The Voice of the Moon (1990) A Film by Federico Fellini

"Somewhere deep in the foggy Italian countryside, in an abandoned barn in the middle of the night, Michael Jackson's 'The Way You Make Me Feel' booms over a sound system for the dancing pleasure of a mob of leather-clad Gen X-ers. On the evidence of The Voice of the Moon, this was an aging Federico Fellini's vision of a world under the spell of globalized pop music and youth culture, where the new and the hip is a pervasive bug filling every crevice left by the old and the archaic. When this endearingly absurdist illusion manifests itself around the three-quarter mark of the film, however, it's a sense of euphoria, not cynicism, that prevails."

Full review of Fellini's swan song, now out on Blu-ray from Arrow Video, continues at Slant.

The Other Side (2015) A Film by Roberto Minervini

"An artist of herculean empathy turns his camera on a narrow-minded community in The Other Side, Italian director Roberto Minervini's fourth cinematic sojourn in the American South. Nearly every moment in this Bayou-set docu-fiction hybrid engenders a tricky twofold reaction: The words and actions of the people on screen often trigger revulsion, anger, or pity, even as Minervini's camera tenderly cozies up to its subjects, examining them in intimate proximity until the root causes and emotional justifications for their destructive behaviors become impossible to ignore." Review continues here.

Swept Away (1974) A Film by Lina Wertmüller

After a prelude aboard a ship full of Italian literati quarreling about politics somewhere in the gleaming Mediterranean, Swept Away takes the path not travelled by L’Avventura, imagining Antonioni’s narrative absence—the vanished beauty—as the focal point. Whatever ambiguities the earlier film left dangling with regard to the relative value of the privileged classes are swiftly bulldozed over by director Lina Wertmüller’s gambit of teaming up the materialistic heroine (Mariangela Melato’s Raffaella) with the working-class ruffian (Giancarlo Giannini’s Gennarino) tasked with manning her personal motorized rowboat—a trip intended as an easygoing afternoon sojourn that goes awry when they lose track of their home base. It’s a facile setup—capitalism and communism forced to collaborate!—that Wertmüller takes glee in probing from all sides, then picking apart until the central dichotomy evaporates and reveals sedimentary layers of power relationships. Right off the bat, Raffaella’s shrillness as a bourgeois caricature makes it easy to side with Gennarino’s barked indictments of her cultural ignorance, as well as to applaud his reflexive ability to enter survival mode against her preference for hysterics and constant cosmetic self-interest. But when the duo stations on an island, the rocky geography of which offers Wertmüller ample opportunity to encode power shifts as high-low spatial dynamics, Gennarino’s rhetoric and behavior abruptly veer toward the sadistically authoritarian—his perceived righteous vengeance for the accumulated sins of the upper-middle-class enacted on the Good People of Italy.

Swept Away’s action gets progressively thornier (Gennarino’s revenge fantasy goes unchecked, basically), and with it the angle of the film’s attack deepens. What begins as a takedown of materialism evolves into an expose on the horrific means and ends of masculine power, then a broader critique of the perils of having authority in general, then ultimately the deduction that the implicit codes of society itself are the greatest evil. As Gennarino wills Raffaella under a spell of carnal lust and the two arrive at a perverted but strangely effective co-dependence, Wertmüller’s implication is that the pair has devolved back to a nascent, animalistic state, composed in part of Adam and Eve’s spiritual purity and Neanderthalian barbarity. (A lengthy close-up of the impassioned lovers framed against the roaring glow of a fire in the background christens the mythical mood accordingly.) But even in this newfound harmony, Gennarino’s glaring misogyny persists, while Raffaella never gets a comparable chance to own any persona other than subservience. If Wertmüller’s recurrent staging of Gennarino looking down on Raffaella either mid-coitus or from atop a rocky perch are meant to taken ironically, there’s no leavening impression of Raffaella ever gaining agency as an individual (the closest the film gets to elevating her out of servility is the suggestion, wrung out in a series of high-angle shots of the characters wrestling in sand, that both characters have become equally debased).

In the uncivilized utopia that Swept Away posits as an alternative to the corrupted societal infrastructure, women still play second fiddle to men, a strange proposition coming from a female filmmaker but one that seems aligned to the more regressive extremes of the era’s radical politics. It’s possible that the final sequence—which finds Gennarino, now rescued and reunited with his wife, attempting to escape again with Raffaella only to be thwarted by her last-minute departure by helicopter—is meant as an indication of the victory of the female over the oppressiveness of the male (as well as an amusing comment on the luxuries of the capitalist, always able to just phone in expensive transportation to ascend above a situation literally and figuratively). But that reading is dissolved by Wertmüller’s decision to spend the last few minutes of the movie with the mopey and reproachful Gennarino, a misplacement of empathy that lands the final blow to this adroitly cynical but ultimately wrongheaded experiment in allegorical melodrama.

Navajo Joe (1966) A Film by Sergio Corbucci

"In no small part because of Reynolds's centrality, Navajo Joe feels like the first installment of a no-nonsense action franchise that never materialized. It's got a big-name star whose presence supersedes his fictional character, a theme song that renders its title and central character a jingle, and a barebones plot with broadly sketched good guys and bad guys. It's easy to imagine the central conceit—bandits slaughter members of Joe's tribe, and Joe seeks revenge on them—accommodating theoretically endless and interchangeable iterations. Perhaps Joe, after ridding the southwest of the unruly Mexicans in Mervyn 'Vee' Duncan's (Aldo Sambrell) gang (there's more than a hint of conservative border-policing implicit in the scenario), would attempt to seek peace with his people up north, only to encounter more amoral outgrowths of manifest destiny. The thematic root of Navajo Joe—righteous Native American indignation at the seizure of their land and the killing of their people—is a simple enough narrative engine to generate countless grindhouse plots of merciless pursuit and vengeance." Reviewed a new Blu-Ray of Navajo Joe from Kino Lorber for Slant Magazine.

The Creation of Meaning (2014) A Film by Simone Rapisarda Casanova

"At first glance, The Creation of Meaning's title seems unapologetically, unambiguously direct with regard to the film's spectatorial challenge. The film starts by offering a series of disparate stimuli: talk of Italian-German conflict during World War II, a group of young students, a mountainous Tuscan landscape clouded in fog, a solitary farmer trudging through thick brush, a shot of a beetle toppling itself over. These discrete components of image and sound exist somewhat autonomously in the context of a languorous visual style where takes can run as long as 15 minutes, which frustrates an impulse to make dialectical associations within the montage." Continued over at Slant as part of coverage for the New Directors/New Films Festival.

The Great Beauty (2013) A Film by Paolo Sorrentino

I've never actually seen a film by Italian director Paolo Sorrentino (Il Divo, This Must be the Place) until now, but based on my positive response to The Great Beauty, I'll be sure to start hunting more down. His latest is a virtuosic visual hymn to contemporary Rome, indelibly haunted by the influence of legendary Italian filmmakers (Fellini and Antonioni especially) and other formidable European auteurs of generations past (several shots suggest the grandiosity of the late Theodoros Angelopoulos). My review can be found here.

TIE: A Selection of Shorts

TIE, the International Experimental Cinema Exposition, is a traveling program of experimental films curated by Christopher May that seeks to bring to light the impoverished image of contemporary experimental cinema to a broader filmgoing public. What's more, May is working hard to revive the nearly extinct ghetto of 16mm exhibition, a medium that has become less and less attractive to the profiteers of international cinema curation. TIE's latest program, which recently made a pit stop in Boston, is a collection of short films by mostly American filmmakers ranging from 5-22 minutes that loosely explore the notion of travel and aim to transcend conventional anthropological approaches. Further affinities between the six films reveal themselves throughout the program - the idea of the outsider, the trajectory through a space, certain visual and editorial rhythms - that speak to May's sharpness as a curator.

