Oh Woe is Me 1993

OH, WOE IS ME (1993)

By the early 1990's, the vanguard of cinema, which had brazenly plunged ahead into all-out experimentation in the decades preceding, had been thoroughly put down. Either domesticated, retired, dead, or castrated by industry, the cinema makers had shrunk back into their seats and relegated their creations to a place of fanciful triviality on the stage of society; what once seemed an imperative pillar and a powerful channel was a sideshow attraction at best and an effective tool toward fortune by its most practical definition. The broad and limitless spectrum of what constituted cinema had been clipped and de-clawed and categorized into video store sections. Ever the agent provocateur of cinema, Godard never got the memo and continued on making films that grew, evolved, never could be categorized nor even so much as summarized and went further into the thick woods of cinematic possibility rather than linger on its edges where it could clearly be seen. 'Play where I can see you', seemed the directive looming over his contemporaries of the time and Godard's films, as always, do not. They venture where they will, they go further than we may be prepared to follow, and we must if we're to keep a grip on the journey. Godard's cinema can only be experienced and can only be known from one frame leading into another, never can the frames be separated and reassembled as plot descriptors, nor can they be so succinctly analyzed, that's not why we're here. The words that stick feel as though we've seen the convergence of narrative pull, of Simon and Rachel and what will they do next and perhaps we can't even agree on what they did do before this. 

Once, we knew a place, we knew how to light the fire, we knew the prayer. Now, we know none of these things, we can only tell the story. Oh, Woe is Me has markings of the process of rediscovery, of finding those things again; it also carries the mark of merely being a story about those things. A hunter of stories stalks the film, the story now being the film's prize. What can be said of a film where the Gods step down from the heavens on their ziggurat and inhabit the minds of men? Quit talking and start chalking. Godard's tale tells us not of a generation that time forgot, but of a generation who forgot time, the beginning of the internet age, perhaps even unaware, was already changing the face and structure of the world. The age of information where all information is accessible, and all information is just data, all information is meaningless, each piece regarded with the same significance and anything else. To a lost age after the fall of communism, when the west celebrates its victory and war is all among us, God himself descends on the staircase built for him in the centuries past and inhabits the body of Simon. Godard does not cease to layer multiple meanings and stimuli on top of one another, a substantial element of his filmography from this point forward, the layering of audio here suggest the layering of video that will occur decades later in Goodbye to Language. Characters are dressed up from without, Depardieu is given a new hat, trench coat, newspaper and made to appear as another character. Characters are inhabited from within, as above so below, Simon becomes God, or at least says he does, or at least that's how the story is told. We who exist now have forgotten all these things, and where all originates from, but we know enough to tell the story. As one grand narrative after another crumbles at the twentieth century's end, the characteristics of communism, of christianity, of national stories and cultural tradition seem to be vanishing from the Earth, replaced by new ones, new quasi-narratives. History not printed on stone or page is easily washed away and we have entered the age where neither are used; same screen different content. Woe to the people of the coming twenty first century. 

Our characters speak in riddles and proverbs, time-tested mantras to live by are tested again in a new time. Godard's later output, especially with this film, seems to come from a place outside of time itself. It is no longer reflective of film convention of any time, nor is it railing against it. Like all great artists, Godard has spent so many years fully immersed in his craft that it has fused with his DNA, the films of Godard's later periods find cinema at its most basic elements and building blocks, as the microscope drills in to matter and shows us sub-matter, Godard brings us cinema at a sub-celluloid level, the river of substance that flows through its veins. The film does not seem to begin or end, merely start and stop, at times even during we are at fits and starts, the film shedding and applying its layers at various intervals, sometimes all at once and others not at all. The film's plot builds and disperses much in this way, we are privy to all time at once and not in any linear fashion. at times we are within the film, and at times totally outside of it looking at it from a removed distance. How do we discern between these two states? Does not any inclusion in the runtime of Oh Woe is Me cause it to be part of the film? Godard's film is as a deep dark wood, we venture in and eventually emerge with the clear idea that we likely did not see all of what it had to offer. The mythology of the film sees that Gods sometimes abandon men to their folly and doom, and the art can abandon the artist just the same, and the person can abandon all wisdom and knowledge of their own culture and history, but never will history abandon us, it can't. Whatever happens will be absorbed into the story of us, be the Gods among us or not. 

9

Hiroshima Mon Amour 1959

HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (1959)

In an instant we've forgotten ourselves. Over time, we'll forget all the 'unforgettables' that we hang onto, the deep impacts, the scars that we won't allow to heal, but it's inevitable. Time heals all. What Resnais realizes with Hiroshima mon Amour is the human desire to open the scabs and keep the wound alive, lick the blood and feed off of it, keep our pain alive so as not to betray a love that we never wanted to end.  It captures, as Emmanuelle Riva's character puts it, an eventual "indifference and then shame at being so indifferent", the horrors of war cross-cut with sensual imagery, two shades of skin on skin. The terror of the greatest act of annihilation ever committed, and we are but tourists to this kind of Hell, the destruction and the monstrosity, what else can tourists do but weep? In the chaos of it all, as the world moves toward remembrance, creating films that remind us to never commit such acts again, films calling for peace (that are "taken very seriously in Hiroshima"), Renais introduces a mirroring personal tragedy,  the outward and the inward reflect one another, a forbidden lover at an age ripe for high emotion, the deeply personal resonating with the global. He finds his darkest truths in that Hiroshima and the horrors of atomic warfare make for initial erotically-charged conversation with one who has penetrated so deeply as to be a temporary lover. The true violation is to let one trespass on the individual's crises, in the reveal of the personal tragedy, the true depth of caring is still in Riva's loss of one, not the world's loss of many. Each will be ultimately forgotten as the world moves forward, the tides of time turn, and the minutes pass into hours. A loss of innocence at the realization that all our deepest cares are but transitory and tragedy only alters our behavior but for a brief, fleeting moment. 

The film's point of high emotion arrives during an alcohol-fueled revelation at a Hiroshima Tea Room. Riva's unnamed character finally breaks down and delves into the deepest of past scars, one that left her emotionally wounded for years and completely devastated her mind. What Resnais aims to impart is the most cruel fact of history, that today's tragedy is tomorrow's footnote, soon to be an increasingly glossed-over line of text as the centuries pass, even within our lifetimes, the human mind's instinct to bury its tragedies runs deep as a mechanism of survival. To show strength against tragedy, Riva resolves to "never forget". To show strength against the transient love, the opposite, she tries to "forget immediately". Both struggles are ultimately useless battles with the shadows in one's own mind. As the film progresses, we retreat inward, opening on the unforgettable visual of the radioactive ash falling on our lovers' naked bodies. In the darkness, we cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. We see first the world, the most horrific documentation of the deformity, the dismemberment, the burns, the destruction. Resnais blends his portrait of real footage and dramatic recreations, of then and now, twisted metal in a museum and the sobbing international onlookers. It is just as much an emotive journey through the highs and lows of erotic attraction, deep love, loss, humanity run amok, the human mind slowly losing itself, what has happened to a world that would do this to its own people? Resnais posits that the human mind, capable of so much, simply breaks under the pressure when the burden is too great and we do not have the faculties to withstand it. Politically, he states, we have not evolved in pace with our technology. If a world of such horror is possible, we must rise above the frailty we possess mentally, spiritually, philosophically, our characters attempt to maintain their equilibrium and grip on reality and their roles in society, yet all will clearly never be the same again. We don't want to return to normalcy, we want to allow the shock and awe of those initial seconds live on forever, so that we need never confront the sense of complacency that allowed us to wander down such a path ever again. Disregard for human frailty is what allows fools to rush in for love and war. Resnais captures like no one before or since, the instant when all becomes clear, when past, present and future collide in an instant of realization. Something at the tip of characters' fingers, on the tip of their tongue, they are about to verbalize a grand understanding of time, love, loss .. and in an instant they retreat again, terrified to leave their place of pain, unable to move on. 

