Crossing the Line

I want to add a bit more about the style in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Of all the tricks Mamoulian pulls out - the roving camera, the first person shots, all the fancy transitions (radial wipes, lateral wipes, lap dissolves and such), and holding those transitions halfway through, all the special effects and makeup and whatnot - I want to pick out one - the 180 degree cuts, especially between closeups. I suppose those things are just made for me - Ozu fan that I am - seeing it here, in a Hollywood film, is quite wonderful. I like the variety you get, too - the shot opening this post is a reverse angle on the shot opening yesterday's post on the film - that is, a cut between fairly long shots of the audience and Jekyll at his lecture...

Then there is this - starting with a profile shot of Jekyll and a girl at his clinic:



Cutting in to these shots - the girl, starting to walk, and Jekyll encouraging her:





...And later - in the love scene between Jekyll and his fiancee, Mamoulian repeats the series of shots, pushing it even further - starting, again, with a profile two shot:



Then cutting at 90 degrees to Rose Hobart, then 180 degrees to March, then back to Hobart closer, and so on:









It's pushing the principal about as far as you are likely to see. Of course, Mamoulian establishes frontality from the beginning of the film - the subjective camera device justifies it at first, but it doesn't take long for the motivation to disappear, as seen in the shots above.



And all of it sets up and pays off the doubling theme, playing on the image of a man looking in a mirror - and allowing for mathced images across time. Jekyll in the mirror -



...becomes Hyde in the mirror...



And from there - you can expand the principal - Jekyll slicking his hair back -



...to Hyde slicking his hair back (in a mirror, naturally, with Ivy on hand, as before...)



... and so on. A clever, innovative, piece of work indeed, and all its tricks integrated into its story and themes - films like this just make me sing...

Look.... Look... Look

I have said before, I rather dread October in the blog world - a solid month of horror film posts - blah... It's not that I don't like horror films, I think it might be a certain generic resentment - you don't see whole months devoted to melodramas do you? westerns, screwball comedies, the color blue? I suspect if you did, if ever February were given over the romantic comedies, say, I would soon get tired of that, too... I start here with ritual condemnation because this complaint is particularly disingenuous this year. I am positively steeped in horror related art just now. There is that vampire class - so it's a book and a movie a week about vampires. (Though we seem to have left the horror section behind - doesn't seem to be a lot of horror left by the time you get to Anita Blake or Dead Witch Walking - they seem a lot more Stan Lee than Bram Stoker.) And that aside, I keep watching horror films, and thinking about horror films when I'm watching other kinds. Did I mention that Mark Zuckerberg sometimes seems like a vampire? Who wouldn't think about vampires watching Inside Job? Or Carlos?

Though more directly - I'm certainly attentive to the overlap between vampire stories and other kinds of horror films. Questions of sympathy - watching vampire films and books pick up on the idea of the tragic monster. It's interesting that of the wave of horror classics in the early 30s, at Universal mainly, but elsewhere too, Dracula is probably the least sympathetic to its monster - Dracula is a monster, with some charm, perhaps, but not much in the way of pathos. Compare him to Frankenstein's monster - to the Mummy, or the Invisible Man - or to other studio's horror characters, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. They all have their reasons - they are all, in some sense, driven to their evil, and we are made to feel the loss when they go wrong. (And in a couple of them, we are brought very close to seeing them as not evil in the least.) In Dracula, we get that with Renfield - though he's a secondary character - not so much the Count himself. But from the first sequel, it's there, even more overtly than in some of the others - Dracula's Daughter is a sympathetic, self-reflective, guilt ridden vampire who fights her legacy, her nature, her evil nature, her needs. It is a very sad film, full of ironies that you can't quite ignore - the way she keeps begging people for help and no one understands her, no one is willing to help her, and when, inevitably, she acts - they carry on like she has been a demon from hell. This is, in fact, something of a trademark for at least one strand of horror films - it obviously goes back to literary sources, Dr. Faustus or Dr. Jekyll, good men who found that evil was present with them, any number of doppelganger stories and temptation stories and stories of overreaching or too late repentance...



It's interesting in those 30s films. First - those early films seem to have been made for two sets of eyes - like there are two films in one. I mean - most of them are, on the surface, straightforward horror films, with ugly, horrible monsters, doing terrible things to pretty innocents (or not so innocents, but still pretty.) And since films, in those days, played, and then went away, never to be seen again (at least until Henri Langlois came along), this is how they were remembered. But when you see them over and over - you notices how much sympathy most of them show their monsters. Now - after decades of availability on video, DVD, etc. - this probably doesn't come as much of a surprise. But they were always made that way, weren't they? For two audiences - the one that saw them once and twice for the thrills - and the devotees, who would see them over and over and absorb as much of them as they could... And there's another element to this - the more you see these films, the more you notice the complexity of their morality. A film like Bride of Frankenstein (probably the best of the bunch) functions almost as a straightforward bildungsroman - but because the hero is a monster, the film has a surprising amount of leeway in his morality. The monsters have the ability to act out desires that the Hays code forbade - since they are monsters, they will get what's coming to them in the end - but along the way, they can act far more naturally than regular characters could, and the filmmakers usually gave us a chance to sympathize with them. At least, for those who came back, who watched them carefully, for something more than shocks and thrills.