The program began with Diane Kitchen's Penfield Road, the oldest film of the bunch from 1998. It's a playful meditation on travel, specifically contrasting the ideas of vacation and of merely occupying a place. Kitchen uses postcard pictures rather than here own footage and accumulates a bizarre editing rhythm by alternating back and forth between two images several times before introducing a new image to alternate with the second in the first pair. This somewhat unsettling pictorial rhythm, akin to a line of dominoes reversing their inevitable momentum every other piece, is set to rough, fuzzy ragtime that skips as if spinning on a bad record player. Kitchen's clearly suspending a sense of irony when she shows uninhabited nature alongside dolled-up middle-aged women peering out at the world from an observation tower, but the effect is less often funny and more often stuck between bluntly didactic and curiously thought-provoking. Whether one thinks of these small and iconic figures in the postcards as exploiting the beauty of the natural world or respecting their small roles within it, Kitchen is at least attempting to make the viewer consider the way we inhabit the physical world.

In Death Throes #1, filmmaker Tony Balko goes way beyond Kitchen's rapid photomontage to achieve pure frenzy, an assault of images that paradoxically achieve a mood of relaxation, of quietly taking in the stillness of nature. The effect is not unlike some of Stan Brakhage's shorts that use fast bursts of images to reach for something warm and ephemeral, such as Cat's Cradle or Mothlight. Balko assembles hundreds of fragmented shots of Northern California mountain regions, combining rocks, leaves, dirt, insects, trees, sky, and mountaintops to gradually form a cumulative mental picture of the landscape. Usually the same piece of scenery, no matter how undramatic, will be shown several times in a row from slightly different angles, perhaps some blurred and some not, offering multiple ways of looking at the same thing before the image quickly recedes into the rapid movement of the film and reveals something else. The editing is relentless but often strikingly beautiful, such as when Balko creates an extended stretch of shots that form their own miniature progression. And despite the seeming chaos, one could similarly apply an overarching narrative to the entire short; the images, abstracted from the utter speed and momentum, appear to tell the internal, emotional tale of a sunny hiking trip.

If Balko's objective is to aggressively interrogate the objective to locate the subjective, Chilean filmmaker Jeannette Muñoz' Villatalla takes a more reserved stance on objectivity and aspires to suggest nothing more than the physical world before her camera. Muñoz' film is split into two parts - one in color with field recordings and the other in black and white with no audio - that observe the daily happenings in a remote mountain village in Liguria. So drastic is Muñoz' shift that the project feels like two separate films, the first of which is superior in mood and discipline. It is there that her compositions are at their best, fragmenting the space visually while uniting the village through the quiet, spacious field recordings. In the second chunk of the 22 minute running time, the camera observes a sun-bleached forest where a farmer collects various sticks for an unspecified task. Muñoz' attention to the rhythms of the man's work wavers, making it a somewhat incomplete study of labor and solitude. Instead, her focus drifts to a seemingly endless succession of indifferently-framed shots of forest undergrowth. Still, however unfocused, there's a real sense of an outsider's compassion for her new and humbling surroundings.

The highlight of the showcase was Jonathon Schwartz' Between Gold, which possesses a measure of thematic complexity to coincide with its casual and nuanced observation of an exotic country. The film grew out of Schwartz' brief stay in Istanbul, where he brought along a Bolex and indiscriminately filmed people and places, and it concerns itself with the docking grounds on either sides of the Bosphorus Strait, which mark a divide between Europe and Asia as well a distinct separation of the Turkish areas of Anatolia and Rumelia. Being an economic center, the Strait sees great amounts of back-and-forth migration. Schwartz focuses on this unceasing movement while keeping his images unobtrusive, languid, and ruminative. As much as people are traversing from one space to another, there is also stasis between transportation, and it is during this layover that Schwartz finds his most evocative images of quiet, lonely figures, partly dehumanized in the midst of the ongoing cultural exchange (is Schwartz' insistent non-diegetic soundtrack of dogs barking a suggestion of the ultimate debasement inherent in all this monotony?) yet elevated by the camera's gaze. The finest example of this act of individualization is the film's centerpiece, a long and repetitive passage focusing on a young woman's face, back-lit by the sun, as she rides the ferry from one continent to another. Few films in the program allowed such transcendent moments of introspection, and Between Gold was the humanistic triumph because of it.

Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times) A Film by Michelangelo Frammartino (2010)

It's quite a magical transfiguration how the smoke that fills the frame in the opening shot of Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte comes to be freighted with such expansive significance by the end of the film. The film's title, translated as either The Four Times or The Four Lives, has rather clear meaning in terms of its loose, suggestive narrative trajectory: in a small medieval Italian village perched atop steep mountains, Frammartino covers the four transformations of an object (human, animal, natural, material) that he posits to be the universal cycle of nature. An old, coughing goat herder (Giuseppe Fuda) dies and gives way to a baby goat, who then dies next to a tree, its decomposing corpse feeding life into the tree which ultimately is chopped down and used for the production of charcoal. This description nails down the entirety of the narrative, but it's beyond that the film achieves such an epic and unique meditation on life, death, and nature. The presence of the smoke at the beginning of the film is either an example of an "end is the beginning" storytelling maneuver or it's simply an excuse for Frammartino to prime the viewer for the eventual metaphysical discovery that the smoke is more than smoke, just as everything in his cosmically interconnected vision of nature has a multifaceted history behind its surface appearance.

An amusing oversight in the majority of synopses for the film place the elderly shepherd at the center of the "plot", as if he's the axis around which everything revolves, and as if the film can't be swallowed without a distinct point of human empathy. Frammartino, I imagine, would likely get a laugh out of this, because what his film is more precisely getting at is the relative inconsequentiality of the human in the vast order of nature. Le Quattro Volte merely begins with the human (or to be more exact, it begins with the smoke, the vessel in which only traces of a life form are returned back to the atmosphere) and ends somewhere far more permanent and intangible. This is not to say that the film is smug or reductive in its representation of humanity (quite the contrary as Frammartino's long attentiveness to the contours of the shepherd's face or the reliance upon spiritual folklore that marks his daily routine suggests a heightened sensitivity to the dignity of human beings in such an anti-modern, agrarian environment), just that it realizes and even celebrates the inevitable smallness of our place in the universe.

The film's elliptical progression is built around mini, self-contained action narratives (when I say action, I mean these scenes gather an enveloping power and story arch based purely on the physical behaviors within the frame). In the opening segment - the first of four separated by seconds of black leader that strongly suggest moments of reincarnation - the shepherd, a man clearly dying from some ailment, must trek down to the village church at night to retrieve a refill of his special medicine, which in adherence to a long-standing method of folk healing is the dust swept up from the floor of the church, presumably thought to be "holy". Normally, the shepherd trades his goat milk for a batch of the church dust but in this instance has no option when he discovers that the church is locked. Frammartino follows his odyssey of desperation in fixed takes, but he also keeps his distance. In such episodes, the film exhibits an omniscient foresight, asking us not to immerse ourselves in fear for the shepherd's life but to observe casually and prepare for what's next. This forward-thinking quality most closely resembles that of nature, which in Le Quattro Volte is seemingly always a step ahead, ready to produce newer life forms out of the rubbish of old.



