modern day vantage point, knowing full well that even under today’s more open circumstances, true communication is a lost art, where people continue to drown in their own repressed and often agonizing sorrows and regrets, unable to change those few haunting and fateful moments that seem to forever define our lives.
Digital Spy [Stella Papamichael]
Carey Mulligan is suitably breathless in a tightly cinched 1870s
corset, but Thomas Vinterberg's elegant adaptation of Thomas Hardy's classic
tome gives her more than a few opportunities to assert her free will and shove
it in the faces of three men who take a shine to her. Julie Christie softened
those edges in John Schlesinger's 1967 version, still Mulligan is, in other
ways, more convincing as a woman who is prepared to muck out the sheep pen on
the farm she inherits and it helps make up for her capriciousness in love.
What's more surprising is that Vinterberg – who spearheaded the maverick Dogme
movement with Lars von Trier – takes a more restrained, rather conventional
approach to the staging of the story, which shuttles through the key events in
Bathsheba's emotional life without drawing a huge amount of feeling from them.
Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts is the humble sheep herder, Gabriel, who
proposes too quickly, inviting the rejection that will obviously become a
source of regret for Bathsheba. Once she takes over at her uncle's farm and
puts him on the payroll, the imbalance of power seems too much to overcome.
Unusually, it is Bathsheba's ego that proves to be the bigger obstacle on the path to true love, but Mulligan's smart reading of the character draws out the naiveté that breeds such confidence. To his credit, Vinterberg tunes into her every moment of hesitation and especially in startling encounters with the dashing Sergeant Troy (the boyish Tom Sturridge) whose immaturity is more elemental. A point-of-view shot that relays Bathsheba's coyness about looking him in the eye is one of the more instinctive, eloquently framed scenes in the film, otherwise Vinterberg's approach is, like Bathsheba's ribcage, marked by restraint.
Michael Sheen wears the stiffest collar in the village as 'the
older man', William Boldwood, who errs by trying to woo Bathsheba with talk of
protecting her and yet it's his own vulnerability, so touchingly played by
Sheen that makes a lasting impression. Schoenaerts appears to be carving a
niche as the silently smouldering lover (currently in Suite Français and
A
Little Chaos, too) and he certainly has the charisma - but there is an
awkwardness about him; perhaps, too mindful of his elocution. And the chemistry
with Mulligan when they're caught in the rain, or wading in the sheep dip,
never quite gets to boiling point.
The film has its moments (like Troy flashing his sword at
Bathsheba for a bit of Freudian texture) and as classic heroines go, Bathsheba
is among the more dynamic ones, shaping her own destiny for better, or worse.
Mulligan must have jumped at the chance to play her and she handles all the
switching and stalling with grace, lending her some dignity when it might look
as if she is too reckless.
Sprawling romantic novels such as Hardy's are often best suited to serial
television, because bringing heart and mind into sync takes time, so it's just
as well that – apart from the brutal tailoring – Mulligan is seamless.
A Jungian take on Thomas Vinterberg's Far From the Madding Crowd Alison Sayers from The Guardian, May 11, 2015
The lush rural visuals of Thomas Vinterberg’s adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd capture one’s attention, and quickly. We watch Carey Mulligan as Bathsheba Everdene ride through the English countryside at full gallop, in full bloom. Confidently, she rides like a man. Approaching a wooded path, she reclines backwards to avoid being entangled with branches blocking the way. The image presents a strong metaphor for the gender-prescribed constraints from which Bathsheba seeks to escape.
We are alongside Gabriel Oak, the shepherd, played by Matthias Schoenaerts, and following his male gaze as he observes Bathsheba on her ride. Then, Vinterberg rapidly changes tack to Bathsheba’s point of view. Mulligan gives a fiercely intelligent and physically active portrayal of Bathsheba. The ethereal floatiness of Julie Christie, receiving the projections of the idealised feminine from her suitors and empty of her own desires and will, is discarded in this version, nearly 50 years later. Christie’s Bathsheba was a vessel into which masculine desire was poured; Mulligan’s Bathsheba is alive to her own desires, initially for power and control, then sexual, and, ultimately, for a relationship.
This Far From the Madding Crowd is a fairytale, describing the archetypal integration of the inner masculine and feminine. Carl Jung called this process “individuation”, the process of becoming a whole person. No wonder the movie starts with Bathsheba emerging out of darkness, for that is the process: coming out of the unknown and the conscious, humbling, work of integrating it. Jung held that each of us carries the psychological functions of what he named the feminine and masculine. Vinterberg’s film depicts these functions being processed through the characters of Bathsheba, William Boldwood, Francis Troy and Oak.
The difficulty of accepting the inner feminine is showcased in Boldwood, Troy and Oak. The feminine brings relatedness, commitment, fidelity, friendship, love, compassion, imagination – all qualities that Oak demonstrates over the course of the film.
Schoenaerts is well cast for this; he is a man of feeling rather than words. In excess, this feminine aspect brings moodiness, sentimentality, hysteria, possessiveness, fantasising; between them, Boldwood and Troy illustrate these. Bathsheba experiences the challenge of integrating her inner masculine dimension. Her assertiveness, courage, analytical thought, strength, vitality and decisiveness are all positive masculine aspects. But she also shows aggression, ruthlessness and abuse of power: the negative masculine. She can only allow space for the feminine aspects of valuing and relating if she recognises the negative repercussions of her behaviours.
Impetuous and irresponsible, seduced by her own position of power and authority, Bathsheba acts, and her actions impact others. Angered by Boldwood, a neighbouring farmer who slights her at the corn market, she takes her revenge by sending him a Valentine’s Day card as a joke. He takes seriously its message of “marry me”, with disastrous consequences.
Michael Sheen’s Boldwood is dignified, proud and aloof, a man of gravity, status and tradition, highly respected by those around him. His encounters with Bathsheba bring him pain and suffering. He is consumed by his longing and becomes neurotic and obsessed. With self-control lost, he holds to both the fantasy of marrying her and the mind-altering grief of her absence, feelings that ultimately destroy him.
In parallel with Bathsheba’s experiences with Boldwood run those with Sergeant Troy, played by Tom Sturridge as a young, seductive soldier decked out in his scarlet uniform. He arrives at Bathsheba’s farm searching for Fanny Robin, the sweetly innocent serving girl who let him down at the altar. Meeting and seducing Bathsheba, and the masculine power she represents as the propertied woman, revives his feelings of potency, a means to wipe out the feelings of humiliation and loss at having been jilted by Fanny.
Bathsheba’s initiation into herself is accelerated in these scenes, first at the farm at night when she first encounters Troy, and then in the forest, when he demonstrates his swordplay, and in doing so penetrates her masculine armour. The scenes are short and quick, like sword thrusts into the consciousness, yet shadowed, erotic and dark.
Through Troy, Bathsheba experiences feeling and sensation. But their marriage fails and she is rejected, abandoned, left in debt. Mulligan is excellent here. She shows Bathsheba’s pain and humiliation at discovering that she cannot order the world as she wants it; and through this, she opens up to the world of feeling and valuing, previously absent in her.
Far
From the Madding Crowd JR Jones from
The Reader
“It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in a language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs,” declares Bathsheba Everdene, the young heroine of Thomas Hardy's novel Far From the Madding Crowd. For a Victorian writer, Hardy has always struck me as unusually modern—especially in his simple, exacting, observational prose—but Bathsheba's statement is positively postmodern in its understanding of how words create their own value system. The gulf between men's and women's experience couldn't be more obvious in Thomas Vinterberg's solid, well-acted screen adaptation of the novel, the first in nearly half a century. British screenwriter David Nicholls (One Day), catering to the art-house market for prefeminist Victorian romance, makes a game attempt to Austen-ize Far From the Madding Crowd by emphasizing its story of an independent woman who challenges the sexism of her times. In the end, though, he and Vinterberg can't obscure the strong patriarchal feeling Hardy brought to the book: in his view it was the tale of a woman being gently brought to heel.
Like so many other romances of the era,
Far From the Madding Crowd turns on marriage as a matter of love and
finance. Bathsheba is working on her uncle's farm when she meets sturdy young
Gabriel Oak, a neighboring shepherd; he immediately proposes marriage, but
after a calamity costs him his entire flock and Bathsheba inherits the farm
from her uncle, Oak winds up as her employee. A second suitor enters the
picture after Bathsheba impishly sends a valentine to the middle-aged bachelor
William Boldwood; he too proposes, offering her a more comfortable life, but
she's not attracted to him. Impulsively she allows herself to be wooed by the
dashing rake Francis Troy, an army sergeant who reduces her to jelly by meeting
her in the forest and executing a lightning-swift sword drill around her
person. The lucky winner of her hand in marriage, Troy soon begins spending
down her money on drink, gambling, and Fanny Robin, a young honey whom he got
pregnant before meeting Bathsheba.
No one could miss the parallels to
Hardy's own life. Son of a stone mason, he was working as an architectural
apprentice and trying to establish himself as a novelist in 1870 when he fell
in love with Emma Gifford, daughter of a retired solicitor. Two years into
their acquaintance Hardy approached Emma's father to ask for her hand, but the
elder Gifford turned him down—"rather indignantly," according to
Hardy biographer Ralph Pite—and Hardy, realizing he had to give a better
account of himself financially, resolved to get ahead in his true calling as an
author. Within months he had scored a handsome offer for a new novel to be
serialized anonymously in Cornhill magazine; Far From the Madding
Crowd began appearing in December 1873. It was a great success, and once
Hardy was revealed as author of the book, his career took off. He and Emma were
married in September 1874.
Hardy had already fictionalized his
courtship of Emma in his previous novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, but the
rural setting of Far From the Madding Crowd (it's the first of his
novels to take place in his fictional Wessex) and the character of Gabriel Oak
allowed him to approach the situation again from a greater remove. In the
novel's opening scene the young shepherd happens to be standing behind a hedge
and in a good position to spy on Bathsheba when her wagon comes to a halt on
the road. As the wagon driver disappears to attend to something, Oak watches
Bathsheba unwrap a household mirror for no other reason than to admire herself.
"She has her faults," Oak tells a gatekeeper after Bathsheba and her
wagon have rolled away. "And the greatest of them is—well, what it always
is. . . . Vanity." Oak is nearly her inverse, thinking
least of himself. When his sheep, harassed by an ill-trained dog, plunge over a
cliff to their deaths, Oak's primary concern is Bathsheba: "Thank God I am
not married: what would she have done in the poverty now coming upon me!"
Hardy's courtship of Emma Gifford
wasn't the only aspect of his private life to creep into Far From the
Madding Crowd; a few months into the book's composition, Hardy was shocked
to learn that his friend and literary mentor Horace Moule had killed himself at
age 41. Moule, the son of an Anglican Evangelical minister, had been a
promising scholar and orator when he and Hardy first met more than a decade
earlier. "He was born into the educated upper-middle classes; he was
cultured, 'a fine Greek scholar'; he was everything Hardy wanted to be,"
explains Pite. But Moule was also a closeted homosexual whose spiritual agony
fueled a series of terrible depressions and alcoholic binges. His academic
prospects ruined, he was making ends meet as a workhouse inspector when he and
Hardy last met, in London in June 1873. Three months later Moule slit his
throat.
Shortly after this awful news, Hardy
introduced the character of William Boldwood into Far From the Madding Crowd,
and as the story progresses, the shy, awkward farmer develops from a figure of
fun into one of pity. The mischievous valentine he receives from Bathsheba,
inscribed with the words "Marry Me," awakens strange emotions in him,
and after years of turning away marriage-minded young women, he's crippled by a
sudden and insatiable need for love. Boldwood, who owns a large farm adjoining
Bathsheba's, eventually hires Gabriel Oak to manage his property, and Oak, who
still nurses his own infatuation with Bathsheba, becomes an unlikely confidante
to the lovelorn man. "O, Gabriel, I am weak and foolish, and I don't know
what, and I can't fend off my miserable grief!" Boldwood confesses after
Bathsheba has married the flashy Sergeant Troy. "I had some faint belief
in the mercy of God till I lost that woman." Like Moule, Boldwood will be
overwhelmed by despair.
Nearly all of these developments wind
up onscreen, but that only goes to show how the most faithful adaptation, by
emphasizing some things and deemphasizing others, can spin the story in a
different direction. Nicholls has dropped Hardy's unflattering scene of the
heroine admiring herself in a mirror; instead he begins with Bathsheba (Carey
Mulligan) saddling her horse for a morning ride as she explains in voice-over,
"I've grown accustomed to being on my own. Too accustomed, some would say.
Too independent." Various plot twists and minor characters are excised,
yet Nicholls dramatizes every incident demonstrating Bathsheba's pluck and
resolve: her forceful takeover of the farm's management, her spirited haggling
with male buyers at the local corn market. The fatuous workman Joseph
Poorgrass, a frequent source of comic relief in the novel, barely registers
onscreen, but Nicholls has dutifully preserved the moment when he provokes
giggles among the hired help by clumsily addressing their new mistress as
"sir."
This celebration of Bathsheba's
independence might play well with contemporary women, but it doesn't really
square with much of the movie, in which Bathsheba's inexperience as a farmer
forces her to rely on Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts) again and again. When he first
arrives on the farm, a fire has broken out, and only his quick thinking
prevents it from reaching the barn; when her sheep break through a fence, gorge
themselves on clover, and suffer from bloat, only Oak knows the surgical
procedure that will save them; and when Bathsheba's wedding reception coincides
with an approaching storm, only Oak rouses himself to cover up her wheat and
barley harvest before it's destroyed by the rains. Meanwhile Troy (Tom Sturridge),
the man of her dreams, is passed out in the reception hall with her workmen,
having gotten them all drunk on expensive brandy. In fact Far From the
Madding Crowd can be viewed as an epic struggle between an independent
woman and the world's most dependable man.
A stand-in for Hardy, Oak not only
rescues Bathsheba multiple times, he also calls her out for her bad behavior,
and he demands to be treated with respect despite her superior station.
"You are greatly to blame for playing pranks on a man like Mr.
Boldwood," he tells Bathsheba after learning about her flirtatious
valentine. This so incenses her that she fires him, and he hits the road with
his belongings, only to be summoned back to the farm when the sheep take ill.
To his credit, he refuses to return until Bathsheba rides out personally to ask
for his help, sending her the message "Beggars can't be choosers."
Onscreen these episodes play like the sort of Tracy-and-Hepburn jousting that
always ends in a rapturous draw, but Hardy didn't necessarily feel that way.
Observing Emma Gifford with another lover, he once noted, "In spite of her
orders to him to fetch & carry, of his devotion & her rule, he is in
essence master." From his perspective, Far From the Madding Crowd
ends on a happy note only because Bathsheba has learned her place.
Sight & Sound [Thirza Wakefield] May 1, 2015
Cinema365 [Carlos deVillalvilla]
Far From the Madding Crowd Means Well but Sells Its ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice
Screen International [Fionnuala Halligan]
Review: 'Far From The Madding Crowd' With Carey Mulligan ... Kevin Jagernauth from The Playlist
Avengers: Age of Ultron - The New Yorker Anthony Lane
Slant Magazine [Jesse Cataldo]
Movie Review: Far From the Madding Crowd -- Vulture David Edelstein
Far From The Madding Crowd / The Dissolve Mike D’Angelo
Spectrum Culture [Erica Peplin]
Far from the Madding Crowd Review | Vanity Fair Richard Lawson
Reel Views [James Berardinelli]
'Far from the Madding Crowd' Will Satiate Your Jane Austen ... Ben Dickinson from Elle magazine
Little White Lies [Trevor Johnston]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Angus Wolfe Murray]
Film-Forward.com [Caroline Ely]
Georgia Straight [Ron Yamauchi]
Filmaluation [Hemanth Kissoon]
Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy]
Film Review: 'Far From the Madding Crowd' - Variety Scott Foundas
Far from the Madding Crowd review – solid, but needs more ... Mark Kermode from The Guardian
Evening Standard [David Sexton]
Associated Press [Lindsey Bahr]
Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]
'Far
From the Madding Crowd' movie review - Washington ... Stephanie Merry from The Washington Post
How Hardy made me like 'Madding Crowd' all the more Bruce C. Steele from The Asheville Citizen-Times
Austin Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]
Review: 'Far from the Madding Crowd' - Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey
Far from the Madding Crowd Movie Review (2015) | Roger ... Christy Lemire from Roger Ebert site
Review: 'Far From the Madding Crowd,' the Rom-Com ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times
On England's Coast, Thomas Hardy Made His World The New York Times
Bill
Viola (Designer) - BalletAndOpera.com
Welcome to the official BILL VIOLA website
Bill Viola Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works | The Art Story biography
Blain|Southern
| Artists | Bill Viola | Curriculum Vitae
art profile
Blain|Southern | Bill
Viola biography
Bill Viola | Artist | Royal Academy of Arts biography
Bill Viola's Profile on the Getty site
The Passions, National Gallery, London
Bill Viola talks to The Independent about The Passions by Doris Lockhart Saatchi, October 10, 2003
The Arc of Passions Bill Viola’s New Works, by Yvette Bíró from Rouge, 2005
Guardian review of LOVE/DEATH Tristan Und Isolde by Adrian Searle, June 29, 2006
Bill
Viola video installation heralds new national exhibition space for ... Mark Brown from The Guardian, June 14, 2015
Bill Viola - Journal of
Contemporary Art Interview from
The Journal of Contemporary Art, June
30, 1990
Tate Modern - Bill Viola talks about his work June 2006
Bill Viola - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Although I'm not prepared to make any grand claims
for Lie with Me, it's considerably more interesting than one
would expect given its poor reception at last year's Toronto festival.
Furthermore, its distributor, ThinkFilm, sent it straight-to-video in the
World Cinema: Directors -- Luchino Visconti
Luchino Visconti occupies a unique place in the history of world cinema; he is the most Italian of internationalists, the most operatic of realists, and the most aristocratic of Marxists. Although one of the progenitors of the Italian neorealist movement, Visconti, with his love of spectacle and historical panorama, would seem to have more in common with Orson Welles or even Erich von Stroheim than with Rossellini or De Sica. Directors as diverse as Bertolucci, Scorsese, Coppola and Fassbinder have named him as a major influence. — Baseline
Aristocrat and
Marxist, master equally of harsh realism and sublime melodrama, Luchino Visconti
(1906-1976) was without question one of the greatest film directors of the
mid-twentieth century. Immensely rich and a bit of a dilettante, he went to
Paris in the 1930s to escape the stifling culture of Fascist Italy. In Paris he
met, and fell in love with, the fashion photographer Horst P Horst. But even
more formative was his meeting with Jean Renoir in the heady political
atmosphere of the Popular Front.
In 1937 he worked
with Renoir on Une partie de campagne and was imbued with a lifelong
love of cinema. Returning to Italy he took part in the Resistance and became a
convinced Marxist, which he remained until his death. A leading light of the
neo-realist movement in the 40s, he also acquired a reputation as an innovative
theatre and opera director.
With the costume
spectacular Senso in 1954 he applied his theatrical talents to a more
melodramatic form, while retaining his commitment to a Marxist interpretation
of Italy's troubled history. From then on, he mixed contemporary subjects - as
in Rocco and His Brothers (1960) - with a meditation on the past and on
a world which is lost but has left a deep mark on the present. The focus of
almost all his films is families, either the disintegration of large families
or the breakdown of couples, with betrayal - whether of marriages or of
political causes - a recurring motif. Although his films usually end unhappily,
in the earlier ones some hope is expressed for the future. But in his later
films his vision becomes darker as he chronicles the collapse of dynasties and
his personal focus turns inward on to themes of sadness, ageing and death. An
autobiographical strain emerges, first in The Leopard (1963), but also
in Death in Venice (1970) and even more powerfully in the sublime Ludwig
(1973). During the making of Ludwig he suffered a severe stroke, from
which he never fully recovered.
In all his films,
regardless of period or subject matter, visual splendour is combined with
meticulous realism and deep historical and psychological insight. Although he
put a lot of himself into his films, he did not make them for himself, but
always for an audience. Famous as the embodiment of art cinema, films such as The
Leopard and Rocco were also hugely popular at the box office,
particularly in Italy but also worldwide.
At the same time,
however, Visconti never compromised his art. He was fanatical about detail, but
even more so about the integrity of his vision, which he expected the audience
to be able to share.
Sometimes his
overpowering self-belief led to errors of judgement but, with the possible
exception of his adaptation of Camus's The Stranger (1967), none of his
films was a failure with the public and the critics at the same time. In the
bfi retrospective we showed all of his films, including those never released in
this country, such as the Resistance film Days of Glory (1945). A number
of new prints have been struck, based in many cases on restored negatives,
enabling many of the films to be seen for the first time in all their splendour
Luchino Visconti BFI Screen Online
Luchino Visconti's
film career spanned over four decades, making him a key force in 20th-century
Italian cinema. However, it was in Paris that his career began when he
befriended the fashion designer Coco Chanel, who introduced him to Jean Renoir.
Visconti worked with Renoir on various film projects, one of which was the film
Une Partie de Campagne (1936), as costume designer and assistant
director. During this period, and contrary to his aristocratic upbringing, he
became influenced by Marxist ideology, and these beliefs would later shape his
own style of film-making.
Visconti did not
direct his first film until 1942, when he returned to Italy. Ossessione
was based on the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M Cain.
Visconti's adaptation was unauthorised - which meant the film was rarely
screened in the USA - and heavily censored by fascist officials of Mussolini's
regime. Despite all its difficulties, it remained a success in Italy and is
regarded as the first film of the Italian neo-realist movement.
Visconti's
political leanings were expressed in his second film La Terra Trema (The
Earth Trembles) (1947), which tells the story of class exploitation in a
small Sicilian fishing village. This theme continued with the 1960 film, Rocco
e i Suoi Fratelli (Rocco and his Brothers).
In his later work,
Visconti seemed to move away from the neo-realist style towards more historical
and literary themes. The battle between progress and nostalgia is constantly
fought in this director's work, but towards the end of his career Visconti
seemed to favour the latter with a definite air of scepticism about the value
of progress.
One such film was
the cinematic epic Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) (1963), starring Burt
Lancaster as the Prince of Salina. By arranging the marriage of Tancredi, his
nephew, and Angelica, the daughter of a rich merchant, the Prince attempts to
financially rescue and secure the future of his family by joining the old aristocracy
with the new money of the bourgeoisie. This film's operatic style was a cross
over from Visconti's theatre work.
Visconti was
openly gay, but few of his films dealt with the issue of male homosexuality.
The most notable exception to this was the 1971 film Morte a Venezia (Death
In Venice) from the novel by Thomas Mann. Dirk Bogarde plays the lead
character, the reserved composer Gustav Aschenbach who, when confronted with
the purity and beauty of a young boy, played by Bjorn Andresen, allows the
secret passion within him, his homosexuality, to awaken.
Visconti returns
to the topic of the aristocracy in the melodrama L'Innocente (The Intruder)
(1976). This was to be his final film. As a result of the strokes he suffered
in 1972 and 1974, which left him completely paralysed, Visconti died at the age
of 70 before editing was completed.
During his life,
Visconti had made over 20 films, many of which are considered cinematic
masterpieces, directed plays by Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, and
staged ballets and operas, such as La Vestale (1954) and La
Sonnambula (1955), starring Maria Callas.
"Visconti's
death marked the end of an era of Italian cinema" - Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
Luchino
Visconti - Biography BFI biography
Luchino Visconti facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com ... biography
Luchino
Visconti - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films:, Publications profile by Joel Kanoff from Film Reference
Visconti Biography from Library Think Quest
Biography
for Luchino Visconti - TCM.com
All-Movie Guide bio information
GLBTQ Biography Encyclopedia for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture
Luchino Visconti @ Filmbug bio page
The
rooms of Luchino Visconti - Villa Erba
THE HIDDEN
ANGELES OF LUCHINO VISCONTI - lulifilm
Homage to Luchino Visconti And Adriana Asti < 2006 < Festival ... Osaka-European Film Festival, including photos and brief comments on films
The Films of Luchino Visconti - by
Michael E. Grost Classic
Film and Television
Cinematheque Ontario - Programmes - MAESTRO: THE FILMS OF LUCHINO ... which includes film reviews
BAM/PFA - Luchino Visconti brief overview for a film retrospective
The Life and Times of Count Luchino Visconti BBC Four Documentary
Female Sensuality Female sensuality, Past joys and future hopes, by Gertrud Koch from Jump Cut, March 1985
Visconti's
Cinema of Twilight • Senses of Cinema Maximilian Le Cain from Senses of Cinema, December 29, 2001
'Count zero' Jonathan Jones from The Guardian, December 12, 2001
Rocco
and His Brothers - Bright Lights Film Journal Gary Morris, January 1, 2003
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Death Becomes Visconti Michael
Wood from Sight and Sound, May 2003
Leave it to Diva | Film | The Guardian Peter Lennon article on Claudia Cardinale from The Guardian, May 9, 2003
Visconti Revisited Take 2: Luchino Visconti by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith ... book review by Benjamin Halligan from Senses of Cinema, July 2003
The
Aristocrat - The New York Times
Horacio Silva, September 17, 2006, also seen here: Horacio
Silva, "The Aristocrat", New York Times, September 17, 2006. An
account of Visconti's life and work
FEATURE: Cinematic aristocrat Luchino Visconti born 100 years ago Peer Meinert from Monsters and Critics, October 28, 2006
The Leopard in Historical Context, (1963): Luchino Visconti , 28/05/07 ... Kinoeye essay, May 28, 2007
The Damned: Luchino Visconti. Nationalism as Regression, 09/06/07 ... Kinoeye essay, June 9, 2007
Queer
- Bright Lights Film Journal
Nicholas de Villiers on Death in
Venice, August 1, 2007
Bellissima:
Luchino Visconti, 19/08/07, Kinoeye - Warwick Blogs Kinoeye essay, August 19, 2007
Senso, 1954. Dir. Luchino Visconti , 09/02/08, Kinoeye - Warwick Blogs Kinoeye essay, February 9, 2008
Ossessione:
Shabby Little Shocker? - Bright Lights Film Journal D.J.M. Saunders, April 30, 2010
Rocco and
his Brothers • Senses of Cinema
Hamish Ford, July 11, 2010
The Godfather's
Godfather - Bright Lights Film Journal
C. Jerry Kutner on The Leopard,
July 20, 2010
Luchino Visconti's The Leopard cost a fortune and it was worth every ... John Patterson from The Guardian, August 20, 2010
Senso • Senses of Cinema Pasquale Iannone, March 13, 2011
Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice: A Love Story Not About Love ... Glauco Gotardi from The Huffington Post, May 24, 2012
Luchino Visconti's The Leopard and Those Who Are Not ... - Offscreen Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard and Those Who Are Not Rich in A Country of Arrangements, by Daniel Garrett, July 2012
A
Marxist Romanticism? Visconti's <em>La Terra ... - Screening the Past A
Marxist Romanticism? Visconti’s La Terra Trema and the Question of Realism, by Lisabeth During, December 2013
Filmmaker
Retrospective: The Passionate Cinema of Luchino Visconti ... Matthew Benbenek from Taste of Cinema, April 4, 2015
The Essentials: The 8 Best Luchino Visconti Films | IndieWire Jessica Kiang, October 8, 2015
Rep
Diary: Rocco and His Brothers - Film Comment Scott Eyman, October 13, 2015
and the Tramp: Luchino
Visconti's Ossessione - Senses of Cinema
“I’m No Lady” and the Tramp: Luchino
Visconti’s Ossessione, by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, February 4, 2016
Marcello Mastroianni
in Luchino Visconti's The ... - Senses of Cinema To
Shoot at the Impassive Stillness: Marcello Mastroianni in Luchino Visconti’s
The Stranger (Lo straniero, 1967), by Joanna Di Mattia, February 4, 2016
Where to begin with Luchino Visconti | BFI Christina Newland, March 17, 2016
Martin Scorsese on
Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers
Martin Scorsese, July 3, 2016
White Nights • Luchino
Visconti • Senses of Cinema David
Melville, January 7, 2017
TSPDT - Luchino
Visconti They Shoot Pictures,
Don’t They
Claudia Cardinale
| Film | The Guardian Adrian
Wootton interview from The Guardian,
May 10, 2003, continuing here: Claudia
Cardinale: part two | Film | The Guardian
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
The religion of director Luchino Visconti
Luchino Visconti (1906 - 1976) - Find A Grave Memorial
Luchino Visconti - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
OSSESSIONE
Italy (140 mi) 1943 US cut version (112 mi)
Visconti's stunning feature debut
transposes The Postman Always Rings Twice to the endless, empty lowlands
of the Po Delta. There, an itinerant labourer (Girotti) stumbles into a tatty
roadside trattoria and an emotional quagmire. Seduced by Calamai, he disposes
of her fat, doltish husband (De Landa), and the familiar Cain litany - lust,
greed, murder, recrimination - begins. Ossessione is often described as
the harbinger of neo-realism, but the pictorial beauty (and astute use of
music, often ironically) are pure Visconti, while the bleak view of sexual
passion poaches on authentic noir territory, steeped, as co-scriptwriter
Giuseppe De Santis put it, 'in the air of death and sperm'.
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review
The only thing that Fassbinder had in common with Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti (1906-76) is that both filmmakers were gay and that Fassbinder cultivated a great appreciation for Visconti's work.
Visconti is often lumped in with Italian Neo-Realist filmmakers like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, but in truth, his work stands apart, landing somewhere in-between realism and operatic indulgence.
He was born independently wealthy and developed a passion for various art forms, including opera and theater. But he learned to love cinema after working as an assistant for Jean Renoir, and even developed a liberal worldview and an interest in the common people.
Visconti's first film, Ossessione (1943), was made two
years before the Neo-Realist movement really started. Based unofficially on
James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, it was not released in
Visconti earned far greater acclaim for La Terra Trema (1948), a lengthy portrait of a Sicilian fishing village, starring real-life fishermen -- and not one trained actor. The young fishermen grow weary of working so hard for so little and attempt to start their own business, which promptly fails and eventually tears the family apart. Visconti's touching affection for the characters comes through clearly, and though it can get a bit slow (Pauline Kael called it the most boring great film ever made), it's a remarkable social document.
OSSESSIONE Clare Norton Smith from BBC Four
Ossessione marks Luchino Visconti's stunning debut, adapted from American novelist James Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice. It begins with the arrival of Gino, a travelling tramp (Massimo Girotti), who stops off at Bragana's (Juan De Landa) roadside trattoria for a drink. He's immediately attracted to the oafish landlord's wife Giovanna (Clara Calamai), who returns his lustful gaze, and Gino hatches a plan to inveigle his way into the life and bed of his unwitting host Bragana.
The film is a hotbed of smouldering passion, playfully symbolised by boiling pans, screaming cats and gathering storms. But as the story unfolds, the twisting psychological journey suffered by the deviant lovers, coupled with the film's moral ambiguity, stretches the tension to near breaking point.
Knowing glances and sexual gratification are corroded to mercenary pleasure and paranoia - the self-sufficient Italian family idyll is as broken as the shattered glass that Gino sweeps aside during Bragana's fitting rendition of Verdi's familial tragedy, La Traviata.
Visconti's sweeping overhead camera, coming to rest on expressive close-ups, are a pure joy and capture beautifully the face of tormented consciences, agonised by betrayal, caught up in the daily bustle of Ancona's street life.
Unlike Visconti's later work (most notably The Leopard, 1963), Ossessione is not tied up in political or social history yet it became an obsession with the church and Mussolini's Cultural Ministry who deemed it "a film that stinks of latrines". With its setting in the heart of quintessential Italian life (equally matching De Sirca's naturalistic portrayal in The Bicycle Thieves) the dictatorship perceived it 'un-Italian' and forced censors to cut numerous scenes.
Despite these invasions, Ossessione's tragic energy remains devastatingly intact. Out of the brutal force of raw, human passion, Visconti has created a classic of Italian cinema.
· Ossessione was so scandalous on its release that an archbishop was asked to sprinkle holy water in the auditorium following the screening.
· Visconti was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1944 following his involvement with armed resistance against the German occupation.
Acknowledged as the first film of the Italian neo-realist
movement, Ossessione
(Obsession) (1942) was also the remarkably assured directorial debut of Luchino
Visconti. Loosely based on James M. Cain's 1934 novel The Postman Always
Rings Twice, with the setting moved from
To understand the impact of Ossessione,
one must understand the Italian film industry at the time. The Fascist
government had established a Hollywood-like studio system, which turned out
glossy, superficial, escapist films known as "white telephone"
pictures. Ossessione,
with its earthy characters, frank sensuality, and visual authenticity provided
by location photography, was a dramatic contrast. Even more extraordinary were
the contrasts in the director's own life. Count Don Luchino Visconti di Modrone
came from one of
Anna Magnani was slated to play Giovanna, but by the time production began,
Magnani was pregnant and had to withdraw from the film. Another established
star, Clara Calamai, got the role. Calamai was younger and more glamorous than
Magnani, but Visconti didn't want glamour. He wanted realism, which meant no
makeup, no permed hair, and drab, grimy clothes. When Calamai saw the first
rushes, she burst into tears and threatened to quit. Visconti responded with
scathing aristocratic imperiousness. "Listen when I talk to you...or go
back to your whorehouse!" he shouted. He insisted that her co-star Massimo
Girotti slap her harder, and forced her to bathe in the icy river. Once, an
actor was supposed to knock over a glass so that it fell and shattered. Furious
that the glass didn't break in several takes, Viscount threw glass after glass
at Calamai's feet, and the splinters flew up dangerously close to her face.
Still, Calamai remained in awe of Visconti, whom she called "a medieval
lord with a whip."
Girotti also suffered under Visconti's direction. In one scene, he had to drink
a glass of wine. Visconti shot the scene so many times that Girotti passed out,
dead drunk. On the last day of filming, the actor collapsed again, fainting
from nerves and fatigue. Visconti later admitted that his cruel behavior was
calculated. "I'm interested in extreme situations, those instants when
abnormal tension reveals the truth about human beings; I like to confront the
characters and the story harshly, aggressively."
While Ossessione
was in production, Visconti allowed his family's palazzo in
Ossessione
was not shown in the
and the Tramp: Luchino
Visconti's Ossessione - Senses of Cinema
“I’m No Lady” and the Tramp:
Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione, by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, February 4,
2016
Ossessione:
Shabby Little Shocker? - Bright Lights Film Journal D.J.M. Saunders, April 30, 2010
DVD Talk
(D.K. Holm) dvd review [3/5]
Kamera.co.uk
review Richard
Armstrong
DVD Times Anthony Nield
DVD
Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Jon Danziger) dvd review
Ossessione
(1943) James Travers from
Filmsdefrance
Movie-Vault.com
(Vadim Rizov) review
A
Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
Images
(Gary Morris) review also reviewing LA TERRA TREMA
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] also reviewing LA TERRA TREMA
introduction to neorealism Kinoeye,
Shiel, Mark 2006: Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding
the Cinematic City Kinoeye,
The Cinematographers of
Neorealism and Beyond Kinoeye,
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Les amants
diaboliques.Ossessione.Visconti.1
on YouTube (
Les amants
diaboliques.Ossessione.Visconti.2
(
Les amants
diaboliques.Ossessione.Visconti.3
(
Les amants
diaboliques.Ossessione.Visconti.4
(
(Visconti – Caruso trial scenes)
User
comments from imdb Author: raffles-4 from
Some of the footage here is
featured in Martin Scorsese's documentary on Italian cinema, but this gives
little idea of the tremendous impact of the film as a whole. It focuses on a
notorious massacre of over 300 Italian prisoners in reprisal for a partisan
attack on the SS in March 1944, and the post-war trial of some of the Italian
fascists responsible. Several sequences (the removal of bodies from the
Ardeatine caves and the executions by firing squad of the fascists in
particular) are gruesome in the extreme, but the film is an essential
complement to the picture given in works such as Rossellini's "Paisà"
and "
Ghastly to look
at, annoying to listen to, this documentary (made by four uncredited directors)
covers events between Italy's surrender to the Allies in September '43 and her
liberation from the Nazis eighteen months later. Its hectoring, uninformative
commentary sanitises the murky labyrinthine politics of the epoch, with further
obfuscation guaranteed by a Moscow-speak vocabulary ('Nazi vampires', 'Fascist
dogs'). As for the footage we are given to look at, or away from, a lavish
selection of executions, atrocities and humiliations is intercut with passages
of gripping actualité (the trial of police chief Caruso, filmed by
Visconti) and some palpably phoney combat material. The intention, presumably,
was to repudiate the Fascist past and look forward to a democratic future. A
sour and shifty tone, however, consorts uneasily with that agenda.
Long
and full of political cliches, and yet in its solemnity and beauty it achieves
a true epic vision. The film is lyrical yet austere, and it's beautifully
proportioned. It may be the best boring movie ever made: although you might
have to get up and stretch a few times, you're not likely to want to leave.
—Pauline Kael
La Terra Trema,
directed by Luchino Visconti | Film review - Time Out
Visconti's second feature (five years after Ossessione in
1942) was an improvised drama produced by the Communist Party, filmed with and
among Sicilian fishermen in the village of Aci-Trezza. An overwhelmingly stark
chronicle of a family which strives but fails to break out of the poverty trap
- they try to cut out the middlemen by embarking in what one might call 'free
enterprise', with disastrous results - La Terra Trema‚ stands as a
masterpiece of neo-realism, a social conscience cinema of proletarian ways and
means. Yet, despite this, it's no less 'operatic' than the director's later
decadent melodramas: it surges with great tides of emotion. The film is
distinguished by its vivid camerawork, at once poetic and 'documentary'.
(Francesco Rosi and Franco Zeffirelli, it may be noted, served as assistant
directors.) Visconti only finished the film by selling some of his mother's
jewellery and an apartment in Rome. Yet, true to his breeding, he brought home
one of the boys from the film and installed him as his butler.
DVD
Talk (D.K. Holm) dvd review [3/5]
Italian directors start out like Rossellini and end up as
Visconti. Even Rossellini and Visconti did. Both began in the so-called
neo-realist mode and ended up doing lavish historical dramas. In this, they
also reflect the lineage of Italian directors to follow. Pasolini, who was also
gay, learned a great deal from both ends of Visconti's career, and in turn his
disciple, Bernardo Bertolucci, whose films are definitely bi, has also followed
suit.
But what is it to say that someone began as a neo-realist? What was, and where
was, the "old" realism that Italian films of the war and post-war
year's are the "neo" versions of? The plays of Ibsen, perhaps, dating
back to the 1800s?
It's perplexing, because there was never really much of a "realist"
movement in cinema to begin with. Also, neo-realism is as hard to define as
film noir. Unlike some of the genres developed in
That being said, it's hard to fine a pure neo-realist film, outside of
Rossellini's two most famous examples,
Like Rossellini, Visconti's first two films—Ossessione and La Terra
Trema—are seemingly realistic accounts of passion and political protest
amid the working classes. But both films, now released on DVD in the
At first it comes as a surprise that Visconti worked under Jean Renoir for many
years. Like Satyajit Ray, who also worked for Renoir, Visconti later went on to
define a national cinema. But Renoir's realistic method, which was to influence
both neo-realism and the French new wave, was still rooted in theatrical
melodrama and comedy. And in fact, Ossessione, Visconti's first feature,
is on the surface a melodrama. As is well known, it is based on James M. Cain's
crime thriller The Postman Always Rings Twice, which has been filmed
many times, once in
The film sure starts like something out of neo-realism. Yet also like something
out of Fellini. There are long dusty roads and decrepit trucks used for
multiple purposes, hustlers doing odd shows in town squares, and drifters and
sweat and men who are used to traveling.
The story is the same as in all the other versions. A drifter named Gino
(Massimo Girotti) ends up in a small way station, a lonely diner and gas
station in the middle of nowhere. It is run by an unnamed stolid older man
(Juan de Landa) and his wife Giovanna (Clara Calamai), who in the past may have
been a prostitute. Gino stays on, has an affair, runs away with another fellow
(in a barely disguised gay subplot that in fact has tangible links to Cain's
work), participates in the murder of the husband and so on.
But though the film begins in a "neo-realist" mode, it becomes more
phantasmagoric or stylish as it progresses. While staying much more
"realistic" than the
Visconti's second feature, released in
La Terra Trema is about the Valastro family, long time fishermen in an
isolated Sicilian village called Acitrezza. 'Ntoni Valastro wants to go into
business for himself, and mortgages the beloved family house to buy their own
boat. Unfortunately, like something out of a Hemmingway novel, a storm destroys
their boat; their budding romances are wrecked, and they are reduced to
crawling back to the same merchants they were trying to get away from in the
first place
Though the film has been touted by some critics as inherently optimistic, to
the average viewer it may well come across as one of the most depressing,
hopeless films ever made. It's not subtle. In the end, 'Ntoni speaks almost
right to the camera, giving the films message of collective action, in dialog
directly recorded, unusual in Italian films of any era. Like Visconti's later Rocco
and His Brothers, Trema is about the destruction of a family in the
face of hardening economic and social pressure, where an idealized past or wish
for the future clashes with the realities of the new
A
Marxist Romanticism? Visconti's <em>La Terra ... - Screening the Past A
Marxist Romanticism? Visconti’s La Terra Trema and the Question of Realism, by Lisabeth During, December 2013
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Jon Danziger) dvd review
La Terra
trema (1948)
James Travers from Filmsdefrance
Strictly Film
School Acquarello
A
Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
CineScene.com
(Chris Dashiell) review
homevideo.about.com
(Ivana Redwine) dvd recommendation
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review
Images
(Gary Morris) review also reviewing OSSESSIONE
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel
Murray]
also reviewing
OSSESSIONE
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[5/5]
The New York Times (Howard Thompson) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
A curiously sentimental satire on
Cinecittà Film Studios, in which half of Rome's adoring mothers stridently
cajole their untalented offspring into a studio child-star competition. It
rivals most Hollywood-on-Hollywood movies in ironic entertainment value, but
the abiding memory is of Magnani at full throttle contributing to quite the
noisiest film ever made.
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
Perhaps the most unjustly neglected of Luchino Visconti's early films is this hilarious 1951 comedy, tailored to the talents of Anna Magnani, about a working-class woman who is determined to get her plain seven-year-old daughter into movies. A wonderful send-up of the Italian film industry and the illusions that it fosters, delineated in near-epic proportions with style and brio. With Walter Chiari and Alessandro Blasetti.
DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd
review [5/5] [Italian Release] [Region 2]
In post-war Italy Maddalena Cecconi (Anna Magnani) lives an uneventful life often shattered by the degrading abuse of her husband Spartaco (Gastone Renzelli). Looking to escape her miserable existence Maddalena is obsessed with transforming her daughter Maria (Tina Apicella) into a successful movie star. She hopes that with the money which young Maria will earn her life will also change for the better. Determined to make her dream a reality Maddalena will have to endure pretentious ballet teachers, insincere industry execs, and the suspicious looks of her neighbors.
Considered the "odd child" of the great Luchino Visconti Bellissima was completed in 1951 at a time when Anna Magnani was arguably at her best. Indeed, the film marks an unusual shift in Visconti's creative philosophy as the social disparagement behind Bellissima seems unusually strong. There is a harsh criticism, veiled with the typical for Visconti humor, directed at Italian culture and its tolerance for corruption, poverty, and female abuse.
Unlike Visconti's Ossesione (1943) and Giorni di Gloria (1945) and especially the commissioned by the Communist Party La Terra Trema (1948) where the narratives seem to be built around a larger social context Bellissima is more of an intimate exploration of a woman and her hopes for a better life. The great Anna Magnani is simply stunning as the ambitious and somewhat hurt housewife ready to sacrifice her family in order to materialize a powerful dream. Her actions are often tragic-comedic and the situations that she puts herself into amusing.
Behind all the laughs and edgy dialogs, however, Bellissima reveals a side of Visconti that will years later transform him into a legend. His ability to surround the main protagonist(s) with characters that naturally enhance his/her presence, an approach that Visconti will heavily rely on in his Il Gattopardo (1963), is impressive. Take for example the scene in Bellissima where Anna Magnani awaits the film committee to announce the results from the preliminary auditions. Look at her eyes, now look at the way she moves, and focus at the nervousness she reveals. Now listen to the film operator addressing Maddalena's daughter and explaining that a possible "career" in the entertainment industry is likely to be accompanied with bitter disappointments. The sea of emotions which we witness on the face of Anna Magnani is breathtaking- there is doubt, there is hope, there is anger. Indeed, I have hardly seen a more convincing "mother" revealing so much about her character simply by doing all the little things right. Impressive!
While the storyline of Bellissima is largely predictable the finesse which Magnani provides through her acting visibly changes the complexion of this beautiful film. Her ability to switch comedy with drama in a matter of seconds allows Bellissima to consistently surprise its viewers even though they might feel that the film is heading into a familiar direction. In addition Magnani's contagious southern temperament brings that typical for Italian cinema from the early 1950s sense of melodrama that we have come to appreciate from the films of Pietro Germi, Mauro Bolognini, Piero Ballerini, and Giuseppe De Santis. What a spectacle!
While recognizing the remarkable performance by Anna Magnani and the manner in which she transforms Bellissima into a great film one also must admit that the success which Visconti achieved would have never been possible without the young Tina Apicella playing the character of Maria Cecconi. There really is very little that I can do to justly describe to you how incredibly good the little girl is. You will have to see her "screen test" at Cinecitta after Magnani storms in utterly upset and demands an apology from the film director. The "honest" tears which Tina Apicella has in her eyes mixed with the outrageously entertaining crying are classic. Visconti must have spent countless hours looking for the right girl to take the role and a simple glance at Bellissima proves that he chose the right one.
Thirty years have passed since Luchino Visconti's last film L'Innocente (1976) saw the light of day. Visconti is now gone, many of the actors that graced his films are gone, and so is the Golden Era of Italian cinema. Yet, cinephiles around the world still talk about the legacy of films this imaginative director left behind. Controversial, delicate, extremely passionate the films of the Maestro will remain Italy's priceless gift to those who treasure classic cinema.
Bellissima:
Luchino Visconti, 19/08/07, Kinoeye - Warwick Blogs Kinoeye essay, August 19, 2007
not coming to
a theater near you (Ian Johnston) review
DVD
Outsider Slarek
DVD Times Noel Megahey
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Movie Magazine International review Monica Sullivan
The New York Times review A.W.
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Bellissima - Scena finale Final Scene on YouTube (
Visconti segment: Anna Magnani
Italy (95 mi) 1953 Omnibus film with 5 directors: Gianni Franilini “Alida Valli” segment, Alfredo Guarini “Concorso 4 Attrici 1 Speranza” segment, Robert Rossellini “Ingrid Bergman” segment, Luchino Visconti “Anna Magnani” segment, and Luigi Zampa “Isa Miranda” segment
User comments from imdb Author: Jojo-21 from Lyon, France
The quintessential Ingrid Bergman
movie! Alright, maybe not. But she's great, she's fun, and her 15-minute sequence
is hilarious. The story (if I can call it that...) is so so dumb, but what's
great is that it gives you the opportunity to watch Ingrid at home running
after a chicken and speaking in Italian. It's a gem. Watch it!
User comments from imdb Author: david melville (dwingrove@qmuc.ac.uk) from Edinburgh, Scotland
A real
curio, this one. Four famous actresses play themselves in four sketches, each
one based (allegedly) on an incident from her own life. Mind you, only a saint
or a masochist would have the patience to sit through the first part, directed
by producer Alfredo Guarini - where two unknown girls go for screen test at
Cinecitta Studios in
It does pick up considerably once the divas appear. Alida Valli goes to an
engagement party for her humble masseuse, and is taken aback when the other
guests treat her 'like a star' - and she herself feels a forbidden attraction
to the girl's future husband. Ingrid Bergman engages in a war of nerves with a
recalcitrant chicken. (No, I'm not joking!) Isa Miranda drives an injured boy
to hospital, and regrets having no children of her own. Anna Magnani rages at a
taxi driver who dares charge extra for her toy dog. At the end, she goes
onstage and sings. Divinely.
Like any film made up of sketches, Siamo Donne is wildly uneven. The Bergman
and Miranda episodes are wafer-thin, and seem overlong even at 15 to 20
minutes. Valli's is beautifully observed, and directed with great sensitivity
by Gianni Franciolini. The Magnani sketch may be a one-woman show, but director
Luchino Visconti still contrives to show lots of pretty young men posing about
in uniform. Good to know some things never change.
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
Siamo Donne
(1953) segment "Anna Magnani" (1/3) on YouTube (
Siamo Donne
(1953) segment "Alida Valli" 2/3 (
Siamo Donne
(1953) segment "Anna Magnani" (3/3) (
aka: The Wanton Countess
Like other Visconti melodramas,
sumptuous in its Technicolor expressionism, Senso sees heterosexual love
through homosexual eyes: Farley
Granger (in the Helmut Berger role) plays the young Austrian officer in the
force occupying Venice in the 1860s, and Alida Valli
(in the Burt Lancaster role) the older, married woman who falls insanely in
love with him, betraying her husband, her principles, and finally Italy itself
in the headlong folly of her passion. The man sadistically exploits his own
beauty and willingly prostitutes himself; the woman submits to one humiliation
after another, her masochism finally indistinguishable from madness.
Fassbinder's version of this story was called The Bitter Tears of Petra von
Kant. Visconti, using English dialogue by Tennessee
Williams and Paul Bowles,
generates emotions so violent that even his operatic vision can barely contain
them.
Eye for
Film (Merlin Harries) review [4/5]
Visconti’s romantic tragedy is set in
The ultimately ill-fated love affair between Countess Livia Serpieri (Alida Valli) and the charming-yet-arrogant Austrian lieutenant Franz Mahler (Farley Granger) begins after a visit to the opera. It is here where the Countess’s cousin Roberto (Massimo Girotti) challenges the lieutenant to a duel; Roberto is then consequently arrested and exiled. The tragedy of war provides a moving backdrop to a somewhat heart-wrenching tale of a secretive affair.
Luchino Visconti later became known for his technically
exquisite work behind the camera and Senso is wonderfully framed and lit with
especially pleasing cinematography. Being a product of
In terms of themes and genre Senso is both pleasing and adored by the masses yet also a prevalent and important work in terms of the central issue of social and moral decline during the period. It is the same sordid debauchery that was also employed in his latter works such as Damned/Götterdammerung (1969).
Though first impressions may hint towards a simple matinee romance, Senso is subversive in the extreme. The central characters, when viewed through the harsh gaze of their turbulent and self-serving time, are revealed to be insipidly shallow making the fate of their affair all the more appropriate. Although Visconti’s Marxist leanings are proudly displayed the film has an undeniable honesty in its depiction of the two lovers. The sub-plot concerning Roberto’s rebellion against the Austrians was actually introduced by Visconti who downplayed the romance which was the central theme from the novella upon which the film is based.
The stark daring with which Visconti executes Senso is better appreciated when taking in to account the rough treatment it was given by censors at the time who insisted the original ending, where the Countess wanders the streets before being waylaid by soldiers, was re-shot. While the alternative ending may not have been the director’s ideal, it did at least serve to redress the moral balance.
Senso • Senses of Cinema Pasquale Iannone, March 13, 2011
Senso, 1954. Dir. Luchino Visconti , 09/02/08, Kinoeye - Warwick Blogs Kinoeye essay, February 9, 2008
Visconti's Senso and the
Evolving Italian Cinema 14-page
essay by John Bennett (pdf)
Visconti Website: Senso a Palimpsest Alberto Zambenedetti
Useful site on a lecture series and screenings of Italian films representing the Risorgimento Rochester Film Series
FilmExposed dvd review Andrew Pragasm
Episode 161 - Luchino Visconti's Senso - CriterionCast.com Scott Nye
A Second Look: Luchino Visconti's 'Senso' - latimes Dennis Lim
Movie Review – Senso – Luchino Visconti’s ‘Senso’ Arrives on Bleecker Street – NY Times A.H. Weiler, also seen here: The New York Times (A.H. Weiler) review
ARCHITECTURE: Villa Godi in Senso YouTube (4:11)
SENSO, ALIDA VALLI, VISCONTI (9:30)
Senso, 1954, by Luchino Visconti (10:23)
Senso Visconti Valli Finale (10:39)
1957 is a
significant year in world cinema, as it is uniquely connected to historical
events, coming one year after the spirited idealism of the Hungarian
student uprising of 1956 was crushed by an invasion of Soviet tanks mowing down
dissidents in the streets of Budapest, also one year after the 20th
Congress of the Soviet Communist Party where Premier Nikita Khrushchev made a
speech denouncing Stalin and the Stalinist purges as well as the gulag labor
systems, leading to the
Russian release of THE CRANES ARE FLYING (1957), the first film after the death
of Stalin to put a human face in Russian films, which went on to win the Palme
D’Or at Cannes in 1958. What’s unique about
this era is a political thaw, an opening of doors previously closed, where art
could once again flourish and express itself freely and openly without having
to follow the dictates of a heavy handed, State-controlled social realist
agenda. This also led to a changing style
in Italian cinema, where the post-war Neo-Realist movement softened its grip,
allowing greater freedoms onscreen than ever before, which led to Fellini’s
NIGHTS OF CABIRIA (1957), featuring the incomparable Giuletta Masina, which
arguably stands up to anything Fellini ever created in his lifetime, and also
this film by Luchino Visconti, which couldn’t be more unlike his earlier works,
moving from naturalistic, on-site locations into a completely artificially
constructed world inside the Cinecittà studios, much of it set in a dreamlike layer of fog, beautifully
illuminated by street lamps. The set
design of this film is hugely imaginative, transporting Dostoevsky’s short
story White Nights from the closely
observed detail of St. Petersburg to an Italian city of bridges and canals,
loosely based on the city of Livorno.
Bresson remade this film in Paris as Four
Nights of a Dreamer (Quatre nuits d'un rêveur... (1971), and what the two versions have in common
is a beautifully idealized construction of a utopian vision, something rarely
seen in cinema.
Opening pensively with the enchanting Nino Rota theme heard
here Nino Rota - Le Notti Bianche (1957) on YouTube (2:48),
Marcello Mastroianni as Mario finds himself alone on the city streets at night
after spending a pleasant but uneventful afternoon in the country with his boss
and extended family. A recent transplant
to the city, he knows no one, so he takes in the rhythm and atmosphere of the
streets around him, where a realist element continues to exist in the way the
walls are crumbling and the paint peeling, with piles of garbage swept off to
the side of the street where he unsuccessfully attempts to make friends with a
stray dog. What catches his eye is a
woman standing alone on a bridge trying to hide her tears, German-Austrian
actress Maria Schell, who he immediately befriends. But despite his polite manner, she quickly
runs away, evading his every advance, but eventually relents and agrees to meet
him on the bridge the next night. While it should be noted that there was
always an unreconciled tension between the socialist agenda of neorealism and
the operatic theatricality of Visconti, who after all, filmed three versions of
Verdi’s La Traviata in his lifetime,
it is also often said he is one of the greatest directors of women, including
Clara Calamai in OBSESSIONE (1943), Anna Magnani in BELLISSIMA (1951), Alida
Valli in SENSO (1954), Annie Girardot in ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS (1960), but
also Ms. Schell as Natalia in this film.
In each case, these females use men for sport and wreak their havoc with
a psychic force men can neither resist nor overcome. Natalia is a perfect example, though some
might find her performance overly simple and childish, living at home, never
leaving the side of her blind grandmother, she is the picture of innocence and naïveté, yet when the floodgates of emotions are
released, she is a force of nature, revealing a hidden dimension of love held
in reserve for a lodger (Jean Marais) in her grandmother’s house that she met
and fell in love with a year ago, briefly seen through flashbacks, but he had
to abruptly leave, agreeing to meet her on the bridge in exactly one year. Finding this story fairy tale-like and
delusional, Mario can’t help but suspend his disbelief if only to comfort her,
as she is in considerable pain at the thought he won’t show up.
Over the course
of four nights, they meet on the bridge, where by the last night, Mario is
tired of being sucked into her continuing melodrama. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Natalia
lives in constant hope, believing with the purity of a child, where to dispel
her notion is simply cruel and unethical, leaving Mario no choice but to play
along. What’s especially interesting is
to see how Dostoevsky’s story of a hopelessly adrift male dreamer attaches
himself to an even more innocent girl, whose own dreamlife simply overwhelms
his, where Visconti shows Mario grounded by the poverty of his economcis, as
he’s so regrettably poor, awakening in his pitiful room every morning to the
gossip and chatter of his intrusive landlady, who has a way of getting into
everybody’s business, where there is nothing remotely evident of a private
thought. With Natalia, however, hearing
her hold fast to her illusions has an almost calming and tranquil effect, as it
takes the dreariness out of his own miserable life. By the final night, however, Mario is
convinced their own love can work, little by little building up his courage in
admitting how he feels, which is perfectly expressed in a dance sequence where
he starts out confessing his shyness, knowing nothing about dance, remaining
coy until another man shows an interest in his girl, where he suddenly lights
up the room in an outrageously intoxicating sequence set to the music of
“Thirteen Women” by Bill Haley and the Comets seen here: Le
Notti Bianche on YouTube (6:08).
This sets into play a deliciously romantic set of sequences where Mario
confesses his love, where his heart literally opens up in such a delightfully
natural fashion, where Mastroianni is nothing less than divine in the
role. As the snow begins to fall, so beautifully
captured by cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, it’s as if their storybook lives have an enchanted touch of grace after
all, adding a poetic layer of innocence to their lives, which is suddenly
bright and new, reversing courses suddenly, evolving into sheer ecstasy
and exaltation on the part of Natalia, who rushes off at the sight of her lost
love waiting for her on the bridge, leaving Mario heartsick and utterly
devastated, all but crushing his
spirit, as if the air suddenly rushes out of his lungs, finding himself once
again alone in the world, even more isolated than before.
Chicago Reader (capsule) Dave Kehr
Long dismissed as a footnote to Luchino Visconti's career,
this 1957 film, from the Dostoyevsky story, now seems to be a crucial turning
point, the link between Visconti's early neorealist manner and the obsessive
stylization of his late films. Shot on forthrightly false sets entirely within
a studio, the film brings a lonely stranger (Marcello Mastroianni, in one of
his first important parts) together with a surrealistically detached woman
(Maria Schell) for a brief, enigmatic affair. Robert Bresson treated the same
material in his Four Nights of a Dreamer; curiously, it became one of
Bresson's most socially oriented films, while this is one of Visconti's least.
Visconti's version of the Dostoievsky
story - about the chance encounter of a couple as she is waiting in vain for
her lover, and the obsessive, panic-stricken relationship which then develops
between them - later filmed by Bresson as Four Nights of a Dreamer.
Visconti traps his characters (three excellent performances) within a
claustrophobic canal-side set, and the film is a series of brief walks, chases,
attempted escapes, always frustrated. Shot as neo-realist high tragedy, the
film offers its characters only one strange moment of escape from their
night-time obsessions - a raucous, sexual, subversive scene in a dance-hall.
Then the snow comes down, and with it a chilly desperation about the extent of
human self-delusion.
White
Nights (Le Notti Bianche) Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film Nathaniel
Thompson
Ostensibly based on a Fyodor Dostoyevsky story (in the same
way the director's Ossessione is a riff on The Postman Always Rings
Twice), this elegant dip into magical realism marks an early pivotal entry
in the career of Luchino Visconti. The time-hopping storyline relates the strange
romantic history of Natalia (Maria Schell), a distracted and emotional woman
whose repeated encounters with single clerk Mario (Marcello Mastroianni) compel
her to tell him about her lover (Cocteau favorite Jean Marais), a seafaring
lodger at her blind grandmother's boarding house, who has promised to return to
her in a year but has yet to materialize. When she believes her long-lost
paramour has returned, she gives Mario a letter to deliver to him - but the
clerk's own feelings towards Natalia compel him not to obey her.
Set in a fantastic modern-day Italy of artificial winter and fabricated
cobblestones, Le notti bianche (White Nights)
makes excellent use of its cast with Schell (luminous in a rare leading role
worthy of her talents) and Mastroianni making an engaging couple whose destiny
cannot possibly be guessed. Presumably because of his role in the thematically
similar Eternal Return, Marais is an apt choice for the possibly
mythical boyfriend who seems to act on the heroine more like a force of nature
than a human being.
With his previous film, Senso, Visconti had already begun swerving from
the tenets of neorealism he played such a key role in establishing; his films
were becoming more ornate, fastidious, and dreamlike, a tendency carried further
in this film until reaching full-blown epic status with his sumptuous The
Leopard six years later. Though Mastroianni's famous impromptu dance scene
here can't hold a candle to that latter film's legendary ball sequence, the
seeds of genius were clearly already being sown here.
Criterion's opulent DVD presentation offers a stunningly clean transfer,
slightly spit and polishing what was already an impressive job on the earlier
Italian DVD. For a title never really seen outside
Based on a short story by Dostoyevsky, White Nights is a
film about dreamers who live in a dream-like
Mario (Marcello Mastroianni) has been transferred to the city. His job is immaterial but we know that he’s an outsider. A million thoughts roam through his mind as he wanders the city streets at night, a dreamer in a fitting realm. He sees a young woman crying on a bridge and approaches her, attempting to console her. Her name is Natalie (Maria Schell) and she confides in Mario that she is awaiting her lover at that same bridge. She tells him that her lover was a tenant in her grandmother’s house and that he had promised to meet her on that bridge before parting ways a year ago.
Mario is a hopeful romantic and constant dreamer who’s yet grounded and surrounded by reality. Natalie is a hopeful romantic who dreams of her reunion with her stranger (Jean Marais) but is oblivious to the time passing by, and that her romanticism may be nothing more than a fairytale. Consumed by longing for the stranger, she refuses to see the world that exists outside of her, even as Mario tries to make her to notice him because he’s lonely.
The storytelling is in a peculiar style. When a character speaks they speak the truth; their dreams merge with reality. Other characters that listen to them are able to apprehend their reality from their audible desperation, which might lead to delusion and eventual seclusion.
Director Luchino Visconti showcases delusions and desperation in his protagonists and the city that the art department created for them to inhabit is something to behold. It was entirely constructed on a set but looks like a real city: the walls are made of concrete and some are covered by bills and posters, the streets look to be built with bricks, and a large contrast between shadows and light is seen throughout. It looks and feels like a neorealist city but contains an enormous dream-like quality. We, the audience, consistently feel like we’re in a dream state and that we’re grounded in reality at the same time.
Visconti’s background was in theater, film, and the opera and we can constantly sense the other mediums in this film. In the cinematography, his filmmaking side is present in terms of composing beautiful shots while the quiet compositions containing deep-focus, tall buildings, and shadowy streets come from his opera side. Also, the performances of the protagonists contain realism but as we see them drifting through this dreamscape we can sense an operatic grandness and applaud the actors for portraying their characters with their entire body and their soul.
Here’s a primary example of the director’s way of telling a story without using words: Mario tries to take Natalie’s mind off of her mysterious stranger and at the same time win her heart and have her notice him, so he takes her to a night club. There they begin to dance and we feel that they are happy together. Within that moment they are happy, but Visconti expertly throws many other dancing couples onto the dance-floor and Mario and Natalie drift apart, dancing with others that take their hands. While dancing with another woman, Mario constantly looks over the heads of the other dancers at Natalie and vice versa but we understand, in a visual sense, that Mario and Natalie cannot be together; he wants to be with her and she wants to be with her stranger.
The film is easier to understand by watching it than reading about it. The chemistry between Mastroianni and Schell feels real and yet you can sense that her character is always somewhere else, figuratively speaking. Every element in this film that contributes to the storytelling gets the job done in spades, from the surrealistic lighting to the story taking place entirely at night, except at the very end, and the war-torn look of the city. We take in the crumbled and decayed walls and associate those images with the surrealism of the film in our subconscious. In doing so we understand what is happening from the visuals, without the need for much dialogue.
Film is after all a visual medium, yet telling one’s story through visuals more than dialogue is hard to pull off. It is especially difficult conveying a sophisticated visual landscape to contemporary audiences who must be spoon-fed explosions and random acts of sexuality. I believe that Visconti had outdone himself with this early masterwork and can’t thank Fyodor Dostoyevsky enough for having concocted the short story out of observing Russian society like a hawk.
Criterion Collection film essay [Geoffrey Nowell-Smith] July 11, 2005
Remembering
Suso Cecchi D’Amico Criterion essay
by Antonio Monda,
Le notti bianche (1957) - The Criterion Collection
White Nights • Luchino
Visconti • Senses of Cinema David
Melville, January 7, 2017
Le Notti Bianche (1957) - #296 | Criterion Reflections David Blakeslee
Dan Schneider on Le Notti Bianche November 19, 2006, another version here: Alternative Film Guide (Dan Schneider) and here: WHITE NIGHTS by Luchino Visconti
Le Notti
Bianche (aka White Nights) - TCM.com
David Sterritt
Unrequited Love in the Shadows : Cinespect Ryan Wells
DVD Verdict (Bill Gibron) dvd review [Criterion Collection] also seen here: DVD Verdict
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection, also seen here: DVD Savant
DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review [4/5] [Criterion Collection] also seen here: DVD Talk
DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review Criterion Collection, also seen here: DVD Town
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Matt Peterson) dvd review Criterion Collection, also seen here: digitallyOBSESSED.com
A Guide to Current DVD Criterion Collection, Aaron Beierle
The White Nights of Luchino Visconti’s ‘Le notti bianche’ Geo Ong from The Urchin Movement
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The Films of Luchino Visconti [Michael E. Grost] Classic Film and Television
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review also seen here: CineScene.com
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
Dave's Movie Site: Year in Review: 1957 Dave van Houwelingen
Entertainment Weekly Aine Doyle
DVDBeaver dvd review Rob Janik
Le Notti Bianche, 1957, by
Luchino Visconti. Finale on YouTube
(
Italian neorealism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ...
Khrushchev Thaw - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Speech to 20th Congress of the C.P.S.U.
Khrushchev's secret speech: Khrushchev addresses the 20th ...
The Cranes Are Flying - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hungarian Revolution of 1956 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution National Security Archive
Luchino Visconti
was heir to one of Milan’s richest families, as his mother inherited the Erba
Pharmaceuticals fortune, where young Visconti grew up training and breeding
racehorses before fashion designer Coco Chanel introduced him to French
filmmaker Jean Renoir, where he began his career as Renoir’s assistant
director. Despite living in great
luxury in a palace on the Italian island of Ischia, where today
there is a museum dedicated to his work, possessing original works by Picasso
and Gustav Klimt, he was also an avidly outspoken Communist after the war and
openly gay, where throughout his film career he also worked as a theater and
opera director. This apparent
contradiction in class consciousness lies at the heart of his films, as along
with Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, Vittorio de Sica, and others, they
forged an Italian neorealist movement in the late 1940’s, much of
which was forced upon them as they had no money, featuring non-professional
actors, or poorly paid stars, often shooting on the street as many film studios
were destroyed by the war, mostly in the rundown sections of urban areas,
featuring the plight of the poor and the lower working class, focusing on their
everyday struggles to survive the economic disaster that was postwar
Italy. Despite his connection with
neorealism, Visconti also revealed an operatic flair for artificiality,
beautifully expressed in White
Nights (La Niotti Bianche) (1957) which was shot entirely within the artificially
constructed world inside the Cinecittà studios.
Visconti is acknowledged to be one of the greatest directors of women,
including Clara Calamai in OBSESSIONE (1943), Anna Magnani in BELLISSIMA
(1951), Alida Valli in SENSO (1954), Maria Schell in White
Nights (La Niotti Bianche) (1957), and Annie Girardot in this film, where
the latter two, Austrian and French-speaking, were both dubbed in Italian. Manipulating men for sport, in each case
these women are representative of dominating forces men can neither resist nor
overcome. Released the same year as
Antonioni’s L’AVVENTURA (1960), which won the Jury Prize at
Often viewed as a flawed masterpiece, there remains an
unreconciled tension between the realist, near documentary-style vision of a
Marxist society and several over-the-top melodramatic moments where characters
exhibit an operatic flair for excessive theatricality. While not ruining the film, the exaggerations
stand out as obvious contradictions to the otherwise low-key and brutally
realistic style. Adapted from the
Giovanni Testor novel The Bridge of
Ghisolfa, the story has an historical but also epic sweep about it,
spanning more than a decade, following the continuing hardhips of the Parondi
family as they leave behind their traditional rural home in Southern Italy for
a major city in the industrial north, apparently one the first films to portray
a North/South migration, where the nation’s so-called economic miracle occurs
almost entirely in the North. The film
captures the essence of postwar
Given the ingenious advice by a relative to move into the cheap housing projects by paying first month’s rent, but after awhile, if you stop paying, they won’t throw you out on the street, suggesting this was quite common in Milan, as they’re already living in the city’s cheapest housing. Simone, Renato Salvatori’s best role, is the next oldest, becoming completely smitten by the sexual exploits of a willfully manipulative local prostitute Nadia (Annie Girardot), whose family lives upstairs but continually kicks her out, so she takes refuge prancing around this house of brothers where Simone can’t take his eyes off her, much to his mother’s regret. Jobs are scarce, but Simone picks up a few bucks in the boxing ring, but his first few wins go to his head, as he spends all his winnings on Nadia, filled with the deluded notion that his future is lined with victories. But he drinks, smokes, and womanizes, refusing to train hard, which eventually catches up to him. Enter the next brother, Rocco (Alain Delon, also dubbed), the quiet one with the pretty face, who initially works in a dry cleaners run exclusively by women who are all enthralled by his presence. When Simone steals some clothing to impress Nadia, Rocco can’t go back to work there, so he follows his brother into the ring. This habit of forgiving his brother and bailing him out of jams that he continually gets himself into is the central theme of the film, as Simone’s troubles only escalate, contrasting the traditional macho sexuality of animalistic men who think they own women as their exclusive property with those who feel genuine love and respect for them. Envisioned by Visconti as the saintly Prince Myshkin from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, “a representative of illustrious goodness as an end in itself,” Rocco is seen as the only saving grace holding the family together, even persuading Nadia to give up prostitution after spending a year in prison.
But the story only grows bleaker, as Simone’s trajectory
spirals further out of control, becoming a drunken brute that turns on his
brother when he takes an interest in Nadia, enraged that Rocco is stealing
“his” girl, as if he still owns her, even though he hasn’t seen her in years,
leading to a horribly violent rape of Nadia in front of Rocco, followed by a vicious
beating when his younger brother won’t apologize for what he’s done. In a strangely baffling and utterly appalling
moment framed atop the
The highly mobile, black and white cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno
veers between ultra realism and heavily stylized film noir effects, with
heavily darkened scenes during particularly murky moments, while Nino
Geoff Andrew from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
A key transitional film in Luchino Visconti’s shift away
from his initial adherence to the principles of neorealism (admittedly already
diluted by an interest in tragedy verging on the melodramatic) toward the
decoratively operatic excesses of much of his
later work, Rocco and His Brothers
also remains on of his best. Giuseppe Rotunno’s black-and-white camera work is
tantalizingly pitched between grim, documentary-style neorealism and the
stylization of film noir, with Nino Rota’s score eloquently reflecting the
emotional dynamics of the story about a family newly arrived in Milan from
Sicily as falling apart as the influences of money, rootlessness, and sex work
their destructive magic.
It is difficult, perhaps, to be convinced by the
astonishingly beautiful Alain Delon as a boxer of such saintliness that he
sacrifices his happiness in the forlorn hope of keeping the family united, and
Katrina Paxinou’s clichéd histrionics as the long-suffering matriarch are a
little hard to take; however, Renato Salvatori is convincing as the brutish and
irresponsible elder brother ruined by greed and excessive jealousy, and Annie
Girardot is both sexy and remarkably persuasive as the emotionally complex girl
who comes between Salvatori and Delon. The final moments of her martyrlike
death may be over the top, but they are nevertheless effectively cathartic.
Time Out
Tony Rayns
The last gasp of the neo-realist
spirit in Visconti's work, Rocco chronicles at length the misfortunes
that befall an Italian peasant family when they move to The Big City. There's a
grey conviction about much of the scene-setting and the location shooting, but
the film gathers interest as it escalates into melodrama; the tragic climax is
pure opera. Delon is unconvincing as the saintly Rocco, but Renato
Salvatori makes the thuggish elder brother who falls in with a gay boxing
promoter his best part ever.
Pauline Kael - GEOCITIES.ws Pauline Kael
Rocco
and His Brothers Mike D’Angelo from Time
Out
Arguably Visconti's greatest
achievement, Rocco and His Brothers also served as something of a
transitional work for the Italian director. Born into a family so ancient and
noble that Chaucer mentions it in The Canterbury Tales, Visconti began
his career as a neorealist, eschewing ornamentation in favor of spare,
unsparing portraits of the dispossessed: Ossessione, La Terra Trema,
Bellissima. His late works, by contrast—The Leopard, Death in
Divided into five sections, each named for one of the title characters, Rocco
concentrates largely on the troubled relationship between goodhearted Rocco
(Delon) and his angry, animalistic brother Simone (Salvatori), who come to
grief over their mutual fondness for a sad-eyed prostitute (Girardot). But
while the plot doesn't shy away from melodrama—robbery, rape and murder are
present and accounted for—what commands your attention is Visconti's
clear-eyed, minute examination of life in
Rep Diary: Rocco and His Brothers - Film Comment Scott Eyman, October 13, 2015
They called him the Red Duke, and for good reason.
By birth, Luchino Visconti was a nobleman, a descendant of Charlemagne and the family that ruled Milan for centuries. As such, he favored silk shirts, Parisian ties, handmade shoes, and the scent of Hammam Bouquet. But Visconti was also homosexual and a Communist—simultaneously aristocrat and outlier, a beneficiary of tradition and a believer in radical change.
If, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time, then Visconti went Fitzgerald one better: he lived a life that depended on an established social order, he believed in the necessity of disrupting that order, and then he rounded back to a deeply poetic appreciation of what was bound to be lost in the transition.
Visconti’s 1960 epic Rocco and His Brothers has had a stealthy but perceptible influence in the 55 years since its release, most prominently in the thematics of Martin Scorsese movies such as Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Casino, and The Departed, all of which involve cohesive units gradually destabilized by forces both within and without.
The 4K restoration of the movie showing at Film Forum before it rolls out across the country should serve as a trenchant reminder that its creator was more than the sum of his contradictory parts: he was also an artistic titan. Among the slew of great Italian directors of the postwar era—De Sica, Fellini, Antonioni, Rossellini—it is Visconti whose posthumous reputation has seemed the most imperiled, perhaps because of his refusal to type himself.
Visconti first gained notice with Ossessione (42) a bootleg version of The Postman Always Rings Twice. He continued along a neorealist path with La Terra Trema (48) and Bellissima (51), but when his career as an opera director took off, a corresponding pomp began infiltrating his movies, as with 1954’s Senso. Rocco and His Brothers constitutes Visconti’s last tussle with neorealism. In its expansiveness and novelistic focus on character and environment at a time of national transition, it looks forward to his 1963 masterpiece The Leopard, but played for passionate intensity instead of a luxurious passivity.
Rocco and His Brothers was a critical and financial success, but it was swept away by the tidal wave of La Dolce Vita, which came out the same year. Fellini’s smash hit must have galled Visconti mightily—the two men disliked each other.
The story is basic: the Parondi family—a mother and five sons—arrive in Milan from a small town in the south. Like all migrants, they are in search of opportunity, but instead they find an environment that only magnifies their respective strengths and weaknesses. The disconnect between the values of the agrarian environment and the city is made clear in one exchange between Rocco’s brother Vincenzo (Spiros Focás), and his fiancée, played by the luscious 21-year-old Claudia Cardinale.
“A real man takes the woman he wants without asking permission,” Vincenzo says, earning himself a fast shot to the chops. “With me,” she replies defiantly, “you have to ask every time.” Point taken.
Milan is not the Oz they have imagined, but rather a mélange of hideous public housing developments. There is no work, so Simone—handsome, charming, and all too aware of it—becomes a boxer, while Rocco works menial jobs to support the family as best he can. Rocco, played by Alain Delon, has the face of one of Caravaggio’s dark angels. He’s the good son, the caretaker, and his rise is slow but sure until he falls in love with a prostitute (Annie Girardot) with whom Simone (Renato Salvatori) had a brief liaison. It is here that Rocco and His Brothers ascends to the torrential emotions of Verdi and Victor Hugo, as the Parondi’s collapse into interlocking antagonisms.
Scorsese aside, the American director who most resembles Visconti is Francis Coppola in his Godfather films. Certainly, there is more than a touch of Don Fabrizio from The Leopard in Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone—idealistic heads of dynasties who have outlived their time and know it. Both Visconti and Coppola favor a centered camera, the better to absorb the accumulating emotional upheavals; both feature brother betraying brother, and expansive long shots at crucial dramatic moments. Rocco renounces the woman he loves on the roof of the Milan cathedral, and Visconti’s images of jagged Gothic spires duplicate Rocco’s agony.
As the Parondis ponder their lost paradise—the foundational story of Western civilization—the film ascends to ravaging tragedy. “Ours is the land of the olive tree, the moon, and rainbows,” Rocco says, remembering their small town. And then he utters the sentence that eerily foretells the destructive tearings of the 21st century:
“We’re no longer in God’s grace. We’re our own enemies.”
Rocco
and His Brothers - TCM.com Jeff Stafford
Arriving at the end of the neorealism movement in Italian cinema, Rocco
and His Brothers (1960) was Luchino Visconti's most ambitious production to
date and a personal favorite among his many films. Recounting the tale of a
widow, Rosaria Parondi (Katina Paxinou), and her five sons - Rocco (Alain
Delon), Simone (Renato Salvatori), Ciro (Max Cartier), Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi)
and Vincenzo (Spiros Focas), Visconti paints a sprawling canvas that tells
several stories. At the center is the Parondi family, poor Italians from the
south who have moved north to
The emotional range of Rocco and His Brothers is excessive and
theatrical like a Verdi opera and often plays like a modern-day Greek tragedy,
particularly in its depiction of the relationship between the good son, the
saint-like Rocco, and his brutal sibling, Simone, a promising boxer whose
downward spiral ends in total degradation (his arrest for the brutal stabbing
death of his prostitute lover, Nadia (Annie Girardot).
Visconti's original purpose in bringing Rocco and His Brothers to the
screen was to create a drama with a historical and political focus, one that
would address the problem of southern emigration to the northern Italian cities
as well as the disintegration of the family and its traditional values. The
screenplay, which went through numerous writers and drafts during
pre-production, was based on a novel by Giovanni Testori but also inspired by
the real lives of migrants who reside in
When creating the storyline, screenwriter Suso Cecchi d'Amico recalled (in the
biography, Luchino Visconti by Laurence Schifano) that the director
said, "I want to do this in a sports setting, boxing, a setting where
there's violence," since most Italian boxers were from the southern region.
D'Amico admitted, "We spent countless hours in gymnasiums. I spent a year
in them, and I don't like boxing. Gradually the subject took shape. Luchino
came to my place in Castiglioncello with [screenwriter Vasco] Pratolini to talk
and talk. When he talked he was a great actor. He began telling us what he'd
seen in
Visconti was equally decisive on the casting of the film. He decided that
Renato Salvatori would be ideal as Simone after witnessing the actor get into a
fight with Italian star Umberto Orsini over actress Rossella Falk. "That
aroused his enthusiasm," Salvatori recalled in Schifano's biography.
"He kept saying: 'But you could have killed him! That's not a bad backhand
you've got, not bad." Salvatori was soon enrolled in a five month training
program at a gym, working out four to five hours a day. During production,
Salvatori fell in love in with his co-star Annie Girardot and they married soon
after the film was completed.
Visconti's most important casting decision, however, was the part of Rocco.
After meeting Alain Delon in
Most of the filming of Rocco and His Brothers took place in and around
When Rocco and His Brothers first premiered, it attracted considerable
controversy, shocking some viewers with its scenes of brutality and violence.
It also became Visconti's first commercially successful film. Nevertheless, it
incurred numerous censorship problems.
Rocco and
his Brothers • Senses of Cinema
Hamish Ford, July 11, 2010
Dan Schneider on Rocco And His Brothers Cosmoetica, also a somewhat shortened version here: Rocco And His Brothers Review (1960)
Austin Film Society [Chale Nafus]
Rocco And His Brothers | DVD Video Review | Film @ The Digital Fix Mike Sutton
Rocco
and His Brothers - Bright Lights Film Journal Gary Morris, January 1, 2003
Martin Scorsese on
Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers
Martin Scorsese, July 3, 2016
rocco and his brothers - review at videovista J.C. Hartley, also seen here: VideoVista
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice Angelina Sciolla
Rocco and His Brothers (1961) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Jeff Stafford
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Arthur Lazere, also seen here: culturevulture.net [Arthur Lazere]
Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960) James Travers from Filmsdefrance
Film Freak Central review Travis Mackenzie Hoover, also seen here: Film Freak Central review [Travis Hoover]
Welcome to Emanuel Levy » Rocco and His Brothers (1960)
Realism and Melodrama in "Rocco and His Brothers" Matt Barry from The Art and Culture of Movies
Rocco and His Brothers :: Film :: VUE Weekly Josef Braun
ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS - Electric Sheep Magazine Pat Long, also seen here: Electric Sheep Magazine
Strictly Film School Acquarello
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Angus Wolfe Murray] also seen here: Eye for Film
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4] also seen here: MovieMartyr.com [Jeremy Heilman]
A Full Tank of Gas... [Richard Cross]
DVD Talk Svet Atanasov, also seen here: DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review [4/5] [Remastered Italian Release] [Region 2]
Combustible Celluloid Jeffrey M. Anderson
homevideo.about.com Ivana Redwine
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Village Voice (Michael Atkinson) review also seen here: Village Voice
All Movie Guide [Elbert Ventura]
User reviews from imdb Author: stalker vogler from Xanadu
User reviews from imdb Author: mido505 from Richmond, VA
User
reviews from imdb Author: Audun Bråten
(braugen@hotmail.com) from
Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review also seen here: Washington Post
Washington Post (Desson Howe) review also seen here: Washington Post
Rocco and His Brothers - Film Calendar - The Austin Chronicle Nick Barbaro
Rocco and His Brothers :: rogerebert.com :: Great Movies
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review also seen here: The New York Times
DVDBeaver.com - Full Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze] also seen here: DVDBeaver
Rocco ei suoi
fratelli (Rocco and his brothers), 1960
on YouTube (
Visconti
segment: Il Lavoro (The Job)
Italy France (208 mi)
1962 omnibus film with 4 directors, Vittorio De Sica “La Riffa”
segment, Federico Fellini “Le Tentazioni del Dottor Antonio” segment, Mario
Monicelli “Renzo e Luciana” segment, and Luchino Visconti “Il Lavoro” segment
Probably the best
remembered of that exasperating sub-genre, the portmanteau film, largely
because the directors concerned (the undisputed heavyweights of their time) let
rip in their most vulgar styles in an attempt to recapture the spirit of
Boccaccio. The filmettes also reveal a startling fear of women in general.
Fellini's episode concerns an outsize Ekberg who steps out of a billboard
poster to torment an ineffectual puritan; while Visconti delivered a vicious
tale of a beautiful young wife (a stunning performance by Schneider) who takes
revenge on her husband by making him pay for her body. De Sica and Monicelli
went for broader, more traditional comedic effect - less pretentious, but
perhaps inevitably in this company, less memorable.
Being
There Magazine [Nathan Williams]
In 1962,
Inter-continental super-producers Cesare Zavattini, Carlo Ponti, and Joe Levine
dreamed up the idea of matching four top directors with four bombshells, all in
the style of the Renaissance poet, Boccaccio. They wrangled Fellini, Visconti,
De Sica, and b-level talent, Mario Monicelli, as well as a substantial budget
for their four-part (and nearly four-hour) tribute to gorgeous women. The
results are mixed, but the total film is better and more thematically coherent
than any other of the genre (if, at 208 minutes, a bit of a cinematic endurance
test).
Monicelli's segment, "Renzo and Luciana" is a touching depiction of
the difficulties of marriage in the modern industrial
Fellini's segment, "The Temptation of Dr. Antonio," produced between La
Dolce Vita and 8½ is disappointing. The good doctor is a moralist
who becomes obsessed with an Anita Ekberg poster, 50-foot Anita comes to life
to torment him, and a victory is won for sexual freedom. Despite some
impressive flourishes of style, the whole thing is relatively uninspired, and
silly to the point of inducing boredom. Fans of a certain early Scorsese short,
however, should note this as a source of inspiration.
Visconti's segment, "The Job," is easily the best of the quartet.
Contrasting strongly with the large-budget, on-location competition, Visconti's
film takes place entirely in a handful of small rooms. Romy Schneider, as a
countess who wants to earn her own living, is tremendous under Visconti's
direction. Also fascinating are small hints of the film he would shoot next, The
Leopard: (the relationship, the large dog, the novel itself on the couch).
De Sica bats clean-up with, "The Raffle," a depiction of a carnival
worker (Sophia Loren) who sells her sexual services via lottery. De Sica gets
success with the dangerous combination of the savvy Loren and his usual
assortment of non-actors. The dropped jaws at Loren's beauty isn't acting, it's
regular Italian men genuinely excited to be sharing space with her. Indeed,
without this charm, the film would be nothing more than an above average sitcom
episode.
The transfer is unexceptional, but not distracting in any way. The extras are
minimal (a mildly diverting interview with De Sica as the highlight) and the
sound is fine. Not an especially good introduction to any of these directors,
and not among their best work, but far from their worst. For fans of Italian
cinema, required viewing.
At the height of the craze for European art films when Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni were in peak form, super-producer Carlo Ponti dreamed up this omnibus opus, four lengthy short subjects each directed by a major talent. Clocking in at a whopping three hours and eighteen minutes, American importer Joseph E. Levine immediately lopped off Mario Monicelli opening episode, leaving a more easily distributed film by the three directors with bigger reputations among New York critics: Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica.
Most American viewers have only seen Boccaccio '70 in this tryptich form, and usually pan-scanned in faded Television prints. The new DVD outfit NoShame Films (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow) gives us this interesting landmark production at its full length, uncut, and in a brightly-colored transfer.
Renzo e Luciana: The marriage between low-income
factory workers Luciana and Renzo (Marisa Solinas and Germano Gilioli) is kept
a secret because of company rules. Their home life is frustrated by the lack of
privacy, or funds to buy any - that and the unwanted attentions of Luciana's
pushy boss, who assumes that she's available to be his girlfriend. Le
tentazioni
The American trailer for Boccaccio '70 tries to explain that the title refers to what Boccaccio would come up with if he were to make a film in 1970; in other words, it's meaningless. What we get are four rather good mini-movies by top Italian filmmakers. There was some talk of Mario Monicelli's episode not fitting in with the others, but the obvious reason it was dropped from international distribution was to cut down the length of the film. If Monicelli's show seems different, it's because the other three each have a more exploitable sex element. The producer's natural favorite Sophia Loren does yet another of her big-tease-but-no-payoff farces, Romy Schneider provides some discreet but intoxicating near-nudity, and Anita Ekberg sends up her bosomy bombshell image from La Dolce Vita by appearing as a literal mountain of flesh, a Colossus of Sex.
Each episode presents a different facet of Italian art filmmaking of the time. Mario Monicelli's tale of frustrated newlyweds is a Neorealist exercise, sketching the day-to-day reality of love oppressed by economic concerns. Renzo and Luciana have to sneak across town to marry on a work break. As they can't afford a place of their own, the pair spend a miserable honeymoon surrounded by curious children and insensitive adults. If they want a drink when they dance, they should probably walk home. And all the while they must put up with the unwanted advances of Luciana's loutish office supervisor.
Monicelli's episode is handsomely produced and needs make no excuses, but viewers will probably be anxious to get on to the big names and sexy actresses of the later chapters. The chopping of this section by Joe Levine invites comparison with the Japanese horror omnibus Kwaidan. It was shorn of an entire chapter for American art houses as well. That spirit lived on in the Miramax company's routine editing of their foreign imports of the last fifteen years - Like Water for Chocolate, Italian for Beginners, etc.
The most famous episode is Federico Fellini's The Temptation of Dr. Antonio, the "1/2" in 8 & 1/2. Here's the first time we see Fellini's "crazy circus" filming style in all its glory, as Nino Rota's bouncy, maddening jingle Bevete più latte ("Drink more milk") provides the music for the mad parade of boy scouts, schoolgirls, nuns, firemen, jazz musicians and ordinary citizens that rallies around the giant billboard of "Anita" holding a glass of milk in a seductive pose. Fellini is taking time out from 'meaningful' epics to have a bit of fun and doesn't mind pulling in references from Frank Tashlin (remember Ekberg's mammary competition Jayne Mansfield holding the milk bottles in the suggestive cartoon The Girl Can't Help It?) and of course American science fiction films with Allison Hayes and Dorothy Provine as fifty-foot females on the prowl. Ekberg becomes the monstrous incarnation of the prudish Dr. Antonio's repressed desires - his 'enemy' is at one point revealed to be a lost mommy figure. Antonio is indulged and tolerated by even his conservative friends and Church officials also consider him a pest; he's as alone as the figure of St. George slaying the dragon that hangs on his wall. The episode is unique, highly enjoyable, and shows Fellini at his fun-loving best.
The most profound episode is Luchino Visconti's Il lavoro, a deft and thoughtful one-act that's modest in production value. The devastatingly beautiful Romy Schneider is the center of the show, before her dilution in comedies like What's New Pussycat? She totally eclipses Thomas (Tomas) Milian, who would later become a fixture in political Spaghetti westerns. This chapter makes a Boccaccio-esque comparison between a wife and a whore, as Schneider's pampered frau discovers her real place in her fairy-tale of a marriage. The husband whines and pleads for his straying to be ignored and his allowance untouched, which prompts Schneider to put him to the test. It's all conveyed through costume changes and elaborate 'business' in their palatial home, with servants serving food, starting baths and rounding up Schneider's collection of kittens. She acts nonchalant and teases her insolent hubby with her body, while revealing several layers of inner disillusion and disappointment. Visconti pulls off an almost perfect character analysis, without the grandiose trappings of his other masterpieces (Senso, The Leopard, The Damned) . Schneider's wife never says explicitly what she has in mind but her crushed, rueful look when Milian thoughtlessly falls into her trap expresses much more. It's a masterful sequence that sums up A Doll's House in just a few telling moments.
The final chapter is a light comedy in Vittorio De Sica's
'down in the streets' mode. If I were Italian I might wonder just how
condescending is the director's typing of common folk as mostly sweet but crude
buffoons. Sophia Loren's unlikely gutter princess is just another side of beef
in a stockyard fair, the grand prize in a blind raffle. Prospective lechers of
all shapes and sizes show up to "see the goods" as if they were
inspecting a prize heifer. In an inspired bit of sex-play, the writers contrive
to make Loren remove her red blouse so as not to arouse a mad bull. The bull
calms down but the assembled Italian cowpokes are aroused en masse by
the sight of the star's (obviously custom-fit) underwear. As in a number of
other sex farces with Ms. Loren the episode has to be all tease. Events
conspire to make sure that the meek churchgoer with the winning ticket doesn't
collect his prize, and that the naughty girl's profits are returned, etc. The
fun here will depend greatly on one's attraction to
Showing up in various bits throughout the show are name actors Suso Cecchi d'Amico, Paolo Stoppa (practically a cameo) and Romolo Valli; the amusing gallery of sad sacks in La Riffa are said to be non-professionals.
Boccaccio
'70 (1962) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
Paul Sherman
DVD Talk (Bill Gibron) dvd review [4/5]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Wilson)
Monsters At Play Gregory S. Burkart
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice dvd review [5/5] Daulton Dickey
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
DVD
Beaver
Italy France (187 mi) 1963 ‘Scope premiere version (205 mi) US cut version (165 mi)
Prince Salina has always been the
biggest cat on the block. Guys call him The Leopard. He growls, they shift ass.
Now some biscuit-brain named Garibaldi wants to run the whole show from City
Hall. Did 20th Century-Fox think this was the movie Visconti sold them back in
l963, the way they hacked, dubbed and reprocessed? At last, 20 years later, we
have the original version in a restored Technicolor print, revealing this as
one of the finest 'Scope movies ever made, and Visconti's most personal
meditation on history: muscular in its script, which deals with the declining
fortunes of a Sicilian aristocratic clan under the Risorgimento, vigorous in
performance, and sensuous in direction, changing moods through subtle shifts of
lighting to give a palpable sense of the place and the hour. Lancaster, in the
first of his great patrician roles, is superb; the rest of the players, right
down to the hundreds of extras in the justly celebrated ball scene, are
flawlessly cast, each of them living a moment of history for which Visconti,
Marxist aristocrat himself, privately sorrowed.
Lawrence of Arabia to Let's get Lost Pauline Kael
filmcritic.com (Jake Euker) review
[4.5/5]
1963’s The Leopard, directed by the Italian Count
Luchino Visconti and based on the best-selling novel by countryman Giuseppe
Tomasi di Lampedusa, tells the story of an Old World aristocrat – the Sicilian
Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina – as he faces the changes forced upon his
embattled social class by the Italian Risorgimento of 1860, a
revolutionary social movement (and armed conflict) that brought about the end
of that country’s feudal monarchies and united its states into what now is the
country of Italy. The vision of both the novel and the film is epic, and the
politics of the thing are intricate enough that even a native Italian likely
found it a challenge in 1963, and would likely find it even more so today. The
politics are also central to the film, and this undoubtedly contributed to its
uneasy stateside reception in ’63 and its virtual unavailability on video until
now.
