Some Film Reviews

I haven't actually been to any movies (or watched any, for that matter) since the World Cup began - it's been a bit of a soggy patch for new releases, and that's made it easy to ignore films in favor of soccer. The World Cup only happens every 4 years, after all - and it is such a magnificent spectacle, it's hard to take your eyes away. So this post rounds up films I saw a few weeks ago, and has been sitting in draft ever since - that has more to do with a couple events (a niece's graduation, notably) taking up time than the cup, but still... There were some good ones in this batch, so I want to get it posted eventually...

Metropolis - the restored version: 15/15 - No doubt about it, this is an event. I don't know if it is because of the quality of the print, or the new footage, but it is like seeing a different film. The new footage is important - some of it is added plot - the "Thin Man", following Freder and his associates around town - more details about Georgy (the worker Freder trades places with) and Josephat (Joh's fired assistant) - etc... Though most of the additions seem to be adding shots to familiar sequences. These shots, maybe even more than the added plot elements, give the film a brand new feeling - and, frankly, make it seem more like a Fritz Lang film. A couple sequences in particular - Freder and Maria's rescue of the children, and the mob chasing the "witch" through the city - really illustrate this. Both are a good deal longer - both are much more detailed and intricate. The rescue gains a sequence trying to break through a grate that threatens to doom them at the last moment (a la Harry Lime) - the mob scene gains a number of shots, that show more of the geography of the city, and clarify the relationship between the two Marias (real and robot) and the mob. Bbut more than making more sense, the two esquences have a much better rhythm - Lang is a master of rhythm, of alternating slow and fast passages and shots, action and pause - he's a master of building tension and releasing it... that's missing in the versions of Metropolis I remember (and confirmed by glancing at my 10 year old DVD). Those sequences are dashed off in the old version - they lack sense (it's not clear at all that the mob is chasing the real Maria when they catch the robot, say), and the rhythm is direct and fairly monotonous. Everything is cut, action to action to action - all movement and violence, unfolded without pause. The new version is much more Langian - the action is varied - there are shots full of movement and shots of stillness, tension - literally, the movement of the children in the rescue and the mob in the chase is blocked - there are obstacles (the grate) - people in motion run into walls... Throughout these sequences, and many others, the new footage builds tension - creates multiple threads of action, retards the action before releasing it, and so on. I would say - for the first time, this film looked and felt like a truly great film - not just an iconic film, full of wild ambition and great imagery. For all that, in the past, I think I always felt a bit distanced from it - as iconic as its imagery and ideas were, the film felt dated. But the full version feels anything but dated - it is as thrilling and powerful as M or the Mabuse films - it's just bloody great.

Air Doll: 10/15 - Kore-Eda's little mermaid update - a sex doll comes to life, lives, suffers... It starts well, but it seems to run out of ideas. The Air Doll comes to life, wanders around Tokyo, takes a job at a video store, etc. - her adventures are intercut with snippets from the people around her - her owner, a clerk at the store and the store's manager, a drunk girl next door, some kind of kid, an old woman who seems to want to be arrested, a cop looking for bad cop movies, and old man on a bench, a father and daughter.... We get the usual array of living doll/robot/fairy princess imagery, but at first it's quite intriguing, in its low key meander through the streets, and its not-that-subtle intimations of sex slavery and the immigrant experience. (It's a Korean woman, after all, playing this doll - her experience is not unlike someone brought here, without knowing the language, dependent on a man, etc.) There are hints of similar alienation in the other characters - her owner is from Osaka, and she is mocked for speaking with an Osaka accent, for example - though most of the alienation turns out to be less literal, just loneliness and isolation. (That is, it blunts its potential political edge.) In the end, it never really builds - the second half tends to slide into cliches, competing cliches - will she be redeemed? will she be destroyed? will someone innocent suffer? It fades; Kore-Eda is a superb director, but this story loses its way and goes to nothing.

Harlan: In the Shadow of Jud Suss: 10/15 -fascinating documentary about the family of Veit Harlan, director of Jud Suss, dealing with the repurcussions of his activities in the war, especially that film. Or I should say - dealing with the lack of repercussions. The conscience of the film, and family, is Veit's son Thomas Harlan - who made a life of trying to take the responsibility for his father's act of enormity... Meanwhile the rest of the family seems to grasp the evil of the film, but still tend to make excuses - and claim that they are not to blame, that they too suffered - though it is to the point that they did not suffer in any way comparably to the way Jews suffered, to some extent because of the film. One of the women in the film talks about her grandparents - Harlan on one side; on the other, a Jewish couple who were murdered in Russia. The film addresses these issues quite well - through the experience of this family.