The best of these vignettes, and exactly what the film neutrally advises us to prepare for, is a marvel of choreography that extends for several minutes. In it, a church procession marches down the street in one of Frammartino's recurring high-angle shots on the morning following the shepherd's search for the medicine. The composition is precisely structured: the fenced-in herd of goats appears on the left side of the frame, the street cuts across the middle, and an inconveniently-placed truck sits on a hill on the right side. Miraculously, Frammartino stages (or does he?) a dramatic series of events in which the shepherd's faithful dog tries desperately to alarm the passersby of the discrepancy in his owner's routine, barking and jumping around. The procession understandably doesn't heed the dog's unreadable warning, barging through to the other side of the street wherein Frammartino's camera position pans 270 degrees into another exquisite framing of a wooded street. The dog returns to terrorize a stray worshipper and then dislodge the truck from its position to crash directly into the goat fence, both actions occurring seemingly unintentionally. Despite the mammoth length of the scene and relative distance between pivotal points in the shot, there is a supreme sense of slapstick comic timing that raises the tantalizing question of directorial intrusion or natural absurdity. Given the difficulty of directing animals with this amount of shocking precision, I would feel inclined to agree with the latter, which only strengthens the film's revelatory view of nature as a force bearing a separate, universal consciousness.

Once the goats have escaped from their enclosure, they investigate the shepherd's grounds, finding him gasping lethargically for life in his bed. Upon the man's expected death the film launches into its second section, inaugurated by a startling shot of a white calf dropping from between its mother's hind legs. This is the film's most persuasive hint towards a theme of reincarnation; Frammartino certainly doesn't spell his ideas out, but he doesn't cloak them in deep obscurity either. The calf is slow to adjust to the world, and the film responds by casting a glow of freshness upon objects. In a barn lit only by cracks of beaming sunlight, the group of young goats experience the falling of a broom with mutual bemusement. A pack mentality and eventually a growing need for competition arises, until suddenly the white calf is stranded in a ditch during one of the daily herds through the countryside. Frammartino expertly manages his minimalist soundtrack, conveying as great a sensation of loss and isolation in the sudden absence of the hitherto omnipresent clatter of bells as in the melancholy image of the calf alone in the forest, "baah-ing" with a fear of the unfamiliar (a moment that is, I should add, nearly as moving as the final scene of Au Hasard Balthasar.)



Frammartino's evocation of the subsequent transformation is remarkably subtle and free of emotional manipulation (we are talking about the stranding and innocent death of an adorable young animal here). Instead, the expected strategy is reversed and the sequence is unusually uplifting, with a series of the same landscape shot in different seasons containing the tree the calf last laid down under, a slight aesthetic move that allows for a mere inference towards the animal's fate while acknowledging the idea of seasonal renewal. Adding a layer of absurdist comedy to the mix is the next narrative progression involving a gang of gung-ho civilians cutting down the tree to embark on some weird celebratory ritual back in the village. The shot of the treetop slowly rising with human force above the thatched roofing of the village, accompanied only by the faint sounds of camaraderie, is a particularly memorable one, humorously indicating man's ceaseless drive to claim and manipulate nature.

Le Quattro Volte doesn't stop there though, ensuring that although the tree (an amalgam of both the shepherd and the calf's life forms) was stolen from its place in the ground for arguably trivial human purposes, it will be returned to the Earth in a more diffuse manner, spreading through the smoke of the charcoal production across the many vast and misty mountains that Frammartino carefully photographs throughout the film. Rather than belittling to human experience, this is a graceful and humble nod to the ultimate possession of our souls to the Earth in which we reside and not simply in the domain of a personal lifespan. Lest I sound too abstract and poetic (such an opaque, wordless film will do that to you), it's important to mention that Frammartino has crafted an elegant visual essay that can really only be described in such terms. But rather than being intellectually exhausting, it's an inviting, rewarding work, a soft punch right to the frothy, ambiguous gut of emotions and feelings, and even as it elicits dense allusions to the cyclical theories of Pythagoras and the alarming illogicality of village folklore, it need not be reduced to linguistic justifications.

Red Desert (Deserto Rosso) A Film by Michelangelo Antonioni (1964)

When Monica Vitti first appears in frame in Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert, her figure looks surreal against the pale, corroded industrial landscape she traverses. She's beautiful, as usual, with a green wool coat and voluminous red locks of hair. On the same waterside dock as her is a mass of striking workers in homogeneous gray and brown uniforms, their appropriately herd-like behavior set against Vitti's cautious mother figure, navigating the acres of factories and steamships with her little boy to meet up with her husband Udo (Carlo Chionetti), the manager of this misty compound in Ravenna, Italy. It's a world of vapid technological progress, of muscle and science, and Vitti's elegant, delicate Guiliana instantly feels out of place. For all of the surface similarities between Red Desert and Antonioni's previous three films (his "alienation trilogy" made up of L'Avventura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse), the outsider quality of Vitti's main character, her casual exoticism in her own habitat, vastly separates Antonioni's project. We now have a woman who is not isolated from her familiar, though somewhat evolving bourgeois dwellings, but rather a bourgeois woman permanently housed within an alien environment, the pressure point of modern materialism. The film is the slow-burning dramatization of her misplacement.

Guiliana's problem goes deeper than a simple case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time however. The industrial habitat is a nucleus, a predictor of how the outside world will evolve, and not just a rare exception. It is clear that the unpredictable, enigmatic neurosis that Antonioni superbly conveys in Guiliana cannot be cured in any systematic manner. Instead, it is the result of a woman being out of step with the movement of society around her, unprepared to adapt psychologically and physiologically to her surroundings. Udo stubbornly attributes her emotional turmoil to a vaguely defined "accident" some half a year before that put her in a hospital for months, but from the first time Antonioni reveals one of her chilling midnight haunts, the implication is that something far more all-encompassing, more undefinable, is at the root of her world-weary exhaustion. She twitches, forgets things, caresses her body in a panic fit as if to make sure it's still there, and shies away from all physical contact. Yet when she's not having such convulsions, she's acting comparatively normal, maintaining an air of adult complacence and even engaging in a bit of horseplay in the film's drawn-out centerpiece, an impromptu gathering between a group of industrialists and their wives at an abandoned fishing hut. This sequence, a languid choreography of laughing and sometimes writhing adults chatting circuitously about aphrodisiacs and other insignificant topics, illuminates the seeming calmness and comfort level of the majority of the group, and cements Guiliana's status as a fundamental outcast, prone to certain behavioral changes that come across as hasty and unmotivated.

Only a mild and arbitrary interjection of the external world - say, the presence of a color (intentionally calculated by Antonioni) or a particular spoken word that doesn't sit right - can disturb Guiliana back to her angst. In the case of this particular sequence, a quarantine flag raised by a neighboring ship sends her into a panic. This occurs after an aphrodisiac compels her to make an offhand, celebratory comment about her desire to make love. She then reiterates privately to her husband, "I meant it, I do want to make love." His response is at once practical and backhanded: "How can we?" Though he's referring to the social incorrectness of indulging in desire before the group of people around the two of them, he might as well be speaking broadly. How are two people to make love in Antonioni's grim world, a place where "it's never still", as Vitti pronounces, where thick fog and industrial horns perpetually interrupt the stasis. A sensual pleasure such as that which Guiliana requests, which is potentially enough to remind her of a reason to live, seems impossible and unthinkable. As with many of Antonioni's films, Red Desert's general narrative action can be brusquely reduced to "people talk and talk and never quite connect", and one gets the sense that it's a fatal misfortune, that the searing emotional divide between people is partly what's preventing Guiliana from properly engaging with the world.



