the misfits (d. john houston, w. arthur miller)

Whose film is this? It feels as though there are three separate animi for the movie, each pulling in their own direction. The film opens with some classic, droll MIllerian dialogue, as Monroe’s Roslyn is introduced. Miller wrote the script for his then-wife, and much of the opening sequence deals with the pains and pleasures of being, or being married to, America’s pin-up girl. The Rino sequence is light, almost frothy, with Monroe showing off her comedy chops. When the film moves out of the city, the tone changes. It becomes a meditation on the America west, reminiscent of the plays of Shepherd as much as Miller. There’s a metaphor at the heart which feels as though it might work better in the theatre than film, as Gable, Wallach and Clift go hunting for wild mustangs to make a buck. Nevertheless, the filming on the Nevada salt flats is visceral. Here it feels like Houston’s film, a vigorous tale of men and their values, the rights and wrongs of the American way, with an implicit critique of the men’s petty greed reminiscent of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Finally, of course, this is Marilyn’s film. She is the pivot around which everything revolves, the one who questions the men’s phallocentric vision of the world, the one who gets the big emotional moment, filmed curiously in the middle distance, as though Houston felt uncomfortable with her scene disrupting his high-octane hunting sequence.

All of which makes for an awkward, angular film, which struggles to fit in its variant, misfitting parts. Nevertheless in spite of the over-simplified, sentimental finale, it acts as a warped homage to warped dreams. The dream of the American west, the dream of the American beauty, the dream of the Miller-Monroe marriage. It’s not perfect, but then no marriage is. 

through a glass darkly (w&d bergman)

Bergman’s film goes through all the gears, from the mundane to the extraordinary. A chamber piece, four characters on an idyllic Swedish island, it gives little sign of the coming storm in the opening act. A novelist father returns from time in Switzerland to visit his two children, Minus, (17) and Karin who is married to Max von Sydow’s down-to-earth Martin. There are petty family resentments, and they entertain him with a twee medieval drama about seductive death as a maiden. However, gradually deeper tensions begin to emerge, on the part of both children. Karin is sick, with an incurable illness, but she is also going mad. She hears things in a deserted room. She’s convinced god is there. She rejects her husband sexually, but in the room on her own she seems to be possessed of a sexualised psychosis. When the father leaves, this erupts in to a full-blown psychotic episode. Scratch the surface, and under the veneer of civilised society there lurk uncontrollable forces, waiting to take over your sanity. Strangely, the room where Karin goes to see her abusive god reminded me of Mariana Enriquez’s haunted houses, with rooms where the spirits hide. What seems so extraordinary here is the way Bergman constructs a completely convincing and attractive normality, only to render it asunder in the final act. Harriet Andersson gives an astonishing performance: another aspect of Bergman’s talent was his ability to push actors to completely credible extremes. There are other elements which are faultless: the sound design is brilliant, and the use of a static camera acting as witness whilst a character enters then leaves the room, (which Haneke later adopted), affords a tension-building voyeuristic element, long before surveillance cameras had become a thing/ trope.  

accattone (w&d pier paolo pasolini, w. sergio citti)

A second Pasolini film in a few weeks is a direct contrast to Theorem. Where that felt like a calculated, ordered and indeed theoretical piece of filmmaking, Accattone, made only seven years previously, has a chaotic, rambling feel, reflecting the life of the eponymous protagonist. Accattone is a pimp, and not a very successful one. He comes from a culture where it’s considered undignified to do a day’s honest work. His gang hang out drinking on the outskirts of Rome, in streets where the after effects of the war are still all-apparent. Accattone is both charismatic and unsympathetic, an existential proletarian anti-hero. Pasolini paints an unsentimental portrait of Roman low life which is perhaps stepfather to Coppola’s Godfather. Italian machismo in full flight, with women as second class citizens and a life of crime the only honorable profession. It’s a raggedly brilliant tale, part of a European cinema which, like Varda’s film, was seeking to create characters with greater psychological depth. 