A search for permanence in an impermanent world. As we near our final frames, the lovers come together and drift apart, not wanting to leave the other's side, not wanting to approach, Riva berates herself for letting him into her private world. In the final moments, this realization comes full circle, the private world trumps the world at large for all individuals, like it or not. It is not a selfish or distasteful web Resnais weaves, but one that sees the human experience for what it is; no matter what we see, we are seeing it through the same two eyes we always have and always will. Regardless of how the world reacts at the mere mention of the word "Hiroshima", for Riva's character it will forever live as another meaning, she has washed away what the word used to signify, used to trigger, and now has a new memory which takes precedence in her mind. The interior self, the individual holds more sway than the collective at this time, the mid-point of the twentieth century, we will watch as the tides of time change that as well, of course. For now, our two lovers care not for the world at large, but only deeply about themselves. This love affair has been a deeply personal experience, first with an image of another person and later scratching the surface at having the experience with the real person underneath. Resnais' film is so deeply layered, it is pointless to write more about. This occupies a sublime place in the visual medium where the film can only speak in its own language and cannot be translated back again.. One of cinema's highest achievements, Hiroshima mon Amour itself has become an experience to travel back to over and over, lest we forget. 

10

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg 1964

THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1964)

One of the new wave's peak achievements was not only to experiment with new cinematic technique, but to use the critical eye to cut through what had congealed into cinematic pillars, deconstruct them, and build them back up in a purer form. Enter Jacques Demy and the movie musical. Cherbourg is a film that achieves rare formal perfection. By way of this intricately constructed form, however, the revelation of the apparatus is achieved. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is so hyper-designed, so operatic and so visually fluid, we are simultaneously swept away by the narrative and constantly acutely aware of the falseness of the images in front of us. Demy's direction of the picture cannot be understated, the careful color palette, the rich texture of each sequence drawn out for extra moments that could have easily glossed over, not to mention the complete commitment by his players to a world where everyone sings out their most mundane dialogue as though it were ‘Carmen’. The understanding and tactical employment of musical tropes is so visible that our resulting awareness of them is what characterizes the tone for much of the film. The complete unreality coupled with the bittersweet realism of its storyline create its unique blend of distanciation. In this way, Demy satisfies the emotional desires of the audience while also disrupting their ability to fully engage with the material at the subconscious level. By creating an operetta, Demy lets go of all hinting at a naturalistic, realist cinema and enters the level of pure fiction. Nowhere in this dance are we even given the opportunity to interpret the events as being true to life, and yet, the narrative is never lost in fantasy, it is stark and bleak in its portrait of love, loss, moving on and living past our idealistic imaginings of how life will be. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg tells us of love under circumstance, including all of the elements of life that could, and likely will, derail even the most poetic of passions. 

Demy, of course, revels in the dichotomy. Theatrical and sugar-coated on the surface, Cherbourg reveals loss in a way that is at once life-affirming and disparaging. True love is something rarely felt, and easily shattered, and though the two lovers at one time imagined it would end their existence to live without the other, love here is fleeting and we must go on. We continue, we who bear the emotions, the feelings of passion that are born of our attractions, we lived before them and we will live after they have disappeared, perhaps this is the true musing of Cherbourg. The emotion is distilled within Legrand's score, and it is impossible to separate the effectiveness of the film from the effectiveness of the music. The set pieces that give the film its distinct flavor are contained in the earliest scenes, and in the train sequence where Guy is called off to war is the film’s true climax. The sequence represents the death of their story while we remain to see two episodes of the fallout. Exuberant youth diminished and eventually defeated by authority and forebears, everyone from Genevieve’s mother to compulsory military service seems to descend on their unspoiled passion, desperate to snuff it out. Even Roland Casard invades the film, escaped from his own movie, a legacy character here to steal away the happiness of the young lovers that eluded him in Lola. Demy never ceases to accent, to add increasing levels of color as we approach the film's darker themes. By its construction, the film seems to grow ever more lovelorn and bittersweet. Is Cherbourg a tale of triumph or a tale of loss? Is it a tale of young naïveté replaced by a maturation of emotion? Or is it a tale of the ideal love being lost and replaced by a passive acquiescence?  By the film's climax we see Guy, seemingly happy in his new life, coming into contact with his old love once again. In a way, he has what he was looking for at the outset. He has the gas station he had hoped to own, he has love in his life and he has a son, so why does the scene where he meets Genevieve again feel so traumatic? Is it perhaps that they have both named their child by the same name? Does it solidify that they had diverged and yet hung onto something from their past romance. What Demy imbues here, and the strength of the picture, is that the singsong nature of the dialogue allows them to be so candid. By communicating in in emotional song, all kinds of dark thoughts are exposed, Madeline even goes so far as to say she believes that Guy's affection for her is actually the affection for the next best thing. Guy casually denies this, but we wonder if it's true. We will go on wondering, for the answer is never given. Demy explores a dark truth about love. Surely, their affection for one another at the film's outset is genuine, surely Deneuve as Genevieve is true when she expresses she will 'die' if Guy leaves her, but what of her newfound affection for her new husband? Is it an affection of circumstance. Demy seems to be telling us that it is. Both had a youthful ideal in mind and both settled for the easy answer that was in front of them at the moment, rather than chase love's hardships. It is in this that Cherbourg is at its most impactful. Little can be said, it can only be witnessed, about the perfection with which Demy crafts his visual language. It is a language that can only be spoken through the film, but the images tell the tale all on their own, calling back to the silent era, telling a story through the images alone and the song and lyrics only adding to it. Musicals do not often sing of buried thoughts and feelings, and here, it is all they sing about. 

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg exists in a world that is purely cinematic, it makes little attempt to relate to our world and the human emotion that it conjures is more real than most. It cannot be said for many films, but it is wholly unique in cinema; never rivaled, in fact, never even attempted again. It has never been paralleled. The use of juxtaposing elation via color and music with a narrative of love and loss brings us closer to the internal human experience than any other. A world of beauty and passion that is subject to the tides of time, to circumstance, and to doing what seems like the best bet for the moment, rather than following idealism. It is one of the most delicious dichotomies ever manifested on celluloid to be sung a song of the life often chosen, it dramatizes the normal. Through Demy's refusal to film anything that is not keyed on such high power, the film takes on an other-worldly grace, all the while the developments of the plot refuse to follow suit. The resulting film exists on two levels at once and rings into its audience at a level that is at once familiar and completely foreign. Demy brings us poetry in the form of a musical, and redefines a genre while giving a thorough thesis of it. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a mircale of cinema.

