I ran across a disc of the films I made in college, so I figured I’d upload them to YouTube. Now I just need to scrounge up that VHS of the stuff I made in high school and get it digitized so I can treat it similarly.

Cash Flow

This was a silent film assignment to get us acquainted with the equipment and basic storytelling.

Dialogue Sequence

This film assignment was more concerned with writing dialogue and camerawork than the first one.

Don’t Be Curious

Shot on Super 8mm color film stock, we had a limited amount of film, and had to plan and ration its use. The result is fairly disjointed since we ran out of film.

Vice Versa

Intermediate film project on 16mm Black & White. These films only made it to the rough cut stage, as the pre-production and production itself were the stressed items instead of post-production. Neither of us were very happy with the outcome, we never really liked our story, and all the other ideas got turned down.

Hammer to Fall - 2002 Notre Dame Fencing Video

I made this for my teammates at the end of the 2002 season. Not an assignment. I made this kind of thing fairly often in high school as well.

Pressure - 2003 Notre Dame National Championship Fencing Video

Same deal for my senior year.

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #420: Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur.

After quite a long hiatus from watching Criterion Collection films [and an abortive reentry with Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming], I got back into the swing of things with this charmingly menacing film by Agnès Varda. Foremost, the film is beautiful to watch, with shifts in color signaling shifts in theme, and a subjective cinematography that further refines the viewer’s attention to exactly the bits that Varda is interested in us being interested in. Often a series of zip cuts will alert us to a character’s state of mind by showing us at what they are looking. For the most part those swift bits of ephemera are exactly what the character isn’t paying attention to, like the first time François visits Emilie’s apartment, he looks at everything but her, though we know she’s the only thing on his mind. A similar tactic with a different result is used the first time they go on a date. He stares at her chest while all else is out of focus and she speaks to him, he is out of focus while talking as she observes the couple behind him.

But for all of the quick cuts and strange uses of focus, the film proceeds at a stately pace and seems to cover much more diegetic time than one short summer. I think much of this feeling is accomplished through the editing, short scenes that consist of long takes result in cuts that elide time only, leaving space to be filled by the moments on screen. At one point a series of extreme close-ups illustrate the ping-pong progression of François from wife to mistress and back. The grace of the editing is further enhanced by the use of still lives. shots are framed and held in such a way that the mise-en-scène becomes a character; a rumpled bed, a kitchen window, a flower arrangement, all are signifiers for the true state of things. Lastly, an entire paper could be written on the use of Mozart; he isn’t a character in the film, but his music serves as narration and underscore for the emotional aspects of the storyline. I’ll leave it at that. It is better experienced than described.

The story starts out in mundanity and continues in this vein for the majority of the film. This focus on everyday activity is the strongest emotive force; it sucks the viewer in with recognition and betrays the viewer with the insidious same. It is a story about a happy family and the happy husband/father who happily starts a happy affair because he is so filled with happiness. It eventually all comes out in the wash, with fairly predictable consequences, but the final few bits of the film turn the mundane into a psychological horror show for the viewer [but not for the characters]. This masterstroke acts something like a warning for those who are looking for one, but seems more akin to documentary than morality play to me.

• Drought de Seigneur - by Carloss James Chamberlin
• Gerald Peary interviews Agnès Varda
• Criterion Collection Database info
• Agnès Varda European Graduate School Lecture [6 parts]

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #39: Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter.

While this is another Seijun Suzuki gangster film, it is vastly different from Branded to Kill on just about every point. Most notable is the use of bright swathes of single colors in different scenes; the same set might be yellow, then fuchsia, then white at different points in the film, and the color often changes in response to actions from the characters. The film is less gritty and psychologically compelling than Branded to Kill, with more of a 1960s pop-culture vibe, complete with its own mawkish pop ballad that various characters sing throughout the film. Despite this much more lighthearted tone, there is still significant tension surrounding the main character’s role in a complicated gang war.

This film is a good data point for making an argument that Yakuza films are just updated samurai flicks. The main character, Tetsuya, is the equivalent of a ronin, except that while he thinks he’s left his gang, he’s still being used by it as a lightning rod to undermine other gangs in places outside of Tokyo. This is fairly superficial to the main focus of the film, which is Tetsuya’s process of self-actualization, but the twain meet in the final shootout. The film’s excellence is due to how stimulating each scene is, due in large part to the aforementioned color schema, and fleshed out with the constant plot twists, musical interludes, stylized battles and preternatural abilities of the various gunmen in the film.

The complications of the plot are revealed in snippets much like manga or anime, the rapid changes and reversals are confusing, but slowly congeal into an emotional tenor that reflects Tetsuya’s growing cognizance and disgust with his status as a pawn of the crime lord he looked to as a father-figure. It gets a bit confusing at times, there is another assassin, who looks a bit like Tetsuya, named Tetsuzo [both of them are called Tetsu at various times in the subtitles] which made me think that there was a weird multiple personality subtext going on. This film’s place in the Criterion Collection fits a specific niche of Japanese filmmaking that is usually overlooked. It is easy to see how Suzuki drove his studio’s batshitinsane, his stylized creations are awesome, but a definite trend away from the sure-shots that studios usually like best.

• Criterion Essay by Manohla Dargis
• The Criterion Contraption Review
• KFCC Review
• Deep Focus Review
• Love HK Film Review

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #38: Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill.

Watching a Japanese B-movie was a great way to get back into the swing of Criterion reviews. This is the first Seijun Suzuki film I’ve seen, but it reminded me very much of Samuel Fuller, and it is even a bit like Shock Corridor in its portrayal of psychological trauma. The protagonist is Hanada, the third best yakuza assassin, and the film sticks with his ironic disintegration into madness throughout. At first the film is quite hard to follow, mainly because it is often difficult to determine whether we’re in his subjective frame of mind or whether actual plot-oriented action is occurring. The irony kicks in because the assassin is convinced that he’s going to win and become Number 1, though he obviously becomes less and less stable and capable as the film progresses. In retrospect, the washed-up assassin we meet in the beginning of the film is a foreshadowing of Hanada’s fate.

Suzuki’s dramatic cinematographic stylings offer profound and sometimes startling character insights; often serving as a reflection or counterpoint to Hanada’s self-absorbed obliviousness. All of the other characters have no existential qualms, they know exactly where they stand in relation to the world they inhabit; so Hanada’s ambition is almost aberrant in this environment. The tepid screenplay dialogue becomes polysemous and intriguing in this context, as no one seems to know what the other is truly saying. There is no trust and little understanding between the characters, so every attempt at communication is fraught. There is also a darkly comedic tone to the plot that alternates between being noticed by the characters and completely ignored by them. Number 1 is the only character who truly knows exactly what is going, even unto meta-cognizance, as if he knows that he’s in a film and what the director is trying to do with it and him.

It seems that the film has little to say as an ultimate moral; there are no sympathetic characters, so their deaths don’t mean much to the viewer, except in the aforementioned darkly comedic manner. The environment in which they lived was too violent and chaotic for any sort of sustainability or continuity, they’re all living on borrowed time. The frequent salacious and violent power-struggle sex acts provide another data point to strengthen this claim. It is certainly a much more accurate Japanese film culturally, instead of offering stylized, cliché or stereotypical portrayals more in line with Hollywood’s MO, Branded to Kill is vulgar in the word’s most literal and complimentary sense.

• Criterion Essay by John Zorn
• Criterion Contraption Review
• Midnight Eye Review
• YouTube Clips:
  • Clip 1
  • Clip 2
  • Clip 3
  • Clip 4

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #36: Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear.