Anyway - these days, films are a lot more free to spell things out. And back in the day, there were films that laid out what they were doing pretty clearly. For example, the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I am ashamed to admit it, but I had not seen it until this week - needless to say, it was a revelation. The theme - the good man who does evil - is explicit of course; so is the sense of a more complex view of morality and humanity than the Hays code could handle. It's rather shocking what the film does get away with - not just the strip teases and brutality, but a pretty direct statement of Victorian hypocrisy - poor Dr. Jekyll, saintly and brilliant as he is, is going half mad from lust - he begs to be able to marry his sweetheart NOW, but her father refuses - and he, like many a good Victorian gentleman before him, turns to drugs and whores. (More or less at the urging of his respectable pal, too.) The results are all too predictable. It's interesting that this is, in a way, a reversal of the central moral issue of Dracula - there, it's the horrors of female sexuality - here, it's the horrors of male sexuality. Both the horrors that come from acting on it, and those that come from its repression. It's an exaggerated enactment of the classic Victorian hypocrisy.



Though what really gets me about this film is what a a magnificent piece of filmmaking it is. Gorgeous, and endlessly clever - look at that shot of Jekyll (post-Hyde) and his pal, under the picture of the old Queen... paintings, statues, decor are used throughout to similar effect. Rouben Mamoulian was, I won't deny it, as flashy and thrilling a director as any of his peers - and he had some very impressive peers ca. 1931 (Capra, Lang, Sternberg, Lubitsch, Renoir, etc.) He is as skillful as any of them - and probably flashier than most. This film is really a dazzling display - relentless moving camera, sophisticated sound, brilliant and showy editing, state of the art special effects, superb sense of composition, staging, set design, you name it. There's not much like it in Hollywood at the time - with its 180 degree cuts and innovative wipes and dissolves (he loves holding a transition in the middle - wipes (as below), dissolves (Ivy's swinging leg chasing Jekyll and Lanyon through London)).... It's as showy and strange as a Japanese film of the period....



Though I'll end with another general comment on horror films, especially in the 30s - this is one of their other hallmarks. They held onto a lot of the aesthetics of art films, especially German art films, longer than most of Hollywood, and further down the food chain, if you will. A fairly uninspiring production like the Murders of the Rue Morgue still looks great (see below). And at the high end, Dr. Jekyll, or the Whale horror films, they were as good as anything of the time, and worthy successors to the work of Murnau and Lang and company in the 20s.

Vampire Films, At the Beginning

The Vampire class I am taking is proceeding nicely, and it seems like time for a post. The class itself is concerned mainly with vampire literature, but I am a film enthusiast, and am only too glad to take this opportunity to write a bit about he films we're seeing. We've started at the beginning, more or less - Nosferatu and the Universal Dracula - which is also starting at the top. It's all downhill after Murnau.



Of course, that's true for most films - there aren't a lot better than Nosferatu, ever, in any genre. It's one of those foundational films - a fully realized masterpiece, hugely influential, and deep and rich, thematically, aesthetically. It's beautiful, innovative and imaginative, terrifically important to film history - a fully realized effort of the mature German style, something of a pivot between expressionism and new sobriety, with its real locations and expressionistic performances and compositions. Obviously one of the foundations of horror films, especially vampire films, and one of the primary sources of art films for the next 40 years. (That is - I think Murnau's style, developed here, in the Last Laugh, and so on, becomes something of the model for art cinema until the 60s, maybe, when other traditions - Eisenstein, say - comes back into vogue. It's an idea, anyway...) Thematically, it stacks up well against Stoker's novel, even, itself a perfect grab bag of themes, imagery, social and cultural commentary. Nosferatu's blend of expressionism and romanticism advances a number of gender concerns, psychological themes (Hutter's lack of potency, vs. Orlock's surfeit), the way Ellen takes control of the story; it contains powerful historical echoes - WWI, the inflation, the anxieties (stressed by Sigfried Kracauer) of the Weimar Republic, developing the theme of chaos vs. tyranny, weak, emasculated men vs. superpotent tyrants; it offers, as well, hints of anti-semitism (and anti-Slavism), the fear of the East, the fear of outsiders (themes certainly shared with Stoker's novel); like Stoker, Murnau's film brings out issues of class - the old aristocracy coming back to haunt the middle class, the importance of money, property, commerce; there are scientific interests tucked in - not as explicitly as in Stoker, but there - as well as consideration of nature, man's place in nature, nature red in tooth and claw. Disease, pestilence, predation, and the finality and pervasiveness of death. Add to this, I suppose, hints of a roman a clef, building on relationships among the artistic circles Murnau moved in - it's dense, dense, dense.



And all of this is put together with exquisite skill. Patterns of imagery (arches, spiders, webs, predators and prey, light, vision, frames - windows, doors and mirrors), careful editing, careful and innovative use of text and manipulation of information (Murnau picks up Stoker's multiplicity of texts - the intertitles feature, if I remember it all - text from the chronicle of the plague; text from the book of vampires; letters; a ship's log; and straight dialogue... all running alongside the imagery) - the different sources of information posed against one another, sometimes in synch, but not always. But always combined with great skill. And finally - the sheer imagination of the film's look - from the extremely effective monster, to the use of simple, but haunting special effects - using negatives, stop motion, step printing, and so on. Like so many early films, it revels in its filmicness - I don't think it's an accident that it introduced one of the fundamental rules for vampires, the fatality of sunlight - the reference to cinema is hard to miss. Vampires, like films, are shadows on the wall, in the dark, and turning on the lights, kills them both...



