Ferdy on Films, etc.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le scaphandre et le papillon, 2007)
Director: Julian Schnabel

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor of French Elle, became something of an instant legend when from inside the stroke-paralyzed, speech-robbed shell of his body, he produced a book of haunting, poetic beauty called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Originally intending to reimagine Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo with a woman as the main protagonist before the stroke, he fulfilled his book contract by describing instead the dreams, sensations, thoughts, fantasies, and emotions brought out by his condition. Filming a largely interior monologue presents huge challenges, but if anyone was likely to succeed, it was Julian Schnabel. As a artist of largely nonrepresentation images, his vision of how to film Bauby’s fantasies as well as his subjective reality stood a chance of matching up to his subject’s poetry. Janusz Kaminski, Steven Spielberg’s go-to cinematographer whose sharp, color-saturated work wouldn’t seem to be a perfect choice for this film, shot it, and there are some wrong choices in the film that I have to think are his. Yet, overall, the film’s visual sensibility is both as binding and freeing of our imaginations as Bauby’s mind was to him.

The film opens in a blur of snatched images that float and move back into the mists. We are experiencing with Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) the first disorienting moments after he emerges from a three-week coma. He finds himself in a hospital in Berck sur Mer, a place he used to visit as a boy. Now he has a medical team telling him he’ll be fine, that is, until his neurosurgeon, Dr. Lepage (Patrick Chesnais), asks “Jean-Do” to consider him a friend (to Jean-Do’s protest that he’d rather Lepage be his doctor) who has come in to tell him “the truth.” Jean-Do is completely paralyzed with a rare condition called locked-in syndrome. More shocking to Bauby is that all his utterances in response to his caregivers have been in his head, as Dr. Lepage casually announces he will have a speech therapist, Henriette (Marie-Josée Croze), who will try to bring his verbal and swallowing skills back so that he can speak and eat again. Henriette and physical therapist Marie (Olatz Lóprz Garmendia) come into the room and introduce themselves as Jean-Do haphazardly eyes their breasts, which are at his eye level.

Jean-Do’s life in the hospital begins with a tech who sews his right eye closed to prevent damage to the cornea. Jean-Do pleads against this procedure, but we watch with him in a how-did-they-do-that shot as the curved needle moves through his flesh, pulling sturdy thread behind it. After this trauma, Schnabel focuses mainly on the parts of Jean-Do’s days spent learning to communicate using his good eye to blink out words, one letter at a time, as Henriette recites the alphabet, and receiving guests.

His first guest is a man named Roussin (Niels Arestrup) to whom he gave his seat on a plane that ended up getting hijacked. Roussin spent four years as a hostage; feeling a kinship with Jean-Do’s condition, he advises him to hold onto what is most human in him to endure the ordeal. His second guest is Céline (Emmanuelle Seigner), the mother of his three children, who stays by his side even as Inès (Agatha de La Fontaine), the woman Jean-Do left her for, refuses to come to the hospital, preferring to remember Jean-Do as he was.

Jean-Do prefers to remember himself as he was, too, overseeing a photo shoot for Elle, driving with his son in his new car, visiting Lourdes with his girlfriend Joséphine (Marina Hands), whose obsession with a lighted Madonna prevented their love-making that night and precipitated their break-up. Catching sight of himself, with his drooping, drooling mouth and patched eye fills him with horror. Considering his helplessness reminds him of going to care for his invalid father (Max von Sydow), in a close and emotional scene of the younger man shaving the fussy older one. Eventually, Jean-Do decides that he must live somehow, and that is when he calls his publisher and says he wants to fulfill their book contract. Claude (Anne Consigny) is hired to learn the alphabet communication and take down the prose Jean-Do “dictates,” resulting in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Bauby likened his condition to that of a deep-sea diver, while nonetheless hearing butterflies fluttering in his head: “To hear them, one must be calm and pay close attention, for their wingbeats are barely audible.” His contrasting of the heaviness of the diver with the delicacy of the butterfly is a metaphor Bauby used to convey the silent life that continued inside the leaden uselessness of his body. Schnabel presents these images in a straightforward way, showing a diver floating underwater and a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis.

His fanciful shots that suspend Jean-Do between reality and imagining are really quite wonder, for example, recounting the history of the hospital as a place where Nijinsky was said to have leapt 12 feet in the air, and showing this feat among the nurses and orderlies. Another fantasy in which he and Claude, who is smitten with him, indulge in a food orgy compares favorably with the food-seduction scene in Tom Jones, even if it does include oysters as the obligatory aphrodisiac.

Schnabel digging into the oppressiveness of the Madonna figure on Bauby is especially effective. Showing how the electric Madonna destroyed Bauby’s relationship with Joséphine highlights what went wrong between him and Céline, whose motherly, fretful demeanor must have killed Bauby’s passion for her. Seigner is wonderful in conveying the hurt and confusion of a woman abandoned for being what women with children are supposed to be. When she has to translate Jean-Do to Inès on the phone, her pain at his longing for her is nearly unbearable.

Some of the imagery came from Schnabel’s imagination and didn’t work for me. For example, Schnabel has been quoted as saying that the collapsing front of a glacier that begins Jean-Do’s inner exploration was necessary, or there would have been no film. The image is too heavy and heavy-handed for me, and showing it in reverse in the closing credits was just weird. I also think Kaminski might have contributed some unfortunate choices, for example, showing Jean-Do’s sewn-up eye. The closing from the inside told us all we needed to know about this loss; actually showing the result on the face seems voyeuristic. In fact, in general, I preferred to inhabit Bauby’s dreams and imagination and follow his amusing and rueful musings about everything from wanting a father’s approval to wanting to feel the bodies of his children in his arms again—each thought a precious meditation on the infinite importance of the intimate moments that make us human.

The final problem I had with the film was mine alone. Amalric looks exceedingly like Robert Morse, a musical comedy star whose persona is quite at odds with Bauby’s. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t dislodge my impressions of Morse from Amalric; perhaps a failing on my part, perhaps the result of a weak performance. However, that I cared about Bauby as those who cried for him in the movie did points to me as the problem. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is an intriguing and touching tribute to one man’s perseverence and discovery of what mattered to him in his too-short life. l

Something's Wrong

Ferdy on Films has been hacked! Or something. Anyway, there are odd links throughout the site that encourage you to visit some Russian honeys. This is perhaps the natural extension of posting a positive review of How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, which is a favorite on a Russian discussion board. Anyway, we're trying to fix the problem, so please bear with us.

The Management

Plague of the Zombies (1966)/The Reptile (1966)
Director: John Gilling

By Roderick Heath

In gratitude to Marilyn and her hubby Shane for a terrific birthday present, Marcus Hearn’s Hammer Glamour, a gorgeous paean to the heyday of gothic cheesecake, I’m finally getting around to writing up several excellent works to come out of the great British house of horror, starting with two of the most sober, solid, and intelligent of their 1960s output, The Reptile and Plague of the Zombies. These were shot back-to-back on location in Cornwall by John Gilling, a stalwart British writer and director, intended to run as a double bill. They were never screened that way, but it feels right to look at them together, for they share common locations, themes, and a crucial cast member—the vivid young actress Jacqueline Pearce. Pearce would later gain a cult following playing a villianous dominatrix in Terry Nation’s late ‘70s scifi show Blake’s 7, but her brief window of mid ’60s prominence suggested someone headed for bigger things, a potential rival for Glenda Jackson as an intense brunette with acting clout.

Set in the last third of the 19th century and striking a common note of colonial evils returning to bite the British backside, The Reptile and Plague of the Zombies display the radical bent of Hammer close to the end of the studio’s golden age when it could do little wrong at the box office. Exploring in The Reptile problems of nascent feminism and waning patriarchal authority and presenting in Plague of the Zombies an explicit allegory for social exploitation, and, of course, all wrapped in the cosiest folds of Hammer’s traditional, uniquely solid approach to the fantastic and the gothic, Hammer had its fingers directly on the pop culture pulse. The shift in location to Cornwall also offered a different milieu and mood to the overused precincts of forest so many Hammer films used to suggest the stygian wilds of Mittel Europa.

Plague, written by Peter Bryan, sees an eminent professor of medicine, Sir James Forbes (André Morell) and his daughter Sylvia (Diane Clare) travel to the Cornish countryside on receiving a letter from one of Sir John’s brightest former pupils, Dr. Peter Tompson (Brook Williams), begging for aid and advice. A mysterious malady has been claiming lives in the small village where he’s set up practice with his wife, Sylvia’s school friend Alice (Pearce). Upon arrival, Sylvia is harassed by a group of fox-hunting aristocratic barbarians led by Denver (Alex Davion) when she directs them away from their prey. As they ride into the village pursuing her, they casually knock over a coffin containing the body of the latest victim of the mysterious disease, infuriating his brother, Tom Martinus (Marcus Hammond), who takes out his feelings on the visitors and on Tompson, who’s utterly at a loss. Worse still, the fraying, desperate Alice is being assaulted by nightmares and physical manifestations of supernatural influence, perpetrated by masked voodoo practitioners in a subterranean vault.