I no longer have any Criterion Collection films queued up at the library. After the inundation I’ve had with them over the last few weeks, I think it is time to take a bit of a break. Thankfully, the last film before this sabbatical was another suspenseful masterpiece by Henri-Georges Clouzot. The film is a hodge-podge of languages, French, English, Italian, Spanish and the odd German now and then; the polyglot atmosphere is one to be expected in a place where risky business pulls risk takers in for a chance to make a fortune. Like any boom town, Las Piedras has more bums than boomers, petty men too poor to leave, desperate for any chance that will enable them to do so. The first hour of the film is a necessary exposition of this desperation, in addition to important personality quirks and relationship establishment that will amplify in the more suspenseful nitroglycerin transport scenes. We learn about the vaguely homoerotic love triangle between Mario and Luigi [No, I am not kidding] that is broken up by the appearance of Jo. Mario’s disdain for Linda [once again played by the knockout Vera Clouzot, in more see-through clothing] is probably the greatest sign of his loss of perspective based on indolent disgruntlement.

That the men are stuck in this predicament is based mainly upon their lack of citizenship in an unnamed South American country. The bullying, morally bankrupt presence of an American oil company doesn’t help matters, and there are multiple quotes that illustrate just what Clouzot thinks about this sort of corporate shenanigan. Where there is oil, Americans are quick to follow. Living in the hell that is Las Piedras, the four aforementioned men plus a German guy named Bimba make a deal with the devil [the Southern Oil Company] to drive two trucks full of hellfire [nitroglycerin] across hell to put out a fire. If they make it, they’ll get enough dough to leave Las Piedras far behind. The only problem is the slightest bump will explode the nitro. Obstacles include a 40 mile dash across something called “the washboard”; a hairpin turn involving a rotten bridge, blowing up a huge boulder in the middle of the road [and then pissing on the spot where it used to be], and driving through a 3′ deep lake of petroleum, which is all that is left of one of the trucks after it explodes. Like all deals with the devil, no one makes it out alive, no matter how safe they might seem. Especially once the distortion of constant fear sets in and you start to feel safe in thumbing your nose [or John Thomas] at the devil.

The wages of fear turn love to hate, uncover cowardice and pretty much ruin everything they can. As one man quotes earlier in the film:

You don’t know what fear is. But you’ll see. It’s catching. It’s catching like smallpox. And once you get it, it’s for life.

Most of the money quotes are in Dennis Lehane’s essay, which says pretty much everything that one needs to say about this film. What struck me about it was how its implicit and explicit cultural critiques are just as applicable fifty years after the film was made, especially in regard to immigrant labor issues and American corporate policy [and, by proxy, American policy as a whole] in regard to oil. And from an existential standpoint, the film is just as absurd and Camusian as Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits. Clouzot knows we’re all doomed, and the only way to deal with the irony of risking death for a uncertain future is to laugh all the way to the grave.

• Criterion Essay by Dennis Lehane
• Culture Vulture review
• Roger Ebert Review
• Reelviews review
• Deep Focus review
• Criterion Contraption review
• Senses of Cinema on Clouzot
• YouTube: Trailer

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #35: Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques.

This movie is amazing. I’m not one for horror movies, because I never get scared, but the ending sequence of this film even creeped me out. Pretty much any time you hear anything about this film there will be the inevitable comparisons with Hitchcock and the statement that this film inspired him to make Psycho. Thankfully I haven’t seen Psycho yet and am therefore unqualified to talk about that. What I am qualified to talk about is the total awesomeness of this film. These two women, a wife and mistress, plot and kill the man who abuses them and rapes them and beats them. They’ve got a great alibi and all that, they dump the body into the dirty swimming pool of the boarding school they run/work at. The pool gets drained and the body is nowhere to be found. Then people and things start happening that insinuate that Monsieur de Lassalle is still alive and kicking. This must be impossible, since he was drugged, drowned and then held underwater all night by a big bronze statue.

Clouzot’s extreme filmmaking excellence is so effortless that it is hard to feel the suspense creeping up on you until the money shot at the end. This shot was so good I had to watch it about a dozen times. You can see it in the YouTube clip linked at the end if you don’t mind spoiling the movie for yourself. Basically what happens [and this isn't a spoiler] is that Mrs. de Lassalle thinks someone is in the school at night and is creeping down the hallway at night. She puts her back to a door which we know someone is behind and look-listens her attention down another hallway. Then the camera pans away from her and slowly tracks around to reveal the extent of the hallway. It doesn’t sound too spectacular but it works on so many levels that for me it is definitely the money shot of the film, no matter what came after it.

The reason this shot is so spectacular is because on top of all the traditional weight of suspense embodied in the “what’s down the darkened hallway” cliché we have the dramatic irony of knowing where figure of suspense is located; right behind the heroine. When the camera moves away from her there is a torturous foreknowledge that something horrible is going to happen to her, and that we won’t get to see it! The viewer, at the height of suspense and tension in the movie, is essentially told that they will get no satisfaction. Then the movie kicks back into gear and we eventually do get satisfaction, but that pan and track would have made the movie worth watching even if all the rest of it had sucked. Plus, Vera Clouzot, who played Mrs. de Lassalle is quite attractive and wearing a see-through nightgown. Clouzot’s reference to actors as “instruments” is not as insulting as it seems, for these instruments, it is an honor to be held in the hands of a master.

• Criterion Essay by Danny Peary
• Salon article by Michael Sragow
• Criterion Contraption Review
• YouTube Clips: Trailer, The Murder, Creepy as Shit Twist-ending Finale

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #30: Fritz Lang’s M.

Fritz Lang always blows my mind. The precise craftmanship in all of his films, the exactly correct framing for a shot, the inspired, slight, understated camera movements, the chiaroscuro and beauty of the black and white would be worth watching in a film without anything resembling a plot. But Lang is not merely good at one or two aspects of filmmaking. He is good at making films, complete worlds unto themselves. M is a world of suspicion, where neighbors are encouraged in paranoia and tale-bearing, where the innocuous becomes sinister, and a budding fascist government controls the public through its efforts to find and stop a faceless enemy. It was made in 1931, anticipating the Third Reich by a few years. That’s just the macro level. On the micro level, the psychological portrait of a child-killer is immediately abhorrent and understandable, and the steps into Hans Beckert’s [played wonderfully by Peter Lorre] mind are so well-written, portrayed, apt and surprisingly potent that the film, which is largely run-of-the-mill police procedural for the most part, culminates in an unexpected explosion of emotion that a viewer is left with something approximating a thousand-yard stare.

If we have to pick one word for this film to be about, it is likely repression. The reason Beckert acts as he does, even though he knows he is mad and should not, is because he has no option in his society but to repress his reprehensible desires. Even a verbal expression of his desire to have sex with little girls and then murder them is so outside the norm that it would likely cost him his life or at least a few teeth. Stuck as he was, forced to internalize and cocoon himself from the everyday of everyone else, it is unsurprising that he would essentially disappear, so innocuous that no clues appear apart from his habit of whistling Peer Gynt as he seeks new prey. Similarly, his writing of a letter to the police, and then the papers attests to his desire, no matter how now malformed, to have communication with society at large. This is all possible to learn without actually seeing his face, or hearing him speak. Sound was a relatively new feature in film at this time, and its ambient use by Lang, its appropriate and heightening omissions, and its laconic dialogue make the final soliloquy by Beckert all the more effective.

