A video by Melanie Juliano

by Allan Fish

(Germany 1926 95m) DVD1

Aka. Der Student von Prag

He gambled with his soul and lost

p  Harry R.Sokal  d  Henrik Galeen  w  Henrik Galeen, Hanns Heinz Ewart  story  Edgar Allan Poe  ph  Gunther Krampf, Erich Nitzchmann  art  Hermann Warm

Conrad Veidt (Balduin), Werner Krauss (Scapinelli), Fritz Alberti (Graf Schwarzenberg), Elizza Porta (Liduschka), Agnes Esterhazy (Margit), Ferdinand von Alten (Baron Waldis Schwarzenberg),

Take a crash course in German Expressionism in the 21^st century and a great injustice will be perpetrated borne out of ignorance.  We know Murnau, Lang, Pabst, of Robert Wiene for Caligari (if little else) and Paul Wegener for and as Der Golem.  Yet it’s a summary guilty of numerous oversights.  Such avant garde pioneers as Hans Richter and Walter Ruttmann, Kammerspiel founder Lupu Pick, Paul Leni, E.A.Dupont, Joe May and Hanns Schwarz all merit a mention.  As do the likes of Hermann Warm, Karl Freund and Fritz Arno Wagner.  Not to mention the man who perhaps was the movement’s very soul in the same way Zavattini was to neo-realism, writer Carl Mayer.

The one missing from this illustrious roll call is Henrik Galeen.  Various key film reference works list him as an essential figure in German expressionism, but why do we not know him better?  It can be partially explained by looking him up on the IMDb, where Galeen comes up as “writer, Nosferatu.”  He did indeed write the scenario for Nosferatu.  He wrote Der Golem and Waxworks, too, but who remembers that he once co-directed the 1913 version of Der Golem?  Who indeed remembers him as a director at all?

He didn’t make many films as a director, and fewer still survive, but there are two that are worth tracking down.  Alraune is a worthy variation on many expressionistic themes with Paul Wegener and Brigitte Helm excellent in the leads.  Better is his The Student of Prague, like Der Golem a remake of a 1913 original, and while that version has its advocates, few could argue that Galeen’s is the better film. 

The story is an old chestnut, essentially another Faustian reworking about a student, Balduin, who is bored with being the greatest fencer in the land and wants to turn his attention to the fairer sex, but lacks the money to do so.  He thus strikes up a bargain with the mysterious Scapinelli, who promises him 600,000 ducats in exchange for just something of Scapinelli’s choice from within Balduin’s room.  Balduin agrees in the belief he possesses nothing valuable, but Scapinelli claims his reflection from within the mirror.  At first he doesn’t miss it, but then the reflection stars getting ideas of his own, and kills a rival in a duel which he had promised would not be fatal.

The plot being such a familiar one, and Balduin’s death foretold in the opening graveyard scene, its reputation rests on its performances and visual command.  Veidt and Krauss are reunited from Caligari (they were both in Waxworks, but didn’t share a scene) and they’re both superb.  Krauss’ freaky appearance, with deliberately exaggerated make-up, is quite unnerving, while Veidt is superb in one of his greatest doomed romantic roles that he often played in Germany or Britain before Hollywood typecast him as a villain.  That it’s stunningly photographed in chiaroscuro worthy of the old masters and superbly designed goes without saying, as does the fact that the scene where Krauss summons Veidt’s reflection through the mirror should be as celebrated as Max Schreck on the deck of the Demeter or Rotwang’s creation of the Maria robot.  Sadly all prints currently in circulation are not in the best condition – those German classics not made under the UFA banner just weren’t preserved as well – and with the original negative lost a restoration seems unlikely.  Yet still its influence can be seen down the years.  Take the final scene where Balduin confronts his errant reflection in his room and shoots it.  The mirror shatters and he sees his reflection back on the other side through the remaining shards, only for him to then realise he’s actually shot himself.  If it sounds familiar, replace the mirror with a painting, locked away in an attic, a knife through the heart.

One of the greatest honors ever for Wonders in the Dark was bestowed upon the site and Yours Truly this past week, when author Peter Danish used a quote praising his book from me that is included with five others from some of the biggest names in opera.  The quote will also appear on the book’s back cover.  The novel, which I read months ago is stupendous, and a full review will be posted sometime after it is officially released in ten days.

The book’s trailer is offered here with the incredible inclusion of Wonders in the Dark.  When trailer appears, simply click on play and wait for the five quotes, including the one for WitD, which appears at the 2:02 mark.

-S. J.

Cliff Bernunzio and Nemesys rock the Recovery Room in Westwood

The Lego Movie figures

by Sam Juliano

As I pen this week’s lead in snow is again falling on the Metropolitan area, though expectations are that it will conclude around midnight, leaving in its wake two inches.

What can beat a glorious marathon session of classic rock from a talented veteran trio who grew up in your own back yard?  The Nemesys and their erstwhile leader, bass guitarist Cliff Bernunzio rocked the rustic night club-restaurant The Recovery Room for over three hours on a frigid Saturday night in the quaint town of Westwood, New Jersey.  Bernunzio, 63, and his his esteemed colleagues, Tony Cavallo on lead guitar and Chris Carnavale on drums gave the classic catalog quite the work out with three sets, that totaled 36 songs by the greatest bands in rock history: The Beatles, The Stones, The Doors, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, The Yardbirds, Black Sabbath, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Queen, Steppenwolf, The Ramones, The Kinks, Simon & Garfunkle, The Zombies, John Lennon and the Steve Miller Band.  As performed by the Nemesys, several of the covers were electrifying – “Magic Carpet Ride,” “I Want You,” “Brown Sugar” and “Green River” among others.  All three band members alternated and/or converged on the vocals, with Carnavale assuming much of the duty in dynamic form.  Bernunzio, of Little Ferry, has upcoming venues in Bayonne, in Maywood and back in Westwood in the coming months, with one devoted exclusively to Doo Wop, that will focus on Classic 45s.

The Romantic Film  countdown will be pushed back one month because of the Tribeca Film Festival scheduled for mid April.  Still, everyone’s Top 50 ballots will be due on April 1st.  The group e mail announcement is nearing.

Lucille and I saw the following films in theaters this past week:

7 Boxes     ****   (Friday night)   Cinema Village

A Field in England  *** 1/2   (Sunday afternoon)   Cinema Village

The Lego Movie  **** 1/2   (Saturday afternoon)  Starplex

The Paraguayan thriller 7 BOXES makes impressive use of setting to showcase an original chase tale, where the characters know little about what awaits them.  For the most part this is an original and tautly constructed tale by a South American director  - Juanca Maneglia - with considerable talent.  He appeared at the theater from a most engaging Q and A.  THE LEGO MOVIE takes its inspiration from TOY STORY, but there’s quite a bit of originality on display as well.  This animated treasure is irreverent, satiric and brimming with ideas and a resounding emotional undercurrent that make this an entertainment with resonance.  Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, this all seems headed to another blockbusting money franchise, which could be good or very bad.  Ha!  I think Jaimie Grijalba said it best when he called Ben Wheatley’s A FIELD IN ENGLAND a “head f**k” yet like Jaimie I found there was a certain degree of brilliance in this bizarre yet cinematically dazzling film by a master of this form.  At some point I’d like to take in another viewing.

by Sam Juliano

There’s no getting around it.  Caroline Kennedy’s recently-released collection Poems to Learn by Heart breathes life into a literary genre has has lost some relevance in an age of i-phones and college curriculums that have cut back on classes examining poetry.  Caroline Kennedy traces her own affection for poetry back to her own reading sessions with her grandmother Rose Kennedy, who purportedly quizzed them on American history and some of the story poems that captures specific events.  One, Longfellow’s beloved “Paul Revere’s Ride” was a favorite of the late Senator Edward Kennedy, who recited the marathon poem at public events.  The tradition of reading poems as a family though, goes back to Jacqueline Bouvier, who met with her grandfather at least once a week to examine and recite the classics.  The love for poetry was also evident at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration when he looked to Robert Frost for inspiration.  Caroline herself of course published the volume A Family of Poems, a 2005 best-seller, one in which she collaborated with ace illustrator Jon J. Muth.

She and Muth again teamed up for this new volume of poetry, and the work represents some of the finest work the illustrator has ever done in a career that already has amassed some picture book classics.  Muth’s magnificent Zen Shorts won a Caldecott Honor in 2006, and the talented illustrator moved on to some other distinguished picture books such Blowin’ in the Wind, a pictorial rendition of the Bob Dylan treasure, and the moving City Dog Country Frog, a collaboration with Mo Willems.  Muth’s work brings fresh new visualizations to some venerated poems that date back hundreds of years.  Poems by Tennyson, Shakespeare, Beckett, Chaucer, Shelley, Melville, Lincoln, Browning, Crane, Dickinson, Melville and many others are given some lovely new clothes that vividly broaden and accentuate the various interpretations, and offer the art lover some glorious watercolor paintings in this vast 200 page book that is aimed more for the higher middle school and Jr. High School students.  Indeed, this collection could not be appreciated by the youngest, even if the illustrations would still captivate the gifted students in the lower age group.

The volume’s magical cover is taken from page 74, where Robert Graves’ “Id Love to Be a Fairy’s Child” is printed.  Some of the most famous writings ever created are also on these pages: The famed Crispin’s Day speech from the Bard’s Henry V, Lincoln’s “Gettsyburg Address,”  a passage from Ovid’s The Metamorphosis, and the General Prologue from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.  An obvious favorite of Kennedy’s is Robert Louis Stevenson, who is represented in this collection repeatedly.  The poems are arranged by themes, and total an even 100.  There are rhymed poems and free-verse poems, “girl” poems and “boy” poems, the latter including Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Slam, Dunk, & Hook,” Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat” and the former by Caroll’s Through a Looking Glass.  Some of the poems are light and carefree, while others explore some of the darkest themes, including wars and the Holocaust.  The use of the excerpts from some of literature’s most celebrated works gives the collection some philosophical heft, even if such a decision was sure to keep this volume with the older kids.

Some of own favorite marriages of words to illustration include a double page spread on Jonson’s The Masque of Queens, Ogden Nash’s “The Tale of Custard the Dragon,” and “The Lesson” by Billy Collins.  But there is a unity here that makes it difficult to choose the spreads that stand out most.  This is a diverse tapestry that brings into disparate seasons, terrains, countries, time periods and settings and it both engages the mind while peppering one’s sense of art appreciation with some extraordinary and expressionistic art.  It’s so good in fact that it will enhance the poetry experience for most.  There is a bleak undercurrent in the meditative “The Snow Man” by Wallace Stevens, a grotesque specter hanging over Prelutsky’s “Herbert Glerbert” and some irresistible humor in Neal Levin’s “Baby Ate a Microchip.” Caroline Kennedy has some great taste in poetry and poets, and though I might quibble the absence of favorites like “The Highwayman” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” who could argue with this collection.  Simply put, it’s a treasure.

Note:  This is the first in a series that will examine (mostly) exceptional non-American picture books released over the past year, and some others like today’s posting- that well warrant inclusion in the series.  Though a good number of the reviews will appear on Saturdays, this won’t be exclusive.

by Sam Juliano

Wonders in the Dark crossed the finish line for 3,000,000 page views earlier today.  This feat is a testament to the site’s sustained popularity as a meeting place for movie loving bloggers and many others who have come to expect the current diverse attention paid to all the arts including live theater, literature, television and music and opera.

The two most traveled threads -and both continue to get hefty hits each day- are The 50 Best Movies of the 2000′s and The 25 Greatest Opera Films with 161.000 and 26,000 hits respectively.  I am proud of both those posts, especially the one on opera which continues to amaze me with its resiliency.  Both the recent Best Westerns countdown and the extended series on the Caldecott Medal contenders attracted remarkable numbers as well.  The most page views ever for any countdown was the one for The 70 Greatest Musicals, while the weekly voting thread that ran for almost two years achieved solid numbers as well.

I would like to thank my very dear friend Dee Dee for the miracles she has performed for this site since its inception all the way back in September of 2008.  I would also like to thank dear friends like Pierre de Plume, Laurie Buchanan, Frank Gallo, Maurizio Roca, Jon Warner, Sachin Gandhi, Jim Clark, Peter M., John Greco, Pat Perry, Samuel Wilson, Jeffrey Goodman, Jaimie Grijalba, Stephen Mullen, John Grant, Jaimie Grijalba, Mark Smith, Dean Treadway, Judy Geater, Patricia Hamilton, Terrill Welch, Murderous Ink,Tim McCoy, David Noack, Ed Howard, Bob Clark, Brandie Ashe, Duane Porter, Shubhajit Lahiri, David Schleicher, Jason Marshall, Mike Norton, Celeste Fenster, Joel Bocko, Dennis Polifroni, Marilyn Ferdinand, Roderick Heath, Peter Lenihan, Stephen Morton, Just Another Film Buff, Jason Giampietro, Drew McIntosh, Michael Harford, R.D. Finch, Adam Zanzie, Hokahey, J.D. La France, Dave Hicks, Stephen Russell-Gebbett, Kaleem Hasan, Pedro Silva, Anukbav, Movie Fan, Kevin Deaney, Longman Oz, Troy and Kevin Olson, Rick Olson, Jason Bellamy, Joe, John R., Karen, Broadway Bob, sirrefevas, and of course to Allan Fish for collectively bringing this place sustained activity and prominence.  My longtime friend from Down Under, Tony d’Ambra has helped this site above and beyond and has remained an unwavering and dependable friend all the way to the time we first unveiled this place to the public eye.

It’s been an amazing ride, and I dare say it’s far from over.  Thanks my friends!

Below are the top posts as copied from word press:

Title		Views
Home page / Archives		811,989
The 50 Best Movies of the 2000s		161,146
The 25 Greatest ‘Opera Films’ Ever Made		25,107
500 Days of Summer opens 40th annual Nashville Film Festival		19,853
(unknown or deleted)		19,726
Metropolis – Restored Version (no 8)		14,452
Holocaust Drama “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” Has Some Powerful Moments But is Largely Uneven		11,869
Monday Morning Diary (December 21)		11,650
All-Time Top 3,000		11,511
Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” and “Vertigo” Place No. 1 and No. 2 in ‘Best of the 1950′s Movie Poll at WitD		10,919
The Skeleton Dance (no 29)		10,671
J.M.W. Turner Exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art		10,358
25. Texas Chainsaw Massacre		9,544
Irreversible (no 9)		9,448
Forsaken 70′s Cinema: “A Separate Peace” Based on Novel by John Knowles		9,023
‘Eyes Open…Darkness’: David Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’ and ‘Rabbits’		8,484
Allan Fish’s Decades Countdown		8,383
Across the Universe (no 99)		8,055
1. The Great War		7,590
About		6,865
David Lynch’s ‘Mullholland Drive’ Named Best Film of the 2000s by WitD Readers by Wide Margin		6,502
Notes on “The Duel of the Fates”		6,488
Best of the 2000s

One of the most extraordinary animated short film line-ups ever to compete for the Oscar

Henry Fonda as ‘Young Mr. Lincoln’ screened at Film Forum on Sunday

by Sam Juliano

How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December’s bareness every where!

-William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 97″

Every state in the nation has been visited by the ultimate barometer of winter -that once welcome, but now tiring and meddlesome white marauder- over the past week, except for Florida.  In the now beleaguered northeast it has been a conveyor belt of storms and frigid temperatures, and the latest word is that we may not yet be done.  Certainly our dear Midwestern brethren have suffered through the darkest season in many a year, and there has been some catastrophic weather in parts of the United Kingdom.  March inches closer, but can anyone feel safe until April Fool’s Day or even then in this season of uncertainty and vulnerability.  Amidst all the mayhem, some school districts -including our own in Fairview- are closed for President’s Week, allowing for some recovery and/or meditative time.

The e mail chain for the Romantic Film Countdown polling will be sent out to all e mail members this coming Wednesday, February 19.  Those casting ballots will have until April 1st to vote and send on to the network.  While it has admittedly taken quite a bit of time to get this project off the ground for various diversions and considerations, I am (personally) ready to move forward and am very excited.  Hopefully a good number of friends and readers are of the same mind-set.

One of the most incredible and most comprehensive Film Festivals ever staged anywhere or anytime will be commencing at the Film Forum on Friday, February 21st, and will continue for five full weeks.  The Festival has been titled The Complete Hitchcock and the schedule will include every feature length film the prolific Hitch ever made, including the ultra-rare German-language MARY (1930) and his nine surviving silents, all restored by the BFI.  Lucille, young Sammy and Danny and I will be on hand for a fair number of these screenings, including a few attractively-paired double features for the price of one.  A more glorious tribute to Hitch than this one?  I doubt it.  Here is the link to the full Film Forum schedule:

http://www.filmforum.org/movies/more/the_complete_hitchcock#nowplaying

In any case, after the Complete Hitchcock concludes on March 27, the Film Forum will then stage a complete festival on Francois Truffaut and a 60th Anniversary restoration of Godzilla.  Happy times for movie lovers in New York City for the upcoming months.  Presently, Godard’s Alphaville and Resnais’s Je T’Aime Je T’Aime are playing on separate screens until Thursday.

Dennis Polifroni, young Sammy and Yours Truly will be recording our annual Oscar Predictions video at the local Boulevard Diner on Monday evening, February 24th.  The you tube video will be the first time be filmed and edited by the talented Miss Melanie Juliano, though the wily Oscar veteran Jason Giampietro may be on hand with a second camera.  The finished product will be posted at the site on either Wednesday or Thursday of that pre-Oscar week.