10

Roma 2018

ROMA (2018)

Cuaron’s poem of promise and loss flows like a parade across the screen, or the calm surge of water that Cleo uses to mop the family driveway, growing deeper with each wave until it reflects an airplane flying overhead; dreaming of some far off place, some distant imagination during routine chore. The first layer shows us one portrait, the more layers, the deeper, until that glimmer of a self we never knew was there; a life we dream to live, someone we dream to be, or someone we were when we were old, before we were born. It flows like the violent waters of the ocean that threaten to swallow Sofi, chaos and imbalance, as in the minds of men for whom discipline can become the only respite. Above all, Roma believes in the ties that bind women together in this world, and the ties that bind them to their children. There exists a life beyond our own, “out there”, and in counterbalance there exists the here and now; the present circumstance, the present responsibility. For the women of Cuaron’s film, here, now and responsibility not only make up their existence, it is their only choice. It is his restless males who seem frightened of the here and now, always looking for the next conquest, the next phase. It is Cuaron’s men who seem angry, drawn away by the world outside, some nagging feeling or preoccupation, unable to embrace their families, their homes. The men of Roma are only able to chase what is out there; life, love and violent revolution, rather than nurture. It is more seductive to chase political causes and escape with a mistress. In Roma, our men even seem to marry in pursuit of the challenge of marriage itself, a promise which may see its permanence shattered down the road. Always in the back of our mind Cuaron plants the image of the airplane flying overhead, a constant reminder that out there, somewhere, there are others on their way to great adventure while we quietly sweep up the dog shit on the driveway.

Two visual cues frequently appear in lieu of the father’s presence: the behemoth car (and the struggle to pull it into the driveway), and the mounds of dog shit that collect there; the former being a burden on the family without the father to drive it around and park it, the latter being a bad reaction toward the shit that permeate everyone’s reaction henceforth. While Daddy is a car and a lingering smell of cigarette smoke, Mommy has her episodes and only Cleo is present in each moment, though not allowed into the intimate ones. Cuaron barely uses a closeup, his action spread wide across a 65mm frame, only revealing the characters’ features by having them come to us, not the other way around.  At a New Years celebration, through the weight of dilemma in the personal lives of Cleo and the family, they pause for the holiday’s reflection and warmth. When a fire breaks out in the woods behind the house, all must put the holiday on pause to deal with the here and now, the blaze that threatens them from without. In the midst of the rescue mission, the man, costumed as a monster, approaches our stationary camera as we’ve grown accustomed to. He is the only participant still attached to the world at large, still in tune with the ticking of the clock, still counting down the seconds until midnight, whereas the rest are firmly determined to quench the flames. He sings to us, seemingly so aware of what is outside of the scenario that he can sense the audience on the other side of the lens. These transcendent moments are infrequent, but weighty in Cuaron’s tapestry. By contrast, Cleo seeks out the father of her unborn child. She stands by a large group of martial artists waiting for him, as all are caught up in the teachings of a master from a far off land come to town. Only she and the master contain the balance to perform his feat, though she goes unnoticed. When she tries to approach him, he rebukes her. Little does he know that she contains within her the same spiritual balance as the man he calls master, little does she know that to reunite with him may be the key to a strong and healthy pregnancy and birth. As his final act in her life, he may deliver the final surge of fear that takes the baby, we cannot be sure. He is drawn away, as all men in Roma, toward a cause, toward an ideal, an imagination of a life better served. Life with Cleo is an abomination of mundane normalcy, the home and all it represents makes him sick. Boys dream of space travel, the image fills the silver screens within the screen, pilots and astronauts, firing from cannons in their pursuit toward the world beyond. What we’re left with is the depth of Cuaron’s images, the tableaux of his frame, the life all around our characters, not part of their story, but visible for an instant, the world makes its presence known.

Perhaps Cuaron’s film truly deals with the depths of responsibility and desire; where they overlap, where they oppose one another, and where those who feel them are willing to go to achieve their ultimate expressions. We find ourselves in the ultimate collision between the two during Cleo’s admission in the film’s climactic sequence on the beach. Her desires outweighed her sense of obligation, though she cannot outrun what she is inside, because we know that she feels responsible for the fate of her child, even now. Cuaron’s emotional apex is strengthened and bolstered as she acts to ensure she won’t lose Sofi, yes Cuaron makes us aware that she cannot swim. It is to Cuaron’s credit and humanity as a filmmaker that he never uses these elements overtly in the scene, they are present in the back of our mind, as are all things we see and hear in the world of the film, but never are they called to our attention, the moment is allowed to play naturally and freely toward its necessary conclusion. With Roma, Cuaron has constructed a tone poem, an epic narrative and a personal story all in one. As we see deeper into Cleo’s soul, so does our scope widen to include all the strife and suffering, the elations and joys of those around her in a way that we are only acutely aware as the scenes progress. Cuaron has crafted one of the finest films of his career, one that forgoes spectacle to bring us humanity and which does not crowd our senses, that we may look toward the sky and see.

9

Alphaville 1965

ALPHAVILLE (1965)

 Godard supposes much for the future of the human race with Alphaville; that we will begin to trust machine senses and logic more than our own, that we will find art, poetry and language, even emotion itself obsolete in the face of new capabilities that our inventions afford us. Alphaville is tongue in cheek, filled with brazen hyperbole and recklessly blunt eyes turned toward human progress, and at the same time its exaggeration begins to look more and more accurate, its fears seem more and more realized, its cares become more our own cares, or do they become less? Is it a sign of Godard’s valid prediction if we find the film more relevant or less relevant? Does it mean we’ve overcome his fears or succumbed to them? Godard’s major fear seems to be that we will embrace, and grow accustomed to, our inability to be complete people without attachment to our technology. We think we can travel at 100 mph; we cannot, not without our cars. We think we can fly from city to city; not so, not without our airplanes. Great thinkers in history have always espoused philosophies of non-attachment and yet, as we move forward in humanity, we find that the prominent minds in our own societies espouse that we should become more attached, that we should become more assimilated with our devices; half man and half machine entities that rely on circuitry and mainframes to help us think at levels and paces that we have not yet begun to dream of. Will these levels bring us depth? Will the knowledge bring us wisdom? Will true love and the poets who spoke of it seem useless to us? Will we exterminate those who do not want to join our utopia of ultra-logic?

Godard’s version of Lemmy Caution is a hybrid of poet and secret agent, with a little more emphasis on the secret agent. By the film’s conclusion, he is anything but philosophical about the possible benefits of Alphaville’s highly controlled society, where words are wiped out by the day and their meanings destroyed until we are left with nothing but utilitarian basics. This new dark age that Godard sees us entering will one day need to be met with a renaissance of its own, where humanity and its spirit are reinvigorated to emerge once again, and he displays it with bold fashion in the film’s final action sequence. Alphaville is by its turns crushingly oppressive with its sections of Alpha 60’s view on reality and society, only later do we leave the cold and calculated brutality of its world and enter the lyrical reality of the visual poem that Godard has laid out for us. Though the thematic elements do get a bit muddled in these segments as we are shown Lemmy Caution’s world as one of brutality while espousing love, Godard of course means to see love triumph, eradicating Alphaville’s mathematical reality and censorship in favor of human expression. Godard embraces the last of his period of pulp, save for Pierrot le Fou’s reverence for comic books, Alphaville sees him at his most hard-boiled. Structurally the flick moves from a controlled rigidity to an opened human mind, to a short circuit. The film’s art direction, or rather lack thereof, is of prime interest here. Godard utilizes Paris as it is and somehow we are completely transported to the alternate reality of Alphaville. His use of the era’s most available high technology to prop the adventure, and the low tech use of closeups on neon signs, the light positioned behind a fan to represent Alpha 60 and his moving array of microphones. The grotesque voice of Alpha 60 announces the future of civilization like a prophet. No beauty, no humanity, no ability to express complex thought, only to relate complicated concepts and findings, Alpha 60 is the ideal machine for a world without hope, just sedate existence.