The fact that even the criminals, societal edge-cases themselves, want to destroy Beckert with no qualms is telling to his extreme deviance. Yet, when he explains the motivations and guilt that drive and torment him, heads nod even among the kangaroo court. These are people who know what it is to sin, though for the most part they can control it. The coda is so terse that it was either meant to be that way or some of the missing footage belongs at the end of the film, but no matter the reason, it attests simultaneously to the paradoxical ethical and reasoning satisfaction of the rule of law and the passionate, emotional dissatisfaction of justice not being served. The tale of serial killer becomes analogous to the life of every person, only taken to an extreme; and the character sketch of a doubly fear-driven society adds another facet to Lang’s idea that vice and viciousness are all too easily encouraged with any person.

• Criterion Essay by Stanley Kauffmann
• Criterion Contraption Review
• Fritz Lang’s M
• ‘M’: Fritz Lang’s Dark Masterpiece, Still Shocking After All These Years
• M (Murderer Among Us) a film by Fritz Lang [Plenty of Stills]
• ImagesJournal Review
• Jonathan Rosenbaum Review
• Senses of Cinema on Fritz Lang
• Broken Projector Review
• Watch the whole movie on Google Video
• Watch and Download the whole movie from Archive.org

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #37: Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits.

Woops. This movie totally didn’t do a damn thing for me. And usually I really like Terry Gilliam. I would have preferred something like The Adventures of Baron Munchausen as the Criterion pick, if they were going to go with a Gilliam kid’s movie, since that film is both entertaining, wonderful and well made. Time Bandits doesn’t seem like any of those to me, but I’m hoping that it was necessary practice for Gilliam in order for him to produce Munchausen. It is a pretty good children’s film, although the characteristic Gilliam darkness might focus the demographic on older children. A younger one might not understand the whimsical Napoleon, the technocratic declamations of Evil or cope with the explosive ending of the parents. The film certainly doesn’t strike me as something funny. Silly, definitely, children will laugh at the dancing dwarves, but actual humor is rarely to be found. It is Monty Python without the punch.

The filmmaking is Gilliam™; a sort of steampunkesque magical realism, where things like knights breaking through wardrobes in 20th century Britain seem plausible mainly because the sets are as banal as real life and the future already appears obsolete. What I mean is that a viewer doesn’t have to suspend disbelief to see and enter into a room that looks like what any boy’s room looked like in 1981, and when the magic occurs, it is the type of magic that a boy would imagine happening in his room. Gilliam never dives too deeply into the rich territory he presents. Instead the constant flitting about allows him to keep the film at a level that children can understand and that also appears to be a bit dreamlike; setting up the “it was only a dream, or was it?” cliché ending.

It often seem like Gilliam keeps making movies in attempts to either elucidate a complicated thought or pin down a specific worldview that is his Truth. He’s ambitious, in the respect that his goal appears to be a unified theory, whereas other directors are content with the explication of a small piece of truth. Gilliam is a philosopher who accidentally became a filmmaker and uses that medium as his thesis vehicle. He certainly seems to express a Camusian existentialist absurdity, focused less on the absurdity of existence period, and instead on the absurdity of existence now. And while this idea that humans waste their lives convincing and dreaming about better things provides frustration, the fact that these fantasy escapes are often better than actual life, and the fact that Gilliam is a creator and purveyor of such fancifuls is an irony that I am certain Gilliam is aware of.

• Criterion Essay by Bruce Eder
• Criterion Contraption Review
• Screenonline Review [subscription required for clips and other goodies]
• Terry Gilliam at Senses of Cinema
• Fanzineish review at Sweatpants Erection
• YouTube Trailer

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #43: Peter Brook’s Lord of the Flies.

It is tough getting children to act well; just ask anyone who’s ever had to get children to act well. A vast majority of the cast in Lord of the Flies couldn’t act their way out of a wet paper bag, but thanks to Peter Brook’s careful planning and choreographing of key scenes, and relaxed improvisational allowance in others, the awkward acting ability morphs into an appropriate skittishness for adolescent maroons. This adaptation is well on the mark of the book, with an added intensity of visceral imagery and psychological warfare that only film can provide so effectively. The main strength of the film is that it was shot entirely on location, apart from the opening montage, and the reality of the island setting feeds into the reality of the characters’ development. Without the imposing hand of civilization, regressing to a wild and savage state becomes easy.

Lord of the Flies is not only a tract about the importance of civilization, but also an interesting thought-experiment on the emergence of new cultural forms. In the film, this is noticeable fairly soon, as the political rifts between the two leading boys, Jack and Ralph, are a microcosm of international political strife. Similarly, the creation of ritual chants and activities to ward off the beastie, and Jack’s clever manipulation of their fear to maintain control have contemporary parallels in our own country. This is no new trick, but its efficacy ensures its continued use. The cognitive dissonance and linguistic lacunae in their vocabulary after the first murder takes place is also telling in terms of their fear. Similarly, the development of face-paint and little to no clothing are marked changes from their initial school-boy attire.

Still, there are similarities between before and after. The choirboys become the hunters and their discipline, organization, and loyalty as the latter is due directly to their training in the former. They are also the ones who create and enforce the cultural progression of the tribe of boys, while Ralph and Piggy, who’ve maintained their reason to some extent, are increasingly ostracized. All of this terror comes through strongly through the use of liberal cutting and realignments in the editing room, and the sheer amount of footage Brook had on hand to pick and choose from. The final scene is so abhorrent , as Ralph flees the other youths on all fours, much like the pig they are convincing themselves he is, that the appearance of white socks and matching deck shoes of adult proportions, and the adult that is wearing them is a great relief. The monster we’ve only caught glimpses of, the monster that was about to appear in full and terrible force, especially because of its familiarity, is slain just like that.

• Criterion Essay by Peter Brook
• Site dedicated to the film
• Exhaustive Lord of the Flies site
• Criterion Contraption Review

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #46: Irving Pichel, and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s The Most Dangerous Game.

As soon as this film kicked in, I realized that it was an adaptation of Richard Connell’s short story that I’d read years ago, loved and lost. So, I was excited to see how it would play out. The adaptation is fairly faithful, with the seemingly always necessary addition of a love interest [Hurrah Fay Wray!] to make it a bit more mass-appealing. The only downsides to this additive are the super-annoying brother and the overuse of poorly done soft focus anytime the camera got near Ms. Wray. Clocking in at 62 minutes, the film is also a bit on the short side. After two British by British adaptations Lean on Dickens in Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, the brashness and lack of subtlety in this American production is quite a change. In the first 8 minutes there are at least half a dozen intimations of doom and some immediate cosmic irony; a shipwreck, explosion and a couple of shark attacks. It is almost hilarious in its blatancy.

But, this is a horror movie, from Hollywood’s Golden Age so we’re supposed to be scared. The protagonist is a famous big game hunter and author so we know he’s capable of surviving a shipwreck on a small island in the South Pacific. Dude ends up at the fortress of a lunatic Kossack and his crazy cohorts, discovers a herd of Great Danes that look like they were recycled [in costume] 27 years later in The Killer Shrews and a drunk New Yorker that you want to be murdered about 2 minutes after his introduction. It is apparent right from the getgo that all the non-shipwrecked folks are bloodthirsty degenerates, but Our Hero is so wooden and bad acting that he doesn’t buy anything until he sees the shriveled heads in the trophy room. This discovery, and the welcome murder of Annoying Drunk American Guy, get dude booted out with a hunting knife and Fay Wray to take care of in the harsh jungle. Fay Wray’s presence is a bonus, because her dress gets skimpier and more falling-offier in every scene.