chronique d’un eté (d. edgar morin, jean rouch)

At the start of the film, the filmmakers declare their objective is to document the city of Paris over the course of summer, 1960. This is clearly an unviable objective and the filmmakers make clear that they are conscious of the limits of their project. Things open with a straightforward device, as two young women stop people in the street and ask them, bluntly, if they are happy, with predictably humorous results. It’s vox pop, ahead of its time, which allows the film to engage with a variety of people from differing backgrounds, but it’s a limited strategy. Then the methodology shifts as we move into a series of interviews with seemingly random characters: a worker in a Renault factory, an Ivory Coast immigrant, Marceline, one of the young women doing the interviews. Gradually the film starts to piece these seemingly random elements together. They meet, they interact, they discuss the events of the day, including the post-imperialist wars in Algiers and the Congo. They even go on holiday, to Saint Tropez, a paradoxically essential element of the Parisian summer. Along the way there are surprises and moments of raw emotion. Some of the characters open up, others are more guarded. The joys and futilities of living in the French capital are laid bare. The film closes with a sequence where the participants are shown the film in preview, a device which allows for more surprises and a further layer of commentary on the viability of the project in itself.

What do we get out of all this as viewers? Well, on the one hand, we do indeed get an idea of what Paris was like over the course of the summer of 1960. We get to see what it looked like, and what the concerns and hopes and fears of its citizens were. We also get an investigation into the limits of a certain observational fly-on-the-wall filmmaking style, what it reveals and what it hides. Where the traps might lie. But more than all of this, we also get a sometimes marvellous study of humanity, the simplicity of humanity, its everyday charm and its everyday despair, a life clothed in the secrets that every soul carries around with them. 

la notte (w&d antonioni, w. ennio flaiano, tonino guerra)

La Notte takes L’Avventura’s elaboration of mood (what they call clima over here) and welds it to a disciplined twenty four hour structure. Moreau and Mastroianni make for an impeccably charismatic troubled couple, as the film documents their marriage on the verge of collapse. Cinema in mid-century Italy embraced existential angst with a vigour that even the French can’t claim to match. The French fascination with the rules of form meant they were always more playful than their Italian neighbours, who seem to be perpetually chewing on the hollow bones of affluence. (Perhaps it is more than coincidence that the Godard film which feels closest in tone to the likes of Antonioni, Fellini et al was shot in Italy.) In La Notte, Antonioni pushes the ennui and angst towards a kind of perfection, a perfection which is conveyed through the cinematography and lighting, where every shot is another element in the couple’s exquisite decadence. It is at once claustrophobic, deadening and brilliant, as is the case of their marriage.

Unfortunately I was teaching on the night of the screening of LÉclisse, the third in this kind-of trilogy. But seeing the first two on consecutive days, you can see how the director had no choice but to gravitate towards colour and the fractal explosion at the end of Zabriskie Point. La Notte would appear to be pushing an aesthetic as far as it can go. Even if there was one more step, the end of this journey, the one he and his characters is on, is clearly nigh. The constrained concerns of the mid twentieth century cannot be masticated for much longer, no matter how beautiful they (and their avatars, Antonioni’s perfect actors) may be. People will soon stop wearing perfect suits, their hair will be a mess, the codes of civilisation will be challenged and overthrown, to an extent. The whole of late twentieth century thought is encapsulated in the films of Antonioni, leading to Jack Nicholson going awol on the edge of the world’s great desert. 

une femme est une femme (w&d godard, w. geneviève cluny)