Not much can live up to that, and certainly Universal's Dracula doesn't. It's an interesting case, anyway. I can't deny, it can be unsatisfying - I'm inclined to think it's the weakest of the early Universal horror films. It lacks the mastery James Whale brought to the Frankenstein pictures (those are as good as it gets, really); The Mummy plays, to me, as an improved remake of Dracula, with Karl Freund having figured out how to make films, and a much more balanced cast. (Zita Johann holds her own, even against one of the truly great Karloff performances - the juveniles in Dracula are decidedly dull.) It's maddeningly uneven - in fact, my opinion of it tends to rise and fall depending on how I watch it. Sitting at home with the DVD remote in hand, I can watch the scenes with Lugosi and Dwight Frye and fast forward through the rest - I love it! whenever I sit through the whole thing, all those long conversations in the second half - Overrated!...

But I am here to praise, not complain... The availability of the Spanish version on the DVD sets is a great boon - watching it back to back with the English version is almost a history lesson in the transition from silent to sound films. It also demonstrates what Browning and company did right. The Spanish version gets a lot of praise, sometimes even being said to be better than the English version - I can't go along with that. It definitely has some advantages - the most obvious is that the source print for the DVD is gorgeous, much better than the source for the English DVD - though that shouldn't fool people into thinking the film itself is better. It is also more consistent, without the strange lapses the English version has - the production itself seems more careful and regulated. (Stories of confusion and indifference on the set between Browning and Freund abound.) It seems more confident in its identity as a sound film, though this has a cost, as it means it tends to be played much more theatrically - more on that later. More on the price paid for that consistency, too.... But the main reason the Spanish version falls well short of the English version is the cast. It's true the Spanish film has better juveniles - but the real stars, Dracula, Renfield and Van Helsing - are far far better in the English version.



Edward Van Sloan is the least of the three, but he gives a first rate character performance as the monsters' foil, giving Lugosi and Frye something to play against. And they are magnificent. Lugosi became an icon for good reasons - he makes remarkable use of his presence, his voice, his body - a grand theatrical performance that is even more powerful on a movie screen. He translates into closeups - very well in fact - and film gives him a frame to use his hands and eyes to great effect. You can watch the exchanges between Dracula and Van Helsing just by watching the performers' hands - a gesture here, a clenched fist there - though who would want to give up Van Sloan's little bows? Lugosi's glances and head tilts?



Though even Lugosi is upstaged by Dwight Frye - Renfield is a great role, and he gets everything he can out of it. This makes another interesting comparison with the Spanish version - there, Pablo Alvarez Rubio plays Renfield as a raving lunatic, all wild laughter and huge gestures, which while arresting in its way, has none of the horror and menace Frye gives him. It's surprising how restrained Frye is - or maybe, how important restraint is in Frye's performance. He plays Renfield as though his body were a straightjacket - he speaks as though forcing the words out at great pain. He builds to it, too, seeming to tighten up in every scene, as his possession becomes more complete, and the enormity of his actions seem to dawn on him. His iconic moments - his mad laughter on the ship is as iconic as anything Lugosi does - are all taut, underplayed, constrained moments, that work better for it. (Or maybe you could say, when he exaggerates, he exaggerates the restraint.) His performance is unsettling, even now - he embodies - and here the word is quite literal - the idea of a man fighting with himself, compelled to act against his better nature. He plays it, he moves it. I could watch Frye's scenes over and over, all by themselves. He's almost Peter Lorre at times....



But meanwhile - the Spanish Dracula's consistency is not always to its benefit. It avoids the dull patches and lazy scenes in the English version - but it has none of the heights of the English version. The English film seems to comes into focus whenever Dracula or Renfield is on screen,and not just because of the performers - the compositions usually get better, the staging gets more imaginative. Best of it, the editing gets crisper and smarter. The editing is wildly uneven, like everything else - but parts of the film are quite brisk, especially the first half. The story certainly whips along. This is especially noticeable compared to the Spanish version. The latter is a good deal longer, partly because there is a lot more there (the English version has been cut down severely), but also because the Spanish version is much slower than the English version. Individual scenes are longer because there is more dialogue (more exposition, usually), because they are played slower - and because they are played out in long takes more often, with more space left between speeches. The English version is cut into shot/countershot more often; there is less of it, and it is played faster. It certainly feels as though the cutting has peeled away all the gaps between the speeches - it feels much snappier than the Spanish version. But beyond all this - the fact is, the editing in the English version (when the editors seem to be engaged by the material) is infinitely better than the Spanish version. Its speed helps - it cuts a lot of the transitions, little shots in the Spanish version clarifying what is happening - you see it during Renfield's arrival at Dracula's castle, where the SPanish version makes sure you know the bats are Dracula, and the English version just cuts from Renfield to three bats to Dracula on the stairs. Things like that are not quite jump cuts, but they aren't far off. There are many examples of this - probably the best being Renfield's slow creep toward a fallen maid - the English version cuts away before revealing the real purpose - the Spanish version finishes the act (he is stalking a fly). These choices do things - they speed the film up - they also give it a sense of mystery, of creepiness - rather like the stop motion effects in Nosferatu.

And then, there is one of the film's great moments - Dracula's appearance at Seward's house - a lovely piece of sound and vision editing. They talk about the marks on Mina's neck - "what could have caused them?" Harker asks. "Count Dracula," the maid answers... It's worth asking about sound - these films were made in late 1930, and show the seams. And again, in many ways, the Spanish version seems more at ease with sound than the English version - it seems quite confident about how to play scenes. There are times - more than one - when it feels as though Browning and Freund were baffled by how to deal with sound. But at the same time, they (and their editor - Milton Carruth, as it happens) end up with a much more modern looking film - where the Spanish film is content to play scenes out as on a stage, the English version looks much more like a film. And it is much more aware of sound as an expressive element - they use it to get in and out of scenes more often - the wolf's howl, a gunshot, off screen screams... Sound moves the story, telling us things that we can't see - the murdered flower seller's scream; the coffin lid dropping when Dracula emerges from his tomb, or his death groans at the end. Offscreen sound is important, and at times, used systematically - Renfield, particularly, always announces his approach with laughter or words. In cold fact, once he goes mad, I think we always hear him before we see him - his appearance is always proceeded by sound... I don't want to make too much of this - it is very uneven in this, as in everything - and compared to some of the truly great early sound pictures, M or Blue Angel or Blonde Venus, it's quite mundane. But like so much about this film - when it's good, it's close to great.