My hope is that Criterion’s marvelous new three-DVD edition will change that.
Unlike many special editions, there’s no superfluous material here: The set
includes the original, 187-minute Italian version of The Leopard, the
U.S. theatrical release (because Burt Lancaster starred, 20th Century Fox had
American rights to the film; not knowing what to do with it, they trimmed 16
minutes, dubbed it into English, and distorted – in the interests of
“accessibility” – Giuseppe Rotunno’s gorgeous widescreen cinematography),
enlightening commentary by film historian Peter Cowie, and video essays that
provide important historical context for the action alongside new interviews
with surviving cast and crew members.
What Criterion has returned to us is a great screen epic with a compelling
psychological portrait at its center, a film that is simultaneously sprawling
and intimate. As the Prince,
In terms of Italian cinematic power, it was really Visconti, and not Fellini
(whose 8
½ came out that same year), who wore the mantle of
royalty in 1963. What that power bought for him and his film is a
sumptuousness, in production terms, that illuminates every frame of The
Leopard, and that Visconti wields with taste and unerring intelligence.
Leslie Halliwell wrote that the film is “painted like an old master,” and the
truth of that comment is borne out in Visconti’s sublime framing and composition,
in Rotunno’s intuitive yet formal camera work, and in Nino Rota’s elegant
score.
The Leopard is not for everyone, maybe even less so today than in 1963.
Its elegiac pacing requires more patience than many will be willing to give and
its conflicts seethe below the surface rather than on the screen. But true
lovers of cinema will find in it an awesome example of screen craftsmanship of
a sort that has vanished as surely as the way of life it portrays.
The Boston Phoenix review Jeffrey Gantz
Luchino Visconti’s Il gattopardo/The Leopard opens
without pretension. It’s
Visconti’s 1963 masterpiece, which is celebrating its 41st birthday with a week-plus of showings at the Brattle Theatre (there’s also now a Criterion Collection three-DVD set with the Italian original and the cut-and-subbed English version plus a feature on the making of the film), had a similarly unprepossessing history. The novel on which it’s based, by Sicilian nobleman Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, couldn’t find a publisher until 1958, two years after his death, and then in an edition of a mere 3000 copies; it went on to be a bestseller here as well as in Italy. Visconti got Twentieth Century Fox to back the film on condition he use a big-name American actor (who turned out to be Burt Lancaster, as the prince). According to one report, Fox executives didn’t even understand the movie was being made in Italian; in any case, they cut the 205-minute original by 40 minutes. In 1983, a new print was made and 20 minutes were restored.
It’s a mark of Visconti’s genius that he achieves greatness
here by not doing very much. He barely explains the politics of the
Risorgimento; his non-partisan approach to the fighting between Garibaldi’s
redshirts and Francis II’s soldiers, the arbitrariness of who lives or dies,
takes the film beyond politics. Don Fabrizio understands that it’s not the
royalists who will emerge victorious, or the revolutionaries, but the rising
bourgeoisie. "Everything has to change," he tells the family priest,
"if we want everything to remain as it is." So though his daughter
Concetta (Lucilla Morlacchi) is in love with his nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon),
Don Fabrizio arranges for Tancredi, who’s hoping for a career in the new
government of Victor Emmanuel II, to marry Angelica (Claudia Cardinale), the
beautiful and only daughter of a wealthy, social-climbing local mayor. "We
were the Leopards, the Lions," the prince muses. (The
Yet Visconti, like Tomasi di Lampedusa, knows that this
change is inevitable. Don Fabrizio’s sons are polite but without drive; the
pious, tight-lipped Concetta takes after her mother, who crosses herself when
her husband kisses her and, after seven children, still hasn’t let him see her
navel. The film turns on the moment of Angelica’s first appearance, at a
Alain Delon’s Tancredi is so goodhearted and enthusiastic
that it’s easy to overlook his easy switches of allegiance, from redshirt to
regular army, or from Concetta to Angelica. Cardinale is as radiant here as in
Fellini’s 8-1/2, an earth goddess who can laugh at a tasteless joke one
moment and mazurka magnificently the next. (The sublime 45-minute ball scene
that closes the film suggests Gone with the Wind directed by John Ford.)
As for
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
The fact
that Luchino Visconti was both an aristocrat and a Communist is repeated so
often that people rarely stop to think what it might mean beyond the obvious
contradiction — or, if you're less charitably disposed, hypocrisy. Salvador
Dali denounced Visconti as "a Communist who liked only luxury," while
David Thomson writes him off as a middlebrow darling. The climactic rape and
murder in Rocco and His Brothers, Thomson writes in The New
Biographical Dictionary of Film, is "such as the bourgeoisie think
necessary for "the point of the film': the momentous way in which Annie Girardot
lifts up her arms to the crucifixion pose satisfies the plainest sensibility
because of its predictability."
Thomson's
onto something, though it's only half the story. True, Girardot's death is
staged with symbolism blunt enough to make Paul Schrader blush. But as
Girardot's arms reach their apex and the frantic Simone (Renato Salvatori)
moves in for the kill, Visconti cuts away to the boxing victory of Simone's
golden-child brother Rocco (Alain Delon), and when he returns, the scene has
lost all pretense of order. Rather than portentously accepting death,
Girardot's Nadia is grasping for life, flailing on the banks of a canal and
screaming as Simone stabs her to death. A death susceptible to human, and
artistic, understanding is replaced with a far more chaotic and discomforting
sight: the last moments of a woman who wants, desperately, to live. If Rocco
offers up Nadia's murder as a symbolic event, it's only to lure the audience
into a trap.
To be
sure, Visconti was as susceptible of falling into that trap as any of his
audience. But what makes his best movies fascinating, and far more complicated
than his detractors allow, is the constant battle between naturalism and
stylization — or, if you like, between neorealism and opera. The latter tendency
is hard to miss. Born in 1906, Visconti said he came into the world "as
the curtain went up at La Scala," and a love of spectacle and grand
passions infuses even his humblest works. But if Visconti, the son of an
Italian duke, was born into a love of luxury, his politics swung from far right
to far left, as the rise of Italian fascism and a stint as Jean Renoir's
assistant director opened his eyes to the plight of the less privileged —
which, in Visconti's case, was just about everyone.
In 1943,
two years before Rome, Open City and five before Bicycle Thieves,
Visconti fused noir and neorealism into Ossessione, turning The
Postman Always Rings Twice into a veiled Marxist critique under Mussolini's
watchful eye, and in 1948 he unveiled La Terra Trema, a story of
Sicilian fisherman struggling against greedy merchants and unforgiving nature.
As powerful as it is overwrought, the film's doomed-romantic vision of
working-class life is an obvious godparent to the noble suffering of The
Salt of the Earth. André Bazin wrote that Visconti filmed his well-built
nonactors as if they were "Renaissance princes," but surely the ideal
would be to film them as if they were fishermen.
In
retrospect, it's clear that Rocco, for all its virtues, was a
transitional film, an attempt to reconcile Visconti's early features with the
stylized spectacle of intermediary films like Senso (which uses an opera
house as a key set) and White Nights. The result of that reconciliation,
released in 1963, was The Leopard, a splendid but exacting historical
epic which encompasses the birth of a united, democratic Italy and the
beginning of the end for its titled classes. Set during the Risorgimento, a
period of Italian history sufficiently complex that it takes a 20-minute
interview (with Penn's Millicent Marcus) to explain it, The Leopard is,
like The Rules of the Game, both a melancholy valentine to the age of
aristocracy and a clear-eyed acknowledgement of its fatal flaws. Saddened as
Don Fabrizio (Burt Lancaster) is to see the torch pass to his opportunistic
nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon), whose allegiances shift with the prevailing
winds, he passes up a chance to be part of the country's first parliament. He's
outlived his relevance, and he knows it.
The
Italian preference for postdubbed sound can be a distraction, but Lancaster's
physicality is such that you're rarely looking at his lips. Despite the flecks
of grey in his mane of hair, Don Fabrizio is a man of a tremendous, if
suppressed, vigor; the way Lancaster crosses a room, even the way he deals
cards, suggests a grace belied by his imposing size. It's surely no accident
that the men who are to surpass him, Tancredi and the spineless Don Calogero
(Paolo Stoppa), seem so physically slight beside him. He's a giant, but the
time of giants has passed.
Inevitably,
The Leopard takes place in sumptuous banquet halls and gilded studies,
but Visconti films his splendid interiors with the matter-of-fact air of a man
to whom such luxury is unremarkable. Unlike most movies about excess, The
Leopard is not itself excessive. Even at its full three hours, the movie
never belabors a point (except, perhaps, in Don Fabrizio's climactic speech,
which unnecessarily summarizes all that's gone before). Criterion's three-disc
edition is another matter. While the transfer shows off Giuseppe Rotunno's
cinematography to rapturous effect, and the second-disc documentaries shed
welcome light, the inclusion of the movie's truncated American cut is something
of a mystery: The excitement of hearing Lancaster's voice can't compensate for
the missing 20-odd minutes of footage. When the original, available for the
first time on home video, is half a DVD box away, it's hard to imagine anyone
will want to do more than glimpse its bastard offspring.
The
Leopard (1963) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com James Steffen
Although it is now generally cited as a masterpiece of
Italian cinema, Luchino Visconti's The Leopard
(1963) has for many years been available in the
The Leopard is adapted from the
1958 novel of the same title by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957). Set
during the Risorgimento (the movement for the reunification of Italy in the
1860s), the story concerns Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, a Sicilian nobleman
who witnesses his way of life changing before his eyes. His favorite nephew
Tancredi joins Garibaldi's fighters and later falls in love with Angelica, the
beautiful daughter of Don Calogero, a ruthlessly ambitious middle-class
politician. While Don Fabrizio recognizes in the young couple's union the
political future of
The novel, which wasn't published until a year after Lampedusa's death,
immediately became an international bestseller; its English translation is
still in print today. However, at the time The Leopard was widely
criticized in leftist circles for its nostalgic view of the nobility. A prince
in real life - albeit one who had fallen on hard times - Lampedusa identified
personally with the fictional protagonist, who was inspired by his
great-grandfather. The film's director Luchino Visconti, who was also a
nobleman, clearly identified with both the author and Don Fabrizio. At the same
time, as an avowed Marxist, Visconti introduced a concrete historical dimension
to the film beyond what was already present in the novel, most notably in the
siege of
One striking feature of the novel that cannot be reproduced in the film is its
narrative voice. While the time of the novel spans from 1860 to 1910 and much
of it closely follows Don Fabrizio's thoughts, occasionally the narrator
reminds us of the present, using an airplane as a metaphor or alluding to
"Eisenstein's baby carriage." During the ball sequence, for instance,
Lampedusa writes: "From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches,
gazed down smiling and inexorable as a summer sky. They thought themselves
eternal; but a bomb manufactured in
In one respect, however, Visconti's film is arguably an improvement over the
novel: the novel's last two chapters detail the death of Don Fabrizio and, some
twenty years later, Angelica's visit to Concetta in their old age. The film
closes instead with the magnificent ball sequence, lending the story a tighter
dramatic unity. Visconti's film has sometimes been compared to Proust, and not
unreasonably so; it is a cornucopia of painterly compositions and faces, but
its visual beauty is no mere window-dressing. The film's images - the soldier
lying dead in the garden, the mistress that greets Don Fabrizio at the brothel,
the Salina family covered in dust during their visit to the chapel at
Donnafugata - no matter how fleeting, leave an indelible impact on the viewer.
By the end of the film, it seems as if we too have accumulated a lifetime of
impressions, paralleling in purely cinematic terms the process of memory
treated more explicitly in the novel.
The film represents a peak of achievement for all involved. Visconti's
direction displays a remarkable integration of setting, decor, camera movements
and blocking of actors. Burt Lancaster not only fits the physical description
of Don Fabrizio in the novel, he plays the character convincingly and movingly.
Some critics have argued that Lancaster was too young and vital to play the
Prince confronting death at the ball; while this is true to a certain extent,
it should be kept in mind that in the novel the character does not die until
1888, twenty-six years after the ball sequence takes place. The point is
less the immediate proximity of death than Don Fabrizio's acknowledgment of its
necessity. Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale are likewise memorable as the
opportunistic Tancredi and the carnal Angelica. The many smaller roles that
populate the film suggest that not the least of Visconti's talents was his eye
for striking physiognomies. Nino Rota's richly melodic score is appropriately
nostalgic and operatic. Giuseppe Rotunno's cinematography cannot be praised
highly enough; this is, at risk of hyperbole, one of the most beautiful color
films ever made. As much as I admire other films by Visconti, particularly Ossessione
(1943), La Terra Trema (1948), Senso (1954) and Rocco and His
Brothers (1960), to me The Leopard is
probably his masterpiece.
Criterion's new high-definition transfer, supervised by Rotunno, was made
directly from the Technirama negative. Technirama was a process developed by
Technicolor using a horizontally fed 35mm negative like Vistavision. The
resulting image, which was 8 perforations wide, was also anamorphically
squeezed to produce a wider aspect ratio. The superior clarity and definition
of this process works greatly to the film's artistic advantage, giving the
painterly compositions of director Visconti and cinematographer Rotunno a
sumptuous tactile quality. The richness of color and detail on the DVD are a
revelation, especially those accustomed to the murky DeLuxe color process used
on the old English-language prints distributed in the
Disc Two contains the bulk of the special features: A Dying Breed, The
Making of The Leopard, a set of cogent
interviews with the surviving cast and crew; an interview with the film's
producer Goffredo Lombardo, who among other things expresses interest in
filming a sequel (!); an interview with scholar Millicent Marcus, who provides
an excellent overview of Italian history as it relates to the film; and lastly,
trailers, newsreel footage, production stills and promotional materials.
A new of transfer the 161-minute English-dubbed version has been included on
Disc Three. Now that we have the full Italian-language version, the dubbed
version is of interest mainly as a historical curio; hearing Sicilian nobility
speaking in American English somehow robs the film of a little of its operatic
grandeur, makes it seem like more of a prosaic costume drama. While one would
think that hearing Burt Lancaster's own voice would enhance his performance,
paradoxically the opposite is true; in the English version he comes off as a
little stiff; with the carefully dubbed Italian voice, the vitality of the
character shines through more fully, and Lancaster's transformation into Don
Fabrizio is complete. The video transfer, while not bad, is no match for the
Italian version. Still, I'm glad that Criterion decided to include it.
This is, in my view, the DVD release of the year.
The
Leopard in Historical Context, (1963): Luchino Visconti , 28/05/07 ... Kinoeye essay, May 28, 2007
Luchino Visconti's The Leopard and
Those Who Are Not ... - Offscreen
Luchino Visconti’s The
Leopard and Those Who Are Not Rich in
A Country of Arrangements, by Daniel Garrett, July 2012
DVD
Verdict (Bill Gibron) dvd review
[Criterion Collection]
DVD
Journal Clarence Beaks
DVD Talk (Matthew Millheiser) dvd review [5/5] [Criterion Collection]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review
DVD Movie Central Ed Nguyen
Il Gattopardo (1963) James Travers from Filmsdefrance
The Godfather's Godfather - Bright Lights Film Journal C. Jerry Kutner on The Leopard, July 20, 2010
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
Leopard, The (1963) Emanuel Levy
10kbullets Johann Fundin
Movie Gazette (Anton Bitel) dvd review [8/10]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/5]
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul review Matthew Wilder
American Cinematographer dvd review Kenneth Sweeney
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
BBC Films review Jamie Russell
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
KQEK (Mark R. Hasan) dvd review [Criterion Release]
Decent
Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review
[B+]
Leave it to
Diva | Film | The Guardian Peter
Lennon article on Claudia Cardinale from The
Guardian,
Claudia Cardinale Adrian Wootton interview from The Guardian, May 10, 2003, continuing here: Claudia Cardinale: part two
Useful site on a lecture series and screenings of Italian films representing the Risorgimento Rochester Film Series
introduction to neorealism Kinoeye, May 20, 2007
Shiel, Mark 2006: Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding
the Cinematic City Kinoeye,
The Cinematographers of
Neorealism and Beyond Kinoeye,
Scorsese
Restores The Leopard and Revives Cannes's Golden Age Julian Sancton from Vanity Fair,
Il
gattopardo / The Leopard (Italo-French, by Luchino Visconti with Burt ... Napoleon Foundation
Luchino Visconti's THE LEOPARD previously at Film Forum in New ...
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[4.5/5]
Derek Malcolm's Century of Films: The Leopard The Guardian, November 16, 2000
Luchino Visconti's The Leopard cost a fortune and it was worth every ... John Patterson from The Guardian, August 20, 2010
Washington Post (Desson Thomson) review
San
Francisco Chronicle [G. Allen Johnson]
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Wilmington) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDBeaver
dvd review Gary
W. Tooze
Il Gattopardo, 1963, by
Luchino Visconti
Claudia Cardinale’s entrance on YouTube (
Time Out review Tom Milne
Visconti's retelling of the Electra
story starts with Sandra/Electra (Cardinale) returning to her ancestral home in
Italy - and reviving an intimate involvement with her brother (Sorel) which
troubles her naive American husband (Craig) - on the eve of an official
ceremony commemorating the death of her Jewish father in a Nazi concentration
camp. As ever with Visconti, he is ambivalently drawn to the decadent society
he is ostensibly criticising; and Armando
Nannuzzi's camera lovingly caresses the creaking old mansion, set in a
landscape of crumbling ruins, where the incestuous siblings determine to wreak
revenge on the mother (Bell) and stepfather (Ricci) who supposedly denounced
their father. Something like a Verdi opera without the music, the result may
not quite achieve tragedy, but it looks marvellous. The title, culled
from a poem by Leopardi, has been better rendered as 'Twinkling Stars of the
Bear'.
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Sandwiched between the Verdian canvas of The Leopard
and the succès d'estime of The Stranger, this Luchino Visconti
houthouse opus remains relatively obscure, more compact in its scale yet a key
transitional work. The promised exoticism of the title's idiotic English
translation aside, Claudia Cardinale's eponymous heiress is less odalisque than
jet-setting Elektra, returning, American husband (Michael Craig) in tow, to her
roots in a palatial Volterra manor. In town to honor her dead father, Cardinale
is faced with a nightmarish gallery of figures from her past, including her
babbling wreck of a mother (Maria Bell), rancorous stepfather (Renzo Ricci)
and, most notably, her younger bro (Jean Sorel), a layabout lothario primed to
exploit their unwholesomely close youth with a roman à clef. The movie is no less
operatic for being deprived of the director's trademark Technicolor delirium --
it abounds in hushed scandals, subterranean rendezvous, characters moving in
and out of chiaroscuro and pounding out their turmoil onto pianos. Visconti's
atmosphere is voluptuously contaminated, with family as the main source of rot:
perched somewhere between the elegiac dignity of Leopard nobility and
the free-flowing depravity of The Damned clan, the familial laces are so
knotted by unsavory phantoms (there's much whispering about concentration camps
and bungled suicides) that incest starts looking merely like the logical
extension. The erosion of family is linked not to outside forces but to
internal, oppressive tensions inherent to the structure (and, by extension, to
the aristocracy), links that bridge Cardinale with her brother's passionate
decadence, no matter how hard she tries to towel off the past. From there, it's
only a step to the complete pollution of The Damned. Screenplay by
Visconti, Suso Cecchi d'Amico and Enrico Medioli. Cinematography by Armando
Nanuzzi. In black and white.
User comments from imdb Author: Tom Doe from Japan
As they say, the characters in this
movie are based on the Greek mythology, namely, the killed father (Agamemnon),
his wife (Clytemnestra), her new husband (Aegisthus), the daughter, Sandra
(Electra), the son, Gianni (Olestes) and ex-boyfriend of the daughter, Pietro
(now he is a doctor but he comes form a tenant farmer family like in the
original), and the Trojan War is replaced with the Second World War ... the
story line is difficultly categorized into a direct adaptation like Mourning
Becomes Electra (an O'Neill's play, made into a movie by Dudley Nichols 1947),
however, it follows the traditions of the Greek tragedies : the past and the
blood dominate and determine every destiny of the characters.
Here, Andrew (the outsider) is an interesting character. Innocently, (without
receiving an oracle!), he analyzes 'the curse' of the dead father rationally,
objectively and very ordinarily in vain and opens Pandora's box with his 'good'
foolhardiness. Besides, he judges Gianni according to 'his' ethics as a total
stranger and raises his fist against his brother-in-law. And still he is never
involved in the mythology and should walk away forever. Is he an incarnation of
our prosaic civilization of today? The establishment that he is an American
(who has a camera!) could be an irony in Visconti's own way?
By the way, recently I watched Desperate Housewives, season 2, Episode 9,
"That's Good, That's Bad", and suddenly I remembered the scene in
which Gianni takes out the pills and threatens Sandra : George who took the
pills menaces Bree ... (so I'm writing this comment now, but I know it's an
exaggerated analogy, anyway....)
Jean Sorel is heavenly beautiful. The scene in the water tower takes my breath
away. César Franck's music suits the aestheticism of the director, too.
If you are an amateur of Visconti's works, you might know this one doesn't end
just as in the original script. Do you think Sandra flies across the ocean to
join Andrew or she buries herself in her destined blood there eternally?
Including Mourning Becomes Electra, it could be interesting to refer to also :
1. Les Enfants terribles / Jean-Pierre Melville (1950) 2. Höhenfeuer /Fredi M.
Murer (1985) 3. Jeux d'artifices / Virginie Thévenet (1987) 4. La Banyera /
Jesús Garay (1989 / fantastic!)
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
Volterra
on the movie: Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa - L.Visconti 1 on YouTube (
Volterra
on the movie: Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa - L.Visconti 2 (
Volterra
on the movie: Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa - L.Visconti 3 (
Volterra
on the movie: Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa - L.Visconti 4 (
Volterra
on the movie: Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa - L.Visconti 5 (
User comments from imdb Author: Jackstone54
Luchino Visconti's sublime
adaptation of Camus' "unfilmable" existentialist classic is all but
forgotten. It's one of Visconti's best films, a searing, intelligent film.
Marcello Mastroianni reportedly stepped into the role of Meurseult, which
Visconti had earmarked for his protégé Alain Delon, who would have been too
pretty to play the character. Mastroianni gives a masterful performance. As his
mistress Maria Cardona, Anna Karina is stunning. She is especially moving in
the courtroom scene. Giuseppe Rotunno's cinematography is peerless. Pauline
Kael voted this as one of the top three films of 1967, after "Bonnie and
Still of the Night to Strike Up the Band Pauline Kael
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The curious fault of Luchino
Visconti's "The
Stranger" is that the film follows the book too closely.
If Visconti had tampered with Albert Camus' masterpiece, I suppose I would have
responded with knee-jerk indignation. But he has handled Camus with an almost
excessive reverence, and halfway through we realize the film will have no
surprises.
This doesn't mean "The
Stranger" is bad as cinema. Visconti, like Camus, realizes that the
meaning of "The
Stranger" is not to be found in the plot but in the mood. The mood is
ennui, the dominant emotion of a man who hardly cares enough to tell his own
story. Meursault, Camus' hero, commits a murder almost absent-mindedly.
The point is not so much that he murders a man as that he hardly seems to care.
The courtroom is enraged that a man could be so lacking in basic human emotion.
The hazard for the director is to show Meursault's boredom without making a
boring film, and Visconti succeeds for the most part. Even when there is very little
happening on the screen, it is happening interestingly. Visconti mutes his
colors, preferring blues and grays, an occasional yellow or white or orange,
and only a rare splash of anything bright. Thesurface of his photography is
still, at most, passive.
The murder scene is filmed in a deliberately unsensational way; it hardly seems
to matter. Against this passive mood, the strong emotions of the other
characters clash strongly. There is the opening scene at the funeral for
Meursault's mother; an elderly friend faints, but Meursault is unmoved.
In the other rooms of Meursault's building, an old man passionately loves and
hates his dog, lovers quarrel and there are shouts on the stairway, but for
Meursault the day is only something to be got through.
The people who surround him CARE about the events in their lives; Meursault
does not. Marcello
Mastroianni is perhaps too striking to play Meursault (I would have
preferred a nonentity). But he turns in a good, restrained performance. He is
at his best in the scenes with Anna
Karina, the girlfriend he hardly cares about. Even when he says he loves
her, it is his good nature and not his passion speaking.
He wants to be agreeable. That is why the murder is such a puzzle. Why would
such an agreeable, indifferent, passive person murder one of his fellows? But
that is the question Camus began with.
July 31, 2006 -- THE STRANGER (dir. Luchino Visconti, 1967) Bilge Ebiri from Screengrab
Let’s
just start with a basic factual statement: More people should know about the
existence of an adaptation of Albert Camus’s seminal novel The Stranger (L’Etranger), starring Marcello
Mastroianni and Anna Karina, and directed by the great Luchino Visconti (Rocco and His
Brothers, Death in Venice) at the height of his career. That such a
film has gone largely unseen for so many years kind of boggles the mind. I’ve
never been able to understand why it has been impossible to find on video – as
far as I know, only some bootleg VHS copies show up on eBay now and then – but
I can only assume there is some kind of catastrophic rights dispute preventing
its release.
Visconti, in many
senses, would not seem like the ideal person to adapt The Stranger.
Although his debut feature, 1943’s Ossessione, had helped bring about
the gritty Italian Neorealist movement, in the 1950s and 60s this scion of one
of Italy’s oldest and richest families (he was also, as luck would have it, a
communist and a homosexual) moved towards a more aestheticized realm, staging
immaculately reconstructed, operatic period pieces such as Senso and The
Leopard. Actually, Visconti’s flair for elaborate historic recreations was
really just an offshoot of the same impulses that led to his first kitchen-sink
films: A desire to recreate the plastic world onscreen, utilizing setting and
mood to achieve a kind of acute psychological realism. Many Visconti films have
been criticized for being all texture; but in a Visconti film, texture is
the inroads to understanding character.
So
where does that leave The Stranger? Camus’s rarefied, slim novel of
existential despair seems miles away from the historic, epic tomes Visconti
liked to adapt (he preferred expansive writers like Thomas Mann and Giovanni
Verga). Indeed, the melodrama that is often the central focus of other Visconti
films is here reduced to an object of distant observation: Camus’s central
character, Meursault (Mastroianni) is a Frenchman living in occupied Algiers,
profoundly alienated from the world around him. Unable to feel anything, he
goes through the motions of his life. He feels nothing at his mother’s funeral,
he feels nothing at the sight of a man viciously abusing his girlfriend, and,
most notably, he feels nothing as he kills an Arab on a sandy beach, in the blistering
heat and blinding glare of the North African sun. In the trial that ensues, he
is condemned not so much for his crime but for his cool, seemingly uncaring
demeanor. Which makes him about as un-Viscontiesque a character as one can
imagine.
Somewhat
surprisingly, The Stranger is an extremely faithful adaptation, at least
on its surface. But in translating Camus to the screen, the director and his
screenwriters (among them his longtime collaborator Suso Cecchi D’Amico) bring
an earthiness to the story that gives it a strange new kind of life. From the
opening images of Meursault sweating away on a bus, through his days in the
sweltering heat, his free-spirited dalliances at the beach and in the sea with
the lovely Marie (Karina), this is a film that is very much about the physical
reality of a character whose mind seems to constantly be elsewhere. The heat is
certainly also a part of Camus’s novel, but the extent of its presence in the
film -- with sweat constantly seeping through Meursault’s shirt, fans
everywhere blasting away helplessly, and nearly every character existing in a
strange netherworld of fierce passion and frustrated exhaustion – is striking.
This
tension –- between the deeply-felt, impeccably-filmed textures of the physical
world, and the distant, alienated nature of Meursault’s inner life -- makes The
Stranger a profoundly disquieting film. But I suspect that much of the
world wasn’t ready for this film at the time –- at least, not from Visconti.
The director was roundly castigated for making the film a period piece (it’s
set in the time frame of the novel). It fit in with many critics’ view of
Visconti as a director who was only at home in the past, a kind of
Merchant-Ivory with an Italian accent. So how odd it is to learn that Visconti actually
wanted to make the film set in contemporary times, but was forced to turn it
into a period piece at the insistence of Camus’s widow.
Furthermore,
Mastroianni is considered by many to be a bit too good-looking and cool to play
Meursault. (Even Roger Ebert, who liked the film back in the day, agrees with this
criticism.) I disagree. Part of Mastroianni’s charm was his affability. Even
though by the 60s he had become an international symbol of Euro-cool, there’s
an Everyman dimension to this actor that was at the root of his appeal;
remember, in the film that made him an icon, 1960’s La Dolce Vita, he
was the journalist lusting after the movie star. By casting such a likable,
good-looking man as Meursault, Visconti adds to the tension between his
character’s inner and outer worlds.
The Stranger is rare, but it isn’t
impossible to see. It tends to show up in retrospectives of the director’s
works. I try to catch it whenever I can, and I’m always encouraged by the
enthusiastic response the film gets from viewers at these screenings. That not
only suggests that there is interest in it (which bodes well for a DVD release,
one day) but that audiences are finally able to see it for the remarkably
haunting work it is. It deserves to be seen by more people. I hope one day it
will.
Luchino Visconti's The Stranger - Film Comment Farran Smith Hehme, June 2, 2017
Beware the movie based on literature, or, in that showbiz term of art, a “literary property.” Not because adaptations are an inferior form of cinema—I don’t believe that for a moment—but because they create an added layer of copyright issues for the film. When a movie stays long out of sight, and the studio still has prints, very often the reason you’re not seeing it has to do with the rights to its literary source.
This is most likely why Lo Straniero, from 1967, directed by the great Luchino Visconti and starring Marcello Mastroianni and Anna Karina, has gone missing for so many years—never on VHS, never on DVD, unseen on TV, and infrequently revived in cinemas. It’s based on The Stranger by Albert Camus, and it has what J. Hoberman calls “complicated rights issues.” (In the 1990s it was reported that Camus’s daughter dislikes the film.) Consequently an extremely rare screening as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s 28-film Mastroianni series was mobbed.
Whatever is keeping The Stranger out of American hands, it isn’t lack of quality. I wouldn’t rank it with Visconti’s greatest films, but the first half in particular gets under your skin, and stays there. Shot in Algeria, where the novel was set, it’s a sun-soaked movie, with exteriors in harsh yellow and glaring white that look as if they were filmed entirely at high noon. The buses, the cars, the cramped apartment buildings all seem to have temperatures and textures. Mastroianni sweats clear through his linen jacket; other characters mop their brows incessantly. The only one uncrumpled and perspiration-free in the heat is the perpetually cool Karina.
The adaptation is highly faithful to the book (reportedly at the insistence of Camus’s widow), even keeping the temporal setting of the 1930s. Mastroianni plays Meursault, a clerk whom we first see going to Marengo to bury his mother after her death in a nursing home. The home’s locked-in atmosphere and addled residents seem more akin to an asylum, but it doesn’t affect Meursault, who settles in next to her coffin, drinks coffee, and smokes cigarettes until the funeral the next day.
Meursault, it seems, has very little in the way of ordinary human feeling, and zero desire to fake it. Visconti’s camera shift to close-ups again and again, of Meursault’s blank expression, of the lively and mobile faces around him. Algiers, where Meursault lives, is an intoxicating city, but he is immune. There is an extended shot of Meursault walking home at night, a hundred different noises swirling around him, detached from them all.
Mastroianni, an actor of immense charisma, is an oddity as Meursault. Even his smiles of boredom or indifference reel you in; the charm is who he is, he can’t turn it off. It isn’t just his beauty, although that makes a late-movie line that he might have “wished for a better-shaped mouth” unintentionally amusing; a mouth more perfect than Mastroianni’s is hard to imagine. (Visconti is said to have wanted the even more handsome Alain Delon, whose stern reserve might have been less anomalous.) When Meursault chuckles at an old hobo who is screaming at a dog, or lights up next to his mother’s coffin, there is more there there than the character is probably supposed to have.
Overall, however, thank God for that. Existential anomie can be riveting on paper, but ennui is possibly the hardest and least rewarding thing that can be put on screen. And the actor’s Marcello-ness does make it easy to believe that dazzling Marie (Karina) would be in love with this phlegmatic clerk, who responds to her declarations by saying he probably doesn’t love her, but he’ll marry her if she wants.
The climax of the movie comes at a beach house where Meursault and Marie are visiting friends of his Algiers neighbor, Raymond (Georges Géret), a brutish type who’s being pursued by the brothers of an Arab woman he roughed up. Visconti builds beautifully to the story’s abruptly violent climax, through the cackling of the women, the empty beach, and the sun drilling a hole in Meursault’s head.
The Arab brothers have followed them there, and Meursault, walking alone and with a gun in his pocket, shoots one of the young men, following the first fatal shot with four more bullets. (The nameless Algerian has drawn a knife, a fact that would matter a great deal in the good old U.S. of A., but in the world of this movie is never once mentioned by anyone.) Meursault is taken to prison, and in a brilliant moment, is put into a large holding cell full to bursting with Algerians. What did you do, Meursault is asked.
“I killed an Arab,” he responds.
The absolute silence, and the pan around every face in the room, that follow this statement make for the most telling (and politically jarring) moment in the film.
The action of the movie then shifts to Meursault on trial for murder, where it seems that the prosecution is most interested in his bad manners at his mother’s funeral. It’s reminiscent of the nightmarish trial in The Lady from Shanghai—close-ups of homely lawyers, odd camera angles, nonsensical arguments, and an audience baying for blood. In the middle of it all is Meursault, unable to play at human feeling even when his life is on the line. Asked if he feels remorse, he will admit only to being “a little annoyed.” Sentenced to the guillotine, essentially for not crying over his mother, he retreats to a black-painted cell and an extended, highly philosophical conversation with a priest. Mastroianni, tasked in this scene with conveying the full freight of the movie’s message, does very fine work. But the best of the film lies in what Visconti and his star do with the beach, and the buildings, and the sultry atmosphere of The Stranger’s long-gone setting.
Marcello Mastroianni in
Luchino Visconti's The ... - Senses of Cinema To
Shoot at the Impassive Stillness: Marcello Mastroianni in Luchino Visconti’s
The Stranger (Lo straniero, 1967), by Joanna Di Mattia, February 4, 2016
aka: Götterdämmerung
Time
Out review
Tony Rayns
Visconti on the rise of Nazism as
reflected within a German industrialist family in the '30s is as operatic and
overblown as you'd expect, often to extremely impressive effect. But the
overall languorousness finally swamps even the carefully elaborated decadence,
making heavy going of otherwise interesting performances from Bogarde and
Rampling. And the indulgence of Helmut
Berger (who debuts in drag, impersonating Dietrich) is already
unmistakeable.
Dad to A Day at the Races Pauline Kael
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [2.5/5]
Think of it as The Magnificent Nazi Ambersons.
Luchino Visconti (Death
in Venice) weaves a fictionalized account of 1933-34
Along the way Visconti tosses a litany of decadence at us. As if Nazism wasn't
enough, we get incest in the family, a little pedophilia, and some
cross-dressing and homosexual hijinks. It all culminates in a bloodbath -- the
historical "Night of the Long Knives," a one-night, bloody purge of
dissidents in Hitler's old private army, the SA (predecessor to the SS),
brought on by fears of a coup against his budding rule. Hitler's rule would be
solidified after this history-making event.
But The Damned is not a film about Hitler. He doesn't even appear in it.
You might wish, though, that he did, for all the zooming shots of disturbed,
lounging frauleins and goose-stepping Nazi officers. Visconti has never been a
master of the camera, constantly drawing attention to himself with his long
zooming shots and penchant for, say, hiding behind a plant and shooting through
the foliage. Here he's undone by an overlong story (at 2 1/2 hours), some truly
mediocre performances, and a script that feels written by a graduate student
doing a research paper on Mein Kampf. The dubbing is atrocious; Visconti
was Italian, and his cast hails from just about every country in
There are moments of great sadness and depth in The Damned, but these
are crushed under the film's weight of self-importance. You can imagine
Fassbinder making this film with far more aplomb and a better sense of
political history, though the scenes of naked and frolicking Germen men would
have undoubtedly taken on an even weirder significance. As an Italian, Visconti
surely understood what he was getting into with this deconstruction of the
involvement of the rich in Nazi Germany, but by confusing the film's length
with its depth, he flubs the attempt here, missing by a mile.
The
Damned (1969) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Pablo Kjolseth
While in his 30's, Italian director Luchino Visconti (1906
- 1976) worked with Jean Renoir (1894 - 1979). He emerged in his own right as
one of the directors to inaugurate the neorealist movement starting with his
film Ossessione (1943) and ending with one of Martin Scorsese's personal
favorites; Rocco and his Brothers (1960). Visconti actually raised the
ire of many neorealism fans with many other works that were big productions
strewn with what some thought were over-blown, opera-like qualities - and,
since Visconti spent several years as the director of theater and opera pieces,
why not? It is here where The
Damned (1969) resides, a film that won the director his sole
Academy Award® nomination (for Best Screenplay), and is both celebrated and,
well, damned, depending on the critic; even so, most agree it is a memorable
and ambitious affair.
Wagner is evoked in the dramatic opening scenes that show the molten fires and
flames that cascade through an industrial factory, as well as the German title
itself: Gotterdammerung. In the Dictionary of Film Makers by
Georges Sadoul, the author notes that 'Visconti once described himself as 'very
German' and the embryonic German Romanticism of his earlier films has since
reached full flowering in the powerful adaptation of Lampedusa's The Leopard
(1963), the lurid vision of fatalistic passion, Sandra (1965), and the
brilliant, extravagant portrait of society trapped by destiny and decadence, The Damned.' Visconti's
theatrical flair certainly picks up after a relatively straightforward
narrative start set in Germany, 1933, where a fancy dinner is staged to honor
the retiring patriarch of a wealthy family of steel industrialists; the
Essenbecks, loosely based on the Krupp family whose steel empire forged the
weapons of war that would play a key role in Hitler's rise to power. The
opening dinner festivities in The
Damned come to a screeching halt when the Reichstag is burned
and, from here on out, the Nazi ascension to power mirrors the Essenbecks¿
descent into chaos. The three hour ride that is The Damned, and which earned an X-rating in the
Warner Bros DVD release of The
Damned presents the film in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio,
with options for English, Spanish, and French subtitles. A somewhat dated, ten
minute-long, behind-the-scenes look at the director brazenly announces how 'One
man stands out among the lengthy list of film artists. One man is recognized
throughout the world as THE creative genius of modern films ' his name is Count
Luchino Visconti di Modrone; but they call him Visconti.' Despite the
hagiographic bent of this behind-the-scenes look at the director, it presents
no spoilers and it lets the viewer see the man behind the camera while at work.
Ironically, the bombastic theatrical trailer included on the DVD is riddled
with spoilers for the film, thus inspiring a cautionary note for viewers to
save the trailer for last.
The Damned: Luchino Visconti. Nationalism as Regression, 09/06/07 ... Kinoeye essay, June 9, 2007
Slant Magazine review Eric Henderson
DVD Verdict (Erin Boland) dvd review
Film Freak Central dvd review Travis Mackenzie Hoover
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
La Caduta degli dei (1969) James Travers from Filmsdefrance
The Films of Luchino Visconti - by Michael E. Grost Classic Film and Television
The
Damned (1969) - Articles - TCM.com
Nathaniel Thompson
American Cinematographer dvd review Jim Hemphill
The DVD Journal DSH
THE DAMNED (LA CADUTA DEGLI DEI) BBC Four
Death Becomes Visconti Michael Wood from Sight and Sound, May 2003
DVD Talk (Mike Long) dvd review [1/5]
PopcornQ review Dennis Harvey
Mondo Digital also reviewing CONVERSATION PIECE
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver.com - Full Review[Gregory Meshman]
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF COUNT LUCHINO VISCONTI documentary film from BBC Four
The Damned - Luchino Visconti on YouTube (5:37)
ALLA RICERCA DI TADZIO
Italy (30 mi) 1970
User comments from imdb Author: Christian-Doig
My
comment is not an opinion on Morte a Venezia, the 1970 film version of Mann's
novella Der Tod in Venedig, yet it is an inevitable reflection of my thoughts
about the circumstances of its translation to the screen.
Directed by Visconti himself, this short feature offers an insightful look at
the arduous process he had to go through to cast the child actor for the
pivotal, most significant part in the movie: that of Tadzio, the tangible ideal
of beauty in the eyes of egregious literary artist Gustav von Aschenbach. As
the filmmaker admits it in the documentary, he was to leave untouched the
character of Tadzio even though he had changed Aschenbach into a music
composer, what made for a better use of cinematic language and was ironically
closer to Mann's original conception, nurtured from the figure of renowned classical
musician Gustav Mahler. However, Visconti did transform, cinematic wise too,
the original Tadzio. He had to: he met Björn Andresen.
Andresen was 14, 15 years old at the time, and much tall; but he was also
androgynous, and his incredible Renacentist beauty was what get him the role.
Mann's Tadzio is a 12-year-old boy of quite naive and plain nature in
comparison. Visconti got it right, ultimately; I don't know how he wanted to do
his film with a perfect replica of the character when he had already an
Aschenbach composer, not writer, in mind. And these weren't to be the last
licenses he was to take concerning the scenario and the themes from the
original source (but that could be the stuff of a review for the actual
full-length film).
Alla ricerca di Tadzio lets us be with Visconti in
User comments from imdb Author: debblyst from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Visconti's
credit as director of this short documentary is a misstatement. There isn't a
trace of Visconti's elaborate artistry here and he's obviously not directing
anything; what we see are informal images of Visconti looking grave and
slightly bored as he travels around Europe (Munich, Budapest, Warsaw, Venice,
Helsinki and Stockholm) with a small crew in the winter of 1970, looking after
a 12-year-old boy to play the emblematic role of Tadzio in his adaptation of
Thomas Mann's novella "Death in Venice". Visually unpolished (to put
it nicely), "Alla Ricerca di Tadzio" plays like a TV newsreel, with a
narrated commentary full of laudatory remarks on Visconti's oeuvre and excerpts
of Mann's physical description of Tadzio. The commentary is at odds with the
images: the pompous, artsy phrases don't match the improvised auditions in
hotel rooms with self-conscious, inexperienced young boys, most of them bluntly
dismissed by Visconti with a grunt, a few of them earning
"compliments" like "hmm, yes, pretty face".
Especially ludicrous is Visconti's disappointment with Polish boys (remember
Tadzio was Polish in the novella). Unable to find in Warsaw the Greek/Nordic
living statue he is searching for -- described by Mann as the owner of graceful
body, golden curls framing a noble head with straight nose, blue eyes, full
lips, majestic presence, a sort of preteen reincarnation of Antinoo -- he
blames the demise of Polish aristocracy through successive periods of war in
Poland for the rather "proletarian" appearance of the young Poles: a
VERY politically-incorrect comment by that walking paradox Visconti (a Marxist
aristocrat:))
Visconti's insistence on a Tadzio that would perfectly match Mann's description
seems rather obnoxious: if he took significant liberties with Gustav von
Aschenbach (not only physically by casting Dirk Bogarde, who was considerably
younger than Mann's Aschenbach, but also by making him a composer instead of a
writer), why was he so particular about Tadzio's physique?
Well, it turned out he couldn't be THAT particular after all, because in a
In 2005, Björn Andresen turned 50 (oh time, time...) and gave a few interviews
-- you know the sadistic game of the press, "let's see how old and used up
he looks now!!". He complained how he felt abused by Visconti, who used to
take him to gay bars and parties to "publicize him", exposing him to
the gay scene when he was but 15, turning him into a gay icon overnight, which
made Andrésen -- a heterosexual teenager -- understandably confused and
rebellious. Furthermore, he states that Visconti never again employed him as an
actor or helped him get acting jobs. Feeling traumatized by the whole
experience, Björn went on to make a few minor Swedish movies, got married,
faced the tragic death of his baby child by Sudden Infant Death Syndrome,
experimented with drugs and alcohol, is now out of work as an actor and trying
to make a living as a piano player...in other words, a messed up life of
unfulfilled promises. His face doesn't bear a single trace left of his former
beauty, he now looks haggard, prematurely wasted, deeply wrinkled, completely
unrecognizable. But despite the fact the he wasn't the Tadzio Visconti
originally had in mind (was Visconti looking for a 12-year-old Helmut Berger?),
Björn Andresen will forever be -- for better or worse -- the one and only
embodiment of Tadzio for all of us moviegoers. More than that: since the
opening of "Death in
"Alla Ricerca di Tadzio" ends with a commentary that is objectionable
and disrespectful -- and scary. The narrator declares in a bombastic tone:
"Visconti has found at last his Tadzio in Björn Andresen. But why should
we still call him Björn? From now on he is simply Tadzio and that's that -- È
TADZIO E BASTA!!!". If you see this documentary today, you'll feel chills
up your spine when you hear that last remark, that turned out to be a prophecy
-- and a curse.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Dire adaptation of Thomas Mann's
novella, which turns the writer of the original into a composer, simply so that
Visconti can flood his luscious, soft-focus images of Venice with the sombre
sounds of Mahler, thus attempting to give a heartfelt emotional core to the
hollow, camped-up goings-on. Bogarde is more than a little mannered as the
ageing pederast whose obsession with a beautiful young boy staying at the same
hotel (Andresen in sailor-suit and blond locks) leads him to outstay his
welcome in the plague-ridden city. Everything is slowed down to a funereal
(some might claim magisterial) pace, Mann's metaphysical musings on art and
beauty are jettisoned in favour of pathetic scenes of runny mascara, and the
whole thing is so overblown as to become entirely risible.
Edinburgh University
Film Society Spiros Gangas
A stylistically lavish adaptation of Thomas Mann's novel, Death In Venice tells the story of composer Gustav von Aschenbach (Bogarde) who, in a quest for spiritual perfection finds himself bewitched by Tadzio (Andresen) a beautiful narcissistic boy. As Aschenbach descends deeper in his personal dilemma, these opposite currents of his being move continuously away from any reconciliation.
Visconti's penchant for a cinema which combines intellectual profundity with stylistic brilliance has something in common with the composer's culde-sac. In this film he makes the ultimate attempt to make all the things which proved detrimental to some of his previous films such as The Damned, work. The initially latent homosexual element is adorned with the intellectual schism between spirit and the flesh and Visconti actually gives us neither of the two. Thus, the philosophical discussions are reduced in shallow arguments which along with an excess of Mahler's music - just because Visconti wants to make sure we know he's talking about Mahler - makes the whole thing more tedious than it actually would have been.
However, the depiction of the decadent aristocratic style
which surrounds Aschenbach's world creates an aesthetic context for the story
which is admirable. Dirk Bogarde is excellent as the permanently melancholic
composer while Bjorn Andresen radiates on the screen as the tempting boy. To
deny the exceptional beauty of some scenes in Death in
Day Dreams to Defence of the Realm Pauline Kael
Death
in Venice Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film Nathaniel
Thompson
For about a decade or so, film and literary criticism were
obsessed with the concept of the "gaze," that voyeuristic, sexually
driven need to watch that provides much of the intensity in great works of art.
Hitchcock was a frequent case study, of course, but one of the more peculiar
examples is Death in Venice,
which began life as a Thomas Mann novel, became a Benjamin Britten opera, was
filmed by Luchino Visconti in his second venture with Warner Brothers, and
became the subject of countless indie gay riffs including Love and Death on
Long Island and Death in Venice, CA. Though filled with the usual
opulent visuals - distractions one would expect from nobleman Visconti
(overstuffed rooms loaded with velvet and flowers, misty landscapes dotted with
figures in period dress, and so on), this PG-rated study in "artistic
voyeurism" strips the gaze concept down to its essence, an aging
intellectual so captured by an image of pure physical perfection that he
literally (and happily) wastes away in its presence.
Nearing the end of middle age, exhausted composer Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk
Bogarde) arrives for some seaside relaxation in turn of the century
While Mann's novel has been acknowledged as largely autobiographical, Death in
Warner's DVD thankfully compensates for years of horribly cropped video and TV
presentations by restoring the original widescreen dimensions, vital to
understanding everything from the haunting opening moments (a steamer dreamily
gliding across foggy waters towards
Apart from the pompous theatrical trailer, the biggest extra here is
"Visctoni's
Queer - Bright Lights Film Journal Nicholas de Villiers on Death in Venice, August 1, 2007
Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice: A Love Story Not About Love ... Glauco Gotardi from The Huffington Post, May 24, 2012
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Death Becomes Visconti
Michael Wood from Sight and Sound, May 2003
DVD Times Mike Sutton
Literature and Film Quarterly Alexander Hitchison (2000)
Film Freak Central review [Bill Chambers]
DVD Verdict Bill Treadway
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [2.5/5]
KQEK DVD Review [Mark R. Hasan]
The Films of Luchino Visconti - by Michael E. Grost Classic Film and Television
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] also reviewing Antonioni’s BLOW-UP
The worst best films ever made Tim Lott from The Guardian, July 24, 2009
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4.5/5]
BBC Films review Jamie Russell
Austin Chronicle [Nick Barbaro]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
Guardian Death
in Venice Is Big Tourist Attraction, Philip Winan, November 20, 2000
Guardian
Unlimited Thomas Mann page
Guardian Sir Dirk Bogarde obituary by Margaret
Hinxman, May 10, 1999
The Times Sir Dirk Bogarde obituary, May 10, 1999
Mahler
Adagietto / Björn Andrésen (Death in Venice - 1971) on YouTube (
Morte a
Venezia - La morte del professore sulla spiaggia (
Death in Venice (Muerte en Venecia) (
Time
Out review
Tony Rayns
Interested only in Ludwig of Bavaria
as a neurotic individual, Visconti centres everything on the king's fears,
sublimations and fantasies. He therefore produces a loving, uncritical portrait
of a mad homosexual recluse, whose passions are opera, fairy-tale castles, and
exquisite young men. Nothing is more sumptuous than Helmut
Berger's performance in the lead, the brooding mad scenes, the deliberately
contrived hysterical outbursts, and it takes only a flicker of scepticism to
find the whole charade risible. But suspension of disbelief has its own
rewards: Visconti's connoisseurship of historical detail and manners is as
acute as ever, and his commitment to his subject is total. The film was
originally released in cut versions ranging between 186 and 137 minutes; this
uncut one, obviously more coherent, simply doubles the interest/boredom rate.
User comments from imdb Author: aussiebrisguy from Australia
Ludwig truly is Visconti's magnificent epic masterpiece. The
life of Ludwig II of
DVD Talk
(Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [3/5]
Luchino Visconti's 1972 film Ludwig is an example of a biopic done as an epic, a grand and opulent study of the life of the 19th-century "mad kind of Bavaria," Ludwig II. A member of the Italian aristocracy himself, Visconti stood apart from his filmmaking contemporaries and their embracing of Neorealism, instead crafting meticulous studies of the various classes that were almost more realistic in their painstaking attention to detail but at the same time created a feeling of another world. This feeling of disconnection went hand in hand with the themes of many of the director's pictures, where his characters were often at odds with the world around them and seemed to walk rarefied streets that had little in common with the spaces they connected. Thus, we get Marcello Mastroianni's lonely romantic traversing bridges and canals in Le notti bianche or Burt Lancaster's patriarch in The Leopard, a symbol of a passing age.
Ludwig's one respite is sneaking out at night and riding his horse under the stars. This is where onlookers begin to suspect him of madness, as apparently this quest for solitude was considered strange behavior back then. He finds some comfort in the fact that his cousin Elisabeth, the Empress of Austria (Romy Schneider, who also played the Empress at a younger age in the Sissi trilogy fifteen years earlier), engages in similar activity, and she joins him for a few moonlight rides. Of course, he has also fallen in love with this independent woman, who seems to enjoy the freedom he does not, and his pining for her postpones any serious hunt for a wife and causes further rumblings of his state of mind. So, too, does his harboring of Richard Wagner (Trevor Howard, Brief Encounter), the composer, whose music Ludwig adores but whose personal life and money grubbing ends up being an embarrassment to his sponsor.
Like most of Visconti's dramas, Ludwig has a leisurely storytelling style that adds to the feeling of serious contemplation the film requires and is also successful in creating that sense of another world that is essential to understanding his outsider characters. The director is not hurried in his portrayals, but rather able to document the ennui with a pacing that is akin to real time, the languorous dialogue scenes showing a lack of urgency in Ludwig's life. Even discussions of war seem protracted and separate, with Ludwig having no idea what the frontlines are like and not understanding why his younger brother, Prince Otto (John Moulder-Brown), can't merely abandon his duty.
In the case of Ludwig, the longer running time also allows Visconti to avoid the compression of time that hobbles so many biography movies. There is no rush to cram everything in, Visconti can take his time. The first half of the picture begins with Ludwig's coronation and ends in the midst of his engagement to Tsarina Sophie (Sonia Petrovna), whom Elisabeth has chosen for the King. The second half looks at Ludwig's later years and his being deposed. Visconti also cuts interviews with members of Ludwig's cabinet into the action, with the noblemen talking directly to the camera to explain some of the interpretations of the King's behavior and the scandals that dogged him. It's not a device that Visconti labors over, but it certainly prefigures the fake documentary style that would become popular decades later.
Of course, that longer running time can be a fault as much as it is a virtue, and the second half of the film does drag, particularly in its first hour when Ludwig disappears into his obsessions and instead of trying to break free into the outer world, locks himself away from it. The King continues to pursue a love of the performing arts, including inviting an actor he admires (Folker Bohnet) back to his home and trying to make him his personal performer the way he wanted Wagner to be his personal composer. Ludwig also builds a continuous string of ever-opulent palaces, one after the other, most of them left to sit idle as soon as he moves on to the next. (Visconti shows these in exacting detail when Elisabeth takes a tour of them. These scenes were shot on location, but special praise should also be reserved for production designers Mario Chiari and Mario Scisci.) In his exile, he cavorts with young boys and lets his health deteriorate. By the end, he is a pale shell of himself, his teeth rotting along with his brain. Helmut Berger, who bares both a passing physical resemblance to Alain Delon as well as the actor's icy demeanor, really distinguishes himself in these scenes, imbuing his performance with a brittle incredulity that is both childish and sad. Throughout Ludwig, he comes off as a monarch that is more tolerated than followed, which contrasts well with Schneider's portrayal of Empress Elisabeth as a woman always in charge. Her manipulation and domination of her troubled cousin is quite impressive.
In this period, Ludwig is not at all concerned with governance, which eventually attracts the notice of the ruling officials. At this juncture, the "documentary" interviews meld with the narrative as we realize that they are part of an inquiry into Ludwig's mental health. The investigation leads to a political coup, and here the film begins to pick up again as the various conspiracies to remove the King from his throne and to protect him intersect. Multiple doctors diagnose Ludwig as paranoid, so imagine what it must be like when, shortly after being imprisoned/hospitalized, he discovers the peepholes in the wall where his enemies spy on him--he may be paranoid, but they have really come after him! In this last act, the early hints of Ludwig's eccentricities being calculated and voluntary start to have some bearing. (One aide, Count Duerckheim, played by Helmut Griem, even says as much.) Ludwig may also be truly mad, it's an unanswerable question, and one that Visconti isn't too rigorous about pursuing; rather, as King Ludwig II accepts his fate, he joins other Visconti protagonists in acknowledging the passing of his time on top. The King seems to realize that it's over for him, that the world can no longer tolerate his passions, and that it will continue to turn without him. (He would be pleased to know that Wagner's music still endures, I am sure.)
A film with the scope and patience of Ludwig certainly requires as much patience from its audience, but there are few directors that can guide his viewers through the grandeur of this kind of lifestyle the way Luchino Visconti can. While other filmmakers would be drawn to monarchs who distinguished themselves in battle or effected greater social change, Visconti is more fascinated with a ruler who felt trapped by his position and yearned to be a part of the larger tableau of music and art. For him, Ludwig was more important for how his heart was broken by beauty than for how he lost his country. With sumptuous set designs and well-tailored performances from the distinguished cast, Ludwig takes us behind palace walls to view the fragility that is often secured inside them.
User
comments from imdb Author: david melville (dwingrove@qmuc.ac.uk)
from
User comments from imdb Author: alexx668
User comments from imdb Author: Quibble from Berkshire, England
User comments from imdb Author: dbdumonteil
Eye for Film (Harry Lockhart) review [3.5/5]
waitsfortherain: To John Moulder-Brown on His 50th Birthday
PopcornQ review Dennis Harvey
Cleveland Press (Tony Mastroianni) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [1/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
LUDWIG YouTube (3:15)
Movie Ludwig (8:38)
CONVERSATION PIECE (Gruppo di
Famiglia in un Interno)
Italy France (115 mi) 1974 ‘Scope
Conversation
Piece Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Reader
Luchino Visconti's controversial 1974 feature was originally
hooted off the screen at that year's
A parable about the approach of death,
this centres around a slightly Prospero-like professor (Lancaster incarnating a
role similar to the one he played in The Leopard) who finds his
carefully nurtured, opulent solitude upset by the eruption into his life of a
wealthy woman (Mangano) and her chaotic jet-set entourage. Berger, for whom the
film on one level seems a valedictory love-song, plays an angel of death
figure, to whom a certain mystery attaches. If the dolce vita-style
intrusion is given distinctly Jacqueline Susann-like overtones by the rather
dissociated dialogue in the English language version, Conversation Piece
nevertheless comes across as a visually rich and resonant mystery, far more fluid
and sympathetic than Death in Venice.
Chicago Reader (J.R. Jones) capsule
review
David Thomson has called Luchino Visconti's penultimate
feature (1974) a "maudlin portrait" of the director's homosexual
relationship with actor Helmut Berger; that may well be the case, but the film
is at least as revealing in Visconti's conflicted response to his aristocratic
roots. A retired American professor (Burt Lancaster) is hustled into renting an
apartment on the top floor of his Roman palazzo to a haughty marchesa (Silvana
Mangano); she promptly hands it over to her airy, bisexual lover (Berger), who
scandalizes the professor with his sexual escapades (one involving the
marchesa's daughter and her lover). Visconti rolls out some heavy left-wing
proselytizing in the last half hour, but what really hits like a hammer is
User comments from imdb Author: Ubaldo Martinez from United States
This is Luchino Visconti's first
feature film after his almost fatal heart attack. He was in a wheel chair and
his left side was completely paralyzed. Enrico Medioli's original story about a
man who's facing the end of his life, whether consciously or unconsciously
seemed very close to the knuckle. I've read a lot of material and talked to
people connected to the production before actually seeing the movie. Nothing
had prepared me for what the film presents to the audience and I wondered if
the film that ended up on the screen was the film that Visconti intended.
Starting from the cast: the first rumors that Visconti was ready to go back to
work, announced the film with Laurence Olivier and Audrey Hepburn in the roles
that went to Burt Lancaster and Silvana Mangano. Anne Marie Philipe and Martin
Donovan (the director) in the roles that went to Claudia Marsani and Stefano
Patrizi. For what I gather, Olivier was sick at the time and couldn't accept.
Audrey Hepburn turned it down, Donovan and Philipe found themselves outside the
co-production regulations where two Italian nationals were required for those
roles. Helmut Berger was the one who survived all the changes and I'm tempted
to say: unfortunately! His character is the one who doesn't ring true. Clearly,
User
comments from imdb Author: Angelly-black from
"Gruppo
di famiglia in un interno" has a special meaning for me, `cause it was the
first Visconti`s film I`ve seen. It was a successful beginning for "Gruppo
di famiglia" has concentrated all the most significant themes of his late
works - death, solitude, disintegration of family and decay of traditional
values, human searching for harmony in conditions of hostile environment and
internal dissonance. I guess this movie is a kind of psychological puzzle - the
director gives us some fragments of picture and a slight allusion how to make
it up. So you'd better watch this movie several times ( at least two).
Is it a precise sketch of decaying society or a drama of solitude and
misunderstanding? I think both. The old Professor fenced himself off with
beautiful pictures, classical music, exquisite trinkets. He seems
disillusioned, he dislikes people and prefers things, they create. We conceive
the environment from the Professor's viewpoint, the action of movie is
restricted with his apartment - so we have exact and oppressive sensation of
his voluntary hermit-existence, externally calm, but desperate like the Death.
This measured life is abruptly broken off by the group of people - eccentric,
tactless, obtrusive and noisy. Despite the Professor's resistance, the newcomers
involve him in the storm of their passions and collisions. The epicenter of
this storm is Conrad - an unscrupulous young man, a gigolo of the rich
marchesa. But it's just one side of his figure, the first and quite deceitful
impression. It also refers to other characters who turn out to be different
from the impression they produce at first. The part of Conrad was gorgeously
played by Helmut Berger who seems to embody in last films of Visconti the
dangerous temptation of beauty - fatal for other people and finally for its
owner. Suddenly it becomes evident that the unapproachable Professor dreams of
family. The reality is pierced now and then by his reminiscences of the youth,
of his mother, his young wife who'd left him (or he'd left her?). Those memories
are always interrupted by irritating noise of his guests. The Professor exists
at the joint of two realities and rush from one to the other with torment and
hesitation. At last he realizes that feels more affection to those people with
all their problems then to his exhausting reminiscences or imaginary
interlocutors from "conversation pieces". He told sensitively:
"It could have been my family!" Blinded with this unexpected
affection he doesn't notice the doom sneering at him. He doesn't realize that
he neither knows nor understands those people and there's very little time to
achieve something new. There's only death ahead for him. That's why like a
sudden intolerable blow he takes a suicide of Conrad who attracted the
Professor most of others. Indeed Conrad is the least false figure in that
"family". Beside his ruthless awareness the Professor looks like a
naive idealist. His bedroom transformed into a hospital ward, a tape of
cardiogram - it's a price he pays for his illusions.
DVD Times Anthony Nield
The Stop Button (Andrew Wickliffe) review [2/4]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
User comments from imdb Author: Marcin Kukuczka from Cieszyn, Poland
Mondo Digital also reviewing THE DAMNED
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
www.rarovideo.com
- Gruppo di famiglia in un interno
on YouTube (
Time Out Tony Rayns
After several misguided projects,
Visconti's last film returns to the territory he knew best, and forms a worthy
finale to a distinguished career. The plot is understated melodrama: a
turn-of-the-century gentleman of leisure indulges all his own extra-marital
whims, but is mortified when his wife has an affair; his whole philosophy
crumbles as he desperately tries to preserve his self-respect. It's based
(faithfully) on a novel by Gabriele D'Annunzio, and Visconti's treatment is
much more novelistic than melodramatic: the style is uninflected, and the
stately camerawork directs attention to the period manners and environments and
the notably convincing characterisations. The film resolves itself into an
almost painfully sincere meditation on masculine self-delusion. It has a great
performance from Laura
Antonelli as the wife, and excellent ones from Giannini and Jennifer
O'Neill as husband and lover.
All Movie Guide [Wheeler Winston Dixon]
Luchino Visconti's
last film is haunting and sad, the final work from a major filmmaker who saw a
way of life vanishing with his passing. Set in
The Incredible Shrinking Man to Investigation of a Citizen Under Suspicion Pauline Kael
For its first half, this Visconti film, based on the 1892
D'Annunzio novel, is a steamy comedy of manners that seems an almost perfect
preparation for a tragicomedy of jealousy, and Visconti's work is masterly in
its expressive turn-of-the-century decor, and in its control. Tullio (Giancarlo
Giannini), an aristocratic liberal, has become sexually indifferent to his innocent,
round-cheeked, country-mousy wife (Laura Antonelli), and has turned to a
liaison with an ardent, glittering countess (Jennifer O'Neill). But when this
gentle wife becomes interested in another man, he falls passionately in love
with her. In the second half, the picture runs out of steam and turns into a
ponderous melodrama. Giannini is far from ideally cast, but he seems acceptable
until he remembers to act; toward the end he's all over the place acting.
Antonelli gives the picture some amusing sexual suspense. At first, she's like
a placid ingenue, except that she has furtive yearnings-naughty thoughts. When
she's finally nude, in bed, and aroused, she heaves and writhes so prodigiously
she's like a storm-tossed sea. It's the kind of passion you learn in a circus:
she's a horizontal belly dancer. Visconti had finished shooting this film when
he died in 1976, but he did not complete the editing, and perhaps the
maundering second half is partly the fault of others. With Marie Dubois as the
Princess, Marc Porel as the novelist, Rina Morelli as Tullio's mother, Claude
Mann as the Prince, and Massimo Girotti and Didier Haudepin. From a script by
Suso Cecchi d'Amico, Enrico Medioli, and Visconti; cinematography by Pasqualino
De Santis; art direction by Mario Garbuglai; costumes by Piero Tosi. In
Italian. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book When the
Lights Go Down.
Read the New York Times Review » Vincent Canby
THOUGH it's sometimes difficult to associate the neo-realism of Luchino Visconti's early films, especially "Ossessione" and "La Terra Trema," with the operatic indulgences of "The Damned," "Ludwig" and "Death in Venice," the connections are there — and not simply in the visual elegance of all his work. The more profound connections are in the passions that rule Visconti's principal characters, whether a lusty, sex-starved mistress of a roadside inn, a Sicilian aristocrat at the time of Italy's unification, or an upper-class Roman wife who manages to betray her philendering husband in a way that confers on him an unbearable innocence.
This last is more or less the heart of "The Innocent," Visconti's last film (completed in 1976 shortly before his death) and among the most beautiful and severely disciplined films he has ever made. It goes a long way toward erasing the memory of "Conversation Piece," that curiously (sometimes ludicrously) awkward talk-film that opened the 1975 New York Film Festival and seemed emotionally charged to some Visconti admirers, who saw it as an old man's summing up.
"The Innocent," based on Gabriele D'Annunzio's 1892 novel (published in this country in 1898 as "The Intruder"), which I haven't read, may well keep to the spirit if not the letter of the original, as Visconti said some time before his death. More importantly, it exemplifies Visconti's social concerns, though in terms of a story so limited in its field of vision and so precise in its details that it comes as something of a shock when, at the conclusion, one realizes the real magnitude of the work.
The turn-of-the-century world of "The Innocent," though small, is no microcosm. It is exactly what it seems to be, a world of fashionable drawing rooms, music rooms and bedrooms in ancient Roman palaces and immaculately tended country villas, where incomes are enormous but invisible, and where affairs of the heart have almost nothing to do with the soul and everything to do with the body.
Tullio (Giancarlo Giannini) is a perfect specimen of his time and place. He is rich, handsome, arrogant, self-confident and cruel, with a beautiful wife Giuliana (Laura Antonelli) whom he once loved and now fondles as a sister, which allows him the freedom to pursue his equally beautiful mistress, Teresa (Jennifer O'Neill), a widowed countess who is quite as self-absorbed as he.
Though Tullio fancies himself a realist, completely in charge of his emotions, he is struck with a suddenly renewed, totally baffling (to him) love for his wife when he learns she has been having an affair with a young novelist. This new love is different from all the others he has experienced. It may even be real. Magnanimously he offers to overlook Giuliana's indiscretion until he learns that she is pregnant with the novelist's child.
Though the novelist conveniently dies, Tullio tries
unsuccessfully to persuade Giuliana to agree to an abortion. She refuses to go
against church law, which infuriates Tullio, who thinks of himself as an
atheist. "The earth is the only country I belong to," he says.
"When I die, that's the end of it. I live now." In the most sunny,
civilized, well-ordered and well-mannered of worlds, the lives of Tullio and
Giuliana are wrecked by their passions, as fatally as if they'd gone down with
a luxury yacht in the middle of the
"The Innocent" has a surprising kind of narrative balance, a shapeliness that is not characteristic of Visconti though it serves to implement his larger concerns with the individual in his own society. In "The Innocent" these concerns are reflected in major scenes as well as in the most seemingly casual images, such as a series of shots of the guests at a piano recital sitting in the manner of beings frozen in time. Even the women's costumes, with their wasp waists, their veils and their parasols, suggest psychological constraints — bonds that eventually snap in the series of revelations that concludes the film.
Although "The Innocent" is one of Visconti's most beautiful films, the décor is essential to its meaning. "The Innocent" is also one of Visconti's most terse, most dramatically economical films. There's not a superfluous frame in it. Further, it is splendidly performed by Mr. Giannini, who indulges none of the comic mannerisms that are standard equipment in his work for Lina Wertmuller, and by Miss Antonelli, whose childlike face and voluptuous body combine to form a kind of ideograph that tells us what the film is all about.
It is difficult to judge Miss O'Neill's performance. She looks great but her Italian dialogue has been dubbed, sometimes none too carefully, though for that matter all of the dialogue sounds post-synchronized.
"The Innocent," which opens today at the Gemini II Theater, is a fitting coda to the Visconti career. It's a film of effortless command in which the director's presence is everywhere felt — and nowhere intrudes.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Death Becomes Visconti Michael Wood from Sight and Sound, May 2003
Female Sensuality Female sensuality, Past joys and future hopes, by Gertrud Koch from Jump Cut, March 1985
Movie House Commentary Tuna and Johnny Web
DVDBeaver.com [Per-Olof Strandberg]
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A Czech filmmaker rarely seen in the USA, noted for his solid writing, as he wrote and directed all his films, most feature long periods with little dialogue, instead his films are known for carefully etched mood and character, also, in particular, his use of powerful, metaphoric imagery. Frantisek Vlacil made some his best films in the 60's, then was banned from making films during the early stages of the Soviet occupation in the 70’s, returning to make more films in the mid-70's and early 80's. They are all completely different from one another, they couldn't be more different, each unique, beautifully made, smart, intense, some brilliant acting performances, wonderful imagery, controlled pacing, original use of sound and music, a film poet who is largely unknown here but is considered one of the masters in what was Czechoslovakia.
BFI | Sight &
Sound | Out of the past: Frantisek Vlácil
Michael Brooke from Sight
and Sound, September 2010
‘Cinema as
Poetry: Frantisek Vlácil’ Retrospective
from Czech Centres, September 1 –
A widescreen black and
white 13th century Middle Ages drama that opens with a wedding, a
shy young boy offers his gift of flower petals to the bride, but underneath are
bats, so his father, in a rage, literally throws his son against a brick wall,
promising to offer this child to God if he survives. Later, the boy is seen joining the Order of
the Teutonic Knights, befriending one of the brethren there by lying naked in
the cold sea together, nearly numb from the cold as the waves continuously roll
over their bodies, concluding “One must suffer to find God.” Oddly, they remain friends, but develop
differing religious views, which pits one against the other. The boy returns home to his village after his
father dies and develops an attraction for his step-mother, which evolves in
one of the best sequences in the film.
There is a procession of children singing and chanting, a sign of
complete innocence, while the boy, now a young man, assumes his father’s
position and takes hunting dogs out into the countryside where they release a
young deer, then let the dogs give chase until they consume the deer, this is
juxtaposed against the scenes of the children, while the step-mother enters a
private room that resembles a dungeon, removes her garments above the waist and
flagellates herself, but the young man catches her in the act, she rejects him,
claiming “I am your mother,” but then in the next scene leads him out into the
woods where she proclaims they can be married, and lo and behold, they are
lovers, only to be spotted by the other brethren from the Order, who has
maintained his religious zealotry, and feels the need to stop humans from
behaving like dogs. So of course, the
prominent scenes in this film are scenes of humans being mangled by wild,
hunting dogs, who were thought of as werewolves, possessors of evil,
supernatural powers. The contrast of
this kind of paganism and a more ordered, structured religion, both equally
intolerant, both causing a great deal of suffering, frames the story, while
outside the Order’s walls, the ocean is ever present, timeless, and never
ceases to cleanse man’s sins away.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| DVD review: Valley of the Bees (0)
Michael Brooke from Sight
and Sound, May 2010
Tuesday
Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "The Valley of the Bees"
(Frantisek Vlacil, 1967) Glenn Kenny
from The Auteurs,
The Return
of the Son of Monday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: 'Marketa Lazarova' Glenn Kenny from In the Company of Glenn,
Czechoslovakia 1969 (98 mi)
As the camera moves in and out of train tunnels, stuck sometimes in the darkness, this film examines the post-war, built-in prejudices that remain in a war’s aftermath, and how such intolerant views prevent any society from advancing very far in the reconstruction stage. A young Czech Lieutenant returns from the war, weakened and still mentally and physically damaged, but is allowed to recover in a giant mansion that was the property of a wealthy German war criminal during the war, and discovers the young German maid that is allowed out of the camps each day to help is actually the daughter, Adelheid, of that former resident. In a near wordless exchange, he finds himself enamored by her even though she is really his servant and has little choice under the circumstances, he allows her to stay and tries to build her trust and affection, but the ever watchful eyes of the police are more interested in hanging her father and tracking down her still missing brother, seeing Germans as little more than dogs, love is simply out of the question, so, in a rather extended sequence, all appear to be losers in this little Bohemian village, and our lieutenant is seen at the end walking in the snow past a gravestone that is marked, “This is the end of the road,” further on lie minefields, so he walks further on in a blanket of white snow.
A
measured, evenly paced, extremely controlled, psychologically mesmerizing film
about a doctor’s split with his wife, and his subsequent return to his
Communist homeland, brilliantly underplayed by Rudolf Hrusinsky, a man in real
life who was blacklisted in Czechoslovakia for his anti-Communist leanings, and
only the slightest movement in his face could ever be detected, but he was
superb in this role, his dignity challenged at every turn, but always remaining
intact. He is introduced to a
countryside clinic by the local Communist lackey, his quarters are spare and
without possessions, immediately, as the outsider, he is the object of the entire
town’s suspicion, represented in a single scene where he is smoking potatoes,
something he must have learned as a child, in an attempt to gather some
semblance of himself, yet across the landscape a cry is heard for him to put
out the fire, that’s not allowed, what is he, crazy? Every attempt to help
someone is met with whispers behind his back and with the town’s scorn. The
psychological pressure to allow so little to be shown, always holding
everything inside, as who knows, someone near could, and would, use any piece
of information against you. This film
reminded me of some of the early Kieslowski films, such as the rarely seen
CURRICULUM VITAE, where this Communist Party pressure is relentless to obtain
confessions from your neighbors for the most ordinary actions of men. To live under the pressure of such a constant
cloud of suspicion, where the Party representative is rarely even seen or
heard, is wonderfully transparent in this film.
Czechoslovakia 1977 (99 mi)
Czechoslovakia 1984 (90 mi)
Somewhat reminiscent of Fassbinder, in particular QUERELLE, with characters appearing as the Angels of Death, this film could be titled HANSEL AND HANSEL, the story comes from the novel by Josef Capek, and is one of Vlacil’s wordiest, more philosophical films, as two young men are caught in the woods by the gameskeeper killing a deer, so they kill him as well, immediately discarding the deer still another senseless act, and spend the rest of the film running away, hiding in the woods, plagued by their crimes. The two talk incessantly, pledge to never leave one another, and enter into a homosexual bond which is never actually realized, as they rarely even touch, but they can’t exist without one another. As they get deeper in the woods, memories, fantasies, and hallucinations appear more prevalent, one, the shooter, the more dominant of the two, walks naked to the waist through the funeral procession of the gameskeeper they just shot, while the other looks on horrified. Another beautiful recollection is a sepia-tinged image of the two sitting on a front step, back to back, while one plays the accordian and they sing a wonderful duet, until they stop, and one of them, the shooter, pulverizes the other repeatedly. As they get deeper into the woods, they hear their names called out by the dead, in this case the gameskeeper reappears like the witch in HANSEL AND GRETEL, and laughs at their futility. Or they find a beautiful outdoor beer garden where the townsfolk are drinking and dancing, all whispering about the murderers in their midst, while a local drunk has a fabulous scene commenting on their status as wealthy farmers, as they are buying enough alcohol to feed a regiment. One take on this film is the hatred of the workers, particularly in the Communist State, that they always feel justified to hate the outside world, which they imagine as living in bliss. Always, they seem to wake in a beautiful green meadow where the world appears in perfect harmony, except for these two, perfectly realized in a scene where one observes, “At least the world will have all this beauty,” while the dominant partner tries to rip up the field, tearing it apart, while the sound of bees buzzing seems driving his actions. My favorite scene was when they sit on a hill above a rural landscape that is harvesting their fields, again a scene of community harmony, a world where they are not allowed. But the townsfolk close in on them, real or imagined, it’s never really explained, again their names are called out by the dead, like the voice of DON GIOVANNI, calling them into hell. First one, then the other is shot, they lie cuddled next to one another, while the dead gameskeeper gleefully comments: “They can’t escape their punishment.” The camera moves to the entrance of a dark cave, which enlarges into total darkness.
The Vogel Call Nicole Brenez from Rouge, 2004
FIRST STATEMENT. We have not yet seen the most important films of the twentieth century. The German films of the concentration camps, the Soviet films of the gulags (Solzhenitsyn did not think that they were ever shot, but that seems unlikely), the scientific films of the splitting of the atom, the films of the workers who, at the very end of the nineteenth century in Chicago, never left the factory where they worked but were hacked to pieces, like beasts in a slaughterhouse.
SECOND STATEMENT. The amnesia and neglect which covers the history of cinema in the twentieth century is due to multiple factors, among which – and this is not the most important point – is the role of film critics and historians. Most of them, appointed by the industry itself, are the press agents for industrial cinema, or they are merely content to make distinctions between good and bad product. A true history of cinema can only be established thanks to those pioneering spirits who have left the profitable terrain of the market and adventured into the unknown land of non-commercial cinema, whether that be scientific, artistic, pedagogic, or domestic. This patient and difficult work of reconstruction, for a film historian, will need to be undertaken from now on every day, daily. It is almost impossible to write the history of contemporary cinema. The means of creation are everywhere, as is the desire for images. Film production has nothing to do with industry, which is nothing more than its most obvious and mediocre aspect. Should we deplore and grieve for this situation? On the contrary!
For the contemporary historian of cinema, this realisation leads to numerous consequences that are theoretical and above all practical. The most immediate are to:
1. Abandon the terrain of industry which is better left to sociologists, psychoanalysts, economists, historians of technique, anthropologists of ritual and spectacle, and historians of cultural practices (among others).
2. Create an international network to begin collecting films, videos and catalogues of electronic images from the world of independent production.
3. Name this network ‘The Vogel Web’ in homage to Amos Vogel, one of the first programmers to decompartmentalise cinematic practices and list this type of film in his book (Film as a Subversive Art) including some that without him would have totally fallen into oblivion or remain unidentifiable.
The Vogel Web will be characterised by the following attributes:
4. Like Henri Langlois when he founded the
Cinémathèque française or Jonas Mekas when he defined the deontology of the
experimental Cooperatives, no selection will be practiced. All titles, or all
descriptive labels if the works do not have titles, will be welcomed and
protected.
5. The maintenance of the collection sites for titles must not be conferred upon a single source, but must at least be doubled: by a national cinematheque, and by an even more independent association. The collection of information on the production of free images must itself be practised freely.
6. The creation of a network from the banks of material thus constituted will establish a synthesis.
7. Access to the Vogel Web by researchers, cinephiles, historians, filmmakers and anyone interested in the information thus collected and recollected will be open, free and unlimited.
8. The sites of the Vogel Web can perfect a collection formula allowing the listing of the most information possible on the films or tapes collected (authors, title, format, duration, places of production, description of content, commentaries, etc). But every listing must also be able to be left free and spontaneous, independent of administrative forms of identification.
9. The depositors will technically facilitate the collection of images and sounds made from the titles on the Vogel Web.
10. Information on independent production can be collected in a voluntary way by all interested parties: cooperatives, production houses, authors, laboratories, publishers, theatres, cinematheques, programmers, festivals, university departments ...
11. To facilitate access to the material, software for specific searches will be put in place. Searches can be conducted by author, title, duration, format, theme, and keyword. But software will also be available for iconographic and sonic searches by visual and aural motifs.
12. All commercialisation of this material concerning independent creation will be forbidden.
Film as a Subversive Art Self-Subversion, a book review by Sam Rohdie from Jump Cut
Vojtek,
Jaroslav
THE
BORDER (Hranica) C 74
Slovakian filmmaking still has a long way to go, as despite the
compelling nature of this film which documents an absurd border dispute, a
longstanding historical oversight between two nations, viewers will have a hard
time distinguishing between different nationalities. Next to no historical background information
is provided, so instead of receiving an education on the subject, we are forced
to accept overheard man-on-the-street gossip and hearsay, where politics and
personal views are discussed. Initially,
however, a kind elderly gentleman leads the camera to his backyard where he
counts out the few meters to the border between the Ukraine and Slovakia, which
was divided by the Russians under cover of night way back in August of 1946 by
entities then known as the Soviet Union, now independent Ukraine, and Czechoslovakia,
which in this region is Slovakia.
Families that used to walk three minutes to visit one another were
suddenly restricted from crossing the border, where a guard watchtower was
constructed armed with regularly rotated soldiers carrying machine guns keeping
watch. We see them amusingly on guard
walk past the gentleman’s backyard border looking for who knows what, but it’s
their marching orders and their routine.
Today that family can shout at one another, perhaps a 30 or 40 meter
distance over the constructed barriers, which we see them do for family
updates, but they’d have to travel to the capital to petition for a visa
request and back again to receive the decision if they wished to visit
relatives today. The country road
between the towns is completely indistinguishable, hardly of any significance
whatsoever, grown over by grass, perhaps used more for cows than cars. But the division also separated the cemetery
and the church, which exists only on one side.
Residents of the other side can see it, but receive no visa to actually
participate. As a result, families
haven’t visited their parent’s graves in decades.
Many of these families on both sides are elderly, nearly all on both
sides of the border turn out to be of Hungarian descent, where from what we
hear in conversations, the Ukrainians dread having to visit the Slovaks as
their roads are in miserable condition and they’re forced to endure a meager
existence, as the quality of life is much poorer. We see cars on both sides backed up to a
complete stop, as the processing of visas is unendingly slow. One man dons a priest’s outfit in order to
move quickly to the front of the line.
But time passes, and the separate nations eventually become part of the
European Union, keeping hope alive that they’ll loosen up the border
restrictions. The Ukrainians get
excited, getting their visas approved and their passports stamped only to be
rejected on the Slovakian side, where things apparently move at a more slothian
pace. On the magic day when both sides
agree to open the borders, there are public speeches and marching bands,
families are thrilled to be united once again simply by walking a few
meters. One man walks about 5 feet and
exchanges a bag of sugar for a bottle of vodka, enthusiastically beaming with
pride. An elderly blind woman is aided
up to the border gate, where she doesn’t have a passport to walk across, but is
reduced to tears just being able to get that far. As we see citizens share drink and
conversation, we hear villagers after awhile actually regret the border
opening, as it does little to change the lives of most people on either side of
the border. Instead people come for
miles to buy reduced priced goods in the cheaper
The inhabitants of the Slovak
Film
New Europe - The Border – Slovak National Nomination for ...
During the night of
The Border had its world premiere at Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival 2009 and was awarded the main prize of the Between the Seas Competition as the "Best East European Documentary 2009.
In addition, the Slovak Film and
Visit our Blog for
reviews of individual films Josephine Ferorelli from Cine-File,
In 1946, Soviet ideology found a logical geographical endpoint
and cleaved a random community in two. The tiny, Hungarian-speaking town of
Cineuropa
- News - Oscars 2011 – Slovakia - Slovakia enters ... Theodore Schwinke
The Slovak Film and
The academy considered three films: The Border, Mariana Čengel
Solčanská’s The Legend of the Flying Cyprian and Mongolia–In the
Shadow of Genghis Khan by Pavol Barabáš.
The Border examines the lives of residents of Slemence, where in 1946
the Red Army erected a new border between
Vojtek became interested in the story of Slemence in 2001, while
working on his film We Are Here and studying at the Slovak Academy of
Music and Dramatic Arts. “At that time I captured the first happenings at the
border and in the village. I waited for different events in the village, and
after I had the baseline of the individual stories established, I only
continued following the real daily occurrences in their lives. In this way I
recorded the village life as well as the destinies of its people for seven
years,” Vojtek said.
“I wanted to reflect on the absurdity of creating any borders, and about how
helpless man alone is, even now, against the power decisions made by the state
or pursuing higher interests,” Vojtek said.
The Border saw its world premiere at the Jihlava International
Documentary Film Festival in 2009, where it was named Best East European
Documentary.
The Slovak academy has also nominated The Border for the European Film
Academy Documentary Award.
The Border is produced by Leon Productions
with the support of the Slovak Ministry of Culture, the Slovak Government
Office and the Open Society Foundation
THE BORDER |
siskelfilmcenter.org
Interview -
Hranica - The Border Interview with
the director
The
Border Hranica (Documentary -- Slovakia) By JAY WEISSBERG ... Variety
My Father, My Lord (Hofshat Kaits) | Review | Screen David Fainaru from Screendaily
Even the top drama award at Tribeca can't make My Father,
My Lord, David Volach's debut feature, into a crowd pleaser - but then
again, it was never meant to. An intimate chamber piece, requiring its audience
to interpret the apparently banal images into the intense drama that they
refuse to initially reveal, this is the kind of picture that could easily go
unnoticed.
The
Shot in
Their small son
Menahem (Griff) is loving and affectionate but bewildered as any young boy his
age would be at the world around him, trying to make sense of its mysteries,
like life and death, divine authority and its application and the existence of
a human soul. But the only guidance available to Menahem from his parents is
strict obedience to the letter of the law, the same law which his father
studies, teaches and practices, day and night.
Minutely observing a
world familiar to him in every detail, Volach takes his three characters
through a series of seemingly uneventful occurrences, often bordering on
potential crises that never quite erupt because of the limitless respect mother
and son have for the head of the family.
He follows them
through a brief summer holiday trip to the Dead Sea (the film's original title
translates as Summer Vacation) leading to devastating tragedy and
culminating in a wordless act of rebellion all the more powerful because of the
silence it wraps itself in.
At first glance, this
could be the classic example of a man immersed in his own personal universe – a
scientist or an artist would fit the bill just as well – to such an extent that
it distorts his vision of the world and causes him to dismiss anything that is
not directly relevant to it, including the people closest to him.
It's not as if he
doesn't love them; if asked, he would insist there is nothing in the whole
world he prices more. But his calling, of course, comes always first. It is
this tragic misconception which lends Volach's film its universality.
However, the
particularity of this piece and the source of its considerable power and
authority lies in the essence of the calling itself and the precise way it is
portrayed, down to the smallest details. The father is a spiritual leader whose
entire life is dedicated to the study and interpretation of sacred laws, which
are supposed to establish all the essential rules of human conduct. The final
tragedy, therefore, denotes not only his personal failure but that of the laws
as well.
A profoundly
disturbing indictment of religious fanaticism that never raises its voice, nor
cares to parade its intentions out in the open, it is ever more painful to
watch because of the great sympathy it displays to all the characters here.
Volach, who knows
exactly not only what he is talking about but also how this particular world
looks, never puts his foot wrong. His subdued restraint keeps the emotions
smoldering under the surface but never allows them to break out: he never gives
in to the temptation of excessive explicitness and militant stances, his film
displaying the depth that others, like Amos Gitai's Kadosh, dealing with
similar subjects, didn't always possess.
Possibly less of a
visual treat than The Return - another picture with which it shares
certain features yet as introvert and secretive in nature as Zvyagintsev's film
- My Father, My Lord is valiantly supported by a splendid cast.
Assi Dayan offers
probably the finest performance of his career as the rabbi torn between faith
and humanity, while Sharon Hacohen-Bar is remarkable as the silent wife who
lovingly endures her fate until she cannot stand it any more. Ilan Griff and
his simple, unaffected and sincere Menachem is the pivotal point of the drama.
Technical credits are
better than satisfactory and the soundtrack, using existing modern pieces of
music, is not only suitable but at times heartbreaking.
von
Bagh, Peter A- 93
In
a faraway land called
Director Peter von Bagh has worked as the director of the Finnish Film
Archive and also curates two film festivals, one in Bologna, the Il Cinema
Ritrovata Festival that specializes in restoring films, for instance they are
restoring all of Chaplin’s works, and one in his home country of Finland held
in Sodankylä above the Arctic Circle, known as the Midnight Sun Festival as the
summer sun never sets, so they set up tents with bleachers inside and project
movies 24 hours a day while consuming large quantities of vodka. According to film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum
who introduced the film, this highly condensed documentary film will likely
never be released on a DVD, as it would prove difficult to impossible to clear
the rights for all the archival footage used, as every single inch of celluloid
is a beautifully restored clip from archival Finnish films, some going back as
far as the very first silent film ever shown in Finland to clips of some of the
more recent Kaurismäki films that were made within the past few years.
Unlike Terence Davies’ OF TIME AND THE CITY (2008), a film that draws
comparisons, as it’s a personal recollection of Davies’ home town of Liverpool
as seen through vintage archival clips, Davies adds a livid accompanying
narration that sears with emotional intensity, as it angers him what’s happened
to his beloved city, much of it reduced to dilapidated conditions, eventually
driving him away in disgust. Von Bagh,
on the other hand, has no personal axe to grind, and he’s one of three
narrators used in the film, all of whom form a poetic ode to the city of
Helsinki, mixing poetry, paintings, newsreels or still shots with archival
movie clips, moving back and forth in time throughout, melding the present with
the past, also combining fiction and documentary footage to such an extent that
it becomes indistinguishable. In this
manner, simply the way that it is composed, it becomes a city symphony montage,
much like Murnau’s SUNRISE (1927), which is actually called A SONG OF TWO
HUMANS, which mirrors a song of a city, or Vertov’s THE MAN WITH THE CAMERA
(1929), a film about the making of a film, or ENTHUSIASM (1931), an abstract
avant-garde homage to the worker state using a symphony of industrial sounds,
von Bagh has
created a very experimental, cutting edge film, as it’s the style itself that
advances the message.
If one is to walk through any major city of the world, the architecture
of the past and present are blended together, where within a few feet at any
particular point, one might be hard pressed to tell the difference, and no one
thinks anything of it. The same goes for
museums, classical music, paintings, or literature, where a blend of different
time periods is appreciated, even expected, yet in film, this blurring of time
through constructive editing is still seen as radical. Von Bagh makes fascinating use of a
particular street corner or public square, seen in a 1910 silent era film,
perhaps again using clips from the 30’s or 40’s, but also finding a painting of
the exact same subject. When juxtaposed
in this manner, it broadens the meaning of a particular time and place. So many young people feel completely
disconnected to their past, or feel they have no use for history, yet film,
when presented in this light, combining various footage from the past hundred
years so seamlessly, perhaps enhanced by the use of pop music from different
eras, one can’t help but feel greater insight into the culture of Finland while
at the same time broadening one’s appreciation for the nature of cinema
itself. At one point, we’re subjected to
what is considered the most beautiful shot in all of Finnish film history, an
interior shot of a woman looking out a window where the camera steps outside
for a rooftop pan of the entire city, or we see excerpts from the best ever
Finnish musical!
According to Rosenbaum, nearly every film festival has rejected
screening this film, as it has no commercial possibilities, where he himself
introduced it as a critic’s choice film at a festival in Norway, so this
Chicago EU Fest is a rare public screening.
The found footage has been exquisitely restored, and includes a May Day
parade taking place in a blizzard of snow, or a huge crowd gathering over the presence
of a flying zeppelin, where the curiosity of the fixed camera brought as many
stares as the zeppelin, and where children’s faces are captured through every
era of changing history, always dwarfed by the machinations of the adult world,
usually off to the side somewhere, not at all the focus of the shot, but their
weary faces in every era tell all. Much
like Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa’s COLOSSAL YOUTH (2006) or Chinese
filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke’s recent efforts STILL LIFE (2006) and 24 CITY (2008),
blurring the line between fiction and reality using a documentary style social
realism has become something of a preferred technique for showing the face of
the modern world. Von Bagh has found a
treasure trove of mesmerizing archival footage which he uses to explore the
changing face of a city, and in doing so discovers a city’s relevance and
cultural identity.
Note – of interest to me, the film identifies Finnish composer Jean
Sibelius as a regular customer at a particular restaurant that is shown, but no
music by Sibelius, easily the country’s greatest composer, is ever used in the
film. Not sure why.
Music: George de Godzinsky, Tuure Ara, Otto Donner, Einar Englund, Väinö Haapalainen, Nils Lerche, Vilho Luolajan-Mikkola, Georg Malmstén, Ernst Pingoud
Cinematographers: Heikki Aho, Björn Soldan, Pekka Aine, Felix Forsman, Osmo Harkimo, Armas Hirvonen, Pirjo Honkasalo, Eino Kari, Veikko Laakso, Theodor Luts, Vittorio Mantovani, Kalle Peronkoski, Uno Pihlström, Marius Raichi, Timo Salminen, Sulo Tammilehto, Esko Töyri
13th Annual European
Union Film Festival | Gene Siskel Film Center Martin Rubin
"The first eye-popping masterpiece that I saw in 2009 in some ways remains the best."--Jonathan Rosenbaum, Moving Image Source
Critic/historian/archivist von Bagh evokes a hundred years of
Helsinki,
Forever Showtimes & Reviews | Chicago Reader | Movie ... JR Jones from the Reader, or here: full
review »
Peter von Bagh uses paintings, historical photos, and
archival footage to contemplate the title city in this lovely and lyrical 2008
documentary. Like Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself, the movie
also doubles as a critical evaluation of filmmakers who’ve set their stories
against the streets and buildings of the city (though the only one of them I
know is Aki Kaurismaki).