During the night, Alice wanders off, causing Sylvia to pursue her, whilst Sir James and Tompson dig up Martinus’ brother, only find the body missing from the coffin. Sylvia is ridden down and assaulted by Denver and the hunters, dragged to a remote manor house, and threatened with gang rape before their host, the autocratic local squire, Clive Hamilton (Tom Carson), intervenes. Hamilton begs Sylvia’s forgiveness of his friends, but she walks out in a fury, only to glimpse in the ruins of an old tin mine, a dead Alice being dumped by a man with the pallor of a walking corpse. Sir John soon begins to discern the dread truth: that the villagers are one by one being turned into zombies to work in Hamilton’s tin mine, and Hamilton now has his sights set on Sylvia as a prospective sacrifice to his dark, imported religion.

Whilst the references to voodoo practice as being especially revolting and disgusting and Hamilton’s exotic squad of drum-beating black servants suggest the usual hoary racist take, Bryan’s script takes thorough care to pin the villainy squarely on Hamilton as a profiteer who has gone abroad and returned with a supernatural means of exploiting workers and ensuring their servility, thus offering commentary on abuse of immigrants and strikebreaking at the same time. Hamilton’s mob of uptown goons is a particularly gross caricature of a peculiarly English variety of well-bred bastardry, particularly with Davion’s Denver, who suggests the James Bond type of sadistic playboy stripped of any remnant nobility, drawing cards to see who’ll mount Sylvia first and encouraging his prey to “go to ground, little rabbit!” Hamilton, however, has even grosser motives when it comes to ensnaring the pretty women he encounters, carefully arranging the little tricks—getting them to cut themselves and taking samples of their blood to use in his rites—to put them under his spell, whilst stating of himself that, “I would like be to popular…but that would require me to conform, which I cannot do.”

In opposition stands the always wonderful Morell, who had formerly played Watson in Terence Fisher’s giddy 1959 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, as Sir James, a gruff, grumpy hero, and Clare as his intelligent, willful daughter. In their first scene together, Sir James grumbles that he regrets not drowning her at birth, lending an edge of eccentric conflict to their mutual reliance. Gilling realises the scenes of the voodoo rites within the depths of the mine with spilt blood, voodoo dolls, and furiously tattooing congregants, and Satanic-masked men stalking the dreary streets of rural Britain, with a near-surreal intensity. There’s a memorable graveyard scene in which Sir James and Tompson are forced to decapitate a newly undead Alice, and a fainted Tompson hallucinates the entire cemetery disgorging its denizens in a putrefying army. Plague of the Zombies was the first halfway serious zombie movie since the 1940s, and its mixture of social commentary and ghoulish threat might have given young George Romero an idea or two and lent some juice to some European zombie movies with distinct visual echoes, like of Jorge Grau’s Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974) and Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 (1979).

The Reptile, written by Hammer bigwig Anthony Hinds under his usual pseudonym of John Elder, employs similar elements: a haughty, dictatorial lord of the manor around whom mysterious deaths proliferate, except this time the man in question is Dr. Franklyn (Noel Willman). He’s a stern, mysterious taskmaster who keeps his nervous, attractive daughter Anna (Pearce again) confined in their house as much as possible, whilst the attacks of a mysterious beast leave locals riddled with bite marks and flush with fatal poison. Former Grenadier Guardsman Harry Spalding (beloved Aussie character actor Ray Barrett in an early, uncharacteristically heroic, part) and his newlywed wife Valerie (Jennifer Daniel) move into the house left to Harry by his brother, one of those mysterious victims killed in bizarre circumstances in Franklyn’s house at the very beginning. Franklyn is desperate to get them out of the house again, but the Spaldings find a local friend in Tom Bailey (Michael Ripper) and are warned of the mystery by resident eccentric Mad Peter (John Laurie). When they encounter Anne, the Franklyns are fascinated by her brittle, intoxicating persona and alarmed by the doctor’s fierce repression of her.

The punchline this time is that Franklyn, a scholar of all varieties of religious practise who had spent decades in the Orient, has incensed a Malayan snake cult whose practises he spied upon. They kidnapped Anna and had her possessed by a snake-demon. Under the insidious control of a cult priest posing as Franklyn’s servant (Marne Maitland), the demon occasionally takes Anna over and sooner or later destroys anyone who comes close to her. This makes for an interesting variation on the familiar paranoid theme of much Victorian gothic literature, in which icons stolen from other lands bring imperialist devils home to roost manifesting displays of corrosive supernatural influence. In this film, the theme is made more explicable and pointed, as the sibilant Malayan reiterates to Franklyn the arrogant crime for which he will be punished continually through his own daughter, who has taken on a sensual intensity forbidden to Victorian femininity.

This abuts a second more acutely troubling metaphor, one of incestuous patriarchal panic and attraction to emerging female sexuality. In a brilliant scene, Franklyn has Anna, who, having lived with him in the East for many years maintains Indian customs and dress, play the sitar for the Spaldings. She travels into a deep, predatory trance while playing, she and her father staring at each other in fixation until the doctor erupts in disgust and smashes her instrument. Later he’s nauseated to discover she’s shed her skin, leaving it in her bed, a perfectly distilled image to represent the forbidden sexuality at the tale’s heart. A common thread in the two movies is the portrait of a prodigious widowed father with a precocious, takes-after-her-old-man daughter, except the mild abrasiveness of the Forbes duo conceals deep affection and trust, with the medical man’s daughter a pithy and worthy offspring, whilst the stern religious expert’s daughter has become a manifestation of all that must be repressed and disdained.

Both films were shot by Arthur Grant, whose steady work offers some fluid tracking shots and cunning deep-focus frames. Apart from Pearce, the two movies also carried over in the cast the familiar supporting actor Michael Ripper, who, particularly in The Reptile, has the most sympathetic and substantial parts of his career. It’s a pity that Pearce has relatively little screen time in either film, though she works wonders in both, technically playing second fiddle to far blander female leads, of which the preferable is Clare, an inexperienced actress (and Buffalo Bill’s great-granddaughter) who is decent enough as a tomboy out of her depth. Both Carson and Willman, in their distinct roles, are memorable embodiments of unctuous villainy. Of the two movies, Plague is the most entertaining and propulsive, with its corny but lividly impressive imagery of the eerie mine and its underground workforce of rotting slave labour, rampaging and bursting into flames in the breathless finale when their dolls upstairs fall into a fire. But The Reptile is the most intriguing and effective in building a mood.

Gilling’s direction isn’t quite as sinuous and atmospheric as the work of Hammer’s first and finest horror auteur, Terence Fisher, with slight narrative stumbles in nearing the conclusion of both films. But his work is nonetheless solid and as free from cheese as a Hammer film could possibly get. Plague, with the nightmare graveyard scene, is notable for offering perhaps the first-ever example of a dream sequence offered purely for shock value, a touch that would be reproduced to less and less effect many times in the genre’s coming decades. It’s also particularly admirable the force with which Gilling uses jagged cuts, for instance, at the start of Plague, where the exotic ferocity of the voodoo rite suddenly segues to the becalmed grounds of the Forbes’ house, illustrating a dramatic disparity in conflicting realities, or in The Reptile when a brief, but indelible insert finds the Malayan mastermind singing and charming his reptilian slave as she writhes in perverse ecstasy in her bed. In such moments Gilling wields intelligent, disorientating power. l

The Chaser (Chugeogja, 2008)
Director: Na Hong-jin

By Marilyn Ferdinand

A South Korean film that’s been getting a fair amount of good press and audience reaction is The Chaser. Described by most as a thriller in which former police detective turned pimp Eom Joong-ho (Kim Yun-seok), after having several of his girls go missing, tries to track down one of them, Kim Mi-jin (Seo Yeong-hie), only to find himself in the midst of a serial killer investigation. Like many South Korean films that have murder as one of their prominent ingredients, The Chaser is graphically violent. The serial killer, Jee Young-min (Ha Jung-woo), likes to bash heads in, especially those of prostitutes, who make easy targets. He prefers to drive a chisel through their brains, but he’ll make do with a hammer, a shovel, or a vase when an unexpected need (e.g., snooping neighbors) arises, as it does many times in this film. Joong-ho likes to kick the shit out of people to get the information he needs, and he’s always very impatient for an answer. So far, we’re in Dirty Harry country.

The features that I believe make this film stand out to audiences and critics alike is the extreme concentration on Eom’s desperate race to find Mi-jin, which builds suspense even as it documents the reawakening of a conscience in a pretty rotten man. As they say, scratch a cynic and you’ll find a disillusioned idealist underneath. Even as we start to understand Eom, the killer remains a cipher. Why does he kill? We don’t really know, and that irrationality tickles our fear and offers a welcome level of uncertainty in a genre that seeks to reassure with simplistic psychological profiles and explanations; indeed, this film makes fun of a psychologist who tries to do just that. The film also displays that sideways, absurdist humor for which South Korean filmmakers are justly lauded, offering an ineffectual police force to which Eom hand-delivers the killer that hatches some wacky ways to try to find evidence to hold him before he must be released. The film also displays an ironic contempt for technology, given that the country is both a leader in electronics manufacturing and has a nuclear threat just north of the border. There isn’t a single gun in the entire film, and cellphones, though plentiful and a device Eom believes will help him find Jee and Mi-jin, are ineffective. Scenes on the narrow, steep streets of Seoul provide a visually interesting and noirish atmosphere that suits the film beautifully.