Dude wins and Kossack guy dies, of course. Fay Wray and hunter dude boat off into the sunset. What is startling and ahead of its time for the film, is due mainly to the story. It is a fairly effective argument against big game hunting and animal cruelty. By placing a human in that same situation, Our Hero realizes that being hunted is not the same as being the hunter. This ends up making his final fight with Count Kossack more interesting than usual because he has a light in his eye like a wild animal might have. So while his acting was pretty terrible throughout, he mitigates that to some extent at the end. If you can’t tell, I wasn’t too impressed with the film. The print Criterion got its hands on wasn’t that good, and the flaws in the filmmaking are consistent enough that it is obvious that either Pichel or Schoedsack didn’t really have a handle on movie-making. It would have been a great film without those hiccoughs [and 20 minutes more plot to cud on].

• Criterion Essay by Bruce Kawin
• Read Richard Connell’s short story
• Some interesting production tidbits at The Curmudgeon
• Criterion Contraption Review

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #32: David Lean’s Oliver Twist.

Two years after David Lean’s Great Expectations, Alec Guinness is back in another Dickens adaptation. This time he’s very aged through makeup and a giant prosthetic nose [that got the film denounced as anti-Semitic], but his portrayal of Fagin really shows off his particular acting chops. His struck posed eccentricity steals the show in every scene he’s in, although sometimes the beautiful Nancy gives him a run for his money. I’m only familiar with the Oliver Twist tale in terms of modern cultural references, like Chef Boyardee commercials. Yet it seems as if the same [albeit small] issues that were found in Great Expectations are here as well. Namely, the inconsistent use of intertitles as narrative cues, and obvious plot excisions to remain true to the core story. Where this film astounds is in the cinematography. Much more varied than Great Expectations, dutch angles, subjective camera-work and amazing approximations of natural light make the film beautiful to watch even when the action gets a bit boring and predictable.

The artistry that I claimed hard to find in most of Lean’s work is always evident here. From the German Expressionist reminiscent London exteriors, to metaphorical shots that reflect pain or violence, like the opening scene’s shot of thorned branches cut to a woman in labor pains, to a later scene where a woman’s murder happens offscreen while a dog scrabbles and yelps to run out of the room. Where Great Expectations was psychologically charged, Oliver Twist is more concerned with physical abuse. Although the film is quite violent, however, it never really seems as though Oliver has it that badly off. Especially since we know how tired the trope of down-on-his-luck makes good is. This isn’t the fault of the movie, but a necessary expectation derived from the legacy of Dickens’s influence on English literature and story-telling as a whole.

The controversy engendered by this film was mostly concerned with the anti-Semitism implicit in Fagin’s character. There really isn’t any way to soften it more than Alec Guinness’s portrayal managed. Fagin isn’t so much a bad character as one to be pitied; his obvious care for his pickpocket charges is just twisted by avarice. The fact that he is Jewish is incidental to this, but unfortunate since it does play to certain stereotypes. Coming as quickly as it did on the heels of World War II [distributed in 1948], the timing for the release of the film could certainly have been a bit more tactful. Nevertheless, the classic-status of Oliver Twist as a novel and its trickle-down to this film in particular will leave these thorny problems to crop up each time someone decides to make a great adaptation of the work.

• Criterion Essay by Michael Sragow
• YouTube Trailer
• Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist in an easy-to-read HTML format
• Criterion Contraption Review

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #31: David Lean’s Great Expectations.

Upon seeing this version of Great Expectations, I’m fairly sure that I’ve seen it previously. As book-to-movie adaptations go, it suffers from the normal malaise of truncation, but not so much as other stories, since the verbose Dickens is involved. Alec Guinness has a supporting role, his first screen performance of any note, and is so bloody young that one’s mind is boggled. My generation was introduced to Sir Alec via Star Wars, near the end of his acting career, so it is doubly surprising for me to see him at the beginning of it. David Lean is a director with which I have some trouble discovering auteuristics, those tricks of the trade that become attributive of style to each great one. David Lean certainly is a great one, but his filmmaking strengths come not from his departures from conventional filmmaking, but his fidelity to them. His films are so good because they immerse you into the story, make you forget about the fiction of the silver screen so wholly that the full force of the narrative can be felt.

The narrative of Great Expectations rang with much more psychological terror and abuse than when I saw it at a less experienced age. The viciousness of Estella and the unwitting infatuation of Pip are like vinegar and baking soda, they can’t help but react together. The many strings and sub-plots weave such complexity that it is almost second nature to feel that audiences of the day were likely better able to appreciate that depth of filmmaking, which is a rare commodity coming out of Hollywood these days. It was probably rare then as well, but the post-modern ambiguous ending that would culminate a similar film today is no where to be found. In Dickens day, people wanted everything shipshape when they closed their book. Lean is his namesake and well-done at that, in this instance. He has excised enough material to make the film intelligible and not boring, while retaining just enough to guide the viewer to where he should linger.

There are, of course, stumbles in this effort. Often the transitions from skin-crawly creepy scene to light-hearted indolence are jarring, and the motivations and history of a few characters are woefully but necessarily shunted aside. Some of the clichés of adaptation-cinema are present as well, although inconsistently. The open-book at the beginning, exactly quoted passages from the book, and voice-over narration are present, but inconsistent. The filmmaking is excellent however, and the approximation of candle-light is a testament to the excellence of the lighting crew Lean put together. It is possible to sense something like frustration on Lean’s part; it seems as if he knows he could get more pathos out of the same material if he wasn’t bound to the task of adapting a novel, something that is difficult at best, and impossible at worst. Like trying to film Don Quixote, for instance. I have three more adaptations to watch in the box set that came from the library, so it is time to get started on those, already.

• Criterion Essay by Adrian Turner
• Great Expectations in Film and Television 1918 to 1998
• Senses of Cinema article
• Criterion Contraption review
• YouTube clip of the opening sequence

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #34: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev.

For a film named after and about a single man, Rublev is remarkably absent. Instead Tarkovsky exposes and lingers on specific events that intertwine and illuminate the life of Russia’s most famous icon painter. A chance encounter with a jester, the observation and unwitting participation of a pagan ritual, the casting of a bell - all are significant moments in the intellectual, spiritual and moral development of Rublev; and right along with this, the hand of Tarkovsky adds simple, perfect, brushstroke moments to emphasize the lesson that Rublev is about to learn. The wide aspect ratio [2.35:1] does less to stretch the shot arrangements and acts more as a focus, mainly because the long takes and extended pans and tilts Tarkovsky was so fond of make it seem as if the film was matted in post production. The extremities of distance that appear in shot after shot, and the surprising introductions and revelations this technique allows, often give the film a disturbingly oneiric feel. There are times when the viewer might be watching Rublev’s imagination, but transitions to and from the actual and the flashback are so smooth as to be nonexistent, and a viewer is left filled with the same sense of doubt that consumes the protagonist.