Cinematheque
Ontario - Film Details - HELSINKI, FOREVER
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Cities have long been a sujet fétiche of the cinema,
from the early silent, expressionist urban symphonies to the recent surge in
city auto-portraits like Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City. Peter von
Bagh, distinguished film critic, historian, one-time director of the Finnish
film archive and current artistic director of Bologna’s Ritrovato festival,
brings his wealth of knowledge and infectious cinephilia to Helsinki,
Forever, a charming tribute to the titular city, whose character and
cartography are rendered through a captivating array of visual and audio
references. Using clips from both well-known and obscure Finnish filmmakers
(from Teuvo Tulio to Aki Kaurismäki), von Bagh’s “fabulous and rather
Markeresque documentary . . . is a lovely city symphony which is also a history
of Helsinki (and incidentally, Finland, Finnish cinema, and Finnish pop music)
recounted with film clips and paintings by three voices (two male, one of them
von Bagh’s, and one female – each one reciting what seems to be a slightly
different style of poetic and essayistic discourse)”
JonathanRosenbaum.com
» Blog Archive » HELSINKI, FOREVER (A City ... February 20, 2009
An unexpected gift arrives in the mail: a subtitled preview of Peter von Bagh’s fabulous and rather Markeresque documentary (2008)—a lovely city symphony which is also a history of Helsinki (and incidentally, Finland, Finnish cinema, and Finnish pop music) recounted with film clips and paintings by three voices (two male, one of them von Bagh’s, and one female—each one reciting what seems to be a slightly different style of poetic and essayistic discourse). There are no chapter divisions on this DVD, and the continuity is more often geographical than chronological, although there’s also a lot of leaping about spatially as well as temporally. At separate stages we’re introduced to the best-ever Finnish camera movement and the best Finnish musical, are invited to browse diverse neighborhoods and eras (and to ponder contrasts in populations and divorce rates), and are finally forced to admit that a surprising amount of very striking film footage has emerged from this country and city.
Peter von Bagh—prolific film critic, film historian, and professor, onetime director of the Finnish Film Archive and current artistic director of two unique film festivals, the Midnight Sun Film Festival (held in Sodankylä, above the Arctic Circle, during what amounts to one very long day in the summer, when there’s no night) and Il Cinema Ritrovato (held soon afterwards, in Bologna)—is the man who convinced me to purchase my first multiregional VCR in the early 80s. So he has a lot to answer for, including my DVD column in Cinema Scope—the most recent of which I’ve just turned in. I’m sorry that my online Finnish isn’t good enough to fathom when (or if) it might be possible for you to order Helsinki, Ikuisesti on a commercial disc or see it at a festival; but you should watch out for it whenever or however it comes your way.
blog Patrick Friel from CINE-FILE
While Peter von Bagh has been making films since the late
60s, he is not as well known as a filmmaker as he is a critic, film programmer,
and archivist—someone who has spent his life immersed in film, someone
who has given a careful eye to everything he sees. It shows. Both of the
cinematic spheres he’s travelled in come together in
Light
Indusrty: Helsinki, Forever | Events | Experimental Cinema Jonathan Rosenbaum,
"The first eye-popping masterpiece that I saw in 2009 in
some ways remains the best...Peter von Bagh's Helsinki, Ikuisesti (Helsinki,
Forever) is a lovely city symphony of found footage that is also a history of
Helsinki (and incidentally, Finland, Finnish cinema, and Finnish pop music)
recounted with film clips and paintings by three voices (one of them von
Bagh's), each one periodically reciting different segments in the film's poetic
and essayistic discourse.
The continuity is more often geographical than chronological, although there's
also a lot of leaping about spatially as well as temporally. The film is an
unalloyed pleasure to watch and listen to, but professional packagers hoping to
fix a convenient generic label to this flood of delights might be flummoxed. At
separate stages we're introduced to the best-ever Finnish camera movement and
the best Finnish musical, invited to browse diverse neighborhoods and eras (and
to ponder contrasts in populations and divorce rates), and finally forced to
admit that a surprising amount of very striking and beautiful film footage has
emerged from this country and city.
Peter von Bagh—prolific film critic, film historian, and professor, onetime
director of the Finnish Film Archive and current artistic director of two
unique film festivals, the Midnight Sun Film Festival (held in Sodankylä, above
the Arctic Circle, during what amounts to one very long day in the summer) and
the magnificent Il Cinema Ritrovato (held in Bologna)—is the man who convinced
me to purchase my first multiregional VCR in the early '80s. So he has a lot to
answer for, including, for instance, my DVD column in Cinema Scope. Thanks to
his unwarranted modesty about his film, I don't believe he's gone public with
the responses he's already received from Chris Marker ("If I read in
[Walter Ruttmann's] Berlin the social commitment and the aesthetic maestria, I
don't feel the personal acquaintance with the city, its history, its ghosts,
that I found in yours") and Jean-Pierre Gorin ("Paean to these cities
that you inhabit both, the one called Helsinki and the other called
Cinema"), but he certainly should." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Moving
Image Source
Helsinki, forever - Midnight Sun Film Festival
NICE
2009 – Helsinki Documentaries at the Festival of Nordic Art ... The Finnish Institute in
Tiburon
CA – “Helsinki Forever” (Finland) 5:20pm, Tiburon ... Robert James,
A brilliantly realized depiction of the East German Stasi secret police,
set in the mid 1980’s when they were in full swing, casting their net of
surveillance over the entire nation, sadistically turning neighbor against
neighbor, all under the thumb of an information hungry police state, where all
choices were impossible, where for an entire nation there was no option, as
failure to cooperate with the authorities usually meant dire consequences. This is a revival of Kieslowski’s behind the
iron curtain cinema of moral anxiety, and in many ways parallels his 1988 film,
A SHORT FILM ABOUT LOVE (1988), as in this case, instead of an ordinary citizen
spying on his attractive neighbor, it is one of the highest Stasi agents
bugging the home apartment of one of the country’s leading playwrights, a man
who flaunts western attire, interests, books and other periodicals, also a
demure leading actress, so the police can only conclude he’s up to no
good. In both cases, the voyeur becomes
intoxicated with the subject, so much so that they act in a way that might
otherwise be considered insane, as it’s beyond logic or reason, and might even
be considered an act of love.
Ulrich Mühe, a man who was in real life married to a Stasi informer, who
understands all too well what it feels like to live under constant police
surveillance, plays Captain Gerd Wiesler, an Alec Guinness look-alike from DR.
ZHIVAGO (1965), an unassuming man of quiet intelligence, a Party advocate who
rarely speaks, but continually jots down what he sees in a small pocket
notebook, the eyes and ears of the State.
At each level above him are more despicable men, men enthralled with and
corrupted by their own power, men who hold themselves above the laws of the
nation, who would rather intimidate the entire population into blind
obedience. Their systematic infiltration
of the population is legendary, their interrogations ruthless, operating with
100,000 full-time employees, 200,000 informers, forcing each citizen to
capitulate to the police one interrogation at a time. In the opening sequence, Wiesler demonstrates
how he wears down his subjects, offering them no sleep, coldly and
calculatingly waiting them out until their resistance is broken, then
threatening their family or loved ones with arrest until they confess. Sebastian Koch is the East German playwright
Georg Dreyman, “the only non-subversive playwright we have,” while Martina
Gedeck is exquisite in the role of his girl friend, the nation’s leading
actress, Christa-Maria Sieland, “the loveliest pearl of the G.D.R,”
who
unfortunately has an addiction to popping illegal pills. The head of the Stasi is forcing Christa to
submit to weekly sessions of sex in exchange for allowing her to work, an
artistic practice that is completely controlled by the State. It is their apartment that Wiesler bugs,
sitting and listening and typing his reports on everything he hears.
Dreyman is connected to a community of other artists, many of whom have
already defected to the West, which is the government’s greatest fear, which is
why they keep such close tabs on them. Many
have already been interrogated and imprisoned, leaving them with a bitter taste
in their mouths, while others have been blacklisted and out of work for as long
as a decade. The Stasi’s method is to
imprison them indefinitely, but long enough so that they voluntarily never
again contribute anything else in their chosen field. What Wiesler discovers, however, is that
these artists are hiding nothing, exhibiting a rare openness in a society that
thrives on secrets and covering up, discovering instead that it is his own
superiors who have the suspect motives, which puts him in the same impossible
position as the people he is spying on.
This turns into a series of calculated risks, where each side realizes
they’re being watched, but they have to decide how to act. When a blacklisted director who hasn’t worked
in ten years finally hangs himself, Dreyman and Wiesler simultaneously commit
to more drastic actions, beautifully rendered in a musical sequence where
Dreyman plays a piece of piano music given to him by the director called
“Sonata for a Good Man,” a piece written by the film’s musical composer,
Gabriel Yared, which has a significant impact on Wiesler, who begins to
identify with “the lives of others,” omitting significant details in his
reports, as it’s hard for him to believe his government didn’t drive that man
to the breaking point. Dreyman at one
point is heard asking how anyone who has listened to this music, really
listened to it, could ever think of it as anything bad. On several occasions Wiesler nearly blows his
cover, one is a beautifully designed sequence in a bar which is one of the
turning points in the film, as without ever coming out and actually saying so,
he subtly persuades Christa to re-examine her weekly sessions with the Stasi superior,
where she inquires into his motives, as he seems to know so much about her,
questioning if he is a “good man?”
Beautifully written, mixing meticulous detail with intelligence and
humor, where the tone and pacing of the film are perfectly matched, where the
music does not overreach, yet is genuinely in synch with the mood of the film,
where the ensemble cast is flawless, and where the urgency of the story starts
to feel overwhelmingly personal after awhile.
There’s another scene nearer the end where Christa is arrested and
subject to interrogation, a scene of indescribable conflict and tension, where
she identifies her interrogator as a friend from an earlier moment in the film,
yet cannot reveal anything, where the interrogator himself is under observation,
so both are placed in an impossible dilemma.
This poignantly describes living under the thumb of relentless
totalitarian psychological pressure, eloquently described in his book as The Captive Mind by Polish Nobel prize
laureate Czeslaw Milosz, and the film never for a minute wavers in this regard,
filled with small moments that are as revealing as the larger ones, which
include a not so incidental reference to Communist Party Premiere Gorbachev, a
man who simply walked away from a position of unlimited power, and a man who
incidentally changed the entire culture of living under an authoritarian police
state, and in doing so, changed the course of possibilities for others. It’s a powerful work for a first time
filmmaker who also wrote the film, whose recollections include his mother being
searched by the secret police as a young boy, which may help explain the
dramatic impact this film reaches by the end, stunningly understated, yet
precisely to the point.
The
Times Roger Boyes in
A GRITTY and
emotional story about a disillusioned Stasi secret policeman has scooped all
the leading prizes in the German Film Awards and stoked a debate about how the
country should digest the Communist legacy of the East.
Das Leben der
Anderen (The Life of Others), directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, won a record seven Lolas —
the German equivalent of the Baftas — prompting critics and politicians at the
weekend to predict the end of Ostalgia. That is the term for the sentimental
view of East Germany that has set the tone for a decade. From feel-good films
like Goodbye, Lenin! to Trabant fan clubs, the Communist state has been
presented as absurd or misunderstood.
“At last we have a
film that shows the East German state was not some kind of comedy show”, said
Vera Lengsfeld, a former dissident who is now a Christian Democratic
politician. After Germany reunited 16 years ago, she learnt that her own
husband had been spying on her for the Stasi. “I know from my own experience
how police surveillance systematically destroys the personality. It is
relentless and merciless.”
The film depicts
an agent who is ordered to bug the book-lined Berlin apartment of a young couple,
an actress and a writer. The order has come down from a minister who covets the
actress and wants the relationship destroyed. The Stasi man is drawn to the
couple and feels disgust at his work.
Communism, argues
the director, caused real psychological harm and it is time that Germany
acknowledged the brutality of the regime. “Just because people don’t have scars
to show, doesn’t mean that they escaped injury”, said Herr von Donnersmarck. In
the film the Stasi agent is played by Ulrich Mühe, who in real life was married
to a Stasi informant.
It has taken time
for the dark side of East Germany to be aired properly. The staple fare for
years has been films such as NVA, showing life in the East German army
as a hilarious, if bruising, slapstick adventure.
Controversy,
however, has followed a proposal to shift the emphasis from hunting down former
agents. Marianne Birthler, a former dissident who runs the Stasi research
agency, said yesterday: “That would be a victory for the old Stasi officers.”
Some have formed a
noisy lobby and at some screenings of The Life of Others have shouted:
“Rubbish!”
An opinion poll
published in Der Spiegel magazine today suggests that 41 per cent of
Germans believe that the country should continue to grapple with its eastern
Communist past. Giving so many prizes to the film was not just an artistic
gesture but a political one too.
FOR THE RECORD
In 1974 West
Germany learnt that Chancellor Brandt’s close aide, Günter Guillaume, was
spying for the Stasi. Brandt resigned
The Stasi had
100,000 full-time employees and 200,000 informers by the time East Germany
collapsed
Stasi officers
tried to destroy some 33 million pages of incriminating documents before the
Berlin Wall fell. Many pages have since been restored
John le Carré is
said to have modelled Karla, his Soviet intelligence chief, on Markus Wolf, the
Stasi foreign operations chief
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Directors with a
recognizable style, like Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, and Oliver Stone,
frequently get scolded for marking serious movie material with their gauche
personal stamps. But at least those filmmakers have personalities, and the
boldness to impose them. Writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck gives
his debut feature, The Lives Of Others, no particular style, and the
absence of visual risk-taking renders an exciting premise ponderous and stolid.
Set in East
Germany at the end of the communist era, The Lives Of Others deals with
the Stasi's cruel and ultimately futile efforts to root out subversives through
surveillance and interrogation. The film focuses on Ulrich Mühe, a
secret-police officer who questions what constitutes subversion as he digs
deeper into the life of seemingly devoted communist playwright Sebastian Koch.
This is a terrific, suspenseful story about voyeurism and hypocrisy, but von
Donnersmarck largely keeps the emotion at a distance, preferring to
intellectualize the action rather than letting the audience fully feel what
Mühe and Koch are going through.
In spite of that
lapse, The Lives Of Others perseveres, thanks to the performances of the
heartbreakingly stoic Mühe and the problematically heroic Koch, and thanks to a
plot that keeps twisting in intriguing ways, chased down a winding path by the
historical change we know is coming. As Mühe peers into Koch's life and learns
all his contradictions—including his love for a woman who'll gladly sell him
out to support her drug habit—the cop begins to stall the process of making an
arrest, in part because he's no longer sure if Koch's association with known
dissidents is really a criminal act, and in part because he can't bear to stop
following the story.
It's almost
painful to imagine what someone like De Palma or the Coen brothers could've
done with this concept, using artful cross-cutting and rhyming compositions to
keep the audience so wound up that they almost miss the political implications
of what's going on. Instead, von Donnersmarck makes the meaning of every moment
thuddingly clear, and doesn't move on until he's sure everyone's gotten it.
It's ironic, really, that a movie about learning to appreciate the subtleties
of human behavior is so disappointingly blunt.
european-films.net Boyd
van Hoeij
Spying in former
A man with a blank stare steps into a lift in an anonymous
high rise in 1984
This small gem of a scene, not even two minutes long, is a
first indication of cracks appearing in the outer veneer of the much-respected
Stasi Captain, a staunch defender and teacher of state spying in
Wiesler is assigned – at least partially by his own doing – to literally keep an eye and an ear on celebrated playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch, the Nazi Officer in Zwartboek/Black Book) and his live-in girlfriend, lauded actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck, Bella Martha/Mostly Martha). Their bohemian existence seems to somehow fit with the party line and Wiesler cannot uncover any blemishes, until an incident involving Dreyman’s playwright friend Jerska (Volkmar Kleinert) will change both Dreyman and the man who follows his every move.
Technically, the film is polished and avoids the fixed-camera Big Brother aesthetic by softly gliding through the rooms to the notes of Gabriel Yared’s low-key but effective score. The beauty of Henckel von Donnersmarck’s script and direction is that he trusts the audience to pick up on the small changes and motivations in his characters, even if they are apparently inexplicable. The first time Wiesler realises that something dubitable is going on in the Dreyman household, he acts on an impulse and censors it from his daily report. This small action will snowball through the rest of the lives of all of the characters, not only his own, but also that of Dreyman, and, more tragically, Sieland’s. It is unlikely that he would have allowed such a slip-up had he known beforehand where it would lead, but in that split-second of decision making, he has sealed his fate for years to come (an unsentimental epilogue set after the fall of the Berlin Wall will show how everyone’s lives have been affected by each other’s actions).
The film is long (it runs 137 minutes) but the rhythm never flags; the script is full of subtle mirror effects and references, and its themes only gradually surface, again trusting the audience with the material. One of the major themes is of course the play acting metaphor: Sieland and Dreyman are in the business of make-belief, while Wiesler is on the opposite end of the spectrum, trying to find out the real feelings and intentions behind people’s public masks. In a police state, everyone is aware that a certain level of acting is necessary when in public, if only to avoid drawing attention to one self that might invite further scrutiny. Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film on the other hand is a work that can easily bear multiple viewings and an investigation of its characters and motives. In fact, it is exactly this denseness of storytelling that the rookie filmmaker carries off with such light grace that makes Das Leben der Anderen compelling.
Guilty Parties : The New Yorker Anthony Lane from the New Yorker
If there is any justice, this year’s Academy Award for best
foreign-language film will go to “The Lives of Others,” a movie about a world
in which there is no justice. It marks the début of the German director Florian
Henckel von Donnersmarck, of whom we have every right to be jealous. First, he
is a stripling of thirty-three. Second, his name makes him sound like a lover
with a duelling scar on his cheekbone in a nineteenth-century novel. And third,
being German, he has an overwhelming subject: the postwar sundering of his
country. For us, the idea of freedom, however heartfelt, is doomed to
abstraction, waved by politicians as if they were shaking a flag. To Germans,
even those of Donnersmarck’s generation, freedom is all too concrete, defined
by its brute opposite: the gray slabs raised in
It is a tribute to the richness of the film that one cannot say for sure who the hero is. The most prominent figure is Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), yet if you passed him on the street you wouldn’t give him a second glance, or even a first. He would spot you, however, and file you away in a drawer at the back of his mind. Wiesler, based in East Berlin, is a captain in the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, better known as the Stasi—the state security service, which, by the mid-nineteen-eighties, employed more than ninety thousand personnel. In addition, a modest hundred and seventy thousand East Germans became unofficial employees, called upon to snoop and snitch for the honor—or, in practical terms, the survival—of the state. “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” Jesus said. The German Democratic Republic offered its own version: watch thy neighbor, then pick up thy phone.
The movie begins, fittingly, in 1984. The Stasi machine still
fulfills its Orwellian function, training its sights on anyone who might be
construed as seditious. All the more surprising, then, that Georg Dreyman
(Sebastian Koch) should have escaped censure. He is a playwright. He is
handsome, affable, and draped in a corduroy suit that must have been made in
the West; his live-in girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), is
also his leading lady, and supporters of compulsory egalitarianism would
consider her beauty an insult. Yet the fact remains that Dreyman is a pet
talent of the state—“the only non-subversive writer we have,” according to
Lieutenant Colonel Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), Wiesler’s cheery superior. As for
Sieland, she is, in the words of a government minister, Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme),
“the loveliest pearl of the
One evening, Wiesler attends the première of a Dreyman play. What is it that alerts him? The curtain call, brimming with a warmth that he, as a Stasi operative, will never feel? The kiss that Christa-Maria exchanges with Dreyman? Or, most wounding of all, their happiness? Whatever the reason, Wiesler decides that Dreyman, precisely because he has neither said nor written anything suspicious, must be a suspect. Kafka would recognize the logic: a man too good to be true cannot be trusted. Wiesler confides his doubts to Grubitz, who passes them on to Hempf; the upshot is that Wiesler is deputed to spy on Dreyman and Sieland—to enter their lives, like a virus, and lay waste to their innocence until it decays into guilt.
He and his team infest the apartment where Dreyman lives. As they
emerge from a van, pick locks, and start to seed the rooms with bugs, the
musical score—by Gabriel Yared, best known for “The English Patient”—keeps
urgent step with their task. This is the director’s riskiest move; he expects
us to deplore the demolition of human rights, yet he knows that, as filmgoers,
we cannot help thrilling to the steeliness of Wiesler’s method. (The van is
like the one from the TV series “
One of the marvels of Ulrich Mühe’s performance—in its seething
stillness, its quality not just of self-denial but of self-haunting—is that he
never distills Wiesler into a creature purely of his times. You can imagine
him, with his close-cropped hair, as a young Lutheran in the wildfire of the
early Reformation, or as a lost soul finding a new cause in the
Downstairs, Dreyman finds his own passivity, his tactical playing
of the system, beginning to crack. A blacklisted friend hangs himself, and
Dreyman feels obliged to write about the terrible suicide rate in the
The result is like a clash of puppeteers. Dreyman controls his
characters in the theatre, but his strings are pulled by the state. His
girlfriend, wanting to be mistress of her fate, is just a mistress, and not for
long. (“I never want to see her on a German stage again,” Hempf says, after she
summons the courage to spurn him.) Wiesler toys with the destinies of his
suspects, but he is finally snarled in his own plans and dispatched to a cellar
for the rest of his career, there to steam open the mail of ordinary citizens:
the hard labor of a Stasi drone. Above them is von Donnersmarck, shifting his
fretful players around the city—his horribly convincing re-creation of a
repressive world, ranging from the meagreness of Wiesler’s lonely dinner (a
tube of something red, squeezed onto a bowl of something white) to the
unchanging nylon gray of his clothes. “The Lives of Others” was shot in color,
but you would barely guess as much, since the landscape has long since
shrivelled to black-and-white. I am still shuddering at the scene in the Stasi
lunchroom, where Lieutenant Colonel Grubitz overhears a young recruit telling
an Erich Honecker joke. (Honecker was then leading the
It is a shock to find the action lasting until 1993. As the
events of 1984 hastened to a climax, with treachery being punished on a damp
street, I was already reaching for my coat. So why press onward? Why drag us
into the debris of the broken
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
The Lives of Others has a superbly alienated title and a quintessentially 20th-century premise. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's first feature is set back in the days when the Berlin Wall seemed the immovable center of the geopolitical universe.
It's 1984: Orwell is really happening! The model Stalinist police
state, called the German Democratic Republic, has more snoops, tapped phones,
and bugged bedrooms per capita than any place in the world; the Stasi (state
security apparatus) maintains some 100,000 agents and at least twice as many "informal"
informers. Blackmail rules. Spies infiltrate opposition groups to spy on each
other. Graffiti is duly noted, along with jokes and rumors; the Stasi carefully
collects the body odors of suspects to be archived as future evidence. It is
around the time The Lives of Others unfolds that Party leadership
decides to generate individual computer files for every one of
The 33-year-old writer-director's melodramatic evocation of everyday betrayal makes vivid a distinct form of social existence. Living under the glare of total surveillance, giving unintended meaning to Socrates' thoughts on the "unexamined life," the movie's characters are the shadows cast by their files. The Lives of Others and the more tightly focused Decomposition of the Soul, a Belgian documentary opening this week at Film Forum, go through the looking glass into a world of self-perpetuating paranoia and proliferating fictions. As The Lives of Others' secret star, Stasi officer Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), tells a hapless detainee during the course of a 40-hour interrogation ("decomposition" in Stasi jargon): Not knowing one's crime is a crime in itself. Or, as one victim explains in Decomposition of the Soul, the Stasi's mission was not so much to find as to manufacture behavior, "to make people feel guilty."
Both films add to the corpus of Stasi art. Soon after
unification, East Germany's most distinguished novelist, Christa Wolf,
published What Remains—the story of a day under the Stasi's unblinking
eye. (Shortly after that, it was revealed Wolf herself had been an informant a
quarter-century before.) Cornelia Schleime, the East German Cindy Sherman,
obtained her files and augmented them with staged photographic self-portraits
to parody their allegations. By 1992, the German government created an
interactive Stasi museum. Foreigners contributed as well: British journalist
Timothy Garton Ash found his dossier and wrote a book about it; artists Jane
and Louise Wilson's Stasi City used footage shot in the Stasi's trashed
Self-proclaimed "shield and sword of the ruling party," the Stasi was dedicated to eradicating the "enemies of socialism" —which is to say, policing the socialist intelligentsia. The fattest files belonged to writers, actors, and artists. In a perverse sense, surveillance was a form of entertainment; as proposed by The Lives of Others, life lived under continuous observation was theater. The movie's designated victim is the playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), "our only non-subversive writer who is also read in the West," as a cynical superior notes in assigning Wiesler to the case. Dreyman isn't exactly Josef K. He's far more abstract—handsome, charismatic, and impossibly naive, imagining that, because he hasn't done anything wrong, he is beyond suspicion.
In a quasi-military operation, the fastidious Wiesler wires the apartment inhabited by Dreyman and his leading lady Christa (Martina Gedeck) in time to eavesdrop on the writer's 40th birthday party. It's a fiesta of drunken malcontents, each accusing the other of being with the Stasi. From the strategically empty upstairs garret, the impassive Wiesler ponders it all, tracking the action on a full-scale floor plan of the flat below. Dreyman is an artist and so is he. Indeed, Wiesler is Dreyman's equal in idealism. He's a true believer who is genuinely disturbed to learn his mission is personal: The porcine Minister of Culture has designs on Christa. Wiesler contrives to have Dreyman figure this out. That's the beginning.
Soon, the severe Stasi robot is sneaking downstairs to borrow
poetry books. Under this benign influence, he becomes a vicarious participant
in Dreyman and Christa's love affair. Listening to their
"confessions," he is their guardian angel—as The Lives of Others
is a materialist gloss on Wim Wenders's free-floating allegory of divided
The performance continues. Dreyman decides to write an essay
exposing
The Lives of Others is a compelling thriller but an unsatisfying character drama. As the Stasi-man becomes more human, the movie's tragic trajectory is betrayed by an increasingly squishy humanism—even more than the artists he's invented, the filmmaker exercises the power to make everything (almost) right.
Spy vs. Spy
- New York Magazine David Edelstein
from
Michael Wood
reviews The Lives of Others · LRB 22 March 2007 Michael Wood from The London Review of Books, March 22, 2007
BFI | Sight & Sound
| The Lives of Others (2006) Geoffrey
Macnab from Sight and Sound, May 2007
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
The Stasi on
Our Minds Timothy Garton Ash from
the
THE LIVES OF OTHERS Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
'Lives of Others' brings Iron Curtain chills Jim Emerson from the Chicago Sun Times
The Lives of Others Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
The Screengrab DK Holm
Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]
Movie Review: ‘The Lives of Others’ A.O. Scott from the New York Times
von Sternberg, Josef
Josef von Sternberg - Director - Films as Director ... - Film Reference John Baxter
There is a sense in which Josef von Sternberg never grew up. In
his personality, the twin urges of the disturbed adolescent towards
self-advertisement and self-effacement fuse with a brilliant visual imagination
to create an artistic vision unparalleled in the cinema. But von Sternberg
lacked the cultivation of Murnau, the sophistication of his mentor von Stroheim,
the humanity of
Much of von Sternberg's public utterance, and in particular his autobiography, was calculated to confuse; the disguise of his real Christian name under the diminutive "Jo" is typical. Despite his claims to have done so, he did not "write" all his films, though he did re -write the work of some skilled collaborators, notably Jules Furthman and Ben Hecht. While his eye for art and design was highly developed, he never designed sets; he merely "improved" them with props, veils, nets, posters, scribbles, but above all with light. Of this last he was a natural master, the only director of his day to earn membership in the American Society of Cinematographers. Given a set, a face, a camera, and some lights, he could create a mobile portrait of breathtaking beauty.
Marlene Dietrich was his greatest model. He dressed her like a
doll, in a variety of costumes that included feathers and sequins, a gorilla
suit, a tuxedo, and a succession of gowns by
Von Sternberg was born too early for the movies. The studio system constrained his fractious temperament; the formula picture stifled his urge to primp and polish. He battled with MGM, which offered him a lucrative contract after the success of his von Stroheimesque expressionist drama The Salvation Hunters , fell out with Chaplin, producer of the still-suppressed Woman of the Sea , and fought constantly with Paramount until Ernst Lubitsch, acting studio head, "liquidated" him for his intransigence; the later suppression of his last Paramount film, The Devil Is a Woman , in a political dispute with Spain merely served to increase von Sternberg's alienation.
For the rest of his career, von Sternberg wandered from studio to studio and country to country, always lacking the facilities he needed to achieve his best work. Even Korda's lavish I Claudius , dogged by disaster and finally terminated in a cost-cutting exercise, shows in its surviving footage only occasional flashes of Sternbergian brilliance. By World War II, he had already achieved his best work, though he lived for another 30 years.
Von Sternberg alarmed a studio establishment whose executives thought in terms of social and sexual stereotypes, formula plotting, and stock happy endings; their narrative ideal was a Saturday Evening Post novelette. No storyteller, von Sternberg derided plot; "the best source for a film is an anecdote," he said. From a single coincidence and a handful of characters, edifices of visual poetry could be constructed. His films leap years in the telling to follow a moral decline or growth of an obsession.
The most important film of von Sternberg's life was one he never made. After the humiliation of the war years, when he produced only the propaganda short The Town , and the nadir of his career, as closeup advisor to King Vidor on Duel in the Sun , he wrote The Seven Bad Years , a script that would, he said, "demonstrate the adult insistence to follow the pattern inflicted on a child in its first seven helpless years, from which a man could extricate himself were he to realize that an irresponsible child was leading him into trouble." He was never to make this work of self-analysis, nor any film which reflected a mature understanding of his contradictory personality.
Von Sternberg's theories of cinema were not especially profound, deriving largely from the work of Reinhardt, but they represented a quantum jump in an industry where questions of lighting and design were dealt with by experts who jealously guarded this prerogative. In planning his films not around dialogue but around the performers' "dramatic encounter with light," in insisting that the "dead space" between the camera and subject be filled and enlivened, and above all in seeing every story in terms of "spiritual power" rather than star quality, he established a concept of personal cinema which presaged the politique des auteurs and the Movie Brat generation.
In retrospect, von Sternberg's contentious personality—manifested in the self-conscious affecting of uniforms and costumes on the set and an epigrammatic style of communicating with performers that drove many of them to frenzy—all reveal themselves as reactions against the banality of his chosen profession. von Sternberg was asked late in life if he had a hobby. "Yes. Chinese philately." Why that? "I wanted," he replied in the familiar weary, uninflected voice, "a subject I could not exhaust."
Josef
von Sternberg - Österreichisches Filmmuseum biography
Biography for Josef von Sternberg - Turner Classic Movies
All-Movie Guide Hal Erickson
Josef von
Sternberg • Senses of Cinema Tad
Gallagher from Senses of Cinema,
March 13, 2002
Josef von Sternberg: Information from Answers.com biography
Josef von Sternberg (Austrian-American director) -- Encyclopedia ... biography
Josef von Sternberg Filmography - Film Directors biography
The Films of Josef von Sternberg - by Michael E. Grost
Josef von Sternberg - Mubi profile
Josef von Sternberg - NNDB.com filmography
Josef von Sternberg - Director by Film Rank - Films101 Film ranking
Jo,
where are you? The silent presence: He made her, she made ... David Thompson from The Independent,
The Patriot • Senses of
Cinema Michael Koller, June
13, 2001
Mother Russia! Josef von Sternberg's Scarlet Empress on Criterion DVD Gary Morris, July 1, 2001, also seen here: Images (Gary Morris) review
Scarlet Empress: DVD Review –
Offscreen Donato Totaro,
October 2001
Movies | Distilling emotion - Boston Phoenix The Privileged Worlds of Josef von Sternberg, by Chris Fujiwara, May 7 – 13, 2004, also seen here: Boston Phoenix Article (2004)
Dishonored • Senses of
Cinema Tamarqa Tracz, April
15, 2005
Derek Malcolm's Century of Films: The Scarlet Empress The Guardian, May 25, 2006
The Film Sufi:
Josef von Sternberg August 10, 2008
Josef von
Sternberg: Eros and Abstraction - BAM/PFA - Film Programs Juliet Clark,
Josef von Sternberg: the man who made Marlene sparkle - Telegraph Tim Robey from The Telegraph, December 9, 2009
Early Josef von Sternberg (WEB EXCLUSIVE) - Cineaste Magazine David Sterritt from Cineaste, 2010
BFI | Sight &
Sound | Von Sternberg - six chapters in search of an auteur David Thomson from Sight and Sound, January 2010
Sternberg
Before Dietrich - Harvard Film Archive
Observations
on film art : Directors: von Sternberg - David Bordwell Kristin Thompson,
Josef von Sternberg's silent films, review : The New Yorker Richard Brody, August 30, 2010
BFI | Sight & Sound
| In the magic hour: 3 silent classics by Josef von ... Michael Atkinson from Sight and Sound, October 2010
Book
Review: Von Sternberg - WSJ.com The Unhappiest Man in
Essential
Reading: Dietrich, Sternberg and THE BLUE ANGEL ... Essential
The 100 Essential Directors Part 10: Josef Von Sternberg to Zhang ... Pop Matters, September 5, 2011
Shanghai Express •
Senses of Cinema Wheeler
Winston Dixon, February 7, 2012
The Last Command: Josef von Sternberg's Life ... - Senses of Cinema Shari Kizirian, February 7, 2012
The
Docks of New York • Senses of Cinema William “Bill” Blick, March 18,
2012
Beyond Camp or the Politics of Persona: Josef von Sternberg's The ... Beyond Camp or the Politics of Persona: Josef von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress by Peter H. Kemp from Senses of Cinema, March 18, 2012
Josef von Sternberg | Cinematheque University of Wisconsin retrospective, Spring 2012
The
Blue Angel (Josef Von Sternberg, 1930) | Forrest In Focus: Critical ... Forrest Cardamenis from Forrest in Focus, August 5, 2012
Bright
Sights: Recent DVDs: The Blue Angel; The Rolling Stones ... Gordon Thomas from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 31, 2013
Cinéastes de notre temps: Josef von Sternberg - From Silence ... October 2013
Weekly
Top Five: The best of Josef von Sternberg | Bleader Drew Hunt from the Chicago Reader, September 7, 2014
Josef von Sternberg: Morocco and Blonde Venus - Senses of Cinema John Flaus, October 6, 2014
The
Front Row: Marlene Dietrich in “Dishonored” | The New Yorker May 30, 2017
Images for josef von sternberg
Josef Von Sternberg (1894 - 1969) - Find A Grave Memorial
Josef von Sternberg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
UNDERWORLD B 88
Heavily influenced by German Expressionism, using strong contrasts
between darkness and light, von Sternberg often transcended his contemporaries
in terms of sheer visual style, creating a visual lushness that figures most
prominently in establishing atmospheric mood, where nearly all his films use
mist, fog, and contrasts between shadows and light to set the tone for his
films, where he was such a master of lighting that he was the only
director of his day to earn membership in the American Society of
Cinematographers. Though born in Vienna to humble
origins, von Sternberg lived most of his childhood in New York City raised by
his Jewish Orthodox father Moses, a former soldier in the
Austrian-Hungarian army. After dropping
out of high school, having difficulty with the English language, he set out
determined to learn on his own, finding work repairing sprocket holes and
cleaning movie prints at the World Film Company in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where
he rose to chief assistant to the director general. He went on to help make training films for
the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War I before earning his first credit
as an assistant director on THE MYSTERY OF THE YELLOW RIBBON (1919), directed
by Emile Chautard. In 1923, he moved to
Hollywood and was the assistant director on the British film BY DIVINE RIGHT
(1923), where he picked up the aristocratic title of “von” in the listed
credits at the suggestion of actor Elliott Dexter, before gaining the notice of
studio executives with the surprise success of his independently produced directorial
debut in THE SALVATION HUNTERS (1925), a starkly poetic tale of poverty and
depression that he made in three weeks for $4900, where the grim naturalism was
hissed at during its premiere before later being hailed as a masterpiece by
Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin, becoming a successful
picture widely considered to be America’s first true independent film. MGM refused to release his next picture, THE
EXQUISITE SINNER (1925), which was eventually lost, while his third film THE SEA
GULL (1926) was destroyed by producer Chaplin as a tax write-off. Finding himself an assistant director at
Paramount, he was called in to help fix Frank Lloyd’s CHILDREN OF DIVORCE
(1927), reshooting about half the film in three days, mostly at night when the
actors were available, after which he was allowed to make UNDERWORLD, with a
script written by Ben Hecht. Paramount
then shelved the film, with Hecht asking to have his name removed from the
credits, before a New York theater needed a last minute movie to screen, and
the film created an instant sensation, exclusively by word of mouth, where the
theater had to stay open all night showing it.
Often credited as the first
Von Sternberg brought a distinctly European style to American studios,
blending German Expressionism with elaborately exotic production design,
creating sensuous images with a frank eroticism, becoming something of a visual
poet with an obsession for lighting and detail, known for the slow pace
of his films, with their long dissolves and strange narrative twists, an
aesthetic that evolved from the Silent era.
He believed that the story didn’t matter, but trusted instead the
artificial aspects of cinema, preferring illusion to reality, where he wanted
control over all the elements, not just the photography and editing, but every
inflection and movement of the actors, working closely with costume designers
and set designers, providing his own sketches before hearing their ideas, never
designing sets, but introducing props to “improve” them, where the peak of his
creativity are his films from 1930 – 1935.
In a book review of John Baxter’s Von
Sternberg, Book
Review: Von Sternberg - WSJ.com, Scott Eyman from The Wall Street Journal describes von Sternberg:
He was a man who kept large, aggressive dogs, who avoided direct eye contact, who presented his opinions as incontrovertible fact and who treated everyone with unconcealed disdain or contempt. On the set, he had a blackboard; if crew members or actors wanted to talk to him, they had to write their names on the blackboard, and he’d schedule an appointment. “The only way to succeed,” he once said, “is to make people hate you. That way they remember you.”
UNDERWORLD generated a series of Prohibition-era
Evelyn Brent’s Feathers is an interesting prelude to the later iconic works with Marlene Dietrich, who made seven films with von Sternberg, including some of the most dazzling films of the era, where Dietrich was his greatest model, someone he dressed in sequins and feathers and stunning evening gowns, even a tuxedo, where in close up, with the right lighting, he could create an image of ravishing beauty. Brent, by contrast, is more subdued and the film more conventional, especially at the outset, where it takes awhile for the young director to find his patented style, yet Feathers likes what she sees in her cleaned-up project to remake Wensel into a well-dressed gentleman, a lawyer when he’s not drunk, where his calm reserve offers a contrast to the demented laughter heard from Weed, yet in a typical von Sternberg theme, both feel guilty for succumbing to their forbidden sexual desires. We can catch a whiff of Dietrich’s masculine tone when a bored Feathers tells Wensel, “C’mon, let’s drift.” The film is pre-Code and has its share of erotically charged come-ons, but perhaps the central sequence of the film is an all-night gangster’s ball, where one night a year all the criminals declare a truce from one another and have a rollicking, alcohol-driven affair, where they all buy votes to have their girls named Queen of the Ball. It’s a rather grotesque affair, edited with a montage of close ups showing inebriated individuals, each uglier than the last, where emotional and physical violence erupt amid a storm of confetti and streamers. Feathers makes eyes for Wensel under the careful watch of Weed, but the one that gets riled up is Weed’s arch enemy Buck Mulligan (Fred Kohler). Leave it to Ben Hecht to name a character after the then-banned book Ulysses. Mulligan makes his move on Feathers once Weed is collapsed drunk, but he’s awakened in time to catch him in the act of raping Feathers, shooting him on the spot. Using an economy of means, von Sternberg shows the arrest, sentencing, and jailing of Weed in just a few short scenes, but he escapes before his execution, vowing to get his revenge, where all he’s heard about while sitting in jail is how Feathers and Rolls Royce have become an item. The finale, however, the notorious chase sequence, has an interesting existential tone about it which is unlike most gangster dramas. Nonetheless, this hard-boiled gangster drama is an early indication of themes with a visual stylization that would ultimately become film noir.
Chicago Reader Capsule Review Dave Kehr
The first full-fledged gangster movie and still an effective mood piece, this 1927 milestone was directed by the master of delirious melodrama, Josef von Sternberg. George Bancroft is the hard-boiled hero, granted tragic status in his final sacrifice. Ben Hecht wrote the script, and many of the same ideas turn up, in a very different moral context, in his screenplay for Howard Hawks's 1932 masterpiece, Scarface.
Josef von Sternberg's silent films, review : The New Yorker Richard Brody, August 30, 2010
“Underworld,” from 1927, may have launched the great round of Prohibition-era gangster films, but Sternberg’s approach to the genre has little to do with the ins and outs of organized crime. Rather, he presents a story of confidence and betrayal, in which the brazenly violent robber Bull Weed (George Bancroft), a sanguine hunk of meat with a sentimental streak, pulls a floundering drunk, a former attorney he nicknames Rolls Royce (Clive Brook), off the sidewalk, gets him cleaned up and dried out, and unwittingly turns him into a suave and witty heartthrob who appeals to the boss’s moll, Feathers (Evelyn Brent). Sternberg was already a master of an ornamental bathos—brought out in shadows and objects serving to screen the action—that suggests a reticent distance from his characters. A poet of solitude and shame, he framed the story’s rounds of recriminations and repentance with the striking visual correlate of starkly frontal shots, as if expressing a shy and solitary man’s revulsion at human contact.
Time Out Capsule Review Tony Rayns
Ex-reporter Ben Hecht drafted the script for Underworld,
and clearly saw the project as a reflection of his experiences on the crime
beat. Sternberg had no interest in
CINE-FILE: Cine-List -
Cine-File.info Jamie Stroble
Josef von Sternberg, like his contemporary
Yasujiro Ozu, appears inextricably linked in the mind of modern film culture to
his iconic leading actress; Sternberg with Marlene Dietrich in works such as
THE BLUE ANGEL and THE SCARLET EMPRESS, and Ozu with Setsuko Hara in the Noriko
trilogy. As with Ozu though, the viewer would be remiss not to reckon with
Sternberg's silent work. Far more than just a dress rehearsal for the main
event, Sternberg's 1927 film UNDERWORLD arrives complete, a silent classic at
once hilarious and brutal. The film features Evelyn Brent, Clive Brook, and
George Bancroft, who, amid more notable roles, starred in the original THE WOLF
OF WALL STREET in 1929, the plot of which involved various characters ruining
each other via the stock market—still a wildly entertaining conceit in January
of that year. Bancroft portrays Bull Weed, a perpetually cackling mobster who's
assumed the role of local Robin Hood—if Robin Hood were more loathsome and
contemptuous of the poor. He extends a helping hand to lawyer-cum-wino, Rolls
Royce (Brook), after he spots Weed robbing a bank late one night. With Weed's
help Rolls Royce sobers up and the two form an uncertain friendship.
Complications arise when Rolls Royce falls for Weed's lover, Feathers (Brent),
and Weed clashes with another local mobster, Buck Mulligan. These, along with
several unseen characters (Blossom
Early
Josef von Sternberg (Web Exclusive) — Cineaste Magazine David Sterritt, 2010
Josef von Sternberg rarely took a writing credit on his films, but an amusing way to assess his unique artistry is to compare his 1927 masterpiece Underworld with “Underworld: An Original Story of Chicago,” the Ben Hecht yarn that inspired it. Both versions revolve around gangster Bull Weed, who breaks out of prison just before he’s due to be hanged. Here he is in Hecht’s version, holed up in a rented room and realizing that his mug is staring out from every newspaper in the city:
Terror and impotence filled the Killer. The world was armed with his picture. His picture hung before the eyes of millions. There was no hiding. Anyone who spied him for an instant—there was no hiding from these photographs turned on him now like a thousand searchlights.
Carried away by the horrible resemblance he bore these pictures Bull Weed sprang to his feet and, seizing the mirror, smashed it into fragments. And for the moment he felt as if he had obliterated himself.
When he sat down again at his table he saw his reflection in the tiny windowpane, in the piece of tin behind the bed.
His lips tightened…
Now read the opening intertitle of the film: “A great city in the dead of
night…streets lonely, moon-flooded…buildings empty as the cliff-dwellings of a
forgotten age.” Von Sternberg’s transformation of boiler-plate pulp fiction
into stylish cinematic art begins with those evocative words, continues through
a host of finely tuned changes—a Hecht character called the Weasel becomes a
von Sternberg character called Rolls Royce, for instance—and persists until the
final scene, which replaces Hecht’s lurid dynamite blast (“They took Bull Weed
to the undertakers—what was left of him”) with a moment of bittersweet
redemption.
As critic Geoffrey O’Brien points out in a program essay for The Criterion
Collection’s new box set, 3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg, the
director was almost dismissive of Underworld in his 1965 autobiography, Fun
in a Chinese Laundry, calling it an “experiment in photographic
violence and montage” laced with “many an incident to placate the public, not
ignoring the moss-covered themes of love and sacrifice.” Mossy or not, Underworld became
an unexpected blockbuster, running literally around the clock in New York, and
helping to define the gangster-film genre by interweaving the criminal exploits
of Bull (George Bancroft) with his friendship for the reformed drunk Rolls
Royce (Clive Brook), his possessive love of a beautiful woman called Feathers
(Evelyn Brent), and the domineering jealousy that gives way to forgiveness in
the end.
Underworld seems thrillingly modern even today, as do the other two features—The Last Command and The Docks of New York, both released in 1928—in this excellent three-DVD set, which presents them in first-rate transfers accompanied by two different music scores apiece. Among numerous other extras, the package includes a reprint of the “Underworld” story and a video essay on the Underworld film by scholar Janet Bergstrom, who notes that Hecht so loathed the alleged sentimentality of von Sternberg’s ending (one of many alternatives seriously considered by the director) that he tried to have his name removed from the picture. This was a brave gesture for a young writer with no other movie credits to his name, but his request was ignored, and one surmises he forgave the slight when Underworld won him an Oscar for best original story at the first Academy Awards ceremony in 1927.
Hecht went on to become a legendary screenwriter, of course, and fun though it is to scoff at this particular story, it contains a minor ingredient that subtly contributes to the film’s sophisticated modernism. As a well-read intellectual and insatiable collector of modern art, von Sternberg surely appreciated the fact that Bull’s bête noire in the story is one Buck Mulligan (played by Fred Kohler in the film), named after a secondary character in James Joyce’s epochal Ulysses, which had been published in book form just five years before Underworld reached the screen. I don’t take this as a secret clue to hidden meanings in the film, much less the story it’s based on, but it points in intriguing directions—suggesting, for instance, that the film’s boisterous underworld ball (not present in Hecht’s yarn) is an oblique equivalent of Joyce’s bravura Nighttown sequence, and underscoring the fascination with processes of consciousness shared by Joyce and von Sternberg, who described his debut film, a 1925 succès d’estime called The Salvation Hunters, as an attempt at photographing thought. The wish to accomplish that rare feat steadily enriches the exquisite play with light, shadow, and décor for which von Sternberg’s films are famous, Underworld emphatically included.
The Last Command was the first of two films von Sternberg made with Emil Jannings, who had built his reputation with German pictures such as Ernst Lubitsch’s Madame DuBarry (1919) and F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924) before coming to Hollywood, earning the first-ever Academy Award for best actor with The Last Command in 1929, and returning to Germany with von Sternberg for The Blue Angel (1930), the director’s second talkie and first picture with Marlene Dietrich, who rode it to international superstardom. The Last Command stars Jannings as a former Russian general and nobleman named Dolgorucki, now eking out his living as a tenth-rate Hollywood extra with a nervous twitch brought on by some “terrible shock” he suffered earlier in life. His mug shot comes to the attention of a powerful director named Lev Andreyev (William Powell) who’s assembling the cast for a movie about Russia, and the old thespian lands a part. As he gets ready to play his scene, a long flashback reveals the power he enjoyed in Russia, his infatuation with dazzling Natalie Dabrova (Evelyn Brent again), who is secretly “the most dangerous revolutionist” in the land, and the devastation he suffered when she seemingly betrayed him to his enemies. Along the way we realize that Andreyev was formerly the insurrectionist who brought about the general’s downfall.
In an essay for the Criterion box set, film scholar Anton Kaes makes a case for The Last Command as an exploration of “the magic and mystery—and perils—of double identities inherent in the very nature of film acting.” This is an insightful remark, but for me the movie’s biggest pleasures are more strictly visual, as when Dolgorucki sees Natalie aiming a gun at him in a stunning mirror shot, or when (as critic Tag Gallagher observes in an otherwise weak video essay) von Sternberg mischievously inserts Stalin and Trotsky lookalikes into a meeting of Russian revolutionaries. The final scene is the most powerful of all, with Dolgorucki playing his little part on a Hollywood stage that von Sternberg presents in stylized, almost abstract terms—a movie set of the mind, swarming with phantom revolutionists from the old man’s hallucinating brain. For me The Last Command is the least brilliant of the films in this box set, largely because von Sternberg overstresses Jannings’s suffering-soul shtick almost as heavily as Murnau does in The Last Laugh, and also because the very end (when Andreyev abruptly decides the dying Dolgorucki is “a great man”) seems like the worst kind of tacked-on Hollywood uplift. The film has many beauties, though, and is a key work of von Sternberg’s early career.
By contrast, The Docks of New York strikes me as a nearly perfect work of art. George Bancroft plays Bill Roberts, a shipboard stoker who saves a woman named Mae (the incomparably cute Betty Compson) from drowning in a suicide attempt, falls in love with her, marries her on a drunken whim, and heads back to sea the next morning, leaving only a few dollars and a bitter memory for his bride—until the thought of her tears and the lure of her smile make him waver in his heartlessness and reconsider the prospect of a landlubber’s life. The vividly etched secondary characters include Bill’s hardboiled boss, Andy (Mitchell Lewis), the boss’s equally hardboiled wife, Lou (Olga Baclanova, billed by last name only), and a preacher called Hymn Book Harry (Gustav von Seyffertitz), who reluctantly performs the wedding at the midpoint of the film.
The story is superbly crafted as a whole and in each of its parts; especially arresting are scenes that build to the brink of melodramatic action that then amazes you by nothappening, instead letting the story glide to its next destination with restraint and assurance. And all the while von Sternberg works the visual wonders that were already his trademark, draping the set in fog and fishing nets that are at once utterly mundane and signifiers of a higher, visionary truth that reaches miraculously toward the characters despite the drabness of their lives and the squalidness of their surroundings. Even by the lofty standards of silent cinema’s greatest period, The Docks of New York is a towering work.
Presenting silent movies with multiple scores to choose from is a growing trend among DVD distributors, and it’s a welcome one, allowing for divergent interpretations by different composers and inviting viewers to select favorites for themselves. Criterion plays it safe in the von Sternberg set, generally opting for time-tested approaches. All three films have orchestral scores by Robert Israel composed for this release, blending Israel’s own themes with familiar Twenties tunes and other appropriate materials. There are times when Israel comes close to the dubious tactic known as mickey-mousing, imitating the action of Underworld with percussive stingers when Bull shoves Rolls and shoots Buck, for instance, and spinning a gracefully descending line when one of Feathers’s feathers floats down a staircase; and speaking of Feathers, her moony scenes with Rolls call up a schmaltzy love theme that Hecht would have really hated. But these are minor letdowns in generally first-rate scores that generate excitement and enhance moods just as they should.
Underworld and The Last Command also have modernist scores by the three-member Alloy Orchestra, sounding more symphonic than they sometimes do but playing up a storm on their usual assortment of electronic instruments, conventional instruments, and things that aren’t instruments at all (although they downplay what they call “junk,” perhaps seeking von Sternbergian hauteur on this occasion). These sounds have nothing to do with the Twenties, but they’re irresistible all the same. The one score in the set that bothers me a bit is the one by pianist Donald Sosin and singer Joanna Seaton for The Docks of New York. While it’s good to have an old-fashioned piano accompaniment in the mix, the lyrics of Seaton’s vocals intrude on the delicately balanced texture of the visuals. They’re pleasing in their own right, though, and Sosin’s melodies are fine, if a tad corny at times.
Other supplements include an interview with von Sternberg produced by Swedish television in 1968 and booklet essays by Luc Sante and the composers of the scores. Plus an excerpt from Fun in a Chinese Laundry focusing on von Sternberg’s fraught relationship with Jannings, all from von Sternberg’s perspective, of course. As a director he was as difficult as they come, demanding retakes and fussing over décor until his casts and crews were fuming. But in the Twenties and Thirties, before his career began its irreversible decline, the results of his perfectionism were astonishing. Criterion’s admirable package is a wonderful way to experience them.
Criterion Collection film essay [Geoffrey O'Brien] August 24, 2010
Underworld: Dreamland - From the Current - The Criterion Collection
Josef von Sternberg Tad Gallagher from Senses of Cinema, March 2002
Observations
on film art : Directors: von Sternberg - David Bordwell Kristin Thompson,
BFI | Sight & Sound | In the magic hour: 3 silent classics by Josef von ... Michael Atkinson from BFI Sight and Sound, October 2010
The Films of Josef von Sternberg [Michael E. Grost]
Josef von Sternberg | Underworld Douglas Messerli from International Cinema review
Underworld, 1927 | Silent Film Festival Megan Pugh
Silent Film Festival | Josef von Sternberg's Underworld | Film ... - Metro Richard von Busack
Book
Review: Von Sternberg - WSJ.com The Unhappiest Man in
Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Zachary Wyman]
Underworld | Film Review | Slant Magazine Fernando F. Croce
CineScene Review Chris Dashiell
Underworld (1927) - AMC Blogs Paul Brenner
Silents
Please: Shadows, Silence and Sternberg - Parallax View Sean Axmaker, Criterion, 3 Silent Classics,
August 26, 2010, also seen here: Three
Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg Read TCM's Home Video Review on this
film
The
Daily Notebook [Daniel Kasman] For The Icon, The Shadow, and The Glimmer Between: 3
Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg, by Daniel Kasman, August 23, 2010
3
Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Bill
Weber, Criterion,
3 Silent Classics
The
QNetwork [James Kendrick] Criterion, 3 Silent
Classics
DVD
Savant Glenn Erickson, Criterion, 3 Silent
Classics
DVDTalk.com
[Jamie S. Rich] Criterion, 3 Silent
Classics, also seen here: CriterionConfessions.com
3
Silent Classics By Josef Von Sternberg - AV Club film Scott
Tobias, Criterion, 3 Silent Classics
DVDs.
Josef von Sternberg and the Rest on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson, Criterion, 3 Silent Classics
Ozus' World Movie Reviews Dennis Schwartz
Crime and Gangster Films Tim Dirks from the Film Site
New York Times [Mordaunt Hall]
Underworld (1927 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE LAST COMMAND
USA (88 mi) 1928
The Last Command, directed by Josef von Sternberg and ... - Time Out Tony Rayns
The Last Command starts from a brilliant script idea: a Czarist general, defeated in the Russian revolution, finds himself down and out in Hollywood, working for peanuts as a bit-player in movies; he is spotted and hired by his former adversary, a Mayakovskian stage director turned Hollywood film-maker; and both men loved the same woman ten years earlier. (Goodrich's script was apparently from an original story by Sternberg, based on an incident told by Ernst Lubitsch to Lajos Biro...) Half the movie is an acid vision of the gap between success and the breadline in contemporary Hollywood, and the other half is a long flashback to revolutionary Russia, with the general seducing the woman Communist, imprisoning his rival, falling from power, and discovering abject humiliation. In other words, this is the first Sternberg masterpiece, the first of his glitteringly stylised rhapsodies of commitment and betrayal, expertly poised between satire and 'absurd' melodrama. The cast are fully equal to it; Jannings, in particular, turns the characteristic role of the general into an indelible portrait of arrogance, fervour and dementia. Even more incredible, the sheer sophistication of Sternberg's visuals makes nearly all current releases look old-fashioned.
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The breadth of Josef von Sternberg's satire is laid out in the passage at William Powell's office, where the elegant axis (perfect casting via a phantom from Czarist Russia with "no film experience") is complemented by sang-froid gagwork (the émigré filmmaker ponders a studio portrait, half a dozen lighters spring into the frame as he reaches idly for a cigarette). Emil Jannings is brought to the Hollywood breadlines, old and pitiful, his head quavering due to "a great shock" from the past; a lateral pan navigates him through the mob grabbing uniforms, beards and bayonets, he stares into a mirror to apply makeup for a role, and relives history. Imperial Russia, 1917: The tumultuous masses line up, Jannings parades with supercilious majesty, a grand duke swathed in furs and smoke. The Revolution draws near, Powell lies among the rebels disguised as a theater director, his leading lady (Evelyn Brent, "the most dangerous revolutionist in Russia") is invited for supper by the general. The etiquette of seduction (where some things "should always be done after caviar" -- Lajos Biró's scenario is lapidated from a rich Lubitsch anecdote) is one of glittering surfaces cultivated and torn asunder by Sternberg. Upheavals shake the nation, yet the central moment finds the heroine's mask cracked by emotion, a trembling hand before the assassination attempt in the boudoir and a poker face smeared with tears; when the Revolution explodes and the aristos are lined up against a wall and shot in a contorted mural, she switches from Mata Hari to Mother Russia with red flag in the wind, the only way to save her new love from the rabid mob. All grist to the mill of Hollywood, where orders are now barked by studio executives and the old man is fitted into his imperial uniform, the vengeful Powell mans the cameras. Enacting a battle charge in the studio is meant as the deposed general's ultimate degradation, but the stirred Jannings rises to the occasion, usurps the mise-en-scene from Powell and, taking a cue from Sternberg's art, fills it with passion and illusions. With Jack Raymond. In black and white.
The Last Command (1928) - TCM.com David Sterritt
Josef von Sternberg is
best remembered for his seven-film partnership with Marlene Dietrich, which
stretched from The Blue Angel in 1930 to The Devil Is a Woman in
1935. But the director's two-film collaboration with Emil Jannings was also
pivotal to the acclaim he enjoyed in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the only
period when his career really thrived. Sternberg's first picture with Jannings
was The Last Command (1928), and his success in working with the
temperamental star was what prompted the invitation to direct him again in The
Blue Angel for Germany's renowned UFA studio. The latter film's lasting
fame has overshadowed Sternberg's earlier achievements, but his Hollywood films
of the silent era--most notably The Last Command, Underworld
(1927), and The Docks of New York (1928) - are much too entertaining to
be forgotten.
The Last Command is distinguished on many counts. Jannings's performance
in it (and in another picture, Victor Fleming's 1927 drama The Way of All
Flesh) brought him the very first Academy Award for Best Actor - although
the canine star Rin Tin Tin received more votes for the honor, only to be
disqualified by Academy officials (who valued dignity over arithmetic) for not
being human. The Last Command also earned screenwriter Lajos Biró the
Academy Award for Best Original Story. Prizes aside, The Last Command is
a splendid instance of Hollywood dealing directly with its own nature and
practices, and dealing indirectly with Old World cultural legacies that helped
shape the American film industry.
Jannings plays Sergius Alexander, a former Russian aristocrat whose glory days
came crashing down in 1917 along with the czarist government. After a narrow
escape from the Bolsheviks he made his way to America and ended up in Los
Angeles, where he scrapes by as a studio extra, making $7.50 a day when he's
working. The story begins when Russian-American movie director Lev Andreyev
(William Powell, sophisticated as always) sees Sergius's photo in a casting
file and chooses the melancholy old man to play a Russian general in a
historical drama he's about to shoot.
But more is going on than meets the eye. In the kind of uproarious coincidence
you only find in movies, Lev has recognized Sergius from bygone times. Back in
the day, it turns out, Lev was a young firebrand in the revolutionary struggle
and Sergius was an imperial bully who took pleasure in toying with his foes,
one of whom was Lev, who's still angry after all these years. Preparing for his
role in the dressing room, Sergius gazes into a makeup mirror and sees himself
in a czarist getup like the one he used to wear. At this point another actor
complains about a nervous tic Sergius has, and Sergius explains that the twitch
- a constant shaking of the head -is the result of an awful shock he once
experienced.
A long flashback then ensues. We see Sergius flaunting his imperial power,
beating and jailing the revolutionary Lev, and falling in love with Lev's
beautiful companion, Natalie Dabrova (Evelyn Brent), who's known to insiders as
"the most dangerous revolutionist" of them all. Natalie reciprocates
Sergius's love, and when Bolsheviks attack him during a train journey she helps
him get away. But she dies in a crash moments later, leaving him lost and alone
in a frozen, hostile land. And now we return to modern-day Hollywood, where Lev
is maneuvering Sergius into playing a bogus version of his former self, thus
taking revenge for the indignities he suffered at the arrogant general's hands.
In the powerful conclusion of The Last Command, feeble old Sergius
performs his bit part in Lev's movie, rallying disheartened troops and
responding to an upstart's defiant taunt - "You've given your last
command!" - with the same furious blow he inflicted on Lev so many years
ago. And then he succumbs completely to madness; forgetting that he's only
acting in a film, he hallucinates a fierce battle with antagonists on every
side. This extraordinary scene takes place on a studio soundstage that
Sternberg endows with a stylized, almost abstract design; it's less an actual
place than a movie set of the mind, thronged with phantom revolutionaries from
the old actor's delirious brain. In an abrupt (and unconvincing) turnaround
when old Sergius breathes his last, Lev finally softens to the old man,
declaring that he was not merely a great actor but "a great man" as
well.
According to a 1929 newspaper report, the story of The Last Command was
inspired by an encounter between filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch, who had directed
Jannings in several pictures going back to 1917, and an erstwhile Russian
general he had known years earlier, now hiring himself out as a movie extra for
$7.50 a day. The Last Command may itself have influenced Billy Wilder's
classic Sunset Blvd. (1950), in which Erich von Stroheim-whose name
encouraged the young Josef Sternberg to add a "von" to his moniker in
the middle 1920s-plays a once-celebrated filmmaker reduced to serving as butler
and gofer for a faded Hollywood star.
Jannings was a towering star when he teamed with Sternberg - even today his
performances for F.W. Murnau in The Last Laugh (1924) and Faust
(1926) are celebrated and studied everywhere - and although the actor was
difficult to handle, Sternberg generally brought out his most expressive
qualities. His most fully realized scenes as Sergius almost reach the heights
he scaled as the love-wracked professor of The Blue Angel, although in
both pictures he pours on a bit too much suffering-soul sauce for my taste.
Soon after his Sternberg films, Jannings's career was undermined in Hollywood
by the arrival of talkies, which didn't take kindly to his heavy German accent;
and back in Germany he acted prominently in Nazi propaganda films, which doomed
his prospects in the postwar years. Sternberg's career declined for different
reasons, including the fact that he was too obsessive an artist to flourish in
Tinseltown over the long haul. In all his finest films, he concerned himself
less with niceties of acting than with nuances of light, shadow, and décor, and
The Last Command deserves high praise in those departments, especially
during its climax on Sergius's delusional battlefield. Look beyond the film's
anguish and occasional bathos, moreover, and you'll see a sharp-eyed satire of
Hollywood politics, crafted by a director whose creative personality contained
more than a trace of mischief.
The Last Command: Illusions and
Delusions Criterion essay by Anton
Kaes, August 24, 2010
Mit
Out Sound, Mit Out Solution Criterion essay by Guy Maddin, August 13, 2010
The Last Command
(1928) - The Criterion Collection
Early Josef von Sternberg (WEB EXCLUSIVE) - Cineaste Magazine David Sterritt from Cineaste, 2010
The Last Command: Josef von Sternberg's Life ... - Senses of Cinema Shari Kizirian, February 7, 2012
BFI | Sight
& Sound | In the magic hour: 3 silent classics by Josef von ... Michael Atkinson from Sight and Sound, December 20, 2011
The
Films of Josef von Sternberg [Michael E. Grost]
The
Last Command (1928) A Silent Film Review – Movies Silently Fritzi Kramer
Ferdy
on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Wellington
Film Society - THE LAST COMMAND
The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1927-1928 (Erik Beck)
Silents
Please: Shadows, Silence and Sternberg - Parallax View Sean Axmaker, Criterion, 3 Silent Classics,
August 26, 2010, also seen here: Three
Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg Read TCM's Home Video Review on this
film
The
Daily Notebook [Daniel Kasman] For The Icon, The Shadow, and The Glimmer Between: 3
Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg, by Daniel Kasman, August 23, 2010
3
Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Bill
Weber, Criterion,
3 Silent Classics
The
QNetwork [James Kendrick] Criterion, 3 Silent
Classics
DVD
Savant Glenn Erickson, Criterion, 3 Silent
Classics
DVDTalk.com
[Jamie S. Rich] Criterion, 3 Silent
Classics, also seen here: CriterionConfessions.com
3
Silent Classics By Josef Von Sternberg - AV Club film Scott
Tobias, Criterion, 3 Silent Classics
DVDs.
Josef von Sternberg and the Rest on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson, Criterion, 3 Silent Classics
Oscarvations D.W. Gardner
Jay's Movie Blog Jason Seaver
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
New York Times [Mordaunt Hall]
THE DOCKS OF NEW YORK
USA (76 mi)
1928
The
Docks of New York | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
This masterpiece by Josef von Sternberg belongs to the last years of silent cinema (1928), the period in which the form, facing extinction, achieved perfection. There's no waste, no excess, in Sternberg's production: the melodramatic plot (a ship's stoker rescues a girl from suicide, marries her, and takes the rap for a minor crime she is accused of) is so familiar and so desultorily presented that it's barely perceptible, and the acting is minimal, confined to ritual gestures endlessly repeated. Sternberg suppresses direct emotional appeal to concentrate on something infinitely fine: a series of minute, discrete moral discoveries and philosophical realignments among his characters. With George Bancroft, Betty Compson, and Olga Baclanova.
The
Docks of New York at Film Forum | Village Voice Nick
Pinkerton, March 16, 2010
Under the direction of Jo von Sternberg, a Jamaica High School dropout and rising star at Paramount, Hans Dreier built a gorgeous ramshackle East River waterfront to be hidden in studio fog. It’s the setting for a tale of New York that marries true crimer Herbert Asbury’s lowlife mythology with the gloomy romance of Dostoevsky’s White Nights, transporting the audience of 1928—the zenith of silent filmmaking—to a roughneck yesteryear. George Bancroft plays an I-can-lick-any-sonofabitch-in-the-house steamboat stoker emerged from his stygian belowdecks for a one-night shore leave. While swaggering over to his local, the Sandbar, he stops, drags from his cigarette, and jumps into the brine after a foundering suicide. The oblique visual shorthand of the jump—a hesitant reflection, a ripple, some splash—shows von Sternberg’s mastery; the bit with the cigarette shows Bancroft’s perfect embodiment of lumbering deliberation—once he starts to move, he’s unstoppable. His catch turns out to be Betty Compson’s broken-down good-time girl; her suppliant loveliness, in graceful close-ups, becomes the film’s emotional mooring while they pass the night together in the riotous Sandbar, where the gliding camera is the only thing that’s not overturned. In a way lost to contemporary social-work movies, von Sternberg’s unsentimental poetic realism ennobles his lower-class protagonists through beauty. Classic.
MoMA
| Josef von Sternberg's The Docks of New York Charles Silver, curator of Film Department at
MOMA
Josef von Sternberg (1894–1969) divided his childhood between his native Vienna and Queens, New York. Before going to Hollywood in the mid-1920s, he learned the rudiments of filmmaking at the studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and in the Army Signal Corps during the Great War. His first film, The Salvation Hunters (1925), was amazingly accomplished, especially considering its miniscule budget. It was, in essence, an independent film, an almost unique specimen in its time. Only the good fortune of capturing the eyes of Douglas Fairbanks and Charles Chaplin brought Sternberg out of obscurity and to the attention of the studios. Of his nine silent films, only four survive. These other works (Underworld, The Last Command, and The Docks of New York) are so good that one must conclude that Sternberg’s career, more than that of any other director, suffers from the blight on film history we have come think of as “lost-film syndrome.” In a pattern set by The Salvation Hunters, his films deal with complex and painful romantic relationships shot in a stylized manner. While Erich von Stroheim made a false claim to realism, Sternberg was often apologetic for having too closely approximated reality. By the end of his first decade as a director (far and away his most productive period), Sternberg could certainly be considered the cinema’s greatest Romantic artist, rivaled only later by Max Ophuls.
As a studio director, he had to pay some lip service to genre. Underworld (1927) was the first gangster movie, and it was an enormous commercial success (even without the audible machine guns and police sirens that Warner Brothers would soon bring to the genre). The Last Command (1928) was an inside-Hollywood film, depicting a former Czarist Russian general, now a Hollywood extra, brought out of obscurity to command a faux army before the cameras, with fatal consequences. (It was partially for this film that Emil Jannings won the first male acting Oscar, while Sternberg’s film shared the “best picture” award with William Wellman’s Wings.)
The Docks of New York (1928) is Sternberg’s first surviving full-scale collaboration with screenwriter Jules Furthman (1888–1960). (Furthman had adapted Underworld and cowritten the now lost The Dragnet with his brother, Charles.) The writer went on to collaborate on six more of Sternberg’s (mostly) finest films, while also beginning a similarly symbiotic relationship with Howard Hawks. Although I would certainly argue for the primacy of the director over the writer, there are instances where the writer is so intrinsically in synch with the director’s vision that their mutual contributions cannot be easily distinguished. It should be said, too, that Furthman’s work with other directors did not measure up to his films with these two giants.
The Docks of New York is probably the last genuinely great silent film made in Hollywood (save for Chaplin’s against-the-grain masterpieces of the 1930s). It largely established the themes and style (camera movement, lyrical lighting effects, etc.) that, I believe, helped to make Sternberg the most important American director of the early sound period. Betty Compson’s performance anticipates in manner and gesture that of Marlene Dietrich in her films under Sternberg’s direction. The sound films, of course, are better able to provide Dietrich and Sternberg with emotional equipoise through the actress’ sophisticated mastery of ironic ambiguity in dealing with her gentlemen, even though the films rely on relatively sparse, often clipped, dialogue. The result is a combination of deeply felt emotional maturity and raw passion not previously seen on the American screen.
The Docks of New York: On the Waterfront
Criterion essay by Luc Sante, August 24, 2010
Mit
Out Sound, Mit Out Solution Criterion essay by Guy Maddin, August 13, 2010
The
Docks of New York (1928) - The Criterion Collection
The
Film Sufi: "The Docks of New York" - Josef von Sternberg (1928)
Early
Josef von Sternberg (Web Exclusive) — Cineaste Magazine David Sterritt, 2010
The
Docks of New York • Senses of Cinema William “Bill” Blick, March 18,
2012, also een here: "The Docks of New
York" by William Blick - CUNY Academic Works
BFI | Sight
& Sound | In the magic hour: 3 silent classics by Josef von ... Michael Atkinson from Sight and Sound, December 20, 2011
notcoming.com |
The Docks of New York Leo Goldsmith
The Docks
of New York | Silent Film Festival
Eddie Muller
Only
the Cinema: The Docks of New York Ed
Howard
Silent Volume Chris
Scott Edwards
Best
Adapted Screenplay: 1928-29 [Erik Beck]
Docks
of New York commentary - Silents Are Golden
"The
Incomparable Compson - A Tribute to Betty Compson" Tim Lussier from Silents Are Golden
Of
Love and Other Demons: 'The Docks of New York' (Josef von ... Justine A. Smith from Vague Visages
#41.
The Docks of New York (1928) – Thousand Movie Project Alex Sorondo, April 27, 2017
The
Docks of New York Review | CultureVulture
George Wu
Silents
Please: Shadows, Silence and Sternberg - Parallax View Sean Axmaker, Criterion, 3 Silent Classics, August
26, 2010, also seen here: Three
Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg Read TCM's Home Video Review on this
film
The
Daily Notebook [Daniel Kasman] For The Icon, The Shadow, and The Glimmer Between: 3
Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg, by Daniel Kasman, August 23, 2010
3
Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg | DVD Review | Slant Magazine Bill
Weber, Criterion,
3 Silent Classics
The
QNetwork [James Kendrick] Criterion, 3 Silent
Classics
DVD
Savant Glenn Erickson, Criterion, 3 Silent
Classics
DVDTalk.com
[Jamie S. Rich] Criterion, 3 Silent
Classics, also seen here: CriterionConfessions.com
3
Silent Classics By Josef Von Sternberg - AV Club film Scott
Tobias, Criterion, 3 Silent Classics
DVDs.
Josef von Sternberg and the Rest on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson, Criterion, 3 Silent Classics
CineScene.com Chris Dashiell
Josef
von Sternberg and The Docks of New York – Girls Do Film
The Docks of
New York (1928, Josef von Sternberg) – Brandon's ... Brandon’s Movie Memories
Time
and tide: Class struggle on the New York waterfront | Village Voice Toni
Schlesinger, February 17, 2004
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
The Docks
of New York - Silent Era : Home Video Reviews
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The
Docks of New York (1928) - Josef von Sternberg | Synopsis ... Hal
Erickson from All-Movie
The
Docks of New York | Variety
New
York Times also seen here: Movie
Review - - AN ENTERTAINING PICTURE.; "Docks of New York ...
The Docks
of New York - Wikipedia
THE BLUE ANGEL (Der Blaue
Engel)
Germany (100 mi)
1930 German and English language versions filmed simultaneously,
released in Germany first, April 1, 1930, released in America several weeks
“after” Morocco in December 1930
PopcornQ Robin Baker, British Film Institute
Although Dietrich protested that von Sternberg forced such a
nice German girl to behave so badly, her performance as the voluptuous,
insouciant diseuse, Lola-Lola, seems so disarmingly authentic that it's hard to
believe that she hadn't spent her life knocking back sekt in a smoke-filled
cabaret. But the film is permeated with authenticity. The wife of the Blue
Angel's owner is played by Rosa Valetti,
Cine-File Chicago: Tristan Johnson
Josef von Sternberg takes his share of liberties in this adaptation of a Heinrich Mann novel about the ruination of a redoubtable academic, but the most telling may be his rechristening the object of pitiful Professor Rath's obsession: Lola Lola, a name so nice, she bears it twice. Telling, because while THE BLUE ANGEL is largely carried on the staunch shoulders of Weimar cinema mainstay Emil Jannings, it is best remembered for the pulse-quickening breakthrough performance of Marlene Dietrich—a gal who was going places, you might say—and soon to become Sternberg's own obscure object of desire. The stripped-down story follows Rath from the classroom to a seedy cabaret, where on an ostensible mission to catch his students up to no good, he instead finds himself besotted with Dietrich's iconic chanteuse. One minor transgression later and his long-drawn tale of downfall and humiliation is already underway, though given the sensation the pliant figure of Lola is responsible for, one can empathize with the poor Professor. Sternberg and Dietrich were of course only getting started, and their later collaborations (two of which are right around the corner at Doc Films) would cement their partnership as one of the most lavish and fascinating in all cinema. THE BLUE ANGEL may lack the opulence of these later films, and it's similarly devoid of the scope of Sternberg's silent classics (especially his work with Jannings in THE LAST COMMAND), but arriving as it did at the dawn of the sound era, and chronicling a world-class director's first outing with his muse, it is very much a film at the crossroads, and the result is pretty damned essential.
Strictly
Film School Acquarello
The Blue Angel is a desperate, emotionally unrelenting
portrait of a man whose consuming love for a cold, manipulative woman leads to
moral descent and ruin. Dr. Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings), is a repressed,
middle-aged high school professor who decides to confront Lola Lola (Marlene
Dietrich), a cabaret singer, about her "bewitching" of his students.
He is captivated by the sensual, carefree Lola Lola, and continues to return to
the Blue Angel to be with her. Soon, he is the object of ridicule, and, in an
attempt to protect her honor, marries her. We next see Professor Rath several
years later, where unemployment and humiliation have taken their toll on the
once dignified teacher. He is disheveled and broken, hypocritically selling
provocative pictures of his wife to the cabaret patrons (an act he earlier
promised would never happen while he is with her). He is subjected to
increasingly degrading circumstances, culminating in a pathetic clown act in
front of his former colleagues and students. The Blue Angel is a
devastating film about the cruelty of love...and fate.
Josef von Sternberg's use of stark, hyperbolic imagery to symbolize moral
degradation is derived from the German expressionist cinema. Note the two
scenes where Professor Rath crows like a rooster: one, an attempt at humor, the
other, a cry of despair. Both scenes suggest his subservience and debasement at
the hands of the seductress. Most of the scenes occur at night and in cabarets,
emphasizing the dark, sordidness of his situation. From a historical perspective,
The Blue Angel was filmed during the
The Onion A.V. Club [Tasha Robinson]
No one in cinema
history has ever smoked a cigarette quite like Marlene Dietrich. Without a hint
of self-consciousness, she handles the process as if she's been puffing since
infancy, passing the cigarette through her fingers with uncommon fluidity and
blowing luxuriant curls of smoke that cloud the lights like a special effect.
While cigarettes didn't carry her performances, they were the first cue to her
otherworldly confidence and control, which she wields over her helpless suitors
like a hammer ready to drop. Director Josef von Sternberg—an Austrian émigré
who was already responsible for Docks Of New York, one of the silent
era's most technically sumptuous films—found his muse when he cast Dietrich in
1930's The Blue Angel, the first of eight memorable collaborations.
Newly restored and released to theaters in its original German cut, The Blue
Angel arrives on DVD in a superb two-disc set that includes both the German
and English-language versions, which were filmed simultaneously and run at
different lengths. Dietrich received second billing to German expressionist
icon Emil Jannings, but for all his raging, over-the-top bluster (an
unfortunate carry-over from the silents), she commands the screen with nothing
more dramatic than a well-timed cackle. An easy mark for the von
Sternberg-Dietrich juggernaut, Jannings plays a morally pious and ironfisted college
professor who scolds his students for carrying around bawdy postcards for
"Lola Lola," the featured songstress at a local nightclub. Eager to
catch the youngsters in the act, Jannings ducks into the club and finds himself
mesmerized by one of Dietrich's scandalous song-and-dance numbers. So begins
his fall from grace, as he woos Dietrich into marriage but relinquishes any
authority over her career or his own dignity, which is whittled away to the
nub. The Blue Angel follows his descent with accumulating speed,
building toward a wrenching conclusion. Although the story essentially revolves
around Jannings' character, von Sternberg seizes on Dietrich's gifts as often
as he can, but he wouldn't fully humanize her until the superior Morocco,
which he made later that year. Save for the exceptional songs, The Blue
Angel might have been more transfixing as a silent movie, which would have
elided Jannings' excesses and the frequent drop-offs in sound. But as
Dietrich's breakthrough and a key transition into the next phase of von
Sternberg's career, it's essential. Of the many special features on the DVD,
Dietrich devotees won't want to miss her hilarious original screen test, in
which she chastises the pianist for repeatedly botching her song. With typical
aplomb, she strolls behind him and hisses, "Don't screw up again or I'll
kick you."
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer)
Few film debuts are quite as memorable or important as that
of Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel.
As cabaret singer Lola Lola, Dietrich steams up the screen (and her co-star's
eyeglasses) with a wild and confident performance. Opposite her was the great
Emil Jannings, one of the most notable actors of his generation, appearing in
his first German sound picture.
Jannings stars as Prof. Immanuel Rath, a fastidious and straitlaced teacher of
English and literature to high school boys. When the boys are caught with some
naughty postcards of the singer Lola Lola (Dietrich), headlining at the Blue
Angel night club, the professor goes to investigate what his charges are up to.
After some initial discomfiture, Rath soon falls under the spell of Lola,
however, and has shortly fallen in love with her. Love with the wrong woman
proves deadly, however, for he quickly loses his position and descends into
poverty, degradation, humiliation and despair.
While Jannings turns in an unforgettable performance, even surpassing his great
turn in The Last Laugh,
Dietrich holds her own with him. Her brassy confidence sparkles against Rath's
martinet demeanor, hiding his raw marshmallow character. The supporting cast is
exceptional as well, most notably Kurt Gerron (who would later be killed at
Dietrich's voice has not yet become the smoky and dusky rasp that is most
familiar; her rather clear and belllike tones are a surprise to the novice
viewer of this film. She imbues the songs (including her signature tune, Falling
in Love Again, quoted above) with an earnest eroticism that does indeed
resemble a flame. Not particularly sexy physically, Dietrich is surrounded with
women ranging from heavy to obese in a needless attempt to artificially
heighten her appeal. Her costume changes through the picture are intriguing;
initially tawdry and cheaply sluttish, they develop more and more class as Rath
loses all of his, as if she were some sort of psychic vampire.
The production notes indicate that the original version of the film approved by
the censors ran 108 minutes, which means that seven minutes was cut somewhere
along the line. Presumably this footage no longer exists, but it would have
been nice to include a synopsis of what was deleted, since the shooting scripts
are extant.
Von Sternberg's picture is still an extremely powerful piece of filmmaking,
with the lead performances shining brightly as some of the great moments in
film. The descent of Rath cannot fail to chill, as the proud rooster crow of
his wedding becomes the strangled half-scream of his concluding sequences at
The Blue Angel. This picture points up better than any other the dangers of
self-delusion and projecting one's own thoughts onto a love object.
Marlene Dietrich and The
Blue Angel Unnatural Woman, by Chris Fujiwara
"Woman is natural, that is, abominable," wrote Baudelaire. Marlene Dietrich, who would have been 100 this year, refutes this maxim. Baudelaire opposed Woman to his masculine ideal, the dandy, who, he said, "should aspire to be sublime without interruption; he should live and sleep before a mirror." But Dietrich, one of the sublime creations of the 20th century, unites Woman with the dandy. She constructs herself before the mirror of the camera lens.
She didn’t do it alone. "Without you I am nothing," she once wrote in a telegram to director Josef von Sternberg, who chose her to play the female lead in The Blue Angel (at the Brattle this weekend, August 10 through 12), the 1930 film that won her a Paramount contract and made her an international star. She knew what he wanted to hear, but she would say the same thing to others when he wasn’t there. Sternberg shaped her nonchalance, made her time the reflections of her soul to a count in her head, and taught her what he knew about lighting, which was considerable.
In The Blue Angel, Emil Jannings,
Dietrich takes charge of the film from Lola’s first appearance on stage at the cabaret. Sizing up her audience, she holds her right hand flat against the side of her right buttock and her left hand on her hip — a posture both commanding (the left hand is judgmental, aloof) and relaxed (the right hand is sensual, forgiving, approachable). Her eyes as she raises them to stare past the camera are satisfied, only mildly curious.
Dietrich’s Lola is a chameleon: in her first 15 minutes on screen, she has three different changes of costume — the last in front of Rath, in her dressing room. She adjusts her stiff skirtflaps and hitches up her undergarments, a teasing exhibitionism that’s her way of showing affection. She lets him hold her little make-up palette for her. She treats him like a little boy, combing his hair back when it’s messed. Her simplicity, as if she were just doing whatever she had a mind to, contrasts with Jannings’s worked-up acting. Over breakfast, Lola is adoring, wifely, asking how many sugarcubes she should put in his coffee. She makes a parody of all this domestic stuff, including the kiss goodbye and the "Do you still love me?", but it’s a sweet parody, with no meanness.
There’s a close shot of her when he gives her the wedding ring: her mouth a childish "O" of surprise, she stares up at him five times, holding the look longest after she opens the box and sees what’s in it (this is one of those shots where Sternberg told her to count). Is it real astonishment or a put-on? The distinction is meaningless here. Sternberg and Dietrich create a totally theatricalized person. And it’s Sternberg who gives Lola her habit of pausing in doorways and turning around, sizing up what’s she’s leaving before she goes out — implying that where she’s going can take care of itself.
The centerpiece of the film is Lola’s rendition of a song whose English version became Dietrich’s signature ("Falling in Love Again") but whose opening line in German means "I’m from head to foot made for love." As she sings, her face, voice, and arms are all doing one thing (serenading Rath) and her legs are doing something else: they have a life of their own, crossing, uncrossing, being clasped by her hands. The combination of amused eroticism with the song’s superb half-regretful quality would define Dietrich’s star persona.
The Blue Angel can be called a grim drama of a man degraded by an unworthy woman only from Rath’s point of view — a point of view Sternberg keeps us from sharing. It’s Rath who is abominable, who goes mad. Lola never ceases to be magnificent.
But is The Blue Angel the best film from Dietrich and Sternberg? Of the seven films the two made together, surely the greatest is the last, The Devil Is a Woman (1935) — they thought so, anyway. The rest of her career is mostly devoid of first-rate films, but one exception — and what an exception — is Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958). There she utters the best last line ever spoken in a film: "He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?"
The
Blue Angel: Two-Disc Ultimate Blu-ray Edition — Cineaste ... Graham Fuller, Spring 2014
The single-disc Blu-ray of The Blue Angel that Kino Lorber issued in December 2012 featured only the restored high-definition German-language version—Der blaue Engel—of Josef von Sternberg’s masterpiece. Released in December 2013, the two-disc package that’s under review here contains the German version, the marginally inferior English-language version that Sternberg filmed simultaneously at Ufa between November 4, 1929 and January 22, 1930. Also included on the new Blu-ray are a comparison of a classroom scene that exemplifies differences between the German and English versions, as well as Marlene Dietrich’s beguilingly offhand screen test for Sternberg, Dietrich archive footage, and trailers that appeared on the 2001 two-disc DVD. Absent from the Blu-ray is the DVD’s spare commentary by the film historian Werner Sudendorf, a chronicle of the film from preproduction until its banning in Germany in April 1933, and brief cast and crew biographies. Some of the omitted material had been useful in historically contextualizing the film for viewers who aren’t steeped in Blue Angel lore.
Presumably to differentiate the new Blu-ray from the previous one, Kino made a significant change to the disc cover. An advertising shot of Dietrich’s Lola-Lola, photographed in close-up, wearing her silvery white top hat, and smiling knowingly at the onlooker, replaced the DVD cover shot of her clasping her knee as she leans back on a beer barrel onstage, displaying the expanse of her gartered right thigh to the Blue Angel beer hall’s audience, to the smitten Professor Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings) in the loge above her, and to all the males (and females) since who have gazed on it. The latter image was, of course, extracted from the most famous still in cinema history; it is so famous that Kino playfully used a miniature cutout of it for the graphic that appears when users choose extras on the 2001 DVD.
Sternberg modeled Lola-Lola’s look on the death-laden images of
women in Félicien Rops’s etchings and aquatints, though Egon Schiele’s 1913
“Woman in Black Stockings” anticipated Dietrich’s reclining. Her languid but
inciting pose, photographed from different angles in the film, became
instantaneously iconic. Miguel Covarrubias painted a green-faced Smith W.
Brookhart, the Republican prohibitionist senator, leering at Dietrich, leaning forward but
with her right leg angled at ninety degrees, in a Vanity Fair caricature
of September 1932. As the 2001 DVD’s chronicle extra shows, on January 4, 1933,
the Nazi humor magazine Die Brennessel (The Nettle) featured
a National Socialist caricature of Heinrich Mann, the leftist author of the
1905 novel Professor Unrat, which was the source of The Blue Angel,
as Lola on the barrel; a Michael Heath cartoon similarly lampooned Margaret
Thatcher in the British conservative weekly The Spectator in June
1993. Among film actors who have adopted the pose, Helmut Berger did it in
Visconti’s The Damned (1969) and Liza Minnelli, less accurately, in
Cabaret (1972). Fassbinder’s Lili Marleen and
especially Lola (1981) were indebted to The Blue Angel but
drew most precisely on the pose in their advertising, the former exactly.
Commenting on some of these quotations (and providing other examples) in his
2002 British Film Institute monograph on The Blue Angel, S. S. Prawer
observed how they all associated the film with “Nazism and also with
sadomasochism and/or homosexuality.” Although it brings him only fleeting
pleasure, Rath’s erotomaniacal desire for Lola-Lola, initially rationalized by
him as chivalrous protectiveness, is self-brutalizingly sadomasochistic. The
tragedy of his relinquishing his bourgeois status and respectability for
fleshly pleasure is augured in psychological terms by Sternberg.
Having confiscated saucy postcards of Lola-Lola from his male English students, who have been visiting her at the Blue Angel, Rath goes there himself to rescue them, or so he thinks. The narrow street, or gauntlet, that takes him there contains warnings, in the lingering prostitutes, the sound of foghorns, and in its Expressionistic ambience, which Weimar moviegoers would have recognized as ominous. His second visit there is prompted by his conscientious wish to return to Lola-Lola her unwashed undergarment—sardonically fetishized, like her legs, by Sternberg—which had been mischievously stuffed in his pocket by one of his pupils, Goldstaub, and with which he had accidentally mopped his visage.
On his first visit, Lola-Lola shines a spotlight in his face; on his second, she blows face powder at him. These threatened Oedipal blindings are in keeping with Lola’s playing mother to his child: after nervously dropping cigarettes under her makeup table, Rath grovels at her feet as he picks them up and narrowly avoids looking between her legs (though Sternberg implicates the viewer as a voyeur when he offers him/her this privilege, as he offers him/her private shots of Dietrich’s thighs when she’s in her bedroom and Rath is downstairs). When he resurfaces beside her on his knees, she looks down on him and coos reassuringly as she combs his hair. It is as if she has intuited already that he is unmanly. Notwithstanding that, she marries him, partially because he will play a “sugar daddy” role for a while. By the time their traveling troupe returns to his town over four years later, he has become an unkempt depressive reduced to hawking postcards of his wife and playing a cockerel in the magician’s act. He is humiliated thus in front of his former fellow citizens, and when he sees Lola submit passively to the virile embrace of the strongman Mazeppa (Hans Albers), the sound he admits is not the amusing crow he offered at their wedding but the anguished scream of a cuckold.
It was Siegfried Kracauer, the author of From Caligari to Hitler (1947), who first suggested that The Blue Angel prefigured Nazism. Echoing Mann’s barbed comment to Jannings that, “The success of the film will rely in a great measure on the naked thighs of Miss Dietrich!,” Kracauer wrote that the film’s international success owed to the actress —”Her Lola was a new incarnation of sex”—but also to “its outright sadism. The masses are irresistibly attracted by the spectacle of torture and humiliation, and Sternberg deepened this sadistic tendency by making Lola-Lola destroy not only [Rath] himself but his entire environment.” He adds that the “sadistic cruelty” meted out to Rath by his pupils and the [stage] artists—primarily Lola-Lola and the magician-manager Kiepert, middle class like the professor—”results from the very immaturity which forces their victim into submission.” Kracauer saw a warning in the film: “The boys are born Hitler youths, and the cockcrowing device is a modest contribution to a group of similar, if more ingenious, contrivances much used in Nazi concentration camps.”
A more pernicious strain in the film than that outlined by Kracauer is detectable in the casting of the Jewish actors Kurt Gerron and Robert Klein-Lörk in the roles of the bullying Kiepert and the sneaky Goldstaub, respectively. Gerron would die in Auschwitz after directing the infamous propaganda film that depicted Theresienstadt as a model concentration camp. It is unlikely that Sternberg, himself a Jew, would have endorsed such anti-Semitic typage; some directives may have filtered down from Alfred Hugenberg, the right-wing nationalist politician who headed the Ufa consortium. Mann’s character Kieselack was renamed Goldstaub in the condensed version of Professor Unrat that preceded the screenplay; the dramatist Carl Zuckmayer, who wrote this intermediate novella (but contributed little, Sternberg claimed), would eventually flee the Nazis because his maternal grandfather had been born Jewish.
Kracauer’s belief in The Blue Angel’s proto-Nazi tendency has been countered by such film scholars as Anton Kaes. Sternberg himself habitually denied any interest in investing his films with political or sociological meanings. In his autobiography, he rhetorically dismissed Kracauer’s opinions that The Blue Angel was “a study in sadism” or “a considered statement of the psychological situation [in Germany] of the time.” The “Hitler Youths” and “cockcrowing device” theories, he said, went “far afield.” He added, “I must be forgiven if I state once more that most of the story of the film and its details existed only in my imagination, that I knew very little about Germany before I began it, that then I had not yet seen anyone resembling a Nazi….” Herman G. Weinberg’s critical study of Sternberg cites his comment: “Mine was an artist’s pilgrimage, and no more.”
He could not, of course, keep “the psychological situation” out of the film entirely. Speculating that Weimar Germany—and themes and atmosphere common to its movies—might “by some sort of osmosis” have “got into the private world Sternberg sought to construct in The Blue Angel,” Prawer aligns Rath with the “disoriented male figures” in the era’s films, including those played by Jannings in Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924) and Dupont’s Varieté (1925). He also posits that the performers in Kiepert’s troupe epitomized the kinds of “destructive outsiders” feared by respectable Weimar citizens.
In Willing Seduction: The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich and Mass Culture (2009), Barbara Kosta persuasively argues that the relationship between Rath and Lola-Lola embodies the gendered dialectical clash in Weimar Germany between high art (represented by the bibliophile Professor’s devotion to the word) and mass culture (represented by Lola as a sexualized female image produced by the new technological medium of the cinema). Kosta writes that “Dietrich’s supersensual presence in the film, produced by her body, legs, and voice”—and, one might add, the knowing smiles that acknowledge her sexual magnetism—”which mask Rath’s inadequacies, may explain critics’ blindness to the larger cultural struggle that the film stages, and which the sexualized body conceals or displaces, and that many critics stop short of naming.”
