Valerie and her Week of Wonders 1970

VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS (1970)

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is the finest of subconscious cinema; a film where the inherent emotive logic is so palpable, we forgo any development of the plot in favor of diving ever-deeper. Jaromil Jires' cinematic dreamscape is a vivid depiction, and even explanation, of the human obsession throughout time for the purity of virginal, and here prepubescent, form (especially female). As Valerie enters puberty, all those around her shape-shift into monsters and vampires with insatiable desires so strong that they lose all logical faculties in their pursuit. Her authority figures, at this stage in her life, suddenly become inhuman. The desires that awaken during this transgression transform the people in the film irreversibly, and Valerie's horror at her own transformation subsides as she begins to become like them. The male figures of course, never transform back into what they were before the desire was planted. The women, in their post-menopause, continuously yearn to get it back, they associated it with life. This is what Valerie discovers during her week of wonders: the desire, and that the desire is life to those inexplicable adults all around her. In the phantasmagoria of the film, Valerie comes to terms with this for the first time, and we are led along through a fantasy/horror balanced in equal measure. When Jires realizes the film is becoming a horror, he will suddenly shift into beauty, fantasy and then back again, always painting the picture of the ever-transforming Valerie. 

Jires also finds the internal struggle and lays it bare in vivid visual detail. The desire so strong it overwhelms the individual, their lust to feel it, and their subsequent remorse at having given in. Valerie sees this as a never-ending vicious cycle of adulthood. Jires leaves his tale largely absent any peer with which Valerie could confide or find solace in, she seems surrounded only by family members who may either be her savior, or simply another deceitful desire-filled entity drawing her in to a deal with the devil. The male figures of the Polecat and Eaglet, one a lustful demon and the other her knight in shining armor (and she, his) may or may not be incestuously desiring her as it is referenced over and over that they are her father and brother respectively. Nothing is as it seems in this picture and so no character's word can be trusted, except our Valerie, who faces the horrors with a number of enchanted objects to pull her from danger when needed. The film is able to freely and readily deal with a wide array of taboo, but nonetheless lingering on the fringes of the human mind, concepts as well as untether itself to narrative obligation so that thematic exploration becomes all that is pressing. At any point when the film progresses into a corner of sorts, the thread is merely dropped (or Valerie uses one of her enchanted objects) and we're off into more interesting territory. The imagery in the film is as pleasing as it is terrifying, as uncomfortable as it is satisfying, Valerie often changing from frightened child to apple-chomping sprite from one scene to the next. It is the constantly morphing world that rings so awfully true in this film, that not one character can be trusted or believed, that at the same moment when a grandmother provides all of the hope and guidance she will ever know, that same person is overcome by their own desires, forgets qucikly about Valerie and plunges into her own fulfillment. The nightmare is a hedonistic landscape which spouts morals to gain superiority in the town square or the public court or in everyday conversation, yet lives by none of its code, only the fulfillment of a desire implanted during puberty, from which the individual will never return. Jires communicates all of this with beauty and imagery straight out of our deepest mind. The character of the polecat is at once a mythological vermin, father, man of the law (constable) and in some cases the devil himself. It is to Jires credit that he does not attempt to separate them into separate actors, as the constantly shifting character-types with the same face and wildly different demeanors serves the surreal nature of the piece. Valerie eventually seems to understand and come to join the vast parade of strange debauchery and puritan ideals by the end of it, yet maintains an element of realization. She has gotten to serve as observer just as much as player and cheated death a number of times, after all. 

Jires greatest strength is that the film never attempts a delineation into realism in any way, there is no point at which Valerie departs her plane of existence and returns, which works greatly to its immersive advantage. As we float through his imagery as Valerie floats through the waters of the fountain in the village square, there is magic to its hypnotic calling. The macabre underground mausoleums with their spider webs, dust and coffins, the fields of tall grass and warm sun and of course multiple interior words with white sheets and sheer curtains that envelope Valerie as she hides from the darkest elements. Time and time again Jires recurs instances to show their falsity, like much of Eaglet's communications coming from letters with little proof that he wrote them. We swim in such deep waters in this film fantasy that it becomes difficult to pinpoint precisely where we've gone where all is said and done, only that we've lived deeply within the dark parts of the mind for the entirety of our film's duration, that we've never experienced the dive or returned to the surface by the conclusion, we've lived in the deep. Jires wraps us in the feeling of change that every human has experienced, the change we will never recover from, the change that we will live in for our entire lives. How can we separate our internal experience of consciousness from the chemicals in our brains and bodies that influence them. It's one of the mysteries of human experience and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders dances with it as no film ever has or ever will. We see the life we know, and the life we've only known in our mind dancing together in a cinema of brilliant color and sharp imagery. 

10

A Place in the Sun 1951

A PLACE IN THE SUN (1951)

One of the more quietly brilliant pieces of work from the early 1950's, Stevens' A Place in the Sun is a genre mashup on the surface and a deep dive into the subconscious dreamscape for much of its runtime. Its romance practically falls away into film noir and procedural yet never ceases its shifting until the end. The beauty of Stevens' images is what we're left with throughout, the beauty of Taylor, of Winters, of Clift and those high contrast closeups, voyeuristic in their imperfections. Taylor at one moment gasping, "are they watching us?" and fleeing the gaze of the audience. Deeper and deeper we dive into private worlds, private thoughts, the deepest of love and desire, all feelings we can never share suddenly laid naked in front of the judgmental eyes of a jury, the press, family. A Place in the Sun is as much classic Hollywood romance as it is Freudian fever dream. It is Stevens' readiness to dive into unabashed desires and fears that form the backbone of the picture, the ambitious youth riddled with insecurity, the high anxiety of coming of age in an era when all dreams are attainable and the upward climb of the American capitalist ladder is just in reach. The peasant who finds himself in the palace with the princess, Clift anchors the entire proceeding with an earnest performance, watching him quietly unfold George Eastman is a revelation and brings much of the gravitas to a a deep internal struggle that Stevens' smartly chooses not to over-indulge in, allowing him to emote most in darkness or when his back is turned to the camera. It is this delicate balance of honesty that allows A Place in the Sun to resonate with all of its power, choosing dream logic against all else, catching us in the whirlpool, the stiflingly ordinary factory floor and tweed suits dissolving into the champagne and tuxedos of the upper class. Stevens' key use of dissolves and overlays brings artistry and beauty to otherwise traditionally-shot sequences. A Place in the Sun is a triumph of craft and care taking over in cinema to blend the screen dream beyond anything the script could possibly convey. 

