Jezebel (William Wyler, 1938)

The farther back we move into William Wyler’s career the more liberal he seems with camerawork and cinematography. The absence of deep focus in Jezebel leads to dramatic focal contrasts between foreground and background, and he still has a way with framing groups of people in the same shot. However Jezebel is one of the worst costume dramas I’ve seen, Gone With the Wind lite, where every heated moment gives way under the impenetrably thick, false Southern accents, and where every black character is comic relief. Wyler’s New Orleans also lacks much to distinguish itself. The opening dolly shot through a crowded market place is an excellent example of staging and is at least competent at lathering on some regional flavor, but it’s more or less dissociated from the rest of the film. Everything else takes place in manors and banks and ballrooms, and it’s rather interchangeable with the unspecified Georgia setting of Wyler’s The Little Foxes, although that particular film is a far more accomplished work of daring theatrical asceticism. Jezebel overreaches by drawing dubious parallels between Julie (Bette Davis) and the Biblical Jezebel, and the film is unsuccessful at keeping the primary character dynamics within a larger historical context. Maybe if I were to re-watch the film with subtitles I would have liked it more and wouldn’t have zoned out so much, but as it stands, this is my second least favorite Wyler so far.

Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983)

Sans Soleil is an essay film that follows in the footsteps of F for Fake, a film made by Orson Welles about art forgery, which takes many detours and makes many references and plays with editing to make statements and connections without ever forming a complete whole. Chris Marker’s film is a more serious, wide-reaching, and conclusive travelogue that explores an endless array of philosophical and anthropological topics, but can be boiled down as an exploration of memory, and by extension history. It is about how videogames interpret reality through delirious imagery, television is a substitute for our dreams, a city is a monumental comic strip, a seemingly lifeless procession through a subway is its own symphony, and Pacman is the perfect graphic metaphor for the human condition. Just about every idiosyncrasy of Tokyo is a gateway into a cultural history that is at once made expansive and compressed. Everything can be connected or represented in a multitude of ways, and one feels that Marker’s juxtapositions and graphic parallelisms are but a few among infinite possibilities. He is interested in memory as a circular phenomenon as opposed to a linear one. I can finally see how Vertigo is a reference point for him, and his intensive analysis of it as it pertains to time and space describes the opening spirals as the perfect embodiment of a memory that is at once expanding outward and concentrated in a singular point, both moving along a fixed path and yet concentrically situated. The abstract and the specific are all swirled together in a grand symposium of humanity’s collective memory; two dogs prancing about on the beach on an overcast day cuts to a grand scale ceremony for the year of the dog, a few girls in kimonos exist to the exclusion of every possible apocalyptic catastrophe, and a transient ritual performed by a priestess, upon whose death it will dissipate forever, transpires in spite of the bombastic, Americanized city just two miles away. The film’s fascination with technology as a means of supplanting memory comes to a head in the ending, when our narrator peers into the year 4001, when perhaps nothing in history will ever be forgotten, and it is at this moment that all of history is neutralized and strung together in a fluid progression toward an arbitrarily marked, hypothetical pinnacle, and the concept of collective human experience becomes beautiful, exciting and poetic.

Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986)