Nonetheless, none of these qualities were able to cut through the intense loathing this film generated in me. The Chaser trafficks in femicide in a particular grotesque way—to redeem Eom. He was selling women's bodies and originally thought someone was stealing his “property” to sell into a sex slave ring. That was his motivation to find Jee. Frankly, I’m not the least bit impressed with his slowly dawning guilt, blaming himself for forcing Mi-jin to service Jee when she wanted to stay home to nurse a bad cold. While I won’t deny that people can acknowledge the wrong they do and change, Na’s willingness to indulge his audience’s more prurient appetites and the abuse of a woman to allow Eom to find his soft spot are cheap and exploitative.

In case we can’t see how thick Eom is, the script bludgeons him with pathos and idiocy to ensure he changes. It lays the guilt on even thicker by giving Mi-jin a beautiful 7-year-old daughter Eom discovers when he breaks Mi-jin’s door down and whom he drags around Seoul with him and eventually has to rush to the hospital after she comes to ill in a dark alley when nobody is minding her. The film floors the pedal on Eom’s guilt when he retrieves a message Mi-jin was forced to leave in voicemail saying she’s afraid of continuing life as a prostitute because he was too busy hoofing it to where he finally figures out Jee lives to answer his cellphone. This, of course, exposes the idiot plot whereby he and the police have been looking all over the district, even looking for bodies on a nearby mountainside, even though they found Mi-jin’s car in roughly the same location where another of Eom’s missing prostitutes had parked her car and Eom has the killer’s house keys.

Women have been raped, tortured, and murdered for our entertainment with great regularity—and generally without placing these atrocities in a context that respects women—for as long as there have been serial killer movies. This convention is so well accepted that the reviews of The Chaser I’ve read (though, I’m assured, not all) don’t even comment on the femicide, preferring to concentrate on how the film comments on politics, institutions, and Eom’s character development. I noted a similar lack of critical comment about femicide in my recent review of Backyard, even though that was the whole point of the movie.

In the winter 2009 issue of Cineaste, Christopher Sharret asserts in his article “The Problem of Saw: ‘Torture Porn’ and the Conservatism of Contemporary Horror Films,” that filmic serial killers seek to teach their victims a lesson in old-fashioned values and decency, with allusion to the government-sanctioned torture of terrorists out to destroy America and its wholesome values of Mom, apple pie, liberty, and justice for all. It’s not a far leap to suggest a similar message in other serial killer movies, including The Chaser, only the lesson not only encompasses sexual and social conservatism (note that when Jee decides to move on after apparently eluding prosecution, he dresses like a businessman) but also continues the fictive efforts to put women back in the place they started to abandon with the dawning of second-wave feminism in the 1970s. I think it’s very telling as our culture wars continue that this film has already been picked up for a Hollywood remake starring Leo DiCaprio as the detective/pimp antihero.

If there can be a line in the sand when it comes to films, I think I’m finally ready to draw it. Femicide should not be so normalized among film and TV producers that it goes largely unremarked upon. I earnestly ask my fellow film reviewers and audiences to stop ignoring this disturbingly ordinary plot device and bring outrage back into our collective consciousness in written reviews and other public forums. If you're willing to do it for Native Americans, African Americans, and other put-upon people, it behooves you not to give these kinds of films a pass no matter how much they engage you (see Cinema Styles on Pixar for more). l

Sayat Nova (aka The Colour of Pomegranates 1968)
Director: Sergei Paradjanov

By Roderick Heath

An authentic piece of cinematic shamanism, Sayat Nova was a work that placed its brilliant Georgian-born, ethnic-Armenian director Sergei Paradjanov in hot water with the Soviet-era authorities. At first glance, this seems nearly incomprehensible. What the hell was so subversive about a plotless, characterless, almost-silent extended montage of beautiful and mysterious images? Perhaps therein lies the answer: nothing upsets the bureaucratic mindset like mystery. Of course, there are layers to such a controversy. Paradjanov was a dedicated nonconformist, a bisexual bohemian linked to nationalist and civil rights groups and celebrator of pan-Caucasian folk traditions, and his film was an aggressive act of cultural dissembling. Damn it if the commissars didn’t sense something under all the strange gestures and allusions to Armenian history. The Soviet Union, like Tsarist Russia before it, had always maintained a hegemonic domination of the many smaller nations it bordered and swallowed, and Paradjanov’s fetishist celebration of his culture’s dreamtime past seemed a jab at that hegemony.

A contradictory quality of much post-Stalinist Soviet cinema is what appeared to be its relatively unfettered artistic bent, producing wondrously innovative cinema from the likes of Paradjanov, Tarkovsky, Klimov, Konchalovsky and others, which rarely betrayed any sign of subordination to the familiar rigours of narrative appeal. Indeed, Paradjanov was taking to an extreme something Eisenstein had begun in his historical films Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible Part I (1943) and Part II (1946) in reducing mise-en-scène to iconography and acting to gesture: the distance from Ivan the Terrible’s wedding dance to Sayat Nova’s figurations isn’t so great, even if the gothic force and giddiness of Eisenstein’s style is dispensed with. Such a retreat into formalism and poetic allusion angered authorities, but it often was the only mode of expression left to genuine film artists when “Soviet realism” was defined only as sanctioned realism. Either way, Sayat Nova was edited, retitled to the less culturally specific The Colour of Pomegranates to reflect one of the first images of the film, and often completely suppressed; its director was later imprisoned on trumped-up charges, including that he raped a man bigger than he was.

None of which says much really about Sayat Nova as a piece of artistry, which in intent and effect transcends the immediate agonies of its history. Named for and, after a fashion, telling the life of famed 18th century Armenian “ashug” (poet-troubadour) Harutyun Sayatyan (his popular title means “King of Song”), Paradjanov refused to create a biopic, instead preferring images illustrating poetic metaphors and vaguely describing the key acts of Sayat Nova’s life. The opening seems to be juxtaposing images associated with one of Sayatyan’s poems on the stages of the soul’s ripening. Paradjanov apparently identified deeply with the poet, and the on-screen biography seems partly imbued with aspects of Paradjanov’s own life: both men were born in T’bilisi outside of their ethnic homeland.

In vaguest outline, Sayat Nova is similar to Paradjanov’s good friend Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev: both examine the role of the artist in terms of society in historical contexts infused with allegorical purpose. Each embellishes sketchy life narratives with similar details as both films’ heroes reject the world after youthful pains and burrow deep into monkish asceticism, only to reject such abstinence as death-in-life without rejecting faith. It’s easily discernable why such a narrative could fascinate artists in a troubled political milieu. There, however, similarities end: where Rublev is allusive and illustrative in a rare but comprehensible and realistic fashion, Sayat Nova is pure artifice, exploring Nova’s poetics and life through tableaux vivants that achieve a synthesis of the aesthetics of early cinema; the Byzantine-influenced, flat-perspective stylisation of Orthodox religious art; and the ritualised dance and theatre of folk cultures.

It’s not too hard then to read the biographical details Paradjanov evokes of Sayatyan’s life (he’s played at different stages of his life by Sofiko Chiaureli, Melkon Aleksanyan, Vilen Galstyan, and Giorgi Gegechkori). We see him in childhood, the son of wool vendors in a small village. He is taught a love of books by a priest and introduced to the human body and eroticism by spying on men and women in steam baths. His life as a courtier and traveling diplomat, his ill-fated romance with a princess, his retreat into a monastery, his final disillusionment with such a withdrawn life, and his failed attempt to return to the world all follow, before his final violent death at the hands of invading Persians. Much of the film was shot in or near the 1,000-year-old Haghpat Monastery, where Sayatyan really met his end. It’s how Paradjanov invokes such details that is amazingly creative, relying on the viewer’s visual literacy, for instance, ability to infer from a woman’s beauteous mode of dress and bearing what her social rank is, and how she holds a veil of embroidery over her face to suggest the barriers of form and propriety that keeps Sayatyan from being able to love her. The fact that the same actress, Sofiko Chiaureli, plays both the young poet and his princess amour suggests the narcissism often inherent in young crushes (and also an inherent sexual ambiguity in Paradjanov’s sense of the artistic figure); Paradjanov juxtaposes this with a pair of mimes enacting a ritualised romance between the figures of a devil and an angel.

In between the identifiable moments of narrative in Sayat Nova is a cornucopia of evocative imagery, built out of the cultural and religious tropes of classical Armenia, and essayed in not-quite-surrealist terms. The wonder of music as it is presented to young Sayatyan is evoked by his standing with music teachers amongst a number of hovering instruments; a love of literature explicated in a remarkable moment when a priest has him and others rescue soaked books and dry them upon the roof of a church, the young poet standing amongst dozens of the wind-wavered pages. The necessary connection of artistic passion to the earth is communicated when the young poet pours earth from a dish onto a cloth he holds; later, when his sense of life has degraded, he holds up an empty dish forlornly. A late crisis in his sense of life is communicated through an awe-inspiring sequence in which the roof of the church transforms into fields reaped by labourers, whilst the aged poet stands on a ledge, his pale body contrasting dead stone whilst the chaff rains, his separation from the natural wellsprings of creativity confirmed.