In a similar fashion to Rublev’s physical absence, we never see him do the painting he is so famous for. Mostly we are treated to discussions on aesthetics that would appear superficial to anyone who isn’t concerned with the effect their art will have on the immortal souls of all who view it, or the most spiritually accurate ways to portray a saint or Biblical anecdote. The film ends before Rublev makes his way to Trinity monastery, as an old man, to complete his most famous work. The fact that Tarkovsky deliberately ignores the most well-known fact of Rublev’s life in favor of apparently tangential notes actually makes the appreciation of the Rublev oeuvre more refined. Rublev becomes a man who is tortured by the very gift that makes him famous and allows his best effort to glorify God. He sins, terribly, in his own eyes, and gives up speech and painting for decades as penance. Only when he encounters himself in a gifted young man does he realize that his talent and its accompanying terrors belong together, and that by denying them he denies God. Really, only then, do we see him relax, or realize that throughout the film, no matter when we’ve seen Rublev, he has been taut as piano wire.

Politically and historically, the film was immediately banned in the USSR upon release. This kind of thing always interests me in an aggravating way. It is hard for me to understand how so much of Russia’s artistic production that was antagonistic to the Soviet cause got made in the first place, likely with state-funding. And how their makers often didn’t get into trouble. Andrei Rublev doesn’t seem like a particularly politically offensive film; although it seems to indicate what has held through the centuries, Russians peasants are dirt-poor and crushed beneath the petty squabbles of the nobility. To jump to the wrong continent for a trenchant phrase: “When two elephants are fighting, the grass is what suffers.” Which is certainly true in this film. Whether the violence and bickering of the Princes, to the Tatar invasions, the poor can’t win for losing. Tarkovsky works hard to make this violence and its everyday callous expectation come through, and it does effectively, mostly through the auspices of animal cruelty. In such a world as Rublev lived in, it is not surprising he was so conflicted in the exegesis of his work. This is a fabulous movie.

• Criterion Essay by J. Hoberman
• Senses of Cinema article
• University of Chicago Chronicle review with stills
• Decent Films Review
• Andrei Rublev: Religious Epiphany in Art
• Deep Focus Review
• Comprehensive Tarkovsky at Nostalghia.com
  • Tarkovsky on Rublev
  • Unpublished interview with Tarkovsky on Rublev
• Criterion Contraption Review
• 20 YouTube Clips

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #26: John Mackenzie’s The Long Good Friday.

The Long Good Friday stars Bob Hoskins and contains a Gayish Pierce Brosnan. It was made before I was born, but having seen it, I believe that Guy Ritchie loves this movie. Maybe because the film is argotful of the London underground, and films like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, and characters like Don Cheadle plays in the Ocean’s franchise echo so strongly with the natural cadence, of bob [Hoskins] and weave. It is a gangster film only loosely, and even 27 years after it was made, the political subtext involving the IRA and hands-dirty political corruption is what is most obvious. We don’t find out that it is the Irish causing Harold [Hoskins] to have such a long Good Friday, but we do discover a sincere respect for the effective tactics of the IRA, if not quite an outright endorsement of them.

Hoskins is meant to be the hero, as much as a crime-lord can be; so we have to find something even more despicable to attach the rancor toward. Betrayal is the motive which allows this to happen, and when it turns out that betrayal was only apparent and accidental the cliff ahead seems inevitable. Harold has ruled London, in peace, for ten years, but in a little over 24 hours ends up so far out of his element that we have almost as complete a reversal as possible. Notwithstanding the aforementioned Gay Pierce Brosnan, there is a significant amount of homosexual subtext to the film as well. The always excellent Helen Mirren is the only female character of any substance in and entire film of gun-wielding gangsters taking showers, hugging each other, taking more showers, being stabbed by Gay Pierce Brosnan while taking showers, etc. Pierce Brosnan’s character isn’t actually gay, he just acts like it in order to stab the left-hand man and bosom-military-buddy of Harold, who actually is gay, at least in the movie. Follow me, didja?

The American Mafia is present in the form of a lawyer and some dude who is going to help fund Hoskins in his real-estate venture to make a mint buying property for the Olympic Stadium before it is built, or something. The details aren’t ever crystal, and don’t need to be. What also isn’t crystal is whether the Mafia is in cahoots, or at least contact, with the IRA who are destroying Harold’s empire. So this gangster film also raises some hairy foreign policy questions. There’s plenty of the decadence that characterized 1980s culture, sans the cocaine, since Harold “never got into narcotics.” I kept expecting a Goodfellas-esque unsanctioned drug ring after that, but it never materialized. That’s what the film excels at, the immaterial expectation, there are shadows in the London fog, but nothing clearer, even for those used to walking its streets, innit?

• Criterion Essay by Michael Sragow
• Criterion Contraption Review
• MQRE Review Roundup
• Tons of YouTube Clips
  • Clip 1
  • Clip 2
  • Clip 3
  • Clip 4
  • 11 Helen Mirren Clips

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #29: Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Despite the fact that Gheorghe Zamfir smears his panflute are all over the the score for this film, it isn’t a bad movie. It seems to be Weir’s Australian interpretation of the Lady of the Wood mythos, with liberal doses of various other fairy tales, most noticeably a swan-princess motif that is perfectly saturated throughout. I wish other films were so restrained in its use, it was a perfect accent. The film is also an autopsy of the Victorian-era, not necessarily a critique of it, but a chance to explore repression in a time where repression was considered a good thing. The first portion of the film is extremely, innocently sensual; such a good approximation of the Victorian era that some of its commonplace items would seem shocking in our more cynical time, such as the ease and abandon of love and longing looks that the schoolgirls give to each other. Before their repression becomes complete.

The flip side of the coin comes from the adults; constantly worrying about the intactness of hymens and the presence of corsets and pants, and whether or not to mention such things to the cops investigating the disappearance of a few schoolgirls [the swan-princess being one of them]. There is also a bit of class-critique going on, one of the girls at the Appleyard College is from an orphanage, she’s lost her brother, who happens to be working for some gentry not too far away. They don’t know about each other and never meet, but the differences and deferences they show when they are comfortable opposed to when they are in the presence of authority offer startling insights. Sara, for instance, barely talks at the school because she has such a low-class accent.

The disappearance of the girls, the recovery of one of them, the mystery enhanced by the Zamfirocity of the panflute create an outlet for the repressed desires of every character in the film. It is almost as if the virgins were assumed into heaven. I wouldn’t even hesitate to call this a science-fiction film, for it is apparent that there is some preternatural force at Hanging Rock that affects the mind. Although there is no answer to the mystery of the girls’ disappearance, the gap they leave in the lives of complete strangers and the yearning instilled in every heart hints at the actual meaning that Weir aimed for. Innocence is always lost.

• Criterion Essay by Vincent Canby
• Roger Ebert Review
• Review with trailer and interview information
• Extensive Fansite
• Criterion Contraption Review
• Tons of Screencaps
• YouTubage

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #24: Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low.

Almost the entire first hour of High and Low takes place in one room, but there is no lack of activity despite this fact. Just synchronizing the blocking must have taken a ton of work. The room is spacious because it belongs to Gondo, a wealthy industrialist [played by Toshiro Mifune] who is making a bid to take over his shoe company. Right after kicking out the other executive and just as he is about to send his assistant off to Osaka with 50 million dollars to complete the takeover, he gets a call from a man who has kidnapped his child and demands a $30 million ransom. Well it turns out it isn’t his kid that was kidnapped, but the chauffeur’s. The kidnapper demands the $30 million anyway. No police, unmarked bills, the usual deal. The police show up in a shoe delivery van, dressed as shoe delivery men and get to work. So we’ve got a standard police procedural, but we’re also dealing with Kurosawa.