One character, Richard Harris' Corrado Zeller, a friend and coworker of Udo, gestures towards personal, enlightening connection with Guilana. He arrives with both a calculated sense of lust towards her and his own particular breed of sorrow. Listening and ogling more than he does engage in conversation, he nonetheless represents a somewhat continuous source of support and empathy for Guiliana, who reveals to him a story of her past suicide attempt. But when he proves to be equally out of sync with the world, affirmed by his eventual taking advantage of Guiliana in her climactic moment of distress, Antonioni's point becomes clear as ever: that there's no easy escape, no shoulder to cry on in regards to this kind of moral discomfort, that only approximate adaptions made over time can approach anything near alleviation. This is the undertow of the quiet, poetic final scene, in which Guiliana once again walks through the industrial maze, answering an innocent question from her son about a bird's ability to evolve in such a way that it knows to avoid the gushing poisonous smog from the silos. Guiliana's small feat of acknowledging this instinctual maturation, of becoming the authority on it, implies that she is prepared to at least tolerate the world, if not cope with it.

All of this is, for the most part, more alienation from Antonioni, a thematic concern that was in danger of becoming simplistic shtick at this point in his career. But too much of Red Desert hints towards newer ideas and points towards the refreshing experiments of Blow-Up and Zabriskie Point. One sequence in particular stands out, and it comes at roughly the beginning of the final act. Guiliana is comforting her son with a story, but at his request it's not a preexisting story, something pre-fabricated to elicit a streamlined response. Therefore, she is forced to pull from within, from her ideals, experiences, and memories. As she narrates an iconic tale of a curious little girl and her secret private beach, Antonioni provides luminous, nostalgic images that feel like estimations of Guiliana's own thought process. The girl is confronted three times with unsettling mysteries - a floating empty boat, an unidentified operatic voice, the startlingly human-like rock formations - and is forced to overcome them with both excitement and fear. It's touching that Antonioni engages with and allows for this kind of emotional crutch, the ability to conjure up the past in an attempt to understand the present. Rather than being stranded totally in her confusion, there is this sudden moment of catharsis that is uplifting and transfixing.

Antonioni's typically impeccable mise-en-scene stretches here to a new degree of artistry. Interestingly, shots of the back of Vitti's head, with her vantage point out of focus, the kind of images that might be brief insert shots in another film, become the punctuation points to focus on here. They communicate a murkiness and unfamiliarity of vision that Lucrecia Martel certainly must have lifted as inspiration for her film The Headless Woman. His decision to convert to color was the boldest and most advantageous choice of his career, and Red Desert, his inaugural experiment with it, renders one astounding image after another. It's been argued that his integration of specific primary colors warrants a scene-to-scene symbolic or psychological value, but I take them as being an incessantly oppressive and taunting force, a reminder of the colorful allure of Guiliana's wardrobe, and hence her preferred mode of living. They seem like the last potent indicators of life and creativity in a milieu mostly dominated by unflattering grays and browns and exacting progress. It's a beautiful plea indeed, the kind of thing that conveys an even greater pain and isolation than almost anything Antonioni had done prior.

The Sheltering Sky (1990) A Film by Bernardo Bertolucci

(Disclaimer: This is an essay I wrote for a class I take called Exoticism in Literature and Art. It was not a critical piece per se, and thus limited me to speaking on rather objective terms. Though I do hold many of the points in my essay to be true and indeed effective in the film, I also refrained from criticizing areas that truly needed criticism. This is far from Bernardo Bertolucci's best film.)

Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky is a film that deliberately pulls a well-mounted rug out from under you to immerse you in vast uncertainty, to confront you with the true indifference of the natural world. Based off of Paul Bowles’ acclaimed novel of the same name, the film tells the brooding tale of a pair of long-time lovers – Port and Kit Moresby, played by John Malkovich and Debra Winger, respectively – who venture out of their familiar New York City home to the Sahara Desert to lead a traveling life of exoticism and unpredictability from which they plan not to return. Deep down the film is also a study of an estranged marriage and the ways in which the empty, forbidding landscape provides an exotic channel through which Port and Kit can evaluate their own fundamental differences.

Bertolucci divides the film into two dissonant sections, mirroring the structure of Bowles’ novel. Both parts utilize sharply contrasting cinematic techniques, a method which first produces audience comprehension but eventually turns to anarchic confusion. The initial half is essentially a conventionalized translation of the personalities that the book gradually establishes; Port is a self-assured, humorless intellectual with an existentialist worldview, Kit is an artless, well-meaning lover prone to superstitious beliefs, and the pair’s tagalong, George Tunner, is a shallow, personable aristocrat interested in the romantic foibles of Port and Kit. A sharper eye than that of the book is spent documenting their interrelations, creating the notion that these are people that can be understood, albeit with some difficulty, whereas the book tends to wallow in strong relational ambiguity. Perhaps wisely, Bowles rarely attempts to mine the complicated depths of what is left unsaid; Bertolucci and his cinematographer Vittorio Storaro apply visual indicators that serve to assist interpretation, like deep red and blue color filters.



The emphasis throughout the first half is on dialogue and exposition, much like a Hollywood film. There are moments of tension as well as lighter filler scenes, and discerning which is which is all made helpful by the inclusion of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s mournful score, which only really underscores the scenes when Port and Kit are having serious conversations about the state of their marriage. Bertolucci’s camera stays at a traditional distance to his characters, employing an even dose of medium shots and close-ups. All of this manages to communicate a cinematic language that is familiar to Western moviegoers, a language that gives them what they expect regarding narrative flow, character development, and visual style. Though the plot moves at a relatively calculated pace, the audience comes to foresee a climax and eventually a typical conclusion involving the state of Port, Kit, and Tunner. Then, as in the book, Port suddenly dies of a Typhoid illness that quickly weakens him. In an instant, the film itself feels exotic. How could the main character die so early in the story? What does that mean for the rest of the characters? What does that mean for the film? Bertolucci lets these questions linger without an answer until by the end they are no longer important. Kit is finally alone in an unusual land, finally unguarded against the elements. Having each other earlier was what provided a barrier to really being immersed in the new culture they were entering. Once Kit finds herself without a crutch, there is no protection from what surrounds her; everything is unfamiliar, and superstition cannot solve her husband’s unanticipated death.

If Bertolucci’s classical mise-en-scene felt ill suited to the existential undercurrents in the first half, it was because he was saving all of his vast panoramic shots for the second. Close-ups become few and far between. Finally the camera captures both the land and the sky that is so crucial to the title as well as the thematic content of the story, dwarfing humans against it to suggest their triviality on a grand scale. In a film about the gulf between the existentialist tenets of Port – the idea that humans are without guidance from higher powers, that their actions alone dictate who they become – and the hopeful mysticism of Kit, these kinds of distant, contemplative shots are necessary both to allow for audience interpretation and to recognize the unavoidable, physical fact of nature that is constantly playing a role in either. Amidst the intense solitude and sorrow of the second half, they primarily work to propose that Kit is, much to her dismay, without assistance.