Interestingly, Paradjanov criticised Fellini for driving ever deeper into mystification. This is a curious stance because mystification seems an objective for Paradjanov, and the men used not-dissimilar techniques. But it becomes apparent that such an affection for the corporeal, the tangible, an attempt to suggest through texture alone the solidity of things rather than mere dreaminess through surrealism, is altogether exceptional: Paradjanov ransacks and offers up the very building blocks of a culture in its many manifestations (songs, poems, books, architecture, clothing, paintings, dance, acting, religious and social ritual, design and pattern) as wrought from the same tactile relationship with soil and nature. Paradjanov’s visions take on the characteristics of mystical incantation, even magic, but they are certainly nonetheless linked to a subtle dialectic between spirit and flesh, earth and aesthetic, that refuses the celebratory, but selfish reinvention of reality that Fellini offered up in his final films.

Nonetheless, in structure and effect, Sayat Nova is a rite, a liturgy, an invocation for the sake of remembering, as well as a study in the nature of poetic elucidation and the formation of artistic character. The film is almost entirely lacking in spoken dialogue, and indeed many immediate sound effects are also muted in favour of folk music styles on the soundtrack, and recitations of Sayatyan’s poetry. Paradjanov notes a child’s fragmented, distracted way of reading existence in the early sequences, full of jagged observations of such fleeting wonders as the feet of women dancing upon carpets being washed in his home village where such carpets are made, boiled up in vats of crimson dye that becomes interchangeable with blood and therefore sustenance. Likewise barnyard animals constantly appear throughout the film, most memorably, a chicken that sits on the poet’s arm like a natural aide, and a flock of sheep that invades the church. Such glimpses are linked to the much later, more complex metaphors of the grown artistic imagination. Later in the film, the cloistered Sayatyan is visited by nuns, one of whom, looking like the princess, magically strips off her black gown, stepping out in blinding white, and comes to him with a carpet, as if embodying the lingering spirit of the fecund, romantic, industrious life he left behind: when she moves to kiss him, he pulls the carpet up between them, echoing the veil the princess once held up to him and reinforcing the self-imposed barrier he’s put up against life.

This encounter precipitates his crisis, however, for the poet’s search is for an utterly selfless kind of love, and yet discovers in such a moment that his retreat is self-obsession. Begged to come perform by villagers, he ventures back into the landscape with the blessing of the monastery’s abbot to spread his art through the land. But he seems to be too late, finding nothing but empty dishes and encountering the white-clad woman’s burial. Escorted by cherubim, he returns to the monastery. There, however, he meets her again, incarnated now as a nature goddess or angel of resurrection: she tips a vat of red dye over him, symbolising his final murder, falling victim finally to utter corporeal truth. But as he dies, a workman holds up lengths of pipe and calls for him to sing; his songs echo forever from the pipes, a plain metaphor for the ability of the artist’s work to transcend death, and his songs become part of the structure of his culture and nation. The angel provides the final, reigning image, of an evergreen creativity.

Whilst all of this might sound obscure and dull, the images flow with hypnotic rapidity and teeming imagination that always tantalise and stimulate even at their most bewildering; it’s also a weirdly, subtly sexy movie in its layered textures and obsessive refrains to Chiaureli’s ambisexual beauty. Sayat Nova moreover doesn’t so much demand intellectual dissection as emotional involvement with the intricacy and beauty of its images. Certainly such a conjuring requires an intensely shared cultural basis to work from, as well as a keenly developed symbolic imagination. Still, peculiar and unreproducible as it is, Sayat Nova also seems to have influenced many a director, like Pasolini, Theo Angelopolous, Gus Van Sant and Bela Tarr, through perhaps to Todd Haynes’ Dylan flick I’m Not There, which sustained a similar conceit of using multiple actors, including a woman, to embody a hero reduced to a series of quotes and affected figurations, if without a tenth of Paradjanov’s artistry.

It’s worth noting in such light that Paradjanov’s impish sense of humour is often in evidence, in moments such as when a number of monks are bathed by their fellows and then carried away as if in preparation for some rite, but actually for treading wine grapes; a flashback the poet has to his childhood of a wool fair that sees a gusting wind upsetting everyone’s wares; and those sheep in the church circling whilst the monks repeat sonorous cant to mourn their dead Patriarch evoking the silliness of religious solipsism and Pavlovian habits of worship. And yet the film’s texture surely confirms two of Paradjanov’s personal statements of his aspiration: “Direction is about truth. It's about God, love, and tragedy”, and “Beauty will save the world.” Whether he’s right or not, Sayat Nova certainly suggests an untapped world of cinema still awaiting conquest. l

The Damned (1969)
Director: Luchino Visconti

By Marilyn Ferdinand

The Damned, Luchino Visconti’s loose history of Germany’s dynastic Krupps family during the consolidation of Hitler’s power in the mid 1930s is a difficult film to pigeonhole. Not a war film, it talks about munitions manufacture and Hitler’s plans for conquest. One of the few films to earn an X rating, its subject matter is more disturbing for censors than its nudity, and it almost certainly would not receive an NC-17 rating today. Italianate in its operatic richness and byzantine melodrama, it has a distinctly German feel, reveling in the drab, amoral squalor that infests the minds and actions of most of its characters. Most certainly a family drama, it indicts the entire, rotting hulk of privilege and shows how easily swayed and dominated it could be at the hands of common (in the class sense) thugs with uncommon ambition. Were we inclined to feel pity for the passing of a more genteel era, that impulse is squashed like a cockroach by Visconti’s extended scenes of depravity and decadence that almost seem to be the raison d’être for the film.

The Damned begins, fittingly, with hellfire images of the steelworks on which the Von Essenbeck family (the Krupps steelworks were in Essen) has built its fortunes over the centuries fabricating, among other things, weapons. The family is set to celebrate patriarch Joaquin Von Essenbeck’s (Albrecht Schönhals) birthday with dinner and homemade entertainment provided Joaquin’s grandchildren: Thilde and Erika (Karin Mittendorf and Valentina Ricci), the young daughters of Joaquin’s daughter, Elisabeth Thallman (Charlotte Rampling) and her husband Herbert, vice president of the steelworks; Martin Von Essenbeck (Helmut Berger), son of Joaquin’s beloved, dead son and his widow Sophie (Ingrid Thulin); and Gunther Von Essenbeck (Renaud Verley), son of Joaquin’s son Konstantin (Reinhard Kolldehoff), a brownshirt SA officer who already sports a swastika on his lapel. Speeding toward the dinner are Frederick Bruckmann (Dirk Bogarde), an executive at the steelworks, and Herr Aschenbach (Helmut Griem), a cousin to the privileged family and an officer in the SS. Bruckmann and Aschenbach discuss how Frederick, who has been carrying on an affair with Sophie, can rise to power in the new Reich by stepping over the Von Essenbecks to assume control of the steelworks.

The first shock of the evening comes when Joaquin, having enjoyed the recitations of his granddaughters and cello solo of Gunther, is confronted with Martin dressed like Sally Bowles and singing and strutting lasciviously for all he’s worth. The performance is cut short by the evening’s second shock—the announcement that the Reichstag has been set on fire. Joaquin delivers another blow, to Herbert, when he sizes up the political circumstances this attack on the Reichstag signals and announces that to curry favor with the Nazis, he is replacing Herbert as vice president with Konstantin. Herbert, a vehement anti-Nazi, storms off and prepares to leave the country, feeling his place is no longer secure. Indeed it isn’t. The SS storm the Von Essenbeck mansion that very night, and Herbert must flee for the nearby border. In the meantime, Frederick has taken Herbert’s gun and shot Joaquin, pinning the murder on Herbert.

From this point on, Elisabeth is a virtual prisoner at the Von Essenbeck estate as Sophie plots like Lady MacBeth to see Frederick best Konstantin for total control of the steelworks. Like the MacBeths, Frederick and Sophie’s hubris will be their ruin, but indeed, the Von Essenbecks are as doomed as the Third Reich they tried oafishly to play. The full dinner table at which Joaquin was toasted will eventually seat only one diner, as the rest are killed, arrested, or driven mad.

The film is constructed as a series of extended set pieces. Visconti’s most elegantly filmed sequence—the birthday performance and dinner—is a signature one for him realized most fully in the ball sequence in The Leopard. Unlike the Prince and his aristocratic family, however, the Von in Essenbeck is more window dressing than breeding; Joaquin and his forebears were industrialists who thought more about the steelworks than their honor. As such, their splendid festivities look rather shabby and bourgeois. In another contrasting sequence between the two films and families, whereas the Prince visits his mistress in town resplendently dressed and liveried, the perverted Martin, dressed like a dandy, visits a prostitute who has given him the key to her flat and finding a young Jewish girl next door, proceeds over successive days to seduce her. Watching the little girl throw her arms around his neck and plant kisses all over his face is a pretty disgusting display made worse by his ecstatic response.