The rub comes with the money. If Gondo doesn’t pay the ransom, the kid gets killed. If he does pay the ransom, he’ll be unable to takeover the company, and will be unable to repay all of the money he has borrowed in order to do so. There are several tense scenes where various parties struggle to rationalize this conundrum, but it really isn’t ever in doubt that he’ll fork over the cash. Not to do so would be dishonorable. Anyway, the whole friggin’ police force seems to get in on the investigation, mainly because of Gondo’s altruism. We’re talking around 100 cops working on this one case. Somehow I don’t think that would ever happen in the USA, but though this film was meant for a contemporary Japan, there are strong echoes of the clan loyalty we see in many samurai films. These echoes are deliberate and help highlight the social critique that is actually at the heart of the film.

The kidnapper lives in the slum below the cliff estate of Gondo and comes to hate the man for his affluence. This is his motive. Even the cops, as they track the movements of the criminal, note that the estate looms over the town in a patronizing fashion. The fact that Gondo worked hard to make it where he was is of no consequence. The struggle is emblematic of the adolescent-stage transition of Japan to a more Westernized economy and culture. The kidnapper is not to be considered sympathetic, but it is certainly possible to empathize with his uncomprehending hatred of newly emerging class boundaries with Gondo as its symbol. Even in the latter third of the film, which contains an extremely marked change in style, substance and acting, the kidnapper hides behind mirrored glasses when he enters into the bustling, and very Western nightlife in search of some heroin. While Gondo can adapt, and continues to do so no matter how bad things get, the kidnapper can only react negatively to his environment Thus, at the end, when he says he does not fear death, he speaks the truth. Death would be welcomed by him. His ensuing breakdown I attribute to an inability to cope with the new face of Japan.

• Criterion Essay by Chuck Stephens
• MRQE Review List
• Senses of Cinema Review
• MovieMartyr Review
• Movie Stills
• Criterion Contraption Review
• YouTube clip

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #25: Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville.

Watching this film, one of the first things I realized is that Jean-Luc Godard has no idea how to make convincing science fiction. The next thing I realized was that Godard was merely using enough of the science fiction idiom to display and enact his dialectic battle between love and logic. From this point of view, the inconsistencies and pathological inability to fully suspend disbelief are of secondary consequence to observing philosophical gymnastics that only the French are capable of. Alphaville is a city controlled by a computer called Alpha 60, whose goal is to remake humanity in his own image, purely logical and without even the slightest ability to express emotion. Alpha 60 also sounds like you’d expect a guy who smokes through a stoma to talk. Thank God the Intergalactic Secret Agent Lemmy Caution has been sent from the Outlands to do a little recon, kill a man and destroy Alpha 60 if he can. As a bonus he gets to sleep with Anna Karina.

Since this was shot in the 60s it feels pretty dated, because the sci-fi is cultural, it becomes anachronistic in its setting; whereas something like The Day The Earth Stood Still brings in all the science fiction from an extra-terrestrial source, and while dated, remains believable. Alphaville is more on the order of Philip K. Dickian, psychological trauma fraught with paranoia. Alpha 60’s omnipresence facilitates cultural comparisons to Orwell’s 1984 and David Bowie’s song Saviour Machine. At the same time, the 60s were the perfect time to find visual cognates to reflect the technological advancement of society. You’ve got to think in that frame of mind to recognize buildings that look like punch-cards though. Much like sci-fi from that period couldn’t predict personal computer or the digital age, and you end up with spacemen using slide-rules.

At one point Lemmy is interrogated by Alpha 60 to determine whether he can be successfully assimilated or whether he should be executed. He manages to present the computer with a conundrum that eventually short circuits the thing, simultaneously freeing and destroying most of the inhabitants of Alphaville. The ones who had become fully logical and emotionless, who had forgotten words like weeping and redbreast, went mad and died when the lights went out. Only those with some emotional bearing left to them had the ability to survive the death of logic in the face of universal poetry wielded by the ugly crag of a man called Lemmy Caution. Light is both safety net and the yoke of logic in Alphaville, and it is only in the dark recesses of intergalactic space, and in the human heart that emotion can find the strength to triumph.

• Criterion Essay by Andrew Sarris
• Criterion Contraption Review
• Cinematic Reflections Review
• Strictly Film School Review
• Epistemology in Jean Luc Godard’s Alphaville
• PIF Magazine Review
• Video:
  • Watch the Trailer
  • Watch a Clip
  • Watch the Whole Movie

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #21: David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers.

Dead Ringers is based on a true story about identical twin gynecologist drug addicts; both played by Jeremy Irons. The film is a psychological thriller deeply concerned with obsession, sexuality and co-dependence. Cronenberg doesn’t overdo the shots that contain both Mantle brothers, but the most effective aspect of the film is also the subtlest, there are virtually no exterior shots apart from the beginning and end. So the entire film occupies a claustrophobic internal space both physically and psychologically, and these spaces tend to reflect each other as the plot develops. The twins are Elliot and Beverly, both male, Elliot the oldest and extroverted, the businessman and marketer of the two; Beverly younger and reserved, the medical genius. They share everything, including patients, including banging patients. In particular, an actress with a trifurcated uterus named Claire Niveau. Jesus Christ, you’ve gotta love Cronenberg.

Beverly becomes attached to Claire and vice versa, until she learns that she banged Elliot initially. They break up but get back together. Beverly’s love of Claire begins to separate him from Elliot and their relationship changes in small ways at first, but when Bev starts pill-popping his personality begins to degrade rapidly. His nadir results in his attempts to operate on a using “gynaecological instruments for operating on mutant women”. Elliot has his own psychological eccentricities associated with his twinship [at one point he gets twin escorts and has one of them call him Elliot and the other Beverly]. He also attempts to score a threesome with his brother and his girlfriend. When detoxing Beverly fails, Elliot decides that he needs to start taking drugs as well to get back on the same wavelength, so they can get off the drugs together. They deserve a Darwin Award for that idea.

There is no easy resolution to the myriad questions about gender, abnormal physiology and psychology, sexual deviance and relationships that are raised in this film. The resolution instead comes in the form of an abhorred pity for the Mantle brothers and a feeling of relief that such troubled souls find their rest. Meanwhile, the casual viewer is left with the need to examine his or her own predispositions about the nature of human relationship and cultural conformation. In this sense, this film owes a debt to Tod Browning’s Freaks. The references to the first set of conjoined twins is also relevant in this context, and the moral of the film, if there is one, is that deviance from the norm has disastrous consequences, even if the deviant parties are innocent in and of themselves. Or perhaps, that the heavy pressure to conform has disastrous consequences to offer another side of the same coin.

• Criterion Essay by Chris Rodley
• 30 reviews at MQRE
• Criterion Contraption review
• Psychological Determinism in Dead Ringers by Dan Shaw
• Cronenberg on Cronenberg
• Interview with Cronenberg in 4 parts:
  1. Part 1
  2. Part 2
  3. Part 3
  4. Part 4
• Trailer

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #360: William Greaves’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm is most interesting to me because it is a experiment in which, for the most part, the people in the film know they are being experimented upon and then become participants in the experiment themselves. It is uncontrolled metafilmmaking that defies analogy by its sheer complexity. It is difficult to tell who is being authentic, who is acting, and just where the line between documentary and fiction stands. My favorite film professor probably loves this movie. Filmed in the seventies, it used egregious amounts of film, several simultaneously-filming cameras and a bunch of crappy actors constantly retaking an overblown, lurid and poorly written psychodrama.