One might argue with equal conviction that the “sexualized body” of Lola-Lola displaces the “larger cultural struggle” with good cause. How else to explain the primacy in film culture (and popular culture in general) of the classic Dietrich pose alluded to above? A key example of its timeless power and ubiquity occurs in Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003), set in Paris in May 1968, when Louis Garrel’s student masturbates on a still of it. The shot is more indelible than any of the orgies or revolutionary protests in which he participates with his twin (Eva Green) and their American friend (Michael Pitt).
In The Blue Angel and the six Paramount films Sternberg subsequently devoted to Dietrich’s erotic allure, he recognized that the images he was creating would always retain more currency than the flimsy social or political elements of his stories or the metaphoric meanings he did or did not intend, or which have been subsequently supplied by critics and scholars. Desire, the Sternberg-Dietrich films ruefully proclaim, is an infinitely renewable force, more enduring than romance, reason, or the events that shape nations and societies. As Lola’s signature song “Falling in Love Again” makes clear, with its “men hover round me like moths around a flame” analogy, she is not accountable for Rath’s self-destruction, or the terminal melancholy of the two wasted clown figures, her former lovers, who provide a silent Greek chorus to his sufferings. She just is.
Neither the German and English versions of The Blue Angel on the Blu-ray are pristine, but both are cleaner and clearer than the versions that appeared on the 2001 DVD. That both are extremely grainy adds to their mystique as films made eighty-four years ago. Mild background hiss can be heard on both tracks. The majority of the dialogue and singing is audible, though the snatches of German conversation heard on the English version might have been helpfully subtitled.
The
Film Sufi: "The Blue Angel" - Josef von Sternberg (1930)
The Blue Angel | Kino
Lorber | Foreign Film | Movie Review | 1930
Matthew from Classic Art Films
Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: The Blue Angel; The Rolling Stones ... Gordon Thomas from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 31, 2013
The
Blue Angel (Josef Von Sternberg, 1930) | Forrest In Focus: Critical ... Forrest Cardamenis from Forrest in Focus, August 5, 2012
Why Women go to the Movies Gertrud Koch from Jump Cut, July 1982
Video Essay. The World and Its Image: Josef von Sternberg's - Mubi Video essay by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin from Mubi, February 14, 2017 (6:52)
Marlene
Dietrich's Temperamental Screen Test for The Blue Angel ... 1930 screen
test for Marlene Dietrich, August 9, 2011 (3:39)
Scott
Reviews Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel [Masters of ... Scott Nye from Criterion Cast
REVIEW: Der blaue
Engel [The Blue Angel] [1930] | www ... Jarad Mobarak
The
Blue Angel (1930) Kristen
Lopez from Journeys in Classic Film
The Blue Angel - TCM.com James Steffen
World Cinema Review: Josef von Sternberg | The Blue Angel Douglas Messerli
Images - The Blue Angel Gary Johnson
Notes on film: The Blue Angel | Cinema Autopsy Thomas Caldwell
Examining
films of Nazi Germany- “The Blue Angel” and “Pandora's ... Examining
films of Nazi Germany- “The Blue Angel” and “Pandora’s Box,” by elumni from
Steemit, Summer 2016
Surrealism and the Cinema: Open-eyed Screening (Revised) - kamera ... Leo White from Kamera, May 24, 2012
The
Blue Angel | News | The Harvard Crimson
Mike Prokosch, August 1, 1969
Blueprint: Review [David Brook]
The Blue Angel, 1930: Dir. Josef von Sternberg, 30/03/07, Kinoeye March 30, 2007
dOc DVD
Review: The Blue Angel (der blaue Engel) (1930) Mark Zimmer
The Blue Angel (DVD) - AV Club Film Scott Tobias
Blue
Angel, The (Der blaue Engel) - The Digital Bits Joe Marchese
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Radiant
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The
Brilliant Doomed Romance of Marlene Dietrich and Josef von ... The
Brilliant Doomed Romance of Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg, by
James Hancock from Wrong Reel
Melissa Anderson on the films of
Dietrich and von Sternberg at ...
Melissa Anderson from Artforum,
April 4, 2014
Marlene
Dietrich – The Exotic Allure Personified – Pre-Code.Com
Where
to start with the essential performances of ... - The A.V. Club (Film) Where
to start with the essential performances of Marlene Dietrich, by Emily
Withrow, October 18, 2012
Marlene
Dietrich's “The Blue Angel” (1930) | Feminéma
Acidemic Journal of Film and Media [Erich Kuersten]
Flicks March 2002 -
Cinescene Chris Dashiell
The Blue
Angel (Der Blaue Engel) Review ... - CultureVulture.net Les Wright
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Le Mot du Cinephiliaque [Michaël Parent] (English)
MovieMartyr.com [Jeremy Heilman]
Jay's Movie Blog Jason Seaver
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
Brooklyn Magazine: Samantha Vacca
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
MUBI [Adrian Curry] movie posters
The
Blue Angel | Film | The Guardian
Philip French
The Blue Angel
Movie Review & Film Summary (2001) | Roger Ebert
New York Times [Mordaunt Hall]
DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
MOROCCO
USA (92 mi) 1930
Morocco |
Chicago Reader Jonathan
Rosenbaum
This 1930 feature was Josef von Sternberg's first American film with Marlene Dietrich, and some purists might declare it the best; certainly the visual exoticism is thick enough to taste—in layers yet. Gary Cooper at his most effective costars as a foreign legionnaire who wins Dietrich's heart, and Adolphe Menjou plays a wealthy rake who competes for her affection; Dietrich, as a cabaret singer, does three numbers.
Morocco, directed by Josef von Sternberg | Film review - Time Out Tony Rayms
Sternberg's first Hollywood film with Dietrich looks like a deliberate reversal of their first collaboration on The Blue Angel the year before in Germany. Dietrich plays another sumptuous vamp, but this time one who is retreating from her past by taking a one-way ticket to Morocco... as although she runs delicately cruel rings around Menjou's affection for her, she ultimately sacrifices everything for the man she truly loves, legionnaire Gary Cooper. It's been customary to dismiss Sternberg's 'absurd' plots as mere vehicles for his experiments with lighting and decor, and his loving explorations of Dietrich's visual and emotional possibilities. The truth is that films like Morocco are completely homogeneous: the plotting and acting are in exactly the same expressionist register as everything else. Here, the highly nuanced portraits of men and a woman caught between the codes they live by and their deepest, secret impulses, remain very moving and 100 per cent modern.
Morocco (1930) - Articles - TCM.com Felicia Feaster
Unfolding with a strange,
dreamlike logic, Morocco (1930), director Josef von Sternberg's first
American film, follows the beautiful Amy Jolly (Marlene Dietrich) to the only
possible destination for a love-burned, down-on-her-luck cabaret singer: the
arid African city of the title.
Wealthy Mons. Le Bessiere (Adolphe Menjou) spies the gorgeous Amy alone on the
ship's deck as it makes its way to that desert lair of thieves, Foreign
Legionnaires and various luckless souls. Le Bessiere is immediately enthralled
and offers to escort Amy around Morocco. But Amy is a woman of great resourcefulness
and talent, who quickly adapts to Morocco's strange ways, as seen in her first
musical performance in a disreputable local bar populated by sophisticates and
riffraff alike.
Dressed in a man's tuxedo and dragging on a cigarette, Amy sings to the enraptured
crowd who respond instantly to her smoldering, androgynous sensuality. As a
saucy finale, Amy plants a kiss on a pretty female member of the
audience, titillating a handsome Foreign Legionnaire in the audience, Tom Brown
(Gary Cooper). The womanizing Brown has pledged himself to service in the
Foreign Legion with no ties to any woman, but is soon fantasizing about
desertion when he meets Amy. Equally taken with Brown, Amy is forced to make a
difficult decision, between the wealth and stability of life with Le Bessiere
who proposes marriage, and her smoldering passion for Brown.
Morocco was von Sternberg's and Marlene Dietrich's first American film
after an unforgettable introduction to the international film community with
their collaboration on The Blue Angel (1930). Lovingly photographed by
her frequent collaborator von Sternberg, Dietrich is ravishing in Morocco,
often at the expense of Cooper, who was angered at the attention the director
lavished on his leading lady while virtually ignoring him. Originally the film
had been titled Amy Jolly, The Woman of Marrakesh. But Cooper, again
fearing that too much of the picture's focus was being placed on Dietrich,
pressured the studio to change the title to Morocco.
Though von Sternberg and Cooper developed a strong dislike for one another
during the making of Morocco, Cooper and Dietrich were reportedly more
amicable and their onscreen romance soon became an off-screen one as well. The
combination of Dietrich's smoky exoticism and Cooper's all-American machismo
somehow worked despite the incongruity and the pair would go on to appear as
lovers once again in Desire (1936), directed by Frank Borzage. Later in
life, Dietrich was more candid about her co-star, remarking that "Cooper
was neither intelligent nor cultured. Just like the other actors, he was chosen
for his physique, which, after all, was more important than an active
brain."
Von Sternberg, who made a total of seven films with Dietrich, controlled every
aspect of his prized star's performance and appearance. He placed her on a
strict diet, made sure her onscreen voice had the desired throaty, sexy timbre
and even oversaw the plucking of her eyebrows to ensure the proper accent for
her eyes. It was also the director who designed the ideal lighting for
Dietrich. The actress recalled, "the light source created my
mysterious-looking face with hollow cheeks, effected by putting the key light
near the face and very high over it."Von Sternberg was equally famous for
continually correcting Dietrich's heavily accented English. At one point during
the production Dietrich fainted from the intense heat and had to be carried
from the set. While lying on a stretcher, the workaholic actress asked von
Sternberg if he needed another "cloze-up." Ignoring her fatigue, he
instantly corrected her pronunciation.
Dietrich was von Sternberg's creation in many regards. Early on he saw
something in this ordinary girl born Maria Magdalena von Losch that caused him
to pluck her from the obscurity of small parts in German films. He transformed
her into an improbably gorgeous, mysterious dream-woman whose sexual appeal was
rarely matched in her films for other high profile directors like Ernst
Lubitsch, Rene Clair, Raoul Walsh, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang
and Orson Welles.
Cinematographer Lee Garmes, von Sternberg, art director Hans Dreier and
Dietrich were all nominated for Oscars for their work on Morocco. And
the film proved a spectacular success at the box office as well, earning a
phenomenal $2 million for Paramount Studios and ensuring a place in film
history for an unknown German actress whose name soon became synonymous with
movie glamour.
Josef von Sternberg: Morocco and Blonde Venus - Senses of Cinema John Flaus, October 6, 2014
The
Film Sufi: "Morocco" - Josef von Sternberg (1930)
Savoir-être: Josef von Sternberg's 'Morocco' - Parallax View Richard T. Jameson, January 2, 2011, originally published in Movietone News, November 1974
World Cinema Review: Josef von Sternberg | Morocco Douglas Messerli
Battleship Pretension [Scott Nye]
notcoming.com | Morocco Jenny Jediny
Journeys
in Classic Film [Kristen Lopez]
A
Mythical Monkey Writes About The Movies
Morocco
(1930) Review, with Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper – Pre ... Danny Reid from Pre-Code
Marlene Dietrich: The Glamour Collection - AV Club film Tasha Robinson
Understanding
Screenwriting #65: Hereafter, Fair Game, Morocco ... Tom Stempel from The House Next Door
Gary Cooper Film Reviews - 1930s
Marlene
Dietrich: The Glamour Collection | Film at The Digital Fix Eamonn McCusker
DVD Savant Review:
Marlene Dietrich: The Glamour Collection
Glenn Erickson
Marlene
Dietrich: The Glamour Collection | DVD ... - Slant Magazine Dan Callahan
Marlene
Dietrich: The Glamour Collection - The A.V. Club (Film) Tasha Robinson
Le Mot du Cinephiliaque [Michaël Parent] (English)
Radiant
at BAM: “The Films of Dietrich and von Sternberg” | Village ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice, April 2, 2014
The Brilliant Doomed Romance of Marlene Dietrich and Josef von ... The Brilliant Doomed Romance of Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg, by James Hancock from Wrong Reel
Melissa Anderson on the films of
Dietrich and von Sternberg at ...
Melissa Anderson from Artforum,
April 4, 2014
Marlene
Dietrich – The Exotic Allure Personified – Pre-Code.Com
Where
to start with the essential performances of ... - The A.V. Club (Film) Where
to start with the essential performances of Marlene Dietrich, by Emily
Withrow, October 18, 2012
The Sill of the World [Hila Katz]
Jay's Movie Blog Jason Seaver
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Morocco (1930) Movie Review from Eye for Film Leanne McGrath
MUBI [Adrian Curry] movie posters
New
York Times [Mordaunt Hall]
Movie
Review - - THE SCREEN; David and Goliath. A New German ... The New
York Times
DISHONORED
USA (91 mi) 1931
Dishonored | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
It's possible to look at this 1931 Josef von Sternberg film and see nothing but camp (it stars Marlene Dietrich as secret agent X-27, working behind the lines in World War I), but give it an ounce of respect and you'll discover a remarkable aesthetic object—an exercise in mise-en-scene of an awesome, glacial beauty. Audiences always howl during the final scene, in which Dietrich carefully retouches her makeup before facing a firing squad, but it is perhaps the purest expression of Sternberg's belief in the triumph of aesthetics over mortality. With Victor McLaglen, Lew Cody, and Warner Oland. Cited by Jean-Luc Godard as one of the greatest American movies since the coming of sound.
Dishonored - TCM.com Genevieve McGillicuddy
The rivalry between Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich dates back
to Dietrich's entry into Hollywood. Even before Dietrich's biggest
German-language film, The Blue Angel(1930), had been released in the
United States, Paramount Studios had started a campaign promoting their new
star and her first American film, Morocco (1930), co-starring the
up-and-coming Gary Cooper.
As Paramount's answer to MGM's biggest star, Dietrich ironically had played an
unbilled role in one of Garbo's first big hits, G.W. Pabst's The Joyless
Street (1925). In that film, Garbo stars as a young girl pushed into
prostitution. In Dishonored (1931), her second American film, Dietrich
plays a prostitute who is recruited to spy for her country under the code name
"X-27."
Her character and story is reminiscent of Mata Hari, which was no coincidence.
When word came that Garbo was playing the famous female spy in an upcoming film
(Mata Hari, 1932), Dishonored was quickly moved into production
and was released nearly two years before Garbo's portrayal of the seductive
spy. Initially, Gary Cooper was to re-team with Dietrich, but the role
eventually went to Victor McLaglen.
Cooper turned down the part not because of any friction with his co-star, with
whom he was having an affair, but because of his unwillingness to work again
with director Josef von Sternberg. Now working on his third film with his muse,
von Sternberg wished to expand the gallery of Dietrich characters. In Dishonored, Dietrich takes on a variety of
disguises - at one point, shedding makeup and the usual glamorous wardrobe to
don a peasant girl outfit.
Dishonored, however, is a very stylish entry in the Dietrich-von
Sternberg canon. Notable among a veritable parade of outfits is her black
leather outfit, foreshadowing Diana Riggs' catsuit in the TV series The
Avengers (1966-69). And no film heroine died with more panache than
Dietrich. Upon facing a firing squad, X-27 applies lipstick and dons her
streetwalking clothing so that she may "die in the uniform in which (she)
had served" her countrymen. Dietrich's portrayal of X-27 was lauded as
intelligent and captivating by critics. A fascinating portrayal of sex and
death, Dishonored is an underrated and interesting chapter in the
Dietrich-von Sternberg legacy.
Review: Dietrich and von Sternberg at the Brooklyn Academy of Music ... Graham Fuller from Blouin Art Info, April 7, 2014
The Brooklyn Academy of Music's retrospective of the seven films in which Josef von Sternberg directed Marlene Dietrich continues April 7 with “Dishonored” (1931) and “The Devil Is a Woman” (1935), which is also being screened singly on April 8. They are near-phantasmagorical spectacles of sexual subterfuge: “Dishonored” features a masked ball; “The Devil Is a Woman” features a masked carnival. The blizzards of streamers in each crank up the visual delirium brought on by Dietrich's catch-me-if-you-can amorousness.
Dietrich's character in “Dishonored,” a Mata Hari-like Austrian prostitute-spy, falls fatalistically in love with a man in uniform, as she did in “Morocco” (1930). Whereas Gary Cooper's legionnaire — beautiful, laconic, his own man — was more than a match for Amy Jolly in the latter, however, the brusque and burly Victor McLaglen was badly miscast as the lieutenant who wins Agent X-27's heart.
Yet it must have entertained the masochist in Sternberg, perennially smarting from the impossibility of possessing Marlene, to ply such a brute at her. Andrew Sarris suggested that, in “Dishonored”’s ending, “There may also be in the final spectacle of Dietrich's death more than a trace of directorial fantasy and wish fulfillment.”
“The Devil Is a Woman” was the last and most baroque of their collaborations and suitably the most anguished statement on the Dietrich persona's lethal allure. It was based on Pierre Louÿs's 1898 novel “The Woman and the Puppet,” which Paramount had previously filmed with Geraldine Farrar in 1920; Luis Buñuel remade it as “That Obscure Object of Desire” (1977). Louÿs took his title from the Goya tapestry cartoon that shows four young Spanish women tossing a male puppet in a blanket.
Concha Perez, Dietrich's character, an outrageous femme fatale, is introduced as the fabulously bedecked centerpiece of a float during the pre-Lent carnival procession, from which she beguiles a dashing Republican rebel, Antonio (Cesar Romero), a Zorro-esque figure who's her sexual equal. After they tryst, he runs into an old friend, the embittered retired police chief Don Pasqual (Lionel Atwill).
When Antonio remarks that Pasqual looks ill, the older man recounts the history of his five-year pursuit of Concha, who led him on for financial gain and was forever disappearing with handsome bullfighters and similar studs. A trick Pasqual plays on Antonio backfires since he cannot keep him from Concha's embraces. The rivals duel in the rain – a breathtaking anticipation of film noir atmospherics.
Famously, Sternberg cast Atwill as a version of himself — refined, immaculately turned out, resigned, and quietly sardonic. In “Just Watch! Sternberg, Paramount, and America,” Peter Baxter notes that a bronze bust of Sternberg by the German sculptor Rudolf Belling that appeared in a 1931 Museum of Modern Art show: “The eyes are especially arresting, hanging as they do over the empty spaces below them and thus conveying something of that hooded watchfulness [italics mine] assumed by Lionel Atwill as Don Pasqual in 'The Devil Is a Woman'….”
This look — suspicion wedded to the moroseness that comes from sexual despair — can be seen in all of Sternberg's closeups of Atwill in the movie. The watchfulness is that of a man who has lost out to so many young studs but who, in the spirit of self-destruction, still hasn't given up the chase. Dietrich's self-satisfied smiles, more mocking here even than they were in her first Sternberg film, “The Blue Angel” (1930), where they were occasionally tempered with pity, gleam down the years, collectively a knife in the groin.
Atwill wasn't the only actor Sternberg cast as an autobiographical character in his films. Versions of him had been played by Stuart Holmes (“The Salvation Hunters,” 1925), Warner Oland (1932's “Shanghai Express” and “Dishonored”), and, most exquisitely, by Adolphe Menjou, who played the gentleman who claims Amy but can't keep her from following Cooper's Tom Brown into the desert in “Morocco.”
Humiliation and wounded pride mingle in these mordant self-portraits, especially in Atwill's Pasqual. Peter Baxter says of “The Devil Is a Woman,” spiritually as well as literally Sternberg and Dietrich's joint swansong, “Most of all, the sense of frustration, self-criticism and resigned melancholy that pervades the film are surely comments by the weary but reflective Sternberg on a relationship that had brought him immense stimulation but concurrent emotional hardship.” It remains a masterly evocation of the notion, understood by the Surrealists, that love yearned for is more powerful than love fulfilled.
Dishonored • Senses of Cinema Tamarqa Tracz, April 15, 2005
The Film Sufi: "Dishonored" - Josef von Sternberg (1931)
The Films of Josef von Sternberg - by Michael E. Grost
notcoming.com | Dishonored Brynn White
Review: Dishonored (1931, von Sternberg) – Cinema Enthusiast Catherine
Acidemic
Journal of Film and Media [Erich Kuersten]
The
Front Row: Marlene Dietrich in “Dishonored” | The New Yorker Richard Brody, May 30, 2017
WWI in Classic Film: Dishonored (1931) » historyonfilm.com
CineScene.com Chris
Dashiell
Radiant
at BAM: “The Films of Dietrich and von Sternberg” | Village ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice, April 2, 2014
The
Brilliant Doomed Romance of Marlene Dietrich and Josef von ... The
Brilliant Doomed Romance of Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg, by
James Hancock from Wrong Reel
Melissa Anderson on the films of
Dietrich and von Sternberg at ...
Melissa Anderson from Artforum,
April 4, 2014
Marlene
Dietrich – The Exotic Allure Personified – Pre-Code.Com
Where
to start with the essential performances of ... - The A.V. Club (Film) Where
to start with the essential performances of Marlene Dietrich, by Emily
Withrow, October 18, 2012
Classic
Movie Ramblings: Dishonored (1931)
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Dishonored (1931) - Josef Von Sternberg - RoweReviews
Dishonored (1931) -
Josef von Sternberg | Synopsis, Characteristics ... Hal Erickson from All-Movie
Dishonored 1931 – Once upon a screen… movie poster
Dishonored Movie
Trailer, Reviews and More | TVGuide.com
New York Times [Mordaunt Hall] also seen here: Movie Review - - THE SCREEN; An Austrian Mata Hari. Mary Pickford ...
'Dishonored'
and 'Shanghai Express' - The New York Times March 3, 2012
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY
An
American Tragedy | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
Sergei Eisenstein was
originally set to direct this 1931 adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's novel; the
job eventually went to Josef von Sternberg, whose heart was not in social
realism, but for all of its compromises and evident haste the film plays better
than George Stevens's 1951 remake, A Place in the Sun. Ironically the
earlier film, made before the descent of the censorship code in 1933, is also
more frank in its treatment. With Phillips Holmes, Sylvia Sidney (her first
major film), and Frances Dee. 95 min.
An
American Tragedy | Film Review | Slant Magazine Dan Callahan
Josef Von Sternberg's rock solid adaptation of
Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy has been long overshadowed for a
number of reasons. Sergei Eisenstein came to
Von Sternberg called his work on An American Tragedy a "little
finger exercise" in his 1965 autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry.
But his version trumps A Place in the Sun at every turn and stands on
its own as a full-blooded, uncompromised vision of temptation and abject
cowardice. Though the film is compressed, it never feels rushed, and the full
sociological impact of Dreiser's book is captured in Von Sternberg's flowingly
poetic visuals. He also made inspired use of his three lead actors: Phillips
Holmes, Sylvia Sidney and Frances Dee.
In A Place in the Sun, George (Clift) has to choose between the good
life with luscious Angela (
In A Place in the Sun, when Winters' character falls into the lake,
Stevens cuts away quickly so as not to steal sympathy from George. In An
American Tragedy, Von Sternberg lets you see Roberta as she drowns, and he
shows
Von Sternberg makes inspired use of water imagery all through the film, so that
when we're shut up in a courtroom in the last scenes, we feel that something
has been lost. As
An American Tragedy (1931) - Articles - TCM.com Margarita Landazuri
The better-known 1951 film version of Theodore Dreiser's 1925
novel An American Tragedy is A Place in the Sun, directed by
George Stevens and starring Montgomery Clift as a poor but ambitious young man;
Elizabeth Taylor as the rich girl he loves; and Shelley Winters as the hapless
working-class girl he seduces, with disastrous consequences. But the
rarely-seen first film version of the novel was made in 1931, just six years
after the book was published, and it was directed by one of that era's most
distinctive auteurs.
For Austrian-born director Josef von Sternberg, An American Tragedy was
a radical departure from the glamour-soaked American vehicles he made in the
early 1930s starring Marlene Dietrich. At the time, von Sternberg was still in
the throes of his personal and professional obsession with Dietrich--two
American collaborations had quickly followed their first film together, The
Blue Angel. Dietrich had returned to Germany to visit her family and to
recover from bad reviews. At loose ends, von Sternberg took on an even more
challenging adversary, An American Tragedy's author Theodore Dreiser. As
von Sternberg wrote in his memoir, "I took a rest doing a little finger
exercise on An American Tragedy.
My knuckles were rapped this time also."
Paramount had bought the film rights to Dreiser's book (which was based on a
real murder case from 1906), and Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, then under
contract at the studio, had originally been slated to write and direct.
Eisenstein delivered a treatment for the screenplay, but even though associate
producer David O. Selznick called it "the most moving script I have ever
read," Paramount head B.P. Schulberg was not impressed and replaced
Eisenstein with von Sternberg. Samuel Hoffenberg and von Sternberg wrote a new
script, and after the film was finished, the studio screened it for Dreiser,
who sued, according to von Sternberg, to "stop its exhibition, claiming it
outraged his book." The court allowed the film's release, ordering the
studio to restore some of the incidents from the novel which had been deleted
from the film. Eisenstein returned to Russia, and never made an American film.
The Hayes Office also had some objections, such as references to the couple's
efforts to arrange an abortion, which led to the film being banned in several
states, England, South Africa and Italy.
The strongest performance in An American Tragedy is by Sylvia Sidney as
the main character Clyde's downtrodden lover, giving her a poignant appeal that
Shelley Winters's drab, downbeat portrayal in A Place in the Sun lacks.
A very young Frances Dee, in an early performance as Clyde's rich girlfriend,
is also good. But critics found the blond and preppy Phillips Holmes, who plays
the main character Clyde, wooden and inexpressive. The Time magazine
review called Holmes's performance, in typical Time wisecracking
language, as "faintly Barrymorose."
More than 30 years later, re-evaluating An American Tragedy, film historian and critic William K.
Everson described the film as the "least familiar and most elusive of all
the von Sternberg Paramounts." Noting that "through the years it has
been consistently maligned as being "sub-Sternberg, a travesty on the
original, little more than cheap melodrama," Everson wrote that it had
been critically attacked and was a box office flop. But looking at it with
fresh eyes, he found it "a surprisingly powerful and satisfying piece of
work," and in comparison to A Place in the Sun, "It is
starker, and thus probably closer to the spirit if not the letter of Dreiser's
original."
The
“tragedy of desire” in An American Tragedy and A Place in the ... The “tragedy of desire” in An American Tragedy and A Place in the Sun, by Imogen
Sara Smith from Library of America,
March 8, 2017
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An American Tragedy (film) - Wikipedia
USA (82 mi) 1932
Shanghai Express | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
More action oriented than the other Dietrich-Sternberg films, this 1932 production is nevertheless one of the most elegantly styled. The setting, a broken-down train commandeered by revolutionaries on its way to Shanghai, becomes a maze of soft shadows and shifting textures, through which the characters wander in a philosophical quest for something—anything—solid. The screenplay, by Jules Furthman and an uncredited Howard Hawks, has a quality of wisecracking wit unusual in Sternberg's films: when someone asks Dietrich why she's going to Shanghai, she retorts, "To buy a new hat." With Clive Brook, Warner Oland, and Anna May Wong; photographed by Lee Garmes.
Time Out Tony Rayns
Von Sternberg, who was forever looking for new kinds of stylisation, said that he intended everything in Shanghai Express to have the rhythm of a train. He clearly meant it: the bizarre stop-go cadences of the dialogue delivery are the most blatantly non-naturalistic element, but the overall design and dramatic pacing are equally extraordinary. The plot concerns an evacuation from Peking to Shanghai, but it's in every sense a vehicle for something else: a parade of deceptive appearances and identities, centering on the Boule de Suif notion of a prostitute with more honour than those around her. Dietrich's Shanghai Lily hasn't aged a day, but Clive Brook's stiff-upper-lip British officer (her former lover) now looks like a virtual caricature of the type. None the less, the sincerity and emotional depth with which Sternberg invests their relationship is quite enough to transcend mere style or fashion.
Cine-File
Chicago: Tristan Johnson
"It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily," so says glamorous, gravely-voiced Marlene Dietrich, but the truth behind the camera is that it took only one man, fellow German ex-pat Josef von Sternberg, to make Dietrich the most enigmatic of Hollywood icons. Sternberg's SHANGHAI EXPRESS was the commercial height of their seven collaborations, where exotic adventure and popular thrills exist in equilibrium with the director's sometimes smothering artistic vision. The film follows the eponymous locomotive on an ill-fated journey from Peking to Shanghai; which begins with a worldly array of passengers all buzzing about the appearance of the notorious Shanghai Lily, then gets held up by a band of rebels for a lengthy episode that exists mainly to provide the film with some sort of conflict, only to end in an extended denouement that affirms Sternberg was far more interested in erecting a monument to his muse than in telling a simple adventure story. And this, ultimately, is what it makes the film—and this could be said of their entire partnership—so damn fascinating. Dressed in decadence, awash in chiaroscuro, Dietrich is unforgettable, and while much is made of her image itself, there's more to it than an early auteur's obsessive gaze. Dietrich's presence is palpable, which goes hand-in-hand with the abundant confidence required to pull off Sternberg's increasingly larger than life heroines, and as it turns out here, she can deliver one-liners with the best of them. Together, they made SHANGHAI EXPRESS one of the great popular successes of their respective careers, which allowed their partnership to push forward in even more outlandish directions, something this ongoing series will touch on next week with THE SCARLET EMPRESS.
Shanghai Express (von Sternberg, 1932): USA - SBCC Film Review Larry Gleeson
Shanghai Express, a 1932 Pre-Code U.S. production, based on a book by Harry Harvey, written by Jules Furthman, and directed brilliantly by Joseph von Sternberg, is a story of one-time lovers, Shanghai Lily, played by Marlene Dietrich, and Captain “Doc” Harvey played by Clive Brook, who rediscover each other during an exciting, yet dangerous, train ride from Peiping (Peking) to Shanghai. Complete with stabbings, machine gun fire, and plenty of physical altercations the Shanghai Express is a non-stop action/adventure with high production values encapsulated within a melodramatic narrative.
Interestingly enough, most passengers on the train are more concerned that the notorious Shanghai Lily is on board rather than the fact that the country is enmeshed in a bloody civil war. Shanghai Lily is referred to as a “coaster, a woman who lives by her wits along the China Coast.” In essence, it is a nice way of saying she is a woman who indulges in casual affairs as a means to an end – a lavish lifestyle of beautiful gowns and stunning jewelry. Yet, when Chinese guerillas stop the train and Captain Harvey is selected to be the hostage, Shanghai Lily foregoes her honor and manages to entice the elusive Mr. Chang, played by Warner Oland, to release the doctor by “praying all night,” and by agreeing to visit Mr. Chang at his castle. By the film’s end, the core group of passengers’ real identities have emerged. None of the characters were who they seemed to be when the train ride began.
Von Sternberg, nominated for an Oscar for Best Director for his work in Shanghai Express, makes exquisite use of the camera and lighting in creating the effect of tight space with mesmerizing shadows and his extensive use of netting in delivering a phenomenal atmospheric of a train ride in the Orient is a visual treat. Dietrich’s performance as Shanghai Lily was alluring and she captivates with her emotionally wrought physicalities and exotic costuming. We first get a glimpse of her dressed in black with her face partially covered with a veil. She is often seen puffing on a cigarette as she paces sluggishly back and forth. Her heavy eyelids and sultry good looks, however, offset any semblance of an awkward accent. provided the cinematograpy and received an Oscar for his efforts. Controlling most of this production in China for Paramount Pictures, Sternberg claims to have collaborated extensively with Garmes and felt he was as much deserving of an Oscar as Garmes. In addition, the costuming, handled by Travis Banton (gowns) and Eugen Joseff (jewelry), was right on the mark. The film utilized over 1,ooo extras, primarily in the locales where the train made stops.
The screening was followed by a Q & A with Nicholas von Sternberg, son of Director Joseph von Sternberg along with author and film historian, Jeremy Arnold. The younger von Sternberg shared an original script book from the 1932 film, Shanghai Express as well as how his father discovered Marlene Dietrich on a cabaret scene. The elder von Sternberg saw something in Dietrich he believed would be perfect for his upcoming film, The Blue Angel. The two would go on to collaborate on seven films between 1930 and 1935 with most film historians agreeing the 1932 Shanghai Express to be the team’s best work.
In my opinion, Shanghai Express is a must-see treasure from Hollywood’s Golden Age of Glamour. This digitally restored version of Shanghai Express kept the refinement of the original film and provided a seamless viewing. Highly recommended.
Shanghai Express (1932) - Articles - TCM.com Margarita Landazuri
In the early 1930's, director Josef von Sternberg transformed a
plump, not-very-successful German actress into an international sex goddess
named Marlene Dietrich. Their first collaboration, The Blue Angel
(1930), was followed by a Hollywood contract for Dietrich, and two more films
in which her mystery and allure blossomed under von Sternberg's guidance. Shanghai Express (1932), the fourth of
their seven films together, is perhaps the apotheosis of the partnership.
Hollywood wits called Shanghai Express, which deals with an eventful train
journey between Peking and Shanghai, "Grand Hotel on Wheels."
Dietrich plays Shanghai Lily, a lady of easy virtue known as the "White
Flower of the Chinese coast." During a time of political unrest, she
boards the train in Peking, along with an assortment of characters with their
own agendas. They include Clive Brook, as an English officer and former lover
of Lily's; Warner Oland, a rebel leader traveling incognito; and Anna May Wong,
Lily's companion, a fellow prostitute hoping for a new start. The train is
hijacked by the rebels, and the simmering tensions among the characters
explode.
From the beginning of their collaboration, von Sternberg and Dietrich had been
having an affair, although both were married. Von Sternberg was clearly in
control behind the camera, but increasingly, it appeared that Dietrich, with
her non-exclusive attitude toward sex, had the upper hand in the romance. She
indulged in affairs with Gary Cooper and Maurice Chevalier, then went back to
Germany to see her husband and daughter. Von Sternberg was feeling both
personally and professionally frustrated, and wanted to abandon the
partnership. Critics, too, were beginning to grumble that perhaps the
Dietrich-von Sternberg films were too rarefied, that the exotic German beauty
might do well to work with another director. Dietrich, however, would not work
with anyone but von Sternberg, and he began preparing Shanghai Express. Shortly before the film went into production, von
Sternberg's estranged wife sued Dietrich for alienation of affections and the
suit was later dropped.
Given the tense circumstances, and von Sternberg's tyrannical manner and mania
for perfection, working on Shanghai
Express was a stressful experience for everyone. Von Sternberg shouted so
much that he lost his voice. A production executive gave him a microphone to
use, and von Sternberg went one better and hooked up a huge public address
system, so his voice boomed in all corners of the soundstage. Cinematographer
Lee Garmes recalled that the director acted out all the roles and insisted the
actors imitate him. "His impersonation of Anna May Wong had us all in
stitches. But we didn't dare show our amusement."
Von Sternberg's obsessiveness paid off early in Shanghai Express, in the scenes of the Peking railroad station,
created on the Paramount back lot and in nearby towns with train tracks. The
scenes are densely packed with faux-Chinese atmosphere and layer upon layer of
detail. In his memoir, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, von Sternberg himself
recalled one such detail. "We had to plan to have a cow give birth and
nourish its calf near noisy railroad tracks, so that it would be undisturbed by
clanging bells and hooting whistles when my train came along through the
crowded streets to be stopped by an animal suckling its young."
The most beautiful and exotic of von Sternberg's creations in Shanghai Express, of course, is
Dietrich herself, swathed in designer Travis Banton's feathers and veils, and
stunningly lit and photographed by Lee Garmes. In one particularly ravishing
image, only her pale, elegant hands are lit, clasped in prayer for her former
lover. As the world-weary courtesan, Dietrich also murmurs what is probably her
most famous line: "It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai
Lily." The surefire combination of glamour and adventure made it the most
successful of the Dietrich-von Sternberg films and at Oscar time, Shanghai Express was nominated for Best
Picture (it lost to Grand Hotel, 1932) and von Sternberg was nominated
for best director for the second year in a row. But only Lee Garmes won the
award for his cinematography.
Dietrich and von Sternberg would make three more films together, each one
becoming more and more stylized and remote, and nearly wrecking the careers of
both. But many fans agree with critic Pauline Kael that what makes Shanghai Express such fun is that
"this movie has style - a triumphant fusion of sin, glamour,
shamelessness, art, and perhaps, a furtive sense of humor."
Shanghai Express • Senses of Cinema Wheeler Winston Dixon, February 7, 2012
The
Film Sufi: "Shanghai Express" - Josef von Sternberg (1932)
Shanghai Express (1932) - Filmsite.org Tim Dirks
Movie Magg [Mark Gabrish Conlan]
Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Jenny Jediny]
Shanghai
Express (1932) – Speakeasy
FELICE'S
LOG: "SHANGHAI EXPRESS" (1932) Review
Shanghai Express
| Mountain Xpress Ken Hanke
The
History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1931-1932 [Erik Beck]
Cinemasparagus: Craig Keller January 11, 2007
Understanding
Screenwriting #68: The Fighter, Somewhere, Shanghai ... Tom Stempel from The House Next Door, January 24, 2011
Shanghai Express (1932) Review, with Marlene Dietrich, Anna May ... Danny Reid from Pre-Code
Anna
May Wong in Shanghai Express (1932) - Classic Movie Favorites
Style Essentials--Marlene Dietrich Finds Her Key Light in 1932's ... Kimberly Truhler from GlamAmor, April 30, 2015
Shanghai
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(1932), March 29, 2013
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at BAM: “The Films of Dietrich and von Sternberg” | Village ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice, April 2, 2014
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Brilliant Doomed Romance of Marlene Dietrich and Josef von ... The
Brilliant Doomed Romance of Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg, by
James Hancock from Wrong Reel
Melissa Anderson on the films of
Dietrich and von Sternberg at ...
Melissa Anderson from Artforum,
April 4, 2014
Marlene
Dietrich – The Exotic Allure Personified – Pre-Code.Com
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to start with the essential performances of ... - The A.V. Club (Film) Where
to start with the essential performances of Marlene Dietrich, by Emily
Withrow, October 18, 2012
Movie Review: Shanghai Express (1932) | Scott Holleran
Shanghai
Express (1932) | 1001 Film Reviews
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MovieMartyr.com [Jeremy Heilman]
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Combustible Celluloid Review - Shanghai Express (1932), Jules ... Jeffrey M. Anderson
Shanghai
Express - Dr. Macro still
photos
Shanghai Express
Movie Trailer, Reviews and More | TVGuide.com
Marlene
Dietrich's new talkie - archive, 18 March 1932 | Film | The ... Robert Herring from The Guardian
Marlene
Dietrich stars in Josef von Sternberg's ... - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan, May 24, 2017
New York Times [Mordaunt Hall] also seen here: Movie Review - - Marlene Dietrich in a Brilliantly Directed Melodrama ...
'Dishonored'
and 'Shanghai Express' - The New York Times March 3, 2012
Shanghai
Express (film) - Wikipedia
BLONDE VENUS
USA (93 mi)
1932
Blonde
Venus | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
Even Josef von Sternberg had his off days. Blonde Venus (1932), his fifth film with Marlene Dietrich, is drawn in Sternberg's characteristic chiaroscuro, but nothing seems to be happening beneath the (admittedly elegant) surface. Dietrich is permitted her only sympathetic role—as a woman who leaves her husband (Herbert Marshall) because she thinks she's no good for him—but this type of melodramatic pathos seems unsuited to Sternberg's sensibilities. One unfortunate scene, with Dietrich singing “Hot Voodoo” dressed in an ape suit, has predicated several generations of supercilious camp. With Cary Grant and Sidney Toler.
Blonde Venus - TCM.com Stephanie Zacharek
Blonde Venus,
the fifth of seven collaborations between Josef von Sternberg and Marlene
Dietrich, wasn't particularly successful with the public when it opened in
1932, and the critics didn't care for it much, either. New York Times's
Mordaunt Hall called it "a muddled, unimaginative and generally hapless
piece of work," though he did have some nice things to say about its star:
"There are good portraits of Miss Dietrich, who sings two or three
songs."
But wait: Hall spends most of his review decrying the melodramatic and
convoluted plot, complaining that he can't sympathize with any of the
characters, and noting that Cary Grant, a newcomer at the time, deserves a much
better role than the small one Sternberg cast him in. Only then does he get
around to mentioning Dietrich's "two or three songs" (there are in
fact three). And even then, he fails to mention that one of these numbers
involves Dietrich's stepping onto a nightclub stage dressed in a gorilla suit.
After cavorting with a chorus line of scantily clad native cuties, she removes
the gorilla mask, tops her smoothed-back hair with an ethereal blonde Afro-wig,
and steps out of her furry suit to finish the number in a scanty costume made
of spangles and feathers. In 1932, or even today, it would have been unlike
anything Hall had ever seen in cinema. You have to wonder if he even had eyes.
Or maybe he simply found that musical number, "Hot Voodoo," too hot
to handle in the paper of record. And today, the routine certainly wouldn't win
any prizes for political correctness - it has to be accepted as a product of
its time. But it's a stunning sequence, and just one of the reasons that Blonde
Venus, underappreciated in its
day, deserves a careful look.
Hall is right when he says that the storyline is a little nutty. Dietrich plays
Helen Faraday, a successful German cabaret singer who has given up her career
to move to New York and be a wife and mother: Her husband, Ned (Herbert
Marshall), is a chemist; her son, Johnny (Dickie Moore), is simply adorable.
Then Ned contracts radium poisoning. He must travel to Europe for the
treatments that can save him, but how will the family afford it? Helen decides
to return to the stage only long enough to earn the money she needs to save her
husband, but she succumbs to the advances of a suave but unusually principled
playboy, Nick (Grant). Ned, discovering her infidelity, tries to wrest Johnny
away from her, but she kidnaps him and begins an odyssey that takes her from
New Orleans to Paris and, eventually, back to New York and domestic happiness.
Blonde Venus is a melodramatic fantasy, but it has roots in social
realism, too. Seeing a refined beauty like Helen struggling to support herself
and her young son brings home the reality that hard times could hit anybody.
And if you look beneath the surface of the picture's (supposedly) happy ending,
you'll see that Dietrich's character is actually very much in control of her
own destiny, as well as her sexuality. In her study of women in movies, From
Reverence to Rape, critic Molly Haskell cites Dietrich's character in Blonde
Venus as one of the pre-code era's "sensualists without guilt."
Haskell writes, "Until the Production Code went into full force, between
1933 and 1934, women were conceived of as having sexual desire without being
freaks, villains, or even necessarily Europeans - an attitude surprising to
those of us nurtured on the movies of any other period. Women were entitled to
initiate sexual encounters, to pursue men, even to embody certain 'male'
characteristics without being stigmatized as 'unfeminine' or 'predatory.'"
That certainly is true of Dietrich's character in Blonde Venus: She's two things at once, a doting
housewife and mother but also an unapologetically sensual being - before the
Hays Office cracked down, you could find that kind of complexity in a
character. And the white tuxedo Dietrich wears late in Blonde Venus is
just one of many examples of how the actress defied the boundaries of her
gender throughout her career.
The picture is notable for other reasons, too: It's fun to watch Dietrich
playing the role of a mother, and considering how hypnotically aloof and
elegant an on-screen presence she could be, she's surprisingly good at it. Her
scenes with Moore are casual and sweet without ever being cloying; in these
moments, she's pleasingly naturalistic, a screen goddess who has temporarily
stepped down from her Mount Olympus to mingle with mere mortals.
As it turns out, Dietrich, a mother in a real life, was facing some unusual
difficulties of her own as Blonde Venus was being filmed. Just as
shooting was about to commence, Dietrich received a threatening letter from an
anonymous extortionist, demanding that she pay the sum of $10,000 or her young
daughter, Maria, would be kidnapped. Though nothing came of the threat,
Dietrich was terrified and refused to let Maria out of her sight during the
making of the film, bringing her to the studio every day.
Even beyond that, the film was beset with problems. Sternberg and B.P. Schulberg,
then the head of Paramount, had quarreled over the script: Both the censors and
Schulberg took issue with the story, though not necessarily for the same
reasons, and Sternberg was forced to negotiate. Upon the film's release,
Sternberg himself wrote it off as a disaster. And the mysterious, complicated
relationship between Sternberg and Dietrich was apparent to everyone working on
the film, particularly Grant, who was at that time just launching his career.
As Grant would later say to Peter Bogdanovich, he could see what Sternberg and
Dietrich "were up to" and he steered clear of them as much as
possible. He did say that Sternberg gave him one invaluable bit of advice.
Bogdanovich quotes Grant, including the actor's famous inflections: "The
first day of shoot-ing he took one look at me and said, 'Your hair is part-ed
on the wrong side.'" So what did Grant do? "I parted it on the
other side and wore it that way for the rest of my career!"
The Film Sufi: "Blonde Venus" - Josef von Sternberg (1932)
The Films of Josef von Sternberg - by Michael E. Grost
Bitterness
Personified: Reflections on ... Blonde Venus (1932) Graham Russell
Nick's
Flick Picks: Favorite Films [Nick Davis]
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Venus Leo Goldsmith
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Review: Blonde Venus - Spindle Magazine
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Monday
Editor's Pick: Blonde Venus (1932) - Alt Screen
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Blonde Venus (1932) Review, with Marlene Dietrich – Pre-Code.Com Danny Reid
Radiant
at BAM: “The Films of Dietrich and von Sternberg” | Village ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice, April 2, 2014
The Brilliant Doomed Romance of Marlene Dietrich and Josef von ... The Brilliant Doomed Romance of Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg, by James Hancock from Wrong Reel
Melissa Anderson on the films of
Dietrich and von Sternberg at ...
Melissa Anderson from Artforum,
April 4, 2014
Marlene
Dietrich – The Exotic Allure Personified – Pre-Code.Com
Where
to start with the essential performances of ... - The A.V. Club (Film) Where
to start with the essential performances of Marlene Dietrich, by Emily
Withrow, October 18, 2012
Of
Love and Other Demons: 'Blonde Venus' (Josef von Sternberg, 1932) Justine A. Smith from Vague Visages
Understanding
Screenwriting #68: The Fighter, Somewhere, Shanghai ... Tom Stempel from The House Next Door, January 24, 2011
Blonde Venus Movie
Review | Movie Reviews Simbasible
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(1932)
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McCalmont
Blonde
Venus (1932) and Applause (1929) | Film stuff by Mark Mark DuPré
Blonde Venus
- Josef von Sternberg - 1932 - film review
James Travers from Films de France
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Dietrich in "Blonde Venus" (1932) - Classic Movie Favorites
Acidemic
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Movie Blog Jay Seaver
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Dietrich is Blonde Venus | Pretty Clever Films Christina Stewart
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World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
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Essentials: Blonde Venus (1932) | The Hollywood Revue
Blonde Venus
(1932) - Josef von Sternberg | Review | AllMovie Andrea LeVasseur
Blonde Venus Review - The
Ultimate Cary Grant Pages
Review:
'Blonde Venus' - Variety
New
York Times [Mordaunt Hall] also seen
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Review - - Marlene Dietrich and Herbert Marshall in a Film ...
Blonde
VEnus Text of “Hot Voodoo” song
There is a high degree of delirium featured in this picture,
with sets so extreme it seems filmed on the grounds of a carnival funhouse,
with masks, sculptures, gargoyles, Christ icons on a stick, Russian orthodox
paintings and endless candles set in cavernous rooms with giant doorways and
other enormous expressionistic set pieces that feel expressly designed to
imitate the illusion of a dream as concocted by Salvador Dali. Within this context, we have Sternberg’s take
on a piece of 18th century Russian history. Made near the transition from silent films to
talkies, this continues the silent film look, which attempts to overwhelm the
viewer with a barrage of dazzling visual effects which overshadow anything
spoken, as the amateurish quality of the performances resemble the burlesque
theater of early Marx Brothers, while some of the costumes could have been used
in THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939). Nothing here
remotely feels real, so you might as well get used to the massive artificiality
that all but engulfs this picture in a complete indulgence of style. Set in two parts, Marlene Dietrich is a
Shirley Temple-style, innocent young woman named
Once in
The Scarlet Empress | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
Josef von Sternberg's
1934 film turns the legend of Catherine the Great into a study of sexuality
sadistically repressed and reborn as politics, thus anticipating Bertolucci by
three decades. Marlene Dietrich's transformation from spoiled princess to
castrating matriarch is played for both terror and sympathy, surface coolness
and buried passion, with weird injections of black humor from Sam Jaffe's
degenerate grand duke. Sternberg's mise-en-scene is, for once, oppressively
materialistic, emphasizing closeness, heaviness, temperature, and smell. With
John Lodge, Louise Dresser, and C. Aubrey Smith.
The Scarlet Empress,
directed by Josef von Sternberg | Film review Tony Rayns
Sternberg's penultimate film with Dietrich was the visual apotheosis of their work together: a chronicle of the rise of Catherine of Russia, with elements of burlesque and pastiche, conceived principally as a delirious, extravagant spectacle. (It could almost be read as Sternberg's homage to silent cinema, with its strong alliance of music and visuals, and its narrative relegated to intertitles; but it's also a prefiguration of Ivan the Terrible) Catherine begins as an ostensibly naive innocent, tucked up in bed to tales of the Tsars' atrocities, and winds up in male military drag, killing her halfwit husband, leading her cavalry into the palace, herself merging with icons of Christ. In other words, beneath the surface frivolities, it's tough stuff. The decor and costumes, and the mise-en-scéne that deploys them, have never been equalled for expressionist intensity.
Lovefest '07: Countdown and #10 The Exploding Kinetoscope
Von Sternberg's bitter and baroque films make a hideous
burlesque not just of humanity, but in The Scarlet Empress, of all human
emotion, except, perhaps, Dietrich-worship. It's a hard obsession to argue
with. Ostensibly, we're watching Dietrich document the evolution of naive
Princess Sophia into cold, hard, magisterial Catherine the Great. It is
certainly a wonder to watch Dietrich as the transformed Catherine, parading around
like a liberated badass in a world of trolls and worms: when Catherine is
revealed, she's the spectacle you bought the ticket to see. Captivating as she
is as a reborn Bad Motherfucker, fitting hilariously into von Sternberg's
gallery of grotesques is Dietrich's performance as Sophia-in-transition. She
plays every scene literally wide-eyed, and in a breathless proto-Monroe idiot
whisper. Dietrich doesn't drop her smoky eyelids until the woman is jaded and
self-possessed. Most fascinating to me is this would-be seduction scene in the
palace stables.
John Lodge as the concerned-but-horny Count Alexei is attempting to get into
Catherine's pants for the 2000th time, but now she's willingly come to him,
understanding his intentions; a sort-of-innocent, still undecided about taking
the plunge into personal agency by way of debauchery. Lodge's frustrated and
funny performance dominated their previous scenes, but this one's all in
Dietrich's hands, and it's her best physical performance moment in the film. The
playing is so weird and ridiculous we don't buy for a second that she's not the
sensuous, frankly oversexed Deitrich of our dreams. Bugging out those
mesmerist's eyes, she grabs an overhanging rope, awkwardly twisting her figure
into unnatural poses, absentmindedly at first, until she falls backward into a
haystack entirely on purpose. Avoiding eye contact with Alexei, she sticks a
piece of straw between her impossible, swollen lips, for no discernable reason
but an oral-fixation joke. When he plucks it from her mouth, she does it again.
And again. And again! She just keeps putting staw in her mouth and looking in
the opposite direction until Alexei and the audience are in a confused frenzy.
It's one of the strangest, grossest, sexiest and most absurd seductions scenes
in all of film. Yanking out the final golden blade, she gasps "if you come
closer, I'll scream." It doesn't sound one bit like she means it. Subtext
promptly becomes text, as Alexei growls "It'd be easier for you to scream
without a straw in your mouth."
They kiss, sure, but was that ever the point? The unspeakably tasteless
dirty-joke punchline is a beat later: a horse whinnies, Catherine panics and
flees in a cloud of dust. Now that's a make-out scene.
User reviews from imdb Author: John O'Grady from
This picture is absolutely one of the oddest damn things ever to come out of
the old
The
Scarlet Empress - TCM.com Lorraine
LoBianco
The collaboration of actress Marlene Dietrich and director
Josef von Sternberg had been a successful one, beginning with The Blue Angel
(1930) in
A highly fictionalized biopic of the German-born Russian empress Catherine the
Great, the film’s screenplay by Manuel Komroff was supposedly based on
Catherine’s diary. The original title was Her Regiment of Lovers to
capitalize on both Catherine’s reputation and Dietrich’s image as one of
Disagreements over costumes weren’t the only problems encountered during the
making of The Scarlet Empress. An English film The Rise of Catherine
the Great (1934) starring Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Elisabeth Bergner had
bombed at the box office. Another problem was von Sternberg himself. Malene
Sheppard Skaerved wrote, “The film failed spectacularly. In 1934, audiences
were not looking for imperial Russian excesses. The Great Depression at its
height, F.D. Roosevelt been elected to change the country’s fortunes and cinema
audiences cried out for homely escapism;
Dietrich was not spared von Sternberg’s abusive behavior. According to Diana
McLellan, von Sternberg and Dietrich had violent arguments that lasted for
days, with the two only speaking to each other on the set, and then strictly
when necessary. “So after three days of the silent treatment, she and Mercedes
[de Acosta, author and Dietrich’s reported lover] hatched a plot. Marlene would
fall off her horse on the set and pretend to be badly injured. Mercedes’ doctor
would be persuaded to take part. The ‘accident’ would stir up Jo[sef von
Sternberg]’s more agreeable sentiments.
It worked. The empress of all the
Mercedes’ doctor darkly reported that Miss Dietrich had fainted, “probably from
undue emotional strain.” Jo drove her home, giddy with relief. Marlene sent
herself flowers, “from Mercedes.” The Scarlet Empress was finished in
peace." All the emotional drama was in vain. When the film was released in
the
The
Scarlet Empress Criterion essay by
Robin Wood, May 07, 2001
The Scarlet
Empress (1934) - The Criterion Collection
Beyond Camp or the Politics of Persona: Josef von Sternberg's The ... Beyond Camp or the Politics of Persona: Josef von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress by Peter H. Kemp from Senses of Cinema, March 18, 2012
Mother Russia! Josef von Sternberg's Scarlet Empress on Criterion DVD Gary Morris from Bright Lights Film Journal, July 1, 2001, also seen here: Images (Gary Morris) review
Falling in love again - Bright Lights Film Journal Joseph Aisenberg, May 24, 2009
Auteur
in Distress: On Wallace Beery, von Sternberg, and Sergeant ... Tom Sutpen from Bright Lights Film Journal, February 1, 2006
Scarlet Empress: DVD Review – Offscreen Donato Totaro, October 2001
The
Film Sufi: "The Scarlet Empress" - Josef von Sternberg (1934)
The
Scarlet Empress - University of St Andrews
Ferdy
on Films [Roderick Heath]
Not Cominig to a Theater Near You [Beth Gilligan]
notcoming.com | The Scarlet Empress Matt Bailey
The
Scarlet Empress - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Robin Wood from Film Reference
World Cinema Review: Josef von Sternberg | The Scarlet Empress Douglas Messerli
Images -
The Scarlet Empress Gary Morris
Acidemic
Journal of Film and Media [Erich Kuersten]
The
Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem]
Criterion Reflections [David Blakeslee]
Classic Woman-centric Movie Review: “The Scarlet Empress ... Linotte Melodieuse
The
Ahistorical Fever Dream of The Scarlet Empress - Luddite Robot Rick Kelley
The Scarlet Empress (1934) Movie Review - 2020 Movie Reviews Richard Cross
The Scarlet
Empress | Mountain Xpress Ken Hanke
The DVD
Journal: The Scarlet Empress D.K.
Holm, Criterion Collection
DVD Savant Review: The
Scarlet Empress - DVD Talk Criterion
Collection
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3/4] Criterion Collection
dOc DVD
Review: The Scarlet Empress (1934) - Digitally Obsessed Criterion Collection
DVD Verdict (Barrie Maxwell) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
DVD
Review - The Scarlet Empress (Criterion) - The Digital Bits Todd Doogan
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review [Criterion Collection]
Radiant
at BAM: “The Films of Dietrich and von Sternberg” | Village ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice, April 2, 2014
The Brilliant Doomed Romance of Marlene Dietrich and Josef von ... The Brilliant Doomed Romance of Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg, by James Hancock from Wrong Reel
Melissa Anderson on the films of
Dietrich and von Sternberg at ...
Melissa Anderson from Artforum,
April 4, 2014
Marlene
Dietrich – The Exotic Allure Personified – Pre-Code.Com
Where
to start with the essential performances of ... - The A.V. Club (Film) Where
to start with the essential performances of Marlene Dietrich, by Emily
Withrow, October 18, 2012
User reviews from imdb Author: Scott holman
(findkeep@eburg.com)
User reviews from imdb Author: theowinthrop from United States
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
The Spinning Image Graeme
Clark
Classic
Film Freak Orson DeWelles
MovieMartyr.com
- The Scarlet Empress Jeremy Heilman
Retrospective
Film review: the scarlet empress | Spindle Magazine
Krell Laboratories [Christianne Benedict]
The Scarlet
Empress Movie Trailer, Reviews and More | TVGuide.com
Josef von Sternberg: The Scarlet Empress | Film | The Guardian Derek Malcolm’s Century of Film, May 25, 2000
Reel history:
The Scarlet Empress (1934) | Film | The Guardian Alex von Tunzelmann
The
Scarlet Empress Movie Review (1934) | Roger Ebert
New York Times A.D.S. also seen here: The Scarlet Empress - The New York Times
The Scarlet Empress -
Wikipedia
USA (79 mi) 1935
The Devil Is a Woman, directed by Josef von Sternberg ... - Time Out Tony Rayns
Sternberg's final film with Dietrich, as precisely aimed as a whiplash to the coccyx. Marlene is Concha Perez, cigarette factory girl, sailing serenely through a comic-opera Spain in a steely, deeply-felt analysis of male masochism. Sternberg adapts the same Pierre Louys novel as Buñuel did for That Obscure Object of Desire, but he does it from the inside, centreing on the experience of two men (a young revolutionary and an older military man) who love Marlene and compulsively submit to the agonies of being rejected by her. Even those who go only for the Dietrich glamour can't miss these underlying tensions, since the stoic acceptance of emotional pain undermines all the surface frivolity. Some will find the glittering cruelty sublime. Unique now, as it was then.
The Devil Is a Woman | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
Josef von Sternberg's final collaboration with Marlene Dietrich (1935) was out of circulation for many years, withheld by Paramount at the request of the Spanish government, which objected to the portrayal of the nation's officials as doom-ridden romantics. But the material world, of Spain or anywhere else, has little to do with Sternberg's creation, which remains one of the most coldly beautiful films ever made. Sternberg's universe is a realm of textures, shadows, and surfaces, which merge and separate in an erotic dance. The director's distant, serene gaze on the melodramatic action represents the closest cinematic approach to James Joyce's ideal of “aesthetic stasis.” The source material, Pierre Louys' The Woman and the Puppet, was used again as the basis for Luis Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire. With Lionel Atwill, Cesar Romero, Edward Everett Horton, and Alison Skipworth; John Dos Passos contributed to the screenplay.
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
It’s been 10 years since Susan
Sontag proclaimed that cinephilia was dead, an ironic milestone for a writer
whose best film writing keeps the flame burning. Sontag, who died last December
at the age of 71, made her share of wrongheaded pronouncements: "the death
of cinephilia" was doozy, and even "Notes on "Camp,'" the
1964 essay that established her reputation, now seems like a mass of
overstatements and mischaracterizations. (For one thing, while establishing
camp as a primarily homosexual sensibility, she neglected its potential as an
offensive, not merely defensive, weapon.) But if one were to judge Sontag
simply by compiling a list of the films she championed, the evidence would be
irrefutable that she was on the side of the angels.
For proof, look no farther than
this weekend's Sontag tribute, presented by International House and curated by
BAMcinématek's Jake Perlin. The series opens with Josef von Sternberg's The
Devil Is a Woman, whose "outrageous aestheticism" Sontag noted in
"Notes." In her last film with von Sternberg, Marlene Dietrich plays
Concha, an Spanish coquette who lures men to the edge of doom and then dances
away. Von Sternberg, whose obsession with Dietrich was personal as well as
professional, tended to set Dietrich free only to punish her in the end, a
hypocrisy that runs deeper than the mandates of the production code. Concha is
among the most light-hearted of Dietrich's sultry sirens, but that doesn't save
her from an offstage beating that is uglier for being concealed. If there's
nothing in Devil as excessive as the "Hot Voodoo" number from Blonde
Venus, which finds Dietrich emerging from a massive gorilla suit, the movie
still has style to burn, particularly the carnival scenes where streamers fill
the screen like undersea plants. (Von Sternberg handled photographic duties
himself.) Style of a more consciously artless sort will be on display
beforehand in the form of the six screen tests Sontag shot for Andy Warhol.
MoMA
| Josef von Sternberg's The Devil Is a Woman Charles Silver, curator of Film Department at
MOMA
Josef von Sternberg (1894–1969) has already been represented in this series by The Docks of New York (1928) and Morocco (1930). After The Blue Angel and Morocco, Sternberg went on to make five more semi-autobiographical films with his star and lover, Marlene Dietrich. In my judgment, the best of these were Shanghai Express, The Scarlet Empress, and the confessional The Devil Is a Woman. The films starring his “discovery,” Dietrich, are the centerpiece of the director’s career and represent perhaps the highest point achieved in cinema’s early sound era.
The Devil Is a Woman is something of a translation of the Sternberg/Dietrich relationship into visual poetry and metaphor. Dietrich steadfastly maintained that it was her favorite of the films they made together, and many observers have commented on the obvious physical similarity between Sternberg and his two male protagonists, Lionel Atwill and Cesar Romero. The film is neither as warm as Morocco nor as accessible as The Blue Angel. If it is perhaps the most perfect film ever made in some ways, its very precision conveys a coldness, a diamond-like hardness; the romanticism of Morocco transformed into cynical introspection and fatalism. If Sternberg is any closer to understanding Dietrich, he is unwilling to solve the puzzle for the audience; the film remains one of the most beautifully realized enigmas in the history of the cinema. If, as Ernest Hemingway said, Dietrich knew more about love than anyone, let us not forget her insistence that Sternberg taught her everything she knew. Indeed, in his marvelously entertaining autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, Sternberg comments, “No puppet in the history of the world has been submitted to as much manipulation as a leading lady of mine who, in seven films, not only had hinges and voice under control other than her own but the expression of her eyes and the nature of her thoughts.” Elsewhere he says, “Miss Dietrich is me – I am Miss Dietrich.”
The complexity of their relationship may be reflected in the film’s ornate style but not in its plot. One of the great virtues of The Devil Is a Woman, and one of the problems it has with audiences, is its compactness. There are no melodramatic subplots, as there are in Shanghai Express, to cushion the blows or sugarcoat the pill. The film is as raw as the emotions it portrays, as raw as the wounds Dietrich blithely inflicts.
Dietrich was to go on to work for other world-class directors (Borzage, Lubitsch, Hitchcock, Lang, Wilder, Welles), but she occasionally called out for “Jo” in a moment of desperation. She survived a period of “box office poison,” performed heroics at the front in the struggle to destroy her former countrymen, and did her extraordinary cabaret act in clubs and as “the Queen of Broadway.” In spite of everything, she always acknowledged her debt to Sternberg. The two actually appeared together at MoMA in the late 1950s. One afternoon in the 1970s, I returned from lunch to be told that Marlene Dietrich was calling me from Paris. In disbelief, I heard a slightly woozy voice (cocktail hour in Paris) requesting any documentation we might have from this appearance. (She was becoming involved in the production of Maximilian Schell’s documentary, Marlene). In the course of humble and awed compliance, I mentioned that I had written a small book about her and her films, which I would also send her. A short time later, I received back a handwritten letter thanking me and telling me “not to worry about all the mistakes in my book. You probably copied them from somebody else’s book.” I was thrilled.
After breaking with Dietrich, Sternberg’s career plummeted, only recovering spasmodically until his retirement in the 1950s. The Depression and World War II left the world with little inclination toward romantic mythology, and television would mostly sweep visual grandeur off the screen. For less than a decade, he was one of the Kings of Hollywood, and we can be grateful that most of his best work has been saved, although several of his silent films are missing.
Take note that our Weimar Cinema, 1919–1933: Daydreams and Nightmares show opens this week, featuring several lesser-known but important German films from the years 1919 to 1933. It’s an extraordinary opportunity to catch up on one of the cinema’s greatest periods.
The Film Sufi: "The Devil is a Woman" - Josef von Sternberg (1935)
Auteur
in Distress: On Wallace Beery, von Sternberg, and Sergeant ... Tom Sutpen from Bright Lights Film Journal, February 1, 2006
The Devil is a Woman 1935 - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Evan Kindley
Read
TCM's article on The Devil Is a Woman
Jeff Stafford
The
Devil is a Woman Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film Paul Sherman
Tough Love: The Devil Is a Woman (1935) | Nitrate Diva July 14, 2013
The
Devil is a Woman - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Jeanine Basinger from Film Reference
Review: Dietrich and von Sternberg at the Brooklyn Academy of Music ... Graham Fuller from Blouin Art Info, April 7, 2014
DVD of the Week: The Devil Is a Woman | The New Yorker Richard Brody, October 12, 2011
The
Devil Is a Woman (1935) | Journeys in Classic Film Kristen Lopez
Radiant
at BAM: “The Films of Dietrich and von Sternberg” | Village ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice, April 2, 2014
The
Brilliant Doomed Romance of Marlene Dietrich and Josef von ... The
Brilliant Doomed Romance of Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg, by
James Hancock from Wrong Reel
Melissa Anderson on the films of
Dietrich and von Sternberg at ...
Melissa Anderson from Artforum,
April 4, 2014
Marlene
Dietrich – The Exotic Allure Personified – Pre-Code.Com
Where
to start with the essential performances of ... - The A.V. Club (Film) Where
to start with the essential performances of Marlene Dietrich, by Emily
Withrow, October 18, 2012
Marlene
Dietrich: The Glamour Collection | Film at The Digital Fix Eamonn McCusker
Marlene
Dietrich: The Glamour Collection | DVD ... - Slant Magazine Dan Callahan
DVD Savant Review:
Marlene Dietrich: The Glamour Collection
Glenn Erickson
Marlene
Dietrich: The Glamour Collection - The A.V. Club (Film) Tasha Robinson
Of
Love and Other Demons: 'The Devil Is a Woman' (Josef von ... Justine A. Smith from Vague Visages
The Devil is a Woman
(1935, Josef von Sternberg) – Brandon's movie ... Brandon’s Movie Memory
The
Devil Is a Woman - Josef von Sternberg - 1935 - film review James Travers from Films de France
Marlene
Dietrich in "The Devil is a Woman" (1935) Classic Movie Favorites
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
The Devil Is a Woman (1935) - Josef von Sternberg | Review | AllMovie Craig Butler
Review: 'The Devil Is a Woman' - Variety
Josef
von Sternberg: the man who made Marlene sparkle - Telegraph Tim Robey, December 9, 2009
New York Times [Andre Sennwald] also seen here: The Paramount Presents Mr. von Sternberg's 'The Devil Is a Woman'
The
Devil Is a Woman (1935 film) - Wikipedia
USA (81 mi) 1952 co-director: Nicholas Ray, uncredited
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Not an entirely happy production - Sternberg, according to Mitchum, shot and cut it in such a way that characters kept walking into themselves, with the result that Nicholas Ray was called in to reshoot (uncredited) many of the action scenes - but still a delightful bit of RKO exotica. The thin story, set in the port of the title, sees Mitchum's drifter joining up with Russell's sultry singer and helping the local cops catch a criminal bigwig. But what is so enjoyable, apart from Harry Wild's shimmering camerawork, is the tongue-in-cheek tone of the script and performances, best evidenced in the sparkling banter and innuendo between Mitchum and Russell.
Film Noir of the Week Kristina
I remember a few
years back Macao was scheduled for the Film Noir Festival at
the Egyptian. Eddie Muller was the host and he told the audience he had called Jane Russell that day and told her the Egyptian was
showing Macao. Her response was “Why”?
Her less than enthusiastic response is easily understood once learning about
the making of the troubled RKO
production. I can understand why she’d probably just want to forget the
experience. The audience though sees the film differently, not having
participated in the taxing production and can accept the film as a good example
of the film noir genre, with the most interesting parts being the story of the
production and the opening scenes of the film..
Macao’s production
began after the success of the first Mitchum/Russell flick, His Kind of Woman, a better film than Macao in my
opinion. Howard Hughes
hired Josef
von Sternberg (who helped Dietrich
rocket to fame) to direct Macao, despite the fact Sternberg hadn’t done
anything recently. Perhaps Hughes was hoping to recreate the atmosphere of Shanghai Gesture which Sternberg had directed, but
more likely it was to propel Jane Russell’s star higher in Hollywood. Sternberg
had all the right ingredients to start with: the very capable writing team of Stanley
Rubin and Bernard
C. Schoenfeld and a terrific array of noir actors including Mitchum,
Russell, Gloria
Grahame, Thomas Gomez,
Brad Dexter and William
Bendix. Unfortunately for the crew and the studio, Sternberg didn’t
play well with others and made the set quite unpleasant. A showdown ensued
between Mitchum and Sternberg and the director lost. He was replaced by Nicholas Ray after most of the movie (if not all of
the movie, depending on which source you read) had already been filmed.
Nicholas Ray and various members of the crew added dialogue and scenes and they
shot over most of the scenes, but some of the remnants of Sternberg’s product
are hinted at times through the use of unusual camera angles and lighting. Scenes
of Gloria Grahame behind beaded curtains, Dexter spying behind shuttered
windows, and Mitchum & Bendix shrouded by fish nets add to the veiled
mystery of Macao and were probably filmed by Sternberg. The final product is a
good, but not great, film featuring typical noir characters - a crime boss
(Dexter), his mistress (Grahame), an ex-serviceman on the run from the law
(Mitchum), a bad girl with a heart of gold (Russell), an undercover cop
(Bendix), a crooked policeman (Gomez), and a odd assortment of various
characters.
The opening of the story draws the audience immediately into the action and
into a romance between Mitchum and Russell. The pace is pretty tight in the 81
minute movie and besides a tidy plot we are treated to some snappy dialogue
including a great closing line (how’d that get by the 1952 censors?) and 3
songs by Jane. The story opens with a chase on a dock. The man being chased is
a New York cop & is killed. We see that Vincent Halloran (Dexter) is
involved in the murder.
Cut to Julie Benton (Russell) aboard a ferry. She’s broke and has hooked up
with a seedy salesman so she can get to Macao. The salesman gets a little
rough, even for Julie, and she throws her shoe at him, but it goes out the
window and hits Nick Cochran (Mitchum) instead. Nick comes into the room and
busts up the party. Cochran helps himself to a kiss from Julie and Julie lifts
Nick’s wallet. They land in Macao, Julie and another passenger, Lawrence C.
Trumble (self-proclaimed businessman of coconut oil, pearl buttons, fertilizer,
and nylon stockings) gain entry but Cochran is without wallet and passport, so
he has to check in with the local police, Lt Sebastian (Gomez). Sebastian
allows Cochran into Macao for the time being.
Sebastian is on Halloran’s payroll and tells him that Cochran must be
the cop sent in to finish the dead officer’s work of bringing Halloran to
justice since Cochran has no identification papers. Halloran’s casino, The
Quick Reward, attracts the characters from the boat – Julie gets a job singing
there, Trumble gambles, Cochran tries to find work there. Also at the Quick
Reward is Halloran’s girl, Margie (Grahame).
The major characters are now in place and the story moves steadily forward. I
want to leave some mystery for those who haven’t seen the film yet, even though
it is easily figured out, so that’s all of the story I’ll give.
The actors are good, but Grahame is somewhat underused. We see her but she
doesn’t get enough dialogue and that is interesting too because Nicholas Ray
was the clean up director and added extra scenes. Dexter is great as the
crooked casino owner with the hots for Julie. He speaks in a soft voice and
often with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Bendix gets to go a bit against
type in this movie, playing a relatively calm character. Male audiences will
enjoy Russell’s gowns, er that is cleavage, and take a look for that lame dress
rumored to weigh 26 pounds. Women will enjoy Mitchum’s charms.
Macao is a worthy entry in the noir genre, but some more mention must be made of
Howard Hughes involvement in the film. His obsession with Russell's wardrobe
and tactics he used while running RKO directly affected the quality of films
made during his regin at RKO. The days of RKO noir films like Crossfire, Out of the
Past, and They
Live by Night were over by 1952. Hughes had script and star approval
for all features by 1951 and the creative talents of the studio were not
usually permitted to make decisions. So, RKO's noir products of this era turned
out to be the type and quality of films like Clash by
Night, Beware,
My Lovely, Angel Face,
and the exception to this list of lesser film noirs - The
Narrow Margin (the best of the bunch from this period, Hughes must
have left his one alone). So, all said, Macao turned out pretty well
considering the chaotic production, switch of directors, and meddlesome tactics
of Hughes.
The Films of Josef von Sternberg [Michael E. Grost]
not coming to a theater near you review Thomas Scalzo
Macao (1952) - Articles - TCM.com Bret Wood
Riding
the High Country [Colin McGuigan]
Cinema
Romantico [Nick Prigge]
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
Macao Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film Jeremy Arnold
The DVD Journal | Reviews: Macao DK Holm
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Robert Mitchum, The Signature Collection
DVD Verdict - Robert Mitchum: The Signature Collection [Dylan Charles]
Classic Film Freak Orson DeWelles
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
User reviews from imdb Author: bmacv from Western New York
User reviews from imdb Author: James Hitchcock from Tunbridge Wells, England
User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: ackstasis from Australia
User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: Terrell-4 from San Antonio, Texas
User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: blanche-2 from United States
User reviews from imdb (Page 3) Author: Dennis Littrell (dalittrell@yahoo.com) from SoCal
Through the Shattered Lens [Gary Loggins]
Macao
- The New York Times Bosley
Crowther
aka: The Saga of Anatahan
aka: Ana-ta-han
USA (92 mi) 1953
Cine-File
Chicago: Patrick Friel
One of the great masterpieces of cinema, ANATAHAN may not be as well known as Sternberg's 1930's films with Marlene Dietrich, but it's a rich and raw culmination of the themes and stylistic attributes he had been pursuing since the 1920s. Made in Kyoto with an all Japanese cast and crew, ANATAHAN is the ultimate directors' film: Sternberg was in total control over all aspects of the production (a stark contrast to his previous film—the ill-fated, Howard Hughes-produced JET PILOT, which wasn't released until four years after ANATAHAN), including narrating the film himself. At the end of WWII a group of Japanese sailors is shipwrecked on an island where they find a solitary beautiful young woman and her companion. The narrative is less important as a story than it is as a framework that allows Sternberg to create a fever-dream of lust and temptation, jealousy and rivalry, which plays out in a time seemingly out of time. Not to be missed.
Anatahan | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
Josef von Sternberg once said that his films should be projected upside down, to allow the audience to better appreciate the pure play of light and shadow. He was joking, of course—his films do have a profound abstract beauty, but they also have much more than that—but in his final film (1954) he comes close to making this joke a reality, and the result could be his masterpiece. A more extreme degree of stylization is impossible to imagine: the Pacific island setting was re-created entirely in a Japanese studio out of cellophane and paper (Sternberg complained that he was forced to use real water), and the actors who perform this tale of shipwrecked sailors are Kabuki-trained Japanese. Distance is built into every aspect of the production, from the shadowed, filtered images to Sternberg's own voice-over narration, yet the feelings that emerge are incredibly pure and immediate: Sternberg seems to be photographing the absolute essence of human emotion. In English and purposely untranslated Japanese.
Restored at Last, von Sternberg's Masterpiece ... - Village Voice Kenji Fujishima, January 31, 2017
Long celebrated but too
often difficult to see, Anatahan, Josef von Sternberg’s final film,
reemerges in a new 2K restoration from Kino Lorber — and what a strange and
still-radical swan song it remains.
Sternberg dramatizes a
real-life incident that found a band of Japanese soldiers stuck on the
eponymous island for seven years at the tail end of World War II and beyond,
re-creating the setting in a Japanese studio without bothering to cloak its
artificiality. Further adding to the alienation is Sternberg’s decision to
leave the wholly Japanese dialogue — delivered by Kabuki-trained native
Japanese actors — untranslated. But the director’s own English-language
voiceover narration gives the film a documentary-like flavor that clashes with
the stylization. The result is a film full of fascinating contradictions.
Anatahan plays as a near-anthropological study of
humanity pushed to the brink, with the soldiers slowly succumbing to power
plays, petty jealousies, and sexual rivalries the longer they’re trapped on
this island. But Sternberg’s eye for sensuality, familiar from his many
collaborations with Marlene Dietrich, is undiminished, especially in his ripely
erotic treatment of Keiko (Akemi Negishi), the lone female character.
Somehow, through all this
abstraction, the feeling of bearing sobering witness to the breakdown of
civilization comes through vividly. Though some of these people are rescued in
the end, the final sequence suggests that their newfound understanding of the
depths of human cruelty within themselves will haunt them for the rest of their
lives.
Sternberg in Full: Anatahan - Film Comment Scott Eyman, May 15, 2017
A few weeks before Kino Lorber’s April 25 Blu-ray release of Josef von Sternberg’s Anatahan (aka The Saga of Anatahan), an online writer mused that he didn’t know anybody who had seen the movie. As a matter of fact, it only received what seems to have been a token theatrical release in 1954, and later, in 1977, Twyman Films, a Dayton, Ohio, rental outfit, distributed the film in 16mm. Unfortunately, the bookings did not flood in.
My understanding is that in return for a partial investment and his professional services as writer, director, and cinematographer, Sternberg was given the Western Hemisphere rights. If so, it must have been a bitter financial disappointment.
It was a long ride down from Sternberg’s lofty position as one of the triumvirate that made up the directorial heart of Paramount, with Cecil B. DeMille and Ernst Lubitsch forming the other two points. After Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich broke up their legendary partnership in 1935, he moved nomadically through a series of studios to steadily diminishing returns: Columbia for Crime and Punishment (1935); Korda for the aborted I, Claudius (1937); MGM for Sergeant Madden (1939); United Artists for The Shanghai Gesture (1941), culminating as a glorified assistant to King Vidor on Duel in the Sun (1946) before his two (heavily reshot) films for Howard Hughes and RKO: Macao (1952) and Jet Pilot (1957).
Yet, with each failure, his arrogance only increased. Cinematographer Paul Ivano told me of Sternberg setting up a blackboard on the set of The Shanghai Gesture. Any member of the crew with a question had to sign in before Sternberg would deign to speak to them. The late writer Steven Bach was a student of Sternberg’s when he taught at UCLA, and got to know him outside of class. He said that Sternberg was one of the most profoundly unhappy men he had ever known.
None of these pictures have much of a reputation today, but I’d like to say a word on behalf of The Shanghai Gesture. The version available at present is missing about 15 minutes, but a few years ago I saw a print of the complete version and it was a revelation—the editing of the shortened version was done by lopping out entire scenes and sometimes the culmination of beautiful shots. The result was that the expressive downward arc of the characters was garbled. The film isn’t The Last Command or Shanghai Express, but it’s far from negligible.
Creatively, Anatahan is not a disappointment so much as it is a curiosity. It’s certainly in line with Sternberg’s primary narrative theme—a stunning, emotionally distant woman who leads men first to distraction, then destruction. A large part of Sternberg’s work is a competition for sexual subjugation, but he needed actors with an erotic charge to compensate for his naturally cold, ironic temperament. Because the men in Anatahan are wartime Japanese sailors who have washed up on an island after their freighter has been sunk by American planes, the scene is set for a sexually charged, Japanese version of Ten Little Indians.
And some of that process of elimination actually takes place. One man after another becomes the consort of Keiko, dubbed “the Queen Bee” in Sternberg’s narration, but only after they kill off the previous one. Keiko (Akemi Negishi) is mostly a passive observer, although Sternberg suggests that she thrives on the attention, which she actively encourages through discreet displays of nudity.
The years had not dulled Sternberg’s eye for female sensuality. With her decisive, pantherish movements that contrast with languid come-hither moments, Negishi is a worthy successor to Dietrich, Evelyn Brent, and Gene Tierney. The men, on the other hand, are indistinct and unremarkable—the battle between the sexes is slanted from the beginning.
The plot thickens when the sailors learn of the end of the war and refuse to surrender. Soon, more dead-enders just become dead, until the survivors finally agree to leave the island years after the Japanese surrender.
The film ends with a haunting coda, as the survivors joyously greet their families at an airport. Keiko’s deceased victims are there too, their faces impassive as they move from light into shadow—an ending that prefigures the joining of the living and the dead at the conclusion of John Ford’s The Long Gray Line, not to mention Robert Benton’s Places in the Heart.
Keiko, who has mysteriously disappeared from the island, is also there at the airport, unseen by everyone, her mournful aura separating her from the other survivors.
The problem with all this is that the story is not so much dramatized as illustrated. It’s basically a silent movie with (very good) musical accompaniment narrated by a single voice that handles the exposition and informs us of the emotional states of the characters.
Sternberg’s unemotional narration was obviously intended to be an integral part of the movie—the occasional dialogue scenes don’t carry any titles, so we’re left with the director functioning as a variation on a benshi with a bent for gnomic aphorisms that fall short of profundity: “All long journeys begin with one step” or “There are those who lead and those who wish to be led. There is not necessarily any other bond between them.” Anatahan is an auteurist’s wet dream, a Sternberg film in its totality—and the final one he directed in its entirety—but at the crucial cost of a distancing, a loss of immediacy. Passion is mostly indicated through stylized violence, not eroticism. The movie was expertly shot on a modest budget and features art direction reminiscent of the studios Republic or PRC—most of the backdrops involve nothing more complicated than a photographic blow-up with some palm fronds between the backing and the camera. But its lack of physical authenticity combined with its lack of emotional authenticity makes the film weirdly abstract.
It’s very much of a piece with the opaque nature of some of Sternberg’s later films and his 1965 memoir, Fun in a Chinese Laundry. He’s working in some private code, and he’s not particularly interested in giving the audience any information that might enable them to break said code.
In recent years, there’s been a lot of nonsense written about Orson Welles being an independent filmmaker, simply because his work proved so reliably uncommercial even when he worked in familiar genres. It seems to me that the mantle of an independent filmmaker hiding in plain sight is far more suited to Sternberg, whose films owe very little to conventional narratives or styles of storytelling. He stubbornly followed his fantasies of ritualized humiliation to their logical end: a proud marginalization resulting in creative silence, followed by death.
Keiko would have understood.
Hail
the Temptress of "Anatahan!" - Culture Trip Graham Fuller, May 20, 2017
Aspects
of ANATAHAN | Jonathan Rosenbaum
from Film Comment,
January/February 1978
PopMatters
[Michael Barrett] April 18, 2017
Anatahan | Film Review | Slant Magazine Carson Lund
Anatahan | Featured Screening |
Screen Slate Kazu Watanabe
Anatahan
(1953)| Review - IONCINEMA.com
Nicholas Bell
A
Pessimist Is Never Disappointed: Von Sternberg's Anatahan (1953 ... Glenn
Review:
Anatahan, 1953, dir. Josef von Sternberg | A Constant Visual ... Andy Crump from A Constant Visual Feast
Josef
von Sternberg's Swan Song 'Anatahan' and the Reduction of ... Daniel Schindel from The Film Stage
The
Restoration Revolution | Village Voice
Michael Atkinson, August 8, 2017
FilmFanatic.org » Anatahan (1953)
The Saga of Anatahan - film review - Louder Than War | Louder Than ... Jamie Havlin from Louder Than War
Blueprint: Review [David Brook] DVD review
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Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "The Saga of Anatahan" Glenn Kenny from Mubi
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[Jeremy Carr] Blu-ray
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Review: ANATAHAN (1953/58) – ZekeFilm
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The
Saga of Anatahan (1953) Blu-ray Review | Filmwerk Chris Hick
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The New Yorker: Richard Brody January 27, 2017
Combustible Celluloid Review - Anatahan (1953), Josef von Sternberg ... Jeffrey M. Anderson
Anatahan
Review (1953) - The Spinning Image
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Von Stroheim, Erich Art and Culture
Vienna-born actor, writer, and director Erich Von Stroheim worked mainly in the silent film genre (only one of his films was a "talkie"), but he seemed nevertheless to make a lot of noise. As an actor in Hollywood during World War I, he was often typecast as the leering, be-monocled Prussian villain. In his most famous role, he played Max Von Mayerling to Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond in the 1950s classic "Sunset Boulevard."
As a director, Von Stroheim was ahead of his time, making extravagant, over-budget films. The original cut of his epic, "Greed" (1924), ran over nine hours, but the film was later lopped to 140 minutes by the studio. Though he directed nine films between 1919 and 1932, he frequently encountered mid or post-production interventions from his financial backers. Only "The Merry Widow" (1925) was a redemptive success, focusing as did most of his movies on a story of decadent perversion in high society.
After numerous directing jobs ended as smashing failures, he returned to Europe and devoted himself solely to acting. Von Stroheim was stridently anti-establishment as an artist, his films obsessed with adultery and betrayal in an era of public probity. His "Greed" is a masterpiece of the silent cinema. Based on Frank Norris's novel, "McTeague," it captures the destitution of the American dream on a perfect black, white, and noiseless plain.
Erich
von Stroheim - Film Comment Jonathan
Rosenbaum, May/June 1974, republished again February 6, 2017, here: Second
Thoughts on Stroheim | Jonathan Rosenbaum
Preface
Total object, complete with missing parts, instead of partial
object. Question of degree.
—Samuel Beckett, “Three Dialogues”
Two temptations present themselves to any modern reappraisal of Erich von Stroheim’s work; one of them is fatal, the other all but impossible to act upon. The fatal temptation would be to concentrate on the offscreen image and legend of Stroheim to the point of ignoring central facts about the films themselves: an approach that has unhappily characterized most critical work on Stroheim to date. On the other hand, one is tempted to look at nothing but the films — to suppress biography, anecdotes, newspaper reviews, reminiscences, and everything else that isn’t plainly visible on the screen.
Submitting Stroheim’s work to a purely formal analysis and strict textural reading of what is there—as opposed to what isn’t, or might, or would or could or should have been there—may sound like an obvious and sensible project; but apparently no one has ever tried it, and there is some reason to doubt whether anyone ever will. Over the past fifty-odd years, the legend of Stroheim has cast so distinctive a shadow over the commercial cinema in general and his own work in particular that the removal of that shadow would amount to nothing less than a total skin graft; above all, it would mean eliminating the grid through which his films were seen in their own time—a time that, in many crucial respects, remains our own.
From one point of view, Stroheim’s films only dramatize problems of directorial control and intention that are relevant to most Hollywood films. They dramatize these problems, however, in a particularly revealing way: we remember his best works (Foolish Wives, Greed, The Wedding March, Queen Kelly) not merely because of their power—which is considerable—but also because of their will to power, which is always even more considerable. We are constantly brought up against the problem of considering his films as indications and abbreviations of projected meta-films that were either reduced and re-edited by the studios or, in the case of Queen Kelly , never completed in any form.
It is central to Stroheim’s reputation that he is valued today more for the unseen forty-two-reel version of Greed than the ten-reel version that we do have. And if history and legend have conspired to install Stroheim as an exemplary figure in cinema—virtually the patron saint of all directors who have suffered at the hands of producers—it is precisely because of this discrepancy, the gap between the power and control that was sought and the amount that was visibly achieved.
How are we made aware of this discrepancy? Certainly we sense it almost as much in Stroheim’s acting in the films of others as in his own projects—not simply because of all the dictatorial parts, from Prussian officers to assorted lunatics, but in the very style of his delivery, the very manner of his presence. Consider the sublime and all-but-hallucinatory tedium of his first role in a sound film, James Cruze’s The Great Gabbo, when he seems to speak each line at roughly half the speed of everyone else in the cast; here one can witness the will to power in a strictly temporal arena—the apparent desire to remain on the screen as long as possible—lending to the part of the mad ventriloquist an intolerable tension and demonic mulishness that go well beyond the melodramatic demands of the plot, as though he were pulling at his character like taffy to see how far it could stretch before breaking. Insofar as a single performance can be compared to an entire film, it is likely that the duration of the original version of Greed was motivated along similar lines.
The opening credits of Greed, The Merry Widow, and The Wedding March alert us to Stroheim’s aspirations before anything else appears on the screen: the first two are said to be “personally directed by Erich von Stroheim,” the third is labeled “in its entirety an Erich von Stroheim creation.” But if accepting Stroheim’s legend means submitting to a fiction —a supplement, in many cases, to the fictions that he filmed—denying it is tantamount to imposing another, alternate fiction. (However much we may ever learn about Stroheim, it’s highly unlikely that we’ll know enough to do away with fictions entirely.) Bearing this in mind, an attempt will be made here to isolate his legend whenever possible, but not to dismantle it.
I.
It is bad for man to believe he is more almighty than
mountains.
—Sepp (Gibson Gowland) in Blind Husbands
Some favorite devices, recurring frequently throughout Stroheim’s work: a long shot dissolving into a medium shot of the same character, a camera movement that turns a medium shot into a close-up, and an upward or downward pan taking in the whole body of a character. Each represents a different way of taking a closer look at someone—the first usually introduces characters, the second permits an increasing concentration of dramatic focus and detail (like the extraordinary track up to the face of Dale Fuller, the exploited maid in Foolish Wives, where we’re enabled to see revenge being hatched in her eyes), and the third is more in the nature of an inventory.
Eyes have an unusual authority in Stroheim’s films, and what is frequently meant by his “control of detail” is his uncanny gift for conveying information through an actor’s eye movements. How someone looks and sees is always a central character trait, and the story of each film is partially told in glances.
A memorable example occurs as one of the privileged camera movements in The Wedding March, when Mitzi (Fay Wray), standing in a crowd, looks up at Prince Niki (Stroheim) sitting on a horse, and an upward pan gives us her exalted estimation of him. We can trace this shot all the way back to Blind Husbands, Stroheim’s first film (1918), when Erich von Steuban (Stroheim) first encounters “Silent Sepp,” the local Tyrolean mountain guide. Each sizes up the other in a separate pan: Steuban looks at Sepp, a slow pan from feet to head; Sepp looks at Steuban, a slow pan from head to feet. The central metaphysical conceit of the plot is hung on these two camera movements. Significantly, they are repeated in different but related contexts near the end: a slow pan all the way up the mountain on which the climactic struggle will take place, introduced as “The Pinnacle” (Stroheim’s own original title for Blind Husbands,) and which Dr. Armstrong (Sam de Grasse) and Steuban are about to ascend; and in the midst of this struggle, while Armstrong stands over Steuban, clenching him by the throat—a slow pan from Steuban down the mountain to the rescue party of soldiers and others, including Sepp, making their way up.
From top to bottom, from bottom to top: thematically and dramatically, all of Stroheim’s films refer to this basic pattern. Blind Husbands provides at best only a rough sketch of what is to follow, but the essential lines are already there. Sepp is the pinnacle, the higher aspiration, and also something of a dumb-ox innocent, earthy and inert, who prevents Steuban from seducing Mrs. Armstrong (Francelina Billington) by appearing in the hotel corridor at just the right moment. (A cryptic monk appearing out of a rain storm in Foolish Wives functions identically.) Steuban is the depths, the lower aspiration, the grim, deadly, and well-dressed seducer, full of bluff and pretension. In between stand the Armstrongs, an American couple, naive without being simple or wise (like Sepp), adventurous without being irresponsible or pretentious (like Steuban)—two freefloating characters who are, by extension, ourselves: likable zeros susceptible to the influences of a Sepp or a Steuban.
These and several other characters in Blind Husbands represent archetypes traceable back to the nineteenth-century novel. The credits indirectly acknowledge this heritage by claiming that the film is derived “from the book The Pinnacle by Erich von Stroheim,” an apparently imaginary work that no visible research has ever uncovered—much like the book Foolish Wives that the heroine of that film is shown reading [see above]. If the “realist” tag assigned to Stroheim often seems today like an outdated literary category—and one that might make Stroheim seem more outdated than he actually is—this is equally the case with his first literary models, Zola and Norris. The fictional worlds of all three are so charged with metaphysical forces and intimations of fatality that the “realism” they project is not one in which free will predominates; characters are usually doomed to be what they are by class and social position, heredity, mysterious turns of fate, or some malign combination of all three.
Steuban and the Armstrong couple can easily be seen as first drafts of Karamzin and the Hughes couple in Foolish Wives—an elaborated remake in many respects. (The Devil’s Passkey, made during the interval between the two, is a lost film today, but existing synopses indicate it to be another version of the same plot, which remained with Stroheim for years: Stroheim completed a new script based on Blind Husbands in 1930, which he planned to film in sound and color.) But the distance traversed between Stroheim’s first and third film is cosmic, even though only three years separate them. Vaguely sketched essences of character and locale became “three-dimensional” embodiments—not merely ideas expressed, but ideas incarnated—and we leap from an apprentice work to something closely approximating a mature style.
II.
They are showing only the skeleton of my dead child.
