Columbo

(Despite the lack of posts here, I have been busy lately - this is the third of three posts in about a week for the epic TV countdown at Wonders in the Dark - this one for Columbo.



Somewhere in Los Angeles are two people who hate each other - or at least one of them hates the other one. Maybe we will see them together; maybe we will see them separately; maybe we will just see one of them, going about some strange ritual. Maybe they'll talk - maybe they will be, or act, friendly, but more likely they will quarrel. Either way, one of this is going to kill the other. Maybe we see the killer covering up the crime; maybe we now recognize that their rituals were aimed at hiding the crime. By the time the first commercial comes, it looks like they will get away with it. When we come back, the police are on hand. Among them is a dumpy looking guy in a raincoat, who putters around, and notices things; he sticks his nose into conversations; he looks at the bodies; he talks to the relatives. He probably talks to the killer, and he'll probably notice something when he does. By the end of the first scene we know there's more to this guy than meets the eye. Over the next hour, he'll keep running into the killer, and it's going to take the killer longer to catch on that there's more to him than meets the eye, but he will - but by then it will be too late.

That is Columbo, and for my money, it's the best show ever made on network television in the USA. Columbo ran 7 years in the 1970s, came back for a couple more seasons and string of TV movies in the 80s and 90s, and every episode (except one or two here and there) fit that description above. The shows were a series of little movies, 90-100 minutes long, airing in rotation with a number of other shows (McCloud and McMillan & Wife, later Hec Ramsey too) in its first run - the longer production schedules (a show a month, instead of a show a week) meant episodes were made with a lot more care than the average TV show of the time. They looked it. It starred Peter Falk, and brought in high profile guest stars, writers and directors, as prestige television has always done. Columbo's early years boast Steven Bochco and Steven Spielberg at the start of their careers; later years featured people like Jonathan Demme, and along the way, any number of Hollywood veterans and actors got a shot behind the camera - Richard Quine and Leo Penn; Ben Gazzara and Patrick McGoohan. And of course a parade of guest stars, to kill and be killed, or sometimes to offer dubious advice in the role of lawyers or uncles or ex-hubands and wives.



It originated as a television episode, became a play, then a TV movie, written by Richard Levinson and William Link. They built a detective out of Crime and Punishment and Father Brown, and used the Crime and Punishment plot as their template: we see the crime, know who did it, why, how - the police come in later, most of them all wrong about the killing, but one of them figures it out, and spends the rest of the story trying to make an arrest that will stick by talking to the suspect. Columbo was openly and unapologetically formulaic, but that is where it got its strength. It has the rigid form of a sonnet or blues song, and the almost infinite variability of those forms. The fact that the stories all follow the same structure - killing, investigation/confrontation, solution/arrest - means that all the show's attention goes to the details. The restrictions force the writers to be brilliant - every killing has to be imaginative, every killer has to be interesting, their motives have to be believable, their victims and the survivors - have to be interesting. The process of solving the crime has to be clever, and - most of all - the interactions of the characters have to be completely compelling. It worked - it held up through 9 or 10 sets of shows over 25 plus years, staying watchable right to the end. The mysteries are compelling (far more often than on other long running crime shows); Columbo's work to solve them fascinating, clever, full of quiet demonstrations of his abilities. The killers and those around them make good television - they all seem to think they can talk their way out of anything, because they are Super Geniuses, and it keeps them engaged with Columbo, as he circles them, tracking down the crime, figuring them out.



The shows are not really mysteries (except a few designed for a twist) - the suspense is all in how Columbo figures out the crime, and pins it on the killer. And the substance of the show is in the interactions between Columbo and those killers, and the people around them. (A flock of husbands and wives and children and parents and uncles and aunts and lawyers and secretaries and hangers on who are usually as loathsome and pathetic and sometimes wonderful as the killers and victims.) Columbo lurks, and talks - he tells stories about his wife and nephews and brothers in law and cousins and childhood and he gets to know the killers, he goads or soothes them, and he gets them in the end. For all the show's debt to Dostoevsky, Columbo usually doesn't break the killers down psychologically. He figures them out, alongside the plot of the crime, and usually gets them through some detail, some clue everyone's overlooked that he can get them to plant somewhere. He shows them what looks like a sure fire way out of trouble, but he's always waiting by the door. No, where the show really lives is in the characterizations themselves - Columbo revealing the people he interacts with; and revealing himself, in a way. The plots and such make for a fascinating puzzle show - but those conversations, and the situations around them, are what raise the show to something more.

It's a show with a quiet, but firm social conscience. It was always very class conscious - Columbo is often described as a blue-collar detective, and the contrast between him and the rich, arrogant, privileged set of murderers he runs to ground gives it it's tone. But it uses class and money as more than just a contrast between rich killers and middle class cop. Money is always present in the show, almost always the reason for the crime - but the exact reason for this varies. The killers may all be rich, but don't miss how often the plot depends less on straight greed than on the threat of losing ones position. Over and over: someone who has gotten rich somehow, who was not, in fact, born rich, finds themselves facing a divorce, losing their job or business, being disinherited, being exposed as having stolen it or riding someone else's talents. Columbo was as much about anxiety about money as about the corruption of money - anxiety about money, and status - of being exposed. Though don't miss either how that money corrupts - the killers and their initial victims tend to all be rich; but there are many shows where the killers get someone else, as well. Maybe a witness - sometimes, just a lower class accomplice, who has to die to protect the killer's alibi. These tend to be the killings that bring out Columbo's claws - when he gets really tough with killer (like Leonard Nimoy's doctor, who kills a nurse and a drifter, or Robert Conrad's fitness guru who poisons a woman who might have heard something), it's because they've started killing people below their station.

There's another important piece of working class consciousness: the value of work itself. Columbo himself does this - Levinson and Link say it plain in the pilot: Columbo tells the killer, you do this once, you have one chance to get it right; I do this 100 times a year - I practice what I do, I learn it. Columbo does what he does by putting in the work - you can't deny his genius, but you can't miss his thoroughness, or the way he's willing to teach himself something new to solve a case. Even his patter is usually just cover for doing the grunt work of collecting clues and evidence. But this goes beyond Columbo himself - the show always values talent. The killers who are most sympathetic tend to be the ones who are good at something valuable - Johnny Cash's singer; Donald Pleasance as a vinter; Janet Leigh's actress; Ruth Gordon's mystery writer - are all craftsmen. They are rich, some of them are pretty much evil (Cash plays someone being blackmailed for statutory rape, who murders the both blackmailer and the girl), but they got rich by working for it. Even some of the more unpleasant figures - Patrick McGoohan's parade of psychotic spies and soldiers; John Cassavetes' conductor - are partly redeemed by the fact that they are good at what they do.



That respect for craftmanship - for artistry, through effort - suffuses the show. It features artists often enough - writers, musicians, painters, chess masters, photographers, chefs, scientists - it tends to respect them, even when they are villains. And it is built on the same respect - the quality of the scripts, the filmmaking effort, the parade of character actors, in leads, and tucked into the corners. Among its many delights are the chance to spot Bruce Kirby and Timothy Carey and Val Avery in the cast a couple times a season. It's guests tend to be TV stars (Dick Van Dyke, Robert Culp and McGoohan, Wlliam Shatner), old time movie stars (Ray Milland, Ida Lupino, Myrna Loy, Ruth Gordon), and those more independent film types - people from Cassavetes' films (including Falk and Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara, behind the camera.) It's not flashy casting, it's casting built on craftsmanship. It's also not above playing it for laughs - William Shatner comes on, and is pilloried, playing a comic version of both himself and Columbo - he's bald, wears lifts, and turns out to be a complete con man, as well as a helpless ham. For every real artist, there is a smug asshole who thinks he matters because he has a TV show; and there are innumerable "business consultant" types who think they are rich because they are brilliant when they are, in fact, glorified con men, preying on real businessmen, who usually act like glorified gangsters. Columbo's creators do not hold a high opinion of American business, I think.