Where Stevens' excels most is in precocious feelings of love erupting in a beautiful honesty, those first raw feelings, perhaps the first time truly experienced. "I love you too. It scares me" confesses Taylor "But it is a wonderful feeling". Like no other romance film A Place in the Sun paints these moments with grace. Lovers on the run from the world, always emoting their ambitions to leave all else behind and exist in a private world with the lover for eternity. Winters' hope that, as they float alone on a lake, the rest of humanity might vanish so that when they return they'll be the only two people left in the world. The perfect dichotomy of desire and crushing reality. The impulses of youth and a world that feels too big to possibly contend with. Our three leads are equally tragic figures, of course, as each are caught in the legacy of their birth, the expectations of those around them, their own desires. Like all great 50's movies about youth, they are glorified as the raw innocence of the human being, caught in a world they did not create and traveling down a dark path to contend within it. Poverty to Clift's Eastman sounds like a death sentence, the rigors of religious upbringing seem to have left him numb and uninitiated with the world around him. His yearning for survival in all senses, a desire to live and love condemn him, an evasion of responsibility, a selfish callousness and above all a deep and unsettling confusion for the truth of his own actions. As the internal human experience is suddenly translated into an external "all the facts" courtroom depiction, we see the senseless act of judgement over another's life. Just as he's been tested and re-tested by his elders to gain him access to the house on the hill he so desperately wants to enter, it is the females in his life who seem to bring unconditional love in stark contrast. A Place in the Sun could of course be unpacked as a depiction of a boy without a father, endlessly appealing to father figure types for acceptance, even the state prosecutor fills this role. A Place in the Sun is best left to the cinematic senses, the emotional highs of each punctuated burst of raw feeling, the deep dark parts of the mind displayed in full. Lust in all of its beautiful and  gruesome detail plague the film, and the expressionist imagery find a deft balance of heightened representation and verite. It is this balance of the altogether unpolished and the highly crafted that combine to the film's power. 

The film concludes in a sequence that is equally quiet in its tragedy, as with the rest of the film, a cathartic and satisfying blend of melancholy, a love that can never be. Though they were for an instant, Taylor's utterance of "Seems like we always pend the best part of our time just saying goodbye" that provides the perfect summation of one of the screen's best love stories. Tragic love trumps the happy ending here. In lieu of a triumphant conclusion, Stevens' rightly gives us feeling, in lieu of logic, Stevens' gives us passion. This is the essence of A Place in the Sun, a film that favors the beautiful moment over the sensible story or the moral road taken, it is a tale told with fervor of the pitfalls of falling into ones' emotion. Like a serene and deadly lake set in the majestic mountains, it is the coldest water. Taylor, the tragic female, to both hers and Stevens' credit is always the object of our sympathies, we are played against form of what could be construed as a temptress of femme fatale and left only with an earnest little girl so in love that she cannot see through her lover's deceptions. The constant forthright narrative always pushes through cliche and trite answers that might fill our minds, the dream and the nightmare of existence are always at play, in a dance with one another until the final fade out. If only those moments, dancing cheek to cheek could last forever, if only those feelings could remain. A Place in the Sun always finds its characters hiding in the dark, running from the truth they'd hoped would vanish. Like the best of cinema we hide in the dark theater in a dream Stevens has dreamt for us. A haunting film, A Place in the Sun won't vanish upon waking. 

9

Rope 1948

ROPE (1948)

Rousing chamber play, suspense thriller and wry comedy; Rope combines the best of Hitchcock's talents into a tense potboiler. The film barely lets up in its continuous simmer, with injections of tension via appearances by props and, of course, watching Jimmy Stewart catch on to the mystery. Each element is played for full suspense, from the film's use of real time and limited setting to the use of long-take to give the full to sense of unbroken time to Hitchcock's carefully paced proceedings. The body at the center of the screen at all times, the reemergence of the rope every now and again, even the metronome on Phillip's piano to speed our heart rate; each are carefully placed to be on screen for enough time to have maximum impact, and never overstay their welcome. The steady introduction of character and conflict that filters in for much of the first half of the film's runtime is matched then by their dramatic apex and exit, giving way to a third act that takes the tension from devilishly building in the background to full roaring boil. The script brings a decadent amount of melodrama to the mix, with each of its denizens being somehow connected, more often than not romantically (either past or present) or locked in admiration, which Hitchcock plays as degrees of the same. Our protagonist couple is never outed by the narrative for their romantic involvement, yet we see it in all they do. Hitchcock plays the murder as sex and so on, with the post-coital "leave the lights off" and even lighting up a cigarette. It is one of the director's chief achievements of his preoccupations, combining sex, murder, high society and the phases of a meal; the film plays like our own dinner party with gun play and suspense as the dessert. Rope is Hitchcock at his most playfully amusing and macabre, the amoral and deranged Brandon becoming the audience-proxy for much of the film, the only one onscreen we have the means to identify with is the mind of the sociopathic killer. Hitch slowly and without fanfare ushers in our protagonist a full half hour into the picture, which, for the film's terse 80-minute runtime is well into the second act. 

Rope seems to be the collision of the post-war question of the modern era versus the rising postmodern ethic of Nietzsche and, as the film alludes, Hitler. The film tests the 'super man' theory, that in any age there exist human beings so superior in intelligence to the average knuckle-dragging Homo Sapien that they need not be bogged down in their actions by the 'every man's moral code and rule of law. It is a question without an answer, and the film does well to ponder it, debate it and then ultimately cast it as insanity, but not without giving Brandon and his superiority complex a good time in the spotlight. It is Hitchcock's mastery at steering the ship that keeps his audience in the film's grip from start to finish, allowing his theme to ebb and flow with the tides of characters as they wash to and from the screen, as they exit from time to time, and as the ever-wandering camera takes on a life of its own. It is in this surrogate field of vision that has a mind of its own that Rope finds its most unique and powerful storytelling device, and one that has yet to see its potential fully realized in cinema. The effect of the wandering camera on the viewer causes them to become acutely aware of the staged nature of the film, causes a hyper-awareness of the fictional nature of our play and puts us directly in touch with the underlying humor. The modernists debate the postmodernists, the concrete concepts of good and evil, right and wrong give way before our eyes, yet the thinker of the modern era who bore these students sees with horror as his abstract concepts are acted out in front of him. Rope curiously espouses several other systems by which we find superiority and inferiority, most notable Hitchcock includes astrology as a means by which Mrs. Wilson divides the good characters from the bad in this world. What's so strikingly effective about the picture overall is Hitch's manner of always staying on the inside with our antagonists, while the film's protagonists are always out, or coming in for that matter. When David is killed, we are there to witness the climax of his death, his moment of hiding when Brandon and Phillip slip him inside the chest. When Rupert calls to reenter the apartment as the third act commences, we are witness to the gun Brandon hides in his pocket and expressly aware of its presence the entire sequence. It is this level of subconscious awareness, the audience being in on the joke with Brandon, that crafts the spell we are under for the duration of Rope. It is the spell of attributing abstract significance to normally insignificant objects such as the titular rope, the chest, the pocket of a suit jacket and the like. 

The passage of time as exemplified by the light outside the panoramic window of the penthouse crafts just as much expressive character as any of the players onscreen. The moment when, as we descend into the murky depths of the third act and that red sky that signaled such danger and alarm for the second act, gives way to dusk and the continuously flashing neon sign outside of the window ratchets the tension and sinister undertones beyond their already-sizzling heights. One of the film's greatest strengths is that the set itself seems to breathe the malevolence under the surface of the action. Visually its conscious camera at times ignores the characters entirely to stay and linger by David's "coffin" just to add more suspense in key moments. The film seems to effortlessly and with a wry tongue in cheek craft its most intense moments, in all of Hitchcock's canon it stands apart for being just as effective at both its humor and its dark tale of murder. It is also one his most poignantly socially aware films for it captures a moment in history after the atrocities of the second world war when the world was collectively contemplating such notions, and the act of murder by the nazis which seemed so monstrous was given a free pass for the act of mass murder by the atomic bomb when the United Staes was the culprit. This may be Hitchcock's most telling social commentary on film detailing the sense of superiority felt within the United States itself for the bombing that ended the war. Thankfully he does not overly focus on his thematic elements enough to take away from the delicious film he lays out on a dead man's final resting place. 