While the beginning and middle of this past week was spent watching the multiple storms unfold from home and shoveling out from the aftermath, Lucille and I (and young Sammy as well) still manged to take in three movie presentations in theaters over the weekend, somehow negotiating the challenging road conditions.  We took in:

Gloria  ****    (Friday night)   Montclair Bow-Tie Cinemas

Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) ***** (Sunday) Film Forum

Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts ***** (Saturday) Bow-Tie

Sebastian Lelio’s focused Chilean drama GLORIA about mid-life crisis and eventual rejuvenation owes some thematic debt to the character Gena Rowlands played for Cassevettes, but the film has a naturalist spontaneity and honesty that forges its own path, bolstered by an absolutely extraordinary performance by Paulina Garcia, who pulls away from mid-life crisis doldrums to finally celebrate life for a new found vitality.  Jaimie Grijalba wrote a fantastic review of it at Overlook’s Corridor, which I have linked here:

http://overlookhotelfilm.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/chilean-cinema-2013-12-gloria-2013/

This year’s crop of Oscar-nominated Animated shorts is the strongest for any year I can remember, and I am presently unable to select a favorite – all are excellent, and the three others that were shown that apparently “just missed” have complicated the issue further as all of those are terrific as well.  One of those three that missed the cut – the often hysterical French A La Francaise about a gaggle of chickens running King Louie’s court matches the best of the best here.  The American Feral, a lush and entrancing tale about a child raised by wolves and later found in the wilderness to be domesticated, has the look of a moving oil painting, and the color is both stark and vibrant.  Emotionally it is unquestionably the most resonant of the lot.  Simon Pegg’s utterly winning narration for the British Room on the Broom, based on the children’s book of the same name establishes added heft to this oddly engaging story of a witch who assembles a group of animals to fly the skies with her.  At about 30 minutes this is the longest short, and the one that may snare the Oscar in the end.  The way I am seeing it now the race is neck and neck between Room and the Pixaresque story Mr. Hublot, about a robot and a dog in a machine city.  As to the other two nominees, Get A Horse is a Disney homage to the classic “Mickey saves Minnie” and the Japanese Possessions, (the favorite of my son Sammy) tells a story of a fix-it man  who chances upon a temple during a storm.  The amime style here is the real allure.

John Ford’s masterful 1939 classic Young Mr. Lincoln was screened on Sunday morning at 11:00 as part of it’s popular “Film Forum Jr.” series, and a very special treat awaited those who attended.  The esteemed screenwriter and playwright Tony Kushner (who penned the screenplay to last year’s Lincoln) was on hand to introduce the film, which he identified as one of his favorite by the director he referred to as “America’s all-time greatest.”  One can never tire of Young Mr. Lincoln, and every new viewing will invariably set one off on yet another study of the most studied of all historical figures.  It was great introducing Sammy to the film -he loved it as expected- and to again revel in the superlative craftsmanship and rhythm and in one of the greatest of performances by Henry Fonda as a youthful Abe.  The best reference point ever on this great film is the now-famous and incomparably passionate statement from Sergei Eisenstein:

Suppose some truant good fairy were to ask me, “As I’m not employed just now, perhaps there’s some small magic job  I could do for you, Sergei Mikhailovich?  Is there some American film that you’d like me to make you the author of – with a wave of my wand?”

I would not hesitate to accept the offer, and I would at once name the film that I wish I had made.  It would be ‘Young Mr. Lincoln’ directed by John Ford.  There are films that are richer and more effective.  There are films that are presented with more entertainment and charm.  Ford himself has made more extraordinary films than this one.  Connoisseurs might well prefer ‘The Informer’ (1935).  Audiences would probably vote for ‘Stagecoach’ (1939) and sociologists for ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ (1940).  ’Young Mr. Lincoln’ didn’t even get one of those bronze Oscars.  Nevertheless, of all American films made up to now, this is the film that I would wish, most of all, to have made.  What is there in it that makes me love it so?  It has a quality, a quality that every work of art must have – an astonishing harmony of all its component parts, a really amazing harmony as a whole………..I saw this film on the eve of the world war.  It immediately enthralled me with the perfection of its harmony and the rare skill with which it employed all the expressive means at its disposal.  And most of all for the solution of Lincoln’s image.  My love for this film has neither cooled nor been forgotten.  It grows stronger and the film itself grows more and more dear to me.

I am happy to have links up for this week:

At Tuesdays with Laurie, the indomitable Ms. Buchanan is the subject of another great and deserving honor: http://tuesdayswithlaurie.com/2014/02/12/words-of-wisdom-from-laurie-buchanan/

At Noirish the exceedingly gifted and prolific author John Grant has penned an especially excellent review of the little seen Stanley Kramer debut film “Not as a Stranger”: http://noirencyclopedia.wordpress.com/2014/02/15/morton-thompsons-not-as-a-stranger-1955/

Stephen Mullen (Weeping Sam) has declared “Inside Llewyn Davis” as the best film of 2013 and one of the Coens’ most formidable works at The Listening Ear:  http://listeningear.blogspot.com/2014/02/inside-llewyn-davis.html

Dean Treadway continues his fabulous annual cinematic coverage with an in-depth look at 1927 at Filmacability:  http://filmicability.blogspot.com/2014/02/1927-year-in-review.html

Judy Geater has launched her new series on Douglas Sirk at Movie Classics with a terrific essays on “Has Anybody Seen My Gal?”:  http://movieclassics.wordpress.com/2014/02/16/has-anybody-seen-my-gal-douglas-sirk-1952/

John Greco has written a superb review of Luchino Visconti’s extraordinary “Bellissima” at Twenty Four Frames:  http://twentyfourframes.wordpress.com/2014/02/14/belissima-1952-visconti-luchino/

At Scribbles and Ramblings Sachin Gandhi has the South American Movie World Cup pairings up for your perusal: http://likhna.blogspot.com/2014/01/south-american-films.html

At Overlook’s Corridor Jaimie Grijalba is up to “screenplays” in the continuing examination of his annual ‘Frank Awards’ given to the best films and components:  http://overlookhotelfilm.wordpress.com/2014/02/14/frank-awards-2013-screenplays/

Pat Perry’s latest post at Doodad Kind of Town superbly addresses “Philomena” and “Inside Llewyn Davis”: http://doodadkindoftown.blogspot.com/2014/01/surprise-surprise.html

At Dee Dee’s ‘Ning’ network site she has posted some spectacular and rare Hitchcock posters in honor of the Film Forum’s great Festival on the prolific icon:                             http://filmnoire.ning.com/forum/topics/darkness-before-dawn-takes-a-peek-at-foreign-posters-and

Jon Warner has posted a fantastic essay on the documentary masterwork “The Act of Killing” at Films Worth Watching: http://filmsworthwatching.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-act-of-killing-2012-directed-by.html

At FilmsNoir.net Allan Fassions has written a superb essay on 1955′s “Dementia” for the site’s erstwhile proprietor Tony d’Ambra:  http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/alan-fassioms-on-dementia-1955-beatnik-noir.html

And speaking of Fassions, his site is now the latest inclusion on the WitD sidebar.  It is called “Stranger on the 3rd Floor” and it looks like a fabulous place to visit:  http://strangeronthe3rdfloor.wordpress.com/

At The Last Lullaby filmmaker Jeffrey Goodman is leading up with his 12 Best Films of 2013:   http://cahierspositif.blogspot.com/2014/01/my-top-twelve-films-of-2013.html

The great Canadian artist Terrill Welch is leading up at her sublime Creativepotager’s blog with a post titled “One Brush Stroke After Another”:  http://creativepotager.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/one-brushstroke-after-another/

As ever, Samuel Wilson is posting superb reviews that may have esaped the radar.  His latest great piece to that end at Mondo 70 is an essay on “Greed in the Sun”:            http://mondo70.blogspot.com/2014/02/greed-inthe-sun-cent-mille-dollars-au.html

Patricia Hamilton has written a tremendous book review on Anish Majumdar’s “The Isolation Door” at Patricia’s Wisdom, and the author chimed in:                                                    http://patriciaswisdom.com/2014/02/the-isolation-door-a-novel-anish-majumdar/

Shubhajit Lahiri has penned a provocative capsule on the Argentinian film “Wake Up Love” at Cinemascope:                             http://cliched-monologues.blogspot.com/2014/02/wake-up-love-despabilate-amor-1996.html

David Schleicher has penned a fabulous review of the Iranian “The Past” at The Schleicher Spin:  http://theschleicherspin.com/2014/02/09/secrets-and-lies-in-the-past/

Brandie Ashe has posted a wonderful post on Shirley Temple at True Classics:                    http://trueclassics.net/2014/02/11/remembering-shirley-temple/

Mike Norton has penned some superlative pieces on Hip Hop at Enter the Screen:    http://enterthescreen.wordpress.com/

Joel Bocko posts about the screen-capping he’s managed over the past year at The Dancing Image:  http://thedancingimage.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-final-watchlistscreencap-some-notes.html

Roderick Heath brings unprecedented scholarship to Ivan Reitman’s “Ghostbusters” at Ferdy-on-Films:  http://www.ferdyonfilms.com/2014/ghostbusters-1984/21071/

J.D. LaFrance leads up with a terrific review on “Neuromancer” at Radiator Heaven:  http://rheaven.blogspot.com/2014/02/neuromancer.html

Drew McIntosh has again offered up a fascinating post at The Blue Vial, showcasing works by Walerian Borowczyk and David Lynch:  http://thebluevial.blogspot.com/2014/01/end-of-road.html

Tony Kushner speaking at Film Forum before YOUNG MR. LINCOLN (photo by Lucille Juliano)

by Sam Juliano

The indefatigable “Mr. Hulot”, who appeared in four of Jacques Tati’s films is one of the cinema’s most venerable creations.  First published in France under the title Hello Monsieur Hulot David Merveile’s sublime and utterly delightful picture book Hello Mr. Hulot is a labor of love by a lifelong fan of the iconic character, Jacques Tati’s tragic-comic alter ego.  A pace gone awry, technological advancements and the inevitably complex transportation system make life difficult for  the gauche and blundering Hulot, whose most distinctive attributes center around his dress.  His short trousers and wrinkled coat, striped socks and trademark pipe, hat and umbrella have established a singular identification.  While never matching the universal love and recognition afforded Chaplin’s tramp or Keaton’s stone face, he has persevered in the shadow of the cold and inhuman modern society he mocked with a unrepentant quixotic glee, as one of the greatest comic creations in the history of the cinema.

Hulot was featured successively in Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953),  Mon Oncle (1959), Play Time (1967) and Traffic (1971).  Author Melville claims he caught Hulot fever in 2004 after hiding a drawing of the iconic character in one of his illustrations, and then getting many responses from fans.  Merville adds: “Translating Tati’s films into the genre of the picture book seemed very logical to me: I could actually silhouette the behavior and gestures of Monsieur Hulot.  It’s ideal for a paper copy.  The great film posters from Pierre Etaix demonstrated this.  Also, Tati’s access to film, his love for details, his keen powers of observation, his interest in things, his feelings about architecture, his economical use of dialogue, and his visual jokes have all encouraged me to develop Monsieur Hulot on paper.”

The book features delightfully colorful and witty comic strip-style illustrations depicting twenty-two alluring scenes with a page turn that showcases a surprise ending the narrative panels that precede it.  In one gem titled “Pipes Allowed” Hulot’s incessant pipe smoking in an increasingly hostile environment plays out on a bus where a woman angrily points to a no-smoking sign while surrenders as bubbles flow from his pipe, amusing the woman’s young child.  In the full page denouement bubbles seem to emanate from all sources in front of a French cafe – they rise from the popsicles being enjoyed from a young couple, one fills in for a balloon being held on a string carried by a child and they form speech bubbles for conversing patrons.

One of my own personal favorites, “Hulot the Plumber”  is one that vigorously recalls the 1940 Del-Lord directed Three Stooges classic “A Plumbing We Will Go” which chronicles the bumbling antics of a clueless Curly, whose idea of fixing a leak is to complicate the situation with far more damaging consequences.  Hulot the Plumber comes upon the scene after drips are heard in the kitchen of an apartment building.  By utilyzing a  mis-directed red hose the bumbling Hulot even manages to intermingle the water and electricity (as the boys in “A Plumbing We Will Go” did with anarchic hilarity) before a temporary reprieve leaves his smugly reading a book while disaster looms by way in the matter of a building completely flooded, with a geyser rising from a chimney, and others trying to save themselves in various manners from the flooding.

Chaos of a different flavor plays out in two other clever vignettes.  ”The Snowball Effect” first spies our hero innocently walking on a snow covered sidewalk, where he is subsequently pelted by a snowball thrown by a quickly enough revealed mischief hunter.  Always the obliging one, Hulot retaliates in kind, but accidentally hits another, while crossfire develops, culminating in the final spread of a street gone haywire with many game to engage in the mayhem.  In “Urban Symphony” Hulot is regaled in succession by a boom boxer, a car wildly honking, the grating rat-a-tat of a jackhammer, the sloshing of a street cleaner, the clanging of a man hole cover and the roar of a truck, before noises of every kind converge in a scene that exasperates and even deafens the perpetrators.  Hulot’s inherent kindness and solitude surface in “The Umbrella Corner” and “Valentine’s Day.”  In the former he shelters a group of birds under his umbrella as rains begins to fall.  After the bus pulls up he decides to leave behind the umbrella, which becomes wedged between branches in a tree to serve as a cover for the flock.  In the latter series, our everyman ventures upon couples celebrating and toasting their romances, and finally leaves in the rain, with his shadow offering flowers to a woman on a building poster.  Merveille’s use of muted colors and lighting is very effective in this melancholic tapestry.

Other memorable vignettes include “The Heart of Paris,” “French Riviera”, “Hulot the Hero”, “Don Quixote” and especially “Chameleon” when Hulot finds physical and ornamental kinship with a penguin, an iguana, a butterfly display, bats hanging in a cave and a raccoon before unconsciously aping the physical positions of a group of flamingos.  Much like his cinematic incarnation the Hulot who is at the center of this book’s adventure is a sad figure, and there is a wistfulness that suffuses the vignettes.  There is droll humor, more than a dash of irony and the underlining heroic stature that defined this iconic figure.  The book proceeds with the kind of cinematic energy and engagement that would make Tati proud.

NorthSouth books     56 pp.    $17.95

Note: This is the second entry in a continuing series that will examine non-American picture books of a high level of artistry and creativity that were released during 2013.  The series will also include a few special items and recent releases.

© 2014 by James Clark

 When we come to a film as bizarre as Nicolas Refn’s Valhalla Rising (2009), we are, perhaps unbeknown, placed within large demands to get to the bottom of its expressive design. The work appears at first glance to be a study of sorts concerning the ways of Nordic tribes in the late medieval period (say, 1000 AD) where a pagan (Viking?) ethos finds itself troublesomely confronted by the clerkish circumspection of bands galvanized by Christianity. At the outset, we are put on notice, along such lines, by this signage: “In the beginning there was only man and nature. Men came bearing crosses and drove the heathen to the fringes of the earth.” Judging from the Scottish dialect of the non-heathens here, we would seem to be dipping into the ethnology of early Britain. (Valhalla Rising was in fact filmed in Scotland, spilling our way as concentrated a swatch of disturbing atmosphere as you’re ever apt to see—unremittingly dark and damp and stark, with winds close to blowing the cast off of the planet, reminding us of the inclement features of Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller, filmed in another weather hell, Canada.)

    But if the concern of Valhalla Rising were at all driven by the romance of history, we would not, surely, see so much Gothically chic wardrobe—not unlike the garb on display in expensive, media-zone restaurants. Nor would we have a camera-angle, during a tense confrontation, where the protagonist’s battle axe is poised like a big pistol in a holster. Nor would we have a Man with no Voice, unmistakably giving off a (highly inflected, of course) version of the Man with No Name. (Actor, Mads Mikkelsen, provides a similarly handsome tautness of skin and expressivity of eye.) The protagonist’s loyal companion, a young boy with Scandinavian hair, tells him, during one of the myriad tight spots they occupy, “You need a name. You’ve only got one eye…” This near-banter within a narrative plunge so heavily steeped in violent death, while seeming to fit nicely within the glory days of Clint Eastwood, does, in fact, bring us to the point of realization that Valhalla Rising no more closely stalks early film than it stalks early history. (For good measure, Refn has apparently done his bit to muddy the waters by referring to this movie as “science fiction,” especially thrilled by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

The quip about needing a name sends us to the business of a figure, mute, but on close inspection fully aware of the conversation coming his way, and having devised a strategy to disarm it. His silence, as I think we’ll come to recognize, is as formidable a weapon as his bare hands and his axe—and, in that, it comprises a double edged sword, a trusty stabilization in a context of deadly derangement; and an atrophied medium of interpersonal discovery. His having only one eye (presumably gouged out at an earlier stage of his enforced practise of the craft of kill-or-be-killed-exhibitions for a market in need of couth) silently speaks to that far less evident and far less readily comprehended deficit.