There are other elements of social conscience in the show - it's very sympathetic to women. Lots of women get murdered; more than a few of them are murderers; they are not necessarily any more sympathetic than the men around them. But the show manages to convey their sense of having to fight harder to get anything - men in the show don't take them seriously; they fight off bullies; they are manipulated and ignored. The writers - and Columbo, often enough - notice, and let the women have their say. They aren't condemned when they cheat on their husbands; they are not treated like usurpers for holding jobs men have (though Columbo, in some episodes, seems surprised at their positions). And shows where women kill men who cheat them - well, feel a bit different than shows where men kill. Though the show can still create a female monster - Johnny Cash's wife, in his episode - blackmailing him for statutory rape, though it is strongly hinted that she was providing him with underage girls in the first place - well... villainy knows no gender.

And so: I'll end with a quick little list - 5 of my favorite episodes, since this should let me look a bit at how the theme and variation structure worked...

1. Negative Reaction: this is the one with Dick Van Dyke as a photographer. It's interesting because while he is an artist, and artists usually get a break on the show, he is one of the most irredeemably evil characters they ever created. He kills his wife, strictly for money; he kills a harmless ex-con who almost worships him for giving him a job, purely to make his own alibi work (framing him for good measure); he takes the usual contempt for Columbo farther most, becoming abusive - only to have it all swept away at the last minute, when he sees how Columbo has set him up. A great show - using Van Dyke's affability to mask his viciousness; and the fact that it is, maybe, a show about failure and self-loathing. He used to be an artist, but he has become a hack: his fall leads him to this. Great show.
2. Murder by the Book: This is the first regular episode, and features the Stevens, Bochco and Spielberg, and from the first shot is obviously up to something fantastic.  Long shot of the street and a slow zoom back into the room where a man is typing - Spielberg was already capable of virtuosity. The show as a whole is well made, and often rather flashy - usually not this effectively though. The rest of the episode - Jack Cassidy as the untalented half of a writing team that's about to break up, who kills his partner, and then a lonely widow who sees something she couldn't - is first rate as well. It sets up those class tensions, the anxiety about losing status: Cassidy knows he can't continue as he is without his partner to write the books; he kills the witness almost without thinking about it - arrogance of the rich. It's a fine episode, already varying the motivations from the pilots.
3. Swan Song: This is the Johnny Cash episode. He plays an ex-con country singer, forced to give all his money to his wife (Ida Lupino), who's blackmailing him for sleeping with an underage choir girl - though it's hinted that the wife set them up in the first place. So he kills both of them. The plot doesn't hold up so well in this one - but the interplay between Cash and Falk is superb. Cash's character is a nasty piece of work, other than the singing; he starts out angry and abusive of Columbo - but he changes. This comes as close as any episode to having Columbo literally talk someone into confessing - it's also fascinating to watch Cash's guilt catch up with him. He softens, he fades on screen, and is grateful when he's caught. Worth noting too that in the mid-70s, Johnny Cash was not the hero he was in the 50s and 60s, or would be in the 90s and on - this is a down period for him, but this show could still see him for what he was.
4. A stitch in Crime: this is the Leonard Nimoy episode - Nimoy can vie with anyone (Van Dyke and Robert Conrad's Milo Janus might be the other finalists) for the most loathsome character in the series. He plans a clever way of killing his mentor, with dissolving sutures in the heart, then kills a nurse who starts to suspect, then kills a drifter to make the cops think the nurse was selling him drugs. This, and Nimoy's mocking contempt, gets Columbo's goat, provoking near violence. All this, by the way, is provoked by resentment over someone else getting his name on a scientific project. He's a piece of work.
5. The Conspirators: this is a bit of a wild card - this is the last episode from the 7th season, the last one in the 70s, the last one for 10 years or so. It stars Clive Revill as an Irish poet who uses his book tours as cover to raise money to buy guns for the IRA. It's different - the structure of the show is like all the others, but the plot, and Revill, are not. He is almost unique in the series for being a professional criminal, a practiced gun-runner. (As is his victim.) The story is different - professional criminals; political motives; this character. It brings up the show's respect for professionalism - he is something of a mirror of Columbo. A poor kid, ex-con, who became a writer, a poet - though also a terrorist. He's an artist, and a professional. He's Columbo's peer - he's done this before. He poses a different kind of challenge. Their interactions are increasingly cordial in the show - some of it is due to Revill's charm, but there's more than a hint of mutual respect here as well - two men doing their jobs. It's a fascinating episode, a good way for the show to go off the air...

Dekalog (For Wonders in the Dark)

(Cross posted on Wonders in the Dark, part of the television countdown.)



Dekalog is a 10 part television series, made in Poland in 1988, directed by Krzystof Kieslowski, written by Kieslowski and Krzystof Piesiewicz, his frequent writing collaborator. Each episode in the series is dedicated to one of the Ten Commandments, though the links are often quite free. The series is, in practice, more like a film cycle than television series - each episode is self-contained, linked only in their relationships to the commandments, and the setting, a large apartment complex in Warsaw. (And the filmmakers and crew.) Kieslowski conceived of the films as 10 separate films. He did not conform to TV conventions: recurring characters in an ongoing story; the need to pace the stories to match the way TV is watched, in the home, with the phone ringing and tea boiling and so on. Indeed, since 1989, Dekalog has been treated more like a film, or group of films, than as television. This is understandable: the films were distributed theatrically outside Poland, and Kieslowski himself was an established filmmaker when they were made, and his subsequent works made him a major art house figure internationally in the 1990s. He is a filmmaker first, and so Dekalog is treated as part of his film career. This is probably even more the case for Dekalog than for other TV shows made by people established in the film industry. David Lynch and Twin Peaks comes to mind - a series made by an established film figure a year or so after Dekalog, that, however congruent with Lynch's career, is still seen primarily as a television show. Of course, Twin Peaks did play by the rules of television - a continuing series with characters and a through-plot and so on - which certainly helps explain the difference. But the fact remains, Dekalog's origins in television is seen as somewhat incidental to what it is.

I don't really mean to dispute that - Kieslowski’s own remarks and ideas about the show push criticism in that direction; I have certainly always thought of these films that way myself. But it is interesting to consider how they do relate to television, as an art form, as a social force, as technology. The strongest link to television, I think, is the way Dekalog is structured around the home, the family, the domestic space. Television is a domestic form of entertainment and art - it exists in the home, to be watched in the home; Dekalog is centered around the idea of home. Far more than other Kieslowski films, which are often about individuals making their way in the world, or at least about how people live in public, outside the home, Dekalog is almost entirely rooted in domestic spaces. When it leaves the domestic sphere, it either brings it in through other means (as the ways the domestic ethical problems of Episodes 2 and 8 are discussed in a class in Episode 8), or makes the loss of the home a felt absence in the story (Episode 5 can be seen this way.) The apartment complex where the series is set may seem to be just the device linking these stories - but in fact, those homes become central to the stories being told. The importance of children in the series, and the importance of relationships between parents and children, is an obvious theme - but these themes are themselves part of the series' emphasis on the home. Home as family, as social space; home as physical space, actual buildings and rooms; home as symbolic space - a place of safety, rest, protection. Almost everything in the series hits one of those themes.