Whether this is all deliberate or not is, initially, unknown. In fact, whether or not the whole film is scripted is or not is unknown. It might just be an excellent faux-documentary. Suspicions of this are constantly raised, especially when one of the crew members says something along these very lines, that the audience has no way of telling whether they are legitimately secreting themselves as an act of defiance, or if Greaves is just off screen directing them. The sincerity of Greaves on-screen persona is also called into question by the crew, it is said that he doesn’t act they way we see when the cameras are not rolling. One of the crewmen says that he hasn’t read the concept so many times, and is nonetheless so perspicacious that he must be lying. The crew scenes are the best parts of the film and it is certainly early reality-TV, and a bit like Project Greenlight, albeit unguided and decidedly independent. The film being filmed is supposed to be about sex, but in the crew discussions becomes more about what constitutes believable screenwriting.

So I guess it is no surprise that when someone with Hollywood clout like Steve Buscemi saw the thing and wondered where the promised Take Two was, that a new film got made. This is very very bad. Take One existed in a hermetic environment, no one knew more about the film, no one knew the truth. The resulting Take Two and a Half is utterly disappointing. Made with the help of Soderbergh, it is shot with DV cameras, has Steve Buscemi in it, and lacks all of the punch of the original and also takes away from the original’s mystery. There is a bit of tension at the end when a mimic acting coach shows up, but it was obviously staged, and while it is another example of metafilmmaking, at the same time it is like seeing the same card trick over again. Even though Buscemi meant well, Take Two and Half should have never been made. I recommend watching the first one and not the sequel, that way it will remain mindblowingly in need of analysis.

• Criterion Essay by Amy Taubin
• William Greaves Site
• Reel.com overview
• Metacritic links to 4 reviews
• MRQE review list
• YouTube clip

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #22: David Lean’s Summertime.

I didn’t like this movie. Sure, David Lean, sure Katharine Hepburn, sure Technicolor, sure boring. I think this is one of those films that doesn’t age well in terms of its accessibility to audiences. It plays pitch-perfect to pre-sexual revolution morality for the vast majority of the film; at times there are startling moments. The word sex is said! In 1955! And the laissez faire extra-marital affair is also a bit striking for the time. Perhaps there is a bit of prescience to the film in this regard. However, Hepburn’s character, Jane Hudson is a probably-virginal spinster in her late 40s who has come to Venice, somewhat subconsciously, looking for a fling. She finds one, but her Akron, Ohio bred prudity, repression of desire, and defensiveness keep her from giving in for quite a while. The first 40 minutes or so of the film are filled with her looking alternatively wistful and frightened. There really isn’t much plot apart from the sought-after golden year’s sex romp, although there is a tiny bit of pathos at the end when she must leave her Venetian shopkeeper while she still can.

Lean’s direction appears to illustrate an indecision in regard to what kind of film he is making. Much of the film functions as a travelogue, almost too touristy, and some of the shots are deliberately filmed to reflect what Hepburn is chronicling on her little 8mm [that apparently works in Technicolor!]. Then there are bits of slapstick with Hepburn’s character, she’s not good at comedy, her mishaps all seem contrived to be more about Hepburn doing comedy exclamation point, than integral parts of the film. The romance seems to have the most focus, but apart from one awesome scene where the Italian dude scolds Hepburn for being prude, it isn’t very romantic. It probably seems so very romantic for Hepburn’s character though, since she’s so inexperienced. The dramatic episodes are pretty facile, too. All in all it seems like the whole production was just having a good time filming in Venice and wasn’t too concerned with filming in Venice. The film is extraordinary in this regard. Technicolor was well suited as an homage to the city of Venice. Too bad the story itself wasn’t.

• Criterion essay by David Denby.
• Notcoming review with some good behind-the-scenes info.
• Criterion Contraption review.

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #18: Samuel Fuller’s The Naked Kiss.

Sam Fuller is widely regarded as a very masculine filmmaker; his works associated with violence, bravado, exploitation, primitiveness and vulgarity. And while those associations are correct, the masculine label is misplaced. A film like The Naked Kiss illustrates Fuller’s claim to focus on undiluted emotion, emphatically ungendered. The character Kelly is central to the story in this film, and she essentially plays the role of the archetypal female. Maybe in Wicca [something I'm only tangentially familiar with] she would be the embodiment of the Goddess. Another way to look at it would be to combine all of the defining characteristics of Greek goddesses into her form. She’s by turns wanton, vengeful, motherly, sisterly, housewifely. She is everything that anyone has ever thought about a woman. This type of embodiment translates easily into a characterization of Kelly as power. She is what the film is about, and her unconscious inability to be pigeonholed by other characters is indicative of the “moral tract” that Michael Dare mentions in his Criterion essay.

Despite this reading, the film has moments of weakness in its portrayal of Kelly. Her prostitution is equated as a sexual perversion akin to pedophilia. It is obvious that Kelly isn’t a sexual deviant, but there is a brief moment that gives the film its name when she says she can tell when a man is a pervert by the way his kiss tastes. A naked kiss, prostitutes call it. This sort of sixth sense is nothing but hokey. Even in the 1960s I suspect. Despite and because of Kelly’s multifaceted characterization, she’s the least accessible character in the film. Illimitable. It helps that the setting and other characters are so purely one-dimensional. Grantville could be Leave it to Beaver’s Mayfield, except it is even more idyllic.

Of course, the lurid plot is exactly right for exploitation cinema: prostitutes, pedophiles, small town America. Dateline could learn a lot from Sam Fuller. Kelly, though a hooker with a heart of gold, has an extremely violent streak that appears when she must defend virtue and justice; an odd trait for a prostitute, but fully in keeping with the complex and imperfect characters that are trademarks of a Fuller film. There is a scene where she shoves money into the mouth of a cathouse madam, and the fact that the madam looks like Kelly might in 15 years is startling. The framing of each shot throughout the film is as tight and claustrophobic as possible, not until the end do we get a sense of freedom and release, as Kelly leaves town to make her way elsewhere. The Naked Kiss isn’t Fuller’s best film, but it is certainly a standout in comparison to his other works and the scholarship that has been done in relation to his defining auteur characteristics. If you’re a fan of anything Fuller though, you’ll enjoy this film.

Criterion Essay by Michael Dare.
Criterion Contraption review.
San Francisco Gate article.
Dan Schneider essay.
YouTube Clips: Clip 1, Clip 2, Clip 3.

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #133: George Sluizer’s The Vanishing.

The Vanishing is a very 80s movie with a very 80s score. It is a pretty good thriller/horror, especially because of its unorthodox methodology. Much of the film is spent with detailed views of a sociopath’s life; the man who kidnaps the main character’s girlfriend and drives Rex into obsessive search mode for the next three years. There ensues a game of cat and mouse that concludes with dire consequences. The film is engrossing from a psychological standpoint, mainly for the fact that the serial killer is the most sympathetic character and the protagonist is a fairly large jackass. This juxtaposition also takes the place usually occupied by suspense, something the film largely does without. I guess one could argue that wondering what happens to the victims is suspenseful, but I honestly didn’t care so much about how they died as much as I wondered how Rex would destroy his life next.

What I found most interesting about the film were its production values. The characters don’t have makeup crews and perfect clothing, the cars are similar to what anyone would drive. It is almost like a Dogme 95 film in these respects. Mostly because this was a European co-production and they didn’t have tons of budget to blow on mise-en-scene. Instead, the quality of the film comes with the cinematography. Nothing particularly flashy, but sometimes the decision whether to make a rack focus or not has powerful effects. An example of this occurs when the killer sends Rex a postcard telling him to show up at a certain café to meet. Rex arrives with his new girlfriend and as they conversate, the killer sits at a table behind them, very out of focus, but obviously him. Rex and his skirt take off and the camera lingers on the killer, but remains out of focus. This is basically the cinematic equivalent of the unfulfilled expectations that the narrative provides. The Vanishing is a well put-together film, but not a life-changing experience. I will say that if Hollywood put as much care into its screenplays as went into this one, many of its releases would improve dramatically.