Godard’s fears for the future have continued on throughout his career, we especially see the lamentation of his prophecy made manifest in his work of the 2010’s. Goodbye to Language, in every way shows the same societal degradation that appears as a strengthening and progress. Alphaville questions the pillars of modern western society, as many of his films of the era did but in a profoundly different area of focus. If we are to become all consuming buyers and sellers whose entire lives are for sale, all at the behest of a thinking machine that performs the role of deity, the master mind behind it all, then Lemmy Caution’s reactions are as that of an organically grown man from outside of this controlled hyper-civility, the human spirit unbound. As those who weep are shot down and drowned, as those who hide evidence of human emotion under a mattress and are encouraged to commit suicide fade away, we are left with the fleeting feelings of the world of love and natural thought process we once knew; a thought process working hand and hand between a unified bodily system of mind, body spirit, the heart. As Alphaville’s most memorable moment, the thought police descend on our heroes as they utter illegal missives of what they feel. They enter a cinematic dreamscape far from the rest of the film. Godard would have been kind to allow the film to live in this place for longer, but that is for another film. For this film, we are in the throes of a society that would bulldoze the human being under its necessity for central planning, “great” men who stand above all and make the decisions for the masses, etc. We see brief glimpses of beauty and we relish them.

9

Love Streams 1984

LOVE STREAMS (1984)

"Love is a stream, it's never ending". Love is multiple streams that we pick up, put down and re-enter when we'd least expect it. Love is a state of being that we engage in when we feel that we have love to give. For Cassavetes, whose life had been a long stream of directorial masterpieces, deep performances and alcoholism, the fear of death brought something out in him that had never been tapped into, and an earnest artist put forth his absolute best on all fronts. It's only circumstantial to call it a "late life" opus (Cassavetes died five years later), he directed Love Streams at an age when many artists, filmmakers in particular, are in their prime. Glorious, as always is Gina Rowlands. Both of their scenes, whether together or apart, hit deep at what makes people tick; a kind of understanding of the multidimensional nature of the human mind, its ability to center on a frame of reference for its own nature, what it is, and to block out erroneous or unpleasant details. What we do to each other, the unintended results as we move on, forced into it by time itself in some way, thirsty always for a moment of pause, just to stop the blur of a quickly spinning world. Perhaps Love Streams' best moments come out of interior thoughts manifest into cinema; how simple it all is when those other people obey our frame, live by our center of gravity, in our imagination. How well we come off in the scene when we're the star of the show, and how sorry they look being on the wrong side of the fence. How obvious it is to ourselves that we're doing the right thing, how confused and foolish everyone else must be, maybe they didn't hear us correctly, maybe they weren't paying attention. We were right, you know? The decisions we made, the things we did, if only they could see it from our perspective, walk in our shoes, they'd see. We were right. 

The streams diverge, they come back together, and calm waters turn to rapids when they do. Cassavetes captures like nothing else the deranged human tendency for justification, how it bleeds into each reactionary and unplanned decision after the fact. The purity of the act, how shamelessly we live until the voice of justification whispers in our ear. Soon we're grasping at straws, explaining our actions to others, whether they questioned our behavior or not. There's always a good explanation, but we live on the surface of one another, making contact between surfaces, but never contact of mind, spirit. We remain at a distance from one another, mediated by a judge, whether physically or in our own psyche. We imagine the questions of others and begin to answer without provocation. Cassavetes films have always succeeded largely because they are not attempting to tell us a story, rather the people that we see onscreen are trying to live; false personas, characters, fighting, spitting mad, to become real, as real as they can be. Yet, somehow, they are displaced. They can't put their finger on what is awry, they navigate a cinematic terrain that is as real and false as they are, they try to come to terms with their own falsehood and come up empty every time; characters in a film they don't understand, playing roles they got lost in so long ago they can't remember where it all began let alone the lines. Though facing opposition, they reject living life with opponents, instead choosing to drift in and out of good times, turning on the juke box in between tracks of life, dancing even when the music isn't playing. All conclusion is rejected, all rhythms of life are kept up, on tempo, never missing a beat and all the time wondering why. It doesn't take long to realize that this charade will go round and round until eventually drifting off into the eternal. Cassavetes final thoughts on life, people, the world, etc. seem to be thus; when you really look at it, I mean really look at it, it's all beauty, even the ugly parts. Even the parts that by all rights and justification should strike us as unforgivable, shameful, eliciting guilt or any such emotion, we're alive. When life comes to a close and the curtain falls nothing else will matter except whether or not you lived at 90mph and never slowed down, not for an instant. What is there to hold onto? It is the mark of a free mind, an unflinching artist, to truly communicate between the two worlds. Love Streams plays like an extended inner voice, like Rowlands' unforgettable fantasy sequences, for a dying man's dying dream, the last thought that crosses a human mind before it's extinguished. To catch this moment and distill it is nothing short of miraculous in filmmaking. 

We get ideas in our heads, we get carried away with them, we resist the comedown with every fiber in our being; that 'wake up' call that life in this world is everyone's equal dream and not simply our own. Around each corner lies the next generation, quiet, marginalized and ignored by their parent who's trying to figure their own life out. Is it tragic? Are these casualties? Or just another stream of consciousness in a body, pulled in the current like the rest of us? We run to one pair of loving arms, only to renounce them and run to another. Today's hero is tomorrow's fraud, and back again. Love, the film seems to eventually posit, comes from trying to do for another what we should have been doing for ourselves all along. What we need most, we try to give to the one we love, even if it isn't at all what they need. Desires and actions that solve yesterday's problems and leave today wide open. With such an open canvas, Cassavetes leaves Love Streams open for meditations to enter its own celluloid, are we seeing the film that he made? Are we seeing the film we imprint on what he made? For a master of the art form to leave us with these final burning questions is what any human does for another in love. We don't offer answers, we don't know them ourselves, we offer what we've seen and hope it's a piece of the puzzle another was missing. If anything, Love Streams eventually leaves us with that notion. Hope.

10

Body Double 1984

BODY DOUBLE (1984)

De Palma's Body Double represents, in many ways, the pinnacle of what the director aims to achieve in his entire ouvre. It represents his deep-seated thesis on cinema that underlies his every work and, since its release, has only permeated into more of the culture than the bubble of cinema alone. It is a film startlingly in touch with its own era, barely into the mid-1980's and De Palma has already recognized and formulated a critique on what the decade means for the American psyche. If Scarface, Body Double's immediate predecessor and self-professed re-make of the Hawks classic, saw American excess and capitalism's effects on the machismo of an emboldened immigrant unleashed into a world that was his for the taking, Body Double examines the polar opposite of the American raised within its borders; domesticated, riddled with addiction and phobia, a real limp noodle all around. The film is not a self-professed re-make, though it is a re-make nonetheless. De Palma selects his favorite Hitchcockian elements as the skeleton for his story, but the film is a re-make of Vertigo that subverts the master's masterpiece in the same way that De Palma seems to view postmodern society subverting  its individuals. In Vertigo we see similar elements of the phobic protagonist, the human weakness characterized through submission to psychological impulses be they fear, or love. In Body Double, the same is present, only this time not by turns of elegant and operatic obsession and tragedy but by cheese and over the top schlock. 