Let’s, then, begin by way of that scene where the boy points out to him that minimalism can be carried too far. They’ve escaped, in a shower of enemy blood, from the porn circuit and have come upon an encampment of pious Celts, where in fact their leader is on his knees in prayer before a cross. (Also catching our eye is a group of women huddled together under an armed guard—disconcertingly naked [McCabe’s dismal early brothel pops up] in that frigid air, and somehow missing out on the demonstrative delicacy as advertised.) The chubby attendant to that early YWCA blurts out that, “He’s one of the biggest savages in Sutherland… He killed our chieftain’s son… most of his men as well…” That displaced swordsman lets us in on details of the film’s outset, showing how the professional blood sport has become a staple in that territory. But even more to the point, he takes his place as one of a panoply of straight men in this settlement, to the minimal black comedy our protagonist displays a powerful flair with. From the moment that quasi-ventriloquist-team comes into view, its singular micro-climate induces the anal rustics to exorcize them along lines of reciting their ownership of a multifaceted bulwark against every dangerous feature intrinsic to existence. The chieftain leads off with, “Are you from the clans, Warrior?” It is the boy who hesitatingly says, “No,” an interactive peculiarity that especially prompts the edgy leader to demand, “Why does the boy speak for ya?” One Eye fixes him with a suspenseful glare, establishing the ground rules as he understands them to involve deadly (if necessary) resoluteness always having the advantage. His frustration and anxiety mounting, the local alpha barks out, “You Christians?” And after a pause, uncomfortable to the little blonde, his androgynous demeanor being a special irritant in a patriarchal orbit, he replies quietly, “Yes.” Pulling his sword out of the mud where he’d parked it during prayers, the commander snarls, “Yer lyin’,” calls to his son, who approaches, locks eyes with One Eye and his gunslinger axe-angle, takes out his sword, notes with shock that his adversary pictures him as already a corpse—and, with a funereal-apt raw glint hanging over the moors, his father steps up and the boy withdraws. Now exposed as not competent for conflict, the leader retreats with a touch of patently empty bravado—“Does the mute have a name?”—to which the young boy (now more than ever a page) replies, “His name is One Eye.” (Seeing his unofficial master less than pleased with that invention, he reasons, “You only have one eye;” but with the harder truth, “You need a name,” he proves he belongs, rendering in fact a fundamental reminder about the gallantry, the creative recognition of others, implicit in the discharge of his fighting efficiencies.)  “One Eye, ye can eat with us,” is where things go next, and during the meal, while the Man with a New Name silently disses these self-assertive nuisances, both poles of this confrontation are looking for what they can exploit from the other.

The setting of this dinner is arresting: almost complete darkness with not so much as an ember to evoke the merest spark of interaction, and everyone seated on the absolutely unattractive moor. The convenor asks, “So, how did you get your freedom? What do you plan to do with it?” One Eye imperiously looks toward the topography, pointedly stressing his seeing that the fretful hosts know nothing about freedom and are whistling Dixie if they think he owes them any accounts of his priorities. The flaccidity of these correspondents confirms him in a sufficiency of communing with his own carnal composure. The Sutherland body-counter suggests, “Maybe he could bring us luck;” and the commander follows with, “I could use a good fighter like you… We’re God’s own soldiers, Warrior. Heading to Jerusalem to reconquer the Holy Land…” The look on One Eye’s face at this moment can only be well comprehended with regard to the time of his captivity, when—confined to a wooden cage and with shackles trailing from an iron collar, and then taken out to fight for his life while being chained to a pole like a bear in a bear pit—attending to that indispensable composure and efficacy afforded by silence was all that could make sense to him. Now prodded by garrulous cowards, he would assimilate the desperation and volume of the rhetoric as both contemptible and ludicrous; but there would be something more than a sterile standoff. “There’s great honor in it [the reconquest]… riches, land” [and here the boy looks over at One Eye, and the look on his face is to communicate his strong desire for avoiding violent rupture. He told the leader, “I wanna go home.../ “Where is that?”/ “Dunno...”]. Another greybeard, but with a more agile fluency, regarding the warrior’s being underwhelmed by the chief’s pitch (we see One Eye in close-up and in profile, and the speaker is some distance removed, leaning on a boulder), declares, “Endless warfare [capturing a bit of interest]… But it makes more tramps than heroes…But you should come with us to Jerusalem. Yer sins will be absolved, whether you live or die. Ye will see yer loved ones again.”

Though most viewers come away from Valhalla Rising with the priority of having seen “senseless violence” (perhaps even more viewers come away from it with that idea in having avoided seeing it at all), I maintain that it is a compelling reflective drama, written and produced with rewarding verve. As we complete our survey of a passage valuable in navigating exactly where this far from straightforward or simplistic movie is going, we should notice that the boy with scraggly blonde locks often covering his face progresses, in light of the sustained poise of his companion being at perfect pitch for the occasion, to a bit of playful intimidation of his own. Someone from out of that celebratory gloom asks, “Boy! Where does he come from?” After thinking a moment, he declares, “He was brought up from hell…” We see the supposed hellion in profile, and off a ways someone asks, “So where is this hell?” And the boy pipes up, “On the other side of the ocean…” Perhaps twigging to the fact that they are being ridiculed by the kid, the locals, led by the theologically erudite second-in-command, return to the unearthly prize which One Eye represents to them. “It’s more than revenge… all these things go… You should consider your soul… That’s where the real pain lies…” With this, One Eye turns and looks hard into the speaker’s face. Then we are face on and up close to the stranger. Something more than contempt informs his stance.

That his pensive profile as becoming a pensive face-on amidst the darkest of clouds, the most shattered of moors and the shrieking gales transposes to the rippling waves in a Scottish bay at the beginning of a huge gamble that represents his only move, has to be bolstered here by introductory action we’ve left until now. One Eye and the boy, the most unlikely of crusaders, have to be introduced as the most desperately isolated and besieged of voyagers. Far from a government-endorsed space odyssey affording adventuring in the grand style, theirs is practically the quintessence of that “tight spot” the Coens’ Ulysses makes a mockery of. As we proceed with details of their truly epic and thereby truly revealing distress, we are, when looked at trenchantly enough, truly engaged by Refn’s wildly inflected researches in “science fiction.”

So now is the time to pull away from the badinage which defines our protagonists as earthy outsiders, to savor for a moment the quite unique intensity of a state of “home” requiring improvement. The first shot—showing a figure (the boy) at long distance trudging along a hillside with a pail of water, almost completely lost in thick fog and almost swallowed up by the impenetrable darkness of the moors—keys the narrative setting in such a way as to emphasize that we have entered a protagonistic field where the human and the non-human meet in an uncanny, dangerous interplay. Even before we clearly focus on our main figures, then, we are aware that names are startlingly irrelevant. The insistent ringing motif complements that fusion, with the added factors of mortal danger and stunning hostility. The recipient of the water is not only locked into a timber-sided cage; his hands are bound, and as we regard that condition we can see that animal-like tattoo images invade his arms and back. This situation unfolds to an action of the boy’s tending to open wounds on his charge’s back. His being restrained, during these attentions, by chains trailing from his neck further installs into the viewer’s startlement, at such a state of distemper, that this figure has more in common with wild beasts than with the human community and its discharge of security measures as crude as they are mawkish. The lumpen guards are insinuated, by these means, into a base facsimile of the prisoner, in his carnal integrity, and the boy, raptly applying a black poultice to the sores. Therefore, as the next scene explodes in our face, showing the leashed warrior smashing an overturned opponent repeatedly, to the sounds of broken bones, there is a panning shot displaying the promoters of this mayhem, crumpled like anxious fungi as seated around the battlefield. A monkey-like local with a blanket over his shoulders comes up to an authority-type, receives some coins and wobbles through the assembly,  stopping to give some of the handicapped money to a bettor. There is more such testing of One Eye’s physical powers, his being a creature conversant with a battle terrain of wet muck and with deploying his body to destroy an alien body. But the point to especially concentrate upon is the aftermath of two more (Sutherlanders’?) crushed skulls, when the one-eyed survivor, being tethered to return to his outer-limits home, holds out his hands, fists clenched. With that gesture, he traces the intensive concentration that defines his days; and, moreover, he touches upon the reversal of that tightness, a flux in proximity to the readily overlooked graces of that ominous highland. The elder who payed out the winnings comes to the cage with a sour visage. We notice with some surprise another such pen, in the distance. We also note a bit more brightness in the gloom. One Eye calmly glares back at such a cheap master. But, in fact, master no more, as the following scene has another aspirant (in fact the fungus paid off by the monkey) to stage such tempestuous theatre and wagering. The latter tells the sour one, “You’re time has passed… Mine has come…”

The transfer of One Eye develops in many fresh ways the scenario’s bringing about a strange planet with its divide between those who only grasp and those whose grasp becomes part of a startling equilibrium. The episode begins with One Eye asleep in his cage, the wind howling. He dreams of a river of blood, and then he is chest-deep in it, the river shimmering, and rocks on both shores. The dream includes his taking a big rock and bashing in the skull of an enemy with it—a brutal materiality of slaughter ensuring that his purchase upon equilibrium could not be divested of its nightmarish associations. Heavily chained and guarded, he is seen in a column lunging across difficult terrain in that terrible wind. He is intent and calm as he surveys a promising volatility. Allowed to be watered like a horse, in a pool of shimmering, clear water, he stands chest-deep in a new avenue for action. The boy watches him from the shore, his concern very distinct from that of the guards also on hand. What with the clean water trumping the bloody waves in his dream (just as the boy trumps the jailors), he occupies a zone of absolute silence and stillness. Then he looks down into the water, sees something promising for a change and submerges toward it (not unlike finding couth where hitherto it was savagery all the way). Picking up an ancient arrowhead, he studies it for a bit, underwater, savoring the beauty of its lines and texture, and its useful aspects; and then he puts it in his mouth and surfaces to face those he has to defeat. At night he studies his gift from the world-wide world, from one far-away expert to another. He tests its sharpness by cutting his hand with it, after which he clenches his fist on the wound. As he fills his heart in this way, the outmanoeuvred old pagan rails against his prevailing rival—“Bastards! Eat his flesh. Drink his blood. Abominable! We pray to the gods to protect us… We have many gods. They’ve only got the one! Won’t let him go. We need him…” And the rival rubs it in, his white-collar violence a rational component of the dead ends facing our protagonist. “You need money… like everyone else…It’s the only way to reason with the Christians… You might as well get it from me.” They shake hands, and the new force clenches his fists, looking across an infinite gulf to the fighter, who is even more proudly silent than we saw him before.

In accordance with the new ownership, One Eye travels with his head covered by a black cloth. The cloth has protuberances that resemble ears. Donkey ears! He strides across that terrain and his legs are closely filmed; they are greyish and the texture of the covering of a quadruped. He begins to free with that sharp edge his neck restraints under that convenient and thought-provoking temporary skin. Ripping off his mask, he’s on track to be much more like the tiger than the donkey. (And yet, has there ever been a more Balthazar-like beast of burden, showing seemingly endless capacity to endure hardship? Balthazar, though, you may recall, was also devoted to sharing love, the big question mark posed by this film.) Quickly acquiring an axe, he uses it very effectively and before you know it he’s not only a free agent but he has tied to a rock one of those too petrified to challenge him or run away. The captive has no eye for One Eye’s slight progress toward buoyancy. Surprisingly for so inept a warrior, this diminutive road kill has quite a mouth on him. He rudely rallies the former slave and lax communicator, with, “What do you see? When I die, you will go back to hell.” Having spent years being insultingly categorized as lacking valuable perceptive traction (while in fact not being one to miss the point that everyone around him is far from impressive), he performs an execution of that vox populi which, while clearly lacking Arthurian gallantry, constitutes a bellwether of sorts concerning a toxic irritant much more, in fact, germane to the twenty-first than to the eleventh century. As a means of measuring how confined he remains within that “endless [physical] warfare,” he comes up to the cheeky prisoner and with his bare hands rips out his guts, plopping them on the unfertile land like a load of fertilizer. We are given a close look at one of the victim’s hands, quivering and then freezing, very unlike the kinetic expertise of the outsider having come to relish savaging those precious smartasses on the other side. The kiss-off from a life having been unspeakably annoying consists of mounting the head of one of those mainstream underachievers at the top of one of those neck-bars that would always have been a presence of his routines. Their partnership now on new footing, the boy shows him a ring and asks (not so puzzlingly in view of One Eye’s appreciation of fine craft), “Do you like it? My father gave it to me…”  But now the escapee has turned to the dilemma of nowhere to turn; coming to his imagination is his face smeared with blood. Also he considers the sea as a way to rejuvenate his hitherto cramped, humiliating endeavors.

Coming upon those quixotic sailors and their cut-and-dried travel objectives, One Eye bids to make the best of a long-shot. In accordance with the farcical incompetence of his new associates, the ship promptly runs across a protracted passage of doldrums (where the setting is like a liquid desert). The old theoretician, kindly enough thinking to relieve the discomfort of the only child onboard, tells the little stranger (who has, as we know, seen much worse), “Do you know what I do when I’m scared?” [for instance, now]… The boy, whose repertoire of equilibrium does not run to panaceas, shakes his head at this puzzling juncture. And that elicits the emergency supply, “I pray to Christ.” On seeing how puzzled and noncommittal the mascot is, the officer asks, “Do you know who he is?” The boy shakes his head again, no longer feeling compelled to butter up a fighting force which One Eye has effectively subdued. “He sacrificed his life so that we could be free… from pain and misery… So you have to be strong…” The boy does not need such a reminder, and it shows. Moreover, One Eye, who had been listening close by, makes a gesture (cut mid-way) of spitting on the floor in face of this presumptuous authority. Both of them, then, at this point, are impervious to the prospect of giving the time of day (mustering a loving sacrifice of their self-sufficiency) to hated enemies, as propelling life forward. This quiet display of repulsion is not lost upon the rest of the crew perched about the deck in a prostration resembling a diseased aviary. Soon the impulsive former attendant to the ladies is thinking out loud, “Perhaps it’s a curse.” During prayers for delivery away from a deadening sunlight haze, the one who floated the idea of a curse (only to be rebutted by the chief) notices how indifferent the two strangers are. So, on the heels of another bloody nightmare visiting One Eye, the obsessive tells his mates, in focusing on the far more easily managed child, “I’m gonna kill him.” Another action hero steps forward, declaring, I’ll do it,” but before he can use his dagger One Eye has chopped a hole in his torso and thrown his corpse overboard. The leader tells his noisily upset crew, “Back off!” And while the complaining from them goes nowhere, the situation of our protagonists’ alienation has been underlined once again, in order that the eventful saga of the destination not lead to blind alleys.

Before the wind does get back to business, and the little ship ends up somewhere (though not Jerusalem), the chief, true-blue dour Scot that he is, recalls, “The boy said he was from hell,” and infers, “Maybe that’s where we’re going.” And though several Canadians might concur in the epithet, “hell,” the scene does in fact shift to a Scottish facsimile of the Labrador/Newfoundland coast, in the form of a sparkling blue estuary with skies of hitherto unseen blue and pine forests and sub-Arctic meadows all round. Though miffed from many angles, the crusaders, led by the somehow charismatic chief and his theological advisor, seamlessly (Celtic whimsy in full force) shift into taking this clearly Nordic locale for the Holy Land. (For all the blood-curdling pistons of his scenarios, Refn is an impressive exponent of situational comedy.) There is, however, also, about this flood of bracing landscape, an indicator, at a subliminal pitch, that our protagonists now occupy a terrain where the constraints upon their bringing into play an opening of the clenched fist have been somewhat relaxed. After the spate of compulsive, self-justifying chatter with which the crusaders have bombarded the strangers and us, we now effectively occupy an expressive zone closely resembling dance and its special investigation of the challenges and rewards implicit in silent motion. At the early stages of the scouting mission on foot, anticipation begins to take on the property of malaise, inasmuch as they come upon wooden platforms (vaguely echoing One Eye’s cage) where corpses lie, perhaps implying famine. One Eye, now more in the capacity of Swiss Guard than a reluctant novice/companion to the elect, tensely surveys the hinterland of this oddly callous statement. The chief says, “I’m gonna show them a man of God has arrived;” but One Eye is no longer absorbed by obviating him. He interrupts a circle of silent prayer by plunging the sword of a crewman, who had ventured off alone, into the soil. “Where did you get that?” someone asks. One Eye barely notices such impertinence, his attention galvanized by his and the boy’s project now beginning to crash and burn. The fat loudmouth offers, “You killed him!” One Eye doesn’t even look his way, his attention in fact focused on the river below their vantage point. The leader commands them to row the ship further upstream, to “find out where we are…” One Eye joins in the rowing, a moment of unity at a point he knows to be a foolish venture. Soon an arrow rips into a crusader, blood gushing and much howling. The boy is horrified; One Eye impassively looks into the dimension of death; and the crew, swords drawn (clearly the wrong weapon) commences what spins from a military to a mystical exercise. Were the point to simply exterminate the invaders, more arrows would be flying. One Eye becomes dead calm (the boy still distraught) in realizing that he’s become once again part of a sadistic entertainment. (The owner of the sword One Eye put into the puzzle does show up, stripped, painted upon and quite insane.)