• Criterion Essay by Kim Newman
• Links to tons of reviews
• Steven Jay Schneider essay
• kamera.co.uk review
• Roger Ebert review
• Qnetwork review
• Popmatters review

THIS POST CONTAINS A PICTURE OF AN EVISCERATED CORPSE, IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE IT, DON’T READ THIS POST.

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #184: Stanley Brakhage’s By Brakhage: an anthology.

I’d forgotten how good Stan Brakhage is at the avant-garde filmmaking gig. It has been 5 years since my brief obsession with avant-garde film; I should really get back into it. There is a lot of talk [linked below] about relational spectatorship, subjectivity, deconstruction and any number of other theories that attempt to parse out what Brakhage was trying to do with his numerous films. This collection of 26 works by Brakhage, and knowing a bit about the man from the supplementary commentary on the discs, leads me to believe that the fundamental goal of a Brakhage film is to be devoid of all subjectivity and objectivity; something merely exists to be shown. His paint-films seem to approximate synaesthesia, and while I can see some merit in the assertions that Brakhage wants his viewers to see light, I think there is a more general goal here; Brakhage wants us to see things that we take for granted, or never see in the first place. I like the man more than his films, which is saying a lot. He seemed like a man with a good heart and an earnestness about him that completely threw away any pretention. He wasn’t doing avant-garde stuff to be edgy, but because it suited him.

So watching a film like The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, that shows graphic visions of autopsies, is a chance to see a dead body before it is all maked-up for viewing. Sure we hear about death and dead bodies all the time and see them on TV, but how often do we actually get to see a dead body without all the fuss we put around it. The only thing that could be closer than this film is to actually go to a morgue. Dog Star Man is his earliest masterpiece, and is the visual representation of man’s place in the universe with a bit of our ultimate futility thrown in for good measure. This is the least happy of his films, in my opinion. Tons of footage of Brakhage running up a snowy mountain carrying an axe. Tough work, two forward one back, his determination becomes admirable, but his final failure hurts just as badly. Window Water Baby Moving is an amazing document of the birth of his first child, and I was rooting on Jane Brakhage and then baby Myrrena through the whole thing. It is quite graphic too, but like his autopsy film, how often does the average person get the chance to witness a birth?

The older he got, the more refined and experimental he became. The collaged detritus of Mothlight is beautiful, and it looks as if it were made of the stuff that you pull out of the ceiling lamp shade. The Wold Shadow is a horror film, or at least ridiculously creepy, and consists of shot of a woodland over various times and has Brakhage painting or tweaking the plate or the film in such a way that it looks as if there is something moving in the wood. He says it is his homage to the God in the Wood, and it certainly should be. Much of the rest consists of paint on film, each individual frame painted by Brakhage and many of them could be considered great abstract art; when they’re animated and modified, the effect is wholly engrossing. This is what synapse firing would look like. The Dante Quartet is probably the most easily accessible of the paint-films, and Black Ice the most evocative. There is a later film with his grandchildren that is statelier and more meditative, it seems more about analyzing time than light. All in all, this anthology was extremely enjoyable, and although I wouldn’t recommend watching the autopsy film over breakfast [as I did], of all the films that he made, that one affected me the most. We miss you, Stan.

• Criterion Essay by Fred Camper
• Fred Camper’s Brakhage site
• Senses of Cinema on Brakhage
• Interview: Brakhage at Sixty
• Criterion Collection collection of links to essays on Brakhage
• Stan Brakhage on Ubu
• YouTube Madness
  • The Dante Quartet
  • Dog Star Man, Part 2
  • Desistfilm
  • The Garden of Earthly Delights
  • Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse
  • Black Ice
  • Rage Net

Hollowed, the body upon a table; no verbs for
the inanimate, a cicada shell.

And men in long coats have removed them;
peeled flesh - skull over face -
sawn through bone
cracking walnuts for the meat inside;

each soft and hidden part apprised;
the inside of your breast, the open boat
of your body sprayed clean of gristle;
blood pooling, numbered.

Those sullen limbs have
lost integrity to knife, hose,
microphone.

But who else holds the bodies of the dead;
thumbs the clayed flesh of your father;
that last and longest intimacy?

No better lover has had
such indifferent hands, no other
judge such objective compassion.

Look.
It demands only,
the act of seeing with one’s eyes.

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #379: Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp.

The Burmese Harp seems less the anti-war film it is often billed as, and more of a post-war re-evaluation of Japanese nationalism. For practical purposes there are two characters in this film, the deserter Mizushima and the rest of his battalion. After the Japanese surrender, both characters find themselves bereft and in search of a new direction now that their ideology of Imperial Japan no longer exists. This loss is compounded by their expatriation in Burma and British captivity; they are orphaned in a foreign land and unable to return to their home for healing. Because of this it is not surprising that they cling to one another; when Mizushima goes missing after an attempt to save the lives of some stalwart Japanese holdouts, the rest of the battalion spends the film concerned with his discovering his whereabouts and then convincing him to come home with them.

Mizushima’s failure to convince the Japanese at Triangle Mountain to surrender, and their resulting destruction in his presence [and his wounding], are life-changing events. He is nursed by a Buddhist monk and convinced to rid himself of the past and take vows. Yet, for a man who has sworn to start anew, he has a torturous time coming to grips with this. On his journeys he repeatedly stumbles across the unburied and unmourned corpses of Japanese soldiers. The emotional toll this takes on him doesn’t reach its peak until he arrives in Mudon and watches the burial of a British soldier with full honor. Distraught, he heads back into the wilderness to bury his dead brothers at arms, by hand. This vaguely penitential purpose brings him great respect all over Burma; instead of inflicting suffering as a solider, he endures his own to ease that of others.

I’ve not yet mentioned the role that music plays in this film, and it is an important one. The battalion captain is a trained choirmaster and in the rough times in the Burmese jungle trains his men in the ways of choral singing. Mizushima plays the role of accompanist with his Burmese harp. The music throughout the film is outstanding, and it even saves the Japanese lives on the night of their surrender, as the tune they sing is well-known to the British. At the very beginning of the film, the captain says that the ease of singing is meant for times of suffering, and there seems to be a direct correlation between his battalion’s reasonableness and rationality in contemplating surrender and their love of music. The contrast to this is the resistant honor-unto-death attitude of the Japanese at Triangle Mountain. Thus, Mizushima’s spiritual journey contains a component of tension between these two attitudes as well.

In the end the battalion and Mizushima take inevitable separate paths toward the same goal. The battalion is eager to continue in its component lives back in Japan, and Mizushima is focused on putting to rest all of his dead comrades. Everyone is moving on and coming to terms with their new lives. Mizushima’s monastic life intersected the battalion’s in a way that made him truly seem dead to the past, a silent ghost, except for the music of the Burmese harp; a reminder that there are ties that bind between culture, distance, religion and even death. This is a beautiful, wretched movie, definitely the kind of film meant for the Criterion Collection.

• Criterion Essay by Tony Rayns.
• Stylus Magazine review.
• Strictly Film School review.
• Kon Ichikawa Interview Part 1; Part 2
• Rentaro Mikuni Interview Part 1; Part 2