9

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie 1972

THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE (1972)

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie sees Bunuel at an affirmed stage of his career, playing his game with more verve than in the days of his youth. A subdued film, with a plethora of cinematic conventions eschewed, Discreet Charm paints a picture of the cues and assumptions that hold social order and propriety together, each one slightly tilted to the left. Like a western where bananas replace the guns but none of our players remark on it, Bunuel paints mustaches on the elements of society that give us privilege and status. For much of the film, the archetypal elements he turns upside down are in favor of humanization, which sets the film vastly apart from other would-be lampoons of social convention. When Bunuel refutes the image of a soldier, it is to show us a scared little boy reaching out to his mother from beyond the grave. When he refutes the idea of the preacher it is to show us a man with the human weakness for revenge even in the face of piety, rather than denigrate the cloth. Discreet Charm plays as narrative within narrative and dream within dream, Bunuel asks his own audience the question "Why are you watching this film?, seeming to muse on the oddity of everything in modern life if looked at from an outside lens; how uncomfortable our characters look when their dinner hour is placed on a stage in front of a gawking crowd. How unaware of it all, that they have been players on a screen for the entire duration of the film, each act of God and circumstance carefully plotted by Bunuel to give them a run for their money. Above all Bunuel crafts a world where his characters are at his mercy, creating false life and toying with it, devising reactions for the false personas to emote whenever fate deals them a joker. It is the mere act of living in this false reality that is simultaneously reminding us of the eccentricities and ridiculousness of our own while also reminding us of true human frailty in the face of a world they do not understand that gives the film its unique blend, its dreamlike power. Much as in a dream state, the film has no consequences, and when it uses up one narrative it simply leaves it behind for another. It keeps the loosest of continuities as it goes along, in a constant state of re-invention. 

Bunuel's refusal and any kind of visual play and outright surrealism cause a cinema of consistent disruption. Each time we are shaken out of the ordinary, we are subsequently lulled back into a state of passivity by the generally believable scene or two that follow, only to be time and again reminded of our world's complete falsity. Bunuel centers the action around the act of eating, or in more specific terms, around the meal (which may or may not in reality have much to do with eating). The ritual of the meal, its place in bourgeois culture and, of course, the bourgeois confusion and loss of self at the upset of their ritual, the existential stasis experienced at the breaking of propriety. For this culture, Bunuel finds, is built on propriety and ordinariness; anything that is to come along and break stride with the general flow of predictability causes a sort of frozen gaze or mental paralysis until a reset of the propriety can take place. Into it all, Bunuel injects an outsider, an ambassador from South America who walks amongst these bourgeoisie but is not one of them, who has learned their ways and easily navigates their circles, even pantomiming their behaviors much of the time, yet always existing on a level of more honest or authentic thought process. A critique of the European. This bit of savvy does nothing for him, of course, as the inherently ridiculous is not limited merely to cultural customs, but to the entire construct that is the society the characters are existing in. Into their limited view and confused proprieties, Bunuel injects ghosts and spirits, former members of the confused herd that look on. Do they look on with pity? Do they look on with admiration? With jealousy? No, Bunuel's dead merely look, vacantly, commanding the living to carry out final acts of vengeance. Vengeance is Bunuel's transcendent human emotion, the animal emotion that we try so mightily to stamp out of ourselves by all of our propriety, yet fail at every turn. When one is offended, one must have the satisfaction of acting out against the offender. Even shooting them down in their own home, at their own dinner party no less. The joke being that our dear colonel broke merely social convention yet was reacted toward with the most ferocious jungle-law consequences. 

With each scenario Bunuel builds his staircase to nowhere, our characters wandering a long country road among the fields. No car, no means of getting anywhere faster than they're going, senselessly dressed to impress, the women in their best heels. Bunuel paints a picture of modern life that would be depressing if it weren't so tongue-in-cheek, would be distressing if it weren't done with such humanity and humor. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie sees the surrealist toward the end of a long career approaching life with a smile at the oddity of it all. Bunuel posits that much of humanity is like his dull characters, going through life in mimicry, putting on heirs and doing their best to perform the type of character and role that will suit their desired station. Above all, he seems to show us that the roles, be they politician, priest, war hero or terrorist, are ultimately of little consequence as the dance we perform with one another goes on; the series of meals is uninterrupted no matter how hard we try to interrupt them. In the series of meals Bunuel terms ‘life’, whether or not we eat is entirely up to us, even if we have to hide under the table and eat with our bare hands. The sequence of propriety and manner will continue whether we satisfy ourselves or not, whether we get ours or not, we will have to take part in the ritual and that is a never-ending fact. In Bunuel's comedy we don't laugh, we smile and nod. 

9

Johnny Guitar 1954

JOHNNY GUITAR (1954)

Ray's 1954 western Johnny Guitar is, as much of Ray's work in other genres, a highlight of its kind. Against a backdrop of the barely-tamed west, Ray spins a tale of sexual and psychological repression, examining its behaviors first in individuals, then widening his scope to see it manifest into groups and societies. Johnny Guitar has as much to say about its contemporary American culture as it had to say about the culture of the west, showing us the infamous rugged individualism of the American frontier held back and caged in by a populace that has as much xenophobia running through its veins as it has pioneering spirit. In many ways Johnny Guitar is about the transformation of a first generation of settlers, who came to 'untamed' country and cultivated it (or in this case ranched it), only to watch as enterprise paved the way, with dynamite and rail ties, for those without the stomach for the wild west to move in to the domesticated west and set up shop. To undertake the task, to trek out into wild country and lay the groundwork meant sacrifice, and for the women of Ray's film, it meant transcending their gender roles as well. For Johnny Guitar's Freudian script, the unfulfilled gender role causes deep-seated trauma and an urge to kill anything or anyone that makes the film's villain, Emma, "feel like a woman". For everyone but Crawford's Vienna, their role in life has forced them to band together for survival, when the band becomes one thinking unit and acts more like a posse, well, as the film's titular character puts it "a posse thinks like an animal", it ceases to become a collection of thinking men and makes decisions on base instinct, usually violent decisions. The witch hunt that ensues in the film mirrors Americas own witch hunt at the time for communist sympathizers in Hollywood's McCarthy-era blacklisting. When the posse-mindset takes over, individual identities make no difference, the herd must act and the actions won't be impeded by judgement. All guilt and responsibility are alleviated; the hanging of the young outlaw, Turkey, seems as justice in the eyes of the mob. 