Now expecting death to strike them at any moment, the entire invading force silently plays out a series of bizarre personal observances. That One Eye and the boy also come within this thrust places them in a highly inflected context of kinship with vastly unforthcoming traditionalists. One Eye washes the blood from the arrow that depleted the crusade. The design beauties of the arrowhead in the pool are clearly invoked again, for their resonant powers. Though the leader can’t resist revealing a perdurant ideological insanity (“We claim this land…”), many of his followers dispense with doctrine and enact primal, almost infantile rites. The Sutherland source of distemper comes upon someone who had prayed at an altar-like rock formation and gone on to slog through the jet-black muck of the tidal flats. He pushes the latter’s face and the rest of his head into the wet, black substance in some kind of assertion of powers he doesn’t possess. With a grinding sound design becoming more insistent, One Eye has a premonition of a blood-soaked attack upon him. He tries to balance rocks in a column formation. Fails; and a bit later he tries again and succeeds—his way with craft calling to him as a significant stand. The chubby aggressor demands that they return; the leader vetoes that idea with, “We’ve raised the cross! Now we bring the sword!” One Eye looks on in silent contempt. In one disastrous outburst, the contrarian declares to the chief, “One Eye took us to hell. And there is no God!” He pulls out his dagger and lunges at the protagonist, who slashes his throat with his axe. The subsequent repeated chopping him to bits, blood splashing up, underlines One Eye’s realization that sustained harmony has no hope.

He strides away from his odious travelling companions and he stops to look back at the boy, who then follows him into the hills. Some stragglers try to follow them, including the leader’s careful son. During a pause from negotiating the high country, the latter regards the two strangers standing together. “What did he say?” he asks the boy. “We’re gonna die,” is the answer. “Then he’s lyin’!” the son insists. One Eye’s slight smile at this point contains no joy. The son turns back to join his father who has already been felled by many arrows. The boy sadly beholds the old theologian, a man of hope, who smiles at him. Then the protagonists reach the salt water of the estuary, and a numerous band of natives appears. One Eye gives the boy a little smile (their telepathy in fact having given solace on many occasions) and he touches his arm. He proceeds toward the locals who have their fun. Then, in vague recognition of the warrior’s integrity, they leave the boy unharmed, which is to say, to starve like the folks on the platforms. But unlike those folks, he’s seen something of the world and its promise, over and above its savagery.

by Sam Juliano

There is something about the Scandinavian sensibility that seems to infuse their artistic output with a pervading sense of melancholy and darker themes.  It is easy to understand when one considers the shorter days, colder climate and generally more austere and cerebral mind set (cliches to a degree, but this has always been the perception) and the tendency for their arts to reflect a more pensive and philosophical mood.  One may immediately think of the brooding death-obsessed master filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, the playwright extraordinaire August Strindberg, who explored naturalistic tragedy, the iconic painter Edvard Munch, whose masterpiece The Scream, is a prime example of evocative treatment of psychological themes.  Carl Theodor Dreyer, whose  Vampyr, The Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath rank among the greatest of all films was another who examined state of mind in harrowing terms, and a long string of contemporary filmmakers like Thomas Vinterberg have relentlessly examined family strife and depression.  In music there has always been a melancholic undercurrent in the nature-infused work of Jean Sibelius and Edvard Grieg.

Stein Erik Lunde and Oyvind Torseter’s sublime and incandescent picture book My Father’s Arms Are A Boat was recently named as a Batchelder honor book by the American Library Association in the one category that awards foreign language achievement, providing that it has been translated.  The translation for My Father’s Arms Are A Boat is by Kari Dickson, and it is extraordinarily effective and deeply-felt.  Starkly set during the dead of winter in and around an unforgiving country house lived in by a father and young son (“My window is pitch black.  I have socks on, and a wooly sweater under my pajamas.  I can’t sleep.  It’s quieter now than it’s ever been.”) the story is poetically and suggestively told with a great deal of shivery emotion:

I go back into the living room.

Our longtime friend and cinematic colleague Shubhajit Lahiri has happily announced that he and his lovely bride Riya were wed in a beautiful ceremony in India on January 21st.  We at Wonders in the Dark were thrilled beyond words to hear of this surprising but most welcome news, and we wish this perfect couple the very best in the years ahead.  So much seems to be coming together for the “king of the capsule” as of late and this ultimate final piece to the puzzle is one of supreme magnificence.  Here’s to a life of love, success and eternal bliss! (click on ‘continued reading to see second photo)

Sam with Horn Book editor-in-chief Roger Sutton after panel discussion at Simmons College in Boston on Thursday, Feb. 20.

by Sam Juliano

The past week’s spotlight event was staged on the fifth floor penthouse of the management building at Simmons College in Boston on The Fenway, just a stone’s throw away from the famed baseball stadium.  Or maybe just a bit further than that.  The 90 minute panel discussion “Why did that book win?” was moderated by longtime Horn Book editor-in-chief Roger Sutton.  His co-panelists included executive editor Martha Parravano, Lesley University children’s literature professor Julie Roach and Kirkus Reviews book critic Vicky Smith, all of whom vigorously promoted a spirited discussion centering around the recent awards given out by the American Library Association.  Ms. Roach expressed gleeful surprise that children’s author extraordinaire Kate Di Camillo’s profusely illustrated Flora & Ulysses won the Newbery Medal despite the general aversion to books that veer away from the generally all-prose format.  A subsequent question from the audience later on addressed the confusion that sometimes emanates from the indecision of whether to honor words or pictures in a book that is seemingly divided equally, as was the case with the Caldecott Honor book Bill Peet: An Autobiography in 1990.  Mr. Sutton pointed to a similar perception in 2008 when Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret won the Caldecott Medal despite the marked division of prose and pictures.

While Ms. Smith was delighted with Brian Floca’s  Caldecott Medal triumph for Locomotive (“the author is no longer a bridesmaid”) there was some disappointment with some of the omissions, a sentiment that prompted Sutton to quip that the title of the discussion should have more in tune with “why certain book’s didn’t win?”  Sutton bemoaned the failure of Kirkpatrick Hill’s Bo at Ballard Creek to achieve recognition in the awards process, while Ms. Perravano was amazed and disappointed that Cynthia Kadohata and Julia Kuo’s National Book Award winner The Thing About Luck didn’t figure in the final Newbery line-up.  The panel addressed the matter of certain books that win the subsidiary awards (Pura Belpre, Coretta Scott King) but fail to win Caldecott or Newbery mention because the perception is that they have their own category.  This has always been the mind-set of the Oscars, where a nomination or win in the animated film and/or foreign language category always always results in being passed over in the major categories.  One spirited questioner talked about the specific perceptions and expectations of certain books aimed at a minority audience, and how those perceptions might be different among a more general reading audience.  Another commenter, an artist and designer, appeared to intimate that some of the committee members should have a more artistic background, and that such a reform would result in different books winning the awards.  This was not a position that others in the group (myself included) shared, and the panel and another commenter with an artistic background argued against such a narrow qualification.

With every panel member serving on past committees that have chosen Newbery, Caldecott, Sibert, and Pura Belpre winners, there was a long and intricate discussion of the painstaking ways books are studied and chosen, and how all members are sworn to secrecy as far as divulging specifics.  Coffee and refreshments were offered to the nearly 100 people who showed up on a relatively mild evening in Beantown.  Lucille, Danny and I had spend the afternoon in and around the Faneuil Hall marketplace, with Danny an enthusiastic visitor at Newbery Comics, an impressive book, DVD, blu ray and comic store off the outdoor strip.  We ate in the Bell in Hand Tavern, which is touted as the “oldest tavern in the United States (1795)” and where we enjoyed burgers and eggplant fries.  (Heck once in while we can manage that kind of food.  Ha!).  The nearly four hour ride home the same night (mostly rain-drenched) brought us to our door a little after midnight.  All in all a memorable time was hat on this quick trip.

My meeting with Roger and a corresponding photo appeared here in The Horn Book:

http://www.hbook.com/2014/02/blogs/read-roger/book-win/

Lucille and I (Sammy for all the Hitchcocks) took in the Oscar-nominated OMAR on Saturday night in Montclair, and managed four films in The Complete Hitchcock Festival at the Film Forum.  Three of the four films were seen in succession on Sunday.

Omar  **** 1/2  (Saturday night)     Bow Tie Cinemas

Blackmail *** 1/2  (Friday night)     Hitchcock at Film Forum

The Lodger (1927) **** 1/2 (Sunday) Hitchcock at Film Forum

North by Northwest (1959)  ***** (Sunday) Hitchcock at Film Forum

To Catch a Thief (1955) *** 1/2 (Sunday)  Hitchcock at Film Forum

Young Sammy and I took on Hitchcock with veracity over the weekend, watching NORTH BY NORTHWEST, THE LODGER and TO CATCH A THIEF in succession on Sunday at the Film Forum.  As always, the wildly implausible but wholly exhilarating NORTH BY NORTHWEST provided one of the most entertaining cinematic experiences ever, even being watched for the umteenth time.  But this was Sammy’s first viewing of the 1959 classic, and to my extreme delight he talked about it all the way home–the Mount Rushmore climax, the crop duster sequence and the entire wrong man scenario.  The color cinematography by Robert Burks is as ever astounding, and Bernard Herrmann’s music is magnificent.  Oh yes, there’s the suave Cary Grant, one of the greatest of actors, and that sexy ambiguous blonde Eva Marie Saint and a superb James Mason in support.  THE LODGER could well be Hitch’s greatest silent, and a viewing of the pristine BFI print on the big screen made me fall in love with this atmospheric work yet again.  A moody film where sex rules over the identity of the murder, the film is tinged with German Expressionism and some eerie nightime scenes, and contains a great matinee turn by Ivor Novello.

The very best review I have ever read on THE LODGER was posted at ONLY THE CINEMA by the incomparable Ed Howard:

http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com/2012/05/lodger-story-of-london-fog.html

TO CATCH A THIEF is not one of Hitch’s strongest films, but in ways it is irresistible.  The French Riviera is a great place to make a film, and cinematographer extraordinaire Robert is on top of his game again with some gorgeous lensing.  Grant is on board again, as is a ravishing Grace Kelly.

The silent BLACKMAIL, about a rape and murder and some left behind evidence, was filmed at the same time as the talkie version, but the rich BFI restored print makes quite a case for its stand alone worth.

The Palestinian OMAR (directed by Hany Abu-Assad) is a tension-packed thriller about trust and betrayal, with a romantic sub-plot.  Actually, one of the film’s creators said this week it is more a love story than a political one.  It is wholly riveting, and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

I have re-posted last week’s links with a few revisions:

At Tuesdays with Laurie, the indomitable Ms. Buchanan offers up another provocative post:                                                                                  http://tuesdayswithlaurie.com/2014/02/18/under-over-through/

Head over to FilmsNoir.net pronto to check out Tony d’Ambra’s fantastic Top 25 film noirs in a tremendous post:                                                                  http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/filmsnoir-nets-top-25-films-noir.html

At Noirish the exceedingly gifted and prolific author John Grant has posted a splendid takedown of 1962′s little-seen “Stark Fear”:  http://noirencyclopedia.wordpress.com/2014/02/23/stark-fear-1962/

Stephen Mullen (Weeping Sam) has declared “Inside Llewyn Davis” as the best film of 2013 and one of the Coens’ most formidable works at The Listening Ear:  http://listeningear.blogspot.com/2014/02/inside-llewyn-davis.html

Dean Treadway continues his fabulous annual cinematic coverage with an in-depth look at 1927 at Filmacability:  http://filmicability.blogspot.com/2014/02/1927-year-in-review.html

Judy Geater has launched her new series on Douglas Sirk at Movie Classics with a terrific essays on “Has Anybody Seen My Gal?”:  http://movieclassics.wordpress.com/2014/02/16/has-anybody-seen-my-gal-douglas-sirk-1952/

John Greco has written a superb review of Luchino Visconti’s extraordinary “Bellissima” at Twenty Four Frames:  http://twentyfourframes.wordpress.com/2014/02/14/belissima-1952-visconti-luchino/

At Scribbles and Ramblings Sachin Gandhi has the South American Movie World Cup pairings up for your perusal: http://likhna.blogspot.com/2014/01/south-american-films.html

At Overlook’s Corridor Jaimie Grijalba is up to “screenplays” in the continuing examination of his annual ‘Frank Awards’ given to the best films and components:  http://overlookhotelfilm.wordpress.com/2014/02/14/frank-awards-2013-screenplays/

Pat Perry’s latest post at Doodad Kind of Town superbly addresses “Philomena” and “Inside Llewyn Davis”: http://doodadkindoftown.blogspot.com/2014/01/surprise-surprise.html

At Dee Dee’s ‘Ning’ network site she has posted some spectacular and rare Hitchcock posters in honor of the Film Forum’s great Festival on the prolific icon:                             http://filmnoire.ning.com/forum/topics/darkness-before-dawn-takes-a-peek-at-foreign-posters-and

Jon Warner has posted a fantastic essay on the documentary masterwork “The Act of Killing” at Films Worth Watching: http://filmsworthwatching.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-act-of-killing-2012-directed-by.html

At FilmsNoir.net Allan Fassions has written a superb essay on 1955′s “Dementia” for the site’s erstwhile proprietor Tony d’Ambra:  http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/alan-fassioms-on-dementia-1955-beatnik-noir.html

And speaking of Fassions, his site is now the latest inclusion on the WitD sidebar.  It is called “Stranger on the 3rd Floor” and it looks like a fabulous place to visit:  http://strangeronthe3rdfloor.wordpress.com/

At The Last Lullaby filmmaker Jeffrey Goodman is leading up with his 12 Best Films of 2013:   http://cahierspositif.blogspot.com/2014/01/my-top-twelve-films-of-2013.html

The great Canadian artist Terrill Welch is leading up at her sublime Creativepotager’s blog with a post titled “One Brush Stroke After Another”:  http://creativepotager.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/one-brushstroke-after-another/

As ever, Samuel Wilson is posting superb reviews that may have esaped the radar.  His latest great piece to that end at Mondo 70 is an essay on “Greed in the Sun”:            http://mondo70.blogspot.com/2014/02/greed-inthe-sun-cent-mille-dollars-au.html

Patricia Hamilton has written a tremendous book review on Anish Majumdar’s “The Isolation Door” at Patricia’s Wisdom, and the author chimed in:                                                    http://patriciaswisdom.com/2014/02/the-isolation-door-a-novel-anish-majumdar/

Shubhajit Lahiri has penned a provocative capsule on the Argentinian film “Wake Up Love” at Cinemascope:                             http://cliched-monologues.blogspot.com/2014/02/wake-up-love-despabilate-amor-1996.html

David Schleicher has penned a fabulous review of the Iranian “The Past” at The Schleicher Spin:  http://theschleicherspin.com/2014/02/09/secrets-and-lies-in-the-past/

Brandie Ashe has posted a wonderful post on Shirley Temple at True Classics:                    http://trueclassics.net/2014/02/11/remembering-shirley-temple/

Mike Norton has penned some superlative pieces on Hip Hop at Enter the Screen:    http://enterthescreen.wordpress.com/

Joel Bocko posts about the screen-capping he’s managed over the past year at The Dancing Image:  http://thedancingimage.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-final-watchlistscreencap-some-notes.html

Roderick Heath brings unprecedented scholarship to Ivan Reitman’s “Ghostbusters” at Ferdy-on-Films:  http://www.ferdyonfilms.com/2014/ghostbusters-1984/21071/

J.D. LaFrance leads up with a terrific review on “Neuromancer” at Radiator Heaven:  http://rheaven.blogspot.com/2014/02/neuromancer.html

Drew McIntosh has again offered up a fascinating post at The Blue Vial, showcasing works by Walerian Borowczyk and David Lynch:  http://thebluevial.blogspot.com/2014/01/end-of-road.html

by Sachin Gandhi

2014 marked the 30th anniversary of the Sundance Film Festival, a festival that has been the launching pad for many exciting cinematic voices over the years. The festival’s importance in discovering new directors was nicely highlighted by the trailer shown before all the films which gave a glimpse of some of the stellar titles that played at the festival. The first Sundance was held in 1985 but it is acknowledged that the festival shot into the limelight in 1989 with Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotapes which changed the perception of the festival. Besides being the launching pad for Soderbergh, Sundance ushered the discovery of many other American directors including Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs, 1992), Kevin Smith (Clerks, 1994), Kelly Reichardt (River of Grass, 1994), Paul Thomas Anderson (Hard Eight, 1996) and Darren Aronofsky (Pi, 1998). All of these directors, plus many more, have made the jump from Independent to Commercial cinema thanks to their discovery at Sundance. Even James Wan’s Saw premiered at Sundance before it transformed into a multiplex franchise.

The success of certain Sundance films or genre means the media attention seems to gravitate towards a similar subset of the festival’s output. One hears plenty about how a certain work is a “Sundance film”, words which paint the festival in a single light. In recent years, that term has been associated with Little Miss Sunshine or Sunshine Cleaning, two films that seem to embody the kind of films that Sundance loves. But these films are not representative of the entire body of carefully programmed films that make up the Sundance film festival. Over the years, documentaries and a growing list of foreign films have premiered at the festival. Although, one would not know that from the media coverage. As this year showed, the films at Sundance represented a multi-tiered global outlook, not only in terms of the foreign film selections but the topics covered in many American films as well. Even though many films were American productions, they were shot in foreign locations or featured topics that were universal in theme. And as it turned out, through a series of intriguing choices, I ended up with many films which were tied together despite coming from different parts of the world. The 13 films I saw can be grouped together in the following 5 categories.