Although, De Palma's films have never made much of a distinction between these estimations which, itself, is another pieces to the puzzle of his thesis. Films, in the De Palma world, are all dreams in the dreamscape of the cinema, little nightmares and sweet dreams that we tap into when under the hypnotic trance of those 24 flickering frames. This, of course, ties directly back to Vertigo. It has been posited and debated time and time again, in this film's cinematic parent, whether Scotty's experiences in the film's final act are meant to be interpreted as "real". We witness a series of somewhat believable events (with the caveat that we take spiritual possession as a given truth) followed by Scotty's descent into catatonic madness at a mental hospital, fade to black. The final act opens with Scotty inexplicably back to his old self and through a series of bizarre coincidences, we find a thrilling conclusion to our story. It seems too good to be true. So, is the finale of Vertigo a dream in the catatonic Scotty's head or not? This opens up a very simplistic, yet relevant, observation, and one at the core of De Palma: of course not, none of it's real, it's a movie. This consistent, Brechtian tactic of folding the material back onto itself over and over until we're not sure what is a dream and what is reality for the characters pops up in most of his films. Body Double refreshingly does not use this device, instead it uses the presence of film cameras and film sets to remind us that literally none of what we're seeing on screen can be taken at face value as realism. The very idea of taking elements of Rear Window and Vertigo and remixing them into the world of 80's pornography is deliciously perverse on its own (and probably would have garnered a "why didn't I think of that?" from Hitchcock himself), but De Palma's punctuated instances of pure cinema, consistently interrupted by displays of the apparatus, work to tear down our notion that we're witnessing anything but a theatrical representation; a heightened impression of life in motion. When the visual medium was relegated to the movie house, this notion may have seemed a bit quaint and fun. By the 80's we were consuming a larger portion of our information in the home via television. By the 2010's we're consuming the bulk of our information as well as entertainment in this way and so distanciation is of increasing importance. Is there any scene in any De Palma film that captures the essence of his career better than the Frankie Goes to Hollywood 'Relax' segment? We're suddenly transported into a musical porno where our lead character becomes another character altogether, De Palma recreates a signature shot our of Vertigo as our lead eyes the blonde from behind a door, she reflected in the mirror. As the door swings we see the film crew in the reflection, we're witnessing him acting a shoot. From there on our we see our hero acting as multiple different people. In Vertigo and Rear Window, the voyeurism is understood as part detective work and part innocent curiosity, the possibility of a twisted scopophilia is merely hinted at. In Body Double it is front and center. No better critique can be made of the 1980's than this sharp contrast of the same basic behaviors being read in vastly different ways. In Body Double the shaming of a social and sexual deviant points to that, unlike Vertigo's Scotty who looks out of duty and concern that later manifest into love (or unhealthy obsession depending on your take), Jake Scully looks out of personal gratification, a lack of fortitude and falls in love out of desperation. Scully's complete failure to fulfill his gender role in American society is the ultimate disruptor to our identification, and the strongest Brechtian device in the picture. 

He is also in sharp contrast to Tony Montana as the embodiment of emasculation. In a fitting depiction of surveillance in the 80's (and perhaps its ineffectiveness) Scully is meant to watch a titillating display from the safe confines of higher ground in a lavish apartment resembling a flying saucer. That he is unable to rescue the object of his desire in the over the top theatrics of the murder scene, being bested by a vicious dog only adds to audience disdain. Scully is also unable to triumph in the final fight, being saved by the very same animal. His very "solving" of the plot centers around his succumbing to his alcohol addiction and watching pornography in a sea of fast food wrappers. Unlike Vertigo, he has no resolution and never overcomes his fear, yet a surreal ending ensues anyhow where he is somehow given his job back and is able to play the vampire yet again in De Palma's final nod of juvenile glory fading out on a blood-soaked pair of breasts. The whirlwind of criticism of De Palma's era concludes as the credits roll. Ignored in its day, Body Double now stands as an all-too vivid mirror held up to the era. 

9

Last Year at Marienbad 1961 Review

LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (1961)

 A mundane repetition, enigmatic and confounding in its similarity, punctuated by instants which are re-lived over and over via memory, eventually becoming narrative; a personal narrative which twists their occurrences to the mind's liking until they have become what is most appealing. If we could burrow into your mind and live there for some hours, taking in all the half-thought thoughts, the garbled dreams, fantasies, memories, ambitions, desires; we would exit with an unreliable notion, a fantastic breath of life that amounts to illusion. With Marienbad, Resnais speaks this language of the mind, the language of the subconscious, better than perhaps any other filmmaker has achieved. If Brakhage spoke the language of the eye, Resnais speaks the language of the hippocampus; the limitless depths of the human intellect, our remembrance, our pursuits. The mind as blank canvas, the promise of potential, the ecstasy of the 'beginning' gives way. Each initial brushstroke, each line drawn, a prison. The past, haunting, reaching to remember. Running from memory, wishing to forget. Fragments. Were they dreams? The mind witnesses a puzzle, a game, and instantly becomes engaged to solve it. Each time we lose, we start back at the beginning, each loss is a new blank canvas, we set it up and try again. From the first move we make in the game, we are trapped. Trapped to repeat the pattern, to lose the game all over again. Still, we start back at the beginning. We imprint, onto what we encounter, a narrative of our choosing; but we never chose it at all. It was chosen for us by the mind, our own subconscious, taking the experiences we've given to it by our living and applying them to what we see.

Last Year at Marienbad wraps us up in this experience that the mind goes through daily at our most subliminal level, the experience that our higher senses mercifully filter from our perception. We cannot deny its familiarity, our basic understanding of the images we see. These characters seem to linger on, ghostly and without inner desire, repeating the same patterns over and over, almost as a memory played on loop, the mind reeling, like the reels of film. Maybe, we think, if I play it back again I will be able to make sense of the events. We have our emotional experience, the bits of experience that lodge in our brain and won’t leave. With these comes our inevitably incorrect recollection of events, who we were distorting to form our self image interacting with other images. Resnais and Marienbad form these images for us in varying degree, we recollect little, after the credits, of any character or experience other than their core emotional sting. A woman whose mood shifts from welcoming to dismissive in an instant, a domineering and intimidating man whose intellectual superiority seems a God among men. As in the film's iconic shot of the gardens, only our figures cast shadows. As in the minds of those who walk the halls of this vast hotel palace, only the characters leave impressions, the space is immortal, as are our statues, the blank faces of the statues, the blank canvas on which we impress our own interpretation of their thoughts and feelings. The other people centered around our character are much the same. Resnais infuses the film’s progression less as acts or sequences and more as layers of narrative that we dive in an out of, with the space and our central character’s observations and recollections are built on its unchanging permanence, and his interactions with the memory of the actions of people, which are fleeting and potentially entirely false. This specter of a man may even be dead for all we know, in one of Resnais’ most cryptic flashback sequences played near the end of the film (as though it were a revelation) are of our character falling from a broken ledge as her husband approaches. The film places form and structure at the forefront, the structure is anything but unchanging, it morphs as we move through it, it reveals itself and yet moves in a spiral around a central point. The empty souls onscreen regularly stop what they’re doing to focus on some spectacle, or anything that might change their status quo, a waiter cleaning a broken glass is passively observed by the partygoers, frozen in time, hungry for something human to happen. The other couples we overhear at the film’s opening lament their inability to connect, though they are physically standing side by side, they are separated by an ocean in their ability to feel the presence of the other. They are unable to connect in a way that makes them feel present in the world of the other, in the truer sense. They exist in an endless pose, yes as statues, an empty series of gestures that mimic the behavior of living and bleeding human beings with soul behind their eyes, yet here we see only postured flesh. The addiction to the familiar paces of the routine, the only fear not being of a death of passion in life, but of an unknown element, of a moment out of the stasis. Our central character wants to live, he sees his key to life in the woman and her promise to join him in life, the woman desires her purgatory above all else. Or maybe, as a thought-form herself, desires nothing.