The film's thematic roots run deep. Crawford's Vienna chooses her path based on information gleaned from one-on-one partnerships rather than banding with the group for survival, as this threatens the group, they can think of nothing but ousting her, even murdering her and burning her saloon to the ground is barely enough. Ray does well to delve into little of the film's backstory save for a few details about their tangled romantic relationships. As the best of western drama and melodrama, we are dropped straight into the high point of the action with an opening sequence that play out for the film's entire first act. Ray's methodical direction ramps the sequence up throughout, taking the narrative stakes up with each new revelation. Men are judged by their ability to drink and shoot to garner respect, causing an instant competition for dominance at the appearance of a 'guitar man' who's new in town. Respect is earned only through consistent competition, and each character must fight for their claim time and time again, no contest being final. What stands out most in Johnny Guitar, more than all of its thematic complexity and commentary, is Ray's steady and focused direction of the film's evolution. Keeping us strictly within Vienna's saloon for the entire duration of the opening act, only to burn our only known world down at the conclusion of the second is a master stroke of storytelling that bears its fruit in the final act as the feeling of vulnerability pervades every frame, no alliance can be trusted. double-crossing and (literal) backstabbings litter the finale as the rugged west is brought to vivid life. The deep color of the image, the high-key performances and the high-key lighting draw us in in a way that is at once expressive as it is rousing. There is a dreamlike quality to the film on a purely visual level that most westerns cannot achieve, the intoxicating color of the outdoor sequences and Crawford's bright costumes shine. Beyond its symbolism and theatricality in presentation, however, is a deeply realist and humane story of the underpinnings of the human mind unraveling when in survival mode. The ties that bind break down when the mob is formed, the retaliation is swift when its reasoning is questioned. 

Above all, Ray's operatic film is purely cinematic. His visual communication is without a misstep from the opening, rife with well placed closeups to rolling shot glasses, to his use of the spinning roulette wheel to add tension. Johnny Guitar is a deeply crafted genre picture that succeeds on the merits of its drama just as easily as its themes resonate throughout. As the game for psychological dominance trades from the groupthink of the posse to the power games of individuals in the film's final act, Ray makes use of the dichotomy to highlight the role of lust, sexual and financial. The film's love story, which is never front and center serves as a fitting backdrop and the shootout that ends the final act is some of Ray's best sequencing and design. Johnny Guitar succeeds on a strong narrative and direction, even Ray's use of music to break up some of his centerpiece sequences elevates the film's craft. Johnny Guitar is not only one of the best films of Ray's career but one of the best westerns that the 1950's Hollywood studios have to offer. The film is explosive from beginning to end. 

9

Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (1929)

Dziga Vertov put forth a radical ideal at the end of the 1920's and challenged the accepted norms of an art form that had yet to be ironed out into tradition. Man with a Movie Camera paints a portrait of the visual language of cinema, in such a way that it neither requires, nor barely flirts with, verbal and written language to communicate its concepts. To call the film documentary would be too simple, and to call it narrative would be disingenuous. It is neither form as we know it today, as the two formats have crystalized into their own substructures of cinema, and yet, Vertov's film is far closer to the idea of pure cinema than most films have gotten in the subsequent ninety years. 

Vertov's film begins very simply, and for a time his audience may even believe they are being shown a storyline as we attach ourselves early to a cameraman as he speeds through the city and the countryside gathering footage. What Vertov does instead is to construct an elaborate escalation whereby the film seems to scale to a new level of complexity as the film continues. Vertov divides the film in chapters in order to give some structure and progression to the events, the technique is simple enough to cause us to feel a sense that the film is leading us somewhere. Where Vertov leads us, of course, is not in a straight line of linear time as we would expect, but into the moment, we dive deeper into an instant many times over, replaying sequences and seeing them from all angles. The footage that the camera is capturing, the camera that is capturing the footage as captured by a second camera, the editor, Vertov's wife Elizaveta Svilova, as she cuts the footage and runs it backward and forward. We see occurrences from multiple angles and in multiple speeds, we come to know time as a series of frozen instants; how strange that in the century to follow Vertov's experimentation, the availability of video and photo cameras has caused everyone on Earth to be entranced by the concept of capturing an instant. It may have been that Vertov wanted us to examine the moment and to see life as it was lived in an endless instant, but it can also be argued that life moved in that direction on its own, too preoccupied with the moment and the falsity created by images than in living a true life. Cinema, as Vertov knew, has the power to free the mind of the human being from its temporal trap, its usual rut of forward-moving time, caught in the stream of existence and grant the human mind omniscience, a power thought only to be possessed by gods. In this way, Vertov's mission to create a new cinematic language was that of trying to expand the consciousness of man, and narrative film served only to further trap the human mind into more and more levels of adherence to time and space. With Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov charts a course in cinema where we are still trying to achieve to the fullest expression. His film, here, turns from a whimsical assembly of footage from both everyday life and the filmmaking process itself into a transcendent foray into the uncharted waters of cinema in the film's final act. The use of double exposure (sometimes more than that) and flash cuts, jump cuts and the like all blend into an experience that can neither be quantified nor told. Man with a Movie Camera's final act cannot be put into words, we intuit it through visual language of Vertov's construction. What the final act trying to say exactly? It speaks of possibility, it speaks of man entangled with machine (apparently Vertov's view was that man paled in comparison to the possibilities that machines brought to life), the camera is one such machine and he is in love with it. His eye seems to become the lens, we become the best of our form, we become chiseled and sculpted and perform great feats of athleticism. Above all, Vertov, whether he likes it or not, only drives khuleshov's point home further; images hold deep meaning, but they are a subjective meaning, they mean what we believe they mean. 

Vertov's experiment is ultimately one of the greatest works in cinema, it is tantamount to any great master work of art that is ultimately about its own process. Yet, Vertov's views are much more than just a film about filmmaking, his work is about what the act of recording even means, so existential are his musings that he brings us closer, not only the experience of watching a film, but the experience of living, of existence in and of itself. The complexity in Vertov's field of view have everything to do with a notion that has overtaken the public consciousness in the 21st century. Where Vertov believed that to become more involved in the moment, the instant and to see the superiority of machine over man as a mechanism of efficiency would eventually benefit humanity, the idea has taken hold in a rabid and overblown obsession of the new century. For Man with a Movie Camera's cinematic standing, it is one of the finest films the early era produced. It is a film which reinvents itself as it expands and contracts in front of us, it moves in ways that most films could never dream of. It opens and closes itself to us, it brings us in and then shows itself to us in new combinations, it remixes its own first act into a third act that brings us closer to the existential nature of the image itself. An image, which was once in history an imagination, now made manifest in front of us by the power of the machine. Vertov was correct to worship this new device, but woe to any who give it too much credit. The power is in the poetry of its communication, not in the certainty of its mechanisms. 

10

Summer with Monika 1953

SUMMER WITH MONIKA (1953)

Summer with Monika exists in looks, the entire film could be contained to a series of closeups and reaction shots by Andersson’s Monika. It’s the far off, motionless gaze while she drags on a cigarette at the bar, searching for escape near the end of the film. It’s the chin up into the warmth of the sun on the rocky beach where she and Harry escape to, it’s their faces, pressed together as they drag on a cigarette together, deep evocations of the rain drops of youth that endure, frozen in time; a time we all live once and rarely again. The spirit of youth is captured so openly, the desperate need to escape the cage of childhood, even fearing that childhood will never end. The responsibilities of adulthood come quickly, the earn and put food on the table, raise a child, hold a relationship with your lover, and so forth. The cage grows smaller and smaller for our young lovers and they bust - as children they are still subject to the prying eyes of their elders, their judgment and their beatings, while as adults they must prove themselves and work up from their station. Monika, with her budding body and sexuality, has already drawn the attentions of the elder men, who are eager to take advantage. She flees from this as well, finally finding Harry in his genuine ‘sweetness’ as she puts it, not like the other men, and not like her father most of all. It’s these transgressions, so trite as all youth must face them, so common and yet so phenomenal in the minds of all youth who feel them. It is this dichotomy that summarizes youth, what it is to be young in the first place. The youth escape father and mother, they escape town and the rabble they grew up with, escape employment and responsibility and sail for the shore. They sail for their summer and find a dream of life as only the youth can dream it.