In a power play that parallels Frederick’s move for the steelworks, the SS, with Hitler’s blessing, prepares to liquidate its competition—the SA. Visconti shoots a very long scene of the SA gathering in Bad Wiessee that became known as the Night of the Long Knives. As SA officers pour into the town and the town’s alcohol pours into them, the link between the beer hall and German fascism comes blazing into focus. The men get drunker and drunker, start pawing the barmaids, attempt to rape one, dress up in slips, garters, and bras, and eventually end up having sex with each other in the brothel-like upstairs of the inn. Although the sequence is carefully edited to depict the events of the day and night, their cumulative effect and a fairly stripped-down, verité look make the scene seem like one (extremely) long take, one reminiscent of Visconti’s extravagantly decadent, though much less base scene in the Venus grotto in his 1971 film Ludwig (which, incidentally, also starred Helmut Berger in another sexually decadent, though much more sympathetic role as The Swan King).

The liquidation represents the climax of the film, but Visconti lets it dribble on for about another half hour in order to ensure the complete destruction of the family. Unfortunately, the script kind of devolves as well, nearly destroying the film. Auschenbach becomes less a fanatical human and more a mustache-twisting cartoon, tempting Gunther to hate and tucking him under his black cape. Martin, having driven his mother mad by raping her, arranges a long-awaited marriage between her and Frederick. Sophie moves like a zombie into the grand ballroom where Martin first donned his drag outfit for the entertainment of Joaquin, her face ghostly white, as though she were a medieval victim of small pox covering her scars. Our last view of her is grotesque, which rather unfairly suggests that she deserves to be held up for special humiliation. None of the Von Essenbecks, including the beautifully elegant, but willfully blind Elisabeth, deserve our admiration, at least not in this film.

The actors strain valiantly to realize this high melodrama with some semblance of truth, but none escapes unscathed, not even the great Dirk Bogarde, who is called on to depict shrill egomania. Schönhals acquits himself best of the entire cast, fully embodying a pragmatic man of appetites. Berger is to Visconti what Kinski is to Herzog, so it’s hard to judge his performance apart from his persona. The print I saw projected was atrocious—scratchy and pink, with the entire SA liquidation scene in unsubtitled German. Fortunately, Warner Home Video has released a decent DVD of the film.

This film has been panned by many people, but I found something hypnotic in the languorous set pieces whose utter decadence addressed the moral rot of the elites and power brokers of 1930s Germany in a way other approaches could not. l

Taking Woodstock (2009)
Director: Ang Lee

By Roderick Heath

Ang Lee’s Cannes-selected comic epic was savaged upon release for replicating plentiful clichés of the hippie era. Whilst I can’t really argue with the fact that it does revel in a kind of theme-park aesthetic of ’60s anarchy whilst soft-pedaling the social friction, antiwar protests, and mood of mild terror that always defined the counterculture era, Lee’s film was, I feel, much mistreated and its finer elements ignored. I’m not sure if 2009 produced a movie both as enjoyable and as cinematically loquacious as Taking Woodstock. It possesses, moreover, a celebratory warmth that I’ve so badly missed from Lee’s breakthrough film of 1992, The Wedding Banquet, with which it shares many crucial characteristics. Lee’s intervening films, like The Ice Storm (1997) and Brokeback Mountain, and even his fine but curiously po-faced tribute to wu xia, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2001), often felt like the work of trying to play the grown-up a touch too studiously. His impressive 2006 film Lust, Caution was both highly uneven and deeply moving, and its unchecked aggression suggested a release and new direction for Lee.

Taking Woodstock is, first and foremost, a comedy spun from a memoir by Eliot Tiber, who attended the fabled festival. Eliot and his hard-bitten Russian-Jewish parents Jake and Sonia Teichberg (Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton) run a crummy, barely surviving motel. Eliot, a failing interior decorator who’s been ripped off by his former (probably mafia) employees, has been sinking most of his money into keeping the motel afloat. He’s also gotten himself made president of the local chamber of commerce, which allows him to sign off on his own small cultural festivals to try to increase traffic to the locale.

He gets a brainwave when he reads about the proposed music festival being kicked out of Woodstock proper and another nearby town. He calls up the supernaturally laidback festival organiser Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff) and offers Lang the use of his own festival permit. Lang and his cohort of moneymen, corporate hangers-on, and suited lawyers immediately fly in by helicopter. They reject Eliot’s first proposal—to set up in the swamp behind the motel—but soon he hits on a perfect location: the dairy farm of his local acquaintance Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy). In compensation, the festival organisers make the motel their base of operations, a move that makes the Teichbergs not only immediately solvent, but actually quite rich.

As well as saving his family from economic ruin, the subsequent explosion of freak power and communal effort helps Eliot overcome his inability to express his homosexuality to the world, and reveals telling details about his own character and those of his parents that both draw them closer and then push them apart. Around them swirls a gallery of types, like Eliot’s boyhood friend Billy (Emile Hirsch) who’s recovering from his hitch in ’Nam; Lang’s philosophical girlfriend Carol (Christina Kirk); Reverend Don (Richard Thomas), a hip priest handling the festival’s community outreach; Paul (Darren Pettie), a hunky builder whose knowledge of Judy Garland hints at hidden passions; an out-and-proud, pistol-packing, ex-marine Muscle Mary called Vilma (Liev Schreiber), who becomes the Teichbergs’ guardian angel after some goodfellas come knocking; and the two beatific hippies (Paul Dano and Kelli Garner) who guide Eliot on his first acid trip. Although he toys with pat exemplars, James Schamus’ script manages to delineate them all with intelligent eccentricity, aided by the actors, noting with some smartness the process of the outsiders of the world inverting the importance of things for a brief window in time, everyone from the full-on fairies to laidback dairy farmers who have never gotten along with their waspish neighbours determined to realise a moment of pure joy.

And, indeed, Taking Woodstock manages to conjure a rare sense of communal celebration. If Groff’s Lang seems a touch more saintly than the faintly asocial, willfully oblivious creature glimpsed in Michael Wadleigh’s documentary Woodstock, Eugene Levy’s sharply inhabited Yasgur reveals a man both idealistic in nature and firmly pragmatic in wit. It’s pretty hard not to laugh at the more obvious humour, as when the Teichbergs chase off two wiseguys to the hoots and cheers of the hippies and their son’s congratulations: “Dad, Mom, you’re superheroes!” Then there’s the Earthlight Players, who live, or more accurately, are corralled in the barn by the Teichbergs, yearning for food; when the time comes for them to perform at one of Reverend Don’s outreach gigs, they strip down and berate a local audience, inspiring Billy to gleefully join them. Lee recreates the sights and sounds with such fidelity he can seamlessly integrate shots from Wadleigh’s Woodstock and what’s what can scarcely be discerned.

The feel for time and place is exact—the hairy DIY aesthetic of it all backed up by wads of mysteriously plentiful cash, the feeling of energy welling from the organisers and the people who flock to make the scene. An epic tracking shot, following Eliot riding with a motorcycle cop through the great hippie exodus, is both an effective restaging of an iconic moment and a tribute by way of rebuke to the similarly anarchic, but apocalyptic traffic jam of Godard’s Week-End: the world set in chaos can be beautiful, Lee’s vision affirms. Later, when Eliot, doped to the gills on LSD, wanders the fringes of the festival, the sea of people transforming into a vortex of energy in a brilliantly executed visual orgasm. Lee avoids making too much of the on-stage malarkey that was the focus of Wadleigh’s film, with its worshipful visions of seraphim rock stars (Eliot never gets to actually see the concert), and even disdains leaning too much on the familiar soundtrack of the period. The most crucial song in the film is one by Love, the best American band of the era not to play at Woodstock, which is played by the hippie couple in their van as they trip.

Perhaps the best quality of Lee’s film is the way it tries to elucidate with some genuine feeling the animating idea of the counterculture, that aspect well summarised by 8½’s Guido Anselmi as the desire to cut away “what is dead in ourselves,” as well as exploring the limitations of such curatives. It’s most obviously portrayed in Billy’s shaking off the terrors of his Vietnam tour by recalling that the festival is taking place on the very hill where he celebrated a momentous football victory in high school and joining with Eliot in mud-sliding. But the theme is most interestingly portrayed in terms of the disconnect between Eliot’s roots and family and the new life sprouting around him and beckoning to him where Taking Woodstock is most substantial.

The ghosts of Old World persecution and the grind of surviving a drab existence still linger, not to be entirely dispelled from the heart even when fate presents wonders. When Vilma serves the Teichbergs some hash brownies, they dance in giddy ecstasy. It’s a cliché, but one with an interesting pay-off: Eliot finds the next morning that in a druggy stupor, his mother has uncovered her savings, which she has neurotically squirreled away over the years whilst allowing her business to decay. Here the film notes with fascinating incision and lack of sentiment the potential for rebirth and also the limitations of personality to transcend its defining anxieties, as Mrs Teichberg is motivated by a very real fear and paranoia that lurks behind her amusingly gruff shtetl manners. Even when she’s made to act as broad as the Mississippi (“No schtupping in the bushes!”), Staunton still deserves a lot of admiration for the bodily force and conviction with which she inhabits the part.