—Stroheim after the release of Foolish Wives
Comparing the Italian and American prints of Foolish Wives in Cahiers du Cinéma no. 79, Jacques Rivette observed that they differ not only by length, order of sequences, and editing within scenes, but also by the fact that they don’t always have identical takes of the same shots. He offers the very plausible hypothesis that the longer Italian version corresponds much more closely to Stroheim’s, while the American print is the version recut by Universal after the film’s New York premiere. It seems quite possible—I haven’t seen the American print in a few years—that the remarkable close-up of Dale Fuller’s storytelling eyes and the fire/fire-truck montage, as described here, exist only in the Italian version.
A particularly troubling problem with both versions is the absence of what must be considered the film’s climactic sequences: the rape of Ventucci’s half-witted daughter (Malvine Polo) by Karamzin—or “Karamazin,” according to Thomas Quinn Curtiss—resulting in the murder of Karamzin by Ventucci (Cesare Gravina); and after Ventucci’s depositing of Karamzin’s body in a sewer (visible in both versions), the corpse shown at dawn in the midst of garbage floating out to sea; and Mrs. Hughes giving premature birth to a child, which brings about a reconciliation with her husband. (These scenes are all indicated in Stroheim’s synopsis.) Lacking these scenes, our understanding of Karamzin’s function in the film remains incomplete. Unless we can see the contrast between his magisterial first appearance by the Mediterranean and his exit as “rubbish” in the same setting, the trajectory of his scurrilous career is not fully articulated. And without the birth of the Hughes’s child —apparently suggesting a quasi-mystical resurgence of life out of the ashes of corruption—his death fails to achieve the proper resonance. But despite these and other regrettable lacunae, Karamzin remains Stroheim’s most complex and fascinating character outside of Greed, and provides the occasion for his definitive performance.
The differences between Karamzin and Erich von Steuban are so closely related to the differences between Stroheim’s authority as a director in each film that it is difficult not to see both characters as partial autobiographical counterparts. Karamzin displays all the low traits of Steuban, from vanity to cowardice, but two crucial characteristics are added: he is an impostor; and he is mainly out for money. Moreover, he is something of a professional con man while Steuban is at best a promising novice in the arts of deception, too often a fumbler to convince us that he is truly malignant. Both characters are identified with an “artistic” sensibility: one of Steuban’s ploys with Mrs. Armstrong is to play soulfully on the violin along with her piano, while Foolish Wives invites us to relish Karamzin’s more subtle methods of enticement, delight in his grander fabrications.
A classic instance of Stroheim as trickster: the episode of the armless veteran. Already, in contrast to Blind Husbands, he is firmly establishing a very specific milieu and period in which to locate his story—Monte Carlo just after the War, where veterans on crutches and kids playing soldiers (some of whom seem to mock and “see through” Karamzin’s postures) form an essential part of the background. Because we don’t realize that the stolid man who, early in the film, neglects to pick up Mrs. Hughes’s gloves is armless, we assume that he’s around merely to indicate the kind of courtesy that she’s accustomed to receiving, and to provide Karamzin with an opportunity to display his own gallantry. The second time the man appears, exhibiting similar behavior in an elevator, we might imagine him to represent some sort of running gag. Then, when we discover he is armless, we are brought up short, and moved to pity: a strong ironic point has been scored. But Stroheim refuses to stop there. As Mrs. Hughes proceeds to fondle and caress one of the veteran’s armless sleeves, pity quickly turns into disquieting morbidity, and what we’ve previously been led to ignore we’re now obliged to dwell upon. In a brief instant that illuminates the rest of the film, comedy turns into tragedy and the tragedy becomes a fetish. It is a remarkable transformation of tone, created throughout by a series of false narrative expectations…If Blind Husbands squats somewhere uncomfortably between a “symbolic” play and a cheap novella, Foolish Wives all but invents the novelistic cinema.
How does Foolish Wives resemble a nineteenth-century novel? By turning the spectacle of Griffith into an analysis of social and psychological textures—Monte Carlo was his Intolerance set—Stroheim asks us to move around in his frames and episodes in a way that grants us some of the freedom and leisure of a reader’s experience. Griffith’s suspense montage has enough Kuleshovian (and Pavlovian) effects to deny the spectator the opportunity to use much of his intelligence. This creates momentum, to be sure, but Stroheim usually sweeps the spectator along with a different kind of persuasion. Griffith either lulls or harasses you into the role of just plain folks; Stroheim starts with the assumption that you’re witty, discerning, and twice as sophisticated as the fellow sitting next to you. Karamzin may be a sneak fooling that American ambassador and his wife with his phony credentials, but he doesn’t fool us.
We hate him because he is evil; we love him because we know him: that’s probably why we love to hate him. Stroheim loves to hate him too; it is something he is sharing with us as much as showing us. It is a very strange process: what the actor creates, the filmmaker annihilates and the portrait is as merciless as the character. He is confidential about what he shows us, like a novelist; he tells us the kind of things that are going on behind closed doors, when certain people are out of earshot. He wins our confidence by telling us secrets.
III.
I had graduated from the D.W Griffith school of filmmaking and
intended to go the Master one better as regards film realism. In real cities,
not corners of them designed by Cedric Gibbons or Richard Days, but in real
tree-bordered boulevards, with real streetcars, buses and automobiles, through
real winding alleys, with real dirt and foulness, in the gutters as well as in
real castles and palaces . . . I believed audiences were ready to witness real
drama and real tragedy; as it happens every day in every land; real love and
real hatred of real men and women who were proud of their passions.
—Stroheim, date unknown
It is witty for Godard to suggest that Méliès made documentaries, and rewarding to look at Feuillade’s films under that aspect; but Stroheim turned the fiction film into the documentary in a much more central and decisive way. He did this above all in Greed, and not so much through “stripping away artifice” as by reformulating the nature that his artifice was to take.
This was not simply a matter of shooting Greed on locations. More crucially, it was a direct confrontation with the challenge of adapting a literary work. McTeague is a work of fiction that impressed Stroheim and his contemporaries for its “realism”; by attempting to arrive at an equivalent to this literary mode, Stroheim wound up having to deal exhaustively with all of the essential problems inherent in adapting any fictional prose work.
There was certainly no filmmaker prior to Stroheim who attacked these problems in quite so comprehensive a manner, and it is arguable whether there has been anyone else since. For this reason alone, Greed remains a laboratory experiment of the first importance — valuable for its failures as well as its successes, and comprising a virtual textbook on some of the formal issues that it raises.
When Stroheim filmed Greed, Kenneth Rexroth tells us in the Signet edition of Norris’s novel, “he is said to have followed McTeague page by page, never missing a paragraph. We’ll never know because the uncut Greed, greatest of all movies, is lost forever.” To understand the important aspects of Stroheim’s adaptation, the first step is to dismiss hyperbole of this sort and work with the materials available: the novel, Stroheim’s screenplay,[1] the version of Greed that we do have, and the existing stills of scenes that were cut from the film.
The first thing that the published script tells us is that an enormous amount of material has been added to the novel, particularly in the opening scenes. About sixty pages—nearly one-fifth of the screenplay—pass before we reach McTeague eating his Sunday dinner at the car conductors’ coffee joint, the subject of Norris’s first sentence. Mac’s life prior to his arrival in San Francisco is conveyed by Norris in a brief resume of two paragraphs; in the script it consumes twenty-five pages. A brilliantly designed sequence that runs even longer, and is completely missing from the final version of the film, introduces us to all of the major characters on a “typical” Saturday afternoon that precedes the novel’s opening.
Interestingly, this sequence is largely constructed around cross-cutting between characters whose inter-relations in the plot have not yet become clarified —and in the case of Mac and Trina, between characters who have not yet even met —so that the juxtapositions are unusually abstract, even from a thematic point of view. As an approach to narrative that was already common to prose fiction but far from being a convention in cinema, this is probably the most “advanced” and experimental departure in the script: nearly everything that takes place is descriptive and inconsequential as plot, and each character is linked into an overall pattern of significance that nothing in the story has yet justified. Harry Carr, one of the only people who saw Greed in its complete form, may have had this sequence partially in mind when he compared the film to Les Misérables and remarked that “Episodes come along that you think have no bearing on the story, then twelve or fourteen reels later, it hits you with a crash.” (Motion Picture Magazine, April 1924.)
Undoubtedly the most problematical element in Stroheim’s adaptation is its use of repeated symbolic motifs—shots of gold, greedy hands, animals and other emblems—which seem to be a direct misapplication of literary principles to cinematic structures. The recurrent image in McTeague of Mac’s canary “chittering in its little gilt prison”—a phrase repeated with slight variations in many contexts, before it appears as the final words in the novel—works symbolically and “musically” because it is laced smoothly into the thread of the narrative, with no breaks in discourse or syntax. But in Greed, the repeated images have the disadvantage of interrupting the narrative, usually without adding any useful perspectives to it: they are like footnotes that mainly say “Ibid.” In their limited use in the film that we have and their implied use in the script, they tend to seem like dead wood clinging to the rest of the film.
The script further leads us to suspect that many of the motifs are repeated without variation—like the mother rocking the cradle in Intolerance—and occasionally without any naturalistic explanation, like the shot of wood being sawed, which recurs no less than eight times during the wedding sequence. Such a shot is a purely abstract intrusion, but not one that serves to expand the narrative; like Tolstoy’s historical arguments in War and Peace, it seeks to contract the total picture into a graspable, didactic design. And it fails, one can argue, for roughly the same reason that Tolstoy fails—because Stroheim has more to show than he has to say. The world he creates in the wedding sequence alone overwhelms anything he has to say about it: it is too rich to accommodate supplementary lessons.
Which brings us back to the “realism,” the documentary aspect of Greed. Clearly one of its most extraordinary aspects remains the unusual conviction of the performances, which is apparent even in the random instants offered by stills. Look at any frame enlargement from Greed showing ZaSu Pitts, Gibson Gowland or Jean Hersholt and you’ll see not a familiar actor “playing a part,” but a fully rounded character existing—existing, as it were, between shots and sequences as well as within them (or such is the illusion). How many films in the history of acted cinema would pass this elementary litmus test? Certainly not Citizen Kane; perhaps The Magnificent Ambersons, a film whose achievement (and mutilation) parallels that of Greed in many important respects.[2]
One recalls André Bazin’s famous remark about Stroheim: “In his films reality lays itself bare like a suspect confessing under the relentless examination of the commissioner of police. He has one simple rule for direction. Take a close look at the world, keep on doing so, and in the end it will lay bare for you all its cruelty and its ugliness. One could easily imagine as a matter of fact a film by Stroheim composed of a single shot as long-lasting and as closeup as you like.”
This is the spirit of documentary—a tendency that is equally present in Stroheim’s introduction of outside chance elements into his fictions. It’s not so much a matter of letting random accidents creep into the staged actions (as in Léonce Perret’s 1913 melodrama L’Enfant de Paris, when a friendly dog wanders into a shot at the heels of an actor) as a sort of semi-organized psychodrama, exemplified in a scene missing from current prints of Greed: When Trina discovers Maria Macapa with her throat slit, she runs out of Zerkow’s junk house and hysterically reports the murder to the first people she sees. Stroheim shot this sequence with hidden cameras, and the responses came from passersby who were not aware that a film was being made. When Samuel Fuller used a similar technique at the beginning of The Crimson Kimono (1959) and Godard followed the hero of Le Petit soldat (1960) down the streets of Geneva holding a gun, they were drawing on a common principle that Stroheim had already made extensive use of thirty-five years ago.
IV.
O Love—without thee marriage is a savage mockery.
—opening title of The Wedding March
Greed stands at roughly the halfway point in Stroheim’s fifteen-year career as a director, constituting both a caesura and a change of direction in his oeuvre. Four features precede it[3] and four follow it, and beneath the continuity of certain undeniable stylistic and thematic traits, Stroheim’s preoccupation with realism, his concern with narrative, and the nature of his ambition all undergo important transformations.
The first thing to be said about The Merry Widow, the film immediately following Greed, is that it represents a nearly total inversion of the former’s approach: after filming his least compromised, most “realistic” work, he promptly made a film that was his most compromised and least “realistic.” At its best, The Merry Widow has a lightness of touch and a grace of movement suggesting a presound musical, with an idealized fairy-tale landscape (clearly established in the opening shots) that necessitates a very different kind of discourse. The most striking offbeat elements in this Hollywood dream bubble—Prince Mirko (Roy D’Arcy) and Baron Sadoja (Tully Marshall)—figure in the overall scheme in a way that is analogous to the “marginal notations” of irreverence that characterize most of Buñuel’s films in the Fifties: they offer ironic swipes at the conventional aspects of the material without ever seriously threatening the root assumptions of these conventions.
Prince Mirko is an obvious derivation of Erich von Steuban and Count Karamzin, but his role here is not as central: as a foil to the romantic figure of Prince Danilo (John Gilbert), he can not wield the same kind of lethal authority. Similarly, the more grotesque part of Baron Sadoja—a “first draft,” as it were, of the even more monstrous Jan Vooyheid, incarnated by Tully Marshall in Queen Kelly—is allowed to function as a grim commentary on the action and an intrusion on the central love story, but at no point is he really permitted to dominate the film.
Regarding The Merry Widow as a transitional work, one can perhaps best understand Mirko and Sadoja not as ”realistic” intrusions—they are anything but that—but as rebellious counter-fantasies provoked by the more conventional fantasies embodied by Danilo and Sally O’Hara (Mae Murray). If the earlier films were an attempt to subvert Hollywood from an outsider’s position—eliminating the characteristic romantic leads, and in the case of Greed, literally moving out of the studios to locations—The Merry Widow announces the counter-strategy of boring from within. There is more than one prefiguration of this procedure in The Merry Widow. The most celebrated instance occurs in the theater, when Sadoja, Mirko and Danilo each look at the dancing heroine through opera glasses: the first concentrates on her feet, the second on her body, the third on her face.
Another noticeable shift in Stroheim’s style is a somewhat different use of durations in relation to narrative. In the silent films after Greed, despite Stroheim’s continued interest in making long films, the novelistic aspect becomes less important, and the ritualistic, ceremonial aspects of duration gradually come to the fore—the obsessive desire to keep looking at something not in order to “understand” or “decode” it, but in order to become totally absorbed in it, transfixed by it; not to penetrate the surfaces of things, but to revel in these surfaces. As suggested earlier, the aggressivess of Stroheim’s camera eye ultimately leads to a kind of passivity. In the films after Greed, this change becomes much more explicit. The belligerent eye of the skeptic gradually turns into the passive eye of the voyeur.
This generalization tends to oversimplify a great deal of Stroheim’s work, and probably shouldn’t be taken as literally as it is stated above; but it does help to account for the peculiarly dreamlike elongations of actions and scenes in The Merry Widow, The Wedding March, and Queen Kelly. A simple comparison might help to clarity the difference: when the camera slowly approaches Dale Fuller’s face in Foolish Wives to reveal the revenge plans being formed in her eyes, the lingering effect has a purely narrative function, permitting us to watch a process more clearly than we could otherwise. But when the camera slowly tracks up to the face of Mae Murray in her wedding dress, and then recedes a bit to frame her entire figure as she proceeds to tear up the dress, we are being asked to concentrate on her primarily as an object; the “process” at work is chiefly the camera movement itself. We can intuit that the character’s visible distress leads to her act of violence, but the steps leading from A to B are implied more than chronicled. They are the scene’s justification, but not its major focus.
Nor is it just a question of the relative lack of virtuosity in Murray’s performance. Gloria Swanson’s performance in Queen Kelly is quite adept in its development and exposition of motives. But this is no longer the camera’s primary subject: virtually all of the characters in Stroheim’s last silent films exist as essences, fixed points of reference—“static essentials,” to borrow Pavese’s phrase. That Stroheim intended to show Kelly undergoing a complete transformation—from innocent to brothel madam to queen—must be acknowledged, but the evidence of this change was not recorded on film; it isn’t until Walking Down Broadway that we find a visible (if partial) throwback to a ”narrative performance” in the part of ZaSu Pitts as Millie.
The Merry Widow announces a more static view of action and character; The Wedding March and Queen Kelly, both epics of slow motion, expand and sustain it. It is hardly accidental that religious and military ceremonies figure so importantly in these films—they, too, are “static essentials.” The “realistic” impulse goes through no less pronounced a change: the European countries of The Merry Widow and Queen Kelly are fantasy kingdoms, and even the celebrated accuracy of detail in the Vienna of The Wedding March is subject to fanciful additions. “I am through with black cats and sewers,” Stroheim is reported to have said while making the film. “I am going to throw perfumed apple blossoms at the public until it chokes on them. If people won’t look upon life as it is, we must give them a gilded version.”
And a gilded version is what The Wedding March* supplies. Even though the villain Schani (Matthew Betz), a pigsty and a slaughterhouse are all clearly intended to offset the apple blossoms, these supposedly “realistic” elements are just as idealized as the romantic ones. Next to Stroheim’s other villains, Schani is a crude cardboard cutout who is never allowed to expand beyond a few basic mannerisms (mainly spitting); and the other major characters—Prince Nicki (Stroheim), Mitzi (Fay Wray) and Cecelia (ZaSu Pitts)—are unusually simplistic creations for Stroheim.
One could be charitable (and many critics have been) by regarding the figures and themes of The Wedding March as mythic distillations of their counterparts in previous Stroheim films; or one can be less charitable and regard them as inert calcifications — rigid prototypes whose original raison d’être is lacking. The Wedding March is generally accorded a high place in the Stroheim canon, and it must be admitted that it has a magisterial, “definitive” quality that is missing from most of his other work. But speaking from a minority viewpoint, I might argue that a certain price has to be paid for this rather self-conscious classicism. Apart from rare scenes-like the remarkably subtle exchange of looks and gestures between Nicki and Mitzi during the Corpus Christi procession, the action, characters, and symbolic motifs (e.g., the Iron Man) are so schematically laid out that they assume a certain thinness; investigation is consistently bypassed for the sake of a polished presentation, and the eighth time that we see Schani spit could just as functionally be the second time or the ninth.
Seen purely on its own terms, The Wedding March is undeniably an impressive work. Offering us spectacle more than drama, it is a stunning display of lavishness and an ironic commentary on a particular kind of royal decay lurking underneath. It is only when we place it alongside Foolish Wives, GreedQueen Kelly that we can understand its limitations. What these films (and even the others, to lesser degrees) possess that The Wedding March lacks is an acute sense of transgression. And it is precisely this sense that makes Queen Kelly, for all its own limitations, a more pungent and exciting work. If The Wedding March converts many of the familiar Stroheim themes into a series of dry homilies and mottoes, all suitable for immediate framing, Queen Kelly converts many of these same themes into a species of delirium—a possessed work of hypnotic, almost hallucinatory intensity. In contrast to the icy elegance of The Wedding March, Queen Kelly breathes fire.
It is trashy, yes; but in the best sense, like Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk and Faulkner’s Sanctuary. And at certain moments it achieves an elegance of its own, an elegance recalling that of a Nathanael West or a Georges Bataille, at least in stylistic control and continuity.
Which is not to praise Queen Kelly for its literary qualities: it has none, or at least no more than Stroheim’s novels like Paprika do. On the contrary, Greed and location work aside, it is the most “cinematic” of his films, the one most alive to the medium’s formal possibilities. The lighting is his most richly orchestrated, the camera moves about with an unprecedented freedom (assuming the hero’s angle of vision, for instance, as it scans the doors in the convent for Kelly’s room), and the use of duration has never been quite as operative as it becomes here. Queen Kelly is Stroheim uncensored—that is to say, more kinky, due to the effect and implications of the durations, than he probably ever intended it to be.
The unnatural protraction of the fireside seduction scene and (most particularly) the marriage of Kelly to Jan Vooyheid over the figurative and literal corpse of her aunt, would probably seem more sentimental and less carnal if they were trimmed down to conventional lengths. As they stand, they tend to create an emotional detachment in the spectator by making the actors and settings into purely aesthetic objects, delectable or abhorrent surfaces arranged in such a way that the possibilities of identifying with them or sentimentalizing them are decreased. Considering the increase in sentimentality in all of Stroheim’s films after Greed, this is rather a throwback to the dryer, more “scientific” style of his earlier period, but here it is exercised on a fictional world that is substantially more metaphysical and dreamlike, and less concerned with sociological and psychological matters. Queen Kelly is probably the closest thing in the Stroheim canon to an abstract work, a self-enclosed film that secretes its own laws. The sense of transgression that we experience in the previous films is always grounded in morality; here it seems to come to life as a direct expression of the id—as when Queen Regina (Seena Owen) beats Kelly with a whip across an enormous hall, down a grand flight of steps, and out the door of the palace—and morality mainly seems to figure in the action like the memory of a bad dream.
Unconsummated lust, a sustaining leitmotif throughout Stroheim’s work—a stale-mated struggle reflected in the pull between the nineteenth and twentieth-century aspects of his art—is finally stretched out into a slow-motion revery that is studied as if it were taking place under a microscope. Vooyheid is even literally seen as an insect, when he appears in the final marriage-and-death sequence comprising the recently discovered “African footage”: a scarred preying mantis on crutches, with a cigar in his teeth (or fist) and various objects sticking out of his pockets like additional legs, and a tongue that moves over his lips like a feeler.
He and Kelly stand on opposite sides of the aunt’s deathbed; a wedding veil is fashioned out of a bed awning by some local prostitutes. Intercut with close-ups of Kelly in tears are shots of the black priest—who, like her, is dressed in white from her viewpoint, blurring (to suggest tears) and then turning into an image of Prince Wolfram in white robes; another blur, and the Prince is in a black uniform; still another blur, and we return to the black priest in white. When her aunt expires, Kelly throws herself down on the body; the priest kneels; and then Vooyheid, who is kneeling, slowly raises himself on his crutches until he is the only figure standing.
As far as the silent cinema is concerned, this Manichaean spectacle constitutes Stroheim’s last rites: an arbitrary ending, perhaps—it was certainly not the one he had in mind for Queen Kelly—but an appropriately emblematic conclusion nevertheless. With the death of the aunt, we arrive at the imminent loss of innocence and the ascension to power of pure evil—a lurid ellipsis and a suspension of possibilities that were already rather explicit in Blind Husbands. But the “message” is no longer, ”Watch out for him!” It has become, simply, “Look at him!” And were it not for the somewhat problematical footnote provided by Hello, Sister!, one might say that Stroheim’s career as a director ends at roughly the same time that virtually all remaining pretense of free will vanishes from his imaginary kingdom.
Epilogue
Do you like funerals? I saw the cutest one last Saturday… I’m
just a fool about funerals!
—Millie (ZaSu Pitts) in Hello, Sister!
Even in its mutilated, garbled, and partially reshot form, Hello, Sister!, the release version of Walking Down Broadway, is recognizably Stroheim for a substantial part of its running time. (See the factual/speculative reports of Richard Koszarski in Sight and Sound, Autumn 1970, and Michel Ciment in Positif no. 131, Octobre 1971). The “final shooting script” of Walking Down Broadway—dated 8/9/32, assigning story and continuity to Stroheim, and dialogue to Stroheim, Leonard Spigelgass, and Geraldine Nomis—helps us to understand some of the original intentions, but also suggests that even in its original state it would have been a minor Stroheim work. The absence of certain audacities and eccentricities in the release version—which include Mac (Terrance Ray) on a dance floor “[holding] up his middle finger at Jimmy,” jokes about Prohibition, and various things relating to Millie (such as her pet turtle Lady Godiva and her dialogue with Miss Platt, a middle-aged hunchback)—are somewhat offset by various banalities that are also missing. The ending of the film that we have is a standard Hollywood clincher; but it is hardly much worse than the one prefigured in the script, in which ”Peggy and Jimmy walk close to show-window and look. Wax baby in Nurses’ arms—as before —except window is dressed for Easter.” Peggy says “(Motherly): Isn’t it cute?” Jimmy says “(Fatherly): Sure is!” And “They draw close together and look at each other admiringly.”
Much of the interest in Hello, Sister!! today derives from the opportunity to see Stroheim recasting many of his most familiar procedures in the context of sound. The repetitious character trait that would have been expressed visually in The Wedding March—e.g., Schani spitting—is conveyed here in the dialogue: Mac uses the phrase “Catch on?” nearly two dozen times in the script, much as Veronica (Françoise Lebrun) continually makes use of “un maximum” in Jean Eustache’s recent The Mother and the Whore. Elsewhere the dialogue often becomes less functional and tends to distract from the visuals. The Southern and New York accents of Peggy (Boots Mallory) and Jimmy (James Dunn) are important aspects of the characters, but their narrative function is not controlled in the way that the actors’ visual presences are. When Jimmy provokes Millie’s sexual jealousy in a scene near the end by refusing her help (”You’re all right, Millie—but you wouldn’t understand”), the extraordinary expressiveness of ZaSu Pitts’s reaction—the way her eyes flare up at his casual dismissal—is as striking as the close-up of Dale Fuller already alluded to in Foolish Wives. (The relationship doesn’t stop there: both characters suffer from sexual rejection, and take revenge by starting fires which provoke the grand finales of both films.) But Pitts’s acting in this case becomes the subtext of the dialogue rather than vice versa, a classic instance of the way that sound films often teach spectators not to see; the mystery inherent in her character tends to be minimized by the “explicating” power of the dialogue, and what might have been twice as powerful in a silent context can easily escape attention here.
To some degree, the dialogue in Hello, Sister! only makes more explicit some of the schematic simplifications of character and situation that are constants in Stroheim’s work, negating some of the openness and the demands on the spectator’s imagination imposed by silence. In every silent Stroheim film but Greed, the sound of English or American voices invading the continental kingdoms would surely have worked as an alienating factor. Hello, Sister!, which relates back to Greed in many respects (Mac and Jimmy are derived from Mac and Marcus, and even a lottery figures comparably in the Walking Down Broadway script), is set in New York, and doesn’t have to deal with this problem—indeed, the accents and inflections here are aids to verisimilitude—but at the same time, the screen is no longer quite the tabula rasa that it was, and the characteristic Stroheim Stare (the trained concentration of the camera on his fictional world) recedes somewhat under the verbiage, which frees us partially from the responsibility of looking.
The major stylistic developments in Stroheim’s career took place between Blind Husbands and Foolish Wives. One can speak of additional developments up through Greed, but after that one can principally refer only to certain simplifications and refinements. This is surely characteristic of Hollywood cinema in general, where Howard Hawks can devote a lifetime to refining Fig Leaves and A Girl in Every Port, and even a director as “experimental” as Hitchcock is periodically forced to retreat to the formulas of earlier successes. In the case of a maverick like Stroheim, the miracle—apart from his remarkable early development—is not that he wasn’t able to develop his style after Greed, but that he was able to make further films at all.
And in order to do so, he clearly had to pay a price. Whether or not future work in sound films would have led to other stylistic developments is impossible to determine; at best, all that Hello, Sister! suggests is the desire to accommodate his style to sound rather than to expand its basic options. Considering its relatively small budget, Blind Husbands can be seen as another sort of accommodation; and in a sense the evidence of the best in Hello, Sister! is comparable. It marks Stroheim as a promising director.
Notes
1. Consider the close relationship between Mac’s and Trina’s loss of the Dental Parlors and the ultimate fate of the Amberson mansion (and the accompanying scenes in each film); consider the use of a closing iris to seal off an era when the Sieppes depart on the train at the end of Part I of GREED, with the retreating horseless carriage in Ambersons. Even the “real” explosion of anger between Gowland and Hersholt in the last reel of GREED, is matched by Agnes Moorehead’s “real” hysteria as Aunt Fanny in a climactic scene. Indeed, the primary contrast between these films (apart from the nearly two decades that separate them—a period that corresponds quite precisely, eighteen years, to the time that passed between the first appearances of McTeague and the Tarkington novel) is in the respective economic and social classes they depict.
2. Originally published by the Cinémathèque de Belgique in 1958; a somewhat copy-edited version has recently been brought out by Lorrimer, edited by Joel W. Finler. Finler, who has kindly assisted me on much of my research, has informed me that he has subsequently seen another, presumably later version of the script at the Cinémathèque de Belgique, on the basis of a quick examination, Finler estimates that if this was the draft used by Stroheim as a shooting script, the film would have been roughly an hour shorter than the version prefigured in the published script.
3. Regrettably, the only portion of the film that can be considered here is the First Part, as edited by Stroheim for the Cinémathèque Française in 1954; the Second Part, The Honeymoon, was destroyed in a Cinémathèque fire, and apparently no other copies survive today.
Erich von Stroheim | German actor and director | Britannica.com biography
Erich
von Stroheim - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films ... Roger Manvell profile essay from Film Reference, also seen here: Erich
von Stroheim facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com ...
Erich
von Stroheim - American Society of Authors and Writers extensive biography
Overview
for Erich von Stroheim - TCM.com
biography
Erich Von Stroheim |
Biography (1885-1957) - Lenin Imports
biography
Erich von Stroheim - Silent Era : People brief bio
Erich von
Stroheim [1885-1957] Page at Magic Lantern Video & Book ... profile page
Erich
Von Stroheim Movies List: Best to Worst - Ranker as an actor
Erich von Stroheim - Dr. Macro movie stills
Erich von Stroheim movie stills from Piero Scaruffi
Realism in film history - Realism - actor, children, movie ... origins of realism in cinema, from Film Reference
Erich von Stroheim
Collection | Old Time Radio
Erich von Stroheim - Fred Camper Stroheim’s review of CITIZEN KANE from Decision magazine, June 1941
Erich
von Stroheim - Film Comment Jonathan
Rosenbaum, May/June 1974, republished again February 6, 2017, here: Second
Thoughts on Stroheim | Jonathan Rosenbaum
The Story Behind "Queen Kelly" - UCLA.edu Peter Reiher, September 16, 1994
The Merry Widow • Erich von Stroheim • Senses of Cinema Adrian Martin from Senses of Cinema, December 12, 2002
Paradise Regained: Queen Kelly and the Lure of ... - Senses of Cinema Paradise Regained: Queen Kelly and the Lure of the ‘Lost’ Film, by Darragh O’Donohue, July 2003
Erich
Von Stroheim - Hollywood Star Walk - Los Angeles Times Susan King, January 9, 2005
The
Reckless Art of Erich von Stroheim Part One: The Pinnacle - Bright ... Tom Sutpen from Bright Lights Film Journal, February 1, 2007
Queen Kelly • Senses of Cinema Michael Koller, August 27, 2007
Great
Director #54: Erich von Stroheim | News from the Boston Becks June 19, 2009
notcoming.com | Oh, the Depravity! The Cinema of Erich von Stroheim Cullen Gallagher, David Carter, Evan Kindley, Ian Johnston, Adam Balz, and Brynn White, August 23, 2009
MoMA
| Erich von Stroheim's Foolish Wives
Charles Silver, curator of Film Department at MOMA, January 2, 2010
Erich Von Stroheim
retro at Film Forum (thru Jul 30) - Alt Screen Imogen Smith, May 28, 2012
Cruel and Unusual: The Exquisite Remains of Erich von Stroheim ... Harvard Film Archive, July 16, 2012
The Social Secretary (1916) A Silent Film Review Fritzi Kramer from Movies Silently, February 3, 2013
How
Erich von Stroheim lost his 1924 battle with the studio bosses ... Geoff Pevere from The Globe and the Mail, March 20, 2014
The
Merry Widow (1925) A Silent Film Review – Movies Silently Fritzi Kramer, March 23, 2014
Erich von Stroheim - The Hindu Srikanth Srinivasan, August 9, 2014
The
Heart of Humanity (1918) A Silent Film Review Fritzi Kramer from Movies Silently, September 6, 2014
Foolish
Wives (Erich von Stroheim, 1922) - Senses of Cinema Luke Aspell, March 18, 2016
Greed (Erich von Stroheim, 1924) - Senses of Cinema Frederick Blichert, March 18, 2016
Erich
von Stroheim's "The Merry Widow" At The Staatsoperette Dresden Maud
Nelissen (musical composer) from the Operetta
Research Center, September 5, 2016
1885:
A nice Jewish boy who would act the evil Hun is born - This Day ... David B. Green from Haaretz, September 22,
2016
NitrateVille.com •
View topic - WSJ: Erich von Stroheim's 'Greed ... Erich
von Stroheim’s ‘Greed’ (1924): When The Studio Said ‘Cut!’ by Peter
Tonguette from The Wall Street Journal,
reprinted at NitrateVille, November 25, 2016
“Beauty in the lap of
horror”: the Gothic appeal of Erich von Stroheim in ... “Beauty
in the lap of horror”: the Gothic appeal of Erich von Stroheim in Blind
Husbands (1919) and Foolish
Wives (1922), by Elisabetta
Girelli, August 16, 2017
Erich
Von Stroheim (1885 - 1957) - Find A Grave Memorial
Erich von Stroheim -
Wikipedia
Blind
Husbands | Chicago Reader Don
Druker
Erich von Stroheim's first solo effort as writer-director introduced audiences to Stroheim the leading man and to some of the filmmaker's characteristic themes: old-world decadence versus American naivete; the extremes of passion; the irony of honor. Minor when compared with the masterful Foolish Wives, this 1919 silent feature is nevertheless essential viewing, signaling the arrival of an authentic genius in American cinema. 70 min.
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) also reviewing THE GREAT GABBO
Erich von Stroheim's Blind Husbands (1919) was praised for its "realism," but not many noticed or anticipated its author's bizarre stylistic touches, which only increased with subsequent films. Blind Husbands contains all the usual Stroheim elements, including a lecherous count trying to worm his way into a married woman's graces. The story ends at the top of a treacherous mountain. And it's Stroheim's only film that was released more or less the way he intended it, minus his original title, The Pinnacle. But it's minor Stroheim, lacking in the scale, grandness and tragedy of his later films.
Kino's Blind Husbands disc also includes The Great Gabbo (1929, Kino, $29.95), an odd benchmark in Stroheim's career. It was his first talkie and his first starring role in a film that he did not write or direct. It's a kind of musical horror film with Stroheim playing a Svengalian ventriloquist who tries to lure his poor assistant back after she has dumped him and fallen in love with a more stable man.
The film's musical numbers grow increasingly bizarre, including the dummy singing the "yucky" song and a kind of spider-and-fly stage production. Like Bela Lugosi in Dracula, Stroheim was unable to shake the Gabbo persona and continued to play despicable villains for the rest of his career.
The
Erich Von Stroheim Collection - AV Club Film Keith Phipps, also reviewing FOOLISH WIVES and QUEEN KELLY
It takes a little
knowledge of film history to appreciate fully the richness of Billy Wilder's
decision to cast Erich Von Stroheim as the ex-husband and former director
turned butler to Gloria Swanson's faded silent-era star in Sunset Boulevard.
It wasn't the first time they'd taken turns bossing each other around. In 1928,
Swanson hired Von Stroheim to direct what was intended as a self-produced
masterpiece called Queen Kelly, the story of an innocent convent girl
(Swanson) who falls for a seductive European prince (Walter Byron) engaged to
insane queen Seena Owen, and eventually ends up in an East African brothel. For
Von Stroheim, it could have been a chance to redeem his reputation as an
egomaniacal spendthrift. Had history and its star's whims not gotten the better
of him, it might have done just that. But Swanson reportedly got squeamish as the
film grew more lurid, and, with the assistance of lover and silent financial
partner Joseph Kennedy, she fired Von Stroheim just in time to have its
commercial viability squashed by the advent of sound. For Swanson, who cobbled
together a hasty ending and released the film in Europe several years later, it
was the beginning of a long fade from the spotlight. For Von Stroheim, it was,
aside from a couple of half-hearted stabs, the end of his directing career. A
1985 restoration of Queen Kelly reconstructed from outtakes, stills, and
Von Stroheim's screenplay spearheads a three-DVD set of his films, and confirms
the folly of shutting the production down. As visually stunning as any movie he
made, it presents a lush, sensual world in which bottomless depravity and
innate virtue overlap, and frequently resemble each other. Queen Kelly
was only the final conflict for a director who saw none of his films survive in
their intended form, but with Von Stroheim, it's hard to separate the martyr
from the tyrant. Born in Austria, he remade himself in America, masking his
Jewish heritage with tales of his aristocratic birth and working his way up
through the ranks as a stuntman, actor, and assistant director under D.W.
Griffith. By the time he made Blind Husbands in 1919, he was already
famous as "The Man You Love To Hate," playing evil Germans to a WWI
audience hungry to despise the enemy. One amazing bit of footage from a
Griffith propaganda film (included in the 1980 documentary The Man You Loved
To Hate, one of the DVD set's many special features) has Von Stroheim
throwing a baby out a window for interrupting his concentration as he tries to
rape a Red Cross nurse. For Blind Husbands, he reprised that persona's
look—uniform, monocle, scarred eye, preposterously long cigarette—but made the
violence moral. Directing from his own novel, Von Stroheim stars as a decadent
officer eager to seduce a neglected wife. It's peerless melodrama carried out
with a pioneer's visual imagination, and it made Von Stroheim's name as a director.
It also gave him the chance to work on a bigger scale, a chance he ran with
until it destroyed him. Foolish Wives re-creates Monte Carlo in a
Hollywood back lot, reprising the themes of Blind Husbands while upping
the perversity. Playing a fraudulent aristocrat, in a touch that echoed his own
biography, Von Stroheim dupes the gullible, lusts after a retarded teenager,
and attempts to undo an innocent American. It's like a Henry James novel as
dreamt by a pornographer, and it illustrates what makes Von Stroheim such a
problematic genius: Is it nascent post-modernism or egotism run amok that made
him prominently feature a character reading a novel called Foolish Wives,
credited to Erich Von Stroheim? If this is the studio-trimmed version, why does
it still feel overlong? Sadly, such questions remain entirely academic: Like
the all-day version of his masterpiece Greed, entire, completed Von
Stroheim films have been lost, alongside most of his extra footage. But what
survived contains brilliance, as well as the lingering echo of an even more
thundering genius. Someone involved with Sunset Boulevard (whether
Wilder, Swanson, or Von Stroheim himself) decided that only one film could
symbolize the faded glories of Swanson's character, and with her the glories of
an entire age, in Sunset's famous screening-room sequence. That film: Queen
Kelly.
Boxoffice Magazine Wade Major, also reviewing FOOLISH WIVES, THE GREAT GABBO and QUEEN KELLY
For close to ninety years Erich von Stroheim has remained the quintessential manifestation of the megalomaniacal filmmaker -- an obsessive artist who, for better or worse, has become almost more legendary than any of his movies thanks to an unforgettable image of a crazed, monocled Teuton in jackboots with an extended cigarette holder chomped firmly between his teeth.
Until recently, however, there was little opportunity for the curious to examine his films and appreciate the diversity and artistry which is so often overwhelmed by the persona. But with Kino's three-disc "Erich von Stroheim Collection" all that has abruptly changed.
The three disc collection features four films and one documentary -- "Blind Husbands" and "The Great Gabbo" on one disc, the masterful "Queen Kelly" and assorted extras on another, and "Foolish Wives" and the documentary "The Man You Love to Hate" on the third. In total it represents the most insightful and complete study of the man and his work yet released to DVD.
"Queen Kelly" is the film most likely to capture people's attention. The legendary picture is known to vast legions of people who've never even seen it simply for the connection to "Sunset Boulevard." Yes, this is the old movie that Norma Desmond has projected when she's reliving her past glory. Those in the know are still tickled by the parallel of having Swanson and von Stroheim play variations of themselves in "Sunset Boulevard" only to then have the actual film that destroyed both their careers projected as the movie within the movie. The real drama surrounding the movie, however, is almost more intriguing than the movie itself. And it's all included on the DVD as part of the commentary by von Stroheim biographer Richard Koszarski. What's not commonly known is that "Queen Kelly" was also produced by Swanson with money from her then-lover Joe Kennedy, patriarch of the Kennedy clan and father of the president. So extreme was the pre-code nature of the picture's content at one stage that Swanson had it shut down. The unfinished film is presented here on DVD in its restored form for the first time ever.
In addition to the thrilling history provided by Koszarski on the commentary, the disc boasts Swanson's alternate and inferior ending, fascinating outtake material, screenplay excerpts and production documents and a restoration ending courtesy of Kino. But is it as great a masterpiece as has been rumored? The story is surely nothing spectacular with Swanson as a convent girl who is seduced by an engaged prince. It's the kind of obvious morality play that von Stroheim loved -- broad, melodramatic, hammer-fisted in its approach. But von Stroheim also knew how to work such material better than anyone in history. Whatever weaknesses and inherent cliches might doom it in the hands of a lesser director become attributes in von Stroheim's capable (and gloved) hands. It's a masterpiece, though not a masterpiece for all tastes.
"Blind Husbands" and "The Great Gabbo,"
made ten years apart in 1919 and 1929, present a tamer side of von Stroheim.
The former is a typical von Stroheim morality plan about a couple whose loving
vacation in the
"Foolish Wives" is the one title here that has been
released before, though in a separate edition from Image which features a
slightly different cut. It's not enough to change the story, but completists
will want both as the film's editorial history is something of a messy drama by
itself. This release pairs the 1922 silent with the definitive documentary on
von Stroheim, 1979's "The Man You Loved to Hate," written by
Koszarski and directed by Patrick Montgomery. "Foolish Wives" again
stars von Stroheim himself along with Miss Dupont in the story of a Russian
count who ensnares the wife of an American diplomat against the lavish backdrop
of
"The Man You Loved to Hate" is by no means as lengthy as a von Stroheim film -- it's only 78 minutes -- but it's as complete as it needs to be. Those who have listened to the two Koszarski commentaries will recognize his imprint on this as well -- it's concise, packed with fascinating detail and consistently compelling. The approach is nothing novel -- the standard blend of interviews and movie clips -- but the subject matter is so intriguing and the scholarship on the part of the filmmakers so complete that it actually transcends the limitations of the format.
Other extras of note: audio clips of von Stroheim's wife, Valerie, and producer Paul Kohner on both "Foolish Wives" and "Blind Husbands" as well as the 1944 radio broadcast of "The High Command" (on "Blind Husbands") and amusing New York Censor Board cuts notated on "Foolish Wives." The latter is also beautifully complemented by a spectacular performance of the original 1922 score by renowned composer and operetta legend Sigmund Romberg.
Image quality on all the titles is superlative -- time has left some unavoidable marks, but the effort that Kino has made in restoring and preserving these historic films, and then transferring them to DVD, is beyond reproach. As a result, the legend of von Stroheim not only survives but thrives.
“Beauty in the lap of
horror”: the Gothic appeal of Erich von Stroheim in ... “Beauty
in the lap of horror”: the Gothic appeal of Erich von Stroheim in Blind
Husbands (1919) and Foolish
Wives (1922), by Elisabetta
Girelli, August 16, 2017
Erich
von Stroheim - Film Comment Jonathan
Rosenbaum, May/June 1974, republished again February 6, 2017, here: Second
Thoughts on Stroheim | Jonathan Rosenbaum
The
Reckless Art of Erich von Stroheim Part One: The Pinnacle - Bright ... Tom Sutpen from Bright Lights Film Journal, February 1, 2007
Erich Von Stroheim
retro at Film Forum (thru Jul 30) - Alt Screen Imogen Smith, May 28, 2012
notcoming.com | Blind
Husbands - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
David Carter
Blind Husbands
(1919) Film Review & Synopsis - Obscure Hollywood
Edition
Filmmuseum Shop - Blind Husbands (Die Rache der Berge ... Paolo Caneppele and Michael Loebenstein
Film
Reviews: The Great Gabbo & Blind Husbands - critic picks w/alex ... Alex Udvary
Blind
Husbands (1919) Movie Review - 2020 Movie Reviews Richard Cross
Flicks - December 2007 Chris Dashiell from CineScene
Wild Realm Reviews:
Blind Husband Paghat the Ratgirl
Blind Husbands
- Erich von Stroheim - 1919 - film review
James Travers from Films de France
Silent
Volume: Blind Husbands (1919) Chris
Edwards
The
Erich Von Stroheim Collection - AV Club Film Keith Phipps, also reviewing FOOLISH WIVES and QUEEN KELLY
Blind Husbands
(1919) - Movie Reviews Simbasible
A
cinema history [J.E. de Cockborne]
also seen here: Blind
husbands (1919) | A Cinema History
Cinepassion.org
[Fernando F. Croce]
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Blind Husbands (1919)
directed by Erich von Stroheim • Reviews ... Letterboxd
Blind
Husbands (Die Rache Der Berge) - Gartenberg Media Enterprises
Blind Husbands
review - Silents Are Golden a
collection of reviews, including Variety
and The New York Times
The New York Times 1919 review
von Stroheim’s 2nd film does not appear to have survived
USA (141 mi) 1922
Foolish Wives | Chicago Reader Deve Kehr
Little more than half of Erich von Stroheim's 1921 film survives as he designed it, yet its epic view of postwar European decadence is still staggering. Stroheim stars as a bogus count plying the wealthy widow trade in Monte Carlo (actually a mammoth set built on the Universal lot, and equipped down to the last detail); when he seduces an American millionairess, her husband challenges him to a duel, and the count takes advantage of his last night on earth to rape the mentally retarded girl who's been placed in his charge. All of this is carried out in the name of high "realism," yet Stroheim's compulsions far outstrip the merely naturalistic. With Maud George, Mae Busch, and an actress billed as "Miss Dupont." 117 min.
Stroheim wrote, produced, directed,
starred in, codesigned, and cocostumed, but unfortunately didn't have final
cut. His original 6 1/2hr or so opus was, at various times, hacked down to a
mere 73. Though Stroheim's films were dark, the butchery was probably more due
to their uncommon sophistication. The film does for vanity what Greed did for
greed, as Von Stroheim is a charming false aristocrat trying to con the
fortunes of married American women who need (or at least think they do)
something their American husbands can't give them. It's also a stunning look at
decadent postwar Europe, which Stroheim spent loads reproducing. Supposedly
it's the first million dollar movie, and though this amount threatened to
bankrupt Universal in this case the overspending does add to the final product,
which more than passes for Monte Carlo. Again it's hard to tell if it's a
masterpiece or not given the amount that's survived, but the attention to
detail, the maturity of the story (both in terms of intelligence and sexual
depravity), and the effectiveness of closeups (granted he picked this up from
Griffith), and the sequencing are generally years ahead of their time. In
particular, the fire scene stands out for its modernity, utilizing editing to
show what's going on with the threat, the threatened, and the potential savior
to create something as effective as anything in Eisenstein's cannon.
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Erich von Stroheim (1885-1957) pushed the cinematic envelope early and found the glass ceiling that all film directors must duck under to this day.
He had a wildly epic vision of gigantic proportions, propelled by his own personal fetishes and desires. But film was and ever is a business as much as an art. And, as a result, nearly every one of his films was truncated or dismantled or diluted in some way.
Born in
Arriving in
Stroheim directed nine films during his career. One, The Devil's Pass Key, no longer exists, four (Foolish Wives, Greed, The Wedding March and Queen Kelly) were cut down to a fraction of their intended lengths and two (Merry-Go-Round and Walking Down Broadway) were taken away and finished by other directors. The final two (Blind Husbands and The Merry Widow) were released more or less as intended, though Stroheim complained about those as well.
His third film as director, Foolish Wives (1922, Kino, $29.95), may be Stroheim's greatest achievement -- at least the equivalent of Greed -- though it's also one of his most truncated. Originally envisioned at about 6-1/2 hours, the complete film today runs only about 2-1/2. It suffers from lost plot threads and the death of one of the leading men halfway through filming, but it's still Von Stroheim's most elaborate and spectacular film.
He also stars, adding another level to the cult of personality, playing Count Sergius Karamzin, a rogue involved with a counterfeit scheme. He lives in a mansion atop a high hill with two female "cousins," both of whom he is apparently engaged with sexually. He's also involved with the retarded daughter of his counterfeiter connection and drinks ox blood for breakfast. He spies an American woman (credited simply as Miss DuPont), the wife of a diplomat, whom he hopes to seduce and bilk for a considerable sum of money.
Von Stroheim always goes for the biggest, most bizarre setups and constantly indulges in all his most personal and twisted whims -- such as his fetishes for amputees and uniforms. These kinds of films usually frighten producers and distributors and rarely get made.
Also included on the disc is the excellent feature documentary, The Man You Loved to Hate (1980) -- which tells the story of Von Stroheim's roller coaster life and career -- and a commentary track by biographer Richard Koszarski.
Foolish Wives |
Film Review | Slant Magazine Ed
Gonzalez
Cineastes know that there are only a half dozen
botched works that can be indisputably referred to as cinematic Holy Grails.
One is the original print of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons,
believed to be lost somewhere in
Intended to run anywhere between six and 10 hours, most of Von Stroheim's films,
from Greed to the pre-talkie Swanson vehicle Queen Kelly (the
inspiration for Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, which stars Von
Stroheim as the fading star's butler), were severely bastardized by studio
heads upon their release. 1922's Foolish Wives begins with the perfect
iris shot. This is no ordinary "fade into" effect, but an entrancing
reinforcement of the sinister, insular and constrictive nature of the milieu
Von Stroheim is about to introduce us to. Because the man spent much of his life
hiding his Jewish background, it probably comes as no surprise that there's so
much lingering beneath the surface of his films.
In post-war Europe, a bogus Russian count, Sergius Karamzin (Von Stroheim), and
his two "cousins"-cum-mistresses (Maude George and Mae Busch) confer
with their pathetic counterfeiter before descending upon the wife of an
American envoy sent to Monte Carlo to meet with the Prince of Monaco.
Karamzin's business is destroying lives, and over the course of the film's
existing 141 minutes, he takes advantage of no less than three women: the
American Helen Hughes (Miss DuPont), his maid Maruschka (Dale Fuller), and the
counterfeiter's half-witted daughter,
The film features the most daring intertitles in the history of silent cinema,
and Von Stroheim uses their stream-of-conscious nature to enhance the film's
startling aesthetic shifts and to point to the politics at work throughout the
narrative. Karamzin is a monster, not so much because his "eyeopener"
is oxblood and his "cereal" is caviar, but because he understands how
to oppress others with sinister surroundings. Who knows what Universal suits
left on the cutting room floor, but you get a sense that Karamzin knew poverty
once. "Dense Marshes—Slimy—Sombrous—Betraying—Then—Night." The count
uses darkness to scare and seduce Helen, who defends her weakness to her
husband in the only way she can: "I'm Free—White—and Twenty-One."
One can imagine the scenes deleted from the film involving the details
surrounding Karamzin's murder. After Karamzin sneaks into Ventucci's house (ostensibly
to rape the man's daughter) and a duped Maruschka kills herself, Ventucci is
seen pulling Karamzin from a closet (a black cat darts across the frame) before
dumping his body into a sewer. Foolish Wives is a seductive film, but
it's also supremely sad because Von Stroheim sees something morally and
emotionally debilitating in the way his characters forcibly cling to facades,
from Dupont's disillusioned would-be feminist to the "cousins" who
don't own up to their true identities until cops pull off their wigs.
"Take off that monocle," says Helen's husband to Karamzin before
punching him in the face. There is a place and breaking point for everyone
here, and Foolish Wives is disillusionment Von Stroheim style.
Foolish
Wives (Erich von Stroheim, 1922) - Senses of Cinema Luke Aspell, March 18, 2016
“Beauty in the lap of
horror”: the Gothic appeal of Erich von Stroheim in ... “Beauty
in the lap of horror”: the Gothic appeal of Erich von Stroheim in Blind
Husbands (1919) and Foolish
Wives (1922), by Elisabetta
Girelli, August 16, 2017
Erich
von Stroheim - Film Comment Jonathan
Rosenbaum, May/June 1974, republished again February 6, 2017, here: Second
Thoughts on Stroheim | Jonathan Rosenbaum
FOOLISH
WIVES (1976 review) | Jonathan Rosenbaum
Monthly Film Bulletin,
November 1976
Ferdy
on Films [Roderick Heath]
Erich Von Stroheim
retro at Film Forum (thru Jul 30) - Alt Screen Imogen Smith, May 28, 2012
Film
Notes From the CMA [Dennis Toth]
September 8, 2008
notcoming.com | Foolish
Wives - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
Cullen Gallagher
Foolish
Wives - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Michel Ciment from Film Reference
Foolish
Wives - Erich von Stroheim - 1922 - film review - Films de France James Travers
Joshua
Reviews Eric Von Stroheim's Foolish Wives [Blu-ray Review] Joshua Brunsting
Hollywood
Whipping Boy Von Stroheim's Decadent 'Foolish Wives ... John Anderson from indieWIRE, July 27, 2013
MoMA
| Erich von Stroheim's Foolish Wives
Charles Silver, curator of Film Department at MOMA, January 2, 2010
DVD of the Week: Foolish Wives | The New Yorker Richard Brody, July 28, 2010
Movie Review – Foolish Wives - Fernby Films
FilmFanatic.org » Foolish Wives (1922)
Film Review: FOOLISH WIVES – ZekeFilm David Gill
dOc DVD Review: Foolish Wives (1922) - Digitally Obsessed Mark Zimmer
Foolish Wives - Silent Era : Home Video Reviews Carl Bennett
The Erich Von Stroheim Collection - AV Club Film Keith Phipps, also reviewing BLIND HUSBANDS and QUEEN KELLY
DVD Savant Glenn Erickson, Blu-Ray
Foolish Wives (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Jamie S. Rich
Slant Magazine Blu-ray [Budd Wilkins]
Foolish Wives Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest Bran Kluger
Blu-ray.com [Casey Broadwater]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
'Foolish Wives' review by Karl J. Kipling • Letterboxd
Foolish Wives (1922) directed by Erich von Stroheim • Reviews, film + ... Letterboxd
Best Movies by Farr [John Farr]
Greatest Films of 1922 - Filmsite.org Tim Dirks
THE SILENT TREATMENT: Erich von Stroheim's “Foolish Wives”
Foolish Wives (1922) - Erich Von Stroheim | Review | AllMovie Hans J. Wollstein
Top
10 Most Expensive Movies By Production ... - The Gazette Review September 3, 2016
Throwback Thursday: Von Stroheim! | IndieWire Trade ad photo
Foolish Wives Movie
Trailer, Reviews and More | TVGuide.com
Ebert Presents: At the Movies Ignatiy Vishnevetsky video review (1:20)
New York Times (registration req'd) 1922 review
DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
Foolish Wives - Alchetron,
The Free Social Encyclopedia
Boxoffice Magazine Wade Major, also reviewing two earlier silent films
Archivist David Shepard's
Blackhawk Films has, to date, done more for silent films on DVD than any other
single library. Two more treasures from Image continue that tradition:
"Merry-Go-Round" and the double-feature "The Life and Passion of
Jesus Christ"/"From the Manger to the Cross."
The former, set in 1914 and
ghostwritten and -directed by Erich von Stroheim before he was unceremoniously
fired by Irving Thalberg, is an exceptional example of flawed brilliance. The
debauched WWI-era freakshow is framed around the romance between a count and an
organ grinder, though it's all just pretext for another of von Stroheim's
indulgent morality plays. The director who replaced him, Rupert Julian, doesn't
contribute much by way of style -- he mostly just finishes off what von
Stroheim started. But it's easy to see where the one picks up and the other
leaves off, and vice versa. Von Stroheim knew no restraint, Julian knows
nothing else. This edition is plenty acceptable, tainted by the usual
unevenness in the original print but nicely sustained by a new score recording
based on the 1923 original.
The other DVD, comprised of
the two most thematically and artistically important Christ-films of the silent
era, assuming that one discounts those portions of "Intolerance," is
a marvelous artifact. "The Life and Passion of Jesus" is easily the
oldest such film, a Parisian effort from 1902 by Ferdinand Zecca, though Zecca
didn't finish the version that is presented here. Such films were, at the time,
shot as an audience might see them on the stage. Zecca began shooting the
various scenes of Christ's life as such, with the film virtually doubled in
length over the course of 1904 and 1905 when Zecca's collaborator Lucien Nonguet
finished it. What's remarkable about the effort, in all its primitiveness, is
the use of color, the result of a patented Pathe stencil process which is
utterly unlike anything else in any other film of the period.
"From the Manger to the
Cross," made almost a decade later in 1912, is the more impressive effort
from an artistic standpoint. Viewed as one of the seminal efforts in American
film history (it was added to the National Film Registry in 1998), it employs
actual Palestinian and Egyptian locales to bring the story of Jesus to life in
a way that few other films, even during the sound era, managed to approach.
There's a roughness to the direction that might be a distraction if not for the
fact that it seems to add a sense of immediacy to the proceedings. Though
clearly a Hollywood film, especially by comparison to the earlier Pathe effort,
it doesn't suffer from the excessive gloss and reverence paid to future
"Jesus movies" of the '50s and '60s, in some ways resembling more
closely Pier Paolo Pasolini's "The Gospel According to St. Matthew,"
albeit without the Marxist slant.
The latter film also
features some lovely use of color, though of the more traditional
"tinted" variety. Both films feature fine transfers from the best
possible source materials.
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
In the waning days of the Hapsburg Empire, an Austrian count
(Norman Kerry) is engaged to be married to a countess he doesn't love. On an
outing at the Prater, an amusement park in
The original director was Erich von Stroheim. His
perfectionism had already caused controversy on his previous film, Foolish
Wives, and on this project he reportedly raged at the cast and crew
nonstop, unhappy with the sets, the costumes, and Kerry. After a month of this,
he was removed from the picture by Universal studio chief Irving Thalberg. This
was something of a milestone in
Thalberg replaced Stroheim with the reliable but less talented Rupert Julian. You can almost tell the exact point at which Julian took over. The first half hour or so of the film has the dry, formalistic rigor of Stroheim at his best -- the sequence of the count waking up, bathing, and being dressed by his servant shows a characteristically amused attention towards the minute rituals of aristocratic life. Then, soon after Philbin's character appears, the picture starts to become sloppy and exaggerated. The plot, involving the organ grinder's puppeteer father, an evil circus barker, and a hunchback in love with the girl, is much too complicated for its own good. The main thread -- a hopeless love affair between a nobleman and a commoner -- was already an old formula, familiar even from Stroheim's other films, such as the later (and far superior) The Wedding March. Still, the film is at its best in the scenes between Kerry and Philbin, who had her first major role here, and is lovely and touching in the movie's quieter moments. The plot, however, drags on -- with death and war and reconciliation and chance encounters -- past the point where one cares about any of it.
Julian lightened the story's tone, and now we can only wonder what kind of film Stroheim would have made. In any case, Thalberg's instincts paid off: Merry-Go-Round was a major box office success. This was the end of Stroheim's association with Universal. He went on to sign with Goldwyn, but unfortunately for him, there was no escape. L.B. Mayer bought it up, and then Thalberg jumped to the new firm, MGM.
Merry-Go-Round
(1923) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Brian Cady
If only the cameras had been turned around as the drama
behind the scenes on Merry-Go-Round (1923) was more interesting than the
story taking place in front of the lenses.
By 1922 director and writer Erich von Stroheim was the most powerful filmmaker
at Universal Studios. His films Blind Husbands (1919), The Devil's
Passkey (1920) and Foolish Wives (1922) were the studio's biggest
moneymakers. The last film, however, was one of its biggest money drains as
well. Stroheim had shot miles of film and fussed over the smallest details. He
created a masterpiece but one too long for the exhibitors and too suggestive
for the censors. Universal chopped the film down, and then sought someone to
bring Stroheim's future costs under control. They found him in studio boss Carl
Laemmle's personal secretary, twenty-three-year old Irving Thalberg.
Thalberg was placed in charge of the studio while Laemmle was in
After Stroheim had finished approximately one-quarter of the film, Thalberg
finally had enough and dismissed him. The firing sent shock waves through
What part of the surviving film is Stroheim's and which Julian's has been a
matter of controversy ever since. Although Stroheim is known to have directed
the first few sequences of the film and a later orgy scene, he also wrote the
script for the entire film and his story was used even though it was
substantially shortened and sweetened. Gone was Stroheim's portrait of the last
days of the beautiful but decadent Austro-Hungarian Empire and what remained
was a love story between a lofty count and a lowly girl in an amusement park.
Those who, nevertheless, want to view this movie with its touches of the
Stroheim genius can now do so thanks to Image Entertainment which has released Merry-Go-Round
on DVD. The film exists today only on 16mm copies made for home viewing during
the 1920s. Restoration wizard David Shepard used two of these prints to create
this DVD and, despite the lower gauge and scratches on the film from wear, the
image is clear and sharp. The original color tinting has been retained and the
movie features musical accompaniment by Brian Benison based on the original
1923 performance score.
notcoming.com |
Merry-Go-Round - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Evan Kindley
Erich Von Stroheim
retro at Film Forum (thru Jul 30) - Alt Screen Imogen Smith, May 28, 2012
dOc DVD
Review: Merry-Go-Round (1923) - Digitally Obsessed Mark Zimmer
Merry-Go-Round -
Silent Era : Home Video Reviews Carl
Bennett
Merry-Go-Round 1923 -
Silent Film Review, Rating, Plot Summary
User Reviews from imdb Author: Arne Andersen (aandersen@landmarkcollege.org) from Putney, VT, August 16, 2001
User Reviews from imdb Author: planktonrules from Bradenton, Florida, August 4, 2010
The New York Times 1923 review
Merry-Go-Round
(1923 film) - Wikipedia
I
never truckled, I never took off the hat to fashion and held it out for
pennies. By God, I told them the truth. They liked it or they didn’t like it.
What had that to do with me? I told them the truth; I knew it for the truth
then and I know it for the truth now.
—Frank Norris, opening title card
from his essay The True Reward of the Novelist, 1903, which may as well
be the voice of the director
What
had become of her husband Trina did not know. She never saw any of the old Polk
Street people. There was no way she could have news of him, even if she had
cared to have it. She had her money, that was the main thing. Her passion for
it excluded every other sentiment. There it was in the bottom of her trunk, in
the canvas sack, the chamois-skin bag, and the little brass match-safe. Not a
day passed that Trina did not have it out where she could see and touch it. One
evening she had even spread all the gold pieces between the sheets, and had
then gone to bed, stripping herself, and had slept all night upon the money,
taking a strange and ecstatic pleasure in the touch of the smooth flat pieces
the length of her entire body.
—McTeague, by
Frank Norris, 1899
It is rare to see live screenings of Erich von Stroheim films, and it is equally rare to get young people to sit through a silent feature, even when accompanied by the artistry of a live piano performance. When asked how to persuade young people to see a silent film, writer and film scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum, in his recent column from the winter edition of Cinema Scope, Conspicuously Absent or Apt to be Overlooked | Jonathan ..., replied, “By saying that Stroheim knows more about people than Spielberg does — and more than we do.” Not sure even that would work. Rosenbaum goes on to express his dismay at the dearth of representation of von Stroheim on DVD, currently containing less than half his output, and only one film is available on Blu-Ray. Altogether missing is Rosenbaum’s choice for the greatest American film ever made (as of January 2016), My Ten Favorite American Films and Capsule Reviews of ..., which is von Stroheim’s silent film GREED (1924), the same film singled out by Catholic newspaper mogul and moral crusader Martin Quigley, one of the driving forces behind the establishment of the Hays Code (Production Code) in the early 1930’s, who was quoted as saying art must be handled carefully because it could be “morally evil in its effects,” calling this film “the filthiest, vilest, most putrid picture in the history of motion pictures,” a perfect example of how negativity is often more graphically convincing than the best reviews. Part of the mythology behind the film exists in the artist himself, who began reconstructing a new persona for himself the moment he arrived at Ellis Island on November 25, 1909 at the age of 24, claiming to be the son of Austrian nobility, calling himself a Count, though his accent was distinctively lower class (according to his agent and Austrian-born director Billy Wilder), where his father was known to be a middle class Jewish hat-maker from Vienna. The reasons for his emigration to America were concealed until after his death, as it turns out he was a deserter from the Austrian army. Nonetheless he fooled virtually everyone in Hollywood and Western Europe that he had links to Austrian aristocracy, a ruse he successfully carried out throughout his lifetime, presumably the greatest role he ever played. In America he worked as a traveling salesman, moving to San Francisco and eventually Hollywood, where he surrounded himself with rumors of a military heritage, proclaiming himself an expert in these matters, which led him to a job in 1915 as a wardrobe supervisor in charge of uniforms, responsible for assembling his own costumed “student corps.” According to one of his biographers, Thomas Curtiss Quinn in Von Stroheim, “Each morning the von Stroheim ‘student corps’ — all of whom had been subjected to a German haircut — would ‘fall in’ in military fashion on an open stage and stand roll call, inspection, and a rehearsal drill.” He was hired as an uncredited assistant director to D.W. Griffith on BIRTH OF A NATION (1915), also a production assistant and an extra for INTOLERANCE (1916), claiming “I worshipped D.W. Griffith the way that someone can worship the man who has taught him everything, who has lavished the treasures of genius on him without holding back. He was the greatest of his day.”
Not Coming from a Theater Near You, August 23, 2009, Oh, the Depravity! The Cinema of Erich von Stroheim - Not ...
Traces of Griffith’s
signature style are present throughout von Stroheim’s work. The presentational
mise-en-scene that privileges both the actor’s expression and the obsessively,
painstakingly detailed sets; poetic (sometimes excessively so) title-cards;
idyllic, romantic interludes that off-set an otherwise realist aesthetic;
close-ups that reveal the character’s soul (for Griffith often signs of purity,
for von Stroheim corruption); and a dexterous use of montage to maneuver around
a set, or to cross-cut different scenes for dramatic effect. Von Stroheim often
takes Griffith’s stylizations to their furthest extreme, strictly adhering to
montage and rarely moving the camera (defiantly against-the-times, as
filmmakers were more and more employing expressive lighting and tracking
shots).
But he also learned
something else from the master: a grand, uncompromising vision that no theater
or studio could contain or, more importantly, maintain. Much like Griffith
initially planned for Intolerance,
von Stroheim had hoped to show his monumental Greed in two parts on consecutive nights, something akin to
Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung, a
series of four connected operas that are intended to be seen consecutively
(though they are often divided and performed individually). Neither Griffith
nor von Stroheim saw this vision of theirs actualized, but certainly they are
two early visions of cinema as a higher art in an age that still saw the medium
as decidedly lower.
As a director renowned for his authoritative, dictatorial style, with tensions occurring both on and off the set, von Stroheim is also remembered for his extravagance in budget indiscretions, along with painfully slow working methods, where studio executives often had to step in before shooting was finished due to cost overruns. He directed nine films between 1919 and 1932 but was fired (or replaced) from as many as five of them, demonstrating an unwillingness or inability to modify his artistic principles, such as his extreme attention to detail and his insistence on near-total artistic freedom, where his career as a director was all but finished when he was prematurely fired working with Gloria Swanson in QUEEN KELLY (1928), which forced him to return to acting, salvaging his reputation and career through iconic acting performances in GRAND ILLUSION (1937) and SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950). To many he is known primarily as an actor associated with a decorated military past and aristocratic background, but as a scene constructionist, von Stroheim was far more sophisticated than many of his contemporaries, using magnificent crane shots, often blending subjective points of view, using surrealistic flourishes, including Technicolor shots. Obsessed with portraying characters as realistic, succumbing to their own desires, von Stroheim is arguably the first director to shoot a feature film on location, using natural light, displaying an uncanny sense for meticulous detail and decors, driven by a desire for perfection, using a novelistic approach where his ultimate goal was to achieve naturalism and believability in the often exaggerated theatrics of silent cinema. The films of von Stroheim lie in a cloud of mystery, as not one of his films was ever released to the public in the manner of his choosing, as all were altered significantly by studio execs and recut by studio hacks, none more than this film, considered the Holy Grail of butchered movies with the complete version presumed lost forever, where generations of cinephiles can only imagine what was originally conceived by the artist. As much about the legendary story behind the film as the film itself, GREED belongs in a unique category, as it’s among the most ambitious efforts never to have materialized onscreen.
Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Guardian, August 31, 2002, Jonathan Rosenbaum on Erich von Stroheim's Greed | Film ...
Legends about the
“complete” Greed have existed ever
since Erich von Stroheim’s film was released in 1924. Stroheim’s bosses at
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer slashed the film to a mere 10 reels, but the great Austrian
director had shot no fewer than 446. In early 1924 Stroheim apparently screened
various rough cuts to friends that were about one-tenth as long, ranging from
47 to 42 reels. Private screenings can be interrupted for many reasons —
projector breakdowns, pauses for meals or reel changes — but even so, most accounts
put the duration of the Greed
screenings at between eight and 10 hours.
The next version
Stroheim edited, said to be somewhere between 28 and 22 reels, still ran for
over four hours. When he asked editor Grant Whytock to produce a still shorter
cut — designed to be shown over two evenings and eliminating one of the major
subplots — the results were somewhere between 15 and 18 reels. This too was
rejected by MGM, which whittled the film down again, adding intertitles to
account for some of the gaps.
The studio burned the
footage that it deleted over 75 years ago; according to Stroheim, this was done
in order to extract the few cents’ worth of silver contained in the nitrate of
the film-stock.
What MGM eventually
released contains the only surviving footage of the film, but in 1999 the
American producer Rick Schmidlin reconstructed on video what Greed might have been. Schmidlin’s main
sources, apart from the 10-reel version and a new score, are Stroheim’s
“continuity screenplay” dated March 31, 1923, together with hundreds of
re-photographed stills of missing scenes — sometimes with added pans and zooms,
sometimes cropped, often with opening and closing irises. It’s a useful and
enlightening undertaking that should alter and enhance most people’s understanding
of Greed, and if you believe the hype
from Turner Classic Movies, what has been lost has now been found. However, by
necessity it is a project that is doomed to remain unfinished, since so many
scenes were destroyed.
(In the interests of
full disclosure, I must confess that I was hired by Schmidlin a few years ago
as a consultant on another speculative version of a classic — Orson Welles’s
1958 Touch of Evil. Schmidlin also
invited me to serve as consultant on his Greed
project, but — with regret — I had to decline because he couldn’t afford to pay
me a fee.)
Both before and after Greed, most of Stroheim’s released films
turned a profit, which helps to explain why he survived as long as he did in
Hollywood, despite cost overruns and constant battles with the studios. Whether
any of his own cuts of Greed could
have been profitable is hard to say, but it’s difficult to fathom how Hollywood
apologists can argue that Irving Thalberg was justified in eviscerating Greed for business reasons, because the
movie he released recouped less than half its budget.
It’s a truism that
writers are among the most neglected creative participants in movies,
especially in relation to actors and directors. Yet a special kind of hell
awaits writer-director-performers when they function as writers, as Charlie
Chaplin, Orson Welles, John Cassavetes and Stroheim all found to their cost.
Stroheim’s authoritarian image as director and as actor left little room for
any notion of him as a writer. Yet it’s mainly as a writer that we can come to
any understanding of what he was trying to accomplish in his films, above all
in Greed, where his only appearance
as an actor is a cameo as a balloon seller, which is missing from the released
version.
The 1972 edition of
Stroheim’s screenplay, edited by Joel W Finler and published by Lorrimer, is a
slightly longer adaptation of Frank Norris’s 1899 novel McTeague than the one used by Schmidlin; it gives a pretty good
idea of the writer-director’s intentions. Contrary to the absurd legend that
Stroheim simply “filmed” Norris page by page, nearly one-fifth of the plot in
this script transpires before the first sentence of the novel, and much of what
follows brilliantly expands or elaborates upon the original.
Curiously, von Stroheim rejected the idea of coddling movie
stars who were encouraged to dramatically overact onscreen, which did not
endear him to the movie moguls and Hollywood executives who relied upon a
sympathetic star system to generate box office, and instead demonstrated a passion
for authenticity, focused upon the innate emotions involved, writing flawed
characters prone to making poor decisions, victims of their own mistakes,
subject to repressed resentments and dark, uncontrollable motives. Instead of creating a false Hollywood
melodrama that spins its own alluring fiction, von Stroheim created a grim
realism with no stars, no glamor, and no happy endings, exposing a seamy
underside of everyday life that includes the hardships and pitfalls of living
in poverty, enhanced by the use of actual locations, creating a harrowing and
uncompromising vision where money literally destroys lives right before our
eyes in a stark depiction of a man unable to control his baser instincts. There are few films being made even today,
more than 90 years later, that create such a shattering effect. Adapted from the 1899 Frank Norris novel McTeague: A Story of San Francisco,
considered one of the first major naturalistic novels in American literature,
drawing upon Darwinian theories of evolution, such as survival of the fittest,
and the work of contemporary French writers such as Émile Zola, who helped shape the naturalism literary movement, suggesting
man is a product of his social environment, where the surrounding forces affect
human behavior. For instance, the
influences of violence, alcohol, and prostitution were more prevalent for those
living in the filth and squalor of industrialization, subjecting those workers
to harsh realities that would also include poverty, racism, prejudice, disease,
injury, and death. In creating the
character of John “Mac” McTeague, played by Gibson Gowland, he is a hulk of a man known
for his virile physicality, having grown up in the Big Dipper Gold Mining
region in Placer County, California made famous by
the California Gold Rush, where from the outset we
see a man struggling to contain the brute within, as he’s learned to survive by
relying upon brute force and his lower instincts. Viewed as a simple headed but basically
good-natured miner, with a tendency to be overly friendly, especially after a
drink, he is composed of strong and often warring emotions, where primal
instincts such as lust, desire, and greed would often fight for dominance in an
otherwise amoral and indifferent universe around him. What’s unique here is the unflattering
portrait of an archetypal specimen of the human species, as throughout the film
McTeague is viewed more as a symbol who comes to stand for the entire human
race.
While McTeague is an acclaimed novel, it doesn’t resonate with the same conviction as von Stroheim’s film, as Frank Norris was the son of a millionaire who started writing the novel in a creative writing class at Harvard University, where the book is dedicated to his teacher. Von Stroheim, on the other hand, dedicated the film to his mother (who he adored) as the epitome of his artistry, adding painfully autobiographical elements of his own life into the film, where the poverty and physical abuse mirrors his early years in America and his difficult first marriage. While the novel takes place over several decades, featuring dozens of characters and subplots, including lengthy descriptions of the characters and the seedy neighborhoods where they live, the countless details might be hard to translate to a silent film, but von Stroheim’s exacting methods more than measure up, making him ideally suited for the job, as what he was trying to do was put an entire novel on film, something that was not fully achieved until 1980 with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s mammoth 15 and ½ hour adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz. A blistering critique of the American Dream, von Stroheim centers his film around several dynamic characters, using bold, larger-than-life performances that project the unrelenting emotions at the core of this story. McTeague’s life effectively begins in 1908 with the death of his father (Jack Curtis), who also works in the mines, but is seen as a cruel, womanizing, and drunken lout, where as the saying goes, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. When first seen in the film, he’s holding an injured bird in his hand, kissing its head, resembling a gentle giant evoking moments of tenderness, but when another miner knocks the bird out of his hand, McTeague savagely throws him off a bridge. Hoping for a better life for her son, his mother (Tempe Pigott) pleads with a traveling dentist, Dr. Painless Potter (Erich von Ritzau), who is little more than a con artist, begging him to take her son along as an apprentice. So McTeague leaves the mining town where he grew up, and with the $250 dollars his mother leaves him when she dies, he opens a small dentist practice in a working class area on Polk Street in San Francisco. While he has few customers, he makes enough to get by, which seems to satisfy him. With a lone friend in the world, Marcus Schouler (Jean Hersholt), an assistant at a dog hospital, the two are joined at the hip with their destinies entwined.
When Marcus’s fiancée (and cousin), German immigrant Trina Sieppe (ZaSu Pitts), chips a tooth falling off a swing, he brings her in to McTeague to have her tooth repaired. While waiting, Trina buys an underground lottery ticket from McTeague’s cleaning lady, receiving a lecture from Marcus about how he doesn’t believe in gambling, but only because his pockets were empty at the time. Putting her to sleep in the dentist’s chair, McTeague finds himself powerfully attracted to Trina, swooning over her ecstatically before leaning down to kiss her at one point, arousing animal instincts, again resembling a brute that has to restrain himself from molesting her. Claiming he’s in love, McTeague confesses his feelings to Marcus afterwards, literally begging to go out with her, while entreating her to return on a daily basis for more dental work, just to have a chance to see her. Marcus makes a big deal about stepping aside, given ominous weight by the way the scene is shot, staring out the window of a pub, seeing the foot traffic of pedestrians before the camera moves further out to an expansive sea and returning back again, then casually giving her away as one might a new puppy or an old worn-out shirt, but almost immediately begins resenting McTeague for intruding into his personal territory. The afternoon picnic scenes with her German family are priceless, with ill-behaved children running around unsupervised, with the family almost always seen waving American flags, as if they’re more American that way. After the engagement party, the cleaning lady informs Trina that she has won $5,000 in the lottery, news that Marcus takes badly, thinking that should have been his. When Trina finally agrees to marry McTeague, oddly taking place in their living room as a somber funeral procession can be seen out the window behind the preacher, followed by a family feast of gluttonous proportions, which plays out like The Last Supper, as her family leaves for Los Angeles, leaving her petrified to be left alone. Interestingly, McTeague’s wedding present to his wife is a bird cage with two love-birds, though from her vantage point, seeing the cage transposed over her husband’s face, the birds are trapped with no hope of escape. Seen again after the passage of time, the aggressive nature of the birds picking at each other inside the cage resembles their own marital bickering, as the lottery money seems to have transformed Trina into an obsessive miser, hoarding the money and refusing to spend any of it, even if that means the couple is forced to live in squalor. Resentment between McTeague and Marcus grows worse as well, seething with underlying threats of violence in the saloon, with Marcus blaming him for stealing his girl, claiming half that money rightfully belongs to him. Soon afterwards, Marcus announces he’s leaving town, heading for work on a cattle ranch, but this is accompanied by the imagery of a cat stalking the two fluttering birds in the cage, with thoughts of devouring them.
Shortly afterwards, McTeague receives official notice from the State that he’s not licensed to work as a dentist, subject to a hefty fine and a jail sentence if he persists, which they soon realize is the subtle actions of Marcus working behind the scenes. Bouncing from job to job, McTeague has little luck. With little to no money, the marriage deteriorates quickly, reaching desperate straits when the couple is forced to sell their possessions. After attempting to reason with her about hoarding the money, an incident occurs that changes his demeanor. Just after losing one job, she orders him out the door in search of another, refusing to give him even a nickel for busfare, forcing him to walk for miles in a downpour of rain. Of course, he never makes it to the job and ends up in a saloon instead, where McTeague becomes increasingly violent, literally ripping any money out of her hands and taking it instead of asking for it, where they are reduced to a loveless and pitiless existence. Made even worse are scenes of Trina carefully polishing her gold coins every night, including abstract inserts of long, scrawny arms reaching for and caressing the gold. On nights when McTeague is out all night, she even strips naked and crawls into bed with her coins, relishing the touch on her bare skin. After a certain point, McTeague never returns home anymore, where Trina gets a job working at an elementary school scrubbing the floors. On Christmas Eve, with nothing in his pockets, discovering their wedding picture ripped in half in the garbage can outside, McTeague breaks into her living quarters and murders her for the gold, grabbing one of the birds still left in the cage (which figures in the final sequence), a scene made even more memorable by the presence of Christmas decorations and two policemen standing outside having a conversation, but are clueless to what’s taking place. A “wanted for murder” poster alerts Marcus that McTeague is on the loose, where he joins a sheriff’s posse going after him, stopping when they reach the desert, refusing to enter, as those that enter don’t come back alive. Defying the sheriff, Marcus goes in after him alone, heading into the isolated wasteland of Death Valley, one of the hottest locations on earth, where temperatures during the shooting were reported between 91 and 161° F. Von Stroheim dragged as many as 43 cast and crew members into the heat of the desert for two months, with no roads or running water, wrapping the cameras with towels of ice to prevent overheating, where insurance coverage was denied, the closest town 100 miles away, yet 14 fell ill and returned to Los Angeles, including actor Jean Hersholt who had daily bouts with heat stroke, losing 26 pounds during the ordeal, suffering internal bleeding, and was forced to spend a week in a hospital afterwards. The most memorable shots were filmed during the heart of the summer in the middle of the day when the sun was the strongest, with the camera gradually building to longer shots, where the desolate landscape elevates the extreme gravity of the situation and the steadily out-of-proportion sense of desperation. From this place they have wandered into, a literal Hell on earth, there is no retreat and no possible chance of redemption, where the ultimate confrontation couldn’t be bleaker and more dramatically oppressive.
Annalee Newitz from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
The first movie ever shot on location, Greed is notorious as much for the story behind its making as for
its considerable artistic power. Director Erich von Stroheim wanted to make the
most realistic movie possible with his adaptation of Frank Norris’s novel McTeague, about the rise and violently
murderous fall of working-class San Francisco dentist John “Mac” McTeague. But
his creation, originally commissioned by the director-friendly Goldwyn Company,
was destroyed when the studio became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), with von
Stroheim’s nemesis Irving Thalberg as the new General Manager.
MGM wanted a commercial film, and von Stroheim wanted to
create an experiment in cinematic realism worthy of the 1990’s Dogma school.
During the two-year shoot, he rented a flat on Laguna Street in San Francisco
which became the set for Mac’s (Gibson Gowland) dental parlors. Many of the
scenes there were shot entirely in natural light. Von Stroheim also insisted
that his actors live in the flat to help them get into character. One of the
fascinations in watching Greed is
seeing all the historic San Francisco locations as they were in the early
1920’s. When it came time to shoot the film’s final climactic moments in Death
Valley, von Stroheim shipped his whole crew out to the 120ºF desert location,
where the cameras became so overheated they had to be wrapped in ice towels.
The director’s first cut was nearly nine hours long. It was
a painstaking reenactment of Norris’s novel, which itself was a re-creation of
an actual crime that took place during the early 1880’s. After a quack doctor
helps Mac escape the Northern California mining town of his childhood, he
becomes a dentist in San Francisco. There he meets Trina (Zasu Pitts) with whom
he falls in love during a memorably creepy tooth-drilling scene. His best
friend and rival for Trina’s affections is Marcus (Jean Hersholt), who grants
Mac permission to marry Trina but changes his mind after she wins a lottery.
Using his connections in local government, Marcus manages to put Mac out of
business and send his former friend into a free fall of back-breaking day
labor, drunkenness, and wife-beating.
Trina turns to her lottery winnings as a source of
satisfaction, hoarding her thousands in gold coins while she and Mac starve One
of Greed’s most famous scenes has
Trina climbing into bed with her money, caressing it, and rolling around in
erotic abandon. Shortly thereafter Mac murders her, steals the money, and heads
out to Death Valley where his life comes to a bitter end when Marcus hunts him
down.
Only a handful of people ever saw the original nine-hour
version of Greed. After von
Stroheim’s friend helped him cut the picture down to 18 reels, or about four
hours, the studios took it away from him and handed it over to a low-ranking
editor who reduced it to 140 minutes. This version of the film, which von
Stroheim called “a mutilation of my sincere work at the hands of MGM
executives,” is nevertheless stark, captivating, and genuinely disturbing.
In 1999, film restorer Rick Schmidlin released a four-hour
version of Greed reconstructed from
original production stills and von Stroheim’s shooting script.
Breaking Bad: Greed, Capitalism and Walter White's Paper ... Manar Ammar from Occupy, September 27, 2013
In the closing scene of the silent film classic Greed
(1924), which was written and directed by Erich Von Stroheim, Death Valley is
the hero much like the desert outside of Albuquerque in Breaking Bad: the
location where things start and finish. In Greed, the final sequence of events
sees two old friends, now enemies, fighting over money somewhere in the remote
valley. Stroheim colored the scene a yellowish hue, as if to say that the whole
world is now the color of gold, of money, saturated with the tint of banknotes.
Greed, directed by Erich von
Stroheim | Film review - Time Out Geoff
Andrew
Originally planned to run around ten hours but hacked to just over two by Thalberg's MGM, von Stroheim's greatest film still survives as a true masterpiece of cinema. Even now its relentlessly cynical portrait of physical and moral squalor retains the ability to shock, while the Von's obsessive attention to realist detail - both in terms of the San Francisco and Death Valley locations, and the minutely observed characters - is never prosaic: as the two men and a woman fall out over filthy lucre (a surprise lottery win), their motivations are explored with a remarkably powerful visual poetry, and Frank Norris' novel is translated into the cinematic equivalent of, say, Zola at the peak of his powers. Never has a wedding been so bitterly depicted, never a moral denouement been delivered with such vicious irony.
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kian Bergstrom
Spoilers! The story of GREED, of von Stroheim's slavish fidelity to the text of Frank Norris's Naturalist novel, McTeague, of his obsessive, tyrannical treatment of his actors while on location for months in Death Valley, of MGM's butchering of his 8-hour cut into shreds and melting down the cut scenes for scrap silver, is surely so legendary that whatever dubious relationship to truth it once had is no longer relevant. It is the go-to example to illustrate so many spurious arguments: the impossibility of 'straight' adaptation, the dangers of trusting the Money Men, the dangers of allowing directors too much freedom, and so on. Von Stroheim's lost original version has become, not merely a sort of Holy Grail of silent cinema enthusiasts but an Icarian fable all it's own, warning through example of the punishment meted out to the hubristically ambitious, the psychotic perfectionist. But let us set all this aside, for GREED is so very much more than a mere legend. Quite simply, in this critic's estimation, GREED is the single best film ever made. Let me be clear: the GREED that was taken out of von Stroheim's hands, that Thalberg and his hackworkers took to pieces, the GREED that von Stroheim found so upsetting to watch years later that he compared seeing it to peering into a coffin—this shortened, adulterated, mutilated, damaged, and disavowed movie is the best I've ever seen. Whatever von Stroheim's original version might have actually been, the intensity, power, and overwhelming beauty of the GREED we have far outweighs the longing we might feel for the GREED we don't. There's a tremendous amount in GREED to discuss—its discussions of capitalism and violence, the masterful handling of a romance poisoned over time by its own lovers, the complex network of symbolism echoing through its iconography, the emotive and heart-rending performances by Zasu Pitts and Gibson Gowland. But think now just of the closing moments of the film. Having murdered his wife, McTeague has fled the authorities into the desolation of Death Valley, pursued to the end by his friend and betrayer, Marcus. Marcus has McTeague at gunpoint. McTeague's horse suddenly bolts, carrying off with itself the only canteen of water left between the two men, and Marcus, panicked, shoots the animal. What follows is the most moving moment in any work of art I know of, delivered through the crystalline perfection of von Stroheim's direction: a close up of a pair of fists, a lolling, crushed head, the briefest of kisses pressed atop a freed canary. As the visual patterning draws to a close, McTeague's avariciousness has proven itself the greatest, but it is the world itself that will dominate him, exterminate him, and indeed, as Nature must, forget him. No film more magically dwells on, depends on the fleshy interstices that we do our level best to imagine separate us from mere beasts, more tragically understands the depths of depravity humanity will sink to in any effort to maintain the illusion of civilization. In that rift between our selves and our actions, our dreams, pouring out like the film's bloodied gold through a dead horse's saddlebags, never fail in von Stroheim's world to be the final casualties.
My Ten Favorite American Films and Capsule Reviews of ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, January 27, 2016
Capsule
reviews of two of my favorite American films, both commissioned by BBC.com, who
previously asked me to name my ten favorite American films. (For some reason,
my computer can’t handle their own web site and link, which is why I’m posting
this material here.) I responded to their first request with these choices:
1.
GREED (Stroheim, 1924)
2.
SUNRISE (Murnau, 1927)
3. THE
MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (Welles, 1942)
4.
CITY LIGHTS (Chaplin, 1931)
5.
LOVE ME TONIGHT (Mamoulian, 1932)
6. THE
BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (Wyler, 1946)
7.
STARS IN MY CROWN (Tourneur, 1950)
8.
LOVE STREAMS (Cassavetes, 1984)
9.
A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (2001)
10.
WHEN IT RAINS (Burnett, 1995)
Other truncated masterpieces
(most notably Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons) tend to be
appreciated in spite of their flaws, but Erich von Stroheim’s Greed
maintains its strength and intensity and even much of its density in its
surviving form. The characters are rich and complex and the mise en scène fully
serves both the power of the performances and the richness of the world
depicted. The overall fidelity to Frank Norris’s McTeague is matched by
a highly personal and inventive dedication to its meanings and resonance, and
the overall vision of what money does to disfigure and destroy human
personality is unequaled.
Erich
von Stroheim - Film Comment Jonathan
Rosenbaum, May/June 1974, republished again February 6, 2017, here: Second
Thoughts on Stroheim | Jonathan Rosenbaum (excerpt)
Total object, complete with missing parts, instead of partial
object. Question of degree.
—Samuel Beckett, “Three Dialogues”
Two temptations present themselves to any modern reappraisal of Erich von Stroheim’s work; one of them is fatal, the other all but impossible to act upon. The fatal temptation would be to concentrate on the offscreen image and legend of Stroheim to the point of ignoring central facts about the films themselves: an approach that has unhappily characterized most critical work on Stroheim to date. On the other hand, one is tempted to look at nothing but the films — to suppress biography, anecdotes, newspaper reviews, reminiscences, and everything else that isn’t plainly visible on the screen.
Submitting Stroheim’s work to a purely formal analysis and strict textural reading of what is there—as opposed to what isn’t, or might, or would or could or should have been there—may sound like an obvious and sensible project; but apparently no one has ever tried it, and there is some reason to doubt whether anyone ever will. Over the past fifty-odd years, the legend of Stroheim has cast so distinctive a shadow over the commercial cinema in general and his own work in particular that the removal of that shadow would amount to nothing less than a total skin graft; above all, it would mean eliminating the grid through which his films were seen in their own time—a time that, in many crucial respects, remains our own.
From one point of view, Stroheim’s films only dramatize problems of directorial control and intention that are relevant to most Hollywood films. They dramatize these problems, however, in a particularly revealing way: we remember his best works (Foolish Wives, Greed, The Wedding March, Queen Kelly) not merely because of their power—which is considerable—but also because of their will to power, which is always even more considerable. We are constantly brought up against the problem of considering his films as indications and abbreviations of projected meta-films that were either reduced and re-edited by the studios or, in the case of Queen Kelly, never completed in any form.
It is central to Stroheim’s reputation that he is valued today more for the unseen forty-two-reel version of Greed than the ten-reel version that we do have. And if history and legend have conspired to install Stroheim as an exemplary figure in cinema—virtually the patron saint of all directors who have suffered at the hands of producers—it is precisely because of this discrepancy, the gap between the power and control that was sought and the amount that was visibly achieved.
How are we made aware of this discrepancy? Certainly we sense it almost as much in Stroheim’s acting in the films of others as in his own projects—not simply because of all the dictatorial parts, from Prussian officers to assorted lunatics, but in the very style of his delivery, the very manner of his presence. Consider the sublime and all-but-hallucinatory tedium of his first role in a sound film, James Cruze’s The Great Gabbo, when he seems to speak each line at roughly half the speed of everyone else in the cast; here one can witness the will to power in a strictly temporal arena—the apparent desire to remain on the screen as long as possible—lending to the part of the mad ventriloquist an intolerable tension and demonic mulishness that go well beyond the melodramatic demands of the plot, as though he were pulling at his character like taffy to see how far it could stretch before breaking. Insofar as a single performance can be compared to an entire film, it is likely that the duration of the original version of Greed was motivated along similar lines.
The opening credits of Greed, The Merry Widow, and The Wedding March alert us to Stroheim’s aspirations before anything else appears on the screen: the first two are said to be “personally directed by Erich von Stroheim,” the third is labeled “in its entirety an Erich von Stroheim creation.” But if accepting Stroheim’s legend means submitting to a fiction —a supplement, in many cases, to the fictions that he filmed—denying it is tantamount to imposing another, alternate fiction. (However much we may ever learn about Stroheim, it’s highly unlikely that we’ll know enough to do away with fictions entirely.) Bearing this in mind, an attempt will be made here to isolate his legend whenever possible, but not to dismantle it.
I had graduated from the D.W Griffith school of filmmaking and intended to go the Master one better as regards film realism. In real cities, not corners of them designed by Cedric Gibbons or Richard Days, but in real tree-bordered boulevards, with real streetcars, buses and automobiles, through real winding alleys, with real dirt and foulness, in the gutters as well as in real castles and palaces . . . I believed audiences were ready to witness real drama and real tragedy; as it happens every day in every land; real love and real hatred of real men and women who were proud of their passions.
– Stroheim, date unknown
It is witty for Godard to suggest that Méliès made documentaries, and rewarding to look at Feuillade’s films under that aspect; but Stroheim turned the fiction film into the documentary in a much more central and decisive way. He did this above all in Greed, and not so much through “stripping away artifice” as by reformulating the nature that his artifice was to take.
This was not simply a matter of shooting Greed on locations. More crucially, it was a direct confrontation with the challenge of adapting a literary work. McTeague is a work of fiction that impressed Stroheim and his contemporaries for its “realism”; by attempting to arrive at an equivalent to this literary mode, Stroheim wound up having to deal exhaustively with all of the essential problems inherent in adapting any fictional prose work.
There was certainly no filmmaker prior to Stroheim who attacked these problems in quite so comprehensive a manner, and it is arguable whether there has been anyone else since. For this reason alone, Greed remains a laboratory experiment of the first importance — valuable for its failures as well as its successes, and comprising a virtual textbook on some of the formal issues that it raises.