The Arab Spring 

Talal Derki’s Return to Homs embodies the characteristics of the “Direct Cinema” movement that originated in the 1950-60’s. Just like the pioneers of Direct Cinema, including Michel Brault, Derki shared the same quarters as his subjects and thereby put himself in harm’s way to get footage of the Syrian Revolution. Once the Syrian Revolution started in 2011, most of the Syrian media were not allowed in the country. Derki was a rare person who was able to capture the events which makes the footage essential in understanding what went on while the rest of the world continued to sleep. Derki and his crew continued filming even when bullets were fired in their direction. Such vérité footage results in many gut wrenching moments when people are on the verge of dying on-screen. By keeping the focus on a few key people, Return to Homs shows the human impact a revolution has on people. But one can also extrapolate these personal experiences to a larger scale and understand what motivates people to act the way they do. In essence, the film focuses on a few streets in a city but this microscopic focus helps shed a light on similar struggles going on in other streets not only across Syria but the rest of the Middle East.

Return to Homs

While Return to Homs views the Arab Spring from a street level, We Are the Giant takes a few steps back and looks at the Arab Spring from a bird’s eye view not only in the present but even from the past. We Are the Giant inserts quotes and pictures from the past which frames the Arab Spring in context of past revolutions and the inclusion of tweets and social media footage shows the currency of protests. Social media is the new weapon of protest. Previously, the printing press allowed people’s revolutionary messages to be distributed but as We Are the Giant shows, social media manages to accelerate the revolutionary process by distributing live video with text to portray events in real time. And just like how the printing press threatened those in power, the same applies for tweets and blog posts. A blog post or a single tweet can land a person in jail and subsequent torture as shown by We Are the Giant. The film examines the Arab Spring from a larger scope but it highlights three stories about families from Libya, Syria and Bahrain whose loved ones are impacted. The stories are shattering but help one to understand the reason why the Arab Spring revolution started and why people are taking to the streets. We Are The Giant is the only Sundance film that I saw which got a standing ovation for its director, Greg Barker, which it rightly deserved.

We are the Giant

Return to Homs and We Are the Giant pack a heavy emotional punch but both are essential viewing that allows one to see the world in a new light. In 2013, The Square, a documentary about the Egyptian revolution, premiered at Sundance. 2014 saw the world premiere of We Are the Giant while Return to Homs got a North American premiere. The programming of these three films shows a different side to Sundance, one that is going beyond the traditional media coverage to highlight relevant stories.

Neo-Noir: blood spilled to defend a family 

Blue Ruin (USA) and To Kill a Man (Chile/France) come from different countries but they compliment each other and present a complete picture of what happens in a society where the innocent are left to protect themselves.

An alternate title for Blue Ruin could easily be “To Kill a Man” because a killing takes place early on in the film. Dwight (Macon Blair) has no choice but to kill in order to protect his family. The killing dates back to a family feud and his murder is a further addition in a cyclic act of an “eye for an eye”. Blue Ruin wastes no time in jumping right into events and moves at a rapid pace while maintaining the tension on a knife’s edge for much of the film. A few moments of humor are sprinkled throughout the film which provide a welcome relief as the humor releases some of the tension. Blue Ruin is a perfectly realized neo-noir that depicts some of the same spirit that has made Justified such a worthy show. The film debuted in Cannes 2013 but will only get a wider American release in April 2014. As it stands, Blue Ruin is the best American film of 2013 that I have seen.

Blue Ruin

To Kill a Man can be called a precursor to Blue Ruin because the film shows the path a man is forced to undertake when contemplating murder. Jorge (Daniel Candia) is bullied and humiliated by a local gang to the extent that his family is no longer safe. The law cannot act fast enough and as a result, Jorge has no choice but to take matters into his own hands. To Kill a Man contains many sequences which defy belief and just when one expects the film to end, it continues and further astounds. When all is said and done, the words “Based on a true story” appear just before the closing credits. The decision to show these words at the end of the film is masterful as it manages to put the entire film in a different light. Without the appearance of those words, one would question the decisions that took place in the film. Yet those words lend reality to the events and instead manage to make the film a larger case study of what can happen in a society where the innocent can no longer be protected by the law, the same law which makes it easier for the guilty to always evade capture.

To Kill a Man

Hostile World, defending oneself 

Liar’s Dice and A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, debut films directed by women, also depict a hostile world where women are potential prey to men. But the two films take radically different approaches in how the female characters handle their situation.

In Geethu Mohandas’ Liar’s Dice, Kamala (Geetanjali Thapa, mesmerizing) travels from Chitkul to Delhi in order to find her husband whom she has not heard from in 5 months. She takes her daughter and their family goat along the journey. However, a woman traveling without a male companion in India, especially in Delhi, is never safe from men’s constantly prying eyes; a fact that has gained a lot more exposure in the last 2 years with the huge number of documented rape cases. Kamala meets a completely untrustworthy stranger (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) but the film shows that given the dangerous setting, even this stranger becomes a rope to cling on. Liar’s Dice manages to stay away from the usual romantic attitude that Bollywood and foreign films depict India in. Instead, harsh reality is allowed to filter in. The cinematography is breathtaking and shows snowy parts of Northern India rarely seen on screen. The acting is also memorable with Geetanjali Thapa properly expressing her character’s anger and fear while Nawazuddin plays his dishonest persona to perfection.

Liar’s Dice

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night beautifully turns the table from a girl who could be an easy prey and makes her the hunter instead. As per the title, a girl does walk alone but she is not the one in danger. Instead, every man in her sight is. This is because the black and white Iranian film is a contemporary take on a Vampire story. The fact that the girl wears a hijab when attacking men can clearly be read as a subtext on the treatment of women not only in Iran but the Middle East. But instead of being subdued by the men, the girl bites back. Ana Lily Amirpour’s film is seductive and features a pulsating soundtrack which combined with the Californian setting gives the entire work an American feel, except that it is in Farsi and takes place in a fictitious place called “Bad City”. Plenty of touches of Jim Jarmusch can be found plus a nod towards early David Lynch as well.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Natural Resources: Corporations, Cycle of Boom and Bust 

A few films highlighted the methods that corporations go about in extracting natural resources from nations and the impact it has on local residents of a city/nation.

In Marmato, the gold mining methods in a small Colombian town are shown and how the Canadian corporation’s decisions play a part in the resident’s lives. The town residents have been gold miners for centuries and they live close to the mines on the mountains. However, the corporation wants to instead use an open mining technique which would level the mountain, thereby displacing the residents. The residents try to fight the corporation but their plight faces a tough political battle as depicted by the film. One could easily replace gold with oil, shale, silver or any other natural resource and the film would still be relevant in the unfolding of events.

Marmato

We Come as Friends examines the newly formed nation of South Sudan and depicts how colonialism still exists but hides in a new mask related to resource exploitation. In the film, the resource in question is oil which governs the level of foreign interest in the nation. One can imagine that the rest of the world would not have have cared about what happened if there was no oil.

We Come as Friends

The cycle of boom and bust related to resource discovery has been repeated throughout history and many films have shown towns that fall in either categories. The Overnighters shows the impact on the local economy when an influx of workers arrives. Williston, North Dakota is the site for a new gold rush to speak, that of shale gas. The town cannot accommodate the hundreds of new arriving workers who have no place to sleep. On top of that, the residents of Williston are wary and fearful of the strangers, who are Americans moving from different states.

A local pastor, Jay Reinke, puts up as many workers in his church as possible and helps find accommodations for others. But some of the workers are ex-convicts or felons which causes the town residents to fear them more. Reinke goes out of his way to treat every worker equally but that puts his reputation on the line. As the film progresses, the pressure of the town and the overnighters takes its toll on Jay Reinke, who is almost on the brink of losing everything, his faith and reputation. In fact, events threaten to make Reinke an overnighter as well. The film shifts from the larger focus of the town to a personal story about the pastor’s life because what happens is not foreseeable. The film was awarded a Special Jury Prize for intuitive filmmaking and that is justified as events take an unexpected turn but director Jesse Moss trusted his instincts and continued filming. Also, Jay Reinke and his family deserve credit for allowing the camera to stay on in their households even though many personal conversations were taking place. In many moments, Moss achieves a Direct Cinema style of intimacy and the camera becomes one with Reinke’s household. When all is said and done, The Overnighters leaves one shaken at what they have just witnessed. Such was the case with many audience members at the sold out show.

The Overnighters

Young Ones shows a future when water has become a scarce resource and where humans fight for every drop of water. The film is sci-fi but the desert surroundings and theme of revenge evoke a Western genre. The story unfolds in three chapters, with each chapter highlighting a key character. Michael Shannon stars as the father, who is willing to fight for his family’s benefit, a theme shown in other films at the festival. The film highlights the battle of survival that ensues when a society is on the verge of collapse.

Young Ones

Cutter Hodierne’s Fishing Without Nets shows a Somali village where all jobs have dried up and the only real money that can be made is by piracy. The film covers a similar topic to Captain Phillips and A Hijacking but Fishing Without Nets is told entirely from a Somali perspective. The feature film is an expansion of Cutter Hodierne’s award winning 2012 short film by the same name which also debuted at Sundance. It is a wonderful time in cinema when three films such as A Hijacking, Captain Phillips, Fishing Without Nets can exist in a similar timeframe. The three films are directed by men from three separate countries but they present a 360 degree view of events. There are many scenes where the three films directly reference each other and show an opposing perspective. For example, in Captain Phillips, events are seen from Tom Hanks’ character’s point of view such as when he sees the pirates approaching on boats and boarding the ship. In Fishing Without Nets, the camera is instead in the pirate boats and events unfold from the pirates’ perspective when they are climbing onto the ship. Another example is regarding the negotiations between the pirates and the shipping company. A Hijacking shows the parent ship company offices when the pirates phone to demand ransom while in Fishing Without Nets, only the pirates are shown talking on the phone and we never get to see the company on the other side. Therefore, these three films paint a complete picture of the entire piracy operation including the men who fund the process and provide supplies to those who kidnap the hostage and those that make the deals.

Fishing Without Nets

Portrait of an Artist 

Tim Sutton’s Memphis is a beautiful contemplative film set in the city that has fulfilled many musical dreams. However, the film is not about an artist who is on the verge of discovery. Instead, it looks at an artist’s life when the lyrics stop. Willis Earl Beal plays a famous musician who is struggling to finish his new album. He is told by his agent that he needs to come up with something but as Willis indicates, lyrics escape him. He is suffering from the equivalent of a writer’s block and as a result, the film applies to any artist struggling to produce a work. Willis procrastinates, wanders the city and manages to find solace among the unemployed people who can barely make ends meet. Yet, Willis has a talent. A close friend advises him that Willis has a responsibility to God, to realize his artistic duty. Willis has the keys to the kingdom, he is at the state that thousands other want to be. But he decides to turn in his keys to the kingdom and goes on a less traveled but difficult journey. Casting Willis is quite the coup as the film shatters the boundary between reality and fiction. The film is not autobiographical but there are some moments which depict Willis’ working methods regarding his music recording. The decision to withhold music for most of the film is also smart because that makes one thirst for Willis’ songs. And when we finally listen to Willis’ voice, it is magical! The music and words of “Too Dry to Cry” are sprinkled throughout the film, elevating the film and giving the entire work a soulful momentum. Memphis is a worthy addition to Contemporary Contemplative Cinema and is one of the most original American film in years.

Memphis

Mr. Leos CaraX is a documentary that demystifies Leos Carax and allows a window into his style. The film is an ode to the director and includes plenty of clips and interviews which help shed a light on Carax’s references and usage of citations. Denis Lavant is featured prominently and his interview is quite useful in understanding his growth as an actor over the years in working with Carax. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Harmony Korine, Richard Brody, Kent Jones, Gilles Jacob also provide insightful critical analyses. Tessa Louise-Salomé’s documentary makes one want to revisit Carax’s films while eagerly awaiting his new work; which hopefully is not another decade away.

Mr.Leos CaraX

Top 5 Films: a tie for 5th means 6 films

1. Return to Homs (Talal Derki)

2. Memphis (Tim Sutton)

3. Blue Ruin (Jeremy Saulnier)

4. We Are the Giant (Greg Barker)

5. The Overnighters (Jesse Moss) and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour)

I missed many other wonderful films due to scheduling conflicts or sold out shows. Whiplash (winner of both Jury and Audience Award for US Dramatic film), Imperial Dreams (Audience Award, Best of NEXT) and The Green Prince (Audience Award, World Documentary) were high on my see list. Discussing with dozens of other cinephiles, there were a few common titles that popped up on many other top lists. Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was #1 on many lists as was Mike Cahill’s I-Origins, talking about which made some people giddy with excitement. I-Origins was the winner of Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize, a prize which Cahill also won at Sundance back in 2011 with his first feature Another Earth. Raid 2 was #1 on few lists and almost everyone was certain that the film’s extreme violence meant the film would not be released without some cuts in North American cinemas. Other films that got plenty of buzz were E-TEAM (Winner of the Cinematography Award: US Documentary), Wetlands, Watchers in the Sky (Winner of two awards for Animation usage and Editing), Alive Inside: A Story of Music & Memory (Audience Award for US Documentary) and Happy Christmas. We Are the Giant is the only film from my list that featured on two other’s list at #1.

An overall festival experience is made or broken by one’s choices. In this regard, almost all my choices delivered, which helped! Of the 5 films that I bought advance tickets to, 3 won top prizes. To Kill a Man won the Jury Prize for World Cinema Dramatic category, Return to Homs won the Jury prize for World Documentary while Fishing Without Nets bagged the Best Directing prize. Along with Return to Homs, Memphis, Blue Ruin and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night were on my must-see list before the festival started. Therefore, it was especially delightful to discover that these films were worth attending.

The only disappointments were Young Ones and We Come as Friends, but only because the films could not build on an early impressive setup. In the case of We Come As Friends that is understandable as the film was clearly impacted by the degrading situation in South Sudan. The film won a Special Jury Prize for Cinematic Bravery which recognizes the effort of director Hubert Sauper who tired to cover as many different angles to the South Sudan nation creation story as possible. We Come As Friends shows that making a documentary in a dynamic and constantly changing landscape can be challenging. This was also demonstrated in Marmato when the situation of the town residents worsened. However, Marmato ends before the tensions rose to a boil. One of the producers mentioned that they had to leave the country when there were concerns about their safety, something which helped give the film a natural ending. In the case of The Overnighters, the reason why the change in direction worked was because the main subject Jay Reinke was part of the film early on. As a result, he provided a continuation thread when the film changed course.

Return to Homs, We Are the Giant, We Come as Friends and Marmato depict a window into current events which are getting worse and changing constantly. As a result, these films don’t offer a natural conclusion because the ending of these struggles has not yet been written. But these films are essential because they serve as a living breathing digital document.

Sundance is interchangeable with American cinema and will always be a place where new American directors will be discovered. However, as this year’s festival showed, Sundance is giving a peek into the wider world outside of American shores by including films which are relevant and timely. No matter what category a film was programmed in and how different it was, it still fit in the overall program and showed that there was careful attention paid to ensuring all the films had a purpose.

The festival gets a lot of attention for its distribution side along with the celebrity presence. There are many private parties around the festival which feature celebrities and grab a lot of media coverage. This gives the appearance of a large closed-off film festival. But that is not the case as the festival has successfully managed to bridge its larger media aspect with a smaller independent feel. This is evident not only from the film selections but from some of the panels. I attended the Film Church on the final day of the festival where the Festival Director John Cooper and Director of Programming Trevor Groth talked about their festival highlights. Both John and Trevor were candid about some of their programming decisions and challenges that took place. The panel made it hard to believe that Sundance is the media crazy festival that some publications make it appear. Instead, Sundance felt like an intimate festival that is open to film lovers from all walks of life. This is also reinforced by talking to many of the volunteers and other festival patrons. There were many volunteers and patrons who have been attending for decades and shared a zest for cinema. In fact, every single volunteer I came across was a bona-fide cinephile, something I have not seen at another festival. One of the volunteers was a documentary maker and I learned that many of the volunteers working at one of the venues also worked regularly at the Toronto International Film Festival. Overall, Sundance proved to be a more open and inviting festival than I expected. And the variety of programming choices meant the festival balanced both artistic and commercial cinema while keeping its ears tuned to global events.

Sam, Dennis, Pierre de Plume, and Sammy give their predictions for the 2014 Oscars.

Note:  Pierre de Plume appears at the 1:05 (one hour and five minute) mark.

99 year-old ‘Saboteur’ actor Norman Lloyd speaking to Film Forum audience via Skype from Los Angeles

Classic 45 band at Whiskey Cafe in Lyndhurst

by Sam Juliano

Incredibly, more of the white stuff is headed our way tonight, though forecast updates are now painting a much better picture than was was originally speculated.  (In the end we got nothing, praise the Lord!) The New York City area is now facing 2 to 4 inches overnight, with an expected starting time of around 8 P.M.  The way it stands now I’d be very surprised if any of local schools were to be affected, though as always the proof will be in the pudding.  In any case our annual Oscar party is being held at the Tiger Hose Fire House -I am actually writing this MMD just two hours before the gathering commences- where we are expected in the neighborhood of around 35 people.  The expected snowfall will probably impact the attendance of several people who must travel a long way to get here.  The party will be catered by a fantastic local Italian market – Dante’s, which will provide two robust six-foot heroes with three sections (fresh roast beef; turkey and cheese; and an Italian combination) and trays of meatballs, chicken parmigiana, eggplant parmigiana, sausage and peppers, cavatelli and broccoli and a three-color arugula salad, and beer, soda, coffee and desert.  As always we will be conducting our annual Oscar pool, where willing participants will choose winners from every one of the 24 categories.