Balancing this half of the family dynamic is a burgeoning father-son relationship, mediated through a coming-out on both men’s part—one sexual, the other emotional—that clearly evokes the conclusion of The Wedding Banquet. TV comic Martin is good, if unremarkable, in his role, and Goodman is quite marvelous as the wearied patriarch who finds himself one of the freaks and loves it, discovering a perfect pal in Vilma and congratulating his son on restoring his sense of life. Taking Woodstock’s generally amusing, but still pointed view of reactionary protests that fail to keep a lid on the event actually says something of contemporary relevance, particularly in stressing gay liberation as a major aspect of the scene. There’s a particularly delightful moment when Eliot is bewilderedly beset by lusty hippie chicks, and then gathered up in a full-blooded smooch by Paul, to their roars of delight in a moment of collapsing barriers.

Lee reminds us that the resentful, narrowing outlook of the Moral Majority was based chiefly in an offended sense of entitlement to dominance of discourse. Taking Woodstock makes an effective reminder that no matter what its multifarious modern mutations, the ideals of personal liberation and alt-culture resistance still have their roots firmly planted in this era. Although Lee’s style is still cool and balanced, it hasn’t been anything like this much fun to watch one of his films since Sense and Sensibility, and even if it’s no earth-shaking work of originality, it is a scene worth making. And scenes worth making don’t hit movie screens so often. l

Lady Snowblood (Shurayukihime, 1973)
Director: Toshiya Fujita

By Roderick Heath

The late ’60s and early ’70s were something of a golden age in Japanese commercial cinema, with rugged genre reinventions displaying a great confidence in a modernising milieu and industry. In particular, a number of electrifying, blood-lusting, visually chic jidai geki works like the Lone Wolf and Cub series initiated by Kenji Misumi and Toshiya Fujita’s Lady Snowblood cast a long shadow even on Hollywood filmmakers. A key correlation between these works is the way they contrast intense, heightened physical beauty captured in the crisp, muted colours Japanese cinematographers made their own in the era and rapturous pseudo-poetic stylisation with ruthless violence and aestheticised gore. Another more immediate link was the fact they were both based on the work of manga author Kazuo Koike, who also contributed to the scripts.

Lady Snowblood is particularly notable for offering a memorable heroine in Meiko Kaji’s Yuki Kashima, and for Fujita’s inventive, layered, pop-cinematic techniques. This jaw-dropping melodrama, set during the early Meiji period of the late 19th century, when Japan was undergoing tremendous social upheaval, offered fascinating cross-cultural blends in style and dress that have been a powerful fetish for anime artists. Fujita commences with a scene of birth that’s a bleak inversion of many a nativity scene, with Sayo Kashima (Miyoko Akaza) giving birth in prison, white snow falling outside, her red-clad fellow prisoners trying to midwife as she painfully and fatally gives life to Yuki. A jump cut reveals a grown Yuki, calling herself Lady Snowblood, taking on and besting in brutal fashion the bodyguards of a yakuza boss and then dispatching the boss with cold aplomb after describing herself as vengeance personified. This assassination, it soon proves, was on the behalf of the leader of a gang of beggars, Sir Matsuemon (Hitoshi Takagi), because the boss had dispossessed them of their village and left them to scrounge a living.

As repayment for her service, Yuki requests that Matsuemon and his followers find for her three ruffians, Banzô Takemura (Noboru Nakaya), Okono Kitahama (Sanae Nakahara), and Gishirô Tsukamoto (Eiji Okada). This trio and a fourth confederate, Tokuichi Shokei (Takeo Chii), were scamming peasants afraid of a government draft and murdered Sayo’s husband Gô (Masaaki Daimon), an innocent schoolteacher coming to take a rural post, to prove their ability to sniff out and fend off federal officials. They also slaughtered her young son and held her captive and raped her for days before Shokei dragged her to Tokyo as his concubine. There she knifed him during sex, a crime for which she was imprisoned, but Sayo made sure she got pregnant by screwing any man she could, with the intention of producing a child who could carry on her vengeance. In spite of Sayo’s death just after her birth, Yuki can remember her momentous entrance into the world. Raised by one of her mother’s fellow prisoners, Tajire no Okiku (Akemi Negishi), Yuki was roughly drilled in swordplay and athletic feats by Dôkai (Kô Nishimura), a priest and former government official who delighted in making Yuki an unwavering force of punishment for an increasingly corrupt, shapeless, despicable society.

Lady Snowblood is Fujita’s most famous and acclaimed film, and his formal innovation in telling his story is rich. The ritualistic form of much Asian action cinema is intact, with Yuki moving from target to target with relentless, mounting mayhem after intensive training in the art of killing. But Fujita essays the narrative in chapters, utilising a circular style in revealing the story that ties intricately to the what-goes-around-comes-around moral and multigenerational shape of the tale. Flashbacks and backstory points of reference are explicated in freeze frames, black-and-white sequences, illustrations from manga, constructing a substantiated vision of the motivating past filtered through artifice: Fujita makes explicit that the art of telling Lady Snowblood’s story is part of that story. It’s easy to see why the film was a profound model for Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, and not merely in its thematic and stylistic preoccupations with the beautiful agent of apocalyptic destruction at its centre, but also because it utilises an imaginative, self-reflexive approach to telling a generic story that suggests boundaries extending beyond the immediate borders of the film.

The story is being recounted by an off-screen narrator, author and journalist Ryûrei Ashio (Toshio Kurosawa), who stumbles upon Yuki’s tale when he visits the grave of Tsukamoto and passes by Yuki, who’s outraged to find one of her nemeses is dead and has assaulted his tombstone instead and sliced the heads off the decorating flowers. Ryûrei learns Yuki’s story from Dôkai, who hopes that the story might flush out Yuki’s last opponent, Okono, now a yakuza matriarch. Ryûrei turns Yuki’s biography into a popular book, introducing a note of meta-textual irony to the proceedings, especially when Ryûrei begins “Chapter Four” only to have the villain of the piece walk in to tell him to stop. The title’s motif is constantly reflected, both literally—much blood gushes out upon the snowy streets—and metaphorically, the contrasting textures of pure snow and sticky gore reflecting the perverse disconnect between Yuki’s serene appearance and inner demons. These demons manifest in her wide, remarkable eyes, with their reddened rims burning in her almost spectrally pale face, offered in awe-stoking close-up. It’s also there in the careful costuming and set décor in the opening birth sequence, and repeated through the reiteration of the image of emanations from the “netherworld,” a blood-red snow that cleanses.

Lady Snowblood came out of an era in which women were becoming both more overtly heroic and yet more often brutalised on screen, especially in Japanese films, concurrent with the increasing international profile of women’s lib (it’s revealing that Kaji, who had risen out of sexploitation films at Nikkatsu Studios, fled to Tohei as Nikkatsu went deeper into producing “pink” porn-and-violence movies). Although they’re far more common now, Yuki is one of the first and truest ass-kicking women of cinema, and though the film hardly celebrates ruthless violence inflicted by anyone, this telling social dimension of the story plugs into a broader mythology of generational revolt and historical anger. Yuki’s first claimed scalp of her mission elucidates a theme of female exploitation, in presenting Banzô as a wash-up living off his daughter Kobue (Yoshiko Nakada), who pretends to make baskets but is actually whoring herself out. Banzô gambles the money some of her clients give to him, trying to cheat, with Yuki rescuing him from the clutches of yakuza only to confront him on a stormy beach and slice him open after asking, “Look into my eyes. Do I remind you of someone you once raped?”

The sins of the fathers are indeed being repaid, and Yuki finds an enemy in Kobue, but also an unexpected helpmate in Ryûrei, who is, she learns in shock after saving him from Okono’s clutches, is actually the son of Tsukamoto. Worse yet, his father isn’t actually dead, having faked his demise to escape investigations into his smuggling operations, a fact of which Ryûrei is unaware until his father comes to him and tells him to desist in recording Yuki’s tale. Ryûrei is a scurrilous muckraker assaulting the new order of things, whereas his father has become a war-profiteer, engaging in building up Japan’s military force and hosting parties for international guests to cover and help his secret arms deals. Yuki and Ryûrei crash one of his masked balls to do him in, leading to a familial bloodbath in which Ryûrei tries to hold Tsukamoto still long enough for Yuki to stab him while father empties bullet after bullet into his son’s body. Yuki skewers them both, and Tsukamoto plunges over the balcony into the midst of his horrified guests, pulling with him the Rising Sun flag (and the US flag nearly goes with it), in an image that’s as metaphorically radical as above-ground Japanese cinema gets.

Then again, an interesting aspect of post-WWII Japanese genre cinema, especially of the historical variety, tends to be its outright cynicism over institutions and social roles of the past, unlike many equivalent western genres, like Hollywood and British swashbucklers, Italian peplum, or pre-Peckinpah westerns, instead fixating on warriors and nobles and yet very often portraying a corrupt, decaying, brutal world. Figures as grimly determined as Yuki or Lone Wolf and Cub’s Itto Ogami, or outcast, like Zatoichi, are heroic merely by standing for a principle and their towering skills. Kaji was a big star with young pop-loving audiences, sustaining a recording career simultaneously with her acting; her appeal was pitched for that generation, and one of the films she followed Lady Snowblood with was the antisocial Bonnie and Clyde variant Jeans Blues (1974). Yuki, the narrator reminds us, possesses a compassionate heart underneath her stoic exterior, and meets a soul-cracking problem when she thinks her mission is over and faces potential romance with Ryûrei; her entire life is predicated to a violent mission that puts her, as Dôkai says, beyond even Buddha’s redemption. And yet her rampage seems connected to natural justice, finding echoes in the snow and the waves that wash about Banzô’s body, white foam staining red.