Once she is alone, the narrative loses a large portion of what made it feel traditional in the first place. She finds herself drifting aimlessly through the Sahara and is eventually taken under the wing of a small Arab group riding on camelback, becoming one man’s concubine. At the same rate of Kit’s transformation from an American traveler to another covered-up member of the tribe, the film eschews its sense of narrative control until eventually it seems as if Bertolucci is no longer directing the action onscreen. Instead, in long scenes depicting Kit’s wanderings through the small desert villages that the group takes rests at, the visual and aural cacophony of her surroundings seems to dictate what exactly the camera is doing. Vittorio Storaro never shot any documentaries early in his career, but in The Sheltering Sky’s latter half one begins to wonder if he did, because the film gains a sturdy element of verisimilitude, as if it’s an ethnographic video.

Unlike in a Hollywood film, Kit - who up until this point is one of the major characters and is frequently onscreen in close-up – blurs in with the other bodies that swarm around her. Because she has finally adopted the clothing of the Arabs, often times it is unclear where she is, and the film’s densely layered diegetic sound further obscures her presence. The Arab people chant and drum relentlessly for what feels like an entire thirty minutes, and clamoring voices – mainly in native tongue, but also in Kit’s shifts between French and English – reach a level of intelligibility that differs greatly from the clearly audible conversations occurring earlier. Bertolucci doesn’t even include subtitles in every instance, and when he does they appear to merely confirm how trivial the words actually are. Verbal language no longer holds importance, ruling out the means through which Kit has communicated throughout the film, as well as through which most conformist art conveys its messages.

That The Sheltering Sky is able to utterly abandon its initial sense of order is crucial to its success as a practice in exoticism. The very chaos it eventually embraces is in itself exotic to Western audiences. It also helps to amplify the film’s fundamental philosophy of existentialism and its acute atmosphere of disconnection and incomprehension; the level of detachment we feel from the characters matches that which they feel from each other. Bertolucci wisely realizes the ability for the cinematic medium, as opposed to literature and theater, to create these distinct moods.

Eclipse (L'Eclisse) A Film by Michelangelo Antonioni (1962)

I have a troubling relationship with Michelangelo Antonioni's loose early 60's trilogy (the other two being L'Avventura (1960) and La Notte (1961)), because it seems that just about every time the films become so achingly beautiful that I'm in awe, Antonioni does something that achieves little more than bland fulfillment of the conventions of alienation that were in vogue in the art cinema of the time. L'Eclisse represents the apogee of this divide, with sequences that are among the most sublime Antonioni ever committed to film and others, like an endlessly prolonged stock market diversion or the moments when Monica Vitti can't utter anything but the words "I don't know", that are irritating beyond belief. Throughout these works, one senses that Antonioni was building up a personal stamp in the public's eyes, one that dealt with longeurs of wordlessness and blunt acknowledgments of the kind of dwarfing effect that modernity has on the individual, and, either consciously or subconsciously, he was factoring in what was expected of him. Thus, there are times when Antonioni is just being Antonioni, lounging in his signatures without necessarily always servicing the work. I find L'Eclisse to be the most accomplished of the three films though despite the transparency of these shout-outs to himself, because when it shines, it really shines.

It goes without saying, but the film is about the difficulty of making lasting emotional connections in an increasingly modernized milieu, and it stars Antonioni's muse Monica Vitti as the romantically, even spiritually confused bella. The first scene of L'Eclisse is actually the middle of a scene, one in which Antonioni does not supply the supposedly essential parts. We experience the feeling of dropping in on an uncomfortable tension between two lovers - Vitti's Vittoria and Francisco Rabal's Riccardo, a smug, corporate type - as it is perceived that Vittoria has in the very near past made a declaration of closure to Riccardo. The silence that pervades the moments with the adult couple shying awkwardly away from each other in a confined apartment space, a polar opposite of the chatty remoteness occurring in a similar scene between Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot in Godard's Contempt, is an immediate predictor of the film's relentless quietude, not just sonically but psychologically. Even in the most boisterous stretches, there is a blankness of mind, a murkiness, a general inability to externalize internal feelings. Vitti may invariably laugh, smile, and dance, such as in an uncharacteristic throwaway visual gag where she paints herself black and has a Kenyan pow-wow with her best friend's colonialist neighbor, but she is never resolutely happy.

About halfway through, L'Eclisse seems to incidentally pick up what becomes its primary plot point, just as L'Avventura unexpectedly transitions from a mystery regarding a lost woman to a timid romance between the two who are dispassionately searching for her. It's important to mention however that a "primary plot point" to Antonioni is just an excuse to explore a theme, and any semblance of story is democratized amongst the other aspects that make up the film. After literally drifting around for an extended period of time after leaving Riccardo, she begins to develop an enigmatic romance with a stockbroker working for her mother (Lilla Brignone) named Piero (Alain Delon). Their interactions begin as fragmented and uncertain; although Piero's attraction is bluntly clear, Vittoria has a habit of turning away from him at all possible costs, though never fully abandoning his company for fear of losing all hope in human connection. Eventually, she has difficulty holding back her attraction, and they grow more flirtatious, even engaging in a few outbreaks of unrestrained jostling with one another. Yet, to emphasize the fundamental distance between them, which can be uncannily felt through through their more mechanized movements, Antonioni, in one of his more leaden uses of visual symbolism, composes them kissing from opposites sides of a glass window. The suggestion is that attraction can exist merely on a superficial level, and as long as there are barriers to put up (the stock market and glass windows, both creations of man), people will forever be doomed to stand on either side, prohibiting them from real physical and emotional contact.



Vittoria's romantic liaisons are foregrounded against the materialistic concerns of urban life. To be more accurate, L'Eclisse is set in what looks like a newly renovated metropolitan area, with vast expanses of construction work within a hilly landscape. There is a driving contrast that the film establishes between the natural and the unnatural or man-made, evident in both the physical landscape as well as the emotional landscape between the sensual, searching Vittoria and the money-hungry Piero. Several instances powerfully illustrate this, such as Vittoria's aimless walks, shot in successions of wide panoramas. Antonioni also extracts the synthetic beauty out of the environment through Vittoria's heedless curiosity; one particularly stunning moment shows her standing motionless before a row of metal pillars clanking in the soft wind. However, there are also times when he brazenly overstates the world's mechanization, and this is precisely what I mean when I say Antonioni's just being Antonioni. The sequences at the stock market are intolerably long and banal, simplistically implying that to experience it for long enough is to truly understand its shallowness. Unfortunately, this comes across right away, and we are left to wallow in a clamor of writhing men in suits, screaming out numbers and plotting their next moves behind gargantuan pillars. Furthermore, the rather absurd, Tati-esque tone of the scenes muddles the intent, attempting to make something that should be dry and mathematical into an almost slapstick romp.

The absence of Vitti's character for a great portion of the stock market scenes is typical of L'Eclisse's propensity to completely strand its main characters and plot line. It's also an augur for the film's notoriously mysterious conclusion, which, after creating the expectation that Vittoria and Piero will meet the next morning in their usual spot, instead becomes an extended piece of visual poetry documenting their absence from the street corner where they first kiss timidly. At this point, the overbearing presence of the locations takes total precedence over the people occupying them, eclipsing them, if you will. Antonioni's aloof camera makes the mundane seem alien, luxuriating in a piece of driftwood floating in a bucket of water, the textures of the skin of a random passersby, or a long, empty street. Droning soundscapes accompany the images, creating what feels more like a sci-fi than a romance. I can't think of a more entrancing way to conclude this lonely, elegiac film, and it almost singlehandedly makes up for the more eye-rolling formalities.