Comparative Propagandists, Genius Division

I'm still posting at a gruesomely slow pace - at least I have reasons: a class - I got some posts out of the class I took in the spring, hopefully we'll get some material from this one. Like this post! Which - if I'd had a bit more time this week, I might have posted as part of the double billathon - of course I could have posted the paper I was writing for the double billathon too...) Still.... the Nazi Cinema Class has had me watching, well - Nazi cinema - Leni Riefenstahl, in the early going. And this week, the HFA showed Sergei Eisenstein's October - offering a nice chance to do some comparing. The class has made quite a bit of "fascist aesthetics" - what it is, whether it's a valid and useful term... I suppose thinking about that guided what I noticed watching the Eisenstein this time around.

I don't know how much you can generalize from Eisenstein and Riefenstahl about Nazi and Soviet propaganda and cinema - they're both exceptional, both relatively unique... But I think there are some patterns there - things he does that she didn't that other Russians did and other German's didn't.... I suppose I can say something about them. Let's see:

1) Faces - after watching a Nazi films, especially Riefenstahl's, Russian films are quite a shock. Everyone in Triumph of the Will is beautiful (except the party leaders - a distinctly unimpressive bunch...), young and healthy - October is full of all kinds of faces. Young, old, handsome, not handsome - scraggly beards, snaggly (missing) teeth, lined skin, awkward, plainspun clothes, all kinds of ethnicities.... but they're all shot with the same heroic lighting, framing, all treated as though they were beautiful - the film celebrates their diversity, their individuality, though also their ability to be representative, of Russia, or Siberia, or Woman, or whatever they are... I think this is logic to it: the Russians act as though the cause confers beauty - being on the right side makes you beautiful; the Germans - Riefenstahl in particular, but this seems pretty common in Nazi propaganda and art - act as though beauty proves the rightness of the cause. All those faces in October are made beautiful or ugly depending on their righteousness - the bourgeoisie, the government, the cadets and women in the Winter Palace, the Mensheviks, are shot to look distinctly unattractive - but overall, they don't really look much different from the Bolsheviks and workers. They're just shot differently- and the ones who switch sides, immediately start getting better lighting... Triumph of the Will doesn't do anything like that - everyone is beautiful, everyone gets a cool uniform.... not because they're right and the enemy is wrong - rather, beauty is a guarantee of the rightness of the cause - if they weren't beautiful, they wouldn't be Nazis. (Though the bets are off when it comes to Himmler of Hess's unibrow...)

2) Jokes - there is no comedy in Triumph of the Will. There are some smiles and laughing - there are German men playing rough games, but there are no jokes. October on the other hand is, basically, a comedy - it's more like one of those comic book histories of the world than serious history or propaganda. It is packed from end to end with jokes - mostly visual puns (Kerensky and the peacock, the empty coats of the provisional government), but plenty else, including some neat verbal/visual jokes, like Kerensky's introduction - the repeated shots of him and a pair of cronies going up the same set of stairs, with the intertitles listing his many government offices... Of course, since the actual October revolution was fairly bloodless, it makes sense to shoot it as a comedy. The government was done for - the soviets took over without much effort - Kerensky (at least according to Eisenstein) bravely ran away. (And Eisenstein treats it in just about those terms - though most of the Eisenstein quotes in The Holy Grail are from Alexander Nevsky.) And it is, in fact, funny....

3) Voices - Triumph of the Will is a completely controlled production - nothing we see, nothing we hear comes from anyone but an authorized source. The only voices we hear are Nazis, speaking as Nazis - we don't even hear Nazis "off duty" as it were - everything is official, everything has a controlled source.... October is just as controlled (though Eisenstein's control is certainly at least a counterweight to that of the communists proper) - but it has a very different approach to words. Everyone speaks - there are words everywhere - the narration in the titles, dialogue (some in the titles, quite a bit just shown - but you barely get that (seeing, not hearing, people talking) in Riefsenstahl's film) - banners - pamphlets.... People act, as crowds, as individuals making up crowds - there's a much stronger sense of the individuality of all those people - coming together to form whatever they form... And this is quite obvious in the proliferation of words (actual or implied) in October...

4) Style - those relationships between the mass and the individual in Nazi and Soviet propaganda films remain pretty consistent. Riefsenstahl, particularly, is completely controlled - the mass is a mass, individuality is stripped away - indiivduals become blocks in the mass.... But in Eisenstein's film - for all the mass movements, the types, the choreography, the heroic angles - there remains a significant amount of chaos. Chaos, individuality, are harnessed by the communists - in theory at least. (Obviously, this is all how they are presenting themselves - what the commies were really up to is another matter.) But it's still striking - the choreography of Eisenstein's crowds is far more chaotic, kinetic - they don't form patterns and masses, they flow - they have the turbulance, unpredictability, and sheer power of rivers and oceans - they never form into the blocks you see in Triumph of the Will. Again - the end results may have been terror and control, state violence and repression, in both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia - but the two movements present themselves, their ideal image of themselves, very differently. The Germans are all arranged in blocks - mass ornaments (in Siegfried Kracauer's term) - individuals function as blocks in these masses. Their films are full of lines, lines of people - static blocks, that retain their shapes as they move - parades, lines of men, salutes en mass, all in unison, all together.... The Russians though - Eisenstein, at least - also deal in masses, but masses that are not blocks, but - to pick up the metaphor above - flows. They move - they don't form rigid lines, or they lose them quickly when they do - when crowds act as masses, they do so in turbulent pulses. A crowd voting in October, everyone holding up a kind of ballot - does not do so in uniform, but rather, a roomful of men waving their cards in the air and shouting. Everyone moves on their own, to create a massive pulse of energy.