Lucille and I experienced a rollicking time on Saturday night at the Whiskey Cafe in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, where the Classic 45 rock band doo wopped the entire night away with their splendid renditions of many 50′s and early 60′s classics like “Earth Angel,” “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?,” “This Magic Moment,” “My Girl,” “Have You Heard?,” “Under the Boardwalk,” “Runaround Sue,” “Pretty Woman,” “More Today Than Yesterday,” “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing,” “He’s So Fine,” “Three Coins in a Fountain,” “Bristol Stomp,” “Dream Lover,” “Peppermint Twist,” “Up on the Roof,” “My Guy,” “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?,” “Tears on my Pillow,” “The Wanderer,” “The Wonder of You,” “You Belong To Me” and many more.  The nine person ensemble included two stupendous lead vocals -one male and one female, three excellent background vocals and four musicians including the versatile guitarist Cliff Bernunzio.  Within a stone’s throw of Medieval Times and Met-Life Stadium, the Whiskey Cafe really knows how to treat a crowd, and Saturday night the place was Doo Wop Heaven.

Sammy and I continued our torrid attendance at the Film Forum’s The Complete Hitchcock Festival, where we took in six more of the master’s films:

The Wrong Man **** 1/2    (Monday night)  Hitch at Film Forum

Mr. & Mrs. Smith  ***   (Wednesday)    Hitch at Film Forum

Rich and Strange   ***   (Wednesday)   Hitch at Film Forum

Saboteur    *****      (Thursday)     Hitch at Film Forum

The Skin Game  ** 1/2 (Friday)  Hitch at Film Forum

Strangers on a Train ***** (Friday)  Hitch at Film Forum

I will have more to say on the films at some point in the comment thread, but heck I have seen most of these many times over the years, and the special thrilled was to turn Sammy on to the lot.  The BIG EVENT was on Thursday night when the screening of the classic 1942 SABOTEUR was followed by an incredibly fascinating SKYPE live HD interview with the 99 year-old actor Norman Lloyd (who played the saboteur Frye in the film) who met in his living room with Ben Mankiewitz to respond to questions posed by Film Forum program director Bruce Goldstein.  Lloyd was remarkably lucid, and he held the audience enthralled with stories of his relationship with Hitch and Orson Welles, and of his career, his wife of 75 years who died two years ago at age 98 and of his coming of age in the entertainment business.  Film Forum patrons posed some really fascinating questions as well.

I just heard today of the passing of one of the cinema’s great auteurs, 91 year-old Allan Resnais, whose NIGHT AND FOG, LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD and HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR are rightly ranked among the greatest of films.

I have re-posted last week’s links with a few revisions:

At Tuesdays with Laurie, the indomitable Ms. Buchanan offers up another provocative post:                                                                                  http://tuesdayswithlaurie.com/2014/02/18/under-over-through/

Head over to FilmsNoir.net pronto to check out Tony d’Ambra’s fantastic Top 25 film noirs in a tremendous post:                                                                  http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/filmsnoir-nets-top-25-films-noir.html

At Noirish the exceedingly gifted and prolific author John Grant has posted a splendid takedown of 1962′s little-seen “Stark Fear”:  http://noirencyclopedia.wordpress.com/2014/02/23/stark-fear-1962/

Stephen Mullen (Weeping Sam) has declared “Inside Llewyn Davis” as the best film of 2013 and one of the Coens’ most formidable works at The Listening Ear:  http://listeningear.blogspot.com/2014/02/inside-llewyn-davis.html

Dean Treadway continues his fabulous annual cinematic coverage with an in-depth look at 1927 at Filmacability:  http://filmicability.blogspot.com/2014/02/1927-year-in-review.html

Judy Geater has launched her new series on Douglas Sirk at Movie Classics with a terrific essays on “Has Anybody Seen My Gal?”:  http://movieclassics.wordpress.com/2014/02/16/has-anybody-seen-my-gal-douglas-sirk-1952/

John Greco has written a superb review of Luchino Visconti’s extraordinary “Bellissima” at Twenty Four Frames:  http://twentyfourframes.wordpress.com/2014/02/14/belissima-1952-visconti-luchino/

At Scribbles and Ramblings Sachin Gandhi has the South American Movie World Cup pairings up for your perusal: http://likhna.blogspot.com/2014/01/south-american-films.html

At Overlook’s Corridor Jaimie Grijalba is up to “screenplays” in the continuing examination of his annual ‘Frank Awards’ given to the best films and components:  http://overlookhotelfilm.wordpress.com/2014/02/14/frank-awards-2013-screenplays/

Pat Perry’s latest post at Doodad Kind of Town superbly addresses “Philomena” and “Inside Llewyn Davis”: http://doodadkindoftown.blogspot.com/2014/01/surprise-surprise.html

At Dee Dee’s ‘Ning’ network site she has posted some spectacular and rare Hitchcock posters in honor of the Film Forum’s great Festival on the prolific icon:                             http://filmnoire.ning.com/forum/topics/darkness-before-dawn-takes-a-peek-at-foreign-posters-and

Jon Warner has posted a fantastic essay on the documentary masterwork “The Act of Killing” at Films Worth Watching: http://filmsworthwatching.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-act-of-killing-2012-directed-by.html

At FilmsNoir.net Allan Fassions has written a superb essay on 1955′s “Dementia” for the site’s erstwhile proprietor Tony d’Ambra:  http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/alan-fassioms-on-dementia-1955-beatnik-noir.html

And speaking of Fassions, his site is now the latest inclusion on the WitD sidebar.  It is called “Stranger on the 3rd Floor” and it looks like a fabulous place to visit:  http://strangeronthe3rdfloor.wordpress.com/

At The Last Lullaby filmmaker Jeffrey Goodman is leading up with his 12 Best Films of 2013:   http://cahierspositif.blogspot.com/2014/01/my-top-twelve-films-of-2013.html

The great Canadian artist Terrill Welch is leading up at her sublime Creativepotager’s blog with a post titled “One Brush Stroke After Another”:  http://creativepotager.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/one-brushstroke-after-another/

As ever, Samuel Wilson is posting superb reviews that may have esaped the radar.  His latest great piece to that end at Mondo 70 is an essay on “Greed in the Sun”:            http://mondo70.blogspot.com/2014/02/greed-inthe-sun-cent-mille-dollars-au.html

Patricia Hamilton has written a tremendous book review on Anish Majumdar’s “The Isolation Door” at Patricia’s Wisdom, and the author chimed in:                                                    http://patriciaswisdom.com/2014/02/the-isolation-door-a-novel-anish-majumdar/

Shubhajit Lahiri has penned a provocative capsule on the Argentinian film “Wake Up Love” at Cinemascope:                             http://cliched-monologues.blogspot.com/2014/02/wake-up-love-despabilate-amor-1996.html

David Schleicher has penned a fabulous review of the Iranian “The Past” at The Schleicher Spin:  http://theschleicherspin.com/2014/02/09/secrets-and-lies-in-the-past/

Brandie Ashe has posted a wonderful post on Shirley Temple at True Classics:                    http://trueclassics.net/2014/02/11/remembering-shirley-temple/

Mike Norton has penned some superlative pieces on Hip Hop at Enter the Screen:    http://enterthescreen.wordpress.com/

Joel Bocko posts about the screen-capping he’s managed over the past year at The Dancing Image:  http://thedancingimage.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-final-watchlistscreencap-some-notes.html

Roderick Heath brings unprecedented scholarship to Ivan Reitman’s “Ghostbusters” at Ferdy-on-Films:  http://www.ferdyonfilms.com/2014/ghostbusters-1984/21071/

J.D. LaFrance leads up with a terrific review on “Neuromancer” at Radiator Heaven:  http://rheaven.blogspot.com/2014/02/neuromancer.html

Drew McIntosh has again offered up a fascinating post at The Blue Vial, showcasing works by Walerian Borowczyk and David Lynch:  http://thebluevial.blogspot.com/2014/01/end-of-road.html

by Allan Fish

(Canada/Sweden 1987 873m) DVD2 (France only)

To comment on the process of the film

p/d/w  Peter Watkins  ph/ed  various

Peter Watkins’ monumental study of life in the nuclear age had, for over 25 years, become a thing of myth.  Glimpsed as frequently as the village of Brigadoon, barely seen even when it was released.  It had been financed by various European organisations and Watkins intended it to be seen in schools, with each episode between 30 and 50 minutes, the length of a single class or period in a classroom.  After shooting for several years, over a hundred hours of footage were edited down to 19 episodes.  At its centre there was a summit between Ronald Reagan and Canadian leader Brian Mulroney, but also visits to Japan, Norway, Finland, West Germany, the US, Scotland (including the Isle of Lewis), Mozambique, Tahiti and the Soviet Union. 

Historical context must be taken into account; this was the world pre Glasnost, pre the Reagan-Gorbachev thaw, pre Berlin Wall, pre Tiananmen Square, pre Mandela.  These were the death throes of the Cold War.  Even Watkins would have been amazed at how much could change in a few short years.  Did the changes then make The Journey seem redundant?  Here was a plea to end the arms race, and only a few years later the two super powers did just that.  The Journey seems now best taken as a time capsule, when hope was dwindling and the way ahead seemed to indicate disaster, the seemingly endless militarisation of the planet with its diaspora of troops overseas, whose leaders spend countless millions on armaments while letting individuals’ basic needs suffer.

From the get go Watkins informs us that “the presentation is biased due to our very strong feelings on the subject.”  We’re given not just the facts about nuclear expenditure and the extent of desolation and destruction that such weapons bring, but also the impact on the world’s environment.  There are numerous moving sequences, visits to Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial, like an ancient burial mound, and to Bangor submarine base in the US.  Here a chilling analogy can easily be made, between the slow tracking shot down the railway tracks on which the nuclear warheads are brought and the tracks that took the doomed millions to Auschwitz.  The difference here, of course, is that the Nazis’ form of murder was still personal, face to face.  The world has since advanced, or rather degenerated, into murdering countless millions by proxy at the flick of a switch.

Cinematically, however, Watkins presents us with a paradox.  As well as looking at the effects of nuclear arms race, he also takes time to discuss the disintegration of the global community, the failure to provide sufficient infrastructure in former colonial countries in Africa and the manipulation of the media, how they concentrate on the sensational and use rapid editing to disfigure and make the audience see the world as they want them to.  The paradox being that Watkins himself uses a manipulative editing technique, having dialogue from one scene overlap with visuals for the next, captions come up for what may be the next scene but may be the scene after.  It’s disorienting, at times needlessly so, but Watkins sets out to challenge us.  The Journey cannot be watched in long sittings, it’s made too uncomfortable to do so, with its endless repetition and occasional sledgehammer editing.  One cannot escape the feeling that The War Game, which was only 45 minutes long, was more impactful, that The Journey is self-indulgent and as much a monstrosity as a masterpiece.  Yet it can be both, and its most powerful moments will stay with you, such as the exchange of video welcomes between a family in Scotland and another in Leningrad, and it’s in this attempt to forcibly glue together a sense of community for which Watkins is to be most applauded.  But the most moving scene of all is surely that in the penultimate episode, with an elderly German woman, visibly shaking as she talks about her terror of where the world is heading mixed with memories of where her country had been.  In a mere few minutes she speaks more sense than you’ll find in a yearly record of Hansard.  As a state of the planet, for all its flaws, it’s an astonishing achievement.

 © 2014 by James Clark

 What can we bring to an ambitious film masking its ambitions in many ways? This question becomes especially pressing in face of the ultra-sophistication inherent in an order of modern Italian cinema, generally perceived to be inexorably receding into oblivion. The peculiarities of such a dilemma might never have staged a counter-thrust without the deft cinematic archaeology of Paolo Sorrentino as disclosed in his film from 2013, The Great Beauty.

    It will take a while to lucidly get to the point of such a unique tangle; and as good a beginning as any would be a passage, near the work’s outset, where a celebrity journalist attends a display of site-specific performance art on the outskirts of Rome. Along with a few dozen middle-aged Gran Tourismo drivers and a clutch of academics having put through precious, runic (spring solstice?) paces their expensively educated young children, the writer, Jep, beholds a nude woman (with a hammer and sickle trim of her red-dyed pubic hair), her head covered by a veil, sprint headlong into an ancient stone pillar of the aqueduct defining the space, after which she lies on the ground, bleeding through that veil, and then gets back on her feet, announcing to the shaken audience, “I don’t love you!” But now having passed beyond that, and given her a couple of noncommittal claps of applause, Jep proceeds to interview her, the late sun having finally (iconically?) set. He interrupts the swarthy, bruised sensation of the moment, to protest her referring to herself in the third person, an inflating of her specifics in art-prissy terms of “The Talin Concept.” The unsmooth, rather rustic toiler, a far cry from Jep’s unmistakable urbanity, gallops into the infelicitous harangue, “I don’t need to read. I live on vibrations. The pattern of vibrations cannot be supported by the vulgarity of words.” When Jep registers his sense that that tangent is passé (“You can’t charm me with things like this…”), she retorts, “I’m starting to dislike this interview. You’re an ass!” (It may come about that she herself is one of a surprisingly viable herd of asses.) After arguing, the picture of reasonableness, “I want to know what a vibration is… Lives on vibrations, but doesn’t know what a vibration is…” Jep thinks to put her in her place by patronizingly informing her that he works for a journal that has “a core of cultivated readers” who are beyond being “taken as fools.” She backs down from this chastisement, quietly stating, “It’s a difficult journey for an artist…” But she signs off with the more energetic protest, “You’re an obsessive jerk!”

Jep, the somehow unlikely jerk, now back at the office/ ornately-furnished-home of his publisher-editor, with his poised, self-assured, almost benign humorous presence accessorized by a patrician-style, longish coiffure, smiles warmly when his business partner, Dadina, a self-possessed, swarthy dwarf lady passes out far from the first such accolade he’s received, “This interview is a hoot! [bound to elicit pleasurable sneers from their first-rate clients]… You haven’t had the career you deserve…” He laughs that off expertly, reducing thereby to trivia her affectionate mooting his having been “lazy.” Soon after this, he’s with a friend, Romano, in his spartan studio, who enthuses about his own rendition of a classic from modern Italian literature. Jep urges him to venture into something “original,” and puts his foot down, when the far from affluent hustler moots a pop, insider’s look into Jep the notorious party animal/ celebrity and his startling friends—an action giving him the simultaneous gratifications of eschewing such pomposity and displaying his writer’s smarts to the effect that such a tome would sink like a stone amidst a glut of such low-life angling. Then Romano returns to a subject we can see to have been often tested, namely, Jep’s not having followed up an acclaimed first novel, from decades past, with a second one. “You’ve been lazy. You have to take yourself seriously…” This is clearly another project the clever journalist does not care to pursue.

A bit later he’s at a lavish outdoor party one night where the host interrupts his children having a snack indoors to rather violently dragoon his older daughter (of about eleven years of age) to give the guests and us another instance of performance art in Rome that spring. She had insisted that staying with her siblings was far preferable to her; but her father (described by Jep, to his date, as “the most important art collector in this miserable country”) drags her away to confront a patronage it is safe to say she does not love. As with the girl at the aqueduct, she pauses before her objective (here a monumental canvas on stretchers, stationed on the grounds) and, gasping, growling and shrieking, she proceeds to splash the contents of many large paint cans onto that wall of firm cloth, following up with hurling herself into the soaking canvas, smashing at it and lunging in such a way as to distribute and imbed the rather gory liquid all over the work site. Jep’s young lady friend is alarmed that the child having been pressed into the role of a beast of burden is crying, as if suffering great pain. But Jep, who has been by his date’s father pressed to perform the role of easing her into the successful and gratifying avenues of Roman life, replies—in a register recalling that of the interview at the aqueduct—“What do you mean, hurt? That girl earns millions!”

In light of the presentation thus far framed, it seems that one of the correspondent tasks in meeting the challenges of Sorrentino’s ambitions is becoming aware of recurrent motifs in the narrative—torrents of passion being met by indifference; and the associative plight of Balthazar the donkey, from the distant corridors of film history. But this panoramic film is not a machine to activate by way of twigging on to its constituent parts, its apparatus (Jep’s only book being titled, The Human Apparatus). And one way of going ahead with the vast remainder of this large (in every sense) work, is to note that smug, razor-sharp little Dadina, at the end of Jep’s sixty-fifth birthday party, wanders about her suave associate’s penthouse estate, directly across from the Coliseum, anxiously calling out, “Ragazzi!” [“Guys!” “Kids!”], just as young Balthazar brayed for his young mistress, Marie, as he frantically tried to reunite with her and find supportive life in face of an abandoned farmstead.