The film’s cool hysteria is remarkable. Fujita eschews all but the most basic stunts for Yuki to perform (a stink bomb hidden in her hair is as fancy as her tricks get), and in spite of the stylistic flourishes, Lady Snowblood walks a tricky tightrope that offsets lyricism and action with a raw realism. It doesn’t quite belong in the same fantastic world of superhuman protagonists as other such films, even when taking into account such wacko moments as Yuki recalling the scene of her own birth and holding an unspoken conversation with nemesis Tsukamoto. Fujita realises some startling images, like the prepubescent Yuki stripping off her dress and dodging Dôkai’s sword strokes, sucking on the wound he leaves on her arm with fearless bloodlust, and Yuki’s final anguished scream as she touches a handful of bloodied snow to her face. Multitalented star Kaji (she’ll be 63 in March) had, after leaving Nikkatsu, found proper stardom in the Female Prisoner Scorpion series, and later gained her highest accolades in a film version of classical playwright Chikamatsu’s Sonezaki Shinju (1978). Yuki is a role that suits her dark, marauding intensity perfectly, and she also sings Yuki’s gorgeously melancholy theme song (I also recommend the compilation of her various film themes and pop hits, “Zenkyoku Shu,” one of my favourite albums ever) that punctuates the start and conclusion of the film: the rest of the film’s jazz-pop score, by Masaaki Hirao, is terrific too.

The third-act complication, of course, removes Yuki’s moral quandary by killing off Ryûrei and leaving her to stumble away from the carnage, with one of Tsukamoto’s bullets in her, to receive another indelible wound from Kobue’s dagger. Yuki crawls away, bawling in crushing existential anguish at where her life has led her. But right or wrong, good or bad, Yuki simply refuses to die, and the film ends with her looking up to the rising sun, still hovering between worlds. Of course, Fujita and Kaji reunited for a sequel the following year. l

God’s Little Acre (1958)
Director: Anthony Mann

By Marilyn Ferdinand

We’ve all had them—books we pawed through in adolescence, furtively looking for the “dirty” parts. Mine was Ian Fleming’s The Spy Who Loved Me. The hubby’s was Erskine Caldwell’s 1933 Southern Gothic novel God’s Little Acre, a book so steamy and controversial that its author was arrested and tried for obscenity—his exoneration set an important First Amendment precedent that is still used to offer artists protection from censorship and prosecution. In 1958, God’s Little Acre set tongues wagging again. The film of this sensational novel, following in the footsteps of Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire and the general trend in Hollywood of offering up starlets with enormous breasts, paraded both the broad, strong chest of Aldo Ray and the luscious buxomness of Tina Louise in her screen debut. Throw in the extreme randiness of the jailbait daughter of the central character and a suggestion of adultery, and the film seemed poised to satisfy every vicarious need of the uptight American of the 1950s. That the film failed to connect with audiences then, and has its detractors now, bears testament to the conflicted point of view of its director, Anthony Mann.

Ty Ty Walden (Robert Ryan) is a farmer in name only. When we first meet Ty Ty, he’s shoveling dirt at the bottom of a deep crater with two of his sons, Buck (Jack Lord) and Shaw (Vic Morrow). He has spent more than a decade digging holes on his Georgia farm, not to plant cotton seeds, but to extract gold he claims his grandfather buried on the property. He’s got the fever, he says, and won’t give up until he’s unearthed his fortune. In a striking shot, Buck’s wife Griselda (Tina Louise), walks to the edge of the hole to offer the men some cooling lemonade—the light looming behind her reveals her shapely legs through her cotton shift. Her breasts threaten to spill out of her low-cut neckline as she bends over to serve the lemonade. Ty Ty admires her beauty, but Buck has turned angry and abusive with suspicion that Griselda has taken up again with her old beau Will Thompson (Aldo Ray), who is married to Griselda’s sister Rosamund (Helen Westcott) and lives in hope that the lights in the shuttered cotton mill where he and the rest of the town used to work will come on again.

The Waldens are paid a visit by Pluto Swint (Buddy Hackett) who is traveling the county in his truck to solicit votes for his bid for sheriff; he has an eye for Ty Ty’s youngest daughter Darlin’ Jill (Fay Spain), who sees him as nothing but an “old horsehead” with no sense. Ty Ty is delighted that Pluto wants to marry Darlin’ Jill, but he’s even more pleased that his daughter is getting a reputation as a terrible flirt, evidence that his little girl has finally become a woman. In fact, she’s jumping bones all over the county. She’ll soon make a bid for Dave Dawson (Michael Landon), an albino Ty Ty has kidnapped, convinced he has the power to “divine” where the gold is buried.

When Ty Ty began digging for gold, he staked a cross in a patch of land he calls “God’s Little Acre”—whatever the land produces here will be donated to the church. Worried that the albino will find the gold there, he moves the cross to a corner near his house. When Dave actually wields the divining rod, he moves toward the new God’s Little Acre. Ty Ty moves swiftly to remove the cross before the rod comes down exactly where it had been planted. The Waldens get to work digging with renewed fury, undermining the stability of the house.

Although Ty Ty is a religious man who never takes a drink, he is desperate. He ran out of money long ago, has extended his line of credit as far as it will go, and justifies the superstitious use of a diviner by reckoning that the albino is one of God’s creations. He has a dream of a happy, united family, but like the great tragic figures in literature, such as Oepidus, King Lear, and especially King Arthur, he is blind to the trouble he himself is creating. Just as Arthur fell into despair at the helpless treachery of Lancelot and Guenevere and plunged his kingdom into darkness, Ty Ty has failed to realize that he and the land are one and that to try to force wealth out of it instead of nurturing it will result in destruction.

Ty Ty is the figure with which Anthony Mann is interested. In David Boxwell’s short essay in Senses of Cinema on Mann, he says the following:

And if there is one consistent major character archetype in Mann’s work it is the thwarted patriarch: Walt Radak (Raymond Burr) in Desperate; Lance Pool (Robert Taylor) in Devil’s Doorway; T.C. Jeffords (Walter Huston) in The Furies; Alec Waggoman (Donald Crisp) in The Man from Laramie; Ty-Ty (Robert Ryan) in God’s Little Acre; Dock Tobin (Lee J. Cobb) in Man of the West. These men have tragic limitations of almost Greek proportions as they attempt, and often fail, to exercise control over self, family, and property. The limitations of their character and their power provide a thoroughgoing analysis of the limits of patriarchy as a social and economic structure of kinship and commerce.

The exuberance coming from the full-bodied performance of Robert Ryan generates a cockeyed optimism that does indeed seem strong enough to draw his family along with him in something other than dutiful obedience. But, Mann fails to discern the scope of Erskine Caldwell’s social commentary due to his intense focus on Ty Ty. Will, a delusional romantic who failed to marry the girl he loved and whom everyone else lusts after, has no children with his drably dutiful wife, and is stuck, permanently out of work, in his company town. He is the very picture of emasculated Southern manhood for whom hope is a noose into which he will one day slip his neck.

The lot of the sharecroppers and factory workers in the South was indeed desperate, and it was this desperation Caldwell sought to expose even as he wove an archetypal story, both humorous and grotesque. Mann does film scenes of great poignancy—for example, the night Will appoints himself the town’s savior and sacrificial lamb by breaking into the mill to turn on the lights and the machines. Noirish lighting, cutaways to close-ups of Rosamund waiting in nervous dread for him to come home, of the townspeople rousing from sleep to congregate at the awakened behemoth of the mill, and the feckless security guard (Russell Collins) following and threatening Will as he flips switches make for a tightly paced and tense sequence. Likewise, the reunion of Will and Griselda at the Walden farm results in a steamy near-seduction—Louise cooling herself at the outdoor pump wearing only a slip, Ray shirtless and swooning in her presence.

But there’s some connective tissue missing here. What happens to Will, to Griselda, to everyone but Ty Ty lacks urgency. We don’t feel this is a family that once was connected and that has now fallen apart. The symbolism is there—the empty holes, the precariously balanced house, the marriages lacking children, the factory lacking activity—but it all seems strangely remote, episodic. The film’s tone is all over the place, thus, the ironic ending has little impact. Despite a dynamite script from blacklisted writer Ben Maddow (through his front Philip Yordan) that makes excellent use of Caldwell’s language, Mann just didn’t seem to understand what to do with it. While God’s Little Acre doesn’t approach the true masterwork of this genre, Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll (1956), the film can be enjoyed for some of its excellent parts, some good performances, and a great sense of landscape. l

God’s Little Acre, another preservation success story, was restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding from the Packard Humanities Institute. The film was shown during UCLA’s 13th Festival of Film Preservation in 2006.

Avatar (2009)
Director/Screenwriter: James Cameron

By Roderick Heath

The entertainment value of entertainment sometimes seems to have become less and less valued. A more broad-minded way of looking at genre fare has entered contemporary criticism, transformed by an academic reading of subtext and semantics that can often invert the presumed value of high and low culture in movie-making, with the potential message-making power of generic films acknowledged. An instance of this can be seen in numerous commentaries I’ve read on 2009’s diptych of scifi allegory, Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 and James Cameron’s Avatar, many of which made both films sound like sticky tracts on racism and environmentalism rather than the rip-snorting action flicks they are. Nor is it hard to see why this element still tends to be emphasised: an action-adventure film still can’t really be just an action-adventure film without having some variety of pretension attached to it to justify its existence.