The power in Resnais’ filmmaking here is that it will likely be interpreted differently in each decade that an audience views it in. The film has so many labyrinthine corridors within itself that it’s all what we as an audience choose to focus on that informs the read, Resnais does not demand that we pick up any pieces, rather leaving it up to us and still besting our efforts to pin it down at every turn. Our pair of statues, blank enough to be imprinted on, yet vivid enough to attach emotion, a story of a cliff and a dog that happens along. The mind ready to imagine onto its chosen blank canvas, jolted by the interruptions of learned text (the statue is of Charles III, so we’re told), of known history; a sober retelling of a tale that’s long since lost its living quality. The wide-eyed visitor and the jaded local. The silence takes over, we examine our objects, our surroundings, we struggle to recall where we saw it all before, the phenomena becoming the familiar and the reversal, the mind’s way of turning the familiar back into the unknown. Our sneaking suspicion that there are those with secret knowledge of these systems, who understand how to bend them to their will, and we with our earnestness, always stuck holding the last card. How simple it would be to shed this imagining, to silence the mind that hopes, and come out as the victor. In Marienbad, form and formality maintain their grip on the humanity underneath, in the empty eyes of the statue, we see all the other forms which the stone may have wished to have been carved into. Even as the inevitable conclusion, the fatalist reality, is revealed, we never lose the initial charge of possibility, the first glance.

10

The Shape of Night 1964 review

THE SHAPE OF NIGHT (1964)

Nakamura’s odyssey of abuse is subtle, it involves its audience deeply when we least expect it. The script’s split in chronology constantly feels as though the story is on the verge of evolving to a new chapter, and it never does. All the while, we are slowly pulled in by this whirlpool, forming our own bond, becoming entranced in the same deep weaving of the threads of two lives, two lives entwined by destruction and remorse. Nakamura cuts deeply into the feeling that is the bond, another that attaches, ever-present, until the only fear left in this world is of detachment from that other. To bond is one of the deepest primal instincts of nature, it is psychological, spiritual, physical. It brings with it elation, mania, desperation, longing, euphoric bliss in equal measure. In the case of the bond at the center of The Shape of Night, the deeper and more intense the trauma, the deeper and more intense the bond that results from it, the more extreme the abuse, the more pronounced the psychological impression, and therefore the dependence. Now, Nakamura shoots the picture with all the sensibilities of a magazine ad, including the subtly erotic opening credit sequence, drowning in jazz and saturated with color, he beckons us into this world with the same aloof salesmanship of our star on her street corner, look ‘em in the eye and don’t flinch for a second or you’ve lost the play. We don’t realize what’s lurking, we don’t know who’s watching from the shadows and we don’t know what’s in this woman’s sordid past.

The film reveals its shape through a slow and steady unfolding, First that silent figure, the form of feminine luxury, and next archetype; the shy young man and the callous working girl. What begins as a bookend to add that air of fatalism to our extended flashback soon reverses to become a hope of salvation, some light at the end of our tunnel. What’s unexpected is that from the archetypes will soon breathe life, the deeper we follow these young tragic figures the deeper grows our disdain, our sympathy, our attachment. What begin as figures soon become flesh and blood before our eyes, Nakamura’s humanity is the film’s greatest strength, no suffering is wasted on gratuity, rather it is essential and vital to the trauma-based bonding of not only our two leads, but of the audience to the picture. Even the most tragic of images when lensed here take on beauty. It’s the humanity with which each sequence is presented that makes the picture standout, it rightly casts its characters in a desperate bid for survival amid an ever-descending spiral of self-destruction, the gambler’s curse of always thinking there will be a score on the other side of their ill-fated decisions. Promises of protection from Yakuza, the weight of the pressure on the young man from the bosses and soldiers he’s gotten himself in too deep with. We’re led to believe there’s debts from his own reckless stupidity, each action creates more implication, our young characters become more guilty of causing their own suffering at every turn, yet feel trapped and powerless to break the cycle. The bright glow of neon bathes each scene, the same street, the same sad story, the same images of the same neon shop signs provide the segue from one scene to another. A story so simple except for the ones who live it. Another girl from the street gets out, starts a family and moves on, from the outsiders perspective Yoshie should easily be able to do the same, but the attachment to the source of our suffering is the paradox ay work here, the central point around which all of Nakamura’s downward spiral is focused on. As she becomes drawn in, her vampire lover becomes strong with each action that leads to her weakness. He becomes more possessive, more crazed, grooming her for further use as a source of cash. The dichotomy is expertly highlighted, His fear outweighs his possessiveness only for so long before his jealousy takes over, her trauma only lasts so long before she gives in again and again to his demands.

When Nakamura eventually inverts the spiral is when the film shows its truest color. As Yoshei becomes more independent, Eiji, whose monicker ‘princess’ served as an emasculating Yakuza tactic of control, is fully robbed of his ‘manhood’. He shrinks, becomes servile. His displays of his inadequacy in the form of psychological control and physical abuse give way to the weakness underneath it all, a desperation for affection of any kind from Yoshei. Here our director discovers his darkest truth about the weakness at the heart of those who take part in the aggressive role of the abuse, and the equal measure of the same from their victim. In the end, as Yoshei is bathed in blue light, no longer red, we fear her suffering is only beginning, what should be her day of liberation is the crushing realization that she is bound to him forever, and that some ties defy all logic, this bond at the level of trauma is difficult, if not impossible, to break. Nakamura concludes his tragedy at the crossroads where the past and present narrative threads collide and leave us at the peak point of the devastation. His story is told with great understanding and his aesthetic is enraptuing, even when when grotesquery is on display. The triumph here is in the detail and nothing is left unsaid, the curtain falls at the point of saturation; tragic, poetic and deeply moving.

9

Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962)

CLEO FROM 5 TO 7 (1962)

The dissociative act of looking is a practice in human perception whereby we forget ourselves. Agnes Varda brings the act of leaving oneself behind to life in various ways in Cleo from 5 to 7. Facing death, Cleo seems to wonder the existential question of whether or not she has lived at all. Has she simply lived as the image of herself? Has she looked through her own eyes? Or has she only seen life through the prism of iconography? Cleo begins to rearrange her own icon in her own view, as well as break down her concept of others as icons. What Varda's camera tells us, and what the long, unbroken takes come to signify as the film progresses, are the multiple mental self-images and mindsets that we volley amongst in any given day, here heightened by a tense couple of hours as Cleo waits to hear the results of her medical test. Cleo experiences moments of selfless transcendence through physical transformation, gazing at herself in a mirror while trying on different hats to change her appearance. Varda layers multiple images here through reflection in the windows and mirrors all around her. As Varda's camera floats alongside her taxi or with her down the street, we see her point of view, through her eyes. Do the men who gawk at her as she walks down the street forget themselves for a moment? Do they cause Cleo to reflexively become more self conscious? Between the hours of 5 and 7, Cleo experiences life in various mental states, brought on by singing, watching, and finally through connecting. 