Kieslowski and Piesiewicz present a complex vision of the domestic world, as well. Homes (as physical spaces as well as domestic spaces) are complicated - sheltering and protective, but also dangerous, often broken. They promise protection but don’t deliver, neither the physical space or the social one of families. Homes do not protect you from bombs - they do not protect you from being spied on - they do not protect you from being pulled out in the middle of the night on a wild goose chase - they do not protect you from being stolen by your relatives - they do not protect you from thieves. When they do offer protection, that protection is not guaranteed - you can be refused shelter. You can be banished from your home. And even when you seem to have a stable, safe home, there is no guarantee that what you have is what you think you have. Your wife's child may not be yours; the man you thought was your father may not be; you sister can be your mother. Someone could be listening in on the phone; and if you think going back to your mother's house will offer you protection, be careful - you never know who's hiding in the closet. Home promises stability but it is never there.

In many of the episodes, this instability is shown through a significant absence. So in Episode 1, the mother is out of the country; in Episode 2, the husband is in a coma; in 3, Ewa's husband is missing, so she pulls Janusz away from his family on Christmas eve; Episode 4 is structured around the dead mother; Episode 10, a dead father. Episode 9 has a more symbolic version of this - first, in the husband's very Freudian lack, that his wife tries to fill with a young lover; later, by shifting to the more abstract idea that they are missing a child, which they hope to fill by adopting. These absences create many of the stories - certainly 2, 3, 4, 9 and 10 work that way - the thing that is missing drives the plot. The story itself, of course, can go a couple different ways - it can end up destroying a home and family (as in 1), it can end up restoring a home and family (2, maybe 9, even 10, in a sense) - but  for all of them, the status of the family, the home, is what is at stake in the story.



Other episodes approach it from different angles. The protagonists may have lost their homes, or at least their connections to others, as in Episodes 5 and 6; they may be expelled from the home (or expel themselves) as in Episode 7; they may be denied the shelter of a home as in Episode 8. Or home itself may disappear, as literally happens in the Doctor's backstory in Episode 2. It is interesting that Episodes 5 and 6, the most famous episodes, both expanded into feature films, feature protagonists who are the most isolated. The characters of 6 are all alone, separated from any family, and most companionship. Magda has lovers, but they are not very reliable or satisfying; the landlady's son is on the other side of the world, and though she sometimes treats Tomek as a surrogate son, she and he are both intensely solitary figures; Tomek has no family, and has even lost the closest thing he had to a friend. We usually see these three in their apartments, in their homes - but these are places that offer very little solace. Their living spaces give them no privacy, no protection - they all spy on each other, interfere with one another, often with very dire consequences. They all look for a connection - and you can almost imagine the three of them forming a kind of family of their own - but it doesn't come, and the connections they form are imaginary ones, existing only in the own heads.

Episode 5, and A Short Film About Killing, is even more extreme. (One of the harshest films ever made, frankly.) Of all the films in the cycle, it spends the least time in anyone's home - none, that I can think of. It all takes place in public. Despite the story occurring out in the streets, Jacek and his victim are almost perfectly alone in the film, living completely in their heads, hostile to everyone around them. Even in this episode, though, home operates as a structuring absence. The end of the film, with Jacek telling the attorney about his sister's death, reveals, probably, the reason why he is here, alone in the city. Having helped kill her in a drunken accident, he has lost his family and home. We have less information about the cab driver's isolation, but we see it played out. He treats his neighbors with contempt (leaving Andrej and pregnant Dorota in the cold, rather than giving them a ride); we get a hint at how his neighbors treat him, when someone drops a dirty rag on him. He lives in the apartment complex, but he rejects it - and it rejects him. Unlike the other characters who live there, we never see him at home - all we hear of his family are his pleas with Jacek that his death will leave his wife alone, and the possibility that the woman in a wheelchair in the courtroom scenes is his wife. The attorney, meanwhile, is only seen in either public places - school, the court, prison - or alone. We do, though, get a glimpse of his family life when a colleague congratulates him on his child. That is all.



The double edged significance of home, though, probably comes out the most starkly in Episodes 7 and 8. In 7, a girl in her early twenties kidnaps her 6 year old daughter, who has been raised as her sister. It's notable that this is almost the only episode in the series to show a complete, intact family (we get a glimpse at one in 3, though the poor father is pulled out in the middle of the night) - and because this is by far the most poisonous family in the series. Majka's parent's home may contain the entire family, but it is a family based on deception, on the exploitation of children - the younger Majka as much as her daughter Ania. Even here, though, Majka is driven as much by the desire to find a home as the desire to leave the one she is in - she takes Ania and seeks out the child's father, a teacher who seduced (to put it as kindly as possible) her when she was 16. She doesn't say so, quite, but she seems driven by the hope that she can find a new home, a real home, uniting her child with its true parents. It is a vain hope, even though Woytek seems to regret losing the same thing - and has turned to making teddy bears, as if in compensation for losing his child. They come together, sharing a space sharing a shot briefly - but they can't even look at one another, and their child is asleep, buried by teddy bears....



And it ends. He calls Majka's mother, she leaves - that is all. In the end, her mother finds her, takes Ania back, and Majka rides away alone on a train. She loses everything - her mother keeps the semblance of home, but it is one based on a lie, and it's hard not to see Majka's absence becoming the fissure that destroys that home in the end.

Episode 8, finally, is structured around the notion of home as shelter, and shelter denied - as well as raising the stakes, by setting that drama in the midst of the holocaust. It is also the most metafictional part of the series - discussing its own backstory in a class, along with the plot of Episode 2; containing direct comments on the apartment block, the idea of all the stories going on in that space. It brings the themes to the foreground: children in peril, what adults owe children, the notion of a home as a refuge, a chance to live - though also the possibility of betrayal. (The real backstory of the backstory - the false information that the family intended to shelter Elżbieta were collaborators - raises that image: home as false security.) Though this is not about a family in the present, or even really about homes in the present, these images permeate the film. The home Elżbieta is denied; the house where she met Zofia and her husband during the war, which they return to, and Zofia finds herself turned away; the tailor's home - which was denied its possibility of saving a child.

Episode 8 might also be seen as a model for the series as a whole. Zofia's class is a seminar about ethics - from what we see of it, it seems to operate by posing ethical dilemmas, that are then filled in by the class. That's not far from the structure of the whole Dekalog: take 10 situations suggested by the commandments and tell them as stories, rooted in lived human experience. That is what Kieslowski and Piesiewicz do - and indeed, the sense of lived experience elevate them. It is also important, I imagine, that episode 8 is also both explicitly based on an actual story from World War II, and brings politics and history explicitly into the series. Grounding these things in the lived experience of 2 specific women, yes - but also implicating them in the overall history of Poland in direct, inescapable ways.

All together, then, Dekalog is a magnificent piece of work, as film, as television, however you want to slice it. It is a very rich text, for its stories, for its ideas, and certainly as filmmaking. There are many ways to look at it - taking it as a meditation on the idea of home, family, on how they work as both shelter and menace is just one to look at it, though it's an important element. And one that links it more strongly to television - an art form made for the home, about home. It has to rank very high.



(Let me offer a quick recap of the episodes: it may help.)

1. Father and son live happily, though his wife is gone; they work work with computers, waiting for the pond to freeze; father and sister differ, one religious, one rational. The father calculates that the pond is frozen, then tests it – but the boy goes skating and disappears, leaving his father and aunt desolate.

2. A man is in a coma, his wife has had an affair and gotten pregnant - if the man lives, she needs to abort the child, but if he is going to die, she will keep the baby. She nags the man’s doctor to know if he is going to live or die. He refuses to answer, she insists - he finally tells her the man will die. The man of course lives,and is pleased to have a child, even if it is not his.

3. Christmas eve, a man’s former lover comes to his house, saying her husband is missing and asking for help finding him. He goes with her, and they search the city and replay the end of their affair. In the morning she admits her husband left her long ago - she just bet herself she could keep this man out all night, or she would kill herself.