All of this is a long way of saying that I didn’t know until I’d watched it that Cameron’s Avatar is vintage Cameron, probably his best film since The Abyss (1989) and an unabashed scifi swashbuckler.

Here’s the plot. A couple of hundred years in the future, humans are now engaging in gleeful colonial rape of neighbouring planets, executed by the people who obviously never took a cultural studies class at college. The people who did are represented by Sigourney Weaver, as Dr. Grace Augustine, a humane scientist who’s trying to communicate with the understandably xenophobic natives of Pandora, the Na’vi (Native, get it?), who, with their glamorous blue complexions and long, pendulous bodies, resemble nothing so less than a race of Kate Mosses. She does so by creating hybrid bodies, or avatars, that can be mentally controlled by human operators. The mining company whose concerns take precedence over all projects, represented by Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi, caricaturised, if not ineffectively) and their hordes of mercenary bullyboys, led by the formidable Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), want the Na’vi shifted from their home over a particularly large and juicy seam of “Unobtainium,” an obscure ore that, like everything else on Pandora, seems part of its amazingly interconnected ecosphere, which, Grace realises, resembles a colossal brain.

Into this scenario comes Jake Scully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic ex-marine whose identical-twin brother, intended to be one of the anthropologist avatar operators, dies just before embarkation. Thus, Jake, having the same genetic make-up, can plug into his brother’s intended body. Grace is initially appalled by having a solider imposed on her team, and Selfridge and Quaritch immediately presume him to be a malleable tool to gather information. But Scully takes to his new part-time body like a duck to water, and his mysteriously anointed status, bestowed by the Na’vi’s nature-deity, which proves to be rather more than a merely ethereal being, gives him a foothold in the Na’vi tribe. Quicker than you can say “A Man Called Horse,” Jake is trained by whippet-hipped Na’vi chick Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) in Na’vi ways, earns induction into their tribe and religion, and gets busy Na’vi style with Neytiri. And, when the time comes, and the humans’ bulldozers and gunships come rocking in, Scully’s loyalties are, of course, brought into desperate question. When Quaritch kills Grace, Jake and a few human confederates, including tough-girl helicopter pilot Trudy (Michelle Rodriguez) and nerd Norm Spellman (Joel Moore) are left with few options. Will Jake man up and show the Na’vi how to fight off the invaders? Well, duh.

Avatar has much in common with the last major Hollywood swashbuckler, Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), in the way it contrasts and intertwines yearning, conscientious, scientific spirit and Enlightenment idealism with martial vainglory and ra-ra action: if it’s not half as smart and nuanced as Weir’s film, it executes action better. Of course, the uptown guy in me kept thinking that it was an inferior variant on Malick’s The New World, with hero Jake and Neytiri taking the place of John Smith and Pocahontas and utilising a battery of special effects to evoke the same feeling of wonder and awe in the natural world that Malick was able to conjure with some stalks of grass. Where Malick turns the familiar into the spectrally strange, Cameron specialises in turning the utterly alien into the cosily familiar.

But, if it’s a stock story, the film knows it, and stock stories have always been a motif of space opera upon which to hang evocations of wonderment. There’s a reason why such a plot has survived a couple of thousand years: scenes of Jake taming and riding a kind of dragon to rouse the Na’vi to follow him is pure Joseph Campbell (or is it Robert E. Howard?), backed up by the Dickensian character names. It’s long been Cameron’s stand-out trait to fuse intriguing genre ideas pilfered from a multitude of sources with a rocking matinee pace: just because it’s older doesn’t mean The Terminator is any different in this regard, even if, like Spielberg and Jackson and George Miller and many others, Cameron has long ago left behind the bargain-basement gore and cruder provocations for blockbuster blandness, a development that film fans can never quite forgive. But Avatar sports great ideas, with its concept of a biological version of the internet conjoining organisms in a web of awareness and reliance, lending the hippy-dippy nature mysticism an unexpected solidity. And, of course, the metaphoric potential for on-line networking and gaming, and traditional cinephilia, in the avatar concept will launch a thousand term papers in the near future.

Although Avatar is indeed cutting-edge technical cinema redefined, Cameron remains utterly, blissfully indifferent to many modern Hollywood faults, like its love of excessively tight framing, space-distorting editing, and wobbling cameras that destroy most contemporary would-be thrill rides. His sense of spectacle is just as cleanly organised and visually easy to read as it was 20 years ago. If you don’t have a taste for action and spectacle, that’s all well and good; I’ll see you later at the Tarkovsky festival, no fear. But then again, a shot of one of the Na’vi’s six-legged riding beasts running away from battle engulfed in flames evokes the stumbling horse in the battle scene of Andrei Rublev, and like that film, it raises the question of whether the divisions of pagan nature-worship and more polite creeds might be wrong-headed, with an overall concept of humanity and nature fatally out of balance. Avatar is also, like The New World, about the American dream of an Eden, and, like The Last of the Mohicans, a fantasy of cross-cultural merging that promises the growth of a new and better kind of man by embracing values rejected by the Old World. When Wes Studi turns up playing the Na’vi chief, I nearly laughed out loud, not knowing if this was a cunning or corny casting cue. Both? I could say that of the whole film. But Studi isn’t playing Magua here, the embodied spirit of the savage in man: that part is reserved for Lang’s Quaritch.

Ironically, and amusingly, that Old World is now one of super-technology and asshole corporate types, and the New conceptualises god as a unified natural scheme, pantheism with some organic cyberpunk jive thrown in. Some right-wingers have criticised Cameron for offering greenie propaganda, and they have a point—in fact, it’s utterly, thumpingly obvious—but Cameron is a bundle of contradictions as a director. He doesn’t analyse the divides between his preoccupations, but sets his disparate selves in highly unironic conflict, which is perhaps why he’s so popular. A supreme Hollywood technocrat who began in special-effects production, he’s also an unabashed romantic who gives us a love affair between two animated cat-people that’s warmer than most of those found in modern romantic comedies. A fetishist of military lingo, hardware, and attitude, he often deals out ruthless punishment to soldierly and authoritarian types for blind arrogance and aggression. A pillar of Hollywood cultural imperialism, he, like George Lucas, constructs fables of embattled outsiders fighting to overcome unstoppable monopolies and spends huge sums of money on making films that metaphorically reflect the exploitation of third-world populaces.

Cameron’s not very subtle—anyone who’s seen his award speeches knows that—but he is a canny filmmaker and curiously ardent one: Avatar, even more than Titanic, flies a long way on pure enthusiasm. If it’s a better film than Titanic, a film I liked well enough for its visual beauty, strong stars, and felicitous quotations of ’30s screwball comedies and Victorian melodrama, it’s because Cameron’s love of antisocial rebelliousness and resolutely contemporary sense of character and dialogue fit far more easily into the not-too-distant future than into the not-too-distant past. Where he never had a hope of successfully grafting his American love of the fighting chance onto a situation defined by accepting the inevitable, he’s in his element with Avatar. In engaging with his conjured alien milieu, he maintains a depth and care in his scifi and metaphorical concepts that eluded the less detailed, more self-congratulatory analogies of District 9, whilst also cranking his narrative up to an action climax that is too long, but brilliantly done. What’s inherently likeable about Avatar is that it wears its values on its sleeve: it’s not busy hiding behind a glaze of hip alienation and elusive visuals.

It’s not perfect. Not nearly. Cameron’s habit of writing dialogue that drops like lead weights now and then hasn't altered, his storytelling in the first third is occasionally choppy, and if the imagery doesn’t tap into your sense of wonder, the obvious narrative will leave you cold. The special effects are indeed amazing in their immersive detail, but the film’s greatest avatar is Stephen Lang: building on his impressive, if brief, turn in Public Enemies, his face carved to an Easter Island idol under a mean crop of white stalks standing at parade attention, his villain is the best kind—one you both enjoy enormously and badly want to see get it in the neck. Requiring no more props than some make-up scars, Lang as Quaritch offers a hybrid of every gung-ho hard-ass in screen history and the mean gym teacher from your nightmares, embodying everything malevolent about the über-macho type. His and Scully’s relationship, defined at first by patronising paternalism, and then, finally, by nakedly bellicose warfare, evokes the clash of John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red River. Like that film, it’s fundamentally about the irreconcilable clash of force and felicity, frontier and civilisation, but it also reveals changes in the popular zeitgeist ever since: the world’s gone native, and the best cowboys have joined the Indians.

Worthington himself is, well, worthy: his capacity to play undoubted masculinity with low-key soul is intact, and it’s to her amazing credit that Saldana projects as much charisma CGI’d nearly out of existence as she did in her other scifi hit of 2009, Star Trek. But it’s Lang who animates the film and drags it toward sheer mythic confrontation. Of course, I can see through all of Cameron’s tricks, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I enjoyed them enormously, though, admittedly, my expectations were mild. Avatar will probably win a lot of Oscars and make a mountain of money. For once I won’t mind. l