Now, obviously, some of this does come down to the filmmaker - Eisenstein is a shockingly kinetic filmmaker. Even now - October is an overwhelming onslaught - as fast a film as I have ever seen. (Though Eisenstein also modulates - he builds tension, uses longer shots, still shots, quieter shots - that explode when the action comes...) Riefenstahl - though a dynamic editor, with a superb eye for imagery, has none of his protean powers, none of his energy. She is too in love with the compositions, the patterns, the aesthetics - Eisenstein is more in love with the movements, flow, energy, making images clash and bang off one another - Riefsenstahl prefers editing that builds to a grander pattern - editing that reinforces its underlying imagery. She hammers away at her ideas sometimes - she seems to be aiming at a kind of monumentalism, awe... I find it, I'm afraid, much less appealing than what Eisenstein does - it seems simple minded and pretentious, very quickly. Eisenstein might have his pretentious moments, but they're gone in a flash, the second or two it takes him to cut to something else.... There have been comments from people in this class about how good Riefenstahl is, how important - I can almost see it in Olympia, but not Triumph of the Will. Its wickedness aside, it's a chore to watch. Good or evil, Eisenstein's films are all revelatory, and thrilling, every time I see them.

German Film History (and 2 examples)

I have fulfilled at least one of my resolutions for 2009 - signing up for a film class, at Harvard Extension. "Masterpieces of German Cinema", it's called - which reminds me of an odd fact about my experience with German films. I have seen a pretty strong representation of the masterpieces of German cinema - certainly, most of the (non-Nazi) films featured in this class. But I have seen very little else from German films. Even the auteurs - other than Herzog, maybe Murnau, it's thin going - 8-10 Fassbinders (what's that, a week's production?), half dozen Wenders, only a couple of Lang's German films, and not much else. And not much German film that isn't sort of a "masterpiece" - a handful of films in the last decade or so, though not many even there... Compared to French films, or Japanese, or Chinese - even Italian - it's well behind those countries, not just in how much I've seen, but how widely I've seen them. No German equivalent for any of the genres I've sampled in other countries (Giallo, kung fu films, anime or Samurai pictures, etc.) I haven't really even read about German films that much - less than French, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, Indian, African, Iranian, Italian, even Spanish I suspect.... So I hope, even if the screenings are standards, the reading, the lectures, the clips and shorts we cover will significantly expand this knowledge.

Anyway: the class got off to a rousing start, with screenings of the 1913 Student of Prague and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The latter of course is one of the founding text of Canonical German Cinema - the former is a clear precursor of expressionism, horror films - a doppelganger story derived from Poe, featuring some neat double exposures to allow Paul Wegener to play himself and his reflection... it's both a Faust story and a doppelganger story - a sorcerer offers Wegener's student (of Prague) 100,000 marks for any one thing in the student's (very studentlike) room - a good deal! the sorcerer takes his reflection from the mirror - who, as in Poe's William Wilson, or Dostoevski's The Double, (not to mention Rob Lowe) starts showing up at inopportune times, doing terrible things that the student probably thought of first... The student pursues a woman, of course, neglecting, of course, the Poor Gypsy Girl who stalks him... all this ends in tears, and - you can read William Wilson if you need the rest... Caligari is famous enough, I'll skip the long recap - we have a mad scientist, a somnambulist, two friends in love with the same girl, a string of murders, an old book of magic and a diary, flashbacks, and a possibly misbegotten frame story - and a revolutionary and still rather radical design sense.



Though one of the things that struck me watching these two films is that Caligari (made in 1920, already showing a fair amount of understanding of classical cinema codes) looked more archaic, "primitive" than the earlier film. Not because of the sets, which are still dazzling, or the design,but because it does seem to be moving toward that classical style, but using archaic means. It has picked up on the ideas of centering and controlling the image, of creating identification with characters and holding it there - it picks out the important elements of the shot, makes most of its meaning from shot to shot, rather than within shots - all classical conventions. But it still has the older tableau style staging - fairly long shot lengths - and it doesn't really use editing to construct the story. It uses lighting - and irises and other masks, where later films would cut (or wipe or what have you.) It looks odd - creating montage like effects without montage....

Student of Prague, on the other hand, looks surprisingly modern. Part of the reason for this is that it's aesthetic has reappeared - mostly in art films, new wave, etc. It's shot mostly in long takes, usually in fairly deep spaces, and uses a lot of the "tableau technique" David Bordwell has discussed. Decentralized framings, multiple planes of action, a certain freedom in the frame - things happen that seem unrelated to the story. In class, this was used to illustrate pre-classical structures - the dispersal of action in the frame, vs. the concentration and control of classical cinema. True enough - but it's also controlled quite well. The filmmakers do a fine job of directing attention - and of shifting attention, or creating multiple points of interest. The opening sequence is a fine example: Balduin, the student, comes to a cafe - but he is broke and bored and sits apart from his friends, though they try to get him to join the party. The dancing girl (who has an eye for him) dances on a table, but he doesn't care. Finally - Scapalini the sorcerer turns up and he and Balduin share a table and a chat. Balduin wants a lottery ticket and a woman - Scapalini says he can do that. They leave together....