I found the viewing of Oliver Stone’s Platoon a truly reprehensible experience. The first half hour or so juts nice on-location wilderness shooting up against every war movie cliché and Vietnam War movie cliché specifically. There are horrible voice-overs, profanities over-emphasized as if the film were a 1970s holdover, the soldiers defined by how loudly they argue with each other, and there’s even an obligatory scene of that one soldier who’s showing off the photograph of his girl back home. Family, race, social standing—yes Platoon thinks it has something important to say about all of it. A lot of this was starting to thankfully wear off when the raid on the village sequence made me hate the film about fifty percent more vigorously than I did beforehand. Watching amoral American soldiers hold guns to little children’s heads, attempt rape on young women and crush a man’s skull with a rifle absolutely disgusted me, and it’s not the proactive form of disgust, which might result after a provocative, thought-provoking film that sets out to call my attention to a truly abhorrent real-world issue. Rather it’s a Vietnam war film, made well after the Vietnam war film was already its own subgenre, relying on cheap exploitation to make the audience feel petrified with shock and disgust, only to result in our young protagonist calling out his fellow animalistic soldiers and then in a dramatic long shot of the burning village, the accompanying operatic music meant to make us respond emotionally as only Oscar-hungry war movies can. As soon as the mean-old scar-faced sergeant Barnes murders noble Willem Dafoe and then lies about it, a plot twist so intent on making the audience cringe and accumulate hatred for the film’s posited villain, I decided I was going to disengage myself from the film completely. I knew it wasn’t worth caring about upon hearing all the hackneyed dialogue afterward: “I saw it in his eyes!” “Death? What do y’all know about death?” “There’s the way things ought to be and then there’s the way things are,” and the worst offender, “We did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves. And the enemy…was in us.” The closing monologue, intended to conjure up metaphysical ideas and feelings about the war, is one of the worst things I have ever heard and everything else is an action movie.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring (Ki-duk Kim, 2003)

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring is my introduction to Asian film of the past decade, and it makes me hungry for more. Not a masterpiece by any means, but a lovely storybook parable enhanced by lush nature photography and near-perfect visual storytelling; contemplative close-ups of statues, animals, and written figures, and placid long-shots of the temple resting on the lake and the surrounding wildlife. The title blatantly evokes the cyclical and seasonal nature of the film, which in turn indicates its Buddhist simplicity, and simplicity enhanced by lyricism is one of my favorite modes of filmmaking.

L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962)

In the first scene of the L’Eclisse, when Vittoria (Monica Vitti) leaves her lover Ricardo, Antonioni alternates between framings that compress the space between the two and deep focus shots that maximize distance. Spatial proximity is Antonioni’s primary tool, and part of Vittoria’s existential crisis is reflected in the visual battle waged between natural forms and artificial ones, and whether the natural will dissolve into the artificial. This opening scene, then, creates ambiguous visual relationships between not only Vittoria and Ricardo, but also the couple and their environment. The remainder of the film will explore these relationships between human beings, and human beings and their environment in an increasingly modernized world.

The most initially striking element of Antonioni’s style is the ascetic approach to sound, wherein all is silent except for isolated noises manipulated to grate on the viewer by encroaching either on tranquility or sanctity. The roaring, ear-splitting sound of plane propellers puts short end to the momentary beauty of flight. A moment of silence held out of reverence for a recently departed associate at the stock market exchange is interrupted by ceaseless telephone ringing. Antonioni’s apprehension over how modern mechanics and architecture affects our daily lives seeps forth in every creaking door and blaring car horn.

In conjunction with isolated sounds is an assault on art and iconography, namely the reproductions of man and nature that would appear to equate them with objects. Photographs of Kenya, landscape paintings, wildlife wallpaper, and even a man’s crude sketches of flowers on a notepad establish this recurrent motif, and each time these reproductions appear can be argued to be an instance of grasping out at a natural world all too absent in the modern industrial ghost town of Rome. Vittoria searches the photograph of the Kenyan plains in vain for her friend’s farm, which is cut off by the restrictive framing, and the man who draws flowers in his notepad does so in miserable response to his losing 50 million lire in a stock market debacle. Vittoria is noticeably uneasy about making love in Piero's apartment, which is filled with busts and novelties that marginalize the human figure, all of which look grotesque in her eyes.

This argument that man and object are becoming interchangeable is fully communicated in two crucial lines of dialogue. The first is Vittoria’s statement that holding a man is like holding a pen or any other object, a statement that is made visually manifest when Piero (Alain Delon) finds himself, soon after Vittoria’s leaving him, among his desk pens, sitting erect in the foreground, every bit as prominent as he. The other arrives soon after Piero learns that his car, stolen the night before by a drunkard, had been driven into a lake. Expressing no sadness over the man’s death, whose mangled body he has seen draped across his wrecked automobile, he worries instead about the damage. Both the drunkard and the man tragically affected by the stock market are examples of strangers that Vittoria tries, in vain, to reach out to. Antonioni juxtaposes alongside his abstract statements about man’s collective dissipation in response to modernity more specific concerns over our inability to connect or empathize with other individuals.