Amarcord (1973) A Film by Federico Fellini

To watch Federico Fellini's Amarcord is to step inside someone else's mind as they flip through old photo albums from their youth. The film exists in that ineffable place where the brain constructs its own memories of the past, regardless of whether or not they play out as they did in the photographic scenes. Or at least, that's what Amarcord feels like. In truth, Fellini did not have to resurrect any ancient photographs or memorabilia from his past in order to build the world of the film; he did not need any objective indicators to use as springboards for ideas. That the atmosphere of the film seems so polished, so intimate, and so paradoxically accurate, despite its deliberately fabricated surfaces, speaks volumes about the feverish imagination of Fellini. The subject of the film is Fellini's hometown of Rimini, yet it's a place that he visited only sporadically and for brief periods of time since his youth. Fellini made a conscious decision not to shoot Amarcord in Rimini in order to preserve the poignancy and essential constructive nature of his memory, an intentional sidestep of representational autobiography.

Therefore the film is a work of self-mythology, and is all the more universal for it. Released in 1973 and thus considered one of the initial works in Fellini's much-overlooked "later career", Amarcord is the Italian director's warmest, most nostalgic, and most continually surprising film. Aside from the coherent time span of a year that the film takes place within, signaled by the yellow puffballs of spring that delicately breeze through the air and act as bookends, any semblance of narrative structure is nonexistent. Fellini instead just strings together a series of scenarios, mostly centering around a boisterous family with their pre-teen son Titta, but also expanding to accommodate for other members of the town, such as the impassioned prostitute Volpina, Titta's lovesick friends, and the object of all male desire, the refined Gradisca. Interspersed within the vignettes are brief scenes of meta-documentary, where a lawyer and historian muses about the town's culture directly to the camera, a trope that Fellini would return to in And the Ship Sails On. Emerging from this cacophony of seemingly disjointed scenes is a loving portrait of a community connected by its collective quirkiness.

Amarcord is an ensemble piece in the purest sense of the term, in that no individual character stands out as more important than another. Instead, it is their presence onscreen together, along with their surroundings, which work to form one large character, and it is this character, a spirit more than a physical shape, which proves of interest to Fellini. Fittingly, none of the individuals in the town would seem entirely plausible in this world; they occupy an adjacent universe as faint distortions of recognizable "types" seen through Fellini's mad imagination. He spent the bulk of his pre-production time going on day-trips to search for faces that could occupy his film, figures whom he believed could undergo his warping process from individuals to caricatures to the embodiments of his own crude sketches. The result is a cast of characters who may or may not be based off of real people from Fellini's past, yet each is so fully vested in that it's hard to doubt their existence. From Titta's father's enraged dinnertime fits to Gradisca's endearing poses for a Fascist officer to the priest's odd fascination with when and why the young boys touched themselves, Fellini depicts a town full of spirited oddballs who are grounded less in movie stereotypes as they are in one man's bubbling imagination.



The film's communitarian spirit is accompanied by an equally unwavering loyalty that the characters have towards God, their country, and their families, three values that are stated in this order throughout the film. Although Fellini's foremost interests are personal and anecdotal rather than political or religious, his examination of the inherent patriotism and faith in his characters proves to be quite crucial to the film. It is through these lenses which we view some of its most significant events. For instance, Titta and his friends' sexual fantasies - this being one of the most omnipresent themes in the film - are triggered mainly by the priest in confessionals. He adamantly inquires about their experiences in vulgarity, launching a hilarious montage of Titta and his friends satisfying themselves in inopportune places due to the smallest of erotic gestures. Later on, in a blazing release of sensual desire, the voluptuous tobacconist exposes herself to Titta and lets his face be consumed by her bosom. Similarly, Titta's plump friend imagines a marriage to his crush Aldina staged in front of a Fascist rally replete with an oversized flower-sculpture of Mussolini, the figure behind the force that puts Titta's Communist father through a scene in which he is coerced into drinking castor oil. Fellini, famously indifferent towards Fascism (a notion which is evident in the largely comic portrayal of the officers in the film), may not see politics or religious institutions as his film's meat, but it is an inevitability that they play a large role in the proceedings, figuring prominently into even the most personal of moments because of how sewn into the fabric of Italy they are.

For its majority, Amarcord is a boisterous film, punctuated almost constantly by joking spurts of foul-mouthed familial anger (a distinctly Italian trait if there ever was one) and Nina Rota's typically wistful, circus-like score. Even when we think we're silently viewing the town center in the middle of the night, with its dog seated territorially as always, a blaring motorcycle zooms by the frame and circles the square only to return and vanish off into the distance with another crackling roar. This continuous clatter emphasizes the liveliness of Rimini, the fact that even when it's ostensibly sleeping, it never quite tips over entirely into stasis. Yet there are a few scattered scenes where the magic of the visuals requires little to no aural accompaniment, and it is during these quiet moments that Amarcord is most sublime and memorable. The calm after the family's zany uncle stops screaming "I want a woman!" from high stop a tree, the thick fog covering the morning route to school where a cow is seen enigmatically sipping from a puddle, the first snow of the winter which, famously, marks the inexplicable arrival of a peacock; such scenes sprinkle mystery and beauty into this otherwise hilarious, irreverent, and charming artistic creation.

Irreversible and Salo (2002/1975) Films by Gaspar Noé and Pier Paolo Pasolini

French Director Gaspar Noé specializes in dishing out horrible experiences. Even if you consider yourself to be an especially audacious spectator of extreme cinema, Noé will manage to shock you out of your wits. Uniquely, this is not to say he is a poor director. In what is widely considered to be the apotheosis of Noé's expectation-bending oeuvre, Irreversible (2002) boasts considerable technical skill, comprised of only 12 excruciatingly tense, semi-improvised shots that tell a revenge tale in reverse. Within ten minutes of the film, there is no question that Noé is a filmmaker who is giddily willing to push boundaries, even if that means inducing severe headstrain in the face of topsy-turvy cinematography that careens around a seedy alleyway as if from the point of view of someone who had way too many drinks. Without a doubt this type of singularity should always be a breath of fresh air. However, once Noé's camera plunges into the depths of a homosexual nightclub called "The Rectum" to capture one of, if not the most unrelentingly savage sequence in cinema history, one wonders what the purpose of originality is if it's used for something so cruel. Significantly, that's not even the end of it; since we are given subliminal clues as to what happened before the events onscreen, we can only brace ourselves for what's to come.

My experience of watching Irreversible reminded me obliquely of the only other film I've seen that has disturbed me so profoundly: Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Although the two films were made in such distinct contexts - Italy in the 1970's and France in the 21st century - their unique ability to boost cinema to a level of uncontested vileness is something they share. Pasolini's film took on a more political urgency when it was made, focusing in on a group of perverted Fascist officials who subject a large group of kidnapped teenagers to brutal physical and sexual torture in a remote mansion in Nazi-occupied Italy. Constructed of a series of painfully detached tableaux, Pasolini works up to a rhythm of aloof symmetrical compositions that are all the more horrifying for their absence of directorial intervention. When the head dignitary forces a young blond to eat her own fecal matter, Pasolini's static camera sits like a dead duck, disallowing our eyes to wander.