When Stroheim filmed Greed, Kenneth Rexroth tells us in the Signet edition of Norris’s novel, “he is said to have followed McTeague page by page, never missing a paragraph. We’ll never know because the uncut Greed, greatest of all movies, is lost forever.” To understand the important aspects of Stroheim’s adaptation, the first step is to dismiss hyperbole of this sort and work with the materials available: the novel, Stroheim’s screenplay,[1] the version of Greed that we do have, and the existing stills of scenes that were cut from the film.
The first thing that the published script tells us is that an enormous amount of material has been added to the novel, particularly in the opening scenes. About sixty pages—nearly one-fifth of the screenplay—pass before we reach McTeague eating his Sunday dinner at the car conductors’ coffee joint, the subject of Norris’s first sentence. Mac’s life prior to his arrival in San Francisco is conveyed by Norris in a brief resume of two paragraphs; in the script it consumes twenty-five pages. A brilliantly designed sequence that runs even longer, and is completely missing from the final version of the film, introduces us to all of the major characters on a “typical” Saturday afternoon that precedes the novel’s opening.
Interestingly, this sequence is largely constructed around cross-cutting between characters whose inter-relations in the plot have not yet become clarified —and in the case of Mac and Trina, between characters who have not yet even met —so that the juxtapositions are unusually abstract, even from a thematic point of view. As an approach to narrative that was already common to prose fiction but far from being a convention in cinema, this is probably the most “advanced” and experimental departure in the script: nearly everything that takes place is descriptive and inconsequential as plot, and each character is linked into an overall pattern of significance that nothing in the story has yet justified. Harry Carr, one of the only people who saw Greed in its complete form, may have had this sequence partially in mind when he compared the film to Les Misérables and remarked that “Episodes come along that you think have no bearing on the story, then twelve or fourteen reels later, it hits you with a crash.” (Motion Picture Magazine, April 1924.)
Undoubtedly the most problematical element in Stroheim’s adaptation is its use of repeated symbolic motifs—shots of gold, greedy hands, animals and other emblems—which seem to be a direct misapplication of literary principles to cinematic structures. The recurrent image in McTeague of Mac’s canary “chittering in its little gilt prison”—a phrase repeated with slight variations in many contexts, before it appears as the final words in the novel—works symbolically and “musically” because it is laced smoothly into the thread of the narrative, with no breaks in discourse or syntax. But in Greed, the repeated images have the disadvantage of interrupting the narrative, usually without adding any useful perspectives to it: they are like footnotes that mainly say “Ibid.” In their limited use in the film that we have and their implied use in the script, they tend to seem like dead wood clinging to the rest of the film.
The script further leads us to suspect that many of the motifs are repeated without variation—like the mother rocking the cradle in Intolerance—and occasionally without any naturalistic explanation, like the shot of wood being sawed, which recurs no less than eight times during the wedding sequence. Such a shot is a purely abstract intrusion, but not one that serves to expand the narrative; like Tolstoy’s historical arguments in War and Peace, it seeks to contract the total picture into a graspable, didactic design. And it fails, one can argue, for roughly the same reason that Tolstoy fails—because Stroheim has more to show than he has to say. The world he creates in the wedding sequence alone overwhelms anything he has to say about it: it is too rich to accommodate supplementary lessons.
Which brings us back to the “realism,” the documentary aspect of Greed. Clearly one of its most extraordinary aspects remains the unusual conviction of the performances, which is apparent even in the random instants offered by stills. Look at any frame enlargement from Greed showing ZaSu Pitts, Gibson Gowland or Jean Hersholt and you’ll see not a familiar actor “playing a part,” but a fully rounded character existing—existing, as it were, between shots and sequences as well as within them (or such is the illusion). How many films in the history of acted cinema would pass this elementary litmus test? Certainly not Citizen Kane; perhaps The Magnificent Ambersons, a film whose achievement (and mutilation) parallels that of Greed in many important respects.[2]
One recalls André Bazin’s famous remark about Stroheim: “In his films reality lays itself bare like a suspect confessing under the relentless examination of the commissioner of police. He has one simple rule for direction. Take a close look at the world, keep on doing so, and in the end it will lay bare for you all its cruelty and its ugliness. One could easily imagine as a matter of fact a film by Stroheim composed of a single shot as long-lasting and as closeup as you like.”
This is the spirit of documentary—a tendency that is equally present in Stroheim’s introduction of outside chance elements into his fictions. It’s not so much a matter of letting random accidents creep into the staged actions (as in Léonce Perret’s 1913 melodrama L’Enfant de Paris, when a friendly dog wanders into a shot at the heels of an actor) as a sort of semi-organized psychodrama, exemplified in a scene missing from current prints of Greed: When Trina discovers Maria Macapa with her throat slit, she runs out of Zerkow’s junk house and hysterically reports the murder to the first people she sees. Stroheim shot this sequence with hidden cameras, and the responses came from passersby who were not aware that a film was being made. When Samuel Fuller used a similar technique at the beginning of The Crimson Kimono (1959) and Godard followed the hero of Le Petit soldat (1960) down the streets of Geneva holding a gun, they were drawing on a common principle that Stroheim had already made extensive use of thirty-five years ago.
1. Consider the close relationship between Mac’s and Trina’s loss of the Dental Parlors and the ultimate fate of the Amberson mansion (and the accompanying scenes in each film); consider the use of a closing iris to seal off an era when the Sieppes depart on the train at the end of Part I of GREED, with the retreating horseless carriage in Ambersons. Even the “real” explosion of anger between Gowland and Hersholt in the last reel of GREED, is matched by Agnes Moorehead’s “real” hysteria as Aunt Fanny in a climactic scene. Indeed, the primary contrast between these films (apart from the nearly two decades that separate them—a period that corresponds quite precisely, eighteen years, to the time that passed between the first appearances of McTeague and the Tarkington novel) is in the respective economic and social classes they depict.
2. Originally published by the Cinémathèque de Belgique in 1958; a somewhat copy-edited version has recently been brought out by Lorrimer, edited by Joel W. Finler. Finler, who has kindly assisted me on much of my research, has informed me that he has subsequently seen another, presumably later version of the script at the Cinémathèque de Belgique, on the basis of a quick examination, Finler estimates that if this was the draft used by Stroheim as a shooting script, the film would have been roughly an hour shorter than the version prefigured in the published script.
3. Regrettably, the only portion of the film that can be considered here is the First Part, as edited by Stroheim for the Cinémathèque Française in 1954; the Second Part, The Honeymoon, was destroyed in a Cinémathèque fire, and apparently no other copies survive today.
Fables of the Reconstruction: The 4-Hour GREED | Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, November 26, 1999
A
Few Further Reflections on GREED (as seen on TCM, 6/14/15–6/15 ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, June 15, 2015
Jonathan Rosenbaum on Erich von Stroheim's Greed | Film ... Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Guardian, August 31, 2002
Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks
notcoming.com | Oh, the Depravity! The Cinema of Erich von Stroheim Cullen Gallagher, David Carter, Evan Kindley, Ian Johnston, Adam Balz, and Brynn White, August 23, 2009
The Merry Widow • Erich
von Stroheim • Senses of Cinema Adrian
Martin from Senses of Cinema,
December 12, 2002
Paradise
Regained: Queen Kelly and the Lure of ... - Senses of Cinema Paradise
Regained: Queen Kelly and the
Lure of the ‘Lost’ Film, by Darragh O’Donohue, July 2003
Queen Kelly • Senses of
Cinema Michael Koller, August
27, 2007
Greed
(Erich von Stroheim, 1924) - Senses of Cinema Frederick Blichert, March 18, 2016
Erich Von Stroheim
retro at Film Forum (thru Jul 30) - Alt Screen Imogen Smith, May 28, 2012
NitrateVille.com •
View topic - WSJ: Erich von Stroheim's 'Greed ... Erich
von Stroheim’s ‘Greed’ (1924): When The Studio Said ‘Cut!’ by Peter
Tonguette from The Wall Street Journal,
reprinted at NitrateVille, November 25, 2016
FilmPhest.com Chris
Greed (1925) | Kozak's Classic
Cinema Erin Elisavet Kozak
Greed: The Lost Masterpiece - Neatorama Miss Cellania, December 29, 2014
Ozus' World Movie Reviews Dennis Schwartz
Greed - FilmMonthly Michael Koenig
notcoming.com | Greed - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Ian Johnston
Only the Cinema: Greed Ed Howard
Greed - TCM.com James Steffen
The adaptation racket - Salon.com Michael Sragow from Salon, December 2, 1999
My Favorite Anti-Semite: The Case of Frank Norris and his ... Elisa New from Tablet magazine, October 24, 2013
Monday Editor's Pick: Greed
(1924) - Alt Screen collection of
reviews
Greed - Film (Movie)
Plot and Review - Publications
DeWitt Bodeen from Film Reference
Silent Volume Chris Scott Edwards
Top 100 Directors: #54 - Erich von Stroheim Erik Beck
Top 100 Novels #50: McTeague [Erik Beck] the difference between the novel and the film
Greed | Electric Sheep Ed Gibbs
Cruel and Unusual: The Exquisite Remains of Erich von ... Brittany Gravely from the Harvard Film Archive, July 16, 2012
Erich
von Stroheim's GREED | Irene Fleming's Blog
"The Flight of McTeague's Soul-Bird: Thematic Differences ... The Flight of McTeague's Soul-Bird: Thematic Differences between Norris's McTeague and Von Stroheim's Greed, opening remarks only by Thomas K. Dean from Film Quarterly, January 1, 1990
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Conspicuously Absent or Apt to be Overlooked | Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, January 27, 2016
Infinite Art Tournament [Michael5000]
The 1999 Reconstruction of Greed (1924) - Silent Era ...
Ghost Worlds | Village Voice J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, November 20, 2001
Jigsaw Lounge Neil Young
Greed (1924) - Movie Review
and Showtimes - New York Magazine Hal Erickson from All-Movie Guide
'Greed' Review: Erich von Stroheim Silent Masterpiece Andre Soares from Alt Film Guide
Greed: Stroheim's
$64,000 Question | The Metropolis Times
Adam Call Roberts
The
Barbican's "Colour of Money" Season presents Erich ... Owen van Spall from Smoke Screen
The Entombment Of Father McTeague also seen here: Erich von Stroheim | The Seventh Art
Lovers of Cinema: the
First American Film Avant ... - H-Net Reviews Experimental
Films, Michael S. Shull book review of Jan-Christopher Horak’s Lovers of
Cinema: the First American Film Avant-garde, 1919-1945. From H-Net Reviews,
March, 1999
20/20 Movie Reviews Richard Cross
Student Film Reviews » Blog Archive »
Greed (Erich Von ... Byron
Potau from Student Film Reviews
Combustible Celluloid Review - Greed (1924), June Mathis ... Jeffrey M. Anderson
Antonioni Snoozes; Arnold Stretches; Greed is Good Again ... Michael Atkinson from The Village Voice, November 30, 1999
Greed |
Pro Reviews on Movie-Film-Review
Erich von Stroheim [Archive] - FilmLeaf - Journal of Cinema Cinema forum
Production
Photographs from "Greed," Erich von Stroheim ... also seen here: Jean
Hersholt's drawings and production photos of GREED
100 Best
Films - Village Voice - Greatest Films
Ranked #28 by Village Voice
poll in 2000 of Top 20th century films, also at Mubi seen here: The
Village Voice's top 100 Films of the 20th Century poll ...
Review:
'Greed – Mutilated Masterpiece Gets the Loving Touch' - Variety Todd McCarthy, September 13, 1999,
also seen here: Greed
| Variety
Erich von Stroheim: Greed | Film | The Guardian Derek Malcolm, September 30, 1999
Where is the rest of 1924's Greed? | Examiner.com Jonathan Hanie
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Greed Is Good | L.A. Weekly David Chute, February 3, 1999
Greed Movie Review & Film Summary (1925) | Roger Ebert
New
York Times [Mordaunt Hall] also seen
here: The New York Times and here: Movie
Review - - THE SCREEN; Frank Norris's "McTeague ...
Greed (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Greed
(1924 Silent Film) Full 8 Hour Cut - Lost Media Wiki - Wikia
Flicks - Cinescene Chris Dashiell
At the height of his powers, and in the midst of a bitter
struggle with Metro over his previous picture, Greed, Stroheim took
considerable liberties with the Franz Lehar operetta, turning it into another
of his characteristic portraits of upper class decadence. Sally O'Hara (Mae
Murray), a vivacious American showgirl, visits the central European
The romantic fantasy of the story is pure fluff, but it gives Stroheim an opportunity to display aristocratic spectacle with both fascination and contempt. His pacing and visual style are almost flawless. The sense of space within and without the magnificent sets, the handling of crowd scenes with their glittering costumes and processions, the selection of just the right way to frame a shot - all combine to suffuse the film with a bittersweet feeling, a poetry of richness and twilight, even while it goes beyond most movies of the time in sexual frankness and the depiction of the cruel and bizarre aspects of human character.
The director's struggles with his temperamental leading lady are now legendary. I'm afraid my sympathies are with Stroheim, for the simple reason that Mae Murray can't act. She strikes poses; she purses her pretty lips; but she fails to convince me that crowned potentates would ever fall at her feet. Hers is a weak presence, but luckily, Stroheim managed to tone down her mannerisms, so she doesn't ruin the picture. She is also fortunate to be paired with Gilbert (on the brink of superstardom that year), who can act, and is at his most natural and charming here, at least in the context of silent performance, which almost always erred on the side of excess.
The director continually displays little stylistic flourishes
that set the movie apart. A duel scene in the morning mist is more beautiful
that one has a right to expect (Oliver Marsh was the DP, with help from William
Daniels). In a striking sequence late in the picture, a man is looking at a
woman whom he only wants for her money. Suddenly everything is dark except for
the woman's jewelry, which glows. This use of objects for symbolic effect, and
the experimenting with technique in order to portray subjective states
(improving on the ideas of his idol
The Merry Widow was the final film in Stroheim's hated MGM contract. It was not tampered with, and it was a huge box office success - making over eight times its production cost. (The studio cut the director out of the profits, in order to recoup the losses from Greed.) It seems strange that the only major hit of Stroheim's career is one of his least seen films. Although I much prefer The Wedding March ('28), which explores similar themes more powerfully (and has a better lead actress in Fay Wray) - The Merry Widow is an interesting and often impressive example of the great director's work.
User reviews from imdb Author: Ben_Cheshire from Oz
This is
I know Stroheim only went to
I think he achieves something better. I'm not one of these
fellows who insists a picture hold a mirror up to reality to be good - if i was
interested in reality, i'd watch a documentary, or perhaps sit on a park bench
and watch the thing itself! I go to the pictures to see a different world, with
a reality all its own. Its why i love the work of Fellini, the Coen Brothers,
David Lynch, Wes Anderson, Kubrick and Co. They give us something better than
reality! I think that's what Stroheim does here, and despite the fact that he
didn't respect what he did, I think its among his greatest achievements. For
modern audiences, The Merry Widow is one of the most delightful pieces of black
salacious comedy available before the last twenty years (along with Bunuel's
priceless L'Age D'Or). Such intelligent, aware humour - we all had a great
laugh at the State Theatre in
John Gilbert looks marvelous on screen, and MY what a fantastic actor he was.
But the show is all but stolen by Roy D'Arcy, as Stroheim's beloved evil cousin
figure. His salacious grin is a thing to behold. He cracked the audience up throughout.
Seems D'Arcy is a great unsung hero of the cinema, from looking at his credits
list. Perhaps a rediscovery of La Boheme and Bardleys the Magnificent might
rejuvenate his memory, not to mention a beautiful DVD edition of The Merry
Widow... or even a VHS edition! Who are we kidding here, guys! This is not only
one of the most enjoyable silent films i've ever seen, its just a darn tootin'
good comedy!
For all the talk of the "boundless shots of shoes"
i'd heard were in this movie, i was expecting it to be a two-hour long
shoe-store commercial. Whoever went on like that about this movie, including
Irving Thalberg, must SO not have even heard of foot fettishism. Its so obvious
when you see the picture. There are probably six shots of shoes in the picture
total (!), and four of them are to illustrate one of the B-characters as a foot
fetishist, which is fairly obvious, since he licks his lips and virtually
salivates when he looks at feet! This is also ironic for this character,
because his feet are the location of his disability: he walks with comic
difficulty on two replacement feet, crutches. The remaining shoe shots are part
of a delightful scene involving a game of footsies, which i won't spoil for
you, but they are most certainly justified by the narrative.
Look, this is the sort of film i'd love to have on a pretty DVD edition
(attention Kino!) as part of the wonderful Erich von Stroheim Collection
sitting next to my bed so i can watch it to send me off onto a nice sleep. Its
the most fun of Stroheim's films, but he in no way sells out, in my opinion.
The humour is satirical, subversive "let's see what i can get away with" comedy - a treat!
For the record, i recommend to you
in this order:
1. Foolish Wives 2. The Merry Widow
(when its released some time soon, or at a film festival near you) 3. Greed 4.
The Wedding March 5. Queen Kelly
(the only other surviving Stroheim
picture i'm yet to see is Blind Husbands, and he only directed some scenes from
Merry-Go-Round, which you can see on the doco The Man You Love to Hate -
they're pretty great!)
The
Merry Widow (1925) - TCM.com Bret
Wood from Turner Classic Movies
So overwhelming is Erich von Stroheim's reputation -- as the
actor who portrayed the villainous Hun in numerous WWI silents, or as the
obsessive director who created the epic 1924 film Greed -- that his more
sophisticated artistry as a director tends to be overshadowed. Of the nine
films he directed, seven are romantic fables cum morality plays that parallel
the works of Ernst Lubitsch and foreshadow the films of Rouben Mamoulian.
On the surface, Stroheim's romantic tales are pure
The most successful of these pictures, critically and financially, was The
Merry Widow (1925), produced at MGM in the wake of the monumental Greed.
In fact, while The Merry Widow was being shot, Greed was in the
process of being drastically re-edited (some might say "butchered")
to reduce its length and soften its impact. Although the project had originated
slightly prior to Greed, Stroheim looked upon it as an opportunity to
show the studio that he was not a tyrant, but capable of working with
established stars and making the kind of picture movie-goers wanted to see.
Against his better judgment, he succumbed to studio pressure and consented to
give Mae Murray the leading role.
While
Gilbert stars as Prince Danilo Petrovich, the good-natured, womanizing heir to
the throne of a tiny
On their wedding night, with the bride significantly dressed in black lace,
Sadoja collapses with a heart attack. Sally completes the requisite year of
mourning, while Danilo grieves of their stolen love, seeking distraction in the
wild revelry of Maxim's in
Sally now controls the millions, and the two princes resume their efforts to
woo her. Rebuffed by Sally, and horrified at the prospect that she might marry
his foe, Danilo challenges Mirko to a duel... and the fate of the Merry Widow's
happiness is determined by the barrel of a gun.
Much of the plot is owed to the operetta upon which it is based (music by Franz
Lehar, libretto by Victor Leon and Leo Stein), but Stroheim personalized it to
such a degree that it barely resembles the two remakes that would follow
(Lubitsch's 1934 version and a 1952 musical starring Lana Turner).
Stroheim's collaborator on the screenplay was Irish-born
lawyer-turned-newspaper editor Benjamin Glazer. "I frankly acknowledge
that von Stroheim did the work," Glazer said, "If he received any
inspiration or ambition from me at all, it must have been from my
indolence." Glazer went on to script such important films as Flesh and
the Devil (1926) and Seventh Heaven (1927) and was one of the
founding members of the
The repulsive Baron Sadoja is purely a Stroheim creation. He is not only a
physically unappealing lecher, he is also a foot fetishist. When Sally tries to
pawn him off on one of the other showgirls, he examines their footwear, and then
dismisses them with a sneer, before gazing lovingly at Sally's high-heeled
white silk dance shoes. After viewing all his films, it is clear that, to some
degree, Stroheim himself was an appreciator of women's fine footwear.
To each his own, Stroheim seems to say, and playfully illustrates this idea as
Sally's three suitors gaze upon her while she performs at the Castellano opera
house. Through his opera glasses, Sadoja, of course, stares at Sally's delicate
feet. The villainous Mirko wants only her body, and his point-of-view reveals
only her legs and midriff. Danilo, however, is more interested in her soul, and
his opera glasses reveal a radiant view of Sally's beautiful face.
This difference in romantic philosophies is echoed in a scene in which Danilo
woos Sally. It occurs in a secret wine cellar catering to Castellano's ruling
elite. Mirko and his cronies indulge in an orgy of sorts, frolicking with
prostitutes, engaging in a drunken pillow fight, and shooting the eyes out of a
classical statue. Danilo, meanwhile, serves Sally a romantic dinner in a
private apartment within, while being serenaded by two scantily clad musicians,
who are blindfolded lest they witness a royal indiscretion.
In creating the fantastical
The coronation was even more spectacular upon the film's original release. The
final two minutes of the film were shot in two-strip Technicolor (Stroheim
employed the same technique with a parade sequence in The Wedding March
[1928]). The Technicolor consultant on the film was Ray Rennahan. According to
Stroheim biographer Richard Koszarski (Von: The Life and Times of Erich von
Stroheim), "For years Rennahan would find Hollywood technicians who
had kept small clips from the scene as souvenirs, for it quickly earned a
reputation as one of the finest examples of early Technicolor." Sadly,
none of the Technicolor footage seems to exist today.
Years later, Stroheim came to look upon The Merry Widow with less pride
than it deserved. "I am far from being proud of it and I do not want to be
identified at all with so-called box-office attractions...When you ask me why I
do such pictures I am not ashamed to tell you the true reason: only because I
do not want my family to starve." There is some element of truth to this.
It had been a year since his last payment from the Goldwyn Studios for Greed.
But the fact that he repeatedly returned to the genre -- and that he recycled
numerous elements of The Merry Widow for his ambitious production Queen
Kelly (1929) -- seem to indicate that his personal investment in the tales
of decadence among Eastern European royalty was much greater than he was
willing to admit.
The Merry Widow • Erich von Stroheim • Senses of Cinema Adrian Martin from Senses of Cinema, December 12, 2002
The
Merry Widow (1925) | The Midnight Palace
Karl Holzheimer
notcoming.com | The Merry
Widow - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
Adam Balz
Erich Von Stroheim
retro at Film Forum (thru Jul 30) - Alt Screen Imogen Smith, May 28, 2012
Wonders
in the Dark [Allan Fish]
The Merry Widow (1925) A Silent Film Review – Movies Silently Fritzi Kramer, March 23, 2014
Parallax View [Sean Axmaker] May 24, 2011
366 weird movies [Alfred Eaker]
Film
Review: THE MERRY WIDOW – ZekeFilm
David Gill
FilmFanatic.org » Merry Widow,
The (1925)
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Films de France [James Travers]
Movie Review - The Merry Widow - THE SCREEN - NYTimes.com Mordaunt Hall
The Merry
Widow (1925 film) - Wikipedia
The Wedding March,
directed by Erich von Stroheim | Film ... - Time Out
Geoff Andrew
Like Foolish Wives, Greed and Queen
Kelly, The Wedding March (originally made in two parts, of which
only the first is extant) survives as a mutilated masterpiece, even this first
part having been cut from 14 reels to ll. Charting the ill-starred romance
between a Viennese prince (Stroheim in an unusually sympathetic role) and a
lowly commoner (Wray), the film would perhaps appear to be its cynical
creator's most romantic work, were it not for the marvellously detailed
portrait of the corruption of society in general, rich and poor. Nevertheless,
it is the love scenes, played beneath shimmering apple blossoms in lyrical soft
focus, that stick in the memory, ironically turning what is now the film's
ending - the frustration of that love - into one of the director's most
bitterly pessimistic scenes.
The Wedding March | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
I seem to be in the minority in considering Erich von Stroheim's 1928 extravaganza to be less than a masterpiece. It's a bit obvious and redundant, and it doesn't compare with Blind Husbands, Foolish Wives, Greed, The Merry Widow, or Queen Kelly. But it's exceptionally subtle and witty at times (one highlight is an early sequence in two-strip Technicolor), and even minor Stroheim is considerably better than most other filmmakers' major work. The director, also one of the great silent actors, plays the lead, a flirtatious prince who agrees to marry for money to help his parents (ZaSu Pitts is the expectant bride, a crippled heiress) but falls in love with a poor woman (Fay Wray) shortly before the wedding. At great expense Stroheim re-created the decadent splendor of the Vienna of his youth, then saw his film mutilated by Paramount; the first half of the story is all that survives today in any form.
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
St. Stephen and the Iron Man are the guardians overseeing
Erich
von Stroheim - Film Comment Jonathan
Rosenbaum, May/June 1974, republished again February 6, 2017, here: Second
Thoughts on Stroheim | Jonathan Rosenbaum (excerpt)
O
Love—without thee marriage is a savage mockery.
—opening title of The
Wedding March
Greed stands at roughly the halfway point in Stroheim’s fifteen-year career as a director, constituting both a caesura and a change of direction in his oeuvre. Four features precede it[3] and four follow it, and beneath the continuity of certain undeniable stylistic and thematic traits, Stroheim’s preoccupation with realism, his concern with narrative, and the nature of his ambition all undergo important transformations.
The first thing to be said about The Merry Widow, the film immediately following Greed, is that it represents a nearly total inversion of the former’s approach: after filming his least compromised, most “realistic” work, he promptly made a film that was his most compromised and least “realistic.” At its best, The Merry Widow has a lightness of touch and a grace of movement suggesting a presound musical, with an idealized fairy-tale landscape (clearly established in the opening shots) that necessitates a very different kind of discourse. The most striking offbeat elements in this Hollywood dream bubble—Prince Mirko (Roy D’Arcy) and Baron Sadoja (Tully Marshall)—figure in the overall scheme in a way that is analogous to the “marginal notations” of irreverence that characterize most of Buñuel’s films in the Fifties: they offer ironic swipes at the conventional aspects of the material without ever seriously threatening the root assumptions of these conventions.
Prince Mirko is an obvious derivation of Erich von Steuban and Count Karamzin, but his role here is not as central: as a foil to the romantic figure of Prince Danilo (John Gilbert), he can not wield the same kind of lethal authority. Similarly, the more grotesque part of Baron Sadoja—a “first draft,” as it were, of the even more monstrous Jan Vooyheid, incarnated by Tully Marshall in Queen Kelly—is allowed to function as a grim commentary on the action and an intrusion on the central love story, but at no point is he really permitted to dominate the film.
Regarding The Merry Widow as a transitional work, one can perhaps best understand Mirko and Sadoja not as ”realistic” intrusions—they are anything but that—but as rebellious counter-fantasies provoked by the more conventional fantasies embodied by Danilo and Sally O’Hara (Mae Murray). If the earlier films were an attempt to subvert Hollywood from an outsider’s position—eliminating the characteristic romantic leads, and in the case of Greed, literally moving out of the studios to locations—The Merry Widow announces the counter-strategy of boring from within. There is more than one prefiguration of this procedure in The Merry Widow. The most celebrated instance occurs in the theater, when Sadoja, Mirko and Danilo each look at the dancing heroine through opera glasses: the first concentrates on her feet, the second on her body, the third on her face.
Another noticeable shift in Stroheim’s style is a somewhat different use of durations in relation to narrative. In the silent films after Greed, despite Stroheim’s continued interest in making long films, the novelistic aspect becomes less important, and the ritualistic, ceremonial aspects of duration gradually come to the fore—the obsessive desire to keep looking at something not in order to “understand” or “decode” it, but in order to become totally absorbed in it, transfixed by it; not to penetrate the surfaces of things, but to revel in these surfaces. As suggested earlier, the aggressivess of Stroheim’s camera eye ultimately leads to a kind of passivity. In the films after Greed, this change becomes much more explicit. The belligerent eye of the skeptic gradually turns into the passive eye of the voyeur.
This generalization tends to oversimplify a great deal of Stroheim’s work, and probably shouldn’t be taken as literally as it is stated above; but it does help to account for the peculiarly dreamlike elongations of actions and scenes in The Merry Widow, The Wedding March, and Queen Kelly. A simple comparison might help to clarity the difference: when the camera slowly approaches Dale Fuller’s face in Foolish Wives to reveal the revenge plans being formed in her eyes, the lingering effect has a purely narrative function, permitting us to watch a process more clearly than we could otherwise. But when the camera slowly tracks up to the face of Mae Murray in her wedding dress, and then recedes a bit to frame her entire figure as she proceeds to tear up the dress, we are being asked to concentrate on her primarily as an object; the “process” at work is chiefly the camera movement itself. We can intuit that the character’s visible distress leads to her act of violence, but the steps leading from A to B are implied more than chronicled. They are the scene’s justification, but not its major focus.
Nor is it just a question of the relative lack of virtuosity in Murray’s performance. Gloria Swanson’s performance in Queen Kelly is quite adept in its development and exposition of motives. But this is no longer the camera’s primary subject: virtually all of the characters in Stroheim’s last silent films exist as essences, fixed points of reference—“static essentials,” to borrow Pavese’s phrase. That Stroheim intended to show Kelly undergoing a complete transformation—from innocent to brothel madam to queen—must be acknowledged, but the evidence of this change was not recorded on film; it isn’t until Walking Down Broadway that we find a visible (if partial) throwback to a ”narrative performance” in the part of ZaSu Pitts as Millie.
The Merry Widow announces a more static view of action and character; The Wedding March and Queen Kelly, both epics of slow motion, expand and sustain it. It is hardly accidental that religious and military ceremonies figure so importantly in these films—they, too, are “static essentials.” The “realistic” impulse goes through no less pronounced a change: the European countries of The Merry Widow and Queen Kelly are fantasy kingdoms, and even the celebrated accuracy of detail in the Vienna of The Wedding March is subject to fanciful additions. “I am through with black cats and sewers,” Stroheim is reported to have said while making the film. “I am going to throw perfumed apple blossoms at the public until it chokes on them. If people won’t look upon life as it is, we must give them a gilded version.”
And a gilded version is what The Wedding March* supplies. Even though the villain Schani (Matthew Betz), a pigsty and a slaughterhouse are all clearly intended to offset the apple blossoms, these supposedly “realistic” elements are just as idealized as the romantic ones. Next to Stroheim’s other villains, Schani is a crude cardboard cutout who is never allowed to expand beyond a few basic mannerisms (mainly spitting); and the other major characters—Prince Nicki (Stroheim), Mitzi (Fay Wray) and Cecelia (ZaSu Pitts)—are unusually simplistic creations for Stroheim.
One could be charitable (and many critics have been) by regarding the figures and themes of The Wedding March as mythic distillations of their counterparts in previous Stroheim films; or one can be less charitable and regard them as inert calcifications — rigid prototypes whose original raison d’être is lacking. The Wedding March is generally accorded a high place in the Stroheim canon, and it must be admitted that it has a magisterial, “definitive” quality that is missing from most of his other work. But speaking from a minority viewpoint, I might argue that a certain price has to be paid for this rather self-conscious classicism. Apart from rare scenes-like the remarkably subtle exchange of looks and gestures between Nicki and Mitzi during the Corpus Christi procession, the action, characters, and symbolic motifs (e.g., the Iron Man) are so schematically laid out that they assume a certain thinness; investigation is consistently bypassed for the sake of a polished presentation, and the eighth time that we see Schani spit could just as functionally be the second time or the ninth.
Seen purely on its own terms, The Wedding March is undeniably an impressive work. Offering us spectacle more than drama, it is a stunning display of lavishness and an ironic commentary on a particular kind of royal decay lurking underneath. It is only when we place it alongside Foolish Wives, Greed, Queen Kelly that we can understand its limitations. What these films (and even the others, to lesser degrees) possess that The Wedding March lacks is an acute sense of transgression. And it is precisely this sense that makes Queen Kelly, for all its own limitations, a more pungent and exciting work. If The Wedding March converts many of the familiar Stroheim themes into a series of dry homilies and mottoes, all suitable for immediate framing, Queen Kelly converts many of these same themes into a species of delirium—a possessed work of hypnotic, almost hallucinatory intensity. In contrast to the icy elegance of The Wedding March, Queen Kelly breathes fire.
The Wedding March is greatest of von Stroheim's perverted
valentines to old
Erich von Stroheim was one of the greatest of the silent era directors, famous for his obsessions, disregard of budget, schedule and running time, and who shot hundreds of hours, take after take, sometimes of subjects so gamey he knew the censors would never permit a fraction of it. His first film, Blind Husbands (1919) was thought by one of his biographers to be "the most impressive and significant film debut in Hollywood history" until Citizen Kane. All films but his masterpiece, Greed, were set in an imaginary Vienna, with "an Erich von Stroheim character" an officer of dangerous sex appeal and the recurring themes of pure and impure love, doppelgangers and youthful and aging members of the decaying order. Stroheim's downfall was partly due to his own cinematic excesses, but also to his inability to be confined by the ever more powerful studio system. He was not the only maverick to be discarded for his inability to kowtow to the producers. He was a believer in fate. So, there was no other way.
Discharged from the Austrian Army (unfit 4-F) he added the aristocratic "von" to his name at Ellis Island and set about reinventing himself. He fell in with director D. W. Griffith and became his disciple, making his living as an actor before taking up the director's megaphone. He played many variations on the bestial Hun, "The Man You Love to Hate." Who could forget The Heart of Humanity, the ripe piece of propaganda in which, distracted by a screaming infant as he tries to rape a Red Cross nurse after tearing at her clothes with his teeth, he plucks the baby from its cradle and throws it out the window? His parts made hm so reviled, he could barely go out in Hollywood without being hissed, a tribute to his acting skill. And, of course he is most remembered for his stunning performance as (of course) "the Erich von Stroheim character" in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard. He knew immediately that this was how he would be remembered, and groused about "that lousy butler part."
After Blind Husbands, Foolish Wives and The Merry-Go-Round, Stroheim directed his masterpiece, Greed. He had become consumed by his desire to faithfully render an acurate version of Frank Norris' realistic turn of the century novel, McTeague. The rough cut supposedly ran 10 hours, and even brutally edited in half, and then in half again, its power was unmistakable, although it was savaged by contemporary critics. MGM then had him direct a silent version of the popular operetta, The Merry Widow. It was a glittering success (and his most profitable film) managing to meld the MGM studio gloss with his own skewed vision. He gave silent diva Mae Murray her greatest role (over her hysterical protests), and also helped cement the romantic image of John Gilbert, soon to be one of MGM's greatest stars. The studio had been a little confused about the character of old Baron, trembling in the final stage of syphilis, who spent so much time fondling the heroine's dainty shoes. In one of the great apocryphal Hollywood tales, Irving Thalberg supposedly asked what was going on. "He has a foot fetish" Von helpfully explained. "And you have a footage fetish" Thalberg is said to have retorted.
His next film was to be the apotheosis of "Old Heidelberg" variations, with himself in the "Erich von Stroheim part." Once again, a scion of the old aristocracy will become enamored of a chaste and beautiful commoner although his parents warn him he must marry for money. He couldn't bear the stifling atmosphere at MGM any more, where Greed had been butchered, and the profits he hoped for from the smashing success of The Merry Widow were being charged to Greed's losses. There were still plenty of people in Hollywood willing to work with Stroheim, including millionaire Pat Powers, searching for that certain someone to make a star of his mistress, Peggy Hopkins Joyce. Stroheim managed to evade that "honor" but Powers was still willing to finance him in the hopes of a success as glowing as his previous one.
He cast many of the familiar actors who had been in his 1920s films, and himself as the hero, Prince Niki. He then set out to discover a suitable leading lady. Teenaged Fay Wray had been in a few comedies and Westerns when she was brought to his office. He saw in her the emotional accessibility that would allow him to elicit the nuanced performance he demanded. (Like Chaplin, he acted all the roles in his films, and expected the players to imitate him). "As soon as I had seen Fay Wray and spoken with her for a few minutes, I knew I had found the right girl. I didn't even take a test of her. Why? Because I select my players from a feeling that comes to me when I am with them, a certain sympathy you might call it, or a vibration that exists between us that convinces me they are right. I could not work with a girl who did not have a spiritual quality…Fay has spirituality too, but she also has a very real sex appeal that takes hold of the hearts of men."
Wray understood that she was participating in a unique enterprise and gave many interviews on her experience with von Stroheim…and continues to do so; she just celebrated her 94th birthday. "That first scene (in the wine garden) was photographed just before the dawn came up and naturally, I'd been up all night. But, I just felt good as I was going home in my Hudson early in the morning. I drove with my right hand on the steering wheel, and my left hand holding my forehead. I just felt like I had to hold my head--I was so tired--but at the same time I was so happy, because it was such a beautiful feeling to be in that film…Von Stroheim was highly appreciated by those of us working on the film. He was so meticulous and he was so detailed that every moment had an implicit urgency about it. There was nothing loose or clownish or anything about working with him. Some of the scenes like the ones in the butcher shop were so awful, but so realistic that there was no sense of acting. I didn't even think about acting--I was just being."
The Wedding March was the most lavish of his films, even surpassing the million dollar Monte Carlo of Foolish Wives. Weeks were spent filming the elaborate Corpus Christi procession, which included the Emperor Franz-Josef's real golden carriage, brought to America and photographed in Technicolor. Stroheim, who had a photographic memory for the Vienna of his childhood, may have seen this procession as a boy. When the Emperor's nephew, the Archduke Leopold visited Paramount, he couldn't believe his eyes. Richard Day designed 36 sets to recreate Pre-War Vienna, including a wine garden with thousands of wax apple blossoms wired to the tree branches on by one.
Stroheim shot over 100 reels of film, intending that the film would be edited down to two 8-10 reel features to be shown over two nights. Finally, the plug was pulled, and inevitably his film was turned over to a third party to edit to the studio's specifications. The first half was released as The Wedding March. The second part, The Honeymoon, was pastiched with a hasty recap of the first film and less than an hour of the second half of the plot and released in Europe. Stroheim strenuously disowned the second half, and for a while there was one print at the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris. Sometimes, it would appear unannounced after The Wedding March was shown. Five days after Stroheim died in 1957, there was a tragic fire at the Cinematheque, and the only print was destroyed. Henri Langlois attributed it to von Stroheim's vengeful ghost.
The screening at the North Carolina Museum of Art was accompanied by David Drazin. He reconstructed the theme of the film, "Paradise" by J. S. Zamecnik, using one musical line from inside the front cover of the sheet music of Redskin, and a violin part discovered in an antique store. Drazin's Vienna-flavored score added zest and drama to the screening of this magnificent print from the Library of Congress. The second reel was a bit out of focus (which Drazin said is also true of the Paramount 75th Anniversary video he used to devise his score) but the rest of the print was crisp and beautiful, and includes the Technicolor Corpus Christi procession.
"The living, breathing Erich von Stroheim was so outrageous that only a gifted scenario writer could have invented him, as indeed was the case. The man was a host of contradictions: he played at being a nobleman, yet gave us great insight into the lower classes. He appeared cynical yet showed he was the most dedicated of men. He provided glossy fiction yet depicted a gritty truth. Although he came from the mercantile class, he became the least commercial of directors. Always fascinated by the wheels of fate, he eventually found himself ground up by them. In his films, he fused art and reality, myth and naturalistic detail, love and lust, idealism and cynicism, discipline and unbelievable excess. In the process, he became the legend that he had created: Erich von Stroheim." --(Arthur Lennig)
The Wedding March - Not
Coming to a Theater Near You Cullen
Gallagher
Erich Von Stroheim
retro at Film Forum (thru Jul 30) - Alt Screen Imogen Smith, May 28, 2012
The
Wedding March (1928) - Articles - TCM.com
Susan Doll
The Wedding March | Silent Film Festival Rebecca Peters
New York Times [Mordaunt Hall]
The Wedding March (1928 film) - Wikipedia
QUEEN KELLY
USA (101 mi) 1929 co-director: Richard Boleslawski (uncredited)
Queen Kelly | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
Erich von Stroheim's 1928 film was the last that he would be allowed to sign, yet it, too, survives only in a fragmentary version. The story of a convent girl who is romanced by a prince but ends up as the mistress of an African bordello, it was intended to run for five hours, but producer Joseph P. Kennedy (who financed the film as a showcase for his close friend Gloria Swanson) turned off the money at the midway point, and the film was released in a truncated 70-minute version. (Two reels of the African footage, shot but never incorporated into the original prints, were discovered some years ago and spliced into the present 101-minute version.) Though it's far from coherent, Queen Kelly is one of Stroheim's most provocative works, not just in terms of its extravagant subject matter but in the aesthetic shift it suggests between the fierce realism of Stroheim's earlier work and a distant, abstract perspective that points to the cinema of Josef von Sternberg. With Walter Byron and Seena Owen.
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
For Queen Kelly (1929, Kino, $29.95), box office star Gloria Swanson hired Von Stroheim to direct her in what would have been a hugely ambitious five-hour epic about a convent girl who falls in love with an English prince and is sent to work in an African brothel.
Of course, Swanson fired the director midway through production and this 100-minute release is the final result of their work. Certain scenes are filled in with stills, and the love affair with the prince is played up perhaps more than it ought to be, but it's still a fascinating work, filled with unique Von Stroheim touches, specifically the mad queen, who walks around naked with a fluffy white cat clutched to her chest. It's also Von Stroheim's most overtly beautiful production, with luminous, glossy cinematography befitting a star such as Swanson. Billy Wilder used a clip of this film in his 1950 Sunset Boulevard, which starred both Swanson and Von Stroheim.
The new DVD contains a useful commentary track by biographer Richard Koszarski and the strangely abrupt ending that Swanson put together for her version of the film. Other extras include a video introduction by Swanson, outtake footage, a 1950s television performance by Von Stroheim and a dossier on Stroheim's earlier film, Merry-Go-Round, from which he was fired.
Three
Movie Buffs [Patrick, Eric and Scott Nash]
Legendary silent director Erich von Stroheim and legendary silent movie star Gloria Swanson made almost one movie together. Production on the ill fated Queen Kelly was halted only one third of the way through the script. The sudden popularity of talkies added to the mounting expenses caused by the extravagance of the eccentric filmmaker led the producers, Joseph Kennedy and Swanson herself, to abandon the project midway.
What remains today is an incomplete masterpiece. The attention to lavish detail is truly amazing. Like other von Stroheim vehicles this one would have run very long, nearly five hours in fact. Only about 100 minutes of film exist today.
Queen Kelly tells the story of a young convent girl who meets Prince Wolfram von Hohenberg Falsenstein the consort of the mad Queen Regina V of Kronberg. He meets her walking along a country rode with the other nuns in the convent. When he points out, with a laugh, that her unmentionables have fallen around her ankles, she angrily takes them off and throws them in his face. He is instantly smitten by her charms. So much so that later that night, after the Queen has announced that their wedding shall take place the very next day, he sneaks out of the castle, goes to the convent, abducts the sleeping girl and stupidly, brings her back to the palace. In the midst of falling in love they are interrupted by the Queen. In a rage she sends the Prince to prison and mercilessly whips the young girl with a riding crop.
From here the story jumps to Kelly being sent to
When Norma Desmond says her famous line “We had faces then." in Sunset Boulevard it is a scene from Queen Kelly that she is watching. Even more ironically, von Stroheim as Max is running the movie projector.
Thankfully today we have at least part of this flawed yet intriguing movie in a newly restored version.
Queen
Kelly - TCM.com Bret Wood
from Turner Classic Movies
For actress Gloria Swanson, director Erich von Stroheim and
producer Joseph Kennedy, Queen Kelly
(1929) seemed like the perfect filmmaking opportunity.
Swanson had once been the most glamorous star in the
Her partner in this endeavor was Joseph Kennedy, a brash Irish-American who had
built an American empire on Prohibition booze, and was keen to establish
himself as a respectable businessman and public figure. His ambitions were
ultimately realized when his son, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was elected to the
Presidency. The elder Kennedy's pursuit of legitimacy had led him into film
production. For a while, he was the head of FBO Studios (Film Booking Offices
of America), which specialized in low-budget westerns and other formulaic
amusements. Although this provided him with some degree of respectability, it
didn't exactly earn him the admiration of his peers. He needed to undertake a
monumental project: a cinematic masterpiece that would rank among the greatest
films ever made, showcase the talents of his secret Inamorata (Swanson),
and demonstrate his strengths as a
Enter Erich von Stroheim. When he began his directing career in 1919, he
immediately rocketed to the forefront of the cinema's most sophisticated
directors. Consequent with his rise to renown was the circulation of rumors
about his difficult personality. For eight years he had created some of
Because Stroheim was in the weakest bargaining position (one might call it
"dire professional straits"), he agreed to Kennedy and Swanson's
terms. As he later phrased it, he felt like he "had a goddamned sword
hanging over [his] head." He waived creative control and agreed that he
could be removed from the project if he ran over budget or schedule. Responding
to warnings about Stroheim's difficult personality, Kennedy boasted to Swanson,
"I can handle him." On
Stroheim was confident that this time, his bosses shared his ambitions,
appreciated his vision, and would permit him the creative freedom to properly
commit it to film. Kennedy and Swanson wanted a masterpiece. Stroheim delivered
one in screenplay form. Entitled The Swamp, it was 735 scenes in length.
Life Magazine's Robert E. Sherwood called it, "the best film story
ever written." By October, 1928, Stroheim had conscientiously reduced it
to 510 scenes, and shooting was scheduled to begin.
Set in the mythical Prussian
The idea of a schoolgirl dropping her undies during a military procession may
seem completely outrageous and unprecedented. Stroheim was actually borrowing
it from the 1911 German stage farce Die Hose, by Carl Sternheim. The
drawers-dropping continues, almost 100 years later. Comedian/actor/writer Steve
Martin re-adapted the play in 2002 as The Underpants.
Later, during a resplendent dinner,
At this point, the locale changes to
The story was meant to continue, with Kelly installed as the new Madame
(nicknamed "Queen" by the hookers and sailors), and later being
reunited with Prince Wolfram. However, the production was abruptly shut down.
Swanson claims that she pulled the plug on the film when she suddenly realized
the "dance hall" that Kelly inherits is actually a brothel. "My
aunt was supposed to be the owner of nightclub," Swanson recalled, years
later, "By the time that Mr. von Stroheim got in there and felt a free
hand...it wasn't exactly a dance hall. It was sort of one of those things that
they long ago closed up in the United States... and you can imagine my
consternation when I walked on the set and saw what was going on."
Either Swanson was shifting the blame for the film's collapse, or else she had
not carefully read the screenplay. The script abounds with references to the
type of commerce being conducted at "Poto-Poto." "In foreground
is an unkempt and slatternly blonde, in a kimono," specifies the script in
one scene, "unmistakably a lady of the horizontal profession."
The breaking point occurred on
When the footage was reviewed by Kennedy's staff, red flags began to appear.
"Story as screened [is] slovenly gross, often revolting," wrote
production manager E.B. Derr in a telegram, "I have never been so shocked
and revolted. It was in execrable taste."
Stroheim had controlled his often despotic personality and for the most part maintained
a professional demeanor on the set. When one biographer regurgitated rumors
about on-the-set squabbles, Stroheim politely chastised him, "The
relations between Gloria and myself were before the picture, during the making
and afterwards and still are the most intimate and friendly ones."
In an attempt to restore his good name, Stroheim had made compromises -- more
than he had on any other production. He accepted a title change from The
Swamp to Queen Kelly
with no apparent complaint. And when the film was falling behind schedule, he
re-conceptualized and rewrote the second half of the film. Instead of occurring
in a swamp amidst a horrible storm, the climax would now occur in the
"Poto-Poto" brothel, since sets were already constructed and no location
work would be required. In order to keep the production alive, he signed away
his claim to any of the film's earnings...for the token sum of one dollar. In
return, he was given the story rights, which was later published in novelized
form, as Poto-Poto. Released in
It was early 1928, and the silent era was quickly coming to a close. Warner
Bros.'s The Jazz Singer opened on
Adolf Tandler was commissioned to compose a score for the film, and in 1931,
Swanson shot a rather jumbled ending (shot by Gregg Toland, who would later
photograph Orson Welles's Citizen Kane [1941]) in an attempt to tie up
the loose ends of the narrative. This version received a very limited release.
The film faded into obscurity, until a portion of it was integrated into Billy
Wilder's Sunset Blvd. (1950). When faded star Norma Desmond (Swanson)
screens one of her classic films, it is a beautiful scene in which Kelly is
sent to the chapel for prayer. Her face surrounded by glistening, dripping
candles, the unrepentant Kelly prays not for forgiveness...but that she
will encounter Wolfram again. The footage so impressed viewers that the film
was unearthed and given a few museum play dates.
Queen Kelly
finally received a proper theatrical release in 1985 when a restored edition
was prepared by Dennis Doros for Kino International Corp. A fair amount of the
controversial "Poto-Poto" footage had survived, but Swanson had
chosen to leave it out of the 1931 release version. Doros reunited the African
footage to the rest of the film, and bridged many of the gaps using still
photos and script excerpts. It is this version that Turner Classic Movies will
be screening, and remains the definitive version of this extraordinary (and
extraordinarily jinxed) production.
Paradise
Regained: Queen Kelly and the Lure of ... - Senses of Cinema Paradise
Regained: Queen Kelly and the
Lure of the ‘Lost’ Film, by Darragh O’Donohue, July 2003
Queen Kelly • Senses of
Cinema Michael Koller, August
27, 2007
Erich Von Stroheim
retro at Film Forum (thru Jul 30) - Alt Screen Imogen Smith, May 28, 2012
Not
Coming to a Theater Near You [Evan Kindley]
All
Talking! All Singing! All Dancing!: Queen Kelly - A talkie that never ... Jonas Nordin, June 9, 2009
World
Cinema Review: Erich von Stroheim | Queen Kelly Douglas Messerli
A
Mythical Monkey Writes About The Movies
20/20
Movie Reviews [Richard Cross]
Queen
Kelly (1929) | The Hollywood Revue
Angela
The Story Behind "Queen Kelly" - UCLA.edu Peter Reiher, September 16, 1994
Queen Kelly - Silent
Era : Home Video Reviews Carl
Bennett
The
Erich Von Stroheim Collection - AV Club Film Keith Phipps, also reviewing BLIND HUSBANDS and FOOLISH
WIVES
Erich
von Stroheim – Brandon's movie memory
Queen Kelly (1928, Erich von Stroheim)
Movie Title Screens - 1929 -
Filmsite.org Tim Dirks
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Queen Kelly
(1929). | Desuko Movie Spot.
Queen Kelly (1929) - Trailers, Reviews,
Synopsis, Showtimes and Cast Hal
Erickson from All-Movie
Queen Kelly
(1929) - Erich Von Stroheim | Review | AllMovie Craig Butler
The
Cleveland Movie Blog [Matt Finley]
'Queen
Kelly' finally on the throne - latimes
Susan King
'QUEEN
KELLY' OPENS - MORE THAN 50 YEARS LATE - NYTimes ... September 22, 1985
Queen Kelly - Alchetron, The
Free Social Encyclopedia
USA (92 mi) 1929 co-director: James Cruze, von Stroheim uncredited
Ladies
and gentlemen, I have the privilege to appear before you in what I might call,
with all due modesty, the greatest ventriloquism exhibition of all times. —The Great
Gabbo (Erich von Stroheim)
Shot in the era of early talkies, when the studios were under pressure to crank out talking pictures before they even learned how to use the cumbersome equipment, and while the result is a highly uneven film, it’s notable on several counts. First, it’s a time capsule look at the Vaudeville era, where the charm of these old musical numbers are priceless, choreographed in an odd hybrid of styles, all of which predate Busby Berkeley, but heavily costumed dancers fill every inch of the frame, using a sense of constant motion in order to dazzle the audiences back in the 20’s. Just as a note of comparison, this film was released the same year as the very first Marx Brothers movie, THE COCOANUTS (1929), where both feature plenty of overblown musical numbers that include both amateurish and near operatic singing voices. Ben Hecht wrote the screenplay, adapted from his 1928 short story The Rival Dummy, described as “a macabre adventure into the strange workings of an unbalanced mind.” But the real showpiece of this film is the slow psychological deterioration of a world class ventriloquist, The Great Gabbo, played by the legendary director Erich von Stroheim. The eccentric nature of his performance is simply off the charts, yet his aristocratic mannerisms, so prevalent in THE GRAND ILLUSION (1937), are fully developed here, wearing a white Tuxedo with white gloves, with honorary medals tuck to his chest, not to mention his customary cigarette and eye monocle. His distinct pronunciation of every Hecht word lends credibility to his view of himself as a legendary star, even early in his career when he’s playing in dives. Betty Compson, the director’s wife, though they divorced a year later, is Mary, the faithful girlfriend with the shrill, high pitched voice that makes her sound dumber than she really is. But she can’t compete with the real love of Gabbo’s life, his dummy Otto. Though Mary is considered a second rate performer, her career is thwarted by slavishly taking care of Gabbo and Otto.
Chicago Reader Capsule Review Dave Kehr
An oddball genre hybrid, made at the dawn of sound (1929). Erich von Stroheim plays a mad ventriloquist, visibly relishing every word of Ben Hecht's arch dialogue; while he cracks up, his ex-wife rises to the top as a variety star, which provides the occasion for several very strange production numbers (originally in color). The direction, by James Cruze, is underwater slow, but there is something irresistible in the idea of a psychological thriller with music--this may have been the All That Jazz of its day. 92 min.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
There's an exquisite strangeness to the early
American talkies. More than any other country,
It's All Over Icky: Erich von Stroheim as The Great Gabbo in 35mm from Kyle Westphal from the Northwest Film Society
“Ladies and gentlemen, I have the privilege to appear before you in what I might call, with all due modesty, the greatest ventril-o-quil exhibition of all times.” So intones Erich von Stroheim and we’re inclined to believe him. It’s certainly kinkier than Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy: Stroheim’s demanding Gabbo pushes away his girlfriend (Betty Compson) but tries to win her back with his seductive dummy Otto. A one-of-a-kind collaboration between two titans of silent cinema, The Great Gabbo shows Cruze and Stroheim groping their way through the wooly world of experimental sound filmmaking. (That the film was released by short-lived Sono Art tells you all you need to know about their respective positions in the industry, which was then using the talkie revolution as a pretext for shunting aside difficult talent.) What with its delirious musical numbers (including “Icky” and the arachnophilic “Web of Love”) and satanic molasses pacing, The Great Gabbo makes a mighty peculiar case for the talkies—but then, how could a wisecracking dummy work in a silent picture?
User Reviews from imdb Author: lugonian from Kissimmee, Florida
THE GREAT GABBO (Sono-Art, 1929), directed by James Cruze,
adapted from the story "The Rival Dummy" by Ben Hecht, stars famed
director and actor Erich Von Stroheim in his talkie debut as an egotistical
ventriloquist named Gabbo, or should I say, THE GREAAAT GABBO. He not only
performs on stage with his dummy, Otto, (Gabbo's better half) but talks to it
in his dressing room, on the street and in restaurants, with the dummy himself
talking back to him, especially when Gabbo is drinking water, eating or smoking
a cigarette. He has an assistant named Mary (Betty Compson), with whom he
constantly finds fault in her efforts. ("My coffee is too cold/ My coffee
is too hot!" etc.) During one performance she accidentally stumbles and
drops a tray, which infuriates him to criticize her action, causing her to walk
out on him. As time passes, Gabbo increases his fame by becoming a featured
headliner in the Manhattan Revue where Mary now performs as a singer and dancer
along with her new partner named Frank (Donald Douglas). In spite that he is
more conceited than ever, Gabbo decides he wants Mary back with him, but
something happens that will cause Gabbo to go completely insane in a dramatic
climax that disrupts the show.
Aside from long stretches of dialog and no underscoring, a common practice in
early talkies, "The Great Gabbo," though not considered a musical,
has its share of production numbers. What makes this 1929 movie stand out among
other musicals at that time is that the orchestration during the stage numbers
doesn't sound at all like the usual 1920s score but more-so something from the
Ziegfeld Follies. The choreography, compliments by Maurice L. Kusell,
unfortunately, does not have the creativity of a Busby Berkeley, for that
mainly the girls on stage simply walk back and forth carrying umbrellas, do
some dancing and ballet, but there are never any closeups and the camera seldom
moves or intercuts, making some of the eight to ten minute production numbers
appear to be a little longer than its time length. The tunes itself, however,
aren't really bad to listen to, although none of them became popular on the Hit
Parade. The opening credits listing mentions sequences in Multicolor, but the
entire movie itself can be seen today only in black and white.
The songs (By Paul Titsworth, Lynn Cowan, Don McNamee and King Zany) from the
existing film print include: "I'm Laughing" and "The Lollipop
Song-Ickey" (both sung by Otto); "Every Now and Then" (sung by
Marjorie Kane and Donald Douglas); "I'm in Love With You" (sung by
Douglas and Betty Compson); "The New Step" (sung by Kane);
"Caught in the Web of Love" (sung by Douglas and Compton/ chorus);
"I'm in Love With You" (dance number); and a finale that includes a
montage of dance numbers, including the cut number of "The Ga-Ga
Bird" which is shown briefly. Of all the songs, only "Caught in the
Web of Love" has a slow score, but a production number that sets Douglas
and Compton as human spiders dancing in front of a giant spider web. "I'm
in Love With You" is one of the better songs presented in the movie, that
would be sometimes edited out from some TV prints. Marjorie "Babe"
Kane (famous for her role as WC Fields' daughter in the comedy short THE
DENTIST in 1932) supplies some comedy, songs and taps.
THE GREAT GABBO is Von Stroheim's show all the way, monocle and all, but not
the voice that accompanies his dummy, Otto. In spite of slow spots, it's an
interesting drama, original in theme and premise. One wonders if Rod Serling,
host of TV's "The Twilight Zone" of the 1960s, had seen this movie,
since there is an episode that I recall that involves a performer obsessed by
his dummy and having conversations with it, for which the dummy runs and later
ruins his life and career.
I last saw THE GREAT GABBO on Cable TV's The Nostalgia Channel in the early
1990s, and it used to be one of the movies shown on Public Television's
SPROCKETS back in the early 1980s. This rarely seen antique, a real curio at
best, can be found on video cassette through various distributors. For a best
VHS or DVD print with clearer picture and sound quality, with restored opening
and exit music (but minus the reported color sequences), the best
recommendation is to obtain a copy from the KINO Video Company.
User Reviews from imdb Author: spaman34 from United States
The Great Gabbo "The Great Gabbo" is one of the finest
examples of American Communist Propaganda films of the early 1900's existent
today. It is a master piece of film literature, when you consider the
limitations of the technology of the day. Vitaphone, the technology used to cut
a vinyl record of the speech or music as the action was filmed, was new and
very expensive, and made film editing a nightmarish chore if not impossible.
The script employ's Epic Theater techniques taught by Bertolt Brecht. In this
respect it is a thinker's film, the film forces you to think. From the very
beginning to the end you are constantly quizzical about behavior, motivation
and environment. This is a musical comedy, right? How and why is the title card
segment at the beginning of film different from other "musicals".
Meet the self-absorbed individualist Gabbo who never acknowledges others who
help him gain fame, his ventriloquist dummy Otto, and his stage partner Mary.
We soon realize that Gabbo has very superstitious religious beliefs. While he
does not perform a sign of the cross, we know that he operates under the fear
of his destined fate from unseen mystical powers. For instance when Mary
inadvertently places his hat upon the bed, Gabbo calls Mary a foul name saying
"Don't you know that it is bad luck?" Mary, in response, lists a
series of activities which might displease and bring about the wrath of an
angry immortal. She is more practical stating, "We make our own bad
luck." The comparative is the communist environment of the musical
theater. Everyone works and does their part for the betterment of the show.
Here, once Mary leaves Gabbo, she too climbs to the top and find success in her
profession as a singer and dancer with her partner/husband Frank. Gabbo and
Mary are both successes in their professions, who then is happier? Who is more honest
in their success? Capitalism is treated as an impertinent side note to the
values being discussed. Capitalism is the financier management of the show and
it seeks gain through investing in both ideals.
The film contrasts individualism versus communism. Many reviews have missed the
underpinning effort of the writers and directors to use epic theater, and there
blatant agenda to use it to teach the values of communism. They often deride
the films production numbers as being unpolished and lacking flair. I ask, how
could a film made with the intent to teach communistic ideals express them more
eloquently? The ideal of community is not a flawless world, but a world where
everyone does what they can to contribute to the whole. Some dancers lag behind
the others yet they are there doing there part. Some simply walk from one place
to another. The stage is full, busy and the message is understood. The
imperfect dance numbers, in the epic theater style, emphasize the communistic
ideal not detract from it. Few people would dare be as direct today.
The sad thing about communism's failure is that without community all we have
left is individualists who, like Gabbo, are only self-absorbed and care nothing
for their neighbor, nor acknowledge supportive people.
This film is a treasure that should be studied over and over. There are so many
messages you simply can not absorb them in one viewing.
Watch for Otto's "I'm laughing" song sequence, it is a precursor to
Bobby McFerrin's "Don't worry, Be Happy." An interesting comparison
is with this film's theater community and with the community environment of
If you don't own a copy of these films you should. I give "The Great
Gabbo" two thumbs up and a black and blue stubbed toe. I guess I'm a
little like Mary—accident prone. Oh and have a nice day. Be Happy!
Erich Von Stroheim
retro at Film Forum (thru Jul 30) - Alt Screen Imogen Smith, May 28, 2012
AND YOU CALL YOURSELF A SCIENTIST! - The Great Gabbo (1929) Liz Kingsley
Film
Reviews: The Great Gabbo & Blind Husbands - critic picks w/alex ... Alex Udvary
Alternative Film Guide [Danny Fortune]
The Films of James Cruze [Michael E. Grost]
The Gabbo-Flamarian Combo David Cairns from Shadowplay
Monster Shack [Dennis Grisbeck] Nathan Decker, also seen here: Million Monkey Theater
Wild Realm Reviews: The Great Gabbo
Cinepassion.org [Fernando F. Croce]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The Erich Von Stroheim Collection - AV Club Film Keith Phipps, also reviewing BLIND HUSBANDS and FOOLISH WIVES
Silent Era : Home Video : The Great Gabbo (1929) Review Carl Bennett
SciFilm Review Dave Sindelar
User
Reviews from imdb Author: planktonrules from
New York Times [Mordaunt Hall] also seen here: NY Times Original Review
The Great Gabbo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
HELLO,
SISTER!
USA (62 mi) 1933
Hello Sister | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
Begun by Erich von Stroheim under the title Walking Down Broadway, this 1933 film was taken away from him and extensively reshot by Alfred Werker; nonetheless, the first half of the film is fairly close to Stroheim's intention, and it stands as his last confirmed directorial work, as well as his only confrontation with sound. James Dunn and Boots Mallory star as a couple threatened by the sexual jealousy of an echt Stroheim figure—a psychotic spinster played by ZaSu Pitts.
Erich
von Stroheim - Film Comment Jonathan
Rosenbaum, May/June 1974, republished again February 6, 2017, here: Second
Thoughts on Stroheim | Jonathan Rosenbaum (excerpt)
Do you like funerals? I saw the cutest one last Saturday… I’m just a fool about funerals!
—Millie (ZaSu Pitts) in Hello, Sister!
Even in its mutilated, garbled, and partially reshot form, Hello, Sister!, the release version of Walking Down Broadway, is recognizably Stroheim for a substantial part of its running time. (See the factual/speculative reports of Richard Koszarski in Sight and Sound, Autumn 1970, and Michel Ciment in Positif no. 131, Octobre 1971). The “final shooting script” of Walking Down Broadway—dated 8/9/32, assigning story and continuity to Stroheim, and dialogue to Stroheim, Leonard Spigelgass, and Geraldine Nomis—helps us to understand some of the original intentions, but also suggests that even in its original state it would have been a minor Stroheim work. The absence of certain audacities and eccentricities in the release version—which include Mac (Terrance Ray) on a dance floor “[holding] up his middle finger at Jimmy,” jokes about Prohibition, and various things relating to Millie (such as her pet turtle Lady Godiva and her dialogue with Miss Platt, a middle-aged hunchback)—are somewhat offset by various banalities that are also missing. The ending of the film that we have is a standard Hollywood clincher; but it is hardly much worse than the one prefigured in the script, in which ”Peggy and Jimmy walk close to show-window and look. Wax baby in Nurses’ arms—as before —except window is dressed for Easter.” Peggy says “(Motherly): Isn’t it cute?” Jimmy says “(Fatherly): Sure is!” And “They draw close together and look at each other admiringly.”
Much of the interest in Hello, Sister! today derives from the opportunity to see Stroheim recasting many of his most familiar procedures in the context of sound. The repetitious character trait that would have been expressed visually in The Wedding March—e.g., Schani spitting—is conveyed here in the dialogue: Mac uses the phrase “Catch on?” nearly two dozen times in the script, much as Veronica (Françoise Lebrun) continually makes use of “un maximum” in Jean Eustache’s recent The Mother and the Whore. Elsewhere the dialogue often becomes less functional and tends to distract from the visuals. The Southern and New York accents of Peggy (Boots Mallory) and Jimmy (James Dunn) are important aspects of the characters, but their narrative function is not controlled in the way that the actors’ visual presences are. When Jimmy provokes Millie’s sexual jealousy in a scene near the end by refusing her help (”You’re all right, Millie—but you wouldn’t understand”), the extraordinary expressiveness of ZaSu Pitts’s reaction—the way her eyes flare up at his casual dismissal—is as striking as the close-up of Dale Fuller already alluded to in Foolish Wives. (The relationship doesn’t stop there: both characters suffer from sexual rejection, and take revenge by starting fires which provoke the grand finales of both films.) But Pitts’s acting in this case becomes the subtext of the dialogue rather than vice versa, a classic instance of the way that sound films often teach spectators not to see; the mystery inherent in her character tends to be minimized by the “explicating” power of the dialogue, and what might have been twice as powerful in a silent context can easily escape attention here.
To some degree, the dialogue in Hello, Sister! only makes more explicit some of the schematic simplifications of character and situation that are constants in Stroheim’s work, negating some of the openness and the demands on the spectator’s imagination imposed by silence. In every silent Stroheim film but Greed, the sound of English or American voices invading the continental kingdoms would surely have worked as an alienating factor. Hello, Sister!, which relates back to Greed in many respects (Mac and Jimmy are derived from Mac and Marcus, and even a lottery figures comparably in the Walking Down Broadway script), is set in New York, and doesn’t have to deal with this problem—indeed, the accents and inflections here are aids to verisimilitude—but at the same time, the screen is no longer quite the tabula rasa that it was, and the characteristic Stroheim Stare (the trained concentration of the camera on his fictional world) recedes somewhat under the verbiage, which frees us partially from the responsibility of looking.
The major stylistic developments in Stroheim’s career took place between Blind Husbands and Foolish Wives. One can speak of additional developments up through Greed, but after that one can principally refer only to certain simplifications and refinements. This is surely characteristic of Hollywood cinema in general, where Howard Hawks can devote a lifetime to refining Fig Leaves and A Girl in Every Port, and even a director as “experimental” as Hitchcock is periodically forced to retreat to the formulas of earlier successes. In the case of a maverick like Stroheim, the miracle—apart from his remarkable early development—is not that he wasn’t able to develop his style after Greed, but that he was able to make further films at all.
And in order to do so, he clearly had to pay a price. Whether or not future work in sound films would have led to other stylistic developments is impossible to determine; at best, all that Hello, Sister! suggests is the desire to accommodate his style to sound rather than to expand its basic options. Considering its relatively small budget, Blind Husbands can be seen as another sort of accommodation; and in a sense the evidence of the best in Hello, Sister! is comparable. It marks Stroheim as a promising director.
notcoming.com | Hello,
Sister! - Not Coming to a Theater Near You
Brynn White
Erich Von Stroheim
retro at Film Forum (thru Jul 30) - Alt Screen Imogen Smith, May 28, 2012
Hello,
Sister! - Clipped Wings - Alan Crosland - 1933 - film review James Travers from Films de France
Hello Sister!
- Movie Reviews and Movie Ratings | TVGuide.com
New
York Times [Andre Sennwald]
Critical
Consensus: J. Hoberman and Amy Taubin Discuss ... Amy Taubin, from Eric Kohn interviews of
critics J. Hoberman and Amy Taubin from indieWIRE,
Jim and I agree about the work of many directors, but von Trier
is not one of them. I loathe most of his movies, “Dogville” included, primarily
for their misogyny. Von Trier’s central female characters are tortured nonstop
until they either achieve beatitude through suffering or take bloody revenge on
their torturers. But it’s not only the misogyny that makes the movies
unbearable. I loathe the empty Brechtian distancing devices, the slippery
send-ups and self-satire, all the sophistry. Not for me. So I was certainly
surprised that “Melancholia” got to me from first to last when I saw it in
Lars von Trier
• Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema
Thomas Beltzer from Senses
of Cinema, October 4, 2002
Dancer in the
Dark Rhys Graham
The
Prodromic Institution of Spass: The Idiots
Gregory Little
“Colorado
Death Trip”: The Surrealist Recontextualisation of Farm Security Administration
Photos in Dogville Holger Römers
The
Prodromic Institution of Spass: The Idiots
Gregory Little
The King of Dogme Peter Schepelern from the Danish Film Institute, published in FILM #Dogme, April 2005
Lars von Trier | Film | The Guardian David Thomson, September 22, 2011
Lars von Trier: I was addicted to drugs and alcohol Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, November 28, 2014
Lars von Trier fears sobriety will destroy talent Toronto Sun, November 29, 2014
Lars von Trier Worries He Can’t Make Movies Now That He’s Sober Nolan Feeney from Time magazine, November 30, 2014
Sean O'Hagan talks to Lars von Trier about Antichrist | Film ... Sean O’Hagan interview from The Guardian, July 11, 2009
Mini Reviews Gerald Peary
My favorite Lars Von Trier films were pre-Breaking the
Waves (1996), before he became so swell-headed about his artistic genius. Case
in point: his dazzling Medea (1988).
Medea Mike D’Angelo from Time Out
Fifteen years ago, Lars von Trier's Medea—made for Danish television
and based on an unrealized script by Carl Theodor Dreyer—looked like pure
hubris, an ambitious tyro's attempt to position himself as the heir to his
country's cinematic throne. As it turns out, of course, Von Trier was right;
today, hardly anybody would dispute his status as the most significant Danish
filmmaker since Dreyer. But it's also clear, with the benefit of hindsight,
that Euripides' tragedy must have appealed strongly to the director's taste for
female self-abnegation—the driving force behind both Breaking the Waves and
Dancer in the Dark. Granted, Medea destroys herself out of hatred and
spite, whereas Breaking's Bess and Dancer's
Those expecting a faithful adaptation of the play will be disappointed, as
Von Trier (or Dreyer, more likely) has scrapped a number of key scenes and
virtually all of the dialogue. Visually, however, the piece is quite strong,
albeit more reminiscent of Welles than Dreyer in its bold yet stark
compositions and its use of theatrical effects (shadow play, rear projection).
Von Trier shot Medea on video, and his understanding of the medium seems
to have regressed over the years; the saturated colors (some shots almost look
hand-tinted) and rough, scrimlike textures employed here put the
let's-pretend-it's-celluloid blandness of his recent work to shame. Let's hope
his new picture, Dogville—shot on digital video and slated to premiere
at
Medea Eric Henderson from Slant magazine
An apologia for all future Susan Smiths, Euripides' filicidal classic Medea
is a simple story. The titular woman of magic is scorned by Jason, her husband
and the father of her two children, who leaves her to marry Glauce and become
the son-in-law of
Real
Horror Shows | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum, November 23, 1995
Breaking
the Waves Terrence Rafferty from The New Yorker
The Danish director Lars von Trier tells the sad story of a devout
Scottish girl (Emily Watson) who becomes a whore in order to save the life of
her critically ill husband (Stellan Skarsgård). She is, unmistakably, a female
Christ figure, and, as von Trier follows her up the steep road to her carnal
Calvary, he seems to be rediscovering some forgotten magic formula for
art-house success: he gives the highbrow audience precisely what it wanted in
the boom years of the fifties and early sixties—nudity plus theology. The
erotic-metaphysical hokum would be somewhat easier to take if the picture
displayed anything resembling a genuine religious impulse. But von Trier is no
Bergman or Dreyer: he's just a peddler of cheap miracles, a wily postmodernist
mountebank. Also with Katrin Cartlidge and Adrian Rawlins.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Idiots (1998) Xan Brooks from Sight and Sound, May 1999
Lars von Trier's self-consciously amateur experiment
The Idiots has spasms of genius, but its playful, inner-child message and too-tidy
ending trouble Xan Books
The second film to be released under the Dogma 95 code of conduct, The Idiots is a curious and haphazard creature, more daring thematically than Thomas Vinterberg's gripping but essentially conventional Festen, yet more wild and woolly too. From its opening title (rendered as chalk marks on a parquet floor), this essay in social deviance positively wallows in semi-contrived amateurism. Writer-director Lars von Trier has stated that the principal purpose of both Dogma and The Idiots is to allow film-makers to relinquish artistic control, and make a push towards an ideal dramatic state that's closer to camcorder voyeurism than to the sanitised gloss of mainstream cinema. So The Idiots breaks away from the formal precision its creator showed in his previous feature, Breaking the Waves, and adopts a guerrilla aesthetic. Von Trier's baby jives to a rhythm of jump cuts, using ill-focused camera movements (handheld, naturally) and scene changes that arrive abruptly, unheralded by audience-friendly establishing shots. At one point a boom microphone's shadow chases the characters up a sunlit gravel drive. Fluffed lines and technical gaffes are proudly flaunted. The whole thing runs on a kind of whoops!-accidentalism.
All of which would surely turn The Idiots into the cinematic equivalent of ready-ripped jeans were it not for the fact that the film's form fits so snugly with its content. The picture's opening half views like nothing so much as a dramatic (and X-rated) extension of such downmarket, fly-on-the-wall television shows as Candid Camera and Beadle's About. It functions like a controlled social experiment, a hard-and-fast study in behavioural science. The opening scenes find von Trier's group of middle-class youngsters running amok through straight society, "spassing" or playing the "idiot" to tease, test and bait the 'normal' people they encounter. They gorge themselves on a free meal at a chichi restaurant, disturbing their fellow diners in the process. They are ushered around an insulation plant by an accommodating factory foreman. At a busy local swimming pool, the vixenish Nana (Trine Michelsen) bares her breasts, and ringleader Stoffer (Jens Albinus) sprouts an erection in the communal showers. Unsettled by these antics, new recruit Karen (Bodil Jørgensen) initially views them as cruel student japes, a way of getting at people. "You poke fun," she comments disapprovingly.
Throughout its second half, however, The Idiots grows more layered and contemplative. The dubious shenanigans of its opening minutes become the raw data for a wider thesis. While the simple thrill of transgression seems to be the appeal for many of the idiots (Nana in particular), others prefer to regard themselves as a band of renegade anthropologists striving for a new Utopia. Pocket-demagogue Stoffer contends that, "idiots are the people of the future," and claims that the point of his experiment is the "search for the inner idiot". In this way, the characters' embrace of idiocy is portrayed as a blend of druggy transcendence and primal-scream therapy. The previously sceptical Karen reverts to murmuring infancy in a swimming-pool sequence that's shot to look like a new dad's video recording of a water birth. Later Josephine (Louise Mieritz) and Jeppe's (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) spass love-making shifts imperceptibly from play-acting into a fumbling real-life union. (Josephine's subsequent removal from the group – by her father who claims, "she is seriously ill" – further blurs the lines between phoney mental instability and the real McCoy.)
The trouble is that in following this dictate through to its logical conclusions, von Trier pilots his film into a tricky cul-de-sac. On its most basic level, The Idiots pushes a message that idiocy equals the inner-child; that real mentally-handicapped people represent an unsullied human essence, people who operate at the business end of their emotions: who love, fight, fuck and eat without regard for social etiquette. Dramatically, this is fraught with problems. On the one hand, it risks sentimentalising the mentally impaired, conjuring them into generic emblems of saintliness. This, incidentally, looks to be a recurring pitfall for von Trier. Breaking the Waves employed Emily Watson's guileless heroine as a sacrificial lamb, while his generally masterful serial The Kingdom suffered from the use of a Down's syndrome couple as a visionary Greek chorus within the narrative.
More crucially, The Idiots' inner-child message is a banal and
well-worn one. Within
Ultimately, The Idiots emerges as a truly fascinating folly, an all-but-impenetrable muddle with glimmers of genius running from top to tail. Von Trier claims he wrote it at speed (four days) and shot it at a sprint in order to pin down that butterfly spirit of improvisation, of tumult, that is Dogma 95's lifeblood. This undeniably results in a film of crazy-paved surfaces and deep puddles of ambiguity. But what it also does is offer an X-ray of its creator's ideals and aesthetic. Von Trier sets up his laboratory, ignites his chemicals and watches them burn. But try as he might to distance himself from his experiment, there remains a strict methodology to his madness: man's moral code is unbreakable, it hungers for dramatic resolution, reasserting itself at the finish. The result is less a filmic revolution than an Aesop's fable for anarchists. In its dying moments, The Idiots cleans off the cum and transgresses to a purpose. It all ends tidily.
THE IDIOTS Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
BFI | Sight & Sound | Dancer in the Dark (2000) Peter Matthews from Sight and Sound, October 2000
Washington State, 1964. Selma, a
Czech immigrant, lives with her son Gene on the property of policeman Bill and
his wife Linda. Despite poor eyesight, Selma operates a machine press at a tool
company. A fan of musicals, Selma attends drama class, where she is rehearsing
for a production of The Sound of Music. One day, Bill confesses to
her that the bank will soon repossess his house; Selma reveals she is going
blind from a hereditary condition and saving for an operation to rescue Gene's
sight. After Selma refuses to loan him money, Bill discovers where she hides
her savings.
Helped by her friend Kathy, Selma
begins working the night shift, but gets sacked when she breaks the machinery.
Selma discovers she has been robbed. Bill admits the crime, only to tell Linda
that Selma was attempting to steal his money. When Selma tries to
take back her savings, Bill pulls a gun and is mortally wounded in the ensuing
struggle; he begs Selma to finish the job, and she batters him to death with a
strong box. Selma then visits the doctor to pay for Gene's operation. Soon
after, the police arrest her. On trial, Selma claims to have sent the money to
her father Oldrich Novy, a musical star in Czechoslovakia. Novy arrives and
refutes this. Selma is found guilty and sentenced to death. Her friend Jeff
finds out about Gene's operation and gets the case re-opened. But Selma refuses
to use the money to pay for the lawyer. In the execution room, Selma sings a
song and is hanged.
Björk gives an astonishing performance in Dancer in the Dark, one
which deserves all the praise that has been lavished upon it. Let's admit,
however, that the role is an easy one, almost guaranteed to reduce us to
blubber. In her pop-star incarnation, Björk plays the ethereal sprite whose
plaintive voice can break your heart, and it's a down-market version of this
persona she embodies here. Dreaming of
From the catcalls the film has received in some quarters, one gathers it's
possible to dismiss the whole exercise as meretricious tosh. It's true that set
beside a certifiable masterpiece such as Robert Bresson's Mouchette
(1966), another tale of an abject waif who goes from bad to worse, Dancer
reveals itself as a gleeful tear-jerker. Unlike Bresson, who refuses to enlist
facile sympathy for his protagonist, von Trier practically hog-ties us into
accepting
Indeed, the main difficulty presented by the movie is determining how far it can be taken straight. It's ultimately undecidable whether Dancer is a transcendental experience or just the newest confidence trick from the reigning mountebank of European art cinema. Following Breaking the Waves and The Idiots, the director undergoes mystical self-abnegation with his familiar hair-shirt style, and once again, his film comes across as the most arrant form of self-promotion. The studied home-movie technique (the film was shot, largely handheld, on digital video camcorders) consorts rather weirdly with the kitschy flamboyance of the plot; but instead of naturalising the artifice, it only throws it into bolder relief. The film flicks between endorsing its delirious excess and ironically disavowing it, a double-jointed manoeuvre that puts one in mind of 50s soap king Douglas Sirk. But where Sirk deployed reflexivity for a political critique, von Trier seems interested in flaunting his own conceptual cleverness.
You get the sense that von Trier is using popular culture as so much grist
for his mill, especially during the movie's musical sequences. In the very
first scene,
BFI | Sight & Sound | How Do You Solve A Problem Like Von Trier? José Arroyo from Sight and Sound, September 2000
Lars von Trier's anti-musical Dancer in the Dark sparked protests when it won the Palme d'Or this year, but José Arroyo
thinks it's as exhilarating as it is exasperating
Watching Dancer in the Dark
I kept wondering whether director Lars von Trier wasn't experimenting his film
right down the toilet. Here Denmark's ageing enfant terrible mixes genres, bucks conventions and eschews
celluloid; his direction is formally innovative and visually daring. The
performances, particularly Björk's, are riveting. But is this film that begins
with a song from The Sound of Music, 'My Favourite Things', and
ends with its heroine hanged from the gallows a challenge or a cheat? Does it
all add up? For once reports of booing and hissing at Cannes can be believed.
Yet the wildly differing receptions this film received there were probably not
between individuals but within them: Dancer is as
exasperating as it is extraordinary.
It tells a simple, melodramatic
story: Selma (Björk) works day and night to afford the operation that will save
her son Gene (Vladica Kostic) from the blindness he will genetically inherit
from her. Bill (David Morse), a cop neighbour, attempts to steal her money and
forces her to kill him. It looks like murder: her goodness makes her a victim.
That there is no last-minute reprieve is not the most unusual thing about this
story. To begin with, it's told as a musical.
Making Dancer in the Dark
a musical melodrama is an odd choice and an inspired one. Musicals and
melodramas both deal with expression and emotion, but in very different ways.
In musicals, characters leap into dance or break into song when they're
bursting with a feeling they can't contain; in melodrama, the protagonists also
feel intensely but they have to repress its expression - only the audience is
witness to the burdens of their knowledge. Where the terrain of musicals is
romantic love and the formation of community, the terrain of melodrama is
generally that of the family, romance and the psychosexual havoc which results
from trying to live up to socially imposed sexual mores. At their best, say Meet
Me in St Louis (1944) or Written on the Wind (1956),
musicals and melodramas are lush, stylish, excessive - they accentuate or
reveal emotional states through mise-en-scène
Using a melodramatic situation as
a structure for a musical offers von Trier a basis from which to work against
the musical's conventions. First of all, it is rare that characters in musicals
have any kind of job except in show business. Here Selma is a factory worker,
seen working at a steel press. Moreover, in the rare musical where factory work
is involved, such as The Pajama Game (1957), the musical numbers
are an indication of a sharing in community. Here Selma has to withdraw from
the community into her own head before the music starts.
In combining the conventions of
musicals and melodramas while simultaneously working against them, von Trier
has achieved a rare feat: Dancer is a musical about alienation.
Selma is loved by her best friend Kathy (Catherine Deneuve) and her admirer
Jeff (Peter Stormare). Even the cop Bill admires and, one suspects, loves her,
not the least for her goodness. But it is this very goodness, combined with a
single-minded certainty, that cuts her off from them and from the world.
Selma's love for her son Gene is overwhelming, overriding every other human
relationship. She can't allow herself any other emotional attachments, and
can't even allow her son to feel loved because he needs to be tough to face the
future that awaits him. Selma's estrangement has a purpose, but her resulting
isolation is no less intensely felt.
If Selma's love for her son cuts
her off from the world, it's her love of music that makes her feel alive. In
her interior dream world, abstract noises become concrete as music. A good
example of this is the 'Cvalda' number early in the film. Selma is at the
factory. The noise of the machines is the traditional cue that a number is
about to begin. Industrial noises create a rhythm that is then enveloped,
developed and swept up by a full orchestra on the soundtrack. Selma sings,
"Clang the machine, what a magical sound, so clang the machines, they
greet you and say, we tap out a rhythm and sweep you away." Her co-workers
join in the dancing as Selma sings, but at the end of the number, when Kathy
wakes her from her dream world, she finds herself alone. Moreover, her lack of
attention to her work has meant she has almost broken the machinery. The number
is not about the celebration of work, as in the Eastern Bloc musicals the film
refers to; it's about how work is such a drudge that even industrial sounds
provide an escape. The escape into herself is depicted as a joy, yet a
dangerous one because it puts what is already a threadbare living in danger.
Aspects of Dancer in the
Dark are so recklessly ambitious they're thrilling. Is it conceivable
for musicals to be gothic? Well, Dancer has a musical number with
a corpse. After shooting Bill, Selma breaks into a musical dialogue with his
ghost where explanations are given and forgiveness is granted. Selma even sings
to Bill's wife, gently judging and blaming her for being criminally unconscious
of what is happening around her. This kind of song dialogue risks risibility.
It's what the Marx Brothers used Margaret Dumont to caricature in their films -
the fat lady at the opera who has to struggle through several octaves merely to
trill 'open the door'. But as lovers of opera know, these musical dialogues,
properly judged, are the grounds for differentials of knowledge among
characters that create a moral dimension to the work and allow it the scope of
tragedy which is closed to traditional operetta and musical comedy. Here Selma
and Bill know the reason for the killing. The fact that Bill's wife,
representing the rest of society, is ignorant and misunderstands everything, is
what enables the film to take on a tragic dimension. The highly stylised,
quasi-gothic form of this number is balanced by the effect of emotional realism
that Björk and her music succeed in conveying.
The most beautiful number in the
film is 'I've Seen It All'. It takes place shortly before Selma kills Bill.
Selma is walking home along the railroad having been fired from her job. Her
admirer Jeff, who is following her, realises that she is going blind when she
is nearly hit by an oncoming train. Just as with Judy Garland in The
Harvey Girls, the sounds of the train's wheels on the track are the cue
for a song. As Selma starts to imagine herself inside a musical number, the
cinematography seems to be filtered by amber tones, and moments appear in slow
motion. While Selma removes her glasses and prances, the song she is joyfully
singing indicates a generous resignation to a life already lived: "I've
seen what I was and I've seen what I'll be, I've seen it all there is no more
to see." While the duet is being played out, the men on the train dressed in
western gear mournfully perform some slow movements: they may look like the
exuberant frontier men in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, but
their actions are gracefully restrained, almost muted. The number is the
emotional core of the film, but also indicates why the film doesn't work as a
musical: there are problems with the music, the dancing, the tone.
Dancer in the Dark underlines its intertextuality and cues
the audience to its uniqueness by generic references that are meant to situate
it within and distinguish it from the musical. At the beginning of the film we
are told how unrealistic it is when characters burst into song in musicals.
Selma talks about how in the last number in a musical, a sweeping crane shot
always makes the camera seem to go up through the roof; she says she always
tries to miss this bit because it's a sign that the film is about to end and
she prefers to think the singing and dancing go on forever. Later on, when
she's walking to the gallows, she sings about how there's always someone to
catch her when she falls, because this is a musical. But of course there isn't.
It isn't that type of musical.
But what type of musical is it?
The film refers to Busby Berkeley by citing his famous geometric overhead
shots. There are also plenty of references to the MGM musicals directed by
Vincente Minnelli, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly. The presence in the film of
Deneuve and Joel Grey instantly brings to mind Les Parapluies de
Cherbourg (1964) and Cabaret (1972). Grey's character, the
Czech tap dancer Oldrich Novy, carries an awareness of musicals from what used
to be called 'Iron Curtain' countries. And of course, The Sound of Music,
which Selma is rehearsing with the local amateur dramatic group, refers to the
famous 'integrated' musicals from Broadway which Rodgers and Hammerstein are
credited with inventing with Oklahoma! (1955). But Dancer
is not quite like any of these models, for though it shows an extraordinary
awareness of the genre, it doesn't show much sensitivity to an audience's pleasure
in it.
One of the reasons why Dancer
is exasperating is that music, dancing and mise-en-scène are all problematic,
albeit in different ways. The problem is not necessarily the music per se.
Björk has composed an extraordinary score, melodic and complex, which
contributes to and develops the film's narrative. Hearing it on CD, my
admiration increases with each listen. But watching the film, one only hears it
once, and on first listen it sounds samey. Possibly this is because Björk is
the only singer in the film, and has a very particular and distinctive style.
As the film unfolds, the songs become hard to distinguish from each other. One
does not whistle a happy tune coming out of this film.
Dancer is also insensitive to dance. Von Trier
has bragged about how he used 100 cameras to film the musical numbers as it
freed him and the performers and offered surprise moments that wouldn't have
been captured if the numbers had been carefully storyboarded. However, this
also meant it was impossible to co-ordinate dancers and camera and thus
construct a true filmed choreography. There are snatches of the numbers in the
factory and the railway that suggest that Vincent Paterson's choreography might
have been marvellous. But who's to know? The way the numbers are filmed and
edited privileges 'surprise moments', so what we get is a series of
occasionally interesting movements rather than the poetic communication of
mood, tone and intensity of feeling we expect of filmed dance.
The film's look also contributes
to its status as an 'anti-musical'. First of all, it's drab: Selma wears ugly,
worn print dresses; her house is so bare, a tin chocolate box becomes a symbol
of richness; the non-musical sequences are shot in dreary browns and metallic
greys. Second, the film is shot on digital video, which makes the image feel
thin and somehow incomplete. Traditionally musicals and melodramas convey a
feeling of richness, which derives partly from costume, colour and camera
movement, but partly from the use of celluloid itself.
Celluloid gives a rich, textured
image with a depth of tonalities and a range of sensitivity to light. In 35mm
even scarcity comes across as plenitude, and it seems perverse to film a story
dealing with extreme states of feeling in thin digital video. But of course,
frustrating as they are, all of these elements add up to a carefully chosen
aesthetic. It's frustrating in terms of expectations of the traditional
pleasures of the musical or the melodrama, but the various elements cohere as
an organic attempt at a stylised kind of realism. The film becomes thrilling in
the moments when one is aware that these odd, usually impossible, choices
actually work.
Many elements in Dancer in
the Dark initially come across as profoundly irritating, but as the film
progresses their raison
d'être as aesthetic
choices becomes clear. As in von Trier's earlier Breaking the Waves (1996),
the film is mostly shot with handheld camera and plays with the traditional
rules of continuity editing. Rather than cutting to a reverse shot in a
conversation, for example, von Trier does a swish pan (the equivalent in
literature of constantly repeating 'he said' or 'she said' after every line
rather than merely using quotation marks). However, as the film continues to
anchor itself in characters' faces, it becomes clear that the swish pan, a
non-cut, also has a narrative value. The device creates an urgent expectation
of a response. Likewise filming on digital video initially feels like a cheat.
Then one realises that this thin look fits in with the grimness of Selma's
life. Moreover, cinematographer Robby Müller creates a look for the musical
numbers that is similar to old 8mm Technicolor footage. The cinematography thus
creates a sense of 'pastness', an evocation of memories in danger of fading.
The film is set in the 1960s in an imaginary America, and its look underlines
that the past is another country, at the same time evoking both an attachment
to and an estrangement from it.
Watching the final scene, I could
only think, "What a bastard." One could imagine von Trier gleefully
thinking up how best to upset his audience: wouldn't it be fun and completely
different to make a musical about this great sacrificial mother and then hang
her during the finale? It seems like a perverse theatrical shock tactic. Yet as
the final number unfolds one finds oneself moved. The old punk aesthetic of
publicly revelling in the display of the socially forbidden has been evident in
von Trier's work since his debut The Element of Crime (1984).
If Dancer in the Dark
is exciting to watch in itself, it becomes positively exhilarating when seen as
a von Trier film, for the man seems capable of anything. The hallucinogenic
visuals of The Element of Crime stayed in the mind long after the
plot was forgotten. The hypnotic work on memory in Europa (1991),
with its dazzling use of back projection, made it an extraordinary work of art
cinema. In The Kingdom/Riget (1994), von Trier produced great
television that wove black humour, a gothic story and social critique into a
seamless and gripping narrative. Breaking the Waves proved his
virtuosity with melodrama. Here, in spite of the dazzling technique on display,
the use of jump cuts, zooms and so on, von Trier always lets his camera rest on
faces, often in extreme close-up. As in Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of
Arc (1927), what the faces reveal is the film's truth; what they
represent is a condemnation of the fact that a society would kill a person with
the very virtues it claims to protect and uphold.
Björk's performance has been described as one that is 'felt' - she couldn't act, she could just be. Yet what is important is what she represents and conveys; how she achieved this is beside the point. And her performance is a tour de force: seeming plain one moment, exotically beautiful the next, she conveys the extraordinary intensity of Selma's repression. Indeed often in Dancer in the Dark it feels as if von Trier and Björk are two virtuosos on a collision course (Catherine Deneuve is often caught unawares by the camera, seeming to stand back, as if dazed and confused at the carry ons). Yet whether it's through collision or collaboration, art is what von Trier and Björk have succeeded in producing.
post note –
Plan
of Attack, Bob Woodward's new book, is out soon and only confirms
previous assertions made by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill as well as
former White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke in their
recently published memoirs. According to Woodward, Bush ordered Defense
Secretary Rumsfeld to begin planning the attack on
Dogville | Film
Review | Slant Magazine Ed
Gonzalez
Lars Von Trier is quick to set up his motivation for Dogville,
an austere Brechtian critique of an unjust society, via a self-reflexive bit of
wisdom: "I think there's a lot this country has forgotten, I just try to
refresh folks' memories by way of illustration." Pursued by gangsters and
gunfire, Grace (Nicole Kidman) arrives in the film's quiet, eponymous hamlet.