L’Eclisse’s mise-en-scene is always full of blunt juxtapositions between dense, obstructive walls and pillars and the more lyrical beauty of the natural world. An early shot, which finds Vittoria in her apartment, positions her to the right of a massive wall, as she peers sadly out of a window at the trees blowing in the wind that populate the left half of the composition. As in the last shot of L’Avventura, the stone wall blocks out nature in its totality, replacing an immersive, picturesque image with a flat, imposing structure. Vittoria communicates to many people through windows and walls, and even the would-be intimate kisses she shares with Piero transpire on either side of glass doors, rendering the action an illusory mockery of the real act.

Vittoria’s and Piero’s relationship receives no closure, and their disappearance from the film may be said to be their immersion into the larger environment, that being a desolate area of the city inhabited by construction sites, streetlights, and apartment complexes. Antonioni calls attention the rigid trees pictorially transcribed onto these monumental structures, similar to how characters are often transcribed onto architectural fixtures or vice-versa. The finale of the film is one lengthy meditative montage surveying this eerie sector of the city. Axial cutting is used at two points for potent effects; the first gradually renders a portion of an apartment building abstract and lifeless, and the second begins with an extreme close-up of an old man’s face, every ridge and contour strikingly visible, and ends with his departure from the frame. The second to last shot presents a row of streetlights receding into the horizon. The one closest to the camera is positioned in such a way that the fluorescent light looms over the entire frame. The final shot reveals this to be the eclipse of the title, an eerie close-up of this artificial light that renders it as supreme light source, made all the more unsettling by the fact that I actually did mistake it for the moon upon first glance of the preceding shot.

In so many films, I tend to extract some sort of thesis the director is attempting to make and then move on after mentally applauding his skill. I see fascinatingly, but to no real provocative effect, that his visual style will tend to reflect his message. But in L’Eclisse, I was blindsided by Antonioni’s visual and auditory arguments, the formal elements of the film not merely reflections of a point already made clear in the narrative, but the entire substance of what he wishes to say. I feel that I did adopt Antonioni’s anxiety over the dehumanizing effects of modernity, and at some point it hit me that there is one moment at the beginning of the film when an electric fan caresses Vittoria’s hair, and that every subsequent shot of natural wind has it rattling metallic poles or blowing through wooden scaffolding. This observation, for whatever reason, sent a chill down my spine.

Shadows (John Cassavetes, 1959)

Shadows is my introduction to John Cassavetes, and perhaps my introduction to independent American cinema of this period. I was surprised by how ahead of its time it felt, its improvisations and overlapping conversations reminding me of Altman, while the brutal violence erupting from racial tensions and the glimpse of intellectual New York culture reminding me of Scorsese and Allen respectively. Sadly the DVD I viewed the film on was accompanied by horrible picture quality, which is hopefully remedied in the Criterion release. Even so, Cassavetes’ jumpy, freeform style is a wonder to behold, even in its awkward editing and unpolished sound. It’s a rough hodgepodge of beatnik culture and dingy Manhattan living, eruptive character relationships and existential angst, and it ends without any coherent finality, preferring instead to leave its characters waltzing forward to the beat of the saxophone solos.

Two by William Wyler: The Letter (1940) and Mrs. Miniver (1942)

My Major Filmmakers class continues with these two films by Wyler, and while they are an arbitrary pairing, I like the contrast they provide between wonderful pulpy noir story and bloated wartime propagandist Oscar favorite. Made before Wyler became a name synonymous with deep focus cinematography, The Letter, even in its conventional noir trappings, is far more complex than the simpleminded Mrs. Miniver. A film about a married woman who murders her lover in a fit of passion and can only be convicted if a letter she wrote on the night of the murder enters the hands of the prosecution, The Letter has something interesting to say about the respected British citizens of Singapore and their feelings toward their native cohabitants. The glittery lavishness of the mise-en-scene and Max Steiner’s exotic score make them feel strange and otherworldly, while Wyler appears to implicate Davis’s character, part of whose motive was her rage over her lover’s daring to marry a native islander. Mrs. Miniver, meanwhile, conforms to a very banal ‘big picture’ model, depending on Theresa Wright’s perkiness, Greer Garson’s nobility, German caricatures, and pandering speeches about how it is everyone’s duty to contribute to the war effort, made by a priest no less, to rally the Allies in that particular moment in world history. Unfortunately, it is entirely hollow, and Wyler was right to conclude that his experience in the war gave him the proper experience necessary to make a truly relevant film about the effects of the war, The Best Years of Our Lives, which far surpasses the comparatively shallow exercise of Mrs. Miniver.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972)