This type of voyeuristic gaze is another element that Irreversible and Salò share. Whereas Pasolini at least settles into a groove of detachment so that we know what's coming, Noé prefers only to cease the camera's perpetual whirl when there is something terrible to look at. The culmination of the "Rectum" club scene is a still, sideways view of brutal manslaughter: the film's "protagonist", Marcus (Vincent Cassel), pummels a man's skull with a fire extinguisher. Marcus' reason for doing so is observed a few scenes down the road in an even more notorious effrontery as the narrative rewinds in a manner similar to that of Christopher Nolan's Memento (2000). His girlfriend Alex (Monica Bellucci) regrettably passes through a deserted subway underpass before being stopped by a tough womanizer known to the mob community as "Le Tenia", who violently beats and rapes her in a terrifyingly realistic shot that lasts just short of ten minutes. In moments of evil, Noé and Pasolini are challenging our complicity as viewers. Our inability to help the characters onscreen mirrors our blindness to such events in reality, as grim naturalism seems to be rooted in both of the films, albeit more pointedly in Irreversible.



The presentation of objectivity, Noé and Pasolini wisely realize, is therefore capable of the greatest debilitation. More so than manipulative "horror" films that make an audience jump by venturing into the unknown, Irreversible and Salò prove to us that in order to get under a viewer's skin the deepest, the best method is to insist on a front seat to such matter-of-fact depravity. After all, one question that both filmmakers seem to prioritize is "what is considered acceptable to show?" and furthermore, "what does it mean for an image to be acceptable?" Noé and Pasolini function by the credo "if it could happen or has happened, the audience needs to be aware". It is no mistake that the miserable dehumanization of the teenagers in Salò occurs in a Nazi-occupied territory, linking their degradation explicitly to that of the Jews during the Holocaust. More abstract but no less substantial is Pasolini's integration of Marquis De Sade's controversial 18th century text The 120 Days of Sodom, from which the film version takes its shape. Pasolini loosely visualizes Sade's words - which were written while imprisoned - in his own contemporary context to prevent them from being tied down to one specific generation. Evil, he implies, can exist anywhere, anytime.

Noé undoubtedly agrees, but his film contains a bit more specificity, which obviously provokes a different reaction. An essential distinction between the two films is the two types of affliction they elicit in the viewer. Given Salò's highly deliberate pacing and calculated visuals, it is no surprise that its effect is more cerebral. By the end of it, and it is no quick endeavor at 145 minutes, one is left with a gaping lack of humanity, thus its aftermath is more fundamental and dehumanizing. I've neglected to mention thus far that Irreversible's provocations do not come without their warm, tender counterparts at the end, or rather, the beginning, and therefore we are not simply conned by quasi-pornographic nonsense. Regardless, its first 45 minutes are more viscerally intense than any single scene in Salò. For instance, during the "Rectum" sequence, Noé layers an unsettling percussive industrial drone over his already manic camerawork that bounces furiously from Marcus's angry expression, the dim red lights of the club, fragmented gay sex, and the genuinely unnerving scowls of the onlookers. The result is a sequence that defies the viewer to sit through its entirety, no matter how much of a disturbing sensory overload it becomes.

Salò is more of a homogeneous experience in the sense that there is rarely an individual scene that is particularly harsher than any other. Instead, it is the creepy persistence of anti-emotionality in the visages of the four head Fascists that ratchets up the terror. Never do their expressions change, whether they are anal raping a teenager, leading a competition among the victims for the finest behind, or observing through peepholes as their cohorts put on the finishing touches in the excruciating denouement. The closest they come to genuine emotion is the Duke's robotic sneer that is seen several times in close-up, but we still never get the sense that it is anything more than a mechanized response to his own sadistic acts. Irreversible at least treats us to some good old fashioned human feeling: vengeance, anger, debauchery, even love and compassion in the end. Pasolini, being an oppressed individual himself - as a filmmaker, he was put into exile consistently for his racy films - was too strict with his execution and intent to provide the audience with anything familiar to latch onto. He wanted to display without any restraint the capacity for evil within the human soul.

Cumulatively, the two films show more naked human flesh than a doctor is likely to see in his entire career. Irreversible flaunts it so routinely that it becomes unsurprising whereas Salò materializes the physical body, reducing the strategically placed figures to pawns on a chess board, forever inferior to the dominant Kings. On that note, Salò is almost, dare I say, recommendable for its formal rigor; nearly every composition is of intense mathematical symmetry. Similarly, if one can handle the arduousness of Irreversible, what emerges is a thought-provoking study of the nature of time, littered with unbelievably difficult set pieces. "Enter at your own risk" though is really the motto here - which is certainly something I should have given more credence to when I brushed off the warning sticker emblazoned on both film's DVD covers - because the effects that the two films have on the viewer is potentially irreversible as well. They are "scarier" than any film in the horror genre, if only for the fact that they convincingly reveal the abysmal depths to which humans can descend.

Black Sunday: The Mask of Satan (La maschera del demonio) A Film by Mario Bava (1960)

The iconic symbols of Italian Gothic horror films have somewhat made their way, not always knowingly, into the film world's collective consciousness, and perhaps the most stylish purveyor of these types of images is Mario Bava. Despite never before seeing his debut Black Sunday (or The Mask of Satan), I found myself recognizing his certain phantasmagorical ways of seeing things, of giving them a durable horror that is tried-and-true. Imagine the best haunted front lawn you've seen on Halloween, magnify that bravura tenfold, and extend it to feature length and you'll get Bava's seminal work of Italian horror. It's the kind of familiar storyworld where characters are always decoding inscriptions, making haste, rushing to complete tasks "before the sun goes down", and being enveloped in sinister curses.

The film has lost some of its terror as years have past, with camp taking its place, but what remains can be attributed more to the indelible face of Barbara Steele in the the unsettling double role, to the otherworldliness that her mere corporeity sheds off, than the actual plot of the film. Steele, who would later appear in a different light in Fellini's 8 1/2, plays both Katia Vajda, the alluring daughter of a 19th century patriarch, and Princess Asa Vajda, a seductress who has long been dead and entombed for her wrongdoings in the 17th century. Befitting the title, Asa was walloped with a spiked mask said to carry the spirit of Satan and subsequently charged with death by fire to rid of the evil spirits entirely. However, when rain from above - as if sent be some supernal force - washed out the fire, Asa was simply buried in a decrepit vault. Of course, material things such as vaults can not contain the elusive power of evil, so when Asa is awoken by a doctor and his colleague who were sent to Katia's village with healing duties, she wreaks all kinds of sadistic havoc on the townspeople, also spawning the revival of the brute warrior she was killed with. The vampiric look of Steele, with her extensive forehead, defined cheekbones, and pointed eyes, is pivotal to the success of her performance.

What's most fascinating about the film however is Bava's careful control of the mise-en-scene, the blatantly manufactured milieu of doom that he creates. Restless fog rolls over the swampy forests that outline the village and, even in night scenes, there is a mystical light that diffuses through the lively tree limbs that hang like tentacles over the environment. Although it is always obvious that studio lighting or fog machines are situated somewhere not too far from the confines of the frame, Bava's intricate settings never come across cheaply. Known for an equally prolific career in cinematography, Bava takes the director of photography role as well. In keeping with a classic horror staple, Black Sunday thrives on its chiaroscuro look, its deft shadow and compositional play. The production is as sparkling accomplished as Hollywood studio dramas (complicated dolly shots that compliment action, slow zooms to elevate fear), only there is an added grit when the high contrast images are coupled with their ominous, cobweb-laden settings. The film is a prime look at how Mario Bava's technical mastery was omnipresent, even at such an early stage in his career.