All that is one shot. It's a big open space, a cafe - though the cafe is ranged around the back of the shot. There is a table in the foreground... The filmmakers use this space wonderfully. The cafe is full of people - all in the back of the shot though - there is an open space in the left foreground. Three students enter from the bottom left of the screen - focusing our attention on them. But they lead us back into the crowd - except one of them, Balduin, circles through the cafe and comes back into the foreground, in front of the rest of the people, and sits at the table facing us. This creates two levels of space - the bustle in the back (decentered, dispersed, etc.) and Balduin, alone, in the foreground. HIs friends come and talk to him, connecting the two, but he ignores them - they go back and the girl emerges, climbs on a table and dances - intensifying the division of our interest. Balduin ignores her - she dances - a spectacle to us, but she is staring intently at Balduin all the time... And then - a wagon comes through the frame, cutting off the background all at once, as effectively as a curtain falling. Scapalini gets off the wagon and sits beside Balduin. The wagon rolls off - now the cafe behind them is empty, expect for the girl. And the filmmakers continue their use of multiple points of interest - as Balduin and Scapalini talk, the girl creeps up on them, trying to seem or hear - they never notice her, but we are very much aware of her. And finally, when the men leave, she creeps after them, still unnoticed.... It's a fine piece of stagecraft - and filmmaking - using the camera compositions to define the staging - using on and offscreen space, but through stagecraft (like the horse) and camera movements, or just entrances and exits. It carefully modulates our attention from foreground to background, from the crowd to he characters, and between the characters... The rest of the film, though less brilliant, probably, is similarly handled - a consistently fine use of space, staging, the borders of the camera's frame, multiple planes within the shot, use of doors and internal frames to expand and contract the space of the shot, and so on.

It looks modern because much of this has been picked up by art films (primarily) - and it looks less outdated than Caligari because later films tended to pick up these devices fairly straight. Staging and composition is staging and composition, especially within long shots - the means of editing have changed quite a bit since 1920 (let alone 1913) - but a long take of a more or less coherent space is a long take now... It is interesting to see how certain strands of film history get picked up, half a century or so later (and then off and on since then)...

Bad Influence and Neo (Not so) nNoir

Cross-posted at the Film of the Month Club.

One of the interesting features of neo-noir, probably following in Chinatown's footsteps, is the use of light, in place of darkness. Bad Influence follows that trend -light plays a key role in its look, throughout. It begins in darkness, and certainly, shadows and dark are significant in the film - but it is remarkable how much emphasis there is on light.



Its key spaces (Michael's workplace and his apartment) are bright, airy places, with white walls, bright lighting, windows, white decor.






When he moves outside, much of the story takes place under the brilliant LA sky:



Meanwhile, as the deeds grow darker, darkness enters the film, as well - though light remains significant. The robbery spree the men go on leads them through dark streets, but the actual crimes occur in the light.



And light itself is a significant part of what is seen. The light of the TV screen is a recurring motif, the TV and camera are integral to the plot; plot points also depend on a tail light, the light of a refrigerator door opening, etc. Even incidental details like the dance routine at one of the underground clubs are built around lights:



And here is darkness, framed in light:



It's a strong pattern throughout the film, and helps establish a theme, maybe: that light hides our bad impulses - darkness reveals them. That may overstate it - the film does fascinating things with what it shows and hides, puts onscreen or off... but its use of light (and whiteness, and glass, surfaces, etc.) is quite remarkable.

...One more thing (added here, not the FOTMC, since this is not a completed thought) - the look of Bad Influence reminds me of certain high modernist films, Antonioni, Edward Yang. It does not present itself as an art film, but it really is - the decor, the modernist spaces, the clean lines, the whites and light, the glass and steel - and the ambiguity of the story. For it is a very ambiguous story. Exactly how many characters are there in this film? A question to be asked! a hint of posts to come!

An Aside on Film and Poetry

I'm in another posting slump. There might be reasons. I have been taking a class - a poetry class, for pure edification. It keeps me busy, it's been draining off whatever energy I might be putting into blogging.

I suppose I could get around that by blogging about the class - or about ideas the class inspires. I could write about poems that work "cinematically" - often hundreds of years before the invention of cinema. I suppose that's an old game - spotting things in novels or poems or Shakespeare or such that anticipate techniques we think of as cinematic. It's probably a silly game - the point is probably that things happen in the world, and have always happened in much the same way - in space and time, and we experience them and remember them, and try to put them into other forms - words or pictures or stories - and the forms we put them in will resemble one another. (I think I am quoting someone here: is it Manny Farber? or Jean Mitry? someone I have read in the last few months, who wrote about "cinematic" techniques that predate cinema.... Mitry I think...) Anyway - it's not too useful, probably - but it's fun - and might be useful. "Cinematic" techniques are techniques that use space and time as their basic building blocks. Poets and novelists and obviously painters always used space and time as building blocks - so analogies are inevitable.

Take Shelley's Ozymandias: there's a poem that's almost a camera ready script. Scenes and shots are all laid out: the poet meets a traveler from an ancient land, who starts to tell of what he's seen. As he does, the poem almost cross fades (across an ellipse) to shots of the ruined statue of Ozymandias in the desert. We are give a series of shots - as analytically edited as a Russian: "legs of stone... shattered visage... lip and sneer..." - described like a series of shots, edited together - though you could do it as a track past the pieces, though still fairly close... with maybe superimposed ghosts of the old days, the artist's hands carving the scowling face.... then in - cut or track in, to the inscription:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

And then - what I would call a shock cut, to a long, long shot of the site: "Nothing beside remains." says the poem - and describes the scene in its full context - the desert sands, "boundless and bare" - with what amounts to a zoom out or pan away from the statue to the empty sands - "The lone and level sands stretch far away."