The nights on the boat, the days on the rocks, Monika and Harry yelling at the top of their lungs and dancing for joy. What is predictable by those who’ve lived and experienced can be so shockingly unpredictable when experienced. The young man who angrily lights fire to their boat and destroys their happiness, while already their happiness was being destroyed between the two of them as they snap at one another while dancing together. Harry’s clumsiness going hand in hand with his sweetness, Monika’s reaction that is so feminine and chemical, sexually disdaining him for his impotence at the dance party. In the ultimate emasculation for Harry it is the same man who destroyed their vessel and fought brutally with Harry who sleeps with Monika while he is away, working to secure money to raise their new baby girl. Monika, here, plays like a force of nature, so gentile does Bergman cast her and yet rough as a thunderstorm as soon as waters get choppy. Bergman sets up the cruelest lesson of youth, how we must reconcile ourselves with our society, how we must learn to know who we are and what we are and all the while we must learn who and what we are in the world and to the world. It is this lesson that the youth here take such anger toward, fleeing the world and its judgments and hardships, rather than face how the world sees them and earn their way into better standing. For the world tells Harry who it thinks he is; lazy, late in the mornings, always breaking things. The world tells the same to Monika as it sees her in much the same way, not to mention sexually loose and promiscuous. What Harry and Monika, as all young people, desire is a world of their own, far away from the eyes of anyone. In this world, they have perfection, love, acceptance and all the joyous elation that the young heart desires. When in the world of people, it falls apart. Monika is now a prize, a trophy who must consistently be won over and earned. Harry is now a clumsy boy, far from leader of the pack, low on anyone’s pecking order. He cannot keep Monika any more than he could keep his job, the sadness is that they were both entry points to adulthood, entry points that must be left behind.

But oh, what dreams had been spun when summer broke and the sun was shining. What visions were made manifest on celluloid of the dancing and the shouting, the quiet rocking of their watercraft bed, cigarettes in the hot sun and Monika’s nude body running for the water. The energy that the summer and the springtime bring, the escape and the freedom of youth, the pangs of first love, all are wrapped up in the visions of these moments as are crafted to perfection by Bergman and by Fischer’s lens. Each new sequence is a revelation, the hectic home life for Monika, the children running in the courtyard, the adventure to steal a pot roast. Monika becomes more and more animalistic as her pregnancy creates deeper urges than ever before, as she runs clutching the roast and gobbling at it as she does. The intensity of the two youths’ desires and impulses, the severity with which they feels their withdrawals and their indulgences, all add up to a picture-perfect portrait of teenage energy. What Bergman captures best is their hope, each believing that they have found their salvation in one another, each ready to give up everything in pursuit of what the other makes them feel, and the crushing disappointment, the existential and essential defeat they experience at the dissolution of their romance, all are some of Bergman’s most powerful cinema of his entire career. Summer with Monika stirs in a way that cinema rarely can, it hits deep at the memories we hold in heart, it activates a time when all emotion is heightened, all acts are in explosions of exuberance and desperation. It is a film that knows what it is to be young.

8

Sawdust and Tinsel (1953)

SAWDUST AND TINSEL (1953)

Sawdust and Tinsel brings us the spectacle and the crowd, the private embarrassments played as fodder for public entertainment, and of course the vengeance that can be wrought on a lover with the mildest of efforts. Bergman opens his tale with an illustrative example; a moment of open liberation, of physical, not sexual, exhibition that becomes ensnared in life’s complexities only to result in sorrow and humiliation. The story plays like a Felliniesque nightmare with all the trappings of an expressionist dream yet we are meant to read this as a tale of reality. The rest of the film plays as such. The performers, who at their heart yearn to be desired, to parade before the crowd, begin to see cracks and splinters in their facade. The deeply hidden layer of truth is underneath, like the peeling paper on a billboard, of the clown and his fragile ego, the ringmaster and his human past. Our circus troupe, wanting, above all, to outrun its own existence, to live as the avatars of their chosen archetype and never live as the human being underneath ever again. In those opening moments, the men in uniform laugh mockingly as the clown sheds his own uniform, underneath we find a man hopelessly destroyed as he attempts to maintain dignity. For all in this troupe live in a state of permanent temporary occupation, which is to say that their life in the circus suffices for today but they don’t identify with it enough to see it in their tomorrow. Each of our players ready to hang it up and find their place in a world they sought to escape. The life of the performer, pursued to get away from the crushing normalcy of it all, now suddenly tastes sour by comparison.

Our characters question their existence, their profession and their partners in the craft, love and life. Andersson, as beautiful as ever, moves in strides of mesmerizing posture and affectation, the low class on a spectrum of walking/talking spectacles that sell tickets to their antics, unaware of what she is and wondering what she could be in the eyes of respectability. As Bjornstrand’s theater director puts it, “We make art, you make artifice”. The perception that their kind enjoys a lowly existence while constant comparisons are drawn to the imagined gold treatment of circus performers in America, who need only parade into town and announce their presence before they are treated as great artists in the midst of the people. The imagination is the world outside their known universe, the imagined life we could lead if only we’d played our hand differently, or been dealt a different one altogether. Our ring master wondering about life as a sedentary family man, would his life suddenly become fulfilling? He pretends not to notice as a theater performer hits on his wife, he breaks character during the evening’s big top performance to attempt to exact revenge on the man who slept with her. The performances can no longer hold the human being underneath, can no longer suffice for a life separated from the possibilities of all lives we could potentially lead. Adherence to a craft can sometimes feel like being chained to a role we did not choose; even our clown cannot bear it after a while. Searching for the salvation, in this case monetary salvation through a necklace, in order to leave the circus and gain her complete independence, Andersson’s character violates her role as wife (or ‘breaks character’ if you like). Bergman has understood modern life in one fell swoop. All are performing, all are working, but the moment they might get their chance to stop and move on they will take it, because the escape is all they ever wanted in the first place. The dark truth of a life in role-playing, pretending, while constantly and secretively yearning and searching for your escape is where the film finds its power.