4. A man and his daughter are happy together - but there is a letter from her mother that she finally can't resist reading. She looks at it, and may or may not open it - she makes up a fake version and reads it, saying she is not the man's child. She then makes a pass at him, but he resists. In the morning, she repents - they end up burning the original of the letter, except for a bit of it, which says the same thing she wrote in the forgery. (Assuming it was a forgery.)

5. Follows a young lawyer, a bitter taxi driver, and a young man, the lawyer through his exams, the young man looking for a cabbie to kill. He kills this one, a brutal, horrific murder. Then cut to the end of the trial, then the execution, with the lawyer trying to comfort the killer, and railing against the system.

6. A postal worker spies on a woman; when his stalking starts causing her problems, he confesses. Later they go out together, but she ends up humiliating him - she immediately repents, but not before he tries to kill himself.

7. A woman kidnaps a child who has been raised as her sister but is really her daughter. They are found, though and she leaves alone in the end.

8. A professor has a visitor in her class – a woman who tells a story about a jewish child who was refused by a Polish family who said they could not bear false witness, to claim she was Christian. It was the professor of course, and the woman who tells the story was the child – the professor had good reasons for her actions, but has hated herself since anyway. She takes comfort in the child’s survival.

9. A doctor is impotent - he half tells his wife to have an affair, but when he finds out that she did have an affair, he becomes wildly jealous. He also treats a girl who needs major surgery to be able to sing, professionally - she would rather not, but her family, and the doctor get her to do it. In the end, the man and wife are nearly reconciled, but the lover hangs around, leading to a near crisis.

10. Two brothers discover that their father was one of the country’s most important stamp collectors. They get tied up in a scam to trade a kidney for a crucial stamp, but this is a ruse to allow someone to rob their father's apartment and take all the stamps. In the end, after many trials, they forgive each other and bond over having picked up their father's bug for stamps.

Alphaville

(Cross posted from Wonders in the Dark.)



Alphaville is the first Godard film I ever saw, way back in the mid-80s. I saw it on a double bill with Alexander Nevsky, if my memory is accurate after 30 odd years. I remember liking Nevsky, though finding it all a bit strange; but Alphaville was a revelation. I had ideas about what Godard was supposed to be like - he was supposed to be difficult, possibly blasphemous (this is back around the time of Hail Mary - which I think was the second Godard film I ever saw, and came a bit closer to what I had been led to expect.) Instead, I saw this astonishing science fiction noir...



It is a beautiful film, with its rich play of light and dark, its bodies in rest and motion in overlit antiseptic spaces and dingy dark hallways, its faces, its eyes, especially Anna Karina's face and eyes. It's an overpoweringly romantic film - I walked out enthralled by Eluard and the staging of his poetry, Anna Karina’s voice, the light and dark, hands and faces, the strange contrast between Karina and Eddie Constantine - that sequence is, by itself, one of the most romantic, achingly sensual, passages ever put on film. I had never seen anything like it then, and haven't seen much like it since. But what might have been even more surprising was how funny the film is. Full of jokes, full of wit, visual, verbal, jokes coming out of the material, the references, the performances, staging, the setting. (That machine that asks you to insert a coin, then gives you a thank you token.) It's always serious, but never takes itself seriously - a pretty universal trait in Godard’s films. They are funny - they are full of serious things, conversations, ideas, images - but they are packed with jokes, visual and verbal puns, in jokes, references and allusions that become comical in context. (And it gets even funnier when you start spotting the things Monty Python stole - it's tattooed on the back of their neck!) It was a fine introduction to Godard - it conditioned me to look for beauty, romanticism, sensuality and wit, as well as Deep Thoughts and Art. (Which it has; don't discount that.)



And even more - it worked quite well, when I saw it the first time, as straight up science fiction. It holds up as science fiction now, both as pop fiction and for its ideas. It's ideas are legit, it’s image of the future: artificial intelligence, technology and technocracy, its particular brand of dystopia - a cool vicious embrace of science and logic, a technocratic tyranny, power diffused and de-personalized, a cruel, violent regime uncluttered by charismatic monsters. Dr. Von Braun is a cold dead eyed technocratic sadist, surrounded by dull technicians who follow him around like nervous interns. The only villain with any personality is Alpha 60 itself, a thing of rhythmic flashing lights, slide shows, and a mechanical voice. People have become zombies in this world, responding automatically - "Yes, I'm fine, don't mention it" - to any conversation; clapping politely at executions - their responses as automated as machines. Against this comes Lemmy Caution violent cool in a trench coat, cigarettes, and 45 automatic, crashing through this world with passion, emotion and art. This might be Godard's most Romantic film, too - in the sense of Romanticism as the embrace of passion, art and beauty, emotion and disorder against logic, order, science. Lemmy comes bearing pop culture props and poetry and represents the artist very well. He represents Godard very well - this is his quintessential mixture - pop culture and high art, science fiction tropes (high and low science fiction), plus noir, plus comics, plus high art, Eluard and Celine, and Cinema, always cinema - and maybe some general semantics to boot. All of it is fed in, all of it is taken seriously, and all of it is material for jokes. Nothing is allowed to settle in Godard's films - and it's that settling, that insistence on control, predictability, order, that Godard (and Lemmy) object to under the rule of Alpha 60.



Though in fact even the computer is more complicated that that. It is commanding and charismatic, in its way - almost Romantic, in a strange sense. A Satanic figure, undone by the hero - but compelling in itself. Satanic in Mick Jagger's sense, which itself is a Romantic notion of the devil - Satanic like Lucifer, bringer of light, trying to take the place of god, to rule all creation - not a bad description of Alpha 60.



And yet it’s a very ordinary monster, that computer - represented by just what you see there - lights, wires, boxes; sometimes by fans, or a simple flashing light, and always by a disembodied, mechanical, voice. This is another extraordinary quality of Alphaville - it is a very convincing science fiction film made up entirely of things in the real, contemporary (1965), world. It is probably the epitome of the type of film I referred to writing about Face of Another, films that shoot the real world to look and feel like science fiction. Alphaville is shot on the streets of Paris, in the buildings of Paris - but the glass and steel Paris, the modern Paris, of lights and machines and clean, modernist design. It looks other-worldly.



Godard constructs a futuristic world from this. Streets and cars and most of the actual technology are all contemporary, though shot and combined to look alien. Godard treats the world as it is like a science fiction place: flying in from New York (6000 miles away), becomes intergalactic travel. Only the computers are not part of the everyday world - but they are perfectly normal contemporary (1965) machines. Rooms full of banks of processors, wires, with keyboards and switches and card slots and flashing lights. You don’t see a lot of computers from 1965 - though it's interesting to consider that the back rooms where the real computing lives aren't that commonly seen now. We see the desktops and laptops and screens, keyboards and mice, the phones and tablets and all the other things people use - everything that interfaces with humanity. But even now, we don’t see the back rooms, where the infrastructure lives. Even now, it seems a bit alien when you see it (in Werner Herzog’s new internet film, say) - and not much different from what it looked like in 1965. Routers and processors and disk arrays and wires haven’t changed that much.



Though Godard does imagine the interface with humanity, though this didn't exist so much in 1965. It's an odd mix of analog and digital - invisible technology, disembodied voices, pervasive surveillance, microwave ovens - all made of sound and light. He warps it out of the real world, combining things in strange ways, showing pieces of the world, showing a world of sound and light, reflections and window panes, that subtly distort the world. Inside and outside, up and down, intermingle - it's an odd, translucent world, up on the surface....



And when the chance comes to use cinema to transform the world, he’s ready:



And so it is. A beautiful film, funny, fairly exciting, as adventure yarn (at least containing action scenes, half joke and half real excitement), imagining a dystopic future and what might be done about it, arguing what we have to protect - art, love, words - without quite (quite) disavowing what we could get from technology. And at times, almost exploding from sheer passion, desire and loss. Alphaville, the Capital of Pain, indeed...