Umberto D. (1952) A Film by Vittorio De Sica

"A dog is a man's best friend" is a sentiment that has never been portrayed more aptly than it is in Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D. A monumental contribution to the Italian neorealist movement, the film chronicles Umberto Domenico Ferrari, a retired pensioner living off scraps in a one-room apartment he is in danger of being evicted from, and his adorably faithful dog Flike. Umberto is played by a non-professional named Carlo Battisti whose humane performance - one that he looks born for - almost guarantees no future acting repertoire. His existence, like many other elders (as shown in the opening protest), is marred by the difficult Italian postwar economic situation and the depersonalizing nature of modernity. Friendship, or simply human contact, does not come easily for Umberto; his snappy landlady, racked by bourgeois sensibilities, rudely reminds him constantly of his debts, the maid (also portrayed unprofessionally) hints at loyalty but is too weary-eyed and plain to be reliable, and the long-lost business partners he meets on his way are too self-absorbed to offer assistance. Throw in a cute and saintly dog to the mix and you have the ideal ingredients for an immodest weeper. However, Vittorio De Sica, who made his claim with the similarly honest The Bicycle Thief, deals with his subject with utmost matter-of-factness, supplementing overtly political material (the protest, community hospital sequences, a brutal dog pound) with pragmatic daily life (the maid's morning routine and Umberto's domestic struggle).

Sometimes De Sica's techniques mirror those of current contemplative filmmakers in his willingness to let his camera sit still and watch deliberately uninteresting activities at the expense of entertainment. For this, I commend his revolutionary courage (Italy produced loads of costume dramas and historical epics during this period). At the same time, I condemn the film's manipulative use of a typical movie score to stitch together the action; it seems De Sica stole a trick from the very films he was against and undermined the purity he was aiming for. This is a minor criticism though, for there is so much compassion in this film that it is rather easy to forgive a blemish or two.

Umberto D. is extremely understanding of its titular character and his relevant predicament. In the final and most heart-rending act, Umberto departs from his longtime apartment with a loose plan of lending his beloved dog to a trusty caretaker and subsequently ending his life. He approaches a haggard alleyway where a couple keeps scurrying dogs for money and, after inquiring about the price, he finds himself in a moral pickle. Umberto watches Flike cling to his leg while being growled at by the couple's bulldog a first time and musters up enough willpower to continue asking questions regarding the well-being of the dogs. All of his dignity teeters during this. The second time Flike whines by his ankle, the power of companionship pushes him to forget the negotiation and walk away. Although he continues his wrenching pursuit for Flike's new owner in a culminating sequence of brilliant emotional exchanges, this particular scene is the most telling example of De Sica's empathetic understanding: the pressures of socioeconomic struggles cannot overcome human dignity.

And the Ship Sails On (E la nave va) A Film by Federico Fellini (1984)

Many have said Federico Fellini approached lunacy in the latter half of his career, but these have often been self-defensive critical stabs that result from Fellini's journey into more unconscionably personal works. The elements that peppered the films he received acclaim for (8 1/2, La Strada, La Dolce Vita) do not differ greatly from those present in his more festive late films; rather, they are exemplified - frequently overblown, but always striking. In a way, 1984's And the Ship Sails On feels like a nutty cross between 8 1/2's high culture and Amarcord's fantastic incoherence.

The film is set in 1914 on the brink of World War I - which becomes evident in its finale - on a cruise ship titled Gloria N. On board there is an eclectic horde of Italy's intelligentsia: wealthy aristocrats, musicians known for their abnormally high or low registers rather than their genuine musical merit, painters, political thinkers, hopeless romantics, and even a stenchy rhinoceros. They are headed to the island of Edmea Tetua's birth (a sublime opera singer whose death has left the artistic world in mourning), where they will scatter her ashes according to her wishes. A frizzy-haired journalist, who resembles both palpably and thematically the tour guide in Sokurov's Russian Ark, introduces himself to the camera as an outsider on a mission to document the monumental funeral. When he breaks the third wall in a number of silly scenes, Fellini is suggesting him as the viewer, equally new to the unusual circumstances.

The initial half of the film is rife with lightweight, quietly affecting moments that play like a satire on snobby, highbrow culture. The camera stops by several of the ship's peculiarly lavish interiors to capture scenes that range from delightfully surreal to softly touching. Some highlights include a symphony of silverware in the kitchen, an tacit battle of singing voices in the depths of the ship between a multitude of aristocrats, a basso stoning a chicken to sleep with his bellow, and a stroll on the deck at dusk to a gentle piano accompaniment. This somewhat inchoate rhythm is hindered by the arrival of a group of Serbian refugees, rescued from a shipwreck by Gloria N's captain. Many of the passengers are wrongfully discomforted by the refugees, thinking of them as possible threats, so they are ordered to stay behind an expanse of rope. What results is the eventual acceptance of the Serbs, translated vivaciously into a mutual celebration on the ship deck beside a glistening cellophane sea in one of Fellini's trademark motifs (the setting aside of woes for the genuine excitement of hoopla).

The film also invites political significance into its repertoire with the coming of the Serbs. Eventually an Austro-Hungarian battleship is spotted making threatening requests to the Gloria N to hand over their refugees. Deliberately stagy spectacle begins to overwhelm the carefree charm of the first half of the film. It's an opportunity for Fellini to showcase his creative bravura but it feels slightly uncharacteristic in relation to the rest of the film. There is an even more overt acknowledgment of the artifice towards the end when the camera reveals the vast film set and its busy crew; it feels gratuitous when given the number of times this ground is covered less directly. There are a multitude of moments in And the Ship Sails On however, especially when Fellini's sympathies lie with his jaded central bunch, that feel like a very fond farewell to Edmea Tetua, a symbol of shimmering humanity and perhaps even of fine art itself; interestingly, the film may have been Fellini's final work of art.

La Strada (1954) A Film by Federico Fellini

In a century of cinema that has certainly seen its share of decadent personal visions, few reach the radical extremes of Italian icon Federico Fellini's films. His embellishments of Italian culture have detached me from his themes time and time again. His obsessively recurrent motifs (circuses, raucous town centers, zany lunatics) have led me to believe he is one of the most self-indulgent filmmakers in history. However, there is a childlike grace and compassion that shines through these criticisms which is unmissable. Surely his films have the capacity to enchant and captivate, but the universal themes he attempts to evoke are often times shrouded in the quirky dynamics of his films, which I think are anything but fluent. A recognizable characteristic of Fellini's films is Nina Rota's scores, which are constantly circus-like and rambunctious, and serve to toss your attention around wildly. Surprisingly, up until seeing La Strada, his most personal film, Amarcord, was my favorite of his. I discovered soon enough that the rewards of his tale of love and cruelty are plentiful.

La Strada is the story of the self-deprecating but generous vagabond Gelsomina who is sold to the hulking traveling performer Zampano to work with him in his circus acts. When Gelsomina gives her heart continually, Zampano violently orders her around. Along the road, a possible metaphor for living, Gelsomina and Zampano encounter various postwar celebrations such as weddings and performances until finally they join up with another circus troupe, one which contains Zampano's longtime enemy The Fool, a tightrope artist of giddy passion. When emotions stir up between Zampano and The Fool and eventually take a turn for the worst, Gelsomina is left to fend for herself in a world she has learned is unforgiving. Zampano realizes in a powerful ending where he has gone wrong, and through this epiphany Fellini shows he can empathize with human beings of all types, no matter how monstrous.

At times the imagery is extremely enticing, such as in the scene where Gelsomina first escapes and jaunts around in the windy, barren market square after the tight rope display. The compositions can be very striking, but could benefit from being on the screen longer. La Strada is Fellini's most coherent film, and in my opinion his most masterful achievement. I just wish that at some point in his career he could have broke free from his artistic handcuffs and explored some slightly different areas.