The town's young philosopher, Tom (Paul Bettany), hides her inside a mineshaft
before introducing her to the townsfolk. After slowly winning everyone's
affection over the course of two weeks as their indentured servant, Grace
becomes one of their own. But the denizens of this impoverished burb are quick
to bare their teeth when it appears that the good Grace is not who she seems.
And after being dutifully tortured by the Dogville clan, Grace reveals herself
as a force majeure to be reckoned with.
If you can't go to
Brecht's theater thumbed its nose at expressionism, and in his essay
"Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting," he laid much of the
foundation for a radical aesthetic that actively rejected Western forms of
realism. Von Trier is very much a disciple of Brecht's, using Dogville's
chalk outlines and non-existent walls to estrange the audience from his
material and to help us develop a more critical, observant relationship to the
film's themes. This is exactly why the film's rape scenes aren't as disturbing
as, say, the torture mechanisms at work within Breaking the Waves and Dancer
in the Dark (which similarly used song and dance as a distancing effect).
Brecht observed, "We see this theater as uncommonly precious, its
portrayal of human passions as schematized, its idea of society as rigid and
wrong-headed." In stripping their material of all artifice, Brecht and Von
Trier leave behind only the clockwork of human cruelty.
From the gooseberries in Ma Ginger's (Lauren Bacall) garden to the porcelain
figurines (German Hummels) Grace collects throughout her stay in Dogville,
everything in the film is a symbolic gesture of some kind. Narrated by John
Hurt, this acerbic "illustration" of a small town's curious notions
of entitlement unspools as a Christian allegory by way of Mark Twain or Dr.
Seuss. "It's got to be hard, or it's not punishment," says one of
Vera's (Patricia Clarkson) odious children, asking Grace for a smack-bottom and
ghoulishly foreshadowing the physical and sexual abuse she's subjected to after
she's perceived as a threat by the townsfolk. What with all the repeated
references to characters wanting to protect their community, or the
hypocritical Tom stating that he is there "to do the thinking" for
Grace, it's easy to read Dogville as a post-9/11 satire of American
oppression and our country's misguided notions of Christian charity.
When the film's black mamie (Cleo King) castigates Grace, there's no mistaking
the irony of this ritual of abuse. Von Trier seems to ask: What makes this
classic American victim a victimizer herself? These are the kind of questions
this radical, minimalist primer beckons the spectator to ask and decipher from
the bits and pieces of the film's mise-en-scène. Dogville's
condescending stance is a deliberate one, and it's all over the god-like
overheads that evoke the same "sense of mastery" implicit in one
character's preference for the symmetry of two eyes over the one eye of the
mythical Cyclops. For all his harsh criticisms and depictions of cruel and
inhospitable behavior, Von Trier affords some sympathy for his rabid dogs. If
the film's American culture can be likened to a Trojan Horse, then who's to
blame for the evil disguised within when all is said and done?
Because Tom creates and repeatedly reinvents Dogville's moral litmus
test, the character's full name, Tom Edison Jr., is not without its allegorical
implications. Tom is in many ways the commander-in-chief of the film's Trojan
Horse, and if he is a doppelganger for Von Trier, then the director seemingly
reserves some of the harshest judgment for himself. An impervious Von Trier
pits Tom's idealist philosophy against that of the hopeless pessimist played by
Stellan Skarsgård. Both are reprehensible in their own way, except Tom (here a
symbol for a pretentious intelligentsia) uses love and deceit to control Grace,
and, in the end, is every bit the monster as the neighbors he morally
condescends to throughout the film. (Unlike the privileged Rex Reed—who
ruined the film's ending in his Toronto Film Festival article "Trapped in
Dogville" for the New York Observer—we're going to alert you to the minor
spoilers that lie ahead.)
So what's to be the made of Dogville's cynical, final act of vengeance
by a group of exterminating angels, which is as punishing as the titular town's
hate? Though Grace's final conquest can be read as a campaign for cultural
euthanasia, the film's devastating final credits—which juxtapose David Bowie's
"Young American" with photojournalistic memories of American
underdevelopment—are unmistakably sympathetic. Von Trier understands that the
root of American aggression may very well be our arrogant elite's oppression of
the culturally underprivileged, which has bred ignorant and isolationist
attitudes throughout the ages. Contempt breeds more contempt, so to speak.
"It's got to be universal," says a confused Tom at one point,
widening the director's political perspective. In the end, Dogville is
less anti-American than it is, quite simply, anti-oppression.
In an essay written for The Guardian
widely reprinted during the latter half of 2002, Indian novelist Arundhati Roy
maintained that “anti-Americanism” is “a term usually used by the American
establishment to discredit and, not falsely – but shall we say inaccurately –
define its critics.” It may be one of the peculiar virtues of Lars von Trier’s
fascinating, if characteristically muddled, Dogville that it was branded
“anti-American” almost immediately after it unspooled at
Despite McCarthy’s parti pris, von
Trier’s output demonstrates that he is far from politically consistent – or
even politically savvy in any discernible fashion. Dancer in the Dark, that
extremely profitable slice of postmodern sludge, seemed to verify – one is
tempted to say “unambiguously” – that the canny self-promoter who embraced, and
quickly abandoned, Dogme 95 preferred a Manichean moralism (one that might even
have made D.W. Griffith blush) to narrative or sociological subtlety.
(Allusions to Eastern European socialist-realist musicals mislead some
jingoistic
Of course, it’s arguable that films
like Dancer in the Dark and Dogville retain a certain patina of socialist
nostalgia, if not fervor. Although von Trier insisted at his
Dogville highlights equal amounts of
ironized sentimentality and bogus social significance. On the run from
murderous predators, the demure Grace (one of many cringe-inducing names given
the protagonists) is sheltered by seemingly benign townsfolk, who quickly turn
this visitor into one more von Trier scapegoat. Yet Dogville is more quirkily
effective, and even slightly more politically resonant, than bloated gimmickry
such as Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves, thanks to its paradoxical
status as a self-consuming artifact that synthesizes a number of contradictory,
often blatantly antithetical, elements.
Shot on a soundstage with chalk
outlines instead of sets, Dogville resembles the most lavish episode of
Playhouse 90 ever made, and incorporates everything from a wide repository of
pseudo-Brechtian effects to aspects of Paul Sills’ improvisational Story
Theatre, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology,
the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Nicholas Nickleby, and Altman’s McCabe and Mrs.
Miller (1971). Von Trier’s most successful films to date – Medea and The Kingdom
(1994), both made for television – drew sustenance from their adherence to a
stripped-down television aesthetic. By partially reverting to the (relative)
modesty he abandoned in recent years, Dogville seems comparatively less fatuous
than many of von Trier’s other recent projects.
The limitations of von Trier’s
political vision emerge when one contrasts his current film’s relatively
restrained melodramatics with Brecht’s more astringent social vision. The aging
Danish wunderkind both emulates and dilutes Brechtian epic theater. Like von
Trier, Brecht offered an acerbic assessment of
Above and beyond all of the
allusions enumerated above, von Trier seems fascinated by the “We the People”
populism endemic to Popular Front, Depression-era realism, as well as its
bastard, de-radicalized, “liberal” children, like John Ford’s The Grapes of
Wrath (1940); it is this form of kitsch that von Trier both celebrates and skewers.
In a maneuver that appears to wed the most egregious cliches of Warner Brothers
crime films and proletarian fiction, the patrician Grace, fleeing from
gangsters, arrives in the impoverished
From the outset, John Hurt’s
mock-Masterpiece Theatre voiceover narration clues us into the fact that the
residents of Dogville are less pure-hearted and honest than they appear; not a
single Elm has ever been spotted on
In addition to being a
self-reflexive meditation on myriad American genres, Dogville derives much of
its impact by initially undermining – before ultimately reinforcing – Kidman’s
star image. The glamorous centrepiece of To Die For and Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
is often instructed to deliver her lines in a near-catatonic monotone. She
remains impeccably unscathed; the indignities of what could be viewed as a
particularly perverse parody of an Actors Studio workshop cannot permanently
scar her charisma. The love-hate relationship between the denizens of Dogville
and the dangerous outlaw Grace/Kidman often seems generated by their
alternating fascination with and contempt (not to mention von Trier’s) for the
allure of stardom. As the more tabloidish journalists at
It is quite possible that, in this
instance at least, the National Enquirer set is more on target than many of the
tonier critics-cum-pundits. In an ironic reversal of McCarthy’s polemic, the
New York-based critic John Anderson, writing for a British audience in The
Guardian, applauds von Trier’s supposed “anti-Americanism” and hails the film’s
conclusion. Grace, after being reunited with her thuggish father (played with
self-mocking glee by James Caan), agrees to annihilate all of Dogville’s
inhabitants, a plot contrivance seen as a chilling allusion to the carnage of
9/11. It is true that Dogville’s concluding cinematic flourish – a montage of
Depression-era photographs by the likes of Dorothea Lange, featuring
dispossessed Americans sardonically accompanied by David Bowie’s “Young
Americans” on the soundtrack – is an unmistakable provocation. Nevertheless,
despite
Movies:
Theater Of Cruelty - Esquire Mike
D’Angelo from Esquire, March 31, 2004
Walking the red carpet at last year's Cannes Film Festival,
Nicole Kidman, in town for the world premiere of Lars von Trier's Dogville,
paused for a moment to remove her high heels. The film's notoriously travel-shy
director, she explained, had agreed to come to
The point of these anecdotes is that von Trier is something of a dickwad, which is important because in many ways his dickwaddedness, for lack of a better word, is inextricable from the impulses that inform his work. Dogville, a stark, three-hour allegory about a woman hiding from some abstract malevolent force in a tiny mountain hamlet during the Great Depression, owes much of its genius to the same cruel, manipulative behavior that we rightfully deplore in real life. Holden Caulfield famously expressed a yen for books that make you "wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it." I'll be surprised if I see a better movie than Dogville this year, but I'd sooner chat with clinical depressives.
Still, like most talented jerks, von Trier is capable of enormous charm when seduction suits his purpose. Too canny a manipulator to be abrasive right from the get go, he likes to soothe the viewer into a state of rapt complacency before delivering the truncheon to the skull. First and foremost, Dogville is a magnificent yarn, the "once upon a time" kind, narrated by John Hurt in a dry, insinuating baritone that would make the slimy thing that burst out of his chest in Alien lean forward so as not to miss a syllable. And it boasts an immensely sympathetic heroine in Kidman's Grace, whose ritzy clothes and patrician manner suggest a life of luxury that she seems touchingly eager to exchange for a little neighborly kindness. Suspicious of outsiders, the town is slow to warm to Grace, but her good cheer and industriousness gradually win folks over. (The stellar ensemble cast also includes Chloë Sevigny, Patricia Clarkson, Stellan Skarsgård, Ben Gazzara, and Lauren Bacall.) Once the law arrives with a wanted poster bearing Grace's likeness, however, her status as an honorary citizen of Dogville becomes tenuous in a hurry. What follows is mesmerizingly horrific, replete with startling plot twists and incendiary acting. But it's also blatantly unreal, more Grimm than grim, and it mirrors the film's look, which resembles nothing you've ever seen before on a movie screen.
As it turns out, even this distinctive look can be traced
back to a snotty motivation. Annoyed by complaints that his previous film, the
musical melodrama Dancer in the Dark, misrepresented
For von Trier, who has spent his career seesawing between
artifice and naturalism—he helped create the influential Dogme 95 Manifesto,
with its rules prohibiting tripods, background music, genre tropes, Keanu
Reeves, et cetera—this theatrical level of abstraction is at once a sly joke
and a bold, powerful conceit. Most people immediately think of Our Town,
but the approach is closer to Bertolt Brecht. Deprived of the details that
ordinarily create a sense of verisimilitude, we can't help but view the
characters and their actions as representational. Show us enough signs (
AT
Von Trier's genius here is twofold. He's taken a subject
ordinarily restricted to earnest, self-righteous Sundance rejects and turned it
into something suspenseful, sexy, and controversial—in other words, into
something people would choose to see even if they weren't looking to feel
ennobled. At the same time, the film's set-bound artificiality leaves those who
would accuse von Trier of distorting "the real
Still, what bothers critics most about Dogville, I'll
wager, isn't its pointed (if oblique) criticism of the way the
A quick survey of festival reviews suggests that detractors are evenly divided about whether this mind-set constitutes misanthropy or nihilism—which makes sense, since in this context both words are basically synonyms for "not very nice." Humanism is the tepid watchword for these critics, who tend to award movies bonus points for good intentions, generosity of spirit, conceptual huggability, and just generally inspiring the wish that the director were a terrific friend with unlimited minutes on nights and weekends. But from A Clockwork Orange to Straight Outta Compton, and going back at least as far as de Sade, some of the most vital human expression has been in the service of hateful ideas and abhorrent emotions. If you want to understand how the Holocaust happened, Triumph of the Will offers more food for thought than any number of sober, respectful, Oscar-nominated documentaries. If you're perplexed by the self-destructive behavior of people smart enough to know better, Mike Leigh's lacerating Naked will yield more insight than a fluffy concoction like Good Will Hunting.
None of which is to imply that Dogville is designed solely to get a rise out of the audience. While it may be going too far to claim that von Trier cares about these characters, I do believe that he cares deeply about what they represent and that his maliciousness has been channeled in a productive way. Yes, he's criticizing certain aspects of our country, but why should that be so threatening? Franz Kafka wrote, "I think we ought to read only books that wound and stab us. . . . A book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us." Dogville functions more like a blowtorch, but the sentiment remains the same.
Lars von Trier is a major filmmaker out of the innovative filmmaking group Dogme 95 (Dogma 95) best known for drafting the group’s ascetic “vow of charity” manifesto that writes off sets, artificial lighting, and soundtrack music as decadent crutches.
Von Trier’s “Dogville” opens this week in
None of this is to say that Dogme has not influenced low-budget filmmakers all over the world. Von Trier’s talent was well established by 1996’s “Breaking the Waves,” which brilliantly combined religious allegory with a pseudo-documentary style.
There are two kinds of von Trier films. The first includes “Breaking The Waves,” “Zentropa,” “Dancer in the Dark,” and now ““Dogville.” These large-scale productions, scripted in English, flaunt their ambitious treatment of history, religion, and politics.
The second group includes “Medea,” the two-season mini-series “The Kingdom,” “The Idiots,” and “The Five Obstructions.” These are modest films, spoken in Danish and, in the case of “The Kingdom” and “The Five Obstructions,” made in collaboration with other directors and philosophically and stylistically experimental.
Having seen both “Dogville” and “The Five Obstructions” over the course of two days, I’m starting to think that von Trier is at his best when he shackles his desire to make grand statements.
“Dogville” takes place during the 1930s in the
His trademark Dogme style–– aggressive handheld camera movement, jerky edits, washed-out color––has been copied so often that von Trier had no choice but to move on. There’s plenty of choppy camerawork in “Dogville,” but nothing that will leave the audience feeling seasick.
Von Trier experiments in other ways. The film is bluntly theatrical, shot on a nearly bare soundstage. Characters’ houses––and even a dog and two gooseberry trees––are mere markings on the ground. A few pieces of furniture are visible, but von Trier eschews obvious artifice. He also uses chapter headings––the film has nine, preceded by a prologue––and an omniscient narrator.
John Hurt’s voice-over initially seems gently ironic. In time, its snide contempt––he remarks that “[Tom’s house] in good times might almost have passed for presentable”––sinks in.
Without being very funny, “Dogville” feels like a black comedy. In Tom’s failure to live up to his ideals and ultimate ambivalence toward Grace, one can see von Trier’s attitudes towards his heroines. Accused of misogyny for his depiction of female martyrs in “Breaking the Waves,” “The Idiots,” and “Dancer in the Dark,” von Trier merely fans the fire in “Dogville.” Yet, though a victim, Grace eventually fights back against her degradation. I couldn’t quite escape the impression that von Trier’s treatment of Grace may have been a conscious self-parody.
As the actors and technicians’ names roll over “Dogville”’s closing credits, von Trier shows a procession of still photos of disenfranchised Americans. In case one doesn’t get the point, he’s set this sequence to David Bowie’s “Young Americans.” The film’s flaws are encapsulated here. By the end, hasn’t even the dimmest spectator figured out the politics of “Dogville?” The use of the music is ludicrously heavy-handed.
If “Dogville” is meant to be an allegory about
Von Trier’s fear of flying has kept him from ever visiting the
Von Trier began working in English with his very first feature, “The Element of Crime.” But there’s something passé about his critique of American culture in “Dogville.” The dark underbelly girding the myth of rural benevolence and town meeting democracy and the challenges and hostility facing minorities and outsiders in that milieu have all been done to death. Attacking the American dream is facile. Imagining a decent alternative to it, rather than crafting a cynical revenge fantasy, takes more work than von Trier appears willing to do.
The Grace Of Wrath J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, March 16, 2004
Review | Dogville Victor Morton’s religious insight from the now defunct 24 fps
Dogville Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Dogville - Deep Focus Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus
THE HIGH HAT | NITRATE: For Dogville Gary Mairs argues for the film from the High Hat
THE HIGH HAT | NITRATE: Against Dogville Phil Nugent argues against the film from the High Hat
Manderlay | Review
| Screen Allan Hunter in
The road to hell is paved with the noblest of intentions in Manderlay,
the stunning second film in Lars Von Trier’s American trilogy. A philosophical
debate on slavery, equality, oppression, free will and racism, it will
inevitably be read as anti-American in general and a specific response to the
recent war in
Von Trier’s intentions seem more wide-ranging; attacking the
awful peril of those naive enough to believe they know what is best for the
world. It’s just that the most glaring, insistent examples that support his
view are the foreign adventures of a superpower like
The risk, of course, is that Manderlay will simply preach to the converted. It is still an experimental, challenging film and expectations of its appeal will need to reflect those realities. It does have a shorter running time than Dogville and is a powerful enough piece to attract the critical debate that would allow it to match or even surpass the patchy arthouse success of its predecessor. It seems unlikely to suffer from the absence of an A-list draw like Nicole Kidman.
Von Trier claims that his inspiration for Manderlay
came from the work of Danish photographer/writer Jacob Holt and from critic
Jean Paulham’s preface to Histoire d’O which details the aftermath of a
rebellion in 19th-century
His intellectual inspiration may have changed but his aesthetic approach is a direct continuation of his work in Dogville. The film is shot on a vast, bare studio set with chalk marks outlining the buildings whilst the surrounding forest and countryside are left to the imagination. The story is divided into eight chapter headings and John Hurt’s wry, amused narration is like a fine ruby port that accompanies a mature cheese.
The Grace of Dogville is now played by Bryce Dallas Howard. Younger and less experienced than Nicole Kidman, she makes Grace more naive and wilful; determined to take the moral high ground because life has yet to challenge her idealism. She is a cheerleader for liberty whose judgment is rarely clouded by doubt.
In 1933, Grace and her father (Dafoe, substituting for James
Caan) arrive in
Her visit coincides with the death of the plantation owner Mam (Bacall). The handwritten Mam’s Law has provided all the rules for how the plantation has been run. Grace now takes control. She promises to stay until the first harvest has been gathered and starts instructing everyone in a brave new world of equality and democracy, whether that’s what they want or not.
Pursuing her vision of bettering their lives, she is also
unsettled by her erotic fantasies surrounding Timothy (de Bankole), who claims
to be from the proud Munsi tribe of
Destined to repeat the mistakes of her past and never learn from history, Grace is left to observe as her experiment unravels and life refuses to behave in the way she has ordained.
More tightly scripted and less gruelling than Dogville, Manderlay keeps up a running commentary on events through a wry, sarcastic narration that injects a welcome degree of humour into the film. The experimental nature of the film is less of a novelty this time and less of a distraction from the ideas. There are less actors just around for window dressing and memorable performances are supplied by Danny Glover as Wilhelm, the community’s elder statesman, Mona Hammond as Old Wilma and Isaach de Bankole as the proud, wary Timothy.
The film ends, as Dogville did, with David Bowie’s Young Americans played over a kaleidoscopic photomontage of images that range from a Ku Klux Klan meeting to the Rodney King beating, George Bush at prayer and Martin Luther King at his final rest, American soldiers in Vietnam and the Gulf, the Twin Towers and much more. It is an emotionally overwhelming recapitulation of the price that is paid by those who take the moral high ground and by a society that tolerates bigotry and is as provocative as the film itself.
Lars von Trier acts as a slave to controversy | World ... - The Guardian Charlotte Higgins at Cannes from the Guardian, May 17, 2005
It may be set on an
"We tried several [Americans] who thought it was a good thing that the
film was being made and that it was interesting. But they didn't take part it
in because it's explosive stuff in the
"The English actors were completely relaxed about it, and they said
'yes
Von Trier's film steers clear of presenting the black characters as saintly.
"It's a shame for the coloured [sic] actors if they're only allowed to
play heroes. If they aren't allowed to be human as well."
The British actors include Clive Rowe, winner of an Olivier award; Dona
Croll, currently starring in the West End in Elmina's Kitchen; and Ginny
Holder, recently seen as Calpurnia in Deborah Warner's Julius Caesar at the
Barbican.
Danny Glover, one of the three American actors, initially turned down the
part. He was uncomfortable with the film being "told exclusively and
entirely from a white perspective ... the images were very strong from that
perspective".
Asked about the paucity of American films tackling the subject of slavery,
Glover said: "It would be extraordinary for [the American] film culture to
unravel [slavery] but it doesn't. People are afraid to deal with it. There is
no framework for people to unravel it."
The film is Von Trier's follow-up to Dogville, in which Nicole Kidman stars
as Grace. In Manderlay, Bryce Dallas Howard, who replaces Kidman, appears at a
cotton plantation where the black workers are still treated as slaves, 70 years
after their legal emancipation. Full of idealism, she steps in to help them
take control of their own destinies, teaching them to vote on community
decisions. But things do not go to plan.
Von Trier has said it is "quite clear" his film can be seen as
alluding to President Bush's efforts to impose democracy in
Explaining why he chose the
"I feel there could just as well be an American military presence in
"
He added: "Since I have said I am 60% American I can say there is one
thing that kills any debate - an American disease called political correctness,
which is a fear of talking ... What makes me a little bit sad is that there's
an American TV show in which the president of the US is black. People say, 'Oh
look, that's OK, there's a black president on TV.' That's completely
humiliating because that's not how it is. There's no black president. Political
correctness kills discussion."
Dogville was famously played out on a black studio floor with simple white
markings on it to denote the movie's various spaces. Manderlay is different.
This time the set is denoted by "black lines on the floor so there's
something new to look at", says Von Trier.
Audiences may have to wait a while before the final part of his trilogy, to
be called Wasington, he said. "I have ways of punishing myself. One is to
make three films that are the same. I thought that was very mature. But maybe I
am not mature enough. I will have to have a little break."
There is speculation that Kidman may return as Grace, though not if Bryce Dallas Howard can help it: "I would amputate my toes to work with Lars von Trier again."
BFI | Sight & Sound | Manderlay (2005) Ryan Gilbey from Sight and Sound, March 2006
America, 1933. After leaving the
town of Dogville, Grace and her gangster father head south to Alabama, where
they find slavery thriving at the Manderlay cotton plantation. Her father moves
on, but Grace stays at the plantation and oversees the slaves' emancipation,
teaching them successfully about democracy. A dust storm ruins most of the
cotton, but this drives the community to work harder. Grace rations the food so
that Claire, a child sick with pneumonia, will have enough to eat. The girl
dies when an old woman called Wilma steals her rations; the workers vote for
Wilma to be killed, and Grace carries out the execution. Against the odds, a
bumper harvest is reaped. While Grace has sex with Timothy, whom she earlier
saved from a whipping, chaos ensues: the workers discover the money raised from
the cotton harvest has disappeared and kill a man who they wrongly believe to
have stolen it. Grace discovers that it was Timothy who stole the money, and
that some of the cotton workers themselves colluded in the continuation of
slavery at Manderlay. Grace tries to leave, but the community votes instead for
her to be its new 'owner'. Planning to liaise with her father, Grace first
discloses that Timothy has stolen some wine, for which he must be whipped.
Administering the thrashing, Grace misses the rendezvous with her father and
flees Manderlay.
A Lars von Trier film that failed
to attract controversy would be like dawn without birdsong. But as the second
part of a trilogy that began with Dogville (2003), Manderlay inevitably lacks
the shock of the new. Whereas its predecessor enlisted Hollywood stars (Nicole
Kidman, James Caan, Lauren Bacall) to ratify its wry anti-American campaign,
the new instalment draws less on celebrity. The impish Bryce Dallas Howard
steps into Kidman's shoes as Grace, the gangster's daughter who attempts to
remake damaged communities - in this case, the Alabama cotton plantation
Manderlay, where slavery continues 70 years after abolition - in the image of
her own idealism. As her father, Willem Dafoe replaces Caan, while there is
little to occupy Bacall and fellow Dogville veterans Chloë Sevigny and Jeremy
Davies.
The novelty of the mise en scène
seems initially to have diminished. The set is still mapped out in lines, with
the name of each area ("Slaves' Table", "The Mansion")
inscribed on the vast sound-stage floor across which von Trier and
cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle roam and reel. Actions like the opening of
doors or the pouring of water are again mimed by the actors in their wall-less
houses. David Bowie's 'Young Americans' is reprised as the end credits roll
over another photomontage of US-inflicted brutality.
It's startling, then, to find
that the liberties von Trier has made available to himself remain rich in
ironic potency. In Dogville, Grace's body was sexually abused by the men of the
town, and the absence of a set allowed every character, no matter that they
were simply going about their chores, to be made complicit in these casual
rapes.
A similar trick is used in
Manderlay: once when Grace approaches the bath-house inside which are the
African-American men about whom she is fantasising, their naked bodies only a
whisker from her unseeing eyes; and later when the town votes to kill the
elderly thief Wilma, and the ballot takes place in the background of a shot of
the woman alone in her house. Crosscutting, or the use of split screen, are the
nearest equivalents in conventional film language to this juxtaposing. There is
something horribly eloquent, though, in the way von Trier accommodates an
action and its consequence in a single frame.
The audience's familiarity with
the stylistic devices of Manderlay should allow the film's more reflective
screenplay to shine through. The structure is built once more on escalating
disaster: Grace's efforts to democratise the slaves are ultimately confounded,
though the cruelty of Dogville is replaced by a rigged agenda in which
everyone, from Grace to von Trier himself, is implicated. The director's
interest in the white cultivation of black male stereotypes, as touched on in
his script for Dear Wendy, is not so much explored as parodied, with the slave
Timothy forged in the furnace of Grace's (and von Trier's) fears and desires.
It's beneficial to the film's political thrust that Grace is no longer the
righteous angel of Dogville. She is flawed now, her downfall predicated upon
her own missionary-like assumptions about civilisation and savagery. It isn't
that the ordeal undergone in the first picture has scarred her. As Manderlay
begins, she displays the distracted manner of a woman with a stone in her shoe,
rather than someone who has come hotfoot from sanctioning the slaughter of her
tormentors. But her dispassionately itemised disintegration - from her forcing the
plantation owners to black up their faces, to her wielding the whip herself on
a slave - makes her less of a cipher, if more of a bully.
Appropriately for a film in which
so much is unseen, from sets and props to the unsettling abyss that surrounds
the stage, the driving force is John Hurt's softly sneering narration. The
voiceover is traditionally a source of guidance, but Hurt makes the text sound
like a bedtime story read by an untrustworthy uncle. His vocabulary is prurient
("a pulsating explosion in her nether regions") and racist
("swarthy pursuers"), nudging the audience toward prejudice and
provocation, daring us to be incensed.
It can only be modesty or stage fright that prevented von Trier from delivering this mission statement himself.
First things first: compared to
the rigor and precision of Dogville, Manderlay is simply
shoddy. This is evident in the first ten minutes; the camerawork is lax and
indistinct, and the edits seem designed to cobble sequences together out of
multiple takes rather than interacting on a shot-by-shot level. The John Hurt
narration is nowhere nearly as well-written, drifting into the omniscient background
just as conventional third-person tends to do. You can forget to listen to it
at all, whereas Dogville absolutely hinged on it. Second things
second: Bryce Dallas Howard, I hear, is a wonderful young actress, but she was
not right for this role at all. Kidman's Grace evinced noble bearing and a
soulful, beatific charisma, whereas Grace 2.0 often comes across as a petulant
Bonnie Franklin, perkily cheerleading our misbegotten slaves into freedom and
democracy. But make no mistake, Howard's task is largely impossible since von
Trier has reinvented the Grace character beyond recognition In fact, Manderlay
sees Dogville's avenging angel reborn as . . . Tom Edison, the
pedantic voice of white privilege and highfalutin liberal idealism. (Is Lars
implying that all Americans will become this in time?) Yet despite all these
caveats, and the fact that so many of them could have been avoided by
abandoning the trilogy concept a bit earlier, I can't deny that Manderlay's
midsection pummels along with a righteous power. Buoyed by uniformly strong
performances and a careful narrative escalation, Manderlay's middle
gets down to business -- the whole post-Civil War slavery trope is a bracing,
politically incorrect armature for an allegory on nation-building in Iraq. In
fact, Manderlay is jarring because of how brazenly didactic the
present global situation has made von Trier. Brecht himself would either
applaud scenes like the voting sequence, or perhaps find them a bit too
overdetermined in their meaning. This makes it all the more fascinating, and
troubling, that near the end of the film von Trier de-allegorizes the American
blacks and demands that we take them at (fractured, horrifying) face value.
This results in a muddle, since the very specific historical circumstances of
American slavery are abstracted, then concretized again, without the requisite
intellectual substance. In dealing with material this volatile, von
Torture is Fine: Lars Von Trier Interview - Film Comment Stefan Grisseman interview, January/February 2006
Your latest film,
Manderlay, is a Danish-Swedish-British-French-German-Dutch co-production…
Really?
That’s what the credits
say, yes. Now the film could indeed be read as a European declaration of
distrust against the United States.
Well, you can read anything as anything, as you know.
You certainly encourage
different readings of your work, don’t you?
I hope so. In Denmark my film has been seen very much as a traditional look on racial problems in America. But, of course, I am happy if it can be read in more ways than one.
But the one way all the
world seems to want to read Manderlay is: anti-American—or, more
specifically, targeted against Bush’s policy in Iraq. Is that an interpretation
that you wanted to provoke?
No, not at all. First of all, the Iraq War wasn’t on when I wrote the film. The film is based on historical research. But its theme, although dealing with American racism, is more universal: a story like that could take place anywhere really. But it is fiction and, as you can see, not shot in America. I’m quite sure that Alabama doesn’t look like the locations in my film.
It must have been quite
hard to cast American actors for Manderlay.
Not the white parts but the black ones, yes. Extremely difficult.
Was the script too hard to
digest or the image of U.S. history too negative?
Probably both, but there was another reason why it was so hard to find a prominent black actor to do Manderlay: there’s a reason why certain black actors have made it in America. I don’t mean that in any negative way. Within any group of underprivileged people, only some are capable of being successful under the conditions of the privileged. The ones who make it are able to somehow fit into the white system. And it is very difficult to give this privilege up. We actually talked to well-known black actors who told us they would not risk giving up the privilege of success to do a film like Manderlay. They said they were very happy that the film is going to get made, but they dare not be part of it. I do not want to tell you who that was, but there aren’t that many prominent black actors of Danny Glover’s age. The reason why Danny finally, after long discussions, wanted to do the film, is that he’s very much into politics. That’s his whole life. But it takes so much courage that even with Danny it was difficult. It is dangerous stuff somehow, even if it’s hard for us Europeans to see.
Having black presidents in
TV series also seems to show and prove: they can only exist there, in Hollywood
dreamland, never in real life.
Exactly. It’s completely ridiculous. We will never see a black president, yet they are all over TV.
Glorifying black people only
in the entertainment world prevents us from socially upgrading them in real
life?
Probably. And it’s simply a lie: there is no black president. So what good does that do? It only sounds politically correct, but it’s not a reality.
How long did you prepare
before writing the screenplay?
I did not read a lot, but we had many historical advisors onboard. I trusted them. Our story is all based on second-hand information, anyway—and it will be just that for most Americans seeing my film.
When Dogville opened
you were harshly criticized for doing an “American trilogy”—without ever having
been to the United States. Have you been there since?
No, and I don’t really plan to do so, since I have a problem getting onto a plane. I try to see it as an advantage that I have not been to the States. I cannot go back in time, anyway. Of course I see things in a different perspective. But sometimes things can be even clearer when you’re farther away. And my trilogy is fiction, after all-not a documentary on the USA and its people. Let’s say I’ve taken the clichés and made them up to play against each other. I am twisting clichés, that’s what Manderlay is all about.
Do you want people to be
entertained by your films? Or, rather, enlightened?
I don’t know if entertainment is the right word for what I want. It’s hard to say. Some of the films I love were definitely boring the first time I saw them.
Like what?
Well, the first time I saw Barry Lyndon, I fell asleep three times. After that, I saw it another 20 times, and I loved it more and more each time. Sometimes art is not so easy to digest.
Who do you direct films
for?
I do not think I work for an audience in that sense. You can only work for yourself-and maybe see yourself as an audience.
Your producers do not keep
reminding you that you actually have to work for an audience?
No, otherwise they would have told me earlier on that I shouldn’t stage the film on a black floor with some chalk on it. But, you know, I am very lucky to have many good distributors around the world. And they need to be fed also: that’s my only concern. As you can see from all the co-producing partners: financially, my films are euro puddings—hopefully without looking like that. But my distributors have to also stay alive somehow. I guess they will all be happy when the black-floor period is going to be over.
The last entry in your
trilogy, Wasington, is going to be directed in the exact same style
as Dogville and Manderlay?
That is the idea, yes. And that does not sound very entertaining for me as well-to do that a third time… But then I have a feeling it would be more mature if I just stick to the plan.
You have to be consistent
here.
I believe in this form, you know? I feel good about it. Manderlay is a little bit too nice, maybe. The problem about it is that if you do things more than once they tend to get boring. But you also get too good at it. Manderlay is too clean, too perfect, story-wise also.
Dear Wendy, a film
that you wrote and Thomas Vinterberg recently directed, also deals with
America. Is that a side product of your trilogy?
No, not really. The script is quite old. My version of Dear Wendy was very much a love story: a man and a gun. That seemed interesting to me. I am actually a hunter myself, even if I don’t do it often enough these days. You have to do things a lot to be good at them. And I do too many things already: I’m playing more tennis now, go on fishing trips. You can’t do everything. To me the fascination of a gun’s power is not that I feel like shooting anybody, not even animals. There’s no fun in killing an animal, but the hunting itself is fun. Shotgun hunting is a little uncivilized, very noisy, but if you go after a small deer for maybe three days and finally kill it with one shot-that is like De Niro in The Deer Hunter. If hunting is done right, it’s very clean and nice, actually. Of course, you’re killing an animal…
… but it’s painless.
No, I don’t think so. No matter how you do it. But it’s also not painless to be a cow in a stable and be slaughtered. I would actually prefer to be a wild deer and be shot in the woods: not a bad way to go maybe. But painless? That’s also an illusion. We want to believe that everything is painless. But it’s not.
A question about your
actors…
Is it painless to be acting in my films?
No, I’m actually changing
the topic here. Is it true that you keep telling your performers to cut away 90
percent of their acting? You always go for understatement?
Difficult question. It is pretty simply always about being able to accept a performance—or having to reject it. To overact a scene is actually very good for understanding intention and character. If you do not understand that, it is impossible to overact. So it’s great to start with overacting and then tone down, but to still keep the essence. That takes time.
As highly stylized
exercises, Dogville and Manderlay seem so sparse and ascetic at
first glance—and yet they induce fascination rather than boredom. How do you do
that?
That’s something you do, I think. Any audience will do that. If you go along with a given story, this fascination will always be there. That’s just the nature of being an audience, of seeing and listening: you want to tie things together, you want to see things alive. Remember, as a child, when you had a book with a few drawings in it-you wanted to see those creatures alive, to be drawn in by their story.
Everything in those two
films—the scenery, the sets, the narrating voice-seems destined to take away
illusion, to minimize naturalism. Still there’s identification, emotion—and also
illusion. Do you think reductionism eventually produces the other extreme: even
more emotion?
It could, yes. As kids we all had those very simple toys that did not look like anything, yet were very precious to us—or the game that we all played, where you’re drawing a house on the sidewalks to playfully live in. This could be infinitely better for children than expensive toys or full illusionism. If things get too explicit, you get tired of them. If you only had a perfect model train, you probably didn’t play with it for very long. What can you do with it? There’s no real freedom in it. You want to use your imagination.
On the other hand, your
style of editing is very punchy, very gestural, very physical—very
“documentary,” if you will. Do you spend a lot of time in the editing room?
Oh yeah. When we shoot the film we are simply collecting enough material to be able to play around with in the editing phase. We shoot quite a lot-and since it all is video, you can do that with no limits. I do 50-minute shots sometimes.
Do you believe in realism
in cinema?
No, that again is an illusion. But I believe in life.
An imitation of life,
rather.
Sure, there’s nothing real about cinema. This handheld camerawork of mine, incidentally, is not about imitating life. It goes back to these fundamental and very complicated questions: where do we place the camera and why? There are no specific rules for that, only conventions. When I ask myself why I do certain camera movements or setups, I find out that this pointing manner in which I use the camera is a direct translation of my own curiosity: what interests me? Who do I want to look at or listen to? There is always some personal logic to where the camera goes. There are reasons.
But that’s not necessarily
more realistic. This freewheeling “documentary” camera is a fake, of course, an
old trick.
Yes, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t try that method. I believe—as we did with the Dogme movement—in working on location, in unchanged places, with actors wearing their own clothes. That provides a film with so many gifts that it becomes alive. Something happens that cannot be planned. And it’s the same with my handheld camera: it is something that shouldn’t be planned. That was my big problem on Breaking the Waves: the camera operator wanted to learn those movements. But then they lose their vitality. So even though the mobile camera is obviously fake documentary, it still contains more truth to me because it can’t be planned. Strictly there’s no truth at all, of course. But even documentary is not “true.” My camera style also has a lot to do with taste and a lack of grammar—and it’s a result of my earlier heavy storyboarding and working with cranes.
Nevertheless your U.S. trilogy is a sharp move away from Dogme: you are actually excluding all traces of real life by hiding away in this dark room, this black stage.
Oh yeah, I’d like to make things collide: all the sounds for example are very naturalistic. And that’s decidedly not to explain things. Usually sounds explain far too much. Normally a train in films always has this cartoonish train sound attached, even though I think it would be easy to record real train sounds that do not sound like film trains at all. That I tried to do in my films: to find a sound that is the opposite of the drawing of a house saying “a house.” We tried to find sounds that do not really represent things that do not explain themselves properly. So Manderlay is theater, yet we have those strong filmic elements: handheld camera, close-ups. We get a fusion of very different things.
You have been publicly
stating that everything that has been said or written about you is a lie.
Well, isn’t it? Everything is becoming a lie once it’s being manipulated. You know, I am being asked all the time about how cruel I am with actresses, how arrogant I am, and stuff like that. That’s not how I see myself. I cannot relate to that. Of course I got angry when Björk wanted to bankrupt the company during the shoot of Dancer in the Dark.
She did?
Oh yeah. Yeah. Every day she threatened to leave the set. And, of course, you get mad because that really hurts; you begin to have nightmares. Am I going to lose everything? Will the film never be finished? Fuck. But she was very good when she was working. God, we fought. But I don’t think that makes me a sadist. It’s a very natural reaction to stress, right?
As a director, isn’t it
completely impossible to be sweet-tempered all the time, anyway?
Sure, you have to be authoritarian somehow, but I actually try to do it in a very Scandinavian way. To work well, I simply need good relations, especially with the actors. Contrary to other directors, I cannot work when there’s a war going on.
But then how were you able
to finish Dancer in the Dark at all, with the war going on?
I honestly don’t know. Björk kept saying that she did not want to do the film, right from the beginning. It was ridiculous. I wanted to fire her. She screamed, “You can’t fire me”—it was all completely crazy. But somehow, this last scene when she is hung, I remember that very clearly, she didn’t want to see the gallows before at all-and then she played the scene extremely well. After that I said to her, when she was lying there, hyperventilating: could you maybe take out the second line of the dialogue and replace a certain word with another? Everybody thought, okay, now she will explode and die for real. But she didn’t say anything, we filmed it again-and she did it. Exactly right. She was really far out then, that wasn’t acting or feeling or whatever, but she was still, as a musician, completely in control.
But she wasn’t always like
that.
No. There was one scene where I simply couldn’t take it anymore. I was literally running away. She shouted, “How can you leave me when I have to commit this murder—”we were just doing that in close-up. Then she said, “You can’t leave me alone in this suffering.” It was wild. But you know, Iceland and Denmark have a troubled history, so maybe that’s also to blame. And people from Iceland are just plain crazy. All of them. That’s a fact.
In the media, it’s usually
rather you being portrayed as either pretty neurotic or especially mean or
calculatedly provocative. Are those just stereotypes?
Well, there’s some truth to it, of course, but not the whole truth. I’m sure, for instance, that Björk really believed I was pushing her. And I was, because she was pushing me. And I have a lot of phobias—the reason why I talk about them is because that way it’s the easiest for me. It’s not that I particularly like to talk about my phobias, but I have them and it’s extremely unpleasant.
Sadism is, in fact, at
least thematically, a driving force of many of your films. Why are you so
obsessively working on stories of torture and rape and exploitation? Because
you’re a moralist?
Maybe, but also because I’m a filmmaker, and those topics are the fuel that films can live on. And you know what? Those themes are really the regular stuff in cinema. Take one of the usual Bruce Willis films: he will always be treated really badly, otherwise there would be no story. That’s just normal—and nobody would call the director of one of those films a sadist.
Right, but heavy violence
is rather rare in art house films.
Maybe so. The whole technique that I use in any film is to go to the edge of things. When I try out a new method or a new subject, I always want to see how far I can go with it. How far can I go with the characters and the drama?
Radicalism always
generates emotions, that’s for sure. You enjoy to crush your audience,
especially with those less-than-unhappy endings.
Yeah, I like feel-bad movies.
Is there anything to be
learned from being depressed?
I’m against pedagogic cinema. But endings really are difficult. Those artificial happy endings, they just aren’t good enough, you know? I want endings that somehow resist to end the film.
You quite surprisingly
gave up directing Wagner’s monumental Ring tetralogy for the Bayreuth festival
in 2006. Did you really lack the strength to do that or was it just an excuse?
Of course my ambition was to do the Wagner that would destroy all other interpretations. I worked on that for two whole years. But I realized that technically it would be so difficult, there was no way to realize my plans on stage. The four operas were not too big for me, only the way I wanted to stage them. If you know that you could only succeed with 30 percent of what you set out to do: that’s not good enough. So I decided, unwillingly, to end my work on Wagner.
What would it have been?
Something very cinematic?
Oh yeah. Lots and lots of technology.
In a recent interview your
colleague Thomas Vinterberg called you “a very lonely man.”
Well, aren’t we all?
He also remarked that he
thought you were born at the wrong time. What did he mean?
Thirtieth of April? Because it’s also Hitler’s death day? No, I have no idea.
In 1991 you started a film
that should be ready in 2024. You wanted to shoot three minutes every year. Is
that project still on?
No. I have abandoned it. I think we should put the material on the Internet for everyone to use it. It’s like with the hunting: you just can’t do everything. It’s only one of my many unfinished projects. I have to admit that I’m only human, even if I struggle to be more than that. You have to be realistic at some point. Otherwise you keep making a lot of nonsense. But sometimes it’s a victory to give in.
You once stated that one
of the complaints you had against your parents was that your upbringing was
“too free” for you, that you missed stricter rules. Did you feel you had no
guidance at all?
Now that I am a parent myself I can say that it is necessary to provide some guidelines. I’m not very strict, but the difference is I am able to take a minimum of responsibility. When I was very small and in fear I frequently asked my mother if I had to die tonight; she would say, “I don’t think so. The statistics clearly say that you won’t but, of course, I can’t be sure, because anything can happen in this world.” I tell my children: “No. That cannot happen. Just sleep.” It’s just a matter of how much inconvenience you are willing to put on your shoulders instead of living up to your honorable idea of truth. Because if my kids die, I take that on me. If as a parent you are not willing to even do that, to employ this small lie for your child: with parents like that you easily get the feeling that you’re not really loved, even though today I believe I was. It’s a question of ideology.
This yearning for rules
certainly infuses your films. The Five Obstructions for example is a
film about rules and how rules can alter art, people, and ultimately-the world.
To set up rules can also be a loving act, after all. I’m not saying it always is. Most of the times it’s the opposite. But it can be.
Dogme also was nothing but
a game with rules.
Although most of those rules were really only meant for myself. I mean, some of the rules Thomas did. I forget which ones, but most of them I targeted against myself, against the areas I felt I already was too good at, against the filmmaking that seemed too easy to me. It was not only to make things harder but to make the product better by making it harder to produce.
In that sense your films
are extremely private.
Yes. But I believe in privacy. Or rather, I believe in specialization. When I watch TV and this strange man appears on screen promoting a product that you’ve never even heard about, then all of a sudden TV becomes enormously interesting. I prefer specialized narration to the popular form of narrowing everything down so that everyone can understand it.
Many of your films are
about believing. You are religious yourself.
I am a Catholic, yes. I got baptized only 10 or 15 years ago because my parents were non-religious.
Why did you join the
church?
I guess I wanted to be religious. But that doesn’t mean that I am. I saw Catholicism as being much more of a healthy religion than Protestantism. I know this is difficult to understand for people who have to live under Catholicism. But as a Protestant you simply have all this guilt and will never get rid off; as a Catholic you can. That’s kind of practical. You say your Hail Marys and all your sins are forgiven. That’s wonderful.
Do you go to church?
Well, no. But I do pray: I say selfish prayers—do not let this happen to me and my children, that sort of thing.
Do you educate your
children religiously?
No, they have to make up their own minds about religion. That is quite important to me. And I am not sure if I really believe. It’s so difficult for me as a logical human being not to see any religion as man-made, for a purpose. This is so hard, because it’s very obvious. But maybe this is just another way of testing us.
Next April you’re going to
be 50. Afraid of the date?
No, not at all. I mean I do not particularly like getting older, but it was a fact from the day I was born. With each day you’re one day closer to death. That’s how it is. I don’t think death is so bad once you are dead. It’s just something you have to get over.
It’s well known that you
adore Carl Dreyer’s work, and that you find Bergman’s films fascinating. Is
there anything contemporary that you like?
I don’t see anything anymore. I think you either see films or you make them. I defend myself with the claim that I don’t want to be distracted by other films. Which to some degree is true. Let’s say—which I don’t think—that I fell completely in love with some new technique: I have my basis and I want to navigate from there. I don’t want to do Matrix for a change.
Could that also be fear of
further complication? Since it is complicated enough as it is?
Somehow I feel that there have to be people like me who have to keep on going south. Let’s say we arrive at this new land and we send out a man southwards-like in this battle game, Age of Empires—I don’t know if you play that on your computer, I play it all the time. Now if this man saw some films in cinema land and he changed his direction to north, then we can’t use this man. I respect the people who have always followed their nose-even if sometimes they may not have succeeded with their films. But they are not trying to please like everybody else.
Is making films after 25
years still as interesting to you as in the beginning?
Yeah, but the problem is to keep it that way.
That’s why you set up new
challenges for yourself with every film.
Actually, at Zentropa we are currently setting up a small lab for the directors—with an editing room, a camera, some lamps, and a little computer. And I’m so fascinated by that because even though it’s low-tech it’s a room for experiments and playing around. You can stay young that way. Yesterday I found—now that is also completely banal—a little helicopter in a toy store, where I wanted to buy something for one of my sons. A remote controlled helicopter. Right now I am learning how to use it, which is extremely difficult. It’s almost like a real helicopter. And I’m just dreaming of putting a little camera in there. I would so like to try that, even though I know it’s silly. Because I think that really might help me understand why and where to put the camera.
That is still the
all-important question for you.
Yes, absolutely. It’s constantly on my mind. Answers like: you have to see the face of the hero closer in that scene to see his reactions-that’s not good enough. The camera as the stand-in for the spectator? Doesn’t satisfy me. Why can’t the camera do a certain move? Because you get sick of seeing it? So? Those reasons are simply not enough. Filmmaking to me has to be a pleasure, a play. Only when you derive satisfaction out of playing with cinematic forms a film can become really good. I am really longing for that little editing table, because you can play with the images yourself there, without an editor. Just see what happens when you put two things together, to re-invent all the time is fun. Really. It can make you so happy. This helicopter made me so happy. I bought it straight away, even though I couldn’t afford it, but it is so fantastic. It flies indoors! If you’re good at it you can land the thing right over there, in this room.
So for you cinema is all
about visual, sensual attraction?
Yeah, and actually this fascination comes from mechanics somehow.
Technics shape aesthetics.
I guess so. When I was a kid I was building a camera crane, out of wood, just to have this movement. It felt so good.
But great films can also
be very simple, very low-tech. Take Dreyer’s Gertrud.
But think of that film: those long, long slow movements? Lit by those tiny lamps? Very nice. I talked with Dreyer’s director of photography, Henning Bendtsen, about that for quite some time. It’s a rare film. Thank God.
You often operate the
camera yourself. In Manderlay you are credited together with your DP,
Anthony Dod Mantle. Are most of the shots in Manderlay yours?
Almost all of them, actually. Anthony did one scene, I think. On this little comedy of mine called Direktoren for det hele that I will be directing very soon, before I start work on Wasington, I will do all camera work myself. And I needed training for that, because I’ll be shooting that on 35mm. When we did Dogme we had long discussions about my rule that even 35 always had to be handheld. The others claimed that it couldn’t be done, that it was too heavy. So now I am proving that it is possible.
Sounds like torture again.
Oh yeah, torture is fine, as long as it’s only physical pain.
Especially if it’s your
own pain.
It should be. I enjoy that, indeed.
Will the comedy be the
start of a new trilogy?
No! I hope not. But honestly: I don’t know. All the other trilogies evolved, almost against my will. It’s like when you are out running, and you mean to run two kilometers and suddenly you decide, no, I’ll run five. And that’s normally just before you finished the second kilometer. Suddenly it’s become a five-kilometer run, even if you had no idea it would.
A conversation about Manderlay (and much more...) a conversation between Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth, published in FILM #43, May 2005
Denmark Sweden Iceland Italy France Norway Finland Germany (99 mi) 2006 Official site [Denmark] (English)
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kyle A. Westphal
At a 1967 symposium on the New American Cinema at the University
of Cincinnati, John Cage, composer of 4'33", delivered an extended
riff on his art and its relationship to contemporary cinema: "To me, the
essential meaning of silence is the giving up of intention. As we might
expect, few films follow silence in renouncing intention: when one looks at
films (and I here lump together art films and Hollywood films) one sees that
intention is almost never renounced. I think that the closest to the
renunciation of intention ... would, in my experience, be through the films of
Stan VanDerbeek, a renunciation of intention which is effected through the
multiplication of images. In this multiplicity, intention becomes lost and
becomes silent, as it were, in the eyes of the observer." VanDerbeek was
hardly the only avant-garde filmmaker to renounce intention. Barbara Rubin
implored the projectionist to find a rockin' local radio station to serve as
the soundtrack for CHRISTMAS ON EARTH. Fred Camper leaves the selection of one
of the reels of his multi-reel Super 8 work SN to a random number generator
before each screening. Who'd ever think to put self-styled enfant terrible
Lars von Trier in their company? Personally speaking, I get off the von Trier
bus as it cruises the portentous path to MELANCHOLIA—is it wrong to prefer von
Trier at his most self-effacing? The script for THE BOSS OF IT ALL is a good
one, an incisive satire of corporate skullduggery that, but for its utter,
deadpan absurdity, could court that fashionable Nordic Noir label. But von
Trier righteously fucks it up with a sui generis cinematographic
conceit: Automavision, a system of von Trier's invention that produces a cacophony
of random, computer-selected camera angles and movements. Von Trier described
his new toy as "a principle for shooting film developed with the intention
of limiting human influence by inviting chance in from the cold and thus giving
the work an idea-less surface free of the force of habit and aesthetics."
As far as I can tell, Lars hasn't sold any other filmmakers on his
Automavision, but the process is uniquely suited to THE BOSS OF IT ALL—a work
conceived in the crucible of an utterly irrational universe where even
self-interest is never properly understood. Two years after the BOSS OF IT ALL
shoot (and the bout of severe depression that followed), von Trier mused,
"If you want bad framing, Automavision is the perfect way to do it. It was
rather pleasant to lose control. In this case, I wanted to lose control 100 per
cent." When a filmmaker has nothing to say, but speaks anyway, that's a
bad film. When a filmmaker conceives and elaborates a system for negating
himself, that's a work of art.
The Boss of It All Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
The latest from Lars von Trier is a masterpiece of minorness, and as such, an oxymoron. Many out there on the Continent of Cinephilia consider Lars to be simply a moron; they should consider giving Boss a look since it offers the pleasures of his cinema shorn of the stuf Lars' opponents like to dismiss as empty philosophical grandstanding. But yes, in all the possible senses of the word, including the Kafkaesque one popularized (!!!) by Gilles Deleuze, The Boss of It All is "minor." It's in Danish -- no overreaching three-hour star-studded international production here. It's explicitly genre-bound, an office comedy that, in his arch, self-servingly self-effacing introduction, von Trier assures us will have no real meaning and will vaporize almost immediately from our memories. In terms of its trajectory through the world, von Trier gave Boss a world premiere at the film festival in Copenhagen, and mostly held it back from international fests -- no splashy controversy-courting debut in Competition in Cannes or Venice, no smug Nietzschean pronouncements to the press. All the same, this is a pretty brilliant film despite its dogged determination not to do much of anything (hmm, sort of like your average office worker), just punching the clock and hitting certain marks. Boss flirts with masterpiece status but adamantly demurs to it, precisely because if you or I mistake it for a masterpiece, the joke is on us. On the other hand, if von Trier mistakes it as such, the joke is on him, his hubris matching that of the satire's targets -- namely venture capitalists and misunderstood artist-outsiders. Like such phenomenal anti-masterpieces as Ken Jacobs' massive, potentially endless Star Spangled to Death and William E. Jones' hyper-atmospheric cinemaniac mixtape v.o. (a work that grows not only in stature but in sheer comprehensibility with repeat viewings), The Boss of It All is a self-consuming artifact. It is "about" the illusion of absent authority. (The basic plot: a businessman wants to screw his employees over but still be liked, so he invents an über-boss on whom he blames unpopular decisions; then, in the midst of the company's acquisition by an Icelandic firm, the "boss of it all" must materialize, and is embodied by a vain out-of-work actor.) This illusion, like the mealy-mouthed liberalism von Trier despises, allows tyranny to masquerade as camaraderie and compassion. Likewise, Boss adopts the illusion of absent authority in its very form -- von Trier used "Automavision" to relegate camera angles and framings to a randomizing computer program. So, we get lots of startling, oblique views on rather mundane action. Sometimes actors are cut out of the frame altogether. But this avant-garde gesture (not unlike von Trier's Oulipo-inspired hurdles for Jørgen Leth in The Five Obstructions) naturally disguises an overarching, more thoroughgoing directorial fascism. Von Trier, notoriously a bastard on-set, but also equally notorious for his highly public neuroses, gets to "abjure" responsibility while actually placing it elsewhere -- in a set of predetermined, off-scene (offshore? outsourced?) decisions that occur well out of reach of his actors, crew, or financiers. It's all so cunning, it's hard not to want to slap the thing onto my top ten. But like Kaufman and Jonze's Adaptation., Boss "cops out," in scare-quotes, yes, but nonetheless in a fully, angeringly unsatisfying way. According to its own internal rules, it almost has to. As Von Trier notes in his concluding commentary, some will get more from Boss than he put there, some will receive much less, and others "will get just what they deserve." I love you, Lars. You fucking asshole.
Lars von
Trier's Boss "Comedy"
Scott Foundas from the Village
Voice
America, that recurring object of Lars von Trier's long-distance
disaffection, figures only in passing in The Boss of It All, as the
adopted home of the title character, the president of a Copenhagen-based IT
company. Except, as we discover early on, this Oz-like figure, whom none of his
employees has ever actually met, doesn't live in the
No, the real boss here is a man called Ravn (Peter Gantzler), who started the company a decade ago and in a bid to be loved, not feared, invented a phantom to shoulder the blame for his executive decisions. Now, as he plans to sell the company to a surly Icelandic businessman, Ravn must make that phantom appear in the flesh. So he hires an out-of-work stage actor (Jens Albinus) to play the part, and The Boss of It All is about how that actor, as actors have been known to do, comes to identify a little too strongly with the role.
However one felt about Dogville and Manderlay—and I happened to like them both—they undeniably represented von Trier at his most polemical, whereas The Boss of It All finds him in a more playful mode. He even appears on-screen in the movie's opening frames, impishly informing us that there will be "no preaching" in what follows, "just a cozy time." Thanks, Lars, but surely we know well enough by now not to take anything in one of your films at face value. As its farcical situations fall into place, The Boss of It All turns out to have quite a lot to say, actually, about loyalty, the temptation of the almighty dollar, and corporate buck-passing as a kind of Olympic sport.
It also feels like a revealing checkup on its creator's career. Von Trier turned 50 while making The Boss of It All, parted ways with his longtime producer, and returned to working in Danish with a predominately Danish cast following three consecutive star-studded English-language productions. But despite its small scale, a premise that recalls (of all things) the 1993 Ivan Reitman comedy Dave, and the best efforts of its own maker to disparage its significance, The Boss of It All finds von Trier once more staking out new— if somewhat troubling—formal ground.
A decade after von Trier and a cabal of film- making countrymen took a semi-infamous "vow of chastity" and a movement known as Dogme was born, The Boss of It All was made in accordance with a new set of Larsian dictates. Called Automavision and described in the press notes as "a principle for shooting film developed with the intention of limiting human influence by inviting chance in from the cold," the process hands over control of a film's images and sound mixing from trained technicians to a computer program designed to randomly change settings at the touch of a button. (To wit, Automavision is credited as the film's cinematographer.) Colors and angles and sound levels don't match from one cut to the next. The movie is ugly as sin to look at. But it's all intentional on the part of von Trier, who once told an interviewer that moviemaking had become too easy because "all you have to do is buy a computer and you have armies rampaging over mountains; you have dragons." Now he's showing us how close we are to the time when movies will be directed by machines instead of artists. Perhaps he's telling us that we're already there.
Let
me weep over
my
cruel fate,
And
that I long for freedom!
And
that I long,
and
that I long for freedom!
Let
me weep over
my
cruel fate,
And
that I long for freedom!
The duel infringes
these
images
of
my sufferings
I
pray for mercy.
for
my sufferances.
I
pray for mercy.
Let
me weep over
my
cruel fate,
And
that I long for freedom!
And
that I long,
and
that I long for freedom!
Let
me weep over
my
cruel fate,
And
that I long for freedom!
—“Lascia ch'io pianga” (Let Me Weep) from Rinaldo, by Georg Friedrich Hӓndel
Perhaps
as overanalyzed and critically reviewed as any film released in years, cinema’s
reigning provocateur has done it again, this time with a psychological horror
thriller whose gruesome and sadistic torture porn effects rival the graphic
horrors seen in the SAW series, and at least in my view, are equally unengaging,
as my eyes turn away, not towards the screen.
The opening epilogue, however, takes one’s breath away with its supreme
beauty mixed with a lament of innocence lost, showing in slow motion a child innocently falling to its death while his parents are
distracted in the act of lovemaking, expressed through a mournful Handel aria 'Lascia ch'io pianga' (Let Me Weep) from Rinaldo.
This brief black and white short piece sets the stage for the larger
work showing the intimately personal ramifications of this tragedy. Divided into chapter headings, Grief, Pain
(Chaos Reigns), and Despair (Gynocide), the film follows a dual track,
initially starting in synch with the one that is being rationally discussed
between the characters before the film imagery veers off course into the
irrational hallucinations of one of the characters, leaving all rational
discourse behind. Supposedly based on
von Trier’s own bout with depression, he has created two allegorical Adam and
Eve characters that he obviously closely identifies with, and despite the
apparent schism between them, they become so blended together that at times
it’s hard to distinguish between the two.
But the characters couldn’t be more cold and distant, whose
conversations together are one long protracted annoyance, making it difficult
for the audience to sympathize, leaving a feeling of conniving manipulation by
a director who lures us into their brutal dysfunction as a means to prove a
point, that a human being is capable of any despicable act, even when it goes
against the rationale of everything they believe in. As usual with von Trier, it luridly
over-intellectualizes the material, creating another heartless projection of
his own intellectual emptiness scattered across the screen. With some directors, it's style over
substance, with von Trier, it's mind over matter, as his brain gets in the way
of his artistic filmmaking, literally forcing viewers to endure endless, overly
rational expository chattering that may mean something to him, but has
little significance to anyone else.
The operative word in
the beginning is atypical, as Charlotte Gainsbourg is being comforted in the
hospital by her husband Willem Dafoe after an extended treatment for a
condition known as atypical grief. Being
a therapist himself, Dafoe believes she’s being overmedicated by young
inexperienced doctors, thinking she would be better off in his hands where he
can attempt to help her confront her own fears.
Her inconsolable grief at the loss of their child leaves her in a state
of inertia, afraid of pretty much everything, but still maintaining an
insatiable appetite for sex. But Dafoe
believes rational thought is the best medicine.
While this immediately gets lost in the tiresome superficiality of
psycho-babble with each far off to their various sides of the screen,
Gainsbourg is right to question her husband’s motives, as his arrogance is
blinding him from seeing how deep-seeded her ailments really are, as it’s
possible they preceded the death of their child. When Dafoe insists that what’s best for her
is to confront her own fears, creating a pyramid chart leaving the top open for
her absolute worst, she decides their remote cabin in the woods called
Laying the groundwork
with ominous offscreen sound as well as subliminal horror images, von Trier
reminds us where we’re heading all along.
His use of metaphoric forest creatures, one that talks and one that
squawks, never fully connects with the audience, but adds to the creepy,
dreamlike fog where reality and fantasy are indistinguishable. Even the greatest fear listed at the top of
the pyramid chart is hastily written to read “Me,” yet it remains ambiguous
whether this refers to him or her, creating a confounding interplay between
victimhood and empowerhood, but by the end, their entire universe is dominated
by the insanity of hallucinations. Like
Bjork, Emily Watson, and Nicole Kidman before her, Charlotte Gainsbourg becomes
von Trier’s willing foil, winning the best actress award at the Cannes Film
festival for what is viewed as her fearlessly uninhibited performance, as she
goes places no one in their right mind would go. In contrast, Willem Dafoe as her arrogant, controlling
and patronizing husband is used as a pawn in her game, using her madness to
force him to commit horrible crimes against her that she knows are ancient and
mythical, perhaps even Biblical, all consistent with her view that males have
been oppressing women since time immemorial.
There’s an ironic and some would say misguided tribute in the end
credits to Andrei Tarkovsky, another artist imbued in the metaphysical world,
and perhaps the cottage home in the forest is reminiscent of THE MIRROR (1975),
where mankind’s human impulses always brushed against the beauty of the natural
world, but where this film elicits a base horror, Tarkovsky was one of the
film’s great cinematic poets whose intelligence and imagination continually
bordered on the sublime.
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Lars von Trier conjures up some of his most shocking and
effective imagery for this, his first full-out exploitation film. (If it had
been made in the 1970s, it would have been a "grindhouse" film.) The
trouble is that critics at
The Onion
A.V. Club review [B+] Noel Murray
Lars von Trier’s new film Antichrist opens with the writer-director’s name scrawled crudely on a huge title card, which makes for an apt overture. Antichrist is a boldly personal film, tossing all von Trier’s ideas about faith, fear, and human nature into an unfettered phantasmagoria, full of repulsive visions and fierce scorn. It’s also the most lush-looking movie von Trier has made in about 20 years. Antichrist starts with a gorgeous black-and-white prologue—spiked, in typical von Trier perversity, with explicit sex and operatic tragedy—then moves to woodland sequences where the edges of the frame look subtly distorted. Ever since he helped devise the Dogme 95 restrictions, von Trier has been giving himself handicaps before he starts a film, but nothing has been left out of his bag of tricks this time.
Antichrist stars Willem Dafoe as a touchy-feely therapist
who tries to help his wife Charlotte Gainsbourg deal with her grief over the
accidental death of their toddler son. He asks her to dump her medication, and
to trust him as he has her confront her fears in a series of increasingly corny
exercises. He demands that she come with him to their cabin in the woods, at a
spot called “
Cinema’s leading Brechtian wouldn’t seem like the best choice for a visceral examination of real emotional pain, but von Trier makes Antichrist about how aesthetic control can be as impotent as therapeutic control when it comes to dealing with nature at its wildest. He does this first satirically, by subtly mocking Dafoe’s platitudes (Where would you place your fears on a pyramid chart?), then turns on the audience, subjecting us to disgusting sexual violence as Dafoe descends into his wife’s nightmares. The shift is triggered when a fox announces “Chaos reigns!”, and anyone who rolls their eyes at that moment may have trouble stomaching Antichrist. Truth be told, the movie is filled with a lot of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, but the images stick, and the audaciousness of what von Trier’s trying to execute here is hard to shrug off. He’s dumped all the crap in his head into a different kind of horror film: one that imagines what it would be like to be trapped inside the mind of a depressed arthouse filmmaker.
Antichrist David Hudson at
"Danish
director Lars
von Trier elicited derisive laughter, gasps of disbelief, a smattering of
applause and loud boos on Sunday as the credits rolled on his drama 'Antichrist' [site]
at the Cannes film festival," reports Mike Collett-White for Reuters. "The film, starring Willem Dafoe
and Charlotte
Gainsbourg as a couple seeking to overcome the grief of losing their only
child, has quickly become the most talked-about at this year's festival."
And he quotes von Trier from the production notes: "I can offer no excuse
for 'Antichrist'... other than my absolute belief in the film - the most
important film of my entire career!"
"It's
not often that you leave a movie and feel like you've just experienced a moment
in cinematic history," writes Charles Ealy in the Austin Movie Blog. "The
movie's violence has an emotional impact that hasn't been seen since Gaspar Noé's
'Irréversible,'
which premiered here a few years ago. That's because you care about the
characters, long before the violence comes."
"The
first five minutes of Lars von Trier's 'Antichrist' contain both a scene of
eye-opening sexual explicitness and an act of tragic misadventure so extreme
that it begs a new word to describe over-the-top: Baroquecoco, maybe." Elizabeth Renzetti for the Globe and Mail writes
that Dafoe and Gainsbourg "play an unnamed couple, recovering from a
personal tragedy, who retreat to their remote cabin, called
"Blood
spurts, bones are broken, genitals are mutilated... hellooo? Are you
still with me?" asks Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum. "The movie looks almost tauntingly
great, of course, with von Trier's longtime collaborator (and 'Slumdog
Millionaire' Oscar winner) Anthony Dod Mantle as cinematographer. So it's one
good-looking, publicity-grabbing provocation, with an overlay of
pseudo-Christian allegory thrown in to deflect a reasonable person's
accusations of misogyny. As a kicker, the director dedicates the picture to the
memory of the great Russian filmmaker Andrei
Tarkovsky - a final flip of the bird to the
For Jeffrey Wells, this is "easily one of the biggest
debacles in Cannes Film Festival history and the complete meltdown of a major
film artist... It's an out-and-out disaster - one of the most absurdly
heavy-handed and over-the-top calamities I've ever seen in my life."
A few days
ago, Gunnar Rehlin spoke with von Trier for Variety,
noting first that, two years ago, the director "was hit with a severe and
inexplicable depression. It left him bedridden for months, staring at the
walls, even unable to decide whether to get up for a glass of water. Part of
the road to recovery was reinventing the horror film in the form of
'Antichrist.'" Von Trier: "I'm not religious. I've tried to be, but I
can't. If I believe in anything, it is some sort of good power. People can be
very nice to each other, and I think that the foundation to survival is
kindness and cooperation. But I would not want to be one of God's friends on Facebook."
Rehlin: "He says that he has no idea what to do next, or if 'Wasington' -
the third film in the trilogy that started with 'Dogville' and 'Manderlay' will
ever get made. 'I have spent all my energy on making this bird fly,' he says of
'Antichrist.' 'What's up next, I don't know. First I have to survive
The Horror Review
[Steven West]
One of the more
interesting end credits of Lars Von Trier’s audacious ANTICHRIST (alongside the
first-in-cinema-history listing of “misogyny researcher”) is that of “horror film research”. This suggests what is already apparent
from what has gone before - that this is a horror movie made by an auteur who
either doesn’t much like the genre or is using it to
experiment, indulge and shock. Consequently, it’s a like-it-or-loath-it affair, though, in truth, the same can be said for
the rest of Von Trier’s back catalogue, and any previous forays
into art house horror.
Separated into
significant chapter headings of “Grief”, “Pain”, “Despair” and “The Three Beggars”, the movie is virtually a two hander : there are
no speaking roles for anyone bar the two leads, and, save for some ghostly
faceless extras at the very end, the only other character on-screen is the child
who perishes in the prologue. The camera is usually hand-held, the takes are
extended, sometimes painfully so, and much of the first hour is talky to the
point of theatrical.
Clearly, it’s not a movie for your average genre audience, or
your average audience full stop. Those with patience and the ability to
overlook Von Trier’s pretentiousness will be rewarded to some
degree by a genuinely unsettling cinematic experience. It’s strong on foreboding mood : the soundtrack alone
has been contrived to unnerve with its relentlessly falling acorns and
off-camera screaming infants. Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, who shot 28
DAYS LATER, delivers some astonishing imagery, including the extraordinary
visuals of the monochrome prologue and epilogue.
Its calculated
surrealism - notably a disemboweled talking fox who portentously warns “Chaos reigns” - and unerring sense of dread (along with the use of decaying nature
imagery) immediately recall the darkest of David Lynch’s ventures, though the influences run further. DON’T LOOK NOW would appear to be a prominent source of inspiration, as would
THE SHINING and MISERY (a demented woman overpowering and crippling a male).
However you feel
about the movie as a whole, there’s no denying the
power of its opening sequence, a prologue that’s as haunting and devastating as it is visually and aurally beautiful.
Characters known only as He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) make
love - with brief hardcore penetration shots performed by doubles - just as
their playful, inquisitive young son falls to his death from his bedroom
window. Gainsbourg promptly falls apart and therapist Dafoe becomes more of a
shrink than a husband in the process of trying to reach her. Her encroaching
madness is dominated by hallucinations and an obsession with her own thesis - a
study of the maltreatment of women in the 16th century, chiefly
witchcraft. Taking refuge in “Eden”, a cabin in a remote forest, the couple descend
into violence.
Deliberately paced
and arguably self-satisfied, this movie is also beguiling and virtually
hypnotic. It is driven by two remarkably committed star turns : Dafoe
(surprisingly muted and sensitive) has the lower-key, reactive role, ultimately
having to play victim AND aggressor. It’s Gainsbourg who bears her soul and everything else in a wrenching,
exhausting portrayal of the physical and mental impact of grief. You will feel
drained just watching her in any given scene.
The film’s art house horror pretensions can’t hide the fact that its now infamous denouement
takes it into another variant of the post-SAW torture movie cycle. This final
reel, however, is still jaw-dropping stuff, with some of the most extreme film
imagery to ever make it into UK cinemas : Dafoe’s erect cock ejaculates blood (shades of NEKROMANTIK!), Gainsbourg screws a
barbell excruciatingly to his leg and, most unforgettably, she bloodily snips
off her own clitoris in horrific close-up just to prove a point. Needless to
say, the latter moment would never, ever, have survived intact from the British
censor board had this been a non-arty low budget American horror flick.
ANTICHRIST is a
bleak (Von Trier says satirical) study of human nature’s weaknesses, rich with the blackest of irony as it becomes clear that
Gainsbourg has contrived to get her husband to kill her to make her another
victim of the male violence she has studied. Consider the film a cautious
recommend - love it or loathe it, you won’t easily forget it.
Hypnotic. If I had
to write a one-word review of this film, that would be the one. I knew this
film would live up to my expectations in a scene where therapist husband Willem
Dafoe says “close your eyes … and imagine” to wife Charlotte Gainsbourg, who is
going mad with grief over the death of their son. I closed my eyes too and sank
into my chair too, and it was as if Lars was semi-hypnotizing me too.
Lost in all the
controversy and misogyny charges and countercharges is that quality of the film
— its superb formal control casts a spell over you and plays you like a piano
through one of the most radical tone shifts in movie history (it’s a structural
kissing cousin to the great Japanese movie AUDITION). Von Trier made this film
as a way of struggling with his own depression (more on that anon) and every
frame looks it. The hypnosis effects (and dream effects) are legion — slow
motion, fog shrouded scenes, silent scenes, scenes repeated, talking animals,
obviously symbolic details like an animal still-birth. One thing Von Trier does
several times to great effect is to repeat an image though first in a stylized
mythopoetic dream style, then second in a more realistic mode (think a bridge
or “She” lying on the grass), usually to underline the gap between the beauty
of theory and reason on the one hand and the much messier, dirtier experience
of actual embodied beings. Even people who don’t like this film acknowledge
that it’s made masterfully.
It starts out with
a black-and-white overture — shot like a perfume ad but so as to establish an
impossibly idyllic state of innocence, shattered by the boy’s death. Then we
see scenes of Defoe trying to help Gainsbourg “work things through” in scenes
of psychological gamesmanship, like an Ingmar Bergman chamber drama involving a
therapist and patient (you can easily imagine this part of the film recast with
Gunnar Bjornstrand and Harriet Anderson). Only what’s really happening (as Von
Trier repeatedly foreshadows) is a slow burn into the unrepressed id of a horror-movie
third act. But what’s remarkable in retrospect is how many horror tropes Von
Trier used even before the notorious “torture porn” scenes. It’s all done with
such gravitas and style though that comparisons with trash like the SAW movies
couldn’t be more misplaced — Brakhage-like nightmare forests that look like
jagged shapes wailing guttural despair from the center of the universe;
expressionist sound design (you’ll never hear acorns quite the same way again)
with portentous music and anti-realistic sound effects resonating in space as
if the film were itself own echo chamber; and several heart-in-the-mouth “Boo!”
moments (the fox, the pyramid, the washtub). Unlike horror trash, this isn’t
done to entertain: you really get the sense that Von Trier means it all (the
audience I saw this film with was rapt and nobody stirred during the credits).
And through the slow catatonia of the first part and the violence of the
second, wants the audience to share his experience of depression. Which is why
only an idiot would criticize the last part of this movie is either too violent
or illogical — that IS the logic of depression; the repercussions have to go
too far and have to be randomly inflicted on self and other.
But does it wind
up meaning anything? I think it does and I think the title both is and isn’t
misleading. It certainly doesn’t refer to the biblical figure from Revelation.
Nor does it (as I was kind of expecting) really play as a straightforward hell
portrait — there’s no reason for the two-sided dynamic between the couple, e.g.
What I’m leaning toward instead, I think, is that this film is merely a raw
production of Von Trier’s inner depressive state, which in theological terms
would be Gnosticism — that creation (the world) is evil, the work of the devil.
Von Trier has an impish reputation, but I think (as someone who’s felt really a
soul connection with Von Trier since seeing BREAKING THE WAVES in 1996, just a
few years after my his conversion and my confirmation) — that he’s really being
more honest and blunt than he lets on. That he uses his Biggest Asshole in the
World persona as a way to say what he thinks and duck it at the same time. This
really is as simple as a depression movie — a portrait of how the world looks
from the black pit. As someone who’s suffered from depression (to one degree or
another, with varying levels of knowledge thereof) for most of his life, I can
say with authority that it’s very easy when you’re in the utter depths to see
the world itself as evil, irredeemable, hellish and write it all off. It’s also
very easy to see your therapist or therapy as the cause of it all (that’s
probably, ultimately, why I stopped going). And, to judge from this film, Von
Trier clearly has no use for therapists — Defoe plays He as a self-centered,
unethical, controlling jerk. Yet despite the personal connection I had with the
material, I wasn’t as *moved* by it as I thought I should have been. The film
doesn’t have a character like DOGVILLE’s Grace or WAVES’ Bess. It therefore
resists emotional involvement because “identification” in the usual sense is
impossible — the only two people in it are a dick and a nut.
The
L Magazine [Henry Stewart]
For a while Antichrist
is wonderful, a mature and gripping film—at turns fanciful and literal, pitting
the rabidly emotional against the coolly rational—that grapples with the
contours of grief, the effects of toddler suicide, the limits of psychotherapy
and the dynamics of marriage. And then Charlotte Gainsbourg has to spoil it all
by doing something stupid like cutting off her clitoris. With a pair of
scissors. In extreme close-up.
Oh, right, this is
a Lars von Trier movie—the Danish provocateur's (gulp) "horror
movie".
Gainsbourg and
Willem Dafoe play She and He, unnamed parents who, in the film's prologue, make
love in the shower with the baby monitor on mute while their young son escapes
his crib, watches them briefly and then jumps out a window to his death. From
the start, von Trier is trying to nettle the audience: this opening is shot in
elegant black-and-white slow motion and set to an ethereal Handel aria—what
would amount to a spoof of the European Art Film, were it not so gorgeous—challenging
us to appreciate the Beauty of that most Horrible thing: the (accidental?)
death of a child.
From there, it
switches to earth-tone-tinted color as the couple copes with their bereavement:
He is a therapist, with a sonorous voice both comforting and condescending, who
turns wife into patient, taking She off her prescribed meds and forcing her to
confront soberly her pain and fear. (Gainsbourg's subsequent breakdowns-beating
her forehead against the toilet bowl rim, for example-put to shame the awards-baiting
sham that was Sean Penn's embarrassing Spectacle of Weeping in Mystic River.) They retreat to
their summer shanty, called Eden (a blatant allusion for which von Trier
apologized at his press conference), and the film slowly becomes a
cabin-in-the-woods horror movie, sort of, a la Evil Dead and The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or Cabin Fever and Baghead—except
the threat isn't external, at least not entirely, but derives mostly from
within, from the couple's individual anguish and the resentments buried in
their shared relationship.
Without ghosts, a
virus or a weapon-wielding psycho with whom to face off, they're battling
nature itself, internal and external—"Satan's church," the cruel
indifference of godlessness. They return to a primitive scene, The Woods
(which, here, literally weep), to deal with their primal fears and feelings.
"I'm outside," He says, role playing as Nature, "but also
within." "OK, Mr. Nature," She answers. "What do you
want?" "To hurt you as much as I can." And, wow, they certainly
do proceed to hurt themselves and each other, culminating in that
circumcisional, mutilative snip, while Mother Earth plagues them with symbolic
reminders of their son's fate: a baby bird tumbles from its nest; acorns assail
the cabin's roof; tree branches are felled by a storm—all dead things, falling.
(He will also confront a talking fox. What a movie!)
Antichrist is conspicuously more filmic than von
Trier's recent features, which have tended toward the downright anti-cinematic:
his last, The Boss of it
All, chose its camera positions at random, through a computer
program; the two before that, Manderlay
and Dogville, did away with locations, featuring bare soundstages with
chalk markings in lieu of sets. But this film depends upon no such gimmicks:
the intimate dialogue scenes are shot in handheld close-up, evoking the
director's Dogme days. Then there's that aestheticized opening, bookended by a
similar epilogue, as well as wildly stylized scenes, shot in what looks like an
ersatz forest lighted by Annie Liebovitz and drenched in Hammer Studios fog. In
Antichrist, characters and storytelling trump von Trier's preoccupation with
the politics of form.
When von Trier
arrives at the film's third act, he largely drops the verbal sparring for
physical battle and issues of mourning for sexual matters, like misogyny, the
feminine revenge (watch out for the ejaculated blood!) and womanhood's
seemingly irreconcilable mother-lover duality; he mixes Biblical imagery with
torture porn tropes while tinkering with the gender roles: Dafoe will have his
gonads crushed and a hole bored in his leg, which is then penetrated with a
grindstone on a shaft (the penis as excruciating albatross). Gainsbourg
literally emasculates her partner in order to gynocize him, as she defeminizes
herself. It would be easy to write off a lot of this violence as simple
misogyny. But von Trier doesn't hate women-here, as in many of his other movies
(Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville), he just takes
depicting the cruelty committed against them further than most others would
deem appropriate. At the same time, he smartly eschews glorification and
fetishization; the director's mad and mistreated woman, channeling Shelley
Duvall in The Shining, stands in for mistreated women everywhere, and
deserves our sympathies, though they may be ambivalent.
Von Trier's hardly
bearable ultraviolence, though shamelessly and shamefully incendiary, is
ultimately pardonable, unlike Darren Lynn Bousman's, because it is at least
rooted in the well-developed characters' psychology: it's their mental problems
manifest in violence, the inner made outer. (If we can appreciate if not
forgive the Hostel series for its political undertones, we can certainly
embrace von Trier's film despite its unnecessary gruesomeness.) For all the
provocative blood spilling, Antichrist at heart is a masterfully
performed, exhaustible but thrilling portrait of a relationship. It's just hard
to watch the whole thing with your eyes open, because it's so fucking gross.
The
Six Commandments of the Church of Lars von ... - Film Comment The Six
Commandments of the Church of Lars von Trier's Antichrist, by Larry Gross, September/October 2009
Neither meltdown nor breakthrough
A CRITICAL VOW OF CHASTITY
There will be no thumbs up or down in this article. Antichrist is neither disgusting and worthless, nor is it one of the great films. It is a transitional work made by an artist clearly in crisis, but not necessarily the psychological crisis he discussed at length in the press at Cannes.
But this movie shouldn’t have come as such a shock to the festival’s film journalists. Crisis has been a regular if not predictable feature of von Trier’s career from the start.
In 1991, the 35-year-old von Trier came to Cannes with the Holocaust-themed Europa (released in the U.S. as Zentropa). With a prestigious international cast and visuals more elaborate than anything he had previously attempted, especially in terms of production design and optical effects, it was as if von Trier was aspiring to be the European Coppola. But Europa, which tried to do with post–World War II Europe what Dogville was to do so brilliantly with America in the Thirties—namely, turn a small, historically based crime story into a comprehensive vision of the human condition—was, for all its elegance, opaque and unconvincing. Von Trier was so indignant at not receiving the Palme d’Or that he denounced the Jury president Roman Polanski as a “midget.”
This embarrassing episode turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to von Trier.
Quickly setting up the TV series The Kingdom, a mix of horror, soap, and medical drama, he eliminated all vestiges of art-film glamour from his work. He started to focus intensively on working with actors, on handheld camerawork, and a new, nervously kinetic editing style. Von Trier’s subsequent accomplishments grew from this unfussy vigorous method, as did the concepts that became Dogme95.
Full disclosure: though I’ve never met or spoken with him, I worked as a writer for von Trier once. He was involved in preproduction on Breaking the Waves and I was hired by a producer to redo a script von Trier owned about a bizarre historical figure, Baron Ungern von Sternberg, a German-Russian aristocrat and Czarist officer who in 1921 lead anti-Bolshevik forces in Siberia, briefly conquered Mongolia, and dreamed of an Asian Buddhist army that under his command would conquer Europe. Himmler was apparently a huge fan. The original script was written by Fridrikh Gorenshtein (the screenwriter of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris) and it was laughably awful—or maybe just badly translated. I proposed starting with a detailed outline explaining, scene by scene, how I planned to diverge from the first draft. When I was done, I offered this modest proposal: von Trier should scrap the project and adapt Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed instead. The producer relayed this response from von Trier: “He thinks you did a very good job. He doesn’t want to meet with you, speak to you, or have any sort of contact with you, ever.”
It was a case of no harm no foul. I was decently and promptly paid.
[ 1 ] THOU SHALT NEVER TRUST THE TELLER
“Yes, I am a moralist.
But I don’t want my films to be moralistic. I also don’t want you to think I’m
a moralist. I want you to think that I’m cruel, hard, and manly.”—Lars von
Trier
Some great creative
artists assuage the burden of doing what they do by vehemently insisting that
what they really care about is not art but rather the moral and spiritual example
they set in their lives. They pound their chests, insisting “I’m a real person
with a soul and moral instruction to give, not merely some artsy-fartsy
aesthete,” but of course, being artists, they cultivate this persona till
they’ve launched a second career as a prophet. In America, we have had many of
this type, inspired by Emerson, including Thoreau, Whitman, Miller, and
Kerouac. Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy were strident versions of the tendency, but
they at least had the advantage of coming from a culture and historical moment
that took the notion of reconciling theological and political prophecy
seriously.
There’s a problem with
pursuing this vocation nowadays, as Norman Mailer discovered in the final years
of his life. You have no national Church (or synagogue or mosque) to
revolutionize, so you wind up on TV and in the press instead. And, absent a
coherent political ideology to articulate, adhere to, or sell, you end up
asking people to be fascinated by the vicissitudes of your ego—and risk
becoming a joke in the process.
Lars von Trier has
trapped himself in this weird territory. He can’t seem to shut up about his
beliefs, his lack of beliefs, his sincerity, his upbringing in a paradoxically
rigid hippie commune, his phobias, his dishonest mommy (on her deathbed in
1995, she revealed that her husband was not von Trier’s biological father).
He doled out endless
amounts of this at Cannes, as if Antichrist couldn’t stand on its own.
Von Trier has become a Nabokovian invention, fostering the image of himself as
a fraudulent wannabe, when—wonder of wonders—artistically, he’s the real deal.
Most of us mediocrities do our best to be taken seriously. Von Trier, who’s
made more great or near-great films than any European director under 60 except
Almodóvar, does a perfect imitation of a fake.
Von Trier’s breakdown
coincided with a moment of crisis for art films generally, that had its
external symbol in the death of Antonioni and, especially personally for a
Scandinavian, Bergman. You can’t think about Bergman dying without thinking
about the end of the art film as we have known it. In an oblique but powerful
way, Antichrist feels like a response to the crisis of von Trier’s
future as an artist, a new anxiety about the economic and cultural viability of
a serious career in film now dominated by the commercial power of Hollywood
genre cinema. Porn and horror film violence have always shadowed art cinema,
and in films as varied as Un chien andalou, Meshes of the Afternoon,
Saló, Hiroshima mon amour, Persona, and Prénom Carmen,
art cinema claims the power to depict the most extreme human behavior in a
coherent, mediated way, incorporating but going beyond the capacity of marginal
sensationalist genres.
But now, in a worldwide
recession, the single-minded sensory extremity of porn and horror has a power
and viability that the art-film director views with both envy and alarm. In Antichrist,
with the anxiety caused by the death of one of his artistic fathers compelling
him, von Trier experiments with marrying the language, imagery and narrative
codes of pornography, and slasher-film violence, even to the point of ceding
them a certain degree of autonomy in the construction of the drama.
He is doing this as a
nervous, desperate “good son” trying desperately to have a hope of saving the
family business his “father” ran with pride and dignity.
[ 2 ] THOU SHALT NOT TAKE WHAT HUNGOVER, SLEEP-DEPRIVED
JOURNALISTS AT CANNES SAY ABOUT ANY MOVIE COMPLETELY SERIOUSLY
If von Trier’s press
chats are a creepy embarrassment, the rhetoric of journalists responding to Antichrist
in Cannes was borderline psychotic. Off the top of my head I can’t think of
another film that has elicited so much wildly inaccurate description. A few
corrections:
No, it’s not exceptionally violent. The opening aside, violence doesn’t occur until 20 minutes before the
end—and even then it is hardly uninterrupted, nor is all of it graphically
presented.
No, von Trier isn’t joking or taking the piss. The grisly juxtaposition of a child’s body
smacking into pavement with clothes curling in their dry cycle is memorably
ironic and about as funny as watching a girl torture a scorpion at a comparable
structural moment in Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Von Trier is perfectly
capable of being funny when he wants to be (The Boss of It All, The
Five Obstructions, parts of Dogville) and this time he clearly
doesn’t intend to be. (Arguably, the film might be better if it were funnier.)
No, Antichrist is not boring. It is superbly shot, with a constantly
morphing color palette by Anthony Dod Mantle, a von Trier collaborator since Dogville.
And it is superbly acted. Even when their characters are making impossible
transitions, and their reactions are confoundingly implausible, Gainsbourg and
Dafoe perform with so much confidence, dedication, and tact that we stay with
them.
The incapacity to be
boring may in fact be von Trier’s biggest handicap as an artist. As with David
Lynch, who he resembles in many ways, von Trier and his creative team run the
risk of getting mesmerized by their own phenomenal talent for using images,
sounds, and bodies in cool ways. This gift can distract him from noticing when
he’s in danger of going off a cliff conceptually. Dancer in the Dark is
like this. Watching it is like being forced to watch a car wreck over and over
again. Antichrist always seems to be about to succumb to this, but never
quite does.
[ 3 ] THOU SHALT NEVER COME COMPLETELY CLEAN
“For atonement, in the
sense of the mythic world that the author conjures, has always meant the death
of the innocent . . . Mythic humanity pays with fear for intercourse with
daemonic forces.”—Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities”
The second-best scene in Antichrist
is the opening prologue juxtaposing a married couple fucking, with a baby
stepping out of a window and falling to its death. As commentators have
observed, it’s an astute allegorical rendering of mankind’s Fall into the
mundane corrupt quotidian. It’s also the first and the last time that the film
feels like it’s set in a recognizable contemporary world, the one where
over-scheduled married couples steal time for sex while doing the laundry—the
tempo of the clothes whirling in the dryer matches that of the erotically
linked bodies, in a particularly delicious touch.
Part of what’s brilliant
about this sequence is that all the elements—man, woman, baby, washing machine,
laundry, falling water droplets—are made graphically interchangeable. Nothing
is individuated to the point where conventional narrative causality can be
inferred. This is one of those moments when von Trier gets everything that he
wants to do going at once. The couple and child effectively become Humanity.
The realistic is subsumed completely into the mythic. It’s
tragic-funny-sexy-violent-horrifying-real and fantastic all at once.
[ 4 ] THOU SHALT NOT SUFFER A MAN TO HAVE A PENIS
“The male protagonists
in my films are basically all idiots who don’t understand shit. Whereas the
women are much more human, and much more real. It’s the women I identify with
in all my films.”—Lars von Trier
This perhaps is
counterintuitive, but von Trier doesn’t have a problem with women.
He has, on the other
hand, a serious problem with men.
The male figures in his
films are either inept and passive (Jean-Marc Barr in Europa, many of
the supporting citizens in Dogville), graceless brutes (the rapists in Breaking
the Waves, rapist and thief David Morse in Dancer in the Dark,
Stellan Skarsgård in Dogville), or else their symbolic castration is
plain as day as with Skarsgård in Breaking the Waves. Von Trier was obviously
venturing beyond himself and into masterpiece territory in Dogville with
the introduction of the Paul Bettany character, whose mixture of tenderness and
cruelty, intelligence and myopia, altruism and egotism, strongly implicates us
in a way no other masculine figure in the director’s work ever had done before.
Unlike any other von Trier film, Dogville incorporates the image of a
believable masculine norm that might conceivably link up with feminine
spiritual power and grace. The subsequent collapse of that alliance is
excruciatingly sad, granting Dogville a depth and universality unique in
von Trier’s films.
For much of its length Antichrist
is a compelling Bergman-esque marital psychodrama with the male figure
articulating secular-humanist Reason struggling for power over a female
embodying Emotion and Intuition, with some scenes playing like a remake of Through
a Glass Darkly. (Dafoe’s resemblance to Max von Sydow physically and
vocally as well makes this link particularly powerful—and they did both play
Christ.)
The only problem is that
despite Dafoe’s gracefully good-humored sincerity, his character as written is
a maddeningly obtuse idiot (so was von Sydow’s doctor-husband in Bergman’s
film; there was just less of him), and Gainsbourg gets all the good lines (“The
doctor says my grief is atypical”; “Can’t I be afraid without a definite
object?”). Von Trier assumes we’ll accept Dafoe as a generic horror-movie
skeptic scoffing at the supernatural before getting his bloody comeuppance. The
problem is we seldom have to listen to those guys deny what we all know is
coming for nearly the entire length of the film. They’re usually dispatched
much sooner than that.
[ 5 ] THOU SHALT NOT BE FOOLED
“Let no man beguile
you in any wise: for [it will not be], except the falling away come first, and
the man of sin be revealed.” —2 Thessalonians, New Testament
“God matters less to Pascal than the refutation of those who deny Him.”—Jorge
Luis Borges
In his films, is Lars von
Trier religious? Is that why Antichrist is dedicated to Tarkovksy, whose
religious orthodoxy was aggressive and indisputable? No. Von Trier is more of a
magical realist who ransacks the images and tropes of religion to enable the
smashing of realist aesthetic conventions. The fox, the deer, and the crow that
confirm the legend of the three beggars in Antichrist, function this
way.
The hitch is that vivid,
psychologically plausible human interaction is precisely what von Trier is
supremely gifted at putting up on screen. It’s when the supernatural becomes
transparently and literally “true” (the ending of Breaking the Waves,
the musical numbers in Dancer, or the faceless women who “reclaim”
Nature at the end of Antichrist) that he becomes temporarily idiotic.