Face of Another

Cross posted from Wonders in the Dark, part of their fantastic science fiction countdown.



Science Fiction can come in many forms. There are the big world building SF stories imagining whole worlds different from ours, however rigorously they might work out how they got to be different. Think Metropolis, Star Trek, Brazil, Children of Men. There are smaller world building exercises, where something alien or some invented technology is dropped into the world, and we see how the world reacts: think The Thing from Another World, or Under the Skin, or Midnight Special. But there is another type that isn’t, really, about world building at all. In these stories, something is changed – technology, usually, something that doesn’t exist in fact – and it is used to tell an intimate story, about a small group of people, with no direct implications for the world at large. (Though with indirect implications, maybe.) The Face of Another, a 1966 film by Hiroshi Teshigahara, from a novel by Kobo Abe, is this kind of story. It is science fiction because of one detail – the face itself – a detail used to justify what is mainly a psychological study, with horror overtones.

The story is this: a man (Okuyama) is burned in an accident, his face ruined, forcing him to wear bandages the rest of his life. He broods, alienated from his wife, his co-workers, everyone. He has a doctor, a psychiatrist who dabbles in science (making prosthetics) who says he will make him a face that will look exactly like a real face. He does so, all the time speculating on how this different face will change Okuyama’s psyche. Okuyama puts it on, and starts establishing a second life – but his ultimate intention is to try to seduce his wife with the new face. He tries it and it works all too well – he is horrified at her unfaithfulness. (He has made himself jealous.) When he confronts her, though, she says she knew all along, and thought he knew – thought this was a shared masquerade, to get past the complications of his bandages. She thought he was being considerate of her. (He is not considerate of anyone.) After that, whatever claims he had to sanity are gone – he attacks a woman in the street, and when the doctor bails him out, put him out of his misery – and then? Good question. This story is intercut with another story, a young woman with a terrible scar on her face, probably from Nagasaki, though half of her face is beautiful. She suffers and becomes increasingly anxious about the coming of another war, until she pulls her hair back and walks into the sea.





This is presented more as a psychological thriller, or horror, than as science fiction. It’s themes are mainly from horror – bodily integrity (and its loss); questions of identity itself; the sense of the darkness inside us being given an external form, that turns on us. The Self and The Other is one of the great themes of horror, and the main theme of this film. Its precedents are familiar horror situations – doppelgängers and Faust type stories – doubles, tempters and tempted, the chance to become someone else. The science fiction here essentially replaces the supernatural or psychological motivations of classic horror – Okuyama doesn’t go mad (as in Dostoevsky’s The Double) or make a dealt with the devil (as in Faust) – he gets a prosthetic face. This is, in fact, a rich tradition within science fiction itself, especially early science fiction. Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau all tell stories that feel closer to gothic horror than to science fiction, and explore themes associated with horror, while using technologies as the justification for their marvels. All involve doubles, secret identities, divided selves, tempting, corrupting figures, bodily monstrosity and so on – as does The Face of Another.



It has all of it in fact – with the Doctor serving both as Okuyama’s doppelgänger and his Mephistopheles. It’s a double function (of course it’s a double function) that recalls the plot of The Student of Prague, where the devil takes the student’s mirror image for his own purposes, and foreshadows works like Bad Influence and Fight Club (though Fight Club resolves the double/tempter back into one character), and especially Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Doppelganger. (A film definitely influenced by this one.) The doctor enables Okuyama to live a double life; he urges him to take advantage of it, though he imagines the freedom as corrupting. He pushes Okuyama to act, and begins to seem to urge him to act out his (the doctor’s) desires. The doctor come off even more sinister than Okuyama – he is a Dr. Jekyll who is not willing to swallow the potion himself; he pushes Okuyama to act out his own darker urges, while keeping himself out of it, trying to eschew responsibility for what he pushes Okuyama to do. Though as doubles it’s hard to say who is corrupting whom – the doctor allows Okuyama to follow his worst instincts while telling himself the doctor put him up to it – as much as the reverse. But that constantly switching perspective is what the film is about.



Teshigahara is a stylist, and the film’s themes are given rigorous formal treatment. It is a film about masks and doubles, about reflections and reversals, about unstable identities, and it is made up of all those things. Doubles: Okuyama and the doctor; Okuyama and the scarred girl. Repetitions: scenes – Okuyama arriving at the apartment, first with his bandages, then with his Face, encountering the super’s daughter, then her father, in just the same way, touring the rooms in just the same way; situations – arriving at his boss’ office, scenes with his wife; shots – Okuyama facing the camera with his wife behind him, then his wife facing the camera with Okuyama behind her. Scenes, shots, situations repeat, reverse, reflect one another. This is most consistent and extreme in the relationship between Okuyama and the doctor, of course. Every device appears: the two as doubles of one another, as parts of one another, overlapping, as mirror images of one another, either specially or in color (one in white, the other black, which happens repeatedly); scenes are repeated – they go to the beer hall twice, where they talk and drink – while reversing their positions (right and left) and their suits (Okuyama wears dark, the doctor light the first time, they reverse it the second time) between visits.



They are the strongest pairing in the film, but not the only one. Okuyama is linked to the scarred girl; all the women – Okuyama’s wife, the doctor’s wife, his nurse, the boss’s secretary – form a series of displacements of one another, visually, structurally. They haunt the film – recognizing Okuyama, not recognizing Okuyama, flitting around the edge of the frame (the doctor’s wife tucked off in the back of the frame as he and the nurse talk and flirt), erupting, now and then, into something fully uncanny. No one is quite who they seem – or quite who they are. (Though some are more aware and accepting of this than others.)



Finally, all this style does one more thing – it makes the film look like science fiction. This is especially so in the doctor’s office, with its glass shelves and windows and reflections, its floating body parts and instruments, its shifting perspectives, its pristine futuristic strangeness.



But it extends the look to the rest of the film as well. Okuyama’s apartment, his office, the airport where they buy his face, the streets of Tokyo, all have a similar alienating modernity. It’s a look common in films of the 1960s – as if filmmakers discovered the modern (and modernist) city, and found it as surprising and foreign as any science fiction city. The idea of the contemporary city as a kind of science fiction setting appears in many ’60s films – sometimes explicitly, as in Alphaville or the shots of Tokyo in Solaris – sometimes implicitly, as in Antonioni’s city scapes, or Playtime, or any of a host of stylish thrillers. They emphasize the alienating modernity of the glass and steel city, making it as sterile and alien as the future everytown in Things to Come. The sense, which is very strong in this film, especially in the doctor’s office, is that actual science fiction would be almost redundant. The world itself is already science fiction – they don’t need complex world building to create an alien world: they just need to show the streets and offices and people as they are. (Maybe with some extra floating ears…)

This was, of course, especially true in Japan, in Tokyo, a city wiped off the map twice in the first half to the 20th century (by the 1922 earthquake and World War II), and rebuilt twice, more modern and ambitious than before. And a population rebuilt as well – remade after the war, a country and culture largely reimagined after the war. That sense of alienation runs through so much of post-war Japanese films and literature, giving it tremendous power. The nation itself had to confront who it was, what its identity was, what was real and what not – and find ways to enact the new selves it was supposed to inhabit. That tension – the sense of human beings as aliens – it embodied (very literally) by Tatsuya Nakadai’s performance as well. In the bandages, he has to act with his body and his eyes; with the mask, he has to perform both the performance of normality and the fact that it is a performance, that his face is a mask. The way he moves – his control of his face – the way he sits, while he is being fitted for the mask, is one of the most alienating physical performances on screen. He’s an alien, as off, in everything he does, as a robot or space man – he is fantastic.