Back into Godard world, which will never die. Sit down in the cinema, having forgotten how the film opens. Think, Dios Mio, how destacado era ese pibe. Out there. Doing his shit like no-one else, before or after, no matter how imitated. The ebullience of the cinematic vision, ripping up the rule book like he’s one of the Lumiere brothers all over again, reinventing cinema for the masses. Yeah, sure, the whole film is balefully self-indulgent. Yeah, sure the vision of femininity is balefully masculine. Yeah, sure so the director gets to make a paean to the girl he’s crazy about. Probably knowing that it’s never going to last for ever, that all good things come to an end. Yeah sure, it’s got a soggy middle, which is basically Angela (Karina) and Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy) cosplaying being Karina and Godard. There’s a hundred reasons to dislike or at least have reservations about this film, but there’s a million reasons to love it. Which is the same sort of thing that could be said about any child, and there is something so gloriously childlike about this film, with its dippy creativity, its gauche gender wars, its naive iconoclasm that you can’t help adoring it, no matter what. Children don’t respect rules and neither does Godard, playing with sound, image, character like a kid in the biggest, best playground on earth, aka making a film. 

viridiana (w&d buñuel, w julio alejandro)

Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 6/6

Viridiana was the final film in a week of Buñuel. It marked his return to Spain as a filmmaker after years of exile in Mexico, and at the same time, it marks the start of his third incarnation as a director, the era that would produce a handful of copper bottomed classics.

It’s a remarkable film, full of complexity and what is known in Spanish as highly atrevido, a word that means bold or daring, but also implies a naughtiness, or a cheek. It has a narrative which is unafraid to twist and turn like a cobra, heading one way at one point, then changing gears. The film’s delirious closing sequence only features the protagonist, Viridiana herself, at the very end. The coda ending is like a throwaway sidewinder, which at once heralds the future of Spain and casts its past in the bin.

The story opens with the titular heroine Viridiana committed to a nunnery, seeking a life in Christ. Forced by her mother superior to visit her older but virile uncle, played by Fernando Rey, she finds herself drugged and abused by him. When it looks as though she has successfully escaped, she is brought back by a brutal strategic move on the uncle’s part, one which will wed her to life beyond the nunnery, whether she likes it or not. The film then switches tack, as Viridiana becomes a kind of Mother Theresa, welcoming the down and outs and outcasts of the local town to come and live with her on the estate. All this is then turned on its head again as her cousin, played by Francisco Rabal, comes to take over and modernise the estate.

In the course of all this, every single Buñuel trope is thrown into the mix. Perverse sexuality, the hypocrisy of religion, the marginals of society, and the overturning of the social order, depicted in a riotous scene which is like something out of Twelfth Night. Ancient European customs and class divides are represented and challenged. It’s a glorious jamboree of a movie which manages to conclude with the modern world subtly infiltrating and taking over the old world, as electricity and music flood the house and seduce, perhaps, a newly glamorous if tarnished Viridiana, her blond hair released like a dose of pure hedonism, the coming hedonism of the sixties. 

last year at marienbad (d. alain resnais, w. alain robbe-grillet)

This remains an astonishing, formally brilliant film. In spite of the archness of the narrative and setting, there’s an undercurrent of brutal humanity. Delphine Seyrig’s enigmatic posturing conceals the fact that this is a film about choices. The choices made in relationships which are pivotal, determining our fate: a relationship might be a stay in a luxury hotel or it might become a stay in prison. Like the film’s recurring motif, the game of Nic, which is always won by Seyrig’s husband, our capacity to determine our own fate is denied by the logic of a game we fail to understand. Someone else is always winning. In this sense there also appears to be a strong echo in Robbe-Grillet’s radical script of Beckett’s quiet nihilism. The characters are trapped in a Godotian conundrum, one whose logic the viewer can intuit without ever really understanding. This lends the film an interpretative ambiguity. Is the hotel heaven or the hell of a concentration camp or the decline and fall of Western Civilisation? Watching the film for the first time in twenty five years, (when Mr C and I watched it on video in his Kilburn flat, a viewing which clearly influenced the Boat People), it resembles nothing so much as Jaramuschian zombie film, a far more complex and darker narrative than that director’s faded aristo opus, Only Lovers Left Alive. Marienbad has the prophetic power of a greek tragedy, no more so than in the director/ screenwriter’s use of the statue of a man and a woman poised on the brink of danger. In a more classical screeenwriting scenario, it might have been suggested that the interpretations of the statue not be articulated (who’s holding who back, what it really means, etc). However, here the novelist’s articulation works, precisely because it is not done to elucidate or clarify, but to further confuse. Words are part of the puzzle, a puzzle the viewer is constantly failing to solve, and the watching process is far more engaging for our failure to understand than it would be if we had a clear idea of what the film was trying to say. 