Though I prefer Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, the only other Fassbinder film I have seen, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant more greatly convinces me of Fassbinder’s talent as a filmmaker. It might possibly be the most visually ravishing of all films set for the most part in a single room. The bleak, somber tone achieved through many awkward conversational pauses, moments of anguish, and an absence of all but ironic music, the meticulous camera movements and frequent manipulations of the depth of focus that place the female characters in varying dramatic proximities to each other made me think it Fassbinder’s equivalent to Bergman’s Cries and Whispers of the same year. Its adeptness at telling its story about a lesbian fashion designer trying to transcend established norms and gain possession over an aspiring model seems to me more skilled than the melodramatic tale of love between an elderly widow and a young Arab. And yet The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is so predictably defeatist, Petra’s fate is locked from the outset, and as Jonathan Rosenbaum notes in his essay about the film, the enormous reproduction of Poussin’s Midas and Baccus that dominates a great quantity of the compositions serves from the beginning as a patriarchal rebuke to von Kant’s misguided attempts at liberation, at the same time the mannequins are ever-looming symbols of inhumanity and the absence of intimacy in Petra’s attempted conquest of Karin. The film is bitter to the core, reveling in Petra’s sadness and frustration only at the end to deny her even her servant Marlene, who relinquishes her docility only in the last minute when her mistress needs her most.

Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937)

If most of McCarey’s features are as powerful as Make Way for Tomorrow, then no doubt he will soon be among my favorite directors. What I find so amazing about this film is how emerging from so much sadness and neglect is the complete resurgence of premarital romance and infatuation, a period in marriage that I have been told never happens for some couples. The paradoxical development of a new love bursting forth from the most tragic of situations is achieved in large part through McCarey’s insistence that the viewer be subject to every stray moment of embarrassment or intimacy; when the former occurs without the security of the latter, as when Lucy infringes on her daughter-in-law’s bridge classes, the viewer cringes, but come the finale there is a marriage between the two that makes the couple seem so pure, innocent, and childlike in their love for one another. The film’s depiction of New York as seen through the eyes of the newly enraptured old couple has more wonder and romance than even Woody Allen’s famous Gershwin montage, and the final shot all the dragged out devastation of that which closes Truffaut’s The 400 Blows or Ozu’s Late Spring.

The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)

The Blue Angel is at first glance a playful farce, taking a rigid, repressed, and respected professor (Emil Jannings), and dooming him to fall in love with a young, flirtatious cabaret dancer (Marlene Dietrich) at a burlesque house called The Blue Angel. Its first two acts alone are a travelogue of visual and auditory wonders, one the spatially fragmented club full of spiral stairways, trapdoors and a goldmine of exotic props and trinkets, and another the complete dissipation of sound upon the closing of doors or the shutting of windows. Yet it is also tragic, and one biting shot, one of the few in which Sternberg moves the camera, beholds the professor alone in his cavernous classroom after having been reported for his engagement to Lola. Hopes for a more dramatically involving movie would appear to be dashed with what ensues: a quick proposal and happy marriage that ostensibly reeks of love-conquers-all. But the professor’s spiral from college instructor to traveling showman, while ever hilarious, eventually erupts in a brutal sequence of events that involves the motif of the tragic clown and the revelation of his wife’s philandering, all of which return the wounded man back to his classroom in a shot that mirrors the earlier emotional cliffhanger, this time with a lyrical beauty that fully employs Sternberg’s reputable talent for gorgeous low-key lighting. What a wonderful film.