And so, to end, with one more note, about one more bit of doubling. There are two stories in the film – and the second story, of the scarred girl and her brother, looks quite different from the strange modernism of Okuyama’s story. She moves along older looking streets, through older parts of the city. The psychiatric ward where she works is old and shabby, with none of the modernism of the Doctor’s rooms. When she and her brother leave the city, they go to the sea – they walk on the beach, they explore caves, they stay in a conventional looking seaside resort. They are contrasted with the new Japan of the doctor and Okuyama – but they hardly fare any better. She carries the scars of the wars, dreading the next war, losing herself and coming apart as surely as Okuyama does. There is no comfort in the old, any more than the new; no sense that authenticity will save you any more than masquerading will.

Things to Come

Cross posted from Wonders in the Dark.



Things to Come, released in 1936, a collaboration between H. G. Wells, Alexander Korda, William Cameron Menzies, and a host of illustrious others, is a bit of an odd duck. Gorgeous looking, with stunning imagery (pre-apocalyptic, apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic and utopian), even more stunning montage sequences, fantastic music, and - well, a star-studded cast, doing what they can - and preachy, static, abstract, with characters designed to Make Points, all of it Deadly in Earnest and political - all at once. It's a case of too many cooks - creating a wild pot luck of - metaphors...

Try again:



The best way to look at it is to realize that it is an advertisement. Propaganda. An advertisement - for Wells' book (The Shape of Things to Come), though probably more for Wells' ideas, his political schemes. The concept of the book is that it is a transcription of a history book from 2105 or 6 that an otherwise very clever man attached to the League of Nations has dreamed of reading over the past few years, writing down as much as he remembers in the morning. He told HG Wells about it, then died, in 1930 - Wells got the notes together and made them into a book, and when the events of 1930-33, described in the dream book, all proved true, Wells decided to publish it (in 1933 or so). The film, then, is an adaptation of this book - given some cinematic touches (it is a book of history, dry, rather impersonal history at that), like characters and drama - but not a lot. The characters are types, put in typical situations, where they make speeches to one another....

But as an advertisement, for the book, and the ideas, the style is perfectly natural. Like ads and propaganda, it may have characters and stories, but they are distinctly abstract - types, there to state the ideas they are advertising, directly and explicitly. "15 minutes can save you 15% on car insurance;" "we don't approve of independent sovereign states." These people and stories, most of the time, are completely swallowed in the technical displays around them. The technical displays of Things to Come certainly swallow its characters. It is monumental and grand, and dominated by its montage sequences - spectacular montage sequences, brilliantly stitched together series' of beautifully staged and shot images, tightly edited to the music. They are dazzling: the opening Christmas/War montage - the sequence of the start of the war - the bombing of Everytown - a couple sequences showing the long progress of the war - and an orgy of machine porn (I mean, what else are you going to call it?) showing the building of the new, underground, utopian Everytown.



It's a style that shows up on TV every 10 minutes or so; you can watch a dozen 30 second examples while you wait for Michael Phelps to win another medal. In 1936 it was a bit more novel, but not unknown. It's approach - monumental imagery, dazzling montage, human beings as types, and treated as elements in the design, and, indeed, an overpowering sense of design to the whole endeavor - appears in many propaganda films of the day. Triumph of the Will has it; Eisenstein's films have it, especially in the 20s - as do many other films, experimental films, city symphony films, as well as straight up propaganda. Most of the techniques turn up in mainstream films as well (plenty of montage sequences anywhere you want to look in the 30s, some of them as abstract as anything here) - what sets it apart, and links it to propaganda then and advertisement since is both the reduction of humanity to Points to be Made, and that pervasive sense of design.

Because for all the clash of styles and egos going into the making of the film, it is a carefully, and completely, designed film. Look at it: the stunning sets, the careful arrangements of objects (including human beings) in front of the camera, the superb editing - but also look at the overall structure. The film is careful in its symmetries - repeating situations, images, etc, from one section to another. As an example - the symmetry between the bombing/gas attack on Everytown that marks the beginning of the end of the old world, and the "gas of peace" attack that issues in the era of the air dictatorship, the beginning of the new world. Repeated situations and reminiscent shots:




The parallelism is certainly helped by the fact that the same actors keep showing up in new roles, that embody the same types (Raymond Massey the hero, Edward Chapman as his cautious friend) - they get to repeat their conversations in new clothes and on different sets, with a different young friend as interlocutor:



Advertisement, then. And what is it advertising? The political idea of H. G. Wells, basically, in the form of a prediction of future history. Wells took them seriously, he had high hopes for the film as a way of spreading his ideas - it's worth giving them some attention, I think. What is Wells saying? He tells the story of the next 100-200 years to describe what he thinks will happen, and what he thinks should happen - this is prescription as much as prediction. He has some strong theories about how the world should work, spelled out in detail in the book, indicated int he film. What are they?

1. The World needs a single world government to allow humanity to develop into what they should be.
2. The history of the world is the history of smaller units of people forming larger units - individuals, to families, to tribes, to communities - to both larger political units, and other units, such as ethnic and linguistic groups, religions and so on.
3. At every step of this evolution, existing units resist the development of larger units - hanging on to their own privileges and powers.
4. To get to #1, you need an elite of scientists, technicians, intellectuals who share the values and goals of the World State, and who work not just to implement it but to educate the population in its precepts - humanity is what it teaches itself to be.

Those assumptions drive the story he tells. He believes that existing systems - the nation-state and capitalism, mainly, as well as religious and ethnic forces - have reached the limits of their ability to cope with the world and are starting to break down. (He wrote this in 1933 - this thesis is well supported.) He thinks - and this is going to cut right to the core of what he gets wrong in these predictions - that the existing Sovereign States will resist any attempt to replace them with a World State, and Capitalism will resist any attempt to change economic forms. Therefore, they need to be destroyed - though he is not a revolutionary, thinking they will be overthrown. He thinks they will destroy themselves. (Not a stretch, in 1933.) Once they collapse, the World State can rise to take their place. There will be a time of sorrow first - but science and technology will survive, and will recover, and implement a world based on - well, Wells' ideas. He doesn't think this will be easy - he shares with the Communists the belief that there must be a period of dictatorship, not of proletariat, but of intellectuals and technicians - the air dictatorship, Wings over the World in this story. This dictatorship will wither away - he's clearer than the Communists on the means: a complete education reform will turn everyone into a little superman. They will need no exceptional leaders because everyone will be exceptional. Utopia!

That's what he expects (and wants): how does he think it might happen? War will come - in the book he says it will come in Europe in 1939, between Germany and Poland over the Danzig corridor. A pretty safe bet in 1933, probably, but still, he got that right. It's interesting that the film changes this: the book is rather precise about who will invade who, who might gas who, which cities would be sterilized, what areas made uninhabitable, and so on. The film abandons this precision for a very English Everytown, that suffers all the misfortunes of the coming troubles. The war is just as vague: no cause is given for it, and there isn't a lot of detail about what happens afterwards - just those montage sequences. The book does not stint on such details. The war, in both film and book, quickly becomes dominated by air power and chemical weapons - the book offers plenty of detail about the type of gas used, its effects, who did what to whom, and so on. This war lasts decades - and is accompanied by economic collapse (the "Hoover Slump", they call it in the book, lasting 30 years.) Then comes disease - the "wandering sickness" - which is more obviously brought on by all the chemicals in the air in the book. All this - the collapse of the economy, plus the war, plus the disease that obliterates half the planet, leaves the world in a state of barbarism and ruin - nations shattered, reduced to half comic local warlords like The Chief, ripe for picking by heroic flyboys.



None of this happened, of course. The only thing he got right about the war was when it would start and where. And the aftermath, in a sense: Germany and Japan after WWII looked quite a bit like his post-apocalyptic world, for a while at least. But when they were rescued, it wasn't by Raymond Massey is a funny hat - it was by George Marshall and the good old US of A.