Death only serves to enhance one's iconography, Cleo even remarks that streets should be named after the living and the name should be changed when the person dies. In a society of spectacle, of looking and being looked at, the gaze can be the dominant form of interaction. Varda is integral in this ear whereby cinema came to know itself. Through the film medium, through watching and leaving our identity behind as we become immersed in the world in front of us, we come to moments of clarity. For Cleo, such moments draw her from her anxieties and free her from the material concern for her body's death. So multi-layered is Varda's cinematic essay here that we are swept through feminist critiques of the male gaze and its effect on females, existential musings on our own gaze and our own self-image that rap our perception, as well as mystical storytelling of the unseen forces that affect our existence. Cleo begins by consulting a medium who reads the tarot to tell her, faster than the scientific test, what is really happening to her body. Varda tests our own perceptions by conferring on her audience the psychic's diagnosis, while leaving Cleo in the dark. The tarot, apparently, spells her doom, the doctor tells her that she will survive and not to worry, the truth of these two predictions is never rectified as the film ends with a mystery about Cleo's ultimate resolution. What Varda has done is not to remove the cinematic element of identification, as many of her nouvelle vague contemporaries attempted to do, but to cause the character that we identify with to come to the zen conclusion that the results of the test don't matter and that life hinges more on the moments we live, not the ones we don't, etc. Varda's use of time here is what's really interesting. The film is meant to take place in real time, though Cleo experiences the kind of transformation in attitude that would normally be shown over a longer stretch of time. It's to Varda's, and the film's, credit that time is utilized like this, however, as the multiple self-images that live in synchronicity is at the thematic center. The act of seeing herself and imagining the positive attention from others is pleasing, far more pleasing than actually being looked at by others as it is a moment of veritas, not imagination. The act of singing is freeing for Cleo, though not hearing the recording of herself on the radio, again, because to hear it is to be forced to face the truth of the situation. Here, the film can be read another way, with the denial of self-image actually being an avoidant evasion of truth. Whereas the soldier she encounters at the end of the film is going back to the war, as is his duty, Cleo avoids at all cost coming face to face with anything unpleasant. Varda's camera moves effortlessly through long, uncut takes, allowing us to witness change as it occurs. Time is almost stationary in Cleo form 5 to 7, as the director has no manipulative control over it. Moving the camera into a black space as Cleo sings, a tear rolls down from her eyes, she is somewhere else while Michel Legrand's score takes us away. These constant transformations and evasions add up to a film that is constantly in flux. Varda seems to posit that this is the natural human mental state, always trying on new ways of being, wearing new hats.

Cleo eventually resigns to hearing the results of test later, even the next day, rather than wait for them in suspense. She elects to spend quality time with the stranger she's met, somehow it seems more pressing. Varda leads us through a journey of self-obsession. The obsession with the image of the self, both toward others as well as inwardly. She also leads us on a journey of complete out-of-body experiences whereby the human consciousness is able to forget the material and become free. When Cleo finally rests and connects, among the trees, with another individual who is perhaps as lost as she is, she finds respite from all her concerns. Varda has created a journey through cinematic reinvention, through the use of camera, actors and script in a different manner. Varda's formal experimentation lead us to a place of complete silence, the quieting of our own fears and concerns as we witness her free cinema, her pure cinema. Above all, the idea of 'the moment' is captured. We are uncertain about the future. We are uncertain about who Cleo is. We are uncertain about who we are. We do not know what will happen and perhaps we'll never find out. Varda communicates the feeling of a fleeting instant within the human experience. She has captured what we feel like in daily existence. She has reflected life back to us, and she has spoken to the eyes through their own language. 

9

Through a Glass Darkly (1961)

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY (1961)

Private rumination and the stage we inhabit as we interact others, the play of life, our roles to ourselves and our roles toward one another. Frequent themes for Bergman, as we gather together in unison to find God, what becomes of our private relationship with the concept? What we find in private, we struggle to bring forward, to place on the altar of public knowledge, electing much of the time toward keeping our private visions as ours alone, a secret we share only with ourselves when we're left alone to wonder. When the mind is free to wander it goes to a place we can barely describe, let alone rationalize. Has the mind slipped into malfunction which medicine will cure? Or has the hand of the divine reached from beyond the curtain of our stage to touch those chosen and show them a glimpse of eternity? A crack in the wallpaper of life, whispering to we who stand on the outside. What of our works? Our novels and plays? Are they a part of the wallpaper or are they within the wall, with the voices? As minus puts it, his works flow out of him, but where does it originate? As Bergman entered the 1960's, arguably the decade which bred his most intense and personal statements, the first installment of his 'silence' trilogy was Through a Glass Darkly. The film, centering on an artist, his two children and his daughter's husband on a family getaway finds its roots in the chamber isolation of its four and only players, each isolated in their own private despair. The three blood relatives each languish in forms of self-pity, while Von Sydow provides the foil. His pity belongs to his wife, his despair is her condition which he feels helpless to mitigate. Is insanity merely the delusion that others could comprehend our private, interior thoughts? Could anyone comprehend our divine relationship with our expressions, or our God?

Von Sydow’s character is one seemingly devoid of this interior world, one who clinically approaches life as function, ready to judge the artist who hides away in their fantastical portraiture. When confronted about his dissatisfaction in the relationship by Karin he doesn’t seem to muster the imagination that things could be anything but the way they are .. or does he? Unlike Minus, Karin and Papa, we are never shown Von Sydow’s private life in any way, only as he is in relation to the others. Bergman focuses on three states of being here, each with relative depth and shallowness based on the size of the group. There is our group of four, barely together for much of the film’s runtime, a world of small talk and polite, empty gestures. In this scenario, we are doing away with ourselves, committed to the happiness of the group, only when paired off in groupings of two do we begin to scratch the surface of reality. Each confesses things to the other, and begs that their secret not be revealed, “you’re the only one who would understand” Karin tells Minus. Only in these pairings is truth told, however slight, to another person. Then there is the private, personal world, that glass darkly through which we view life, the one where truths are untested, never needing to be founded in an objective reality, only felt. The personal world is one of feeling and inclination, of imagination, and soothing rationalizations, unchallenged by the outside world; where our inner poetry flows freely and our actions can be justified through our own means, where the significance of an instant is as life and death for us, and as trivial as a child’s fantasy to others who do not share it. Karin, writhing in ecstasy in the wallpapered room, waiting for God incarnate to enter and reveal himself, attaching cosmic importance to a moment that is the ravings of a lunatic for Von Sydow. Without witnesses and without those who pull us back from our own abyss, we float freely and readily off into the ether, into madness perhaps, or perhaps we leave this mortal coil and touch the divine, who is to say for sure? No one for an instant considers that Karin may be experiencing a miraculous vision, and even Karin herself eventually loses all faith as the God reveals itself as a spider, trying to force itself inside of her. In their moments of role playing on the lamp-lit stage after dinner, they can freely exist, not having to play the role of themselves with the baggage that comes with it, the seeds of doubt sewn into each of their interactions. We know Karin is ill, Papa is distant and absent, but when Karin becomes the specter of the princess on the stage none of it matters. In their pairings they jab at one another, Karin teases minus as she discovers him with pornography, yet some lust, which no longer exists for her husband, is ignited by the experience. The incestuous longing of a broken family filled with broken people as they drift away from life and reality, Papa discusses his suicide attempt, Minus his disgust with women, Karin her desire to be alone with her voices forever. It is the utter failure of the solitary person to connect with anything outside of their private, perverse world that draws them deeper and deeper into the void at the core of their own self. The characters here pantomime human behaviors which they cannot substantiate. The ever-present sunlight and the slowly pulsating fog horn drift through us, through our bones, as an endless waking dream unfolds.