blood from the sky [piotr rawicz]

Piotr Rawicz committed suicide at the age of 60. Suicide is often seen as a desperate, tragic event, but to those who survived the Holocaust, such as Levi, Borowski  and more, perhaps it felt like a blessing to be able to have dominion over the moment of your death, unlike so many others. Blood From the Sky does not deal with Rawicz’s time in the camps. Rather it follows the misadventures of his alter-ego, Boris, as he seeks to escape the Nazi net as Jews were rounded up in his native Ukraine.

Boris is atypical. He’s blond. He doesn’t look Jewish and has few problems passing himself of as a native Ukrainian. He is a descendant of aristocratic stock and has reserves of cash. As the whole of his town is rounded up, he escapes with a girlfriend. It’s made clear that Boris is not a one-woman man, something that gives his relationship with the understandably jealous Naomi even more pathos.  Together they drift around the country, getting by, constantly moving on, before Boris is finally picked up and identified as a Jew through the absence of a foreskin.

The book is split into three parts. The first takes place in Boris’ hometown, where the horrors are a blend of Artaud and Kafka, the flip side of Litttel’s The Kindly Ones. There, we are also offered an insight into the world which is in the process of being annihilated, with flashbacks to Boris’ louche youth. It’s an unromantic account. Boris spares no-one as he describes how people were happy to deceive themselves as they scrambled for the right to survive, only later finding out the worthlessness of money or influence. The second section of the book deals with his peregrinations through the country, and the last is the account of his arrest.

One wonders why this work of Holocaust literature is not better known. There must be reasons why Rawicz’s novel has not been praised in the same way as the work of Levi, remaining obscure. It may well have something to do with the unsettling, semi-cynical tone of the book. At times Blood from the Sky truly reads like a horror movie. It has moments which are grotesque, blood-curdling. The nobility the reader might hope to find in order to lend a retrospectively life-affirming slant to events is more or less absent. Instead, the author delights in subverting his anti-hero, Boris, a subversion he himself joins in with. The irony that his whole fate depends on the presence or absence of a foreskin is not lost on him, with two of the chapters being titled “The Tool and the Art of the Comparison” and “The Tool and the Thwarting of Comparison”. There’s a grittiness to Rawicz’s prose which refutes sentimentality and refuses to let the reader settle. The author appears to be fully conscious of the degree to which his experiences have damaged him, and wants the reader to sense this through his complex prose and unyielding capacity to look the horror straight in the eye.

The further it recedes into history, the more the Holocaust emerges as a sign, or a symbol, one which can be appropriated at will be storytellers (see Scorsese, Benigni etc). All to often, this leads to a dissolution of the reality of what happened. (Something Littel’s novel was clearly seeking to counteract). Rawicz’s neglected novel shakes the reader out of their comfort zone. It feels as though it is almost written in spite of itself. At one point, early in the book, Boris is told by his community leader that he has a duty to act as a witness to events, and the book honours that call to duty. However, this is a writer who also seems conscious of the absurdity of trying to write about what he has witnessed. There is a paradox in that, in the act of documenting, the storyteller inevitably reduces events, converting them from the real to signs on a piece of paper, signs which can never do justice to that which has been lived. Hence, Rawicz both accepts and reacts against the role of witness. He guards his right to cynicism in order to retain his individuality in the face of the machine which sought to annihilate it. Perhaps the choice of a suicide, exercised by so many survivors, was a similar act of paradoxical self-affirmation.