It's a thing of beauty. I suppose treating it like a film doesn't really add much - that might be the point, though. Poets, novelists, playwrights, painters manipulate space, time, combine images, vary their position relative to their imagery, to create their effects - you have to pay attention to how they treat space, when they do manipulate it. It's more or less a given with film - the way manipulation of words is a given in poetry, manipulation of stories and characters are in novels or plays - but novels and films manipulate words, poems manipulate characters - cross media techniques are a valuable device for any and all....

Anyway - it's all very interesting. One thing this class has done is emphasize the value of close reading - I notice that the techniques of close reading are pretty consistent across all art forms. The specifics vary, as one looks at different elements that go into making a poem or a panting or a film - but the general principals remains. Repetition - patterns of repetition and variation, parallels, series, related pieces: all the sound effects of poetry (rhyme, alliteration and assonance, meter), semantic patterns, patterns of imagery... in films: manipulation of space is primary; repetition of patterns of things on the screen, editing, how images connect... I might get ambitious and pursue some of this - it occurs to me that all films are in fact more poetry than prose: there is a reliance of the detail of the shots and sequences of shots in film that seems more like the pressure poems put on words and lines and sentences, than like the way prose uses those things. But if I start down that road I may never get to stop.

Almost Random Film Observation - Ozu

Prompted by something, I can't put a finger on what, I've been thinking about Ozu's camera work, specifically, how he moves the camera. It's probably due to a class I'm taking, on poetry - I was probably thinking about how form signifies in art - how a formal device can convey emotion or meaning. (Like the repeating pairs of sounds etc. in, say, Shakespeare's Sonnet #12 invoke the ticking of a clock, the back an forth of time.) That, I suppose, made me think of the crane shot that comes at the end of Early Summer - the only crane shot Ozu ever used, as far as I know. And maybe even more rare - an instance of a moving camera (or any formal device) in an Ozu film that carries fairly explicit emotional and signifying weight. The camera goes up as two women walk to the sea, and it's hard not to see it as a metaphor - a moment of soaring, something - whatever sorts of troubles are coming for all involved, here is a moment where someone in an Ozu film is about to do Exactly what She Wants To Do. And before the scene is over - her sister in law will second her decision: the two women will share the understanding that while nothing is perfect, this will be a Good Thing for Noriko.

But what struck me about it, thinking about it, and thinking about the patterns of moving cameras in Ozu's films, is this: that though this is the only time he used a crane, he uses it in a way that maintains the general rules he sets for moving his camera. That is - it might be his one crane shot - but it is still very much an Ozu shot.

I suppose I should say something about that. I don't mean to do a complete anatomy of Ozu's camera movements - just sketch the patterns, and note their characteristics. (Though once you start playing that game with Ozu, it's hard to stop.) He's fond of lateral tracks - especially in the prewar films, though there are still some in the later films, like Early Summer. In the earlier films they are often comic - and can be very elaborate, sometimes reversing direction, cutting in the middle, making jokes and so on - the later moves tend to be very spare and much less motivated. He's also fond - always was - of shots of people walking, that keep the people in the same place in the frame. These can be lateral tracks (especially in the early films), or frontal shots where the camera retreats, or following shots. And sometimes, he will track forward - usually through an empty space - a hall or room - though once in a while it will move in on an object. Early Summer has a track in on a broken oaf of bread, for instance. Okay - given these types of camera movements: he also usually organizes them characteristically. He will repeat a camera movement - Early Summer repeats a track through a theater - the first time toward the old man cupping his ear; the second time the theater is empty. He also frequently cuts from movement to movement - Early Summer has, I think, 13 moving shots: 3 different times, he cuts from a moving shot to another moving shot - and one of the three is in fact 3 consecutive moving shots. And - all of them, I think, follow the same patterns of 45-90-135-180 degree angles that David Bordwell has discussed in his editing. Shots move perpendicular to the dominant plane of the shot - or they move straight forward or back. Very rarely (though more commonly in the early films, again) they will move at a 45 degree angle...

Which brings me to the crane shot. Even here - 1) it is related to all those shots of people walking and talking: the camera rises as the women rise, climbing a dune - it rises to keep them roughly in a fixed place in the screen. 2) Note that the camera goes straight up - maintaining the 90 degree rule; 3) and emphasizing it, with the strong horizontal horizon lines of the beach. Even when he does something uncharacteristic - he makes it completely characteristic. even something that has as much emotional freight as this might be made to carry - it functions more or less perfectly within the abstract patterns of his style. The ability to do both, always - is what makes Ozu Ozu.

Notes on Variations, Mostly

As the second contemplative cinema blogathon comes to a close, I want to write up some thoughts on "parametric" explorations in contemplative cinema. I am not sure what this means, if it means anything. I suppose I start from the notion (outlined in my previous post on this) that "contemplative" cinema is a refinement of the "art film" - that it derives its style mostly from that tradition, and shares most of its concerns, and its orientation toward reality, human subjectivity, expressiveness, and so on, with the art film. That is - style and content are, usually, aligned - silence and stillness and ambiguity in contemplative films, like in art films, are meaningful - they express either the subjective experience of their characters, or of the filmmaker. This is one of the points where they differ from the "parametric" film - the "modernist", or maybe "formalist" film. These are films where elements of the style function on their own - the style still conveys the experience of the characters and ideas of the filmmaker, but they take on other functions as well.