Sawdust and Tinsel sees Bergman dealing with the flesh and blood underneath the archetype, and the embodiment of archetype. When you take on your role in life, you are no longer the person who entered the role, you are the role. You are the clown, and you are now a part of a legacy of all clowns that have existed through time. When you are the clown your life does not matter, your history and your cares are not the cares of the clown and therefore are not your cares while you embody the clown. The need for this role is pervasive in the human mind, and the need to shed it when the role becomes a burden is also great. Bergman envisions a life of thin loyalties that would buckle and break at the slightest weight upon them. Devotion to a lover, devotion to a craft and our fear that we might lose what we devote ourselves to vanishes at a moment’ s friction in the relationship. Our performers are as vessels waiting to be filled with the air of desire. How easily we can feel small in the eyes of another and beg to be reinstated, how instantly we can snap back into our self that is alone, that survives and rebuff them. In the end the clown, now after hours and out of character, tells us of desiring to shrink smaller and smaller until he can crawl back into the womb and sleep, soundly and peacefully. In Sawdust and Tinsel, all life is but a role in a harsh and cruel reality. We live out each day and in our deepest imagination, dream of leaving it. And in our dreams we take many forms but all are the same in fact; to leave our role to crawl back to the memory of the life before we lived.

8

Stalker (1979)

STALKER (1979)

As the rumbling force of a freight train, or perhaps just the future in its relentless drive onward, begins to make its presence known in the small home of all the would-be small inhabitants of the world, their relative tranquility is disturbed, their sleep disrupted and their mind’s nocturnal journey in dreaming is snuffed by their waking eyes. We feel it in the displacement of the objects that seemed stationary if not for being acted on by the force, the glass of water that might sit unchanged for eons on its own begins to rattle and quake, the chair quakes beneath it and suddenly we see it sliding inward toward the center of the chair. Tarkovsky finds small moments in Stalker and elaborates them to their true spiritual and cosmic significance. The smallest act in our eyes can be as a super nova in the great chain of happenings that make up existence, but only if the eyes that witness it are tuned toward the divine. With Stalker, each of our characters in this sparse play provide a differing viewpoint for how to interpret the existence we live, the occurrences we witness and the life of the world around us. We’re offered the three men in the group that will traverse The Zone; The Stalker, The Writer and The Professor. Our lead, The Stalker, who ushers the other two and we the audience through the world of The Zone is concerned primarily with what this mysterious place is, as is our Writer character, though he is decidedly of the alternative viewpoint on its significance. The Professor, caring little about what the The Zone is, cares only for what it means; what its existence will mean for the world and the people in it. Our Stalker explains the rules of the alternate dimension we enter and, as with the parameters of all fiction, we take it at face value, but not for long. Minute by mundane minute we begin to question, we begin to doubt, we begin to lose our faith and our belief is shaken. There seems to be nothing magical or special in this place. As the film stretches out before us, we begin to wonder if the Writer speaks the truth; perhaps life is a dull nothing, no telepathy, no ghosts and no flying saucers.

Stalker builds, like a time bomb, to its final conclusions. Our characters enter with desire, The Stalker to escape the mundane world and enter, once again, his place of hope, where life has meaning, his place of purpose. For The Stalker, it is The Zone, a place he knew nothing of until his mentor showed him the light. It was with this light that he was saved; saved from the terrors of a mundane existence, living in the fog of confusion, never knowing the truth. In short, he would have been like his guests. The Writer, a nihilist, unable to believe, unable to see anything but the liquor in his bottle, the words (his own words) on his page, the thoughts in his own mind. This man is limited in his ability to see, and selfish is the lens through which he sees at all. The Professor, who is also searching, he is a skeptic who has the capacity to believe anything that is proven to him beyond a shadow of a doubt. Once proven, The Professor wonders what the practical application of his findings are, of course. The Stalker, having never known anything of The Zone by his own volition or findings, merely believing in what he was taught by his mentor, finds reverence for all he sees while inside this alternate reality. The entire place takes on an intense purpose in his mind; The Zone has wants, needs and desires that it would also like to fulfill. The Zone sees all and the it knows all; it knows our inner self even better than we do; it sees our deepest subconscious desires, the things we should be careful to wish for, and it gives them to us. What sets Tarkovsky’s Zone apart from other cautionary tales of our desires is this; The Zone does not give us our wishes, it gives us the things we wish we did not desire, it finds the deepest and darkest of our wants and shows them to us in all of their horror (or so we are told by The Stalker). We are also told by The Stalker that our group is avoiding certain doom at every turn, being spared by The Zone and narrowly escaping disaster. By the time our troupe finds their way to The Room, our Writer can no longer stomach the dogma. Their time in The Zone has neither been harrowing nor dangerous, it has been dull and pointless; their journey has brought them to the place they desired and yet our Writer has his mind no longer on his desires, but on the farce of their trek and on The Stalker most of all. The Writer desires that the Stalker would blaspheme by entering the room, angry by the very persistence of The Stalker’s beliefs in the face of the seemingly obvious; The Zone is ridiculous, pointless, and above all, most likely bullshit. The Professor, on the other hand, clearly realizes that if he crosses the threshold, he will learn one way or another, he will find certainty. If he is successful and The Room’s power is real, there will be nothing to stop the masses of Earth from pouring into it to gain ultimate power, it will be chaos. However, if it is not true, then he will seem a gullible fool to the colleagues he returns to. The Professor deems the only logical solution to destroy The Room altogether so as to never know the answer.

By Tarkovsky’s conclusion, our Stalker is in dejected disgust with the world around him, how these passionless men defile the sacred ground he has taken them to walk on, how their lack of belief spits in the face of his entire existence. The Zone, in the mind of The Stalker, is impassable, unknowable; just when we think we have grasped it, it changes right before our eyes. Just as all who devote their lives to something, it is barely understood by the master, merely grasped at for eternity, unattainable and requiring the deep study and sacrifice that the master has given to it. How jealous they are that the novice seems to traverse it just as well; that there seems to be no difference in their outcomes. Take your choice of the metaphors here, for Tarkovsky can see this as the relationship between the person and their God, between the artist and their craft, between lovers and friends, between life and the living. The Stalker’s wife provides our closure, the beacon of light that guides many of us through existence, to cherish the happiness and the suffering, to know one in order to know the other, to live with intensity in both areas to further illustrate the good times and bad. The Stalker has practically become an addict for the way that The Zone makes him feel, the sense of purpose it provides (and in some ways it may even emit some form of radiation that his body is in withdrawal from). Above all, we hear rumors throughout the film that his daughter is damaged from birth as a result of The Zone’s toxic influence. In Tarkovsky’s final statement in the film we are left to wonder, is she damaged, or has The Zone granted her a gift for telekinesis? Or is it just another train passing by, rattling the glasses? Is there some magic in this world we can believe in? Or is it really ‘unutterably boring’ as our Writer suggests? Is our conscious mind and all of its logical hopes, dreams and desires really our selves? Or is it the subconscious with all of its irrational needs and selfish aims? Tarkovsky has devised the perfect canvas for these questions and then some, a hypnotic cinematic and spiritual journey that signifies nothing, or perhaps, signifies everything.