What von Trier does have in common with Tarkovsky is a compulsive hatred of
secular power structures for their irredeemably hypocritical pettiness and
cruelty, whether he’s attacking the small-minded communities that do mean
things to Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves, Björk in Dancer,
and Kidman in Dogville, or the self-deluding liberal humanism of Bettany
in Dogville and Dafoe in Antichrist.
[ 6 ] THOU SHALT NOT ALWAYS BE ABLE TO HAVE IT BOTH WAYS
“I don’t see my film
characters as either male or female. It’s just that they assume a female appearance…
They are part of me. But I’m not a woman. I’m not a woman! Let’s make that very
clear! Oh, I don’t know, maybe I am. I am an American woman. Or 65 percent of
me is.”—Lars von Trier
Antichrist is both inspired and disabled by von Trier’s
ambition to link a psychodramatic art film to a horror movie. And this boils
down to the film’s evasive uncertainty about whether to represent Gainsbourg as
a case of psychological trauma or an incarnation of mythic evil.
Von Trier seems to be
demolishing psychological interpretation of Gainsbourg when he reveals that she
was abusing the couple’s child the summer before he died. The evidence of
Gainsbourg’s chaotic academic writing further indicates that their vacation
forest retreat has possessed her. We think, okay, it’s like The Shining,
where you finally figure out the ghosts are real. She’s really the monstrous
incarnation of malevolent female Nature. But how exactly are we meant to take
this Female-Nature-is-Satan’s-Church stuff? Is it every forest, rock, river,
flock of seagulls, that’s female-and-evil, or just this spot on the outskirts
of Seattle? Von Trier seems to be going further than ever in pushing
masculinity, as such, almost out of existence.
But just when we’re
accustoming ourselves to seeing Gainsbourg as the vengeful monster in a horror
film, she smashes Dafoe’s dick with a block of wood, screaming “You’re going to
leave me!” This is not the voice of savage gynotheological goddess energy
erupting against civilized constraint, this is more like Annie Hall gone
bad. The next step of bloodily fastening an iron weight to Dafoe’s leg is a
further inconsistency because it draws upon the imagery of the violence that
men did to suspected witches, as depicted in the pages of Gainsbourg’s thesis.
If she’s Woman angrily erupting, why exactly is she behaving like those who
torture women?
Von Trier can’t seem to
keep from confusing the mythic power of the oppressed Female and the history of
repressive violence done to women. The two kinds of violence arbitrarily cross
paths. Thus Dafoe mutates from symbolizing masculine oppressiveness to being
the castrated victim—a proto-woman himself. And this gets mashed up with horror
movie conventions. He eventually morphs into the “final girl” who generically
survives the knives of movie serial killers like Jason in various horror
franchises. And the clitorectomy Gainsbourg performs on herself only dimly
makes sense if she has also undergone a spiritual sex change, actively assuming
the persona of vindictive masculine oppressor.
The inappropriate way to
rationalize this is to say it’s all a dream. More precisely, the realistic and
supernatural levels of the story come unhinged at a certain point and, despite
his brilliant moment-by-moment craftsmanship, von Trier can’t put them together—or
has, toward the end, simply lost interest in doing so.
Fortunately there is one
great sequence about two thirds of the way through the film that lets us
glimpse what a balancing of all these elements might look and feel like.
Gainsbourg recounts hearing a weeping voice near the cottage the previous
summer. She and we assume it’s the wail of their child but she discovers him
playing, smiling happily. She says she recognizes it “as the voice of all those
that are going to die.” This is the one moment where Gainsbourg is allowed to
have the visionary gift that goes with her thematic trajectory of sacrifice and
martyrdom. The event, recounted through the prism of grief, now foretells not
only the tragedy of their child but links that to the knowledge of all loss.
The grief for all things that will die is to be illuminated by, but not limited
to, the agony of the particular death of those we love.
This is a theme both real
and grandiose enough for a masterpiece. Hopefully, we will look back at Antichrist
in a few years, and recognize it as a sketch for the next great film that will
renew the remarkable career of Lars von Trier.
A speculative consideration of Lars von Trier and Antichrist Steve Garden from The Lumière Reader
not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith) review
Eye for Film ("Chris") review [4/5]
Cannes
'09: Day Five Mike D’Angelo at
They Shoot Actors, Don't They? Katarina
Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review
The House Next Door [Jeremiah Kipp]
CineScene.com (Chris Knipp) review
PopMatters (Todd R. Ramlow) review
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] also seen in yet another article here: The Auteurs (II)
second opinion Sheila Seacroft at Jigsaw Lounge, also seen here: floatationsuite [Sheila Seacroft]
New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review
Last Night With Riviera [Matt Riviera]
Slant Magazine review [1.5/4] Ed Gonzalez
Sex and Fury: Antichrist Brannavan Gnanalingam from The Lumière Reader
Sound On Sight Myles Dolphin
Salon.com
[Andrew O'Hehir]
Twitch [Kurt Halfyard] also seen here: Rowthree [Kurt Halfyard]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
DVD Times Noel Megahey
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]
ANTICHRIST
Review Karina Longworth at
Matt Singer Termite Art
Confessions of a Film Critic [John Maguire]
Bloody-Disgusting review [4/5] Michael Panduro
Fangoria.com [Michael Gingold]
The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
filmcritic.com (Jason Morgan) review [2.5/5]
Lars von Trier's Porno Horror Rhapsody Mary and Richard Corliss at Cannes from Time magazine, May 2009
J Hoberman Graphic,
Controversial, Yucky: Lars von Trier's Antichrist
Can't Save This Year's Cannes, from The Village Voice,
May 18, 2009
Screen
International (Jonathan Romney) review
at
Plume Noire review Moland Fengkov
Off
The Edge: The Primal Power of Von Trier’s “Antichrist” Anthony Kaufman at
Torture
Porn Mark Harris essay from Patrick
Murtha’s Diary,
Melissa Anderson at
Patrick
Z McGavin at Cannes from Stop Smiling magazine, May 19, 2009
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [2/5]
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
Brian
Orndorf also seen here: DVD Talk or here:
filmJerk.com
Review [Brian Orndorf]
EdinburghGuide.com
[Dylan Matthew]
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
So
What Happens to Willem Dafoe’s Genitals in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, Anyway? Lane
Brown from New York magazine, May 18,
2009
Cannes:
Lars von Trier Vigorously Defends Antichrist ’s Genital Mutilation Dennis Lim at Cannes from
A
Squeamish Person’s Guide to Seeing Antichrist Lane Brown from
The
Ten Most Brutalized Wangs in Movie History
Tim
Hayes Critics Notebook
Moving
Pictures magazine [Ron Holloway]
David
Bourgeois at
Antichrist
in Cannes Charles Ealy at
Alex Billington at
Jeffrey Wells Antichrist = Fartbomb, at
Eric Kohn A Nutty Nightmare From
Lars von Trier, at Cannes from The Wrap,
May 17, 2009
Von
Trier: “I am the best film director in the world” Eugene Hernandez covers a
Lars
Von Trier: “I am the best filmmaker in the world.” Karina Longworth at
Gunnar Rehlin interview with Von
Trier from Variety, May 13, 2009
Fabien Lemercier interviews von Trier at
Cannes from Cineuropa, May 18, 2009
Dennis Lim 'Antichrist'
is controversial, but therapeutic for director Lars von Trier, an interview at the luxurious Hotel Du Cap in
Village Voice (Melissa Anderson) review Melissa
Anderson interviews Charlotte Gainsbourg, September 22, 2009
Antichrist
Director Lars von Trier Reviews His Reviews Bilge Ebiri interview from
Lars von Trier film Antichrist shocks Cannes | Entertainment | Reuters Mike Collett-White, May 17, 2009
The Hollywood Reporter review Peter Brunette at Cannes, May 18, 2009
Entertainment
Weekly review
Owen Gleiberman
Lisa Schwarzbaum at
Variety.com
[Todd McCarthy] at
Anne Thompson Variety blogger, May 18, 2009
7
minutes with Lars von Trier Paul
Morley at
Time Out
London (Dave Calhoun) review [4/6]
at
Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [2/6]
The Daily Telegraph review [5/5] Some audience members think it's the most offensive film they've ever seen, Sukhdev Sandhu at Cannes, May 18, 2009
Cannes film festival: Can Lars von Trier be having a laugh at us? Mark Brown at Cannes from The Guardian, May 18, 2009
Xan Brooks tries to get a handle on Lars von Trier's Antichrist at the Cannes film festival The Guardian, May 18, 2009
Peter Bradshaw Who’s Afraid of the Talking Fox? I Am, at Cannes from The Guardian, May 19, 2009
Peter Bradshaw: Why the outrage over Antichrist is misplaced Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, July 21, 2009
The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [2/5] What the Devil’s Going On Here? July 24, 2009
The Irish Times review [3/5] Donald Clarke, July 24, 2009
Cannes '09 Day 5: Charlotte, don't Wesley Morris at Cannes from The Boston Globe, May 17, 2009
Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review at Cannes, May 19, 2009
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [2/4]
Los Angeles Times (Betsy Sharkey) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Cannes #5: Even now already is it in the world Roger Ebert at Cannes, May 17, 2009
Cannes #6: A devil's advocate for "Antichrist" Roger Ebert at Cannes, May 19, 2009
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4] October 21, 2009
Laughs, Jeers and Fascination Greet ‘Antichrist’ Manohla Dargis blogs at Arts Beat from The New York Times, May 18, 2009
Lars von Trier Is Still Provocateur of Cannes Manohla Dargis at Cannes from The New York Times, May 19, 2009
Dave Itzkoff Updated: IFC Says Cannes Cut of ‘Antichrist’ Will Play in U.S., at Arts Beat from The New York Times, May 20, 2009
Charlotte Gainsbourg: From Grim Pain to Hell in Eden Joan Dupont from The New York Times, June 2, 2009
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review October 23, 2009
Tuva Semmingsen - Lascia ch'io pianga (GF Händel ... The song from the Epilogue (sound only) on YouTube (5:28)
Don’t miss the
opening ten minutes, a wordless slow-mo montage set to the Prelude orchestral
music of Wagner’s opera Tristan und
Isolde, seen in its entirety here: Melancholia
Prologue on YouTube (7:46), as it’s filled with the most dramatic shots of
the film, all of which set the apocalyptic tone of gloom and doom which
dominate this film, as an approaching star named Melancholia is veering toward
the earth’s orbit, but scientists expect it to pass by without interference or
harm. Shot in ‘Scope with a mix of
digital and 35 mm imagery by Manuel Alberto Claro, most all of it taking place
at a single location, a mammoth estate in Västra Götaland County
in Sweden that resembles the grounds of LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (1961), a sign
of the upper echelons of the aristocracy.
After an opening Prologue, the film is divided in two parts, each
representing the state of mind of two sisters, Kristen Dunst as Justine and
Charlotte Gainsbourg as Claire. Justine
arrives on the scene as the bride in her full wedding regalia with the groom in
tow, both in the throes of love as they experience a comically absurd sequence
where it’s near impossible for the driver to park a stretch limo. This moment of levity is interrupted by the
severity expressed from her late arrival where she’s apparently missed the
first several hours of the world’s most expensive and elaborately planned
wedding, by Udo Kier of course as the wedding planner, who after awhile refuses
to even look at the bride as she’s completely ruined his wedding. Justine can’t
seem to focus and continually wanders off, throwing the timing off, forcing
guests to continually wait, where Claire and her husband John, Kiefer
Sutherland, who’s paying for it all, grow more irate by the minute, as they
feel embarrassed by the apparent indifference of the bride. Nonetheless, despite Claire’s continual
interference, supposedly reminding her sister of her social obligations,
Justine just never gets the hang of it, and her more casual air doesn’t match
the growing mood of annoyance and frazzled nerves, especially from Justine’s
unhappily separated parents, the equally carefree John Hurt dangling two women
named Betty on his arm, and the contemptuous view of her domineering mother,
Charlotte Rampling, who hates weddings in general and is not afraid to express
her misanthropic views.
The man in the middle of this apparent
wedding from hell is Alexander Skarsgård as Michael, the groom, a
perfectly charming and innocent young man who’s thrilled at the idea of being
married to Justine, though, as the night goes on, he learns he really doesn’t
know her at all. When the father of the
groom, Stellan Skarsgård, makes a perfectly odious speech about his preference between
his son’s happiness and his own business success, he quite naturally chooses
the success of his business, which simply stakes his claim as the biggest
egoist in the room. There’s plenty of
behind the scenes nastiness, especially when Justine has had enough and simply
tells off the father-in-law that he’s an imbecile whose arrogance is
despicable, where he and his family, again with the groom in tow, quickly exit
the premises. One guesses this may all
blow over by the morning, but it doesn’t, as the sisters, for days, weeks, or
even months afterwards, continue to inhabit the immense grounds, which is
located on a golf course. Never once
throughout this ordeal is anyone ever seen actually playing golf at this ultra
exclusive country estate. Only
afterwards is there a suggestion that Justine suffers from depression, which
really isn’t remotely suggested during the wedding party itself, where instead
the idea of a perfect day where she’s supposed to be happy is literally forced
upon her, leaving her bewildered and in a state of confusion and mixed
emotions, where in the aftermath she simply lies around unable to get out of
bed. Sometime later, as the film
switches to the other sister, with the mysterious planet moving ever closer,
Claire is openly suspicious about the possibilities of what could happen when
Melancholia passes near the earth. John,
however, considers himself something of a science expert, who’s continually
looking up at the star in his telescope, sharing the moment with his young son,
and can barely contain his enthusiasm at this priceless moment, knowing all
scientific experts have predicted the star will simply pass by, allowing an
unheard of opportunity for skywatchers.
The mood in the second segment grows more
broodingly intense, as Claire becomes more unsettled at the thought of
potential doom, despite her husband’s calming speeches to the contrary, she
still has her suspicions, made all the more ominous by the abnormal behavior of
animals, especially their horses that won’t sit still in their stalls,
whinnying and remaining restlessly agitated throughout the day and night. While Claire grows more hysterical,
especially for the life of her son, it’s Justine that develops a calmly
fatalistic attitude, sensing the end is near, claiming she knows life in the
universe exists only on earth and it’s about to come to an end where no one
will notice its absence. Her ease
in accepting impending doom is in stark contrast to her panic ridden sister,
where the sisters seem to represent opposite ends of the distressed mood
spectrum, but it’s all displayed with heightened melodrama that
reeks of excess, especially from Gainsbourg, where the director continues to
flood the theater with the neverending sounds of Wagner, a monotonously
repetitive theme of gloom that drives the point home with the subtlety of a
sledgehammer, as we’ve obviously gotten the point, but is that all there
is? Is this a one-note drama? All we ever see are the few lives that remain
on these massive grounds, where the spacious emptiness is substantial, as all
the other people in the world are missing, as no one else is ever seen, as if
these are the last humans on earth.
There is no radio, television, Internet news, phone calls, no sirens
blaring, nothing to connect these life forms to anyone else on earth, and all
this is before anything happens. Dunst, who won the Best Actress Award at
Cannes is good, but nothing special, but the ominous atmospheric mood is
substantial, as the director contemplates a scenario where the human race and
planet earth are on the verge of collapse from a mysteriously off course star
that appears out of nowhere. Obviously
anything’s possible, but this is a bewildering climax that is overly hyped and
pre-ordained from the opening prologue, so there’s little mounting tension or
suspense. Judging from the blasé
evidence of life shown in the two or so hours onscreen, there is little
sustained human drama that makes this feel in any way memorable.
Alone in the Dark [Paul Greenwood]
Like Danish director Lars von Trier’s previous film, Antichrist, Melancholia begins with a dreamy super slo-mo prologue, presenting seemingly random shots of Kirsten Dunst on a golf course in a wedding dress, intercut with images of the cosmos and the earth crashing into another planet. This takes us into a lengthy wedding sequence in which Dunst’s depressive bride and her loathsome family are revealed, as their bickering takes its toll on her fragile mental state. Though this goes on much too long, and is frequently deeply pretentious, it contains many moments of merit, not least a fine performance by Dunst. Meanwhile, a planet called Melancholia is due to pass by earth, and this is where the film becomes something remarkable, an existential sci-fi where Deep Impact meets The Tree of Life. It wouldn’t be a von Trier film if it didn’t go bananas at some point, and there’s a grim fascination to see just where it will go. And as an examination of depression, desperation and how people deal with death, it’s really quite distressing despite its indulgences.
Critical
Consensus: J. Hoberman and Amy Taubin Discuss ... Amy Taubin, from Eric Kohn interviews of
critics J. Hoberman and Amy Taubin from indieWIRE,
Jim and I agree about the work of many directors, but von Trier
is not one of them. I loathe most of his movies, “Dogville” included, primarily
for their misogyny. Von Trier’s central female characters are tortured nonstop
until they either achieve beatitude through suffering or take bloody revenge on
their torturers. But it’s not only the misogyny that makes the movies
unbearable. I loathe the empty Brechtian distancing devices, the slippery
send-ups and self-satire, all the sophistry. Not for me. So I was certainly
surprised that “Melancholia” got to me from first to last when I saw it in
Despite Lars von Trier’s purported reverence for Tarkovsky, even
the most successful of the wayward Dane’s films jump on the furniture in the
next room, none more so than his latest concoction, Melancholia.
Aside from the magnificent opening, much of the film (especially the first
half, which plays like an over-cooked adolescent homage to Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen
[The Celebration, 1998], a good, but by no means great film) is
characterised by the self-congratulatory (if not masturbatory) mannerisms of
Dogme 95: frenetic cameras, specious jump-cuts, and the unrestrained
scenery-chewing of ill-disciplined ac-tors. Even the weight and majesty of the
opening was repeatedly undermined each time von Trier returned to Wagner’s
enthralling prelude from Tristan und Isolde. Having shot his bolt in
the first few minutes, each new attempt to coax an erection felt increasingly
desperate. He essentially conveyed in the opening ten minutes what he proceeded
to spend the next two hours labouring over. If it had a little more meat on its
bones, I might have been tempted to make a case for it as a development in Von
Trier’s ongoing examination of his personal (and our global) narcissistic
dysfunctionality, but the film is too thematically and formally slight to
justify that degree of effort, and frankly, dignifying von Trier’s misanthropy
for a second time would be twice too many. I will admit, I enjoyed a quiet
titter when Justine (Kirsten Dunst) said, “What do I think about it? I think
it’s a piece of shit!”
The thing I like most about Lars von Trier's films is his unique
ability to challenge dominant morality, essentially telling large groups of
people to go screw themselves and their assimilative piety with such clarity
and seeming ease. He manages to get to the core of social hypocrisies amidst
the etiquettes and niceties, often aggressively communicating his point in a
shocking and horrific manner, giving a visceral appeal for those less
interested in dissecting his message.
Even though Melancholia ostensibly deals with the end of the world,
spending its latter half detailing the varying reactions of sisters Claire
(Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Justine (Kirsten Dunst) to the impending collision
of Earth with another planet, it's surprisingly low key, making its point with
the same clever, almost snarky structure as Antichrist, only without the
violence and mutilation.
In fact, the first half is almost comedic, focusing on Justine's wedding and
channelling Fat Girl in its juxtaposition of a comic and horrific take
on the same subject to inspire introspection. Feeling depressed after her
mother (Charlotte Rampling) makes a speech predicting a short marriage, she's
repeatedly told to cheer up by her anxious sister, whose husband, John (Kiefer
Sutherland), takes every opportunity to remind everyone how much the wedding cost.
While identification with the melancholic Justine is implied, the intrinsic
notion of nuptials as a sunny celebration assign judgment to the well-adjusted
who will similarly want her to "just be happy."
This light-hearted first half, with its sassy insults and pseudo-sarcastic
depiction of an affluent party, is contrasted with the possibility that the
world might come to an end. It's here that depression is explored and assessed
with astounding insight, as Claire and John cope with the varying stages of
paranoia, denial and melancholy associated with annihilation anxiety that
Justine was suffering on her wedding day.
Unsurprisingly, von Trier's occasional slow motion, artistic photography makes
melodic the almost dryly-analytic nature of this exceedingly realistic
depiction of impending sadness and doom. He mixes realism with fantastical
imagery to fuse the literal with artistic expression, adding intrigue to what
is essentially a pedagogical exercise in telling off everyone that dismisses
the validity of depression.
While certainly not as shocking or overtly memorable as some of his previous
works, Melancholia is exceedingly clear in its point and resultantly
cathartic to anyone that can relate to his assertion.
At her own wedding reception, Justine (Kirsten Dunst) is overcome by depression and alienates everyone, including her new husband (Alexander Skarsgard) and her devoted sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). When a new planet, Melancholia, appears in the sky, Justine knows it will destroy Earth.
Lars Von Trier continues to make the same film —about a
masochistic woman who finds transcendence when the worst possible thing happens
to her — in different genres. We’ve had it as a love story (Breaking The
Waves), a musical (Dancer In The Dark), a small-town drama (Dogville), and a
horror film (Antichrist); this is the science-fiction version, and the worst
possible thing happens to everyone in the universe
It opens, like Antichrist, with an ultra-slo-mo horror scored to classical
music, offering surreal images (Kirsten Dunst in a wedding dress as birds fall
from the skies, Charlotte Gainsbourg and a child sinking into a golf course)
that add up to the end of the world. The two sections are named for sisters who
are both von Trier heroine-martyrs: Dunst’s melancholy Justine rejects every
trapping of happiness and is thus not depressed by the end of all things, while
Gainsbourg’s better-adjusted Claire has much more (happy marriage, child,
lovely home) to lose and is enraged by cosmic cataclysm. Imagine the last five minutes
of Beneath The Planet Of The Apes rewritten by Chekhov: its audacious mix of
silliness and solemnity is glacially gripping even as it risks losing audience
sympathy (and patience) by making Justine wilfully irritating as she responds
to generosity and kindness with a kind of blank self-destruction that’s easy to
read as cruelty. Twice, Claire tells Justine, “I hate you so much,” when she
does or says something unforgivable — but she then forgives her anyway.
The first half is set on the evening of Justine’s wedding reception at the
upscale hotel owned by her brother-in-law, John (Kiefer Sutherland, playing
another of von Trier’s wrong-headed rationalists), which has been arranged at
great personal and emotional cost by Claire and is wrecked by an escalation of
delays, caprices, unhelpful guests (John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling as the
long-estranged parents) and the bride’s impulse to turn away from her devoted,
handsome, decent new husband (Alexander Skarsgård) to take an al fresco leak
while in her wedding gown, disappear to sulk in the bath when the cake is due
to be cut, and flee the bridal suite to rape a minor guest (Brady Corbet). She
is generally such a nightmare that the wedding planner (Udo Kier) hilariously
covers his eyes when she’s near because he can’t face the woman who has ruined
his wedding. This section has a train-crash fascination, and Dunst (like so
many von Trier actresses) is extraordinary in a difficult role, an impish but
gloomy spirit.
Gainsbourg, cast in the ‘straight’ role after beyond-the-call-of-duty mania in
Antichrist, is similarly perfect, and gets her heavy lifting to do in the
second part, which takes place in the aftermath of the failed wedding as the
near-catatonic Justine stays at the empty hotel in the last days of the planet.
As has been proved by his offscreen statements, von Trier has a tendency to say
things he doesn’t mean just to provoke an argument: the film seems to get
behind Justine’s miserable vision, but its beauty, mordant wit and
oh-come-on-now speeches about how dreadful it all is (“Life on Earth is evil”)
constitute an undermining of gloom which practically sounds a chortle in the
empty, Godless universe. Besides being an end of the world film, this is an
Altmanesque comedy of a social event falling apart and a country-house drama
that trumps family spats with the end of the world.
Verdict
Von Trier is a burr under the hide for many viewers, and the unconverted won't
be convinced. But it's audacious, beautiful, tactful filmmaking and perhaps the
perfect match for The Tree Of Life on a bipolar double bill.
Build Your Own Review: Lars von Trier's Melancholia | Spectacular ... Spectacular Attractions
Not
With a Whimper But a Bang: The End Times of ... - Village Voice J. Hoberman,
Surrender to the Void-[Steven Flores]
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
Cannes
'11, day seven: Two days after The Tree Of Life screening, Lars Von Trier
issues a rebuttal Mike D’Angelo at
Cannes
'11, day eight: The latest from Takashi Miike, and a reminder of why grades
often don't tell the whole story Mike D’Angelo at
Drew McWeeney at
The
House Next Door [Joseph Jon Lanthier]
at
Confessions of a Film Critic [John Maguire]
Review:
Lars von Trier's Melancholia | Entertainment | TIME.com Richard Corliss,
Melancholia:
Lars von Trier's Tree of Death
Richard Corliss at
CANNES
REVIEW | With 'Melancholia,' Lars Von Trier Delivers a Dark Apocalyptic
Masterpiece Eric Kohn at
CANNES REVIEW: Lars von Trier Gets Happy, in His Way, with Melancholia Stephanie Zacharek at Cannes from Movieline, May 18, 2011, also seen here: CANNES REVIEW - Movieline
Cannes
2011: Lars Von Trier's Melancholia. Wow. - Voice Film J. Hoberman at
Apocalypse
von Trier; Miike in 3-D Barbara
Scharres at
Ruthless Reviews » MELANCHOLIA Alex K.
The King Bulletin [Danny King]
Gordon and the Whale [Chase Whale]
Criticize This! [Andrew Parker]
David Edelstein on 'Melancholia' and 'J. Edgar ... - New York Magazine
Eat Your Heart Out, Harold Camping! The ... - The New York Observer Rex Reed
DustinPutman.com [Dustin Putman]
Digital Fix Noel Megahey
Melancholia | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Scott Tobias
Melancholia - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Bernardinelli
Man, I Love Films [Brian Roan]
Melancholia
Lee Marshall at
The
House Next Door [Nick Schager]
Lars Von Trier's Melancholia - Film School Rejects Simon Gallagher
Screen Comment [Saïdeh Pakravan]
Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin
Daily Film Dose [Greg Klymkiw]
Screenjabber.com [Stuart Barr] and Jacqui Barr
AdvanceScreenings.com [Matthew Fong]
Tonight at the Movies [John C. Clark]
The Film Pilgrim [Helen Murdoch]
The Film Stage [Raffi Asdourian]
Critical Movie Critics [Mark Zhuravsky]
Monsters and Critics [Anne Brodie]
Black Sheep Reviews [Joseph Belanger]
Melancholia | Film School Rejects Allison Loring
Fantastic Review: 'Melancholia' - Film School Rejects Cole Abaius
FlickFilosopher.com [MaryAnn Johanson]
Melancholia - Film School Rejects Jack Giroux
Digital Spy [Ben Rawson-Jones]
Little White Lies Magazine [Jonathan Crocker]
Melancholia — Inside Movies Since 1920 - Box Office Magazine Richard Mowe
Von
Trier is serious, meditative in Melancholia
Mike Goodridge at
Alex Billington at
Digital Spy [Mayer Nissim - Cannes 2011]
ColeSmithey.com [Cole Smithey]
Cinema
Blend [Katey Rich] at
Melancholia
will make you puke | Film | Newswire | The A.V. Club ... John Semley,
Lars von Trier: the Melancholy Dane Richard Brody from The New Yorker, May 20, 2011
Cannes bans von Trier after Hitler remarks David Germain at Cannes from Salon, May 19, 2011
Cannes: von Trier apologizes for Hitler comments Associated Press at Cannes from Salon, May 18, 2011
Cannes: Lars von Trier at world's end Andrew O’Hehir at Cannes from Salon, May 18, 2011
Cannes 2011.
Lars von Trier's "Melancholia"
David Hudson at
Lars von Trier on
'Melancholia': 'Maybe it's crap'
Brian Brooks at the director’s press conference at
Lars
Von Trier: “When I make comedies they become very melancholy” Eugene Hernandez from Film Comment at the
Lars
von Trier: "O.K., I'm a Nazi"
Mary Corliss from Time
magazine at the
Lars
von Trier provokes Cannes with 'I'm a Nazi' comments Charlotte Higgins from The Guardian at the
The 10 Most Controversial Things Lars Von Trier Said at the Melancholia Press Conference Jada Yuan from Vulture in The NY magazine at the Cannes press conference, May 18, 2011
Kirsten
Dunst Handles 'Melancholia' Disaster With ... - New York Times Interview with Kristen Dunst,
Charlotte
Gainsbourg: 'It's good to be disappointed in yourself' Angelique Chrisafis interview with Gainsbourg
from The Guardian,
Kirsten Dunst: after the apocalypse Xan Brooks interview with Dunst from The Guardian, October 4, 2011
Charlotte Gainsbourg on Melancholia and the ... - New York Magazine Miranda Siegel interview with Gainsbourg from New York magazine, November 7, 2011
Melancholia | Film review roundup | The Omnivore links to various British film reviews
Melancholia Dave Calhoun at
Melancholia (15) - Reviews - Films - The Independent Anthony Quinn
Cannes
2011: Melancholia, review Sukhdev
Sandhu at
Melancholia – review | Film | The Observer Philip French
Cannes
2011 review: Melancholia Peter
Bradshaw at
Cannes film festival bans Lars von Trier Catherine Shoard and Ian J. Griffiths at Cannes from The Guardian, May 19, 2011
Will
Lars von Trier's Melancholia make us laugh or cry? Xan Brooks from The Guardian,
As
Von Trier exits Cannes ... is it the end of the world on planet Lars? Xan Brooks at
Poster
notes: Melancholia Paul Owen from The Guardian,
Melancholia's
sly twist on the flashback film Anne Billson from The Guardian,
Lars von Trier collides with the Hollywood blockbuster in Melancholia Danny Leigh from The Guardian, September 30, 2011
Melancholia: The end is nigh, but that's not so bad ... - Globe and Mail Rick Groen
MontrealGazette.com [Al Kratina]
"Melancholia" movie review -- "Melancholia" showtimes - Boston.com Ty Burr from The Boston Globe
Sadly, 'Melancholia' script crashes, burns - BostonHerald.com James Verniere
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Philadelphia Inquirer [Steven Rea]
'Melancholia' review: Actors great, movie isn't - SFGate Mick LaSalle from The SF Chronicle
Melancholia :: rogerebert.com ... - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times
"Melancholia"
descends on Toronto ... - Blogs - Chicago Sun-Times Rogert Ebert blog,
Lars von Trier's 'Melancholia' - Review ... - Movies - New York Times
http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/mediaPlayer/11391.html Melancholia Press Conference at Cannes, in its entirety on YouTube (38:51)
Västra Götaland County - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Richard
Wagner - Tristan and Isolde Prelude
YouTube (
Another epic flop from the man who makes outrageous claims to greatness, but remains the most pretentious filmmaker on the planet. Even early in von Trier’s career (whose name is Lars Trier, as he himself added the “von” to emulate Erich von Stroheim and Josef von Sternberg), he considered himself the natural heir to Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer, using Dreyer’s unrealized screenplay for a made-for-TV version of Euripides’ Greek tragedy MEDEA (1988), a film that begins with a dedication to Dreyer, calling his film “an homage to the master.” In more recent films, von Trier is giving thanks in the end credits to Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, in whose company he only appears dwarfed in comparison, but it doesn’t stop the swelled expectations from this director who becomes more and more irrelevant with each movie. While this is originally conceived in two parts, much like Tarantino’s KILL BILL Pt’s 1 and 2 (2003-04), this reviewer has seen enough in the first section so there will be no interest in Part 2, expected to be released in several weeks, while in Denmark it was released as one five-hour film, which will likely make the DVD copies. Every von Trier film now, whatever the subject matter, is all about the director himself, as he is such a megalomaniac that he can think of little else, as all roads lead back to him. Charlotte Gainsbourg returns as von Trier’s muse for the third film in a row going back to ANTICHRIST (2009), perfectly suiting the director’s taste for self-abnegation, the driving force of nearly every von Trier film since BREAKING THE WAVES (1996). You’d think the audience would grow sick of a director trotting out the exact same psychological state of mind in every movie, expressing a similar masochistic impulse to fall victim to obsessional impulses that only destroy humankind. For his legions of followers, apparently, they can’t get enough, yet for others, it’s gotten ridiculous and we’ve had enough.
Once more, von Trier can’t stop himself from eternally long monologues, which only grow in dreary yet descriptive detail of endless monotony, where sex is used not so much as a clinical subject matter, as shown here, but as a battering ram for human obsession. Gainsbourg as Joe is found battered and beaten, lying unconscious on the street, where she is discovered by a curious academic named Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), who nurses her back to health, and in doing so, listens to her recount a life full of meaningless sexual exploits, which she uses to drive home the point that she’s a despicably contemptible and worthless human being. While Seligman suggests there are countless examples in literature and the arts of equally contemptible human behavior, he provides a counterpoint to her theme, usually rambling on about one of his favorite personal obsessions, like fly-fishing, turning her wretched sexual exploits into a common sport, which he meticulously details in his own mind in order to help understand where she’s coming from, yet unlike fishermen, and despite her claims otherwise, Joe receives no pleasure in sex, as it only temporarily numbs the pain. Seen in a Sex Addiction treatment program, Joe refuses to acknowledge the term sex addiction, preferring to believe in the lust of her female anatomy. But lust suggests human desire, yet for Joe it’s little more than a necessary trip to the grocery store, just part of the typical routine of the day, where she has 9 or 10 sexual encounters daily. Joe’s early life is played by Stacy Martin, where the audience may cringe at how she and her teenage girlfriend B (Sophie Kennedy Clark) casually try to have sex with as many men as possible on a passenger train, where there’s obviously no feelings involved whatsoever, in fact, love is what they’re rebelling against, developing dogma-like rules for how to play the game, never repeating the same guy twice. Over time, however, B falls for a guy she wants to keep seeing, which only infuriorates Joe, who finds that overly sentimental.
Whether it is Stacy Martin or Charlotte Gainsbourg, both are tainted by emotional dysfunction, as they simply don’t feel anything or show any empathy towards others. All they think about is themselves, all that matters is thinking about themselves, where like vampires who are endlessly dead, feeding their obsession is their only way of life. It’s difficult for the audience to watch a series of continual affairs where the woman are continually naked, engage in loveless and passionless sex, shown with that same expressionless look on their face, where this has little to do with sex as we know it. While something is going on in their heads, there’s little attraction other than these men qualify as sexually active males, where one is as good as another. In some cases, we never even see their faces, as they simply become an anonymous stream of male appendages to use. There is nothing remotely curious about any of this, because both Joe and Seligman are clueless about just how uninteresting they become after awhile, yet the audience is forced to endure more, becoming more of an exercise in marathon manipulation than anything else, where it has the feel of being bullied by a director who insists upon maintaining control long after the interest is gone. While expressed in the utter detachment of a clinical exercise, the masochistic predictability of the stunted emotional growth factor becomes all too tedious after awhile, as from childhood to adulthood, Joe remains stuck in the same rut. While this is not a film to recommend to anyone, it does have one redeeming scene involving Uma Thurman who brings a zest for life into the forefront, like a force of nature, providing what’s missing in the rest of the picture. Her sequence is well-written and she astounds, as always, dominating the scene, literally overwhelming the presence of everyone else on the set, making them all seem so insignificant. Her appearance is stunning for injecting well-needed humor into the movie, but she’s only in one scene, so the rest of the film is subject to the same endless parade of self indulgence, nonchalance, guilt, and self-loathing, where one soon grows tired of all the attention paid to this gloomy nonsense, the final in his trilogy about depression, following ANTICHRIST (2009) and Melancholia (2011), where it’s depressing to think this is what qualifies as a serious effort to understand depression.
Nymphomaniac: Part One | review, synopsis ... - Time Out Dave Calhoun
Lars Von Trier’s wild, sprawling ‘Nymphomaniac’ is an orgy of the
sublime and the ridiculous. It exists in two versions of differing lengths and
explicitness. This is the first episode of a shorter, cleaner version (still,
it’s unlikely to play in
‘Nymphomaniac’ is the story – over several decades – of one woman, Joe’s self-destructive sex life, first as a young girl, then in her teens and twenties (played by dazzling newcomer Stacy Martin) and later middle-aged (Charlotte Gainsbourg). It’s framed by Joe in the present (Gainsbourg) recalling her life to a man (Stellan Skarsgård) who finds her crumpled and bloodied in an alleyway and takes her back to his place to recover. We cut from this long, dark night of Joe baring her soul in this bookish virgin’s sparse flat to flashes of her past, including her early discovery of her sexuality (‘I discovered my c*nt as a two-year-old’) and youthful tallies of sexual conquests.
Chaotic and not especially pretty, the film has more of the punkish, radical spirit of Von Trier’s ‘The Idiots’ or ‘Dogville’ than the gloss or contained drama of ‘Melancholia’ or ‘Antichrist’ – although the nominal British setting and interest in religion and a promiscuous woman nod to ‘Breaking the Waves’ too.
There’s plenty of flesh (much of it belonging to porn doubles), although the film is rarely, if ever, what most people would call erotic or pornographic. It’s neither deeply serious nor totally insincere; hovering somewhere between the two, it creates its own mesmerising power by floating above specifics of time and place, undercutting its main focus with bizarre digressions (fly-fishing, maths, religion), a ragbag of acting styles and archive footage. There’s humour too, not least when the wife (Uma Thurman) of one of Joe’s lovers turns up at Joe’s flat with her three young kids in tow. Enormous penises flash across the screen; tragedy sits next to comedy. It feels like an X-rated farce, a circus of genitalia.
‘Which way will you get the most out of my story?’ asks Joe. ‘By believing in it? Or not believing in it?’ It’s this sort of narrative playfulness that keeps you close and keeps you guessing – even if it also stops Von Trier from doing anything as conservative or reassuring as offering a clear opinion or coherent perspective via his teasing scrapbook of sexual adventure.
Angeliki Coconi's Unsung Films [Hannah McHaffie]
Lars Von Trier’s latest work proves just how simultaneously
serious and silly he can be. Nymphomaniac is
the final in his trilogy about depression; the first two films in the series
being Antichrist and Melancholia.
Split into two volumes, the film’s total running time is over four hours. In
This confusion and complexity of release is what we expect from Lars Von Trier. Known for being a trickster, Lars Von Trier’s films have always had an underlying sense of a private joke between the films and their maker. It is the arrogance and manipulative nature of his cinema that has often turned me off. I was impressed by the likes of Dancer in the Dark but also disliked its emotional manipulation. Antichrist was artistic and atmospheric but ultimately pretty ludicrous. I can never take Lars Von Trier’s cinema particularly seriously but that doesn’t stop me from admiring some of his work.
Nymphomaniac suffers from a different set of problems than the likes of Dancer in the Dark, for example. The film tells the story of Joe, a “sex addict” who hates that very description. When she is found beaten in a dingy alley, she tells her life story to the stranger who rescues her. The main bulk of the film is told in flashback, returning to Joe’s childhood and moving through her life. Her stories are occasionally interrupted as her rescuer feels the need to analyse her and compare her, and her state, to that of fish and other such boring nonsense.
Although these interruptions are acted beautifully by both Charlotte Gainsbourg and Stellan Skarsgård they are the most irritating sections of the film. Other reviewers have reacted differently but to me these scenes felt highly structured and detract from the fluidity of the film. The conclusion of the film also destroys any sentiment these encounters may have had, but perhaps that’s almost saying too much; my apologies. The performances are all of a high standard. Even Shia LaBeouf gives a good performance but sadly his accent is far too comical and remains a constant distraction when he is on screen. The best performance comes from Stacy Martin in her debut role as the younger Joe. She is a fresh face and a revelation.
When it wanted to be, the film was insightful and meaningful but for most of the four hours it is dull and ridiculous. Anything important is has to say seems to be about death and loneliness. I was thoroughly disappointed with how little exploration into sexuality there was. Sex appears nasty and clinical throughout the two volumes and it is difficult to connect with anything or anyone. Of course, this is likely to be Von Trier’s intention. Fan boys will be enthralled, I have no doubt. There was more of a narrative than some of his other work but still not enough to convince me that this was the complex work of a deep thinker or a cinematic artist.
Lars Von Trier seems to spend more time entertaining himself than anyone else. Some find this intriguing and amusing; I find it boring and tiring. Nymphomaniac could have been two hours. I don’t think enough is said or explored to justify making audience’s pay for the film twice. Nymphomaniac had potential but ultimately fails to deliver anything of true substance. Struggling with the arrogance and self-obsession found in his work, I remain unconverted to this prankster’s cinematic ventures. Anything I say against Nymphomaniac would probably be addressed by Von Trier as “being the whole point” so I find that my hands are tied – ironically, a bit like Joe’s are at several points in the film.
Nymphomaniac: Volume I | Film Review | Slant Magazine Ela Bittencourt
Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac: Volume I is a cryptic morality tale whose occasional impulse toward simplistic voyeurism is offset by its adamant hyper-narrativity and its main character's agonized quest for meaning. In the film, Charlotte Gainsbourg, along with Stacy Martin in the film's flashbacks, plays Joe, a downcast nymphomaniac who takes shelter with a solitary bachelor, Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), a coolly cerebral, and increasingly dubious Good Samartan. Bruised and battered, Joe ventures to narrate her youthful sexual adventures, from arousing play as a child and losing virginity at the age of 12 to sexual encounters with strangers.
Von Trier stages Joe's first sex rampage, on a night train, with visual bravado: As Joe and her friend, B (Sophie Kennedy Clark), bet who can score more men, a series of tense, suggestive glances and gestures builds up to a pictorial catalogue of arousal, heightened by the time compression, and spliced with text on the screen, to evoke the girls' play and wantonness. We're close in these scenes not only to Joe's actions, but also to her thoughts, directed at a single aim of asserting her sexual prowess and debonair air. Her single-mindedness is evoked again in a brief scene, in which Joe and her sexual liberation conspirators recite, "mea vulva, mea maxima vulva," a moment so comical in its depiction of an infantile sorority that we can only take it to mean that Joe is puzzled by her original, youthful naïveté, and wishes to distance herself from it. But Joe's retelling ultimately lacks self-irony, and her rebellious liberation soon becomes a shackle, as she cannot shake off her ravenous sexual appetite, even as she falls in love. Love, in fact, becomes the ultimate threat, and part one of von Trier's opus ends with Joe and her sweetheart, Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf), in tormented coitus.
Von Trier uses the dark, claustrophobic depths of the alley where Seligman finds Joe before bringing her home to evoke the murkiness of the human psyche. But what happens in Seligman's bedroom as Joe recuperates is more like a grotesque failure in communication. Joe is self-flagellating in her guilt, as she sets out to prove that she's been reprehensible, while Seligman, an avid fisherman, offers plain biological metaphors for her behavior. Von Trier's choice to frame the narrative as a chat between a punctilious materialist and a poetically inclined nymph results in endless breaks and starts, with Seligman's imagination eventually emerging as patronizing and grotesquely smutty (at one point, as Joe mentions her education, he pictures her as a stocking-clad schoolgirl masturbating at a blackboard). Perhaps these are hints that Seligman, as the alleged voice of reason and compassion, isn't to be trusted. After all, von Trier's work abounds in bigots and hypocrites, of which the eponymous town in von Trier's Dogville—a work that featured a woman whose sexual abuse bordered on martyrdom—was a prime example, and there are hints in Volume I that by exposing herself Joe, too, risks physical peril.
Dark hints aside, von Trier does a masterful job of presenting Joe's life as dominated by and, in large parts, electrified by sex. All other private details—a despised mother (Connie Nielsen) and beloved, doting father (Christian Slater); education; and laissez-faire approach to work—are pushed to the background. More successfully than Steven McQueen in Shame, von Trier manages to convey Joe's acting out as a desperate need to feel alive. She's so listless the few times that we see her on screen when she's not having sex that it's hard not to feel sympathy for her. As is customary with von Trier, even the lighter moments are tinged with hysteria, which is given full reign in a wrenching hospital scene where Joe watches nurses change her dementia-addled father's diaper.
Von Trier draws on Freudian psychoanalysis sufficiently enough to hint at deep-seated childhood trauma—or at the very least, fixation. Her helplessness and despair in the face of her father's illness couldn't be more starkly at odds with her clinical chilliness when she's confronted by a desperate wife, Mrs. H (Uma Thurman), and children of a man who has abandoned them for Joe's sake. Thurman shines in the high-voltage, somewhat operatic role of a betrayed spouse—a reminder that von Trier's art often lies in the cleft between cool, essayistic detachment, frequently conveyed via voiceover, and harrowing immediacy. If we're firmly in Bergmanian family-drama territory, recalling Scenes from a Marriage, von Tier finds his own way to raise the stakes. There's discernible tension between how little impact the family tragedy has on Joe, and yet how, slowly, at times almost undiscernibly, it propels her toward acting out and, in turn, harshly judging her own actions. But whereas female sexuality was borderline vampiric in Antichrist, this time we're in more ambiguous, contextually richer terrain, where desire is complicated not only by love, but also by a deep need for self-determination, and pride.
Cinema
Scope | Persona Non Grata: Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac Michael
Sicinski from Cinema Scope
[Note: This review contains SPOILERS.]
A few technical notes as we begin to talk about Lars von Trier’s latest film:
1) For the purposes of this discussion, I will refer to Nymphomaniac as a single work, rather than treating its two-volume release as an integral part of its construction.
2) I will refrain from adopting the graphic (pun intended: “explicit” as well as “typological”) stylization of the title, whereby the ‘o’ in Nymphomaniac is rendered with parentheses, so as to form a pseudo-vaginal glyph. Not only is this a patently silly affectation, but said affectation is, I think, a bit of a dare, designed to ensure that any writing on the film has the potential to look patently ridiculous. I choose to opt out of this particular game of Chicken.
Turning to Nymphomaniac itself, I believe this is a film that finds von Trier moving in several new directions, as well as returning to some older strands in his work that he’s abandoned for quite some time. In the course of their lengthy discussions about sexuality—with the protagonist’s own posited as a possible case study of the human animal—Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) refer a number of times to polymorphous perversity, Freud’s theory of the original unbound erotogenic potential of the infantile body. In its own way, Nymphomaniac is a study in polymorphously perverse storytelling, a film that can veer from abject tragedy to absurdity to horror and sexual excitation and back through these modes, without cheapening that which is serious or placing that which is comical under the sign of guilt.
Narratively, Nymphomaniac is organized in a manner that reflects a new frankness in von Trier’s methodology: it is, fundamentally, a film about storytelling, and has no qualms announcing itself as such. It’s not just that it combines picaresque movement with the general stasis of Scheherazade’s tales as Joe details her complex personal/sexual history to Seligman, recounting her education of the senses from “discovering her cunt” as a small child, to learning of the wonders of nature from her father (Christian Slater), and eventually wending her way towards the loss of her virginity at the hands of local rogue Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf). It’s that the almost preternatural chance recurrences of Jerôme in Joe’s life/story, along with various other points of improbable detail, brings the veracity or lack thereof of her account to the film’s narrative forefront. While Joe maintains that her story is true against Seligman’s claims that the tale as told beggars belief, she also poses the rhetorical question of whether or not her story is better and more satisfying with the coincidences intact, with Jerôme, her great love/great sexual antagonist, as the dominant through-line.
It is highly unusual for von Trier to place this kind of emphasis on the actual spinning of the yarn. But this may have to do with the fact that Nymphomaniac is a film of action, whereas many of his recent films have been about the paralysis of depression, reflected not only in their dramatic contents but also, and above all, in their cinematic style. Both Melancholia (2011) and Antichrist (2009) begin with operatic sequences in extreme slow motion, emphasizing the exquisite, agonizing beauty of stasis; both are almost entirely dominated by one enveloping emotional/philosophical idea, and both are arguably arranged around one master image that consumes everything in their path. (If lack of motility is the dominant trait of clinical depression, one could do worse in crystallizing it as a visual idea than Melancholia’s massive orb, the final triumph of pure geometry set to consume all light and form.) The same cannot be said of Nymphomaniac, which is seismographic in nature, following the tremulous subjective movements of Joe’s story—which, though it contains multitudes, is also the emanation of an individual psyche that is never less than recognizable.
If the structure of Nymphomaniac prohibits it from being a masterpiece like Dogville (2003), or even an all-consuming train wreck like Antichrist, part of why it’s generally so successful is because it functions a bit like a notepad, moving through different styles and tones without ever lapsing into stuntsmanship. This is a promiscuous film, one that intends to strip that descriptor of any pejorative scent. Like Joe, Nymphomaniac is exploratory and remains radically open, while retaining a core existential self. It can attach its diegesis to a character who may well weave in and out of objective truth; it may tip its hand into reflexivity, only to pull back and attempt to compel belief, both on the level of story and that of formal organization.
On the latter point, there is at times an unusually direct debt to Godard in evidence, particularly in unexpected moments of sexual vulgarity that suggests that von Trier may have been paying attention to latter-day queer Godardians such as Gregg Araki and Xavier Dolan; how else to explain Joe’s clinical description of Jerôme’s two-hole deflowering (three thrusts in the pussy, followed by five in the asshole) being visually emphasized onscreen with a giant “3 + 5”? (Seligman replies in astonishment, “Those are Fibonacci numbers!”) In other, more lighthearted moments, von Trier knocks our blocks off with the sort of on-the-nose music cues we’d expect from Michael Bay or Darren Aronofsky: young Joe (Stacy Martin) and her teen friend P (Mia Goth) trolling for sex on a train to the tune of “Born to Be Wild,” or Joe firebombing an ex’s car while Lars blasts “Burning Down the House.” The utter shock of this hackery (combined with instant rewinds or shock cuts, showing us that Lars is in on the joke) typically sets us up for a return to the austerity of Seligman’s parsonish abode, or a move toward one of Nymphomaniac’s more explicit moments: e.g., Joe giving a blowjob to a businessman, or getting ready to give herself to the sadist K (Jamie Bell).
Probably the most consistently harrowing moments in the film entail young Joe’s on-again/off-again relationship with Jerôme, which eventually results in a son. These domestic scenes are shot in a handheld kitchen-sink realist style, rather washed out but completely suited to the drab middle-class life on display (tacky furniture, beige walls). It’s a conscious throwback to the Dogme style: Dancer in the Dark (2000) without the musical fantasy, Breaking the Waves (1996) with no painterly rapture. More than anything, Joe’s “straight” life resembles The Idiots (1998), and when she finally flees, she experiences a somewhat similar misunderstanding as Bodil Jorgensen’s Karen in the earlier film, mistaking a rule-bound game for a brand new life. At one particularly tense moment during the K vs. Jerôme segment (Chapter 6: The Eastern and the Western Church (The Silent Duck)), von Trier even seems to be on the verge of borrowing a major plot point directly from Antichrist. In the event, he refrains, but this still speaks to his general willingness to treat Nymphomaniac as a broad formal field through which any number of distinct ideas can find space to jostle and insinuate themselves.
Granted, von Trier does give us a visual baseline in the framing device of Seligman’s spartan home, with Joe in bed. This intellectual’s hovel, with its harsh but spare light and isolated religious icons engulfed by a wide sea of surrounding plaster wall, seems to function within our image vocabulary as a sign of the Scandinavian cinema (especially Dreyer, Bergman, and Stiller). Seligman’s tendency to colonize Joe’s story by mobilizing the Western tradition like a phalanx (psychoanalysis, music theory, science, mathematics, theology) eventually becomes something of a joke (Joe: “I think that was your weakest digression so far”). But when we learn that Seligman is a virgin, von Trier is pulling us back into a zone of uncertainty, one that is not explicitly discussed within the film but that can only fall on his shoulders and that we must judge. Is he really doing the virgin/whore thing? The mind/body split? Has Seligman been set up as a kind of middle-class Immanuel Kant, the celibate humanist who stumbled upon a bloodied harlot while taking his daily constitutional?
To an extent, yes, but as we know, it’s never quite that simple with Lars. On the one hand, just as Nymphomaniac provides Joe as the film’s internal storyteller, a driving force who may be giving us the tale we need rather than “the truth,” Seligman is von Trier’s internal audience: not only is he listening to Joe’s story (indeed, he is the reason for its telling), he is a version of an ideal viewer. Nymphomaniac can send his mind off on many interpretive journeys, connecting young Joe’s luring of sex partners to fly fishing, or thinking about her dream in art-historical terms based in Erwin Panofsky’s iconological method. Seligman is a Barthesian: he takes as much pleasure in the text as Joe ever took from the flesh. On the other hand, we know that the white male liberal is a dangerous creature in Von Trier’s universe, partly because he thinks he “understands.” Like Paul Bettany’s Tom Edison in Dogville or Willem Dafoe’s “He” in Antichrist, Seligman is a bit too smug, never willing to simply listen and learn. Joe’s knowledge, as lived through her (female) body, remains something Seligman thinks he needs to interpret and explain for her. That said, he’s not all bad—at least until the film’s final moments, when Von Trier seems to cast a final and definitive vote on Joe’s behalf: that there is not, nor ever will be, a safe harbour from the patriarchy.
Nymphomaniac not only represents a new direction for Lars, but a new level of directness. It’s not just those music cues, or the fact that his beloved male/female dichotomies are so blatantly problematized here, presented as the clumsy thinking that they’ve always been, or that the script contains a number of unusually blunt statements which, while not immediately attributable to Lars himself, seem a bit too forthright to ignore (Seligman describes his family as being long-time Jewish anti-Zionists, “which is not the same as being anti-Semitic, as certain political powers try to convince us”). It’s that despite the sexual explicitness (which is the least interesting thing about Nymphomaniac) or the blend of light comedy with violence and abuse, von Trier has taken a break from his puckish provocateur persona to make a film that wants very much to let you know where its maker stands on things.
It’s a fool’s game to read artworks as expressions of their makers’ autobiography, but with a self-professed neurotic like Von Trier it is difficult to resist the temptation, particularly as even his most seemingly disingenuous manoeuvres are undertaken with complete investment. While he has frequently discussed the personal underpinnings of his films—he has spoken of his own struggles with depression as a formative influence on Antichrist and Melancholia, and has responded to those who criticize his films’ depictions of women as victims by saying that he identifies with these female characters—the constant throughout Von Trier’s career thus far has been his unwillingness to stake out a clear-cut position outside of his films’ moral universe. By offering no safe, liberal perspective from which to watch (and judge) sexism, racism, and xenophobia, Von Trier’s films were always self-indicting, and to some they were examples of the social ills they purported to indict. This willingness to risk looking like a crypto-racist, for example, was the price Von Trier felt was necessary to make a deeply flawed but compelling film like Manderlay (2005), in order to pose questions about race that could not be asked within the bounds of good taste.
By contrast, Nymphomaniac is a film that finds Von Trier working overtime to be understood, to clarify his messages and where possible to distinguish himself from the aggressive men who fill Joe’s life, especially Jerôme and K. Where his earlier films were dominated by crises of helplessness and the micro-negotiations possible within oppressive systems, Nymphomaniac is fundamentally about coming to terms with choice, overcoming shame and fully assuming one’s imperfect selfhood. Even when Seligman (Lars’ arguable stand-in) becomes a threat, it is depicted as a calculated move towards masculine vileness, a rhetorical gesture written in rape. Von Trier seems to be working to avoid looking like a creep, which is not something he’s ever felt the need to do before. Could this be a result of the shellacking he received at Cannes, when he jokingly called himself a Nazi and was declared “persona non grata” by the festival that helped put him on the map? In a way, the provocation was simply a sloppy, off-the-cuff version of the self-indicting, everybody’s-guilty Nietzschean maneuvering that has been Lars’ stock in trade. But maybe it’s hard to be the devil all the time, especially if you actually have things you want to say to the world. So in certain respects, Nymphomaniac is Von Trier’s most timid film in years. But paradoxically, it’s also his most unguarded, the most palpably human.
The House Next Door [John Semley]
J. Hoberman Sex:
the Terror and the Boredom, by J. Hoberman from the
Lowry Pressly "Nymphomaniac: Vol.
1": Fishers of Men, Meaning,
from The
Nymphomaniac and the infinite loneliness of Lars von Trier . David Ehrlich from The Dissolve
Lars
von Trier Knows Nothing About Female Sexuality, but ... Lars
von Trier Knows Nothing About Female Sexuality, but He Made Nymphomaniac
Anyway, by Michael Atkinson from The
Village Voice, April 2, 2014
Yaron Dahan "Nymphomaniac": Acts of
Profanation, from Mubi,
The Rage of Joe: Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac and the ... The Rage of Joe: Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac and the Female Scream, by Toni Bentley from Vanity Fair
Richard Brody Lars von Trier’s Joyless Sexual Tantrum, from The New Yorker, March 21, 2014
Nymphomaniac - New Republic 'Nymphomaniac' Isn't Shocking. It's a Man's Conventional, Sexist View of Female Sexuality, by Eric Sasson
8 Ways of Looking at Lars von Trier's 'Nymphomaniac ... Judy Berman from Flavorwire
Electric Sheep Magazine [Virginie Sélavy]
Boyd van Hoeij
The 'Nymphomaniac' Cheat Sheet: Everything ... - Indiewire Boyd van Hoeij
Josef Braun The Phantom Country
Shia LaBeouf in Nymphomaniac: Indolently Sexy ... - Village Vo Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice
What Separates Von Trier's Nymphomaniac from Porn? Amy Nicholson from The Village Voice, January 22, 2014, also seen here: In Nymphomaniac, von Trier Plunges Deep - Page 1 ... - Village
Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac: Vol. I, starring Shia ... Dana Stevens from Slate
Richard Jameson and Kathleen Murphy online conversation from Cinephiled, March 11, 2014
In Review Online [Carson Lund]
Lars von Trier's dizzying, tragic, hilarious sex odyssey ... Andrew O’Hehir from Salon
Steve Erickson
Review: Lars von Trier's 'Nymphomaniac' is thrilling and ... - HitF Guy Lodge from Hit Fix
Jessica Kiang The Playlist
Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
PopcornReel.com [Omar P.L. Moore]
Marc van de Klashorst International Cinephile Society
David Edelstein The Vulture
Nymphomaniac: Lars von Trier Up to His Old Tricks ... Kaleem Aftab from Filmmaking magazine, Pt’s 1 and 2
David Denby: Lars von Trier's “Nymphomaniac” - The New ... David Denby from The New Yorker, Pt’s 1 and 2
Adam Nayman The Girl Can’t Help it, from Reverse Shot, Pt’s 1 and 2
Jeremi Szaniawski from Tativille, Pt’s 1 and 2
Nymphomaniac:
Volume I / The Dissolve Noel
Nymphomaniac:
Volume II / The Dissolve Noel
Lars von Trier's two-part, four-hour Nymphomaniac: a ... Jason Shawhan from The Nashville Scene, Pt’s 1 and 2
Sean Reviews Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac Vols. I & II ... Sean Hutchinson from Criterion Cast, Pt’s 1 and 2
Next Projection (Parker Mott) Pt’s 1 and 2
Film Corner [Greg Klymkiw] Pt’s 1 and 2
Little White Lies [Sophie Monks Kaufman] Pt’s 1 and 2
Twitch [Ard Vijn] Pt’s 1 and 2, and more: (UPDATE: Indeed I went to see Part 2 the next --or technically the same-- day, and here is THAT review...)
Flavorwire [Jason Bailey] Pt’s 1 and 2
White City Cinema [Michael Smith] Pt’s 1 and 2
Horrorview.com [Black Gloves] Pt’s 1 and 2
both parts of Nymphomaniac Anne Brodie from Monsters and Critics, Pt’s 1 and 2
Nigel Andrews The Financial Times, Pt’s 1 and 2
'Nymphomaniac' Review: Lars von Trier's Latest Provocation . Philip Brown from High Def Digest, Pt’s 1 and 2
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]
'Nymphomaniac,' Lars von Trier's Icy Orgy of Sex and Self ... Marlow Stern from The Daily Beast
Nymphomaniac Volume I - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
Monsters and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]
And So it Begins... [Alex Withrow]
theartsdesk.com [Graham Fuller]
Spectrum Culture [David Harris]
Nymphomaniac - Directed by Lars von Trier • Film Reviews ... Joseph Belanger from Exclaim
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
Daily | Lars von Trier's NYMPHOMANIAC | Keyframe ... David Hudson from Fandor
Peter Debruge Variety
Scott Foundas Variety
Geoffrey Macnab The Independent
Nymphomaniac, vols i & ii, review - The Telegraph Pt.s 1 and 2, by Tim Robey
Examiner.com [Rick Marianetti]
Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]
Huffington Post [S. Brent Plate]
'Nymphomaniac: Volume I' movie review: Lars talks about sex Pt. 1, by Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post
'Nymphomaniac: Volume II' review - Washington Post Pt. 2, by Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Milan Paurich]
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
Alibi.com [Samantha Anne Carillo]
Vancouver Weekly [Indrapramit Das]
RogerEbert.com [Sheila O'Malley] Pt. 1
Nymphomaniac: Vol. II Movie Review (2014) | Roger Ebert Pt. 2, by Sheila O’Malley
Pain Abounds in Lars von Trier's 'Nymphomaniac' - The ... Pt. 1, by Manohla Dargis from The New York Times
'Nymphomaniac: Volume II,' the Rest of von Trier's Story ... Pt. 2, by A.O. Scott from The New York Times
DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
Nymphomaniac (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lost Honor Of Katharina Blum Who’s
the Terrorist in
Film
and Feminism in Germany From the Outside Moving In Marc Silberman from Jump Cut, July 1982
German
Women's Movement and Ours Renny
Harrigan from Jump Cut, July 1982
Women's
Cinema in Germany Claudia Lennsen
from Jump Cut, February 1984
Feminism
and Film Helke Sander from Jump Cut, July 1982
aka: The German Sisters
Inspired by the
cases of Gudrun Ensslin - the Baader-Meinhof terrorist and Stammheim 'suicide'
- and her journalist sister, von Trotta once again takes up questions of the
roots and potential paths of women's resistance and revolt, creating a
disturbing mosaic of personal and state histories around a sisterly
relationship of intriguingly contradictory complexity. As in The Lost Honour
of Katharina Blum, terrorism itself is an offscreen phenomenon; its
ramifications at the personal level, and its unlabelled reactionary
equivalents, marking the film's painful subject across at least a generation:
from two schoolgirls watching film of the concentration camps to a young son
almost burned alive in the '80s because of his now notorious parentage. A bold
assertion of the continuity of history from the culture most willing to deny
it, and fine, accessible political film-making.
Film Intuition Jen Johans
Two sisters raised in conservative 1950’s
Talking Pictures (UK) Howard Schumann
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, radical student groups,
frustrated with the lack of results from peaceful protests against the Vietnam
War, channeled their energies into campaigns of direct action. In the
Maragarethe von Trotta's 1981 film, Marianne and Juliane is based on the life
of Gudrun Ensslin and her sister Charlotte. Though supporting the same causes,
the sisters have a wide divergence of opinion about how to achieve their aims.
Juliane (Jutta Lampe) is a feminist reporter who believes that social change
can be achieved through political channels while her sister Marianne (Barbara
Sukowa) is a member of a terrorist group and believes that violence is
justified by the righteousness of her cause. Ms. von Trotta assumes that the
viewer has some knowledge of the historical context and does not show specific
incidents of direct action or even the source of the group's disaffection. Rather
the film is a character study of the two sisters and how Marianne's radical
activities affected the people around her.
As the film opens, Marianne has left her husband and has gone underground as an
urban terrorist. Her ex-husband Werner visits Julianne to persuade her to care
for their young son Jan telling her that he has accepted a position in
Juliane's compassion leads her to try to prevent Marianne from continuing her
unproductive rage but she is not successful. Marianne is arrested, presumably
for her part in a bombing campaign, and sent to prison where she is kept
separate and apart from the other prisoners. Although Marianne recognizes that
her sister is her last remaining contact with the outside world, she rejects
Juliane's attempt at support through her magazine and goes on a hunger strike,
protesting the group's isolation. When Marianne refuses to back down or
compromise, the result is sad but inevitable.
At the end, Juliane calls her sister an exceptional woman yet the film does not
show us much evidence of this. Although I'm inclined to believe it is true, von
Trotta depicts Marianne as rigid and doctrinaire and clearly leaves the
impression that any attempt to foment violent revolution in a consumer-driven
society is doomed to fail. In any event, what does emerge clearly, however, is
the bond of love and support between each sister, brought to life by the
magnificent performances of Jutta Lampe and Barbara Sukowa who render their
characters with psychological insight and emotional truth.
User reviews from imdb Author: Rigor from Chicago, USA
The film is a fictional reworking of the true story of the
Esslin Sisters- one of whom was a successful social democratic feminist writer
and the other a revolutionary member of the "terrorist"
Baader-Meinhof Group (also called the Red Army Faction). Three members of the
real Badder Meinhof group, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Enslin, and Jean-Carl Raspe
mysteriously "committed suicide" while in prison after other members
of the RAF allegedly participated in the kidnapping and eventual murder of a
wealthy businessman and an aborted hijacking attempt. Popular opinion in
Von Totta takes the story of these two women and creates a kind of historical
canvas (much as Orson Welles does with Hearst in Citizen Kane) to explore a
wide range of issues concerning modern political and social life. The film is
remarkably fair minded. Although, the narrative spends much more time with
Julianne the social democratic journalist it does not stack the deck towards
her. Her reformist views towards social change seems forced and at times
desperate. Nor does Von Trotta, romanticize Marianne, the revolutionary. Her
actions are often ill conceived and her confidence that history will prove her
correct seem equally forced and desperate. Amazingly, Von Trotta creates a
dialectic in this film by actually sympathizing with both women. She seems to
suggest that in the remarkable confusion and despair of the late 20th century
simply to attempt to remain engaged with a project that desires fundamental
change is an act of hope.
The film is probably best known for its impeccable acting. The two leading
performers Barbara Sukowa (Marianne) and Jutta Lempe (Julianne) are
extraordinary. There scenes together are examples of some of the finest acting
in contemporary cinema. The supporting performances in this film are also
superb. One of the remarkable things is the way the film shows that two
children from the same family could become radicalized in such different ways.
The film definitely roots the women's politicalization in their family and
national history. Why does one Sister become convinced that violent revolution
is possible and necessary, while, the other becomes convinced that a nonviolent
"war of position" is the more appropriate choice? Both women have
clearly broken from the conservative tradition of their upbringing in the home
of their Protestant Minister Father, but, what is it that has caused the
ideological differences? Von Trotta is wise enough not to answer this question
directly or didactically.
The late Canadian film critic, Jay Scott said in a review of the film:
"The methodology is Proustian: Von Trotta cuts with effortless clarity
back and forth through the sister's lives." This seems to be a remarkably
efficient way of explaining the films structure and effect. The remarkable
editing of this film by Dagmar Hirtz (whose excellent work has won him three
German film awards- Check out his equally amazing contributions to Maximillian
Schells END OF THE GAME, Jeanine Meerapfel's MALOU, and Volker Schlondorff's
VOYAGER) and the cinematography by Franz Rath (whose lensed most of Von
Trotta's films) should be studied as textbook examples of narrative film
craftsmanship. The technical aspects of the film make the time tripping
narrative technique seem natural rather than distancing.
Later in the same review, Scott says what I think is the most precise statement
ever written about the film: "Marianne and Julianne is a document that
struggles to come to terms with an impossible past in a barely feasible
present, and its director appears to realize that her film, like its heroines,
is trapped by history, which is why she avoids pretending to be definitive -
either about the sisters, or about the agonies of the nation she has presumed
to concretize in their story." This defiant stance of refusing to be
definitive about character motivations and ethical/ideological essences
connects the film to a wide variety of other masterworks that have also used contemporary
history in a similarly complex way- I am reminded particularly of Alain Resnais
(esp. Hiroshima Mon Amor and Muriel). I can't recommend this film highly enough.
Marianne and Julianne Baader-Meinhof fictionalized, by Lisa DiCaprio from Jump Cut, February 1984
Read the New York Times Review » Janet Maslin
The Duke vs. The Dust Bowl Moira Finnie from Movie Morlocks
A certain influential Mr. Turner–no–not the estimable Ted, but Frederick Jackson Turner
the American historian, once pointed out that “the forging of the unique and
rugged American identity had to occur precisely at the juncture between the
civilization of settlement and the savagery of wilderness. The dynamic of these
oppositional conditions engendered a process by which citizens were made,
citizens with the power to tame the wild and upon whom the wild had conferred
strength and individuality.” That was at the end of the 19th century, just as
the American Western frontier was closing, but the impact of that view of
Watching the distinctly different Three Faces West
(1940-Bernard Vorhaus) as part of the John Wayne Day for Summer
Under the Stars celebration on TCM, the scholarly Turner’s sometimes
controversial ideas came back to me out of the blur of my increasingly distant
undergraduate days (or is it daze?). This Republic studios movie is among the
least known of
This film–which is not a Western shoot-em-up but more of a fin
de siècle Pare Lorentz docudrama set in the late
1930s–begins with European refugees from fascism, Dr. Karl Braun and his
daughter Leni (Charles Coburn and Norwegian-American actress Sigrid
Gurie), appearing on the radio. During the broadcast the elderly orthopedist
describes their harrowing escape from post-Anchluss
Faster than you can say “Roosevelt and the New Deal”, the youthful leader (John Wayne) of a passel of beleaguered sod busters in Asheville Forks, North Dakota sends for the good doctor, who arrives with his reluctant daughter in tow just in time for a heckuva dust storm. After a whirlwind introduction to the devastating effects of erosion and drought on the overworked, parched prairie land and those trying to scratch a living out of it, the doctor insists on staying to help the desperate farmers. He must also coax his disheartened, cultured daughter to work as his nurse in this bleak wilderness. This decision occurs despite his daughter’s preoccupation with her grief for her reportedly dead fiancé in the old country, Eric, (Roland Varno) and the all-night sessions imposed on her generous father to treat everything from influenza to dust pneumonia to a dislocated limb.
As Dr. Braun (Coburn) begins to tend to the medical needs
of this impoverished group, he is appalled at their plight. Despite his own
fatigue and painful past, the doctor begins to identify with the grateful
farmers. He sees that in some ways he is far better off than they, prompting
him to comment quietly that “there must be a more tragic word than refugee” for
these people. Gradually, just as John Wayne comments that
people “stop being refugees when they leave
At moments during these hectic introductory scenes, this movie may seem like a low rent B movie echo of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the John Ford masterpiece that opened four months prior to Three Faces West. The first movie brought recent American history to the movie screen, and had every frame informed with Steinbeck’s righteous eloquence, an inspired cast, a visual poet as a director, and a reported $750,000 budget. Three Faces West, a far more obscure companion piece to the story of the American dispossessed has a bit of unpretentious grittiness lacking in the large scale 20th Century Fox film.
The two films may share some inevitable similarities, such as the cast, (look for the ubiquitous Russell Simpson as a minister with a Scottish burr and and uncredited Francis Ford as a farmer in this cast as well as The Grapes of Wrath). Yet unlike Ford’s masterful rendering of an American tragedy, which softened some of the politics of the original story, the people in this Dakota burg struggle to maintain a community against great odds, including their own self-doubt. The filmmakers of this $100,000 budgeted Republic Studios production–big money for studio boss Herbert J. Yates to dole out–managed to inject more topical themes into the storyline of the John Wayne movie than can possibly be resolved dramatically in one little movie. Still, it is an engaging reflection of the real world forces shaping movies just at that moment. With its fast-paced story, packing ideas by the carload into every frame without worrying about a dramatic payoff, Three Faces West was also less sentimental and not nearly as tragic as the better known movie. Consequently, Three Faces West lacked The Grapes of Wrath’s power. What it did have, among other things, was John Wayne, just as his physicality and acting skill began to coalesce into something approaching stardom.
Just before making this movie, the thirty three year old Wayne,
who had languished in poverty row and B movies since his first big film, The
Big Trail (1930-Raoul Walsh), had shot to critical and popular success
in Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) playing the Ringo Kid. Just after
making Three Faces West, the Duke gave one of his best early
performances as part of an ensemble for his mentor, in John Ford’s
adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s plays in The Long Voyage Home (1940).
It’s fascinating in Three Faces West to see
Gurie, a Brooklyn-born child of Norwegian parents, had been
cast by independent producer Sam Goldwyn previously in films
as an exotic beauty. Playing a Chinese maiden opposite Gary Cooper
in the unfortunate The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938) and an
Algerian girl in love with Charles Boyer’s Pepe le Moko in
The effectiveness of these scenes may owe something to a skilled crew, some of whom have only met with relatively recent acknowledgment among cinephiles. These included a talented journeyman director, Bernard Vorhaus, (a mentor for David Lean who credited him as a major influence), and the influential cinematographer John Alton, (who worked with Vorhaus nine times). The relatively large Republic budget for this movie also gave F/X man Howard Lydecker, and art director John Victor Mackay a chance to display their virtuosity. Throughout this movie, the remarkably evocative moments of potency, and is quite effective at times, weaving newsreel footage of the real Dust Bowl with recreations of pitiable bleakness on location in the Alabama Hills, in the Lone Pine, California region.
That arid landscape in this movie is unlike many of those usually associated
with American Westerns, which visually celebrate both the power, the
possibility and the emptiness of ever-changing horizons. In this movie, the
vistas suggested by the interesting camera angles, the actual newsreel footage
of people and animals struggling in the eroded farmland and the montages of
cars and trucks instead of covered wagons lumbering across the landscape
suggest that Mother Nature is not as malleable as previously believed.
Beleaguered mankind, in this instance, represented by John Wayne
and his followers, are almost undone by the power of the earth and their own
reluctance to face the truth about their situation. As
There are several scenes when the filmmakers toy with several powerful ideas
trying to encompass some of the daunting issues of their day. Their
introduction in the screenplay, (credited to veteran scenarists F. Hugh
Herbert and Doris Anderson, poet Joseph Moncure
March, Popular Front and later member of the Hollywood Ten Samuel
Ornitz), does not mean that the story will ever develop these points
to their logical, often politically radical ends in the course of the movie.
Some of the topics touched on are ecology, cooperative farming, the delicate
balance between leadership and dictatorship, xenophobia, the role of necessary
violent upheaval in social change, the appeal of a potentially fascist
leadership when a society is in desperate straits, and even Nazi budgetary
practices the German-Soviet Pact, as well as the proposed need for “socialized
medicine” in America, (how timely can you get!?). And that’s not even getting
into the love triangle, though the need to sacrifice self for the group and the
choice of duty over emotional fulfillment also crop up in this plot skein,
especially after Sigrid’s former intended magically reappears,
fresh from being brainwashed by the Nazis and a trip to
As would become increasingly clear as the history of the next few years, the political values of the right and left and of love and commitment, might not amount to much when weighed against the fate of the world. This embedded message of this movie seems to be alerting viewers to prepare for the coming upheaval, (though most individuals had endured more than their share already by this point in the 20th century).
In one of the better developed plot points,
Eventually, a representative from the Department of Agriculture (called a
“swivel-chair farmer” by
The angry, dispirited farmers begin to turn against their government, but
Just as the parallels with the Old Testament’s Exodus begin to mount up, Bardette
again tries to persuade the people to change direction and head for that
Pacific Golden Calf by the sea,
Implicitly, despite the inevitable
So far I haven’t been able to find any opinions expressed by John Wayne about some of the possible left wing implications of this movie, but given his widely known later political views, I can’t help but wonder what the story conferences on and off the set might have been like. Both Wayne and co-star Charles Coburn would go on to be key supporters identified with the conservative Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. While Coburn would be an officer of that organization and Wayne a frequent spokesman, it is possible that the implied messages about the nearing European war and communal need to support the nation in a crisis may have overridden any qualms they may have had about some aspects of this script. Both performers also probably needed the paycheck.
The American born director, Bernard Vorhaus, after honing
his skills by guiding several “quota quickies” to theaters from England in the
’30s, knew first hand what it was like to have the Nazis
on his trail. Vorhaus, who actively
helped fight fascism by his support of the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil
War, and the production of films such as this, eventually found himself
described as “prematurely anti-fascist” during the McCarthy era. Vorhaus,
who was nearly forgotten after his blacklisting and living in obscurity in
Though it is difficult to assign contributions to a script by one writer in any Hollywood production of this period, screenwriter Samuel Ornitz, a deft storyteller whose credits also included the original, better (imho) version of Fannie Hurst’s racially charged Imitation of Life (1934) and the excellent Richard Dix prison exposé movie, Hell’s Highway (1932), was also a doctrinaire communist sympathizer. He would also be among those who served time in prison as one of the Hollywood Ten following examination during the most contentious period of HUAC influence on American political life.
Only in
The Engagement of Anna Toward
the definition of a new Greek cinema, by
Peter Pappas from Jump Cut, 1975
First time filmmaker and writer, Roland Vranik, was an assistant director on Bela Tarr’s WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES, and with this absurd minimalist comedy, he won first prize at this year’s Hungarian Film Festival. The film makes its US debut at this festival and though comparisons have been made to early Jarmusch or Kevin Smith, it could just as easily be Kaurismaki. One really doesn’t know what to expect when you enter the theater to see this film. The director was present and he spoke of a problem that exists in Eastern Europe, that a gap exists between the time someone finishes high school and the time they actually get a job, that it may be in their 20’s, 30’s, or even 40’s or never, but a lot of people are sitting around with nothing to do. Rather than create a social drama, he attempted to explore the subject from a different viewpoint – complete irreverence.
A black and white ‘Scope film, which, according to the director, was used to disassociate the film as much as possible from reality, creating a strange film that defies any sense of time, though it supposedly takes place all in one day, it resembles a bad dream. Like a road movie, the film follows the unusual exploits of 4 slackers, four extraordinary bullshit artists who work for some unknown, unseen gangster collecting money from lonely apartment dwellers by supposedly cleaning chimneys, but what they’re really doing is hanging out on rooftops all day getting high, drinking, gambling away the bosses money, always coming up with their next get rich scheme, which only leads them from one disaster to the next. At one point, they think they need a holy goat, believing that a marijuana/hashish-eating goat perfectly digests the product, creating a stronger effect afterwards when you smoke the goat dung. What it really leads to is a sensational goat dream. A true comedy of errors, this is an adventure in misdirection, as these guys hilariously fuck up everything they touch. The director has a deft touch for comic pacing, and his brother apparently created the enjoyable in synch techno music on his computer.
Roland Vranik:
"It's
about the void. It's about how you can live a life without doing anything
and having no motivation...The lifestyle can be funny and entertaining for a
while, but beyond a certain point it gets scary. The film is an absurd
comedy, but it hopefully has layers that give some food for thought."
Vromen, Ariel
THE ICEMAN B 85
Beginning in the spring of 1954,
Kuklinski began prowling Hell’s Kitchen in a search of victims. He came to
—Philip Carlo, author of The Iceman, Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, 2006
While HBO already aired The Iceman Tapes: Conversations with a Killer in 1992, a documentary of two interviews a decade apart of Richard Kuklinski, a notorious mob enforcer for the Gambino crime family, alleging he killed somewhere between 100 and 250 people, there are also several books written on the subject, Philip Carlo’s The Iceman, Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, a rambling, non-investigative account that reveals as much truth as fiction, and the 1993 book upon which this film is based, Anthony Bruno's The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer. Bruno combines the stories of the notorious killer, a former altar boy who is also the seriously abused son of a brutal, alcoholic, and child-murdering (killing Richard’s older brother Florian) father in Hackensack, New Jersey, and the ATF agent Dominick Polifrone, a cop who grew up with the same mobsters in Hackensack, but posed as a mobster in a risky undercover assignment wearing a wire of Kuklinski attempting to buy cyanide. The book captures the tension of the ATF agent fearing he would be the next target, as Kuklinski’s reputation for cold-blooded efficiency intimidated even the crime families, while the film is less interested in any police involvement, preferring an exposé on the double life of Kuklinski, played by Michael Shannon, a shadowy figure who heartlessly kills with ease using a variety of methods including derringers, shotguns, knives, poison, ice picks, tire irons, baseball bats, bombs, along with his bare hands while also maintaining a normal family life as a husband and doting father of two daughters in suburban New Jersey. To them, he was actively involved in the legitimate business of currency exchanges and finance, seen as a respectable man in the community, never giving them reason to suspect otherwise, though in real life Kuklinski was an enormous hulk of a man who regularly beat his wife. Still, up until the moment of his arrest, they inexplicably remained completely in the dark about what he did for a living.
Kuklinski lies when he meets his wife Deborah (Winona Ryder) in the mid 60’s, amusingly telling her he dubs Disney films for a living when he’s really duplicating porn films, and while he’s not yet connected to the mob, he casually slices the throat of a poolroom hothead who casts dispersions on the reputation of his wife to be. While this is the first murder shown in the film, it’s more likely that he’s killed a dozen men by then, many of them simply for sport, where he was a weird way of practicing various techniques on live subjects, just to see how they work. But it’s the porn business controlled by organized crime that initially gets him involved, when mob boss Roy DeMeo (Ray Liotta) pays him a visit on a sizeable debt owed and decides to have some fun at his expense, sticking a gun in his face and the guy doesn’t even flinch. Showing cojones to a mob boss is not an insignificant thing. When DeMeo points out a random bum on the street and orders him to kill him, Kuklinski, better known by now as The Pollack, displays such a natural ease that he instantly becomes Roy’s favorite enforcer, staging robberies, collecting debts, helping traffic illegal porn for DeMeo and the Gambino family until he eventually becomes their preferred killer for hire, known for his efficiency, as his executions are ruthlessly cold and quick. DeMeo’s right hand man is interestingly played by David Schwimmer, supposedly a Jewish kid he picked up off the streets with furry eyebrows and a shaggy ponytail, where despite the hardened look he will always be overly anxious Ross Geller from the TV sitcom Friends (1994 – 2004), while DeMeo’s connection to the Gambino family is Robert Davi as Leonard Marks, whose pock-marked face has tough guy character written all over it. The side characters are all excellent, where outside of Shannon’s smoldering performance, it’s Winona Ryder, making the most of a small part, who may be the biggest surprise, reminiscent of Faye Dunaway as the pampered and overly entitled mob wife in James Gray’s The Yards (1999).
Perhaps the most chilling sequence in the film is a visit to Trenton Federal Prison where Kuklinski visits his younger brother Joey (older in reality) who raped and killed a 12-year old girl, the nearly unrecognizable Stephen Dorff from Somewhere (2010), where we gain insight into their collective child abuse, with older brother Richard always bearing the brunt of his father’s beatings. Joey crudely reminds him that they’re no different, going ballistic when he hears him try to pass himself off as a family man, “You remember when you bashed that kid’s head in with a rock?” literally screaming at him when he tries to leave, “You’re no better than me, we’re screwed up in the head!” While it is true, Kuklinski's daughters are devoted to their dad, Shannon is near brilliant as a complex individual who remains distant and aloof but capable of conveying softness at home, a subtle and nuanced work defined by physically remaining calm and still, almost inert, expressing himself with only a facial gesture, where his scenes together with Liotta are a sheer pleasure. While the initial intrigue into Kuklinski’s duplicitous life is intriguing, carefully balancing his calculating professional brutality with an almost tender home life, it’s when the mob is forced to cut him loose that things start to go astray, as without them, he’s an uncontrolled loose cannon, where his emotional stability starts to unravel as well, veering towards interior psychological horror, where the guy is surrounded by an all-enveloping paranoia, believing everyone around him to be his enemy except his family, where he goes on a one-man crusade to extinguish them all. While it’s never clear how this is supposed to protect the lives of his family, who seem ever more vulnerable and exposed, his actions only draw public attention to the mob, something they deplore.
The film starts to deteriorate with his friendship and tutorial from another hired killer, Mr. Freezy (Chris Evans), a sleazy assassin whose cover is driving around in an ice-cream truck selling popsicles to children, both of them loners, teaching him some of the most unsavory aspects of the business, such as freezing their victims and chopping them up before disposing of various body parts, often placing them in the trunks of cars and having them compacted into scrap metal before shipping them off to Japan to make new cars. Hard corps and gritty throughout, depicted with almost unwatchable graphic gore through the equally remorseless character of Freezy, the director is literally rubbing the audience’s noses in the overriding stench of killing and death. The seamy story covers some 30-years, detectable only through vintage cars, changing hair styles, and some odd choices of music, where we hear ELO’s lushly orchestrated “Livin’ Thing” ELO- Livin' Thing - YouTube (4:01) during a roller-skating outing of Kuklinski and his family and later we hear Blondie's "Heart of Glass" Blondie - Heart of Glass 1979 Video TopPop stereo widescreen (4:09) during an infamous disco scene where Kuklinski blows cyanide into a guy’s face on the dance floor, killing him instantly. It was Freezy that introduced Kuklinski to cyanide, becoming his preferred method of choice, as he could use it in public and simply walk by his victim while pretending to sneeze, spraying his face with poison, where he didn’t even have to dispose of the body afterwards. But it was also Kuklinski’s undoing, attempting to buy the hard-to-find, exotic poison from an undercover federal agent, ultimately betrayed at age 51 in 1986 by “the only man I didn't kill.” While the body count feels exaggerated and grows out of control by the end, this barely hints at the real damage caused by this man, who reportedly started by killing neighborhood cats as a youth and said he committed his first murder at 14, after which he said he felt ‘empowered.’
Note – While Shannon was the original pick, there were multiple last minute casting changes, including Chris Evans and Ray Liotta replacing James Franco (who later took a secondary role) and Benicio del Toro, while Maggie Gyllenhaal quit after announcing her second pregnancy, and was replaced by Wynona Ryder, who’s suddenly all grown up.
Until his arrest in 1986, most people believed Richard Kuklinski to be an all-American family
man. In reality this suburban
The question, "do you have any regrets?" is put to real
life contract killer Richard Kuklinski in the opening moments of selective biopic
The Iceman. Were that same question turned on director/screenwriter
Ariel Vromen (Danika), I wonder how he'd respond?
Would he lament his pedestrian translation of Anthony Bruno's book? Would he
wring his hands over the marginalized character motivations of Kuklinski's
wife, Deborah (Winona Ryder), or the lackadaisical inspection of historical
signifiers of a man devoid of empathy? Or would he stand by his convictions,
proud to have acted in the specific interest of what he holds dear?
Vromen's particular interest is in clearly, efficiently and dispassionately
presenting the sequential events of Kuklinski's time as a hit man. Emotionally
despondent even with a gun barrel kissing his cheek and capable of nonchalantly
dispatching a beggar for a job interview, Kuklinski (an impeccably cast Michael
Shannon) is drafted from a job dubbing audio for genital stew cinema into the
services of small time mob boss Roy Demeo (Ray Liotta, buried in the cosy womb
of typecasting).
As scenes of Kuklinsky the family man are shown in contrast to his mounting
body count, The Iceman plays a bit like a less sensationalized Dexter.
Trouble is, beyond a brief conversation with Kuklinsky's imprisoned brother
(Stephen Dorff), indicating an abusive father and family predilection for
callousness, Vromen doesn't bother exploring the killer's reasoning process.
The imposing Polish murderer doesn't take kindly to violence against women or
children, but that's the extent of anything resembling a moral code to temper
his poor impulse control. Half-baked implications of religious distrust come
across as tangential, amounting to little more than an underhanded admonishment
to atheists, rather than a key component to understanding Kuklinsky's
psychological or ideological makeup.
Vromen's greatest achievement is in the freedom he gives his cast to play
dress-up and dig into some persona building. Chris Evans (The Avengers)
in particular has a great time disguising his newly iconic mug and physique
beneath bushy mutton chops, an unruly mane, massive aviators and baggy
post-hippie attire.
His brief but dedicated performance is one of the best things to happen to the
film, and not just because his prominent casting bumped James Franco to little
more than a cameo, where his daft overacting does less damage.
Will you have any regrets after seeing The Iceman? As long as you don't
expect much more than a well-acted diversion out of it, probably not.
DVDTalk.com - theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
Richard Kuklinski was a real-life mob hitman whose career spanned across three decades. He killed more than 100 people before he was finally brought to justice in 1986. He was referred to as "the Iceman," not because he was so cold-blooded, but because he would freeze the bodies of his victims and keep them under wraps for extended periods of time so that their time of death would be harder to pin down.
The new movie The Iceman is based on a non-fiction book by crime writer Anthony Bruno, who profiled Kuklinski in 1993. Twenty years later, Ariel Vroman's film version takes what one assumes is a less exacting approach, dramatizing the career of the notorious killer as a combination of historical biopic and gangster hagiography.
Michael Shannon (Boardwalk
Empire, Take
Shelter) stars as Kuklinski, playing him as a lumbering sociopath who
goes from making copies of porno movies to working as an enforcer for
It's a bit of a disingenuous origin, suggesting that this impulse killing was the only murder the death dealer caused prior to meeting Demeo. That is far from the case; Kuklinski was more your garden variety serial killer before the criminal underworld gave him purpose and a paycheck. The Iceman balances on a precarious line that many gangster movies teeter across: by default, by virtue of it being his story, the bad guy becomes a kind of antihero. Kuklinski's true past as a serial killer would color him in an entirely different fashion. The decision to erase his rage-filled early history is indicative of where the movie really goes wrong. One doesn't get the sense that Vroman, who co-wrote the script with Morgan Land, really knows how to engage with such a chilly subject. Despite being described as his prime motivator, there are no warm family moments. As a father, Kuklinski is just as stand-offish and calculated as he is when on the job. There is no demonstrable dichotomy. Perhaps this is legitimate, that was how it was in real life and Kuklinski is really that strange of a fish--but that doesn't make for a very dramatic movie.
Not that there isn't otherwise quite a bit to recommend The Iceman. Michael Shannon is unsurprisingly excellent as the killer, bringing intensity and menace to the screen in a way only he knows how to achieve. There is an unnerving hardness to his eyes, and the actor is able to use that to constantly remind, through sheer presence, how frightening Kuklinski really is. As his counterweight, Winona Ryder does a lot with a small role. Her scene explaining why she eventually fell for this man is really the only time where their union makes any sense. The actress disappears in the role, reminding us of how good she can be and how it's a tragedy that she doesn't work more often.
Vroman and his team do a nice job with the period details, conveying the passage of time without overdoing it. Fashions change gradually, with hairstyles in particular evolving slowly, almost like we're watching the hair grow in time-lapse. (Oh, David Schwimmer, and your increasingly ridiculous ponytail!) Vroman doesn't rely on his soundtrack as a cheat, either. He uses pop music sparingly, but effectively, so as not to undermine The Iceman's serious subject. Despite my earlier complaints about how some of Kuklinski's more twisted personality traits are swept under the carpet, the director does show admirable restraint when it comes to the violence. He is careful not to glamorize the killings, using blood and gore sparingly and for intentional effect.
I feel like there is a nearly excellent movie here. The Iceman certainly isn't boring, it just fails to be as engaging as it could be. I keep going back to their being the one essential component missing, and that's Kuklinski himself. We either needed to dig deeper into his pathology, or Vroman should have used the reactions of the people around him to give the viewer a stronger sense of just how he functioned in the world. It's one thing to present us with an enigma, but you have to go a little bit of the way to unpack the mystery if you want your movie to have any true meaning or lasting merit.
ReelViews
[James Berardinelli]
The Playlist [Oliver Lyttelton]
Movie Shark Deblore [Debbie Lynn Elias]
The Iceman Review: Michael Shannon Will Cut You - Pajiba Amanda Mae Meyncke
The Iceman, starring Michael Shannon, reviewed. - Slate Magazine Dana Stevens
Slant Magazine [Tomas Hachard]
Sound On Sight Lane Scarberry
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
Film School Rejects [Caitlin Hughes]
Electric Sheep Magazine [Pamela Jahn]
notcoming.com | The Iceman - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Victoria Large
Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]
theartsdesk.com [Emma Simmonds]
Ruthless Reviews [Devon Pack] (Potentially Offensive)
The Reel Critic.com [Lisa Minzey]
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
The A.V. Club [Ben Kenigsberg]
Entertainment Weekly [Chris Nashawaty]
The
Hollywood Reporter [David Rooney]
Barbara
Kuklinski: Life married to the Iceman killer was no ... Adam Higginbotham from The Telegraph,
The Iceman – review Philip French from The Observer
The Star-Ledger [Stephen Whitty]
The
Iceman, Reviewed: Richard Kuklinski killed people in many ... Tricia Olszewski from The Washington City Paper
'The Iceman' review: Gangster film manages to ... - Pioneer Press Chris Hewitt
Austin Chronicle [Louis Black]
Dallas Film Now [Peter Martin]
Los Angeles Times [Betsy Sharkey]
New
York Times [Stephen Holden]
Richard Kuklinski, 70, a Killer of Many People and Many Ways, Dies ... The New York Times, March 9. 2006
Richard Kuklinski - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
True
Crime XL: The Story of Richard Kuklinski, The Iceman
The
Iceman - Richard Kuklinski (Full Version) - Park Dietz Videos ... Park Dietz
interview (
The Iceman Tapes: Conversations With a Killer - YouTube (47 minute made for TV documentary broken down into 5 parts)
The
Iceman Tapes: Conversations With a Killer Part 1 - YouTube (
The Iceman Tapes:
Conversations With a Killer Part 2 YouTube (
The Iceman Tapes:
Conversations With a Killer Part 3 YouTube (
The Iceman Tapes:
Conversations With a Killer Part 4 YouTube (
The Iceman Tapes:
Conversations With a Killer Part 5 YouTube (
The Iceman Interviews - YouTube (139:59)
Richard Kuklinski | Murderpedia, the encyclopedia of murderers Murderpedia
Profile of The Iceman - Richard Kuklinski Crime About