So what did he miss? One big thing is that he took his moment in history as the next-to-last moment in history, a mistake a lot of prognosticators make. He describes the evolution of larger and larger units of people, up to the modern state, and to ideas about transnational organizations like the League of Nation - but assumes those organizations and agreements will be completely opposed by existing States. But compare it to what happened. Start with World War II - he makes two big mistakes in predicting how it will go, militarily. One is that he discounts the importance of tanks in the war to come - that is, like many others, thinking the next war will be a repeat of the last. (He's clear about that; the film adopts it completely, showing its battle scenes as very much like WWI, even with tanks.)



But the other mistake is that he thinks the war will be fought primarily with chemical weapons. He was wrong, and wrong because the combatants followed a treaty, the Geneva Protocol against chemical warfare (and most of the world has to this day). It's almost shocking that they did - the participants in WWII didn't show a lot of restraint in their willingness and ability to kill people. It's hard to fault Wells for not seeing that coming. (It's also worth noting that the real WWII ended up killing more people in 6 years than Wells imagines it would kill directly in a decade. He didn't quite seem to realize the devastating power of high explosives and incendiaries; nor did he imagine anything like the Holocaust.) And in the aftermath of the war, we see again that States were able to adapt more effectively than Wells imagines. His imaginary war leads to decades of primitivism, poverty, disappearance of technology and culture; the real war led to a decade or so of acute suffering in the losing countries - then a miraculous recovery, in those countries, and technological innovation everywhere. Though these miracles weren't exactly miracles - they were driven by the American money, which was driven both by competition with the Soviet Union, and new forms of cooperation among other States. Wells didn't imagine intermediate forms between existing nations and the World State - but what developed in the Cold War was not far from two competing versions of World States.

What this adds up to is that Wells imagines a much more manichean future than the one we have had. He makes the same mistakes in economics - he doesn't think capitalist countries will go off the gold standard and spend money ti put people to work - but they did; not enough to end the Depression, but enough to mitigate it. He imagines it will be all or nothing - the world must unite, or it will be destroyed. Instead - nothing happened universally. States found ways to cooperate in some areas, not in others. They wouldn't avoid warfare, but they were able to avoid using chemical weapons (mostly) - and after Nagasaki, have managed to avoid using nukes as well. States have split into smaller units (all the countries invented out of nothing after WWI have reverted to smaller units), while creating new and different international units. Businesses operate globally, they compete with States; religion fades, or becomes more radical, or less radical, depending on where and who you are. It is a hodge podge. And really, that hodge podge is more predictable than the all or nothing systems Wells wrote about. He should have known better. He liked to think he was a historian - but the first principal of history is that everything is contingent; everything depends on everything else. His passion for science is also real - but it's clear his great love was for biology. His imagery and his systems are all organic ones, based on evolution - and he should know: evolution is messy. It does not move in a straight line, or along clearly marked choices. It's a tangle. And human beings are an incredibly successful species because they are incredibly adaptable.



Finally (I hope - this essay is turning interminable!), let's take a couple paragraphs to think about the technology of 2036. It's interesting that in this world, we have been to the moon, and in his, they are just preparing to get there. Maybe this is what you get for not having the Cold War, which certainly chased us to the moon. Or maybe it's because Wells' air dictatorship decided to rebuild earth before doing anything else. But in this world, the two didn't compete. The US made its biggest push to space in the 1960s - roughly the same time as it made its biggest push to solve its social problems. Both of which, space and social progress, were pretty well ended by the Vietnam war: you know - maybe Wells had a point about war....

Anyway - we don't have anything quite like that house building things up there - but we do have Apple watches - smaller and better than Raymond Massey's...



Which leads me to one last point about technology and culture. Wells makes some odd predictions in his book: he writes about the horrors of the wars, and the collapse after the war, and he says that they left very little record. Few photographs, few memoirs (compared specifically to the masses of prose generated by the first World War.) He writes about the disappearance of cinema, the near disappearance of radio - in general, he imagines humanity going silent over those years. Now - one of the big things he didn't think of was the explosion of information technology in the latter half of the 20th century and beyond. (Noted by David Kalat on the commentary track of Criterion's DVD.) The filmmakers imagine some of it - that watch; some fine flat screen TVs, including one covering an entire city square; live television broadcasts to the public square. But back to what people write about - even without computers and blogs, people documented WWII quite extensively, even the most horrible parts of it. Wells imagines that the world will be too horrible for anyone to bear to write about, and that basic communication technology will disappear; but nothing he imagined is as horrible as the Holocaust, and think of how documented that is. Think of the lengths people went to to document their experiences in other places, wars, gulags, genocides. It is odd to think of a writer underestimating the human need to record ourselves - but that obsession to remember, and to recall what has been hidden, is very fundamental to what we are.

And Wells clearly understood that. He just tended to segregate the intellectuals from the rest a bit too much. Though I suppose he knew better: think how proud Roxana is that she can read. Wells almost gets a real story on screen in this part of the film - or maybe, Ralph Richardson and Margaretta Scott get some story on screen, some human beings. Especially Scott, though, who gets a bit better material than Richardson to work with, and makes Roxana into the conscience of the film. She's what's at stake in the film - the one who could have chosen between the Chief's violence and the scientists and mechanics' hopes. If the Wings over the World guys hadn't just gassed everyone...



In the book, there is almost none of this - but there is the artist, Theotocopulos, who is a much more appealing character in the book. He gets his own chapter, drawn from his diary (this is from the mid-20th century, the hey day of the air dictatorship), devoted mostly to complaints about the dictator's monumentalist tastes in art and architecture, but also to some thoughts on art and love and humanity. He is presented as a critic of the regime, but one who makes sense - the film version is almost incoherent. Railing against progress - meaning what? (Passworthy comes up with much better arguments against the space gun than Theotocopulos does.) And then he leads an angry mob against the scientists' windmill - basically undermining the whole point of Wells' political hopes. These World State geniuses are supposed to educate the masses to the point where they are all truly free individuals - no more demagogues and angry mobs, no more revolutions or needs for revolutions. Instead - the film reverts to what was getting to be a hoary cliche even then: get out the pitchforks! It's a disappointment, and looks even worse if you've read the book, and seen how the air dictatorship is overthrown there. (Basically given a gold watch and sent off to write their memoirs.)

Of course the film really just drops the mob at the end, and gives us more of Massey's speeches. But in fairness, he does cut a fine figure, silhuoetted against the stars.

Jacques Rivette

Jacques Rivette has died. He was 87, and apparently has been suffering from Alzheimers disease for the past few years - I had heard he was ill, and so am not surprised. Still; saddened. The news come the day after I finally finished paying my 88 pounds for the new Out 1 collection - unfortunately, before this object crossed the ocean to my front door, so I can't spend the next week watching it... But it is coming...

He is One of the Great Ones. I haven't posted any kind of list of favorite directors lately, but if I did, he would be up there - top 10 somewhere. I came to him late - most of my favorites I discovered in the mid and late 90s, when I started watching films obsessively. I saw some Rivette in that period, but didn't see enough until 2007, when I saw a whole series - that immediately elevated him to his place among the greats. I do remember when I first heard about him - when La Belle Noiseuse came out - that was before I was an obsessive filmgoer, and the main thing I remember about it is that it was a very French film about a painter that had some actress naked for 3 hours. Some time after that, probably around 1998 or 99, I finally saw a Rivette - Haut Bas Fragile - by that time I had become an obsessive filmgoer, I knew who Jacques Rivette was, in a general sense (historically), and had seen some films obviously influenced by him - Pascal Bonitzer's Encore, possibly, or some of the Assayas or Desplechins films that call Rivette to mind... I liked it - quite a bit in fact, though I don't know if I could have explained it at the time. Later, Va Savoir got a bit of an American release, and I saw that in the theaters. And I tried renting the Story of Marie and Julian, though the DVD copy I got was damaged and I missed the opening 15 minutes or so of the film - which made it even more incomprehensible... Though still enjoyable. I liked Va Savoir very much - liked The Story of Marie and Julian well enough. It meant that Rivette had gone into that pile of directors whose films are just too hard to see - so you have to wait for your chance and take it.