10

The Chase (1946)

THE CHASE (1946)

Arthur Ripley keeps us suspended in limbo during The Chase, his Dada journey into the space between here and there. The Chase is a surrealist feat, it’s noir cinema’s answer to Schroedinger’s Cat. Throughout the film, Ripley keeps us frozen in superposition; in moments that occupy two states simultaneously without becoming either of them by virtue of our suspension. Extrapolate that out for a moment and you find the very nature of “suspense” in art, or as it pertains to filmmaking; a unique place of adrenaline-fueled anxiousness whereby we are neither in a place of calm safety nor have we arrived at the danger we feel is lurking just out of sight. We are, in a word, frozen, much like the cat which is neither living nor dead and is somehow both living and dead. Ripley is so good at creating this dual space that we begin to realize his deconstruction of suspense through a chase sequence in and of itself. A chase, in cinema, is a state of non-being whereby the hero lingers between the states of escaping and being caught simultaneously. The longer our suspense lasts, the longer the chase goes on. Ripley’s film contains many such moments including a kind of exquisite corpse of collaborative chauffeuring. While the passenger controls when the car will accelerate and brake, as well as its speed, the driver is left to control the vehicle’s direction, never knowing how fast nor the duration of the journey. In fact, Ripley highlights the nature of a chase as a state in which we are only in control of half of it at any given time; how long we flee or how long we pursue.

The film begins to swirl around symbols of meaningless stimuli to which we assign meaning. When the telephone rings its meaning is entirely decided by what happens after we make the choice to pick it up. Until that point of answering, the ring is both meaningless for its lack of context and meaningful for its infinite possibility. It could be anyone, it could mean anything, and as we see in one of the film’s final scenes our heroin sits idly without leaving the state of suspension, which has at this point become a place of comfort. “Why don’t you answer it?” her domineering husband asks. Because to answer it would be to assign it meaning, and to assign it meaning results in a moment of hope potentially becoming hopeless. Our hero wakes from his dream comprising act two and ties a deep significance (one which he is not sure of its meaning) to a specific time on a clock face, though time of day and numbers on a clock face are inherently meaningless until we attach and greater significance to them and contextualize them into a concrete agreement between two persons. Ripley simultaneously rectifies the convergence between avant garde and kitsch by making a film that is, all times, both and neither. In tone and tropes the film is far too tied to genre mainstays and narrative arcs to be an abstraction and yet is filled with thematic depth, expressionist dream-logic and dense frames of surrealist mise en scene to the point that it fully transcends the B movie that it is. Meaning is constantly attached to objects be they uniforms, medals, a wallet, a rare bottle of brandy, and usually it is torn down or destroyed (like the brandy) before the scene is through. Where Ripley chooses to depart from his narrative to indulge an alternative dreamscape narrative, is simultaneously when the film diverts to be taken more seriously. Suddenly emotions and connections are real and meaningful rather than aloof and distant; there are consequences and loss and death rather than the film’s ‘real world’ logic of the preceding act in which hungry people magically find wallets, or jobs as chauffeurs.

What the film does best in its third act is to introduce a series of scenarios whereby the hero and heroin’s plans are about to be discovered at near-minute long intervals. Finding a brochure about Cuba, our villain being acquainted with the very same doctor who is drinking with our hero in the very same bar, or the man in the white hat who overhears the lovers’ travel plans at the boat. Each present a moment where the narrative is given latitude to collapse and yet our suspension between states of missing and found continues to unfold. Our suspension between narratives is wisely not done away with even by the end. Yes, we know the chase is over, our complete uncertainty was finally done away with when our antagonists explode in their car; but do we know that a man with a monkey knife does not await them in their Havana bar, under orders to kill with no one alive to call him off? We will never know. Ripley leaves us with one final contradiction: as our hero cites “forever” we fade to our end credits, effectively leaving the characters in limbo “forever” as all films do when they conclude, never to be visited again. The chase examines thesis and antithesis and cinema in equal measure; it finds a place where the state of being as well as the state of non-being overlap to form an infinite present. This infinite future as well as the infinite present, of course, are killed relentlessly as time passes and we find ourselves with a concrete definition of the past. The chase attempts to shatter that definition and display the vastness of the moment.

9

The Irishman (2019)

THE IRISHMAN (2019)

With The Irishman, Scorsese dips a brush into the American mob movie and splatter paints a piece that is at once as classical as it is abstract. Here we have a summation, a deconstruction and an evolution. All of the ingredients for narrative are there, yet we’re never in for the beginning or the end of most any sequence; we enter mid-action, linger for the punch and then we’re transported away before the coda. To Scorsese’s credit, this is energizing rather than fatiguing, and makes a film that floats just above the world of our characters, our audience perspective never allowed to cross into the scene enough to feel a part of it. To the film’s further credit, this plays as mirroring the central character’s experience as Deniro’s Frank Sheeran is not only an outsider to the worlds displayed in the film (earning his way into the insider position throughout the narrative), but is also a man trying to make his way through what he distinctly refers to as ‘trying to survive’. Sheeran is describing his experience at war, near-constant fear, he describes that any man who claims to have been unafraid is likely lying to themselves, but when the moment of combat arrives it is time to survive and that’s the long and short of it. Scorsese gives us a film from the perspective of survival mode, a film that moves so fast we can only react and rely on our loyalties to discern right and wrong; ties that bind as our only logic to make decisions by and know how to construct our own private narrative of what happened. Sheeran is not a man who attempts to construct some great narrative or self-image about himself, and neither so does the film. The best he does is cite loyalties as his reasoning behind his decisions (“for my family”, “for my country”, etc.), yet the film never truly demonstrates the truth, rather the hubris of powerful men shape the destinies of all those around them. Scorsese’s decision to de-age his actors and allow old men to play younger men, rather than the reverse, is essential. Rather than see traces of their younger glory days on the faces of old men, we see traces of their eventual downfall in old age on the faces of younger men; rather than seeing who they were, Scorsese never lets us forget who they will become. Frank’s tragic future is always in his eyes no matter what age the character is onscreen.

It’s the kind of pure cinema Scorsese’s been evolving into since The Departed, a kind of finger on the trigger narrative that pulls at a moment’s notice, launching us directly into the next sequence, only stealing away close-ups, glances and breaths as the film overall calls for (not the scene). It’s how a master of the craft constructs a film as a vast whole, not allowing any scene to run away with the film, and allowing the film to be more than the sum of its parts. By the time we reach the film’s final moments, the pace slows. As Sheeran’s body begins to slow down so does the film, and with Hoffa gone, his world loses its dramatic pull, now there is only the slow passage of time, watching and waiting as one by one your friends and relations burn out their flame and eventually so does your own. And what was it all for? There are few more shocking images in the film than Pesci’s shaking, feeble hand dipping a loaf of bread into a prisoner’s cup of wine so he can gum it down easier, no more haunting instant than Sheeran’s World War II vet eyes watching television news as American fighting continues through time; another series of events without a grand narrative, survival mode that lesser film’s try to assign a significance to. Significance comes upon reflection, when all is said and done. At the end of a life, all we’re left with are the pieces of what we have left, what we didn’t lose along the way. It is Scorsese’s rejection and embracing of narrative that gives The Irishman its depth. As time goes by, a young nurse doesn’t even know the name Jimmy Hoffa. The haunting truth of time, who holds all the cards during a hand is all that seems to matter, but when the hand is over, who remembers? How does a mind locked in survival mode deal with finality? It doesn’t really, and Frank’s last days are spent trying to find a way it can all end without it feeling so “final”. The film floats effortlessly on its moments and soundtrack for much of its runtime. The rejection of grand narrative leaves us with the ego and its own survival instinct as the one who occupies the driver’s seat of this mid-twentieth century tapestry. The ego can never back down, the ego takes ownership and possession, the ego is ever-hungry. Hoffa can neither stand to be kept waiting, nor let go of even the smallest infraction, for to give even an inch would seem to leave the door wide open to destruction. Once a desire is cemented, the ego must drill deeper and deeper at all costs; dig its heels in no matter how trivial. It could be an organization we run, a pension we’re owed, or the validation of a child we think is reticent to connect with us. In a fleeting film that rarely lingers, one of our few lengthy scenes takes place in Hoffa’s son’s car discussing a fish, a trivial matter yet no one will let it go. Scorsese’s deepest impacts come from his fatalism, constantly pulling us from the narrative to remind us that these characters and the real lives they were based on were headed for nothing but destruction and premature death. That one character was well-liked and dies of natural causes becomes a punchline. It’s this refusal to attempt a surprise moment, actively refusing narrative excitement, that so characterizes the hit man’s life. The target is ambushed, but the hit man knows it’s coming, every time.