Network: 10/15 - Howard Beale is fired, and goes mad on the air, first promising suicide, then trying to apologize, but saying he couldn't take the bulshit anymore. This is a hit so he is allowed to rant - at first, things go nowhere special, then he has a real crack up and starts talking about visions - and finally turns up in his PJs and gives the mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore speech. Success! WIth Faye Dunaway as a cynical programmer, William Holden as an old time news producer who makes moralizing speeches but is as selfish and amoral as anyone, Robert Duvall as a company man, and Ned Beatty as the big boss, who steals the movie with a speech about money. There's a subplot about terrorists as entertainment, that ends the film. Overall, it's basically Meet John Doe with the roles redistributed a bit, and in general, simpler and more paranoid. (Rather obvious parallels - from the promised suicide to a confrontation at a long table to the girl reporter to the John Doe clubs...) Money and information has replaced power politics as the goal and means, though. Still, it's a bit too simplistic, and not too convincing in its implication that TV is the devil, especially considering that Lang and Capra were doing this stuff in the 20s and 30s - the ballyhoo boys...

Casino Jack and the United States of Money: 10/15 - basic documentary about Jack Abramoff, the super lobbyist, right wing freak, and con man. Though the most disturbing thing is how the confidence schemes are indistinguishable from the legal lobbying. All of it is deeply immoral and corrupt. Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Edward Arnold and Ned Beatty would feel right at home.

Film Clubs

Another week without a post here - at least I managed to get up another installment of my Dr. Mabusethon at the Film of the Month Club. Hopefully a couple more of those to come before the month is over. I am endlessly intrigued by those films. And by Fritz Lang, who I've never paid enough attention to, but am becoming utterly fascinated by...

Meanwhile, today is the day for the TOERIFC's discussion of the Serpent's Egg - which, as it happens, appears to be Ingmar Bergman's stab at a Fritz Lang film... And I clicked on The Kind of Face You Hate today, rather than just read through RSS - and was reminded just who's sinister mug graces the banner there. Is there nowhere to turn? Can there be any escape? from -

Breathless

This is my second contribution to Joseph B's New Wave blogathon - or, since the two started out together, but both got a bit out of hand - part 2 of the first... Anyway - turn our attention to one film... The 400 Blows may be the founding film of the new wave, but for me, the definitive film remains, Breathless. It's the one, the early example, that sets the parameters for the new wave as it developed. It's all there - the jump cuts, the loose style, the movie madness, the appropriation of genres, the natural locations (shooting in the street, often enough), the seedy glamor - all there. And it establishes one of the key elements of these films - their mixed modes of discourse (to get nerdy about it.) In a number of ways - in the sense of appropriating genres and styles (the crime film); in the ways it incorporates other texts and images (newspapers, comics, films, ads, street signs, you name it); in the way it shifts registers - direct addresses to the camera, people stepping out of character, the in jokes, quotes of all sorts... This is a pretty significant change from most previous films: these films, especially Godard, but you get it from quite a bit of the new wave, do not present a unified "discourse" - what you see and hear does not all come from inside the fiction, or have the same relationship to the fiction. These films tell their stories - don't just show them. They keep the forms, the act of telling, of shaping the film, in view. And they don't pretend they are just telling a story that existed somewhere, sometime - their stories come from other texts, they are - the fictions, I mean - performances themselves - they are not to be taken as the real world...

All of which is there from the beginning:



This remains as audacious a film as I have ever seen - it's still more challenging and strange than most of its descendants. That blend of experimentation, art film, genre film, its loose humor, the whole breeziness of the story and style - and its pretty convincing melancholy - still holds up. Because it is beautiful - look at the light and space and smoke in this shot:



And - well - underrated as a straight fiction. Godard can tell a story - can get characters on screen - quick, without conventional detailing, but a shot like this, the first meeting between Michel and Patricia, packs so much of the film's style into it, a style that does sketch these people... Here they are - on the street - back tot he camera (they are indifferent to it, though they never seem to forget it) - moving, as always, the camera moving - glamorous, cool, and a bit shabby...



Finally - since I am eye-deep in Fritz Lang at the moment, it's hard to miss the parallels - not just the imagery, but the themes. Advertisements - newspapers - messages - cityscapes - Breathless is most assuredly a picture of its time, as well. And Godard seems to be aiming for the same deliberate blend of art film and popular film that Lang went for. He never quite masters making popular films in a popular style - but he never leaves the genres and forms behind either. And, like Lang never forgets the importance of information...

Throw in all the references - to Lang himself with his eyepatch and monocle:



Characters framed in shop windows:





Irises:



Ads:



Working class detectives:





And always, the city as media:

Modern Dancers

I have mentioned that I am taking classes this spring; there are two, on German films and another on the history of drama. I should probably try to find something else to blog about (and stop using it as an excuse not to write anything), but this week provided an uncanny overlap, too interesting to ignore. The film class covered Mabuse the Gambler, Fritz Lang, 1922. The drama class covered Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, 1592. The two resonate with one another in many ways.