Of course there is an extensive network of instances pertaining to the energies of our protagonist; but we have to be alert here to the cornucopia of earlier inventions as spotlighting Jep’s unprecedented and easily underestimated toil, which calls for an essentially immediate, intuitive apprehension of the thrust of the presentation. The shadows of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and, even more importantly, Antonioni’s La Notte, must not mislead us into supposing we have here a rather impertinent, “one more time” tour of mid-twentieth century ennui. The Great Beauty, I hope to make clear, ambitions to outgrow those giants, to set in relief that twentieth century amazements might lead to twenty-first century enchantment. And it aims to do this on the cinematic, experiential basis of—wait for it—vibrations! Sorrentino, though not surprisingly (for an artist whose favorites are David Lynch and the Coens; and, to judge from the abused action painter’s quick premonition of herself covered in paint from head to toe, keeping a close watch on the Nicolas Refn of Valhalla Rising and its very different territory) knowing his way about cinematic metaphors, aims to propel his craft from out of the sensuous glories of Rome itself, including the generous intimacies of its inhabitants. As such, that would prompt us to bring to this scene of revelry, this “Eternal City,” a steady bead upon death. The Great Beauty is, it seems to me, an audacious and incisive meditation upon death inasmuch as it can be encompassed and aptly tempered by ecstasy. Not surprisingly, then, its narrative provides an uneasy counterpoint between collapse and upswing. The first scene, wherein a supernal woman’s chorus rehearses a performance of David Lang’s “I Lie,” on a balcony overlooking a grand piazza which in turn overlooks the whole city, involves a Japanese tourist’s dropping dead in the course of snapping the visual magnificence while the beautiful singing and its guiding composition continues to haunt and delight us. As the tour group assembles around the man and absorbs the bad news, there is a sudden cut to a woman’s face and her piercing scream in the course of dancing, amidst a big party, to an electropop number that, as combined with a huge complement of the sexy young and the persistent old, conveys vibration far more powerfully than the flustered hopeful at the aqueduct. It has to be emphasized that, despite its brushing aside the sublime women’s choir, and presenting to us some very poor dancers and a weaselly little guy who fiercely twists and turns toward a tall young woman and desperately repeats, “I’ll screw you!” the scene emits an unmistakable and infectious ebullience. Over and above the awkward fringe, the heart of the affair features many dancers vamping with skill and wit, and, above all, delighting in motion. And there comes a moment when we see a man’s head and shoulders from behind, surfing that gale of sound, a man with patrician coiffure, a man who, when he turns to face us gives us such a smile that we’d bet a ton he’s a devotee to vibrations! And it’s Jep, indeed, throwing an all-night gala on his huge penthouse terrace in celebration of his being alive and still rockin’. The party, including the birthday boy, is seen upside down, and that’s just right for the dynamical shift in the air. The dancers move inside, where, to a Latin number, there is non-improvisational line dancing (with pre-planned arm and hand patterning) which changes the mood, not for the better. Then, outside again, there is more breathing room, but the earlier whiff of inertia hits like a bomb, everything is in slow-motion, and Jep “looks his age.”

Next morning with his housekeeper, he is critical of “the smell of old people” and, in response to her giving him a lucky pendant from her Asian homeland for his birthday, he remarks gracelessly, “It better be lucky because it’s pretty ugly.” By way of rejuvenation, there are, on his constitutional, convent girls looking his way as he takes on some much-needed water from an ancient fountain amidst richly colored and textured stonework, the children charmingly amused by a little dog. One of them ignores the teacher’s summons, and there are the two of them, recalling Marcello and the angelic girl who could not snap him out of his defeatedness. Further on, there are for him in a quietly effective way a swarm of starlings swooping about the skies in stunning ways. By attending to such highly charged events, we can gain entry to the full range of those self-contradictory gambits by which Jep experiences painful self-doubt, joyful confidence and an intermediate domain of smooth-as-silk curmudgeon. The latter force comes to bear memorably during a dinner party in which a television journalist refers to his book as a novelette.” Being a life-long shepherd of social progress, she can’t resist running with the slick hostility in the air at this gathering (bitchy snipes [by Jep] at another guest’s title for his book of poetry—Up with Life, Down with Convenience; [Jep again] regarding a lady’s troubled son—“He’s always been weird”; and that lady’s in turn cutting up another woman who expressed a fondness for the jazz on the playlist—“The Ethiopian jazz scene is the only one that matters”) to paint sybaritic Jep as an inferior, a trivial figure unable to find the cogency within modest, practical actions. “Rome is the only truly Marxist city [inured to child care]… I have three children and I’ve written eleven novels…I have convictions…I try to be modern, I’ve learned much about life.” Jep’s first line of response to this self-congratulatory insolence is to note the unseemly “ego” behind her devotions, and the “untruths’ in her biography. She calls him a misogynist, and he corrects her in describing himself as a misanthropist. The attacker, Stefania, haughtily demands he point out where there are untruths in her characterization. And, in his best facsimile of a prosecuting attorney, he fires off a rhetorically adept series of embarrassing ironies, couched, however, in an appeal to pay due recognition to simple equilibrium. Her Marxist fixation derived from being for many years the mistress of the Party boss in Italy, who saw to the publication and friendly reviews of her novels which were in fact sentimental tripe. Her devotion to her own children (her “sacrifices”) consisted of hiring a trio of babysitters and very seldom going anywhere near them. Before she leaves the gathering, shaken, he mocks her, “Modern is badass, right? You’re 53, with a life in tatters, like the rest of us… You should look at us with affection instead of contempt…” Counterpointing the unlikely Bolshevik working off her frustration at her cutting-edge, minimalist condo’s pool, we have Jep working off his frazzle by strolling the late-night streets of the deluxe core of Rome. She has resurfaced from an underwater sprint; and his resurfacing is, unsurprisingly, somewhat more complex.

This latter episode, constituting the narrative heart (as distinct from the thematic heart) of the film, begins with the kind of gossamer glimpse concerning which blue-chip Italian cinema excels. On a deserted byway, he encounters a woman, coming in the opposite direction; after passing her, he realizes he knows her and he stops and addresses her, “Signora Ardant…” The lovely lady turns and smiles, then assures him, by her presence, that she’s, just like him, needing solitude. That she’s Fanny Ardant, an Antonioni player, endows the night with its first assurance of sensual wit and magic. (That the actress appeared in Antonioni’s Beyond the Clouds [1993], during the filming of which he suffered a stroke, sustains the line concerning deterioration [During another curative ramble coming out of the two-part warfare with Stefania, he passes some joggers, one of whom tells his friends, “Antonioni is a fucking pain in the ass!”]; that it was a film about the seeming impossibility of love due to expecting perfection, ever-so-slightly looks forward to Jep’s showdown with badass modernity.) He stops by a striptease club, the owner of which greeting him profusely, not having seen him for 30 years. That entertainment specialist dolefully brags about having graduated from cocaine to heroin; but his erratic, fretful timbre suggests that his life has effectively escaped his management. Apologizing to a long-lost friend finding it quite easy to always seem “smart” (his wardrobe and real estate making very clear that whatever he’s making with Dadina is not the source of his real income), the club-owner declares, “I sound like a loser.” In a weird and wonderful take on Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau, in Antonioni’s La Notte, having it out while an amazing stripper/contortionist does great things, though ignored by the protagonists, the old pal bemoans his forty-two- year-old girlfriend still stripping (not great, but not that bad), seen in silhouette behind them. “She’ll still want to be stripping when she’s 50!” Then he gets down to the most compelling problem of his life, in hopes that his smart friend can tackle its badass-modern dilemma, namely, his daughter, Ramona, who, when she joins Jep  and hears him claim to be a friend of her father, declares, “Dad has no friends.” The launch of this liaison could hardly be less promising. Friendless Dad had, before cutting out, remarked that Ramona’s defining quality was, “She always wants money…” clearly implying that she was as drug-dependent as he. Jep’s gambit, “He asked me to find you a husband” [or at least a new source of cash flow] carries on to the proposition, “A family’s a beautiful thing,” which prompts her to maintain, “I know. But I’m not cut out for beautiful things.” Appearances notwithstanding, however, Jep finds in dark, anxious and showgirl-attractive Ramona a regime to offset tatters with a mobilization of the smarts he knows himself to command, though in a most accident-prone way.

These two are definitely not a couple destined from out of heaven. Jep immediately has a bit of slippage, and she asks him with some delicacy (one of the stable of Polish youngsters being average in the glass cage behind their banquette), “What’s wrong?” He replies, “I feel old,” to which she offers, “You’re no spring chicken.” He takes her to the party where the child prodigy produces a painting few can afford, and she, no slouch herself at visual punch, shows up in skin-tight, transparent lace which reveals every feature of her physical resources. An ageing lady remarks to a friend, “Jep’s proving to be a disappointment…” (Ramona, in turn expresses disappointment with the girl’s father, who captures her with his phone and tells them they’ve arrived too late for a knife-throwing performance. “Who was that asshole?”) He introduces her to a young man requiring a cane to walk, but having in his possession a set of keys, to, as Jep explains, “enter the precincts of the most elite domains and art galleries” [another take, that is, on the badass home and art designs that have just finished doing nothing for them]. They proceed into the grounds of a palazzo with ravishing gardens and enter the building, suffused by its stonework and exquisite Renaissance art, all burnished by candlelight. In seeking elevation for Ramona, he’s attending to sensuous treasures that have not only provided so much more securement for him than he’s been able to acknowledge, but have been instrumental in his eschewal of producing writings beyond The Human Apparatus, a title perhaps alluding to an effacement of cultural heroics.  Ramona asks the keeper of the keys, “How did you come to possess [them]?” His answer, “I’m a trustworthy person…” whets her curiosity but does not seem to her entirely credible. Along with a clip showing the troubled son of the Ethiopian jazz fan killing himself by running his sports car into an obstacle, there immediately follows Jep, Ramona and the young man coming out upon a fabulous terrace,  garden and skies at dawn, silently beholding beauties that don’t need explanation. What first of all seems the primal moon becomes, over a short while, a huge jet coming into Rome. Another trompe l’oeil: the two of them in bed in the morning, neither thrilled nor repelled by what has transpired. Bringing her coffee (as she lies prone upon the bed, her dark skin so flawless) he’s briefly alarmed by her not responding to his voice. Then she comes to life. Before that fright, he managed, with both lying together in bed, on their back, to direct her vision to the reflection of the breathtaking turquoise sea on a mirrored ceiling, our cue to realizing that he has taken her to the Mediterranean coast near Rome, a place that he becomes fixed upon in the course of pulling himself together. Also at this juncture she tells him (after he’s mused, “It’s nice loving someone…”), “I spend all my money curing myself.” He goes on to alert her to the performance/self-aggrandizing possibilities of funerals (the troubled boy’s big scene in the offing). The intense calculations he recites find her (and us) thinking Jep’s proving to be a disappointment. Further discomfiture occurs when, in direct contradiction to his dictum to be smoothly solicitous to the family of the deceased but never under any circumstances to cry, he bursts into tears in his role of one of the pallbearers. Ramona watches from the church pew, at a loss from his fear as much as from his cynicism. Then we see Jep in another smashing ensemble of black. He’s buying cigarettes in a bar far from his comfort zone of the millionaires’ haven. Some young bloods look his way with askance. There is a quorum of winos and a folk-rock playlist. His feeling out of place and miserable in a district affordable to the floundering, grief-stricken father of Ramona is increased by a sharp-tongued funeral attendee and tippler, a catty socialite to whom the vibrations no longer speak, if they ever did. “Who’s going to look after you now?”

That smug and hostile lady hadn’t closely observed how resilient our protagonist could be. The thematic pyrotechnics which round off our saga consist of another woman who spends the night with Jep, a 104-year-old Mother Teresa lookalike, headed for canonization. He’s at a wedding reception on the quietly gorgeous grounds of a bucolic palazzo, and he’s dancing (you might think rather surprisingly) on the grass with Stefania, the questionable modernist. “Life’s marvellous,” he tells her while smiling broadly, his eyes twinkling as we’ve seen them so often before (for instance, in beholding, a few days prior to this event, an outdoor photo exhibition on equally impressive grounds, whereby a young man has recorded and placed in chronological order portraits of his face showing all the changes wrought daily since he was 14 years old [as augmented by his father’s photos of him since he was a baby]). Within this same stream of exploration into change, at the wedding, he approaches, in advance of meeting Stefania, a cardinal touted to be the next Pope (who cautions some enthusiasts [concerning the aged divine about to pay a visit to Rome], “A saint, but not technically”), and with seldom seen shyness and confusion mumbles something about, “…from a spiritual perspective…” But the Church executive, who only wants to talk about food and its expert preparation, brushes him off. Later that day, with Dadina, discussing plans for an interview with the future saint (“…she loves your book…”), he tells her, “Everything around me is dying…” His editor notes, “You’ve changed. You’re always thinking.” They share a supper of minestrone at her desk, and she calls him “Little Jep,” explaining that it will help him if he embraces for a few seconds his distant past and its being free from complication.

The project concerning the Italian lady who has spent the past many decades tending to the wretchedness of those having been born in Mali kicks off with a reception where Catholic notables from near and far pay their respects to a diminutive ancient on what could be called a Roman Holiday. She’s dressed in a version of sackcloth and her complexion, too, does not remind you of Audrey Hepburn; but her little legs dangling in a chair much too big for her zero in on a gem of the lightness of being young. Off pops one of her far from Givenchy-inspired shoes. It makes a sharp noise in the hushed circumstances where kindness and deep respect inform every face. Everyone notices. Jep and Dadina round up an aristocrat-for-hire duo and, with the cardinal dominating the conversation by way of his encyclopedic store of food ideas and religious zeal for carnal pleasure, the evening (at Jep’s place) is less than a blast of social and journalistic splendor. The saint’s hyperbolic spokesman (far more a Catholic operative than his charge, “Sister Mary”) won’t hear of granting an interview, though he assures the media team that she found Jep’s novel, “beautiful and fierce;” and the cardinal once again brushes aside a befuddled Jep, floating a gambit that, when more himself, he’d regard as daft, namely, that the high priest’s reputed skills as an exorcist could help him a lot. In that scrum of swollen egos (Jep had sneered at Stefania in terms of “…ego, ego, ego…” in the course of his hatchet job), no one notices until a long time later that the honored guest has not returned from the wash room. A frantic search of the area fails to locate her. And, at the end of the day, Jep, going to bed, discovers her on the bedroom floor; and, with a cry of shock, for a split second we think again that his special guest has died. Far from it, however.  (She was only, like Audrey, cutting out from a boring exercise.) She asks him with whispery passion, “Why did you never write another book?” He tells her he was “looking for the great beauty” that would give his work true stature. “I didn’t find it…” As he began to undress for bed (the lady having been covered by a sheet), we found that he wears a fixture to give the illusion of a flat belly. Coming all the way from that bit of ego, the far from cat walk figure tells him that in Mali she lived on roots, and, accordingly, such grubby fare is “important.” The authority by which she counters his preciousness is rooted in the carnal thrum we’ve seen from the outset, a pulse sustaining her declaration, “You have to live it [poverty].” In an echo of the early morning with Ramona and the keeper of the keys, they go out to his terrace; and there they find that a large flock of migrating flamingos has settled there, some nibbling on the leftover carriage-trade-catered delicacies from the party beginning to look far less abortive than it did a short while ago. Since she’s a saint (in the same vein as that of the donkey invoked in the earlier moments of our trek), she’s so well connected that, as she tells a quietly delighted Jep, she knows every name [every defining feature] of these beautiful visitors from Mali. Then she puffs out a bit of breath from her toothless mouth [actually comprising three baby teeth], and the gorgeous birds (recalling the party girls) take flight upon that vibration, a joy to behold, surpassed only by the Audrey-wattage smile on this ancient oracle’s face. (On one of his hopefully therapeutic rambles he tries to help a mother find her wayward child, a young girl who has made her way to the lower levels of a small basilica. Looking into the dark stairwell in the dead silence, he’s prompted to consult the place as inhabited by an oracle. A child’s voice challenges, “Who are you?” “Who am I? He awkwardly asks. “You’re nobody,” the brat tells him. Yes, from the point of view of stifling ego. No, in light of the boost he gets from his most recent girlfriend. Here we should let Jep tell us, as he told himself in kicking himself for squabbling with Stephania, ‘I didn’t just want to be king of high-life parties. I wanted to have the power to make them a failure.”)

Periodically Jep has been reminded of a brief, enigmatic summer romance when he was a college boy and a beautiful girl (seemingly as well-off as he) paid close attention to him and then vanished from his life. Her husband looks him up, to let him know she has very recently died and has left a diary that declares Jep to have been the only man she ever loved. During the visit of the saint, he plays over to himself a moment during a moonlit evening when she exposes her breasts, covers them again and watches for his reaction. It would appear that she was repelled by something she saw in him, and he spends quite a bit of time trying to comprehend what went wrong. Judging from the rather self-doubting and plebeian aspects of the husband/messenger, one might infer that that same uncharted daring and joie de vivre of Jep’s sensibility, that had induced Stefania to feel he needed cutting down to (mainstream, predictably domestic) size, had driven the (perhaps undeservingly) fascinating rebuff to his ego, coming to seem some kind of iconic visitation. (A vignette shows the young Jep swimming in the stunning blue waters of the Mediterranean, diving far underwater to avoid being torn apart by an onrushing power boat, and being cheered lustily by the group of girls observing this—cheered with feeling by all but one unforgettable, resentful siren.)