So how do these kinds of formal play work in contemplative films? I can't pretend to answer that - but I will offer some observations on a couple films that do play with those kinds of ideas. Particularly Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century...

Syndromes does some parametric things. It is split in half, and the two halves are related in a number of ways: same actors, playing the same (or similar) characters; both set in hospitals; the second one starts in a new, modern hospital but later moves into the basement, which uses the sets from the first half. It's structured as two sides of a love affair (or anticipated love affair) - in the first half we follow a woman doctor, her affairs, or non-affairs; in the second, a man, and the end of an affair, rendered with great subtlety. The plot turns on this continuity - both stories are about one of these characters not falling in love, or falling out of love, with someone else. And the two halves echo images and ideas - repeating or reversing them. The most powerful, probably, the pairing of a solar eclipse in the first half with a long strange shot of a piece of machinery, a hose or lamp or something, which, like the eclipsed sun, fills the screen with a huge black circle....

Repetition and parallelism are common in art films - and contemplative films. Hong Sang-soo, for instance, usually builds his films around repeated scenes and stories. But Weerasethakul seems to be handling this a bit differently, here and in Tropical Malady (the two of his I've seen so far - though with luck, I'll see Blissfully Yours next week). Hong naturalizes the repetitions - he tends to repeat scenes as they are experienced by different characters: so in Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, for example, we see the same story from the two main characters' points of view. Syndromes and a Century may be doing something like that, but not exactly - because it is creating a different story world, where different things happen. It is not the same story seen two different ways, with differences that can be attributed to varying memories and attitudes: it is a different story.

This moves it closer to what Bordwell calls "parametric" films. It highlights the act of telling a story even more than usual for art films. It is not presented as multiple versions of the same story, but of multiple stories with a related purpose. It plays, then, like two passes through the same material, running the changes on the basic stuff of the story. In this, it recalls Ozu's films - the way he kept reusing his actors, his story situations (a daughter marrying, usually), character names, family relationships - but arranged differently, as if trying out all the possible permutations. This begins to suggest a way of considering these films different from Bordwell's. Bordwell focuses on narration, on how the story is told, on the relationship, in a film, between the telling and the story world being created. But while there are stylistic variations in Syndromes and a Century, the main changes are to the story world - the "fabula". This creates a different dynamic - one that calls to mind Brian McHale's characterization of post-modern fiction as being driven by ontological concerns. McHale argues that modernism was driven by epistemological questions - what can be known about the world? how does ones subjective experience of the world shape it? Post-modernism, though, is driven by ontological questions - what is real? The distinction is neatly illustrated by comparing Hong's double narratives to Weerasethakul's. Hong's films show a stable ontology from multiple points of view - his films are about point of view, memory, individual interpretation of events. Syndromes, though, shows two different possible worlds, linked by various elements - characters, actors, situations - but they don't create the same story from two angles. They create different stories.

Bordwell, as it happens, covers something similar to this in his new book. One of the chapters discusses forking path films: Run Lola Run - Too Many Ways to be Number One - Sliding Doors - Blind Chance.... films that explicitly pose varying possible futures. Syndromes and a Century doesn't present itself explicitly as an alternative future film, but it is similar. In some ways, it might be more radical - it doesn't rationalize its style as fantasy or science fiction or explicit options or allegories. It just tells 2 similar, but not identical stories about similar, but not necessarily identical characters, in similar, but not identical worlds, populated by similar, but not identical people. Using similar, but not identical locations, images, conversations and so on. Which if you're a bit of as formalist like me is just endlessly fascinating....

Getting back to the question of contemplative cinema - this sort of formal game play may seem to be at odds with the expectation for muted narrative, blankness, silence and so on, but it's not unknown. Divided stories turn up quite often in films of this sort. Some, possibly most, follow the fairly conventional art film patterns of Hong Sang-soo's films: exploring different points of view, following different characters in turn, etc. is common enough. But this can be linked to some degree and type of parametric storytelling as well. Sometimes safely within the "fabula" - Kiarostami's A Taste of Cherry, say, is structured around three variations of one conversation... Sometimes by imposing formal strangeness on a relatively stable story world - as in Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, with its parallel stories, each centered on a different Lee Kang-sheng character.... And sometimes, films push the variations quite far into the realm of style. In Vanda's Room, Pedro Costa alternates between scenes shot with Vanda and her family and friends, and scenes shot with a group of men, living (mostly) in a condemned, abandoned, room. All of them share the basic look - digital camera, natural light, long takes, etc. - but there are significant stylistic differences as well. He has said that he looks at the scenes with Vanda as theater - the men as cinema: he films her in her room, usually on her bed, holding forth, quite often, with her family or friends, fairly vocal, very performative. The bed is a stage - he frames and shoots to emphasize the stage, the frontality of the room. The men, though, are cinema - which emerges in the way he shoots them. While the camera is fixed in any given shot, he shoots from a much greater variety of placements; the room has much more of a sense of 360 degree space. There is a stronger sense of offscreen space as well, with sounds coming from the street, with visible doors, people coming and going, and so on. Vanda's room tends to be closed in: it is what you see (though not always what you can hear.) I'd even say that the variation extends to the type of drugs they use: the women smoke heroin - the men shoot it. I don't know what that means - but in the film, it serves to create a kind of structural, formal pattern. Its meaninglessness, in fact, emphasizes its formal functionality - it slides toward being a purely formal device. Which, again, pushes the film toward "parametric" filmmaking....