Not a moment in the film is without closure or called back in some way, and it’s to Scorsese’s credit that he makes it look so easy. The film is completely bolstered by each scene weaving seamlessly with the others, the narrative pull driving relentlessly toward the inevitable climax. The true point of The Irishman, however, doesn’t occur until after the climax is over and done. Hoffa is dead, Sheeran and Russel drive off, and the film seems poised to cut to the credits, but Scorsese lingers. He lingers on long after; long after Russell and the rest are dead and gone, long after Sheeran’s attempts to reconnect with his estranged daughter Peggy have failed for the last time, long after he’s selected his own plot and casket. Long after all those would-be Earth-shattering moments have faded into dust only to be replaced by new Earth-shattering moments and new men like Sheeran just trying to find their place in it all. Men fall in and out of power, and the power plays reverberate through the lives of the other men. The courts beat the drum of justice, politicians beat the drum of patriotism, unions beat the drum of rights, while the mob beats the drum of family. At the end of the day, as far as life through Sheeran’s eyes, the hand that beats the drum is always money and power, and for every organization, there’s loyalties and leaders, and each one trying to move against the other when they get their chance. Sure, one hand can wash the other when it needs to; Hoffa donates to Nixon, Kennedy moves to lock up Hoffa, Nixon frees Hoffa, Russell and the mob eventually order Hoffa killed, it’s Frank who does the killing. The final shot, a door left ajar that a feeble and dying Frank can’t bear to see shut, is Scorsese’s final statement on money, power, influence, etc. No matter how much you got, it always comes to this.

9

Pierrot Le Fou (1965)

Pierrot Le Fou

Pierrot le Fou transcends absurdity, it transcends poetry, it transcends cinema. One of Godard's most inspired cinematic essays blends the elation and celluloid-obsession of his early 60's work with the deconstructionist, political suppositions of his late-60's output. Pierrot le Fou never ceases its shifting from romance to thriller and on, rendering genre obsolete yet always existing as pulp, action detective stories and pornography, even comic books. Godard presents the written work; novels, comics and paintings as pillars, the skeletal framework behind the essay. With this bizarre mix of hallowed and mundane sources of images to inform his protagonist, and his narrative, Godard sets about constructing a harrowing romance. Within the context of the romance, a sprawling statement of the world. Or is it a statement on fiction? Godard's farcical approach to tragedy and death, both real and imagined, captures the disconnect of media, here we celebrate the weakness of cinema. His lens usually wide, long unbroken takes, only short and infrequent punctuations of closeups have all the more impact. The denial of visual pleasure, (including the 'kiss between two cars' image seen above, never shown in close, only in wide shot) mirrors the denial of all narrative resolutions. At least until the conclusion of the film, Godard leaves a trail of loose ends as he recklessly wanders without any intent of returning to them, never allowing the narrative to wander off with itself, yet always hinting that intrigue is around the corner. The essay instead uses the narrative as a canvas rather than allowing narrative calling the shots and leading all other aspects of the picture. 

This is where Godard, perhaps for the only time, fully balances his love for film as its pre-60's incarnation as well as his hopes for what a truly postmodern medium might look like. He is on each side of the knife in Pierrot le Fou. To create a truly 'living cinema', the picture must appear to morph and grow right in front of our eyes, it must appear responsive to the moment and never become bogged down in preconceived notions of what it purported to be about, only what it is, the film is fluid. As a film, it is about little more, and yet when a film spreads its scope as wide as Pierrot le Fou, suddenly being about itself equates to being about much more. It is the essence of cinema unfurled and enlightened. The unabashed interest in the beauty of the technicolor image combined with the poet's lyrical, yet cynical, ramblings fuel a complete explosion of celluloid subconscious. Truly, when cinema dreams, this is what cinema dreams of. Somewhere in the deep ocean that surrounds cinema, Pierrot le Fou was caught. It was baited with Chandler and Nicolas Ray, Sam Fuller even cameos. It's like putting film itself into a blender, Godard adds a desire to elevate the medium to that of literature and comes up with this musing. This period in Godard's filmmaking is its own chasm of poetry, he leaves us without much to say about the work formally except that it has succeeded in satisfying the senses and leading us from one point of absurdity and cinematic nirvana to the next. The film is carried aloft by its sheer adherence to incoherence. Life, love and literature are lambasted and lampooned liberally. Godard's cinema has always put more merit in the experience for the viewer as he navigates the human experience than in a summation or statement resulting from the work itself. When the sum total of Pierrot is examined, we come up with nothing an everything. As Fuller puts it early in the film, here was have "in one word: emotion". If this is to the purpose of cinema, and here for the thesis of Pierrot le Fou, it certainly is, then Godard explores it to the fullest. Again, delving into a cinema of weakness; for if the emotions on display in this piece of cinema are to be examined, we will soon realize they are not only fleeting and flimsy, but featureless as well. Our protagonists seem to simultaneously care little, and care deeply, for one another. Godard, here, takes one of his more pronounced leaps toward a cinema that blends showmanship with Brechtian awareness, to see a world of cinema laid out before us where the audience need not enter into the usual 'contract' with the work, that usual bit of self-delusion, that state of mind where we agree to 'get into' the film. 

With this in mind it is impossible to be 'taken out of' the movie experience with Pierrot le Fou, though there are moments where Godard beckons us in and is shocked we came along for the ride. Just as Karina takes Belmondo for one final ride he should have known better than to take by the end of the film. Do the characters even have concrete being? Concrete essence of emotional and some sort of underlying plot or motive? Doubtful. In the same sense as the narrative shifts so do our characters in front of us, there is no plot to uncover, only a thematic cinema of deeper and deeper reflective properties on cinema itself, its very nature, a hall of mirrors for the medium. Pierrot le Fou is, as with all of Godard's work, able to be read as a critical essay on cinema on one level as well as being a meandering diary, a tone poem on the nature of existence. Godard is just as existential about cinema as he is about life and using these multiple levels on which to relate his mind's communication to the mind of the viewer, Godard's cinema finds new avenues on which to define itself. The existential dichotomy of wanting everything and nothing, being drawn to and repulsed by everything in this society of the spectacle is what characterizes Pierrot le Fou and breathes life into Godard's cinematic evolution at this junction point of rapid evolution. Pierrot le Fou is as enjoyable at it is confounding, as important as it is negligible and as powerful as it is dismissive of its own power. In one word: emotions.