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]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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