The odds are good that Mabuse draws on Faust, fairly explicitly. Lots of films do, especially German films. Here, the influence is less the idea of selling your soul to the devil for power than the character of Faust, updated in Mabuse himself - the slippery identity, the conjuring tricks, the illusions, the acting - as well as the power, attained through manipulation of others, and usually employed to manipulate others. There are, as well, elements of the divided self implied by Faust, and the idea of gaining power by sacrificing individuality - Lang's film plays out as if Mabuse is both Faust and his own Mephistopheles. He manipulates technology, clocks and railroads and all the rest, and those tools become the source of his power, much as Mephistopheles is the source of Faust's power. And - the source of his destruction...

But the element that linked the two works for me was more the way both Faust and Mabuse are figures of their times - and specifically, figures of modernity. I mean modernity in a broad sense - in the sense of a whole new way of living, a new conception of the world and man replacing existing ideas. Faustus is a figure of a changing time. The late 16th century was a time of profound change - it's the beginning of the modern world, really. The world changed in the 16th century - I mean that literally: the world doubled in size after 1492, and the subsequent century kept expanding it, changing everything there was to change about the world. And - the dominant cultural institution of Europe also changed, utterly, in the 16th century, with the Reformation. And that led to a remapping of the world. And to new forms of government, new ideas about the state. And all this is in addition to the almost equally profound changes of the Renaissance: the birth of humanism, of capitalism, everything that happened in the 15th century. All these changes to the world changed what it meant to be human: changes how the individual interacted with society, how people defined themselves, everything. All reflected in the play....

All of which is equally true of the early 20th century, when things changed as profoundly in half the time... During the 19th century broadly, and especially the stretch from 1875 to 1925 (say), the world, again, completely changed. Political and social and cultural changes turned the world on its ear - though the real stunner was the technological changes. It's hard to really do justice to how much changed in that period. To consider how utterly differently we relate to thew world in 1925 than 1875 (more or less). The age of exploration may have doubled the size of the known world - but the technological changes of the late 19th century changed the perceptual, experiential sense of the world even more radically. The relationship between time and space were changed (an idea I'm borrowing from Tom Gunning) - space could be eliminated; space became a function of time. By 1900 it was possible to cross vast distances in short periods of time (steam ships and trains, then cars, then airplanes...). It was possible to send messages to someone on the other side of the world, in a second. Possible to talk to them. To hear their voice, to see their picture.

All these things are reflected in Faustus and Mabuse. Marlowe's play is full of travel, Faustus traveling around the world, flying up to the heavens to study the stars, wandering around Europe; it reflects facts of the 16th century - the appearance of new foods in Europe (the scene of the duchess asking for fresh grapes, which Mephistopheles fetches from around the world reminds me of the scene in Blackadder where Sir Walter Raleigh presents Queen Elizabeth with a potato.) Political schisms and religious controversies. Even the appearance of professional theater - Faustus by the end seems more like a theatrical entrepreneur than a magician, putting on shows for the nobility... It's also a story about a man who gives up all the traditional signs of identity - family, home, state, religion - in search of power, knowledge, and his own self. He is a performer - and his identity becomes a performance...

Which is also true of Mabuse. He's a gambler and an actor - the film starts with Mabuse looking at a deck of cards with his various disguises on them (like an actors' head shots.) But he's also a figure of the media - he manipulates information, directly, indirectly (in the opening stack fixing scheme especially.) He's a master of modern technology - the phone and the railroad and clocks and stock tickers - and he is presented, in that opening sequence, especially, as a master of time itself. Everything timed to the second... He's the master of the gaze, as well - a hypnotist, which Lang presents with some fascinating editing and framing of sequences - he uses hypnosis to win at the tables, not cheating at cards: manipulating, again, the game from outside, but in. He works, somewhat surprisingly, within the systems of the modern world - he exploits the railroad timetables; he uses the fact that people trust the newspapers; he takes advantage of the timing of the closing bell at the stock market. He takes advantage of the importance of maintaining the game, when he's gambling - he depends on keeping the game going, on the idea of people paying their debts, he uses all the well learned politesse of civilized life...

And they both come to highly symbolic ends: Faustus alone begging for another hour, another minute, only to be torn to pieces by devils... and Mabuse trapped in one of his own hideouts by a machine he made to keep his minions from stealing; powerless, because the men trapped with him are all blind, and his hypnotic powers are useless; surrounded by piles of his worthless counterfeit money, and then surrounded by ghosts - no longer able to control the illusions... (all that copped from Gunning's comments on the film, more or less...) Alone and mad, both of them.