The ornate wallpaper hides the rotting wood of the wall, the wallpaper gives way as foliage and we are in another world entirely. Bergman, here only several years prior to his ultimate commentary on the cinema itself, Persona, is acutely aware of the parallels with the silver screen, Karin staring intently at a wall as dazzling images dance in her mind, in rapt attention waiting to see the conclusion to the saga of her voices and their God. Von Sydow, breaking down perhaps in pure pity for her, at the phantom images he cannot see. We who sit in the darkened theater staring at what amounts to a brick wall with imagery and light passing over it, just as enraptured by her visions, in some way understand. Bergman dazzles us with the layers that make up a human life, the roles. Artist, too self-aware to love his creation fully. Father, too wrapped up in the artist he sees in the mirror to truly raise his children. Human being, too drawn by the darkness and perversions of life to be fully connected and honorable as a man in the world. And then there is Karin, too much a believer to doubt, and all the time wanting something else to take responsibility for her own destructive perversions. “It was the voices”, she explains. With Through a Glass Darkly, Bergman touches the divine in his own way, finally leaving us on a note of connection rather than isolation, all of the existential pain and complicated angst suddenly alleviated by one simple gesture, ‘Papa spoke to me’.

10

L'Avventura (1960)

L’Avventura 1960

In a meditation on all things temporary, Antonioni found the rhythms of cinematic language, as it needed to be spoken and related to. More than just a tale of love and loss, L'Avventura is a study on connection and disconnection, the fleeting moment, and more importantly our reaction to it. Time passes, life changes, and in the face of great change our reaction fades even faster, until we can barely remember the way things used to be. Nothing stands still in this picture, all is moving, swirling like waves crashing against the rocks, like the endless search for something or someone, like the rise and fall of the sun over the water. The shifting nature of the human mind, subjectivity and lies, even the lies we tell ourselves and want to believe so earnestly that it becomes a silent promise. At the center of it all is Monica Vitti, her far away eyes and that hair blowing in the wind, her entire body choreographed with the rhythms set forth by the narrative, skipping through life like all the rest, resisting the senseless highs, only to give in to them, and then never wanting to come back down. Antonioni does not simply show us his characters, he shows us their aura, the way they linger in the psyche even after they've left the frame, we can still see fragments of them reflected in mirrors, staying for just a moment in our eyes and mind. Ana, whose presence haunts the film long after she has vanished from us, is everywhere from the first frame to the last preserved in memory and the minds of Sandro and Claudia. Even Vitti's final statement in her performance, to simply touch her lover's hair, resembles the way that Ana used to touch him. Antonioni hits at something deep here, the way we bleed into one another, the way we become inhabited in some way by those around us. In L'Avventura all is in transient motion, and we can no sooner grasp something than it vanishes forever. Like a sunrise, we'll see many in our lives, yet we'll never see this particular one ever again.  

Here, crafted, is a different kind of love story; a story of the emotion itself; its permanence and impermanence. Though this particular love is like days in our lives; we'll see many, we'll never have this one again.  The film has a unique texture, it is high art and cheap romance, and the structure that Antonioni uses to guide us is deceptively unique as well. We begin with a short prologue (only a few minutes) that plays like a microcosm of Antonioni’s theme. Eventually it gives way to a scenario in act two that fully illustrates what we’re looking at. In the extended act three we are suddenly emotionally engaged, the theme plays out a third time, with an extra sting of loss now that we’ve become engrossed ourselves. We're introduced over and over to the lies of human interaction that play more like a solitary game with ourselves as the opponent. How cold we treat what seems permanent, how precious it seems when it vanishes. Claudia, and every character onscreen, is swept away as the waters on the island, resisting the current until the moment she's pulled in, and just like that, the wave breaks and all she wants is to be swept away again. We're left, of course, without any answers to the mysteries. Was Ana swept away? There is a moment in searching when the camera explores a dark space between the rocks, the water crashing in all direction inside, is she down there somewhere? Antonioni's camera seems constantly in motion, even when it stays still, and that's the magic in L'Avventura. The tide moves in and out, in our private worlds we grapple with the questions of why and how it carries us where it does, but the unavoidable fact that we're being moved about by the world around us remains. We're moved by the waves created by others, or perhaps Claudia just is. The strong personality of Ana, the impressionable nature of Claudia, the predator in Sandro. Could it be that in all the time he was being dominated by her that he eyed the delicate figure who orbited on the fringes? Claudia, out the window, as Ana orders him into bed. Water takes the shape of that which contains it and the rocks are hard and immovable. Deep waters hide a mystery, a shark? The rock is safety, solid ground where one can rest. The thing that wears away at the rocks and erodes them over time is the water. It is Antonioni's penchant for playing each of these elements as equals in the scene, leading his audience to consider each in its own characteristic and manner, that holds his cinematic language. Ana, Claudia, Sandro, the rocks, the water, the sunrise, the ever-encroaching modern world that would cut tunnel through rock and sail about the waves on yachts. Claudia awakes the morning after Ana’s disappearance to find a cold and chilling sunrise. She opens the shutters and retreats, but the camera stays, fixed on the cosmic episode. The underlying stimuli takes center stage, drawing us away from character. The distant universe turns and rotates whether we are there to see it or not, we are observer, it is unaffected. Claudia was never the focus of this shot at all, she is only there to open the shutters so that we may experience the moment. So intricate a construction is L'Avventura that we barely notice its construct, its seams or its mortar. Much is made of the artist and the wealth class, eating up the terrain, leaving broken hearts and waste in their wake, pouring ink over the artist's sketches. It is simultaneously the talking point of the pseudo-intellectual, the sexual draw for the wealthy female and the envious object of deserved destruction for the wealthy male. Is it the intersection between full, living, breathing humanity and a bored and overfed inhuman class of consumers? Claudia, untainted, walks among them, playing pretend and dancing to pop music, letting the spectacle of modern life and the strong personalities fill her plain existence. She wears a dark wig, like Ana, remarking with pleasure that she looks like someone else. When she dances to that song, she exists in each frame whether she is physically present or not; we see her in reflection, even her shadows seem to cast their alluring spell. Perhaps Sandro remembers a time when he himself was that way, before Ana, and like all parasites, seeks the vibrant life of a new host. 

The adventure here is life itself, and like the best of cinematic poetry, Antonioni makes a grand and sweeping adventure out of the mundane. He also makes little attempt to rein in the sprawling mystery of it all. We follow our instincts, we move impulsively, we look at each other rather than into the mirror, rather than into the mystery, rather than into the abyss, rather than into that swirling darkness in deep waters. For Sandro, by those final moments, Claudia's eyes which once held a new and exciting escape have now become one such mirror. For Claudia, the feeling she resisted for so long cannot dissolve quickly. As she reaches out, Antonioni leaves us with the final image. On the one hand, a brick wall, on the other an endless horizon, and a dormant volcano. Each carefully crafted image of beauty must cut to the next, eventually we must fade to black, L'Avventura's dreamy exploration of transience swells with the music and is extinguished. Our characters continue to grope in the dark, looking for another to hold onto, an answering bell tower across the city. There seem to be mysteries lurking here, mysteries so deep and existential that they dare not speak of them for they fear to even conjure the thought. L'Avventura may, in many ways, be the summation of life as avoidance, indulging ourselves in the warmth of what we do understand when the questions prove too deep. Always looking for what we want to find, ignoring what we do find. Time ticks away, the sun rises, we fall in and out of love, we find out slowly that some answers are not for us to know. Those among us closer to the mysteries can conjure a shark in our imagination and then vanish right before our eyes. What L'Avventura is truly about, we never see on screen, because we've never seen it in life either. It can't be photographed. L'avventura is about the mysteries.