After the episode with the true charmer and her flamingos, Jep (alone on a grandiose yacht) is back in the territory of the boating adventure of 1970. Having just been given that right nudge toward consistent buoyancy he had been seeking from an exorcist, a suicide and the now suspect young dream girl, he could muster from his secluded deck a sad little smile progressing, as with Audrey and the other Roman holidayer, to a beam that defines his heart as it does theirs. He tells himself and us that his subsequent aspirations to great beauty would no longer find the myriad impediments to preclude “taking things seriously,” a recommendation his much-maligned admirer, Romano (who eventually drops his own lofty, quantity-dependent plans [“Rome disappointed me”]) tried (not that unlike the vibrations specialist) to make fly, for Jep and for himself. From the deck of his deluxe observatory, he recalls the temptress giving him not only a glimpse of her breasts (another exasperating stripper) but a taunting hardness in her eyes. “This is how it always ends, with death. But buried beneath the blah, blah, blah, the clutter, there is silence and sentiment, the haggard, inconstant splashes of beauty… Now let the story begin. It’s just a trick.” (A friend had shown him a magic trick whereby he makes a giraffe disappear. [At that point, a depressed Jep had asked, “Can you make me disappear?”] The saint’s dispersing her flamingos was sensual deftness far beyond any stunt; and Jep’s use of “trick” ironically alludes to his recently acquired magic rooted in love. In a shaky run-up to this realization, Jep tells a woman anxious about her just-ended performance of making love with him [“I’m not very good...”], “It’s sad being good. Good falls into being merely deft.”)

Jep had maintained, to the young man about to allow his trouble to kill him, that Proust’s sense of death emergent at any time did not undermine lightening up. He had, however, that day (with Ramona in bemused attendance), resorted to the sophistical trick, “Things are too complicated to be known by one person…” His transformation, that was always at the tip of his fingers, might result in another book, one that would no longer have to be devastating. He might, on the other hand, persist in spreading cheer and continue to be a lightning-rod for dogmatic killjoys. It’s even within the realm of possibility that, like his mentor, he might carry through a love of life to the point of charitable actions utterly shorn of their historically long-standing egotistical resentments. (During the post-narrative credits, we’re on a [yachting?] cruise along the Roman shore of the Tiber, and we behold the vast, often grotty, incident that Jep has finally got a creative handle on.) While he goes yachting, the sublime new woman in his life drags her arthritic little body up a long, steep flight of stairs to do homage to her wide open spaces, her rough-hewn heaven illuminating such a range of love. (Though she maintains a sense of taking vows of “poverty,” her hotel is in the five-star Spanish Steps district.) The Great Beauty casts light upon a most subtle and unprecedented migration in the midst of patterns seemingly cast in stone.

A production of such complexity and astonishment might, in the course of its being explored, find itself somewhat being overlooked as a directly sensuous communication. There is, to me, one scene that transports the viewer in a way that is sheer filmic magic. During the wedding reception on the grounds of the estate, the cardinal and other guests of a hyperactive bent race off to what they call “a skunk hunt.” Those staying behind on the vast lawn are touched by a quietly uncanny play of diffuse sunlight and an accordingly rippling musical motif by a small dance band. In this stream adults stand transfixed and children dart around delighted parents. Jep dances with Stefania and they are, within this moment, generous and delighted with each other. He tells her, “The future is marvellous, Stefania!” As we savor the work’s magical (though all but invisible to a viewer bound to circumspective issues) seismic shift, featuring our protagonist, we have to pay homage also to the countless little passages of gentle congeniality defining the players as much closer than they realize to as much creativity as life allows.

by Allan Fish

(USA 2003 170m) not on DVD

Call 555…

p/d/w  Thom Andersen  ph  Deborah Stratman  ed  Seung-HyunYoo

narrated by  Encke King

The wording of the title to Thom Andersen’s three hour visual doctorate thesis on his home town could act as its ultimate summarisation.  It’s Los Angeles, not LA.  There had been a film titled LA Plays Itself, of course; that infamous gay porn classic from 1972 which Andersen even includes and praises.  Yet Andersen spends some of his three hour address – actually spoken by Encke King – talking about how he hates the abbreviation and how Hollywood became complicit in the foreshortening of the name.  This attitude, pernickety in the extreme to outsiders, sums up Los Angeles’ curmudgeonly appeal.  It’s the prejudiced, jaundiced diatribe of a grumpy old man.  In some ways it’s reminiscent of Terence Davies’ later Of Time and the City, but twice as long and no less grouchy.

That in itself brings another thought, of Los Angeles as one of a series.  Say that the BFI commissioned, as they did the Century of Cinema series in 1995, a series of movie documentaries along the lines of Los Angeles, but with different locations.  Andersen talks of the difference between LA and New York, so New York’s an obvious one, with Marty Scorsese, but then how about London Plays Itself by Patrick Keiller, Paris Plays Itself by Godard or Rivette, Rome Plays Itself with Bertolucci, even Tehran Plays Itself with Mark Cousins?  Interesting concept, but one for another diatribe than this.

So what does Andersen give us?  On one level a tour of the architecture and ever-changing street map and façade of his city.  There are detailed sections on how the Bradbury Building became part of movie folklore in everything from D.O.A. to Blade Runner, and on the irony of it ending up an LAPD Internal Affairs HQ.  There’s a nod to the staircase immortalised by Laurel and Hardy in The Music Box. There’s Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis house, that modernist take on Chichen Itza, also used famously in Blade Runner, but perhaps best remember in recent years as the empty abode of Spike, Drusilla and Angelus in season two of Buffy.  (Indeed, one could make a case for LA’s use by Whedon for Angel’s nightscapes as one of the most iconic uses of the city in recent times, had Andersen looked at TV outside of a passing nod to Dragnet.)  There’s the old Union Station building, of course, and the geographical mesh-up of the film of the same title from 1950, and long passages about how the white majority view downtown and how Hollywood’s movie past has been left forgotten.  Mere signs are put up where Mack Sennett’s original studios once sat, ditto Walt Disney’s first animation studios.

Perhaps the most interesting section is on the demise of Bunker Hill and the once lost and resituated funicular railway that was a favourite for 1940s and 50s noir, as seen in Criss Cross, Kiss Me Deadly and Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles.  It’s all good, but no mention of the same location being used by Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd in the silent era, the latter using it to fake the perspective of his legendary climb up the building in Safety Last.  Sadly there are virtually no clips here prior to 1930.  Andersen seems to find more to say about 1980s trash.  There’s a surfeit of such garbage, punctuated by just a few references to key classics, like Double Indemnity, The Long Goodbye, Kiss Me Deadly, Chinatown and LA Confidential.  References to movie shoots dominate, with Andersen taking time out to observe the making of Swordfish, a film whose only reason to exist was to gratuitously bare Halle Berry’s breasts.  Yet in a way that’s what Hollywood has become in the decades of that gross oxymoron, high-concept cinema, all flashes, lights, explosions and tits.  When buildings lose their initial purpose, they’re reinvented as a movie location, repeat ad infinitum, so life imitates art and vice versa.  Andersen knows LA’s shortcomings; “the most photographed city in the world is the least photogenic…getting into movies becomes a substitute for achievement.”  Yet the truest words are when he notes “movies aren’t about places, they’re about stories.  If we notice the location, we’re not really watching the movie.”  Andersen shows that LA’s history on film is, if nothing else, a great story.

by Duane Porter

It’s been a great year for movies, even though there are quite a few I have yet to see. I try to limit my selections to those that had prominent premiers during the year 2013. For example, Kiarostami’s Like Someone In Love, Baumbach’s Francis Ha, and De Palma’s Passion have appeared on some 2013 lists. All three of these are in my top ten for 2012. Also, there are several films from 2013 that I am waiting to see, such as Claire Denis’ The Bastards, Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, Philippe Garrel’s Jealousy, Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin, and Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. Any one of these may have the potential to alter my present list. So, with these reservations in mind, here is my list of the best films of 2013.

1. Before Midnight, Richard Linklater

After putting his son on a plane for home, Jesse returns to his car and the waiting Celine. For the next ten minutes or so, in a scene evoking Rosselini’s Voyage to Italy and more recently Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, Celine and Jesse talk. The long take allows the conversation to flow with a naturalness not often encountered in American movies. It’s the talking that’s exciting, the banter, the arguing, the philosophizing, I could listen to them talk for hours.

Dinner time. The conversation continues. This time there are several couples, in a scene reminiscent of Rohmer’s Le rayon vert, talking of food, books, relationships, sex, and life itself. Mingling the perspectives of youth, midlife, and old age the consensus around the table seems to be that we are all just passing through.

Towards evening, in another long take, Celine and Jesse walk through the villiage down to the shore to watch the sun set into the sea, talking all the while. Talking of their remembrances of how they met, talking of what they should do now, and talking about their hopes and expectations for the future. Entering a hotel, they go to their room. As the conversation becomes an argument, we find ourselves in the territory of Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. Complaints, recriminations, dissapointments come boiling to the surface. Celine declares, the problem is I don’t love you anymore, and goes out the door. Is this the end or can we have one more conversation?

2. Blue is the Warmest Color, Abdellatif Kechiche

A love story. The most commonplace sort of story. Everyone has had one. Adele is experiencing love for the first time and it is overwhelming. We all can identify with her emotions, they are universal.

The cameras relentless pursuit of Adele as she tries to find her way through life is extraordinary. Adele Exarchopoulos gives an astonishing performance, so real it seems incorrect to call it a performance. She does so much with her face that often dialogue is unnecessary. I am tempted to compare her to Renee Maria Falconetti or Louise Brooks. This is indeed a performance for the ages.

3. Her, Spike Jonze

Her is a masterpiece, a genuine work of art. I was continuously amazed as it unfolded by the depth of understanding of what it means to be human. I have since learned that Spike Jonze worked out the screenplay in a loose collaboration with Samantha Morton and Joaquin Phoenix. Although Samantha Morton is not in the final cut, Jonze credits her by saying her DNA is all over the film. Perfection was achieved when Scarlett Johansson was brought in to be the voice of the OS. Her ability to express the ineffable joys of being alive made the whole thing believable.

4. The Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino

The Great Beauty is exactly that, a rich and sumptuous feast of images. A contemplation of one man’s search for meaning. While celebrating his 65th birthday, the news of the death of a woman he loved in his youth sends him wandering about Rome meditating on lost love and squandered opportunities. He lingers before each passing beauty acutely aware that he is just passing through and that the world will soon go on without him.

“This is how it always ends. With death. But first there was life, hidden beneath the blah, blah, blah… It’s all settled beneath the chitter chatter and the noise, silence and sentiment, emotion and fear. The haggard, inconstant flashes of beauty. And then the wretched squalor and miserable humanity. All buried under the cover of the embarrassment of being in the world, blah, blah, blah… Beyond there is what lies beyond. And I don’t deal with what lies beyond. Therefore… let this novel begin. After all… it’s just a trick. Yes, it’s just a trick.”

5. Inside Llewyn Davis, Joel and Ethan Coen

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone ?

After a second viewing, Inside Llewyn Davis is now my second favorite Coen film. With perfect, understated performances from the entire cast, especially Carey Mulligan (she has to pretend to blame Llewyn for her problem when she knows she’s as much at fault as anyone). Along with the gorgeous cinematography evoking the bleak cold grays of winter in Manhattan.

A week in the life of Llewyn Davis. Much like a week in the life of anyone else, if one happens to be an unappreciated artist. Uncompromising, scornful of those that do work more accessible to the audience, he searches for a place where he might fit the surroundings. Perhaps, his most appealing quality is his artistic integrity. He auditions for a job and doesn’t get it. He takes an odd job, completes it, gets paid and looks for another couch to spend the night on. The movie forms a loop, ending where it began.

6. Blue Jasmine, Woody Allen

When Vivien Leigh portrayed Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire she gave us one of the great screen performances of all time. Now we have Cate Blanchette as Jasmine French in Woody Allen’s wonderful Blue Jasmine and she’s mesmerizing. This may be the best performance of Blanchette’s distinguished career, though I do reserve a special admiration for her turn as Bob Dylan in Todd Hayne’s I’m Not There.

Woody Allen has given us a story of a stupid, self-centered woman who has lost everything because her life was based only on having money and not being too concerned with where it came from. It is a measure of his understanding of human nature that we are made to care about this entirely unsympathetic character.

Ultimately, this is a movie about pain and loss and how people deal with it. When Ginger, Jasmine’s sister, lost her chance at a better life, she took a job in a grocery store and carried on. Jasmine is having a more difficult time dealing with her loss. The story progresses and Jasmine becomes more and more distraught. As she puts it, “…there’s only so many traumas a person can stand before they take to the streets and start screaming.”

7. Only God Forgives, Nicolas Winding Refn

Nicolas Winding Refn’s homage to Alejandro Jodorowsky uses the cinematic vocabulary of David Lynch to tell a tale of one man’s quest for redemption. A mesmerizing swirl of intense color and shadow, this is almost a silent film, the score telling us more than any spoken dialogue. Julian (Ryan Gosling) moves silently through this vision of a personal hell seeking a confrontation with God. He suffers from the guilt of past transgressions and can’t abide the sight of his own hands. He knows that he will find redemption only through a confrontation with God, as “Only God Forgives”.

8. Gravity, Alfonso Cuaron

Gravity is on one level the story of one person surviving a disaster, but then on another level it is a metaphor for the human condition. Dr. Ryan Stone lost her daughter to a stupid playground accident and for several years has just been going through the motions of living. When she finds herself the sole survivor of a disastrous space mission she is forced to come to terms with her own mortality. She experiences a sort of rebirth, a drive to survive and get on with the mystery and magic of living.

Dealing with loss and finding a reason to go on, this is a story as universal and ancient as the existence of humanity. Alfonso Cauron has used the most advanced technology available to tell this simple story. It is this juxtaposition of the complex and the simple, the old and the new that makes Gravity so compelling.

9. American Hustle, David O. Russell

I don’t care whether the script works or not, whether the events depicted actually happened or not, or even if the characters portrayed are believable or not. American Hustle works as an old Hollywood screwball comedy in the tradition of Bringing Up Baby or The Lady Eve. Mostly, it just gives the wonderful cast a chance to shine. The foursome of Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, and Jennfer Lawrence rivals Spencer Tracy, Myrna Loy, William Powell, and Jean Harlow in Libeled Lady. Jennifer Lawrence especially stands out and could give even Carole Lombard a run for her money. This was a fun time at the movies, exhilarating and utterly delightful.

10. The Canyons, Paul Schrader

Empty seats, empty theaters, an empty movie about empty lives. In The Canyons, Schrader sees his characters as morally ambiguous, antisocial beings who after having been interrupted in midstep do not know where to go. A kind of do-it-youself movie made for very little money, with actors working for minimum wage, this may be the most nihilistic view of American life that I have ever seen.

Runners-up include but are not limited to:

The Wolf of Wall Street, The Grandmaster, The Counselor, 12 Years a Slave, The Past, Drinking Buddies, Nebraska, Computer Chess, Upstream Color, and Stoker.

by Sam Juliano

     There are some small but telling indications that the ferocious winter that most of us have somehow endured over the past months is drawing to an end.  But I must say that without an ounce of confidence, as March can still bring some unwelcome surprises.  The snow on the ground in the NYC area is melting away and the clock has now been pushed forward, extending our daylight, and we are being promised some days in the 50′s.  The romantic polling has officially commenced, with ballots being sent out to the email network from Dean Treadway, Allan Fish, Tony d’Ambra and Yours Truly this past week.  They will be accepted up until April 16th, at which point Voting Tabulator Extraordinaire Angelo A. D’Arminio Jr. will step in to compile the results.  Shortly thereafter, assignments will be decided voluntarily.

For Sammy and I it has been all Hitchcock this past week, with a real sense of purpose in absorbing the Film Forum’s fabulous five-week festival on one of the cinema’s greatest masters.  We saw nine (9) films, though we still didn’t see every film that was offered during the week:

The Pleasure Garden  ***  (Monday)  Hitchcock at Film Forum

Easy Virtue (1928) ***  (Tuesday)  Hitchcock at Film Forum

The Paradine Case (1947) **** (Tuesday) Hitch at Film Forum

Rope (1948) *** 1/2 (Wednesday) Hitch at Film Forum

I Confess (1953) ***** (Wednesday) Hitch at Film Forum

Notorious (1946) ***** (Friday) Hitch at Film Forum

Dial M For Murder (1954)  ****  (Saturday) Hitch at Film Forum

The Lady Vanishes (1938) ***** (Sunday) Hitch at Film Forum

The 39 Steps (1939)  ***** (Sunday) Hitch at Film Forum

I CONFESS has always been for me Hitch’s most underrated film.  A crisis of conscience, the film sustains psychological tension and in anchored by the brooding performance of Montgomery Clift and Father Logan.  Obviously the most “Catholic” of the director’s films, I CONFESS was a huge favorite of the French New Wave directors.  The ending is one of the most powerful in any Hitch film.  THE LADY VANISHES is a comedy thriller par excellence, and one of the director’s supreme masterpieces.  Michael Redgrave, Margaret Lockwood, Dame May Whitty and Basil Radford and Naughton Wayne all turn in unforgettable performances.  The 1935 spy thriller THE 39 STEPS, likewise is one of the master’s most rightly celebrated films and one of the very best British works.  Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll are marvelous in the leads.  1946′s NOTORIOUS is for some Hitch’s greatest film, but for for all a master class spy and romantic thriller with three of Hollywood’s most beloved performances by Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains.  The 3D presentation of DIAL M FOR MURDER is a lot of fun, and the fine cast features an irresistible John Williams as the head detective.  ROPE has its moments (and the actors are impressive) but its largely a mixed effort.  I think I like THE PARADINE CASE more than most, but could understand the problems some have with this English courtroom drama.  EASY VIRTUE and THE PLEASURE GARDEN are generally among the weakest of Hitch’s silent 9, but both are still worth watching.