That's what happened: the HFA booked a whole run of his films, and I went to see them, starting with Paris Belongs to Us, the Nun and Celine and Julie Go Boating - and those three were enough to put him in the pantheon, and then I saw Out 1: Spectre and L'Amour Fou and Jeanne la Poucelle and La Belle Noiseuse - and that settled it. They all hit me hard - you can see the comments from back when I wrote about films I saw, at the Rivette link - his films, once I saw them clean like that, really hit the sweet spot. All those doubles and old houses and games and plays and lost manuscripts - that stuff fascinates me; the structural games - but also the sense of play, invention, imagination in his films. Their playful postmodernism - if I had been able to see Paris Belongs to Us in 1993 or so, I would have saved a lot of time. Back when I was reading Pynchon and Barth and Gaddis and McElroy and Queneau and DeLillo, and reading about them - it struck me when I saw the film how well it matched them. Like Lookout Cartridge or V, with its mystery plot, lack of resolution, the lost artists and artifacts, the shadiness of the whole thing, the way it comes apart and gels into something sinister at the same time. Seeing it, it felt like something I had been waiting to see - and then I saw Celine and Julie and the short Out 1, and those were even more perfect. They bring in the other great thread in his work - the making of art, of theater, or sometimes music, painting, etc. But especially theater, since it is art as collaboration, as invention and exploration, and as acting things out. Maybe most of all, he gave us a view of art as play. That convinced me. That series, and his films, changed how I saw films, and probably how I saw the world.

It is sad that there will be no more Rivette films - though given what I still haven't seen (the three titles in the Arrow set I just bought, mainly - Out 1: Noli Me Tangere, Duelle and Pont Du Nord), I have plenty to look forward to - and more, his films have a kind of inexhaustibility that makes rewatching them as surprising as watching them. The ones Ive managed to buy never disappoint, and I keep noticing more to them, more twists and ideas and details. And more - his films have been immensely satisfying, intellectually - but they are also, always, exceptionally entertaining. They are full of pleasures, like early Godard, as well as depth and thought. He was one of my favorites, and will be missed.

Work, pleasures and mysteries:

Ivan's Childhood

[Also cross posted at Wonders in the Dark as part of their ongoing Childhood films countdown.]



Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan’s Childhood begins with the sound of a cuckoo, and a shot of a boy standing behind a tree, looking up at us through cobweb. It ends with the same boy chasing a little girl along a beach, the two of them circling a dead black tree, that seems to keep forcing itself into the image. Both are dreams: the boy, Ivan, is in the middle of a war, dreaming of the world before the war, his childhood. He is still a child in the present of the film, but his childhood is long gone.



Ivan’s Childhood, like Germany Year Zero, is a war film about childhood that is also a childhood film about war, using each side of the equation to heighten the emotion of the other. Ivan is already a hardened veteran when Ivan’s Childhood begins - orphaned, a partisan, now working for the regular army as a scout. That is where he is when the film’s story begins - but that is not how the film begins. It begins with the dream, Ivan walking, running, flying, through fields and forests, coming to rest at his mother’s feet, drinking from a bucket of water. It begins with the childhood he has lost, before waking him to the war he is living in. But it is a very thin line between waking and dreaming. The difference may mean everything to Ivan, but it is very permeable for Tarkovsky’s filmmaking. In Ivan’s dream, Tarkovsky’s camera soars and swirls, almost gleefully defying gravity and rules of space. But when Ivan wakes in a ruined windmill and goes out, the camera remains as vertiginous as in the dream, swinging around, taking extreme angles, cutting up his experiences into flashes of imagery. Real life is immediately established as being as disorienting and strange as any dream.



As we come to know Ivan, we see that he thinks of himself as an adult, the equal of anyone around him - but he is still a child. In the banal outside world, he tries to be an adult, but he isn't, and he remains at the mercy of the men around him. They try to force him to be a child, to go to school, to find surrogate parents, none of which he he thinks he needs. And Tarkovsky's filmmaking emphasizes Ivan’s subjectivity, both awake and in dreams, in ways that show just how close he is to his lost childhood. Dreams and childhood push into his life, haunting him. Ivan isn't always sure which is which - he worries that he is talking in his sleep, his dreams and memories escaping into the world where he wants to be treated as an adult. And apart from the dreams, we see that Ivan has a kind of psychic bond to the world around him. Much of the film is set in a house serving as headquarters for Lt. Galtsev's unit, a house where 8 Russians, none over 19, were held before being shot by the Germans. Their last message is written on the wall - “Avenge us” they say. Tarkovsky emphasizes this graffiti throughout the film - and Ivan, when left alone in the room, is swept up into the story of those executed children. He hears them; feels them; sees them (and his mother, and himself). He seems to slip between his present and the past, theirs and his own, increasingly acting out their story. They are palpable ghosts for him.



It’s not just how Ivan sees the world, but how Tarkovsky sees the world that keeps the boundaries between reality and visions permeable. The camera work remains fluid and inventive throughout; the editing disruptive, jumping across time and space without connections. Things appear out of context, and Tarkovsky takes his time to reveal the context. For example, the first sight we have of Lt. Galtsev - a hand sticking up out of a blackness. A hand coming out of the ground? Out of the swamp Ivan had been wading through? No - eventually we see it is just a man, sleeping. But Tarkovsky delays the revelation. Similar imagery continues - isolated body parts (of the living or the dead); slippage between reality, flashbacks, visions and dreams; and the nature shots - vertiginous rows of trees, people moving through them; the earth disappearing under their feet. Some of this harkens back to other films - especially to Cranes Are Flying, another crucial Soviet war film. Tarkovsky’s camera work owes a lot to that film - the camera flying, spinning, moving, dancing, all of it in luscious black and white. As well as specific scenes and moments - particularly the scenes in a wooded swamp, referring to the death of the hero of Cranes Are Flying.



There are thematic parallels as well - the way human beings are swallowed by nature; the god’s eye views and worm’s eye views of the world. But we can see some of Tarkovsky’s obsessions appearing as well. Bells - pervasive natural imagery, the elements (earth water air and fire) - flying - memories, visions, dreams - and images and words on walls, seeming to come off the walls, into the minds of the characters in the film.



And in the end, Tarkovsky blurs all the lines of the film - between reality and visions, between Ivan's subjectivity and others, between all the times of the film. The final sequence takes place at the end of the war, the Soviets going throught he ruins of Germany - Galtsev, the only survivor, going through old Nazi records, looking at the fate of their prisoners. He finds Ivan's record - and it is as if he can follow the records into Ivan's memories and dreams. He imagines/sees/feels Ivan’s death - rather, the film shows it, but shows it as if Galtsev were experiencing it. And Tarkovsky moves from the vision of Ivan’s death to another dream, children on a beach, Ivan and his mother again - in a way here that links Galtsev to Ivan's mother, making identical gestures, reality and dream combining:





And so we end, with Ivan playing on the beach, running, laughing, with a little girl - though still haunted by the image of the war, that gaunt stark tree in the middle of the beach. (That reminds me, maybe incongruously, but maybe not, of the hanging tree in Budd Boetticher’s Ride Lonesome.) The kids play, but around that tree, that seems to keep intruding into the frame, and finally swallows them up.